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

Few figures have shaped modern conservative media like Ben Shapiro. After more than 20 years in politics and a decade building The Daily Wire, Shapiro sits down with Patrick Bet-David at a pivotal moment for the American right. They unpack why the movement is fracturing, how Shapiro found himself at odds with voices he once stood beside, and what the battle for conservatism could look like heading into 2028. 👞 GET THE FLB1's: https://bit.ly/4mC4uf6 🎟️ SECURE YOUR 2026 VAULT TICKETS: https://bit.ly/4xU2SCW ▶️ SUBSCRIBE TO BEN SHAPIRO: https://www.youtube.com/@UCnQC_G5Xsjhp9fEJKuIcrSw ▶️ SUBSCRIBE TO THE DAILY WIRE: https://www.youtube.com/@UCaeO5vkdj5xOQHp4UmIN6dw 🧑‍💻 VISIT THE DAILY WIRE: https://www.dailywire.com/ 🧢 SHOP THE BLACK & GOLD FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT HAT: https://bit.ly/4pe7gZh 🦁 SPONSOR THE VAULT 2026: https://bit.ly/4mFBPpw Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP 👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj 🇰 KALSHI: http://kalshi.com/pbd SUBSCRIBE TO: @VALUETAINMENT @BetDavidConsulting @ValuetainmentComedy ABOUT US: Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller "Your Next Five Moves" (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You were a hero. And then, all of a sudden, you became a villain.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  I see myself as the same person I always was.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Who do you think had the biggest impact of you becoming a villain?

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Let's say, for example, October 7th somehow, you know, made me a villain.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Do you think you have any blind spots? Tucker said MAGA was betrayed.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Giant fissures that have emerged inside the conservative movement.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  They don't trust JD because they think JD's been compromised.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  If that's what JD Vance gets for all of his loyalty to Tucker Carlson, that'd be kind of astonishing.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  They respect you, but they love him.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  I would rather say 100% of the truth.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  I believe Daily Wire, without Ben Shapiro, shuts down the next day.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  When Jeremy and Caleb fired Candace, I thought that they should have publicly explained why they fired Candace. I think that it is evil what Candace Owens has done to Charlie Kirk's family. I've taken a bunch of positions that my audience does not like, including the position that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  You had a vaccine position as well.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Please ask me about vaccine. For the love of God, there are certain bright lines I will not cross. And one of those bright lines, I will not lie. I won't do it. I've been labeled alt-right 1,000 times wrongly because the alt-right despises me.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Oh, Nick Fuentes. Did you ever have him on?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Would I ever have him on? Um, I mean, it depends. Again, if he, if he weren't, I would, the, the answer is...

• 1:10Speaker 00

  So, do you think there is a growing problem on the right?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  A civil war is brewing in the republic. Transgressive politics is always attractive to young people. Whether it's Hassan Piker saying he loves Mao on the, on the left, or whether it's Fuentes saying he loves Hitler on the right. You joke about Hitler, you joke about Hitler. At a certain point, you're like, am I really joking about Hitler? Or was he really kind of okay? Pierce is trying to pin him down on his beliefs about the Holocaust. And so what Nick does, he immediately launches into a bunch of jokes about the Holocaust. Was everyone smarter for having heard that? I think actually everyone might be stupider for having heard this.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Do you think there's a net positive to society with Pierce Morgan's show?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  I've said that he's basically the Jerry Springer of political talk. Here's a, here's a five-person panel, and, and here's Hitler, and here's Air Bud. Now, I would say that mostly what Pierce acts like on his show is a slightly foolish child. I mean, come on.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  My handshake is better than anything I ever signed, right here.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  You are a one of one? My son's right there.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  I don't think I've ever said this before.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  So, Ben, I guess we're doing this.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, why not?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're doing this. I know the first time we sat down was in your LA studio in 2018.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  And then, that was the podcast we did when I asked you, I said, so who do you think is going to be a president in 2022? You know, 2020? He said, I think Joe Biden's got a chance of becoming a president.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  And then, next time around, I came to you, we did a podcast in the great city of Boca, and then we're doing it here, part three, with the two of us. So, I appreciate you making the time to come down here.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Hey, for having me, I appreciate it. It's a very cool studio, by the way.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Well, thank you. You guys were playing basketball.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Much more fun than our studio.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Right before, you guys need to know this, Ben asked for tissue because in case he gets emotional, so we brought him some tissue. Adam was here since 4 o'clock in the morning, waiting for you. He doesn't get here at 9 o'clock, but he wanted to see you. But, uh, open, open question for you to, to think about. When I talk to kids, when I talk to folks who are in their 30s or 40s, and I'll say, what was your transition of becoming a conservative? Why, I used to be a liberal and all this stuff. I don't know how many of them will tell you, I watched Ben Shapiro, right? I was watching Ben Shapiro, who was the OG guy on campuses before Crowder, or Charlie was Ben. Uh, Ben, the first time I watched him on Pierce Morgan, a month after Sandy Hook, when he talked about, hey, it's not about the semi-automatic weapons, why don't you take the guns? And you brought

• 3:44Speaker 00

  him the Constitution. Oh, that went viral, right? Or, hey, the guy that puts his arm on your shoulder, and you said, that's mildly inappropriate. You had transgender, Caitlyn Clark, Caitlyn Jenner, and I think that was Dr. Drew, and then the physicist, I'm a mathematician. You are not a biologist. All these clips that would go. So, you were a hero. You were a guy that people looked up to. You were a guy that people would share with others and say, this is why I'm a conservative. Watch this guy. And then, all of a sudden, an evolution happened after October 7th, where you went from being the hero to, on the conservative side, you became a villain. A little bit to some of the folk.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  To a certain segment.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  To a certain segment, for sure. Not all of them. You still have a massive following that people follow you. What do you think was that turning point of going, being, you know, from the guy that everybody looks up to and shares, to all of a sudden, wait a minute, is this guy a villain? Is this guy on my side? What do you think happened there?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think that there's been some underlying fragmentation in the conservative movement that you're seeing reflected all over the place. So, I'm not sure there's anybody who's now sort of acclaimed as a universal hero inside of conservatism.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  I agree. It used to be Charlie.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Right. It, it was Charlie.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  But even Charlie had, you know, people who disagreed with him.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  And the truth is that, you know, if you went back to 2017, 2018, Tucker was a hero to everybody. If you went back to 27, 2018, Trump was a hero to everybody, right? Like, the, the reality is that as the sort of tides of politics move, there are moments when a movement starts to crack up or fragment. Uh, and it, it's easier, I will say, for people to be unified in opposition. So, when Barack Obama was president, which is when some of this stuff was happening, right? Sandy Hook was 2013, the shooting was 2012, the appearance on Pierce Morgan was 2013.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  You know, that Obama was president. Being in the opposition tends to unify you. Being in power tends to disunify. And so, when that happens, then you start to see a bit, a bit of a crack up. Uh, as far as the, the sort of 2013, 2023, 2024 of it, I think that there was a lot of roiling inside the conservative movement about sort of what the future of the conservative movement was, was going to look like. Because President Trump is a pragmatist. He doesn't have sort of a set of ideological values for everybody to gather around. He's also sui generis, meaning that his brand encompasses everybody. Like, I can vote for him, and Tucker could vote for him, right? And so, what, what that meant is that he was open to interpretation by everybody. And so, all of those politics were sort of roiling under the surface. And after October 7th, when I spoke out, obviously,

• 5:58Speaker 01

  very strongly about Israel and Hamas, and, and the position of, you know, various parties in the least, when I spoke out about that, I think that, you know, some of my detractors saw an opportunity to sort of latch on to my position on that, and then to try to make the claim that the predominant feature about me, despite the fact that I've been doing this since the time I was 17 years old, was focus inordinately on, on Israel. I, I think some of that was code for, he's Jewish, but it doesn't really matter. I mean, the bottom line is, people can think what they, they want to think. My positions have been exactly the same for about 25 years. I mean, I think the thing that people don't maybe know about my career trajectory, because most of them got acquainted with me in, like, 2013, I've been in this since 2004. My first book came out in 2004.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Brainwashed.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Exactly, brainwashed, about, about liberal bias on college campuses.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  You know, I, I wrote a second book in 2005 about how social liberalism was going to destroy America, and America would turn into a pornographic, a pornographic society. I was widely mocked for it at the time. So, I've been doing this since I was 17. I'm now 42. That is a very, very long arc. And so, you know, you see times when you're the hero. You see times when you're the villain. You see times when you're unknown, times when you're known. Uh, and so, I think it's a little bit much to expect that, that you're always going to be the universal hero in every circumstance. And again, politics is necessarily oppositional. And so, when people watch a clip of me on a college campus dealing with a wokester or something, very easy to say, ah, I'm rooting for that guy. But what do you do when you have to take a nuanced or complex position about what America's foreign policy ought to be, going forward in, in the bloodiest region of the world, for example? Or, or where do we go from here in terms of our economics? I mean, that's

• 7:29Speaker 01

  a, that is, that's a debate that's getting very little coverage, but actually is very core to what's happening right now. I'm, I'm very much free market oriented. Many of the people who are against me are very much not free market oriented. Uh, these are, these are open debates.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  That's who?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Tucker does not like the free markets.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Okay, tell me more.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  I mean, by any stretch of the imagination. Actually, my, my first indicator of serious political disagreement with Tucker, who was on my show in maybe 2018. Uh, and he comes on the show, and his book was, I'd say, very negative toward innovation and, and capitalism in general. The, the idea that he, he had said this on the air, I believe by that point, or he would soon, was that capitalism is just a system put in place by powers that be, and we, and the, the economy needs to work for us, which to me is left-wing language, because when I'm, I'm thinking about how the economy works, there are basic realities of human nature. We are acquisitive people. We are creative people. We wish to own the property that we produce. And based on those fundamental truths, you then get property rights in a free market economy. And when you, and, and when you encroach upon those

• 8:28Speaker 01

  fundamental truths, what you end up with is a form of statism. So, anyway, in that interview, I, I asked Tucker specifically, because he'd written about this in his book, about self-driving cars, because he had basically said that he was anti-self-driving cars, uh, because it would take away trucker jobs. And so, I asked him about that, and I said, what would you, you know, would you ban self-driving vehicles? And he said, yes. And I was a little surprised by that, because obviously, I'm of the opinion that self-driving vehicles are, are one of the great inventions to come along in the last 50 years. I mean, they're incredible. My father is 70. A few months ago, he got hit in a car crash. He'll be fine, but when he went to get a new car, I told him, you're 70 years old, you should get a Tesla, because it's self-driving, and it's going to perceive things on the road, particularly at night, that you're not going to be able to perceive. It's amazing. And he's much safer now. And the truth is, obviously, self-driving cars, if we all had them, would

• 9:13Speaker 01

  radically cut down on the amount of motor vehicle death in the United States, who have tens of thousands of people dying in car. Okay, so anyway, I said this to Tucker, and I said, on what basis would you ban self-driving cars? And he said, on the basis of safety. And I said, well, Tucker, they're safer than, than human drivers. And he said, you asked me on what basis I would ban them, not what's true.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  And to me, I mean, that does not bespeak, shall we say, faith in innovation. He's part of a movement that has arisen on the right that basically says that capitalism empties the soul. It's sort of a, an almost Marxist materialist conception of the universe, where economic circumstances are supposedly responsible for your spiritual fulfillment. And as a very religious person, I don't think that's true. I have ancestors who are poor, I have, you know, ancestors, I'm sure, at some point who are rich. You know, people were forming families under a wide variety of circumstances. Many of the most impoverished places on earth have high levels of family formation and child rearing. There are lots of places that live under tyranny, where people are getting married and having children. And there are lots of places, like the United States, where for a long period of time, capitalism was the predominant way of life, and people were getting married and having children.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And so the attempt to say that the government's job is to get involved in creating a spiritually fulfilling life for you, and somehow it's a shortcoming of economics if you're not spiritually fulfilled, I think these are category errors.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Do you think, like, the way you said, "I've been like this for 25 years, and I've been at it since '04," it's 21 years, whatever the timeline, like you said, do you think Tucker's always been like this, or he became like this?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  You know, I hesitate to speculate about what people, quote-unquote, "secretly" believed. I can only speak to his public statements. So I know that he was not oriented toward capitalism since at least the mid-2010s. As far as his orientation on foreign policy, that seems to have kind of shifted and moved over time in a wide variety of ways. All I know is that right now, I think that he is spewing an enormous number of untruths about the state of the world, and conspiracy theories about, you know, systems that are rigged against you by nefarious powers, most of whom seem, in his mind, to have conflated with Israel, which, again, I think that is part of the underlying sort of tenor of a certain level of politics on the right.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  So, so let's go to the Israel topic. So when the Israel event happened, October 7th, you came out, you had your statements that you made, then the Candace situation took place, and then that went on for a minute, and then Charlie Kirk, which I think we're coming up to the one-year anniversary in about a month or so, when he came here like this.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  And we all remember where we were there. Do you think the Israel topic is still as big of an issue as it was during October 7th, meaning, in the 2028 election that comes around, do you think it'll be one of those topics where people are gonna say, "Hey, are you pro-Israel, you know, are you this, are you that," or you think that's not gonna play a role?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Probably. No, I think that it's gonna continue to percolate, because I think that many of the theories about what Israel is in the world are not actually, are not actually connected to the reality of what Israel is in the world, which is a fairly small state, and by the regional standards, a very small state, located in one of the most violent areas of the world with a robust economy and a significant military capacity. And the rule, the rumor about Israel, rather, that people have been putting forward, is that Israel, you know, controls our politics, that everything that's happening, from a Moroccan migrant invasion of a Spanish city, to, you know, how people vote on economics, to the boot of the NYPD, all of that is being manipulated by Israel. That's, that's just conspiracism.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Well, let's do this. So, so to me, because I think there's three camps. There's those that anything happens, it's Israel.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Right? It's like, the same as anything happens, it's Trump. Anything happens, it's socialist, anything. So everybody, there's a camp here, right?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  They lack the ability to reason. Then you got the guys that nothing is Israel's fault. I think both of them have a problem here. Both these camps have a problem.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I would say those are not equivalent problems, but sure. I mean, one of those is closer to the truth, and one of them is much further from the truth. Everything is Israel's fault, and nothing is Israel's fault, if that's a spectrum. I'm not saying nothing is Israel's fault. Obviously, Israel's a country that makes mistakes, and does bad things, like any other country. But, if you're, if you're talking about a spectrum, if I were to say to you, there are two camps.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  One says Nigeria is responsible for literally all of our problems, all of them. And one of them says Nigeria is responsible for none of our problems. Both of these are untrue. Okay, these are not equal levels of untruth.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  I don't know if I'm putting equal, but I'm saying that both of them lack reason, for me. They both lack the ability to reason.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  If you can't sit there and say, "This guy's 100% innocent, he never does anything wrong, this guy's 100% guilty, he does everything wrong," I have a hard time hearing you. Both camps, they lose a guy like me. Then I get to a guy in the middle, and I'm like, "You know what? The fact that they're out there, they're fighting the tough guy, the bad guys around them, and you have to worry about Iran, you have to worry about this small little place, these guys have been surviving their entire lives, hey, they have the survival, they're a little bit more paranoid than us, they're a little bit more careful of what's going on. Imagine if your neighbor wanted to kill you all the time." Okay, fair, that's a good argument. And then the other side is, well, they got a hold of politicians, and they started, instead of taking the money, everybody's playing a propaganda game, but instead of taking the money and maybe winning the youth over, they took the money and tried to win over politicians,

