How to Let People Offend You
- Jun 19
- 44 min read
Updated: Jul 3
For most of human history, offensive speech was equal to violence, and saying the wrong thing could get your tongue chopped off. Today, we aim to use words instead of violence. But what do you do when those words really hurt?
This week on A Braver Way, Mónica sits down with Greg Lukianoff, who she fondly calls “the free speech guy.” Greg is an attorney, author and president of the mighty Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Together, they explore the complicated relationship between speech and safety, and how what we let ourselves say determines how we let ourselves live.
Credits
Host & Executive Producer: Mónica Guzmán
Senior Producer: Tracy Egbas
Producer: Jessica Jones
Associate Producer & Graphic Designer: Fredo Viola
Contributors: April Lawson & Travis Tripodi
Artist in Residence: Gangstagrass
A production of Reclaim Curiosity
Distribution Partners: KUOW, Braver Angels, and Deseret News
Financial Supporter: M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust
Key Topics & Quotes
1. What is free speech? The “opinion absolutist” distinction
Mónica and Greg open by framing what free speech actually means. Greg introduces a term he coined — “opinion absolutist” — to capture his belief that every honestly held view deserves protection, while acts that use words as instruments of harm do not. The distinction, he explains, turns on whether the words are incidental to an action or are the action itself.
Greg:
Freedom of speech is the ability to think what you will and say what you think. Any opinion you have is and should be protected.
Greg:
The thing that exceptions to freedom of speech tend to have in common is that they’re more like the way we use words to do actions. Nobody makes a First Amendment defense of mugging someone and says, “Well, I said ‘your money or your life.’”
2. The “eternally radical idea” — why free speech keeps losing
Greg explains why he named his blog “The Eternally Radical Idea”: because in most human societies, throughout most of history, free speech loses. He traces our resistance to dissenting views to tribal wiring — in our ancestral environment, meeting a stranger who disagreed with you often happened at the point of a spear — and describes the fragile, brief window of history in which strong speech protections have actually existed.
Greg:
People need to remember that in most human societies, free speech loses. It’s a pretty narrow period of time that we’re lucky enough to live in.
Greg:
The natural state of humanity is: someone’s in charge, and they’re going to shut you up if you say the wrong thing.
3. The threat landscape today — state, campus, and culture
Mónica asks Greg to name the biggest current threats to free speech in America. He identifies three: a political culture where neither the left nor the right still shares civil libertarian values; the Trump administration’s prosecution of clearly protected speech (including a man jailed 37 days for posting a meme after the Charlie Kirk murder); and a decade of campus cancel culture that, in documented firings alone, exceeded McCarthyism two to three times over.
Greg:
He was in jail for 37 days. And people really need to understand — you have to go back to the 1920s to see a case this bad.
Greg:
When we did a national survey asking professors if they’d been threatened or punished for speech, one in seven said yes. That’s insane. There’s no historical parallel to that.
4. Words vs. violence — the historical case for the distinction
Greg pushes back on the widespread belief that words can be violence. He traces the alternative view — that speech and action are fundamentally different categories — to the bloody European religious wars that shaped the founders, and argues that the bright-line distinction between the two has been “the greatest tool for self-actualization, prosperity, and peace ever invented.” The Afroman case serves as a modern illustration: a hip-hop artist whose security footage of a police raid became art, and whose legal vindication showed the system working as intended.
Greg:
For most of human history, we did not make a clear distinction between speech and action — that an opinion could be treated, and often was, as likened to physical violence. And therefore you could have your literal tongue cut out for it.
Greg:
Deciding instead that we fight things out using words is a wonderful innovation — but you shouldn’t be surprised it hurts sometimes.
5. The iron law and the power of curiosity
Greg introduces what he calls his “iron law”: in the overwhelming majority of scenarios, you are not safer or better off for knowing less about what people really think. Not knowing distorts your model of others — you imagine them worse than they are — and leaves you vulnerable to threats you can’t see. The antidotes he names are humility and, above all, curiosity: adopting what he calls the “anthropologist hat” to create enough emotional distance to actually understand the people whose views alarm you.
Greg:
In the overwhelming majority of scenarios, you are not safer or better off for knowing less about what people really think.
Greg:
Put on your anthropologist hat when dealing with people. Why do you think that? Why would someone like you think that? I want to know more.
6. Give power more power — why “enlightened censorship” always backfires
Greg argues that restricting speech invariably benefits whoever holds power, not the powerless it claims to protect. Drawing on his family’s Soviet history and the rhetorical playbook of the Bolsheviks, he urges a simple mental test: imagine the speech restriction you favor in the hands of your worst enemy. Mónica asks how, then, people find justice for the pain words cause. Greg’s answer: all is fair except violence — and creativity, mockery, and the democratic power of expression are legitimate weapons.
Mónica:
Regardless of who holds it.
Greg:
Exactly. And this is the thing — the Bolshevik rhetoric was very much: we’re going to empower the people, we are the representatives of the working people, the only truly moral people around. And they were bloody, violent, cruel mass murderers.
7. Culture vs. law — and the courage to exercise free speech
Mónica and Greg explore whether free speech is primarily protected by law or by culture, landing on the view that culture must come first — but law is the guardrail when culture “loses its mind.” Greg recalls the original meaning of “safe space” (a place for genuine candor without punishment) and his mentor Harvey Silverglate’s counsel: choose the ten people in the world whose opinions genuinely matter to you, and choose them carefully.
Greg:
Culture comes first, and law is generally the product of culture. The nice thing about law, though, is that it can keep you sane when the culture loses its mind.
Greg:
If you’re going to do anything important in life, people are going to hate you for it. So you can only really care about what ten people in the world think of you. Choose those people very carefully.
8. How to build the courage — practical and personal
Greg closes with concrete ways to develop tolerance and courage: read old books, travel, work in a restaurant — any practice that exposes you to the genuine diversity of human opinion across time and space. He shares his own 2007 psychological breakdown under the weight of constant controversy, his recovery through cognitive behavioral therapy, and the in-the-moment technique that steadies him when cameras roll: stay present, focus on exactly what you need to say, and defer the consequences to later.
Greg:
Read old books. People’s attitudes even a couple of decades ago will curl your toes. And if you go further back in time, you’ll be like, oh my God, I can’t believe they believed that.
Greg:
In stressful situations, concentrating on precisely what you need to do at the time really helps. Getting yourself very present-focused.
