388. How Gender Affects Your Ideals | Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

[0] Hello everyone watching and listening.

[1] Today I'm speaking with Greg Lukinoff and Ricky Schlott, co -authors of the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind.

[2] We discussed the inception and inspiration of this new book, which seeks to assess cancel culture as it's harshly affecting American universities and other institutions.

[3] we break down the difference between feminine and masculine tendencies in regards to free speech, the entirely real and yet rarely discussed phenomenon of toxic femininity, and why we must prioritize a cultural shift away from the ease of self -described victimhood.

[4] So you have a new book coming out on October 17th.

[5] This is recorded in 2023.

[6] October 17th, canceling of the American mind.

[7] Authors, Greg Lukinoff and Ricky Schlaught.

[8] So congratulations on that.

[9] Thank you so much.

[10] Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about the book and why you guys are partnering together also to write it?

[11] Yeah.

[12] Well, I mean, I think it's probably a little unusual for a 48 -year -old and a 23 -year -old to be writing together, but I couldn't feel luckier than to get to work with Ricky Schlaught.

[13] She's absolutely brilliant, and it was something that we knew right away when we saw her writing when she was 19 and 20, that there was something very special about this young woman.

[14] So originally, Ricky reached out to us because she read my book with Jonathan Haidt, coddling of the American mind, and said, this is exactly right.

[15] This is exactly what I'm seeing in my own environment, that the threats to free speech are also devastating to mental health.

[16] And she actually dropped out of NYU in 2020, and also during COVID, which I think is exactly the right move.

[17] You know, once you're on lockdown, drop out.

[18] The defeats a major point of college.

[19] And originally what we were planning to do was write a book or what I was considering doing was writing a book that was a follow -up to coddling, even though canceling is a follow -up in a sense, something that was much more directly a follow -up because it's me, you know, the book was written by me and Jonathan Haidt, like 248 and 60 years.

[20] year old, Gen Xers.

[21] But a lot of it's concerned about the terrible injustice we're due to young women, teaching them the mental habits of anxious and depressed people.

[22] So she wrote me in height to talk about if we thought maybe COVID could uncoddle young people by presenting challenges that they could then overcome.

[23] It's a little optimistic.

[24] Probably a little overly optimistic, but I was excited about the premise.

[25] And immediately realizing just how brilliant she was from her writing, she became a fire fellow.

[26] And we talked about the idea of working together on something that would be a follow -ups to talk about from a Gen Z young woman's perspective.

[27] But as we were getting ready for that, I started realizing that there are still people out there who are trying to claim that cancel culture isn't real.

[28] And I'm like, okay, I'm sorry.

[29] Like fire is sitting on a mountain of data.

[30] Something absolutely catastrophic has happened on campus in the last 10 years.

[31] This is easy to establish.

[32] So we decided to do a book that focuses on three things.

[33] One, prove it's not just real.

[34] It's historic.

[35] We don't see the kind of numbers of professors fired in the last, you know, we mark cancel culture's beginning around 2014.

[36] We don't see the kind of numbers of professors fired during cancel culture since the 1950s in the United States.

[37] There's nothing even close.

[38] About twice as many professors fired than the standard estimates of McCarthyism, for example.

[39] So people saying it doesn't exist is just crazy.

[40] Then we try to situate it as a as part of a way of winning arguments without winning arguments.

[41] That essentially it succeeds so well, because people realize, well, I could try to refute you an argument and I might fail.

[42] But I could also scare you into thinking that you don't have a livelihood going forward to just make the cost so high of dissenting that you win arguments without persuading anybody.

[43] And then the last part of it is really trying to point to different potential solutions.

[44] Yeah, and I would also add that the difference of our perspective together is really rich because I'm Generation Z. We're decades apart.

[45] We have very different political beliefs, but everything in this book in terms of classical liberalism and free speech and pluralism and re -invigorating our democracy and our civic conversation is just like we hold that so near and dear into our hearts.

[46] and I think that that cross -generational kind of melding really worked very well to our advantage in the book.

[47] Absolutely.

[48] And Ricky also made me more of a cat person.

[49] No, well, that's always a good thing.

[50] I did convince him to get cats in the scheme of, in the time that we did the book together, yeah.

[51] Good, good.

[52] Well, you're always supposed to pet a cat when you meet one on the street, you know, so.

[53] I remember that from your book, and I think that's excellent advice.

[54] That's exactly right.

[55] So you now, you guys said a bunch of interesting things there, and we'll go through them.

[56] But I want to ask you first, Ricky, you pointed out that you, to have different political beliefs.

[57] Like you share some core presumptions, but you have different political beliefs.

[58] So how would you characterize both the similarities and the differences in your beliefs?

[59] Yeah, I'm a right -leaning libertarian.

[60] I don't want to speak for you in terms of how you define your politics.

[61] But I'm left of center, homeless Democrat, but definitely, and when it comes to, and that may sound highly inconsistent to a lot of people these days, but there was nothing inconsistent for someone my age to be really pro -free speech and also think of themselves as a left of center.

[62] Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of us.

[63] When I look at what was going on in the 90s, I always thought kind of like the more working -class element of the left would win over.

[64] And I thought the people who believed in speech codes and some of the identity politics stuff were just our crazies who would eventually self -marginalize.

[65] I'm really disappointed to see that they seem to have all the juice on the left at the moment.

[66] Yeah, and it seems like, at least in my lifetime, the word liberal was associated with very illiberal actions and things in a way that, you know, true classical liberalism is not a partisan divide in my mind.

[67] And I think that that's really where we share our common values.

[68] And certainly in terms of free speech and cancel culture, that's like the heart and center of our book.

[69] And we pull no punches.

[70] You know, when we think the right or left has been wrong, just like we do is fire.

[71] We call them out.

[72] But when it comes to the, when it comes of the phenomena of cancel culture, the place where it's the most dominant, of course, is in higher ed, and that is a very, you know, disproportionately lefty space.

[73] And it's gone really off the rails, as you well know, in higher ed.

[74] Ricky, how in the world did you become a right -leaning libertarian?

[75] I mean, as, as while Jonathan Heights data in particular, although Craig worked on this too, I mean, the data is indicating quite clearly that there's a growing divide among young men and young women in relationship to their political affiliation, with young men increasingly tilting towards where you stand, I would say, right -leaning libertarian, and young women increasingly not only becoming much more miserable on the mental health front, but also becoming much more leftist.

[76] So how is it that you aren't part of that cohort?

[77] Since you're not, why do you think it's reasonable in some sense for you to speak for younger women, younger people, younger women.

[78] And why did you drop out of university?

[79] So I'm actually 23, but my father is 86, and having that breadth of historical knowledge in my household and so near, I think, made me a little bit more resistant to generational trends and, you know, the tides and just kind of shifting away from what I think common sense right and left was, which happened.

[80] And I think a lot of my parents or my friend's parents we're a little bit more lenient towards the nonsense of what my generation would bring home, whereas, you know, I'd come home to my dad sometimes at dinner and come home with whatever the next politically correct isom is and say, oh, no, dad, we don't say African American anymore.

[81] We say black.

[82] And my dad would be like, we changed that rule like four times.

[83] And what I actually, my intent is what matters more than the impact.

[84] And I think that those sort of formative lessons definitely grounded me in a different time and space.

[85] And I would say, you know, despite that, the coddling was talking about mental health and a lot of the cognitive distortions.

[86] And even though my political orientation is different, I did grow up on the internet.

[87] I did grow up on Tumblr.

[88] I have a bunch of friends I saw firsthand just how ugly and how horrific the mental health crisis has been for my generation.

[89] My freshman year at NYU, I remember like one of the first nights that we were in my dorm, we were all sitting around about six girls.

[90] and every single girl was comparing her self -harm scars.

[91] I was the only one that didn't have scars.

[92] And I just remember in that moment being like, wow, there's something so wrong with this generation.

[93] And I'm here firsthand watching it on the ground.

[94] I feel in some ways a part of it, one foot in and one foot out at the same time.

[95] But certainly, I mean, it's hard to ignore, even if your politics are different, you're mirrored in it.

[96] And it's so pervasive.

[97] And then lastly, my decision to drop out of NYU, actually, And also, I got into Columbia recently, and I don't expect to be doing that as well.

[98] I don't want to finish my undergraduate degree, frankly, because I've had two great years at NYU, but unfortunately, the stifling environment was just so beyond something that I could handle for myself.

[99] And I also think, you know, I mean, I had a 4 .0.

[100] I was succeeding.

[101] I was headed to law school.

[102] I was on the right track, but I found something that I was passionate about, and I realized that I'd been kind of hoodwinked by a system that was telling me that I needed to, fork over enormous amounts of money and spend time fulfilling requirements that weren't important to me in writing essays that, you know, defied my own personal opinions because of the obvious slants of my professors.

[103] And so at a certain point, I realized there are more than one pathway to success.

[104] And I'm going to tread my own.

[105] And fortunately, people like Greg were there to kind of pick me up and make sure that I ended up on the right track.

[106] And so this is a way cooler place to be at 23 than to have just graduated.

[107] So, Greg, I wanted to commend you for something first.

[108] You're not a psychologist, but you are the most outspoken psychologist that I know of, pointing out the fact that if we had set up a cognitive behavioral therapy program nationwide to demoralize young people, we couldn't possibly have done it more effectively, speaking strictly from a clinical perspective than we have done.

[109] Every psychologist there is who's worth his or her salt knows that you don't hyper -protect people because you make them dependent.

[110] You don't inundate them with idiot trigger warnings.

[111] You don't try to infantilize them.

[112] You gradually expose them voluntarily to situations and people and ideas.

[113] that they're leery of, and by doing so, you fortify them in terms of their own self -concept and their ability to deal with the world.

[114] And there isn't anything, there's nothing that therapists who are real know more thoroughly than that.

[115] If you don't know that, you're not a therapist, you're a bloody fraud.

[116] And despite that, there is an absolute dearth of psychologists speaking out against, say, cancel culture trigger warnings, all of this infantilizing idiocy that characterizes the campuses.

[117] Now, that's partly because, as I've found out in Canada, that if you do speak out, and this obviously speaks to cancel culture, the probability that the mid -level, miserable, resentful bureaucrats who are in charge of doing things like handing out professional licenses will come after you.

[118] And if you can't afford to have your career threatened, well, then you're in trouble.

[119] Now, I don't think that excuses people precisely because I think there's a time and a place to speak in some ways, regardless of personal cost.