• 14:13Speaker 00

  AIPAC comes up, all these things that come up, right?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  And then you'll say, "Well, it's really Bibi. Bibi's the guy we gotta get rid of, because Bibi is a fanatical, he's a, you know, you heard what Mumdani said about Bibi, if he comes to New York, this is what I'm gonna, then he realizes he can't do any of it." So talk to the reasonable community in the middle. And if you don't mind doing the following, I don't, I can't hear these guys. I'm, I'm, I can't hear anything they're saying. But to the reasonable community in the middle, they're like, "Look, yeah, I get along with Jews, I do business with them, it's easy, they're very good business people, but, you know, I also realize they got certain motives that they're trying to protect." What did Israel do wrong, or Bibi do wrong, or the Jewish community do wrong on the right? Not, I'm not talking ADL. ADL's a very different game we're talking. I'm talking specifically conservative Jews, or Israel, or Bibi.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  What did they do wrong to all of a sudden get blasted on social media by the youth, the way that they did the last couple of years?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Again, I will say that, I think that to discuss Israel outside of the context of the broader political kind of environment in which conspiracy theories are rife, would be a mistake. And so to say that Israel is driving, for example, you know, Tucker Carlson to become radically anti-Israel, that Israel did something different October 8th than Israel had done October 6th, and that's what drove Tucker Carlson to where he is, or Candace Owens to where she is, or something, I just don't think that's true. As far as things that Israel has done wrong, I mean, are we talking internally or externally? Because I could name a dozen problems inside of Israel.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Give me any direction you want to go.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Okay, fine. I mean, internally in Israel, they have obviously major problems, including the fact that they have an entire sector of the population that is ultra-religious that refuses to serve in the army, and that's terrible. That's an internal Israeli problem. As far as...

• 15:48Speaker 00

  They refuse to serve in the army?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, this is like a Syria, it's probably the number-one issue in Israel, and it explains a lot of sort of the chaos that you see inside the Israeli government, and also the reason why Bibi leads a coalition that is very unpopular in Israel, but also can't kind of be electorally defeated. The thing that people should understand about the Bibi of it is that if Bibi did not exist, the Israeli government would be following essentially the same playbook. In fact, the people who are running against him right now in an election that's slated to happen in October are running to his right.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  They're running to his right?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yes, that's correct. Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett. There's a perception in American politics that Bibi is a sort of radical right-wing figure. In Israeli politics, Bibi is actually slightly right of center and quite incrementalist in his approach. So one of the big critiques of Bibi has been that he actually has not gone hard enough, for example, in Lebanon, or he didn't go hard enough, believe it or not, in Gaza, because the idea was he should move faster and get fewer Israeli soldiers killed and all of that.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  This is, this is the people further right than Bibi that are not happy with his actions that he took?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Even the people who are campaigning theoretically to his left, people like Naftali Bennett or Gadi Eisenkot on foreign policy, are actually where he is or to the right. Because the entire Israeli population has reacted to October 7th by saying, "We're not going to take a sort of defensive step backward, we're going to lean forward and say, 'Okay, now we're going to preemptively hit threats, we're not going to wait for those to materialize.'"

• 17:03Speaker 00

  So stay on that. So what percentage of the population, of the people that are running, are aligned on that topic?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  On that topic?

• 17:09Speaker 00

  That we should have reacted even stronger?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  To, in different ways, to Iran, to Lebanon? I would say that there is a coalition that represents probably 80% of the population, that is somewhere between just barely to Bibi's left, all the way to his right.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  So like, there's widespread agreement on foreign policy in Israel. There are a couple of fringes that don't agree, that would say the Arab population of Israel obviously is one, which is about 20% of the population there, and the, there's a left-wing party run by Gadi Yaragolon. Okay, so those are internal problems in Israel. Then there's sort of how Israel has addressed the world. And I would say that, you know, Israel is operating in a mode that, when it comes to PR, that I think is past its sell-by date. And that is that they have continued to try to make a moralistic argument with regards to foreign policy that I don't think has a lot of truck in a world in which people are significantly more realpolitik in their, in their sort of approach. So, I've said this openly lately, I think that the reasons that the United States ought

• 18:09Speaker 01

  to be allied with Israel, obviously, I think that there's moral alignment with a democratic state that is allied with the United States, and literally flying planes alongside the United States against common enemies like Iran. But, put aside that, the real reason that we ought to be allied with Israel from a sort of realpolitik standpoint is that Israel's an extraordinarily technologically advanced military power in the region that has oversight and overwatch in a bunch of other areas where terrorist groups percolate, that Israel's intelligence gathering capacity is extraordinarily high, that Israel acts as what some generals have called a non-floating aircraft carrier for the United States. And, again, if you're gonna talk about aid to Israel, I've been talking about phasing out aid to Israel for probably 20 years, so that really is not the issue.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Why?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Because I think that it is good for our allies to be militarily capable on their own. Israel has enough of an economy to support itself. I think in emergency situations, obviously, like post-October 7th, when you have to ramp up your defense because you're on a war in seven fronts, the United States very often will fund our friends and allies. We did that in Ukraine. I was an advocate, by the way, of funding Ukraine. That's another unpopular position on some parts of the right.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  You were for funding Ukraine?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. 100%. Because I think the Russians are our enemies, and I think the Russians do not have America's interests at heart.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Which, by the way, in a weird way today, you're seeing conservatives who would have never defended Zelensky, they're defending Zelensky now because they're realizing Putin was giving different military bases of US to Iran, they were given that intel, and so now that's caused folks to unify against Putin.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  But listen, the sort of bizarre willingness to... Look over or hug Putin for years is bizarre to me. I'm old enough to remember when Mitt Romney was saying that Russia was the number one geopolitical threat to the United States and the right was totally unified about that. And then obviously that sort of went away. And one of the things that I've learned about politics over the course of the last 15, 20 years is just how reactionary everything is. Everything is just bouncing off of something else. And so it's very few people, I would say, in the political sphere have the same principles that they did when they were 17. And I think that if there's something that separates me from other pundits is that you can, you can, people have commentated on politics. If you look at the through line of what I've believed since I was 17 years old, it's basically the same. And as I've said before, nobody ever looks at what I say and goes, you know, man, when did he change?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  When did that happen? Right? I'm the same guy I was in 2013, 2014. That's why when you say, you know, what is it that you did or what made you more unpopular post October? It's not as though I hadn't said anything I was saying, you know, on October 8th that I'd never said before. I mean, obviously that's silly.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Do you see yourself as a villain right now? Do you see yourself as a hero right now?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I hesitate to lay, I see myself as the same person I always was, speaking truths that I think are important and how people perceive me is of very little relevance to me.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Why are you, why are you an easy villain for a lot of people on the right right now? Specifically to youth, to young, you know? Why are you an easy villain?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, there is a tendency to, again, try to blame external actors for the problems in your life. And also, there's something fun about the idea that your problems are not your fault. And I will say that if there's one message that I've been perfectly consistent about, and there are many, but this is the number one message, most of your problems in your life are solvable by you. This is an unpopular political message. And it varies very strongly from, from people like Tucker, who says that most of the problems in your life are the fault of somebody else and are unsolvable maybe altogether. Right? I think that-

• 21:24Speaker 00

  We're on the same page with that message.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And, but it's becoming an increasingly unpopular message, which I think is tragic. I think that if there's no one left in American politics who says, most of the problems in your life are solvable. You live in the freest system in the history of mankind, the most prosperous system in the history of mankind, and you're sitting there bitching because you don't want to make decisions that will make your life better. And that doesn't mean that we can't do things politically that will alleviate some of the roadblocks, that'll get rid of those obstacles. I mean, that's, that's the job of politics. But most of your successes or failures in your life, like 97% of them, are going to be up to your personal decision making. And so I'll say stuff like that, and it's fascinating. I'll give you like a villain moment, right? That sort of became a villain moment. So one of the things that I said, I was on, I think it was Constantine Keston's podcast, and we were talking about-

• 22:06Speaker 00

  They do a great job of that.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's great. The trigonometry guys are really good. And we were talking about affordability in New York. And one of the things I said is, listen, there are things you could do to alleviate housing prices in New York somewhat. Okay, New York is a, is a limited piece of territory that is very, very highly built up. So you're not going to double the housing stock in New York. It's just not going to happen because there's not enough space. And so if the rent is too high there for you, you're a young person, you don't have a job that can pay for the rent, if you want to improve your life, you might think about moving out of New York. Which, again, I thought is relatively uncontroversial. I've moved many times in my life in pursuit of a job, in pursuit of a better career opportunity. We've considered moves that we didn't make, right? That was kind of the norm, and I thought that that is how you pursue success. Right? If you, if you're not succeeding in a particular situation, look for another situation in which you can succeed.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  This became uber viral because the idea was that I was telling people that they did not have a right to live where they grew up. And listen, you have a right to live where you grew up, but you don't have a right to not pay rent there, right? You don't, you don't have a right to a $200,000 salary from a company.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Who criticized you? Who criticized?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I mean, Tucker was very heavy on this. He played this, but this went very viral online. It was, it was a huge percentage of the right was trying to make the argument. And then this is where you see it telescoped into an issue that, this is where I start to say, okay, because I'm wearing a yarmulke, there's something to, you know, the targeting. They tried to telescope, believe it or not, that issue into Israel. So what they tried to do is they did a two-step. The first thing that my opponents did is they lied about what I was saying, obviously. What they said is that I said that you have no right to grow, to be where you grew up, which is not what I said. And then they said, but you have a right to be in Israel, right? You have a right to, of Israel to exist, but you don't have a right for America. What in the world are you talking about?

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Is this it? Is this the clip?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yes, it's probably it.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Okay, go for it.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  If you're a young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here. I mean, that is a real thing. Okay, I know that we've now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up, but the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that. The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity. And if the opportunities are limited here and they're not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities. If you're a young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  You can pause it. So that's what you got hit for?

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Because what? Because you're asking people to leave where they can't afford to live?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  I mean, that's what everybody's family's ever done.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  I know. But it's, it's stuff like that. So again-

• 24:32Speaker 00

  So this, who villainized you? Who was on your side who villainized you? Who looked at this and said, what a jerk Ben Shapiro is?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Um, well, I mean, I believe Tucker has used that one a lot. He's also used a clip where I talked about how I think that it's better for people to retire later unless you have like backbreaking labor and you have physical problems.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  I've seen that one. And that one can be debated. That actually can be debated.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Well, what I was speaking about there actually was the idea of sort of life fulfillment. And well, I wasn't saying when you, that when you, what I was saying is, it is actually a bad idea in life to think that you're going to hit 65 and go golfing and be on the beach for the rest of your life.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  And be happy for the rest of your life. You're not.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  That's not like, there's no social science data to back that. You need a feeling of-

• 25:09Speaker 00

  But somebody can twist that and say, you want me to live till 75 years old? I've even made the argument even further than you with that one. And I've said, I think we need to raise the social security age from 65 to 72 because we can't afford it.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  So that's exactly what I was talking about in that clip, right? If you go back two minutes, that's what I'm talking about.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  That's not a popular issue. You'll never win on that, in that position.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Correct. But the idea is that if this is the stuff that makes me unpopular, quote unquote, on the right, how many of these people are on the right? I mean, this was traditional conservatism. Traditional conservatism was the idea of free market economics-

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Personal responsibility-

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Virtue, and recognizing the shortcomings of the welfare state, right? These were all traditional conservative opinions. There is, in fact, when people on the right will say, oh, you're, people today were suggesting, I think it was Dave Smith suggesting that I was on the left. I mean, there's not a single position on which I am somehow to Dave Smith's left. I mean, that is a bizarre sort of characterization. And so this is why I say, I think what's really happening here-

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Where are you at with gay couple men adopting kids? What's your position there?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think that that is not good. I'm, I'm against that.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  You're against that?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Has that always been the case since 17?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  So you're-

• 26:13Speaker 01

  I literally was on Joe Rogan talking about how I would not attend a gay wedding. He did an entire episode on it. He couldn't let go of it.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  You wouldn't attend a gay wedding?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Correct. I'm a religious Jew.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  Okay, so there is a-

