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We just we just pretty much go for it.
Cool. You
shave the beard?
Yeah, my wife hated
it Pradhan here. I don't think it's a good look for you. Yeah yeah. I noticed. He's been I've been watching you for a long time. By the way, I'm a big fan. Been watching. All your
sake, everything about it. Yeah, I
noticed you've been right even sporting the beard a little bit more
recently. Yeah it was it was an experiment that I don't think they spent went amazing. Yeah, there's some who like there's some who hated my wife has absolute veto power, really? Yeah. I mean there's only one person I can sleep with on planet Earth and so she she has
100% veto power on
this awesome. We've been here before for the the Candace Owens, we did Candace. Oh,
it's okay. What is like, what is like the
daily Wyler daily wire in general like the business stuff and stuff like that?
Well, I mean, so the business, I think takes a bunch of forms. So originally, it started as just a website, a News website, largely aggregation base, and my podcast, and a couple of other podcasts. And now it's grown to include an entertainment component and emerge component. It originally started being and what went
Start. It was much more Advertising based in terms of Revenue, and now we have a million paid subscribers. So, it's, it's taken a bunch of forms are doing kids entertainment. We're launching a hundred million dollar kids, entertainment initiative. The first the first show is going to roll off the line, the middle of next year. We've brought out some some believe for movies under our own Production, Studio, have a couple more in the works. We just optioned the rights done on Atlas Shrugged to make an actual good miniseries out of Atlas Shrugged, really excited about that. We option the rights on an Arthurian Legend series, like the King Arthur
So we're going to be producing that the idea is sort of to expand into all the Arena's of culture. So we've done really well in the news area and the News commentary area. Obviously that's still our bread-and-butter Revenue wise but more and more. It's going to expand out into other areas of the culture where we feel. That conservatives are being underserved. So
so would you say it's almost like not like a Netflix competitor, but it is like a subscription-based model like platform competitor,
almost. Yeah, I mean, I think that that would eventually be the goal. I don't think we're gonna get to the point where you have 200 million subscribers way, Netflix does. But then,
Nice thing for us is that were success in a million paid subscribers. So but that's
actually a number like a million paid
subscribers, we have a million subscribers right
now. Why isn't that? What at what monthly subscription rate it varies mean
we have kind of low-level subscriptions like readers past subscriptions that are for, I think five bucks a month or 4 bucks a month and then we have upper range subscriptions that go up to 20 bucks a month. But we're 200 million dollar a year business.
Wow, I don't think people, I haven't really seen an interview of you. Talking about that side of stuff too much. We should talk about that before. Like we get when you said that you
Expanding to interesting kids
platforms. It was like so you know, the we'd always been interested in the possibility of making kids content. I have three young kids. A lot of a lot of us have young kids around here and I'm historically an enormous Disney fan, so we were Disney annual past members, my fourth date with my wife was at Disneyland, when he moved to Florida, one of our big moves was that we were going to get the annual pass over at Disney World. So we love doesn't exist as big thing in our house. And when
it became clear that his knee is starting to promote messages that don't sort of a chord with the traditional values worldview. And then when that tape broke via Chris, rufo of the of the, there was an open Forum with some leadership of Disney talking about what they called, a quote, not at all secret gay agenda to put a lot of these sorts of messages and kids programming. And that's not something that I'm interested. My kids seeing it became clear to us that the best way to fight that is to actually just provide an alternative.
Yeah. Why is Disney doing that? Because you're not a big like conspiracy
Quote unquote guy, right, let
me know this sounds like they said it out loud, it's not a conspiracy.
Give us an example. I like why done
so recently, okay? So their last couple of movies have had explicit gay relationships in the movies when you rented it, the buzz like the light your film and Strange World. Okay, also also had one, they've in a lot of their programming. They've started to inject some more of that type of messaging with regard to gender fluidity and
Did some of the remakes also, like the beating, the beach remake suddenly with who was gay and they're they're doing some of the stuff I think because they're staffed by people who are on that side of the aisle and that's, that's their prerogative. But they're not inclined service anymore. They're not there now. More interested I think in pleasing a lot of their employee base. This is a broader corporate problem that we're seeing across the Spectrum. Right now, what you think their motive is by that like to make and I think that that makes a noise. Well, they're oriented toward the left. They actually don't think that these are controversial propositions and they don't understand, there's an entire swath of
Beings who disagree with them in these Arenas, I mean they live in LA they traffic in particular circles and so they think to themselves. Well, I'm not going to lose money because everyone agrees with me and also I get to quote unquote, do some good. And from the perspective I got it by pushing kids toward our particular political agenda and so we can do that as well. So where's the downside? And so you saw top-level Disney Executives talking openly about. I have a trans kid in a gender non-binary kid and so I want to make sure that there's a place for them and yeah.
Again, you can make that place, but that's not to place. My kids are going to be watching material nor do I think, frankly, that that is what most Advocate, most most people who love Disney product, that is not what they bought in for hmm. And by the way, Disney knows this. I think secretly deep down. They know this which is why, for example, they have all sorts of warning labels, you know, they put on all their movies. Now, if you go to Disney plus, we subscribe to Disney plus before all this happened Disney Plus on Aladdin. They have like a warning label at the beginning talking about its culturally insensitive and Jungle Book. They've been warning saying
Culturally insensitive? I didn't see you guys take it down. Are you still making money off of it? You're happy that you're happy to cash. The
check, that's actually on like the Flyers,
know it. When you first start the movie, there is a there is a warning screen that says, what you're about to see is culturally insensitive and and maybe sort of archaic and contains gender or race stereotypes like that kind of stuff. They're not taking it down right now. If we would offer to buy the rights off their hands, I highly doubt they would sell them to us. Yeah, I'd be perfectly willing to put up lady in the Tramp without a
Warning about stereotypical stereotypical depictions of Italians or something and it's cutting off your nose to spite their face. Their this is one reason among others that they had a very, very rough couple of years here and it's why they fired. Bobby J back and they brought back in Bob Iger. And they're kind of trying to figure out where they are. But the answer is that, what parents want, more than anything else? Is what they would have considered until five minutes ago in a political space for their kids. It's not that I want to my kids to, to be watching stuff that's promoting right-wing messaging. I just
To put my kids in front of a TV and the next thing I know, my kids asking me about gender fluidity. Yeah, I'm not interested in explaining to my six-year-old, son, what gay marriage is like, that's just not something I'm interested in, explaining my six-year-old, son. When he's, when he's 13 14. I'm happy to explain to him what that is or why in my viewpoint same-sex marriages and traditional marriages are not equivalent. But at six years old, this is not when those conversations need to be happening, but according to a lot of people on the social left, that's precisely when the conversation should be happening because we have to break free of the structures of traditional morality and all the rest of us. So,
so, again, what we've done, we're not calling for anybody to get banned. We're not saying that Disney plus should be taken down or not calling for for people to boycott Disney's, advertisers, or anything like that. What we are suggesting is that you take your money, if you don't want to consume that stuff and provide an alternative. So, you know, subscribe and we'll make the kind of content where you can put your kid in front, is
your stuff going to be like animated? Yeah,
pictures. So we have it we have one show. That's an animated show. We have a shuttle edge just on the set a moment ago that sort of a live-action mr. Rogers type show. Okay messages.
Any
political values in there? No, no politics. No politics is a political. It's just straight up the stuff that you were watching when you were a kid when I was a good guy stuff. They like mr. Rogers not political and Sesame Street was not particularly political. Yeah, and that's the way it should be. I don't understand why my kid has to be hit with politics again. I have kids who are 862 and I've won in the womb and like I don't understand why exactly it is the job of Hollywood people who lead lives that I do not approve of to preach their version of morality to my kids.
Did you go through that?
We're when your kids saw something and they came to you. Or did you just
notice anymore? So, I'm hawkish on this stuff. My kids don't watch anything without me. Pre-screening, it got it. I'm very very hawkish on this. Like I won't let them read books without me knowing what's in the book I which is why the Henry Classics. Got him my daughter's a big reader, she's eight but she reads it. She's in third grade. Sure, it's probably 8th and 9th grade level. How old is your oldest kid? I should say, and she reads it, like seventh eighth, ninth grade level and so she can read sophisticated books. But there are certain books that are, you know, for 8th graders were not for third graders in terms of,
Of ideas and Concepts that are presented and not appropriate for that age category. But increasingly what you're starting to see is this bleeding over into content for very young kid, I mean there, I was recently at a bookstore and we're about to go on a flight and there was a series that she was interested in picking up the book, and it was just a book about Dragon. There's Something Magic books about dragons and says about to buy it for her. And then I said, you know what I mean, I just Google this, I Googled it. And sure enough there's like a transgender drag like what the hell what the hell?
Well, you could have just written like a nice book about dragons. I have to have to explain to my eight-year-old daughter. Why boys can't be girls and girls can't be boys. It's just pretty wild. It's amazing how this sort of cultural moment has allowed for the infusion of a lot of these messages into content that where it wasn't before. And I think the truth is that right left or Center. A lot of people, even people who agree with sort of the left-wing cultural agenda, many of those people don't want this stuff. Being taught to small kids like they say, okay that's tougher. Adulterer that stuff for teenagers and that those are conversations we can have with more sophisticated.
Two people, which is which is why what we're doing? Kids I don't think is actually I think we're doing is restoration of the a political I think there's going to be some moderates out there who are like, well I'm not particularly interested in content for my kids. That is preaching, you know a political agenda. If this is a political, then maybe we'll take a look at it
as far. A lot of parents out there too. That don't even know that like, this is going on though,
right? Right. So that I think it's been a big wake-up call Disney when people started realizing that that was going on in, let your was a massive box office failure like a huge box-office failure. Strange
World is a massive box office failure, these things. Just they tank, they bombed. And I think that Disney at a certain point is going to have to get the message then it's not that, you know, these issues can never be discussed, but you do not have permission to discuss these issues with my
five-year-old. Sure. I'm curious. At what age do you think it is appropriate for your kid to just not have to get your approval to read something or watch
something? Well, 18, I know. Yeah. I mean, realistically speaking? I think that
Yeah, kids are in their teenage years that are obviously going to gain access to stuff that, I can't control. You can't realistically control everything your kids. He's doesn't mean I'm gonna stop trying. Hmm. You know, I don't think the kids are capable of making good decisions up until the point where they had ultimate. Yeah. Was that nice not eight years old? It's really not even frankly I think 15 year olds are very good at making good decisions affect to make quite shitty decisions on a regular basis. And the story of civilization is human beings making crappy decisions between the ages of 12 and 24. So you know, I think that the
My plan is no, no smartphones for my kids. There's no internet access my kids until they until they hit well, into their teenage
years. How tough is it like being a parent right now? That's something. I would worry about if I had kids now, it's like, it's such a different game than when I was growing up. Or even when you're going
up its super tough, you have to Bubble them so much more than you did when I was growing up. Was that tough? Oh well this is why we live. You know, I'm an orthodox Jew, we live in a religious community so we tend to live near people who share our values. So that makes it a lot easier, but my kids also don't watch.
A lot of TV and we really encourage them not to watch TV nearly at all. If they are watching TV, then it's usually an old movie that we've that we've picked for them, Disney movie or stop stood. The original Star Wars here is stuff like that. First of all, a lot of stuff is better than the stuff they make now, but second of all, I've seen it before. So I'm know that I'm comfortable with my kids. Seeing that, that sort of stuff. I also have to particularly bubble my kids because I am so out there and because I am so political and there a lot of people who would love to you, no harm me by harming.
Kids, unfortunately and that's that's that's a thing. That like there are no pictures, my kids online. I will not put pictures of my kids online are very few pictures of my wife online. I really try to keep my family out of the public eye because they deserve to be able to live, you know, a nice innocent life without having to deal with all the crap that I have to take. It's bad enough that they, we have to have 24/7 Security on my house. Like they shouldn't have to deal with the predations of people who are, who are coming for them on the
internet, has that affected like any of your content, like, kind of your family and keeping them safe.
No, I kind of say what I want to say. It's just fact that our budget for security
T, right? We spent a lot of money on security
because when you used to go to like colleges and stuff like that, like people would show up in like, protest, pretty much,
right? Yeah, that's, that's died down a little bit. I would say. And frankly, I think that's a smart PR move by people on the left, not to come and make a big fuss. Because when they come make a big fuss, all they're doing is drawing attention to their own intolerance for opposing viewpoints. But yeah, I mean, the there was a time when it was pretty well. I mean, the the Berkeley example being the most obvious,
what happened that in that
sense that, that was where I was.
By the college Republicans to speak and young America's Foundation to speak at Berkeley. And there's a big protest. People were very upset about it and there are so many threats that the required, I believe, six hundred police officers, something like that and it hundred they call the staties. Like, they basically like loaded up on the security there. And I like, what in the world is this and people are protesting out front. Chanting speeches violence. They they blocked out the top half of the Arena because they were afraid that people were going to supposedly. They're afraid that people are going to go into the top part of the arena and throw things.
Things stuff like that. And that's when I was wearing a they made me wear a bulletproof vest like it's absurd kind of stuff. Now I I always
tend to think anybody thinks like oh maybe I shouldn't go speak
their Nomad. You know, generally I think it's Overkill. Yeah. My my usual reaction Simon. Idiot is like well you know why do I morning the vast wide waiting secure down Unitas crap. Like what was somebody going to do? And my Securities General take is yeah it's stupid Overkill into limited. It's not stupid. Overkill. Sure. And that's so they have to constantly be pulling me back. Yeah.
You know, it's no fun having to walk around with security all the time and now that my kids are used to it and we live in a very protected gated area, so they don't have it all the time, right? And again the Jewish schools are already, they go to Jewish school so that the Jewish schools are very staffed up in terms of Securities that kind of used to it. But yeah it's it's a very it's a very weird moment. It's all very strange.
Me and Kyle were talking before this. We haven't really heard like your story. So what about your kids? Where did you inherit like your
Beliefs, when did you get into like all the politics all that? So yeah. When you start making content?
Yeah. So I'm making content. I'm 38. Now I started making content content when I was 17. Maybe so I also taught over 21 platform. So my
from sponsoring cultural events to partnering on community projects, creating youth programs to supporting First Responders and MidAmerican Energy caring about our community goes beyond keeping the lights on. It's about being obsessively.
