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April 6, 2018 - Louder with Crowder

01:09:18

#310 YOUTUBE SHOOTING COVER-UP!! Thomas Sowell and Owen Benjamin Guest | Louder With Crowder

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	Just play it smart out there tonight, boys.
	Okay, we got Thomas Sowell on tonight, one of the most brilliant economists in the world.
	YouTube's just itching for a reason to demonetize us, so we want to see a lot of hard work out there, okay?
	Crying out loud, we know how to bring a laugh.
	Let's just play it smart. Yeah, come on, stick him!
	Yeah, f*** him! Come on!
	Come on! Come on, now!
	Now, we need this win tonight.
	We got a lot of losses. Yeah, we got a lot of losses!
	Winner! Urbana, come on!
	Let's get out there, guys. It's a rear bar.
	Come on, let's play heads up out there.
	Man for man, we're better than any...
	We're Z for Z! Yeah, Z! All right, Z for Z, we're better than any f***ing late-night show in the world.
	Yeah, come on, let's go!
	Come on, let's go! Come on, let's go!
	Come on, come on, come on!
	We can do this, guys!
	Take it down, take it down!
	You know what dance that is.
	Back to the Hawking. So glad to have you.
	That's the sound of the weekend, the last show of the week, and I couldn't be more grateful.
	Unbelievable show on up today.
	Thomas Sowell is on the show.
	Newsbook, Discrimination and Disparities.
	It kind of looks like I changed my mind to red and white there.
	One of the men I've wanted to have on the show.
	That's a great start. I'm sure he's thrilled that he just appeared on this program.
	I've been talking about him since I met you, you've been wanting him on the show.
	Yeah, I've really wanted to have him on the show, which actually leads me to a question of the day.
	Who would you most like to see on the show as far as great minds?
	Who do you consider to be some of the most, I guess, formidable minds of our time?
	I would certainly say Thomas Sowell on there, and then in the comedy realm, Norm MacDonald, so we're We're holding out hope.
	And then the second question, have you noticed the incredibly odd coverage of the YouTube shooting, which we'll talk about later?
	And finally, does anyone else have allergies?
	I feel as though an entire field of dandelions just decided to line up and flagellate right in my eyeball.
	I don't know about anyone else out there.
	Producing in the in-video studios, as always, is Jared, who is not gay.
	Follow him on Twitter, not gay. Jared, meet us credit with your comments, your thoughts, your Photoshop, your life, fulfill my legal obligations, jargon, conclusions.
	Are we good? Another day, not gay.
	Good. And SimplifiedWine.com, a sommelier, that's a thing, at G. Morgan Jr.
	How are you, sir? What's the wine of the day?
	We've got the wine of the day is Baby Bear.
	Baby Bear. Yeah, well, that's actually perfect because Owen Benjamin is going to be on and Baby Bear is no longer allowed on Twitter.
	But you are soft, my friend, so you either need to speak into the microphone or adjust your volumes.
	Are you ready for the overlays?
	Beep, beep, I'm ready. And also, I'm now a cult leader on Twitter.
	I know, you were telling me that. You were very concerned about it.
	Ed Svencombe. He's got to go back to it.
	I screwed that one up. His cult followers already know.
	Send him back for an update. Owen Benjamin is on the show, by the way.
	He was, I guess, OB. I don't know if he's been completely removed from Twitter.
	We just, we just, he was helping us write some of these jokes this morning.
	Yeah. And then after that, he was just permabanned.
	Yeah, I think he's permanently banned. I don't know why, this is a good device, the book.
	I see when people, this is why hosts are like, this book.
	Are you going to throw it at us? I get why all these leaders, like, you know, Hitler, they're like, the book!
	It's the book! It's the book!
	It's the book! It's the authoritative! I know why Oprah has her face on the cover of every magazine.
	That's right. Exactly. Hey, by the way, in case you didn't know, next month, O Magazine, She's on the cover.
	All right. Nah.
	We'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.
	Always proud of my hometown.
	This comes from MLive.com.
	The 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.
	When asked why the free poop, Detroit zoologists specified because slim tap water wasn't available.
	I... 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.
	Detroit Zoo.
	Come for the animals.
	Leave with a little piece of Detroit.
	For a taste that's pure Michigan.
	You know, it seems like Tim Allen will do anything nowadays as long as the Sider House Rules theme song is right behind it.
	It just makes anything sound good.
	Yeah. Slow motion at the Sider House Rules.
	It's pure Michigan. Genius.
	Watch. People who live in Michigan love that.
	People who don't have no idea what we're talking about.
	It's a tourism campaign and Tim Allen.
	Nobody makes fun of Tim Allen.
	Name that movie line, or I guess sort of series line.
	By the way, hey, here's another story.
	A woman said an Ancestry.com DNA test told her that she had a different father, who happened to be her parents' fertility doctor...
	The test showed that her DNA matched a sample from a doctor more than 500 miles away.
	At the time, Rowlett was not aware that more than 36 years ago, her parents had struggled to conceive.
	There is a twist. Seeking more information, Ms.
	Rowlett had her older sister take the same test, only to discover a DNA match with the milkman.
	Her 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.
	Oh my gosh. It's always the crazy person who claims he's Jesus in 2018.
	It's true. Never the guy in the office.
	Never anybody cool anymore.
	The memo's done. By the way, I'm Jesus.
	Really? Really. Good to know.
	I've been this weekend. Put that on my contact information.
	Lisa explains why every doctor's visit was accompanied by chocolate and roses.
	And AstroGlide, technically, you were saying this, technically...
	Technically, the fertility doctor did his job.
	You can't take that away from him.
	All sales are final.
	Imagine the mother rationalizing that.
	You know where your good genes come from now.
	Dear, he charges.
	I don't think this was a redneck family, and I actually resent that presumption.
	Yeah, absolutely. Probably Arkansas.
	We have standards. Let's get lighter, because this news has been so heavy.
	Let's watch this Russian postal drone smash into a wall on its inaugural flight.
	Roll clip. Here it goes.
	Beautiful. In Soviet Russia, our mail will be a sight to behold for an entire- Oh, crap.
	Good news is that in Russia, it's a flat rate for next day killing.
	That's convenient. In an unsurprising turn of events, the drone turned out to be manned by the only Chinese drone pilot in Russia.
	So I know someone's going to fact check and say, they're not pilots if they're manning a drone.
	Here's the thing, we don't care.
	Some people are saying, that's racist.
	Maybe. A Japanese couple apologized for ignoring their work pregnancy timetable by conceiving, quote, before their turn.
	This comes from the Telegraph.
	Japanese worker...
	I don't think we want to break the name because, you know, she deserves her non-animity.
	That's the problem she needs to worry about.
	She's been reprimanded by her boss for selfishly breaking the rules after she became pregnant before it was her turn.
	The couple formally met with the director to apologize about the pregnancy in person.
