1216: Greg Lukianoff | Failing Arguments Against Free Speech

1216: Greg Lukianoff | Failing Arguments Against Free Speech

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Special thanks to Cayman Jack for sponsoring this episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Greg Lukianoff: I think that there is a value in knowing what people really think. Full stop. I think it's the scientific value. I think it's an artistic value. I think it's a democratic value.

You're not safer for knowing less about what people really think. And I think in a situation where people are scared to say what they actually think because they think their job's gonna be on the line, whether that's cancel culture from the left or pressure from the right, that's not good for a democratic society.

Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional neuroscientist, national security advisor, [00:01:00] astronaut or hacker.

And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now, today, Jimmy Kimmel got canceled over the jokes he made. Some people call that accountability. Others call it censorship. So where is the line between legitimate backlash and mob justice? If comedians are scared to tell jokes, isn't that kind of already the joke?

Why do late night hosts lose their jobs over words? While politicians can say worse and walk away untouched? Does free speech only protect the powerful? Well, today we are exploring cancel culture comedy, the intersections of free speech and the future of free expression with insights from the War on Words.

A new book from Greg Luciano, the Tackles, the 10 Most Common Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Just Don't Hold Up. And Hey, even [00:02:00] if Jimmy Kimmel is probably back by the time this airs, my point still stands If comedians and Talk show hosts aren't safe, who is and what's more dangerous, bad jokes, or a society that can't tolerate them?

Here we go with Greg Loff. I was thinking this morning, man, you know we're doing a show on free speech. And it's just, it's unfortunate that there's nothing relevant in the news these days. Yeah, I know. It's been boring. Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: I, I've been like doing my nails and stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It was like Monday I'm prepping this show.

Yeah. And I'm going, all right. Free speech. Always timely ish, you know? Yeah. And then by Friday, the day we're doing the show, it's, oh my God, we have to talk about free speech, because Jimmy Kimmel gets canceled and the people on the left are like, this is crazy. And the people on the right are like, oh, so now you care about free speech.

It couldn't be more relevant and more timely right now.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. No, it's business is booming, unfortunately

Jordan Harbinger: in the censorship free speech defense business. Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: It's

Jordan Harbinger: never

Greg Lukianoff: a good thing.

Jordan Harbinger: No free speech. It's one of those things that's like the fire extinguisher [00:03:00] business. We want these around, but when they're getting used a lot, that's a bad sign, right?

It's like that kind of thing. So it's free speech. All right. We wanna defend this. Oh, if we're really busy, that's no good. We wanna make sure that we're just moderately busy. But unfortunately, yes, business is good. As you mentioned at the top of the show, to give people a little bit of background, just in case they are not paying attention, or maybe they're not from the United States.

Jimmy Kimmel popular comedy late night show host. Was he canceled? Is that technically the term that happened or he fired? Really,

Greg Lukianoff: I have a very particular definition of cancel culture. I wrote a book called Canceling of the American Mind with Ricky Schlop, young genius, real pleasure to work with. But our definition is that the uptick of campaigns to get people fired, punished, or otherwise expelled for speech that would be protected for, let's say, a public employee under the First Amendment that began around 2014 and resulted in a sort of climate of fear.

And there's no political valence to that definition, and it can come from the left and the right. [00:04:00] It tended to come somewhat more from the left for sure. I would say that as serious as cancel culture was, I do think that the use of federal pressure in order to get media to do the dirty work for the Trump administration is worse.

More classic, in this case, what's called jawboning, which is when the government goads the. Private entities to censor speech that the government itself is forbidden from punishing under the first amendment.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Did you say job boning? Job boning. Okay. Sounds

Greg Lukianoff: a little dirty, doesn't it?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But I like it.

I like it more because it sounds dirty. I think actually. So when I say canceled, Jimmy Kimmel was canceled. I guess it should have clarified his show was canceled. Oh, in the very literal sense. Yeah. Not like his personalities, careers now canceled. I should have clarified that. Especially given the context of your previous work.

They're saying suspended. Yeah, but he doesn't work there anymore, so I dunno. Oh, has he

Greg Lukianoff: been full on fired? I've been on the road for nine days straight.

Jordan Harbinger: I probably should have double checked this morning. 'cause the problem with the news is it's like his show's off the air. That must mean all these [00:05:00] things.

It doesn't necessarily mean that, but thanks for all the speculation and so I really don't know. And also it doesn't matter because by the time this is out, that'll have changed 10 times anyways. That show could be back on the air. Tomorrow, it could never come back on the air. And he could be fired by tomorrow.

He could have retired or resigned by tomorrow officially to get some sort of severance. I mean, like who the hell knows? So it almost doesn't matter. The point is it was federal pressure to take him off the air.

Greg Lukianoff: So can I tell you the story of my ill-fated business trip that I just got out of?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, sure.

Greg Lukianoff: So I had this ridiculous breakneck thing where my itinerary was Pittsburgh. I'm in order to do a debate with the free press team in Barry Weiss. Cool. Then Saulsalito in California, then San Francisco, and then Santa Fe, then New York. And this was stretched over about nine days.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a brutal travel schedule.

Greg Lukianoff: It was too much. Yeah. And when I land in Pittsburgh, the first thing I find out is that Charlie Kirk has been shot. And at that point he wasn't dead yet, but just they knew. They knew he'd been shot. And [00:06:00] of course that's horrifying and an obvious threat to freedom of speech because I guess there was some tiny possibility.

It wasn't for his speech, but the we, we all kind of counted that. Yeah, as negligible.

Jordan Harbinger: And not only that, but you're also about to go up on stage. And also you're like, wait a minute, is that gonna be a copycat thing that happens to me in an hour?

Greg Lukianoff: I tell you what's worse about it is they actually asked me, Utah Valley University to come out and give a talk.

I might be standing where he was jot in about a month, and I'd be lying if I said, it didn't spook me, but I'm doing it. 'cause he can't actually let your speech get chilled. And honestly, I'm less worried for me. But I think of people I love, like Barry Weiss, like Sarah Hater, like Carol Hovan. Like people who I feel like would be, are understandably really scared because there are crazy people who hate them too.

Jordan Harbinger: Carol Hoover, it was interesting, she was on the show. She was really good. I thought. Relatively non-controversial in some ways. Look, some of the stuff was like obviously gonna strike a nerve. But you [00:07:00] just think, wow, she almost lost her job at Harvard. That's really bad. That's as bad as it gets. You don't think sniper rifle from 200 yards.

So it's, the stakes are even higher and it's even crazier. So Jimmy Kimmel canceled, fired, whatever over jokes he made. This is probably a dumb question in light of our previous conversation here, but do you see that as accountability working? 'cause that's what some people view it as? Or is that a failure of free speech?

Greg Lukianoff: That's a failure free speech. I realized that I was gonna tell the Odyssey of my entire trip because, and people are really focused on the Jimmy Kimmel thing, but there are so many other things that happened that the Trump administration tried to pull, including having Pam Bondi talk about hate speech not being protected, which of course, hate speech is like the tool developed by the left to go after freedom of speech and that we've fought on campuses for decades now at fire, and suddenly Trump himself is accusing reporters of engaging in hate speech.

Jordan Harbinger: Can you explain what fire is briefly? 'cause I think some people are like, oh, this guy just hates Trump. Where's the channel changer? Uh, on my phone?

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're the foundation for [00:08:00] individual rights and expression, formerly the foundation for individual Rights and education. And if you've ever heard of horror stories of people getting in trouble on college campuses, it's probably because we've been involved in defending those students or professors and what that's looked like has changed over the years.

But for a lot of it, what we were fighting was the censorship instinct of what, what is now called loosely wokeness. So there are people who really loved us for that. But of course, like we've always been a genuinely nonpartisan defender of freedom of speech since day one. My very first time on TV was defending a lefty professor who was extremely controversial after nine 11, and I had got tons of hate mail.

