Bankless - Why We Should Fight for Freedom of Speech | Greg Lukianoff

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 write a freedom of speech is going to become much more important, not less. Welcome to Banklets, 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 Lukianov 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?

Starting point is 00:01:00 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 want you to know what they're up to in the new world of liquid staking on Ethereum. If you're a solo staker, but your ETH is locked up in a liquid because you're solo staking, you can continue to be a solo staker in the Stakewise protocol while also being able to mint OSEath in order to use your solo staker. staked eth in defy on layer 2s in IGL layer or anywhere else across the Ethereum landscape. You get to keep your rewards that your node is earning while doing more with your eth. And if you're not a solo staker, Stakewise is introducing a vaults marketplace to choose perks that you want to add onto your staked eth between custom MEV strategies, DVT, insurance, API boosts, all things available through the Stakewise Vaults Marketplace.

Starting point is 00:01:56 There is a link in the show notes if any of this stuff peaked you. 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 pretty simple. It's 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 bank lists. In the meat space world, we secure censorship resistance speech through the First Amendment. common law and the social layer. Both David and I had a lot of questions about how that's secured, how freedom of speech works going to this episode that were answered. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:43 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 Cracken. Go create an account. Support free speech. Use Cracken.

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Starting point is 00:05:35 and users can even pay for gas using ERC-20 tokens, including native USC and USDT, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using social connect. But SELO is a community-governed protocol. Make your voice hurt in the SELO forum to shape the future of Ethereum. Follow at SELO on Twitter and explore the ecosystem built for the real world on cello.org slash quests. Bankless Nation, I'm excited and honored to introduce you to Greg Lukianov, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the acronym Fire.

Starting point is 00:06:04 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 Banquist. 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?

Starting point is 00:06:32 And why is it important? Why is it the first amendment of all the amendments? 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 sort of talk about like the broader kind of concept of freedom of speech, I always make the biggest bullying circle to be freedom of speech itself. So thinkers like Jonathan Roush, who's become a good friend, talks about ideas like liberal science,

Starting point is 00:06:57 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. You can't say, you know, I as the head priest of Zeus, 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.

Starting point is 00:07:32 You can never fully get there because it's mostly a process of chipping away at falsity. Because like sometimes when you've got 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,

Starting point is 00:07:52 I mean, it's just a simple part of, for one of the reasons why we think of it as an essential human right. 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 actually make us fully human

Starting point is 00:08:06 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. Generally speaking, would you say that you have the most expansive definition of the freedom of speech? Are you, 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? I would actually say that it might be even frustratingly reasonable in a lot of ways.

Starting point is 00:08:38 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 that'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 that failure to prosecute true threats has actually undermined people's faith. in freedom of speech because they incorrectly think that that's protected speech, and then 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 as, you know, as someone who loves constitutional

Starting point is 00:09:26 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. So things like true threats are not protected, incitement to imminent lawless action is not protected.

Starting point is 00:10:02 It's a hard standard, though. It's not easily met. Harassment is not protected on campus or racial, sexual. harassment is not protected, for example. Obscenity, which is not defined as obscenities, but like hardcore pornography, essentially, is a 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.

Starting point is 00:10:26 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 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 that's unprotected speech because, and 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, it's a reason why. That's one of the categories I don't agree with. But I do actually think that the First Amendment largely gets it right. 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.

Starting point is 00:11:30 Yeah. Maybe to help like draw that line out a little bit more just like threats of violence. Yeah. 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. It's harder to draw it for all the different categories.

Starting point is 00:11:51 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 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, but I do generally think a good way to understand protected speech and unprotected speech

Starting point is 00:12:27 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, and it's also this one's kind of a true threat 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, and that's absolutely a lot. as it should be. And here's my big sort of meta kind of vision on this stuff.

Starting point is 00:13:07 And it's weird having specialized in First Amendment law and like this being my lifelong passion and also the philosophy, 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 it doesn't really emphasize the simple

Starting point is 00:13:23 value of knowing what people actually think. 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, you actually create a more dangerous environment in many ways because you don't know what people really think. And here's the

Starting point is 00:13:48 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. Okay, so this is where you draw the line at. You are 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 freedom in all given like opinions. And then like, oh, I think they're can be an unsafe opinion. I think that some, you know, versions of anti-Semitism or versions of

Starting point is 00:14:31 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. Yes. And there is 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. Say from a societal perspective. Yeah. And so one of the things that actually happens, a very predictable phenomenon, 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. You get more radicalized in the direction of the group. 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, that this is somewhat of a more recent invention.

