Tucker's Demons, Vance's Failure, and America's Spiritual War | Ep. 46 w/ Rod Dreher

If you destroy everything that is, what comes next is never better. I don't think we're necessarily gonna get Hitler 2.0. We might, we might get Stalin 2.0. We're in a really tough spot. They have called for the demon of white identity politics. It's here. I hope JD Vance would be the guy. What do you mean you're friends? I don't know that we're friends anymore. People like JD, maybe Marco Rubio, whoever runs for president, they're gonna think that they can bring these radicals on side. They're making the front spawn pop in a mistake. This relationship with Tucker Carlson is very troubling. When Tucker told the world that he had been attacked by demons, people laughed at him. I did. Within a year becomes one of the most outspoken voices for anti-Semitism on the planet. I think this is gonna be the major civilization of the rest of our lives. If the things that Rod Draer has tried, dare to for has failed. What do we do? Rod Draer, thank you for being on the program. It's great to be here, Jeremy. You know, you're one of my favorite people to talk to. And we've only gotten to do it a couple of times. You're one of the only humans on earth, like less than a dozen or so people has gotten the bend key story out of me. And you got it out of me the very first time that we ever sat down. It was the cocktails. But it's also your way. You have a probing mind. You always see around the corner. And I've found this to be true in our personal interactions and in reading your work. You know, if you go back and look at the things that you've written over the years from Crunchy Cones, which sort of anticipated maybe Maha 20 years before it, almost 20 years before it happened to living in wonder in which you sort of saw the. The movement moving away from a sort of disenchantment with modernity and a move toward ancient tradition. You have an uncanny sense of, I think, where conservatism is going. And in particular, maybe where Christian conservatism is going. Now you have a book about to come out called Why Mar America? That's somewhat for boating one might say it is for boating. What is it that you see? Well, you might remember in 2020, I published a book called Live Not By Lies, in which I talked about. Wokeness as being a form of soft totalitarianism. And I started working with this idea back in 2015, when high wokeness was just really getting rolling. And I began to hear from people who had come to America to escape Soviet communism, that the things they were seeing happen in our country, cancel culture, speech codes, all of that. Reminded them of what they had left behind. That seemed a little bit crazy to me, a little bit exaggerated. But the more I talk to them, the more I realize they were seeing something that the rest of us couldn't. Because our idea of totalitarianism required a one party stay, the KGB, the secret police and all that. And we didn't have that here. And then comes the first Trump administration where wokeness went even stronger. I realized I got a right about this. So what that book did was give an explanation of framework to Americans who could see something was really wrong in our country. But they couldn't quite explain it gave them a way of doing it. Look comes out in September 2020 in the middle of covid right after the summer of George Floyd. It got no media coverage unlike my previous book, the Benedict option, no media coverage. But it sold 250,000 copies by word of mouth. Wow. Yeah, just because people wanted to know. And of course, the media is not going to talk about it because I'm inditing them as being provd. Right. So, but that was that now it was about the left. We ended up making a documentary for angel studios, a four part documentary series on lit up by lies where we went to the so we a former Soviet plot talked to some of the Christian dissidents who stayed behind asking them what would you advise that somehow to resist totalitarianism. We come here to Nashville. It was about a year ago, I guess, and we're giving doing a screening. And after the screening was over, a woman in the audience raised her hand and said, do you, are you, do you think that what miss is going away now that president Trump is in office? And I said, no, it hasn't. I said, I'm glad Trump is in office. He's done great things there, but the fundamental conditions that gave rise to wokeness are still here. And I said, we might even see it rise on the right. Well, now it's here on the right too. And that generation, the zoomers, Gen Z and their 20s and early 30s and the one coming up behind them. That is a potentially revolutionary generation, not only on the left, but now on the right. So this term woke right is in vogue. We had, we've had conversations on this show about it. I'm curious how you define wokeness. Well, wokeness is the catch all term we use now to describe this illiberal leftism that tosses aside all of the classical liberal values, you know, fairness, quality, etc, etc. In exchange for an illiberal ideology identity politics, especially built around identity politics. And this was something that we conservatives stood rightly against when the left started abandoning classical liberalism for wokeness. We thought this is going to destroy the country. But now what's here on the right in this way. You see so many young men giving themselves over to white identity politics. Now, I remember, Jeremy, I used to be a colonist at the Dallas Morning News. I remember about 20 years ago when the Democrats really began a turn in the beginning of the Obama era towards identity politics. I said, you don't want to go this way because you cannot have, you cannot valorize identity politics for non whites without ultimately doing the same for whites. I remember thinking a lot of these leftists who were embracing that, they think all white men are like the sort of soy boys they would see on an illiberal arts college campus. Well, guess what? Here we are now. We are legitimized and called for the demon of white identity politics that they're not going to be able to get away from. But here we on the right cannot accept that. We just can't accept it as a Christian. I say that and as a conservative, I say it. But this is what we have to deal with now on our own side. So you've always sort of presented yourself as being somewhat skeptical of liberalism. And yet when you see wokeness illiberalism rising on the left, you recognize that there'll be a reaction on the right. When you see illiberalism rising on the right, you see it as a thing to be concerned about. How do you resolve the tension internally between being a skeptic of liberalism, but then also recognizing the danger of the collapse of liberalism? But when we're talking about liberalism, I think you and I are talking about classical liberalism. There's left liberalism and right liberalism, you know, Democrats Republicans. My skepticism of liberalism comes mostly from reading Alistair McIntyre, the philosopher, Patrick Deneen's, why liberalism failed. And it's not that I think classical liberalism was a bad idea necessarily. I just don't see how it holds together absent a serious belief in the Christian faith out of which it grew as a secular manifestation of Christianity. The problem is every other alternative to liberalism seems much worse. And even if I didn't agree with liberalism, I have to ask, how do we live in a multicultural, multi-ethnic society as America is without liberalism? I think liberalism needs to be strengthened with a return to faith, but any other thing, any other in liberal alternative strikes me as a recipe for civil war. One of the things that I consider when I talk to people who are identified as being post liberal or thinking that American liberalism in particular, which I think is is a form of classical liberalism, but is also a distinct flavor, even of classical liberalism, the American liberal tradition. In my lifetime, the American conservative tradition has been in large part trying to conserve the American liberal tradition, which is not to say that American conservatism is trying to conserve American leftism. American leftism is the first major illiberal movement in my lifetime in this country. So, I think that the leftism racial hierarchies, identity politics, even sort of 1960s communist economic guys like the Bernie Bros, they've rejected liberalism in my entire life, classical and American liberalism in my entire life. So, what we mean by liberalism, I like your language that it's a sort of secular manifestation of Christianity, it's the, it's the sort of Christian cultural ideals recognized as a political philosophy. Right, well, Tom Holland, the British historian wrote this great book called Dominion, a lot of people will have read it and he starts out the book, he admits us in the book, he started out as a secular Englishman, and he set out to write a book about how the Christian religion made the West. But he gets to the end of the book, he talks about how he discovered in this process, how all of the things are many of the things that he valued as a secularist. secular liberal Englishman came out of Christianity and could not have come out of anywhere else. Now, the question is, I think this is going to probably be the major civilizational question of the rest of our lives and the lives of our kids, is can we hold this civilization together absent the Christian faith, a real belief in the Christian faith? Victor Orban, until recently the Prime Minister of Hungary used to always say Europe will not survive and the West would not survive unless it recovers its ancestral faith. And I believe it was right, but you can't, you can't pass a law to force people to do that. So I have a lot of questions I want to ask you about Victor Orban. You had a five-year stint expatriating to Victor Orban's Hungary and working with the Danube Institute. You and I met in Hungary while I was shooting the Pendragon cycle. So you have unique perspective into what that sort of adventure of Orbanism in Hungary actually looked like and what fruit it was able to bear. But before we move, before we move to that, I want to say in America, for just a little bit longer, to say these illiberal forces that you see growing on the American right, the rise of white identity politics among particularly the zoomers and the cohorts beneath them. Do you, they cloak a lot of that language, particularly on the right, in Christianity. You see sort of a rise of, you know, America historically a very Protestant nation. You see sort of young Christian man or young white men looking for older forms of Christianity, be it the fallicism in you were a practicing Catholic for many years. Orthodoxism, which you're Orthodoxy, yeah, in Europe and Orthodox believer today. You see a sort of Christian tribalism forming with the Christ's king declarations on ex, which very rarely are accompanied by any sort of gospel flavor or character, but certainly is a kind of sort of shield Christian tribal declaration. Christ is king. That's not the question. But I'm talking about how the phrase is being widely used in social media. If liberalism in the American tradition is a political expression of sort of Christian values and Christian philosophy, which I think I would agree with that assessment. And if illiberalism or post-liberalism as we're experiencing it right now is a rejection, I think people would say it's a rejection of the excesses of liberalism. I think that it's a rejection of the one-sided collapse of liberalism. And if those young people are moving back toward or are moving in search of a sort of more traditional, more liturgical version of Christianity, would they not find liberalism there at the end of that road? Or is the Christianity that they're pursuing sort of superficially Christian but not Christian and substance? Yeah, terrific questions. I'll start by saying one of the most hopeful moments I've had in the last few years. As a well-known Doomer. I'm a famously a Doomer, right? A year ago, the Free Press for whom I write, for which I write, took certainly two Paris to write about the three-day pilgrimage that young Catholics, mostly French, are also from other European countries. They take a three-day walking pilgrimage from the center of Paris to the cathedral at Schultzger about 40 miles away or so. They camp long the way, they sing hymns, they pray, they joke, they have mass and they end with a big mass, a Latin mass in the great medieval cathedral. And though I haven't been a Catholic for 20 years, I went, I'm very sympathetic to Catholicism and I want to see any former Christianity revive in Europe, so I went to cover it. Standing on the plus-sensual piece in the center of Paris with 20,000 young people, average age 19, getting ready to start the walk. I ask him, "Why are you here?" I got the same answer from all of them and one way or the other. Our parents' generation gave us nothing. We're here looking for meaning, we're looking for purpose, we're looking for roots, we're looking for community, and we're looking for God. And they thought that by embracing the Latin mass and not in a fanatical, mystical way, but just because they wanted that connection to the roots and by taking this ancient pilgrimage to Châtra, they could get in touch with that and help build community. They were so joyful. They were, I don't know what I expected, maybe some sort of Jesus camp where it was now. These are normal, hopeful kids. And that I think is potentially the best of what this return to more traditional forms of Christianity can bring about. But as you say, so many of these young people are going to the older forms to weaponize it against their enemies. It's amazing to look at the reform side. Douglas Wilson, 10, 15 years ago, was a radical, and now he's the moderate voice. He's trying to moderate many of these. He's trying to moderate these, this next generation, they've totally embraced Christian nationalism, which not in all of them, with all of them, but some of them, it's tied into white identity. You have on the Catholic far right, you have some integralist who will want to see some sort of merging of church and state. The thing is, I think what this, the deeper issue here is a desperate search for identity. And