Ep 1347 | Going Soft on Islam? The Right’s Shifting Views Explained | Jeremy Boreing

Jeremy Boring is the former CEO of Daily Wire. After a year of being away, he is back, entering straight into the podcast wars, the culture wars. Today we are talking about all of that, in addition to his biggest regrets from his time as CEO. We've got all of this and so much more in today's episode of Relatable. Jeremy, thanks so much for joining us. You don't know this, but I'm having you on for a totally selfish reason. Okay. It's not for you at all, it's only for me and your purpose here today is to make me feel better about the state of the conservative movement and conservative media. I don't know if you're up to the task. I don't know if anyone is, but I've been listening to you and as I listen to you talk about the problems. There is something underlying that makes me feel like, okay, maybe things are going to be okay. This is a big question, but can you lay it out for us? How do you see the way things are post-Charlie Kirk, especially on the right, in the media, in politics, whatever? How do we navigate it? Where do we go from here, those of us who are on team stain? There was a study that came out this week that talks about delusional optimism and how healthy it is. Essentially it says that realists live much less happy lives and less successful lives and that people who have a healthy dose of optimism, even if it's delusional optimism, tend to live happier and more successful lives. I think about when I was a kid in the 90s, you had Oprah Winfrey would put up vision boards and talk about manifesting all of your dreams. Of course, on a spiritual level, it's sort of silly and superficial, but it's probably also somewhat effective in a really practical sense because as it turns out, if you're hopeful about the future, if you articulate your goals, if you point yourself in a direction, you're so much more likely to achieve them. In my career, which has been very entrepreneurial, it's involved a lot of risk-taking, a lot of trying and failing, certainly a lot more failing than succeeding, though a fair amount of succeeding too along the way. I would say that optimism has been like a central component of what's allowed me to take the risks that I've taken in my life. I think that the Bible calls us to a kind of optimism. The command before sin even enters the world to be fruitful and multiply is fundamentally a command to optimism. It's a command to believe in a future that you don't understand, a future that could be a bad one and yet you're doing something very hopeful and sewing into that future in both literal ways, but in the most important of ways by bringing children into that world. I think if you go through the entire book of Genesis, it's just God calling people to optimism, lift up now thine eyes, lift up now thine eyes. I suppose that I try to approach, not always successfully, but I try to approach life that way and I try to approach our political moment that way, which is to say to the extent that we're called to operate in the world, to have dominion over the earth, to participate in creation, as I believe man is called to participate in creation, then we're called to have a kind of optimism. It doesn't mean that things will go well. Yes, delusional optimism might actually help you have a successful life, but one shouldn't be delusional. One should try to have their optimism centered as something real and ultimately our faith is not in outcomes that we can control, but our faith is in Christ. And yet faith as a animating principle is a kind of optimistic hope in things that we can't see. And so I look at the same information landscape that you look at, the enormous losses in the conservative movement in the last 18 months from essentially from the moment the election was over, within one week Dennis Prager had his fall, then Jordan Peterson encountered his health challenges, lesser but incredibly important and powerful figures behind the scenes like David Horowitz left us incredibly powerful and important non-political figures like John MacArthur left us and then Charlie's murder. Those are, that's a lot of L's. That's an unbelievable amount of loss for one ideological movement to absorb in such a short amount of time. When you look at the prospects for the midterms are bleak. When you look at the division in Congress that we haven't had a single major legislative, Donald Trump hasn't had a single major legislative accomplishment in the second term because Congress is so dysfunctional. When you look at the fact that the country has run sort of by executive fiat now, that we elect kings once every four years and they declare what the law is going to be in absence of a working legislature. When you look at the changes happening technologically, the AI displacement that we're obviously living through when you look at the uncertainty in the market, all the problems with Gen Z incredible challenges ahead of us and yet what I know is that if we don't approach it with hope in the future, well then our pessimism will be self-fulfilling. If you believe that the future is bad, then the future will be bad. If you believe that we have an active role in creating the future, then you believe, I don't know if the future will be good or bad, but I know it will only be good if we do good things. I know it will only be good if we sow goodness into it. That may not be enough, but it's the one thing we've got and every other alternative is bound to end and ruin for us. In this black pillow moment, I try to be a white pillar. I try to say, well, we can build the future. We can impact the world around us. We can affect change. God's going to do what God does. He can make a determination about how it's all going to end, but for my part, I'm going to be hopeful. As much as there is to be pessimistic about, there's incredible cause for optimism all around us. It gets drowned out by the podcast wars and the technological wave that's upon us as disruptive as it will be will probably bring about human productivity and expansion of human productivity that we've never witnessed. It may even dwarf the industrial revolution. It will certainly be the greatest change in human productivity that we've ever witnessed. What that means is an opportunity to see billions more people lifted out of poverty. It means the opportunity to see our worldview promulgated in places that it's never been promulgated before. It means the opportunity to cure disease. It means the opportunity to go on new adventures as a people. I think that all of those positive opportunities accompany the things that we're worried about. A lot of it's just where we choose to focus. Quick pause to tell you about our first sponsor for the day. It's We Heart Nutrition. Y'all, I love We Heart Nutrition. I take all of their supplements. They've got multivitamins. They've got pre and postnatal vitamins. I've taken all of those. They've got a wholesome balance, which is great for your hormones. They've got an immunity supplement, which I have used when I'm feeling like I'm coming down with something. That thing will zap out your sickness. It just really boosts your immune system with everything that you need to fight off illness. Omega-3s, iron, probiotics, magnesium. I really do take it all because I believe in it. The proof is in the pudding. 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This is how we not only protect the content that you guys want to see, but we protect our community. It's how we guarantee that you'll always have access to the truth that we speak and the things that we make. Go to BelizeTV.com. When you subscribe, you can use my code ALI for $20 off. BelizeTV.com. Code ALI. At Charlie's Memorial. Were you at Charlie's? I was not. Okay. There was this just incredible moment. The whole day was really amazing, but there was this incredible moment when the band started to play and I didn't realize until after it was totally spontaneous. They didn't even know that they were going to continue in this instrumental moment. And then I turned around and everyone started raising their signs. Again, not orchestrated and it was a sign with Charlie's face saying, here I am, Lord, send me. And it was this, it was maybe the most tangible experience that I've ever had of just feeling like the weight of the Holy Spirit. Like something is happening that is obviously beyond, you know, something that a human can contrive. And that big of a room with Donald Trump and all of these people who have all these massive theological and political disagreements, like everyone kind of felt the same thing in that moment. And I just thought, wow, what is the Lord up to? Like, what is he about to do? This horrible thing happened to our friend. And yet God is clearly bringing something good out of it. I don't know. Maybe it's a massive revival. Maybe it's the great awakening that we've all been wanting. There's unity. You know, you had Stephen Miller and Tucker Carlson and all of these crazy people going up there, not crazy people, but all these people who don't typically go in the same category saying things that are like pretty true. And I'm like, okay, maybe we're going to come together as Christians on the right and maybe we're going to accomplish something great. And that's the redemption that we're going to see from this horrible thing happening. In addition to all the other horrible losses that we had in the year before, like all of that was somehow mysteriously leading up to like this really great spiritual moment, this unifying moment. And I'm not saying that that's entirely untrue now, that the Lord hasn't accomplished really good things or that people haven't turned to Christ because I think that they have. But the internet certainly doesn't look that way. And I don't feel that. And I know we can't, we obviously don't base our faith on just what we feel in any given moment. But certainly like even when I look at my audience and when I get online, I'm like, wow, that's spirit of thinking that we were about to have this season of incredible unity and shared accomplishment on the right or as Christians or whatever. That so did not happen. I feel like I'm losing people left and right to just a worldview, a conspiratorial worldview, like strangely pro-Islam worldview that I just would not have even had words to describe before Charlie died. And some, it just makes me feel sad. Like it just makes me feel like, I don't know, like where, where are we, where are we headed? Are we ever going to have that moment that I really thought that we were going to have? Are we going to have that great revival? Are people's eyes going to be open? Are we going to have a