SIO87: Eli Bosnick with Brian, Dmitry and not Sean from Mythicist Milwaukee

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to episode 87 of Serious Inquiries Only. This is, as promised, probably going to be one of the worst episodes I've ever done, but it needs to be out there. Many people have asked for it, and also I will point out that there are certainly redeeming qualities about it, mainly being Eli. Eli. I'm trying to debate how much to preamble. I don't want to color anything in any sort of unfair way ahead of time.

But I will mention that this was, to my and Eli's understanding, going to be with Brian and Sean. Sean being the president and co-founder, the main driver of the organization, I thought he would, we are understanding that he would be joining us, but he did not join us, he dropped out last minute, didn't tell me, I guess they told Eli, So after me having to go to their event full of shitlords and howler monkeys and debate a shitlord on their terms and be subject to endless trolling after that. After they gave the video to Sargon's channel in order for him to put on and attract further trolls. After all that, Sean was not willing to speak to us. So as a result, he is not in this podcast. We speak to you, Brian and Dimitri. Another note, I went on a stream of someone called Bearing, who is a YouTuber, a quite popular YouTuber, many followers, many viewers, many subscribers. I did this on the recommendation of Eli because though,

0:02:09 Thomas: Of course, this person Bearing is not anywhere on my side on the social justice issues, Eli vouched that he was somebody who cared about who cares about truth and cares about being accurate and not harassing people, and I took it as an opportunity to try to get the word out on some of the misconceptions on YouTube, and I really appreciate the opportunity, so I want to thank Bearing, you can check out the stream on his channel, it was probably near two hours, I thought it, I thought it went really well. I thought that he, he was a jerk at times. I think I thought he opened it really, really poorly. I don't know what he was thinking. He opened it with just insulting me. Not sure why, but I was determined to not let it bother me and just try to talk ideas.

0:03:00 Thomas: So that I did. I would also like to point out that during the course of that stream, he became incredibly angry and yelled at me a few times, which is something, of course, I would be ridiculed for if I did, but, but I'm sure his fans won't care. Um, and also the reason I bring it up is I, I do think you should check out that, that Bearing stream, I bring up because prior to that recording we had already done the recording you're about to hear, but it wasn't released yet, and uh, the, the people at Mythicist Milwaukee saw fit to give the recording to Bearing, in order for him, prior to its release, in order to him to pick the worst moment, my worst moment, and play it for me during the YouTube stream.

0:03:47 Thomas: So I only bring that up because don't let these people fool you that they're somehow in the middle of a debate or facilitators of a debat. They very much have their side, and that's fine. They can have their side, but just as long as they're honest about it. They have a side about this, and they're, they're motivated to one side, and that's what they're doing. So that's happened, and yes, there was a very bad moment in this recording for me.

0:04:13 Thomas: I'll just let you hear it, I suppose, I'll let you here the recording, and then maybe I'll have to say a word after. But with that said, I give you one of the worst recordings I've ever done. Oh, one more word of explanation. I said frequently during this that I needed to go. I was not expecting a two hour plus, two and a half hour, whatever it ended up being, recording. Recording, in fact, I did need to go. Uh, my wife and I had plans, she had the baby, ready to, to drive, to go, uh, for probably a half hour with texting me and telling me what's going on, you know, what's up, and I had to say, I, I can't get out of this recording, and so that's why I needed to go. It was a very hard out, I overstayed it, and we were late, but there you go. And also I didn't speak for most, for much of this, reporting, because, mostly because I, I don't have anything really to say, say to these people.

0:05:03 Thomas: I'm done with them. I've said what I need to say. I think what they did was horrible and they don't recognize it. So that's why I didn't talk much. So, that's all the explaining I'm going to do. Let's get to it.

0:05:25 Thomas: All right, well, we're here with uh, with Brian and Dimitri, right, okay.

0:05:30 Guests: Yes, sir.

0:05:31 Thomas: Can you guys just, for the uninitiated, briefly, you know, say what your role in the organization is in MythCon, and

0:05:39 Guests: I'm Brian Edward. I am one of the directors, director of finance and podcast co-host. And I'm Dimitri Kaye, and I am also Brian's co- host and, well, for all intents and purposes here, emcee at the, you know, at the last myth conference.

0:06:00 Thomas: Then uh, we've got uh, Eli is here as well. How's it going, Eli? Yeah.

0:06:04 Guests: Thanks so much for having me, Thomas.

0:06:06 Thomas: Well, my pleasure. Um, where do you want to start? I mean, Sean doesn't seem to be here. Usurp

0:06:10 Guests: Well, yeah, I mean, this is unfortunate, why don't we start this way that, you know, we're coming on, like, obviously we disagree about some things, but both of us, I think, you know, Dimitri and I, and I think this is definitely true for us. We want to speak in good faith and have some dialogue. And we think that's true on your side. Well, that's, that's definitely true on our side, but unfortunately, as excited as I was for a genuine conversation, we have to begin with the elephant in the room. That is neither of your your fault, right? Which is that the president of your organization arranged this conversation. He's the one who gave us the date. He's the reason that this conversation was delayed by two weeks. I'm going to, I got to interrupt right away. Actually, Eli, I know that you thought those emails were from Sean, but those were from me. All of those email communications were me.

0:06:59 Guests: All of them were you? They were all me. Sean never confirmed the time. No, that was all me, okay? Okay, so well, then allow me to adjust. The time was confirmed. I believed I was talking to Sean and Brian. The Mythicist Milwaukee social media post said when I said they're not willing to have a conversation, said we are willing to have a conversation. We gave you a date and I changed my mind in good faith. I said, you know what? That's unfair to them. So I changed my mind and I waited the two weeks. And then last night with less than 24 hours notice, I was told not even by Sean, but by Brian, that Sean wouldn't be here. And I just want to say that is a terrible way to start a conversation in good faith. That is a terrible way to start a conversation in good faith, and it makes your organization look terrible.

0:07:47 Guests: Okay, come on, Eli, give me some credit. And Eli, okay, if we, if you're talking about the personal phone calls, we can talk about the emails. You know, there was some threatening things going on. I actually replied applied nuts right to one of them, which is a reference to General McAuliffe in the 101st Airborne, who is surrounded at Bastogne by the Nazis and stood his ground for five days before Patton came back in. The only thing I want to mention is that our whole thing is we're very much about teamwork. And all of the decisions that the organization makes are really done in in a democratic fashion with voting. So there's not like one person at the helm or two or, you know, there, there's just everyone who shows up to the planning meetings has a say in the decision-making and then, you know, we do a vote and then.

0:08:37 Guests: You know, we go in one way or another. So I think whoever talks, like we talk for the organization and Dimitri hosts the podcast with me. I've never enjoyed the podcast as much as with Dimitri. That's his goal to have Sean assert that position is wrong. And we, that's, that's why we did that. Just for clarity, every other interview you have done has been Sean and Brian. All right, Dimitri, what's available? Okay, so just for- And we were lucky enough to have Sean. Wait, no, I did- Damn, what was it? He meant for the Bearing podcast. No, no. But there was one or two I did. For Bearing, for Callie, for Godless Spellchecker, it was Sean and Brian. I will leave it up to the audience to decide whether or not Dimitri has become available, or Sean decided not to do the only interview, as the president of your organization, where he was going to see pushback. I'm interested in having a good faith conversation with you. And I just thought at the outset, we need to talk about an incredibly bad faith decision, in my opinion, incredibly bad fate.

0:08:53 Thomas: That position yeah what

0:09:36 Guests: But you guys are here.

0:09:36 Thomas: Is what is the can we even get a straight answer from you guys, like, what's the official, spatial reason, the myth Mythicist Milwaukee reason, Sean's not here, just for no reason, just

0:09:46 Guests: Because we are the podcast hosts. You guys are also the podcast host. This is the way our organization works. I mean, to rule out Dimitri on a big podcast like this.

0:09:54 Thomas: Well then it's not ruling

0:09:57 Guests: I mean, you guys

0:09:57 Thomas: Out you could have all three come, and not only that, as Eli points out, Sean did many an appearance about this con, and we're talking about the convention

0:10:03 Guests: Asked us, you guys ask us and we said, yes, and we're bringing to the table that. So now you're mad. I mean I have customers that would say, hey, I need one of your directors out here, right? Can they demand the CEO every time? Come on, I mean it's insulting to Dimitri and I to say that Sean's not here. Honestly, I think enough has been said and we will allow the people listening to this podcast to make their own judgment. I will say, I think your strongest supporters will agree with me on this. They might disagree with every other word I say on this podcast, but I think they'll agree with me on this. But you came here for a good faith conversation. So let's talk to you, right? Because you don't you know, you're I again, the reason I pointed out is because I don't believe your organization deserves that level of honestly bad behavior. I don't I don I don't believe you deserve that that stink on you.

0:10:04 Thomas: Yeah Brian and Sean, yeah yeah

0:10:55 Guests: So let's have a conversation with you. You came here in good faith. That is something that I will openly say at the front of this conversation. I admire and I'm glad that you're willing to come on here and talk about Mythicist Milwaukee. So I have some questions for you.

0:11:08 Thomas: Well let me, let me just start off, yeah, I, because I only really have one thing I want, want to ask, I don't honestly have that much to say, so I'll just, I'll just start. Um, you guys, uh, we've covered Sean's not here, but uh, you two who are here, when, um, when I read Sargon's tweet and the audience cheered, I just want to know what, what that felt like, from, for your perspective, because I, because

0:11:31 Guests: Exactly the question I was going to ask.

0:11:33 Thomas: I honestly, 100%, I want to tell you from the bottom of my heart, the reason I was so upset was that I didn't expect that, and I did not in my wildest dreams expect that the resulting reaction from the organizers, from you guys, would be pride in that. I thought the minute that cheer happened, everybody must be feeling like I'm feeling, which is, that's fucking horrible. I, that's honestly, I felt, I thought, okay, there's no way they intended for this to happen. Subsequent communications from your organization indicates that, that, that you don't share that feeling, and I really just want to know what it felt like for you in that auditorium when I read sexual harassment and people cheered, oh.

0:12:14 Guests: Okay. So you're asking two different questions. One, you're talking about the actual cheers after that first question. And then the second question is about the post-, post-MythCon. So why don't I address those? Well, yeah, I'll start with the cheering portion. I think you can break that down into multiple ways. One is that folks came there for a convention. We had a diverse crowd. We strive to bring in the most diverse possible crowd. And immediately, uh, you know, I think, Thomas, you, you have to take some, some responsibility there, is, you know, when you, when you walk in, obviously you knew that there were folks that were there to see Sargon, uh, and you open up with an uppercut, which is exactly what happened.

You know, I think that at some point you have to realize that some sort of reaction, you know, people are excited, they're there to see someone that they've been waiting to see, so I don't know what the, the expectation was, you thought that he was going to roll over, you thought that he wasn't going to say, oh, you know, you're right, I'm a piece of shit. I want to frame this in context, there were people that were excited to see him, and then you punched him in the face verbally.

0:13:33 Thomas: Let's talk about what actually happened then, because that's nonsense. So I got up there, and you can watch the video, the video is available, by the way, on Sargon's channel, on Sargon's channel, without my permission, no one asked me, I didn't release my rights to go to Sargon channel, nobody asked me about that, nobody even ran it by me, but you gave it to Sargon. It's on his channel. And now I receive just thousands of trollish bullshit on every possible social media that I have as a result of that. So thank you for that. But what actually happened was,

0:14:02 Guests: What about your patrons though, I heard you've gotten an increase in patronship, your name recognition is much higher but

0:14:03 Thomas: Oh, cool. So what actually happened was I read, uh, the, his tweet. I said, here's why people don't want you. Here's why some people don't want you here. Like you tweeted the following. And I even said, you can watch the video. I will give you a chance to respond. Let let me just read the tweet. And I read his tweet. How is that an uppercut? How is reading his words an upperkut?

0:14:29 Guests: What We're talking about, I think what you're talking about is we're worried about people in the audience wigging out about that, right? I mean, you cite- Wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry, gentlemen. Can I interrupt slightly? I'm sorry. And Brian, I shouldn't interrupt you. I should let you talk. But I really do need to address this because we changed the subject from a very, very simple question. And Dimitri, I know we don't know each other, but I really wanna give you a chance to answer that again. Again, my question to you, and Thomas said it perfectly, was how did you feel when Thomas Smith, a speaker at your convention, read, I wouldn't even rape you, sent to a sexual assault survivor, and your audience, the people that you gathered in a room, cheered? How did you fill in that moment? That's what I want to know. Not what was the situation. Let me answer that, because I was in the crowd. I watched all of that.

0:14:37 Thomas: No. What? You

0:15:25 Guests: Yeah, Dimitri was emceeing, so he might have been back offstage, right? You can answer this. I want to know how you both feel. I would like to hear Dimitris' answer first. This is not M.M.'s business, and this is my perspective. Now, this is also coming from someone who did over 100 hours of research on all of the guests. So I was extremely familiar with this story, even before any of the controversy started. This was old hat to me three months before the conference started. So I knew this was coming. I talked to Thomas on the podcast. I talked to Sargon on the podcast. To me, everything was going. I can see exactly what everyone was thinking. I was actually sitting with five people that would call themselves social justice advocates. So that was kind of an interesting position.

0:16:11 Guests: And I talked to the folks that cheered afterwards, right? And you know why? You know why they said that they cheered? No, I don't want to hear why they cheared. Because I knew. I knew, asked you a very simple question, Brian, and you failed to answer it. How did you, I'm talking to the human being, right? We're going to get to the explanations. We are, and I'm going to let you explain for hours if you want to. I'm telling you, the human thing, Eli, in that way, we're a little bit the same. We can feel other people's pain. I could feel exactly what the people that were cheering for it felt, as well as some of my social justice friends that I was with who kind of react very negatively. I felt all of it. Not very negatively, I asked you a very simple question.

0:16:58 Guests: How did you feel when your audience cheered mocking a sexual assault victim? This is not a hard question. Would you like to hear how I felt? Would that help? Would you like to see what a direct answer to that question sounds like? This is called leading the witness or something. This is the most direct possible conversation.

0:17:18 Thomas: Literally haven't answered. You keep trying to avoid answering the question. You Keep. I

0:17:23 Guests: I'm asking you as a human being how it felt. It's the easiest question to answer. Go ahead. Eli, I can answer that. It was a very strong reaction. What do you mean strong? That is not the reaction that I would have liked in a perfect world. Absolutely. But I didn't have feelings one way or another. I was like, ooh, yeah, that was an incredibly powerful opening to this whole. First of all, we had no idea how this was going to go. So we were hoping that it was going to be a civil conversation. Immediately when that happened, we knew that it was going to be very combative. Because, I mean, how else is that going to stay? It went from a boxing match to a street fight. Wait, your reaction, your reaction to that was, oh, this is going to be a very powerful event?

0:18:13 Guests: No, no, no. In terms of, like, combative, like this is going to be not violent from from a physical standpoint, but from a verbal standpoint. Yeah, so actually one of the things that I thought of, again, what are you getting? I'm feeling a bunch of things at the same time. I think probably one of the first things that I thought of and maybe this isn't the feeling that you want, is I should have asked Thomas for the questions, right? Like, why open that?

0:18:41 Thomas: Told you, you know, curiously,

0:18:42 Guests: You know, I felt what I was feeling was this is going to get off the rails right away. What I was, why

0:18:43 Thomas: I. OK, here's why what you're saying is such nonsense. Did you or did You guys not on Callie's show? Did you? Or did you guys not say several times? Oh, Thomas is going to ask him about that tweet. I can't wait for Thomas to ask him about that tweet. I did the very thing that you just said, my wording was here is your tweet. I will read your tweet word for word. I will let you respond. I read it. People cheer. How could I have done that differently in your mind, coming in super hot? Yeah,

0:18:49 Guests: Did you come in with, you know, exactly, but how you worded, if you provide the context, okay, but without providing context and coming in super hot. Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen. How about this? Let me play Thomas for a second. Sargon, you know, I'm here. I can't get over this, Sargon. I've looked at all the background. I'm got this tweet. I cannot get over it. It's pissing me off. I have looked at it in every way, but it's kind of dickish. It is kind of a dickish, Sargon. Here is the context for the audience. Can you tell me why you tweeted that? You don't get a crowd roar in that. You come in soft like that.