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So I grew up in Burbank, California. My mom was a Hollywood executive, she worked on reality TV. My dad was composure, and I were religious originally know. So they were, they were kind of Quasi interested in religion. They only became fully Orthodox when I was 11. Okay. I remember reading a KFC and McDonald's, for example. Yeah. And, you know, not bad. Okay. I will say but it was
When we're 11, that's when family became fully, Orthodox had gone to public school until I was about eight or nine. Then I was private school for a couple of years. Then went back to public school for part of middle school. Then I was in private school, Jewish Day School for for for high school. I skipped during that process third grade, and Ninth Grade. So I finished high school and I was 16 and went to UCLA. And when I went to UCLA, I thought that I was actually going to make a double major in music and genetic science. That's, that's what I was interested in. At the time, I was a concert level.
At the time. Also, I started playing when I was five and so I you know you have to make a choice at a certain point when you're 15 16 years old if you're going to go for it like try to be the concert level violinist. You have to be practicing six to eight hours a day and so do you want to basically make that your life or do you want to go do something else? My dad who is a musician and my mom who was married to musician was like this is a bad idea. You're going to go get a job. You're going to you're going to go on a career path that doesn't end with with you you know playing and playing in a bar somewhere and so I
I end up going to UCLA. I'd wanted to go to to Johns Hopkins, actually, and my parents were like you're 16, you're not going anywhere. So I lived at home while I was in college. So I stepped on campus and very quickly. I, I saw, you know, kind of help left and I never really thought of myself as super political. I mean, I knew I was political, I was interested in politics, I like history. I like talking about political issues and current events, but it was really on campus that I was kind of faced with an alternative point of view that I really want to speak about.
And so the one of the first things that happened is I walked on campus, I picked up the UCLA student newspaper, the daily Bruin and there is an editor. There's an editorial comparing. The then prime minister of Israel. Ariel Sharon, this is this is 2001 to Adolf Eichmann as in like the facilitator of the Holocaust. And and so I walked into the daily burn offices. And I said, can I write a counter to this? I would have been 16 at the time, I said can try to counter this and I'm like, yeah sure. Ready counter. So rude counter. And then a couple weeks later they came to me and they said we have
of a perspective column from somebody and you're the only person who's on the right that we've ever heard of and so can you write the countervailing point of view? So that turned into every couple of weeks we would do like a point-counterpoint column in the daily Broad and then I applied for and got a kind of regular columnist position. Just writing my own column at the daily Bruin. As the token conservative on paper is very well-read and then after doing that for maybe a year or so 17, I turn to my dad and I said, you know, you've been reading my stuff. Do you think my stuff is good enough to go in a real
A paper, not just a college paper and he said, yeah, actually, I do let me do some research. So he looked up online as syndicator, like, who puts who places columns and papers. And so, the place he came up with was creators Syndicate. Creators Syndicate, was this indicator at the time of people on the left like Molly Ivins and people on the right leg David Limbaugh, Michelle. Malkin was big craters at the time and and so he my dad gave me their address. And there was sort of a form that you can just send in your columns so I sent my columns cold.
About three weeks later they called and they didn't know really how old I was. And so they said we want you to write what they know. I was young, they know how young I was. They said we want you to write a weekly column for us. So I was they're going to indicate the column which means they're going to put it in a bunch of different papers at one time. So got 10. 12 now. I think it runs in maybe 150 or 200 papers every week. So I've been writing a syndicated column since I was 17 years old and pretty much everything dumb. I don't say everything. I say, dumb stuff fairly routinely but most of the dumb stuff that I've said,
It was between the age in that column between the ages of maybe 17 and 24, which is why I say, like, people make bad decisions. At that time, you have more radical view points when you're younger, eaten a moderate a little bit. At least be, I would say, moderate as much as become more. Realistic about the world as you got older. But yes, I was writing a syndicated column when I was when I was 17, my first book came out and I was 20 about left-wing bias on college campuses called brainwashed. That came out in 2003, 2002 2003 2004, and then I went to, and
However, law school are another couple bucks. I was at Harvard Law. I came out of Harvard Law when I was 23 and and then I actually thought I was going to go into law practice. I worked at a law firm called Goodwin Proctor which was a major Law Firm, corporate law firm in the real estate market. There's only one problem. I joined a real estate law firm in 2007, which is the worst time in human history to join a real estate law, firm, you. So the market absolutely tanks. I'm sitting in a beautiful office.
It's overlooking Century City and then all the way down to the ocean and doing nothing all day long. And I couldn't stand it, I couldn't bear it. I hated it. Also, if you're a first-year associate at a law firm, you basically sit there all day and you just read page numbers. It's like, is this paragraph properly? Formatted, you have to read for typos, is the common the right place. I'm not that detail-oriented. In fact, I'm so naughty until oriented that my assistant has, like, text me to take out the garbage. I just don't get everything. So this is like the worst job in history for me. So about eight months in, I turn to I'd met my wife. When I came back to Los Angeles,
She was at UCLA at the time, she was a junior at UCLA and we had been dating for we dated for like two and a half months. For we got engaged and so we're already engaged at this point.
Half months. Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. As we see you like vast. Right. Take it off the market I like it. Yeah. Yeah that's smart. I listen II encourage it. I think that people dating for five six years at a time if you can't make your mind up within your one, I think that you probably need to move on, I think people people date for too long. They tend to talk themselves
into longer.
- and trouble. Yeah.
Whenever whenever I meet you know people who are say, how long you been dating, I'll say two years. My shorty waiting for either get married or get off the pot you know
like and it's true. Like the little skirt commitment though, right? Yeah. It's a lifelong thing after that
for sure, but you shouldn't but my view is different when it comes to dating. Then everybody else is, right? Because I was always dating from Eric. So, my father had always said, I think he's right? That the, you only meet the person you're going to marry when you already believe that, it's time to get married.
People tend to make sense to meet a person date a person, they all fall into marriage, I'll just all sir. I'll fall in love with them and then I'll and then I'll decide to get married wrong, you decide you're gonna get married, then you meet the person you can fall in love with because you're thinking in a different way. When you're, when you're dating for marriage, you have a set of values that are that are in your head. What do you want your life to look like? How do you want your life to be structured when you want to teach your kids? What kind of community like these are really important questions, because Jonathan, haidt, the the psychologist social psychologist, he talks about sort of the trajectory of relationships and love.
And what he says is that at the very beginning, this is true for every relationship, the very beginning. There's a lot of passionate love and very low levels of what he calls companionate love companionate love is sort of like trust and knowledge with the other person or the other person. How could you passionate? Love is like, I want to be with them all the time. A lot of sexual attraction here, we got like the Sparks are flying and in every relationship after a couple of years, you start to see a decline in the passionate love and an increase in the companionate love which is why you'll see couples 47 years old. And it's not like they're, you know going at it 24 hours a day it's more like they feel like they're integrated with one another. It's almost
Like one unit and so when you're dating for marriage your yes, the passionate love will be there, but you're also trying to look beyond what that two-year passionate love period is going to look like to what is the rest of your life going to look like and that sets up a whole different expectation of the person you're dating and and for yourself, right? Why are you actually in the room with this person? Is it because they're good-looking and because they're sexy or is it was it because this is a person you actually want to spend serious amounts of time with and maybe commit to. Yeah. And so that that's a like my first date with my wife was like a three-hour date where we
Walked into a coffee bean on in Santa Monica and then we walked on the beach before it was taken over by drug addicts and the mentally ill and we walked for three hours on the on the beach talking about like Free Will and determinism and religion. And
so I mean kind of stuff. My relationships never gone that deep. I have not analyzed anything like that.
So yeah. Well I mean if they need to yeah you have to first decide whether you think it's time in your life to get serious about marriage and if it is, then you have to ask. You
only one whole three hour session with benefits.
So yes, when we were kids, you get back to the story. We were, we were dating for two and a half months before we got engaged and that's pretty funny actually, like it, maybe two months in actually, it's our first date was September 5th. And we got engaged to somewhere 22nd which she at all surprised record amounts to three and a half pounds. When she was not surprised when we got engaged. She well, what was really funny is that? So a couple things happen. One about mid November, November 15th. I remember all the dates November 15th. It was the first time I said, I love you to my wife.
And she said, thank you as I shit. Yeah, so that was and that lasted for about a month I was a very awkward month is like I'd finish every phone. Call. Be like love you sweetheart. Thanks, bye. That was really awkward. And and then but the read the reason she was doing that. It made sense is because what happened next right? December 15th. If she says to me I love you too and I said and she knew what was going to happen. She said that, the next words out of my mouth were okay, let's get married.
Like we're done. Okay, and she's hit. Like, I love you. You love me. We're done. Let's get married. Let's have kids. Let's have a life together. And she goes, let's just enjoy this time, so I'm not enjoying this time. This is miserable for me. Like, what are you talking about? There's nothing for there's nothing for if you're a religious person, dating for marriage. The worst thing is is the dating they like the dating in the engagement sucks. Then you actually get to get married. Like if you're religious person then you get married, you get to sleep with the person you get to live with the person but live it like that all the rest of this is just delay. So she's like, why don't you try this on? My can understand, you don't.
Don't, I'm not enjoying this at all. This sucks like I want to lock this down. We done, it'll be great. This will be over this period of our life. And so she was like, well, you know what's? Let's just think about it a week later, we got engaged. So it took about a week to adjust, and that was because she was 20 at the time. And so, she was afraid of telling her parents, like, they didn't expect her to get married, that fast. Sure. And so, she was afraid of telling her parents at the time that that she was engaged or that she was going to get engaged. And she's very what people would say, and all this kind of stuff and actually the most
Romantic thing she ever said to me, I was talking to her. And it was a, it was a Shabbat, it was a Saturday. And I was staying over at this kind of coop that she lived at. And we were talking. And and I was saying her like this is, is there a reason why we shouldn't get married really. And she was like what? And she finally realized that the reason that she was holding off is because she was she was afraid of what other people are going to say, and how other people were going to judge her for it. And so she's turning me into people are so full of shit.
And then we got engaged and so that and so we got engaged in service. Anyway, we scheduled our wedding for July, we're married on July 8th, and when we and, and during that intervening periods, because he has been more and more miserable, the job like, just hated the job. So, we, I bought a condo in preparation for us, getting married and moving in. And, and so we took a mortgage. And then I came home one day and I just said, this is miserable. This is this is the worst. I hate this Law Firm. I don't want to be doing this. It's garbage and she said you should quit. And so we
A mortgage and we have cost and she said, I don't care. You should quit your miserable. You should quit. And so I said, okay and so I went in the next day and I quit and again that was it that was kind of a funny story, I walked in and the pay when you get out of Harvard Law School and you're an associate is really good like a your first, your pay is very good. You have to make up. For the fact, they are hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad. So the law firms pay, you a not insignificant amount money. And so I walked in and I said to the senior associate, I'm quitting. I hate this. This is the worst edges. I can.
And it and he starts trying to talk me out of it and he calls in another senior associate to come and try and talk me out of it. This other senior associate had played some minor league baseball. And so, he's sitting there and he starts telling me about how he played Minor League Baseball. Many got into the law and I'm like, yeah, but you know what, I hate this is miserable. I don't even know what you guys do all day. Like, this just seems like a terrible job and he, the senior associate turns to the other senior. So, she goes, he's totally right. I hate this job. She has terrible. And so the other senior associate had to talk both of us out of quitting, he succeeded with one
Of them did not succeed with me. I walk into the partners office, I tell him I come out. This is this is terrible. I don't want to be here and the partner was was not happy and and he says to me, you know, I just want you to know this is the most money you're ever going to earn in your life. And I've been wanting to send him tax returns for 24, a solid period of time for solidly 15 to 20 years. I've been wanting to send that did some tax returns. So
anyway, I bet he probably motivated you to.
I was great. I mean like like he was a jerk but it was a motivating factor. I'm, you know, motivation is
Not hard for me to find. I'm tend to be pretty driven. My, my battery, my motor runs a lot, so that was day. I end up quitting. I picked up a job at talk radio network, which is this indicator for Laura Ingram, and Michael Savage that I'm on radio. And the job was, I would be in-house counsel, but the deal was, I said to the owner of the company, I'll only be in-house counsel for you half the day. The other half of the, I want to learn the production side of radio. So I would actually sit there and cut the audio on the audio program.
I would put together kind of rundown for various people shows. I would read articles for them and highlight them. Get up at 4:30 in the morning and do that sort of stuff. And meantime, I would still writing my books and coming out with books that time under my own name, but this is one of the things about, you know, when you see a company like the one that we built that it's become very big people. See the size of the company, they don't see the laboring in obscurity for 10 years. Selling books. Out of backyard car. Yeah. Literally my wife remembers us going to like local Republican clubs with with a box of books in the back of my car that I got in free from the publisher. And if you sold like ten of those
You were so happy, like, oh my God, I made 200 bucks a day. That's unbelievable. So we can go to dinner. Like this is great. So, anyway, I took that job for 60 Grand a year as in-house counsel, and producer, which was a massive pay cut from, from the law firm and then sort of work my way up until I was Executive. Vice President of that company. Meanwhile, I was Ghost writing a lot of books at the time. Also, I became known as sort of the, The quickfix Ghostwriter so famous people would need to write a book. I don't know how to write a book is their famous and
They would call me in, to write the book and they give me like, no time to be like you have a month to turn out 60,000 words by X person. Okay? So I was cobbling together, a decent income by doing many many jobs and one time. So I was, I was doing all that I ended up latching on doing a radio show in Los Angeles and Radio Show in Seattle. I became editor at large of Breitbart. When Andrew Breitbart was still alive. He and, I had been friends for a long time by that point, and
So basically before we founded this company my day was I did six hours of radio day I was the editor-at-large Breitbart writing for them and doing a little bit of editing. I was the editor of Truth Revolt. I was Ghost writing books and I was writing books and doing speeches my own so I was doing like five or six jobs at one time before we ended up launching.