Immediately after that. We lost donors. So it was good training from day one to have that.

Jordan Harbinger: You just figured out a way to piss off the left and the right at the same time, which is one of your talents.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, I, I've been told that I have a terrible business model as a fundraiser because it, we piss off the left and the right.

It's like you need to find those rich centrists,

Jordan Harbinger: which maybe don't exist anywhere. Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: Well we have to find are actually the people who believe in free [00:09:00] speech for its own sake. And thankfully there are wealthy people who aren't even necessarily centrist who actually get it from a principled standpoint.

I just wish more people would.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's funny because you say we gotta find people who appreciate free speech. And when I go online, depending on what the speech is, there are people defending free speech on both sides. The problem is when it changes to something they don't like, then it becomes something else suddenly and.

That's the problem I think.

Greg Lukianoff: I mean to me, like the Trump administration dusting off hate speech was pretty comical, but watching people say unironically, people on the right say this isn't cancel culture, this is consequence culture, which was like a favorite refrain of the left defending, cancel culture like Michael Hobbes has made his career basically like on the idea that, well, that's just accountability culture.

While he tries to wish away even the existence of cancel culture. But the right actually making that argument verbatim is like, okay,

Jordan Harbinger: the worm is turned here. So to give people a little bit of background on this, 'cause my audience, this show is very not political. So when we mention [00:10:00] politician and there's also an international audience, so sometimes I gotta be really careful to be like, oh, so this is these, this is, yeah.

Yes, exactly. Hello Australia. Where they're like, wait, I thought you had freedom of speech, but now you're mad that people are speaking. But then also you don't have freedom from consequences. But like when other people get consequences, everybody's mad. Make up your mind. You don't have to go to Australia to be confused.

You just have to go to Canada. You have to like throw a stone hard enough from the United States and you hit people who go, I don't get it. You said this last week, but now it's on the other side. And you didn't mean it that way. No, not like that. And so the idea that the left was saying, Hey, this isn't cancel culture, this is just consequences.

What they mean by that is basically like, look, we have the legal right to free speech, but if you're a surgeon at a hospital, you kind of represent that hospital. So if you're like, ah, I hated that Charlie Kirk guy, I don't care that his kids don't have a dad, you can get fired for that. You're not protected by some invisible shield of the first Amendment.

You're only protected because the government can't arrest you for [00:11:00] that. It doesn't mean the hospital can't go, man, that was in really poor taste. And regardless of our politics, you can't be spouting that crap on our company Twitter account. So you are no longer employed here.

Greg Lukianoff: But one of the reasons why I object to Ansel culture is because I believe in a culture of free speech.

And to be clear. Your company can decide to fire someone for embarrassing the company that's absolutely within your First Amendment rights. We'd even fight for that first amendment right? But if you live in a society where you can have an opinion or a job, but not both, that's what it was starting to look like back in 2020.

That essentially if you disagreed with the boss on his politics or the loudest people at your firm, you're not gonna have a job anymore. And so I think that people need to remember. That broader principle, and we always try to get people to step a little bit back about what kind of country they wanna live in, in terms of whether or not you should have free speech as a citizen if you have a job.

Now, of course, one of the reasons why I compare it to public employee law is 'cause there are all sorts of additional nuance in that of being like, yeah, like if you're a spokesperson for something and you say, by the [00:12:00] way, I think the boss is an idiot, of course you're gonna lose your job. But if you're like a pizza boy, like we always give the example of the pizza boy wearing a Biden hat or MAGA hat, and their boss doesn't like that candidate.

I think as Americans we can agree that person probably shouldn't lose their job.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's really difficult to pay your rent with an opinion. So if I had to choose between an opinion and a job. I probably choose the job. Right? Isn't that your point? So there's a chilling effect if you just can't ever express anything and like Yeah, there's a difference between, like you said, being a lawyer that goes to work every day and nobody can really tell what your politics are, and you volunteer at a fundraiser for something and someone finds out that's different than, oh yeah.

There's the guy that will never shut the hell up about this particular presidential candidate at work in the office, and anybody who disagrees with him is an idiot. And he will tell you that.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh yeah, if it's on the job, that's an entirely different thing. It's one of those things kind of like, so a paradigmatic case in First Amendment law is someone who is like a K through 12 teacher.

He wrote an op-ed talking about education [00:13:00] policy in his town and in a case called Pickering be Board of Education, the Supreme Court said, listen, he's a public employee. We shouldn't be firing people just for having actual opinions as citizen. That seems to really limit the ability of public employees, and I still think that's like a good model.

By the way, I just got a news alert saying Jimmy Kimmel has been fired.

Jordan Harbinger: In real time. Wow. Breaking news. So he has officially been fired, and I wonder how they handle that. Does he just get the rest of his contract paid out? Surely it costs them a bunch to do that. There's definitely gonna be some lawsuits filed in response to this.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh yeah. And when it comes to the lawsuit that should be filed is there should be a lawsuit from Jimmy Kimmel against the FCC because like the extent to which it's quite clear that the FCC was pressuring. A lot of parties at the same time to come to this. And it's been so frustrating watching Twitter explode with people being like, oh no, this is just a business decision that a BC made.

But Trump said, Jimmy Kimmel will be next, like several months ago. He repeated this like a couple of times. He is definitely shown that he is very willing [00:14:00] to use mergers as a way to coax Paramount, for example, to do what he wants. And then Brendan Carr was on the Benny Johnson show and was like, we can do this easy way or the hard way.

And he was really quite explicit that they need to dump this guy. And to be clear, like I'm critical of what Jimmy Kimmel said, I think that Jimmy Kimmel. Was going with this kind of embarrassing for the mainstream media kind of narrative that this guy has to be right wing, which they really jumped on to a degree, which I think I was embarrassing for them.

And Jimmy being a Hollywood guy just implies Sure, of course. This guy

Jordan Harbinger: might be actually Maga, so tell me what he said. 'cause I think a lot of people are like, what does he do again? And the answer from my end is, I'm not entirely sure.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. What he said was that MAGA was desperately trying to figure out a way that he wasn't actually one of theirs.

Jordan Harbinger: The person who shot Charlie Kirk.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. Which is a literally true statement. But the implication was that of course he's gonna be a right winger. Gotcha. The kind of dumb thing that Hollywood people that he just kind of roll your eyes at. And I think it'll be clear, I understand why conservatives were mad about it.[00:15:00]

But if that was the case that you can say that this guy should lose his job and maybe he would've if there wasn't state intervention. The thing that distinguishes this case is the state intervention, and Trump's clearly demonstrated tendency to use every lever of power at his disposal in order to punish his enemies.

Jordan Harbinger: How did the federal government apply pressure then? Do we know the specifics of that?

Greg Lukianoff: Well, basically they held out their licensing and Trump then doubled down on the idea that essentially like we're thinking about pulling. Every network's licensing. And he said something like that earlier in the week as well.

Weirdly, he said that for NBC and A B, C, but not CBS or Fox, the threats have been accelerating over many months. And then specifically here, I mean when the chairman of the FCC is basically saying the same thing and specifically about Jimmy Kimmel. Yeah. If these are companies that want a merger, they get the message, you know, like, this guy's gotta

Jordan Harbinger: go.

So what they said essentially was, you might not be able to legally broadcast unless you do what we want. And also we know you [00:16:00] wanna merge with another company and we have to approve that as the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. If we're gonna approve that, you know, you gotta be in our good graces.

And that was loud and clear. Okay, so we have to fire this guy, then you'll approve our merger. And I guess that's why people are like, it's a business decision. And it's like, okay, but not really. I mean it was like extortion. It was a little bit mafia. It's totally

Greg Lukianoff: like nice business. He got there, wouldn't want

Jordan Harbinger: anything to happen to it.