Links & References
FIRE — Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
The Eternally Radical Idea — Greg Lukianoff’s Substack
Greg Lukianoff’s TED Talk on free speech and opinion absolutism
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) — landmark Supreme Court case on incitement
Canceling of the American Mind — Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
The Coddling of the American Mind — Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt
Heather Berlin — neuroscientist, Greg’s forthcoming co-author
“Because I Got High” — Afroman
“Lemon Pound Cake” — Afroman
“Will You Help Me Fix My Door?” — Afroman
Alex Edelman: Just for Us — comedy special
Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media — Jacob Mchangama
Clear and Present Danger — podcast by Jacob Mchangama for FIRE
Hamilton — musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Harvey Silverglate — civil liberties attorney, co-founder of FIRE
Learned Hand — jurist quoted on the true spirit of liberty
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Transcript
Lightly cleaned for readability. Speaker voices and all substantive content preserved.
(theme music up and under)
Greg Lukianoff:
How do we normally, historically, solve conflict? Usually violence, or the threat of violence. Deciding instead that we fight things out using words is a wonderful innovation, but you shouldn't be surprised — it hurts sometimes.
Mónica Guzmán:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to A Braver Way. I'm Mónica Guzmán, your guide across the divide, and I'm so excited to bring you today's conversation. Why am I excited? One, our guest is super down to earth. He's supremely intelligent, a lot of fun to talk to. He deals with some of the heaviest stuff you can imagine. He's been hated by people on all sides. He's built a remarkable amount of courage just doing what he does, for as long as he's done it, with the conviction that he's been able to marshal and deploy.
So this is our guest this episode: Greg Lukianoff. Who is Greg? Greg is an attorney, a bestselling author of several amazing books, and he's the head of FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — one of the premier free speech organizations anywhere, and one that's been very, very active recently.
I've been interested in free speech — newly interested in it — for the last couple of years. I've started to understand how much this means to me, I think because it's the most baseline right for any of us to be able to say what we mean and to hold convictions at all in a useful way.
To Greg, I wanted to bring a question that I know a lot of people have held in their hearts at one point or another: In a world this distrustful and divided, how are we supposed to just let people say things that hurt?
I think you're going to get a lot out of this conversation. I definitely got a lot out of it, and like I said, I've been looking at free speech for a while, and yet I never stop learning from Greg Lukianoff — both his knowledge and his courage.
So without further ado, here's my conversation with Greg.
(music up)
Mónica:
So yeah, Greg, again, thank you. Thank you for joining. I feel like in all the conversations we've had — we've had a lot — but we haven't necessarily gone really, really deep into free speech. Even though you're the free speech guy. Which, by the way, how does it feel to be the free speech guy in 2026 America?
Greg:
Scary and tiring. It's nice that there are more people who appreciate how genuinely non-partisan we are, and how much we've been willing to suffer for that as an institution. But there's always a little bit of a mixed feeling about it — like, oh, because we're fighting someone you don't like, suddenly you're like, "Well, these guys are consistent." And I'm like, no, we've actually always been consistent.
Mónica:
I've told you a couple of times how much I admire the integrity that you've been able to navigate, because that's not easy — especially in the last ten, fifteen years — sticking to one thing with all the political winds blowing in every which way.
Greg:
Yeah. Well, you have to be willing to lose money. You have to be willing to, in some cases, actually lose friends — which is horrible.
Mónica:
You've lost friends?
Greg:
Oh yeah. I definitely have.
Mónica:
Wow. Was there a period where that was happening, or does that seem ongoing, given what you do?
Greg:
I feel like there was a fair amount of it at the beginning — or at least people would get mad at me. But I was kind of surprised to lose a friend right before the Trump election, from someone who liked the fact that we defended liberals but didn't like the fact that we defended conservatives. And that we don't have a political litmus test for who we take donations from. And it's like, but you've known me for decades. You know me. And yeah, that really hurt.
Mónica:
Highly relatable experience, I think, to a lot of listeners of this podcast who are at least curious about bridging divides, even when the world seems to signal that it's not worth it, it's not going to be good for your sanity, et cetera. So — let's start with a bit of a definition of terms. Maybe without getting too clinical about it, but what is free speech to you, ultimately? And what isn't it?
Greg:
Freedom of speech is the ability to think what you will and say what you think. It's a simple definition, it's a broad definition, and once people realize I really mean it, it sounds too radical for them. Now, that doesn't mean that everything you say is protected. But why I say it specifically that way is because I'm talking about any opinion you have — that is and should be protected.
Mónica:
I heard you once distinguish between a free speech absolutist and an opinion absolutist, and that you're the latter. I found that fascinating.
Greg:
I came up with that in my TED Talk. It's a term I made up myself — "opinion absolutist" — because I do think that what we ultimately mean by expression, for the most part, is saying: I don't like that thing. This is what I think happened. This is what I think. And when it comes to the exceptions to freedom of speech — which I understand and support, at least most of them — the thing they tend to have in common is that they're more like the way we use words to do actions. Nobody makes a First Amendment defense of mugging someone and says, "Well, I said 'your money or your life.'"
Mónica:
Right. That would be a bit much.
Greg:
You used words to do extortion, you use words to do all sorts of crimes. But the distinction is where words are kind of an incidental part of an action.
Mónica:
The spirit of it is the action. The word was incidental to the action, and we're looking at the action.
Greg:
Yeah, exactly. So even with harassment — harassment is not, and shouldn't even be considered, really an exception to freedom of speech. It's a pattern of behavior that's discriminatory. Is it effectuated to some degree by words? It can be.
Mónica:
It's really more about an action.
Greg:
It's really a pattern of behavior. And similarly, defamation — it's clearest when you're trying to defame a politician, and that's very hard to prove. But under the law, if you knowingly lie about someone, about something important — basically accusing someone of being a pedophile in a very specific kind of way, something that could really damage their life — that's also treated more like a pattern of behavior.
And incitement — the test there is from a case called Brandenburg v. Ohio. Were you in a situation where you had the intent to get an angry mob to do something illegal, that was likely to happen and about to happen? So it's a high bar. And our definition of incitement is actually a lot like conspiracy to commit a crime. "Let's go burn down the mayor's office" in a situation where you're likely to burn down the mayor's office — that's probably incitement under Brandenburg, and it's also pretty similar to conspiracy to commit a crime.
But the words by themselves aren't a crime. They have to be in a particular context.
