Seth Dillon
Appearances
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
But when the good ones kind of rise to the top and we agree that this is one we should run, we'll draft up the article, do the Photoshop for the image, and roll it out there. So we publish like... roughly six, sometimes up to eight articles daily. You can't do too much satire. You'll overload people a little bit. A handful go out every day, but that's part of the process.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Oh, I was just going to say that it's kind of the mark of good satire. Sometimes it's a criticism of satire. Oh, your jokes are too believable. You're trying to mislead people on purpose. But there is truth to it, and that's why it's funny. There's truth to it. That's why it's funny. And satire is designed, especially news satire, because we're mimicking a news publication.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
That's what we're doing. It's got to make you do a double take where you look at it as you're like, wait a minute, is that real? And then you realize that there's a punchline there. It's actually a joke.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
I heard a great quote. I think his name is Scott Peck. Does that name ring a bell to you? I think he's a psychiatrist, but he said that mental health is the process of staying dedicated to reality at all costs. I like that quote. Oh, yeah.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Staying tied to reality, staying tied to what's true, because that's, you know, so much of poor mental health is having a mistaken perception of yourself or of others or the world and the influences that are affecting you and what you can control and what you can't control. You know, all of those things play into mental health. And I do think I'm optimistic about this.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
I do think, you know, the pendulum will swing back the other way and started to swing back the other way in terms of people Re-engaging with reality and deciding actually, you know, the truth does matter. And there are harmful effects if we lose sight of that.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
There's a doctrine story with you guys, too. Go ahead, finish your thought. Yeah, you mentioned the resilience thing. I mean, when you teach people these harmful ideologies and you get them to buy into things that aren't rooted in reality, you do affect their ability to develop character and resilience. And like you said, so you end up in this very fragile mental condition as a result of that.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And so that is, I just, you have to underscore the importance of that.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Well, I can tell you what happened. I mean, we have... You mentioned at the start of this conversation that the real headlines seem really crazy to the point where you question whether or not they could be satire.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And that was kind of the reason why we gave birth to this new site, Not the Bee, which is kind of a sister site adjacent to the Babylon Bee, which reports on those crazy stories that should be satire, but somehow aren't. It's like this humor-based entertainment site.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Yeah, so the SPLC, they started reaching out to me and to our writers. And it's the writer, it was specifically the writers who work for Not the Bee, right? So Not the Bee actually publishes, you know,
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
real news stories it like i said it's a humor-based entertainment site but we cover you know real stories that are kind of outrageous and we offer a lot of commentary as well and we have several part-time writers working for that site who have day jobs uh and they write for not to be on the side and they do it anonymously they do it using a pseudonym so that they're not
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
exposed for some of the opinions and some of the things that they're doing because they want to protect the safety of their job. We live in a cancel culture and they don't want to lose their day job because of what they're doing on the side for us.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And so for some of them, it's a privacy concern, it's a safety concern, and it's the ability to just speak freely without having to fear repercussions for that. given that they have something to lose and they're trying to guard against that. And so we respect that and allow them to publish anonymously. And the SPLC started digging.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
They wanted to go after us because they didn't like a lot of the opinions. They said in their statement after they doxed us that divisive commentary like ours has no place in society. And they've elsewhere said, one of their senior fellows at one point was caught on camera saying that their goal is to completely destroy the people that they target.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And so this was an effort – it wasn't an effort to – in the public interest, we're going to release information for transparency so that you know what's going on. This was a deliberate effort to intimidate and suppress the voices of these writers who say things that they don't like. And so what they did was they sent emails to our staff, to myself included, and said, you guys are publishing –
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
headlines like this and stories like this, we actually dug around in the code on your site and were able to sniff out who the writers are that are associated with these pseudonyms, these anonymous profiles. And so we've connected names, addresses, workplaces, all of this stuff to these writers. And we're going to do a story on this and expose this. Do you have comment?
