Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
other / recommends
“I talk a lot about class, again, and there’s a great book called Poison Ivy by Evan Mandery, which I recommend to everybody, it’s outrageous, it sounds like me on a rant at Stanford, which was, and I think the stat is elite higher education has more kids from the top 1% than they have from the bottom 50 or 60% depending on the school.”
book / uses
“Francis Fukuyama’s, the book that I’m reading right now, Origins of the Political Order, actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we’re not special in a variety of ways.”
book / built
“I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in 2014. It really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors.”
Claim ledger
26 transcript-backed records
01 / observation
“We talk a lot about cancel culture on campus as well because even though most of the attempts that come from on campus to get people canceled are still from the left, there are a lot of attacks that come from the right, that come from attempts by different organizations.”
02 / belief
“I think you should just to know, because such a touchstone in the way people talk about things, it can get pretty tedious.”
03 / recommendation
“Francis Fukuyama’s, the book that I’m reading right now, Origins of the Political Order, actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we’re not special in a variety of ways.”
04 / recommendation
“I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in 2014. It really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors.”
05 / recommendation
“I talk a lot about class, again, and there’s a great book called Poison Ivy by Evan Mandery, which I recommend to everybody, it’s outrageous, it sounds like me on a rant at Stanford, which was, and I think the stat is elite higher education has more kids from the top 1% than they have from the bottom 50 or 60% depending on the school.”
06 / recommendation
“Yeah. There’s a great new documentary about Floyd Abrams that I really recommend.”
07 / belief
“” You can agree with… It’s not hostile to the other kinds by the way, but the idea that we need more people from the bottom of three quarters of American society in higher education, I think, should be something we could all get around, that the only one that really succeeded was the one that sprouted back exactly the kind of ideology that they thought the readers would like, which is like, okay, there’s no way this couldn’t be a political litmus test.”
08 / belief
“” I have to actually live up to what I believe on this stuff because it’s ridiculous that we have this primitive idea that you can dismiss someone as soon as you claim rightly or wrongly that they’re on the right.”
09 / belief
“Once we were able to get all those elements together, we first did a test run, I think in 2019 about 50.”
10 / belief
“Oh, Harvard. And there are a couple people who have actually been really, I think making a mistake by getting very Harvard sounding, by being like, I’ve had statisticians look at this, and they think your methodology is a joke.”
11 / belief
“I think that the person that I always think of that wasn’t a right-winger that would be like, “Go to hell,” if you made him fill one of these things out, it’s Feynman.”
12 / belief
“Did they do anything to stop it? Because I think a lot of what’s really going on here is the hyper bureaucratization of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically policing speech, more or less.”
13 / belief
“When this got in front of a judge, he was exactly as skeptical of it as we thought he’d be. I think he called this dystopian and it wasn’t a close call.”
14 / belief
“I do think that departments take on momentum when they become a place where you’re like, “Wow, it’d be really unpleasant for me to work in this department if I’m the token conservative,” and I think that takes on a life of its own.”
15 / belief
“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.”
16 / belief
“We point out sometimes how cancel culture can interfere with faith and expertise, so we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts, but at the same time, if you follow that and you follow it mechanically, and I definitely… I think everybody in the US probably has some older uncle who exercises some of these.”
17 / belief
“There were a couple of schools, I think Penn included, where every single attempt, every time a student group objected to that speaker coming, they canceled the speech.”
18 / belief
“I actually, when I was thinking about ways that X could be used to argue towards truth, I wouldn’t want to have it so that everybody would be bound to that. But I think, imagine almost being a stream within X that was truth focused, that agrees to some additional rules on how they would argue.”
19 / belief
“We’ve been giving LA Times some heat on this because it’s like, “Yeah, if you said, in my opinion, they’re right wing,” we would’ve argued back saying, “Well, here’s the following 50,000 examples of us not being,” but when you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with, first of all, there’s no way for us to agree with opinions because we actually have a politically diverse staff who won’t even agree on which opinions are good and what opinions we have.”
20 / preference
“I think that for those of us who really have devoted our lives to freedom of speech, one thing that we are into, whether we know it or not, is epistemology, the study and philosophy of knowledge.”
21 / prediction
“Censorship doesn’t actually change people’s minds and it pushes them in directions that actually, by very solid research, will actually make them more radicalized. So yeah, I think that the attempt to ban hate speech, it doesn’t really protect us from it but it gives the government such a vast weapon to use against us that we will regret giving them.”
22 / evaluation
“I even mentioned in the book there was a time when a gay activist friend, who I think decided to lean to my left, but nonetheless had that pragmatic experience of actually being an activist, said something like, “Well, just because someone’s conservative doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” and I remember feeling scandalized at some level of just being like, “Well, no, it’s not the whole thing.”
23 / evaluation
“America is exceptional in a number of ways, but some of our dynamics are incredibly typical. It’s one of the reasons why when people start reading Thomas Sowell for example, they start getting hooked, because one of the things he does is he does comparative analysis of country’s problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just unique to the United States exist in 75% of the rest of the countries in the world.”
24 / evaluation
“I think sometimes the right gets very excited of the free exercise clause and the Left gets very excited about establishment.”
25 / preference
“I mean, people find it a different thing if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that employer has every right in the world to fire you, I think Americans should still be like, “Well, it’s true.”
26 / prediction
“I thought it was just something that right-wingers complained about. But I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity, and actually, a lot of the research that I got most interested in was done in conjunction with the great Cass Sunstein who writes a lot about group polarization because as… The research on this is very strong that essentially, when you have groups with political diversity, and you can see this actually in judges, for example, it tends to produce reliably more moderate outcomes, whereas groups that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction.”