[120] And the thing is, you've spoke, so obviously it can be done.

[121] Now, I want to talk to both of you guys about some psychological ideas that I've been working on, and some of them are quite contentious, and I'd really like to know what you think.

[122] So, first of all, there's a very large literature on female antisocial behavior.

[123] now it's not as extensive as male antisocial behavior literature because males who are antisocial tend to be violent physically and that gets more attention but there are antisocial females and they have a very set way of going about destroying their opponents to their own advantage and the way they do that is by innuendo reputation savaging and gossiping And this literature all arose before the dawn of social media, and it was very well established for multiple decades.

[124] Now, my observation is that that scales brilliantly on social media, right?

[125] Because you can savage reputations, you can use innuendo, you can gossip, you can destroy with zero cost to yourself.

[126] Now, women tend to turn to that because they don't engage in physical fighting, not between each other, very, very rarely.

[127] and they certainly can't fight physically with men.

[128] So if they're going to be antisocial and instrumental, narcissistic, psychopathic, and all of that, they're going to do it in this more subtle manner.

[129] Now, I see absolutely no limits to the expression of that sort of behavior whatsoever on social media.

[130] In fact, quite the contrary.

[131] That leads to an even more dismal possibility.

[132] This terrifies me to tell you the truth.

[133] So, you know, the problem of parasitical, criminality.

[134] Parasitism in particular is so deep that sex itself evolved as a solution to the problem.

[135] So the problem of parasitism is very, very old.

[136] And this proclivity of the psychopathic and narcissistic types to denigrate and to elevate their reputation falsely as a form of parasitism.

[137] and it has no constraints whatsoever on social media.

[138] We know that the troll types and the online criminal types are much more likely to have dark tetrad personality characteristics, Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic, because the other three weren't enough.

[139] My sense is that we've enabled the psychopaths, they have free reign to express themselves in this more feminine anti -social manner, and we risk bringing down the whole house of cards because of it.

[140] So the first thing I'd like to know is, like, what do you guys think about that hypothesis, this disparity in the virtual versus the real world?

[141] Well, first thing is that we took this, you know, head -on and coddling in the American mind.

[142] We said we didn't apologize for the research, and we made the point that when it comes to the different ways that males and females exercise aggression, particularly when they're teenagers, but also throughout their lives, that men is much more physical.

[143] You know, like, I've been in a lot of fights in my life.

[144] I've been a bouncer.

[145] I've seen that.

[146] But I also grew up in a house that was dominated by women and that female aggression tends to be relational.

[147] That definitely all these mechanisms that are much more relying on, you know, verbal tendencies and ways of battling things out verbally, you know, are well established.

[148] And I don't think it's any coincidence.

[149] And this is a very sad fact, but it comes out very, it's very clear in the polling.

[150] Is it in general?

[151] and of course this is, you know, this talking about, you know, polling, women are more skeptical of freedom of speech than men are.

[152] So when you look on campuses, the polling for women's attitudes, this is actually a very funny statistic that we found, that the schools that tended to have the highest level of students saying that violence is acceptable in response to speech, or that shoutdowns are acceptable in response to speech, or that blocking doors are responsible or acceptable speech or either women's colleges or former women's colleges.

[153] So that's a distressing, and that's one of the reason why we want to reach more women because we know that there are plenty of women, including Ricky and Nadine Strausson, who works for fire, who are great civil libertarians.

[154] And we need to recruit from that because as universities become more feminized, it could be a bad, an even worsening situation for freedom, speech unless we actually, you know, really bring that argument to more women.

[155] But anyway.

[156] Yeah, and I would add to that point that I think, especially in the past couple decades, now that attacks on free speech are tied to emotional harm and the idea that people need to be protected and that their feelings are hurt, I do think that it's just an honest, like, truth that that just speaks to the female proclivities a little bit more.

[157] And so in some aspects, and I suppose the more antisocial people, that becomes a really militant response that they act on when they feel as though they're able to be the arbiters of justice and to protect weaker, more vulnerable people in just like a pure emotional sense, I would say, as well.

[158] Yeah, or they pretend a kind of genuine, feminine compassion and use that as a mask to cover their actual anti -social motivations, right?

[159] Because the borderline personality types and the real psychopaths, this is particularly true on the female.

[160] male side in relationships, say, to borderline pathology, they use self -proclaimed stories of victimization as manipulative techniques.

[161] And part of the reason for that is that if you're really serpentine in your capacity to manipulate, you harness the persons that, the person that you're manipulating, you harness their compassion, right?

[162] Because that's a very effective way of hiding from them your predatory proclivities.

[163] It's extremely dangerous.

[164] And so I have a question for you, a deeper question, Ricky.

[165] And so this is a horrible question.

[166] I don't think anybody's ever raised it.

[167] So I am not convinced that higher education institutions and maybe institutions in general, why should we be convinced that they can survive if females run them?

[168] And here's, I'm not saying they can't, but I'm going to present the counter argument just for the sake of getting myself in all sorts of trouble.

[169] Here's what I see happening.

[170] I mean, first of all, or what may be happening, childless women infantilize other people because they don't have an infant.

[171] And so female administrators infantilize their students, female professors infantilize their graduate students.

[172] They use that fundamental impetus to protect.

[173] They misuse it and misapply it.

[174] Now, that's well -documented proclivity.

[175] In the clinical literature, the psychoanalysts documented that, starting with Freud, that's the devouring mother fundamentally.

[176] And then we have no historical data suggesting that women, as such, can organize large -scale social institutions because, as the feminists themselves have claimed forever, they were either not doing that or excluded from it forever.

[177] And it may be naive to assume that that's just something that women can do, even though that's, as I said, there's no historical precedent for it.

[178] Now, I did research in 2016 before I had to stop, fold up my research enterprise entirely.

[179] We were looking at what predicted authoritarian politically correct beliefs, and we did a very careful job.

[180] The first thing we did was analyze political beliefs to see if there were a collection of coherent beliefs that you could identify as authoritarian politically correct, and they're clearly was, so it's not just a right -wing conspiracy theory that such a complex of ideas exists.

[181] And then we looked at what predicted the proclivity to believe in those ideas.

[182] And the first predictor was low verbal intelligence.

[183] And it was a walloping predictor.

[184] It predicted politically correct authoritarianism better than general cognitive ability predicts grades.

[185] So that was quite shocking to us.

[186] But the next best predictor was being female.

[187] And the next best predictor was having a feminine temperament.

[188] And so, you know, all that together makes up a pretty damn brutal story.

[189] And so you said, both of you said that, you know, you're very much hoping to reach out to women.

[190] And fair enough.

[191] And obviously there are women like Ricky who adopt viewpoints that aren't totalitarian compassionate, let's say.

[192] But something's very strange in higher academia and in our institutions overall.

[193] And I think toxic femininity is a very much under -discussed phenomenon.

[194] So, well, with that, have adder, because like anything I said that you think is wrong, boy, I'd sure like to hear it.

[195] Well, I definitely can only really provide annex data to the survey data that you have.

[196] But I would definitely say that in my experience, the people that have been most militant in circles of higher education have been my female, my fellow students and also professors as well.

[197] But I think that, you know, regardless of whether there's a, on the mean of women is to lean that way further one way or another, like we can't change that aspect of nature.

[198] And one thing that I do think that we can change, just going into the inevitable future of more women in these institutions, is making sure two things.

[199] First, I think from the root of education, just just as young as kindergarten, we need to emphasize rationality and stop, like, feeding into kids' emotions and just saying, you're always right and you're totally valid and you do you.

[200] And if you're upset about this or if you feel harmed by this, then we need to empower you to accept that reality.

[201] I think that we, like, that's what the coddling of the American mind talked about.

[202] And I think that that really hijacks women's psyches more.

[203] And I think that we need to, from the start of education, emphasize.

[204] rationality, that emotions are a valid part of the human experience, but that they should not lead your rational, common sense kind of mindset.

[205] So I think that's one thing.

[206] And I think the other thing is also making sure that our universities can maintain a balance that's more healthy than the balance that we have right now, because I think of Richard Reeves and his research in boys and men falling behind.

[207] And so I think it's a combination of having to make sure that we can foster young men who are able to take up leadership roles in higher education, I think that the education system by and large is fairly feminized and it definitely feeds more into female strengths than male strengths, especially given the fact that girls tend to develop a couple years earlier than boys.

[208] And so I think that that's another thing that we, you know, maybe it's as simple as redshirting boys and making sure that we have more young men who will end up in those leadership positions in the end.

[209] Because having a 60 -40 split, which I think is what the current situation is in higher education right now is not healthy, I don't think, for the future or for society.

[210] No one side should be falling behind so dramatically and so quickly over the past couple decades.

[211] So those would be my two, my two things to point to on that front.

[212] Okay, so let's talk, okay, let's talk about that.

[213] So, so the first question you might ask is, if there is a feminine proclivity to prioritize emotion, why might that be?

[214] And I would say there's two reasons, one in one which is nested in the other.

[215] So women are higher in trait neuroticism, which makes them more prone to feeling negative emotion.

[216] They feel it more frequently and more powerfully.

[217] And that's extraordinarily well -documented phenomena cross -culturally.

[218] I don't think any psychologist who knows the literature would doubt it.

[219] And it's buttressed by the fact that there are sex differences in different forms of psychopathology.

[220] So men, for example, are overrepresented in alcoholism and in violent antisocial proclivity, but women are radically overrepresented in depression and anxiety.

[221] And that's also true cross -culturally.

[222] So women feel negative emotions more intensely.

[223] Now, then you might ask, well, why is that?

[224] And the answer seems to be, well, it has something to do with sexual maturation because the differences in temperament aren't there in childhood.

[225] They appear with sexual maturation.

[226] And the reason for that, here's three reasons.

[227] One is, well, women are smaller than men at physical maturation, and so they should be less, they should be more anxiety prone in a physical conflict.

[228] And that should co -occur with puberty, because that's when the size and strength differential kicks in.

[229] Then women are much more sexually vulnerable than men, because of course they can get pregnant and they have to bear the cost of that.

[230] And then probably more importantly, women have to take primary responsibility for early stage infant care.

[231] And the thing about infants is all they have is emotion to communicate.

[232] And more importantly, possibly, their emotions have to be regarded as 100 % valid and correct, right?

[233] Because if you're a good mother, and I saw this with my wife, who by the way is not particularly agreeable and is very low in neuroticism, she would respond to her infant's distress like in a microsecond.

[234] And that was extremely helpful.

