Comedian Seth Meyers joins the show to talk about his new show, The Joe Rogan Experience, and what it's like being a conservative comedian in the modern era of the internet. Seth is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and podcaster. He's also the founder of The Babylon Bee and Attack, a website dedicated to exposing the lies and hypocrisy of the far-left, and he's one of the funniest people I've ever met. Seth also talks about how he got started in comedy, and why he thinks comedians should punch people in the face to get their point across. He's a good friend of mine, and I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you enjoy this episode, and don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms! Thanks for listening and Happy Listening! -Jon Sorrentino Music: "Punching Down" by Zapsplat - "Goodbye Outer Space" by Ian Dorsch Art: "Outer Space Blues" by Jeff Kaale Logo by Ian McKellen Theme Song: "Too Effing Highlighted" by Skynyrd (c) by Ian McElroy (Music: "Incomptech) by Jeff McElore and "Outro: "Good Morning America" by Fountains of America (feat. by John Rocha & "The Good Morning" by Haley Shaw is outtro music: "Blinde" by Robert Foy "Feat. "Solo" by Kevin McLeod (ft. ) . & "The White House Banday" by Bobby Lord , "The Realest" by John Fennell -- "Puncher" by Jon Foreman Thank You ( ) and "I'm Too Effing Goodbye" by Fergie ( ) is out of Town ( ) & // "The Best Thing" by James ( ) and ? ( ) ( ) by Jeff Perla ( ) . (Thank You Can't Stop This Is My Name? (Seth's Music is Out Of My Mind? ) & (Fucking Goodbyes? ) - "Let Me Talk About It? & (A Message From You?
00:00:51.000So he's like, he publishes this site using like a WordPress template and like puts out some articles and they go viral so quick, like within two months he's getting millions of visits.
00:01:01.000So, I don't know, he just had a sense that like somebody, you know, there's so much comedy, like the left dominated comedy.
00:01:17.000So everything, like all of these institutions, like, you know, the media, education institutions, corporations, all these things, they're all dominated by the left.
00:01:26.000So comedians, though, I mean, as you know, there's been this opportunity, this big opportunity to kind of like step in and provide comedy that makes jokes that the left isn't willing to make.
00:01:39.000And so they were dominating for a while, but now I think things have shifted because you've got all these rules about what you can and can't joke about.
00:01:45.000And the people who are willing to make jokes that kind of like sidestep those rules, they're, you know, they're meeting a demand.
00:01:53.000Yeah, the meme space though has always been very right-wing in a lot of ways because it's like the thing to make fun of because since the media has been so dominated by the left whenever there's like a narrative that just gets pushed with like that Sort of ignores logic and ignores reality.
00:02:14.000There's a thing that happens where someone goes, yeah, but what about this?
00:02:58.000So, I don't know, I think comedy that challenges the narrative is key, and it's like, that's what people are gonna find funny, because it's like, you're trying to hold people in positions of power accountable.
00:05:11.000If you can't make fun of this idea that someone could be a woman for six months and then win Women of the Year, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:06:20.000Not, is it targeted at somebody who views themselves as marginalized or oppressed and they're going to come after me and try to destroy my life and career?
00:06:27.000Because if I'm trying to think in those terms, or if I'm thinking in the terms of...
00:06:39.000That's so condescending to have that thought.
00:06:41.000And if I was in a marginalized community, if I try to put myself in the shoes of somebody who's considered marginalized today, I wouldn't want anybody trying to protect me from jokes like I can't handle it, like my skin is too thin to handle a joke.
00:06:54.000But it's that thing where my friend Morgan Murphy has kicked off Twitter forever, too.
00:07:01.000Because she got in some sort of a debate.
00:07:03.000I think, I don't remember who it was about, but she was basically, she's a feminist and her problem was that transgender women are entering into these female spaces and sort of dominating them with these almost like male perspectives on female issues.
00:08:02.000And, you know, in my mind, and when you think of, like, Section 230 and its provisions and language that's in there, and, you know, like, what they get immunity for when they're engaging in content moderation, it's like, what's in view there is, like, lewd and indecent content, you know, like, things that wouldn't be appropriate in the actual physical town square.
00:08:45.000So much of that remains in place, but then opinions like, okay, you see a family-friendly drag show that kids are tipping these dancers and stuff like that, and you call that grooming behavior.
00:08:57.000Now all of a sudden you're banned for that.
00:08:59.000Now the family-friendly drag show isn't considered lewd and indecent.
00:10:18.000Because basically what he was saying has all been proven in terms of studies and scientific, whatever data that has been accumulated over the course of the last two years.
00:10:46.000Which is one of the arguments that people on the right make that these are not private companies just engaging in regular – these are like – they become state actors when you have the government behind them saying, okay, it'd be unconstitutional for us to block this speech ourselves, but we can outsource it to this privately owned third party and they can do it.
00:11:04.000That's still considered government censorship.
00:11:06.000That's where it becomes like a First Amendment issue beyond just saying these are private companies that can do whatever they want.
00:11:12.000Right, like what happened with the Hunter Biden laptop thing.
00:11:15.000That is an egregious assault on reality.
00:11:20.000We deserve to have all the information at our disposal in terms of what is actually going on, what has been done, is there evidence of corruption?
00:11:31.000And if there's evidence of corruption and it's censored by a company that is obviously not just in contact With the current administration and the previous Democratic Party.
00:11:44.000But also, what they're doing is working with them.
00:12:11.000And that collusion between the government and these private companies, ultimately that's going to end up coming back to bite them because they're not going to be able to moderate.
00:12:17.000There's going to be some kind of pushback on that.
00:12:18.000There's going to be some kind of legal change or something.
00:12:40.000I don't want to play along with this game that like, you know, they bake.
00:12:43.000If you go to the hateful conduct policy on Twitter's website, you pull up the hateful conduct policy, it starts out with like this ringing tribute to free expression, right?
00:12:51.000They say that Twitter is supposed to be a platform for free expression without barriers.
00:13:16.000You've got to go back and rewrite that.
00:13:17.000But I just don't want to go along with a system where, you know, we're...
00:13:21.000They say on what they offer you as a platform for free expression.
00:13:26.000But then in reality, and it's supposed to be without barriers, but then in reality, they have these ideological terms that you have to agree to.
00:13:33.000And so they're making it, especially from like a comedian's perspective, you know, when I talk about like poking holes in the popular narrative, they're rigging the system so you can only affirm the narrative.
00:14:03.000It's like, look, I think you should be able to say that two and two make four, and you shouldn't fake into your terms that two and two make five, and you have to say that, or else you can't tweet on this platform.
00:14:11.000It's like, I don't want to be on a platform like that.
00:14:12.000I'd rather stand up and say, you know, look, we're not going along with that.
00:14:16.000And did you guys have the same post on Instagram?
00:14:36.000Twitter's the one that's forcing us to delete something ourselves.
00:14:40.000I mean, like, Instagram is, you know, Instagram, Facebook, we've had plenty of issues with them with, like, getting flagged for, like, inciting violence with a stupid joke or misinformation.
00:14:52.000We did a joke about how during Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings, we did a Monty Python joke about how she was being compared to a duck to determine whether or not she was a witch.
00:15:03.000And then the caption said, like, we must burn her.
00:15:07.000And that was like, we said we must burn her.
00:15:09.000So like the automated system flagged that as like a threat.
00:15:13.000And then we appealed it and somebody manually reviewed it and upheld the ruling that it was incitement to violence.
00:15:18.000We're like, this is a Monty Python joke.
00:15:24.000It's just Twitter is the one that's like going a step beyond and saying you have to acknowledge you did something wrong and delete this and that's where it's like a little bit different.
00:15:31.000I think you guys getting banned from Twitter was one of the influences that led Elon to want to purchase Twitter.
00:15:40.000He hasn't talked about it publicly, but I know he had a real issue with it.
00:15:43.000I mean, I think it's one of them, yeah.
00:15:46.000I mean, I wouldn't say, and I've never taken credit for it, like, oh, we are the reason that Musk...
00:15:50.000Because some people have said that, you know, like, oh, he did this to save the Babylon Bee.
00:15:53.000I don't think Elon Musk is putting tens of billions of dollars on the line to try to save the Babylon Bee.
00:15:58.000But I think he's genuinely concerned about speech.
00:16:01.000You know, he's called Twitter the de facto town square.
00:16:26.000But when it's the number one platform for distributing information by average citizens, which is what it is, it's a little bigger than that.
00:16:35.000And I don't know what the response to that is.
00:16:37.000I don't think the response to that is, let's get the government involved and regulate it.
00:16:41.000But I think there's a responsibility that they have, and this is what Elon believes, that they have a responsibility to...
