Peter Boghossian and Dave Rubin debate Biden's cognitive state, contrasting views on inflation lies versus Republican denial of police violence statistics. They analyze Portland State University's authoritarian takeover by woke ideology, the failure of legacy institutions like Wikipedia due to ideological capture, and the necessity of building new educational frameworks. Discussing online hatred, they argue that ignoring nihilistic attackers deprives them of desired reactions while groveling fuels further aggression. Ultimately, Boghossian suggests voting for Republicans only if they adopt evidence-based policies, advocating for spirited disagreements over avoidance to restore legitimacy through ideological diversity. [Automatically generated summary]
Let's just start with that, because something interesting happened, and I referenced it on my show this morning, on my wrap-up show, that what I see happening in America that I think is one of the most disturbing trends is that we're all watching the same script, we're all watching the same movie, and we are experiencing wildly different things.
We are seeing completely different things, our reactions are completely different.
Anyway, I'm watching that thing.
Thinking this guy's a liar, a fraud, he's obviously drugged, these people are bringing in all of the wrong policies, it's a miracle he hasn't fallen off the stage and knocked the podium over, I mean all of the stuff.
And then I thought, man, I cannot wait to sit with Pete tomorrow because we're friends and it does not matter if we disagree on this stuff, but how we could view this so differently.
So I guess the more profound point is that we can disagree about our perception.
We're going to talk about what we perceive, but we're still buddies.
I'm still sitting here.
We're going to hang out like that.
There's a context for our disagreement.
So this is what I thought.
Independent of the content, the narrative that Biden is senile or he has dementia, I think that speech, to me, it completely put that to rest.
He was sharp.
He was focused.
And I understand he has a teleprompter.
I understand he has notes in front of him.
A senile person or a person with dementia, I don't care if he's on Monafidil or Provigil, whatever drug he is on, I don't think he could have delivered that performance.
Sure, so we'll do the content and the policy thing after.
But putting that aside, so you're just talking about his physical and mental ability to walk up on that stage and read that prompter.
You think that, look, I can't diagnose him.
For sure he has dementia or Alzheimer's or something but to me he clearly clearly has something wrong with him and that the fact that they can prop him up either through Adderall or a ton of coffee or God knows what they have whatever those drugs are I don't know how do you view that and go well because he had a decently cogent two hours that overrides all of the other video of the stammering and confusion Okay, two things.
Okay, so some of the words weren't Articulate or enunciate it perfectly, but I walked away from that and I questioned a lot of the narratives.
I also think that there is a kind of unfairness no matter who's in office.
You know, when Biden pinned the, I don't know, gave blood or something on his granddaughter, people edited it to make it look like he was touching her breasts.
Or I think that there's a lot of just Hacks who, if they don't like the content, and we can talk about the content, that's fine, but I'm just talking about him standing up there and delivering that performance.
I don't understand how you could not look at that and say, drugs aside, say, he was on point.
That was a good talk.
He was clear.
He made arguments.
He remembered to the extent that he's on a teleprompter.
You would have to find people who suffered from similar perceived cognitive ailments and give them whatever suite of drugs and see if they could perform.
I would highly doubt it.
Unless you want to say he's somehow like a trick pony, he's somehow—and even this
is territory I'm not particularly comfortable wading into—he's somehow performatively
giving a talk he has no idea what he's talking about.
But even then, it was pretty impressive.
I just thought it put to bed to rest the idea that here's a senile, demented guy.
Now, if you've watched the videos of Joe Biden from 20 years ago, I mean, he's clearly
My, my grandmother on my mom's side had it for longer and I, and I, and I really saw, and I spent a lot of time with her because I was doing standup at night.
So during the days I was with her often for days on end, hours and hours.
And I really saw that decline.
One of the things that I noticed that Biden seems to have, and I've seen a lot of people mention this also, is there's a dysregulation related to his emotional response.
And that China thing where he's yelling, it's like there was no anger to be expressing there, but he has to emote in a very weird way because something back there is not right.
The funny thing is neither one of us know what he was trying to drive home.
Related to the content part of it.
Okay, so putting that aside, because I don't want to spend three hours talking about his cognitive state, but I think the fact that we even don't really see that eye-to-eye is interesting, that you just feel it was enough evidence, as you said, to put it to bed, where to me it was like, that's not enough evidence to put to bed.
