Speaker 1: There's plenty of heated debate about free speech nowadays, and
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, almost everyone claims to
Speaker 1: be in favor of free speech, but they often mean
Speaker 1: speech from their side and not whatever those dangerous grifters
Speaker 1: are on the other side, whatever they want to say. Now,
Speaker 1: from the point of view of the brain, why do
Speaker 1: I think that free speech is worth defending? And what
Speaker 1: does this have to do with internal models or Internet indecency,
Speaker 1: or printing presses, or college campuses or John Stuart mill
Speaker 1: or cultures of honor or Robinson Crusoe or cancel culture.
Speaker 2: Why literature matters?
Speaker 1: And why free speech makes everyone safer. Welcome to Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
Speaker 1: author at Stanford, and in.
Speaker 2: These episodes we seek to.
Speaker 3: Understand why and how our lives look.
Speaker 1: The way they do. Today, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: free speech with lawyer and passionate advocate Greg Lukianov. I'm
Speaker 1: a defender of free speech, but I'm not coming at
Speaker 1: this from the point of view of a political principle. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm asserting this as a neuroscientist. And here is my argument.
Speaker 1: As you've heard me say on this podcast before. The
Speaker 1: brain operates by building an internal model of the world,
Speaker 1: which is a compressed version of reality that it uses
Speaker 1: to make predictions and help us navigate. But the thing
Speaker 1: that's it's not always easy to see is that our
Speaker 1: internal models are extremely limited. Your model is stitched together
Speaker 1: from the very specific details of your past experience and
Speaker 1: the influence of your hometown and the circles you spin in,
Speaker 1: and the country you happen to live in, and the
Speaker 1: era you happen to live in, and the context of
Speaker 1: the culture you happen to be embedded in. That's how
Speaker 1: you arrive at your version of what is true and inviolable. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing that's always struck me is so interesting is
Speaker 1: why it's so hard for us to think of other
Speaker 1: points of view on any argument. It's difficult because we
Speaker 1: don't even know what to look for. We're just not
Speaker 1: smart enough most of the time to think outside the
Speaker 1: borders of our own model.
Speaker 2: And this is where free speech comes in.
Speaker 1: My interest in free speech each is as illumination of
Speaker 1: ideas that live outside of your visual field. When someone
Speaker 1: expresses an idea that you hadn't considered, even one that
Speaker 1: you might find uncomfortable. They're shining a light into a
Speaker 1: corner of the map that you didn't even know was there.
Speaker 1: You didn't realize anything was missing from your map. Other
Speaker 1: people's opinions offer new pieces of the puzzle to your model.
Speaker 1: Sometimes those are corrections, sometimes just considerations of other points
Speaker 1: of view. Sometimes you'll dismiss those out of hand, and
Speaker 1: that's fine, But at least that territory now sits on
Speaker 1: your internal map while it wasn't even there before. Without
Speaker 1: that input, your brain is just going to continue making
Speaker 1: its predictions based on partial data. We are all blind
Speaker 1: to our own blind spots. So from this neuroscience angle,
Speaker 1: the important thing about free speech isn't just being allowed
Speaker 1: to say things. It's about the critical importance of hearing things.
Speaker 1: This is how minds stretch beyond their parochial borders. Hearing
Speaker 1: new ideas is how we push, even just by a
Speaker 1: few inches, the boundaries of our mental models, and slowly, iteratively,
Speaker 1: we start seeing other territory that we didn't know was there.
Speaker 1: If I were going to use a totally different metaphor,
Speaker 1: I might just say that friction polishes us. It's critically
Speaker 1: important to be exposed to ideas that can stretch us.
Speaker 1: Lots of the ideas that we're exposed to aren't going
Speaker 1: to do too much for us, but there's no way for.
Speaker 2: Us to know in advance which ones will.
Speaker 1: We are living in an age of personalization, algorithms and
Speaker 1: social silos, and it seems to me the main risk
Speaker 1: of this is that we stop even encountering ideas outside
Speaker 1: our worldview, and that has big consequences for our brains,
Speaker 1: especially for young brains, because without friction, we lose the ability.
Speaker 3: To gain wisdom.
Speaker 1: As a side note, I've previously made the argument on
Speaker 1: this podcast about literature that reading literature is so important
Speaker 1: because it allows you to go on holidays on other
Speaker 1: people's planets. In other words, it allows you to put
Speaker 1: yourself in other shoes and stand in other vantage points
Speaker 1: than the one you're used to. This is the same
Speaker 1: idea with free speech. We have to be exposed to
Speaker 1: these other vantage points. Often in this case, these are
Speaker 1: unexpected and maybe uncomfortable political points of view, but that's
Speaker 1: the only way we can expand our fence lines.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that all sounds good.
Speaker 1: But the problem is that free speech triggers a lot
Speaker 1: of discomfort listening to someone defend a posing idea is
Speaker 1: is an unnatural act for the brain because it asks
Speaker 1: us to entertain ideas that we might hate. It makes
Speaker 1: us defense of it sometimes asks us to sit with
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance. It asks us to admit that we are
Speaker 1: not perfect in our own views and that sometimes we
Speaker 1: are wrong. But is it important to build some cognitive flexibility? Well,
Speaker 1: just look at the history of science, where every new
Speaker 1: idea was very unpopular to begin with. Whether that's the
Speaker 1: Sun at the center of the orbit instead of the Earth,
Speaker 1: or the idea that we and other animals evolved through time,
Speaker 1: or Einstein's theory of relativity. Every single advance in science
Speaker 1: triggers a lot of pushback before it gains acceptance. We
Speaker 1: tell the story of Galileo fighting the Church, but there's
Speaker 1: a sense in which we could equally cast it as
Speaker 1: a fight against the brain's instinct to.
Speaker 2: Preserve the status quo.
Speaker 1: But especially in recent years, it seems like something has
Speaker 1: shifted on campuses and on social platforms and in institutions.
Speaker 1: We have seen the rise of emotional reasoning, the belief
Speaker 1: that if something doesn't match your internal model, it's offensive.
Speaker 1: Maybe the words are equated to violence, and therefore the
Speaker 1: speech has to be shut down. And it's no surprise
Speaker 1: because when you're confronted with ideas that you don't like,
Speaker 1: your limbic system is cranked up and that steers your reactions.
Speaker 1: The ancient alarm bells that we have, including for example,
Speaker 1: the amygdala, these circuits don't distinguish so well between a
Speaker 1: snake and a sentence that we don't like, and who
Speaker 1: wants their sense of what's true to feel threatened. So
Speaker 1: today we're going to talk about all this and why
Speaker 1: it matters. And I'm so happy to be joined by
Speaker 1: my colleague Greg Lukianov, who is a constitutional lawyer and
Speaker 1: a passionate lifelong free speech at we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about the benefits of free speech, including several that don't
Speaker 1: often strike us. Greg is the president of the Foundation
Speaker 1: for Individual Rights and Expression known as FIRE, and this
Speaker 1: organization is very creative and how it defends freedom of speech.
Speaker 1: They use lawsuits and videos and documentaries and books. And
Speaker 1: in fact you might know him from his co authored
Speaker 1: books The Coddling of the American Mind and more recently
Speaker 1: The Canceling of the American Mind, and also he recently
Speaker 1: gave a Ted talk exploring how we've come to equate
Speaker 1: words with violence and how the shift might be doing
Speaker 1: more harm than good, especially to young minds. So here's
Speaker 1: my interview with Craig. Craig, you care a lot about
Speaker 1: free speech. How did you get here?
Speaker 4: Well, I went to the Stanford for Law School right
Speaker 4: down the road, and I went to law school to
Speaker 4: do First Amendment freedom of speech. My family, on my
Speaker 4: Russian side, you know, fled the Soviets, and I grew
Speaker 4: up in a neighborhood with a lot of other first
Speaker 4: generation kids. So we really took free speech very seriously
Speaker 4: because a lot of us came from countries that didn't
Speaker 4: have it. So that definitely got that that'll give you
Speaker 4: that real fire in your belly. And you grew up
Speaker 4: in a diverse community as well, right I did. Yeah,
Speaker 4: a lot of kids from China, a lot of kids
Speaker 4: from Vietnam, a lot of kids from from South America,
Speaker 4: and therefore.
