<<This is transcribed by AI. I’m sorry I did not have time to edit it!>>

What is happening? Welcome to another episode of Speakeasy English, the number one podcast on the entire internet. If you only ask my grandma. Okay. Welcome back and thank you for joining me. As you know, this podcast is designed to give English learners content that you can listen to in order to improve your fluency and your level of comfort with the language. The more you listen, the more you give your brain the ability to acquire English. Now remember, the habit of active listening every single day is the only thing that you will ever need to do to become fluent in English. Of course, there are other activities that you can do which will speed up this process, and I talk about those tips and tactics in the first ten episodes. So if you have not already, go back and listen to the first ten episodes. But if you don’t have time, just know that active listening is the only thing you need to do. The only thing that you absolutely need to do in order to acquire English naturally and automatically, without ever studying any grammar. Okay, so today, uh, as usual, I do not have any script. I just have a feeling that I want to talk to you about free speech and some of the differences between truth and fiction. That is, between truth and lies. So I guess let’s start with free speech. Why am I thinking about free speech? Well, first, what is free speech? So here in the United States, you have a constitutional right. That means you have a legal right to free speech, meaning you can say whatever you want. You can say and write and publish whatever you want, as long as what you are saying or publishing is not infringing. That means hurting or limiting someone else’s rights. So, for example, I am allowed to say that I do not support Donald Trump for president. I am allowed to criticize Joe Biden and say, I think he did a bad job securing the American border, and I can say all of these things without any fear that I’m going to get in trouble. I have the legal right to express my opinion. Now. There are limits to free speech. For example, I cannot go to a movie theater or a crowded room and scream fire like scream that there is a fire and everyone would try to run all at the same time to escape, and people could get hurt. People very likely would get seriously hurt if I did that. Well, that’s the limit of free speech. I cannot say things that are going to physically hurt or threaten other people. Unfortunately, in the last two elections in the United States, there has been a lot of fake information, what we call disinformation, which is false information or misinformation, which is misleading information. So maybe the core facts are sort of true, but the information is presented in a way that is false. That would be misinformation, whereas disinformation is just false. So unfortunately, we have been forced to start thinking very closely about this, because when you have lots and lots of disinformation and misinformation, that is false and misleading information. Being published, and you also have social media making it very easy to spread these lies. You start having to ask yourself where exactly is the limit? When should speech be restricted? If I am lying? And for example, saying that a common medication is killing people and it causes people that need that medication to stop taking it and then they die. Well, I just hurt somebody by telling lies on social media. So do I have the right to publish fake and false information on social media concerning medicine or health? That’s a good question. Now, what about politics? What if information is being published? That is completely false about one candidate or the other? Does the social media company have an obligation to remove that content, or should all content be permitted? Should all content be allowed, even if it is false or misleading, or designed to fool people, designed to trick people into believing things that are not true, and perhaps to coerce that means to influence, to to change people’s behavior. Should that be allowed? Furthermore, what if other countries are the ones promoting this political disinformation? So what if one of our adversaries, one of the countries that we do not get along with? What if they start pretending to be Americans, posting content on social media that is false and designed to divide our country? Should that be removed, or should that be permitted in the name of free speech? I don’t know the answers, and I know this is a very nuanced and complex. Thing to discuss. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about it and asking myself, what do I think? And to be honest, I still don’t have a firm opinion on where I would draw the line, where I would make limits. But I do believe that if you look at some extreme examples. So we could create an extreme hypothetical situation to help illustrate that means to help show that some limits probably should exist. So for example, if you are an American, should you be allowed to use social media to organize a coup, that means to organize the overthrowing of the American government? Should I be able to use a Facebook group to recruit and organize an insurrection that is a coup against the government here? Well, obviously not right. I mean, of course there must be limits on my free speech in that case. Okay. So all of these thoughts and thought experiments, that is these hypothetical situations that I think of to test my beliefs and to try and find out what exactly my opinions and beliefs even are. All of these things have driven me to become more interested in ideas around free speech and truth and lies. So recently I listened to a podcast by Sam Harris. If you don’t know Sam Harris, by the way, you should definitely listen to him now. You will need a pretty high level of English comprehension, or you can get the transcripts and translate them into your native language. But he is very smart and very thought provoking, and I absolutely love his podcasts and his, uh, his blog. So I was listening to an episode where Sam Harris interviews Yuval Noah Harari. You might recognize that name. He is the author. That means he wrote the book sapiens. That is a history of how Homo sapiens humans, how we became dominant on Earth and our evolution. It is extremely interesting. I was very impressed when I read that book, because he was able to take a subject that is generally pretty boring, and he created a story that is interesting and compelling, and he just did a really good job with that. So if you have not read sapiens, I definitely recommend it. Anyway, apparently he wrote another book recently called Nexus that is about information, and he and Sam discuss a lot of things concerning information and how it is used and manipulated, etc. but one of the pieces of that podcast that I found particularly interesting. Was when he discussed the difference between truth and fiction, that is, between truth and lies in a way that I had never thought about previously. Let’s start by talking about the common belief that the world is a marketplace of ideas, and all information should be in the conversation. We should discuss all information, and the best information will naturally win. It will naturally come to the surface. That’s a metaphor, but it will naturally defeat all of the information that is less true. And another common expression to describe this is that, quote, sunlight is the best disinfectant, unquote. That means, literally that the sun, the sunlight kills germs. It kills, uh, bacteria and germs and cleans things. And so people use that expression to say that more information is always better. The more information we have, the