Gentlemen, gentlemen, I know I'm gonna sound a little bit like a broken record here, but I am aghast at the lack of empathy in both of your answers. Look, I understand you're standing by your convention, but I asked you a simple question about what it felt like to watch your audience cheer, mocking a sexual assault victim, and your answer was, I should My answer is judge slowly. That is a reprehensible answer. Let me tell you how I felt, okay? Let me you how felt, because that is reprehensible. And I think it is the basis for what this conversation really needs to be, right? Cuz when I saw that video clip, I was standing, getting ready for a platinum night, right. I was getting ready a platinum and my show in Salt Lake City, hanging out with my buddies, he's living on my side of atheism. And I froze in horror and shame at the idea that a convention with the label that I fight for, that a convention with the title of atheism, that a convention that claims to be secular, would have an audience cheer that poison.

0:21:03 Guests: And the thought of all of the sexual assault, and I'm sorry for getting emotional about this, and your audience will call this a win, but the thought of the sexual assault survivors... We're on your podcast, remember?

0:21:16 Guests: It's not our audience. It's your audience. We're coming on your podcast. The thought of a sexual assault survivor sitting at home and thinking that this is what the community thinks of their pain, that this is what the community feels about them. I was ashamed to call myself an atheist. I have fought for atheism since I was 19 years old. I fight the creeping theocracy that covers this fucking country every day. I make nine to five jobs look easy. And I was ashamed. I was ashamed of myself. And I thought of my father, who's no longer with us. And I felt I'm just the bully he asked me not to be. That's what I felt. And I didn't put on the convention.

0:22:03 Guests: I was fucking appalled. And I'm appalled for you. Okay. Okay, you know, there's a person, okay, there is a person that had their child raped that may have listened to your joke, and are you appalled for that? What if somebody had the same outrage over the same joke? You know what? This has got Milo. Milo made a reference to something like this and got deplatformed from CPAC by his own people. There are conservatives out there like Ben Shapiro that could have been appalled by your jokes, and you know what, you have the right to say them. Them. We have a free speech and free expression in this country. I can think it's reprehensible, but you have the right to do it. And obviously, you cannot sit there and dictate what I must feel or anyone in the audience might feel. We can have rape and sexual assault survivors in our group that do not agree with you.

0:22:54 Guests: And are you going to tell them that they do not have the right to their opinion? Are you going to take away their agency? And I think Eli, that's that's a really important point to bring up that Brian. Great point, Brian. But one of the things that he kind of glossed over is we have members of the group who are, you know, sexual assault survivors. They were in that audience. They were in that auditorium. No one had this level of shame, aghastness, whatever you said that you describe. And there were maybe people in the audience that did perhaps or people that were listening at home. And that is entirely their right to have whatever opinions or whatever thoughts that they they hold.

0:23:42 Guests: We held a conference that had differing ideas, differing perspectives, and definitely a diverse audience. I would not have said that that reaction was something that I would have preferred. But at the end of the day, we're talking about one piece of one interview that happened for a span of five minutes. We had 10 plus hours of content of amazing conference content. And yet every single thing revolves like a merry round around this one point. And we don't understand why, you know, again, I don't know. Are you looking for some sort of public apology or like what? And if you remember when Thomas, when we were on the podcast and I had an enjoyable podcast with Sargon, an enjoyable broadcast with you.

0:24:32 Guests: And after we cut the podcast, we asked about, let's talk about the interview. Do you remember what my position was? Let's talk About the issues. Let's not even bring that up. So again, I ask you if we are that concerned about rape victims, as you say, why do we even not? Right. If we're worried about rape, possible rape victims in the audience getting triggered, why did we not issue a trigger warning? Why do we just not talk about issues? There was so much good discussion about Black Lives Matter going on that just didn't get deep enough that I really wanted to, affirmative action. I really wish we could have dissected those issues. Okay, so you've asked me three questions, and I'm going to answer them in reverse order, right? That was Thomas. That was Thomas.

0:25:16 Thomas: But you You threw a lot at Eli, I think That you Guys Just Threw like four Or five Different Issues I

0:25:16 Guests: Okay. Yeah, you threw a lot. That was, I mean, and Look, I didn't want to interrupt you, but I remembered the question, so I want to answer them in reverse order. The first, and I have to be honest here, Dimitri, I don't believe the question of what about the sexual assault survivors who didn't mind the mockery of a sexual assault victim to be a good faith argument. I think you know what the answer to the question is, honestly. But I will take away your word.

Find me a person, find me a person in that audience that said that they were cheering because they were mocking sexual assault. If you can find me me that then your point is solid, you've just, you've countered, you just countered to a different conversation that I'm talking about, right?

So you've just changed the subject again, I'm answering the first question you asked me, well I have two more questions to answer, of you wait, and now you've changed the object before you do, and I don't want to change the subject too, but um, we also, you know, we kind of dove in, which is totally cool, but we never, uh, you know, we never explained the context, context of the tweet or anything,

0:26:21 Guests: Because there's a lot of misrepresentation that goes on online or, you know, in discussions. And for your listeners, I mean, they might, you know, they could be making up all sorts of, you know, opinions about this tweet, this whole thing, but they don't have the background information. So do you want to share that real quick? But, you know, before you move on from this point or, or Brian can, or.

0:26:42 Thomas: Gave the Background In my, in my episode it Was, yeah I've given the background Kind of it

0:26:44 Guests: Yeah. Thomas has already I'll give it, I'll give it then. And you know what? That's the thing. There were people there that were following all of this that knew everything that was coming, right? And they would have understood that context right away. For those that didn't, I can imagine people were a bit shocked. Yes. And in the context that, But just so we know, do you want the context of the tweet? Tweet. So the context of the tweet is, he's tweeting to a member of parliament. Her name is Jess Phillips. A week before he sends out the tweet, he makes a video saying he's going to do this. The point is to make a purposely offensive tweet in order to insert himself in the conversation. The point to make it a non-threat and they'll take it as a threat. That's what he says in his video.

Do you want to go back though and explain, playing even, right? So right now, now Jess Phillips, right? Well, and Jess Phillips, at 19, um, she came out, uh, this was a, this is last spring, um, was at 19 and at a pub, and she was pushed up against the wall, somebody grabbed her crotch, and this

0:26:59 Thomas: The context Doesn't Make It better You can No The Context Doesn't Take it better, she

0:27:51 Guests: Really bad, this sucks, and then apparently they didn't even throw that guy out, so it's, it's pretty, it's pretty horrible, pretty crappy, what happened to her, you know, that sucks. And so she talks about that publicly, um, and now she is leading a campaign to stop bullying on the internet. She feels that women, it's not a safe place on the internet, and she wants certain, what Sargon believes, are censorious laws in order to combat this.

0:28:15 Thomas: Doesn't want Censorious Laws Have

0:28:17 Guests: So he believes that she's censorious.

0:28:17 Thomas: You looked Have You looked at her Initiative, do you know what it is, it's Nothing to Do With Censorious Loss

0:28:21 Guests: I'm saying what Sargon believes. What I believe about Jess Phillips doesn't matter. I'm seeing what Sargun believes. So this is what, in Sargon, I didn't make the tweet. So Sargon wants to insert himself into the conversation with a purposely offensive tweet. Tweet, Jess, I wouldn't even rape you. And, and it certainly gets news, you know, um, Jess Phillips. And I watched her reaction because I, I was, do I invite this person? Like to me, I wanted to see whether Jess Phillips is, is offended, whether he's apologized and so on and so forth. Just Phillips said, I don't, I didn't care. I went out with my kids. I just don't care to me. If any apologies owed it's to Jess Phillips, you Know, could I encourage Sargon to do that? Sure. I I mean, but that doesn't matter. That's between those two. That's not my business. Okay, so you've given the context, which was definitely a change in subject from me trying to answer your question.

0:28:25 Thomas: Where

0:29:15 Guests: And again, we started this conversation saying it was gonna be in good faith. You've raised two points which have very, very simple answers, right? One was used to dismiss my emotional response to the thought of how people might have reacted attracted to seeing that on your stage. And the second was sort of, what about a re? And I tried to answer that, but now that we're talking about the context, it was just, just notice that other people have different responses. Your emotional response is fine. Other people won't, don't have to have the same response. Yes. I'm aware people lack empathy and they are on this podcast. Um, my question is this, my question isthis you've brought up this context, right? You've obviously brought it up for a reason. My question to you is very simple. Does that make it better?

0:30:02 Guests: Does that, again, that is for the audience to judge. That's not for me. No, no. I'm asking you personally. I want to know what Brian's opinion is. Right. Well, you already accused me of having no empathy, right? I mean, this is the person that- Prove me wrong. Prove me wrong and- No, I want a challenge that you say that you have empathy. Let me challenge that. Not once did you, you could have intervened with with the people leading the platform campaign. They were on your own Facebook page. You're calling them in, tagging them in. You're leading them on. Where's the empathy there? Like, come on. I'm sorry. Brian, you've just changed the subject. You've got empathy for the full on-source side of your political position. You've just change the subject for a third time. You've read out. You've changed the- ... subject for the third time- What I'm challenging is- No, you're not answering a simple question.

0:30:49 Guests: And I'm saying that you don't. No, no, you are not answering the simple question, my simple, and I will answer your question about the deep platforming campaign because you just set up a ball for me on a fucking tee. And I will happily answer that. And I will also answer the two questions you brought up earlier in this podcast that you still haven't let me answer. But first answer mine. You took five minutes of everyone's time, five minutes to explain the contest, and I at, context, and I asked you a very simple question. Does that make it better? Look, you have allies listening to this podcast, Sargon listeners listening to the podcast, and they have the honesty to me to say yes, it, it makes it better. Fuck Jess Phillips. I don't care how she feels. I don't care how upset she is. You're trying to give me an ideological position that I don't have. No, I'm asking you if that makes it better. It's a simple yes or no question that literally anyone can answer.

0:31:38 Guests: Are you kidding me? Why do I have to have an opinion on this? I used to talk to you about that. When I go into a conversation. You have no opinion. Your answer is you have no opnion. I can see why people think my opinion does not matter.

0:31:54 Guests: I'm reaching out to you as a human being, and here's the thing, next year when you try to book guests, people are going to send them this podcast, and people are going to say, what kind of person, people are going to make their own opinions, not everyone thinks like you, and what we're going to say, and this is perfect, and I hope they do listen to the podcast, is that we stand up for discourse, free speech, and for people to have their own opinion. And Eli, I'm very respectful of your emotional reaction to what you heard. That is entirely your purview. You are 100% entitled to that. But Brian is entitled to his thoughts, and so are the people who are in the audience or whoever. I mean, we can't thought police.

0:32:40 Guests: We can't moral police everyone. I mean right. I mean you are kind of sounding like the Jehovah's Witnesses, you know, that you can't read this, can't look that. You must feel this way. You have done absolutely everything I possibly needed. So I abandoned that question. Now I'm going to answer your question about the deplatforming campaign, because I do want to talk about deplatforming. Then I'm going to ask you a question about what about the sexual assault victims who didn't mind. And then I'm gonna answer your questions about my jokes. All right, so let me start by answering the question about your deplatforming campaign. In the Facebook post, the only Facebook post that I made about your convention, convention, I supported your convention and I supported the speaker's right to go. And I said, lots of people I agree with on both sides are disagreeing about this.

0:33:28 Guests: I tagged in Steve, I tagged in Dan, I tag in Kristi, I've tagged in Matt, I'd tagged in Seth. And I spoke in support of your conference because I believed your conference to be acting in good faith. No, I'm talking about earlier, a month earlier, you were in the thread with the same people. They were listing out exactly what they were saying to try to get the whole thing derailed by leaving the venue. Did you mention anything to them then? It was your post. We took screenshots. I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you talking about the one where I said, don't trust me? But I'm saying you were aware of the deplatforming campaign well before you made this post. Okay. You had to. It was taking place on your Facebook page. Okay. So let's talk, because I think we're talking about the same post. The one where I said, there's a lot of people I really care about on both sides of this thing.

0:34:16 Guests: No, no, this is much earlier. This is much earlier. . This is about a month earlier. Well, so this is not something that I remember. If you bring it up, if you send me a screenshot, I'll happily comment on it. It's there. We will tag it in. Yeah, feel free to tag me in it. But let's talk About the deplatforming campaign, right? Because what you're getting at here is that it was wrong for Kristi and Dan and Steve to try and deplatform your convention based on your invitation of a controversial speaker. So let me ask you a question. First of all, did I just relate your opinion correctly? It was wrong of Dan and Steve and Kristi to try to de-platform your convention, to reach out to your venue and say not to work with you because of the speakers you invited. These are obnoxious tactics. Yeah, it was wrong. It was wrong of everyone. Yeah, that is not

0:34:28 Thomas: Is Are You sending It on Skype or what Oh The first

0:35:02 Guests: Something.

0:35:03 Thomas: Direct answer I think I've heard from you guys So it was wrong Is

0:35:04 Guests: Yeah, no, I appreciate the directness. So, let me Let me ask you a question. Do you believe in universal against, do you believe universally against de-platforming?

0:35:16 Guests: I don't even know what that means. So do you believes everybody?

0:35:20 Thomas: There anyone you could have invited who would be bad enough to where you think it would be appropriate for people to try to get you to uninvite Them.

0:35:27 Guests: No, we don't believe in your universal de- platforming. There can be a narrow standard. We have adopted the Chicago principles on free speech and free expression, and you can look that up. University of Chicago. Yeah, the University of chicago. Tell me your opinion. Who would have been acceptable for you to de-platform?

0:35:49 Guests: Well, wait, of ourselves? No, no. So are you talking about who we ourselves would deplatform or Who we would support? Okay, so Amos Yee was invited to a level special guest, right? And again, the aims of the MythCon were not to grab the fringes, but to the political mainstream, right. Now, we elevated, he was never going to be a speaker, speaker, but we'd elevated him to a special guest. And once we'd done that, now this falls under the bounds of MythCon. Amos has probably got a lot of growing up to do and he didn't wanna back off to some of his controversial statements that were way outside and light is on the absolute fringes. So we said no and we uninvited him. Okay, wait, sorry, I need to clarify that, because that was the most generous retelling of a story since, in eighth grade, when I got to second base with Becky Anderson. Amos Yee has and continues to defend pedophilia and child pornography.

0:35:54 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:43 Guests: That's why you uninvited him. But only after your official Twitter account defended him multiple times and said he'd taken back those statements. Okay, so do you believe that a person under the age of consent can have an opinion on consent laws?

0:36:59 Guests: He made those statements when he he was under the age of consent, right? That when he's 15. So in that case, can't I hold a kid responsible for something that he said when he couldn't even consent to sex itself? You, if you can't consent to six, you can hold an opinion on this either. Right. And again, now he's 18. So he's either got to come back off these statements, which he was unwilling to do. So he uninvited him, right. Had he come back up the statements, are you going to hold it to that that 15-year-old, that's a different scenario, right? That's a different scenario. But he didn't, and your official Twitter account said that he had, and then when it was obvious that he was going to double down on those opinions, you reversed what your official Twitter accounts said, and you uninvited him and made a public statement.

0:37:47 Guests: What you're trying to do is saying, wow, Mythicist Milwaukee is not utterly perfect. Guess what, Eli? Guilty. We're not, not perfect. Yeah, and okay, and frankly, and I want to come back to, you know, you guys were talking about the conference, and I hope we get to talk about the rest of it, because we've only talked about like five minutes of it, um, but we, uh, you know, we don't think that that ran perfectly. Yeah, we're, we're incredibly proud of, you know, the effort that we put into it, and at the end of the day, how, how it turned out was, you know, with a 13 and a half hour conference, and we had had one tumultuous Sargon-Smith debate, right? Did that go well the way we wanted? No, it didn't. But Sargon and Smith did. Dimitri did a great job. Melissa did a great job. Ron Miscavige did a good job, great job, that there was an absolute diamond with the Faisal-Osser debate.

0:38:36 Thomas: Can I just give you guys an analogy? Just analogy.

0:38:38 Guests: And wait, hang on, hang on. And a great movie and a great after party. So you're going to judge that on the tiniest of standards, right? So I'm going to make you the taniest of standards. Yeah, No, we feel like it's a little unfair. Percentage-wise, you're going to look now. Do you hear yourself? Yes. I mean, genuinely, do you hear yourself, the tiniest of standards? You're expecting absolute perfection from us, Eli. Okay, can we be proud of this? No, not perfection. I'm going to tell you a story anyways. I come from a crappy high school in Ohio, right? I got all A's there, and I show up in college, and I'm not nearly the smartest guy. I'm way around the end of the bell curve. And my hardest course there was calculus. I worked my ass off at that course. It was hard for me. I'm not good at that. Four hours on the phone with my brother every day, studying my ass up.

