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

“Repatrimonialization. Which is the reversion to societies in which you favor your family and friends? And I actually think a lot of what I'm seeing in sort of in the United States, it makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit of a process of repatrimonialization. And I think that's one of the reasons why people are so angry. I think that the prospect that we very nearly seem to have an election that was going to be Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton, it's like, are we a dynastic country now? Is that what's kind of happening? But also, it's one of the reasons why people are getting so angry about legacy admissions, about how much certain families seem to be able to keep their people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually. And believe me, like I was poor when I was a kid and I went and I got to go to, I got to go to one of the fancies. I got to go to Stanford. And I got to see how people”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dominant religious minority. And that's when you start actually detaching yourself a little bit from it, how typical America is exceptional in a number of ways, but some of our dynamics are incredibly typical. It's one of the reasons why when people start reading Thomas Sowell, for example, they start getting hooked. Because one of the things he does is he does comparative analysis of countries' problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just unique to the United States exist in 75% of the rest of the countries in the world. Francis Fukiama's the book that I'm reading right now, Origins of the Political Order, actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we're not special in a variety of ways. This is actually something that's very much on my mind. And Fukiyama, of course, it's a great book. It's not stilted a little bit in its writing because his term for one of the things he's concerned about what destroys societies is”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wonderful employee, Angel Enduardo, has something that he calls Star Manning. And I find myself doing this a lot. It's nice to have two immigrant parents because I remember being in San Francisco in the weird kind of ACLU slash burning man kind of cohort. And having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas. And that was his metaphor for Middle America is what he meant by it. But he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas. And I'm like, you got to understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners. And think about like change the name of Kansas to Croatia, you know, change the name of Kansas to some, that's what it sounds like to me. And the star manning idea, which I like, is the idea of being like, so you're saying that you really hate your...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arguing about Chop, you know, someone bringing up January 6th isn't super relevant to it. Or if I'm arguing about January 6th, someone bringing up the riots in 2020 isn't that helpful.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So January 6th, watching everybody arguing about Chop, you know, like the occupied part of Seattle or the occupied part of Portland and basically trying to like, oh, you're bringing up the riot on January 6th. And by the way, I live on Capitol Hill, so believe me, I was very aware of how scary and bad it was. My dad grew up in Yugoslavia and that was a night where we all ate dinner in the basement because I'm like, oh, when the shit goes down, eat in the basement. It was genuinely scary. And people would try to deflect from January 6th being serious by actually making the argument that, oh, well, there are crazy, horrible things happening all over the country, riots that came from some of the social justice protests. And of course, the answer is you can be concerned about both of these things and find them both problems. But I'm arguing.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What about as a yeah? That's everywhere when you look at it, when you look at Twitter, when you look at social media in general. The first, what we call the obstacle course is basically time tested old fashioned argumentative dodges that everybody uses? And what about Ism is just bringing up something like someone makes an argument like Biden is corrupt and then someone says, well, Trump was worse. And that's not an illegitimate argument to make back, but it seems to happen every time someone makes an assertion, someone just points out some other thing that was going on. And it can get increasingly attenuated from what you're actually trying to argue. And you see this all the time on social media. And it's kind of, you know, I was a big fan of John Stewart's daily show, but an awful lot of what the humor was and what the tactic was for arguing was this thing over here. It's like, oh, I'm making this argument at this important problem. Oh, actually, you know, there's this other problem over here that I'm more concerned about. And on the, you know, let's pick on the right here.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually, when I was thinking about ways that X could be used to argue towards truth, I wouldn't want to have it so that everybody would be bound to that. But I think that I imagine being like a stream within X that was truth focused that agrees to some additional rules on how they would argue.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make little cards of these of all of these tactics and start using them on X all the time because they are so commonly deployed. And what about is them? I put first for a reason.