Speaker 3: Everyone had different opinions. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: Well, they had different opinions, but they also one thing
Speaker 4: that they tended to have in common was that back
Speaker 4: home they didn't allow free speech aha, or at least
Speaker 4: not much of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, okay, So you went to law school and
Speaker 1: you thought, I'm going to really concentrate on free speech.
Speaker 4: Okay, I took every class Stafford offered on freedom of speech.
Speaker 4: When I ran out, I did six credits on censorship
Speaker 4: in the Tudor dynasty because I'm a herd. And then
Speaker 4: I interned at the ACLU of Northern California up in
Speaker 4: San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Aha, wait, give me just one second about what the
Speaker 1: Tudor dynasty.
Speaker 4: See, Because the printing press is kind of, like, you know,
Speaker 4: was the first big disruptive technology of kind of like
Speaker 4: you know, modernity, and Henry the Eighth was reacting in
Speaker 4: response to what the printing press was bringing to England.
Speaker 4: He wanted to have a control over printing in all
Speaker 4: of England, so there was these print licensing laws that
Speaker 4: he basically if the only way you were allowed to
Speaker 4: print in England was using a printing press that was
Speaker 4: owned by a company that he approved of, which was
Speaker 4: a smart way to do censorship kind of on the cheap.
Speaker 4: And so Henry, you know, was no friend of freedom
Speaker 4: of speech. And Elizabeth wasn't.
Speaker 2: Really great either.
Speaker 4: She did have some people, you know, nimed for example
Speaker 4: for free speech.
Speaker 1: God, and so the idea is they wanted to control
Speaker 1: the press is so that they can control the message.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And this is what's in common with essentially all countries
Speaker 1: that try to control free speech. They work on the presses.
Speaker 1: I mean, for example, in the Soviet Union. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the thing. You control the newspapers, you control
Speaker 1: the weather reports, and control everything.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: And so I have a quick tangential question, which is,
Speaker 1: how did the invention of the Internet change the ability
Speaker 1: for governments to do that?
Speaker 2: Oh that's so cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that was the thing that got me the
Speaker 4: most excited about going to law school to study freedom
Speaker 4: of speech. It was something called the Communications Decency Act
Speaker 4: in the Telecom Act of nineteen ninety six, and it
Speaker 4: was trying to ban indecency on the Internet, not obscenity,
Speaker 4: indecency and indecency is like lewdness, you know whatever whatever
Speaker 4: that's supposed to mean. And I remember studying this in
Speaker 4: undergrad and being like this is laughably unconstitutional, Like there's no,
Speaker 4: this is way too broad, this is way too vague.
Speaker 4: And so that's what I went to law school to fight.
Speaker 1: So you gave a ted talk recently a great Ted
Speaker 1: talk where you outlined four reasons why you are an
Speaker 1: opinion absolutist. Now we actually just to back up for
Speaker 1: one second. You're not a free speech absolutist because there
Speaker 1: are in fact limits to free speech. And actually give
Speaker 1: us a very short sense of that in America, what
Speaker 1: are the limits on free speech?
Speaker 4: Sure, so, for example, incitement to imminent lawless action, basically saying,
Speaker 4: like in a situation where you're likely to burn down
Speaker 4: the mayor's office, let's go burn down the mayor's office.
Speaker 4: You know, for example, defamation is not protected, but defamation
Speaker 4: has a very particular definition that is, essentially it's not
Speaker 4: saying you're a jerk.
Speaker 2: It's saying, I know.
Speaker 4: For a fact this person's a pedophile, right, you know,
Speaker 4: It's an accusation of something serious, and it's a factual accusation,
Speaker 4: not opinion. And of course, the protections that we have
Speaker 4: in place to make sure that it's very hard to
Speaker 4: get sued for defamation if you're defaming, say the President
Speaker 4: of the United States, is one of the reasons why
Speaker 4: I'm okay with the defamation as a category of unprotected speech,
Speaker 4: because we have very good protections to keep it from
Speaker 4: getting out of hand. Obscenity is not protected, but that
Speaker 4: doesn't mean it's normal, meaning in regular human English, it
Speaker 4: basically means hardcore porn, so that's not protected. But most places,
Speaker 4: you know, a lot as long as it's like kind
Speaker 4: of like controlled, as long as they can keep kids
Speaker 4: off of it. For example, child pornography is never protected
Speaker 4: under any circumstance.
Speaker 2: Has got no issue with that.
Speaker 4: So basically, like as a rule of thumb, the things
Speaker 4: that make speech unprotected are things that start to look
Speaker 4: a lot more like parts of crimes, for example, like
Speaker 4: incidental parts of crimes, the fact they use words to
Speaker 4: say your money or your life, who cares? You know,
Speaker 4: like like that doesn't give a First Amendment person at
Speaker 4: the second's pause. But things that tend to look more
Speaker 4: like patterns of behavior, like harassment for example. Which is
Speaker 4: why I make the distinction of being an opinion absolutist,
Speaker 4: which is essentially I think there's value in knowing what
Speaker 4: people's opinions are always full stop, right.
Speaker 1: Because otherwise you don't know who you're hanging out with
Speaker 1: in your community or your university or in your population
Speaker 1: in terms of what they really think.
Speaker 4: But also from a scientific standpoint, it is valuable to know.
Speaker 4: You know, the example that I gave in my talk
Speaker 4: was that no lizard people who live under the Denver
Speaker 4: Airport do not in fact control the world. But knowing
Speaker 4: that your future husband thinks they do, knowing that your
Speaker 4: congressman thinks they do, or every single person in your
Speaker 4: new city thinks they do, is really important information.
Speaker 2: To have about your world. Exactly right.
Speaker 1: And so you made the argument that free speech makes
Speaker 1: you safer. Yes, so give us a sense of that.
Speaker 1: So free speech makes you safer?
Speaker 4: Is this idea that you're not safer for knowing less
Speaker 4: about what people really think. It can give you the
Speaker 4: illusion of safety that essentially people nobody's saying Nazi things
Speaker 4: around me. But if it's illegal to say that, here's
Speaker 4: what you actually do. And this goes a little deeper
Speaker 4: than I had time to go on my ted talk group.
Speaker 4: Polarization is about one of the best documented, you know,
Speaker 4: findings and social science is if you get people who
Speaker 4: politically agree with each other to talk to just each other,
Speaker 4: they become back, they come back more radicalized in the
Speaker 4: direction of the group. And this is you can simulate this.
Speaker 4: It replicates easily take you know, a dozen people, figure
Speaker 4: out where they are politically, split them right down the middle,
Speaker 4: have them go talk about a hot button issue that
Speaker 4: they agree on. They will come back much more radicalized
Speaker 4: in the direction of the group. And we end up
Speaker 4: doing that in censorship because essentially censorship means and I
Speaker 4: said this on the Bill Maher show, you know, we
Speaker 4: don't have laws against anti Semitic speech in the United States,
Speaker 4: but they have had them in Europe for decades. And
Speaker 4: anti Semitism, you know, has really increased in Europe over
Speaker 4: those same decades in a way that it hasn't.
Speaker 2: I mean, more.
Speaker 4: Recently it's a streintly it seems to be going up,
Speaker 4: but over the past several decades it hasn't had the
Speaker 4: same kind of curve. And my point where there was
Speaker 4: in America, but as in Europe, it's gotten really bad
Speaker 4: in Europe. And what I said was, it's like you
Speaker 4: passed a law that basically said anti Semites can only
Speaker 4: talk to other anti Semites.
Speaker 2: So what did you expect to happen?