• 26:21Speaker 01

  I would go to, I mean, I have gay friends who have adopted kids or have surrogated. I'll go to their house, they're my friends, but do I think that what they did is morally right? No. Do I think that, again, I, one of the things that I also, people have a bit of a tough time sometimes understanding where I'm coming from, is that my political stances are not consonant with, you know, that, that does not obviate me being a decent person to people with whom I disagree.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Right? So people say, how could you even be friends with a person like? I'm friends with a lot of people I disagree with, it turns out. I'm not a child, right? I can, I can be friends with people that I disagree with, I can treat them well.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm asking especially because you said Dave Smith.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And also, why are people looking for my moral impermeur? Like, this is the thing I've never really understood. So people like Joe got very upset at me on one episode, I think it was the second time I was on his show, because I said I wouldn't attend a same-sex wedding. And my, my question to him was, why do you want me at your same-sex wedding? Do you need my moral impermeur for your lifestyle? I don't need your moral impermeur for my lifestyle, right? If you said, I don't respect your marriage, I'd say, okay, and? Like, can't you be confident in your, in your own choices enough that you don't need my, you know? I'm not the one who's like stepping in there and telling you, you can't do X, Y, or Z. My perspective on marriage, by the way, on gay marriage, is that the state has an incentive for people to get married and have children. That means there's an additional incentive for heterosexual couples because they get married and have children.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Do you think, remember back in the days, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, Charles Barkley had that one commercial, "I am not a role model." I don't know if you remember that or not, 30 years ago.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, of course.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  He's like, leave me alone. I mean, he's not a role model to young kids. Do you think, in the position you're in as an influencer, do you think you are a role model? You should play role model?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Tell me more.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so I am a married father of five.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Okay, congratulations on your fifth.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Thank you, I appreciate it. I have lived as clean a life as it is possible to live. Um, you know, and I say that with pride because that's a series of decisions. Now, again, I was given the ultimate privilege, which is great parents. Right? That is the ultimate privilege, not white privilege, not economic privilege, the privilege of awesome parents, right? I grew up in a small house in Burbank, California, it was like 1,100 square feet with three younger sisters. We all shared a bedroom until I was 11, and, and we had one bathroom for six people. So, you know, again, we weren't economically privileged, we weren't really poor, but we weren't, we were probably like middle, middle class, lower middle class.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  What high school did you go to?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I went to a Jewish day school.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  But I went to, I was in and out of public school. So I went to public school from first through fourth, technically.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  In Burbank?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  In Burbank. So I went to Edison Elementary from, from K through, through four. I skipped third. And then I went to a Jewish school, fifth and sixth. And I went back to a public school called Walter Reed Middle School for seventh and eighth. And then I went to, and then I went to, I was in the, the IHP program, which was sort of the like magnet program.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Magnet, yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then, and then I went to a Jewish day school that my parents were on scholarship for, for 10th, 11th, 12th, I skipped ninth. So I graduated high school when I was 16. And then I went to UCLA for, for college and then Harvard Law. Um, you know, all of that is, is predicated in trying to make good decisions. So this is why I put a lot of focus on good decisions, because there ain't no substitute for it. And so when I'm speaking to people as a role model, I feel it incumbent on me to try to tell the truth about things, even when it's unpopular. And so one of the things that I've noticed about, you know, a certain number of people who are critical of me, is that if I criticize them, their defense will be these days, well, look at my numbers. Look at, look at how many clicks I'm getting. I'm more successful than you. That has never been something by, I have never measured morality by popularity.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  It's just not important. It isn't. I'm glad a lot of people listen to me. You know, I prefer that more people listen to me than fewer. But I'm not going to change any of my moral precepts based on the number of people who listen to me. If it's one person or if it's a million people, I'm just saying the same thing.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Who do you think has?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  I mean, again, without directly ascribing motivations, people who definitely have shifted their perspectives and cite their clicks a lot, Megyn Kelly is the most obvious example. Tucker, I don't know whether it's genuine or whether he's just aiming for clicks, but obviously he's changed a lot of his positions. And he will very frequently cite sort of statistics about his listenership or viewership as defense. Piers Morgan does it. But again, I don't expect anything from Piers because that's what Piers is. Piers is not particularly a political creature. What's funny about Piers being angry at me is that he's angry at me for saying something that he kind of admits is true. Right? I've said that he's basically the Jerry Springer of political talk, because that's what he is, right? I mean, it's like, here's a five-person panel, and here's Hitler, and here's Air Bud, and here's, you know, and

• 30:40Speaker 01

  here's a left-winger, and here's some crazy homeless hobo screaming from the street. And now let's have an open and honest... Again, that's your business model. Good for you. Like, you can do it.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Morty Downey Jr. used to do that 30 years ago.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then he'll say, and then he'll say he respects Jerry Springer, but then he's angry at me for saying that. And he'll say that I owe him an appearance on his show, which, like, I don't. If I don't want to come on your show, I'm not going to come on your show.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  So some people may say, well, Piers had a position where he was defending Israel, then all of a sudden, I don't know which podcast it was, and it's like, well, I like to hear people's perspective. Then he changes a position, and he's like, well, you know what? I saw a good argument. This is not fair what Bibi is doing. And so some people may say, you know, he has the ability to see a new argument and adjust his positions. What would you say?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I would say that mostly what Piers acts like on his show is a slightly foolish child who is just discovering the world anew every day. And so what he'll do is he... Whatever puts him in sort of the position where he can assume moral superiority in any conversation he'll take. So I don't think there's any consistent through line.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Do you think there's a net positive to society with Piers Morgan's show?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  It's hard for me to say yes. But I also don't think that there's a net positive to society from most of social media. I mean, I think that if I could hit a red button and make social media disappear tomorrow, I probably would. I think it's quite...

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Would you really?

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. At great personal cost to myself, sure.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Because of what?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Because I think it's made people stupid. I think nobody reads a book anymore. I think people don't have any depth of knowledge on issues about which they speak. I think that they go to sources who don't know what the hell they're talking about three quarters of the time. I think that even those, even those kinds of shows have now been, you know, telescoped down to 30-second segments on YouTube Shorts or TikTok. I think the attention span of the public has been radically reduced. And I think people are frankly dumber in their engagement with politics than they were, you know, when I was growing up. And I don't think they're particularly smart when I was growing up. So I think it's really gotten bad now.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  I see. I like the debate. I like seeing the conversation, because to me, I think that's a good thing. You know, one thing that made Charlie, and I went to Amfest a few times, and I spoke a couple of times at Amfest, and I would see, he was able to bring guys and talk that he had. One time Dave Smith went against, what's the guy's name? Something Hammer?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Josh.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Josh Hammer? Guess what? I thought it was great. You know, I thought it was great that he had the courage to bring the guys to do it. And I know one time you went up, the big, this was about a year ago, maybe in December, where you called out Megyn Kelly, and then that's when everything started, after you called out Megyn Kelly. And that became a...

• 33:00Speaker 01

  That was about the Candace Owens attacks on Erica and all that, yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Right, right. That was, I remember that. So in regards to going back to hero-villain, and I want to move on to the next topic, who would you say had the biggest impact of causing somebody to look at you as a villain? Let me just give the names, and then you tell me.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Is it the exit of Candace, how it happened? Is it October 7th, Israel, you defending Israel? Is it you? Is it Tucker? Is it more the fact that there is no real enemy today on the right because Trump won? Who do you think had the biggest impact of you becoming a villain?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Again, I will attribute this to just giant fissures that have emerged inside the conservative movement.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  But let's put one thing there as well.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I mean, listen, all those people are detractors of mine. You know, some of them personally hate me, I assume, or have spoken about personally hating me. That's, I'm sure that that's had an impact. I'm sure there are things that I've said that I could have said better, because that's true for everybody. And as far as, you know, the Israel of it, I do think that there has been disproportionate focus placed on that issue that is not in consonance with, you know, what frankly I even talk about on the show. One of the great kind of lies about my show, and this is where, again, I think social media has made people dumber, is that the people who don't like me, they'll clip from my show as though I only talk about Israel. We've actually gone back, and we've measured, like, how much I talk about Israel. And the answer is very, very, very little. Very little. I talked about Israel a lot right after October 7th. And then, you know,

• 34:25Speaker 01

  by the time we hit, I'd say, mid-2024, when sort of the war had been going for a while, we went back to kind of talking about not Israel. And even, you know, on my show today, the amount that I'll talk about Iran, which is very much in the news, might be three or four minutes, right, out of a 45-minute or an hour-long show.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Why do you think that is? Is it just because strategically people are burned out, or you're burned out?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I think some of both, but I also think that there hasn't been a lot of movement there. I try to cover the news. And so the sort of stasis that we are currently in with regard to Iran, there's nothing happening. If something big happens, like the MOU breaks, we'll lead with it, right? But if it's not breaking news, but the implication in sort of the online world is that I do nothing but talk about Israel, which is just on a factual level on through.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  What I'm trying to find out is, because you got to realize...

• 35:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I'd love to hear your theories, because honestly, you know, it's, since I've been saying, it's been a mystery to me to a certain extent, because if you say the same thing for 25 years, and then the perception of you changes, then I hesitate to say that it's because I said something different, because I really didn't. So then the question becomes, what changed? And so I think, by the way, I think that the answer is all of the above, obviously. Right? I mean, the way that I thought that when Jeremy and Caleb, who were the decision-makers, fired Candace, I thought that they should have publicly explained why they fired Candace. I think that it was, I advocated for that at the time. I think in retrospect, it was a huge mistake not to explain to the public why they had decided to fire Candace. I think they thought it was self-evident, and it turns out there's no such thing as self-evident. So that was a mystery to a lot of people.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  They didn't know. Maybe they hadn't been watching her show. One of the things that, you know, another thing that I've learned about politics is that because, you know, I'm so in it, because I'm in it like every single day with all the details, I assume a level of knowledge on the part of the audience that I shouldn't assume. And I assume that people know that when they see Tucker Carlson, he's changed many of the things and the kinds of things he says since 2020.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  And people don't know that, because they don't engage that level with politics. Most people who are watching politics are not watching your show or my show every episode, right? They might engage once every three, four episodes. And even then, they might engage for 10 minutes on the episode. You have a core of people who are very solid, but that's a fairly small core.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's guys that watch the shorts, and there's a smaller percentage that watch the whole thing every day.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Those are two different audiences. And I wish there was a way of being able to know exactly who it is and do a focus group on your core guys versus... That'd be so valuable.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  This is exactly right. And again, this is one of the things that I think has been really negative about the direction of social media, is there has been, and you can see it in everybody's numbers, a movement from the long to the short. The migration of eyeballs from a two-hour show, or a three-hour show, or a one-hour show to a 30-second short is very obvious, right? The kind of TikTok-ification. And politics is very hard to do in a sort of 30-second soundbite. I mean, there's certain, there's certain issues you can do, right? The ones that are most popular on the right are the ones you can do in 30 seconds, right? Man is man. Woman is woman, right? That's like a unifying thing on the right, because you can explain that in one sentence, right? But how do you explain laissez-faire economics versus quote-unquote common-good conservatism? That's going to require a dissertation, right?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And so you can't do that in 30 seconds. So then it turns into a bunch of sloganeering on either side, right? You have the common-good conservatives, so to speak, calling the, you know, the laissez-faire people, a bunch of cruel-hearted libertarians who want to rob you of your soul. And then you have cruel-hearted libertarians saying about the common-good conservatives, that they're actually, you know, Francoist fascists. You know, and there's probably a grain of truth to, like, all of these things to a certain extent, but these are, like, robust and long debates that typically require somebody to read and know things. And so, you know, the shortening of the attention span is quite a tragedy.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I will tell you, like, I remember when, running the insurance company, if I went hard after one of my guys in the company, and let's just say from stage I called him out because he had a bad quarter, or a bad year, or a bad month, I would all of a sudden see, well, you can't call this guy out too much, because 50% of the company sides with him. So you just upset 50% of the company. You didn't know how much he was loved. They respect you, but they love him, right? So that was kind of like, okay, I got to be... If I call this guy, no, we're on the same page. If I call this guy, we're on the same page. So I don't know what it was.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  By the way, that actually, that distinction is a really important one. So, you know, when we sort of survey, you know, the broader conservative audience, what we very often see is that the conservative audience has high levels of respect for me, but high levels of love, smaller portions of the audience, well, high levels of love for, say, Candace or for Tucker.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  And I think that that's...

• 38:40Speaker 00

  By the way, that's a very important point you're making, because the respect is there for your brilliance.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Right. But I think that, but I think that a lot of that love is predicated on the idea that Tucker and Candace are quote-unquote taking the side of the audience. Right, they're on my side. And they're on my side because they're telling me that nothing that I do in my own life is my fault. It's everybody else's fault.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  An attractive message, yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Of course, I mean, this is why, this is why it's easy. Every cult movement starts with, I'm on your side, not with, you're on my side.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  So how do you win that? That's not an easy thing to win. So how do you win? I had kids that came over here the other day from school. And I'm giving them a tour to campus. Guys want to get into media, they're lawyers, all this stuff. So I'm walking with them, I'm like, so tell me, you know, who do you watch right now online? Oh, Nick Fuentes. Who do you watch right now online? Oh, Tucker. Who do you watch right now online? And they give me streamers, some of the streamers' names came up. I watch what he says because I can't stand him, but I watch what Piker has to say. I watch what this person has to say. I said, who'd you watch two years ago? Oh, it was only Charlie Kirk. Really? Yeah, so you went from Charlie to this, yes. All right, who else? Used to be Ben Shapiro, but I don't like the position he took with Israel. These are 17-year-old kids, 18-year-old kids who are 4.5 GPA. So it's not like they're the...

• 39:47Speaker 01

  So this is, so again, I think one of the tactics that's been played with the Israel thing is, if you go back to that model of, you know, my thing is say true things. And a lot of other people in the space, their idea is, I'm on your side. What's a great way to alienate somebody from their audience? Say they're not on your side, they're on a foreign body's side. They're not speaking on behalf of truth, they're not saying things they think are true. They're actually secretly motivated by a dual loyalty or by a loyalty to another party. And it just so happens that party's manipulating all world events. Right, again, that's a really good way to do it, honestly. Like strategically, it's a very smart thing to do. It's dishonest, but it's a smart thing to do.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  So you, so going back to the like, respect, fear, love. So you think you're in the respect community? You think Candace and Tucker are in the love and like community?

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Got it. Okay, and so the difference there is the love and like community feel like they're on their side. You're not.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  You're part of now the mainstream establishment name that, you know...

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Israel first, all this kind of...

• 40:43Speaker 00

  Israel first, all that kind of, okay. So, so, okay, so then let me ask you a different question. So let's just say we had the technology to take everyone's, you know, New York Times has this article just came out, I'm sure you saw this, this was a couple of days ago. And it's the MAGA media machine is fracturing, okay? And if you go a little bit lower, YouTube views down, this is from early 2025 to today. This is across the board. X views down, across the board. Rumble views down, across the board. Probably that big drop off is when Dan Bongino took the job. I don't know when it is, but Dan was a big part of it. Across the board. Podcast listens down, and it's going down, and it explains different things. By millions, it gives numbers from you, they talk about Johnson, Bongino, Megyn Kelly,

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Tucker, Crowder, Walsh, Candace, Bannon, Fuentes, Shapiro, Poole and Kirk. Those are the main names that they're looking at. And then they quote, you know, it seems that everyone in the space is experiencing a drop off in the views from 2025, Fuentes said. Seems as though 2025 was an anomaly, either due to organic interest or potentially artificial boosting. Okay, and then a part of it is Charlie Kirk passed away, Candace talked about this. So she went up there and, and, and they said, Ms. Owens saw her YouTube channel, podcast audience surge amid the controversy she had stoked. Other conspiracy theories before an end, including falsehoods about the sex of Bridget Macron, wife, et cetera.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  And as she responds, it might be a conspiracy to some people, but it's not to me.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's...

