Hello and

welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Gissen.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant and returning guest today is the deputy editor of Spike.

Tom Slater, welcome back to Trigonometry.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's good to have you.

We were just sitting here before the interview started, very relaxed and now we've all all three of us have gone really serious

Thanks for how much for having me

But it's good to have you back man. It's been a while. It's been a couple of years since we first had you on and as I was saying to you before we started we really

didn't know very much about anything at the time and we were kind of using guests like you

who thought about the stuff we were interested in in detail more carefully

who had a history of writing about it and sort of debating stuff like that.

And you know, the first time we had you on, we were talking about freedom of expression.

I think we talked about students banning some rareos and all that sort of silly stuff.

Two years have passed I think things have gone a little bit more sinister haven't

they particularly with stuff we've seen recently, Darren Grimes obviously,

what do you make of the state of the ability to discuss ideas and issues and

societal issues freely now? I think it's incredibly bleak because as you say a lot of the things

that we were talking about previously a lot of it's very similar to what we've seen explode

in recent months but it almost feels quaint by comparison the game we were talking

about sombreros you, the biggest campus controversies were about

...