Transcript from Greg Lukianoff interview: Free Speech, Stoicism, AI and more. A Conversation with Greg Lukianoff Hosted by Jordan Myska Allen for UpTrust.
Here's the interview on YouTube
here's a transcript
Introduction
Jordan: Greg, welcome. Happy to be here. For those who don't know, Greg runs FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In my mind, it's the spiritual successor to the ACLU when the ACLU decided to get political instead of sticking with the mission. I've heard you on a few different podcasts and I really respect the way you are committed. There's a certain kind of integrity that I think you embody—you're like, "Look, this is what we're about. This is what we want to stand for. And we don't really care if you like it or don't like it. We don't care what side of the politics you're on." We're going to do what we think is right. I think we just need more of that. That's why I'm excited to share your thoughts and what you've done. You also have just so much experience in the trenches for decades now.
Greg: Thanks, Jordan. I just wrote something on my Substack, The Eternally Radical Idea, about how I understand why more organizations don't take a principled position on things like freedom of speech. One, you can make a lot more money if you decide to make one side happy or the other—this happens on both the left and the right. Two, it's less exhausting because you have one consistent set of fans and one consistent set of enemies. But if you're going to be principled about it, there are people you really like on the left who hate your guts on half the cases, and some people on the right who you might've thought were allies who turn on you if you're on the opposite side of Trump, for example. It takes a lot of hard work.
I wrote about my mentor, Harvey Silverglate, the co-founder of FIRE—a great old Brooklyn civil libertarian who lives up in Boston now. I told him how exhausting this was, and he told me, "Greg, in this life you can only really care about what ten people in the world think of you. Pick those ten carefully." And I was like, wow—that's the best advice I've ever gotten in my life.
Jordan: I love that. I think about it because a lot of people in the personal growth field have this trope of being individuated, and it's true and good, but I actually do want those ten people. I don't want to care what the eleventh through infinity think, but I really do care—and want to care—about what those ten people think. It matters to be shaped by our relationships and have people hold us accountable.
Greg: Yeah. I met you at Liv Boeree's podcast, for example. And she's someone who, even when I disagree with her, I 100% always take her opinion seriously, because I know she comes at it very honestly and very critically.
Free Speech in the Age of AI
Jordan: So let's dive in. For me, free speech—I grew up in Texas, basically as a civil libertarian, so free speech was always something I took for granted. Obviously something we need to defend and stand by. But even from that point of view, it's a little confusing in the age of AI. Does somebody have a right to clone my face and my voice and then put out fake stuff about me? Does somebody have a right to do it at scale with bots on millions of accounts? What do you think?
Greg: The issues of AI are serious, just the same way the issues of social media are serious, as I talked about in my book with Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. But the civil libertarian's role has got to be to explain to people: letting government actually make those decisions for you will not end the way you think it's going to end. It is a very dangerous path.
The good news is that existing court decisions and existing jurisprudence are going to really help us understand the parameters of AI. Preexisting law actually really helps you. You do have a property interest in your image. If people are trying to deceive someone that it's actually you, that's fraud. If you create something that goes out and does that, you're liable for it. I think we underestimate the sophistication of American law. I run into this all the time with First Amendment law. People are like, "What about someone doing this or that?" And I'm like, that is already banned, ten times on a Sunday.
For other things—if you're just talking about someone having highly offensive opinions—my whole point is epistemological. If you think you're safer from reality for not knowing what people really think, I've got really bad news for you.
Jordan: Yeah. This has been the UpTrust position. Look, you have a right to believe whatever you want. The thing we're making a stand for is the process of how, out of the millions of things that could be put in your feed, who and what gets to decide that. We trust that people sort themselves out, and we set the algorithms up so that you're able to have conversations with people who think differently from you—in the way that's most likely to be heard by you, instead of the current situation where you're most likely to encounter the craziest opposite.
Knowledge Creation, Conspiracy Theories, and Structured Friction
Greg: I love what you're doing, because one thing people don't always understand is why the head of a free speech organization is always talking about knowledge creation. They're not loosely related—they're the same thing. Karl Popper's idea of conjectures and refutations is how we figure out what's not true, which turns out is the only way you actually get to truth. You don't get there directly. You just get to a cloud of probability around what might be true. It's frustrating to people who want more absolute universes, but sorry, that's the best we can do.
But the other thing people really miss—and I'm a big evangelist for this—is that there's an information value in knowing what people think and why. It's not of slight importance; it's of the greatest importance. People will say, "What about conspiracy theories?" I said this in a TED talk—the one where I met Liv, because she ran the whole thing. I said, listen: lizard people who live under the Denver airport do not run the world. But knowing that your future husband thinks they do, or all of your neighbors think they do, or your president thinks they do, is incredibly important information to have. These kinds of misconceptions—and we're all filled with them, we're all going to learn we were filled with misconceptions that we thought were rock-solid truth twenty years from now—this is really important data to have about your world.
But you also need to test it against reality. One thing I've been working on with the Cosmos Institute—and we're going to be doing more at FIRE too—is increasing structured friction against what we think is true. Honestly, I think right now we're sitting on a giant pile of supposed knowledge that is a lot of weak research, a lot of bad scientific habits, a lot of misconceptions, a lot of trees built on rotten roots. But also everything from genuine data falsification to actual misconduct. The Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment—everything tells me that was complete fraud.
And then there's the bias you end up having in highly politically homogeneous situations, where weak research that agrees with what's popular locally on campus gets through, and the stuff that isn't studied in the first place—and when it is, it's subjected to entirely different standards. So what you're doing, and what people like you are doing, I think is so important. Understanding the world as it is—this is a never-ending, arduous process. But it's worth it.
Jordan: Yeah. Psychologically, I think that is super critical, what you just said. To be able to contend with the reality that there are two things that are just unpopular for the psyche, for the ego. One is being in constant relationship with uncertainty and mystery.
