Ben Shapiro Admits His Biggest Blind Spot | PBD Podcast #842

You were a hero and then all of a sudden you became a villain. I see myself as the same person I always was. Who do you think had the biggest impact of you becoming a villain? Let's say for example, October 7th somehow made me a villain. Do you think you have any blind spots? Tucker said MAGA was betrayed. Giant fishers that have emerged inside the conservative movement. They don't trust JD because they think JD's been compromised. If that's what JD Vance gets for all of his loyalty to Tucker Carlson, that'd be kind of astonishing. They respect you, but they love him. I would rather say 100% of the truth. I believe daily wire would avenge Shapiro, shuts down the next day. When Jeremy and Caleb's fired Candace, I thought that they should publicly explain why they fired Candace. I think that it is evil what Candace Owens has done to Charlie Crook's family. I've taken a bunch of positions that my audience does not like, including the position that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. You had a vaccine position as well. Please ask me about the vaccine. For the love of God, there are certain bright lines I will not cross. And one of those bright lines I will not lie, I won't do it. I've been labeled alt-right a thousand times wrongly because the alt-right despises me. Oh, Nick Fuentes, do you ever have a mon? Would I ever have a mon? I mean, it depends again. If he were, I would, the answer is. So do you think there is a grove for problem on the right? A civil war is brewing in the Republican. Transgressive politics is always attractive to young people. Whether it's Hassan Piker saying he loves Mao on the left or whether it's Fuentes saying he loves Hitler on the right. You joke about Hitler, you joke about him at a certain point. You're like, am I really joking about Hitler? Was he really kind of okay? He appears as trying to pin him down on his beliefs about the Holocaust and so what Nick does is he immediately launches it into a bunch of jokes about the Holocaust. But it's everyone smarter for having heard that. I think actually everyone might be stupider for having heard this. Do you think there's a net positive to society with Pierce Morgan's show? I've said that he's basically the Jerry Springer of political talk. Here's a 5% panel and here's Hitler and here's Air Bud. Now, I would say that mostly what Pierce acts like on his show is a slightly foolish child. I mean, come on. [MUSIC] Did you ever think you would make it? Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm so pissed I could take sleeved the stories. You know this lies me for me. I don't. What's your damage? The future looks bright. And Jake is better than anything I ever saw. It's right here. Can you borrow one of one? I'll send you right here. [MUSIC] So Ben, I guess we're doing this. Yeah, why not? Yeah, we're doing this. I know the first time we sat down was in your LA studio in 2018. Right. And then that was the podcast we did when I asked. I said, so who do you think is going to be a president in 2022? You know, 2020. You said, I think Joe Biden's got a chance of becoming a president. Yeah. And then next time around I came to you, we did a podcast in the great city of Volca. And then we're doing it here, part three with the two of us. So I appreciate you making the time to come down here. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I think very cool studio by the way. Well, thank you. You guys are playing basketball. Much more fun than ours. Right before you guys need to know this. Ben asked for tissue because in case he gets emotional. So we brought him some tissue. Adam was here since four o'clock in the morning waiting for you. He doesn't get here at nine o'clock but he wanted to see you. But open, open question for you to think about. When I talk to kids, when I talk to folks who are in their 30s or 40s. And I'll say, what was your transition of becoming a conservative? Why I used to be a liberal and all this stuff? I don't know how many of them will tell you. I watch Ben Shapiro. Right? I was watching Ben Shapiro who was the OG guy on campuses before Crowder or Charlie was Ben. Ben, the first time I watched him on Pierce Morgan a month after Sandy Hick when he talked about, "Hey, it's not about the semi-automatic weapons. Why don't you take the guns?" And you brought him the constitution. "Oh, that went viral, right?" Or, "Hey, the guy that puts his arm on your shoulder." And you said, "That's mildly inappropriate. It's transgenital." So he talked. Yeah. Caitlin Jenner. And I think that was Dr. Drew. And then the physicist. I'm a mathematician. You are not a biologist. All these clips that would go. So you were a hero. You were the guy that people looked up to. You were the guy that people would share with others and say, "This is why I'm a conservative. Watch this guy." And then all of a sudden an evolution happened after October 7th, where you went from being the hero to on the conservative side, you became a villain a little bit to some of the folks. To certain segments. To a certain segment for sure. Not all of them. You still have a massive following that people follow you. What do you think was that turning point of going from the guy that everybody looks up to and shares to all of a sudden? Wait a minute. Is this guy a villain? Is this guy my side? What do you think happened there? Well, I mean, I think that there's been some underlying fragmentation and the conservative movement that you're seeing reflected all over the place. So I'm not sure there's anybody who's now sort of acclaimed as a universal hero inside of conservatism. I agree. It used to be Charlie. It was Charlie. But even Charlie had, you know, people who disagreed with him. And the truth is that, you know, if you went back to 2017-2018, Tucker was a hero to everybody. If you went back to 2017-2018, Trump was a hero to everybody. The reality is that as these sort of tides of politics move, there are moments when a movement starts to crack up or fragment. And it's easier, I will say, for people to be unified in opposition. So when Barack Obama is president, which is when some of this stuff was happening, Sandy Hook was 2013. The shooting was 2012. The appearance on Pierce Morgan was 2013. Obama was president. Being in the opposition tends to unify you. Being in power tends to disunify. And so when that happens, then you start to see a bit of a crack up. As far as the sort of 2013 and 2023, 2024 of it, I think that there was a lot of roiling inside the conservative movement about sort of what the future of the conservative movement was going to look like. Because president Trump is a pragmatist. He doesn't have sort of a set of ideological values for everybody to gather around. He's also sweet generis, meaning that his branding compasses everybody. I can vote for him and Tucker could vote for him. And so what that meant is that he was open to interpretation by everybody. And so all of those politics were sort of roiling under the surface. And after October 7th, when I spoke out, obviously very strongly about Israel and Hamas and the position of various parties in the least, when I spoke out about that, I think that some of my detractors saw an opportunity to sort of latch onto my position on that, and then to try to make the claim that the predominant feature about me, despite the fact that I've been doing this since the time I was 17 years old, was focus inordinately on Israel. I think some of that was code four. Not too much, but it doesn't really matter. I mean, the bottom line is people can think what they want to think. My positions have been exactly the same for about 25 years. I think the thing that people don't maybe know about my career trajectory, because most of them got acquainted with me in like 2013. I've been in this since 2004. My first book came out in 2004. My sentence, exactly, brainwashed about liberal bias on college campuses. I wrote a second book in 2005 about how social liberalism was going to destroy America and America would turn into a pornographic society. I was widely mocked for it at the time. I've been doing this since I was 17. I'm not 42. That is a very, very long arc. You see times when you're the hero, you see times when you're the villain, you see times when you're unknown, times when you're known. I think it's a little bit much to expect that you're always going to be the universal hero in every circumstance. Again, politics is necessarily oppositional. When people watch a clip of me on a college campus dealing with a wokester or something, very easy to say, "I'm rooting for that guy." But what do you do when you have to take a new monster complex position about what America's foreign policy ought to be going forward in the bloodiest region of the world, for example? Or where do we go from here in terms of our economics? That's a debate that's getting very little coverage but actually is very core to what's happening right now. I'm very much free market oriented. Many of the people who are against me are very much not free market oriented. These are open dates. Such a talker does not like the free markets. Okay, tell me more. My first indicator of serious political disagreement with talker, who's on my show in maybe 2018. And he comes on the show. And his book was, I'd say, very negative toward innovation and capitalism in general. The idea that he had said this on the air, I believe by that point or he would soon, was that capitalism is just a system put in place by powers that be. And the economy needs to work for us, which to me is left-wing language because when I'm thinking about how the economy works, they're basic realities of human nature. We are a positive people. We are creative people. We wish to own the property that we produce. And based on those fundamental truths, you then get property rights in a free market economy. And when you encroach upon those fundamental truths, what you end up with is a form of stateism. Anyway, in that interview, I asked talker specifically, because he'd written about this in his book, about self-driving cars. Because he had basically said that he was anti-self-driving cars because it would take away trucker jobs. And so I asked him about that. And I said, "What would you ban self-driving vehicles?" And he said, "Yes." And I was a little surprised by that because obviously, I'm of the opinion that self-driving vehicles are one of the great inventions to come along in the last 50 years. I mean, they're incredible. My father is 70. A few months ago, he got hit in a car crash. He'll be fine. But when he went to get a new car, I told him, you're seven years old. You should get a Tesla because it's self-driving. And it's going to perceive things on the road, particularly at night, that you're not going to be able to perceive. It's amazing. He's much safer now. And the truth is, obviously, self-driving cars, if we all had them, would radically cut down on the amount of motor vehicle death in the United States who had tens of thousands of people dying car. Okay, so anyway, I said this to Tucker. And I said, "What basis would you ban self-driving cars?" And he said, "On the basis of safety." And I said, "Well, Tucker, they're safer than human drivers." And he said, "You asked me on what basis I would ban them, not what's true." And to me, I mean, that does not be speak, shall we say, faith in innovation. He's part of a movement that is arisen on the right, that basically says that capitalism empties the soul. It's sort of an almost Marxist materialist conception of the universe, where economic circumstances are supposedly responsible for your spiritual fulfillment. And as a very religious person, I don't think that's true. I have ancestors who are poor. I have, you know, ancestors, I'm sure, at some point who are rich. You know, people are forming families. Under a wide variety of circumstances, many of the most impoverished places on Earth have high levels of family formation and child rearing. There are lots of places that live under tyranny where people are getting married and having children. And there are lots of places like the United States where for a long period of time capitalism was the predominant way of life and people were getting married and having children. And so the attempt to say that the government's job is to get involved in creating a spiritually fulfilling life for you. And it's somehow it's a shortcoming of economics if you're not spiritually fulfilled. I think these are our category errors. Do you think, like the way you said, I've been like this for 25 years and I've been at it since '04. It's at 21 years, whatever the timeline you said. Do you think Tucker's always been like this or he became like this? - You know, I hesitate to speculate about what people, quote unquote, secretly believed. I can only speak to his public statement. So I know that he was not oriented toward capitalism since at least the mid-2010s. As far as his orientation on foreign policy, that seems to have kind of shifted and moved over time in a wide variety of ways. All I know is that right now, I think that he is spewing an enormous number of untruths about the state of the world and conspiracy theories about systems that are rigged against you by nefarious powers, most of whom seem in his mind to have conflated with Israel, which again, I think that is part of the underlying sort of tenor of a certain level of politics on the right. - So let's go to the Israel topic. So when the Israel event happened, October 7th, you came out, you had your statements that you made then the Candace situation took place and then that went on for a minute and then Charlie Kirk, which I think we're coming up to the one year anniversary and about a month or so when it came here like this. - Yep. - And we all remember where we were there. Do you think the Israel topic is still as big of an issue as it was during October 7th, meaning in the 2020 election that comes around, do you think it'd be one of those topics where people gonna say, hey, are you pro-Israel? Are you this? Are you dead? Are you think that's gonna play a role? - No, I think that it's gonna continue to percolate. - I think that many of the theories about what Israel is in the world are not actually connected to the reality of what Israel is in a world, which is a fairly small state and by the regional standards, a very small state located in one of the most violent areas of the world with the robust economy and a significant military capacity. And the rumor about Israel rather that people have been putting forward is that Israel controls our politics, that everything that's happening from a Moroccan migrant invasion of a Spanish city to how people vote on economics to the boot of the NYPD. All of that is being manipulated by this. That's just conspiracism. - Well, let's do this. So for me, because I think there's three camps. There's those that anything happens, it's Israel, right? It's like the same as anything happens, it's Trump. Anything happens, it's socialist, anything. So everybody, there's a camp here, right? - Sure. - Black, the ability to reason. - Didn't you got the guys that nothing is Israel's fault? I think both of them have a problem here. Both these camps have a problem. - I would say that those do not equivalent problems, but sure, I mean, one of those is closer to the truth and one of them is much further from the truth. Everything is Israel's fault and nothing is Israel's fault. If that's a spectrum, I'm not saying nothing is Israel's fault. Obviously, Israel is a country that makes mistakes and does bad things like any other country. But if you're talking about a spectrum, if I were to say to you, there are two camps. - Sure. - One says Nigeria is responsible for literally all of our problems, all of them. And one of them says Nigeria is responsible for none of our problems. Both of these are untrue. Okay, these are not equal levels of untruth. - I don't know if I'm putting equal, but I'm saying that both of them lack reason for me. They both lack the ability to reason. If you can't sit there and say this guy's 100% innocent, he never does anything wrong. This guy's 100% guilty, does everything wrong. I have a hard time hearing you, both camps. They lose a guy like me. Then I get to a guy in the middle and like, you know what? The fact that they're out there, they're fighting the tough guy, the bad guys around them and you have to worry about Iran. You have to worry about the small little place. These guys have been surviving their entire lives. Hey, they have this survival. They're a little bit more paranoid. They're us. They're a little bit more careful of what's going on. Imagine if your neighbor wanted to kill you all the time. Okay, fair, that's a good argument. And then the other side is, well, they got ahold of politicians and they started, instead of taking a money, everybody's playing a propaganda game, but instead of taking a money and maybe winning the youth over, they took the money and tried to win over politicians. A pack comes up, all these things that come up, right? And then you'll say, well, it's really BB. BB's the guy we got to get rid of because BB is a fanatical. He's a, you know, you heard what Mamdani said about BB. If he comes to New York, this is what I'm under. And then he realized he can't do any of it. So talk to the reasonable community in the middle. And if you don't mind doing the following, I don't, I can't hear these guys. I can't hear anything they're saying. But to the reasonable community in the middle, they're like, look, yeah, I get along with you. I do business with them. It's easy. Very good business people. But, you know, I also realized they got certain motives that they're trying to protect. What did Israel do wrong or BB do wrong or the Jewish community do wrong on the right? Not, I'm not talking ADL. ADL is a very different game we're talking. I'm talking specifically conservative Jews or Israel or BB. What did they do wrong to all of a sudden get blasted on social media by the way that they did? The last couple years. - Again, I will say that I think that to discuss Israel outside of the context of the broader political kind of environment in which conspiracy theories arrive would be a mistake. And so to say that Israel is driving, for example, you know, Tucker Carlson to become radically anti-Israel. That Israel did something different October 8th than Israel had done October 6th. And that's what drove Tucker Carlson to where he is or Candace Owens to where she is or something. I just don't think that's true. As far as things that Israel has done wrong, I mean, are we talking internally or externally? 