March 4, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:24:57
4018 The End Of The World - As We Know It! | Owen Benjamin and Stefan Molyneux
When you trace many of societies ills back to their root cause, the damage done by through public school indoctrination is a significant factor which cannot be overlooked. Owen Benjamin joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss their respective experience in government schools, combating the regressive left, the role of social ostracism in enforcing social standards, the impact of political correctness on comedy, the power of laughter and much much more!Owen Benjamin is a popular comedian and the host of the “Why Didn’t They Laugh?” podcast. Website: http://www.hugepianist.comYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/owenbenjamincomedyTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/OwenBenjaminYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, here with our good friend Owen Benjamin.
He is a popular comedian and the host of the Why Didn't They Laugh podcast, which unsurprisingly enough has no laugh track.
The website is hugepianist.com, youtube.com forward slash Owen Benjamin comedy and twitter.com forward slash Owen Benjamin.
We're going to talk about his upcoming special and some tour dates a little bit later, but first...
It's time to go back to school with Stephen Owen.
And we're going to talk a little bit about experiences in a variety of schools.
So I did watch some of the webcasts you did with your mom, who is great, by the way.
And what was it like?
You got IQ high, creativity high, energy high, school.
School. What was it like when the unstoppable force of your personality met the immovable goo of government schools?
Well, I think that's why I became funny, because it was a bit of a defense mechanism, or it was like, I should have been some sort of normal, smart person, and the abuse of public school made me...
It was a little bit of sand in the oyster that just made a couple funny pearls.
But I fortunately had my mom, and thank you for saying that about my mom, because I listen to all your shows, and I know the problems that can happen when people have abusive parents or, you know, a single mom that's abusive.
And fortunately, my mom...
I'd come home and she'd be like, she'd have my back and she'd teach me and she'd allow me to not be that depressed.
But I'd go into school and, you know, I was playing Bach by ear when I was like seven.
And so I got sent to the office for that because they said that I was trying to embarrass my teacher.
It's just like insane.
Just goo. I am a teacher who takes your talent personally as an insult to my abilities.
Wow! That is quite the reaction formation.
Yeah, and the incentives are off.
And that's one thing that drew me to your show about the corrosive effect of the state.
We had three nuclear power plants.
I'm from Oswego, New York.
And so the power plants, the fact we agreed to be District 12 from the Hunger Games, they paid, they gave the school just an ungodly amount of money and it didn't help at all.
It just made things almost more hyperbolic.
You know, we'd have like all brand new clarinets and teachers that didn't know how to play the clarinet.
You know, I remember this one teacher, instead of saying rhetoric, she said rhetoric.
And I corrected her.
I said, you know, it's rhetoric.
I was in seventh grade. She was like, it's rhetoric.
And at that point, I knew she was drunk.
And I got punished for it.
And I'm like, yeah, my dad has his PhD in rhetoric.
And I thought I'd get a big laugh.
And no one laughed.
Well, I'm sure that she took your correction as an insult.
Also, your sobriety as an insult due to her state of mind.
Now, this is interesting as well.
I was just talking to someone the other day who was saying, with regards to smart kids, at some point you realize if you're a smart kid and your parents aren't that smart, that you're smarter than your parents.
I think there's a tipping point in schools where you realize that you're wiser or more mature than your teachers.
Not hard in some districts at all.
Did that happen to you? Do you remember that moment at all?
Yeah, I remember in first or second grade, they had us count as high as we could, and I could count almost Because I just understood how it worked.
And I just remember almost feeling a sense of sadness for my teachers because they didn't know how to explain decimal points or anything.
And it's one thing if you're smarter than your teacher or you're a better athlete than your coach.
It's another thing if they resent you for it.
My wife is better looking than me, and I'm happy about that.
I'm like, I lucked out.
And there's other people that would be like, how dare you win?
And that zero-sum game effect of certain people, that happens with socialism versus free market, where they don't know that you can grow the whole thing.
That it's not about limiting everyone and chopping up Something and selling it off for parts.
And I saw that in school where someone would be like, if you're better than me, you're a threat to me.
And we have all these perverted incentives that will make me make you hate yourself for your creativity.
And I just can't believe and in the 80s and 90s, when I was in school, it wasn't we didn't have the drugs yet, which now they have.
And being a young boy, especially.
Oh, you mean the ADHD drugs and all that kind of crap, right?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, at least I just got sent to the corner.
You know, I had all this isolation, they called it, where I'd have to be alone all day.
But now it's like if you're a creative boy and you want to run around and just be a natural male, they put you on like amphetamines and tell you you're toxic.
Like that's straight up dystopian torture.
Yeah. No, I mean, there was a whole bunch of stuff that was not around when I went to school, this sort of hatred of the West, this hatred of your own culture.
I was sort of raised, you know, I was born in the 60s, and the aftermath of the Second World War, there was still a glow, you know, Britain's finest hour.
There was a lot of pride in the history, a fair amount of pride in the empire.
That sort of... Brain-eating wormwood of leftist self-hatred had yet to worm its way into the system.
There was not a lot of identity politics.
There was not this constant scream of racism and toxicity.
Feminism had started, but it was busy carving up families before moving on to the main feast of young boys' brains.
And so they were busy out there just sowing the seeds of resentment among women that the men who went out and worked for them and paid for all their bills were somehow oppressing them and they had to throw them to the side because right down the street was a heavily muscled sculptor who would just take her into his bed and make her life wonderful from here to eternity.
Funny story. Not true.
Not true. Even remotely, that sculptor is gay.
So they were slicing and dicing the families up like fruit ninja, but they hadn't turned their cold, beady-eyed Medusa heads towards the children as yet.
So I kind of skated just ahead of that wave.
I could kind of see it coming behind me, like in graduate school.
I could see this Marxist wave coming up behind me.
This, well, we're done with class, so let's start on race.
Let's start on gender as the way to slice and dice society.
But I just was ahead of it, and that's given me, I think, quite a different perspective from a lot of the people who've come after me who got really swallowed up in that tsunami.
Yeah, it's almost like the proximity bombing effects in war, where if it's a near miss, like what you experience, you get to see a little, you get to have almost a little of the antidote without all the horrific, without losing yourself in it, you know what I'm saying?
And for me, I'm just lucky to have my mom because I easily could be just a mess because really smart people that are really abused are just really good at being horrifying.
Let's give him the biggest brain in the known universe and fill his soul with malevolent thoughts.
Ah, Lex Luthor to the rescue!
Well, yeah, that's also this Marxist thing where people don't realize that sometimes intellectuals that don't have an ethic or don't have some sort of goal for a universal Good or truth or whatever someone wants to call it.
They have potential to become absolute monsters.
Stalin was probably a smart guy on some level.
He was a bank robber, went to a seminary.
He was a smart guy in many ways.
This is the thing I didn't really understand until later, which was this Pareto principle, which is that there's a huge cluster of ability at one end and at the other end.
This is more so true for men.
One of the reasons I think that this egalitarianism is so hostile towards people of real ability, who are often men, is that if somebody's so super smart, it's really tough to hold up the equality of outcome idea.
Or that all the rich people are necessarily evil and they're only wealthy because they've scooped money up from the poor people.
So if you're in a class with somebody whose abilities are just so beyond the pale, Then you remember that.
And it's almost like you have to have everyone clustered around the middle so they can get used to the idea of redistribution and get used to the idea that there aren't really special great people and everyone who's rich is exploiting.
This gooey center has to be kind of maintained at all costs, which is why they carve off the low ability and they also carve off the really high abilities as well.
Yeah, it's just listening to that shadow self.
It's just like... You know, anything you didn't get, it isn't your fault.
It's because someone took it from you.
It's almost like right out of Lord of the Rings.
Just, it's not you.
It's because your skin's a little different or because you're not from around here.
And we all have that voice.
And that's why I like the Solzhenitsyn concept of like the evil, good and evil split down the middle of a person's heart, that we all fight that.
And there isn't just good people and bad people.
There's just people that will go down those roads and become ideologically possessed and then bad.
I'm smart enough to know how smart some people can be, if that makes sense.
Oh, yeah, yeah. I was telling that, you know, Eric Weinstein, the mathematician?
Actually, I was telling him that.
I'm like, I'm smart enough to know what you're potentially seeing in the world, just, you know, the dimensions of reality.
It's kind of like, I'm 6'7", so when I was around Shaq, I knew how big he was, because he towers over me.
I was wearing a top hat in a movie, and he was above that.
And I think if you're 5'5 or 5'6, it's just all trees.
But if you're already tall, you're like, whoa!
And being around people that are just naturally talented at something, it just implodes postmodernism.
And this subjective worldview that is strangling our civilization.
I thought postmodernism was like an exercise, like that it was almost like meditation where you just, it's like a creative exercise where you go, okay, pretend there's no objective reality.
What else can we see?
And then we'll go back to normal.
And people are like, no, that's like it.
I'm like, no, that's a creativity exercise.
Right. It's not a drill.
This is your brain being disassembled.
And I don't know what it was like for you, and I'm curious, but certainly for me, in Canada in particular.
So, you know, when I first came to Canada, I was in grade eight for a while.
Then they put me back in grade six.
