The Ben Shapiro Show - November 20, 2024


The COLLAPSE Of The Elitists

Topics
false meritocracy retired Border Patrol agents media disconnect
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Donald Trump David Brock Vladimir Putin Oliver Schnee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Type Ben Shapiro Gary Sinise Bambi Ezra Klein Joe Biden Nature Boy Anne Applebaum Made Joe Scarborough J.B. Pritzker Barack Obama Eddie Glaude Matt Gaetz Elon Musk Tom Homan Shenandoah and 36 more
Joe and Mika BEND THE KNEE Trump Is VENGEANCE

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

191.1

Word count

11,555

Sentence count

774

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

David Brooks has a piece on the cover of The Atlantic this week talking about the death of the "meritocracy" and why it's time to go back to a system of technocratic rule over the whole country, not just a few people who are better than the rest at getting ahead. I think we can all agree that this is not a good thing, but it's also a symptom of a larger problem, which is that David Brooks doesn't understand what a meritocracy actually is, and very few people seem to actually do. In politics, the easiest thing to do is you make a mistake, and then you attribute it to the philosophy of your opponent. And so as we'll see, what we are watching right now, and what we've watched over the course of the last century and a half in America, is the transformation of meritocracy, the idea that anyone could get ahead in a system ruled by a technocratic elite who are attempting to reconstruct their society. David Brooks is a tinkerer. He wants to better manage the problems of a managed system, because he wants to make it a better managed system. And he's making it so managed that he doesn't actually solve the problems he's actually wants to solve them. And that's why he's not a meritocrat, he's a technocrat, and that's what we need to be worried about, because that's the end of the meritocratic order we've had for a long, long time. and we're going to need a system that's better than what we veered off into technocracy in order to live up to our potential in the past and become a better version of what we actually have in the 21st century a better, better, more productive, more like a better democracy . or better than we used to have a meritocratic system. . . . and it's not going to get better, is it? that's a problem we're all going to have to deal with, right? - Tom? ... or is it ? - What are you waiting for? ? - What do you think of this episode? - Tom Bilyea What are your thoughts on the future of the American meritocracy? - tweet me on this one? - Tweet Me! to let me know what you thought of this one, and do you have any thoughts on what you would like to see in the next episode?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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00:00:00.000 Well, folks, if there is one thing common to President Trump's cabinet picks, it is Newton's third law of motion.
00:00:05.000 So Newton's third law of motion suggests that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
00:00:11.000 The same thing is true in politics.
00:00:12.000 If you corrupt the DOJ, then President Trump is going to unleash Matt Gaetz on you.
00:00:17.000 If you corrupt HHS, he's going to unleash Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:00:20.000 on you.
00:00:21.000 And all of this sort of reactivity in politics is leading to a bit of introspection on the part of people who backed Kamala Harris, people who hate Donald Trump.
00:00:29.000 And what that's resulting in is a wide variety of theories as to why exactly Democrats have lost their way, why the left has lost its way in the United States.
00:00:38.000 One of the biggest theories going right now is being brought out by David Brooks.
00:00:42.000 David Brooks is, of course, a former pseudo-conservative columnist for the New York Times.
00:00:46.000 Then he turned toward the left.
00:00:47.000 He famously suggested that he liked Barack Obama because he liked the crease of his pants or some such nonsense.
00:00:53.000 But he's also been responsible for some sort of interesting social theories.
00:00:57.000 He talked for a long time about the Bobo generation and sort of bohemian generation that formed its own morality.
00:01:03.000 He's sort of an interesting writer.
00:01:04.000 Well, he has a big piece on the cover of The Atlantic this week talking about the death of the meritocracy.
00:01:10.000 And his basic suggestion is that one of the reasons you're seeing outsiders like Donald Trump or RF Kennedy Jr.
00:01:17.000 or Matt Gaetz or a wide variety of the figures that you are seeing David Brooks has a perverse view of what meritocracy actually is.
00:01:31.000 David Brooks is not a meritocrat.
00:01:33.000 He's not somebody who believes that people who have merit ought to rise to the top naturally.
00:01:38.000 There's an evolutionary process by which people rise to the top.
00:01:40.000 Instead, he is, like many members of the traditional left, a technocrat.
00:01:45.000 He is somebody who's trying to construct systems in order to make the world a better place.
00:01:50.000 He's not going to live with the evolved systems of, say, free markets and free government.
00:01:54.000 Instead, he is a tinkerer.
00:01:57.000 He is somebody who believes that as an expert, he can set up a system that is going to rule over hundreds of millions of people.
00:02:02.000 And this is the actual plague of Western civilization over the course of the last century and a half.
00:02:08.000 The movement from evolutionary structures of government and markets and toward a technocracy.
00:02:13.000 A group of people, a self-appointed coterie of elites are going to fix all of your problems.
00:02:17.000 And so as we'll see, what David Brooks is doing in this essay, and I think it's really important because he does point out what he sees as some problems with the so-called meritocracy.
00:02:26.000 But the biggest problem is that he does not understand what a true meritocracy actually is.
00:02:31.000 And very few people, it seems, actually do.
00:02:34.000 In politics, the easiest thing to do is you make a mistake and then you attribute it to the philosophy of your opponent.
00:02:39.000 So this happens very often, for example, with capitalism.
00:02:42.000 2007-2008, there's a massive market crisis.
00:02:45.000 That market crisis is not driven by free markets per se.
00:02:48.000 It's driven by government tinkering with free markets.
00:02:51.000 driven, for example, by the subprime mortgages pushed by the federal government under Bill Clinton, the attempt to spread home ownership throughout the society through technocratic tinkering.
00:03:00.000 And then when everything falls down, the free markets and capitalism get blamed.
00:03:04.000 The same thing is sort of happening here with meritocracy.
00:03:06.000 So in my view, and traditionally, meritocracy simply means something that should be good for everyone, which is people of merit rise to the top of a system that is better than So for example, aristocracy, which is you are born into rule, or oligopoly, in which you essentially have a group of people who maintain their particular rule through corruption.
00:03:30.000 Well, what we are watching right now and what we've watched over the course of the last century and a half in America is the transformation of meritocracy, the idea that anyone could get ahead if they had merit, into a technocracy ruled by an elite who are attempting to reconstruct the entire society in their image.
00:03:44.000 So for David Brooks, he isn't actually solving the problems of meritocracy.
00:03:48.000 He's making it worse because he is a tinkerer.
00:03:50.000 He wants to better manage the so-called better managed system.
00:03:53.000 As I say, it turns out that systems in the United States, particularly organically evolved to maximize actual merit.
00:04:00.000 And then at the beginning of the 20th century with the progressive movement, we decided that wasn't enough.
00:04:05.000 Free markets were bad.
00:04:06.000 Churches were a problem.
00:04:08.000 All of these sort of natural institutions of life were in positions on the elites who were going to create a better managed system.
00:04:17.000 Free markets, which are in fact a natural outgrowth of a basic concept of private property, maximize both productivity and innovation.
00:04:25.000 Free markets, they game for that.
00:04:27.000 That is what they incentivize.
00:04:28.000 If you innovate, you're going to get richer.
00:04:30.000 If you are productive, you're going to get richer.
00:04:32.000 This is the sort of merit that free markets actually incentivize.
00:04:36.000 Communitarian church systems maximize virtue and social bondedness.
00:04:39.000 So if you live within a community with a strong church or synagogue or mosque, the people who tend to do best in those systems are the people who are the most virtuous and create the most social fabric.
