The Eric Metaxas Show - Seth Dillon

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon shares his insights into comedy, as well as censorship, when he sits down with Eric at the recent Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida.

to the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to Michael Knowles, author of Speechless. Controlling words, controlling words. I just have to laugh, Michael, because I know that your previous book literally was word-free. It was wordless. We won't get into that. Well, how have we gotten to the point in America where reasonable people could be so silly that they would not understand?

why drag queen story hour could be deeply harmful. Do they not understand that a child could be deeply messed up by this kind of thing? I mean, it's like, you know, if a child witnesses a rape, what are we going to argue that it's not going to make any difference to? Have we lost this concept of trauma that just watching something like that could be traumatic? I mean, why would we even have to discuss this? Well, we've lost our concept of first principles, you know, as the Hemingway describes bankruptcy.

He says it happens gradually, then suddenly. And this happened gradually for at least a century. And then I think we're sort of in the suddenly episode right now. So one way, how is it that we've lost a sense of the good, the true, and the beautiful? Well, because, for instance, there's one book that you will not be taught in schools right now. You can be taught Robin DiAngelo. You can be taught Ibram Kendi. You could probably be taught mind conf.

But the one book that you can, you will go to court if you teach it, is the Bible. What? In the 20th century, some justices on the Supreme Court, they found in the invisible ink above the emanations beneath the penumbras that the Constitution says no Bible in schools. Right now in schools, you can have a religious liturgy. You can pray to the various secular saints. You can have rituals for BLM or pride or you have a whole month for pride. but if you in any way pray to God in schools, that's going to be a big problem in a lot of places. And so I think conservatives fell for this trap where we believe that secular liberalism is just a neutral playing field.

And the left is going to do it and end. But it's not. It's obviously a rigged game. And if we're not allowed to state plain truths, God exists. There's a difference between good and bad men or not women. If we're not allowed to stay those truths, then not only we're not playing on an even playing field, but we've already lost the debate before it's begun. I mean, to me, the principal culprits in this, well, let's say there are two, but it is our Republican leaders. It's one thing for the left to go crazy. But when you have rhinos, you have men and women who seem only to care about power and who are naive enough, ignorant enough, to think that's okay, to not understand that there's a moral component to

leadership and that if you are not willing to be a servant leader elected by the people to represent you, huge, huge honor that people would choose you to represent them. If you don't take that extremely seriously, you should resign. And we have innumerable leaders on the Republican side who I would say they simply don't understand what I just said. They take it lightly. They don't understand that they're the last line of defense in this battle. And, you know, that's the first problem. Then the second problem is, in a sense, we the people who aren't behaving as though we are the government, we kind of act like, well, we've, we've farmed that out to professionals and we're just going to do our thing. We each have a role in this and screaming when we see absurdity

being pushed on our kids or in the public square. We have a duty to do that. And if your biggest fear is people are going to think I'm uncool. You're what is called traditionally a coward, which is a bad thing. Well, courage is not only a virtue. It's a prerequisite for all of the other virtues, and people have certainly forgotten that. But your point is so right on this issue of the rhino weak, squishy leadership. I just fear that that kind of squishy leadership is not necessarily, it's in part the cause of the problems, but more than that, it's the consequence of the problems. It's not all John Boehner's fault. John Boehner is the consequence of the left invading every institution, notably the media, academia, big technology, all these places. It's not Chamberlain's fault. It's Hitler's fault that Chamberlain was a coward.

It's not Boehner's fault. It's not McCarthy's fault or McConnell's fault. Come on. No, they need, obviously. Yes. No, you need courage. I just mean that too often the only people who can make it to the top in a system that is now entirely dominated by the left, But including our military is now dominated by the left.

