00:01:18.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:09.000Adam Ford is the founder and he started it back in 2016 and I just saw it as like the best thing on the internet.
00:02:15.000I mean, it was just blowing up really quickly.
00:02:17.000It's getting a lot of attention and it was really quality, conservative comedy that wasn't cheesy, which was a breath of fresh air.
00:02:26.000And so, you know, I approached Adam just looking to invest in it initially, but he was looking to get out largely because of tech censorship, which I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit about in this discussion.
00:03:50.000For my favorite, my other favorite satire site is CNN or MSNBC because I can't always tell whether or not what they're saying is true.
00:03:58.000What I love about your site, and I could just flip through some of the articles here right now, is that it really pinpoints the absurdity of the left and kind of the double standard that all of us exist under.
00:04:09.000Can you talk about just the utility that satire you think that actually fits into American discourse, especially with as much fake news we live under and just the total activist nature of the journalist class?
00:04:26.000Well, I mean, the utility of it, I think the thing that satire does most effectively, more effectively than anything else, is it ridicules bad ideas.
00:04:33.000And, you know, you've got so many bad ideas out there that are just on the face of them absurd.
00:04:39.000And sometimes the best response is to laugh at them and to make a joke of them and to mock them mercilessly.
00:04:44.000You know, and it's not about attacking people as individuals.
00:04:47.000It's about attacking the bad ideas that they're advancing and how damaging they are.
00:04:50.000And I think we need to, you know, safeguard ourselves, especially our youth, against being, you know, inoculate them against these bad ideas that they don't adopt them and try to bring them into, you know, our legislative bodies and our society and our culture.
00:05:05.000So, you know, getting a handle on that and using satire effectively in that way, I think that's, you know, that's one of the things that we've done well over the course of the last several years.
00:05:17.000It's one of the reasons that our site resonates with a lot of people.
00:05:19.000You know, they see it as having an impact for precisely that reason.
00:05:23.000What you mentioned a minute ago, though, about the best satire being really close to the truth.
00:05:44.000One of the ways that the left tries to come after us and censor us is by suggesting that we're riding too close to the truth on purpose so that we can mislead people and spread misinformation and get people angry and fuel the flames of discord or however Snopes puts it.
00:06:00.000And that's, you know, it's really disingenuous on their part.
00:06:03.000They're the ones actually putting out misinformation by saying that about us because all we're doing is trying to make jokes, trying to make light of things, trying to, you know, with mockery and irony and sarcasm, you know, do our satirical thing.
00:06:14.000So it does have to be close to the truth.
00:06:17.000And one of the challenges that we're finding today is that it's difficult to go beyond the truth a little bit and exaggerate it when reality is as crazy as it is.
00:06:49.000And modern day rebels just plan on celebrating holidays just like normal.
00:06:53.000I mean, that could be an article on the Atlantic.
00:06:56.000I mean, it is so incredibly within the kind of, it's like one interval or one or two degrees away of something that I was probably reading, you know, right near there.
00:07:06.000Skynet introduces new line of voting machines.
00:07:10.000Now, I don't know if you've seen it or not, but sometimes like Kyle, our editor-in-chief, who wrote probably half of those, he will highlight sometimes these fulfilled prophecies, he calls them, where, you know, we'll write one of these pieces and then like 10 minutes later or 10 hours later or 10 days later, it actually happens.
00:07:42.000Well, it's just a matter of time before our exaggerations bump up against reality and somebody goes and does something as absurd as what we joked about them doing.
00:08:44.000You don't have an investigative news division.
00:08:47.000You have a bunch of witty, you know, probably late 20, early 30, you know, people that could have been screenwriters, but they aren't Bolshevik enough to get into that community that work for you that purely tell jokes in the news cycle.
00:09:00.000Tell us your experiences with censorship.
00:09:03.000So it manifests itself in a couple of different ways.
00:09:06.000And with satire, you know, it's a unique thing.
00:09:08.000It's not like they're not coming after us by saying, you know, that one of our stories, well, okay, I'll give you the first example.
00:09:18.000This really started back with Facebook when they first started implementing fact-checking with third-party fact-checkers, right?
00:10:27.000And Snopes, what was really difficult with Snopes and the reason that it was really concerning to us where it wasn't just like, okay, you know, sometimes people misunderstand jokes.
00:10:36.000So whatever, a fact check is harmless.
00:10:39.000Their fact checks weren't harmless because when you looked at how they fact-checked the onion, it was always, okay, this is a satire site, the funniest satire site in the world.
00:10:48.000That's kind of how they would treat the onion stuff.
