Why We Should Fight for Freedom of Speech | Greg Lukianoff

Why should we fight for Freedom of Speech? That’s the question that Free Speech Lawyer and Writer Greg Lukianoff helps us answer today. Using first principles, Greg goes deep into the importance of Freedom of Speech, “Free Speech Culture”, what happens to Free Speech when new technologies like the printing press and the internet are introduced, and how all this intersects with blockchains and crypto. ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David Unpacking the Episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-greg-lukianoff-interview ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/19?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ 📣STAKEWISE | LIQUID SOLO STAKING https://bankless.cc/Pod_StakeWise ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐 TRANSPORTER | CROSS CHAINS WITH CONFIDENCE https://transporter.io/ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:19 Defining Free Speech 15:59 Free Speech Origins 19:43 The Printing Press 37:11 The Constitution 39:50 Free Speech Culture 47:48 What Protects Free Speech 55:57 Generational Differences 1:09:17 Censorship Societies 1:16:29 The Internet 1:21:04 AI & Free Speech 1:23:04 Web2 Censorship 1:27:17 Freedom to Transact 1:36:38 Privacy 1:38:30 How to Get Involved 1:40:49 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Greg Lukianoff https://x.com/glukianoff The Eternally Radical Idea Newsletter https://greglukianoff.substack.com/ FIRE https://www.thefire.org/ Support FIRE Today! https://www.thefire.org/donate The Canceling of the American Mind https://www.amazon.com/Canceling-American-Mind-Undermines-Threatens-ebook/dp/B0BTZT9PLM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Canceling-American-Mind-Undermines-Threatens-ebook/dp/B0BTZT9PLM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1 Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media https://www.amazon.com/Free-Speech-History-Socrates-Social/dp/1541600495/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1 Revolution in the Age of Social Media https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Age-Social-Media-Insurrection-ebook/dp/B00GVZJWAM Free Speech, The People's Darling Privilege https://www.amazon.com/Free-Speech-Peoples-Darling-Privilege/dp/0822325292 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In times of crisis, in times when things are really important, rules like freedom of speech, the rules of the road of a free society matter more. They don't matter less. And believe me, like all of these troubles that I'm concerned, and I hope I'm wrong, I think we're going to be seeing over the next couple of years, they are going to be situations where the individuals, you know, citizens' right of freedom of speech is going to become much more important, not less.

• 0:28David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today, we're exploring the frontier of freedom of speech, from law to society to technology. Some topics on the show today, the idea of freedom of speech. What is it and why is it important? And what is what our guest Greg Lukianoff calls free speech culture? And why it's critical for a free and open society? What happens when new technologies like the printing press or the internet are introduced? How do they impact free speech? How Greg rates the healthiness of today's society in terms of our freedom of speech? And what does all of this have to do with blockchains and crypto? Before we get into the conversation, our friends and sponsors over at Stakewise

• 1:10David Hoffman?

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• 1:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That last question, I think, requires some more reflections because you might be asking, why is a crypto podcast doing an episode on freedom of speech? And I think the answer to that question is is pretty simple. Because freedom of speech isn't just an adjacent concept for crypto. It's the core concept of crypto. In crypto, we call it censorship resistance. And we secure it through cryptography, economics, and the social layer. It's what we talk about all the time on Bankless. In the meatspace world, we secure censorship-resistant speech through the First Amendment, common law, and the social layer. And both David and I had a lot of questions about how that's secured, how freedom of speech works, going to this episode that we're answered. And I think there's a lot of interesting parallels between both crypto and the fight for freedom of speech.

• 2:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there's lots of common areas of cooperation between both the world of crypto and the world of free speech advocates like Greg and FIRE. All of us, at the end of the day, are fighting for liberal values of freedom, and that indeed is a common cause. So let's get right to our conversation with Greg. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended exchange and a place where you could buy your freedom technology, of course, which is Kraken.

• 3:05David Hoffman?

  Support free speech, use Kraken.

• 3:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right.

• 3:09David Hoffman?

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• 3:54David Hoffman?

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• 4:37David Hoffman?

  So if you're a developer looking to push the boundaries of what's possible in Web 3, Cartesi is now offering up to $50,000 in grants. Head over to Cartesi's grant application page to apply today. And if you're not a developer, those with staked CTSI can take part in the governance process and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure you're vote ready by staking your CTSI before the votes open. Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications. Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions. Arbitrum has the leading DeFi ecosystem, strong infrastructure options, flourishing NFTs, and is quickly becoming the Web 3 gaming hub. Explore the ecosystem at portal.arbitrum.io.

• 5:20David Hoffman?

  Are you looking to permissionlessly launch your own Arbitrum Orbit chain? Arbitrum Orbit allows anyone to utilize Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own Orbit chain, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you're a developer, an enterprise, or a user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum. Experience Web 3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Visit arbitrum.io and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. Bankless Nation, I'm excited and honored to introduce you to Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the acronym FIRE.

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  FIRE is a nonprofit with a mission to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, specifically with a focus on college campuses and universities. It's a free speech episode. Greg, welcome to Bankless. Thanks for having me. We like, in the bankless world, our first principles. And so, we definitely want to talk to you about the ways that free speech and the First Amendment has become relevant in the different facets of modern day. But we want to go all the way back. What is free speech? And why is it important? Why is it the first amendment of all the amendments?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Freedom of speech is exactly what it sounds like. It's the ability to think what you will and say what you think. And when people talk about the broader concept of freedom of speech, I always make the biggest Boolean circle to be freedom of speech itself. So thinkers like Jonathan Rausch, who's become a good friend, talks about ideas like liberal science, which is essentially a way of figuring out what is and isn't true through disputation, through a never-ending process of evaluating arguments. And his first rule is no argument is ever truly over. And two, you don't get to call special priority. Basically, you can't say, "I, as the head priest of Zeus,

• 7:20Speaker 00

  I'm the person who has unique touch with reality as it exists, so therefore I can decide what is actually true." But I always make the point that freedom of speech is actually even bigger than that. That's just truth-seeking. And truth-seeking is incredibly important. You can never fully get there because it's mostly a process of chipping away at falsity. Because sometimes when people claim, "Oh, truth doesn't exist." It's kind of like, "Yeah, but I bet you believe falsity exists." "I bet you believe that some things aren't true." And that's actually the way that in liberal science, you actually get closer and never quite to truth itself. But outside of truth-seeking, I mean, it's just a simple part of... It's one of the reasons why we think of it as an essential human right.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  It's about things as mundane as what you like, what you care about, what your personality is like, who you are authentically. All of these things, all these things that actually make us fully human, are also part of freedom of speech. So I have a very expansive view of what freedom of speech is. And there are subcategories within it, like academic freedom, like journalism, all this kind of stuff. But I think the big Boolean sphere is freedom of speech.

• 8:29David Hoffman?

  Generally speaking, would you say that you have the most expansive definition of the freedom of speech? Are you, like, as far as the extension of freedom of speech goes, are you all the way out there? Or are there different, like, stops on the train where you wouldn't go so far?

• 8:45Speaker 00

  I would actually say that I can, I might be even frustratingly reasonable in a lot of ways. But there is one thing that you can tell if you're a First Amendment lawyer, that someone doesn't necessarily know what they're talking about, is if they claim to be a free speech absolutist. And it's like, one of those things, it's like, no, that doesn't quite exist. Because practically, nobody thinks, like, death threats, for example, should be protected. Like, if you say something to someone that, basically, the goal of it is to make them sure that you're going to kill them, that's not protected speech anywhere in the world, nor do I believe it should be. I actually think failure to prosecute true threats has actually undermined people's faith in freedom of speech, because they incorrectly think that that's protected speech.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  And it seems so clear to people that it shouldn't be. I do, however, consider myself a viewpoint absolutist. And here's what I mean by that. When it comes to freedom of speech, in the First Amendment, we have this categorical approach, which I think is, you know, as someone who loves constitutional law, but also psychology, it's smart to have things kind of set aside as actually distinct categories of speech that we consider either unprotected or less protected. Because otherwise, you're left with kind of more the European system of always balancing. And of course, when power starts doing balancing, guess what power tends to find? That finds in favor of whatever power actually wants. So a categorical approach, from sort of like a choice architecture standpoint, is smart.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  So things like, true threats are not protected, incitement to imminent lawless action is not protected. It's a hard standard, though. It's not easily met. Harassment is not protected. On campus, racial, sexual harassment is not protected, for example. Obscenity, which is not defined as obscenities, but like hardcore pornography, essentially, is not protected speech. The only one category that I actually disagree with, and has kind of fallen out of favor in First Amendment land, is something called the fighting words doctrine, which is a, it's a very weird case to watch people Particularly people on the left kind of take the idea of like, oh, we should revive

• 10:56Speaker 00

  the fighting words doctrine so we can ban hate speech on campus. And you always want to remind them, this is a case from the 1940s. You want to make it illegal to call a cop a fascist? Because that's actually like the scenario in this case called Chiplinsky from 1943, I think. Saying that you have a, that's unprotected speech because, and it's very, it's a very macho concept too, that like a reasonable man would find those to be fighting words. And there's a reason why we haven't upheld a fighting words conviction, even for things way more offensive than calling a cop a fascist, in the Supreme Court since 1943. So that's one of the categories I don't agree with. But I do actually think that the First Amendment largely gets it right.

• 11:39David Hoffman?

  It gets it right in spirit, right? And so I think the line that you're delineating is that there is speech, and then there's freedom of speech. And I think you're calling out some categories where just like, the words that you are saying are more expansive than just what the spirit of freedom of speech is trying to protect.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:58David Hoffman?

