Walter Kern is the editor-at-large of County Highway and co-host of This America Week. He's also a writer, a thinker, and a thinker who helps us make sense of the larger stories of our time. And he's one of the most impressive and important thinkers of our moment.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:02:30.000But, you know, Blake understands this because we make content and there's only so much content you can consume when you're making content as well.
00:02:39.000You've got, you know, you but America This Week, which is funny that I got the name wrong, I listen to that often with you and Matt because I think you guys have a way of breaking down the news that's swirling, the big stories of the day.
00:02:54.000And so I wanted to have you on the show because I think, like I said in the intro here, you are an important thinker.
00:03:02.000You're an important, I think, distiller of these larger stories and you make them make sense and you bring out the most important through line, right?
00:03:12.000So what do you really need to pay attention to?
00:03:15.000So this is we're going to have you on the entire hour here, Walter, and we just want to make sense of what happened in 2025, maybe go back to 2024 and back further, but we want to also look forward to 2026 and this new year that we've just embarked on, a year that I'm grateful that we have.
00:03:33.000And so I haven't been so grateful for the passing of a year into the next as I have this one.
00:03:40.000But so let's start at the big question.
00:03:45.000Help us make sense of our current moment.
00:03:47.000If you had to distill all of these disparate pieces of Somali fraud and Democrats are now pro-Maduro and, you know, you've got cultural elements weaving throughout.
00:03:58.000What are you thinking about right now, Walter Kern?
00:04:01.000Well, let me, just for those who don't know me, introduce my point of view and my reasons for having it.
00:04:09.000I'm chiefly a novelist, and I was a literary critic and a kind of columnist for all kinds of magazines from Time to the New Republic, Harper's Magazine, fairly liberal magazines.
00:04:22.000And I see us as living inside a story.
00:04:27.000There's a big story that goes back thousands of years, and there's a smaller story that goes back, you know, just years and then weeks and then days.
00:04:37.000And what I try to do is examine what's going on in terms of narrative, but not in the sense of pushing a narrative as we often see the mainstream media doing, trying to get us to pick a preferred version of reality.
00:04:57.000But in terms of a real drama, a drama that involves the big things, our lives, our freedom, our history as a culture, and the big events that affect it.
00:05:07.000So if I were to take this moment in time, January 2026, and tell you where we are in the current story as I see it, I would say we're at a first act break in which we suddenly look around and realize that not only were we right to distrust certain kinds of authority,
00:05:34.000you know, in the media and in government, you know, particularly, I think, under Biden, when we weren't even treated to the facts about his health situation and mental condition, but due to this Somali fraud,
00:05:50.000which I think is just an aperture into a bigger story, we're suddenly realizing that we've been in the middle of a daylight theft, a theft of our resources, of our money, of our attention, of our ability to interpret things.
00:06:11.000Suddenly, a new filter is dropping, and we're seeing that politics is not just about ideology, but it's about resources and what I think is the ongoing cover-up of a great diversion of our resources.
00:06:28.000So as Americans suddenly think about themselves, you know, paying the bills, paying their taxes, raising their families in light of what seems to have been an almost full scale across the board.
00:06:42.000You know, we have the Minnesota example as a microcosm, but the macrocosmic example extends, you know, to the federal government and to many, many states.
00:06:50.000We ask ourselves, are we in a society anymore that we can go on supporting?
00:06:58.000Just as the revolutionary colonists wondered if they could survive under the British, we're starting to realize that we may be in a situation in which the very legitimacy of our government, you know, and its promises to protect us, to use our resources wisely, to provide for the common welfare such as we believe it's necessary, are all empty.
00:07:23.000And in fact, we've been in the middle of a con job.
00:07:27.000I knew a big con man in my life, a guy who called himself Clark Rockefeller, and who was a friend of mine for years, turned out not to be a Rockefeller, turned out, in fact, to be a murderer.
00:07:38.000And I remember the week after he was exposed in the news as a German immigrant who had a whole other name and a whole other history than I had known him to have for 10 years.
00:07:52.000I suddenly felt like I was floating in space.
00:07:55.000I was like, I don't know the guy's real name.
00:07:58.000All the stories he told me seem to have been a cover-up for a life of crime.
00:08:05.000I don't know if I'm in danger when I'm around him because he was exposed as a suspect in a double murder, a grisly double murder many years before.
