YouSaid · the spoken record

Greg Lukianoff

lines on the record: 165
first: 2023-09-25
most recent: 2023-09-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think that there's lots of things that technology could do to really help with this. I think some of the stuff that Sal Khan is working on at Khan Academy could really help. So I think there's a lot of ways, but they exist largely around coming up with new ways of doing things, not just expecting the old things that have, say, $40 billion in the bank that they're going to reform themselves. And here's my, you know, I've been picking on Harvard a lot, but I'm going to pick on them a little bit more. I talk a lot about class again. And there's a great book called Poison Ivy by Evan Mandry, which I recommend to everybody. It's outrageous. It sounds like me and a rant at Stanford, which was, and I think the stat is elite higher education has more kids from the top 1% than they have from the bottom 50 or 60 percent, depending on the school. And when you look at how much they actually like replicate class privilege,”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a society. If people could prove their excellence in ways that are coming from completely different streams and that are highly respected, I sometimes talk about there should be a test that anyone who passes it gets a BA in the humanities that like a super BA like some way, not a GED. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something that one out of only a couple like 100 people can pass some other way of actually of not going through these massive bloated expensive institutions that people”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't just be up to us arguers to try to fix this. And I think that, and this may sound like it's an unrelated problem, I think if there were highly respected, let's say, extremely difficult ways to prove that you're extremely smart and hardworking that cost little or nothing, that actually can give the Harvards and the Yale's of the world a run for their money, I think that might be the most positive thing we could do to deal with a lot of these problems and why. I think the fact that we have become a weird America with a great anti-elitist tradition has become weirdly elitist in the respect that we not only, again, are our leadership coming from these few fancy schools, we actually have great admiration for them. We kind of look up to them. But I think we'd have a lot healthier.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that people are sick of it. I think people are sick of not being able to be authentic. And that's really what censorship is. It's basically telling you don't be yourself. Don't actually say what you think. Don't show your personality. Don't dissent. Don't be weird. Don't be wrong. And that's not sustainable. I think that People have kind of had enough of it. But one thing I definitely want to say to your audience is.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was always my sort of flippant answer to if mankind is basically good or basically evil being like the biggest debate in philosophy and being like, well, the problem with the first is there's nothing basic about humanity.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for the good people out there who actually just sometimes think that they're vent and think about it. Remember that there are people on the other side of it.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reimagined in campus debates in the most asinine way. People will literally say stuff like, but now we know words can hurt. And it's like, now we know words can hurt. Guys, you didn't have to come up with a special little thing that you teach children to make words hurt less if they never hurt in the first place. It wouldn't even make sense, the saying. It's a saying that you repeat to yourself to give yourself strength when the bullies have noticed you're a little weird. This might be a little personal and it helps. It really does help to be like, listen, okay, assholes are going to say asshole things and I can't let them have that kind of power over me.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, that's one of the things that we do in the book to really kind of address people who still try to claim this isn't real, is we just quote, we quote the Pope. We quote Obama. We quote James Carville. We quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture. And Taylor Swift's quote is essentially about how behind all of this when it gets particularly nasty, there's this very clear, you know, kill yourself kind of undercurrent to it. And it's cruel. And the problem is that in an environment so wide open, there's always going to be someone who wants to be so transgressive and say the most hurtful, you know, terrible thing. But then you have to remember the misrepresentation, getting back to the old idioms. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me has been...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's such a thinking that your cause is social justice in many cases can lead people to think I can be as cruel as I want in pursuit of this when a lot of times it's just a way to sort of vent some aggression on a person that you think of only as an abstraction.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like an invite only thing. It's Aaron Hoffman runs it It intentionally tries to get people over the political spectrum to come together and have off the record conversations about big issues. And it was nice to be in a room where liberal conservative, none of the above were all like, oh, thank God someone's taken on cancel culture. And where it felt like maybe this won't be the disaster for me and my family that I was starting to be afraid of it would be that taking the Stefan might actually have a happy ending.