'Cause I think I could name it a dozen problems inside of Israel. - Can we any direction you wanna go? - Okay, fine. I mean, internally in Israel, they have obviously major problems including the fact that they have an entire sector of the population that is also religious that refuses to serve in the army. And that's terrible. That's an internal Israeli problem. As far as-- - They refuse to serve in the army? - Yes, I mean, this is like a series. It's probably the number one issue in Israel and it explains a lot of sort of the chaos that you see inside the Israeli government. And also the reason why BB leads a coalition that is very unpopular in Israel but also can't kind of be electorally defeated. The thing that people should understand about the BB of it is that if BB did not exist, the Israeli government would be following essentially the same playbook. In fact, the people who are running against him right now in an election that's slated to happen in October are running to his right. That'd be good. - They're running to his right. - Yes, that's correct. Gaudi, Eisenkaught, and Naftali Penet. There's a perception in American politics that BB is a sort of radical right-wing figure. In Israeli politics, BB is actually slightly right of censor and quite incrementalist in his approach. So one of the big critiques of BB has been that he actually has not gone hard enough. For example, in Lebanon or he didn't go hard enough, believe it or not in Gaza because the idea was he should move faster and get fewer Israeli soldiers killed and all that. This is the people further right than BB that are not happy with his actions that he took. - Even the people who are campaigning theoretically to his left, people like Naftali Penet or Gaudi Eisenkaught on foreign policy are actually where he is or to the right. Because the entire Israeli population has reacted to October 7th by saying we're not going to take a sort of defensive step backward. We're going to lean forward and say, okay, now we're going to preemptively hit threats. We're not going to wait for those to materialize. - So stay on that. So what percentage of the population of the people that are running are aligned on that topic? - Now we should have reacted even stronger. - In different ways to Iran to Lebanon, I would say that there is a coalition that represents probably 80% of the population that is somewhere between just barely to BB's left, all the way to his right. - Wow. - So there's widespread agreement on foreign policy in Israel. There are a couple of fringes that don't agree. I would say the Arab population of Israel obviously is one which is about 20% of the population there. And there's a left-wing party run by Agan Miragola. Okay, so those are internal problems in Israel. Then there's sort of how Israel has addressed the world. And I would say that Israel is operating in a mode that when it comes to PR that I think is past, it's a sell-by date. And that is that they have continued to try to make a moralistic argument with regards to foreign policy that I don't think has a lot of truck in a world in which people are significantly more real policy in their sort of approach. So I've said this openly. I think that the reasons that the United States has to be allied with Israel, obviously I think that there's moral alignment with a democratic state that is allied with the United States and literally flying planes alongside the United States against common enemies like Iran. But put aside that, the real reason that we ought to be allied with Israel from a sort of real politics standpoint is that Israel is an extraordinarily technologically advanced military power in the region that has oversight and overwatch in a bunch of other areas where terrorist groups percolate, that Israel's intelligence gathering capacity is extraordinarily high. That Israel acts as what some generals have called a non-floating aircraft carrier for the United States. And again, if you're gonna talk about Israel, I've been talking about phasing out a day to Israel for probably 20 years. So that really is not the issue. So because I think that it is good for our allies to be militarily capable on their own. Israel has enough of an economy to support itself. I think in emergency situations, obviously like post-October 7th when you have to ramp up your defense because you're on a war in seven fronts, the United States very often will fund our friends in allies. We did that in Ukraine. I was an advocate by the way of funding Ukraine. That's another unpopular position on some parts of the right. You were for funding Ukraine. Absolutely. 100% because I think the Russians are enemies and I think the Russians do not have America's interests at heart. Which by the way, in a weird way today, you're seeing conservatives who would have never defended Zelensky, they're defending Zelensky now, because they're realizing Putin was giving different military bases of US to Iran. They were giving that intel. And so now that's cause folks to unify against Putin. Listen, the sort of bizarre willingness to look over or hug Putin for years is bizarre to me. I'm old enough to remember when Mitt Romney was saying that Russia was the number one geopolitical threat to the United States. And the right was totally unified about that. And then obviously that sort of went away. And one of the things that I've learned about politics over the course of the last 15, 20 years is just how reactionary everything is. Everything is just bouncing off of something else. And so it's very few people, I would say, in the political sphere. if you have the same principles that they did, when they were 17. I think that if there's something that separates me from other pundits is that you can, you can, people have commented on politics. If you look at the through line of what I believed since I was 17 years old, it's basically the same. And as I said before, nobody ever looks at what I say and goes, you know, man, when did he change? When did that happen? Right? I'm the same guy I was in 2013, 2014. That's why when you say, you know, what is it that you did or what made you more in popular post-docs? It's not as though I hadn't said anything I was saying, you know, on October 8th, that I'd never said before. I mean, obviously, that's silly. Do you see yourself as a villain right now or do you see yourself as a hero right now? I mean, I hesitate to lay, I see myself as the same person I always was, speaking truths that I think are important. How people perceive me is very little relevance to me. Why are you, why are you an easy villain for a lot of people on the right right now? Specifically, do youth, do young, you know, why are you an easy villain? I think that there is a tendency to, again, to try to blame external actors for the problems in your life. And also, there's something fun about the idea that your problems are not your fault. And I always say that if there's one message that I've been perfectly consistent about and there are many, but this is the number one message. Most of your problems in your life are solvable by you. This is an unpopular political message. And it varies very strongly from people like Tucker, who says that most of the problems in your life are the faults of somebody else and are unsolvable, maybe altogether, right? I think that-- We're on the same page with that message. But it's becoming an increasingly unpopular message, which I think is tragic. I think that if there's no one left in American politics who says most of the problems in your life are solvable, you live in the freest system in the history of mankind, the most prosperous system in the history of mankind. And you're sitting there bitching because you don't want to make decisions that will make your life better. And that doesn't mean that we can't do things politically that will alleviate some of the roadblocks that will get rid of those obstacles. I mean, that's the job of politics. But most of your successes or failures in your life, like 97% of them are going to be up to your personal decision-making. And so I'll say stuff like that and it's fascinating. I'll give you like a villain moment, right? That sort of become a villain moment. So one of the things that I said I was on I think was Constantine Kesson's podcast. And we were talking about-- - You do a great job on that. - Yeah, he's great. The trigger geometry guys are really good. And we were talking about affordable in New York. And one of the things I said is listen, there are things you could do to alleviate housing prices in New York, somewhat. Okay, New York is a limited piece of territory that is very, very highly built up. So you're not going to double the housing stock and it's just not going to happen because there's not enough space. And so if the rent is too high there for you, you're a young person, you don't have a job that can pay for the rent. If you want to improve your life, you might think about moving out of New York. Which again, I thought is relatively uncontroversial. I've moved many times in my life in pursuit of a job, in pursuit of a better career opportunity. We've considered moves that we didn't make, right? That was kind of the norm. And I thought that that is how you pursue success. Right, if you're not succeeding in a particular situation, look for another situation in which you can succeed, this became uber viral. Because the idea was that I was telling people that they did not have a right to live where they grew up. And listen, you have a right to live where you grew up but you don't have a right to not pay rent there, right? You don't have a right to a $200,000 salary company. - Who criticized you? Who criticized you? - I mean, Taco was very heavy on this. He played this, but this went very viral online. It was a huge percentage of the right. It was trying to make the argument. And then this is where you see a telescope into an issue that this is where I start to say, okay, because I'm wearing a Yamacut, there's something to the targeting. They tried to telescope, believe it or not, that issue into Israel. So what they tried to do is they did a two-step. The first thing that my opponents did is they lied about what I was saying obviously. What they said is that I said that you have no right to be where you grew up, which is not what I said. And then they said, but you have a right to be in Israel, right? You have a right to exist, but you don't have a right for America. - What in the world are you talking about? - Is this it? Is this the clip? - Yes, this is probably it. - Okay, go for it. - If you're a young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here. I mean, that is a real thing. And I know that we've now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up. But the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that. The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity. And if the opportunities are limited here and they're not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities. If you're a young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here. - You can pause. So that's what you got hit for. - Yes. - Because what? Because you're asking people to leave where they can't afford to live. - Correct. - I mean, that's what everybody's family's ever done. - I know. But it's stuff like that. - So this, who villainized you? Who was on your side, who villainized you? Who looked at this and said, what are jerk Ben Shapiroes? - Well, I mean, I believe Tucker has used that one a lot. He's also used a clip where I talked about how I think that it's better for people to retire later unless you have like back breaking labor and you have physical problems. - I've seen that. - Right. - And that one can be debated. That actually can be debated. - Well, what I was speaking about there actually was the idea of sort of life fulfillment. And what I wasn't saying when you were, what I was saying is, it is actually a bad idea in life to think that you're gonna hit 65 and go golfing and be on the beach for the rest of the day. - You're happy for the rest of your life. You're happy. Like there's no social science data to back that. You need a feeling of. - Somebody can twist that and say, you want me to live till 75 years old. I've even made the argument even further than you with that one. And I've said, I think we need to raise the social security age from 65 to 72 because you can't afford it. So that's exactly what I was talking about in that clip, right? - But that's not what I'm talking about. - You'll never win on that perspective. - But the idea is that if this is the stuff that makes me unpopular, quote unquote, on the right, how many of these people are on the right? I mean, this was traditional conservatism. Traditional conservatism was the idea of free market economics, personal responsibility, virtue, and recognizing the shortcomings of the welfare state, right? These were all traditional conservative opinions. There is an impact when people on the right will say, oh, people today were, we're suggesting, I think there's Dave Smith suggesting that I was on the left. I mean, there's not a single position on which I am somehow to Dave Smith's left. I mean, that is a bizarre sort of characterization. And so this is why I say, I think what's really happening. - Where are you at with gay couple men adopting kids? What's your position there? - I mean, I think that that is not good. I'm against that. - You're against that. - Yes. - Has that always been the case at 17? - Yes. - So you're, I literally was on Joe Rogan talking about how I would not attend a gay wedding. He did an entire episode on it. - You wouldn't attend a gay wedding. - Correct, I'm religious you. - Okay, so there is. - I would go to, I mean, I've gay friends who have adopted kids, or if it's surrogated, I'll go to their house and my friends, but do I think that what they did is morally right now? Do I think that, again, one of the things that I also, people have a bit of a tough time, sometimes understanding where I'm coming from, is that my political stances are not consonant with, you know, that does not obviate me being a decent person to people with whom I disagree, right? So people is, how could you even be friends with a person like, I'm friends with a lot of people I disagree with, it turns out, I'm not a child, right? I can be friends with people that I disagree with, I can treat them well. - No, I'm not. - And also why are people looking for my moral imprimatur? Like, this is the thing I've never really understood. So people like Joe got very upset at me on one episode. I think it was the second time I was on a show, 'cause I said, I wouldn't attend the same sex wedding. And my question to him was, why do you want me at your same sex wedding? Do you need my moral imprimatur for your lifestyle? I don't need your moral imprimatur for my lifestyle. Right, if you said, I don't respect your marriage, you say, okay, and I can't you be confident in your own choices enough that you don't need my, you know, I'm not the one who's like stepping in there and telling you you can't do X, Y, or Z. - Remember that? - My understanding of my marriage, by the way, on gay marriage is that the state has an incentive for people to get married and have children. That means there's an additional incentive for heterosexual couples because they get married and have children. - Do you think, remember back in the days, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, Charles Barkley had that one commercial? - I am not a role model. I don't know