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
So they ended up publishing that story, but not before I got out ahead of it and said, look, the SPLC is a hate-driven smear factory that tries to intimidate people and chill speech by threatening them with penalties and consequences, including deplatforming and cancellation, by putting them on this hate watch list.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And they're doing this with our writers, and they're trying to intimidate our writers and And we think that's messed up. So I got a statement out there ahead of them publishing this thing, which was great because it ended up getting like 17 million views. And then their post ended up getting like 50 likes. So I think we kind of won the PR battle on that one.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
It's done harm. I mean, it's a scam. There are organizations that have actually faced violent attacks as a result of some of the reports. There are charitable organizations, great charitable organizations, like the Alliance Defending Freedom, who's defended us. They've represented us in multiple cases. They're on the hate watch list.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
They were unable to take charitable donations through Amazon Smile program, for example, because they were on this hate list. And that's really the purpose of what they do, is they're trying to make speaking freely
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
and saying things that they don't like that they disagree with so costly that you're you're unable to do it you get penalized for doing it and so maybe you'll just shut up and go away and that's censorship that is it is oppressive it's tyrannical and they're trying to chill speech and get people to censor themselves which i think is even it's even worse if we if we if we go along with that if we if we cater to that and out of fear you know zip our own mouths shut i think that's even worse than hard censorship that that kind of pervasive soft censorship so
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
We were very upset by what they were trying to do with our writers. And I'm glad that we got as much public support as we did. And guess what? I think they only drew more attention to us and raised our profile and got more support behind us as a result of this, which tends to be the case. It backfires over and over again.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
It has surprised me. It surprised me the extent to which, well, not just free speech in general, but comedy in particular has come under attack. They're jokes. It's humor. We got booted from Twitter for a joke that we made that was considered hateful conduct. And they wanted us to delete it and take it down or else we lost access to our account. And by the way,
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
We were one of the few accounts ever, I think, that said, no, we're not going to do that. We are literally willing to die on this hill and lose access to our Twitter account because we should be able to tell the truth, for one thing. There's truth to the joke that we told. Comedy should be legal. We should be able to have humor in the public discourse, in the public square.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
We refused to censor ourselves and thank God for Elon coming in and buying the platform and setting us free because We need that in our discourse. You know, you shouldn't have people deciding what's true up front and what you're allowed to say. And you shouldn't have humorless scolds, you know, pulling the levers to drop the floor out from under anyone who makes a joke they don't like.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
What are the battles ahead for you guys? Uh, well, from on the censorship side, um, we, well, thankfully we, we have X, which is a great fallback. I don't think Elon's going to be banning us for any of the jokes that we make. Um, a lot of the battles are legal battles, you know, at the state level, there's a lot of, um, there are, uh, laws against, um,
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
either hate speech or misinformation or misleading parody or deep fakes or AI-created content that apply to satire, especially around election times. There's various state laws that are being passed along those lines. We just sued California over one, and we actually got that enjoined, so it wouldn't apply to us. but we have to fight those in a number of other states too.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
So that's really a big thing. And Alliance Defending Freedom, who I mentioned earlier, is representing us in that. And the SPLC hates us from all sides, and thereafter even our lawyers. Wow.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Yeah, my attitude is bring it on. Yeah, my attitude is to bring it on.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Yeah. I worry about people having enough courage to fight back on this because I think one of the biggest problems is people censoring themselves and doing the tyrant's work for him. And we need to embolden people and encourage them to speak freely because this is a fight we will win if we go out there and fight it.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And the fight for free speech, by the way, winning that fight is necessary every day because it makes all the other fights we need to engage in possible. You can't win those other battles against those bad ideas if you can't speak freely.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
All right, thank you.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
That's very true. We read headlines all the time as we're kind of scanning them to see, you know, what's in the news and what we should be joking about. And sometimes the headlines themselves seem like a joke. It's exaggerated. It's become kind of like a caricature. The reality itself has become kind of like a caricature, which makes it hard to caricature a caricature.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
So our job is more difficult than it's probably ever been.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
I'm glad that we agree on that point because you do actually get a lot of people who think that it isn't defensible and that it isn't a tool that we should be using because it's mean and cruel and whatever but I just couldn't disagree with that more strongly. I agree with what you're saying that mockery is necessary and one of the reasons I think it's so necessary is because
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
when you take bad ideas seriously you end up with catastrophic consequences and so one of the ways of combating bad ideas isn't just to you know employ reason and uh and refutation to try to shut them down which is obviously you know something that should be done as well but in addition to that ridicule is an extremely effective way of addressing bad ideas exposing the foolishness for what it is so that it isn't taken seriously you're doing