  Maybe to help like draw that line out a little bit more, just like threats of violence.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:04David Hoffman?

  The idea of that, like speaking those words doesn't stop at speech, right? If you are threatening to have violence against someone, that's more than just speech. There is further actions that might take place as a result of your words. And maybe that's the line that's being drawn.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  It's harder to draw it for all the different categories because you have things like, for example, I have no issue with the fact that child pornography is not protected. And part of the rationale there is actually very smart, which is essentially there's no way to create child porn without exploiting a child, which is itself a crime. But it's the only one where the mark, where it's, the First Amendment rationale is to dry up the market for something. Because if you applied that to other, less offensive kinds of speech, you know, it would be pretty troubling to say we're trying to dry up. But when it's something as odious as child porn, that's such a serious harm, you know, I'm comfortable with that. But basically, I mentioned that partially to make the point that sometimes it's not as neat and tidy.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  But I do generally think a good way to understand protected speech and unprotected speech is that unprotected speech is often, not always, but often more action-like. So for example, there's a doctrine of First Amendment law about words that are just an incidental part of the commission of a crime. And that means, you know, you're, and it's also that this one's kind of a true threat. Saying, telling someone your money or your life, the fact that you use words to do that, who cares? Like, that's obviously a crime. So there are contexts in which kind of like we use words to engage in action, which I think the First Amendment correctly recognizes. But you're on the safest ground when you're talking about, in my opinion, this thing, you know?

• 13:45Speaker 00

  And that's absolutely as it should be. Because, and here's, here's my big sort of meta kind of vision on this stuff. And it's weird, having specialized in First Amendment law and like this being my lifelong passion and also the philosophy of freedom of speech, to notice that in First Amendment law, you know, there's ideas like the marketplace of ideas, which are all about truth-seeking. And that it doesn't really emphasize the simple value of knowing what people actually think. And, and I really always try to get some people to pause for a second on this. If the project of human knowledge is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think. And if you create an environment in which people aren't being their authentic selves,

• 14:28Speaker 00

  you actually create a more dangerous environment in many ways, because you don't know what people really think. And here's the thing. It's even more important to know if what someone thinks is hateful or odious or dangerous, etc. The idea that we're safer for not knowing that, you know, some portion of the population actually thinks there's a horrible conspiracy theory against itself, it's just kidding yourself.

• 14:52David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this is where you draw the line at. You are a, an opinion absolutist, thinking that there's no such thing as an unsafe opinion. Now, there might be unsafe words, but generally those things lead to actions. But as far as like opinions go, if we're just containerizing things to opinions, total, total freedom in all given like opinions and then...

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Oh, I think, I think there can be an unsafe opinion. I think that some, you know, versions of antisemitism or versions of racism, for example, are... You know, as I think Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, their ideas fraught with death. But what I'm saying is it's really important to know that. Right. And there's, there's well, there's very predictable psychological phenomena that because of course censorship doesn't change someone's opinion. It just says, okay, well, I'm not going to talk about this to you guys anymore who disagree with me. I'm just going to talk to the people over there who agree with me. Right. And as far as- From a societal perspective. Yeah. And so one of the things that actually happens, a very predictable phenomena is group polarization. Because when you're encouraging people to just talk to people they already agree with, the social science is very clear on this.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  You get more radicalized in the direction of the group.

• 15:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Greg, I want to just pull it back for a second and look at freedom of speech in the context of the arc of civilization. Because it strikes me that humanity did not always care about freedom of speech. But this is somewhat of a more recent invention. And I'm sure you've charted the history of this and know the history like very well with speech. But like, when did we start caring about freedom of speech? When did that come about? And how did we get to a place where we've actually enshrined this in the operating system, the code of a major nation like the United States?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  So here's my grand theory of history. And I actually have to cite to some degree the work of David Graeber, a thinker who I actually quite disagree with on any number of things. But one of the things he does point out is that we have, from the knowledge that we have of tribal societies and from smaller scale societies that, you know, that we have record of, that there were almost certainly ways of governing that are completely lost to history. That essentially, you know, from the agricultural revolution to the beginning of recorded history, you're talking about maybe about 6,000 years. And during that time, the various, if some of these structures looked anything like some of the things we saw in South America and North America and Papua New Guinea, like

• 17:20Speaker 00

  they, they would have some amount of, you know, you have certain rights to say what you really think to the, to the chief, that people have like special obligations and special- As special privileges essentially to share their opinion. So I think that there were social structures that were tended to be more small scale well before Athenian democracy that actually did have an idea of freedom of speech, something like it. So it's something where basically like it's important for the whole group to know what you actually think. So people are allowed to be even disrespectful to like to our leader sometimes.

• 17:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just in a much smaller setting, right?

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Just in a much smaller setting.

• 17:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and the difficulty with these types of things is how do you scale it?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, okay.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  And there was no way. So basically you go from unrecorded history that if there are parallels to other societies, and there probably was in many of them, not necessarily all of them, some kind of idea of local, small-scale freedom of speech. Freedom of speech was taken very seriously from the citizens in Athens, and they actually had two different ideas of Isagorria and Parisia. Isagorria was rational discourse, and Parisia, though, was freedom of the tongue. It was like this idea of like, I can be nasty to you under the following circumstances. It shouldn't be that much of a surprise, though, that once you get outside of relatively small-scale societies, freedom of speech doesn't make much of an appearance on the

• 18:47Speaker 00

  global scene for a couple of reasons. One, you're talking about after the fall of these small democratic experiments, everything was pretty much top-down, usually some kind of imperial system or monarchical system. But also, it wasn't practical. You couldn't communicate over massive scales. So free speech was something that, but I do find it really fascinating and really telling that almost as soon as the printing press starts making a mark on Northern Europe and Central Europe, you start having people arguing for expansive ideas of freedom of speech. So as soon as it became practical to talk to a mass audience, very quickly thinkers

• 19:30Speaker 00

  start advocating for, wow, you really should be, the government shouldn't be restraining before things are published, people's ideas that has tremendous benefit potentially to the human race.

• 19:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe we could talk about that in the context of we've done some podcast episodes with one gentleman by the name of Josh Rosenthal, who compared the internet very much to kind of like the printing press. I believe that the date of the invention of the printing press was like the 1400s or something.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  1450s.

• 20:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  1450s, okay. So this was a technology that really brought the concept of freedom of speech to the forefront.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 20:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like another version of this technology, something that's happening now, which is probably a communication technology that is every bit as revolutionary as the printing press, which is like the internet. So at some level, we're living in the 1450s yet again. And so maybe there's something to learn here. But you're saying the history of freedom of speech, well, we had it in smaller societies. It didn't really appear on the global stage until after the printing press.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Until mass communication was possible.

• 20:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then how did it make its way into the US Constitution in the form of the First Amendment? And was that the first kind of nation-state operating system in which freedom of speech was embedded in such a direct way?

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Oh, I love this stuff. Okay, so I feel like one of the big advantages of Europe was essentially that it was a place that nobody, no single power was ever quite able to conquer. And that you had all of these societies kind of, you know, struggling against each other. And I think that that's one of the reasons why, you know, if you looked at the world from the point of view of 1500, everyone would have been like, well, you know, it's either China, India, or the Islamic world. Like this backwater in Europe is nothing special. But one of the reasons why it became something so special is that in China, you know, there was a very much a top-down system, you know, by the time that Europe really started taking off, there was very much a top-down system. That was kind of impossible in Europe.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  And it led for a lot more people from moving from place to place and a lot more experimentation. So when you start having, so my friend and FIRE senior fellow, Jacob Mishengama, or now I think he's in the US, he's okay with people calling him Jacob. He wrote a book called Free Speech: From Socrates to Social Media. I got a nice shout out in the acknowledgements for being one of the people who really kind of gave him a stern talking to about like, you really, you know, you did this incredible podcast series on the history of freedom of speech, the global history of freedom of speech, like, bring it for the book, man. And it's great, like, it talks about surprising things, like, Transylvania, you know, like,

• 22:20Speaker 00

  had a, was one of the first places to codify different ideas of rights of freedom of speech. But that was partially because they were, you know, the intersection of all these warring empires. But you definitely had Holland, the Netherlands, Dutch people, you know, with a, what was probably the most literate society in human history, probably at that point, it's probably, and the, and second in line was probably Britain. And so, I'm gonna do a shout out, I like doing shout outs for books, as you can tell. But Fareed Zakaria's recent book is actually really quite good, and it was the first one

• 23:02Speaker 00

  to really convince me, when people refer to something as being Anglo-Dutch, I'd always kind of like, eh, doesn't sound quite right. I mean, because the Netherlands were kind of a impressive republic, very forward-thinking, very literate, very advanced in a lot of ways, but then kind of a flash in the pan. And I didn't fully appreciate, you know, when William of Orange came over during the Glorious Revolution in, what was it, 1688? That essentially, it was taking a lot of that liberalism, smaller liberalism, from the Netherlands into Britain, and it really transformed some of, some aspects of the way work was done in Britain from that point on.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  So I've come around to the idea that there was some, something special that deserves to be called Anglo-Dutch. And so you have two of the most literate societies in the country, two of the, in the world, and really with tons of printing, tons of, tons of reading, and it became hard not to see genuine advantages for having a highly literate society that could actually talk out its problems, because innovation, you know, resulted, you know, political action became easier. Of course, that was oftentimes considered one of the downsides, but that it was very clear that there are real benefits. So, well before that, and this is what I did in law school, I studied censorship during the Tudor dynasty. So, when I was at Stanford,

• 24:31Speaker 00

  I took every class they offered on freedom of speech. When I ran out of those, I did two, three credit generals, like independent studies with two different professors, on censorship during Henry VIII, and censorship during the later Tudors, most notably, of course, Elizabeth I. And I always try to liken what's going on with social media and with the internet to what was going on back then with the printing press, because that was, this was early. And it was, it was around 1520, 1521, when Henry started kind of turning on the printing press, first by, you know, banning the sale or distribution of a, what was called the Tyndale Bible, which was an English translation of the Bible that was

• 25:16Speaker 00

  considered to be filled with heresies. This is back when, when Henry was Catholic. So, he turned on it then. But then, you know, he couldn't have kids with Catherine of Aragon, he meets this hot little number that he wants to marry, and, you know, the rest is history, he becomes a Protestant. And by 1538, he, he and his Congress, and his parliament, passed the first print licensing program of, in British history, which basically meant you had to have a, sort of like a special dispensation from the crown in order to have a printing press. And if, and if something was printed with something that didn't have the seal

• 25:56Speaker 00

  of the crown on it, it was an illegal printer, and, you know, that, the punishment for that was very, very serious. And basically, what Henry was trying to do was he was trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Like, he was basically looking at a technology that caused tremendous disruption, and he wanted to end it. And I feel like we're seeing a lot of that today.