I was in grade eight when we first moved.
I lived in Whitby. They put me back in grade six.
And, you know, I was just like, go with the flow kind of thing.
And I just remember the very first day, the kids all come out, and it was punch the girls in the groin day, which is the girls just, like, the boys would chase the girls down, punch them in the groin, and I'm like, wow, this is kind of different, you know, from sort of where I was coming from.
But then in junior high school, I fell into a crowd of, like, really smart people, mostly guys, really smart guys.
And they've all gone on.
And it was just a weird kind of cluster.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about this, like the smart people he knew growing up.
They've all gone on to become like professors and writers and entrepreneurs and academics and so on.
This really smart group of people.
We played Dungeons and Dragons.
We argued philosophy.
I remember ferocious debates on like abortion and the death penalty and all that kind of stuff.
Starting at like... 14 and 15.
And we all had a different set of skills.
Like one guy, fantastic. His spatial reasoning was incredible.
And he, of course, went on to become a professor of engineering.
There was another guy whose memory of poetry was astonishing.
Like you just quote your sections of Beowulf from here to eternity, you know, in case you had trouble sleeping.
And another guy was like math genius kind of thing, like close to Rain Man, like, yeah, I'm going to throw these paper clips on the floor and now give me the square root before they hit the ground, right?
And when I was around, now my specialty was sort of the logic and language stuff.
And looking at what these guys could do, I was like, that's incredible.
It seems like magic to me.
Like when people have a great ability in stuff that I don't, it just seems like complete magic to me.
And I recognize, just as you say, how far I am from any kind of expertise and power in that kind of area.
And it gives you the kind of humility and a kind of wonder at the capability of the human mind.
And then, later on, when people do really well and other people don't do really well, it's like, well, yeah, because they have magical powers.
So, of course, they're going to do well.
Right. And I think one of the big things, because I've also had a lot of friends that just Ended up in just remarkable places in life.
I think a big difference in human mentality is when one person is presented, this is, by the way, one of the reasons I was drawn to your brain over, you know, over the course of the years, but is one person's presented with new information that contradicts their information and you either see Fear and anger or relief.
And when you see relief, you're like, oh, thank you.
I was wrong about that.
And you're like, man, I get a sharper sword today.
And other people are like, even though I know that's true, that now threatens my position.
And that's the difference between merit and power-based hierarchies.
And that's one thing that drew me to Jordan Peterson, is he's talking about the unwinnable power hierarchy of socialism and these giant government There's blobs that push.
There's no possible way to win.
Because even if you win, at some point you'll be eaten by your own type of person.
Because there is no merit.
There is no ethic. There is no love, I see.
And you see that a lot in public school.
Like, the tallest nail gets hammered down, as the Soviets used to say.
And I was a pretty tall nail there.
In life, I'm not.
I know a lot of people smarter than me.
Or more talented than me.
But in that environment, it was pretty intense.
And it comes from the teachers, but it also comes horizontally.
And what was your experience of the other kids with regards to your abilities?
Oh, I was not remotely alpha in the student group at all, you know, because I think it's what they value at the time.
And the value was, does your dad own a collision store?
How far can you kick a ball?
Can you take punches to your face?
You know, and I also wasn't really interested in women because my parents had been together, only been with each other their whole lives and they're still married.
So I didn't have that.
Like I had friends who's what you're talking about, like the single mom dads or there are a lot of different dudes in their house.
I never saw that. So I didn't really have that muscle.
You know, I was terrified of kissing a girl.
I was mocked a lot of times for The things I was good at.
But that allowed me to find people with like-minded thoughts and worldviews.
And from there, the fact I committed to that over popularity, I think, was one of the first Positive steps in my life that I still try to do now.
And people will be like, how did you get two Comedy Central specials?
How did you know the president of Comedy Central?
I was friends with him when he was working at a racquetball court.
It's because I'm not looking at people as power.
I'm looking at them as someone I like or don't like.
And if you do that, and if you line up your values and your thoughts, they always do well.
And I didn't know it at the time, but now I'm like, I'm friends with so many different people and so many amazing positions in the world.
And it wasn't because I sucked up to them because they were powerful.
It's because I knew them when they weren't.
And we just are like brothers in arms.
And I think that the oppressive public schools allowed me to learn that.
It's kind of like, I remember you got a caller once where you had a really funny response where someone was like, are you kind of thankful that you had an abusive mom because it made you who you are?
And you were like, I won't take that as an insult at all, but let's just go through that.
Because part of me almost wants to be like, was the abuse good for me?
But that's so crazy.
It's like saying, does Stockholm Syndrome make you better at hugging?
No, I wish I wasn't beaten down, but I definitely got better punchlines from it.
Well, yeah, I would say that trauma as a child can make you stronger to fight evil in the world, but wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to be so strong to fight endless evil in the world?
What if the world was just a better place?
So it's good that you have, oh good, I'm good at combat.
You know, like, so my mom was crazy, so I spent a lot of time, either verbally or in my own head, pushing back against bad arguments.
So now, when I'm in a debate, this is like a muscle I was developing since I was like three years old, so it's kind of easy.
Right. But the reason that it becomes so valuable is there's so many anti-rational arguments in the world.
And it's like, I would like for there not to be the need for this muscle that was developed as a child, which of course is why I'm trying to spread as much reason as possible.
Now, you were put on your own, you were saying, just like, sliced right out of the social hierarchy.
And were you put in a separate room?
Was it like a Harry Potter closet?
Like, how were you segregated from the kids?
It's so crazy. It's like, if you describe it to people, it sounds just like legit child abuse.
But at the time, I didn't really understand it.
My mom would fight on our behalf.
She homeschooled my brother for, I think, two years.
But first, I was put in PEGS, which was the program for gifted students, because...
I would always just get hundreds on all the tests, even if I was not doing well in the class, and they kicked me out of pegs because I asked too many questions.
You can't write that.
And then I was a soloist for violin.
I would even hold my own with the Asians when we do states.
And then I was seen as a threat.
And so I would ask questions.
I remember one time there was a solar eclipse and I really wanted to see it.
And they were like, we have to learn pronouns.
I'm like, I may never see this again.
I'm going to put my head out the window.
And they're like, no. And I just did.
And then for five days from the time I went to school to the time I left, I was behind filing cabinets and I wasn't allowed to see other kids because they described me to my parents as cancer and they didn't want me to spread.
And another time, yeah, because it's my nature to be not contrarian for the sake of hurting people's feelings, but almost like stress testing ideas, you know, like what you do, where it's like you got to know if the wings will work, so you just bang them a little bit, and then you go, oh, that plane will fly.
So they told us all to walk from class to class in one direction, and it was easier for me to go the other direction.
I realized that if students are smart enough to know, just walk on the right side of the hall, and I I just did that.
I got another five days. In one year, I had 47 days of this isolation because I was a cancer.
I just got a lot of reading done.
I always try to see the optimistic outlook on it.
I was going to ask you, how do you react to people that project these things?
How do you tell who's dumb and who's evil?
Well, that's a simple question for you.
So the way that I do it is dumb people don't use moral concepts to get their way.
They're just sort of brute force, bullying, you know, they'll call names.
But the smart people are the people who use moral concepts in the service of evil.
So the moment they start saying, you know, the left does this all the time, political correctness.
Like, it's racist to X, you collective aggregation of white privilege.
It's like, okay, so white privilege is a way that you pretend you're not being racist when you are.
Okay, I get it.
I get it.
So they're using the concept of racism, which is a collective judgment about a group.
And they're using it to make collective judgments about a racial group.
So if they're using moral language, then they are the worst kind of evil to me because they're manipulating moral concepts.
And they're trying to get you to do their evil doing for them.
Like the guy who comes up to you in the alley, sticks a gun in your ribs and says, give me a wallet.
He doesn't say redistribute your income to the needy, right?
He's just like, give me your money.
I got a gun. You know, I have an excess of violence and you have an excess of money.
Let's trade, you know, buy your way out of this.
But he's not. So it's evil for sure.
But he's not giving you a moral argument.
The people who all say, well, if you don't want the government to take your money to use it to buy votes and auction off the unborn, then you hate the poor and wish them to die.
If they're using all these moral concepts, that's when I know they're very familiar with morality, but they've studied morality like a sadist studies the human body to find out the weak spots and turn it against itself.
That makes sense. For example, I didn't realize minimum wage was a bit of a debate until I read Thomas Sowell.
I never made other people feel like they're bad people.
I think that's a good point.
I never was like, you're evil because of this.
I just didn't know certain things.
One point that you make when you're like, do you think I belong in a cage because I disagree?
That's just a big line in the sand in an argument where you're like, And that's changed my view of a lot of laws, because you've said that, where I was just like, whoa.
Because my buddy Dave Smith is like, the threat is violence and imprisonment and death for any law.
And I'm like, man, that's an intense thought.
And when you actually say to someone in their eyes, you say, should I be put in a cage because I smoke marijuana?
And I still have that duality, that cognitive dissonance, because the answer is obviously no, but I can't picture a world without a government.
And I'm just trying to be as honest as possible about that.
Because it's like, I know you're right, because I can't get past that thing.
But I also might have just a little bit of Stockholm Syndrome, where I'm like...
