Jack Symes

Yeah, I just think all the things we've just said there, right, is the nuance that's lacking in a lot of the public conversation about this stuff. Absolutely. I agree. At the start of your documentary, just say, don't do this. If you're going to do this, you need to speak to – again, it's about legalization. It's about safe use.

Well, it's the same kind of, again, this is back to the point of philosophy, getting clear on the details and communicating them clearly when it comes to psychedelics. I mentioned free speech a moment ago, right? This is something which is huge in our culture at the moment. I was at your comedy club on Monday. I've never seen Kill Tony before. Pretty fun. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

It was great fun. And afterwards, a few guys in the bar afterwards were asking what I'm talking to you about. And they started talking about free speech, because I'm obviously from the UK and wanted to know whether I supported Keir Starmer as if Keir Starmer was like Mao or something. I was like, there's no comparison. He's like, you're like Marxist there now, right?

I was like, no, it's not quite like that.

It's a fun place. The people in Austin are some of the best people in the last five days that I've came across.

Yeah, well, it seems like, I'm not sure if, this happens in the UK as well, especially with the, like, we've obviously been exposed to a lot of riots and stuff as of late, those three poor girls that lost their lives in Southport. You know, and it's a huge shame, because this is what people wanted to talk to me about at the bar, right? Right.

The big shame is that people are going out of their way to use it as an excuse to rob shops and firebomb mosques and try and burn down hotels with innocent women and children in there, right? Like every single politician in the UK condemns them. Less than 5% of people in the UK even sympathize with them, right?

But there's an interesting question that comes out of that, which we're not talking about, which is, the line of free speech, right? Everyone just goes, it's like George Orwell's 1984 or something. It's like you can't be open with your thoughts. And it's been interesting being here and experiencing a bit more of that strong sentiment, which is, you know...

I think free speech isn't an absolute right in the US or in Europe. You can't share, you can't engage in slander. There's laws against that. You can't share sexually explicit images and the like of children, which is a type of freedom of expression, which might come under freedom of speech.

Well, if you were to take... Okay, let's take an image. So you don't want to include... If you want to include images, plays, symbols... Well, you can't dox people.

You can't display a Nazi flag on your front lawn. Right. You might be able to do that some places. Well, it was interesting in the US it was 1919 when someone was, uh, that the high court, Supreme court legislated against somebody for spreading anti-war leaflets because it was a threat to the stability of the US more generally.

And the state decided that the thing more important for free speech and to preserve it into the future is to limit it in this case. So there are things, you might think that free speech is like intrinsically valuable, the thing which is more important than anything else.

Yeah. And my intuition is in that case that that was the wrong way to legislate against.

This is what I found speaking to some of the comedians after the show, because comedians are often, you know, the strongest defenders of free speech, right? It's an interesting conversation.

Is that when we're thinking about the things we value most, I think things that come ahead of free speech are things like life, ability to have conscious experiences, the potential to flourish, be happy and experience pleasure. So I take even if free speech is something worth pursuing for its own sake, which I take it to be, it is still subject to those other things.

So even one of the strongest proponents of free speech in the history of philosophy, John Stuart Mill, argued that free speech should be allowed in every single scenario except when it breaches the harm principle. And so the interesting question we need to ask is, when does something breach the harm principle? People famously say, so you can't shout fire in a crowded theater.

If you know by shouting fire that there's going to be a stampede and two people will die, thought experiments, pretend those are the rules. You shout fire, two people will die. Should we punish that person for doing it, knowing that those two people would die? And you sort of go... I think it's fairly reasonable. It doesn't have to be 100% the case.

We just need it to be more reasonable than not to prosecute that person. So in that case, you might go, yes. So it breaches the harm principle. John Stuart Mill gives the example of, I think it's like a corn dealer, and saying like, you can write in a newspaper like, The corn dealer's like, you know, he's the worst. He's exploiting us all. That's the reason we're hungry.

But then he says, you can't shout that to an angry mob that's outside the corn dealer's house. And maybe that one's a little bit more tricky because there's more... The harm's not as direct. Right. But what we're seeing is... Public intellectuals who, back to our conversation earlier, like I'm a part of this team that just defends free speech no matter what.

Like even the most valiant defender of free speech might go, don't shout fire in a crowded theater. One of your comedians actually said, I'd shout theater in a crowded fire. I thought that was funny. I'd even think it's okay to get people to stay in the fire if there was one.