That was one of the last holdouts. And so the only people who can really make it to the top in that system, with few exceptions, are going to be the sort of squishy cowards who are not going to do very well. And so I think that the issue for us is we need to go in gradually then suddenly. We need to retake those institutions. We need to be willing to exercise real political power and reorder the system such that the more courageous, clear-minded candidates with a substantive vision have a better chance of making it to the top.

so that the squishes aren't, aren't leading the party. In a sane world, General Millie, is it? In other words, for somebody to rise to where he is and then to say the deeply offensive anti-American things, he said, you cannot function as a general in the American military if you think that way. Lives literally depend on you, General. And I just, I can't believe that somebody like this could,

I mean, in a sane world, no one like that would rise to the level of general and would be permitted to say such deeply preposterous offensive things. It's just not normal in a sane world for that to happen. So that's how you know that somebody that crazy, that antithetical to the founder's vision, I don't mean slightly. I mean deeply antithetical to the founder's vision and to the very country he's supposed to be protecting. It's a magnificent horror that somebody like that could be a general and could be foolish enough to spout off the way he has on those subjects. I mean, if you really want to see

how crazy things are, as far as I'm concerned, he's exhibits A through F. Well, he's promoting explicit Marxism in the ranks of the military. I mean, it's really wild. And it's not just him. I mean, it's sad that you got the chairman of the Joint Chiefs doing this, but it's the chief of naval operations, and it's a lot of other guys who were at the Pentagon. And you saw those two ads that came out, one from the CIA, one from the Army. The Army said, you know, the way that I learned to be a tough fighter was when my lesbian parents took me to the pride parades, and that's what's going to scare Vladimir Putin. And the CIA ad, there was a woman, she said, I'm a brave, intersectional latinx, whatever, you know, crazy leftist jargon. And you think, good grief. Xi Jinping is going to invade tomorrow.

But I think those commercials were. He should, frankly. I'd like to advise him. Like, now's your chance, pal. You just look at the commercials. Because once the American people wake up, it's game over. But I think it's intentional, Eric. I think the reason they're putting out these ads is because the left is signaling as they have in other institutions. We don't want conservatives to join the military.

We don't want conservatives in the police force or in the CIA. We only want people who wear the pink hat, who are woke and intersectional. So that, you know, once they take over even the military, name me an institution that hasn't succumbed in the United States. We've only got 90 seconds left. Why should we be hopeful? The hope is in these parents showing up to their school boards. The hope is in people saying, no, we're not going to let drag queen story hour CRT infiltrate our kids' educational places. You know, the hope is that, yes, there is often a uniparty, but an elite that's got some of the,

Republicans and a lot of Democrats and they have all the institutions, but the ordinary Americans don't agree with them. And on some important issues like immigration, for instance, the vast majority don't agree with them. That is the hope they just need to get some political power and wield it. Well, it is funny, though, because things have to get really, really, really bad, and things have gotten exceedingly bad, almost irreparably bad, for people finally to wake up, for nice Americans, finally to say, wait a minute, that's far enough. I really do think it happening. We see people getting involved on the local level. We see state legislators getting involved and understanding that I may be the last line of defense. I, a state senator,

between the end of the United States of America and are having a future. So I am generally hopeful, but we have to be candid about how really satanically bad things can get. And we've been talking about that, but I don't want people to leave without hope. Tell Candice, we need to talk. Candice, we need to talk. And I got to tell you, it's just a joy to know you, Michael Knowles. God bless you. Congratulations. The book is speechless. Hey, folks, are you concerned about memory loss for you or a loved one? Vivalor's founder prayed that God would show her the solution to memory loss because her mother had dementia. After many divine encounters combining faith in her background as a pharmacist, Susan Gibson created

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Folks, I find myself in Tampa at a Turning Point USA Conference Student Action Summit. I'm no longer a student, but whatever. I'm a friend of Charlie's. And there's so many wonderful people here. One of them is Seth Dillon. Some of you have heard of the Babylon B. If you haven't heard of the Babylon B. Oh, my goodness.

It's rare in life that you have something so wonderful to look forward to. But the Babylon B, I was, I say this, Seth. Seth, you're sitting here. You're the CEO of the Babylon B. Yes, sir. I was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Humor magazine. I've written humor for the New York Times. for the New Yorker.

I know a lot about written humor. And when I've discovered that there's some conservatives and Christians writing that kind of humor, the odds that it would be brilliantly funny were zero, were less than zero. So I maybe more than anyone am astonished and thrilled at the comedic genius of the Babylon B. I want to say that up front to my audience. Tell me, Seth, what were you doing before you get involved with the Babylon B? How did you get involved and why are you their CEO today? Well, I'm very lucky when I answer that question.