00:16:52.000He said, if this is what you guys are, because it is what they are, they are the town square, you have a responsibility to allow everyone to communicate.
00:17:03.000Otherwise, you create this divisive...
00:17:06.000Environment where it just divides the country even further without the ability to discuss things like Without the ability for people to criticize that post that you guys made about Rachel Levine or Laugh about it or make other memes or all these different things without that ability Then you're gonna get more people angry more people to feel isolated disenfranchised and it creates A problem that we already have,
00:17:33.000It throws gasoline on a problem we already have.
00:17:36.000And that problem is this country is divided in a lot of ways.
00:17:39.000And it's divided in a lot of ways because of the narratives that the media pushes, the fact that the vast majority of mainstream news and media is leaning to the left, and the ones that are on the right It's like, what do they have?
00:17:53.000They had OAN News and Newsmax, and they're just not that effective.
00:19:04.000All the all the big tech companies in concert all at the same time it started I think it started on reddit so like reddit stopped allowing you to say call this behavior grooming and the other ones kind of didn't we discuss this Jamie was it it's not is it in certain rooms they did they've banned the term groomer because what about Heterosexual groomers what about men who go after like really young girls and befriend them and groom them because that's real yeah,
00:19:30.000that's real and it's always been disgusting well, it's all real but I mean the The term itself is now designated a slur.
00:20:28.000If you're just watching this on Twitter and you see it and you say, I think that's grooming, you're not necessarily targeting a transgender person.
00:20:34.000You don't even know if they're transgender.
00:20:36.000For all you know, it's a straight man who's been hired to do this drag performance.
00:20:51.000I just can't, because that term, to not ever use that term for trans people, but what about a trans person that is engaging in grooming behavior?
00:21:04.000Look, I'm sure that the vast majority of trans people do not support pedophilia, right?
00:21:10.000So if someone is a pedophile but also trans, wouldn't it behoove them, wouldn't it help their cause to say, like, this is not good, this is bad, this is not what we want.
00:21:22.000We don't want people like this connected with us.
00:21:28.000I mean, as far as, like, taking it to the point where you ban this language, it's not the answer.
00:21:33.000I think the answer is, okay, look, you know, if there's a huge swath of the population who has a problem with this behavior, and look, I can speak for myself.
00:21:41.000I can tell you why I think, when I use the word groomer, if I use it in a tweet, I'm referring to behavior, okay?
00:21:49.000I'm like, it's a criticism about somebody's behavior around kids, right?
00:21:53.000It has nothing to do with that person's identity or who they sleep with or the color of their skin.
00:21:59.000It's not targeted at a person for their identity.
00:22:05.000I think so much with the left's kind of heavy-handed censorship, they do a lot of this conflating where they take criticism of behaviors and treat it as criticism of identities and people.
00:22:19.000And you have to be allowed to criticize behavior because there genuinely is, like you said, real bad behavior that actually harms people and we're not allowed to talk about it.
00:22:27.000Well, that's the problem also when they have this sort of blanket free pass for people who are trans where you're finding people that are...
00:22:37.000Sexual abusers with a long history of being sexual abusers, like people that have literally been incarcerated for various sexual offenses, sexual assault, and these people are going into women's locker rooms and saying that they're trans now and pulling their dicks out.
00:22:58.000And, you know, there are a lot of people that just genuinely are transgender people that would like to use a woman's locker room.
00:23:04.000But there's also people that are, they're sick.
00:23:10.000And these people do harass women and sexually assault women, and you're giving them access to women in a very vulnerable place where there's no protection for them at all.
00:23:20.000And that was, you know, that LA case where the massage was the massage place?
00:23:56.000Yeah, but even if they haven't in a context like that, where you've got, like, a biologically male person in a women's space like that, and a mother's in there with her child, it's like, you know, regardless of how that person identifies, it's not an attack on them to say, hey, look, you know, like,
00:24:11.000I don't want my daughter seeing a naked man's body in the locker room.
00:24:56.000Police said she has a criminal history.
00:24:58.000Yeah, she's a registered sex offender.
00:25:01.000Okay, Marager has been a registered sex offender since 2006. So that's 16 fucking years of being a registered sex offender as a result of convictions for indecent exposure in 2002 and 2003. So 20 fucking years.
00:25:20.000This is crazy because you're giving someone who is a sex offender access to women where they can do the exact same thing where they were arrested for and now they're celebrated and you're going to have people protest for them.
00:26:23.000The recording which surfaced in late June showed an irate customer arguing with employees after she said she had seen a customer with a penis in an area that's reserved for women.
00:26:34.000The Wilshire Boulevard facility has some gender separated areas with changing rooms and jacuzzis.
00:26:39.000Now, what they'll try to do, and this is the thing, it all goes back to this punching down conversation with comedy.
00:26:45.000It's like, we can't joke about this situation.
00:26:47.000You can't joke about it because it'll be perceived as the target of the joke is a marginalized person.
00:27:45.000I think we're in the middle of the fog of war.
00:27:48.000It's like a fog of war in this culture war and there's so much chaos going on and so many people are trying to score a victory for their perspective and their ideology that they're missing the big picture on this.
00:28:03.000That free speech and freedom of speech and free expression have always been very important for sorting out what's right and what's wrong.
00:28:10.000And it's not good for anybody when you silence that.
00:28:13.000If someone makes a joke on Twitter, like if you guys did something that was truly offensive, you would lose audience members.
00:28:20.000Some people who supported you would not support you anymore.
00:29:51.000We have all of these methods in place now to insulate people and keep them safe from ideas that might hurt them or jokes that might offend them.
00:30:01.000There was an interesting study that was done.
00:30:03.000Well, let me push back on that because the problem with the transgender thing is, this is the elephant in the room, is that It's easy to make fun of a very obvious male that wants to be a woman.
00:30:16.000If you attack them, or I shouldn't say attack, if you mock them and belittle them, there's nothing they can do that turns them into the physical form of a female.
00:30:30.000If Rachel Levine was attacked in jokes, or someone criticized her or mocked her in jokes, It's not like fat shaming, right?
00:30:41.000There's an argument like fat shaming, like the reason why you're upset is because you've eaten yourself into this position.
00:30:47.000This is your own doing, and you can actually not eat yourself out of it.
00:30:52.000You can exercise your way out of it, and many, many, many people have done that, where they've actually become smaller again.
00:30:57.000It's almost the same argument you would say about people who are handicapped.
00:31:01.000Like, if you mock a handicapped person, they're not going to go, you know what, I shouldn't be handicapped anymore.
00:31:06.000This criticism is really getting me to the point where I'm going to be mobile.
00:31:09.000They can't do anything about it, right?
00:31:11.000So she can't necessarily do anything about her physical appearance, and, you know, that's the argument.
00:31:23.000I'm just speaking in general terms about this idea that, like, Doing everything that you can in your power to moderate speech to keep people safe from ideas or jokes that might hurt them is not necessarily helping them.
00:31:38.000I was going to mention a study that was done by this nonprofit group in New York.
00:31:43.000And they were taking a look at the playgrounds in New York.
00:31:46.000And they were studying like whether or not they were trying to answer the question whether or not the playgrounds have been made too safe.
00:31:51.000And they actually determined that they had.
00:31:53.000It was this weird thing, like, all these playgrounds had been, like, redone so that they had really cushy, soft flooring, and you couldn't really fall from any heights or get hurt on these playgrounds.
00:32:04.000And what they found was that it was actually teaching kids that, like, falling on the ground doesn't hurt you.
00:32:10.000You know, they learn on the playground that they don't get hurt when they fall, and then they go climb a tree over a sidewalk and fall, and it does hurt, and it shocks them, and they're learning the hard way.
00:32:17.000You know, now they've got a broken arm.
00:32:20.000I think that some of the efforts, it's one of these things that's just like a self-defeating thing.
00:32:24.000You know, you try to create a safe space, a safe environment.
00:32:27.000In some cases, I think you actually do more harm because you're protecting people from what?
00:32:32.000You know, like I said before, I mean, like being the target of a joke, like...
00:32:42.000That's more offensive than any joke you could tell to my face.
00:32:45.000Well, the other argument in your case with the Rachel Levine thing is that we're being forced to say something that some people don't agree with.
00:32:56.000This is not like they're forcing this opinion as fact.
00:33:01.000And there's a narrative that a transgender person is a woman.
00:33:06.000And a lot of people support that, but a lot of people don't support that.
00:33:43.000It's almost like you better not criticize.
00:33:46.000We're going to go even further and further and further.
00:33:49.000And we're going to take this to this crazy place where these are the best women we have.
00:33:53.000There's just such a tremendous distinction and difference between somebody going on Twitter and tweeting something like, all trans people should die.
00:34:02.000Someone's going to take that clip out of context, by the way, and say that I said that.
