Presidents Have Tried To Censor the Media Before…and It Backfired

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Pushkin.

Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today in the show, have you been canceled ever, Maria?

I have not been canceled.

Have you ever been canceled, Nate?

Oh, people have tried.

If you listen to the last episode with Eleoneg, you know, you come at the king, you best not miss.

miss fucking blue sky idiots on fucking twitter and now they move to blue sky

yeah i tell us how you really feel nate about

no it's a strategy of the weak sometimes it is no no it is and sometimes of the strong

Today in the show, we're going to be talking a little bit about Jimmy Kimmel.

Maria, I think you're going to have some historical points of view.

I'll just be ranting.

You'll provide the evidence.

I'll just have takes.

We will go into some historical context in a discussion of free speech and how it has evolved throughout the history of the United States.

So on that note, Nate,

let's talk some Jimmy Kimmel.

Last week, Jimmy Kimmel's show was canceled indefinitely by the powers that be at Disney and ABC.

And

we are taping this on Monday, September 22nd.

We just found out the Jimmy Kimmel live show is going to be returning.

By the time you guys hear this Wednesday, it will have been last night.

But I do want to stress that we have not actually seen or heard the return yet.

But yes, they just made an announcement.

that

they will be bringing Jimmy Kimmel back to the air after discussions with Mr.

Kimmel

about the future.

And the original cancellation was very, very different from anything we've talked about on the show in terms of like cancel.

No, no, in some ways.

Hold on.

May I finish?

In terms of cancel culture, because it was coming from Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC,

who exerted pressure on the brass at Disney to cancel the show and made some very veiled, but not that veiled threats that, you know, we're probably going to pull your license.

We're going to pull your license.

It was like, okay, we can do it the easy way or the hard way.

You sound like a solid person.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It sounded like we were back in the Sopranos, you know, or, or, you know, Sopranos because

a much worse written version of the Sopranos.

Someone who didn't actually know how to write and decided the easy way or the hard way was the way to write this dialogue.

But yeah, so that's what happened.

And that's why I said that's different from what we've been talking about, because there's, you know, cancel culture, and then there's the chairman of the FCC saying, hey, if you can say anything we don't like, we're going to yank your license.

So in response, you know, there were tons of protests.

There was a lot of people canceling their subscriptions to, you know, Hulu, ABC, ESPN, all of these things.

And Nate, I'm actually very curious.

I do want to give some background to this in a second, but while we're setting kind of the present day context, I'm curious what you think the financial impact of this was, because I actually, I saw a lot of people canceling subscriptions that I wouldn't have expected.

And I wonder, you know, I wonder if this is in any way a financial decision as well, whether that actually had an effect or not.

I don't know.

I want to think that it did, but I'm actually just curious what your, what your take on that particular element is.

Yeah.

And I worked for Disney for 10 years.

I was working at ABC News.

So full disclosure, you know, I

you know, a pension, some which is a Disney stock, but I also hate their guts.

So, that bias probably outweighs my financial motivation.

But, like, look, these companies tend to make decisions very expediently, is one way I would put it, right?

Maybe you have people who have vision about individual products, right?

But, like, I think at the end of the day, Bob Iger cares about theme parks and movies and big franchise IP, right?

These gigantic projects and like, and probably sees ABC News as this thing that, like,

you know, still, I think, probably makes money.

I mean, TV news does not get the ratings it wants to, but it's not that expensive to produce as compared to like scripted drama or things like that.

But, like, increasingly, these big networks have wondered, do we even want to be in the news business at all, right?

Like, the head of Disney doesn't really care about like the creative or journalistic integrity, except to the extent that, like, you know, it might create problems for talent down the line.

So yeah, look, the precedent I would draw is to the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos.

I'm a keen observer of media, particularly when it comes to covering American domestic politics, right?

I would say

five or 10 years ago that people would say, well, you know, the New York Times is the most prestigious.

and highest grossing newspaper, at least center-left newspaper media brand in America.

But the Washington Post is nipping at their heels.

They have a lot of talent on domestic politics.

They're kind of co-equal.

They break a lot of stories.

They win a lot of Pulitzers.

And they've made one decision after another have led to a lot of the other kind of cancellations, canceled subscriptions.

You know, when they squashed a op-ed endorsing Kamala Harris, and again, I don't really think that like newspapers should be in the business of endorsing candidates, at least for national office.