	And they actually did it before that by phone.
	And we have the exclusive audio of that call.
	I'm so sorry. Forgiveness, please.
	Forgiveness? Why forgiveness?
	I am with her baby.
	With her baby? Yes!
	Forgiveness! No! No forgiveness!
	You have to wait ten!
	You bring great shame!
	Yes! I bring great shame!
	How you get with have a baby?
	With a husband! So sorry!
	Forgiveness! You make love to husband?
	Yes! Forgiveness! No!
	No forgiveness! Even more shame!
	You make love many times?
	Yes! Many times!
	Forgiveness! No forgiveness!
	You make fun with have sex!
	What? You make a doggy!
	I'm not the other! Oh, boom boom!
	Please! You make me uncomfortable.
	Forgive me. No, you no, baby.
	You no, doggy. You seppuku.
	No, seppuku.
	You. For all the shame.
	I'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?
	It's always in English. It's always in English.
	It's just as vexing to us.
	By the way, keep fine. We ask ourselves the same thing.
	As Retitis said, they have all the same freedoms in Japan, so...
	Yes, they do. Don't let this story...
	We'll talk about the YouTube shooting and just some overall startling statistics that are ignored by the media.
	People should go and watch the John Lott interview yesterday.
	But a great example is this idea that controlling guns will reduce suicides.
	Japan has, I think, some of the strictest gun control in the world.
	The highest suicide rate in the industrialized world, I believe.
	That's because I have to have babies in turn.
	Yeah. 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.
	I haven't been able to find sources on that.
	If someone can send that to me, at S. Crowder, I've heard it.
	I cannot substantiate it, but I've heard that multiple times.
	Isn't Switzerland as well? Like, really high?
	I've never heard of that.
	I thought it was. Sven Computer, do you know if that's true or not?
	They're pretty close. I only know that we can't annex them.
	Okay. Yeah.
	Always thinking about the next war.
	Speaking of annexing, said the rest of the world, it's time for this week's Eye on India segment.
	Why do we single out India?
	Because it's a terrible place.
	It is terrible. And also because people like to act as though it's not.
	They go there on spiritual quests.
	So, you know what? We'd like to warn you.
	This is why. We have so many stories from India.
	Every time we do it, we're global. We're globalists when it comes to news.
	According to an Indian professor.
	Did you guys read this article?
	Yeah, this is great.
	And a doctor, from what I hear.
	Women who wear jeans give birth to transgenders and autistic children.
	From India today.
	Rajiv 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?
	These children are called transgenders or nebulkunkumsakumsihidra.
	Someone's going to pronounce that correctly.
	He also later added that, and women who wear miniskirts should call me.
	It's science. Very self-serving.
	Tor-free. Tor-free. And what's funny is he was adamant about his opinion.
	We 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.
	Which, in his defense, we believe stems from the recently published Double Blind Placebo Controlled Wranglers Make Retards Study.
	You can search that one on PubMed.
	The vies are still in question.
	We don't know yet. Fate of glory.
	Low rise, the jury is still out.
	If anybody asks us, man, why are you picking on India?
	That story right there. That's exactly why.
	You're making it too easy, India. He's on television.
	Although they probably look at our country with this next story and say, you're no better to you.
	I say, eh, okay, you got a point.
	Because Robert De Niro says that there's no use in reaching across the aisle at all to Trump supporters.
	Oh. In a recent interview, he said, the people that I care about are those young people who demonstrated.
	They're the future. They know.
	They 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.
	He then said, we're at a point with all of us where this is beyond trying to see another person's point of view.
	There are ways you can talk about that, but we're at a point where the things that are
	happening in our country are so bad, and it comes from Trump.
	He went on citing examples, blaming Trump, of course, for a lackluster economy, political
	divisiveness, as well as Rocky and Bullwinkle, Stardust, analyze that, hide and seek, the
	family, grudge match, the intern, the big wedding, dirty grandpa, meet the Fockers,
	little Fockers, his entire post-2006 catalog, aside from Silver Linings Playbook and alimony
	slash child support 2-2-X-Y.
	You.
	laughs You're a bad president. I don't think that's a...
	Yes, it is!
	It's the bad president!
	At best, I've heard people describe the intern as cute.
	Yeah. Which is the last review, raving review, any director wants to hear.
	Also, the first time Anne Hathaway has been associated with anything called cute.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. How did you feel about The Godfather?
	It was cute. It was cute, yeah.
	Great. It was encouraging.
	Thanks. That's what we were going for.
	Your personality. Yes. Alright, speaking of which, we have to move on to our dive inside the YouTube shooting!
	It's odd, isn't it, that we haven't been talking about her at all?
	No. Not at all.
	It disappeared. It was...
	As quickly as it came, it went.
	Kaiser Cersei. It's just gone.
	Like a fart in the wind. Everything we know, like the pollen in my eyes.
	I don't know if I watch. People are going to say, he's on coke.
	A little bit.
	To fix the dandelions.
	Yes, to fix the dandelions.
	Everyone knows. It's the antidote.
	You find the antidotes in the most surprising places.
	Like snake venom needs just a different kind of snake venom.
	Pollen? Cocaine.
	A little heroin will do that. Plant?
	It's another plant. It's natural, right?
	It's natural, man. Well, so is cocaine.
	So is mercury. Cocaine is natural.
	I don't fool around with anything synthetic.
	Just cocaine for this cowboy.
	Okay. None of that methamphetamine.
	I don't know where that's been.
	Pure coke. Everything we know about her.
	Okay. Nisam Agdam30.
	Agdam, am I pronouncing that correctly there, Sven Computer?
	Is that the pronunciation? I think so, yeah.
	Nisam Agdam. Oh, there we go. Great.
	I feel great that I go to you for my information and make sure that I'm correct.
	I think so. I'm not really sure.
	My mind was somewhere else.
	I was thinking about how he screwed up.
	Throughout history, we really haven't gotten a try.
	Replace him with a Google Home. Yes.
	Alexa, wipe our history.
	39 years old, Iranian heritage, PETA activist, vegan.
	She wounded three, shot herself.
	Because we call it a happy ending.
	She shot herself.
	And also, by the way, forensic scientists believe the damage could have been much worse had she had any B12 in her body.
	Or if she were a man.
	Women aren't even good mass shooters. So here's...
	They can't even mass shoot as well.
	And 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.
	Don't believe me? Here's Taylor the tape.
	Oh no, the worst is yet to come!
	Hahahahaha!
	Hello FBI, I have a tip!
	Yeah. She looks like Michael Jackson in transition.
	Well, 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.
	So 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.
	Have you guys seen this? They're still talking about Parkland, no mention of Sutherland Springs.
	No one mentioned the YouTube shooting.
	At all? The second biggest tech company, I guess the first biggest tech company, because it's Google, but YouTube, right behind Facebook.
