4084 Escaping Groupthink | Owen Benjamin and Stefan Molyneux
When you expose yourself to new arguments and information, your intellectual understanding can evolve over time. Owen Benjamin joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss their respective intellectual evolution, what important life moments lead to shifts in their thinking and the powerful journey one takes when they are dedicated to reason and evidence. Owen Benjamin is a popular stand-up comedian and his new comedy special "How Dare Me?" is now available on Vimeo.Website: http://www.hugepianist.comYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/owenbenjamincomedyVimeo: https://vimeo.com/owenbenjaminInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/owenbenjamFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/owenbenjamincomedyYour 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 a good friend, Owen Benjamin.
He is a popular and funny comedian, hilarious comedian, whose new special is now available on Vimeo.
We'll put the link below. And it's called How Dare Me, which is very good.
The website is hugepianist.
Do not mistype that.
Oh, you'll end up at my website.
So hugepianist, pianist.com, youtube.com forward slash owenbenjamincomedy, facebook.com forward slash owenbenjamincomedy, instagram.com forward slash owenbenjamin, and vimeo.com forward slash owenbenjamin.
This being the year of our Lord 2018, you can catch him June 1st in lower Yakima Valley, Washington.
He's yet to surmount higher Yakima Valley.
I think that's where the real money is. June 2nd, he's in Portland, Oregon.
June 4th, In Bellevue, Washington.
I was hoping to do that in one breath, but it didn't quite work out.
Owen, how are you doing? Great.
Thanks for having me. So we're doing origin stories today.
We're doing backstories to the intellectual dark web superheroes of thought.
And so I guess the question is, how did you get to be where you are?
What were the stepping stones slash landmines slash jetpacks slash catapults that got you to where you stand intellectually at the moment?
Well, I think what got me into comedy was the thought that anyone could do it.
It felt almost like fighting.
It felt like if you could be the funniest, it's almost like the free market of art, where Where if you made the crowd laugh or if you won a fight, people had to take notice.
And that's what brought me into comedy.
And what brought me into comedy also was that I would play piano at weddings and I would have more fun writing songs for the bride and groom and making them laugh than I would just playing Canon and D for five straight hours.
And then from there, things got pretty wild.
But that was the first thing that got me into Los Angeles and got me into doing stand up comedy and just watching Adam Sandler do Opera Man because my father sang opera.
And it was one of the only things that could bond us because, you know, I'm from a small town and people would make fun of my dad for singing opera.
And then that that sketch that Sandler did was something that him and I had in common.
And that meant a lot to me growing up.
It's funny, you know, I guess like you, I was kind of drawn to, wait, I don't need a license for this?
Woohoo! I'm in! Because, you know, I mean, some friends of mine were like, ah, you should go into the trades, you know, and I kind of looked into it, as I guess everybody does when they're cast and their net's pretty wide, and it's like...
Oh, I get to apprentice for this amount of time.
And then I have to get a license for this amount of time.
And then I have to be part of this union.
And I'm told to do this and told to do that.
And it's like, oh, can't take it.
Inverse hedgehog fish sandwich.
And so anything where it's like, you can just cast your net in.
You know, like acting or being in a band or comedy or what I do or what you do.
It's like you don't need a license.
You're not controlled by anyone and you can really be free to speak your mind.
And that was pretty tempting for me for a lot.
Like entrepreneurship, too. Don't need a license.
Yeah. And that's why it's extra tragic what's happening in comedy because it was the ultimate...
I remember you did that one, you were talking to a listener, and on the video on YouTube it actually has my tweet where it's all the late night comedians.
And they all endorse the same candidate and have all the same opinions.
And when you talked about how much you love comedy and how it's become this conformist state propaganda arm, that hit me hard because that was what I loved about it is that you never knew what anyone would say or where they were coming from or how they would do juxtaposition or irony or dramatic irony or all these wonderful things.
And once the election of Trump just changed everything where it just everybody became this humorless drone.
And that sent me off on this newest path that it seems pretty uncharted and kind of bizarre.
But that was a weird change to happen in my life.
Because in the beginning, I would sit in the back of the improv and wait for comics to not show up with the sound guy.
And if anyone didn't show up, I could do five.
And I was a busboy and a janitor.
And I lived with three dudes in a little room.
And it was exciting. And it was the American dream of just if you wrote Well enough and we're there every night and you develop this community you could succeed and I did and I went from being just a guy waiting for people to not show up to being painted on the wall of the Hollywood Improv and then after that having this weird pariah stigma around me for certain things because I won't take a knee on certain issues and how that's both built a career around me and also got me banned permanently from Twitter and It's an intense world,
but I wouldn't change any of it.
You know, I love the freedom of it.
This is one of these times in history and in life, Owen, where, like, sorry to say, you got to pick sides.
You know, I kind of like being the bridge guy.
You know, I like being the guy who can help the two worlds interact with each other.
But two people kind of have to show up willing to talk and, you know, without casting a whole lot of aspersions one side or the other.
Ain't a lot of people meeting in the middle these days.
And that's one of the great tragedies that people like myself and I suspect yourself who want to bring people together are finding that, you know, rather than bringing people together, we're like the guy in the medieval town who was convicted of blasphemy and they got like four horses and a rope tied to each of his limbs and they're all just...
You know, it's like, I can hold these horses together.
No, actually, I'll just be a limb bouncing down the cobblestone.
And that's become kind of tough because, yeah, I like bringing people together, but it's getting shot by both sides is not the best way to bring peace.
Right. And I also think that the best way to bring people together is admit the lack of middle ground when you're dealing with leftism.
You have to agree on basic fundamental rules to have any conversation.
And at this point, It's the lack of shame and hypocrisy or the lack of shame and not having any core values makes it so you can't really debate a leftist these days because you could point out You know, when they kick me off Twitter and they say, well, it's a private company. And I say, so you must then also have the same view of the cake, you know, the gay cake in whatever state that was.
And then they would say, no, but that's different.
And there's no shame in it.
And I'm like, so we're just playing basketball.
One guy pulls out a gun.
It's like, no, you can't use a gun playing basketball.
And then I realized that it's not about merit.
It's the inverse pyramid where it's about how much of a victim can you be?
And that fundamentally goes against What can pull people out of poverty?
What can get someone from being a busboy to being painted on the wall?
It can't possibly be who is the worst and the saddest.
I just can't play that game.
I don't think very many people want to do that, but they're just gaining all this power because, of course, it's attached to the need for government.
That's what drew me to you.
I never knew why.
I'm like, why is this happening?
Then I saw the jaws of the state where it's like, oh, because this is what justifies the father, the husband being the state.
Is this world of endless victimhood.
And that's the first time it actually made sense why these people are sabotaging what we've built in this society that's so great and I'm so proud of.
Yeah, you think you're playing a nice friendly game of chess or even a competitive game of chess at the park and the guy takes a phone call, calls in an airstrike, and it's like, that's not the repair!
Exactly. And here's the funny thing.
This is how hysterical it's become.
So I was thinking about this just before we got on the horn, Owen, which was, there's some great comedy that comes out of World War I. It's bitter comedy, of course, right?
And World War II had had even more.
I mean, just a silly example is when I was a kid, I was taught that song, you know, Hitler has only got one ball.
The other is in the Albert Hall.
His mother, the dirty bugger, she cut it off when he was small or something like that.
And it's like, so even when you're facing the Luftwaffe raining bombs down on your cities, you can, you know, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile.
Like they had good natured, good humored comedy and positivity.
While in a war where sometimes 100,000 people got slaughtered in a single day.
But by God, you go to a college campus these days, that's serious business.
They may have been able to joke in the trenches in World War I, but we're not joking anymore.
And it's like, you have to think, what?
This is like as privileged as a human being could ever possibly be throughout history.
And you can't even muster the same humor as a guy facing an oncoming tsunami of mustard gas.
It's unreal. And one of my close friends in comedy is Brian Quinn from The Impractical Jokers.
And we did a whole podcast once about that because he used to be a New York City firefighter.
And we talked about the gallows humor and how necessary it is when facing actual problems.
Like if he would show up at a house and a kid had been burned to death, like if you don't joke, you're mentally dead.
And so now that you have these ultimate privileged people like just on this nihilistic lazy river of nothing, They're almost getting their meaning from being false victims.
And all it does is, ironically, you know more about this than anybody.
It hurts everyone that they claim they're standing for.
Like, you know, black people are free, except if you disagree with us, Kanye, get back on the plantation.
You know, it's just it's so obvious that I don't know how people can possibly think that that's the The thought arena of freedom for black people.
Like, you have to agree with this crazy lady who thinks she's Native American?
Like, what? Now, that's cultural appropriation.
Yeah, I know. Like, look at Trudeau.
He's constantly dressing up like a...
It's like he's a village person.
Now, see, because I live in Canada, that's what the comedy stops for me.
That's my thin red line.
It's like, yeah, we can laugh about any...
Oh, Trudeau? No. Fuck that.
I can't laugh about that. He's like Hansel from Zoolander.
He is. He's the Prince Arella.
No question. He's the himbo.
But no, that is really tragic.
The Kanye thing too is wild.
You know, when he's talking about mental slavery, that's an old thing.
Right? It's the Bob Marley song.
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.
None but ourselves could free our minds.
