https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KukpEgjkXIk
People feel like they can’t speak their minds. The millennials are just saddled in debt. We have a system in which a third of American colleges produce graduating classes in which the median graduate makes less than the average high school graduate. Like who can blame young people? [“The Star-Spangled Banner”] [“The Star-Spangled Banner”] Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I’m speaking with Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott, co-authors of the new book, “‘The Cancelling of the American Mind.” We discussed the inception and inspiration of this new book which seeks to assess cancel culture as it’s harshly affecting American universities and other institutions. We break down the difference between feminine and masculine tendencies in regards to free speech, the entirely real and yet rarely discussed phenomenon of toxic femininity and why we must prioritize a cultural shift away from the ease of self-described victimhood. So you have a new book coming out on October 17th. This is recorded in 2023. October 17th, “‘Cancelling of the American Mind.” Authors, Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott. So congratulations on that. Thank you so much. Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about the book and why you guys are partnering together also to write it? Yeah, well, I mean, I think it’s probably a little unusual for a 48-year-old and a 23-year-old to be writing together, but I couldn’t feel luckier than to get to work with Ricky Schlott. She’s absolutely brilliant. And it was something that we knew right away when we saw her writing when she was 19 and 20, that there was something very special about this young woman. So originally, Ricky reached out to us because she read my book with Jonathan Haidt, “‘Coddling of the American Mind’ and said, this is exactly right. This is exactly what I’m seeing in my own environment, that the threats to free speech are also devastating to mental health.” And she actually dropped out of NYU in 2020, also during COVID, which I think is exactly the right move. Once you’re on lockdown, drop out. It defeats the major point of college. And originally, what we were planning to do was write a book, or what I was considering doing, was writing a book that was a follow-up to Coddling, even though canceling is a follow-up in a sense, something that was much more directly a follow-up because it’s me, the book was written by me and Jonathan Haidt, like two 48 and 60-year-old Gen Xers. But a lot of it’s concerned about the terrible injustice we do to young women, teaching them the mental habits of anxious and depressed people. So she wrote me and Haidt to talk about if we thought maybe COVID could uncoddle young people by presenting challenges that they could then overcome. It’s a little optimistic. Probably a little overly optimistic, but I was excited about the premise. And immediately realizing just how brilliant she was from her writing, she became a FIRE Fellow. And we talked about the idea of working together on something that would be a follow-up to talk about from a Gen Z young woman’s perspective. But as we were getting ready for that, I started realizing that there are still people out there who are trying to claim that cancel culture isn’t real. And I’m like, okay, I’m sorry. FIRE is sitting on a mountain of data. Something absolutely catastrophic has happened on campus in the last 10 years. This is easy to establish. So we decided to do a book that focuses on three things. One, prove it’s not just real, it’s historic. We don’t see the kind of numbers of professors fired in the last, you know, since we mark cancel culture as beginning around 2014. We don’t see the kind of numbers of professors fired during cancel culture since the 1950s in the United States. There’s nothing even close. About twice as many professors fired than the standard estimates of McCarthyism, for example. So people saying it doesn’t exist is just crazy. Then we try to situate it as a, as part of a way of winning arguments without winning arguments. That essentially it succeeds so well because people realize, well, I could try to refute you an argument and I might fail, but I could also scare you into thinking that you don’t have a livelihood going forward to just make the cost so high of dissenting that you win arguments without persuading anybody. And then the last part of it is really trying to point to different potential solutions. Yeah, and I would also add that the difference of our perspective together is really rich because I’m Generation Z, we’re decades apart. We have very different political beliefs, but everything in this book in terms of classical liberalism and free speech and pluralism and reinvigorating our democracy and our civic conversation is just like we hold that so near and dear and I think that that cross-generational kind of melding really worked very well to our advantage in the book. Absolutely, and Ricky also made me more of a cat person. No, well, that’s always a good thing. I did convince him to get cats in the time that we did the book together, yeah. Good, good, well, you’re always supposed to pet a cat when you meet one on the street, you know, so. I remember that from your book and I think that’s excellent advice. That’s exactly right. So now you guys said a bunch of interesting things there and we’ll go through them, but I want to ask you first, Ricky, you pointed out that you two have different political beliefs, like you share some core presumptions, but you have different political beliefs. So how would you characterize both the similarities and the differences in your beliefs? Yeah, I’m a right-leaning libertarian. I don’t want to speak for you in terms of how you define your politics, but. I’m left of center homeless Democrat, but definitely, and when it comes to, and that may sound like highly inconsistent to a lot of people these days, but there was nothing inconsistent for someone my age to be really pro-free speech and also think of themselves as a left of center. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of us. When I look at what was going on in the 90s, you know, I always thought kind of like the more working class element of the left would win over. And I thought the people who believed in speech codes and, you know, some of the identity politics stuff were just our crazies who would eventually self-marginalize. I’m really disappointed to see that they seem to have all the juice on the left at the moment. Yeah, and it seems like, at least in my lifetime, the word liberal was associated with very illiberal actions and things in a way that, you know, true classical liberalism is not a partisan divide in my mind. And I think that that’s really where we share our common values and certainly in terms of free speech and cancel culture, that’s like the heart and center of our book. And we pull no punches, you know, when we think the right or left has been wrong, just like we do with fire, we call them out. But when it comes to the phenomena of cancel culture, the place where it’s the most dominant, of course, is in higher ed, and that is a very, you know, disproportionately lefty space. And it’s gone really off the rails, as you well know, in higher ed. Ricky, how in the world did you become a right-leaning libertarian? I mean, as, well, Jonathan Haidt’s data in particular, although Greg worked on this too, I mean, the data is indicating quite clearly