moment of unity? Or are we just going to continue to be completely fractured? And the only thing you can do is focus on what God has called you as an individual to do and hope for the best. I don't know if you have the answer to that. And I don't even know if that really makes sense, but it's been very disorienting for me to look at people that I thought, okay, we're my allies over the past few months and like, I don't, sometimes it feels like I'm on an island and I don't really know what God is up to or how he's going to redeem the horrible death of our friend. Well, I think that the forces that arrayed themselves against that revival that was obviously trying to happen in the wake of Charlie's death have proven very powerful. And none of us could have seen that coming in the days immediately following that terrible event. Like you, I wasn't present for the memorial, but watching the memorial, I certainly thought, this may be the great revival of our time. And perhaps it would have been save a very small group of individuals who made it their mission to blunt whatever that positive spiritual moment promised. And in its own way, well, that's evidence of God as well. A lot of the evidence of God ends up being negative evidence. Like God very rarely reveals himself directly and he very rarely proves himself through positives. He usually proves himself through negatives. And I think that the presence of evil is one of the great arguments on behalf of God. Evil is a thing that we get to experience in the world. And because it exists, we're able to understand what goodness is. And we've seen enormous evil done by people who we know, by people who operate in circles that you and I move in, certainly. But I wonder if we were there at Pentecost. You read back on those events and you see them through the lens of all the history that's happened since. So, you know, we live in a largely Christian West or certainly in the remnants of a Christian West in which there's billions of people who claim Christ in one form or another without getting into the theology of what might divide us. And it's easy to sort of imagine Pentecost as the beginning of something and then a straight line that can be drawn from there here. There's always up and to the right, but it wasn't always up and to the right. You know, Pentecost itself is a very small event compared to the population of the world at the time. You know, they hadn't even gotten to persecution yet. Stephen hadn't been killed yet. The church hadn't been driven out of Jerusalem yet. I've been saying lately of technology, particularly around AI, that when there's technological innovation, the negative impact of new technology tends to front load and the positive impact tends to take time. To reveal itself. And so the classic example is the printing press. The printing press comes along and for the first time, really in any major way, we put the Bible in the vernacular and people have access to it. Who've never had access to it before and the language that they speak. And when they open up the Bible and first read about God's love for man, their very immediate reaction is, let's kill each other over sectarian differences. And we have revolution in Europe for 30 years of Christians killing Christians. Right. And you go, well, that's, I don't know, 500 years later, I'm pretty bullish on the printing press. I'm pretty bullish on the Bible in the vernacular. I think it's done a lot more good than it did ill, but there was a lot of ill front loaded. And I wonder if that's not only true of technological innovation, but sort of a, of spiritual awakening too, that there is a kind of spiritual awakening happening in the country right now. But it brings with it a kind of calling out of the forces of opposition to God. And I wonder if we just have to sort of bear those between here and whatever the ultimate positive impact is going to be. And in a way, if that's not the call to faith, because if you could look and see Charlie Kirk is assassinated and we have God in America again, well, then in a way that recommends Charlie Kirk, but God doesn't recommend us. God's in the business of recommending himself. He uses Charlie Kirk. He used Charlie Kirk during his life. He used Charlie Kirk in all of our lives. He's used Charlie Kirk in his death, but ultimately the glory belongs to God. And so perhaps this is part of how we have to experience that is that we have to go through a further darkness even after that beautiful moment that we saw begin to be born at Charlie's Memorial. Gosh, that is such a good and simple point that, you know, I say this to my audience all the time, I say God's eternal plans of redemption is going off without a hitch and that that is not, you know, he's never looking down and wondering how did that happen? How do I clean this up? How do I make this right? I didn't see that coming. He's never, you know, caught off guard or taken aback. And that's not, you know, that doesn't change based on the election year. But actually when you're talking, I'm like, I actually kind of have had my mentality, um, kind of wedded to the election cycle that I'm like, I think I did subconsciously think, well, if that revival doesn't happen quickly and it doesn't change the country before the midterms, I wasn't consciously thinking that, but I think subconsciously I'm thinking, okay, everything now needs to fall into place. It needs to change immediately. But even just your simple point about the Pentecost, I mean, gosh, as you said, that was a small event, obviously a very monumental event. But then after that, we had Stephen martyred. We had many persecuted and killed. We had Ananias and Sapphira, I mean, drop dead because they lied. I can't imagine what the Christians around them at the time thought of that. Like it was very rocky, very turbulent. Uncle Ipeater didn't ask for a show of hands for who else had lied. Yeah, come on. But there's, there's so much. And obviously that's true when you look at the history of the church, it's not like Jesus came on the scene and everyone decided, yeah, you're right. Like that's exact. I mean, he was crucified. He rose again. He said, take heart. I have overcome the world, which must have been like a weird thing for them to hear going back to your like message of optimism, considering that he also said, like, you're going to be killed. You're going to be dragged into prison. You're going to be persecuted. And that's exactly what happened. And so yes, the history of the church absolutely reflects that when you look at the Reformation, when you look at every revival, when you look at every awakening, it's not just one moment happens and then everyone wakes up. It's actually typically that some people wake up and the people who are not awake are really, really angry that other people did. And so you have accomplished what I selfishly set out for you to do at the beginning of the conversation already. You've given me a bigger perspective of the present moment that we're in, in light of history and not just in light of the present American political moment and election cycle. I think it's hard to remember on a day to day basis when you're on social media and you're looking at the state of things and you're like, how are people losing their minds and believing things that just aren't true? But yeah, I guess you just can't, you can't be inundated with the day to day. While at the same time, like when I look at your podcast, you are taking on like the issues of the moment, like you're taking on Tucker Carlson and what they're saying. So how do you balance that? How do you balance that in your own life? Trying to remain hopeful and optimistic, but you're getting, I don't want to say down into the weeds, but down into the details of what some of these people are putting forth on their podcast and their arguments without, you know, I don't know, getting muddy yourself. Yeah. Well, imperfectly, you know, certainly when you engage in political warfare, um, you don't stay completely clean. You know, when, when you avail yourself of these tools, uh, my attitude doesn't always remain where it should be. My motives don't always remain what they should be. You know, we're all fighting in this battle where you're trying to rightly order a set of sometimes competing priorities. So for example, you have a, um, you have temptations that are unique to people in our space. You have to get clicks and you have to be successful. You have to drive revenue in order to pay all the people who make this happen, to pay for, to pay yourself to provide, uh, for your own family and for the families of the people supporting you. Uh, you want your message out there, which requires people to engage with the things that you say, which require you, um, to sort of fish where the fish are, requires you to avail yourself of all the tools that are necessary in order to make a successful podcast, for example. Uh, and yet if you don't rightly order that, um, alongside other priorities, then it can take you to the dark places that we've seen other people be taken recently, um, with their quest for success in this, in this medium. You know, there are things that you can say that guarantee that your show will grow. There are things that you can do that guarantee that your show will grow on the internet. The one thing that's true is if you only are pursuing business goals, if, if your highest pri, not if you're only, that's not fair. If your highest priority in our space is a business goal, you will eventually make pornography because the thing that we can do with these lights and these cameras and these microphones that will get the most clicks and make us the most money has already been established. It's not a mystery. We know what it is. Uh, if you play to people's worst vices to their worst instincts, that's where the money's at. So you, you have to have business goals. There's nothing immoral or wrong about business goals. They have to be ordered though. And the thing that has to be ordered in the highest priority spot, the goal to which all other goals will be subordinate is the mission. Um, if the mission is the goal that, that is preeminent all over, over all of the other goals, uh, then you'll rightly use the tools that are available to us. You'll rightly use the profit motive. You'll right, rightly use that little bit of narcissism that every person who thinks that they should point a camera at themselves, uh, possesses or everybody who thinks that they should, you know, Yeah. Reagan said like you have to have a little bit of an ego to run for president. Yeah. You have to have a little bit of an ego to have a podcast. That's right. Yeah. Next sponsor is paleo