00:04:51.000 Government is a substitute for neither of those things.
00:04:54.000 Managed systems are a substitute for neither of those things.
00:04:57.000 This is one of the reasons why colleges have collapsed in the United States.
00:05:00.000 So colleges originally were supposed to feature and innovate productivity and virtue.
00:05:05.000 The idea was to create good citizens who are good at things.
00:05:08.000 So for example, the purpose of Columbia University When it was founded in 1754, it was founded as King's College.
00:05:16.000 According to its first president, William Samuel Johnson, he wrote,"...the chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children to know God and Jesus Christ, and to love and serve Him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness of life with a perfect heart and a willing mind, and to train them up in all virtuous habits and all such useful knowledge as may render them creditable to their families and friends,
00:05:35.000 ornaments to their country, and useful to the public weal in their generations." So, in short, these people were not being made to reshape the society.
00:05:47.000 Columbia University was designed to teach eternal truths, to pursue knowledge of nature and nature's God, to create good citizens and good men, to feed into things like free markets and property rights, to feed into things like good membership in community.
00:06:02.000 Well, now, of course, Columbia exists not to teach either productivity or godliness, but to teach an elite set of values that confers membership on a self-appointed aristocracy.
00:06:11.000 And that is the David Brooks problem, is that the thing that he's railing against, the thing that he's recognizing, which is the failure of the so-called meritocracy, he's not wrong about it.
00:06:19.000 It's just that he's mislabeling.
00:06:20.000 It's not the failure of meritocracy.
00:06:22.000 It's the failure of a technocracy that's been established over the course of the last century and a half, and that has failed the American people.
00:06:29.000 So, David Brooks' essay in The Atlantic, I'm going to quote extensively from it.
00:06:33.000 I want to critique it because I think it's very important.
00:06:35.000 I think that, again, a bait and switch is being attempted here, and it's a dangerous bait and switch.
00:06:41.000 Because the solutions that David Brooks suggests basically maintain that the same elites who have screwed things up ought to maintain control of the system.
00:06:48.000 And that's the problem.
00:06:50.000 So he writes about his idea, which is that there is a shift in how the meritocracy worked happening around the turn of the mid-century in the United States in the 20th century, 1950 to 1960, essentially.
00:07:04.000 He's talking about James Conant, who was the president of Harvard.
00:07:06.000 He says, Eventually, Conant's vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life.
00:07:34.000 If you control the choke points of social mobility, you control the nation's culture.
00:07:38.000 If you change the criteria for admissions at places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, you change the nation's social ideal.
00:07:43.000 Okay, so the basic idea that he is promoting here is that a sort of test-based meritocracy at the universities is the big problem.
00:07:50.000 Now, what that replaced, of course, was the idea that if you had a brother or a dad who went to Harvard, you went to Harvard too.
00:07:55.000 And so what Conan pushed was the idea that instead, if you're a poor kid who did well on your SATs, you should be able to go to Harvard.
00:08:02.000 That isn't a bad thing.
00:08:04.000 That isn't a bad thing.
00:08:06.000 So what's the problem?
00:08:07.000 Well, David Brooks is suggesting that actually we set up a sort of replacement meritocracy that is based on intellect, and that's the problem.
00:08:18.000 Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century?
00:08:24.000 We can scorn the smug wasp bluebloods from Groton and Choate, and certainly their era's retrograde views of race and gender, but their leadership helped produce the progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan NATO, and the post-war Pax Americana. 1.00
00:08:36.000 After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.
00:08:47.000 Okay, so, first of all, you can see the category error right away.
00:08:50.000 He says that the break happened in the mid-20th century, and that up until the mid-20th century, everything was hunky-dory.
00:08:55.000 But half of the things that he mentions before the mid-20th century are things that are not exactly great.
00:09:00.000 So, for example, the progressive movement in the United States, which has generated an outsized Extraordinarily large bureaucracy in American government has been really bad.
00:09:09.000 And what you're watching right now is a reaction directly to that because it wasn't a meritocracy.
00:09:14.000 The break, as it turns out, in American life was not in 1950.
00:09:17.000 The break was in 1900.
00:09:19.000 The break happened in American life with the substitution of an expert elite in favor of the American people, in favor of those organic systems that I was talking about, of free market and church communitarianism.
00:09:30.000 The substitution of this top-down system, it was attempted for a century and a half, and its thorough failure in 2020, basically, has led to what we are currently seeing.
00:09:41.000 So again, the things he lists off as sort of wonders are the progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II.
00:09:47.000 Victory in World War II, by the way, would not have been a simple, you can't just chalk that up to the so-called smug wasp of blue blood from Groton and Choate. 0.90
00:09:57.000 There's very little of that sort of elitism in the victory in World War II.
00:10:03.000 The victory in World War II was the most proletariat war in American history. 0.90
00:10:07.000 It was literally a draft of the entire male population of the United States. 0.61
00:10:10.000 and then he attributes to them the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the post-war Pax Americana It's a lot easier to attribute that to the circumstances of the post-World War II era than it is to attribute that to the expertise of the people who are leading the charge.
00:10:24.000 Well, folks, it is terrifying that a self-appointed elite Moral elite are ruling the country.
00:10:29.000 But that is coming to an end.
00:10:30.000 But there is something else that should terrify any conservative in America right now.
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00:12:34.000 Promo code SHAPIRO. So then he discusses what he thinks are the sins of the meritocracy.
00:12:39.000 And again, the reason I'm pointing this out is because there's an attempt by so many members of the elite who have blown it to maintain their control by saying they're going to fix it.
00:12:48.000 You cannot let them fix it because they blew it.
00:12:50.000 And even their diagnosis is wrong.
00:12:52.000 So David Brooks gives what he thinks are six sins of the meritocracy.
00:12:56.000 Sin number one is he says the system overrates intelligence.
00:12:59.000 He says, quote, Okay, he is right that the system does overrate one type of intelligence, technocratic bureaucratic intelligence.
00:13:19.000 That is true.
00:13:20.000 Any top-down system is going to do that.
00:13:22.000 It's going to work to feature people who wants to fit into the system.
00:13:26.000 This has been true since the days of ancient Chinese bureaucracy, where you'd actually have bureaucratic tests that were designed to shuffle people into the upper systems of management.
00:13:35.000 Whatever the system needs is what the system gets.
00:13:38.000 But we've tried to fix the overrating of technocratic and bureaucratic intelligence by saying that everyone should go to college.
00:13:47.000 The problem is not elitism in this sense.
00:13:50.000 The problem is the attempt to extend technocratic, bureaucratic intelligence across the entirety of the American body politic.
00:13:58.000 So it's important that a kid who got 1100 on his SATs not go into sort of manual labor of some sort, not go into woodworking or go into plumbing or go into fracking, but that that kid instead go to a college and become qualified to be a middle manager at a government agency somewhere.
00:14:14.000 That's the problem.
00:14:16.000 Now, markets wouldn't make that mistake.
00:14:18.000 In a free market system, you would not be able to get a loan.
00:14:21.000 If you were a 1100 SAT student attempting to go to college to study lesbian dance theory, you would not be able to obtain a loan.
00:14:28.000 We constructed entire technocratic systems that were designed to funnel more people into this broken system.
00:14:35.000 The free markets are an amazing way to evaluate, not for intelligence, but for productivity and efficacy.
00:14:42.000 Again, you don't have to be particularly smart in America to get ahead in America.
00:14:46.000 As it turns out, you actually just have to be fairly good at the job that you are good at.
