It's the last show of the week, and I couldn't be more grateful to have Thomas Sowell on the show. He's one of the most brilliant economists in the world, and we know how to bring a laugh.
00:01:27.000Newsbook, Discrimination and Disparities.
00:01:29.000It kind of looks like I changed my mind to red and white there.
00:01:32.000One of the men I've wanted to have on the show.
00:01:37.000That's a great start. I'm sure he's thrilled that he just appeared on this program.
00:01:40.000I've been talking about him since I met you, you've been wanting him on the show.
00:01:44.000Yeah, I've really wanted to have him on the show, which actually leads me to a question of the day.
00:01:47.000Who would you most like to see on the show as far as great minds?
00:01:50.000Who do you consider to be some of the most, I guess, formidable minds of our time?
00:01:54.000I would certainly say Thomas Sowell on there, and then in the comedy realm, Norm MacDonald, so we're We're holding out hope.
00:01:58.000And then the second question, have you noticed the incredibly odd coverage of the YouTube shooting, which we'll talk about later?
00:02:03.000And finally, does anyone else have allergies?
00:02:05.000I feel as though an entire field of dandelions just decided to line up and flagellate right in my eyeball.
00:02:11.000I don't know about anyone else out there.
00:02:12.000Producing in the in-video studios, as always, is Jared, who is not gay.
00:02:15.000Follow him on Twitter, not gay. Jared, meet us credit with your comments, your thoughts, your Photoshop, your life, fulfill my legal obligations, jargon, conclusions.
00:03:18.000We'll get to other news, but first, for those who are chomping at the bit, you can get your free bucket of poop at an upcoming Detroit Zoo event.
00:03:28.000The first thousand people at the zoo's sixth annual Green Fest will receive a token good for one free five-gallon bucket of Detroit Zoo poop.
00:03:37.000When asked why the free poop, Detroit zoologists specified because slim tap water wasn't available.
00:03:42.000I... This is just, this is exactly what you would expect from Detroit, particularly if you've seen how they've branded their local tourism campaign.
00:04:27.000Name that movie line, or I guess sort of series line.
00:04:30.000By the way, hey, here's another story.
00:04:31.000A woman said an Ancestry.com DNA test told her that she had a different father, who happened to be her parents' fertility doctor...
00:04:40.000The test showed that her DNA matched a sample from a doctor more than 500 miles away.
00:04:44.000At the time, Rowlett was not aware that more than 36 years ago, her parents had struggled to conceive.
00:04:52.000There is a twist. Seeking more information, Ms.
00:04:54.000Rowlett had her older sister take the same test, only to discover a DNA match with the milkman.
00:04:58.000Her younger sister matched with the mailman, and unsurprisingly, her youngest brother, who wears a leather helmet, matched positive with the hobo who pees down the elevator shaft, claiming he's Jesus.
00:05:06.000Oh my gosh. It's always the crazy person who claims he's Jesus in 2018.
00:05:12.000It's true. Never the guy in the office.
00:07:53.000I'll leave the office You know, we often get people asking us, you get these exclusive calls, but why don't they speak in their native tongue?
00:08:01.000It's always in English. It's always in English.
00:08:12.000We'll talk about the YouTube shooting and just some overall startling statistics that are ignored by the media.
00:08:16.000People should go and watch the John Lott interview yesterday.
00:08:18.000But a great example is this idea that controlling guns will reduce suicides.
00:08:22.000Japan has, I think, some of the strictest gun control in the world.
00:08:24.000The highest suicide rate in the industrialized world, I believe.
00:08:27.000That's because I have to have babies in turn.
00:08:29.000Yeah. You know, someone else once told me that if you were to judge Quebec separately as its own country as opposed to a province, that it would have number two.
00:08:35.000I haven't been able to find sources on that.
00:08:36.000If someone can send that to me, at S. Crowder, I've heard it.
00:08:40.000I cannot substantiate it, but I've heard that multiple times.
00:08:42.000Isn't Switzerland as well? Like, really high?
00:09:33.000Rajiv Kumar, a botany lecturer, so he's staying in his lane, at Khaledi Street Sankara College said on television, a woman who dresses up like a man, a woman who dresses up like a man, what will the character of the child she gives birth to be?
00:09:47.000These children are called transgenders or nebulkunkumsakumsihidra.
00:09:52.000Someone's going to pronounce that correctly.
00:09:54.000He also later added that, and women who wear miniskirts should call me.
00:10:01.000Tor-free. Tor-free. And what's funny is he was adamant about his opinion.
00:10:06.000We have from the same article, speaking on a TV show recently, he defended his remarks, doubling down, saying they were based, quote, on science and years of experience.
00:10:15.000Which, in his defense, we believe stems from the recently published Double Blind Placebo Controlled Wranglers Make Retards Study.