if you remember that or not. - Sure. - 30 years ago. - Yeah, of course. - It's like, leave me alone. He's not a role model to young kids. Do you think in the position you're in as an influencer? Do you think you are a role model? You should play role model? - Yes. - Yes. - Tell me more. - Okay, so I am a married father of five. - Okay, congratulations on your period. - Thank you. I appreciate it. I have lived as clean a life as it is possible to live. And I say that with pride because that's a serious of decisions. Now again, I was given the ultimate privilege, which is great parents. That is the ultimate privilege. Not white privilege, not economic privilege. The privilege of awesome parents, right? I grew up in a small house in Burbank, California. It was like 1100 square feet with three younger sisters. We all shared a bedroom until I was 11 and we had one bathroom for six people. So, you know, again, we were economically privileged. We were like poor, but we were probably like middle middle class, lower middle class. - What high school did you go to? - I went to a Jewish day school. But I went to, I was in and out of public school. So I went to public school from first through fourth. - In Burbank? - In Burbank. I went to an elementary from K through four. I skipped third. And then I went to a Jewish school fifth and sixth. And then I went back to a public school called Walter Reed Middle School for seventh and eighth. And then I went to, and then I went to, I was in the IHP program, which was sort of the like magnet program, exactly. And then, and then I went to a Jewish day school that my parents were on scholarship for, for 10th, 11th, 12th, 10th, 9th. So I graduated high school and I was 16. And then I went to UCLA for college and then Harvard Law. You know, all of that is, is predicated in trying to make good decisions. So this is why I put a lot of focus on good decisions 'cause there ain't no substitute for it. And so when I'm speaking to people, as a role model, I feel it incumbent on me to try to tell the truth about things even when it's unpopular. And so one of the things that I've noticed about, you know, a certain number of people who are critical of me is that if I criticize them, their defense will be these days. Well, look at my numbers. Look at how many clicks I'm getting. I'm more successful than you. That has never been something, but I have never measured morality by popularity. It's just not important. It isn't. I'm glad a lot of people listen to me. You know, I prefer the more people listen to me than fewer. But I'm not going to change any of my moral precepts based on the number of people who listen to me. If it's one person or if it's a million people, I mean, who do you think has? Who do you think has? I mean, I mean, again, without, without directly ascribing motivations. People who definitely have shifted their perspectives and cite their clicks a lot, Megan Kelly is the most obvious example. Tucker, I don't know whether it's Jen you or whether he's just aiming for clicks, but obviously he's changed a lot of his positions and he will very frequently cite sort of statistics about his listenership or viewership as defense. Pierce Morgan does it, but again, I don't expect anything from Pierce because that's what Pierce is. Pierce is not particularly a political creature. What's funny about Pierce being angry at me is that he's angry at me for saying something that he kind of admits is true, right? I've said that he's basically the Jerry Springer of political talk because that's what he is, right? I mean, it's like here's a five person panel and here's Hitler and here's Erbaud and here's, you know, and here's a left-winger and here's some crazy homeless hobo screaming from the street. And now let's have an open and honest, again, that's your business model. Good for you, like you do it. More Downey Jr. used to do that 30 years ago. Exactly, I mean, like I'm not sure. And then he'll say he respects Jerry Springer, but then he's angry at me for saying that and he'll say that I owe him an appearance on his show, which I don't, if I don't want to come on your show, I'm not going to come on your show. So some people may say, well, peers had a position where he was defending Israel, then all of a sudden, I don't know which podcast it was. And it's like, well, I like to hear people's perspective, then he changes a position and he's like, well, you know what, I saw a good argument. This is not fair what BB is doing. And so some people may say, you know, he has the ability to see a new argument and adjust his positions. What would you say? I would say that mostly what peers act like on his show is a slightly foolish child who is just discovering the world a new everyday. And so what he'll do is he, what ever puts him in sort of the position where he can assume moral superiority in any conversation he'll take. So I don't think there's any consistent through line. - Do you think there's a net positive to society with peers more against show? - It's hard for me to say yes, but I also don't think that there's a net positive to society for most of social media. I mean, I think that if I could hit a red button, make social media disappear tomorrow, I probably would. I think it's quite true. - Would you really? - Yeah, absolutely. Great personal cost to myself, sure. - Because of what? - I think it's made people stupid. I think nobody reads a book anymore. I think people don't have any depth of knowledge on issues about which they speak. I think that they go to sources who don't know what the hell they're talking about, the recorders of the time. I think that even those kinds of shows have now been, you know, telescopes down to 30 second segments on YouTube shorts or TikTok. I think the attention span of the public has been radically reduced. And I think people are frankly dumber in their engagement with politics than they were, you know, when I was growing up. And I don't think they're particularly smart and I was growing up. So I think it's really gotten bad now. - I see, I like the debate. I like seeing the conversation. Because to me, I think that's a good thing. You know, one thing that made Charlie, and I went to Amphist a few times and I spoke a couple of times at Amphist and I would see he was able to bring guys and talk that he had one time, Dave Smith went against the, "What's the guys? "Is something hammer?" - Josh. - Josh Hammer? - Yes, what? I thought it was great. I thought it was great that he had the courage to bring the guys to do it. And I know one time you went up, the big, this was about a year ago, maybe in December, where you called out Megan Kelly. And then that's when everything started after you called out Megan Kelly. And that became a-- - That was about the Candace Owens attacks on Eric and all that, yep. - Right, right, that was, I remember that. So in regards to going back to hero villain and I wanna move on to the next topic, who would you say had the biggest impact of causing somebody to look at you as a villain? Let me just give the names and then you tell me, is it the exit of Candace, how it happened? Is it October 7th, Israel, you defending Israel? Is it you, is it Tucker? Is it more the fact that there is no real enemy today on the right because Trump won? - Again, I would attribute this to just giant fishers that have emerged inside the conservative movement. - Oh, but let's put this in a number of numbers. - I would make sure. - I mean, yeah. - All those people are detractors of mine. Some of them personally hate me, I assume, or have spoken about personally hating me. That's, yeah, I'm sure that that's had an impact. I'm sure there are things that I've said that I could've said better because that's true for everybody. And as far as, you know, the Israel of it, I do think that there has been disproportionate focus placed on that issue that is not in consonance with what, frankly, I even talk about on the show. One of the great kind of lies about my show, and this is where, again, I think social media has made people dumber, is that the people who don't like me, they'll clip from my show as though I only talk about Israel. We've actually gone back and we've measured like how much I talk about Israel. And the answer is very, very, very little. I talked about Israel a lot right after October 7th. And then, you know, by the time we hit, I'd say, mid 2024, when sort of the war had been going for a while, we went back to kind of talking about not Israel. And even, you know, on my show today, the amount that I'll talk about Iran, which is very much in the news, it might be three or four minutes, right, out of a 45 minute or an hour. - Why do you think that is? Is it just because strategically people have burned out or you're burned out? - I mean, I think some of both, but I also think that there hasn't been a lot of movement there. I try to cover the news. And so, the sort of stasis that we're talking about in Iran, there's nothing happening. Something big happens. Like the MOU breaks, we'll lead with it, right? But if it's not breaking news, but the implication in sort of the online world is that I do nothing but talk about Israel, which is just on a platform. - But what I'm trying to find out is because you got to realize. - I mean, I'd love to hear your theories, because honestly, you know, since I've been sent, it's been a mystery to me to a certain extent, because if you say the same thing for 25 years, and then the perception of you changes, then I hesitate to say that it's because I said something different, 'cause I really didn't. So then the question becomes what changed? And so, I think, by the way, I think that the answer is all of the above, obviously, right? I mean, the way that I thought that when Jeremy and Caleb, who were the decision makers, fired Candace, I thought that they should publicly explain why they fired Candace. I think that it was an advocate for that at the time. I think in retrospect, it was a huge mistake, not to explain to the public why they had decided to fire Candace. I think they thought it was self-evident, and it turns out there's no such thing as self-evident, so that was a mystery to a lot of people. They didn't know, maybe they hadn't been watching her show. One of the things that, you know, another thing that I've learned about politics is that because, you know, I'm so in it, because I'm in it like every single day, with all the details, I assume a level of knowledge on the part of the audience that I shouldn't assume. I assume that people know that when they see Tucker Carlson, he's changed many of the things, and the kinds of things he says since 20. - Right, right. - And people don't know that, 'cause they don't engage that level with politics. Most people who are watching politics are not watching your show or my show every episode, right? They might engage once every three or four episodes, and even then, they might engage for 10 minutes on the episode. You have a core of people who are very solid, but that's a fairly small core. - Yeah, there's guys that watch the shorts, and there's a smaller percentage that watch the whole thing every day. - Exactly. - Those are two different audiences, and I wish there was a way of being able to know exactly who it is and do a focus group on your core, guys, versus that would be that be so valuable. - This is exactly right. And again, this is one of the things that I think has been really negative about the direction of social media is there has been, and you can see it in everybody's numbers, and movement from the long to the short. The migration of eyeballs from a two-hour show or a three-hour show or a one-hour show to a 30-second short is very obvious, the kind of tick-tockification. And politics is very hard to do in a sort of 30-second sound bite. I mean, there's certain issues you can do, right? The ones that are most popular on the right are the ones you can do in 30 seconds, right? Man is man, woman is woman, right? That's like a unifying thing on the right, because you can explain that in one sentence, right? But how do you explain laissez-faire economics versus quote-unquote common good conservatism? That's gonna require dissertation, right? And so you can't do that in 30 seconds. So then it turns into a bunch of sloganering on either side, right? You have the common good conservative, so to speak, calling the, you know, the laissez-faire people a bunch of cruel hearted libertarians who want to rob you of your soul, and then you have cruel hearted libertarians saying about the common good conservatives that they're actually, you know, Francois fascist. You know, and there's probably a grain of fruit to like all of these things to a certain extent, but these are like robust and long debates that typically require somebody to read and know things. And so, you know, the shortening of the attention span is quite a tragedy. - Yeah, I will tell you like, I remember when running the insurance company, if I went hard after one of my guys in the company, and let you say from stage I called him out because at a bad quarter or a bad year or a bad month, I would always sudden see, well, you can't call this guy too much because 50% of the company sides with him. So you just upset 50% of the company. You didn't know how much he was loved. They respect you, but they love him, right? So that was kind of like, okay, I gotta be kidding. If I call this guy, no, we're on the same page. If I call this guy, we're on the same page. So I don't know where you are. - That distinction is a really important one. So, you know, when we sort of survey, you know, the broader conservative audience, what we very often see is that the conservative audience has high levels of respect for me, but high levels of love, small portions of the audience, well, high levels of love for say Candace or for Tucker. - Exactly. - And I think that that's, okay, that's a very important point you're making because the respect is there for your brilliance. - Right. But I think that a lot of that love is predicated on the idea that Tucker and Candace are, quote unquote, taking the side of the audience. Right, they're on my side. And they're on my side because they're telling me that nothing that I do in my own life is my fault. It's everybody else's fault, the track system is fault. Of course, I mean, this is why it's, every cult movement starts with, I'm on your side, not with, you're on my side. - So how do you win that? - That's not an easy thing to win. So how do you win? I had kids that came over here the other day from school and I'm giving them a tour to campus. Guys want to get into media. They're lawyers, all this stuff. So I'm walking with them and I'm like, so tell me. You know, who do you watch right now online? Oh, Nick Fuentes. Who do you watch right now online? Oh, Tucker, who do you watch right now online? And they give me streamers. Some of the streamers' names came up. I watch what he says because I can't stand him, but I watch what Pycra has to say. I watch what this person has to say. I said, who'd you watch two years ago? Oh, it was only Charlie Kirk. Really? So you went from Charlie to this, yes. All right, who else used to be Ben Shapiro? But I don't like the position he took with Israel. These are 17-year-old kids. 18-year-old kids who are 4.5 GPA. So it's not like they're the-- So this is, so again, I think one of the tactics that has been played with the Israel thing is, if you go back to that model of, you know, my thing is say true things. And a lot of other people in the space, their idea is, I'm on your side. What's a great idea? way to alienate somebody from their audience to say they're not on your side, they're on a foreign body side. They're not speaking on behalf of truth. They're not saying things they think are true. They're actually secretly motivated by a dual loyalty or by a loyalty to another party. And it just so happens that party's manipulating all world events, right? Again, that's a really good way to do it, honestly, like strategically, it's a very smart thing to do. It's dishonest, but it's a smart thing to do. So you, so go back to the like respect fear love. So you think you're in the respect community. You think Candison's Tucker are in the love and like community. Yes. Got it. Okay. And so the difference. There is the love and like community feel like they're on their side. You're not. Correct. You're part of now the mainstream establishment name that, you know, Israel first, all this kind of. Israel first, all that kind of. Okay. So, so, okay. So then let me ask you a different question. So let's just say we had the technology to take everyone's, you know, a New York Times as this article just came out. I'm sure you saw this. A couple days ago, and it's the mega media machine is fracturing. Okay. And if you go a little bit lower, YouTube views down. This is from early 2025 to today. This is across the board. X views down across the board, rumble views down across the board, probably that big drop off is when Dan Blanjino took the job. I don't know when it is, but Dan was part of it across the board podcast listens