Yes. Extortion. Yeah, that's

Greg Lukianoff: scary. So I think the conservatives trying to wish this away as a big deal are kidding themselves.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay. I try not to make it a political show, but I think it's really difficult to discuss this without discussing what each political side is doing. As you mentioned before, the left was doing the cancel culture before, and I think that's what a lot of people on the right or even in the center are applauding.

They're like, yeah, remember when you guys were doing all this other horrible stuff? Well, it's our turn now. But that's kind of, what is it? An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind kind of thing. So it's really not good that the shoe is on the other foot, at least the shoes on the other foot. Maybe you shouldn't be kicking people with it.

I don't [00:17:00] know. The metaphor breaks down at some point. So where is the line between legitimate backlash and basically mob slash government censorship? And maybe I just gave the answer away here.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, like legitimate backlash. Of course, people have a first amendment right to complain about anything. I would defend that, right.

It was a noticeable change though within my own lifetime. Then people started going, that person's a jerk. Hit that person. Two, I have to engage in a campaign to get this person fired. That was kind of, in some ways, only like logistically possible to do in a quick way until when social media existed that you could create like the appearance of a million people demanding that you fire Harry.

What it actually turns out, there's 30 people who actually think that, but when you start getting into like, what's the line with government coercion, like the government's not supposed to place any meaningful pressure on institutions to censor speech. The government itself cannot. Censor. So this is one of the things that was so frustrating about the Murthy v Missouri case, which they'll explain for the international audience.

So there [00:18:00] was a case where a number of conservatives were saying that they were kicked off of social media because the Biden administration was pressuring a number of social media companies to kick off people who were questioning things like COVID and vaccines and that kind of stuff. And the pressure was dramatic.

It was not pussyfooting around. It was very tough on a lot of these social media platforms. And then these were people who were actually kicked off social media. And the Supreme Court found that it wasn't clear that these guys would've standing. It wasn't clear that it was absolutely certain that the government was the, but for a reason they got kicked off social media.

And meanwhile, I think the case is overwhelmingly clear. I'm embarrassed on behalf of other First Amendment people who are, the government was right on this. It's like, no, the government should not be pressuring social media companies to punish speech that the government itself cannot punish. Period. But the Supreme Court figured out a way to not deal with this case.

And I think they got that case wrong in Murthy v Missouri. Now we're seeing, I guess there's a bit of, I told you so on [00:19:00] this, that essentially, of course the government is now using pretty overt pressure to get revenge on some of Trump's personal political targets.

Jordan Harbinger: So it basically saying, Hey, the Biden administration shut down a lot of speech on social media during their administration.

Many of us opposed, and other people thought this is fine. And now it's happening from the other side during the Trump administration and it's hard to go, Hey, you're not allowed to do that. And it's, didn't we just establish that we can do that because Joe Biden's administration did it and it's, we don't want it to happen like that.

We were right and you guys are wrong. And look, the counter argument is, hey, one was disinformation about a pandemic, the other one was a joke from a comedian you don't like. That's different. Okay. But also like you are the ones that opened the door to this BS in the first place.

Greg Lukianoff: And the thing is, like some of the stuff that the Biden administration was targeting is.

Disinformation misinformation. First of all, it wasn't disinformation. It was people having theories, like the lab leak theory. It was people saying maybe vaccines aren't very well tested on human beings, which [00:20:00] is also factually true, and so maybe we should be worried about some of this stuff and some of the stuff like myocarditis and this kind of stuff, yeah, there was some reason to be concerned about this stuff, but it was treated like blasphemy.

And in this case, what Kimmel was saying was barely a joke, but it was certainly an opinion.

Jordan Harbinger: So the problem is now, right? People are gonna start self-censoring to avoid the backlash. Oh, they already are. And they are already. Look, one of the reasons I'm so glad this is a nonpolitical show. Not that I'm gonna make a dent in the universe with this podcast or anything, but I don't have to worry about, oh gosh, am I gonna get shot for something?

Am I gonna get put off the air? Am I gonna get dumped by sponsors? Because while there are controversial guests and stuff like that, I'm just not that much of an agitator for either side. At least I don't think so. That could always break down as people start getting crazier and I'm trying to anchor myself to sanity.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, remember, your words can be violence, but also your silence can be violent. So you're kind of

Jordan Harbinger: Right. So I have to speak and also not speak unless uh, right. Okay. Well, we'll get to that in a bit. So people [00:21:00] are self-censoring to avoid the backlash. That seems to me like evidence that the marketplace of ideas, as they called it during law school, is breaking down.

Greg Lukianoff: I agree. And I was talking to someone where they asked me like how I define free speech and you know, I always stumble over it 'cause of the formulation. But to think what you will and just say what you think and that essentially it's just that simple. And I got this very like, well anything. And I'm like, if you're talking about opinion, then yeah, I gave a TED talk and one of the things I said is like, I've been defending freedom of speech professionally for 24 years now, but even longer unpaid.

And that essentially like people bring up, sometimes derisively, sometimes as a compliment. Oh you're a free speech absolutist. And I made a point my TED talk, like I've been doing this for a long time and if there are free speech absolutists, I have not met them.

Jordan Harbinger: Define what that is. 'cause people do label themselves or others that, and it turns out to never be true when the shoe is, again, when it's directed at them, they're like, this is unconscionable.

Remember when you [00:22:00] didn't give a crap a month ago when that other thing happened about the guy you didn't like? Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: So a free speech absolutists in theory is someone who believes that if you do something with words, essentially. It's always protected and that's not true. That's an extreme version even of that definition.

But for example, a free speech s might not even believe that defamation should be unprotected. And defamation is like saying even when you know it's untrue, this person molested so-and-so as a child, something that is clearly trying to destroy someone's career, particularly if you know you're lying and everybody knows you're lying and it's legit harmful to a particular person.

All these special protections that apply defamation. I believe defamation should not be protected. I don't believe incitement shouldn't be protected, which is torture. You're just about to be late. You're in front of the mayor's home and you're saying, let's burn down. The mayor's, you know, home, that's incitement.

And then you have other categories like obscenity or obscenity towards minors, which basically means things that allow you to protect kids from say, hardcore porn, for example. I actually think the exceptions [00:23:00] to the First Amendment as established by the Supreme Court, for the most part, make a lot of sense.

I think they're well thought out for the most part. But what I am is an opinion absolutist, which basically means I think that there is a value in knowing what people really think. Full stop. I think it's the scientific value. I think it's an artistic value. I think it's a democratic value and that you're not safer for knowing less about what people really think.

And I think in a situation where people are scared to say what they actually think because they think their job's gonna be on the line, whether that's cancel culture from the left, or pressure from the Trump administration on the right. That's not good for a democratic society.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's not good. I mean, that sort of answers my next question here, which is what's more dangerous, bad jokes or a society that can't tolerate bad jokes?

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, definitely the latter.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, like hands down and very obviously for everyone involved and I mean, hell, we had down Rickles back in the eighties and we survived. I barely remember him, but yeah, it's crazy 'cause I remember my mom talking about how obscene Rodney Dangerfield was or [00:24:00] something, and now she's probably just like, okay, he's still stupid, but I've seen worse.

Right? Back to school is a masterpiece that's, I'm gonna get us derailed if I go down that road. All right, so what do we apolitical at least? Yeah, there you go. There you have it. People say words are violence, and if that's true, my inbox is a war crime. Let's take a break from the carnage and hear from the amazing sponsors that support this show.

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Now back to Greg Luke Ooff. It is hard to imagine that anybody's against free speech, but here we are. I mean, you mentioned this in your book, war on Words. Authoritarians are really used to these same arguments, right? They use a lot of the arguments that you mentioned in the book against free speech.