Daily wire so
and had it and how did you like? How did that was the Inception of that? The
daily wire. So Jeremy Inception was only me and my business partner, Jeremy boring. Now we have a third business partner and incapable Robinson who and what came in here was this as well. So, the daily word was founded in 2015, I had known Jeremy since 2010 is 2010-2011. That was because when I was working at talk radio network, there was a secret underground. Hollywood conservative group called
Friends of Abe is supposed to take off on Friends of Dorothy, which really when gay people in Hollywood weren't allowed to speak openly about being gay, they call themselves friends of Dorothy. So friends of Abe was like you're an underground, Hollywood person who's conservative and so your friend of Abe, Lincoln writes, friends babe. So so Jeremy was one of the people who is heading up friends of Abe and he was making zero dollars a year and doing a lot of work for free and I was working at talk radio network and my boss to talk right now twerk, it was interested in doing movies and so he said, you know, been you should talk with Jeremy. Well, Jeremy and I hit it off became very
Friends did a couple of kind of small-time business ventures together and then ended up working together at truth Revolt which is sort of the precursor to daily water. Truth Revolt was supposed to be Media Matters in Reverse. So Media Matters is designed to take away advertising from right-wing shows by astroturfing boycotts. And so, what we said is we don't like that tactic, we hate that tactic and we're going to stop that tactic from being used by essentially create a mutually assured destruction until the left understands that this is a bad tactic, we will do it to you and we'll see how you like it and so
So we were fairly successful at doing that, like we knocked out probably knocked out with Baldwin off the on MSNBC and Martin Bashir off the on MSNBC. It was it was a part of the David Horowitz, Freedom Center so Jeremy was Jeremiah. I ran the editorial side on truth of V, which was sort of a News website and also an activist site and Jeremy sort of did the business side of that and it was a subsection of a nonprofit called the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Well, we had been working there for a couple of years is from like 2013 2
15 2000. Yeah, 2015. And there came a point where Jeremy came to me. He said, listen, I have this idea. I've really been studying marketing, I really think that the conservative movement does not know how to Market. This is our big shortcoming as we do not know how to Market and I have this idea and the idea is that we need to raise a budget and spend an awful lot of money on marketing. And so we went to the board of the David Horowitz, Freedom Center and we tried to explain this to them and there was this meeting and
Boards of nonprofits are typically staffed by very elderly, large-scale donors. And so this board was people who are very wealthy and rather old and so we're sitting there trying to explain to them Tech and Jeremy who is known as the stupid Whisperer because I speak very fast and I'm yeah, I'm a Jew who uses big words and speak very quickly. And Jeremy is a southern Texan who speaks very slowly with a soft felt. So in a meeting with one congressperson
Who shall remain nameless? I remember I was trying to explain something this Congress person, which is glazing over. And Jeremy said, the exact same thing, but slower and this Congress person suddenly understood and said it's had Jeremy earned the nickname, the stupid whisper. Anyway, Jeremy was stupid Whispering, the board. And he was like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to, we're going to take the money, we're going to spend it here and here and Phi for like an hour and they refuse to understand. And finally one of them turned to me and he said, what's your, what's your plan? What you want to do? And I said, okay, here's our plan, I took I was mad because it's been like an hour of waste of time and I took a napkin
and I wrote on the napkin dollar sign Arrow, Facebook Arrow website, Arrow back to dollar sign. I said, this is our business plan. We're going to spend money on Facebook, we're going to use Facebook marketing. In order to jack up, traffic on the website. We're going to take advertising of subscription Revenue back to money and we're gonna do it over and over again. So me a money machine, that's how it's going to work. So that was our entire business plan. They fired Jeremy the next day and I quit in solidarity and we took that exact business plan. We walked across the street and we found a daily wire. So we had a meeting with our initial funders.
And the initial funding for the company was about four point, seven million dollars in Angel investment. We were we were cash flow positive at 18 months in and we have been operating off cash flow ever since and we'll do two hundred million dollars in business this year. Wow, thank God. Thank God. Yeah, it's pretty
cool. So, what was like, the first thing when you started doing, like more like viral YouTube stuff? How did that start a
big hit? Actually, this was a big kind of inflection point in terms of how Jeremy and I were thinking about all this stuff that the first big moment when I sort of broke loose and suddenly people started to know,
Who I was because I've been writing a syndicated column as I say for a long time. Like since I was 17 and I'd written several books and that meant some Fox hits and you knows is a time when you got like super excited, if anybody on Fox would call you to do ahead and and then 2013 is when I had a book that was called bullies come out, I brought a piece. A syndicated column about how Piers Morgan was using bully tactics with regard to gun, control is right after Sandy Hook and peers, saw it and a head, you could just he just had on Alex Jones.
And the interview team shares. Now it's Jones Is Wild. And if you've never watched it and it's yeah I mean it's Alex Jones. So yeah, Alex Jones is going full fledge. Like I knew go nor to take you out and that kind of stuff. And, and so peers reaches out to me, and he's like, yeah, I saw your column. I want you to come out and just having some big success by using the same tactic over and over. Which was basically if you're not in favor of gun control, you're in favor of kids getting killed which is just from my perspective. And I think any sane perspective absurd, no one is in favor of children. Getting
Murdered anyway. So I he called me up and I think he sort of assumed that because I'm on the right, that was going to look like Piers Morgan. That particular that was gonna look like Alex Jones? Yeah, particular debate. I'm gonna be like 70 76, the Reverend. And, and it wasn't right that it did this. This debate with peers and it was such a disaster area for appears that the Washington Post is like an entire write-up about what it is. A stir area was for peers and ended up being this incredibly viral moment where every conservative watched it like five times and suddenly people recognize that I had the skills.
Set that. I mean, I knew I had excited about it. A lot of people and in law school, but you don't really debate. All that much is the truth in sort of the public sphere,
was that your first like very public debate though.
Yeah. That's that's the first one that kind of went super. Yeah. That's the first one that, I think one super viral was
that before the trans woman, like threaten to beat you
up. Oh, yeah, that was, yeah, the CNN CNN Headline News. One was later. That year, I believe, I think that's good. 2013, or 2014? Yeah. They're they're a bunch of
We're sort of in succession or I'd be on a panel with with three other people, and I would kind of, you know, have one of those viral destroys moments. It
was that a big moment to that one? Because that one's like
funny which one they like, it's like the h5n1, I
think so. Yeah. It's like five people in the girls. Like what did she say? Like, I'll take you outside after something like that.
Yeah, if by the girl. You mean the dude, whatever. Earlier than I am yesterday. Yes, the. Yeah, what did he or she say, well. So, as always, I preface this by saying I only use biological pronouns because they're the only ones.
That refer to an objective truth. Anyway, what he said was if you what happened is, it was this whole debate on CNN, Headline, News about Caitlyn Jenner and and was it was Caitlyn Jenner, been given some sort of sportswoman of the Year award by ESPN or something. Even though Caitlyn Jenner is not engaged in a sporting activity since before I was born. Anyway, Caitlyn Jenner. The question was just how much of a hero was Caitlyn. Jenner is Caitlyn Jenner. Just like a small hero or the greatest hero was Caitlyn Jenner like the
greatest hero or like a normally level hero is Caitlyn Jenner. Like a normal level hero or Jesus by the these were the gradations of the conversation. There was no one on the other side saying what I was saying which is Caitlyn Jenner is a person who is possibly suffering from gender dysphoria and it doesn't seem like an act of heroism to suffer from a mental disorder. And so this is funny story actually. So we're they call me and they won't have me on a panel about Caitlyn Jenner, fine. All right, so I come in the producer comes in and he's like, I just want to tell you.
I want you to say whatever you want to say, man, like I like this a hot show and what you say, whatever you want to say and then he and then he said something that should have tipped me off as to where this is going to go. He said, I used to be a producer on Jerry Springer, and okay, fine. So so, all right, so they sit me down and it's a panel of let's see. It's like five people plus dr. Drew
and look like a Jerry, Springer type Vibe.
Yeah, and so then they sent me deliberately right next to Zoe Turner who is a transgender woman, meaning a biological male who believes that.
She's a female. And and so this conversation is going and it's going for a while and just how heroic is it like heroism level of like the Battle of the Bulge or heroism level of like being dropped behind the lines in World War One? Like and so finally they come to me and I said I don't really see what we're talking about in terms of heroism. It seems like instead what we have here is society that would like to restructure itself to support a delusion. And this notion that I'm supposed to pretend that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman when Caitlyn Jenner is clearly a man.
Is very foolish to me and the and everybody aghast had no one could say that it's terrible to say this. And so he turns to me and says and I said Caitlyn Jenner, you go view the video, it's pretty funny. I said okay I said Caitlyn Jenner, you know, is a biological male, every cell in Caitlyn Jenner's body, includes Y, chromosome with ironically the exception of some of his sperm cells, right? And and so he turns to me and says well you know you don't know anything about genetics little boy, you know.
Know anything about science. Little boy and I and he get he just kept saying little boy over. And so finally I turned him and I said well what are your genetics? ER and and he grabs me by the back of the neck. And he says, if you say anything like that, again I'll send you home in an ambulance, all right?
And what do you say like that seems mildly inappropriate for
political? Some. Yeah. Is that this is highly inappropriate for political conversation. Mean honestly, it took me aback so much. Like you don't go onto a TV show. Aspect can be physically assaulted typically. It's not, it's not how you think.
Nights going to go. And when I got that morning, I'm like, yeah, transgender woman grabbed me by the neck and threaten me on national TV, wasn't I saw the - so viral though. Oh yeah. And honestly, my first thought when he said, you know, if you don't cut that out little boy, I'm gonna send you home in an ambulance that doesn't make any sense. You don't go home in an ambulance here, the hospital in an ambulance and you're right. Anyway, it was yeah, it was it was weird. Then he, then he continued to throw. And then the entire panel was was upset with me for having quote, unquote provoked, and then afterward on the way out is all
He turns to me and growls at me as like I'll see you in the parking lot like first of all, not very ladylike Behavior but number two like I'm not going to the parking lot. What are you what? Why would I meet you in the parking lot? I'm like go fight you. What was that you're
intimidated? I was puzzled.
Yeah, it's a intimidated as much as like, this is again, very, very weird. There aspects of my life that are very much like a fever dream. That was definitely one of the more fever dream aspects of that. That was, that was a weird one. That's weird. What
do you think of Caitlyn Jenner now? Because we've had her on the show,
I mean, seems like a perfectly nice human being. It's almost like is is a is a man who believes he is able one and those are, those are my complete thoughts was a great athlete. As Bruce seems like the Kardashian family kind of screwed up. I mean, like I fairly generic thoughts on
this. Would you say that Caitlin's like more courageous now, because I think it's pretty cool. How he, or she speaks out on like, like, she's like, the only trans like Republican. Like, she takes a lot of heat
now. Yeah. I mean, listen. I think that saying saying unpopular things at
At, at personal risk, certainly takes a level of courage. And so, but the question is, whether that's heroic or not. I mean, you know, like again, I agree with some of what Caitlyn Jenner says. I disagree with some what Caitlyn Jenner says. I'm the truth is that I've tried to, I've tried to avoid labeling human beings as a whole, meaning, that instead of thing, people as heroes or villains, it's more. Like, did they do a heroic thing or did they do a villainous thing? Because the truth is,
People are kind of shaded. So I think there's some of the stuff that they Caitlyn Jenner says, is worthy of emulation. I think someone said Caitlyn Jenner says, is not just like everybody else.
We gotta talk about Brittney Griner, okay. Just want to hear your thoughts on the whole the trade just tapped in happened obviously,
right. Yeah. First WNBA trade anybody's ever noticed. Yeah, yeah. Just
like your thoughts on how that went down, something to that. Just got posted. I just saw was Nick Fuentes just said that, Kanye was supposed to meet with Putin. If you look I don't know if you seen it. No, no. I
He was supposed to meet miss this one, he was supposed to meet with Putin and
other he was going to come out of ribbentrop
pact. He was gonna get Brittney Griner out. And the reason that Biden did the trade was, because they knew that they were going to release
him. Yeah, whatever man. That seems like a lot of reliable sources speaking about really important topic. So, um, yeah, my general thoughts on the Brittney, Griner trade are several fold, one, Brittney Griner is an American citizen. We should do everything we can to bring American citizens home too.
When you have the White House Press Secretary saying is particularly important to bring this particular American citizen home because she is an lgbtq woman of color starts to go. Why will be seriously? Why, like why why, why does that make her specifically more important to bring home? Is it more important than Poland more important than the 40 to 50 other people who are American citizens being held in captivity around the world? Like, I don't know what makes Brittney Griner more special than they are? Choose. Certainly victimized by the Russian government, which was using her as a pawn. No question. As a general rule, you shouldn't go into foreign countries holding drugs.
Apparatus. That's that's not a smart move,
but that's so stupid. It's a would never bring weed to fucking Russia
is a very stupid thing to do. I mean, they're listen. They're plenty of places that are not even dictatorships or you're not going to bring drugs. Don't bring drugs into Japan is a good recommendation, you'll end up in jail for at least like yeah, I mean it's just a dumb thing to do. That said, again, many things can be true at once. She's an American citizen one, we should try to get her home too. She was given a sentence. That was completely unjustified by the crime that she committed three. She's an idiot for trying to bring drugs into Russia. For. Why are you going to Russia in the first place in?
The middle of what is going on. I think she went in February which was like, it was like right before the break out of the war in Ukraine. 5i, now I understand the tendency to want to bring American citizens home. That's a bad trade, it's not a pure GM level. Lord of War for woman who wants dunked is just a bad trade. Like, that's it. If you're going to if you're going to give up the most notorious arms dealer arms, dealer ever put in prison, then you would hope to at least get back like to my or like one and a player to be named later later like this just not not good.
Humming by by the by the administration. So they
tried to include Waylon to, right?
They did supposedly. So there's conflicting reporting one report from NBC News. Originally suggested, they were given the choice of either grinder or Whelan and then NBC News scrubbed it. And they said oh it's just a choice of grinder or nothing. And so depending on which version of that you believe, you know, the trade was what what the trade was. It is, it does incentivize, I mean, just in general, a lot of level it incentivizes people to take hostages obviously. Yeah. If you're a famous person, don't go to Russia right now is
Isabella Story, how do you think it should have been handled? And then do you think that there was so much pressure because all these celebrities start speaking out like, yeah, we need her back and that puts pressure again. I'm
not super blaming Biden for making the trade actually. Like, I think that from the outside, I wasn't part of the negotiations. It seems like a very disproportionate trade in which Putin wins. Like, if you're just doing, this is like a straight-up sporting trade. It's a bad trade for the United States and it really incentivizes them to take prisoners in American citizens and try to get more criminals who are useful
To them out of prison. But, you know, again, I understand the tendency to try and get grinder out. The part that I really don't understand. Is the pr effort in the aftermath to turn this into. This is, is a giant victory for the United States. It's a particularly important Victory because of Brittany Grinders intern intersectional status. Hey, listen, it's still not as bad a trade as by as Obama made for Bowe. Bergdahl. That was the worst red. Now, that was the worst hostage trade. That was that was a deserter in for the Taliban five. That was a particularly bad trade. This one is like, just kind of am I?