down. And it's going down and it explains different things by millions, it gives numbers from you. They talk about Johnson, Banjino, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Crowder, Walsh, Candice, Bannon, Fuentes, Shapiro, Paul and Kirk. Those are the main names that they're looking at. And then they quote, you know, it seems that everyone in the space is experiencing a drop off and a views from 2025, Fuentes said, seems as though 2025 was an anomaly either due to organic interest or potentially artificial boosting. Okay. And a part of it is Charlie Kirk, passed away, Candice talked about that. So she went up there and they said Ms. Owens saw her YouTube channel podcast audience surge. And with the controversy, she has stoke other conspiracy theories before and end, including falsehoods about the sex of Bridget McRone, wife, et cetera, and as she responds, it might be a conspiracy to some people, but it's not to me. Yeah, and it's I think I do very good job, a thorough in what I present to people. We spent a lot of time on research, hours and hours and hours on research. I would disagree with that assessment. And then they come with you. They could talk about blaze website. Anyways, you look at this chart, go a little bit lower to the one that shows everybody's numbers with Bungino on the purple side and Fuentes's rise and fall, not fall, but decreasing right here. And you kind of see everybody, right? What happened with them where they are today, Bannon was high, he's out. So if you were, if we had the ability to take everyone's audience, Candice's audience, yours, Fuentes's, Tucker's, the main names. And we put a room of a hundred people, take the millions, a hundred people in that room, who's in the room? What do they look like? How old are they? What denomination are they? Where they're from? What's their economic status? You know, you understand the question I'm asking. I mean, it would be a different hundred people for each room. I know what it is, but what is your guesstimation of what that audience is that they've captured? Um, like the broader conservative ecosystem you mean, or are you talking about for each individual host? So in some cases, these, these audiences are almost completely bifurcated, in some cases, you have crossover, right? I understand that, but I don't think they're all the same audience. No, I agree. I think, I think there's a pool that's been, that's, that was very large. Uh, I think that, you know, off your elections, obviously right, right now we're, it's sort of like asking how NFL ratings are in the middle of the off season. I mean, right now it's not the time when people are like, when it gets to 27 28, people will reengage because we'll be in a presidential race and then people will get back into it. But, and also we came off, I mean, it's a little unfair in the sense that 24 was the single greatest political year in the history of American politics, probably, I mean, it was just psychotic, right? I mean, you had, you had the, the sitting president of the United States go completely defunct in the middle of a presidential debate, drop out, be replaced in the middle of the campaign. And President Trump made the single greatest political comeback, probably in American history. And combined with, with all of that, you had inflation that was raging out of control. Uh, you, you had, you know, social issues that were really hot like trans, like it was, it was just a, it was, it was kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity for, for ratings. And then you come off of that. It's going to be not as good. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I'm not doing a good job asking the question. Yeah. Yeah. So the question is, what, what does the audience look like? Like I used to go to and visit my guys would put conventions in a month of December or January. And I would go to it. One of the guys was 48% African American, 20% Hispanic, and the average age was 42 married with kids. And the other guy would go to the average age was 24, young, you know, white. Yeah. So, so what I'm trying to ask from you, the other one, for my audience, you're asking for the other people. Those main names. Who do you think is watching? I mean, I can go down to the phone. Very important. Yeah. So, I mean, I, I would say that, you know, I, our audience is, uh, typically millennial. It's, it's males, predominantly probably 70, 30 or 65, 35 male, uh, in the, the, the, the, earning power by the data that we have is that they make more than $100,000 a year, typically, uh, they are, they are more college educated, rather than less, uh, the, the audience tends to be larger in cities because that's also where more people are, uh, and, yeah, again, that in terms of, uh, I'm not sure we have a racial or ethnic breakdown, uh, I would say that if I had to speculate for Nick Fuentes, I would say it's a lot of 17 to 24 year-old young white men, uh, which I think he would probably agree with, uh, if you were talking about Candice Owens, it's a heavily female audience. Much more heavily female. I think the number is, uh, 80 plus, uh, I don't know, it's probably 70, 30 to be fair. I mean, like, again, this is total speculation. I have no insight into it. Totally. Yes. Uh, so, uh, but, you know, Candice who shows very gossipy and it's, it's largely rooted in sort of gossip and conspiracism. And so I'd imagine that she has sort of the same audience breakdown as, you know, gossipy shows in the entertainment sector, because her show is really more in the entertainment line than it is. Uh, I would say in the political line, even, um, yeah, Tucker is going to be, um, predominantly older people who watch him on Fox or predominantly younger people who are sort of aligned, uh, you know, Flint is adjacent, shall we say. Uh, so again, you think he'll have some of the 17 to 24 Tucker, okay. Of course. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, which is why I think that he's treated Flint as, you know, alternatively warmly and coldly to, to, apparently, next great consternation. What, what would you speculate for Banjino? Um, I think Banjino's audience in my audience are probably fairly similar. Although I would say that the, the Dan's audience is probably a little more blue collar than mine. How about Walsh and, uh, Knowles? Uh, so Knowles would be, uh, you know, same age range, maybe cut slightly younger, perhaps, um, and, uh, I would say that, that Walsh is, again, probably more along Banjino's lines in terms of, uh, in terms of, say, income and, uh, educational breakdown. Yeah. And, and so with this article, when you see something like this, when things are going to happen next, um, I mean, I think that there will be abs and flows that go along with the success of particular political movement. I also think that there is some fun top positionality, meaning that, you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens. Well, there's what's good for America and then there's what's good for the, uh, the conservative media landscape. It's always good for the conservative media landscape is opposition, which is why I think so many people on the conservative media landscape, uh, like Tucker are, are, are pretty openly rooting for Democrats to do well in the upcoming elections. Uh, you know, I, I would prefer to have lower ratings and not have Democrats around the country. Uh, but I think that that's a rarity. You've been in a 25 years since 17 watching all of this, like a sport, right? Who have you seen? Rise, fall, disappear. I've not been in this space that long. So have you seen any guys that were like rock stars that were killing it and then boom, they're out. Uh, sure. I mean, that's happened a few times. Um, I would say a kind of good example, maybe Milo Unopolis, there's a point where Milo was like super hot back in 2015, 2016 and then he had a bit of a scandal with some audio talking about, uh, a priest abusing him, I believe, and, uh, and, and all that and then he kind of disappeared, um, and has gone to kind of friendship places. But I think that the, the new way that the internet works is that nobody fully disappears. Everybody kind of sticks around, right, and say old, old conservative media stars never die. They just fade away. I mean, you, you see that with, with a wide variety of people, you know, they're people who, you know, were very prominent and now they're still kind of prominent. They're just not as prominent as they were and that happens to everybody. You know, again, maybe, maybe, you know, my show is doing better this year than it did last slightly. Uh, maybe that is, you know, the sign that I'm about to explode out. Maybe that's the sign that I'm about to create or I don't know. I mean, we'll find out. Yeah. It's a beautiful part of a free market. If you don't adjust, you don't pivot, you know, but then also the pivoting and adjusting sometimes does that mean you compromise your morals and values? Right. This is, this is, this is where, and it's a thing that I said while I was on the stage of TPSA for me, I don't watch this like a sport. The reason I say that is because a sport in the end, your team wins, your team loses, and then you go back to your daily life where actually you have problems. For me, these are real problems that have real solutions or real answers and require serious conversation and so that requires a higher level of responsibility than simply aiming for the clicks. I mean, there are certain, let's say, for example, that October 7th somehow, you know, made me a villain among a certain segment of the audience. Well, the obvious thing to do then would have been for me to swivel on my heel and just turn on all my principles and, and just reverse course. Right. I didn't do that. Okay. Why didn't I do that? The easy solution would have been to do that. And the answer is because for me, that's not how this works. I've taken a bunch of positions that my audience does not like including the position that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. He did not win the 2020 election. I took the position that January 6th was bad because January 6th was bad. Right. I'm willing to say that stuff and maybe it cost me audience, but this is again, this is why why you had a vaccine position as well because my guys with TIPIC when I ask about Ben. So let me tell you, why don't you ask him about the vaccine because please ask me about the vaccine for the love of God. What was your position about the vaccine from the beginning? in the beginning was that I was following what the data was and what the government was saying about the data and what Pfizer was saying about the data. So I was very pro-vaccine for people who were older and had obesity. Hey, my own children, I did not vaccinate. I was never in favor of children being vaccinated. My company sued the federal government, unlike any of these other assholes, including the people at Fox News, who mandated that many of their employees get the vaccine. We never, not only, we did not mandate the vaccine or a company and we sued the federal government to stop vaccine mandates. My own personal view on whether you should take the vaccine or not is irrelevant to my public policy view as to whether you should be forced to take the vaccine. Now, there's a tweet that, again, people clip and goes viral every so often from like January of 2021, maybe. And where I said that this means you should, that take the vaccine idiots. Okay, what that was, that was a response to a misinterpretation of data that was being put out at the time that suggested that you were safer, that somehow you were less likely to get COVID from not taking the vaccine and then from taking the vaccine. Now, the current data did not suggest that it was a misinterpretation of the data. Now, so it was a mistake based on the data they presented to you at the time. Correct. And then the data started out. Don't you trust the data at the time. Correct. And this is always the, and so, again, this runs somebody could question that and say, come on, Ben, I mean, you know it was propaganda. How did you buy into it? We set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury. We had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscanero. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skilled hands. We chose patience, spending two years perfect in every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the Future Looks Bride Collection. Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary. Rather intentional, luxurious, timeless. Well, I mean, but I didn't know that it was propaganda at the time, and either did the Trump administration, which was pushing it at the time. I mean, President Trump still says that operation Warped Speed was one of his greatest investments. It's always confusing with us. Well, so again, like, and by the way, the data tend to show that it did lower death rates among the elderly and the obese. It didn't do much for people who were 40 and healthy, and it had counterproductive effects for people who are young. So, Ben, that's why I questioned your instinct. You were off on that, you know, we followed you and you got people to say, yes, I think that's a great way to put it, I questioned your instinct. Okay, so here is my view. People's instincts are less reliable over the course of time than the data. I will change my opinion as evidence and data comes in. Okay, the evidence will change, and so will my opinion on these things. So, I came out very early on, very early on. I said, there should not be lockdowns, and that we should start tranching people back into the path. This is like April of 2020. I said, we should not be locking anybody down. Kids should go back to school. The data that was coming out of Sweden suggested there was not open-air transmission and that the virus was not particularly damaging to people who were young. So, we should tranch back young people into the workforce, let them all get COVID, develop natural immunity, and then you start tranching people, right, this is the, you're right, it's December 2020, December 2020. Right, you have to go back to-- - December 8 2020 is what, so-- - This is right when Pfizer was announcing that the, and when the administration was announcing, that the vaccine not only prevented death, but also prevented transmission, which it turns out was not rooted in data that were just lying. Okay, now, you could say, I think the government's lying to me all the time. That is heuristic, that is stupid. Sometimes the government is lying to you. Okay, sure, but I can't use the absence of data to just form an opinion, right, the game online right now that I find bewildering and stupid is a game where somebody makes 100 predictions. 