00:35:09.000Who's trying to protect women and keep their sports their sports?
00:35:13.000Well, not only that, what is the percentage of people that are upsetting the far larger percentage that are biological females that are competing against this person to protect one person's feelings by affirming them as a woman?
00:35:27.000You're making all these other people victims of unfair athletic events, because that's what it is.
00:35:48.000There's clearly some kind of advantage for some sports.
00:35:52.000And to say that any differently after you see what happens with Leah Thomas or Whoever the bicycle is and some other athletes that have started to dominate in those spaces.
00:36:07.000Because if you're a male and you've had testosterone pumping through your body most of your life, all of your life, until like a couple of years ago, and then you transition, that's not the same as being someone who's never gone through puberty.
00:36:22.000And that's why the swimming organization changed the threshold for transgender athletes, people that have not transitioned after 13 or 12. So avoiding males going through puberty, where it would give the minimal amount of biological advantage.
00:36:38.000When people talk about outliers, they always want to talk about outliers.
00:36:42.000They always want to talk about someone who is like the elite of the elite of female athletes, the freak of the freaks.
00:36:49.000There's a giant difference between the elite and the elite of females and the elite and the elite of males.
00:36:55.000Like, if you're gonna do this thing where you're going to the far ends of the spectrum, you gotta go all the way.
00:37:00.000Because I don't give a fuck what the elite of the elite female boxer is.
00:37:35.000Listen, you can take ten high school boys in this country That are competing in track and field, and they will be the greatest female athletes of all time.
00:38:06.000If you say your name is no longer, it's Sethina now, and you want to be a woman and you really believe it, I'm like, okay, I don't give a fuck, dude.
00:38:35.0006'2", 240. And saying that she would dominate these women, I'm like, well, okay.
00:38:40.000I mean, anybody who has a size advantage in contact sports, whether it's men against men or women against women, you have a size advantage, that's an advantage.
00:38:56.000Yeah, I don't know how you use that as a justification for saying, well, therefore, it follows that we should allow men to come into women's sports and dominate them all, including the 6'2", 240 women.
00:39:52.000But what we should do is make it so that it's not so hard for people who live in disenfranchised communities.
00:39:58.000That's a real concern that we're not addressing.
00:40:01.000And I think if you wanted to really give people the best chance in life, don't give them a fucked up childhood.
00:40:06.000Figure out a way to somehow or another revive communities and give them a sustainable future where you don't have a long history of gang violence and crime and drug sales and violence.
00:40:20.000We cannot deny that it's a big difference growing up in the suburbs of, you know, fucking the Hamptons versus growing up in Baltimore.
00:41:11.000There's this narrative, this pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
00:41:14.000There's people that don't have fucking shoes.
00:41:17.000There's these people that they got a terrible roll of the dice and by the time they're working and integrated into a system, they're 18 years old or whatever they are, that's 18 years of a fucked life.
00:41:44.000But should that be done by the government or privately?
00:41:45.000And I would think that, you know, with a lot of conservatives who are often criticized for that mentality that, oh yeah, equality is just making sure everybody has the same opportunity.
00:42:51.000I think the problem with someone like Elizabeth Warren's idea that you should shut down a place that has an ideology that millions and millions of people believe in, that life is sacred, and that this is somehow an assault on a woman's right to choose whatever her decision may be.
00:43:09.000They're worried about other influencers.
00:43:30.000And this idea that you can't have someone who is a Christian who talks to another person who's a Christian and maybe they were on the fence about something and you convince them to have a child and it's the best decision they have ever made in their life and they love their kids so much they couldn't imagine they were thinking about getting an abortion.
00:44:08.000We have to agree on both of those things.
00:44:10.000There are also, though, I'm not going to argue with you on that point, but I will say there are people who have been born of rape and are alive right now and are pro-life.
00:44:19.000And they go around speaking, talking about how I had a right to live.
00:44:23.000And they will go out there and make an argument, a pro-life case.
00:47:16.000I was talking about the different thing then.
00:47:17.000I was talking about RU486. This drug terminates an established pregnancy, one which the fertilized egg has attached to the uterine wall and has begun to develop.
00:47:26.000Okay, so forget about Plan B. What about RU-486?
00:47:32.000The same question is if someone knows they're pregnant or if they test positive for pregnancy and they take a pill that can get rid of that like the day of.
00:48:18.000Like you could literally get to the point where the sperm cracks the egg.
00:48:21.000If you could scoop that egg out right there, would that be abortion?
00:48:25.000Well, I mean, at some point you're gonna have to say there was a magic moment that happened because you believe that we eventually become valuable humans, right?
00:48:31.000Well listen, where's the moment where you think the magic happens?
00:48:34.000Let me tell you my perspective on this because I've said this multiple times, but it bears repeating.
00:48:38.000I think abortion is a very human issue in that humans are, we're messy.
00:49:21.000You know, there was a story that came out recently that someone had said that this woman got in trouble for having an abortion because they got a hold of her Facebook messages.
00:49:33.000And then my wife sent me the actual story.
00:49:36.000The actual story was it was a late-term thing.
00:51:01.000And like, so, you know, when we start talking about harmful misinformation and the types of things that are considered, like that I say or that we tweet or the jokes that we make that are considered harmful misinformation, I'm like, well, what about calling that baby a clump of cells?
00:51:13.000I think that's harmful misinformation because then you're encouraging people to kill it like it's nothing when it's actually a human life.
00:52:21.000Plus, we also, you know, I think one of the things that was refreshing to me about the Babylon Bee before I got involved in the Bee when I saw it for the first time...
00:52:37.000Look, if we were able to laugh at ourselves, we wouldn't have people breaking down crying on TikTok because one of their students used the wrong pronouns for them.
00:53:00.000But I think with these people, the thing about if you go on TikTok or Twitter or any kind of social media, And you have a story like that, where it's really, you know, if you're a man with a beard and you have blue hair and you say you're a woman and your teacher calls you a man,
00:53:16.000or your student rather calls you a man, and then you want to cry on TikTok, can't you see why that's kind of an issue?
00:53:23.000And I know you're going to get a shit ton of support from people that say you're right and that's why people do it.
00:53:29.000They do it because they know that there's like a lot of love with that narrative.
00:53:34.000There's a lot of love if you say that.
00:53:35.000So if you put that out there, you will get a lot of people supporting you.
00:53:38.000But then you also get a lot of people attacking you.
00:53:41.000And then they have to smear those attackers and these hateful people, hateful comments and transphobic comments online because a male with a beard and blue hair who thinks he's a woman because he decides he's a woman and is just fully biologically male and is in a class and a kid A little kid,
00:53:58.000not me, who I would definitely call him a woman, whatever your name is, I'll call you whatever you want.
00:54:14.000Because in this particular argument, and again, you and I are opposed in some ways about this, but I think what we agree with is that what you are trying to say is that all life is valuable.
00:55:45.000It's just, human beings are a weird fucking creature, you know, and this is one of the battlegrounds of the two ideologies.
00:55:55.000This is where they get together, it's with abortion.
00:55:58.000It's one of the most heated battlegrounds because the people that are pro-life have this In many ways, it's a loving view that all life is sacred.
00:56:13.000And then the people at the other end of it, see where this is going if you tell a woman what she can and can't do.
00:56:20.000And tell a woman what her decision is.
00:56:22.000If she decides that at two weeks it's not a fetus, it's not a baby, it's not a life, it's a clump of cells.
00:56:28.000Like if she makes that decision and she wants to move on with her life, I don't think we should have the ability to tell someone what they can and can't do like that.
00:56:37.000But again, when it gets to like where it's six months, it gets kind of crazy.
00:56:44.000And I appreciate that you distinguish the two because I would say, you know, when you talk about outliers in sports, for example, those outliers being used as examples to try to shove an argument through.
00:57:17.000That is the vast majority of abortions.
00:57:19.000And so but yes, I do think, though, what's interesting about this topic, because, you know, you go back to like the harassment, intimidation, content moderation, free speech, all of that stuff.
00:57:28.000You know, depending on where you land on this issue, you can say almost whatever you want.
00:57:32.000Wade was overturned, the kind of stuff that people are saying about the Supreme Court justices and how they should never know peace again and harassment and intimidation, all of that's perfectly acceptable.
00:57:48.000And essentially what they did was law is a complicated thing where you look at rulings and you go over decisions and you try to find out if it applies to what you're talking about right there.
00:58:24.000They basically just said, like, the states can determine this.
00:58:26.000This is not like there's no there is no federal protection.
00:58:29.000There was no constitutional right to it that's explicit in the Constitution that was inserted in there.
00:58:35.000And so they're saying we're going to toss that out.
