Lex Fridman Podcast
#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech
25 Sep 2023
Full Episode
The following is a conversation with Greg Lukianoff, free speech advocate, First Amendment attorney, president and CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and he's the author of Unleashing Liberty, co-author with Jonathan Haidt of Coddling of the American Mind, and co-author with Ricky Schlott of a new book coming out in October that you should definitely pre-order now called The Canceling of the American Mind.
which is a definitive accounting of the history, present, and future of cancel culture, a term used and overused in public discourse, but rarely studied and understood with the depth and rigor that Greg and Ricky do in this book and in part in this conversation.
Freedom of speech is important, especially on college campuses, the very place that should serve as the battleground of ideas, including weird and controversial ones, that should encourage bold risk-taking, not conformity. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
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Also, there's other ways to contact me if you go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. They're awesome. They deserve all the love in the world. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
This show is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. Boy, can I tell you some stories about life and death. I've been hard at work tolling over videos that I recorded in Ukraine, still looking to publish soon. There's just so much. It's so personal. It's so rich with feeling.
And one of the conversations, one of the soldiers has a kind of philosophical existential discussion about death. And he describes the tension of having a kind of infinite value for life because it's so visceral in a time of war, but also not having such a high value for life that functioning as a soldier becomes debilitating. I don't know. Something about that tension that really stayed with me.
About the value of life. When we look around us, how much do we value life? When we look in the mirror, how much do we value life? That's something I constantly think about when I meditate on my own mortality. And when I do think about my own death and the death of people I love, the value of life becomes so intensely clear. that life is beautiful and every single moment is precious.
So it's funny when you think about getting insurance of any kind, and especially when you think about getting life insurance, those kinds of questions come to the surface of what is the worth of life? And also just the actual fact of death comes to the surface. It's a beautifully pragmatic, metaphysical, psychological, human reality of death.
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