Starting point is 00:15:23 And I'm sure you've charted the history of this and know the history very well with speech. But 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. So here's my grand theory of history. And I actually have to cite to some degree the work of David Graber, a thinker who I actually quite disagree with on any number of things.

Starting point is 00:15:50 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 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.

Starting point is 00:16:12 And during that time, if some of these structures looked anything like some of the things we saw in South America, North America, in Papua New Guinea, like they would have some amount of, you know, you have certain rights to say what you really think to the chief, that people have like special obligations

Starting point is 00:16:29 and special privileges, essentially, to share their opinion. So I think that there were social structures that were tended to be more small scale, scale well before Athenian democracy that actually did have an idea of freedom of speech. There's 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 our leader sometimes. Just in a much smaller setting, right? We're talking about the trial.

Starting point is 00:16:54 Just in a much smaller setting. Yeah. And the difficulty with these types of things is how do you scale it? You know, like, okay. And there was no way. So basically you go from unrecorded history that if there are parallels to other societies, then there probably was in many of them, not necessarily all of them, some kind of idea of local small-scale freedom of speech. A freedom of speech was taken very seriously from the citizens in Athens, and they actually had two different ideas of Isogaria and Parisia. Isagoria was rational discourse, and Parisia, though, was a 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,

Starting point is 00:17:34 freedom of speech doesn't make much of an appearance on the 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. 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 start

Starting point is 00:18:16 advocating for, wow, the government shouldn't be restraining before things are published. People's ideas that this has tremendous benefit potentially to the human race. 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 the date of the invention of the printing press was like the 1400s or something. 1450s. 1450s, okay. So this was a technology that really brought the concept of freedom of speech to the forefront.

Starting point is 00:18:46 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. Until mass communication was possible. And then how did it make its way into the U.S. 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?

Starting point is 00:19:25 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 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

Starting point is 00:19:54 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. That was very much a top-down. down system. That was kind of impossible in Europe, and it led for a lot more people from moving from place to place and a lot more experimentation. So my friend and Fire Senior Fellow, Jakub Mishengama, or now I think he's in the U.S. 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 acknowledgments for being one of the people who really kind of Gamma Stern talking to about, like, you really, you know, you did this incredible podcast series on the history of freedom of

Starting point is 00:20:32 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 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 at the intersection of all these warring empires but you definitely had Holland in the Netherlands Dutch people you know what was probably the most literate society in human history probably at that point and second in line was probably Britain. And so, I'm going to do a shout-out. I like doing shout-outs for books, as you can tell. But Fareed Sakaria's recent book, it's actually really quite good. And it was the first one to really convince me, when people refer to something as being Anglo-Dutch, I'd always kind of like, it doesn't sound quite right. I mean, because in otherlands were kind of an 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, like, what was that, 1688, that essentially it was taking a lot of that liberalism, smaller liberalism, from the Netherlands into Britain. And it really transformed some aspects of the way work was done in Britain from that point on.

Starting point is 00:21:47 So I've come around to the idea that there was something special that deserves to be called Anglo-Dutch. And so, yeah, two of the most literate societies in the world. and really with tons of printing, 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 resulted, you know, political action became easier.

Starting point is 00:22:11 Of course, that was oftentimes considered one of the downsides. But it was very clear that there were 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, I took every classly offer, 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 tutors, most notably, of course, Elizabeth I first. And I always try to liken what's

Starting point is 00:22:42 going on with social media and with the internet to what was going on back then with the printing press, because this was early. And it was around 1520, 1521 when Henry started kind of turning on the printing press, first by, you know, banning the sailor distribution of a, what was called the Tyndale Bible, which was a English translation of the Bible that was considered to be filled with heresy. So this is back 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 of his history, he becomes a Protestant.

Starting point is 00:23:17 And by 1538, he and his parliament passed the first print licensing program 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 something was printed was something that didn't have the seal of the crown on it, it was an illegal printer. And the punishment, but 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,

Starting point is 00:23:51 and he wanted to end it. And I feel like we're seeing a lot of that today. And it, Greg, or maybe just like control it, right? Because like, so this would be almost the equivalent of, if you like, in the internet to the printing press. Yeah. Having the U.S. government maintaining a registry of approved websites, right? 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.

