So to Speak Podcast Transcript: Is cancel culture dead?

Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Greg Lukianoff: The dirty little secret of cancel culture is it wasn’t just the students getting bad. It was the administrators who were already bad meeting the new students who were much more open to settling scores with professors and students. It was this unholy alliance between these two forces meeting.

Recording: Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Nico Perrino: You’re listening to So To Speak, the free speech podcast, brought to you by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. All right, folks. Welcome back to So To Speak, the free speech podcast where every other week, we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech.

I changed that tagline a couple of weeks ago, and now it just doesn’t come out like it used to. It used to be an uncensored look at the world of free expression through personal stories and candid conversation. So, our dear listeners, if it sounds weird to you, it sounds weird to me as well, and I’m still getting the hang of it. I’ll have it down in no time.

Rikki Schlott: ChatGPT could do that for you.

Nico Perrino: Absolutely. You know what? I always forget that ChatGPT is a resource. It’s really good at that kind of stuff.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, I just adopted it recently, and it’s scary. But I feel like it’s like make or break. You gotta do it at this point. ‘Cause if you don’t do it, someone else is gonna start doing your job and doing that.

Nico Perrino: Well, now I think it’s a Google GPT or a Google AI tool that can take your articles –

Rikki Schlott: What is it cloud [inaudible - crosstalk]?

Nico Perrino: And turn them into podcasts?

Greg Lukianoff: That was more than a year ago. And it came out, and it was eerily ... Actually, they did it. It was even more than that. They did that – Suleyman, our brilliant IT guy, ran Canceling the American Mind, and tried to do a podcast about it. And it was really good, but it does also point out how formulaic most podcasts are, except, of course, So To Speak.

Nico Perrino: Yes. Well, the one that I listed to was great insofar as – As I mentioned to you guys before we started recording, I like messy podcasts where there’s a lot of give and take, where questions are premised, where it’s not just question, answer, question, answer, question, answer. And this one that I heard was exactly as I’d want the podcast to be.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, nice, okay.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, some interjection, the sort of dinner table conversation that might naturally happen if there aren’t microphones in front of people. That’s what I try and emulate on the podcast. And this did it great.

Rikki Schlott: That’s probably ‘cause it trained off of the endless hours of Joe Rogan.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. I mean, does Joe, does he do podcasts in that way? He lets his guests go for quite some time.

Rikki Schlott: He’ll interject, though, I feel like.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I guess.

Greg Lukianoff: I always feel funny. Since promoting books, we’re so reliant on podcasts. I don’t really listen to podcasts.

Nico Perrino: When Joe Rogan had Ira Glasser from the ACLU, that director made a documentary called Mighty Ira in 2020. On his podcast, Joe just would throw out a question here, a question there, and then let Ira go for like 25 minutes, which he can do. And that’s the problem with Ira Glasser.

Greg Lukianoff: But really well.

Nico Perrino: He does it really well. He’s one of those people who talks in perfect sentences and perfect paragraphs and, if you will let him, perfect pages, but you need to interject in his monologue.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, but nobody outdoes John McWhorter on that, though.

Nico Perrino: Oh, yeah, I mean...

Greg Lukianoff: Perfect iambic pentameter if you asked him to.

Nico Perrino: I’m always jealous of that skill.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, it’s creepy.

Nico Perrino: But you mentioned promoting books. That’s why we’re here today.

Greg Lukianoff: Yay.

Nico Perrino: We have The Canceling of the American Mind, which is your guys' book that is now out in paperback. And I guess I should introduce you guys. Of course, regular listeners will know Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of FIRE.

Greg Lukianoff: Hi, everybody.

Nico Perrino: Author of Coddling of the American Mind and Canceling of the American Mind. And we’re also here with Rikki Schlott, who is Greg’s coauthor on The Canceling of the American Mind, a New York Post columnist. Rikki, welcome into the studio.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Nico Perrino: Is this the first time on the podcast?

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, it is.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, my god. And I haven’t got to see Rikki in a while. So, this is news.

Rikki Schlott: Oh, no, it’s not. It’s my second time on the podcast.

Nico Perrino: I don’t even remember.

Rikki Schlott: I think we did one. I know we did one.

Nico Perrino: I’ve done like 250 of them.

Rikki Schlott: No, we did one when the book came out.

Greg Lukianoff: Did we?

Rikki Schlott: I’m pretty sure.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, we did. We did. We did.

Rikki Schlott: We did. We did. We did.

Greg Lukianoff: Yep, yep.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, we did.

Greg Lukianoff: You’re right.

Rikki Schlott: In the whirlwind of podcasts that happened when the book first came out.

Nico Perrino: How many have you guys done?

Greg Lukianoff: We did so many.

Rikki Schlott: I don’t even remember. It was really crazy. And we divided and conquered, too. So, I did some, and Greg did some, and we did some together. I said the same terms over again. It was crazy.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Well, let’s see if we can differentiate ourselves here. Maybe I can throw some grenades into this conversation [inaudible] [00:04:06].

Greg Lukianoff: I can’t stand this.

Nico Perrino: I did say we can have some verbal violence on this podcast, but no physical violence, please. Let’s start, I guess, for those who aren’t familiar with the book. What is the origin of this book? Why a book about cancel culture?

Greg Lukianoff: As you know, I kill myself every time I write a book. It’s always way more than I can [inaudible – crosstalk].

Nico Perrino: Yet, you’re still here.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, I know. Sometimes, people ask, “You’ve got an organization. You seem to be doing stuff all the time. How do you also write books?” And I’m like, “1.) I have great coauthors. But also, 2.) I kind of kill myself over these things.” So, after Coddling came out, I wanted to wait a while before writing another book because you need to get back to more day-to-day work. But I start getting the itch. I really wanna write another one. So, around the time the itch was getting really bad that I wanted to write my next book – I mean I’m thinking about two books I wanna write right now.

Nico Perrino: What was that year that you were getting this itch?

Greg Lukianoff: That would have been 2022. I guess that would be about four years after Coddle came out. But we found this brilliant young woman, Rikki Schlott, who I think I first met when she was 19.

Rikki Schlott: I think I was maybe 20.

Greg Lukianoff: Twenty?