00:10:54.000They say we'll remember in November. They're the ones who feel the way we do, not the way the gun lovers and the NRA do with all that idiocy to the point of absurdity.
00:11:01.000He then said, we're at a point with all of us where this is beyond trying to see another person's point of view.
00:11:07.000There are ways you can talk about that, but we're at a point where the things that are
00:11:10.000happening in our country are so bad, and it comes from Trump.
00:11:15.000He went on citing examples, blaming Trump, of course, for a lackluster economy, political
00:11:18.000divisiveness, as well as Rocky and Bullwinkle, Stardust, analyze that, hide and seek, the
00:11:22.000family, grudge match, the intern, the big wedding, dirty grandpa, meet the Fockers,
00:11:25.000little Fockers, his entire post-2006 catalog, aside from Silver Linings Playbook and alimony
00:13:49.000And by the way, for everyone wondering what happened here, there's a lot of evidence, strong evidence, that this shooter had a problem with mental illness.
00:13:56.000Don't believe me? Here's Taylor the tape.
00:14:08.000Yeah. She looks like Michael Jackson in transition.
00:14:12.000Well, she looks like Michael Jackson after the transition in a parallel universe where the surgery was conducted with nothing more than spent up garbage parts from a salvage yard.
00:14:22.000So one thing that really struck me, and this is why I'm really curious what the rest of you have noticed, is the difference in how the media covered this versus other shootings.
00:14:29.000Have you guys seen this? They're still talking about Parkland, no mention of Sutherland Springs.
00:14:32.000No one mentioned the YouTube shooting.
00:14:34.000At all? The second biggest tech company, I guess the first biggest tech company, because it's Google, but YouTube, right behind Facebook.
00:14:40.000I think the biggest website is Google, then Facebook, and then YouTube, I believe.
00:14:43.000Number one, two, and three. So, shooting at the number three, arguably number one tech company, no headlines.
00:14:52.000Already gone, two days later. Look at the HuffPo and the last story on MSNBC. You can see this here.
00:14:56.000And something that I loved about Huffington Post, they said, look, they go, motive's still unclear.
00:15:01.000Notice one thing? It's the police officer.
00:15:05.000They don't even show her picture. Anytime it's a male shooter, a white male shooter, it's just Dylan Rue.
00:15:10.000It's right up there. This is the face of domestic terrorism.
00:15:13.000Yeah, along with the rebels. Now they just show the cop, because they're like, let's show the white male involved in our reporting.
00:15:18.000It's horrible, because every time I go to a comic book movie now, I just assume it's full of mass shooters, because they all look like that.
00:16:28.000And of course, part of the reason for this difference is that it didn't fit the narrative of the white male shooter, which is what the leftist media loves to claim is the trend.
00:16:35.000This doesn't go with it. Another clip.
00:17:05.000I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but strong gun laws?
00:17:08.000Pretty strict gun laws there in California.
00:17:10.000Also, by the way, YouTube, Google, not a hotbed for gun culture.
00:17:14.000Which is also just even more damning because you sent a woman into a virtually gun-free state and she still couldn't come up with any victories.
00:17:20.000Well, hold on a second. She did injure three people.
00:17:21.000Injure three people. You don't want to make light of that.
00:17:23.000But she shot herself. But she shot herself.
00:17:26.000By the way, no, listen, it's always sad when someone loses a life, but not equally sad.
00:17:32.000When you're shooting at other people, it's like...
00:17:34.000Put it this way, if I had the power, if I could do the...
00:17:37.000What do you call the power? Is it ESP? What's the power where you can actually control people with your minds?
00:17:40.000If I had the Jedi... If I were there at YouTube, that's exactly what I would do.
00:17:45.000If she were shooting at people, I'd go...
00:17:51.000And then go to lunch. Thomas Sowell coming up after the break.
00:17:53.000One trend that we do see is that just like the Parkland shooting, we are looking for actual trends.
00:17:58.000Police were warned beforehand, but did nothing.
00:18:01.000Now to be fair, they claim that they didn't have any reason to detain her, and that's obviously, you can't just detain someone for no reason.
00:19:55.000Sven's conflicted. He's like, oh, I know what I should say if I want to stay on my visa, but I know how I feel.
00:20:04.000Committed in a gun-free zone and something else stopped by someone with a gun, which might explain why this person who was there at the shooting, well, let him explain it for himself.
00:20:12.000What's going through your mind with, I mean, people dropping, being shot multiple times, bullets whizzing, people bleeding?
00:20:19.000What's going through your mind? Well, Leslie was on my mind, but at the same time, I knew, you know, I had to be smart.
00:23:21.000Actually, this is one of the rare instances I had to go into my office and just kind of meditate during the break because I had so many questions I wanted to ask.
00:23:26.000There are only a handful of people, one of whom we've already had on, George St.