Well, listen, though, I understand that.
The government is like the reserve parachute.
You know, it's like, okay, free market.
Oh, shit!
It's flying off into the sun and it's being attacked by eagles and I have my reserve parachute called government because otherwise, you know, I'm just a perfectly consistent moral stain on the sidewalk.
So I understand that.
Let me sort of give you a tiny analogy because the whole point is you're not supposed to be able to conceive of a life or a society without a state.
You can't. That's the whole point of freedom.
If you could conceive of it, you'd be the one in charge of it and organizing it.
It's sort of like saying, I can't conceive, like, you know, go back to like 1985 and say, what's communications technology going to be like in 35 years?
Well, if you could conceive of that, you'd end up owning the entire market because you'd get the reason.
Like, the whole point of freedom is you can't figure out what the heck is going on.
And that's the great lie of government and central planning, that they have some clues.
So I'll give you a sort of an example.
All societies prior to the modern West, for the most part, and there was the Great Crusade of the British Empire, was to eliminate slavery.
So all societies, everywhere throughout all time, had dabbled in slavery off and on.
And a lot of societies that had slavery continuously throughout their history, particularly the Middle East.
So let's say you and I having a debate, I don't know, it's like 1820 or something like that, so we got, you know, weird ruffles and uncomfortable wigs and shit like that.
So we're having a debate, and you say, okay, well, If we get rid of slavery, who's going to pick the cotton, right?
Who's going to pick the food?
Like, so you'll have to pay people who are now working for free, but if you pay people, you have to jack up the price of your fruit and of your cotton to the point where poor people won't be able to afford it, and they're starved to death, right?
Okay, that seems reasonable. And I say, hey man, I smoked some wild peyote last night, and I had a vision.
Let me tell you, Owen, what my vision was.
My vision was that after we get rid of slaves, after we end slavery, there are going to be these giant metallic robots that sweep back and forth across the fields, and they're going to be powered by crushed prehistoric tree juice.
And then there will be flat roads of, like, they don't change in summer and winter, flat, perfectly even roads, and giant wheeled machines, also powered by the same squished prehistoric tree juice, will go rocketing across at speeds we can't even fathom, while at the same time there will be these giant flying machines that are halfway to space.
Right. These giant exploding tubes of metal, also, oddly enough, powered by the same crushed prehistoric tree juice, and they will fly all over the place, and everything will be cheaper over time.
And Bruce Jenner's a chick.
Right. So you say, come on, man, that's insane.
Right, right, right. You can have freedom, but you can't just make up crazy sci-fi crap, right?
And you'd say, and you'd be right to say, but that's kind of how it unfolds it, right?
It is almost like Stockholm Syndrome.
I always don't necessarily believe people who say they speak the truth, but people who won't speak a non-truth.
It's almost like an interesting inversion where it's like, all you're saying is what definitely isn't good.
But I think we're so trained to think, especially maybe even Northern Europeans because of winter, but it's like, How do we prepare?
What is the future? If I can't see it, I'm scared.
The devil I know is better than the devil I don't know.
But all you're saying is, imagine being in a relationship where someone's just beating you, and you're like, well, at least this isn't the lack of that, because then I wouldn't know when I'm going to be beaten.
That's fascinating. Well, it also is.
When you have a particular form of social organization called the state, which has been pretty universal throughout human history, Yeah.
Then it is...
We get this, and Freud had a lot to do with this, this idea that we're like this seething, bottled-up volcano of, like, rape and murder, nature red in tooth and claw and so on.
And without the state kind of tamping us down, you take that away...
You know, it's the purge, man.
It's like, it's violence.
It's bald guys on with sides on the side of, you know, giant death machines in sort of Mad Max style.
And this is we just we're keeping everyone tamped down.
But the funny thing is, when I interact with people face to face, they're mostly pretty nice, mostly pretty reasonable, mostly, you know, nice to deal with and so on.
When they get in these collectives and they start taking control of the state.
Well, then you're in a different kind of situation.
You know, like there was religious warfare when the government had control over religion.
The religious warfare went on for hundreds of years.
It's still going on in many places in the world.
You get the separation of church and state and everyone's like, oh, wait a minute.
If there's no gun in the room, We maybe can all just get along.
I can do my thing, you can do your thing, and neither of us has to win at the other's expense.
Neither of us ends up having the power to force the other into compliance.
So when you remove, like, we have this kind of civil war going on at the moment because the state has the power, as you've pointed out, to transfer trillions of dollars, to control the minds of children, to Pick winners and losers and give advantages to particular groups and disadvantages to other groups.
So we're all pretty feral and desperate because it's kind of kill or be killed economically or politically in the public sphere.
But if that gets diminished, people will be like, oh, wait, you can do your thing, I can do my thing?
Well, good, because I'd rather be doing my thing than fighting you over your thing.
And I think that kind of peace is hard for us To fathom because this is the way that we've kind of organized things for so long.
But this is the cycle of history, right?
You get a small government, you get a lot of freedom, and then you get a lot of wealth because there's a lot of freedom.
And then that wealth is used to grow the government.
And it literally is like sawing that goose that lays the golden egg in half looking for infinite gold.
You just end up with nothing. Yeah, and that's why I think we're seeing a major culture shift towards the right or towards small government because I think it's happening so rapidly now It's almost like boiling the frogs, how they don't jump out if it's slow.
I think it's happening so fast that it's like, wasn't three days ago the world different?
And I think that people are now starting to swing the other direction because I see it everywhere.
I get emails all the time like, thanks for standing up, thanks for standing up.
These people are scared to talk.
And I think that people are getting, because I know ideological possession is the scariest thing now.
And I see it now with people that I'm close with.
I did a taping recently in the town I live in, and it went great, you know, standing ovation, it was packed, I brought people to the town, I brought honor to the town, lots of laughter, lots of hugging after, and then, you know, one person had an issue with it, and then the same people that were hugging me were, it's like, right after Trump got elected, and all these, like, hippie liberals were just like, yeah!
I'm like, where'd you come from?
It's like, what you said was racist.
I'm like, we both know what isn't.
Remember all the black people dancing and stuff to it?
But they said it is.
And that's where the power is.
And I'm like, that's terrifying.
I think the scariest thing, even scarier than an enemy, is an enemy idea.
Because it almost infects people that you love.
And it can go away and come back.
But that's why I try to not say what I don't believe.
Because once you're on your knees, I don't see people getting up very often.
It's just a matter of will and courage.
Like all of the old traditional virtues that we used to hear a lot about, they kind of got scrubbed out by postmodernism.
Now it's about conformity and intersectionality and, you know, sensitivity to identity politics and stuff.
But the sort of fundamental basic virtues of standing up to bullies and standing up for what's right, you know, you see this all the time.
Like they organize some boycott of some company.
This happened with the shooting recently.
We've got to sever your contacts with the NRA. Some people in that organization will freak out and panic.
They won't ride out the storm. They'll appease whoever's shaking their fist in the moment.
Without looking at all the other people who are going to lose respect for them, who they're going to lose business with, who is a very small number of people?
Radical feminists are a couple of percentage points of the population.
Radical Marxists, very small percentage of the population.
Now they're loud, of course. But, you know, if you stand up to them, they kind of go away because they go pick on someone who's easier, right?
And so there's this moment of crisis where someone's coming at you and you say, well, maybe I can buy five minutes a piece by appeasing this person.
But all you've done is, you know, big mark on your forehead, which is, you know, this guy's a good shakedown.
He'll bow. He'll bend under pressure.
And then it's really tough to take it back.
Really tough to take back the high road, take back the courage, but the companies that are standing up to these people saying, listen, we may not agree with this or that about guns, but we're not going to start severing business relationships based upon political viewpoints.
That is not a business we want to be in.
Like FedEx, we want to deliver something from here to here.
That's all we're doing. We're just squishing up space like an accordion, so something can hop from one place to another.
That's our business. But, you know, what's in the package?
Okay, let's have it not be illegal.
But whether it's a manifesto for freedom or a manifesto for communism, that is not our business.
We are in the business of moving things, not judging ideologies.
And a very reasonable position, I think a very fair position, a rational position, an honorable position, so that everything will just move on.
And all the people who cucked and caved, they have to wear that stain now forever.
But if you stand up, it's really not that bad.
Not only isn't it bad, you see everything a lot more clearly that it was an illusion and it just goes away and all these people are like, thank you for making it through this stage of your life.
It's almost like an act of maturity and people respect you for it.
It's just so crazy that this is happening.
Bringing it back to the public schools, I think one of the reasons that they hate children and why my mom sent me an article recently where they referred to kids as human capital is Kids allow you to get through that looking glass without fear, because that's what happened to me, is once I loved someone more than myself, I no longer did that hedonic treadmill of appeasement.
What did Churchill say, if you appease, you're just the last one eaten by a crocodile or something?
He said, appeasement is a desperate desire that the crocodile will eat you last.
Right. It's like you'll give up your ground for a little more time to drink and play video games and watch pornography, and then they'll get you...
And then you'll die.
And if they don't kill you, you'll kill yourself, you know?
And when you have a kid where you're like, I know I might have made mistakes in my life, but that's an innocent human being.
And that's why they hate families.