Greg: Yes.
Jordan: And the other is that it's not always comfortable.
Greg: Amen.
Race, IQ, and Taboo Research
Jordan: One of the things that typifies what you're saying about knowledge creation—and why it matters—is a really good example for me. It has to do with race and IQ. Here's a topic that, if we can open it up and be honest about it, we find a couple of surprising things that don't fit neatly into the right or left or the racist/anti-racist narrative. My best understanding—I'm not a geneticist—is that there is a very tight correlation between race and IQ, but it changes within a couple of generations. So it's both nature and nurture, mostly nurture. I think actually being able to say, "Look, this is a real thing that shows up in the IQ data, and that's a problem," is an argument for the left: we need to do something structurally, because we messed this up. We made it so that, on average, somebody born from a particular racial background has a leg down. That's now encoded in their genes. But it doesn't have to always be the case.
Greg: Yeah, and talking about these difficult things is really crucial, or else you end up with a distorted picture of the world. I think about the Larry Summers situation at Harvard—it was such a bad picture of things to come. People have all their issues with Larry for different reasons, but the speech he actually gave—which was misrepresented to this day in the media as him saying women are not as smart as men—was actually him asking, "Why are there fewer women in some of these really intensive theoretical physics-type fields?" His primary argument was that the life is extremely unpleasant: it's very isolating, it doesn't really involve interacting with people. Men tend to be more drawn to that. And women oftentimes want to have families, want to be in the world, want to interact with people—which is pretty great, actually, in its own way.
The only point he made that got people angry was the idea that there are higher tail distributions for men—meaning there are higher numbers of men who are very low IQ, and somewhat higher numbers of men who are multiple standard deviations above the mean. That really only starts to matter when you get into the deepest theoretical physics. There's lots of research on this, and we can't pretend there's not. But it got treated as blasphemy. And that just can't be allowed in a situation where you're trying to get to truth. Blasphemy and taboos are the enemy of truth discovery.
Social Pressure, Elites, and the Crisis of Trust
Jordan: How do we deal with that? There are these questions of power—you work on the legal and governmental front. There's a question of what happens when the censor is the algorithm. But then there's this other thing that's more about culture and psychology than a legal thing.
Greg: I'm working on a book tentatively called The Neuroscience of Knowing—but it might eventually be called something like Reality Test. It's with a neuroscientist, and we're basically trying to make the argument that we've underestimated—and this is partially First Amendment people's fault, I'll take blame here—the role of social pressure on distorting what science and research do.
Essentially, if you think you're going to get fired—FIRE fights this all the time, and very successfully, I should stress. People get in trouble for what they say, we come to their defense, and we win an awful lot. But what's much harder to fight is people being afraid they're going to be a pariah if they even do certain kinds of research, especially on the hottest-button issues of the day.
Here's the big miscalculation of American elites. And to be clear, when I say "elites," I basically mean people who are opinion makers, big business people, people in government, people in academia—it doesn't mean they're special or good. I actually think our elites need a lot of work. But one of the things they did—and I watched this in action—was start acting like they were automatically owed deference on their expertise, and that it couldn't be frittered away. Like, the public would always look to the experts and say, "We trust you." But wait a second: when you're highly politically homogeneous, there's good research on this, people don't really trust you. And when you start having situations where professor after professor gets in trouble for asking the wrong questions or being on the wrong side of a hot-button issue—which oftentimes is actually the side of most of the rest of the public—they're never going to trust you again.
What you need to do is create environments where people are insulated from the social backlash to conform with societal taboos, but where they have a reputational interest in their integrity. If you think it's going to ruin your life to say something that might actually be technically, scientifically true, you're probably not going to say it. But if you're in an environment where the whole thing is about truth-seeking, that can change things.
Unfortunately, a lot of the worst activists on campus now don't even believe truth exists. And whenever I hear this argument, I'm like, "Listen, so do you believe everything is true?" And they're like, "Of course I don't believe everything is true. Some things are false." I'm like, "Then you believe in truth—because the only way we know truth is by figuring out what isn't true."
Jordan: If something isn't true, that's a truth.
Greg: That's one of the most important truths you can know. There's an old joke about Edison—when he worked so hard on various filaments for the light bulb and it took him forever to get there. Someone said, "So you've gone this far and learned nothing?" And he said, "No, actually I've learned about 10,000 different filaments that don't work in a light bulb." Very important knowledge to have.
Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Peer Review
Jordan: It's interesting—I feel like we have to evolve our thinking in some way. On the one hand, we have these problems with science that you're talking about, and part of that is we pretend there's a view from nowhere. I love that we've gotten to the moon. I think being able to be objective about stuff matters and is real. But we have to remember that we're always bringing in a subject—there's no way to step outside of the subjective bias. And this is why we need people to push back: let's test these ideas, let's do peer review, let's have people challenge us and say, "You must be wrong about this," and we have to keep engaging that. But if you take that too far, it becomes, "There's no truth."
Greg: Yes.
Jordan: And that's clearly a truth claim, ironically. So that doesn't work.
Greg: A pretty silly truth claim, really. Because otherwise, why are we arguing about anything at all?
Structural Reform: Counter-Institutions, AI, and Education
Greg: I do slightly disagree with what we need to do now. If we had a profession that was really committed to this ethos of truth-seeking—feelings be damned, my taboos could all be wrong—that would be better. But I tend to take lessons from the founding fathers and from people like Montesquieu, who believed in separated, divided government—separation of powers, as it's now called. And people like James Madison, who were really serious about human nature. Listen, we're not going to fix human nature. People are going to be biased. They're going to be sure they're always right about everything until they die. So what you need are structures that actually reduce that problem. You can create them as long as they have different incentives, as long as they're adversarial—not in the sense that they hate each other, but in the sense that they're trying to disprove each other.