• 42:14Speaker 00

  I think I do a very good job, thorough in what I present to people. We spent a lot of time on research, hours and hours and hours on research. I would disagree with that assessment. And then they come with you, they talk about Blaze website. Anyways, you, you look at this chart, go a little bit lower to the one that shows everybody's numbers with Bongino on the purple side and Fuentes's rise and fall, not fall, but decreasing right here. And you kind of see everybody, right? What happened with them, where they are today. Bannon was high, he's out. So if you were, if we had the ability to take everyone's audience, Candace's audience, yours, Fuentes's, Tucker's, the main names, and we put a room of 100 people, take the millions, 100 people in that room. Who's in the room?

• 42:59Speaker 00

  What do they look like? How old are they? What denomination are they? Where they're from? What's their economic status? You know, you, you understand the question I'm asking?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  I mean, it'd be a different 100 people for each room.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  I know it is, but what is your guesstimation of what that audience is that they've captured?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Um, like the broader conservative ecosystem, you mean? Or are you talking about for each individual host? In some cases, these, these audiences are almost completely bifurcated. In some cases, you have crossover, right?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  I, I understand that, but I don't think they're all the same audience.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  No, I, I agree. I think, I think there's a pool that's been, that's, that was very large. I think that in off-year elections, obviously, right, right now, we're, it's sort of like asking how NFL ratings are in the middle of the offseason. I mean, right now, it's not the time when people are, like, when it gets to 27, 28, people will reengage because we'll be in a presidential race, and then people will get back into it. But, and also, we came off, I mean, it's a little unfair in the sense that 24 was the single greatest political year in the history of American politics, probably. I mean, it was just psychotic. Right, I mean, you had, you had the sitting presidents of the United States go completely defunct in the middle of a presidential debate, drop out, be replaced in the middle of the campaign. You had President Trump make the single greatest political comeback probably in American history. And combined with, with all of that, you had inflation that was raging out of control.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  You, you had, you know, social issues that were really hot like trans. Like, it was, it was just a, it was, it was kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity for, for ratings. And then you come off of that, it's going to be not as good.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  I don't know, I don't know, maybe I'm not doing a good job asking the question. So the question is, what, what does the audience look like? Like, I used to go to and visit, my guys would put conventions in a month of December or January, and I would go to it. One of the guys was 48% African-American, 28% Hispanic, and the average age was 42, married with kids. The other guy would go to, the average age was 24, young, you know, white. The other, so, so what I'm trying to ask from you, the other group was...

• 44:50Speaker 01

  So you're asking for my audience, you're asking for the other people's audience?

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Those main names, who do you think is watching?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I can go down each one. Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I would say that, that, you know, our audience is typically millennial. It's males predominantly, probably 70, 30, or 65, 35 male in the, their earning power by the data that we have is that they make more than $100,000 a year typically. They are, they are more college educated rather than less. The, the audience tends to be larger in cities because that's also where more people are. And, yeah, again, that, in terms of, I'm not sure we have a racial or ethnic breakdown. I would say that if I had to speculate for Nick Fuentes, I'd say it's a lot of 17 to 24-year-old, young, white men, which I think he would probably agree with. If you're talking about Candace Owens, it's a heavily female audience, much more heavily

• 45:38Speaker 01

  female.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  What do you think the number is? 80 plus?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  I don't know, it's probably 70, 30, to be fair. I mean, like, again, this is total speculation. I have no inside data. So, but, you know, Candace's show is very gossipy, and it's largely rooted in sort of gossip and conspiracism. And so I would imagine that she has sort of the same audience breakdown as, you know, gossipy shows in the entertainment sector. Because her show is really more in, in the entertainment line than it is, I would say, in the political line even. Yeah, Tucker is going to be predominantly older people who watch him on Fox, or predominantly younger people who are sort of aligned, you know, Fuentes-adjacent, shall we say. So, again...

• 46:15Speaker 00

  So you think he'll have some of the 17 to 24?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Tucker, okay.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  I mean, which is why I think that he's treated with Fuentes, you know, alternatively warmly and coldly to, to apparently Nick's great consternation.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  What, what would you speculate for Bongino?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Um, I, I think Bongino's audience and my audience are probably fairly similar, although I would say that, that Dan's audience is probably a little more blue collar than mine.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  How about Walsh and Knowles?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Uh, so Knowles would be, you know, same age range, maybe cut slightly younger, perhaps. And I would say that Walsh is, again, probably more along Bongino's lines in terms of, in terms of, say, income and, and educational breakdown.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and so with this article, when you see something like this, what do you think's going to happen next?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Um, I, I mean, I think that there will be ebbs and flows that go along with the success of a particular political movement. I also think that there is some fun to oppositionality, meaning that, you know, it, it'll be interesting to see what happens. There's what's good for America, and then there's what's good for the, the conservative media landscape. What's always good for the conservative media landscape is opposition, which is why I think so many people on the conservative media landscape, like Tucker, are pretty openly rooting for Democrats to do well in the upcoming elections. You know, I, I would prefer to have lower ratings and not have Democrats around the country, but I, I think that that's a rarity.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  You've been in it 25 years since 17, watching all of this, like a sport, right? Who have you seen, seen rise, fall, disappear? I've not been in this space that long. So have you seen any guys that were like rock stars, that were killing it, and then boom, they're out?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Uh, sure, I mean, that's happened a few times. I would say... A kind of good example, Milo Yiannopoulos. There was a point where Milo was like, super hot back in 2015, 2016, and then he had a bit of a scandal with some audio talking about a priest abusing him, I believe, and all of that, and then he kind of disappeared and has gone to kind of frenzied places. But I think that the new way that the internet works is that nobody fully disappears. Everybody kind of sticks around, right? And say, "Old conservative media stars never die, they just fade away." I mean, you see that with a wide variety of people. There are people who, you know, were very prominent, and now they're still kind of prominent, they're just not as prominent as they were. And that happens to everybody. You know, again, maybe, you know, my show is doing better this year than it did last, slightly.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Maybe that is, you know, the sign that I'm about to explode out. Maybe that's the sign that I'm about to crater. I don't know. I mean, we'll find out.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's the beautiful part about free market. If you don't adjust, you don't pivot, you know? But then also, the pivoting and adjusting, sometimes, does that mean you compromise your morals and values for the viewership?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Right. This is where, and a thing that I said while I was on the stage at TPUSA. For me, I don't watch this like a sport. The reason I say that is because, a sport, in the end, your team wins, your team loses, and then you go back to your daily life where actually you have problems. For me, these are real problems that have real solutions or real answers and require serious conversation. And so that requires a higher level of responsibility than simply aiming for the clicks. I mean, there are certain things. Let's say, for example, that October 7th somehow, you know, made me a villain among a certain segment of the audience. Well, the obvious thing to do then would have been for me to swivel on my heel and just turn on all my principles and just reverse course. Right? I didn't do that. Okay, why didn't I do that? The easy solution would have been to do that, and the answer is because, for me, that's

• 49:32Speaker 01

  not how this works. I've taken a bunch of positions that my audience does not like, including the position that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. He did not win the 2020 election. I took the position that January 6th was bad, because January 6th was bad. Right? I'm willing to say that stuff, and maybe it cost me audience, but this is, again, this is why...

• 49:48Speaker 00

  You had a vaccine position as well, because my guys were typically, when I ask about Ben, so, "Well, let me tell you, why don't you ask him about the vaccine?"

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, please ask me about vaccine. For the love of God, ask me about the vaccine.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  What was your position about the vaccine?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Seriously. My position on the vaccine, from the beginning, from the beginning, was that I was following what the data was and what the government was saying about the data and what Pfizer was saying about the data. So, I was very pro-vaccine for people who were older and had obesity. Okay, my own children, I did not vaccinate. I was never in favor of children being vaccinated. My company sued the federal government, unlike any of these other assholes, including the people at Fox News, who mandated that many of their employees get the vax. We never, not only, we did not mandate the vax in our company, and we sued the federal government to stop a vaccine mandate. So, my own personal view on whether you should take the vaccine or not is irrelevant to my public policy view as to whether you should be forced to take the vaccine. Now, there's a tweet that, again, people clip and goes viral every so often, from, like, I don't know, January of 2021, maybe?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  And where I said that this means you should, that "take the vaccine idiots." Okay, what that was, that was a response to a misinterpretation of data that was being put out at the time, that suggested that you were safer, that somehow you were less likely to get COVID from not taking the vaccine than from taking the vaccine. Now, the current data did not suggest that. It was a misinterpretation of the data. Now...

• 51:03Speaker 00

  So, it was a mistake based on the data they presented to you at the time?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Correct. And then the data turns out...

• 51:08Speaker 00

  And you chose to trust the data at the time?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Correct. And this is always, and so, again, this runs...

• 51:11Speaker 00

  Somebody could question that and say, "Come on, Ben, I mean, you know it was propaganda. How did you buy into it?" We set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury. We had the choice to make it fast, we had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscanyero. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skilled hands. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing, the Future Looks Bright Collection.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary, rather intentional, luxurious, timeless.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, but I didn't know that it was propaganda at the time, and neither did the Trump administration, which was pushing it at the time. I mean, President Trump still says that Operation Warp Speed was one of his greatest accomplishments.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  It does. It's always confusing when he says that.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Well, so, again, like, and by the way, the data tend to show that it did lower death rates among the elderly and the obese. It didn't do much for people who were 40 and healthy, and it had counterproductive effects for people who are young.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  So, could somebody say, "Well, Ben, that's why I question your instinct. You were off on that. You know, we followed you and you got people to say..."

• 52:25Speaker 01

  I think that's, yes, I think that's a great way to put it. "I question your instinct." Okay, so here is my view. People's instincts are less reliable over the course of time than the data. I will change my opinion as evidence and data comes in. Okay, the evidence will change, and so will my opinion on these things. So, I came out very early on, very early on. I said there should not be lockdowns, and that we should start tranching people back into, this is like, April of 2020, of 2020. I said, "We should not be locking anybody down. Kids should go back to school." The data that was coming out of Sweden suggested there was not open-air transmission, and that the virus was not particularly damaging to people who were young. So, we should tranch back young people into the workforce, let them all get COVID, develop natural immunity, and then you start tranching people, right? This is, you're right, it's December 2020, December 8, 2020.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Right? You have to go back to the one...

• 53:12Speaker 00

  December 8, 2020 is what?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  That, this is right when Pfizer was announcing that the, and when the administration was announcing, that the vaccine not only prevented death, but also prevented transmission, which it turns out was not rooted in data, they were just lying. Okay, now, you could say, "I think the government's lying to me all the time." That is a heuristic that is stupid. Sometimes, the government is lying to you. Okay, sure, but I can't use the absence of data to just form an opinion. Right? The game online, right now, that I find bewildering and stupid, is a game where, somebody makes 100 predictions, 99% of them are outlandish and insane. One of them is outlandish and correct. Everyone forgets the 99 they made that were outlandish and insane, and remembers the

• 53:57Speaker 01

  one that they made that was outlandish and correct, and say, "This person is now a good person to trust going forward on all things, because they had a good instinct. They had a good instinct." Okay, but would you put that money with the money manager? He fails 99 out of 100 dimes. He was first on all 100, but he was wrong 99 out of 100, but on that one, he did great. Sure, on net, he lost you a shitload of money, but on that one man, he nailed it. Okay? Or, are you gonna go with the person who follows the data and has a pretty steady and solid rate of return, and is right, say, 95 out of 100 times? But sometimes, on the 5, the data, underlying data, is wrong and problematic. The instinct in politics is always to go with the outlandish prediction that comes true. So, to take another example, I thought Trump was gonna lose the 2016 election. Why did I think Trump was gonna lose the 2016 election?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Because every piece of data suggested that Trump was gonna lose the 2016 election. There are people out there who are saying, "No, no, no. I've been checking the law and signs, Trump's for sure gonna win." Now, okay, that's fine. You were right. I was wrong. Trump won. Right? And I'm happy he won, because then I, you know, voted for him in 2020 and endorsed him in 2020 and campaigned for him in 2024. I'm happy he won. Even though I did not vote in the 2016 election, I was pleased that he beat Hillary Clinton. When that happened, a lot of people then went to, "Okay, we can't trust any poll ever again." Now, that's a bad heuristic. Okay, so, again, there are rules that we ought to approach the world with. That doesn't mean that you're right every single time. It doesn't mean that all polls forever cannot be trusted, and it doesn't mean that your best source, we, one of the things that happened in sort of the vaccine space, is that we went from, we ought to be skeptical of the experts, which I agree with.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  I agree with. And if I committed a sin there, the sin was not being skeptical enough of the people who were purported to have the expertise.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  That's fair.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  That's fair. Okay, that's, that's fine. And that's, that's a fair critique. And in the future, I will be even more skeptical. Fine. But we went from be skeptical of the experts to be totally unskeptical of morons. Right? People who are total non-experts, people who don't know their ass from their elbow on epidemiology or vaccines. Like, don't listen to that doctor. We should be even more skeptical of the doctor than we would be for Bob down the street, who says the measles vaccine's gonna kill your kids. And that's just a bad way to approach data. It's a bad way to approach the world. And again, if you don't take this stuff seriously, then it's great. You can just throw a bunch of bullshit out there, and then people glom onto the one piece of, Alex Jones is a great example. He says outlandish stuff all the time. But one time, he said one thing about maybe an airplane would hit the World Trade Center, and that means that he's Nostradamus. And Nostradamus isn't even Nostradamus, right?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  You see this online all the time. Nostradamus made this prediction. You can, this game is really, really, really dumb. If you've predicted, say, 15 out of the last two recessions, but you hit those two recessions, but you missed 13 times...

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Yep. There's a guy named Harry Dent that's known for that. He predicted a recession, and he kept saying it, you know, and saying it, and...

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, or Nouriel Roubini, Dr. Doom, right?

• 56:37Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, we had him on. He's always, you know, and the world is coming.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  I like Nouriel, but he, always, we're five seconds away from complete collapse, right?

• 56:43Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, that's right. So, okay, so, that's fair to know that, that's your position now.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  But it's not a position that earns love, right? Love positions tend to be based on, "That guy has my instincts. That guy is confirming what I always knew, what I always thought."

• 56:56Speaker 00

  So, let me, let me ask you. So, you got a salesperson, you know, they'll, they'll say, "Facts tell, stories sell." Right? So, logic, yes. You can sell a S, a person that's super systematized, structured, with logic. You can sell an analytical, technical person with logic, but that's less than 20%.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  It's not a big percentage. So, now, we know the youth, not all of them, but they're more emotional, and they're more relationship and action-oriented, so you gotta kind of communicate with them in a different way. So, the, when you're looking at right now with the DSA, the way the DSA is communicating with them, or even a Tucker, or even a Fuentes, they're able to connect with them emotionally.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Right. Because of the "I'm on your side" thing.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  "I'm on your side."

