145. Greg Lukianoff — How Free is Free Speech?

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this wide ranging conversation focused on Greg Lukianoff’s co-authored (with Jonathan Haidt) book The Coddling of the American Mind, and his new documentary film Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story, about the free speech champion Ira Glassner, who headed the ACLU for decades, he and Shermer discuss:

the state of free speech today,
how coddled today’s students are,
the data on rates of depression and anxiety in students today,
possible causes of the coddling of the American mind: social media, screen time, culture of safetyism, culture of victimhood, helicopter parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play,
cancel culture and its effect on self-censorship and silencing speech,
current rates of deplatforming and canceling in academia,
the polarization of politics,
when self-censorship is healthy,
default to truth theory vs. default to skepticism theory,
How gullible are we, really?
how to combat the negative influencers on social media,
a brief history of free speech in the 20^th and 21^th centuries,
why people in power want to silence dissenters (even free speech advocates in power), and
the value of viewpoint diversity.

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. He specializes in free speech and First Amendment issues in higher education. He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech. Read about his new film: Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before I introduce today's guest, I want to tell you about our sponsor, the Great Courses.com.
0:05.4	The Great Courses is of course the teaching company's Great Courses, of which I've been a long time fan and user.
0:10.9	And now they have an app, you just download the free up on your phone you tap on it and you go to whatever
0:16.0	course you're interested in listening to I just this is my latest one I've been going
0:21.2	through native peoples of North America. This is lecture number 17 I'm up to now by Daniel Cobb, PhD.
0:28.0	The beautiful thing about the Great Courses Plus app is that you can skip around with lectures. You don't have to just kind of grind
0:33.8	through lecture after a lecture for an entire course if you decide you don't want
0:37.3	to listen to the whole thing. This particular course is 24 lectures and so like most courses I probably won't listen to every single lecture but this one I've been thinking about because of the whole conversation
0:49.2	national conversation on reparations for African Americans and if we go that route then Native Americans
0:55.6	certainly have a case to be made and this history is really disturbing
1:00.0	it's difficult to listen to because it's reality of what happened here in North America
1:06.4	So I think it's the kind of thing where knowledge is good before we make political decisions
1:11.6	But anyway that's not the point of this.
1:13.2	I just want to encourage you to log on to the Great Courses Plus.com
1:19.0	slash Salon, and then you get a free trial as a listener to my podcast the great courses
1:24.9	plus dot com slash salon and you get a free trial it's great so give it a shot
1:29.8	give it a try when you're driving working out doing chores walking
1:34.1	hiking whatever it's a great way to consume content all right thanks for
1:38.0	listening my guest today
1:40.0	Greg Lucianof with his book, The Coddling of the American Mind,
1:44.8	how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.
1:50.6	I hosted Jonathan Hite on the podcast when the book first came out and so it was great to have his co-author Greg Lucianov whose work I've followed for many years because he's one of the premier free speech defendants of our generation and his work at
	...

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