Rikki Schlott: Twenty or 21 because it would have been at the pandemic, yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And we’d kind of immediately had our eyes on her because she was someone who was writing for Reason, sometimes, and just writing better than people twice her age, easily. And we’re like, “This is a real talent we’ve got here.” So, we made Rikki a fellow, and I really enjoyed working with her. And I started thinking, you know, Coddling the American Mind was so much about the problems faced by Gen Z young women. It would be really cool – Obviously, me and Haidt are not Gen Z young women.

Nico Perrino: Oh, really.

Greg Lukianoff: Likes to claim he’s Gen X, and he might technically be correct. But I’m like, “I think you’re a little more, Boomer, but no offense, John.” Although, it’s a terrible thing to be. And sorry, listeners. I’m a very proud X-er. But working with her ... So, we originally talked about writing a book that was kind of a follow-up to Coddling the American Mind. But as we were getting ready to write it, there were all these people who were actually starting to say that cancel culture – and they had been saying it, but I thought they would have shut up at some point – saying cancel culture is a hoax or a myth. I was like, this is insane.

Starting from 2014 up, it was a disaster for students. It was a disaster for professors. And the first and foremost thing we needed to do was: 1.) Show the data and prove this is happening, and it was really serious. 2.) I really wanted to situate it as getting people to rethink cancel culture as a way of winning arguments without actually persuading anybody, to just kind of scare them but as part of a constellation of cheap tactics, and then really get into how we solve it. So, we started. I think we signed the contract maybe in late 2022.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, that sounds ...

Greg Lukianoff: Was it earlier than that?

Rikki Schlott: Or earlier. It had to have been earlier, I think.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, you’re right, in ’23.

Nico Perrino: It came out right after October 7th. Right?

Rikki Schlott: Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, okay. So, it might be off by a whole year.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah. I think it was probably ’21 when we were talking about selling it.

Nico Perrino: You mentioned you had the data to prove that cancel culture was happening, but I think we should probably start by defining what cancel culture is. What is this thing that people are debating happening or not happening?

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, I gave some boring but very lawyerly kind of definition of it that we were kinda like, “Maybe we should make it something better than this.” But at the same time, I wanted to be hyper precise about it.

And it’s the uptick starting around 2014 of campaigns to get people fired, punished, ostracized, or expelled for speech that would be protected, for example, for like a public employee under First Amendment doctrine, but often happening in environments where the First Amendment doesn’t apply and the climate of fear that results from that situation. And it begins around 2014. So, we were trying to really offer a historical definition that is essentially saying cancel culture is something weird that started around 2014 and really kinda went crazy.

Nico Perrino: Well, you kinda have to. Otherwise, it’s just anecdotes. Right? You need to create a precise definition if you wanna be able to quantify it.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: So, Rikki, what was your experience at this time? Why did you feel this was the right project for you? What were you seeing?

Rikki Schlott: My entrance into the media scene was like an op ed for the New York Post about my experience at NYU feeling that free speech was under siege and having hidden books under my bed in my dorm room, because I was afraid that my roommates might see them and cancel me. And I very much –

Nico Perrino: What were you –

Greg Lukianoff: What books?

Rikki Schlott: Thomas Sowell books, Jordan Peterson books. We did Jordan Peterson’s podcast, and now I’m very canceled by those – actually, not my roommates, to give them credit, but other peers at NYU. But I very much self-censored on campus and had the experience not yet of being canceled until I did put myself out there, but was living that day to day until the pandemic. And it was kind of my life story. And so, I think having had that recent college experience, which is kind of the heart of cancel culture or was the kind of Ground Zero for it, made me feel like I was a collaborator that maybe could put some meat on the bones of the story, too.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. So, you were experiencing this at college in ways that maybe don’t always capture headlines. It’s just the environment. It’s the zeitgeist. Meanwhile, Greg –

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, absolutely.

Nico Perrino: You’re here at FIRE. What are you seeing that is signaling to you we have a problem here?

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. I mean I’ve been doing this for 24 years now, almost. And FIRE was 25 years old last year. And I started in 2001. And I always explain that even in 2001 it was already easier to get in trouble for what you said on a college campus than I expected, and my whole background was specializing in First Amendment free speech law. But overwhelmingly, it was administrators doing the censoring. Students tended to be very good at free speech. They came to each other’s aid. They protested, sometimes. They fought on behalf of the professors’ free speech rights in some cases.

And it was really more a problem of the administrators. But something really dramatic changed very clearly around 2013/2014, and students started showing up in large numbers demanding new speech codes, demanding professors get in trouble. That really accelerated in 2017, but that started to really spike in 2014. So, it was a very sharp, sudden change. And a lot of the first exploration of this was actually in my book that I wrote with Jonathan Haidt, Coddling the American Mind, trying to explain how we believe. By the way, the original article is 10 years old this August.

Rikki Schlott: Oh, wow.

Nico Perrino: Don’t tell me that. That feels like yesterday.

Greg Lukianoff: [Inaudible] [00:10:56] 17 [inaudible – crosstalk].

Nico Perrino: I know, but it feels like yesterday.

Greg Lukianoff: I mean, Nico, neither of you are old. I’m old. 2013/2014, the idea of coddling was essentially the observation that the same habits that are peculiar to students showing up on campus around 2014 would be really bad for free speech and academic freedom, because they were sort of justifying new reasons to restrict freedom of speech and academic freedom, but also that were relied on a way of thinking that would actually make those students anxious and depressed.

And unfortunately, the data does really support it, that idea that we were on to something, because both things happened. But Canceling the American Mind was much more to focus on the toll in terms of professors and students that we saw after 2014, and it really got bad. And I think one of the things that listeners might not understand is that historically it is not normal for students to sign petitions against their professors to get them fired just for their research, teaching, and ...

Nico Perrino: What they say on social media.

Greg Lukianoff: And what they say on social media. It’s not saying this is completely unprecedented. But in terms of scale, it is very unusual for students to be the ones leading the charge to get professors fired.

Nico Perrino: What are they usually doing, just debating them?

Greg Lukianoff: Protesting in some cases, being snotty to them in other cases.

Nico Perrino: Is what qualifies as a cancel campaign what that protest is demanding?

