← Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big for Free Speech: Greg Lukianoff on Empowering Minds and Protecting Expression
00:57:41
Loading summary
Transcript88 lines
- [00:02]
Greg Lukianoff
Your message amplified. Ready to share your message with the world?
- [00:06]
Kevin Gentry
Start your podcast Journey with Podbean. Podbean. Podbean.
- [00:10]
Greg Lukianoff
PodBean.
- [00:10]
Kevin Gentry
PodBean, the AI powered all in one podcast platform.
- [00:14]
Greg Lukianoff
Thousands of businesses and enterprises trust Podbean to launch their podcasts. Launch your podcast on podbean today. My school uses Podbean. My church too. I love it. I really do. When I started to realize there were environments that I could run as fast as I can, you know, like, go as deeply into things, get as. Get as immersed in ideas and study and all this kind of stuff, that. That was when everything started to really change, you know, So I think that that's. And I think, honestly I will say this for a very positive aspect of the current technology. I mean, like the idea that I can have someone to bounce ideas off with when I get up for my morning walk at like 5:00am you know, like all day. You. The potential for a single person with an exciting idea to do something big with it is greater than it's ever been in human history right now. And you should be excited about that and lean in.
- [01:12]
Kevin Gentry
Welcome to the Going Big Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Gentry, and this is the place where we celebrate bold moves and big ideas. Each week, I sit down with inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs and change makers who are making a significant impact in their careers and in their communities. Whether you're looking to level up your leadership, pursue your passion, or just get inspired to take your next big leap, this is where those stories come to life. Now, if you're listening on iTunes, YouTube, or anywhere else you tune into podcasts, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you'll never miss an episode. Now let's dive in to what it means to truly go big. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Our special guest today on Going Big is Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of fire, the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Greg has spent two decades fighting for the rights of free speech, especially on college campuses. It's the most fundamental of America's constitutional rights. We know how important it is in a free society, and there's no better champion of this in the modern day than what Greg Lukianoff is doing. There's a lot to talk about that with respect to the current day. Greg also is the co author with Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist of the New York Times bestseller the Coddling of the American Mind, which predicted a lot of the absolute chaos that we've seen on American university campuses in recent years with respect to free speech. Through his efforts at Fire. They've documented that over 84% of university campuses either restrict or have plans to restrict free speech and free expression in some way. And we know that a free society cannot survive without the right to challenge each other in a respectful and fair manner that we've so enjoyed since the founding of this country. It's one of the things that makes America so special. So, Greg, it's a great pleasure to have you on the Going Big podcast today. And I'm just going to ask you, going right out of the blocks for you, in terms of going big, why is free speech so important to you?
- [03:30]
Greg Lukianoff
First of all, thanks for having me, Kevin. It was good to see you as well. I mean, free speech is kind of the whole ball game, you know, like the ability to think what you will and say what you think is the very essence of freedom. And so I think of it as a natural right. I think of it as a human right. Sometimes people forget that human rights are natural rights. People tend to poo poo natural rights arguments these days and then forget somehow that that's the same thing as human rights. But also I make the point a lot is that I think there are perfectly pragmatic reasons for believing in free speech as well, in addition to the moral. The moral ones. And I make the point that basically progress is impossible without people's ability to dissent. Dissent is one of the key elements of actually understanding the world as it is to scientific advancement, to artistic advancement, to personal advancement. And that's a little bit more of the standard kind of marketplace of ideas argument, which is an expansive rationale. But I go even further. I basically believe I'm an old school humanist in this respect. I believe that human beings are, to our knowledge, one of the most, if not the most interesting thing in the universe. I say that unapologetically and it's important to know what makes us tick, what we think and why. And I gave a TED talk recently, you know, where I explained this, where I said you are not safer for knowing less about what people really think. And that if the goal of the project of human knowledge is to understand the world as it is, it is absolutely crucial that we understand why people think what they do and, and why you have no hope of understanding the world unless you understand those two things. And you're never going to find that out if people are too scared to say what they think.
- [05:20]
Kevin Gentry
Well, you're here and, you know, we just know through history there are gazillions of examples about how the challenge process has driven innovation and Progress and human advancement. And when it's been clamped down, we've gone in the other direction. And it's just, you know that all too well. You're the one, though, that is out there as the Paul Revere alerting us to the danger that exists. So tell us, give us a sense for where we are today. Since you got into this effort for several decades now, Are we better off than we were when you started? Are we worse off than we were when you started? Where are we?
- [06:01]
Greg Lukianoff
I'd like to give one of those scholarly kind of like, well, you know, it's one of either. But the answer is we are absolutely in worse off shape than we were when I. When I began my career in 2001.
- [06:12]
Kevin Gentry
So why is that?
- [06:12]
Greg Lukianoff
What's.
- [06:13]
Kevin Gentry
What's going on?