You know what I got? A B minus, a B minus. And I was more proud of that B minus than I was an A in my science course that I didn't work as much. So guess what? You can be proud of something that's imperfect. Are

0:38:49 Thomas: Yeah, no, no.

0:39:40 Guests: You really, are you really describing a conference where your audience walked around wearing MAGA hats and Kekistan flags? So we're gonna convict all Trump voters. And booed a speaker for defining a term and applauded that feminism is a mental illness to not being perfect. Are you really gonna use the term not perfect about that? So we should have said, if you voted for Trump, you're not allowed. Yeah, so let's talk about some of those things. This is such a ridiculously dishonest way to behave. It's a gift to me. I mean, it's hard because I wanted to have an honest conversation,

0:39:40 Thomas: It's not about imperfect.

0:40:20 Thomas: Yeah

0:40:21 Guests: But it's a gift to me. I mean don't get me wrong. You're recording yourself forever calling a conference where people cheered feminism is a mental illness, right? Your grandchildren will hear this recording. They will hear you say nobody's perfect when we talk about mocking a sexual assault. And there are people in Saudi Arabia that are pissed off. Are you saying that Mohammed didn't exist? Imagine the outrage there. Yeah. Yeah, that's the, Eli, I think that's the... This is outrage.

0:40:21 Thomas: This is this is nonsense.

0:40:47 Thomas: What? What does that even mean? Okay I haven't talked at all. I literally have not talked. I'm going to say something before you guys go and ask us like four questions that we never get to. Too.

0:40:52 Guests: Why does everybody have to have the same morals as you, Eli? No,

0:40:57 Thomas: Here's what I want to say about what I, here's here in terms of the percentage of the conference, it is as though in one part of your conference, someone got up on stage and whipped their penis out and exposed it to everybody and you didn't address it. And then you said, whoa, there was so much, there is so much of the conference that was good. There was, but there was, we had a debate between Azra and Omani. It's like, we need to talk about the first thing.

0:40:57 Guests: No, I get where you went with this. Go ahead.

0:41:13 Guests: That is absolutely ridiculous. That's absolutely absurd. If somebody did that, that would have been illegal. Illegal.

0:41:27 Thomas: We need to talk about the first thing. Do you understand analogies?

0:41:27 Guests: Right? Grab Grab your attorney that you're also podcasting

0:41:31 Thomas: That was an analogy. So if you had come out after the conference and said, here, so let me, I want to give this to you guys. I'm being a hundred percent honest. What I hoped and what I expected was that after the conference, we would get some sort of statement that was, hey guys, and we could skip all the pleasure. There might be some parts that were, hey, we were very proud of part of the conference we put on we were very proud of a lot of the events we had a lot of the speakers it was great there was one moment that was inexcusable that was when the crowd cheered for sexual assault sexual harassment that was an excusable that created a disgusting horrific

0:41:31 Guests: And ask him which one is legal. All right.

0:42:04 Thomas: Environment for women that was awful can you let me finish I haven't talked at all let me finished what I'm saying that would have been 100 acceptable I would have accepted that apology I would have said you know what they know that there was one part of their conference that was horrible they they understood that that That one part of their conference made everybody feel terribly uncomfortable. And then we can get to the part where you say, you know what, you know what?

0:42:05 Guests: That's – we have to prove that the crowd is a sexual harassment.

0:42:26 Guests: Everybody. Everyone. You're speaking in absolutes.

0:42:29 Thomas: Then we can give the public say, You know what a lot of our conference went well, and I could have said, yeah, I agree. And you know, what else I'll commend you on most of your the other parts of your conference were really diverse. You had diverse speakers, you had a lot of it with a lot of people that were kind of on the on the right wing of things. But you have diverse speakers. You had debate. There's nothing wrong with the rest of your conference, but that one part you didn't apologize. You didn't address it. You don't seem to grasp how ugly of a moment you created.

0:42:56 Guests: I don't understand why that's a focal point for everything. And, again, we explained exactly what the context of all of that was. And if you don't, you know, if you don't take the context into account, then all you're doing is pointing

0:43:11 Thomas: That's why we asked you if the context made it better, because the context makes it worse, actually. So, I don't know why you're giving that as some sort of excuse. A woman who was a victim of sexual assault?

0:43:16 Guests: Right, I mean Thomas, you're in charge of this conference. You're the one that had the lead on that. You have to go there, you could if you would have delivered it softly it would have done. You know what, here's what in your home run would have been, Thomas. Said, guess what, I come up with a better tweet that would have had the same impact and not offensive. You'd have done that And the other thing that I feel like we keep continuously glossing over, and Brian mentioned this, and I think it bears repeating, is that you contend that there were people in the crowd who were explicitly cheering for sexual harassment. That's that's

0:43:25 Thomas: Oh, yeah, I was the one that asked the question that you guys said I was going to ask. Oh, it's up to to me it's up to me to soft pedal what Yeah.

0:43:57 Thomas: Let

0:43:57 Guests: Essentially why we keep talking about this. And it is it is our position after talking to the people in the audience, after moderating, after being in the hallway, everything that that reaction was not a reaction to yay for sexual harassment, which you you keep claiming. Right. And that was that was a reaction to free speech. He said something that he was allowed to say, contentious or not. And they were cheering for their, you know, for somebody stand. They perceive that they are cheering for somebody who is standing up for censorship. That is exactly what they said. If you have talked to them and heard differently. Tell me, gentlemen, the level of dishonesty on display in this conversation is I know you're both smarter than this.

0:43:58 Thomas: Me

0:44:45 Guests: And I know you're both more empathetic than this. You are not the moral arbiter of the United States or the world. Yeah, Eli, why do you get to come and call us liars? I'm saying to your face, I wish you were here, this is the God-honest truth, and I don't even believe in God. This is 100% the truth. I say this with every fiber of my being. Me too. And for you to say, you're talking about

0:45:09 Thomas: Give you Once again, an analogy, just to see and we'll see, you can overreact to it and then not realize it's an analogy. Let's say that the tweet was something else, because clearly the problem here is that you guys don't understand that the tweet is awful, you don't understanding, you think that there's some excuse, you think there's some context you don' get. So let's replace it with something we could agree was awful. Let's say the tweet was, the Jews deserved it. Let's say the tweet was. The Jews deserve it. I read the tweet. So I say, Mr. Sargon, you tweeted the Jews deserve it. Me says. Yep, and the crowd cheers, this you could give the same bullshit argument. Hold on. You could give the same argument if they were not cheering that they were cheering the fact that their support their against censorship.

0:45:39 Guests: Absolute hypotheticals. Wait. Hold on. No, no, no. That's that's fine. Tom, Tom, you totally have the right to say that. But what is the you know, you got to explain to me the context like like where was this said to what reaction was this? Because I because I am very you know there's literally nothing on earth that pisses me off besides anti-Semitism being a Jew. So so for me that that's a that's you know that's my that's mine like one weakness.

0:46:18 Guests: So, even I would be like, okay, what's the, is he trying to make a political statement, you know, was there, was there someone who was trying to push like a Jewish narrative like what was the context there. You can't know some.

0:46:28 Thomas: It is in the realm of discussion to talk about the context that wasn't what happened.

0:46:31 Guests: No, it absolutely is.

0:46:33 Thomas: Yeah, I said no.

0:46:33 Guests: I on your podcast you

0:46:34 Thomas: No, I I said it's in, hold on, you misheard me. You misheard be, you miss heard me.

0:46:34 Guests: Claim that Sargon is friends with Spencer, again, it's

0:46:39 Thomas: You misheard me. I said, it is in the realm of conversation. It is in realm of, we could have talked about the context. That wasn't what happened. What happened was the crowd cheered for the tweet that I just read. That's not a discussion of context and excuse, which still would have been pathetic.

0:46:53 Guests: In. That's what you perceive. You perceive the crowd cheered for sexual assault. I talked to them. Them. Did you talk to them? Thomas, did you talk to them on

0:47:01 Thomas: They cheered the tweet I read. Oh, I talked to them all fucking night. I'll have, you know, they, they cheered for the tweet.

0:47:06 Guests: What did they say? What did they say? When you asked why they cheered, what did they say.

0:47:10 Thomas: They cheered for the tweet. I don't, the people

0:47:13 Guests: That's what they said to you. That is what they say to you,

0:47:16 Thomas: Here's what, how about I tell you what, hundreds of people who emailed me and messaged me, and I could give you these messages, who said, "I'm a victim of rape." Thank you for standing up for that. I'm a victim sexual assault. I cannot believe what I heard. I talked to a woman who said her and six other women I can't vouch for her numbers. This was what she told me. She said six other women roughly left when they heard that because they did not know what the fuck this was about. They're not in the shitlord YouTube world. They don't know that there's all this context where it's okay to say, I wouldn't even rape you somehow. They don't know that. They're at an atheist conference and they hear, I wouldn't even rape you. The crowd goes wild and they freak the fuck out justifiably because they don't know what's happening.

0:47:24 Guests: So Thomas,

0:48:00 Thomas: Because they are women and they DON't know if they're safe in that situation.

0:48:01 Guests: Can I cover That one real quick? Just because you brought it up. So I want to say two things on that. One is, you know, you mentioned there were hundreds of people that emailed you, etc. We had literally hundreds of people messaging and emailing us, including women, that were saying, we so appreciate the fact that you guys are standing up to free speech, to censors, and that this is exactly the slippery slope that we don't want the country to slide into.

So that's the one thing I want in terms of support, because I don't wanna seem like all of the moral support is kind of pouring into this moral question on your end. It's also on ours. But the secondary thing is, so I took that time, you know, right when you guys were up on stage, I actually left through the side door. I went out the back and then I walked into the front of the the theater, so I was in where the registration table was and where kind of people would leave the auditorium. There were exactly two women who exited the auditoriums shortly afterwards, and I was immediately right there, and I was like, "Hey, how's it going? You know, what, what's, what do you think of everything?" And they were like, "Yeah, yeah, it's pretty intense in there." And I said, quote, "Yeah, it is very heavily testosterone, isn't it?" And they were like, "That is exactly how I would put it." No one said, "I don't feel safe." I feel

0:49:25 Guests: Like you should be chasing things around.

0:49:25 Thomas: Well, they told me that. I talked to people after the event and they said they didn't feel safe I

0:49:28 Guests: Literally, I know, but I am saying that I stood out there and I counted the two people and I talked to them. This is eyewitness account me. Like, literally.

0:49:36 Thomas: Talked to them as well and

0:49:38 Guests: Yeah, but you were up on stage. I'm saying that I was back when people ostensibly were leaving. No, Dimitri, what he's explaining to you is that he talked to people after the event who felt unsafe, who felt threatened, who thought excluded from the community.

0:49:54 Thomas: She left. I talked to a woman. Do you need me to get your fucking name or something before you'll accept that I talked to her at the bar afterward. Yeah.

0:49:59 Guests: Yeah. No, no, no. Are you? Tom, I believe you. That's, I'm not, I'm trying to give you just my perspective as someone who was, who was there, who was talking to people who were leaving the auditorium or that were coming into the auditorium, um, and in the, I think the point there to make is, you know, not everyone is going to like everything, and uh, yes, is it not everyone is going to like everything, yeah.

0:50:21 Thomas: It's unbelievable.

0:50:21 Guests: So, you have a situation and I don't know, I don't like, come on, I don't want to, I'm not making light of this, but I'm saying you have, you have an audience that was, you know, predominantly male, you know, it was at times it almost felt like a sporting event where they, where they were cheering. Now, that being said, instead we had active moderators in the crowd that were coming up to individual users because, you know, we had a security inside. Yeah. Thomas, we didn't want anyone to like throw you off or whatever it is. And there were some people, they got a one strike warning. Um, but again, you know, when you have people being loud like that, you're going to have people who maybe feel uncomfortable. And what, what I a hundred percent want to take responsibility for, and I think Brian will agree with this is, you, you know, run up to the event, you know, this is, hold on, this was supposed to be, you know, discourse, debate, dialogue.

0:50:21 Thomas: Well,

0:51:09 Guests: It was like, it was an intellectual, it was supposed to be an intellectual event. That segment, but, but oh my, oh man, I'll let, I let Brian hit you on that one. Because, because Sargon 100% is an intellectual, intellectual, but um, but beyond that, um, that segment alone was one that was very high energy, very high testosterone, there was cheering. I am not surprised that there were people that were like, yeah, I didn't really like, I came for a conference where there was going to be speakers and it was kind of like a football match. And if that's the case, a hundred percent we failed, the you know, our goals and the, the, you know, the ideal on that segment, on that one, right. And I'm sympathetic, I'm sympathetic to anyone that came to the con that said, "I didn't get what I wanted. I didn't have a good time. I didn't like this segment. I didn't like that segment." Someone says, "I didn't think the chairs were comfortable."

0:51:15 Thomas: Then invite an intellectual next time. Go ahead, can

0:52:04 Guests: I'm sympathetic to that. But all we can do is our best. I'm sorry. Brian. We did not slack off on that. Brian, I'm sorry. Can you just clarify? Are you comparing the people in your audience who felt threatened and alone by the cheering hearing of sexual assault to the chairs, not being comfortable enough of them. So anyone that felt that way could have come to me and I would absolutely address or Dimitri or any of just now, just now right now, live on the air, you just compared their discomfort to the chairs. Okay. Well you can hear the record anyone that felt weird, uncomfortable. I am sympathetic to that. And then you said it is just like if the chairs were uncomfortable.

0:52:51 Guests: You're saying everybody must have your moral values.

0:52:51 Thomas: I ask you, what what would result of that sympathy what good what good does your sympathy do when you clearly don't care and would do this event again I

0:52:57 Guests: What good does your sympathy do when you say everyone must think like me? You guys are acting like totalitarians.

0:53:02 Thomas: Didn't say everyone must think like me. I didn't say everyone must think like me. I

0:53:04 Guests: No, but I have to agree with Brian on this. I mean, it's very, you know, it is very like moral arbiter-ish. And, you know, I know we didn't really cover this very heavily. But, I mean, Thomas, since you're here, you know, I have to ask you, and there are a lot of your fans that are listening to this and Eli's fans, you have to take at least some maybe modicum of responsibility for the way that the conversation went and falling back on emotion and really not, again, had it been very chill and very calm, I think that the whole thing would have gone differently. So I don't want to level, you know, 90 percent of the blame on you, but I would hope that you would step up to the plate and at least say, hey, maybe.

0:53:53 Thomas: Will take as much blame as I, in so far as I tweeted, I will not even rape you, I would not even rate you, as much as I treated, that I'll take as much blame as that is, which is 0%. So you're trying to put the blame on me for reading someone's fucking tweet. I read it in a car in a calm way. I was, I was certainly challenging him, but I read in a calm way, and I said I will give you a chance to respond, and then the crowd fucking cheered, and that's when that's way over the line. You guys do not understand what it means for a crowd to have cheered. I will not even rape you.

0:54:03 Guests: Oh, wow. So is this how you talk to a friend when we have a disagreement and you're getting us? OK, but then you guys don't understand what it means to make a podcast and threaten an organization. I want to burn it to the ground. I'm going to create a voicemail. Now all these people are going to call you. You're freaking people out.

0:54:35 Thomas: Threatened. Create a voicemail? My

0:54:40 Guests: Okay, that's already there.

0:54:40 Thomas: Voicemails have been around since January,

0:54:42 Guests: But you're going to use your email.

0:54:43 Thomas: You fucking idiot.

0:54:44 Guests: You threaten us.

0:54:44 Thomas: I didn't create a vocemail for this. You could Google that in three fucking seconds.

0:54:47 Guests: Okay, I know it already existed. I know if you're

0:54:50 Thomas: You

0:54:50 Guests: Threatening us, I'm going to threaten them, ma'am. I'm gonna blackball them. So these are just okay tactics, right? You are just fine with that. You're fine with threatening. What a disgraceful, disgraceful change of subject. What a dishonest, Brian, for me to take you seriously would be, for you to take those opinions seriously right now would be an insult to your intelligence. You managed to put on pants, so we both know you're being dishonest. We both know even the way you phrased set up the email just now. That's all. It's Eli's way or then that's the only way. And I have a question. Gentlemen, there is nothing better for me. No, Dimitri, you've chatted a little.

0:55:35 Thomas: Said set up a vocmail.

0:55:37 Guests: Yeah, there there is absolutely.

0:55:37 Thomas: Set up a voicemail It's

0:55:39 Guests: It was already existing.

0:55:40 Thomas: In every single episode post since January. Look it up. Take five fucking seconds.

0:55:44 Guests: No, I know that. I know what I said. So you understand to threaten. No, you said set up. You said set. Oh, you're using. No, no. You said setup. You said. Set up a voice. OK. I was wrong on one little thing. OK.