It's enough evidence to go, oh, I'm probably right about this thing, and we will probably find out that I'm right.
So my main takeaway from that was different than yours, I think.
My main takeaway is that we are so divided, and I've lost very close friends of mine who have been in my house, you know, buddies of mine over political disputes.
So because I know you as a person and as a decent human being and all that, to watch last night and I'm watching you tweet and I'm like, this is wild.
But it really made me want to sit down.
So let's talk a little bit about the content of some of this stuff.
I don't think of you as a purely political beast, but you sort of became a political beast because of what was going on at Portland State and your stance on free speech.
So maybe for people that haven't seen our previous interviews or don't know too much of your bio, you want to maybe hit like a minute or two of that just so that it has a little context.
A little context to how you started talking about politics, I guess.
Yeah, so I experienced a woke takeover, or let's put it this way, I experienced an authoritarian takeover fueled by an ideology, not only for which there was absolutely no evidence, but for which the evidence was against.
Every time I started asking, not even questioning, but asking for evidence, The hammers came down, the investigation started.
Right, you wrote these hoax papers with James Lindsay that really caught fire, and basically the whole idea was to show how the peer-reviewed process is, in essence, complete nonsense.
So, to relate that to the political part of this State of the Union and some of the stuff that we didn't see eye to eye on, which I think is, it's rich that we're doing this.
So my basic position is that virtually everything he said was either a lie or an intentional obfuscation of the truth.
Something like saying gas prices are going down.
That is technically true, but they're significantly higher than when he took office.
Or inflation is going down.
Technically true, significantly higher than when he took office.
We can get into some COVID stuff in a bunch else, but what would you say about that in general?
And by the way, I'm not just blaming this on Democrats, they all do it.
I would much rather have preferred, forget what I would have preferred, if you want to talk about things that are true and participate in reality, then that follow-up talk, that, I can't remember, the rebuttal or what have you, that should have been data-driven and talked about where Biden was wrong and it did not.
So I will say, and I said it on my show this morning, I thought her, the speech itself, I thought was quite good because I think she was dealing with the grand narratives.
I liked her line.
I liked her line on you're basically either for reality or for craziness, something to that effect.
But yes, she didn't go in, they clearly didn't write it on the fly, because then they could have done what I did on the show this morning and shown that.
Let's just put that aside for a second, the rebuttal, because very few people actually watch the rebuttal.
In a case like this, someone like you who cares about truth, when you hear him say these things, if you're willing to grant me the leash that what I'm telling you right now is true, that gas prices, for example, when he came in were about $2.30, they went up to $5, now they're around $3.30, so they are higher than when he took office, and then he says they're coming down.
It's just a verbal trick.
Now, I have no doubt Trump did it.
I have no doubt Obama did and everybody else.
But I think something's happening now where the lies because of COVID are so everywhere in society and they have been so debunked in real time that people can't take it anymore.
Something feels different about the lies.
We can be lied to to a certain degree and I think we're crossing a threshold with the lies that is going to do something very dangerous.
Which is also dangerous that they think as political beings and as presidents that everything that happens is because of them, which is also nonsensical.
You know, I just kept laughing about it because, you know, one, it's good to not be ideal, captured by your own audience, your audience capture.
But the other thing is, I think if you're not willing to cross the line and say, look, if somebody does something, not everything Ron DeSantis, if you're a lefty, does is bad or not everything.
But so many people, they're just not willing to cross the aisle and say, look, this is
true or this is false.
And you know, Harris was up there, you know, clapping, robotically clapping at these idiotic
things that are clearly divorced from reality.
I don't know in a two-party system what the solution to that is, given the penalty for
crossing the aisle.
Andrew Yang and others have suggested, well, that there is no solution, you have a third party, etc.
I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that the environment is so toxic right now for even saying you agree, or not only even that, platforming, going on someone's show.
I just talked to Brian Keating this morning.
You know, even going on someone's show when he did the PragerU videos and the grief people have gotten from that, that the left then won't have you on, because Constantine Kissin is another example.
You know, you used to tell me that, you know, this whole shadow banning from Twitter and stuff, and I'm like, oh, dude, please, come on, like, but it turns out you were completely right.