00:14:50.000 This is the benefit of comparative advantage in free markets.
00:14:53.000 Comparative advantage suggests that people with very high IQ should do things that require very high IQ. And people who have mid-level IQ should do things effectively that are required of people who have a mid-level IQ. And then they trade with one another and both of them are richer for it.
00:15:07.000 This is the reason why plumbers can make a lot of money in the United States.
00:15:11.000 Because free markets, again, maximize that which you are good at.
00:15:16.000 A comparative advantage, one of the great discoveries of mankind.
00:15:20.000 Okay, but that is the thing that our system does not feature.
00:15:23.000 He says the second problem with the so-called meritocracy is that success in school is not the same as success in life.
00:15:29.000 He says success in school is about jumping through the hoops adults put in front of you.
00:15:32.000 Success in life can involve charting your own course.
00:15:34.000 Again, that is true.
00:15:35.000 But markets solve for that.
00:15:37.000 And he keeps forgetting markets.
00:15:38.000 He keeps forgetting that it's not something that requires David Brooks to come in and tinker.
00:15:42.000 If you really want people to rise based on things like agility, as we'll see, what you need is a system that features agility.
00:15:52.000 And the system, for some people, does feature agility.
00:15:55.000 So, for example, if you take a look at our business here, our business was founded by a Harvard Law graduate and two guys who did not graduate college.
00:16:05.000 And we are a very large business at this point with 300 employees or so.
00:16:09.000 Because of the free market, not because of the system that David Brooks wants to construct.
00:16:14.000 Then he says, the problem with the meritocracy is that the game is rigged.
00:16:17.000 He says the meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability.
00:16:19.000 What it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are.
00:16:22.000 As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college admissions arms race.
00:16:29.000 Well, here's the problem again.
00:16:30.000 Why is the college admissions arms race the thing that matters most?
00:16:33.000 And the answer is, realistically speaking, in a free market system, it isn't.
00:16:37.000 And one of the great lies that people tell about economics in the United States is that there's no income mobility.
00:16:42.000 Everybody's sort of stuck where they started.
00:16:44.000 That isn't true.
00:16:45.000 It just isn't true.
00:16:47.000 In a 2014 New York Times article titled From Rags to Riches, for example, Washington University professor of social welfare Mark Rank talked about income mobility in the United States.
00:16:57.000 And here's what he found.
00:17:00.000 After a 44-year study of longitudinal data regarding individuals aged 25 to 60 to see how Americans moved up and down the income spectrum, it turns out 12% of Americans will find themselves in the top 1% of the income distribution for at least one year.
00:17:15.000 39% of Americans, of all Americans, will spend a year in the top 5% of the income distribution.
00:17:20.000 Over half, 56%, will find themselves in the top 10% for at least one year in income distribution.
00:17:25.000 And 73% will spend a year in the top 20% of the income distribution.
00:17:31.000 So again, the idea that they have like a stagnant 1% that is ruling the roost over everybody else, that is not true.
00:17:37.000 People can rise and fall in a free market system based on their own merit.
00:17:41.000 But he keeps forgetting that the free market system has to be left alone.
00:17:45.000 And so he says, quote, the meritocracy has created an American caste system.
00:17:50.000 And he says that that is the fourth problem, this caste system.
00:17:53.000 He says, quote, After decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well-educated from the less well-educated.
00:17:59.000 The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation.
00:18:01.000 Segregate your family into a fancy school district.
00:18:03.000 If you're a valedictorian in Ohio, don't go to Ohio State.
00:18:06.000 Go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are.
00:18:09.000 But again, that's actually not the problem.
00:18:12.000 That's actually not the problem.
00:18:13.000 It's linked to the fifth problem that he notices.
00:18:16.000 Quote, he says, the meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite.
00:18:20.000 He says, the meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards.
00:18:23.000 Its gatekeepers, educators, corporate recruiters, workplace supervisors impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young.
00:18:29.000 Students are trained to be good hurdle clearers.
00:18:31.000 We shower them with disapproval or approval depending on how they measure up on any given day.
00:18:36.000 Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next.
00:18:42.000 But again, that's actually wrong.
00:18:44.000 Okay, the reality is not that our students are petrified of losing out in the sort of college admissions game.
00:18:50.000 The reality is that, again, the false meritocracy, the technocracy that's been created, leads people who succeed there to believe that they are members of a higher moral caste.
00:19:01.000 That they have a different set of values.
00:19:04.000 That if you put she, her in your pronouns in your bio, this makes you part of the coterie of the elite who ought to rule society. 0.52
00:19:11.000 The fake meritocracy that David Brooks is talking about has created an American case system, but not economically, culturally.
00:19:18.000 It's people who get together in cloistered areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, and they believe that they are morally superior to all the people around them.
00:19:28.000 So what he is talking about here is, again, a category error.
00:19:32.000 He is making a large-scale mistake.
00:19:35.000 He says in the end, what we should be doing if we want to fix the problems of what he calls the meritocracy is redefining merit to include curiosity, a sense of drive and mission, social intelligence and agility.
00:19:44.000 And he says if the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid with the tiny exclusive peak at the top.
00:19:51.000 It would look like a mountain range with many peaks.
00:19:53.000 Status and recognition in such a society would be more broadly distributed, diminishing populist resentment, making cultural cohesion more likely.
00:20:00.000 Yes, that's true.
00:20:01.000 It was called the free market.
00:20:02.000 It was called the free market.
00:20:04.000 It was called a thing that if you left it alone, then the meritocracy would not be the problem.
00:20:09.000 The problem in the United States, as always, is that we don't have a true meritocracy anymore because people who believe that they're smarter than everyone else constructed a system and then shoved people into that system. 0.93
00:20:19.000 And it turns out they suck at everything.
00:20:20.000 It turns out that these people created a value system all their own because in order to ignore free markets and communitarian churches, which was the balance in American life, free markets representing rights, communitarian churches representing duty.
00:20:32.000 That if you ignore that balance, if you destroy that balance, if you upset the apple cart in the name of a utopian social scheme, what you end up doing is screwing everything up.
00:20:42.000 That the give and take of free markets makes for better products, better productivity, better innovation.
00:20:47.000 Smarter people actually.
00:20:49.000 And that communitarian churches mean that the wealth flows downward too.
00:20:54.000 Not just because free markets mean that everybody's boat rises with the rising waters, but also because in a communitarian church, we all have the same sort of orientation.
00:21:03.000 That local communities and social fabric actually matter.
00:21:05.000 They upset all of this from top down.
00:21:07.000 Now they're trying to fix it from the top down.
00:21:10.000 And the problem is that once you create an elite coterie of people who believe that they are at the top of the meritocracy based on their membership in this sort of moral top tier, their policies stink because they're totally disconnected from the rest of the American people.
00:21:25.000 And then the rubber hits the road.
00:21:27.000 And that's what we've been seeing.
00:21:28.000 What we are watching right now is the revenge of the normies.
00:21:31.000 It's the revenge of things like evolutionary free markets where people like Elon Musk, a no name from South Africa, can become the richest person on planet Earth.
00:21:40.000 What they're looking for is a return to a system of morality where people actually know what it's like to raise a normal child in a normal situation with a normal family, as opposed to the bizarre social values of this elite that suggest that we should be totally morally apathetic about how families are raised or how children as opposed to the bizarre social values of this elite that suggest Okay, that day is over because the coterie of the merits, the fake meritocracy, the technocracy failed.
00:22:06.000 And that is why you're getting the revenge of the Trump administration.