- [06:14]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, I call my substack the eternally Radical Idea as a reference to free speech. Because my point is we should first understand, just like poverty is the natural state of man and, and wealth is the thing that has to be explained. Poverty is our default state. Censorship is humankind's default state that you defer to power. And what power wants to be true and wishes to be true and is willing to use violence to coerce is true. It's much more sophisticated concept, and it's a much harder concept to maintain that you're supposed to challenge power, that you're supposed to be uncomfortable sometimes. You don't get to rest in the comfort of certainty all the time. Your intuitions are wrong. All of these things, these are hard. These are skills, these are disciplines, these are practices. And when you stop engaging in them, the rationales for censorship all come back. Because I really try to emphasize this in the title Eternally Radical Idea. Free speech is historically weird. It doesn't happen very often. It's fragile. And people start arguing for it almost as soon as you're able to reach a large audience. People argued for it even in ancient Athens to a smaller audience. But once you actually could talk to a larger audience, after the dawn of the printing press, people argued for it, had some expansive arguments, but people tend to be pretty good at defending their own freedom of speech. They're not so great on defending other people's freedom of speech. So unless you practice it, unless you hold it to be a very important value, it tends to degrade. And I feel very lucky, and same with you is for most of your life, free speech was being vindicated. The First Amendment law was getting better. Americans appreciation for free speech was becoming more unanimous. But over the last particularly, I'd say 15 years, and particularly the last five, we've been in something like a nosedive globally. Free speech is in real trouble. Not just in the unfree world, which of course it is, but in Europe, in the Anglosphere. Canada's considering a law that would imprison people for life for certain speech offenses. Something like 30 people a day are arrested now in Britain for speech related offenses. Things are bad. And America is back to its role, which we've done a lot, we've done before. But we are the ones defending free speech right now. And we're probably the only unapologetic defender of free speech in the world right now.
- [08:47]
Kevin Gentry
Yeah. And by the way, what you say, I mean, with respect to Canada and Britain, places that you would never imagine.
- [08:53]
Greg Lukianoff
My mom's from Britain. They used to laugh at us for our political correctness. And when I would go over there and then suddenly I was over there in like 2015 and it was like they were sprinting to outdo us. And now they're arresting people. I mean, I quoted the 30, 30 a day number. We were doing some math for this last month from news reports and we're like, yeah, this is more like a 10,000 person month. So it's definitely well above 30 a day for this past month. So it's scary.
- [09:26]
Kevin Gentry
Well, Greg, and you know this really, I would say almost better than anyone. But this fundamental right, we know through time that governments often will use it to go against their opponents, to silence their opponents. And when somehow maybe those opponents get back, go get into office, maybe overturn the regime, they will unfortunately sometimes do the same thing against the other and we can ratchet it downward to a bad spot. And maybe that's what's happening in so many countries around the world. You know this, but bring us here to the United States as well. On President Trump's first day in office, you wrote him a letter about what could be done about this issue. The New York Times just had some a pretty favorable story about how courageous you've been in challenging everybody, whether it's challenging President Trump or President Biden or whoever it would be on this, help us understand exactly what's going on. What advice would you give to President Trump today about free speech, especially on university campuses?
- [10:37]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, I would say, though, when it comes to universities, you know, like we are, you know, ahead of the crowd. We are leading the charge in calling out lack of economic freedom, lack of free speech on campus. We really blew the whistle on this topic. In fact, Jason Stanley, a now Canadian scholar formerly of Yale, who fled the country after Trump was elected to go to the much freer Canada, which I found interesting. He said that we created this moral panic about free speech on campus. And it's like, no, Jason, thousands and thousands of cases of students and professors getting in trouble is what created this panic. And everybody knew it was not. You know, people are rightfully panicked. I mean, one in six. One in six professors say that they've either been threatened with punishment or actually punished for speech. There's no historical comparison for that at any period in time that we're. We're familiar with. So this was something that happened. Not enough people were paying attention to it. We, you know, we did the campus free speech ranking. Harvard finished deadly last in it two years in a row, and it really earned its way there. But then when the Trump administration started, you know, I'm, well, you. Probably your biggest advocate for, you know, serious higher education reform. I think lots of things need to be fixed, and we need to keep everything from cost to free speech in mind. Deburaucratization, all of these things, Viewpoint diversity, things that could actually make higher ed work better. But unfortunately, some of the tactics the Trump administration was using when they came in exceeded the president's power. So even though I'm sympathetic to the cause of higher education reform, it doesn't give President Trump powers. He does not have. So, for example, it's kind of funny that we came out in defense of Harvard, of all places, since we've been very critical of Harvard over the years. But the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard saying that we believe you had violated Title 6 in not intervening to prevent anti Semitic behavior by your students and sometimes your staff. And therefore, here's a list of demands which was essentially saying that we would take over decisions, everything from admissions to curricular decisions to hiring. And it's like, no, that's like saying that you're nationalizing Harvard, essentially. You do not have the power to do that. Harvard actually has. Do I think it's possible Harvard could have been found responsible for allowing anti Semitic behavior? Yeah, actually, I do. But they have to follow the process just the same. So we came out, you know, in defense of Harvard saying that this is not okay. And I guess what's frustrating to me in some ways is since I'm sympathetic to the cause of higher education reform, going about it in a way that's. That has already led to multiple defeats in court. It squandered, I fear, as a pendulous, really squander an opportunity.
- [13:40]
Kevin Gentry
Well, let me I'm going to play devil's advocate here a little bit and probably immediately expose how little I know. But an argument that is made on some of these universities is because of how much federal funding they receive, doesn't the federal government have a right to challenge some of their policies? Help me understand that.