00:08:14.000And I went to the bank that day and I thought, I'm giving the bank my money, but I don't know where it goes after I hand it over.
00:08:22.000I was giving a key to a contractor who had to work on my house and I said, but what if he is part of a burglary ring?
00:08:29.000And suddenly everything that I, all the bonds of trust and all the expectations of reciprocity that go into daily living were broken.
00:08:40.000And I think we're in that as Americans.
00:08:42.000We suddenly looked around and realized we're on a spacewalk when we thought we were secure inside a spaceship.
00:08:51.000Yeah, I really relate to that actually, because, you know, given what we're going through with, you know, the trial for Charlie's assassin coming up and all these conspiracy theories swirling, it sort of suddenly occurred to me that, you know, listen, we went from don't trust the experts to never question the non-experts.
00:09:13.000You know, it's like, but that's what you're talking about.
00:09:16.000It's like the legitimacy of the system when it becomes in question in such a massive way, especially following COVID and some of the revelations that we learned in the wake of that.
00:09:31.000It feels like there's no solid ground to place your feet.
00:09:34.000Imagine a drama in which you find out your wife is cheating on you, but then you find a letter and find out she's cheating you with your best friend.
00:09:40.000Oh, not only your best friend, three of your best friends.
00:09:44.000And you look around and you think, can I trust anything?
00:09:57.000President Trump walked into a catch-22 when taking office.
00:10:00.000Do nothing, and America would be staring at a ticking debt bomb, the kind of crisis that could cripple our future.
00:10:05.000Instead, he's taken action with strong policies to slow the train and buy us some time.
00:10:10.000But the effects of past administration spending are still working through the system, and experts predict dramatic price increases and market uncertainty.
00:10:18.000Trump is doing all he can, but no matter who's in office, protecting your retirement savings is ultimately up to you.
00:10:24.000And that's why many Americans are turning to real assets like gold and silver.
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00:10:54.000President Trump is fighting for America's future.
00:10:56.000Now it's your turn to help protect yours.
00:11:01.000Yeah, so, but yeah, how did we get here to this moment then, Walter?
00:11:05.000How did we get to a point where we can't trust the ground under our feet?
00:11:09.000Well, I think it's Act One because the Trump presidency and the re-election of Donald Trump provided a kind of refresh to the whole cycle.
00:11:19.000You know, that was a point at which people who had anticipated and worked hard to bring about a result on the behalf of Donald Trump's election succeeded and sat down for a minute, reflected on their expectations and the promises that they felt they'd been made and started over.
00:11:38.000And that first year of Trump is a pretty natural, a pretty natural time span to review.
00:11:47.000When he came in exactly almost a year ago, I think people were expecting justice.
00:11:55.000They wanted an immediate kind of redemption and even revenge for the sins of COVID, for the deep state hoaxes.
00:12:08.000Coup against him that had been going on for years, and for the deceptions that had come.
00:12:16.000from the opposite party and from our own government in an attempt to unseat him, from the legal cases that were flimsy to the charges about Russia and so on.
00:12:27.000So everybody got in their seat and they prepared for a gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and it didn't happen.
00:12:33.000And there was a lot of instant dissatisfaction, a lot of it fomented and aggravated by his enemies who want to create dissatisfaction in his followers.
00:12:56.000Well, I think that's just changed because both the revelations of this fraud, which are really an extension of the Doge revelations, but with much more vividness, have suddenly come a spate of actions on his part.
00:13:15.000Whether it's this Maduro raid, whether it's what we're seeing right now in Minnesota, which is a 2,000 agent descent of federal force on what appears to be a criminal racket of almost unimaginable riches and financial dimensions.
00:13:40.000So combined with that sense of floating and displacement that I described before, we're also getting a feeling, oh, wow, we just shifted gears.
00:13:50.000And the thing that we maybe some longed for and felt frustrated that they hadn't gotten immediately is now going to come very swiftly.
00:14:01.000And whether or not it's too late, whether or not it's, you know, people have gotten too cynical to even believe justice is possible, I don't know.
00:14:15.000But it's an action time and he's telegraphing it all across the board.
00:14:21.000I guess it's interesting to me, as Andrew pointed out, you've been around a little longer than us.
00:14:26.000I do think if you want a reason for optimism.