00:23:30.000Pierre in athletics. We had him on the show.
00:23:32.000Norm Macdonald in comedy, hopefully someday.
00:23:34.000And then when it comes to economists, social thinkers, philosophers.
00:23:38.000This next guy. For those of you who don't know, he is an American economist, social theorist, I guess political philosopher, currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, and his latest book is Discrimination and Disparities, though it is one in a long catalog of many, and one of the people I look up to most.
00:23:57.000Mr. Thomas Sowell, thank you for being here, sir.
00:24:56.000Well, okay, that's a brilliant answer.
00:24:57.000And I will say this. I never have felt better about myself than seeing, when I was doing research on you recently, seeing people insult Thomas Sowell.
00:25:04.000I realized it doesn't matter who you are.
00:25:08.000I'm like, if they say it about Thomas Sowell, why do I even try to appease them?
00:25:12.000Let me ask you this. In your longest, I know obviously you'll say the latest book, for those who don't know Discrimination and Disparities, is incredible.
00:25:19.000And I'm sure you'd consider it among your best.
00:25:21.000But with such an extensive catalog, for a lot of young people watching today who may not be super familiar with you, you know, 18-year-olds, if you had to pick one or two of your books as sort of your crowning achievement or the one you'd recommend most, is there one that sticks out?
00:25:35.000Well, if it's the one that I recommend most, it would be basic economics, because that's where most people are most lacking.
00:25:42.000And so there are other books I've written that represent more of an intellectual effort on my part, but that's really not the criteria when you're recommending something for their benefit.
00:25:52.000And that's the book that has, in fact, sold the most copies and been translated into the most foreign languages.
00:25:59.000I talked about this growing up in college.
00:26:01.000I remember I was a conservative by nature.
00:26:03.000And I said, where do I really go if I really want to learn and read up on this?
00:26:07.000And someone actually gave me, I think it was actually basic economics, handed it to me, and that was my start.
00:26:13.000So, an incredible book for those who are in their formative years.
00:26:16.000Let me ask you about this latest book.
00:26:18.000I want to talk about this. Discrimination and Disparities, for people who don't know, it's available pretty much everywhere because he's Thomas Sowell.
00:26:23.000More relevant today than I think possibly in my lifetime for both the right and the left.
00:26:29.000And I don't know if you've seen this quite a bit, sort of with the rise of this new right contingency.
00:26:33.000The left is either inaccurate or misleading, we know, in so many facets of the economy, culture, not the least of which is how they use identity politics.
00:26:39.000But now there's this contingency, and Jared was talking about this, on the right, not the mainstream right, but semi-French who play the same game.
00:26:45.000Namely, they claim that race largely determines IQ, IQ largely determines socioeconomic status, thus different races are doomed to different socioeconomic fates, period.
00:26:53.000Your book posits a very different argument, doesn't it?
00:27:01.000The two main explanations of disparities in the 20th century and in our own time are, one, genetics, and two, discrimination.
00:27:14.000And the irony is that American progressives have taken the lead, took the lead, in both those cases.
00:27:20.000That is, 100 years ago, American progressives We're completely on the side of genetic determinism.
00:27:41.000Yes. It is virtually impossible that there could be any such thing as equal outcomes for different groups.
00:27:51.000Let me give you one simple example that is ignored almost universally.
00:27:57.000Different groups have different median ages.
00:28:00.000Japanese Americans have a median age of 50.
00:28:03.000Right. Mexican Americans have a median age of 26.
00:28:07.000Now, why would you ever expect to see Japanese Americans Why would you expect a group with an immediate age of 26 to be represented Professional occupations like, say, surgeons or high managerial executive positions that require long years of education and long years of experience.
00:28:41.000How many 26-year-olds, from any ethnic background, would qualify for such jobs?
00:28:47.000But the discussions go on as if age is not a factor.
00:28:52.000Right. Incidentally, this is also true internationally.
00:28:54.000I mean, there are any number of countries where the median age is over 40 And in many other countries where the median age is under 20, there's no way you should expect them to have the same outcomes when those outcomes require a great deal of knowledge, experience, and so on.
00:29:13.000Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's a great point, and obviously one of the main macro points in your book.
00:29:18.000You see it with, obviously, I think the median age of Fox News viewers is in their 70s, and so the ads are different.
00:29:23.000The same thing, when we were looking at sponsorships, we said, well, hold on, people actually watch this show for an average of half an hour or more.
00:29:29.000What do you mean? That determines the ad rates, how long people stay with it.
00:29:33.000Time is a huge factor, which you often don't necessarily see discussed.
00:29:37.000Could you maybe expand on more so the myth that if not for discrimination...
00:29:42.000Society would have equal representation in careers, income, education, and incarceration, because that's the huge sort of, I guess, main tenet of leftism that's taught on campus.