00:10:50.000But our stuff, when they would fact check it, they'd be like, oh, this is skirting dangerously close to the truth.
00:10:55.000It's maliciously misleading and it's dangerous, harmful misinformation.
00:11:00.000You know, they were impugning our motives every time they fact-checked us.
00:11:03.000And so we actually had to get legal involved and send them a cease and desist to stop slandering us, basically.
00:11:11.000So that's one area is with the fact-checking.
00:11:14.000The other thing that's been going on where there's been kind of like, I wouldn't say it's a concerted effort, but everyone seems to be in sync on the left with how they approach us.
00:11:22.000And you've got these people like Brian Stelter, Donnie O'Sullivan, and Kevin Roos at New York Times.
00:11:29.000You've got CNN personalities, New York Times people out there talking about us on Twitter all the time about how we're a fake satire site.
00:11:36.000You know, we're pretending to be a satire site so we can get around Facebook's rules.
00:11:41.000And what they're trying to do there is just set a predicate for censorship.
00:11:44.000They're trying to suggest we're not really satire.
00:12:05.000It's like people are constantly working the angles to try to find a way to put us in violation of the community standards of these social networks so they can shut us down.
00:12:16.000And it's, you know, they're reaching far to try to do it too.
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00:14:26.000So you were mentioning being censored by these tech companies, and you said that Brian Stelter and many others say that you're not a real satire site.
00:14:50.000A double negative or something, right?
00:14:53.000Well, you know, I think that they think satire, what they consider fair game is anything that doesn't poke at them and their sacred cows and their views and values.
00:15:59.000I'll take satire over a 538 or Cook political report every day.
00:16:04.000So, what do you think that the fight that you're currently engaged in to be able to still mock, show irony, and use sarcasm and be able to tell jokes?
00:16:15.000What do you think your fight tells us about the broader cultural struggle we're in in our country?
00:16:19.000What do you think your placement in it tells us that could kind of fit into a broader narrative?
00:16:24.000Well, I mean, it's just kind of an indication of where we're at right now.
00:16:27.000I mean, we're in this, you know, with all this cancel culture stuff and this intolerance, extreme intolerance of views that the left doesn't like, opinions, beliefs, whether they're religious beliefs or political ideology or whatever it is.
00:16:41.000The deep intolerance that's there is manifesting itself to the point where we can't even make jokes anymore.
00:16:49.000And the fact that they're being disingenuous and dishonest in their efforts to try to like stamp it out and shut us down, it's just, you know, it's indicative of the dark place that we're in.
00:17:00.000You know, people will say, oh, you know, the world is so crazy, you know, you can't even do satire anymore.
00:17:05.000It's that much more important, I think, for us to be doing satire right now.
00:17:09.000It's more important than ever because we have to be able, there has to be somebody that's there that's really, you know, the arguments and refutation, the kind of stuff that you do is extremely important to engage people and shut down what they're saying and offer your case, your positive case for what you believe and why you believe it.
00:17:26.000But, you know, there's a great quote by GK Chesterton.
00:17:29.000He said something to the effect of, you know, humor can get under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
00:17:36.000And I think that that's, you know, one of the reasons that satire is so important to keep going, to keep having a voice, because the humor is just so effective in making its points.
00:17:48.000And I mean, I've said for a long time, we did a whole segment on this on our program that America isn't laughing nearly enough because we take ourselves so seriously.
00:17:56.000And that's part of the biggest problems with the left is they have no capacity for self-deprecation.
00:18:02.000They have no tolerance whatsoever to actually allow any form of criticism or any form of cross-examination of their horrendous ideas.
00:18:13.000Yeah, and even to the point where they're eating their own at this point.
00:18:16.000You know, they're going after their own comedians, their own voices, people who ordinarily they considered heroes and idols.
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00:20:16.000So, Seth, we were talking about the death of comedy.
00:20:19.000And as we've mentioned before, if you look at late night comedians, the audience that they have in front of them does not laugh.
00:20:45.000He had about an eight and a half minute monologue where he went off on the Democrat Party, where he said, we are now, the Democrat Party is the party of every woke, fragile, you know, social justice warrior Karen out there.
00:20:58.000It's like, that's no way to be able to win elections.
00:21:01.000And what was so stunning is that he had a studio audience in front of him and it was dead silent.
00:21:14.000And what's very interesting is that the Democrats and the left, they're okay with using humor and mockery against the other side, but the definition of comedy is being able to also look introspectively and also be able to make fun of yourself.