I had a love for satire. I love like, I love... You like to laugh? I like to laugh. But I loved how the left, you know, the left was so effective at... Because they don't have very good arguments. But they're very good at ad hominum. They're very good at a time.

They're very good at making you look silly and look stupid, right? That's what they've been doing so effectively for so long with their comedy. Nobody on the right was doing that effectively. When I saw the Babylon Bee come along, and Adam Ford is the one who founded it back in 2016, he's a genius, absolute genius, and we quickly found some really talented people to add to the team to come alongside him and start producing some of this content. And the whole point of it was to do comedy from a Christian conservative perspective that wasn't cheesy, that didn't make us the joke because we were...

Isn't it funny that we always have to start there? Yeah. We're doing it. It's really brilliant, brilliant, but it's not cheesy. Like, we're making films, but it's not cheesy. There's so much that we do. That's cheesy. And it is an amazing thing.

I said it before, but you guys, it's not just not cheesy. It is brilliant. And actually, in the world in which we live today, it's almost the only stuff that's happening at that level. I mean, there's nothing on the left that can compare to it. The reason there's nothing. good on the left right now. And I know I followed the onion for years. They've been around for 20 plus years. They used to be very funny. They're less funny now and they're less funny now for a very good reason.

You know, the left has made all these rules about what you can and can't say. And they also have this idea that you can't offend anybody. So in enforcing these rules, they even do this on comedians. They try to make comedians follow rules. You can't say this. You can't say that. You can't joke about this. You can't offend this people. You can't punch down. Never punch down. Right. And so they make all these rules and comedians by their nature flout rules they make fun of people who make rules that's what comedians are supposed to do right that's their that's really their role in all of this and so to handcuff comedians in that way leftists are actually created by trying to kill comedy and strangle it they're creating an opportunity for people on the other side of the aisle to to say the things that you're not

supposed to say make the jokes you're not supposed to make and so I think they've just created an opportunity for that honestly there's a threshing and a sifting going on in a American culture right now because the idea that comedians who would not identify as Christian or conservative, nonetheless, they find that they have an innate sense of wanting to rebel, wanting to crack jokes about things that people say you can't. You know, it's kind of a fundamental aspect of comedy and of truth-telling, which, you know, comedy is usually a form of truth-telling. So it's fascinating to me to see people who might previously have identified as on the left or something pushing back against the cancel culture and the absurdity of this.

Because they usually the ones who were doing that with the right. And that was the right was making the rules and they're puritanical. Of course, that has all shifted. And so because of that strange shift, you're just seeing a sifting in the culture. I think most people are really unaware of where it's going to go. But we know that any self-respecting comedian cannot tolerate this. You can't function as a comedian. No, yeah.

You can't. I mean, if you're going to censor yourself in deference to that power, that's above you, that's telling you what you can and can't say, you know, then you are, you are the joke. You're not making jokes, you are the joke. Comedians, you know, in our situation, you know, what we look at is what we're doing. We're often accused, where lately have been accused of punching down. We're punching back.

We're not punching down. This is a situation where we're, culture, conservatives are literally on the ropes in the culture battle. Yeah. And they're defending themselves against this top-down attack, this top-down tyranny from progressive ideology that's coming from celebrities, it's coming from corporations, it's coming from politicians. Yeah.

We're not punching down. We're punching back at that stuff. Well, so I, because I've been involved one way or another with comedy, my whole adult life, I have often felt that I want to do something in concert with the Babylon B. Because when you see that kind of talent, you say, okay, it exists online in the form of words on paper or on the screen. But it seems like more can come out of that. It's become a brand in the way that the Harvard Lampoon became the national. National Lampoon and you know it strikes me that there's room for that because I've always been about the culture more than about politics or theology and

The problem has always been the talent where are the geniuses so right you do have a number of people at the Babylon B I mean you mentioned Adam Ford who are the other folks Ethan Ethan Nicole is our creative director. Yeah, he's got a ton of animation experience and writing experience He worked for Veggie Tales or worked on Veggie Tales as a writer for Cole, because I worked for Veggie Tales. I didn't know that. He must have come after me. He was writing there. Bob the Tomato was in the hospital and a lot of people just left.