Free speech laws are used frequently against the press, and this is kind of why, as a member of the press, we have to be really vigilant against this kind of stuff. And it seems to me like the latest generation is really a lot less protective of free speech. And I'm not trying to throw Gen Z under the bus because I think they've just had to face harder issues when it comes to free speech than maybe my parents generation.

Look, you're already disagreeing. Tell me why you disagree. My parents, they're relatively [00:28:00] educated people. I don't think they could formulate a free speech argument. I think you'd be surprised. Yeah. You might be right.

Greg Lukianoff: Could I get a sense of like when your parents were born? Oh yeah. The forties. Forties, yeah.

You'll be shocked at how good they are actually at formulating free speech argument.

Jordan Harbinger: I, I'm gonna give that a try tonight at dinner.

Greg Lukianoff: They were coming up in like the sixties and seventies. That's true. That was one of the major topics of one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Like much more intense than they're today.

I think Gen Z is the victim of an educational system, K through PhD, who really tried to explain the downsides of free speech. Partially because when you have a monoculture in K through PhD. The incentive has changed and suddenly, like if you're in charge of an institution, then why on earth would you wanna limit your power against people's freedom of speech?

Because you understand what right think is. So I do actually think that a lot of these attitudes about free speech really fall on education schools in particular within higher ed, but just the way we educate young people. That's why I did my, you know, again, to come back to my TED Talk, I tried to do in 12 minutes, like my most basic lesson on what free speech is, what young people are getting [00:29:00] wrong about it, what they have they been miseducated on it, and what's scary and how bad this has gotten.

Fire does the campus free speech ranking and it says massive undertaking. We pulled about 70,000 students this year, the biggest survey of student opinion about free speech in American history, and we have some really terrible news for a long time. The students who tended to be more pro violence in response to free speech, like it's okay in some circumstances, tended to be on the left this year.

The right has caught up. So right now, a little more than one in three students think that under extreme circumstances, speech can be met with violence. And at some schools, I think uc, Davis, I, I think it was like 52% of students said that. That's terrifying. The answer should be, that should be zero.

Jordan Harbinger: So explain what that essentially means.

That means that if you don't like an opinion that somebody is expressing, you can beat them up. Is that kind of where we're going with this? The

Greg Lukianoff: way it's asked is that, can you respond to speech with violence? So yeah, [00:30:00] like potentially actually physically harm them. Because we also ask, is it okay to shout down speakers, speaker?

Is it okay to block entrances? So we're clearly talking about something more extreme than those two options. And when it comes to shout down speakers, we're talking about, it's more than like two thirds. I think overall, and by shouting down we don't mean heckle. A shout down is when you can't proceed with a speech because students are preventing it from happening.

And I always point out that's mob censorship. That is not freedom of speech. That is the oldest form of censorship, literally in the book where basically groups of people get together and like, I don't like this guy and you can't hear him 'cause I don't like him. And that's imposing your will on everybody else.

Jordan Harbinger: And that this is probably not a brilliant observation or anything, but it seems like that would make. Actual violence inevitable, because if you can just then go and do that, anything you feel strongly enough about, you can just say like, Hey, let's just go throw things at this guy until, oh yeah, he stops talking, and we can just do that for everyone.

We don't like everywhere.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. There's a great quote from a Supreme Court [00:31:00] case about what's called the heckler's veto, which we're describing here, is basically we can't limit speech to just speech that isn't unpopular with bottle throwers. Essentially, it incentivizes violence response to speech. Once you actually let the violent perpetrator silence and behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated for 2023 and 2024.

Those are the two worst years for shout downs in US history as best we can tell. Well, when it comes to campuses, at least that's what happens. If you don't actually say, listen, if you respond to speakers on campus with shout downs or God forbid, respond with violence, which has happened in cases, that's something that should get you punished at minimum expelled, and in some of these cases, probably arrested.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, look, it makes sense to me. It depends on what you're doing, of course. But there seems to be a lot of, not just, Hey, I don't want, I dunno, Ben Shapiro to speak at my university, but I don't want Ben Shapiro to speak at my university and we are going to make it so people can't get in, make it so he can't get out.

There was a couple of [00:32:00] instances where professors were being false imprisonment is really what it was. They were like, can I go to the bathroom? No, you're gonna stay here until you agree to, I don't remember what it was, but, well they did that at Barnard, right? Yes. You know, for one,

Greg Lukianoff: they also did at Evergreen State University to the, to the university president.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh, that's what I'm talking about. And then they were like, yeah, the people who wouldn't let you go to the bathroom until you agreed to their demands, but you didn't feel unsafe. Okay, sure pal.

Greg Lukianoff: He meekly requests if he can go pee and they say no and they laugh at him and it's kind of like that's

Jordan Harbinger: not okay.

That's not liberalism. Insane. What about the idea that hate speech isn't free speech? I know it's hard to draw a bright line around that. It's a very

Greg Lukianoff: common misconception and certainly young people have this belief that a lot of adults do as well, that hate speech is not protected speech at the United States.

And actually what we have rather than hate speech codes is something called the Bedrock Principle, which comes out of a 1989 case called Texas v Johnson that said that if the First Amendment means anything, it's that you can't ban speech in this country simply because it's offensive. [00:33:00] And I think this is the right rule for a multicultural, diverse society because like people's idea of what is offensive.

I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrants, mother's, British, my dad's Russian. They have wildly different ideas of what is and isn't offensive.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. That, and you grew up during the Cold War, that must've been an Yeah, an interesting dinner. Neither of my parents, much like the Soviets, I

Greg Lukianoff: suppose.

That makes sense. So essentially, I think about even just the kids I grew up with, they had all radically different ideas, what you should and shouldn't be allowed to say. At least their parents did. And then as I got to like fancier more upper class places like Stanford. I was like, and the upper class of the United States has some real ideas of what you shouldn't be allowed to say.

And campuses, Ivy League campuses certainly have all sorts of, um, quasi Victorian ideas of what you should and shouldn't be allowed to say. So the bedrock principle is the right call. You can't ban speech just 'cause it's offensive. And that's kind of the hallmark of hate speech laws. It's essentially like the main thing is that it's offensive.

Now, what we don't have any issue with at fire are harassment [00:34:00] laws. As long as you define harassment as being a pattern of behavior that is severe, persistent or pervasive, that targets someone for discriminatory intent. That actually in the case of higher ed, denies them the ability to fully engage in, in their education.

It's a high standard, but it's how you actually prevent someone saying something rude from being harassment. And believe me, we've seen plenty of probably thousands of examples of people trying to do that, but you change it into a pattern of harassing behavior.

Jordan Harbinger: That's the difference between, hey, we don't like this class on.

Israel and we don't want Jews here or something, which is gross, but hate speech, which is gross. Yeah. As opposed to we are gonna make sure that these five Jewish professors can't ever do anything on campus because they're scared.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. I mean that would be easily harassment. That would probably even be stalking.

It depends on what you would actually mean by that.

Jordan Harbinger: Just trying to give people an example so that they're not like, because it could be a little bit confusing. Sure.

Greg Lukianoff: So for example, like people would ask us [00:35:00] if the pro-Palestinian chant from the river to the Sea Palestine shall be free, was protected. And the correct answer is if that's all you're doing, then sure it's protected.

I don't like the sentiment. I feel like a lot of people don't even know what river or what sea they're talking about, but they're still chanting it. But if you're doing that and you're like marching towards Jewish students and surrounding them, and you're following them around campus menacing in a way that actually indicates that you are targeting them to make their lives miserable, that can be harassment.

And there was a lot of things that happened on campus. That really crossed the line. Take Columbia for example. Columbia was just a fricking mess on this kind of stuff. They allowed a lot of stuff they shouldn't have allowed. There was one video of this guy who later got kicked out I think for death threats against someone.

