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Greg Lukianoff

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2023-09-25
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2023-09-25
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  1. “Yeah. You have this history. 64. You have the free speech movement on Berkeley. And in 65, you have repressive tolerance by Herbert Marcuse, which was a declaration of, by the way, we on the left, we should have free speech, but we should have free speech for us. I mean, I went back and reread repressive tolerance and how clear it is. I forgot, I had forgotten that it really is kind of like, and these so-called conservatives and right-wingers, we need to repress them because they're regressive thinkers. It really doesn't come out to anything more sophisticated than the very old idea that our people are good. They get free speech. They should keep it other side bad. We should not have, and we have to retrain society. And of course, it ends up being another, he was also a fan of Mao, so it's not surprising that of course the system would have”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That even though, sure, American First Amendment law is very strongly protective of First Amendment for now, it's not going to stay that way if you have generations of law students graduating who actually think there's no higher goal than shouting down you're an opponent.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, it's an older, bolder, more expansive idea. And you can have a situation, and I talk about countries that have good free speech law, but not necessarily great free speech culture. And I talk about how when we sometimes make this distinction between free speech law and free speech culture, we're thinking in a very cloudy kind of way. And what I mean by that is that law is generally, particularly in a common law country, it's the reflection of norms. Judges are people too. And in a lot of cases, common law is supposed to actually take our intuitive ideas of fairness and place them into the law. So if you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free sweet from a philosophical standpoint, it's not going to be able to protect free speech for the long haul, even in the law, because eventually that's one of the reasons why I worry so much about some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools, because I...”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Saying to themselves, I don't think I can actually say what I really think and still believe I can keep my job. And that's where I was worried I felt like we were headed, because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled was very simply, you know, oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person. And that's the end and beginning and end of the discussion. And I thought that was a dodge. I thought that wasn't actually a very serious way that if you care about both the First Amendment and freedom of speech of thinking it through.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, I mean, people find it a different thing. You know, if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that employer has every right in the world to fire you, I think Americans should still be like, well, it's true they have every right in the world. And I'm not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn't fire someone for their political opinion. But think that through. What society do we want to, what kind of society do we want to live in? And it's been funny watching, and I point this out. Yes, I will defend businesses First Amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide who works for them. But from a moral or philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of if every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit maximizing organization, that would be a disaster for democracy because you would end up in a situation where people would actually be”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah. You know, if you're saying that something is or is not economics. Well, you can say everything's economics, and therefore I want to talk about poetry, that there'd be some line drawing exercise in there. But let's say at once you decide to open up it to poetry even, it's a big difference between saying, okay, now we're open to poetry, but you can't say, you know, Dante was bad. That's a forbidden opinion now officially in this otherwise open forum. That would immediately at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that poetry isn't economics.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Principles from First Amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense as good principles for when what is protected in a protected speech, what should get you in trouble, how you actually analyze it, which is why we actually try in our definition of cancel culture to work in some of the First Amendment norms just in the definition. So we don't have to bog down on them as well.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “What I think free speech is can be well explained with reference to a lot of First Amendment law, partially because in American history, some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the parameters of freedom of speech are in relationship to the First Amendment. And a lot of those principles, they transfer very well just as pragmatic ideas. So like the biggest sin in terms of censorship is called viewpoint discrimination, that essentially you allow freedom of speech except for that opinion. Now, and it's found to be kind of more defensible, and I think this makes sense, that if you set up a forum and we're only going to talk about economics to exclude people who want to talk about a different topic, but it's considered rightfully a bigger deal if you set up a forum for economics, but we're not going to let people talk about that kind of economics or have that opinion on economics most particularly. So a lot of the”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So I'm a First Amendment lawyer, as I mentioned, and that's my passion. That's what I studied. And I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting. In one sentence, the First Amendment is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why humankind had been killing each other for its entire existence, that we weren't going to fight anymore over opinion. We weren't going to fight any more of religion, that you have the right to approach your government for redress of grievances, that you have the freedom to associate, that all of these things, in one sentence, were like, nope, the government will no longer interfere with your right to have these fundamental human rights. And so one thing that makes fire a little different from other organizations is, however, we're not just a First Amendment organization. We are a free speech organization. And so, but at the same time, a lot of”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “When you start testing a lot of it is nonsense and it doesn't hold up. Even our ideas about the way things fall. Galileo established, like even our intuitions, they're just wrong. And so a lot of the early history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as sort of the scientific revolution. So a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech were tied in. So certainly Galileo. Always point out like Kepler was probably the even more radical idea that there weren't even perfect spheres. But at the same time, largely because of the invention of the printing press, you also had all these political developments. I always talk about Jan Huss, you know, from a famous.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think that for those of us who are really, have devoted our lives to freedom of speech, one thing that we are. Into whether we know it or not. Is epistemology. The study and philosophy of knowledge. Freedom speech has a lot of. Moral and philosophical dimensions, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it is necessary because we're creatures of incredibly limited knowledge. We are incredibly self-deceiving. I always love the fact that you've all Harari refers to the enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance because that's exactly what it was. It was suddenly being like, wow, hold on a second. All this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got, which by the way can be surprisingly reliable here and”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “He has a lecture on Blaze Pascal. And Blaze, of course, is famous for the Pascal's wager. And I left it just so moved and impressed with a depth of understanding of how important this person was.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So fire was founded in 1999 by Harvey Sliverglade. Is a famous civil liberties attorney. Been on the show. He's the person who actually found me out in my very happy life out in San Francisco, but knew I was looking for a First Amendment job. I'd gone to law school specifically to do First Amendment. And he found me, which was pretty cool. His protege, Kathleen Sullivan, was the dean of Stanford Law School. Remains the best compliment I ever got in my life is that she recommended me to Harvey. And since that's the whole reason why I went to law school, I was excited to be a part of this new organization. The other co-founder of Fire is Alan Charles Kors. He's just an absolute genius. Is one of the leading experts in the world. Enlightenment, and particularly about Voltaire. If any of your listeners do the great courses.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors. And when it comes to the number of professors that we've seen be targeted and lose their jobs, I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns, starting around 2014 to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, et cetera for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment. And I say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where the First Amendment applies. But what I mean is as an analog to say things you couldn't lose your job as a public employee for. And also the climate of fear that's resulted from that phenomenon. The fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion. And it wasn't subtle that there was an uptick in this, particularly on campus around 2014. John Ronson wrote a book called So You Been Publicly Shamed. They came out in 2015, already documenting this phenomenon. I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in 2014.”

    2023-09-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source