Greg Lukianoff

And the thing that really helped me more than anything else was confessing to my staff about

that I, you know, books take a lot of energy.

So I knew they didn't want to hear that not only was this taking a lot of the boss's time, this was making him depressed and anxious.

But when I finally told the leadership of my staff, you know, people that even though I try to maintain a lot of distance from, I love very, very much, it made such a difference, you know, because I could be open about that.

And the other thing was, have you heard this conference dialogue before?

Oh, yes.

It's like an invite only thing.

It's Oren Hoffman runs it.

It intentionally tries to get people over the political spectrum to come together and have off the record conversations about big issues.

And it was nice to be in a room where liberal, conservative, none of the above were all like, oh, thank God someone's taking on cancel culture.

And where it felt like maybe this won't be the disaster for me and my family that I was starting to be afraid of.

It would be that taking this stuff on might actually have a happy ending.

Thinking that your cause is social justice in many cases can lead people to think, I can be as cruel as I want in pursuit of this.

When a lot of times it's just a way to sort of vent some aggression on a person that you think of only as an abstraction.

Well, that's one of the things that we do in the book to really kind of address people who still try to claim this isn't real is we just quote – we quote the Pope.

We quote Obama.

We quote James Carville.

We quote Taylor Swift on cancel culture.

Yeah.

And Taylor Swift's quote is essentially about how behind all of this, when it gets particularly nasty, there's this very clear kill yourself kind of undercurrent to it.