00:21:27.000Jerry Seinfeld always used to say is that you are not a comedian if you cannot lead with a joke about yourself.
00:21:32.000And Seinfeld, the greatest television show ever created, bar none, because it was the most brilliantly written comedy ever, because it really is about nothing and it was allowed to be done with no swearing and no inappropriate material.
00:21:44.000Sometimes there were some veiled references, but they did a great job, is because the whole idea of Seinfeld is we're going to make fun of ourselves first.
00:21:53.000We're going to make fun of people living on the Upper West Side who are Jewish mostly that kind of have a certain like pattern of living and we're going to make fun of that and then we'll make fun of everyone else with it.
00:22:08.000And I think that's one of the things when I was first looking at the Babylon Bee is that it was so refreshing, the self-deprecating humor that was there.
00:22:15.000I mean, it was cost, you know, it's a Christian site.
00:22:19.000Christians and conservatives aren't spared on this site.
00:22:21.000We make fun of worship leaders and pastors and, you know, little theological stuff and inside church jokes, you know, all kinds of stuff.
00:22:30.000We're poking at ourselves all the time.
00:22:31.000And that's one of the values, like you said, of the purposes of comedy is to sometimes, obviously, just to entertain you, make you laugh, but also to make you think, to make you like look at kind of your own issues, your own beliefs, some of your own hypocrisy and challenge yourself, convict yourself a little bit.
00:22:46.000And I think the Babylon B has done a pretty good job of that.
00:23:06.000It's also good to confront yourself with your own jokes.
00:23:08.000Yeah, there was one you guys wrote a year, a year and a half ago, which said like mega church pastor checks Instagram follower count, you know, in between worship, like in between standing ovations or like people like just kind of looking.
00:23:21.000That just kind of goes at the heart of kind of big Christian ink and kind of, it was something of that variation.
00:23:28.000So you run Babylon B. You also have thinker.org, which we talk a lot about on this program that allows people to consume big ideas very quickly and succinctly.
00:23:37.000Tell us about why you either bought or you started that project.
00:23:42.000Yeah, we started Thinker because there's a market for this stuff.
00:23:47.000You know, people are, first of all, they're short on time, you know, and they're not finding the time.
00:23:52.000They're not fitting reading into their lives the way that they want to.
00:23:56.000But a lot of the apps that are catering to that market that's looking for something like it aren't providing them with books that really give you a well-rounded view of things.
00:24:08.000You'll get a lot of like self-help stuff or just like top-selling bestsellers or business and marketing.
00:24:15.000There's lots of little focuses and niches and stuff like that.
00:24:18.000But what we're trying to do with Thinker is expose people to ideas that they otherwise wouldn't encounter in these other apps or even in their schools.
00:24:25.000You know, a lot of like what Turning Point is doing or what Prager U is doing, you know, addressing a lot of these issues from another perspective that people who have been so indoctrinated with leftist stuff, it's like it's refreshing to see that there are other viewpoints that are articulated well.
00:24:41.000There are intellectuals on the other side.
00:24:43.000And so we try to really offer a balanced library there.
00:24:46.000I mean, you'll read things like C.S. Lewis books on Thinker that you're not going to find on these other apps.
00:24:52.000And it exposes you to ideas, religion, theology, philosophy, political ideology that you otherwise wouldn't encounter.
00:24:59.000And we have our promo code thinker.org/slash Charlie, and people should sign up right now to do that on our program.
00:25:06.000So, Seth, I think what this all really comes down to, especially when it comes to comedy and it comes to the expression of ideas, it comes down to are you going to tolerate speech that you do not like?
00:25:17.000And the left and the entire kind of power structure that runs our country, instead of trying to win the argument, they try to destroy the arguer.
00:25:27.000This is a pattern that they use time and time again.
00:25:30.000Instead of actually trying to do the difficult thing of winning an argument, which actually usually no one actually wins an argument.
00:25:36.000This is one of the biggest kind of fallacies out there when it comes to free speech.
00:25:41.000It's very rarely when you have a debate, is there a clear winner?
00:25:45.000Typically, there is a slight favored person, but there's some nuance.
00:25:50.000And usually, the audience will say, I think both sides made good points, but I tend to be more on this side, but I can see where they're coming from.
00:25:57.000All of a sudden, then it kind of deflates a lot of the rigid dogma that guides a lot of the political conversations in our country, almost all from the left.
00:26:06.000And that's one of the reasons they don't like speech, is it's really, really hard to make a country in your image when you allow speech to occur, because from a utilitarian standpoint, it actually, by definition, makes people less outraged and far more understanding of where the other side might come from.