Greg Lukianoff: Yes. That’s a huge part of it. If you’re just saying this person is wrong and a jerk, more power to you. We’re right there with you. And I wanna be clear about this. This is something. This is a disagreement between me and Randy Kennedy.

Nico Perrino: At Harvard.

Greg Lukianoff: At Harvard, yeah. He talked about, for example, our deplatforming database being an assault on freedom of speech essentially because, of course, students have the right to demand that someone not speak on their campus. And I was like, “Of course, they do.” We defend people’s right to say that, to demand that someone not speak. So, if we didn’t believe in the right to do it, we’d be demanding they be punished for doing that. We’re not saying that people should be punished for engaging in cancel culture.

What we are saying, however, is that you can have movements that censor and make people shut up and chill speech that are directed from individuals that are fundamentally illiberal impulses. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re not arguing to cancel culture being banned. We’re arguing for a free speech culture where you’re much more tolerant of people you disagree with. And yeah.

Do I think you have the right to get a campaign together to ruin someone’s life for a bad tweet? Absolutely, you have that right. Do I think that’s admirable or good for a democratic society where candor is really important? No. And I always have to remind people On Liberty, the most brilliant book ever written on freedom of speech –

Nico Perrino: By John Stuart Mill, yeah, 1859.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, same year as Origin of Species, the same year, and also a book called Self-Help. Anyway, sorry. It’s literally called that first in the genre. Anyway, he is very clear he’s not arguing that the state of the law was really bad in England at the time. He says very clearly that, actually, due to some cases in 1858, it was actually pretty good. He was worried about a conformist culture that was actually very harmful to the exchange of ideas.

Nico Perrino: And that’s actually what Alexis de Tocqueville was worried about, too, in colonial America when he was – It wasn’t colonial America. I think it was America at that point when he was touring the country and reporting back to France.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: So, Rikki, though, this isn’t just a story of college campuses. Right? I’m looking here at part three of your book. You studied cancel culture in comedy, in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, in corporate America, in the media. What was happening there?

Rikki Schlott: I mean I think that it really has trickled down from educational schools down to –

Nico Perrino: So, that’s where it started.

Rikki Schlott: I mean I believe in many ways that is where it started, but it’s trickled down all the way to – I was horrified to hear in middle schools from a lot of parents that would tell me that their kids had gotten cancelled for how their parents had voted by their peers. And they’re in fifth grade and don’t even have political viewpoints yet.

Nico Perrino: Man, I hope I will not be held accountable for my parents’ beliefs. My parents are great. They don’t have crazy beliefs. But you never know.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, no, truly. I mean that happened on my high school campus, too. People during the 2016 election were looking at people’s parents’ voter registrations and stuff. And it was like a big thing of, “Oh, their parents are Republicans,” which is really crazy.

Greg Lukianoff: I didn’t know the registration part of that story. That’s awful.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, that was a big deal on my campus. That happened very commonly.

Greg Lukianoff: In the name of tolerance, though.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, of course, of course. And also, not to mention a lot of people who were Republicans didn’t even vote for Trump. It wasn’t like –

Greg Lukianoff: Of course, yeah.

Rikki Schlott: That aside, I would say of all the case studies that we did, the one on science and medicine was the most concerning to me.

Nico Perrino: Yes, agree.

Rikki Schlott: Because that’s really an area where you don’t want conformity, and the scientific method depends on a lack of ideological rigidity and people being willing to say, “I don’t really agree with your hypothesis.” And I think the COVID-19 pandemic was a perfect moment where we would have had, I think, much better outcomes for just institutional trust in our social fabric if it was okay to question some things that were not yet set in stone and totally known as the pandemic was unfolding and as science was discovering more and more about the pandemic. And so, I think of all the case studies, that one was the most frightening.

Nico Perrino: Well, can we talk about some specific stories? Greg, maybe I’ll start with you. Is there one story of a cancellation in this book that really stands out to you as being emblematic of the problem? And then, Rikki, I’d love to hear if there’s one that stands out to you as well.

Greg Lukianoff: I mean the short answer is no, because I’ve been overwhelmed by stories that essentially you really can’t distill it into a single story. But the one that’s the most emotional ... The most heartbreaking one – and I talk about it in some detail – is my admittedly very conservative friend, Mike Adams, who ... He started at University of North Carolina Wilmington as a progressive, but then he became an evangelical Christian and became the rarest thing, kind of conservative on most campuses, not a libertarian conservative, but a full-on social conservative.

And he started really pushing back against things on the left. And he always credited me ‘cause someone like this, of course, is gonna get in trouble a lot. So, FIRE defended him from the very early days when he got in trouble. But he credited me for recommending the book How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce.

Nico Perrino: We are in the Lenny Bruce podcast studio.

Greg Lukianoff: Yes, we are.

Nico Perrino: You know, by the way.

Greg Lukianoff: But I was reading it at the time which, contrary to Nick Gillespie, is actually a very funny book. And I recommended it to him, and Mike read it. And I remember he was on talk radio when he was crediting me as being the person who was like, “Yeah, Greg told me. He recommended this book, and I realized I gotta be much more in your face conservative, much sharper.” I was like, “Dude, I created a monster.” And in 2020, he posted something where he was complaining about lockdowns in his state.

And he posted a tweet of him and a bunch of dudes in a state that didn’t have lockdowns drinking beers and said ... And he posted, “Massa Governor of North Carolina” – I don’t remember whose name it was – “Let my people go.” Insensitive, for the use of the word “Massa.” “Let my people go,” however, of course, that’s right out of the Bible and, for that matter, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And there was just for the rest of June and July of 2020, which was unlike anything FIRE had ever seen. There were campaigns of score settling with basically every professor who’d ever said something offensive.

And so, since I knew Mike, I thought Mike was this extremely confident dude and that he knew what he was doing. To my eternal regret, I didn’t actually write to Mike until I heard that he was being targeted to be fired, ‘cause I’m like, “Mike can handle himself. We gotta help all these other professors.” And so, I wrote him kinda late, and he’d already taken the severance package because students started protesting it. They demanded he be fired. Because Mike had actually defeated UNCW in a previous court decision, they knew they’d lose in court against him.