Mónica:
Right. You call free speech "the eternally radical idea." That's the name of your blog, that you've written for a while. Is that something you came up with?
Greg:
That's another thing I made up.
Mónica:
Alright, credit Greg Lukianoff. It's a great phrase.
Greg:
TM.
Mónica:
There you go. Why is it that this set of ideas — the idea that we ought to protect people's ability to say what they mean, to say what they really think — is never just accepted for all time, or rejected for all time? Why do we keep bouncing?
Greg:
Lots of good reasons. For one, we're tribal animals. We're used to being in socially coherent groups, and socially coherent groups tend to be morally coherent groups. So there's this idea that you could say things, or express beliefs, or a lack of belief, that actually marks you as not one of us. There was a writer — I can't remember his name — who wrote something about how in our ancestral environment, you generally only met people you fundamentally disagreed with at the point of a spear.
Mónica:
Whoa. That's a good point.
Greg:
Which I really like as an image, because it's kind of literally true.
Mónica:
I get it. I wasn't there, but I know enough.
Greg:
Yes. And I call it the eternally radical idea because people need to remember: in most human societies, free speech loses. It's a pretty narrow period of time that we're lucky enough to live in where it's been considered — at least in the United States, and at least in most of the rest of the free world — where freedom of speech is taken very seriously.
And I think free speech is, to a degree, a victim of its own success. We've had this relatively short period of very strongly protected freedom of speech. The fall of the Berlin Wall also helped spread that to places that were very unfree. And within a couple of decades of that, we're regressing badly. Someone talks about how poverty is the natural state of humanity — what we need to explain is abundance. Same thing here. The natural state of humanity is: someone's in charge, and they're going to shut you up if you say the wrong thing.
Mónica:
Because what's power good for if you can't control things around you — maybe to make sure you stay in power?
Greg:
Make sure I stay in power. And the most powerful thing you can do is help define what truth is. Make sure that everyone knows that the following things are true and are not to be questioned.
Mónica:
Right. Exactly. So, good segue — on a scale of one to ten, what is the threat level you see right now against free speech in America?
Greg:
Historically, or in my lifetime?
Mónica:
Let's say in your lifetime. Historically we're doing a pretty solid ten versus hundreds of years ago.
Greg:
Historically, we're still doing great, compared to most of human history. But within my lifetime, in the United States — it's the worst in my lifetime.
Mónica:
You're 51.
Greg:
Yeah. So that covers quite a bit.
Mónica:
What are the threats that worry you most in America right now?
Greg:
The biggest change in the last five years is that America has become sort of just like everybody else. When people sneer at the idea of American exceptionalism, I'm like, what history are you familiar with? A gigantic democratic republic just never existed prior to us. One that had strong protections for things like freedom of speech for millions of people — that never existed prior to us. There are lots of things that are genuinely, in a non-jingoistic sense, exceptional.
Mónica:
And you and I both come from immigrant families. I was a direct immigrant.
Greg:
I was born in New York, but my dad was born in Zagreb, even though he's Russian, and my mother was born in Britain, even though she's actually ethnically Irish. So I'm Irish and Russian, which is a crazy mix.
Mónica:
I always wondered if some immigrant thing leads people to feel a little more — I am so aware of how exceptional the United States is.
Greg:
Oh, 100%, because we grew up knowing what the other possibilities were. I grew up in a neighborhood that had a ton of other first-generation and immigrant kids. If you're in an immigrant neighborhood, a lot of kids are going to be fleeing authoritarianism or totalitarianism. There were a lot of Vietnamese kids in my neighborhood, a lot of Korean kids, a lot of kids from South America, all fleeing different levels of repression. And sometimes — it's funny, because I think I'm the most American boy who ever American-ed, but sometimes when I get mad at people who are fifth generation, I immediately turn into, you know, these Americans — they take all these things for granted.
Mónica:
I agree. I think it's my most common critique of native-born Americans: you guys don't know how good you have it on this, and that, and that thing. Why are you yelling so loudly about this?
Greg:
Absolutely.
Mónica:
Well, back to threats. What do you think are the biggest threats to free speech? The ones that would keep you up at night?
Greg:
The shift from America becoming just like everybody else. Europe has something that looks like a Marxist centralized left and either an ethno-nationalist, monarchist, or pro-centralization right — both extremes in both directions want some kind of utopian, authoritarian system. And America was great in the sense that we tended to have a civil libertarian left and a libertarian right. But now we have something that looks more like a European-style left, and a populist right that thinks freedom of speech is useful when you have it, but who cares if anyone else has it. That is the scariest development of my life. If you don't have free speech as a value, then what is special about the country really does go away. Free speech is in mortal danger.
Mónica:
Okay, bring it down to the ground. How is it manifesting? Give us two or three sites of threat.
Greg:
Well, the Trump administration has been terrible. One of the worst cases I've seen in my entire career —
Mónica:
And I want to highlight, you're saying this as the head of a non-partisan organization. I can hear listeners going, well, he's saying that because his political beliefs must be such and such.
Greg:
No, no. I've spent a long time fighting the left on a lot of things. And right now I'm fighting the left as well, but I'm also fighting the populist right. To give you a strong example — Charlie Kirk was murdered, and I thought more people should have been horrified about that. More people on the left should have been horrified, and more people should have said something. People celebrating it or making gross jokes about it are protected — FIRE defends them, to be clear. But that doesn't mean I don't think it's gross.
Now, however, what the Trump administration did with that was go after professors, students, and people all over the country who said things that ranged from "that guy had it coming" — which is pretty gross — to "I really disagree with that guy," which is how I feel. I disagree with Charlie Kirk about a lot of stuff, and I have the right to say that.
The worst case that came out of that was a local Tennessee case. A guy who was kind of a local gadfly — a former cop, a local liberal gadfly in this town in Tennessee. They sent out some email about a vigil for Charlie Kirk, and he responded with a Trump meme. It was a meme of Trump who, in response to a school shooting in Iowa maybe two years before, had said something like "we have to get over it" — which he took a lot of flack for because it sounded so insensitive in context. So this guy sent the meme, and it was more critical of Trump, really, than anything else.
Mónica:
But it was aimed at the Charlie Kirk grief.
Greg:
And he was arrested. The argument was that because that was directed at Perry High School in Iowa, this was somehow a threat upon Perry County High School in Tennessee. It doesn't make sense. And because he found a local judge who also didn't like him, he was in jail for 37 days.
Mónica:
Wait, wait, wait. I did not think the story was going there.