00:29:51.000If not for discrimination, we'd all have these equal representation outcomes.
00:29:56.000You put your finger on the key assumption on which the whole...
00:30:00.000It's like the keystone that holds up the whole structure, and you remove that, and they don't have very much.
00:30:07.000Age is one of those things, but what people desire to do matters.
00:30:11.000Right. You know, for all I know, I might have been born with genes that would have enabled me to become another Rudolf Nureyev as a male ballet dancer.
00:30:23.000Okay. If I was, it was a total waste of genes.
00:30:25.000Because where I grew up, nobody ever thought about, no guy has ever thought about becoming male ballet dancers.
00:30:33.000So it doesn't matter what their abilities were.
00:30:36.000It doesn't matter whether the opposition or the gates of opportunity were wide open.
00:30:43.000They weren't going to become male ballet dancers.
00:31:20.000And the more you look into either people or nature, you find disparities everywhere, all over the world, at all kinds of things.
00:31:30.000And yet when you come to people's talk, the talk is about how everything would be even.
00:31:36.000Let me throw another one to nail the point.
00:31:41.000Geography. You know, people who live up in mountains on any continent are not the same as people who live in the river valleys.
00:31:50.000The people in river valleys almost invariably have higher incomes, more education, they're more advanced The people in the mountains tend to lag behind.
00:32:02.000Coastal people seem to be far more prosperous than people that live inland.
00:32:08.000One study pointed out that something like 8% of the world's population lived on coast in the temperate zone, but they produced something like But 8% of the land is like that.
00:32:25.000But 23% of the world's population lives there.
00:32:28.000And they produce 53% of the world's output.
00:32:31.000I mean, the circumstances matter hugely, and those circumstances are almost never the same for everybody.
00:32:37.000That's very interesting, you know, that you bring that up.
00:32:38.000I would wonder if we would talk about the economic disparity of the coastal cities.
00:32:41.000There's sort of that legacy wealth, because back in the day, before technology, you had to be on the coast, right, for mainline shipping.
00:32:48.000Any kind, if you want to do any international commerce.
00:32:50.000And again, that's one thing you could look at as geography, or you could look at it from some kind of economic standpoint.
00:32:56.000You know, something that was really telling to me, when we were just talking about socialism, And I'm sure you're familiar with this.
00:33:02.000When we talk about Denmark and these Norwegian countries, when we talk about their economic status, one thing that's often not mentioned is actually Swedish.
00:33:11.000It's true, they do better than the average American, but Swedish Americans, Danish Americans, on average, have a 55% higher lifestyle, not life expectancy.
00:33:21.000What's the word I'm looking for here? Life expectancy.
00:33:23.000No, not life expectancy. I'm trying to think.
00:33:26.000What's the word? See, with Thomas O. I get nervous.
00:33:53.000Discrimination and Disparities book in the first chapter, I go into the fact that the firstborn child does so much better than the laterborn children.
00:34:01.000And here you have both the heredity and the environment is the same as these are normally defined, and yet you find a complete over-representation of firstborn children and of the only child in so many areas.
00:34:22.000The Apollo astronauts who got a man on the moon, 29 of them, 22 of them were either first born or an only child.
00:34:31.000Why is that? Do we have any sort of causation?
00:34:34.000We don't fully know, but I make the argument and show some evidence that it's the parental input, because the only kind of child that does better than the first born is the only child.
00:34:46.000And what he gets that the others don't get is full parental attention.
00:34:50.000The firstborn is an only child for a while.
00:34:56.000Also, if you look at twins, twins average several points lower IQ than people who are born singly.
00:35:03.000And yet, where one of the twins is still born or dies early, then the other one has an IQ not very different from those of people who are born singly.
00:36:19.000How much does IQ itself determine socioeconomic status?
00:36:23.000That's obviously a big point of controversy with different factions right now.
00:36:27.000And I know you write about it in your book, but for people who are listening or watching...
00:36:31.000Well, I guess there's a high correlation between IQ and success in a lot of areas.
00:36:37.000But as I also point out in the first chapter of my book, there are people who never made the IQ cutoff of 140 for a major study at Stanford.
00:36:48.000Who went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics.
00:36:53.000And yet none of the 1,500 people who did make that IQ cut off, none of them won a Nobel Prize in anything.
00:37:14.000And I know a lot of people have been arguing the opposite, but this book puts forward a tremendous case.
00:37:19.000Let me ask you a final question here, because obviously right now I'm sure you're well aware of the gun debate going on in the country, and you've weighed in on this before.
00:37:26.000At what point do we say, okay, here is a clear-cut case where correlation to causation here?
00:37:32.000We can look at this graph and determine it.
00:37:34.000One to me that stands out, we've been talking about this quite a bit, with the gun debate, you know, 98% of public mass shootings occur in gun-free zones.