valley. Paleo valley is incredible. All their products are so good. Their bone broth protein is a really good savory protein that you can mix in your spaghetti, different food. And this is how you sneak in protein for your kids and your mac and cheese. And they won't even be able to tell. Um, it's, I've used it for all different kinds of items that we cook. And I love it. But I also love like their chocolate and vanilla protein. It's all really clean ingredients, but their snacks are awesome. Like their protein bars, they're a hundred percent grass fed beef sticks. Unlike other beef jerky that can really just kind of make your stomach hurt because of all this synthetic ingredients. These are the real deal. These are a hundred percent natural, organic, all that good stuff. I love paleo valley. Go to paleo valley.com. Use code alley, get 15% off your first order. When you use my code alley, it is paleo valley.com code alley. Yeah. So you just have to keep that in check. It has to be subordinate to the mission. For me, the mission is the promulgation of the things that I think are true. Um, and because they're true, they're also, you know, if we're going to, if we're going to use the sort of Catholic, um, description of the true, the beautiful and the good, which I find really resonant, um, you know, true, beautiful, good. Uh, those are the things that I've always wanted to do in my career, in my own unique Jeremy way. It doesn't look exactly like it would look to everyone, uh, else all the time. And I don't always rightly order those priorities. I can't say that there's never a time when ego becomes dominant or when, uh, desire from material prosperity becomes dominant. Um, I don't think there's ever been a season where those things have been dominant because I've surrounded myself with other people who understood the need to rightly order those competing priorities. And so it's not as though you could say, well, in, in 2022, all you were thinking about, no, cause I had people around me. It's more like moment by moment. Have you, did you make decisions from a place of cynicism? Certainly I've made business decisions from a place of cynicism. Um, did you make decisions from a place of ego? Certainly I've made decisions from a, from a place of ego. Um, but I try to make sure that I'm in a position where as an operating these, as my operating premise, the mission remains preeminent over my other priorities. And in this moment, picking these political fights that I've been picking since I've been back, uh, from my time in the wilderness and, and since launching my own podcast. Um, I've, I've tried to only pick those fights that I think are essential for sort of winning the day for my values, for winning the day for my central mission. And part of that is showing people, I felt during the time that I was gone in particular, that these forces had sort of ascended in our movement. And the average person didn't have good language to answer, uh, some of, some of those new voices that they're not, not, not that the voices were new, but new sounds they were hearing from those voices. And so I've been trying to give language to it because I think if you empower the audience with a framework by which they can understand what they're seeing, it helps immunize them against the effect. Watching Tucker, he's an unbelievable communicator. He's far more skilled than I am as a communicator. Uh, Candice, Candice has the most it, the most raw star power of any person I've ever personally met and I've spent my entire life working in one way or another in show business. Uh, these are incredibly powerful voices. Voices. And so any, any one of us might listen to Candice talk about Erica Kirk and be swept away by what she's saying, because she's incredibly compelling. We might listen to Tucker talk about. Israel or Iran or Islam or the, the myriad things that he's spoken about in the last year and be, and be sort of swept away by the power of his rhetoric. But it's an amazing thing. If you, if you go in knowing what you're about to hear, if you're, if you're sensitive to what those techniques are, if you have language that you can apply to those techniques, it really does help immunize you against what otherwise might be persuasive. And that's what I've been endeavoring to give people in this moment is just sort of the, the tools that they need, uh, to process what they're hearing without being swept away by it. I wonder what words you would give to the seeming about face when it comes specifically to Islam that I've seen at first. I didn't really have words for it. I just thought, okay, it's a weird part of the man a sphere. It's like Andrew Tate becoming Muslim. They kind of make sense. It's like you can spiritualize the fact that you hate women. And so that makes sense. But now it's not just people who hate women who are doing that. It's they're very sympathetic to it. I've heard people say, Oh, well, maybe it was just propaganda in my own messages. And, you know, on Instagram, I have a very conservative Christian female audience. I've got some people, anytime I talk about Islam, there are some people, few, but they'll say, well, why aren't you saying this about Israel too? Oh, you think Islam is a problem? Israel is a problem too. And it's a weird way to try to soften Islam. I don't have a problem with criticizing Israel, but if I'm not talking about that in the moment, then I don't need to talk about that. And so like, what do you think this, what do you think this is exactly? Why Islam? The thing that I thought that the right all united on at least 10 years ago was like, yeah, Sharia law is not good. We don't want it here. Now, I don't know if we all agree on that. Well, I think there's two parts of that that are interesting. One, you know, there are 15 million Jews on planet Earth, 15 million, not, not 50, not 100, not 500. There, you know, a billion and a half Muslims in the world, like to try to even just as an order of scale, like if every Jew is 10 times worse than every Muslim, they're still a rounding error. They don't even count. And so the scale of the challenges that we face in the West as a result, of let's call it just radical Islam. Okay. Maybe only 3% of Muslims are radical. That there's, if every Jew on earth is a radical militant, racist, jingoistic, war mongering, genocide in his heart. Okay. There's still more radical Muslims, you know, by a mile. Like you, you know, I find it interesting that we all seem like we have to qualify support for Israel now. Like you have to say, well, I listen. I don't always support Israel, but I think there are ally or I think they're, I try to avoid, I catch myself doing it because it feels like now, you almost have to earn permission from anyone to say something positive about Israel. But I'm trying not to do it because I just reject the notion that you can talk about Israel and Judaism in the same breath that you talk about Islam and, and the Arab States in particular, uh, relative to the threat that they pose to Western life, you know, the West has been in some ways battling against Islam for 15, no, 1300 years. I mean, it's been a massive part of the history of the West. Islam almost conquered Europe many times, conquered parts of Europe. Many times Europe, the Christian Europe invaded into the Middle East. Many times, you know, our Marines were basically created to go and fight the Barbary pirates like this. So it's been a part of our history and our lifetime, of course, the defining geopolitical event of our lifetime is 9-11. And Israel's Israel, there are allies, half of the Jews in the world live in this country and have been an important part of the formation of this country. Israel is certainly, we say often there are best allies in the region, and that's certainly true by a mile. They may be our best allies that we have left right now anywhere. And the world, because our relationship with our historic allies is in some of the roughest shape that it's been in, certainly in the lifetime of anyone living today. And so, yes, do we have, are there critiques to be made of Israel? Of course, are there critiques to be made of Judaism on a theological basis? Well, of course, I disagree with the Jews on the most fundamental question that exists, which is the question of Christ. But I can tell, I can tell a friend from Fo. I know that Israel is a friend of the country. I know that the Jews are friends of Western Christians. I know that, I know that radicalism is not. I know that they present enormous challenges to our way of life. And so, I, you know, I don't support Israel for eschatological reasons. I don't have a well-formed eschatology. I'm kind of anti-eschatology. I think like all the people who thought they knew what the Messiah was going to look like when he showed up and nailed Jesus to a cross. Like God doesn't give us prophecy so that we know the future. He gives us prophecy so that when the future arrives, we'll remember that he was God. Like again, God's always recommending himself. God's taken the land of promise away from the Jews numerous times throughout history. I don't know. There's a kind of hubris that we have that says we all, we live in the most important time, like this is it. But there could be 20,000 more years of human history ahead of us and God could take Israel away from the Jews 20 more times if he wants to. That's his business. You know, I try to focus on who's friend and foe. The more substantive part of your question is why do so many people now say that our historical foes are our friends and our historical friends are our foes? And, you know, I think that the answer to that is probably somewhat complicated. But fundamentally, what I think that it's about is an emerging belief among a certain very vocal cohort on the right that we could form a new governing coalition in this country, a new governing majority in this country that is not currently represented by either party, which is essentially premised on a left wing economic populism. Take from those who have, give to those who don't. And a right wing social populism, which is no gay marriage, women shouldn't work or vote, get rid of abortion, get rid of the kind of trappings of social liberalism. And I think that there are voices from Steve Bannon, who I think has been, was an early mover in this space. The Catholic integralists, which is a very small cohort. Obviously, the average Catholic isn't an integralist. I don't even think the average person who says that they're an integralist is an integralist, but there is such a thing as Catholic integralism represented by Adrienne Vermeule and others who, who sort of marry a Catholic economic, you know, policy of, you know, giving