Jordan: Competitive in the best way.
Greg: Yeah. You can actually achieve this as long as you create the right structure. Not by what a lot of campus presidents are doing right now—since they realize a lot of people don't trust them, if they're being intellectually honest—which is saying, "Everyone's going to pinky-swear to be better." No. That's not going to work. That's not the way bias works. You're the first people to explain what bias is, but you just never apply it to yourselves, for goodness' sake. The way you get through it is better structure.
Jordan: Yeah. And the incentives really matter. This is what I've been focusing on for the past many years—how do we set up the system and structure of online dialogue to reward attention in the right way? There's nothing wrong with fighting for attention, but right now the way you win is by being outrageous and picking a polarized side and leaning into it as hard as you can. So we're like, "No, we've got to change that." I don't know how to change the incentives with academia. It's really tricky.
Greg: I think there are a couple of things I'm pretty bullish about. One: you need AI designed to comb through as much literature as possible and figure out who's falsifying data, who's plagiarizing—doing all the obvious immoral stuff. Falsified data is actually surprisingly easy to find. You just look for data that follows a pattern that people think in their head looks random, but we're terrible at that. Our brains aren't good at coming up with genuinely random things. So those are easy to flag, at least. Of course, in rare cases you might actually have data that comes out looking like that—but the idea is it would flag it so you could have a person review it.
But then there's stuff where you can have that same AI look for what questions were asked, what things were based on nonsense. There are so many things that are based on—I always go back to Zimbardo. Zimbardo told his students to act like jerks, like they did in Cool Hand Luke. Is that a real experiment, or did you put on a play? He put on a play and then said, "Oh, human nature's terrible—I'm proving that we're awful and we'll immediately become evil as soon as we're given power." That's one of the reasons why it doesn't replicate.
Interestingly, Milgram's experiments actually do replicate. But if we can start finding those rotten branches, you can start figuring out what isn't true. And here's an important thing: we will probably also find hidden gems—pieces of research done by some super-studious scholar back in 1911, where we discover, "Actually, turns out this person was right." You can also do foreign-language research much more easily and compare across languages. So I definitely think AI—and it can't just be one silicon pope, it's got to be multiple designs—needs to be turned on the entire corpus of human knowledge.
But I also think you need institutions—what I call counter-institutions. Take over one of these failing colleges, make it Replication University. Have the entire ethos be: our job is to kick the tires of what we think is true. Using a combination of AI and manually trying to figure out what's true. That's a way where you're not relying on pinky-swears; you're relying on institutions to tear down what isn't true and find what is true.
Jordan: Totally. And there's a way we can culturally support that by just saying, "This is cool. This is a neat thing." There are a lot of pressures—some economic, some cultural. Getting people behind that and saying, "This is a valuable thing" matters.
The Signaling Function of Universities
Greg: Universities also have other things that allow them to be successful. A huge part of it is signaling: if you're already smart and hardworking, all these schools have to do is not ruin you at the end of four years, and you're still going to be smart and hardworking. So congratulations. I don't want to call it a scam, but it sometimes seems a little bit like it. But there's also prestige, which is very important to humans and really underestimated, and networking, which also really matters.
Bryan Caplan wrote a book called The Case Against Education where he also said that being able to complete college tells employers that you're conventional enough—essentially, that you'll sit in your desk and do your job.
Jordan: That's true. And it's really bad for free speech. It's indicative of why we're having these issues and why you guys started and focused on campuses.
Greg: 100%. But what you need is to be able to create something that is rigorous, that is tailored to people's individual learning speed, their weaknesses and strengths—and if you add the networking aspect and the prestige aspect, then you're really talking. I've been trying to think through ways you could do this for the self-starter, because when you look at the data, there's a top 10% of almost every college in the country that I would describe as essentially unstoppable. They will figure out a way to succeed in life, period. And sometimes these same people end up in big debt because of some of these schools. I think that's outrageous. I think there are much better ways to do this—much more seriously, much less politically, without imbuing them with a ton of societal taboos they're not allowed to talk about or disagree with, and much more inexpensively.
Jordan: It's interesting—this just clicked for me using developmental psychology. In a lot of ways, universities traditionally have been like, "Yes, seek knowledge," but really they want to train you to be a socialized conformist—a third-order, in the Kegan developmental psychology model, type of person. What we actually want is for you to be autonomous, self-authoring, self-starting. And we don't really have institutions that support that.
Greg: Yeah. It reminds me very much of Plato's Republic. A lot of people that I really admire tend to take it as Plato literally doing a thought experiment about a perfect society, even if there's lots of satire and wisdom in it. But I'm open to the idea that it's primarily a thought experiment, not really a plan for government. If you do take it seriously, though, there's this idea that you have to have an elite and then you have to lie to the people—you have to tell the myths about them being different races: some for working, some for fighting, some for thinking. It's all this terrible stuff. But Plato thought he was teaching them good things—stuff that would be better for societal harmony and prosperity.
Every society does the same thing. We're terrified of the idea of having elites that think for themselves, and we do a lot of indoctrination. A lot of the elite colleges consciously favor people who emphasize activism in their materials. And I defend activism all day long—but at the same time, it is a certainty mindset. It's not a scholarly "I could be wrong" mindset. And that "I could be wrong" mindset is one of the reasons free speech matters so much. Free speech is necessary no matter what—but it gets infinitely more useful if you have the willingness to take seriously the possibility you might be wrong and actually hear other people out. Then it becomes this incredible innovation for truth-seeking, for connection, for growth.
The Three Great Untruths
Jordan: I went to Rice University, graduated in 2008, so it was still a place where I was confronted with a lot of different ideas.
Greg: I've been impressed with Rice overall.