00:14:43.000And of course, maybe I'm only going off the movie here, but I know one of your books up in the air is about a lot of the ennui from, you know, since the corporate world is getting detached from human values and such.
00:15:01.000Or maybe are we just psychologically worse because of the internet, for example?
00:15:05.000Worse isn't a word I like to use because the framing around better and worse is always changing.
00:15:14.000You can look at it in the short term, the long term, and so on.
00:15:19.000I think that things are actually starting to become hopeful because we've started to reach the roots of some of the problems that before we were confused, baffled, and depressed by.
00:15:33.000I think people are starting to feel a sense of agency and comprehension about how these bad systems work and what might disrupt them.
00:15:45.000And I think they are moving out of a period of cynicism about bred by their, I think, over exaggerated expectations of action into a sense that maybe it's possible for the bad guys to be defeated.
00:16:48.000And they are, I think, preparing themselves for action.
00:16:53.000And they're also persuading their neighbors and friends.
00:16:56.000I think, you know, that all of this new critical information dropped over the holidays was a great opportunity for people to share it and discuss it and meditate on it.
00:17:11.000So just as January is when the New Year's resolutions kick in, I think this is kind of harmonically timed for people who want to kick into gear.
00:17:30.000You know, we had Jonathan Kieperman on just before the new year, and one of the things that he was saying is it was similar in tone to what you're saying.
00:17:36.000He was saying, you know, the ship is pointed in the right direction for probably the first time in living memory.
00:17:43.000You know, and it's hard to communicate that to a base that is not going to be satisfied until Fauci is strung up by his entrails in the public square, right?
00:18:01.000And, you know, and yeah, there's other, there's other monsters to slay here, but, you know, you talk about this sense of agency and you talk about this new footing that we found in Trump.
00:18:12.000And I couldn't help think about Charlie's reaction on election night.
00:18:25.000What was happening in that moment was Charlie wouldn't let himself believe that it was possible until it was done because he knew that he was he needed to he needed to keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, because the agency that we had been robbed of in 2020, in 2022, we almost had PTSD from it.
00:18:49.000And you could see this wiping away from him in the moment.
00:18:52.000And I think that's why it went so viral.
00:19:13.000Everybody should remember this moment.
00:19:15.000Look, I'm going to echo Charlie from earlier.
00:19:17.000Remember where you were when this happened.
00:19:20.000Remember where you were when you realized that the uniparty and all of these, you know, just the establishment, you said it's time to actually participate.
00:20:13.000I just remember feeling like I couldn't believe it until it was true either.
00:20:17.000And let me tell you where I was on election night.
00:20:21.000I was here in Livingston, Montana, where I live, and I was at the Elks Club in downtown Livingston, population 7,000.
00:20:30.000My magazine slash newspaper, the one I help edit, County Highway, which is an only in print paper, had announced on X that we were having a party at the Livingston Elks Club for election night.
00:21:21.000There were three TVs in the Elks Club.
00:21:24.000And then we started talking with each other and people started meeting for the first time and talking about how they'd gotten to Livingston, Montana, which is a popular place to vacation, but it's also an obscure spot.
00:21:36.000Well, hours went by in which people were more interested in talking to each other than they were looking at the news.
00:21:42.000And I finally tipped my head back up at the screen.
00:22:30.000This is for all the closed businesses.
00:22:33.000This is for all the families that were set at each other's throats over minor things like masking and so on.
00:22:40.000This is for RussiaGate, which undermined the entire journalist structure of America and enrolled them in a major lie, as far as I'm concerned, which they at a certain point knew.
00:22:51.000This is for everybody who pretended they didn't realize we were being led by a zombie.
00:23:24.000And I felt in that room, even though there were a lot of people who weren't supporting Trump, a sense of refreshment.
00:23:33.000And I think getting ready for year two was what year one was all about.
00:23:39.000Even a fighter jet needs a runway to take off.
00:23:42.000Can't just, you know, there are some that can lift straight off, but most of them have to, you know, run along the ground before they can get airborne.
00:23:49.000And I think we're getting airborne at the moment.
00:23:54.000Yeah, I mean, would you even agree with that?
00:23:56.000Yeah, no, I think we saw that in the first admin, too.
00:23:59.000I would often tell Charlie, I thought the last year of the Trump administration was the best one.
00:24:03.000Not ignoring COVID, all the background stuff was so good.
00:24:06.000It finally got appointments, were really humming.