00:37:42.000Seems to me that's pretty cut and dry, one that's never talked about.
00:37:45.000In your opinion, when does it cross that barrier where, okay, we can definitively say this is the reason?
00:37:51.000Well, I think for gun control people, it will never cross that barrier because they will never discuss it in those terms.
00:37:58.000When did you ever see any gun control advocate?
00:38:02.000We've come up with numbers to show that gun control reduces murders.
00:38:09.000There's a huge volume of evidence out there.
00:38:12.000Think of it. There are 50 states, each having all kinds of different gun laws.
00:38:17.000There are all kinds of ways they could be compared.
00:38:19.000Think of all the countries around the world with different gun laws, different periods of history when there were different gun laws.
00:38:25.000And so you have a mountain of evidence if you were looking for evidence.
00:38:29.000Instead, they just simply assume from day one that if you have tighter gun laws, you'll have less murder rates.
00:38:36.000And there's tons of empirical evidence pointing just in the opposite direction.
00:41:02.000We were originally going to have Dinesh D'Souza. The show should quit while we're ahead.
00:41:03.000Yeah, we'll just quit while we're ahead. No, instead we decide, let's just crap the bed and bring on somebody who leaves a wake of controversy wherever he may go.
00:41:12.000I was going to plug his Twitter, but I don't know what's going on.
00:41:13.000He's not on the Twitter, and I know he's suspended or something.
00:41:16.000I don't know what's going on on YouTube.
00:41:17.000So we had Dinesh D'Souza, since he's obviously a good friend of the show, and we spoke with him this morning because he helps write for this show on occasion.
00:41:23.000Yep. All this happened between this morning and now, hugepianist.com, pianist.com, pianist.com is a special, and he has Owen Benjamin.
00:41:33.000What's your Patreon again? Patreon slash WDTL for Why Didn't They Laugh?
00:41:39.000WDTL. Speaking of not laughing, it seems like Twitter and YouTube are not having a guffaw now.
00:41:45.000Please explain. Overnight, they took out Owen Benjamin, and then I had a backup one called Owen Bearjaman.
00:41:54.000I had on the back burner in case they took me out, and they took that out too.
00:41:59.000Hold on a second. Are you suspended or are you banned?
00:42:03.000Suspended permanently, I believe, because I saw a little widget pop up that said, Donald Trump Jr.
00:42:10.000no longer follows you, and then I realized that they blocked everyone who followed me and unfollowed everybody and then suspended me.
00:42:19.000Yeah, it's really, I think it was something that happened in upper management, because it was, I think they got, because I don't even know how they knew about Owen Bergeman.
00:42:29.000I don't think it's that hard to figure out.
00:42:31.000I don't think, you didn't tackle like a trail of breadcrumbs, like, they'll never find me, see?
00:42:36.000It's pretty easy to Hansel and Gretel to Owen Bergeman.
00:42:39.000And if you didn't tell them, all the unbearables who follow it did immediately.
00:42:45.000Yeah, yeah. Meet them at Owen Bergeman.
00:42:47.000And they're like, ha ha ha, no more Bergeman.
00:45:10.000And if you go and you look at people on the left, I mean, look at the people who put up fake Nazi memes of myself and professors who retweet it.
00:45:41.000And even though that's not what it was meant, it's clearly twisting.
00:45:43.000Shouldn't have just done the at reply.
00:45:45.000Yeah, yeah. No, like looking back, I can see some, as I said earlier, a few Achilles heels.
00:45:51.000And the problem is you have so many followers too, so then the kid gets a bunch of at replies and it bothers him.
00:45:55.000If you were a nobody, he wouldn't care.
00:45:58.000They're using him almost like PETA from Hunger Games where the state takes him, some kid, and they make him say all this stuff.
00:46:06.000And so I just feel as a comedian, I get to say the hyperbole and the ironies and the satires that a lot of academics and politicians aren't allowed to say.
00:46:15.000And I've always enjoyed that position of mocking power.
00:46:18.000But in this situation, I mean, you got to give it to them for getting a 17-year-old kid to try and take down our right to bear arms.
00:46:26.000And I do regret giving them ammunition against people like us.
00:46:30.000But at the same time, You know, it's tough.
00:46:33.000It's tough to realize that when I do a tweet, it's not just for the people that follow me and know my humor.
00:46:38.000It's for the world. These are things that we're all facing now as a global species about how to deal with the internet and how to deal with the fact that the whole world can now see that I'm mocking that he doesn't have ball hair.
00:47:06.000One of my heroes. Black, redneck, white, liberal literally changed my life.
00:47:10.000I think it should be mandatory reading for every American.
00:47:12.000I was just saying that about economic facts and fallacies.
00:47:15.000But his latest book is great, and it's just as relevant, like I was saying, for the left and sort of the fringe alt-right with this whole racial IQ. You know, you've heard this now.