Because it's a lot easier to stand up and say, I need a gun because I'm going to protect my family.
And the cop response time here is, what, an hour?
And it's like, no, give up the gun or we're going to call you racist.
It's like, I don't care. I care more about that kid than I do you.
And they just go, I'm melting!
And it just disappears.
Because the leftism all depends on cowardice.
Without it, they got nothing.
You know, they'll take your neighbors and if you don't say anything, they'll take you and you have no neighbors to speak up for you.
Right, right. No, and it's easy in the throes of an attack to forget the love and the support.
And that's sort of what I want to point out to people, that if you see someone who's being attacked, like just reached out to someone this morning, see they're under attack, let's have a conversation.
You know, you were there at the Night for Freedom, the cheers, the enthusiasm for what you did, you know, the chanting of my name, the happiness and enthusiasm that people have for what we do, you know, people traveling, like traveled from Europe and even further to come and sort of shake my hands and take a selfie.
I mean, that's amazing and wonderful stuff.
Yeah. And it's easy to forget that love because what the left does, and this is out of Saul Alinsky's playbook, is they polarize and isolate you.
They want to make you feel cut off from the herd, isolated, like there are the lions and the undergrowth and you're separated from the herd and they've all moved on without you.
And that causes you to panic and say, I'll do anything to rejoin the herd.
Anything. To rejoin the herd.
I mean this herd, not in terms of the sheep or anything, but just people who are companions we all need to support on this challenging journey.
So they want to separate you.
They want to make you feel chilled and isolated and alone.
And particularly for, you know, we've talked about the R versus K stuff on the show before.
Particularly for K-selected people, they've done studies that say that social ostracism and isolation activates the same mental agony as physical torture.
We need tribal animals.
Aristotle said anybody who can live alone is either an animal or a god.
And we need those. So they want to separate you and in that moment they hope to isolate you and make you feel like there's big glacial walls between you and anything and only they can unlock you through appeasement and get you back.
And that's when we need to, from the outside, claw down that ice prison.
You know, remind people that they're not alone.
Remind people that they're loved.
Remind people that what they do is of value.
And give them that sense of community that has them stand up against these bullies.
And this is not on the right or on the left in particular, because a lot of leftists get attacked as well.
We've got to reach out.
And I just urge people to do this.
You know, private DMs, private emails, like anything.
Phone the person up. Like whatever it is that you can do to get in touch with people and give them your support when they're under attack.
I used to think when I was younger that these personal virtues like courage were like in this Ayn Rand magnificent individualist sense was just something you willed and had like, you know, like your roots go down to the very earth and then you're unmovable.
But as I'm getting older, I don't know what you think.
But to me, things like courage, they're a collective endeavor.
They're not something that we should expect necessarily from individuals who are standing alone and isolated and so on.
The courage to take on the lions comes from no individual zebra.
It comes from the group of zebras, because that's why the lions want to separate.
They know they can't stand against the group, but they can take down the individual.
So when we see someone being polarized and isolated, remind them that they have a community, remind them that their lives are important and what they do matters and that they're loved.
And that is a way of transferring courage, which we need collectively in order to stand up to these bullies.
Wow, that's a beautiful statement.
And I think as a kid, my community was piano, and that got me through times.
And also, the virtues you talk about, that can become almost a community.
You know, I had a friend who died, and one of the things he always said was that we kept the troop in our head.
He'd always say, because we were going to college together, and then the summer we wouldn't see each other, and he'd go, but the troop in our head.
And that can get you through tough times, because the lone wolf does starve to death.
The community doesn't.
And that's why I do the same thing.
I'm trying to start a new comedy network, just not even for any other reason than just to get other comedians heard.
Because I've been doing well lately because I made it through the gauntlet.
And I think I had a specific set of circumstances where I was actually trained to do it because I had seen it.
And so when people are coming at me, I'm just like, you're going to go away.
And if I give up what I believe, a coward dies a thousand deaths.
You know, it's not worth it. And so now I'm in a good place and I see these other people just fighting Medusa.
And I'm like, let's do it together.
And then that's how we change a culture.
Because we can't really fight the left with the dismantle because that's what they do.
It has to be a build.
It has to be like, what do we believe in?
Let's show love. Let's show...
A lot of people on my Twitter, the unbearables, the bears, they make art, all this art.
And a lot of people are like, I don't know what you guys are about.
Sometimes you say crazy stuff, but that art is beautiful.
And I'm like, yeah, that dude's an engineer.
That person digs holes.
But we all collectively won't allow ourselves to be ideologically possessed.
And that's pretty much the unifier.
Also, when you get through a gauntlet, they seal it up.
So you got through the narrow pass into the forbidden land of truth and prominence, right?
So they look back and they say, how the hell did that guy get through?
We're going to seal that shit up, right?
So you're through, and then it's like you look back and the swords have come down in whatever passage you took, and I think it's worth circling back.
To try and open that up.
Always. Because otherwise you end up isolated, other people can't move forward, and it doesn't help anyone in the long run because you're going to end up isolated and thus subject to various attacks.
So I think it's worth it.
We're through, and we say, oh, well, I got through.
Maybe the next person can get through.
It's like, no, because you got through, they're mapping that opening, and they're now policing that opening, and they're making sure nobody gets through again.
So you've got to circle back and help the next group through.
Yeah, like Sarah Silverman's career, for example.
Where it's like, she'll say, she was so funny.
Like, her and Amy Schumer started off really funny, and then as soon as they got through, they just sealed it up.
No one else says anything on PC. I'm like, that's how you got your whole career.
And I totally agree with you on that.
Especially in this world where I'm about to have my second son, and especially in the world of how people are talking about young boys, how we're just...
Now that they got the state money and we're just tax cattle, you know, we're not really that valuable.
I know that pendulum will swing hard against women, and I really am not looking forward to that because it'll be insane.
That's what's happening right now with white identity politics.
I'm like, because it's now starting to become justified.
And I'm like, you're now justifying that because it's like at one point it sounded like white pride sounds intense.
And now it just sounds like people competing in the identity games And I'm like, if you're going to make a world where people have to compete with their identities, white people are pretty organized, you know?
So let's just not have the state importing all these people and not have the state committing theft all the time and go back to principles and ethics, because I just want my kids to have a good life and not be called Awful because they're white males and they're probably going to be pretty intelligent because I'm not going to beat them and they get breastfed.
No, and it's a funny thing too because we were talking about before how we meet individuals and it's great.
And, you know, when it comes to different races and so on, I have like, it's so much fun.
Like, so when I was at the last speech that I gave, I was heading up to my hotel room.
And this black woman was running down the hallway, and the doors were starting to close.
And I couldn't figure out which buttons.
I just sort of reached out to open them, right, to let her in.
And she was like, oh, thanks, oh, thanks, right?
And I said, yeah, you know, it's considerate.
But also, I hate that horrible thud, you know, sound when somebody doesn't make it.
And she was laughing, and we were just joking all the way up.
And that's at an individual level.
It's fantastic. You know, nothing but positive fun, nothing but enjoyable interactions, and so on.
But when you get these groups that harden together and they become culture warriors and they try to get resources from the government, then you've got to eye each other suspiciously because you can't deal with people as individuals because now it's all this politics and it's all this tribalism.
That, to me, I just want to have nice interactions with people, which, with virtually no exception in my public life, I have wonderful interactions.
So, I mean, I have no problem with anybody.
At an individual level, that's what I want.
And it's the same thing if there are religious differences.
You know, just keep the government out of it.
We can all get along pretty well, but when the government has all this power, you know, whoever picks it up first wins, and that makes everybody kind of jumpy.
Right. Right now, what they're doing with races is like what you're talking about with religion in Europe, where it's like, ask anyone on the street the difference between a Lutheran and a Presbyterian.
But back then, it meant a lot of cheddar.
And so now that they're doing that...
And I love one time you said, my tribe is smart people.
And I was like, yes.
And if you're going to go millions of people for an agenda...
That's when you honestly have to talk about assets they bring.
And that's not racist.
That's just facts.
And I think it's almost more, it's weirder that the left won't acknowledge what Jordan Peterson now calls hate facts, where you're like, if an NBA team was like, all right, we have to recruit a ton of people from a country.
Do you want Nigeria or North Korea?
And they say, Nigeria, no one would call them racist.
You're just looking at Demo.
You know, and also with the state, there's no assimilation because the government, that's what's happening with Islam a lot.
Because back in the day, you bring people in, they're all digging ditches together, they're saluting the flag, they're going for it.
And everyone realizes that you like sandwiches and families.
But when you got the state, it hyper...
It makes them extra extreme.
And you see that in Sweden and Germany and all these places where they don't have to mingle.
So whatever they are, they internalize and then they become really nutty.
Well, you used to get a lot of money for integrating.
Right. And just in the free market, right?
So you come to 19th century America, you're Polish, you only speak Polish and so on, and you can stay in Polish town or Chinatown, but you're kind of limited, right?
You're limited to that.
Now, if you learn English and you learn the culture of trade that is in America and you build up your credit rating and you start working and you sell the customers, which you need to speak English to do if you're going to sell outside of your particular ethnic group, man, the world is your oyster.
I mean, you can go as far as you want.