Greg:
37 days. And people really need to understand — you have to go back to the 1920s to see a case this bad, historically speaking. You're talking about cases that happened before the First Amendment became as strong as it currently is, which really started ramping up around the early 1950s, through the 1960s and seventies.
Mónica:
So this is a case of the state. You started out with culture. Where else would you point and say, we've got to take a close look at that whole arena?
Greg:
Campus. I did a piece for The Dispatch about what's going on on campus, and I called it "the worst of both worlds now" — because as of around 2020, it was really bad for free speech on campus. There was such a mania for several years there. I wrote a whole book about it called Canceling of the American Mind, because it was a ten-year period of just people losing their jobs for nothing. For making a joke that people misunderstood.
Mónica:
And this was compared to McCarthyism — didn't we see even more professors let go and fired than during McCarthyism?
Greg:
Yeah. The standard number for McCarthyism, at the time — and you have to account for the fact that more cases come out later, which is also happening with cancel culture — was established around the end of that period: about 62 communist professors fired. And probably about a hundred fired overall. Whereas I wrote this book with the brilliant Rikki Schlott — who is only 25 — and we documented at least 200 firings that we know of. Either two to three times as many. And it's going to get worse as time goes by.
But the way to really convey how many people we're probably missing: when we did a national survey asking professors if they'd been threatened or punished for speech, one in seven said yes.
Mónica:
Wow.
Greg:
That's insane. There's no historical parallel to that. That would be around a hundred, hundred and fifty thousand professors.
Mónica:
Yeah. Geez. Okay, so there's another one — we've got to look at what's going on on college campuses. In your TED Talk, which you brought up, you shared four truths about free speech. Free speech makes you safer. Free speech cures violence. Free speech protects the powerless. And even bad people can have good ideas. You mentioned culture as your first answer to where the threat is coming from. But why do you think so many people believe the opposite of these things? Is there a connecting thread?
Greg:
I think it's pretty hardwired, and I don't think it mostly comes from a bad place — although to the extent it involves ego and some amount of "how dare you contradict me," that's hard to call a good place. But it's a relatable, very human place.
I think we need to do more work at the intersection of neuroscience and First Amendment law, because a lot of it is the disgust response. When we have that really violently ugh kind of response to speech — that's one of the reasons why blasphemy and heresy have been such effective ways of getting people to turn their critical faculties off and say, "This person needs to burn at the stake." I'm working on a book with Heather Berlin where we're trying to explain from a neuroscience standpoint what gets us further away from being objective, and what makes us more likely to censor.
We're storytelling creatures. If someone tells a really convincing-sounding story, we tend to be suckers for it — and oftentimes that's a moralistic story. Scientific method is more or less: let's check your stories. And it turns out most of our stories are wrong.
Then there's anger, actual physical fear, social fear, shame and guilt — and also self-interest. We're very good at rationalizing our own self-interest, and that one pervades all the others. So we have to try really hard to understand free speech and to see value in it, because it goes against a lot of our instincts. The idea that there's no "they" there in charge, that it's actually supposed to be all of us — that's something that's hard to adjust to.
Mónica:
Let's zoom into the first two of those four truths, because they're about safety and violence. So many people believe free speech is harmful to the point of making them quite unsafe. You talk about free speech as the peaceful substitute for violence. But for a lot of people out there, a world where vicious speech has this much power feels violent already. At least half of Americans believe that words can be violence. If someone who believed that were here with us right now, how would you begin to tell them why you disagree?
Greg:
I always go back in history and explain that for most of human history, we did not make a clear distinction between speech and action — that an opinion could be treated, and often was, as likened to physical violence. And therefore you could have your literal tongue cut out for it. Your tongue is what offended us, so we cut out your tongue, or we kill you, in any number of ways, for speaking ill of those in power or for questioning sacred beliefs. This is most of human history.
It's only when you start having free societies, when you start having what you could even describe as proto-free societies, that you start to have movements — in England, in Holland, in other parts of Europe — toward democratic societies, and with them this idea that we should actually make a major distinction between speech and action.
And frankly, you don't understand the founders unless you understand the insanely bloody religious wars that roiled the continent for 150 years. Those wars really affected the way the American founders thought. Thinkers like Montesquieu and John Locke were very affected by the idea that so much blood was spilled over religious belief. And this led to a change in thinking — that your beliefs are your business, and that you are entitled to them. All these little sayings we used to say — "to each their own" — they really convey this idea.
So what I would explain is this: the bright-line distinction between speech and action has been the greatest tool for self-actualization, prosperity, and peace ever invented. You just have to learn to live with the idea that people are going to say offensive things sometimes.
Mónica:
So what do you say to somebody who goes, okay, it's a great tool for peace — why does it feel like everything's falling apart? I'm not buying that it's a great tool for peace if we're not at peace right now.
Greg:
There's some conflict that exists outside our borders too. But when it comes to our own internal conflict, it's partly because we didn't live our values all that well. We became much less "to each their own" and much more "you do what I say." The left became much more judgmental of what people were saying and what should even be allowed to be said — and that's cancel culture. And the right went away from being very libertarian to being this kind of centralized, fight-back-by-any-means-necessary approach, just like the left used to. We're in a really scary moment as a country.
Mónica:
And people are believing these threads that basically say you'll be safe as long as the other side is controlled.
Greg:
Yes, exactly. And this is the thing about the culture war — it was always supposed to be a metaphor. It's not actually a war.
Mónica:
Oh, that's such a good point. That makes me sad.
Greg:
And now I feel like the left wants to win the culture war and the right wants to win the culture war. It's like — you do know this isn't the kind of war you can win other than through something awful.
Mónica:
Jumping from speech to action — and not the greatest kind. The question I kind of shaped this conversation around was one that I know sits in a lot of people: In a world this distrustful and divided, how are we supposed to just let people say things that hurt? I'm thinking of what many of us would consider hateful, harmful things — racially supremacist views, slurs against religions or religious people, and also the promotion of any social order that would undermine the liberties we enjoy. I think one thing that good people in their heart of hearts really struggle with is: should we really, really, really just let people express any opinion if it feels like they're doing it just to hurt other people? How do you begin to untangle that?
Greg:
This is again where the historical perspective really helps. My dad was born in Yugoslavia in 1926. And then his dad died when he was six, so he was an orphan in Yugoslavia in the 1930s — just utterly horrifying. And I think the most important thing is to make sure that power is limited in its abilities. One of those powers that power should not have is the ability to decide what is true and what you are and aren't allowed to say.