	I think the biggest website is Google, then Facebook, and then YouTube, I believe.
	Number one, two, and three. So, shooting at the number three, arguably number one tech company, no headlines.
	Already gone, two days later. Look at the HuffPo and the last story on MSNBC. You can see this here.
	And something that I loved about Huffington Post, they said, look, they go, motive's still unclear.
	Notice one thing? It's the police officer.
	They don't even show her mugshot.
	They don't even show her picture. Anytime it's a male shooter, a white male shooter, it's just Dylan Rue.
	It's right up there. This is the face of domestic terrorism.
	Yeah, along with the rebels. Now they just show the cop, because they're like, let's show the white male involved in our reporting.
	It'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.
	They all look like the mass shooter.
	They condition me. You don't see many of this...
	What's her name? Nisam Agdam.
	Nisam Agdam. Probably not going to be in Avengers Age of Ultron.
	No. Because she did. Or didn't have the energy.
	Something else that was also really striking, I didn't notice a lot of people writing about this, Mashable.
	Let's see if you can spot the difference here between the actual picture and Mashable.
	What? Yep. They lightened the skin and her eyes didn't even try!
	The skin is one thing that's like, okay, maybe that's just a filter.
	Maybe they just Instagrammed that bad boy.
	But the eye color, that's not a filter!
	They took their iPhone wand and put it...
	Hold on, that was meant to remove red eye.
	No, we're just going to change the actual tint.
	That's better for us. It's very reminiscent of...
	Her name is Stacy. Her name is Stacy now.
	And she transitioned to Stefan.
	Ugh. White male terrorist.
	Reminiscent all of this. I think of the...
	Remember the Fort Lauderdale shooting?
	I don't know if you remember this. I was beside myself.
	They call Esteban Santiago, who's labeled a white Hispanic.
	I don't know what that means!
	Oh my gosh. White Hispanic.
	And 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.
	This doesn't go with it. Another clip.
	Oyna kuzum, oyna, oyna kuzum, oyna, oyna kuzum, oyna, oyna kuzum, oyna, oyna kuzum, oyna, oyna kuzum.
	It's like that dancing baby gif when the internet first started combined with a child's nightmare.
	I don't know why that wasn't monetized.
	It makes me feel so much better about this show.
	Production value is way up here.
	It does. I feel good about myself.
	You said you had something you wanted to say on this.
	Well, this happened in California.
	I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but strong gun laws?
	Pretty strict gun laws there in California.
	Also, by the way, YouTube, Google, not a hotbed for gun culture.
	Which 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.
	Well, hold on a second. She did injure three people.
	Injure three people. You don't want to make light of that.
	But she shot herself. But she shot herself.
	By the way, no, listen, it's always sad when someone loses a life, but not equally sad.
	When you're shooting at other people, it's like...
	Put it this way, if I had the power, if I could do the...
	What do you call the power? Is it ESP? What's the power where you can actually control people with your minds?
	If I had the Jedi... If I were there at YouTube, that's exactly what I would do.
	If she were shooting at people, I'd go...
	No! Sorry! Them's the breaks!
	And then go to lunch. Thomas Sowell coming up after the break.
	One trend that we do see is that just like the Parkland shooting, we are looking for actual trends.
	Police were warned beforehand, but did nothing.
	Now 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.
	Though again, tale of the tape!
	Wah! Wah!
	Wah! Yeah.
	I mean, what does it take for you to show up at their house and bring them to the quiet room with the white jacket and the arms crossed?
	Somebody get her an intern or something.
	And for crying out loud, the standards have become so stringent.
	A long time ago, you know, you said the fridge was talking to you.
	They put you in a pool and gave you electroshock therapy.
	This broad's uploading like it's her job.
	You can't do anything? I suppose that whole day uploading and manual review of all the videos.
	That is a hard balance, though. Obviously, you can't infringe on people's rights just because someone says she's crazy.
	Listen, I don't know a whole lot about Iran.
	This could be the norm.
	For all we know, she could be batting a hundred for non-crazy Iranians.
	I have no idea. I know about her and Ahmadinejad and Annie Cyrus, and she seems normal, so I guess that's the only contrast.
	The real trend, and we'll talk about this probably with Thomas Sowell after this, what do you think this had?
	It wasn't white male.
	It wasn't politics.
	It wasn't religion. What do you think this has had in common with other mass shootings?
	98% of public mass shootings, in fact.
	Gun-free zone!
	It was committed in a gun-free zone.
	Also something else that we don't talk about.
	Do you know another commonality here?
	It was stopped.
	Someone with a gun. Yes.
	Bad person with a gun. Usually stopped by a good person with a gun.
	Either a good Samaritan, a police officer, or in this case, bad girl turned good girl when she shot herself because she took out the perp.
	She still was taken out.
	Yes. That's weird. Yeah, I don't know what to do with that now.
	Where is the person who killed Hitler?
	Heaven or hell? Think about it.
	Sven'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.
	Committed 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.
	What's going through your mind with, I mean, people dropping, being shot multiple times, bullets whizzing, people bleeding?
	What'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.
	You know, you gotta be smart.
	You gotta think fast because smart.
	I didn't have a gun on me, but I wish I did.
	By the way, did anyone else not expect that voice to come out of that face?
	And he's like, you gotta be fast.
	I'm like, you don't look fast. You look like an Okinawan fisherman.
	Well, you know, you gotta be smart.
	Oh, wow, really?
	That's the voice coming out of that body.
	Surprised me, but yeah, he wished he had a gun.
	And you know what? I can understand where he's coming from.
	If you saw this walk into your office or neighborhood, you might feel the same way.
	Sadness, hair, crying, saw your food, oh my brain, look at that meat, it looks like your next heart attack.
	Life's a game, wanna play?
	It's taking everything I have to not reach for my concealed carry piece right now.
	And you know what else? The reason I want to stay here with you?
	I have a reason to live. Thomas Sowell coming up after the break right now.
	I'm excited nervous I
	think we're back maybe oh my god I can't believe about my life. I'm not a man man
	I can't even believe about... Mother of God!
	We're losing!
	They're burying us alive!
	YouTube trending list? Oh piss on YouTube trending list!
	Susan Wojcicki? Oh piss on Susan Wojcicki!
	You're blowing it boys!
	Every viewer at Alternative YouTube is out there tonight with money in their pockets looking to join Mug Club!
	And they're looking for talent!
	For winners! Oh, all my years of Mug Club publicity, all the tretty-banes and midget sanders and waterboarding for nothing!
	They came out here tonight to see Louder with Crowder!
	The funniest, toughest show in late night!
	Not this bunch of pussies.
	Bobby scores at the good ol' hockey game.
	Oh, the good ol' hockey game is the best game you can name.
	And the best game you can name is the good old hockey game.
	Keep clinking.
	All right. I'm so glad to have our next guest on.
	to have our next guest on.
