#1269 Greg Lukianoff on Bringing Free Speech Back To America

Greg Lukianoff is the President of The FIRE Organization, and a free speech lawyer. He is also the co-author of "The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution." FIRE is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In this conversation, we talk about why free speech is so important, what they are doing to protect people, how exactly "cancel culture" has taken over America, why the codling of our young people has been so detrimental, and what you can do to reinforce free speech. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Greg Lukianoff is the president of FIRE and the co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind. FIRE is the foundation for individual rights and expression. And in this conversation, Greg lays it all out. Why is free speech so important? What are

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  they doing to protect people who have come under FIRE? How exactly canceling and cancel culture has taken over America? Why the coddling of our young people has been so detrimental to the development of our society? And what you at home can do to continue to reinforce all of the major points and the aspects of free speech that have helped build America? I always enjoy talking to people like Greg, and this conversation was no different. So here is my episode with Greg Lukianoff.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on-chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer-two offering, a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time. Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online.

• 2:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Learn more at base.org, or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase. Again, that's @BuildOnBase, to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will. I've gone through a number of different changes in my life over the last few years. I got married, I had a kid, and I had to start thinking about how could I ensure that my wife and my child would be okay if anything ever happened to me? That's where trust, wills, and estate planning come into play. Now, most people, what they do is they get introduced to a friend, an uncle, or someone in their local community. It tends to be someone who's really expensive, a lawyer, an accountant, or somebody who does estate planning, and they just simply are using a one-size-fits-all template and

• 2:56Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Whether it's for you or one of your loved ones, having a trust and/or a will can literally be the difference between someone being taken care of and someone not. Go check them out today at trustandwill.com/pomp. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Greg here with me. Greg, I thought a great place to start is free speech is paramount to a democracy really kind of thriving. And the best way I know to describe the importance of free speech is free speech is all about letting the people you disagree with still have a voice. And it feels like FIRE as an organization has been very focused on supporting not only those you agree with, but also maybe those you don't agree with. And so, talk a little bit as to how do you unpack what is a free speech issue versus what may be something else?

• 4:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Because I think we need to kind of define free speech issues before we start talking about the canceling of the American mind, the coddling of the American mind, and what's going on in campuses today.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Great question. Yeah, and there was, it was kind of funny, like, the LA Times had a piece saying, "Fire only defends opinions it agrees with." And it's like, "Well, then, I guess we agree with all opinions, because we defend people all over the political spectrum." And what's funny is, we also couldn't decide who we agree with, because the, one of the goals of the staff, and we've maintained it really well, is to have actual political diversity in who works for the staff. If anything, we, you know, we don't have enough conservatives in, in, in leadership, for example. We, we really do try to be a place where people who vote for different candidates actually work together in common cause. And we have been since 1999. So, free speech. I, I'm a big believer in, I'm a First Amendment lawyer. I specialized in First Amendment. And I think you can draw a lot of wisdom from the First

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Amendment, even in situations where you're not talking about government suppression of speech. So, there are lots of, like, really smart principles, decided by some of, you know, some of the smartest people in, in American history. People like Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis Brandeis, and Robert Jackson. And some of the parameters are, you know, what's the purest, kind of, clearest example of freedom of speech? I would call that a mere expression of opinion. That, that essentially saying, "This is what I think, this is my preference, etc., etc." And the big rule that runs all the way through First Amendment law is a prohibition against viewpoint discrimination. Which, and that means, that if you're, like, if you have a forum, and you're allowing everyone to talk, except

• 6:02Speaker 02

  for the people who disagree with you on macroeconomics, or more specifically, people who have a point of view on a particular policy, that's considered to be not allowable in a public forum under the law, but also kind of a bad idea in general. Because it, it makes it, the marketplace of ideas unfair. It makes the, the playing field unfair. It also helps you unpack things about, like, what is harassment, what isn't harassment, what's a threat, what isn't a threat. And we've actually given how nasty things have gotten on campus. We've actually had quite a workout going through these fact patterns lately, because since the attacks, the horrible attacks by Hamas on our

• 6:43Speaker 02

  October 7th, we're seeing actual threats on campus more often than we're used to. We're seeing actual harassment or flat out discrimination. So I think that there's a lot of wisdom that the law can bring to bear. But one thing that makes fire different, we were the foundation for individual rights in education until 2022. And then we rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to indicate that we now litigate off campus. We now have a much wider goal. And one of them is to get people to appreciate not just the First Amendment, but free speech culture. And we always try to, you know, answer what are the norms of free speech culture? They come back to sort of older fashioned idioms, like everyone's entitled to their opinion.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  It's a free country, all these things that indicate that we used to have a better sense that you are entitled to your opinion, even if, even if I hate your guts.

