In this episode, Gadsad interviews the co-author of the new book, "The Future of Free Speech," Jeff Kasseff, about the future of freedom of speech in the 21st century. They discuss the role of technology and AI in shaping our understanding of the world, and the role that technology plays in shaping the way in which we think about free speech.
00:02:58.180Well, so to understand it, I think it's helpful to look at what happened in the 20th century,
00:03:02.300especially toward the latter part of the 20th century, where we had really an expansion
00:03:09.400of free speech. We had governments recognizing the potential for protecting freedom of expression
00:03:15.320and resisting authoritarian urges. And we also had really the emergence of the modern commercial
00:03:23.160internet really posing this great potential for speech. So we had governments really embracing it
00:03:29.420during the end of the 20th century. And then what we started to see in this century has been
00:03:37.660governments becoming nervous that people might have too much power and that the harms might be
00:03:45.040too great, whether it's hate speech or whatever they would term as misinformation. And now we're
00:03:52.020even seeing it with concerns about AI. And I think that the people in power felt like they were
00:03:58.940losing control because of this expansive free speech. And that's really driving so much of
00:04:06.960what you see in terms of proposals, and unfortunately, laws, regulations, and court rulings that really
00:04:13.500crack down on people's ability to freely speak without government intervention.
00:04:19.180Do you feel that, and this is something that I actually addressed in some of my own writings,
00:04:24.000do you feel that the default reflex or default penchant, you know, within the architecture of
00:04:30.880the human mind is actually to not permit for, you know, unfettered free speech if I'm in power.
00:04:38.620And it really is a bleep in history that you actually have the, you know, institutional
00:04:45.220mechanisms and the associated values that have allowed free speech to flourish. And if that's,
00:04:51.160if what I'm saying is true, then in a sense, your book could be one that could be rewritten
00:04:57.880every 10, 20, 100 years, because we always return to the default value, which is when I'm in power,
00:05:05.360I want to control what you can say. I think that's exactly right. And there are some
00:05:10.440exceptions where people in power do really stand up for free speech. But in general,
00:05:15.500once you have the power, it's very tempting to say, well, I want to control criticism
00:05:21.700of my government. And this goes even beyond just political power companies as well. Corporate
00:05:30.460executives also don't like it when they're criticized. I think you're exactly right. It is
00:05:35.240a very natural reaction to want to suppress criticism. And unfortunately, when people are
00:05:45.500in power, they can use the force of law, the force of the police, of the court system to really make
00:05:53.740it difficult, if not impossible, to speak out against those in power. So I fully agree. Now,
00:06:00.620in my own writings, I've argued that the reason why there is constantly an attack on freedom of
00:06:07.780speech, certainly within the Western tradition, is because you, the ruler, you're conflating
00:06:16.280the distinction between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. And so deontological
00:06:22.260ethics would be absolute principles, inviolable principles. Presumption of innocence should be
00:06:28.460a deontological principle. Freedom of speech should be a deontological principle. Freedom of
00:06:33.080of inquiry should be a deontological principle. A consequentialist ethic would be, it's okay to
00:06:39.300lie if you're trying to spare someone's feeling. And so I think that not all, but some of the
00:06:47.120attacks on freedom of speech in the West do not necessarily come from a sinister,
00:06:53.460nefarious purpose, but it's because we are the benevolent and kind, empathetic overlords who
00:07:00.100need to, you know, hold back some speech for some valid, consequentialist, empathetic reasons. So,
00:07:09.100for example, don't do research that demonstrates that one particular religious group is less
00:07:15.220likely to assimilate in Western countries than another, because that's just mean. This is what
00:07:19.900I call epistemological empathy. So, do you at all distinguish, and even if you don't, maybe we can
00:07:27.020talk about it there is the nefarious sinister you know squashing of speech and then there's
00:07:33.520the empathetic benevolent plate platos lie type of squashing of does that matter to you that
00:07:40.040distinction or all squashing is bad so i come from the first principle that all squashing is bad and
00:07:49.080i i fully agree that there are different motivations and some might i might agree with
00:07:55.520the reasons behind some of the motivations, but I still think that giving into that impulse
00:08:03.320is wrong. I'll give you one example that is from about five years ago. I wrote about it in my last
00:08:09.140book. This was proposed by a few Democratic senators in Congress in the United States when
00:08:18.280they were very concerned about what they viewed as COVID misinformation. And so they proposed