Starting point is 00:24:13 And the goal you'd think would be to just control this new, you know, technology. Yeah. It would be like a read-only internet with privileged, right access. Yeah. Right. Yeah, no, 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'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,

Starting point is 00:24:44 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 numbers are something like 12 million to like 24 million over brief-ish period of time, but not that brief. And when you bring that many people, that many eyes and voices and ideas and minds into a discussion, it's going to be disruptive. It's unavoidably. And I always point out, like, the printing press at 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 one of the biggest sellers was the maleficorum, which was like the handbook of how you know, like,

Starting point is 00:25:23 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 bottle. And I've got my issues of social media. I've written with Jonathan Hyde about this, absolutely. I do think, particularly 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.

Starting point is 00:26:02 So there's literally no way at this moment right now to not have a anarchical period. We are an epistemic anarchy. Our knowledge production is all higly-pigley. And I see sometimes people coming up with regulations to kind of fix it, And I'm kind of like, there's no way to fix it. You can do some things that might make some improvements here and there, but really the cultural has to adapt to this massive shift in technology. And the idea that we panic and give government the power to do with it what it will would

Starting point is 00:26:33 just be so much worse than the problem. I guess the point as well as 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 enshrined in the First Amendment. And I only got us as far as... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, before we get there, though, let's go take this sidetrack for a minute.

Starting point is 00:26:51 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? Yeah, I mean, it was ugly, frankly. So people were surprised 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 and the Stuart 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 Arapagittica, which is a tract written by John Milton talking about in the mid-17th century, saying the government shouldn't be licensing the press. And it's a great statement.

Starting point is 00:27:35 People don't realize it wasn't at all influential 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, over. 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 you're saying. 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 human right, doesn't count unless they immediately went to the universal application of it. That's a really convenient little dogey 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, 16th, This is when John Locke returned from the Netherlands, you know, with ideas of separation of powers, with ideas of small liberalism. And they worked some of these rights into, I don't want to call 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.

Starting point is 00:28:35 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 could see it. It was very clear. This starts 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

Starting point is 00:29:13 in a very real sense is more important the free speech law because that's where free speech law comes from in the first place. The First Amendment didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of people

Starting point is 00:29:23 who were excited about the Enlightenment. And in France, they didn't have free speech law. And still the French Enlightenment is remembered to this day. Sure, sometimes people had to flee off to the Netherlands again at the University of Leiden, for example.

Starting point is 00:29:37 Some people fled to other parts of Europe. Both Voltaire and Rousseau were arrested at different times. Or did they actually get Walter? 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.

Starting point is 00:30:00 Now, of course, I'm much more of a Scottish Enlightenment guy. 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 like crazy scientists from one, 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 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 a like a weirdly hyper-educated, you know, 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 U.S., my mom's British. And actually, my mom's divorce.

Starting point is 00:30:48 So maybe that's that word semi-consciously. But they thought of themselves as having the right of freeborn Englishmen, which was a way that John Lillburn, the – oh, man, you're letting me have fun with this, so I'm going into John Lulburn and everything. The idea of rights of freeborn Englishmen, which included the right to freedom of speech. So when it came time to write the Constitution, now of course, 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.

Starting point is 00:31:29 Why it would 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 rights. own autonomy here, you know, to be in charge. But James Masson finally came around to the idea that we needed a bill of rights. And sometimes, smarty 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. 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

Starting point is 00:32:03 about the distribution of seats that would have resulted in there being like 10,000 congressmen if it actually passed, and something about the limitation on their ability to give themselves races. 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 a, well, I consider that it to be six of them in the First Amendment. A lot of people like to say five, but I think they're wrong.

Starting point is 00:32:29 It's freedom of speech, freedom of the press. and by that they meant the machine and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances and then freedom of assembly which is also usually interpreted or freedom of association. But the two additional ones

Starting point is 00:32:42 usually get just called religion and I don't 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.

Starting point is 00:32:59 It's 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 trying to prevent everything people have been murdering themselves over and each other over for the last two centuries? It's pretty cool. I just came back from Philadelphia with my kids. We went to History of the American Revolution. Yeah. I love that one. 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 an opportunity to just read the First Amendment actually. It says this, Congress shall make no law respecting an

Starting point is 00:33:36 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. It's kind of a run-on sentence, but it includes, as you said, maybe five, or 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

Starting point is 00:34:07 in an organizing operating system? I think of the Constitution is 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?

Starting point is 00:34:20 One that endured? Yes. One that existed previously, no. 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 pops up here and there.