Jordan: I loved it. It may have changed—it's been almost twenty years now. But I'm curious: I also love what you and Jonathan Haidt did with the three great untruths. It's coming up in my mind because one of the things I unofficially learned at Rice was how to disagree and still be friends. And when I look at these great untruths, I get scared that we're losing that.
Greg: Yeah. The three great untruths were something Jonathan Haidt and I were working on for the book Coddling of the American Mind. We got really deep into intersectionality and a lot of the philosophy behind it, and I said to him—not really jokingly—we're starting to write a book that I don't want to read.
We wanted to really simplify the advice. The theory of the three great untruths was, one, my family advice theory: nobody's going to listen if you say, "Do exactly this thing." What they might listen to is, "Definitely don't do that thing." Negative advice—"Don't do the following"—is what most people are willing to learn. And we looked at things that disagreed with ancient wisdom, particularly Buddhist and Stoic thought, and things that modern psychology says are bad for you or will make you miserable.
The three were:
First: "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker." Terrible advice to give anyone if you want them to have a fully actualized life.
Second: "Always trust your feelings." It sounds so nice, so cute, and it's absolutely terrible advice. Susan David, I think, said it well: your feelings are data, not directions. Oftentimes they're telling you things that are different than you think.
Third: "Life is a battle between good people and evil people." While I actually do believe there is a small subset of humanity—particularly malignant narcissists or people who are sociopaths who are also sadists—that I think you could say are the secular equivalent of evil, most people aren't. And we're acting like everyone who disagrees with us is.
Jordan: Those evil people aren't trying to advance any particular ideology—they're just using whatever party or thought system to get what they need.
Greg: Exactly, yeah. They've got no empathy. And the idea is that we've come to think of the people we disagree with as just being evil, stupid, or probably both. That's a very nice compliment to pay yourself and the era you're living in, but it's also very foolish.
Jordan: I'm really familiar with "always trust your feelings" because, before UpTrust, I ran—and I'm still deeply involved with—the Relatefulness community. In a lot of ways, we've borrowed the best of what we can find from personal growth and transpersonal psychology. And there's a meme that "always listen to your feelings" gets smuggled in. I think it's really innocent—we are not taught how to feel very well or what to do with feelings. It's getting better. I'm a young parent and I get all sorts of parenting books about this. But a lot of us just didn't grow up learning to do anything with feelings, so there's this counter-movement to fully embrace them.
But the way I think it works is that feelings, thoughts, sensations—all of it can lie to us. All of it can be right. It's all data, and we have to learn how to sort through it. It's that uncertainty, that discomfort of there's nothing you can rest on all the time. You have to continuously face reality and be undone.
Greg: Yeah. And think about it in yourself. A lot of times I find myself getting really angry, and it's almost always—not exclusively, but almost always—because I'm angry at myself about something. If I take a deep breath, I'm like, "Oh, that's right, because I feel like I messed something up, and that's why I'm getting really disproportionately mad about this."
But also feelings like jealousy or sadness—when you actually trace them back. And this is something that campus activists really weaponized to go after people they didn't like: "This person's talk is making me uncomfortable. The fact that they're even here on campus is a threat to me"—or usually not to me, it's a threat to some other unnamed group. "So this person can't speak here." When you look at that, one, it's manipulative—it's trying to get to a political goal by making people feel bad. But also, a lot of times, why is it making you feel bad? Do you think this person is metaphysically evil? Do you think people are simple receptacles who'll hear what the person says and become contaminated? When you start examining those thoughts, you often come back to the conclusion that you made this argument because it would be successful, and that's the primary reason you made it.
The Fourth Great Untruth and "High Decoupling"
Jordan: I was curious—you've defended all sorts of people, and probably people that you really didn't like and didn't agree with. Do you ever find yourself having this transformative moment of, "Oh, I'm actually just like them"—being in relationship with someone you're initially disgusted by?
Greg: I don't have that response as much because I don't associate the right of free speech with the content of speech as much. I take it so deeply for granted that sometimes you're defending jerks. But: are you safer for not knowing what they think? Is it better that you can just decide someone's a jerk and shut them up? Is it possible they might even be right about some of the things they're being schmucks about? All of these things I take so deeply for granted.
But I will say one thing that's been genuinely surprising about my career. I'm one of those old school—I remember as a kid, I grew up as a first-generation kid in an immigrant neighborhood, hearing about the fact that in the United States—and a lot of us were people who fled totalitarianism or authoritarianism—there was this group of largely Jewish lawyers so principled that they were willing to defend the free speech rights even of Nazis. And I was like, that's amazing. That's completely unique in history—somebody really is defending the principle, no-means-no.
So I was ready coming in, in 2001, to defend all sorts of unpopular speech and vile opinion. But working on campuses, how often I'm dealing with genuinely sweet people who are like, "I don't understand how anyone got mad at me about this. Where did this come from?" How often it's like: you have intentionally decided that you're going to misunderstand what this person said, because honestly, I think there's a power play going on. How often I'm defending actually nice people as a First Amendment lawyer is—I wouldn't say it's a pleasant surprise, because finding out that even nice, well-meaning people get in trouble a lot is actually terrible. But it is funny how rare it is that I'm like, "This person is just completely vile, but I'll defend them." A lot of people I'm defending were just talking the way every other American talks everywhere except on campus—and that's what got them canceled.
Jordan: There's an attitude you have that I really respect and love. You somehow don't fall into this drama triangle of "there's a victim that I have to save and an oppressor." How do you stay so on-mission without getting caught in these cycles?
Greg: I almost want to say—my dad's Russian, my mom's ethnically Irish. There's a lot of great literature that comes out of those two cultures. Also, I feel like novels are a wonderful way of teaching that things are not that simple. And most of my life, when I get in an argument—I used to get in lots of arguments in law school, unsurprisingly. My best friend actually put it together. He said, "Your argument is almost always the same. You're almost always arguing two things: one, you don't really know that, and two, it's not that simple." They were always epistemically humble things.