- [14:01]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, certainly the government can challenge their policies, but they can't control it. When it comes to the idea of academic freedom is more or less that you're creating sort of a special, what I'd say is basically a special free speech space in which people can pursue inquiry without fear of government coercion or pushing in any particular direction. Because when the government actually wants to come to a particular outcome, the people who. And they can use their money in order to sort of coerce that, they're going to get the outcomes they want. They just might not be true. So it is one of these interesting things where essentially you are funding an environment in which you want to keep government coercion to an absolute. Well, you don't want government coercion in there at all. And so when people say this is the problem of schools receiving public funding, you know, I agree with this to some degree that I essentially think the public funding of student loans, nominally to allow poor kids to attend, actually ended up becoming an excuse for schools to raise cost. Raise cost, raise cost and hyper bureaucratize. So I think that some of that argument absolutely did come true and the libertarians were actually right. But I do think, and that when it comes to funding like the sciences, you know, for example, we've had this very successful model in the United States where we have, you know, independent private schools and we fund research and it, and it's highly productive. Now one of the questions, of course, is are we allowing too much overhead? For example, you know, are we, are we wasting some of this money? Are we paying in some cases for nonsense? All of these things are completely legitimate questions. But what isn't is because the government is paying, it's entitled to the response. It's entitled to the answer, that it wants science to produce that. That defeats the entire point.
- [15:59]
Kevin Gentry
Got it. Well, very helpful. Okay, so there's so much to talk about here today. It ain't null, but I don't know that our audience necessarily fully understands the plight of students and faculty on university campuses with respect to free speech and expression. So bring it to life a little bit, maybe an example or two. I think unless somebody is experiencing it directly, it's hard to understand. And for many of us, we just think about our own time when we were in school. What, when, when you, when you're see, when you hear and understand these concerns, what are the concerns that people face on campuses? Oh man.
- [16:42]
Greg Lukianoff
I mean, when I started way back in 2001, I was shocked at how easy it was to get in trouble for what you said on campus. I mean, I started right after 911 and we saw cases where, you know, professors were, you know, one professor faced the end of his career for cracking a joke about 9 11. Bad taste, but still protective. But in another several cases, people were got in trouble for saying, yeah, let's get those terrorists, you know, actually putting up a. The San Francisco Chronicle had a newspaper cover that actually just said bastards on the top of it. Students who put that up were basically told, this is going to be offensive to students who I guess were pro, I don't know, terrorist or something, which is kind of insulting by itself. And I've seen examples like this my entire career, some of them even more ridiculous that I talk about my first book, Unlearning Liberty. But in recent years, one of the things that got was really scary on campuses. And I don't blame Jewish students for being angry and in some cases wanting students expelled for what was really, truly anti Semitic harassment. In many cases, pro Palestinian students, for example, were almost entirely responsible for the largest uptick in campus shout downs. That means there's very little viewpoint diversity on campus. So sometimes like a conservative group, for example, or a libertarian group will have, you know, a dissenting voice, you know, come to campus to sort of, because they have to import it in sometimes, and the pro Palestinian students would show up and shout down the talk. This happens certainly with, you know, pro Israel speakers a lot, but even sometimes, just for example, a Jewish professor who wanted to give a lecture on black holes. So it's been a rough situation for free speech. Meanwhile, we've seen pro Palestinian students and professors also get in trouble for speech that was clearly protected. Now if you get in trouble for the shout downs, by all means punish them because that's mob censorship. That's not okay. That's not protected by free speech. But if you get in trouble, like Rizmayyah Ostrich did for writing an op ed saying that she believed that the Tufts should divest from Israel. You know, you can disagree with it, I disagree with it, but who cares? I mean, you have the right to, to make that argument. So I would say the last 10 years, but particularly the last five years, certainly 20, 20 up has been just the campus has just Been kind of a madhouse for free speech, and it's taking blows from all directions.
- [19:19]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, let me ask you some related questions to that. So, first of all, it's my understanding that at the heart of a lot of this, and certainly with what I understand to be in Canada and Britain and others, is this sense somehow that forces believe that free speech is insensitive or hurtful to people, and therefore those people have to be protected from hearing it. So therefore certain words, phrases, terms, usages are banned because they might hurt somebody, hurt somebody's feelings or whatever it may be. Yeah. Is that a big part of it?
- [19:56]
Greg Lukianoff
It's a huge part of it. And this is one of the things that I always have to explain is that there isn't a movement in censorship history where the people who wanted to do the censorship didn't believe they were saving the world or being kind or saving the country or enforcing morality. They always, like most people, they always think they're doing something very good and very important. But hate speech theory is one, is one that I actually do see as, at least in its origins, to be quite cynical. Hate speech theory really goes back to, you know, one year after the dawn of the free speech movement in Berkeley in 1964. One year later, Herbert Marcuse writes something called repressive tolerance, making a not at all sophisticated argument for free speech for the left because they believe in equality, but not for anybody else because they are regressives, they're conservatives, and that society should be organized to silence those people.
- [20:57]
Kevin Gentry
Well, if I could. So the sort of. The sort of. The next component, and you keep going on this, but the next component is, okay, I disagree with what you're going to say. So therefore I need to figure out a way to keep you from saying it because maybe because I'm afraid you might win the argument. So I'm going to stop you from doing it, and then we'll talk about the shout downs, because I want people to understand that as well. But is that another big prevalent aspect of it?
- [21:24]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, Herbert Marcuse was arguing basically just because conservatives are bad people. And that is true. Maybe they'd win. Maybe they'd actually persuade people that the left was wrong about any number of things. And that couldn't happen because obviously the left being right is. It was important to him, but that got turned into hate speech theory. And hate speech theory is essentially the idea that you shouldn't say things that could be found to be stigmatizing or victimizing in the words of the Stanford Speech Code, or hurtful or offensive on the basis of sex, race, gender, et cetera. And this sounds nice to a lot of people, certainly not to first Amendment people like me, because we know how this is going to go. But of course, it turns into an all purpose tool to shut down people you disagree with. And I can, I used to do long, long lists of people who are punished for racial or sexual harassment and higher ed just for having opinions that certain people didn't like. And it was, you know, very clearly used in that way. So hate speech. It sounds like, oh, we're saving the world from, from, from bad people. And I always make, you know, two points. One, there's a value in knowing what people really think, full stop. If someone's a bigot, it's important to know that. But you can't just let power, accusing someone of being a bigot have the power to shut anyone down. Because guess what? Next thing you know, they're calling everybody a bigot and shutting everyone down. And I feel like in 2020, in 2021, and Thomas Chatterton Williams just wrote a book about this, suddenly everyone was being accused of being a Nazi and everyone was scared to say what they actually thought.