And it's like mental slavery has been an old aspect of thinking philosophically since pre-Plato.
But it's like, now he's saying that slaves were free.
And it's like, To intentionally misinterpret.
It's like the final days of the worst dating relationship that you've ever been in.
You know, like, well, you look nice today.
Oh, so you're saying I didn't look nice yesterday and I'm not going to look nice tomorrow?
And it's like, oh man, we are going to have to break up or break through because this can't last.
Well, that's what I faced on Twitter.
It was the intentional misrepresentation of my hilarious jokes.
You know, it would be that...
Someone said, well, use this racial pejorative, so you're racist.
I'm like, but I was calling Justin Trudeau that, and he's not black.
I was responding to him trying to ban words, so I said the worst word possible.
You must see the joke.
I said, if David Hogg can't tell us what to do, he hasn't grown pubes yet.
All these people would say, oh, you're obsessed with a kid's pubes.
I'm like, You know you're misrepresenting that.
It's an old saying, like, until you have hair on your balls, you can't drink this or whatever.
Or we used to say, have a snort of this, it'll put hair on your chest kind of thing, saying that there's a transition.
Exactly. I was pointing out his age, where I'm like, this young person can't tell my vet friends that they can't I'm like, what's he going to do, rollerblade up and save the day?
You know, I'm just making fun of his inexperience with life.
And because of that, to watch the intentional misinterpretation, that's when I'm like, oh, we're on different.
Like, you're not even trying to find truth or find the right answer that lets us prosper.
You're just trying to acquire force.
And that's why I don't see the middle ground in a lot of these things.
Aren't you afraid? Well, I shouldn't say aren't you.
I tell you this. Sometimes I have to review, like I'm doing a video, like I did one on Marx recently, and Marx had horrifyingly revolting things to say about Jews, right?
And I'm like... Should I just put it up on the screen?
No, then there'll be a screenshot.
Should I read it out? Well, people are going to snip it out and then say, this is what I said.
I spend the rest of my life saying, no, I'm quoting Marx.
And it's like, so I just do a different voice for it.
I do a different voice for it so that if anyone clicks it out, they know that it's not sort of me.
But it's got to the point where you can't even quote bad people.
You can't do satire.
Because people are just going to be like, well, you know, that's what you're saying.
And it spreads like wildfire.
And then you're running after trying to pee it out.
And it's like, I can't drink enough to...
To generate enough liquid to put out this forest fire.
Well, right. That's why I don't fight them anymore.
That's why – something you said once a while ago I really liked.
You said, my tribe is smart people.
I started thinking about that.
I'm like, well, I'm not going – anyone who thinks that way isn't with me anyway.
They'll keep taking platforms or whatever.
I think one of the things that's happening right now that I find very interesting is – Me not being squashed and my survival, so many people have got on board with this because the town square execution is so necessary for authoritarians, where if you go off book or if you don't go narrative, they have to say, look what happens to Owen.
He was on a sitcom for three years set in the city that we can ban him from.
That's what happened in Pittsburgh. And I was like, You know, the socialist people claiming they're comedians, open mic comedians, would call every venue and get me cancelled from every venue.
So I ended up performing in a library, and 600 people showed up, and it was a wonderful show.
The cops stayed to watch.
The people who run it were invited back any time.
You know, because the audience I draw is like, good people.
Wait, can I just do an imitation of Owen Benjamin giving a comedy show in a library?
Are you ready? Yeah.
So what's up with that airline food?
There, and seen.
Can I get some cheeseburgers?
It's like, this is a library. It's like, oh, can I get some cheeseburgers?
And so on. Now, how old were you when you first...
So there's sort of the ability to make people laugh, which you figure out whether you've kind of got early on or not.
And then there's a process of, at least for me, disinhibition.
Is really, really key.
And this disinhibition where, you know, it's like, these are private thoughts.
I'm pretty sure they're not private just to me.
Like, I'm not the only guy who thinks or makes these kinds of connections.
And when people are very inhibited, there can't be any sort of human community or human connection because everybody's just so restrained that you can't actually have contact with the real person inside the vault.
And so the process of disinhibition, I think, helps a lot of people.
It's risky, of course, because when you're disinhibited, you're going to say stuff that's going to annoy people.
I think we're good to go.
self-censorship.
And so I think people out there who are trying to disinhibit and just push the envelope really help us connect with each other, which is my roundabout way of circling back, apologizing for the segue and saying, so how old were you again when you got into comedy?
Oh, yeah.
I think I've always naturally kind of been like that.
And what you just said is so true that one of my mottos for life that I try to stick to is I might be wrong, but I'm not lying, which allows me to be like, oh, at one point I did like believe in socialism because it was weaponized compassion.
I hadn't done the math yet.
And that allows me to make mistakes as I act out my truth.
Are very forgiving with that, and they're drawn to it, and it allows connections to be made.
And my first set ever was opening for Kevin Hart when I was 19, and that was after I had been a heckler at a renaissance festival for a summer.
Talk about losing your inhibition.
What do you mean a heckler at a renaissance festival?
What do you mean a heckler at a renaissance festival?
Just point with everyone with a cell phone saying, anachronism!
Anachronism! I mean, what does it mean to be a heckler at a renaissance festival?
That's totally enlightenment.
That's middle ages. This is renaissance, baby.
Get your shit straight. That's hilarious.
Yeah, it was more middle-aged festival, but I didn't want to really.
But I was like, so I was playing the role of a prisoner in a stock, and I would heckle people, and they would pay money to throw tomatoes in my face.
So you just insult people on the fly?
Yeah, and at first, I tried to be really clever and witty and stuff, and I realized that that didn't really dig.
And if someone was very fat, calling them fat didn't matter, or if someone was very gay, a gay joke didn't matter, because they're just, it's them.
What it is, oh, bald.
Yeah, bald. What's that?
Bald is, yeah. Well, you know, you're like one razor and a sneeze away from joining me, but go on.
No, but for example, you, a ball joke wouldn't work.
A ball joke would work on a guy with a toupee or a guy 10 pounds overweight- Or a guy with the thinning who's trying to cover the troops on way too wide a territory.
Right. It's where someone's pride is and what they're lying about.
It has nothing to do with what they are.
And so I realized that if someone called me fat, I'd be pretty bummed out about it because I feel like I'm 15 pounds, 20 pounds overweight.
I have a pregnant wife right now, so I'm snacking.
I have shame. But a 400-pound man is like, yeah, I know.
And so in that, I saw that whatever someone was hiding...
Is what would draw them out to actually pay money to try and hit me in the face.
And then the better I was at it, the more they would just throw tomatoes into the dirt.
It was like a force field around me that their confidence would be so shattered they couldn't actually hit me.
And then I would let them slap me in the face for 20 bucks and I made so much money that summer.
Okay. Well, it's funny because the overweight people too, particularly the guys, there are the guys who are a little overweight and they just suck it in, right?
And then there are the guys who have the tum-tum and they have this weird thing, I don't know if you've ever noticed it, where they're like, they fold their hands over their belly.
Yeah. Like it's completely camouflaged now, and you think that they're completely lean.
It's like, dude, it's not a hologram.
You're not generating a force field.
You're not screwing with my eyesight.
The fact that you can rest your elbows and your arms on your belly tells me a lot more about what you're trying to hide.
And then the guys who just overweight, and they never do any of that stuff.
They're just moving around like Jabba the Hutt on a catapult, and they don't even try to hide it.
Because what are you going to do, suck in your gut when you're 500 pounds?
It's like, whoa, that guy's 500?
But he looks 480. That's much better.
Yeah, there's a guy that just accepts their impending death, where they're like, yeah, I'm a slob.
I get it. I have a horrible childhood I never dealt with.
So what? I'm not going to throw any tomatoes at you.
I mean, what am I going to do?
A little comb over? People are like, wow, that's a comb over.
Woo! Other dimension, hairy staff has arrived.
And it's like, it's not, there's no reality to that.
It's almost like a dare, you know?
Like, can you actually just tell me that I'm bald or that I'm fat?
Or does my magic crossed arms and comb over change everything?
It's almost like a dare. Can you tell me the truth?
Let's find out. It is. And it's like the sophistry of the arm cross.
You know, it's almost like you're trying to create an illusion that isn't there.
And then women, if you heckle them, they never would throw.
It was always about over-sexualizing them.
And even like a grandmother, where I'd be like, oh, she's going to break a hip.
You know, I'm going to break her hip.
She's so beautiful. We'll take some of that centrum silver, you know, like that, like some type, like a clever sexualization, because then they want attention from someone who's queer.
I'm covered in tomatoes, like I'm a mess.
So it's not real. And then the guy would be insulted.
And then they'd all just be throwing.
And then there was this gypsy that would collect the money named Boob who ended up stealing.
Yeah, I don't trust a guy named Boob.
Well, I got to tell you, that's not breaking the gypsy stereotype quite a lot.
Kind of announcing that coming in.
I'm a gypsy! Where's my watch?
Man, I just had it. Right.
That's why it's called getting gypped.
That's where that comes from. Right.
So what got you out of socialism?
Oh, when I realized it mathematically, it led to starvation and genocide all the time and that it was a way of using compassion against myself because the selling point was always, do you care about poor people?
You know, do you care about equality?
And I'm always assuming of opportunity, not outcome, which is like the subtle thing that they never tell you.