Speaker 1: Okay, So the first one is if people are putting
Speaker 1: all their cards on the table, you have more knowledge
Speaker 1: about what's going on.
Speaker 2: Yep, okay.
Speaker 1: And the reason this makes a lot of sense is
Speaker 1: because we have these very limited internal models which we
Speaker 1: take to be the truth.
Speaker 2: We say, like, here's my view of the world.
Speaker 1: I know that's truth, I know that's correct, and I
Speaker 1: don't know what all those other idiots and trolls are
Speaker 1: doing out there, but I know that I have the
Speaker 1: right answer.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's only when you're exposed to those other points
Speaker 1: of view that you might even scratch at the fence
Speaker 1: lines of your internal model and start pushing it around
Speaker 1: and seeing what else is happening there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, So it makes you smarter as well as safer,
Speaker 1: just to be able to understand.
Speaker 2: Ah, there's very different views here on this. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, and I mean most discussions aren't truth seeking discussions.
Speaker 4: A lot of times when people defend free speech, they
Speaker 4: only talk about the situation in which you're trying to.
Speaker 2: Figure out what the world actually looks like.
Speaker 4: And I'm trying to make the point that even when
Speaker 4: you say things just about preference, you're saying something important
Speaker 4: about the world, like, you know, like that I'm willing
Speaker 4: to pay a billion dollars for a really good wine
Speaker 4: is very important permission to have if you're if you're
Speaker 4: selling wine, for example. But when it comes to truth
Speaker 4: seeking arguments, this is one of the reasons why. I
Speaker 4: mean John Stuart Mill, the guy was a freaking genius,
Speaker 4: you know, like he was speaking Greek at three, like
Speaker 4: he was off the charts. And I coined this term
Speaker 4: called Mills trident because he makes this argument and on
Speaker 4: Liberty eighteen fifty nine, same year as Origin of speechies
Speaker 4: very clear, nice and the three things are that in
Speaker 4: a truth seeking argument, there are only two three possibilities.
Speaker 4: One you're wrong, two you're partially right partially wrong, and
Speaker 4: three you're completely right. And he makes the point that
Speaker 4: free speech matters in all three circumstances. Obviously, if you're wrong,
Speaker 4: the much more you're not going to know you're wrong
Speaker 4: until someone can challenge it. A second, if you're partially right,
Speaker 4: then even you know, even more so because then you'll
Speaker 4: actually get you'll actually refine your opinion. And people have
Speaker 4: this experience every day where you're like, oh yeah, yeah, okay, right, right, okay,
Speaker 4: you change yourself a little bit on that. But even
Speaker 4: if God forbid, you're entirely right, it's because you don't
Speaker 4: understand why you believe it in the first place until
Speaker 4: you have to defend this. And I see this all
Speaker 4: the time on college campuses. These people who I agree
Speaker 4: with politically, I'm a political liberal, but they don't know
Speaker 4: how to defend a lot of what they believe because
Speaker 4: they hold them as mill referred to it as the
Speaker 4: way people hold prejudices. They know they believe the right things,
Speaker 4: but they don't really know why because they've never had
Speaker 4: to defend it.
Speaker 1: So your second argument was that free speech actually protects
Speaker 1: you from violence.
Speaker 2: Unpack that us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so free speech is an alternative to violence. So
Speaker 4: most of human history was spent in a there's this
Speaker 4: idea of different sort of moral cultures, and one of
Speaker 4: the most ancient forms of a moral culture is something
Speaker 4: called a culture of honor, where essentially the idea is
Speaker 4: that to a degree, it's up to you to protect
Speaker 4: your property, to protect your family, and to protect your reputation.
Speaker 4: And that's a serious sort of property interest you have
Speaker 4: in that, but also a serious moral obligation you have
Speaker 4: now in societies where can.
Speaker 1: I just get some you mean moral in the sense
Speaker 1: that because you need to protect these things and you're
Speaker 1: on your own that gets written into what you believe
Speaker 1: equals morality, as in, if I'm a moral person, I'm
Speaker 1: going to defend my sister's reputation to the death.
Speaker 2: Is that was what you mean by it? Well, I
Speaker 2: think both.
Speaker 4: I think that in more ancient societies, essentially, like this
Speaker 4: idea that essentially like an eye and eye kind of idea,
Speaker 4: was actually an idea of sort of limiting the damage.
Speaker 4: And people forget this about eye and eye, like it
Speaker 4: sounds so horrible, but really what they're saying is, listen,
Speaker 4: if someone wrongs you and they take your eye out,
Speaker 4: you can only get one eye back.
Speaker 2: You can't destroy their entire village.
Speaker 4: And because that's how brutal, you know, it was in
Speaker 4: some of the older times. So this idea of a
Speaker 4: culture of honor, you know, like is still pretty typical
Speaker 4: in a lot of a lot of societies, but that
Speaker 4: is often resorting to violence in response to defending yourself.
Speaker 4: Cultures of dignity are ideas that actually came sort of
Speaker 4: right around the time of the Enlightenment, and with democratic societies,
Speaker 4: where essentially the rules are there is a legitimate authority,
Speaker 4: there's a legitimate use of force out there, and it's
Speaker 4: up to you to be able to handle some amount
Speaker 4: of insult, some amount of abrasion, and hold on to
Speaker 4: your own dignity, and you are not allowed to resort
Speaker 4: to violence. So when on campus and I ran into this,
Speaker 4: it's it's gotten a little bit better, but definitely over
Speaker 4: the last ten years, I've seen this a lot, this
Speaker 4: argument that essentially, if you're saying something really offensive, that's
Speaker 4: a form of violence. So like, for example, at Cornell
Speaker 4: a couple of years ago, and Culture was.
Speaker 2: Invited to speak. Now, I don't.
Speaker 4: Agree with her politics, but and Culture is trying to
Speaker 4: shock and annoy you, like she makes she cracks jokes
Speaker 4: about being like I couldn't believe I can make money
Speaker 4: just by you know, spewing right wing vitriol, Like that's
Speaker 4: her stick. She's going to try to anger you if
Speaker 4: you're on the left. And students showed up though they
Speaker 4: shouted her down, they wouldn't let her talk and they said,
Speaker 4: your words are violence. And this is something I've heard
Speaker 4: over and over again, Like in response to the Mile
Speaker 4: Napolist riots, how many articles were written at Berkeley by
Speaker 4: students saying, well, his speech was violence. Give us background
Speaker 4: on that real fasts, not a nice Millianapolis was a
Speaker 4: right wing provocateur and he was going to speak at
Speaker 4: Berkeley and then an angry mob showed up Antifa, and
Speaker 4: they started a riot and they and it did something
Speaker 4: like half a million dollars of damage. You know, they
Speaker 4: burned things, like people. There was one guy who really
Speaker 4: should have died because they hit him with a flagpole.
Speaker 2: Like it was. It was bad. Now, to be.
Speaker 4: Clear, a lot of the people who were hurt weren't
Speaker 4: even fans of my Leanopolis. They were bystanders who were
Speaker 4: just there during this, during this riot, and you know,
Speaker 4: things like this happen on campus. They're they're shameful in
Speaker 4: my opinion. But what was really different about this was
Speaker 4: after those riots, students wrote pieces justifying the student violence
Speaker 4: as saying, well, Milo's speech was violence, so our violence
Speaker 4: was self defense. And I make the point it's like, well,
Speaker 4: welcome back to the thirteenth century, Like this is not
Speaker 4: a new idea. This is an ancient idea and an
Speaker 4: ancient bad idea that leads to a spiral of violence
Speaker 4: a La Romeo and Juliet. I mean, like like it's
Speaker 4: it's one of those things. It's a very bad ancient idea.
Speaker 4: So I made the point also of this metaphor of
Speaker 4: speech being like violence. I talk about I've been I
Speaker 4: got punched out randomly at a party. I had done
Speaker 4: nothing and I got assaulted and I was so badly
Speaker 4: hurt I couldn't stay out of this eye for a month.