Bad trait. It's not like Ernie brolio for Lou Brock. It's kind of it's more like maybe like the White Sox Sammy Sosa trade as a reagent like not not, not
amazing, right? I guess for their base. It's a good, a pretty good, like political trade for them for their own political. Like I'm sure everyone that supports Biden. Wanted Brittney Griner
out. Yeah, for sure. I mean I like for re-election I again for political reasons I totally get it as far as his real electoral prospects. I think that you know politicians tend to think in terms of days and
Weeks and they're wrong. If they think people can remember this by the election 2024. I mean can you remember what happened three weeks ago and politics and it's very difficult to remember what happened three days ago in politics. So the idea that that's going to have any sort of durable impact for Biden in the future, I think is wrong. That's why I always find it weird. When you have these sort of big celebrity events, look how we got Brittney Griner out, it isn't that amazing? It's not super amazing. I mean like, it's like good, I'm glad but that there's certain things that are worth taking a Victory lap on. I'm not sure that was worth such a big Victory lap.
Do you think
I didn't will rerun and yes, he will for
sure. Yeah, I think the fact that you can get you lack in 2022, means he runs in 2024. It's it like before, if you'd lost in 2022, there have been a lot of internal pressure saying, he's a drag on the ticket, he's having he's creating problems for other Democrats. We need to get him out of there, but because Democrats over performed because Republicans ready to local homeless shelter, for candidates. The Democrats did not end up being punished in 2022 and because of that, they ended up, you know, it reinvigorates his 2024 run
Now, is that the best candidate for them aside from Michelle Obama? Yes. Actually, I think he's gonna be a better candidate than Kamala Harris. Who's the worst politician who's ever been assembled? An elaborate even hear anything about her really? Well, I mean, they, they tried not to. I mean, she's just, she's a disaster every politician. She makes Hillary Clinton looks smooth. An authentic. Yeah. She's awful at this. And then the and it who's arrested a bunch of people who judge and dude, went on maternity leave for two months and nobody noticed that doesn't speak well to your efficacy and how useful you are in the governmental structure.
So yeah, I think they'd be very weak bench and the the kind of Ace in the Hole for them. Is if things really got bad, they probably I still think there's a shot. They bring in somebody like Michelle Obama has really made herself over in a pretty dramatic way and it's extraordinarily popular. Yeah. For sure. So they brought her in. She'd be a heavy hitter for them. For sure.
Do you think that Trump has any chance of winning?
So I think having made this mistake before and I'll say he has a chance of winning. I didn't think is gonna win in 2016. I also didn't think I wanted anything.
2016. Like this is I mean I know people who are in the room who's literally the most surprised person in the room in 2016 21. And it, by the way, it was hilarious. It was so funny. It was so funny. I mean, like, just the sudden vision of Donald Trump is the president of the United States because it's just, it was so funny. You're watching on TV, like, this is not we went into an alternative timeline at some point right here. I don't know when it happened, but we like everything the pandemic trumping elected the riots last year like it's just like or two years ago, like
Is just so insane. It feels like just getting crazy. It feels like Circa 2013. There was some breakpoint, in reality, we just entered into the alternative timeline that really shouldn't exist and and that's where we are right now. But yeah, when it does, Trump have a chance. Yeah, his chance. Because he is still gay. So it's hundred percent name recognition, you can see some weird circumstance in which the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot so badly that he wins. Do I think that that chance is very strong know? I think I think that he is the weakest Republican I could
We feel that against Joe, Biden. I think he is going to, I think the bloom is off the rose with him. I think he's tired out. A lot of people, the case that he basically made in 2016. The Madame popular was I'm out here, taking slings and arrows for you, right? I'm a member of the elite. I'm very wealthy. I wish I had a lot of friends in Hollywood and now they hate my guts, and the reason they hate my guts is not because they hate me, they've known me for a long time. The reason they hate my guts is because they hate you. And so, I'm out here taking the bullet for you. And so a lot of conservative sort of resonated to that and then for the subsequent four years,
When he was attacked, they took it as like, well, they're attacking him because they really want to attack us. Hmm. And then after 2020, he started making the reverse case, which is, I want you guys to take the head for me, I lost the election. But I want you guys to all go out there, and I want you to say that I won the election, and I want you to make everything about election 2020, and I really want, it's all about me. It's not about you anymore is about me. And I think a lot of Republicans were somewhat willing to at least abide by that, until he lost a couple of Sanitation Georgian 2021. And then he got clocked in 2022. And I think that the
Real pitch for him was again, in 2016 to fold. I'm the only one who can win and I'm standing in for you and when he did win in 2016, that granted him almost a magical Aura for a lot of Republicans of. He's the only one who can win. He's so powerful, he's so intimidating, he's so aggressive. He's the only one who can do it and then after 20 21, 20, 22 and him giving his campaign so far, seems extremely tired.
He's advocating for a suspension on the Constitution right now, right?
I mean, yeah, they try to walk it back at least thing wasn't doing it, but yeah,
I mean, he said something like that because of the Twitter, Banning of the hunter Biden story that the founders wouldn't want election stolen. And so, the Constitution wouldn't apply in these circumstances. He
hurts his case when he's still trying to like talk about his loss.
Unless of course I think that most Republicans even people who love Trump and I'm not somebody who love Trump on a personal level, write-in vote for him or Hillary in 2016 and 2020. I voted for him and I said I still don't think that he's a person of High character but I like a lot of his policies and I like his policies better not like Biden and and
A lot of people who love him a lot more like really love the guy. I think a lot of them look at him and they say this is a tired routine. This is this is he has a lot of baggage, this is and it is tiring. I mean the fact that he's spending all this energy kind of fulminating over his own personal grievances, when meanwhile, if you're a conservative Democrats feel like they're running roughshod over a lot of the things that you actually care about. It feels like a distraction and that's why you're starting to see people like to Santa's really gaining ground against Trump in the in the primary poem. I think he runs this and his. I'd be shocked if he doesn't have
Shocked. If he doesn't all the, all the stars are aligned for me, gotta go or like in politics. The worst thing you can do, is, mr. Moment. You can see those who like Elizabeth Warren in 2016, Elizabeth Warren, to run, she missed her moment. She, she ran in 2020 and said and that was not her mom. In 2016 was her moment of she'd run against Hillary. She met a woman nomination in 2016 by 2026
tired. That is going to be so interesting if he runs because I feel like Trump hasn't had a real rival really rival and the Republican side, right? And that's right to be like me to
watch, does it? Well, I think that does.
This is tactic is going to be what it's mostly been so far which is just run by ignoring drum. And from tries to bite his ankles, basically just say listen, I don't have a bad word to say, about the former presidents of the United States. I like a lot of what he did as president, but it's time for new blood and I like what we've done in floor and I think that stands up against anybody and what Trump says, just keep repeating that line because Trump is that the mistake that every makes with Trump is the Trump is, he's like Doomsday from the DC Comics, like every bit of energy, you fired him, he takes a Negros. Yeah. And so the more attention you give him the more final
and actually it because people we live in a really reactionary time or people sense opposition to a thing as social proof that you should support the thing. So you see this on both sides of the aisle. So if Democrats start attacking, for example, Marjorie Taylor, green Republicans instead of saying, well, is that critique, well-founded or poorly? Found it though, man? Democrats are attacking Marjorie hologram. She must be amazing. So, the Democrats are attacking her and that is part of an aftereffect of trump right now. People would attack Trump be like, oh my God, they're attacking Trump. That means that the trial. Must be him. Awesome, everything he's doing. He's awesome.
You see that on the left to that, if somebody on the right attacks, you know, attacks. Kamala Harris. Then it'll be, oh, well, they must be attacking her because she's a racist. She must be amazing at this. Actually, she secretly great at this like, well, no, she might be bad at this. Marjorie Hilary might be bad. Like again, little bit of nuance goes a long way but it's hard to do as far as the Santa's running. And when I say the stars are aligned, I don't just mean that right now, he's very popular at the base. I mean, that he took a purple state where he had won by .4 percentage points in his last gubernatorial election. He won by 20 over.
Charlie Crist, the entire state is blood red. Now, which I'm proud to have been a part of having moved my family there and, and DeSantis also has in the bank. 150 million dollars here is more money for his gubernatorial race than any candidate, I believe in American history and all that money is fungible. And is Governor is yeah. And so when he so if he declares for president all that money just goes directly into his presidential fund. So he's incredibly well fund. He's also termed out right, which means that he can't run again for governor after, after 2026, he's done.
So, he the runs now, or if you ran later, he'd be running two years out of office. And the American people have a really short memory of people, people two years out of office. Don't tend to sort of recapture the magic from, from the moment. Also, to Santa's has the keys much more disciplined than Trump way am I mean, yeah, that's not saying a whole hell of a lot and most people are more disciplined than Trump in most ways, but just dance is a very disciplined politician and he also was made the face of the opposition by the media. And during covid when they decided that Andrew Cuomo was the greatest governor in America and Rhonda Santos.
Is Ron death Santa's. That's like the best thing for the Santa's politically because it turns out he's a pretty good job in Florida and people like him. And so when the media hate you, that's a real that gets Republicans in your corner. Like almost nothing else.
Wow. That's gonna be crazy if he runs. Yeah, so we crazy. I'm obsessed with this but I just want to get your take on the whole FTX SPF situation is fascinating. Yeah, it is. I keep looking into it because like there's just new info every day. It gets crazier and Crazier. By the moment, what do you think is like, how do you think this is going to be handled?
And he's going to jail for a super long time. You should go to jail for a super long time. Yeah. It's it is amazing. What connections and inflated valuations will do for a company.
Yeah. What do you think that represents us? Because he's affiliated with some of the most powerful people. He's donating a bunch of money. I saw that he's actually was donating to both
parties. So his Deputy I believed and donated to to one of his deputies. I think donated a bunch of Republicans, he donated like 30 or 40 million dollars Democrat. Yeah, but yeah, what it says is
Is a couple of things. One, it's not a rip on crypto. It's actually people who didn't understand the very premise of crypto who actually got ripped off here. So, the premise of crypto is that it's a trustless system, right? The entire basis of crypto is I don't have to trust that my money, I don't have to trust you. The, my money is in your bank because I have my crypto wallet, it's owned by me. I have the code, it's in my possession, people forgot the basis of crypto and they left their money in the care of somebody else, right? They left their care in the left, their money in the care of FDX, belt in The Exchange.
Living in the exchange that made it vulnerable to being embezzled and so it's actually not a repudiation of crypto. It's a repudiation of a of a system in which people assume they could trust authority figures once again and turns out that they couldn't. And this is why it turns out SPF of spending enormous amount of time, cultivating, politicians and appearing in public with some of the most powerful people on earth. When you appear on panels, with very powerful people, the creates a hello a halo effect. Everybody starts to think that you're somebody worthy of emulation that they can trust you.
And then give you their might mean Bernie Madoff to the same thing, right? Yeah. Like ring the bell in at the at the New York Stock Exchange like well that guy can't beat a Friday. Me he rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Hmm. And so that I think that that's that's not really big
parties. Are part of him that like does that for protection in case something? Ever did go
south. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's how it's companies sort of got started. I don't know that he was backfilling it as much as as just continuing to do. What he'd always done. I mean I think the surprise for him is that he thought like it seems most of these fraudsters do
Eventually there would be something that filled in the Gap that he'd created. This is the Elizabeth. What's her face? Like their nose was with Homes at their nose. They see the same thing. Like she kept assuming that the science would catch up with the y-yeah it. Eventually they cracked the code and suddenly all the lies she told would be justified, he said the same thing with SPF, I think whether that's with SPF, you know, they were embezzling the money. They're using it at Alameda to buy ftt to artificially inflate the price of f DT. And then, they were borrowing against the inflated price of ftt to go by themselves. Really nice, condos and boats.
And have they're polygamists molecule of weirdos and
I know I read that the other day, the house in the Bahamas.
Yeah. With a poly cool of like the people you at least like to sleep with on planet Earth just like 10. Yeah, Larry, crypto people. Yeah, incredibly already crypto. People having a pollock alike. I mean not to not to be judgmental, but like if you're going to be this terrible and sinful at least physical Beauty ought to be part of it. Like my goodness, he said the same thing. You
can't be a billionaire in like, you know what I mean?
I mean that yeah that was the critical blindness is anyway. So they it's
always safe like yeah this guy wears a I'm
not most handsome guy but like, come on. Yeah I agree with you. I mean, I agree with you is bad. But anyway, the, you know, SPF, you know, doing that. I think his assumption was that eventually, the promise of ftt would be carried out, that eventually there would be enough users of ftt that they could basically take the money back out and they can put it back into the FTX exchange and nobody would be the wiser. Hmm.
And it turns out that it all collapse in on them because the guy who owned the biggest exchange decided to basically cut their legs out from under them, it's like, just a mock it Machiavelli. And political level, you have to admire. You have to admire the move. Yeah, the from Finance. Yeah, I mean that it's a just if you're just watching the chat for watching like a TV show, it's an amazing move. Oh yeah, they completely undercut the price of Apple. How do you just collapse the place from within?
How do you think this is going to affect the future of crypto?
So I think that people always run to government when
They think that things have gone wrong and so you'll get some bad regulations out of this in all likelihood regulation. I mean hilariously enough some of the regulations are pushing herself that SPF actually supported now so I call, you know, it fix this the regulation that SPF liked. Yeah. So I'm probably not. Yeah. I think that it's wasn't that the price on on I always thought that there are a couple well-established cryptocurrencies that we're going to be durable and the vast majority of them are going to fall away and it like any Innovative space, they're gonna be a lot of scamsters at the very beginning who are taking advantage of this who launched their own Bitcoin.