00:58:38.000And put it back to – make your own abortion laws at the state level because this was imported into – imposed on the constitution, not derived from the constitution.
00:58:46.000That's essentially – So for a conservative perspective, this would be a good thing because this would give people the ability to make their own decisions without having the federal government dictate something.
00:58:58.000And move to a state, you know, that has, you know, this way it's like not federally mandated.
00:59:01.000You can live in a state that's pro-life, you can live in a state that's pro-choice, you know, like you can make your own.
00:59:05.000That gives you more leeway, too, to decide where you want to live.
00:59:08.000But the problem people have with that is if they're stuck in a state where it used to be legal, and now all of a sudden it's not, and there's no federal protection for it, so they can't get it.
00:59:18.000And so then you have someone who's forced into keeping their baby.
01:01:28.000And I would say, I would just argue that the, and we can move on to a different topic if you want to get off this one, but I would say that it's a person with potential, not a potential person.
01:02:23.000But I think it's, you know, what we agree on 100% is that you should have a conversation.
01:02:27.000I don't think this effort, the content moderation effort, which is not aimed at the lewd and the indecent, but it just opinions that the powers that be don't like.
01:02:37.000That effort is limiting what information we have access to, limiting what we can talk about.
01:02:42.000And we're supposed to be better informed as a result.
01:02:44.000The arguments that they give are that somehow we're going to be better off because we don't have access to all this misinformation.
01:02:50.000You're better informed by hashing it out and talking through it and saying, we might learn something.
01:02:54.000We might change each other's minds by engaging in debate.
01:02:57.000And you take that away from everybody.
01:02:59.000And I think it's the most valuable thing in the world.
01:03:01.000I think it's the reason that Musk got involved, not because of the B. Musk got involved because he saw that threat to...
01:03:12.000I think Twitter's the problem in the format, because think about what you and I just did.
01:03:18.000This would be horribly frustrating to do through text.
01:06:21.000I mean, some people put more effort into it and they really like structure their tweets and those people are mentally ill and they should fucking go find actual physical hobbies that real human beings should engage in.
01:06:29.000You don't spend an hour on each tweet thinking through it?
01:06:31.000Well, I mean, if you had something important to say, yes.
01:07:36.000I do think that Engaging in those forums, if you have something to say on issues that you think are important, rather than keeping it in and holding it to yourself for fear of whatever backlash you might get or getting sucked into an argument,
01:08:01.000It's like you're on Twitter all day, like debating people or like trying to beat people over the head.
01:08:06.000With whatever your political ideas are or your moral ideas or whatever.
01:08:11.000But I mean, advancing, trying to, you know, like the bee, it's interesting.
01:08:16.000What we do with the bee, satire itself is like, on one hand, you're just trying to make people laugh, but you are also trying to make them think.
01:08:24.000You're trying to engage the ideas of the day, right?
01:08:27.000Like the way that the Onion defines satire in one of their encyclopedias or whatever is it's, It's being a smartass while saying it's for a higher purpose.
01:08:37.000And that's funny because the satirists will tell you it's for a higher purpose, right?
01:08:42.000They'll tell you, like, we're trying to, like, speak truth through these jokes.
01:08:45.000We're trying to, like, tear down bad ideas and address them.
01:10:36.000The absurd has only become sacred because it hasn't been sufficiently mocked.
01:10:41.000I think we have crazy ideas, crazy ideas that comedians to some extent bear the responsibility for becoming popular because they were too afraid to mock them.
01:10:49.000They were too afraid they would get canceled.
01:11:33.000The idea that comedians are responsible for mocking something.
01:11:37.000Well, if there's a comedian who sees something there and he wants to talk about it on stage, then he's responsible for making it funny and it's an important subject and it's something that you can mock.
01:12:29.000And so you can look at it from two perspectives.
01:12:31.000If you want to be funny, you've got to go after the stuff that's really funny and you shouldn't try to avoid that just to not ruffle feathers.
01:12:40.000But the key is just whether or not you think it's funny.
01:13:12.000Now, if I look at something like Rachel Levine winning Woman of the Year and think it's hilarious, I would probably do a bit about that, but Chappelle had already done that bit about Caitlyn Jenner winning Woman of the Year and compared it to Eminem, and it was hilarious.
01:14:31.000A lot of times you're just mocking the mundane and the silly and the deserving of it.
01:14:34.000But you're also finding those things that are dangerous, that are harmful, the social cancers, and you're saying, okay, look, we're not running around.
01:14:41.000We're not an attacker with a knife trying to stab and hurt somebody.
01:14:43.000We're more like a surgeon with a scalpel trying to cut out something harmful so healing can happen.
01:15:04.000And Planned Parenthood defends him for that reason.
01:15:06.000Because Planned Parenthood claims that abortion is only 3% of what they do, right?
01:15:10.000So we'll do an abortion joke like that to show the absurdity of Planned Parenthood trying to get off the hook by saying this is only 3% of what we do by saying, okay, what if Bill Cosby said sexual assault is only 3% of what I do?
01:15:23.000So we're making a point there that's not just like going for laughs.
01:17:55.000If a CEO doesn't capitalize on some opportunity where there's a really popular thing that keeps happening, Like, that's why Instagram is always pushing the videos.
01:18:52.000She goes, one of my friends is so mad at you because her mom watched a video of you talking about the terms of service on TikTok and she made him delete it off his phone.
01:19:17.000And I don't think in this world, I think this world, keeping your kids off social media, you might think that's good, and it's probably good to regulate it, and it's probably good to have discussions with them.
01:20:03.000And to encourage that kind of communication, that shit is gonna come back on you.
01:20:08.000You're setting a tone, and you see it with so many people that these attack dogs, they develop like a fan base of other attack dogs, and then someone goes after them.
01:20:18.000They go after them, they start attacking them, and they hate it.
01:20:25.000If you were having a fucking dinner conversation at your house with a couple of buddies, and one guy brought his friend, and his friend is just an insulting asshole, he just wants to mock everything you do and shit all over you, talk about shit you did in seventh grade, and you're like, get this fucking guy out of here!
01:20:43.000He'd be like, get this fucking guy out of here, this guy's rude.
01:20:47.000That leaves room for mockery, leaves room for comedy, but I think what we have to be really careful with is we're setting a tone for communication.
01:20:56.000Because most of the communication that people do today, where it's with other folks that they don't know, a lot of people are like, the majority of their communication is on social media.
01:21:08.000It is scary though the teens are like suicidal because of like what they see on social media I mean like I don't think rock and roll ever had that kind of like you know like expo letting your kids listen to rock and roll you know there was a lot of that was a debate at one time right but I don't know social media has like It has the ability to put kids into very unhealthy mental states.
01:21:31.000That's what they thought about rock and roll.
01:22:11.000But to try to pretend that we should all live in a world that is completely alien to the world that we currently live in seems to me to be ridiculous.
01:22:20.000That doesn't mean you should be on Chinese spyware.
01:22:47.000There's a lot of narratives that are being projected that aren't accurate, and they do it on purpose, and these are people that are in the fucking highest echelons of media.
01:22:56.000And they're putting out lies and nonsense.
01:22:58.000They're acting as propagandists for the state.
01:23:02.000They're doing what administrations want them to do versus what their journalistic ethics should compel them to do.
01:23:19.000That the vast majority of what people see on television has to be in line with the hugest advertising budget that the world has ever known.
01:23:43.000And it also goes back to the point about mockery.
01:23:46.000I think that kids should see you modeling good behavior.
01:23:48.000They should also see you mocking ideas that deserve to be mocked.
01:23:52.000Because otherwise, they're going to take those ideas seriously.
01:23:54.000They're going to think that there is such a thing as a transgender three-year-old.
01:23:57.000You know, just because the boy picked up a Barbie for two seconds.
01:24:00.000Well, there's so many stories of people who were, when they were younger, thought they were a boy and then they grew up and just became a tomboy and then became a regular woman.
01:24:08.000And they're like, oh, what if I had lived today?
01:24:11.000Oh, and what a crazy time for gays and lesbians, like lesbian women who are a little bit more masculine in how they dress and how they feel, but they don't identify as male.
01:25:03.000And you notice how, like, there's a couple of conversations in that documentary, too, where there were just questions, just simply questioning, like, what do you believe and why do you believe it?
01:25:49.000You should be able to have answers to those questions.
01:25:51.000You should be able to have answers to those questions to people who agree with you.
01:25:55.000If you hold that idea in your head, and you're a politician, And you might actually vote on these things, and you might have to actually have a say on these things, and you might be able to promote these ideas.
01:26:09.000You should tell me what you think about everything, about crosswalks.
01:26:14.000I want to know what you think about stop signs.
01:26:15.000I want to know what you think about everything.
01:30:45.000I had a friend who was arguing with me about it.