[235] the case that because human infants are born so helpless, so neotenous, that they have to be attended to with great care, and they have to be treated as if their distress is 100 % valid.

[236] Now, you've got to stop doing that at about nine months of age, and that's a hard transition for women to make.

[237] And so I have this sinking feeling that the default female ethical proclivity is to prioritize emotion, to attribute to it 100 % validity, because that serves infants best, and that that bleeds out into the relationships that women establish when they produce large -scale social institutions.

[238] Now, you said, and fair enough, you know, possibly we could prioritize rationality over -emotionality, and we could start doing that in kindergarten.

[239] But I guess the counter position would be, hey, you know, that's what we were doing.

[240] And then the consequence of having women flood into these institutions is that was instantly inverted.

[241] And so maybe education can do something about that and maybe not.

[242] So, and it's not like I'm happy about this, or even that I believe it, although, you know, it's a hard argument for me to escape from.

[243] I'm certainly not happy about it.

[244] I think it's completely bloody dismal.

[245] But unless, see, Greg, you said earlier, something really kicked around in 2014, right?

[246] Something's shifted.

[247] And the biggest shift in the last 20 years is definitely on the sex balance in universities.

[248] Like, that's the most stunning transformation.

[249] So have that, Greg, what do you think about all this?

[250] Sure.

[251] Well, when it comes to whether, you know, feminization of institutions, It's a fact.

[252] Feminization of politics, feminization of corporations or higher education, and we just have to figure out ways to not give up on these institutions because they become feminized.

[253] Now, I do have some hope there, partially because I think that men have been able to reflect on downsides of masculinity, including things like excessive machismo, which can be very destructive.

[254] and I've certainly seen that in my own life and among my own friends, that there's a kind of dangerousness and stupidity that men have as well.

[255] Now, as a society gets more feminized, I don't think it's going to take forever for people to start realizing that a more feminized society also has its own unique downsides and for people to, especially women, to push back against some of these.

[256] And there certainly are women out there who are pushing against it.

[257] I should note that some of the best champions against cancel culture are themselves women.

[258] Alice Dregor, Megan Downe, Bridget Fetsey, there's a long list of people who have actually really, J .K. Rolling, who have really stood up against this.

[259] Yeah.

[260] So I think that, yeah, I think that by nature, you know, different genders, and this is actually, of course, the fact that saying this is radioactive, I think it's just absolutely ridiculous, talking about that different genders have different strengths and weaknesses.

[261] That's a fact.

[262] But we do have a not bad track record of learning how to recognize what were our strengths and weaknesses and get past them.

[263] And we're going to have to be, because it's not like a higher ed is going to suddenly have good gender balance immediately.

[264] But one of the things that we really do try to point out in the book, and a major part of the book is we talk about different kinds of rhetorical hortresses.

[265] And what we mean by that are really creative and some not very creative ways of getting out of addressing someone's actual argument.

[266] And we first go through the ones that left and right and basically all humanity uses, which we call the minefield and the obstacle course.

[267] But then when we get to, on the left, we go through this thing that we call the perfect rhetorical fortress.

[268] It is just this exquisite maze of dodges all over the place of ways to not have to address the person's argument.

[269] And we even go through what we call the first one, by the way, is labeling someone conservative.

[270] And this worked back when I was in law school, I'm embarrassed to admit.

[271] and I'm very embarrassed to admit.

[272] It worked on me. That essentially, if you could label a writer as...

[273] Yeah, that if you could label a writer as conservative, then suddenly you took them less seriously, and that that was something that I'm embarrassed to admit.

[274] So that's level one, and that's just ridiculous.

[275] That's the way children argue.

[276] But then we take through the entire demographic funnel, and of course you can dismiss someone on the basis of gender, on the basis of sex, on the basis of race, on the basis of, etc. And we bring it, get you down the demographic funnel to about 0 .4 % of the entire population of the U .S. And then say, and by the way, none of it actually mattered because if you have the wrong opinion like J .K. Rowling or for that matter, black conservatives, you're still discounted anyway.

[277] And one thing that really kind of gave truth to the lies, I talked to every black conservative writer and black moderate that I know.

[278] All of them said they've been told they're not really black for having the wrong opinion.

[279] So it's really more of a dogma protection system.

[280] So I do think that there is hope that if we basically can, even if we can just establish, get back to rules, we all know are better for finding truth and get away from this ridiculous way of arguing that literally has no hope of getting you towards the truth and actually waste time to just get to whatever your opinion is, that if you can focus on constructive ways of arguing, there is still some hope.

[281] I would also add that I see some hope in alternative educational methods that are popping up, especially post -COVID.

[282] And, you know, I think part of the problem is the education schools are so politicized in America and so feminized.

[283] And also at the same time, you have the vast majority of teachers, especially at younger grades who are women.

[284] And so ideological, too, the education system.

[285] Absolutely.

[286] And I think that those schools tap into those instincts and those, those, those, those, negative feminine instincts that you're talking about, Dr. Peterson.

[287] And I think that especially post -COVID, now that we're looking at different models and different educational forms and different ways that parents can be involved or positive male role models can be involved in education from the start, I think that that has the upstream effect, hopefully, of counterbalancing some of the excesses that we see in our universities today.

[288] I honestly think that mechanisms that allow people to completely sidestep higher education is actually in some cases our best hope for making higher education better.

[289] Because right now, you go to Harvard.

[290] Who knows if you're, it's a good guess that you're probably pretty smart and work pretty hard in high school, but not necessarily.

[291] You could also be kind of a major donor or led in on an athletic scholarship.

[292] And the average grade at GPA now, Harvard is 3 .8, which is, which is like an A plus.

[293] So right now, we have at least an opportunity that schools, like really prestigious elite schools are no longer very good markers of who are going to be your best hires or who are going to be your best employees.

[294] Because you might, they might be smart, they might not be.

[295] You can't really tell if they learned anything because they all get 3 .8s.

[296] And they also are likely to come with them a very difficult to work with kind of idea of, you know, my workplace is oppressive.

[297] Meanwhile, if there are ways, for the, for hardworking, smart kids to be able to show that they are conscientious, that they're able to read at a high level, that they're, and that they are the hardest working and best and brightest.

[298] That can be done actually really inexpensively.

[299] And if we start actually looking at some of these alternative ways of educating yourself, it could, it will scare elite colleges like crazy.

[300] And I mean, and I tried to practice what I preach here, because originally, like, we had a policy, and I didn't realize this, that we have a policy that we wouldn't hire non -degree holders.

[301] When this was pointed out to me, when we're considering hiring Ricky, I'm like, oh my God, I'm not practicing what I preach here.

[302] We have to get rid of this policy.

[303] And I think more places should, because there's going to be a lot of really super smart people who are smart enough to see that they should opt out of higher ed as it currently exists and try to figure out to show that they're the best, brightest, hardest, working in different ways.

[304] we're going to launch a new university in November called Peterson Academy and I've spent a lot of time researching objective assessment methods for general cognitive ability and for conscientiousness and the universities have left that all on the table and it's of unbelievable economic worth and my sense is that a system that would actually provide a genuine assessment and accreditation of people based on their intellectual merit and their ability to work hard would be of incalculable economic value and could supplant the universities very rapidly.

[305] That is what should happen.

[306] I had no idea you're working on that, by the way.

[307] Oh, yeah, man. We got 30 great professors already up.

[308] We think we can knock the price of a degree equivalent down to $4 ,000, which I think would be absolutely hilarious.

[309] Yeah, so Ricky, I should point out here, you know, I went after women pretty hard and I think rightly so in some ways.

[310] But I want to point some things out that I know, too, just so you know and everybody listening knows where I stand.

[311] The data on ability with regards to men and women is pretty damn clear.

[312] Men and women have virtually identical levels of general cognitive ability.

[313] There might be some additional variability in men, although that's disputable, but fundamentally half the intellectual capital in the world is in the hands of women.

[314] and we'd be absolutely fools not to make full use of that, right?

[315] And we know, too, that countries that have a better record of rights for women and also providing better access to women on the educational front, they do way better economically.

[316] It's not even close.

[317] And so it's obviously the case that it would be to the benefit of everyone if we could harness the full potential talent of people, regardless of sex, you know, the old liberal dream.

[318] That doesn't solve the problem of the fact that we're corrupting our institutions at a rate that's absolutely beyond comprehension, but it does mean that, you know, we're not going to put the genie in the back in the bottle, and neither should we, if we can, as we have, if we can free up women so that they can have their families and their relationships just like men, and they can produce and explore and create in relative freedom.

[319] Obviously, that would be better for everyone.

[320] I just wanted to make that clear.

[321] I want to put out one more pessimistic observation that you guys can comment on, and then maybe we'll turn to fire for a minute and your recent rankings of freedom on campus.

[322] Well, so we have this potential problem of the feminization of the institutions and the rise of politically correct authoritarian doctrine and the cancel culture that's emerged out of that.

[323] talked a little bit about that, I guess I think maybe we're in a perfect storm, because if it's true that antisocial female behavior in particular scales extremely well on social media, maybe what we're seeing is this weird, unexpected interaction where we have the emergence of female -dominated institutions at exactly the same time.

[324] We have this immense technological capacity that we never had before, that enables the worst of feminine -like behavior to make itself fully manifest in the public sphere.

[325] Now, I know that lots of trolls online, by the way, are men, and perhaps even the majority of them, but that's not precisely the point.

[326] The point is that it's reputation, savaging, gossiping, and innuendo, that the net does particularly well.

[327] And that puts us all in a, well, it exacerbates, it might be exaggerating substantially...

[328] the detrimental effects that we're also seeing as a consequence of the rapid sex transformation in our institutions.

[329] So, Greg, I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, if what you think about that is a potential observation.

[330] I think that when you pointed to the sex difference being the major change that we saw in 2014, and I know it's almost become a cliche, I really do think that the big change that allowed for cancel culture, more than anything else is a massive technological shift.

[331] And when I was in the law school, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty.

[332] And because I'm a First Amendment nerd and our theory of prior restraint in the United States and First Amendment law comes actually out of the old print licensing scheme in Tudor and Stuart England.

[333] And I actually studied a lot of the first person to licensed printers in England, which was Henry VIII.

[334] And you can see from 15, to 15 .38, this desire to put the genie back in the bottle, as you say.

[335] But the simple fact is that when you introduce a huge number of additional people to a global conversation, it is unavoidable that you'll enter an anarchical period.