So, they gave him an okay severance package, not a particularly generous one, and he stepped down. So, I only talked to him after he’d signed the papers. And I had to break the news to him, “There’s not really anything we can do for you. You signed the severance.” And I had said I’d ... But he sounded bad. The students were still coming to his house. They were saying ... People were talking about his wife and child engaged in sex acts.

It was really ... And he was clearly scared ‘cause he called the police about it. And a week after I called him, he killed himself. And so, that really stuck with me, and particularly the idea that when I started talking about a friend, Mike killing himself. And you know now I got a number of people basically saying, “Well, he was pretty terrible.” And I’m like, “Dude, he was a person.” So, yeah, that chapter was the hardest to write.

Nico Perrino: In a culture of free speech, what would be the appropriate free speech friendly response to Mike’s tweet? If people found it offensive, how should people have responded?

Greg Lukianoff: Well, like I said, it is arguably even appropriate. I mean you can demand that someone be fired. It’s particularly incumbent on administrators to not humor this and that administrators must be the ones saying, “No,” and fast and quickly and actually decisively. And they used –

Nico Perrino: But that outcome is not viable if we are not following it.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, we’re not –We’re a public university bound by the First Amendment. Not even not viable, but this is not the environment for that. We don’t do that. But the dirty little secret of cancel culture is that it wasn’t just the students getting bad. It was the administrators, the administrators who were already bad, meeting the new students who were much more open to settling scores with professors and students. It was this unholy alliance between these two forces meeting.

But there’s a million ways you can protest this. I mean you can just flat-out protest it. You can write an op ed. You can respond in scathing language. But when you start calling for someone to be fired for something that is clearly protected, 1.) That creates real First Amendment issues. But also, for free speech culture, you really wanna understand where people are coming from. You wanna understand what they’re getting at. And I think if the –

Nico Perrino: And presumably, you wanna change his mind. Right?

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: This is the story of Darryl Davis, the Black man who would meet with members of the Ku Klux Klan and have conversations with them with the idea being, “Hey, I’m a Black man. All your preconceived notions about who I am and what I represent are wrong.” And he got ... I visited his home. I saw all the Klan’s robes, dozens and dozens of Klan robes from former Klansmen who gave up their robes after meeting him. None of that would have probably happened if he had just sought to get them fired, for example, as opposed to sitting down over coffee and having a conversation.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. But also, if the administration had just slowed the whole process down, this would have faded. That’s the thing about cancel culture campaigns. They're very hot, and they have a lot of heat, but they don’t burn for very long. And a lot of these –

Nico Perrino: You gotta ride them out.

Greg Lukianoff: Situations would be avoided. But here’s the problem: A lot of administrators didn’t want to ride it out. They wanted the momentum to get rid of a conservative gadfly like Mike.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Rikki, is there anything that stands out to you?

Rikki Schlott: This young woman, probably mid 20s, who was appointed editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue. And she had tweets that were at the time already a decade old from when she was like 14 or 15 that were definitely offensive and off color, that people resurfaced when she was hired. She ended up getting fired, or I don’t even know if she had been hired, but they called off her hiring. And it turns out that in the process of her – She’d already apologized for them, A.

And in the process of her getting hired, she already had said, “Full disclosure, these are out there. I’ve distanced myself.” So, the company knew that they existed. So, the only reason that she got fired was this public pressure campaign, which I think is insane to accept somebody on that basis and then fire them when push comes to shove, and you get shamed for it. A ton of big advertisers pulled out over that, too, which I think is really shameful.

And the thing about that case that really I think is most important is: As young people today who grew up online come of age and enter the workforce ... I had an iPhone when I was 10. Everybody who’s now a new hire had access to technology way too early and has done something stupid at some point that probably isn’t great and ideal, and they'd prefer not to be out there. If we have a culture that has that as the status quo of just firing people, and major companies pull their advertising and stuff, I think that’s an absolute disaster for society.

Nico Perrino: So, her name is Alexi McCammond.

Greg Lukianoff: Yes.

Rikki Schlott: Okay, yeah, yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: That’s right.

Nico Perrino: And I wanna read a passage from your book here and then ask you guys about it, ‘cause I think it speaks to what you were just saying, Greg. “In the following days, McCammond apologized to her future coworkers in private meetings and engaged in one-on-one talks with some of the offended Teen Vogue staffers. She also tweeted a public apology reiterating, ‘I’ve apologized for my past racist and homophobic tweets and will reiterate that there’s no excuse for perpetuating those awful stereotypes in any way.’”

Rikki Schlott: Also, she’s not White, too.

Nico Perrino: Oh.

Greg Lukianoff: She’s Black. Right?

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, I think she’s biracial.

Greg Lukianoff: Biracial.

Nico Perrino: She added that she was so sorry to have used such hurtful and inexcusable language. Nevertheless, pressure to can McCammond continued to mount, not just from Teen Vogue staffers, but from their advertisers, too. Bert’s Bees, ULTA Beauty both halted advertising campaigns in response to the tweets. When the public shaming became too much to bear, McCammond resigned.” So, the apologies don’t really work.

Greg Lukianoff: No, the apologies make – They’re basically –

Rikki Schlott: Definitely.

Nico Perrino: It seemed like she did everything right. She had one-on-one meetings. She publicly apologized. She privately apologized. But the staffers were still coming after her.

Greg Lukianoff: It’s confessing you’re a witch. And I like apologies. Basically, I was –

Nico Perrino: It should work if they’re heartfelt and genuine.

Greg Lukianoff: I always had a policy, like when people would ask me, “Should I apologize?” Earlier on in my career, I’m like, “That’s not for me to decide. Follow your conscience If you think you did something wrong.” But I do sometimes remind them, “Don’t apologize if you don’t think you did anything wrong.”

Rikki Schlott: Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: But unfortunately, if you do apologize in these moral kinds of spirals, it’s confessing, essentially, that you’re a witch, and it only makes it worse.

Nico Perrino: And that’s why Donald Trump never apologizes. Seemingly, he’s Teflon Don and never gets in trouble.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And unfortunately, that seems to be good advice.

Rikki Schlott: Although, I have to ask you on that front, too. In that sort of instance where she did use slurs and stuff, it’d be hard for me to say she shouldn’t say, “I’m sorry that I used those words. Those are not reflective of me. However, I’ve previously apologized for that.” Should she not have said – What should she say? I mean I don’t think you should do an apology tour with every single individual. I think that’s a little over the top. But what? Should she not have said, “Sorry?” I’ve never quite figured out what the actual alternative is to that.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, no. And just so the listeners know, the example that I’m remembering is that she used the term “Asian eyes” for waking up with puffy eyes.