Like, it was, you were telling me that all along, and I'm like, you know, I wasn't thinking it was a conspiracy theory, but now, you know, Jack goes before Kong, you basically lied.
OK, so I have a feeling we probably have less disagreement on some of the policies than we may even think.
But on the race one, specifically, and that moment where he talked about how, you know, when you get pulled over, black and brown people, my children never had to be told that they had to keep their hands on the wheel and blah, blah.
What a shame that we have to live in a society where I have to say to you, well, he's a black academician.
Like, that shouldn't have literally anything to do with it.
But he has some great data.
Should I tell you about my black friend last That's the other kind of point of commonality.
What should we do is we should be able to agree that there's a truth of the matter independent of whatever immutable characteristic you possess, right?
So if we can't agree to that, then there's just a... I mean, it really is incommensurable at that point.
But the fact that we consistently racialize this is a problem, but here's my pushback on that.
Because so many, and I do that thing for my YouTube channel where I go out and I ask random people questions and I put them on a line from neutral to strongly agree and strongly disagree and they walk to the side.
So, in Europe, for example, if they're not African-Americans because they're not Americans.
Right.
Right.
But that's one thing I consistently find is that they are mad, they're frustrated, they don't know what to do, and I think we need to have some kind of an honest town hall debate that isn't captured by lunatics for what is the nature of, like, what are these, I don't like to use the word grievances because it's so fraught, but What are the perceived problems and what can we do to help people?
But I think it starts... We'd also have to talk about why that is, because more black people were educated and in two-parent homes until the welfare state in the early 70s.
Thomas Sowell is going to say that.
That's correct.
So it has a lot to do with the Democrat policies, not just that the system is inherently racist.
So how do we get beyond, how do we speak bluntly about facts and evidence without having the Democrats go berserk or the Republicans go berserk?
How do we just say, listen, this is the data, we need to make the best available, the best policies based upon the best available evidence without people losing their freaking minds?
I guess my concern is, and I haven't been following that closely, my concern is I would want to make sure that no speech would be quelched in that process.
So if you want to have someone spouting some idiocy like critical race theory, that's fine.
And I know I have significant disagreements with people on this.
You know, I think I initially said, you know, you wouldn't have people, if someone wants to, you know, scream about phrenology or about the earth being 5,000 years old, but these are dangerous, divisive, toxic, and racist beliefs.
So every single attempt at saving them or fighting for free speech or this guy got canceled because he showed the picture of the Prophet Muhammad which by the way is on Wikipedia that now certain countries don't want on and if you look at the Islamic Wikipedia still if you go to the museums in Turkey there are Drawings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, but bracketing that for a side, as an aside, any attempt to fix or solve the problem is only slowing it down.
I had Stephen Blackwood in that very chair talking about Ralston and he's obviously doing that with Jordan.
What's happening here in Florida now with Chris Ruffo is going to sit on the board of I believe it's New School on the West Coast and they're going to Try to fix what's going on over, because even in Florida our institutions were captured by this stuff too.
How important is it do you think, I mean as someone that you care deeply about academia, I mean how important is it that kids even go to college at this point?
Yeah, it's interesting on the liberty front, I'm only mentioning this because I was invited there, I spoke at their Sunday convocation, 14,000 kids, huge, huge, absolute, 14,000.
They know I'm married to a man.
They know, as I still describe myself, begrudgingly pro-choice.
There's a couple other things that I certainly am not a traditional conservative on.
Standing ovation from these kids.
Spent the entire day walking around the school taking selfies with kids.
So what does that tell you then about the conservative, even in this case, and you as a guy that wrote a book called Emanuel for Creating Atheists, you spend an awful lot of time around religious people now.
Yeah, or people like Marc Andreessen who just basically think that the system is corrupt like I do and we need to build, you know, that's the new culture war, by the way, legacy institutions versus building new things, old universe, like Substack versus New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.
So, well, this odd alliance that you're now in, as someone that was, that you were literally, your mission at first, at least at one time, was to create atheists.
I also do want to talk about how the atheist movement has seemingly collapsed, but let's pause on that for a second.
So that your allies are now the people that you maybe used to want to Yeah, so I think, while I've never converted anyone, I just gave them the tools to convert themselves, just to be clear.