that there’s a growing divide among young men and young women in relationship to their political affiliation, with young men increasingly tilting towards where you stand, I would say, right-leaning libertarian, and young women increasingly, not only becoming much more miserable on the mental health front, but also becoming much more leftist. So how is it that you aren’t part of that cohort? Since you’re not, why do you think it’s reasonable in some sense for you to speak for younger women, younger people, younger women? And why did you drop out of university? So I’m actually 23, but my father is 86, and having that breadth of historical knowledge in my household and so near, I think, made me a little bit more resistant to generational trends and, you know, the tides and just kind of shifting away from what I think common sense right and left was, which happened, and I think a lot of my parents or my friend’s parents were a little bit more lenient towards the nonsense of what my generation would bring home, whereas, you know, I’d come home to my dad sometimes at dinner and come home with whatever the next politically correct ism is and say, oh no, dad, we don’t say African American anymore, we say black, and my dad would be like, but we changed that rule like four times, and what I actually, my intent is what matters more than the impact, and I think that those sort of formative lessons definitely grounded me in a different time and space, and I would say, you know, despite that, the coddling was talking about mental health and a lot of the cognitive distortions, and even though my political orientation is different, I did grow up on the internet, I did grow up on Tumblr, I have a bunch of friends, I saw firsthand just how ugly and how horrific the mental health crisis has been for my generation. My freshman year at NYU, I remember, like, one of the first nights that we were in my dorm, we were all sitting around, about six girls, and every single girl was comparing her self-harm scars, I was the only one that didn’t have scars, and I just remember in that moment being like, wow, there’s something so wrong with this generation, and I’m here firsthand watching it on the ground, I feel, in some ways, a part of it, one foot in and one foot out at the same time, but certainly, I mean, it’s hard to ignore, even if your politics are different, you’re mired in it, and it’s so pervasive, and then lastly, my decision to drop out of NYU, actually, and also, I got into Columbia recently, and I don’t expect to be doing that as well, I don’t want to finish my undergraduate degree, frankly, because I had two great years at NYU, but unfortunately, the stifling environment was just so beyond something that I could handle for myself, and I also think, you know, I mean, I had a 4.0, I was succeeding, I was headed to law school, I was on the right track, but I found something that I was passionate about, and I realized that I’d been kind of hoodwinked by a system that was telling me that I needed to fork over enormous amounts of money and spend time fulfilling requirements that weren’t important to me and writing essays that, you know, defied my own personal opinions because of the obvious slants of my professors, and so at a certain point, I realized there are more than one pathway to success, and I’m going to tread my own, and fortunately, people like Greg were there to kind of pick me up and make sure that I ended up on the right track, and so this is a way cooler place to be at 23 than to have just graduated. So Greg, I wanted to commend you for something first. You’re not a psychologist, but you are the most outspoken psychologist that I know of pointing out the fact that if we had set up a cognitive behavioral therapy program nationwide to demoralize young people, we couldn’t possibly have done it more effectively, speaking strictly from a clinical perspective than we have done. Every psychologist there is who’s worth his or her salt knows that you don’t hyperprotect people because you make them dependent, you don’t inundate them with idiot trigger warnings, you don’t try to infantilize them, you gradually expose them voluntarily to situations and people and ideas that they’re leery of, and by doing so, you fortify them in terms of their own self-concept and their ability to deal with the world. And there isn’t anything, there is nothing that therapists who are real know more thoroughly than that. If you don’t know that, you’re not a therapist, you’re a bloody fraud. And despite that, there is an absolute dearth of psychologists speaking out against, say, cancel culture, trigger warnings, all of this infantilizing idiocy that characterizes the campuses. Now, that’s partly because, as I found out in Canada, that if you do speak out, and this obviously speaks to cancel culture, the probability that the mid-level, miserable, resentful bureaucrats who are in charge of doing things like handing out professional licenses will come after you, and if you can’t afford to have your career threatened, well, then you’re in trouble. Now, I don’t think that excuses people precisely because I think there’s a time and a place to speak in some ways, regardless of personal cost, and the thing is, you’ve spoke, so obviously it can be done. Now, I wanna talk to you, both of you guys, about some psychological ideas that I’ve been working on, and some of them are quite contentious, and I’d really like to know what you think. So, first of all, there’s a very large literature on female antisocial behavior. Now, it’s not as extensive as male antisocial behavior, because males who are antisocial tend to be violent physically, and that gets more attention, but there are antisocial females, and they have a very set way of going about destroying their opponents to their own advantage, and the way they do that is by innuendo, reputation-savaging, and gossiping, and this literature all arose before the dawn of social media, and it was very well established for multiple decades. Now, my observation is that that scales brilliantly on social media, right? Because you can savage reputations, you can use innuendo, you can gossip, you can destroy with zero cost to yourself. Now, women tend to turn to that because they don’t engage in physical fighting, not between each other, very, very rarely, and they certainly can’t fight physically with men, so if they’re gonna be antisocial and instrumental, narcissistic, psychopathic, and all of that, they’re going to do it in this more subtle manner. Now, I see absolutely no limits to the expression of that sort of behavior whatsoever on social media, in fact, quite the contrary. That leads to an even more dismal possibility. This terrifies me, to tell you the truth. So, you know, the problem of parasitical criminality, parasitism in particular is so deep that sex itself evolved as a solution to the problem. So, the problem of parasitism is very, very old, and this proclivity of the psychopathic and narcissistic types to denigrate and to elevate their reputation falsely is a form of parasitism, and it has no constraints whatsoever on social media. We know that the troll types and the online criminal types are much more likely to have dark tetrad personality characteristics, Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic, because the other three weren’t enough. My sense is that we’ve enabled the psychopaths, they have free rein to express themselves in this more feminine, antisocial manner, and we risk bringing down the whole house of cards because of it. So, the first thing I’d like to know is like, what do you guys think about that hypothesis, this disparity in the virtual versus the real world? Well, first thing is that we took this, you know, head on and coddling of the American mind. We said we didn’t apologize for the research, and we made the point that when it comes to the different ways that males and females exercise aggression, particularly when they’re teenagers, but also throughout their lives, that men is much more physical. You know, like I’ve been in a lot of fights in my life, I’ve been a bouncer, I’ve seen that, but I also grew up in a house that was dominated by women, and that female aggression tends to be relational, that definitely all these mechanisms that are much more relying on verbal tendencies, and ways of battling things out verbally are well established. