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 you should be able to study what people think, and I think it's important that we actually do. So I think that let's take, for example, QAnon. Yeah, QAnon's wrong. But where did it come from? Why did they think that? What's the motivation? Who taught them it? Who came up with these ideas? This is important to understand history. That's important to understand modern American politics. And so if you put your scholar hat on, which you should be curious about kind of everyone, about where they're coming from, Daryl Davis, who I'm sure you're familiar with, part of his goal was just simply to get to know where people were coming from. And in the process, he actually de-radicalized a number of clans members when they actually realized that this black man who would befriended them actually was compassionate, was a decent person. They realized all their preconceptions.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get them in trouble. So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with, and group polarization takes off. So we have some interesting data in the book about how driving people off of Twitter, for example, in 2017. And then again, I think in 2020, driving people to Gab led to greater radicalization among those people. It's a very predictable force. Censorship doesn't actually change people's minds, and it pushes them in directions that actually by very solid research will actually make them more radicalized. So, yeah, I think that the attempt to ban hate speech, it doesn't really protect us from it, but it gives the government such a vast weapon to use against us that we will regret giving them.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't say that you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think. You're causing what Timor Kerran, who's on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be. And actually, these kind of restrictions, there was a book called Racial Paranoia that came out about 15 years ago that was making the point that the imposition of some of these codes can sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being a raging racist are these codes. So it must be really, really bad. It can actually make all these things worse. And one which we talk about in the book, one very real practical way it makes things worse is when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion. It just encourages them to not share it with people who”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's diverse that you can't ban things simply because they're offensive. And that's one of the reasons why hate speech is not an unprotected category of speech. And I go further. My theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers. And I think that's partially because some of these theories, although a lot of them are really good, are inadequate. They're not expansive enough. And I sometimes call my theory the pure informational theory of freedom of speech or sometimes when I want to be fancy, the lab and the looking glass theory. And its most important tenet is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. So every time you're actually saying,”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a bedrock principle. It's referred to this in a great case about flag burning in the First Amendment that I think all the world could benefit from. You can't ban speech just because it's offensive. It's too subjective. It's one of the reasons why these kind of codes have been more happily adopted in places like Europe where they have a sense that there's like a modal German or a modal Englishman. And I think this is offensive and therefore I can say that this is wrong. In a more multicultural, in a genuinely more diverse country that's never actually had an honest thought that there is a single kind of American, there's never been we had the idea of Uncle Sam, but that was always kind of a joke. Boston always knew it wasn't Richmond always knew it wasn't Georgia always knew it wasn't Alaska. We've always been a hodgepodge and we get in a society.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was to create this new category of unprotected speech called hate speech and to get it banned. The person who enabled this drift, of course, was Herbert Marcuse in 1965, basically questioning whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left. And he was on the losing side for a really long time. The liberals, you know, the way I grew up, that was basically being pro-free speech was synonymous with being a liberal. But that started to be etched away on campus. And the way it was was with the idea of hate speech that essentially, oh, but we can designate particularly bad speech as not protected and who's going to enforce it, who's going to decide what hate speech actually is. Well, it's usually overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment of really low viewpoint diversity because you have to actually agree on what the most hateful and wrong things are.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship. And it came from academia of the 20th century. And that when I talked about the anti-free speech movement, that was one of their first inventions. There was a lot of talk about critical race theory and being against critical race theory. And fire will sue.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speculate, you'll never actually get to something that's right in the first place. But it's especially galling when people who were right were censored and never actually got the credit that they deserve.