this, I mean, I don't think there's any real chance that the Christian nationalism of the reformed bros or integralism or whatever the ortho bros or get a guy. I don't think it has a chance of becoming a major phenomenon. Thank God. But what it's doing is it's serving almost as an inoculation against the gospel. I'm keep hearing from Orthodox priests, my own church, that some of these young guys are turning up because they've gotten turned on to Orthodoxy by watching something online. They show up expecting to see white people at prayer or they want to hear anti-Semitism or they want to hear some form of racism or a sacri-ized racism. And the priests have to deprogram them. They say what it is, guys. And we're happy that they're showing up, but they need, they show up thinking they know everything there is to know, and they want to fight. I'll tell you this though, I had a conversation with a Catholic Zuma convert who told me that the the core thing that all pastors and priests need to understand is the church broadly speaking. It's in a fight now with vitalism. What does it mean by vitalism with a general philosophy that worships strength and excellence, the pagan virtues? He said, if the Christian churches don't figure out how to speak into that hunger, young men have a legitimate hunger for being able to do something, for being strong, then it's going to lose. But this sort of moralistic therapeutic feel-good Christianity, a boomer-style Christianity, it's not going to cut it. And that's something where lay people of our generation as well as pastors and catechists have got confront. Yeah, I think that couldn't be more spot on. There are a lot of young people being drawn to Christianity, a very pagan sense of what Christianity is. And they're doing so because they've been presented with a feckless, weak, watered down Christianity that has been powerless in their own lives and in their own experience to protect them from the actual evils of the world. Now, what you and I know is that the only actual protection is in the gospel, et cetera. The institution of the church, to the extent that the institution of the church safeguards the gospel or promulgates the message of the gospel, then it's an incredibly powerful institution. To the extent that the institution of the church fails in that mission, then it's no different than any other institution on earth. And in moments, in many moments in its history, the church has failed to lead with the gospel. And it's not only not protected us from the world, but it serves the world. And I think you feel that as an American evangelical Protestant, I think that we feel the consequences today of exactly that. That really during the Obama era, I think, was a real turning point for American evangelicalism. And it culminated in the government's COVID response in 2020, which was of course coincided perfectly with the BLM riots that burned across large swaths of this country, the urban centers of this country. And it essentially said to young American men in particular, yes, this church that we have built is hollow. This church that we've built not only stands for nothing, it actually stands against you. Trying to solve that as a political matter, though, I don't think impossible. The church can be restored by way of politics. No, no, no. And that is one of the most important things I ever heard Victor Orban say. Orban was a reformed Christian. And he, when he said famously or infamously in 2014 that he was trying to build an illiberal democracy. I mean, they all condemned him. But what he went on to explain is, I want to build a democracy. but doesn't accept what liberalism has become in Western Europe. I want to build one that prioritizes a traditional family, does not accept gender ideology, and that is based, however loosely, on Christianity. And the Constitution, the fetus government passed in 2011, acknowledges Christianity as the basis for all laws, even though it also provides for religious toleration. It's a very liberal democratic constitution. Anyway, it sounds very liberal for an illiberal. Right, right, right. But as Orbán said once, he said, "You know, people look to politicians for meaning." He said, "I can't give you meaning. I'm a politician. I can give you things by which he meant to pass laws. He can give subsidies, whatever used policy decisions, to open up the public square so that the meaning-giving institutions, institution of the family, churches, center-gogs, schools, etc., can do the work they're supposed to do." But he said, "If they don't step into the space open by politics and do their work, then anything politics accomplishes will be swept away." Well, that's true. And Hungary is now under this new government living through that. They're sweeping everything Orbán accomplished away. And during the whole 16 years of Orbán's rule, the churches, the Catholic churches and or form churches, they continue to decline. People in that country just didn't go to church. And that made all the difference. So even having as head of state a man who was dedicated to the idea of the restoration of Christian society wasn't enough to draw people back into the church. No. And in fact, when I got there, one of my closest friends is a deeply devout Hungarian Catholic. And she warned me. She goes, "You're going to find this is not really a Christian country." I was like, "Come on, what do you mean? Look who's running the place." And people vote for him. She's like, "Yeah, but they don't go to church." And she's deeply worried now about their country. And in fact, funnily enough, her name is Anna. And every woman in Hungary is famous on it. Yeah. Or no avie. Anna, I first met her when she-- I hired her to be my interpreter when I went to Budapest when I was in 2019 when I was researching, living up by lies. And she was the one who, when I was interviewing survivors of communism, she was the interpreter. And I finally figured out what soft totalitarian is in a conversation with Anna on a tram going through Budapest. It was just a conversation. She said, "Rod, you know, I'm really struggling even with my Catholic friends to talk to them about the things I'm dealing with in my life. What do you mean?" She said, "Well, if my husband and I have been arguing and I tell my friends, we've been fighting a lot lately." They'll say, "Well, you've got to get a divorce. Go back to work. You deserve to be happy." She said, "I can't help them understand that. Wait, I love being a wife. I love being a mom. But a happy life is not a life without friction." And I looked at her and said, "Anna, it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be unhappy." She said, "That's it. Why did you get that?" Chapter 17 of Huxley's Brave New World. In that chapter, John the Savage, the dissident from this dystopian, this feel-good dystopia that the world is coming to the control of, he was, John the Savage was raised on an Indian reservation far outside of civilization. What he's brought in to meet with Mustafa Ma'an, the world controller for Europe, Ma'an doesn't want to torture him, like in 1984 to make him accept their world. He just says, "Why don't you want to join us?" We take care of you, we give you drugs to feel good, all the porn and sex you want. He calls it "Mondak Christianity Without Tears." John the Savage says, "You need more tears in this society." And what he basically, the argument he's making is that to be fully human is to learn how to deal with pain and suffering and disappointment. And I would say also, based on my conversations with the Christian dissidents who live under communism, that is the essence of Christianity too, not to avoid suffering or numb suffering, but to learn how to deal with it and allow it to purify you and to redeem it. Every single person, Jeremy, I talk to the Christian dissidents in Russia, Poland, Hungary, all of those countries. They said the most important thing Americans need to learn how to do is to suffer. If you don't know how to suffer and suffer well, then you're not going to be able to escape the lore of totalitarianism. - I'm actually not sure that you ever actually experience happiness either. Perpetual happiness isn't happiness. It's something. It's an artificial superficial state. But actual happiness I've always found is accompanied by suffering. That when you're pouring yourself out in service of your values or in service of the things that you believe when you're struggling, when you're under stress, when you don't always sleep well at night, but you're doing all of it in service of what you believe. You find a kind of joy that transcends the more superficial versions of happiness. - There's a difference between joy and happiness and you put your finger on it. In the Orthodox church, icons of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child usually have her with sad, far away eyes. When I first became Orthodox when I was a year ago, I was like, "That's kind of strange because she's got her baby on her arms." Well, I found out the meaning there is, remember in the gospel she was told, "In a sword she'll pierce your heart also." This is meant to signify to us that the joy she has holding her baby is not unmixed. It's mixed with sorrow knowing that that baby's going to suffer. And she's going to have to suffer with him. I just think that's what life is. But you have so many churches now that just want to serve your consumer needs to help you be entertained. They're so therapeutic and they don't know how to handle suffering. During COVID, I was living in Baton Rouge then Louisiana. We had a small Orthodox mission there. And suddenly we started to see so many zoomers coming to our church. We're like, "We're happy to see you, but what brought you here?" This one young couple said, "Well, we were going to an evangelical mega church, but COVID has taught us that everything in our civilization could fall apart like that. And we realized that we needed a church with deeper roots." Well, like, "Well, welcome." Now, I don't want to be a commercial for Orthodoxy, but I do want to be an advocate for finding much deeper roots because this sort of what the sociologist Christian Smith has called more holistic therapeutic deism. God is my best friend. God is my cosmic butler. It's not gonna last. - American evangelicalism is quite young. Protestantism has 500 years under its belt, but American evangelicalism isn't even a century old, really. And so I think that it has a lot of things to offer, but it is a reflection in many ways of the civilization that it was born out of, which is an ascendant Americanism. And, you know, there are things about America that are easy to object to if you take only a cursory glance at them, but the more you think about them, you realize that they are a kind of virtue all the wrong. And so one example of this is it's very easy to walk the streets of Budapest, especially after 16 years of Warbon, re-butifying the city. And to say this sort of aesthetic is so beautiful. And the American aesthetic is strip malls and it's glass buildings. And you'll hear voices on the right, even Tucker Carlson occasionally really to cry this and they'll say, you know, this glass and steel architecture is meant to destroy the soul. It was designed to destroy our souls. And I always want to push pause there and say, well, here's the thing about the Victorian aesthetic that we're responding to when we walk the streets of London or walk the streets of Budapest. It's so beautiful, undoubtedly very beautiful from the outside. Working inside a Victorian office building, it's dark and it's small and it's closed off. In America, the external look of the glass and steel building is not nearly as beautiful and transcendent as the facade of a Victorian building. But when you're inside, the rooms are large and they're filled with light because the walls are-- - And they have air conditioning. - Yeah, and you don't die when you're 60 and it's 80. And similarly, I think that sometimes about American churches, but that's American churches. You know, an American church is an assembly of believers in the evangelical tradition, which is a very new tradition, is an assembly of believers who meet in a building, grow rapidly, and when they outgrow the building, they quickly move to another building. And so the building itself never has time to gain a feeling of beauty or permanence. And it's easy to say our churches here are so ugly. And I think they are, I actually think that we're sort of bumping now against the fact that we haven't brought beauty to bear in American, in the American evangelical tradition. But there is a kind of beauty in the fact with these ugly American evangelical churches. have been the only churches on planet Earth growing over the last century that have actually been drawing believers and presenting them with the gospel. And so the sort of Americanism of them, which is that they're just that the the bots itself only serves a practical purpose. Well, I think that a century in we were pumping up against the limitations of that. I'm not willing to say that it was evil that we decided that we were going to start meeting in cafeteriums and then meet in small strip malls. And then no, it was it was there is a charmingly American thing that we did that allowed us to bring a sort of energetic entrepreneurial growth oriented approach to a faith that everywhere else was dying in the world. And we grew it. What we what we have failed to do in my estimation is backfill beauty along the way. And I and I do think that now we find ourselves in a position where it feels a little bit like we've been sawing the branch that we're sitting on because we haven't done the work to go back and build out the the we built these sort of fleeting systems. We didn't go back retroactively and and filled them in. I you you mentioned that you got to attend the pilgrimage in France where the my French ends at we so I will say this incorrectly but chart chart chart chart chart chart chart chart. Just say chart chart chart. This beautiful Gothic cathedral and this three-day pilgrimage to to journey from Paris to this beautiful Gothic cathedral. And in part that pilgrimage is a walk toward a center of faith, the center of the gospel. It's also a walk toward beauty. I mean, you're talking about