I've always found that strange.

In some ways, I find the distinction between op-ed and news kind of strange.

But that led to, I think, maybe tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of canceled subscriptions.

And meanwhile, if you look at the talent, right?

Like if you took like the 50 biggest name brands at the Washington Post from two years ago, I think literally half might be gone.

And a lot of

voluntary based on feel-like did not have editorial support of the masthead.

And, you know, that's a challenge.

I mean, it might be in a world where like, you know, I think the Washington Post has significantly declined in both revenue and relevance.

Right.

And like,

yeah, I know.

I mean, they're going to be very sensitive to things like Hulu subscriptions.

That's the way these businesses work.

Right.

Like, again, ordinarily, sometimes I think boycotts are a little pretentious and silly.

Like, the way these big

gigantic, generic kind of media brands work is, you know, they don't want to get yelled at by people, right?

They're risk averse.

And so if they're like, well, this could jeopardize your whole business.

And I think that's

probably part of it.

I mean, one thing to understand about Trump is he does a lot of things that I think are very extreme and objectionable.

And I think this is one of the clear things that, like, is classic authoritarian capital A, right?

You look at Turkey or Russia or other countries where there's been a pullback from democracy and like finding a pretense to cancel broadcast licenses is

capital A authoritarian.

They did kind of pull back back and Carr kind of said, well, I was just pontificating and

well, it's important that they, you know, and people have this heuristic where they'll kind of discount what they're doing.

No, no, it is, you know, they could have not pulled back.

Yes, this is true.

No, but look, I will say, since I criticized him in my newsletter over the weekend, like, you know, I will say good for Disney for.

uncanceling Kimmel, who, by the way, did fuck up in some ways.

Let me just, you know, the fuck up is that he said or strongly implied that the person who, allegedly, uh, killed Charlie Kirk was MAGA and that MAGA was trying to, MAGA Made America Creek, and was trying to deny the fact that, like, he was MAGA.

And,

you know,

Kimmel said that on Monday evening's episode,

based on really no evidence whatsoever, based on kind of like

you know, what I think are properly called kind of conspiracy theories on blue sky and Twitter, you know, you know and everyone uses the phrase insensitivity like i think this to a certain extent

the job of

comedians is to press the line on sensitivity so i think sensitivity is like a dumb euphemism right he jimmy kimmel spread misinformation but i tell you what who hasn't at some point yes it's script tv it's not live to be another reason i'm less forgiving but like it's far far below a canceling offense right or a firing offense yeah And just to

give a bit of history to that particular point, but then I also want to go even a little further back to highlight something else that you said.

There was a pretty substantial Supreme Court decision back in 1964, New York Times versus Sullivan.

And that decision came out of an ad that the New York Times had run.

And they basically were trying to contribute donations to defend MLK on perjury charges, and the ad had some factual inaccuracies.

And

L.B.

Sullivan, who's the cellulant of the case,

said that he felt personally criticized, even though he was never actually mentioned by name in the ad.

He sent a request to the Times to retract the information and wanted damages.

The Times refused.

Anyway, this went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the times and established a standard known as the actual malice standard or reckless disregard of the truth.

So basically, if you want to win a libel suit, you have to prove that the person

who was making the statement knew it was false and acted with a malicious purpose, right?

With an intent to harm the

subject, which was a huge kind of huge win for free speech because these factual inaccuracies that were in the ad, they weren't on purpose, right it's not like they wanted to take this guy down and so but they just said you know okay yeah like factual inaccuracies but it's not enough to suspend our license and to get rid of this and this was kind of a landmark first amendment free speech decision but something that i want to kind of go back even further in history the reason by the way that i invoke the actual malice standard is I think that Jimmy Kimmel, you know, also,

you can be factually inaccurate and not actually follow foul of that standard, right?

You didn't say it knowing that you were blatantly saying something untrue.

I think at the time he probably thought that he was saying something that was right.

Whether, you know, he was correct journalistically or not is a different story.

But going even further back, Nate, one of the things that you said was that, you know, networks, places like Disney are constantly way...

playing this calculus, right?

They don't want to get criticized and they're trying to figure out like, what do we do?

How do we sidestep that?

And it's really interesting to me because I think that all of the free speech attacks in the United States have shown this kind of constant calculus.

And it's not always worked out the way that the person thought it was.