• 26:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  End it, Greg, or maybe just like control it, right?

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Or control it, right, right.

• 26:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because like, so this would be almost the equivalent of, if you like, in the internet to the printing press.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  The having the US government maintaining a registry of approved websites, right?

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You had to be one of the approved websites, or the approved social media accounts, or something like this. It would be that kind of an equivalent. And the goal, you'd think, would be to just control this new, you know, technology.

• 26:44David Hoffman?

  It would be like a read-only internet with privileged write access.

• 26:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Right. You know, that's entirely fair. I usually talk about it as kind of like trying to put the disruption, you know, to try to end the disruption, put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. And I think, you know, if he was, if he'd been allowed to sort of wish, whether or not to have it at all, I wouldn't be surprised if he said, no, this infernal device actually isn't worth it. Because like, when people look at what the disruption that was actually caused, and I always point out, it was only about a doubling of the number of literate people in Northern Europe in the early days of the printing press, which is, of course, impressive, but still, you're talking about, I think the number's something like 12 million to like 24 million over a brief-ish period of time, but not that, not that brief. And when you bring that many people, that many eyes,

• 27:34Speaker 00

  and voices, and ideas, and minds into a discussion, it's gonna be disruptive. It's unavoidable. And I always point out, like, the printing press, in its early days, you know, it led to religious strife, it led to social strife, it led to an increase in the witch trials, because the biggest, one of the biggest sellers was the Malphacorum, which was like the, you know, the handbook of how you know, like, what a witch is. So there are all sorts of arguments against, you know, like, the printing press being good. And I always make this point to people when they want to kind of put social media back in the, back in the bottle. And I've got my issues with social media. I've written with Jonathan Hyde about this, absolutely. I do think it can be certainly for, particularly

• 28:18Speaker 00

  for some young women, it can actually be quite harmful. But we have to remember that we just introduced, printing press was introducing millions of additional people into discussion. We just introduced billions of additional minds and eyes and thoughts into a discussion. And it's not just fast, it's instantaneous. So there's literally no way at this moment right now to not have a anarchical period. We are in epistemic anarchy, you know, like our knowledge production is all higgly piggly. And basically, like, and I see sometimes, like, people coming up with regulations to kind of fix it. And I'm kind of like, there's

• 29:00Speaker 00

  no way to fix it. You can do some things that might make it, some improvements here and there. And but really, the cultural has to adapt to the, this massive shift in technology. And the idea that we panic and give government the power to, to do with it what it will would just be so much worse than the problem.

• 29:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess the point as well is the government can't stop it, even if it tries. Perhaps it can sort of slow it down. Just pulling on that thread, we'll come back to kind of the constitution, how freedom of speech maybe was in trying in the first.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  It only got us as far as.

• 29:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, before we get there, though, let's, let's go take this, the sidetrack for a minute. How did it resolve? So this period of anarchy with free speech and printing presses, right? So like, how did that finally fix itself and lead towards maybe the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the things that followed?

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it was ugly, frankly. The, so people were surprised who knew a little bit more about the printing, or who knew a little bit about the printing press, that I was focusing on the tutors, because they didn't even realize the tutors were, you know, so important to this. They mostly thought of the 17th century, the, and the Stewart Kings, you know, trying to put the printing press genie back in the bottle. And part of the reason why they think of that is because. Arapigidika, which is a tract written by John Milton, talking about not in the mid 17th century, saying we shouldn't be like, the government shouldn't be licensing the press. And it's a great statement. It wasn't, people don't realize it wasn't at all influential

• 30:41Speaker 00

  at the time, but it's a great statement on the value of freedom of speech. Stanley Fish, who's a big critic of freedom of speech itself, you know, always points out, yeah, but he didn't include Catholics. And it's like, okay, this is an argument that I find a lot that always irritates me. It's like, so if what you're saying is that someone in the past wasn't an argument for increasing the number of people who enjoy a human right doesn't count unless they immediately went to the universal application of it. That's a really convenient little logic out there. So it was a big issue in the mid 17th century. But when I mentioned the Glorious Revolution before, the year after the Glorious Revolution,

• 31:22Speaker 00

  1689, you start having, this is when John Locke returned from the Netherlands, you know, with ideas of separation of powers, with ideas of small l liberalism. They worked some of these rights into, I don't want to call it a constitution, a list of rights in 1689. And after the Glorious Revolution, Britain really started taking off. It became a much more sort of wealthy, business oriented society. And it was clear that some of this was the literate society, the fact that they were in constant communication with each other, that they had this wonderful republic of letters, you know. So it was clearly giving an advantage to Britain and everyone, everyone could see it. It was very clear. This starts

• 32:05Speaker 00

  happening, and this was happening as well, in France, just in France, as you start heading towards the Enlightenment, you're much more likely to get arrested for handing out, you know, racy pamphlets and that kind of stuff than you were in Britain. And I always make this point about free speech culture versus free speech law. Because in my most recent book, Canceling in the American Mind, I point out that free speech culture in a very real sense is more important than free speech law. Because that's where free speech law comes from in the first place. You know, the First Amendment didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of people who were excited about the Enlightenment. And in France, they didn't have free speech law.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  And still, the French Enlightenment is remembered to this day. Sure, sometimes people had to flee off to the Netherlands again, the University of Leiden, for example. Some people, you know, fled to other parts of Europe. Both Voltaire and Rousseau were arrested at different times. Or did they actually get Voltaire? I forget. Anyway, so a lot of the biggest, you know, French Enlightenment thinkers were arrested, and all of them risked being arrested. But they still, because they had this strong free speech culture, where disputation and argument and all this kind of stuff was welcomed voraciously, we still remember the French Enlightenment. Now, of course, I'm much more of a Scottish Enlightenment guy. But that's really where the badasses were, as far as I was concerned. You know, whether it's David Hume or Adam Smith, or then again, all of the crazy scientists

• 33:34Speaker 00

  from one world if we might name my kid for. That essentially, you know, you have this, you know, tradition blowing up in Britain. And the people in the colonies, you know, who actually, I didn't, I also didn't fully appreciate as much as like how much the Glorious Revolution, how much influence that actually had in the colonies, you know, for example, and how much it kind of changed kind of the nature of what the colonies were looked like to being like a weirdly hyper-educated, you know, they were, in some ways, they were the boonies, but they're also like weirdly scholarly boonies, you know? And so by the time you actually start getting to the big divorce between Britain and the

• 34:17Speaker 00

  US, my mom's British, so, and actually, my mom's divorced, so maybe that's, I was that word, semi-consciously. But they, they thought of themselves as having the right of free-born Englishmen, which was a way that John Lilburn, the, oh, man, you're letting me have fun with this, so I'm going into John Lilburn and everything. The idea of rights of free-born Englishmen, which included the right to freedom of speech. So when it came time to write the Constitution, now, of course,

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Originally, James Madison, the most important architect of the Constitution, he didn't actually think we needed a separate Bill of Rights because his point was, and it makes a lot of sense, who are we limiting here? We're limiting our own power as a free people on how to govern ourselves. That was initially his argument. Why would we be limiting our own will? It's kind of like in the British Parliament, like that's one of the reasons why they didn't have a Bill of Rights was because the idea of like, we're limiting our own autonomy here, you know, to be in charge. But James Madison finally came around to the idea that we needed a Bill of Rights. And sometimes marmy people like to point out, well, it wasn't the first amendment, and it was actually the third amendment, because there were two amendments that were before it.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  And I always point out, I'm tired of this cliche, like, it's a nerd cliche, like, you have to be nerdy even to know it. But the first two ones were basically procedural ones about the distribution of seats that would have resulted in there being like 10,000 congressmen if it had actually passed, and something about the limitation on their ability to give themselves raises. So those are procedural, and I don't even understand those as being Bill of Rights. Like, those are basically addenda to the Constitution. The very first right that is stated is, well, I consider there to be six of them in the first amendment. A lot of people like to say five, but I think they're wrong. It's freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and by that they meant the machine, and the

• 36:20Speaker 00

  right to petition the government for addressed grievances. And then the two, you know, that I count, oh, I'm sorry, freedom of assembly, which is also usually interpreted as, or freedom of association. But the two additional ones usually get just called religion. And I think that's unfair to the brilliance of putting these two right next to each other. The freedom from the state establishment of religion, and the freedom to engage in your faith. And having establishment and free exercise right next to each other is just, and sometimes people call like the American Revolution, like the conservative revolution, because it wasn't as radical as the... Failed French Revolution. But I always think of it's like, no, what is more radical than in a single sentence,

• 37:04Speaker 00

  trying to prevent everything people have been murdering themselves over and each other over for the last two centuries?