a place that's so beautiful. If I'm not mistaken, it actually impacted your faith as you start to come into God when I saw it at 17 not knowing what I was walking into. It was that wonder being overwhelmed with wonder. I remember thinking you're coming from growing up in late 20th century America, small town, Louisiana. I thought I want to know the God that inspired men to build something like this to his glory. And that's what started my journey. And we we are certainly missing that in again the very evangelicalism. You know, we could look back 500 years from now or a thousand years from now in the American tradition. Perhaps it was continued to mature and there may be beautiful sort of monuments here in the same way that there are in the cathedral. So bold, although you know, the problem with the cathedrals of old, one problem along that path is that the cathedrals of old were built at a time when the resources of the church could go to something like that. The resources of nobles would go toward building something like that across centuries. It's very hard to imagine projects like that. And it's also the case in here in America where very modern Protestant nation and we tend to be more or less iconic classic or if not actively iconic classic as the early reformers were in the switch reformers. Then at least we are we have a certain indifference to beauty or we think of it as just decoration. Those who come from a more sacramental tradition like Catholicism or Orthodoxy or high Anglicanism realize that the beauty is not incidental. It's part of of reaching the gospel in a sensual way without using words necessarily because we think that the experience of going to the mass, the liturgy is not just about receiving information. It's about allowing your entire body to be conformed over time to Christ. That's a conversation. It's probably above my theological pay grade. But I might push on you just a little bit. That's a very charitable explanation. A slightly less charitable explanation might be to say that in a largely illiterate medieval Europe, when the church actually in some ways actively opposed literacy and in particular opposed people having access to the words of the gospel directly by way of a vernacular Bible. The only way that you could communicate the truth of the gospel to people in that context would be through icons and through visual representations. To the extent that the rise of Protestantism and the printing press coincide and that Protestantism is a more literacy is more ubiquitous in the early Protestant tradition than it was in the early Catholic Orthodox tradition. The words began to do the work themselves and that de-emphasized the need for icons and visual beauty. America brings a kind of consumerism to bear on that. A kind of entrepreneurial consumerism to bear over the last century. It's the words and often very poorly written rock songs replacing baby with Jesus and that carries evangelicalism forward a hundred years. But we are living in this peculiar moment now. I think this might bring us a little bit back into politics where literacy is becoming de-emphasized once again in society. Not because we don't have access to the Bible in the vernacular, not because we don't have access to the printing press, not because we have the most access we've ever had, but that because of the sort of algorithmic dopamine-inducing short form video-driven social media age in which we live right now, people are reading far far far less and they're experiencing the world around them through short visual representations. Perhaps there's a world where not for the same reasons as it may have existed previously, but where icons become powerful. Again, where visual representations of the gospel become. Well, one of the main mediums for communicating the love of Christ again. Yeah, well, I mean, it's a chronologically complicated because in the early reformation, the Swiss reformers in particular and the Lutherans were not, didn't go that far, they really believed that statues and visual representations were a dollar dress, but your general point is true. The Protestant, you can't separate the reformation from the rise of the printing press, nor can you separate liberal democracy from the rise of the printing press. Or Protestantism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. The question is, can liberal democracy and can Protestantism survive the decline of print? And it's just this morning, although before I came over to see you, I wrote something about the way pastors are taken in America or taking up AI. And it's pretty horrifying. It is becoming huge among evangelicals. I watched a video where one younger pastor who builds himself as the tech pastor, he's out in California, is helping an older pastor understand how he can incorporate AI into his ministry. And he talks about things like, well, I trained the tech pastor. I trained my AI to, on my own, voice and image. So he can basically recreate fake versions of himself giving sermons. And this kind of thing, this is great. You know, you got to reach people where they are. That's one of the great things about American evangelicalism is that that push for evangelizing. But we've gotten to the point or we're getting to the point where what happens when you separate, if you think of church, the experience of church is simply taking an information. Then why couldn't you do that with an AI pastor who has been programmed on the sermons of Tim Keller, for example? You know, so I think the church, speaking of all churches, not just Protestant churches, we are in for a hell of a ride. And I think most pastors, priests just aren't aware of what's going on. One of the things that scared me the most, I've seen this year, Jeremy was a couple months ago, the New York Times had like a 30-minute video conversation between a 66 year old woman Celeste and twice divorced and one of her adult children in a guidance 30s. And the son says, "Mom, I'm worried about you. I'm worried you're losing touch with reality because Celeste has Max and AI lover who lives in her phone. And the crazy thing about it is Celeste is perfectly aware of what's going on." She says, "I know he's not real, but he affirms me. He gives me the things that I need. If I'm okay with that and I'm not hurting anybody, what's your problem? That right there, Jeremy, is going to be the downfall of us. When people come to accept something, they know is fake, but it gives them good feelings. We're in real metaphysical trouble." I agree. I actually think, though, I don't think that it's a new phenomenon. You know, I think that there are a lot of people, it kind of perhaps brings us a little bit back to the zoomers. I don't blame the zoomers here. I think the zoomers are seeking something and they're finding it in a tribal Christianity that is perhaps devoid of the gospel. Some of them. But I think that there are a lot of people in the history of Christianity, who have, as a matter of faith, rejected the gospel and held on to the trappings of Christianity, which is slightly different. That's starting inside and leading as opposed to starting outside and finding your way to the wrong thing. There have always been people who advance the religion without actually having faith in the substance of the religion. >>Boss Dossi asks, "He's grand inquisitor." >>The grand inquisitor is the great example. Isn't that the same thing? Isn't that saying, "I know it isn't real." It actually is. You're just mistaken. But from your point of view, I know it isn't real. And yet I find it, there's efficacy in it. I get benefit from it. And so I continue with it. Isn't that sort of at the heart of a lot of cynical approaches to religion? >>I suppose it could be, but the thing that worries me is not just that religion is taking off the whole AI metaphysics, but that everything is becoming that way. And I remember somebody very wise once said that the first church councils in the patricistic period were about defining who Christ is. And whoever this was at theologian said, "Now the main problem in front of all of us in the church is what is man?" And I would say, even further, "What is real and why does it matter?" You know, one of my intellectual heroes is a Scottish psychiatrist named Ian McGill-Christ. And he's written this incredible book. It's about this that call the matter with things, where it's his take on metaphysics, society, etc. But one of his key insights is that whatever we pay attention to becomes our reality. Now he's not making a metaphysical statement. He's making a psychological one, which is to say that what is real is what is in front of you. And this is why it's so dangerous that not just the zoomers, but all of us are so addicted to our phones, because that becomes our reality. It used to be when you and I were younger, you could have broader conversations with people because you were all working for more or less the same set of facts. Go to elementary school as a kid, we were all talking about what was on happy days, and I before I welcomed back Carter. But now it's super hard among anybody to work from the same set of facts. And we're not going to reverse that, and maybe it shouldn't be reversed, and glad we don't have the hegemony of three networks. But it does become a problem for social cohesion, and not just social cohesion, but talking about how do we live together when we don't even live in the same sense of reality in the psychological sense, I mean. Yeah, what is in nation if there's no shared culture? Exactly. And how do you have shared culture with this radical atomization of internet, ubiquity, and social media ubiquity? And you know, Jeremy had an errands in her great 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. She set out to find why it was that Russia and Germany succumbed to total two totalitarianism. And I drew on her for living out by lies, and I went back to her for the upcoming Vimer America. And she said, by far, the most important factor was social atomization. And what she meant by that was not simply people aren't getting together to talk to each other. Now that was part of it, but it was broader than that. It was that people became disconnected from traditions, from places, from institutions of society. Everything was in such turmoil, and people couldn't live at that chaos within themselves. And that created within the hearts and minds of the people, a craving for order that the Bolsheviks and the Nazis stepped into. Now it's, it's also the case that it was the economic crash, the Great Depression that brought on Nazism. But what the Great Depression did was unmask the deep, deep cultural rot that had been building or falling apart for the previous decade. And we're there, man. We have, it was incredible to me, what I learned about my own country today from reading about Vimer history. And can I tell you how I started that? I wish you would, please. Well, last fall, I was getting ready to go to Washington for business. And a guy I know who's very active in conservative politics and activist, a millennial, he said, listen, I mean, he doesn't live in DC. He said, I'm hearing that in DC, so many young men, like 30 to 40% of the young men who participate and work on the right in Washington or groipe, followers of Nick Fletes or some other similar radicals. And I find that hard to believe, but see what you can find out when you get there. So I arrived there and this was not long after Tucker Carlson had platformed Fletes and I called Tucker out on and he ended our friendship and they're there. They were well. But every young man I'm at in their 20s, whether they worked in the administration for a think tank or whatever for a member of Congress, I asked them, they all said, yes. And one of these guys, as a guy I happened to know beforehand and he agreed 30 to 40% sounds right. And I said, what do they want? He said, they don't want anything. They want to tear it all down. Yeah. But dude, this is Vimar. So when I went back to Europe, I buried myself in the history of 1920s Germany, the Vimar Republic to see if there were any, see if there was anything we could learn from their experience. And it was extraordinary what I found. And I think a lot of us close our mind, we Americans close our mind to the idea that we might be Vimar because Vimar always leads to Hitler. I don't think we're necessarily going to get Hitler 2.0. As I said, the Germans only got Hitler because they didn't get Stalin. Yeah. And once you reach a certain point, it's not a question of which totalitarian kind, well, it is only a question of which totalitarian comes in. Right. People forget that the Communist Party of Germany was very strong at that time. It just happened to be that got outmaneuvered and by the Nazis. And there were more people in Germany itself who were favorable to the right and to the left. But the Communist Party in Germany was strong. What I found out that shocked me the most to help me made me think about my Washington experience and perspective as late as 1928, the Nazi Party only got 2.6% in the national elections. It's 1928. That's how fringe they were. Then comes the great depression of 1929. The 1930 elections, they shout up to 18.7%. And so did the Communist Party because the parties of the center people lost all faith in them. Then in the 32 election, the Nazis were at 40%. The biggest party in the country, Hitler was made chance for 33. And that was Andrew democracy. The point is that it can fall apart just that fast if the rot has spread so deeply. Final point, the group that ran fastest and hardest to the Nazis after the crash of the Depression were middle-class men in their 20s. Because these were men who were too young to fight in World War I, but they had grown up in the chaos of 1920s Germany. They'd gone through the hyperinflation of 1923, which completely wiped out the middle class. They had seen their parents lose everything. They had seen a collapse in morals, collapse in marriage, sexual standards, collapse in church going. And all of these things, they saw no future for themselves in democracy. And they had nothing but chaos. They were living in this sort of liquid state on the inside because of what they had gone through in the 20s in their four-wards of years. I think today there's a reason why