Rikki Schlott: I think there was also some homophobic slurs in there. I can’t remember.

Greg Lukianoff: What was it?

Nico Perrino: I’ll see if I can find them here.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: Which she claimed was kind of slang at the time in the Black community, which is, of course, offensive. But at the same time ... you know.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, she used slurs for gay people, “homo,” and derogatory use of “gay.” I think that’s what I see here, that and then the “Asian eyes” note that you had before.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. I would be inclined to apologize, too. And that’s one of the reasons why it kinda breaks my heart to say that maybe you shouldn’t. Or if you apologize, it’s gotta be something strong. It’s like, “Listen, I regret doing that. However, I have said this over and over again, and I do feel like I’m being treated like ...” You’re put in a position essentially where you have to push back.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Part of me just wants to say, can I appeal to common sense and say –

Greg Lukianoff: No.

Nico Perrino: I was 15 years old. I was an idiot. I think most people who are 15 years old are idiots.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, my god, I was such an idiot.

Nico Perrino: And I actually do think that resonates with most people.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, yeah, with most people.

Nico Perrino: And I think that’s why you’ve seen the backlash to cancel culture, because people had this sort of moral awakening that was like, “Hey, we don’t wanna cancel people for things that they said when they were a teenager.” Right? We have in this country presumably this belief in redemption and forgiveness. And if you can’t be redeemed or forgiven for what you did at 15, what can you be redeemed or forgiven for? Even in the criminal context, we treat 15-year-olds more than we treat 25-year-olds, for example.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah. Although I do think, we really have a crazy punitive disciplinary system in high schools and middle schools that can even change your trajectory in life. If you get in trouble in high school, you could end up at a different college. You could end up with a different job down the road. There is some real permanence to that age demographic that I – I mean I saw that. Maybe it’s a private school situation, but I certainly saw that having gone to boarding schools. People that made one mistake, lifechanging, sometimes.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. I wonder if there are differences even between when you were in school and when I was in school in the mid 2000s. But how much did Twitter, now X, have to do with these cancel campaigns?

Rikki Schlott: I think quite a lot, but I’ll let you take that.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. So, actually, this is a nice chance for me to plug in a different book. I’m reading Musa Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke. And I’m already writing the review of the book in my head, and the very first line is gonna be, “First of all, I’d like to apologize to Musa Al-Gharbi for not reading this sooner,” because it’s excellent. And it talks about how self-serving a lot of the interests of elites can actually be and basically describes cancel culture as a way of sort of showing yourself socially superior at the cost of other people. Sorry. I lost track of the –

Nico Perrino: The role of Twitter in this.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, yeah, okay.

Nico Perrino: And I have to say Musa’s book is sitting on my bookshelf. I’m writing my own book right now. So, I’m really trying not to read anything that’s not for my book. But he sent it to me ‘cause he wanted to come on the podcast. So, maybe you and I can have a conversation with him about it.

Greg Lukianoff: It’s excellent.

Nico Perrino: And his agent is my agent, too.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And I realize one of the only things that I really disagree with Musa about is on two pages, and the rest I like completely ... I think it’s brilliant and very important. But he does talk about – and one of the things I do disagree with is he talks about cancel culture. Well, cancel cultures happen all the time. There was trashing in the 1960s. In the 1930s, in Marxist circles, they were incredibly doctrinaire, and they’d ruin your life and get you kicked out if you weren’t doctrinaire. But I try to point out –

Nico Perrino: And coincidentally, Ayn Rand would do that to people in her inner circle.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, that’s shocking. But I feel like what you’re saying is ostracization, like eliminating people who aren’t doctrinaire is a theme that repeats. Of course, it is. But one of the arguments that Rikki and I were making was essentially the uptick is we’re talking about scale and nature in terms of canceling, ‘cause you can’t find something that really happened on this kind of crazy scale.

And one of the defining characteristics of it that did require technology is you had to be able to almost instantaneously create the perception of or the reality of an angry mob trying to get someone fired. And that literally was not possible until technologies like Twitter, like other social media where ...

And you really could create the sense that there are tens of thousands of people who were demanding you fire Jerry or some other person in your organization in a way that -- When you wanted to get someone fired from their job before, a lot of cases, you’d send an angry letter to the company, and that would be the end of it. So, it was a new phenomenon in that sense because of the technology.

Nico Perrino: And was it primarily a left-wing phenomenon? Because when you think about cancel culture, you often think about left wing excess, so to speak. And then in the current context, you often think of Trump as a backlash against that, or at least that’s how it’s often positioned. Do you see it as a left-wing phenomenon?

Rikki Schlott: I think originally in terms of Twitter cancel culture predominantly it was. But it’s interesting now to see, now that Twitter is X, it feels like a lot of the pushback that I’m getting when I personally think that I’m being consistent with my viewpoints if from the right. And it’s like, “I thought you were more conservative.” There’s a lot of conservative cancel culture going on, on X. And Bluesky has become all the place for all the left wing cancel culture people have moved. So, it’s interesting to see none of those voices really interacting, and everyone’s getting even more insular in their two little camps. Although, Bluesky is like a fraction of the user base.

Greg Lukianoff: But Bluesky doesn’t believe cancel culture even happens because they’re in their little bubble where they can actually believe something like that.

Rikki Schlott: Exactly.

Nico Perrino: Well, in the same way that old school Twitter didn’t really believe it happened.

Greg Lukianoff: Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons why we had to write the book because I felt like it was so irresponsible to make that argument.

Rikki Schlott: It’s interesting, too, though. They’ll throw stones at people and centrist people and stuff, but they don’t hear them because they’re just in Bluesky. A lot of people just have no idea of what’s going on and what sort of critiques they’re getting, which is interesting. They’ve definitely insulated themselves and their critiques from a lot of the people that they’re critiquing.

Nico Perrino: Yes.

Greg Lukianoff: So, basically, long story short, the cancel culture being like the campaigns to get people fired definitely started on the left. We talk about a lot of examples of cancel culture on the right, though, in the book. And if we were writing it today, we’d have a lot –

Rikki Schlott: A lot more.