A lot of people who think of themselves as enlightened censors are stumbling into this: let's give power more power — often justified as helping the powerless — and that will work out well for the powerless. And when exactly in history does this work out? Because when you give power more power, it generally benefits power.
Mónica:
Regardless of who holds it. I think you've said something like: when you imagine free speech, what you want to restrict and what you don't — imagine those restrictions in the hands of your worst enemy.
Greg:
Of your worst enemy. Because it will eventually be there. The Bolshevik rhetoric was very much: we're going to empower the people, we are the representatives of the working people, the only truly moral people around. And they were bloody, violent, cruel mass murderers, just like the Nazis were.
That's one of the things that made Jonathan Haidt and me immediate friends —
Mónica:
And this is Jonathan Haidt, for anyone who's wondering — my co-author on Coddling the American Mind, and most recently the author of The Anxious Generation.
Greg:
Right. I remember being at a party with him and there was someone talking about how greed is the source of all evil in the world. And we both kind of looked at each other across the room, like — you do know that historically, the most dangerous people are the ones who think only they can save you? Often from yourself. Often from society itself. The people who present themselves as the most altruistic are oftentimes the ones you should be the most scared of.
Mónica:
Because they'll have some version of what's true and good, and it's really about control and power.
So given all this — if it's really not good, and history teaches us this lesson over and over again, to treat words as violence — how then do we look for something like justice for the pain we feel downstream of those words? What do we do with the drive to find it? It seems to me that drive — you've been humiliated, you've been squashed, you've been insulted beyond belief, your disgust instinct has been activated something fierce — you look for justice. And it seems like that's one of the things that drives the idea of "we can't let them do this to us."
Greg:
Yeah. It's this idea that more or less all is fair except violence. Because I always say: we shouldn't be surprised that free speech can sometimes be sharp and hurt and all those things, because life is a deadly serious business. And being a citizen in a democracy is a deadly serious business. We decide who lives and dies, what wars we fight, who gets cured, who goes to jail, who gets wealthy. We decide life-and-death matters as part of being a free citizen in a free society.
How do we normally, historically, solve conflict among us? Usually violence, or the threat of violence. Deciding instead that we fight things out using words is a wonderful innovation, but you shouldn't be surprised it hurts sometimes.
Take the Afroman case — have you followed this at all?
Mónica:
I have not, no. Please inform me.
Greg:
You remember that song "Because I Got High" from 2000?
Mónica:
Yeah, now it's in my head. Thank you very much.
Greg:
It's a song about things he didn't do because he got stoned. And Afroman — that's still what he calls himself — got in trouble. The police got a tip that he'd been engaged in drug trafficking and kidnapping. So they raided his house, scared the hell out of his two kids and his wife — he wasn't there at the time — came in with an AR-15 and all that. He got all of it on his home security footage. They broke down his door, wouldn't help him fix it, scared his kids, treated his family like they were criminals.
And one of the officers seemed to be eyeing his mother's famous lemon pound cake. Kept looking at it under glass. Afroman was pissed about this — because he didn't do anything wrong, and they treated his family like criminals and wouldn't fix his door. So he did a bunch of songs and videos using the footage of the people invading his house, and made fun of them mercilessly.
Mónica:
Lemon pound cake.
Greg:
He actually wrote a song called "Lemon Pound Cake." Some of it's nasty, some of it's offensive —
Mónica:
All of it's protected, I imagine.
Greg:
All of it's protected. And it's certainly not the first time this has happened with an artist — particularly hip-hop artists — where they've been the ones to vindicate our free speech rights. But the officers sued him for $3.9 million, claiming defamation. And it went in front of a judge, and the judge said this is protected — but it still had to go in front of a jury. Shouldn't have gone in front of a jury, but it did. And the jury was like, are you kidding me? They're mocking you. You're police officers and people are going to be mad. One of his songs was literally called "Will You Help Me Fix My Door?"
Mónica:
Now I'm thinking of that Trump meme. Just get over it, move on.
Greg:
The jury vindicated his free speech rights. And Afroman wore an American flag suit to the whole thing. Did a whole press conference talking about how this isn't his victory, it's the American people's victory, and did a little Battle Hymn of the Republic — talking about how Afroman's going to bring it to you if you come at Afroman.
Mónica:
Wow. So it sounds like you're laying this out as a case study: you were hurt, you were offended, something horrible happened to you. Maybe you can find justice through words, through creativity.
Greg:
Exactly. We get it in a case like that because we're like, yeah, this guy was wronged. But when we have our partisan blinders on, we'll try to figure out who that person voted for before we decide whether this is funny or horrifying.
Mónica:
That's so true.
Greg:
And you know what? One of the best sayings we have for this — that has been badly and unintentionally, in my opinion, misunderstood — is "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." The way this is presented now in scholarship sometimes is: well, now we know that words do hurt. And it's like —
Mónica:
That is the way I often hear it now, but it wasn't the way I heard it as a kid.
Greg:
Because would the saying have made any sense if words didn't hurt? I was a weird, spectrum-bullied kid. And believe me, I repeated that saying in my head many times as a way to make words hurt less.
Mónica:
Right. So you were asserting something to work on yourself. It felt true — that's part of the issue. If words are not violence, but they can feel like violence — would you agree with that statement?
Greg:
Absolutely. But at the same time, that saying is a wonderful small-d democratic saying. It's like: you are a free person in a free society, in a culture of dignity — as it's called in the literature — where the idea is that you are responsible for your own dignity. You're not allowed to engage in violence. You have a respect for law. It's not up to you to beat someone up for calling you a bad name. It is up to you to be able to live with some of this stuff sometimes, if you want to continue to be a free person in a free society, where we're supposed to be, at least in theory, legally equal.
This is actually a really beautiful saying that now gets presented as: well, now we know that words hurt. And yes, we always knew that — that was the point.
Mónica:
And I guess it reflects the mood we're in. We're in this mood where we're just feeling adrift and lost and distrustful, and I worry that we are going to give up our own power. We're going to give in to these other things, and we're going to forget some of that stuff that keeps us grounded and disciplined in the power that we have — and how radical it is, how eternally difficult to keep.
Greg:
Well, what we're going to do is give power more power, and then be shocked when that power is used against us by the next person in charge. Civil libertarians get tired of being right on this stuff. When people say, "I didn't expect the hate speech code to be used against speech I liked" — and it's like, well, who could have warned you? Of course that's what's going to happen. We've been telling you this for decades.