0:55:46 Thomas: Oh, Yeah, one little thing that everybody on the internet is coming after me with.

0:56:03 Guests: OK. They're coming after you for the threats. Threats. They don't give a damn about the voicemail.

0:56:04 Thomas: No, they said did you. I will show

0:56:08 Guests: It doesn't matter.

0:56:08 Thomas: You the tweets. You set up an email. You set up a voicemail.

0:56:10 Guests: It's a threat.

0:56:11 Thomas: You set a voicemail. They're coming after you for that because you started that fucking nonsense without looking it up for three seconds. Irresponsible bullshit.

0:56:12 Guests: Okay, now you're . Actually, Armored Skeptic started that, and he did it on a video, his wrap up of MythCon. That was him making that up. I think Armored, as per usual- And many other things. Right, just repeated that lie over and over again. I I think he might have just been mistaken, but luckily for us, Brian didn't make that up. What Brian did just now, let me finish please. What Brian just now is, you were incredibly dishonest, right? You tried to repeat that lie and you were hoping, like many of the abhorrent things you've said in this conversation, we're gonna skate through them, right, like when you tried to compare Sargon's tweet to my jokes, or when you try to compare the people who felt alienated by mocking sexual harassment on stage to the people didn't care about it, Or when you've called me an authoritarian every time I've asked you to feel any kind of empathy towards the people who did not agree with you.

0:57:11 Guests: And I want to say, I know you don't understand this. Please let me finish, Brian. I let you talk. I let you tell the tale of the context. Just let me finish. I wantto inform you, gentlemen, that the reason I came on this show, right, wasn't to shame you, wasn't to blame you, wasn't to be cruel to you or mean to you, or threaten to you. It was because I wanted to talk to two fellow human beings.

And what I wanted out of this, and what I think we all wanted, was to see some humanity. To see some empathy for the people that were hurt by your actions. Because here's the thing, guys, everyone makes mistakes. And if you had come on this show, or even the day afterwards, and come on and said, you know what, I can't believe that happened at my conference, I feel awful. The way that I feel awful, the way Thomas feels awful for that moment having happened, we would have something to talk about. We would have wounds to heal. But instead, you have doubled down, doubled down. And you have shamed empathy and sympathy for the people in our movement who you made feel vulnerable and alone and scared as totalitarian. And I don't believe you actually think that way.

I'm sorry. I just don't believe it. I don't believe it, Eli, one thing I want to say is, you know, you have impeccable delivery. I 100% will give you that. You sound very calm, measured. But at the same time, you Know, throughout this whole conversation, no matter what we say, and we could have said, You know that the sky is blue, you keep saying in a very calm tone that we are dishonest, that we're liars, that we misrepresent. And I don't understand, like, you know, it's it's one thing if you if you honestly think that we're lying, then this conversation doesn't get anywhere, because I can say that I'm a hundred percent saying the truth. I know Brian, because we've chatted about this, is a hundred percent saying the truth and his representation.

So again, when when you flat-out call someone a liar, I don't, I mean, I don't do that in my regular life. Actually, the term I used was, if I were to believe you, it would be an insult to your intelligence. No, no, no. You you you've said, you've said you call this liars three times. Oh, absolutely, but for context, the reason why I'm saying I don't

0:59:35 Guests: Believe you is because it is much easier for me to to believe that you understand what you did was wrong and you don't want to admit it because you know your audience values sticking to their guns and the alt-right approach of never be wrong, never concede, never concede. So, you know, that's fair that you bring that up, 100%. The alt- right thing is not fair. Oh, no, not that. I'm saying the stick to your guns thing. What I will say is that we don't have a target audience.

Even after—well, I should clarify, because secularism—even after this conference, it's not like we cater to center-right or that we've catered to them before, or now all of a sudden, oh, you know, we're a rising star. None of this is accurate. We all hold some social justice values. We believe in just the overall term of social justice, and we think tactics are important here. And so we're not doubling down on lies or we can never be wrong or whatever it is. The one thing that we all agreed on after the recap, and I wish you were there in the room when we debriefed after the conference, was, okay, wow, that was an energy-packed hour and a half.

1:00:09 Thomas: Oh, you do now. Yeah.

1:01:01 Guests: We didn't deliver on the conversation portion that we wanted to. We wish we had changed up some of the tactics during the debate or during the conversation, had the questions beforehand, whatever it is. But overall, the overall conference was a success, and we didn't think that there was anything – I mean, there was a lot of support, and you mentioned that there were – Let's address this claim because you've made your point. Let's stress this claim that the overall confidence was a successful. Process. David Silverman has come out and decried your conference. The heads of QED, the two nicest humans I have ever met in the entire world, Andy Wilson and have come out and decried your conference, Seth Andrews has decried your conference, Matt Dillahunty has decried your conference as well as pretty much every other social justice advocate.

1:01:55 Guests: Every person I've met within the last three months, every conference organizer trying trying to book me, every human being talking to me about what's going on in our community right now, has used your conference as an example of failure, and you lost $12,000, which you had to fundraise so that you wouldn't, so that I assume you would be able to do the conference again next year. Tell me, either you believe that all the people I just listed are wrong and you're right, or your conference is by no measure a success. All right. First, the money. We've never made money on a conference. This is an investment that we feel is something that we're giving to the community. So that's that's one. And two, OK, you mentioned David Silverman, Matt Delahunty and others.

1:02:42 Guests: Right. And if I can summarize their position and tell me if I get it wrong, what they're saying is by they're, they're saying that that conference wasn't humanism, that that falls outside of the bounds of humanism, and we have to kind of be within humanism in order for atheism to grow and look good, right? Less because there were already that most hated, right? And that, that would get this way of the religious, right. And the only thing I would add to that, I would say that's a very fair interpretation of the words. The only thing that I would to that is that every person has come out and said that the, the behavior of one of your speakers and your audience was abhorrent. OK, so here's my response. My response is this. So humanism is one way to go, right? And you know what? I think that taking that route is people need to try that.

1:03:31 Guests: Right. And go on. Obviously, Matt Delahunty is going to do that. I think Silverman is. But here's the route that we're going to try. We're going to stand up for free speech and free expression and pluralism, right, with the pluralism that that, saying we don't have to have the same moral values, but we can get along without insulting each other, without going after each other, without making each other's lives miserable. And in our GoFundMe, in our go fund to me, if you look at the comments, here's ten dollars from a Baptist, thanks for sticking up for free speech and free expression, I know we don't agree, but we, with this we have enough to carry on the conversation, I'm about Catholic, thanks for sticking up for pluralism, this is what we need to move the dialogue forward. We don't agree, but we got an enormous support from the religious.

1:04:17 Guests: I think that growing and normalizing atheism can be done from a first amendment and pluralistic stance. It can probably also be done for me. Humanistic stance, you guys can go in that direction. Awesome. You're going to do, you're going nail it and we let us go in this direction and normalize it too. Yeah. And we fully support you guys. I mean, Tom, we, we have nothing against your content. Of course, from maybe a political standpoint somewhere, some of us disagree, but that doesn't mean that we go out, we demonize you, we make public statements. I mean that's just – that's not humanist, and I don't understand what the point of that was. And one thing that I want to –

1:04:52 Thomas: Point of what? Sorry. Pointofwhat? Pointof what? Clarify what you're saying. Pointoffwhat? You said, I don't understand what the point of that was. What do you mean? What are you referring to?

1:04:57 Guests: Yeah, what specific public statements are you saying? Yeah. So I so I don't understand the direction of, well, not only deplatforming, but we kind of covered that. But I want to come back to the fact that, you know, you've publicly come out and you've said, you Know, whatever it is, like, I hate this organization, I want it to burn to the ground, all of these inflammatory statements. And, you know, we just think that they're, they're kind of, they're not kind of, they're very incendiary. And they, you know, they're, they're angry. They're, I don't know what place they're coming from. Gentlemen, let me No.

1:05:03 Thomas: Yeah.

1:05:17 Thomas: What? You don't know where that's coming from?

1:05:33 Guests: No, no, Thomas, let me explain, uh, you need the context for those statements, um, you see when you have the context of the statements, it all makes sense. Go ahead. Reason why he made that, that seems like an incendiary statement, but it's not when you know the context. Let me, let me explained the context, and then you'll understand. I mean, people can make up their own mind, we're not the moral arbiter, but let me expand the context. The context was, see, um, Thomas, Thomas Smith, he runs a podcast, and he went on stage to have a conversation with someone that he had disagreements with, and an audience full of howler monkeys applauded, calling feminism a mental illness. So do you understand the context? Do you understand why those statements make sense in context? Does that context help? Yeah. So now, so on one hand, you're denying that context matters, and now context matters.

1:05:37 Thomas: Ah, yeah. Good call. No, context says

1:06:18 Guests: And no,

1:06:18 Thomas: We've never denied that context matter. We asked you if you thought the the context behind the tweets makes it better. You've refused to answer. We answered that it makes it worse. Uh, yeah, this is, do you want me to give you here? I'll give you my stance.

1:06:27 Guests: We, oh, we did not have a position. Well, I want to hear Tums.

1:06:31 Thomas: I'll gives you my stats,

1:06:32 Guests: You

1:06:32 Thomas: Uh, on, on your organization. I already said it. I don't know if you let me finish. I forget, but I already that, uh had you come out and, uh recognized how awful that particular moment and, and most of what your audience did that you cultivated, uh, what they did at the conference. Had you recognized, okay, we don't support things like, jeering and booing interrupted me. When I tried to define feminism, someone shouted and called me cuck. When I tried to Define Intersectionality, someone shouting called it cancer as well. They interrupted me at every turn. They yelled at me down. This is not a debate. That's not a discussion. That is not...

1:07:06 Guests: Yelled at them, too. You yelled at them too.

1:07:10 Thomas: What's that? Oh, so when I yelled at them for cheering sexual harassment, that's the same to you. That s the same thing?

1:07:11 Guests: Right. Once it's off.

1:07:16 Thomas: When I have a platform, when I'm on the stage,

1:07:16 Guests: And therefore, you said, if we don't apologize, then we will do this. That is a threat. That is demand. If you don't apologize, then I'm going to do this, Is it okay if we turn this back around on you? Is it cool if we threaten SIEU?

1:07:29 Thomas: I don't know which I don t know. I literally do not know what you're talking about. Let me finish my statement. I started

1:07:33 Guests: Yeah, he didn't say if you don t apologize. He didn't say anything. He did. Here's the demand. If you

1:07:35 Thomas: To say it and so maybe we get where the spirit of Sargon and his audience just interrupting before I can even finish a question. I guess we get why you're not very sensitive to that or you don't care about it. So what I was going to say was, had you given some apology for that? Had you shown any ability to recognize how disgusting and toxic that was in in your community, I would have, I would have accepted that. But now since you are doubling down, now since you're doubling down and not only that, it's not a threat. I'm telling you my position. I'm telling you what I'm going to do. There's no, there's no threat.

1:07:40 Guests: Yeah, that's that's not a threat. That's not a threat, that is an is statement. Yeah.

1:08:11 Thomas: Like you can tell me you're not going to listen to my show. What I'm going to do.

1:08:13 Guests: If you don't give me your lunch money, I'm going to punch you, right? I mean, that that is that is the thing, right.

1:08:17 Thomas: What the fuck are you talking about? If you are, you

1:08:20 Guests: Genuinely? You made a blackball list of all of this. You called us alt-right, right, the definition of alt-right means white white supremacists. So you've, you, that, that means that we believe that white, that you need to be white in order to support liberal democracy.

1:08:20 Thomas: Are not, I didn't call you alt-right. I didn't call you all right. I didn't call you you alt-right. I didn't call you alt

1:08:36 Guests: Yes, you did on multiple Facebook calls, right?

1:08:36 Thomas: Right. I said alt-light and I said that the people you

1:08:41 Guests: You don't know

1:08:41 Thomas: Are inviting are alt-lite. I don't think you're alt-right. How

1:08:46 Guests: It. No, I honestly think that you're far enough to left. You can't see over the horizon to actually know what the actual right is. Like, that's the thing you're seeing Seeing the center, but so far on the rise.

1:08:54 Thomas: Many times do I need to say it? I don't think you're alt-right. Do I need say it again? You're not alt-right.

1:08:59 Guests: Yeah. No, no, no. Thank you, Thomas, for being on the record. And one other thing that I kind of want to mention, and I think we just— Wait, wait. I'm sorry.

1:09:07 Thomas: I still haven't gotten to finish

1:09:08 Guests: Before we move forward, wait, yeah, I'm sorry. Before we move forward, I just want to be very, very clear, right? And so you've both requested now that I stop saying I don't believe you, which is hard for me. I'm not going to be honest. So here's what I'm going to do. The idea that Thomas would, with an open mind, say to you, if you had behaved this way, I would have felt this way. For you to interpret that as a threat belies a level of inability to understand the English language that is— if you don't, I'm gonna make sure that nobody ever comes to your conference again.

1:09:08 Thomas: What I'm fucking saying because you guys interrupt every five seconds.

1:09:50 Thomas: How about I tell you? Do you want to hear it from me?

1:09:52 Guests: I'm It's not a threat of violence. It's a threat.

1:09:55 Thomas: Do the to hear from me the actual what I actually think rather than just make a straw man of what I'm saying. If given that you have absolutely no remorse and are not actually addressing what you did, Sean's not even here to speak for it. Given that you didn't, what I am going to do is make every effort to make sure that it's just a shitlord convention. You can have your shitlord convention in the future. You invite Sargon, you can invite a bunch of people who like to tweet disgusting stuff to women, and you can parade around and say, hey, no one's the moral arbiter of us, that's great. You can have your shitlord convention. But if you invite any regular atheist, what I'm going to do is reach out and say, hey, here is the conference that you are invited to. That'ss all I'm gonna say. I'm going to give them the information to make them realize this is the conference they're invited to you. I will point them to this recording and say these are the people who are inviting you. You can make the decision.

1:09:58 Guests: Sure.

1:10:43 Thomas: I can't physically prevent someone from going to your conference, and I'm not going to try to physically prevent someone from going to your conference. What I'm going to do is make sure everyone in the fucking atheist community who has any sense knows what you are and that you don't give a shit about this situation you created. And that's disgusting. And you're the only ones who don't realize it who aren't Sargon fans.

1:11:01 Guests: You're going to culture of fear, a culture of sure. So so what,

1:11:06 Thomas: So have fun. I don't know why there's a problem. Go your own way. Do your shitload shitlord convention.

1:11:06 Guests: Tom? Hold on. So that is that's that's definitely, you're right. A hundred percent. What I will say to that is, you know, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Jonathan Haidt's TED talk on morality, but he does a brilliant job of saying, you know, they're they're conservatives, they are liberals. And frankly, you know, everyone on this podcast considers themselves a liberal. But they they share different different levels in morality sectors. And you know if you don't reach out to the other side, then you're essentially going to alienate half or however much of the population in this country, it's what, 49%. So, if that's the case, and if we want to keep creating echo chambers, you know, Thomas, we send folks to your podcast because we think that your progressive humanist stance is something that should be cultivated, people should listen to it, and that you have, you opinions that are worth sharing.

1:12:07 Guests: We similarly feel that even people who you ostensibly just call shitlords also have... Well, yeah, but you just repeated it. That'fine. So the shitlords of society also...

1:12:13 Thomas: They call themselves shitlords, by the way. It's in their Twitter bios, by The Way. Like I'm getting harassment from people who say I'm a shit lord

1:12:25 Guests: Yeah, no, no. That's fine. That' s fine. I'm not saying it in a derogatory matter, um, I just, for for your audience, um, you know, they also have, they live on this planet, you can't, you know, colonize Greenland and be like, that's it, we live here, no one else does, fuck the rest of the world. So what we've tried doing with with this conference, with with everything that we do, is we try to build bridges between communities that typically don't have those bridges.

And what it sounds like from the statement that you just made, and I would hope that at some some point you change your mind on this, is that you would be willing to, you know, do the whole compromise thing and talk to people, whether they have bad opinions, whether they have, you call them deplorables when you were on stage, whether that's true or not, these are people that are not going anywhere. We need to talk to them. Let me step in here. Outrage is going to change their mind or certainly not going to go ahead. Let me step in here for a moment. May I? Because this is what I specialize in, right? I have conversations across all sorts of different platforms. So does Thomas. That's what this show is dedicated to, is talking to people we disagree with.