[336] You're going to enter a crazy period because, yes, printing press, long term, great benefits to it.

[337] Short term, increase in the witch trials, absolutely crazy, bloody wars of religion, that it led to some short -term, really horrific results.

[338] And what we've just done, particularly with the rise of social media, is we've done something, and people really have to appreciate the scale of this.

[339] We just made it possible due to largely social media and the internet over an incredibly short period of time, introduce billions of additional eyes and mouths to a discussion.

[340] And when you have that many critical eyes on a problem, you can tear down any person, and that's cancel culture, any idea, or any institution.

[341] But I think that the pessimism that we have right now is partially because, and I, you know, my co -author John Haidt and so many other people are trying to figure out ways to put the social media of the genie back in the bottle.

[342] And I'm the one saying, I was like, I've got bad news for you.

[343] There is no way to avoid this being a crazy period.

[344] However, cultures adapt.

[345] People, people learn, people do actually learn new cultural ways of adapting.

[346] to major technological shifts.

[347] And over a period of time, it actually turned out that those extra million eyes that the printing press brought on to problems were incredibly good at actually getting towards truth because you had mass disconfirmation.

[348] You had that many more people reading something could actually point out falsity much faster.

[349] And that's the way you get to truth mostly is just by chipping away at falsity.

[350] And I feel like there is, I have not stopped being at least to some degree a techno -optimist.

[351] Because I think once you have an extra billion eyes on a problem, you can actually solve some problems much more thoroughly and much more quickly if you're not using it just to gossip, just to cancel people, just to, if you use it to argue towards truth.

[352] And that's something that we really emphasize in the book.

[353] It's like, listen, social media as it currently exists, there could be a better way.

[354] And I know that they're all small companies trying to actually figure out ways to argue towards truth.

[355] So the short -term pessimism that we all feel.

[356] It doesn't have to be this way forever.

[357] And I think that when you alluded to the idea that there are some reasons to be wildly optimistic as well, you know, like I think we're both there talking about potential technological advances that really could, you know, save the species, so to speak.

[358] So I do think that long term, a lot of the problems that we're seeing right now are the early problems created by something that will ultimately prove to be a positive shift.

[359] Yeah, well, your comments about what happened after the printing press was enabled are very interesting.

[360] I mean, so what's essentially happening according to your analysis is that the territory of public discourse has expanded extremely rapidly twice in the last 500 years, once with the introduction of the printing press and now once with the introduction really, well, of a variety of modes of communication that were not there.

[361] including long -term video and audio and the permanence of those, and then the fact that people can communicate with the pen stroke with millions of people.

[362] So we've expanded the polity of free speech dramatically.

[363] Now, you could make the case, and I think this is what you're doing, that there's going to be a lag before the institutions catch up, right?

[364] And those would be the cultural norm institutions, but also the rules and regulations, the laws.

[365] It's the Wild West.

[366] and what that means is in the Wild West, while the psychopaths have an opportunity to flourish, at least temporarily, till everybody figures out how to get the back under control.

[367] Yeah, the problem I see, that's fair enough, and you could well be right.

[368] The problem I see is that, well, there's a bunch of problems, is that the way that psychopaths, the manipulative types, are held responsible, is that people eventually learn who they are, right?

[369] So, well, first of all, if you're enough of a prick in face -to -face, contact with people, especially among men, you're going to get punched.

[370] And so that tends to keep that down as long as you're in embodied form and a few feet away from each other.

[371] And of course, that disappears if you're separated, which is why people are more aggressive when they yell inside their own cars, for example.

[372] And it's completely gone, well, right, exactly.

[373] It's a very well -known phenomenon.

[374] And it completely vanishes online.

[375] Now, the problem is with online communication is there's no iterability in it, right, because you can poke someone hard and then run away and never see them again.

[376] So there's no constraint of iterability, which is a big problem.

[377] And you can do this anonymously.

[378] You know, and I've gone after the online anonymous trolls, and I know the literature indicating that online anonymous troublemaking trolls tend to have dark tetrad personality types.

[379] And they all bitch at me because they think, well, we have to be anonymous because, you know, we're heroic whistleblowers and otherwise will be canceled.

[380] It's like, no, one of you in 10 ,000 is a heroic whistleblower, and the rest you were just the sorts of pricks who sit in their basement and poke at things who would immediately get punched in high school, and that's gone.

[381] And so, but I can't see a way, like, one of the things I've thought through is the fact that, you know, the social media companies could separate the anonymous types from the people who had actual verifiable identities.

[382] But I'm also afraid of verifiable identity because that takes us down the whole digital identity route and that's God, man, look what's happened in China.

[383] That's just, that does look like...

[384] What's happened in Canada?

[385] Well, oh yeah, Canada.

[386] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[387] I know, well, people in Canada say, well, you keep warning that free speech is in danger.

[388] It's like, no, no, guys, I'm warning you that free speech in Canada is already gone.

[389] It's not in danger.

[390] It's already gone.

[391] And, you know, to the degree that that's the...

[392] case in places like the U .S. is debatable, but I don't think it's debatable in Canada.

[393] It's just that people haven't woken up to it.

[394] Anyways, you are optimistic, but with that optimism, I mean, what do you see?

[395] I'm a little mixed.

[396] Okay, okay, well, fair enough, fair enough, you know.

[397] I mean, we're in very, very variable times, let's say.

[398] I mean, I'd call myself hopeful.

[399] Okay, well, what do you see?

[400] You've thought about this a lot, both of you, what do you see that might actually be done concretely to regulate this proclivity towards council culture without also, you know, I see what Christopher Rufo and people like him are doing in Florida, you know, and I have some real sympathy for their attempts, but I can easily see that going astray too.

[401] You know, once the politicians enter the fray of ideas, I mean, how could that go wrong?

[402] I mean, it's going to go wrong real fast, right?

[403] Yeah, real fast.

[404] Real fast.

[405] Yeah, absolutely, man. Because most of these ideas have to be beat in the realm of ideas.

[406] as far as I can tell.

[407] So what do you see as concrete steps that are positive that we could take moving forward, say within the universities?

[408] Yeah, no, absolutely.

[409] And what's funny is, you know, I end up, you know, arguing with Rufo about reforms.

[410] And step number one, and I believe profoundly in higher education reform.

[411] But step number one of reform is you have to pass something that actually is legal, is actually not going to be immediately laughed out of court.

[412] And so this is what we warned about some of the regulations that they were trying in Florida.

[413] Because I'm a First Amendment lawyer.

[414] And we looked at the Stop Woke Act that DeSantis, you know, came out with them like, no, no, no, no, that's going, that will never survive judicial scrutiny.

[415] And by the way, we are a principal and nonpartisan and will be one of the ones to sue them.

[416] But definitely, even if we didn't, the ACLU is going to sue.

[417] And you're going to lose very clearly.

[418] And you're going to waste oxygen of the reform movement.

[419] You're going to achieve nothing.

[420] You're going to give them a new boogeyman.

[421] It will get you nowhere.

[422] And so far, that's exactly what happened.

[423] Meanwhile, some of the other reforms that DeSantis was talking about were great ideas.

[424] When it came to, you know, for example, having, you know, as part of orientation debate series where you actually have people argue about the most radioactive topics in the country, that could be amazing.

[425] Talking about free speech and orientation could be amazing.

[426] I think that reducing the bureaucracy is something I've been saying for decades.

[427] A lot of the worst things that are happening for freedom of speech, at first, for the first part of my career, they were overwhelmingly coming from the ranks of administrators.

[428] And then in 2014, they started coming from the students as well.

[429] Now, people sometimes think what I'm saying is it used to be administrators and now it's students.

[430] No. Now it's administrators and students and usually end students they like.

[431] So like what happened at Stanford, my alma mater, when they shouted down a judge Kyle Duncan, you know, very much seem to be a collaboration between some administrators and the DEI programs and students themselves to do a shout down there.

[432] So I think a de bureaucratized university will have more free speech, it will have more due process, and it will have fewer of these incidents.

[433] But I also think we desperately need the kind of experimentation that you're doing, and the University of Texas at Austin is doing, Minerva University out in San Francisco, like ways that actually can perform better at much lower costs that can actually tell you who the best and brightest and most hardworking are out there.

[434] And your point about the laws going horribly wrong, that essentially if you think you can just get rid of bad ideas on campus through legislation, well, I've got bad news for you.

[435] They're already trying to do that all across the country.

[436] They're just coming at it from the left rather than the right.

[437] And I'm very proud that we were able to find, because we've been looking, Dr. Peterson, we've been looking for this for a long time.

[438] We wanted to find a really good, read, terrible, D .E .I. policy to shoot down in court to make it clear that this is compelled speech.

[439] This is against academic freedom.

[440] This is utterly inappropriate for a place that's supposed to be the marketplace of ideas.

[441] And we found that, unsurprisingly, in California.

[442] And the California Community College system had a system that actually requires you, and this includes whether you're a chemistry professor or an English professor, to incorporate.

[443] what is it called?

[444] Intersectionality, anti -racism, you know, which is Kendi's idea, to incorporate all of these ideological things that a lot of people don't even believe are true to begin with, but that you have to actually incorporate in your classroom regardless of what you teach, and regardless of whether or not you disagree with them or not.

[445] So we brought this in court, and it's been very funny to me, watching people who were totally with us when we litigated against the Stop Woke Act, freaking out that we're litigating against the DEI, tyranny, and making the point that, and I just argue back to, I'm like, no, this is a gross violation.

[446] And I always make the point that telling people what they can't say is really bad and we will always fight it.

[447] Telling people what they must say is a thousand times worse, and we will definitely fight that right away.

[448] That's what I objected to in Canada, and that's also why my license is on the line now, is because I am being told what I have.

[449] to say, which is way different than what I can't say.

[450] You know, it's a little bit of both.

[451] But, yeah, it's stunning.

[452] It's beyond comprehension.

[453] The other thing we found, by the way, in that research I referred to, was that if people had taken even one course that had a politically correct orientation, they were also much more likely to be politically correct authoritarian.

[454] So this tactic that the radicals on the left have of gaining control of the education system, that's unbelievably effective.

[455] And Ricky, you mentioned earlier.

[456] This is something that's been an absolute bloody mystery to me. I can't believe, you know, I'm not a fan of the Democrats in the U .S. for what that's worth, given that I'm Canadian.

[457] But the Republicans and the conservatives have their problems.

[458] And one of those problems is kind of short -sightedness.