00:22:09.000 That's why you're getting picks from the outside to wreck administrative agencies.
00:22:12.000 Because you blew it.
00:22:13.000 Because you blew it.
00:22:14.000 It's not that the meritocracy was improperly screwed around with in 1950, 1960 with the university system.
00:22:22.000 It's that a moral case was created at the top of American society that was willing to rule everybody, and we don't like it, and it's wrong.
00:22:30.000 And that didn't start in 1950.
00:22:32.000 That started again with the progressive movement around the turn of the 20th century.
00:22:36.000 And we're seeing the effects of it right now.
00:22:38.000 All of it is bearing its fruit in the smallest possible ways, right, in our daily lives.
00:22:44.000 Well, as we say, these technocratic elites, they believe they know what's best for you.
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00:23:57.000 Also, when we started Daily Wire, the biggest question mark was what we would do for HR. You know, when you start a business, you're focused on creating awesome product.
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00:25:00.000 It takes a while for bad theory to hit the streets.
00:25:03.000 A bad theory has hit the streets.
00:25:05.000 To take just the most obvious example over the course of the last couple of weeks.
00:25:09.000 In New York City, according to the New York Post, a blood-covered lunatic toting two knives trekked across Manhattan in a savage broad daylight stabbing spree that left a woman and two men dead Monday, according to the cops.
00:25:21.000 The sick suspected stabber, a mentally ill homeless man with eight past arrests in New York City alone, was stopped by a hero cop thanks to the help of good Samaritans, including a cab driver and a British tourist, said NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenny and police sources.
00:25:34.000 Ramon Rivera, 51, was identified by sources as the person of interest in custody, seen with a long beard and unwieldy hair in a grizzled mugshot obtained by the Post.
00:25:42.000 Police have no other suspect in this fate of unprovoked, random attacks, said Mayor Adams.
00:25:46.000 He said, today we have three innocent New Yorkers just going about their lives who are the victim of a terrible, terrible assault.
00:25:50.000 It's a clear example of the criminal justice system, mental health system that continues to fail New Yorkers.
00:25:56.000 Who designed that system?
00:25:57.000 The technocracy, not a meritocracy, a technocracy of people who believe that they have a morally superior view of the universe, in which the mentally ill ought to be able to walk the streets, in which if you defend against attackers on a subway, you are tried for manslaughter.
00:26:12.000 That's happening currently right now in New York.
00:26:14.000 You want to know why this sort of stuff is happening?
00:26:16.000 Because no one steps in between killers and their victims. 1.00
00:26:20.000 Because if they do, they might be prosecuted by precisely these idiotic technocrats. 1.00
00:26:26.000 That is why when people look at situations like this, they say, this is so easy to stop. 0.99
00:26:29.000 Like in any normal society, this would be stopped forthwith.
00:26:33.000 The sort of evolutionary basis of all society and government is to stop the killer from attacking the innocent.
00:26:39.000 That is why the government generally has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force because you don't want people revenge killing one another.
00:26:45.000 And so the idea is the basic bargain is you give up some of your rights so that the government will defend you against the crazy guy in the street who's going to stab you.
00:26:53.000 One right you don't give up, by the way, is the right of self-defense.
00:26:55.000 But in New York City, you can give that up because if you're Daniel Penny, you go to trial on the basis of defending others.
00:27:01.000 You wonder why there's a backlash against the technocrats?
00:27:04.000 Because they designed an unworkable system.
00:27:06.000 It's the technocrats who designed a system that said that we have to open our southern border wide and allowing 10 million people from who knows where with values that we don't understand or know. 0.73
00:27:16.000 And those people have to be let in in the name of social justice. 0.87
00:27:20.000 And the backlash is coming in the form of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration.
00:27:26.000 Tom Homan, who's the Bulldog Borders are, who's going to be appointed by President Trump.
00:27:29.000 He talked yesterday about how excited he was to get started on the job.
00:27:34.000 Since I've been announced, Lawrence, I've gotten thousands of soldiers that just recently left the military.
00:27:41.000 They want to join forces.
00:27:42.000 Police officers that retired want to join forces.
00:27:45.000 But retired Border Patrol agents, retired ISIS that want to come back. 0.88
00:27:49.000 Retirement from Border Patrol, that paperwork is pulled back.
00:27:52.000 There's a lot of excitement to do this job for the President of the United States.
00:27:57.000 So, again, he's right about that.
00:27:59.000 There's a lot of excitement about it.
00:28:00.000 And he says, what is commonsensical?
00:28:03.000 He says, when it comes to America cracking down on illegal immigration, we're going to focus on public safety and national security threats first, which, of course, is the way I think most Americans would like to do it. 0.68
00:28:12.000 The president's been clear.
00:28:14.000 Out of the gate, we're going to focus on public safety threats and national security threats first.
00:28:20.000 And fugitives, those who crossed the border illegally, had great due process, had great taxpayer expense, were ordered removed by an immigration judge and didn't leave.
00:28:29.000 They're also a priority.
00:28:30.000 So, again, this is the way that I think most people want this done.
00:28:34.000 And you know what Democrats are doing?
00:28:35.000 Technocratic Democrats in blue states, you know what they're doing?
00:28:37.000 They're resisting.
00:28:38.000 They're resisting.
00:28:39.000 J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire scion, governor of Illinois, a person who literally was born into gigantic levels of wealth.
00:28:49.000 He's a perfect example of the anti-meritocracy.
00:28:51.000 J.B. Pritzker, he says that he's deeply concerned about Donald Trump's illegal immigration plan.
00:28:57.000 We, of course, are deeply concerned about the President of the United States calling out military inside the United States, where people are peaceful, even if there may be people who are undocumented.
00:29:10.000 But the idea of calling out the army into the domestic confines of the United States seems uncalled for and may, in fact, be unconstitutional and illegal.
00:29:24.000 Again, the fact that he is trying to use the tools of government to stop the government from doing the thing the government was literally appointed to do is pretty incredible.
00:29:32.000 The ACLU is doing the same thing.
00:29:34.000 According to Axios, civil liberties advocates worried about President Trump's plan for mass deportations are suing the federal government to get information on how authorities could rapidly remove people from the United States.
00:29:44.000 They are seeking records on how ICE air operations could be expanded to carry out a deportation and detention program that could ensnare millions of undocumented immigrants.
00:29:54.000 The ACLU lawsuit comes after Trump confirmed Monday he's planning to declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations.
00:30:01.000 Civil liberties advocates are demanding that ICE immediately turn over the requested records, including all ICE contracts and records regarding air transportation to execute removals, presumably to help people avoid these actual mass deportations that Donald Trump is planning.
00:30:15.000 This is the moral system of this elite, the self-appointed elite.
00:30:18.000 And the revenge is here against it.
00:30:20.000 Here is Tom Holman, mourning blue cities.
00:30:22.000 Don't cross the line.
00:30:23.000 Don't disobey federal law.
00:30:24.000 Don't do it.
00:30:26.000 What happens to a mayor or a local police department chief that is under Democratic leadership that obstructs ICE in your federal agents that are helping get these deportations?
00:30:38.000 What happens to them?
00:30:40.000 Well, first of all, if they want to help us get the hell out of the way, we're going to do it.
00:30:43.000 If I got sent twice the amount of resources to that city, that's what we're going to do.
00:30:47.000 If they were to give us access to the jail, that would mean less agents in the community.
00:30:51.000 For them pushing back and not letting us in the jail, it just means more agents are going to be in the community, so they're hurting themselves.