And then once you realize that the Nazis were socialists, it's just a different type of socialists, it's any collective over the group Always will dehumanize the individual.
And then Ayn Rand said that quote that the most persecuted group is the individual or something.
I can't remember, but it was brilliant.
And it hit home to me. Oh, yeah.
I know what you mean. It's that the ultimate minority is the individual.
Yeah. Now, hers was the most persecuted group in America is big business, which just makes people's minds.
And she had the whole thing about the Sherman Antitrust Act.
But yeah, the most significant minority is the minority of one, the individual.
Yeah, totally. And this obsession with the underdog, and I remember a Malcolm Gladwell book, it might have been an interview, but he was talking about how he doesn't root for the underdog because mathematically, they don't deserve it as much.
And I thought that was so funny.
I'm like, why do we always root for the underdog when this other person has spent their life becoming really good at something?
And of course, I still root for the underdog in sports movies and stuff, and I want to see someone do well.
But It's this fascination with trying to make people Bad, the try-hard, that I started realizing that, you know, that with free market, it lifts everybody out of poverty.
And when you see what happened in China and when you see how shows like you are so helpful, too, when you talk about how the Dickens novels and stuff, you see these children in factories and you think it's horrifying, but if they're not there, they're dead.
And you don't show the farming Kids just starving.
And then what happened with Venezuela when you see Bernie Sanders endorse it and then it becomes hell?
You know, I just don't see how anyone can be that.
I think it's almost like weaponized femininity, just like masculinity can be weaponized.
This is weaponized compassion.
It's almost like governments are now treating everyone like a two year old that needs to be away from white sockets.
And that's just it's just death for a civilization.
And so I fight it as much as I can now.
Yeah, I mean, I was the same way when I was younger.
It sort of changed for me around 15 to 16.
But yeah, I was pro-socialist because it was like, well, that's how you take care of people.
You know, that's how people get their health care.
That's how people get their education.
And that's how they don't starve.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's how you take it.
You don't want people to fall through the cracks.
You don't want people to go hungry.
You don't want people to die for lack of health care.
And so, yeah, a little income redistribution is going to smooth everything out.
And sure, you can still have – there's an argument from John Rawls in The Theory of Justice where he says – If you could design a society that you'd end up living in before you were born, like before you knew anything about your IQ, your race, your gender, your family opportunities, the wealth of your environment, if you could design a society before you were born...
You'd kind of roll the dice.
You'd know that there'd be some unknowns.
So you wouldn't want a pure egalitarian society because what if you were a genius?
What if you were like Elon Musk?
Or what if you were just some business genius?
Then you wouldn't want to be in this totally flat society because you wouldn't have any scope for your abilities.
But what if you were born...
Pretty dumb. Or you were born deformed, or then you'd want a lot of sort of safety nets for that.
So he sort of made the case for this mixed economy, like half redistribution, half free market, because he'd say, well, you know, if you would design it before you were born, you'd want scope for your abilities, but you'd also want to be supported if you had deficiencies.
And I mean, it's not a great argument.
It's an interesting argument. But it seemed kind of like, okay, not full communism.
That's kind of crazy. But it seemed like the mix.
You know how they say thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Not an argument. But this idea, well, extreme capitalism, well, that was no good.
Because that was, you know, sooty and smoggy and the satanic mills and the kids coughing up weekly in the mines and so on.
And all of the stuff that was written about in The Road to Wigan.
Peer by George Orwell, you know, like these guys, they have to walk a mile underground before you even get to their job as coal miners and, you know, they have no life-saving equipment.
You know, one of the great ironies of the modern patriarchy is that the West invented labor-saving devices for women before they invented life-saving devices.
for men.
And so there was this sense, well, you don't want full egalitarianism because, you know, that's just kind of crazy.
But unrampant, untrammeled, unregulated capitalism is kind of crazy.
So we kind of need something in the middle.
And that seemed to be the sweet spot of socialism.
And it seemed kind of hard to argue against that because they've got this wonderful thing where if you have principles, you're automatically an extremist.
If you're just kind of pragmatic and want things to go well for everyone mostly, then you're sensible.
But if you have principles, you're an absolutist, you're an extremist.
And then suddenly you're off the reservation.
Yeah, I think empowering the individual, and I think you agree, is the best way to help people in need.
When I'm doing well and I feel a sense of freedom, I feel an obligation to help somebody.
It's not always easy.
Money isn't the best way to do it a lot of times.
Sometimes you give someone money and it ruins their life.
That's happened to me a few times.
To have this state, have this coercive ability of choosing what's right for everybody.
You know that a lot of these Organizations fail upwards, so you're ended up with the biggest sociopath, psychopaths on top figuring out how everyone deserves money.
It never works.
In comedy, what I'm facing right now is people say you can't use this word because it's a hateful word.
I'm like, you are not smart enough to tell me how to use words.
For example, Zach Alvinakis, back before this great purge of words, had one of the best jokes where he'd do these impressions of ironic characters.
One was the condescending illiterate where he'd go, I've already told you, I can't read.
Another one was the lisping homophobe, where he'd be like, all right, guys, time to kill some faggots.
That's not homophobic.
That's ironic. You've got to use a word that's the most venomous word you can in order to make that funny with irony.
I don't think other people have the right To say you can't use all the words to make your irony, to make your joke, because then they're just not smart enough.
It's kind of like saying we know better about who you want to support or what people you want to help in society that are not having a good run because we have a gun.
And it's like, no, you don't.
I've dedicated my life to writing jokes and knowing how to make ironies and not having hate in my jokes, but I need all the colors of the palette to do these things.
Well, I blame J.K. Rowling.
And I think a lot of people overlook what she did to the language.
And I mean, that's kind of funny.
But in a sense, you have kids growing up mad about Harry Potter.
And in Harry Potter, the word brings the evil.
And that's a lot of programming for kids to take.
Like, you can't say the word Voldemort, because then he'll hear you, he'll appear, he'll get stronger.
And the idea that syllables are food for evil.
Is really quite something.
And it is something that is a uniquely female perspective.
You know, because I've never heard from a man, Owen, it's not what you said.
It's how you said it.
You know, because we're more into content than form, right?
And this idea of how you said things, it requires...
Mind reading. It requires thought crime, that you can divine someone's intention behind the language that they're using and damn them for what you imagine their motives to be, which is guilty until proven innocent.
And it's the idea that somehow evil feeds off free speech.
And of course, evil can only be pushed back and held at bay by free speech.
But yeah, this idea that language feeds evil, it's not all J.K. Rowling's fault, but she had something to do with it.
I'm telling you that. No, I can't stand JK Rowling.
I used to tweet at her all the time.
But it's the A-bomb of passive aggression.
And what it does is it not only isn't true, it does the opposite.
Where if you say, if you don't say this word, that problem goes away.
That's the exact opposite of reality.
And I did a whole video once called Why the N-Word is So Bad.
And I only said N-Word because I didn't want it to get pulled off YouTube.
But the concept behind saying that a word is the embodiment of evil is so crazy because what they're saying is just by a white person whispering an incantation, you rob a black person of all their self-worth.
That's the ultimate in white supremacy.
Oh, that we have this magic power as white people to de-platform others from their own bodies.
Right. And intention, the difference in intention, where if you say a word, I just consider that an archaic kind of silly word from just a long time ago.
It's almost like if England calls us a colony, it's not really that offensive because we won, you know?
And so it's a lot worse.
Like, how worse is the word buy if you're a father abandoning his three-year-old?
You know, just bye, and if you never come back.
It's like, intention of a word is everything.
Where if you say, I just, I know that you know this, and I saw this once in a meme, and it kind of drove me a little batty for a while, where it said, imagine, in To Kill a Mockingbird, they're taking the N-word out of it.
Imagine if we did that to all of rap.
And that's a great point, and it's anti-censorship, but they still said N-word.
I saw that in a weird way where I'm like, they're still self-censoring as they're trying to show that they are against censorship.
I'm like, that's the ultimate devil trick.
That's the devil's trick where they already took a knee.
No, you have to say that word if you're going to say that you have the right to say it.
I was on this crazy mission to use that word and never be racist in what I said just to prove that a word is nothing.
And a lot of black people agreed with me, and they were just immediately called Uncle Toms and sellouts.
And it was so dehumanizing that I just wanted more people to just see it.
And a lot of people either saw it and were inspired by it, or they just put their head down and just let me get thrashed.
For me, I had somebody who bungeed in to my life.
It was part of my life, but because he liked the band Rush and the drummer for Rush was into Ayn Rand, I got handed a copy of The Fountainhead and just read it in two days straight and have read it every couple of years since.
Did you have someone who bungeed in?
Was there a moment where it's like, boom, lights are on and it's like, whoa, it can't be the same after this?
Yeah, there's been a few of those.
One was just touring with Vince Vaughn for a long time and he was...
You know, he's been libertarian for a while, and just to see Hollywood just treat him badly, even though he's one of the highest grossing movie stars in the world, and just having him talk about, you know, the gold standard and just- And a great actor, by the way.
I mean, his comedic stuff is great, but you see him in True Detective, it's like, that's terrifying stuff.
Like, he has got some range, baby.
Yeah, no, he's a legitimate genius and just a real artist.
And just to see just the fact that he would, on stage, you know, he would give someone 500 bucks.