• 37:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty cool. I just came back from Philadelphia with my kids. We went to the American, um, History of the American Revolution.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. I love that place.

• 37:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  George Washington's tent, all of these things, right? It gives you in the mindset of that era, which is really cool. I mean, it's not an opportunity to just read the First Amendment, actually. It says this, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," that's what you just said, "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances." That's it. That's the sentence, kind of a run-on sentence, but includes, as you said, maybe five or six, six different rights there that are pretty key. And it embodies a lot of Enlightenment type of understanding. Greg, is this the first place it's ever been sort of embedded in such clear language

• 38:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  in an organizing, operating system? You know, I think of the Constitution as kind of like the code of the United States, if you will, right? And so this is like, is this the first time in history it's been embedded in a line of code that operates a nation-state?

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Uh, one that endured, yes. Uh, one that existed previously, no. Um, there were protections of freedom of speech that weren't quite as expansive. In the Netherlands, like I said, there were protections in Transylvania. There are also some actually in the old Polish monarchy, Polish-Lithuanian monarchy. They pop, it pops up here and there. And of course, there was the 1689 Declaration of Rights, but nothing as expansive and certainly nothing that lasted as long. So in terms of like the American experiment being something incredibly unique and special, this is one of the reasons why we get a little irritated when people talk about American exceptionalism. Like, it's kind of like, okay, like, if you take all value away from like the idea of

• 39:03Speaker 00

  like saying, the thing that you think you approve of something, a truly large-scale democratic republic was something that even the founders were a little skeptical anyone could pull off. Because basically, these had always been small-scale societies, you know, like we said before. So doing it on a massive scale is amazing. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, like, actually reading the Federalist Papers, which is something that I did way too late in life. And I was like, oh, my God, these guys were geniuses. Like, it's so well thought out. Like, how much time Alexander Hamilton, in particular, spent explaining like, why, even though, like, it turns out he actually had some genuine skepticism about the way we're doing the arrangement, he defended

• 39:44Speaker 00

  it just gorgeously. And about how you could actually have a large scale democratic republic.

• 39:49David Hoffman?

  One of our favorite episodes in our library at Bankless is this episode that Ryan mentioned it, started in the Renaissance and talked about the technologies of the Renaissance, and how it kind of spawned new thinking, new culture in Europe. And then we did a repeat with that same guest later for a Fourth of July episode, and talked about how some of the culture and thought and ideas of the Renaissance ultimately came to be manifested in the United States, in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights. And so, like, the United States experiment was very much like downstream of some of the ideas that were created in the Renaissance. And you also talked about this idea of like, free speech culture versus free speech law, and how like, law is actually downstream of what the culture wants.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:33David Hoffman?

  And so, maybe, like, you know, despite the skepticism of some of the American founding fathers, what they didn't account for is like, the blank slate of culture that America offered these, it's like, Enlightenment Renaissance ideas. Can you, maybe you can just like, define the idea of what free speech culture is, if you could put it into a definition? And then we can maybe talk about how that was like, the correct breeding ground for such a large scale experiment in freedom of speech that we call America?

• 41:00Speaker 00

  So, in Canceling the American Mind, trying to explain what free speech culture is, I realized that a lot of a society's values are well expressed in their idioms or expressions. That essentially, like, the little sayings that everybody knows in that society, that so much so that they might even sort of like, think they're cliche, or sort of roll their eyes at, but nonetheless, are like, well, sure, it's true, but... And this also should be a cause for concern because when I pointed to things that actually really show what a free speech culture is, some of the best ways to demonstrate it are little sayings that someone, I don't know, an old fogey like me grew up with. You know, "It's a free country," probably the simplest one, "but everyone's entitled to their opinion," being something that was just taken for granted.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  You know, little phrases like "not my cup of tea," like the idea of just saying, like, "Listen, that might not be for everybody." All of these ways of sort of checking you to sort of like, "Cool your arrogance here. You're one member of a small D democratic society. You should not assume that you're smarter, that your opinion is more valid than anybody else." I mean, even things like, you know, "Walk a mile in a man's shoes before you judge them," or "Don't judge a book by its cover." All of these things are about checking your ego to be a better member of a free society. And my co-author, a brilliant young woman named Ricky Schlot, I think she's turning

• 42:29Speaker 00

  24, she's someone I've been writing words, writing with since she was 20, she's just amazing. And she didn't grow up with any of these things. Like, she was like, "Man, nobody said that." And I think that-

• 42:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where'd she grow up, Greg?

• 42:45Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 42:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where'd she grow up?

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Where did she grow up?

• 42:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  She grew up in New Jersey.

• 42:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, Jersey?

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really? It's changed in America. I thought you were gonna tell me she grew up in a different, like, country or something like this.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  No, no, she grew up in New Jersey. And, you know, she just didn't hear these sayings, people saying them. And one of the things we've been trying to sort of sound the alarm on, you know, at FIRE, is a both kind of predictable turn in, against freedom of speech, particularly in sort of, you know, forgive the sounding too Marxist, but sort of in ruling class kind of circles. But also a turn on free speech culture that I saw coming back when I was at the ACLU in 1999. Like, I have a chapter that I call "The Slow-Motion Trainwreck," where essentially people's attitudes about free speech were sort of changing in-

• 43:37Speaker 00

  The elite institutions and eventually that was going to spell some real problems for the long term future of free speech. And I spent 23 years of my career, you know, I'm in my 23rd year at FIRE, fighting this. And, you know, we, I think to a large degree, we failed. A lot of the things FIRE was warning about when we were founded in 1999, things we were warning about again when things got a lot worse for free speech around 2014 and got even worse around 2020, 2021. A lot of them have come to pass, you know, in some cases legally, you know, some of the laws are considering in Canada, you know, for life imprisonment for speech crimes. Terrifying idea.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  The hate speech laws that actually exist de facto in Britain that they want to pass in Ireland, like this is all over the world now. And yes, the state of the First Amendment is very strong in the United States, but the sort of free speech skepticism that I see particularly in academia scares me to death.

• 44:44David Hoffman?

  I'm probably gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and guess that if we lose the freedom of speech in America, it's because we lost free speech culture first.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:54David Hoffman?

  That's like the correct order of operations. Do you have any like anecdotes, either in history or maybe in modern times of just like when free speech culture was a check on the potential loss of like free speech law?

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:08David Hoffman?

  As in like, maybe somebody was trying to remove some sort of freedom of speech, but free speech culture checked that and stopped that. Do you have any stories that you could present?

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, I, once again, I'm gonna recommend a book. It's a book called The People's Darling Privilege by Michael Kent Curtis. And it's about, because here's something that a lot of people don't know. The First Amendment had very little legal meaning or force until about 1925. It's kind of, you know, it is kind of humbling to think that we passed this thing in 1791. And as far as the law was concerned, it was almost meaningless. Until 1925. So what did that mean? There was no free speech in the United States from that moment on? No, because it was a popular value. And that's what he means in his title, The People's Darling Privilege.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  It was, I think, George III referred to it that way. And he gives this example of abolition, of laws to quell abolitionist speech in the early 19th century. And one thing that has to be really clear here is that abolition was not a popular movement in the North in, say, the 1830s. It would be a while before it actually started becoming a really popular movement. But partially because there were well-publicized cases of people getting killed, including the original Reverend Lovejoy, not from The Simpsons, but like an actual person,

• 46:39Speaker 00

  defending his printing, his abolitionist printing press and actually was killed defending it. That Americans started to realize that it couldn't actually just be that, you know, you have a freedom from being prosecuted by the state for speech crimes. We had to actually kind of protect you from the rest of us doing it, for killing you for your speech. And so the whole point of the book, The People's Darling Privilege, is to say how before the First Amendment was strong at all, a tradition of freedom of speech actually helped keep free speech alive.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Didn't do that much for abolitionists in the South, but it did prevent those same laws being passed in the North. Otherwise, you know, they would have been if there had been no opposition to them. So that, you know, that book and some of those examples of the different attempts, particularly by, you know, southern slave owners to restrict speech across the entire country, you know, the only thing that stood between it and winning the whole country was free speech culture.

• 47:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I think that's important for us to realize, right? It's just in terms of like, if you were to ask the question of what actually protects free speech in America? And like, I'm wondering what answer you'd give to that, Greg? Because it strikes me as like, we started this conversation talking about the First Amendment. That is certainly one protection of it. But I think people who don't, you know, do constitutional law and haven't studied the First Amendment in the ways you have, don't realize it's not just those words in the Constitution, but it's also court cases. All of the precedent over many years of prosecuting this and having it play out in the court system that gives us the free speech system we have today. It's not only that, it's not only the laws and the courts and kind of the enforcement

• 48:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  of the executive branch and police and judiciary and all of these things. It's also the society. And unless like, we can, if we as a society, if the hearts and minds, individual citizens choose that not to enforce free speech, right? Then our law system, our courts become toothless as well. So if I were to ask you the question of like, at the basal level, what kind of protects free speech in America? What things would you draw on to really explain that?

