The Candice Malcolm Show - Humour is the best weapon in politics

00:00:00.000 What can we learn from studying political theory and how can we use wit and

00:00:03.960 humor to persuade people but also to save our society from the march towards

00:00:09.060 the woke tyranny? I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:16.200 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. If you're watching this video on

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00:00:41.480 enjoy your podcasts, don't forget to subscribe to The Candice Malcolm Show and

00:00:45.400 if you like the show, please leave us a five-star review. Okay, so sometimes when

00:00:50.380 you're watching the news and this happens to me so often, I'll see a headline on

00:00:54.800 the CBC or I'll read a report and sometimes it's just so absurd, so 0.91

00:00:59.680 ridiculous, so offensive, you don't know whether you should laugh or you should 0.98

00:01:03.960 cry. Well, my guest on the show today says that you should laugh and that when 0.98

00:01:08.320 we look to political teachings, when we look to the ancient Greeks, people like

00:01:11.980 Aristotle and Plato, when we look at the New Testament, when we look to philosophers

00:01:16.080 and writers like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Hobbes, Mark Twain, or even modern day

00:01:20.880 comics like Norm MacDonald or Jon Stewart, they all use humor and wit as a helpful

00:01:25.980 tool to navigate the world, to warn us on the dangers of tyranny, and to persuade

00:01:30.640 an audience. So my guest today on the podcast is Travis Smith. Smith is a

00:01:35.400 professor of political theory at Concordia University in Montreal. He

00:01:39.200 completed his master's and doctorate in political theory at Harvard

00:01:42.240 University and he was recently a guest on my show. Now, while I was preparing for

00:01:46.380 the show, while I was prepping for the interview, I came across an amusing essay

00:01:50.640 that Travis wrote called Thomas Hobbes Comedian and I really enjoyed it. When I

00:01:56.700 reached out to him to ask him about it, he sent me another essay that he wrote

00:02:00.180 called An Introduction to the Politics of Wit, a Symposium, which was also a great

00:02:04.820 read. And so I've invited Travis back on the show to do another deep dive into

00:02:09.040 political theory. So Travis, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back to the

00:02:12.660 show. I'm really glad to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show today,

00:02:15.560 Candice. Okay, so let's talk about comedy. Let's talk about the use of comedy in

00:02:20.700 writing about politics and thinking about politics. Can you first tell me about

00:02:24.220 these essays and just basically the idea of wit as a political virtue?

00:02:29.180 Right. So whether or not there's any sort of humor in our politics is maybe a sign

00:02:35.140 of its health, right? When politics becomes absolutely humorless, we know that

00:02:40.720 things have gone horribly wrong. And tyrants in particular are renowned for

00:02:47.960 lacking a sense of humor. So when we see parliamentarians, you know, getting their

00:02:54.300 jabs in, when we see, you know, op-eds written with some wit, when we have, you know, media

00:03:05.340 personalities and comedians who are able to sort of help us not only stick it to the people we

00:03:13.040 disagree with, but also help us, you know, understand things a little bit better, make

00:03:18.280 us think twice about things. Those are all signs that things are going a little bit better for our

00:03:23.900 polity. And when things become too dour or too angry, it's a sure sign that something is really

00:03:31.140 amiss. Well, and we see that, I would say, especially in the last 10 years or so, the rise

00:03:38.840 of the sort of nighttime comedy, it was really big and powerful, say, in the era of George

00:03:44.660 Bush when he was president. Then Barack Obama came around and I feel like comics had a tougher

00:03:50.480 time with him. They didn't really know how to make fun of him. And part of it was because so many

00:03:55.520 comedians are on the political left and they saw Obama as an ally. They see Justin Trudeau as an ally.