	Actually, 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.
	There are only a handful of people, one of whom we've already had on, George St.
	Pierre in athletics. We had him on the show.
	Norm Macdonald in comedy, hopefully someday.
	And then when it comes to economists, social thinkers, philosophers.
	This 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.
	Mr. Thomas Sowell, thank you for being here, sir.
	Thank you for having me.
	Well, listen, I always wanted to ask you this because I've always wondered, do greats know when they are great?
	And I've talked about this on the show.
	You know, black rednecks and white liberals was huge, economic facts and fallacies for me growing up.
	And in college, where they teach Karl Marx, I said, well, they should teach Adam Smith, Keynes, Hayek.
	And I had to learn Chomsky.
	I've always said, I wish they put Thomas Sowell's mandatory reading alongside of it.
	How does it feel to be arguably the most influential Certainly probably the most influential conservative economist of our time.
	I know you have to be humble, but has it set in?
	I mean, because you're that guy. Well, I never contradict the opinions of people who say good things about me.
	Because there are so few of them.
	But I really don't know.
	It would be impossible to be objective about oneself.
	And so I never tried the impossible.
	Well, okay, that's a brilliant answer.
	And 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.
	I realized it doesn't matter who you are.
	They called him a racist and a dummy.
	I'm like, if they say it about Thomas Sowell, why do I even try to appease them?
	Let 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.
	And I'm sure you'd consider it among your best.
	But 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?
	Well, if it's the one that I recommend most, it would be basic economics, because that's where most people are most lacking.
	And 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.
	And that's the book that has, in fact, sold the most copies and been translated into the most foreign languages.
	Yeah. And it was fundamental for me.
	I talked about this growing up in college.
	I remember I was a conservative by nature.
	And I said, where do I really go if I really want to learn and read up on this?
	And someone actually gave me, I think it was actually basic economics, handed it to me, and that was my start.
	So, an incredible book for those who are in their formative years.
	Let me ask you about this latest book.
	I 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.
	More relevant today than I think possibly in my lifetime for both the right and the left.
	And I don't know if you've seen this quite a bit, sort of with the rise of this new right contingency.
	The 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.
	But 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.
	Namely, they claim that race largely determines IQ, IQ largely determines socioeconomic status, thus different races are doomed to different socioeconomic fates, period.
	Your book posits a very different argument, doesn't it?
	And a very convincing one. Well, yes.
	The two main explanations of disparities in the 20th century and in our own time are, one, genetics, and two, discrimination.
	And the irony is that American progressives have taken the lead, took the lead, in both those cases.
	That is, 100 years ago, American progressives We're completely on the side of genetic determinism.
	Yes. It is virtually impossible that there could be any such thing as equal outcomes for different groups.
	Let me give you one simple example that is ignored almost universally.
	Different groups have different median ages.
	Japanese Americans have a median age of 50.
	Right. Mexican Americans have a median age of 26.
	Now, 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.
	How many 26-year-olds, from any ethnic background, would qualify for such jobs?
	But the discussions go on as if age is not a factor.
	Right. Incidentally, this is also true internationally.
	I 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.
	Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's a great point, and obviously one of the main macro points in your book.
	We see the same thing in media.
	You see it with, obviously, I think the median age of Fox News viewers is in their 70s, and so the ads are different.
	The 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.
	What do you mean? That determines the ad rates, how long people stay with it.
	Time is a huge factor, which you often don't necessarily see discussed.
	Could you maybe expand on more so the myth that if not for discrimination...
	Society 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.
	If not for discrimination, we'd all have these equal representation outcomes.
	You put your finger on the key assumption on which the whole...
	It's like the keystone that holds up the whole structure, and you remove that, and they don't have very much.
	Age is one of those things, but what people desire to do matters.
	Right. 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.
	Okay. If I was, it was a total waste of genes.
	Because where I grew up, nobody ever thought about, no guy has ever thought about becoming male ballet dancers.
	So it doesn't matter what their abilities were.
	It doesn't matter whether the opposition or the gates of opportunity were wide open.
	They weren't going to become male ballet dancers.
	But what people want to do is huge.
	And you look, for example, I mean, why are there no Asian-American basketball players?
	Because they don't want to play basketball.
	Well, can we say maybe height plays a factor as well there?
	It might, but again, with age, you don't find Japanese Americans as baseball stars.
	There have been baseball stars of Japanese ancestry.
	Every one of them was born in Japan.
	They were not Japanese Americans.
	And the more you look into either people or nature, you find disparities everywhere, all over the world, at all kinds of things.
	And yet when you come to people's talk, the talk is about how everything would be even.
	Let me throw another one to nail the point.
	Geography. You know, people who live up in mountains on any continent are not the same as people who live in the river valleys.
	The people in river valleys almost invariably have higher incomes, more education, they're more advanced The people in the mountains tend to lag behind.
	One study was done.
	Coastal people seem to be far more prosperous than people that live inland.
	One 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.
	But 23% of the world's population lives there.
	And they produce 53% of the world's output.
	I mean, the circumstances matter hugely, and those circumstances are almost never the same for everybody.
	That's very interesting, you know, that you bring that up.
	I would wonder if we would talk about the economic disparity of the coastal cities.
	There's sort of that legacy wealth, because back in the day, before technology, you had to be on the coast, right, for mainline shipping.
	Any kind, if you want to do any international commerce.
	And again, that's one thing you could look at as geography, or you could look at it from some kind of economic standpoint.
	You know, something that was really telling to me, when we were just talking about socialism, And I'm sure you're familiar with this.
	You just talked about geography.
	When 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.
	It's true, they do better than the average American, but Swedish Americans, Danish Americans, on average, have a 55% higher lifestyle, not life expectancy.
	What's the word I'm looking for here? Life expectancy.
	No, not life expectancy. I'm trying to think.
	What's the word? See, with Thomas O. I get nervous.
	Life expectancy. Quality of life.
	Quality of life. 55% higher quality of life on average than the Danes in Denmark.
	And that's something that, again, we'll throw everyone for a loop when you bring that up.
	And it's very easily found.
	Yes, yes. In a previous book, I went into these geographic differences, and they're just astonishing.
	And sometimes it takes just one...
	Discrimination and Disparities book in the first chapter, I go into the fact that the firstborn child does so much better than the laterborn children.
	And 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.
	One strikes me at once is astronauts.
	The Apollo astronauts who got a man on the moon, 29 of them, 22 of them were either first born or an only child.
	Why is that? Do we have any sort of causation?
	We 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.
	And what he gets that the others don't get is full parental attention.
	The firstborn is an only child for a while.
	So I think that's crucial.
	Also, if you look at twins, twins average several points lower IQ than people who are born singly.
	And 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.
	So parental input is just huge.
	And that varies enormously from group to group.
	Yeah, it is fascinating.