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was offered, I think, like a million dollar severance, which you wouldn't take because she wanted to tell the world what she thought about this and that she wanted to continue saying that she hadn't changed her mind, that this was a disaster for young people. And now that's kind of the conventional wisdom, and the research is quite clear that this was devastating to particularly disadvantaged youths. Like people understand this as being, okay, she was probably right. But one of the really sad aspects of cancel culture is people forget why you are canceled and they just know they hate you. There's this lingering kind of like, well, I don't have to take them seriously anymore. By the way, did you notice they happen to be right on something very important? Now, one funny thing about freedom of speech. Freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you didn't also have the right to say things that were wrong. Because if you can't engage an idea for you, if you can't act...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that COVID was a big blow to people's faith and expertise and cancel culture played a big role in that. I think one of the best examples of this is Jennifer Say at Levi's. She is a lovely woman. She was a vice president at Levi's. She talked about actually potentially to be the president of Levi's genes. And she was a big advocate for kids. And when they started shutting down the schools, she started saying, this is going to be a disaster. This is going to hurt the poor and disadvantaged kids the most. We have to figure out a way to open the schools back up. And that was such a heretical point of view and the typical kind of cancel culture wave took over as he had all sorts of petitions for her to be fired and that she needed to apologize and all this kind of stuff. And she”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's fun and empathy? And I mean, what's so interesting about this is that so much societal energy seems to be spent on these nasty primal desires where essentially a lot of it is like, please tell me who I'm allowed to hate. Where can I legitimately be cruel? Where can I actually exercise some aggression against somebody? And it seems to sometimes be just finding new justifications for that. And it's an understandable human that sometimes can be used to defend justice. But again, it will never get you anywhere near the truth.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we call it efficient because it eliminates a lot of people you probably should listen to at least sometimes. We point out sometimes how cancel culture can interfere with faith and expertise. So we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts. But at the same time, if you follow that and you follow it mechanically, and I definitely, you know, I think everybody in the US probably has some older uncle who exercises some of these, it is a really efficient way to sort of wall yourself off from the rest of the world and dismiss at least some people you really should be listening to.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just dismiss. We talk about this from a practical standpoint the way the limitations on reality. And one of them is time. And a lot of cancel culture as cultural norms, as this way of winning arguments without winning arguments, is about running up the clock. Because by the time you get down to the bottom of the, actually even you get a couple steps into the perfect rhetorical fortress. And where is the time gone? You probably just give up trying to actually have the argument and you never get to the argument in the first place.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sexual person who ever lived, and you have the wrong opinion, you're a heretic and you actually probably will be hated even more. And the most interesting part of the research we did for this was just asking every prominent black”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm sorry there. We have a little bit of fun with demographic numbers. I run this by height. And I remember him being kind of like, don't include the actual percentage. I'm like, no, we need to include the actual percentages because people are really bad at estimating what the demographics of the US actually looks like, both the right and the left in different ways. So we put in the numbers and we talk about being dismissed for being white or being dismissed for being straight or being dismissed for being male. And you can already dismiss people for being conservative. And so we give examples in the book of these being used to dismiss people. And oftentimes on topics not related to the fact that they are male or whether or not they're a minority. And then we get to, I think it's like layer six and we're like, surprise, guess what? You're down to 0.4% of the population and none of it mattered because if you have the wrong opinion, even if you're in that 0.4% of the most interesting”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having that in a number of the departments. And it would be very strange to be a, in many departments, a conservative social worker professor. I'm sure they exist, but there's a lot of pressure to shut up if you are.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's like, okay, it's interesting because at least the research as of 10 years ago was indicating that if you dig a little bit deeper into that, a lot of the people who do consider themselves on the left tend to be a little bit more libertarian. There's something that Pinker wrote a fair amount about. The idea that we're just smarter is not an opinion. I'm at least a bit comfortable with. I do think that departments take on momentum when they become a place where you're like, wow, it'd be really unpleasant for me to work in this department if I'm the token conservative. And I think that takes on a life of its own. There are also departments where a lot of the ideologies kind of explicitly leftist. You look at education schools, a lot of the stuff that is actually left over from what is correctly called critical race theories is present and you end up”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't love, and this is an argument that you'll sometimes run into on the left, just the argument that people on the left are just smarter. Right.