01:30:48.000We were talking about divorce settlements, and he was saying that he thinks that maybe it's to make up for the fact that there's a gender pay gap.
01:31:41.000Because it like paints this unrealistic narrative when there's, you could highlight an actual real case, like real gender discrimination, whether it's in with specific fields or specific companies where like there's an old boys network that controls Right.
01:31:56.000Who succeeds and who doesn't succeed, and it's not based on merit, it's just based on, you know, cronyism, then it makes sense.
01:32:04.000But if you're saying that, and you know it's not true, and you know it really is that women choose different jobs, and that men go into different fields of work, and sometimes they're more dangerous, and men are much...
01:32:12.000Jordan Peterson talks about this so eloquently.
01:33:27.000And a lot of people that gravitate towards certain fields that require extreme competitiveness in the work environment.
01:33:35.000You know, 16-hour days, like lawyers and doctors and Oh, I've heard Jordan Peterson talk about that at length and the lack of appreciation that's there too.
01:33:43.000You know, like men are like, men are making things work.
01:35:07.000Well, I'm the opinion that most cops are good people.
01:35:11.000That's why most interactions that people have with cops, I think cops are representative of human beings, and most human beings are good people.
01:35:22.000That's why, for the most part, without mass shootings, you can go to dinner at a restaurant, you can go, because most of the time, people are great.
01:35:30.000Most of the time, even when they have disagreements, it's rare.
01:35:34.000Unless you're hanging out in the wrong bars.
01:35:36.000But most of the time, people are great.
01:35:38.000And I think that's the case with everything.
01:37:25.000And if you want to go to Human Resources and say that, you know, you're going through a simulated pregnancy and he didn't support you, and you were telling him about how you're in the, you know, third trimester of your simulated pregnancy, and he's like, okay, and he just walks away,
01:37:41.000and you've got a beard, and you have blue hair, and your name is Alice now, and for the last six months you've been Alice, and you've been pregnant.
01:37:52.000If you tell me that you're a fucking psychic, and that you're an intuitive, and that you're tuned into the world, you're an empath, and you're telling me all this, and you're getting together with a bunch of people that don't believe in possessions, and they're all polyamorous, and I go, Okay.
01:38:35.000And I think, you know, with a good pledge of allegiance and a good idea of what we represent as a person, it's like a mantra that we can chant.
01:38:55.000When it comes back on you, and there's a dictator saying something you disagree with, but they're compelling you to say it, they're compelling you to do it, just because you think that it's a kind thing to do to transgender people, if you allow that right to exist in modern society, it will go into other things.
01:39:12.000And if we go south, if something goes bad, if there's a civil war or a nuclear war with another country, and only half of us survive, and we get some hardcore Really fucking authoritarian type dictator running this country,
01:39:37.000What's happening in China could happen here.
01:39:39.000If we allow a centralized digital currency, and we allow a social credit score system, and shit goes south, and we have an uprising against the government, and so the government has to lock down and put more rules in place, and they decide whether you can and can't travel based on your tweets,
01:39:58.000And the same sort of compelled speech that you would think would be compassionate towards causes that you support, the problem with that is that could be applied to almost anything.
01:40:07.000And in worst case scenario circumstances, which is what we always have to think about.
01:40:12.000And if you set a precedent for it being okay for the powers that be to enforce those rules, then what if the powers change?
01:40:18.000And suddenly it's somebody who disagrees with you.
01:40:21.000Or this is the problem that the left has.
01:40:24.000The left is redefining things every moment.
01:40:28.000The goalposts are always shifting for what's acceptable and what's not.
01:40:32.000You know, conservatives tend to conserve, right?
01:40:36.000At least that's what they should be doing is preserving what they believe is true and good, right?
01:40:42.000And the left also is going after what they think is true and good, but it's a moving target all the time.
01:40:48.000And so when the target changes, all of a sudden your view that you tweeted out like a year ago is bigoted today.
01:40:53.000Don't you think that's a classic power struggle, though?
01:40:58.000I think that's a classic power struggle between people who are in power and people who want to be in power, and between two opposing parties.
01:41:05.000If you made one team, you made them wear a blue jersey, and the other team, you make them wear a yellow jersey, the fucking yellow ones kind of kick the shit out of the blue ones.
01:41:13.000Those blue ones are all pussies, and the blue ones think the yellow ones are going to quit.
01:41:36.000And then you defend it because you're defending your identity, you're defending your way of life against all these mindless hord of idiots.
01:41:44.000But if you think it's true, then what's wrong with defending it?
01:41:46.000If you think it's true, then you should stand by it.
01:41:48.000The problem is when you have, it's not rigid.
01:42:24.000Or, on the other side, whatever conservative ideas that you attach yourself to, you'll only hook, line, and sinker buy into those, whether it's First Amendment, whether it's Second Amendment, whether it's whatever different issues, border control,
01:42:40.000whatever different issues that people have.
01:43:19.000You know, I believe that human beings should have the ability to defend their home and their property from bad people, because I think bad people are a real thing.
01:43:27.000And I think this idea that you're going to somehow or another make the world a better place by getting rid of guns that are owned by law-abiding citizens and that the crime, the people that commit the crimes are going to follow those rules and they're not going to have guns anymore.
01:43:42.000Well, you're talking about a population of guns that's larger than the population of humans.
01:43:47.000That's a lot of guns to keep track of.
01:43:49.000Do you guys have track of all the bullets?
01:43:51.000You're still allowing people to make bullets?
01:46:11.000Well, and you may have some ideas that deserve to be challenged, that you should let go of, and they're never challenged because you never talk to anybody intelligent who has an opposing view that you might actually learn something from.
01:46:37.000And people are constantly being distracted, whether it's by social media, whether it's by real life.
01:46:42.000And to form like concise opinions, to have like a real understanding of why you believe something and what you believe, it takes a lot of time.
01:46:52.000And it takes these kind of conversations, and the way we have this conversation, like you and I, put our phones off, sit across each other, and talk.
01:47:00.000And it's weird, because we're doing it for a podcast, it's like a way that we probably wouldn't do in real life.
01:47:06.000If we were doing this in real life, we'd probably go to dinner, we'd probably have some food, and talk, and we'd laugh, we'd talk some shit, but we probably wouldn't get heavy into something like that.
01:47:14.000Like whether it's abortion, or, you know, we would probably see a different perspective and just let it go.
01:47:21.000Yeah, well you don't want to get contentious at dinner.
01:48:03.000You know, I think allowing conservative people to talk and joke around about stuff is just as important as allowing progressive people to make Trump memes.
01:48:12.000I mean, you know, how many fucking hilarious comedy shit was made about Trump?
01:49:10.000He did not claim to do more for Christianity than Jesus himself.
01:49:13.000Then you fast forward to 2021. And he calls into some radio show, and he tells the host of this radio show that I've done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in history.
01:49:48.000You know, it was us making fun of Trump.
01:49:49.000You know, we're always accused of being like, and I'm sure you're probably accused of being like a Trump supporter, even though you're like, you know, everybody, if you disagree with them on anything, they'll label you far right, they'll label you, they'll put you in Trump's camp, and there's no escaping that.
01:50:14.000Well, The Onion made a joke about Bernie Sanders supporting or accepting my endorsement that he shouldn't have done that because he shouldn't want to win.
01:50:25.000Something was way better than what I just said.
01:50:27.000I forget how it went, but it was hilarious.
01:50:30.000Because that was the first thing that was canceled for, was saying I support Bernie Sanders.
01:50:43.000I supported Bernie's idea about taking a little bit of stock speculation, taking a small percentage of that, and using it For healthcare and student loans and all that shit.
01:52:12.000If you do that, that's so fucking hard to do that the rest of your life will seem easier.
01:52:17.000And that's what it's all about with people.
01:52:20.000If you think about people that come from a really bad childhood and they have this incredible willpower, where the fuck do you think they got that from?
01:53:42.000How stupid, though, that you mentioned that was like the initial cancel attempt on you because you voted for Bernie Sanders or you supported, you endorsed him, right?
01:53:50.000It's like, Imagine going to a comedy show and you see there's a comedian and you've heard of him and it's supposed to be a funny show.
01:54:00.000So you go to buy tickets and then you want to know first off, wait a minute, who did this guy vote for?
01:54:05.000How is that relevant to whether or not you're going to enjoy the show?
01:54:36.000I don't want to support who you support.
01:54:38.000That was one of the crazy things after Biden won, where people were calling for blacklists of people who supported Trump, people who publicly endorsed Trump or talked about Trump.
01:54:48.000They were talking about making them unhirable.
01:54:49.000I'm like, do you know how crazy that is?
01:54:50.000Accountability Project, they called it or something like that.
