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That's kind of conversation between your soul.

That's conversation between your soul and the night. Hello, Hello, Prestige heads and welcome

And I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade Derek Davison. And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today. Farah de Boisvilla, Farah's historian at Princeton and the author of the recent What is Free Speech, the History of a Dangerous Idea. So Farah, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's great to be on the podcast.

So let's just dive right in. And I mean, I can imagine why someone would write a book about free speech today, given recent things happening on campus. But why did you tell me, what inspired you to

write this book? Why focus on this subject in particular? Well, I actually started it about 10

years ago. And at the time, I thought, whoa, it's peak free speech right now in 2015. I missed

hurry up. Little did I know. And it was provoked really by... Who could have predicted?

Who could have predicted? Prevoked by my previous book, which is a history of sexual attitudes and the origins of

modern Western attitudes to sex. And I started talking about that around the world to audiences

everywhere. And I realize people have different norms about what they say in public about sex.

That was interesting. But then I went to China, and that was an eye-opening experience. First of all, my book, as all books there, had to be run past the official censorship apparatus. It was censored. And I went out there and realized this is a culture in which every single previously discovered apparatus of censorship and some new ones is being simultaneously applied

by the Communist Party to indoctrinate the people of China. So I was blown away by the

censorship apparatus and I came back, I accepted a job in the United States and I started thinking

about, you know, free speech, which is a great ideal, which we all believe in, and yet we can never

agree on exactly what it means. In fact, we fight about it all the time in the West. So I wanted

to answer the two questions, where does this idea come from, and why can we never agree on it?

Which I'm happy to say, you need history to understand. You really can't understand free speech from first principles,

either philosophical or judicial. You need to understand where this idea comes from, and that's part of

why we're in such a mess about it today. So where does the idea come from? I mean, you gesture

...