I believe people should believe in free speech as a human right — something serious that attaches to people as a matter of their due. But even if you just believed it tactically, it's like — wait until president AOC gets her hands on the things that Trump is using, or until president Vance gets his hands on some of the stuff they were using on campus.
Mónica:
Yeah. We'll see how we feel then.
We've brought up fear — it certainly seems like it's the big bad in a lot of ways. And it's in us, it's in all of us. You have something you've called at times your iron law, and I love it so much. To quote it from one of your books: "It is always important to know what people really believe, especially when the belief is perplexing or troubling. Conversely, in the overwhelming majority of scenarios, you are not safer or better off for knowing less about what people really think."
I want to have the courage to deal with the world as the one I'm really in, not the one I want to imagine for myself to feel better — even though I would really like ways to feel better about the world right now.
Here's what I want to raise about it: you may not be safer for knowing less about what people really think, but you might be more terrified if you're exposed to honestly held views that threaten something you hold dear. A lot of people find themselves in that situation, and that will make you feel less safe and a lot more motivated to mute those views by whatever means necessary.
The question — which I don't know that any of us can really answer, but that I think we just have to keep posing — is: how do we overcome the power of fear?
Greg:
It's not easy, and we don't have great training for it. And I think as societies become physically more comfortable, the things that threaten and frighten us become smaller and smaller, but they become bigger and bigger in our heads.
People who've been through genuinely horrible things — my dad's sense of perspective is all colored by his horrifying life. And mine is frankly colored by knowing what my dad's life was like and being like: well, I can't really complain. I'm not an orphan in Yugoslavia. Things are pretty good. The Nazis didn't destroy my village today.
So how do we overcome fear? It takes training. It takes something the founders really thought was important — a conceptual shift that usually cannot be achieved strictly internally. It usually also has to involve some kind of structure that allows things to cool off a little bit, and even if they never change their minds, allows things to be tested against something. That's checks and balances. That's what our whole system is.
But how do we become less afraid? There are two internal values that really make a difference. Humility — if you're too prideful and you take yourself too seriously, when someone insults you, you're just devastated. And the other one — even more important for this — is curiosity.
Mónica:
You know I love curiosity.
Greg:
And the way I put it for a more academically inclined nerd type: put on your anthropologist hat when dealing with people. Why do you think that? Why would someone like you think that? I want to know more.
Mónica:
And it allows you to take a bit of distance so that your emotional activation doesn't just lead directly to a reaction. You get a little space.
Greg:
And often when you think you'll be safer for knowing less about what people really think, you also start concluding that people think things way worse than they actually do.
Mónica:
Which, across the political divide, is rampant.
Greg:
We're terrible at it. We're absolutely terrible at it. And frankly, the left is worse than the right in terms of accurately guessing what their opponents believe. The right's not great at it either. But the left is even worse.
Like — I had this friend in law school who was Chinese American, and he really thought white families like mine sat their kids down and talked to them about their racial superiority. And I was like, who the hell taught you that? We would get lectures on being tolerant, about the horrors of racism. I was like, wow. But that was a very sort of academic belief filtering down to the rest of the population.
Mónica:
I get it. When I'm feeling threatened, when I'm afraid, my imagination starts doing my thinking for me. And then I don't check it, I don't get it checked, because the last thing I want to do is get curious or humble about something I think is out to get me.
Greg:
Yeah. Alex Edelman did this whole comedy special about him being a Jewish guy who ended up going to a white supremacist luncheon type of thing — kind of snuck in — and was both horrified and ended up having a surprising amount of compassion for them. Like, these are people who are hurting and confused and feel looked down upon, and they're just really angry about it and don't really know what to do. And it was remarkable — just for someone to be able to be that empathetic toward someone who hates them.
Mónica:
That's hard. There are lots of examples, but they certainly seem like the exception, especially today.
Greg:
Curiosity is one of the best ways to deal with fear. For the most part, you're going to find that people are less awful than you think. But in a society of complete candor, you would also find out that some people believe some pretty horrifying things, as far as you're concerned. But it's better to know that than to pretend you're better off not knowing.
The Nazi movement — the idea that not knowing who the Nazis are in the room somehow makes you safer from them has been belied by history over and over again. In a situation of greater candor, you can know more what you're dealing with.
When you look at what some call "enlightened censorship" — you can have some sympathy for the fear behind it. In England, there's a lot of anti-immigration sentiment, and they're trying to curb the tide on that. But if you're in a free society and you're actually having issues related to immigration, you need to be able to discuss it. You can't treat disagreement on a policy question as if it's heresy or blasphemy, because you have to make decisions about these things.
Mónica:
Exactly.
Greg:
I feel like Europe is cracking itself up internally trying to maintain the status quo by shutting everybody up — and that's when you start arresting thousands of people a year.
Mónica:
Taking away their freedoms. So — I guess a way to evolve the question I was asking earlier: In a world this distrusting and divided, how are we supposed to build the capacity to let people say things that hurt us? That's where the question becomes useful. It's less an expression of angst and more a question of: let me roll up my sleeves and figure it out.
And I'd start by asking you: how much of what it takes for free speech to be strong in a society is about law, and how much is about culture?
Greg:
I'm very much a proponent of the idea that culture comes first, and law is generally the product of culture. The nice thing about law, though, is that it can keep you sane when the culture loses its mind.
There was this claim in Britain that British rights were better protected than rights in the US because their constitution and rights aren't written down. I remember being in an argument with Brendan O'Neill from Spiked about this maybe fifteen years ago — not a friendly argument. And he was saying: if it's just written down and you have to abide by that, people don't internalize it. And I get the point, it's a good one. But you also have the law to hide behind when you need it, when people have lost their minds — and societies lose their minds fairly regularly.
We go crazy about something. We get very scared, and oftentimes we're scared about something that has a grain of truth. I always try to put myself back in historical shoes — during McCarthyism, during the period when American and British spies gave Stalin the bomb. I think I'd be pretty freaked out. But we then think, "now the threat is real" — and actually we always have less reason to be scared today than in the past.
Mónica:
Yeah. Now I see that.
I read Free Speech: A History by Jacob Mchangama. Am I saying that right?
Greg:
Mchangama. Yeah.