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We try to make three major points in the book one is just simply cancel culture is real. It's a historic era and it's on a historic scale. The second one is you should think of cancel culture as part of a rhetorical, as a larger, lazy rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments. And we mean that in two senses. Without having winning arguments or without actually having one argument. And we talk about all the different what we call rhetorical fortresses that both the left and the right have that prevent you from, that allow you to just dismiss the person or dodge the argument without actually ever getting to the substance of the argument. Third part is just how do we fix it. But the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something I've been very passionate about because it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it wastes time and”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm thinking a lot And that's one of the things we talk about in Counseling of the American Mind is arguing towards truth and that cancel culture is cruel, it's merciless, it's anti-intellectual, but it also will never get you anywhere near truth. And you are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents in something that can actually never get you to truth through the process, of course, of never actually get directly at truth. You just chip away at falsity.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And of course, shoutdowns. That's just mob censorship. And that's something where the university, the way you deal with that tension in First Amendment law is essentially kind of like the one positive duty that the government has. The negative duty, the thing that it's not allowed to do is censor you. But it's positive duty is that if I want to say awful things or for that matter great things that aren't popular in a public park, you can't let the crowd just shout me down. You can't allow what's called a Heckler's veto.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Protesters. But what we are saying is you can't let the protesters win if they're demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of To devote your life to ending freedom of speech and ridiculing it as a concept. And there are people who really can come off as very contemptible about even the philosophy of freedom of speech. And we will defend your right to do that. We will also disagree with you. And if you try to get a professor fired, we will be on the other side of that. Now, I think you had Randy Kennedy, who I really love him. I think he's a great guy. But he criticized us for our de-platforming database as saying, this is saying that students can't protest speakers. I'm like, okay, that's silly. Fire as an organization have defended the right to protest all the time. We are constantly defending the rights to protesters, not believing that the protesters have the right to say this would basically that would be punishing the speakers. We're not calling for punishing the...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was one of the times that it was used as kind of like, oh, this was hostile to the university because the students took over the president's office. And I'm like, no, they let them take over the president's office. And I don't know if that was one of the cases in which the takeover was catered, but if there was ever sort of like a sign that's kind of like, yes, this is actually really quite friendly.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was all throughout my career. A president, a university president who puts their foot down early and says, nope, we are not entertaining firing this professor. We are not expelling this student. It ends the issue often very fast. Although sometimes, and this is where you can really tell the administrative involvement, students will do things like take over the president's office, and then that takeover will be catered by the university. People will point this out sometimes as being kind of like, oh, it was clearly, like, my friend Sam Abrams when they tried to get him fired at Sarah Lawrence College.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of shameful. You shouldn't be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor. And what's even more shameful is that we get this has almost become a cliche within fire when someone is facing one of these cancellation campaigns as a professor. I would get letters from some of my friends saying, I am so sorry this has happened to you. And these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At first they were overwhelmingly led by administrators to attempts to get professors punished. And that was most, you know, I'd say that was my career up until 2013 was fighting back at administrative excesses. Then you start having the problem in 2014 of students trying to get people canceled. And that really accelerated in 2017. And the number, so one way that one thing that makes it easier to document are the petitions to get professors fired or punished and how disproportionately that those actually do come from students. But another big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow professors get punished. And that to me...”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's something that has been profoundly disappointing is that when you look at the huge uptick in attempts to get professors fired that we've seen over the last 10 years and actually over the last 22 years, as far back as our records go.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think a lot of that stuff is going on. And I think it's a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education today, which is hyper bureaucratization.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's an unusual case because we actually got documentation of administrators buying tickets for Angry Students and holding an event where they trained them to jump up in the middle of it and shout, I'm offended. Like they bought them tickets, they sent them to this thing with the goal of shouting it down. Now, unsurprisingly, when you send an angry group of students to shut down a play, it's not going to end at just, I'm offended. And it got heated. There were death threats being thrown. And then the Pullman Washington police told Chris Lee, the guy who made the play, that they wouldn't actually protect him. Now, it's not every day you're going to have that kind of hard evidence that actually seeing the administrators be so brazen that they recorded the fact that they bought them tickets and sent them.