00:26:22.000But the speech that they really don't like is critical speech, and jokes and comedy are that kind of speech.
00:26:29.000And so now you guys have been victimized by big tech, specifically because you're a successful form of ridiculing speech against the ruling class.
00:26:38.000And look, Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot, Mussolini, they all went after the comedians, right?
00:26:43.000They all had public executions of court gestures and kind of people that had fun with things.
00:26:48.000And they would make, they'd always be mocked.
00:26:51.000Those are the first people that were always attacked in these countries.
00:26:54.000Can you talk about the role that you think you're playing right now in the battle for freedom of speech?
00:27:00.000Because I don't think we do a good enough job of explaining exactly why we need freedom of speech.
00:27:04.000We sometimes just say, well, it's important that everyone gets their voice heard.
00:27:15.000Well, I mean, we are certainly on the front lines of it.
00:27:18.000And I don't know if in this case, they're coming after us first necessarily.
00:27:23.000We may not be big enough for us to have been the first target, but we're certainly one of the main targets right now.
00:27:29.000And as far as the importance of it, I mean, you know, when it comes to exactly what you're saying, it's this ad hominem approach on the left, right?
00:27:39.000Personal attacks rather than engaging the arguments.
00:27:42.000And even that is something that we have to make sure that we're targeting with our satire to point out how ridiculous and fallacious that is.
00:27:48.000You know, rather than actually engaging on the points, you know, they want to tear down and attack the person who's making them.
00:27:54.000And we've been, I've personally been a victim of cancel culture myself, where I was disinvited from an event, you know, because of things that I had said on Twitter.
00:28:23.000Well, what they did, I was supposed to talk in the chapel, and some, you know, some students were objecting to that.
00:28:28.000And so they tried to move me out of the chapel, citing the same reason the students were giving that it's a sacred space and someone as controversial as me shouldn't be there.
00:28:36.000And I'm like, well, if I'm not welcome in the chapel, I don't feel welcome there at all.
00:28:39.000So they were catering to the mob and trying to do what the mob wanted.
00:28:44.000I will go to every one of their major donors.
00:28:46.000I know all of them in Palm Beach and I will tell them to divest all of their gifts from PBA.
00:28:50.000I will make a personal mission of that.
00:28:53.000Well, you know, it's an unfortunate thing.
00:28:55.000You know, we need to have more backbone when it comes to dealing with these things.
00:28:58.000But yeah, the importance of free speech, like you said, is absolutely a moral thing.
00:29:01.000I mean, it's the healthiest thing for our society is, you know, people being able to engage in the ideas, talk about what they believe and why they believe it, have the freedom to do that, and let things win on their merits.
00:29:14.000And so, you know, to live in a culture where, and this is the thing, the authoritarianism isn't really coming from the government right now.
00:29:23.000It's all the tools, it's the media, it's the big tech companies working together in concert.
00:29:29.000The concerted effort they're putting on shaping what you're allowed to say and when you're allowed to say it.
00:29:45.000It's not just in the government, which is actually, it makes it very insidious and scary that it's that pervasive.
00:29:52.000And so it has to be, you know, it has to be fought on different fronts, I think, than it's been fought before when it comes directly.
00:29:57.000When the boot that's on your neck is the governments, it's a different battle than what we're dealing with right now.
00:30:02.000Well, and when you hear something you don't like, if you want to respond and say, and clear the record, then you're a believer in free speech.
00:30:12.000If you want to repress and shut that person up, then you're not.
00:30:28.000It's, I mean, and this is something that's so interesting.
00:30:30.000It's completely opposite than how people view conservatives in the mainstream press.
00:30:35.000And it's completely opposite that what people think that Christians and conservatives have, which is you and I are not plotting here, being like, you know what?
00:30:42.000How are we going to go shut down the atheist Facebook pages?
00:30:45.000That's what we wanted to spend our time today.
00:30:47.000How are we going to organize boycotts and try to say we need to shut down the instead?
00:30:52.000We're kind of like, how do we make better arguments so less people are atheist?
00:30:55.000It's a completely different way to approach kind of our desired objective.
00:31:00.000And what's so creepy is that the left views this so much, so theologically.
00:31:05.000I mean, they believe that if you dare disagree with them on a singular policy point, you're a heretic and that you must pay a very serious price for that.
00:31:13.000And so I want you to comment, though, on kind of the silent censorship that exists.
00:31:20.000You know, Adam Smith had the invisible hand, but there's an invisible handcuff that exists in our country now where people feel as if they can't speak out because of the potential fear of retribution.