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about all the vultures out there. Because they didn't like his tweets. But somehow that made them compassionate for some abstract other person. So I was getting a little depressed and anxious. And the thing that really helped me more than anything else was confessing to my staff that I, books take a lot of energy, so I knew they didn't want to hear that not only was this taking a lot of the boss's time, this was making him depressed and anxious. But when I finally told the leadership of my staff, even though I try to maintain a lot of distance from, I love very, very much, it made such a difference because I could be open about that. And the other thing was, have you heard this conference dialogue?”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hadn't actually checked in with him because he seemed so confident I thought he would be totally fine because he had an insensitive tweet in June of 2020 and got forced out in a way that didn't actually sound as bad as a lot of the other professors. He actually at least got a severance package, but they knew he'd sue and win because he had before. And so I waited to check in on him because we were so overwhelmed with the request for help. And he was saying people were coming to his house still. And then he shot himself the next week. And I definitely, and because everyone knows I'm so public about my struggles with this stuff, everybody who fights this stuff comes to me when they're having a hard time. And this is a very hard psychologically taxing business to be in. And even admitting this right now, like”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the thing that was rough about writing canceling the American mind, I'd have mentioned this already a couple of times, I got really depressed this past year because I was studying, you know, there's a friend in there that I talk about who killed himself after being canceled. I talked to him a week before he killed himself, and I hadn't actually.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it slowly over time voices in my head that have been saying horrible, you know, horrible internal talk, it just didn't sound as convincing anymore, which was really kind of like subtle effect. Like it was just kind of like, oh, wait, I don't buy that I'm broken. You know, like that doesn't sound true. That doesn't sound like truth from God like it used to. Nine months after I was planning to kill myself, I was probably happier than I'd been in a decade. And that was one of the things that, you know, the CBT is what led me to notice this in my own work that it felt like administrators were kind of selling cognitive distortions, but students weren't buying yet. And then when I started noticing that they seemed to come in actually already believing a lot of this stuff, that it would be very dangerous. And that led to coddling the American mind and all that stuff.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I got a doctor and I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy. I started having all these voices in my head that were catastrophizing and giving over generalization and fortune telling mind reading, all of these things that they teach you not to do. And what you do in CBT is essentially you have something makes you upset and then you just write down what the thought was. And something minor could happen in your response was like, well, the date didn't seem to go very well. And that's because I'm broken and will die alone. And you're like, okay, okay, okay. What are the following that's catastrophizing? That's mind reading, that's fortune telling, that's all this stuff. And you have to do this several times a day, forever. I actually need to brush up on it at the moment.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That relationship didn't go very well. And then I nearly gotten fist fights a couple times with people on the right because they found out I defended people who crack jokes about 9-11. This happened more than once. By that time in my 20s, I'm not fist fighting again. But yeah, it was always like that. You see how hypocritical people can be. You can see how friends can turn on you if they don't like your politics. So I got an early preview of this, of what the culture we were heading into by being the president of fire. And it was exhausting. And that was one of the main things that led me to be suicidally depressed. At the Belmont Center, if you told me that that would be the beginning of a new and better life for me, I would have laughed if I could have, but I would, you know, I don't, you can tell I'm okay if I'm still laughing and I wasn't laughing at that point.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what I didn't emphasize in that was how much the culture war played into how depressed I got because I was originally legal director of fire, then I became president of fire in 2005, moved to Philadelphia where I get depressed. And just I don't have family there. There's something about the town. They don't seem to like me very much. But the main thing was being in the culture world all the time. There was a girl that I was dating. I remember, you know, she didn't seem to really approve what I did and a lot of people didn't really seem to. And meanwhile, like, I was defending people on the left all the time. And they'd be like, oh, that's good that you're defending someone on the left. But they still would never forgive me for defending someone on the right. And I remember saying at one point I'm like, listen, I'm like, I'm a true believer in this stuff. I'm willing to defend Nazis. I'm certainly willing to defend Republicans. And she actually said, I think Republicans might be worse.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I didn't emphasize as much in coddling the American mind, which by the way, that description that I give of trying to kill myself was the first time I'd ever written it down. Nobody in my family was aware of how of it being like that. My wife had never seen it. And basically the only way I was able to write that was by doing, you know how you can kind of trick yourself. And I was like, I'm going to convince myself that this is just between me and my computer and nobody will see it. It's probably now the most public thing I've ever written.