- [23:03]
Kevin Gentry
Podbean, your message amplified.
- [23:06]
Greg Lukianoff
Ready to share your message with the world?
- [23:08]
Kevin Gentry
Start your podcast journey with Podbean. Podbean, the AI powered all in one podcast platform.
- [23:15]
Greg Lukianoff
Thousands of businesses and enterprises trust Podbean to launch their podcasts. Use Podbean to record your podcast.
- [23:21]
Kevin Gentry
Use PodBean AI to optimize your podcast.
- [23:24]
Greg Lukianoff
Use PodBean AI to turn your blog into a podcast. Use Podbean to distribute your podcast everywhere.
- [23:31]
Kevin Gentry
Launch your podcast on Podbean today. All right, Shout downs or anything like that, well, you just take it further. Intimidation or even intimidation of physical violence. We've seen incidents where speakers, and there's certainly the famous Charles Murray talk at, I think it was Middlebury. At Middlebury. But other examples where, and as you say with some of these Palestinian student protests against Jewish students or Jewish organizations or Jewish faculty, that they are trying to prevent the other person from expressing their opinion, perhaps under the guise of their own free expression, but they're going to do it through intimidation and shouting. Tell us a little bit about that.
- [24:20]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, I actually opened up my recent TED talk talking about the shout down at Berkeley in, I think it was January, February of 2023 of 2024. And this was a case where there was an IDF spokesperson, not a spokesperson, but someone who served in the IDF going to speak at Berkeley. And the pro Palestinian students, you know, Literally sent out a text, like, shut it down to being really clear what they meant to do. About 200 students rushed the event. They smashed a window, they sm open a door, and they chased the speakers, the speaker and the students off. And I had to explain so many times before that, but particularly now, it's like one. You do not have the right to decide for everyone else what they're allowed to hear. That is mob censorship. That is you deciding that. Because I don't like it. You can't hear it. That's authoritarianism, but enforced through brute force. And in this case, they used violence to scare this person away. So I think we somewhat surprise people who don't are a little hazy on the concept of what this means by writing something in the free press saying, yeah, the students involved in the violence need to be expelled. Because.
- [25:33]
Kevin Gentry
And I try to.
- [25:34]
Greg Lukianoff
It's amazing I even have to explain this. Mob censorship like that is not extreme speech. It is the antithesis of speech. Those are people who are hostile to disagreement. They have no place at a university. And universities have tolerated a lot of this behavior, partially because administrators in charge of disciplining them oftentimes are sympathetic to the students who engage in this kind of behavior.
- [25:59]
Kevin Gentry
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you now appreciate why I wanted to have Greg Lukianoff on the Going Big podcast, because he has been going big for something that is so fundamental to America and everything that we stand for, and that is the right of free speech and free expression. We're going to continue to dig into this, but if you want to learn more, just check out Greg lugianoff or the fire.org, so much good stuff. So many good resources. I want to talk about those resources. So let's dig a little bit more into fire. This is an organization that you've been a part of for a long time. If what is the problem at its core that you're trying to address, to eliminate, to get to the root causes of that, if you were able to get rid of this problem, fire wouldn't even need to be around. Yeah.
- [26:45]
Greg Lukianoff
Oh, no. And we'd love to do this. I give this talk to my staff a lot, saying, hey, man, you're all interesting, smart people. You all find something else to do. If we put ourselves out of business, which is the goal. But unfortunately, I don't think we're going anywhere for a while, because our goal isn't just to defend freedom of speech. It is to fight for an America, and preferably even a world that understands and values free Speech as a tool for innovation, progress, peace. Something where people actually don't just grudgingly accept it, but actually value it as being fundamental to everything from human rights to progress.
- [27:25]
Kevin Gentry
Well, thank you. All right, so 84% college and university campuses practicing. Not good stuff. Why is it so high? How did it get this bad?
- [27:39]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, believe it or not, when it comes to those codes, that's better than it was. We used to have something like 79% of schools having the highest level speech code, like what we call red light speech codes, which are speech codes.
- [27:54]
Kevin Gentry
Are there like certain words and terms.
- [27:55]
Greg Lukianoff
That are like, for example, like something. This was a real policy saying that this school disrespectful speech is banned.
- [28:04]
Kevin Gentry
And it's like disrespectful speech?
- [28:06]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, exactly. It's too vague, it's too broad. It means whatever you want to ban can be banned.
- [28:13]
Kevin Gentry
Going on far too long. Oh, I'm sorry, I was disrespectful. I'm going to keep this.
- [28:18]
Greg Lukianoff
I just started.
- [28:19]
Kevin Gentry
Fortunately, so far, podcasts are not regulated. So far. So far.
