Welcome to the Politics Guys interview, conversations about American politics, economics, history, and culture with authors and researchers from across the ideological spectrum.

I'm Michael Barronowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is Greg Lukianna, attorney, New York Times bestselling author, and president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual

Rights in Education, or Fire. He's the author of Unlearning Liberty, Campus Censorship, and the

End of American Debate, Freedom from Speech, and Fire's Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Most

recently, he co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind, how good intentions

and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure, along with Jonathan Hight, which we'll

be discussing today on the show. Greg, looking on up, welcome to the show. Thanks for much

for having me. You know, I thought we could start maybe with you telling us a little bit about

how this book came about and why you and Jonathan Hike decided to write it. Well, you know,

I always, whenever I ask this question, I always want to ask like, how real should I be about

it? I think I decided that I actually be, you know, very blunt about it. I'd been

working in a First Amendment law, defending free speech on college campuses, soon shortly after

I graduated from law school in 2001. And I became president of fire around 2006.

And for my first two years of fighting in these fights and being, you know, isolated from my family in Philadelphia,

even though I'd always struggled with depression, I fell into a really terrifyingly bad one that left me, as I talk about in detail that I've never actually revealed to anyone, let alone my wife or family, of how bad it was in the book. I had that experience of typing

sort of like what got me, you know, what got me committed for a couple of days, you know,

with that kind of weird sort of self-deception that this is just between me and you,

computer.

But I, so, you know, I really hit rock bottom.

And the thing that helped me out of it, the thing that was why, even though I still get, you know,

feel depressions coming on, I can fight them back, is cognitive behavioral therapy.

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