There was an encampment on campus and these Jewish students were trying to like get through their own campus and the guy shouts out. Zionists have entered the camp and students lock arms together and start marching towards them. Just push them out of their own quad [00:36:00] essentially. And it's okay. That's harassment for sure.

It's probably also assault because like when you're actually getting someone to go, 'cause they're reasonably afraid that they're gonna be pushed out, that's assault. So campuses, I never wanna pretend campuses haven't brought a lot of this on themselves, but that doesn't mean that Trump suddenly, magically gets to have all sorts of powers that exceed his rightful powers under the First Amendment.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that was a scary time. And I understand, I can't imagine being Jewish on campus, openly Jewish, whatever on campus. It's crazy to me.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And I've been saying this for a long time and apparently, um, there's one Twitter personality who will remain unnamed, who basically made it sound like I'm the victim of some kind of Mossad op that suddenly I care about antisemitism on campus and believe it's a problem.

And I have always pointed out, dude, I've been saying this since 2014, I've been saying this, pointing out that I do actually think that there is an antisemitism problem both in elite higher ed and in schools in California. I don't even know exactly why the latter. But at the same time, that doesn't actually create sort of a blank [00:37:00] check to just go after speech that you disagree with on Israel Palestine.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure, exactly. So you actually need to let people say some pretty gross racist shit in order to get rid of that type of belief in the long run. Yeah. For

Greg Lukianoff: me, my whole point on freedom of speech is we think about freedom of speech wrong. That essentially we have a tendency, and I think this is part of the K through PhD Miseducation practice, we consider whether or not we agree with the speech at all, as if that matters and we forget.

That's one irrelevant. Even bigots have their own freedoms, but almost more importantly, as far as I'm concerned, from an epistemological standpoint, it's valuable to know what people really think. In almost all circumstances, you are not safer for knowing less about what people really think and if they think horrible things.

That's good to know. So if someone is a bigot, it's better that you actually know that they're a bigot. That is crucial information to have about your world. But if you create situations in which people are afraid to say what they really think, that by the way has [00:38:00] also really demonstrable negative effects.

So I was on the Bill Marsh Show and we were talking about these hate speech laws in Europe and the rise of antisemitism, but there's been laws on the books banning anti-Semitic speech in France, for example, I think since the nineties. But it's gotten way worse. Now, of course some of that is immigration from countries that are very hostile to Israel in the first place, but also some of it is censorship.

Doesn't change anyone's opinion. It just teaches them to, Hey, since you can get in trouble, why don't you just talk to people who already agree with you? And here's the thing. One of the best established phenomena in social science is if you have people talk only to those whom they agree, they get radicalized in the direction of the group.

And as I said it, like really simply, of course, antisemitism got worse. You told all the antisemites that they could only talk to other antisemites.

Jordan Harbinger: That's an interesting point. It's kinda like the Streisand effect. Remember, Barbara Streisand didn't want a photo of her house? I think it was out there in the internet was like, oh, you don't want a photo of your house floating around, so you're gonna drop, cease and desist letters [00:39:00] everywhere.

I am gonna reap all 18 million people who are trolling right now are gonna post this everywhere forever. And thus the Streisand Effect and Hatem Mongers, they love censorship because now it's like, oh, I got de platformed. 'cause they're afraid of what I'm just saying. You hear that crap all the time. The

Greg Lukianoff: Nazis loved

Jordan Harbinger: it.

They love it. Like the literal Nazis? Yes, the literal

Greg Lukianoff: Nazis. Yes. It's called the Via Mar fallacy. That essentially there's this argument by the sort of like the people who really want less free speech, saying that essentially we had hate speech codes back in the twenties during Weimar Germany. We could have stopped Hitler.

And that's stupid to begin with because even before I knew some of the actual state of the law in the twenties, it's like, so you're saying that would've stopped people for voting? One third of the population voted for Nazis. That's, it was a hard thing to overcome, but it actually turns out that. Weimar Germany did have hate speech laws on, they weren't called that, but they were specifically designed to protect people of faith, including Jewish people.[00:40:00]

Nazis went to jail for saying bad things about Jews, and guess what? They turned these into massive PR crews that they would have like big parties for people when they got out of jail for saying antisemitic things. And they really exploited the fact that Hitler, he got a slap on the wrist for trying to overthrow the German government insurrection called the beer hall Push in, which I believe like at least one, but I think several police officers were killed in a, normally in Germany.

The historically, someone doing that would be hung, but instead he was given a slap on the wrist, but then told he couldn't speak. He couldn't give speeches for several years, and the Nazis loved this. They made big posters of Hitler with like tape over his mouth saying, out of 2 billion people in the world, of course, much smaller world, only one cannot speak on a German campus.

And so they turn these things into coups for them. Meanwhile, if you just let these guys talk, at least in a free society, they're gonna turn more people off than on.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I find that to be an interesting point you make, because I'll [00:41:00] hear something where I'm like, oh, this person makes some decent points.

And then, I don't know, they'll go on Sam Harris and I'm like, oh, nevermind. But if you can't have that conversation, then a bunch of people are just going, oh, you know, I guess Jews did get kicked out of 109 countries, whatever like the disinformation nonsense is. And it's like, oh, well we can't talk about why that's bs.

'cause then I'm talking about antisemitism and we can't really have, the other guy can't show up to the debate 'cause he is gonna get arrested for that. So I can't really counter that. And then they're just on whatever the equivalent is of Reddit or Twitter talking about it. And like you said, they get more and more radicalized because they're having the meeting in the basement somewhere instead of out in the open.

Greg Lukianoff: That's the whole thing about Holocaust denial. Like when I'm over in Europe, I definitely get that treated as kinda like, okay, Mr. Free Speechy American weirdo. But surely Holocaust denial should be illegal. And I'm always like, why does that need to be illegal? Because here's the thing, the only way you actually are able to maintain that the Holocaust didn't happen is if no serious person ever gets a chance to [00:42:00] challenge you.

'cause they never knew you were saying it in the first place. It is the easiest argument in the world to refute. But instead we turn these, uh, Holocaust deniers into heroes. They don't have to go through the process of being like, how do you explain this? I think one of the theories, by the way, for Holocaust denial was something like yellow fever in the camps, which was largely Jewish Pacific or something like that.

They're not good arguments. They don't stand up unless they're whispered into your ears and you're told, no one wants you to know this.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Yeah, that's interesting. I looked at Holocaust denial stuff before, not because I believed in it, and my family as people who perish in all. I wasn't worried. Yeah, I didn't think so.

But it's a podcast. You gotta say everything. Or the email you get is, I can't believe you toyed with the idea of Holocaust denial. And that's literally not what anybody said. Please listen to more than 10 seconds of an hour and a half long show. But you're right. You hear these arguments like. What was, there was a movie about this where the guy was like, I don't believe that this was a thing, because the gas chambers [00:43:00] were designed so poorly that they couldn't have been gas chambers.

And it's, yeah, it's almost like they made them in a hurry and didn't care if the people were comfortable when they were inside. Is it a

Greg Lukianoff: craftsmanship argument they're making there?

Jordan Harbinger: Right. It was literally like, oh, if you really wanted to efficiently gas people, you would've made the hole for the cyclone be less deep or something because it's heavier than air and it's, I don't think they had their finest scientists on the case.

I think they would like throw this can in there and make it so that nobody can cover it.

Greg Lukianoff: Trying to do it. Like the horrifying thing about it, like the more you study it is like how much they were trying to do it on the cheap was one of the major goals. 'cause apparently bullets were expensive.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it was wartime and it's just, oh, if this would've killed them faster.