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the whole thing, the whole journey with coddling the American mind began with me at the Belmont Psychiatric Facility in Philadelphia back in 2007. I had called 911 in a moment of clarity because I'd gone to the hardware store to make sure that when I killed myself that I stuck. I wanted to make sure that I had my head wrapped and everything. So if all the drugs I was planning to take didn't work, that I wouldn't be able to claw my way out. It'd been a really rough year. And I always had issues with depression, but they were getting worse. And frankly, one of the reasons why this cancel culture stuff is so important to me is that”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think I actually can make it a little bit fun by you get a limited number of them. It's kind of like you get three Waterbattism cards.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will continue to happen is people are going to establish themselves as being high integrity, that they will always be honest. I think you are establishing yourself as someone who is high integrity. Where they can trust that person, a fire wants to be the institution that people can come to. It's like, if it's free speech, we will defend it, period. And I think that people need new, need to have authorities that they can actually trust. And I think that if you actually had a stream that maybe people can watch in action but not flood with stupid cancel culture stuff or dumb cat means, where it is actually a serious discussion bounded around rules, no perfect rhetorical fortress, no efficient rhetorical fortress, none of the BS ways we debate. I think you could start to actually create something that could actually be a major improvement in the speed with which we come up with new better ideas and separate truth from falsity.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have lots of thoughts on that with the printing press, an extra millions of eyes on any problem can tear down any institution, any person or any idea. And that's good in some ways because a lot of medieval institutions needed to be torn down and some people did too and a lot of ideas needed to be torn down. Same thing is true now. An extra billions of eyes on every problem can tear down any person idea or institution. And again, some of those things needed to be torn down. But it can't build yet. We are not at the stage that can build yet, but it has shown us how thin our knowledge was. It's one of the reasons why we're also aware of the replication crisis. It's one of the reasons why we're also aware of how kind of shoddy our research is, how much our expert class is arrogant in many cases, but people don't want to live in a world where they don't have people that they respect and they can look at. And I think what's happening possibly now, but we'll...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm definitely more in an inescapably anarchical period and require big cultural adjustments. And there's no way that this isn't going to be a difficult transition.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The educational aspect of it, yes, educational, yes. The idea of kind of like both going the speed that you need to and running as fast as you can.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You ever watch Flea Bag? It's absolutely brilliant British show. And it sets you up. One of the reasons why people love it so much is it sets you up that you're watching a raunchy British Sex in the City, except the main character is the most promiscuous one. It's like, okay, and you kind of roll your eyes a little bit out. It's kind of funny and it's kind of cute and kind of spicy. And then you realize that the person is actually kind of suffering and having a hard time. it gets deeper and deeper as the show goes on. And she will do these incredible speeches about tell me what to do. Like, I just, I know there's experts out there. I know there's knowledge out there. I know there's an optimal way to live my life. So why can't someone just tell me what to do? And it's this wonderfully accurate, I think, aspect of human design.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, stress you out to no end. Remember to get off it sometimes. The stats are pretty bad on mental health with young people. And I'm definitely in the camp of people who think that social media is part of that. I understand the debate, but I'm pretty persuaded that one of the things that hasn't been great for mental health of people is just constantly being exposed.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Live in a neighborhood now on X where I mostly deal with people that I think are actually thoughtful, even if I disagree with them. And it's not such a bad experience. I occasionally run into those other sort of what I call neighborhoods on X where it's just all canceling, all nastiness, and it's always kind of an unpleasant visit to those places. I'm not saying the whole thing needs to be like my experience, but I do think that The reason why people keep on coming back to it is it reveals raw aspects of humanity that sometimes we prefer to pretend don't exist.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How unusual Twitter is because I think of it as because people talk about writing and mass communications as being expanding the size of our collective brain. But now we're kind of looking at our collective brain in real time and it's filled just like our own brains with all sorts of like little crazy things that pop up and appear like virtual particles kind of all over the place of people reacting in real time to things. There's never been anything even vaguely like it. And it can be at its worst awful to see. At its best, sometimes seeing people like just getting euphoric over something going on and cracking absolutely brilliant immediate jokes at the same time. It can be a joyful experience. I feel like I...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like the collective unconscious of the species. I mean, it's one of these things where the tendency to want to see patterns in history sometimes can limit The actual bat shit crazy experience of what history actually is. Because, yes, we have these nice comforting ideas that it's going to be like last time. We don't know. It hasn't happened yet. And I think...