99% of them are outlandish and insane. One of them is outlandish and correct. Everyone forgets the 99 they made that were outlandish and insane, and remembers the one that they made that was outlandish and correct, and say this person is now a good person to trust going forward on all things 'cause they had a good instinct. They had a good instinct. Okay, but would you put that money with the money manager? He fails 99 out of 100 times. He was first on all 100, but he was wrong 99 out of 100, but on that one, he did great. Sure, on net, he lost you a shitload of money, but on that one man, he nailed it. Okay, or are you gonna go with the person who follows the data? And it has a pretty steady and solid rate of return, and it's right to say 95 out of 100 times, but sometimes on the five, the data underline data is wrong and problematic. The instinct in politics is always to go with the outlandish prediction that comes true. So to take another example, I thought Trump was gonna lose the 2016 election. Why did I think Trump was gonna lose the 2016 election? Because every piece of data suggested that Trump was gonna lose the 2016 election. There were people out there who were saying, no, no, no, no, I've been checking the lawn signs, Trump's for sure gonna win. Now, okay, that's fine, you were right. I was wrong, Trump won, right? And I'm happy he won, because then I voted for him in 2020 and endorsed him in 2020 and campaigned for him in 2024. I'm happy he won. Even though I did not vote in the 2016 election, I was pleased that he'd be Hillary Clinton. When that happened, a lot of people then went to, okay, we can't trust any poll ever again. Now that's a bad heuristic. Okay, so again, there are the rules that we ought to approach the world with. That doesn't mean that you're right every single time. It doesn't mean that all polls forever cannot be trusted. And it doesn't mean that you're best to horse. One of the things that happened in the vaccine space is that we went from, we ought to be skeptical of the experts, which I agree with. I agree with. And if I committed a sin there, the sin was not being skeptical enough of the people who were purported to have the expertise. That's fine, that's fair. Okay, that's fine. And that's fair critique. And in the future, I will be even more skeptical. Fine, but we went from be skeptical of the experts to be totally unskeptical of morons. Right, people who are total non-experts, people who don't know their ass from their elbow on epidemiology or vaccines. Like don't listen to that doctor. We should be even more skeptical of the doctor than we would be for Bob down the street who says the measly vaccine is gonna kill their kids. And that's just a bad way to approach data. It's a bad way to approach the world. And again, if you don't take this stuff seriously, then it's great. You can just throw a bunch of bullshit out there. And then people glom on to the one piece of Alex Jones, a great example. This says Atlanta stuff all the time. But one time he said one thing about maybe an airplane would hit the World Trade Center, and that means that he's no Stardomis. And no Stardomis isn't even no Stardomis, right? You see this online all of that? No Stardomis made this prediction. Hey, you can, this game is really, really, really dumb. If you've predicted, say, 15 out of the last two recessions, but you hit those two recessions, but you missed 13 times. Yeah, there's a guy named Harry Dent, that's known for that. He predicted a recession and he kept saying it, you know, saying it and-- Yeah, or Noreal or being he, Dr. Doom, right? Like, yeah, we had him on, he's always, you know, I like Noreal, but he, but always were five seconds away from chemical apps, right? That's right, yeah, that's right. So, okay, so that's fair to know that, that's your position now. But it's not a position that earns love, right? Love positions tend to be based on that guy has my instincts, that guy is confirming what I always knew, what I always thought. So, let me ask you, so you got a salesperson, you know, they'll say fact tell stories sell, right? So, logic, yes, you can sell a person that's super systematized structured with logic. You can sell an analytical, technical person with logic, but that's less than 20%. Yes, it's not a big percentage. So, now, we know the youth, not all of them, but they're more emotional and they're more relationship and action oriented, so you got to kind of communicate with them in a different way. So, when you're looking at right now with the DSA, the way the DSA is communicating with them, or even a Tucker or even a Fuentes, they're able to connect with them emotionally. Right, because I'm on your side thing. I'm on your side. But, and again, my, you know, the slogan that was famous was faxed on care about your feelings. It turns out the right legs, faxed on care about your feelings when it was the left feelings that were being hurt. Right, when it was my faxed on care about the left feelings, then it was fine. It turns out that when my faxed on care about some people on the right feelings, then they get very offended. So, how do you overcome that? I mean, can you, do you just let it go? I mean, I think the answer is there are certain things that are not overcomeable from my perspective, because I'm not going to lie. Now, I think that there are better ways to tell the story. I mean, I think that what I say that what I would say is that the people who pretend to be empathetic to you to understand your plate are giving you advice that is going to make you poorer, stupider, and less well off. And it's not, and listen, I have a real problem with, with untruth. Okay, so I do care, obviously, about my listeners. But I'm not going to pretend I care about my listeners, the same way I care about my immediate family, for example. I care about people in China, and it would be cool. I'm about to push in that. But, but again, I think that very often that's sort of what people are looking for. And so, I would say that my affect very often is considered cold, right, because of that. Right, because it, because I basically say pretty openly, listen, I care about public policy, and I care about you to the extent that I want you to succeed. But your success is dependent on your own decision-making. No problem, do you think you have any blind spots? I'm trapped on some of them. What do you think you have? What blind spots do you think you have? I mean, I think I'm always, I think the dishonesty remains a blind spot. When people are dishonest with me, I think they can get away with it for a while before I figured out. Because truth is such a core value for me, like really a core value for me. And one of the names that we gave our latest kid is Rudin the Hebrew word for truth. Like, because I care so much about the truth, when people are just purely willing to be dishonest or openly greedy or just venal corrupt, I'm still taken aback by that. There's sort of a corn I have a day, I think, that I may never get over, because I just, I literally, it does not compute for me. Because my parents raised me in a particular way. Where honesty was kind of the number one value. And so if anything, my relentless honesty has gotten me in trouble from time to time. And it's also done a world good for me. And my great hope, and I think the hope of all politics is that eventually the truth wins out, but the key word there is eventually. Got it. And then how about, how about with business, running a good business? What blind spots do you have running a good business? So the thing is, and I asked this from Jeremy, when he was, I told you off camera, you know, how much I enjoy talking to him. And it was very, very grand review, is being a talent and a business owner operating. I remember one time, Glenn Beck is like, "Man, I realized when I started Blaze, "I don't want to operate." - Yes. - "I just want to be talent. "What blind spots do you have as the face?" We were doing a podcast two months ago and one of the guys on the podcast, Elon. He said, "I believe daily wire would have been Shapiro "shut down the next day." He said, "70, 80% of daily wire has been Shapiro." Now, the debate went to, "Well, no, Michael Noles," which I love, I think he's phenomenal. Matt Walsh plays a very important role with his attitude and personality that's attractive. The way he talks, there's something there. - His documentaries are cute. Jordan Peterson, I hope he's doing better with the family things that he's gonna, you guys got a couple of other people there as well. But how would you respond to that? How would you respond to that? - I mean, listen, for the vast majority of the early days of the business, I was not an operator of the business, right? Jeremy and Caleb were the co-seos of the business for the entire foundational period of the business from 2015 up until about 2025. And Caleb was still the CEO when Jeremy was moved out. - You prefer that, not being in the operational state. - I mean, I'm down here in Florida and the business is located up in Nashville. - Absolutely, I mean, on a lifestyle level, absolutely. I'd much rather go and do my show, think about the issues that I actually care about, not have to worry about the marketing strategy or the budgets or how we deal with the outstanding lenders or any of that kind of stuff. I don't want to do any of that. If I had wanted to do that, I could have. I went to Harvard Law School. I was the executive vice president of a major company when I was 26 years old. Like, I can do that if I want it. I really do not want to do that. And so there's always this kind of bizarre divide where I've not been in a managing position. I don't have a management position with the company. I'm on the board. - When was the time you had it? - I never had it. - You never had it. I was not president. I was not vice president. I was not executive. I was never executive. - I was intentional. I just want to be a talent. - Yes, and that doesn't mean I didn't have 30,000 foot input I did. But I was routinely outvoted by the, we had like a three-man kind of majority in terms of the ownership structure. - Do you think that's a standable long term? - I mean, obviously not. I mean, I think that I needed to get more involved, unfortunately, when the business experience troubles. Obviously, that's why you make a change. Business is experiencing no troubles. You know, I could change. That has nothing to do with my personal love for Jeremy as a human. And one thing that, this is true for politics and it's true for business business. It's business on it ain't personal. It's not personal. I can love people. I can like people. That's irrelevant to whether the bottom line is coming and whether the bottom line needs to come in or whether the decisions are being made that allow for the possibility of future success. That is not the same thing. And again, that's true for politics too. I find that a lot of the people who are very angry at me in the political sphere, like, well, I thought we were friends. I thought we were friends. Well, I'm not criticizing you for being, you know, on a friendship level or on a personal level. I'm criticizing the things you're saying publicly 'cause that's literally our job. And so that's true in business and it's true in politics and politics is closer to business for me than it is to friendship or personal relationship. - What would you score yourself if you're comfortable even talking about this? 'Cause based on what you just said, right, I didn't even think about asking you this. How good would you say you are in building relationships with others in the space? - On a personal level, I think. - Personal level. - On a personal level, I think that it depends who we are talking about. And I would say that, like to tell you, Charlie Kirk ridiculous how the guy was at a relationship. - Right, so it's ridiculous. So I'm talking that where you know what, I would say, you and a fire, he played that role. - I would say good not great. - Good not great. - Good not great. - Intentional, you don't wanna do it. It's not natural, no untrust. - I'll put it this way. Nobody, it's very funny to say this, but Candace actually said this when she left. I had never had a cross conversation with Candace ever. Okay, when she left. - Cross means you guys never had a fallen out. - No, we never had a bad conversation where we're yelling at each other or really going at each other or anything like that. The same is true for people like Brett Cooper who said publicly this at the time, right? I'm actually, personally, I get along fine with people. In some cases, I get along great with people, but business is business and friendship is friendship and they're not quite the same thing. And so what Charlie was really good at was kind of combining the two. So a huge number of people felt that they were Charlie's closest friend. I never said that I was because again, I was not. Because that's not how I have an actual family with actually five kids and I have two sisters who live nearby and I have my parents and my in-laws who live nearby and I have actual friends that I go out to dinner with. If you think it's something you ought to make that adjustment and see yourself as a powerhouse dad for the sake of the conservative movement, there needs to be more relationships instead of just transactional or just business being done. - I mean, probably, yeah, probably. The answer there is probably yes. Because again, you asked about blind spots. This is a peculiar blind spot of mine. So I don't even understand why you'd want to do that. Like, I don't know about you. The people that I hang out with when I'm not at work, it's a different set of people than when I'm at work. I think that that may be unusual. - You're assuming everybody's wired like you, they're not. - Right, exactly. - I'm not lying to you. - No, no, listen, trust me, I've screwed this up many times. So the part I'm bringing to you is, is I'm wondering what needs to happen next? Because, you know, if you talk to Tucker, like I wonder, you know how Megan Kelly all of a sudden made a shift. - Yes. - Because when something happened to Charlie, I came out and I said, the person that I think can unify is a Megan. Because Megan was kind of like the. - She's getting along with everybody. And Megan is very French. - And respect it and respect it. Like everybody's like, that's Megan Kelly. That's Megan Kelly. And Megan is fair, like she'll call our Trump, but she'll also come out. And in all of a sudden, it's like, well, if there was two people who were gonna be in her ear, you and Tucker post Charlie, if she talks to you, goes one direction. If she talks to Tucker, goes a different direction. Do you think she sided with Tucker because Tucker's better at building the relationships than you? I think she sided with Tucker because I think that she, for whatever reason, did not want to alienate people who are saying terrible things. And again, this is one area where I think our standards are different. I think that for Megan, a lot of politics seems to be relational. And for me, politics, again, is principled-driven. And so the critique that I had of Megan was that she was allowing the personal relationships with some people to trump the truth and basic decency. That was the critique that I leveled at her. I said like, why, like, I don't even understand any idea that you can't say that your friend who happens to be a public figure saying public things that what they're saying is wrong and bad. Do you, do you ever before call on out somebody that's one of your peers call them and say, hey, I'm gonna say this, you're probably not gonna like it, but I'm giving you a warning. Yes, you do that. Yes, is that common? Yes. Did you do that with Megan before you hit the stage? Yes. So you told her you're gonna call her out on-- I said, if you ask me questions about Tucker Carlson or about any of these topics, I'm gonna have to say what I think. No, no, no, when you went on stage to give the talk, did you tell her to make you say? No, no, no, no, but not before TPU SA, because we already have this conversation behind the scenes on, I mean, it was like two weeks before when she had said it. And then I didn't say anything differently on the stage of TPU SA, then I had said, right in front of her on stage, in front of an audience, where again, like, we went there because we have a good relationship or had a good relationship. I mean, she openly talks about the fact that I helped restart her career when she was, you know, on the outs with the network after she got fired from ABC. And she came to our, like, and like, none of this is personal animus. None of this is personal animus. They, well, I know, but they do. They think this. So Megan will think that it's like, I have personal animus for Megan, which is why I'm critical of Megan. Megan is a public figure. It is very difficult in the public figure space. And I don't think it's correct to have a stance in the public figure space that if the public figure is your friend and does something wrong, that they are somehow immune to criticism. I think that that is a bad way to do public figuring, shall we say, in the political space. Maybe there's an element of etiquette of how to do it. Um, I mean, I think there is an element. Well, I mean, the element of etiquette that I've applied and I try to apply to literally everyone I've done in here today is I don't attribute motivation. I'm just characterizing your public view. And I'm saying what you are doing is, is, is, in saying is wrong. But I'm not attributing motivation. I'm not saying you're doing it because you're evil. I will, I might say that what you're doing is evil. I think that it is evil. What can a so-and-so is done to Charlie Kirk's family. I think it's an evil thing to do. But I'm not going to get into, like, why I think she's doing it because I'm not a psychiatrist. No, I get that. But to me, you know, I'm wondering, one of the things that a synergist is very well at is building relationships. And you can have another guy who is brilliant, has read 100 books more than 100 times more. Like, I don't, how many books do you think Trump's read on his lifetime? What do you think the number speculates? Do you think he's finished a thousand books? No. Do you think he's finished a hundred books cover to cover? Probably. Maybe give or take. He's probably an article guy, Wall Street Journal. That's right, yeah. Okay. But my god, he's good at relationships. He is amazing in a real way. That's the point. Again, I feel like I'm in a bit of a different industry than everybody else in this sense. Meaning, what is my job? Is my job to, quote unquote, build relationships toward a political end, right? Charlie was two things, right, at once. And he was good at both of these things. But I think they actually are very difficult to both handle at once, which is what made Charlie unique. And also, I think, was going to lead to some internecine warfare inside the conservative movement which had already started to happen, obviously. He was very good at being principled speaker on college campus, which is very similar to what I was doing years before. And he was great at it. And the other thing that he was great at was the sort of relationship building. And what that meant was that very often he was texting to totally conflicting things, to two totally different people at the same time. Such as. I mean, if you see some of the texts that Candace has been releasing about, like what Charlie and Candace were saying about, for