Speaker 4: I got a concussion, and I had a friend stabbed
Speaker 4: in the chest. I'm like right right here, you know,
Speaker 4: and so like also at a moral.
Speaker 1: Level, so you're saying that's real violence, and that's words
Speaker 1: are not real violence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, words not.
Speaker 4: Real and words are our best replacement for violence because
Speaker 4: you have to have a system for resolving conflict. No
Speaker 4: conflict is totalitarianism, you know, the uh, you have to
Speaker 4: have a system for resolving conflict the way we used
Speaker 4: to do it, overly threats of violence or actual violence.
Speaker 2: Harsh words.
Speaker 4: Words being harsh sometimes should be expected when you're replacing
Speaker 4: actual violence.
Speaker 1: So let me connect this issue of totalaitaranism, because it
Speaker 1: feels to me like the at the heart of the
Speaker 1: problem is the fact that a lot of people feel
Speaker 1: if you were to really push them, they feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe we should have a totaliaitarianism in the.
Speaker 2: Sense that everyone should agree with me. I know that
Speaker 2: I'm right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if I have a government structure in place that says, look,
Speaker 1: everyone do my opinion on this, then that would be
Speaker 1: a great That would be a great government.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So do you find that part of your job.
Speaker 1: Is changing people's opinion about that issue of wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be great if the whole world agreed with me and
Speaker 1: we had a totalitarian government that just put that into place?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's my Sisyphian job is to roll that ball
Speaker 4: up the hill every day and be like, listen, there
Speaker 4: are ridiculous advantages to free societies. And of course I
Speaker 4: could just go with the argument essentially like freedom is
Speaker 4: good just because it's good, And that's a little bit
Speaker 4: of the natural law argument essentially, like the idea of
Speaker 4: the human rights argument that essentially we just need to
Speaker 4: take for granted that this is a good thing.
Speaker 3: Okay, but you're saying that's not the good argument. What's
Speaker 3: the good argument.
Speaker 4: The good argument is that free societies are better by
Speaker 4: virtually every measure, and that human diversity is something that
Speaker 4: actually has huge benefits and you mean diversity in terms
Speaker 4: of opinion in this case, Yes, yea, all sorts of diversity. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's right, you know, but also diversity in terms of opinions,
Speaker 4: but also norms, also culture, also preference all the personality
Speaker 4: you know, like having the Big five personality traits be
Speaker 4: distributed throughout society, I think is actually a wonderful thing.
Speaker 4: But there can be this and this, This is the
Speaker 4: totalitarian temptation that essentially, yeah, if everybody thought like me,
Speaker 4: everything would be fine. And this is why I wrote
Speaker 4: I wrote a talk called Fight the Guardians because I'm
Speaker 4: pretty hard on Plato's Republic, like because I think Plato
Speaker 4: was really actually it wasn't a metaphor for the soul.
Speaker 4: He was actually talking about if clever people like me
Speaker 4: were in charge, human evil would.
Speaker 2: Just go away. Everything would be a swell.
Speaker 4: And I'm a little bit like, when clever people get
Speaker 4: a lot of power, the track record has not been
Speaker 4: so great. You know, give us some examples, Lenin, you know,
Speaker 4: like I think about why my family had to flee
Speaker 4: the Soviet Union, you know, like I think about Lenin Stalin.
Speaker 2: I mean, certainly the Nazis.
Speaker 4: Thought they were clever, and they were obviously some of
Speaker 4: the greatest monsters in human history. So I think that
Speaker 4: there's something to be said for systems that actually allow
Speaker 4: regular people of voice, that protect human freedom, that make
Speaker 4: it very hard to vote away human rights.
Speaker 1: And I imagine you'd argue that the study of history
Speaker 1: is part of what teaches us this, because both on
Speaker 1: the left and the right, communists on the one hand.
Speaker 2: Fascist Nazis on the other hand.
Speaker 1: You know, you got people who say, look, here's my
Speaker 1: really good argument why eyone should listen to me, and
Speaker 1: that always ends up in disaster. Yeah, And I assume
Speaker 1: you would argue that when you look at democratic societies
Speaker 1: with lots of fighting about opinion, despite all the disadvantages, they.
Speaker 2: End up faring better.
Speaker 4: They end up faring well, They have better wealth, innovation, happiness,
Speaker 4: all of all of these things. And we have this
Speaker 4: and and unfortunately we have to learn this lesson over
Speaker 4: and over again, like reading like some of the literature
Speaker 4: from World War One, for example, there was skepticism about liberalism,
Speaker 4: you know, going into World War One, and liberal societies
Speaker 4: did much better in World War One than people expected.
Speaker 4: They thought that they thought a monarchical system was going
Speaker 4: to have this huge advantage.
Speaker 2: So it is large advantage in the war.
Speaker 3: In the war, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 1: Okay, but in fact, the liberal societies did finding the
Speaker 1: war in fact won the war.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, oh, PARTI, because they were more innovative, they're
Speaker 4: more prosperous, they had actual genuine advantages. But that was
Speaker 4: more from a material kind of standpoint. The liberalism one.
Speaker 4: It was after World War Two that you had this
Speaker 4: and it's weird reading Supreme Court opinions from after World
Speaker 4: War Two. There's this idea that liberalism was dying and
Speaker 4: that the future may belong to communism, for example, like
Speaker 4: some kind of totalitarian ideology might actually win in the end.
Speaker 4: There was tremendous pessimism about liberal and free societies actually succeeding.
Speaker 4: But then we had nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 4: you know that the fall of the Soviet Union, we
Speaker 4: had the fall of Eastern Europe. We got to see
Speaker 4: that essentially once again liberalism, you know, emphasizing you know, freedom, individuality,
Speaker 4: all these things.
Speaker 2: It's a very powerful system.
Speaker 4: It's a more robust system than we sometimes give it
Speaker 4: credit for.
Speaker 2: But does that mean that's always going to be the case.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: And you know, my job is to be the person
Speaker 4: defending it.
Speaker 2: You know, for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: If you and I were to have this conversation a
Speaker 1: thousand years from now, we might look back and say, Wow,
Speaker 1: the American experiment failed and it turns out some other
Speaker 1: thing worked better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But as far as we can tell right now, you're.
Speaker 1: Going to take this position of saying, I'm going to
Speaker 1: defend free speech and all the rest of what goes
Speaker 1: into having a free society, and I'm going to assume
Speaker 1: for the moment that this is the best case because
Speaker 1: historically it seems to have proven itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, historically it seems to have proven itself.
Speaker 4: I think that it but you know, I do believe
Speaker 4: in the moral argument for it, that that essentially it's
Speaker 4: a good idea to think that anybody who has like
Speaker 4: a mind or a soul should have some certain rights
Speaker 4: attached that essentially, you should not be able to torture them,
Speaker 4: They should be allowed to say what they think, They
Speaker 4: should not be deprived of things without actually some kind
Speaker 4: of process in place, so it can't just be arbitrarily taken.
Speaker 2: Away from them.
Speaker 4: All of these, you know, And I picked on natural
Speaker 4: rights a little bit, but I always point out that
Speaker 4: natural rights are human rights like that. Essentially this theory
Speaker 4: and it was an idea of trying to figure out,
Speaker 4: if God is rational, what rights would he have naturally
Speaker 4: attached to us. And it's it. It's a persuasive argument
Speaker 4: from a moral standpoint that essentially everybody has owed these
Speaker 4: things as a society. Now, is it a societal agreement?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I don't believe in God, you know, like, so I
Speaker 4: don't believe there is someone actually deciding this, but I
Speaker 4: do believe it's a good and smart societal agreement to
Speaker 4: have a more just society.
Speaker 1: Okay, So your third argument in your Ted talk was
Speaker 1: that free speech defends the powerless. Yeah, so unpack that
Speaker 1: for us.