- [28:24]
Greg Lukianoff
So, yeah. So we actually have fewer red light speech codes than we used to have, but still about 85% of them have some kind of speech code of some kind of. I would say that the best way to sort of evaluate the environment on particular schools for free speech is our campus free speech ranking, which is a labor of love for a lot of us at fire. It's something that I really wanted to do forever, was have a super rigorous way to really be able to say with a lot of data, not just our opinion, that one school is better than another for free speech. And it probably won't come to the surprise of very many people that the Ivy League does terribly. You know, last year, Harvard was dead last, as I mentioned, but also Columbia was second to last. No shock there. Barnard was in the bottom five. So was New York University, for example. Somewhat to my own surprise, even though I knew they'd been working very hard at this. Just to be clear, University of Virginia was number one last year, but also Michigan Technological University was one right after that. We have noticed that technological schools tend to have better immune systems from some of this stuff because they understand the.
- [29:37]
Kevin Gentry
Value of the challenge process.
- [29:39]
Greg Lukianoff
Exactly. Because of the scientific method.
- [29:42]
Kevin Gentry
So.
- [29:42]
Greg Lukianoff
But if you're, if you're sending your kids, if you're going yourself, or you're advising your grandkids on where they're going to school, take a look at the campus free speech ranking first. It's a more ambitious attempt to quantify free speech on campus than has ever even been attempted, let alone done.
- [30:02]
Kevin Gentry
Where can one find the ranking? Hefire.org all right, well, grandparents, parents, and even just people who are aspiring, they're high school students looking at colleges. This stuff is important. You don't want to have your wonderful college life ruined by this chilling effect. And it's a lot worse than people, I think, fully appreciate and understand the epic spirit, experience it firsthand. Okay, so I want to get a little philosophical here, and I want to touch on the stuff that you and Jonathan Haidt took up with the coddling of the American mind, this idea of sort of safetyism. Let's start with John Stuart Mill, right? So he talked about the importance of the clash of the minds, but is that still good today? I mean, because it's gotten so vicious and nasty and mean. What? Help us understand that aspect too, Greg.
- [30:58]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, I mean, John Stuart Mill, Jonathan Rauch, who's a good friend, sometimes picks on us First Amendment people because we cite Mill so often. And I'm always like, yeah, there's a reason for that. He's a genius. And on Liberty 1859 is brilliant. And his, what I call Mill's Trident, his three arguments for free speech in any truth seeking argument has never been defeated. Which is essentially, there is literally only three possibilities in a truth seeking argument. Either you are wrong, in which case you need freedom of speech to find that out, you're partially right or partially wrong, and you're only going to find that out through discussion and then you'll get closer to the truth in that process. Or here's the thing, though, Even if you're 100% right, which is kind of unlikely, but like, let's say you are, then you benefit from freedom of speech because if you aren't forced to challenge what you believe, you don't understand why you believe it. In his words, you hold it just like it's a prejudice. You just know you're supposed to believe it. You have no clue why. And if you go to campus and talk to some of these students today, who, you can ask them, like, what their political beliefs are, but then challenge them as to why they believe them. I've seen this and I actually know the arguments for why they should believe them in a lot of cases. But I'm flabbergasted in some cases watching students unable to defend what they say they believe because they've never been challenged in it in the first place.
- [32:29]
Kevin Gentry
All right, safetyism. What is safetyism and why does it make us Less safe.
- [32:37]
Greg Lukianoff
I always give credit to Pamela Peretsky because she was our chief researcher during the time we're doing coddling, and she coined the term. But safetyism is the idea of raising both physical and psychological safety to being almost of sacred value. That essentially anything that you could argue will make someone even incrementally safer physically, or for that matter, really more comfortable psychologically. That's of infinite value, essentially. So safetyism is how you start having young people terrified of taking even risks that we all took for granted. You would take as a kid, like, the excessive kind of, like, protection of kids. And, you know, like the idea when we. When height and I do this experiment with parents and young people, we have them raise their hands about like, when were you let out for the first time as a kid? And for people, you know, I'm 50, people my age, it's all five, six, seven, you know, five or six, mostly. You know, I could go down to the corner store, long walk from where I lived, you know, by the time I was six, did it all the time. And when we would ask younger people, it would be like 12, 13. And it's like, no, no, that. That's teaching people to be terrified of the world. And we also stress in the book, by the way, no, it was more dangerous in the 1980s than it is today. Like, it much more, like, by almost any meas. It was more dangerous back then when we were being let out. So safetyism is this obsession with safety to a point at which it isn't actually safe anymore. It's something that actually can create harms and deep harms by, for example, preventing young people from having, what's called in psychology, an internal locus of control. An internal locus of control is the idea that I can affect my world. And if you don't have that, by the way, you're going to be anxious and depressed if you feel like you're powerless over your world. And I think one of the reasons why we both predicted and saw this massive decrease in the mental health of young people is partially because they have really been taught and they've really lived lives in which they don't feel like they have any control over their own world, because they've been, as I originally wanted to call coddling in the American mind, by the way, because they've been disempowered by the adults.
- [35:12]
Kevin Gentry
You know, a funny little story, my dad told me that when he turned 15, it was during World War II, and school buses were privately owned. There was a shortage of drivers because many people were fighting overseas. World War II. When he turned 15, the owner of the private bus company picked him up in the morning with the school bus. And because 15, you could drive and took the kids to school and then handed my father the keys and said, you take them home. Ah. Now, if that story were reported today, it would probably be a headline story of an outrageous, irresponsible behavior. I mean, this stuff was very commonplace. There's some happy medium in there somewhere. Maybe that was. Okay, well, let's shift gears and talk about artificial intelligence.
- [35:59]
Greg Lukianoff
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [36:01]
Kevin Gentry
All right. It's a. It's a complicated world. We don't want to be fearful the future, we want to be optimistic. We want to run into the future with our arms wide open because so much good happens. But you've also written about the sort of weaponization of AI by government. And how does, how does all of this affect free speech?