01:54:52.000But you know how crazy that is to do to fellow Americans, to try to remove their livelihood?
01:55:30.000People have killed themselves for very minor attacks on Twitter.
01:55:35.000I mean, some people are very vulnerable, and if you want to be this super sensitive, woke, kind, compassionate person, you're supposed to apply that to everybody, okay?
01:55:43.000You're not supposed to only apply that to people whose opinions agree and align perfectly with yours.
01:55:49.000You're supposed to look at people that are Trump supporters or whatever supporter they are that you disagree with, DeSantis supporters, and you're supposed to find common ground with them and find out why do they like that person and And try to have a communication line with them where you're both being kind and friendly and just trying to talk about stuff.
01:56:06.000Well, you're certainly going to have better success if your goal is to change their mind.
01:56:10.000You're going to have a lot better success treating them as a person than vilifying them and calling them names.
01:56:15.000Right, but punishing them by removing their livelihood.
01:56:18.000Because they, maybe in your eyes, were incorrect about their political support.
01:56:40.000And it's going to have to do with state authority.
01:56:42.000And so they're going to try to differentiate it from fascism by saying, well, you're just being held accountable for your actions by people who don't want, you know, it's the market working.
01:56:48.000It's Right, but you're doing that at the benefit of the state.
01:56:52.000You're an actor for the left-wing party.
01:56:55.000That's what you're doing if you're penalizing people for—they're going to lose their job.
01:57:00.000They need to show, by the way, the last date this definition was edited because they change these things all the time.
01:58:26.000It's still a bad thing to completely discourage or attack opposition like that and make it so that they can't talk.
01:58:35.000It's not good for anybody, and I know it's not dictatorial in terms of it's not actually the government, but god damn, they're so in line with them.
01:58:43.000It's so obvious that they'll do things that benefit the side that they want to, and that's never been more clearly expressed than during the Hunter Biden time.
02:00:31.000The content moderation should be – the idea behind giving them immunity to moderate content was to be able to take down things that are like objectively indecent or lewd or obscene.
02:00:41.000You know, like content that like – Well, I think it was mostly to protect people first.
02:00:44.000I think it was more about doxing and harassment.
02:01:10.000They'll say, oh, there's this family-friendly drag show coming up, you know, like, and this is a flyer that's being publicly advertised, you know?
02:01:17.000And then they will go hard like doxing and intimidating and trying to harass and shut up this account that's drawing negative attention to things that they don't want to receive negative attention.
02:01:28.000It's like they're doing what they say you shouldn't be allowed to do, but it's justified when they do it because they don't like the activity or the speech of the person that's saying it.
02:01:37.000See, the thing about Libs and TikTok is people look at it and then they make this defense.
02:01:41.000And this defense is this is not indicative of the greater whole of educators or of liberals.
02:01:49.000You found an egregious example of a far left loon and everybody is now going to attack everyone in that group.
02:01:59.000But that's not, you can't, but it's not, it's not like what libs of TikToks is posting is fake.
02:02:14.000We're dealing with 330 whatever million people we have in this country.
02:02:17.000You're gonna find a lot of really ridiculous people.
02:02:19.000And if you highlight those really ridiculous people, it does have the unintended consequence of forcing people into thinking that's happening everywhere around them.
02:02:27.000And then people who are not doing anything remotely like that get lumped into that same group.
02:03:47.000They'll defend, for example, teachers coming out to their children and talking about sex and gender, talking to them about critical race theory and how white kids should – giving kids an assignment where the white kids have to move to the back of the room and the black kids move to the front to separate them and show how white kids are privileged.
02:04:05.000Now we're going to have the blacks at the front and the white kids need to be quiet right now.
02:04:23.000Okay, but if you wanted a kid to feel like what it would feel like if you were a black child living in the early 60s, if you wanted to express how wrong that is, wouldn't you do it that way?
02:04:35.000Like, for an exercise, you're not talking about, like, if this was like every day, I would say that is fucking crazy racial discrimination.
02:04:41.000But for an exercise, to let kids, white kids, know what it would have been like, to let everybody know, even the black, hold on, even the black kids, to let them know what it would be like.
02:04:50.000Let's imagine, if this was 1963, this is how we would have to do it.
02:04:54.000Okay, so I want all the white kids to sit back there and all the black kids to sit here.
02:04:58.000And then you would say, See how terrible that would be?
02:05:00.000If I treated you only by something you have zero control over, what your ethnicity is, and not by the color of your skin or the content of your character, as Martin Luther King would want you to do it.
02:05:10.000And then you could actually bring the kids together with an understanding that at one point in time, there was horrific racism, and it was prevalent all throughout America, and that people like Rosa Parks did have to sit at the front of the bus and get arrested so that people understood that this was going on, that people did have to sit at that counter.
02:05:27.000And let people know that this is a real thing that's going on, and this is contrary to the way we should all feel about human beings.
02:05:37.000If the lessons were ever framed in the context of the content of your character matters more than the color of your skin, then it would be totally different.
02:06:11.000These are critical race theory lessons that are trying to say that you are – that currently in our current system, the current system privileges white people and not black people.
02:06:21.000You're guilty just because of your skin color for being white and you need to be quiet right now.
02:06:26.000But it's because of the history of slavery, right?
02:07:18.000Masturbation assignment for kindergarteners.
02:07:20.000I mean, this kind of stuff, it's like...
02:07:22.000Shocked but not, because I did read this one thing where they were talking about kids that were preteens, and they were describing different ways that people have sex.
02:07:32.000And I'm like, I just don't necessarily think that's your place.
02:07:36.000It's a complex thing that I don't necessarily want taught by someone who I don't even know.
02:07:49.000Because children are very malleable, and most people want to be the ones, other than the world itself, but in terms of authority figures that are explaining things, you don't want someone explaining things to your kid that you absolutely don't agree with.
02:08:04.000Right, or that you don't think they're ready for yet.
02:09:00.000And that is a problem with And expressing any complex ideas that may have a very nuanced...
02:09:09.000There's nuance to all of those conversations.
02:09:14.000And you might not want this person who's not that bright, not that good at expressing themselves, and very biased, to explain something to your kid that's going to cause an argument at home.
02:09:25.000Because then the kid's going to bring something up, and you're going to be like, where did you hear this from?
02:09:28.000Or to tell your kid that, you know what, you don't have to confide in your parents about this.
02:10:27.000I think that's why this transgender craze, and it is a craze, it's legitimately a craze, the numbers are off the charts with all these young people that are now identifying as either non-binary or some other gender.
02:10:38.000That's Abigail Schreier's position on it.
02:11:08.000The whole reason for like a parental guidance warning on a rap album from like the 1980s when Tipper Gore was promoting that shit, the whole reason is you're influencing kids.
02:11:40.000Yeah, it's, uh, the whole thing is, you know, it's just no one wants to look at both sides of it.
02:11:47.000No one wants to look at both sides of it.
02:11:50.000Everyone wants to think that you have to like buy wholesale all the ideas of either the left or the right Depending upon which group you align with which group you decide you align with that's where it gets weird with people because if you're like a progressive open-minded compassionate person and then you watch two professors having a conversation about kids under 13 should be forced to have sex and Because we force them to do a lot of other things.
02:12:20.000They do a lot of things they don't do.
02:12:21.000Why shouldn't we force them to have sex?
02:12:22.000That's a real conversation I saw on Libs and TikTok.
02:12:25.000That's fucking wild that they're trying to make an intellectual argument about whether or not children should be forced to have sex and about how they've been that way throughout human history.
02:12:38.000Like this arbitrary age that we put on people.
02:12:41.000I think it should concern us more than anything else, this effort to stamp out not just the dissent, not just the different opinions, but the jokes.
02:12:56.000I mean, you know, your show is, you know, it's the censorship from these platforms that are hosting your content that you put them onto.
02:13:07.000I think our ability to be able to laugh at these things that deserve to be laughed at, it's so vitally important for the health of society that we not stop that and shut that down.
02:13:31.000There should be more entering the space and feeling free to say what they want to say rather than everyone learning that, oh, if you follow in the Babylon Beasts footsteps, you're going to get shut up.
02:13:40.000And I'm glad you guys mocked Trump, because if you didn't mock Trump, I mean, if you didn't mock some of the more ridiculous shit that guy says, you know, it's like...
02:14:51.000She went on about how space is, you know, we've accomplished this, we've done something, and now we need to continue doing something, because space, we accomplished it, and now we need to also continue to accomplish it.
02:16:05.000You write this fucking groovy speech, make her look like a wizard, and she goes up there, the time that we're enjoying is different than the time of other times, where people were not enjoying their time.