• 7:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you see this maybe degradation of that belief set, what's driving it? Right? You write in the first book that you put together, or the first book I read that you guys put together, The Coddling of the American Mind. It feels like whether it's parents, whether it is school, whether it is just people in society, they basically said, wow, the world's a really bad place. There's all kinds of craziness out there. Why don't we protect our children from having to experience this? Which, as a parent, you feel like that's a, that's a good idea, right? It's right, I'm gonna protect my kid from bad things. But you guys really unpack and say, look, by coddling the minds of these children, you actually maybe have done more damage than help.

• 8:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And so unpack a little bit as to like, good intentioned people may have had this really negative impact that they still might not even be really aware of yet.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, to back up a little bit about where has the, you know, censorship instinct come from? How have things gotten worse? And I always like to remind people that, and there's a reason why I call my Substack, The Eternally Radical Idea, because that's a reference to free speech itself. Because in every generation, young people, old people, stand up to demand censorship. And they're usually the ones who win. It's actually comparatively historically rare to have. Have a period like we've had for, you know, 50 years where there is at least nominal support for freedom of speech. And I feel very lucky to have grown up in the eighties and nineties where the free speech law was getting much better.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  But certainly for someone, you know, on the, on the left, it was the defining characteristic of being on the left, at least in the eighties and nineties, was being pro, pro freedom of speech. But we're regressing more to the historical mean, which is if you don't have these cultural norms that actually remind you of how valuable free speech is. There's a tendency to kind of regress into this idea, yeah, but words hurt. It's not like we just discovered this. We always knew this. But the response was, yeah, that's true, but it's better than fighting things out in the normal way. We actually resolve disputes historically, which is violence or the threat of violence. And that's one of the reasons why things like sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Was such a wise thing to teach kids and it's been reinterpreted by people on campus as if we now just discovered that words can actually hurt. It's like, no, that, that's nonsense. You didn't need this little saying for, for kids. If words didn't hurt, the saying wouldn't even make sense. But what we were trying to do was to teach kids something to reflect on when words hurt, to make them hurt less. And believe me, all of us who grew up with that, it helped, it helped in situations that you're like, yeah, you know, I'm, I'm the bigger person. I ignore it. So when it comes to Coddling the American Mind, that was my, my first book with Jonathan Haidt. My first book was actually one called Unlearning Liberty, which I wrote in 2012, which pointed out that, hey, guys, I think things are about to get a lot worse.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  And unfortunately, we were right. But Coddling the American Mind has a kind of weird idea that essentially the same things that we're now threatening academic freedom and free speech are the kind of mental habits that will also make people, young people anxious and depressed. And we first talked about this in 2014, when both cancel culture and the, the new norms on campus really became clear and was not subtle. 2024, there was something very different for those of us who work on campus between 2014 and say, 2012, just because students had always been great. on freedom of speech and then suddenly they weren't. But in coddling, we focus a lot more on how I believe that parents K through 12, higher

• 11:13Speaker 02

  ed, a culture in general is teaching young people what are called cognitive distortions in cognitive behavioral therapy. And I know as someone who struggled with anxiety and depression my whole life and actually being hospitalized for it is one of the things that ultimately led to coddling of the American mind. That if you have too many cognitive distortions in your, in your brain, you're going to be miserable. And what are cognitive distortions? They're kind of mental exaggerations, things like overgeneralizing, catastrophizing, binary thinking, believing that you understand the future, you know, the future, and of course, you assume you're going to be doomed. All of these kind of things that for those of that I've had great success in training

• 11:54Speaker 02

  my brain to not take quite as seriously, to sort of respond to as exaggerated thoughts, which they really are. But what, what we were arguing was it seemed as if students showing up on campus in 2014, 2015 had already been taught a lot of these catastrophizing emotional reasoning kind of ideas that would make them miserable. It would also be a big threat to academic freedom and free speech, but it would have the side effect of making the people who believe this ideology depressed and anxious. And unfortunately, when we wrote the article initially in the Atlantic in 2015, we thought we'd see a little scholarly dip in mental health among young people, you know, like something that you could point to, not, not, not necessarily the most dramatic effect.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  And man, things got so much worse, both for free speech and academic freedom on campus and for mental health. And, you know, it's one of those things that height and I usually, when people point out that we were prescient in this, we say, well, we really wish we weren't right.