Starting point is 00:34:36 And of course, there's a 1689, a 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 reason why you get a little irritated when people are talking about American exceptionalism. Like it's kind of like, okay, like if you take all value away from like the idea of like saying the thing that you think you approve the 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

Starting point is 00:35:19 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 it just gorgeously and about how you could actually have a large-scale Democratic Republic. 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

Starting point is 00:35:57 4th 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. And so maybe, like, you know, despite the skepticism of some of our, the American founding fathers, what they didn't account for is like the blank slate of culture that America offered these Enlightenment Renaissance ideas. Maybe you can just like define the idea of what free speech

Starting point is 00:36:37 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. So in canceling the American mind, trying to explain what free speech culture is, I realize 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

Starting point is 00:37:04 but nonetheless, they're like, well, sure, it's true. 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 are little sayings that someone, I don't know, old fogie like me, grew up with. You know, it's a free country, probably the simplest one,

Starting point is 00:37:23 but everyone's entitled to their opinion being something that it was just taken for granted. You know, little phrases like, not my cup of tea, like the idea of just saying, like, listen, this 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.

Starting point is 00:37:49 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 Schlaught, I think she's turning 24. She's someone I've been writing with since she was 20. She's just amazing. And she didn't grow up with any of these things. She's like, man, nobody said that. Where'd she grow up? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:38:15 She grew up in New Jersey. Oh, Jersey? Yeah. Oh, really? It's changed in America. I thought you were going to tell me she grew up in a different country or something like this. 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 against freedom of speech, particularly in sort of, you know, forgive the sounding two Marxists, 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. I have a chapter that I call the slow-motion train wreck

Starting point is 00:38:54 where essentially people's attitudes about free speech were sort of changing in 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 I'm in my 23rd year at fire fighting this and I think to a large degree we failed a lot of the things fire was warning about

Starting point is 00:39:17 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 Canada, you know, for life imprisonment for speech crimes. It's a terrifying idea. The speech laws that actually exist de facto in Britain that they want to pass in Ireland. Like, this is all over the world now.

Starting point is 00:39:45 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. New projects are coming online to the mantle layer two every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA, powered by technology from eigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the Mantle Layer 2

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Starting point is 00:43:06 was a check on the potential loss of like free speech law? Yeah. 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? Yeah, actually, once again, I'm going to recommend a book. It's a book called The People's Darling Privilege by Michael Kent Curtis. 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 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.

Starting point is 00:43:51 And that's what he means in his title, the people's darling privilege. 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, defending his abolitionist printing press, and actually was killed defending it,

Starting point is 00:44:31 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.

Starting point is 00:45:00 Didn't do that much for abolitionists in the South, but it did prevent those same laws being passed in the North. otherwise they would have been if there were been no opposition to them. So, 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,

Starting point is 00:45:19 you know, the only thing that stood between it and winning the whole country was free speech culture. 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,

Starting point is 00:45:36 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 of the exactness. branch and police and judiciary and all of these things, it's also the society. If we as a society, if the hearts and minds, individual citizens choose not to enforce free speech, then our law system,

Starting point is 00:46:20 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? Well, you know, it has to be part of the culture. It has to be a cultural. value or it won't survive. 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 am baffled. But 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

Starting point is 00:47:02 culture and law are somehow what completely separate is a nonsense opinion like it doesn't make any sense but like further great judges are part of culture as well exactly they are certainly influenced by the milieu of the culture at any given moment 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 as 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 kind of like, yeah, but it's the closest to the United States, Ezra come to not existing. So not a good comparison to most other things. But then you have the 19th century where it's all Victorian censorship, where it's all kind of like, you know, people like Anthony Comstock trying to put the sexual genie back in the bottle. And even then, you had this group called the Free Speech League that came up. you know, to defend the right to nude-bath and to swear in private letters to your spouse. And these were real cases. Like, people actually went to jail for, like, using the word fuck 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, was beyond the pale.

Starting point is 00:48:21 And so we've always really admired that bunch of weirdos, you know, in the Free Speech League, that preceded the ACLU. But 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, 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 boy, they passed some very serious sedition and espionage act. And it was those laws and those prosecutions that started to develop the First Amendment law.

Starting point is 00:48:56 And as, you know, the 20th century, you know, progressed, 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. 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 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 speech,

Starting point is 00:49:36 you could count on it to be protected as a cultural value. I think that's been eclipsing. How would you rate the healthiness of free speech, culture, and law in America today in 2024? 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. from 2014 where we saw like a, 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.

Starting point is 00:50:05 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 communist. Then the rest of that hundred, 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 to professors, we found that about one in six, one in six, that would be like 100,000 professors extrapolated out, say that they were either punished for speech or threatened with punishment for speech. And that means research, that means teaching class, that means, you know, what they say in their regular lives.