So I think this, the oldest kind of attack goes back to 1798 with the Sedition Act, right?

And this was John Adams when he basically said that they were in a war with France.

It wasn't a declared war.

And he wanted to silence media critics of the government.

And so he passed an act that said it was unlawful to publish any, quote, false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government, end quote.

And the measures were huge.

Fines up to $2,000.

I mean, how much is that?

I don't even know.

In 1798, like, that's insane.

Two years in prison.

And so a lot of publications started censoring themselves.

But what ended up happening, so they and they actually used it very punitively.

They ended up sending people to jail.

Several newspapers had to shut down.

what ended up happening was that there was a huge backlash against this, right?

This was the end of the Federalists.

Jefferson came to power on like a huge wave of support.

And even later, the Justice Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court, who had been very pro-sedition act, he was impeached for for this.

So basically everyone was galvanized against it.

So it ended up just having a huge, huge backlash to that attempt to stem free speech.

Happened again during World War I, right, with Woodrow Wilson, who was a scholar who had actually defended free speech.

And he tried to get another sedition act.

Then we had McCarthyism in the 50s, who tried to bully journalists and do all of that.

That again, big, big backlash.

The people who stood up to McCarthyism have fared much better in the eyes of history than the people like McCarthy himself.

Then we've got New York Times versus Sullivan.

Then we get Richard Nixon.

And so it was very funny when you started saying that you think the best kind of example is the Washington Post.

I thought you were going to go in a totally different direction because the other time that an FCC license was threatened was against the Washington Post when they were trying to publish the Pentagon papers.

They published them anyway, and obviously they won that battle.

But Nixon was probably, other than Trump, the single most vindictive president against the media.

He ousted Stuart Laurie for an article that he wrote in 1971 for the LA Times.

So he actually just banned him from the White House.

And, you know, he

basically said that the press, whom he started calling the media, that comes from Nixon,

was the enemy and told his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to constantly attack the media,

refer to them as a small and unelected elite and basically

create a rift so that people wouldn't trust the media.

And he even threatened lawsuits if anyone used tricky dick in print.

So that, you know, it became incredibly petty.

And he did kind of this, Trump is really taking a page out of his playbook in a way, because he had the IRS investigate tax returns by Seymour Hirsch and other journalists that the White House didn't really like.

And so the thing that I found that I thought was the most ridiculous is this was pre-Watergate, Gordon Liddy

and Howard Hunt discussed murdering a journalist, Jack Anderson, like actually killing him,

so that he would stop basically the leaks that were damaging to Nixon and to the administration and stop any further criticism of the administration.

They considered things like putting LSD on his steering wheel so that he would start hallucinating while driving his car and get into a car crash.

Which is a free LSD.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't think they realized how LSD.

Yeah, anyway.

And then Liddy, this is a quote from Liddy.

He said, I would have knifed him or broken his neck.

End quote.

So this is all to say that, you know, we see these sorts of attacks in the past.

And every single time they have not worked out well, but every single time the media has actually fought back, right?

The Washington Post.

published Pentagon Papers.

Lori had a career in journalism, like people would hire him after that.

And Seymour Hirsch, obviously, Pulitzer Prize, like all of these people are storied journalists and people who had the support of the country.

And with Kimmel at the beginning, it was the first time that

an organization had gotten a threat from the FCC and rather than saying, no, fuck you, you know, we're the media and this is freedom of press, said, okay, okay, we'll fire you until they didn't.

So this is, I think, a very interesting moment, but those historical precedents, I think, are really interesting to keep in mind, especially because they did not turn out well for the government.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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I think with anything we're covering in today's age, you have to be aware that

most commentators have a bias toward thinking history begins when they're age eight.

You know what I mean?

And the longer sweep of like, how does this moment in America relate to

Solana violence in the 60s, right?

The Civil War.

I mean, you know,

I think one has to be careful with those comparisons.

And it might be concerning enough that we seem to be losing decades of progress on some issues, right?

Yep.

I mean, there is the other precedent, which is, you know, do you know who Jimmy Kimmel replaced on ABC?

I don't remember.

Bill Maher.

Because Bill Maher's politically incorrect got canceled because he said the 9-11 terrorists...

were courageous and we are not lobbying cruise missiles from thousands of miles away, right?