[459] It's like, I cannot believe, and I haven't had anyone explain this to me, except Chris, I talked to Chris Christie about this because he went to battle with the teachers' unions in New Jersey.

[460] So, you know, the faculties of education have a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification, right?

[461] And there's like absolutely no reason for that.

[462] The faculties of education, to call their research dismal and misleading is to barely scrape the surface.

[463] They got to stupid several decades before the rest of the universities.

[464] They generally have the students who perform the worst academically.

[465] And so, and everything they teach is ideological and unfounded.

[466] no evidence whatsoever that the faculties of education know anything whatsoever about making better students.

[467] And yet, they have a hammerlock on teacher certification, and that essentially gives the progressive radicals access to 50 % of the state budgets in the U .S. So it's no bloody wonder that the liberals, the real liberals and the conservatives, are losing the culture war.

[468] I mean, they handed the children, and we've handed all the children to the faculty.

[469] of education.

[470] And for the life of me, I can't understand how conservatives can't see that.

[471] And I just want to add one thing that we didn't know when coddling of the American mind came out, and we should have, is that we've been calling out education schools, you know, since we were founded at fire.

[472] And one thing that we thought successfully, by the way, what was the accreditation body for most education schools, tried to have a social justice requirement, saying that you could not graduate with a degree in education unless you proved your commitment to social justice, which is, we're like, guys, if you don't see this as an obvious political litmus test, then I don't know what to say.

[473] So we got that defeated.

[474] But of course, when you have a situation where only fire and some other groups are objecting to an obvious political litmus test, and it's considered just fine among other people in the field, then the problem's already gone way too far.

[475] One thing we didn't know, though, is how much of the administration at universities come from education schools.

[476] And that we were way ahead of the curve.

[477] at University of Delaware back in 2007.

[478] They had this absolutely crazy brainwashing program that involved people having mandatory meetings with their RAs where they had to confess to, they had to talk about when they discovered their sexual identity.

[479] In this case, one of the examples we had was a young woman being in a session with a man's room being asked this.

[480] And her answer was, none of your damn business.

[481] And she actually got written up for that.

[482] And we're like, that's exactly the right call.

[483] on that.

[484] So we've been fighting this for a long time, but we didn't actually fully understand how much of the distortions we see in higher ed as it currently exists actually come from the fact that the administrators who are enforcing these rules and enforcing the speech codes and enforcing the bias -related incident program policies are actually education school graduates themselves.

[485] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[486] Well, they're responsible also for the worst excesses of so -called psychological research in the last 60 years.

[487] It's like the self -esteem movement, that was a complete bloody catastrophe.

[488] That was the first time that the schools set out to actually produce neurotic narcissists, and they did that quite successfully.

[489] They pushed whole word learning, which plummeted California from top of the national standings and literacy to bottom within about 10 years, right, predicated on the idea that just because expert readers could read a word at a glance that we should teach children to do the same, even though we have a phonetic alphabet, which might have been a hint, right?

[490] The education schools produced multiple intelligences, which was a complete bloody fraud.

[491] They produced practical intelligence, social, emotional learning.

[492] Like it's just one destructive, counterproductive, anti -scientific fad after another.

[493] And that's in addition to the fact that, while they're woke beyond comprehension, incompetent and generally have the worst students and the lowest academic standards.

[494] So the Conservatives couldn't possibly have done a worse job of defending their own territory if they would have come up with a plan to do so.

[495] So, Ricky, with what you're doing, like my daughter is pretty active on social media, and she has a background similar to yours.

[496] I'd say her political leanings are probably approximately the same as yours, somewhat right -leaning libertarian.

[497] And what sort of cancellation, et cetera, do you face online?

[498] Like, I mean, I've read the comments directed towards my daughter.

[499] And I mean, the ones directed to me are pretty brutal.

[500] But women do face a level of brutality, especially personal attacks, often appearance -related, that men just don't face.

[501] And so what's that been like for you?

[502] And how is it, has it been a problem?

[503] And how do you defend yourself against that?

[504] Yeah, I think, you know, I'm benefited by the fact that I grew up with social media and I was on, this is one of the few upsides of that fact that I've been on Instagram since I was 11, unfortunately, but I do know how to deal with negative comments and negative feedback just from day one, essentially, of being an adolescent.

[505] But I would say, yeah, when I did my first real foray into mass exposure and seeing what, you know, I, I tend to be like, I kind of roll my eyes at the, like, misogyny and, like, a lot of my feminist friends who are seeing it in every corner.

[506] But my God, when I did Bill Maher, did I see just like the wrath of God come for me in a way that was not coming from my co -panelists?

[507] So that definitely was a humbling experience.

[508] I made the mistake of reading the Reddit threads.

[509] I told myself, never again.

[510] Now I know what's out there.

[511] I know what they can comment me with.

[512] But I would say, yeah, there was that definitely, weirdly all people on the left I've found so far, at least when I am on conservative forums, maybe because they're more friendly to my ideology, I'd get less of that.

[513] But certainly a lot of the more left -leaning Bill Maher fans were less fans of mine than most of my audience.

[514] Jordan, I tweeted out about like how, like I said at the beginning, how lucky.

[515] I felt to work with Ricky, and we're a great team, because I'm a crazy overwriter.

[516] Hight was good at helping me with that, too.

[517] I'll write 5 ,000 words that has to be boiled down to 500, you know, like, that's a problem.

[518] And Ricky was constantly showing me that the thing that I took three pages to write that could actually be a perfect paragraph that actually was better than my three pages.

[519] So she's absolutely brilliant to work with.

[520] And I mentioned this on Twitter.

[521] And, of course, a lot of people who think of themselves as champion of women and, you know, very progressive on the left, immediately, we're like, oh, you're just writing with her because she's a skinny blonde who works for Fox.

[522] And I was kind of like, wow, so you're just, I'm writing with her because she's brilliant.

[523] And the funny thing is, we'd never met until probably like.

[524] We met after we signed the book deal, actually, in person for the first time, which is funny.

[525] This was a pandemic meeting of mine.

[526] Although it was kind of funny, like, because I was so impressed with her and my interactions with her was just like email and phone calls.

[527] When I first saw, I'm like, oh, my God, you really are a kid.

[528] What was my response?

[529] And Dr. Peterson, if I may go back to your question about what we can do to actually solve cancel culture, I do.

[530] My expertise is certainly less professional, but more on the ground as a young person growing up in the age of cancel culture for as long as I can effectively remember.

[531] And I have to tell you, one thing that I think is just so underappreciated is the fact that just courage is can.

[532] And when I was at NYU, I learned the hard way that cancel culture thrives off of making everyone feel alone and as though they're the only person around them that thinks the way that they do.

[533] It incentivizes you to close in on yourself, to not share your beliefs.

[534] And you know, you could be sitting next to a roommate who feels the same way or someone across the hall.

[535] And I was, when I first decided, my first article that was published was actually in the Daily Wire.

[536] And when I first decided to put my name to an article, I was ready for everyone I knew to instantaneously hate me and disown me. And some people, not huge fans of what I was writing, and that's fine.

[537] But I found out that there were so many people that I was so close to in so many ways that actually shared a lot of my political beliefs, or at least the core principles of classical liberalism, or they respected me in a way that I didn't expect.

[538] And even at a place like NYU, and I actually say this in our book, but when I was a freshman, I was hiding.

[539] books under my bed, including your book, 12 Rules for Life, and Thomas Sol's books.

[540] So I had my secret library underneath my bed, which I'm ashamed to admit, looking back.

[541] But when you're an 18 -year -old in a new place, yeah, exactly.

[542] But when you're an 18 -year -old in a new place, the incentives are to close it on yourself.

[543] And as soon as I spoke out, I had administrators, professors, people that lived on my floor in my dorm, people that I was friends with for years.

[544] And, like, if we can just prove that this is a tyranny of the minority, which it absolutely It's statistically.

[545] Even with Gen Z, even though our Gen Z politics are so out of control, if you look at what generations have a positive view of cancel culture, the most positive view is millennials.

[546] It tapers down as you get older.

[547] But the least positive view by far is Gen Z because we grew up in it.

[548] We know how awful it is to be a teenager with tripwires all around you.

[549] And if we could just get more young people to say, you know what, here I am being open and honest and humble and criticize my beliefs, but they're out.

[550] here and this is who I am, then the courage will be contagious.

[551] I feel very confident in that fact.

[552] Well, there's something I want to zero in on that, too.

[553] So you tell me what your experience was.

[554] So you said, you know, you were hesitant when you first started to write.

[555] But so one of the things I've realized more clearly in the last five or six years is that the meaning that sustains you in life is certainly not a hedonic meaning.

[556] And the reason for that, at least in part, is that, well, hedonism can make you impulsive and make you sacrifice the future for the present.

[557] And it can alienate you from other people because if you're hedonistically inclined, you'll use other people.

[558] But there's a deeper reason why it's not reliable as a means of orientation.

[559] And that is that if something terrible happens to you, hedonism isn't going to protect you because you're not happy when you're suffering.

[560] And so if you're relying on a hedonistic viewpoint, then as soon as you're miserable, you're doomed.

[561] So then you might say, well, what do you turn to to sustain you?

[562] And you can think, well, you have your relationships, your loves, and your interests and all of that.

[563] And I think that that's crucial.

[564] But there's something else that sustains you, too.

[565] And I think this points deeply to what makes life actually meaningful.

[566] And that is that adventure sustains you, and I think we're built for the kind of glorious adventures that we like to go watch on movies, maybe a romantic adventure.

[567] That's the pinnacle of adventure, you know.

[568] And then you might ask yourself, well, if you wanted to have an adventure, maybe a true romantic adventure that was even beyond the scope of your wildest dreams, how might you find that?

[569] And I would say, well, you find that by telling the truth.

[570] Because if you see, if you tell the truth, you have to let go of what you want, right?

[571] Because you don't know what's going to happen when you say what you think.

[572] If you're crafting your message to gain a particular outcome, you're not telling the truth.

[573] You're using your words in a manipulative way.

[574] Now, you have experience of this, this is what I've gleaned from what you've told me so far, is that, you know, you were in a relatively woke environment, say it at least, and then you decided that you were going to actually write what you believe to be true.

[575] Okay, what was the consequence of that for you?

[576] I mean, I certainly have a few less friendships, but they were not the ones that were meaningful and actually bringing me towards my higher purpose in life, I think, 100%.

[577] And I mean, I have to say, looking back, as scary as it was to be on the precipice of deciding, do I want this to forever, you know, Google will exist and that my name was forever in the record with all my political opinions.