to those who don't have, with Catholic social policy, which is, you know, some of the most conservative social policy that exists, anti IVF, anti contraception of any kind. And so I think somebody like Tucker looks at, for example, if you see the very famous monologue that he did about Nicholas Maduro, in which he said that perhaps America was only interested in toppling the government of Venezuela in service of global homo, you know, this idea that we're really doing it because they're against gay marriage. And there's a great line in there in which, in which Tucker says, I mean, yes, he's a communist, but, and then he just elides that and moves very quickly to the next point. But if you, if you dig deeper into the things that Tucker said in the last 18 months, he says that the Democrats that he most admires are those like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have the most radical economic policy. They're the most closely associated with like a communist worldview of any of the voices in the mainstream part of, or elected voices in the Democrat party. I feel like Tucker used to talk about Elizabeth Warren a lot on his Fox show. Yeah. Like negatively. You mean in the before times? In the before times. I really do. I'm not being sarcastic. Like I think I remember multiple monologues about how hypocritical she is and how she used to have a book talking about the, like the double income myth or something about women going to work. And he talked about how she flipped up on that. So it's just interesting how he's now just kind of outright saying that he supports her, maybe. All right, y'all, our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom, they need our help again. They are like the busiest group ever because everywhere, not just here in America, but also abroad, there are governments trying to compel speech and trying to stifle religious liberty. Right now, this is happening in Colorado. They passed a law that will force using quote unquote preferred pronouns. That's a violation of free speech, but as Colorado has proven time and again, the state has little concern for the First Amendment. And that is why Alliance Defending Freedom is challenging the law on behalf of a Christian bookstore and a Colorado based sports apparel company because these people, they just want to be able to speak the truth and to speak in a way that aligns with their Christian faith. Colorado doesn't want them to do that. So we need to help ADF because this fight that they're going to take, hopefully all the way up to the Supreme Court, that affects you. That affects your children. That affects your free speech rights. Go to joinadf.com slash Allie or text Allie to 83848. Have your gift doubled today. Joinadf.com slash Allie. I think because so many people put their hope in the idea that Donald Trump was going to, you know, destroy the left, which hasn't happened. He's given the country some victories over leftism, but there are victories in that exist in time. Yeah. They're not, they're not memorialized in lasting legislation. Most of it's through attitude or executive order. And I think that this group of people has become more and more disillusioned with the democratic process itself. Yeah. And they believe that they can create this new coalition that essentially is very, very strict on social policy and is very, very left-wing on economic policy. And if they do that, they can kind of enter a post-democratic future for this country in which we get a lot of the things that... And listen, they had to pick a party through whom to effectuate that because we're a two-party system in this country. And if you listen to voices like Joel Webin lately, he's very open about it. Like, well, we either have to take over the Democrats or we have to take over the Republicans. It's probably easier to get the Republicans to be socialists than it is to get the Democrats to hate abortion. And I think that's, on a political level, I think that's what we're witnessing. I just don't think that there's enough people in the country to fill out that cohort. Like, I think about something, someone like Nick Fuentes that I assume maybe would be in this camp. I don't think he cares that much about social policy. I think a lot of people in this camp don't really care that much about social policy. And I don't think that there's enough people, like the Catholic integralists, most of them are not strong on secure borders, for example. And so it's such a mishmash of a clash of worldviews, which maybe you could argue any political party is to some extent. I don't see that being a viable option for it being its own entity. I do see it tearing some people away from the right. Probably not the left, because I think they're generally happy with the people that they have in charge and what they're accomplishing. But I do think for those people on the right who have taken the black pill, who do think, which I understand, maybe not like Donald Trump or not thinking the Republicans you mentioned that they're so dysregulated and they're so dysfunctional in Congress, that they're like, okay, what did I sacrifice my social capital for? What did I sacrifice these relationships for? I went against my pastor during COVID and all of these things, because I wanted to support Trump and accomplish whatever they set out to accomplish. And now they just feel like it was for nothing. And when there are voices reflecting that kind of discouragement and to say, okay, we're going to move beyond this, I've seen a lot of, oh, the left and right, like we should come together and like there's some unity now that we should have. I could see that being an appealing message to people who are just tired of Trump, tired of politicians, tired of Washington, tired of mainstream conservatives like us, talking about some of the same things. I could see how that's appealing. I just think it's a road to nowhere. It doesn't lead you anywhere and it certainly doesn't lead to a brighter future for people. Well, I think it does lead you to somewhere. It leads you to the left regaining power in the country, which is what we're seeing, even at the state level right now. Is that intentional in your mind? I don't think that it's intentional. You don't think so. Like, do you feel that Tucker is really saying what he believes? Like, this is just how his worldview has changed and he is saying the things that he believes, or some people would say that there's no, there's some like secret nefarious, malicious thing going on where people actually are trying to get back at Trump or whatever, and they want the left to gain power to teach Trump and the right a lesson. Yeah, well, I don't know Tucker to speak to his personal motives. You know, I can only observe from the outside based on the things that he does. I have no, you know, is he bought and paid for by Cutter? Maybe, I don't know, but you know the way that it really works in politics. I think probably not. I think probably not. I feel like he has plenty of money and... But I would also say that the way, even if he's getting some money from the Middle East, the way it usually works in politics, and I know this isn't what people want to hear, but you usually don't get paid to say things you don't believe. Yeah. You get paid because you're saying the things that you do believe. That you already believe. That align with the interests of the people who write checks. And so even if he's getting paid, I don't think that that is enough to answer why he's taking the positions that he's taking. You know, ego is a huge part of why people do the things that they do. I don't know Tucker enough to know if he's operating from a place of ego or not operating from a place of ego. So I just assume he's saying what he believes. But like you, I think that the end result of it is ruined for the right. I don't think that this new political coalition forms that rules for a thousand years and doesn't have to go through democratic processes anymore. I don't think the left comes over to our side in any significant numbers. I think the left just comes back to power. I think, you know, Gavin Newsom becomes president if we're lucky or AOC becomes president if we're not lucky. If we don't remember how to actually stand for the actual values of our movement and to actually take positive affirmative political action over the next two years, that's the likely outcome. I don't think the likely outcome is the one that they seem to think is going to occur. Can we have a right that agrees on basically everything except for Israel? No. You don't think so? No. Why not? Because the most powerful coalition on the right is the evangelical coalition. And while there is a softening of support for Israel among evangelicals right now, I think that that softening is happening against a backdrop of enormous pressure. And that enormous pressure only really exists right now because we have political, because we've been the ascendant movement politically. Once you're in a minority political position again, you're going to have to go focus on the fights that matter. And when we go focus on the fights that matter and try to reorganize ourselves as a movement, which is going to happen, it'll either happen after defeat in the midterms or we won't have defeat in the midterms. Great. It'll happen after defeat in the next presidential election or we won't be defeated in the next presidential election even better. But we're not going to hold power forever. There will come a time when we're a movement in the wilderness again in the same way that they are. And when that happens, we're going to have to coalesce around fundamental issues that bring us back into the fight. And when that happens, the pressure by all these voices, I mean, Tucker, has he done three episodes in the last year that aren't about Israel that in the amount of energy it takes to soften evangelicals on Israel, even as much as we have, which isn't enough to achieve their ends, won't be able to stay in place permanently. And so once that pressure abates, I just think evangelicals will drift back toward their priors in a meaningful way. Will it abate? It will have to abate because we'll have to go focus on reclaiming power, reclaiming political power when we're no longer in political power. Do the culture wars still matter? I mean, I think they matter to me, but again, I feel like more and more on the right. We talk about them less. They do not me, maybe not you, maybe not Ben, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, like we still do, but it seems like some people have felt like they're graduating from the transgender issue or the marriage issue or the abortion issue, maybe because it's