And it fails and they just make a quick money. Grab for people who are stalkers and then it just falls apart the FDX obviously the size and scope is not small. It's a very, very big one but did it materially affect the price of? For example, Bitcoin, I haven't seen the Bitcoin has plummeted in any real way. It seems like the the drop in the crypto markets happened concomitant with actually the inflation, but it seems like it's been fairly stable Bitcoin. I mean, full disclosure, I own some Bitcoins him, ethereum for the last three, four months. It seems like
Bitcoin particular has been fairly stable so FDX didn't seem to affect a Bitcoin and once you have mass by in then there's stability. The problem is how you achieve Mass Mayan. And I think also, you know, the notion that that you need crypto exchanges because there are enough durable cryptos of this, but there just aren't enough. Terrible cryptos to support a full crypto exchanges, perhaps part of the problem here.
Yeah, there's like 200 coins on
that train. How many of those are really durable? Yeah, exactly. 510 maybe 10.
I just love the fact that this guy like everyone praised him because
Unless he dressed like Average. Joe drove this like old like shitty Toyota Camry. Yeah, I mean, why was just buying all these crabs in Bahamas like
oh it's such a parody of our trust system, right? Actually is the case for crypto. It's like you should trust no one the kids for crypto is trust. No one. This guy like totally fulfilled that case. And then I got this is this is a repudiation of crypto. Not a repudiation of you trusting, people who are jackasses, that's your mediation is. That just because you have some schmuck who's actually playing well, what was he playing World? He's playing video games, all he's like, securing his hedge fund a like and you thought
Was cool because you're an idiot. That's why you thought that was cool because you're stupid. Everything is run on smoking mirrors. Like it's going back to kind of our business is one of the things that drives me absolutely up a wall because look at the valuation of Twitter. At one point, the valuation of Twitter, their price earnings ratio was 160. 160 was the price to earnings ratio in terms of their stock capitalization. What in the 160 name, a business that has a price earnings ratio of 160 single mom and pop, grocery store interns, say it grosses.
Grand a year. So now you're telling me that it's supposed to be like, worth times, 80 40 million dollars, I'll what metric are using here? That's insane. So it's yeah. All the metrics are out of whack. People are, are really oversold on a lot of, a lot of the tech bubble. They tend to buy into personality more than they buy into the actual underlying Finance of these of these companies. And their companies like ours, they're actually cash flow, positive and generate actual revenue. And actually have been in the black every year of our existence so far. As I'm, you know,
Since Monday 18. That's it. That's a it's a weirdness. Yeah, always I'm
sure. What do you think about what you lines doing with Twitter right now? How do you think he's doing?
Oh, I love it, I love it. Are they, what do you understand is what sort of the best. First of all, I love that he came in and fired everybody, and they, and they survive. So, a lot of gonna be a lot of unemployed coders learning to well, which I think will be really, really funny. Yeah, they're really overstaffed the trust and Safety Council was garbage. The the vision, God, he was doing a terrible job, you'll Roth is doing a terrible job. You on coming in? So again,
Because we live in a fever dream. The funniest thing in retrospect is going to be the because Elon Musk like to read The Babylon, be on Twitter, heat completely restructured, How Free Speech works in the United States. Like that's, that's hysterically funny, like that's really, really funny and, and so, you know, him reviewing. What was happening and what I think is good, more transparency is good. The team that he's got in there as much smaller and much more transparent, much more reactive and that's good. And frankly, even the stuff that people don't like what he's doing, where, for example, musk will say kick
Yeah, off of Twitter and I disagreed with that, by the way, I don't think that he's kicking off in Twitter. I think you should be is crazy and ridiculous as he wants to be on Twitter. It's a, you know, he didn't violate any law, so I'm generally nonfat like even people whose views I despise, I think she meant her.
How do you define that line between what, like, that's what all the liberal people will say is like there's a difference between hate speech and Free Speech, right? But
the problem is that I don't think that there's a hard-and-fast, definition of what they think is hate speech, right? So they don't get to Define it because they think that I'm hate speech and I don't have enough temerity to Define hate speech. I mean like, I
I have my own definition but I don't think that it's dispositive. I don't think just because I think something is hate speech necessarily means that it's hate speech, or that it's in an ontological category. Like, there's not a category that's hate speech and everyone recognizes this is hate speech or if it is, it's very, very few numbers of items. So, but this is what I liked about must yet. Even when he kicked, yay off. He just said, I'm making the call. You don't like it. I'm making the call it to me. Yeah. Where's before Twitter was like, it's are vague algorithm and we don't, we can't tell you why. We can't tell you quite how, but only knows that the machines are running. The machines were not
Going to place it was being run exactly the same way that you want is. Except that Elon is actually just taking the hit. He's like, okay, the buck stops here. I don't want you and my service done. Okay. Well, you know, if Twitter had stacked up in the first place is on that. At least would give it a picture of what he's after the service was supposed to be. So no, I I love what he's doing over there. I think it's also hysterical that the second wealthiest or wealthiest man in the world is just tweeting it. Randos I think that's really funny. Like people are just tweeting at him, he's getting back at them and it's it's one of the more fun things that's happened in American public life.
Yeah, I mean you said you think Connie should have his platform. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, what do you have to say about, like, even I think yesterday or two days ago? He made the Rosa Parks comments.
He's my, I stopped paying attention to them. I'll be honest with you since he after after standing for Hitler. I was like, how much further can you go. So, tell me how much further can you go. I missed
it. He said that, Rosa Parks was like a plant, like she was planted there
in what way like of the Jews are like, like, no, like
when they took create chaos. Yeah. Like the whole situation on the bus stations like that
was okay. So I mean what I assumed that his garbling
Actual actually, fairly cool story of Rosa Parks, right? Which is that the NAACP had in fact, recruited her for you like in advance and they said, she'll be an ideal plaintiff, and they'd actually said, go sit on the bus in this particular place, and then we'll have a lawsuit against the against the bus line. So that I mean, that's true. I don't know what he actually said. It is true that that was not. It wasn't like, she spontaneously sat down on the bus and then they see that that. But that doesn't take away from her story. In fact, I think it makes it a cooler story. I think it's cool that they actually were like, okay, we're gonna plan this out. We're gonna get a good good basis for a lawsuit. Rosa Parks is an attractive face for
The plaintiff and and do it like. So I'm not sure how I didn't actually. Yeah, I
don't even know. I honestly don't know the whole context, but I'm curious like you said, you stopped listening to him after the comments made about Hitler.
Well, when, again, if you watch Politics as a comedy, it's so good. If you watch it as a tragedy, it's so sad. But if you watch it as a comedy, it's so good. Yeah, I mean, like that, that episode with him and finds has and Jones sitting there and Jones suddenly realizing he's the least crazy person in the room. He's one of the Great.
Of
the great things that's ever happened. I mean, like Joan sitting there is I wear, I wouldn't say that about Hitler. I'm not sure. I would go that far like, whoa Alex. You're the moderate in the room
because he always like he hates Nazis. He thinks they're like satanic, like Devils that are being fed off and
sitting there and suddenly like, he's he's always the craziest person in the room and suddenly, he walked in and he looks up. There's a guy who's seven feet tall towering over him in terms of his crazy. No. Wow. This is amazing and Fuentes who actually is relatively warm toward Hitler.
Fuentes is also friends, like trying to cram. Yeah. Back into the box. Be like, no, don't say that. Oh my God. This is just hear me while you sitting there with his face cut. I mean, honestly, the truth is. I feel bad. I actually do I feel bad for? Yeah, I've they're people who are bipolar and my family. Like when people are in manic episodes, which he clearly isn't a manic episode, they say things that are insane and they think that nobody can tell me what to do, and the more insane, it is, the more people disapprove, the more they do it and they do crazy stuff. And when he, when he comes out of the manic episode, it's it's going to be really, really bad.
Oh my God. I just, I honestly feel bad for that
waiter started training, pretty downhill
for. It's really, I mean, it's just, it's a, it's a dark situation and the sort of use of him by outside forces, to, maximize Brand Power like Fuentes or you know hapless or or the attempt to, you know, gain off of him. And I think that that that's true. The other way to, I think there are a lot of people who are like, okay well, you know, since ye had come out as pro-life, this is a great baton for us to hit pro-lifers web or something. That's like, well, that's not real. I mean like this guy is
Is a troubled in a bit. Now, two things can be drawn. So on, he's saying hateful despicable horrific things, he may believe and I will say pretty obvious. He does believe those hateful despicable horrific things, right? And all the rest of it, but also, this is a Personnel of a manic episode and I don't think that you treat people who are in the middle of a mental breakdown. In the same way, they treat people who are not in the middle of a mental breakdown. Being
an orthodox Jew, does no part of you think or feel like you have to respond like with
you're going to have responded. I think what I think, what he's saying is straight-up Nazism, and I'd said that before he was
Up there talking about how Hitler was a nice person you know that but again he is not a well person. Hmm. And that's that's not paternalistic. He's not a well person. I don't think you can watch him and his activities over the last few weeks and think this is a normal. Well human being I'm not trying to pathologize evil what he's saying is evil. Also mean he's been out open about the fact that he's that he's bipolar. I've never seen a clearer example of a public personality melting down in bipolar fashion than this. Have you
No. I mean like I'm confused that anybody would even argue with this and I don't think many people are, I think that this is why I say that the treating it with out that angle to it, I think on a personal level, there is a couple things to be said here on a personal level. I think that it is malicious to not analyze his behavior. In terms of his mental illness on a societal level. The bigger problem for me is not what he is saying, is the fact that it's finding a resonant audience in certain quarters, right? That's the part that's really upsetting. And so, I have a friend who's a cop in Los Angeles, he's a Jew and he, and he's out, he's out.
On duty and use accosted, by by guy who started shouting about the Jews to him and he said, well, I'm Jewish and he said, well yeah, he says that the Jews run everything, I like that kind of stuff is really dangerous. The fact that there have been an extraordinary number of attacks on Jews in Williamsburg and in New York. Like that's, that's tough is, is really dangerous and it's a real problem. Now, again, I try to draw very distinct lines between ye saying, go beat up a Jew and people actually beating up Jews, but he does get blamed
I'm for raising the temperature, really dramatically, and also broadening the Overton window. And what is now considered acceptable this course?
I mean I just find I do agree with you. I think he's definitely bipolar has a mental illness but don't you think kind of it is a little similar with Disney how they promote whatever they're promoting and then giving you Twitter because there are kids on Twitter like you just said who might just see that and take that not only history just
he's a platform. So there's a difference like I wouldn't give you a show on my on my platform right? Because we're not an open platform.
Would you debate? Would you debate with them?
I won't.
With people who are mentally ill. I mean like that, that would be totally purposeless, totally purposeless. Again, this is a person who is whose, you know, there are few categories of people that I won't Abate. I won't debate people who are mentally ill. I'm not gonna debate comedians because they're not there debate there to make jokes by the same token. People who are just trolls because you don't actually know what they're believing. They're not very often expressing what they, what they actually believe they're just kind of playing a part in order to elicit laughter from the audience and those are groups of people that I typically won't debate, but other than that you know we have to make smart business decisions. I kind of
Every person who walks into our offices, you have to decide. Is this person worth your time, is percent of big enough following what's this sort of reward in terms of, you know, reaching more people or is there a cost in terms of elevating views that you think are are extreme? And the way I feel the same way about people who refuse to debate me that's fine. I remember a few years ago, I challenged Alexandra Cosmic Courthouse to debate and she suggested I was kept calling her, which is hysterically funny. Like, if you're going to accuse people of catcalling, you should probably not pick the Orthodox Jews happily married with three kids. Like that's, that's, that's the also that
You're trying to get at her.
Well, she said, she's literally called the cat calling. I don't know how cackling Works in New York but typically, my understanding is that it's not like a woman's walking down the street and construction workers like a baby. Come on over here and let's debate the the graduated income tax like that. That's typically not how it works. I thought maybe I'm wrong in any case. She, you know, but what all she had to say is I don't feel like debating you because I'm a congressperson and you're a commentator. I don't feel like, debating you because I so disapprove of your Viewpoint that I don't think should be platformed. Okay, I would disagree with her, I think that's bad.
Bad. But, you know, her prerogative, there's no Duty for anybody to beat anybody else.
Is there anyone else you'd like love to debate with
a man? I'd love to me like your top through about a burning. I'd love to be Bernie I'd love to see you tonight. Ah I love it so good honey. Plus it's usually politicians because those ones I cover the most. Yeah, so yeah. Again AOC would be fine just because I think that she speaks and slogans and I'd like to dig down into what you actually believes and I wonder how deeply she's thought about.
Actually always, have
you ever walked away? Should put that on my pay-per-view. You versão? See
ya? Do they mean the did it would do it for you? I mean, result, in an honest man, is very good. I mean this should know that like I've been lobbying for years to be on The View. I just think that'd be hysterically great TV. Yeah, it'd be the best thing and they're they're, they're very few shows that I really want to appear on but the view is one of them. So yeah, and they from what I understand when Meghan McCain was on The View because you know, our family, she was trying to get me on and they're like, no, no no do which is
I have to say a somewhat wise move probably on their
part. Who's someone that you've debated with her? Just, I don't even know, but just debated with her talk with, and walked away and been like impressed with. I like, wow, I didn't expect that from them. Um, well I mean anytime there's
a civil debate, I usually feel like I'm impressed that it went. Civilly and was interesting. Yeah so you know I may end up disagreeing with somebody was launched is still debated usually interesting. So, you know, a couple years ago, I decided maybe you're going to be an experience and a very nice person and then Young Turks, she spends half her day.
Critiquing me over Young Turks, that's fine. It was a really nice cordial debate about unionization and the economy and and that sort of stuff and great. I mean that's fine. They are the truth is most of the the good debates that I have or not to base the more discussions and the and those discussions are the ones that I find the. Most interesting back on my Sunday, special will have on people who are more on the left. You have, I'm Larry Wilmore, you'll talk about race or you'll have on Andrew Young and talk about the universal Universal basic income.
