 But why is free speech so important as a principle? Because if that's not your principle, then inherently you're saying that there should be someone else who decides what you can and cannot say. And there's nothing to me that's scarier than that. I mean, and I'm somebody who, it's like I've never been the target of hateful speech. I mean, I get some of the most disgusting stuff directed at me every day, like whether it's mean or whether it's deeply kinky sexual from men who you look at their Instagram and it's like a picture of them with their grandkids. Like, okay, did your wife know you're on here, you sick fuck? With the exception of Anthony Weiner, probably not, right? Right, probably not. And, but to me, it's like when people say, okay, what about this speech and what about this speech? And then my question to those people always is, okay, well, then who would you like to see making that decision? It drove me nuts throughout the entire Trump presidency. How many people would call for hate speech laws but then also say that Trump is literally Hitler? So how can you have those two views at the same time? So you want the government to be controlling speech, the same government that you yourself just said you think the figurehead or the head of the executive branch is literally Hitler. And you don't see how those two don't make sense together. If anything, the people who really hated Trump and thought he was Hitler should have came out of that presidency more for free speech, but that's just not how it worked out. So what about, you know, in the book, you run through a bunch of different examples of people who got pilloried for bad speech, Kathy Griffin as well, right? The comedian who, I actually, I'm a big fan of. I think she's very funny. I think my life on the D list was great. But she, as I think the audience will remember, she got in big trouble, including bounce off of Twitter but then put on a no fly list and was being harassed by the TSA and by the government for having done a kind of stupid stunt where she had a kind of mannequin head of Trump, a severed head, et cetera. You defended her speech. And that must have been hard in a Fox context, right? I did. I wrote a column about it for national review at the time. And because at the time there was people, I mean, it was a pretty calm intake on conservative Twitter that she should be, you know, prosecuted for this. And like you said, we're talking about, nobody really thought, no sane person really thought that the star of my life on the D list, as you mentioned, was actually planning to assassinate the president. So I think that you could say you thought it was gross, you could say you didn't like it, but saying that it's not protected speech is that's a super dangerous take in my opinion, especially because we are talking about Kathy Griffin. She made a career being, I mean, when she won an Emmy, she got up there and said, I think something like, suck it, Jesus, this award is my God now. Something along those lines, I quoted it directly in my book, but we can't really be shocked that she did something like this. And again, conservatives, a lot of them who consider themselves free speech said, okay, but this should be prosecuted. It's like, well, no, because the First Amendment, the main purpose of it is to criticize people in power without government retaliation as a check on the government. So I don't care how you feel about it, you have to stand against it to make sure that that's never used against you in the future. So one of the other things you talked about, because I think most of the people in this audience probably are like, okay, yeah, speech shouldn't be banned, but then maybe certain types of speech should be disapproved of in such a way. It's almost the same as banning it. Or one of the examples that you talk about in your book is blackface in old TV, actually not even old TV shows. We're not talking about Amos and Andy, but we're relatively recent sketch comedy where when these shows go up on places like Hulu or Netflix or whatever, they've pulled the episodes that deal in blackface, even though without exception, it's a critique of the world that gave us blackface. But talk a little bit about why, I'm blanking on the exact title of the chapter right now, but it's something like nothing should ever disappear. Yeah, don't erase anything, right? Including blackface. Yeah, in the summer of 2020, they called it, I think the New Yorker wrote a piece called, saying how many different streaming services pulled episodes of things, or different series. I mean, it's always sunny in Philadelphia, 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother. There was so many different episodes. Who knew, who knew, yeah. The interesting thing about How I Met Your Mother was, there was somebody who is more on the left, her name, I don't remember it's in the book, who was saying, we shouldn't erase anything because then we can't talk about it, we can't have that conversation. And I agree with that, but the example that she gave was the Yellow Face episode of How I Met Your Mother, where they sort of dressed up as kung fu masters, and there was this debate at the time of, is this Yellow Face, is this just silliness? But she actually got the character wrong, that was actually dressed like that, because it's a lot harder to have those conversations when it doesn't exist anymore. And the past, it happened, whether you acknowledge it or not, and there's no purpose for wanting to erase things, except for wanting to delude. It's kind of the same thing as, if you don't like how your life is going, you want to go out and get fucked up and forget all about it, that doesn't mean that your life's any better, it means you're just ignoring it, and it's always better to have more information rather than less. And that doesn't even count the time that you get fucked up and then do blackface. Yeah, yeah, true. Which I want to point out in the book, she says that she has never done blackface. No. So you should be standing all of her social media. Well, I mean, we live in a time where, within recent memory, there was this great moment where the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, or the ex-governor of Virginia, was shown to, he was either in blackface or in a KKK, in his medical school yearbook. Yes, we still don't know. Yeah, I've never done blackface. There is, I write about this in my book too. I mentioned this book. I was a black Labrador retriever for Halloween when I was a child, because my cousin had a lab retriever. There is an uncomfortable photo of me with like when I took the ears off. But my brother