#733 - Rikki Schlott - Is Cancel Culture Actually Getting Worse?

29:58People would write the first half of the alphabet down the right side of the room and the second half down the left side of the room and they'd try and kiss one person from each letter of the alphabet. Like this is classic mid -naughty's American pie style like university behavior. But one of the questions asked a friend was like, where did that sort of Larry British sort of student culture go? And he said as soon as the smartphone came around, And no one could make mistakes on a night out without fearing that it would define them for the rest of their life. That you have, you know, you kiss some person that's like uncool or embarrassing or whatever.

30:34You do it in 2006. People laugh about it and then it's either forgotten about or you can deny it outright and do whatever. But in the age of the internet, it's, you know, cemented online for the rest of time. And it defines you. Absolutely. I mean, and I think that the impacts and young people are so much more profound than we've even really started to talk about. I mean, I'm 23 and I'm just at like the beginning of just burgeoning into adulthood and being the first cohort of people who are able to reflect back on what it means to have a smartphone when you're 10 and to have the threat of anything popping up at any point in time.

31:16And any one born post 2002 tells you that they don't have something on savory somewhere, that they would rather not have come back to haunt them, is absolutely lying to you. I think we're ultimately going to have a ceasefire on this front because it's going to get so bad. We're never gonna have a politician who can survive op -o research for the rest of time. Now that we've been so overly online, and I think the sad thing to me is that young people will demonstrably know this. Like, the amount of concern that I've heard from my peers and from people reaching out to me about their own children.

31:53And also the polling, if you ask generations what their view is of cancel culture, positive or negative, the most positive view is millennials and then it gets more negative as you get older. Except for Gen Z completely reverses that trend. So even though millennials have the most positive view of cancel culture, Gen Z has the most negative view, even more negative than boomers, because we grew up with it. Like we grew up looking behind our shoulders, but the problem is it's a very small squeaky wheel minority of our generation that is at the helm of these cancel campaigns and will like Twitter shame their boss.

32:28But the rest of us have not been given the restorative kind of free speech oriented, classical liberal set of values to supplant cancel culture. we just know we don't like this, but we're not quite sure how to fix it or put her finger on it or stop attacking people at hominem and living in the realm of ideas. So I think there's a tremendous amount of anxiety and unrest and being a young person who grows up unable to make social faux pas as everyone does when they're an adolescent or, you know, have their Marxist phase and then realize a couple months later that that wasn't for them, but that's part of growing up and exploring.

33:09And, you know, I think young people just really have not been taught that the values required to interact in the intellectual world with the epistemic humility of realizing that you might be wrong at any point in time and that anyone that you talk to knows something that you don't know, and that your opinions aren't part of your personhood and extending that same generosity and grace to somebody who you might be disagreeing with. And I think that's really profound. And I also just took it back to what you were saying on the university front. I dropped out of NYU with the 4 .0 GPA, not because I have some sort of disdain for education and learning, but the really sad reality at that point in time in such an ideologically homogenous environment was that I had to drop out for my love of learning and defensive it and it's not because I don't believe in the importance of education but I think in its current form it is so distorted and these institutions of higher education have just appointed themselves the sole gatekeepers to success in plate society and have had absolutely no market pressure placed upon them and it's going to require more young people proving that And it's not the only pathway to success to actually, I think, shake society from its complacency and challenge these institutions to actually be better and to serve people who are their patrons.

34:38Talk to me about the relationship between free speech laws and free speech culture. Yeah, I think that this is one of the most interesting insights from the book where, you know, There are three countries with extremely robust free speech laws on the books, which aside from the US, almost two, if you were to read them, you might think that it's the first amendment and they are Turkey, North Korea, and Russia. So having a free speech law on the books means absolutely nothing if your culture and practice is not divided by them. Whereas on the flip side, one of the most vibrant points in intellectual history was the French enlightenment at a point in time where there was absolutely no legal protection for free speech on the books at all but so ever.

35:22But because there was a salon culture and a culture in which elites were interested in the free exchange of ideas and leaning into an intellectual society, free speech was able to flourish. And I think that it's really important to realize that merely having the first amendment on the books or merely having its equivalent on the books in another country is not adequate to actually fostering a culture that operates in a free speech way. And there's a great quote by a judge named Learned Hand, which does not really sound like a real name to me. But, and I'll bungle it, but roughly. Roughly, the quote is that, you know, liberty lives in the hearts and minds of every man and woman, and if it lies there, it doesn't need a court or a law to protect it, but if it dies there, no court or lock and save it.