00:08:24.460a bill that would have essentially created greater liability under a law that I've written
00:08:31.980about called Section 230 for platforms, online platforms, social media that transmit health
00:08:40.080misinformation. And so it would basically become more costly. They could be sued more easily if
00:08:46.200they algorithmically promote health misinformation. And you look in the bill and you think, huh,
00:08:50.460what is health misinformation? And you read the definition and it says that
00:08:56.940health misinformation is determined by guidance that is issued by the Health and Human Services
00:09:03.860Secretary. And I don't know exactly what the logic was for the senators who proposed this at the
00:09:12.720time, but this was in 2021. And I think perhaps they were thinking, well, the person who's
00:09:19.240currently the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I agree with. So I want him to be
00:09:26.400defining what is forbidden speech on the internet about health. And I spoke out very strongly
00:09:33.880against this for a variety of reasons. But one of the things I said is, you know,
00:09:38.900you're not always going to be in power forever. And there might be someone in that office who
00:09:44.440you disagree with at some point. And I think that that's the sort of short-sighted approach
00:09:52.440that they take thinking, well, we're going to control things forever. No, when you tear down
00:09:58.240safeguards for freedom of speech, it's very hard to put them back up. And I think that's too often
00:10:05.900lost on politicians. So I think that they, even when you're having that consequentialist
00:10:13.620impulse. I think sometimes you're looking at the really short-term consequences and not the
00:10:20.000long-term consequences of what happens when you remove these safeguards for free speech.
00:10:25.820Indeed. And actually, I'm glad that you mentioned health quote misinformation,
00:10:30.160because I have a whole section in my, so my forthcoming book is called Suicidal Empathy,
00:10:35.440Dying to be Kind. And I have a whole chapter on forbidden knowledge and settled science and all
00:10:42.580this kind of stuff. And to hammer the point that what is one man's misinformation turns out to be
00:10:50.360another man's Nobel Prize, most Nobel Prizes at some point would be considered by the orthodoxy
00:10:59.740as misinformation. And I mean, that's not hyperbolic. That is literally true, right?
00:11:06.400So it just absolutely befuddles me when I see my colleagues, as I mentioned to you offline, that I've been a very outspoken professor for many decades now against all this nonsense.
00:11:19.660Most of my colleagues who you would think would certainly be on board with me completely swim into the warm waters of the consequentialist pool.
00:11:30.540so then my next question my next question to you would be is it just in the genetic makeup
00:11:37.000of different persons that some of us really can see the value of the deontological principle of
00:11:45.120freedom of speech whereas most people don't have the personhood to do so or is this something that
00:11:50.420you could train the consequentialist to come to the to the warm waters of deontological thinking
00:11:57.640what do you think of all this so i've been trying to do that training for a while and it's not
00:12:03.920worked all that well so perhaps i'm just not doing it right and i or it's genetic or it's genetic and
00:12:10.720you can't really change people's thinking when it comes to this issue yeah and i i'm not going to
00:12:16.760say why people take that approach and again they might i i think many of them don't have any
00:12:23.700nefarious motives. They just think, you know, this speech is so bad that we have to do something.
00:12:32.200And this is actually how I got the title for my previous book, Liar in a Crowded Theater,
00:12:40.460because that book is about why the First Amendment protects most false speech and what the different
00:12:47.240rationales are for false speech being protected in the United States. And the reason I titled it
00:12:52.880liar in a crowded theater was, I actually came to that title pretty late in the writing process
00:12:58.660because as I read all of the court documents in these cases where the government or litigants
00:13:06.440were trying to punish or suppress what they viewed as false speech, Hyman, again, the
00:13:13.500justification by the censor was, well, just as you can't yell fire in a crowded theater,
00:13:18.900you also can't say X, Y, or Z, when in fact, you usually could say X, Y, or Z. And fire in a
00:13:28.260crowded theater really became a proxy for, well, yeah, we have free speech, but there are some
00:13:36.580things that are really bad that we've got to be able to suppress. And free speech has limits. And
00:13:43.560Even in the United States, which really has extraordinary protections for freedom of speech, it's true that the First Amendment is not absolute. That's not a controversial topic. You can't go to court and perjure yourself. If you do that, you can face punishment.
00:14:03.300If you commit fraud, you could face penalties.
00:14:07.220But those are narrowly defined, very carefully defined exceptions.
00:14:11.900And fire in a crowded theater became sort of this placeholder, this wild card for, well, if speech is bad enough, then the government should be able to suppress it.