example, Daily Wire, I mean, Charlie texted with us too. And I don't release private texts. But I can say that he was not saying the same thing to everybody at the same time that was entirely identical. And so that's one way that you presumably build relationships is by telling people what they want to hear and a wide variety of circumstances. And again, that's what you do if you're a coalition builder. Charlie was on the one hand a coalition builder. I'm not begrudging him that. That's just a reality. That's what TPSA was. It was a coalition, right? But at the same time. If you got into this the way that I did because you are less interested in quote-unquote the coalition building than you are in What the coalition is built around Right saying true things like there are certain hard, maybe there's a blind spot for me There are certain bright lines I will not cross and one of those bright lines. I will not lie I won't do it and I'm not going to lie to I'm not gonna tell people that I agree with their positions when I don't agree with their positions And I'm not going to hide the ball when someone very publicly takes a stance that I think is wrong Just because I happen to you know be friendly with that person like that's that that Usually I'll give them a heads up that that's going to happen particularly if we're about to you know be on stage together Which is what happened with with with Megan, but you know like This kind of bizarre notion that has taken hold that Actors in the public space whose job it is to comment on each other's views and to steer a movement in a particular direction That you owe it to somebody before you give a normal basic political critique of their position to call them and Explain to them these things that changes nothing I just don't I find that unconvincing by the way I'm not offended when people do it to me people attack me all the time on a political level I've never once said why didn't you text me first? That is not I don't think but I think that's your personality I don't think it bothers you a second. It does not bother me one I and I believe you that I don't think it bothers you I don't give any shit about it because that's your personality and also because and also because again I am not looking for love here. What's your long term vision? What is your long term vision? I mean my long-term. Yeah, what's your long-term? My long-term vision is to continue to grow daily wire to the point where with it's a plethora of visions because again They're major disagreements inside our company right? I mean like I disagree with nobles. I disagree with Walsh We disagree with each other like this happens all the time to continue to grow the company to take on larger projects to push points of view that I think are within the conservative over-ten window and that are true And and to try to grow our constituency now. This is why I think I'm gonna take a critique well I think you're right. I think I need to spend more time on the intro personal of it because that's just not the kind of person I am I think that I'm a weird introvert extrovert Like if you give me a choice between I can go to a dinner party with a bunch of politicos and I can spend time with my family at home That is not even a that is not even a question. I've minimized travel because of it. It like I There's very little in life that I that I would like to do less and go to a political dinner party in Washington DC I despise it, but maybe I need to do that. Do you see yourself as When I'm saying vision long term is your vision long term purely as a capitalist running a business as that Do you have any aspirations doing doing anything with politics? I know you've addressed as many like running for office or something I think I'd be a horrible political candidate, so probably not I mean like the I could see a circumstance in which I would feel compelled to do it But I would hate it beyond measure because it involves all the things that we're talking about saying different things to different audiences Going out and you know trying to get donors to give money to you All those aspects don't appeal to me in the slightest and so, you know I would despise that and frankly I don't think that I'd be incredibly good at it I think I'd be great on a debate stage and pretty much everything and I give a good stump speech and that'd be pretty much it right like in terms of I'm good in a photo line, I suppose, you know like But you know as far as kind of the the kind of you know The kind of pressing of the flash and the and the back room dealings and all that kind of When you pray when you talk to you know when you're praying do you think Do you see the relationship as a responsibility that God is using you at a time where You're living in a country that's going through a very interesting time that you got the DSA that's making a ton of momentum You got communism that in a way is making a comeback. You got the Republican side that's a little bit fractured Although mag has got 410 million dollars put up in their campaign and the other side doesn't have anything Democrats are really going through it The DNC right now stands for do not contribute because you know a lot of these rich don't want to give I'm sure you saw that article, but do you see yourself that You know God is using you as a vessel is that at all a way you see it or no? I mean, I think that God uses everybody as a vessel No specifically you it's different not everybody because you're a heavyweight. You're not specifically me so I have prayed every day since I was about 13 years old my there's a so there's when when your orthodox you say a Silent prayer called the call the Amida or because oh made means to stand so you're standing when you say this prayer or the Shimonah's right and at the very end there's kind of a section so Jewish prayer is very programmatic So it's it's all kind of written out and it's in a book and you you say it But there's a section where you can kind of insert your own prayer at the very end of Shimonah's right and the thing that I've said every day since I was 13 is God let me fulfill my potential in every way That's what I'm here to do so you know, I'm grateful to God that I have the opportunity to speak to so many people I take it very seriously and that's probably why I take the truth very seriously now if the idea you know and this I see the argument The argument being okay, well if there's a balance between maximizing audience and saying 80% of the truth versus having a smaller audience is saying 100% of the truth What do you do you know for me? I would rather say 100% of the truth in the hope that you know again because I'm not running for office This is why I would hate running for office because I don't think that you can probably win saying 100% of the truth I think that there's a lot of fudzing and a lot of fibbing and a lot of gamesmanship It's not something that I would particularly like was a last time you spoke to Tucker Probably at Charlie's memorial service. What was it exchange like so that day I was on Fox that morning because I was at the memorial service And got a call from the VP's office that he he asked me to to be in the box the luxury box That was next door to the president's luxury box and so obviously in the VPS you do something like that you do it So I was there Tucker was there It's friendly. It's fine. And we talked about him hunting. We talked a little bit about kind of Charlie He's a phenomenal 101. He's off tremendous phenomenal relationship, tremendous tremendous one-on-one Excellent one-on-one. Absolutely. Yeah, so so I'm sure you saw the tweet that they posted I think Marjorie Taylor Green posted first with the picture of them at the house in Maine and it was I think it was Joe Kent Thomas Massey Thomas Massey Joe Kent and TG and some for his spouses yet, right and then Tucker said MAGA was betrayed. We all were. It's time for a new path forward more tomorrow night 6 p.m. What what what do you think we're going to get with Tucker next? You know, he's not about a political party. I think it's very unlikely that he's going to launch a full-scale political party The the reason that I think that's unlikely is because That requires a certain amount of time and effort that I don't think that Tucker is probably willing to put into it and third parties have a pretty negative history in the country in terms of electoral success I think he's probably going to launch is some sort of you know They call it DSA light for the right and sort of in an internal an internal, you know horse shoe right Movement that tries to nominate say primary candidates in particular districts That tries to sound off in loud ways in in the primaries I mean that that that'd be the smartest thing for him to do for sure Not that I want to give him advice, but do you think there's anything any chance that he runs because they're saying right now that They feel JD Vance has been compromised. I think this is very very unlikely and I think he runs. I think it's extremely unlikely Yeah, apparently they're saying they went there to convince him to run because they think it was supposed to be JD And now they don't trust JD because they think JD's been compromised with the Iran I mean all of us if that's if that's what JD Vance gets for all of his loyalty to Tucker Carlson that'd be kind of astonishing I mean come on I mean the the fact is the vice president obvious has very close relationship with Tucker Carlson You know, it's his prerogative in his son used to work for him right? Yeah, Buckley was in was in his office. I mean I have nothing against Buckley. I've heard he's a nice guy So yeah, the that relationship is obviously quite close So I'd be quite shocked if Tucker were to turn around and then stab JD right in the back that way I think that'd be bizarre. Did you read the book regime change? I didn't I saw some of the excerpts of it. It's actually pretty interesting. Yeah, it looked like it was well reported Yeah, it was actually very interesting, you know, Jonathan's a good reporter. Yeah, I know a lot of people are pissed that when I say stuff like that Jonathan happens to be a good reporter. It was actually I couldn't put it down because you you heard so many Stories of one point when Trump was trying to get a message across to Maduro apparently they use Tucker To try to find a way to get there because Tucker had an in with Maduro and yeah, I mean again Like do I think these are good ideas? I think they're very not good ideas and I've said that openly to the vice president Not to the vice president himself because you know the vice president and I you know We're not like texting buddies, but people on his name. I've said I've said this openly. I mean again Everything that I've said privately. I've also said publicly and vice versa And so when when I say to the vice president that I think that a bad way to build a coalition is to build it around 6% of the of the American body politic which is precisely where the polls have Tucker Carlson's kind of peculiar viewpoints It's a move I suppose. I don't think it's a wise move. I think I know the logic that's sort of driving it Which is he's hoping to duplicate president Trump's coalition But president Trump the biggest mistake you can make in politics and electoral politics is assuming you can just pick up the other guy's coalition It doesn't work that way you got to build your own Trump's coalition is unique his Trump is unique some would say he is doing that. Uh, he's not successfully Well, whether it's successful or not. He's definitely trying to do that So you know he is you know when they say the leading indicator lagging indicator some of the positions he's taking how he went up against Trump And you know, it's Trump's bad and at first he started kind of slow and it was like I never say anything about Trump All I'm saying is this I'm never and then now it's very in the open. Yes, that is he's no longer holding it He's no longer holding back so he's probably The biggest conservative that's going after the guy he helped to say the promises were in kept and I think I think that's Incredibly like tactically it's very smart Okay, the the reality is that if you're going to launch a political movement launching it in opposition to the current party is quite successful It's a very successful strategy Trump did it in 2016, right? Trump ran against the Republican Party and then he ran against the Democratic Party. Barack Obama in 2008 basically ran against the Democratic Party and then he ran against the Republicans. I think that's what the DSA is doing now. The running against the Democratic Party, like running against whatever is status quo is always a highly lucrative political strategy. So again, I don't think it's stupid what Tucker is doing. I think that that picture is kind of full areas because Tucker's sitting there like Al Pacino and the devil's advocate and obviously they stole the chandelier from Gaston's hub and beauty and the bees. But again, the sort of blue collar cosplay from somebody's silver spoon is Tucker. I always find amusing. But apparently people like it. So, you know, devil's advocate, great movie. What beauty the bees? You've seen devil's advocate, no. I don't have you. It is. Of course I've seen it. Yeah. That's why there's by the reference. Yeah. So, so 2028, who do you like? You got Vance. You got Rubio. You got some outside or something? I think it is very unlikely that Vance does not become the nominee. I think it's very unlikely. I mean, he's, unless the president withdraws his tacit endorsement of JD and his vice president, the notion that somebody's going to run from the outside and, you know, be able to overtake JD in the primaries. I think that's probably a pipe dream. Again, I have nothing against JD Vance on a personal level. I disagree with some of the political stances that he's taken. I encourage him to take different political stances openly and privately. He disagrees with me a lot of the time. That's his prerocative, right? That's a free country. The biggest thing about JD is that I don't think winning the primaries. I think he's going to have some real trouble in the general. And I think that that is, I think that that is because if you look at Donald Trump's election in 2024, the right likes to tell ourselves that Donald Trump won this broad sweeping election in 2024. That was not a broad sweeping victory. That was a fairly narrow victory by historical standards. He won the swing states by a relatively limited number of votes. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. He pulled out Arizona, he pulled out Georgia, and he pulled out North Carolina. Okay. Please name the group that JD Vance will overperform with versus Donald Trump. I do not think there is a single group that you can name in American politics with which you will overperform Trump. And after building a different coalition, I could have a theory of the case. For example, with Marco Rubio that he would lose certain Trump voters in certain areas, but gain voters for himself in other areas. So it's taken obvious example. I think he could outperform Trump with Hispanics. I think that Rubio could recently outperform Trump from women. Yeah. Right. Like is JD Vance going to outperform Trump with Hispanics? No way. Is he going to outperform Trump with women? I don't think so. Is he going to outperform Trump with blue collar voters, which is sort of his bread and butter? I don't think it's possible to outperform Trump with blue collar voters. And so independent, libertarian. I think there are two libertarians in all of America. The libertarianism is the biggest myth in American politics. It's just, you don't think some of these libertarians would get behind JD. You don't think the Dave Smiths. You don't think some of these guys. You don't think Rogan would get behind JD? I think that it is far less likely that Rogan would get behind JD than that he gets behind the Democrat as long as not Gavin Newsom. You think a Theo Vaughan would inside with a, I think Theo Vaughan would. I think that that, but I'm not sure that that's a huge. Theo Vaughan already went for Trump is sort of my point. You're going for a base that you already got. And so if you're going to expand your voting base, but he's stepping away from it. So you got Theo's that's a little bit against Trump's position. Right. Right. Well, this is the difficulty for, this is also the difficulty for JD, right? Because JD is both running against Trump and running with Trump. That's an unavailable political position for him. And so, is there any outsider that you think about? Is there anybody that's an outsider that stands a chance in a general or in a primary? I primary first in a primary. I find it very difficult to believe that somebody is going to overtake JD. Really? Yeah. I think JD is a prohibitive favorite. You buy any those stories that Rubia may not even run. Yes. You believe that. Yes. Why do you believe that? Because I think that the Secretary of State, again, he may well run, but I think it is unlikely in my own personal perspective, because if you look at his political history, he's a