Greg Lukianoff: More examples.

Rikki Schlott: For sure.

Greg Lukianoff: But partially because our definition is about something that’s about getting regular people into campaigns to get people fired. What’s actually happening with the Trump administration has a little bit less of the campaign to get people fired and just plain old ordinary, “I’m exerting federal power,” and sometimes in very arbitrary and sometimes completely illegal ways to get people punished. The only reason why I wouldn’t call it necessarily cancel culture is because it’s something that’s even graver and more direct, which is just the exertion of ...

Nico Perrino: Executive power.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, or raw political power. And it’s old-fashioned censorship in a lot of cases.

Nico Perrino: So, this is like Chris Krebs, for example, having his global entry revoked ‘cause the Trump administration doesn’t like him, or going after these law firms because they represent or hire people that the Trump administration doesn’t like. These are just –

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, the law firm stuff scares me in particular, but it’s all scary.

Rikki Schlott: It’s almost like institutional cancel culture versus individual. I feel like he’s painting with a much broader brush than specifically going after one person, if that makes sense. It’s like, “Let’s just take it down, Harvard as a whole.”

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. And even during the Obama and Biden administrations, when cancel culture was at its peak, I can’t remember a president going after their political enemies in the same way.

Greg Lukianoff: [Inaudible – crosstalk] [00:35:04], yeah.

Nico Perrino: I mean you have Biden at the podium talking about Elon Musk should be looked into, and that’s a problem, but it seems much more overt now.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, absolutely. And of course, we’re gonna get ... One thing, actually, I think is fun, Rikki – fun for nerds – is that we talk about in the book – we talk about this idea of being tactics that both the right and the left use to win arguments without winning arguments beyond cancel culture. And then we talk about the left having what we call the perfect rhetorical fortress, which is just layer after layer of ways to dismiss people basically largely on identity. But then on the right, we talk about the efficient rhetorical fortress, which is just this idea that if you claim that someone is woke or a liberal or a libtard, you can dismiss them that way.

But also, by the final one, if they’re not pro-MAGA, you can dismiss them as well. But the one that actually really predominates now on this sort of MAGA right to justify everything is what I’ve called industrial grade whataboutism. It’s always pointing to: Where were you on this other thing that happened under the Obama administration? Now, the fun thing about being at FIRE is it’s almost always ... We were only involved in campus until 2022. But if it’s anything to do with campuses, yeah, we’re all over it. We’re perfectly consistent on this stuff. But watching the backlash, just always being whataboutism.

But yeah, the scale of the targeting of enemies is scary. And that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s in some ways its rawest form dealing with law firms because, in many cases, these were just law firms that have lawyers there who were involved in the Mueller investigation, for example.

Nico Perrino: Or they represent Dominion Voting Systems in a lawsuit.

Greg Lukianoff: Dominion Voting System. Real just battle [inaudible] [00:37:02] I guess you’d call it, kind of payback and retribution for slights. And the craziest argument that they’re making is: 1.) They’re threatening to withdraw security clearance from these lawyers in many cases or I guess in this case, global entry, which is nuts.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, that’s a separate matter, the Chris Krebs stings. But yeah, with the law firms, it’s security clearance. It’s access to federal buildings. It’s government contracts.

Greg Lukianoff: Access to federal buildings is the one that I think is the most like, are you freaking kidding me? You’re telling lawyers they can’t enter courtrooms? I honestly think that’s the least well appreciated scary thing that the Trump administration is doing.

Nico Perrino: Or even represent clients in mediation that happens in federal buildings, ‘cause often that mediation will happen with federal agencies. So, the chill is, it seems, the point. And during the height of cancel culture – I’m sure you guys know Randall Sullivan who was the head of a house at Harvard, represented Harvey Weinstein. Randy Sullivan was also a –

Greg Lukianoff: Ronald Sullivan.

Nico Perrino: Ronald Sullivan. Sorry, excuse me. Ronald Sullivan is also a law professor at Harvard and does what good practitioners do, which is represent clients, give them robust defenses before the government can take away people’s liberty. And he was canceled for doing this. He lost his job as the house dean or master. I forget what they call them at Harvard. I always confuse Harvard and Yale with these houses –

Greg Lukianoff: Something offensive.

Nico Perrino: Yes, something offensive that subsequently changed after –

Greg Lukianoff: [Inaudible – crosstalk].

Nico Perrino: Yeah. But that was a cancel campaign. And it was a cancel campaign that was motivated by who this lawyer represented. And now you have a cancel campaign from the other side that’s motivated by who these law firms represent or even who they hire as lawyers within their firm. So, what’s good for the goose, I guess, is good for the gander.

And I’ve talked about how in the Harvard context, now that the Trump administration is going after Harvard for Title VI violations and just ignoring the law in doing so. We had a lot of allies when the Obama administration was doing that in the Title IX context. And the industrial grade whataboutism wasn’t there. Now the whataboutism is coming from us, and it’s saying, “Wait, you guys were on our side during the abuses under Title IX. Why are you ignoring them now under Title VI?”

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. Well, they have the argument at least that they think the Title VI abuses are real and at a scale ... antisemitism at scale at Harvard or these other schools, and I’m sympathetic to that. I think Columbia and Harvard had a real problem. I’ve been saying for almost 10 years that there is a real antisemitism problem in elite higher ed and in schools in California and probably in other places.

That being said, you have to follow the process. Just because there’s a bad actor, it doesn’t mean you can magically make up new powers. And the Trump administration, there’s all sorts of processes that they have to follow, including giving the university a chance to fix things that the Trump administration is just utterly ignoring with regard to Harvard.

So, I think some supporters of ours get a little bit of whiplash that FIRE has been very critical of Harvard. They deservedly finished twice dead last in our campus free speech ranking. But again, that doesn’t mean that suddenly the Trump administration, the executive gets to basically say, “Well, now we can pull all your federal funding and even potentially your nonprofit status,” basically assuming that all of this stuff is true and ignore entirely all the protections you’re supposed to have.

Nico Perrino: And the funny –

Rikki Schlott: Not to mention so many of the demands, too, have nothing to do with the Title VI violations.