00:14:25.000And that's exactly what the Supreme Court has said is not the case.
00:14:28.300The Supreme Court has very strongly said we don't have an ad hoc balancing test.
00:14:33.300for freedom of speech and that, yes, we have some narrowly defined exceptions, but that's exactly
00:14:40.020what they are, exceptions. And other democracies say that. I'm more skeptical of whether that's
00:14:50.560the case. So for this book, Jacob really has a lot of experience. He's from Denmark. And so he
00:14:59.580has a lot of experience with the European system. And most of my work has primarily focused on
00:15:03.920American First Amendment law. So it really was eye-opening for me to learn from Jacob about
00:15:11.020how, yeah, the United States is actually pretty rare in its protections for freedom of speech,
00:15:18.660even among Western democracies. Well, even never mind Europe, I'm Canadian.
00:15:24.280and Canada is of course much closer to the European model than it would be to the American
00:15:30.140model. So I'm sure you've thought about this. I wonder if you have sort of a definitive answer.
00:15:36.200What is unique about the American, whether it be the American ethos or the American experience or
00:15:43.100the American spirit that allowed them to have that extra guardrail called the First Amendment
00:15:49.560that so many other countries, many of which were the founders, right, sort of the British,
00:15:54.720we can turn to them as some of the originators of many of these ideas of individual dignity and so
00:16:01.340on. What is unique about America that it came up with the First Amendment and that hasn't been
00:16:06.920followed in the rest of the Western tradition? Well, what's really unique has been the judicial
00:16:13.000interpretation of the First Amendment. We could have had a very different First Amendment outcome
00:16:19.360in the United States had the Supreme Court not taken this very strong exceptionalist approach
00:16:27.340to freedom of speech. So, I mean, the First Amendment is more strongly worded than some
00:16:32.340of the foundational speech protections in other jurisdictions, including Europe. But
00:16:38.600courts can still read in very broad exceptions and loopholes and balancing tests and so forth.
00:16:46.360And the United States Supreme Court has really resisted that. There have been temptations and there have been some cases that have been better than others. In our book, we actually go through four cases of really hateful speech that the Supreme Court has protected the speakers.
00:17:10.060And it's challenging because the speech is really vile. It is racist or anti-Semitic, anti-military. Really, there's not much redeeming value just from a normative sense.
00:17:29.500But the Supreme Court has said, we're going to take these neutral principles and apply them even to the most difficult cases.
00:17:41.460And I think that that's really the court's willingness to continue to do that is probably the top reason why the American system has greater protections.
00:17:56.940Now, that can always change. We can have a few shifts on the Supreme Court and a case with really bad facts. And that could lead to a radically different interpretation of the First Amendment. And that's something that people like me really worry about all the time.
00:18:16.600But I think at least for now, that's what we have.
00:18:20.080I think the second reason why America has such strong speech protections, and this really applies to the Internet, is a law that I wrote my first book about, which is called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in 1996.
00:18:34.920And what it basically says is that, absent a few exceptions, online platforms are not legally responsible in civil actions for the speech of their users.
00:18:48.400It was not noticed when it was passed, in part because it was 1996, but what that did is it created this ecosystem in the United States for platforms to build their business models around user-generated content rather than content that the platform has created.
00:19:06.520And you think, OK, well, what did that really do? Well, that made it so that everyday users, consumers, individuals could speak their mind and the platform would allow them to do that because it's not worried about being obliterated in court.
00:19:27.420So which section 230 says they're not responsible to to curate the stuff, right?
00:19:35.440Well, it says what Section 230 says is that platforms are not legally responsible if they either moderate or don't moderate the content.
00:19:45.620So they could make the choice if there's some particularly objectionable content, the platform could say, I'm going to leave it up, even if someone's complaining, even if it's defamatory.
00:19:56.820Even if someone says this is about me and it's false, the platform can keep it up or it could take it down.
00:20:01.880And either way, the platform is not going to face legal responsibility for that content.
00:20:10.080Now, there are a few exceptions, but it's a very strong and broad law.
00:20:14.320So to give you an example of how Section 230 really creates a business model, you think about Yelp.
00:20:22.020So Yelp has hundreds of millions of reviews of businesses.
00:20:27.200And Yelp has really, I think, thoughtful policies for when they take down a post.
00:20:36.140And it's things like if it invades someone's privacy, if it names an individual employee who's not an executive, things that are really thoughtful.