36:13And I think that we're seeing this slow and subtle cultural shift away from free speech norms that all of a sudden like throw social media in the mix and you can burn any heretic at the stake. And it'll happen like that because it's it's really hard to grow up in the West today and realize just how crazy it is that we don't burn our heretics at the stake in the scheme of human history. We live in like the teeny tiniest little sliver of time where we actually don't do that, but all of a sudden now we're doing it in the digital sphere because that is mankind's instinct. And so just having along the books doesn't really matter unless everyone buys in and actually abides by the cultural code that it is really required.

37:00There was a really interesting insight I saw from the New York Post article that you guys did where it was talking about how free speech culture and ideological diversity can make the world more chaotic. And because most humans don't like this, a good contingent of those people will happily trade their freedom for increased predictability. That if you're exposed to new opinions and ideas that don't conform with you, you have to confront the fact that maybe you're wrong. And accepting that you are wrong to the ego is tantamount to destruction. It's almost an invalidation of you entirely. Oh my god, if I'm wrong about this, what else might I be wrong about and this denial of ever having to admit that we're wrong, especially in a world where everything that we do and say is permanently cemented on the internet for all of the time for people to scrutinize.

37:50I thought that was very interesting and I think from my perspective that seems to be right. A more chaotic world with a multiplicity of ideological viewpoints and diversity of opinion is unsettling in many ways to people and they will happily trade the accuracy and the truthfulness and the freedom that they have in order to increase the reliability and predictability that they have about the world going forward. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's made even worse by the fact that polarization has, I think, made politics so much more tied to individual identity than it has been in the past as well.

38:28So an assault on your ideas feels like an assault on you as a person. And I think also to the point of chaos, I mean, if we look back historically, we're in the very beginning ages of what it means to now have billions of people in the cultural conversation, thanks to social media, it's been roughly a decade since it's been massly adopted or mass adopted. And if we look back historically, I think the best analogy is the invention of the printing press. And when the printing press was invented, Henry the eighth was trying to license who can print a pamphlet. And there were hundreds of years of religious wars as a result.

39:09And that was a really chaotic and uncomfortable time where I think it's actually pretty understandable why the powers that be and the people that were beholden to them wanted to squash out all the new voices that entered the cultural conversation and challenged the norms. And we look back and we think, well, that was a great thing. Unliteracy rates rose and that created the enlightenment. And the world is we know it. But we're still in that early kind of chaos days of social media. And I think the fact that things haven't gotten worse than they are at the moment is actually kind of amazing. And a testament to the fact that there are still some people who do believe in free speech and the wisdom of the populace.

39:49But I think like the Twitter files just go to demonstrate how threatening new voices in a cultural conversation can be to the social fabric and to the kind of levers of society. What do you say to the people who claim this isn't cancellation culture, this is consequence culture, this is just people being brought to account for having heinous, reprehensible views? I mean, I think that the swath of views that have become cancelable offenses has grown so considerably. I mean, we just have like case after case in our book of, there's one woman, Carol Hoven, who was a Harvard professor who got her bed one on Fox News, and she's lovely, and she's tactful, and she's careful with her words, and she went on Fox News to discuss some issue of gender.

40:38She wrote the book T about testosterone, and she extremely tactfully said, you know, we can respect people's gender identity and use their pronouns, however, we have to also acknowledge the fact that biological sex is real and on a fundamental level. And for that, she was effectively squeezed out of her job to the point where, and I know you know this story, but to the point where she told us in an interview for the book that she was actually suicidal for the first time in her life. And so if the group of cancelable offenses is now including acknowledging biological reality as a professor in your own field.

41:17Or, you know, going all the way down to now middle schoolers, who's parents call me constantly and reach out to me or email me to say that their seventh grader has now been canceled for something, which I mean, in seventh grade that just shouldn't even, you shouldn't even be politically aware. You're worried about boys and acne and not politics at that point in time. And just this sheer number as well, but if it really were about accountability culture, I think the truth that a lot of people who have witnessed these cancel mobs form can attest to is the fact that apologies do not make it better.

