Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Ryan Bourne, Cato's R. Evan Shaff Chair for the public understanding of economics.

Today we want to introduce you to a new Cato colleague here.

Ricky Schlot is a New York Post columnist and the co-author of the book The Canceling of the American Mind.

She writes about free speech, civil liberties, internet culture and Gen Z.

And she's also built a reputation for having long-form conversations

that try to cut across political tribalism.

Now, some of you may have met Ricky before.

She's done a few Cato events around the country in the past few months.

But she now has an official title here. She's a Cato Media Fellow. So, Ricky Schlaught, welcome to the podcast and welcome to the Cato Institute. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to both be here and part of Cato now. Now, there's so much we could discuss today. New York City politics, the state of the media environment, what the

hell is wrong with Gen Z. But I want to start with you. You've become one of those people

others now turn to when they want to understand young people, free speech, and what's going on

with the internet. So how did you end up becoming that person? Completely by accident during the COVID-19 pandemic. I kind of like to say that my

libertarian awakening occurred when I was watching surfers get tickets for surfing on their own

thousand dollar fines. But I was a college kid at that point in time and I decided that

full tuition for Zoom

school made no sense.

So I started first with just a leave of absence and submitting some op-eds here and there,

and ended up getting my foot in the door with the New York Post with a really generous editor

who saw that perhaps there was potential, but I wasn't quite sure what I was doing.

And she had the patience to actually curate that.

But some of my first pieces were about the state of free speech at NYU, where I was going

to school and how I felt that it was quite stifling and unhealthy.

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