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
You're doing culture and society a great good, I think, when you do that. Because one of the reasons we've wound up in this place where the headlines that we're talking about are so outrageous, they're almost impossible to satirize, is because there are things that we should have been laughing at that we lauded.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And so I actually think there's a moral imperative to engage in mockery when there are bad ideas that are flourishing and having catastrophic consequences in the culture.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Typically, yeah, yeah. I mean, there are some public figures we make fun of just to make fun of them because sometimes, you know, people deserve to be made fun of. Generally speaking, it's the ideas that, yeah, I was trying to frame it in a particular way saying, you know, we're ridiculing bad ideas. It's the bad ideas that need to be dealt with because they have the catastrophic consequences.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And so what you're trying to do is, you know, sometimes a person will be part of that story. You know, there may be a person who's advancing a bad idea. And so your satirical mockery of their idea involves them and references them. But you're not necessarily picking on a person to tear a person down, make them feel bad about themselves, something like that.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Generally speaking, the satire is targeted at the ideas themselves. And I think it's important for the same reason. I quote C.S. Lewis all the time when he said that good philosophy must exist for no other reason than because bad philosophy needs to be answered. And I think that's It's exactly why satire is necessary. It's because bad ideas need to be answered.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And ridicule is one of the most effective ways to do that. It really does a great job of showing people just how stupid or foolish a particular idea is.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Well, and it's also kind of a last resort in the sense that a lot of the ideas that we're engaging with right now are such insane ideas that They're advanced by people who have abandoned reason and rationality on purpose. They're looking you square in the face and they're telling you that two and two make five. They're saying these crazy things. They're denying reality.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And so what reason in that person are you going to appeal to in having a serious discussion with them? And so you're probably not going to change their mind by engaging in serious argumentation with someone who's thrown reason out the window. I mean, they've thrown logic out the window.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And you may not even change their mind by mocking their bad ideas, but you can have an impact on the conversation by just showing how bad the ideas are. And that's where I think, yeah, mock reasons. Showing other people.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Oh, man. Well, we never just single out a particular idea or person. There are certainly politicians that we hit more often than others. It's usually the more prominent ones leading the parties on both sides. We had a lot of fun with Biden and Kamala Harris in the lead up to the election and with Trump too. We do a lot of Trump jokes. People think we're fully in his corner.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And of course, I was supportive of Trump and I voted for Trump, but we're still willing to make fun of him and still poke fun at him because I think you don't wanna only punch the other way. You have to be willing to hit your own side and hold them accountable too.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Some of the issues in the culture though, I mean, one of the ones that I think has required and lacked a lot of satirical attention, a lot of comedic combating is the gender ideology stuff, the radical gender ideology. We saw so much of that being taken very seriously and so many people being afraid to even address the issue because you're going to be considered –
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
um to be engaging in hateful conduct uh or spreading misinformation or something like that and so the the censorship regime was really discouraging that then you had the comedians who were all kind of propping up the narrative and i was really encouraged when i saw like bill maher for example when he told a joke about how you know we can't be affirming kids and and what they think they are or want to be when they're eight years old you know otherwise if we did that the world would be filled with cowboys and princesses and he's like you know when i was a kid i wanted to be
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
I wanted to be a pirate. Thank God no one scheduled me for peg leg surgery and eye removal. And I thought that was such a great joke. In a lot of ways, it's funny, but it's also pretty profound that he told that joke because what he was doing is he was – He was basically kind of poking at and chipping away at the validity of an idea that we shouldn't have been taking seriously in the first place.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And he was doing it at a time when it's considered hateful conduct to do it. And so that's why it really – there's a quote from Orwell that really resonates with me. He said, every joke is a tiny revolution. And I think that a joke like that at that time when there's something that you're not supposed to be talking about, it's a sacred cow, it's something you're –
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
You're supposed to take very seriously. Those are the things you must be joking about. Those are the things we shouldn't be taking so seriously. And so taking whatever – that's what's got to be in the crosshairs at any given moment.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
So whenever you have these shifts in the culture and the changes in values and radical ideas being promoted by either the left or the right, those are the things that need to be in the crosshairs.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And I think- They were doing a song and dance promoting the vaccine. That's what they were doing.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Yeah, I would have named the same three guys. I think probably one advantage that they had over a lot of the maybe smaller name people, people that don't have the same kind of platform that they have, is that they're almost too big to cancel. Good luck canceling Dave Chappelle. If you try to shut him down, he's going to become all the more powerful and influential than he was before.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