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Printing press helped create the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the discovery of ignorance. We now have added billions of eyes and voices to solving problems, and we're using them for cat videos and canceling”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the printing press are incalculably great. And that's what gives me some optimism for where we are now with social media, because we are in that unavoidably anarchical period. And I do worry that there are attempts in states to pass things to try to put the genie back in the bottle. Like if we ban TikTok or we say that nobody under 18 can be on the internet unless they have parental permission, we're going at something that no amount of sort of top-down is going to be able to fix it. We have to culturally adapt to the fact of it in ways that make us wiser that actually, and allow it potentially to be that wonderful engine for disconfirmation that we're nowhere near yet, by the way. But think about it. Additional millions of eyes on problems thanks to the”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I was studying in law school, when I ran out of First Amendment classes, I decided to study censorship during the Tudor dynasty because that's where we get our ideas of prior restraint that come from the licensing of the printing press, which was something that Henry VIII was the first to do, where basically the idea was that if you can't print anything in England unless it's with these Your Majesty approved printers, it will prevent heretical work and anti-Henry VIII stuff from coming out pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty efficient idea, if nothing else. And I always, so he started getting angry at the printing press around 1521 and then passed something that required print.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at the little sort of hateful, angry voices kind of pop up and be like, okay, there you are. And I'm still focused on that thing because that is one of the things is, okay, yeah, actually this is probably late in the game to giving my grand theory on this stuff.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Robert Wright. He wrote a book on Buddhism and I talked about trying to use social media from a Buddhist perspective, like as if it's the collective unconscious meditating and seeing those little angry bits that are trying to cancel you or get you to shut up. And just kind of like letting them go the same way you're supposed to watch your thoughts kind of trail off.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am glad, though. I mean, I am one of those kids who is really glad that I was a little kid in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s because having everything potentially online, it's not an upbringing I envy.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A worthy. Generation Z hates cancel culture the most, and that's another reason why it's like people still claiming this is even happening. It's kind of like, no, you actually can ask kids what they think of cancel culture.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I asked them, was that as scary as you thought it was going to be? And they're like, no, Daddy, that was fine. And I'm like, that's one of the great lessons in life. The fear that you don't go through becomes much bigger in your head than actually simply facing it. That's one of the reasons why I'm fighting back against this culture. I love, you know, for all of our kids to be able to grow up in an environment where people give you grace and accept the fact that sometimes people are going to say things that piss you off, take seriously the possibility of be wrong and be curious.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enjoy, study, and work, both things that I very much enjoy. I do for fun. Your life is going to feel great and it's going to feel easy. So some of those old-fashioned virtues are things I try to preach. Counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time, playing, having time that are not intermediated experiences is really important. Little things like I talk about in the book about when my kids are watching something that's scary. And I'm not talking about zombie movies. I'm talking about like a cartoon that has kind of a scary moment. And saying that they want to turn the TV off. And I talked to them and I say, listen, I'm going to sit next to you and we're going to finish this show. And I want you to tell me what you think of this afterwards. And I sat next to my sons. And by the end of it, every single time.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think the first quality you should be cultivating in your children if you want to have a free speech culture? Is curiosity and an awareness of the vastness that will always be unknown. And getting my kids excited about the idea that's like, we're going to spend our whole lives learning about stuff. And it's vast and exciting and endless and will never make a big dent in it, but the journey will be amazing. But only fools think they know everything. And sometimes dangerous fools at that. So giving the sense of intellectual humility early on, being also, you know, saying things that actually do sound kind of old-fashioned, but I say things to my kids like, listen, if you”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way that from now on, anytime your name comes up, it's like, oh, remember this thing I didn't like about him? And it's, again, it's cruel. It doesn't get you anywhere closer to the truth. But it is a little scary at it. Stick your neck out.