And so you used to get really well paid for...
Enriching but integrating.
Nobody's saying everybody has to become exactly like the Founding Fathers or anything, but that to me was the great blend.
You get people with different food, different history, different music, different culture.
They come in and they're well-paid.
For joining the majority economic process.
And now, of course, with the welfare state, this big giant money moat is put around these communities.
And in a sense, they lose out by trying to integrate.
They lose social standing because you don't have to.
They may lose welfare if they get jobs.
They may lose free benefits.
And of course, it costs them all the time that it takes to learn the local language, learn the local customs, and find out how to succeed.
So there used to be this big Like these golden breadcrumbs that led you towards integration.
Now there's this big fiery moat of state money that prevents you almost from joining.
And this is why with the no-go zones, they are economic moats fundamentally because you get money there just for breathing and having children as opposed to Incentives matter so much in life.
It's one fundamental truth about human beings.
We respond to incentives. And if there is that path to the pot of gold and all you have to do is learn the local language and integrate it into the economy, well, that's fantastic.
But if there's this mode of welfare that you lose if you set foot outside the biosphere, that is terrible.
Yeah, and money doesn't give the purpose that the state thinks it does either.
It's what I was talking about with my school growing up.
You can give them all the money they want, and it doesn't make the kids any smarter or give them any purpose.
So when you pump money into these communities, but no purpose and no way out, it makes them need another purpose.
And a lot of times that's like radical Islam.
You have to go down some very bizarre path.
And I think that's why the state is so hyper sensitive about calling every white person who says anything racist is because they're They put the black inner city community in a cast and the muscle is just atrophying so they can't take care of themselves.
Like they're committing a horrific act against the black community and they don't want anyone to know.
So any free thinking person that wants to point out that you might not want to incentivize single motherhood is a Nazi.
You're like, well, I see why you're doing that now.
You don't want that word getting out that you guys are literally making vote plantations.
Yeah, this is the horrible history of the state and its relationship to the black community in America.
We could do a whole show on that, but my sort of foundational point is if you look way back at the beginning, the blacks were often isolated from economic integration through slavery.
I mean, so they weren't part of the general system of trade because they were treated as dehumanized livestock and kept down and kept subjugated.
And so you had the government to kind of build a moat around the black community because they were slaves.
And so there's no integration, no value that way.
And if you kind of fast forward 150 years, now you have these inner cities.
And what people forget about these inner cities so much, Owen, is this is government.
Front and back, top to bottom, from the sewers to the skies.
Like, this is government. The government roads, government schools, government housing, government welfare, government healthcare.
This is government, top to bottom.
And the government, of course, slavery was a government program.
The government was the one who enforced slave contracts.
The government forced whites to go on slave hunting expeditions, which they hated.
And, of course, the whites didn't like slavery because it drove down wages.
And there were lots of, of course, fundamental moral reasons to be against slavery.
And now we have the same sort of massive government program.
Instead of slavery now, it's called the inner cities and welfare.
And it is a way of just sealing off communities from integration.
And this is just this horrible pattern that happens with the government and with the black community that this is rotation and this carving off from society as a whole and the breadcrumbs that lead to the larger society and to a better life are just consistently walled off.
By the state and that to me is the great tragedy and this is why people like Tom Sowell, the great Dr.
Tom Sowell, is so important to read about these things because he speaks very passionately about how the black community used to be doing so much better, about the blacks moving into the middle class in the post-war period was huge, particularly in the 1930s it happened as well, and that this was all interrupted by the welfare state, by other problems with legality.
And that, to me, is one of the most heartbreaking things, because I do have in my mind's eye a very clear vision of where the black community could be now.
But instead, what did we do?
What did America do? I'm not America.
What did America do? Well, they imported 60 million people from the third world and sealed them off in these welfare zones.
And, I mean, that's just catastrophic.
And how that plays out, we see every day, and the foundational...
Roots of how to fix it have become very hard to talk about because of political correctness, but it's pretty obvious to me.
Whatever the question is, the answer is more freedom and less compulsion.
Yeah, and it's now a word war because they need a boogeyman.
So now it's white, typically male free thinkers are now absorbing all the guilt of what the state's done because they need someone to blame.
Now all the blacks were kept down because of white racism and not the fact that it was illegal to not do that.
And if that gets out, they spend like trillions on this propaganda.
I was in LA. I was repped at CAA when I did a joke about how LA is so progressive, except for their Mexican slaves.
And they made me delete it.
They're like, you got to delete this. And that was the last time I caved.
And that was a few years ago.
But I was like, oh man, there really is a propaganda machine.
And then I did that tweet that you retweeted, thanks by the way, about all the late night hosts.
And I just said they all say the same thing, believe the same, endorse the same person, ladies and gentlemen, comedy.
And you're like, wow, this is a big government program now.
And now that I'm outside that, there's just a massive amount of people that don't want that.
And you can't beat it out of people.
The Soviet Union fell.
There's optimism. You just have to reach your hand out, like you said earlier, to other people that still have values and don't look at you like, what's the right answer to get me another cookie?
Those people are kind of screwed.
It's like dealing with an addict.
They have to want to quit. And it's almost like that with thoughts, where someone's When my agent fired me, I don't have a great relationship with him anymore because he told me I was crazy for standing up against three-year-old trans kids and hormone injections.
I wouldn't back down on that.
But my manager I still like because he was like, listen, I can't rep you anymore because you're kind of fringe.
But I know you're not crazy.
I get it. It's just not my business plan.
I'm like, thanks, man.
It's free association. I love you.
I'm glad you're not saying that you think I'm a bad person because I'm saying something we all agree with.
And that was something that I really enjoyed, where I'm like, that's the difference.
You know, whether or not someone's going to do the moral condemnation and saying you're evil for saying Black people aren't handicapped mentally.
Like, I'm the bad guy?
Like, we're the bad guy for saying, oh, no, they can work?
No. They'll have...
20 babies if we don't abort them and we got to give them Doritos every month or they'll starve.
It's like, listen to yourself.
Like, they're valid humans.
Let them work. It's crazy.
And this is the funny thing about comedy, which is I used to love comedy more when I didn't know what was coming.
Right. Like, you know, you switch on John Oliver, you look at Trevor Noah, like these guys, you know.
You know what's coming.
You may not know the exact form of the joke, but you know the exact perspective.
You know what's going to be reinforced and what's going to be marked.
You know that they're never going to go to 99% of the topics that people are interested in.
They're going to circle the drain of that 1%.
And speaking of your manager, to me, it's amazing.
Thinking back on, you know, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce and people who are really pushing the envelope, the idea is like, sorry, you're too edgy.
I mean, isn't that the point of comedy?
To get us to diffuse our fears of controversial topics by reminding us that they can be funny too.
Because, you know, nobody wants to go to the edge and look over, right?
Unless there's a good joke written on the bottom of the canyon.
Then we'll go and we'll look over the edge because then it's funny.
But to say it is a way of comforting us and encouraging us to go to uncomfortable areas of thought and feeling and culture by saying, I've been there.
It's not as bad as you think.
And I'm going to ease your way into it with the endorphin called laughter.
And to me, that is one of the great things that comedians have done.
why comedy is so essential to the progress of mankind.
You know, by the time they started making fun of the people who were pro-slavery, man, that was beautiful.
That was like, when you can start mocking people, and this is why the left, of course, is so dour, because they are so easy, it's why they can't meme, and it's why they're so easy to meme.
Like, I saw a meme, it's pretty funny this morning, that big red feminist woman who was saying, well, you know, if you outlaw abortions, they'll just be back alley abortions all over the place.
But if you ban guns, nobody will be able to get a hold of one of them, right?
Or you've seen that guy with the button.
He's sweating like, which button do I push?
You know, the cops are evil and racist.
Only the cops should have guns. Whoa!
You know, which do I push? They're so easy to meme and they're so dour and human-less because humor is a way of getting us to look at absurdity and have absurdity lose its power.
Because absurdity can be really terrifying.
Like, if you think of the Kafka...
Novels or, you know, what happens in the gulags and so on.
Or the ending of, like, the last bit of 1984, where the guy's mind is being disassembled by the inner party member.
Absurdity, when it's loaded with power, can be horrifying and terrifying and responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of people.
But if you can get people to laugh at absurdity, absurdity loses its power, and it's better to laugh at it and diffuse it that way than be afraid of it while it arms itself continually.
I love this topic.
This is one of the most interesting topics right now, I think, in the world.
Here's something fascinating.
I'm doing a joke about Wakanda and Black Panther, and I'm just playing on the irony of the identity politics.
Literally, it's almost music.
I turn it on its head, I do it three times, and I put in some weird red herring, and that's a joke, right?
It's almost hacky, but they don't see it.
I said, I just saw the trailer for Black Panther.
I didn't see one white guy.
I'm not going to watch that.
I don't relate. You know, like just mocking the whole concept.
Like, do black people not watch Captain America?
That's just an insane concept. And Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle both bit.
And I'm now getting in an argument with these guys because they don't see comedy anymore.
It's almost like a satanic deal where they get all this stuff.
And they now no longer can laugh.
And, you know, Jeffrey Wright is big actor.