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like you'd expect to a degree, you know, economics is what four to one or something like that. It's not as bad. But then when you start getting into some of the humanities, there are departments that are literally not.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It creates a situation where there are sacred ideas. And when you look at some of the departments, I think the estimate from the Crimson is that Harvard has 3% conservatives. But when you look at different departments, there are elite departments that have literally no conservatives in them. And I think that's an unhealthy intellectual environment. The problem is definitely worse as you get more elite. We definitely see more cases of lefty professors getting canceled at less elite schools. It gets worse as you get down from the elite schools. That's where a lot of the one-third of attempts to get professors punished that are successful do come from the right and largely from off campus sources. And we spend a lot of time talking about that in the book as well. It's something that I do think is underappreciated. But when it comes to the low viewpoint diversity, it works out.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when I started Fire in 2001, I didn't take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously. I thought I was just something that right-wingers complained about. But I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity. And actually, a lot of the research that I got most interested in was done in conjunction with the great Cass Sunstein, who writes a lot about group polarization, and the research on this is very strong, that essentially when you have groups with political diversity, and you can see this actually in judges, for example, it tends to produce reliably more moderate outcomes, whereas groups that have a political diversity tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction. And when you have a super majority of people from just one political perspective, that's a problem for the production of ID.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to actually be studying this in 50 years the same way we study the red scare. The idea that this isn't happening will just be correctly viewed as insane.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And back to the Red Scare comparison. And this is one of the interesting things about the data as well that that same study that I was talking about, the most comprehensive study of the Red Scare, there was polling about whether or not professors were self-censoring due to the fear of the environment. And 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring their research and that what they were saying. 9% is really bad. That's almost a tenth of professors saying that their speech was chilled. When we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey, when you factored together, if they're, we ask them, are they self-censoring in their research? Are they self-censoring in class? Are they self-censoring online, et cetera? It was 90% of professors. So the idea that we're actually in an environment that is historic in terms of how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views, I think that it's the reason why”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, when you ask professors about are they intimidated under the current environment, the answer is yes, and particularly conservative professors already reporting that they're afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, it selects for people who tend to be farther to the left in a situation where you already have people, a situation where universities do lean decidedly that way. But it also establishes essentially a set of sacred ideas that if you're being quizzed on whether what you've done to advance anti-racism, how you've been conscious of intersectionality, it's unlikely that you'd actually get in if you said, by the way, I actually think these are dubious concepts. I think they're thin. I think they're philosophically not very defensible. Basically, like if your position was, I actually reject these concepts as being oversimple. You're not going to get in. And I think that the person that I always think of that wasn't a right-winger that would be like, go to hell if you made him fill one of these things out. It's Feynman.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DEI statements. And the one on viewpoint diversity, I think like half of the people who reviewed it would eliminate it right out. And I think it was basically the same for religious diversity. It was slightly better, like 40% for socioeconomic diversity, but that kills me. Like the idea that kind of like, yeah, that actually is the kind of diversity that I think we need a great deal more of in higher education. You can agree with it's not hostile to the other kinds, by the way, but the idea that we need more people from the bottom of three quarters of American society in higher education, I think should be something we could all get around. But the only one that really succeeded was the one that sprouted back exactly the kind of ideology that they thought the reviewers would like, which is like, okay, there's no way this couldn't be a political litmus test. We've proved that it's a political litmus test and still school after school.