41:54It's not about saying, oh, I did tweet that 10 years ago, but I completely disagree with it now and I apologize for offending you because that doesn't fix it. It's not actually about making people account for any error that they might have made or any misstep, it's about being an example of them and shaming them. Yeah, it's having your morality stand on the shoulders of someone that you can easily accuse. I mean, the Carol thing, we went for breakfast, me, her, uh, William Costello, a couple of months ago, and uh, that woman cries more easily than anyone I've ever met. She's like the most empathetic.

42:29I think she cried six times on Rogan, like four times on my shirt. She's just such a touchy, fairly lovely person that's really delicately trying to move through this. She's a really perfect example of whatever we want to call it like soft mechanisms of cancellation because at no point did anyone come to her and say you can't teach anymore, but every teaching assistant that she was supposed to be working with refused to help in her class. So if you don't have a teaching assistant like how are you going to, you can't do your class. And I think she had one of the most popular, is that quite a well attended class at Harvard.

43:04So it's like, okay, well, I guess I'm kind of like on the bench for now. And then when you're on the bench for that so long, you just end up kind of falling away. So and it's so interesting to think that the apology doesn't make any difference because if that was what you were after, then the apology would fix the problem. It's like, hey, that's interesting. How interesting. I didn't know about this particular statistic about this thing because no one from an ideologically pure, purity spiral, spiral driven world can believe that someone would be sufficiently epistemically humble to actually ever be able to say that.

43:42It's like, no, no, no, no, this is you. Your identity and your opinions and your ideology are one and the same. You know, we saw this with Rogan, the variety of cancellations that you went through a couple of years ago. And what people do, I thought, is really formative. people try and say, here is an individual instance or a collection of instances that may seem small here, but we know that they are representative of this big iceberg that lies below the surface. This is the smoking gun that tells you that this person is the bigoted racist, transphobic, homophobic, whatever thing that we always knew that they were and this is this is finally the crack.

44:28The this facade that they've created. So all right, well, what you had with Joe and what, you know, increasingly I would like to think people will see with other online content creators or writers or anybody. All right, well, that might be true, but I also have 5 ,000 hours of him talking to people on podcasts and it didn't come up then. So he's either the best liar and deflector of his bigoted racist views in history, or that's unrepresentative overall. And I don't know, it seems to me like, I would like to think people give what used to be called the benefit of the doubt, but I don't know, that seems to be increasingly rano.

45:09Yeah, I mean, I think that also to that point, the benefit of the doubt is often given to anybody's like ideological friends, but then it's precisely the opposite if they just don't like someone instinctively. And I think, you know, it's been instructive to see, like, Rogan survive cancellation attempts and bury waste to make a career out of it, basically, with the free press and the awesome stuff that she's doing there. Or Shepal and seeing Netflix finally actually toughen up and say no to their employees that we're trying to wreak havoc over a single joke. I mean, I do think that there have been examples of cancellation going so far that there is a band of people who are willing to come around and actually support you and champion you as a result.

45:57And I think that that Gerberg and the perfect example of that. But I, you know, I worry that those are only people who are in a powerful enough position when it first happens to them that people know. And there's so many just, like, unheard stories or even, I think that one of the problems is on a college campus it's much easier to quantify how often this is happening because people often have legal recourse but in the private spheres it's impossible for us to tally how many people have been canceled not only because some people will just shut down and never say anything but also because there are so many examples of people who will talk to you off the record about it but they've signed an NDA because that was their severance agreement with whatever company they were squeezed out of.

46:42And, you know, Jennifer say who left Levi's, she refused to sign an NDA and turned away a million dollars of payout to because she had criticized COVID policies and school lockdowns, which apparently means that you can no longer be an executive at Levi's. But, you know, she refused to sign an NDA and we only know that that even happened because she she had the spine to actually say, no, I want to maintain my intellectual autonomy. But yeah, I mean, I think that there's so many high -profile tear downs that thankfully people are starting to land on their feet and support one another. But you know, I fear that the 2024 election will be another way of all of the same stuff.

47:24And I am not feeling great about the future of cancel culture in the near future. So Oh, yeah. What are your projections? Give me the weather report moving forward for the storm front of cancellation. Yeah, I think I am hugely concerned about 2024 as is my co -author. I especially considering that we have such polarizing options on both sides of the aisle. I am I am very concerned that 2020 and 2016 were just like little trial runs for how polarized and how ad hominum were about to get at least in the US. And I think that the ripple effects of American politics have really felt across at least the English speaking world and often just the cultural, western general.