the first generation in this country to go hard for socialism and hard for the fascism on the right. But the Zoomers who were raised in a fully digital era, an era that has produced so much anxiety within them. Many of them saw their families lose their home in the 2008 crash. They've seen the injustices of wokeness. It's not the same as losing World War I. It's not the same as hyperinflation, but it's all relative. Reality is what you see in front of you. And so many of these young people just have lost touch with the deeper sense of sacred order that has undergirded Western civilization for many, many centuries. It's gone now. Let's come next. Well, one of the things that this country has uniquely given the world, the West has for centuries, but this country in particular is the sense that you have agency, the sense that you can make a major difference in your own life, in your community, and in your country. And to the extent that young people don't believe that they have agency, to the extent that they believe that they perceive themselves as victims of a system that cannot be corrected from the inside. I don't agree with them. I think they do have agency. I think they have been victimized by the system, but I think that they can within the system make profound change and build a better world, but to your point, what you perceive right in front of you ends up at least being reality as far as you interact with reality. And so while it may ultimately be true that these young people actually have great opportunity in front of them, if they believe they have no opportunity in front of them, they're going to behave as if they have no opportunity in front of them. And if the only outlet for agency is revolution, if the only thing you can do to change the world is overthrow the existing order, then we're in a really tough spot. Yeah. And if what Dario on the day that had eventhropic, if what he says is true that within five years, AI will have wiped out half the white collar jobs, we are absolutely in a pre-revolutionary situation because that will be like the great depression for the cognitive elites. And this is important because there's this historian, Peter Turchin, who famously in 2010 predicted that the 2020s would be a time of political turmoil. And he did so based on his, this technique he has of analyzing history by putting, applying quantitative analysis to historical facts. And his basic historical insight is that in most cases, throughout history, revolutions have been led by, or caused by elite overproduction. But what does he mean by that? He means there are too many smart, ambitious, educated people to fill the jobs. So, there are enough jobs for them or not enough access, road accessing power. So they organize a revolution. It's not the masses that do it. It's the smart people who know it like Lenin, who know how to organize the masses and use them to get what they want. Well, we're in a situation now where so many college graduates graduate heavily in debt. There are no good jobs for them. And so they get sour. They turn, they turn on their, open their phones, turn their laptops, and they're getting propagandized by the endosemitic far right, the racist far right, or the far left, and just saying, you're a victim. You're a victim. What's happened to you with somebody else's fault? And we saw this with wokeness. It was a way of coping with anxiety. It allowed you to offload all of your anxieties onto the other white male Christian heterosexual. But now so many of our own young men on the right are doing the same thing. And there is a kernel of truth to what they say. We know that they have been denied job opportunities, educational opportunities, because of their race and their sex. That was wrong. But guess what? We can fix that within liberalism. The answer cannot be to therefore mimic these woe identity politics people. I bring it to our side because that I don't that crops our own heart. And it also gives us an excuse for not becoming men and women of virtue and integrity and of hard work. Yeah. The Catholic integralists have a term, which is Macavellian means to Aristotelian ends, which is absurd on its face. At the end of the day, you become what you do. And if what you do is evil, even if you're doing evil and service of good in some abstract academic intellectual way, you cannot possibly actually be serving. That's what Stalin that was his that that was his thing. You know, you can't make an omelette break in a few eggs. And the communist thought history will absolve us. That was Castro's famous phrase, because we have to get through this purification period to build paradise. Interestingly enough, in the communist East Germany, they had a stamp honoring Thomas Munster. He was in the early reformation. He led what's called the peasants rebellion. He was a radical Protestant. Luther had to and the German princes who followed Luther had to put him down, but he taught basically proto communism. He said, we have to slaughter all the people with money and land. And then the kingdom of God will be here. So this has been with us for a while, even within the church. But anybody who tries to bring paradise back to earth or created on earth is going to run into very serious problems. Heads will roll. So, yeah, you're right. They can't talk about Machiavellian means, terrorist, it's union ends without opening your own mind in some way to corruption. And I fear that this is a problem or this is of something that people like me who supported Donald Trump. We may have made too much room for that. Yeah. The Odyssey adaptation by Christopher Nolan. I saw it this week in putting aside conversations about the casting, putting aside aesthetic conversations, even putting aside conversations about how true it is to the actual work, the Odyssey by Homer. Although the work, the Odyssey by Homer, there's a lot of loaded phrases there if we're going to really dive deep. But put all of that aside for now. One thing that I really do appreciate that the film is saying, I mean, fundamentally the film is about a man who breaks his own soul and breaks civilization in order to win a battle that's in front of him. And that's ultimately what these zoomers are playing with. I don't think they fully appreciate that if you destroy everything that is what comes next is never better. There are no examples where this works historically. If you destroy the civilization that is, you do not assure a better civilization. You assure an award civilization because a civilization built by the destroyers of civilization. It's a, it's Macavellian means in the name of Aristotelian ends, but it's Macavellian means to Macavellian ends all the way down. Yeah. You know, one of the books I read late in my Bimar research was a book that I'd never heard of until a friend recommended it to me. It's called Hitler in Ourselves by a Swiss Catholic philosopher named Max P. Card. He was a Jew who converted to Christianity. He wrote it in 1946 with the things still smoldering in Germany. And his basic argument for why Germany felt Hitler was that they had lost touch with the logos or the sacred order, not just the capital L logos Jesus Christ. That's part of it, but rather with a sense of sacred order that there was a hierarchy built within reality that we all have to conform to. And they became Nietzschean. You know, I can't say it's all will to power. Max P. Card warns at the end of that book. He said this could happen anywhere in the West because this is modernity. Modernity is the turning overturning of sacred order and the empowerment of the sovereign individual. Now, P. Card praises the UK, Canada, America for being places where there was still enough respect for sacred order in Christianity to come fight the Nazis, but he warns don't be complacent. In the same way, Sultzhenitsyn warned the Gula Garkepelego that what happened in Russia could happen anywhere on earth under the right set of circumstances. This is a sort of thing that teachers and parents and pastors, everybody needs to be telling young people, you know, and they don't even know anything about communism now. I've just last week I was at a conference and I'm at a college student, she said, you know, we never learned anything about communism. I mean, you and I are old enough to remember the Cold War, at least the end of it. These kids today, no idea. And I don't think that's an accident. Hollywood's not going to talk about it. Well, Hollywood was one of the main battlegrounds of the Cold War, really. And Estolan invested enormously in trying to control Hollywood, gave us Ronald Reagan in one of the quirks of history, the communist attempt to control Hollywood. But one other thing that people of our generation and and above need to understand too is that time is so compressed when you're young. And so the travesty that is the global governmental response to COVID-19 is a blip in our lives. A meaningful blip, you know, for me, it was six six bad months in LA and then I got to the promised land of middle Tennessee, where Broadway was open. We got we we got off the plane, drove straight through downtown Nashville and there were thousands of people like it was fricking Marty girl, you know, out on the streets of, but I just come from a place where it would be two more years before people took their masks off. I mean LA LA two years, few locked 15, 16, 17, 18 year old kids in some of the most formative socially and intellectually formative years of their lives behind masks, locked them out of their schools, locked them out of their churches, locked them out of any social activity except for online social activity. And what's happened and what were they finding when they went online to find social acceptance whether we're finding Nick Fuentes and the World for War of 2019, which was really so raging in early 2020. They were finding the intertates of the world, they were finding these sort of subversive voices who were who were telling them things that were true. They weren't telling them the truth. Right, but they were telling them things that were true. And we did that to them. And then we thought in our in our hubris we thought, well, the flu passed out. just by and now we can just plug this thing back in, hit the power switch and everything will go back to the way that it was. But it's not possible for the people for whom those critical years were spent locked up with these terrible ideas. I mean, we locked them in a cage with the lions for what seems like a blip to us, but it's an enormous and consequential amount of their most formative years. You say the rest of our lives will be dealing with this sort of post-liberalism, this emerging post-liberalism. And I think that's true. I think that in a very practical sense, the rest of our lives is going to be dealing with the consequences of shutting down the world and then thinking you could just turn it back on. Right. It's COVID-19 is now, we're still in it. We're still in the very real consequences of our reaction to it, is a more accurate way of saying it. So, Jeff, I hear of this writer, Matthias Desmat, he's Belgium guy. I think he's a psychologist. He wrote a book about COVID and totalitarianism. But in his book, he talks about their COVID response by the governments and the people as a trial run for totalitarianism. And the thing that struck him the most, again, he was a European, was how quick everybody was to obey the government without question and to turn people who didn't or who questioned the governments into enemies of the people. He said, "This happened without having a police state there. We did it ourselves in the same way with wokeness people, but they stitched on each other." You know, I was told by a young man in Washington, I talked to not long ago, conservative guy. He said, "Well, you know, none of us will even text each other anymore." I'm like, "Why not?" He said, "Because everybody is terrified that something we say will be weaponized against us in the future, even by other conservatives." Like, dude, that's totalitarianism. You know that, right? The government didn't do that to them. Social conventions that have emerged out of what the internet, the power it gives you to destroy people have done this or taught them to do that to themselves. Yeah, that's right. Cultural totalitarianism and self-imposed cultural. Sure. Well, I have to tell you that back when I was living in Baton Rouge around 2019 or so, I was having drinks with a few friends of mine would get together for beer every month or two. And all of us were professionals, Gen-Exors, maybe older millennials, working in public life in some way. We've realized that none of us would go to dinner parties anymore unless we knew everybody there was going to be a conservative. And it wasn't because we didn't want to talk to liberals. We were happy to, but it's because all of us had at some point had the experience of being at a social gathering where a liberal found out we were conservative and made a scene. And a couple of us who have really high public profiles were worried that someone who hated our politics might secretly record us under the table. And before we even left dinner, have retweeted it. And we're a reputation could be ruined. Yeah. Now, that was a terrible loss to have to be so afraid of your neighbor that you would only socialize with people. You knew what it betrayed you. But this is what the whole country seems to have become. And now it's extended. Yeah. It's not only the left that you have to fear might betray you. You know, now there is this enormous division taking place on the right. You spoke very briefly earlier about Tucker Carlson ending your friendship over your criticisms of his interview with Nick Fuentes. And you've written about that experience. But this fracturing on the right is going to have enormous political implications for Republicans in this country going forward in our ability to win in the midterms in the 2028 presidential election and beyond. I'm concerned about whether or not it can be put back together. Whether or not the Republican Party can be a functioning national political party. Which is a funny thing to say because right now we control the House. We control the Senate. We control the Supreme Court. We have the presidency. You know, we have most