	I believe my producer has a question.
	What you're saying is that would mean that the first few years of someone's life are incredibly formative.
	Because that's the only period of time they live without another sibling.
	Would live as an only child. They're equally two children of the parents who have to split time.
	Do you think that's a big reason why, Mr.
	Soule, the formative years early on?
	Oh, yes. In fact, in doing the research, I thought of my own life.
	Had my parents lived out a normal life, I would have been the sixth child in the family.
	They both died young.
	I was raised from infancy as an only child in a family of four adults.
	A complete, huge difference from what would have been otherwise.
	So it was a great misfortune and my good fortune.
	I was going to say, that explains why he's such an overachiever.
	Thomas Sowley makes the rest of us look like bottom dwellers.
	I need foreparents now. Yeah, exactly.
	That's exactly what you need. Let me ask you this.
	Two final questions.
	How much does IQ itself determine socioeconomic status?
	That's obviously a big point of controversy with different factions right now.
	And I know you write about it in your book, but for people who are listening or watching...
	Well, I guess there's a high correlation between IQ and success in a lot of areas.
	But 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.
	Who went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics.
	And yet none of the 1,500 people who did make that IQ cut off, none of them won a Nobel Prize in anything.
	So it's not determinative.
	I think the IQ itself is a product of circumstances.
	And that's true. The firstborn has a higher IQ than his siblings right after him.
	Right. That is fascinating.
	And I know a lot of people have been arguing the opposite, but this book puts forward a tremendous case.
	Let 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.
	At what point do we say, okay, here is a clear-cut case where correlation to causation here?
	We can look at this graph and determine it.
	One 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.
	Seems to me that's pretty cut and dry, one that's never talked about.
	In your opinion, when does it cross that barrier where, okay, we can definitively say this is the reason?
	Well, I think for gun control people, it will never cross that barrier because they will never discuss it in those terms.
	When did you ever see any gun control advocate?
	We've come up with numbers to show that gun control reduces murders.
	There's a huge volume of evidence out there.
	Think of it. There are 50 states, each having all kinds of different gun laws.
	There are all kinds of ways they could be compared.
	Think of all the countries around the world with different gun laws, different periods of history when there were different gun laws.
	And so you have a mountain of evidence if you were looking for evidence.
	Instead, they just simply assume from day one that if you have tighter gun laws, you'll have less murder rates.
	And there's tons of empirical evidence pointing just in the opposite direction.
	Right. Yeah, it really is.
	That's a very important point, Mr.
	Soll. Empirical data.
	Just like when we talk about healthcare and people say, well, do you like your healthcare?
	And it goes by a poll. I'm going, no, no, hold on a second.
	Let's go by mortality rates.
	Let's go by wait times. Let's go by empirical data.
	And that is the world in which Thomas Soll lives.
	The book, of course, is discrimination and disparities.
	I'm just all nervous.
	I will admit, I'm nervous.
	Yeah. I'm nervous here.
	This guy is a rock star to me.
	Mr. Sowell, I thank you so much for being on the show and look forward to anything you put out.
	I can't thank you enough. Thank you for having me.
	Absolutely. And we'll be back after this with Owen Benjamin.
	If there's a change...
	No, it just isn't done that way.
	The sun will be the green with the light of hate.
	And you aren't going home.
	It's that time, the single live read of the week.
	And because we've had so many new people coming in, we're going to do another Mug Club Live read.
	Often it's been Ben Walther, but by the way, hit the notification bell if you're on YouTube watching this.
	Ladderwithcredit.com slash mugclub.
	It's $99 for the year, or $69 for students, veterans, active military, and there's a free month trial, I think, going on right now.
	Let me say, well, what is it exactly?
	Well, what it is, it's what allows us to continue doing the free content on YouTube and on SoundCloud and iTunes.
	It's what allows us to do it. It's getting free clips up every day.
	It's what keeps everyone employed here, the 15 people across the website and YouTube, because YouTube ain't paying us nothing.
	But also you get the daily show every day.
	What you see is a clip. But what you see on Thursday, we do that every Monday through Thursday.
	Inaki Jared Show, Morning Grinders.
	It's true. And Gavin McGinnis is there.
	Phil Robertson is there. Mark Levin is there.
	Roaming Millennial is there. I don't know.
	There are a bunch of people. So you get your money's worth.
	We do this because we don't want to have our hands out with a cup saying, hey, just fill our cup.
	We say, hey, we're going to give you something.
	Exactly. Either the show, watching the show every day is worth it and all those other people.
	Or it's not. We don't do the Patreon thing.
	We really do want to keep this...
	To be sure that you either want to watch or you don't.
	So lottowithcudder.com slash mugclub.
	We really appreciate the support. If you want the show to keep going, that is the way.
	And of course, you get this hand-etched, hand-painted, girthy mug.
	It is so thick, that mug though.
	And now listen to this.
	Show, highway blue, yeah.
	Show, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
	Show, say it.
	There's a little change of pace from Thomas Sowell.
	What an accomplishment. Wow, I'm really glad to have spoken with him.
	And this is a last-minute booking.
	We were originally going to have Dinesh D'Souza. The show should quit while we're ahead.
	Yeah, 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.
	I was going to plug his Twitter, but I don't know what's going on.
	He's not on the Twitter, and I know he's suspended or something.
	I don't know what's going on on YouTube.
	So 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.
	Yep. All this happened between this morning and now, hugepianist.com, pianist.com, pianist.com is a special, and he has Owen Benjamin.
	What's your Patreon again? Patreon slash WDTL for Why Didn't They Laugh?
	WDTL. Speaking of not laughing, it seems like Twitter and YouTube are not having a guffaw now.
	Please explain. Overnight, they took out Owen Benjamin, and then I had a backup one called Owen Bearjaman.
	I had on the back burner in case they took me out, and they took that out too.
	Hold on a second. Are you suspended or are you banned?
	Suspended permanently, I believe, because I saw a little widget pop up that said, Donald Trump Jr.
	no longer follows you, and then I realized that they blocked everyone who followed me and unfollowed everybody and then suspended me.
	Huh. I've never even heard of that.
	Yeah, 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.
	I don't think it's that hard to figure out.
	I don't think, you didn't tackle like a trail of breadcrumbs, like, they'll never find me, see?
	It's pretty easy to Hansel and Gretel to Owen Bergeman.
	And if you didn't tell them, all the unbearables who follow it did immediately.
	Yeah, yeah. Meet them at Owen Bergeman.
	And they're like, ha ha ha, no more Bergeman.
	Like, well, that was easy.
	Let's go have lunch. So what happened?
	And you've lost your live streaming on YouTube.
	So you still have YouTube, but it's just a strike.
	So that's good. People should know that.
	You're not banned from YouTube.
	Hopefully we'll talk about that sometime off air and see what we can do.
	But sometimes if it's a community guideline, it's like...