48:15So I am not feeling fabulous about the near future. I'm extremely nervous as we seem to be kind of just powering ahead towards an election between two historically unpopular incumbents. So I'm not feeling great. But what are your predictions on that front? Do you think that the social unrest is going to continue? It's a difficult one. I would guess yes, because the memes of production for creating trends online and going completely super viral have become more sophisticated. Like, this is one of the things that's interesting. People look at the algorithms on social media as if they are the things that give us the content, but they also train the content creators.

49:03So if you think that the memes that came out in 2016 were sophisticated and built to limbically hijack you, and if you thought that the things that happened in 2020 were, oh my god, like look at all of this, if wait until 2024, each time that it comes back around, there is a new iteration of people and sometimes AI now creating stuff that is even more compelling, that's even more outrage inducing. So I don't know, I'm in Texas, so I feel a little bit like insulated from anything sort of too crazy, even being in Austin, people call it a blue dot in a red ocean. I've never seen any of the blue dots here.

49:45It I don't know. It's so right to say that most of the people that survived their cancellations were people who already had tons of momentum, you know, Chappelle, Rogan, JK Rowling, etc. And there's definitely a part of some sides of the cancel mob picking fights with people that they know can't fully defend themselves. You know, like Carol Hoeven again is a good example of that. Like she's so kind. It was obviously going to emotionally impact her. If you're someone that even knows, as even seen five minutes of her on a podcast, you know that This isn't someone that's gonna come out of the gate swinging like Dave Portnoy, right?

50:24It's someone who's going to be very Impacted by this and also doesn't have a million person Twitter where they can wrangle a huge audience of people that come around and also like What's the lesson to take away from that? Everybody should have a huge mailing list of email address Everyone should build up a massive sub stack as like a great blessing case of cancellation thing. That's not realistic. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, and I think that I think that we're only seeing just the beginning of how profound that's going to get. I worry about 24. I worry about every single moment of cultural unrest that we have going forward and less.

51:07We actually return to the values that make a diverse democracy possible. I think that that's pretty much impossible and we will end up going towards a Marxist sort of divide and conquer situation, which makes enemies of everyone unless we actually can start looking at viewpoints and and living in the realm of ideas and the realm of of personhood and two separate planes. means. And so I think until we really have a cultural reckoning and it gets really ugly, which I think it's coming in the near future, I don't think that that things will get much better. But I'm curious, so Austin is not as blue as they say it is.

51:48I don't know if it's me just spending time with lots of bigoted, reprehensible people, like neurodivergent degenerates, but they seem to be, they all seem to be like, you relatively free speech, relatively open to new ideas. I mean, yeah, I mean, see, I mean, there's like some stuff stop having kids .org does like this goth parade every year down Broadway. There was some stuff to do with like pro lifey things, but that's not because it's just a variety of opinions being shown via street protest. What else have I seen? There was a pro -natalism conference here two weeks ago. There's a lot of different stuff going on.

52:32It doesn't seem to be very heavily controlled. Thinking about that, though, the complete unlikeliness of people building up some huge online platform so that they can then deploy it to protect themselves in case of being cancelled, what are the potential solutions to this? Beyond make it worse so everyone hates it more and then it gets better. are there any more fluffy solutions than that? Any less apocalyptic ones? Of course. Yeah, so the final section of her book is solutions oriented. And I think a lot of it is just throwing everything at the wall and hoping that something sticks. But we think that parenting is a large portion of it, especially with young people.

53:15And that a lot of the sense that words can be violence and wound you are the result of helicopter parenting. and a just completely abandonment of the sort of ideas of anti -fragility that prior generations were raised with. Gen Z was very coddled and protected and made to be anxious and feel as though they're feeble and endangered by the world around them. And my co -author, his previous book is the Coddling of the American Mind, which concentrated quite a lot on parenting and its impact on politics and Gen Z. And so we think that there's a lot about leading by example as a parent and raising kids who will not be counselors and understand their own vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of their friends.