• 49:04Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it has to be part, it has to be part of the culture. It has to be a cultural value, or it won't survive. Because, and I have this weird debate with Ken White, who's a First Amendment lawyer in the pages of Reason magazine about this, and I'm still baffled by his argument that essentially, you know, free speech, culture, you know, it's just a political argument, it's incoherent, it's not that important, and we have the best free speech law in the world. And I made the point that kind of like, yeah, but we're a common law country. Like, the idea that culture and law are somehow completely separate is a nonsense opinion. Like, it doesn't make any sense.

• 49:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, and aren't, like, further, Greg, aren't, judges are part of culture as well, right? They are certainly influenced by the milieu of the culture at any given moment.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And that's my point, is that essentially, common law, you know, like, it is, a lot of times, the idea that they exist in some kind of cultural vacuum is nonsense. Like, it comes in. And so you have this 19th century situation where free speech culture was the only thing keeping free speech alive. Then you have the utter calamity of the Civil War in which there were a lot of things, you know, a lot of times people refer to like the Civil War as being kind of like, well, they had ferocious, you know, limitations on people's liberties during then. And it's like, kind of like, yeah, but it's the closest the United States have ever, ever come to not existing. So not a good comparison to most other things. But then you have the late 19th century where it's all Victorian censorship, where it's

• 50:35Speaker 00

  all kind of like, you know, people wanting to, people like Anthony Comstock, trying to put the, you know, the sexual genie back in the bottle. And, and even then, you had this group called the Free Speech League that came up, you know, to defend the right to nude bathe and to swear in private, private letters to your spouse. And these were real cases, like people actually went to jail for like, using the word fuck in a, in a letter, like they were sent to like their wife or something like that. There was a nude bathing case, apparently just advocating for that, you know, what was beyond the pale. And so we've always really admired that bunch of weirdos, you know, in the Free Speech League

• 51:14Speaker 00

  that preceded the ACLU. But you really started to, one of the reasons why you really needed the free speech law to start taking over, though, around 1925, and really the process was started a little bit before then, say, 1917, was because the government got emboldened that it could actually pass serious restrictions on freedom of speech due to both World War I, and then also the first Red Scare. And they, and boy, did they pass some very serious Sedition and Espionage Act. And it was those laws and those prosecutions that started to develop First Amendment law. And as, you know, the 20th century, you know, progressed,

• 51:59Speaker 00

  that's when you start seeing a rise in free speech culture and free speech law. And to be clear, you want both. If you can have both, that's ideal. The situation in Enlightenment France, you know, where you had to risk going to jail is not exactly ideal. So, and I think that it was nice to grow up at a time where we could kind of take for granted that freedom of speech was, was something that was taken seriously, you know, by the left and to a degree, at least the libertarian right for sure. And That essentially was something that was almost globally agreed on, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union. But that time, you know, that time when freedom of speech, you could count on it to be protected as a cultural value. I think that's been eclipsing.

• 52:44David Hoffman?

  How would you rate the healthiness of free speech, culture and law in America today?

• 52:49Speaker 00

  I'd say it's a little better than it was four years ago. You know, in canceling, one of the things that we show is how bad the number of professors who lost their jobs got from 2014, where we saw like the big sort of explosion of people losing their jobs for their opinion in a way that I had never seen previously in my career. And we make the point that kind of like, yeah, we're talking about, you know, we know of about 200 professors who were fired. That's about twice as many professors as were fired, you know, during McCarthyism. And there was only about 62 professors that were fired for being communists. The rest of that 100, you know, were just for other opinions. And so we're talking about, you know, twice as many that we know of, but also from talking

• 53:33Speaker 00

  to professors, we found that about one in six, one in six, that would be like 100,000 professors, as extrapolated out, say that they were either punished for speech or threatened with punishment for speech. And that means research, that means teaching in class, that means, you know, what they say in their regular lives. And as another way of like trying to quantify this, it was about, there was a big survey of, which is how we know about like how many prosecutions there were under McCarthyism, of McCarthyism at the time. And they found about 9% of professors were saying that they were toning things down in their scholarships so as not to get in trouble. And I want to be clear, 9% is terrible. Like 9% is really bad.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Like that's one in 10 professors saying that they're self censoring. When we did that exact same question, which was self censoring in their papers, we found about, you know, 35% or something like that said that they were now. And when we asked professors, are you self censoring at all? You know, because there are more, you know, there wasn't Twitter back then, about 90% of them said that they were. So I would say that it's gotten It gotten quite bad. I would say that it seems like some of the ideological intensity of say 2020, 2021 was starting to kind of recede a little bit because I think we all

• 54:58Speaker 00

  lost our minds during COVID. And I think we, it started to recede a little bit, but then last year, last year was the worst year for deplatforming we'd ever seen. And that was before October 7. And deplatforming is like when you get a speaker disinvited or when you shout someone down. And so last year, worst year that we're familiar with, period. And that was going to be that way even before October 7. But of course, things got way worse after October 7 on campus. This year's going to blow it out of the water. And it's been overwhelmingly shout downs of speakers and oftentimes, you know, Jewish speakers are targeted by pro Palestinian students. And there's one example where it's like they do, it's a guy who's there to give a lecture on black holes, like something

• 55:40Speaker 00

  I would have absolutely loved to have gone to. And I'm not sure if they, if they were targeting just because he was Jewish or maybe because he said some pro-Israel things or what, but it's just completely out of control. So I'd say right now, we're not great, but we're definitely doing better than the rest of the world.

• 55:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's slice it in a few other different dimensions. So demographically, you know, like, how does this generation of say 20 somethings, you know, compare to previous generations? Like, are different, the boomers versus, you know, Gen Z or, you know, the other generations? How do they compare in terms of free speech culture and respect for that?

• 56:23Speaker 00

  The polling is pretty clear on this, that basically right or left, if you're over 45, you're pretty good on free speech. And tend to get better the older you get, you know, like particularly closer you get to the World War II generation, like they, you know, they would give you a lecture on they fought, they fought for this stuff and some of their friends died for it. When you get down on the millennials, which I assume you guys are millennials on the left, aren't so great on freedom of speech. So that's basically 45 to 30 millennials on the right, fairly good. When you get below 30, it's a little more complicated because they don't know all that much about it. Like you ask them questions and in the polling,

• 57:07Speaker 00

  it seems kind of like semi incoherent. You do see assumptions, for example, that hate speech is not protected speech. And you just have to explain over and over again. It's like, no, that's not true. Like the bedrock principle of the First Amendment, and this is from a case called Texas v. Johnson in 1989, which was about whether or not you had a right to burn an American flag. And the bedrock principle of American First Amendment law is that you can't ban something simply because it's offensive. So, under no interpretation of pure hate speech law, can you can that be constitutional under the First Amendment? But there's an assumption among young people that it already is unprotected. So it makes it makes even reading the polling kind of hard to figure out what to make of it. Because

• 57:52Speaker 00

  when you already have people who believe that all this unprotected speech, all this protected speech is unprotected, what does it mean when they say that they believe in freedom of speech? Because they're already accepting. So yeah, I would say that I'm we're at fire trying to do our best to sort of educate everyone, but particularly younger people on why free speech matters and what the philosophy of it is. And to really kind of this year, kind of our goal was to go back to basics, to try to explain it as simply and clearly as possible, because we're not sure anyone else is.

• 58:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this typical of younger generations, though? It's like when the boomers were, you know, younger, in their 20s, let's say, in the 1970s, were they bad on free speech?

• 58:37Speaker 00

  No.

• 58:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And just as they got older, they became better?

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is one of the big, it's really funny. No, no offense to current, you know, campus protesters, but it's really funny to see the comparisons when they think that they're just like the protesters of the 1960s. Because it's like, well, generally, the protesters in the 1960s, I think they got some stuff right and some stuff wrong. But they started the free speech movement on campus in 1964 at Berkeley. They definitely talked a good game on freedom of speech, even if some of them just wanted it for them and not for anybody else. But there were people like Mario Savio, who really meant it, like who actually wanted people to come and disagreed, you know, about things. And the weirdest part, over my experience over the last, you know, 23 years at FIRE,

• 59:25Speaker 00

  is that it's very historically strange for young people to want power, to have more power, because they think it will benefit them in some way. The protesters of the 1960s wanted, they wanted the colleges not to act like what's called in loco parentis, like the local parents. And the people in the 60s were much more kind of like Gen X or just like, like in the sense of being like, don't you tell me what to do. I'm gonna do what I want. Like, you're not my dad, was basically, and you should have fewer powers over me, and I should have greater independence, and these rules should not apply to me. And

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  that's a more typical attitude of the young. It's not that power should have more power, it's that power should have less power, and particularly less power over me and my friends. And meanwhile, kind of like, it's been completely reversed around the younger generation. Like that there is, there is a much greater sense of, we need to give administrators more power, more discretion over speech to keep us from being hurt or offended. Now, it is, I think, switching a little bit on campus, because since, since October 7th, it's kind of like an inter-left fight. There's a little bit more of like, the pro-Palestinian side kind of saying, you know, okay, maybe there should be less power over me. And then so suddenly, this generation that had been pretty free speech skeptical has at least a segment

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  that it now seems to think it might be sort of free speech absolutist. That being said, it's also some, the same activists who are oftentimes shouting down other speakers, which is not very pro free speech. So it's a big, weird, scary mess at the moment. Let's put it that way.