00:04:01.140 So you don't see them poking fun as much. And the same thing can be said about Joe Biden today. We

00:04:06.660 still see so much of the political humor being aimed at the right. So when you had Trump come along,

00:04:12.140 in some ways it was easy for them, but in some ways it was also the bar was so low that you just saw

00:04:17.680 so many comics kind of going out of their way to bash Trump that it wasn't funny. It was like

00:04:22.620 watching amateur pundits that didn't really know what they were talking about. So is it possible

00:04:27.480 sometimes that humor can be used the opposite way and it can undermine political discourse?

00:04:34.560 Sure. Right. Well, I mean, with President Obama, there were humorous things about him. Some comedians

00:04:39.880 got really good at doing impressions of his very particular peculiar cadence. You're right. Previous

00:04:48.240 president was a target of a great deal of comedic attack or late night comedy sketches and bits.

00:04:56.740 there is a lot of memeing going on about the current president as well.

00:05:02.380 But right during the past past little while I would I would I tend to think really was the sort of the

00:05:09.960 downfall of a lot of this was the Jon Stewart style of comedy in which almost every Jon Stewart joke

00:05:17.960 for years had the same punchline and the punchline was some version of can you believe these guys 1.00

00:05:22.980 or what a bunch of idiots or look how stupid they are with always being the sort of think about how 1.00

00:05:28.400 smart we are being the joke night in night night out nonstop and it's tiresome and it's and it's cheap 1.00

00:05:36.240 it's easy stuff. And that became the mode of of of that kind of comedy. Now, a lot of late night comedy

00:05:47.560 is also what they call punching down that kind, right? We have contempt for the people that you are

00:05:53.920 making fun of. And you're just, as I said, trying to show how stupid they are, how bad they are. 1.00

00:06:01.340 And, you know, when you look at a classical conception of the role of wit in politics, 1.00

00:06:07.280 there's an understanding that there's something very unseemly, you know, very base, vulgar about just

00:06:12.620 punching down, you know, taking the targets that you think are contemptible and just showing how

00:06:17.840 contemptible they are. And so it's a it's a sign of, again, the health of things when you have a kind

00:06:24.800 of respect for the people that you're also poking fun at. Or, right, I mean, on the other hand,

00:06:34.460 punching up can also be something that you need to do when you have, you know, something that's gone

00:06:39.340 horribly awry. And you've got people who are behaving oppressively when the wit can be used in order to try to

00:06:45.740 take down the very powerful when you have almost no other weapons. When you have no, almost no other

00:06:50.320 weapons, sometimes humor is the thing that you can make recourse to, especially in order to get people

00:06:56.740 to, to realize that things are, are need to be called into question.

00:07:05.380 Well, and so reading, reading some of your essays on the use of comedy and wit throughout sort of some,

00:07:11.700 some of the classic political theorists and contemporary political theorists, uh, a lot of

00:07:16.620 it seems to be, uh, aimed at sort of the, um, aristocracy or the religious leaders. Like for

00:07:22.940 instance, with Benjamin Franklin, that he, he poked fun at the, the ideas around religion, not because

00:07:28.280 he wanted to abolish religion, uh, but sort of because he wanted to save it. So can you walk us

00:07:33.520 through a little bit, either, either of the classics or, or the more contemporary thinkers, uh, some of the

00:07:39.320 best uses of, of comedy to, to help, uh, persuade an audience or prove a point?

00:07:44.500 Right. Well, that's, that's, that's sort of the, what I was saying before about when, when the people

00:07:49.160 make fun of those in power, uh, if sometimes that's the only sort of weapons they might have,

00:07:55.260 but also it can be effective for, uh, piercing, uh, their conceits, uh, and exposing to people that

00:08:03.160 they aren't quite as smart or as virtuous or as righteous or as pious as they pretend to. And

00:08:08.420 therefore you might use wit in order to call their legitimacy into question. And so, right. In

00:08:13.360 early modern times when the democratic revolution was really getting underway, a thinker like Thomas

00:08:18.520 Hobbes was, you know, had lots of fun pointing out how, uh, ridiculous, uh, aspects of, uh, the regime