And I spend, I'm a movie reviewer, and I spend all of my free time having polite conversations with people with whom I wildly disagree, right. Before the recording started, I was talking to Thomas. I disagree with Bearing on every single subject, almost every single subject, but I've had conversations with him. I've had conversations people who make takedown videos with me.

1:12:28 Thomas: Okay yeah Yeah,

1:13:59 Guests: I have had Skype chats with Nazis who have threatened to gas me. So I'm well, well experienced when it comes to having conversations. And no one, no one is saying we shouldn't have these conversations. Well, Thomas, hold on. Here's the point, though. You can have- If you interrupt me, my entire point will be lost. All right, go ahead. If you interrupt me, my entire point makes no sense. Do it, do it. Right? We should be having conversations with them. But is there a difference between a conversation and a platform for them to spew violence? Look, I believe- Spew violence. Sorry, I misspoke, for them spew vile things, right? And let me give you an example. I have a kid who talks to me, he's a big fan of my show, he loves God awful movies, but he's 9-11 truther, right.

1:14:46 Guests: Now, do we need to have me and him have a debate on stage, or does what he require, education? No, 100%. So I think the misconception here is that somehow the online forum differs from the physical forum. And if we somehow allow these people in our physical presence, then we make them equal to us. And these are not second-class citizens. I'm not talking about not letting them in their space. I'm talking about giving them a platform. But that was not, no, and this is where the misconception is. This was not Carl going out there and giving a diatribe about how shitty SJW values are. This was ostensibly supposed to be a conversation.

1:15:31 Thomas: It was you know how many times he called me a racist Did you count it up? You should count up. I never once called him a racist. He called me a racist several times on stage. Oh, yeah, back and forth, yeah, sure

1:15:39 Guests: I did not. I heard ad hominem attacks going back and forth, so I'm really not being a moral arbiter. I actually, I want to bring it back slightly, if I may, because I do want to talk about this, right? And this is actually the conversation I wanted to have. And I have to admit, I am so thrown by what I still consider to be a remarkable demonstration of lack of empathy. And I'm sorry to use that term, but it's really the only one I can use at the beginning of the conversation. But this is the conversation that I wanted. And it's this, right? It's about the platform and the use of platform. So this is the question I have for you, right? We all agree that there are some ideas. I'm not talking about whether or not Sargon's ideas are abhorrent, right? Because it's obvious we disagree on that. But do we agree that there are ideas that are not worth a platform?

1:16:31 Guests: Any ideas that Are not worth a Platform that debating them is a waste of everyone's time at MythCon? Yes. So we said that we're talking about the focus was the political mainstream. So yes, absolutely. 9-11 truther would not get a platform at MythCon. Now, if your point was to combat radicals, so if you're trying to de-radicalize the alt-right or jihadists or maybe Antifa members, somebody's got to talk to them. And those that are going to cater to the extremes, they're going to have to do that. But that's not our focus. Yeah. I think we should clarify. Eli, do you mean in general or do you mean like MM, like this organization? At a conference. I mean, at a conference, Because, look, we disagree about whether, I mean, I can't not get this jab in.

1:17:16 Guests: Sargon of Akkad actually has espoused 9-11 truther beliefs. So the idea that you would say 9-1-1 truthers don't have a platform at our conference, like, I have to say it. I have to say it or I'll die. My brain will explode and I'll just die on the floor. So he has espoused 9-11 truther beliefs. He's also espoused the belief that it's possible Hitler faked his suicide and escaped to South America. I mean we can go on and on about the crazy things one of your speakers said. But I understand that we disagree about whether or not the things that Sargon of Akkad said are worthy of deplatforming, right? I understand that we agree about whether he is worthy of de-platforming. But here's the problem, right. If we agree that there are ideas that are worthy of de platforming, if we agree, and this is the example I always use, because I love to pick on my buddy, Dan Errol, right, Dan Erroll, he loves it when I pick on him. He always sends me a message, he's like, fuck you, Bosnick, right? If Dan Errol- I'm doing a conference, Eli Con, 2018.

1:17:25 Thomas: Uh, yeah, don't

1:18:13 Guests: Dan Erroll comes up, and he's gonna give a talk where he reads the names and addresses of everyone Dan Erro thinks is a Nazi, and then gives a speech about punching them in the face. Exactly. That's an incitement to violence, that's against the law, right. Right, exactly, exactly. Okay, so maybe he doesn't incite violence. Let's say he keeps it legal. Doxing might fall under harassment laws, and again- Right, right. Let's say he keeps it legal, right? Let's keep it legal. I get it. I get, yeah. For the sake of argument, let's say keeps it legal, you find out about it. Is it okay for you to reach out to the venue and say, hey, just so you know, your speaker is planning to do this? Absolutely in no way, shape, or form on any planet, no. That is not okay. Right. It's up to the venues, and it's up too- Like, that

1:18:59 Thomas: What's wrong with informing the venue, though? What they can make the call?

1:19:02 Guests: It's so, well, but it's the venues. I mean, do you think these people don't do their job and do due diligence? Well, no, I want to drill down on that.

1:19:08 Thomas: What, then what's the harm gonna be then? What's

1:19:10 Guests: What about Christians trying to come after atheist conferences?

1:19:10 Thomas: The harm going to be? That's

1:19:14 Guests: I want a drill down. And just harassing hotels. Are you cool with that?

1:19:14 Thomas: Fine, what, what's the harm going to be if they say, hey, you're, you're inviting a bunch of atheists, the venue can just say, yeah, we don't care, harass, no one said harass. We're talking about the specific tactics which was, write a letter, don't

1:19:20 Guests: So I can tell Christians to call and harass planned atheist conferences. Okay, no. Call and say that these are evil people. No, call and say a bunch of atheists are coming. And show the statistics that we are the lowest trusted group. We have the lowest morals by that standard and show that and say, you know what? We ought to de-platform. Do you believe they can be able to do that?

1:19:44 Thomas: Hold on, do you don't think they, people have a First Amendment right to send an email to a venue? I don't understand. Oh, I,

1:19:49 Guests: Okay. Ethics versus legalities. Yeah, no, I'm interested in the ethics. I'm supporting the ethics of this. Yeah, I know. I'm interesting in the ethics. Let's dig down on that, right? So you believe, because I want to go back to my example where we agree something's bad. Not, well then, I don't want to talk about what a battery. I want to talk about where we talk about something that is directly harmful. Not illegal, cuz we know there are tons of harmful things you can do that aren't illegal, right? We all agree to that, right?

1:20:17 Guests: It's not like the law is the arbiter of what's harmful, right? I just wanna be clear. Yeah, yep. Right, okay, so my point is this. You have said, no, I wouldn't call the Dan Arel, general Eli Bosnick conference where we're going to do the things that are illegal, but are absolutely hints at violence or absolutely make unsafe spaces for people. And by that, I mean, literally unsafe, not the common deterrent of that term. Right. You know, you know that this is going to happen. You Know, this makes an unsafe space and you still don't believe. Now, let me ask you, is it because you don't Believe venues have a right to know who is using their goods and services? But it's entirely up to the venue. And that's That's the thing is all the people do due diligence. I mean, I want to be clear. I am not saying that the venue couldn't make the choice to still host Dan Errol and Eli Bosnick's doxing fun hour, right?

1:20:17 Thomas: Would hope we agree to that, we're

1:21:13 Guests: The venue could still make that choice. I'm talking about when a venue is ignorant, right, which most venues are, right. They do a booking, huh? MythCon. I bet they're that sci-fi thing. That's first thing that comes up when you Google, right there is an ignorant venue that Googles the Dan Erroll, Eli Bosnick hour of fun, right? And they don't see anything, but you are aware of what a dangerous situation that is. Are you telling me that ethically you believe it to be wrong to inform that venue? What was dangerous about MythCon? No, no, no. I have already said- No, you have to.

1:21:46 Thomas: Trying to drill down on

1:21:47 Guests: You have to say what was, because you're making, you're conflating- I'm trying to deal down on the principles of your belief. I have already told you, I know you disagree that it is dangerous. I know that. So you condemn the deplatforming campaign against MythCon? No, you're not listening to me.

1:21:47 Thomas: The principle, no we're tying to drill drill down on the Principle.

1:22:05 Guests: Gentlemen, Gentlemen, gentlemen. You have to stop interrupting me and you have to listen. Let me give you this. Let me tell you this, I am already telling you I understand that we disagree that it's dangerous. Pretend if it helps that I am entirely wrong on this issue, right? Right? Pretend that I concede the point that I am a crazy person who believes the most dangerous person at your conference was Matt Dillahunty because he eats people with his goatee. Right? Whatever you need to think about MythCon is fine. I'm trying to talk about the principle. Right. Words are not dangerous. Right. So what I've done- If you saw someone coming in with the AK-47, you bet, you better call. Words are not dangerous. That's not what I'm talking about. I have said said very clearly, I've given a very clear example.

1:22:04 Thomas: Yeah, you're not listening.

1:22:53 Guests: I have said, imagine a fake, and I've taken it away from MythCon so you don't get defensive. I've used me and Dan Arel, right? So people at home are chuckling because everybody knows I love to pick on Dan and Dan's like, he buzz, right. So it's a safe, it is a safe example to use. I'm not talking about MythCon, I'm talking about Dan, because before you said, no, you would not be okay to inform the venue you who they are working with, and I'm asking you- This is an abuse though. So if Dan and I were doing our legal but unsafe speech, right?

I know you don't think- Well, then I can sit there and curse at you, following around cursing you. Is that legal, right, I mean, come on, I'm using an example of deep- I'm using an example of de-platforming. No, I'm trying to drill down on your beliefs. Disagree. Gentlemen, you have to stop interrupting me. Because I haven't gotten to make my point. All right, fine. I mean, Dimitri, maybe you understand. And in which case, if you think you understand, I really do want to hear your answer. Do you understand? Yeah, I do. I 100% understand. Please, use it. I stand with the fact that if you want to platform whatever ideas

1:23:21 Thomas: Abuse? I

1:24:08 Guests: You want, you could do a conference about how much you think I suck and if you know whatever slander libel it doesn't matter, I mean, you- you've a- you've got free speech right to be able to do something. Now, when you talk about safety, of course, that's why you have law enforcement, that's what you have, people who are informed about, you know, do they want to go there, do they wanna hear about, you know, not a Nazi is probably not gonna show up to your conference because the subject of the- the conversation is punching them in the face, so they're not going to feel like they're welcome. So I 100% think that even in your hypothetical scenario...

1:24:44 Thomas: Just want to note that you switch between First Amendment right and ethic when it's convenient for you. So, when you're talking about a conference, you say, yeah, sure, everyone has the right to do that. And then when I say, well, doesn't someone have the First Amendment Right to send an email to a venue, hold on to the ethics of that, though.

1:24:59 Thomas: What we are saying, what I am saying is that what I'm I'm saying is that it is unethical for you guys. I believe it's unethical to host a conference that would platform someone who sends sexual harassment to women online.

1:24:58 Guests: But you use your humanism in the same way. Tom, you're right.

1:25:11 Guests: And it's your right not to go.

1:25:13 Thomas: And it's also my right. It would also be my right, not that I did this, it would be my Right to email the venue.

1:25:13 Guests: Right. But you're stripping our right to throw

1:25:18 Thomas: It would be discriminating.

1:25:18 Guests: It. And the people are the people here. Gentlemen, gentlemen. You're discriminating against a safe space for ideas. You guys wanna create a safe space for whatever, and that's great. We won't stop that. Gentlemen, that's not my question. Okay, but we want to create a space to share ideas though. Gentlemen, that is not my question. You might be offended by an idea. That is not my question, Brian, that is not my question. Please let me finish my question I've been interrupted over and over again. Dimitri told me in the middle of a sentence, I understand what you're saying. And then he He repeated a totally different point than what I was saying because I wasn't allowed to say it. I don't know what it was then. I'm lost. Okay. So please, please, please allow me to explain this, right? I am not talking about my right to put on that conference.

1:26:08 Guests: I am asking you to imagine a hypothetical conference where legal but dangerous speech is taking place. Does that make sense so far? I'm about to say more words. Legal but dangerous speech. You're going to have to define that. Right. So if me and Dan Errol give out the information of someone without doxing them, which is very easy to do, right? If me and Dan Erroll are having Eli and Dan Con and we give out someone's private information without doxxing them and then we give a talk about how, gee, wouldn't it be great to punch Nazis but did it in a way that's clever enough that it wouldn't explicitly incite people to violence because there's lots of clever, winky ways to do that.

How do I know you're gonna say it, though? That's not the point. I want you to bear with me in this example. That's why I created a hypothetical with me and Dan Arel, so that we didn't have to deal with the details. It's a perfect example in my hypothetical. You know with 100% certainty. All right, fine, let's say that, sure. Okay. So here's my question, right? We are not disagreeing about whether or not I have a right to put on that conference.

We are We are not disagreeing about whether or not I have a right to speak at that conference. Where we seem to disagree is that you think it is ethically, we know it's not illegal. You think it's ethically wrong in that perfect situation for you to inform the venue.

1:26:51 Thomas: Yeah, it's not hard to do that.

1:27:37 Guests: And again, we are assuming the venue is uninformed. So it is wrong for you to inform the venue who they have speaking at their venue. Is that correct? Correct. I would say yes. And I will tell you exactly why. Because if we take your hypothetical at face value and we say, yes, it's like beyond a shadow of a doubt that people are in danger, then you contact the police at that point because it's a public safety issue. I have already told you in the example that it's legal.

1:28:11 Guests: But you're saying that it is dangerous. And if that's the case, you contact to contact the police because it's a public safety issue. That is, do you either, do not understand, the point is, right, so in this example, right? Because I'm going to duck and dodge around the speech, right. If you'd call the police, they'd say, what's he saying? And you'd say I don't know, it's not illegal. And then you wouldn't be able to do anything about that. I'm asking you why it is wrong to call the venue. It's a very simple question. Why is it ethically dangerous? It's dangerous. Now we're arguing over the definition of dangerous. What we're claiming specifically about MythCon is that the deplatformers lied. They were saying Kekistan means something that it absolutely doesn't.

1:28:57 Guests: What does it mean? They were making the ties to the- Stop, stop, stop. Sorry. What does Kekistan mean that it doesn't? Define that term. Yeah, because not all of your listeners are going to know. Kekistan is a mocking of identity politics. It's got a whole silly history. It's a silly subculture. It's not white supremacist. There are people that are – Sorry. There are actual people on the alt-right that are trying to take this over. If you go to poll, I've been in these spaces to look around, and it's a shit show in there. The white supremacists hate the Kekistanis. No, the actual alt-right people go into poll. Have you ever been in /pol/ in Foresham? Yes. Have you? What do they say? And what do they do they about Kekistanis?

1:29:45 Guests: They love Kekistanis. No, they don't. You clearly have never been there. No, you haven't been there, you're genuinely making- And you on your podcast also screw up and you put the tweet out of our guy. I bet you've got this from somebody else. You've totally missed the contact. Context. It's because Kekistan mocks identity politics. Sargon was firing back to Spencer go, ha ha, see, yeah, he's our guy, cuz Spencer's so stupid, he doesn't even know that it was mocking him. Sargon's laughing. Sargon actually targets people and all right, he goes after millennial woes. He goes after- That is- He goes What I'm telling you, Brian, is that is one interpretation of- You go after center-left liberals. Let me tell you, one interpretation of that is that he was mocking Spencer.

1:30:31 Guests: I've seen that interpretation. The other interpretation of is that, he is dog whistling to the alt-right in his following. And the former has credibility, but then there's not much evidence for the latter. As you have said multiple times in this conversation, we aren't the moral arbiters. Eli, why would he get kicked off of Twitter for trolling the alt right, if that's not the case? I mean, I don't, you know, you have to have some- If you wanna go back and forth with our evidences about whether or not the alt-right likes him, what about Richard Spencer saying that he is a good in for the movement? I mean, you wanna Go back and Forth on this?

1:31:03 Thomas: Yeah. Not just Richard Spencer answer, either there's

1:31:05 Guests: Yeah, but no, I'm saying that your point is about as valid as like the flat earthers or the 9-11 truthers. I mean you've got tiny bits of evidence, but it doesn't make sense. We'll certainly leave that up to the audience to decide. So wait, just to be clear, because you said they're saying Kekistan is something that it's not. You say that it is not all right. Will you at least admit it is the Kekistani flag, which people use as their profile picture and all the time on Kekistan, right, when we're talking about it, is the Nazi naval flag, but green, with the Reddit logo instead of the swastika? With the K, it's got the K-E-K, yeah. But green, right? But that's the joke behind it. Mm-hmm. Oh, OK. So we just agree that like it is these profile pictures are using a Nazi flag painted green. All right. Do you like? Yeah. The Kekistani flag is what the Kekistani flag is.