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence, and this is a very sad fact, but it comes out very, it’s very clear in the polling, is it in general, and of course, this is, you know, this talking about, you know, polling, women are more skeptical of freedom of speech than men are. So, when you look on campuses, the polling for women’s attitudes, this is actually a very funny statistic that we found, that the schools that tended to have the highest level of students saying that violence is acceptable in response to speech, or that shout downs are acceptable in response to speech, or that blocking doors are responsible, are acceptable speech, or either women’s colleges or former women’s colleges. So that’s a distressing, you know, and that’s one of the reasons why we have to, we wanna reach more women, because we know that there are plenty of women, including Ricky and Nadine Strawson, who works for FIRE, who are great civil libertarians, and we need to recruit from that, because as universities become more feminized, it could be a bad, an even worsening situation for freedom of speech, unless we actually, you know, really bring that argument to more women. Anyway. Yeah, and I would add to that point that I think, especially in the past couple of decades, now that attacks on free speech are tied to emotional harm, and the idea that people need to be protected, and that their feelings are hurt, I do think that it’s just an honest truth that just speaks to the female proclivities a little bit more. And so in some aspects, and I suppose the more anti-social people, that becomes a really militant response that they act on when they feel as though they’re able to be the arbiters of justice, and to protect weaker, more vulnerable people, in just like a pure emotional sense, I would say as well. A few decades ago, private citizens used to be largely that, private. The internet has changed this. Think about everything you’ve browsed, searched for, watched, or tweeted. Now imagine all of that data being crawled through, collected, and aggregated by third parties into a permanent public record, your record. 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No matter what device you’re on, phone, laptop, or smart TV, all you have to do is tap one button to get protected. So if like me, you believe that your data is your business, secure yourself with the number one rated VPN on the market. Visit expressvpn.com slash Jordan. That’s expressvpn.com slash Jordan for three extra months free. Expressvpn.com slash Jordan. Yeah, or they pretend a kind of genuine feminine compassion and use that as a mask to cover their actual antisocial motivations, right? Because the borderline personality types and the real psychopaths, this is particularly true on the female side in relationships, say to borderline pathology, they use self-proclaimed stories of victimization as manipulative techniques. And part of the reason for that is that if you’re really serpentine in your capacity to manipulate, you harness the person that you’re manipulating, you harness their compassion, right? Because that’s a very effective way of hiding from them your predatory proclivities. It’s extremely dangerous. And so I have a question for you, a deeper question, Ricky. And so this is a horrible question. I don’t think anybody’s ever raised it. So I am not convinced that higher education institutions and maybe institutions in general, why should we be convinced that they can survive if females run them? And here’s, I’m not saying they can’t, but I’m gonna present the counter-argument just for the sake of getting myself in all sorts of trouble. Here’s what I see happening. I mean, first of all, or what may be happening, childless women infantilize other people because they don’t have an infant. And so female administrators infantilize their students, female professors infantilize their graduate students. They use that fundamental impetus to protect, they misuse it, misapply it. Now that’s well-documented proclivity in the clinical literature, the psychoanalysts documented that starting with Freud, that’s the devouring mother fundamentally. And then we have no historical data suggesting that women as such can organize large-scale social institutions because as the feminists themselves have claimed forever, they were either not doing that or excluded from it forever. And it may be naive to assume that that’s just something that women can do, even though that’s, as I said, there’s no historical precedent for it. Now, I did research in 2016 before I had to stop, fold up my research enterprise entirely. We were looking at what predicted authoritarian politically correct beliefs. And we did a very careful job. The first thing we did was analyze political beliefs to see if there were a collection of coherent beliefs that you could identify as authoritarian politically correct. And there clearly was, so it’s not just a right-wing conspiracy theory that such a complex of ideas exists. And then we looked at what predicted the proclivity to believe in those ideas. And the first predictor was low verbal intelligence. And it was a walloping predictor. It predicted politically correct authoritarianism better than general cognitive ability predicts grades. So that was quite shocking to us. But the next best predictor was being female. And the next best predictor was having a feminine temperament. And so, you know, all that together makes up a pretty damn brutal story. And so, you said, both of you said that, you know, you’re very much hoping to reach out to women. And fair enough. And obviously there are women like Ricky who adopt viewpoints that aren’t totalitarian compassionate, let’s say. But something’s very strange in higher academia and in our institutions overall. And I think toxic femininity is a very much under discussed phenomenon. So, well, with that, have at it. Because like anything I said that you think is wrong, boy, I’d sure like to hear it. Well, I definitely can only really provide anecdotal to the survey data that you have. But I would definitely say that in my experience, the people that have been most militant in circles of higher education have been my females, my fellow students and also professors as well. But I think that, you know, regardless of whether there’s a, on the mean of women is to lean that way further one way or another. Like we can’t change that aspect of nature. And one thing that I do think that we can change just going into the inevitable future of more women in these institutions is making sure two things. First, I think from the root of education, just as young as kindergarten, we need to