And there's scratch marks on the wall, so that can't be it. And it's like rooms were stuffed with people and people's lungs were filtering out the poisons. You have to make these like really gross arguments to show why they're wrong. But the arguments are really stupid in the first place. And that's also, this is probably just mean, but when you hear these people talk, you go, even before they make an argument, you usually go, yeah, this isn't the finest [00:44:00] genetic specimen.

This is not the most intellectual kind of guy that I would take. The Uber man, this is not somebody where I would go, I'm gonna take this guy's word. This is an intellectually rigorous person. This is a weird fringe guy who, if he approached me on the road, I'd probably slink away and start running as soon as I increase the gap large enough.

And so if you have these people hiding on the internet, you're like, oh, this is well written and dah, dah, dah, dah. But no, I want them to be in front of a room full of people so I can go, ugh, along with half the room and then just walk out the back.

Greg Lukianoff: Jonathan Rauch makes this argument like, so Jonathan Rauch, he's a famous defender, freedom of speech, brilliant dude, friend of mine, but also gay and married to a man and like very early on was one of the, like the real sort of advocates for gay marriage before almost anyone else was saying it.

But he makes the point that, listen, the gay rights movement could have actually been stymied if there was say, I don't know, like hate speech codes going back to like the [00:45:00] 1960s that prevented people from saying, you know what they actually thought about homosexuality because they're like, we benefited from the fact that people could hear how.

Pittable and how bigoted our critics sounded. We're a numerical minority. We have to convince the majority to be on our side, and that's an uphill battle. And essentially, if you had this kind of forced silence, he doesn't think it would've happened. And it's one of these things. It's just really important that one of the key things about reality is trying to get a solid sense of what reality actually looks like.

And you have no chance of doing that whatsoever if you've scared the hell out of everyone from saying what they really think. And again, it's those troubling beliefs that are oftentimes the most important thing to know.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think that's a good argument. I should have brought this up earlier about the idea some people make that speech can lead to violence.

Hateful inflammatory speech that can incite real world violence. So it should be restricted to prevent such outcomes. And you, of course, incitement is actually illegal, correct? It

Greg Lukianoff: is, but it's a tough standard to meet. But in my response on the free press [00:46:00] to the Charlie Kirk assassination, that was my point is like, can we finally retire?

This whole argument that speech is violence or speech can be violence, which is very rhetorically popular on campuses over the last 15 years, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny outside of sort of an echo chamber. In an echo chamber, you could be like. Well, that was so offensive then. Your speech was so offensive that my speech is self-defense, and that may make you sound righteous and passionate, but then you're not thinking it through to be like, okay, so that means you can respond with violence to someone else's speech.

That means unquestionably they can respond to violence to you. It's still the same downward spiral that we're trying to protect the world against.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think it was either you or Sam Harris said something like, campuses are supposed to be safe physically, but very dangerous intellectually. That might even be like a Jonathan Hyde thing.

I don't know. What do you? Smart dudes said that, and I loved it and I wrote it down. It was very fun to do Sam Harris' show. I just, I really like that idea. But we've, of course we have lost the plot on that. I mean, safe physically, dangerous intellectually. Now it's actually inverted. It's actually just dangerous [00:47:00] intellectually and dangerous physically, now that I think about it.

What about the idea that speech should be limited to prevent disinformation in lies? You know, we talked about the Biden administration limiting or essentially pressuring social media companies to kick people off for COVID stuff. But I don't know, man. Look, devil's advocate, false, misleading statements are harmful, and we gotta restrict those to protect public health and elections and trust.

And I don't know. You know, you could make that case as long as nobody's fighting against me. It sounds good, right?

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. It's one of these things where the libertarians are very right on this, and I feel like otherwise intelligent people miss this fact that sounds almost trivial, but has to be remembered every single time.

Laws have to be enforced by people, and people are just as biased as you are, if not more, or maybe less. They're gonna have their own power interests, their own motivations, their own incentives, and you don't want to give power the ability to define what truth is. You don't want to make the president of the United States the arbiter of truth.[00:48:00]

So the way we actually have figured out how we can tell what the world actually looks like is first to accept the fact that truth is very hard to know. This goes entirely against our own senses and our own intuitions. We assume that what we see and what we assume is true, of course we do. There are assumptions, but one of the things that was powerful about the Enlightenment, I think Hari's characterization of the enlightenment is actually being a.

The discovery of our own ignorance is exactly the way we should talk about it, because it was more about being like, wow, if we start testing these things, we're wrong, we're wrong, wrong, wrong on so many of our most sacred assumptions, they just don't fit. Once you start actually applying a. Scientific method to it.

And I think that realization that truth is that hard to know is something that really people need to understand. So how to figure out what's true, at least provisionally. It's something I called structured friction where essentially scientific methods, part of it, peer review, which doesn't work well at all.

This point is part of it. But also things like checks [00:49:00] and balances in the US government or lots of forms of government things where you have actually separate entities with separate motivations challenging you and preferably poking holes in what we think is actually true. And I believe we don't have nearly enough of this right now.

I think that higher education is way too group thinky journalism is way too group thinky. Like we need actually to really commit to structures, not just Pinky Square, to be better. Structures that challenge what we think is true in the first place. But the last thing you want is power. Being in charge of deciding what is and is not true.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 'cause that's kind of 1984, right? That's just like the point of that book was largely that they can just decide what the press prints and if they decide that history needs to change, they just have to reprint all the newspapers or whatever. That was back in Reddit a while ago. But that and rats are scary.

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If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email usJordan@jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to service codes for you. It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Greg Lu Koff, what about the idea that free speech hurts marginalized groups?

So now another critique is a hey, free speech. It just entrenches inequality. It hurts vulnerable communities. If somebody has less social power and they're constantly subjected to slurs and harassment, and racism and stuff like that, doesn't unlimited speech, just deepen that imbalance.

Greg Lukianoff: It's one of those things where if you're talking about actual harassment like we've talked about [00:53:00] before, or things like things like true threats, can you ban that?

Yes, absolutely. But when it comes to what is the remedy for minorities, whether they're numerical or racial, just people who are not in the majority, when they are never going to get to the majority vote. And this is the way I explained what I think has happened. It was about 15 years ago, again, I started noticing younger people were coming to fire thinking that free speech is the argument of the three Bs, the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.

And I have to explain, that's just terrible history. Like the robber baron, as in like the merchant class, like the wealthy people, they do fine 'cause they're rich and powerful. They do fine in almost any society with some exceptions. And. So much of the story of parliaments is the nobility going to the merchant class to ask for money and then getting a say in government so that they do find they don't need some special protection for freedom of speech.

And when it comes to the bully and the bigot, once you get to democratic societies, they call the shots even if they are bullies [00:54:00] and bigots, if they have 51% of the vote or a plurality of the vote. If they have enough, you literally only need a special protection for free speech, like the First Amendment for two types of speech.

Speech that is unpopular with the majority or speech that is unpopular with, and I use this term just saying that people need to understand we have one everywhere. Everywhere does an elite or also known as the ruling class, like essentially like the people who are in charge of enforcing the laws, the most powerful people in society.

You only need it for those two scenarios. So why so many young people today think that this argument is compelling, that essentially the powerless need power to have more power in hopes that would actually better protect the powerless. It's because that's what they've been learning in K through PhD because it is a monoculture, it is a situation within that monoculture when people say to themselves, but I'm in charge of speech now.

And they very rarely say I'm power now, but that's what they are. They say this is limiting our power to better protect. [00:55:00] Minorities and the disadvantaged, but guess what? Even when they do this in higher ed, time and time again, it works to the interest of just like you'd expect it for the government to power and their own interests.