So I think that this Culture War 2.0 is very different from 1.0.
I published a piece on this in the American Mind years ago.
But, excuse me, it's We're unified in objective truth, that you can figure out what it is, that you can find it.
We're unified on the rules of engagement.
So the rules of engagement is, if someone gives a talk and you don't like the talk, you don't blow a bullhorn at the talk.
Like, there are rational, civil ways to adjudicate disputes, you know, legal mechanisms.
If you don't like the statue here in Miami, I don't know, in Portland they destroyed a deer statue.
Great, you go through democratic means and have, I mean, I couldn't care less which statues are there, but you don't, Take the law into your own hands to correct Judge Judy.
So there's an agreement that there are mechanisms that we can go to to figure out how to solve civil issues, civil disputes.
So are you shocked though, even at this point, even though we've been, if people go back and watch our videos from six years ago, they'll find us talking about these same things, me from a more lefty perspective as well.
But the point is, Are you shocked that there's virtually no liberals, obviously not none, and Omar is doing it, and I know you know two or three others, but what you're talking about are liberal principles not defended by liberals.
And I think that what conservative and liberalism has shifted, but I'm going to suggest a new access to you.
The new access is, and Andrew, my friend Andrew, our friend Andrew Doyle wrote about that book, in his book The New Puritans, the access of the way to think about these problems isn't liberal-conservative right-left, it's authoritarian-non-authoritarian.
And the most important thing is cognitive liberty.
We have to enable people to, like in London there, Arresting people for praying.
unidentified
I mean, I think anybody should be able to talk to themselves anywhere they want.
If I want to talk to myself, it'd be a little odd if I started talking to myself right now.
The idea that you would arrest somebody for that, you have a group of people, the woke people, the dominant moral orthodoxy, who wants to tell you exactly what to think, and if you don't think it, you're a problem.
Right, that we need some kind of a struggle session, we need to somehow correct this, we need to intervene, we need to have government sponsorships, programs, interventions.
I suggest the access in the culture war is best thought of As authoritarians versus non-authoritarians.
Right, so basically there's authoritarians or libertarians, not meaning you're a libertarian card-carrying member of the libertarian party, but you either want control or you don't want control.
So it seems to me that the inmates are running the asylum on one side, and there is another side now that is doing basically what you're asking, that perhaps you have some political disagreements with.
And as I kind of went through, I think those things will just kind of become less and less over time.
I think that's just the natural entropy of it.
But what would you say is a problem?
What do you see on the conservative side?
Now, I'll just, look, I'm married, I'm gay.
So there are obviously traditional religious conservatives that are not thrilled with that, for sure.
So what would be something that you're seeing as a red flag on that side that you're like, oh, this is where you guys are just absolutely getting it wrong.
This is where I cannot vote for the same people that you vote for.
And we'll bracket the Ukraine thing because that's another thing, that's another can of worms.
In terms of domestic policy, I would say it's one of the reasons I still consider myself, well I consider myself a classical liberal is, I believe every Citizen, every person born in this country has certain entitlements.
I believe that they're entitled to a public education of the first rate, a la John Rawls.
I believe that they're, up to age 18, they're entitled to at least two square meals a day.
I don't think people should be discriminated against educationally in terms of their zip code or where they're from or the color of their skin or their religious beliefs.
Hold on, I just have to pause you for a second, because I'm not sure what conservative believes in anything other than, you know, they may not want to fund certain things through the government, but...
Okay, then I'll tell you the other substantive disagreements.
Just say real quickly, then I'll put a pin in that.
I also believe that that includes health care for people up to 18, possibly 21 as a compromise.
I don't think anybody should be sick or dying because in this country, if they're a citizen, if their parents can't afford adequate health care for them.
Insulin, which Biden discussed.
unidentified
Um, so I think that's one of the things that separates me and you see, you know, it seems to me that just, I want to just clearly get it.
The defunding of public schools, the non, I don't know if you want to call it socialized healthcare, but... Right, okay, so health, you want the government definitely involved in healthcare.
Because that guarantees, you know, Bush had no child left behind.
That guarantees the kids get, who are poor particularly, and I don't think it's a racial
thing, get trapped in failing schools.