00:08:26.020 of the aristocrats or the rule of the church had been. Uh, and so that was an important sort of

00:08:32.960 weapon in his philosophical arsenal. Hobbes is famous for claiming that he's just offering

00:08:38.000 you know, a purely scientific mode of thinking, uh, purely rational, purely materialistic. Uh,

00:08:45.640 but despite those claims, he is constantly using literary devices, rhetorical devices, especially

00:08:52.300 wit in order to communicate and, and persuade people of the claims that he's making the accusations

00:08:59.260 and the criticisms that he's offering. And wit is something that, um, you know, is one of the

00:09:05.660 things that Aristotle and classical political science recognizes one of the highest social

00:09:09.960 virtues. Uh, he puts it in his list of virtues just before, uh, justice. So it's not, it's not

00:09:16.760 higher than justice, right? Justice is sort of the pinnacle of the political virtues, but it's the one

00:09:23.980 he, he discusses right before justice to indicate how important it is. And my interpretation of that is

00:09:30.720 he knows that because we don't ever actually live in a condition of perfect justice and the natural

00:09:36.120 reaction to injustice is anger, but excessive anger is itself a condition that's unlivable,

00:09:43.480 uh, that we need something to temper anger in order to render living in an imperfect world tolerable,

00:09:51.020 right? And wit is one of the things that we have in order to help us cope with and also cope with

00:09:59.200 injustice, but also help us fight for greater justice, especially in the face of abuses of power,

00:10:05.580 uh, in the face of, um, people whose, uh, uh, claims to expertise, wisdom, righteousness,

00:10:14.040 so forth are exaggerated and pretentious and in deserving of, of ridicule.

00:10:20.700 Okay. Let's take that, that sort of idea from Aristotle and try to apply it to today's political

00:10:26.700 left because some of the themes you were talking about the sort of excessive anger, like sometimes

00:10:31.440 the left will, will criticize something and you kind of say, okay, they have a point, you know,

00:10:35.740 this, that they, they found something that is unjust. They, they, they pointed out something

00:10:39.280 about our society that, that can be true, but, but it's just that their, their solution to the problem

00:10:44.140 is usually, um, you know, either, either completely changing the system and, and, and proposing

00:10:49.660 something that's impossible and never been tried. Um, or, or you just see their sort of righteous

00:10:53.700 anger where you see it in the environmentalist movement, um, in this sort of woke left and,

00:10:57.780 and the, uh, quote unquote anti-racist movement, uh, but, but, but also that, that aspect of

00:11:02.820 humorlessness, like they don't, they don't use humor. They, they, they cancel people for trying

00:11:06.900 to use humor, hence why comedians don't even bother to, to go to university campuses anymore. So

00:11:12.660 I, I, I want you to try to help us, um, understand what, what the left perhaps could, could learn from

00:11:19.460 using more, more wit and humor and what they could learn from, uh, trying to pick up on what

00:11:23.540 Aristotle is, was trying to, to teach. Okay. Uh, I'm going to, I'm going to be sort of, uh, less ready

00:11:31.220 to just accuse one side of the political spectrum of being guilty of this problem, uh, myself, Candace.

00:11:38.100 Uh, but that said, let me say, uh, that, right. The, you, you mentioned something about designs for

00:11:46.180 trying to transform all of society as if we could through sufficient reason, sufficient willpower,

00:11:53.140 sufficient imagination, we might be able to impose ourselves upon the social system and re-engineer

00:12:00.820 it and reconstruct it in accordance with what we know to be right and true. Uh, and we could fix

00:12:06.180 everything and treat society and treat human beings as an engineering project, uh, to be reconstructed,

00:12:13.540 overhauled, recreated, uh, and what it, what it requires are, as I said, the very virtuous and the

00:12:19.860 very wise to take charge and repair it. Uh, and this isn't something that I'm willing to sort of accuse

00:12:28.100 any particular movement of being exclusively guilty of. This is something that dates back,