	No one knows what their policies are.
	Well, what was it? What was the violation here?
	It was about David Hogg.
	I said a comment about how he doesn't have pubes yet, so he can't tell a grown man whether or not I can own a gun.
	And so that just went wild.
	I've never seen anything go like that.
	It was like, pubes?
	In retrospect, would you not at-reply the 17-year-old with the pubes comment?
	Do you think, like, if you went back, you'd be like, uh, maybe Greg?
	Yeah, I mean, looking back, I can see an Achilles heel to it.
	In my mind, I do tree work for a living.
	I actually was in this cold today.
	I'm around men that talk like that, where they're like, someone without any pubes doesn't get to tell me where I eat dinner.
	It has nothing to do with him being a...
	It just got so...
	Twisted. And I'm like, no, obviously you know what I mean.
	Right. And then it just kept going.
	And I realized that that kid, it's like all the flack comes from any criticism of that kid.
	Because when the YouTube thing happened, the shooting, I said, don't worry, David Hogg is rollerblading over to save the day.
	And that's what started a lot of like firing at me.
	I saw the blue check marks get released and all the bots start coming out.
	And I was racing myself because I've been through this before, like with the trans kid thing.
	Or when I called Justin Trudeau a few racial slurs.
	Wait, what were the racial slurs?
	Is it because he's like 118th Cherokee Nation?
	Or just racist white guy slurs?
	Well, I was calling him a snow monkey and an iceback and all this stuff.
	And they were trying to make it seem like I was racist.
	I'm like, well, he's a white person trying to get rid of the word mother and father.
	I was trying to make a statement about censorship by actually using words.
	Obviously, you guys get it.
	No, I get it. That all got shut down.
	Well, you know, one thing I will say, and obviously, listen, the question is not, okay, are these the rules?
	It's, are they applied equally?
	And 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.
	No punishment whatsoever.
	So the real question is, the man we bumped you for, he asks, is the law applied equally?
	Dinesh has talked about that.
	In this case, that's pretty cut and dry.
	But I also always talk about don't give them a reason.
	They're looking for a reason to say you're harassing this kid.
	And so looking back, I'm like, oh, I wonder if a part of you might go like, ah, okay.
	They were looking for a reason.
	And even though that's not what it was meant, it's clearly twisting.
	Shouldn't have just done the at reply.
	Yeah, yeah. No, like looking back, I can see some, as I said earlier, a few Achilles heels.
	And the problem is you have so many followers too, so then the kid gets a bunch of at replies and it bothers him.
	If you were a nobody, he wouldn't care.
	They're using him almost like PETA from Hunger Games where the state takes him, some kid, and they make him say all this stuff.
	And 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.
	And I've always enjoyed that position of mocking power.
	But 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.
	It's a tricky situation.
	And I do regret giving them ammunition against people like us.
	But at the same time, You know, it's tough.
	It's tough to realize that when I do a tweet, it's not just for the people that follow me and know my humor.
	It'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.
	And this stream just got removed.
	Thomas Sowell is like, hey, I was just recently appearing on the...
	Where is it? It is crazy.
	By the way, great book. One last plug.
	Highly recommend it, Thomas Sowell.
	You said you've read Thomas Sowell.
	One of my heroes. Black, redneck, white, liberal literally changed my life.
	I think it should be mandatory reading for every American.
	I was just saying that about economic facts and fallacies.
	But 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.
	Some people, unfortunately, have taken ownership over identity politics on the right.
	But, you know, I was talking about this earlier.
	The fact that someone on—so regardless of the Twitter thing, Owen Benjamin is funny.
	So sometimes what inspires me is not what people say or how people compliment them, but the insults.
	And like I was saying earlier, I was feeling down because we're just talking about the social media.
	We've had this exponential growth, and so it sucks.
	I don't really get to go on social media and even see my fans because there's so much negative feedback.
	And sometimes you just want to hang out with your buddies, and we're all learning how to process this as human beings.
	We never had this. We were able to have a circle of friends.
	Just like you said, it's kind of hard to imagine people who hate you looming, looking for that to happen.
	But Back to my original point, with Thomas Sowell, someone just said it today, and it made me feel so much better about myself.
	They said, he's a tremendous s***head.
	I was thinking, you can't find anyone more cerebral or civil than Thomas Sowell.
	So if they're going to say it about him, I'm like, oh, thanks for making my job easy.
	It's the same thing when someone says, oh, and Benjamin sucks.
	He's not funny. Or I've had it with Nick DiPaolo or Jim Norton for being on the show.
	I'm going, well, hold on a second. I question myself, but I don't question that Owen's funny or that Nick DiPaolo is.
	So it makes it easy. I'm like, well, they're probably wrong about me, even if they're not.
	Right, of course. It's so funny because a lot of people have been saying that now where they're like, Oh, yeah.
	Well, you're a hack who doesn't do anything.
	I'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.
	That's five in the last four years.
	It's the same thing. It's like if someone said that Steven Crowder isn't ethical.
	It's like a joke. It's almost like the exact opposite.
	They're like, yeah, Owen, I bet you would.
	I bet you would think it's ethical if you're hanging out with Crowder.
	It's like me, like, I bet you would think it's funny if Owen Benjamin helped write it for the show.
	I'm like, yes!
	All right. Well, listen, where's the best place for people to go to support you?
	We wanted to fit you in today.
	We don't have a ton of time. Where's the best place?
	It means so much to me that you guys have me.
	Hugepianist.com, just because of my height and my piano.
	And that's where you get the specials.
	And then patreon.com slash WDTL. Like, you can just do the minimum amount.
	And you can still upload to YouTube, right?
	You 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.
	Well, keep us posted, and just do me a favor before we go.
	Be careful with YouTube.
	Just don't do anything that'll get that removed, because we need you on there.
	So consult us.
	I'm about to hit 100K, like, this week.
	Well, I guarantee you'll hit it this week.
	Everyone, go subscribe at Owen Benjamin Comedy and support him.
	We have to go. Last segment after this.
	Thank you, Owen Benjamin! All right, much love.
	Later, guys. All right, all right.
	Now time to call this double-secret patriarchy meeting to order.
	First item of business, um...
	It's imperative that women don't catch on to the fact that marriage is merely glorified rape.
	So, let's all do our best to keep that under our hats, shall we?
	Oh, yeah. Of course.
	Fantastic. On to item number two.
	We 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.
	Any ideas? Suggestions from anyone?
	The room's open. Now's your time to shine.
	Yes, Bradley. What if we told the magazine companies, like, that made the magazine fronts, that we all like robust bosoms and hips?
	Yes. We plant the idea of an attraction to healthy mammaries and birthing hips, even though we don't like boobs and butts!
	Brilliant! That's a sure way to get there, goat!
	Anyone else have any ideas? Yes?
	What if we told them we liked them to smell good?
