The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:30:26 · Scott Galloway
[00:30:26] S0: There's been a lot of controversy on campus about certain speakers being where they face pushback, whether it was Ben Shapiro, Cal State LA, and UC Berkeley, Hassan Piker was cut from a University of Washington speaker series. And Fire Zone data reported 184 de platforming attempts of college speakers in 2025, with 172 counting this year. What really struck me though was that according to your data, it looks like more attempts now are coming from the right to squelch free speech than the left. I'm used to people in Birkenstocks going crazy when some right wing person shows up. The best way to hurt them is indifference, is to ignore them, but that's neither here nor there. Why do you think there's been a shift from, you know, the left trying to get, you know, block certain speakers and move to the right?
00:31:16 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:31:16] S1: Well, both things are still happening. It's just a question of degree. And since Trump came into office, there's been... You know, politicians have felt empowered to really go after higher education, not on the basis of the idea of real meaningful reform in the name of search for truth, but political, score settling. It... It's become this very sort of vain foolhardy sort of project to just kind of give to the left what they what they perceived they were taking for a really long time, which is no way to fix anything. So so in the past, certainly in 2025, it was the first time we'd ever seen, like, the number one constituency for censorship on campus actually be, at least in our twenty twenty six years of existence, be politicians themselves. Now that's not historically unprecedented, but it's certainly not something we've seen in the last, you know, at least most of the last fifty years. I feel like we have failed as faculty
00:32:15 · Scott Galloway
[00:32:15] S0: to convince the students that the whole point of you being here is for us to offend your sensibilities. It's so strange that in this place where you're supposed to build a safe space to push the limits, that kids quite frankly are just such snowflakes. Our job is to create warriors, not wokesters. And I see it in class where a kid immediately identifies himself as being bit right in a fan of Trump. Mhmm. And he is ostracized. He's immediately seen as morally deficient. And I'm trying to figure out where did we go wrong. Like, how did this happen? It's one thing to disagree with someone, but to take it on as this person, I don't feel safe around this person. You know, that bullshit. Where did we come off the tracks here?
00:33:08 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:33:08] S1: Yeah. I mean, that's a long story. And Coddling of the American Mind, the book that I I I wrote with, Jonathan Haidt, you know, goes into depth a lot about where where this came from. One part that I feel like is underappreciated is the refusal to create expectations of discomfort, but also to actually do do something even worse, which is to kind of implant this this sort of idea that if you feel terribly about something, if you feel panicked, if you feel passionate about it, if you feel harmed by it, that there's something inherently noble about that, that that that essentially your heart is doing the hard work that your... Maybe your hands should actually be doing. You know, that's at the core of coddling of the American mind. I do think that part of it came from an idea that if we make students miserable enough, if we make them panicked enough about the future to see the world as a as a binary of good versus evil, that we make them overgeneralize in the name of social justice, that all of these things will somehow magically equal social progress as opposed to a cohort of miserable students who feel like they're always under attack because they're being told they're always under attack, but who are not great for free speech, academic freedom, or for their own mental well-being.
00:34:26 · Scott Galloway, Greg Lukianoff
[00:34:26] S0: I have a 19 and a 16 year old under the auspices of being a good dad without boring them and coming across as too serious. What would you want them to read or watch? What piece of media do you think does a great job, a thoughtful almost sort of sublime way of helping them understand the power and the importance of free speech? What would that what would that one piece of literature or media be? [00:34:50] S1: I'm just gonna say what immediately popped into my head. I wasn't thinking you're gonna ask about books. I would say, I think we'd be living in a much healthier country if at least a year before college students went out and had a real job for a year. Think that... [00:35:06] S0: Gap year. [00:35:06] S1: Yeah. But not just a party [00:35:08] S0: gap Okay. Mandatory national service. I'm interrupting you. [00:35:12] S1: That would be, that's one of those things where I wouldn't want to be imposed, but I would love it to be preferred by colleges [00:35:18] S0: that essentially- Encourage national service. Yeah. Make it so attractive they couldn't resist.
00:35:18 · Scott Galloway, Greg Lukianoff
[00:35:18] S0: that essentially- Encourage national service. Yeah. Make it so attractive they couldn't resist. [00:35:24] S1: Yeah. That essentially like we prefer people who have gone out and worked, you know, before being admitted admitted to the school or national service or something. And how does that teach free speech? It's partially because we are in these class silos to a large degree, and I do think that's a major problem. I I I think that I came in so much thicker skinned than a lot of the other kids, that I went to, know, undergrad and law school with, partially because I've been working in a restaurant since I was 11 with with people from all over the place. It's so empowering. It... It's it's the... It it fights depression. It fights that anxiety. It fights that snowflake ness. But it also teaches you about the give and take and the wide range of opinions outside of the weird elite that goes to Vassar.