Starting point is 00:50:44 And as another way of, like, trying to quantify this, there was a big survey, 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 saying that they were toning things down in their scholarship so as not to get in trouble. And I want to be clear, 9% is terrible. Like, 9% is really bad. Like, that's 1 in 10 professors saying that they're self-censoring.

Starting point is 00:51:10 When we did that exact same question, which was self-censoring in their papers, we found about 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.

Starting point is 00:51:29 So I would say that it's 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 lost our minds during COVID. And I think 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 7th. And deplatforming is like when you get a speaker disinvited or when you shout someone down.

Starting point is 00:51:59 And so last year, worst year that we're familiar with, period. And that was going to be that way even before October 7th. But of course, things got way worse after October 7th 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, targeted by pro-Palestinian students. There's one example where it was like it was a guy who's there to give a lecture on

Starting point is 00:52:21 black holes, like something I would have absolutely loved to have gone to. And I'm not sure if they were targeting just because of 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. 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 the boomers versus, you know, Gen Z? or other generations, how do they compare in terms of free speech culture and respect for that? The polling is pretty clear on this, that basically right or left, if you're over 45, you're pretty good on free speech

Starting point is 00:53:05 and tend to get better the older you get, you know, like particularly the closer you get to the World War II generation, like they would give you a lecture on, 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. 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 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, this is from a case called

Starting point is 00:53:50 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 that be constitutional under the First Amendment? But there's an assumption among young people that it already is unprotected. So it makes even reading the polling kind of hard to figure out what to make of it, because when you already have people who believe that 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 we're at fire trying to do our best to

Starting point is 00:54:31 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. Is this typical of younger generations, though? It's like when the boomers were younger in their 20s, let's say, in the 1970s. Were they bad on free speech? Just as they got older, they became better. Yeah, this is one of the big, it's really funny, no offense to current campus protesters,

Starting point is 00:55:03 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 1960s. 64 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, who actually wanted people to come and disagree about things. And the weirdest part over my experience over the last, you know, 23 years at fire is that it's very historically strange for

Starting point is 00:55:42 young people to want power to have more power because they think it will benefit them in some way. The protesters of the 1960s, they wanted the colleges not to act like what's called in local parentas, like the local parents. And the people in the 60s were much more kind of like, Gen X are just like in the sense of being like, don't you tell me what to do. I'm going to do what I want. Like, you're not my dad. And you should have fewer powers over me. And I should have greater independence. And these rules should not apply to me.

Starting point is 00:56:12 And 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 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 October 7th, it's kind of like an interleft fight. There's a little bit more of like the pro-Palestinian side kind of saying, you know, okay, maybe there should be like. power for me. And so suddenly this generation that had been pretty free speech skeptical has at least a

Starting point is 00:56:52 segment that it now seems to think it might be sort of free speech absolutist. That being said, it's also 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. So, Greg, you're 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 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 free speech you know cryptocurrency very much is a censorship resistant protocol that is also enforced by not only like the idea of code being

Starting point is 00:57:34 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 you like fork in other code we can change the blockchain in various ways. And so we have to make a case to younger generations and also the world as to why we need a censorship-resistant, a mutable ledger of transactions, right, in the field of commerce and even communication. So what do you say when you try to explain and when you get back to the basics, you're trying to explain why freedom of speech is important to a millennial or someone who's in Gen Z? 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, is 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, I mentioned another 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.

Starting point is 00:58:33 Or essentially the people who would use the money the most 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 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 I 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, her Instagram, was a little racy, a little sexy, and it involved her talking about

Starting point is 00:59:16 the lyrics of Cardi B, including WAP. And she was suspended for it. And here was the argument. She's an African-American student. And she explains that she was told that this was basically conduct unbecoming of a

Starting point is 00:59:31 pharmacist. Which is like, can you imagine being kind of like, I don't want my amoxicillin from you. You like, racey hip-hop. It's a stupid idea that's just trying to control people's lives. And nobody's going to look before they 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.