• 57:42Speaker 01

  And again, my, you know, the slogan that was famous was, "Facts don't care about your feelings." It turns out, the right liked "Facts don't care about your feelings," when it was the left's feelings that were being hurt. Right? When it was, "My facts don't care about the left's feelings," then it was fine. It turns out that when my facts don't care about some people on the right's feelings, then they get very offended.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  So, how do you overcome that?

• 57:58Speaker 01

  I mean...

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Can you? Do you? Or do you just let it...

• 58:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the answer is, there are certain things that are not overcomable from my perspective, because I'm not going to lie. Now, I think that there are better ways to tell the story. Right? I mean, I think that when I say that, that...

• 58:11Speaker 01

  What I would say is that the people who pretend to be empathetic to you, to understand your plight, are giving you advice that is going to make you poorer, stupider, and less well off. And it's not, and I, listen, I have a real problem with, with untruth. Okay, so I do care, obviously, about my listeners, but I'm not going to pretend I care about my listeners the same way I care about my immediate family, for example. I care about people in China, and it would be foolish, but, but, again, I think that very often that's sort of what people are looking for. And so I would say that my affect, very often, is considered cold, right, because of that. Right, because, because I basically say, pretty openly, listen, I care about public policy, and I care, I care about you to the extent that I want you to succeed, but your success is dependent on your own decision making.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  No prob. Do you think you have any blind spots?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  I'm sure I have tons of them.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  What do you think you have? What blind spots do you think you have?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I'm always, I think that dishonesty remains a, a blind spot. When people are dishonest with me, I think they can get away with it for a while before I figure it out. Uh, because, because truth is such a core value for me, like, really a core value for me, and one of the names that we gave our latest kid is, is rooted in the Hebrew word for truth. Like, I'm, like, because I care so much about the truth, when people are just purely willing to be dishonest, or openly greedy, or just venal, corrupt, I'm, I'm still taken aback by that. There, there's sort of a core naivete, I think, that I'm, I may never get over, um, because I just, I literally, it does not compute for me. Because my parents raised me in a particular way, where honesty was kind of the number one value. And so, if anything, my relentless honesty has gotten me in trouble from time to time. It's, it's also done a world of good for me.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Um, and my great hope, and I think the hope of all politics, is that eventually the truth wins out, but the key word there is eventually.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Got it. And then, how about, how about with business, running a business? What blind spots do you have running a business?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Um, so-

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Because, because the, the thing is, and I asked this from Jeremy when he was on, I told you off camera, you know, how much I enjoy talking to him, and it was very complimentary of you, is, being a talent and a business owner, operating, I remember one time Glenn Beck is like, man, I've realized when I started Blaze, I don't want to operate.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  I just want to be talent. What blind spots do you have as the face? We were doing a podcast, uh, two months ago, and one of the guys on the podcast, Elon, he said, I believe Daily Wire without Ben Shapiro shuts down the next day. He said, seventy, eighty percent of Daily Wire is Ben Shapiro. Now, the debate went to, well, no, Michael Knowles, which I love, I think he's phenomenal, Matt Walsh plays a very important role with his attitude and personality that's attractive, the way he talks, there's something there.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  His documentaries are huge.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Jordan Peterson, I hope he's doing better, you know, with the family, things that he's going, you guys got a couple of other people there as well. But, how, how would you respond to that? How, how would you, how would you respond to that?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, for, for the vast majority of the early days of the business, I was not an operator of the business. Right, Jeremy and Caleb were the co, were the co-CEOs of the business for, you know, the entire foundational period of the business, from 2015 up until about 2025, and Caleb was still the CEO when Jeremy was, was moved out.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  You prefer that, not being in the operational-

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm down here in Florida, and the business is located up in Nashville.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  Tennessee, yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, on a lifestyle level, absolutely, I would much rather go and do my show, think about the issues that I actually care about, and not have to worry about, you know, the marketing strategy, or the budgets, or how we deal with, you know, outstanding lenders, or any of that kind of stuff. Like, I, I don't want to do any of that. If I, listen, if I'd wanted to do that, I could have. I went to Harvard Law School, I was the executive vice president of a major company when I was twenty-six years old. Like, I, like, I can do that if I want, I really do not want to do that. And so there's always this kind of bizarre divide, where I've not been in a managing position, and I don't have a management position with the company. I'm on the board, I don't have a management position with the company.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  When's the last time you had it?

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  I never had it.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  You never had it?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  I never had it. I was not president, I was not vice president, I was not executive, I was, I was never-

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  That was intentional.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  I just want to be a talent.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Yes. And that doesn't mean I didn't have thirty thousand foot input, I did, but I was routinely outvoted by the, we had like a three man kind of majority in terms of the ownership-

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  Do you think that's sustainable, long term?

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Um, I, I mean, obviously not. I mean, I think that I, I needed to get more involved, unfortunately, um, when the business experienced troubles. Obviously, that's why you make a change. If business is experiencing no troubles, you don't make a change. Uh, that, that has nothing to do with my personal love for Jeremy as a human, uh, and, you know, one thing that, this is true for politics, and it's true for business, business. It's, it's business, Sonny, it ain't personal. It's not personal. Okay, the, the, I, I can love people, I can like people, that's irrelevant to whether the bottom line is coming in where the bottom line needs to come in, or whether the decisions are being made that, that allow for the possibility of future success. That is, that is not the same thing. And, and, you know, again, that's true for politics, too. I find that a lot of the people who are very angry at me in the political sphere, like, well, I thought we were friends, I thought we were friends. Well, I'm not criticizing you for being, you know, on a friendship level, or on a

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  personal level, I'm criticizing the things you're saying publicly, because that's literally our job. Right, so that, that's true in business, and it's true in politics, and politics is closer to business for me than it is to friendship or personal relationship.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  Where, where would you score yourself, if you're comfortable even talking about this, because based on what you just said, right, I didn't even think about asking you this, how good would you say you are in building relationships with others in the space?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Um, on a personal level, I think that-

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  Personal level?

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  On, on a personal level, I think that, it, it depends who we are talking about. Um, and I would say that it, it-

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Like, to tell you, Charlie Kirk, ridiculous, how the guy was at relationships.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Right, so, so, yes, yes.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  Ridiculous, I'm talking that, where, you know what, he was like the unifier, he played that role.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  I would say, I would say, I would say, good, not great.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Good, not great.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Good, not great.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Okay. Intentional, you don't want to do it, it's not natural, no interest?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I'll put it this way, nobody, it's very funny to say this, but Candace actually said this when she left, I had never had a cross-conversation with Candace, ever. Okay, when, when she left.

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  Cross means you guys never had a fallen out?

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  We never had a bad conversation, where we were yelling at each other, or, or really, you know, going at each other, or anything like that. The same is true for people like Brett Cooper, who said publicly this at the time. Right, I'm, I'm actually, interpersonally, I get along fine with people. Uh, in some cases, I get along great with people. But, business is business, and friendship is friendship, and they're not quite the same thing. And so what Charlie was really good at was kind of combining the two. So, Charlie, ever, a, a huge number of people felt that they were Charlie's closest friend. I never said that I was, because again, I was not. Uh, because that's not, I have an actual family with actually five kids, and I have two sisters who live nearby, and I have my parents and my in-laws who live nearby, and I have actual friends that I go out to dinner with.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Do you think it's something you ought to make that adjustment and see yourself as a powerhouse that, for the sake of the conservative movement, there needs to be more relationships instead of just transactional, or just business being on?

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  I mean, probably, yeah, probably. The, and the answer there is, is probably yes, because I, again, it's a, you asked about blind spots, this is a peculiar blind spot of mine, it's like, I don't even understand why you'd want to do that. Like, I don't know about you, the, the people that I hang out with, when I'm not at work, it's a different set of people than when I'm at work. I, I think that, that, that may be unusual.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  You're assuming everybody's wired like you, they're not, so-

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, I'm not saying it's a blind spot.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  No, no, I, listen, trust me, I've screwed this up many times, so the, the part I'm bringing to you is, is I'm wondering what needs to happen next, because, you know, if, you know, if, if you talk to Tucker, like, I wonder, you know how Megyn Kelly all of a sudden made a shift?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  And you're like, um, because when, something happened to Charlie, I came out and I said, the person that I think can unify is a Megyn. Because Megyn was kind of like the, uh-

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  She's getting along with everybody, and Megyn is very friendship oriented person, for sure.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  And respected, and, and respected, like, everybody's like, that's Megyn Kelly, that's Megyn Kelly, and Megyn is fair, like, she'll call out Trump, but she'll also come out. And then all of a sudden, it's like, well, if there was two people who were going to be in her ear, you and Tucker, post Charlie, if she talks to you, goes one direction, if she talks to Tucker, goes a different direction. Do you think she sided with Tucker because Tucker's better at building the relationships than you?

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  I think she sided with Tucker because I think that she, for whatever reason, did not want to alienate people who are saying terrible things. And again, this is one area where I think our standards are different. Uh, I think that for, for Megyn, a lot of politics seems to be relational, and for me, politics, again, is principle driven. And so the critique that I had of, of Megyn was that she was allowing the personal relationships with some people to trump the truth and basic decency. That was the critique that I leveled at her. I said, like, why, like, I, I don't even understand the idea that you can't say that your friend, who happens to be a public figure, is saying public things, that what they're saying is wrong, and bad.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  Do you, do you ever, before calling out somebody that's one of your peers, call them and say, hey, I'm going to say this, you're probably not going to like it, but I'm giving you a warning?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  You do that?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Is that common?

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Did you do that with Megyn, before you hit the stage?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  So you told her you were going to call her out on-

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  I said, if you ask me questions about Tucker Carlson, or about any of these topics, I'm going to have to say what I think.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  No, no, no, when you went on stage to give the talk, did you tell her-

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Oh, at TPUSA?

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  TPUSA?

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  No, no, not, but not before TPUSA, because we already had this conversation behind the scenes-

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  Couple days, whatever.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  I mean, it was like two weeks before, when, when she had said it, and then I didn't say anything differently on the stage at TPUSA than I had said right in front of her, on stage, in front of an audience, where, again, like, we went there because we have a good relationship, or had a good relationship. I mean, she openly talks about the fact that I helped restart her career when she was, you know, on the outs with the network, after she got fired from NBC, and she, she came to, like, and like, none of this is personal animus. None of this is personal animus.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  Not what I'm saying.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Well, this is, no, I, I know, but, but they, but they do, they think this. So Cand, so, so, so Megyn will, will think that it's like, I have personal animus for Megyn, which is why I'm critical of Megyn. Megyn is a public figure, it is very difficult in the public figure space, you, and I don't think it's correct to have a stance in the public figure space, that if a public figure is your friend and does something wrong, that they are somehow immune to criticism. I think that that is a bad way to do public figuring, shall we say, in the, in the political space.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Maybe there's an element of etiquette of how to do it.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I, I think there is an element, well, I mean, the, the element of etiquette that I've applied, and I try to apply to literally everyone, I've done it here today, is I don't attribute motivation, I'm just characterizing your public view, and I'm saying what you are doing is, is, and saying is wrong. But I'm not attributing motivation, I'm not saying you're doing it because you're evil, I will, I might say that what you're doing is evil, I think that it is evil, what Candace Owens has done to, to Charlie Kirk's family, I think that's an evil thing to do. I'm not going to get into, like, why I think she's doing it, because I'm not a psychiatrist.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  No, I get that, but to me, you know, I'm wondering, one of the things that a synergist is very well at is building relationships. And you can have another guy who is brilliant, has read a hundred books more than a hundred times more, like, I don't, how many books do you think Trump's read in his lifetime? What do you think the number is? Speculate. Do you think he's finished a thousand books?

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Do you think he's finished a hundred books cover to cover?

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  Maybe, give or take.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  He's probably an article guy, Wall Street Journal.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right, yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  Okay. But my God, he's good at relationships.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Uh, he is amazing in a relationship.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  That's the point.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  But again, I feel like I'm in a bit of a different industry than everybody else in this sense, meaning, is my, what is my job? Is my job to quote unquote, build relationships toward a political end, right? Charlie was two things, right, at once, and he was good at both of these things. But I think they actually are very difficult to, to both handle at once, which is what made Charlie unique, and also I think was going to lead to some internecine warfare inside the conservative movement, which had already started to happen, obviously. Um, the, the, he was very good at being principled speaker on college campus, which is very similar to what I was doing years before, and he was great at it. And the other thing that he was great at was the sort of relationship building, and that, what that meant was that very often he was texting two totally conflicting things to two totally different people at the same time.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  Such as?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, if you, if you see some of the texts that Candace has been releasing about, like, what Charlie and Candace were saying about, for example, Daily Wire, I mean, Charlie texted with us too, and I don't release private texts, but I can say that, you know, he was not saying the same thing to everybody at the same time that was entirely identical. Uh, and, and so that's one way that you presumably build relationships, is by telling people what they want to hear in a wide variety of circumstances. And again, that's what you do if you're a coalition builder. Charlie was, on the one hand, a coalition builder, I'm not begrudging him that, that's just a reality, that's what TPUSA was, it was a coalition, right? But at the same time, if you got into this, the way that I did, because you're less interested in quote unquote, the coalition building than you are in what the coalition is built around, right, saying true things, like, there are certain hard, maybe there's a blind spot for me, there are certain bright lines I will not cross, and one of those bright

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  lines, I will not lie, I won't do it, and I'm not going to lie to, I'm, I'm not going to tell people that I agree with their positions when I don't agree with their positions, and I'm not going to hide the ball when someone very publicly takes a stance that I think is wrong, just because I happen to, you know, be friendly with that person. Like, that's, that, that, usually I'll give them a heads up, that, that's going to happen, particularly if we're about to, you know, be on stage together, which is what happened with, with, with Meghan. Um, but, you know, like, it, this kind of bizarre notion that has taken hold, that actors in the public space, whose job it is to comment on each other's views and to steer a movement in a particular direction, that you owe it to somebody before you give a

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  normal, basic political critique of their position, to call them and explain to them these things, that changes nothing. I, I just don't, I, I find that unconvincing. By the way, I'm not offended when people do it to me, people attack me all the time on a political level, I've never once said, why didn't you text me first? That is not a thing that appeals to me.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  I don't think, uh, but, but I think that's your personality, I don't think it bothers you a second.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  It does not bother me one iota.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  And I believe you, that I don't think it bothers you a second.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  I don't give any shits about it, it doesn't matter to me.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  Because that's your personality.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  And also because, and also because, again, I am not looking for love here.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  What's your long-term vision? What, what is your long-term vision?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  I mean, my long-term vision.