boring or maybe because they think the Israel topic is more interesting or more important. I think it's just because we won. I think so much of what we're dealing with right now is because of our political victory in November of 2024 that the woke left is defeated. We won the transgenderism debate. We didn't win anything. We won a political victory. Huge. I shouldn't say we didn't win anything. We want something very important for now, but the culture war never ends. The left will come back to power. When they come back to power, we're going to lose. People are going to be shocked. Trans is back. Of course, trans is going to be back. The left never stopped. The radical elements of the left, the vocal elements of the left never stopped believing in the trans humanist agenda, which is more important than the transsexual agenda, by the way. The transsexual agenda is just a small piece of the broader transhumanist agenda. There's that great line in The Dark Knight Rises, you know, victory has made you weak or whatever victory has defeated you, you know, peace has made you weak. That's basically where I think we are as a right right now. We won an enormous victory in Donald Trump's reelection, and we thought that it was the final victory for a moment. And when you no longer have to be organized and fighting because you're on top, you just get soft and you start focusing on issues that aren't... You get tired. I feel like we, I mean, I think conservatives, you know, because Daily Wire did this really well in 2020, like it was such a fight. It was a fight against COVID. It was a fight against the BLM stuff. It was a fight against all the things happening, especially like over here in the evangelical Christian world, the fight for the mind of the evangelical woman to not be captured by BLM or COVID propaganda. It felt like a fight every day. So when 2024 happened, it was like, oh my gosh, can I just take like a little bit of a break and like, let's talk about some fun stuff or something. But that fatigue, even in me, has lasted longer than I realized. And it's only in the last couple of months that I've been like, not, and again, not that my life or even my content is dictated by the midterms, but you do start thinking about the very real consequences of Republicans losing power. And you're like, oh gosh, I got it. Like, we got to get back into this. We got to reengage all those people who are apathetic and thought we were just coasting for a while. We need those people. Politics matters, policy matters, because people matter. It's not just about winning elections. It's about the people that policies affect. And so I even find myself like, it's like I'm trying to wake myself up from an app and I don't really want to. Like I'm kind of tired about talking about it, even sometimes about the culture wars and like how many times are we going to talk about this over and over again? And yet, I mean, every day I get a message or a comment or something of people. I'm like, oh yeah, there's a whole group of people who have never heard this before and who need to be convinced. How do we like reinfigurate ourselves because it can seem demoralizing because of all the stuff we talked about, but also like it just feels like the same battle over and over again. Well, it is the same battle over and over again. I mean, that's the trick. It doesn't just seem like it. It is. As long as humans are drawing breath on this planet, as long as we're carrying around the flesh, we're going to continue to deal with these exact same problems. And ultimately, the victory isn't ours to achieve and the victory won't be achieved in a lasting sense in our mortal experience. That's just not the way that the book is written. How do we keep ourselves in the fight? It's funny to say, but I have a kind of grace for myself and for you and the people in our movement around these sorts of issues, which is to say, we're not going to do it well. If we did everything that we could, Gary Sinise has that saying, we can always do a little more. And that's us. We could be doing more. You do as much as anybody. Matt Walsh on the trans issue did more than anybody. And yet we could be doing more. Of course we could. Of course we get discouraged. Of course we get fatigued and exhausted. Of course, when we do, the darkness has the opportunity to rise up. And yet there's a kind of freedom that we have to say, well, if you can do something, you probably should. And if you should do something, you probably must. And we fail at every point along that spectrum. And that's why our hope's in Christ. That's why we have to have freedom and we have to have grace because we aren't up to the fight. We're not capable of doing all the things that we should. We're not capable of giving a little more. And sometimes we're not even capable of giving as much as we used to give. I don't think that that's an excuse. I think it's really kind of just an explanation and another cause to be thankful that God recommends himself and not us. If Matt Walsh could defeat transgenderism, he came pretty close. But if Matt Walsh could defeat transgenderism, well, then we wouldn't need God. We just need Matt Walsh. If you could save the soul of evangelical women from drifting to extreme leftism, we wouldn't need God. We just have Alibeth. The beautiful thing is actually that God uses us at all. God exclusively uses broken vessels because those are the only vessels available. And that he does, that we get to participate at all in the work that he does, is certainly the privilege of what you and I do on a daily basis. But I think for everyone, the great privilege of life is that for reasons that defy any logic, God uses us. And sometimes we're the bad example and he's still using us. And sometimes we're the right tool at the right moment for the right job and we score victories on behalf of all the things that we value and believe. And so, I don't know how we do it, except I just know that we make ourselves available for him to do it. Let me tell you about Good Ranchers. We've been using Good Ranchers for about five years in our home. We still rely on it almost every single night. Every night that we are eating at home, we're eating Good Ranchers. I had bacon wrapped chicken the other night that was so good. Even the bacon was from Good Ranchers. If you like seafood, if you want seed oil free chicken nuggets for your kids, you can get any kind of meat from Good Ranchers. It's all pasture raised. It is all from American farms and ranches. Chief Related Bro loves cooking their steaks and they're always so good. And we can tell, like if someone has steak from the grocery store, we're like, oh, this is not Good Ranchers. It just doesn't taste as good. It's really high quality. And you just don't have to worry about going to the grocery store and wondering what is the quality going to be like? Where is this really from? It gives you so much peace of mind and just makes your life easier by having a freezer full of all American meat at all times. If you go to GoodRanchers.com and use code ALI, you can get $40 off your first order. GoodRanchers.com code ALI. After you and daily wire parted ways, that was what? A year and some change? A year and some change? A go. I know people are interested to hear how all of that went down and you've talked about it, of course. But did you have a moment of thinking, okay, maybe I'm kind of like just tapping out of this particular fight. Maybe it's just something else that I go into and the culture, political, podcast wars, maybe that's just not for me anymore. Well, yeah, 100%. My wife and I looked at houses in Maine, you know. I didn't expect to be separated from the daily wire. It's not what I wanted. It's not something that I thought even could happen, much less would happen. It's the biggest blow I've ever gone through in my life. And yeah, I was beat and broken and thought, well, you know, I don't have to keep doing this. And for a long time, people would ask me, you know, what are you going to do next? And I didn't have a great answer to the question. I didn't know what I was going to do. In some ways, I still don't know what I'm going to do. But there was one day in particular where someone said, what are you going to do next? And it struck me kind of how funny of a question it was. And this example will sound very dark, but this is how the thought occurred to me. So I'm just sharing it exactly as it occurred to me. I thought, you know, like my wife left me for some other guy and took my house and took my kid and I was wallowing around sad right now. No one would ask me, what are you going to do next? As though the answer is, date guys? I don't know. I'm going to do what I've always done. Like I'm still exactly who I was before this thing occurred. And obviously, it's kind of a farcical and absurd way to think about it, but it did really sort of illuminate for me the reality of, no, you just, you just are you. You've always done the things that you do. You do them because you're compelled to do them, you know, whatever it is in you that drives you, you know, has always driven you down similar paths. And so of course, I'm just going to do the things that I've always done. And it was a really liberating realization that I didn't have to solve my future or reinvent myself or become something other than what I am. I just had to remember that it's okay to deal with embarrassment in life. It's okay to deal with setbacks in life. It's okay to not be where you thought you would be or not be where you want to be, which are lessons that I knew very well in my 20s and 30s before Daily Wire because I failed a lot during that period. When my wife and I bought our first house, you know, this isn't something that everyone will relate to, but we lived in LA and when you live in LA, no one owns a house in their 20s. No one owns a house in their early 30s. Like, I had a couple of friends who owned their own houses and they were all millionaires who had TV shows and movies and so it sort of, it sort of distorts your thinking, you know, yes, back home, everybody owned houses, but in the city nobody did. And then I had these friends, the Phelpses, who were in my tax bracket and they bought a house and it was great. They had all their friends over to help them do kind of the remodel before they moved in, you know, you'd come over and stand on the cabinets or whatever and it was this kind of beautiful community experience of watching people who couldn't really play the game at the level that you thought you had to play the game, doing a thing. And it made my wife and I think, well, we should, if they could do it, we could do it, you know, and we started looking at