March 27, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:11:21
4039 Why Outrage Culture Matters | Dave Smith and Stefan Molyneux
The opposition of politically incorrect ideas and intellectually challenging arguments has not only hindered political debate - but the world of stand-up comedy. Comic Dave Smith joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss his evolution as a comedian, the power of speaking previously unspoken truths, the disappearance of the anti-war left, the defense of sacred cows, leftist hypocritical standards and much much more! [Note: Recorded on March 8th, 2018.]Dave Smith is a stand-up comedian, political commentator, co-host of “The Legion of Skanks” podcast and host of the Part of the Problem podcast.Website: http://www.comicdavesmith.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/comicdavesmithYour 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, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio here with Dave Smith.
I'm sure you know of him.
If you don't, you should.
He's a stand-up comedian, political commentator, co-host of the Legion of Skanks podcast.
I was hoping they'd be in the background, but apparently not.
And host of the Part of the Problem podcast.
The website is comicdavesmith.com and twitter.com forward slash comicdavesmith.
First of all, Dave, thank you so much for having the kind of name.
I don't need to spend 20 minutes spelling at the beginning of the show.
And of course, thank you for your time today.
Well, I wish I could thank you for the same thing with your name.
But I think it took me three years of listening to your videos before I got that one right.
But no, thank you. It's an honor to be here.
I'm a huge lover of philosophy and truth and liberty.
And so this is like, you know, making it to the Super Bowl.
So let's start a little bit with the deep origin backstory.
I'm always fascinated by how comedians first got the nutted up.
Nature to get up on stage and give it a shot.
So what made you think of comedy?
Were you like the funniest guy in your group of friends and everyone was like, oh, you should do this for a living.
Like, ah, that's a living? Ah, give it a shot.
But how did you first win your way onto the bare stage microphone land?
Well, I was funny.
All throughout my childhood, but I kind of felt like my whole group of friends were funny.
I hated school, and I think being the funny guy became my identity pretty quickly.
In terms of doing it for a living, I never thought that was...
It's like famous people, like Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams do comedy.
You can't just do it. I was friends and my roommate at the time, I was like 22 years old, and my roommate was Luis J. Gomez, who's another great comedian, who, by the way, you've had quite an influence on him in the world of peaceful parenting and stuff like that, because he's raising a little boy and he was Beaten as a kid and is raising his kid peacefully.
So anyway, just on a little tangent.
Oh, that's great to hear. Yeah, yeah.
You guys, I think, would have an interesting conversation.
But he started doing stand-up, and we were living together.
And he just kind of kept trying to convince me to do it.
And he was like, you're so funny.
You'd be great at this. And eventually, he convinced me to try.
And once I did it, I just fell in love with it and pretty much been doing it ever since.
Okay, so the first time you're going to do it, so you decide to do it, you have like a week or two, do you say, okay, these jokes have worked with my friends, or this really made this woman laugh once, I'll try it on stage, did you start writing new stuff, or how did you memorize?
I'm almost curious about the technicalities of this kind of stuff.
So my idea when I first thought about it was like, um, cause Lewis was trying to convince me to start and I was like, well, what I gotta do is just really think this thing through and I'll come up with like a great routine and then I'll start and I'll already be awesome and it'll be terrific.
But, um, ultimately I just never realized I sat down and wrote and tried to think of a few things.
And then, um, uh, eventually I started and I just had some loose ideas, but really you kind of just got to start doing it.
And then you figure out the timing.
Cause it's a very specific It's a kind of pattern that brings laughter out of a crowd.
It's a very specific reaction that you have to evoke.
And really, everybody stinks when they start, and then you just kind of start, and you get better at it over time.
I can't remember the comedian who was something like, when the crowd has a big laugh, he's like, don't laugh, it throws me off!
And this is something, like the playing with the crowd, the tennis with the crowd is really interesting.
I mean, I do public speaking, not really comedy, although occasionally I'll throw a joke in, but that sort of waiting for the laugh to subside, standing there and knowing when to launch into the next one, the timing of all of that.
Did you feel that you had a sort of an instinctive feel for that when you started, or is that just like bitter lesson and experiences?
You know, it's like, I do think I had a feel for it, and I think I was somewhat of a natural at stand-up, but it almost takes a certain amount of time to be able to bring that out.
So you have to kind of get comfortable.
And for me, and I think one of the big challenges of stand-up, it's not, you know, it's one thing when you're getting laughs.
A big part of it is when you don't get a laugh where you think you're supposed to.
And being comfortable with that, like realizing that that's not the end of the world.
That's fine. You can just kind of move on and continue.
And that's what the best comedians, like the best comedians are great at that.
They cannot get the reaction they want and be unfazed by it.
So they hit one joke that usually kills and it gets nothing.
And two sentences later, they're killing again.
It's like that never happened.
Well, and also, there's something interesting that I've seen with comedians wherein they're coaching the audience to let go of discomfort.
Insofar as you do a joke that's on the edge, risky joke, and the audience is like, ooh, and everyone's like, oh, I'm not supposed You didn't like that one, now did you?
Well, I'm going to go even further.
And it's a way of enrolling the audience in the edginess of what you're doing without getting mad at them, without feeling beaten back down, but being a real leader in the room and saying, no, no, no, we're going there.
I'm sorry if you don't like it, but you'll end up loving it.
And I find that fascinating, particularly with comedians like yourself who do the politically incorrect stuff and aren't sort of skating in the safe Seinfeld zone.
Ooh, I can't believe I said that, but you know what I mean.
And This working with the audience to help lower this really tense inhibition that people have around certain topics is a really fascinating thing that you do, I think.
Yeah, and it's funny you mention that because the times we live in have gotten so crazy and so full of this leftist political correct insanity that Seinfeld has now actually become an edgy comedian.
He and Chris Rock are afraid of college campuses, right?
For good reason. Well, Seinfeld made a statement, I think it was a couple years ago, where they said, you know, how come there weren't more minorities on your show?
And he said, well, I don't care about that.
I was always just looking for the funniest people.
And this was an outrage.
Like, the most benign statement you could imagine.
But I... Just to what you were saying, to me, like, the highest level of comedy is if you can start with a premise that immediately makes the room uncomfortable, that immediately you know they're not gonna like, and then you can kind of prove it comedically and win them over, to me, that's the most fun.
And when you go in, I mean, nowadays, going into, like, clubs, because I work a lot in New York City, and I'll go to Los Angeles and work in clubs there, and I mean, if you even mention Trump In the premise, and you don't make it clear in the premise that, but I hate him.
I hate him just like you guys do.
I hate him so much. He's the worst person ever.
He's literally Hitler. If you just mentioned something about Trump that might be, you know, just calling it down the middle or not in one camp or the other, people clam up so much.
And I've just had a lot of fun playing with this because I'm convinced that we live in the most profoundly hilarious time ever.
And I think there's a lot that's funny about Trump.
I mean, there's like a ton that's hilarious about Trump.
I mean, he's a cartoon character in so many ways.
Like the color of his skin is different.
The color of his hair is different.
The way he talks is different.
But what's amazing, what's so profoundly hilarious about these times is as cartoonish as Trump is, the opposition to Trump has actually become even more cartoonish and more absurd.
And absurdity always breeds hilarity.
Well, it's funny because we really seem to have politically been dropped into a Looney Tunes cartoon.
You know, the Wile E. Coyote is like the mainstream media and the roadrunner is Trump.
And no matter how often they paint that hole in the wall, boom, straight into it.
And I think that you've got this bit, which I think is great, where you say something like, well, you do it.
You know, the bit about Trump, literally Hitler, literally Hitler, to the point that.
Oh, yes. Well, I just said that I was like, you know, you're overplaying your hand.
I was like, every time you call Trump Hitler, now it's like when he's anything short of Hitler, you're like, I guess this guy's doing a pretty good job.