00:24:09.000That's when you only got, for example, and they got anti-DEI stuff year four.
00:24:14.000It was finally like, wait, we should do something on this.
00:25:04.000We're trying to stop something that's already spread too far.
00:25:08.000It's not a deadly disease if you look at the actual number of casualties versus those who've been infected and so on.
00:25:16.000Well, he came into Washington, an honest man from Stanford University and represented, I think, as much as purely as anyone, somebody whose voice had been suppressed, somebody who had been marginalized and was going to represent real change.
00:25:31.000My conversations with him over the last year suggest and imply to me that when he got there, he suddenly realized that running a gigantic bureaucracy and being an honest person are a difficult pairing in this world, and especially in Washington.
00:25:49.000Getting people to explain to you how the workflow worked, getting people to, you know, not only say yes to an order, but perform on it was hard.
00:26:01.000Going through your staff and bringing real outsider, honest energy to a situation which had been inert, obscure, self-satisfied, often corrupt, takes a lot of time.
00:26:16.000And the other side was whipping up dissatisfaction with the pace.
00:26:21.000It was all sudden, it was all of a sudden.
00:26:23.000Well, he's not delivering his promises fast enough.
00:26:26.000The promises they didn't want to see him deliver at all, the other side was saying weren't being performed on quickly enough.
00:26:35.000It's a brand new year and a brand new opportunity to change the world for the better.
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00:27:41.000All right, so Walter, you know, it occurs to me that so much of what we're talking around here is either a byproduct or a relative, close cousin to this media industrial complex that was blown up at the advent of the internet.
00:27:58.000And then it's been sort of this slow death march, you know, cable cutters, things that, you know, we've been moving more digitally.
00:28:07.000That's created a massive opportunity for shows like this.
00:28:10.000Creators like Charlie, now myself and Blake are now public figures.
00:28:14.000So it's, but, but it's also created a conundrum for truth, for veracity.
00:29:02.000And he had all this evidence and he sent it to a journalist and that was all AI fabrications.
00:29:06.000It was like an AI done hit job against a food delivery company.
00:29:11.000Well, all of these examples underscore the question I'm asking.
00:29:15.000And I haven't really distilled it in a very good question yet.
00:29:18.000But Walter, you strike me as a guy who is very concerned with what is the ultimate truth, what is the deepest truth.
00:29:27.000What do we do when you have a population of 350 million people, not to mention the global population, all trying to suss through these different disparate information streams?
00:29:38.000How do you get everybody on the same page?
00:29:44.000You don't try to get everyone on the same page.
00:29:46.000That was an illusion and a grandiose mythological white whale that was pursued in the age of television and mass media.
00:29:56.000It's no longer possible, and I don't think it's any longer desirable.
00:30:01.000One of the virtues of people not knowing what's real beyond the horizon is that they start concentrating on what's within their horizon.
00:30:10.000We have spent far too long in the United States knowing what's going on in New York, knowing what's going on in Los Angeles, knowing what's going on in Washington, and not knowing what's going on across the street.
00:30:26.000The difficulty of obtaining truth about what's going on around the world should cause us, I think, to slightly give up on it.
00:30:33.000Because there is a family, a house, a street, a town, a neighborhood, a church, a group of friends that needs your attention.
00:30:44.000I promise you, those were the things that they tried to break up during COVID when the powers that be tried to leverage that pandemic into permanent rule for themselves.
00:30:56.000They knew that their first strike had to be at your church, at your hardware store, at your grocery store, at your family, at your dinner table.
00:31:05.000Well, those are the things you have to reclaim first.
00:31:08.000You know, I have a friend who's very into solar magnetic storms and sort of doom and apocalypse around big earth changes and so on.
00:31:21.000And I thought to myself one night, he'd warned me that there was a big ejection of plasma from the sun and all the lights might go out.
00:31:29.000And I said, well, if the lights go out, where do I start?
00:31:37.000I figure out What I can defend and who I'm going to defend.
00:31:43.000And all those questions that would come in the wake of a disaster are ones that we need to be asking right now because the disaster is this, as you say, melting of reality.
00:31:54.000And starting on first principles and starting at home and starting with the world you can look around and see with your own eyes is the solution.
00:32:04.000And then those pods, as it were, those cells, just like the body, the body isn't made of some big giant piece of, you know, chicken McNugget.