houses in bad parts of town, you know, in very small places and we decided we were going to take this huge, the biggest risk and buy a house. And there was a moment where we were driving and my wife said, you know, what happens if this doesn't work? We lose this house. I said, oh, we'll move back into an apartment. As we've lived in an apartment for, you know, a decade or whatever, you know, we've both lived in apartments, why wouldn't we just move back into an apartment? And she said, well, but what would our friends think? And I said, our friends who all live in apartments, like, when you think about the question, the question becomes a little kind of silly, right? Like, and that's just life, you know, I had a big beautiful house. It cost me everything to build it. I was so proud of it. I was so proud of all the effort that went into it and all that it, you know, that we were able to do with it. And then I was talking about Daily Wire and then I lost it. Yeah. And it's embarrassing to move back into an apartment. I never wanted a podcast. If I wanted a podcast, I would have given myself a podcast 10 years ago. I had a top 10 podcast company. I could have given myself a podcast. Easier than it would have been a lot easier. Yeah. I had all the tools. Yeah. So I'm not in the place that I had hoped to be. I've moved back into an apartment and that's okay. I'll just take the next step and do the next thing and keep acting in concert with what I hope are on the majority of days, rightly ordered priorities, mission first, business second, ego considerations third. And I couldn't have dreamed of where my steps took me in relation to the Daily Wire. Certainly Ben and Caleb and I never imagined when we started that company where it would go or the things that we would achieve or the places that it would take us. And I think that that's just true of life, general lab. No idea where this new path leads, but I know that it's better to be an object in motion than an object at rest. And so the very first opportunity to get back into motion I took. And it's kind of exciting to think, well, we'll see where the path takes me. Yeah. Looking back now, is there anything, and you might have 10 things, but just one is fine, that you regret about your time at the Daily Wire. It could be your whole time there or just how things kind of devolved there at the end, that you wish you could change if you could. Well, obviously life is replete with regret. And particularly if you're in the arena, you have to make a lot of decisions and they're not always the right decision. You try to do the best you can with the information that you have. I mean, I hired Candace Owens, which is a thing that I certainly regret and retrospect. And certainly there were things toward the end that if I could go back and change, I think the outcome would have been very different. And some of those things are probably beyond the scope of what I can really discuss in this conversation. But absolutely, I hate how things ended at the Daily Wire. And I hate a lot of my own choices in that process. And I hate other people's choices in that process, too. Human relationships are incredibly complicated things. We kept a band together for a decade. And the Beatles didn't make it any longer than that either. Like, success comes with its own enormous challenges. Failures come with their own enormous challenges. Being at war constantly comes with enormous challenges. And so, on the whole, I'm so incredibly proud of the Daily Wire and all the people who contributed to its success along the path and all the successes that we got to be a part of within the movement. The things that we made, the voices that we amplified, obviously, that's a very complex business, too, where when you cultivate talent for a living, I say often that being a director is like being a painter, but all of your colors have opinions. You don't necessarily get to determine exactly what the painting is going to look like because they're in motion. It's the same with all talent-based businesses. Our talent often say things that we disagree with. In the case of Candice, they go so far that you are filled with regret about whatever role you played in it. But, of course, it's just an occupational hazard. But for the most part, I'm so proud of the work and the people. And certainly would not say in any way that I regret the experience or regret the journey. Maybe a few of the particulars. Yeah. If someone were sitting in front of you and they were like, okay, I'm about to lead a company. I'm about to be CEO of a company. Maybe they would call themselves God King. Maybe not. Lower case. Yeah, lower case. Lower case. What would be, if you just had 30 seconds with them, be like, okay, I got 30 seconds to give you the best advice about being a CEO of any kind of company that I can possibly give? What would you say? Yeah. You have to make decisions. It may sound obvious, but it isn't. The goal of the CEO is not to, the goal of the CEO is to make very good decisions. The responsibility of the CEO is to make decisions. In many, many instances, the wrong decision is better than no decision. All living organisms are either growing or they're dying and companies move so incredibly fast. All of your problems get harder at scale. You lie to yourself all the time and tell yourself, well, we're one hire away from this getting a little easier or we're one deal away or one transaction away from this. I can see that. Yeah. But all of it gets harder at every stage. People engaged in startup culture, they don't sleep, they don't see their family, they don't eat regularly, their health falls apart, and they think once we get out of startup phase, that's when the problem, then your problem start. I think about the phenomenon we see happening right now with talent, where we live in a moment where the network seems to be in decline and the independent talent seems to be ascending. The funny thing is, if you go back in time, even 18 months, a lot of the biggest independent talent in the movement were coming to us asking if they could be part of the daily wire. Why? Well, because they know. Being talent is hard. Being talent is humbling. I say it's humiliating to be talent. You get poked and prodded and everybody stares at you and all of your mistakes are very public. It's also hard to run a business. Yeah. If you're Chris Williamson or Tim Pool or Joe Rogan or one of these guys, you have to be both of those things. Incredibly difficult. It is true that we do live in a moment, especially I think because cancel culture is abated during Trump's second term to a large degree. You don't have the need for an institution fighting the big media companies on your behalf or fighting those wars on your behalf that you may have needed in 2023 and 2022 and 2021. I think what we'll see three years from now is a real return of the importance of the network because being the CEO is just as hard as being the talent and being both is an almost impossibly difficult job. Right now, I think a lot of talent has broken off from networks and they're able to make a ton of money because they don't have to support an institution. They don't have to divide the pie at all, but I think that's going to burn people out really fast and not just burn them out, but ultimately be untenable. They'll either have to build medium-sized businesses around themselves that other people run, in which case they basically are just a network of one. And then pretty soon, like Megan, they'll go, well, I have all this infrastructure. I should start getting a few other people into my network growing or dying. Yeah. So yeah, if you're the CEO, if you're the founder, set yourself up to be decisive and then you have to live with the things that you decided and a lot of them will be wrong because of the pressure and the speed with which you had to make them. Last sponsor for the day is Patriot Mobile. So if you want to be able to vote with your dollar, if you want to be able to do something that pushes your values and advances your goals, you don't have to wait till November, till the midterms. 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And so for people even outside of the podcast space, your metaphor of it being an organism living or dying is really good. You can't really just be a stagnant organism. How do you, like what is your process for making decisions? The best decisions that you've ever made professionally when you look back and you're like, well, here's how I made that decision. And what would you say? The hard way every single time, you know? Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Like, you know, left to my own, I like to deliberate and I like to get my closest advisors in a room and just bat an idea around until it's time to go home and then come back and bat it around some more tomorrow. My wife has observed and others have as well, but I talked to her about this very recently that I tend to have what appears to be a lot of chaos happening up here. And it doesn't sort of like take shape until the last possible second. I take in a lot of information. I take out, take in a lot of different kinds of arguments. I usually don't know exactly what shape the elephant is going to be. You know, like I don't know where he is. I just, I'm taking it in, taking it in, taking it in. And then the pressure of the need for a decision usually gives rise to what the vision for the decision is actually going to be. Of course, you're checking it by those priorities that you have. You're checking it by the needs of the company. But in the end, it always has to take a shape. And for me, that usually happens like right at the last second, the thing kind of clicks into place and you see it. It's not a very scientific process. You know, I don't, there's these guys like Pat Lindsey-Ony or these other sort of corporate coaches who really help people devise systems to make these kinds of decisions. I've never really operated that way. I usually am thinking about, you know, I kind of have this guiding principle of being a lowercase r Republican of both challenging the audience, but also representing the audience leading and representing, which is the opposite of elitism or populism, you know, it rejects the false binary and it lives in that tension in the middle. So I would often think about, is the decision that I'm going to make in the interest of the audience, which is much different than thinking, will the audience like it? I very rarely think about, will the audience like a decision because I don't think that it's my job to make the audience happy. It's my job to represent them fairly. It's my job not to forsake them, not to throw their values in their face or flaunt the places where we disagree. But sometimes it is my job to challenge them. It's my job to encourage them not to give in to their worst impulses or to lead them in a direction that they may not have ordinarily have wanted to go. And that means necessarily that you do things that make the audience unhappy, which is also, by the way, if you're not willing to make your audience unhappy, then just definitionally you've given in to audience capture. You are no longer an advocate for your beliefs, you're an advocate for their beliefs. Which is why, by the way, some people assume that if you're independent, then you are more trustworthy. But sometimes people who are independent are very trustworthy. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're trustworthy because for all the reasons that you listed the difficulty of being independent, you are even more bound to what the audience wants to hear. You have less freedom to just talk about the thing that you're like, okay, I don't think this is going to go viral and get as many clicks, but it's really necessary. And that's okay. If we take a hit on revenue, it's hard to take a hit on revenue when you are the one personally paying the salaries. I'm not saying that that's what all independent people are doing, but I think it's a wrong assumption by people when people say, oh, you're a part of a network, you must be getting told to say this, you're independent, you must be completely untethered from handlers and things like that. That's just not necessarily true. No, that's exactly right. One of the beautiful things about a network, especially when it's functioning the way it should function, when it's a healthy network, is the ability to make sure that each one of the talent is considering the greater mission, not only their own needs and interests. And I think that we cultivated that particularly well at Daily Wire, a story that we were talking about my team and I were talking about on the flight over. Matt Walsh took on Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. And it's one of the great successes of Matt's... Totally. Efforts against the trans movement. It was Michael Noles' idea and it was Michael's idea for himself. He sort of realized that this story existed. He was ahead of everybody else and seeing this story. He came to us and said, hey, I've got this angle and I think that we could engage in this activity and I think that it could have a really positive result. And he was right. It was very clear to see that it was a great story and it was a great idea. But Matt had written Johnny the Walrus and Matt had made What Is a Woman? And I said to Michael, I said, listen, this will give you a bump. You'll get a little extra audience from it. You'll get a little extra attention from it. You'll get a pat on the back. But I don't know if we'll win. But if we take this idea to Matt, given his authority on this issue, given his stature, I think that we could score an actual tremendous victory with this. Well, no talent was to give up. I lost him the second I said, you could be a little bit more famous. He's like, yeah, so we do it, right? But in a network setting, you're able to say, listen, when the idea is the perfect idea for you, you're going to get it too. And it's not that I didn't take it away from Michael. Obviously, it was his idea. But I was able to remind him that there's a mission greater than our own individual successes too. And not even just daily, it's not, in my opinion, like what would be persuasive to me in that moment. And I assume persuasive to Michael because he's such a good guy and really cares about the bigger mission. It's not just daily wire that he's thinking about. He's thinking about the actual injustice that is going on and, okay, what's going to be the most effective. And that speaks super highly, I think, to Michael's character. Yeah. And, you know, and Matt took that because of his position, but also because of his unique talents. Matt was just able to take that to places that Michael couldn't have taken that particular one and achieved an enormous success. Yes, for the daily wire, but that wasn't like a monetizable event. Right. For the world. That was for the world. That was for the country. That was for kids. Yeah. Yeah, totally. That's, you know, being on a team is a pretty wonderful thing. Yeah, it has its perks. It has its perks. A pastor once said, and I think about this all the time, and I'm just curious, if you agree, that leadership is a commitment to being misunderstood. Do you feel like that's true? Yes. When you're the boss, you're the bad guy. And bosses who try to be the good guy are still the bad guy. They're just also ineffective. You know, it is necessarily the case. My top lieutenant at Daily Wire, John Lewis, who is with me now at my new venture, he was walking out of a meeting with me once in my office with one of the attorneys at Daily Wire, who normally wasn't in the CEO's office. And I blew their freaking years back over some issue. I didn't remember what it was, you know, but they, they, they got a talk into that day. And when they were walking out, the attorney looked at, at John and was just like, whoa. And John said, yeah, you don't want to be in that room. He says, everybody thinks they want to be in that room. You know, I always had class. My office was always glass, both in LA and in Nashville. I just thought people need to see me. They need to see who I'm talking to. They need to, for, I mean, one, just on a very practical level, there can't be any accusations if everything's on display. And two, people need to see that you're working, that you, that you exist, and that you're present, and that you're, and, and John made the point, like everybody thinks they want to be in the boss's office. Everybody thinks that like that's the, that's a very hard place to be. You know, your job is to say no. The fundamental job of the CEO is to say no, particularly in a creative business, because, you know, Ben Shapiro has 200 ideas a day. And, you know, he bats above average, so 100 of them are pretty good. Doesn't mean you can do 100 of them. You can't do 90 of them. You can't do 10 of them. Probably you can't even do one every day. You know, you have to radically prioritize when you're the boss. And that kind of radical prioritization actually means that you're going to say no the majority of the time. And you're actually going to say no to the most productive employees, the most, the ones who have the most ideas and the best ideas are going to have to hear no the most. Your worst employees who have the worst ideas don't even present them. They never even get to the point of hearing a no. And the most productive ones, if they're going to hear no all the time, they have to have that delusional optimism that you talked about. Like, okay, I, he's never liked an idea, but maybe he'll like the next one and keep bringing it. Like it's also a matter of persistence that they, that they have to have. Absolutely. But it is, it can be a very lonely and isolating thing to be the boss, you know, it can be lonely and isolating to be talent too. The one difference is the isolation that comes with being talent requires self honesty. And the isolation that comes with being the boss is sort of imposed on you. Like when you're the boss, you sort of know that you're alone, you know, people stop talking sometimes when you walk into the room. The isolation when your talent is the exact opposite is that everybody wants to be near you all the time. And everybody says yes. And all of your ideas are the best and everybody laughs at your jokes. And at a certain point you have to go, Oh, none of that's real. And now I don't know who's being. No, my team actually does think I'm funny. It's, it's genuine. I know they do. They don't laugh because they have to, they laugh because I'm hilarious. Not anyway. Yeah, not me. But now you're both. Well, now I'm both. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I'm grateful that I've had so much opportunity to watch so many good men go through becoming famous, you know, one of the unique advantages afforded me in my life is watching so many of my friends become famous and so many of them be above average at dealing with fame, you know, none of them are untouched. There's no one who gets out alive like fame, you know, I think sometimes about guys like Steve Carell, who's like famously one of the nicest guys in Hollywood or Gary Sinise, who's absolutely one of the best guys in Hollywood. And they became famous in their 40s. You know, they achieved real, their real success in their late 30s, early 40s. They were fully formed. There is a kind of a resting effect that success brings, you know, where it freezes you in time. And so, you know, I've seen my friends become very successful, very young. I've seen friends like Andrew Breitbart become very successful later. I've seen guys like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh or Michael Knowles become very successful in an environment where their worldview is actually what drove them into it. And so they had extra guardrails, I guess. They had the values to actually be a bulwark against some of the worst corrosive influences of wealth, fame, power and pleasure. It's not that they're untouched by them, but way beyond above average in terms of their ability to deal with success. And I hope I can model after some of the good example that they've set. Well, first, I just hope I'm successful. And so that it's a problem in the first place. Yeah, of course, of course. Okay, final thing, in addition to Christ being our hope and our anchor and all of that, what right now is something you tell yourself or you have to remind yourself every day that gets you back into the fight or keeps you hopeful? I've been thinking a lot lately, and I'll probably talk, I'll probably expand on this because I haven't worked my way all the way through it. I've really been thinking about okay, Boomer, and honor your father and mother and how so much of what we're being told right now is to hate the people who went before us, that they destroyed everything, and that we have it so uniquely bad. And you think, well, when the Boomers came of age, they got drafted and sent to Vietnam. It wasn't a volunteer army. They got pulled out of their life against their will, shipped overseas to Southeast Asia, and 58,000 of them died. The older Boomers, yes. The older Boomers. 