He's like, baby, someone's going to get 500 non-gold back US American dollars.
You know, he would always like subtly slip it in.
He's like, non-gold back US American dollars.
We can always print more, baby. Come on, we'll just do more.
And that attitude, I saw like how many people would like just react to that.
And I'm like, but he's making a good point.
Like, can you argue the point? And reading Thomas Sowell, Black Redneck, White Liberal, Becoming Good Friends with Steven Crowder, a lot of people that would bungee into my life in a time when I started realizing that people weren't interested in finding the truth.
Because there was a time when I was still trying to find the truth.
I was just wrong. And then when I would find tidbits like this, and people would react like, but you can't say that.
And I'm like, have we not always been trying to find something true?
And then I started gravitating more to Your Show and Crowder and people like that.
And I couldn't even listen to some of the more left-wing stuff that I was listening to because it was, as a musician, it was like, it was noise.
There was no order in it.
It was just like listening to like, if there's Canon in D, just a beautiful ordered song and then...
And you're like, but what you did makes no sense.
Enter the cat into the symphony.
Right, and that's what got me more into libertarianism and conservatism and stuff where you have to have a base A bass structure in order to improvise.
And it's right in music.
And that's why Bach, with the well-tempered clavier and all the math behind it, you can apply it to everything.
Where it's like, unless you follow the rules of D major, you can't play canon D. And this postmodern nihilist stuff of, well, as a black lesbian left-handed midget, I can play any note I want.
And you're like, no, you can't.
You have to do the F sharp or it sounds like shit.
I think for me as well, I was thinking because, you know, we've had this topic for a couple of days, actually a week, so I've been sort of making notes and mulling things over.
Yeah. So as far as why I was more drawn towards socialism and why getting into the free market was such a challenge for me, I think, Owen, it had a lot to do with growing up in a single mother household.
And a single mother, it's not just a household.
A single mother is an entire culture.
It's an entire biosphere. Because when you have a single mother, usually, of course, your family income collapses and her chance for career advancement is diminished because raising kids, as you know, is like a really, really big...
It's the biggest job, right? So they don't have a lot of time to pour into getting ahead and You know, networking and going to conferences and stuff because, you know, their kids need their ears cleaned with a rough cloth.
And so I think growing up in that environment where not just my family, but I would say virtually all of the families around, you know, were in these dingy rent-controlled claptraps with roaches and, you know, like a weird blueberry juice in the fridge and, you know, like you're a hunter-gatherer within your own house just trying to put something together.
And I think that is such a vulnerable environment Lifestyle.
When I think about the people who are freaking out about Trump, I get it.
I really get it. Because there are so many people.
You know what it's like in America?
Massive proportions of the population can't handle a sudden $500 bill.
Something comes in and they've got to pay $500.
It's like, that's it. The whole house of cars.
There are people really trembling on the edge.
People not going to the doctorate.
People not going to the dentist.
People like... Really trembling on the edge of falling a long way economically.
And if you grew up in that kind of environment, that's a lot of stress.
And that's a huge amount of vulnerability.
And then if you walk into that environment and you say, well, it's free market.
You know, government shouldn't pay for education.
There shouldn't be such a thing as rent control and socialized medicine as a violation of the non-aggression principle.
People are like, hey, man, I love your Dungeons and Dragons fantasy world, but...
I have to live in this world where we're all hanging by a thread.
And they see, I think, the free market guys, Trump and so on, they're coming along just going, it's not true, but they cut these threads, right?
And everyone's just going to fall.
And I think the be nice to people, help people out, it's much easier to believe when you grow up around a really vulnerable and nervous and on-the-edge group of people.
Oh, yeah. And I grew up in a house that had very little money, but I had a two...
My mom saved me in a lot of ways because we could have been that family easily, and she just did that thing that women need to do more often and not just bail when they feel...
Unsatisfied or whatever. And she raised us.
We were poor. I never had new clothes until I was in college.
But she would have that old Wisconsin Jordan Peterson type, you know, frigid prairie eyes, like how Jordan Peterson's like that from Alberta, you know, just...
And she just made it happen.
And that's really cool what you just said, because that's important to have compassion to where people are coming from, even if they're wrong, where we would always take in those kids.
Where it'd be A single mom who's violent, which doesn't get any press at all.
And I'm glad that you're speaking that out because there'd be a lot of moms that would beat the hell out of their kids and they would stay at our house for weeks on end.
Or just be really clingy and have particularly the son be the stand-in husband and boyfriend and companion and soulmate and so on.
It's like you can't get free of that quicksand very easily.
Right. And that's in the black family especially.
That's why yo mama jokes are so insulting because a lot of these kids become, This weird Husband-son figure for their moms, and they get so viciously protective of someone who may be very abusive to them.
And that, as Thomas Sowell said, that the welfare state did what slavery couldn't even do, which is destroy the black family.
And that's why I try not to get conspiratorial, but I really think there's forces trying to destroy the nuclear family.
Yeah. No, I don't think that's conspiratorial at all.
It's very open in terms of the propaganda and the stuff that's being taught to kids.
Yeah, and that's why I'm so lucky to have my wife and my mom because I know how many women out there are so susceptible to that trick and that nihilistic stuff appeal.
And I really think that the family is the only way out.
And I recently had a book deal with a huge publisher.
That because of my opinions and my inability to not say what I say, I have to give back a huge amount of money.
And my wife was proud of me, you know?
And there's so many women that would have been like, what are we going to do?
I can't get my stuff. And my wife's like, you're the man that I want our sons to be like.
And I'm so lucky.
And it's what you're talking about with choosing...
Your partner is so important.
And I just highly recommend men out there get a good woman, choose properly, don't get some crazy lady, and just settle down and make a family because that is one thing that the state just doesn't really hasn't figured out how to crack yet.
Yeah, you should aim at the heart, not at the heart, because the heart is like a big fiery quicksand that'll take you down, and the heart is something that will propel you up.
Now, so I spent, I don't know, let's see, probably about 20 years cooking around the objectivist, small government, minarchist stuff, where it was like, okay, separation of economics and state for the same reason as separation of church and state, but, you know...
Okay, police, military, law courts, maybe some prisons, that like really minarchist kind of government.
And the non-aggression principle, you know, do not initiate the use of force against others.
People were like, they always had a dance around that, you know, always had a kind of dance around that.
It's like, okay, moving right along, you know, it's like you're showing a house and there's like one body hanging in one room and it's like, okay, moving right along, you know, we can fix that right up.
Let's move right along. Look at this countertop, beautiful.
No bodies here. And so for me, that always kind of bothered me.
But I thought it was the best you could get to.
I thought it was the best you could get to.
You know, like if I live to 100, I'm not going to be like, wow, I died really young.
Unless they invent some weird cryogenic thing, unless you live to 1,000.
In which case, I died as a teenager.
And so I thought that was the best you could get.
So then I'm at work back in my entrepreneurial days.
I was chief technical officer.
Then I was director of marketing for another company.
And I'm having a conversation with a guy.
And he's a smart guy at the office.
And he's like, we were at lunch.
And he was like, oh, yeah, well, how would the environmental protections occur in your kind of environment, right?
And I was giving him the usual libertarian answers.
And then I was like, well, wait a minute.
You could buy insurance for your air quality.
You could buy insurance for your water quality.
And that would mean that there'd be millions of dollars of an insurance company to be hanging in the balance of keeping your air and water clean.
And I was like, wow. Never really thought of that before.
And this whole idea of non-state actors being able to negotiate on your behalf, having people who have a direct financial Because, you know, the whole idea of the state is this idea that there's this group of people who are just going to be selflessly devoted to the welfare of strangers.
You know, like that horrible quote from Blanche Dubois, you know, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers, like a terrifying life to live in, right?
Because you've got to be manipulative all the time.
And with that, I was like, boom.
And I started thinking about it more.
Could we do defense this way?
Could we do courts this way?
And I just started really, really thinking about it.
And the great thing about that for me, Owen, was this great, You know, because when you have a principle like the non-aggression principle, and you create this big void, it doesn't apply, the opposite applies, and the initiation of the use of force is terrible.
But we need these things so the government can do it.
it.
It's like it's a splinter in the mind's eye.
It's like you ever do a toothpick in your teeth and then it breaks off and you got like a big piece of wood wedged in between your teeth.
They're like, I think I may have created more of a problem than I was solving.
For me, it was like, okay, stateless society, voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism, whatever you want to call it, that is the principle and no violation, no exception, no undermining.
The That is the principle as it goes.
It must have been like, you know, when Einstein said, oh, speed of light is constant.
Let's just work from there. Sounds crazy.
You got weird time stuff going on and you go faster and faster and you get more and more mass and you slow down time.
So it feels really, really freaky, but it explains so much.
And just having that principle, the non-aggression principle...
In the family, in politics, in business, in relationships.
It's like, ah!
Because the amount of hamsters you've got to keep going when you have a contradiction in your thinking, to me, is enormous and it's exhausting.
I almost burned out on minarchism because it's like, I can't...
Can't keep these helium balloons from floating away anymore.
And so for me, that moment where I was like, OK, well, it could work this way.
Where else could it work? And it's like, hey, I could just have this principle.
And it feels weird. It feels freaky.
But what if you just have that principle, and that's what you live by, the non-aggression principle?