00:30:56.000 Finally, I'll say this.
00:30:57.000 They need to educate themselves.
00:30:58.000 They didn't review this.
00:30:59.000 Title 8, United States Code, 1324, triple I.
00:31:03.000 Read about that and don't cross that line because it is a felony to harbor and conceal an illegal alien from ICE.
00:31:09.000 Read the statute.
00:31:10.000 Don't cross that line.
00:31:12.000 Good for Tom Homan and good for the Trump administration.
00:31:14.000 Again, this is the revenge of the normies.
00:31:16.000 Speaking of which, over in the House, for some reason, it has become an issue of hot contention whether men should be allowed to use women's restrooms.
00:31:25.000 So yesterday, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution to ban transgender women from using women's restrooms at the U.S. Capitol.
00:31:32.000 She told Fox News Digital, quote, Now, this is being treated as Democrats as some sort of grave violation of civil rights.
00:31:46.000 Because, of course, Democrats just saw fit to elect a person named Sarah McBride, whose actual name is, I believe, Tim McBride from Delaware, who is a transgender woman and now insists on being able to use the women's restroom.
00:31:59.000 Now, House Republicans have previously changed rules on their side of Congress, so this would not be a giant shock.
00:32:06.000 Of course, Democrats are freaking out about all this.
00:32:09.000 They're suggesting it's discriminatory.
00:32:10.000 It is precisely this viewpoint that led to electoral defeat for them. 0.94
00:32:15.000 It turns out that when you tell the American people, dumb things like a boy can be a girl, Americans don't like that particularly much. 0.92
00:32:21.000 Americans rebel against that. 0.93
00:32:23.000 Again, that self-appointed bubble of elite who have decided their own moral system, they are totally disconnected from Americans.
00:32:30.000 Speaker Mike Johnson said the obvious yesterday.
00:32:32.000 The fact that this stuff even has to be said on the floor of Congress or in the Congressional House is totally insane.
00:32:38.000 But that is where we are in American life.
00:32:39.000 Again, thanks to not the meritocrats and not the fake meritocrats, thanks to the technocratic elite.
00:32:45.000 I just want to make a statement for all of you here and be very clear.
00:32:49.000 I was asked a question this morning at the Leadership Gaggle and I rejected the premise because the answer is so obvious.
00:32:56.000 For anybody who doesn't know my well-established record on this issue, let me be unequivocally clear.
00:33:02.000 A man is a man and a woman is a woman. 1.00
00:33:05.000 And a man cannot become a woman. 0.99
00:33:08.000 That said, I also believe, that's what Scripture teaches, what I just said, but I also believe that we treat everybody with dignity, and so we can do and believe all those things at the same time, and I wanted to make that clear for everybody because there's lots of questions, but that's where I stand.
00:33:24.000 I've stood there my whole life, and those are facts.
00:33:26.000 Again, the fact that even this has to be said is amazing.
00:33:30.000 The revenge of the normies is upon us, and it is a rebellion against 100 years of bad administrative governance led by a coterie of people like David Brooks who think that they can tinker around with the system instead of letting the evolutionary processes of free markets and churches take care of the vast majority of the American people.
00:33:46.000 Well, Democrats have filled all sorts of offices with terrible people, but you can't afford to do the same.
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00:34:53.000 Also, believe it or not, Thanksgiving is eight days away and at the DailyWire, we're getting you ready for that conversation with those members of the family.
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00:35:31.000 Meanwhile, Democrats are completely panicked about what's to come.
00:35:34.000 It truly is amazing because the truth is, again, that the systems of government that were set up by the founders are really robust.
00:35:40.000 There are checks and balances in those systems.
00:35:42.000 And it turns out that it was the progressive movement that decided to maximize power at the federal level.
00:35:47.000 And now Democrats are freaked out that that federal power may be used against the things that they want.
00:35:52.000 So, for example, Ezra Klein and Anne Applebaum Made fools of themselves yesterday on Ezra Klein's podcast talking about the apocalypse essentially being here.
00:36:00.000 Again, this is sad because Anne Applebaum used to be a really useful author.
00:36:03.000 Her book on the gulags in the Soviet Union is really fantastic.
00:36:06.000 But here they are really scaremongering over the future of the country under Donald Trump.
00:36:12.000 Somebody was saying to me the other day that when I'm back on Twitter, they know things are really bad.
00:36:17.000 And that's how I feel about having you on this show, that when you're back on the show, things are really quite bad.
00:36:22.000 I'm sorry to have put you into a horseman of the apocalypse bucket, but here you are.
00:36:27.000 Thanks for that.
00:36:28.000 Is it a backhanded compliment?
00:36:30.000 I'm not sure.
00:36:31.000 It's a condemnation of the space we find ourselves in.
00:36:35.000 But again, the fact that they are talking about the apocalypse is pretty much the whole thing.
00:36:39.000 And Applebaum and Ezra Klein, they're suggesting that Donald Trump is going to make dictatorial, fascistic moves to take over the auspices of American government.
00:36:46.000 Now, again, they had no problem when it was Barack Obama or Joe Biden doing it.
00:36:49.000 When it's Donald Trump coming back around, they do have a problem.
00:36:52.000 But here is the thing.
00:36:54.000 There's open debate inside the Trump administration about pretty much everything.
00:36:57.000 And there are checks and balances that remain in the system.
00:36:59.000 And those checks and balances remain robust.
00:37:02.000 So, for example, Democrats right now are panicking over RFK Jr. possibly taking over health and human services.
00:37:07.000 First of all, I find that completely odd because much of RFK Jr.'s agenda was actually Democratic technocratic talking points.
00:37:14.000 So a lot of the MAHA agenda, make America healthy again agenda, which is about banning particular ingredients, is the kind of stuff that Democrats used to champion when it was Michael Bloomberg in New York City attempting to stop you from getting a big gulp.
00:37:28.000 But apparently, they're really worried that he's going to thwart, for example, vaccination efforts and all the rest.
00:37:34.000 As the Wall Street Journal points out, no, that's not exactly how the system works.
00:37:37.000 Quote, Kennedy's plans, should it be confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Health and Human Services, are far from sure to be realized.
00:37:43.000 Already, early signs of potential division within Trump's team have emerged.
00:37:46.000 Kennedy is pushing for the FDA to be tougher on big pharma, while Vivek Ramaswamy argued last week on X, the FDA is too restrictive, creating unnecessary barriers to innovation.
00:37:55.000 The market is bracing for backbreaking measures, targeting big pharma while seemingly forgetting it was Joe Biden who signed a law empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly.
00:38:04.000 Furthermore, the Trump first term suggests that investors shouldn't expect drastic changes in healthcare largely because reforms are complex and involve trade-offs.
00:38:14.000 So, for example, if RFK Jr.
00:38:15.000 were to limit the approval of a certain drug or lobby against Medicare coverage of GLP-1s for obesity, it could upset swaths of the public.
00:38:23.000 Instead, President Trump might steer Kennedy toward focusing on areas like nutrition rather than drug approval.
00:38:28.000 Already, by the way, RFK Jr.
00:38:29.000 has suggested he's going to issue a lot of advisory opinions rather than simple mandates from the top of the government.
00:38:34.000 Which, by the way, is probably the best way to do the government at the federal level.
00:38:38.000 But the media are totally disconnected from the public.
00:38:41.000 And Joe Scarborough is experiencing that in real time.
00:38:43.000 So as we talked about yesterday on the show, Joe and Mika went on bended knee to Donald Trump to rehash their relationship and sort of hit that restart button, Vladimir Putin style.