00:31:31.000You dealt with it at Palm Beach Atlantic.
00:31:33.000How are young people supposed to deal with this?
00:31:36.000Well, okay, so this is one of these things where it's either we either all get bold and courageous or we all suffer the same fate.
00:31:44.000And I've told people this before when they, when I've had students come up to me or people, young people in their careers who are like, I can't talk about what I believe or why I believe at work because I think I'll get fired or something like that.
00:31:54.000And that fear, they end up self-censoring because they have that fear.
00:31:58.000But as long as they continue self-censoring, what they're doing is they're fueling this whole system.
00:32:04.000They're fueling their own repression by doing that.
00:32:09.000And I understand that, you know, for someone like me, running my own business and not working for somebody else, I can say what I think and not have to worry about that.
00:32:17.000And I understand that it's a different situation for somebody else in another circumstance.
00:32:22.000But if people don't get bold and actually stand up for what they believe and why they believe it and be willing to say, you know what?
00:32:29.000I'm allowed to have different viewpoints than you.
00:32:32.000I'm allowed to think and feel what I think and feel.
00:32:34.000If people don't do that, then we will all suffer this fate.
00:32:37.000I mean, we're all that the pressure that's there, it is only allowed to succeed because of the passivity of the people that it's being applied to.
00:33:00.000They have no reason whatsoever to be able to do what they're doing.
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00:34:31.000And what would you tell someone that says, well, I want to go be an entrepreneur, which by the way, half infuriates me because this really cool buzzword where they think you get to have all the nicest cars and all the freedom.
00:34:40.000And it's actually pretty awful at times.
00:34:43.000I think that a lot of people, when they describe themselves as entrepreneurs, they're basically unemployed and they're using a different word for it, right?
00:34:51.000But a more glorified term, I guess, but it's been sullied by that overusage.
00:34:56.000I think, you know, well, okay, my history, my experience started out in the internet marketing world.
00:35:01.000I got into a booming industry early on in like 2004, 2005.
00:35:05.000I started working in like the search marketing and search engine optimization world, you know, with Google AdWords and these different marketing platforms that companies were starting to dump billions of dollars into.
00:35:16.000And so I was managing ad campaigns for a lot of different companies.
00:35:18.000And so I'm like, I'm running ads for like insurance companies or lawyers or people that do like garage storage build outs or steel-toe shoes or waterproof boots, stuff like anything, anything you can imagine.
00:35:31.000And so I kind of learned the ins and outs of how to like drive traffic to websites and monetize it on the back end and make it all work, get a return on your ad spend.
00:35:40.000And I learned that for a number of different businesses, whether you're selling in retail or generating leads or whatever you're doing.
00:35:46.000So I got a really good feel for how all of that worked.
00:35:49.000And I decided I would strike out on my own and just run my own internet marketing agency.
00:35:55.000So I started doing ad campaigns for my own clients.
00:36:06.000So I quickly wanted to transition out of that and I basically decided, look, I know how to make money online because I've run all these campaigns.
00:36:15.000I just need to work with someone who knows how to build applications, web applications, apps, things like that.
00:36:20.000And so I partnered with my brother back in 2012.
00:37:17.000What do you say to young people that are under the belief that you can't succeed in this country, that there's too many barriers, kind of that victimology viewpoint that has really kind of infected a lot of young people?
00:37:34.000Look, based on my experience, it doesn't matter who you are, where you are, especially in the internet age, with the tools that are available at our disposal, anybody can succeed.
00:37:46.000All you need is a computer and an internet connection.
00:37:48.000I mean, it might help to have a credit card that has at least a few hundred dollars of available balance on it.
00:37:54.000But, you know, you can, anybody can get started with something, have an idea and push it out there and make it work.
00:38:02.000I mean, the methods of advertising, just like in my background in search marketing, search marketing allows you to connect with buyers, searchers who are looking specifically for what you're selling.
00:38:12.000It's not like putting a billboard out there where like maybe someone who wants your service will see it.
00:38:16.000It's like you only show your ads to people who are actively searching for whatever you're selling.
00:39:02.000There's a social network on the back end of that if you're a subscriber.
00:39:06.000But yeah, we have like, we have, we now have a bundle you can subscribe to where you get Babylon Be, NotTheB, and Discern, which is like a more serious news site run by Adam Ford.
00:39:15.000So yeah, I mean, those are, those are the main things.
00:39:18.000Thinker as well, if you want to check that out, that's a great educational tool if you're looking to expose yourself to new ideas.