And it was like, ah.
And for me, it's been ah.
For a lot of people, it's ah!
So that's the challenge.
No, it's beautiful, man.
Because if you have a fundamental principle that is wrong, And you build your house on it.
That's why you see this constant cognitive dissonance of the left, especially because, you know, Trump is Hitler, but give him your guns.
And you see that this, you know, keep GMOs out of our food, but pump this five-year-old with hormones because he's knitting for a day, you know, like these constant contradictions.
And it's because their fundamental principle is off, that humans are all the same and all differences are based on oppression.
That's wrong. And so out of that comes everything wrong.
And the non-aggression principle is cool because it doesn't do that.
And it also explains like China.
China has one of the biggest, most powerful governments and it has one of the worst ecological disasters.
Oh, the old Soviet Union, they had lakes of battery acid.
It was a mess because nobody had any personal investment in protecting the property.
Yeah, and personal accountability, and that's also what's happening with healthcare, where if you incentivize the lowering of insurance versus incentivizing the bloating of the costs, which is what we're currently doing, we could just lower the cost of healthcare.
Where if you had people researching how to cure diseases and you're incentivized based on success and not based on bludgeoning the population with a gun, we could actually lower how much healthcare costs because that's the real problem.
We just got an ultrasound.
It was like 700 bucks, this machine that looks like it's out of the first season of Star Trek.
And you can kind of see that it's a human, and that's $700.
We know that that's not the market price of that.
You know, it's just bludgeoning.
No, and for me, as you know, when I had a tumor in my throat, after a year of being dicked around in Canada, I just took a flight down to the Oklahoma Surgery Center, and they saved my life.
And, you know, we say, well, it cost me some money.
It's like, you know what else costs money?
A funeral. Really, really quite expensive.
And you know what else costs money?
Not being able to earn any money for the rest of your life because it's over.
That also costs money.
And so, yeah, it is.
And these guys, you know, they're fantastic.
And, you know, I just really want to plug them because, you know, they're fantastic and I owe them my life.
But yeah, there's a lot of great stuff that can be done in terms of healthcare.
I had Dr. Mary Ruart on the show who was pointing out that FDA regs that keep life-saving medicines out of the hand of Americans that are legal in other places and perfectly accepted in other places have killed millions of Americans, all because a couple of kids got mutations in the womb because of thalidomide,
which was terrible. But you weigh that versus, you know, she's calculated millions and millions of Americans died prematurely I think a big problem we're facing is how easily tricked people are because of the infestation of public education.
Like what you just explained is like textbook just trickery.
It's the same risk versus reward.
People don't understand statistics at all.
If one person complains to a theater I'm performing at, they would rather shut me down than realize that that's nothing.
That's a gnat. That's nothing.
And they could end up making more money in the long run because I really think a lot of people are really dumb.
And they could be smart. But they just have been taught nothing in school.
They've been taught that everything bad comes from white Western America, and that math doesn't matter, and it's just the easiest way to trick people.
And that's what I'm worried about, more than anything, is are people capable of seeing the world for what it can be?
Or are they so warped?
That they just are so trickable.
I don't know. To me, this idea that the West is so terrible is so racist to everyone outside the West who's trying to get in.
Right. How stupid do I think someone has to be to say, well, this building is currently on fire and about to collapse.
And he shows up with his blanket saying, I'm moving in.
It looks great. Seems fine.
Seems like that dog in hell.
Seems good to me. It's like, if it's so terrible, are you saying that everyone literally risking their lives to go from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, that they're so stupid?
That they go from a place that's good to a place that's terrible, even though there's social media.
Are you saying that they're just so dumb that they're going to climb?
You know what's going to happen in the Titanic.
And it's like, I've got to get on that ship, man.
That's the place.
I'm good at dram-proofing.
I like a nice chill shower.
So I'm good to go.
Of course the West is the best.
That's why everyone tries to get in.
And the idea that saying the West is the worst is just a huge insult to people who are literally dying trying to get in.
Well, it's just opposite town.
I did a Facebook post recently where I was like, yeah, people say Trump is sexist, anti-gay, and one other thing.
At the end, I said, last time I checked, he's against Sharia law.
What they're criticizing is outlined in a lot of these cultures that they're saying are not bad.
Well, the West, who were the first people to literally pay to free slaves.
That dude that you talked about, I actually knew about him because I was fascinated by that as well, but no one knows his name.
I still can't even think of it.
In England in the early 1800s, he was pushing so hard to free.
He had some weird name.
Was it Wilberforce? What's that?
Was it Wilberforce? Wilberforce, yeah.
Like that should be like a Gandhi, but no one knows his name.
Like this dude, his whole like life, he's pushing to free slaves and we just get blamed for slavery where for a thousand years it was the Arabs.
Well... Yes. And I got to tell you that I think for a lot of Western culture, it's like, sure, let's do more great things for the world because they're just so grateful.
They're just like, wow, thank you.
Free markets. Wow.
Air conditioning. Excellent.
Computers. Sounds good to me.
Separation of church and state. Well, you know, maybe at some point in the future.
But it's like all of these great things that have saved hundreds of millions of lives, if not billions, or allowed them to come into existence.
It's like, yeah, you know, we might want to hold off on Handing out all these goodies because it just seems to make us the most hated group on the planet.
Well, yeah. If you look at some of my family history and probably a lot of Canada, we have a cuckery Achilles heel where very, very cold climates, I think, sometimes can breed a culture of people that just avoid conflict and just kind of let people talk shit about them.
Which is very weird to me, because I'm part Scandinavian and part Czech, and the Scandinavians are kind of like Canadian in that sense, where they just kind of avoid certain types of conflict, and they'd rather just let a bunch of rape gangs come in the country.
It's very weird. I think it comes down a lot to feeling that You know, if you earn your money, you tend to take good care of it.
If you feel you just won the lottery, it's a little easier to just, you know, well, man, I was just lucky.
So here, let me buy you this thing.
So if Europe or the West as a whole thinks that the success of the West, which is undeniable, I just look at sort of income and freedoms and so on.
If we think that the success of the West is just, well, you know, the guns, germs and steel argument, well, it just happens to be geography and it happens to be climate and it happens to be lack of disease and you're just lucky.
In which case, okay, if we're lucky, we should share a lot.
But if we kind of earned it through hard work, through labor, and also, you know, a lot of dumb people in cold climates don't make it through the winter because they're like, I'm hungry.
And then it's like, well, you're not going to do too well because it's a long way to spring.
And so, especially when there's farming, when there's farming involved, people who don't plan, people who don't think ahead, people who don't cooperate.
Like the Amish thing. Everyone goes to help build the barn.
If you don't show up, then you're going to need a barn at some point.
No one's going to show up to you because if we lose our capacity to ostracize, then we end up with this big giant state trying to run everything that ostracism should run instead.
But so if we feel like, oh, well, we were just lucky, then it's almost like we're morally obligated to share all of this good fortune with just people who were unlucky.
And we're both standing in a field with umbrellas.
You got hit by lightning. And I'm not like, well, sucks to be you.
Off I go. And so if we think it's all luck or if we think it's all exploitation, that makes it even worse.
If the only reason Europe is rich or the West is rich is because we stole resources and slaves and so on from all these other countries, then it's like, well, we've got to hand out all these goodies because they're unjustly earned.
You know, if you got, I don't know, 50,000 bucks and someone comes to you and proves to you that that money was stolen by your father from his father and was given to you, you'd be like, okay, well, you know, here you go, have it back kind of thing.
And so this is one of the reasons why our history gets stripped from us is so that we feel this obligation to hand out everything to everyone, which is going to end up with nobody having anything.
Yeah, it's really weird.
And I think I see that a lot with rich kids that are from families without a lot of connection.
Because they really do feel like they didn't earn it or deserve it, and they don't have the infrastructure in their families to show the lineage of great-great-granddad who rode here on a boat and then pulled lead out of the ground to allow you to have what you have.
Don't feel guilty about it.
My grandfather was a lead miner, and It allowed my parents to be educated, which allows me to sing songs about my wiener.
I'm sure he's happy to have made the sacrifice.
If I can just hand the opportunity and leisure for endless dick jokes to my grandson, that makes all of this worthwhile.
Yes, he's just pulling lead with seven fingers out of a Wisconsin wiener.
But oddly, it does help me keep perspective where I think This isn't a gift.
It's just a multi-generational gift.
I didn't earn it, but my family earned it.
And that allows me to not just want to give it away.
And I'm also a quarter Ashkenazi Jew, but I didn't know about that until I was like 20.
So my joke is...
But I always knew I was up to something.
That was my joke. And a lot of Ashkenazi Jews are very intelligent because the smartest...
Guy would get the sex.
Well, yeah, the rabbis have to know a couple of languages and they had higher birth rates for the last 700 years and you add a third of an IQ point per generation because of that positive eugenics and next thing you know, you got your standard deviation above, right?
Yeah, and that always blows my mind that people won't admit that that is an evolutionary force, where it's like our thickness of eyebrows, our noses are constructed based on the dryness and warmth of air, and everyone's fine with that, but nothing about intelligence.
I always found that so weird, and it's not even a race thing.
It's just about an area where Who gets to procreate?
And I'm sure there's probably parts of Africa with horrifying monsoons or deserts or something where the guy who planned got sex.