• 12:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So on the book, the subtitle is how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. This book's been out for a long time. It is an incredible read, but also has done very well from a selling standpoint. On the back cover, it says, Michael Bloomberg has a quote, and rising intolerance for opposing viewpoints is a challenge, not only on college campuses, but Also in our national political discourse, the future of our democracy requires us to understand what's happening and why. Now, the reason why that is such an interesting quote is because that basically describes exactly what has occurred in politics, not only on college campuses, but at the national level, over the last, call it, three to, you know,

• 13:33Anthony Pompliano?

  eight years, depending on what timelines you want to look at. And so, to me, it is very difficult to solve problems if you cannot have conversations with people who don't have opposing views. And so that leads us then to the second book, which is The Canceling of the American Mind. And when I look at that, it's almost like, hey, if you're coddled, and you don't like other people's views, then how do you respond? You can ignore them, or you can cancel them. And it feels like many, many people have been trained to go after the canceling mechanism versus the ignoring mechanism. And so, describe a little bit, kind of, the work and the analysis that went into the canceling of the American Mind.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Sure. The Canceling of the American Mind is very much a follow-up to Coddling of the American Mind. I co-authored it actually with a now 23-year-old named Ricky Schlot. Partially, we decided to co-author, partially because she's brilliant, and we're a very good team, but also because so much of coddling was about threats to the mental health of Gen Z young women. And so, co-authoring the next piece with a Gen Z young woman seemed to be just a common sense. Hight wrote the foreword to Canceling of the American Mind. And, but it does usually help to, you know, be familiar with one. There was a review that was somewhat critical of some of the stuff we left out of Canceling of the American Mind, and it

• 14:53Speaker 02

  basically listed all the things that we cover in Coddling of the American Mind. So I was kind of like, yeah, that's because you didn't read the first one. And one thing we talk about, we talk about in Coddling of the American Mind is this idea of moral dependency, that essentially, we teach young people now at a level that we didn't used to, that if you have an interpersonal squabble, you know, that you go to an adult. And that makes sense for some kind of particularly severe ones, like bullying, for example, or, you know, as often happened to me, you know, as kids, you get punched in the face. I probably got punched in the face more than most, and I didn't always deserve it, to be clear.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  That they but they don't let up on this idea in high school and and they continue it in. So in high school, it can be, you know, a special department. In colleges, it's the bias response team, it's administrators who are there to sort of intervene. And by the time they get to corporations, these norms are embedded in human resources departments, which have become a major problem for a lot of companies. If human resources sees itself as essentially antagonistic to the to the purpose of the organization, which unfortunately, sometimes it really does. So I think that this moral kind of dependency issue is part of the problem. I also think something that happened, and this is one of the real wonderful

• 16:21Speaker 02

  things about writing with someone so young, is that our definition of cancel culture is the uptick around 2014 and accelerating 2017 and after of campaigns to get people punished, expelled, fired, deplatformed for speech that would be protected by the First Amendment. There, what we mean, we explain this more in an appendix, because it's a little bit too in the weeds. We mean as an analogy to public employee law, another way to work in a great deal of nuance into a short definition. I think short definitions are important. And the culture of fear and conformity that results, you know, from from that uptick. And I think the one of the most interesting things that Ricky had to say about this was

• 17:03Speaker 02

  that, yes, we talk about it really hitting the world around 2014, which is around when Gen Z starts hitting higher ed in large numbers. But she essentially grew up with cancel culture, this way of arguing without really arguing, of just morally grandstanding, making sure that your opponent's life is miserable and that there are social pariah without convincing anybody that you're right or they're wrong. You just scare them or eliminate them. And this is very much a junior high school kind of tactic. And unfortunately, it feels like this junior high school way of arguing is now everywhere you look. And about a third of the book is focused on all of the, forgive the expression, BS ways we currently argue, both on the right and the left, that prevent us from ever getting

• 17:47Speaker 02

  close to truth seeking. Because if you if your argument is primarily a system after system for dismissing people based on their identity, also known as ad hominem, based on their personal identity. Um, you you're wasting a tremendous amount of time and you actually there's there's no reason why even even if the person you're arguing with is a despicable person, um, that doesn't mean they're wrong. And just because someone is good, or at least in your eyes, good, doesn't it doesn't at all relate to the fact whether or not they're they are right. So a lot of the book is trying to argue both. There's this dysfunctional way we argue that will get us nowhere, less than nowhere, really. And it's very cruel in the meantime. But there's another way to there's

• 18:29Speaker 02

  another way to argue. And by the way, we can actually solve things if we argue in this other way.