Speaker 4: Now this is I open up by talking about my
Speaker 4: frustration with the younger crop of students I've been dealing with,
Speaker 4: because keep in mind, I've been doing this. I'm old,
Speaker 4: like I've been defending free speech, you know, at fire
Speaker 4: for twenty three years now.
Speaker 2: I did it. I started right after I got out
Speaker 2: of law.
Speaker 4: School, and I started running into students, you know, who
Speaker 4: increasingly seemed to believe that free speech was the argument
Speaker 4: of the three bees, the bully, the bigot, and the robber.
Speaker 4: Baron and I had to explain, you know, like that's
Speaker 4: bad history, because here's the thing, the robber baron. The
Speaker 4: rich and powerful don't need special protections for free speech
Speaker 4: because they have wealth and power, you know, like they
Speaker 4: do okay. A lot of representative government was the king
Speaker 4: asking the merchant class for money, you know, like like
Speaker 4: the rich and powerful did, okay. And when it comes
Speaker 4: to democratic societies, if you're a bully or a bigot
Speaker 4: and your society is bullied, bullying and bigoted, if you
Speaker 4: have enough votes though, you still got to call the shots.
Speaker 4: And so literally, literally the only people who need the
Speaker 4: special protections of something like the First Amendment or freedom
Speaker 4: of speech are people who are either unpopular with power
Speaker 4: or unpopular with the majority. And this is why you know,
Speaker 4: people like Frederick Douglass, Gandhi Nelson, Mandela id to be wells.
Speaker 4: They all were champions of freedom of speech because they
Speaker 4: realized that minority rights, whether you mean that in numerical
Speaker 4: minority or racial minority or opinion minority for that matter,
Speaker 4: they're the ones who need freedom of speech. And I
Speaker 4: think this lessons gets lost in the monoculture of campuses,
Speaker 4: where essentially it is it tends to be so sort
Speaker 4: of politically shifted that you can actually convince yourself of
Speaker 4: free speech, is the argument of those of the bad guys.
Speaker 4: But that's a very typical thing that people tend to
Speaker 4: think once they have a lot of power, is it
Speaker 4: essentially well, yeah, I believe in free speech when I
Speaker 4: wasn't powerful, But I don't know.
Speaker 1: Before we get onto the fourth one, you have seen
Speaker 1: a shift in what's happening on college campus. Is over
Speaker 1: the course of time that you've been running Fire, what happened?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Now that was well, First of all, when I
Speaker 4: started in two thousand and one, it was easier to
Speaker 4: get in trouble for what you said than I expected
Speaker 4: on campus Like that was a genuine surprise because I
Speaker 4: was dealing with a backlog of case submissions that came
Speaker 4: in from years before when the founders of Fire had
Speaker 4: actually wrote a book on the situation on campus. But
Speaker 4: mostly it was administrators who were sort of pushing people around,
Speaker 4: but in truly ridiculous cases, like an early case, for example,
Speaker 4: was this case of Keith John Samson at Indiana University
Speaker 4: Perdue University in Indianapolis. He was a working class dude.
Speaker 4: He was working his way through school as a janitor,
Speaker 4: and he was reading a book called Notre Dame Versus
Speaker 4: the Klan. This is a book about the fact that
Speaker 4: the Klan marched on Notre Dame because they were also
Speaker 4: anti Catholic in the nineteen twenties, and that Notre Dame
Speaker 4: students got together and kicked their hasses like it celebrates
Speaker 4: the defeat of the Klan in a giant street fight.
Speaker 4: But because it had pictures of that actual rally, you know,
Speaker 4: on the cover, and an employee saw the pictures, he
Speaker 4: was found guilty without a hearing, without knowing who was
Speaker 4: charging him. He was guilty of racial harassment because it
Speaker 4: made an employee feel uncomfortable. Now would people are always
Speaker 4: like point out its kind of like, well, you'd be
Speaker 4: saying another tune if you saw someone reading mindkom or something,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, okay, listen, it's protected to read offensive books,
Speaker 4: and it should be. It's just more ironic that he
Speaker 4: was reading anti racist book. It makes it that much
Speaker 4: more are like, are.
Speaker 2: You kidding me? They got kind of thing.
Speaker 4: But those were always administrators over enforcing sometimes really really
Speaker 4: stupidly some.
Speaker 2: Of these rules.
Speaker 4: It was only around when I started working with Height
Speaker 4: that I started noticing large numbers of students having this
Speaker 4: attitude about free speech as well. And that was around
Speaker 4: twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, and that's when I got together
Speaker 4: with HEIGHT and I had issues with anxiety and depression.
Speaker 4: I studied cognitive behavioral therapy. I had a breakdown in
Speaker 4: two thousand and seven, and as I was recovering and
Speaker 4: earning all these tactics for talking back to the exaggerations
Speaker 4: in your brain, I'm watching what's going on on campus
Speaker 4: and being like, why are the adults seemingly telling all
Speaker 4: the young people to overgeneralize, to catastrophize, to engage in
Speaker 4: all these cognitive distortions. That I knew that if you
Speaker 4: didn't talk back to them and talk them down rather
Speaker 4: than talking them up, you will be anxious and depressed,
Speaker 4: even if you're not prone to it. But it was
Speaker 4: only around twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen that I started noticing
Speaker 4: students showing up on campus actually thinking like this, and
Speaker 4: I approached HEIGHT thinking like what, thinking that, essentially, if
Speaker 4: this person speaks on my campus, it's going to be
Speaker 4: psychologically harmful, usually not to me, but to some huge
Speaker 4: portion of the it's going to be a catastrophe. Oh
Speaker 4: and that essentially, if I feel aversion to it, this
Speaker 4: is emotional reasoning, that must mean that something has to
Speaker 4: be done about it, That there's fortune telling that essentially
Speaker 4: will it will result in some kind of permanent psychological
Speaker 4: harm to people. All of this kind of distorted thinking.
Speaker 4: And I went to John and I was like, listen,
Speaker 4: if this is true, two things are going to happen.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a disaster for acking.
Speaker 4: I'm freedom, free speech, because it's going to be an
Speaker 4: environment where it's just too easy for people to get
Speaker 4: in trouble. Then they're going to clam up. And Two,
Speaker 4: it's going to be disaster for the mental health of
Speaker 4: the young people who believe this stuff, because if you
Speaker 4: actually believe that that essentially you're constantly in danger. You're
Speaker 4: easily harmed by words or ideas.
Speaker 2: That's a very.
Speaker 4: Cruel thing to teach somebody because it's setting them up
Speaker 4: for pain, more pain than they would have if they
Speaker 4: just kind of accepted the idea that yeah, okay, you know,
Speaker 4: there's going to be the tricks in the world. And unfortunately,
Speaker 4: and this is the fifth year anniversary, so sorry, the
Speaker 4: tenth year anniversary of the article Coddling the American Mind
Speaker 4: that I wrote with Height back in twenty fifteen. And
Speaker 4: things did get a lot worse on campus.
Speaker 2: So what happened? Why did they get so much worse?
Speaker 1: I mean, and I think many of us in the
Speaker 1: early twenty twenties felt like, Wow, things are really insane.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well I saw it coming a long way out,
Speaker 4: because you could kind of see some of this coming
Speaker 4: when he saw what was happening on campus.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: I think there are a lot of factors going on.
Speaker 4: I think that some of it are kind of like
Speaker 4: natural progression that essentially, if something becomes more politically homogeneous,
Speaker 4: it tends to actually get more radicalized. But I definitely
Speaker 4: think the thing that sped everything up was social media.
Speaker 4: Those students who were showing up on campus in twenty
Speaker 4: thirteen twenty fourteen were the first generation of students to
Speaker 4: grow up with smartphones in their pockets, and they'd kind
Speaker 4: of perfected this way of arguing in junior high school,
Speaker 4: you know, where essentially it was very moralistic, but it
Speaker 4: was also very essentially like I can make I can
Speaker 4: defeat you.
