This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

What a pleasure this is to talk about the freedom of speech, the First Amendment,

the perhaps most vital principle, any self-governing people can hold with Greg Lukianoff of

the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Greg is actually the president and CEO, also the author of a handful of books that I have really, really enjoyed,

including Unlearning Liberty, Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom from Speech.

And I really enjoyed a shortish book that would be a great place to start the war on words,

arguments against free speech, and why they fail with Nadine Strausson.

Greg, welcome. How are you?

I'm pretty good. Unfortunately, businesses booming for First Amendment attorneys these days,

and that's never a good sign for the country.

Oh, yeah, yeah, and I think both sides indulged too frequently too easily in, let's silence the other guys because we don't like what they say, obviously.

How would you characterize the state of free speech in the U.S. right now and we'll just go from there?

Well, you know, I want to expand it even from there because I think people really need to get, and I want to say this to your entire audience.

Free speech is in trouble globally.

Obviously, China and Iran and Russia were not free countries, but the level of totalitarianism that you can deliver with a combination of surveillance, and AI is terrifying.

The European Union and the UK have completely turned around on free speech.

So they're arresting something like 12,000 people a year in Britain now for essentially

hate speech in Britain.

I mean, my mother's British.

They used to laugh at us for a political correctness here, and now they're enforcing it by law.

Canada and Ireland were playing with actually passing a hate speech code that could result in life in prison.

And even within the U.S., like, we're the only country left that really cares about free speech, you know, down to our core.

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