1:31:05 Thomas: Multiple yeah she

1:31:59 Guests: Right. But it is more than welcome. Yeah. You are more than welcome to say Kekistanis aren't white supremacists. They just use a Nazi flag painted green with the Reddit logo instead of a swastika. And members of this audience may say, you know what? I agree, agree, Brian. People use Nazi flags painted different colors all the time, and they don't mean that they're Nazis. They might agree with you. So that was your first point, right? Is you said that the Kekistani flag is something that it isn't. What was the second point about the lies that you think people told? We have a big disagreement there. No, absolutely, and we'll let the audience decide. So the second thing, you said they lied about your conference. Tell us the second lie they told.

1:32:38 Guests: Well, they're saying that Nazis were coming, right, and white supremacists, and that we we were going to hold a Charlottesville-style rally, right? We talked to the board. These were rape apologists, white supremacists, and Nazis. And what happened was when, I mean, Brian, you were there. I mean you can talk about the questions that they asked you, but they flat out were like, hey, are a bunch of Nazis going to be here? They also, right, there were veiled threats of violent protest as well, like hinting at we're going to call Antifa. Okay, so let's be very clear here, right. Right. I mean, is that cool? Oh, is that cool. Like, am I, do I approve of that? Yeah. Correct. I'm asking you. Absolutely. No, that's, that'S what I'm setting up for. Absolutely not.

1:33:23 Guests: Platforming campaign. That is to see now that is different. There is a difference between a deep platforming campaign and lying about an organization. So this is what I will say. This is what I will and I believe you, right? I believe you. If you tell me that someone went to your venue and said, they're going to be a bunch of Nazis there, they lied. They lied, and that is not an appropriate deplatforming campaign. I believe, as I've made pretty obviously clear, in deplatforming. But I don't believe in running up on stage and snatching the mic out of someone's hand. I believe in deplplatforming. I don'T believe in kidnapping their daughter until they agree not to make a speech. There are correct and incorrect ways to deplatform, in my personal opinion. And if people threatened your conference with physical violence, now I will say, I've seen Kristi's letter, I've seen Steve's letter.

1:34:12 Guests: And Neither of them told those lies, and neither of them delivered veiled threats about your confidence. Right, we're not singling them out. Okay, I just wanna be clear. And I wanna say in unequivocal terms, anyone who made the people attending your venue feel unsafe, anyone who made the people attending your venue feel as though they would be violently threatened, or that they would have violence done against them, or that any kind of crime or action of speech outside what we all agree is an acceptable form of deplatforming and responsibility for the things you say and do, is an abhorrent behavior. What about a prominent member of the atheist community saying that we're, we're going to look at the pictures of MythCon, and there will be consequences for those that we find that are in there.

1:34:11 Thomas: Didn't he Well

1:35:09 Guests: So let me ask you a question, right? Let's remove this from MythCon for a moment, right, because there are two differences, right? You don't answer that one? Many people's-

1:35:20 Thomas: No, No, I'll very quickly answer that one. That's you reacting like a snowflake to that post, because what he said was, hey, if anyone was there, and there's going to Be pictures Of Them Then When

1:35:27 Guests: Okay, so now the women that felt uncomfortable about that, that doesn't matter. But it does matter for Sargon Suite, but it doesn't for this. Yeah, it's very selective. Okay, those are incongruent. All

1:35:37 Thomas: They said What you did, again, you didn't let me finish, because that's your style. Your style is to try to finish before I can make a point, or finish a question, that's What You've Preferred to do. Uh, we can find the precise wording of it. What, but what the actual wording is matters. And we can look at it. Do you want me to find it and read it? It was, there will be questions, I think is what he said.

1:35:45 Guests: Right, fire away.

1:35:58 Thomas: There will be question.

1:35:58 Guests: That is creepy. Creepy. Creepy, but it's not. Listen, you may decide that that's creepy, but it's a threat. It's not a threat, but Well, would a reasonable person interpret that as a threat?

1:36:01 Thomas: Oh, no.

1:36:12 Guests: Reasonable people will interpret things differently. No, no, no. I'm asking. No, you brought this up. No, Brian, this is unfair. Brian, there will be some that are outraged over this. Brian, I am asking you a direct question. I'm talking about the fact that I'm not asking you if a reasonable reasonable person would interpret- Yes, hey, a reasonable person can interpret it that way. Absolutely. Okay, great. In the same way that- We will let the audience decide. You're reasonable and you're outraged about the tweet. Reasonable people can be outraged. And again- Reasonable people can also not be as outraged, right? Reasonable people can see that as a threat or not. And I wanna say, I mean, is it a nice thing to do? That's at the end of the day. Well, no, no. I wanna be- If you're going to take the moral high ground on any of these issues- I wanna want to be clear I want to be clear right

1:36:56 Thomas: You're talking about something not either Eli or I did, by the way, just so you know.

1:36:59 Guests: You're talking about no no that's not you guys I know right but

1:37:02 Thomas: None of this was us. We've wasted 15 minutes of precious time, because I have to go pretty soon, arguing about stuff other people did that we didn't do, that neither Eli or I did. Just to be clear.

1:37:07 Guests: I didn't eat a member of the MPE and and and

1:37:14 Thomas: And maybe no one did.

1:37:14 Guests: I didn't tweet An MP and I got grilled. Yeah, but but hold on, I I- and that, this is this is important, and I know, Eli, you were trying to say something here, um, you know, we were, I asked about things that happened at Mythcon, or you know that that happened a year ago or whatever it was, you know, as if we have to to react as reasonable people. So you know, in some way, oh sure, for the past 15 minutes we flipped it and we said, here are some tactics that certain supporters, um, you know, maybe in your realm of influence, do you know, would you counteract that? Would you say that that's not the nicest way to approach things? That's not a nice way to treat us, to other human beings. And so there has to be some sort of, you know, moral judgment from you guys on these tech- And and note how I responded, note how, how I responded, right?

1:38:01 Guests: The moment you clarified the bad behavior, right, I unequivocally condemned it. Unequivocadoly, without a moment's notice. I didn't say, oh, that's not my official stance. I didn't talk about context. I didn't go back and forth. I unequivocally condemned it. I used this public platform, and the only words I said publicly about your conference before it happened, because I believe in conversation, the only words I said publicly about your conference were, I understand people's doubts about the speakers. I understand, in the comment section you also called um June and um Greg miserable pieces of shit, so I'm sorry, that was one of the first comments, so when I got down I thought, wow, that's a really nice Facebook post, but it got ruined after the the third comment that said they're miserable pieces of shit. That record- sorry, let's be very clear, right, there is a difference between, I believe someone has the right to speak, and I like that person, they are nice, right? Okay, you just don't say anything, miserable pieces of shit.

No, no, and and to be fair, I mean, Eli, you've, you fully have the right to an opinion, and and we respect it, but we feel like it's not, it's- It's not reciprocated, like we're super nice to your, you know, to the way that you guys push politics. We think that there's always a give and take. And again, none of us are right wingers. We're not even sympathetic to the political way that these folks operate.

1:39:32 Guests: But we honestly believe that if we're going to meet somewhere and I know, Thomas, when we interviewed you, you didn't you thought that this was the wrong approach. Like we can't meet in the middle because it's like going to adopt some bad ideas. So we disagree there, but we don't see how this is a cause for us to be demonized somehow into, oh, they're so pro-right, all this.

1:39:52 Thomas: Yeah, because you don't care what happened. I mean, you have shown no remorse or no understanding of why the situation you created was shitty.

1:39:59 Guests: How is that different than Donald Trump saying, I'm going to pull NBC and ABC's license because they don't show remorse for fake news? You guys are very critical of Trump by adopting his tactics. I will say one thing, Thomas. And, you know, if this is the case, you're

1:40:00 Thomas: Oh my God. Adopting his tactics. I said you could have your little shit alert convention. That's fine. I won't be there. I won'T support it.

1:40:18 Guests: Going to blackball us for the social justice warriors who we also want at our conference.

1:40:25 Thomas: Well, they're not going to be there because you created an unsafe place for women so because

1:40:28 Guests: And so because of your bullying. And so this is this is so this Is this is one of the things that I would say is the culture of fear. You know, we we honestly are going to hope that at all future conferences that we have a diverse mix of ideas. Is. And we're very confident that there's going to be someone within the progressive community. You know, if you don't want to be that voice, then that is fully your right, you know, or Eli or whoever. But we believe that there will be someone in the progressive committee that's going to go and they're going to say, you Know, I find value in challenging these ideas. I'm going to do it in a constructive way. And then we're going To continue having these dialogues. I think that's that's the end result. And one thing that I want to say lastly, Tom, because you because you brought brought this up a couple of times is, you know, you're looking for an apology for for certain people.

1:40:31 Thomas: Of my bullying and

1:41:19 Guests: I will unequivocally say that if anything that I did on my watch as part of the conference made anyone feel uncomfortable, then I apologize for that. And I stand and I stand 100 percent by that. I think, again, the way that we structured the conference, there is nothing there to apologize for. Again, we can't control massive peoples in the crowd or whatever it is, but we published the skeptic pledge ahead of the conference. We made compelling claims to be fair, not to be a dick, to be an ice person ahead. That was part of my opening speech. So we did everything to set the stage for that. And I'm not going to apologize for the format or anything like that, but for For anything that I could have personally done, you know, short of frigging tackling someone in the in the crowd, I will 100 percent.

1:42:16 Guests: Right. And I agree that that's me, too. And guess what? We're going to get better at this, too, where it's striving for excellence. Right. I mean, we didn't deliver on the Sargon Smith debate, which was supposed to be a dialectic. You know, that's fine. We'll get better because it got too emotional. It got too much. So, like, we'll get better at this too.

And gentlemen, I just I just want to insert a counterpoint because because it is unfair, fair to say it got too emotional. Right? Your opinion is that it got too emotional, and our, right, so your opinion that the reason the Sargon Smith debate didn't go well is that it got too emotional, Thomas, and I's opinion, right, and the audience of this podcast and your podcast and future people who listen to this podcast right and right but right but our opinion and and and all those people that Thomas listed is that went badly because you invited a person whose fans behaved so terribly that they made conversation impossible. Now, I know you disagree with that, but like, let's be clear. The final answer is not it got too emotional.

The finally answer is you believe it got too emotional and we believe you invited someone who has despicable ideas, and his fans who parrot those ideas behaved in a way that I am, I'm ashamed to associate myself with in the secular movement. Now, again, I know you disagree with, you have a free society, though, is, you know, we can disagree on some of these things. And I, you know, I asked the question to Thomas, you know, I asked if he holds any, you know, any compunction to how emotional

1:42:54 Thomas: Matt till honey and and David Silverman and everybody who you know has any ounce of empathy I

1:43:47 Guests: You know he got during that interview, and Thomas, you said no, and you're entitled to, you know, self-critique, not self-critique, whatever it is. You know, again

1:43:55 Thomas: Don't think I did, I don't think I did great, but what is, in what way is it my fault that an audience cheered for sexual harassment? How is that my responsibility? Why

1:44:04 Guests: And we and we need to move away from this point because if that's, if that, that's like the one thing that made you, you know, devolve from there into, you know, and again, I don't think it's a great move to, you know, call the audience, you know, expletives or whatever it is, but it had, had we stuck to issues and principles and said, listen, I don't agree with you on, you know, abortion or Black Lives Matter, all of these things.

1:44:27 Thomas: Would I have a responsibility to steer away from a horrible issue that the audience apparently agreed with. Why would I have a responsibility to... By

1:44:35 Guests: I, I don't, oh, and Thomas, I'm not saying that you didn't have the right to ask that question a hundred percent, but come

1:44:39 Thomas: The way, you said in your recording, you guys said on Callie's show that you were glad I was going to ask about that tweet. So in what way was that my fault is what I want to know.

1:44:48 Guests: At it softly. Yeah. You do not get that response if you come at That was the one thing, and I know we said this, and folks can rewind in the podcast. So Brian gave a way that this could have been broached in a very nice kind of kid gloves fashion. And I'm not saying that that is 100% the best approach, but that could have been a different approach that maybe wouldn't have elicited that reaction. And I don't want to, you know, Thomas,

1:44:49 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah.

1:45:12 Thomas: Do you think Sargon could have done anything differently on that? Do you thing when he said, yep, and the audience cheered?

1:45:14 Guests: I think I'm sure. Why not? Hold on. So I think that you're correct here, and I will 100% agree that he could have done a much better job during that conversation.

1:45:27 Thomas: No, just talk about that one point. I don't even care about the rest. Just talk about out that one. Do you think he could have said, whoa, whoa. Okay. It's inappropriate that people just cheered that. Is that the way he could've made it better or no?

1:45:28 Guests: So again, I have no idea how he interpreted it because, again, talking to some of those people after the fact, which we did, the justification that they gave for why they cheered that was 100% their free speech approach. Right. These people are not pro-sexual assault. Well, gentlemen, let me

1:45:52 Thomas: Oh, they are pro sexual harassment. They are absolutely pro sexual harassment. I

1:45:56 Guests: Ask you a question. Wait, hold on. Well, you've repeated that point now several times. So I do want to ask you a question, right? Because the core of this, right, the core of this and we're wiggling a bit, right. But the core of this is there was a way Thomas could have reacted to that upsetting incident for him that you think would have been better. No, no, no. He's the interviewer. He has the advantage. And I was going to I was was going to comment on this because I knew you were going to come back I got

1:46:21 Thomas: Did not have an advantage because there was a screaming horde of assholes yelling at me the entire time that I do. It was not in an advantageous position. We, people can watch, people are going to watch the tape.

1:46:29 Guests: Cheered I was I was with the SJW crowd and it was loud. Yeah, oh my God, you got cheered Thomas when you came on so

1:46:37 Thomas: People can watch the day. They, they were in the back. Some of them had to leave because it was fucking fucking horrible. And the people were in the front jeering me.

1:46:37 Guests: So I know Dimitri trust me I was with your people. It was last, sorry, it's too bad that more of them weren't there. I know what Eli is going to comes back with now, and I, and I was foreseeing this, Thomas, for controlling the, you know, the questions and his tone or the audience. And I will 100 percent concede that the audience holds, you know, certain, certain responsibility here. But again, that's not something that's under our control. There's four of us talking here. The only person on that stage that had any control over circumstances was Thomas. Now, again, Thomas, I'm not leveling.

1:47:23 Thomas: Really? Why didn't Sargon have any? That's interesting. Why was I the one with all the control? Why wasn't Sargon?

1:47:24 Guests: No, no, no. I'm saying in this conversation, you were the one that that had You are leading it, yeah. And so again, we have plenty of-

1:47:29 Thomas: Oh, okay. I was leading it to a place you said on Cowley's show that I should. So that's interesting,

1:47:37 Guests: No, I said that we should talk about only the issues. You wanted absolutely to get at that tweet and we conceded that you could ask it. I was hoping that you would come at it softly and not- And again- Because

1:47:50 Thomas: Why is it my responsibility to come at it softly? Why would that be my responsibility? Well,

1:47:54 Guests: You're trying to convince people. You want people to flirt with the opposite ideas, right? You want the shit lords to flirt, with social justice, right, that's the idea. Try it out. That's how you convince people. And this is why at the beginning I referred to it as an uppercut, because you're

1:48:09 Thomas: That's weird. Hold on, hold on, why is my responsibility do that? Why isn't it the shitlord's responsibility to say, you know what? Let's not cheer for sexual harassment. Let's try, let's try to convince the other side well

1:48:18 Guests: On stage. You've got a bigger position. Yeah, this is nice.

1:48:21 Thomas: Sargon could have done that. He was on stage. He could have said, you know what, I see how that tweet looks bad. I feel bad that people just cheered it. Uh, I think I should explain it, maybe it shouldn't be something people are cheering.

1:48:26 Guests: Gentlemen, I think we do need to get Eli in here. But the last thing that I want to say on that is you are right in that Sargon holds some level of responsibility here. I agree. And we plan on having him back for like a debrief, whatever. And we plan on asking, you know, we're not going to softball any questions. You know, we're going to ask him legitimate questions that your listeners I'm sure would want to listen to and that his listeners want to. So we think that that's going to be a productive conversation. And yes, he holds some, Thomas, you're right in this. He holds some accountability. As does the entire firestorm of the controversy. Have the controversy never even started? I suspect you guys would add a really good conversation. One that I would love to listen too. Right. Like, I would love to hear you go on Sargon or have Sargon on the podcast. I still think it was a good one on one, because, Thomas, you do good interviews with people that you don't agree with.