Starting point is 00:59:54 When you're trying to explain it from a historical standpoint, you can begin 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, the 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 going to 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. 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, would say that censorship is like poison gas, that essentially it seems like this perfect weapon that you can use against your enemy,

Starting point is 01:00:57 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, in many cases, students tend to lean more or the left. It's like, are they big fans of Trump? Generally, no. You're creating a tool that the people you don't like are going to get to use it, too. And that's one of the most basic things about freedom of speech that people oftentimes don't get. Another way to reach them 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

Starting point is 01:01:35 United States is the story of victories against censorship. All of these things you care about, we have thanks to freedom of speech. So there's lots of different ways. But for me, you know, I'd said it kind of at the beginning, there's a value on knowing what people really think, period. That value on knowing what people think, period, Greg. I'm just wondering, like, there are many seemingly successful societies, you know, one of which is kind of starting to eclipse the U.S. 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 such as freedom of speech. That's an understatement. So totalitarian regimes, authoritarian types of regimes,

Starting point is 01:02:17 and I think it was a bedrock principle of myself and many people who were born in open societies, that open societies would out-compete totalitarian, authoritarian, close societies, given enough time. And things like freedom of speech would propagate innovation, make us more competitive, competitive than societies that didn't embody those values and virtues. Of course, China has, like, shifted towards valuing free markets, which is, you know, a step towards liberalism, but nothing in the realm of speech or political autonomy. And so I want to ask this of you, because over the last, like, decade or so, I could say my blind faith in the idea that open societies will outcompete close societies and societies that embrace freedom of speech will always outcompete and outperform

Starting point is 01:03:06 societies that subjugate it and push it down. That bedrock faith has been shaken a little bit. 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 U.S. 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 at the U.S. and you kind of look over at this more close society and you're like, 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 take in blind faith anymore? Well, I think you have to, you know, remember things like scale. Do I think that, you know, like a free Netherlands, you know, is it going to out?

Starting point is 01:04:01 compete a totalitarian Russia, you know, a Soviet Union. And the answer is, of course, it's not going to. The Soviet Union is just absolutely massive. Now, do I actually believe a, like my grandfather fought in the Bolshek Revolution, 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 a disaster of World War I, you know, had by some miracle. gotten to liberalize, you know, maybe the Mensheviks one instead the Bolsheviks, I think it would be an invincible society at this point. Like, I think a liberal version of that wouldn't have collapsed. It would have been an innovative, prosperous society. And instead, you know, I don't want to offend any of

Starting point is 01:04:48 your Russian listeners, but 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's not nothing. Do you ever play the game of civilization? Oh yeah, it's one of my favorites.

Starting point is 01:05:09 We talk in terms of the tech tree all the time. That's how I think about the world. 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

Starting point is 01:05:25 towards the end once you got a huge 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.

Starting point is 01:05:46 Now they couldn't. Just so far they could go. So they overwhelmingly send their people to our universities. And they spy on us like crazy in part because we produce more and better technology than they're capable of. I think that a lot of the advantages that they have from being totalitarian would be tiny 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,

Starting point is 01:06:14 I think would be unstoppable. 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 are 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, but I think they're always going to be held back in some ways by not being a free society.

Starting point is 01:06:38 Now, what does that mean in an ultimate, like I've ever came to an actual battle? There was an interesting paper done by, I think it was Marshall, after World War II, an investigation of why America did so well in World War II when 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 send their troops into the battlefield and take huge casualties.

Starting point is 01:07:05 Now, of course, part of the argument where there was we had Soviets willing to throw so many people at the Nazis. But one of our advantages was the free exchange of information, the free exchange of science. Like in Nazi Germany, for example, it was very hard to know where problems were having where corruption was existing

Starting point is 01:07:20 because they had a completely censored press. And that was actually a disadvantage for them. same thing in Japan. And so one of the things I 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 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 acting on every fear and regulating every industry, things potentially could be harmful. I think then we're really done for it. I want to introduce a very modern player into the world of free speech, which is the internet,

Starting point is 01:08:08 and it's really changing how the form factor of speech exists. Because now on the internet, there's just so much data out there that we are all learning to navigate that data via curation algorithms. 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 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,

Starting point is 01:08:49 Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are private companies, not the government. Like, how do you navigate this world. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it ever could have been the government. Sure. 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 ARP and that, like, not even close. So I do think that, you know, it was only private industry that actually made it as big and

Starting point is 01:09:31 powerful as it is. My brain goes very quickly, though, to what's it going to look like in the future. And 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 like I said, 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 got excited

Starting point is 01:10:08 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. You just lost a lot of credibility with me. I just, another book, Ethan Mullock's co-intelligence. Do you guys read that? No. It's good, and it's about AI,

Starting point is 01:10:28 and he talks about at the end sort of like three AI scenarios. One, he thinks is very unlikely, and it 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

Starting point is 01:10:48 is that it will level off a little bit, but it will get better. You know, not by absurd leaps and bounds, but 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. Even if there is, though, I don't see how it would stop this scenario. You know, you're going to start using AI to build AI to build AI to make it smarter. And like when it's feeding on itself like that, and it surely already is, where you actually end up, you know, on exponential on top of exponential,