I mean, you know, it's kind of, you know, to that effect.
But yeah, I mean, it's amazing how there's like Like I said, there's a lot of hilarious things about Trump, but the entire Democratic establishment and left-wing media becoming cold warriors.
I mean, I could never have imagined this in my wildest dreams.
Oh, it has become absolutely mad.
I don't know if it was always under the surface and Trump is just like sandblasting the layers of junk away so that you can see these people for who they really are.
And I think that was kind of why they...
We're scared of him so much because his presence was going to rip the mask off, you know, and just, hey, here comes my big four horsemen at crazy.
It's the charge of the mad brigade all the way down the cultural avenues.
And I think that they knew he was going to cause that kind of reaction.
In them. So it's sort of like you'd fight if you were kidnapped and tied to a chair and somebody was going to put something into you, like some serum that was going to make you insane.
You'd fight that tooth and nail.
But it's their lack of own self-management.
I mean, if you really genuinely oppose Trump, there are so many more intelligent ways to do it than Scream Russia collusion and porn star affair over and over and over again.
And they just can't seem to restrain themselves.
They're like these birds pecking at a reflection.
Yeah, I mean, I actually, I wish more of the Russian collusion story were true.
I wish he was working with the Russians a little bit.
And if you take a look at what's going on in Syria, it doesn't seem like he's working with the Russians at all.
But yeah, it really is amazing.
And I think my favorite thing about Trump Forgetting any policy or anything like that is just kind of what you were touching on.
Trump has this ability. He exposes everyone in a way that nobody else was able to do.
And just from his very nature, just the way he speaks exposed the whole system of being like, oh, I guess you don't have to play this robotic Game where every other politician talks in the exact same manner and God bless America and this and that.
And there's just like a regular guy who's just going off the cuff and saying what he wants to.
But he's exposed the mainstream media, the Republican establishment, the Democratic establishment, and the deep state in a way that nobody else was able to do.
Yeah. And I think one thing that's fascinating about him, Dave, Is I think we have become so used to this bloodthirsty Roman death chorus in our head.
Well, I could say this, but it's going to get me in trouble.
I can't say this, this censorship that goes on for so many people, which I guess you're somewhat immune to.
I seem to be peculiarly immune to it.
But I know that it's there.
Like, I imagine every time they make a movie, it's like, well, we could have this character, but what's this pressure group going to say about it?
Well, we could have this character, but if it's an evil gay guy, we're going to be called homophobes.
And therefore... It all has to be arranged.
There's very little spontaneous creativity.
It all has to be arranged to give you minimum damage from high-pressure, abusive social groups, whether they're race or gender or religion.
And I think what Trump is...
Walking through what we think of as iron chains like you can't walk through chains that's only like a crazy person tries to do that he walks through them and there are cobwebs and he succeeds by saying things that are on his mind that a lot of people are thinking and he finds a community he finds people who support him and he goes from never really running in politics at all to winning the highest presidency in the land and I think that example of Of like, hey, they're not chains. They're just cobwebs.
You can go speak your mind. Yeah, people will hate you, but people will love you too.
And this is how we have a human conversation.
The fact that he's doing that makes what seemed like prudence and sensitivity and sensibility seem like a kind of cowardice now.
And I think people don't like that because it gives them a call to action to be frank in their views that they don't want to do.
Right. Yeah, there's so much to that.
And I think, you know, if you saw like when you compare the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, to Donald Trump, and Mitt Romney was, if you remember when they called him sexist and he made that comment about binders full of women to get out of it, he was basically on his knees pleading to the left.
He's like, no, no, no, I'm not a sexist.
I'm not. I wanted to hire women.
I asked them to bring me binders full of women so we could hire them.
And they went, Binders full of women!
You animal!
So it was kind of exposed, like, no matter what you do, they're gonna hit you with this stuff anyway.
But more importantly, I think what you were touching on, for people who do what you do, or I mean, not too many people do exactly what you do, but when you're talking about morality and what's really important, what is really evil in the world and what justice is and things like that, When you have this paradigm that the left has created where words, you know, Touching these chains that turned out to be cobwebs are the worst thing in the world that you can do.
And nothing's worse than that.
You can't have an honest conversation about the true evils, like what's really going on.
So Trump said some things that I wasn't a big fan of.
Like, I didn't like when Trump said, we're going to bomb the crap out of them in the election.
But then you see all these people on the left who are outraged about that.
Like he said, we're going to bomb the crap out of them.
And it's like Obama is literally bombing the crap out of them as we speak.
And that doesn't seem to generate any outrage, you know?
So it's like we can't have any type of honest conversation and actually get to the bottom of what true evil is if we're caught in this paradigm where, you know, saying the wrong thing is the worst thing in the world.
No, that is really tragic.
And there's an old Farsight cartoon that always comes to my mind with these kinds of topics, Dave, which is one caveman looking to another caveman, and there's this big giant glacier, like three feet from the mouth of the cave.
And he turns to the other caveman and says, Say, is that wall of ice closer today, do you think?
And that's what it's like with the restrictions on free speech.
And I know free speech comes with consequences and so on, but the idea that we're all self-censoring ourselves because people are going to get enraged at us for making recent arguments or maybe even unreasoned arguments, being wrong, making mistakes, finding data that turns out to be incorrect down the road or is overturned.
We're so paralyzed by this fear of attack that we are really surrendering what it is to be civilized and human, which is to engage in conversations rather than, you know, pulling fire alarms and all this leftist crap where they try and shut down conversations.
And I have like a very visceral reaction to people who tell me, you can't talk about this.
And it's like, like that, that, I mean, I hate to say it because it sounds kind of reactionary, but when people say to me, you can't talk about this, I'm like, oh, I think I know what I want to talk about now because this is what is upsetting the people I have the least respect for.
Therefore, there's got to be something really valuable in it.
Yeah, I agree. And I have that same tendency.
And I think that everything that, you know, everything that I do with standup comedy, and it's also true for like the world of podcasting and just philosophy in general, which is kind of, as you've pointed out many times, like the most important thing.
Freedom of speech is like a prereq for any of that.
If you don't have the freedom to say something that might be unpopular, then you can't do any of this stuff.
And, you know, I remember one time in one of your podcasts, you said this, and it really stuck with me.
I thought it was such a great point.
But someone asked like, well, how come there have never been throughout history, like a really brilliant philosopher who just nailed the evil of the state and the problems with religion and all these other things.
And you just said, yeah, there probably was.
And he was killed. Because you didn't have the freedom to say what you wanted to.
It's quite possible that someone was onto all this truth, but they just got bashed over the head and that was the end of that.
And you've seen this before with great philosophers who recant on their deathbed and things like that.
And it's like, yeah, no, we can't get anywhere As a civilization, as a people, if we're not allowed to say things that might be unpopular.
Well, this is the funny thing, too.
And I think if there's one thing that is like the red flag to a bull for me, it's rampant moral hypocrisy.
That's my, you know, I have to watch myself around that because I know it's just like red button, red button, red button.
Hulk summoning spell comes into the fore.
Because... If people come to me and say, well, you can't say this because it's upsetting to people or it's offensive to people.
And it's like, but when I grew up, Men were male chauvinist pigs.
There was a patriarchy.
We were repressing and oppressing women and had done for thousands of years.
I have white privilege and apparently racist for existing and, you know, being prone to sunburns and so on.
So after getting this sort of full-on facial shotgun of negative adjectives for my race, for my gender, and all of this kind of stuff...
Then suddenly, it's really terrible to say things that might be upsetting to people.
It's like, well, what do you think I've been doing for 50 years?
Listening to this kind of stuff.
Boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's like, well, we have to be really sensitive to people's feelings.