And I've been watching this for 25 years so that it's not an accident that John Lewis, Nelson Mandela, Maha Gandhi, Frederick Douglas, Ida B Wells, Martin Luther King, Frank Deiner in the gay rights movement, they were all such strong defenders of freedom of speech because they knew it was one of the only tools they had against the will of the majority and the will of the powerful.

Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of powerful, our robber barons or whatever you wanna call them, I guess our elite, they own a lot of places where discourse happens. Like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, whatever. What role should free speech principles play when it comes to private companies moderating content? Because their house, their rules.

Why should platforms be forced to host speech they don't want? But that's scary because not only, yes, it's a private company and you can't force 'em to do stuff, or you can if you're the Biden [00:56:00] administration or the Trump administration. But then also it's how everyone talks. So is it really, yes, it's a private company, but it's also public square.

I don't know, it's just this weird gray area for me in certain ways.

Greg Lukianoff: I get it. And I understand the instinct, and we talked a lot about it, like what happens if one billionaire owns the public square? And that was a concern I took seriously, because you wanna avoid outright plutocracy that essentially like rich people get to control or a rich person gets to control everything.

But this was proven to not be true. So people were making this argument, particularly on the right, but also some people on the left were making this argument with regards to Twitter and Facebook, that essentially we have to pass laws that will limit the owner's of these social media platform's, ability to kick people off for speech that would be protected.

That's what the right was primarily arguing in Texas and Florida. But in California, they were arguing that now these platforms have to police hate speech or heavily implied that they have to police hate speech [00:57:00] because they have to report it to the government. That means they have to police it even if they don't want to.

And those are laws that fire flat out opposes because it introduces Power's role in deciding what these institutions will do, rather than letting the free market decide, for example. But there was some real pushback on this saying like, oh my God, but look like a handful of people own like the entire public square.

And almost no sooner had this argument been made that Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter. Elon Musk buys Twitter, and then everybody runs to Blue Sky. They run to Threads, which is still a thing. Believe it or not, they won't run to Mastodon. They, and it's proven that this is not a monopoly pretty fast.

They run Substack, which I love, Substack. I have a Substack. And that essentially it's that competition, that ability to move that actually best protects it. But as soon as you introduce Power's role, the government's role to be like, I now have a regulation that I could hold over all these guys. Prepare for it to be [00:58:00] abused, and particularly under the current circumstance where it doesn't seem like there's anything holding back the government from utilizing every lever of power it has over every institution it affects.

That's a scary possibility.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no, I, I definitely agree there. But another counter argument to free speech is that this is the digital age you got cancel culture. Yeah. There's deep fakes, viral nature of online outrage and how a, a lot of people are arguing, Hey, free speech. This is a pretty outdated principle, man.

We're a long way from somebody printing up something off a printing press and handing it out in the middle of the village or downtown New York or something like that. I mean, come on. So how do you convince skeptics that old principles of free speech are still relevant in the digital age?

Greg Lukianoff: If you have an entirely new technology that is not very analogous to anyone that's previously listed, then you have to do some real thinking.

But even as we're thinking through ai, like the analogies for the most part are very similar to preexisting technology. And of course some of those analogies are with pretty [00:59:00] recent technology, like for example, the internet and some of the those First Amendment principles, they're perfectly portable to a variety of different settings.

So for example, a very basic one is viewpoint discrimination. And that means that as bad as censorship is, like if you're saying on this platform, nobody should talk about economics. That's. Not great, but if you actually say on this platform, nobody can advocate anything, but I don't know, free market economics or for that matter, or the other side, Marxist economics.

That's something where you'd feel more troubled by it. And that essentially it goes for the principle that if you're allowing discussion at all, you can't simply ban people because of their opinion. So I think a lot of the principles that exist out there also, this is where I actually call for more policing of social media.

I think social media companies unwillingness to enforce prohibitions on true threats has undermined a lot of young people's faith and free speech in the first place, and falsely cause them to [01:00:00] conclude in many cases that threats are protected. That's bad, that essentially like saying like, I know where you live.

I'm gonna come to this address, I'm gonna kill you. That's a threat that would place a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death. But by not actually reporting those to the police or the police actually looking into them, you create this misimpression that it's, oh, if this is what free speech is, I don't want it.

And then you have to explain, it's not protected. There's not a country in the world where threats like that are actually protected, nor should it be.

Jordan Harbinger: You're not wrong. Not that I was ever under the impression that threats were protected, but I get threats. I get people saying, if I ever see you, I'm gonna punch you in the back of the head or hit you with a rock and kill you and no one's gonna find out.

And it's on Instagram and I'll report that. And then four months later they're like, we found that this content does not violate our policies. And I'm like, so this was not automated because it wouldn't have taken four months. So some human ostensibly looked at this and thought, that's fine. You can say that you're gonna hit Jordan Harbinger in the back of the head with a rock and kill him, whatever.

They just don't care.

Greg Lukianoff: I don't know. I have a dear friend who's [01:01:00] actually facing some real scary threats. And it was funny because she was basically saying we shouldn't have cancel culture in response to Charlie Kirk. And weirdly, like a left winger came after her relative that and really was saying things specifically about knowing where you live and all this kind of stuff.

And it, it's okay. But at least in this case, the police were taking it seriously.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I didn't report it to the police. I should have because it was from a guy who owns a boxing gym in Chicago and I'm like, everyone can find you. You just don't have any fear about, and it was like some Israel Palestine thing.

It was just like actually crazy. I should probably go ahead and do something about that. But it sort of just blended in with the other death threats I was getting. So I don't know. It didn't stand out that much.

Greg Lukianoff: I've gotten a fair amount of them, um, over the years. And the light of the murder of Charlie Kirk makes feel that much more worried about not taking 'em seriously.

Jordan Harbinger: You're absolutely right. If we start eroding free speech, even with the best intentions, what do you think the long-term consequences will be? Not just for politics, but for everyday people? 'cause a lot of people are like, I checked out of this political crap. I don't care anymore. Those people should still care,

Greg Lukianoff: right?

Yeah. And here's the thing that [01:02:00] everyone needs to understand. There is not a moment in censorship history where the censor or the advocates for this didn't think they were doing something very good. Oftentimes they thought they were doing something blessed. They thought they were doing something that would save the species, save humanity, save your soul.

The most dangerous censors, frankly, are the ones who believe they're saving the world or saving the country. So they always think they're motivated by goodness. Good intentions can't protect you because if you're the kind of person who looked at the history of censorship and said, that all sounds fine to me, then I don't really know what to tell you except that actually I do know what to tell you, it's going to be worse.

Because when you look back to like say, red scare number one, or Censorship, the Civil War or the great comic book scare a real thing of the 1950s, they didn't have the technology. To censor you at the scale that we have now and to punish you for speech that we have now. So we need to be even more protective of freedom of speech going into the future.

Jordan Harbinger: On a personal note though, what gives you hope that free speech will survive [01:03:00] this current wave of skepticism? Because I think depending on how old you are, this seems pretty serious. What's going on right now?

Greg Lukianoff: It is very serious. And the reason why it's so serious is that there used to be able to rely on the civil libertarian aspect of the left, which is the tradition I come from, and a libertarian aspect on the right, which is probably the thing on the right that I've always related the most to.

And both of those factors have been badly marginalized on each side. So like the civil libertarian left is very weak, and the libertarian right has been pushed aside largely by populism, which sear at libertarianism. So the political climate, there isn't a clear constituency for free speech other than older people in the middle who get freedom of speech.

So it's a very worrisome time and it's the kind of thing that once you lose it, it's very hard to get it back. Why do I still have some hope though, is one, when you look at the polling, Americans still really value freedom of speech and I think they could be convinced to do it again, but also because free speech works.

Free [01:04:00] speech is how you know what problems you have in your society, what problems you have in your community, what problems that are coming your way. Free speech is how you innovate. It's how you actually make money, how you actually know things scientifically. It is huge advantages to have a, for that matter, even just having a company that internally allows freedom of speech and dissent.