But I was bullied as a kid, and after I got sick of being bullied, I started fighting. And I remember telling my dad this very proudly. I described myself as an anti-bully who would beat up bullies. And my father, who fled the Soviets, said, "Is that not just another kind of bully?" And I was like, he's totally right.
So the idea that the bully is always a terrible person—I have known so many people who could be very cruel to others who were the ones suffering the most. And I've known some people who think of themselves as victims every day and are some of the most privileged people I've ever met. But at the same time, everybody is complex, everybody is deep. I do think there are malignant narcissists and a special subcategory of people you've got to be really careful about. But most of us aren't that. Embracing the complexity of what most human beings are—knowing that they generally mean well but they're also selfish—doesn't leave a lot of room for a simplistic story of heroes and villains where you just happen to be a hero.
Jordan: I also love what I'm hearing. You did a follow-up book?
Greg: I did a follow-up book called The Canceling of the American Mind with Rikki Schlott, this absolutely brilliant Gen Z young woman. I wanted to write it with her because she's amazing, but also because since so much of The Coddling of the American Mind is about Gen Z, it was really helpful to work with one—instead of just two Gen Xers writing about Gen Z.
In that, we actually added a fourth great untruth, which sounds a lot like the third but isn't exactly the same: "All bad people only have bad opinions." Because if you look at the way we argue on social media, so much of it is trying to make this moral pollution argument—Pamela Paresky, I think, coined this term—the idea that if you're even close to someone who is bad, everything you say can then be discounted. Or if you've done bad things yourself. Well, first of all, everyone's done bad things. That's one of the nice insights from Christianity—and I'm an atheist, but I take my religion very seriously—that to a degree we're all fallen.
The main argument is: I'm not going to address the substance of what this person is saying; I'm going to point out that they're a bad person and you shouldn't listen to them. In the TED talk I referenced earlier, I asked the entire audience to look at the person to their left, look them in their beautiful eyes, and say, "Just because I hate your guts doesn't mean you're wrong." They all did it, cracking up. But these things are not related. Werner von Braun was incredibly important—he got us to the moon, but he was a Nazi. He wasn't wrong on rocket propulsion. And Thomas Malthus was by all reports a very sweet and thoughtful man, but his ideas on overpopulation, being oversimplified, were used to justify some of the greatest crimes against humanity of the twentieth century.
Jordan: The fourth great untruth—there's a term from my Rationalist Bay Area friends: "high decoupling." You can decouple the theories or ideas of Malthus or von Braun from the character. I think it's important for thinking and epistemics.
Greg: Absolutely. As far as people I think were awful but weren't totally wrong: Jean-Jacques Rousseau—horrible person. Genuinely horrible, probably a malignant narcissist. I think he was wrong about the general will—I don't want to live in a society that's a dictatorship of the majority. However, his ideas on how to raise children? There's a lot of positive stuff in there, which I take very seriously.
Karl Marx—horrible person. The more you learn about him, how racist he was, how nasty, how bad of a scholar he was in lots of ways. My inclination is to dismiss him. But I still go back and read him. I disagree with him for getting all sorts of other things wrong, but I think he was addressing real problems at a real time.
And by the way, decoupling also helps you enjoy art. Some of the best songs were written by or sung by horrible people. Don't ruin the art by thinking too much about the artist.
Historical Figures, Self-Hatred, and Human Complexity
Jordan: It's really unhelpful to constantly have to—it's helpful to look at our historical figures and say, "Look, this person had slaves. That sucks. Be careful of that." But it's also helpful to be like, "They did some amazing stuff anyway," because it gives us a sense that we can do amazing things even though we've messed up a bunch of stuff.
Greg: Yeah. Even though we're doing things right now that people will think we're horrible for doing, and we don't even necessarily know what those things are. As Liv Boeree pointed out, factory farming is probably one of those things we'll look back on and be like, "Ugh, that's a pretty horrible thing." And a lot of us participate in it.
Jordan: We might be doing really horrible things to animals and still be helping push forward society in a beautiful way. And we're not miserable people who should be flagellating ourselves in public because of our failings.
Greg: I think a lot about this desire to hate ourselves. My mentor Harvey Silverglate, when I mentioned this, had no idea what I was talking about—"Who feels that way?" But if you look at history, I'm always amazed that Christianity, which had this very high ascetic quality—the Gnostics in particular had this sense that the body is evil, very literally self-hating—beat out the much more fun polytheism of Rome. That says a lot about human nature: there's some subset of humanity that, if you tell them awful things about themselves and everyone around them, they'll be like, "Yeah, that's totally right. I am an awful person."
We've put up with a kind of popular misanthropy. My friend Alyssa Rosenberg, who used to work for the Washington Post, talked about how often she would get responses that were basically, "Yeah, the planet would be much better if humans didn't exist." And it's like—that's a wonderful luxury belief you have there. I actually happen to be partial to us weird little animals.
Jordan: Me too. I really hope we make it. I think about this with my kids. There are sometimes people who say, "Why would you have kids?" On one hand, the population's declining. Some extreme environmentalists—I have a friend, a climbing buddy, who says, "I don't want to have kids because I don't want to have a negative impact on the world." And I'm like, man—if we all died today, I would be so glad that we existed. I'd be so glad my kids existed, even for two and a half years. And they would be glad they existed too.
Greg: Yeah. There was a great line in Erika Christakis's book The Importance of Being Little—the most important thing is the kid that's right in front of you. Not exactly how she put it, but the idea that there's a tendency to think so much about what they will be as opposed to what they are right now. I didn't really understand that until I had kids. And then it was just like, all that matters right now with my little boys is today and how wonderful it is just to be with them today. That's the part that matters, because it's the part that's really happening.