• 18:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, the issue I see in many of the arguments, I'm going to use Twitter as kind of a really watered down, bad version of a mirror to society, but it definitely shows how people are communicating, interacting with each other is most people can't separate idea from person.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And then they don't know how to engage with an idea in a way that could be respectful to the person, but also attack the idea. And so there's almost two components, like first, separating out idea from person. And then second, being able to engage with an idea in almost, I describe it as like a gentlemanly way. Like, there's a way to, you know, I don't know, if you think back to like, uh, European old movie, right? Or maybe like, kind of the the late 1800s, early 1900s, when everyone has a three piece suit on and they're talking shit for sure. But they're doing it in a very respectful, almost, uh, it's harder to do it that way than just be like, you're a moron, shut up, you know, cancel you. And so is it

• 19:36Anthony Pompliano?

  laziness that is playing into some of this? Is it a lack of intellectual, um, maybe training or preparedness? Like, what is driving this? Where to argue with someone in a high level sophisticated way takes almost more effort and it takes more respect for the art of arguing?

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Than just yelling and screaming at each other like hooligans, you know, trying to cancel each other.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, there's so many different factors that cause that. And once again, it's kind of the regression to the mean problem. You have to learn how to argue well. And it requires a lot of lessons. It requires a lot of knowing, a lot of different rules that young people simply aren't taught. So to some degree, they can be forgiven for simply never being taught this. And the most horrifying example that didn't make it into the book because it was only starting to become clear how bad it had gotten is how literal debate teams are now using ad hominem dodges and basically what we call in the book, the perfect rhetorical fortress to win actual formal debates, which is insane.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  There's one going around, you know, about just, you know, basically making the whiteness of your opponent to be the major issue in a debate as opposed to actually addressing, say, the topic that you were supposed to debate. So even the institutions that should be teaching people how to argue towards truth are not. They're actually, to some degree, at least in some examples, teaching this cancel culture way of arguing. So they're not taught it. Also, frankly, that practice is harder and you might not win. And since a lot of people, we grow up in increasingly isolated spheres now, made worse by social media, but physically also.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  America is more divided by politics, but also by class, economic class, than we were, say, 30, 40 years ago. And this can create a problem where you essentially haven't encountered people who disagree with you and you've more or less learned that people who disagree with me are stupid or evil. And that's a typical assumption. There was a great line from an evolutionary biologist saying, in the ancestral environment, you pretty much only ever met someone you really disagreed with about fundamental matters at the tip of a spear, which is true. So you have to learn these ways of productively arguing. But why would you, when there's this easier out, point out, you know, hey, guess what? I just looked up something. I found out, and this is called defense archaeology.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  You wrote, well, I'm arguing with you about contentious issues, affirmative action, or something like that. Oh, wow, I just found this offensive thing you wrote in your high school yearbook. And then you're a bad person, so I don't have to listen to you anymore. And we go through example after example of this, which was one of the reasons why I got so depressed writing the book is because I already have a little bit of a target on my back for writing "Coddling the American Mind," you know. Mostly from people who haven't read it. They basically think the book is just saying people are spoiled. And it's like, no, that's just the title, which I've never liked. The book is about actually the harm that adults are doing to younger people.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  But the idea of getting an even bigger target on my back, having gone through all of these stories in which once some people on the internet have decided they don't like you, it's not just your speech on that one topic that they're going to go after. They're going to find anything they can. And sometimes they even can do guilt by association, one of the tactics we talk about in the book that both right and left use, to basically delegitimize you having any further opinion. And that's one of the reasons why, just like in "Coddling the American Mind," we talk about the great untruths. These are basically ideas that are dysfunctional, that they go against ancient wisdom and modern psychology and will make you miserable if you believe them.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  So the first three were, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings, which is, sounds nice, but it's terrible advice. And life is a battle between good people and evil people. And we drew the fourth one in this book, which is simply, no bad person has any good opinion. And then in parentheses, and everybody's arguably bad. Because if you'll notice, a lot of the way we debate, we're not actually trying to figure out, is this argument true or right? We're trying to make an argument that this is a bad person, and therefore you don't have to listen to them.

• 24:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So when people come on the podcast, sometimes they're very heels dug in and whether people who listen, agree or disagree.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:24Anthony Pompliano?

  One of my favorite questions to ask these people is like, say something positive about the other side. What is one thing you agree with them on the other side? And so politics is really simple. If you have a hardcore Democrat, right? Ask them, what is one thing you agree with the Republicans?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Vice versa. Um, it always surprises me, the people who I already thought were highly intelligent, can rattle off tons of things that they agree with, with the other side.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  The people who I'm always like, hmm, this is an interesting person, but I'm not sure that the horsepower might be there in the same way that maybe others are. They can't, or they refuse to.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's a very interesting dynamic of like, you know, there, there's the old saying of, um, you need to be able to argue the other side better than you, uh, they can in order to actually argue. Well, actually being able to identify what are the areas of common ground? And in politics, you see these politicians are actually very good at being able to kind of grease these disagreements and basically understand, okay, we might disagree on geopolitical, you know, decision in a certain region.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:25Anthony Pompliano?