00:47:21.000Some people, unfortunately, have taken ownership over identity politics on the right.
00:47:26.000But, you know, I was talking about this earlier.
00:47:28.000The fact that someone on—so regardless of the Twitter thing, Owen Benjamin is funny.
00:47:33.000So sometimes what inspires me is not what people say or how people compliment them, but the insults.
00:47:38.000And like I was saying earlier, I was feeling down because we're just talking about the social media.
00:47:41.000We've had this exponential growth, and so it sucks.
00:47:44.000I don't really get to go on social media and even see my fans because there's so much negative feedback.
00:47:49.000And sometimes you just want to hang out with your buddies, and we're all learning how to process this as human beings.
00:47:53.000We never had this. We were able to have a circle of friends.
00:47:56.000Just like you said, it's kind of hard to imagine people who hate you looming, looking for that to happen.
00:48:01.000But Back to my original point, with Thomas Sowell, someone just said it today, and it made me feel so much better about myself.
00:48:08.000They said, he's a tremendous s***head.
00:48:11.000I was thinking, you can't find anyone more cerebral or civil than Thomas Sowell.
00:48:17.000So if they're going to say it about him, I'm like, oh, thanks for making my job easy.
00:48:19.000It's the same thing when someone says, oh, and Benjamin sucks.
00:48:21.000He's not funny. Or I've had it with Nick DiPaolo or Jim Norton for being on the show.
00:48:24.000I'm going, well, hold on a second. I question myself, but I don't question that Owen's funny or that Nick DiPaolo is.
00:48:29.000So it makes it easy. I'm like, well, they're probably wrong about me, even if they're not.
00:48:33.000Right, of course. It's so funny because a lot of people have been saying that now where they're like, Oh, yeah.
00:48:38.000Well, you're a hack who doesn't do anything.
00:48:40.000I'm like, I've self-produced two-hour specials this year, and I've had two specials with Comedy Central and another with another company.
00:49:15.000We don't have a ton of time. Where's the best place?
00:49:17.000It means so much to me that you guys have me.
00:49:20.000Hugepianist.com, just because of my height and my piano.
00:49:23.000And that's where you get the specials.
00:49:25.000And then patreon.com slash WDTL. Like, you can just do the minimum amount.
00:49:29.000And you can still upload to YouTube, right?
00:49:30.000You just can't livestream. I can still upload to YouTube, Owen Benjamin Comedy, and then, yeah, I don't know what the future holds for me, but I love you guys.
00:49:37.000Well, keep us posted, and just do me a favor before we go.
00:50:30.000We need a new, unified set of standards on what will be determined as the most updated, yet of course very oppressive, standards of beauty for women that we don't even like.
00:55:01.000That's what's most disturbing. It's the lack of quality.
00:55:03.000It's the lack of quality in chroma keying.
00:55:04.000It's the lack of quality. And you know, listen, I think we'll be the first...
00:55:07.000To admit that some of the things that we've done the last couple weeks, we've experimented with some new things.
00:55:11.000Some things worked, some things didn't. Illinois, we put on a show for the students, period.
00:55:14.000It's not what Change My Mind is really meant to be, and we got out there and there were way more people than we expected.
00:55:18.000We could not have the security done properly, and so everyone was just a little bit tense.
00:55:22.000Probably won't be doing that again. Change My Mind is meant to be just sitting down and kind of conversational.
00:55:27.000We don't even announce it usually when we go places.
00:55:28.000No, we never announce it. The whole goal is to not have an audience, but at this point we were kind of...
00:55:33.000We're kind of between a rock and a hard place because we wanted the fans to have some kind of a show that we could do that was secure.
00:55:39.000It turns out it wasn't really anyway when we went out there.
00:55:41.000We didn't have the spot that we anticipated.
00:55:43.000So a lot of stress, but you know what?
00:55:45.000A big reason for it, and a big reason we'll keep experimenting with new things, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and we appreciate you allowing us that flexibility.
00:55:51.000We've talked about this. After SMU was definitely probably the most...
00:55:56.000It was the most visceral sort of moment that I've had in a while where I was like, oh wow, okay, a lot of people were coming up saying how important this was to them.
00:56:02.000This show, it's a late night comedy show.
00:56:06.000Thomas Sowell, okay? I am not an AM radio host.
00:56:09.000I do not want to be your only source of information.
00:56:12.000I want to be that we want to be the show you can go to sleep with and enjoy yourself and have a laugh and not want to punch yourself in the face.
00:56:17.000We want to sleep with you. Yes, pretty much.
00:56:19.000That's the takeaway there. We want to teach you and sleep with you.
00:56:22.000We basically want to be that college professor.
00:57:30.000It's a little bit long, but I hope you go with me on this here.