I named them Maxwell and Benjamin—for James Clerk Maxwell and Benjamin Franklin, because I wanted to name them after scientists.
Jordan: Do they like science now?
Greg: Very much. The younger boy Maxwell—he's got a little bit of a lisp, but he's also this 90th-percentile giant, natural-linebacker kid. It's always nice to hear him talk about James Clerk Maxwell. They love who they're named for.
The Roots of Self-Hatred and Self-Criticism
Jordan: What gives rise to self-hatred? What is it about human nature that makes us so susceptible to wanting to shame ourselves?
Greg: I've thought a fair amount about this. I went back and read the entire Bible a couple of years ago—even the parts that are exhaustively explaining how long the vestments have to be and all of that stuff—because I wanted to get a sense of the whole thing. And it was super interesting, I'm really glad I did it.
When it comes to the roots of self-hatred, when I used to write fiction, I had one character say—and this is a little gross—"Don't let your life be driven by the instincts that make cats bury their own shit." Essentially, there's this sense of the sacred and the contaminated that is very deep. Jonathan Haidt writes about this too—the idea of sacredness and purity. I think some of it comes from an instinct to make sure you're not in a literally contaminated space, a kind of almost-OCD-like drive to purify that causes purification rituals. It's related to that instinct, but it's also sometimes about a gender difference. The neuroscientist I'm writing the book with wrote about how a particular kind of personality disorder in men manifests in violent outbursts, whereas she thinks the same condition in women tends to internalize, turning into a more powerful self-hatred rather than an outwardly directed hatred.
I think there are personality types that are much more prone to it. And somehow it wins a certain amount of credibility, because if you're self-critical—and you should be—a lot of people respond with, "Okay, this person isn't just arrogant, they don't always just think they're right." That wins some credibility. But sometimes self-hatred can look like merely being self-critical.
Jordan: Yeah. I've been noticing this personally in the past few weeks. I have a very strong habit of signaling a kind of humility, which I think is sometimes very innocent and unconscious. But it's actually over-signaling. I think I often have more confidence than I'm putting out, and it's because of this social benefit I get from being humble. I don't like that about myself. I'd like to be more honest and straightforward.
Greg: I feel like for me that's always such a complicated feeling, because I got it so beaten into my head that the worst thing you could be was arrogant. So much so that the only way to deal with that was to internalize it as a kind of self-hatred—which I'm getting over, over time. But it can depend on the day. The more pleasant life is to actually be self-critical but not self-hating. That's what you want to reach. And once you're there, having that kind of cool, humble confidence is probably the best of all worlds.
Stoicism: Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Practical Wisdom
Jordan: Connecting the self-hatred to neuroticism, and then back to Stoicism and Buddhism to some extent—it actually gives me some insight. There's something about self-hatred that gives us a sense of control over an environment that is wildly chaotic.
Greg: Yep.
Jordan: It's a false control, because to a certain extent the self-criticism is the right instinct: what I can control is myself. I can learn self-discipline, keep my impulses at bay. And we eventually get to this Stoic thing of: the only thing I really have control over is the way I view things, how I make sense of this.
Greg: Yeah. My first introduction to actually reading the Stoics—and this might annoy some of your listeners—was Marcus Aurelius. And when I read Meditations, I was like, "This guy's depressed." I know from personal experience what depression sounds like.
I only started reading Seneca's Letters to a Young Man maybe five or ten years ago. And I still put them on my headphones when I'm walking around having a hard time, because it's so filled with wisdom and wit. The idea that someone's jokes from the Roman Empire are still funny—that's Seneca. And he was also George Washington's favorite, I found out. But that version of Stoicism I really loved. I also loved that he had the humility to constantly be talking about Epicurus.
Jordan: I came to appreciate the Epicureans because of reading Seneca. It's so cool.
Greg: Yeah. And the fact that he was like, "Whatever, I don't think my stuff is always right"—and I'm like, you're awesome.
Jordan: Talk about that humble confidence. On the one hand, he's constantly referencing his rivals. On the other hand, he called his shot—he told Lucilius, "People are going to know your name in thousands of years because of my letters." And I'm reading this two thousand years later.
Greg: What's arrogant—but also accurate. Turned out he was right.
Jordan: I was lucky. I didn't read Meditations until after I'd read Seneca, so I was like, yeah, he's depressed, but it's cool in these certain ways.
Greg: Definitely interesting, particularly for an emperor to be like that. But I found it didn't make me want to run out and be Stoic. Whereas some of the other Stoic ways of looking at the world I find so incredibly useful.
What Can People Do? Contacting FIRE and Standing Up for Free Speech
Jordan: I know we're going to come to an end pretty soon, but I could keep jamming forever. I'm curious: for people in personal situations—somebody told me a story recently about a local journalist who was writing a story about a sports team, and the sports team's owner had influence at the local paper, so they pulled her story. What do people do to stand up for free speech when they're in these kinds of personal situations of censorship?
Greg: FIRE's not that small of an organization anymore. Our budget this year is $35 million. We're about 130 to 140 employees. So we do a lot now. One thing we do that's not as well appreciated, because it's more regional, is we defend people in these really seemingly small cases that are more local. That's right, but it also helps convey to people that free speech isn't just about what's going on in Silicon Valley or Washington, D.C. It's about you and your right to tell people you think the local police department is corrupt or the local fire station is spending too much money.
The most horrifying case I've possibly seen in my entire career: I was horrified by the murder of Charlie Kirk. I actually went and spoke at the place he was killed, about a month later, just to talk about it. But unfortunately, in response to the murder, there was this backlash against anybody who said anything even slightly insensitive about it.