  But here's all the other things we agree with. Let's, let's figure this out. And we, as a society, put, ah, there's politicians, they're trying to please everyone. That, that's their job or whatever. But they actually do get a lot of stuff to a point where at least there's a conversation. You don't see, for the most part, again, there are some nastiness still in politics and stuff like that. But for the most part, you don't see as much canceling in politics because you also know that person's not going away. That person is still going to be here in that job for the next two, four, eight years, you know, whatever it ends up being. And so you got to figure out how to work with them because canceling isn't really an option.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  This is really funny. Um, the, I lived in DC, uh, before moving to, uh, I went to Stanford for law school and then I lived up in San Francisco as long as I could. And I worked at the ACLU and, you know, all my, my friends were kind of like the Burning Man artsy crowd. But one thing I didn't like about San Francisco, even late 90s, at least the circles I was in, is that political arguments were kind of lame because it was mostly either we agree or we agree, but you don't go far enough. Whereas in DC, you know, you can have a great argument with a cabbie, kind of like, and I had some of my best, you know, because people understood that it could be actually be kind of fun, it could be, it should be friendly. And actually,

• 26:41Speaker 02

  you know, even doing the devil's advocate thought experimentation approach, where even if you don't actually disagree, it's like, well, let me try, let me try this one on, you know, that, that can actually be great. And I, and I felt like the way we argued in the backyards, at least in the circles I was in in San Francisco, has increasingly become the way we argue everywhere. And that's one thing that I really do love about FIRE's commitment to genuine political diversity within staff. It keeps us honest. I mean, I'm a, you know, I'm a left-leaning atheist, and believe me, I have had my minds changed on a number of things by, you know, right-leaning evangelical Christians, including when I started at FIRE, by the way, having to, you know,

• 27:23Speaker 02

  painfully realize that the most open-minded person on staff was someone who was a self-described evangelical Christian. She, she, she had no problem with us going out and, you know, tossing back some drinks and arguing about the existence to God. Like, it was, it was really, like, and I realized I had stereotypes myself. Yeah, I, I think, and in terms of kind of like what I see, you know, what I personally see as strengths on people on the other side, it's always hard for me to figure out what the other side is, because the book takes on both the right and the left when it comes to cancel culture. I definitely, you know, the, the overall look for social justice, of course, is something I agree with. I do think that

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Cancel culture and the tactics of argumentation that we tend to use on the left prevent a lot of things that could otherwise be fixed. I think we, there's a certain kind of doom, doom and gloom and hopelessness on the left that actually we talk about coddling the American mind that prevents us from fixing things. When it comes to on the right, you know, I don't blame them for being mad at elites. I don't blame them at being mad at higher education. In fact, we talk about the rhetorical fortress as, as the sort of way of avoiding arguments on the right and they're very quick to, you know, you can dismiss anybody that you can label a liberal or woke. You can, you don't have to listen to experts, journalists, even if they're conservative or for the very hard right, you know, anyone who disagrees with Trump.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, we've spent a lot of the book talking about how experts have done themselves no favors. Still, I think anything that prevents you from actually listening to people you disagree with is not healthy for the production ideas and certainly not for solving problems.

• 29:04Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the chapters in the book, The Canceling of the American Mind, is all about keeping your organization or corporation out of the culture wars. And, you know, there's a lot of people who run tech startups, large corporations, that are decision makers at these companies who listen to this podcast. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about and trying to kind of talk through these ideas of the culture wars are going to happen whether you participate or not.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  But you do have an option as to whether to participate or not.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Whether or not you want to be a combatant.

• 29:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. And so, explain a little bit as to how you think business leaders could stay out of these and keep their employees focused on the work, on the product, on revenue, you know, and kind of the capitalistic pursuit that they have been entrusted with doing versus going ahead and actually, you know, being that combatant in the culture war.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Oh, man, yeah, no, that's a chapter. That I think a lot about and initially the first version of that I wrote a co-authored with Hite. I'm going to start with something that I that should have been in there more prominently, which I've been thinking about a lot recently, is you have to make sure you're not hiring cancelers in the first place. And what I mean by that are the kind of employees who will show up and believe it's sort of their politics are the highway, that essentially the organization has to publicly take stances I agree with. And by the way, if it turns out that absolutely brilliant ASPI IT person that I have, if they say something vaguely right wing, that they have to be fired. And that's something