• 1:01:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Greg, you were talking about getting back to basics and one of the things you have to do is try to explain it to the younger generations, why freedom of speech is important. I'm kind of curious what you say because like part of the context for this and this entire episode indeed is there's so many parallels between what we're doing in crypto and like, you know, free speech, cryptocurrency very much is a censorship resistant protocol that is also enforced by not only like the idea of code being law, but also a social layer, right? It's like if people in crypto don't care about censorship resistance, we start to lose that as a property. They can like fork in other code. We can, you know,

• 1:01:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  change the blockchain in various ways. And so we have to make a case to younger generations, also the world as to why we need a censorship resistant, immutable ledger of transactions, right? In the, in the field of commerce and even communication. So what do you say when, when you try to explain, when you get back to the basics, you're trying to explain why freedom of speech is important to, you know, to a millennial or someone who's in Gen Z?

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  It depends on who you're talking to and there are different approaches to it. And the most important thing, you know, I say as someone who, you know, just a constitutional lawyer, but pretends to be a social scientist, is I've long since accepted the fact, and this is something that Paul Bloom mentioned in the book, Against Empathy, you know, he laments the fact that people tend to be moved by stories more than data. And he thinks that that actually can result in some really perverse results, where essentially the people who would use the money the most or, or could use the support the most aren't actually getting it and things tug at the heartstrings, even if they're, you know, complete boondoggle, tend to get it. And he's right, but I know from that that telling stories is really important to persuade

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  people. You need data as well to get over appropriately skeptical hump, but first and foremost, you have to tell stories and ones that sound like them. So like a good example of a story that might sound like someone from Gen Z is we had a case of a student who was suspended from her pharmacy program because on her Instagram, her Instagram was a little racy, a little sexy, and it involved her talking about like the lyrics of Cardi B, including "WAP." And she was suspended for it. And here was the argument, she's

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  an African-American student, and she explains that she was told that this was basically conduct unbecoming of a pharmacist, which is like, can you imagine being kind of like, "I don't want my amoxicillin from you. You're like racy hip-hop." Like, it's like, that's a stupid idea. That's just trying to control people's lives. And nobody's gonna look, before they like pick up their drugs at CVS, you know, like what the pharmacist listens to. So you try to give them cases they can relate to, because we know that can bring them in. When you're trying to explain it from a historical standpoint, you can begin

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  just by saying, "Listen, we are incredibly lucky to have grown up in a country where we could take free speech so much for granted, when it has been this incredible tool for innovation, progress, democracy, and the only way you can actually be guaranteed that you'll be allowed to be your authentic self. We have been so successful at it that we take it for granted now, but you're not gonna take it for granted when it starts to go away. So look at some of these other countries and learn a little more about what history without freedom of speech actually looks like." Because you may think that rule that sounds so enlightened about getting rid of hate speech, you know, that might sound swell,

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  but you always have to imagine that tool in the hands of your worst enemy, because it will eventually get there. And Ira Glasser, who's on our advisory council, the former executive director of the ACLU, we would say censorship is like poison gas, that essentially it seems like this perfect weapon that you can use against your enemy and you shoot it at them and then inevitably the wind changes direction and that eventually it's blowing back on you and that you should understand that this tool will be used against you. And I always have to remind people of this. It's like, you know, do you, like, if they, in many cases, students tend to lean more to the left, like, are they big fans of Trump? Generally, no. You're creating

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  a tool that the people you don't like are going to get to use it too. And then sometimes they, like, then that's one of the most basic things about freedom of speech that people oftentimes don't get. Another way to reach them through, through history is to explain, you know, the story of comedy in the United States, the story of music in the United States, the story of black music in the United States is the story of victories against censorship. Like, all of these things you care about, we have, thanks to freedom of speech. So there's, there's lots of different ways. But for me, you know, I'd said it kind of at the beginning, there's a value in knowing what people really think, period.

• 1:06:20David Hoffman?

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• 1:09:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  That value on knowing what people think, period, Greg. I'm just wondering, there are many seemingly successful societies.

• 1:09:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, one of which is kind of starting to eclipse the US in terms of its economic output and maybe at some point in time, its prosperity. China, for example, that are, I'd say, not embracing of First Amendment principles.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  That's another statement.

• 1:09:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  So totalitarian regimes, authoritarian types of regimes. And I think it was a bedrock principle of like myself and many people who were born in open societies that open societies would outcompete totalitarian authoritarian closed societies, given enough time. And things like freedom of speech would propagate innovation, make us more competitive than societies that didn't embody those values and virtues. And of course, China has shifted towards valuing free markets, which is a step towards liberalism, but nothing in the realm of speech or political autonomy.

• 1:10:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so I want to ask this of you because over the last decade or so, I could say my blind faith in the idea that open societies will outcompete closed societies and societies that embrace freedom of speech will always outcompete and outperform societies that subjugate it and push it down. That bedrock faith has been shaken a little bit. And maybe partially, it's the rise of China. Another part of it is the anarchy that we've seen in terms of our information landscape. My goodness, being the US and trying to like, figure out what is true and what's not these days, particularly as we're going to another election cycle is just incredibly difficult. And you almost wonder, you kind of look over at this more closed society and you're like,

• 1:11:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  well, you know, do we have it all figured out or is there something over there too? So I want to ask you about like, do you think it's the case that free speech societies will outcompete societies that clamp down on free speech and don't embrace this as a right? Or is that not something we can, we can take in blind faith anymore?

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  Well, I think you have to remember things like scale. Do I think that, you know, like a free Netherlands, you know, is it going to outcompete a totalitarian Russia, a Soviet Union? And the answer is of course it's not going to. The Soviet Union is just absolutely massive.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  Do I actually believe a like my my family, my grandfather fought in the Bolshevik Revolution. We were we were serfs later called kulaks, people who were murdered by the millions because we were peasants who made good. And I believe that if Russia actually rather than have the disaster of World War I, you know, had by some miracle gotten to liberalize, you know, maybe the Mensheviks won, so the Bolsheviks, I think it would be an invincible society at this point. Like, I think like a liberal version of that wouldn't have collapsed. It would have been an innovative, prosperous society. And instead, I, you know, I don't want to offend any of your Russian listeners, but

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  I think that Russia's, I don't think Russia's ever really going to be okay again. When it comes to China, you know, scale is a big part of what we're talking about. You're talking about something on a massive scale. But let's also remember, the decades of liberalization really did make a difference. So you've mentioned the liberalization in terms of the economy, that that's not nothing. Do you ever play the game Civilization?

• 1:12:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yes, one of my favorites. We talk in terms of the tech tree all the time. That's how I think about the world.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  So Civilization, like the way to win, you know, if you want to conquer the world, is, you know, despotism and republic, you know, spread your settlements all over the place and then democracy. And then maybe go into some kind of like totalitarian towards the end, once you got a huge economic and scientific advantage over everyone, then you conquer the world. And I feel like I kind of wondered if China was playing Civilization, because it's kind of like, yeah, they liberalized and they got wildly wealthier over a very brief period of time. They allowed for freedom of speech in some spheres, like basically allowing for some liberalization of their universities. Now, they couldn't, they're just so far they could go, so they overwhelmingly send their

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  people to our universities and they spy on us like crazy, in part because we produce, you know, more and better technology than they're capable of. I think that they, I think that a lot of the advantages that they have from being totalitarian would be tiny if compared to the kind of advantages they would have if it was a free and open society. I mean, a society of 1.2 billion people, a free and open liberal version of that, I think would be unstoppable.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  So I think it's compared to like where it would be. But you do have to remember, a lot of the technology that they're taking advantage of or stuff that they're learning in Western schools that have, you know, at least when it comes to science, free and open societies, they're getting a lot of it through espionage. So I think that a society, you know, they've done some smart things in terms of, but I think they're always going to be held back in some ways by not being a free society. Now, when it comes to, what does that mean in an ultimate, like if ever came to an actual battle, there was an interesting paper done by, what's it, I think it was Marshall, after World War II, investigation, you know, of why America did so well in World War II when

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  it was against these massive totalitarian states that didn't have to play by the rules and didn't have to respect human life, and by human life that could, you know, send their troops into the battlefield and take huge casualties. Now, of course, part of the argument, whereas we had Soviets willing to, you know, throw so many people at the Nazis. But one of our advantages was the free exchange of information, the free exchange of science. Like, we, in Nazi Germany, for example, it was very hard to know where problems were having, where corruption was existing, because they had a completely censored press. And that was actually a disadvantage, you know, for them. Same thing, same thing in Japan.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  And so, one of the things they actually concluded was one of our major advantages for the entire time was even though we had wartime censorship, we had a big advantage because we were a comparatively liberal society. Now, if we start losing that liberalism, and we start, you know, becoming much more top-down, well, then we're, I think then we're in big trouble. Because if we don't have the freedom of speech, if we have a scientific community that is afraid to disagree with each other, if we have the government coming in and pulling in all the, acting on every fear and regulating every industry, things potentially could be harmful, I think then we're really done for.

• 1:16:29David Hoffman?

  I want to introduce a very modern player into the world of free speech, which is the internet. And it's really changing how the form factor of speech is exists.

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41David Hoffman?

  Because now on the internet, there are, there's just so much data out there that we are all learning to navigate that data via curation algorithms. And I think this is going to be even more relevant when like AI produces even more data. And then all of a sudden, we need more AI to like parse that data and even just navigate the internet itself, which means that these curation is now a fundamental part of the internet itself. And curation is a filter on what speech one experiences when they are navigating the internet. I'm wondering just how you think about just how the internet has changed our relationship with this notion on free speech, when so much of the speech platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are private companies, not the government. How do you navigate this world?