So we need to be more thoughtfully and work with people across the aisle who hold different opinions.
But those ideas, you know, in the far right, the extreme right, I don't even know what that means anymore, but you have people who want the defunding, the libertarian side of the public school system.
So that's two differences.
Other differences, abortion, for example.
You know, that's a thorny issue.
I'm not sure how, especially with the new Supreme Court decisions and the state choices.
You know one of the things I do in that those videos where I go around I ask people I do a lot about abortion and I'll say so they'll start on the neutral line and I'll say abortion should be allowed legal up to the first trimester and they'll go from strongly agree to strongly disagree and then I'll say abortion should be legal in the second time I reset them at the neutral line and then I'll say abortion should be legal in a third trimester and then I'll say I did this at Dartmouth abortion should be legal up to the last day Because you would see, you want to see what it takes to get people to move.
And a shocking number of people will not move up to the last day.
So I think that there are, I think abortion in the first trimester Not constitutionally protected, but federally protected would be a compromise.
Right, so to me, what Florida has done, and I can always bring everything back to Florida because I really think we're doing it so well here, we have a 15-week ban.
DeSantis signed that, and the legislature passed it before the Roe v. Wade decision came down.
And what's fascinating about that was, here we have this state that is now super red.
It is the leading Republican state in the union, and it has a 15 weeks.
That's three and a half months, having two kids now.
I know an awful lot about that developmental stage, heartbeats and all that kind of thing.
Nobody was going crazy over it here.
And this would prove my point on the conservative side.
The conservatives here, are actually just taking the liberal position of 25 years
ago.
Meaning every sane liberal of 25 years ago, a Bill Clinton 1996 liberal,
had some moderate position on abortion.
There's going to be a cutoff.
It's the Democrats that went bananas with 8-month abortions where Florida, right now, again, the reddest of the red
states, has the 25-year-ago liberal position, and that is now the
It tells me with that and with censorship, you know, the N.W.A., or whatever you want to say, that, you know, Tipper Gore is against the music, that those policy positions have had a large-scale shift.
Now, you've been saying it for a long time, to be a conservative means to defend liberal values.
Okay, so I think most people watching this are probably going, alright, I tend to agree with a little more of Dave's politics, but Pete's making sense.
They want to live in a country with someone like you, the same way they want to live in a country with someone like me.
But what we're still dancing around, I suppose, is what do you do, well first off, how do we quantify how many woke people there are and what level of power they still have?
Well, it seems to me that there are sort of slight disagreement here is you still think that there's a little more utility for the state or at least at the federal level than I do.
So Peter Thiel once said something to me that really rung true to me.
He said, I wouldn't be a libertarian if any of it worked.
And I think that that maybe is the position I'm coming from more.
So I like government when government is effective and competent and efficient.
That's what we have here in Florida.
When you have this other endless sucking machine that is taking money from everyone and resources from everyone and spending ten billion dollars to study asexual monkeys and their relationships to blind frogs, there's no question.
Wait till China says, hey, we'd like you to pay off our debts.
It's a good thing we have nukes.
So, OK, so so understanding that, I think you're right about that.
And by the way, when I did Bill Maher's podcast and we disagreed on a whole bunch of stuff, actually more than you and I are disagreeing out here because he's really has this wild stuff with Trump still and whatever.
What he said at the end was, he said if you and I are not within the acceptable boundaries of what a society can tolerate as differences of opinion, we're totally screwed.
I mean, I think that's the right approach on that.
But what do you do for the, whatever amount of people, the woke thing has infected, it continues to infect people, and we're in a race, it seems to me.
I see this happening all the time with my own audience, and I go out into, go to the supermarket, people saying to me, I didn't believe any of this stuff two weeks ago, then I saw your show.
They have complete control of the university systems.
They have the DEI, bureaucracies, etc.
They have control of most legacy institutions.
The two things that almost nobody talks about, because almost nobody knows that they control, and the damage they do, is they control colleges of education and Wikipedia.
Okay, so let's break that down if I may.
I can't teach with all my publications, years, etc., doctorates, etc.
I can't walk in a classroom and teach.
You have to get a teaching certificate.
Teaching certificates in this country, I'm going to say this, and this is, people are going to be like, no way, that can't possibly be true.