He said that like

seven days after 9-11,

it was litigated in the press for a much longer time.

Eventually,

his show was

let lapse and then he went to HBO and I'm sure made lots of money and became more famous.

You know, part of cancellation, and now I want to be clear, I thought that their cancel culture was a thing that liberals, I call them progressives because it's a very illiberal attitude, right?

That progressives really were bloodthirsty for a number of years, kind of peaking in the year 2020 or so.

I thought it was an embarrassment to the liberal tradition of free speech.

I think they're petty and jealous, and they don't understand how, in a relatively free country, that when you suppress speech, it usually only makes it more compelling and like and more powerful, right?

And they thought they could contain the information ecosystem.

They accomplished nothing that they wanted.

And, you know, they have direct moral responsibility for contributing to a climate in which free speech is compromised.

With that said, Maria, as you said, people have always been hypocritical about free speech.

The definition's always been contingent and evolving in practice, right?

And so, you know, if you were around for September 11th when Bill Maher got canceled, the Dixie Chicks and Phil Donahue and other, you know, people, you know, you're not like, you're not surprised very much by any of this.

And now if I'm Trump, now it's my turn.

Now it's my turn.

And I felt, I think justifiably there was a lot of bullshit from progressives when they were in power.

Right.

And we want revenge.

Right.

And by the way, I don't think progressives have often stood up for like the higher-minded principles either.

Right.

They don't think like good poker players where it's like, okay, what is the equilibrium if everybody adopts this attitude?

It's kind of Kantian, like the golden rule, right?

How does society get along if, you know, literally just put yourself in the person's shoes and say, eventually a Republican is going to win back in office.

And by the way, eventually there will be a Democrat back in office, maybe in, I guess, we're early in the Trump's term, three and a half years, right?

You know, turnabout will be fair play then, but like perpetually you're losing it.

No,

I think that we forget that we forget that free speech was created.

to protect speech we don't like,

not speech that we agree with.

People forget this all the time.

They're like, yes, free speech.

Wait, you said something that I disagree with.

You can't say that.

And we've said this on the show before.

And, you know, I don't want to constantly give you history lessons.

But remember, we talked about Skokie Illinois, Nate, and kind of, and the ACLU on this show before.

For people who missed that episode, that was basically kind of a case that went to the Supreme Court that involved letting neo-Nazis march in a Jewish, in a predominantly Jewish community.

And the ACLU took it on.

And I remember, I still remember learning about that and being like, holy shit, like fuck those guys.

But yes, like you have to protect the speech that you most disagree with because that's the whole point.

right that is what free speech means it means that we can disagree it means that we can have civil discourse it means that we can all have all of these different ideas and it's okay so i actually nate agree with you that you know the liberals went way too far.

I think this was the case in academia.

You know, I think this was the case at my alma mater, Harvard, where certain professors lost their jobs, right, for.

espousing idea, you know, for engaging in research that was not politically correct.

And that's not what academia is about.

As long as you are not academically dishonest, as long as you're actually kind of trying to figure out what the truth is, you're allowed to hold different opinions.

But I think that, as you say, this isn't like we've devolved, like this is horrifying, like that this is now the spiral, right?

And instead, you need to kind of reset and go back to those first principles and say, okay, you know, free speech, we're for it.

The Supreme Court has to say this country is for free speech.

And the FCC can't be threatening licenses because of something somebody said that they don't like.

And we can't be in a climate, you know, after that Trump doubled down and said, yeah, you know, you shouldn't shouldn't criticize the president.

If we don't like you or you say something bad about me, there are going to be consequences.

I mean, it's insane, right, for a president to say that.

But we're at the point where people, there are a lot of people who don't think it's insane and who are like, yeah, serves you right.

You shouldn't criticize the president.

And the funniest thing is,

what has prompted...

this whole conversation is the death of Charlie Kirk, who I think, you know, I didn't know him and I didn't know much about about him until he died, to be perfectly honest.

But I think he would be someone who actually would be opposed to all of this because he was a proponent of free speech.

No, and, you know, a lot of these videos have circulated on social media of him like

debating on college campuses was kind of like his big thing.

And like, you know, he

was good at that.

And the whole idea was it's an open forum.

Come debate me, bro.

Right.

And like, here I'll get myself in trouble with with probably only a very small fraction of our audience, right?