00:38:53.000 And it turns out he got a lot of blowback for that.
00:38:56.000 A lot of people very angry with Joe and Mika for meeting with Trump because they have betrayed the cause that they suggested that they were leading.
00:39:04.000 And so here's Scarborough saying, it turns out a lot of people on the left are disconnected.
00:39:07.000 Yeah, you think?
00:39:08.000 You think?
00:39:10.000 Yesterday I saw for the first time, what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world.
00:39:18.000 Because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world.
00:39:24.000 Very positive, very supportive, going, understand what you did, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:39:28.000 But once in a while I would get a text or a call from somebody and go, oh man, I hope you're doing okay.
00:39:33.000 And I'd call them back and I'd go, well, Eddie Gladys, whatever.
00:39:36.000 And we'd go, Eddie, are you on Twitter?
00:39:37.000 And he goes, I am.
00:39:39.000 I go, I'm not.
00:39:41.000 So we've had a good day.
00:39:42.000 Mika just had a wonderful event and it's fantastic.
00:39:46.000 All of us are going to do the best we can do and we're all working towards a better America.
00:39:52.000 Take it day by day.
00:39:53.000 Day by day.
00:39:54.000 Oh my goodness.
00:39:56.000 Why the long faces then?
00:39:59.000 Again, the complete disconnect between the members of the media who are, again, their own self-appointed moral elite and the rest of the public.
00:40:05.000 That disconnect is very real.
00:40:08.000 Mike Barnacle was on MSNBC asking how they make themselves relevant again.
00:40:11.000 The answer is, it's very difficult for you to do so because you separated yourself off from the American public, not the other way around.
00:40:17.000 I don't know how we make ourselves relevant again because we can't compete with 20-second snippets on an iPhone walking up the streets, getting your entire news digest of the day in less than a minute on your phone as you're walking under the crowd with coffee in one hand and your phone in the other.
00:40:35.000 I don't know how we catch up to that.
00:40:38.000 Well, I mean, the way that you catch up with that is to be honest in your coverage.
00:40:41.000 But again, I think that's kind of hard for you to do, which is one of the reasons why Comcast is now greenlighting a $7 billion spinoff of their cable channels.
00:40:49.000 Yes, that includes MSNBC. So these channels have been falling flat.
00:40:55.000 MSNBC's ratings are in the toilet.
00:40:57.000 I mean, our ratings on this show are way higher than pretty much anything on MSNBC. MSNBC is a collapsing content distributor.
00:41:06.000 Honestly, the only thing that can be done with MSNBC is to sell it to somebody who actually knows what the hell they're doing and who has not disconnected themselves from the American people.
00:41:13.000 Good luck with that.
00:41:15.000 Meanwhile, speaking of a bit of a disconnect, I'm seeing a lot of panic these days about the possibility that Russia is just going to go nuclear and start nuking everybody.
00:41:22.000 I've been hearing this for nigh on two years at this point.
00:41:25.000 The answer, as Russia has shown, is that they're not going to nuke anybody over territorial incursions into small areas of Russia in an intractable war situation with Ukraine. 1.00
00:41:36.000 Russia is not stupid enough. 0.95
00:41:38.000 Vladimir Putin is he understands enough to know that a full scale nuclear conflagration over a bit of territorial incursion or firing a couple of missiles at North Korean troops in Russia would not be in his interest, particularly given the fact that Donald Trump is, in fact, looking for an off ramp. 0.99
00:41:55.000 At this point, they're seeing an enormous amount of outsized panic over this.
00:41:59.000 Many people have been worrying about World War Three for a while here.
00:42:02.000 It turns out that you keep worrying about World War Three and it's never true.
00:42:05.000 Maybe the theory is that one time you're right.
00:42:08.000 Maybe?
00:42:09.000 But so far, it's not been close to true.
00:42:12.000 Nonetheless, Putin knows with whom he is playing, and so he's been publicly signaling that he's going to up the ante.
00:42:17.000 According to CNN, President Putin has updated Russia's nuclear doctrine two days after his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden granted Ukraine permission to strike targets deep inside Russia with American-made weapons.
00:42:26.000 Under the updated doctrine, Moscow will consider aggression from any non-nuclear state with the participation of a nuclear country a joint attack on Russia.
00:42:36.000 The Kremlin began this fresh round of nuclear saber rattling on Tuesday saying the revised military doctrine would in theory lower the bar to first use of military weapons.
00:42:44.000 In a phone call with reporters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov noted the changes mean that, quote, the Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression using conventional weapons against it or the Republic of Belarus.
00:42:56.000 So the revised doctrine apparently is now that if you have a state like Ukraine that is backed by any NATO member that has nuclear weapons, that the Russian Federation may consider using nuclear weapons first use.
00:43:09.000 They're not going to do that.
00:43:10.000 Okay, let's be real about this.
00:43:11.000 They're not going to do that.
00:43:13.000 They're publicly signaling that because they understand that by signaling that they might be able to get the United States to back off.
00:43:19.000 But the sort of outsized panic, you see World War III trending on Twitter.
00:43:23.000 I promise you, the Twitter foreign policy analysts who are determined that World War III is going to happen because suddenly Ukraine can fire a missile at North Korean troops that are entering Ukraine.
00:43:34.000 Really, that is not true.
00:43:36.000 It's not real.
00:43:37.000 It's not going to happen.
00:43:38.000 I'm just saying, if it does, then I will be very shocked.
00:43:42.000 Now, does that mean that we should take the risk blithely?
00:43:44.000 Of course not, which is why you look for an off-ramp.
00:43:47.000 But the notion that we should all be quivering in our boots when Vladimir Putin's saber rattles, that's a bad way to do foreign policy, especially given the fact that Russia has been spreading its tentacles as a nuclear-backed power literally all over the world, from Africa to the Middle East.
00:44:02.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, as Israel advances its invasion of southern Lebanon, troops are finding large troves of Russian weapons, confirming long-standing suspicions in Israel that Hezbollah is enhancing its fighting capacity with the help of sophisticated Russian arms.
00:44:14.000 And of course, it was Russia that had shipped in a bunch of anti-aircraft defenses to Iran that Israel then blew up in the last round of fighting.
00:44:23.000 The Russian government and Syrian foreign ministry did not return requests for comment.
00:44:27.000 Israel's foreign minister, Gidon Tsar, highlighted Russia's leverage over the militant group when he said recently Israel hopes Russia will help enforce any agreement to disarm Hezbollah by preventing weapons smuggling from Syria to Lebanon.
00:44:37.000 He said the Russians are present in Syria.
00:44:39.000 If they agree with the principle, they can contribute to achieving its objective effectively.
00:44:43.000 So again, Vladimir Putin has a very strong interest in saber-rattling over Ukraine in the hopes that this will leverage him a better deal.
00:44:50.000 He is going to end up retaining large swaths of the Donbas in Crimea.
00:44:53.000 This is already a foregone conclusion.
00:44:54.000 The only question is what sort of security guarantees will be given to Ukraine to dissuade a further Russian invasion in the future.
00:45:02.000 But people should not be, I think, unduly concerned about Russia saying they're going to nuke everybody.
00:45:09.000 They've been saying this for nigh on 80 years at this point.
00:45:13.000 Since they gained nuclear weapons in the early 50s, they've been doing this.
00:45:16.000 So I would be shocked to take any of this particularly seriously, at least more seriously than is necessary in order to achieve some sort of off-ramp here.