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm, I don't think it ever could have been the government, you know. I don't think, I think a government, you know, Twitter or a government Facebook would be, you know, just learning how to hit the like button, you know, last week. Like, I think that the, you know, the superpower of the United States was, you know, unleashing one of the most creative segments of the United States, you know, and getting out of its way, you know, in the 1990s. So I think that the internet, as we know, it just wouldn't exist if it was just left to ARPANET, like not even close. So I do think that, you know, it was only private industry that actually made it as big and powerful as it is.

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  My brain goes very quickly, though, to what's it going to look like in the future. And I, you know, here I want to practice the epistemic humility that I preach, because I feel like the fundamental value of freedom of speech, like the fundamental sort of like, Moral inclination or philosophical inclination is knowing in the grand scheme of things, none of us are all that clever. None of us really know all that much, even the smartest of us. That essentially, you know, knowledge is a process and it's a net and like I said, it's a never, it's a never ending process. But when it comes to AI, particularly now that I spend a lot of time, you know, quizzing it about various topics that I get

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  excited about and showing it to my kids and that kind of stuff. It is hard to think about exactly where we're going to be in 10 years. And I think that anybody who claims that they're like, oh, no, I know. It's like, no, I'm sorry. Like you just lost a lot of credibility with me. I just another book, Ethan Mollock's Co-Intelligence. Did you guys read that? It's good. And it's about AI. And he talks about at the end, sort of like three AI scenarios. One, he thinks, he thinks is very unlikely and it almost is, it almost sounds funny to say, this is as good as AI is going to get. But his point there is to say, even if it doesn't get a lick better, this is still transformative to the world. But it's going to. The second one that he actually thinks is more likely

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  is that it will get, it will level off a little bit, but it will get better. You know, like, not, not by absurd leaps and bounds, but like steadily. The third one, which he somehow is more skeptical of, which I think is just wishful thinking, because he does think that there's going to be regulation and it's going to come in and all that kind of stuff. And even if there is though, I don't see what, how it would stop this scenario. You know, you're going to start using AI to build AI to build AI to build AI to make it smarter. And like what it's feeding on itself like that, and surely already is, where you actually end up, you know, exponential on top of exponential. It's really kind

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  of hard to know. But one thing I am confident about is that we are entering a And it's not a very nice thing to say, but I think we're heading into a geopolitically unstable and nationally unstable period. And I'm not trying to bum people out. Just, I tend to think that the, you know, I read the Fourth Turning by Neil Howe, which I thought I was going to dismiss as being, you know, pseudo mystical claptrap. And then it was basically just talking about the fairly predictable sort of 80 to 100 year cycle of there being a major, you know, a major conflagration. And I, I think we're heading into something big and disruptive, and I hope it's not as potentially

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  harmful as it could be. And I hope we get out of it.

• 1:21:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's so many sources to that disruption, like one of which is the technology that we're seeing now, and how non-state actors, non-state actors might use that technology. Based level of question, though, for you, Greg. So you believe very strongly that humans should have freedom of speech. Should robots have freedom of speech as well? Or is this only a thing for for humans, right? So should, I mean, like, one example that I see in my social media, I have no idea. It's very difficult to tell who is human and who is a robot.

• 1:21:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if we could secure freedom of speech for all of the humans on Twitter, for example, but not give that same right to robots, I would be happy to ban them. That, to me, would feel like a better protocol, because just the cost of spinning up a robot and polluting my feed with some sort of message is just like, you know, decreasing to near zero.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  I wouldn't want that to be like the law. But I think, but I think if you had a, like a social media, I think increasingly, you're going to have to have, particularly if you want it to have any meaningful role in truth seeking, you're going to have to have some social media platforms, for example, where basically you're known to actually be a human. And you, for example, have a reputation. It doesn't have to be.

• 1:22:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some proof of humanity does not have to be a nation state passport, but something, right?

• 1:22:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. And particularly for truth seeking, though, I've been working with this company called Integrially, a little bit, where they're trying to actually figure out a way to create social media for truth discovery. And one, you know, some of the important ways to do that is to make sure that you have a reputational stake in having high integrity, that you're known to be an actual person, and you have a single account. If that's the, you know, for truth seeking, I think you have to have stuff like that. Now, of course, does that mean like in your? Like while you're on there, you could actually be consulting with AI at the same time. Great. Use it as a tool, you know. But I think the, I think that when it comes to, you know, good, good discussion even, the, you're going to need places where people know they're talking to people.

• 1:23:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Greg, one other thing about the design of the internet is we've seen multiple phases of the internet. Kind of the web one phase was very, let's call it decentralized, right? So it was based on these core primitives, protocols like TCP IP, right? Stuff like this, HTTP, HTTPS. Anyone could spin up a website. Anyone could spin up a server. There was no curation, no moderation. None of this was controlled by companies, right? In web two, we saw a departure from that. We saw these mega apps. We saw, you know, the Apple Store, the Google Play Store. We saw Twitter and these large aggregators. We saw, you know, Facebook basically kind of control, create almost a Disneyland out of, out of

• 1:23:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  the internet and these walt gardens. And now we have an internet which is kind of dominated by these web two players and they have the ability to deplatform you, not from the internet in total, but certainly from their walt garden application. What's your take on that in general? Do you think that, is this, is this like a public space versus private space type of debate? And in what context should we preserve freedom of speech? And like, do we actually have freedom of speech in the US?

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, definitely. I've been really urged by a number of people who I think are very smart and very well meaning, that, you know, FIRE, my organization, has to, you know, come out in favor of regulation of social media, for example, by the, by the government in order to, you know, make it better for freedom of speech. And there have been attempts by Texas and Florida and also California to do just this. And I can't help, I'm a civil libertarian, saying, listen, if Texas, Florida and California all agree on a goal, that means it's probably a terrible goal. And it's not going to work. So right now, one of the things that's in front of the Supreme

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  Court, you know, is are some of these regulations that they tried in Texas and Florida, both of which we oppose, are they constitutional? And we think that they're not. We also but however, on the other side, in a case called Murthy, which used to be Missouri v. Biden, we're also on the side of there have to be limitations on the government's ability to pressure social media companies to engage in censorship that the government itself cannot engage in. And this actually came out a lot in reference to COVID, that essentially the Biden administration, and I think even before that, the members of the Trump administration, were leaning on different social media companies to censor that opinion and this one with things that sounded an awful lot like threats. And reminding people, it's like, there's got to be a limit

• 1:25:45Speaker 00

  to that, or else you're really just saying that if on these platforms that don't have a First Amendment, that the First Amendment is no limitation on the government censoring speech, it would never be allowed to if it was just functioning as a government. So I, you know, the civil libertarian is generally more afraid of the concentration of power in the government. And people will then point out, it's kind of, well, shouldn't we be frightened of incorporation? Like, you can be absolutely frightened of incorporation. But as the, you know, good libertarian always points out, the, yeah, but the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Like, that makes it fundamentally a different kind of actor. So something that's been happening to me a lot more recently, you know, in fires work,

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  is having people, my friends on the, on the left and my friends on the right, you know, and I tweeted out something about this this weekend when I was thinking about it, that essentially, things are so dire, things are so serious right now, that we can't waste time on something as insignificant as freedom of speech for everybody, First Amendment for everybody. And I always have to remind them, no, in times of crisis, in times when things are really important, rules like freedom of speech, the rules of the road of a free society, matter more. They don't matter less. And believe me, like, all of these troubles that I'm concerned, and I hope I'm wrong, I think we're going to be seeing over the next couple of years, they are going to be situations where the individuals, you know,

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  citizens' right of freedom of speech is going to become much more important, not less.

• 1:27:17David Hoffman?

  Greg, I kind of want to skip to the bottom of a rabbit hole that we are currently exploring in the crypto world.

• 1:27:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24David Hoffman?

  In the Ethereum landscape, because Ethereum is a smart contract platform. You can kind of code up anything. Developers can code what they can imagine. Users can code up a transaction that can do a specific thing. So it's really just the intersection of money and code, right? And that's why there's a lot of really cool things that's happening in the crypto world. In the Ethereum world, in the Ethereum landscape, there's this very strong commitment towards censorship resistance. And so we don't want certain applications on Ethereum to not be usable by end users versus others. And so credible neutrality is one of our core social contracts. If the United States is a culture of freedom of speech, we try and have a culture of censorship

• 1:28:09David Hoffman?

  resistance on Ethereum. Because we want Ethereum to be like the internet, right? Anyone can make a website and on Ethereum, anyone can write a smart contract. And so this kind of brings up this idea of freedom to transact, which is the freedom to spend money, purchase a good, buy a service between two parties. I'm wondering, just how familiar are you to this topic as it relates to free speech? Does this come up in your valence at all? Do you have thoughts on this idea of freedom to transact? Anything, any neurons firing here?

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it is something that we've been thinking a lot about, is that essentially, FIRE went from being a 60-person organization, maybe $15 million a year, to being a 120, 150, probably by the end of the year, person organization and $36 million budget, partially because we do things like our campus free speech ranking. And we're really trying to be the nation's premier defender of freedom of speech. And I think we already are. We just need to be a hell of a lot, a hell of a lot bigger. And one thing that I think we really do need is a tech, like a high-tech department, essentially. Because I'm into this stuff. There are a number of lawyers who are into this stuff at FIRE, but there's not enough of us yet.