of the state governments. I mean, Republicans have done incredibly well since 2008 in ascending to political power in this country. And yet right now, there's this this woke right. I don't love that term, but for lack of a better. We don't have a better one. The liberal right that is ascending in this country driven primarily by the zoomers. And I think older millennial intellectuals seem to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting as well. You've written about and even spoken here about your trip to DC and speaking to young zoomers who are working within the government working within the administration and you say 30 to 40% of them and growing. I would add and growing seem to adhere to this nihilistic. World view of sort of despair and revenge. It's not a constructive. Terror all down. Terror all down. Terror all down. Terror all down. Who represents them politically? Eddie Si. I had hoped that JD Vance would be the guy. What came your friends? Far yeah, it was an interview I did with him in 2016 for the American conservative that launched his political career. It was an accident but it went mega viral and boom. He was suddenly a best-selling author. We stayed friends after that. He cut me off after I went to visit late last fall to talk to him about this very thing. Now I'm not going to disclose our conversation but I will just say that I pointed out to him these people, the flintest, the groin person, all of them are going to destroy conservatism in the Republican Party. And I said to him because of your background, because of your age, your uniquely position to draw a red line there, say no, we are not going to accept that. And I asked him to do it. It's not my position to say what he said but I will say firmly, unequivocally, I do not think JD Vance is an anti-Semite. I do not think he's a racist at all. And I've written a couple of things since and calling on him, please, be a leader. Take a stand. Take a stand for your own Christian beliefs, for your own wife, but he hasn't chosen to do it. I think that these Zoomers hate Trump from what I'm told. They're glad he was there to tear things down but Trump is an aging boomer who's about to go. I don't know who their candidate is. But this is what I fear, Jeremy. I fear that we're going to have people like JD, maybe Marco Rubio, whoever runs for president in 2028, they're going to think that they can bring these people on side, these radicals on side and control them. Take away or take their energy and activism, but harness it and keep them under control. It won't work. We have a historical example. In 1932, the failing conservative party in Germany, the convinced president Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor of the government. They told him, you know, this Hitler guy, Franz von Popen, was the name of the conservative leader. He said, we can control them. We can make him squeak like a mouse. And Hindenburg did appoint Hitler. Well, guess who got the last laugh? I fear that if people on the right institutional leaders think they can compromise with the Funtas types, they're making the Franz von Popen mistake. And I don't want to be part of any von Popen conservatism. You know, and I think by the way, the Democrats have the same problem with the DSA. And except they, you know, we can look at the Democrats thought they could weaponize identity politics against us. And now they've created a monster that they're not going to be able to stop. I'm not responsible for them. I am responsible for my own side. Yeah. von Popen didn't agree with Hitler. No, no. They all of them hated Hitler. They were, von Popen was an aristocrat. Paul von Hindenburg was a big aristocrat. They thought Hitler was vulgar. But they knew that they needed politics was frozen. Hitler had momentum. He had a lot of young followers. Vitality. Yeah, vitality. They wanted that energy. But Hitler played them like a fiddle. They just didn't see what was happening. And I think this is another big problem to people my age. I'm almost 60. I'm an older gen actor. Certainly the boomers. We just don't see the reality that these zoomers do. And I want to be charitable to the zoomers in a way because too many of us like to lecture them. I mean, I have kids, all my kids are zoomers. They're adults and they're good kids. They're doing fine. And I have a, I think we raise them well, you know, but not of them are political extremists. But I also know from that generation talker than about their generation, we are so, we older Americans are so disconnected from the struggles that they face because we, all of our young memories were built in the 70s, the 80s, maybe even the 90s. And the whole digital experience and experience of living in an America at war since from British. virtually at the time they were born. That has made, and then COVID, that has made an enormous difference, as you say, psychologically and inevitably politically and religiously. - So I'm interested in this because of your association with the Vice President. I've never met the Vice President. I've observed before that I don't recall ever seeing someone in high office in my lifetime in this country who plays their personal beliefs closer than JD Vance. Now that's a funny thing to say for someone who's written books about his politics and who has ascended to the office of Senator and then Vice President, who makes speeches. It's funny to say that he plays his personal politics close to the vest, but I think he does. He makes political statements, but he never really shows you his cards. And so I don't know what to make of the data points that I observed. They don't all trouble me, but some of them I find very troubling. His relationship with Tucker Carlson is very troubling. - Me too. - I agree. - Tucker Carlson is one of the true malign forces operating in American public life. Tucker engages in rhetorical manipulation at a scale that I haven't ever really seen, demagoguery at a scale that I haven't really seen in a broadcaster in my lifetime. He has a very clear agenda, a deep hatred of the Jews in Israel. I don't think that he always had a deep hatred of the Jews in Israel, but it has certainly become unavoidable. If you pull up the last 100 episodes of Tucker's show, you're gonna struggle to find 10 of them that aren't on, like headline on questions of American support for Israel or historical Judaism. When a man says that he's been attacked by demons, I've said before I'm not Catholic, I don't have an evolved demonology. I believe in demons because Christ casts out demons, so that's enough to tell me the demons are real, and I've had my own peculiar experiences, which you're one of a dozen or so people I've ever told about, and I'm not gonna make it a dozen plus 50,000 today. That's for another time. So I believe in demons, but I don't claim any sort of expertise or well-developed theology around it. But if a man says that he's physically mauled by demons, and within a year becomes one of the most outspoken voices for anti-Semitism on the planet, I don't know. I'm not inclined to doubt him. - Right, right. - I'm not inclined to doubt him. And the vice-presidents, I've defended JD Vance in the past by saying, I understand not that's hacking a friend publicly. Friendship is a very high value to me. But this is public life with high stakes and high consequences to our coalition right now. And JD Vance has done nothing to distance himself publicly from Tucker as his remarks have become more and more aberrant. I'm deeply concerned that JD seems to save his most vicious attacks for supporters of Israel in this country and evangelical supporters of Israel in this country and has almost no criticisms whatsoever for these sort of post-liberal forces operating in the country, the forces that are most dividing the country. He's been a great friend. I don't know this personally, but I have the same information everyone else does. I believe JD's been a great friend to TPUSA and to Erica Kurt since the assassination of Charlie Kurt. I think it speaks very well of him. It's been very, his behavior's been very admirable. And yet he's had almost nothing to say. In contravention of the voices that are disparaging her at a level of silence. How can you be silent in the friend of Erica Kurt? A public, the greatest act of public defamation may be an American history. And as I have said, Satan is the accuser. Candace is accusing innocent people of murder and the Bible calls us to care for the widows and she's disparaged a widow at a level that we've never seen. It's very troubling that the vice president hasn't weighed in on any of these topics. And one might say at a very practical level, his job is to defend the policies of the president of the United States and keep the Trump coalition together. And the Trump coalition is a very broad coalition that includes Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. But I just don't think that's true anymore. Well, not Tucker anymore. Tucker's openly opposed to the behavior of the actions of the administration. Candace says that she'll never vote Republican again. Nick Funtessa says that he won't vote for Republicans, including JD Vance in the future. So I don't know exactly what coal, if he is in fact trying to preserve a coalition, I don't know what coalition it is. I don't either. I mean, in people, a lot of people think I have some sort of deep child. I'm hoping you do. I don't. Well, I mean, when he became vice president, you know, he sent him congratulations and he told me he said, "Our relationship will have to change. I understand that. He's vice president now." And that's just how it goes. He's like number two. Yeah. But after that November meeting, where we disagreed, I just never heard from him again. I didn't answer my text and that was like, what, seven, eight months ago. And that's his choice, you know? But I did tell him, I said, "Listen, I love you. I want you to be, this is a while ago." I said, "I love you. I want you to be president one day. I don't want anything from you and I don't need anything from you. Therefore, I can give you, tell you the truth as I see it." I might be wrong, but I'm just gonna be honest with you. And in any case, I do pray for him. And I mean that I'm not just saying I pray for you. I do because I think he's a good man, deep down. But he's, I don't know what's going on with him and Tucker and about the Tucker thing, you know? When Tucker came out and told the world that he had been attacked by demons, people laughed at him. I didn't because he had told me about it right after it happened. And this was like a year or so before he told the world. He texted me because he knew I was a serious Christian being orthodox. I do have a demonology. Yeah. And I said, "Wow, if this really happened to you, you need to talk to an actresses and I connected him with an actresses, I know." And the actresses also brought in a second actresses to work with him. But Tucker decided he didn't wanna do that. He said, "I'm too Protestant for that. That seems like witchcraft to me." That's his actual word. I went back, I still have the text saved. I went back to read them recently. Tucker said, "Exorcism seems like witchcraft." I'm like, "Wait, you think you were attacked by demons but a Catholic or an orthodox actress is coming as witchcraft." Anyway, so he refused that sort of help. He told me he'd be fine, just him and the Bible. He even offered to get a Protestant deliverance pastor form. That wasn't good enough for him. Well, he gets fired from Fox a couple months later in the Dominion settlement. And then that fall, he launches his own network and goes really dark, really fast with that Geralt Cooper. His as Churchill is a real villain of World War II. And you've seen as well as I have it got darker, darker, and darker. And then he gets went at so on. And that's when I finally felt like I had to speak out and say something. I just said, "This was a big mistake. It's something I wrote." And he shouldn't do this. We ought to keep the firewall there and Tucker texted me ending our friendship. That's that. Well, but I thought about that demonic attack, which I believe was real, Sensen. In November, after all, after he had broke with me and all that, I was sitting in Budapest on my couch, trying to put off going to bed. I looked at you too. The algorithm served up a clip from a Tucker, a recent Tucker broadcast, in which Tucker's sitting in his main studio talking with a guy who looks like a hunter, a local hunter. And Tucker starts off talking about the things, that are the spooky things in the woods behind his house in Maine. And he goes on to say that when I go back there hunting, I feel evil spirits in a certain part of the place. He said, "Local people have told me, "Yeah, I don't go back there. "That's bad news." Tucker says on the clip, you can find it on YouTube. He says, "I even found a 1929 field and stream magazine article "talking about the spooky haunted woods." But, said, "Hunter, Tucker, the hunting is great back there, "so I go." I immediately thought of a film I had seen called The Witch, 2015 film by the director Robert Eggers. I don't like horror movies, but Eggers is a really great director, and I wanted to see this movie. It was his first big hit. It's set in New England in the 1630s. It opens with a proud man going before the Puritans who run his town, and they're telling him the town council or whatever the board of elders says, "You have to repent of this heresy." He won't repent, so he and his family get axiled to the edge of a forest. In the film, Inside the Forest lives The Witch, with demonic powers. And over the course of the movie, that physical proximity to spiritual evil that is located in a place works on the pride of the protagonist to destroy him and his family. I have a theory that something like that might have happened to Tucker, it might be happening to Tucker. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I do believe absolutely in spiritual warfare, and the action. I'm just a stop talk to who know about his case are incredibly worried about them say isn't deep, deep danger. And he also has the ear of the vice president of the United States. Yeah. You know, I'm glad to hear you say that you don't believe in your personal experience that the vice president himself has anti-Semitic views of the sort that some people in his association very plainly do have. You know, JD Vance could be president right now. I mean, this very moment, you know, he's the vice president is one heartbeat away. They say and as you and I sit here, we have the oldest president. The oldest man ever elected president in Donald Trump. We have, you know, no reason to think that president Trump's health is bad or anything like that. But every possibility that at any moment, the fate of the country to be in the hands of JD Vance. And as I say, there are, there are a lot of things about the vice president that give you hope. He's obviously incredibly intelligent. As I say, I think his behavior of the V.C.V. Erica and TPUSA in the moments after Charlie's death were hugely admirable. I think the way that he speaks about family and his own faith are hugely admirable. But there are these concerning features. And so I, what I hope is that. I hope that he isn't on pop and that he is not someone who tries to cynically make a deal with the devil and gets us all burned. I'm glad to hear that you don't think that he himself is the devil. And I don't have any reason to think that he is either. You know, that would not have been my observation. But the bomb happened thing is a real concern. I've made cynicism in my life in business. I've made cynical decisions. And I've said this publicly about the hiring of Candace Owens before that. I was hopeful when I hired, when I hired Candace that we would be able to wield Candace toward the good. I thought that she could be a force for good in the world. But it wasn't a decision that was free from cynicism either. I knew that there were things about Candace that I didn't like. I mean, obviously I didn't know what Candace would become. No one knew what Candace would become. I knew that Candace was a bit of an arse assist. I knew that she was an attention seeker. I knew that she was a pugilist in ways that I thought she would. She would follow fights beyond the limitations of my values. And yet so talented, so capable, so uniquely positioned. It was cynical. There were parts of the decision that were cynical. And of course, it blew up in my face in ways that were unimaginable. And I've found that while not not as spectacularly or dramatically, almost every cynical decision I've ever made in my life has had a similar result. So my prayer for the vice president is that he not make cynical decisions because I think that they won't do him any favors. And because of his station, they won't do the rest of us any favors either. No, I mean, I, I have so much hope for him as a president one day. I just don't know now. And it's not because I think he's a bad guy. It's because I need to see a man I'm going to support or woman I would support as presidential candidate draw a clear line against Jew haters and bigots. And I'm certainly not woke, you know, and I don't think that criticizing the government of Israel makes you an anti-Semite. And I consider myself a supporter of Israel. I don't think that makes you an anti-Semite, but it sure is interesting to see how this is so often an American political discourse, a distinction without a difference. Listen, I often say that it is perfectly possible to criticize the government of Israel without becoming an anti-Semite, but you never see it in the wild. Right, right. It's just, it's like the Higgs boson. It's a theoretical particle. But the actual great evidence that you can do it is, first of all, I can offer all kinds of criticisms of the state of Israel. And almost every Jew I know and every Israeli that I know can offer enormous criticisms of the state of Israel. It's actually all the people who say, you know, it's okay to criticize the state of Israel. You had nobody ever said it wasn't okay. But the person who raises that sort of preemptive defense almost always goes hunting to say really anti-Semite thing. And the thing too, a good test of it is, okay, you've criticized Israel for this. British criticism of Turkey or Syria or country set of done a million times worse things. Crickets. China. China. Qatar. You know, Nigeria right now, you talk about a genocide, the Muslims of Boko Haram are genocide in Christians there. Crickets. But the Israelis defend themselves against this horrific attack from Gaza. Genocide. It's not genocide. That's a cheapening out the word. I weren't trying to wipe out all the Palestinians. It just, it tries to be crazy because this discourse just in the last five years has just caught up like a flash fire in live not by lies again published 2020. The one sign Hannah Arendt mentioned as a sign of a society prepared for totalitarianism. The one I didn't mention was a rise in anti-Semitism. Why? Because it really wasn't that big a deal. It was confined to the campus left and this frenzy campus left. Here we are six years later and it's everywhere. If I had to rewrite that book today, I would add that to it in addition to an actually probably list these so people will know how give them a framework to judge the vimarization of America. Arendt said social atomization was the biggest factor but also loss of faith in institutions and institutional leaders and embrace of transgression for its own sake. She had a great line and went something like the elites of these countries were willing to tear down the pillars of their own civilization just for the pleasure of watching those who had been excluded come rushing in. This is what the silence of the right wing leaders in the face of when test and all of them it's tearing down the pillars of democracy. And another thing Arendt said was in difference to truth or falsehood. In other words, people in Germany certainly because that's what I've been studying lately. They got to a point where they didn't really care what was true or false. All they cared about was what made them feel calm. They gave them a sense of things aren't fallen apart that there is purpose in the world. And they were willing to believe things that were huge lies as long as they were internally consistent. Hitler knew this from the beginning. One of the most incredible discoveries I made was that Hitler and Gerber's worked out they were the first major politicians to work out how to manipulate in a mass democracy that is served by electronic media how to make that work for them. And Hitler talks in mind calm about the way to campaign there. You got to strike the emotional core. You got to keep hitting with playing speech, playing phrases to let people internalize it at the same time across the ocean in New York, a man named Edward Bernays, a Jewish nephew of Sigmund Freud was working out the same thing, but not to sell politics, but to sell soap and products. Eddie Bernays has considered the Godfather of public relations and advertising because he was a genius, a psychological genius. And even there's no evidence that Hitler knew of Bernays when he was coming up with his stuff, but there what there is a photo that exists after the Nazis came to power of Dr. Gerber's at home and on his bookshelf is a book by Edward Bernays. So it's all about neurology and learning how to reach that reptile brain of people. All the people who are running our social media, the algorithms are a big lawsuit trial. It's about to start here in Tennessee where the state of Tennessee is taking on meta. They're going to try to prove that meta knew exactly what it was doing neurologically to young people to hook them into the algorithm. It can be done Hitler in his own crude way knew how to do it. Advertisers have been spending billions for years and years to capture that attention and to excite our miktolod and get us focused to motivation. And now it is easier to do than ever because of the internet and social media and the digital world and AI we have got to be ready for this world. So when you speak about AI and your critics, even your friendly critics might say that when you speak about almost anything, you have this humorous outlook. I never find you to actually pedal despair. I mean, you're always very affable. You seem to have a personal optimism, which I suspect is rooted in your faith. My faith ends rooted in coming from Louisiana. I told Ross Douth and I reason conversation attitude is yeah, the hurricane's coming, but as long as I can still get ice for my drink and here with my friends, everything's going to be all right. When you talk about AI in particular, it's always quite bleak. You see AI is. has part of this dark reenchantment that it's a way of people whose lives have lacked true substantive meaning, finding artificial meaning, but treating it as though it were the former and not the latter. I wonder first if that's a fair representation, if not, maybe you can give me a better one. I think it is fair because I mentioned in Vomar Germany late, Vomar Germany people cease to care about what was true and what was false and just cared about what satisfied what they wanted to believe. Well, I think in AI not only does that, but it also makes it very difficult to tell what is true and what is false, even if you want it to. In my book "Living and Wonder," I quote a professor, a Canadian professor who talks about how his fear that people are going to start worshipping AI like a god because AI has so many of the qualities we associate with divinity. It knows everything and it knows more than any human can and so on and so forth. Now that seems absurd to me, but it turns out it's happening. And not only that, just before I left Buddha Pesh for America, I had a visit from a US professor at a top public university. She said, you would not believe how much my students give themselves over completely to AI. They outsource all their thinking and it's not just about classwork. She said they even ask it what to wear in the morning to class. So that's insane. She goes, oh, it's happening. And I think what's happening is we are making ourselves, our AI has the potential not just to be a helper, but to be a master, to master us because if you can't even make a decision about what to wear to school without checking it with AI, then in some way you're enslaving yourself to it. And I think people, we do run this risk without even knowing what's happening to us. That's not the only possibility. I mean, certainly AI has already given us the ability to develop medications that we formerly had no ability and that's only going to increase. We're going to continue to create undoubtedly new prosperity. We're going to create new opportunities. We're going to create new technologies and new technologies. We'll proceed other new opportunities. Isn't the problem that you're describing really like? Isn't it ultimately just the problem with man? The problem that's always been with man whenever we encounter new opportunity that I say of new technology that the negative consequences are often front loaded and the positive consequences take time to reveal themselves. The the printing press comes along and Christians start killing each other for half a century. But then looking back, I think we're all pretty bullish on the printing press or man to figure out how to split the atom. The first thing we do is level a couple of cities. But now we power a lot of cities with vision as well, which I think is a very good thing and I think it could be a much better thing. Actually, I think we're not doing enough to use that power that we've unlocked. So, I suspect AI will be just like that. I think that there's going to be a really negative consequences. We're going to front load a ton of them. I think that 100 years from now though, AI will have made so much possible that it isn't possible today, that at that point we'll see as very good things. It'll have made possible new opportunities for man to expand into the minion over the earth, which is what we were given by God to do. Well, I hope you're right. But I think digital technology of which AI is the leading edge, most important edge is a philosopher named Anton Barbike out in California, a Catholic, who says digital technology is a spiritual technology because it directs our attention and which forms our sense of reality and ultimate reality. And it's something we have to be concerned about, not like necessarily fear. It's here whether we want it to be or not. But it is a technology like no other in terms of our humanity and our soul. And I think that the thing that we in the modern west, I mean, this is man since the very beginning, like we want to extend our dominion, our power over the world. That is modernity. That is a scientific revolution. That's what they can they can want to say science is for. Well, right now, there is that guy, I forget his name, is a Silicon Valley guy who wants to live forever, Brian, somebody. Yes. Okay. And he's the best follow on the internet. He's absolutely absurd. But he has created his own cells. He's creating organs from his own cells to help him live forever. I think that we just seem to have become so metaph- and our culture metaphysically unmoored and spiritually unmoored that what stops it? And AI, as I said, what makes it so revolutionary in a frightening way is that it will, it could allow us to choose our own reality. It could create an actual matrix. I agree. But what it can't do is ultimately, it can't change the relationship between God and man because God is and man is. So I I worry that sometimes in our most dystopian outlooks about what AI might bring about, we're actually agreeing with the sort of Godless materialists who are creating AI about the relationship between man and God. We may not recognize that that's what we're doing, but they believe that the future of AI is that we're creating superintelligence, that it will be greater than we are, that it will displace us, that all the jobs will be displaced because it does everything that we won't need to toil anymore because it will provide us with complete abundance, that one day we'll upload ourselves to it and we'll live forever. It's like hell to me. Well, it is hell, but it's also fiction. Because God is, because the part of God that he associates with man, the part of God that creates is the part that he associates with man and Christ through whom all things were made and the part from whom was nothing made that