00:20:45.860But it also says we don't adjudicate factual disputes.
00:20:49.240So if I go to a mechanic and I think the mechanic charged me double what they quoted me and I write a Yelp review about it, that mechanic can complain to Yelp and say, hey, I never did that.
00:21:06.320But Yelp will say, we're not getting involved in this.
00:21:10.720We're just going to keep the review up.
00:21:12.160Now, because of Section 230, that mechanic cannot successfully sue Yelp. Without Section 230, there's a much greater risk that the Yelp could be sued and would have to spend a lot of resources defending itself on the merits of a defamation claim.
00:21:37.040And you just think, you know, given the hundreds of millions of reviews on Yelp, would that business model even be viable?
00:21:45.660What I think probably would happen is, and I don't want to speak for Yelp, but they would probably develop a system where it's much easier for businesses to convince the platform to take down that content.
00:21:58.760Now, you might say, well, so what? But I personally go to Yelp to find the negative reviews. I want to see if I'm about to spend money on a business, I want to go and see if it's being blasted by consumers, then I'm not going to do business with it.
00:22:21.440And without Section 230, Yelp would have far fewer negative reviews because businesses could just exercise a veto by complaining to Yelp.
00:22:31.600So Section 230, if I summarize it, is more congruent with the First Amendment protections than if that clause were not operative, yes?
00:22:44.380So Section 230, I think, supplements the First Amendment, because ultimately, I think a lot of the First Amendment provides strong protections in certain defamation cases, just in terms of for public figures and public officials.
00:22:59.160But what Section 230 does is it provides an additional procedural safeguard so that a platform does not have to defend a defamation case on the merits, which could be very time consuming and costly.
00:23:13.380But Section 230 really is a statute that codifies free speech values for the Internet.
00:23:19.340Okay, well, I've got a great, as you were mentioning the Yelp example and defamation, I thought of a personal case.
00:23:25.520Maybe I shouldn't mention it because it's going to lead to the Streisand effect, but who cares?
00:28:55.420And that would be a pretty good indicator, often, of who's doing it. And that, I think, places the responsibility more squarely on the person who is committing the defamation.
00:29:12.000Right. Got you. All right. Let me go back to the book. Here it is. For those of you who are watching or listening, please go and pre-order. It's out in mid-April, yes? Something like that?
00:29:23.460Right. What are some things in your research for this book that maximally surprised you?
00:29:30.840Oh, geez, I could have, you know, I went and checked something about European free speech protections.
00:29:37.800And boy, was I shocked by that. Or give us some surprising things.
00:29:41.880So one thing that really surprised me was Germany.
00:29:45.880They have laws against insult and particularly against insulting politicians and public officials.
00:29:52.840And just the frequency of the penalties, usually it's fine, sometimes it could be more than that, for people who just post something obnoxious online about a politician.
00:30:07.660And to see that really spreading, those sorts of penalties for what could be deemed insults or even broadly hate speech throughout Europe, the United Kingdom.
00:30:24.920um when i say i was surprised about europe that was really it of how first how thin-skinned the
00:30:34.320politicians are there and uh how frequently they resort to legal penalties for their critics now
00:30:43.120um you mentioned briefly when you were talking about right my professor the streisand effect
00:30:47.400uh that was uh i i assume your listeners know what the streisand effect
00:30:53.440Go ahead. Thank you for saying that, because maybe I'm assuming wrong. So describe it for us.
00:30:58.700So this is actually my friend, Mike Masnick, who runs the TechDirt blog. He wrote that this must have been in 2005, I believe. It might have been slightly earlier.
00:31:08.740He was writing about Barbra Streisand. Someone had taken an aerial photo of her home and she filed a lawsuit to get it taken down.
00:31:22.680And they posted it on a website that got very few views.
00:31:27.320And because of the lawsuit she was filing, it massively increased the number of people who saw these photos.
00:31:36.860They never would have seen it had it not been for what Streisand did.
00:31:43.480And so that's become, Mike called it the Streisand effect, which has really taken hold.
00:31:48.300And I think it's one of the most brilliant free speech concepts because what it says is that, you know, trying to penalize speech will often lead to more dire consequences than just kind of letting it be.
00:32:03.680And when I see what the public officials in Europe are doing, I immediately think about the Streisand effect, because once they bring a criminal defamation charge or an insult charge or anything like that, that draws so much more attention to the speech, because it's one idiot on social media.