	Like, we can give them perfume and, like, shampoo?
	Oh, you naughty man, I see what you're doing.
	Even though we greatly prefer slimy, rotund land manatees, we convince them that we actually value hygienic behavior.
	Carl, is there any way we can implement some kind of mind-controlled chemicals in those products while we're at it?
	Can do, boss. Maybe give them some sort of a slogan to really ingrain it in their oppressed subconscious.
	Something like, because you're worth it, only a little more creative, a little less unknown.
	Absolutely. Any other slogan ideas?
	How about maybe something like, maybe she's born with it, or, or maybe, or, or maybe it's Maybelline!
	Nick, get out! America!
	He runs on Duncan.
	Other Nick! Get out!
	America runs on Duncan!
	Take him out! America runs on Duncan, you son of a bitch!
	Oh, god, you son of a bitch!
	Don't...
	Oh, god, you son of a bitch!
	Doctor soul. Doctor.
	Soul. I'm kidding.
	You're fangirling so hard you forgot to offer.
	I know. You know why I screwed up?
	Thank you so much to Dr.
	Soul and Owen Benjamin. Well, you know, we'll be releasing this next week.
	The dean of UTA, oh dear, I've said too much, is a doctor.
	And was like, please don't refer to me as a doctor.
	Refer to me by my first name.
	So the last thing in my head, because sometimes I've got to think about that.
	They don't want to be pretentious.
	And it doesn't say doctor in his book.
	It just says Thomas Soul. Maybe Tommy.
	Also, I'm kind of just a dick.
	There's no way around it, Dr.
	Sol. Oh, watch.
	People are not going to let me forget that.
	Oh, look. You missed your word.
	You forgot the doctor.
	I'll write you down anyway. These things happen.
	Sometimes you're not having your best batting average.
	We have had a busy and rough...
	I've had a rough two weeks, which I will never fully tell you about.
	Illinois, driving out there, which was terrible, doing the show with quote-unquote non-credible security threats.
	There were. So tensions were high.
	And then this, just a busy, busy week.
	We have a lot of stuff to be taping.
	You and I actually have a private engagement to do on Saturday with Dean Cain.
	I haven't done a corporate gig in a long time, but it's actually a good friend of Dean Cain.
	So it's just been going, burning the candle at both ends.
	Should probably slow down.
	But... You know, we were talking about—oh, hold on, before we move on, I realize, just to remind you, this is the face of insanity.
	Why, if you were going to put out videos, why wouldn't you just learn the language?
	Yeah. Midskin Milk, you're gonna see.
	What? Are these...
	What? Make some key lights in.
	I mean, you know, I have no idea.
	Just learn how to chroma key.
	That's what's most disturbing. It's the lack of quality.
	It's the lack of quality in chroma keying.
	It's the lack of quality. And you know, listen, I think we'll be the first...
	To admit that some of the things that we've done the last couple weeks, we've experimented with some new things.
	Some things worked, some things didn't. Illinois, we put on a show for the students, period.
	It'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.
	We could not have the security done properly, and so everyone was just a little bit tense.
	Probably won't be doing that again. Change My Mind is meant to be just sitting down and kind of conversational.
	We don't even announce it usually when we go places.
	No, we never announce it. The whole goal is to not have an audience, but at this point we were kind of...
	We'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.
	It turns out it wasn't really anyway when we went out there.
	We didn't have the spot that we anticipated.
	So a lot of stress, but you know what?
	A 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.
	We've talked about this. After SMU was definitely probably the most...
	It 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.
	This show, it's a late night comedy show.
	I am not Dr.
	Thomas Sowell, okay? I am not an AM radio host.
	I do not want to be your only source of information.
	I 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.
	We want to sleep with you. Yes, pretty much.
	That's the takeaway there. We want to teach you and sleep with you.
	We basically want to be that college professor.
	Ha ha ha! But we've got some emails.
	One of them I was talking about at Illinois.
	And here's another one. We'll keep his name in any sort of specific references.
	Secret. But this is something that—and I think you can take something like this, and this is something we've always talked about.
	You can take this kind of feedback from people, and you can use it to build yourself up, you can exalt yourself, or you can be humbled.
	And genuinely, when I read something like this, I will meditate on it for a long time and think, gosh, I mean, we have a responsibility.
	We have a responsibility, first and foremost, to entertain, but a lot of people— We've talked about it.
	We felt alone before we did the show.
	A lot of people felt that way, but for them, this is their only...
	You see that a lot when we do these meet and greets.
	You get to meet people and you're like, I bet these people don't...
	These aren't the jocks in the popular kids at school.
	These are the kids. These are the misfits. Yeah, exactly.
	That's one thing, too. When the left tries to cover the show like, it's for dumb jocks.
	Actually, no. We can look at exactly who's watching, when they're watching.
	It is the marginalized people.
	Yeah, it is the marginalized people.
	And they're terrified. And this is an example, actually, of someone from Saudi Arabia who was...
	Well, let me read his letter for you.
	It's a little bit long, but I hope you go with me on this here.
	Again, trying to omit with the overlays anything specific.
	So forgive me for looking down at my iPad.
	I'm reading his letter. I don't know it by heart.
	Yeah. 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.
	That's relevant later, the ICE thing.
	It amazed me when I sat here and read the full letter.
	I 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.
	English is not his first language, by the way, so don't hammer me or him on it.
	Now 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.
	Naively thinking that the people around and not Islam itself were the ones with the bad ideas.
	I later found out about your show during the Gamergate days and got into politics since, and more so during the election.
	Mostly behind fake random names on Twitter.
	That's how it often starts.
	Years earlier...
	I managed to score—he wrote years earlier in time, sir.
	I'm trying to fix the—we appreciate it, sir, the person who emailed us.
	He knows who he is. This is not to give you flack.
	I'm just correcting it as I go. Years earlier, I managed to score a government scholarship and left the hellhole that is Saudi Arabia.
	You 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.
	Which did not hold up when I compared my scores to other Saudis in the same scholarship.
	A 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.
	Since I liked my head where it was, I got a tourism visa to the US and applied for asylum once I got here.
	And due to a misunderstanding at the airport interview, I ended up spending some time in ICE detention, which wasn't all that bad, really.
	This is where I started to, I mean, I can't even necessarily put it into words, which wasn't all that bad, really.
	Can you picture any American talking about those kinds of conditions, an ICE detention center, which wasn't all that bad, really?
	And he went on to describe it. He said, the food was very good some days, even.
	At 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.
	The 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.
	The syntax was off, so I got it wrong.
	I apologize. So I ended up reading the Bible a lot and talking with some Christian detainees and later went to Bible studies often.
	A 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.
	Since then, I've been going to church whenever I could.
	My sponsor gave me a trailer to stay at and I'm managing fine.
	I'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.
	I'm sure that true freedom will be worth it in the end.