And then a new group came in. He's super talented guy, critical part of our team. Kyle Mann is our editor-in-chief. Adam, our founder, has referred to him as an idea of fire hose. He just has, like, all day long, he just spouts out these one idea after another. And he's got one of those minds. And he can look at, you know, when we wake up in the morning and we scan the headlines and we're trying to figure out what we're going to write about.

Kyle reads, he sees what's going on in the world. world and his mind immediately goes to that place where he can exaggerate it and just the right way to expose the absurdity or the hypocrisy or whatever it is. It's like a gene or something. He just has that gene. It's turned on in his brain. And it's an amazing thing. My producer, Chris Himes, who's standing here in the weird jacket, he has a similar gene.

And when you know those people, you know, that's never something that can be taught, ever. Either you know how to do that or don't. So you can hone it and you can practice. But the idea of being able to just do that. And it's obvious from the content that the Babylon B puts out that you have people like that on the staff. Because it's just no way any normally funny person could come up with that many. Yeah, and those guys are the faces, but it goes deeper than that. We have a whole crew of people who are really creative and really talented.

And we all play off each other. We spit out ideas. The headline, the joke is in the headline, right? It's always in the headline. And so we start with the headline. We pitch headlines all day long, and then we iterate on them, and we go back and forth, and it's a really fun and creative process. But it's everybody's involved in it.

And by the time it actually gets onto the website, most of our writers have had a hand in it to some extent. I mean, it's just such a beautiful thing. And of course, this is all done virtually. You're not sitting in a room like on the 40th floor of Rockefeller Center. So you guys are all over the country. We are. Yeah, we do have a Southern California office and we also have a South Florida office. Oh, you do?

Then we have some writers scattered kind of throughout. So it is happening throughout the country. So how big has the Babylon be, like it's grown dramatically? But like, give us some numbers so we have a sense of where you've come from. in the last four years. Well, so in the last four years, I mean, we just reached, we crossed the one million follower threshold on most of our social media. You know what?

I believe I was the one million follower. Were you? And don't I get something? You get something. You get like a million, what is the currency in Venezuela? Zloti? No, that's another country. Yeah, it's worth almost nothing.

I think you get 30 cents. But you know what? That's better than nothing. It's almost nothing, but it's not nothing. Okay, so, so a million followers on... A million followers on Twitter, a million followers. You're on Instagram, a million followers on Facebook. Oh, on all these platforms.

Yeah, on each of them, yeah. But here's the thing. That million is worth more than the normal million. What I mean is anybody who appreciates the humor of the Babylon B has to be sophisticated because it is brilliant humor. It's not broad. It's not stupid humor. It is, it's brilliant humor.

You have to be aware of who you're making fun of and whatever. The funniest thing is sometimes we go for the low-hanging dumb jokes, No, no, but look, that goes without saying. But generally speaking, I mean, the funniest thing I think I've ever seen was the idea of John MacArthur coming out of the rafters to pile drive or something, Joel Oste, that is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. But if you don't know who these guys are or what they have against each other, then it's not funny. Well, some of those theological jokes are really, that's kind of niche humor.

You know, there's a segments of our audience that's really going to get that. Those don't tend to go as viral as some of the other stuff is broader. Well, of course not. Of course not. But, you know, the reason I'm in is because of that kind of stuff. Exactly. Yeah. And those are, you know, we have a core base that really loves that humor.

And, you know, as hard as it is to keep making church jokes and being creative and coming up with fresh material along those lines. Look, it's way easier to follow the headlines and what's going on in the news cycle than it is to continually make theological jokes or church jokes, Christian worldview jokes. But we still try to keep that as a major part of what we do. And I think we have to be able to laugh at ourselves, right? Like, I'm not one of these people. I like John MacArthur. I respect him deeply. but I actually like Joel Osteen.