00:32:25.600Who cares? You should just be able to let them say what they want to say and move on. But all of a sudden, if you're bringing a case against them, there's going to be news coverage. There's going to be more posts about it. And suddenly you're drawing a lot more attention to that speech.
00:32:40.760You know, I'm currently reading this book, which you might appreciate why it's sort of one of the grand ideas. This is Galileo against the church. So when I usually have some sort of super libertarian politician say, you know, we need to get rid of tenure. It's just dead wood.
00:33:02.760And I always say, look, I really do understand the reflex that, you know, the frustration that oftentimes you have professors who, you know, the second after they get tenure, they never do anything again for the next 40 years and are truly deadwood.
00:33:18.080But that's not the case for many professors.
00:33:20.100And certainly I could have not lasted for 15 seconds in academia were I not protected by tenure.
00:33:27.360I know for a fact my university would have loved to solve the Gatsad problem if I weren't protected.
00:33:34.220Do you feel that as a sort of subspecies of the greater sort of freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, do you feel that the concept of tenure itself is increasingly under attack?
00:33:48.600Or is this and I'm not asking this for for personal reasons, but what's your sense about how American politicians view the protection afforded to tenure?
00:33:58.400Yeah, I think that's a great question. And you're seeing it at the state level in various states where tenure is there are proposals to either abolish tenure or make some really substantial changes to tenure.
00:34:12.200And I think that's really dangerous. Now, I think I don't think that it's this sacrosanct system that can never be touched.
00:34:20.440I think that there might be reasonable changes to just ensure that professors are doing their job or having an environment where, I mean, they're not harassing students or anything like that, which is already the case under tenure systems.
00:34:45.520But ensuring that, I mean, you always hear the horror story about a professor, a tenured professor who doesn't show up to class or doesn't want to teach or all of those sorts of things.
00:34:59.260I think there is a fiduciary responsibility that all professors, especially at public institutions, have to make sure they're doing their job. But tenure is absolutely vital to ensuring that professors are able to research freely and speak freely.
00:35:17.880I think, you know, oftentimes we place these sort of constraints on a concept as if it were an intractable problem that can be solved.
00:35:29.080You can, you know, I can walk and chew gum at the same time. So you can keep the tenure mechanism exactly as it is, but set up some minimal standards of productivity that you must surpass in order for the tenure protection to be operative, right?
00:35:49.200So, for example, and it could be unbelievably minimal, right?
00:35:52.240It could be as long as you publish one peer-reviewed paper every three years, which is not particularly difficult.
00:35:59.960And as long as you are showing up to your classes and you're getting at least, you know, higher than one out of five on your teaching evaluations, you are so that that at least ensures that the most egregious manifestations of deadwood behavior post-tenure are dealt with.
00:36:17.280But the idea of getting rid of literally the most fundamental mechanism that allows unorthodox, irreverent thinkers to say and do the things that they do, to get rid of that because there's some idiot who hasn't published something for 40 years, seems to be slightly short-sighted.
00:36:45.840I think if it's something like one peer-reviewed article every so often or something like that, I think that's fine.
00:36:52.080I think the danger is if the standards start to be a pretext to go after someone with controversial views, to say we're going to set these standards in a way that this person or these people can't meet for whatever reason.
00:37:14.120I'm not sure if you were ready to answer the following question, but that's part of the organic nature of the sad truth.
00:37:21.840So, you know, I'm someone who you may or may not know has had a very difficult childhood growing up in Lebanon as a part of the last remaining group of Jewish community in Lebanon in the Middle East.
00:37:36.880So I'm intimately familiar with the beautiful and noble peace purveyors of Islam.
00:37:43.380And so I've been warning for many decades now that while individual Muslims might be perfectly lovely, and as a matter of fact, I can attest to that because I know more Muslims by virtue of being from Lebanon than most people will ever meet in their lives, that doesn't mean that the central tenets of Islam are in any way compatible in the most obvious ways to anything that we would call Western liberties and freedoms.