But in general, if you look at Norway and Ashkenazi Jews, the smart dude, regardless of how big a spear was, was getting sex.
And that allowed that gene to go forward.
And that's all evolution is. It's blind.
It's just how... Can your kids...
Stay alive long enough to have kids.
That's all it is. It's blind.
And for people to discredit that, I think does way more harm than good, because it's just, it's obviously true, you know?
Well, it is one of these great tragedies of history, that the suppression of the Jews was just another big, giant, asshole government program.
Well, we're not going to allow the Jews to own land, and we're not going to let them do this.
And so they end up, you know, as doctors, accountants, and bankers, and so on, because they're not allowed to own Rightly so.
That, you know, next purge could be tomorrow.
So we got to keep mobile. We got to keep things moving.
And so you want to keep your assets mobile and land is not very mobile.
Of course, you could dig it up with a shovel and take it in a bag.
And so this whole idea that we're going to make sure that those Jews are kept out of power and so on.
And basically you're creating conditions so harsh that Jews get smarter and smarter and smarter at the same time.
As you have the Catholic Church in particular saying, well, we don't really want to have a whole lot of our property devolved to the children of priests, so I'll tell you what, let's take the smartest people and have them not have kids at all.
We'll put them in monasteries. We'll make them celibate.
And that way, they won't have any kids at all.
So at the one time, you've got evolutionary pressures to making Jews smarter and smarter and smarter.
At the same time, you've got evolutionary pressures that are keeping smart people from reproducing in the Christian world.
And that all came to a head, of course, in the Black Death and the things revolved.
And then after you get Martin Luther, right, nailing up his theses to the church door in Wittgenstein saying, okay, maybe some smart people can have kids once in a while.
Does that seem like a positive thing for us at all?
Boom! Next thing you know, you've got smart people having kids.
You've got the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason.
You've got the explosion of the Industrial Revolution.
It's like, wow, that seems like a rather costly decision.
We're going to hold on to our land and destroy the future.
Yeah. Right. It's so telling of today.
I always thought that the 95 Theses was almost like the most powerful blog post in history.
I got some blog posts I'd like to nail some people in.
Yeah, but it's also like one thing that I think people, what kind of drew me away from Christianity, falsely, was the corruption of institutions where the Catholic Church, like every problem I had with it wasn't the word, it was the way it was interpreted and how they were trying to intentionally keep people ignorant.
I would go to church as a kid, and it would be in Latin.
And I remember thinking, like, they're intentionally trying to not start a debate.
And I was joking with Crowder about that, where I'm like, you know, we'd be talking about theological stuff, and I wouldn't know half the verses he's talking about.
And I was joking about how I'm like, but I put a dollar in the basket, so I'm going to heaven, right?
And how the Catholic Church was almost like the socialism.
It was almost like the big government of religion.
But then, you know, I'm friends with Tom Woods, who's made me respect How the Catholic Church kind of kept a lot of the greatness of Rome and Christianity and stuff alive in some really rough times.
So I'm not just gonna, you know, say the Catholic Church is bad, but the institutional aspect of it, the big government aspect of it, the how do we keep our land in gold, and how do we contradict so many of Jesus's teachings, like, And no one seems to care.
led to so much stress and problems.
Well, I mean, to be fair, Jesus himself warned against institutions and the corruption of human beings.
Of course.
So, I mean, this is not something that was – that's not to me.
The essence of Christianity is to recognize that human beings – I mean, I'm not so big on the original sin thing, but human beings have a natural tendency to want something Now, in that, the Christians, Jesus himself, and the Darwinists are completely aligned, because evolution is just getting more for less, right?
Getting more for less, right? I can get, you know, if I evolve these really fast legs as a cheetah, I can get more meat per calorie of running.
So people wanting more for less, that's right there in evolution.
All organisms want to make maximum use of resources and calories.
And it's the same thing that, you know, the desire for the unearned, one of the most foundational roots of evil doing.
So to me, that's where there's this great continuity.
And this is what's so frustrating to me about atheists.
And I've been one of them, right?
Throw the baby out with the bathwater back in the day, which is like...
I've got logical problems with this, so out with all of it.
And it's like, you know, there's a lot of really good stuff because religion evolved as well.
And religion evolved for particular efficiencies that really need to be examined.
And, you know, you can't just toss out everything without at least providing the replacement.
And that's my big thing. You know, that's my big analogy.
I'm just working, I'm just finishing up a new book at the moment.
The big analogy is, you know, you've got this terrible storm and the church is the only place where people can be Out of the hail and the branches and the lightning and the cyclone and so on, you get these atheists coming along and saying, you know, this church, it's badly constructed.
It's like ripping the roof off.
And people are like, hey, man, we got cows flying in half frozen from the storm.
And they're hitting our kids.
And they're like, no, no, but this is not a well-made structure.
It's like, where else are we supposed to go?
Go out into the rain.
We're going to fix all of this.
And then they get bored and wander off.
And people are like, well, that was great.
Now we've got no church. And the storm is even worse.
Yeah, it's like you can only think about gluten when you have an excess of calories.
No starving man is ever like, is there gluten in this bagel?
And I think that right now our society is stripping back until people...
There was times when I was very agnostic, and I think it was because society was so obviously on board a moral direction that I could almost just...
Just think that way.
Now, in the face of real nihilism, in the face of a real destruction of morality, I've fallen back more to my Christian roots, but away from my Catholic roots.
I've had an interesting time balancing that.
When my son was being born and his heart stopped and I prayed to God after that, it's tough to deny that that happened.
Then you have to face that you were begging God to save your son.
There's a lot happening with that stuff.
I'm starting to understand the limitations of my brain to even understand the concept of creation or any of that.
I really like Christians.
There's some really cool atheists, but I think long term, I just don't know how you just pass on this really good tradition that we have with atheism.
I think in a few generations, sometimes it leads just to real horror.
Well, you know, the arrogance of atheists is a big challenge, because there's no question that there are logical problems with the concept of God and of religion.
From a purely logical standpoint, it's easy to chip away at that.
And again, I say this full confession, I've done it in the past and all that.
But what happens is then you get the atheist who's measuring his strength against the weakest aspect of another position.
And if you just take the strongest part of your position and measure it against the weakest part of another position, it's easy to get a false sense of security and superiority.
Like if you compare your piano playing to my piano playing, well, you're going to sound fantastic because I'm still working my way through 101, right?
But there are other things I'd be better at.
So if you just compare your strength To other people's weaknesses, you do get a kind of arrogance.
And for sure, when it comes to like raw logical analysis, you got to give the edge to the atheist.
But when it comes to, I don't know, basic morality and the survival of a civilization and the capacity for people to restrain their own desire to get something for nothing.
And when it comes to thou shalt not steal, because atheists tend very much towards the left and to big government and the use of force rather than The use of shame and ostracism and guilt and self-restraint, that is a peaceful way of getting people to limit their own behavior.
If you compare the strength of Christian self-regulation with the weakness of atheists running towards the state for coercive solutions that just make everything worse in the long run, that's a whole different equation.
And that's where my humility as a thinker sort of grew over the last couple of years.
Also, we're talking about the bungee cord.
One was Tolstoy's confession, where when he would talk about his reconnection with Christianity, how many things hadn't changed, where none of the big questions are answerable by science, like, how are we here?
How did we even become multi-celled organisms?
Russia in that time reminded me a lot of Hollywood right now, about people just being paid by the A number of pages and just the vanity and the sloth and how he was this wealthy, famous man and he couldn't be around a rope because he was scared he was going to hang himself,
you know? And reading that book and then really thinking about a lot of this stuff because some of the criticisms that atheists do are accurate and you can have both where it's like what you've talked about in the past with You know, an ability for people who've lost vitality to keep their tribe strong.
I can't remember how you phrased it, but it was something really cool.
I think that that and God can simultaneously exist because of the perversion of it by people to get more gold and sexual resources and stuff has happened so many times in history that I think you can have both simultaneously, that the corruption of man isn't really what the discussion of what God is.
And my mom Didn't like Original Sin to the point where she called it, my baptism was my entrance in the Christian community, because she was like, this baby is beautiful.
And I just see Original Sin as the Jungian shadow self, and I can come to terms with that.
Just kind of like how admiration and envy or greed and ambition are almost the same thing, just depending on if it's the shadow or if it's the goodness.
Yeah. I mean, I see original sin as a rather primitive way to attempt to smash the bottomless greed of the merely Darwinian organism, which is terrible.
It's sort of like basic training where you have to smash the individuality of the guy to get him to function in a government-run army.
And so it is to me like the angry dominant will, the Nietzschean will, the will to power, the will to dominance, the will to gain resources.
Is something that, if untrammeled within society, leads you directly to Kennedy's slash Clinton's slash hell itself.
and this will to power.
You can see this going on with the Mueller investigation.
This is will to dominate, this will to power.
And how do you counter that?
Well, Christianity's answer was to say, okay, well, we kind of cripple you at the beginning and have set you against yourself so at least that you don't have this massive will to dominate, that we're going to give you a goal other than merely Darwinian domination, which is called getting to heaven, that's going to require some pretty damn civilized behavior.
And if you don't manifest that civilized behavior, you don't get to go to heaven.
And it's a way to me of kind of setting your spears against the onrushing charging of the Darwinian will to power.