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's your long-term vision?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Uh, my long-term vision is to continue to grow Daily Wire to the point where, with its plethora of visions, because again, there are major disagreements inside our company, right? I mean, like, I disagree with Knowles, I disagree with Walsh, we disagree with each other, like, this happens all the time. Uh, to continue to grow the company, to take on larger projects, to push points of view that I think are within the conservative Overton window, and that are true, uh, and, and to try to grow our constituency. Now, this is why I think I'm going to take your critique well, I think you're right, I think I need to spend more time on the interpersonal of it, because that's just not the kind of person I am, I think that I'm a, I'm a weird introvert extrovert. Like, I, if, if you give me a choice between, I can go to a dinner party with a bunch of politicos, and I can spend time with my family at home, that is not even a, that is not even a question. I minimize travel because of it, it, like, I, I, there's very little in life that I,

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  that I would like to do less than go to a political dinner party in Washington DC. I despise it, but, maybe I need to do that.

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  Do you see yourself as, uh, um, when I'm saying vision long-term, is your vision long-term purely as a capitalist running a business, as that? Do you have any aspirations to do, doing anything with politics? I know you've addressed as many things.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Like, like, running for office or something?

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  Anything.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  I think I'd be a horrible political candidate, so probably not, I mean, like, I, I could see a circumstance in which I would feel compelled to do it, but I would hate it beyond measure, because it involves all the things that we're talking about, saying different things to different audiences, uh, and going out and, and, you know, trying to get donors to give money to you, uh, all, all those aspects don't appeal to me in the slightest. Uh, and, and so, you know, I, I would despise that. And, and frankly, I, I don't think that I'd be incredibly good at it, I think I'd be great on a debate stage and pretty much everything, and I'd give a good stump speech, and that'd be pretty much it, right? Like, in terms of, I, I'm good in a photo line, I suppose, you know, like, um, but, you know, as far as kind of the, the kind of, you know, aspects of politics.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  The game, the game of doing it, you don't like that.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the, the kind of pressing of the flesh, and the, and the backroom dealings, and all of that kind of stuff, I just.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  When you pray, when you talk to, you know, when you're praying, do you think, do you see the relationship as a responsibility that God is using you at a time where you're living in a country that's going through a very interesting time, that you got the DSA that's making a ton of momentum, you got communism that in a way is making a comeback, you got the Republican side that's a little bit fractured, although MAGA's got 410 million dollars put up in their campaign, and the other side doesn't have anything, Democrats are really going through it, the DNC right now stands for do not contribute, because, you know, a lot of these rich don't want to give, I'm sure you saw that article, but do you see yourself that, you know, God is using you as a vessel? Is that at all a way you see it, or no?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that God uses everybody as a vessel.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  No, specifically you, it's, it's different, it's not everybody, because you're a heavyweight, you're, you're not.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Specifically me, uh, so I have prayed every day since I was about 13 years old. My, there's a, so there's, when, when you're Orthodox, you say a silent prayer called the, called the Amidah, where, because Omeid means to stand, so you're standing when you say this prayer, or the Shmona Esrei. And at the very end, there's kind of a, a section, so Jewish prayer is very programmatic, uh, so it's, it's all kind of written out, and it's in a book, and you, you say it, uh, but there's a, a section where you can kind of insert your own prayer at the very end of Shmona Esrei. Uh, and the thing that I've said every day since I was 13 is, God, let me fulfill my potential in every way. That's what I'm here to do. So, you know, I, I'm grateful to God that I have the opportunity to speak to so many people, I take it very seriously, and that's probably why I take the truth very seriously. Now, if the idea, you know, and, and this, I, I see the argument, the, the argument

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  being, okay, well, if there's a balance between maximizing audience and saying 80% of the truth versus having a smaller audience and saying 100% of the truth, what do you do? Um, you know, for me, I would rather say 100% of the truth in the hope that, you know, again, because I'm not running for office, this is why I would hate running for office, because I don't think that you can probably win saying 100% of the truth. I think that there's a, a lot of futzing, and a lot of fibbing, and a lot of gamesmanship, uh, it, it's not something that I would particularly like.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  When's the last time you spoke to Tucker?

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Uh, probably at Charlie's memorial service?

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  What was the exchange like?

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Uh, so, that day, I was on Fox that morning, because I was at the memorial service, uh, and got a call from the VP's office that he, he asked me to, to be in the box, the, the luxury box that was next door to the, the president's luxury box, and so, obviously, when the VP asks you to do something like that, you do it. Uh, so, I was there, Tucker was there, uh, was friendly, was fine, and we talked about him hunting, we talked a, a, a little bit about kind of Charlie, um, there.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  He's phenomenal one-on-one.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  He's tremendous.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  Off-term, phenomenal relationship charm.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Tremendous, tremendous one-on-one, excellent one-on-one, absolutely.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so, I'm sure you saw the tweet that they posted, uh, I think, uh, Marjorie Taylor Greene posted first with the picture of them at the house in Maine.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  And it was, uh, I think it was Joe Kent, uh.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Thomas Massey.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  Thomas Massey, Joe Kent, MTG, Tucker.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  And some respectable spouses, yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  Right, and then, uh, Tucker said MAGA was betrayed, we all were, it's time for a new path forward, more tomorrow night, 6:00 PM. What, what, what do you think we're going to get with Tucker next?

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Um, you know.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  He's talked about a political party.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  I think it's very unlikely that he's going to launch a full-scale political party. Uh, and the, the, the reason that I think that's unlikely is because, uh, he, that requires a certain amount of time and effort that I don't think that Tucker is probably willing to put into it, and third parties have a pretty negative history in the country in terms of electoral success. I think what he's probably going to launch is some sort of, you know, call it DSA light for the right, and sort of in, in, in internal, an internal, you know, horseshoe right movement that tries to nominate, say, primary candidates in particular districts, and that tries to sound off, uh, in loud ways in, in the primaries, you know, that, that'd be the smartest thing for him to do, for sure. Not that I want to give him advice, but.

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  Do you think there's any, any chance that he runs? Because they're saying right now that they feel JD Vance has been compromised.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  I think this is very, very unlikely, and I think.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  That he runs.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  I think it's extremely unlikely.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, apparently they're saying they went there to convince him to run because they think it was supposed to be JD, and now they don't trust JD because they think JD's been compromised with the Iran war and all that stuff.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  I mean, first of all, if that's, if that's what JD Vance gets for all of his loyalty to Tucker Carlson, that'd be kind of astonishing.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  I mean, come on.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  I mean, the fact is, the Vice President obviously has a very close relationship with Tucker Carlson. You know, it's his prerogative.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  His son used to work for him, right?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, Buckley was in, was in his office. I mean, I have nothing against Buckley. I've heard he's a nice guy.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's, that, that relationship is obviously quite close. I'd be quite shocked if Tucker were to turn around and then stab JD right in the back that way. I think that would be bizarre.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  Did you read the book Regime Change?

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Uh, I didn't. I, I saw some of the excerpts of it.

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  It's actually pretty interesting.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looked like it was well-reported.

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was actually very interesting, you know.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Jonathan's a good reporter.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  I know a lot of people are pissed that when I say stuff like that, Jonathan happens to be a good reporter.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  It was actually, I couldn't put it down because you, you heard so many stories of one point when Trump was trying to get a message across to Maduro. Apparently, they used Tucker to try to find a way to get there because Tucker had an in with Maduro on that.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, again, like, do I think these are good ideas? I think these are very not good ideas. And I've said that openly to the Vice President's team. Not to the Vice President himself because, you know, the Vice President and I, you know, we're not like texting buddies. But people on his team, I've said, I've said this openly. I mean, again, everything that I've said privately, I've also said publicly and vice versa. And so, when, when I, when I say to the Vice President that I think that a bad way to build a coalition is to build it around 6% of the, of the American body politic, which is precisely where the polls have Tucker Carlson's kind of peculiar viewpoints. It's a move, I suppose. I don't think it's a wise move. I think I know the logic that's sort of driving it, which is he's hoping to duplicate President Trump's coalition. But President Trump, the biggest mistake you can make in politics, in electoral politics, is assuming you can just pick up the other guy's coalition. It doesn't work that way. You gotta build your own.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Trump's coalition is unique because Trump is unique.

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  Some would say he is doing that.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  Uh, not successfully.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  Well, whether it's successful or not.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  He, he's definitely trying to do that.

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  So, you know, he is, you know, when they say the leading indicator, lagging indicator, some of the positions he's taken, how he went up against Trump and, you know, it's Trump's bad. And at first, he started kind of slow and he was like, I never said anything about Trump. All I'm saying is this, I'm never, and then now it's very in the open.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  That it's, he's no longer holding it. He's no longer holding back. So, he's probably the biggest conservative that's going after the guy he helped to say, the promises weren't kept.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  So, again, I think, I think that's incredibly, like tactically, is very smart. Okay, the, the reality is that if you're going to launch a political movement, launching it in opposition to the current party is quite successful. It's a very successful strategy. Trump did it in 2016, right? Trump ran against the Republican Party and then he ran against the Democrats.

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Barack Obama in 2008 basically ran against the Democratic Party and then he ran against the Republicans.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I think that's, that's what the DSA is doing now. They're running against the Democratic Party. Like, running against whatever his status quo is always a highly lucrative political strategy. So, I'm, again, I, I don't think it's stupid what Tucker is doing. I think that that, you know, that, that picture is, is kind of hilarious because Tucker's sitting there like Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate. And obviously, they stole the, the chandelier from Gaston's pub in Beauty and the Beast. But, uh, and, you know, again, this sort of blue collar cosplay from somebody as silver spoon as Tucker, I always find amusing. But apparently, people like it, so, you know.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Devil's Advocate, great movie.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  What, Beauty and the Beast?

• 1:20:39Speaker 00

  Have you seen Devil's Advocate?

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Oh, Devil's Advocate, no.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  I don't know if you've.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  It is. Of course, I've seen it, yeah. That's why, that's why they're referencing, yeah.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  So, so 2028, who do you like? You, you got Vance, you got Rubio, you got some outsiders, DeSantis?

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  I think, I think it is very unlikely that Vance does not become the nominee.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  I think it's very unlikely. I mean, he, he's, unless the President withdraws his tacit endorsement of JD and he's the Vice President, uh, the, the notion that somebody's gonna run from the outside and, you know, be able to overtake JD in the primaries, I think that's, that's probably a pipe dream. Again, I have nothing against JD Vance on a personal level. I disagree with some of the political stances that he's taken. I encourage him to take different political stances, openly and privately. Uh, he disagrees with me a lot of the time. That's his prerogative, right? It's a free country. Uh, the, the, the biggest thing about JD is I, I don't think winning the primaries. I think he's gonna have some real trouble in the general. And I think that that is, I think that that is because if you look at Donald Trump's election in 2024, the right likes to tell ourselves that Donald Trump won this broad sweeping election in 2024. That was not a broad sweeping victory. That was a fairly narrow victory by historical standards.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  He won the swing states by a relatively limited number of votes. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. He pulled out Arizona, he pulled out Georgia, and he pulled out North Carolina. Okay. Please name the group that JD Vance will overperform with versus Donald Trump.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  I do not think there is a single group that you can name in American politics with which he will overperform Trump. And if you're building a different coalition, I could, I could have a theory of the case. For example, with Marco Rubio, that he would lose certain Trump voters in certain areas but gain voters for himself in other areas. So, to take an obvious example, I think he could outperform Trump with Hispanics. I think that Rubio could easily outperform Trump with women.

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Right, like, is, is JD Vance gonna outperform Trump with Hispanics? No way. Is he gonna outperform Trump with women? I don't think so. Is he gonna outperform Trump with blue collar voters, which is sort of his bread and butter? I don't think it's possible to outperform Trump with blue collar voters. And so.

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Independents? Libertarians?

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I think there, there are two libertarians in all of America. Libertarianism is, is the biggest myth, uh, in, in American politics. It's just.

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  You don't think some of these libertarians would get behind JD? You don't think the Dave Smiths? You don't think some of these guys? You don't think Rogan would get behind JD?

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Um, I, I think that it is far less likely that Rogan would get behind JD than that he gets behind the Democrats as long as it's not Gavin Newsom.

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  Uh, you, you think a Theo Von would inside with a?

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  No, I think, I think Theo Von would. I, I think that that, but I'm not sure that that's, Theo Von already went for Trump, is sort of my point. You're, you're going for a base that you already got. And so, if you're going to expand your voting base.

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  But he's stepping away.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  You need to expand it.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  So, so you got Theo's that's a little bit against Trump's position right now.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Right, right. This is, this is the difficulty for, is also the difficulty for JD, right? Because JD is both running against Trump and running with Trump. That's an unenviable political position for him. And so.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  Is there any outsider that you think about? Is there anybody that's an outsider that stands a chance?

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  In a general or in a primary?

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  Primary, primary first.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  In, in a primary, I find it very difficult to believe that somebody's gonna overtake JD.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think JD is a prohibitive favorite at this point.

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  You buy any of those stories that Rubio may not even run?

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  You believe that?

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:42Speaker 00

  Why do you believe that?

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Um, because I think that the Secretary of State, uh, again, he, he may well run. But I, I think it is unlikely in my own personal perspective because if you look at his political history, he's a pretty risk averse politician. So, if you're, if you're Marco and you're looking at sort of the gaming out what the next few years look like for you, here are your choices. You run against JD, you lose, you're done. You run against JD, you win. It's a rough election cycle anyway because the President's riding in the 30s and the country's in the mood for a quote unquote, "something new." And you lose, you're done. You don't run, JD may pick you as his VP candidate, JD loses, you're next. JD does not pick you and JD loses, you're also next. So, if you're sort of doing a prisoner's dilemma here, you know, a game theory prisoner's dilemma,

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  I, I think that the prisoner's dilemma suggests that Rubio will probably not run out of risk aversion.

• 1:24:31Speaker 00

  That would be a shame if that happens.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I agree. I would like to see an open and, and robust debate on the stage between all of these various positions where people are actually held to account for their positions because I prefer clarity.

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  Calvesh's got DeSantis third. Who do they have next? Is there anybody else after DeSantis?

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  I mean, DeSantis all the way down at 4.6, right?

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, 4.6.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  And Donald Trump here is not running.

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  Tucker, 3.5.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Right. So. And then, and then, and then back to Trump, who constitutionally cannot run.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  He's so funny. He says, "I'm here to announce my..."

• 1:25:00Speaker 00

  Two weeks ago, he's so funny. So, okay, so, DeSantis, no chance. You think this is a Rubio-JD thing?