- [36:17]
Greg Lukianoff
Oh, man. So I've talked about this to staff. I gave a talk about, like, why, why the boss is so like, concerned about AI. And I just tried to put it in really grave terms. Yes, we're always going to be taking on whatever administration is in power. Power is the enemy of free speech. And you're like, that's what you need to keep a check on. But if we get freedom and AI wrong, that's the whole ball game. Because it has the potential to really be treated, as Brendan McCord Cosmos likes to put it, the autocomplete for life that essentially it could get treated as the biggest of big brothers, essentially like the one source of truth and the reason for which you can then engage in as much censorship as you want. And this is terrifying on multiple levels, not the least of which is, I think a lot of it is built on sand, because I'm very critical of how everything from bias to lack of viewpoint diversity to lack of free speech and lack of dissent has harmed sort of like the corpus of human knowledge as generated by academia. And AI has been trained on that. And so I make the point that I don't want the same people who screwed up knowledge creation in higher ed to be the people who decide what objective truth is for the rest of the human race, for the rest of time, for the operating system, for the planet, as AI is turning out to be. So that's why we decided to work with Cosmos Institute to put together amount of money and amount of computer to try to encourage programmers to think about ways to make AI that respects freedom of speech. That is, I would describe it as like intellectually or epistemically humble AI, things that actually promote thought and things that are actually maximized for truth seeking.
- [38:09]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, as you may know, I had Brendan McCord from the Cosmos Institute on the Going Big podcast a few episodes ago. He certainly has gone big. Really appreciate what he's doing. I want to understand a little bit more about this partnership that you all have developed, FIRE and the Cosmos Institute. But let's dig a little bit more. What, what is this? What is, what is viewpoint neutrality in artificial intelligence and who. I know that's what you're sort of speaking to and you're saying, who, who decides what is neutral? Who decides what is what is truth? Help us understand a little bit more about the challenge, the danger, the threat, and maybe what you see as possible ways to address it.
- [38:53]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, I mean, one of the least intuitive things about the nature of reality is the fact that the world, understanding the world simply as it is right before your own eyes is a difficult, arduous, never ending process. And your brain doesn't want you to believe that. It's like, my intuition's right, I'm understanding everything right. This is all pretty simple really. And it actually turns out the enlightenment was the discovery of that all being BS about being like, you know, we test it and actually turns out all of our intuitions, all of our folk wisdom, all of our guesses were wrong. So truth is a very hard thing to know. And you generally only get at it by slashing away at falsity, not by getting directly at truth. You end up with a cloud around what might be true more than you actually end up exactly. Precisely there for all time. And what worries me is that these institutions that I think, you know, have so many problems and don't have enough sort of like structural testing and retesting of what is and isn't true are being, are producing what we think of as knowledge that is not really. Doesn't really hold up. So there's the ideological part of it that essentially there's research that's never done in the first place because nobody wants to do it, because they don't want to ask controversial questions that could get you in trouble in a left dominated space. But then there's also things that I think are sometimes related, but sometimes not. Like the replication crisis, where essentially it's more or less like, I don't want to be the dude who questions this great titan in the field and points out that his or her research was wrong. So there's even like careerism involved in it. There's all of these disincentives for the very difficult and never ending process of truth. And so one concept I keep on coming back to is increasing the friction for knowledge creation. And I think that one of the great models for this, and this won't be a surprise to hear from a constitutional lawyer, is James Madison. Where James Madison and also Montesquieu. Montesquieu of course, being one of the big thinkers when it came to separation of powers. And James, James Madison being freaking genius, said in the Federals papers that ambition must be made to counteract ambition, where essentially you need to have these different entities where there are different incentives. But the end result is people will have their biases, but they don't matter as much because they're competing against each other with smarter systems. And I think that there's lots of ways that AI could really help us address these problems. I believe for one, that for one, all publicly funded research should be publicly available. I also think that the humanities papers should be available to the public as well. And I think we should be turning AI on that to try to figure out for one, is it riddled with plagiarism, Is there lots of P hacking, is there tons of falsified data, all this kind of stuff, not just to be mean, not just to point out that there's a lot of academic misconduct, which is unfortunately, I'm sure there probably is quite a bit. But really, because that's how you get to truth, is by knowing what's not true. So I think that AI positively could be a revolution for truth seeking, an absolute revolution. It could get rid of. It could help us discard so much nonsense that we sometimes still think is true. But it really also could be used to pretend that the existing sort of what we think is currently true in 2025 is true forever, no matter how thin that knowledge was in the first place.
- [42:36]
Kevin Gentry
Well, you know, we complain a lot about how legislation is made and you know, politicians vote on legislation without reading it. But you could take the big beautiful bill and throw it into AI and say, summarize this for me, which is, that's revolutionary, right? That somehow is exposing this knowledge to us that we can attack and pierce and just really try to understand. There's so much.
- [43:00]
Greg Lukianoff
Okay, but I want to say something on that too. And this is of course horrifying to some of the postmodernist scholars who relied on their prose being so awful and convoluted that nobody could understand how banal what they're actually saying is. And once you can just put this, you know, put this through ChatGPT and it comes back, you know, really, this is saying that people act differently in different circumstances.
- [43:26]
Kevin Gentry
Exactly. Or maybe it just says, you know, this person's really a blowhard.
- [43:30]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, that's. Yeah.
- [43:31]
Kevin Gentry
All right, tell us a little bit more about why you're partnering with the Cosmos Institute and what you all are hoping to achieve with respect to this. When I first heard about it, I'm like, fire cousins. Oh, yeah. Okay, that's pretty interesting. Why? What are you doing?