Mónica:
Gosh, that was amazing. And I love, just re-read the acknowledgements at the end —
Greg:
Because I'm the first person he mentioned. He was a FIRE fellow for a long time, and he did this incredible podcast for us called Clear and Present Danger. But then he kept wanting to also write a book. And I'm like, dude, don't just add on a book — you're underestimating how much it takes. And as I predicted, by the time the book came, he was like, I'm just spent.
Mónica:
I can't imagine. And I'm really glad he did it. One of my biggest takeaways from thousands of years of documentation about free speech — all the setbacks, two steps forward, three steps back — is that it seems true to me that the best way to defend that right when it's under threat is to exercise it. Time and time again, it was illegal and somebody was just that guy or that gal to say: I don't care if it's illegal, I'm going to do it because I'm not going to live the lie. This is my right.
And I'm thinking about this in the context of now, because I work on political divides. It's one thing to have free speech so that we can talk about the uncomfortable things. But if people are too afraid to exercise it, to listen to the truth of what somebody else thinks, if it may hurt them — or to tell them the truth of what they think, if they're afraid of legal consequences — then will we end up losing these incredible rights we fought so hard to grow and to fortify?
Greg:
Yeah. And that's the fear. Some of the stuff that's the most effective at getting us to practice free speech is having a big circle of people — some a lot like you, some not at all like you — who talk with great candor. And we don't have a lot of experiences like that.
What if we had something like a service requirement, where part of it was just having a gathering where people actually got to know each other? I talk about this sometimes as the original meaning of a safe space — at least the meaning I was first introduced to in the 1990s. What it meant back then was: it doesn't leave this room, and we're going to be real. That's what it was. A safe space — meaning people could engage in candor.
Mónica:
And I have to tell you, I remember someone on the right telling me that his problem with the whole term "safe space" recently is that he always wanted to ask: a safe space for who? Not a safe space for me. You've made this very much not a safe space for me, but you're calling it a safe space for everyone.
Greg:
Because what it got co-opted to mean was a place of violent agreement and no tolerance for dissent. Whereas what I'm talking about is a place where it's like: I'm going to talk about some hard stuff, and I'm not going to get punished for it. You're going to try to understand where I'm coming from.
I have a lot of respect for that. I wish we had more chances to have face-to-face interaction with people who are a lot less like us. I think it'd be a lot healthier for the country.
Mónica:
I would love the culture to push us along somehow. And it just seems like we're so far away from that, and yet I feel that pressure. I've told you that all of this around free speech — personally, I've understood my level of care for this more recently. And I've asked myself questions like: if things get really bad, if it becomes illegal to publish an op-ed about a take I believe would help my society — would I still publish it? Because in that moment, that would feel like the way I help. But would I have the courage? And how — I'm actually wrestling with this. What can I do now to build the courage just in case? Because it can only help me be a braver, more honest person in all my life.
Greg:
You could work at FIRE.
Mónica:
(laughter)
But anyway — how do you even look at this stuff? We talked in the beginning about the things you've had to do. You've had to do some things to navigate FIRE along this climate, try to keep integrity, open yourself up to risk. What have you learned?
Greg:
I just did a piece on my mentor, Harvey Silverglate, who is the co-founder of FIRE and a great civil libertarian. He used to defend a lot of the activists on campus back in the sixties, in the early days of his career. He fought in the culture wars on behalf of free speech in the eighties and nineties as well. And he was the one who went out and found me in 2001, when I became legal director.
I found it pretty exhausting to be in the middle of this stuff a lot. And there were times where it got too much for me — including what happened to me in 2007, which I write about in Coddling the American Mind, which led me to that book.
Mónica:
And maybe we should clue in listeners — without needing to go all in — can you sum up what happened in 2007?
Greg:
I had to be hospitalized. I had a really bad year and got really tired of being in the middle of all this conflict, and I paid a real psychological toll for it. I had a girlfriend who was mad that I would defend Republicans, and I had Republicans mad at me because I would sometimes defend the left. It's a lot. And it's a lot of responsibility to be the person ultimately in charge of this organization.
But then I recovered — and that's what got me into cognitive behavioral therapy. And then many years later I started to feel worn down by it again. And I asked Harvey — I almost didn't want to ask him, because Harvey just doesn't care what people think about him. But he said: "Greg, I'm actually kind of surprised it took you so long to come to me. But if you're going to do anything important in life, people are going to hate you for it. So you can only really care about what ten people in the world think of you."
Mónica:
Ooh.
Greg:
"Choose those people very carefully." And I was like: that's right. It doesn't even necessarily mean just your friends — it could be people you disagree with on some things, but whose respect you value.
Mónica:
Yeah. The image I have in my mind is a human being with threads emerging from them, tied to other human beings. And if too many of those threads are connected to people whose opinion could ruin you — then we're being tugged in so many directions we lose sight of who we are, what we really think, apart from the tribes that give us a sense of security.
It does seem like culture war is so warlike because we resolve so easily into groups that can't disobey each other within the group.
Greg:
You'll drive yourself crazy, because you can't make everyone happy. You can try — by saying nothing, by keeping your opinion to yourself, by standing for nothing, by staying in a perfectly politically homogenous shell. And the funny thing is people have tried the perfectly politically homogenous shell and found that even that can be a den of vipers on the smallest of details.
Mónica:
I'm thinking of that line from Hamilton since I'm taking my family to New York to see it next month. "If you stand for nothing, Burr, what'll you fall for?"
Greg:
I love that play so much. And I think one of the reasons why it got such backlash when it came out on Disney was that more of the population got to see it and were like, oh my God — this is actually surprisingly patriotic.
Mónica:
Oh, extremely. I think so. Thank you, Lin-Manuel.
Greg:
I love it.
Mónica:
There's a lot in Hamilton — the character of Hamilton does not make himself necessarily a happy person by being so expressive. That's who he was. He was very expressive, and the country certainly thanks him for the fact that he wasn't so afraid to speak his mind.
Greg:
His mistake was speech versus violence.
Mónica:
Inform me, please.
Greg:
The fact that he felt the need to duel. He literally paid with his life.
Mónica:
There you go. Yeah. Let's not make that mistake in our own lives, people. So true. Alright — how do people develop that skill? The courage to withstand protected speech?
Greg:
Read old books.
Mónica:
Okay. What is that about?
Greg:
People's attitudes even a couple of decades ago will curl your toes. And if you go further back in time, you'll be like, oh my God, I can't believe they believed that. But the more you're exposed to it, the more you're a little bit like: oh yeah, actually, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The past is a foreign country, after all.