58,000 of them were killed in Vietnam. That's 10 were on terror. That's the casualty count of 10 Iraq and Afghanistan's in the most formative moment of that generation's existence. And you go, oh, well, the Boomers made a lot of mistakes. Made a lot of mistakes. No fault divorce. Pretty terrible. That's pretty terrible consequences. And yet the idea that we sit in judgment of them as though our hands are clean, as though we can see our own flaws. I mean, the funny thing about eyes is they only look out and we never see our mistakes. And as Dennis Prager has said in the past, the commandment to honor thy father and mother is the only one of the commandments that comes with a reason, that your days will be long in the land. Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days will be long in the land. You can't have a country if you hate the people who gave it to you. You can't have a country if you tear down all the wisdom that has been bequeathed to you. If you tear down all the structures that have been bequeathed to you, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be critical of the mistakes of the generations that went before us. Of course we should, but we should understand those mistakes before we're so quick to throw out all that great wisdom that's also been handed down through history to us and so you know, on one hand I see that as a place where we can be really critical of ourselves and we should be and we should stop saying, okay, boomer and we should be more respectful to the people who've given us our country. At the same time, as you reflect on the challenges that the boomers faced and the things that they actually went on to accomplish, yes, myriad failures. We're going to have myriad failures too. Humongous successes. I mean the 20th century, the second half of the 20th century is the greatest period of peace and prosperity in all of human history. It's never happened before and you just think, well, what can we do having been given this time of peace and prosperity, having had the blessing of coming of age in a time of peace and prosperity? I know people like, there's wisdom in the idea that good times make weak men and weak men make bad times and bad times make good men. That whole continuum that gets parroted online. Of course, there's wisdom to it, but if you take that to its natural conclusion, then you should hope not to give your children good times, which of course is not what any of us hope. We're motivated by wanting to give our children the best possible life, the best possible future, the best possible opportunity. The Bible doesn't say fathers exacerbate the frustrations of your children. It says, fathers don't exacerbate your sons. Don't make their lives worse. Don't leave them into exasperation. It says that a wise man provides an inheritance for his children and his grandchildren. Of course, we're supposed to leave a better life for our children and for our grandchildren. In that way, the boomers, despite their failures, gave us a lot of at least material success to work with. We have to correct the excesses of the second half of the 20th century. We have to learn from the mistakes of the generations that went before us. What a blessing though that we have all of the successes that they achieved, that they didn't have from this vantage, having been given so much. What excuse do we have if we don't do even more? If we can't build on the foundation that we've been given. The nice thing about the mistakes of the boomers is that they're so obvious. The boomers weren't like a subtle generation. The boomers gave us songs like Indian Outlaw or whatever by Tim McGraw. They weren't the most subtle. Great song. I could sing it, but I won't. We could all sing. Yeah, we could all sing. But that's great. I had this band director in high school who used to say, if you make a mistake, I want to hear it. What he meant was you should be playing with confidence. The boomers played with confidence and their mistakes are embarrassing. But that's great. We get to see them. We don't have to sit around wondering is no fault divorce a good thing. We don't have to sit around wondering is abortion on demand good for the country. It ain't. Enormous successes to build on. Obvious failures to navigate against. Technological increases in human productivity, the likes of which we've probably never seen. I know we're being told that the robots are going to replace us. The robots are not going. You might lose your job to a robot. Of course, it's creative destruction. Pony Express lost jobs to the automobile. Of course, there's going to be displacement. Of course, negative consequences tend to front load as we discussed. But what opportunity also accompanies all of this innovation that's happening all around us, the likes of which no one's ever seen before? I just think if we remember that we have agency, if we remember that we can actually make decisions and impact the world around us and change our own circumstances, if we remember that we don't have to be the victims of the mistakes of the past, we can overcome the mistakes of the past. Then in fact, the places where we've been done wrong, which are very real, can be accompanied by their own blessings because we get to learn from the mistakes of others as we move forward into the future. I don't think that it's just polyana to think that that great revival you thought might be happening at Charlie's Memorial might in fact be happening. It's just up to us to ensure that it is. Nobody said that would be easy. It wasn't easy for the generations that went before us and it won't be easy for the generations that come after us. This is our moment, so we just have to grab it and do it. Amen. God's work doesn't always make headlines. Don't allow X to be your entire perspective of what's going on because the conversations that I have personally are much more normal and much more sane than the interactions that I see on social media. Social media is a part of real life. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. You know that. It affects people. It affects policy. It affects all of that, but it's not the entire story. It's a microcosm of what's going on. God also, he isn't bound to social media trends. He can work how and when and how much he wants to. I have a lot to say about Boomers. I love Boomers and I love my parents. My dad guest hosts the show twice a month and so people get a lot of boomer wisdom. My audience really loves it and actually, it does make me sad when I see people cutting off their parents for arbitrary reasons because they're looking at their childhood through the lens of modern psychology rather than through the lens of just, yeah, we were all imperfect people and that was hard and my parents had it hard. But that's okay. I still love them and honor them is that there are people who are voluntarily giving up that wisdom and those relationships and then there are all these people that I talk to who are like, wow, I love listening to your dad because I don't have a dad or I never had a dad who talked to me like this or my dad died a few years ago or he reminds me of my dad and my father in law and I just think a lot of people are giving up like the mechanisms that God gave us to be vessels of wisdom. Like your therapist cannot replace your mom or dad. The biggest thing that your therapist will not give you that your parents will is tough love and sometimes truth that hurts your feelings and I could go on and on. And the government can't replace them. Yes and I'm kind of going off the reservation a little bit but there is, yeah, there's just a lot of wisdom to what you're saying and also I just will say like there is a lot of positives I think that we can think of when it comes to AI and it's really incredible actually like what Grop can do and the answers that they give you. I just also always tell Christians, you know, when technology can tell you can't, it can't tell you should, you know, it can tell you what is possible, it can't tell you what's moral and when technology takes us from what is natural to what is possible, Christians have to ask but is this moral and I do think there is a risk of people giving up the image of God in ourselves when we outsource our wisdom and our abilities and our creativity to AI and we're just we're voluntarily giving that up because it's more convenient, because it's more lucrative in some cases. I do think AI has its purpose and I'm sure you agree with me but in the future I think that we're going to have businesses entities who say I'm 100% human. We have 100% human company, I'm 100% human podcast, I don't use chat GBT and I will be the one to buy from those companies. I don't know if it's just nostalgia for me but there is something that just feels a little icky to me about AI and I know I've opened up a whole can of forms of conversation that we don't have time for. I'll only say this, I'm very human centric in my in my theology. I basically think that the world exists for the glory of God but the glory of God is revealed in Christ and Christ is the part of God that he associates with man and in a way that means the universe exists for man. No man, no universe. There'd be no point in the exercise of creating the universe without man, not for machines. The people who think the machines are going to replace us or that there's a post-human future that will be uploaded to the cloud and will all just be machines or whatever it no, we're embodied souls made by God, the whole universe exists so that God could be tinted in human form in the person of Christ and reveal himself in glory through the act of salvific redemption of you and of me. That's why the universe exists and the fact that I'm so glad that the guys who are making all of this stuff are smarter than me and I'm also so tickled that they're so dumb. You're so smart. You've invented a machine that can tell me how to make cookies and I can tell it won't went wrong with my cookies and it can make adjustments to the recipe and tell me how to fix it. It's amazing. I love it. It'll cure disease, help us cure diseases and help us go to Mars and the universe still exists for man. It's not going to replace this. We're not going to get uploaded to the cloud because the people who say that either don't believe or have forgotten why the world exists in the first place. There's a lot of hope in just remembering the very fundamental truth that God created man, God walked as a man, God redeemed man and that's kind of the point of the story. Yeah. Gosh, that's so true. God's eternal plan of redemption going off without a hitch. She's not going to let AI derail that and that eternal plan of redemption is not for machines. It is for man. Yes. Okay. I think that's a positive note to end on. Jeremy, thank you so much. People can find your show wherever they find podcasts on YouTube as well, right? That's right. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you.