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's something I've seen throughout my entire career. And the only thing is kind of hard to catch this sort of in the act, so to speak. And that's one of the reasons why it's helpful for people to know about this. It was this amazing case. This was at University of Washington. And we actually featured this in a documentary made in 2015. It came out in 2015, 2016, called Can We Take a Joke? And this was when we started noticing something was changing on campus. We also heard that comedians were saying that they couldn't use their good humor anymore. This was right around the time that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they didn't want to play on campuses because they couldn't be funny. But we featured a case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called The Passion of the Musical, Making Fun of the Passion of the Christ, with the stated goal of offending everyone, every group equally. It was very much a South Park mission.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do shoutdowns. And that's why they really need to investigate this. And it is at Stanford, the administrator who gave the prepared remarks about the juice not being worth the squeeze. She has not been invited back to Stanford. But she's one of the only examples I can think of when these things happen a lot, where an administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shoutdown or de-platforming or resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled, where the administrator has got off scot-free or probably in some cases even got a promotion.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On free speech of free speech not being worth the squeeze. And then for the rest of it, it's just constant heckling after she leaves. This is clearly, and something very similar happened a number of Yale, where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a lot of these disruptions. Help create this problem? Did they do anything to stop it? Because I think a lot of what's really going on here is the hyperbureaucratization of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically like policing speech more or less. They're encouraging students, sorry, they're encouraging students who have opinions they like.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down. It was a real showing of what was going on that 10 minutes into the shoutdown of a Fifth Circuit judge, and I keep on emphasizing that because I'm a constitutional lawyer, Fifth Circuit judges are big deals. They're one level below the Supreme Court. About a fifth of the school shows up to shout them down. After 10 minutes of shouting him down, an administrator, a DEI administrator, gets up with a prepared speech that she's written that's a seven-minute long speech where she talks about free speech. Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And we're at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms. So it's clear that there was coordination among some of these administrators. And from talking to students there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time. They show up, do a shoutdown, then they take additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's the dirty little secret about the big change in 2014 and Fire and me and Height have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech. They were the best constituency for free speech, absolutely unambiguously until about 2013-2014. And it was only in 2014 where we had this very kind of sad for us experience where suddenly students were the ones advocating for de-platforming and new speech codes kind of in a similar way that they had been doing in say like the mid-80s, for example. But here's the dirty little secret. It's not just the students. It's students and administrators sometimes only a handful of them though working together to make to create some of these problems. And this was exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan, a fifth circuit judge, tried to speak at my alma mater.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of de-platforming That when we looked at the bottom five, 81% of attempts to get speakers deplatformed were successful at the bottom five. There were a couple schools, I think Penn included, where every single attempt, every time a student objected, a student group objected to that speaker coming, they canceled the speech. And I think Georgetown was 100% success rate. I think Penn had 100% success rate. I think Harvard did stand up for a couple, but mostly people got de-platformed there as well.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. If Even if we took all of your arguments as true, even if we decided to get rid of those two professors, you would still be in negative numbers. You would still be dead last. You would still be after Georgetown and Penn, and neither of those schools are good for freedom of speech.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harvard. Oh, Harvard. And there are a couple people who have actually been really, I think, making a mistake by getting very Harvard sounding by being like, I've had statisticians look at this. And they think your methodology is a joke and pointing out, and this case wasn't that important. And that scholar, one of the arguments against one of the scholars that we counted against them for punishing was that that wasn't a very famous or influential scholar. And I'm kind of like, so your argument seems to be snobbery, like essentially that you're not understanding our methodology for one thing. And then you're saying that actually that scholar wasn't important enough to count. And by the way, Harvard, if we”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a negative 10.69 Negative 10.69, and we rounded up to zero was Harvard, and Harvard has been not very happy with that result.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had a case involving a student. They wouldn't recognize a chapter of turning point USA. And they made a very classic argument that we, and Classic in the Bad Way, that we hear campuses across the country, oh, we have a campus Republicans, so we don't need this additional conservative group. And we're like, no, I'm sorry. Like we've seen dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular conservative student group derecognized or not recognized. And so we told them, like, listen, we told them at Fire that we consider this serious and they wouldn't recognize the group. So that's a point down in our ranking. And it was enough to knock them from, they probably would have been number two in the rankings. But now they're 13 out of 248. They're still one of the best schools in the country. I have no problem saying that. The school that did not do so well.