1:48:30 Thomas: Yeah.

1:49:21 Guests: And you're always like level headed in this and that. I've seen Sargon do the same thing. I would Love to see you and Sargon without the emotion, knocking it out, because I think I could learn something. I mean, gentlemen, there is no question that in a audience-free environment, you know, the goal of conversation, which I believe all of us share, which is to expose bad ideas, goes very well, right?

The Kristi Winters, Sargon of the Cod debate is a phenomenal example of all of his bad ideas laid bare and destroyed. We can disagree about that, but we agree it's a good conversation, right. Right? I would want them to have a follow up debate. It was civil. It was simple. Right? Right. And we agree that like. Right. So, for instance, and again, look, we agree. That, like that was a civil debate. And in my opinion, the moment where Kristi brought up being date raped by a friend, and Sargon laughed at it, was the victory of all time of ever taking him seriously about any of his ideas. That was a hypothetical.

That was hers. That was hypothetical, right? A chocolate hypothetical, hypothetical. And speaking of which, I need to address one last point, and I know we're almost out of time. I need it. And it's also been brought up on Twitter. And again, I know you don't want me to say anything about bad faith ideas. So I'm going to say that you guys are attributing it in good faith. I know that there are some folks who probably asked this question in bad faith. And the question is this. Well, Eli, you're so happy to condemn Sargon for tweeting that, but you make jokes about pedophilia on your show. What's the difference about you and him?

Or more specifically, what if someone who's the victim of pedophila hears your show and is hurt by it? What's difference between that and people who were hurt or felt victimized by Sargon's tweet? Wait, is that a fair representation of that question? That is. I think I know where you're going with this, so I want to let you finish.

1:50:35 Thomas: It was

1:51:23 Guests: Okay, cool. So I just want to be clear that I was answering a real question being asked, because I've been asked this a lot, right?

1:51:29 Thomas: The first thing they asked you actually, and you never got to answer it today, which

1:51:32 Guests: Right, exactly. I have notes just strewn around my bedroom at this point. I'm covered in foam. It's a winding road. All right, go ahead, Elon. So the answer is this, right, and there's a couple of things. I'm going to get a little technical in a moment. But the simple answer is this. The difference between a comedy show that one must come to to hear content and having content brought to you is very different. Right. So my show and I'm only going to use myself as examples. Right on my show. One of the running jokes is that I have dug up the dead body of Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-abortion advocate, and have sex with it on a regular basis. Right now. Now, here's the thing. That is a very funny joke when I do it on my show.

1:52:19 Guests: It is hilarious. My mother would not like that, but go on. Right, because it is a comedy show. But here's The Thing. Your mother would have to listen to my show to hear that joke. Right, right. She will never find your show. Right, she will never fine my show, she'll never hear that, that will never enter her ears, right? Imagine how abhorrent those same jokes would be were I to tweet them to Phyllis Shoffley's family. Okay. Because they didn't make the joke. They didn't make the choice to come to my show and hear those jokes.

I brought those jokes to them and I used those jokes to harm them. So that's the first difference. Is the difference between huge difference. I think we all agree, huge difference. So that's the first difference, and the second one is a little technical, and it's a little bit of comedy inside baseball, but people ask the question, I want to address it in good faith, and that is the difference between subject and object. And I'm going to use Louis C.K.'s joke. Louis C.K. has that amazing six and a half minute bit about the N-word. And the subject of that joke is the N-word.

Now, what do I feel can be the subject of a joke? Anything, anything. But what is the object of that joke? The object of Louis C.K.'s joke about the N-word is himself and his own discomfort. Similarly, on my show, when I, so a little bit of origin, people have been misquoting this.

1:52:59 Thomas: Is a major difference, he

1:53:49 Guests: The joke that gets made is after I made an accusation that we actually had to do a caveat on about the Cristiano brothers, where we had to actually have someone come on and give like a little spiel at the beginning so that everyone knew it was a joke, because we were worried someone, someone might sue us. Afterwards, on Scathing, as we were doing the headlines, we sort of mentioned that I tend to say these things that are so terrible that it constantly forces people to clarify that I'm joking. And at that moment, with myself as the object of the joke, my character, not me, obviously, with my genuine emotion, said, "I want to fuck a child." Now, listen, that is a horrible, horrible thing. Pedophilia is one of the worst things across all societies.

1:54:34 Guests: And as a subject, I believe it should be joked about. But the object is not victims of pedophilia. The object of that joke is me, right? And that is the difference between myself, and I'm not just going to say Sargon, the difference between myself and internet trolls. Because I talk about the subjects on my show are far more vile, far more wide-ranging than any of the subjects that June or Sargon or Richard Spencer or Baked Alaska, anyone you care to name. The subjects on my show are far more wide-reaching, but the The objects are very specific. The objects are myself. That's well said. Hold on, Eli.

1:55:20 Guests: Are you done? Because I don't want to interrupt. Oh, I'm absolutely done. The objects... That's a well said, Eli, and I want to make sure, like, I don't think Eli' s a pedophile. I don't' t even think Eli' is offensive. I think Eli' Is funny. Like, I' ve had three hours of conversations with him, and even though we' re fighting sometimes, he makes me laugh, so good. So I want to say that. Like, I don't find any of your bits offensive. And that is a really good way to look at it. And I like the way you say the subject and the object. But the thing is, the one thing is I can see the Sargon fans. I'm putting myself in their head right now, and they're saying the object of his tweet is censorship. It's censorship. The same way that yours is you.

1:56:00 Thomas: Sent it to a person the

1:56:02 Guests: Unfortunately, when you send it to a person, that's what they're seeing. Right. Now, somebody may mistake your joke, Eli. And, right, I believe you, I absolutely believe you, because, like, you're a funny guy. And I know you wouldn't do that, because I know you wouldn't do that, and anyone that mistook your joke and mistook the object, that's their fault, but but it's not a mistake, but here's the thing, would say the same thing, and the other thing, the second point was on the come to thing, like, you know, like, again, there, there were people coming at this, right, and and one of the one of the people I think Christiosity is, is one of them, right, and Christiosity is, it was, a she wrote a blog about this, is a survivor or rape, and that, that sucks, I feel for her, I feel for her, right, but is, is she, like, you know, I, was she the person that you're talking about? Yes.

1:56:51 Guests: No, absolutely, and this is, this is, whoever, so this is a, wow, I, I have to shift from jokes to something I think I'll never be able to stop thinking about. Oh, wait, before you do, though, so because I, I don't even think that was the, that was, that was not the two points he mentioned. He mentioned, the first point was, like, essentially out of context, like, you take, you take something out of a comedy show versus you take something out of Sargon's show. And the one rebuttal to that is that every meaningful show right now has to have what I'll call jokes in it. And it has to be very edgy content. And so, again, we look at this as very eddy content. And if you talk about, like, well, it was out of context, and when it was set up on stage and he had his fans or whoever there, they all knew the context of where this was going.

1:57:42 Thomas: Context was him tweeting it directly to the politician, that's the entire point. There's no comparison here.

1:57:49 Guests: Yeah, well, actually, let's go a step further. Let's explain the joke, right? Because one of the things that people do when they're having conversations about this tweet, and it's very easy to do, right, let's compare two jokes. Let's compare one of my worst jokes and compare Sargon's joke, okay, right. So we're gonna compare I want to fuck a child, right something that I say all the time on my show, right Right. And Sargon's joke, quote unquote, to Jess Phillips. And I'm going to explain why I put that in quotes just now. Right. So on my show, someone, uh, who would be hurt by it has to come to my show. They have to listen to my show. They have to download it. They have to get past the explicit tag. They to get passed the warnings, right. And to hear me say that. Right? And if they've listened to my in any form of context, they know that the object of that joke is me.

1:57:49 Thomas: No,

1:58:39 Guests: There's no question. No reasonable person would listen to that show Joe and go, oh my God, that's that guy's serious opinion, right? Why do you put the warnings on there? Is that for the same reason? And the same reason why didn't Thomas do a trigger warning before you fired out? You're changing the subject because I'm comparing the two jokes and I want to talk about Sargon's joke, right. There's two readings of Sargon joke, two, right, the first is I wouldn't even rape you. And then there's, I wouldn't even rape you, right? So. I don't know what's the difference. I'm going to explain them. We're digging into now we're digging. Right. But it's important because it talks about who is the object of the joke, right. But you have to let me explain, right, because there's only two interpretations of the joke, Right.

1:59:28 Guests: I wouldn't even rape is you are the interpretation, the reasonable interpretation of that sentence is you are too ugly to rape. I would not rape you, that's how ugly you are. The second interpretation and the one that Sargon said in his video was the interpretation and let's believe him, right? He says this is what his joke means, so let's believe him, is I wouldn't rape anyone. I wouldn't rape even you. I hate you, Jess Phillips. You are trying to stifle free speech. You want to send people to jail for jokes. I wouldn't rape and even you, I would not rape. That's the interpretation of the joke. In both of those instances, the object of the joke, not the subject, right? The subject of the joke is rape. The object of that joke is Jess Phillips.

2:00:16 Guests: One, the objective is that she is too ugly. And then the second is that she is such a miserable person that he would not even- Okay, but that's okay. It's become a meme. No, no, no. I just don't think that that's what the audience, even if that's true, the audience didn't think that. No, I'm not talking about the audience. I'm talking about his original intentions. Because people compare our humor. Then, yeah, take that up with Sargon. That would be great. I would love for you to ask him that, Thomas. No, this is beyond that.

2:00:46 Thomas: No, you compared Eli's humor to what Sargon does as though it was the same.

2:00:51 Guests: Yeah, my humor has been compared in multiple venues to that joke.

2:00:55 Thomas: In this very podcast. I

2:00:57 Guests: Right. In this podcast. So that's what I'm doing. I'm just comparing the two. I would take that up with Sargon, right? That's the conversation I would have with Sargon about subject and object. When June did not like my second Facebook post where I said she shouldn't be deplatformed, I think because I called her and her boyfriend a piece of shit. It. And she posted on Twitter, she posted the Facebook post. And my response to her was, this is a bummer. Let's have a conversation. And look, her answer was no, she doesn't want to have a conversion with me. But it became obvious right away that I was not interested in a feud. And I am uninterested in feuds. And that is part of, I mean, I don't want to get too into it. But that is a part of the problem with YouTube culture. And part of my problem with you bringing it into our community is that it is a community based on drama.

2:01:49 Guests: I mean, I hate to tell you, but we have no podcast enemies, none, zero. We have one incident in the four years I've been on the podcast where someone got mad at Heath and then he quit podcasting 30 seconds later. There's just, it's just unacceptable. And this is because our audiences are adults. Right, no, that's a reasonable critique, but you are talking to Bearing, right? I mean, that- Well, here's another great example, right, when I have conversations with Bearing. And this is something I've talked about a lot. Me and Bearing disagree on all of the subjects, right. But Bearing, unlike Sargon, and I think this is demonstrably true to say, actively tries to prohibit abuse by his fans, right?

2:02:34 Guests: When he sees abuse by fans, he comes out and says it. I have called him in both of our conversations because I was clear right people were like, "No, Bearing abuses people, Bearing sixes fans on people," and in both of their conversations I said, "If your fans abuse people, do you want them to stop?" And he said, "Yes, absolutely." Yeah, and then and then I said to him, I need, in private, I said, "I need some proof of that. I will not have a conversation with you until I know that you do not victimize anyone using your platform." And here's the thing, I don't like Bearing's opinions, right? I don't like the things I disagree with him on, the things he mocks, but they stay on Bearing's show. If Bearing makes the Eli Bosnick is a big fat fatty fat video tomorrow, it will be on Bearing's channel. And I will have to go to his channel to watch that video.

2:03:22 Guests: But more importantly, if I reach out to him and I say, Bearing, your fans are attacking me. Your fans are treating me badly. Here is the proof. He condemns it. Look, Bearing likes to pretend he and Steve Shives do not have a feud, right? But they do. Bearing has a constant feud. Every third video Bearing makes is about Steve Shive. He's going to be mad at me for saying that, but we both know it's true, right. But the difference is if I pointed out a tweet to Bearing tomorrow. And I said, hey, this is one of your fans. He calls himself a Bearing fan in his profile. And here he is saying mean things to Steve. I know that he would stop it. And if he didn't, he would lose the privilege of sitting at the big kids table, which is why I've had two conversations with him. Now, again, I disagree with him on almost everything.

2:04:10 Guests: But I promise you this. If Bearing had shared that stage with Thomas Smith and Bearing's fans had cheered, whatever whatever their intentions, whatever their intentions, I promise you, Bearing would have put a stop to it. OK, so Bearing for MythCon 2018. Oh, we heard that. And also, right. And Thomas, like Thomas talked to Kristi Winters, right? And there's a heck of a lot of drama on that channel. Yeah. So what, what this leads to, one, one of the. Wow. There were a lot of points there. One of the great points about this, and like the conference, not like the conference, at the end of the day we have very good dialogue going on, you've got YouTubers talking to bloggers talking to podcasts, good dialogue, it's incredibly good, it will get better.

I don't do anything, I gotta tell you guys, I don't, less contentious as it's gone on, because I, I want to bring this back to, I want to bring this back to Christiosity, and and this is, if if I may, this is what what I would like to conclude on, because wait, because I still have stuff to tell you about I want to come back to the joke thing. You gave me like this. Go ahead. Go to the choke thing, please. Yeah, because I don't want to get – you're going to get serious. So the joke things. And again, we spent like probably 45 minutes talking about a tweet, which I didn't know that this was that serious of a thing. But everything boils down to censorship.

I think at the end of the day, that's where we and a lot of Sargon's fans will draw the line, and what, you know, intent on that tweet, you know, you broke it into two separate categories, at the end of the day it all comes down to censorship. And the very important thing that seems to be swept under the table constantly is that she did not give a shit. She did not care. She didn't even see it like there

2:05:11 Thomas: Have to go. I, I have to go this

2:05:59 Guests: Are third-party third-world people who are like, "Oh man, this offends me," and and again, the object, because that's how you brought that up, didn't care. So again, who holds the offense for the community, so to speak?

2:05:59 Thomas: Is I, this is so stupid.

2:06:15 Thomas: Can you, Okay. Can you, for one second, put yourself in the position of being a female politician in a male dominated place and imagine what you would have to do facing this constant sexism all the time. Are you going to get on TV and say, "What he did hurt my feelings, it was awful, I went, I can't even"? Up Are you going to be that honest? Are yougoing to try to look like, uh, she

2:06:23 Guests: Okay.

2:06:37 Guests: Jess Phillips is not weak. She's a strong woman. Yeah, so that's the one thing I would say. And the second thing is that you're kind of inferring what her opinions were behind the scenes. I don't think that's really fair either.

2:06:50 Thomas: Is running a campaign to try to put a stop to online bullying. She becomes the subject of online bullying. She says, because anyone would, if you were a politician, she says, "Didn't bother me, I got over because what do you do, you never feed the bullies." She's not going to do it, but she's running a campaign, she's starting, she's part of that initiative to try to find a way to stop online bullying. Why would you think so

2:07:13 Guests: Are you saying she does hurt, but she's lying? No, obviously, gentlemen, it is obvious. Look, I mean, look, my wife, when I first went on Tom and Cecil's show where I talked about Yale, right, I received an email that says, I hope your wife gets raped, right? And my wife was unaffected by that. I'm making a point. My wife was uneffected by that, she played the ukulele, she raised a single eyebrow, remembered she was married to me, That's unfortunate. And then she went back to her life. She was not bothered by that. But that does not change.

2:07:52 Guests: That's exactly what I was going to say. That does not change how terrible a thing it was to do. And we are not saying, we are not measuring how bad a thing is by how it affects the subject in question. We are measuring it by how the behavior itself itself should be viewed on a moral landscape. And I think we all agree that whether Jess Phillips had laughed and thought that that was a hilarious tweet, or whether Jess Philips had taken her own life at the sight of it on Twitter, it was a repugnant thing to do. It was a bad way to behave. So when you say people in the hall weren't offended by it, or Jess Phillips said she was fine, or some people think it's fine when someone makes takedown videos of them, right?

2:07:50 Thomas: Does that make it okay? Yeah, no,

2:08:39 Guests: I am unaffected. I've had six takedown videos of me, and I'm 30 years old, and I'm like, someone edited stuff about me. That's sad for them, right? It doesn't bother me, but it doesn't mean that it's not a repugnant way to behave. Do you understand that? No, totally. Some people think that. But at the end of the day, and this is playing devil's advocate here, we are here.