00:32:15.000It's got cells in it, little active, isolated engines that link up and work together.
00:32:24.000And at the cellular level, we have to, I think, renew our, you know, renew our contracts if we're going to have a bigger social contract.
00:32:35.000And this vain thought that everybody is going to be guided by some obelisk that beams truth down from the central authorities is does not serve us well.
00:32:48.000It causes us to ignore our own garden.
00:32:53.000Yeah, I love, I love what you're saying.
00:32:54.000I mean, we've been, you know, saying for a long time politics starts local, and you're kind of broadening that conversation to sort of say, look, we just got an email today, someone who said they were inspired to get involved in Maricopa County politics.
00:33:23.000Yeah, I would be remiss if I didn't give you an opportunity to talk about what Charlie's assassination meant for our country.
00:33:32.000And, you know, as I'm hearing you talk earlier, you mentioned Nick Shirley and this sort of new wave that is slowly kind of forming.
00:33:40.000You've got Dan Bongino that's coming back, and he's, you know, he's saying he's going to wage war on certain, you know, influences within maybe the conservative movement and beyond.
00:33:53.000I believed in my whole heart, especially after we got past the memorial, that there was going to be this sifting of the movement.
00:34:00.000There was going to be this, like, this changing of the guard, sort of a new out of necessity, this newness that was going to be created out of the chaos and the loss.
00:34:12.000And I just, so without feeding you answers, I want to hear what you have to say.
00:34:17.000But I believe that there is something that we are observing.
00:34:19.000It will not become clear to us until some time now.
00:34:23.000But what, what did losing Charlie, what did you observe?
00:34:29.000Well, to be very cold about it and systematic, as though I don't have a heart, a power vacuum develops when someone of Charlie's magnitude and competence and gifts is lost.
00:34:43.000And in that power vacuum, all sorts of opportunistic creatures come rushing in and they live by the law of the jungle.
00:34:53.000How much space that has been left vacant can I occupy?
00:35:01.000And that was a frankly ugly process to watch.
00:35:04.000And I guess it still goes on to some extent.
00:35:07.000But in another way, it's a tribute to how big a space he occupied that it was that it left so much vacant for so many sort of competitive, Darwinian struggles over power and attention.
00:35:23.000But I think the real meaning of the thing is the meaning of the moment after that I felt and others felt, which was someone has just given in what is not understood as a war, but suddenly looks like one because of the combatant falling.
00:35:48.000He was someone openly sitting with a square stance before a crowd of his fellow Americans, taking all comers, listening, and speaking back.
00:36:52.000Well, but, you know, I was aware of him in my peripheral vision.
00:37:00.000And suddenly when he moved to the center of my vision in this terrible way, terrible way, I saw the best and worst of America in one lightning flash.
00:37:10.000I saw someone who still believed that freedom of speech, a sort of candor about your spiritual and religious beliefs in dialogue with people who maybe flat out oppose them can still lead to a happy ending.
00:39:27.000I remember trying, you know, I was supposed to get out a statement, you know, about Charlie.
00:39:34.000We had received word that he had he was gone, you know, because there was some confusion about that.
00:39:40.000And I remember trying to write, you know, whatever it was I was supposed to write.
00:39:46.000And President Trump ended up true socialing that Charlie was dead.
00:39:52.000And I remember just being so relieved.
00:39:54.000I mean, I couldn't put one foot in front of the other.
00:39:57.000It was like, you know, it was like that scene out of Saving Private Ryan where it was just, you know, it's just, everything was moving in slow motion, but my body couldn't, I couldn't make it function.
00:40:06.000So the fact that Blake in the middle of that night got the words out, but one of the things he said was that, you know, Charlie will never grow old.
00:40:15.000You know, we'll never see him, you know, lose any of the grandeur and the glory of his youth.
00:40:23.000And I guess in some ways, this far removed from it, I feel comforted in some ways that I always get to remember him that way, but I hate that I have to remember him too.
00:40:33.000So it's a bittersweet feeling, but I know that he's gone and there's no bringing him back.
00:40:39.000This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and founding partner of YReFi.
00:40:44.000It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us.
00:40:49.000His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come.
00:40:56.000Now, here Charlie, in his own words, tell you about YReFi.
00:40:59.000I'm going to tell you guys about whyrefi.com.