I like that sort of stuff. People don't treat it as a debate but it kind of is and they're very few formal debates that I've actually done where it's like your time and you're on a clock. Like the people people don't like to agree to that so much. So if, if there's going to be like a formal debate, then I treat that differently than I even treated discussion. A discussion is more of a back-and-forth like what we're doing here. But a debate, you have to treat like a sports game. After watch tape of the person you actually have to see what their arguments are in advance. You have to sort of game out, how you're going to respond to what you think their arguments against, you are going to be. And so, I treat that very seriously.
I'm going to prep for debate. I prepped for debate.
Damn. That's funny. Yeah, it's great. I was going to ask what do you think about fellow daily wire? Candace Owens like supporting
Kanye. So gonna put you on the spot a little bit. Yeah, no I appreciate it. One second. Candice is entitled to, you know, whatever friendships she want to have. I think that you made and a moral mistake and not condemning guys comments up front, I don't think it was very hard at all for her to say, I'm friends with this person and I disagree with them.
In front of this person, they said something I think is bad. I have a lot of friends who say things that I think are bad, I don't think that would have been the end of the world and I'm, you know, I will not pretend that I wasn't upset by that. I was upset by that with that said, she's an independent being, she has the ability to use her own voice and way that she sees fit, she didn't say what you had said. If she'd said what you had said she wouldn't be working here. Presumably now I'm not in a position to unilaterally hire and fire hair. That's not how the company actually works. That's it's it's actually contrary to yeas opinion. This is not a Jew own company.
Actually the vast majority of the owners of this company are question but even if I had had the ability to fire Candice she would not have been on the chopping block for for saying what she said, which was essentially a tepid defense of of ye initially. And then as he got worse and worse, she stopped defending him. Like, she hasn't defended him on Alex Jones. For example, she hasn't defended his Hitler comments. Do I think that you should have said more? Absolutely. Do, I think she should continue to say more? Absolutely disappointed. She didn't say more
100% my
Because fewer watching you go out or like college kids challenge you and I was kind of off topic but when is the last time you like well how does that even happen? You just go speak at schools and you open up
qas. I mean it's there's no prep is there's no plants it's just whoever wants to get up and ask a question and get up and ask a question. And, and I just, and I just, you know, I actually have a rule with the at those events because it's, it makes for the best kind of viewing experience that. If you disagree with me, you raise your hand, you up to the front. And I always, I always find that most interesting
when you have them come walk up and
You
I want mean usually there's a mic in the audience, they walk up to the mic and then and then usually they I let them stick around for as long as the conversation seems to be going somewhere and sometimes that's five or ten minutes. Sometimes it's like after a minute and a half, they can't. Formulate the question very well, and I don't think it's going to be particularly productive. But, yeah, I mean, that means I have to be on my toes and I have to do myself because you can get asked anything. I mean, I don't know, I'm an ass pretty much. I'm trying to think if there's anything, I haven't been asked at this point. I mean, ask about pretty much everything, you know, from from climate change to tax policy from.
Um, abortion or same-sex, marriage? Like I get asked about all those things. So one of the things I spend an awful lot of time in my daily life doing is reading and thinking and writing and like that's that that's the part that nobody sees kind of behind the scenes of the show. I mean the show is only a couple of hours because I do be our that's the podcast and we do some stuff behind a pay wall. But the amount of work that goes into the show people ask how I prep for the show and the answer is, the news prep is actually fairly low because once you have sort of a bank of ideas from which to draw and sort of a deeper knowledge of the philosophies that undergird,
Ideas. The news is sort of playing on top of the iceberg. So most of the stuff I do is reading about the full scope of the iceberg, and then the news coverage is just like I can read a headline and and I've been doing this long enough that I can read a headline and basically know sort of the political ramifications just from the headline of what the story is going to be.
Was gonna ask what do you think. I saw Ilan said that you know the neuro-link that that they're developing. He said in six months they're going to be ready to put that in humans. Whatwhat's your your whole opinion on like neural link
and so at that
I think that there is a moral difference that we have to be very wary of between fixing problems and sort of artificial enhancements by which I mean if you're talking about a neural link to help paralyzed person feel again, I obviously good. You're talking about making a blind person. See again, Obviously good. If you're talking about our neural link to raise your IQ from 120 to 130, I think that you're going to get into some pretty dicey. Eugenic territory, fairly quickly here.
I think there's moral aspects of that that have not yet been fully thought through. I also have serious doubts as to whether it's going to be workable and six months, I just like I'm I'd be shocked at least you know. I'm the more maybe I'm a more basic level. The the amount that we know about brain science is so small, it's so small. I mean the brain is still a black box. My wife, the doctor, you know she she studied Neuroscience when she was in college and the the lack of understanding of how the brain works, how it functions, what parts of the brain do
How complex the brain is and we just don't know enough about brains to start like messing around by putting Machinery in there and thinking we know everything that like we really don't. I mean if you talk to anybody who have stuck to brain surgeons they will tell you that they don't know everything that's going on inside the brain. A hundred years from now, they're gonna look back and it's like butchers like the same way that we look back and people who are using ice picks to do frontal lobotomies on epileptics and they're gonna be like, wow, that's insane. What in the world were you doing now? And so you know I think brain surgery 100 years from now. People going to look back at what we do now and I'm like that's insane. That's not what are you doing? So the
Idea that we're going to be technologically advanced enough to be able to manipulate the brain. So that you for example can just download knowledge to your brain and suddenly, it's accessible to your brain. So I don't even believe that's going to work. No, not not to that extent, not to that extent. I think that again for certain conditions like fairly well. Understood conditions like blindness, maybe it'll do some good and they're
great and that's insane if that works.
Yeah, I mean, that'd be, that'd be amazing. I mean, that's what I think you have
other side is very scary because it's like now there's a chip and everyone's brain, like, where does that lead is a? Is that like a
Well, doesn't it sound like an agenda as well to like
that? Listen, I'm I tend to be a tech Optimist, more than a tech pessimist so I could see a world in which, you know, efficiencies in science grew to such a point that everyone had access to information at an insane rate and that would maybe allow for possible future Innovation. I just don't I have very little trust that the scientists know exactly what they're building are. All the side effects of what they're building. I think there have been there been too many things that we've seen over the course of the last hundred years where science thinks that it knows exactly what it's doing.
Doing and then 10 years down, the line, you're like, oh my God, that has some really dire side effects that we never really thought about
in general, though. Do you think that like the increase in technology and like Tick-Tock, like how do you think that's going to affect society in the
future? I think it's as if somebody asked me the question the other day, it was sort of an interesting thought experiment, is to, if I could make the internet disappear tomorrow, what I? And as a massive beneficiary in the internet and I don't know, man. I mean like that. That is a, that is a tough question. I think there's a case for yes.
That
is a strong case for making the internet disappear. Not that I'm a Luddite and the internet does enormous amounts of good in terms of allowing Commerce and and free flow of transactions and informational flow and all that. But the amount of social chaos that it's caused is insane. I mean, the the substitution of fake relationships for real relationships, the fact that people don't have friends anymore. The fact that that people are not interacting with each other, that relationships are going by the wayside. That marriage is declining. A child bearing is declining that people are so tied to their devices that they can't.
And have conversations with one another and that the conversations that they do have online, tend to polarize them even more. And so, you can have a crazy person in New York, find a crazy person in California. Go plan an attack in Michigan, like they like that sort of stuff is really dark and so it has great potential. There's nothing morally, you know, nefarious about the internet. But being that people tend to be sinful creatures, the use of such a powerful tool in an unrestricted way, and I don't mean restrict by the government. I mean, I sort of restricted by
Common values is is had some really dire side effects. I'm not sure that the I'm not to let's put this way, the good that the internet has done. I do not think is outweighed by the. It does not outweigh the bad that the internet has done thus far. I
saw, sorry. Have you guys seen? I don't know where I saw it but I saw like Tick-Tock in China. What they're recommending to kids is all like educational shit and they limit it. So there's like a there's like a time barrier. Like you can only access the first certain amount of hours a day and here it's like there's no
rules
Right for that. They're obviously running an op on us. I mean, like I say tock tick, tock tick tock has an
extraordinarily. It's still owned by has decayed. A Chinese company, right? Because I saw Trump was trying to make a US Company by it before and writing
to their there. Is it? So now they're a bunch of tic tac keeps claiming that, they're not handing over data to the Chinese, but it's pretty obvious. They are handing over data to the Chinese. And so, it's now been banned in number of states, for state employees because they're afraid that the the tick tock is using state employee data.
In order to Garner information on how the government works. And so it's been banned in a variety of States. I think, Texas just Bandit, for example, for government workers. Not like the normal person you know a person can still use tick tock and now trying to knows everything about you but that's the yeah they the algorithm is featuring marginal content that makes people more crazy. I mean the stuff that's on Tick-Tock that goes viral. Some of it's very funny and some of it is it mean I'm not saying it's not creators are not producing some pretty amazing content on them are but
But, you know, the and we're beneficial again, we're beneficiary. It's like a grand Tick-Tock. I probably have a million half hours on Tick-Tock or something. I don't have it on my phone, I don't use it, but it's but the version that they're trying out to our kids, to 13, 14, 15, year-olds, promoting, gender fluidity. It's not what they're promoting in China in China. They understand that, that's not really great for their kids instead of promoting like, how to do math. And so yeah they when somebody tries out a service for their own family and one way and to you in another way, then you have to start thinking that, maybe the service is preying on.
You
is chat. Like so when you say China is running an op on us, what do you mean by
that? I mean that I mean that if there's a Chinese back company they're trying to. So they're trying to
brainwash our Young Generation,
I mean, to sort of say, yeah. I mean, they're certainly trying to infuse values. They think are damaging to our young people into the services that they have access to. Yeah, I mean that, that, I'd be surprised if they weren't even trying as a nefarious world
power, what is going on over there? Because I see a bunch of stuff but I don't really know what to believe. I mean like it's hard to
what's going.
On over there is well right now obviously the white paper Revolution, what they're calling it which is by the way super clever on if you guys been following this, the white pepper Revolution is because they know they're going to be censored. They hold of a piece of white paper that has nothing on it and that's like their symbol of we know you're going to censor us and it doesn't say anything. So without saying anything I'm saying something is actually fairly clever. I like it, but it's causing the Chinese government to back down a little bit off of its covid-19 lockdown, policies. They've engaged these insane lockdown pile. There's still a mock down. Oh yeah. They went back into lockdown and they were welding people. This is what would spur
Slings round. Was they lock people in an apartment building and there was a fire at the apartment building, like, eleven people died and so people, in China said enough of this shit. This is insane. And so they started going out in the streets and protesting, and knocking over barriers and saying, I'm going to open my business and I want to go back to regular life. She is in the position of all dictators and failing systems, which is he has to hold harder. He has to grip harder because if his system were successful, he would have to rip his heart. But his system is not successful when she took over. He decided that he's going to redirect from
Eight sponsored capitalism essentially mercantilism. He's going to redirect from the idea that the state is going to subsidize particular businesses. They're going to take part in a global economy and make money off of capitalism and that there was going to be some level of free and open trade with the rest of the world because trade tends to enrich our country. He was going to stop that he was going to pursue an economic policy. That looks a lot like economic fascism or autarky. So if you look at Mussolini and Hitler, what their Economic Policy was, we're going to produce everything. We possibly can. In country, we're not going to produce anything outside, which, of course, the problem is, you don't have all the resources inside, Germany. So what do you do?
Start invading surrounding countries right looking for those resources because if you cut off your own trade, you don't have the ability to bring in resources from the outside. So I mean you got to find the resources somewhere else. So she has locked down his economy. It's become significantly less trade oriented in capitalistic. He's basically said we're going to try and produce everything in house which is way more expensive living standards have been declining particularly for a middle-class. And so what that's going to lead to is one domestic lockdowns into foreign aggression because when you're feeling internally, you have to do what Hitler did and
And in 39 and start invading surrounding states, or you are on the verge of collapse as Gorbachev was, which is why the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself. So if you want to, if you want to revitalize your rule, then it's very important that you make some aggressive moves that both Shore up your domestic support and also strengthen you in terms of the resources available to you, which is why everybody sort of sleeping on Taiwan again, but I wouldn't sleep on the possibility that trying to tries to blockade. Taiwan. For example,
you think they'll invade
Taiwan I know. Invade blockade. Probably. What does that mean? So, what
Cade is basically like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of course, they basically set up their boats all around Taiwan and they say, nobody's getting in and nobody's getting out until Taiwan not surrenders what they really want. I want to do is provide them with this sophisticated microchips, the Taiwan produces. So 92% of all sophisticated to microchips on the planet are produced in Taiwan. So everything in your phone, everything in your computer, everything in the cameras, every like everything your microwave, all of that is, is microchips your cars. It's all microchips. All of those sophisticated, really good versions of microchips.
All that stuff is produced in Taiwan 92% of it. And so, China has been banned by taiwan's taiwan's. An enemy of China has been banned from receiving. Those microchips from by tsmc which is the single biggest manufacturer sophisticated microchipped. And so China has a strong interest in trying to leverage tsmc into Distributing sophisticated microchips to them especially because the area where they're really falling behind is in military Tech. They're falling behind in normal type of, they're also falling, really, really behind a military Tech because we have great military Tech, right? We have Precision weapon.
Really sophisticated if they can't get the sophisticated microchips then they can't compete with us in a war.
How do you think the US would react to that blockade? I
mean, that we would have that be like, we'd have to try to block. We'd have try to break it. We have to try to either apply through the blockade or salesman boats through the blockade and open up. Taiwan, I don't think we could stand for Taiwan to either capitulate or to remain, you know, under the, under the thumb of China, which is why we need to be strengthening our Naval forces, we're worth the lowest number of ships, I believe since World War Two so we need to really be
strengthened General in my car.
Stockholm or just over there.