pretty risk of his politician. So if you're, if you're Marco and you're looking at sort of the gaming out what the next few years look like for you, here are your choices. You run against JD. You lose. You're done. You run against JD. You win. It's a rough election cycle anyway, because the president's riding in the thirties and the country is in the mood for a quote-unquote something new. And you lose. You're done. You don't run. JD may pick you as his VP candidate. JD loses. You're next. JD does not pick you and JD loses. You're also next. So if you're sort of doing a prisoner's dilemma here, you know, a game theory prisoner's dilemma, I think that the prisoner's dilemma suggests that Rubia will probably not run out of risk aversion. That would be a shame if that happens. I mean, I agree. I would like to see an open and robust debate on the stage between all these various positions where people are actually held to account for their positions, because I prefer clarity. Cal, she's got the santa stirred. Who do they have next? Is there anybody else after the santa? The santa is all the way down to 4.6. Yeah, 4.6. And Donald Trump, he's not running on over 3.5. Right. And they're back to Trump, who constitutionally cannot run. So funny. I'm here to announce my two weeks ago. So funny. So, okay. So the santa is no chance. You think this is a Rubio JD thing? And a lot can happen. It's still early. But again, if I were going to put my money on it, if I were in the calcium market, I put my money on Vance. Have you guys ever had them on? Have you ever sat down with them at the daily wire? So, again, the last time I talked with Vice President was at Charlie's memorial. I've invited him many times. He's been on with a bunch of our other hosts. I don't know if it's reticence or if it's just failure of scheduling, but we've invited him on many times. So you would like to have him on? You'd like to. Okay. And he's not done it yet. No. What do you think? I mean, I perhaps he suspects that I might ask him a tough question or two about his run. Huh? Interesting. Interesting. And then on the left, what do you think will be on the left? Primary? You think AOC is a real thing? You think that way? Yeah, I think she's a real thing. I think she's going to have some difficulty with the with the black voting base in the Democratic Party. I think one of the mistakes that black voting base. Yeah, she she she does not outperform. Like most other DSA candidates, because she's basically DSA. Sure. Far left progressive candidates do not tend to do very well with the black voting base of the Democratic primary. Why is that? I think that's because black Democrats are kind of traditional Democrats, meaning they want bigger government, but they definitely are not interested in abolish the police, abolish ICE, open borders, trans the kids. Like I don't think that that black voters are typically very much invested in that. I mean, you saw this in South Carolina, right? Bernie ran. He won New Hampshire. He did well and he won in Iowa. And then he got to South Carolina. The entire party mobilized and you had a dead man as the nominee in 2020 because James Clyburn stepped up and said like, guys, we represent almost 60% of the primary voting electorate in South Carolina. Black voters come on out and vote for Joe, right? So I think that that's going to be a problem for AOC. The rejiggering of the schedule is going to be kind of interesting because they've now moved South Carolina up, which gives it disproportionate weight in the process. Obviously it goes, I think South Carolina and then Nevada. So they're eliminating Iowa, New Hampshire as their first couple of states. They just did that. Yeah, they just did this. I think because they are because they understand that the black voting base is so vital for the Democratic party. They wanted to have sort of an outsized impact in the early states before you get the because Iowa and New Hampshire, you know, those are states that are kind of up for grabs, but kind of not. And also they're very small electoral college states. And so, you know, when you when you look at the sort of way that the calendar is constructed, if you want to know why Kamala Harris is still sniffing out 2028, that's the reason she's figuring that she will outperform in South Carolina. She's the black candidate. We'll vote for her before. Why not actually like go and make that run in South Carolina, because she's almost guaranteed to win South Carolina unless there's a candidate like say a Westmore or something who comes out of Maryland and a similar competitive with the black vote. Do you think Newsom is done done? I don't think he's done done, but I think that peaking to early is a real thing. I mean, there have been, you know, a number of candidates. Like if you go back to like 2012, I think it was like Tim Pawlenty was one of the early candidates. People, ah, Tim Pawlenty, you'll be a thing. Not Walker. It's got Walker. It was a big thing, right? You remember in the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris was a thing in 2020, right? She flamed out. So, you know, I think that when you start to get like all the headlines this early, it's very difficult to sustain that momentum for that amount of time. The thing for AOC is that AOC is going to lock up about one third of the Democratic Party voting base if she decides to run, right? That takes one third basically off the table, minimum. Um, and so. So it's an automatic VP position if she wanted it. Uh, you need her as a VP. Uh, maybe, I mean, I think so. First of all, I don't think VP's tend to matter very much in terms of general elections. People didn't vote for Trump because JD was the VP and they didn't vote. You don't think he won because of Pence? Uh, Pence is the goat. You think Pence is the reason why Trump won in 16. I do not think that the Pence is the reason why Trump won 16. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Uh, so again, I don't think JD played a good role when he talked to. He did a great job with one. He did that. Yeah, the reason he went, I think the reality is that again, Trump, I think, could have picked, you know, anybody out of a line up and probably won that election with this. 24 was a magical year. It was what it was about. Okay. So another article from political couple days ago, GOP staffers say the party has a grouper problem. So grouper problem, you know, we're talking about Fuentes. So yeah, polling shows that the overwhelming majority of young conservatives reject anti-Semitic views. Though their support for Israel has dropped significantly from their prior generations, they also are more skeptical of military intervention than forebears, the oldest members of the Gen Z cohort were toddlers on 9/11 grew up in a era of multi-decade multi-trillion dollar awards and found themselves unable to afford homes as they reached all adulthood, many come up their mistrust of GOP or orthodoxy, honestly. So do you think there is a grouper problem on the right? I mean, obviously, you know, Nick has built himself a nice sized audience. And I think that there, that a lot of these sort of, you know, edgy half-comedy, half-not-comedy stuff that he's doing has traffic. I mean, transgressive, transgressive politics is always attractive to young people. Whether it's Hassan Piker saying he loves Mao on the left or whether it's Fuentes saying he loves Hitler on the right, kind of violating the rules is always sexy to people. people. And so, it kind of be speaks authenticity or be speaks humor or whatever it is. So, yeah, I think that there's a legitimate issue with people who believe some of the things in. Because, at a certain point, and you see this with the DSA left, the same way you're seeing with the gripper, right? It's all joking until it's not joking. Right? Like, you joke about Hitler, you joke about it at a certain point, you're like, am I really joking about Hitler? Or was he really kind of okay? Like, was he really kind of an OG? Or was he not? Right? I think he's just joking, he's just joking. No, I don't think that Flint says is joking. I think that he likes to use humor as a cover for the fact that he is not joking, actually. I think that his belief system is, you know, I'll grant him the courtesy of sincerity. I think he's sincere in his belief systems. I think he's wrong. But I think that I think that's what he says is quite morally terrible. But I think that he comes by it honestly. You work with him. I did not. Did he work? What was the relationship with you guys back in the days? I know he came up. I asked him the question. So he has this whole like weird villain origin story that he's come up with with regard to his rise and daily wire and all this. I'll be honest with you. I don't remember pretty much any of this because this was not important to me at any point of my life. So this is like the only thing I remember is that Cassie Dylan, now Cassie Akiva, was friends with Flint as I believe, and she texted me a debate that Flint has had done. I think he was a, he was a BU at the time, on immigration. And it was, and he did tremendous job because Nick is a smart guy. Like he, he's, again, I think what he believes is quite terrible. But he has, he has my cue. And so I had daily wire cover that debate because he did, it was an immigration debate. And then I was following him on Twitter or what the story was. Some tweet of his came up where he was basically accusing anybody who's pro-Israel of dual loyalty. And I said, that's an anti-Semitic trope that everybody who supports Israel is loyal to the state of Israel over the United States or is more loyal or as loyal to Israel as to the United States. And he uses that, I guess, now as sort of like, and that's when I decided that I had to go, you know, don the dark cape. And it's like, well, first of all, that's, that's oddly illogical. If the, I, if the, I struggle to find a position that I think is evil or if somebody called me that thing, I'd become more of it. So I've been labeled alt-right a thousand times wrongly because the alt-right despises me and hates me and, and it's significant portion of my death threats come from the alt-right. At no point have I said, okay, well, the left called me alt-right, so I'm going to do it. The left, the left, like, if my critique of, of Nick was back whenever it was, when I tweeted that, that he was engaging in anti-Semitism. And his response was Hitler was in OG. Number one was I wrong. And number two, why would that drive you to that? I'm confused. Right? There's literally no political position that, that I find despicable, that you could force me to take simply out of oppositionality. Like, that's not, that's a weird thing. That's a very, weird thing. So again, I think that that, you know, from my perspective, I don't, that's literally all I recall of any of this. You know, you'll have to ask Cassie about it because Cassie probably recalls more. But the idea that he was ever like an intern with us, or he was slated for a job with us, or that he was going to, none of that's true. How much of what you're seeing his recreation as he's going through the space, right? He wrote. And then first guy that kind of went up against Israel. And a lot of people followed his lead. And then now he's like, well, I'm going to vote Democrat. No, we got to vote Republican. What do you think he's solving for? I had him on here. I actually enjoy talking to the guy. He's a smart guy, like you said. It's not somebody that's not smart. Yeah. And he's funny. He's entertaining. He's got. Of course, he's a super, he's a, he's a very funny broadcaster for sure. Again, lots of people I disagree with and think are terrible, are funny at their jobs. So what is he gaming for? He's gaming for personal loyalty. One of the great tragedies of my political life is the recognition that people don't follow ideas. They follow people. It makes me very sad because I'm not a kind of person who wants that, right? I mean, this guy and goes back to blind spots. Yeah, I've always thought that I'm grateful for my position because I get to espouse ideas that I care about. But the idea that people are like Ben Shapiro stands. They love Ben Shapiro. This has never been a motivating factor for me. Nor do I think that like if I say something wrong, I'm fine with people calling me out on it. And also, like when people come up to me, they say, I love you, but I disagree with a lot of what you say. I like, cool. Like that's, like, I'm glad that you, I'm glad. I prefer you agree with everything I say and not love me as much. I actually care about the positions. I think for Nick, when you're trying to build a movement, which is clearly what he's tried to do, the unpredictability and the loyalty tests of it, like, I'm going left. No, I'm going right. No, I'm going this way. No, I'm going that way. Follow me around. Like that, that is all part of the game. I think that's true for Tucker too. I think it's true for a lot of these people. Like the more you can get people to buy into mutually contradictory assertions in loyalty to you, the more loyal they are. I'm very internally coherent in my politics. So I'm never going to ask you to buy into two propositions that contradict one another and prove your loyal to me, to me by doing so. Are you surprised that him and Tucker are not more united? Well, I mean, I think that that's a business thing. Meaning, I think that I think that Tucker largely probably agrees with Flint has. And I think Flint has would probably think that too. I think that Flint has was sort of taken aback by the fact that he went there and Tucker treated him really well and basically hugged him on a show. And the next thing you know, Tucker was sort of disassociating from him because he realized that it was bad business to be associated with Flint has. So you know, that whole kind of two step is, I don't understand. You think that little guy Tucker admires Nick for him to be a little bit more free to say whatever he wants to say doesn't give a shit about making money. It's just kind of like saying whatever's on his mind. Well, I mean, I think that to a certain extent, Tucker thinks that Flint has is going to drink his milkshake. So you think Flint is eventually going to come inside with him. Well, Tucker thinks Nick is going to join. No, the opposite. I think that that Tucker is deeply afraid that Nick is going to is going to drink his milkshake that he's going to take his audience. I got it. That he sees him in a competitive space. And that's why he he's constantly doing the like, I'm patting you on the head. No, I don't want to see you again. I'm going to pat you on the head. No, you're a gay little FBI fat. I can't do that to Nick. Right. Nick is not that guy. I don't agree, by the way. No, Nick is not that guy. Nick is there's some guys that are, you know, they have the street thought gangster sight to them that they don't they understand that part. They don't need flattery. I don't think Nick's part of the flattery camp. I think that may work with certain people. I don't think that's going to agree with that. Yeah. So okay. So what role you think he's going to play in 28? Not much. I mean, I think he'll play a role in so far as the GOP refuses to distance itself from people. I think he'll be used as a weapon for sure. I mean, this is like politics works, right? I mean, like Hassan Piker campaigning with the Democrats is a weapon for Republicans. Sure. And refusal to disavow people or to, or to, you know, say that you don't want the support of people who openly stand Hitler. I don't think that ends well for people typically speaking. And I think that the mistake, again, that the vice president is making with, you know, the Tucker of it or with the, you know, who can them flantas? He won't condemn Tucker. I think that's a very difficult line to draw to a certain extent. Backfired when he, you know, criticized the fointess. Yes. And so I think that, you know, you remember what he said? What? The shit? Yeah, yeah. And, but he sort of, he sort of had to, but the problem is that you can't play that game and then be like, that was a bad move on the VP on us. Well, I mean, if you're going to do it, do it, man. What I mean by that is if you're going to condemn flantas, then condemn everybody who holds that point of view. Right. I'll do that. Like one foot out the VP. I understand. But I don't, game, but, but if you're in the, but, but again, I don't think that that's the audience he needs to, okay. So let me construct an alternative JD Vance. Okay. Here's the alternative JD Vance that I would recommend the Vice President pursue. Okay. So if I were JD Vance and I were somebody who has a blue color appeal because, you know, I go back to Atlanta and all of that. Here's where I would not be aiming. I would not be aiming at the flantas Tucker Catholic integralist crowd. That's not where I would be aiming because that's a very small percentage of the population. I would be the version of JD Vance that you saw on stage with Tim Walls. Politically moderate. Kind of a ventular kind. A person who loves wife and kids. I put them in all my