It doesn't mean I approve of everything. But the point is that I'm not one of these people who is like, you know, theologically very narrow. Right. But I can still appreciate the humor of the idea of, you know, putting these things together. There was actually this morning on Twitter I read the Babylon Bee post about, I guess it was, yeah, Joel Osteen has, he has a new yacht that's thin enough to fit through the eye of a needle. I thought that's the funniest stinking thing.

I'm going to take that to the bank, and I'm going to get to talk to Seth Dillon today. Folks, we're going to a break, but we will continue talking to Seth Dillon. CEO of the Babylon B. Check it out. Folks, I'm talking to Seth D-I-L-O-N, who's the CEO of the Babylon B. If you don't know about the Babylon B. What is wrong with you? Okay, so have you talked about expanding into other media into short form, you know, video stuff or whatever?

because I'm surrounded by comedians and comedy writers and stuff. We all think about that kind of stuff. And I think it was even a couple of years ago, I was looking at the Babylon B and thinking, this is such a sensibility, such a pool of talent, that if you really want to take over the culture, you can't take over the culture, affect the culture. You can't really do it only with short pieces like that.

You want to go broader if you can. I'm assuming maybe you've talked about that. We have, and we've started to dabble in it. You know, our creative team has the ability to write scripts and do, like, sketch comedy. We don't have, like, actors on our staff. But with our guys in Southern California, they have access to actors in the L.A. area. So we've been able to pull in some people who are either voice actors or comedians who can be on screen and work with us on that stuff. And with Ethan's experience and animation, we've been doing animations, a little short animation videos recently.

recently that are really, really good. And we just put together, so you may have seen our article, we did one on how a motorcyclist identified as a bicyclist and set a world record. Oh, dude. And I see all this stuff. We turned that into a short documentary and did an actual short documentary about the motorcyclist

and his path from becoming a bicyclist to a motorcyclist in the transition there. And that was like five minutes long, but a little like short little mockumentary thing. I had a starring role in a filmed mockumentary 30 years ago. That's how far back I go. in the world of mockumentary. It's true.

It's called woven loo. And you can look it up online. It's about 10 minutes. Woveen Lou. But the reason I say that is because that idea of mockumentaries in short form, people would just, you know, you talk about stuff going viral. It's doing well. People are hungry for this.

Yeah. So I think we're going to need to work together, so. I just get excited because, look, let's be honest. Doing this stuff, if you do it at a high level and it works, it's fun. Yeah. It is fun to collaborate. in comedy. I've done it. Chris Himes, who's my producer,

was with SNL for a number of years. I mean, there's so many people that I have known who are in that world, but if you're Christian or conservative, you're kind of stuck, you have to go work for SNL, you have to go work for whoever. So the idea that this is happening, Veggie Tales was that for a season

that didn't really pan out, but the idea that people with these sensibilities that we have could make cultural products, to use a gross term. It's exciting. We're living in an exciting time. It is.

And like I said, I think that the environment is ripe for it. I think that the left has created an environment for it by stifling comedians' voices on their side. They're not going to be as funny as they were. They're not going to be a little. We have the opportunity to tell all the jokes that you're not allowed to tell. Right. And so there's a huge opportunity for, and people have asked me, like, do you see this competition? Do you want to own this market and everything?

It's like, no. There needs to be more conservative voices doing this stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. It will only be beneficial, I think. if there's more of us. Okay, now we're going to have to get serious for a moment. Okay, that's long enough.

Okay, no, we do have to get serious because you, this is really serious, but it's also hilarious. You guys at the Babylon B., doing intensely hilarious, obvious comedy have been attacked by, I don't know, the New York Times, Snopes saying that you're putting out false information.

Yeah. So please explain Because I'm not even joking. Like, that's the world we're now living. And so talk about that. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I mentioned there's, you know, the left is killing comedy by choking it. But they're also trying to censor it.