• 30:38Speaker 02

  that you saw really hitting corporations around 2018 as generations you started graduating from from higher ed. And it's something that after, because Coddling came out in the book, the original article is 2015, the book came out 2018, immediately, Hite and I got emails and phone calls from business leaders all over the country saying, yeah, we have a real problem with a new crop of employees. They want me to fire so and so. And a lot of the cancel culture cases, even some that didn't make the book, were lower level, sometimes new hire employees demanding that, you know, you get rid of Antonio Martinez Garcia, like, there are a couple of people that where it was very clearly, it's just lower level employees demanded, I can't work with that person, because in that case, he wrote

• 31:23Speaker 02

  a fairly racy bestselling fiction book several years before, which is just, just a crazy reason to deny yourself talent. And so you got to make sure you're not handling hiring cancelers in the first place. A good way to do that is to, one, hire older people. I talked to someone who was running a startup in Silicon Valley, and he said, we avoid this problem. I was like, how do you avoid this problem? Everyone we hire is 40 or older. And I was like, okay, that will probably mostly keep you safe. But he said, doesn't exclusively keep them away from that. When it comes to saying at the outset, listen, my organization doesn't take political stances. We're not that kind of organization. We want to have an office where people who

• 32:08Speaker 02

  vote for whomever can work together and we don't want politics to interfere with that. We make widgets. Like, we're not also a political organization. And the kind of employee who might be turned off by that, you know, it might mean that there are some great employees who would want that, but I do think you're probably better off having someone to be like, no, I get that. I can compartmentalize. That's cool. We thought what Coinbase did was interesting, you know, and saying that they don't take political positions. And what's interesting especially about that is something like 5% of the staff actually took the severance package because they didn't want to work in an environment that didn't

• 32:47Speaker 02

  take political positions. But think about that. That's the 5% that actually led to a lot of the problems in 2020, 2021, and to this day, saying that I can't work with people I disagree with. I can't be in an office in which the boss doesn't parrot kind of my political opinions. That's probably avoiding a much bigger headache and allowing the other 95% to focus on their, you know, on their jobs. So I think you definitely need to make sure that HR is on your side. I think having a policy saying like, listen, we don't take political positions. I think that hiring from non-elite schools or people even with non-traditional credentials is going to be increasingly important. I think

• 33:30Speaker 02

  there are lots of ways to prove you're smarter and hardworking that are actually better signals than graduating from Stanford or Harvard these days. I think there's lots of ways to show that now, and I hope there will be more ways to show that. And I think that, oh, and as far as something to avoid, they're called talkbacks at a lot of offices, and I've heard horror stories about this, you know, particularly in law firms, where a, and I think the law firm example was someone said, was a Christian, and she supported the anti-abortion decision. And when the entire firm was planning to take a public

• 34:12Speaker 02

  stance condemning the overturning of Roe v. Wade, she actually said, actually, I agree with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And they did a talkback, which happened all the time, which is essentially just...

• 34:26Speaker 02

  You get yelled at by the younger employees and some of the other ones who agree with them. It's not a it's not a talk back at all. And I'm like, it's always going to be more effective if you talk to people individually rather than having these weird ceremonies. And I call them ceremonies because I talked to one of my one of my awesome employees who's a former law firm guy himself. And he's like, no, no, we know what the drill is with talk backs. Talk backs are, you know, you aren't actually talk backs. You just get yelled at for your lack of political conformity. So don't have those.

• 34:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When you have certain people inside the company, their employees, you can, you know, try to address them in a multitude of ways, some of which you're highlighting here. How do you deal with it if it is your customers?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Or external, so people who are obviously involved in the business. You're dependent on them to some degree.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:17Anthony Pompliano?

  But they're pressure and you see this both with customers and investors a lot of times. How does some of what you've described here change or evolve in that scenario?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do think that there's an opening for particularly if it's consistently enforced an idea of like, we're politically neutral. We don't take political positions. If you stick to it early and often, I think a lot of investors that otherwise might be very, you know, pro, you know, spout, spout my particular point of view would respect that. And I think that's going to be happening more often. So I think there is an opening to take that position that investors and clients might actually come around to respecting. But you have to stick with it and you have to be, you know, clear. And I think that the past three weeks have made some companies aware of the downside of taking political positions.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  You saw a lot of universities that took political positions on every other thing. Be worried about taking a position condemning the Hamas attacks. And of course, that made them look terrible because it's like, so really like on much tougher issues, you took, you took really resounding opinions. And on this one, which seems fairly clear cut, at least the initial attacks certainly did.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  You're not willing to really say anything. So I think that there might be better awareness of the benefits of political neutrality. I think, of course, if you have an investor who really wants to sort of micromanage, you know, the political positions you take, that's a kind of a problem. And I think this is one of the reasons why people object to some of the ESG movement, because it does oftentimes recommend things that kind of would normally be seen as exceeding kind of the appropriate bounds. And sometimes they will recommend stuff that actually there's research on. So one thing that some of the investors I know really like to push