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make the methodology more and more precise to better reflect the actual environment at particular schools. And this year, the number one school is Michigan Technological University, which was a nice surprise. The number two school was actually Auburn University, which was nice to see. In the top 10, the most well-known prestigious school is actually UVA, which did really well this year. University of Chicago was not happy that they weren't number one, but University of Chicago is 13, and they had been number one or in the top three for years prior to that.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And so having that, what we really needed in order to have some serious social science to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was to be able to, one, get a better sense of how many professors were actually getting punished during this time. And then the biggest missing element was to be able to ask students directly what the environment was like on that campus for freedom of speech. Are you comfortable disagreeing with each other? Are you comfortable disagreeing with your professors? Do you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker? Do you think shouting down is okay? Do you think blocking people's access to a speaker is okay? And once we were able to get all those elements together, we first did a test run, I think, in 2019, about 50, and we've been doing it for four years now, always trying to.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So people have been asking me since day one to do a ranking of schools according to freedom of speech. And even though we had the best database in existence of campus speech codes, policies that universities have that violate First Amendment or First Amendment norms, we also have the best database of what we call the disinvitation database, but it's actually named the de-platforming database, which is what we're going to call it.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can try really hard and you will still make some people angry, but serious people will be like, oh no, you actually tried to be fair to the beliefs here. And I try to be respectful as much as I can about a lot of this. I still find myself much more drawn to both Buddhism and Stoicism”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The curriculum like we were talking about. I actually think it would be great if public schools could teach the Bible in the sense of read it as a historical document. But back when I was at the ACLU, every time I saw people trying this, it always turned into them actually advocating for a Catholic or a Protestant or some Orthodox even kind of like read on religion. If you actually make it into something advocating for a particular view on religion, then it crosses into the establishment clause side. So Americans haven't figured out a way to actually teach it, so it's probably better that you learn outside of a public school class.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the First Amendment, we have something that we call the religion clause, and I've never liked calling it just that because it's two brilliant things right next to each other. The state may not establish an official religion, but it cannot interfere with your right to practice your religion. Beautiful. Two things at the same time. And I think they're both exactly right. And I think sometimes the right gets very excited of the free exercise clause, and the left gets very excited about establishment. And I like the fact that we have both of them together. Now, how does this relate to freedom of speech?”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a long way of saying I actually think it's worthwhile. Some of it was, you're always kind of surprised when you end up in the part. There are parts of it that will sneak up on you. Kind of like Isaiah is a trip, Ecclesiastes to Pesh mode.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then at the end, he gods decides Job's like, oh no, you're totally right. I was totally wrong. Sorry. And God says, I'm going to punish those people who tried to argue with you and didn't win. So you get rid of the, I don't know exactly what he does to them. I don't remember. And then he gives Job all his money back and it makes him super prosperous. And I'm like, no way that was the original ending of that book because this was clearly a beloved novel that they were like, but it can't have that ending.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Torture Job, and he turns into the best, why is God cruel? How could God possibly exist? How could a kind God do these things? And he beats, he turns into like the best lawyer in the entire world, and he defeats everyone, all the people who come to argue with him, he argues the pants off of them. And then suddenly at the end, God shows up and he's like, well, you know, I am everywhere. It's a very confusing answer. He gets an answer kind of like, I am there when Lionesses give birth and I am there. And by the way, there's this giant monster Leviathan that's very big and it's very scary. And I have to manage the universe. And I'm kind of like, God, are you saying that you're very busy? Is that essentially your argument to Job and you don't mention the whole kind of like that? I have a bet that's why I was torturing you. That doesn't come up.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you should just to know because it's such a touchstone in the way people talk about things. It can get pretty tedious, but I even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be and how long the garbs need to be and what shape they need to be and those go on a lot. Surprisingly big chunk of Exodus, I thought that was more like in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But then you get to books like Job, you know, wow. I mean, Job is such a read. And no way Job originally had that ending. Job is basically, it starts out of this perverse between God and Satan about whether or not they can actually make a good man renounce God. And initially they can't. It's all going very predictably. And then they finally really twist.