Greg Lukianoff: Good point.

Rikki Schlott: They’re just completely beside the point.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Oh, and that’s a weird thing about this attack on Harvard. Which, yes, Greg, you’re right. They’ve been a bad actor on the free speech and academic freedom front for years. But the justifications the government’s using to go after them are a mix of Title VI violations, racial discrimination violations, but just pure ideological disagreement. If you look at President Trump’s Truth Social feed, he’s going after them for hiring certain Democratic politicians after they’re done in office or talking about their ideology or their sickness or their left wing bias.

Greg Lukianoff: How much time have you spent on Truth Social?

Nico Perrino: I spend far too much on X and looking at Trump’s Truth Social posts.

Greg Lukianoff: It can’t be good for your blood pressure.

Nico Perrino: No. I have this Oura Ring which talks about how –

Greg Lukianoff: I was admiring that.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, and I’m always at the stressed level. I don’t feel stress, but I guess if that’s my baseline, then I wouldn’t feel it.

Greg Lukianoff: Okay.

Nico Perrino: But there’s relaxed, restored. I’m just never in those areas.

Greg Lukianoff: FIRE is not a relaxing job, shall we say.

Nico Perrino: I have fun. I don’t know. I mean I don’t wanna fall asleep at the job. So, I like being here.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, they do say in psychology reconceptualize anxiety as excitement. And I’m not always that good at that, but clearly you are.

Nico Perrino: I don’t know. I also started losing my beard here. And my doctor was like, “That’s usually caused by stress.” It’s like alopecia areata. And I said, “I don’t feel stressed.”

Greg Lukianoff: I’ve been putting a little bit of polonium in your coffee ‘cause I am Russian.

Nico Perrino: Oh, so that’s it. I guess I gotta stop drinking coffee.

Greg Lukianoff: That’s what we do.

Nico Perrino: But in my defense on the Title IX and Title VI point – And for those who don’t know, Title IX governs sexual misconduct and federally funded education activities and programs. And Title VI deals with race, color, and national origin. It’s been interpreted to also prevent antisemitism on campus. The Obama administration saw a rape problem on campus, and they said there was a real rape problem on campus. And they tried to solve that rape problem in part by removing due process protections and implementing speech codes.

And now what the Trump administration is doing, except in the Title VI context, is removing due process protections and implementing speech codes. And that’s a problem in both cases. It’s just some of the arguments that I’m hearing from conservatives now about the Trump administration, it’s just like those arguments weren’t ever made in the context of Title IX. It’s like it’s the government’s money. The government can take it away whenever it wants. I was like, that was the same issue that we were fighting in the Title IX context, too. You never made those arguments then. So, I guess that’s me doing whataboutism.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, actually, that’s interesting. One thing that is interesting is that Rikki and I come from different political directions. But I always have thought, getting to know Rikki better, that if you’d been around in the ‘90s, you definitely would have been considered left of center for your overall views.

Rikki Schlott: I think so.

Greg Lukianoff: But definitely, you felt like a conservative by comparison for a lot of your life. Do you feel at home anywhere now?

Rikki Schlott: No. I mean I consider myself a libertarian, more or less. But I think I was definitely in the first Trump administration more in the camp of, like, a lot of the things that he says, people freak out about it, and he doesn’t really do a lot of them, and chill out. But this time, I’m like, okay, he’s doing them, and this is really bad. So, I definitely have more TDS this time perhaps. But I would say I consider myself a libertarian.

But because I came of age in the very woke iteration of what the Democratic party looked like, I definitely considered myself more conservative when I was younger, just in kind of the same way that I feel like you hear now about so many young men saying they’re very conservative. I think that they are having the same reaction that I at one point had, which is that all of my teachers are telling me that I have to introduce myself with pronouns, even though I don't feel like that’s necessary, and those sorts of formative things where I’m just like ... I kinda wanted to rage against that as a kid. But now I would say I’m a libertarian and probably centrist politically.

Nico Perrino: We were talking before we started rolling here, Rikki, about how the book came out – what – 10 days after October 7th.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: How did October 7th change all of this.

Greg Lukianoff: Very selfishly, it was terrible for sales. It swamped everything else. It was not a great time to have a book come out. But the funny thing was – As Rikki can attest, she was so much more emotionally stable than I was during this whole thing. The process of writing this depressed the living hell out of me, and it made me very sad and very anxious.

Since we were talking so much about the ways that you can dismiss somebody without taking their argument seriously, I was like, “Okay, we just wrote about how people are gonna treat this book. They’re not gonna actually read it, and they’re just going to make up things in the rhetorical fortress to be like, ‘Oh, this is a right wing book,’ or whatever.’ They’re just gonna dismiss it, to not read it.”

But the interesting thing about October 7th is that it definitely led to a lot of behavior on campus that very quickly got people to realize, “Oh, wow, there’s something really seriously wrong here.” The ideology was so intense, particularly on the left, that it kinda freaked a lot of even centrists out. So, I think that even if the book had come out just a little bit later, people would have kind of gotten that everything we were talking about in the book was relevant to how October 7th would actually pan out and how the backlash would go and all this stuff.

But that’s also one of the reasons why the new paperback edition has updated data. We made a number of additions to the text itself, but it also has a 2025 campus free speech rankings at the back of it, which is nice to update, in which Harvard finishes last. But it also has an epilogue talking about how crazy things got on campus. Rikki, are you still a Columbia student?

Rikki Schlott: I’m enrolled. I don’t really know.

Nico Perrino: So, you’re not taking classes.

Rikki Schlott: No.

Nico Perrino: I’m assuming that’s what that means.

Rikki Schlott: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Okay. So, you were at NYU.

Rikki Schlott: I was at NYU. I dropped out, and then I enrolled at Columbia. I took a class during the encampment semester, which is interesting. I got the pandemic at NYU and the encampment at Columbia. So, I’m really striking out with my college experience.

Nico Perrino: If you try and transfer, I think the colleges are gonna look skeptically at you. It’s like, what sort of problems are you gonna bring to class?

Rikki Schlott: Yeah. But it was interesting to be at Columbia with a press pass and student ID ‘cause I had access like no one else did, ‘cause they tried to keep press to just two hours a day at all times. So, I was able to write about it in a different way.