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He got something like almost like 3,000 professors to participate, evaluating different kinds of DEI statements. And one was basically like the standard kind of identity politics, intersectionality one. One was about viewpoint diversity. One was about religious diversity. And one was about socioeconomic diversity. And as far as where my heart really is, it's that we have too little socioeconomic diversity, particularly in elite higher ed, but also in education period. The experiment had large participation, really interestingly set up, and it tried to model the way a lot of these DEI policies were actually implemented. And one of the ways these have been implemented, and I think in some of the California schools, is that administrators and go through the DEI statements before anyone else looks at them and then eliminates people off the top depending on how they feel about their”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mechanisms in the whole thing. And that's one of the reasons why the idea that you'd add something like a requiring a DEI statement to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment is so completely nuts. We have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last, you know, particularly since 2017 on campuses. We have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with. Under these circumstances, administrators start saying, you know what the problem is we have too much heterogeneous thought. We're not homogeneous enough. We actually need another political litmus test, which is nuts. And that's what a DEI statement effectively is, because there's no way to actually fill out a DEI statement without someone evaluating you on your politics. It's crystal clear. We even did an experiment on this. Nate Honeycutt.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A half years of cancel culture 190 professors fired. In the 11 years of the Red Scare, probably somewhere around 100, probably more, the number is going to keep going up. But unlike during the Red Scare where people could clearly tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I'm still dealing with people who are saying this isn't happening at all. And it hasn't been subtle on campus. And we know that's a wild undercount, by the way, because when we surveyed professors, 17% of them said that they had been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught, said, or their research. And one third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research. Extrapolating that out, that's a huge number. And the reason why you're not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are so many different conformity and”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are clearly protected at public colleges in the United States, and we're still seeing these kind of numbers. During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was done of what was going on, as I think this came out in like 55, and the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for being communist and about 90 something professors fired for political views overall. That usually is reported as being about 100. So 60, 90, 100, depending on how you look at it. I think the number is actually higher, but that's only because of hindsight. Like what I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there were more professors who were fired as time reveals. We're at 190 professors fired, and I still have to put up with people saying this isn't even happening. And I'm like, in the 90s...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of 2023. We're at about well over a thousand attempts to get professors fired or punished, usually driven by students and administrators. About two thirds of those result in the professor being punished in some way, everything from having their article removed to suspension, etc. About one-fifth of those result in professors being fired. So right now it's almost 200, it's around 190 professors being fired. So I want to give some context here. The red scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957. It ended, by the way, in 57 when it finally became clear thanks to the First Amendment that you couldn't actually fire people for their ideologies. Prior to that, a lot of universities thought they could. This guy is a very doctrinaire communist. They can't be dissuaded. I'm going to fire them. They thought they actually could do that. And it was only 57 when the law was established. So like right now, these are happening in an environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom,”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humanity, identity politics, but some of the actual ideological assumptions that are baked in can actually cause people to feel more alienated from each other. Now, when I started at Fire, my first cases involved 9-11. And it was bad. Professors were getting targeted. Professors were losing their jobs for saying insensitive things about 9-11, and both from the right and the left. Actually, in that case, actually, sometimes a lot more from the right. And it was really bad. And about five professors lost their jobs. That's bad. Five professors over a relatively short period of time being fired for a political opinion. That's something that, you know, would get written up in any previous decades. We're now evaluating how many professors have been targeted for cancellation between 2014 and middle of this year, July of”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know people who are DEI consultants. Actually, I have a dear friend who I love very much who does DEI. Absolutely decent people. What they want to do is create bonds of understanding, friendship, compassion among people who are different. Unfortunately, the research on what a lot of DEI actually does is oftentimes the opposite of that. And I think that it's partially a problem with some of the ideology that comes from critical race theory, which is a real thing, by the way, that informs a lot of DEI that actually makes it something more likely to divide than unite. We talk about this in coddling the American mind as the difference between common humanity identity politics and common enemy identity politics. And I think that I note some of the people that I know who do DEI, they really want it to be common.