00:57:34.000Again, trying to omit with the overlays anything specific.
00:57:37.000So forgive me for looking down at my iPad.
00:57:38.000I'm reading his letter. I don't know it by heart.
00:57:40.000Yeah. On the day of the SMU show, I had planned to spend a night in Dallas to save some money on transportation, so I brought my backpack but couldn't find a place to stay without a photo ID since all ICE gave me was a paper parole document.
00:57:54.000It amazed me when I sat here and read the full letter.
00:57:57.000I managed to watch the show after leaving the backpack in a friend's car that I met there, but he had to leave a bit early and I couldn't go into the mug club only after show with the backpack and couldn't find a place to leave it.
00:58:08.000English is not his first language, by the way, so don't hammer me or him on it.
00:58:12.000Now that I got that out of the way, I was an atheist for a long time since my early teens, mostly due to YouTube and other online sources after wanting to research some parts of Islam that did not sit too well with me at the time.
00:58:22.000Naively thinking that the people around and not Islam itself were the ones with the bad ideas.
00:58:26.000I later found out about your show during the Gamergate days and got into politics since, and more so during the election.
00:58:32.000Mostly behind fake random names on Twitter.
00:58:38.000I managed to score—he wrote years earlier in time, sir.
00:58:40.000I'm trying to fix the—we appreciate it, sir, the person who emailed us.
00:58:43.000He knows who he is. This is not to give you flack.
00:58:45.000I'm just correcting it as I go. Years earlier, I managed to score a government scholarship and left the hellhole that is Saudi Arabia.
00:58:51.000You said it, not me. And in early 2017, during my third year in a university in blank, they suddenly canceled my scholarship due to, quote, not performing well enough.
00:59:01.000Which did not hold up when I compared my scores to other Saudis in the same scholarship.
00:59:05.000A usual thing in the Saudi government is when they suspect someone abroad of commenting a thought crime is to make a random reason to call them back, then deal with them inside the country to avoid any international scandal.
00:59:17.000Since I liked my head where it was, I got a tourism visa to the US and applied for asylum once I got here.
00:59:23.000And due to a misunderstanding at the airport interview, I ended up spending some time in ICE detention, which wasn't all that bad, really.
00:59:33.000This is where I started to, I mean, I can't even necessarily put it into words, which wasn't all that bad, really.
00:59:40.000Can you picture any American talking about those kinds of conditions, an ICE detention center, which wasn't all that bad, really?
00:59:49.000And he went on to describe it. He said, the food was very good some days, even.
00:59:52.000At the time, I was very open-minded when it came to Christianity, mostly due to your show and people it led me to, like Andrew Klavan and others.
00:59:59.000The only problem in detention, however, where there was all this free time and a lack of good novels to read in the library, in the excuse of a library they had.
01:00:06.000The syntax was off, so I got it wrong.
01:00:08.000I apologize. So I ended up reading the Bible a lot and talking with some Christian detainees and later went to Bible studies often.
01:00:13.000A few months later, I got paroled from ICE thanks to having a plausible reason for asylum and no criminal record in any country I've been to.
01:00:20.000Since then, I've been going to church whenever I could.
01:00:22.000My sponsor gave me a trailer to stay at and I'm managing fine.
01:00:25.000I'm just waiting to get a work permit these days, which is taking a lot longer than expected, but I still want to do this right, so I'm trying my best to hold on and avoid getting any illegal jobs until then.
01:00:34.000I'm sure that true freedom will be worth it in the end.
01:00:37.000Thank you again for all the hard work that you do.
01:00:39.000I know that it must be very hard on your end sometimes, but please remember that the show means a lot to many of us out there who may not be able to speak up and have a voice of their own.
01:00:48.000The fact that it's entertaining helps to warm regards the ex-Saudi fan.
01:02:11.000I can't imagine that at all. I can't imagine being in Saudi Arabia for any reason, but certainly not with them chasing me down.
01:02:16.000And you know what? We never set out—listen, Naki Jr and I, most people here in this room are Christians to one degree or another.
01:02:22.000It's pretty well known, but we never set out to try and convert people.
01:02:25.000There are enough Christian films, there are enough churches you can go to for that.
01:02:27.000But there does need to be—and we've realized we serve as somewhat of a bridge between the pastor and the sermon and Amy Schumer hamster vagina— Barnyard animal, vagina, right?
01:02:40.000There's got to be some kind of a bridge, and we're somewhere in between, is what I would say.
01:02:45.000The impact that we've had with this show, and we've gotten a lot of flack in the last couple of weeks because you become target number one, when you grow as quickly as you have, and again, that's because of a formidable team and because of people like this, this guy came hours.
01:02:58.000The guy not only came across the ocean to the United States, but he came hours from his trailer to make it to the SMU show.