[578] And it felt very much like a no going back sort of situation.

[579] And I have absolutely zero regrets at all whatsoever.

[580] Because as you're saying, like the authenticity.

[581] is the most important thing.

[582] And I think that there's a real crisis with young people who are growing up online, even if it's not their politics, even if it's just feeling like if they say something in artful or they make a dumb joke and they're a teenager that it could be screenshoted and sent to everyone or sent to their college or their college might revoke their admissions.

[583] Like I think that we've, the way that our teenage fumbles are just so etched in stone with technology and social media today I think is really causing a crisis of authenticity with young people, and we need to wake up to that.

[584] Well, you know, you said you started writing, and that went very well.

[585] It propelled you out of the university.

[586] It propelled you into this career you already have at a very young age as a calmist.

[587] It's propelled you into a fire fellowship, and now you're about to become the co -author of a book that will probably be bestseller.

[588] And, you know, you got rid of some friends you didn't need because you found out who they really were.

[589] And to me, that seems like nothing but benefit.

[590] Now, you know, my observation is being, if you do say what you think, there's a short -term price to be paid, which is, of course, why people lie to begin with.

[591] They want to avoid the price, or they want to gain something they don't deserve.

[592] So that's the reason to lie.

[593] So what's the reason not to lie?

[594] Well, the answer is you get to have your adventure.

[595] Now, you have to pay the price for it, and that might be that you get raked over the calls a little bit when you open your mouth.

[596] But it looks to me like, you know, you're on a pretty good pathway at the moment, and that wouldn't happen if you wouldn't have decided to take the risk to actually write down what you believe to be true, you know, despite your youth and your lack of preparation for doing so, right?

[597] So you have that psychological authenticity, but that's not all that happened.

[598] As soon as you did that, a whole series of doors open to you.

[599] And there's no reason to assume at all that that's going to.

[600] to stop.

[601] And I think that happens to everyone if they actually, if they actually abide by and speak the truth.

[602] I think that pathway is open to everyone.

[603] And Jordan, a major theme of the book and one of the things we try to explain to people is sometimes people say, oh, cancel culture is, of course, real, but it doesn't affect me. I'll never be canceled.

[604] I'm not an environment where I'll be canceled.

[605] And time and time again, of course, I hear this from professors and within it like a year, they're writing fire to ask for our help.

[606] But even off campus, one of the ways in which cancel culture is devastating.

[607] And we see this in the case of, like, Carol Hoeven, a professor at Harvard who stepped down from her position and left Harvard for a while.

[608] After she just went on Fox News and argued that biological sex exists and got targeted by administrators there.

[609] And argued it so tactfully so tactfully, compassionately thoughtfully.

[610] She's a wonderful person.

[611] But of course, what I feel like these people don't get is it's like, you know that you've completely destroyed any credibility that anybody will have ever debating these topics ever again when it comes from academia.

[612] If people know that one Galileo can be sacrificed for arguing that the Earth goes around the sun, they're not going to trust anybody else who says that the sun goes around the Earth again.

[613] You know, that's just the way it works.

[614] And from that kind of effect of having the billion extra eyes on the problem, what I feel like it showed us how shallow our expert class is, how shallow our pundit class is, how, you know, it let more people know about the replication crisis and how much shoddy research comes out of higher ed.

[615] And that led to sort of like an epistemic anarchy kind of situation like we currently have.

[616] But that's not sustainable.

[617] And what happens over time, and I think is happening, is people are looking primarily to individuals who they're like, okay, who has always been honest to me, who was actually always said what they think is actually true.

[618] And I think that one of the reasons why I'm, like I said, I'm not necessarily optimistic, but I am hopeful, is that, and particularly on places like Substack, for example, you see some of these experts who have always shown integrity, you know, having, creating audiences around themselves to be the people who raise their hand and say, by the way, one thing I can say is you'll always get the truth for me. Yeah, yeah, like Jay Baticherry at Stanford, for example.

[619] Yeah, there's lots of examples like that now.

[620] And there's more academics like that coming out of the woodwork all the time.

[621] Hey, so let's talk about Harvard.

[622] You brought up Harvard.

[623] I used to work at Harvard, and I loved it there.

[624] It was a great institution when I was there in the 90s.

[625] You, in a fit of comic accuracy, your organization, Fire, has just awarded Harvard your coveted, you score below zero on campus freedom score, and which I don't know how you can score below zero on a scale, so I'd like to hear about that.

[626] I think you gave them, you actually invented a new category, which was abysmal, and abysmal's not good.

[627] Can you explain, why is this not just a joke, let's say?

[628] And can you justify what you did and let people know what it means?

[629] Yeah, I've been kind of amused by some people that I know at Harvard, claiming that our survey was arbitrary, because it couldn't possibly be true that Harvard scored actually less than zero by our, by our rating.

[630] Now, to be clear, we have done every year we've been doing it, fire has conducted, and progressively, the largest study of student opinion about the atmosphere for freedom of speech on their campus ever.

[631] Like from the very, from our very first one, I believe it was the largest one that was ever of student opinion.

[632] And now we're up to 55 ,000 students that we talk to.

[633] We create, we work with a group called College Pulse, we create representative panels at each school, we surveyed them on everything from how acceptable violence is in response to freedom of speech to whether or not they feel like they can disagree with each other or whether or not they're afraid to disagree with their professors.

[634] We also have the largest database of speech codes ever put together.

[635] We evaluate universities according to their written policies.

[636] We evaluate them in terms of cancellation of professors and attempts to cancel professors.

[637] We certainly think that if you have a huge number of professors who have been targeted, that certainly speaks badly of the environment to begin with.

[638] But certainly if you're firing them to or punishing them too, that's even worse, and that's a bigger thing.

[639] We have the biggest database of students being targeted, and we combine all of this research together in definitely the most ambitious attempt to rank schools, according to freedom of speech, you know, ever done.

[640] And I don't put a thumb on the scale at any of this.

[641] And Harvard, when we never did well on our survey.

[642] It was always in the bottom fifth.

[643] Sometimes it was in the bottom 10.

[644] Last year, it was in the bottom fifth.

[645] But every year we try to refine it.

[646] We try to make it more and more accurate.

[647] So we figured out rigorous ways to actually include things like professor cancellations and that sort of stuff.

[648] But the biggest thing we emphasize are what students are actually saying about the environment on campus.

[649] And the news wasn't great.

[650] Interesting, Michigan Technological University ended number one.

[651] The most elite school that ended in the top 10 was University of Virginia.

[652] University of Chicago always does very well.

[653] But besides those schools, elite higher education has done terribly.

[654] Last year, the dead last one was Columbia, and this year it was Harvard.

[655] But Harvard really scored abysmally.

[656] It earned that because, for example, Penn, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has had a really rough bunch of years.

[657] I mean, they're targeting Amy Wax is just one of the things that's going on, like a tenured professor that they're trying to get rid of.

[658] But the students themselves are saying, this is an environment where it's really hard to have a discussion about anything important.

[659] And of course, you know, a lot of these schools you end up them at the same time having, you know, being kind of soft on violence in response to speech, which might be part of the problem.

[660] But University of Pennsylvania, which was 247 out of the 248 schools that we ranked, got a score of like 11 .63, which is really bad.

[661] Harvard score was negative 10 .67.

[662] We rounded them up to zero because we thought that, because we thought that was a responsible thing to do.

[663] But they actually scored below zero according to all the different environments that we rank, including, again, most importantly, what students are actually saying about the environment at Harvard?

[664] How can you score below zero?

[665] How do your scales work?

[666] I know this is a technical issue, but I'm still curious.

[667] I mean, how was that even possible?

[668] We give schools scores for whether or not they support students when they're in situations, when they have their free speech challenged, and when they have a speaker disinvited.

[669] And you get negatives for things like if you have a disinvitation and the school didn't do anything to stop it, you get negative points.

[670] And most schools, actually, sorry, all 247 other schools were able to, we didn't think there was any risk that a school could get an actual negative score.

[671] because we do these little adjustments here and there very, you know, very rigorously to try to accommodate for the fact that, one, you know, students sometimes go to schools that they think are actually pretty good for free speech, but actually, if you look at their record, they're firing tenured professors for freedom of speech.

[672] So like Princeton actually scores surprisingly well, even though they fired tenured, or they forced out Professor Joshua Katz.

[673] Now, of course, they said that was for sexual misconduct, but it's really clear the wrong.

[674] reason why he was targeted was because of his calling, I think, BLM, like a hate group or something like that.

[675] That's when the scrutiny started, and that's what they actually got him out for.

[676] So they get a ding for forcing out a tenured professor.

[677] But the students there themselves, and this comports, you know, somewhat with my own experience, I actually think the environment's not that bad for free speech.

[678] Princeton doesn't do great, of course.

[679] But in, so we, we include all of these factors together.

[680] And Harvard, you know, Harvard's been on our 10 worst schools for freedom of speech list, I think, four times already.

[681] And we've only been doing that since 2011.

[682] So, no, but it shouldn't have come as such a shock to Harvard that they need to fix things.

[683] And meanwhile, you know, good friends like our advisory council member, Stephen Pinker, who's been a friend of fire forever, he created a group that was to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech at Harvard.

[684] I think he got 100 scholars to join it.

[685] And this is something that actually creates an opportunity for them to be taken more seriously.

[686] And meanwhile, kind of like, we, as far as schools that we interact with, Fire has a really good track record of convincing schools to do the right thing.

[687] Sometimes we have to take them to court.

[688] Sometimes it's just public pressure that actually leads them to do the right thing.

[689] Harvard won't ever budge on any of this stuff.

[690] And the question is, like, will the fact that their own students and that their own behavior has gotten them this ranking, will this make them take the issue of academic freedom and free speech more seriously?

[691] And actually, honestly, Jordan, you probably know better than we would.

[692] Yeah, well, the question is, is Harvard, is Harvard a union?

[693] university or a hedge fund.

[694] No, I'm dead serious.

[695] I mean, just because something says it's something.

[696] I'm laughing because it's true.

[697] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[698] I mean, you know.

[699] I'm laughing because it's true.

[700] Like, I worked out that they had something like the GDP of Lithuania, you know, to one side several years ago.

[701] And now it's up to many of the Nordic countries.

[702] Like, they have like $60 billion or something like that to one side?

[703] Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[704] Well, that's it.

[705] And I mean, at some point, the university is a side show.

[706] And we already might be at that point.