It's predicated upon a book from a Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
The idea is that you teach to liberate people from, you didn't say perceive, but perceive oppression, as opposed to teaching for anything else like the truth.
We've educated an entire generation of teachers, pre-service teacher education programs, people are going to get their, future teachers, go into the classroom and teach.
to demean truth and to uphold certain non-falsifiable ideological ideas like
lived experience, lived experience trunks objective truth, etc, etc.
So that's an enormous problem. And the reason that's a problem is even if you could take out all wokeism
Like, you literally extirpated it from all K-12 schools.
It would just repopulate because the teachers would go back in.
And that's the other reason why we need to build new things like the University of Austin is because we need teacher training programs for people who have not been indoctrinated into the tenets of woke ideology.
Okay, so the second thing that nobody talks about is that Wikipedia is woke.
The editors of Wikipedia.
Oh yeah, it's wildly out of control.
Yeah, and so we're going to do something on that that breaks that down and explains the racket and the scam that it is.
You know, my Wikipedia page is consistently vandalized.
It's hijacked by a few people.
Yours is as well, I've looked.
Okay, so we got those two things.
It is almost impossible to underestimate the degree that woke infiltration has played in society, in our institutions.
And the idea is that woke people They, you know, they get indoctrinated into the school system.
They go out from...well, it starts in K-12 because, again, their teachers get teaching certificates that are indoctrinated.
They go through college.
They then, because they have the college degree, go into positions of authority in the society.
And then, slowly but surely, the terminology comes in.
Safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings.
Inclusion is a huge one that nobody talks about anymore, very few people talk about.
They have infiltrated virtually every industry, economy, they've infiltrated the military, they've infiltrated the Biden government, they've infiltrated the Southern Baptist, they've infiltrated the Catholic Church, so the question is, What do we do about it?
And I have a whole set of prescriptions that we could talk about.
Do you think that this parasite that has overtaken so many hosts As I always describe it, you know, the alien in the ship killing everybody and the doctor likes it, the original alien, because he's like, it's merciless.
It's doing exactly what it wants.
You've got to give it credit.
He feels a camaraderie with it because it is so focused and it's accomplishing what it wants to accomplish.
Woke people don't know the other side of the argument by design because it's platforming, it's Nazism, they won't read it, they won't look at it.
Even, you know, not even things like gender studies, but there is no debate.
There is no conversation.
And when you take debate and conversation out of it, you just go ever further down into a rabbit hole.
But just recently, the last few days in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, they've had pieces coming out, even the New York Times, which is the wokest of them all.
I think they hired McWhorter to kind of save their image, etc.
You see now people starting to question, people starting to challenge, people speaking openly about it.
And unfortunately, they're doing it in the most superficial manifestation, which is cancel culture, right?
What do we do about the fact that we have ideological capture of our main institutions?
Well, let's talk about what the problem with that is first.
The problem is that those institutions don't have any legitimacy.
You don't, however you want to call this, the legitimation crisis.
There's a crisis of legitimacy.
A lot of people, I've been screaming about this for years, nobody listens, but the reason for that is they don't have legitimacy because they're not legitimate.
So people don't trust them.
So that's why, to bring it back to what I said at the beginning of the show, we need something we can rely on.
We need some gold standard.
Something that universally aligns us politically, socially, morally, and that should be the peer review process.
If something gets stamped as peer review, we can say the best minds have tried to falsify it, experts in the fields have tried to look at it, and I also want to say, Yeah, but you accept that the inherent problem is that the woke will never accept that, because they will say it is an old system.
You know, people will say, well, why should I trust the science on, the science, they'll put in quotation marks, on global climate change, anthropogenic warming, if the university is staffed with 99% ultra-leftists?
Well, they're right.
That's absolutely right.
I mean, that's why when the Supreme Court is balanced, you know, 5-4, conservative, liberals, maybe a far-righter, a far-lefter, that's why people are more likely to trust those decisions.
So, ideological diversity confers a kind of legitimation on a system.
It legitimizes a system in a way that simply saying it's legitimate or have good branding, or now the New York Times has bad branding.
I'm even hesitant to say this because now people who are doing this to me are going to double down on it.
So I don't even know how many books I've written the foreword to.
I've written the foreword to a lot of books.