And what they're trying to censor specifically is comedy like ours, where they're the target of it. You know, they cannot bear to be laughed at. They can't bear to have their ideas mocked. So instead of just laughing it off or responding to it with their own jokes, they've gone down this route where they've actually tried to smear us as being a, source of misinformation. And there's a reason they're doing that. So Facebook, Facebook, Twitter, you know, all the social networks were really trying to crack down on misinformation and block it and keep it off their platforms. The left took advantage of that

and thought to themselves, okay, well, maybe that's how we get rid of the Babylon Bee. Lump them in with fake news. And so they started writing all these news articles. The most recent one was the New York Times saying that we're a far-right misinformation site that sometimes traffic's and misinformation. I'm quoting them. That's what they said. We had to send them a demand letter and tell them to remove that from their piece because it was defamatory, it was going to get us banned on social networks. Next thing you know, you know, our Wikipedia page is going to say that we're not really a satire site where we pretend to be so we can mislead people. It's just, it's a malicious status.

You're pretending to be a satire site. How brilliant is that? They're pretending to be journalists, and they're, in fact, using misinformation to smear us as being a source of misinformation. So the irony is just like so many layers deep. But what you just said, they're pretending to be journalists. That, unfortunately, is not a That is actually true. They think they're journalists. They no longer know what journalism is. And we're, I mean, this is what I was saying earlier.

Like, we're living in truly strange times. There's a strange threshing, winnowing, separating, where we don't know how it's going to end up. But we've never, at least in my time, lived in a time that is so, well, you can just feel like new things are emerging. We just don't know that, you know, these trends, the trends, the trends that. over the last, you know, decades have kind of come to a point where it's going to break differently. We're seeing it already. I mean, the fact that you guys exist. But the fact that they would push back in that way, it's just amazing that we're in a culture where that they would feel the need to do that.

Seriously. Right. Yeah. Like, they're scared, I guess. They are scared. I'll tell you, it's when people ask me what they're scared of, I think it's the effectiveness of humor. I think that humor, like you said a minute ago, humor is a vehicle for truth delivery. It's one of the ways you can speak truth to culture.

You know, I often quote G.K. Chestered on this. He said, humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle. And I love that quote. You know, he's really highlighting how. I'm pretty sure I said that first. Yeah. It's so good because it just illustrates for you, you know, when you wrap a message in the package of humor, it's more easily delivered and received. Hang on a second.

We're going to a break. Folks, we're going to continue this very serious conversation about humor with Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee. Folks, I'm talking to the CEO. That's, I believe, Chief Executive Officer. You can check that out on Google, see if that's right. Of the Babylon B, nobody really, I shouldn't say nobody. I have never, like, drilled down into the title, the Babylon B. That alone is hilarious.

A lot of people, I would guess that a lot of young people, by the way, I'm talking to Seth Dillon, who's the CEO of the Babylon B, a lot of young people wouldn't even get the reference. No. Because I grew up in Danbury, Connecticut, and right next door is Newtown, Connecticut. And they've got a paper that's like 200 years old called the Newtown Bee. But it's a very old term that some newspapers would have. Right. So obviously calling it the Babylon Bee.

There's a Sacramento Bee. There's a lot of... Well, I forget. I forget. But in my neck of the woods, there's only one B. It's the Newtown B. Please make a note of it. But the fact that you call it the Babylon B, you know, again, unless somebody's tuned in the

ologically, they're not really getting, you know, Babylon represents... whatever you wanted to represent. Yeah. Well, you know, we've got, so you had, you had God's people in exile and in the Old Testament. And so you've got this corollary to that, I guess, what Adam was going for when he named it this, is Christians are to some extent ostracized and in exile in our present culture. You know, there's a very real sense in which we are outsiders. And so the Babylon B's jokes are really dispatches from exile, you know.

And I think that that's a, and it also has that. nice alliteration to it. I can't believe. Yes, alliteration. Babylon B, but I can't believe you just referred to the, to the, to the, to the exile of Israel in responding to that these are dispatches from exile. That's really good. That's really deep, man. Everybody says you're shallow, and they're wrong. Who's everybody? I want to talk to them. All those people. Tell me who they were. That's really sweet. You know, I was, I was, I was, this show, the Eric Mataxis show, had a YouTube channel where we posted all these interviews that were filming. We had 220,000 followers, and it was really growing.