• 37:14Speaker 02

  and have learned that they shouldn't is some of the DEI consultant stuff. But there's research on DEI consultants and there's research in a lot of this programming. And a lot of it doesn't just not work. It actually can increase tension among students from, among employees from different backgrounds. So I think that, you know, if you, if you have an investor who wants to dictate this kind of stuff to you, be, you know, be ready to argue, argue back to basically be able to show evidence that essentially some of these things you're recommending aren't actually helping. You might lose some in the process, but once investors get the idea that they can sort of politically run you as well, that's not necessarily someone you want to do business with.

• 37:59Anthony Pompliano?

  What's been the most surprising part as you've really kind of understood and began to break down what's happening? What has surprised you most?

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Well, in some ways it wasn't as much of a surprise because I've been working on campus for 22 years. So by the time I started writing this, I knew that the problem was really bad. The, I, I am kind of surprised, like there was a recent review of the book and the dispatch that basically, you know, made the argument that

• 38:35Speaker 02

  one third of Americans saying they're either very or a little worried about.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Cancel culture was a miniscule number. And it's like, I don't think you know a lot about the history of freedom of speech. Like in like pure in McCarthyism, for example, and the heart of McCarthyism. Uh, nine percent of professors said that they were self censoring. Um, they were censoring their work. I want to be clear. That's almost one in 10. That's really, really bad to have one in 10 academics saying that they are self censoring. Um, and that's one of the high watermarks you've ever gotten in polling of professors saying they're self censoring. So someone who could actually look at the data and be like, oh, that's only one third. And only, only 10% are saying they're very worried. It's like, you don't have a grasp of this very, very well.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  So like people's lack of, of, of, of understanding about what the various numbers mean continues to blow me away. Um, for example, like how confident people are saying that, you know, we, we talk about, uh, so just to go quickly through the stats. There's, uh, we document about a thousand attempts to get professors fired. About two thirds of them, um, uh, succeed in, uh, sorry, fired or otherwise punished. Uh, about two thirds of them succeed in getting them punished in some way. Um, I always point out that one third of those actually come from the right. Uh, one third of those punishments actually initially start from the right. They're usually enforced by people on the left, but nonetheless, I want people to be clear. This is a book that takes on both right and left.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Um, the, and about almost 200 professors, and it'll probably be past that, but you know, uh, by the, uh, by the end of this year, or maybe at this time next year, uh, were fired. And, uh, and we also know this is a wild undercount because one in six professors say that they have been either investigated or threatened with investigation. One in six have been threatened or investigate, uh, threatened with investigation for academic, for their academic freedom, which is their free speech, their research, et cetera. And about nine percent of students say the same thing, that they've been, uh, investigated or threatened with investigation. I think actually investigated for, for their free speech. These are amazing numbers. But when people point out, it's kind of like, oh, well, you only document, you know, about 200 people getting fired.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  And I'm like, do you know how many people were fired for being communists under McCarthyism? Uh, at the time, and we're still in cancel culture. Uh, McCarthyism was 11 years and we're not, and from where we start, we're dealing with about nine and a half years of data. And it's, and the problem is, is still really quite bad. That if we're in sixty-two, sixty-three professors were fired for being communist, but ninety for opinion overall. And so the estimate is usually about a hundred were fired. We're talking about twice that. And in McCarthyism, nobody said that this was nothing. And the most important thing for people to know, understand about that is that the law was only established between nineteen fifty-seven and nineteen seventy-three. So at the time that

• 41:33Speaker 02

  these universities were firing communist professors, their answer was, well, we can do that. They're incredibly doctrinaire. They can't be allowed to teach in the classroom. They're not critical thinkers. They're just going to espouse their political points of view. And in nineteen fifty-seven, the court said, no, you actually can't fire someone just on the basis of their political viewpoint. And that only became clearly established by nineteen seventy-three. So in the past fifty years since the law has been established, there's nothing even remotely close to the kind of numbers we're seeing here. I mean, I always point out that I started right around nine eleven. There were three professors fired after nine eleven, which we considered to be very bad at the time, to be clear. But guess what?