00:45:25.000 Joining us online is my friend Gary Sinise.
00:45:27.000 Of course, you know him from Forrest Gump among a wide variety of other works.
00:45:30.000 He has a brand new album out.
00:45:33.000 When I say he, I really mean it's an album that he created on behalf of his son, Mac, who's an amazing person.
00:45:39.000 Mac passed away just a little bit earlier this year.
00:45:42.000 And this album is an amazing accomplishment.
00:45:46.000 First of all, it's Max Music.
00:45:48.000 It's a vinyl recording called Max and East Resurrection and Revival.
00:45:51.000 It's a two-part vinyl recording.
00:45:53.000 It really is tremendous.
00:45:54.000 Gary, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:45:56.000 Oh, thanks so much for having me, Ben.
00:45:58.000 So, for those who don't know Max's story, why don't you tell Max's story and how you came about doing this project?
00:46:06.000 Well, yes.
00:46:07.000 Thanks for giving me the time.
00:46:11.000 So in 2018, my wife had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer and we were going through, she had had surgery and then she had her first chemo treatment in, I think it was probably about Blue, August of 2018.
00:46:33.000 And it really rocked her.
00:46:35.000 I mean, I had to take her to the emergency room. 1.00
00:46:37.000 It was so bad that we had to check her in to the hospital. 0.94
00:46:41.000 And that first treatment really knocked her socks off.
00:46:45.000 So I got her home and we were sitting in our backyard and we were discussing with another person what we were going to do with the next treatment, how we were going to get through it because the first one was so difficult.
00:47:00.000 And earlier that day, our son had been having a lot of pain in his tailbone for a couple of years.
00:47:07.000 And he had seen some doctors.
00:47:11.000 They thought it was a bruised tailbone from a bicycle accident where he slammed on the brakes too hard and jammed his tailbone into the seat.
00:47:19.000 They thought maybe it was related to that.
00:47:22.000 There was an x-ray that was done.
00:47:24.000 Really didn't show anything.
00:47:26.000 But he was having so much trouble.
00:47:27.000 He was just terribly uncomfortable.
00:47:30.000 Couldn't even sleep.
00:47:31.000 And so Moira had had, my wife, had had several spine surgeries and I called her spinal doctor and said, can you see Mac and just see if, you know, what's going on?
00:47:43.000 And so I'm sitting there with Moira in the backyard and we're discussing her next chemo treatment.
00:47:48.000 I get a call from the surgeon who sent Mac to the CT scanner and he called me and he said, Mac has a tumor.
00:47:55.000 And the tumor was wrapped around his sacrum.
00:47:58.000 It was about the size of an orange.
00:48:01.000 And I immediately jumped in the car and went down to meet Mac.
00:48:05.000 The doctor had him in the CT scanner and then he sent him to the MRI machine.
00:48:10.000 And I went to meet Mac at the MRI and then went back to the doctor's office and he showed us the tumor.
00:48:15.000 And it was literally been, I mean, it was this big, wrapped around his sacrum.
00:48:23.000 The doctors suspected it was a tumor called chordoma.
00:48:27.000 It's a very, very rare cancer.
00:48:30.000 Maybe 300 people in the U.S. per year are diagnosed with chordoma.
00:48:35.000 Quite often, 70% of the time, they can remove the tumor off the spine and cure it.
00:48:42.000 It's gone.
00:48:42.000 They get everything, and it's out, and it's gone.
00:48:45.000 But 30% of the time, it comes back, and that's That's what happened to us in May of 2019.
00:48:50.000 We found out that Max Cancer had come back.
00:48:54.000 So that began a chemo and radiation fight there as the cancer started to spread.
00:49:03.000 several surgeries to remove more tumors off the spine, several radiation treatments, several drugs to try to fight it because there are no drugs developed for chordoma.
00:49:16.000 So they just throw whatever they can find and they throw it at it.
00:49:21.000 Over the course of the next four years, he would try 25 different drugs.
00:49:26.000 He was a drummer, Ben, an excellent, excellent drummer.
00:49:30.000 He played with my band sometimes and he went to USC music school, Thornton School of Music, where he went from just simply drumming to composing and songwriting and conducting and he wanted to write music for film and And all of that,
00:49:50.000 when the cancer really got difficult for him, he was paralyzed from the chest down, he couldn't play drums anymore, had to really put music away because he was fighting cancer.
00:50:03.000 But then last year, Probably February of 2023 last year.
00:50:09.000 He said to me, Dad, there's a piece of music that I wrote in college that I never finished, and I think I'd like to try to finish it.
00:50:17.000 And Mac hadn't been doing any music for quite a while because he'd been fighting cancer.
00:50:22.000 And I got him together with some of my band members.
00:50:25.000 They started helping flesh it out.
00:50:27.000 It's a piece called Arctic Circles.
00:50:32.000 They went into the studio summer of July of 2023 and recorded this amazing piece of music with an orchestra.
00:50:41.000 I had never heard any of it, Ben.
00:50:43.000 He was working on it with a buddy of his from college, Oliver Schnee, and they were kind of doing it secretly last year.
00:50:50.000 He was in a hospital bed.
00:50:52.000 We had round-the-clock nursing care for him.
00:50:55.000 But in the meantime, he was trying to flesh out this new piece of music And then on July 17th, last year, 2023, we went in the studio and I heard this piece of music for the first time and was floored.
00:51:08.000 There's a Mac Sinise YouTube.
00:51:11.000 There's a video of Arctic Circles on that YouTube channel.
00:51:15.000 And you can see I'm in the video just like weeping and sobbing because it was so amazingly beautiful.
00:51:21.000 And that began a journey for Mac where he wanted to create an entire album of music.
00:51:26.000 So that's where Resurrection and Revival came from.
00:51:30.000 He finished the album just weeks before he died.
00:51:35.000 He died January 5th of this year.
00:51:38.000 And just weeks before he died, he completed the music.
00:51:43.000 All the music was recorded.
00:51:44.000 It went to press and the vinyl was being pressed.
00:51:47.000 Unfortunately, he never got to see the vinyl completed, but he heard all the music.
00:51:53.000 And then after he died, Ben, I just started going through his files and I found all this additional music that he had written that I had never heard.
00:52:01.000 A lot of it I'd never heard.
00:52:03.000 Some of it I had because he wrote it for the Gary Sinise Foundation to use in our videos.
00:52:08.000 But most of it I hadn't heard before.
00:52:11.000 He just wrote it and tucked it away.
00:52:13.000 And so I thought, I'm not going to let this music just sit on his laptop.
00:52:18.000 So I went to work on Resurrection and Revival Part 2.
00:52:22.000 And that was just released on the Gary Sinise Foundation website last week.
00:52:27.000 It's a double album.
00:52:29.000 There's so much music on it.
00:52:30.000 It's amazing.
00:52:31.000 And we're selling it.
00:52:33.000 And as Mac wanted, all the proceeds from the first record went to the Gary Sinise Foundation.
00:52:39.000 And with the second record, we're doing the same thing for Mac.
00:52:43.000 All the proceeds will go to help the Gary Sinise Foundation.
00:52:46.000 He worked for the foundation starting in 2017, but he had to step away for the cancer fight.
00:52:53.000 Obviously, he's an amazingly talented person and the music is just wonderful.
00:52:57.000 The double vinyl album is 17 original compositions, two covers, 19 total tracks.
00:53:02.000 And it really is an amazing accomplishment, both by him and then obviously by you and the team that put this together.
00:53:07.000 Because what did you have to work with?