No in general and like a back in 1906 1907. During the russo-japanese war, the Teddy Roosevelt actually to try and stop the conflict. He painted a bunch of ships, white and and sail them through that region and basically, just demonstrating American Naval power. I'm not sure we have the capacity to project that far at this point, so we're going to have to rebuild our Navy pretty quickly. How about what's
happening over in Russia and Ukraine? What's your opinion on that? I mean, so,
I think that Vladimir Putin is a an aggressive dictator. I think that the Ukrainian people have done an extraordinary job of standing up to Russian predations and it's also just an amazing example of how military Tech works. So Ukraine actually has more sophisticated military attack them in Russia does because we provided it to them. Russia's military Tech is like they're using WWII your ordinance. In some cases they like Russia's military is super second-rate and their Tech is really garbage and so they ran
headlong into Ukraine thinking they're just going to run roughshod and they didn't obviously. And as far as what a solution looks
like,
yeah everybody knows that a solution is not going to be all Russians. Leave Ukraine, that's not going to happen. A solution is going to look much more. Like the Russians end up retaining parts of the donbas which is Houston ask and retaining large swaths of Crimea. Now you have to the only way to get to that solution is that you have to keep exerting military pressure. The way the West is, but they also have to open up the possibility of negotiating
On the other end. And in order for that to happen, they actually have to take some power away. Counter-intuitively, from the ukrainians, in the negotiations, which is the hard part. So, Biden actually has to be the bad guy here, and I don't think he's going to do it, which is why there's going to continue interminably, what I mean by is this the incentive structure. So when it comes to politics, it's much more important to look at incentive structures for politicians. And then looking at the politicians themselves, we tend to look at politicians like this guy's the be-all-end-all he, he's Brave or he's cowardly, it's usually incentive structures that Define who's in power and then
How they act once they're in power, the incentive structure for zolensky right now. Is he cannot come to the negotiating table is people don't want him coming to the negotiating table that one giving up anything. They don't want to make any concessions. They kick the shit out of the Russians and now they're, like why would we possibly give anything to them? Well, the problem is that just going to is going to continue interminably right now. Putin doesn't have any incentive to come to the negotiating table with somebody who has no interest in negotiating. So you actually need is for Biden to go, to zalenski and say listen, I'm going to cut a deal throttle with Russia. I'll be the bad guy. You can go back to your own people and you can say you didn't want the deal.
Cram it down on you, right? And that way, you'll still be popular in house. You'll still be the hero. I'll be the villain. So I'll be the guy who said like, who's bad guy and said, like we have to we can't go on like this forever and then I'll go to Putin and I'll figure out what a deal looks like. And yes, he's a very quietly and then he has when he announces it, he basically has to make it. I Joe Biden made this deal happen. I know a lot of ukrainians are unhappy with the seal, then he and then zalenski is going to have to yell at him a lot
publicly, but that wouldn't be politically smart for him, so he won't do that.
Right. Exactly. So there's the problem. Is that the political incentives in foreign policy. Very often cut directly against
The possibility of a good solution and that, that matters more, it tends to matter. A little more a matters, domestically for sure but it matters, I think, even more in terms of foreign policy,
well, that's interesting. Have you ever thought about doing anything in politics? I mean you must have thought about it.
But yeah, I mean I've promised ask you this, it's terrible. I mean like my life despite all the security is really wonderful, right? My kids don't know, I have a job. It's great. When I get up in the morning with my son, jumps in my bed and wake me up at like 6:15 and then I take care of him and his two sisters and two like 7:30,
Then I go to work and then I pick them up from school and I don't do any work from the time. They get home from school. To the time, they go to bed, they go to bed, like 7:15. And I do some work after they're in bed so my kids don't know, I have a job, which is ideal, it's great. I've structured my life that way.
So politics is such a big life commitment, right?
Yeah. Oh my God, like going first of all it's more difficult job than what I do just on a level because you have to the job of politics is to stray from principle in order to achieve compromise. And my job is to speak about principle and to expose compromise. And sometimes I mean, I'll say this also to
Opposite of what you're doing. Yeah, exactly. Like I think that there's a good politicians will say I am compromising on this principle to achieve a long-term goal. And so, I don't think they're in direct conflict, but it's definitely easier to be the guy who's like a purist. And, you know, I try not to be when it comes to like actually analyzing what's going on when a deal gets caught. It's not necessarily because everybody is a sellout coward, cock, right? Maybe a deal got cut because that's the incentive structure to create a compromise. And everybody has to give a little to get something but
And so I've said to politicians like your job is not my job. And your job is tougher. The real hard. Part of the job though is is the campaigning the being on the road all the time. If you live in Washington DC and you're and you're representing Florida, for example you have to be away from your family which I'm not willing to do. I'm have young kids. I'm not willing to do it
moving to Washington from Florida. That sounds like
hell. It's an awful and then and then you win. You have to be in Congress, which is terrible. It's just and then you spend all your time fundraising from bunch of people who don't know anything about politics. But think they do because they're rich. And like it's just it's a, it's
disaster area of lifestyle. And what I would have said to people about running for office is I'm 38 right now. The average age of our president is now 123. So I have several generations to decide whether I want to run for office. I can I can sit here and do daily wire and turn it into a multi-billion dollar company and then 40 years from now. I'll still only be 62. Also only be 78 younger than our current
president. Do you see any anyone running that could run next year? That could potentially like stop such a divide in America. Like Trump people will say Trump's good but he's not going to unite him and know
It's so the truth is that there are certain things that are just not going to get Bridge right there. Certain devices that are very real. I think the only way that the country comes back together is with a president who is willing to move away from federal power at the top level. So this is why I like to Santa's I think that that state Solutions are going to be the ones that make most sense. Here are the big sword is going to continue families, like, mine are going to move from California to Florida. Families that don't like, Texas are going to move from Texas to California and what you're going to end up with is a bunch of diverse Lifestyles inside the same.
Country, but that only can happen if the federal government isn't able to cram down a California Lifestyle, on Texas and Florida, and Florida is not interested in cramming down a Florida Lifestyle on California. And so what that, what that really means that the federal government needs to be reduced in size and scope that the federal, the founders knew this. This is the crazy things that the founders were totally right about this. They said that the most durable form of political organization is local the people you care about most of your family and the people you care about most after that are your community, very often your religious community and the people you care about. Most after that other people, you share a city with and the people you care about most
That at the state level and then the people you care about most after that, or at the federal level. But we've reversed all of that we've destroyed, all the intermediate institutions of society and so everything we talk about is National politics. It's all we talk about every day. And so Society has basically turned into a bunch of atomized individuals who don't exist within solid family structures or within solid religious communities. They're not embedded in a fabric and social Fabric and sew the atomizer just individuals and then no intervening mediating structures. That is how historically people dealt with the world. And then the federal government setting up here,
And that is an extraordinarily unhealthy thing because then it also means that the way that you're going to feel as though you belong is by joining a political movement, that tries to control the thing up here and then cram it down on the other people down here who you don't like. And I think that's kind of where we
are. I think I because I think the general population doesn't believe that the like not the general population but a lot of people it's tough to convince them that the federal government could be like tyrannical or they could be controlling. That's why I think some people, whether it's like, they don't agree with the gun control thing in the Constitution. They just don't believe that the
Government could ever be not looking out for our best. Well,
I mean, what you see, talk to convince some people her is the way you seen. Is that there's waxes and wanes depending on who controls the Federal Government, right? So so when the federal government was
Soft on segregation. Then the idea was that government can be tyrannical from people who oppose segregation music and be tyrannical. And then, it was okay. Well, now they're coming after high school. My kids had the federal government can be tragic. Like, it depends who's in charge when Trump was President, all you heard was that the federal government was, was a fascist State and Trump was Hitler from the left and then Brian takes over. Do you hear from the right is the federal government is fascist State and Biden is Hitler and like that the solution to that is to minimize what the federal government can do and the
And the founders knew this, this is pure Montesquieu, I mean goes back further and months, go back to Thomas Aquinas people talking about localism and politics or religiously, what they would call subsidiarity. But the idea that the things you all Legions to most of all, are the what would Edmund Burke called the little platoons, your family. It does the people you care about me. There's nothing wrong with saying. I care about my family. More than I care about everybody else. I do care about my family, more than I care about everybody else and if you and everyone does and if they say they don't align. And whenever somebody says I'm a citizen of the world I care about everybody equally. They're completely full of shit, that's not true at all. And anybody who claims that
in the name of their love for all of humanity, they get to run. Humanity is a tyrant.
And so, you know, recognizing that the the way to live a durable life and the things that are important is to embed yourself in these structures that are durable, and good and positive. You're going to live a happier life and I think we're leading an unhappy life, because we have decided that what we really are in the end is a, is my subjective sense of authenticity. What I am is, what I want, my desires are me, your desires are not you, what you are, is your action in the world, particularly with regard to people that you care about in others, that is how you interact with the world and when your desires are you
What that means is that the only way you live in a good world is falling Society mirrors, your desires back at you and Society is not capable of mirroring, all your desires back at you nor will that fulfill you. Anyway, you're just narcissist at that point, you're looking in the mirror and you're saying, this is the god that I worship. That's not the way that that works for all of human history, it's been duties that make people feel embedded. It's been the things that you do for other people and duties that you fulfill to the world that make you feel good. The the best example that I use about this is, you know, if you want to know what people think of their lives, when they sum up their lives and what makes people fulfilled,
All you have to do is go to the cemetery. Go to cemetery and read the Tombstones. If you go to a cemetery and read the tomb Stones, they all say the same stuff. They don't say was transgender, they don't say engaged in this many sexual activities. They may sit not yet, they not seen the, I don't think they ever well. I think that every, every one of them is going to say, beloved husband, beloved, father, beloved mother, beloved wife, beloved, beloved sister, right. It is roles that you play in the world that are good because we were built for those roles evolutionarily were built for those roles human beings are incredibly adaptive, but there are certain rules that are just common to all
All cultures. And when we take those roles and we destroy them because they make demands on us and we don't like demands. If you say that you have a role in the world like to get back to the dating conversation, your role in the world is to be a good husband. That is a role in the world that you need to fill fulfill. Feel like I don't wanna be a good husband, that, that, that that's a lot of Duty. Okay, but that duty is what's gonna liberate you, it's going to make you actually capable of living a better life in the world, and expanding your own boundaries, and your own Horizons is to who you are and what you care about, it can make you a better person. Marriage makes you a better person commitment, makes you a better person being a parent, makes you a better person
It, it changes who you are and more importantly, it does something for somebody else that makes you worthwhile otherwise, otherwise what are you your ball of meat walking around with a set of desires and then you die. Like, what, what exactly is the what is the, what is the thrill of that? I understand the momentary thrill, but I don't understand the idea that there's any sort of true fulfillment or happiness. The Ancients understood this, we don't understand this because we've boiled everything down to the Freudian sex impulse. But this is, but the reality is that you look at any religion, any ancient wisdom. You look at the Greeks, you look at the Romans.
Cicero, you'll get Aristotle. You look at Play-Doh, you look at you, look at Judaism, you look at Christianity Catholicism. You'll get you'll get Islam and get any serious system of thought that is that has abided for thousands of years. And they all say the same thing. And what they all say is that pursuit of temporary. Joy is not the same thing as happiness and that the way that you actually reach, you know, to, you know, paraphrase Russell Crowe in Gladiator, the way that you Echo into eternity is not by pursuing a personal desires, but by fulfilling your duties
And then, there's and there's and what's beautiful about that is that their actual swaths of freedom and how you perform those duties, that's where the choice comes in, right? I'm a good parent which means I get to decide how I raise my kid within certain boundaries. I don't get to abuse my children, I don't get to teach them things that are overtly false, you know, I think that their parents are doing that now by treating their kids sort of like small dogs or or purses and treating them, you know, as though they don't have independent beings that you're trying to shape. But, you know, the, the idea that that you, as a parent have responsibilities but that you have freedom
Within that responsibility where I send my kids to school, how I choose to raise my kid, in terms of the values that they hold within certain specified boundaries without destroying the role itself, like, that's where. That's where the fun in life lies, I guess, their boundaries in my marriage but within those boundaries I get to have all sorts of wonderful and fun experiences with my wife but it's the boundaries to make the marriage count, right? In the end, it's the boundaries the matter and if you blur the boundaries are blurred, the boundaries well you end up with is what Emile durkheim the first sociologist called anime enemy is a state of
Essentially dispossession and confusion chaos. Internal chaos, and it's generated by too many choices by choice paralysis, and then it leads to suicidal ideation and leads people to despair, people need rules of the road, they need things to do, they need relations with other people, they need a place. You need to feel embedded when they don't feel embedded, which is what you're saying in American society. Right now, the internet has really exacerbated. The then, what you end up with is a bunch of chaotic people who are feeling depressed, or feeling suicidal or feeling disconnected from others, who don't feel a purpose for their lives. And
They don't know what to do. And then we turn around, we blame things, like it's intolerance, it's not societal intolerance. That's not the problem. The problem is that you don't know what to do when you wake up in the morning. That's the problem. The problem is that you don't know what the next 10 years of your look like of your life. Look like, that's the problem. And when you ask young people, these things, like, what, what do you see for yourself? If you had asked me. So I think thank God, I've led a really happy life if you would ask me, it's funny. People say, like, do you see where you are in life as if you were 15 or 16? Do you see that this how your life would have turned out in some ways? Not
I didn't know I was gonna be into politics at 17, I would have said but once I knew kind of the career path I was going to take. I should have said yes, this is exactly what my life was going to look. Like I was going to live in a religious community. I was going to be married. I was going to have several children, I was going to live near my parents. I was going to live near my siblings. I was going to send my kids to a school that reflected my values and because I work really hard, I felt like I was going to be successful business wise also. So yeah, because I because I sort of knew what were the things I was supposed to do and we removed all of the guideposts, right? One things that I've been writing about a lot.
Thinking about a lot is sort of where we where we get our knowledge where we get our wisdom from. And the answer is really kind of three sources and we've discarded at least two of them, maybe all three one is we got our knowledge from biology by looking at the state of the world. There are biological realities. Well obviously, that means their limitations on what we can do. I'm never going to be an NBA basketball player, nor should I it's not going to be a thing that happens and recognizing your own limitations is a pathway to success and happiness because you're not going to end up, banging your head against Bobby, a stupid thing to do. So, but we've
Rejected that because it's intolerant, right? If we say that, if we say that I was not born to play basketball or somebody else not born to be an engineer. This means that you're intolerant or your big attend or if you say that a man isn't a woman and a woman isn't a man. It's because you're you're old-fashioned and somewhat biology. However happens to exist and will continue to exist. And as much as we like to think that we in western civilization are the be-all end-all. If we fail to recognize it, then our civilization will just disappear and there will be other civilizations that take its place. So biology is One Source. The other source is traditional knowledge, what we would call culture things that have been tried and tested for
Of years. Hey, this is a form of knowledge. What we tend to do is we let us study came out of Berkeley in the city of Berkeley, says something super counterintuitive, but I believe it because it's a study from Berkeley or maybe the study from broccoli is wrong and thousands of years of practical wisdom that you got from your parents are, right? Maybe you should listen to your parents, maybe she'll listen to your grandparents, they're not always right. But maybe the things that people have been saying for several thousand years and that have stood the test of time. Maybe that's a pretty damn durable version of knowledge that you might want to take seriously before you discard it. And g, k Chesterton, the famous Catholic theologian.