It's like, I don't remember a whole lot of people throwing themselves in front of those words in front of me saying, no, no, no, we have to be sensitive to the feelings of white men.
So excuse me if I don't take it all too seriously when you say how sensitive I have to be.
Right, because it all seems to be kind of just a trick to get their ideology in there.
It's like, you know, when college campuses have like these safe spaces and they're worried about offending people.
I mean, they never seem to be worried about offending conservatives or offending any Christians that might be on their school.
And it's like, right, you start to see it for what it is, is that this is a trick.
You're not actually relativists.
You hate Western civilization, capitalism, straight white men.
There's no relativism there.
It's just like a kind of a term you're allowed to use to then get your agenda forward.
And for people who don't understand just how nutty this is, I'll give you a tiny example.
I guess it's a big example, but it's an important one.
So throughout Western countries, this includes, in particular, I'm thinking of the UK and of Canada.
People who've gone to fight for jihadis in the Middle East, who are warriors for ISIS and so on, they're welcome back into British and Canadian societies.
Welcome back. Welcome back.
Here are your papers. We'll probably give you some welfare and some money to get settled and so on, right?
So you're very, very welcome. In other words, jihadis for ISIS are more welcome in Canada and England than conservatives are in academia.
And if that doesn't make your head spin just a tiny, tiny little bit, well, look down, because your body's spinning instead.
Yeah, I mean, it's very, very strange.
And you see it with the stuff that's going on in California with the sanctuary city stuff and protecting illegals.
And so they've now, they put this statute in where it's now illegal for people to cooperate with federal authorities.
Now, look, I'm not the biggest fan of federal authorities and I'd be against any law that mandated you to cooperate with federal authorities, but to tell someone what they can or can't say on their private property to federal authorities, I mean, so you're willing to sacrifice the freedom of your own people to protect illegal aliens.
It's just like, it's kind of madness.
Well, it's a share of marriage at this point.
It's like you're married and your wife says, okay...
Really, really want to stay married.
You're a great guy. I really appreciate that you pay all the bills and so on.
It's fantastic. However, I do want to go have sex with all the gardeners in the neighborhood.
I'm going to move out.
I'm not going to do any, you know, no cooking, no cleaning, nothing like that for you.
I'm going to live all the way across town, have sex with whoever I want.
I really, you know, keep paying my bills, obviously, that goes without saying.
At some point, do you say to yourself, I don't think we're married anymore.
Like, I think this is not...
You know, it's like that old Seinfeld thing where George gets fired and then he just keeps showing up to work.
It's like, you got fired.
I mean, aren't you supposed to not come to work anymore?
And this thing with California and the federal government, it's like, okay, so they're basically saying they're not going to comply with the law.
Okay. So isn't that a basic secession statement?
I mean, aren't you just saying, hey, man, you know, we gave it a shot.
But, you know, we both want different things.
You know, you want the rule of law and we want third world votes.
You know, we gave it a good shot.
Of course, you've got to keep paying your bills.
That goes without saying. But we're kind of broken up.
At some point, someone has to actually say that you're living like you're broken up, so you're broken up.
Yeah, and it's interesting that all of a sudden, you know, the left is okay with states' rights, which I've been told by them that that's always code for racism or something like that.
But now all of a sudden, it seems to work out fine.
I think the Democrats...
I was going to say they learned a lesson, but they didn't learn a lesson.
They just saw that the polls weren't coming in good.
But when they had that government shutdown, the common knowledge in the mainstream media and everybody said, well, the Republicans control every branch, so this is going to reflect badly on them.
The Republicans paid the political price for the last couple of shutdowns under Obama, under Clinton.
So this is going to work out well for Democrats.
And they saw quite the opposite in the polls.
And this is why the Democrats came right back to the table to reopen the government.
And what they did was they kind of ended up revealing their hand.
And they were like, we're willing to shut down the federal government for these DACA Now, for someone like me, and I think someone like you, the idea of shutting down the federal government doesn't really, you know, terrify us that much.
I'm like, I wish this was a real shutdown and make it permanent.
That would be great, okay?
But the Democrats are the party of government.
They're the ones who are telling you that the government is so important and it's so important for all these different reasons and, you know, whatever.
We'd all be eating poison sandwiches and kids would be starving on the street if we didn't have government.
Government is so important for all these people, yet we're willing to shut it down For people who came here illegally.
So it's just very naked and blatant.
Like, we will sacrifice, you know, the well-being of our citizens for people who came in from another country.
And it's like, okay, play that hand.
But how do you think that's going to play in the Rust Belt?
I mean, how do you think that's going to play to all of the voters who ended up breaking for Trump who you guys need to get back?
And I think they started seeing some polling data in on that and they were like, ooh, we better open this thing back up.
Ixnay on the Arkaday or something like that, right?
No, and certainly the far-left Democrats who are making these mad claims like you're somehow violating the rights of illegal aliens and it's like, As criminals and non-citizens of a country, they're not protected under the Constitution.
That's kind of the whole point of being a citizen.
And by elevating the needs and preferences of non-citizens, of illegal aliens over illegal tax-paying citizens, they're, to me at least, revealing that they are kind of like an insurgency.
They are, in a sense, a foreign government that governs a country called...
Illegal stan or something like that.
And they want to do a hostile takeover.
And it shows that they're interested in power.
They're not interested in America.
They're not interested in American ideals.
But the illegals are the left's path to get and maintain power demographically and politically.
Because as I've talked about in my show, Hispanics overwhelmingly vote for the left, like 70, 80 plus percent.
They overwhelmingly vote for the left.
For the left. And this shows that they are interested in power and they really don't care how they get it.
And that's been kind of chilling.
And I'm going to be really curious to see how that plays out in the 2018 midterms.
But I think that's given a real chill.
like there's something really alien and otherworldly and Saluthian in American society.
And I think there is this kind of recoil that's going on.
Like, hey, it looks like it's a fun clown for a kid's party.
And then it's like, it's it chewing the arm off the young.
Yeah.
And I got to say, like, I really...
Like, I... I'm very committed to believing in individual liberty and freedom.
And I hate the idea that anybody's freedom of movement gets impeded on.
I really do. In an ideal world, I would want to live in a private property-based society.
And if people want to move, they can move.
There's no welfare. You have to assume responsibility for yourself.
You can't burden the taxpayer.
And I hate that there might be some people out there Who would just come and contribute and not be a burden and that they might get stopped.
But it's like, you know, give me a break that the Democrats really care about individual liberty that much.
I mean, come on, we have the highest incarceration rates in the world.
They don't care at all about throwing people in jail if you won't fund whatever program you want to fund.
And it is very difficult.
This took me a while to reconcile this position.
I'm a few months behind you on this, as I usually am.
You just look at the stuff.
They're giving out ID cards so illegals can vote.
They're making it impossible to actually measure.
Some groups are trying to find out the data in Texas right now, and they're not turning it over to them.
This is obviously a scheme.
They're trying to import voters, and it's just going to have disastrous consequences.
Well, it's a coup. I mean, it's a soft political coup to rig the system so that people who are not allowed to vote can vote the left into power.
And that is really chilling because they're basically saying, not even basically, they're explicitly saying the rule of law means nothing.
The lust for power is all.
And whatever tricks and Twips we can use to get into the golden throne of power, we will use.
That there's no rule of law, nothing that they want to do that is legal.
And it's also crazy too, like at the moment, the left have turned into these manic free traders the moment that Trump talks about retaliatory tariffs.
And it's like, well, tariffs are bad.
It's like, I don't know if you're talking about this under Obama.
And if tariffs are bad, then subsidies must be bad.
And if subsidies are bad, then the other countries who are subsidizing all of this dumping of steel and other produce on America, they must be really bad.
And like, it's so weird watching them mutate and morph into whatever they need to...
B, to oppose Trump. They're just like this shadow.