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm an atheist. With an intense interest in religion. I actually read the entire Bible this year just because I do stuff like that. And I never actually had read it from beginning to end. Then I read the Quran because, you know, and I'm going to try to do the Book of Mormon, but, you know.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're part of that. And they can say, like, you should teach the following books. Now, of course, people are always a little bit worried that if they were to recommend teach the Declaration of Independence, that it will end up being, well, they're going to teach the Declaration of Independence was just to protect slavery, which it wasn't.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The empowering of the American mind. I gave principles that were inconsistent with the sort of groupthink and heavy emphasis on identity politics that some of the critics are rightfully complaining about in K through 12. And that is actually in canceling of the American mind, but I have a more detailed explanation of it than I'm going to be putting up on my blog, The Eternally Radical Idea.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There definitely is in K through 12. I mean, my kids go to public school. I have a five and a seven-year-old and they have lovely teachers, but we have run into a lot of problems with education schools at Fire. And a lot of the graduates of education school end up being the administrators who clamp down on free speech in higher education. And so I've been trying to think of positive ways to take on some of the problems that I see in K-12. I thought that the attempt to just dictate you won't teach the following 10 books or 20 books or 200 books was the wrong way to do it. Now, when it comes to deciding what books are in the curriculum, again, that's something the legislature actually can't have some say in, and that's pretty uncontroversial in terms of the law. But when it comes to how you fight it, I add something that, since I'm kind of stuck with a formula, I call”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it just the state doesn't have the power to simply say to ban what professors in higher education teach. Now it gets a little more complicated when you talk about K through 12 because the state has a role in deciding what public K-12 teaches because they're your kids, it's taxpayer funded, and generally the legislature is involved. There is democratic oversight of that process.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, woke topics. It came out of the sort of attempt to get at critical race theory. So it's topics related to race, gender, et cetera. I don't remember exactly how they tried to cabinet to CRT. But when you actually, the law is really well established that you can't tell higher education what they're allowed to teach without violating the First Amendment. And when this got in front of a judge, it was exactly as skeptical of it as we thought he'd be. I think he called this dystopian. And it wasn't a close call.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Florida legislature. Rhonda Santis had something called the Stop Woke Act, which we told everyone this is laughably unconstitutional. They tried to ban particular topics in higher ed. And we're like, no, this is a joke. This will be laughed out of court. And they didn't listen to us and they brought, they passed it, and we sued and we won. Now they're trying again with something that's equally as unconstitutional and we will sue again and we will win.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one thing I want to be really clear about is the book takes on both right and left cancel culture. They're different in a lot of ways and definitely cancel culture from the left is more important in academia where the left dominates. But we talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislatures. We talk a lot about cancel culture on campus as well because even though most of the attempts that come from on campus to get people canceled are still from the left, there are a lot of attacks that come from the right, that come from attempts by different organizations and sometimes when there are stories in Fox News they'll go after professors and about one third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right. And we talk about attempts to get books banned in the book. We talk about and talk about suing.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out that when you have low viewpoint diversity, people start thinking in a very kind of tribal way. And if you don't have the respected dissenters, you don't have the people that you can point to that are like, hey, this is a smart person. This is a smart, reasonable, decent person that I disagree with. So I guess not everyone thinks alike on this issue. You start getting much more kind of like only bad people, only heretics, only blasphemers, only right-wingers can actually think in this way.”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To rely on some kind of totalitarian system. But that was a laughable position, you know, say 30, 40 years ago. The idea that essentially free speech for me, not for thee as the great champion at Hentoff used to say, was something that you were supposed to be embarrassed by. But I saw this when I was in law school in 97. I saw this when I was interning at the ACLU in 99, that there was a slow motion train wreck coming, that essentially there was these bad ideas from campus that had been taking on more and more steam of basically no free speech for my opponent were actually becoming more and more accepted as, and partially because academia was becoming less and less viewpoint diverse. I think that as my co-author Jonathan Hype pointed,”
2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source