I just wrote the foreword to Rajiv Malhotra's Snakes in the Ganga.
I've written the foreword to John Loftus' book.
I've written the foreword to Lindsay's book.
Tons of forewords.
But I wrote the foreword to Dan Arrow's book, who's now a woke maniac.
I wrote the foreword to Stefan Molyneux's book, Against the Gods.
It was about agnosticism.
And of all the forewords I wrote, it's in there.
Not only that, he wrote the foreword to white supremacist Stefan Molyneux, as if You know, I'm somehow in a long-standing collaborative relationship, as if I'm in some kind of cahoots with a white supremacist to talk about whites, you know, the superior race.
But those things are incredibly damaged because they're bundled with the software when you get them.
They're bundled with browsers there.
And so when people want to learn about something quickly, they go to Wikipedia.
There are 50 edits.
This is a whole other show.
So, the way that those decisions get made, the guy who edits my page is openly Antifa.
Why should you... Wait, just to be clear, we were walking down the street going to get ice cream with your son, and we were talking about this endless hatred that people get online, and I was saying how if someone across the street just started screaming, You wouldn't walk up to them and engage them and spend time with them and all of those things, right?
You would just keep walking but for some reason there was this need for people to do it online.
With the anonymity as a cloak and so my fear, so two things, my fear is always been that I've got something wrong and the way that I can figure out if I've got something wrong is to listen to dissenting And that's what I said on your show last time.
I think I missed a word, but the most important thing is you have to figure out whose voice doesn't matter.
Like, this is a great example.
Like, this brings it back to what we talked about.
Are you drunk tweeting right now?
Like, so when you tell me something like, okay, Gabe Rubin said that, you know, if Dawkins contacts me, like, okay, Now I've got to stop and think about this, but if it's a random person, you don't, there's no point to even looking at it, right?
But I do think that there is, that there is something, if I could give advice to people, if I could give advice, I don't know where I looked, advice, if I could give advice to you, you have to figure out whose voice doesn't matter.
And if you have, if you're being mobbed on social media or people are freaking out at you, like, so what?
Like, it's just, this too shall pass.
It's just people who have way too much time on their hands.
You know, the other thing I've learned going around the world asking people questions like political questions or controversial questions is when you leave the United States, People are not looking for a reason to be offended.
In the United States, particularly in college campuses, they are hungry to be offended.
They are craving offense.
They want to show what a good person they are, what a decent person, what a virtuous person they are by how outraged they are that someone's on a different line or has a difference of opinion from them.
I mean, you seem to have done a far better job of getting, like I, you did it more quickly.
I'm slowly at that point.
But I have not... You mean getting over the nonsense?
Yeah, of just... Well, I also think if you don't give them what they want, which at some point when I just was like, I'm never responding to these people, I'm never paying attention, I'm not giving it a moment of my public or private time, at some point they just start running out of fuel because what they also want is the reaction.
You can go with that one too, but I have one more question for you and then I'll let you give your closing statement.
My question for you is this.
Being here in Florida, taking this entire conversation that we've had, the beautiful weather, the freedom, a system that's working, flourishing, getting rid of all the things that you're frustrated with.
Could a good liberal like you vote for a guy like Ron DeSantis?
I want to come back to something we said at the beginning.
If you have a disagreement with somebody, then you just text them and tell them you have a disagreement with them.
It's completely fine that you and I would have a disagreement about abortion or DeSantis or even things closer to our own heart, you know?
And, you know, if you told me, listen, you know, you're, uh, I would have a problem with it, but I would, I would have a problem with it within the context of our conversation.
If you said, listen, I think the fact that you've adopted a Chinese, uh, girl is an interracial kidnapping.
And also, but I think letting friends be wrong is one of the most important lessons that we can have.
And I also think it makes your life more interesting and you have more spirited disagreements with the people.
You know, Aristotle talks about that in the Ethics.
He said, the highest form of friendship is between two virtuous people.
I thought about that for decades since I've read that.
Like, somebody, you know, you can come to me and I can come to you if I think you're off base.
I will absolutely tell you're off base.
And I think we've had those conversations before.
You've told that to me.
Those are the kind of friendships you should strive to have as opposed to everybody agreeing with everyone and to disagree about one small thing and then everyone's a Nazi.