01:03:07.000And he missed the after party, by the way, because the cops ushered us out.
01:03:09.000Again, we've had a lot of problems with campus police being as accommodating as we'd like them to be.
01:03:15.000I don't really know necessarily where I'm going with this.
01:03:17.000All I'm saying is it's been a weird couple of weeks where we never really thought of ourselves as the kind of people who would keep someone in an ICE detention center alive or someone with PTSD who would say, I feel less alone than watching your show.
01:03:30.000And it's something that really echoes out a lot.
01:03:33.000And things maybe will get off my chest...
01:03:37.000Months from now, looking back, some personal issues that have been happening, some health issues that have been tough.
01:03:44.000How I look at it when I read an email like this, and not just to this ex-Saudi fan, but everyone out there listening, is, I mean, I know you don't owe your life to anyone, but I really do feel that way a lot of the time.
01:03:54.000I really do feel that we owe it to you, not only to continue doing this show to the best of our abilities, but when we thought about, well, do we really want to fight Twitter?
01:04:02.000Do we really want to fight YouTube? Do we really want to have Bill Richmond?
01:04:05.000That was a big decision. Like, Bill Richmond on retainer is not cheap, an SMU law grad.
01:05:50.000I didn't know how to feel ever since I was a kid with SMU. Not with SMU. Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of going into a theater.
01:05:57.000You know, I would see Richard Jenny was one when I was growing up.
01:05:59.000And I remember him in Montreal at a theater with the Saint Denis Theater.
01:06:02.000And I think that maybe it was 1800 going, wow, that was a dream of mine.
01:06:05.000That was a dream of mine. I'll just tell you, everyone has your dreams.
01:06:07.000Everyone has dreams out there. Some are bigger, some are smaller.
01:06:09.000A dream of mine as a kid was when I was watching Richard Jenny and saw him doing that theater.
01:06:13.000I was saying, man, to do that one day.
01:06:15.000So to go to SMU and have a theater filled, a 2,500 seat theater filled with people cheering and there for what we do, for what we create.
01:06:25.000If anyone else out there, and I guess it's kind of isolating because sometimes people talk about reaching for your dreams, but they don't necessarily talk about achieving them.
01:06:33.000It may not sound like a big dream, but it was for me as a kid.
01:06:35.000So when you're picturing this a thousand times in your head, I didn't know how to feel.
01:06:41.000And something else. I spoke with someone recently, a doctor, funny enough.
01:06:47.000Who asked when I was stressed if I had any morbid thoughts.
01:06:51.000This is something I often ask you, right? And of course, this is why people are afraid to answer honestly if we're talking about gun control, if someone has ever had a morbid thought.
01:06:57.000So have you ever had thoughts? And I've said, well, you know what?
01:06:59.000Honestly, I've pictured my death a thousand times.
01:07:02.000I can hear a pin drop. What do you mean?
01:07:04.000So let me explain it to you. The same way that as a kid, I probably pictured a theater like SMU that was the same as any theater.
01:07:09.000I pictured it a thousand times in my head.
01:07:11.000I've told Jared about this, the visualization, going through it.
01:07:13.000What does the crowd look like? What does the air feel like?
01:07:15.000What are the lights like? Picture the sounds.
01:07:17.000Picture the touch. Picture the sights.
01:07:19.000Try and put yourself there so it's not a foreign situation to you.
01:07:22.000I'm big on the power of visualization.
01:07:24.000I'm not talking about meditation or tantric yoga.
01:07:26.000Just visualizing something before you do it.
01:07:31.000The same thing has happened because, listen, we have had credible threats.
01:07:34.000We've had very serious, very credible threats.
01:07:35.000And when you go out with the kind of security detail that we have to have and you know that there is this possibility at some point in your life, I told this man, I said, yeah, you know, I've pictured it a thousand times.
01:07:45.000I've pictured walking out and I've pictured the audience cheering.
01:07:47.000I've pictured the bullet going through flesh.
01:07:50.000I've pictured it breaking bone, what it would feel like.
01:07:52.000I've pictured the screams. I've pictured the lights.
01:07:55.000I've pictured the sounds. I've pictured the emergency.
01:08:22.000But I said I always walk myself through that scenario and every scenario that I can possibly imagine, I get back up.
01:08:29.000And that reason is I wouldn't if there weren't people there who cared.
01:08:33.000That's a huge component. If we talk about mental health, people just want to put it on a pill, huge component with these people, these shooters.
01:08:39.000You look at YouTube, they have no structure.
01:08:41.000They have no family structure, no communal structure.
01:08:43.000They don't have anyone who cares about them.
01:08:45.000And so when we go through weeks that are really trying, when we go through weeks here in times that are incredibly difficult, some of us have some family issues.
01:08:52.000Some of us have had some really tough breaks.
01:08:54.000Some of us have had deaths in the family.