And YouTube completely wiped it out. Took the whole thing down. And a lot of people said to me, the reason they did that is because you were being effective. And the reason I'm only bringing it up now is because a lot of that has to do with humor. We joke around a lot on this program, and we go places that, you know, a more, um, theologically focused or Christian focused program would not go. Right. And, and that is dangerous.

So humor and people who are able to kind of, you know, surf in the culture, that's scary because we're not supposed to be able to do that. They're supposed to do that. Right. And they're having a hard time doing it and we're starting to do it. Yeah, it's threatening to them. I think they certainly view it that way. But you know, going back to what you said a moment ago about, you know, a serious, serious discussion

about humor, there is, uh, there is a sense in which we get frustrated. I personally get frustrated having to have these conversations where we're like defensively explaining how we really are satire. We really are comedians. You know, like, I don't want to have serious. I just want to keep doing jokes. But can you even imagine that you have to do that? It's so stupid that it's funny.

But we have to address it. I know, I know. To some extent, we have to address it head on. We can't take it lying down. But we do also, you know, riff on them and spit it back at them with the satire as well. But it is frustrating to have to have so many serious conversations about. our humor and about how we have a right to do our humor. You know, just let's make jokes.

You know, we're bringing levity to stuff and we're doing it in a very, a very lighthearted way and not with any malice behind it whatsoever. So it is frustrating. Even the fact that you have to say that, you don't even say it because they're baiting you into, you know, it's preposterous. You know, you're not Lenny Bruce and this is far more dangerous than Lenny Bruce ever was. Because Lenny Bruce was, you know, part of a movement. that was already happening. He was just the voice of that movement. But you are really, I would say,

igniting a movement of people to learn that, oh, yes, I can laugh at this. Yes, I can be witty. Yes, I can speak truth into the sick culture right now. I mean, we need that now far more than we did in the 50s and 60s when people are, you know, talking about we're being repressed by this, you know, patriarchal, white, you know, we need to kick back against it. Well, that's nothing compared to what we're experiencing to me. Right, right. I agree with that. Yeah. So it is necessary to just keep doing what we're doing. So what do you see for the future of the Babylon V? I mean, what is going on in your world right now? You guys are producing genius stuff every single day, but what do you, you know, you're the CEO. So how do you, where do you see going two, three,

five years out? I mean, we're going to continue to grow in the direction we're currently growing. We want to keep building our audiences. Hopefully we continue to have the platforms that we're on. If we don't, we have to figure something out. But, you know, we have a ton of subscriber support right now, which I think gives us a little bit of independence from big tech. We're not so wedded to them. So what is subscriber? What do you mean? You mean people pay money for some extra content?

Yeah, we have paid supporters. They get, like, exclusive access to content that they wouldn't otherwise get. So they get, like, the Joel Osteen joke like 10 minutes before everybody else? Not necessarily. They do get, like, some, they get, like, the full-length podcast. They get access to our headline pitching forum, you know, like stuff like that. But they're primarily, I think most of those people are subscribing to support us. They see that, you know, we're, you know, we're, you know, we're, you know,

that we're in this battle, this cancel culture battle, this effort to censor comedy. And so they're supporting us. And so we appreciate that. But as far as the future goes, look, I mean, we're trying to get into, like you mentioned, new mediums. We're working on animation. We're working on video. So we want to keep finding new ways to bring our message to wherever people are where they're consuming it. So we're going to continue to try to do that in effective ways.

And so we'll continue to grow in that direction. Well, as I say, I've been kind of in the comedy and the humor world for soul. long that I never thought that I would see the emergence of something as good. I mean, you guys aren't just not cheesy. It's brilliant. I think. I appreciate that. And I feel that there's nothing better you could be doing, Seth Dillon, than, you know, lending your skills as a businessman to this. This is very important. And listen, I don't mean to get too serious, but it's important to the future of freedom and to the future of America that we have a healthy, free, culture where we can make fun of things, where we can, you know, lampoon things that need

lampooning. Yeah. And frankly, without you guys, I see almost nothing. It seems to me that everybody who has a talent in this world will be coming to you, and it'll be a challenge for you to figure out how to use them and how to grow it. Yeah, but I do hope that we inspire other people to do their own thing and to do it effectively too in their own way and establish their own unique voice. I hope that we do that.