Speaker 2: I can cancel you. You know, it would be you know.
Speaker 1: Oh, gave them a new tool, Yeah, to be able
Speaker 1: to cancel somebody I see.
Speaker 4: And those students met a cohort of administrators who were
Speaker 4: already there, who'd been the people I've been fighting before.
Speaker 4: So it wasn't just the students showed up, it was
Speaker 4: the students met this bureaucratic middle middle management level that
Speaker 4: kind of saw its job as policing offense on campus.
Speaker 4: And that's partially encouraged by some some poorly written laws
Speaker 4: that come out of the Department Education. There's a lot
Speaker 4: of things meeting at once, but as far and so
Speaker 4: coddling in the American mind. That whole book is what
Speaker 4: was so different about the students Hitding Campus in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 4: and we called a social science detective story. There's even
Speaker 4: things about you know, parenting in there. Those are some
Speaker 4: of my favorite chapters in the book. We talk about
Speaker 4: polarization and about lack of viewpoint diversity can.
Speaker 2: Make that worse.
Speaker 4: But we also talk about the peculiarity of campuses as megabusinesses,
Speaker 4: you know, and the customer is always right mentality that
Speaker 4: makes that worse to a degree, but also ideological assumptions,
Speaker 4: you know that that are very much the very very
Speaker 4: black or white morality. You know, when I talk about
Speaker 4: we talk about intersectionality. For example, in the book Perfectly
Speaker 4: Fine idea from Kimberly Crenshaw, if you understand it as
Speaker 4: just being this simple idea, the oppression faced by someone
Speaker 4: who has, you know, multiple axes of oppression, what the
Speaker 4: or more simply, the problems that they face are probably
Speaker 4: going to be different than the problem that someone who
Speaker 4: was And the way she described this is the problems
Speaker 4: faced by black women on the job are different than
Speaker 4: the one of those faced by black men, no question accurate.
Speaker 4: But when it starts taking on a sort of moral idea,
Speaker 4: when you start actually seeing life just split into a
Speaker 4: simple moral dey tale of good good a pressed versus
Speaker 4: bad oppressors, and that's really based in immutable characteristics, that's
Speaker 4: you know, I'm not very complimentary towards this idea. I
Speaker 4: think this is a wild overs implication of very much
Speaker 4: more complicated realities about human nature, about what society.
Speaker 2: Is actually like.
Speaker 4: But I think if you have that kind of like
Speaker 4: good versus evil kind of mentality, you do end up
Speaker 4: in a place where that's not that conducive for knowledge, creation,
Speaker 4: for debate, for discussion, etc. If you know for a
Speaker 4: fact that that person who disagrees with you, they're not
Speaker 4: just wrong, they're bad people. Yeah, we're so hardwired for
Speaker 4: this sort of thing. In terms of good and evil.
Speaker 1: I mean all our stories, all the fairy tales, all
Speaker 1: the Star Wars movies, everything is about good versus evil.
Speaker 1: Every way that we tell stories about wars that our
Speaker 1: country has fought in whichever country we're in, we tell
Speaker 1: the story of the bad guys.
Speaker 2: On the other side of the good guys on our side.
Speaker 2: So how do we escape that? It's not easy.
Speaker 4: It's one of those things, just like knowledge creation and
Speaker 4: knowing the world as it is, it is an arduous,
Speaker 4: never ending process of revision and relearning. And I think
Speaker 4: that one of the best things you can do for this.
Speaker 4: And I wrote a book as a follow up to
Speaker 4: Calling the American Mind with this brilliant young woman named
Speaker 4: Ricky Schlott, called Canceling the American Mind, and we talked
Speaker 4: about the antidote for cancel culture is basically what we call.
Speaker 2: Free speech culture.
Speaker 4: And trying to sort of like put to simply explain
Speaker 4: what it means to have a free speech culture. I
Speaker 4: realized that a lot of the idioms that we would
Speaker 4: have grown up with, but younger people haven't so much
Speaker 4: grown up with.
Speaker 2: And we just did a survey on this.
Speaker 4: By the way, I'm writing something about this for my substack,
Speaker 4: called the Eternally Radical Idea, about how often people use
Speaker 4: things like to each their own you know, not my
Speaker 4: cup of tea, don't judge a book by its cover.
Speaker 4: Everyone's entitled to their own opinion. All these we said
Speaker 4: a lot as a kid, and we all we we
Speaker 4: we we thought they were just.
Speaker 2: Everybody agreed on that right. Everyone's tell their opinion.
Speaker 4: I don't have to like it, but I haven't walked,
Speaker 4: you know, walked a mile in your shoes, so I
Speaker 4: can't really judge you. And I think that those are
Speaker 4: great sayings for a culture of dignity, for a culture
Speaker 4: in which you actually are expected to listen.
Speaker 2: I have to.
Speaker 4: I want you to respect my autonomy, but I have
Speaker 4: to respect your autonomy to a degree too, And that's
Speaker 4: something has to be learned and experienced.
Speaker 1: So do you think those expressions that we grew up
Speaker 1: with have changed, have dropped out of the parlance.
Speaker 4: According to the survey, at least young people seem to
Speaker 4: be familiar with them, they just don't use them very often.
Speaker 4: The one that was least well known was judge the
Speaker 4: uh judge the argument not the person you know like that.
Speaker 4: That was probably the one that they knew the least,
Speaker 4: which makes you know, some amout of sense when you
Speaker 4: when you see kind of the problems today. But my
Speaker 4: co author Ricky, who was twenty when I started working
Speaker 4: with her, she said, I didn't hear these at all
Speaker 4: growing up. Wow, And that was really I mean, like
Speaker 4: another one is it's a free country, you know, you know,
Speaker 4: you know, which was a wise ass often way of saying,
Speaker 4: but it's kind of like I'm I'm allowed to do
Speaker 4: what I want to do here, like the it's a
Speaker 4: free country, I can wear this hat right right.
Speaker 1: And importantly, we would say that when you see someone
Speaker 1: else doing something you think is crazy.
Speaker 4: We won't check you because, like so many of that,
Speaker 4: what's that what's in those sayings is the most important
Speaker 4: thing that I have to convey. Like so sometimes since
Speaker 4: I have a seven and a nine year old, people
Speaker 4: will say, okay, mister free speech, like how do you
Speaker 4: do that when you have kids? And I'm like, well,
Speaker 4: I teach them the most important thing about freedom of speech,
Speaker 4: which is epistemic humility, which is knowing that in the
Speaker 4: grand scheme.
Speaker 2: Of things, you don't know that much.
Speaker 4: And all of these sayings they're about, dude, you're not omniscient.
Speaker 2: You don't know everything.
Speaker 4: You can't know everything, and it's also not your place
Speaker 4: to judge everybody else. And this is so well sort
Speaker 4: of like in social science and neuroscience kind of like
Speaker 4: like in psychology, like the illusion of explanatory depth, like
Speaker 4: all of these kind of like ideas about like how
Speaker 4: much we overestimate, how.
Speaker 2: Much we think we actually know and understands. Just for
Speaker 2: the listenership.
Speaker 1: The illusion of explanatory depth is we think we know
Speaker 1: things and we assume we know them all the way down.
Speaker 1: So if I say to you, you know, hey, do
Speaker 1: you know how the electoral college works? You say yeah,
Speaker 1: And I say, hey, can you explain.
Speaker 2: It to me?
Speaker 3: You say, well, actually, hold on, maybe I'm not.
Speaker 2: Clear on this.
Speaker 1: But we do this with everything, where whatever knowledge we have,
Speaker 1: it's often like a Potempkin village where we just see
Speaker 1: the front piece of the houses and we don't actually
Speaker 1: know what's behind it. But it's only when we scratch
Speaker 1: the surface that we realize I don't actually know that piece. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this to me seems like the heart of it, this
Speaker 1: epistemic humility. Yes, because the fact is, for every one
Speaker 1: of us, the most clever person among us, our knowledge
Speaker 1: is a Potemkin village. There are many things we don't know.