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  And so keeping on top of what the latest thing's going on in tech can be daunting. And I think that that's where so many of the issues are coming up. And even if we get excited about it, we need more people on the ground doing that. We need more expertise on it. Now, the best parallel on First Amendment law is, of course, the idea of campaign finance. That essentially, that money, like if you can, if the government can say, "You can't give to the following causes or the following politicians," that, of course, is a way to kill off those causes and politicians. And that's something that I think people get if they understand that, you know, that simply, that essentially, if you're saying the government says, "You can't spend money on that, and you can't spend as much money as you'd like to on that," that is a way

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  of the government basically being able to strangle something out of existence. So I do think that people need to get that while, you know, when people talk about, you know, money is speech and transactions are speech, if someone could decide tomorrow, "Oh, FIRE can still engage in all the speech it wants, it's just not allowed to have any money anymore," you'd understand it really fast. That essentially, like you can, that's a tremendous power, and it does have real ramifications for freedom of speech, for technological process, progress, et cetera. So we do think about this, but I do want to go bigger and deeper.

• 1:30:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would love for you guys to do that, because I see what FIRE is doing, it's just like incredible, and the kind of the fight for freedom of speech, and taking over a lot of like the mindshare of the ACLU, at least from my perspective, that that's what you guys are doing. It would be cool to see you expand into some of these adjacent areas that are very much like fundamental. I mean, to give you an example of what you just said, not to throw Canada under the bus again, but the trucker protests, right? Where we saw actual bank accounts being frozen. People trying to fund some of these protests. A previous Bankless guest, punk6529, says, "Without the freedom to transact, you have no other constitutional rights." And he goes, "Freedom of speech might require activities like a website, or a pamphlet,

• 1:31:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  or an advertisement, or paying a graphic designer, or traveling to a different location, say, to attend a protest, all of which cost money." Imagine you are in a system where you are barred from doing those activities because you're on some sort of, you know, blacklist that the US government puts out, or your political adversaries you put out. So it gets back to this, without the freedom to transact, maybe We don't actually have the freedom, like the freedom of speech in the 21st century, now that everything is in the digital realm. And I kind of want to maybe end this this conversation, talking to you like, because we've talked about freedom of speech from a legal perspective, from a cultural perspective. There is also a kind of a third leg of the stool that we're increasingly seeing.

• 1:32:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're covering crypto, which is why we wanted to have you on, Greg, which is our area of focus is definitely from a social perspective, but more from a technical perspective, right? The way to ensure censorship resistance in communication is encryption. Super valuable. Thank the tech gods that we were able to discover a strong encryption so that the government couldn't pry into your digital transactions. We have applications like Signal that can support secure peer-to-peer transactions. That's similar to what we're doing in crypto as well with the freedom to transact, essentially. If you have a fiat banking type money system, that can be confiscated. That could be censored in all these various ways. And we have, if you have something like peer-to-peer transactions,

• 1:32:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  encryption in crypto and able to keep those transactions private, then you have a, you know, another censorship resistant means of transaction. I guess I'm just like wondering where the next step is for you, you think, in preserving some of these liberties? Because we are in the fourth turning, probably these will come under increasing assault. Where are you spending your time? Is it the culture side of things? Is it the legal side of things? Is it also the tech? Is it all three of those areas? Like, what do we need? Because we are like, on behalf of the crypto industry, I could say, we are kind of very supportive of these lowercase l liberal values. We want to both help you and also team up with you in various ways.

• 1:33:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because, you know, like without, without this, I think we're very weak and divided we fall.

• 1:33:47Speaker 00

  Well, we very badly need your help and your listeners' help because one thing that is frustrating about the current environment for freedom of speech is that very recently, you know, 15 years ago even, you could take it for granted that there were people on the left who are very good on freedom of speech, and there are people on the right, libertarians, who are very good on freedom of speech. And now with the more populist right and the more sort of progressive left, that's not the case anymore. And so I do think actually some of the natural constituencies for defenders of freedom of speech are people who care about progress, who care about small old liberalism, who care about technology, who care about the right to code, the right to innovate. All of these things that are central

• 1:34:30Speaker 00

  go right along with liberal science and then some. So we're trying to figure out right now, kind of like what some of our big strategic priorities are going to be for the upcoming year. Like I said, I'd love to be able to go deeper on tech in general. We just need support to do that. I'd like to go deeper on the campus free speech ranking, too. We need support to do that. But when it comes to some of the things that's on our horizon, one of the things that does, some of the things that we, that are, what I'm thinking of right now, as far as stuff that worries me the most, are more or less excuses for the government to take more power over the freedom to innovate, the freedom of speech, etc. And one thing, like, so we're always looking for new rationales for censorship.

• 1:35:14Speaker 00

  Now, misinformation, disinformation. Now, to be clear, misinformation, disinformation are real problems, but they are also, when understood as something that the government can then have power over preventing, that is, that's the whole ballgame. Like, that's essentially like, oh, now the government gets to be arbiter of truth, game over. Like, that's a scary, a very scary, serious problem. But then you see, like, some kind of like...

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  I guess they're not that creative a rationale. I just haven't thought of it in a while. They're one of the things that they're going after websites, social media websites now is under a product liability theory because of the alleged harms of speech on those platforms. And they're kind of like, okay, that's also limitless. If you're basically saying, oh, we're not going after cryptocurrency or cryptography for that matter, as because of the expressive expression that's done, we're going after it because, I don't know, like the it's somehow.

• 1:36:18David Hoffman?

  Somebody lost money. That's what it'd be.

• 1:36:19Speaker 00

  It's a faulty product. It's a product liability. So we're trying to see the threats on the horizon, anticipate them and educate the population, you know, on why they shouldn't do it. And then, of course, like I said, the some of the hate speech stuff is it's everywhere now.

• 1:36:38David Hoffman?

  How do you see privacy being a part of the freedom of speech or not a part of the freedom of speech? Because there's there's one element where like Signal, for example, is a privacy app to speak to people privately. But do you see like the notion of freedom of speech also containing privacy? Or just where do you see privacy in that realm of this conversation?

• 1:36:59Speaker 00

  I think sometimes freedom of speech and privacy, you know, like they're not exactly the same thing, but they definitely do complement each other. And that essentially that and that's one of the reasons why, even though, you know, I wrote a book, Coddling the American Mind with my friend John Height, pointing out that I do think that social media before a certain age is can be pretty harmful for some number of particularly young women. Like, I'm pretty persuaded of that. But the solution by which you need to fundamentally transform the internet so that you then have to, you know, provide an ID to use social media is a disaster. And we oppose it because the idea that kind of like, oh, yeah, you want to go to, you know, I don't know, like an adult website, you want to go to anything

• 1:37:41Speaker 00

  that you don't want the whole world to know about you, but you have to show your password is a way to chill speech. You know, my my general counsel does this. He likes doing this in the in the context of adult websites. He's like, how many people like in this in this auditorium like to go to adult websites?

• 1:38:00David Hoffman?

  Does anyone raise their hand?

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  Almost like maybe like one dude like raises their hand. And he's always kind of like, okay, that's statistically impossible.

• 1:38:11Speaker 00

  So can you see now why people don't necessarily want to have to show an ID before they go on social media or go on Twitter? So yeah, we do think that they are, they're not, sometimes there's a tension between transparency and privacy, but there are other times where privacy is absolutely the way you actually protect freedom of speech.

• 1:38:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Greg, this has been fantastic. Thank you. We wanted to make a canonical episode on freedom of speech and why censorship resistance is important and how it's embedded in our culture and our laws. And because it's such a critical component of why we're in crypto and what we're here to do, and I think this was the perfect episode for that. One last question. I know FIRE is involved in a number of different activities. If people want to find out a bit more about FIRE, maybe how to donate, what you're up to, the college ranking is, by the way, is incredible. So my daughter is getting ready to go to college, actually, and so I've encouraged her.

• 1:39:09Speaker 00

  You look like you're seven.

• 1:39:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I get this a lot, Greg.

• 1:39:13Speaker 00

  I mean that in the best possible way.

• 1:39:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and we age well in crypto, let's just say.

• 1:39:20Speaker 00

  Clearly.

• 1:39:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, we don't.

• 1:39:22Speaker 00

  You look young, too, David.

• 1:39:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I started young. David has no kids. I don't have any kids. No, and college bound. But anyway, it's a fantastic resource for assessing freedom of speech on college campuses. I've enjoyed that. I know you guys are up to a number of different things. Where could people find out more about you? Is there a newsletter? I know you also have your Substack, which is a wealth of information. Anyway, direct people to what you're up to and how they can get involved.

• 1:39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can find us at thefire.org. And if you can spell my last name, I'm pretty easy to find. My Substack is The Eternally Radical Idea. But definitely go to thefire.org. Actually, also, if you go to The Eternally Radical Idea, I do a weekend newsletter that's overwhelmingly FIRE content that points to a lot of our videos and our podcasts and all the incredible content we produce, and also things like the Campus Free Speech Ranking, which I also talk about in my latest book, Canceling the American Mind. But please do consider supporting FIRE. I think our work is only getting more important as the... Minutes pass by.

• 1:40:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. It's certainly crypto values as well. And we'll include, in addition to a link to thefire.org, a link to some of the books that were mentioned on today's episode. We've got Free Speech, A History From Socrates to Social Media, Age of Revolutions, Free Speech, The People's Darling Privilege, all of these fantastic book recommendations from Greg. So, thank you for those.

• 1:40:41Speaker 00

  Thanks for letting me geek out as much as I... When they told me it was like I was totally free to them, I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna take advantage of that."

• 1:40:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's perfect. Thank you. And thank you for taking advantage of that. I gotta end with this, as we always do. Of course, we didn't talk much about crypto today, but you do know, none of this has been financial advice. It was advice on how to run a society, though, a free and open one at least. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.