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that one's tactical. That one isn't just someone not being empathetic. They're like, I'm going to punish you for this. And that's one of the reasons why I got depressed writing this book. Because, you know, it's already, there's already people who don't love me because of coddling the American mind, usually based on a misunderstanding of what we actually said in coddling the American mind, but nonetheless. But on this one, you know, like I'm calling out people for being very cruel in a lot of cases. But one thing that was really scary about studying a lot of these cases is that once you have that target on your back, what they're going to try to cancel you for could be anything. They might go back into your olds, find something that you said in 1995. Do something where essentially it looks like it's this entire other thing, but really what's going on is they didn't like your opinion. They didn't like your point of view on something. And they're going to find a way.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That never actually really seemed to happen. That I don't think that there are plenty of things we know about human nature and we know about dumb things people say and we've made it into an environment where there's just someone out there waiting to be kind of like, oh, remember that dumb thing you said we were 14? Well, I'm going to make sure that you don't get into your dream school because of that.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big part of what his life was. And I just think of that as such a great metaphor, is expanding your circle and seeing more people as being quite literally on your team is the solution to so many of these problems. And I worry that one of the things that is absolutely just a fact of life in America is like we do see each other more as enemy camps as opposed to people on the same team. And that was actually something in the early days. Like me and Will Creeley, the legal director of fire, wrote about the forthcoming free speech challenges of everyone being on Facebook. And one thing that I was hoping was that as more people were exposing more of their lives, we had realized a lot of these things we knew intellectually, like kids go to the”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very well, and the leader gets flustered. And it almost seems like he's going to shout out kind of like you're making this Nazi rally into a mockery. So it showed how actually allowing the Nazis to speak at Skokie kind of took the wind out of their sails. The whole movement, like everybody just kind of it all kind of dissolved after that because they looked like racist fools that they were they were, you know, even Blues brothers made jokes about them. And it didn't turn into the disaster that people thought it was going to be just by letting them speak. And Iraq Glass here, okay, so he has this wonderful story about how Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and how there was a moment when it was seeing someone, an African-American as on their, literally on their team, and how that really got them excited about the cause of racial equality.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Amazing. Ira, he wasn't a lawyer. He started working at the NYCLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union, back in, I think, the 60s. He was, I think, Robert Kennedy recommended that he go in that direction. And he became the president of the ACLU right at the time that they were suffering from defending the Nazis at Skokie. And Nico and Aaron and Chris put together this and they'd never done a documentary before and it came out so, so well. And it tells the story of the Nazis in Skokie. It tells the story of the case around it. Tells the story of the ACLU at the time and what a great leader Ira Glasser was. And one of the things that's so great is when you get to see the Nazis at Skogie, they come off like the idiots that you would expect them to. There's a moment when the rallies not going.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams that I really recommend. We did a documentary about Ira Glaser called Mighty Ira, which was my video team and my protege, Nico Prino and Chris Malby and Aaron Rees put it together. And it just follows the life and times of Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have people to your conference because you agree with them. We have to get out of this idea that because they were trying to make it sound like that's an endorsement of Steve Bannon. Like that's nonsense. Like if you actually look at the opinions of all the people who are there, you can't possibly endorse all the opinions that all these other people who are going to be there actually have. And in the process of making that argument, I got, and also, of course, the very classic, it's very valuable to know what someone Steve Ann thinks. You should be curious about that. And I remember someone arguing back saying, well, would you want someone to interview a jihadi? And I'm like, because at the moment, it was at the time when ISIS was really going for it. I was like, would you not want to go to a talk where someone was trying to figure out what makes some of these people tick? But that changes your framing, that essentially it's like, no, it's curiosity. It is the cure for a lot of.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember Steve Bannon got disinvited from the New Yorker Festival and Jim Carrey freaked out and all sorts of other people freaked out and he got disinvited and I got invited to speak on Smarkanish about this. And I was saying, listen”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and meanwhile, and the reality check part of this is people will always bring up, what about the clan on campus? I'm like, they're never invited. I haven't seen a case where they've been invited. Usually, the clan argument gets thrown out when people are trying to excuse. And that's why we shouted down Ben Shapiro. And that's why you can't have Bill Maher on campus. That's why, and it's like, okay, and it's a little bit of that whataboutism again about being like, well, that thing over there is terrible, and therefore this comedian shouldn't come.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrong. So it can have a de radicalizing factor, by the way. But even when it doesn't, it still really important to know what the bad people in your society think. Honestly, in some ways for your own safety, it's probably more important to know what the bad people in your society actually think.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source