02:16:18.00013 key staffers have left the VP's team in as many months, including chief of staff, chief spokesperson, deputy press secretary, deputy chief of staff, communications director, director of digital strategies, director of advanced,
02:17:33.000A very thoughtful, very well phrased response about any particular important issue because she actually thinks about them and she formulates her own independent opinion.
02:18:25.000A month later, a report came out that her staff had reached out to Hillary Clinton's staff to try to figure out how they could make Kamala Harris more likable.
02:20:14.000Look, if you're happy that that person's gone and you want to express that in a sober way, you want to say the world is better off without Muammar Gaddafi running Libya, okay.
02:20:36.000It looks like one of those knives that's on the end of a rifle, and he just shoves it up his ass.
02:20:40.000Like, that's not something that anybody should ever laugh at, even if it's to the worst person.
02:20:45.000The worst person dying like that, like, that's not funny.
02:20:49.000I mean, maybe it'll make you happy if that person's a killer and they've killed a bunch of people and someone runs up behind them and shoves a knife up their ass.
02:23:18.000Yeah, I remember in A Gladiator when Marcus Aurelius is going to make Maximus his successor, and he goes, I want you, not my son, to be my successor.
02:23:56.000I was like, the fucking president retweeted me.
02:23:59.000I think that the people who are arguing that he's been given a ton of fuel, like they just poured rocket fuel in his engine, I think that's absolutely true.
02:24:07.000I mean, if you just look at the fundraising he's done off the back of this already.
02:24:10.000Right, but what did they- Absolutely the case.
02:24:12.000Yeah, but I don't mean in terms of politically.
02:25:11.000Yeah, but do you think that's a genuine concern or is it they want to find something, anything that they can use to prevent him from running again?
02:25:23.000I think if they're just doing that and they're using the FBI in a way that they would never use it against Hillary Clinton and they're going after him in a way they would never go after Ghislaine Maxwell's client list.
02:26:24.000I think where people lose, where they don't care about that, is because they're like, okay, you know, if you're going to be selectively enforcing laws like that, and just turn a blind eye to Hillary deleting emails that have been subpoenaed, and all of that, and the...
02:26:38.000A blind eye to Hunter Biden trying to act like this is not a story until you're forced to admit that it is.
02:26:43.000It's the double standard that makes everybody say this is persecution.
02:26:47.000And so even if there was something that was done that was wrong, they're still choosing to be selective about going after him in a way that comes across as they're after him doing what they wouldn't normally do to someone on their own side.
02:26:59.000If it was Hillary Clinton's home, they'd have no interest in what's in her safe.
02:27:10.000I see the side that if you're an anti-Trump person and you find out that he's doing something that's against the law, you'd want to prosecute it for it.
02:27:19.000I don't know the specifics of the Hillary Clinton email thing in terms of what those files were, but if they're the same classification, Of files as like he had you could make the argument they were more vulnerable because they were on a regular laptop Well, and it's still destroyed after a subpoena after a subpoena I mean imagine imagine if Trump was subpoenaed for this information instead of handing it over he burned it,
02:28:08.000You could have a MAGA hat that said anything.
02:28:10.000Like, I saw a lady get maced in the face, because she had a hat on that said, it was a red hat with white letters that said, Make Bitcoin Great Again.
02:28:19.000And she was at one of those protests, there's a video of her.
02:28:31.000Well that happened a lot at those fucking anti-Trump protests.
02:28:36.000It's just the problem is that he was such a divisive character that he became a great enemy for the other side.
02:28:44.000He wasn't like a statesman Who, like, you know, you could criticize his policies and his positions, you could say he's heartless, all you want, but he represents the United States in a statesmanly way, and, like, no, Trump's, you know, he's a wild guy that, like, encourages people to hate him.
02:29:00.000Do you think DeSantis would demand or command more respect from the left?
02:29:05.000The left still hates him, but they don't hate him the same way they hated Trump.
02:29:09.000They try to, but he's more reasonable, he's very, like, level in the way he talks about things.
02:31:17.000You know, the argument for him was his economic policies that people think were better and if we didn't have COVID, didn't hit, we would have been in a better place financially.
02:31:26.000And the argument is as the economy grows, it gives more opportunities for everybody and everybody sort of does better because the economy is doing better.
02:31:33.000And this is like in the anti-Marxist, anti-socialist argument.
02:31:37.000Is that a strong economy where these businesses are killing it is better for everybody because then there's more jobs, there's more opportunity, there's more...
02:31:46.000And then other people say, well, no, because it's a small percentage of people that are getting the most benefit.
02:32:11.000If you want to be a Rupert Murdoch, maybe that's a bad example.
02:32:14.000If you want to be someone who's head of some gigantic industry that's worth billions and billions of dollars, like Jeff Bezos, buying the biggest yachts and fucking flying around the biggest jets.
02:34:16.000You know, maybe they're just out of college, which makes sense.
02:34:19.000If you're just out of college and you're making $24,000 a year, and you're looking at people that are worth billions, and then you're seeing homeless people, and you're a kind, compassionate young person, and these professors are teaching about Leninism and Marxism, and you start to espouse these ideas, like, I get it.
02:34:38.000Personally, I don't get how, as a young person, you look at someone like a Jeff Bezos and all the success he's had, and you're not inspired to go out there and work your butt off to, like, get to that level versus feeling envious or resentful and saying, oh, that's not fair that he did that.
02:35:19.000Most of what they instilled with me had to do with values and faith and doing the right thing, not getting ahead in the business world.
02:35:28.000They were never like, oh, we want our son to go to the finest business school and become successful.
02:35:32.000They judged success in much different terms in terms of how big your bank account is, which is great and important.
02:35:38.000But as a young person when I was in college or before, looking at people who were successful, I never – and we weren't successful.
02:35:46.000My dad said pastors don't make a lot of money unless you're the pastor of a big megachurch that's telling people to be healthy and wealthy if they just give you more money.
02:35:52.000My dad didn't pastor a church like that, so he had a very meager salary, and we had a very middle class, lower middle class upbringing.
02:36:01.000And so, I don't know, I always, but I always looked at wealthy, successful business people, entrepreneurs with, like, I had huge admiration for, like, what they were able to accomplish.
02:36:11.000How brilliant they are, how hardworking they are, what they put into that.
02:36:14.000Well, it's kind of interesting because we celebrate that in a lot of other areas.
02:36:24.000The problem is that comes in a lot of people's eyes with victims, right?
02:36:28.000Like, the overachieving capitalist comes with victims.
02:36:32.000Victims, the environment is a victim, the people are the, you know, the lower class is a victim, the mom, there's like a lot of bodies along the way in their eyes.
02:36:41.000And also, We're talking about how malleable people are.
02:36:45.000I mean, if you're in the university system of 2022, you're 100% at least being exposed to a lot of these socialist ideas and Marxist ideas and very progressive left-wing ideas.
02:36:59.000And they're more popular than conservative ideas by a large margin.
02:37:05.000You're going to have a lot more victims if you get rid of that system and do it a different way.
02:37:08.000By a large margin, though, the university systems are leaning towards the left.
02:37:15.000And so these people, they're looking at this, they just left their parents' house, maybe they disagree with their parents, maybe their dad's an asshole, and now they're at this university.
02:37:23.000And this professor, who's so eloquent and so interesting and so well-read and well-traveled, and they're saying these things that are so opposed to the way they grew up, but make so much sense.
02:37:33.000Like, oh, I'm going to do the right thing now, and I'm going to fight for this right.
02:37:46.000You can't get rich in business the way that Bezos did without offering something of value and employing a ton of people, which is a tremendous good.
02:38:05.000It means you can take the wrong turn, become a criminal, take advantage of people, be a scumbag, mistreat people, be cruel to people, mean to people.
02:38:16.000The upside more than makes up for that.
02:38:18.000The fact that any of this good stuff is possible makes up for the fact that the bad stuff is possible.
02:38:22.000You're never going to have any system that you could possibly think of that doesn't have downsides that are offsetting to the positives that are worth having.
02:38:33.000And I think that looking at it the way you're looking at it...
02:38:39.000To say that you grew up the way you grew up is very interesting because I think having a firm set of ethics and morals when you grow up is very advantageous because you realize like later in life if you do the right thing you'll feel better regardless of the result.
02:38:55.000Like, you do the wrong thing, but you benefit, you feel guilty.
02:39:00.000Like, if you're a person that has made your living in an institution where you're working at some sort of a corporation and you poison the environment in order to succeed and make more profit, but you hit your goal, but then you realize that there's a dead lake in Ecuador now and all these people are suffering and getting cancer.
02:39:46.000And that is the problem with unchecked capitalism.
02:39:49.000That's the problem when they're allowed to go to third world countries, where there's no regulations, do wild shit, and pollute rivers, and fuck up the environment.
02:39:55.000They do that, and they do that because it's profitable.