But certainly, the experience of being somebody that was called to talk about cancel culture on TV and also called on to talk about campus culture after October 7th, there were some very clear early-on cancellations that were free speech violations that did put me in a really strange position, sometimes on live TV, trying to thread that needle, too, and certainly in areas and on shows where that wasn’t really an expected take, too. So, it definitely was a test of like, “Are you really a free speech champion?”

Nico Perrino: Well, that’s the problem. That’s the problem with cancel culture. Right? And Greg, you talk about this all the time. When you’re talking about culture, it’s always going to be a little bit amorphous. Now, in the book, of course, you try to define what cancel culture is in order to quantify it and speak about the period. But I think, even if you don’t buy your definition or your data, I think most people in their gut feel like something significant happened. There was this culture of conformity. There was this culture of pile on. There was this mob mentality that went after people in many cases for holding widely accepted opinions or that just weren’t often spoken about.

Greg Lukianoff: Or cracking a joke that, in some cases, you actually thought was actually woke, but was intentionally misinterpreted because someone wanted to be outraged at you.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. But it’s also hard because there are some real transgressive, offensive, bigoted things that people get canceled for. For example, I know for us, after Trump’s assassination attempt, there were people who went on social media talking about how they wish the shooter hadn’t missed, including one woman who worked, I think, at Home Depot, for example, as a cashier, and had a pile-on on social media and got fired from her job at Home Depot.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, I remember that. Sorry, guys, that’s cancel culture. And we’re pretty clear about that.

Nico Perrino: But it’s nevertheless offensive.

Greg Lukianoff: Unsympathetic.

Nico Perrino: Unsympathetic.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, absolutely.

Nico Perrino: And so, you’re trying to define something and in some cases that is not always easily definable, or there’s not always an easy solution or response for it.

Greg Lukianoff: So, in the appendix, we go a little bit more into the nitty gritty in some of the laws by comparison. I do think sometimes people like, “Listen.” A lot of people will argue that something isn’t cancel culture. And I try to reframe it to be kind of like: What you’re saying is you think canceling this person in this question was justified. And if that’s your opinion, defend it, but don’t pretend, if it’s a campaign to get someone fired for their speech, you’re talking about something completely different.

Nico Perrino: So, I think we can all agree that the McCarthy era is over. Now, is the cancel culture era over, even if it’s like the Roman Empire, and you don’t quite know when it ends or when it started?

Greg Lukianoff: 1453.

Nico Perrino: So, do you think cancel culture is dead?

Greg Lukianoff: No, but I think it still lives in corners. I think it is less severe, and the more pressing issue right now is actually good old-fashioned exercise of state power against speech.

Nico Perrino: What about you, Rikki? What are you thinking?

Rikki Schlott: Yeah, I think it just is taking a different form and has new targets now. I mean I still feel in some sense that, even if it is federally directed, it still kind of cancel culture in a sense to target students over op eds and stuff. I mean, functionally, I think it’s very similar, if not definitionally exactly what we were talking about. I think it is quite similar.

Nico Perrino: But would you say worse because it’s coming from the government –

Rikki Schlott: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: As opposed to a Twitter mob?

Rikki Schlott: Yeah. I mean I think it’s pretty clear to me that it’s in some ways a reactionary kind of causal thing, too, in some ways. It’s learning from examples about how you take someone down for their ideas. I don’t think it came out of a vacuum that the administration thinks that you can attack people like that, because we’ve been doing that in different ways. It just hasn’t been federally directed.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. One of the reasons why I think this book will continue to be very useful for a long time coming is it definitely explains how we got here, because I’m definitely running into a little bit – On social media, every so often, someone pops up and kind of points at one of us being kind of like, “Well, your advocacy led to this backlash.” And I’m like, “Our advocacy did not lead to this backlash. Behavior largely on the left actually led to a backlash. And if you’re saying we shouldn’t have covered it, I think that’s nuts, and I think that’s self-indulgent.”

Nico Perrino: And it’s also an argument for never doing anything ever to correct any excess.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nico Perrino: It’s like I guess we’re just supposed to sit here and not do anything because your advocacy against this excess could lead to a backlash that’s the same or worse.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And I can’t imagine if it had been some other Republican president in power that a lot of the ... Maybe we would have a situation where some of the reforms in higher ed, for example, were being pursued in completely kosher ways. So, I think that there’s a desire to pretend like the thing that actually led to the backlash didn’t really happen or wasn’t that big of a deal in the first place. And it’s kinda like two things can be true at the same time. It’s that the problem was really bad, and it really alienated most Americans in a big way. And the response to it is scary.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Well, I think we’re gonna leave it there, folks. The book is The Canceling of the American Mind, now out in paperback with a new – What, epilogue?

Greg Lukianoff: New epilogue.

Nico Perrino: New data.

Greg Lukianoff: New data and the 2025 campus free speech rankings on the back.

Nico Perrino: And it has very big text.

Greg Lukianoff: I’m such a believer in that, as someone who doesn’t like to have to wear my glasses.

Nico Perrino: And now that I have to start wearing glasses, I am very appreciative of this.

Greg Lukianoff: Haidt and I are very big on little details that make reading easier. It’s one of the reasons why we kinda hated the British version of 'Coddling the American Mind ' because it made the text too small. And they thought we were being a little silly about this. And I’m like, “No. You want to remove as many barriers to people reading your books. And if you make the text too small, it’s difficult.”

Nico Perrino: They also spell their words wrong.

Greg Lukianoff: My mother is British. Thank you very much. Everything deserves a U.

Nico Perrino: All right. Rikki Schlott, Greg Lukianoff, thanks for being here. I am Nico Perrino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues, including Sam Lee, Erin Reese, and Chris Molpie. The podcast is produced by Sam Lee. And you can learn more about So To Speak by subscribing to our YouTube channel or Substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. You can follow us on X by searching for the handle freespeechtalk. And you can send us feedback at sotospeak@thefire.org Again, that is sotospeak@thefire.org. And if you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts Spotify. Reviews help us attract new listeners to the show.

Greg Lukianoff: And please support FIRE.

Nico Perrino: And please support FIRE, and buy Greg and Rikki’s future books, too, this book as well. So, folks, until next time, I thank you all again for listening.