[707] So that could easily be the case.

[708] I read this great book decades ago called Systemantics by a man named John Galt, and it's a great book, very, very short, tongue -in -cheek in a way, but brilliant.

[709] And he has a lot of maxims and axioms.

[710] It's a list of axioms about how you analyze how a system works.

[711] And one of his axioms, which I've never forgotten and has been unbelievably useful to me as an analytic researcher, was the system does not do what its name says it does.

[712] And so that when you approach a system, you have to look at.

[713] So if you want to, for example, figure out what a system does, you look at where it spends its money.

[714] So I learned this when I was working for the Alberta government 30 years ago, 40 years ago, as a junior analyst.

[715] I had to gather statistics on how much the social services branch of the government spent on the actual people to whom they were delivering services, right?

[716] So that would be people receiving welfare and who are being subsidized for kindergarten and so on, everything that comes under the rubric of social services.

[717] And I found out that there were no stats.

[718] The system wasn't set up to actually monitor its own behavior and that the consulting company that had been hired to produce the report detailing those numbers the year before, it just basically made them up.

[719] And no one could tell any different.

[720] Yeah.

[721] And then I realized.

[722] There were no stats?

[723] No, no, no. Nobody had actually looked at how much was, how much the net recipients were receiving.

[724] Right.

[725] You couldn't find the data.

[726] No, no. And I'm sure that's still the case.

[727] Oh, yes, it's beyond belief.

[728] But it's no different than most charities.

[729] You know, most charities spend 90 % of their money running the charity.

[730] Now, you know, I'm not completely cynical about that because most corporations have about a 5 % profit margins.

[731] So that means they spend 95 % of their money running themselves.

[732] You know, it's not that easy to get an enterprise up and running that actually does something other than take care of itself.

[733] But when you look at a organization like Harvard and it has that immense storehouse of money, you think, well, why do they care about being a university?

[734] What the hell difference does it make?

[735] There's $60 billion sitting there.

[736] That's got to be the fundamental preoccupation.

[737] Now, that doesn't account for why it's become so insanely politically correct.

[738] You know, and I've talked to Harvard professors, one from the Kennedy School, which was particularly worrisome given its primary role, let's say, in determining American domestic and foreign policy, and then one from a different department, who both told me that one from the business school, or the Kennedy School, told me flat out that the professors there are terrified to say anything they think because the students will skin them alive.

[739] And then in the other department.

[740] I heard the same thing from a Kennedy school person last month.

[741] Yeah, well, isn't that wonderful, you know, when it was the preeminent, well, it's just so absolutely appalling.

[742] And so, yeah, well, we'll see if Harvard responds to any of that.

[743] They might, and they might not.

[744] It was a great institution when I worked there, you know.

[745] I mean, the faculty ran the place, the senior faculty, that is, and the senior faculty were top rate, and the second people, the second most important people were the undergraduates, and then likely the junior faculty, then the graduate students, and only then the administration, administration actually ran the university.

[746] I'll give you an example.

[747] So I had a friend who was a professor there, Patrick Kavanaugh, brilliant psychologist investigating vision.

[748] And they invited him in, as they did with senior faculty members, with, you know, good bonus and money to set up their lab.

[749] And he wanted a shower in his lab.

[750] And they said yes.

[751] And the reason they said yes was because they were smart.

[752] And they thought, well, if we have professors and students who want to stay in their damn lab so long that they don't go home, they sleep there and they need a shower, it's like, okay, if you want to work 17 hours a day, hey, man, we'll build you a shower.

[753] Now, you know, at my last institution, the University of Toronto, that would have never happened because they would have just thought of that as a luxury, because they weren't, you know, frankly, that bright.

[754] But Harvard was the sort of place, I'm dead serious about that.

[755] They talked a lot about excellence, but had no idea whatsoever how to facilitate it, although they were very good at talking about it.

[756] And so they put obstacles in the way rather than clearing them out of the way.

[757] And so Harvard was great.

[758] And I have no idea what the hell has happened to it in the interim, although, you know, the fact that Pinker felt compelled, and he's a very reasonable person and a liberal by any stretch of the imagination.

[759] He's hardly a right -wing, you know, some sort of right -wing conspiracy theorist, not Stephen Pinker.

[760] And the fact that he felt compelled to set up a whole organization to facilitate free speech at Harvard is another indication of just exactly how dreadful that place has become.

[761] Alumni should stop giving, right?

[762] That's part of the solution as well, especially if they're entrepreneurial or libertarian.

[763] It's like, don't give Harvard money.

[764] When we talk about this, how maddening it is for me to run a nonprofit, we defend free speech, you know, off campus as well now.

[765] We just, you know, relaunch to expand our mission, but we still focus overwhelmingly on higher ed, and that's always going to be central to what we do.

[766] And how often I talk to people who they'll complain and complain and complain about the schools, and then they'll say it's like, I'm even reconsidering my gift this year.

[767] And I'm like, you're reconsidering your gift this year?

[768] And a lot of times these are gigantic donors.

[769] Yeah.

[770] Well, people can't believe it.

[771] I mean, this is what I'm seeing in Canada, is that Canadians, in my situation, I'm being pursued by my accrediting board at the moment who want to take my license or subject me to re -education, which is, you know, just, I just can't even believe that this is the case or how they think that's going to work possibly because I'm definitely not courageable by standard re -education techniques.

[772] So, but I think Canadians, when they look at my situation, they have a very hard choice to make, and it's the same choice that you're requiring people who are analyzing higher education to make.

[773] You had, in the United States, you guys had stellar institutions, man. Those Uri -Ivey League schools, they were knocking it out of the park for a long time, and the state school system in California was deadly good for a long, long time.

[774] And so it's a complete bloody catastrophe that those institutions have inverted and are now actually peddling hard in the opposite direction.

[775] And it's not the least bit surprising that people can't believe it.

[776] Like, I'll tell you a funny story about this.

[777] So I was in the UK a while back, eh?

[778] and I was talking some of the members of the House of Lords, and they're pretty elderly people, generally speaking, and all of them virtually have had stellar careers.

[779] And they had all been forced to take DEI training.

[780] And I asked them, well, what do you mean forced?

[781] Like, you guys are actually only responsible to the queen, technically.

[782] No one can force you to do anything.

[783] And they said, well, they told us that we would lose our library privileges, we would lose our cafeteria privileges, and we wouldn't be able to park if we didn't take the course.

[784] Really?

[785] This is actually true.

[786] And I thought, well, why didn't you just tell them to go to hell?

[787] And they said, well, you know, we just thought we'd had a couple of scandals on the sexual front.

[788] And we thought maybe it wouldn't hurt us to, you know, brush up a bit on our conduct.

[789] But they had no idea, they had no idea whatsoever that there is an entire ideological enterprise underneath this, pushing everything in this insane progressive direction.

[790] They had no concept of that whatsoever.

[791] And so I think a lot of people who are looking at the universities and the political institutions, you know, they can either think that me and people like me, and that might include you two, unfortunately for you, are, you know, just.

[792] noisy conspiracy theorists screeching in the wilderness, or our major institutions, many of which were world -class and which took hundreds of years to instantiate, have now become virtually irreparably corrupt.

[793] Well, it's obviously a lot easier to write off the bearers of bad news.

[794] Sure.

[795] And unsurprisingly, and in Canada, you really see that, because most of our institutions here, they worked until, well, you say, 2014, that's probably about right.

[796] Yeah.

[797] No, it is funny watching the various ways you get dismissed talking about this.

[798] And one of the funniest ones is when people point out that in my book on Learning Liberty, I talked about 2007 as being the worst year I had seen.

[799] And that was the one way of the University of Delaware, you know, brainwashing program that I mentioned before, a crazy case involving someone getting, you know, expelled for a flyer.

[800] another case in which someone said the epithet went back in class and then in order to criticize it and was immediately suspended all things that are day -to -day occurrences now and people are kind of like oh but you're saying that things have been you've never seen it as bad but you said that back in 2007 I'm like because they kept on getting worse every several years and you always have the danger of course of being dismissed as a as a kook or unpleasible but it's particularly difficult when you're saying like I've been doing this for 22 years.

[801] It was already worse than I thought it would be for free speech on campus in 2001.

[802] And it's definitely had peaks and valleys here and there.

[803] But the trend line has overwhelmingly been.

[804] It just gets worse.

[805] So 2014 was a bad year.

[806] 2015 was 2017, giant acceleration in terms to get professors canceled.

[807] And then that's put in the dust by 2020 and 2021.

[808] And to get to the DEI stuff, the idea that in the midst of a situation in which there are departments that have literally no conservatives, particularly in elite higher education, where they have record low, all -time low viewpoint diversities, viewpoint diversity among professors, when they have cancel culture, when they have BRTs, when they have a tenure process that screens out for loud people, when they have all of these, what we call the conformity gauntlet in the book, they have all these mechanisms to shut you up from high school, actually from K through 12 on up, including nature, human behavior, saying that they won't actually publish things that are found to be harmful to groups, which is just like, wow, you can survive all.

[809] that and still not, and they decided in addition to this that they would add D .E .I. statements being required for professors.

[810] They needed an additional political litmus test.

[811] It's like, I can't believe any, like, only an administrator would look at the world of higher education and see, you know what, there is too much freedom of thought.

[812] There's too much heterogeneity among these professors.

[813] We need a mechanism to make it even more rigid.

[814] You know, I might also add in terms of being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for pointing out these realities, I think that the people who I've seen to be most amenable to these arguments that higher education is just completely turned on its head are young people who don't remember the model that you both remember of it actually being better at some point in time.

[815] When you look at the statistics of faith in higher education with Gen Z, two -thirds of current high school students say that they and tread their own educational path, less than half of current high schoolers say that a college degree is necessary for financial success, 100%.

[816] It's a necessity.

[817] And I mean, just the statistics are staggering.

[818] And who can, I mean, like, who can blame young people for looking at the situation in which people feel like they can't speak their minds?

[819] The millennials are just saddled in debt.

[820] We have a system in which a third of American colleges produce graduating classes in which the median graduate makes less than the average high school graduate.

[821] Like, this system has absolutely been filled with federally backed money and student loans.

[822] The generation above us is crippled.

[823] The institutions are dysfunctional.

[824] And no wonder young people who then were told, oh, not only are you going to shell over an arm and a leg to join this university, but now we're going to do the pandemic.

[825] And what NYU did was still charge us.

[826] Still charged us full tuition for Zoom school.