You know, there aren't that many, I don't think,

super eloquent spokespeople for the Trumpian movement, okay?

And yet, half the country,

49.9%, he won the popular vote, you know, half the country voted for it last time.

And like, and like, you know, you have to live in that world.

And

if you're not going to like, you know, give a platform to Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk, who the fuck are you going to give a platform to?

You know what I mean?

You have to be willing to have, you know, again, I believe in speech broadly.

Not, I just don't think of speech as the Free Amendment, but I believe in like, we have to have a more tolerant, tolerance is a word I would use, right?

A more tolerant ecosystem for disagreement.

Absolutely.

More tolerant.

And I would also say kinder, right?

Where your knee-jerk reaction isn't like,

fuck this person, but okay, you know, this doesn't sound right to me, but where are you coming from?

Like to try to understand, right?

To at least try to come from a place of kindness and not a place of pitchforks and like, let's burn you down, which is, I think, you know, to bring this back to Kimmel, which is I think the natural end of all of this rhetoric is, you know, we're going to burn you down

and we're going to remove you from the air and we're going to threaten the license of your parent company and we're going to show you who's boss.

And as you started off, you know, the segment by saying, Nate,

you know, this is authoritarianism with a capital A 101, right?

Like this is the playbook.

Like this is what you do is you take opposition, you take things that you don't agree with, and instead of tolerating them, having discourse, you just remove it.

You say no.

And then you remove the people.

And next step, jail, right?

Like that, that's what happens next.

You start jailing the journalist.

You don't just remove them from air.

And this has happened in the United States before.

And we had come a long, long way since then.

And now it seems like we're devolving again.

The United States has been falling, right, on all of the rankings of freedom of press and freedom of society, all of those global rankings.

All of a sudden the United States has gone from being a leader to, you know, in some cases, falling out of the top 10.

And that's not where you want to be going.

We'll be back right after this.

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Like I said, we're taping this on Monday, and I'm very curious to know what Kimmel is going to sound like when he comes on the air.

Because there's also, as we talked about last week, Nate, chilling effects, right, and self-censorship.

And you can imagine a future where people are like, okay, well, I'm just going to tread really lightly and not talk about certain people and not talk about certain topics and engage in self-censorship which people have been doing for a number of years and i think that happened with the first wave of actual cancel culture i just i keep wanting to stress that the kimmel thing is different because it was coming from the fcc

so that's censorship that's media censorship which is a very different thing it's it's different i mean there are

you know,

different does not necessarily mean

worse or better.

I mean, I feel like people are like...

In this case, I think it means worse.

I understand the word does not, but I think government censorship is worse than

I kind of believe in the

fourth estate in the sense of like media, both kind of

upper

highbrow media, meaning like the New York Times and publications like that, and kind of lower media like Mass Entertainment.

Like, you know, they have a lot of shared cultural power.

So like, I don't, I think they're equal to a branch of government de facto in terms of the amount of power they have.

And when they act in unison, right, when you have organized attempts to cancel people that may originate, you know, from progressives to deny them a livelihood, like I, I, I, I, I, it's different.

It's probably less capital A authoritarian.

Yeah, it's also awful.

Like I,

I'm not, I, I'm not trying to say anything nice about the Jeff Bezos's of the world.

Don't get me wrong.

I think that it's really scary on that level, too.

Yeah.

I would like to see more liberals, especially if they want to have the moral high ground.

If progressives want to say, we're just in a fucking wrestling match with the GOP and we'll win through, not brute force, but we'll win a, maybe we think we're smarter, we'll win a tactically battle or whatever else, right?

You know, I would like to say, I've seen a couple, like Abby Phillip, who was an anchor on CNN, right, had a good segment about this.

But like, I would like to see more liberals say, we fucked up, right?

We fucked up by abandoning free speech as a principle, by pretending, you know, all these people that do the cancel, they never have any heterodox, quote-unquote, opinions themselves, right?

They always like have cookie-cutter opinions because they're not actually, I mean, I don't like these people, so I'm not going to say anything overly generous, right?

You know, I think a lot of people formulate their political beliefs because of peer pressure, right?

And one of the problems with journalism and kind of the liberal academy more broadly is like, and that includes a lot of fucking lonely souls who, who are looking to be joiners, right?

And I'm, I'm against that.