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making a claim that none of these cases matter as well. And I want people to care about censorship when it even is against people they hate”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get in trouble too, and there are attacks from the left, and you should take those seriously too. You should care when Republicans get in trouble. You should care when California has a DEI program that requires this California Community Colleges, has a DEI program, a policy that actually requires even chemistry professors to work in different DEI ideas from intersectionality to anti-racism into their classroom, into their syllabus, etc. This is a gross violation of academic freedom. It is as bad as it is to tell professors what they can't say, like we fought and defeated in Florida. It's even worse to tell them what they must say. That's downright totalitarian. And we're suing against this. And what I'm saying is that when you're dismissing someone for just being on the other side of the political fence, you are also kind of claiming”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three ways I want to respond to this, which is just giving an example after example of times where we defended people on both sides of every major issue, basically every major issue, whether it's Israel, Palestine, whether it's terrorism, whether it's gay marriage. We have been abortion, we have defended both sides of that argument. The other part, and I call these the orphans of the culture war, I really want to urge the media to start caring about free speech cases that actually don't have a political valance, that are actually just about good old-fashioned exercise of power against the little guy or little girl or little group on campus or off campus for that matter, because these cases happen, a lot of our litigation are just little people, there's regular people being told that they can't protest, that they can't hold signs. And then the last part of the argument that I want people to really get is like, yeah, and by the way, right-wing.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hi, I'm a person who only cares about one side of the political fence, and I think everyone else is a hypocrite. And by the way, I haven't done any actual research on this, but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite. And you see this happen all the time. And this happens to fire a lot where someone goes, where is fire on this case? And we're like, we are literally quoted in the link you just sent but didn't actually read. Or it's like, where's fire on this? It's like, here's our lawsuit about it from six months ago. So it's a favorite thing. And also John Stewart daily showed and the kind of like idea that these people must be hypocrites is something that greatest comedy, but as far as actually a rhetorical tactic that will get you to truth, just assuming that your opponent or just accusing your opponent of always being a hypocrite is not a good tactic for truth. But by the way, it tends to always come from people who aren't actually consistent on free speech themselves.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Staff who won't even agree on which opinions are good and what opinions we have. But yeah, one time when someone did something like this and they were just being a little bit flippant about kind of like free speech being fine, I did a 70 tweet long thread, you know, just being like, hey, do you really think this is fine? I decided not to do that on this particular one. But the nice thing about it is it demonstrated two parts of the book, Canceling the American Mind, if not more. One of them is dismissing someone because they're conservative because that was the implication. Don't have to listen to fire because they're conservative. But the other one is something, a termite that I invented specifically for the way people argue on Twitter, which is hypocrisy projection.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was a review of it that was just sort of scathing about the whole thing. And it included a line saying that fire, which claims to believe in free speech, but only defends viewpoints it agrees with, I can't believe that even made it into the magazine because it's not just calling us, because of course, you know, the implication, of course, is that we're right-wing, which we're not. Actually, the staff leans decidedly more to the left and to the right. But we also defend people all over the spectrum all the time. Like that's something that even the most minimal Google search would have solved. So we've been given LA Times some heat on this because it's like, yeah, if you said, in my opinion, they're right wing, we would have argued back, you know, saying, well, here's the following 50,000 examples of us not being. But when you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with, first of all, there's no way for us to agree with opinions because we actually have a politically”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so much to unback there. Barry Weist has this great project, the Free Press. I've been very impressed. It's covering stories that a lot of the media, right or left, isn't willing to cover. And we did hosted a debate with her. And we wanted to make it as fun and controversial as possible. So Fire at the Free Press hosted a debate, did the Sexual Revolution fail. So the debate was really exciting, really fun. The side that said that sexual revolution wasn't a failure that Grimes and Sarah Hater were on,”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right. But once it becomes a tactic that we accept, and that's one of the reasons why I'm more on the left, but I think I'm left of center liberal. Ricky is more conservative, libertarian. And initially, I was kind of like, should I really be writing something with someone who's more on the right? And I'm like, absolutely I should be. I have to actually live up to what I believe on this stuff because it's ridiculous that we have this primitive idea that you can just miss someone as soon as you claim, rightly or wrongly, that they're on the right.