[827] And that was when my family.

[828] family was like, you have our blessing, you get right out of there.

[829] No, that was unbelievable.

[830] And like, I really feel for you in a most fundamental way, you know, when I was a kid, going to school in Alberta, now, Alberta was a rich place at that point.

[831] You could make quite a bit of money working in the summer because of the oil industry, essentially, and, you know, elevated salaries.

[832] It took me a month's work to pay my tuition for the year, and I could make enough in, I could make enough in four months to pay the whole year, no problem.

[833] You know, and I worked part -time during school.

[834] And then I would also say, I went to a little college when I first graduated from high school, and only had about 700 people, Grand Prairie Regional College, and all the professors there loved to teach, and my first year classes were seminars, and I had a blast.

[835] It was great.

[836] And I learned so much.

[837] I basically became literate.

[838] I knew my professors on a first name basis.

[839] I met all sorts of new people.

[840] It was great.

[841] I was, you know, trumpeting the praise of college to everyone far and wide.

[842] And it didn't saddle me with any debt.

[843] I graduated debt -free, essentially, and also with my graduate education, because I had a fellowship.

[844] And so, and lived in Montreal, which was also dirt cheap at the point at the time.

[845] And so I was, this is no nostalgia, you know.

[846] I had an excellent low -cost higher education experience, and I had excellent mentoring, in particular, as a graduate student.

[847] It was high quality.

[848] The clinical psychology program at McGill was, like, extremely effective.

[849] And you could do research.

[850] It was great.

[851] And then when I went to Harvard, I had a blast.

[852] The students were great.

[853] I loved my colleagues.

[854] I thought the university ran like a charm.

[855] So it's not just, you know, old guys looking back thinking things were better when we were young.

[856] It's that things have become so corrupt and so expensive that it borders on what's being done to young people on the higher education front borders on criminal.

[857] The bloody administrators figured out how to pick the future pockets of the students.

[858] That's really what happened.

[859] And so they just elevated tuition fees beyond any reasonable norm.

[860] And then to add to that, your observation, I couldn't believe the universities did this.

[861] It's like, well, we're just, going to teach you on Zoom, which is way worse than a video lecture, like way worse.

[862] Yeah.

[863] And we're going to charge you full tuition.

[864] Mind -balming.

[865] Not to mention, like, half the kids in my classes were in completely different time zones, so they're up at like 3 a .m. and they all have their cameras off as well.

[866] It was just an abdication of all of the school's responsibility on just a fundamental level.

[867] At the same time, all of our lives are being torn apart with these wild cancel culture mobs, which we talked earlier about whether social media made cancel culture go awry.

[868] I mean, certainly when you not only have social media as the predominant tool of communication going into a pandemic, but then you require that it only be the primary sole communication between people where you no longer have to look at your classmate in the eye and stuff.

[869] Like the conversations that I saw on social media, even in Zoom chats during lectures, Like, it's just absolutely rampant, out of control, anti -social behavior.

[870] And I think before the pandemic, we were all kind of complacent for a while and thinking that, you know, cancel culture slowed down after 2016.

[871] And people often are very early to champion that it's over and ended.

[872] But then we have one little cultural, we have a cultural hiccup.

[873] And then we're right back to square zero.

[874] And we're burning the whole house down and tearing people down with it.

[875] So I think, you know, 2020 in terms of just the experience of being a young person was really life -changing.

[876] for all of us.

[877] It wasn't great for the olds either.

[878] Yeah.

[879] Yeah, well, hence your center -right libertarianism.

[880] So let me come back, and maybe we'll close with this.

[881] Let me come back to one thing you mentioned earlier.

[882] And this touches on the work that Jonathan and Greg have done and that Jonathan is pursuing.

[883] I imagine you guys delve into in your new book, too, which, by the way, for everyone listening, is coming out October 17th.

[884] Tell me the title again?

[885] The canceling of the American mind.

[886] Oh, did you rehearse that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that was real good.

[887] That was real good.

[888] Canceling of the American mind.

[889] Yeah, you mentioned in your, you know, the first discussion that you had when you went off to university that all the girls that you were sitting around had a history of self -harm, you know, and Jonathan has done a very good job.

[890] Jonathan Haidt has done a very good job of documenting this cataclysmic rise in self -destructive neuroticism.

[891] Hey, here's something that's useful to know.

[892] So, you know, in the Neo -P -I -R personality questionnaire, it's the gold standard for assessing the five dimensions of personality.

[893] So, you know, one of the sub facets of neuroticism, so that's the proclivity to experience negative emotion, literally one of the sub -facets is self -consciousness.

[894] There's also a very large body of work now that documents the propensity of people who are either depressed or psychotic.

[895] so seriously, mentally disordered in the miserable direction, are much more likely to use pronouns and terms that are self -referential.

[896] So they say, I and me far more.

[897] And so it's literally the truth that the more you concentrate on yourself, the more miserable you are.

[898] And of course, your generation has been taught to identify, to put their own subjective self -identification paramount, to do little else but concentrate on their own feelings, and to do little else but to concentrate it on their own feelings.

[899] Now, in your personal experience, you mentioned what happened to you in that first group at university.

[900] What do you feel has been the consequence of this?

[901] What do you see happening around you?

[902] In terms of the ongoing consequences of growing up in social media and this depressive sort of environment?

[903] Well, let's say for women in particular, also for the relationship between young women and young men.

[904] I mean, I have to say that it feels as though a lot of my cohort is experiencing kind of like a prolonged adolescence.

[905] I don't know if that's in part because of the pandemic and our adulthoods launched in just such a bizarre way.

[906] But, I mean, I would say it's just even still now, when I was a teenager, I thought, you know, when we get older, we're not going to be mired in the same sort of like depressive.

[907] malaise.

[908] It's the only word I can really use to describe how I feel like my generation is just like there's this cloud over us.

[909] And it's often very negative to be in groups, particularly of young women together.

[910] I mean, it's, I remember that night still.

[911] It was just heartbreaking to me. It was unbelievable to me that, like, it was almost like, why was I the one person who in this group was not able to share in that experience?

[912] I mean, it's just, it's so common.

[913] It's so pervasive.

[914] and even as we've gotten older, I've not seen it subside.

[915] I mean, I don't have friends that are still cutting themselves like they did when they were teenagers, but there's still this, this depressive, like, downward pole of my generation.

[916] I think it's harming our interpersonal relationships.

[917] I see my, especially my female friends.

[918] I think that we are certainly more likely to indulge in, like, social contagions.

[919] And when they sit around together, it just gets even more miserable.

[920] I mean, I completely agree with what you're referencing with the gender relationships.

[921] I think that that's completely awry.

[922] I mean, I feel like we're growing up in an age where, you know, the relationship between male and female is quite recently changed very dramatically, and we're still trying to get her footing on that.

[923] The way that we communicate with each other is completely upended because we're now completely digitized.

[924] The political environment around us is so dysfunctional, And it's just, like, I don't really know what to say about the state of my generation besides it's just bleak.

[925] And I'm concerned that it doesn't seem to be getting much better.

[926] And somehow we just all seem to be folding in on ourselves.

[927] You know, one of the things I've observed traveling all over the world now for five years is that, you know, if you try to demoralize young people for 60 years by telling them that their ambitions are pathological and world destroying and that everything's predicated on power and oppression, you actually do demoralize them, especially when you add to that the vision of a necessarily apocalyptic future brought on by that ambition that can only be rectified by having everyone, especially the poor, give up pretty much everything they own.

[928] It's like, well, we're pretty much done with that.

[929] Oh, and also self -hatred, by the way.

[930] Also massive amounts of despising yourself.

[931] Just justified self -hatred as a parasite on the surface of the planet.

[932] Yeah, I think we pretty much had enough of that.

[933] And we do, to end on a positive note, you know, I mean, your situation is instructive, you know, you took these technological tools that are at your disposal, and you're doing that right now, and you decided to say what you had to say.

[934] And, you know, your future, as far as I can tell, from the limited time we've spent together, your future seems to be pretty damn bright.

[935] And there's no reason that can't be the case for everyone.

[936] And so it is a very sad situation that we've managed to demoralize young people so badly and to split them apart at the level of sexual relationship and that's a real catastrophe but by the same token and you'd mentioned this earlier there is an increasing space for people who are willing to stand up and to make their case known to do that with extraordinarily effectiveness using the tools that are at hand and so maybe that and you know i think fire is one of the organizations that's actually pushing for that outcome to be the one that is going to prevail.

[937] I hope your book also tilts things in that direction, as your previous book did quite successfully.

[938] I mean, it's had a good run, and people still talk about it, still sells.

[939] And it did draw a lot of attention to what was going on in universities.

[940] I know that Jonathan Haidt has got a new book coming out.

[941] I don't know.

[942] It's relative.

[943] In March, right.

[944] And you're, right, right.

[945] So there'll be about a six -month gap, eh?

[946] Yep.

[947] Yeah, yeah.

[948] Well, so October 17th, tell us the name of the title again, see if you can do it in unison.

[949] I'll give it to you.

[950] That was creepy the first time.

[951] The canceling of the American mind.

[952] Yeah, well, that would be a catastrophe for the world, by the way.

[953] I mean, one of the things you bloody Americans have managed with immense, what would you say, panache.

[954] And to the benefit of everyone is you managed to create a culture where for a long time, you aimed at success and you...

[955] by and large, you admired it, we're not jealous of it.

[956] That's a very, very, very, very difficult thing to pull off.

[957] And if it doesn't happen, then no one gets to be successful.

[958] And when no one gets to be successful, then everyone gets to be miserable.

[959] And that's the situation that we increasingly find ourselves in.

[960] We don't want that to prevail.

[961] So I hope we don't cancel the American mind.

[962] I hope your book is one of the things that helps everyone wake up to the fact that that might happen.

[963] And I hope your generation gets a revitalizing vision.

[964] And good luck with your book, October 17th.

[965] Very nice to talk to both of you.

[966] Thank you, Dr. Biederson.

[967] Thank you so much.

[968] Yeah, my pleasure.

[969] And to everyone watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention.

[970] It's always appreciated.

[971] I hope you found this discussion useful and engaging and interesting and educational, you know, all the things that universities used to offer.

[972] And so, and this can offer now.

[973] Thank you to the film crew here in Florence.

[974] And I'm going to talk, continue this conversation for another half an hour on the DailyWire Plus side.

[975] So if you want to join us there, please, you're more than welcome to do so.

[976] Bye -bye.