was like, I'm gonna cancel. I'm like, I'm like six years old, maybe, you know? You don't even know what that is. But I was Pocahontas for Halloween when I was like seven. Whoa. I know. What about, you also talk about Roseanne Barr, who, now this, I mean, it's interesting because this, again, is in legal prohibitions. But then there's questions about, okay, how does society organize what is acceptable and what is not. Roseanne Barr who mounted, you know, hands down the most successful reboot and comeback in recent TV history where, you know, the new Roseanne show was a massive off the charts hit that hadn't been seen in decades really. And then she tweeted out, you know, objectively racist stuff about a Barack Obama advisor. And that's it. What's your take on that broader kind of moment? I mean, it was a tweet which she later said I was, you know, on Ambien and a couple of other things, which I don't know, I take Ambien almost every night and my Twitter feed never rises to that level. That's never happened to me. So what should happen in that case is that not simply, you know, the Vox public, I don't know, the public voice, the voice of the people saying, you know, what we don't want that kind of person in our life anymore. You don't have to have any kind of person in your life that you don't want to have in your life. I think that Roseanne, what she's a very interesting example of is just how much, you know, Twitter is pretty much never worth it. You know, it's like, not only do you not get paid, but you also can maybe get fired. But it's the, it's the dopamine. It's the most dangerous drug in the world. It's the dopamine hit. I mean, think of how much, like every stupid thing most of us have ever done has been ultimately because of dopamine, you know? I mean, it makes you do dumb stuff because it feels good. I was gonna say that for me, it was really alcohol and cocaine, but yeah, dopamine's in the top five, you know? You're better off not drinking. I love that. But also alcohol, part of that is because of dopamine, right? That's part of why people seek out alcohol. She had everything going for her, but she still couldn't resist this one thing. I also think that what's the point, and Sarah Silverman said something about this once, what's the point of being a progressive if you can't allow for progress? She actually was speaking in the context of a friend of hers who used to be a literal Nazi, not the way people say literal Nazi now, but like an actual Nazi, who now realizes how disgusting that is and says I was looking for that. If you can't progress and if you can't learn from mistakes and you're just canceled forever, then what are any of us even doing here? What are any of us doing anywhere in trying to educate people or in trying to express our beliefs or say this is why I think this is wrong and this is how I feel, it doesn't matter anyway. We're gonna talk about the roots of your libertarianness in a bit, but I mean, you're very libertarian, but then I'm also thinking you treat this in the book, God is about a decade ago, whenever Fukushima was Gilbert Gottfried, a very funny comedian who I think is dead now, right? He is not just figuratively dead, he's literally dead, but after the Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion, he was the voice of the Aflac duck, which was kind of a great gig, right? Nobody wants to lose that. And he made a bunch of jokes that were completely in keeping with his public career and persona about Fukushima, and he got bounced from Aflac. You would say definitely that's within Aflac's rights to say we wanna distance ourselves, but do you think that's a good decision? No, because especially for a professional comedian when it couldn't be more clear what your job is. I mean, he was making a joke about a tragedy to try to lighten it up. It's not like he was making the joke because he's like, fuck you, Japan, I don't care. I mean, that's like, if you're firing somebody, that's probably what you would be thinking, but nobody actually thinks that, you know? And he was so synonymous that whenever you see that duck, you hear the voice in your head, regardless of the fact that he was canceled and then he died. It is the job of comedians to make jokes about things that are dark and we shouldn't be canceling them for doing that. I think that intention is what should matter. There's this really dumb idea out there now and people actually say this. If someone says they're offended, that's all that matters, full stop, attention doesn't matter, but how stupid is that? Of course intention matters. Of course it matters whether or not somebody was saying, I'm trying to make this joke here because I'm a comedian, whether someone's saying I'm making this joke because I like that that nastural disaster killed all those people, fuck those people. That's a very, then that firing and that fuck you would be completely, and much more would be completely appropriate, but there is that difference. We all know that and it's dumb to pretend that we don't. Is there a moment where like intention just kind of flew out the window and was there a time when people were like, okay, we're gonna look at, at somebody says something that is considered awful or beyond the pale, but we're gonna look at it holistically or with intention. I mean, clearly we don't tend to do that now. Or what do you think has contributed to the idea? People on the right and the left are just like ready to pounce whenever. Why is that? I think that it's tribalism and I think that it's fear. I think that people are afraid of being canceled for sure. I think that it's also easy to pile on on Twitter, for example, if someone's getting canceled, you don't have to actually face that person when they get fired. You don't have to get up off the toilet. You just sit there and say like, wow, quote, tweet it or this, you know, or something. And like, and then you're like, I'm one of the good ones, you know. And if you have a side, there's certain sacred cows on your side that you need to show that you see as sacred or else you might be jeopardizing your place on that side. And I think social media also makes that worse because you get to see all these people telling you, fuck you, when normally you wouldn't get to see that. And also because studies show that on at least Twitter and Facebook, they're historically moral, emotional words and grandstanding, they get more engagement than other posts, which think about how different that is from real life, right? If you had a friend who would only talk like that, you wouldn't wanna hang out with them anymore. But on social media, it's actually rewarded.