He's in Hunger Games and all this stuff.
And he comes in and he's like, how do you think it would be to be black and not have any movies?
He doesn't know I'm being sarcastic.
So I just engage with him.
But I won't be...
Real at all. I just keep playing games, and he's just getting so frustrated.
At the end, I'm like, man, I always thought movie stars were living these wonderful lives, and you're just another asshole arguing with a stranger just like me, you know?
And he never got the joke.
And he ended up starting to delete his tweets, and all my people were like, this is crazy to watch.
And Don Cheadle did the same thing.
When he realized I was joking, he was like, well, maybe you should go back to comedy school.
And I'm like, Yeah, I should just return my oversized boots and my little car.
And he still didn't get it.
And I'm just watching this now.
And you're so right about how comedy is important to diffuse things because in PTSD with military, there's a reason that infantry have way worse PTSD than special ops is because if you choose to go into combat, you're less likely to be emotionally scarred than if it happens to you versus you do it.
That's why sometimes sexually assaulted women, I know for sure, I don't know about dudes, but a lot of them become very promiscuous because they're like, I'm going to have sex with you before you can do it to me.
Because when you engage, you're less likely to feel pain, even though it's a whole different set of issues.
With comedy, it's like I'm going to go into this truth dungeon called a comedy club and I'm going to watch my world blown up into hyperbole and flipped and flopped and I want to be offended because I want to know where my line is and what I actually believe.
And when you do that, Then you can really see what you believe in the world.
And it's so important for thoughts, because we're not born knowing what we believe.
And if you can't make mistakes, you can't grow.
And that's what authoritarians want, because they want you to be an algorithm.
They want to put a nickel in you, turn the crank, and watch the monkey.
And human beings are, like what you're talking about, where you can't, what makes us special is you don't debate a refrigerator.
Like what makes us special is our ability to form thoughts and to adjust and to And if you take that from people, they lose everything.
They can't laugh. They can't taste food.
The color looks dull.
And this is why comedy has to be a collective endeavor.
This is why in a comedy club, you get a community where formerly you felt alone, right?
So one of my favorite jokes of yours is, you know, don't go out, Timmy, there's autism in the grass.
You know, that is a string of just genius syllables.
And people laugh at that because especially if they've grown up with an anxious mom, you know, or a single mom, which is usually a big, big overlap.
Then they have this bubble wrap childhood experience, you know, oh, don't go out there, you know.
Like, I remember reading some woman who was writing in the paper about how, you know, her six-year-old wanted to go to the bathroom at McDonald's on his own.
And she's like, I have nothing but visions of a black-clad guy in the stall who is going to assault my child.
And it's just like, This is more likely to be hit by a meteor when you're driving down the...
I understand the cost-benefit kind of thing, but when you make a joke about overprotective moms, then what happens is, first of all, you're not sure if you're supposed to laugh about it or not.
She was doing the best she could with the knowledge that she had, and she was only there for the...
You're not sure if you're supposed to laugh at it or not.
But then when other people laugh and you laugh, You get this permission, like it inches, it expands your area of personal freedom to think and speak.
Comedy is, to me, a lot of it is, and I spoke about this with Joe Rogan years ago, is pushing back all the shit you can't talk about and expanding the Overton window of permissible dialogue.
And philosophers can do it, but, you know, we're not that funny.
But comedians can do it in a way where people connect and it's like everyone's laughing and everyone gets that everyone else gets it and we have so much in common.
And that, of course, what you're saying with, I think, with the joke in Black Panther is that if people say, well, black people can't relate to movies with white people in it, well, then how the hell are we supposed to get along?
Right. You know, I enjoyed the movie that I went to go and did a movie review of it.
I enjoyed the movie. It was really, really well done.
And because, you know, we can all laugh together.
We can all, you know, there's a lot of stuff that we have in common as human beings.
You know, the big stuff. You know, like being born, you know, for sex and first girlfriend and marriage and kids and aging and decreptitude and death.
Like, there's this big arc that we're all part of in this sort of common story of humanity.
Comedians... To me, the church lady versus the comedian is sort of very important.
You can't speak about this.
And the comedian says, not only can you speak about it, you can laugh about it and realize you're not alone in your desire to speak about it.
And it's not as bad as you think it is.
And that, to me, is wonderful how much it pushes back the things we can't talk about and expands our capacity to speak with each other.
And also, not pass on our trauma to the next generation without realizing it.
You know, like, I had a Michael Jordan poster on my wall growing up.
I'm pretty sure he's a black guy.
I never even thought about that until I saw the Wakanda push.
But a lot of this overprotective, stay inside, Timmy, there's autism in the grass, that's pushing this stuff to the next generation, kind of like breaking the cycle of violence is necessary as well.
When I was a kid, I remember Public school, a friend of mine said, how did Patrick Ewing die?
And I said, how? He said, he stuck his head out the window and his lips beat him to death.
And I laugh. And my teacher says, that's racist.
And I say, why?
I didn't even... I'm like, it's about big lips.
Like, Kenny, because my white friend Kenny Ken had the biggest lips.
And I'm like, that's a joke about big lips.
And there's this awkward silence.
Steve Tyler from Aerosmith said, don't give me no lip, I've got enough of my own in one of his songs, right?
Right. It's almost like if someone says, hey, don't be cheap.
And someone's like, that's anti-Semitism.
You're like, you're the one who just did that.
You know what I'm saying? It's like we're almost pushing these ancient things on the next generation.
And I think that that's so weird that this overprotectiveness, I think Oppenheimer said, the world will definitely go to hell, but the only chance we have is to act like it isn't.
Or something like that, where it's like our walling up of our defenses is how we actually Atrophy.
Authoritarians hate comedy because it allows people to see that we aren't as separated as they're trying to make us.
The difference between the Catholics and the Protestants is just the end of an Our Father.
Not a lot of Stalin comedy roasts, if I remember rightly.
I remember the story in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago where people are applauding some party and they won't stop because no one wants to be the first.
That's a terrifying life.
That is a terrifying life.
And people under communism survived through humor.
Samistat and humor. Because that's how they recognized that the system was insane, because otherwise you go insane.
Like, if you think the system is sane when the system is insane, you're crazy.
So you have to find a way to say the system is insane And comedy is the way to do that.
And, you know, there are all these jokes.
You've probably heard them all. You know, like you asked a little Russian kid under communism, what do you want to be when you grow up?
And he says, a foreigner. You know, all these jokes just go on and on.
You know, they pretend to pay us.
We pretend to work. Like there's a dour Russian humor that goes back even through the czarist period.
And that's how you stay sane.
It's recognizing the absurdity and defanging the absurdity.
And that is so important.
As I said before, if the absurdity grows and becomes armed, then a dominatrix madness infests the entire society and it can take generations to relinquish.
And one thing that gives me so much passion and purpose in comedy is knowing that the people that have had things happen to them are the ones that need it the most.
And these leftists are robbing Certain victim groups from feeling that relief of the monster under my bed is just a shadow.
I've done it on Twitter to show people.
My one friend was like, my uncle killed himself last year.
My mom and I are crying right now.
Owen, I know that you're good with gallows humor.
Can you make a joke? Why did your uncle cross the road?
To kill himself. And she was like, thank you.
Everyone's crying. I just needed that.
And my one friend, Brian Quinn from The Impractical Jokers, used to be a firefighter, and we had a great podcast about how a lot of people with extreme jobs or have seen extreme things or had extreme childhoods or have experienced a lot of trauma, you laugh or you die, man.
It's like when you're a firefighter and you show up and there's a burn-up kid, If you don't somehow make some dark jokes about that, you can't function.
That's why some great humor came out of England after World War II and that tradition because You know, you just, you get through this genocide of war and you either laugh or you're done.
Well, let me ask you this, though.
The male-female stuff with regards to humor.
So there is, this is a very old, this just totally popped into my mind, this as you were talking, this old Mary Tyler Moore show that I watched when I was a kid.
And it was about a clown who had been stepped on and crushed to death by an elephant in a parade.
Now, the women were all like, oh, this is terrible.
This is the worst thing ever.
The kids were traumatized.
This poor clown got killed by this elephant.
And this may not be the exact story, but it's somewhat close to this.
And he was dressed as a peanut or something like that, right?
And the women were all horrified.
And what did the men start doing?
Come on, a clown got crushed to death by an elephant.
They start making jokes. You know, I'm surprised he didn't go on a rampage because you know how hard it is to stop after just one peanut.
You know, like, I mean, just jokes like that.
And the women, I remember Mary Tyler's more like, oh, some mother lost her son in this brutal accident.
You guys are just making jokes.
And it's like, kind of are.
Like, kind of are. And it's good.
I don't know. Like, I get the horror.
And I don't want to sound cold-hearted.
You know, even in this fictional scenario, yes, a mom lost his son.
But come on! A clown in a peanut suit got killed by an elephant.
That's funny. I don't want to be cold-hearted.
That's funny. And I don't know how to not make that funny.
And I also know that guys are much more comfortable, in my experience, being made fun of than women.
And that, I think, limits comedy a lot these days.
Oh yeah, it's a way that men bond and then women react like we're being mean.
See, I see nothing wrong with male or female nature.