pictures. I would be, I'd be talking in friendly terms about what I plan to do for you. I would be significantly less kind of ascorbic and dyspeptic about my politics. It's sort of kind of sour face that you see on JD sometimes. And I would be attempting to reach out to, he could do better with women than Trump. It's possible. But he needs to actually like make that move. He could do better with, say, college educated than Trump, right? Trump did not do well with college educated JD is a Yale law school graduate. It was very smart. He could be reaching out to that crowd by making, you know, kind of more intellectually more intellectual appeals. Instead, he's sort of trying to drive home the blue columnist of him. But the blue collar voters are likely to vote for JD anyway. That's your home base. Like, so again, I think that there is a way that he could be running and he's choosing not to run that way. I think that's a foolish strategy. What's more likely to happen? A sit down with you on Tucker or sit down with you and Nick? I mean, neither is particularly likely, I would imagine. The Tucker, I've offered a thousand times, you know, open invite. Nick is a bit of a different story. And the reason that Nick is a bit of a different story is because Nick's entire mode, and listen, I admire it. I think even sometimes get a bizarre kick out of it. But Nick's entire mode is he's a comedian. And Nick is a is a comedian masquerading as a as a political pundit. He has political views, but in essence, he's a comedian. And you can't really have an honest political conversation with a comedian. It'd be more like interviewing Dave Chappelle or something, but like Nazi Dave Chappelle. Meaning what does Nick believe? What does he not believe? I don't know. I mean, it depends on what's funny at the moment. And so trying to you don't think he has core beliefs? No, I mean, I do think that he has core beliefs, but I think that one of the tactics that he uses to avoid being pinned down on his core beliefs is diffusing with humor. And I think that when you try to pin him down with that, then the idea is that you're an uncool person for even asking him to pin down on that sort of thing. And so there's no sort of honest conversation that can be had about like, what are your core beliefs? And are they right or are they wrong? Because that's that's not what he does. I think when he's asked a tough question, then he immediately reverts to the sort of 17 year old humor that listen, people can find it transgressively funny. I on occasion find it transgressively funny. But that is not an honest conversation about his politics or his principles. And I don't think That's probably in the offing I think he's different when he He's on the mic and on the screen talking, him and the camera like this versus 101. - Well, I think very different one. - Listen, also obviously his insensitive structure, if we were to sit down together, would be to get the own Shapiro moment, right? And then blow it up all over the internet. Clearly. - Would you ever have them on? - Would I ever have them on? If he were, I would, the answer is no, I think. But the reason I'm hesitating is because if I got the impression that he were willing to have like an actual serious sit down conversation without all of the, you know, now I'm just gonna call you a Jew for the shits and giggles of it so that the audience goes crazy. Like I'm just, I'm not interested in that. - Why not? - Why am I not interested in having on somebody who just calls me a Jew for the shits and giggles of it? - I actually don't think he'll do that. - I mean, I actually don't think he'll do that. - So it's, I mean, listen, if you could convince me of that, then I would do it. - Yeah, I don't think he would do that. - Or the, you know. - I think it would be a real good debate and it would be a good conversation. And I think a lot of the youth would sit there and say, good forebend for having them on. It would be what a lot of people would never see coming. And I think you would be more surprised on how he is one-on-one. By the way, just so you know. - I mean, again, from the day he's been on my path. - I'm sure he's a very nice guy. - No one on one. - From the day he was here with me, the interview. Till today, him and I haven't spoken at all. - Yeah. - So it's not like a date conversation. - Of course. - Anything like that. I just think it would be a good conversation to have him. And, you know, selfishly, I would also like to see you in Tucker sitting down. You on his or him on yours. - And again. - I've often talked about that about a thousand times. - I've seen that. - And I really doubt that's going to happen. Again, I think that there's a misalignment of incentives. I think that, you know, Nick, let's put this way, Nick does not want to be pinned down on his ideological beliefs with data or with counterargument that is serious. And so his incentive structure very strongly would be to sort of do the Pierce Morgan interview. Right, like if you watch Nick's interview with Pierce Morgan, again, I found it amusing too because Nick's really good at that game. But Pierce is trying to pin him down on his beliefs about the Holocaust and so what Nick does is he immediately launches it into a bunch of jokes about the Holocaust. Well, again, those jokes may be transgressively funny, but that doesn't actually get to the root of the issue. Is everyone smarter for having heard that? I think actually everyone might be stupid or for having heard this. - Yeah, it is. - That's the hard part, right? A certain level of debate requires a level of sincere revelation of your interior beliefs and willing to defend them. If your, if what you're going to do is run away to comedy or to humor or to insult, then that's not worthwhile. It doesn't it doesn't advance the, it doesn't advance the ball. - You know, there's a difference with comedy and there's a difference with rage baiting comments that you know it's going to get onto your skin. I think if, like when I, I was at Amphist and somebody asked me a question, why won't you sit down with Nick? I said, I'm not comfortable with him saying the end word all the time. And I said it from stage. I'm like, I just want you to be respectful. You know, I listen to hip-hop for many years and maybe a little bit too much when I was a kid, but I chose to change and I went a different direction of my life. And then we had a very respectful conversation together. The crowd was funny. Crowd was one of the most talented guys. I know you guys had something that happened many years ago, but I think crowd was super talented. - Of course, of course. - And he's funny as shit like this stuff they used to do back in the days. You're like, who is this guy? You would watch him, you would say super brilliant, but he's also able to do this. - Again, I think it is important for me to say at this point that at no point, this is what's funny is that there's been this conflation. I'm just going to make this point because you're not making it. But I know that how the internet works. I'm not saying that anybody should take away Nick Plentis microphone or anyone else's microphone. Whether I choose to be on a podcast with somebody or not choose to be on a podcast is an aspect of free speech, the same as it is, whether I want to or whether I don't want to. So again, I think there are circumstances under which I would do something like that, but I'd have to believe certain things about how he would approach the thing in order to mean that I would think it's worthwhile. Now other people might think it's worthwhile, right? But they're not me, so, you know. - I think it's a way to get in front of the youth that right now is not getting a platform because they're listening to more than you. So I think sitting down with you, you would get in front of his audience. And if you feel your argument is more logical, his audience is going to say, "You know what, he's actually got a good point." So that would be the biggest thing. If-- - That is definitely the strongest steel manned argument in favor. - Yeah, even if it's a five percent that's reasonable, that's willing to-- - Right, and the strongest steel manned argument again is that it's a setup, right? That's the strongest steel manned argument. - Yeah, but if it's on your territory, there's no risk. You're controlling the territory. - I mean, I don't think that's true because again, I'm honest enough to, I would not slice and dice it, right? And anything would be type to put out. - Yeah, yeah, no, no, listen. I mean, I came to your territory, so I've seen how you guys do things. - I mean, we're so kind with our interviews as you know that we'll say that if somebody says something they feel they didn't articulate properly in the moment, we'll say like, "Go back and articulate it better." We want people to present the best form of their argument. - Yeah, last thing before we wrap up, Florida, both you and I live in Florida. I wonder how you feel about this. Byron Donalds, capable, talented, I've had him on, I like him, runner for governor, doesn't want to do primary. We held the debate here locally with Paul Renner with Jay Collins and James Fishback. And I had no clue who Renner was, by the time it was on, I'm like, "This guy's impressive." I don't know if you know Renner, to speak to the House, to say to Florida, he did very good during the debate. And Byron Donald said, "If anybody hits double digits, I'll do the debate." Now he's not sitting on doing a debate with anybody. And the Florida GOP is ran by Evan, I don't know what his name is, Evan or if I say him correctly, I think his name is I won't say it properly, I'm not trying to disrespect anybody here, but they don't think there needs to be a debate on the primary side. What do you stand with this? - You know, again, President Trump did this too. So my view is-- - President Trump was already a president. - Well, no, actually, even during the first round debates in 2015, 2016, there came a point where he was upfront, and he was like, "I'm not gonna participate." - Oh, but he did a couple of-- - He did a couple of them, yay. - Listen, would I like to see a debate between the Gobernatorial candidates? Sure. Do I think that it's incumbent on Byron Donalds to do it when he's the prohibitive front runner? No. And again, I think that, you know, like-- - So does this agree with you? - I know, I know the governor disagrees with me. - Sure. - But just as a, there's sort of like, what I would like to see in the best of all possible worlds? - Sure, why not? I mean, everybody's running for governor. I'd like to see their opinions. Am I gonna rip on the guy who's probably gonna win anyway? I mean, like, if-- - I'm not rip on him, not rip on him. - No, no, but I mean, am I going to say that he's doing something morally deficient in not debating James Fishback or something like that? Again, if the public feels that way, they won't vote for him. - You know what my feedback on that is? The more you avoid that sit down, the more credibility you give Fishback. The more, you know what it would be? It would be like to say something like, "You're scared that audience, you know the whole flip "of you scared you this." - So this is the other thing. I think that everybody is way too online. Okay, so everybody-- - That's way too what? - Online, yeah. - Okay, so I think that, you know, right now, Fishback in the polls is what? Eight percent, seven percent? - I think Collins is at 14. I don't know what the numbers are. I think Collins at 12, 13, 14 depending on which polls you're looking at. And then Fishback on some is eight, some it's 12. - Okay, so they're way behind, it's not in 12. - They're way behind. So like the idea that like, "Oh my God, we need, "we must hear from the guy who can't draw one tenth "of the other public in America." - Right, so they're both so on at 12, if you use this floor, I don't know what it is. - Right, and I think this is true on the online. - In the online debate sphere too, so I think this is applicable to a lot of the prior conversation. There is this dumb thing that has happened. Call it the Marty McFly and back to the future two thing, which is like, "Come on McFly, you chicken?" Or like, "If you want to debate this person, "it's 'cause you're chicken." It's like, what if I think that the debate is stupid in a waste of time? I mean, that's possible too. - Yeah, but these are, you think debate would poll Collins, who's a lieutenant governor, and-- - Okay, yeah. - Fishback is a, I don't know, I don't know if it's stupid. I think, I think there's a difference. You can make the argument and say, "I don't want to sit down with Pierce Morgan." Okay, great, yeah, I don't want to go on McFly and just, I get it, Tucker, I don't want to talk to Ben Shapiro. We've invited Tucker many times. He has no desire to, no problem. - Exactly. - But when-- - I said that about Tucker. Tucker doesn't want to come on a show that's his right. He does not have to. - When it comes down to a debate of winning over the GOP, this position is unattractive. And I think it's a-- - It's a fair critique, and I think it can bother him one ounce on his way to becoming governor. - I agree, I don't think it's gonna make a difference on that part. This goes back to, maybe your blind spot is idealism and how much you would like to see people talk together. And now I'm being the pragmatist and saying, "Well, he's gonna win anyway, so I get that." - That's why these conversations are good. This is why these conversations are good. But yeah, Ben, great having you on. Is there anything you want to share with you, anything you guys are working on right now project wise? - Well, we have a lot of stuff that's coming. So I'm really excited about what's coming. So we have a movie that we've already announced called "Run Headfight Infidels", which is just a banger. That's coming out at the beginning of September. And the essential premise of it is college campus where an ISIS cell decides to take over the college campus. And it is a full on 1980s style, red dawn toy soldiers kind of shoot him up, starring in Jonathan Majors. - This is Jonathan Majors' movie. - What does it come out? - That comes out, I believe September 16th. - Oh, nice. - That's a month from now. - Yeah, so we are pumped about it. The movie's so, it's fun, it's great. And it's making a-- - Are you excited at all? Do you have a-- - No, it's an actual movie. - Okay, my view of movies is that the people at Daily Wire, typically, there's some exceptions. Should not be in them. I'm a horrible actor. The, we have another movie that I can't announce yet, but that is likely to come out by Black Friday that is a probably most R-studied conservative movie ever made. So that's likely to come out, most anti-communist film ever made for sure, on Black Friday, so we're moving toward that. We have another film that's in production. We have a major host who we cannot announce contractually, but we'll be joining us next year. We're in heavy negotiations with another major host who I hope will get into business with in the near future. All of that stuff that's just coming in the next six months. Plus, of course, we have a Matt Walsh documentary that's in production for next year. We have a couple other documentaries. Yeah, they're phenomenal. We have a project from Michael Moles that's coming. We have some religious content coming for Christmas. So it's like a plethora of content. We're between now and next year. - That's great. Partly, we actually, this was the main consideration when we rebuilt the business, is that we had to have a pipeline. We had to have a pipeline. Say, the main failing of our business, you know, there's a whole different conversation, but the main failing of our business between say, end of 2024, and now is that there was no pipeline. The pipeline was totally dry. And you got to provide people with content they actually want to see, or you're going to start losing audience, losing subscribers. And so that was the thing that we had to cure. We had to clean up a bunch of business issues in order to make that happen, which is why I've seen some of the headlines that you've seen. And I am more confident about the status of our company going forward than probably I've been, maybe since the inception of the company, because of the exciting and awesome pipeline of projects that are coming, so I'm going to, honestly, some of this stuff's going to blow people's socks off. It's really, really good. It's good. It's high quality, it's going to surprise people, and it kind of kicks ass what problems about it. - Well, looking forward to checking all of them out. So if you, is the website dailywire.com? - Yep. - Okay, if you want to learn more guys, go to dailywire.com, Ben. - We really enjoyed it, definitely. Take care. - When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast, we had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscanyter. We chose True Italian Craftsmanship, each paired touch by 50 skill pins. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the future looks by collection. Rather intentional, luxurious, timeless.