• 42:14Speaker 02

  All three of those were justified in ways that had nothing to do with academic freedom or free speech. One was gross academic misconduct. The other one was actual ties to international terrorism. And the third one was that they devoted way too much of their class to not teaching the subject they were hired to teach. So what has surprised me is the confidence with which people who don't know a lot about the history of freedom of speech think they can evaluate numbers. I point out that the Sedition Act of seventeen ninety-eight, which we considered to be a great stain on the American tradition of freedom of speech, that we, for all of my life, we thought that that involved about twelve prosecutions. We now know it's closer to fifty.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  But still, as far as people actually indicted, actually who were found guilty, I think it's about ten. Does that mean it doesn't matter? No, it's still rightfully considered a great scandal.

• 43:06Anthony Pompliano?

  We look forward. There appears to be two groups of people. One, like yourself, understand what's happening, calling it out, ready to

• 43:17Anthony Pompliano?

  do the work to change and make sure that the future has more free speech in it, has kind of better arguing. And frankly, is probably a better future for our society.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:28Anthony Pompliano?

  There's another group of people who are like, shut up, both of you. I don't care. This person is an idiot. You know, cancel them.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Who wins? How do we ensure that a certain viewpoint of free speech and, you know, what I would consider respectful discourse and kind of results oriented kind of conversation wins out over cancel culture and this coddling type mindset?

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, if you if you were betting, you'd probably bet on a liberalism winning. Because I am not seeing the kind of reflection, like self-reflection on the environment we created over the, say, like the last six years, because cancel culture really accelerated around 2017. I'm still seeing people claiming that it didn't even happen. There was an amazing thing, a

• 44:22Speaker 02

  news anchor, Brianna Joy, she wrote about saying, oh, no, cancelers were never asking for people to get fired. The accountability culture, the accountability culture people, they never wanted people fired. I'm like, no, they they demanded people be fired. Like, so the rewriting of history is already happening. And I'm watching people discover that since people can and will be punished for having pro Palestinian points of view. I'm reading all these articles saying, oh, there's a new McCarthyism, suddenly for the first time since nine 11 or even McCarthyism. People are getting in trouble for what they For their political opinions that I'm like, whoa, where the hell have you been? Like, this has been a bad, a bad problem for a long time, but I thought maybe this would

• 45:06Speaker 02

  cause people to go, you know what, maybe, maybe our whole accountability culture, consequence culture, when one of the consequences is you losing your job, was a little pat, a little dismissive. Maybe we should look at the, the recent history of professors losing their jobs and students being expelled and people being kicked out of journalism, publishing, et cetera, and, and reevaluate. But there seems to be a determination to just pretend none of this ever happened. So I would say right now, without a lot better appreciation of how bad it's gotten, it's gonna keep getting worse. And, and these giant mega corporations, elite higher education, they are currently saying some of the right things on, on freedom of speech, but they aren't really doing anything

• 45:49Speaker 02

  that, that, that indicates that they're going to stick with it when, when the threats to free speech come from faculty or students on campus. They always circle the wagons when they think the threat comes from off campus. So there's nothing surprising there. So I think it's gonna be an uphill battle and we could use all your listener support.

• 46:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Greg, the book, The Canceling of the American Mind, cancel culture undermines trust and threatens us all, but there is a solution. It's a fantastic book. I have read it. I actually did not think that you could kind of follow up the calling of the American mind. It's a really good book and I really enjoyed it and I've cited it many times in private conversation with folks and, you know, kind of suggested it to people, but I gotta say that this, this one was just as good, if not better. And so anyone who, who's interested in this topic should definitely go and get it. What, what about FIRE in terms of where can we send people to learn more about FIRE, especially after they read the book and, and find out more about the work you guys are doing and, and see if it's maybe something that they want to get involved with or figure out a way to, to support it?

• 46:46Speaker 02

  It's thefire.org and definitely check out our campus free speech rankings. We use 13 different factors to evaluate schools on their commitment to freedom of speech, you know, including the largest survey of student opinion ever done, the four largest databases of student cancellations, professor cancellations, deplatforming and speech codes. And this year, we Made some waves by the fact that Harvard finished dead last, which people occasionally presented as if it was some kind of stunt, like essentially like, oh, no, no, that's exactly where the data led us. So I would love that to be not just 248 schools. If we could do that for, say, the top 500 schools in the country, that would cover, you know, a huge portion of the four years

• 47:28Speaker 02

  college students in the country. So yeah, we definitely could use your support because unfortunately, the threats to free speech seem to keep growing.

• 47:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. You know, please write another book. I don't know what the topic will be, but you're two for two in my book for the ones that I've read. And so I look forward to the work that you do next on the book side, but also, obviously, you guys are fighting the good fight with fire and continue to kind of stand up for those who maybe don't have a voice or need help. So it's very much appreciated. We'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Take care. Thank you.