There was this one kind of ex-cop in Tennessee—a local liberal gadfly type. When an email went out saying, "We're all getting together to do a vigil for Charlie Kirk," he sent back a meme of when President Trump said about a school shooting, "We have to get over it," basically saying, "This is my thoughts about this." Was it sensitive? No. Is it using an actual quote to criticize the president, in a way that's immemorial? Certainly he has the right to do it.
He was put in jail for 37 days. They made this complete BS argument that because this was about a school shooting and because there was a local high school with a similar name, somehow that was threatening to that school—even though people at that school said they didn't feel threatened. You have to go back to the 1920s to find an example of someone punished that harshly for speech that's clearly protected.
Back to your question about what to do: contact FIRE. I know it sounds maybe too simple, but we're very effective at helping people, even in smaller cases. I'm trying to expand our tech work, because I do think there are plenty of valid criticisms of AI and social media, but I'm afraid that in our moment of skepticism about these technologies, people are going to push for massive government regulation—like, why not create a new Federal Communications Commission that only deals with AI? And I'm like, because it would be a disaster. That's why.
One of the easiest things people can do—even when their own free speech rights aren't threatened—is what particularly prominent people can do: when someone they really disagree with is getting in trouble for their speech, make a point of saying, "I support this person's right to free speech." Period. Unapologetically. That's the stuff that can really win people over.
Jordan: That's a really great point. We know this in business—there's a term for it: psychological safety. You're so much better off if your team can disagree with each other. If that makes for a better company, wouldn't it make for a better nation?
Greg: Absolutely. It bums me out a little bit that they use the word "safety" in that, because safety gets used as a rationale for so much censorship. But I like that Adam Grant made the point that it means the exact opposite of what it would mean in the rest of society: safe to be wrong, safe to disagree with the boss, safe to experiment, safe to do devil's advocacy. That's the stuff that makes free speech more useful. But unfortunately, on campus it too often gets used as code for "doesn't hurt anyone's tummy."
Jordan: Yeah, it's an unfortunate choice of words, but the concept is in the right direction. Reach out to FIRE. And the other thing I'm wondering—you mentioned this at the Liv Boeree podcast as well—the U.S. is a case-law system, so these small cases that seem like not a big deal actually set a really important precedent for everything going forward.
Greg: Absolutely. I remember getting a criticism of the ridiculous number of cases we cite in The Canceling of the American Mind—someone saying, "Those are just anecdotes." I'm like, anecdotes are secondhand stories without documentation. Don't call them anecdotes. These are highly documented. And you know what highly documented situations of violations of rights are called when they end up in court? They're called precedent.
How many stories seemed like little stupid things that nobody thought would be a big deal? One of the dumbest of all time—which resulted in a bad decision—was this 18-year-old kid who showed up at the passing of the Olympic torch when it went through Alaska with a sign that said, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." And I remember hearing that and thinking, "Okay, that's actually pretty funny." But the school claimed it was an official high school event—which was a stretch—and the kid got punished. He wasn't even a kid; he was 18, he wasn't at school, he was on public property.
When this went in front of the Supreme Court, it resulted in one of the most incoherent decisions ever, where they were trying to parse through what "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" meant. In the opinion, they have things like, "It could mean 'bong hits' [are good] for Jesus, or 'do bong hits' for Jesus..." And I'm like, no—there's a really simple word for this. It's a joke. It's a pretty funny joke. Don't take it that seriously.
But there are so many other examples. For high school free speech—the case of someone wanting to wear a black armband in protest of the Vietnam War, and whether you can do that kind of peaceful protest. The answer was yes. That was a small-town thing that became precedent for the rest of the country. So don't always assume that your little case is really all that little.
Closing
Jordan: That feels so good to hear. Thank you. Anything else you want to say before we close out?
Greg: Always. We're looking for principled people. Since we make both the right and the left mad, we have donors who love it when we fight wokeness but really don't like when we take on MAGA, and we have people who love it when we take on MAGA but really don't like when we take on the left. That means the only kind of people who support FIRE are people who really get it and are really principled. So if you are one of those people, if you know those kinds of people, we really do need your support—because we have to keep growing, because the threat to free speech is actually getting greater, unfortunately.
Jordan: Awesome. Literally when we get off this call, I'm going to go start a monthly donation.
Greg: Thank you so much. It means the world to me, Jordan.
Jordan: I really love what you're doing. I appreciate getting to know you better. This was a blast—so much overlap with Stoicism, with all of it.
Greg: Real pleasure. Stay in touch.
Jordan: Likewise. Beautiful.
Show Notes & References
People Mentioned
Greg Lukianoff — Attorney, author, and President & CEO of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). Co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind and The Canceling of the American Mind. Website: thefire.org
Harvey Silverglate — Civil liberties attorney and co-founder of FIRE (alongside Alan Charles Kors in 1999). Co-author of The Shadow University.
Jonathan Haidt — Social psychologist at NYU Stern, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind with Lukianoff, and author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Rikki Schlott — Journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind (2023) with Greg Lukianoff.
Liv Boeree — Former professional poker player and science communicator. Hosts the Win-Win podcast.
Nadine Strossen — Former president of the ACLU (served right after the Skokie case), now a Senior Fellow at FIRE. Co-author of The War on Words (2025) with Lukianoff.
Ira Glasser — Former executive director of the ACLU (1978–2001); subject of the documentary Mighty Ira. Serves on FIRE's advisory council.
Nico Perrino — Executive Vice President of FIRE; co-directed and produced the documentary Mighty Ira (2020).
Larry Summers — Economist, former President of Harvard University (2001–2006), former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Known for his 2005 remarks on gender disparities in STEM.
Susan David — Psychologist at Harvard Medical School, author of Emotional Agility (2016). Credited with the phrase "feelings are data, not directions."
