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