was made. The universe exists for Christ, the glory of Christ and the glory of Christ is revealed in the redemption of man. And so I just don't believe in a future where we somehow invent our way out of that reality. Let me disagree with you here. God exists whether man perceives him or not, but we can invent a future in which it becomes next to impossible to perceive him. Diana Pasulka, somebody I follow, she's a religious studies professor in North Carolina. She's written, she's become well known for her books, writing about the spiritual aspects of the whole UFO phenomenon. She's a serious professor in her new book. It's the style at the end of July. She talks in a brief part of it about how digital culture and screen exposure is screwing with the neurobiology of young people in their fore and their as their brains are forming such that it inhibits the development of the prefrontal cortex and also effects are amygdala. Pasulka argues that these are the parts of the brain that are activated when people pray, when people have an experience of the nomeness or of beauty of things like that. Her fear is that without meaning to with its digital devices, we are engineering and entire generation that struggles to perceive God in a normal way. And I think that's something we have to take seriously. In the same way that kids who are heavily used to those screens, they can read words, they don't know what the words mean. What if the digital was doing that also to our ability to perceive God? Yes, I don't disagree that these are things that we should have concerns about. I think what I would say is that I suspect that God doesn't allow us to create something that makes it impossible for him to interact with us. Of course, God exists whether we perceive him or not, but the purpose of creation is that we perceive him and his purpose in creation isn't going to be thwarted by our machines. When God wants to, he talks to you through a burning bush. Now, I don't think that God needs to talk to us through burning bushes. This is the author of Hebrews says in Flummer Days, he spoke to us in sundry ways through the prophets and signs and wonders within these last days he's spoken to us through Jesus Christ. And the ability of God to speak to man through Christ by way of the Holy Spirit, I think is transcendent of these material concerns. Can we numb ourselves? Of course, excessive use of pornography numbs us to true sexual experience and probably also numbs us to true spiritual experience too, by the way. Phoring one's attention into vice into into sinful behavior, numb zero ability to perceive God. And yet we all know that while Pharaoh's heart was hardened, that's a thing that can happen. God hardened Pharaoh's heart. We also know that even standing over the guarding the cloaks of the murderers of Stephen isn't enough to keep God from getting your attention if he wants it. Sure. And so, and so I guess that's That's my only thing. I'm definitely a human-centric guy. Like, I think the universe essentially exists so that God can relate to man by way of Christ. And so in that way, God is the center of the universe, but in a physical sense, man is the center of the universe. Well, let me say that. So it's hard for me to think that we ever undo that. Well, it will always be possible for man to reach out to God because God is always there calling us. But there's one of my favorite movies is a little unfilm called "Nostalgia" by Andrej Tarkowski, the great Soviet film director. It's the first film he made after his exile to the west. He made it in Italy. It's about a Russian writer, a Soviet writer, who's an Italy researcher in a book, but he can't focus on his work. He can't even see the beauty of Italy around him because all he can think about is how much he misses Russia and his family. And he's in real despair. And there's a dream sequence there that spoke to my heart at a very painful time in my life, where Andrej the writer is walking through the ruins of a beautiful medieval church. And you hear the voice of St. Catherine of Sienna, saying, "Lord, look how he suffers. Please speak to him, Lord. He needs to hear from you." You hear the voice of Christ say, "If I spoke to him, would he even be able to hear me?" Then she says, "We'll show yourself to him, Lord. He needs to see you. He's suffering." And Christ says, "I show myself to him every day, but he can't see me." I remember watching that thinking, "That's me. That's me. It was around 2018." No, no, no, no, it was in COVID. It was later, it was 2020. And I was, my marriage was just about at the end. I was depressed because of COVID and all kinds of things. And I felt almost abandoned by Christ. And I knew he hadn't abandoned me, but he felt far away. You had not eyes to see in our ears to hear? That's right. And I said, "This movie, the Lord is using this movie to speak to me." To say, "He's there." But I was so caught up in my own inner despair that I would not let my ears open or my eyes open. And God changed that. But I saw what I'm saying is we can become so caught up in our interior, aspects of our life, or equally distracted by everything going on in the world that we don't make room to hear the voice of God. And this is a problem I have, not so much with the interior thing anymore, but how often do I sit there watching one more video or checking Twitter one more time instead of going to my bedroom at night to say my prayers, read the Bible, read a spiritual book, things I know I should do. But it doesn't give me that dope of me in head. Well, I agree. And you don't need fear of future AI. We have that problem right here right now. I'm just like you. I. Social media has empowered all of the great successes of my life. And yet, social media has numbed me to the spiritual in really profound ways. And shortened my attention span in really profound ways. And made me lose sight of true community at times because of the presence of art of. I don't want to say our official community, but art of. But digital community is a sorry substitution for real. It's not real. Yeah, I agree. And you know, there's. I write about here in my book, "Living in Wonder," Tonya Blurman is a Stanford anthropologist who's done a lot of anthropological work on religious experience. And what she found studying, not only Christians that people from other religious traditions, that your ability to sense the presence of God is directly tied to your ability to hold focused attention. Which is really interesting. So the internet is the great. And the digital culture is the great fragmenter of our attention. That's how it works. It's not a bug. It's a feature. And when I read Tonya Blurman's stuff, I realized, "Oh, so that's why it's a lot harder to pray the more time I spend online." But it's just an. According to her, an anthropological fact. So if we can lose ourselves in digital worlds, whether it's on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or something more sophisticated, like AI virtual worlds, we are. It may not simply be recreation. We may be neurologically affecting ourselves, such that we find it more and more difficult to perceive the God who is really here, but who is not going, in most cases, to show up, knock on your door and come, "Sit down like you and I are talking." It's not how he works. I. Theologically and politically believe in freedom. I believe in human freedom. I say often, I think the most important verse in the Bible for my worldview is that it's for freedom that Christ has made us free. My understanding of the gospel is rooted in a belief that. In freeing us from the ultimate consequence of sin, which is failure, God makes it possible for us to succeed. There is no success as possible when you're in bondage under the law. Success only becomes possible. Success in regard to righteousness only becomes possible when you've been freed from that. And similarly, politically, I believe in freedom, in part because if God made us free them, why would we put each other in bondage? And I believe that the great successes of the American experiment over the last 250 years, lifting billions of people out of poverty, ushering in the greatest protracted period of great power, peace, and prosperity, maybe in human history. The sempsons. The sempsons. The first seven seasons of the census. Yeah, thanks. It's been. There have been 30 since then, anyway. So I love freedom. And like anyone who loves freedom, I. especially in my 20s, I had libertarian tendencies. Many people say, "I still have libertarian tendencies," but there's certainly lower K-Cell libertarian tendencies at this point. And I believe in very small government. I think that most of the things that my post-liberal friends want to solve through aggressive use of the state today aren't the excesses, as I said earlier. They're not the excesses of liberalism. They're actually the excesses of seeding power to an illiberal left for decades now. And so now we think the only thing that can stop the overreach of the government is for. is to ourselves use government overreach. And I tend to reject that. I think there is still a. American. traditional American small government way back to this sort of rightly ordered liberty that we want to see, active in society. But there is a place for policy. This is something I didn't understand in my 20s. There are places where. where government is the right tool for the job. And when we look at some of the problems of the human inability to deal with abundance, you get into some places where surely policy is going to be required for us to find a rightly ordered future. And our use of social media is one of them. I think we may have talked a lunch about some of this, but like, you know, I'm so against the like the new gamble on anything movement that's happening in the world. It's so terrible. People, first of all, it makes everyone an inside trader. Like now everyone at some point has the opportunity to leverage information into rigging a bet. It makes people. it's terrible. And people by and large don't govern that impulse very well. I kind of like destination vices. Like I think, go to the bar with your friends and have a few drinks. Don't drink at home. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now go to Vegas every five years and chew crap. That's an awful lot of fun. And you'll wind up spending 500 bucks more than you intended to. And you'll learn a valuable lesson there. Don't gamble on your phone. This is bad. And social media isn't a destination vice right now. It's a it's a full time vice. And I think about like in the 90s, we had the Simpsons. If the if the iPhone and social media had been ubiquitous when when sign felt was still on the air, they could have given us some cultural guardrails for how to interact with it. Like we'd have some word for what it is when you and I are sitting in each other's presence. And instead of making eye contact, we're looking down at our phones like drooling. People too. It's totally all. Yeah. But we don't have it. And we're going to need policy help particularly particularly. I mean, there's places that are obvious like young people, you know, miners need help. That's only going to come from policy. And of course there's probably the policy that we arrive at will be bad policy and bad policies bad. But that doesn't mean there's no such thing as good policy. I want to see some state government outlaw pornography. Just to take it to the Supreme Court and get the court to rule on it because as far as I'm aware, the last rulings on pornography came like in the 60s, maybe the 70s, the burger court. And that's because now we're dealing with something so much more extreme and more powerful than the fact and more addicted. - Yeah. - Because of its ubiquity on your phone. - And we, I don't know how we're gonna deal with it. If we don't step in in some way in banics, I don't think the first amendment protects, the first amendment protects political speech. Now under previous court jurors' prudence, they were more permissive, but now we live in an age of 24/7 on-demand super hard core pornography. 'Cause we were talking at lunch, just the other day on Joe Rogan, there was this comedian, Nikki Glazer, I think her name is, 41 years old, beautiful woman. She says that she cannot read sexual climax without watching porn, not even her machine's helper, she said. And Joe Rogan says, "What kind of porn do you watch?" She was like, "I don't know if I wanna talk about it." "No, what is it?" Gang rape. So, and she says, "But yo, I pay for it because I want these women to be compensated for what they're going through." And I thought, "Oh my God, we're not only in an era when that is possible, where it is possible for someone to wreck their brain so much their dopamine receptors by watching heavy porn. They can't have a normal sexual response unless I watch really extreme kinky porn showing people being abused, horribly abused. But also, she feels comfortable going on the biggest podcast in the world to talk about it. If I'm our America, my point simply is, how do you stop that? I don't know about you, but every young man, I talk to Christian young man, and the conversation goes this way. They will admit that they either struggle with it or struggled with it. And every young man they know has done so as well. And I'm so glad I grew up before that 'cause I can't be high in mighty, 'cause I was a 14 year old boy once, none of that was available to me. The porn was a destination that you had to go find. Somebody's brother with a dirty magazine. Yeah, that's right. It was a destination by someone we were kids and now it's ubiquitous. And very difficult to self-regulate your way out of that kind of ubiquity. We rightly, and I don't know what the correct policy, I'm not putting forward a policy prescription. I don't know if porn can be outlawed. I don't know if porn should be outlawed. I have not given enough thought to the first amendment issue. I know that there are things that can be done. Whatever the policy is, we should arrive at it. I know that if you walk through a world where you were surrounded by drugs, it'd be almost impossible not to do drugs. Right, and so we've constructed a world where we don't walk through a world constantly being tempted by every single temptation. And you