00:12:34.180 concern that dates back even to Plato's Republic, uh, in which the idea of philosopher kings was first

00:12:40.100 pitched as what would be necessary in order to achieve the just society, uh, with an understanding

00:12:45.940 that Plato knew that we actually could not do that. Any effort to try to manufacture the just society

00:12:53.140 would be something that, uh, would not only be monstrous, but humorless. Plato's writings are full of humor,

00:12:59.460 and he loves telling stories and, and, and using irony and jokes. And, uh, and so, right. Part of

00:13:07.540 why there's the susceptibility to this in modern times, however, is that, uh, you know, you've heard

00:13:14.580 people talk about seeing modern times as a kind of secularization of Christian ethics or a Christian

00:13:20.260 conception of history. And that put human beings in the role of imagining that we could save ourselves,

00:13:26.100 so we could manufacture a heaven on earth. As I said, if only we had enough willpower, enough

00:13:30.260 imagination, enough material means and powers at our disposal and sufficient righteousness and wisdom

00:13:36.180 in those in charge. Uh, and that's an attempt to, uh, imagine that we could use our reason

00:13:42.980 to manufacture what is actually a comical outcome, right? Comedies are always when there's a happy ending.

00:13:49.380 Comedies are when, despite all appearances, things go well. And even people who are not really up to

00:13:56.260 the task succeed, you know, beyond belief, and people who might not even deserve great happiness

00:14:03.060 all get it, right? And that's, that's comedy. Uh, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a reader of comic books. Uh,

00:14:10.500 I wrote a book on superheroes a few years ago, uh, and comic books are rightly called comic books in some

00:14:16.100 ways because, you know, the superheroes triumph over super villains that try to take over the world and

00:14:22.100 impose themselves on us all. Uh, they, of course, the super villains tend to often believe that they've

00:14:27.300 got some very rational design. If only everybody did what I said that they should do, and I had all the

00:14:33.220 power and I was in charge and I imposed my will, then, you know, the world would know all the love and

00:14:37.940 joy that only I can bring to it. You know, as soon as somebody thinks like that, they're a madman, 0.93

00:14:42.500 they're crazy. They are deserving of ridicule. Um, and so, you know, we have a society that loves 1.00

00:14:48.980 our heroes that, you know, defeat our, uh, super villainous types. But in politics, we have this

00:14:55.460 idea that maybe some great extraordinary leaders might be able to transform the world and, and, and

00:15:01.140 abolish all the injustice. If only they had all the power and all the trust of the people. Um,

00:15:07.620 this idea that we can manufacture comedy through the imposition of technological reason

00:15:13.620 is, however, from a classical point of view, uh, prone to tragedy. That's not, that's not something

00:15:19.860 that, that works out happily, like, you know, the victories of superheroes in comic books.

00:15:24.980 That's something that we could, uh, the classics would tell us that, uh, we should fully expect

00:15:29.860 to go entirely awry. And so, um, right, uh, we've, we've seen efforts of a great variety of kinds,

00:15:38.500 especially over the last hundred years in which people have believed that on account of their

00:15:42.900 nobility, on account of their wisdom, on account of their piety, on account of their righteousness,

00:15:47.300 on account of their virtue, uh, they could fix the world. Uh, and, uh, I ended that book I mentioned

00:15:54.180 with a claim that, you know, global governance is for supervillains. Anybody who believes that,

00:15:59.300 you know, they could fix the world in that way as somebody we should, uh, not trust and, and, and

00:16:04.740 ridicule. Well, uh, I, I appreciate you, uh, answering the question that way, because you're,

00:16:10.740 you're right that the, um, the, the anger, the righteous anger, it doesn't just come from one

00:16:14.740 side of the political spectrum. We see, we do see it on both sides. It's just that to me,

00:16:18.740 particularly that the side that I'm concerned about right now, um, is left, but I, I, I, I agree

00:16:24.100 that when you, when, when you think of the world in terms of, you know, who, what the biggest threat

00:16:28.820 is, um, to us, the, the, the ideas you mentioned, I, um, I have a son and he's reading a little, um,

00:16:34.740 Spider-Man, um, kids comic book. And in it, the bad guy is just named evil doctor, the evil doctor.