emphasize rationality and stop like feeding into kids’ emotions and just saying you’re always right and you’re totally valid and you do you. And if you’re upset about this, or if you feel harmed by this, then we need to empower you to accept that reality. I think that we, like that’s what the Coddling of the American Mind talked about. And I think that that really hijacks women’s psyches more. And I think that we need to, from the start of education, emphasize rationality that emotions are a valid part of the human experience, but that they should not lead your rational common sense kind of mindset. So I think that that’s one thing. And I think the other thing is also making sure that our universities can maintain a balance that’s more healthy than the balance that we have right now, because like I think of Richard Reeves and his research in boys and men falling behind. And so I think it’s a combination of having to make sure that we can foster young men who are able to take up leadership roles in higher education. I think that the education system by and large is fairly feminized and it definitely feeds more into female strengths than male strengths, especially given the fact that girls tend to develop a couple of years earlier than boys. And so I think that that’s another thing that we, maybe it’s as simple as redshirting boys and making sure that we have more young men who will end up in those leadership positions in the end, because having a 60, 40 split, which I think is what the current situation is in higher education right now is not healthy, I don’t think for the future or for society. No one side should be falling behind so dramatically and so quickly over the past couple of decades. So those would be my two things to point to on that front. Okay, so let’s talk about that. So the first question you might ask is, if there is a feminine proclivity to prioritize emotion, why might that be? And I would say there’s two reasons, one which is nested in the other. So women are higher in trait neuroticism, which makes them more prone to feeling negative emotion. They feel it more frequently and more powerfully. And that’s extraordinarily well-documented phenomena, cross-culturally, I don’t think any psychologist who knows the literature would doubt it. And it’s buttressed by the fact that there are sex differences in different forms of psychopathology. So men, for example, are overrepresented in alcoholism and in violent antisocial proclivity, but women are radically overrepresented in depression and anxiety. And that’s also true cross-culturally. So women feel negative emotions more intensely. Now, then you might ask, well, why is that? And the answer seems to be, well, it has something to do with sexual maturation because the differences in temperament aren’t there in childhood, they appear with sexual maturation. And the reason for that, here’s three reasons. One is, well, women are smaller than men at physical maturation. And so they should be less, they should be more anxiety prone in a physical conflict. And that should co-occur with puberty because that’s when the size and strength differential kicks in. Then women are much more sexually vulnerable than men because of course they can get pregnant and they have to bear the cost of that. And then probably more importantly, women have to take primary responsibility for early stage infant care. And the thing about infants is all they have is emotion to communicate. And more importantly, possibly, their emotions have to be regarded as 100% valid and correct, right? Because if you’re a good mother, and I saw this with my wife, who by the way is not particularly agreeable and is very low in neuroticism, she would respond to her infant’s distress like in a microsecond. And that was extremely helpful. And it is the case that because human infants are born so helpless, so neotenous, that they have to be attended to with great care and they have to be treated as if their distress is 100% valid. Now you gotta stop doing that at about nine months of age. And that’s a hard transition for women to make. And so I have this sinking feeling that the default female ethical proclivity is to prioritize emotion, to attribute it to it 100% validity, because that serves infants best and that that bleeds out into the relationships that women establish when they produce large scale social institutions. Now you said, and fair enough, possibly we could prioritize rationality over emotionality and we could start doing that in kindergarten. But I guess the counter position would be, hey, that’s what we were doing. And then the consequence of having women flood into these institutions is that was instantly inverted. And so maybe education can do something about that and maybe not. And it’s not like I’m happy about this or even that I believe it, although it’s a hard argument for me to escape from. I’m certainly not happy about it. I think it’s completely bloody dismal. But unless, see, Greg, you said earlier something really kicked around in 2014, right? Something shifted. And the biggest shift in the last 20 years is definitely on the sex balance in universities. That’s the most stunning transformation. So have at it, Greg, what do you think about all this? Sure. Well, when it comes to whether, feminization of institutions, it’s a fact. Feminization of politics, feminization of corporations or higher education. And we just have to figure out ways to not give up on these institutions because they become feminized. Now I do have some hope there, partially because I think that men have been able to reflect on downsides of masculinity, including things like excessive machismo, which can be very destructive. And I’ve certainly seen that in my own life and among my own friends, that there’s a kind of dangerousness and stupidity that men have as well. Now, as a society gets more feminized, I don’t think it’s gonna take forever for people to start realizing that a more feminized society also has its own unique downsides and for people to, especially women, to push back against some of these. And there certainly are women out there who are pushing against it. I should note that some of the best champions against cancel culture are themselves women. Alice Dreger, Megan Down, Bridget Fetsey. There’s a long list of people who have actually really, J.K. Rowling, who have really stood up against this. So I think that, yeah, I think that by nature, we’re gonna have to look at different genders. And this is actually, of course, the fact that saying this is radioactive, I think is just absolutely ridiculous. Talking about that different genders have different strengths and weaknesses, that’s a fact. But we do have a not bad track record of learning how to recognize our strengths and weaknesses and get past them. And we’re gonna have to, because it’s not like higher ed is going to suddenly have good gender balance immediately. And I try to point out in the book, and a major part of the book is we talk about different kinds of rhetorical fortresses. And what we mean by that are really creative and some not very creative ways of getting out of addressing someone’s actual argument. And we first go through the ones at left and right, and basically all humanity uses, which we call the minefield and the obstacle course. But then when we get to on the left, we go through this thing that we call the perfect rhetorical fortress. It is just this exquisite maze of dodges all over the place of ways to not have to address the person’s