Trump moves. The shadow moves.
But the shadow has no will of its own.
Whatever he's doing, we oppose.
Hey, we've got to embrace free trade as leftists in order to oppose Trump.
I'm a free trader! Friedman all the way!
Woohoo! And it's like, holy, people have like no, it's like jellyfish, clingy, weird stuff.
It's always, I've always found it really amazing that people on the left will understand basic economics when it suits them.
So, like, if you're talking about, like, you know, whatever, if they say, oh, we want to tax smoking, we want to tax cigarettes because we want less smokers, or we want to subsidize green energy because we want more green energy.
You're like, okay, so you get basic economics.
Like, if you tax something, you get less of it.
If you subsidize something, you get more of it.
Okay, how about taxing Labor and subsidizing unemployment.
Can you not just connect that if those principles of economics are still going to work over here?
We tax the people who work and subsidize the ones who don't.
So aren't we going to get less people working and more people on welfare?
And then all that goes away.
It's so inconsistent.
But as consistent, because Dave, you and I don't have access to the three magic spells that the left has.
The first magic spell is, that's different.
No explanation.
That's different. Okay.
It's magically different.
So that's number one. Number two is, scare quotes.
See, you and I don't get to put opposing arguments in quote and then march around like the cock of the walk thinking we've somehow pulled a Faustian-Socratic move and demolished all opposing evidence, you know.
Science! No, no, putting in quotes!
Like the James Damore thing, right?
Like, men and women are different according to science!
And this is science, scare quotes slash discredited.
You'll always hear this. These theories have been discredited!
Can you give me a source? My source is the word discredited!
And that is my source.
And if you have anything else, too bad.
And of course, the last one is...
Bigot! Right, that, of course, is the magic spell.
Racist, sexist, homophobe! Right, that's the last.
And it's like, because we don't have access to these magic spells, you know, we don't have access to the magic cleavage that gets you drinks or the magic spells that get you the appearance of being right, we actually have to do the work to find out the facts and make the arguments.
And those who can't see the difference, well, you're really part of the problem.
Yeah, well, it's one of the things that I've always appreciated about your work.
I think I heard you describe it once.
In one video, you have an obsessive consistency disorder.
It's one of the things I always loved about Murray Rothbard and you.
You're obsessed with this being consistent and not contradicting yourself.
It's a cartoon. People on the left will, in the same breath, in back-to-back sentences, they'll be like, there's no such thing as gender.
Gender is a social construct.
Also, I knew I was the wrong gender from the time I was born.
And you're like, well, okay, you could have one, but you can't have both of those.
There's no such thing as gender, so we need special programs for women.
What now? Yeah, like, what?
And they don't care.
And then eventually I just kind of came to the conclusion that if they did care about consistency, they wouldn't be leftists.
So that's the whole thing. Right.
Yeah. Well, and I think that weak arguers are naturally drawn to the left because they get this big hall pass.
They get this free, get out of inconsistency free, get out of jail free card.
Actually, literally get out of jail free card if you look at the Clintons.
So if you are, to me, if you're good at arguing, you kind of want...
To argue with the best people.
And you want to debate.
Like, if you really want the World Heavyweight Boxing title, then you've got to go box with the best boxers.
You don't just go around pushing girl guides over when they come to show you cookies to buy.
I mean, that's not really... And I think that if you do have the robustness to have your own ideas challenged, to pursue the truth as rigorously as you know how, and to submit to reason and evidence, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth because it's the humble intellectually who inherit the future, who shape the future, really...
Then you're not interested in the left because it's too easy.
It's too easy. I'd be so bored to sit in there going racist, racist, racist, racist, racist, racist all day or scare quotes or discredited or pouring out that weird verbal venom that the left is capable of that has you coated in a kind of gooey icker that's designed to repel people.
It's like you grab the octopus, you know, the ink or the skunk, like they just try and stain you with stuff.
It would be so boring because it's so repetitive.
I like new information.
I like new arguments.
I like challenging my existing opinions.
I mean, I've changed a lot, just in the public 11 years.
And before that, I changed even more from like Christian, socialist, minarchist, anarchist, against political action, for political actions, and so on.
And I try to sort of document the changes that have gone on, and people somehow think it's bad when you get new information to shape your arguments, but I seriously have no idea, Dave, how people stand it, getting up and doing the same show, or writing the same stuff, or having the same...
You know, crappy little snarkyments over and over and over again.
That repetition would literally drive me insane.
It'd be like being trapped in the brain of Rayman, you know?
I'm an excellent driver. I'm an excellent driver.
Just repeating the same phrases over and over again.
Yeah, and in a way, it works in our favor, because for, say, the last 10 years, while the left has really ramped up this political correctness thing, I mean, it's been there for longer than that.
But what's happened in the last 10 years is something different.
Like, identity politics has gone to a new level.
And there's, you know, it's like, The left used to always say, they don't say this as much anymore, but they used to always say like, you know, we want to have a national conversation about race.
But if you say the wrong thing, if you say the wrong thing, we're going to ruin you.
And so this, it protects them from actually having to debate anybody on the other side.
So they don't have to. So it's kind of like in your analogy with boxing, like they're, they're, Fighting fixed fights, guys who are taking falls all the time.
And they're getting fat and lazy and weak.
And you're like out in the woods punching trees every day, just bloodying up your knuckles.
And not even with my hands.
But I mean, now if it comes to a fight, I mean, it's like they don't have a chance.
I'm like one of the few people.
There's a couple other. But I'm one of the few people who's like in this world where like I'm on the mainstream now.
I'm a contributor to headline news.
I'm in there with the bad guys all the time.
I'll go on CNN panels and stuff, but then I'm also in the internet podcast world and I listen to guys like you and Tom Woods and all these other guys who are brilliant online commentators.
It's this strange reality that we live in where like, you know, that's supposed to be like the big boy grown up.
This is the official news.
This is CNN. And this is supposed to be just YouTube, you know, just like, and I mean, they It's not even like you would win the fight.
You're talking about Mike Tyson and his prime fighting an 8th grade girl.
The average contributor to CNN or MSNBC or Fox News for that matter, they wouldn't even be capable of coming on your show and having a conversation with you for an hour.
They don't have an hour's worth of stuff to say.
They've formatted their stuff into sound bites.
And they'd make one point and you'd be like, yeah, but that's completely ridiculous because of this, this and this.
And they'd be like, can we go to commercial break now?
Like, I don't know what to do here.
Oh, yeah. No, you see this with someone like Bill Kristol, who is a neocon, warmongering insult to a pretty damn fine comedian whose name he shares.
But Bill Kristol, there was something where he was – I think he was on some – I don't know, CNN or something.
And he was talking about his sympathies for the Iranian people.
And somebody was saying, yeah, but didn't you advocate bombing Iran at some point relatively recently?
And he's like – Do you stand with the Iranian people?
It's like, that's not an argument.
It's like, hey, the math teacher comes and says, hey, you said two and two make five.
Do you stand with mathematics?
It's like, what are you talking about?
It's embarrassing to see that this is sort of the default position that people go to.
It's embarrassing. This is like toddler stuff.
Yeah, last night, John Bolden was on Tucker Carlson's show.
And I mean, Tucker Carlson just left this guy like a bumbling fool.
You can almost see in his eyes, he's like, what's going on here?
I'm on Fox News. You're supposed to be blindly supporting whatever country I tell you to bomb.
And he's sitting there saying like, well, now that the caliphate's been defeated, Iran is the big threat because Iran's the big sponsor of terror.
And you're like, wait, but...
ISIS is the one who's inspiring terrorist attacks in Europe and America.
And you're saying Iran's fighting them.
So why wouldn't we be more concerned with fighting those terrorists?
And he's like, but I said the word terrorist.
You're not supposed to. What do you mean?
You know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?
That complicates things a bit.