more sunlight we have, the more likely we are to reach the truth. I myself have used that expression and believed that concept for most of my life, and so it was interesting to listen to Yuval describe some of the differences between truth and fiction, and to put it in a way that I had never thought about before. So he says that you can think of information like you think of food. More food is not better. You can eat and eat and eat junk food and it is very bad for you. And so instead you should think of information like a diet, like like how we choose the food items that we are going to eat in order to be healthy. And he says it is very important to choose an information diet that is healthy. I said, okay, well, that seems interesting. I’m not sure if I believe that, but it at least seemed interesting. I had never thought of information that way, so I kept listening and he went on to describe some of the differences. I guess I would say some of the structural, um, natural differences between truth and fiction. And so, for example, looking at truth, he said, the truth is very expensive to actually find. It is very hard. It takes time and money and effort to discover the truth. I’m forgetting the exact details, but he gives the example of a historian or a researcher trying to describe the truth. Of an ancient culture. So let’s say ancient Rome, for example, the Romans. So that researcher probably needs to learn Latin, learn the language and study for many, many years to learn everything he or she can about the background, everything we think we know, and then to learn something new and true, they probably need to participate in archaeology that is digging up new artifacts, ancient artifacts. And if they find something written, let’s say some piece of written information. And even if they can read Latin and they can read the information, even then that information might just be someone’s opinion from that time. Or let’s say it is a statement or a declaration by the government of Rome. Even then, we don’t know if that is true because it could just be propaganda. It could just be a lie. The government was telling to the citizens. At that time. So there would need to be even more research and archaeology and investigation to determine the truth of that tiny little piece of information that they found buried in the ground. And that is just one example. But that really stuck out to me. I had never thought about that. The truth is difficult and expensive and time consuming and labor intensive to discover. Well, what about fiction? Well, fiction is easy. You can say whatever you want and it is cheap and it is fast, and it hardly takes any effort at all. So the truth is very expensive and difficult to find. Whereas lies are cheap and fast and easy. I had never thought of it that way before. So the second point was that the truth is messy. It is complex, it is nuanced. It is not black and white most of the time. I mean, look at any war or regional conflict. Yes, occasionally there is a clear bad guy and clear good guys, but in most conflict it is much more complex than that. There are hundreds or thousands of factors involved, and they are all overlapping and difficult to separate and understand, and certainly almost impossible to draw a clear black and white truth about who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, right? That’s the truth. It is messy and complex. Well, what about fiction? What about lies? Lies are simple. Lies and fiction are simple and black and white and easy to understand and very compelling. The fact that they are so black and white, so obvious and so simple and so easy to understand. It makes them extremely powerful because our brains are a little bit lazy. We prefer to believe things that are simple and easy to believe. It’s much harder for us to accept the fact that people that we think are bad might not actually be bad, right? That’s difficult for us to accept. That’s very nuanced and complex. It is much easier for us to believe that the other guy, the other team, the other country, that they are just bad and we are just good, right? That’s easy to believe. It’s so simple. The fact of the matter is that it is much easier for the public to believe a simple lie than a complex truth. And so when you look at information, this way that lies are cheap. And effortless and easy. And in addition, they are compelling, uh, easy to understand and simple versus the truth, which is labor intensive, very expensive. And then on top of that, it is messy. It is complex. It’s not black and white, and it’s not nearly as easy to understand or as compelling as lies. Well, when you look at it that way, the lies have a huge advantage. Lies are going to win against the truth. So the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant and that somehow, naturally, the truth will be able to defeat all of these lies, well, that might not actually be true. And when you think about these differences between the truth and fiction, and you think about it in terms of a information diet, well, when you look at Twitter, now known as X. And someone like Elon Musk that is a free speech absolutist. That means he says, all speech, all information should be published. Okay, well, when that happens, what do you have? You have a diet that is made up of 90% junk food. It’s made up of 90, I don’t know, 95, 98% fiction and misinformation and disinformation, simply because that stuff is easier to post. It’s easier to create. It’s cheaper and faster. And on top of that, it’s more compelling. It drives a reaction. People believe it or people hate it, but it drives engagement, which then the social media companies use engagement to boost that content. So the content that is getting boosted. The content that is showing up on your social media feed is highly likely to be misleading or completely false. And on top of that, 90 plus percent of the information being created is fiction simply because it’s cheap and easy and compelling. Anyway, this has all been really interesting for me personally to think about and to analyze my own opinions and my own beliefs. I do not have a solution. I don’t know where we should draw the line, where we should start limiting speech and information, because limiting speech and suppressing information is very dangerous, but at the same time allowing all speech, including lies and disinformation. Seems like it could also be dangerous, both for individuals personally and for entire cultures and countries and governments and the stability of the international order. So I don’t know. I don’t know how to manage it, but we are definitely entering into an age where we will have to grapple with this. That means we will have to address the problem. We will have to figure something out in order to prevent the public from becoming completely detached from reality, believing and reading and bingeing on a diet of false information instead of prioritizing information that we know to be true. Okay. Thank you so much for staying with me during this entire episode. If you appreciate the work I am doing here, please leave a five star review that will help me so much to reach other English learners just like you. And as always, feel free to check out the free transcripts on Speak Easy English Club and send me an email. My email is Brandon at Speakeasy English Dot club. Don’t forget to listen to this episode multiple times as that is the key to natural language learning. Spaced repetition is everything you need to do. So listen to this episode today and maybe again tomorrow morning. And repeating with this sort of spaced repetition is the key that’s going to make you fluent. All right, until next time. Cheers.