54:00And I do find a tremendous amount of hope in the fact that young people are so put off by cancel culture that if they were just given the positive restorative framework to fight back against it and kind of a social pact that would be mutually protective that there's some hope there going forward. We also think that divesting away from the, the elite university system, just being the only way that people end up in positions of power in society is a healthy thing. And that people who are hiring should consider kids coming from large state schools and kids from different backgrounds or people who didn't finish college or people who went down a different path in that we shouldn't just have this funnel of kids coming from consistently the most elite schools or the schools but the worst attitudes towards free speech, which I think it's no surprise that we're seeing absolute chaos erupting on campuses like Harvard right now because if you abdicate free speech and you suppress students and send bad ideas underground for decades on end, all of a sudden in a moment of cultural unrest they're going to explode and that's precisely what we're seeing right now.

55:10And so we believe that opening our minds to alternative education systems and not allowing these schools that seem to breed lead cancel culture and cancelers to take the reins of society consistently with every graduating class that's a positive. And also even people who are running corporations can I think take one note out of Netflix's book after the Dave Chappelle controversy where they said, you know, if you can't tolerate the fact that we are going to publish viewpoint set, you disagree with as a platform for ideas and expression, then you can leave. I think that's that was a remarkably unique and brave stance to take and actually coin -based at that.

55:55A while ago, their CEO, Brian Armstrong, was like, we're just not going to make any institutional statements, and if that's a problem for you, you can go. And like 10 % of their employee -based did actually go. But like, that's not the 10 % of people that you want to work for you. So I think on the level of corporations we can, I think there are a lot of, we hear frequently Greg and I both from corporate leaders who are terrified of their like 23 year old hires and that's just such a bizarre power imbalance and it's very fixable if you just create a free speech culture from the get go. But I also think weirdly after October 7th there's a lot of people rediscovering the importance of institutional neutrality and of free speech and free expression.

56:44And you know, I think it's a really revealing moment for schools to suddenly say, oh, you know, we had a statement about Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal and BLM and all these completely irrelevant things to the interworkings of a university, but we can't make a statement on this. Of course, I think it's it's shocking that this is the moment that they finally discovered that institutions are full of people with viewpoints and do not have viewpoints themselves But maybe there's a silver lining that this moment of just absolute chaos in institutions where free speech was not valued for so long where they're suddenly hiding behind the valence of free speech.

57:21Like maybe this is where we actually buy in and we realize that we're all vulnerable in a world where a liberalism is allowed to reign supreme. What would you say is a piece of advice to someone who is threatened with cancellation or is going through it? Have you got to do and not to do checklist for those people? Yeah, I think obviously it's so dependent on the level of supportive people around you, but I think the most important thing for everyone who is concerned about cancel culture to say now as an individual before anything happens to them or anyone that they know is that if someone that you know and care about and like is attacked, you commit that you will stand up for them.

58:05It's not that I agree with their viewpoint, but they're a good person, and tearing them down is not the right thing to do. And I think that if we afford that to other people, and hopefully expect that in return from them, if the mob comes for us, that's one way to fight back. I think the power of someone else standing up for you is really profound, and unfortunately, cancel culture thrives because everyone else is scared to stick their neck out there and like when I was writing about free speech at NYU for the New York Post, which is not really the most popular thing to do surprisingly. You know, I have so many people messaging me and saying, oh, I completely support you and I completely agree with you, but just don't tell anyone that we have this conversation.

58:46And that's got to stop and we have to short circuit this. But on the front of if you actually are targeted with a cancel culture attempt, it's funny. This is actually a point where my co -author and I have a little bit of disagreement where he says never apologize under any circumstances period. And I don't fully agree with that. I think if it's something that you would apologize to a friend for or something that you genuinely didn't mean, I don't think you apologize and try to placate the individual who's treating you unfairly. But if you genuinely don't agree with the tweet that you sent when you were 14 because who does, then I think you say that's not me.

59:25But I don't think that you ever try to placate the mob. That's the number one thing is if someone is attacking you unfairly, you don't try to respond to that with undue rationality, or ever compromise and apologize for something that you don't actually feel any remorse for, for sure. Ricky Schlatt, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They'll only keep up to date with the things that you're doing. Where should they go on the internet? My Twitter is just my name, Ricky Schlatt and Ricky Schlatt .com. And I think probably by the time this comes out, I'll be launching a new podcast under Bill Marzum, Brella Club Random.

1:00:01So that will be forthcoming in 2024. Very cool. I enjoyed the prospect of you joining me in the muck and the mire of the podcasting world. I'm super excited to. I've been learning from you I'm doing all my homework, waking up to modern wisdom. So thank you. My pleasure. I really appreciate you. Thank you for today.