Well, here's the thing about John Bolton.
Not only does he have the number one punchable mustache in the known universe, but two, I finally now know in an alternate Simpsons dimension what an evil Ned Flanders looks like.
Like a Ned Flanders with like chainsaw blood on his hands and children's heads nailed to a wall.
That's kind of what I know about now and that has cleared things up for me.
All too much. But yeah, these guys, how they sleep at night, how they go through their day having advocated for stuff that has destabilized the Middle East, caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, literally resurrected a slave market in Libya, where all the people, oh, slavery is terrible!
You know what's happening right now?
No, no, no. 150 years ago, you see a little.
No, no, right now.
No, but you see a hundred and...
It's like, can you go deal with...
Like, how do they do it?
I don't know, Dave.
Like, I don't fundamentally... They feel like a different species to me.
Like, how do they not sit there and say, oh, man, I've really, really done some terrible things.
You know, the dominoes that I pushed, maybe even with decent intentions...
Destabilized the Middle East, caught us a massive migrant wave that's threatening European civilization.
Like, holy crap, I get one small fact wrong in a podcast.
I'm like, oh no!
Oh, I should have... I'm going to fix that!
And they're like, well, yeah, okay, it's true.
I'm destroying a lot of Western civilization, but check out this stash.
It's really coming in well. Yeah, it's insane.
And I got to say, I mean, because I really kind of got...
Involved and caring about these issues, like around 2007, the Ron Paul campaign had a big influence on me.
And then I started finding more people like, you know, Tom Woods and Peter Schiff and yourself.
And I started getting really into these ideas.
And I remember at that time, there was a fairly strong anti-war movement on the left.
And Obama, maybe to me, the worst part of his legacy is that he just, he destroyed this.
Because once, like, a smooth-talking black guy was doing the bombing, nobody cared at all.
And I was somewhat, you know, not optimistic, but I was waiting to see, well, maybe, because now Trump is in charge of the military, maybe the left will get into, like, the anti-war mode again because it's convenient.
But that's not been the case at all.
And it's insane that Like people could oppose the Iraq war, you know, rightfully so.
I mean, it was just an absolute disaster.
And then the left goes to a place where we're not really talking about that anymore.
We're going to completely ignore that Obama destroyed Libya, the drone strikes that he just, the people he slaughtered, what's going on in Yemen, all that stuff, we're going to ignore it.
And at the same time, it's like, I used to feel like when I first became a libertarian, I was like, well, you know, the right has some issues correct, and the left has some issues correct, and the big one that the left had correct was being generally anti-war.
And now, what's happened in these last 10 years is the left has gone, eh, that's not really an issue to us anymore, we don't really care about that, with a few exceptions.
There's a few out there who are consistent, but it's like five of them, and the rest of them have all said they don't care about that anymore.
And then, meantime, you had Trump in what I thought was the most amazing moment of the campaign.
Stand up in South Carolina and say, George W. Bush lied us into Iraq.
He lied us into Iraq in South Carolina, the most military state in the union, in the Republican primary.
And then the next day, he took 60% of the vote while the other nine candidates split the other 40%.
It's like, so the issue from my perspective that the left was the best on, the right's far better than them now.
Well, that moment, and I remember it because...
It's like having deja vu, like, did I dream that?
Because everybody has thought that and nobody has said it in the mainstream media.
And the amazing thing about that, that people didn't understand that those of us who really do follow these things understood, Dave, was that the military families do not like seeing their sons and daughters squandered for nothing.
So if you want to hear real opposition to the Iraq war, talk to a vet who's come back from Iraq who says, I don't know what we're doing there.
It was horrible. There's no mission statement.
We've got these rules of engagement that cripple us.
We're basically sitting ducks.
The military families...
They recognize how much of America's military strength was destroyed, squandered, undermined, the trillions of dollars wasted, and they say, okay, what if there's a real threat?
We're not going to be ready.
And we're going to be discredited.
And nobody wants to join the military anymore, so they've got to keep lowering the standards.
IQ standards are just going down.
Now they're going to take people who've got criminal records and so on.
It's like, excellent! Good job!
Let's take great criminals and more high-tech weaponry.
And that is very much – people are very much out of touch with what is going on in the heartland.
And that contempt for the coastal elites is really deep.
And there's always been a streak of anti-intellectualism in America, which is always considered like a bad thing.
Like the Europeans, oh, the Americans are anti-intellectual.
It's like – but – America was founded on ideas, whereas Europe mostly was just like the bloody tumbleweed of historical inertia.
That's how things ended up the way that they are.
America was actually founded on very powerful, strong, enlightened intellectual ideas.
When they say that America's anti-intellectual, what they mean is, America is anti-leftist because leftism and intellectualism has become so co-joined in the West as a whole that it's almost like, well, if you're against the left, you're just anti-intellectualist.
Like, no, just kind of anti-bloodthirsty liars.
And that seems like a bit more of an accurate truth in advertising way to put it.
Yeah, and of course, like, all the socialists were intellectuals.
I mean, they were just horrifically wrong, but that was kind of their idea was, like, you put all the intellectuals in charge of society, and then this will be great because we can run everything.
And then you can look down your nose like, oh, these Americans, they just won't give up their guns.
It's just some guy in the middle of the country who's like, you know, pry this from my cold, dead hands.
But then at the same time, that's why, you know, there hasn't been a major genocidal government in America, and Europe has dealt with a bunch of them.
Well, that is powerful stuff.
And this, of course, is why the left is so keen on gun control, because they wish to expand the state and they know that guns are in the way of doing that.
And the idea that it has something to do with crime...
I mean, Wyoming has like an insane number of guns and like, I don't know, 50 to 100 murders a year.
I mean, there's nothing that's going on there.
And actually, if you look at American stats and you take out the top five democratically controlled cities...
For gun crime, America drops from high in the world to one of the lowest in the world.
So the problem is not guns.
The problem is Democrats and the welfare state and fatherless households facilitated by the welfare state and all that kind of stuff.
And people won't see that because they want to blame the guns for...
What doesn't work in socialism?
And it's the same way that you blame the uncooperative kulaks for not providing you the food you need for your communist revolution.
You line them up and shoot them headfirst into a shallow ditch.
There's this weird mad vanity that goes on where when reality refuses to cooperate with your ideology, you will literally kill people in order to maintain this ideology.
It's like, this girl loves me!
Well, then why is she tied up in the back of your van?
Well, she does love me.
She just doesn't quite realize it yet.
But she's coming around.
I'm going to be right out of the friend-slash-kidnapping zone any time now.
I just, you know, one more flower and she's mine.
And it's like, just let her out of the back of the van, you freak of nature.
Yeah, look, I completely agree with everything you just said.
And I would just add to that.
And I know sometimes this isn't the most popular opinion these days to take with people who are more conservative or right-leaning.
But I think if you're listening to me so far, I've established some of my hatred of left-wing politics.
I get these numbers from John Lott, who's one of the great defenders of the Second Amendment.
But he does make this point too, and I'm just addressing the war on drugs stuff, is that the worst murder rate in American history were the last two years of prohibition.
And when we repealed prohibition, the murder rates dramatically fell.
And if you were looking for a policy that could try to cut down on some of this gun violence, I'd say just repeal the drug laws.
Stop empowering, you know what I mean, the gangs and the black markets.
And that would be the best thing we could do.
But of course, you're never going to actually hear any of these leftists get up and recommend after, you know, you look at some gun violence problem that the answer is less state control and more individual liberty.
The answer always has to be, well, now we've got to round up your guns, too.
Right. Well, and I'm very much opposed to the war on drugs.
And it's important to remember that there was no war on drugs for most of American history.
You could buy cocaine in the local drugstore.
You could buy heroin if you wanted it.
And I mean, before it was illegal, it was cheap and little used.