That tends to be the case with these efforts to suppress. You end up amplifying. But it's more exaggerated the more prominent a person becomes and the bigger audience they already have. And so I agree with you, though. They were willing to kind of go out of lockstep with what the narrative was and challenge it in a humorous way, in a lighthearted way.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And that brought a lot of people to kind of see what was being hidden from them very deliberately.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
I like what you said about it in a thoughtful way, too, because a lot of the way that guys like them or us will be denigrated is to suggest that we're hateful and that we're telling these jokes from a place of hate.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
Right. But the idea is that humor is harmful, that humor hurts people's feelings, that people deserve to have a safe space, that they have a right to not be offended, that Trump's your right to speak freely or to challenge bad ideas. And there's a lot of that going.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
That was cited as the reason why, the reason Jerry Seinfeld gave for not playing college campuses anymore is because you have this kind of safe space culture that exists, especially among young people where they're not willing to laugh at jokes that that poke at the sacred cows there. And they're certainly not willing to laugh at themselves. They take themselves way too seriously.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And so that's the, it's the excuse that is used to try to cancel or censor, uh, voices that are saying things that they don't want to hear is that it's, you know, it's hateful, it's harmful, it's misinformation. You know, you check all the boxes. Um, But it has been thoughtful and it hasn't been hateful. I think the best way to love somebody is to tell them the truth.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And one of the gentlest ways to do that is to use humor. And so I wouldn't suggest for a moment that we just, you know, we hate so many people on the left that we make fun of them so aggressively. No, it's not about that at all. It's because we care about the direction that culture is going in. We care. We want to speak truth to a post-truth culture. And humor is a great way to do that.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And that's one way of actually loving people and caring about people is, you know, I don't actually want young people to succumb to bad ideas that are gonna, you know, rather than build up resilience in them and prepare them for life will make them more susceptible to problems and lead them down a path of despair and destruction and ultimately to death. I don't want to see that.
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
And so, you know, if humor can play a role in the conversation and preventing some of that, then that's a great thing. And it certainly shouldn't be denigrated as harmful or hateful. But back to your original question about, you know, how do we do this and, you know, what is the process?
Ask Dr. Drew
Sneaky F**kers Theory: How Predatory Men Are Faking ‘Wokeness’ To Prey On Women w/ Seth Dillon & Gad Saad – Ask Dr. Drew - Ep 438
I mean, we have, yeah, we have a team of writers and our writers are just kind of scanning the headlines and looking at like what's going on. And the joke is in the headline. You have to nail it in the headline. And so we pitch headline after headline after headline. And very few of them actually get published. We have to sift through them and toss the bad ones. And there's lots of bad ones.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
I have to correct you, though. Not the founder, just CEO. Just CEO. Adam Ford. That's right. I don't want to take that away from Adam. He's the brilliant mind that began the whole thing. I wish I'd started it, but I took it over in 2018, so...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Yeah. I mean... To be caught up in that whole thing was crazy. I avoid saying that we were the reason he bought Twitter, because we weren't. The reason he bought Twitter was free speech. It was free speech. The Babylon Bee was a symptom of that, right?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
He was getting really concerned about the fact that there was these bad ideas, wokeness in particular, which he called divisive, exclusionary, hateful, a civilizational threat. He was... really concerned about the spread of these bad ideas and the inability of people to push back on them and respond to them because it was considered hate speech or misinformation or whatever.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
So when we got kicked off for telling a joke that we weren't supposed to tell, which those are the ones we should be telling, right? It alarmed him. It got him really concerned and worked up about it. So I... Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I don't know.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
It's challenging. I think that probably a common misconception is that it's easier because there's a lot to make fun of. And there's truth to that to an extent. Obviously, there's crazy things happening in the world that are easy to make fun of. But the problem is when you're trying to satirize what's happening in the world, you have to exaggerate it and go a little step beyond that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
And then reality catches up to you. You've got to stay ahead of the curve of these things. A matter of weeks or even hours sometimes, that's all it takes for a joke to become something that actually happens.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
So it's, you know, I think the more, the more like we swing back in the direction of sanity and stop doing some of the really crazy things, like the joke that we had told about that got us kicked out of Twitter was a joke about Admiral Rachel Levine having been named, you know, she was named she. He was named Woman of the Year by USA Today. Tricky language.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
And we mocked that by naming Rachel Levine our pick for Man of the Year. Well, comedy like that, you look at the real headline and it seems like it is satire. It seems like a parody. It seems like something you'd see on South Park. And so in that environment, obviously it's a target-rich environment, but it's hard to satirize what already feels like parody.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