And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint and it's complicated, but in the 19th century, well, the Darwinian horses overlapped the spears of Christianity And there has been some real progress from that.
I'm not going to, you know, this is one of these really complicated, you can see good and bad in both.
But the will to power...
We can see this with the totalitarians of the 20th century, with the wars, with the growth of fiat currency, which is a will to power mechanism, one of the greatest.
And so there has been a lot of breakthroughs, but there's also been breakdowns of, you know, I mean, Jim Crow and segregation all had to go.
Limitations on the rights of women had to go.
More respect for minorities had to come about.
So there was, you know, like all of these things, you can focus on one side or the other, be really happy or really angry, but it is such a witch's brew of plus and minus.
I think the analysis helps so people can start to talk about it more intelligently.
But yeah, that's the way sort of I frame original sin.
It's like, well, otherwise we're just, you know, we lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead because that advances our genetics.
Yeah, and look at Ted Kennedy and a lot of these people.
The thing about will to power is it works.
Yes, it does. When there's a state, it all seems to work with a government.
Privately, you take a lot more hits.
Well, yeah. Also, it works if you measure it based on success, based on acquisition of resources and power.
What it doesn't do is lead to any type of life worth living.
You can see that with the Stalins of the world where His, you know, his own son is electrocuted on a fence in Siberia.
You know, half these people are like stabbed by an ice pick in Argentina.
It's like... Oh, Lennon went insane ranting about electricity in his last days.
Not a happy guy.
But the problem is, I think that's the whole aspect of the devil, right?
And the devil, so to speak, says, here, have all this great stuff.
And you're like, woohoo, great stuff!
Cool stuff. Free stuff.
Look at this. I got a selfie that's going to make everyone's eyeballs bleed with envy.
And then, of course, when the costs accrue, well, you've already lost your soul and it's too late to turn back.
And I've experienced that tremendously in entertainment.
I mean, there was times when I was making so much money that it was like weird and it didn't like, you know, there was times when I was making 30, 40,000 a week and it wasn't leading anywhere good.
And it was because I-- and then now I'll get a super show.
OK, no, wait, wait, wait.
Because the audience's heads just exploded, right?
Because that is one of the great beliefs, is that if you're famous, talented, rich, beautiful, you can't get better than that.
And that is a belief held by people who've not held those particular things and found out where they lead.
It's really tough to explain to people.
I saw once you talking to somebody about Bitcoin, about how there's a momentary excitement and then you're still the same guy, how you bought a bunch of Bitcoin when they were like a quarter.
I was so on board with that because I'm like, so many people don't get that, where you get this This almost like dopamine versus oxytocin, I guess, where it's like you get this weird thing of like, oh, I have money, but if you don't feel you earned it or if you got it from some weird way, it truly doesn't lead anywhere good.
And now, with a more honest career and with a more healthy life and more love in my life, like when I get super chats or any contributions or when I set up a show myself in a library and I profit from it, It feels so much better and it's more earned and it makes me just better as a person.
And it's one of those things.
It's almost like trying to convince someone that one night stands with beautiful people isn't great.
Like people get so mad when you say stuff like that.
They're like, oh, don't cash that lottery ticket.
You'll end up being exploited by everyone around you.
But statistically proven.
A lot of winners, a lot of times they're dead within five years.
Oh, there's a guy, I think he was in Toronto, won the lottery.
He had a terrible coke habit and he ended up in jail.
And he's like, jail is way better than winning the lottery because at least it's tough to get coke in here.
I'm going to live. It's so true.
It magnifies what you are, and if you don't put in the work of who you are, it'll just magnify monsters.
That's why you can still be a good guy and rich.
There's a responsibility attached to it, where you have to do work on yourself and your values or else you're just- You just have an Uzi with no scope.
You're just all over the place.
Everybody wants something from you that is suspect.
And so the isolation that comes from an extremity of positive or perceived positive virtues of any kind This is a big...
There's a movie...
Oh gosh, what's it called? Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin did this movie about bear hunting or bear chasing or something like that.
Yeah. And The Edge, I think it was called, or something like that.
And Anthony Hopkins is this rich guy and he's up there at some lodge and he's just sitting there having a cigar or something and some guy comes and sits down with him and starts chatting to him.
And they're having a pleasant conversation and I think it's the owner of the lodge or whatever, right?
And then the owner of the lodge...
He says, hey, listen, by the way, I really want to expand this lodge.
And he brings out these maps and he brings out these blueprints and the architectural plans.
And he's like, for the low, low price of, you know, kind of thing.
Like, you can invest in this and make you a fortune.
And Anthony Hopkins, his face just falls.
And it's like, here I thought we were just having a pleasant chat.
Exactly. And that's another thing that happens.
When I go in these places where I got that public shaming for standing up against trans children, you see how many people were just hanging around for the power.
And there must be a toll.
Looking back, how many of these famous or rich or beautiful people were around me just because I was A moth close to the light, you know?
And then once they go away, I almost felt a relief where I was like, man, even though they were praising me and giving me money and telling me how great I am, there was always this feeling of like anxiety or something was wrong.
And I think toxic people, when they have bad intentions, you can just feel it.
And I think that's one reason why The Sandlers of the world and the Vons of the world have liked me over the years because even when I didn't have anything, I was never really trying to get anything from them.
They were just people I really looked up to.
I don't see any other real way of living anymore because it's so toxic to think, what can this person get for me?
Because then, at the end of the day, you're just left with this invisible, non-existent, toxic bullshit called force.
What does it get you?
Nothing.
Or prestige, which allows you to lord it over people, which means that you're not connected to them, which brings swarms of people towards you who want something from you, so you can't connect with them.
So you're either superior to people, which means you can't connect with them, or people are trying to exploit you, which means they can't connect with you.
And this is where the fame plus prominence equals isolation.
And then with that isolation, you lose your way so easily.
There's a lot of complicated decisions to make.
Yeah. I find that you have to make very, very complicated decisions about, you know, what to talk about, at what rate you can bring the audience along to certain ideas.
You know, there's a lot of give and back and forth and play.
And you need people in your life who can tell you and help guide you.
Because if you're just making these very complicated decisions in isolation, you're going to get them wrong.
I think this is one of the reasons why people who are famous get paralyzed.
This is why what Kanye is doing is so amazing.
Because they get paralyzed because I can't imagine there's a lot of Kanye's agents saying, we fully support this new direction of yours.
There's a lot of concert promoters who are like, lovely, we can't wait to throw on a concert for you to get bomb threats.
That's going to be – so the fact that he's got a framework around him of people who care about him to the point where he's having these conversations, at least I hope he is.
And so if you're prominent and you're intellectual and you want to do good things in the world with your brain – that's a very technical way of putting it – double plus brain food for excellent planet.
But if you desperately need connection – You need people who love you, who care about you.
You can talk about things.
You can figure out the path.
And so a lot of people who become famous become isolated.
And because they're isolated, they're too afraid to take a step because they don't have people they can bounce ideas off who are going to give them the straight dope, the real good, so that they can step in the right place and not just self-detonate.
Yeah, I saw that happen over and over again, where when people would hit it big or make it or do something great, They'd end up in these golden prisons.
It's like one of those old expressions where if you ride the tiger, you can never get off because it'll eat you.
You see this where all the decisions start becoming very focused on what a small amount of people want you to do so you can keep getting that dopamine.
Because what happens is you get unearned love and unearned hate.
And they both just make you go like this.
You know, there's fight, flight, but freeze.
The third one happens in war a lot more than people think.
And I have a lot of vets that tell me about that, that there's fight, there's flight, but by far the most common is just freezing.
And a lot of these people just freeze.
And you see that in academia.
I saw that with my dad in certain ways.
Great guy, but I would see that the tenure...
That you'd think would give this freedom of thought, but the day in and day out of being around the same people would make you almost freeze in the face of a time when you have to speak up about something.
And it's weird how the very...
The protections and weapons we think we're getting for good can be used right against us.
And in Hollywood, it is that times a million.
Especially when you're given all this sex but no family and no structure, you can't feel it.
It's almost like Tennessee Williams talked about how he'd eat gravy and it would taste like sand.
It was like you'd lose the ability of feeling anything.
And that's when you get this hedonic treadmill that leads to just such, you know, the Ted Kennedy bloated, red-faced He's telling Clarence Thomas that he couldn't make a joke when he let a woman die.
That detachment from reality means he can't feel joy or love or good or anything.
So he wins for force, but he loses everything.
It's that deal with the devil in the desert with Jesus.
Take it and you think you want it, but when you take it, you're done.
It's sand. Yeah.
No, this gold turning to sand, I think, is a very, very common phenomenon.
You see celebrities. I mean, the rare few who can sustain it usually do so, in a sense, by eviscerating any individuation outside of their art.
You know, I mean, unless it's really safe stuff like, you know, hey, I wrote a check to the, I guess, five checks with four different addresses and 12 different names, like Rosie O'Donnell wrote a check to a bunch of Democrats, then you're kind of okay.
But I also think that those days...
are beginning to diminish as well, because with the rise of alternative media, now just being a generic lefty is not enough to sustain your career.
I mean, just look at Kathy Griffin or other people like that, where it's like, you know, she did something pretty egregious and pretty horrifying.