Little used. And I've just been reading this biography of Freud, who helped popularize cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction and other things.
I mean, it turns out, of course, you just get two addicts instead of one.
Good job, Freddie. But there was no particular concern over these things.
And then, of course, when the government started paying people who didn't work, the drug war became more of a problem.
It's the same thing with tariffs, too.
So... In a system, a free market system, let's say that there's some tariffs in another country that subsidizes stuff, well, then your industries will recalibrate.
But the problem is, so they say, well, why is Trump so interested in tariffs?
Well, because if people lose their jobs, they go on unemployment insurance, they might get welfare, they might end up in disability benefits, they're going to have retraining programs and so on.
The government, i.e.
the taxpayers, i.e.
the unborn, are on the hook for problems in the market, this sort of semi-free market.
If there was a genuine free market, wouldn't really need to worry about tariffs because, you know, the town, like, why are there all these ghost towns?
Why is there a rust belt?
Because people are paid to stay where they're not working.
So it matters whether these people have jobs.
Now, you could go to the left and say, okay, I'm willing to give up any kind of tariffs, but you got to give up the welfare state.
No, no.
If we don't have any gold to give, if we don't have any free stuff to hand out, who's going to love us?
It's like, you know, you could stop paying hookers and just ask them, no!
Because if I don't bring money, no one's gonna bang me.
Right. And this is the horrible, slippery slope of state intervention is like one requires another, requires another.
And so, right. So you can say, oh, well, you know, I don't think you should throw someone in a cage because they're doing a substance that I wouldn't want to do.
But then you're like, oh, but I'm going to have to pay for that guy's health care.
I'm going to have to pay for that guy's, you know, unemployment.
And there is some validity to that argument.
It's just the correct response would be like, yeah, no, you can do whatever you want with your body, but you're on the hook for it.
And believe me, that would do a lot more.
That would do a lot more to disincentivize people, you know, living in irresponsible ways, is if you actually had a few examples around of like, yeah, and then you're stuck with the consequences.
Well, there is this real frustration that I have.
with these sort of two groups of people the people who desperately want to be adults and the people who desperately don't want to grow up because being an adult means you're responsible for your own decisions If you succeed, hey, great.
You know, you get the gold.
If you fail, okay, well, you take the hits.
And I want that.
I want... This is what I love about these conversations with people like you and being on the internet is like, I don't have a big logo.
I don't have dancing people.
I don't have like, well, I have a PhD in philosophy from...
I like the fact that nobody knows what kind of education I have.
I like the fact that I've got this bare-ass white wall of winter behind me because that's my challenge.
I've got to be half a cartoon character to keep people's attention.
I like that. I like the challenge.
I like the excitement of it.
But there are so many people who are like, well, but what if I fail?
And what if I do badly?
And they have this belief that somehow life should be risk-free or that you always need a safety net, so to speak.
And I just... I think that's, they're selling themselves short.
They are diminishing their own capacity to survive what they may upfront think is the worst thing in the world.
You know, like, you did it, I did it, I'm sure.
You ask the girl out, and you really, really want her to go out with you.
You're like, you've been thinking about this for weeks, and you're like, you know, I'm ready to go, you know, I got a nice little bit of stubble, I would style my hair back in the day, and you slide on me, you know, all right, and you ask her out, and she's like, no.
You know, and it's like, oh, that's the worst thing ever.
And then you go home and you mourn and then you dust yourself off and say, okay, well, I've got to aim at someone else, you know?
And the worst thing in the world that you think doesn't turn out to be that bad, usually.
And this fear of, well, okay, but I've got to have a safety net.
I've got to have, what if, what if, what if?
It's like, well, if you're that concerned, buy a whole bunch of insurance, but I don't know why I have to surrender my adulthood for your eternal adolescence.
Yeah, and there's an appeal of adolescence, because like you were saying, there's less risk involved.
But when you actually get out and face that risk, it's the most amazing, liberating thing in the world.
And the truth is that every great success has had a lot of failures along the way.
Everybody. That's the way it works.
There's no exception. I remember thinking one of the most idiotic criticisms of Donald Trump was that he had a couple of companies that declared bankruptcy.
And you're like, yeah, dummy, that's how it works.
You fail and then you pull yourself up.
Every success. I think Cosby, not the...
You know, you always have to have the asterisk, you know.
Cosby, asterisk, well, could be a rapist.
Not that guy. But he had something like 13 pilots fail before the show that was like one of the most successful shows ever picked up.
And this is true for everybody.
Literally every successful person that I know has fallen flat on their face a few times.
And that's part of the deal.
That's what happens. And a lot of times, you learn more from those failures and gain more from those failures than you do the successes.
And then by the time you're succeeding, everyone's like, oh man, he makes it look so easy.
But it's like, yeah, because I've been through this game a bit.
Well, I'd go even further, Dave, and I'd say you can't succeed big until you fail big because you can't handle the risk.
So when you fail, let's say you have something you want 100%, you usually don't start there because the risk is too big and you paralyze, right?
Like nobody opens at Carnegie Hall, right?
Like their first gig, right?
Nobody goes on Johnny Carson like for their first comedy gig.
So you have to start off relatively small and say, okay, I can survive that.
Okay. Okay. Next bit of risk, okay, I can survive that.
The courage to do the big things arises from overcoming the failure of the small things.
I don't think you could even get the big successes without the steps up.
Yeah, no, I completely agree.
Now, let's talk a little bit about where things stand on college.
Because, wow, I'm not sure if they're half asylums these days or not.
Or if it's just like, you know, there were these old stories back in the day about, like, you go to an island in the middle of nowhere, and there's an eccentric Ricardo Montalban-style genius out there, and he allows you for a million dollars to hunt a man.
It is the greatest hunt, the greatest challenge for hunters who are bored of lions and tigers.
And now it's like, somewhere on this campus, there is a conservative.
We have marked him with lasers, and you must find him and destroy him before the end of the day.
It's like hunting for conservatives.
It's like the new manhunt in colleges these days, and it really has turned into...
A kind of ludicrous, they strike me as monks, you know, it's grim, it's joyless, self-flagellating for bad thoughts is going on all the time, and this constant hunt for malefactors.
I guess it's a monk slash communist self-education camp or self-flagellation camp, but where do you see things these days?
You've certainly brushed by some college stuff in your career.
Yeah, I've done some college shows.
I really don't seek them out anymore.
I mean, it's just such a turnoff.
I'm like disgusted by the whole thing.
And it's not even like, you know, it's not like they're so trained to be offended or triggered, as they call it, by certain phrases or words or challenging any of their sacred cows.
And it's not even, what really pisses me off is it's not even like, you know, it's one thing if you're like cursing Around a lot of Christians.
And they're like, hey, we don't really like cursing.
We don't curse. We don't live that way.
We don't appreciate this dirty humor.
That's one thing. But you'll go to a college campus and they're like, ooh, you said a no-no word.
And then when we leave here, we're going to a frat party to go get blackout drunk.
And it's like, you guys don't even...
This isn't how you live.
You're not these people. And the thing that really bugs me is that, number one, they're not interested in ideas.
And number two...
They don't know anything.
Like, I could almost put up with the lefty kind of propaganda.
I could put up with the fact that, okay, you guys are all ideologically, you know, kind of conformed to this one point of view.
If they knew anything, they don't know anything.
Like, my grandfather worked in a factory.
That's what he did his whole life.
He worked in a factory and his friends worked in factories.
But, like, they knew stuff.
He read novels for fun and he listened to the classical music he had served in the military.
I mean, if you were to ask him about, you know, world events or military history or, you know, he knew stuff.
You go grab one of these, like, social justice warrior activists, they know nothing.
They know nothing. I mean, you go ask one of them, like, so, you know, who was, you know, what, how did the Weimar Republic fall?