He had, what is my favorite metaphor? He says that the difference between kind of traditional thinkers and and people who are radicals, is that traditional is that radicals will come along in a field and they will see a fence, they won't know why it's there. And they'll immediately start operating the fence and a traditional think or a conservative will come along, see the fans. It's a I don't understand why it's there and say I better figure out why this fence was put her in the first place. Before I stop. It will start uploading the fence. And so, the respect for traditional wisdom, respect for accepted culture for your parents, or your grandparents. We've lost a lot of that.
Don't respect their elders and that's a real problem. Then the third is reason right. Which is the idea of being able to use rationality. Now, you can't have reason that is apart from biology and traditional wisdom. Because reason, Unbound, just you can come up with any idea and you can rationalize yourself into anything right, Marxism, you can rationalize yourself into it, the wrong premise Nazism. You can rationalize yourself into with the wrong premise, people people come up with terrible ideas all the time but if you have all three of those, you can have a workable and durable system of transmission of knowledge. We've been in the midst of destroying all of them. So biology we've destroyed traditional wisdom.
We've destroyed and reason, we've decided is either completely liberated from biology to the sense. It in the sense that you can. Now make the case that men and women don't exist as separate category and is liberated from traditional wisdom because all of our Traditions are bad and wrong and should explode them because I have an idea. I have no idea my head that I got my last five minutes and I'm a genius or we just don't use reason at all. Because reason is biased and reason is a Hallmark of the evils of Western Civilization. Its patriarchal reason is just a construct and sort of Michel Foucault post-modernism in which reasons.
Reason is just something we came up with, but isn't really real, you got rid of all three of those things and you're going to end up with a society that is no source of knowledge or wisdom and that that's a society. That's that's ready to crumble and it feels like we're going to have to make some pretty hard choices as a society as to, which direction we go.
Yeah, for sure. What do you think? Because it seems like a problem that I see is kids in their late teens or early 20s. They just seem so lost, right? Have no idea. Like, if you ask him, what do you want to do? They have no idea, right? So for those people, if you could sum up like, what is your advice?
Okay, so I'm gonna give very, very practical advice.
For young for young people, teens and Below, which I'm going to get my own kids. So, this is advice that I'm like, you know, I'm like any of the it like takes a quick try not like I'll give the same advice to my kids. I'll give everybody else a month. So the advice is this if you are if you are a young person, find an older source of wisdom and cling to that find a community and live within it, okay, like find it find a social Fabric and live within it. So I highly recommend religious community. I think that it is the only form of durable community that has ever been created in the history of humankind.
And basically, that is outside of just biological drive my biological tribe. You can always find a place and you got family, there's continuity, you share blood with them, but religious community has been the only form of community that has lasted the test of time unless you're talking about, like being in the army or something. And there are certain countries where that like in Israel, everybody serves in the Army, it creates a certain level of social fabric. You can do that but we don't have that here in the United States. So find find a community become a part of it, find a duty to perform and perform it on behalf of somebody else and recognize that there are their roles that you have to prepare yourself for.
For across the course of life. And again, you can actually number them. I think they're like they're very set roles in life. So prepare yourself to be a good wife or a good husband. What kind of qualities do you want in your spouse? Create those own qualities in yourself and then seek a spouse that has those qualities, right? You want to have a generous spouse would be a generous person. Do you want to be a person who's giving be a giving person you want to be a? Do you want to be a successful person? Then create the preconditions for your own Career Success and then find a successful person like tends to marry like the great live rom-coms. Is that the homeless person marries the the
King, that's never how it works. The King married, the queen and the homeless person doesn't get married, right? That's the reality of life. So you want you on somebody your own level be the person that my friend Andrew Clemons says, he's always saying women are asking where's mr. Right. And he says, well how do you know you're Miss? Write and submit make yourself Mister or Miss, right? And then you can find your partner, you know, when it comes to, when it comes to other roles, you prepare for being a parent by actually learning about your values and what values you wish to pass on to the next generation.
When it comes to the human desire to seek something higher, don't shut that out. I think that most human beings have a non most all human beings have religious impulse in, gets fulfilled, one way or another. Either people find it in church and they find it in God or they tend to find it and political movements, which is very dangerous or can be very dangerous or they tend to shut it out completely. And then they feel the hole in their heart that they have to find something to fill that hole with. When it comes to one of the roles that we have is that we are creative human beings are inherently creative. Just like animals are inherently creative at the highest levels. Me you'll see like actual animals with
Skating their territory and human beings are also critically like to shape the world around us. Find a task that you're good at that sort of somebody else and that makes you money. That's a creative thing. I find that thing and they, all of these things are very doable. And I think they're actually fairly practical as soon as you start thinking of yourself as playing a role. Because the truth is that again we're being asked to participate in a game where we've thrown away the rules and you can't participate in a game where you don't know the rules.
And when you play chess, if you don't know how to play chess, and if you're playing, you have to know how the pieces work. If you don't know how the pieces work is gonna be a really shitty images and what ends up happening, someone gets frustrated and overturns the board and they sell, we're not playing chess anymore. Well, that's kind of what we're doing societally or you can learn how the chess pieces work. Why do they work that way? I don't know why they work that way. That's the way they work and now you can participate in that game. You can you can have freedom within that game to play that game properly. Then you can you know various iterations of the game life becomes fun, life becomes joyful and the the
And then, the freedom within the rules is what makes things worth worth doing, and the obliteration of rules has been the worst thing that's happened to civilization has happened all over the place. I think has happened in music. I think that it's happened in art. I think that it happened pretty much everywhere. There's a difference between to take a musical example because I used to be a musician too. There's a difference between the Jazz of Oscar Peterson where he's violating certain rules because he knows what the rules are. So he's playing with the rules and play around the boundaries the rules, right? There's a difference.
In that jazz and a kid. We just tuning on a whore. Not knowing what he's doing. That's not a jazz. You don't know the rules. And so we as a society of decided, we don't care about the rules into the kid, who's shooting on the horn, may be producing just as much great art as Oscar Peterson, or as coal train or something. It's like, no that's not the way that this
shit Works wise words from been, I feel like you already have a neural Link in your head. I was gonna ask just back to like the whole tyrannical federal government stuff. What like I always wonder, like, who is like pushing that stuff? Like, let's say gun control for example, right. Because some
Like a lot of people I talk to you, like, they'll just truly believe like it's not they don't think the government's like tyrannical or whatever it is. They just actually think that like, yo, we shouldn't have guns because it's tough to convince them isn't that the only point of view as to why, you know, we want to be pro gun.
I mean, so they're really two points of view on why to be pro-gun because a lot of countries that are not right. One point of view is the sort of founding era point of view, which is that you do want to be able to protect yourself against government tyranny, because governments do become tyrannical.
And there is history in the United States to government's being tyrannical and gun ownership being really, really important. In fact, a lot of gun control statutes in the United States started in the segregated, South is an attempt to stop black people, from owning guns, that white people can oppress them. So, gun control has a pretty in glorious history in the United States. Actually, people people need protection from other people with guns. Once the guns are there yet, either you're going to confiscate them is nonsense, there's 300 million of them in the United States and good luck. And I personally only three. So they like the idea that that
You're just going to be able to get people to turn in their guns. It's just impractical. If you're still, let's say you're starting. Tabula rasa or you're starting a society. No guns. Would you would you have guns? Maybe you wouldn't. But if nobody has gone, then presumably there's some other form of Weaponry. They're using to achieve power. And so then the question becomes what weapon are using to achieve power and the risks and the rewards particular Weaponry, I'm not making the case that everybody should own a nuclear missile in their backyard. And I'm also not making the case that that I've said before and it's some
See that you know you are barred in the United States from the purchase of a fully automatic machine gun through a federally licensed firearms, dealers in Most states, right? The National Firearms Act of 1934 private. So I think that everybody should own a fully automatic machine gun. I'm not sure that the risks outweigh the rewards there but the notion that you can't own a semi-automatic rifle. For example, that the danger of semi-automatic rifles, I'm gonna go and shoot up a school and that's not remotely the same as the risk, that somebody's going to attack me and I need to use my
Rifle to defend myself. And so that's why I always find it very weird that the discussion about gun control seems to be almost disconnected from reality. There's two questions that are being asked. What is the tabula rasa? Question, you creating a society from scratch, does it? Have guns does not have guns. Well, if I'm creating a society from scratch, we all have beautiful houses. Nobody has gone. We all live in peace and Harmony and everything's wonderful. And then, there's the society that we currently live in. Then the question is, how do you get to lower levels of violence in that society? And the that question is not about gun ownership. That question is about how you lower the amount of violent activity in American society.
Tea and it's concentrated in particular areas gun Vermont has tremendous levels of gun ownership and virtually no gun. Violence New Hampshire, very high levels of gun ownership virtually. No gun violence. You know, that it's not about the gun. The gun is a tool. The question is, whose wielding the gun? And I think the easiest way of avoiding the serious social conversations about why violence crops up in the real answer. By the way, is why violence crops up is a lack of fathers in the home? The real answer is lack of social fabric, the real answer is lack of a lot and one of the answers is we don't involuntarily commit people who are
Only mentally ill in this country and they're a bunch of reasons that actually would be taxable. But those reasons, aren't the ones that people want to talk about they'd rather stamp a Band-Aid on a thing and then pretend it's going to work again, even even Australia. This is people use like the Australian gun buyback. That's a great example of gun control, Australia. Had virtually no gun crime before the gun buyback and then after the gun buyback, and the mandatory tournament, only one-third of the guns were actually turned in 2/3. Those guns are still out there. So what those are? The not violent guns in the ones that were turning with violence, you're telling me the most law-abiding people.
Who turned in their guns with were the most violent. Also, I highly doubt it does make any logical sense. So, yeah, again, there is no correlation between gun, law and violence per se. There's a correlation between lots of other stuff and violence. There's another more gun control does not necessarily mean lower levels of violence and less gun. Control doesn't necessarily mean lower levels of violence or depends on the society that you're talking about.
So where does that motive come from the top to like, get rid of the
guns? I mean, I think some of it is, is easy solutions and think it's first order thinking.
To
the consequences on the second order of that. Like, how do you effectuate that? Okay, so let's say you ban the assault weapons, what happens next time, there's a mass shooting, what you gonna ban next? You can ban all the other hand guns, is that a thing that you're willing to do? This is one of the areas where I wrote when I presbyters morning back in 2013, he wasn't willing to say at the time that he just wanted total gun ban because he knew that Americans wouldn't go for it. So he kept saying I'll ban assault rifles and I said well the rifles are responsible for something like 32 hundred three to four hundred murders a year. There's like 35 thousand deaths a year from from
Guns in the United States. I think that don't add. I'm not even sure that includes suicides. So that's so it's, you know, the it's the vast majority of crime committed with guns. In other words, is handguns, so, I don't want a man handgun. And you have an answer for that because you don't want to say the obvious answer which is he didn't want to ban handguns. And so at least the the people who are honest will just say straight up. I want to take all the guns, that's at least an honest answer. It's also completely impractical one and they know it's a completely impractical. Answer,
interesting stuff. Anything else? I'm good, you don't want to talk about female.
What's called what know what you said before? Oh no, I can't, I can't do
that. I don't want to go
to do anything. Go out your knock or at your opinion, you're too high level for me.
Oh no, it's okay. You can feel free. And
yeah, we have this whole plan. I was going to defend like we were going to go equal pay and I was gonna go super hard 04 for women like to win them over for the episode. But I don't want to go that route at all know. Women
should have equal pay for equal work and there's good news they do. Okay good.
Is the end of that. That is the end of that story. Okay? And if they didn't, I would hire nothing but women. It's company perfect. If I could hire women at 70 cents on the dollar to the same work as a man, this would be an all female company.
There it is. Unfortunately, I cannot unfortunately, I have to pay everybody the for the work that they do and men, get paid the same as women when you remove all of the complicating factors. There is
no issue with that.
Know, when you're when you're talking, if you adjust. I mean statistically, it's just the truth. When you adjust for ours, Works time in the workforce degree, are they working part-time or not part-time? Are they did, they take time off for work. That put them on a different career, trajectory men, and women on average have different choices. When you look at career choice itself, very different career choices between men and women that
makes up for the pay Gap. In fact, coming directly out of college. When everybody is single, these days women in major cities Center more than at the outset and then they get married, they have kids, they want to take more time off from the world. My wife is a great example. That's right. Matt, my wife went to school for almost literally ever. She was in school until like three years ago and in medical school and undergrad and all the rest of it. And then she now she works two days a week because she can afford to work two days a week, so she doesn't want to work full time now. If
Me what I work. Two days a week to answer is no, I like working. I think we're, you know, working is good for my wife is like, I'd rather spend time with the kids. I'd rather. I'd rather do a bunch of other things. I'd rather do charity work. Yeah. Well, people make different decisions and failing to adjust for the different decisions. Is how you end up with dumbass stats. Like, women are earning 70 cents on the dollar. Well, if I aggregate everything without regard to any of the complicating Factor, simple fact, single factor analysis is always wrong. Whenever you look at a stat and people just use one single factor to make the distinction is always wrong.
Wrong. I mean it's like saying for example, the NBA is racist because so many of the players are black go, that's a single factor analysis, you're just looking at race in the NBA or not. Looking at quality of the player and I looking at height differentials, you're not looking at time, spent playing you're not looking at at skill level. You're not looking at like any of the things that actually make an NBA player in NBA player. Just looking at the single Factor. Yeah you can't do that with any any analysis, any analysis that comes down to one factor is always wrong. Always Forever, will be that will never change. So
perfect. Thanks amazing. Yeah we appreciate having. Thanks
been awesome. Thanks guys, I really appreciate it.