Speaker 1: There are many points of view we've never even considered
Speaker 1: or thought about, and yet we always have the illusion that, Okay,
Speaker 1: I know the truth.
Speaker 2: This is clear to me.
Speaker 1: And so this is why, from a neural point of view,
Speaker 1: I believe so strongly in free speech.
Speaker 2: It's because of the need.
Speaker 1: It's because of the what's the new term I could use,
Speaker 1: or the epistemic stretching that's needed all the time, because
Speaker 1: you simply can't see all the things that you don't
Speaker 1: know until someone challenges you on it. And then, as
Speaker 1: this was Daniel Dafoe and Robinson Crusoe said I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna get this quite right, but said something like you
Speaker 1: can never understand anything except by its contraries. And so
Speaker 1: the idea is you need to get to the other
Speaker 1: side of something to say, oh, okay, now I understand this,
Speaker 1: I see the landscape here.
Speaker 2: Now a decision on it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, eperzefic humility is the whole bowl game. And
Speaker 4: I think that it's something that I read this new
Speaker 4: of all Harari. He summarized this idea was by saying
Speaker 4: that essentially we should refer to the Enlightenment as the
Speaker 4: discovery of ignorance, because that's what was so brilliant about
Speaker 4: it is we started testing all of these folk traditions.
Speaker 4: A lot of our intuition are just wrong when you
Speaker 4: actually actually test them. And I think that that's one
Speaker 4: of the great I mean, I always think the majesty
Speaker 4: of Newton admitting he didn't know how gravity worked and
Speaker 4: he had no actual explanation for it. Like that's a
Speaker 4: moment of sort of like intellectual restraint that we benefited
Speaker 4: from for the rest of human history.
Speaker 1: You know, this is what I've always loved about science
Speaker 1: is that everybody, when you write a paper, you say, look,
Speaker 1: I don't know this, this is a hypothesis, so on
Speaker 1: you never scientists never talk about truth.
Speaker 2: It's just a word that sciences don't use. People often
Speaker 2: miss quote.
Speaker 1: Scientists say well it's been scientifically proven right that x
Speaker 1: y z or the scientific you know, the truth is
Speaker 1: x y z. But we never use those words because
Speaker 1: all you ever have is the weight of evidence suggesting
Speaker 1: A over B and C and D for the moment.
Speaker 2: It's provisional.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so this is a style of learning and
Speaker 1: of discussion I think is massively important, and I'm surprised
Speaker 1: often that that hasn't seeped further into culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think it's a hard thing to live with.
Speaker 2: I remember, I remember.
Speaker 4: Talking to someone who was religious and he couldn't He
Speaker 4: actually was genuinely skeptical that I could actually draw great
Speaker 4: satisfaction from doubt. And I remember, and it was it
Speaker 4: was a beautiful moment. And it's something that someone might
Speaker 4: be afraid to say to me in a situation in which,
Speaker 4: you know, the speech norms were too much like don't
Speaker 4: offend each other, because you know, he might might have
Speaker 4: thought he was offending me. But I was like, oh
Speaker 4: my god, that No, I don't think you understand. I mean, like, awe,
Speaker 4: Like the experience of not knowing is one of the
Speaker 4: most profoundly wonderful experiences sometimes and just give you the chills,
Speaker 4: you know, but it's mentality, you know, and it's not
Speaker 4: And that's like another reason why I like human diversity.
Speaker 4: There are people look at the sky and feel sad
Speaker 4: and small, and there's others of us who feel wonderful
Speaker 4: and small.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: What science does is replace the feeling of certainty but
Speaker 1: the feeling of awe. Yeah yeah, because you get to understand, wow,
Speaker 1: this is actually much bigger than I am. It's not
Speaker 1: that I can just look in this holy book from
Speaker 1: my deity and see this is the answer, that's the answer,
Speaker 1: and so on, but instead say, oh boy, yes, well
Speaker 1: it's big cosmos.
Speaker 4: It's it's funny like when people like just dismiss you know,
Speaker 4: they'll talk about kind of like the majesty of like
Speaker 4: the way we used to believe the world worked, as
Speaker 4: opposed to like this cold scientific thing, you know, like
Speaker 4: as if the way we used to explain it.
Speaker 2: Wasn't more mind blowing than the way it actually is.
Speaker 1: Lord, Okay, so I want to return to your ted
Speaker 1: talk and your fourth argument, which was that even bad
Speaker 1: people can have good ideas about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's something that when you watch the way people debate,
Speaker 4: like on social media, so much of it is to
Speaker 4: try to prove that someone else is bad, as if
Speaker 4: that was the same thing as proving that they are wrong.
Speaker 2: And I really have.
Speaker 4: To get people remember these two things are not related.
Speaker 4: And I give the example of Verde von Braun, you
Speaker 4: know who I'm kind of like, oh yeah, he got
Speaker 4: us to the moon. Also, he was a Nazi. You know,
Speaker 4: he believed horrible things. You know, I think he recanted
Speaker 4: some of it later, but still like the he was
Speaker 4: a Nazi. But then there are people like Thomas Malthus,
Speaker 4: who was reportedly a very nice man, but Malthusian kind
Speaker 4: of ideas of scarcity were used and that an overpopulation
Speaker 4: were used to justify mass sterilizations. They're used to justify
Speaker 4: mass starvations. Like how the negative effect of Malthusianism on
Speaker 4: human flourishing is hard to overstate. So being a good
Speaker 4: person doesn't mean you're right, and being a bad person
Speaker 4: doesn't mean you're wrong.
Speaker 2: And that should sound obvious, but you know, we hate
Speaker 2: this fact.
Speaker 4: There's even that meme of like worst person you know
Speaker 4: actually right about something.
Speaker 2: I hadn't heard that meme.
Speaker 1: You know what. This reminds me of his Lord George
Speaker 1: Gordon in England in the seventeen hundreds. He was the
Speaker 1: guy who had a lot of empathy for other people.
Speaker 1: He really cared about the rights of the sailors. So
Speaker 1: he was born into some level of nobility, but he
Speaker 1: really cared about the sailors and their rights, And when
Speaker 1: they took a ship to Jamaica, he berated the governor there,
Speaker 1: the British governor, about the rights of the locals, because
Speaker 1: he felt like they were getting treated badly.
Speaker 2: Stuff like him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, this is what he was famous for for
Speaker 1: a while. But what he's really famous for in history
Speaker 1: is that he ended up leading the Gordon Riots because
Speaker 1: he hated his Catholic neighbors. He had such antipathy for
Speaker 1: Catholics that he led the largest ever domestic upheaval in
Speaker 1: London's history. Where the Gordon Riots were you know, some
Speaker 1: like twenty thousand people who mark the streets and burn
Speaker 1: Catholic churches and burn Catholic homes. Wow, people are complex,
Speaker 1: and it matters what the particular opinion in question is
Speaker 1: as opposed to what else they've done. Yeah, what role
Speaker 1: do you suppose cognitive discomfort plays in intellectual development?
Speaker 2: Oh? I think it's essentral.
Speaker 4: And this is actually one of the reasons why I'm
Speaker 4: worried about the future of freedom of speech. So Steve
Speaker 4: Binker is a friend, and I don't know you know
Speaker 4: him as well. He's a wonderful, lovely man. And at
Speaker 4: the same time I tend to be a little bit
Speaker 4: more pessimistic about the future of free speech, and he's
Speaker 4: much more sort of optimistic about where you know, society
Speaker 4: is heading now. To be clear, Steve is making the
Speaker 4: argument with a caveat as long as we don't forget
Speaker 4: what actually works and we don't let ideology get in
Speaker 4: the world.
Speaker 2: He's very clear about that.