argument. And we even go through what we call the, the first one by the way, is labeling someone conservative. And this worked back when I was in law school, I’m embarrassed to admit, and I’m very embarrassed to admit, it worked on me. But essentially if you could label a writer as, yeah, that if you could label a writer as conservative, then suddenly you took them less seriously. And that that was something that I’m embarrassed to admit. So that’s level one, and that’s just ridiculous. That’s the way children argue. But then we take through the entire demographic funnel. And of course you can dismiss someone on the basis of gender, on the basis of sex, on the basis of race, on the basis of et cetera. And we bring you down the demographic funnel to about 0.4% of the entire population of the US. And then say, and by the way, none of that actually mattered because if you have the wrong opinion like J.K. Rowling, or for that matter, black conservatives, you’re still discounted anyway. And one thing that really kind of gave truth to the lies, I talked to every black conservative writer and black moderate that I know. All of them said they’ve been told they’re not really black for having the wrong opinion. So it’s really more of a dogma protection system. So I do think that there is hope that if we basically, even if we can just establish, get back to rules, we all know are better for finding truth and get away from this ridiculous way of arguing that literally has no hope of getting you towards the truth and actually waste time to just get to whatever your opinion is. That if you can focus on constructive ways of arguing, there is still some hope. I would also add that I see some hope in alternative educational methods that are popping up, especially post COVID. And I think part of the problem is the education schools are so politicized in America and so feminized. And also at the same time, you have the vast majority of teachers, especially at younger grades who are women. But I think that- It’s so ideological too, the education. Absolutely. And I think that those schools tap into those instincts and those negative feminine instincts that you’re talking about, Dr. Peterson. And I think that especially post COVID, now that we’re looking at different models and different educational forms and different ways that parents can be involved or positive male role models can be involved in education from the start, I think that that has the upstream effect, hopefully, of counterbalancing some of the excesses that we see in our universities today. I honestly think that mechanisms that allow people to completely sidestep higher education is actually in some cases our best hope for making higher education better. Because right now, you go to Harvard, who knows if you’re… It’s a good guess that you’re probably pretty smart and work pretty hard in high school, but not necessarily. You could also be kind of a major donor or let in on an athletic scholarship. And the average grade at GPA now at Harvard is 3.8, which is like an A plus. So right now, we have at least an opportunity that schools, really prestigious elite schools are no longer very good markers of who are going to be your best hires or who are gonna be your best employees. Because they might be smart, they might not be. You can’t really tell if they learned anything because they all get 3.8s. And they also are likely to come with them, a very difficult to work with kind of idea of, you know, my workplace is oppressive. Meanwhile, if there are ways for hardworking, smart kids to be able to show that they are conscientious, that they’re able to read at a high level, and that they are the hardest working and best and brightest, that can be done actually really inexpensively. And if we start actually looking at some of these alternative ways of educating yourself, it will scare elite colleges like crazy. And I mean, and I tried to practice what I preach here because originally like we had a policy and I didn’t realize this, that we have a policy that we wouldn’t hire non-degree holders. This was pointed out to me when we were considering hiring Ricky, I’m like, oh my God, I’m not practicing what I preach here. We have to get rid of this policy. And I think more places should because there’s gonna be a lot of really super smart people who are smart enough to see that they should opt out of higher ed as it currently exists and try to figure out to show that they’re the best, brightest, hardest working in different ways. We’re gonna launch a new university in November called Peterson Academy. And I’ve spent a lot of time researching objective assessment methods for general cognitive ability and for conscientiousness. And the universities have left that all on the table and it’s of unbelievable economic worth. And my sense is that a system that would actually provide a genuine assessment and accreditation of people based on their intellectual merit and their ability to work hard would be of incalculable economic value and could supplant the universities very rapidly. That is what should happen. I had no idea you’re working on that by the way. Oh yeah, man. I just completely stumbled into that. We got 30 great professors already up. We think we can knock the price of a degree equivalent down to 60 billion or something like that to one side? That’s just insane. Well, that’s it. And I mean, at some point, the university is a sideshow and we already might be at that point. So that could easily be the case. I read this great book decades ago called Systemantics by a man named John Galt. And it’s a great book, very, very short, tongue in cheek in a way, but brilliant. And he has a lot of maxims and axioms. It’s a list of axioms about how you analyze how a system works. And one of his axioms, which I’ve never forgotten and has been unbelievably useful to me as an analytic researcher was, the system does not do what its name says it does. And so that when you approach a system, you have to look at, so if you wanna, for example, figure out what a system does, you look at where it spends its money. So I learned this when I was working for the Alberta government 30 years ago, 40 years ago as a junior analyst. I had to gather statistics on how much the social services branch of the government spent on the actual people to whom they were delivering services. So that would be people receiving welfare who were being subsidized for kindergarten and so on, everything that comes under the rubric of social services. And I found out that there were no stats. The system wasn’t set up to actually monitor its own behavior and that the consulting company that had been hired to produce the report detailing those numbers the year before had just basically made them up and no one could tell any different. Yeah, and then I realized- There were no stats? No, no, no. Nobody had actually looked at how much was, how much the net recipients were receiving. Right, you couldn’t find the data. No, no, and I’m sure that’s still the case. Wow. Oh yes, it’s beyond belief. But it’s no different than most charities. Most charities spend 90% of their money running the charity. Now, I’m not completely cynical about that because most corporations have about a 5% profit margin. So that means they spend 95% of their money running themselves. It’s not that easy to get an enterprise up and running that actually does something other than take care of itself. But when you look at an organization like Harvard and it has that immense storehouse