Like, what? They don't know anything.
Yeah, yeah. And they've actually, they've been given this thing, which the left very conveniently does.
It's like, they don't want people to be historically informed.
And so they give them this almost like get out of jail free card with history, which is basically, well, before 1964, everything was racist.
It's, it's, the whole history is, is patriarchy, racism, and that's that.
So if you were like, oh, well, look at this tremendous step forward that the founding fathers made.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but they were racist.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
They were racist. And I'm not even saying like, yeah, okay, it should be noted that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.
Like that's a real hypocrisy that he was writing this stuff while owning slaves.
But do you really just want to brush off the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights?
Like these things weren't at all important in the development of history and the idea of freedom, but they know nothing and they're content with that.
And then they lecture you for not knowing their dumb words that they've invented in the last five years.
Well, white people ended slavery.
Sorry. If it wasn't for white people, slavery would almost certainly be a still worldwide institution, as it is in many places in the Middle East and in Africa and so on.
Yes, slavery, still 15 to 20 million people estimated are still slaves around the world.
Are you going to do anything about that?
No! Because those people can be mean, and we've pretty much broken the spines of white males, so we're just going to nag them about mansplaining and manspreading and all microaggressions, like, this is like it's International Women's Day today.
Are they talking a lot about Saudi Arabia?
This heroic woman in Iran just got sentenced to two years in jail for taking her hijab off in public.
Two years in jail for letting the sunlight see her hair.
Are you kidding me? And what are they complaining about?
Well, there's a pay gap.
It's like, well, I don't think there's a pay gap if you count all the women staying at home being paid for by their husbands as they raise their children.
But okay, that's your big thing.
That's the big thing. And this cowardice and lack of perspective with regards to where the real problems are, It's to me really horrible.
Really horrible. There are women who are genuinely being oppressed by a patriarchy in the world at the moment.
Are you going to say anything about that?
Are you going to do anything about that?
No! Why?
Like, do you not care?
Are they not women? Does that not matter?
Well, of course, you see how the left treats conservative women, and you realize it has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with the rabid ideology.
Yeah, you're right. It's all about ideology.
And I think part of the reason why they can't admit that is because it would then expose their belief that, you know, women are being horrifically oppressed here.
Because if you acknowledge how much—because, you know, like, okay, everyone's oppressed by certain, you know, things to some degree.
Like, we're all oppressed by forces of nature, by any societal, you know, any way we organize society.
Like, some people I don't know.
I don't know.
So it's like if you want to celebrate women, like I'm fine with celebrating women.
I mean, I know you have a wife who you love very much.
I just got engaged to a really great woman.
Like it's like, you know, I'm fine with celebrating women.
But you would think if we were going to celebrate women, we would celebrate some of the things that women are great at, that women do better than men.
Like women are more nurturing.
It's unbelievable the amount of patience that it takes to, you know, Love unconditionally a child and raise it.
And generally speaking, women are better at that than men are.
But like, are we celebrating motherhood?
No, it's always got to be some like, you know, here's one woman who is a CEO of a company and why aren't there more of those?
And it's almost like they have to celebrate women who have male characteristics or male accomplishments.
It's just very bizarre.
Yeah, and with regards to women overseas, it's a very simple equation.
You can't criticize Islam as a feminist because Muslims vote for the left in general.
It's very, very simple. I mean, it's not white males vote conservative and other groups vote for the left.
And whoever votes for the left, the left will protect regardless of any standards or morality or objectivity whatsoever.
Again, it's a drug addict looking for his drug.
There's not a whole lot of elevated behavior in We're good to go.
Willingness, if you are a public figure in particular, to subject your ideas to reason and evidence, to be criticized, to criticize, that we can all join together in polishing the historical turd of lies that we've all inherited to bring it somewhere close to the diamond crystal beauty of truth.
That is a collective process that requires we all subjugate ourselves to reason and evidence, and through that subjugation we gain mastery.
Over our lives and over the world.
Philosophy to be, like the world to be commanded must be obeyed.
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
You have to obey the laws of physics in order to have control over nature.
And you have to submit to reason and evidence in order to gain the truth.
And there are some people willing to do that and other people who are forever calling it airstrikes on that very process.
And I am very concerned that the gap between these two groups is widening.
And if I know when people give up reason and evidence, they have nothing left but force to get their way.
You can't convince someone, you have to.
If you desperately need something and you can't convince someone, you'll pick up a rock.
Right, and that's absolutely right.
And it's like, it's so, this is why I think the whole like microaggression It seems kind of subtle at first, but they take our precious, precious word that is aggression And then they start changing that.
That's a very important word.
That's been central to your entire work is really defining what aggression is.
And when you start saying, oh, there's microaggressions everywhere, then it's like, oh, well, you've basically justified.
Because an aggression justifies using defensive force.
If someone is aggressive, if someone's trying to kill you, you have the right to defend yourself.
And now if me asking where you're from It is an aggression.
It's basically this excuse to justify force, just as you're kind of saying, like, this is where this stuff leads.
And I think it's very dangerous.
I really, you know, I tend to blame college professors more than anything else, because I do think they get these young kids in that are very impressionable at a very impressionable age, and they lead them down this terrible path.
You know, I have had in my experience, I don't know if you have, but I've I would imagine.
But I've, you know, I've had some college professors who I've talked to, who they'll kind of do this thing, like, it's almost like they whisper to you, like they lean in and go, hey, you know, I actually agree with a lot of what you say.
And it's like this thing, like, where you're like, oh, okay, well, like, man up!
And stop whispering.
But whatever it is, and there's a lot of these people on college campuses who aren't necessarily leading the charge of this social justice warrior, you know, nonsense.
But they're just kind of there.
And they're intelligent people.
I think they're very high in like trait agreeableness.
And even though they're very smart, they just don't have what it takes.
Like they don't have that Jordan Peterson thing.
To actually fight against an idea or risk something or risk being ostracized.
But man, the college universities have let the crazies take over.
And it's a real dangerous thing.
Agreeing with the truth shouldn't be like a gay handshake in a homophobic nation.
It shouldn't be something that you just have to keep buried in the closet, so to speak.
Yeah, you can blame the professors, for sure.
But Marxists love free stuff, and they're handing out free tenureships, so to speak.
And there are lots of money floating into colleges these days because the government's funding all the grants.
I put it more on the parents.
Like, parents, you've got to do the research.
College is not like it was when you were younger.
It has become a toxic environment.
Now, if you want to go get your petroleum engineering degree, which is the number one in terms of lucrativeness, yeah, great.
Go get your petroleum engineering degree.
If you've got to become a doctor, you've got to go through the hoops, go become a doctor.
But if you don't have something very specific that is the portal that the piece of paper opens for you that you really need to get to, if you can do what you want to do without going to college, Going to college is mental.
It is absolutely mental.
It's not even a waste.
Because a waste, you end up kind of where you were but down a little bit.
This is like actively destructive.
These people will poison your brain.
They'll turn you against your culture.
They'll turn you against freedom.
They'll turn you against love.
They'll turn you against the opposite sex.
They'll turn you against marriage.
They'll turn you against commitment.
They'll turn you against honor.
It is a satanic mill where human beings of reasonable decency go in and outcome these twisted, distorted, Kafkaesque silhouettes of former human beings.
It is a dehumanizing, soul-stripping, satanic layer of hell that dissolves human minds in an asset of relativism and identity politics.
And people have got to do their research and find out if it's even remotely worth it.
And don't just look at the financial costs.
Look at the happiness cost.
Look at the knowledge cost.
Look at the love cost.
How are you going to, as a woman, you go and you're a patriarch in rape culture and viciousness and men are evil.
Like, good, go have a happy life with a man now.
Go be married. I mean, they literally are stripping people.
They are sandblasting the capacity for happiness out of human beings.