Speaker 4: But I make the point that there are certain types
Speaker 4: of things that I called in a very short book
Speaker 4: that I wrote called Freedom from Speech, called Problems of Comfort,
Speaker 4: that there are things that get worse precisely because other
Speaker 4: things are getting better, and free speech, inquiry being wrong.
Speaker 2: All of these.
Speaker 4: Things that are essential for intellectual development, essential for getting
Speaker 4: closer to the truth, are unpleasant in a lot of ways,
Speaker 4: particularly if you're not used to them. They can be
Speaker 4: highly unpleasant. If you get super used to them, they
Speaker 4: can actually be just fine. But that's a mentality you
Speaker 4: have to cultivate. And I think that as societies get
Speaker 4: more comfortable, as it's easier, as we become more affluent,
Speaker 4: and as we're able to surround ourselves with AI voices,
Speaker 4: it tell us we're right about everything and stuck up
Speaker 4: to us all the time. And we live in neighborhoods
Speaker 4: where people don't disagree all that much. That essentially you
Speaker 4: shouldn't be surprised that people's appreciation for free speech starts
Speaker 4: going down. So I actually think that free speech issues
Speaker 4: are going to get worse over time, precisely because other
Speaker 4: things are getting better. And I think that that's very concerning,
Speaker 4: particularly at this moment when we're kind of designing what's
Speaker 4: going to be sort of the epistemic operating system for
Speaker 4: the planet.
Speaker 2: This is a time when we need to meeting AI
Speaker 2: in AI.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, yeah, that we have to be kicking the
Speaker 4: tires on what we think is true harder now more
Speaker 4: than ever, because I think that you need. I think
Speaker 4: we need more friction and knowledge creation than we currently have.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you my take on AI.
Speaker 1: I feel like we're in a golden age of AI
Speaker 1: right now, which is to say, if you ask, let's say,
Speaker 1: chat shipt some question, like you know, is Donald Trump
Speaker 1: a good president, what you'll get is pretty new on
Speaker 1: sorryment Like some people think yes, some people think no,
Speaker 1: here's some arguments for and against that sort of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of people are annoyed by this. The fact
Speaker 1: is that's great. Yeah, because what we're going to face
Speaker 1: in the future I'm predicting is a Balkanization of AI
Speaker 1: where the liberals say, we don't want any of this
Speaker 1: literature and there we're just gonna trend on our literature,
Speaker 1: and the conservatives are gonna say, we're gonna get rid
Speaker 1: of all that stuff. We're gonna just trend on our literature,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna start getting AIS that just present a
Speaker 1: particular point of view.
Speaker 2: And I think that's inevitable.
Speaker 1: That's right around the corner, and that's going to be
Speaker 1: a real loss in terms of this epistemic stretching that
Speaker 1: we're talking about.
Speaker 3: You just won't even get to hear the other point
Speaker 3: of view.
Speaker 4: Well, then you'll like Actually, a project that fires doing
Speaker 4: my organization is doing with the Cosmos Institute where we're
Speaker 4: actually put to put a quarter million dollars of our
Speaker 4: own money into a million dollar pool to give spot
Speaker 4: grants for people to develop basically epistemically humble AI things
Speaker 4: that actually promote freedom of speech that promote critical thinking,
Speaker 4: because we're worried about precisely this this thing too, and
Speaker 4: it comes in part from one idea, like a overly
Speaker 4: broad ideas of AI alignment that are kind of you know,
Speaker 4: if you're basically like this a I must say nothing
Speaker 4: that offends anybody, that's pretty bad. But also the fact
Speaker 4: that it wants to suck up to you in so
Speaker 4: many cases it's like, tell me how I make you happy? Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, that's a bit of a problem. So so
Speaker 4: believe me. Like, and I make the point, if we
Speaker 4: get the AI thing wrong, that's kind of.
Speaker 1: The whole ball game, oh boy, Because your take is
Speaker 1: if we then have future college students who get a
Speaker 1: sycophantic AI that says, yep, you're exactly writing your opinion
Speaker 1: about that, and does not challenge them, Yeah, that's where
Speaker 1: we really go downhill. That was my interview with Greig Lukianov,
Speaker 1: who by the way, has a new book out called
Speaker 1: The War on Words, and our conversation gives us insight,
Speaker 1: i hope, not only into law and politics, but also
Speaker 1: into the relationship between the internal model of the brain
Speaker 1: and how we want to structure our society. At the
Speaker 1: heart of the issue is that our inner circuitry would
Speaker 1: WHI has evolved for tribal cohesion and emotional immediacy and
Speaker 1: rapid threat detection. This collides with the demands of a
Speaker 1: pluralistic idea rich culture, and at the center of this
Speaker 1: collision is speech. Now, as I said at the beginning,
Speaker 1: when I think about free speech, I'm not thinking about
Speaker 1: the right to speak, but about the importance of hearing.
Speaker 1: Practice with listening to free speech expands the fence lines
Speaker 1: of our internal models. It teaches us to process disagreement
Speaker 1: without falling apart. It teaches us to engage in ideas
Speaker 1: rather than to retreat. It teaches us to hold competing
Speaker 1: ideas in tension. This is, to my mind, probably the
Speaker 1: most important thing about going off to college. The details
Speaker 1: of your classes you're going to forget after a while,
Speaker 1: But the important skill you learn is how to process
Speaker 1: ideas that challenge and stretch your presumptions. Now, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that just because someone has a different idea that
Speaker 1: you'll come to agree with it, but allowing ourselves to
Speaker 1: be challenged by ideas has the possibility of improving our
Speaker 1: points of view. It can illuminate for each of us
Speaker 1: a different angle on a topic that we've just never
Speaker 1: thought of, and in the best case, from the point
Speaker 1: of view of plasticity, it will ever so slightly change
Speaker 1: our brains. And even if it doesn't shift your views
Speaker 1: at all, even if you stick with your original position,
Speaker 1: just listening to the genuine but differing beliefs of someone
Speaker 1: else is going to sharpen your point of view and
Speaker 1: make the thing that you believe in more worth believing in.
Speaker 1: If you never challenge your belief system, your opinions will
Speaker 1: always be lightweight. The challenge, of course, is that disagreement
Speaker 1: feels dangerous. We want certainty, and when we encounter ideas
Speaker 1: that contradict our worldview, our stress hormones rise our prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 1: The seat of reflection is often bypassed in favor of older,
Speaker 1: faster systems, so being exposed to other viewpoints requires a
Speaker 1: cognitive stretch. It asks us to become aware of our
Speaker 1: own reactivity. It asks us to sit, as Victor Frankel
Speaker 1: once said, in the space between stimulus and response and
Speaker 1: to choose something new. And this is how we build
Speaker 1: meaningful resilience. It comes from experience, with a lot of
Speaker 1: friction from learning to metabolize difference rather than simply being
Speaker 1: afraid of it. And this is where education enters the picture,
Speaker 1: not just on campuses, but every place we interact with
Speaker 1: new ideas. Libraries, dinner tables, inboxes. These are the arenas
Speaker 1: where our brains get to practice the art of tolerating
Speaker 1: different and nuance. Greg Lukianov has long argued that if
Speaker 1: we want a society capable of navigating complexity, we need
Speaker 1: to build psychological anti fragility. What that means is that
Speaker 1: challenge strengthens rather than weakens, and neuroscience gives us every
Speaker 1: reason to believe this is possible. The brain is flexible
Speaker 1: and one can learn to override the deep pathways of
Speaker 1: reactivity in favor of curiosity and patience and discernment. So
Speaker 1: I'd encourage you to find some conversation that you don't
Speaker 1: agree with, or a book that you wouldn't normally read.
Speaker 1: It may or may not change your mind on something,
Speaker 1: even a tiny bit. But every argument we address with
Speaker 1: genuine attention is an opportunity to wire a better brain.
Speaker 1: Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and and further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack,
Speaker 1: and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube
Speaker 1: for videos of each episode and to leave comments until
Speaker 1: next time.
Speaker 3: I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.