of money, you think, well, why do they care about being a university? What the hell difference does it make? There’s $60 billion sitting there. That’s gotta be the fundamental preoccupation. Now that doesn’t account for why it’s become so insanely politically correct. You know, when I’ve talked to Harvard professors, one from the Kennedy School, which was particularly worrisome given its primary role, let’s say, in determining American domestic and foreign policy, and then one from a different department, who both told me that one from the business school told me, or the Kennedy School, told me flat out that the professors there are terrified to say anything they think because the students will skin them alive. And then in the other department… I heard the same thing from a Kennedy School person last month. Yeah, well, isn’t that wonderful, you know, when it was the preeminent, well, it’s just so absolutely appalling. And so, yeah, well, we’ll see if Harvard responds to any of that. They might, and they might not. It was a great institution when I worked there, you know. I mean, the faculty ran the place, the senior faculty, that is, and the senior faculty were top rate, and the second most important people were the undergraduates, and then likely the junior faculty, then the graduate students, and only then the administration. And the administration actually ran the university. I’ll give you an example. So I had a friend who was a professor there, Patrick Kavanagh, brilliant psychologist investigating vision, and they invited him in, as they did with senior faculty members, with, you know, good bonus and money to set up their lab, and he wanted a shower in his lab. And they said yes. And the reason they said yes was because they were smart, and they thought, well, if we have professors and students who want to stay in their damn lab so long, that they don’t go home, they sleep there, and they need a shower. It’s like, okay, if you want to work 17 hours a day, hey man, we’ll build you a shower. Now, you know, at my last institution, the University of Toronto, that would have never happened, because they would have just thought of that as a luxury, because they weren’t, you know, frankly, that bright. But Harvard was the sort of place, I’m dead serious about that, they talked a lot about excellence, but had no idea whatsoever how to facilitate it, although they were very good at talking about it. And so they put obstacles in the way rather than clearing them out of the way. And so Harvard was great, and I have no idea what the hell’s happened to it in the interim, although, you know, the fact that Pinker felt compelled, and he’s a very reasonable person, and a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. He’s hardly a right wing, you know, some sort of right wing conspiracy theorist, not Steven Pinker, and the fact that he felt compelled to set up a whole organization to facilitate free speech at Harvard is another indication of just exactly how dreadful that place has become. Alumni should stop giving, right? That’s part of the solution as well, especially if they’re entrepreneurial or libertarian. It’s like, don’t give Harvard money. Well, when we talk about this, how maddening it is for me to run a nonprofit, that we defend free speech, you know, off campus as well now. We just relaunched to expand our mission, but we still focus overwhelmingly on higher ed, and that’s always gonna be, you know, essential to what we do. And how often I talk to people who, they’ll complain and complain and complain about the schools, and then they’ll say, it’s like, I’m even reconsidering my gift this year, and I’m like, you’re reconsidering your gift this year? And a lot of times, these are gigantic donors. Yeah, well, people can’t believe it. I mean, this is what I’m seeing in Canada, is that Canadians, in my situation, I’m being pursued by my accrediting board at the moment who wanna take my license or subject me to re-education, which is, you know, just, I just can’t even believe that this is the case, or how they think that’s going to work, possibly, because I’m definitely not currigible by standard re-education techniques. But I think Canadians, when they look at my situation, they have a very hard choice to make, and it’s the same choice that you’re requiring people who are analyzing higher education to make. You had, in the United States, you guys had stellar institutions, man. Those, your Ivy League schools, they were knocking it out of the park for a long time, and the state school system in California was deadly good for a long, long time. And so, it’s a complete bloody catastrophe that those institutions have inverted and are now actually peddling hard in the opposite direction. And it’s not the least bit surprising that people can’t believe it. Like, I’ll tell you a funny story about this. So, I was in the UK a while back, eh? And I was talking some of the members of the House of Lords, and they’re pretty elderly people, generally speaking, and all of them virtually have had stellar careers. And they had all been forced to take DEI training. And I asked them, well, what do you mean forced? Like, you guys are actually only responsible to the Queen, technically. No one can force you to do anything. And they said, well, they told us that we would lose our library privileges, we would lose our cafeteria privileges, and we wouldn’t be able to park if we didn’t take the course. Really, this is actually true! And I thought, well, why didn’t you just tell them to go to hell? And they said, well, you know, we just thought, we’d had a couple of scandals on the sexual front, and we thought maybe it wouldn’t hurt us to brush up a bit on our conduct. But they had no idea, they had no idea whatsoever that there is an entire ideological enterprise underneath this, pushing everything in this insane progressive direction. They had no concept of that whatsoever. And so I think a lot of people who are looking at the universities and the political institutions, they can either think that me and people like me, and that might include you two, unfortunately for you, are just noisy conspiracy theorists screeching in the wilderness, or our major institutions, many of which were world-class and which took hundreds of years to instantiate, have now become virtually irreparably corrupt. Well, it’s obviously a lot easier to write off the bearers of bad news. And unsurprisingly, and in Canada, you really see that, because most of our institutions here, they worked until, well, you say 2014, that’s probably about right. Yeah, no, it is funny watching the various ways you get dismissed talking about this. And one of the funniest ones is when people point out that in my book, Unlearning Liberty, I talked about 2007 as being the worst year I had seen. And that was one way the University of Delaware, brainwashing program that I mentioned before, a crazy case involving someone getting expelled for a flyer, another case in which someone said the epithet went back in class and then criticize, in order to criticize it and was immediately suspended, all things that are day-to-day occurrences now. And people are kind of like, oh, but you’re saying that things have been, you’ve never seen it as bad, but you said that back in 2007. I’m like, because they kept on getting worse every several years. And you always have the danger, of course, of being dismissed as a kook or unpleasable, but it’s particularly difficult when you’re saying like, I’ve been doing this for 22 