- [43:45]
Greg Lukianoff
Freedom of speech and epistemology, freedom of speech and knowledge creation. They're one and the same thing. They're not just cousins. There's a reason why a lot of the early history of freedom of speech is the early history of science, like Galileo and Giordano Bruno and all of these early pre Enlightenment kind of scandals where someone tried to enforce an orthodoxy. So freedom of speech, one of the primary justifications for it is truth. But I also make the argument that freedom of speech also reveals truth unto itself in that it lets you know what people actually think. And certainly when we're doing academic freedom and protecting freedom of inquiry, those are one and the same for the concerns about truth seeking. So I'm concerned about potential tyrannical uses of AI. I'm also concerned about intellectually lazy uses of AI that essentially it can become this, you know, as we mentioned, autocomplete for life problem and running into someone like Brendan who's thinking exactly the same thing. And this is something that we are concerned at fire, that if we get this wrong, we're in deep trouble. We started collaborating. One area in which these absolutely overlap is, and this is not very well known outside of a handful of people, and most of them are at fire, are algorithmic discrimination laws. Algorithmic discrimination laws basically say that if your LLM produces knowledge that is then later used to justify discriminatory behavior. Behavior, the LLM company itself can be held liable for that. This is an awful idea. I describe this as being like, so let's say someone goes to the public library, reads a bunch of books, comes out a racist because of the books he chose to read, and you decide, oh, we're going to take care of this problem. We're not going to punish the guy who engaged in the discriminatory behavior. We're going to burn down the library. It's like, no, that's. That's insane. And it's so badly thought out, where it's essentially, it's going to create an unreliable island of knowledge because it's Going to skew the entire body of knowledge to not what's true, but what won't get you sued. So we have very similar thoughts on the importance of preserving the integrity of knowledge for, and also what that means for the future of free speech.
- [46:19]
Kevin Gentry
All right, I want to start to bring this to a close. This has been great, Greg. I'm so glad you agreed to be on this today. So you got, you've done a lot to scare us. Very concerned. Some of our listeners are saying I didn't even know these problems existed. Are you optimistic about the future or given what you said at the outset about the sort of things, how they've gotten worse over the past 20 years, are you pessimistic?
- [46:46]
Greg Lukianoff
I am optimistic for free speech for one reason. It works really well. A company, a nation, a body that has dissent, that has disagreement, that actually, that can actually talk openly about its problems has huge advantages over systems, companies, groups that don't. So that's one of the reasons why you should never bet entirely against freedom of speech. But I am somewhat pessimistic towards the fact that there are certain kinds of problems that get worse precisely because everyone's getting more comfortable. And I believe that actually free speech is one of those things, that the value of it actually involves painful interaction, taking seriously the possibility might be wrong, ugly disagreement in some cases, difficult facts, all these things that are unpleasant at some level, and a more comfortable, more affluent society, predictably, I argue in my short book, freedom from speech might actually get less and less comfortable with it over time. So I think the threats to free speech are going to grow. And that's why I believe fire needs to grow. I mean, we've grown tremendously over the years, but we're taking on the world at the moment.
- [48:03]
Kevin Gentry
You are. Again, it's a reason I have you on going big. Do you think that's why Europe in particular has slipped with respect to this, the relative prosperity, or is that other bigger issues about how they don't see the world with the same kind of principal basis that we do in the United States?
- [48:19]
Greg Lukianoff
Yes, I think it's all of the above. I do think it's a comfortable, affluent place. I think you'll see better defense of free speech in Eastern Europe, which is less comfortable and also has the totalitarian past much more recently. I think, you know, I think they have some lack of viewpoint diversity. And I also think that the structure of the European Union, it's not particularly democratic. So I think there are all sorts of reasons why the EU is in trouble and like a, like a raging alcoholic unwilling to admit it has a.
- [48:51]
Kevin Gentry
Problem, yet, well, tied to that. Okay, we're celebrating America's 250th, and you mentioned James Madison. And it really is truly extraordinary the founders of this country were able to come to what they came to at that time. Do you think the circumstances were such, just as you're describing, that kind of focused the attention to kind of come up with these rights in this way relative to where we are today or why was that so special back then?
- [49:22]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, I mean, America at the time was special from a lot of other places in the sense that it was this really highly educated, highly literate society that Britain thought it could now start pushing around and nothing would happen. And they kind of bet wrong on that. So I think we did have an unusually high concentration of intellect. But we were really incredibly lucky, though, to have genuine bonafide geniuses like Ben Franklin, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton all there at the same time. So I do feel like we were very lucky. But we're also lucky at the historical moment this happened because they were inheriting the, the Enlightenment. They were inheriting this discovery of our own ignorance. They're, they are the heirs to Montesquieu who already mentioned, but also John Locke. They were, you know, the heirs to the scientific revolution and how much that had changed things for the positive. So we had a. There was a great moment to found a country where it was based in ideas of, of human rights that was realistic about human nature. And I stress that so, so strongly because it was neither ridiculously optimistic about us or ridiculously pessimistic about us. It was realistic about what we needed. We need checks and balances. We need divided power. We need all of these things so that ambition can counteract ambition. But if we were founded, I don't know, like 40 years later, in the heyday of Hegelianism and historicism, we. We would have lasted six months.
- [50:57]
Kevin Gentry
Well, related. For parents who are sending their kids off to school to college maybe right now, or they just did a few weeks ago, what advice would you give to them? As well as what advice would you give to those students about how they should be prepared to deal with the suppression of free speech and expression, the penalties, or just even how they should think about how to respectfully challenge a university official professor, a fellow student, what advice would you give?