And people got to wake up to this stuff because you are literally sending your children off to a war.
They're not even armed.
They can't win. And they're going to get destroyed.
Yeah. And it's like, it's so it's damaging for everyone, man, because it's like, you know, on, on the first glance at it, you kind of go like, oh man, it's, you know, it's, it's, you know, if you have like a, if you're a straight white man and you got to go into this, this environment, that's going to be telling you you're the cause for all the problems in the world.
And so there's that, which, which is not good, but it's also, as you said, I mean, I think it might even be more damaging if you're like a black or Latino student who you're going in there and they're basically telling you, oh, you're a victim and you're not responsible for any of the things that have gone wrong in your life.
I mean, that's like, man, I wouldn't want to do that to my worst enemy.
Like that's a really, really horrible, uh, like mindset to plant in a kid.
And then as you pointed out for women, it's like, they put you on this path where it's like, Okay, you're guaranteed to be miserable in your relationships for the rest of your life if you keep this stuff up, if you don't shed this.
Because no decent guy is ever going to be attracted to you.
Like any decent strong guy, it's like, oh, okay, well, I'm not going to sit here and be lectured to about that stuff.
So you'll only end up getting these kind of the snakes who are like, you know, pretending to be feminist allies, whatever, who always end up being creeps.
Aren't those guys like, whoa.
It's like, now it's like, to me, it's just like, hey, Domino's.
Oh, I'm a male feminist.
It's like, okay, well, step aside.
I'm going to have to check your basement for hidden traps and, you know, chains and, like, horrible lubrications made from endangered animals and stuff that's going on that is pretty unholy.
And also, I think college, Dave, is...
Strip mining its credibility from the past.
It's kind of burning up the credibility of the past.
Because in the past, you know, 10% of the people went to college.
They were usually pretty smart. And therefore, the college, they could do well in college.
The standards were high. Now they're just casting their net so wide that college does not make you smarter.
Everybody needs to understand this.
Nobody knows how to raise IQ. Nobody knows how to raise IQ in any permanent way.
So college doesn't make you smarter.
And people go to college thinking they're going to get all the benefits that used to accrue to the top 10% of smart people in society.
But given that it doesn't make you smarter...
It's sort of like, you know, if you're a beautiful person, you go be a model.
But if you take a modeling course, it doesn't make you a beautiful person.
You know, it's like, well, the people who took this modeling course are doing really well as models.
It's like, yeah, because they were really pretty.
And they probably would have done anyway.
But just because you, Mr.
Quasimodo, has taken this modeling course, it's not going to land you on the cover of any magazines.
And they're really strip mining the prior value and selling the prior value to a new generation.
They're not going to be able to achieve it.
Yeah, it's like we decided to have the government start subsidizing loans for modeling courses, and now we've got, you know, everybody in society.
Everyone's got to be beautiful! Right.
And so, you know, no, I think college was much closer to the proper role of what, you know, college or university should be back when you said it was kind of a thing for elite, very smart people to go, you know, get like an enhanced education, get to learn more stuff.
The loans weren't subsidized by the government, so it was relatively affordable.
You weren't going to put yourself into debt.
And we've changed all of that.
And it's just, you know, it's like, it's not just academically what you're What you're learning is actually, like you said, you'd be better off just not reading for those four years.
It's a negative, what you're coming out with.
And then the culture that they create, I mean, it's really difficult.
I mean, I get a lot of younger men who listen to my podcast.
That seems to be like the demographic, our highest demographic.
And man, I've heard a bunch of stories about it, and I just Oh my god, it's just ridiculous.
One guy was telling me there'll be all these kind of feminist activists, female students, and they rant on about all this nonsense, and then they go hook up with the jocks at the lacrosse On the lacrosse team.
Because that's still what they want at the end of this.
And then it's like they're telling them about this continuous consent thing you have to do if you hook up with a girl.
May I touch your breasts now?
May I touch your ass now?
And who's trying that?
It's not the jocks who are even trying.
It's like the nice guys do that.
They try to hook up with a girl like that.
Then she's completely turned off.
She's laughing at him to all her friends.
It's It's just a real difficult situation.
But in addition to the point you were making before, where only a small percentage of the very high IQ population would go to college, it was also pretty well understood, I think, for most of history that some of the smartest, most accomplished people in the world never went to school.
Like it's not even just college.
I mean, like didn't have like, you know, like what we consider like a standard necessary K through 12 government bullshit education to begin with.
And I think one of the biggest disasters in modern history has been kind of intertwining the idea of education and school.
And that school is education.
Education is school. For me personally, I've learned a lot more outside of college than I ever did.
I've learned more from your YouTube channel than I learned in college.
That's a fact. Well, it's interesting, too.
And I remember having this thought, even when I was studying philosophy in university, that there were a lot of people who, oh, you know, get a philosophy degree, so I'll know about philosophy.
But When you thought about it and looked into the bios of the people we were studying, most of the philosophers we were studying did not have degrees in philosophy.
In other words, you're trying to gain credibility by having a degree by studying the greatest people in the field who themselves don't have a degree.
I mean, it's kind of weird in a way when you think about it.
It's like, oh, well, the people who are most successful, the whole reason we have this department, which is supposed to give you credibility in philosophy, is by studying people who never went to university for philosophy.
And it's like, that seems important.
That's, you know, those who can't teach, those who can't teach, teach gym, that kind of stuff.
The idea that you need that piece of paper to gain credibility is saying that the people who are going to judge you can't judge you by any objective standards.
They can't judge you by any objective standards.
They need that piece of paper.
And it's like, you know, you hear a song on the radio, you love that song, you don't sit there and say, well...
I don't know if this guy went to Juilliard or not.
I don't know if he's even won an award for this song.
I don't know if he's been recognized.
I don't know how many people have listened to this song.
I don't know what the YouTube count is for the video.
He's like, I just love this song.
I don't care about the background.
I don't care. Freddie Mercury never took singing lessons.
Like, I don't care. It's great stuff.
And just being able to judge things for yourself is a real challenge.
And the more we lose these objective standards, the more we need these ridiculous pieces of paper that have as much relationship to education as fiat currency does to gold.
Right. Yeah, absolutely.
I couldn't agree more. And it really is like, it also kind of, it gets people in the mindset that education ends at the end of college.
Well, I got my piece of paper, so now I'm educated.
And education is a process that should go on for your entire life.
I mean, it's about enlightening yourself, which is, again, as I said, I've done far more out of college than I ever did in.
Right. When are you doing your gigs coming up?
Tell people where they can come and see you over the next little while in your special talk a little bit about what's going on in the live world of Dave-ness.
Okay, yeah, well, I put out my first comedy special last year.
It's called Libertas. You can get it at gasdigitalnetwork.com.
It's also, all my podcasts are up there as well.
I'm going to be in Boston at Nick's Comedy Stop on March 23rd and 24th, and then I'm going to be out in Los Angeles at the Comedy Store on the 28th and the 29th.
So if you guys want to come check those shows out, and I'm always out in New York City doing shows, and Part of the problem is the podcast.
And yeah, I think that's good.
So just for those who are listening in the future, this is 2018.
If you're listening in 3018, we're either frozen, we brains have been transferred into robots, or we're long dead.
So I just want to make sure people don't show up in futuristic situations.
In Boston and end up trying to see Dave.
So just a reminder, the website is comicdavesmith.com.
The feed, great feed, twitter.com forward slash comicdavesmith.
Try and catch a live show if you can.
It's well worth it. And check out the comedy special.
It's great. Dave, a real pleasure.
I hope we can do it again soon. Thanks so much for your time today.
Absolutely, man. I would love to.
I've wanted to get on this show for a long time, so I'm really thrilled to have done it.
Well, your casting couch audition was fantastic, so obviously we were able to move forward from there.