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there's also part of me that's like, okay, so what? Like, are you really saying that if you can magically make me argue or convince yourself that I'm on the right, that you don't have to listen to me anymore? And again, that's arguing like children. And the reason why this has become so popular is because even among, or maybe especially among elites, that it works so effectively as a perfect weapon that you can use uncritically. If I can just prove you're on the right, I don't have to think about you. It's no wonder that suddenly you start seeing people calling the ACLU right wing and calling the New York Times right wing because it's been such an effective way to delegitimize people as thinkers, Stephen Pinker, who's on our board of advisors, he refers to academia as being the left pole, that essentially it's a position that from that point of view, everything looks to.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's effective. That's why it keeps on getting used. Essentially, it should have hit someone's, because I have a great. Liberal pedigree, you know, everything from working at the ACLU to doing refugee law in Eastern Europe. I was part of an environmental mentoring program for inner city high school kids in DC. I can defend myself as being on the left. But I hate doing that.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among a lot of very bright people, it really was already an intellectual habit that if you could designate something conservative, then you didn't really have to think about it very much anymore or take it particularly seriously. That's a childish way of arguing, but nonetheless, I engaged in it. It was a common tactic. I even mentioned in the book there was a time when a gay activist friend who was, I think, decidedly to my left, but nonetheless had that pragmatic experience of actually being an activist, said something like, well, just because someone's conservative doesn't mean they're wrong. And I remember feeling kind of scandalized at some level of just being like, well, no, isn't that the whole thing what we're saying is that they're just kind of bad people with bad ideas.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the perfect rhetorical fortress is the way that's been developed on the left to not ever get to someone's actual argument. I want to make a chart, like a flow chart of this about like, here's the argument and here is this perfect fortress that will deflect you every time from getting to the argument. And I started to notice this certainly when I was in law school that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people. And perfect rhetorical fortress step one. And I can attest to this because I was guilty of this as well, that you can dismiss people if you can argue that they're conservative. If they don't have to be conservative to be clear, you just have to say that they are. So I never read Thomas Sole because he was the right winger. I didn't read Camille Poglia because someone had convinced me she was a right winger. There were lots of authors that, and when I was in law school, it...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's funny is the elitism has been repackaged as a kind of Masquerades as kind of infinite compassion, that essentially it's based in a sort of very, to be frank, overly simple ideology, over simple explanation of the world, breaking people into groups and judging people on how oppressed they are on the intersection of their various identities. And it came to that, I think, initially, and it had an appeal from a compassionate core, but it gets used in a way that can be very cruel, very dismissive, compassionless, and allows you to not take seriously most of your fellow human beings.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elite education is really insulting to the working class. Part of the ideology that is dominant right now kind of treats almost 70% of the American public like we developed this a little bit in the perfect rhetorical fortress, like they're to some way illegitimate and not worthy of. Respect or compassion.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we can't actually write this in a way that's too kind because cancelers aren't kind. There's a cruelty and a mercilessness about it. I mean, I start getting really depressed this past year when I was writing it and I didn't even want to tell my staff why I was getting so anxious and depressed. It's partially because I'm talking about people who will, you know, in some of the cases we're talking about, go to your house, target your kids. So that's a long-winded way of saying the... I kind of can get what sort of drives the right nuts to a degree in this. I feel like they're constantly feeling like they're being gaslit.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try really hard to empathize to a degree everybody and try to really see where they're coming from. And the anger on the right, I get it. I mean, I feel like the book, so coddling the American mind was a book that could be sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree, partially because we really meant what we said in the subtitle, that these are good intentions and bad ideas that are hurting people. And if you understand it and read the book, you can say it's like, okay, this isn't anybody being Malicious. There's people trying to protect their kids. They're just doing it in a way that actually can actually lead to greater anxiety, depression, and strangely eventually pose a threat to freedom of speech. But in this one, we can't be quite, me and my, oh, I haven't even mentioned my brilliant co-author, Ricky Schlott. A 23-year-old...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They treat you differently in a way that's almost insulting. Basically, like suddenly to a certain kind of person I was a legitimate person. And I look at how much America relies on Harvard, on Yale, to produce its, I'm going to use a very Marxist-sounding term, ruling class. And that's one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes on at these elite colleges. And these elite colleges, with the exception of University of Chicago and UVA, do really badly regarding freedom of speech. And that has all sorts of problems. It doesn't bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest of the society.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source