00:53:09.000 You say that you found new tunes by him.
00:53:11.000 In what sort of state did you find these tunes?
00:53:14.000 Well, let me start with the music that I asked him to write for the Gary Sinise Foundation.
00:53:19.000 So Mac was very, very creative, very talented.
00:53:23.000 But, you know, he's working for a non-profit, so we can't hire an orchestra to go in and record all the music for these documentaries.
00:53:32.000 So Mac would do it on his computer with all his samples and all his patches, you know, the cellos and the The strings and the horns and the drums and everything like that.
00:53:42.000 He created it all on his computer and wrote all this music.
00:53:47.000 There's a documentary about my sort of journey with all the military support and everything.
00:53:53.000 And it kind of tracks the history of all that going back to the 80s.
00:53:57.000 And the documentary is called Always Do a Little More.
00:54:02.000 And so Mac wrote about 75% of the music for that on his computer.
00:54:07.000 And he's got all the strings, he's got everything.
00:54:09.000 It sounds like an orchestra, but it's not.
00:54:11.000 It's all done on samples.
00:54:13.000 So I found all that music again, and some additional music that he wrote for the foundation that I'd never heard because it was never used.
00:54:20.000 But beautiful, beautiful stuff, all done on the computer.
00:54:25.000 The horns, everything.
00:54:26.000 I mean, it sounds like an orchestra playing it, but it's Mac doing it on his computer.
00:54:31.000 So we took all that music and I called up his buddy who worked with him on the first record.
00:54:36.000 His name is Oliver Schnee.
00:54:38.000 He was a composer pal from USC Music School.
00:54:42.000 They were buddies.
00:54:43.000 They teamed up on Resurrection and Revival Part 1.
00:54:48.000 And Oliver kind of took, you know, all this music for part two, transposed it, got it off the computer, transposed it, you know, wrote it out so that we could have it played by a live orchestra.
00:55:02.000 And last summer, in July and August, we went into the studio and recorded all this orchestral music that Mac wrote.
00:55:11.000 He wanted to write for film.
00:55:12.000 That's what he really wanted to do, I think.
00:55:15.000 He loved drumming and everything, but he wasn't satisfied to just be a drummer.
00:55:19.000 He wanted to be a film composer.
00:55:21.000 He loved John Williams and James Newton Howard and James Horner and just scores of great film composers that he loved.
00:55:31.000 Hans Zimmer and all that.
00:55:33.000 And, you know, that's what he wanted to do.
00:55:36.000 So he was writing for the Foundation.
00:55:39.000 And I don't think he ever envisioned that music coming to life with a live orchestra, but we brought it to life last summer with a live orchestra.
00:55:48.000 And then there were all this other music going all the way back to his USC days, Ben.
00:55:53.000 I mean, there were recordings that he made at USC where he's drumming, and he's drumming on songs that he was writing for class.
00:56:01.000 I mean, they had to write songs.
00:56:03.000 They were in music theory class, composition class, all that stuff, and their assignments were to go off and make music.
00:56:10.000 And they have some great studios at USC and all that.
00:56:13.000 So I found all these recordings that I had never heard before because he wrote them, you know, when he was a sophomore and junior in college and then just tucked the music away.
00:56:24.000 So I found it and I started listening to it and I was just knocked out by what I was finding.
00:56:32.000 Then I found charts that he had written.
00:56:36.000 We're big band jazz tunes.
00:56:38.000 I mean, Mac had never been like a big jazzer, but all of a sudden I find this big band jazz tune.
00:56:43.000 I gave it to my piano player.
00:56:45.000 I said, you know, play this for me.
00:56:47.000 And so he got the band.
00:56:49.000 He did a little arrangement, got the band to play it, and it's just a swinging great tune.
00:56:54.000 It's called Sweep Sweeping, and it's on Maxine's YouTube.
00:56:58.000 There's a video of that, as well as videos of some of the other things.
00:57:02.000 But Nineteen compositions later, as you said, there are two covers.
00:57:10.000 One is Nature Boy.
00:57:12.000 Remember that Nat King Cole classic, Nature Boy?
00:57:15.000 Mac does a version of that where he does all the instruments.
00:57:20.000 Plays all the instruments and sings and did his own arrangement and all of that.
00:57:26.000 And then there's one other cover of the old American classic Home on the Range.
00:57:32.000 So on the first record, Mack plays harmonica.
00:57:37.000 His mom suggested he get a harmonica because he couldn't play drums anymore.
00:57:41.000 His right hand was paralyzed.
00:57:44.000 He could move his arm up and down, but the fingers he couldn't move on his right hand.
00:57:53.000 There was a tumor up here in the shoulder, so it fractured his shoulder.
00:57:59.000 So he couldn't lift his arm up, but he had the fingers on his left hand.
00:58:03.000 So he had one arm over here and fingers over here.
00:58:08.000 His mom suggested he get a harmonica.
00:58:11.000 And sit in the hospital bed and play the harmonica.
00:58:14.000 So he taught himself harmonica.
00:58:15.000 So on the first record, he plays Amazing Grace on harmonica.
00:58:19.000 He plays Shenandoah.
00:58:23.000 There's an amazing video, Ben, of Mac playing Shenandoah with this orchestra.
00:58:28.000 And it's really a knockout.
00:58:31.000 He plays the Star Spangled Banner.
00:58:34.000 On harmonica.
00:58:35.000 He plays another one called Tura Lura Lura.
00:58:39.000 And that was a song that his mother used to sing to him when he was little.
00:58:44.000 And she also sang one called Red River Valley.
00:58:47.000 Remember that one?
00:58:49.000 And so Mack plays harmonica on Red River Valley and Tura Lura Lura and all these songs.
00:58:55.000 Well, there was one recording for Home on the Range that was not used on the first record.
00:59:01.000 And Oliver had that recording.
00:59:03.000 Oliver had recorded it.
00:59:05.000 So I said, well, let's complete the arrangement.
00:59:07.000 Mac and Oliver had worked on an arrangement.
00:59:10.000 It just didn't make the first record.
00:59:11.000 So I said, well, we're going to put it on the second record.
00:59:14.000 So that's the other cover, Home on the Range and Nature Boy, and then all the rest, 17 compositions, all original, from jazz to orchestral to rock.
00:59:25.000 I mean, it's all over the map.
00:59:27.000 It's a beautiful, fun record with each side having its own unique kind of characteristic.
00:59:34.000 Folks, it's a wonderful piece of work.
00:59:36.000 Obviously, it's a tremendous tribute to Mac, and all the proceeds of the record sales go to the Gary Sinise Foundation, which honors veterans and first responders and their families and people that are doing amazing work over at the Gary Sinise Foundation, have been doing for years.
00:59:49.000 Gary, thanks for the album, and I'm excited that so many people are going to be able to hear Mac's music.
00:59:56.000 Thanks, Ben.
00:59:57.000 The first record, Resurrection and Revival, that's on digital, so you can download it.
01:00:01.000 You can order the vinyl at GarySneezeFoundation.org.
01:00:06.000 The digital for Resurrection and Revival Part 2 will be out just after the first of the year.
01:00:13.000 Amazing.
01:00:14.000 So folks, go check it out.
01:00:15.000 Gary, thanks so much for the time.
01:00:16.000 Really appreciate it.
01:00:17.000 I sure appreciate it, Ben.
01:00:19.000 Have a safe trip.
01:00:20.000 Alrighty, guys.
01:00:20.000 Coming up, we'll be getting into Elon Musk going with Donald Trump to a Starship launch.
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