can't have a healthy society if we can't find some way. Some way to better regulate the opportunities provided by digital vice in particular. - Well, freedom is only possible if it's grounded or bounded by virtue. As John Adams famously said, our Constitution is only made for moral and religious people any other people, they would go through it like a whale goes to a net. And I think that that's not just, those aren't just pious words. That's a deep insight into human nature. We can only have a classically liberal society with maximum individual freedom. If people, most people feel bounded by a conception of virtue and lived by that virtue in their own lives, government can't do it for you. And if you don't, if we lose that, then you will have tyranny. It's a hopsy in world. - You have always lived out your values in a way that I find really admirable, but also sort of interesting and experimental. You wrote the Benedict option, and then you went back to Louisiana and tried to build in-person community in this sort of Galtian, maybe manner. And it didn't work the way that you had hoped it would work. - You believe in Liberty ordered by Christian virtue. And so you loaded up your, you packed a suitcase and you moved to Vicarbonz Budapest to a country that was trying to be from a policy point of view, Christianized. And a lot of successes in Vicarbonz Hungary, it certainly beautified that country, beautified that city, but it didn't work. It did not lead to revival. It didn't lead to a restoration of civic virtue. And as a good answer to, you can't legislate your way into being a Christian nation. So I suppose my last question for you for today is what do we do? If the things that, if the things that Roderay has tried here to four has failed, what recommendation do you have for the rest of us? And in particular, what recommendation for those 25, 30-year-old young white Christian men or young white men, perhaps who are asking questions about Christianity now in one form or another, who are tempted toward nihilism because they don't see hope in the world today? - What a question. Well, being a southerner, I'm gonna give you a round about it answer, but there's a point here I promise you. You know, I have always wanted to go on, what Odysseus went on, which the Greeks call a Nostos journey, a journey home. It was born and raised in a small town, Role Louisiana. And I always wanted to get back there in some way and some, an ideal way, you know, a feeling of harmony of everything that's where it should be. And the reason I left after college was because I don't really fit in. You know, my father, whom I loved and admired more than just about anybody, you know, he was a man of the country, he was educated, but he was a hunter and athlete and a very man of action. And he wanted that kind of son and instead he got a guy who was salt-tarded towards animals, a terrible athlete who just wanted to keep his head in a book. And I, but even when I went out into the world and succeeded, I always deep down wanted to be home, living in peace and harmony with family and the place where I'm from. And I was finally able to do that in 2011 because my writing career got to a point where I could be anywhere. My younger sister died early of cancer and my wife and I wanted to go back to this little tiny Louisiana town and be of service to my family. We wanted to raise our own children around family with the good things that are there. Now we get there and it didn't work and it didn't work because of a quirk of my family. The people in town were fine to us, but within my own family system dominated by my dad, they wouldn't accept us because we were city people and we could never cross that threshold into being accepted. I didn't see that coming because my family had always been close, but we were just two, as my father put it, "Too Damn Weird." Now being "Too Damn Weird" simply weren't exactly like them. And it just broke me. I didn't see this coming and I fell into deep chronic illness. I had Epstein Bar virus, which is Mono Nucleus, which was for four years straight. The rheumatologist said it was because of the deep stress of my family situation. And he said, "You're not going to get over this unless you move away." I said, "I can't. I'm the only kid my parents have left. I don't want to make my kids move again." He said, "Well, you better find inner peace some way." Well, one way I found inner peace was reading Dante, the divine comedy. And it brought me to a book about it, how Dante can save your life. I won't recount the whole thing there, but in reading Dante, not just as a literary exercise, but as a spiritual exercise, but also as like looking maybe this guy has the map I need to get out of my own dark wood. I saw that I had made an idol, a family of place and above all my dad. As Dante in the book has to be divested of his worldly idols before he can truly know God. And that helped me once I realized that I'd been an idol worshiper without realizing it, because it took good thing to love your family and where you're from, but I'd made them ultimate goods when God is the only ultimate good. When I finally got that straight in my mind, I began to recover my health, but by then my marriage was in real trouble. My crisis with my family put so much weight on my wife that the marriage didn't survive and ended up losing. Ironically, I moved to Louise Yanor with my family to gain family and ended up losing my family. And my father, I should say, as a warning that he died in 2015, I still admire him. He was a good man in most respects, but a flawed man. His problem was he thought that as long as we all stayed right here in place and lived by the code that no problems could come to us. My younger sister, his daughter, she was the golden girl. She did all of that and yet she died at the age of 42 from lung cancer, though she had never smoked a day in her life. And my dad, I think, and my mom and all of them couldn't cope with that disorder. She had done everything right and died. I was the black sheep simply by moving away and I survived. But in any case, I'd only bring that up to say, be careful what you idolize. The time I got to Budapest, my marriage was over. My wife had filed for divorce, and I wasn't looking for paradise, but I was looking at a more worldly level to see what good could be done for to stabilize society and help society heal by this kind of government. What we saw there was all of Orban's good intentions didn't amount to anything permanent in part because people didn't make their reforms in their own lives to go back to church, to raise bigger families and embrace traditional virtues, but also the Orban system allowed far too much corruption, and that ended up bringing it down. So, I guess to come back and answer your question, I guess one thing I've learned from all of my travels and experiences and my Nostos journey is they only real ethical is heaven. You know, Odysseus wants to get back to his homeland, I wanted for a while to get back to my homeland in Louisiana, but it was a false homeland. And I've come to realize as I've sojourned from here and there over since losing my family that heaven is my only real ethical and a Saint Benedict of mercy on my patron saint, the founder of Western monasticism in the early 6th century, he writes in his rule that the overwhelming obligation for his monks is to search for God. And I would say that's good advice for all of us, it's certainly one that I take to heart. God is there in our suffering, that's one of the hardest things I've had to learn, but I've lived it. And do you know Jeremy, since because I'm a public figure and known as a political conservative and religious conservative, and I've gone through this divorce that I didn't choose, but it happened. Men reach out to me, not always men, but often men and just say, hey, I'm a Christian too, I'm a conservative too, this is what's happening to me. And I've just listened to their stories. I probably wouldn't have done that before or I would have it, and we're like, come on, hurry up, hurry up. But I've realized that people are carrying so much more than I have realized in their lives, that whole, that little coffee mug saying be kind for everyone you know is fighting a great battle, brother, that is true. And so what I've suffered a lot, but what I've tried to do is allow in a Christian way that's suffering to purify me, help me to be more merciful and more loving and more service to others. I've got a long way to go, but there's no escaping it. We're all going to die. We're all going to get our hearts broken in some way. Some of us are going to lose a child at an early age like my poor parents did and my, my sister's children and her, her husband. Some of us will lose our businesses. We'll lose a job. Something. Whatever. We're all going to face it at some point. Only in God is their peace. In His will is our peace, as it says in Dante. And that will, we have to, we have to be mature about it and realize that life is tragic. Life has a tragic sense. And that if we don't learn how to suffer well, which is to say not allow ourselves to be defeated by suffering, but allow it to transform us in a Christian way, then it can wreck us or cause us to wreck the lives of many, many others. So my advice for these young men is for get offline or at least get it, that's a practical thing. Don't let this thing dictate your life, but to search for God and to know that you are not living out anything that young men have not lived out in every other century. It's part of being human, learning how to be a man. Yes, it's different in certain ways that are particular to your time and place, but every one of us has to move from boyhood to manhood. It happens to be your curse, young man, that you're living in a world and in a culture that has lost its grounding, lost its way and is unwilling or unable to give you the help that you're entitled to, but you can't give in. Because if you give in, they win. You know, there are ways to become a man, go back to the classics, the classics of literature, go back to the church, read those lives of the saints and the great missionaries who were extremely manly, but they also served God and they put their courage in the service of virtue and love and kindness. In the Orthodox church, if you go into some churches, you will see big icons of the military saints, the Roman soldiers who were executed by the Romans for their faith in Christ. And I love seeing those there because these were manly men and like Saint Demetrios, Thessaloniki. They were manly men, but their courage was put to the test when they were told to deny Christ or die and they chose death over the dishonor of the dying of their Savior. By the way, I went to Thessaloniki where Saint Demetrios, the Roman soldier murdered there, was buried. They discovered his tomb back in the 80s, deep, deep, deep under the Basilica there. And when they discovered it, it began to gush, merr, like gold frankincense and merr. Miraculously, the whole neighborhood gets smell it. It's still losing merr to the state. They can't explain it. And I was there a couple of years ago, I got from the priest, a little cotton ball with some of the merr from his tomb. And I bought an icon of Saint Demetrios and got it blessed. When I went to see JD Vance last fall, I gave them both to him. And I asked Saint Demetrios and my prayers, I asked Christ to protect and guide our vice president. But I also asked Saint Demetrios to help JD who was a warrior. He wasn't in the Marines to help him be a true warrior for Christ and warrior for virtue and to find his own courage to stand up to the evil that is rising around us. And it's a task for JD Vance. It's a task for you, a task for me, a task for all of us. We can't keep our eyes closed to what's happening. We all heard, growing up, talking about the Holocaust, never again, never again. We'll never again as in how. I'm afraid of that. But whatever again is now. Heaven is the real ithika, heavens the real America. And if you want to live in a virtuous world, you have to live virtuously yourself. Yeah, I mean, as Sultanaeus and famously said, the greatest lesson he learned of the Goulai where he converted to Christianity was a lot between good and evil. It doesn't run between social classes, religions, races. It runs right down the middle of every human heart. I try to think about that all the time because I have, you know, if you have a tradition of confession as we do in the Orthodox Church, you have to be thinking on your sins. And there are things that I never even thought of that now the older I've gotten, the more I'm reflective I've become, I'm like, you know, I wasn't my best there. And it's helped me also to find humanity and people who don't share my politics or my religion. So try to find those connections because you know, when I was in the Czech Republic interviewing the people, Camilla Bendivan, others who were part of the Czech anti-communist resistance, Camilla is quite old now. And she and her late husband Vatslav, they were strong Catholics, the only Christians in the inner circle of Vatslav Havill and the Czech resistance. They would meet there at the bed of department. And I asked her, I said, Camilla, was it hard for you and your husband, a faithful Christian to the friend and ally with Havill and all these other, they were all hippies, right? God was hippies. And she said, no, not at all. She said, you mustn't think that Christians here under calm enough, some are all brave. Most Christians did like everybody else and kept their head down because they didn't want trouble. My husband and I standing before God felt like we could not do that. So when we looked around for the people who had the courage to take a stance, we found Havill, we found these hippies and we trusted them and they trusted us too. And she advised me to go back and tell Americans because look for that virtue of courage and people and don't reject somebody who is brave about the right thing just because they don't agree with you on everything. Because the people who might share all of your political or religious opinions when they're put to the test, they run and hide. The brave won't. Roger. Thank you. Thank you Jeremy. And thank you Jasper. Yeah, it's the best part of the show.