Nothing that should be illegal, but that doesn't mean just because it's legal doesn't mean that there's no consequences to it.
And so I do think that some of this I'm going to hide out in generic leftism and everything is going to be hunky dory.
Again, we talked earlier, right, Owen, about the divide, you know, that there's going to be a time to choose sides.
And I think that that's going to be very healthy.
I think that's, I mean, it's going to be rough.
And there's going to be a lot of fractured relationships and there's going to be a lot of economic upheaval and people should look for opportunities in that.
But just, you know, I'm generic lefty and everything's going to be fine.
Well, that's because the Republicans were generic lefties as well, for the most part.
And so now where I think people like you and I and a lot of other people are putting a real alternative forward, a real...
You don't have to be either one of these left-right things.
You know, the number of times I'm called a conservative, or I'm very rarely called a leftist, but, you know, all right, conservative, whatever it is.
It's like none of those labels don't mean anything.
What I'm trying to do is say to people, think for yourself.
Don't take any of these, you know, pre-packaged meals ready to eat that you never get to pick the ingredients.
Think for yourself, because I think the time is coming where cliches are going to be more dangerous than originality.
Yeah, and I don't think a lot of these young lefty comedians that want to hide like what you just described realize that they can't rise.
Everybody that's ever helped me in my life has been a free thinker.
Whether it's the South Park guys let me host something early on or Vaughn or Sandler or any of these guys, I won't pigeonhole them into any categories, but they're the type that says, you're fastest, I want you captain.
And those type of people are the ones that will help you.
The lefties at this point are, if you're talented, I'll ruin you.
And so that's how they think.
Literally, the tallest nail gets hammered down is a Soviet phrase for a reason.
And Stalin would take his best generals and execute them because he felt threatened by them.
So when these people are trying to write their best jokes at their open mics and they're trying to hide out in leftism, I need them to understand that those lefties, when you kill on stage, will try to ruin you.
Because greatness and merit and worth and earning, all these things are seen as threats.
And that's one reason why people have swarmed me so hard is because If I survive all these attacks, which I am, you know, no agent, no manager, I still can book anything I want.
So then they come at the booking venues and I can book other places and they take down my Twitter.
I can be on Vimeo and Twitch and all these other places.
And my fans have been loyal and supportive and are with me.
That is a big F you to leftism because it's saying you don't get to control what people like.
We don't all have to, like Trevor Noah, say the same thing every night.
You know, like, there's no—that Michelle Wolf thing.
All I said was, I'm like, of course she should be able to do it, but that wasn't funny.
It was all expected jokes.
Like, you're doing jokes that 2,000 people have done since the election, and that's—there's so many people that just want another angle on anything, and that's why Norm Macdonald is great, and there's some comedians out there doing some good stuff, but— All it is is just, please say something that isn't exactly on script.
And there's a market for it, and I won't go down.
I won't take a knee, and I will survive.
Well, and... That to me is not just the moral thing to do, the thing with integrity to do, but it's also practical.
There's an old saying that I remember, you can only sleep your way to the middle.
You can't sleep your way to the top.
You're going to get older and there's going to be 12 other people behind you, probably even in the same room if you're in the Weinstein office.
Right. And you can only conform your way to the middle.
Now, that used to be a pretty good deal, right?
So if I'm conformist and I don't really offend too many people, then I can get a pretty decent career going and so on, right?
But now, I think that conformity is only going to lead to obscurity.
There's no greater security than originality these days because I think people are onto it.
So yeah, you can sleep your way to the middle.
You can lefty conform your way into the average.
But when you're overtaken by people who are speaking their mind, A lot of people are going to want to step into that open field and off the train track of preconceived expectations.
Oh, yeah. Now, comedy's gotten so bad that when people just watch one of my normal YouTube videos, it wasn't even that great.
If you compare it to some of the golden ages of comedy, I'm not this angelic figure of comedy.
I'm not that great.
But compared to what's happening now, people will write me like, I was Literally pissing myself just because it was different.
And I'm like, that's what you're talking about with the practicality of it, where it's almost like in Forrest Gump, where all the ships are destroyed.
So then just the one functioning ship can get all the shrimp.
Because it's not even that I'm the best ship.
I'm just not falling victim to this virus.
And there are so many people out there who want and are desperately hungry for something that's not the same.
And something that's not...
I don't know how to put this because, I mean, I certainly swear on my show and so on.
But something that's not gross.
Like, what really comes to mind is Stephen Colbert's line...
About Trump, saying that Trump is Putin's cockholster.
Yeah. Like that is – and there's a lot of this – I don't mind coarse humor.
I don't mind bodily humor and so on.
But there's something so degraded about that cockholster phrase.
And that – It's more than coarseness.
It is almost like a disassembly of human beings into like mere meat machinery.
And that diminishment that comes from a very, very deep rage, and that's why I can see the rage beyond the joke.
And the fact that the left, which claims to be so against homophobia, always reaches for gay slurs when they're upset and offended.
And all of the people who say, well, you can't collectivize, judge about blacks.
When a black is a conservative, say, well, he's not a real black.
It's It's like, well, wait, so you're saying we should collectivize about blacks?
Because the blacks who don't think that way aren't real blacks?
Like, pick a side, people!
And eventually you just have to give up because it's an abusive relationship, so the only way to win is not to play.
Yeah, and you're so right about the cock holster thing, because I'm so trained to be, like, I get so, like, weirded out when people are like, oh, that's homophobic, because that pretty much in my mind just means it's funny.
But that was homophobic, and the way you described that is perfect.
It's like, it degraded The human body.
If I was gay and I heard that, I'd be like, what?
It would just be so creepy.
Even as a non-gay man, it jarred me because it was almost like- Sorry to interrupt, but if you're gay and you love your partner, as many of them do, the idea that your partner would be referred to even tangentially as a cock holster is horrifying.
Yeah. It really was just weird.
And not only did it contradict all their, like, Rainbow Coalition horseshit, it was almost like a joke meets the movie Hostile, where it's like the human body parts are just nothing.
And it degraded any act of love or any act of connection or any act of...
You're exactly right.
That stood out in my mind.
And another thing that stood out in my mind was when he said, Comey's fired, and they clapped.
And then he said, no, we don't.
Like, we should be mad.
Yeah. And that moment, talk about a moment about my development.
That's when I was like, oh, comedy is really in a weird spot.
Yeah, that guy's the bad guy.
Get him. Oh, wait, sorry. Wrong guy.
Let him go. Get that.
I mean, yeah, the rent-a-mob is really chilling because- Oh, it's crazy.
It's just crazy.
And just the degrading nature of it.
It's how, like, if you're a libertarian or a freedom-loving homosexual, you're treated like dirt by these people.
And... And I think that's one thing that makes guys like me and you very threatening is because we actually can relate to a variety of people.
You know, I have trans people come to my show saying, thank you for not pitying me.
Thank you for not putting me in a box.
And I'm known as this person that apparently hates trans people because I think five year olds shouldn't be on hormones.
And I also say that you're not really that gender.
But I'm like, my whole thing is if you pick me up at an airport, I'll go with whatever.
If you want me to say he, I'm down.
I compare it more to OCD. If you tap five times to turn on the light, we both know the light will still turn on.
If we're friends, I'll go with it.
But if not, I'm not going to pretend that like Caitlyn Jenner is better than my mother and wife at being a woman.
You know what I'm saying?
And my joke about that was talking about a physics buddy of mine who just did the math.
It was like Caitlyn Jenner was woman of the year, but hasn't been a woman for a full year.
And he's just talking about the math.
He's like, Caitlyn Jenner times fraction of one is less than one.
And I'm just dying laughing.
And he's like, what is so funny?
I'm like, you just sidestepped the biggest minefield of the year with math.
You can't be woman of the year if you've only been a woman for nine months.
You're not even eligible.
Listen, and the funny thing is too, is that I actually understand and have a good deal of sympathy for let's be more sensitive to other people's feelings.
I mean, I've got, you know, there's been a harshness throughout history and I have no problem with that kind of inclusiveness.
But because I was raised, you know, well, you're a male, so you're part of an evil patriarchy and you're white, so you're part of evil privilege and so on.
And it's like, I don't remember a whole lot of sensitivity to my white male feelings when In fact, people regularly just verbally attacked my entire gender and my entire race.
So now when people are like, you've got to be really sensitive towards other people's feelings, it's like, I'm not sure that's entirely true given how I've been treated.
Maybe true for some people, but not true for a lot of people.
Right, and your whole philosophy is the ultimate in compassion.
That's the deepest irony.
It's like, non-aggression applies to trans people, as well as straight white males.
The reason they're doing all this is because they're trying to extract resources from straight white males in America, and so they're trying to put us in a different category.
Why do you rob the banks?
That's where the money is. What's that?
Why do you rob the banks? That's where the money is.
Right, and why do you get a bank so you can rob the world?
Right, right. Well, I really, really appreciate the conversation.
Just wanted to remind people the website.
We'll put the links below. HugePianist.com, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, all below.
And just a reminder, if you like Owen Benjamin in this conversation, you'll love him even more.
In stand-up. And June 1st, Lower Yakima Valley, Washington.
June 2nd, Portland, Oregon.
June 4th, 2018, Bellevue, Washington.
A great pleasure, my friend. I hope that people understand our positions a lot better now than before, and I look forward to the next chat.