02:39:59.000That's our problem, is that what you are saying, and what a lot of Christians are saying, that grew up in this way, is more important to do the right thing.
02:40:12.000And it's going to benefit you in business, too, to some extent.
02:40:14.000I mean, will you necessarily be as successful as somebody who's like cutthroat and doesn't care if their employees are underpaid or not well treated or you're taking advantage of somebody in a process or ripping somebody off?
02:40:26.000I mean, you're not going to be as maybe successful as them, but you bring values.
02:40:40.000I mean, if you leave enemies in your wake all over the place, like you cut off, you damage and destroy relationships because you're dishonest in business.
02:40:46.000You take advantage of people or you poach from them in nasty and unethical ways.
02:40:52.000You're going to create more problems for yourself than you solve, even if you get ahead in the short term.
02:40:56.000They think they can stay ahead of that.
02:40:58.000Maybe not the best example, but if you have a really good product, you can stick by your ideas, is Chick-fil-A. A lot of people oppose Chick-fil-A for their anti-LBGTQ ideas and gay marriage and stuff, but they don't open on Sunday.
02:41:14.000They're leaving billions of dollars on the table, and they're like, Sunday's the Lord's Day, which is crazy for a fast food place.
02:41:21.000To have that take, but meanwhile, they're everywhere.
02:41:38.000I don't know why it's bad if you still go to church and still work.
02:41:42.000It's still possible to keep Chick-fil-A open, but they don't want it.
02:41:46.000So look, it's not that I align myself with Chick-fil-A's values, but I'm saying like if you have a great product, you can stick by your thoughts, even if they're not the best thoughts.
02:41:55.000You can stick by your ethics and your morals and you can still be successful if you have a great product.
02:42:00.000So that's where the idea of like ethical capitalism could come in.
02:42:04.000You know, like moral, ethical capitalism.
02:42:07.000Like, it's still okay to compete in the marketplace, but it's not okay to lie.
02:42:11.000It's not okay to pollute environments.
02:42:13.000It's not okay to do some of the shit that we know the corporations have done, lie about studies and do different things where they try to proclaim their innocence.
02:42:20.000It's not okay to pretend that you're a free speech platform and then moderate political viewpoints that you don't like.
02:42:30.000And that is, a lot of people would think it's less consequential than corporations doing evil things, but it's still bad.
02:42:38.000It's still not the optimal way to do things.
02:42:41.000But I think part of the problem is, I'm going to keep coming back to this, but I think part of the problem is the format itself, the way people communicate in that text format It's just shitty.
02:42:51.000It's just a shitty way to get thoughts across to people where you're going back and forth with them.
02:42:56.000It just leaves too much to the imagination.
02:42:59.000It's too many openings to be an asshole.
02:43:02.000It's not a good way for human beings who are designed to communicate, look at each other in the eye, reading emotional cues, reading tone and the context of the conversation.
02:43:13.000That's how people are supposed to talk.
02:43:15.000In any other way, I don't think it's good for you.
02:43:18.000It's the reality of the world we live in, though.
02:43:19.000It's just like with your kids and social media.
02:43:22.000There's never going to be a physical town square anymore where you go and have a debate about the issues of the day with your neighbors.
02:43:29.000But you should at least encourage people to not engage with people like that.
02:43:35.000I think that idea needs to get out there in a way that more people resonate.
02:44:25.000And I understand if you have a point, if someone's saying something that's not true, and you want to correct it, or you want to argue against it, or you want to say something about them, like, this is so hypocritical because of this.
02:44:38.000It definitely detracts from our ability to see other people as ends in themselves and not as means to ends or as, you know, an object to dunk on so that we can score some kind of points and generate more followers or likes.
02:45:25.000I think instilling values like that is going to be a lot more beneficial in those kinds of arenas than trying to tell people what they can and can't say.
02:45:59.000Yeah, they played soccer and hung out.
02:46:01.000It was a big deal because, you know, they had a truce and a ceasefire, and I think it lasted a few days, and they went back to shooting at each other.
02:47:45.000How fantastically wonderful and strange.
02:47:47.000The English officers experienced it like that too.
02:47:50.000That, thanks to soccer and Christmas, the feast of love, deadly enemies briefly came together as friends.
02:47:58.000It was one of several impromptu soccer matches played between British and German soldiers in no man's land that Christmas.
02:48:05.000For one day, and in some sectors of the line for several days, the enemies made a spontaneous peace.
02:48:11.000A century on, these games transfix Europeans." We all grew up with the story of soldiers from both sides putting down their arms on Christmas Day, says Prince William, president of the English Football Association.
02:48:25.000No wonder Because this extraordinary story suggests an alternative history of the 20th century.
02:48:30.000Many people, including some veterans of the war, have doubted that these games were ever played.
02:48:37.000Indeed, Jeff Dyer in his 1994 book, The Missing of the Somme, dismisses it as myth.
02:48:43.000Some historians believe the truth is somewhere in between.
02:48:46.000Others contend that the impact of the games has been overstated as we witness the Premier League of FA and other organizations commemorate the moment.
02:49:04.000I mean, it's a great ending, I guess, in terms of the result of the war, but it's a horrible ending for those people that had to go back to shooting at each other when they realized they had common ground and they could just hang out together.
02:49:13.000So you think the liberals and the conservatives can have a day of peace and come together on Twitter and lay down their arms?
02:49:21.000I would hope they could do it individually, one-on-one in real life.
02:49:30.000A lot of people have a conversation about something that they disagree with, even in real life.
02:49:35.000They're so used to communicating in this kind of shitty way that I think they would just engage in the standard and scream at each other.
02:49:42.000I mean, those Karen videos that you see, people yelling at each other about wearing a mask or yelling at each other about, you know, you support Hitler, whatever it is.
02:49:50.000Those crazy conflicts that people have in real life, that's not the way to do it either.
02:49:55.000It's just human beings are in this weird stage of information overexposure and social media and just an incredibly volatile world right now.
02:50:11.000I mean, there's so much uncertainty and there's so much anxiety that people have about international conflicts for the first time in a long time.
02:50:17.000People are genuinely worried about our relationships with China and Russia.
02:50:22.000And so people are just ramped up with anxiety already.
02:50:25.000And then, you know, even if you get them together in public, they might scream at each other.
02:50:29.000But I think that if people could learn how to not do that, they could learn how to just communicate, I think we could get along a lot better and we could find common ground.
02:50:40.000I don't think we're ever going to come to a time in this world where they're not conservative people and liberal people.
02:50:44.000I like what you said earlier about steel manning your opponents instead of straw manning, you know, like actually giving them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they're actually a rational thinking person who's considered, you know, the evidence or whatever and has reached conclusions in good faith and respect that.
02:51:02.000And even if it's different than what you believe, like respect that and be willing to have a dialogue with them about it.
02:51:07.000Without the assumption that they came by their views in bad faith or that they're stupid.
02:51:57.000And if it is the town square, then we do have to have some consideration for First Amendment rights, because otherwise we don't have free speech privileges in the town square.
02:52:19.000Open-minded approach that doesn't just get dominated by right-wing people or dominated by left-wing people.
02:53:29.000But I think one of the ways that that could happen and one of the only ways in terms of having a platform is if Elon buys Twitter.
02:53:39.000Because if you really did open it up, I think most of the people that are addicted to Twitter, the progressives, the left-wing people, they're going to stay on it if they're not censored.
02:53:49.000And if they can develop these little environments where they can block everybody they don't like and limit comments to people who follow them, they can still sort of regulate their own feed.
02:54:20.000Right, and that's the problem with something like Parler, is because the right-wing people go over there when they get kicked off Twitter, or they don't think Twitter's supportive of it, and then it becomes so right-leaning that the left-wing people don't want to go over there.
02:54:33.000There should be, like we're talking about, we're very idealistic in this conversation, talking about how people should behave and how they should treat each other, and it's, you know, is this really going to happen?
02:54:44.000I love when I hear people, like, when people ask me who my favorite comedians are, my favorite comedians are anybody who's, like, willing to make the jokes you're not supposed to make and speak the truth and stand up for free speech and this nonsense cancel culture stuff pushing back on that.
02:54:55.000When Bill Maher is talking about, you know, the importance of free speech, you know, he's very hard on Twitter.
02:54:59.000He talks about how they do need a new sheriff.
02:55:03.000Someone like Bill Maher would be happy, I think.
02:55:06.000I don't even know if he knows what Parler is.
02:55:08.000But he'd be happy to join a place like Parler and bring other people from the left with him because they could actually benefit that discussion.
02:55:14.000They could provide a counter to those other arguments.
02:55:16.000More people from the left should be willing to jump in the pool and swim with others.
02:55:20.000Not the men in the women's pool, by the way.