00:38:09.540usually the blowback i get from supposedly you know uh the intelligentsia is yeah god but you
00:38:19.220know freedom of religion uh which to me again baffles me because what you're saying is that
00:38:27.000there is this inviolable to our earlier discussion thing called freedom of religion which now could
00:38:34.280be used to ensure that you commit what i call in my forthcoming book civilizational seppuku
00:38:41.240right the disembowelment of your society because i'm utterly impotent to recognize that two
00:38:48.840religions might carry very very different consequences to our liberties and freedoms
00:38:55.140could you ever and i'm asking you're you're a lawyer by training yes you're a friend yes
00:38:59.880So that's why I think asking you is particularly relevant. Do you think that there is some legal trajectory by which, whether it be Islam or any other ideology or belief system, that it could be construed as no longer protected under the cloak of freedom of religion, if it can be argued that its foundational tenets are an incitement to violence,
00:39:28.300would result in the end of our freedoms and therefore is seditious and banned? Or there is
00:39:35.420no conceivable legal mechanism under American jurisprudence where that is possible? And if it
00:39:42.620is possible, do you think that that would be a good idea or not? So this is getting a bit outside
00:39:50.460of my area of expertise. So I do freedom of speech, internet law. Freedom of religion is a robust
00:39:57.100body of law that i i feel like i'm probably not the most qualified i i like to say when i am
00:40:04.580qualified to talk about something and when i'm not um so in terms of what the outer bounds are
00:40:10.040of freedom of religion and also i i i just don't have enough familiarity with exactly what would
00:40:17.960be pushing those outer bounds to really be able to give an informed perspective on that on that
00:40:24.300question. I fully respect that if you are truly honest in saying that you're exhibiting
00:40:31.700epistemological humility, and not because, oh, no, I dare not speak about the unmentionable.
00:40:38.500It's absolutely humility. So I've learned long ago to speak what I know. And so I have very
00:40:46.780strong opinions about what I'm knowledgeable about. And I might have opinions about other
00:40:52.480things, but they have to be informed, I think. I actually, this is a great opportunity to actually
00:40:59.080support what you just said, because I've repeatedly said that one of the reasons why it is uniquely
00:41:06.320difficult to cancel me as arguably the most irreverent professor is because I'm incredibly
00:41:14.760well calibrated about what I know and don't know. So that when I go on shows that have millions of
00:41:21.880views, where I know that all sorts of haters and detractors are going to, you know, rip apart every
00:41:28.640syllable that I've enunciated, I'm able to defend every single position that I've taken. But the
00:41:35.500reason why you could never catch me metaphorically with my pants down is because exactly to your
00:41:40.520point, if you ask me, so what do you think about the original laws to, you know, make legalization
00:41:48.060of marijuana, you know, throughout Canada, I say, well, that, you know, that's a great question.
00:41:52.940It's above my pre-grade. I don't know enough about it. So I never wing it. I never fake it.
00:41:57.600And so I never get caught having said this, but it really was that because I'm really confident.
00:42:02.980So I respect that. All right. So anything else you want to cover in this book that we may not
00:42:08.960have discussed so far that you think our listeners and viewers should be aware of?
00:42:14.320So I think one thing we haven't really talked about is that all hope is not lost for free speech. So we believe in a free speech recession where we have governments, both democracies and authoritarian governments, really trying to find new ways to restrict speech.
00:42:32.020But there are models around the world where we're seeing some resistance to that.
00:42:41.080So we talk about New Zealand, for example, which after the Christchurch shooting, there were real movements to restrict hate speech online and really tighten up the speech ecosystem.
00:43:00.620And there was a lot of pressure and New Zealand resisted that.
00:43:06.080And it was principled political leaders who said, we're not going to do that.
00:43:11.460I think another model that we focus a lot on in the book is Taiwan.
00:43:16.220So Taiwan, there were a lot of concerns about foreign election misinformation and also misinformation about COVID.
00:43:24.980And the government, there were some who said, well, maybe there should be more laws about misinformation. And Taiwan didn't take that approach. They actually said, we're going to do something called radical transparency, where we are going to be as transparent as we possibly can with the public and let them see the government warts and all.
00:43:49.080And we can explain it to them and we will give them as much information as we can.
00:43:57.940And that's been fairly effective both for public health and for elections where people really have the information they need to make informed decisions.
00:44:12.360It might go with the government, it might go against it, but the key is that they're not being told what to think.
00:44:18.180They're given the information, they're given the tools to come to their own decisions. And I think, unfortunately, that's not the norm right now. But I think those are just two models that we look at where we could have some hope and a roadmap for other governments.
00:44:41.740Well, I'm always glad to end a show on an optimistic, hopeful note. So thank you for that. Thank you so much for coming on, Jeff. Say hello to Jacob on my behalf. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye and come back whenever you have another worthy topic to discuss. Thank you so much.