Huge advantage. And the research, by the way, is getting better on the role of dissent, not worse, dissent in a cockpit, in the operating room. All of these things actually help improve things. So I'm optimistic that free speech is effective in addition to being morally right. So that's one of the things that gives me hope.

Do I however, think we're currently in a crisis, and I think we're in a crisis, not just in the United States, but in the larger world we are, and this is why I think Fire and I were put on this earth is to defend freedom of speech even in the dark times.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned that it's a problem in the United States.

Tell us, can we do like a few minutes on why it's a problem internationally? 'cause I think a lot of people do view this [01:05:00] as an American problem that they don't have to worry about 'cause they live in Europe or they live in Asia or they live in Australia, whatever it is.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh you, you poor diluted Brits. Like how much they think everything's fine there.

I'm just kinda like, you gotta be kidding me dude. I did something on the BBC where they got really mad at me. 'cause yeah, we've got issues in the United States, we've got serious issues in the United States. You're arresting like 12,000 people a year for speech. That's insane. And you're a fraction of our size.

They did a whole piece on like trying to get a sense of scale so you're never getting invited back to the BBC. Oh yeah, they love me. My mom's British actually. No, they wanna invite me back. 'cause I think, what do you think now, Mr. Ov? It's even worse now.

Jordan Harbinger: Scoreboard ov

Greg Lukianoff: it got worse since last time I talked to you.

But still the scale's not good on your side. But let's take the unfree world first. China, Iran in particular, they have been able to really take the nightmarish potential of AI and use it against its own citizenry in a way that actually makes a situation from worse to worse or worse, or worser in [01:06:00] Iran and China, like the extent to which it allows for mass surveillance.

Some of the examples is they can turn off your car remotely if you're a woman in Iran driving and your hijab is not done quite right.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that.

Greg Lukianoff: Terrifying. And of course, Russia's a mafia state and they don't allow free speech at all. They'll shoot you for it. But the European Union is terrible on free speech.

And it's also the place where innovation goes to die at this point. But they have everything from national security laws to hate speech laws that they enforce in ridiculous ways. They have this idea of the right to be forgotten. That means that if I did some pretty terrible five years ago, like I can have that link explaining that I was guilty of domestic abuse removed from Google, essentially, or at least delisted.

The kind of thing that Americans, when they come back from a date take for granted, you can find out, Hey, I really like this guy, but

Jordan Harbinger: oh look, he's a sex offender. Oh, he just got outta prison. That explains the resume gap, right? That kind of thing.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, exactly. But five years he seemed to be doing nothing.

But in Britain and the Anglosphere, I mean like Ireland nearly passed a law that would [01:07:00] punish hate speech. Canada was considering just last year a law that would actually give you life in prison for a speech crime. And to give you a sense of like how bad 12,000 people a year are in Britain. Back in 1920, we had the first red scare in the United States.

Fred Scare, by the way, was the result of a massive bombing campaign by Marxists and anarchists and like really scary times in the United States in 1919 as the mass murders were going on during the Bulwark Revolution. So people had some reason to be freaked out. We arrested about 2000 people a year during the Red Scare, and that's bad, by the way.

That is actually really quite bad. Even though we were in a genuine crisis, and even though the First Amendment didn't really apply in any meaningful way, way back then, it only about 1925 that it really had a lot of legal meaning. And also at the time, by the way, the population of the US was twice what Britain's is now.

That's like more like they're arresting 12,000 people a year, and that doesn't even include the stuff that [01:08:00] involves the national security laws they have or the noncrime hate offenses, which number in the hundreds of thousands overall. So it, it's a genuine disaster over there. But Brit after Britt's kinda like, oh, it's not too bad.

And I'm like, I'm willing to bet you are no more than one or two degrees of separation from someone who has had a visit from the police or run in for something that they've said noncrime hate incidents. That is, that if you say something that is considered hateful, you will get a visit from the police to take down that you did this, or it could be actually considered something that could get you arrested.

One example of this was Rishi Sunna was being criticized by fellow East Asians. I, it was a Pakistani Brit who had a poster of saying, Sunna is a coconut. By which they mean brown on the outside and white on the inside. Oh. Insulting. Yeah, sure. It was intended to be insulting and she was arrested for that.

And it's like the kind of stuff that we're like, no, this is completely insane. And [01:09:00] yeah, it's not hard to find videos of this stuff all over the internet. People actually taping, like why they got arrested. And of course the Grand Linehan thing that happened when this guy, he got arrested at the airport with five armed guards showing up because he, he made some mean-spirited jokes about trans men in female spaces.

Is that a comedian? I don't even know who this person is. Oh, he's the guy who wrote the IT crowd, which was pretty well known. He did Father Ted, which was pretty well known. He was one of the best known comedy writers in Britain.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow. The going after the comedian thing. 'cause that's one of those, I don't know if it's a sacred space, but it certainly is a space where we have decided that you can say crazy stuff and get away with it for the sake of humor, speaking truth to power, social commentary.

It's almost like the first line of, maybe not defense, but it's certainly a canary in the coal mine. When you see somebody like Jimmy Kimmel. Or whoever. Honestly, getting pushed off the air as a podcaster, it's like, again, I'm not as relevant as Jimmy Kimmel and I never will be, but it's a little bit scary that that's even a thing that can happen.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, that was something that, [01:10:00] we even did a documentary back in 2015 called, can we Take a joke Telling young people about the story of Lenny Bruce. You know, as a comedian who was arrested for rude jokes back in the 1960s, he died of an overdose. But one of the things that drove him into drug addiction was the fact that he had to defend himself so often, and it's a very sad story.

And we started noticing that comedians were, uh, saying that the atmosphere was not so friendly to free speech, particularly on campus. We started being told this by comedians way back in 20 12, 20 13.

Jordan Harbinger: Greg Luciano, thank you for coming on, man. What are you now on tour? What are you doing now?

Greg Lukianoff: I am incredibly excited to be at home for a whole week.

Been promoting the book on a lot of podcasts and running around like a crazy person, trying to defend free speech from all comers.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, I appreciate you coming on the show, man. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Excellent. It was fun talking to you. Thank you. Likewise. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about the warning signs for Civil War.

JHS Clip: There were times when I was [01:11:00] writing that I myself started to get terrified. Is this right? Am I getting this right? Because what I'm saying is going to hit people hard. There have been hundreds of studies of civil wars. The group that tends to start these wars are the one dominant groups that are in decline.

The group that has been politically, socially, economically dominant since the very beginning of this country. White Christian males, for the most part, America is going through this radical demographic transition. From a white majority country to a white minority country, white working class men have declined on most social and economic measures.

That hasn't happened with any other demographic group, and there's a subset of this population that's deeply resentful of that, that's deeply threatened by that and truly, truly believe that it's their patriotic duty to do something about This. January 6th was so [01:12:00] public, it was so obvious. This is part of a far right white supremacist, non-federal government movement here in the United States.

We know that some of the far right militias, the Oath keepers, the proud boys, and the three percenters actively encouraged members to join the military, to join law enforcement. If you continuously portray this as these are just crazy individuals, then you remain blind to what's actually the cancer that's growing slowly from within.

Jordan Harbinger: To hear whether we are on the cusp of a civil war here in the United States. Check out episode 718 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks to Greg for coming on all things. Greg Luciano will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter wee bit wiser. I'd love to see you there. You guys [01:13:00] love hitting reply on these. I love writing them. They're very specific and practical. They'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes.

If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It really is a good companion to the show, a great one in fact. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn in this show. It's created an association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

If you know somebody who's interested in free speech, interested in cancel culture, definitely share this episode with 'em. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.