It's just, it's being so twisted right now because female nature, whether they want to dye their hair blue or not, is to raise little kids.
And so when you have this instinct of like, whatever this little boy does is special and keep him away from anything sharp, like that's the welfare state.
And that's necessary for little kids.
You know, you just, no matter what- They are death magnets, it's true.
And then men kick in around six or seven and they're like, yeah, you're bleeding.
Like, yeah, it's fine.
You know, and that balance is so important.
And that's why music is such an asset in my- In my show, because I've done this one joke, I retired it, but it's about the soundtrack of a man's head and the soundtrack of a woman's head.
And I'm not going to do it. I'll just show you, like, this is a woman just...
And this is a man.
And then I fight back and forth, like, hey, baby, how was your day?
How was my day? And women are crying because I'm setting it up.
I did a video just called Why Women Are Awesome.
Usually when you hear that, you'd think that it's some weird cuck, but it's not.
It's just real. But I'm setting it up like why they are awesome and why it's currently kind of killing us.
I'm thinking about with this music, Owen.
For women, the cop movie is...
It was three days until retirement.
You know, I had one last call.
Everything was going to go fine.
You know, that's the women's cop movie, whereas the men's cop movie is the Keystone Cops.
You know, just running back and forth in corridors, tripping over shit, and running into doors and so on.
And of course, men take a lot more risks than women as a whole.
Men are in much more dangerous occupations as a whole.
You need that humor.
You know, with the high risk can come high anxiety, and you diffuse it.
With humor. I remember when I was working up north, we had these snowmobiles and these big sleds, these massive heavy drill bits, which we'd drill down to try and find the bedrock to get the gold if it was there or whatever.
And I remember sitting on the back and the guy who was driving the snowmobile went down a hill and it kind of jammed at the bottom instead.
And so the whole thing flipped over on the back and I came down like on the snow with these big giant heavy spear things kind of thudding down all around me.
And we were like, I don't know, like a day and a half from the nearest hospital.
Like this would have just been like, just leave me here as an ice snack for the wolves in the spring.
And, you know, he looked at me in this appalling face and I said, dude, it's too cold for spearfishing.
Like, it wasn't even that funny a joke, but it was like, I was like, holy shit, I could have just died.
And you just immediately turn it into a joke.
And of course, it's not like he's going to be more careful and all of that.
But there is something about that risk and that humor that kind of blends together for men that's a little less so for women, I think.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
And that's, I used to do a bit about moving to L.A. and I used to call them indoor cats.
I now think soy boy is hilarious.
And trying to make friends.
I'm coming in from northern New York, which is basically Alberta.
It's a Canadian culture.
And I'm trying to make fun of them to make friends.
I'm like, he's wearing women's clothes.
I can see your balls. Pants jeans guy.
Tight jeans guy. And they're like, his name is Eric, and he's a photographer.
And I'm like, ha, ha, ha.
Like, I don't understand.
And then they start turning on me, but I can't stop because of my culture.
So I'm just like... It takes a lot of balls to talk to me that way.
I can see yours right in your pants.
They're like, how dare you? And they scatter.
And then the end of the joke is that I'm lonely.
It's not like I'm trying to be mean. I'm like, I have no friends.
These people all just ran in to buy some quinoa, some emergency quinoa.
I'm like, the photographer is the only photographer because he has an Instagram account.
I don't understand any of this.
And that's the culture clash.
And you see, yeah, you're right.
Men are more likely to be geniuses and schizophrenics.
We're the extremes. We're the task-oriented people.
And women are more likely to just kind of be, like, not dying.
And, like, women typically, all of them had some sort of sexual advantage because they had eggs, and men almost had to slay a dragon.
And so that's why we're a little more likely to be, you know, a little intense, especially Americans, because we're the genetic line of the one dude that's like, Golden women, just give it a shot.
They're like, you're going to die. It's like, dude, just go.
I'm related to Clark from Lewis and Clark.
It's like those dudes, I can't imagine the one in a hundred European that was like, Dude, just send it.
Dude, I have a rowboat.
Like, what could go wrong?
There's almost like a little bit of narcissism in it, but a lot of, like, fun ambition.
Well, you've got a nice, comfortable seaport in the city, you know?
Yeah. You've got drinks. You've got a horse.
You've got a comfortable bed to sleep in.
And like, fuck that. I'm going to where the bears are.
I'm going to where something can rip my head off every time I lay it down to sleep.
I'm going to where there's waterfalls.
Oh, and these tiny little mosquitoes that carry the most virulent organisms known to man, because I feel like I could just handle it.
And it's like, that is insane.
And they're like, but there's no king though, right? No king.
Yeah, but the guy just keeps being like, but there's no king though, right?
Right, right. Like he's just getting away from the king.
I might get my head ripped off by a bear, but I got a bow to no man out there, brother.
And this is the funny thing too, because- I'll be bow to bears and mosquitoes.
So, but here's the funny thing, because for men, and I say this occasionally on my show, but I'll just repeat it here briefly, because it's a good message.
For men, 99% of what we do is complete fuck-up.
Like, it just is. And I say to people, look, look at the two most famous writers in the English language, right?
You've got your Shakespeare, you've got your Dickens.
Now, Shakespeare wrote, like, I don't know, 50-odd plays and all that.
And how many of those are regularly produced?
You know, maybe eight or ten.
A lot of them are kind of obscure.
So the greatest genius, the greatest poet and playwright in the English language has a consistent success rate of 20%.
And if you look at Dickens' novels, like you wrote a couple of dozen of them, but, you know, maybe five or six or seven of them are, you know, your David Copperfields, your Oliver Twist and so on.
They are the ones, your Great Expectations, one of my favorites.
But so even like Charles Dickens, greatest genius of novel writing in the English language, again, a success rate of maybe 20%.
So the greatest, hardest working, most incredible male brains, the best you can hope for is 20%.
Now, I ain't no Dickens and I ain't no Shakespeare.
And so 99% of what you do is not going to work.
Right. And you have to find a way to keep going.
You have to find a way to keep your enthusiasm up.
You know, I mean, I'm sure you've bombed from time to time or you put out a joke that goes over like a lead balloon that's hissing with a, you know, a bomb on it.
And, like, I do shows like, oh, this is the greatest show ever.
This won't be one of them. This is going to succeed no matter what.
But I say, oh, this is the greatest.
This is my favorite show. And it's like...
You know, and then I just toss off some stupid thing in the car and it's like, 4 billion views!
And it's like, so you can't predict.
And most of what you do is not going to work out the way that you want it to.
So how the hell do you keep your enthusiasm?
How do you keep your motivation to say, well, 99% chance this ain't going to work, but I'm going to get up and do it anyway.
And you just need that humor.
That's the fuel that gets you over the despair of knowing that virtually everything you do is going to be a mess.
Yeah, I think so much of success comes from the acceptance of failure, but not doubling down either.
There's like a good line where you're like, there's some people that their egos are so fragile, they'll just fail in a corner, you know, because they won't acknowledge that they made a mistake.
And then there's other people that are scared of failure.
I think a really good line to take is like, we will fail and then we will figure it out and we'll win.
And it's just like that almost psychotic Ambition is the only reason that there's anything really awesome.
At the time, it seems a little like madness or just overconfidence, but it really does work.
You have to have a short memory.
That's why I did Why Didn't They Laugh.
How many girls did you ask out before you got your wife?
Several. My whole childhood, it was all failure.
How many girls did you want to ask out?
Quite a few. Don't get me wrong, I probably have a touch of the, I just want to play piano alone in a room all day vibe, but I definitely had a lot of failure.
Right. So there's a lot of girls, and the failure is the failure to ask out, right?
So there's a lot of girls, you know, they walk into this room like these Roman goddesses, you know, their feet are wreathed in smoke and they have like halos behind them and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And you're like, well, I could, but, you know, I might as well run my dick through a cheese grater because that's just going to be humiliation.
There's no win in that situation.
And so that's kind of like a failure because you're admitting you can't get what you want.
And then there's the girls who you will think you have a shot, but they say no.
And then the girls who say yes and you wish they didn't because it works out really.
The mask comes off and the crazy town train runs right over you repeatedly.
And so there's a lot of failure before you get to the woman that you really want to be with.
Maybe that failure is necessary. I don't know.
Think of all the jokes that you write that never see the light of day or see the light of day once.
You know, think of all the stuff that you do that doesn't work out.
And I think that the humor, whereas, you know, how much for women?
Doesn't work out. I mean, it's not a lot compared to, because, you know, especially with dating, I don't know what it is for, you know, the kids these days, but in my day, you didn't sit there and wait for the girl to ask you out.
You had to go and do it yourself.
So they're all just waiting, you know, they're just waiting and they're choosing.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, right? Whereas the men are all like going up and trying to get stuff.
So I think that we need the humor and we need that kind of toughness because we're just out there risking a lot more.
And I think that's really been kind of crushed and diminished because there is this incomprehension between the genders.
And this idea that we're enemies and, you know, men are crazy or men are exploiters or men are patriarchs or women are all crazy, you know, some of the MGTOW stuff and so on.
It's like, you know, we are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
We're supposed to fit together. Nature and evolution has designed us to be complementary.
