- All right, every now and then,
you get to meet one of your dream guests
and that just happened.
Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus at MIT,
considered the father
of modern linguistics,
he's a political activist, a philosopher.
He is the most quoted
living author in history,
was just on the show, 92 years old,
and we went deep on censorship,
on all the aspects of cancel culture,
on what's happening right now
with the right and the left.
And he went really deep, back into what
the First Amendment of
the Constitution means,
about how it needs to be protected
and how you need justices
and the whole judicial review process.
And he went also really
deep on a lot of the history
of corporate culture
interfering with politics.
He says that capitalism
and democracy can never
exist together and it was
a fascinating conversation,
to say the least.
If you wanna go check it out,
it's at freedomplatform.tv/chomsky.
We had to stream it there
because he kinda went
off the reservation on some of the stuff.
We would have been
probably banned or deleted
on other platforms, but it's all good.
It's there if you wanna
watch it right now.
It was shorter than some
of my bigger conversations
but it was still excellent
and I appreciate him a lot.
Again, he's a living legend and, again,
we share MIT together and he's just known
for so many really powerful ideas,
known for always being on the side
of fighting against wars, of always being
on the side of the under trodden,
and he said some really interesting
things about censorship.
He said, "This always existed, Brian.
"It just happened against the left."
He said cancel culture has been out there,
it just happened against the left
and now it's happening to both sides
and that's why it's being
organised and recognised.
He also talked about freedom of thought
and how that intersects
with freedom of speech
and also talked about hate speech
and why he thinks that ideas
that we don't agree with,
even hate speech, like a Holocaust denier,
he says, should not be made illegal
because when you do
that, it actually gives
them more attention, whereas
when their ideas have
to actually exist with other ideas,
then people soon realise
that they're not worth
what they are and that's
why he's not a fan
of these big technology platforms
that are echo chambers
and basically tell you
what you wanna hear over and over again
and that's why he thinks freedom of speech
is more important now than ever
and I can't agree with him more.
I think it's super important
that we put out ideas,
but if you really believe
in freedom of speech,
you have to believe in freedom of speech
for things that you don't wanna hear
and that's why I'm really glad
that we had Noam on
tonight on the Platform
to give a voice from the left alongside
the voices that we give on the right
because we need to be
willing to hear things
that we don't always agree with
and that goes for us too and
everybody else out there.
So again, we're starting to do this
with the Digital Freedom Platform
and trying to put out all the ideas
so we can engage with them and decide
what's good and what's bad,
but don't wanna banish things
to the dark corner of the internet
so they can fester and
foster in these strange ways.
Let's have it out there,
let's have these discussions,
and let's have it exist.
Unfortunately, sometimes,
with the internet,
you have a populous culture
that tries to put down ideas
that are against basic freedom of speech
and that's what cancel culture is
and a lot of what we seeing
happening on social media
and it's not okay and the
community policies aren't okay
and this concept of
hate speech is not okay
because it's used as a
blanket to subvert freedom
and free ideas and that's so important.
So, there it is,
freedomplatform.tv/chomsky.
This was epic.
That man's a legend and
it was just an honour
to sit down and talk with him.
I hope you enjoy the episode
and I hope you enjoy your freedom.
It's not free, but it's worth it.
Peace.