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, a lot can happen. It's, it's still early. Um, but again, if I, if I were gonna put my money on it, if I were in the Calvesh markets, I'd put my money on Vance.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  Have you guys ever had him on? Have you ever sat down with him at the Daily Wire?

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Um, so, again, the last time I talked with the Vice President was at Charlie's Memorial. We've invited him many times. I mean, he's, he's been on with a bunch of our other hosts. Um, I don't know if it's reticence, uh, or, or, you know, if it's just failure of scheduling, but we've invited him on many times.

• 1:25:33Speaker 00

  So, you would like to have him on?

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Sure, of course.

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  Okay, and he's not done it yet?

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:25:38Speaker 00

  Why do you think?

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I, you know, perhaps he suspects that I might ask him a tough question or two about his run.

• 1:25:44Speaker 00

  Huh. Interesting.

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  Interesting. And then, on the left, who do you think will be on the left, primary? You think AOC's a real thing? You think that?

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think she's a real thing. I think she's gonna have some difficulty with the, uh, with the black voting base in the Democratic Party. I think one, one of the mistakes that, um.

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  Black voting base?

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, she, she, she does not outperform, like most other DSA candidates, because she's basically a DSA.

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Um, far-left progressive candidates do not tend to do very well with the black voting base of the Democratic primary.

• 1:26:12Speaker 00

  Why is that?

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Um, I, I think that's because black Democrats are kind of traditional Democrats. Meaning, they want bigger government, but they definitely are not interested in abolish the police, abolish ICE, uh, open borders, trans the kids. Like, I, I don't think that, that black voters are typically very much invested in that. I mean, you saw this in South Carolina, right? Bernie ran, he won New Hampshire, he did well in, uh, he won in Iowa. And then he got to South Carolina and the entire party mobilized and you had a dead man as the nominee in 2020. Because James Clyburn stepped up and said, like, "Guys, we represent almost 60% of the primary voting electorate in South Carolina. Black voters, come on out and vote for Joe." Right, so, you know, I, I think that that's gonna be a problem for AOC. The rejiggering of the schedule is gonna be kind of interesting because they've, they've now moved South Carolina up, which gives a disproportionate weight in the process, obviously. It goes, I think, South Carolina and then Nevada.

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  So, they're eliminating Iowa, New Hampshire as their first couple of states.

• 1:27:00Speaker 00

  They just did that?

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, they just did this.

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  Why did they do that?

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  Uh, I think because they are, because they understand that the black voting base is so vital for the Democratic Party. They want it to have sort of an outsized impact in the early states before you get, because Iowa, New Hampshire, you know, those are states that are kind of up for grabs but kind of not. And, and also, they're very small electoral college states. Uh, and so, you know, when, when you, when you look at the sort of way that the calendar is constructed, if you want to know why Kamala Harris is still sniffing out 2028, that's the reason. Because she's figuring that she will outperform in South Carolina. Like, she's a black candidate. People have voted for her before. Why not actually like go and make that run in South Carolina? Because she's almost guaranteed to win South Carolina unless there's a candidate like say a Wes Moore or something who comes out of Maryland. And is similar competitive with the black voter.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  Do you think Newsom is done, done?

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  I don't think he's done, done, but I think that peaking too early is a real thing. I mean, there have been, you know, a number of candidates. Like if you go back to like 2012, I think it was like Tim Pawlenty was one of the early candidates. People, ah, Tim Pawlenty will be a thing.

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  Scott Walker was.

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  Right, Scott Walker was a big thing, right? You remember in the Democratic Party column, Harris was the thing in 2020, right? She flamed out. So, you know, I think that when you start to get like all the headlines this early, it's very difficult to sustain that momentum for that amount of time. The thing for AOC is that AOC is going to lock up about one third of the Democratic Party voting base if she decides to run. Right, that takes one third basically off the table, minimum.

• 1:28:19Speaker 00

  So it's an automatic VP position if she wanted it? You need her as a VP?

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Maybe, I mean, I think, so first of all, I don't think VPs tend to matter very much in terms of general elections. Like people didn't vote for Trump because JD was the VP and they didn't vote.

• 1:28:34Speaker 00

  You don't think he won because of Pence? Pence is the goat. You don't think Pence is the reason why Trump won in 16?

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  I do not think that Pence is the reason why Trump won in 16. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I, again, I don't think.

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  I think JD played a good role when he talked to.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  He did a great job with Walls, for sure.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  When he did the debate and he went, I thought he did very good.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  But the reality is that again, Trump, I think, could have picked, you know, anybody out of a lineup and probably won that election with the same number.

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  2024 was a magical year. That was something else. Yeah, it was wild. Okay, so another article from Politico a couple of days ago. GOP staffers say the party has a Groypur problem. So Groypur problem, you know, we're talking about Fuentes. So polling shows that the overwhelming majority of young conservatives reject anti-Semitic views, though their support for Israel has dropped significantly from their prior generations. They also are more skeptical of military intervention than forbearers. The oldest members of the Gen Z cohort were toddlers on 9/11, grew up in an era of multi-decade, multi-trillion dollar wars, and found themselves unable to afford homes as they reached adulthood. Many come of their mistrust of GOP orthodoxy honestly. So do you think there is a Groypur problem on the right?

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously, you know, Nick has built himself a nice sized audience. And I think that a lot of these sort of, you know, edgy, half comedy, half not comedy stuff that he's doing has traffic. I mean, transgressive, transgressive politics is always attractive to young people. Whether it's Hasan Piker saying he loves Mao on the left, or whether it's Fuentes saying he loves Hitler on the right. Kind of violating the rules is always sexy to people. And so it kind of speaks authenticity, or it speaks humor, or whatever, or whatever it is. So, yeah, no, I think that there's a legitimate issue with people who believe some of the things. And because at a certain point, and you see this with the DSA left, the same way you're seeing with the Groypur right, is it's all joking until it's not joking. Right, like you joke about Hitler, you joke about Hitler, and at a certain point you're like, am I really joking about Hitler or was he really kind of okay?

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  Like, was he really kind of an OG? Or was he not? Right, like, have he really been sold about?

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  You think he's joking?

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  No, I don't think that Fuentes is joking. I think that he likes to use humor as a cover for the fact that he is not joking, actually. I think that his belief system is, you know, I'll grant him the courtesy of sincerity. I think he's sincere in his belief systems. I think he's wrong, but I think, and I think much of what he says is quite morally terrible, but I think that he comes by it honestly.

• 1:30:49Speaker 00

  You work with him?

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  I did not, so.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  Did he work, what was the relationship with you guys back in the days? Because I know he came on, I asked him the question.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  So he has this whole like weird villain origin story that he's come up with, with regard to his rise in Daily Wire and all this. I'll be honest with you, I don't remember pretty much any of this because this was not important to me at any point in my life. So this is like, the only thing I remember is that Cassie Dillon, now Cassie Akiva, was friends with Fuentes, I believe. And she texted me a debate that Fuentes had done, I think he was at BU at the time, on immigration. And it was, and he did tremendous job because Nick is a smart guy. Like he's, again, I think what he believes is quite terrible, but he has, he has my cue. And, and so I had Daily Wire cover that debate, because he did, it was an immigration debate. And, and then, I don't know if I was following him on Twitter or what the story was, some

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  tweet of his came up where he was basically accusing anybody who was pro-Israel of dual loyalty. And I said, that's an anti-Semitic trope, that everybody who supports Israel is loyal to the state of Israel over the United States, or is more loyal, or as loyal to Israel as to the United States. And he uses that, I guess now, as sort of like, and that's when I decided that I had to go, you know, don the dark cape. And it's like, well, first of all, that's oddly illogical. If the, if the idea, I struggle to find a position that I think is evil, where if somebody called me that thing, I'd become more of it. So I've been labeled alt-right a thousand times wrongly, because the alt-right despises me and hates me, and a significant portion of my death threats come from the alt-right. At no point have I said, okay, well, the left called me alt-right, so I'm going to do it.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Right, the left, like, if my critique of Nick was back whenever it was, when I tweeted that, that he was engaging in anti-Semitism, and his response was Hitler was an OG, number one, was I wrong? And number two, why would that drive you to that? I'm confused. Right, there's literally no political position that, that I find despicable, that you could force me to take simply out of oppositionality. Like, that's not, that's a weird thing. That's a very weird thing. So again, I think that, you know, from my perspective, I don't, that's literally all I recall of any of this. You know, you'll have to ask Cassie about it, because Cassie probably recalls more. But the idea that he was ever like an intern with us, or he was slated for a job with us, or that he was going to, none of that's true.

• 1:33:04Speaker 00

  How much of what you're seeing, his recreation as he's going through the space? Right, hero, and then first guy that kind of went up against Israel, and a lot of people followed his lead, and then now he's like, well, I'm going to vote Democrat, no, we got to vote Republican. What do you think he's solving for? I had him on here, I actually enjoy talking to the guy. He's a smart guy, like you said. He's not somebody that's not smart.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  And he's funny, he's entertaining, he's got the talent.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Of course, he's a super, he's a, he's a very funny broadcaster, for sure. Again, lots of people I disagree with and think are terrible are funny at their jobs. So what is he gaming for? He's gaming for personal loyalty. One of the great tragedies of my political life is the recognition that people don't follow ideas, they follow people. It makes me very sad, because I'm not a kind of person who wants that, right? I mean, this guy goes back to blind spots. Yeah, I've always thought that I'm grateful for my position, because I get to espouse ideas that I care about. But the idea that people are like Ben Shapiro stans, or they love Ben Shapiro, this has never been a motivating factor for me, nor do I think that like, if I say something wrong, I'm fine with people calling me out on it. And also, like, when people come up to me and they say, I love you, but I disagree with a lot of what you say, like, cool, like, that's, that's, like, I'm glad that you, I'm

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  glad, I prefer you agree with everything I say and not love me as much, meaning like, I actually care about the positions. I think for Nick, when you're trying to build a movement, which is clearly what he's tried to do, the unpredictability and the loyalty tests of it, like, I'm going left, no, I'm going right, and I'm going this way, and I'm going that way, follow me around, like, that is all part of the game. I think that's true for Tucker, too. I think it's true for a lot of these people. Like, the more you can get people to buy into mutually contradictory assertions in loyalty to you, the more loyal they are. I'm very internally coherent in my politics, so I'm never going to ask you to buy into two propositions that contradict one another and prove your loyalty to me, to me by doing so.

• 1:34:45Speaker 00

  Are you surprised that him and Tucker are not more united?

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think that that's a business thing. Meaning, I think that, I think that Tucker largely probably agrees with Fuentes, and I think Fuentes would probably think that, too. I think that Fuentes was sort of taken aback by the fact that he went there and Tucker treated him really well, and basically hugged him on his show, and then next thing you know Tucker was sort of disassociating from him, because he realized that it was, it was bad business to be associated with Fuentes. So, you know, that, that whole kind of two-step is, is.

• 1:35:12Speaker 00

  You think deep down inside Tucker admires Nick for him to be a little bit more free to say whatever he wants to say, and doesn't give a shit about making money, is just kind of like saying whatever's on his mind?

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think that, to a certain extent, Tucker thinks that Fuentes is going to drink his milkshake.

• 1:35:27Speaker 00

  So you think Fuentes is eventually going to come inside with him? That Tucker thinks Nick is going to join?

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  No, the opposite. I think that Tucker is deeply afraid that Nick is going to, is going to drink his milkshake, that he's going to take his audience.

• 1:35:40Speaker 00

  I got it.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  That he sees him in a competitive space. And that's why he's constantly doing the like, I'm patting you on the head, no, I don't want to see you again, I'm going to pat you on the head, no, you're a gay little FBI fat.

• 1:35:48Speaker 00

  You can't do that to Nick. Nick is not that guy.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  I tend to agree, by the way.

• 1:35:51Speaker 00

  No, Nick is not that guy. Nick is, there's some guys that are, you know, they have the street thug, gangster side to them that they don't, they understand that part, they don't need flattery. I don't think Nick's part of the flattery camp. I think that may work with certain people, I don't think that's going to work.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  I tend to agree with that.

• 1:36:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, okay, so what role you think he's going to play in 28?

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Not much. I mean, I think he'll play a role insofar as the GOP refuses to distance itself from people. I think he'll be used as a weapon, for sure. I mean, this is how politics works, right? I mean, like Hasan Piker campaigning with the Democrats is a weapon for Republicans.

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  And refusal to disavow people, or to, or to, you know, say that you don't want the support of people who openly stan Hitler, I don't think that ends well for people, typically speaking. And I think that the mistake, again, that the Vice President is making with, you know, the Tucker of it, or with the, you know, he'll condemn Fuentes, he won't condemn Tucker. I think that's a, that's a very difficult line to draw, to a certain extent.

• 1:36:44Speaker 00

  Backfired when he, you know, criticized Fuentes.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  Yes, and so I think that, you know.

• 1:36:49Speaker 00

  You remember what he said?

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:36:51Speaker 00

  Eat shit?

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, but he sort of, he sort of had to, but the problem is that you can't play that game and then be like.

• 1:36:58Speaker 00

  That was a bad move on the VP, honestly.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, if you're going to do it, do it, man. What I mean by that is if you're going to condemn Fuentes, then condemn everybody who holds that point of view. Right, I'll do that. Right, like one foot.

• 1:37:09Speaker 00

  You're not the VP.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  I understand, but I don't.

• 1:37:11Speaker 00

  You're in the game.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  But if you're in the, but again, I don't think that that's the audience he needs to be. Okay, so let me construct an alternative JD Vance for you. Okay, here's the alternative JD Vance that I would recommend the Vice President pursue. Okay, so if I were JD Vance, and I were somebody who has a blue collar appeal, because, you know, I go back to Appalachia and all of that, here's where I would not be aiming. I would not be aiming at the Fuentes-Tucker Catholic integralist crowd. That's not where I would be aiming, because that's a very small percentage of the population. I would be the version of JD Vance that you saw on stage with Tim Walz. Politically moderate.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Kind of a vuncular kind, a person who loves his wife and kids. I put them in all my pictures. I'd be, I'd be talking in friendly terms about what I plan to do for you. I would be significantly less kind of acerbic and dyspeptic about my politics, the sort of kind of sour face that you see on JD sometimes. And I would be attempting to reach out to, he, he could do better with women than Trump. It's possible, but he needs to actually like make that move. He could do better with, say, college educated than Trump, right? Trump did not do well with college educated. JD is a Yale Law School graduate. He's very smart. He could be reaching out to that crowd by making, you know, kind of more intellectually, more intellectual appeals. Instead, he's sort of trying to drive home the blue collar-ness of him.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  But the blue collar voters are likely to vote for JD anyway. Like that's, that's your home base. Like, so again, I think that there is a way that he could be running and he's choosing not to run that way. I think that's a foolish strategy.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  What's more likely to happen? A sit down with you and Tucker or sit down with you and Nick?