years. It was already worse than I thought it would be for free speech on campus in 2001. And it’s definitely had peaks and valleys here and there, but the trend line has overwhelmingly been, it just gets worse. So 2014 was a bad year, 2015 was, 2017, giant acceleration in terms to get professors canceled. And then that’s put in the dust by 2020 and 2021. And to get to the DEI stuff, the idea that in the midst of a situation in which there are departments that have literally no conservatives, particularly in elite higher education, where they have record low, all time low, viewpoint diversity among professors, when they have cancel culture, when they have BRTs, when they have a tenure process that screens out for loud people, when they have all of these, what we call the conformity gauntlet in the book, they have all these mechanisms to shut you up from high school, actually from K through 12 on up, including nature, human behavior, saying that they won’t actually publish things that are found to be harmful to groups, which is just like, wow, you can survive all that. And still not, and they decided in addition to this, that they would add DEI statements being required for professors, they needed an additional political litmus test. It’s like, I can’t believe any, only an administrator would look at the world of higher education and see, you know what? There is too much freedom of thought. There’s too much heterogeneity among these professors. We need a mechanism to make it even more rigid. You know, I might also add in terms of being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for pointing out these realities. I think that the people who I’ve seen to be most amenable to these arguments that higher education is just completely turned on its head are young people who don’t remember the model that you both remember of it actually being better at some point in time. When you look at the statistics of faith in higher education with Gen Z, two thirds of current high school students say that they think that they can tread their own educational path. Less than half of current high schoolers say that a college degree is necessary for financial success. 100%, it’s a necessity. And I mean, just the statistics are staggering and who can blame young people for looking at the situation in which people feel like they can’t speak their minds. The millennials are just saddled in debt. We have a system in which a third of American colleges produce graduating classes in which the median graduate makes less than the average high school graduate. Like this system has absolutely been filled with federally backed money and student loans. The generation above us has crippled. The institutions are dysfunctional and no wonder young people who then were told, oh, not only are you going to shell over an arm and a leg to join this university, but now we’re going to do the pandemic. And what NYU did was still charge us, still charged us full tuition for Zoom school. And that was when my family was like, you have our blessing, you get right out of there. No, that was unbelievable. And like, I really feel for you in the most fundamental way. I was a kid going to school in Alberta. Now, Alberta was a rich place at that point. You could make quite a bit of money working in the summer because of the oil industry essentially and elevated salaries. It took me a month’s work to pay my tuition for the year and I could make enough in four months to pay the whole year, no problem. And I worked part-time during school. And then I would also say, I went to a little college when I first graduated from high school and only had about 700 people, Grand Prairie Regional College. And all the professors there loved to teach. And my first year classes were seminars and I had a blast. It was great. And I learned so much. I basically became literate. I knew my professors on a first name basis. I met all sorts of new people. It was great. I was trumpeting the praise of college to everyone far and wide. And it didn’t saddle me with any debt. I graduated debt-free essentially and also with my graduate education because I had a fellowship and lived in Montreal, which was also dirt cheap at the time. And so I was, this is no nostalgia. I had an excellent low cost higher education experience and I had excellent mentoring in particular as a graduate student. It was high quality. The clinical psychology program at McGill was like extremely effective. And you could do research. It was great. And then when I went to Harvard, I had a blast. The students were great. I loved my colleagues. I thought the university ran like a charm. So it’s not just old guys looking back, thinking things were better when we were young. It’s that things have become so corrupt and so expensive that it’s actually, it borders on what’s being done to young people on the higher education front, borders on criminal. The bloody administrators figured out how to pick the future pockets of the students. That’s really what happened. And so they just elevated tuition fees beyond any reasonable norm. And then to add to that, your observation, I couldn’t believe the universities did this. It’s like, well, we’re just gonna teach you on Zoom, which is way worse than a video lecture, like way worse. And we’re gonna charge you full tuition. Mind-boggling. Not to mention, like half the kids in my classes were in completely different time zones. So they’re up at like 3 a.m. and they all have their cameras off as well. It was just, it was an abdication of all of the school’s responsibility on just a fundamental level. At the same time, all of our lives are being torn apart with these wild cancel culture mobs, which we talked earlier about whether social media made cancel culture go awry. I mean, certainly when you not only have social media as the predominant tool of communication going into a pandemic, but then you require that it only be the primary sole communication between people where you no longer have to look at your classmate in the eye and stuff. Like the conversations that I saw on social media, even in Zoom chats during lectures, like it’s just absolutely rampant, out of control, anti-social behavior. And I think before the pandemic, we were all kind of complacent for a while and thinking that cancel culture slowed down after 2016 and people often are very early to champion that it’s over and ended. But then you have one little cultural, we have a cultural hiccup and then we’re right back to square zero and we’re burning the whole house down and tearing people down with it. So I think 2020 in terms of just the experience of being a young person was really life-changing for all of us. It wasn’t great for the olds either. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, hence your center, right, libertarianism. So let me come back and maybe we’ll close with this. Let me come back to one thing you mentioned earlier and this touches on the work that Jonathan and Greg have done and that Jonathan is pursuing. I imagine you guys delve into in your new book too, which by the way, for everyone listening is coming out October 17th. Tell me the title again. The Cancelling of the American Mind. Oh, did you rehearse that? Jinx. Yeah, that was real good. That was real good. Cancelling of the American Mind. Yeah, you mentioned in your, the first discussion that you had when you went off to university that all the girls that you were sitting around had a history of self-harm. And Jonathan has done a very good job. Jonathan Haidt has done a very good job of documenting this cataclysmic rise in self-destructive neuroticism. Hey, here’s something that’s useful to know. So in the NeoPIR Personality Questionnaire, it’s the gold standard for assessing the five dimensions of personality. So, you know, one of the sub facets, one of the sub facets of neuroticism, so that’s the proclivity to experience negative emotion, literally one of the sub facets is self-consciousness. There’s also a very large body of work now that documents the propensity of people who are either depressed or psychotic, so seriously mentally disordered in the miserable, in the miserable direction, are much more likely to use pronouns and terms that are self-referential. So they say I and me far more. And so it’s literally the truth that the more you concentrate on yourself, the more miserable you are. And of course your generation has been taught to identify, to put their own subjective self-identification paramount to do little else but concentrate on their own feeling, and to do little else but to concentrate around their own feelings. Now, in your personal experience, you mentioned what happened to you in that first group at university, what do you feel has been the consequence of this? What do you see happening around you? In terms of the ongoing consequences of growing up in social media and this depressive sort of environment? Well, let’s say for women in particular, also for the relationship between young women and young men. I have to say that it feels as though a lot of my cohort is experiencing kind of like a prolonged adolescence. I don’t know if that’s in part because of the pandemic and our adulthoods launched in just such a bizarre way. But I mean, I would say it’s just, even still now, when I was a teenager, I thought when we get older, we’re not going to be mired in this same sort of like depressive malaise. It’s the only word I can really use to describe how I feel like my generation is just, there’s this cloud over us. And it’s often very negative to being in groups, particularly of young women together. I mean, I remember that night still, it was just heartbreaking to me. It was unbelievable to me that, it was almost like why was I the one person who in this group was not able to share in that experience? I mean, it’s just, it’s so common, it’s so pervasive. And even as we’ve gotten older, I’ve not seen it subside. I don’t have friends that are still cutting themselves like they did when they were teenagers, but there’s still this depressive, like downward pull of my generation. I think it’s harming our interpersonal relationships. I see my, especially my female friends, I think that we are certainly more likely to indulge in like social contagions. And when they sit around together, it just gets even more miserable. I mean, I completely agree with what you’re referencing with the gender relationships. I think that that’s completely awry. I mean, I feel like we’re growing up in an age where, the relationship between male and female is quite recently changed very dramatically, and we’re still trying to get our footing on that. The way that we communicate with each other is completely upended because we’re now completely digitized. The political environment around us is so dysfunctional, and it’s just like, I don’t really know what to say about the state of my generation besides it’s just bleak, and I’m concerned that it doesn’t seem to be getting much better. And somehow we just all seem to be folding in on ourselves. You know, one of the things I’ve observed traveling all over the world now for five years is that, you know, if you try to demoralize young people for 60 years by telling them that their ambitions are pathological and world destroying and that everything’s predicated on power and oppression, you actually do demoralize them, especially when you add to that the vision of a necessarily apocalyptic future brought on by that ambition that can only be rectified by having everyone, especially the poor, give up pretty much everything they own. It’s like, well, we’re pretty much done with that. Oh, and also self-hatred, by the way. Well, and justified. Also massive amounts of despising yourself. Justified self-hatred as a parasite on the surface of the planet. Yeah, I think we’ve pretty much had enough of that. And we do, to end on a positive note, I mean, your situation is instructive. You know, you took these technological tools that are at your disposal and you’re doing that right now. And you decided to say what you had to say. And you know, your future, as far as I can tell from the limited time we spent together, your future seems to be pretty damn bright. And there’s no reason that can’t be the case for everyone. And so it is a very sad situation that we’ve managed to demoralize young people so badly and to split them apart at the level of sexual relationship. And that’s a real catastrophe. But by the same token, and you’d mentioned this earlier, there is an increasing space for people who are willing to stand up and to make their case known to do that with extraordinarily effectiveness using the tools that are at hand. And so maybe that, and you know, I think FIRE is one of the organizations that’s actually pushing for that outcome to be the one that is going to prevail. I hope your book also tilts things in that direction as your previous book did quite successfully. I mean, it’s had a good run and people still talk about it, still sells. And so, and it did draw a lot of attention to what was going on in universities. I know that Jonathan Haidt has got a new book coming out. I don’t know, it’s relative. It’s gotta be in March, right. And you’re right, right. So there’ll be about a six month gap, eh? Yep. Yeah, yeah. Well, so October 17th, tell us the name of the title again. See if you can do it in unison. I’ll give it to you. That was creepy the first time. The canceling of the American mind. Yeah, well, that would be a catastrophe for the world, by the way. I mean, one of the things you bloody Americans have managed with immense, what would you say, panache. And to the benefit of everyone is you managed to create a culture where, for a long time, you aimed at success and you, by and large, you admired it, were not jealous of it. That’s a very, very, very, very difficult thing to pull off. And if it doesn’t happen, then no one gets to be successful. And when no one gets to be successful, then everyone gets to be miserable. And that’s the situation that we increasingly find ourselves in. We don’t want that to prevail. So I hope we don’t cancel the American mind. I hope your book is one of the things that helps everyone wake up to the fact that that might happen. I hope your generation gets a revitalizing vision and good luck with your book, October 17th. Very nice to talk to both of you. Thank you, Dr. Beardison. Thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure. And to everyone watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention. It’s always appreciated. I hope you found this discussion useful and engaging and interesting and educational. You know, all the things that universities used to offer. And so, and this can offer now. Thank you to the film crew here in Florence. And I’m going to talk, continue this conversation for another half an hour on the Daily Wear Plus side. So if you want to join us there, please, you’re more than welcome to do so. Bye bye. Do that, do that, do that. Do that, do that, do that. Do that, do that, do that.