00:42:23.000What that, you know, that happens to poets, rock stars, saints, and a lot of people who die young and yet inspire us to pick up their pack and carry it.
00:42:35.000And I think we're going to have to go where he was going.
00:42:39.000I totally, I mean, a lot of people, you know, speculate, was Charlie going to be president?
00:44:22.000Walter, you and Matt have a great show.
00:44:25.000I want to make sure people know where to find it and how to follow you on that stuff.
00:44:29.000We still have about six minutes here, but I really, really love your guys' content there.
00:44:34.000So please, like, what are you doing with Matt and what should people know about what you're up to?
00:44:39.000So Matt Taibbi is a muck-raking reporter from the left, really.
00:44:44.000I think he was at his greatest fame during the Occupy Wall Street years as he basically took on high finance and showed they had committed crimes all through what we now call the financial crisis.
00:45:00.000But like me, sometime around the first year of the Trump presidency, first Trump presidency, he started to see his colleagues fall for this ridiculous and unverifiable story of Trump being a Russian agent.
00:45:18.000And it alienated him from his cohort, as it did me.
00:45:23.000I was probably a little more to the right than Matt Taibbi or a little more to the center.
00:45:28.000But we both found ourselves after a few years feeling deserted by our supposedly principled and supposedly conscientious colleagues.
00:45:40.000And so we came together in a sense of both being stranded by not getting on the Russiagate train.
00:45:47.000And what we try to do on our podcast, Matt's a huge sports fan, and is give you a sort of skybox, play-by-play, big picture narration of events as though they were a game.
00:46:04.000Now we realize they're not a game, but we try to treat them as one with a lot of humor, with a lot of mischief and kind of pop cultural reference so that the heaviness of things doesn't destroy people.
00:46:21.000It's important to keep a light spirit.
00:46:23.000And when you talk about black pilling.
00:46:37.000And spreading despair is practically Practically, the sin that they tell us is the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit.
00:46:46.000When you try to destroy someone's spirit with pessimism, with cynicism, and a little bit of that goes a long way.
00:46:54.000But when you try to give them the feeling that nothing you can do, nothing you can say, and no one you can appeal to will ever help you, it's lost, and you're just living out the clock on this earth, feeling the pain and feeling the depression.
00:47:12.000Well, that for me is that for me is the enemy in all respects.
00:47:18.000Because as long as you have a lightness, as long as you have a flow, as long as you have sort of a light on in your heart and in your mind, there's a chance for change.
00:47:31.000And the black pill people who tell you, you know, you've been betrayed again, don't expect anything, and they think they're being grown up and they think they're being sophisticated.
00:47:40.000But what they're really doing is sending you to an early grave.
00:47:43.000And what they're really doing is opening the way for the true cynics, the psychopaths, the power mongers to own you forever and enslave you.
00:47:53.000And so it's what Matt and I do is, if anything, an assault on the black pillars.
00:48:01.000You can still laugh no matter how dark things get.
00:48:22.000I mean, they didn't even have AI as an excuse.
00:48:25.000And it's a story of, it's a story of two missionaries who grow up in what's basically a cult isolated in the mountains of Montana, which hasn't gotten out into the world for 100 years.
00:48:35.000And it's become so inbred, literally genetically inbred, that they're sent out in a van to try to get female converts in America 2005.
00:48:47.000And they leave their mountain valley, having never watched television, being as innocent as Martians practically, and they hit the road to bring people to their belief system.
00:49:09.000Because, I mean, the first time they sit down in a motel to turn on TV, they're there for 18 hours.
00:49:14.000You know, they have no, they have no immunity to it.
00:49:17.000So I try to show modern America from the point of view of people who aren't immune to its seductions and its, you know, its poisons and so on.
00:49:30.000I've been describing things a lot like this lately about we build up this immunity to things.
00:49:35.000And next time I have you on, Walter, I want, I feel like since Trump came down those golden escalators, we as a country have been building immunities to the fake news, to the propaganda, to psyops, to color revolutions, to hoaxes.
00:49:52.000And I would be super curious to have a conversation in depth about the immunities that we're growing now.
00:49:59.000Because I think when we're talking about black pillow immunities, we're talking about this vacuum of this laws of the jungle.
00:50:06.000We're sort of building immunities to that.
00:50:08.000I have to believe good will win out, truth will win out.
00:50:10.000But Walter, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk about.