- [51:31]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, I can say very pragmatically, read fire's Guide to Free Speech on Campus. I wrote the first draft of it many, many years ago. And we've improved it since then. They should keep us in mind and they should know that if they get in trouble, they can contact us because it helps to have a big organization behind you if you're on higher ed. I do think that universities need to do a better job of training people to think like free people as opposed to think more like authoritarians. And one of the ways you think like a free person is to believe that you should be trying to find out where someone comes from and that essentially you don't appeal to authority to intervene anytime you have conflict. That's thinking like an authoritarian. One on one discussions, you know, like is ideally how you do it in a free society where we're all at least supposed to be equal. And I'm trying to help universities also to try to start getting this philosophy in at orientation on up. And it's one of these things where, you know, at my TED talk, I had the whole audience do this and believe it or not, it actually went over pretty well as I had people turn to their neighbor and look in their eyes and say, just because I hate your guts doesn't mean you're wrong. And of course, you know, ted, that got a big laugh because nobody hates, you know, nobody hates each other at ted. But that's kind of the point. Like the idea that essentially it's like, yeah, the fact that we, that in society right now we villainize each other so much doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the other person is accurate or whether or not it's useful to know what their perspective is. So we've been emphasizing activism in higher ed when really we should be emphasizing a scholarly mindset which begins at curiosity and profound curiosity.
- [53:34]
Kevin Gentry
Well said. All right. The two closing questions for you, Greg Lukianoff, are more about you personally than about all this great thing that you've done through fire and everything else. Thinking about a younger version of yourself. So you've been dedicated to this for a long time, but thinking about a much younger version of yourself, what would you tell that younger self to have done differently that might help us all understand how we might think about how to, how to change the world in the way you have.
- [54:02]
Greg Lukianoff
You want my honest answer?
- [54:03]
Kevin Gentry
Well, of course this is not a safety ism course.
- [54:06]
Greg Lukianoff
If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be, don't play football. You'll have a life of injuries from it. And that, you know, I.
- [54:20]
Kevin Gentry
You were just saying that we need to mix it up. We need to confront the world.
- [54:25]
Greg Lukianoff
But I loved all this other stuff that didn't, wouldn't get me injured. I loved weightlifting. I loved, you know, I, I loved all sorts of physical things. Just football wasn't worth it. You know, I'm trying to put off a fifth shoulder surgery just to, just to give you a sense of that. But for something that might be more useful for this discussion, I, you know, I was working class and I didn't really want people to know that I went to the library on Sundays to read. I didn't want people to know that about me. The. I was almost embarrassed that I was nerdier than I let on. And I'm a little ashamed of that now. You know, like, essentially like those people who tell you that not reading because I'd read for my own pleasure, I wouldn't read for class, and I'm ashamed of that as well. Like, like the, the, the. Probably the sentence that I regret the most, which is so common in that kind of environment, is, yeah, I did great, given I didn't do any of the homework or do any of the reading. You know, like, I, and I'm like, what. What kind of messed up thing is that? And it took me a while to be, to genuinely let myself love learning as much as I actually do. So I wish I'd learned that lesson earlier. It was okay.
- [55:43]
Kevin Gentry
Nice. All right, Greg. Again, ladies and gentlemen, you got to check out thefire.org, check out Greg Lukianoff. You can follow him in multiple different ways. You've done very important work, and you really live into the spirit of the Going Big podcast. You've cast a big, bold vision. You're standing up for something that is so important to the survival of a free society? So based on all of that and what you've done, what advice would you give to anyone listening anywhere in the world about how we might think about going big for our principles, our values in a way that truly is long sighted and will help people far into the future. Oh, man.
- [56:25]
Greg Lukianoff
I mean, the only person you can judge yourself against is yourself. And what I mean by that is that so many times I felt like I was in an environment where I was kind of holding myself back in a lot of ways, you know, and when I started to realize there were environments that I could run as fast as I can, you know, like, like go as deeply into things, get as, get as immersed in ideas and study and all this kind of stuff, that that was when everything started to really change, you know, So I think that that's. And I think honestly, I will say this for a very positive aspect of the current technology. I mean, like the idea that I can have someone to bounce ideas off with when I get up for my morning walk at like 5:00am you know, like all day. You know, like the, the potential for a single person with it, with an exciting idea to do something big with it is greater than it's ever been in human history right now. And you should be excited about that and lean in.
- [57:30]
Kevin Gentry
Well, that's perhaps the most encouraging thing you've shared this whole entire conversation with you on. But no, no, we really appreciate your dedication, your leadership, your courage, and just being willing to stand up and say the right thing. Free speech is not easy. It may be simple, but it's not easy.
- [57:45]
Greg Lukianoff
Exactly.
- [57:47]
Kevin Gentry
Thanks for being with us today. Really appreciate it. Keep, keep doing your great stuff and let's have you back on in another 20 years to assess our progress.
- [57:55]
Greg Lukianoff
Hopefully sooner than that, but thanks, Kevin.
- [57:57]
Kevin Gentry
Thanks for tuning in to the Going Big Podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling energized and ready to tackle your biggest goals. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps spread the word and it gets these inspiring stories out to more people. You can also find more content, resources and updates at our website, going big podcast.com remember, the only limits are the ones you don't challenge, the limits that you impose on yourself. Keep pushing, keep growing, and above all, keep going big. See you next time on the Going Big Podcast.