You know, I think if you've never pissed an audience off or your own audience off, then like, how can you have lived in a very complicated world like we live in for for, you know, decades and not at some point had an opinion that differed from your tribe, right?

You know, that's totally fine if you just want to go and like, and open a nice little, you know, pasta restaurant or something and get along with your customers, right?

But if you're a political commentator and you've never never said anything that pisses someone off, then you are fucking like terrible at your job.

You shouldn't be canceled because I don't believe in cancellation, right?

But like, but you that's just a tell that you don't have any independent-minded opinions.

And if you always line with one party, the parties have these weird monstrosities.

It's like saying, I think that like PepsiCo, everything that it's like being a fanboy of like PepsiCo or Coca-Cola or something, right?

Like everything this gigantic, faceless corporation makes is the best thing on earth, right?

It's, you know, that's what the political parties are.

They're these kind of mediocre, gigantic brands that are trying to cater to the mass consumer and are pretty darn good at it, right?

But like, but you're just being a fanboy if you're always on the, always advocating the party line.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

You're being a brand spokesperson.

I think actually the

tie that you made to like Coke or Pepsi or something like that is a really good one, right?

You're just being a brand spokesperson for the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.

And this is why this is something that you and I talk about on the show frequently.

I don't think either one of us likes the two-party system.

One of the main problems I have with it is that it discourages independent thinking, right?

Too many people are like, oh, I'm a this, I'm a that.

You apply the label and then you figure out what do I think based on that, not what do I think, therefore, what do, you know, who do I support?

People don't get that granular.

Of course, some people do, but that kind of critical independent thinking is something that we should be encouraging, we should be fostering, we should be creating a culture where people are rewarded for heterodoxy, not for its own sake, but just for having their own mind and for being able to say what they think.

And there are, you know, you can agree, you can disagree.

But yeah, we should be living in a society where people think for themselves.

And this is.

something that both parties are absolutely to blame for.

And we are not in a good place right now.

So I really hope that everyone comes to their senses, including the Supreme Court,

and that we actually start supporting free speech and what it actually means, right?

Which means that Jimmy Kimmel could have fucked up something that he said and then

said, oh, you know,

this wasn't actually true.

And he wasn't removed from the air.

It's kind of that sort of a culture as opposed to one where we start getting threats and trying to strong arm people

into kowtowing whatever the party line happens to be, right?

Which could be liberal and it could be Republican and it could be either one.

I think that that's such an incredibly dangerous moment.

It really does bring me back to the Soviet Union and that is not a good feeling.

Yeah.

And also to create more stigma for cowardice.

I mean, you know, there were some people like in the whole Charlie Kirk Kimmel thing.

I mean, like, you know, Ted Cruz of all people.

Oh, I was about to say I actually agreed with Ted Cruz for once in my life.

I was like, what, what is happening?

Ted Cruz was like, this is bad.

You probably are more familiar with the research on this right but like when when a small number of people who are influential or actually have something to lose right

when they speak up you know even michael eisner the former ceo of disney um

i don't know if he's a friend of me with bob iker or arrival but he said what the fuck are you doing bob right and like i'm sure that's you know disney's company where people are usually pretty nice right and so that might have had an influence too right um yes there's a lot of research on that, Nate.

It's a very good point.

And yes, all it takes is one, even just one influential voice, and that can completely change the dynamic and what people feel empowered to say or do.

But this is a really interesting topic.

And I think one that we are going to keep revisiting on this show.

And I hope, Nate, that our show is still on the air, even if we say something that, you know, the FCC might not like.

What's your most cancelable opinion?

See, that's like not a question you can answer.

Yeah, well, let's come back to that.

I think that'll be

an interesting segment.

No, I actually, I think that that is an interesting segment.

What's the most tensible opinion that

it's actually your seventh most cancel opinion, probably.

You know what I mean?

Right, right.

You have to do the game theory of that, and you have to play that out.

Well,

we hope you feel more educated about free speech, which is something that really is core to risky business and to our ability to have this show.

And to me, as an ex-Soviet immigrant, it's something near and dear to my heart so good luck Jimmy Kimmel I hope that your return to the air was a good one

let us know what you think of the show reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm risky business is hosted by me Maria Kanakova and by me Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

Lydia Jean Cott and Daphne Chen are our editors.

And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

If you like this show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too.

But once again, only if you like us, we don't want those bad reviews out there.

Thanks for tuning in.

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