00:16:41.540 And, um, you know, it's kind of weird, Travis, because, you know, in today's world,

00:16:46.180 we're told to trust doctors that doctors are good. Doctors are, are the, the, the, the authority

00:16:50.900 that we should trust. And then yet, interestingly in this, and it's an old Spider-Man book, it's

00:16:54.900 probably from the eighties or something. Um, you know, it's the, the, the idea that the, that the

00:16:59.700 villain is, is an evil doctor, which I sometimes chuckle at when I, when I see the latest, um,

00:17:04.500 you know, news of some doctor, um, imposing these ridiculous, um, rules and, and, or advocating for 0.64

00:17:11.060 endless lockdowns. And, and, and I kind of chuckle about the idea of a, of an, of an evil doctor. 0.79

00:17:16.340 Um, I, I, I want to change gears a little bit and, and just take, take a step back and talk

00:17:20.820 about the purpose of political philosophy. I remember when I was a undergraduate at the

00:17:25.540 University of Alberta, my first day walking into a political philosophy course or a history,

00:17:29.700 political philosophy course, and my professor saying, you know, why should we bother reading

00:17:33.620 the Greeks? What could we possibly learn from a bunch of old white dead guys? And, uh, you know, 1.00

00:17:39.220 the point of the course was to, was to show that there was some purpose

00:17:42.660 in, in reading someone like Plato or Aristotle. Um, this is what you do day in and day out.

00:17:47.540 So maybe you could, uh, talk to us a little bit about the relevance of, of, of reading political

00:17:52.580 philosophy and what we can learn from, from that today.

00:17:55.300 Right. Maybe I can tell you about how I approach it when I'm teaching undergraduates.

00:18:00.020 Um, and so I, I started off as an engineering student, right? And so when you, when you go

00:18:06.580 into, uh, engineering classes as an undergraduate, uh, you're going to be treated to, you know,

00:18:13.460 calculus and organic chemistry and heat transfer and fluid dynamics and that sort of thing,

00:18:19.220 uh, where the professor is the expert back when I was there, they're still sort of throwing up black 1.00

00:18:25.220 boards, endless black boards for 75 minutes straight. Um, in which, you know, uh, matters

00:18:32.420 regarding which there's, we reckon no dispute are authoritatively put in front of you. And you are like

00:18:38.340 a student, like a machine to figure out how to add this knowledge to your toolkit to solve future problems.

00:18:45.300 Uh, and you are measured on your ability to acquire certainty and exactness, precision,

00:18:52.500 and the application of this kind of knowledge. Um, and every student that's in an engineering

00:18:58.500 classroom is someone you are training to be an engineer, even if they don't end up being an

00:19:01.940 engineer and end up, you know, working in sales for a technology firm, you know, you still train

00:19:06.660 everyone to be an engineer. That's not how you teach political theory. You don't, you don't look at a

00:19:12.980 room of a hundred students who've been, uh, put into your intro to political theory class, uh, because,

00:19:19.140 you know, it's a requirement for their degree as if they're all going to become professional

00:19:24.180 political theorists. Uh, you know, even when I get one student who says, I'm thinking of going into

00:19:29.940 political theory, can I get a letter of reference for a graduate school letter? You're going to,

00:19:35.700 can I get a letter of reference? I'm like, why do you want to go into political theory?

00:19:40.020 And they'll give me some answer. Often it's because, well, I want to spend my time reading

00:19:43.620 and writing, right? I really love to read. And I like to say, well, if you really love to read,

00:19:48.500 get a job as a night watchman or something, uh, you know, if that's what you really care about,

00:19:54.100 uh, you know, study, the study of it from a professional standpoint is one thing, but what is it

00:19:59.460 for as part of, you know, citizen education? What is it part of the liberal education, human education?