2:09:00 Thomas: Don't play devil's app, just tell tell me what you think I don't have time for fucking devil's advocate, just tell me, me what you believe.

2:09:01 Guests: Yeah, we don't need to play devil's advocate. I want your real opinion. We're in the United... Fine, fine. Take it at face value. We're in the United States talking about a censorship issue that doesn't even impact us yet.

2:09:14 Thomas: There is no censorship. Hold on. Where's the censorship issue? Where's

2:09:18 Guests: That is a bullying campaign. He was very critical of the policies, of what Jess Phillips was her solution to online bullying.

2:09:18 Thomas: The censorship? Which you don't know about, which we've already pointed out you don't know about. I read them on my show. The policies were almost nothing. There's no censorship they're working with people. Hold up. Do you think Twitter should be able to ban users who abuse their policies?

2:09:38 Guests: It's up to Twitter. And I would say that their latest policies are a little icky in terms of censorship. The latest thing came out like three days ago. There is a much more basic question at the core of that. All right? Right. Is that behavior excusable based on any political opinions?

2:09:39 Thomas: Oh, okay. So that's what they were working.

2:09:56 Thomas: Yeah, that's true.

2:09:57 Guests: Look, I disagree with I just OK, well, we may disagree on that, but let me say this. But we're talking. That's what we're talking about. It entered the public sphere because it was controversial. And perhaps I go ahead. You are more than welcome to say, yeah, and we disagree on that at the end of this sentence. I disagree agree with Richard Spencer. Because Richard Spencer, though he winks and nods, wants to kill me and every one of my bloodlines, right? The same. Yeah, we are very anti-Spencer. I do not believe that Richard Spencer or his wife or his family deserve that kind of treatment. And by the way, actually, I should back up. Has he ever said that he wants to kill the Jews? No,

2:09:58 Thomas: Is

2:10:44 Guests: He has been very, very careful about talking around that. I think a reasonable person. Can you talk about the Jewish problem? I think it's a common theme among alt-righters, the Jewish question. I think he talks about, and again, I'm not defending in any way, shape, or form Richard Spencer here, but I'm pretty sure he talks about a white ethnostate rather than, like, let's kill a bunch of people. There's a lot of anti-Semitism in the alt-right. He's talked about it. My point is, is there any political opinion that makes that tweet acceptable? In your opinion. I just want your opinion, is any political opinion that the object of that tweet can have that makes that tweet acceptable, and can that an MM's position on that is just for the audience to decide, and I love talking about, hold on, Eli, if you're going to ask me like as a person, if that guy, no, I don't think so. I think that I

2:10:50 Thomas: That really where you want to like

2:11:37 Guests: Think that's a bad joke or that that crosses whatever. I mean, I would never have done that, and frankly, I don't high five, you know, Sargon when I see him and tell him, oh, great tweet, bro. I mean, that that just doesn't happen but

2:11:49 Thomas: His audience did that the conference, so the point is, I'm glad that you guys said that, I appreciate you at least said you don't support that, you said it's for the audience to decide, well, I got news for you, a lot of people, but basically everyone has decided, and here's who's left to go to your conference next year, shit lords uh everybody else at the Major atheist, me, Eli, all the people I named, they've all decided, no, that's fucking disgusting, you and your conference, and the people who are going to go next year are the ones left on the other side. Well,

2:11:52 Guests: It doesn't matter for sure but that's not everyone it's not ever, that's that, no hold on, Thomas that that's referendum on Sargon why is that a referendum on Thompson? I don't know. Know why you're, you know, you're constantly either painting us into a corner or saying all of, again, and I'm gonna come back to the thing that I mentioned at the beginning, there's like 49 percent of the country, and you guys mentioned, oh, it was despicable that Trump supporters, there, we were ecstatic that there were actual right-wingers that were willing to listen to secular, those were fun conversations, that was unbelievable, so absolutely no

2:12:43 Thomas: It gets to the other point of this, though, because are you proud that also that same audience of Trump supporters left after the debate and they didn't watch the Azra Nomani debate?

2:12:50 Guests: They didn't they left to surround Sargon for a little bit, but they were all, came back like like Sargon shoot they were all too deep. Yeah, we want to mention that they came, they came back, that's a, now they missed part of it, that's an misnomer, and and it's a misnumer to say it was a audience full of Trump supporters, because that's nowhere near true there were actually I saw four Trump hats and there was one making tight great they

2:12:54 Thomas: They did. No, no, no. It wasn't an audience. There were Trump supporters. Yeah, it wasn't full of Trump support. It was full of it was half shit lords who all left after the debate. And then they maybe they filed back in.

2:13:12 Guests: Didn't Thomas they but didn't

2:13:19 Thomas: They missed the Azera Nomani debate for the most of it I

2:13:19 Guests: No, so you when oh but you left dude, and then they, they stayed around to talk to Sargon when he was in the hallway, and then, then they came back into the auditorium. So that's blatantly false. I don't, I mean, that's just, that, me being objective here. Yeah. There was some people, right, that didn't want to see Ron Miscavige. There's some that did.

There were some that really wanted to see the debate in Islam, and then there's some that thought, okay, well this is an extra dinner break for me because I want to see the movie. And that's up to them. That's an important thing is that when you go to a conference and you, and you listen to like frigging 10 hours of whatever, it was a long conference. Yeah.

Anyway, let me ask you a question then, because you've brought up this plurocracy of ideas several times in this conversation, yeah, plurality of ideas, thank you for correcting me, I don't know how words work, you've brough up this plurality of ideas a couple of times in this conversation are there people whose ideas you find too reprehensible to be welcomed at your convention and to be exposed to good ideas?

I will start with this first, and then Brian you can going to jump in, um, the the goal of Mythka, or of MM in general, is to attract an audience that is within the, what I'll call, political mainstream, so anything that is fringe, either on the right or the left, like you mentioned Richard Spencer, you know, we would view him as very fringe, like far right, you know, whoa, out there, but then we would also, and I'm not going to name people on on the left, but, you know, people can infer. There are people also who are like Marxists and that are like way out there on the left who we also wouldn't want to court.

2:14:58 Guests: And I vehemently believe, and I think MM will stand behind this, that the speakers that we invite represent a mainstream, represent somewhere within the, you now, center right, center left, whatever it is, community, and that these are exactly the people who we want to bring into, farther into the, secular realm, but then foster conversations between them because they're totally going to have political differences. And how do we know? When you get Jane Doe and John Doe, right? One of these two, again, the mainstream people are going to extract the mainstream audience. Are there one or two extremists that show up and you don't know in the audience? Or are they going to yell shitty things? Maybe, but you would think that they would pull in the center, though.

2:15:45 Guests: Yeah, and I didn't hear everything, Thomas, that folks yelled at you, but again, they were given, you know, there was someone that ran up to them and said hey, stop yelling there

2:15:52 Thomas: Did not I did not see any of that, and it continued the entire time well then it was completely ineffective, ineffective it

2:15:54 Guests: Were like four people in the audience that were crowd Sean and I were doing it as well, yeah yeah so I have I have two final questions

2:16:01 Thomas: Was completely ineffective, it didn't stop anything, I have to go I have two, guys, way overdue, I'm sorry, it's two hours and 15 minutes, I

2:16:05 Guests: Okay I, I have, can I ask two final questions, or do we really have to just jump off, okay

2:16:14 Thomas: I mean I, I guess, well, you're

2:16:18 Guests: I'll make them very long-winded on anything, I will make them very, very quick. My first question is, why do you think so many people in organized atheism have unequivocally condemned your convention and your speakers and your reactions to it? Why do they, why do Thomas and I and Matt and all the people I've listed, I mean, Andy Wilson, nicest dude in the world, why have they all come out against you?

Why are they all wrong and you're right, and not, not everybody, I mean, you can look at the Godless Spellchecker podcast right there's others that that are coming out well, and some, look at Humanism, and that's fine, yeah, I think this condemnation will come down, I think it's a reaction, and you know what, people are allowed to overreact, I'm not going to say you're a leper and that that that we can't be friends after, like, that, like, this is a process, people have a reaction, let's see it, it'll come, come back, I, I really think plurality and First Amendment is one way to go at atheism, humanism's probably a really good way to do it too, and we just, we have to create space for both, and I want to double down on the the, you know, humanist point that Brian made earlier in the podcast, that, you know, it wasn't the most humanist hour and a half of of segment, a hundred percent agreed, and so, yes, is, is that going to, you know, deter some people? But there were a lot of really good, I mean, it was, again, 10 hours. A debate booth was running for eight hours straight.

2:17:49 Guests: I've never seen more conversations. Look, there's a small channel called The Existentialist, and they're around interviewing. Check it out. It's a 28-minute video, The Existentialist. They don't have a ton of subs. Check out what they're talking. They really have the ideals of MythCon because they're just having conversations. And I don't want to move away, Eli, from your point, and I don't want to make this long-winded either. I think it's remiss to say that the atheist community at large is coming out. No, we're receiving a ton of support, but also there is some criticism, and we think that's fully in the right. We're not perfect, and you know what? When we do this again, which we will, and whoever we invite, we are going to use this as a learning experience. We never wanted this negative backlash, and I didn't even get to talk about this during the podcast, But, you know, we went into like, you know, crazy deep platform control for like the last two months before the conference.

2:18:44 Guests: We didn't want any of that, not the notoriety, nothing about that. And again, we are, you know, so 110 percent, you know, on the pro free speech bandwagon that, you know, ideas deserve to be discussed and challenged is that, you know. We still don't think that anything went horribly wrong and that we should continue this conversation. And we hope, Tom, that, That, you know, you have another conversation with Sargon and that all the listeners feel, you know, can contribute and you guys do it without an audience so that it's not, you know, that's well, that that actually leads me perfectly into my second thing. And I know Thomas needs to leave. So what I will say is I understand that you think nothing went horribly wrong. There are a lot of people out there who disagree.

2:19:30 Guests: I disagree, agree. And as someone who has a tiny hold on a tiny corner of the atheist movement, who has a platform for anyone who felt like this movement is for them, for anyone, who felt unloved or afraid or like they won't be believed or like their abusers will be protected or that this community isn't there for them. If they felt that way because of my actions, because of my support for MythCon, because of what happened at MythCon, I want to take this moment, because my other shows are comedy shows, and I can't do this there. I wanna take this moment to apologize. Because I feel, I'll, I wanna take this to apologize, because nobody deserves to feel the way Christiocity felt that night when she saw that video clip.

2:20:23 Guests: Nobody, nobody in the whole wide world, and we don't deserve you. We don't deserve you, but if you want to come back, this atheism, this atheism right here, the one that I control, the one that's about fighting theology and fighting bad ideas, that's about humanism, that's about social justice, that about intersectionality, this is here for you, and I'm sorry I failed. I'm so, so sorry I failed. And we don't want to stop that, Eli. We think that there's room for the intersectionality and social justice conferences. Some people are absolutely going to feel more comfortable there, and there's no reason why we would want to shut them down. As far as, like, the sharing of ideas, coming to a place, a safe place to share ideas, to even be offended, that's what we want to preserve because there's a lot of people that want that, too.

2:21:16 Guests: And if we mismarketed it, you know, like then we're sorry there. But, you know, we want a safe space for ideas. We're not an echo chamber. You know, I'm not saying an echo chambers always bad. Right. Right. If you're right coming out of religion and you want to be around other people, they're not religious. That's OK. But there's a lot of people that are ready for this debate. They want to talk. They want engage respectfully. We just want space for them.

We don't want to shut anyone else. And we want to unequivocally, again, double down, triple down, whatever it is on the fact that we offer a very safe atmosphere for the exchange of ideas, which may or may not be controversial. And that's exactly what we want and so we we Are not, you know, I think you painted this earlier, you know, this is, you know, some shit show convention or shit lord, whatever they're called, uh, convention. That this is, this is not the case. We have diverse viewpoints within, mm, we have diverse viewpoints within the conference, and we're going to continue promoting that, and we, we'd love to have, you know, humanist, secular, every other value represented on stage and in the audience. All right, well, that's

2:22:26 Thomas: Not going to, I have to go. Haven't, haven't said anything, but I will say that I think, you know, know, I think you're absolutely blind. I think you're blind, and I wish I knew how to change that. And I see why you're coming from the place that you guys are. But unfortunately, the result is a bunch of people feel unsafe and shitty, and you're blind to it. And I don't know what else to say. I don't know what else to say, except gauge these prominent atheists who have come out against your conference. Just, just think about that. I mean, there are a lot of people, you posted a video, you posted the video on Sargon's channel. Yes, you were able to raise a bunch of money from people who are already fans of his, but that's people who were already fans of his. Try to listen to what the wider atheist community is telling you.

2:23:15 Guests: Absolutely, and we respect your opinion, Tom. We respect you as a person, and we, you know, we're going to continue and strive to hold cohesive conversations with everyone, including yourself, so everybody should marinate on those ideas proposed, right? You know, we hope you guys marinate in our ideas, and we'll tell you, for, we'll definitely marinate on yours, absolutely. All right, thanks, everybody. Thomas, thank you so much for the extra time. I I know this was a lot of your time. And thank you. I'm so sorry, Dimitri. Dimitri and Brian, thank you for coming. Do you remember the really Russian name, just like the prototypical Russian name? All right. Thomas, Eli, thank for your time, for the time. Thank you, gentlemen. Thanks, Eli. Thanks, Thomas.

2:23:58 Thomas: There you have it. That's the end of the recording. What should I say? Well, I didn't do a good job. I wasn't proud of the job I did. I didn't want to do it. I did it because I knew Eli would be the amazing person that he is and say a lot of good things that need to be said, and I apologize for my very, I suppose, dejected and uninterested recording because, again, I'm not really interested. If people are not able to realize the magnitude of what they did, the moment they created, and are willing to actively be apologists for sexual harassment by trying to make ridiculous claims like, oh, they didn't really cheer sexual sexual harassment.

2:24:44 Thomas: I have found I have not been able to find the words to convince such people. I can only point to how many people know that that's bullshit. Um, but yes, I, I haven't found the right words to do that. I tried, haven't found the Right One. So I, don't, I don't have a lot of respect for this organization. I have actually none. Um. And this, that was why the recording resulted. Uh, I think the reason I got so angry when I did was, uh, right after I believe it was sometime after them having said they did hundreds of hours of research, hundreds of hours of research on all their guests. They decided to, to spread the lie that did, I think, originate with Armored Skeptic on YouTube, spread the line that I started a voicemail for the purposes of Mythicist Milwaukee or something.

2:25:36 Thomas: And, uh, yeah, that was highly frustrating because I've gotten nonstop trolling over that lie. Um, so yes, I was very frustrated that, uh, apologies for name calling, shouldn't have done it, um, that was very frustrating. So where we are now in this is that we are done talking about Mythicist Milwaukee on this show, it's too much, this needed to be released, but I'm done, I'm moving on to other things, to my show, what I care about, what I want to talk about, moving on, I apologize to anyone who was not interested in this entire debacle, you know, you were free to skip whatever you wanted to skip, but, but I do want to get back to, uh, back to more interesting and worthwhile topics as for next year's conference.

2:26:27 Thomas: If I didn't say this during the recording, uh, yeah, I'm sure it will happen, and it will be a shitlord conference, and, and, uh, I will do everything I can to convince, uh, everyday atheists who don't support sexual harassment to not go, and to convince speakers to not, if they are mainstream atheists lending their credibility to it. But if it's just a, a shitlord convention, it'll just be another convention that I don't care about. A thousand conventions a day I don't go to or care about, and I will see it as a shit lord convention and not an atheist convention. I guess I would invite you to do the same, but I can't obviously tell anyone what to do. But that's what I would recommend. Don't give them any controversy in order to stir up their victim narrative. Just ignore it. So that's where I think about that.

2:27:13 Thomas: That, that should, let's put an end to all that. I apologize if my, if my yelling and my name, my one name calling there offended anybody. It was not a proud moment. Definitely not proud of it. Something I shouldn't have done. Highly frustrated. But I look forward to moving on, and, you know, leave commentary on this if you want. Tell me how you feel about it. But I do intend to move on from this whole thing. So thank you so much for listening. If you listen to all of this, pretty amazed. Thanks most of all to Eli, a tireless ally, in my opinion, a tireless Ally and someone who I'm glad to have on this side, and to really put into perspective just how bad this moment was. And more upbeat new, I'll see you on Thursday for a regular old Serious Inquiries Only, let's finish Trump's quote-unquote accomplishments, at least as they stand thus far. Let's do part three of that. What do you say? Let's get back to our regularly scheduled program. I'll see you then.