Starting point is 01:11:21 it's really kind of hard to know. But one thing I am confident about is that we're entering a, and it's not 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. It's just I tend to think that the, you know, I read the fourth turning by Neil Howe,

Starting point is 01:11:43 which I thought why I was going to dismiss as being, you know, pseudo-mystical clap trap. And then it was basically just talking about the fairly predictable sort of 80 to 100 year cycle of there being a major conflagration. And I think we're heading into something big and disruptive and I hope it's not as potentially harmful as it could be. And I hope we get out of it. There's so many sources to that disruption, like one of which is the technology that we're seeing now and how state actors, non-state actors might use that technology. A base level of question though for you, Greg. So you believe very strongly that human should have freedom of speech.

Starting point is 01:12:16 Yes. Should robots have freedom of speech as well? Or is this only a thing 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. 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

Starting point is 01:12:44 including my feed with some sort of message is just like, you know, decreasing to near zero. Well, I wouldn't want that to be like the law. Yeah. But 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...

Starting point is 01:13:06 Some proof of humanity. It does not have to be a nation state passport, but something, right? Yeah. And that, particularly for truth seeking, I've been working with this company called integrally a little bit where they're trying to actually figure out a way to create social media for truth discovery. And 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. For truth-seeking, I think you have to have stuff like that. Now, of course,

Starting point is 01:13:33 does that mean, 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 that when it comes to, you know, good discussion even, you're going to need places where people know they're talking to people. 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 TCPIP, stuff like this, HTTP, HGPS. Anyone could spin up a website. Anyone could spin up a server.

Starting point is 01:14:01 There was no curation, no moderation. None of this was controlled by companies, right? In Web 2, we saw a departure from that. We saw these mega apps. We saw, you know, the Apple store, Google Play Store. We saw Twitter and these large aggregators. We saw Facebook basically kind of control, create almost a Disneyland out of the internet, these Walt Gardens.

Starting point is 01:14:25 And now we have an internet, which is kind of dominated by many of these Web2 players, and they have the ability to de-platform you, not from the internet in total, but certainly from their Walt Garden application. What's your take on that in general? 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 U.S.? 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

Starting point is 01:15:01 of regulation of social media, for example, 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 is in front of the Supreme Court, you know, 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. But however, on the other side, in a case called Murphy, which used to be Missouri v. Biden, were also on the side of there have to be limitations.

Starting point is 01:15:44 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 to that or else you're really just saying that 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 the government. So, 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 incorporations?

Starting point is 01:16:32 Like, you can be, absolutely frightened of incorporations. But as the, you know, good libertarian always points out, 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, is having people, my friends 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,

Starting point is 01:17:06 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,

Starting point is 01:17:23 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 write a freedom of speech is going to become much more important, not less. Greg, I kind of want to skip to the bottom of a rabbit hole that we are currently exploring in the crypto world.

Starting point is 01:17:39 Yeah. 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?

Starting point is 01:17:54 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, like, credible neutrality is one of our core, like, social contracts. Like,

Starting point is 01:18:15 if the United States is a culture of freedom of speech, we try to have a culture of censorship resistance on Ethereum. Because, like, we want Ethereum to be, like, the Internet, right? Like, 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, and which is, like, the freedom to, like, 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? Like anything, any neurons firing here? Yeah. Well, it is something that we've been thinking a lot about is that essentially, you know, fire went from being a 60-person organization, you know, maybe $15 million a $120, 150, probably by the end of the year, a $36 million budget,

Starting point is 01:19:10 especially 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 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. Like there are a number of lawyers who are into this stuff at fire. But there's not enough of us yet.

Starting point is 01:19:32 And so keeping on top of like what the latest things 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. Like, 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, you know, that simply,

Starting point is 01:20:02 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 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 money is speech and transactions are speech,

Starting point is 01:20:21 that what they mean is that if you can destroy something, like if you can prevent it, 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's a tremendous power. And it does have real ramifications

Starting point is 01:20:36 for freedom of speech, for technological progress, et cetera. So we do think about this, but I do want to go bigger and deeper into it. I would love for you guys to do that because I see what fire is doing. It's just incredible in the kind of the fight for freedom speech and taking over a lot of like the mind share of the ACLU,

Starting point is 01:20:52 at least from my perspective, 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 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.