00:20:07.700 That's how I sort of tend to think of it. And part of it is when you are, you know, fortunate enough,

00:20:15.540 lucky enough, privileged enough to get to be in university, you know, in the prime of your life,

00:20:21.380 when your mental sort of abilities are at their, at the prime, when, when you actually are still,

00:20:27.380 you know, uh, capable of, uh, you know, uh, thinking quickly and absorbing new ideas and, and, uh,

00:20:35.220 and still adapting to the world, uh, exposing students to, you know, ideas that are in some

00:20:41.140 ways familiar, but also different and, and should get them to think a bit more broadly

00:20:46.180 and gain some historical sense and get some theoretical breadth so that you're not just

00:20:51.220 caught in the politics of the day and the news cycle and the Twitter verse and the hashtagging

00:20:58.420 and the us versus them and try to be able to sort of step back and try to perceive things,

00:21:03.940 uh, from, uh, perspectives that are altogether foreign, not only to you, uh, maybe, but to the

00:21:12.020 discourse that prevails today, uh, the, and the back and forth between the parties that are

00:21:18.820 reeminent presently. And to be able to sort of, you know, reflect more, uh, on, on the human condition

00:21:24.740 more broadly and your place in society and your place in the world and the, and the status of,

00:21:30.500 uh, the things that you care about and the things that you value, there's a real luxury

00:21:36.580 to being able to do that. And so unlike the sort of the training for an engineering career that, uh,

00:21:44.900 undergraduates in that program are engaged in and, and rightly so, I mean, that makes perfectly good

00:21:50.020 sense when you get to be in a course in which you're assigned old books to read.

00:21:55.780 Um, this is not to train you to solve a problem, right. Or to fix anything or to become the expert

00:22:03.060 that will dictate to others what to do, but it's a, it's a, it's a human activity of just, um,

00:22:09.700 becoming, uh, more self-aware and thoughtful. And, and part of that is what I really like to emphasize

00:22:16.260 in the classroom because we don't do this in politics. We don't do this on the Twitterverse.

00:22:21.060 We don't do this, uh, uh, on, on YouTube even very often, which is, uh, learn how to, you know, uh,

00:22:30.260 really, um, give a generous reading to the people that we disagree with, try to understand why they're

00:22:35.380 coming from where they're coming from and, uh, abstract away from yourself a little bit.

00:22:43.380 Uh, and to gain those kinds of skills. Now, of course, those kinds of skills can be practically

00:22:49.380 useful because you can always criticize something, uh, more convincingly if you do it from the inside,

00:22:55.540 rather than just have a straw man that you attack and caricature and, and, and so forth.

00:23:01.140 Right. If you really ridicule something to go back to saying, but wait, before you can really ridicule

00:23:04.740 something, if you, you know, explode it from the inside on its own terms, rather than just lob grenades

00:23:09.700 at it from the outside. And so there are practical benefits for an education in, in, you know,

00:23:16.820 philosophy, rhetoric, literature, and so forth. But I still, I guess I'm a bit old fashioned in

00:23:22.980 this way that I think that politics is not actually the most important thing and politics is not

00:23:27.300 everything. And that we're human beings before we're citizens, uh, and that we're neighbors, uh,

00:23:33.620 before we are, um, members of parties and that there's an essential purpose to be filled by, uh,

00:23:43.620 retaining, maintaining, uh, communicating education in things like, uh, philosophy, literature, old books,

00:23:51.940 that's humanizing and reminds us of that, uh, we're more than our party identity and we're more than

00:24:02.020 our, uh, uh, our, our commitments and our sides and one or another, uh, debate of the day. So that's,

00:24:09.540 that's part of how I look at it. Candace.