But as we swing back in the direction of sanity, I think that dies down a little bit. And you've got to look for other things to make fun of.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of disconcerting to see it happening on the right, too, but it was becoming a major problem, you know, to the point where Seinfeld was talking about how he won't do college campuses anymore. You know, he had this kind of safe space. I need to be insulated in a bubble. My feelings can never be hurt. That whole thing was...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
it destroyed the ability of people to look at themselves in a critical way, especially with mockery, where they're able to actually have that introspection where they say, some of the things that I do are ridiculous too, and I should be willing to laugh at that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
You know, there's a maturity in that, and we kind of like stunted our own growth, I think, as a culture by suppressing that and saying, no, your feelings should never be hurt by anything, including a joke, and humor is actually harmful. I don't think humor is harmful. I think we were more unified than ever when we were joking about each other, you know, and willing to laugh at ourselves.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
And if you go back 20, 30 years in comedy, that was much more prevalent than it has been over the last decade. And I've seen some on the right getting angry about jokes at their expense and the way that the left used to. And I bristle at that. I don't like people taking themselves too seriously. I think it's unhealthy that we take ourselves so seriously.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
You've got to be willing to laugh at yourself. And if you can't do that, if you're taking yourself that seriously, you're not going to enjoy life, for one thing, but you're going to be stuck as like a child in an adult's body. You need to grow up and be willing to laugh, and you'll have more fun.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Well, we've never aimed for the shock humor. We've never tried to do comedy that just puts people down to make them feel bad about themselves or goes for that shock value. What we're trying to do is really just communicate truth to a post-truth culture and use humor as an effective way to do that. And so there are, I mean...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
There's a value system at play there where what we're trying to do is not just entertain and make people laugh, but make them think about whether or not these bad ideas should be taken seriously. And so those are more likely to be the things that we would challenge with our comedy rather than the kind of behavior that we would engage in.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
For one thing, it's a good thing that they're on the way out. That was kind of the point, right? This is the reason we made fun of these things is because we didn't want people to take them seriously and adopt it into the culture. That was the entire reason to make Lady Ballers was because this is a bad idea. It needs to be ridiculed. It needs to be mocked.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Let's reject it instead of taking it seriously. And, you know... I don't think they're going to go away quietly. You saw the speech that Trump was giving the other night. You had the Democrats refusing to stand or applaud for a lot of these... The return to sanity that he was talking about. We're going to return to sanity, safety, reason. We're going to take care of women and children.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
You're not... There's no such thing as a child born in the wrong body. God made you as you are, and you're perfect that way. These are things to applaud. These are good, reasonable, sane things to applaud, and they sat down and refused to do that. So they're going to continue to fight us, I think, tooth and nail on these issues.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Whether we've won, well, the ascendant power thing, we have more influence than we had before. We have more control than we had before. But I don't know that these things are just going to go away. These are going to continue to be fights at the state level, at the local level. There's still going to be situations where you have trans athletes getting in these meets with other girls.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
And the girls are going to have to make a decision on whether they compete or stand down because it's not completely eradicated yet. And that could take a lot of time. Your question was, what's next? What's next on the horizon? Man, how do you try to predict... what the Democrats are going to go for next, and how crazy that might possibly be. I don't know.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
I would keep an eye on the Babylon Bee headlines, and maybe those will come true in a few months, because whatever we're talking about is probably going to be what they're pursuing. But I don't know. I would ask you, what do you think?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Well, that was fun. So that was kind of our first foray into, you know, I guess you could kind of style that or call that a mockumentary, you know, where we're taking an idea and treating it like super seriously when it shouldn't have been taken as seriously as it was and mocking the actors involved in that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
That was a fun foot in the door for us to do like a larger project, a long form project beyond just like a short comedy sketch for YouTube. So we're going to dabble in more of that, you know, try some of these other ideas that we have kind of floating around and see if we can make some more films like that because the audience loved it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
We generated a lot of subscribers with that, got a lot of really good feedback. There's a lot we learned from it that we can do differently and better the next time. And so we'll iterate on that some, but I think for the beat, the primary thing for us, what we do really well is news satire. We mimic a news publication and publish satirical headlines. Funny fake news you can trust.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
That's our thing. That's what we do really well. And the next logical extension of that is probably some kind of a... a show that is a satirical news show, a daily show style thing. Something like that, I think, could be really successful under the Bees brand. So we have some things in the works along those lines that we're looking at, too, that we're really excited about.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
So where that lives and when that lands is anyone's guess. But we're excited about kind of continuing to do what we've done well that the audience really enjoys and bringing that out to a broader audience in new forms.