	Thank you again for all the hard work that you do.
	I 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.
	The fact that it's entertaining helps to warm regards the ex-Saudi fan.
	And he went on to specify his name.
	Now I read that, and I read it, and we could read it and go, yeah, it has been hard.
	I mean, many of us have gotten, we've been getting by in five hours night sleep for a couple weeks now.
	Uh... But no, probably nowhere near as hard as being in an ICE detention center.
	And probably nowhere near as hard as facing the magnitude of being called back to a Saudi government that wants your head on a platter.
	By the way, they're progressive because they have a lot of female politicians.
	It's true. Nowhere near as difficult as that.
	Nowhere near as difficult as living in a trailer.
	Awaiting, hopefully, a work visa and still trying to do the right thing.
	That's why when he says, isn't all that bad, really?
	And he goes on. It's not false humility.
	It's not him saying, oh, it's not that bad.
	You can tell. This is a guy filled with gratitude.
	And so we read it. When I read this, I can't...
	Feel any other way other than grateful.
	Yeah, we have some pretty tough grinds.
	And the truth is we've had a lot of people come in to work on this show and they left us.
	It's like a revolving door.
	They walk in and say, nope, they don't want this workload.
	It's not just talking into a microphone.
	Everyone here works really hard. And that's why Mug Club is so important.
	We employ so many people.
	It takes a lot to make this show happen.
	It's hard. It is difficult.
	But it is nowhere near as harrowing as the prospect of the life that this man was facing.
	Mm-hmm. I mean, can you even imagine?
	I 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.
	And 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.
	It's pretty well known, but we never set out to try and convert people.
	There are enough Christian films, there are enough churches you can go to for that.
	But 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?
	There's got to be some kind of a bridge, and we're somewhere in between, is what I would say.
	The 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.
	The 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.
	And he missed the after party, by the way, because the cops ushered us out.
	Again, we've had a lot of problems with campus police being as accommodating as we'd like them to be.
	I don't really know necessarily where I'm going with this.
	All 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.
	And it's something that really echoes out a lot.
	And things maybe will get off my chest...
	Months from now, looking back, some personal issues that have been happening, some health issues that have been tough.
	How 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.
	I 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?
	Do we really want to fight YouTube? Do we really want to have Bill Richmond?
	That was a big decision. Like, Bill Richmond on retainer is not cheap, an SMU law grad.
	We said, you know what? We've got to.
	We've got to. Because someone out there has to do it.
	Just like with the change my mind stuff, which isn't meant to be a debate, by the way.
	But when we have people on this show and we invite everyone on to debate, it's not because I'm a debater.
	I never claimed...
	I'm a late night host.
	It's just because no one else is stepping up to the plate aside from a handful.
	Someone has got to do it.
	I'm not doing a lot of this because I'm the best.
	That's not why any of us are doing it.
	We do it because of letters like these.
	We do it because at some point when you have a bunch of people looking to you saying, hey...
	Can you get one over on them for me?
	You've got to say yes.
	It really is.
	I don't want to say it's a selfless endeavor.
	Of course it's not. We all make a living doing this.
	But it is something that I still can't begin to comprehend and for which I am eternally grateful.
	And I want you to keep me accountable.
	I want you, everyone in this room, if you say, hey, you know what?
	I think you really screwed up here.
	Or, you know what? I think this was wrong. Or, you know what?
	I think maybe you're getting off on the wrong direction.
	We want you to hold our feet to the fire.
	Because the only reason we're creating this is for you.
	This is one thing, too, that's a new concept.
	You have people, you hear this, like, I just make my art for me.
	Now, you've got to make art that's authentic.
	And this is. This is art.
	Comedy is art. You've got to make art that's authentic.
	You can't lie. People will smell it on you from a mile away.
	But you can't create art solely for yourself.
	The main purpose of what we create here is not for us.
	The main purpose of it is for you.
	And even more so after SMU and Illinois and letters like these were overwhelmed with the response.
	I'm still continuing to process it.
	I know this isn't anything particularly articulate.
	Usually you're looking for some inspiring closing words.
	Here's what I can tell you.
	I 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.
	You know, I would see Richard Jenny was one when I was growing up.
	And I remember him in Montreal at a theater with the Saint Denis Theater.
	And I think that maybe it was 1800 going, wow, that was a dream of mine.
	That was a dream of mine. I'll just tell you, everyone has your dreams.
	Everyone has dreams out there. Some are bigger, some are smaller.
	A dream of mine as a kid was when I was watching Richard Jenny and saw him doing that theater.
	I was saying, man, to do that one day.
	So 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.
	If 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.
	It may not sound like a big dream, but it was for me as a kid.
	So when you're picturing this a thousand times in your head, I didn't know how to feel.
	And something else. I spoke with someone recently, a doctor, funny enough.
	Who asked when I was stressed if I had any morbid thoughts.
	This 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.
	So have you ever had thoughts? And I've said, well, you know what?
	Honestly, I've pictured my death a thousand times.
	I can hear a pin drop. What do you mean?
	So 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.
	I pictured it a thousand times in my head.
	I've told Jared about this, the visualization, going through it.
	What does the crowd look like? What does the air feel like?
	What are the lights like? Picture the sounds.
	Picture the touch. Picture the sights.
	Try and put yourself there so it's not a foreign situation to you.
	I'm big on the power of visualization.
	I'm not talking about meditation or tantric yoga.
	Just visualizing something before you do it.
	The same thing has happened because, listen, we have had credible threats.
	We've had very serious, very credible threats.
	And 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.
	I've pictured walking out and I've pictured the audience cheering.
	I've pictured the bullet going through flesh.
	I've pictured it breaking bone, what it would feel like.
	I've pictured the screams. I've pictured the lights.
	I've pictured the sounds. I've pictured the emergency.
	And I'll tell you this. This is true.
	And I've pictured it because for the same reason I've walked myself through jokes bombing, through audiences being terrible.
	I walked myself through this because I always try to picture getting back up.
	I always try to picture how I would deal with it.
	And you never do until you really come into it.
	But it's not because I want to.
	But I said I always walk myself through that scenario and every scenario that I can possibly imagine, I get back up.
	And that reason is I wouldn't if there weren't people there who cared.
	That'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.
	You look at YouTube, they have no structure.
	They have no family structure, no communal structure.
	They don't have anyone who cares about them.
	And 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.
	Some of us have had some really tough breaks.
	Some of us have had deaths in the family.
	You know what keeps people going?
	Is having people who care.
	And I know there are a ton of people out there, a ton of you out there who care.
	A letter like this, that can keep someone going for a long time.
	So it actually probably means more to me than to you, Mr.
	Ex-Saudi atheist slash Muslim.
	And I hope you don't mind me reading your letter on air.
	Dr. Thomas Sowell, thank you so much.
	Owen Benjamin, chin up. We'll see you next week.

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