00:24:11.700 Well, uh, that's excellent. I mean, there's so many things that I could pick up on there,

00:24:15.540 but that the idea that sort of politics in some ways has crept into every aspect of our lives,

00:24:19.780 and this is more of a U S phenomenon, but you see politics, um, infused now things like hockey,

00:24:25.300 you know, hockey used to be something where you would go, uh, to escape politics and, and, and,

00:24:30.660 and just go and enjoy something lightheartedly. And now it's like, you know, we hear the woke

00:24:34.660 hectoring, uh, throughout sports, entertainment movies. It's, it's, it's sort of nonstop. And,

00:24:40.580 and that's, that's also part of a problem. And then the idea of social media, it, you know,

00:24:45.300 in some ways it's an opportunity to use wit, you can, you can reply to someone, you can say

00:24:48.660 something funny, but at the same time, it's, it's also set up for straw man arguments and, and, and

00:24:54.180 really, um, putting the worst possible spin on what your political opponent is saying. And for me,

00:25:01.380 I've taken a little bit of a break from Twitter because, you know, you could find yourself getting

00:25:05.620 too, too, too deep into that. But my, my, my final question that I wanted to ask you, Travis,

00:25:10.420 is, um, so back to myself as an undergraduate reading, uh, political philosophy in Edmonton,

00:25:16.340 I, I remember I was carrying a copy of Alan Bloom's Plato Republic and a security guard in,

00:25:22.580 in the building, um, not, not at the school, the apartment where I lived. Um, he, he, he asked me

00:25:29.220 what I was doing reading that. And he, the security guard was from India. He was a political philosophy

00:25:34.340 teacher in India. He just moved to Canada and he was working as a security guard. And I said,

00:25:38.820 you know, that I'm a political philosophy student or actually just political science. And this is

00:25:42.980 a requirement. And he was like, well, you know, you're too young to be reading that book. You

00:25:46.580 don't understand it. He's like, teachers should be assigning books about philosophy for you to read.

00:25:51.220 You shouldn't be reading the original text yet. You can read that later. Um, and, and I thought that

00:25:55.140 was kind of interesting. And sometimes I did feel like I was reading it and I wasn't really computing. I

00:25:59.220 wasn't really understanding what I was reading, but, um, I, I, I appreciate it nonetheless. And I,

00:26:04.340 I like reading about political philosophy as much as I like reading or trying to read, uh,

00:26:09.940 political philosophy, although I'm pretty slow when it comes to reading philosophy. But all that is just

00:26:13.540 to say, Travis, is, is there a book that you recommend someone who doesn't really have a

00:26:17.700 background in this stuff? What's a good, what's a good place to start? Who's a good thinker, um,

00:26:21.780 to start in a journey of, of trying to read and understand, uh, political philosophy?

00:26:25.860 Can I just ask, did you, did you get to take a class on Plato with Leon Craig?

00:26:33.140 No, it wasn't Leon Craig. It was Heidi Studer.

00:26:35.300 Oh, I remember Heidi. Um, um, what book do I recommend? Um, you know what? Let's just go with

00:26:47.300 ones that everybody used to read, even just in high school, and maybe they aren't anymore. Um,

00:26:52.340 um, if you haven't read your brave new world, read your brave new world right now.

00:26:57.780 In late 2021, that's not a bad start. I'll go with that is, uh, is, is something that everybody,

00:27:06.020 if they haven't read it, they should read it. And if they have read it, they should reread it.

00:27:10.660 Okay. Well, that sounds good. That's our, uh, required Christmas reading here on the Candace

00:27:14.820 Malcolm show. And, uh, Travis, we'll have to have you back in the new year and you can,

00:27:18.020 you can talk or we can, we can, we can do a little book review on it. Sure. That sounds great. Candace,

00:27:22.660 thank you very much for having me on the show today. All right. Thank you so much to Travis

00:27:26.660 Smith for joining the show. And thank you everyone for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm,

00:27:30.100 and this is the Candace Malcolm show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - December 16, 2021

Humour is the best weapon in politics

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