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, neither is particularly likely, I would imagine. Um, the, the Tucker I've offered a thousand times, um, you know, open invite. Uh, you know, Nick is a bit of a different story. And the reason that Nick is a bit of a different story is because Nick's entire mode, and listen, I admire it. I even sometimes get a bizarre kick out of it. But Nick's entire mode is he's a comedian. Okay, Nick is, is, is a comedian masquerading as a, as a political pundit. He has political views, but in essence, he's a comedian. And you can't really have an honest political conversation with a comedian. It'd be more like interviewing Dave Chappelle or something, but like Nazi Dave Chappelle. Meaning, what does Nick believe? What does he not believe? I don't know. I mean, it depends on what's funny at the moment. And so trying to-

• 1:39:22Speaker 00

  So you don't think he has core beliefs?

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I mean, I, I do think that he has core beliefs, but I think that one of the tactics that he uses to avoid being pinned down on his core beliefs is diffusing with humor. And I think that when you try to pin him down with that, then the idea is that you're an uncool person for even asking him to be pinned down on that sort of thing. And so there's no sort of honest conversation that can be had about like, what are your core beliefs and are they right or are they wrong? Because that's, that's not what he does. I think when he's asked a tough question, then he immediately reverts to the sort of 17-year-old humor that, listen, people can find it transgressively funny. I on occasion find it transgressively funny. But that, that is not an honest conversation about his politics or his principles. And I don't think that that's probably in the offing.

• 1:39:58Speaker 00

  I think he's different when he's on the mic and on the screen talking, him and the camera like this versus one-on-one. It's a very different one-on-one.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think, listen, also, obviously, his incentive structure, if we were to sit down together, would be to get the own the Shapiro moment, right? And then blow it up all, all over the internet, clearly.

• 1:40:12Speaker 00

  Would you ever have him on?

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  Would I ever have him on? Um, I mean, it depends, again, if he, if he weren't, I would, the, the answer is, is no, I think. But the, the reason I'm hesitating is because if he ever, if I, if I got the impression that he were willing to have like an actual serious sit down conversation without all of the, you know, now I'm just gonna call you a Jew for the shits and giggles of it so that the audience goes crazy. Like, I'm just, I'm not interested in that.

• 1:40:34Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Why am I not interested in having on somebody who just calls me a Jew for the shits and giggles of it? Because I think that's stupid.

• 1:40:40Speaker 00

  I actually don't think he'll do that. I actually don't think he'll do that.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  So it's, I mean, listen, it, if, if you could convince me of that, then I would do it.

• 1:40:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think he would do that.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Or, or the, you know?

• 1:40:48Speaker 00

  I think it would be a real good debate and, and I, it would be a good conversation. Uh, and I think a lot of the youth would sit there and say, good for Ben for having him on. It, it would be what a lot of people would never see coming. And I think you would be more surprised on how he is one-on-one. By the way, just so you know-

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  I mean, again, I'm not saying-

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  From the day he's been on my podcast-

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  I'm sure he's a very nice guy in a one-on-one.

• 1:41:10Speaker 00

  From the day he was here with me, the interview, till today, him and I haven't spoken at all.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Speaker 00

  So it's not like to take conversation, anything like that. I just think it would be a good conversation to have him. And you know, selfishly, I would also like to see you and Tucker sitting down. You on his or him on yours?

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Again, I've offered Tucker that about a thousand times.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  I've seen that.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Um, and I, I really doubt that's going to happen. Again, I think that there's a misalignment of incentives. I think that, that, you know, Nick, let's put it this way, Nick does not want to be pinned down on his ideological beliefs with, with data or with counter argument that is serious. And so his incentive structure very strongly would be to sort of do the Piers Morgan interview. Right? Like, if you watch Nick's interview with Piers Morgan, again, I found it amusing too because Nick's really good at that game. But Piers is trying to pin him down on his beliefs about the Holocaust. And so what Nick does, he immediately launches into a bunch of jokes about the Holocaust. Well, again, those jokes may be transgressively funny, but that doesn't actually get to the root of the issue. Is everyone smarter for having heard that? I think actually everyone might be stupider for having heard this.

• 1:42:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  That's the hard part, right? A certain, a, a level of debate requires a level of sincere revelation of your interior beliefs and willing to defend them. If you're, if, if what you're gonna do is run away to comedy or to humor or to insult, then that's not worthwhile. It is, it, it doesn't, it doesn't advance the, it doesn't advance the ball.

• 1:42:26Speaker 00

  You know, there's a difference with comedy and there's a difference with rage baiting comments that you know it's gonna get under your skin. I think if, like, when I, I was at Amphist and somebody asked me a question, why won't you sit down with Nick? I said, I'm not comfortable with him saying the N-word all the time. And I said it from stage. I'm like, I just want you to be respectful. You know, I listened to hip-hop for many years and maybe a little bit too much when I was a kid, but I chose to change and I went a different direction in my life. And then we had a very respectful conversation together. But Crowder's funny. Crowder is one of the most talented guys. I know you guys had something that happened many years ago, but I think Crowder's super talented in camera.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  Of course, of course.

• 1:43:01Speaker 00

  And he's funny as shit, like this stuff they used to do back in the days. You're like, who is this guy? You, you would watch him, you would say, super brilliant, but he's also able to do this.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Again, I think it is important for me to say at this point that at no point, so what's, what's funny is that there's been this conflation. I'm just gonna make this point because you're not making it, but I know that, how the internet works. I'm not saying that anybody should take away Nick Fuentes' microphone or anyone else's microphone. Whether I choose to be on a podcast with somebody or not choose to be on a podcast, that is an aspect of free speech, the same as it is whether I, whether I want to or whether I don't want to. Uh, so again, I, I think there are circumstances under which I would do something like that, but I'd have to believe certain things about how he would approach the thing in order to mean that I would think it's worthwhile. Now, other people might think it's worthwhile, right? But, but they're not me, so, you know.

• 1:43:42Speaker 00

  I think it's a way to get in front of the youth that right now is not getting a platform because they're listening to him more than you. So I think sitting down with you, you would get in front of his audience. And if you feel your argument is more logical, his audience is gonna say, you know what? He's actually got a good point. So that would be the biggest thing if even if-

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  That is definitely the strongest steel man to argument in favor.

• 1:44:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, even if it's a 5% that's reasonable, that's willing to shift.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  Right. And the, and the strongest steel man to argument against is that it's a setup. That's the strongest steel man to argument.

• 1:44:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if it's on your territory, there's no risk. You're, you're controlling the territory.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I don't think that's true because again, I'm honest enough to, I would not slice and dice it, right? And anything that we taped, we'd put out.

• 1:44:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Listen, I mean, I came to your territory, so I, I've seen how you guys do things.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  I mean, we're, we're so kind with our interviews, as you know, that like, we'll say that if somebody says something they feel they didn't articulate properly in the moment, we'll say like, go back and articulate it better. Right? We want people to present their, the best form of their argument.

• 1:44:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Last thing before we wrap up, Florida. Both you and I live in Florida. I wonder how you feel about this. Uh, Byron Donalds, capable, talented, I've had him on, I like him. Um, running for governor, doesn't wanna do primary. We held a debate here locally with Paul Renner, with Jay Collins and James Fishback. And I had no clue who Renner was. By the time I was on, I'm like, this guy's impressive. I don't know if you know Renner, Speaker of the House of the State of Florida. He did very good during the debate. And Byron Donalds said, if anybody hits double digits, I'll do the debate. Now he's not sitting down doing a debate with anybody. And the Florida GOP is ran by Evan, uh, I don't know what his name is. Evan or E, um, if I say him correctly, I think his name is, I won't say it properly.

• 1:45:21Speaker 00

  I'm not trying to disrespect anybody here, but they don't think there needs to be a debate on the primary side. Where do you stand with this?

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  Um, you know, again, President Trump did this too. So my, my view is-

• 1:45:31Speaker 00

  President Trump was already a president.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  Um, well, no, actually, even during the, the first round debates in 2015, 2016, there came a point where he was up front and he was like, I'm not gonna participate in, in-

• 1:45:39Speaker 00

  Oh, but he did a couple of them.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  He did a couple of them, yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, my, my, my, listen, would I, would I like to see a debate between the gubernatorial candidates? Sure. Do I think that it's incumbent on Byron Donalds to do it when he's the prohibitive frontrunner? No. And, and again, I think that, you know, like, am I gonna-

• 1:45:54Speaker 00

  I think this disagrees with you.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  I, I know, I know the governor disagrees with me. Sure. I mean, and, and, but just as a, as a, there's sort of like, what I would like to see in the best of all possible worlds? Sure, why not? I mean, everybody's running for governor, I'd like to see their opinions. Uh, am I gonna rip on the guy who's probably gonna, who's, who's gonna win anyway? I mean, like, if, if-

• 1:46:11Speaker 00

  Not rip on him, not rip on-

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  No, no, but, but I mean, am I, am I going to say that he's doing something, you know, morally deficient in not debating James Fishback or something? Like, again, if the public feels that way, they won't vote for him.

• 1:46:20Speaker 00

  I, I, you know what my, my feedback on that is? The more you avoid that sit down, the more credibility you give Fishback. The more, you know what it would be? It would be like to say something like, you're scared, that audience, you know the whole flip of, you're scared, you're this.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  So this is, this is the other thing. I think that everybody is way too online. Okay, so everybody-

• 1:46:38Speaker 00

  Online is way too what?

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  Online.

• 1:46:40Speaker 00

  Online, yeah.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Okay, so I think that, you know, right now, Fishback in the polls is what? 8%? 7%?

• 1:46:46Speaker 00

  I think Collins is at 14. I don't know what the numbers are. I think Collins at 12, 13, 14, depending on which polls you're looking at. And then Fishback on some is 8, some is 12.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:46:55Speaker 00

  But yeah, they're way behind. It's not even close.

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  They're way the hell behind. So like the idea that like, oh my God, we need, we must hear from the guy who can't draw one tenth of the Republican primary vote.

• 1:47:05Speaker 00

  So they're both sitting at 12 if you use this Florida. I don't know which poll this is.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  And I think this is true on the online, in the online debate sphere too. So I think this is, this is applicable to a lot of the prior conversation. There is this dumb thing that has happened. Call it the Marty McFly and Back to the Future 2 thing, which is like, come on McFly, you chicken? Right? Like if you, if you want to debate this person, it's because you're chicken. It's like, what if I think that the debate is stupid and a waste of time? I mean, that's possible too.

• 1:47:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, but these, these are, you think debate with Paul Collins, who's a lieutenant governor and Fishback is, I don't know. I don't know if it's stupid. I think, I think there's a difference. You can make the argument and say, I don't want to sit down with Pierce Morgan. Okay, great. I don't want to go on Nick Fuentes. I get it. Tucker, I don't want to talk to Ben Shapiro. We've invited Tucker many times. He has no desire. No problem.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. By the way, I said that about Tucker. If Tucker doesn't want to come on my show, that's his right. He does not have to.

• 1:47:51Speaker 00

  When it comes down to a debate of winning over the GOP, this position is unattractive. And I think it's a...

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  It's a fair critique and it ain't gonna bother him one ounce on his way to becoming governor.

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  I agree. I don't think it's gonna make a difference on that part.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  So this goes back to, this goes back to maybe your, maybe your blind spot is idealism and how much you would like to see people talk together. And now I'm being the pragmatist and saying like, well, he's gonna win anyway.

• 1:48:13Speaker 00

  That's why these conversations are good. This is why these conversations are good. But yeah, Ben, great having you on. Is there anything you want to share with, anything you guys are working on right now, project wise?

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  Oh, we have tons of stuff that's coming. So I'm really excited about, about what's coming. So we have a movie that we've already announced called Run, Hide, Fight, Infidels, which is just a banger. That's coming out at the beginning of September. And the essential premise of it is college campus where an ISIS cell decides to take over the college campus. And it is a full-on 1980s style Red Dawn toy soldiers, kind of shoot them up, starring

• 1:48:49Speaker 00

  This is with Jonathan Majors?

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  This is Jonathan Majors movie.

• 1:48:51Speaker 00

  When does it come out?

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  That comes out, I believe, September 16th.

• 1:48:54Speaker 00

  Oh, nice. So it's a month from now.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we are pumped about it. The movie's so, it's fun. It's great. And it's making a...

• 1:49:00Speaker 00

  Are you in it at all? Do you have a cameo?

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  It's an actual movie. Okay. Like my, my view of, of movies is that, you know, the people at Daily Wire typically, there's some exceptions. Should, should not be in them. I'm a horrible actor. The, we have another movie that's, that I can't announce yet, but that is likely to come out by Black Friday. That is a probably most star-studded conservative movie ever made. So that's likely to come out, most anti-communist film ever made for sure, on, on Black Friday. So we're moving toward that. We have another film that's in production. We have a major host who we cannot announce contractually, but will be joining us next year. We're in heavy negotiations with another major host who I hope will, will, you know, will, will get into, you know, business with in the near future. All of that stuff that's just coming in the next six months. Plus, of course, we'll

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  have, we have a Matt Walsh documentary that's in production for next year. A couple of other documentaries. Yeah, they're, they're phenomenal. We have a project from, from Michael Moles that's coming. We have some religious content coming for Christmas. So we, it's like a plethora of content. We're between now and, you know,

• 1:49:59Speaker 00

  That's good. It's a big pipeline.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  We actually, this was the main consideration when we rebuilt the business, is that we had to have a pipeline. We had to have a pipeline. So the, the main failing of our business, you know, this is a whole different conversation, but the main failing of our business between, say, end of 2024 and now, is that there was no pipeline. The pipeline was totally dry. And you gotta, you gotta provide people with content they actually want to see, or you're going to start, you know, losing audience, losing subscribers. And so that was the thing that we had to cure. We had to clean up a bunch of business issues in order to make that happen, which is why I've seen some of the headlines that you've seen. And I am more confident about the status of our company going forward than probably I've been maybe since the inception of the company because of the exciting and awesome pipeline of projects that are coming. Honestly, some of the stuff's gonna blow

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  people's socks off. It's really, really good. It's good. Like it's high quality. It's gonna surprise people and it kind of kicks ass. I'm pumped about it.

• 1:50:51Speaker 00

  Well, looking forward to checking all of them out. So if you, is the website dailywire.com?

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:50:55Speaker 00

  Okay. If you want to learn more, guys, go to dailywire.com. Ben, great having you on. Really enjoyed it. Definitely. Take care.