So that, you know, I say this to people all the time. There's so much of a feeling in our culture where people are trying to silence themselves and censor themselves, and they're doing the tyrants work for him. There you go. And I think that everybody needs to be willing to be bold. Look, people used to die for their freedom in this case. You give up their lives for freedom. And we're not willing to give up our Twitter accounts.

Oh, man. We're not willing to get banned or potentially lose our jobs. I'm willing to get banned. And I got banned. Yeah. But I mean, but that's the whole point is like we need to lead. We need to lead. We need you to do the same thing that we're doing.

Do not shrink back. And if everybody does, then they can't ban us all, right? They can't cancel us all. They can't shut us all up. We'll leave it right there, folks. That's Seth Dillon, the Babylon B. Seth. Thank you so much. Thank you.

You know what, Alvin, I decided we should do another fun segment right now. We did ask metaxus. Okay. We should now do a Mr. Postman. What's that song, Mr. Let's just call it, let's just call it a listener writes. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, and now a segment of a listener writes.

A listener rights. You know what, Albin? I just got a letter from a listener. Really? Can I give his name? No. Well, it rhymes with Jack Conley. I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I wouldn't say it.

Okay. It's, I'll just say the initials are J.C. Okay, Jack, can we use your name on the air? But it says, this is incredible. You know, I get stuff in sometimes that's very funny. The next letter is very funny. This letter is really serious, and it really moved me to tears. It says, dear Eric, I just completed your biography of Bonhoeffer.

Thank you for such a provocative, inspiring, challenging read. I'm a Catholic priest and so deeply appreciative of your work. I assure you, writing and preaching will be different now. you have opened my eyes. Thanks. John, I'm not going to say the last name, but it's a C. I want to tell you, folks, when I get something like this, you know, you write books. I prayed so hard when I was writing the Bonhofer book that God would use the book for his purposes. But 11 years later, to get a letter like this, this is a priest saying that his writing and his preaching will be different as a result of reading this book.

Now, I know it's not my book. It's the life of Bonhofer, but the idea that I had the privilege of writing the book. So if you're looking for a good book, let me recommend my biography of Bonhoffer, not because I wrote it, but because it's kind of the best summation book. If you're going to read a book, you want his whole life. And just to be clear, you don't have to be a priest or a minister to read it. It helps, but, okay, here's a letter. Now, this letter is serious, but I found it so funny, I said I've got to read this on the air. I'm not going to mention the guy's name, but let's just say it's Joe L.

This is a real letter. The title in the email was, your selection of only men is short-sighted. And then it says, Dear Eric, after enjoying your seven men book, Graduates Edition, I had misgivings about approving, recommending, or gifting it, and wondered why your picks lacked diversity as the number of women is zero. It's unlikely seven men

will inspire female graduates. Your selection of only men is short-sighted. Man, that hurts. Yeah, it does. So I had to respond to Joe L. And I wrote this. I'm not joking. That's the letter

I got, and this is my response. Dear sir, perhaps you will find my seven women book more diverse. Here is a link for you to purchase that book. But I must warn you up front that seven women does not include any men. I'm not sure what can be done at this point, but I thought you should know. Thanks for your email, sincerely, Eric Mataxis, author. That's a real letter. Somebody was upset that my book seven men graduates edition didn't include women and i don't really know how to respond to that

because it hurts it stinks because seven men it's a fact folks i'm not going to deny it you know when you're when you're when you're when you're wrong you're wrong seven men has no women in it i'm guilty you are and seven women to to double down on my non-diversity seven women has no men in it oh what are you going to do the books are printed they're published how people have buying and reading them and being blessed by them, I'm sorry. But you're a big man to admit all this. I must say. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. My next book's coming out, seven drag icons. Joan Collins, we got share. It's unbelievable. All right. Let me be clear. Nutrametics.com, 30% off if you use the code Eric. That's this week only.

They extended it this week. Not joking. Jump on it. Nutrametics.com, 30% use the code Eric. And we're done.