Greg Lukianoff: belief

Transcript context

…From a free speech culture perspective, how to be a good parent. Yeah. I think the first quality you should be cultivating in your children if you want to have a free speech culture is curiosity and an awareness of the vastness that will always be unknown. And getting my kids excited about the idea that’s like, “We’re going to spend our whole lives learning about stuff and it’s fast and exciting and endless. And we’ll never make a big dent in it, but the journey will be amazing.” But only fools think they know everything and sometimes, dangerous fools at that. So giving the sense of intellectual humility early on. Also, saying things that actually do sound old-fashioned. I say things to my kids like, “Listen, if you enjoy study and work,” both things that I very much enjoy, I do for fun, ” your life is going to feel great and it’s going to feel easy.” So some of those old-fashioned virtues are things I try to preach. Counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time, playing, having time that are not intermediated experiences is really important. And little things like I talk about in the book about when my kids are watching something that’s scary. And I’m not talking about zombie movies, I’m talking about a cartoon that has a scary moment and saying that they want to turn the TV off. And I talk to them and I say, “Listen, I’m going to sit next to you and we’re going to finish this show and I want you to tell me what you think of this afterwards.” And I sat next to my sons and by the end of it, every single time when I asked them, “Was that as scary as you thought it was going to be?” and they was like, “No, daddy. That was fine,” and I’m like, “That’s one of the great lessons in life. The fear that you don’t go through becomes much bigger in your head than actually simply facing it.” That’s one of the reasons why I’m fighting back against this culture. I’d love for all of our kids to be able to grow up in an environment where people give you grace and accept the fact that sometimes people are going to say things that piss you off, take seriously the possibility you might be wrong, and be curious. Well, I have hope that the thing you mentioned which is because so much of young people’s stuff is on the internet that they’re going to give each other a break. Then, everybody is cancel worthy.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.