And there's this weird incomprehension between the genders where it's like, well, they're crazy.
No, they're crazy. It's like, how is this going to serve anyone, particularly the next generation?
Well, yeah, and that's what the state's doing.
It almost like blinds you and just throws a bunch of meth in a room, you know, and everyone's just like, because we are, it does work so well when it works.
And then you really see like, men are funnier, at least men are funnier outwardly for sure.
And I won't even field any of the other arguments anymore.
I mean, maybe sometimes, but because even if we're wealthy and pretty good looking, you still have to almost show some sort of balls And making a good joke, women find very attractive because I think they know that it will get them through tragedy.
Like, I think there's an instinctive thing where it's like, if we are starving in the wintertime and he's funny, we may not kill ourselves.
Well, it's also a marker, sorry to interrupt, but women historically, and by that I sort of mean evolutionarily speaking, women had to really roll the dice because women had to get married in their teens or maybe early 20s at the latest, and they had to choose a guy Right.
Right. So you have to kind of roll the dice.
Is she going to be faithful? Is she going to be fertile?
But the women have to roll the dice like, okay, is he going to succeed or not?
And I think that a sense of humor, if it's associated with a rational assessment of risk or the need to talk yourself up after taking risks, a sense of humor is a marker that the man's willing to take risks.
And so I think it's a way for the man to show not just verbal intelligence, verbal dexterity, but a sense of humor about himself, which means he's not going to be too touchy and violent.
And it also shows that he's willing to take risks because he needs the humor to get him over some of the risks.
And I think those are good markers for women to say, yeah, he's got a pretty good shot.
Yeah. And I was listening to Jamie Foxx on Tim Ferriss, and he was talking about how the piano and humor is what allowed him to cross the metaphorical tracks because it is a Social lubricant to just kind of go up and down in social strata.
We were talking about that once, how we both have been desired by women and total outcasts by women in life itself and how that knowledge allows you to kind of see the similarities and how it really isn't these big dividers between social strata.
I could perform for kings and queens and then for a bunch of construction workers with the same jokes and make them both laugh because you And that's what the authoritarians hate.
But I think that's what is attractive to women is that with humor and music, you have someone that can have dinner with the king or their gardener and not have that distance.
And that social currency is the most valuable thing in the world next to maybe time or health.
Well, and I think for the women as well on the left, Because so many of the guys on the left in that sort of dating pool, I think this is where a lot of this frustration comes from.
Because the guys on the left, not only do they have the tea levels of your average sea sponge, but they don't have much of a sense of humor.
They don't have this capacity to laugh at themselves very much.
They don't seem to have a huge amount of ambition.
And they've been trained by the left to hate success.
Now, like it or not, evolutionarily speaking, women need guys who are going to go out and get to stuff.
Because they're going to be disabled with childbirth, breastfeeding with raising little kids and so on.
They need someone who's going to go out and bring them back the leg of something to eat.
Whoever's got that leg isn't going to want to give it up.
They need that kind of stuff.
The funny thing is that with feminism, attempting to turn men into dysfunctional women or broken women, which is the best I think that most men can achieve if they follow that path, It's like, if they fail, they're frustrated because they haven't been able to tamp down the patriarchy or the male ambition or whatever.
But if they succeed, they're even less happy because now they don't have that same tingle that comes from coming in contact with a guy who can really provide.
And yeah, we have the welfare state and we have all of this other stuff that women can get resources from, you know, alimony, child support and crap like that, but that hasn't affected evolution at all.
And that, I think, frustration that comes out of the left, this is why I think it's kind of sour grapes with the men on the right.
And I also think it's sour grapes with men on the left, with women on the right.
Women on the right are generally much more attractive, I think smarter, more feminine, more powerful in that way.
And the men on the right, they're funnier, they're more engaging, they tend to take more risks.
And so I think that we have two people looking across this ideological divide, and it's only one way, though, right?
You've got the men on the left and the women on the left both looking over deep down saying, well, I want that, but I can't say so.
I can't say so. But on the other way, you look over at the women and the men on the left, and it's like, there's no breadcrumbs, there's no force of nature that would get me to cross that canyon.
And I think that's why this obsession kind of goes one way.
This is why the left wants to constantly disrupt non-leftist, the right events, but nothing goes the other way.
It's like stalker.
It's like there's this weird desire and hatred that's all mixed up, this sour grape stuff.
Yeah, and a really fascinating thing that happens is when me and my wife will go to a dinner with people that are more leftist, you see them, like, they bicker a lot, and the women don't really show any respect for the guy at all.
And you'll see Amy just be like, you know, I'll say like, oh, I've seen a second love, and they're just like, oh, you're so sweet.
I'm like, that's like normal gender stuff.
And then you'll see her be like, oh, I can't wait to cook dinner when we get home.
And then, of course, you'll get the reaction of like, oh, well, you know, Sorry, I have my own career.
I'm like, she has her master's in engineering, lady.
This is because she wants to.
It's like she likes that feeling of providing for our family with nourishment and protection, and I provide with resources and masculinity, and we're really happy.
And then you see these, like, leftist couples where you almost can't tell them apart.
Where you're like, are you guys, like, buddies?
Where they're just like, yeah, that's what I said.
Oh, you're so stupid.
You're an idiot. And you're like, this is not...
Fun for those people.
No, my wife is, you know, very well educated and she's a great cook.
And, you know, we go shopping together in the grocery store.
God help me, Owen, if I ever drift towards something that's boxed near the middle of the grocery store, man, she will like shoot me in the leg with a harpoon gun before she'll let me buy anything with fructose glucose in it.
She's like, if there's chemicals in it, you are not buying it.
It is not going in your body.
That's awesome. That protectiveness of the health and all of that, I mean, it's a beautiful thing.
It's a beautiful thing. It's not slavery.
I mean, it's love.
When did love become slavery?
When did devotion become enslavement?
That's just so weird. Like, what kind of fragile ego do you have to have?
That you can't dissolve yourself into service of those you love.
That you can't gain more of a rich and deep identity in service of those you love.
But you feel that if you're nice to people, you cease to exist.
Like, being positive is like this...
This cross that drives the demon of personality into some other dimension.
That's the tragic and isolated and chilled kind of life.
It's unreal. I always thought feminism was allowing women to pursue what they want.
If Amy wanted to go back into engineering in a couple years, I would be totally supportive of that.
If she doesn't, totally supportive of that too.
I married her because I'm in love with her and I love her character.
Her character is what's best for the family.
If I'm working for resources and she's taking care of the kids, she's very happy.
But I don't have this image where she has to do that to be a woman.
My image is because I'm like what feminists should be before the Marxists take over of the word and made it insane.
Where it's like, just let a woman be a woman, whatever they choose to be.
And she could be a rocket scientist or a stay-at-home mom, and I love her either way, and that's what makes it work.
And I'll say little fragments of that sometimes, and people are like, oh, you're a cuck.
And then they'll hang out with us, and they're like, oh, no, I totally see it now.
You're literally just saying what's reality.
And I'm like, yeah, they're out there.
There's not a lot right now, but they're there.
And they're looking for good men, too.
All right. Well, a great chat, Owen.
I just wanted to remind people, of course, hugepianist.com, check out.
You know, can I tell you how embarrassing that is?
Even though that's a homonym, it took me like three goes to go, oh, I get it, huge pianist.
Okay. YouTube.com forward slash Owen Benjamin comedy.
Twitter.com forward slash Owen Benjamin.
We'll put the links to all of that below.
I'm going to rattle through. You've got to go see Owen live.
March 8th to 11th, Houston, Texas.
March 15th, Brooklyn, New York.
March 22nd, Cleveland, Ohio.
Which rocks, I believe. March 23rd, Chicago, Illinois, Bulletproof.
March 29th to 31st, Erie, Pennsylvania.
That's just got a kind of Stranger Things vibe to it.
April 6th in Minneapolis, of course, Minnesota.
April 12th to 15, Brea, B-R-E-A, California.
April 28th, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
June 5th, Kirkland, Washington.
And do you want to mention a little bit about the special you've got coming up?
Yeah, I just taped a special in my town.
And it went awesome, and that'll be out next couple weeks at my website, but I'm currently facing a slight bit of bizarre outrage for one of my jokes, and when you see it, you'll see how silly it is, because it's just a normal joke.
I don't really know what else to say about it, but it's a funny special.
It's going to be called The Mocking Bear.
I want to do a whole theme about like, because I can't believe those movies were made out of Hollywood.
There's so much truth in those movies about media, you know, about how they get PETA. Like that guy from that shooting, that student, I did a picture of him and PETA, you know, where it's the state just getting them to recite whatever nonsense they want them to.
All right, it's a whole other thing. I'm totally on a tangent.
But yeah, it'll be out in a couple of weeks at my website.
Beautiful. Well, thanks, Owen.
A great chat, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
My very best to your family, when's your wife's due date?
Early August. Ah, summer baby.
That's good. Yeah. That's good.
That's the only reason astrology works, is whether you're born in the summer or the winter.
Do you have an indoor life or an outdoor life in your first couple of months?
That's why I think those patterns work.
But anyway, we'll talk about that another time.
Thanks, Emil, for the chat. It was a great time, my friend.