I've really benefited from having parents from two very different cultures — Russian and British. They're very, very different. And having a neighborhood with people from all over the world. Travel changes it. Reading from the past changes it. When you get a sense of the actual diversity of the world, it can help build that muscle.
Mónica:
Get out of your own bubble. Even if you've built that bubble for the sake of your own comfort — and maybe especially so, which is a big ask for a lot of people.
Greg:
Work in a restaurant.
Mónica:
Work in a restaurant. There you go. Drive an Uber. Yeah — get a sense of the real variety that's out there.
Greg:
Both in space and in time.
Mónica:
In space and in time — because you're talking about reading old books, getting the perspective that puts today's horrors in a new light.
Greg:
Yeah. But also just the range of opinion. There were things people in the past were wildly more uptight about — sex, in particular. Any and all things related to that. And we're wildly more okay talking about that now. But our toes curl over other things — often beliefs we consider backwards, and in many cases rightfully so. But it's helpful to remember that even people we admire had beliefs that would horrify us today.
Mónica:
Something does march forward, and we can have faith in each other — hopefully — in our capacity to still march forward.
I asked — but I didn't check before we started recording — I asked if you might come with a story of a time you felt you really had to say something that carried a lot of risk. You chose to do it, but it was quite risky. Did you?
Greg:
That's a pretty regular experience.
Mónica:
Okay. (laughter) A particular case you could share?
Greg:
My first time on national television — on MSNBC — was right after 9/11. We were defending a guy who had been accused of having ties to terrorism, but rather than firing him for ties to terrorism, they decided to fire him for saying "death to Israel" in a recording from 1989. I think it's obnoxious, but it's protected speech. And if they want to fire him for ties to terrorism, they could — if they prove it.
So I went on TV to defend Sami Al-Arian against Daniel Pipes, who is a critic of Middle East policy, conservative. And people really hated my guts on this. It's one of those things where you know it intellectually, but it's a totally different thing when you actually experience it. They hate me. Lots of hate mail. So it was really important to feel that distinction — because when you hear that people in the past that we really admire now were hated in their time, it's hard to actually feel that. But when you do feel it —
Mónica:
It's a feeling, isn't it? It's not an intellectual thing you can grasp.
Greg:
Yeah. So that was a big one. And then Charlie Hebdo, and the Muhammad cartoons — that was scary as hell.
Mónica:
Did you steel yourself to go and do this thing? You know your convictions, but right before the cameras rolled, what were you thinking?
Greg:
Myers-Briggs is kind of BS in a lot of ways, but I tested as a strong T — Thinking — and it hurt my feelings, because I'm a very emotional person. But someone clarified: it's about how you make your decisions. And I was like, oh — because I make decisions all the time that are emotionally difficult, and I try not to think about it too much. It's like: this is the thing I have to do, and I'm going to go do it. I will be sad later.
There's a certain amount of cognitive technique at work — being like: okay, put that thought away, and let's go.
Mónica:
Can I get one more layer? What are the cognitive techniques that help you in that moment? You know your convictions. You want to stay steady enough to deliver in the heat you're facing.
Greg:
In stressful situations like that, concentrating on precisely what you need to do at the time really helps. Working on precisely what you're going to say, and not the consequences of it. Getting yourself very present-focused. I'm a ruminator — but getting yourself in the present as much as possible helps a lot.
Mónica:
I have two more questions for you. I was about to say last question, but there's actually one before it that I think is really important. You talked about how humility and curiosity are good ways to push back against fear. Just generally in the culture, around all these things — how do you check to make sure you're not wrong? You are the free speech guy, and this world is always changing.
Greg:
My organization is pretty good at that. People think some of our cases are very simple at FIRE, but we do a lot of internal checking — are we right on this? We have a strong internal culture of taking seriously the likelihood that we're wrong. And once you get used to that, it's just not so bad anymore.
Mónica:
You get pushback from someone at FIRE and you're like, oh yeah, good point.
Greg:
Yes. A lot of practice. And a lot of testing against other people. Being able to change your mind and not feel like it's some kind of defeat. If you want to always be right, well — wanting to always have been right is a very difficult place to live.
Mónica:
Yeah. You'd have to be omnipotent and omniscient. That's a bit of a high bar.
Alright. Here's the impossible last question: What is it going to take, ultimately, to build a better world and a freer world at the same time?
Greg:
I'm going to practice the epistemic humility I always preach and say: I don't know. But I think about it a lot. And the answer that scares me is that oftentimes it's a crisis. It's something that forces you to actually realize what you've taken for granted. That's usually the historical mechanism by which things change. And that's not what we want — but I actually do feel like right now we're in a crisis. We're in a moment where something's got to give in terms of the way we do business as usual. And you never know what things are going to look like on the other side of that.
In terms of what we can do to prepare: I think there are all sorts of small actions. What I wish people would do right now is be fiercer defenders of small-l liberalism. The things that actually did make Americans different. We have these small-l liberal ideas — free speech chief among them — that the left and right used to share. And right now the center-left and center-right really have more in common with each other than they do with their wings. Those of us who really value there being something special and weird about us need to come together and be a little less apologetic about it.
Because the true spirit of liberty is that which is not too sure that it is right — that's a great quote from Learned Hand. But sometimes, the kind of liberals I've always been tend to direct that only internally. You can also direct it externally and be like: listen, you are all much too sure, in your systems that always seem to involve power having more power. I'm going to listen to the people who are much more serious about taking seriously the possibility that they might be wrong — to build a better world together, in the realm of what can't be known, with some bravery and some faith and some belief in beautiful human institutions that only exist if we fight for them.
Mónica:
And we get through this crisis with a bit of courage. Greg, thank you so much for this. This was a lot of fun.
Greg:
Thanks for having me, Mónica.
Mónica:
All right.
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Mónica:
A Braver Way is produced by Reclaim Curiosity and distributed in partnership with Braver Angels, KUOW, and Deseret News. Our theme music is by the fantastic, number-one Billboard bluegrass-charting hip-hop band, Gangstagrass. You can subscribe to A Braver Way on YouTube and follow us on your favorite podcast app. Want to chat? You can join our listener text line by texting the word "brave" to 206-926-9955, or email us anytime with anything at abraverway@reclaimcuriosity.com. I'm your host and guide across the divide, Mónica Guzmán. Take heart, everyone. Till next time.
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