Starting point is 01:21:07 That's scary. People trying to fund some of these protests. A previous bankless guest, Punk 6529 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 or an advertisement

Starting point is 01:21:23 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 blacklist. that the U.S. government puts out or your political adversaries put out. So it gets back to this

Starting point is 01:21:42 without the freedom to transact, maybe we don't actually have freedom of speech in the 21st century now that everything is in the digital realm. And I kind of want to maybe end this conversation talking to you, like, because we've talked about freedom of speech from a legal perspective, from a cultural perspective. There's also kind of a third leg of a stool that we're increasingly seeing. We're covering crypto, which is why we wanted to have you on, Greg, which is our area focus is definitely from a social perspective, but more from a technical perspective, right? The way to ensure censorship resistance in communication is encryption. It's super valuable. Thank the tech gods that we were able to discover strong encryption so that the government couldn't pry into

Starting point is 01:22:23 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. If you have something like peer-to-peer transactions encryption in crypto and able to keep those transactions private, then you have 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 the culture side of this?

Starting point is 01:23:05 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. Because, you know, without this, I think we're very weak and divided we fall. 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 were very good on freedom of speech and there are people on the right libertarians who are very good on freedom

Starting point is 01:23:47 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 liberalism, who care about technology, who care about the right to code, the right to innovate. All of these things that are, you know, central go right along, you know, 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

Starting point is 01:24:17 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, Some of the things 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. So we're always looking for new rationales for censorship. Now, misinformation, disinformation.

Starting point is 01:24:47 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. That's essentially like, oh, now the government gets to. be arbiter of truth, game over. Like, that's a very, you know, scary, serious problem. But then you see, like, some kind of, like, I guess they're not that creative or rationale.

Starting point is 01:25:11 I just haven't thought of it in a while. One of the things that they're going after social media websites now is under 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, because of the expression that's done, we're going after it because, I don't know, like the...

Starting point is 01:25:35 Somebody lost money. That's what it would be. 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, why they shouldn't do it. And then, of course, like I said, some of the hate speech stuff, it's everywhere now. 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 one element where, like, Signal, for example, is a privacy app to speak to,

Starting point is 01:25:59 to people privately. But do you see the notion of freedom of speech also containing privacy? Or just where do you see privacy in this realm of this conversation? 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's one of the reasons why, even though, you know, I wrote a book, coddling the American mind with my friend John Hight, pointing out that I do think that social media before a certain age 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

Starting point is 01:26:32 so that you then have to 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, I don't know, like an adult website, you want to go to anything that you don't want the whole world to know about you, but you have to show your passport is a way to chill speech. You know, my general counsel does this.

Starting point is 01:26:53 He likes doing this in the context of adult websites. He's like, how many people in this auditorium like to go to adult websites? Does anyone raise their hand? almost like maybe like one dude, like raises their hand. And he's always kind of like, okay, that's statistically impossible. So can you see now why people don't necessarily want to have to show an ID before they, you know, go on social media or go on Twitter? Right. So, yeah, we do think that sometimes, you know, there's a tension between transparency and privacy, you know, but there are other times where privacy is absolutely the way you actually protect freedom of speech.

Starting point is 01:27:24 Well, Greg, this has been fantastic. You know, thank you. We wanted to make a canonical episode on Freedom of Speech. speech and why censorship resistance is important in 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.

Starting point is 01:27:46 If people want to find out a bit more about fire, maybe how to donate what you're up to. The college ranking, by the way, is incredible. So my daughter is getting ready to go to college, actually. And so I've encouraged her. You look like you're seven. I get this a lot, Greg. I mean that the best possible way. Yes.

Starting point is 01:28:05 And, you know, we age well in crypto, let's just say. Clearly. No, we don't. You look young too, Dave. I started young. I started young. Oh, David has no kids. I don't have any kids.

Starting point is 01:28:15 Yeah. No one college bound. But anyway, it's a fantastic resource for, like, 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, you know, like, find out more. about you. Is there like 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.

Starting point is 01:28:36 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 the fire.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, oh, which I also talk about in my latest book, Canceling of the American Mind. But please do consider, you know, supporting fire.

Starting point is 01:29:03 I think our work is only getting more important as the minutes pass by. 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 a free speech, a history from Socrates to social media, Age of Revolution, free speech, the people's darling privilege, all these fantastic book recommendations from Greg.

Starting point is 01:29:26 So thank you for those. Thanks for letting me geek out as much as I. I told me it was like I was totally free to him. I'm like, okay, I'm going to take advantage of that. That's perfect. Thank you. And thank you for taking advantage of that. I got to end with this.

Starting point is 01:29:35 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, for an open one at least. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone.

Starting point is 01:29:50 But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thank you.

Bankless - Why We Should Fight for Freedom of Speech | Greg Lukianoff

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