Bryan Caplan — Economist at George Mason University, author of The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (2018).
Adam Grant — Organizational psychologist at Wharton, author of Think Again and others. Referenced for his discussion of psychological safety.
Pamela Paresky — Psychologist and writer; credited here with the concept of "moral pollution" in public discourse.
Erika Christakis — Early childhood educator and author of The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups (2016).
Alyssa Rosenberg — Journalist, formerly at The Washington Post, referenced in discussion of popular misanthropy.
Karl Popper — Philosopher of science, known for the concept of falsifiability and Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963).
Montesquieu — Enlightenment philosopher, author of The Spirit of the Laws (1748), influential in the theory of separation of powers.
James Madison — Fourth President of the United States, principal author of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Philip Zimbardo — Psychologist who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), which has faced extensive criticism for methodological flaws and accusations of coaching participants.
Stanley Milgram — Social psychologist known for his obedience experiments (1961–1963), which have been replicated in subsequent studies.
Robert Kegan — Developmental psychologist at Harvard, known for his model of adult psychological development outlined in The Evolving Self (1982) and In Over Our Heads (1994). Referenced here for his concept of "self-authoring" (fourth order of consciousness) versus "socialized" (third order).
Seneca — Roman Stoic philosopher (c. 4 BC–AD 65), known for Letters to Lucilius (also called Moral Letters to Lucilius or Letters from a Stoic).
Marcus Aurelius — Roman emperor (AD 161–180) and Stoic philosopher, author of Meditations.
Werner von Braun — German-American rocket engineer; instrumental in NASA's Apollo program, and a former member of the Nazi Party.
Thomas Malthus — English economist and clergyman, known for An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and the "Malthusian trap" theory of population growth.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Genevan philosopher, author of Émile, or On Education (1762) and The Social Contract (1762).
Karl Marx — German philosopher and economist, author of Das Kapital and co-author of The Communist Manifesto.
Books Referenced
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure — Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt (2018, Penguin Press)
The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All — Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott (2023, Simon & Schuster)
The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money — Bryan Caplan (2018, Princeton University Press)
The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups — Erika Christakis (2016, Penguin)
Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life — Susan David (2016, Avery)
The Republic — Plato (c. 375 BC)
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge — Karl Popper (1963)
Émile, or On Education — Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
Letters to Lucilius (Moral Letters to Lucilius) — Seneca (c. AD 65)
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius (c. AD 170–180)
Films & Media
Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story (2020) — Documentary profiling Ira Glasser's career at the ACLU, directed by Nico Perrino, Chris Maltby, and Aaron Reese. Available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and other streaming platforms.
Can We Take a Joke? (2015) — Documentary about comedy and free speech, executive produced by Greg Lukianoff.
Greg Lukianoff's TED Talk (2025) — On "mob censorship" and why free speech is the best check on power.
The Eternally Radical Idea — Greg Lukianoff's Substack newsletter.
Key Concepts & Topics
FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) — Founded in 1999 by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate. Defends free speech and individual rights, with a focus on campuses and expanding into broader civil liberties work. Budget of ~$35 million; ~130–140 employees. Website: thefire.org
The Three Great Untruths — From The Coddling of the American Mind: (1) "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker," (2) "Always trust your feelings," (3) "Life is a battle between good people and evil people."
The Fourth Great Untruth — From The Canceling of the American Mind: "All bad people only have bad opinions" — the fallacy of discounting someone's arguments based on their moral character rather than engaging with the substance.
High Decoupling — A Rationalist community concept: the ability to evaluate ideas independently of the moral character of the person expressing them.
Conjectures and Refutations (Popper) — The epistemological model that knowledge grows by proposing bold conjectures and then attempting to refute them; we approach truth not directly, but by eliminating what is false.
Stanford Prison Experiment — Philip Zimbardo's 1971 experiment, widely criticized for methodological problems. Recent investigations suggest participants were coached to behave abusively, undermining the study's claims about human nature.
Milgram Obedience Experiments — Stanley Milgram's 1961–1963 experiments demonstrating people's willingness to obey authority figures even when instructed to administer harm. Unlike the Stanford Prison Experiment, subsequent replications have largely supported the original findings.
Skokie Case (1977–78) — The ACLU's defense of a neo-Nazi group's right to march in Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors. The case nearly bankrupted the ACLU but became a landmark example of principled free-speech defense. Frank Collin led the neo-Nazi group; David Goldberger was lead ACLU attorney.
Morse v. Frederick ("Bong Hits 4 Jesus") — 2007 Supreme Court case. Joseph Frederick, an 18-year-old student, displayed a banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" at a school-supervised event. The Court ruled 5–4 that schools may restrict student speech that can be interpreted as promoting illegal drug use—a decision widely criticized as incoherent.
Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) — Landmark Supreme Court case establishing that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Arose from students wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War.
Kegan's Developmental Model — Robert Kegan's framework of adult psychological development. "Third order" consciousness involves being shaped by external expectations and social roles (the "socialized mind"); "fourth order" involves self-authorship—constructing one's own identity, values, and worldview.
Psychological Safety — A concept popularized by Amy Edmondson and discussed by Adam Grant, referring to an environment where people feel safe to take interpersonal risks, disagree, and make mistakes without fear of punishment. In the workplace, it means the freedom to be wrong and to challenge authority—distinct from the campus use of "safety" to mean protection from uncomfortable ideas.
The Cosmos Institute — An organization working on truth-seeking and structured friction against received knowledge, referenced by Lukianoff.
UpTrust — Jordan Myska Allen's trust-based social media platform, designed to algorithmically prioritize credibility and nuance over engagement bait.
Relatefulness — A community and practice co-founded by Jordan Myska Allen, focused on relational depth and contemplative approaches to human connection.
Some questions inspired by this post on UpTrust.