The Charlie Kirk Show - February 10, 2026


What the Super Bowl Revealed About America’s Culture War


Episode Stats


Length

39 minutes

Words per minute

186.68903

Word count

7,424

Sentence count

611

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Libby Emmons and Will Chamberlain join me to discuss the Super Bowl halftime show and why it was one of the most inclusive rock shows in history. The 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.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.
00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.
00:00:14.000 If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.
00:00:19.000 But if the most important thing is doing good, you'll end up purposeful.
00:00:24.000 College is a scam, everybody.
00:00:26.000 You got to stop sending your kids to college.
00:00:27.000 You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.
00:00:31.000 Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter.
00:00:33.000 Go start a Turning Point USA high school chapter.
00:00:35.000 Go find out how your church can get involved.
00:00:37.000 Sign up and become an activist.
00:00:39.000 I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.
00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.
00:00:43.000 And I encourage you to do the same.
00:00:45.000 Here I am.
00:00:46.000 Lord use me.
00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:49.000 Here we go.
00:00:56.000 The 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.
00:01:09.000 All right, welcome back.
00:01:10.000 Hour two of the Charlie Kirk Show is underway.
00:01:12.000 We have two amazing guests for this segment.
00:01:15.000 Libby Emmons.
00:01:17.000 She's the editor-in-chief, the Post-Millennial and Human Events.
00:01:20.000 Of course, you know her.
00:01:21.000 She's been here before.
00:01:22.000 And Will Chamberlain, Senior Counsel at Article 3 Project.
00:01:27.000 So welcome to both of our amazing guests.
00:01:29.000 I'm just going to, the floor is yours.
00:01:31.000 We're going to start with ladies first here, though, Will. 1.00
00:01:34.000 Libby, you wrote a piece this morning for Human Events and you said, TPSA's all-American halftime show proves you can just do things.
00:01:44.000 So I just want to get your, we're kind of taking a little bit of a victory lap shamelessly here because we were blown away at just how successful last night was.
00:01:52.000 But I give you guys the opportunity to reflect on what just happened.
00:01:56.000 Yeah, I think you should be shameless in your self-congratulations on this one.
00:02:00.000 And everyone else is congratulating you too.
00:02:02.000 It's really quite an accomplishment.
00:02:04.000 It was very impressive.
00:02:06.000 I was impressed.
00:02:07.000 6 million plus people watching concurrent at one point.
00:02:11.000 I think now it's got well over 20 million views, something like that.
00:02:16.000 So it's really quite impressive.
00:02:17.000 And it really was a triumph because there are a lot of people who were not excited to see the Bad Bunny halftime show and bringing together, you know, artists who are celebrating America and who are specifically not leaving people out, which I think is a really huge thing.
00:02:34.000 Like it's actually one of the more inclusive rock shows that I've seen.
00:02:40.000 It was something that said, hey, America, like this one's for you.
00:02:43.000 We're here for you.
00:02:44.000 And I respected that and appreciated it, especially when you looked at the, you know, you can compare, you can draw so many comparisons between what this was doing in terms of inclusivity and what Bad Bunny was doing in terms of exclusivity.
00:03:00.000 Will, do you agree that we had the more inclusive of the two shows?
00:03:05.000 I didn't know I was going to be debating on those lines, but what's your take, Will?
00:03:11.000 I mean, I suppose it's more inclusive among Americans because everything was in English, so at least I could understand it. 0.96
00:03:17.000 I thought it was great.
00:03:19.000 I mean, I'm not even a country music buffer or anything, but I just enjoy the music.
00:03:22.000 I thought it was really good.
00:03:23.000 The production was really impressive.
00:03:23.000 I thought it was impressive.
00:03:25.000 I thought the fact you had, I mean, the sheer number of people you managed to get to watch, I feel like that's just been understated here.
00:03:31.000 I mean, 6 million live, 25 million something total views.
00:03:35.000 That's not just individuals, that's households too.
00:03:37.000 That's a huge bite out of people who would have been watching ads because, I mean, the other thing I noticed, because I actually watched after the Super Bowl was over, my wife wanted to watch the original show.
00:03:47.000 So we watched them in comparison.
00:03:49.000 The original, the main halftime show is much shorter because obviously there's ads they're selling before and after it.
00:03:55.000 So really, you're just, you're confiscating a huge amount of ad revenue or rather eyeballs from these advertisers and all the attention as well.
00:04:03.000 Like, I mean, normally in the Super Bowl, you get some attention to the more prominent or interesting ads.
00:04:07.000 The entire discussion today is about your Super Bowl show.
00:04:10.000 So, and the people who got the best promotion out of it were the artists who performed at your show.
00:04:15.000 So, I think it's a remarkable achievement.
00:04:18.000 And hopefully, it's just a time for the rest of Hollywood and the sort of LA industry music types to realize that there's an audience that the audience of people who watch football would like to see their halftime show in English, please.
00:04:33.000 Yeah, well, and just to clarify on the numbers, so if you know, Benny gave us some notes, Benny Johnson last segment, he said that we should have consolidated all the YouTube streams into one.
00:04:43.000 Fair enough.
00:04:44.000 I think, Blake, your counterpoint is good, though.
00:04:46.000 We had a lot of people that got to partner with us on this and wanted this to succeed.
00:04:50.000 So, we had a coalition of the willing sort of sort of thing.
00:04:54.000 But yeah, if you combine all the live streams, it was actually over 10 million, which would have probably been the number one live stream of all time, if not like just slightly, barely by an edge, number two of all time on YouTube alone.
00:05:11.000 That's just on YouTube alone.
00:05:12.000 I'm not counting Rumble.
00:05:13.000 I'm not talking broadcast partners.
00:05:15.000 I'm not talking OTT fast channels.
00:05:17.000 So, yeah, I mean, we're looking probably to your point, Will, when you add up households and people viewing together, Nielsen will typically put a 2.5X on that number.
00:05:27.000 So, we're probably looking at 40 to 50 million eyeballs that was on that.
00:05:31.000 The Super Bowl has an audience of about 125 million.
00:05:35.000 So, yeah, that's a huge, huge dent.
00:05:38.000 And we pulled that off in about two months.
00:05:40.000 So, hat tip to the team and to the artists that performed.
00:05:43.000 And yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Libby, the reason I thought of you this morning is because some people don't know this about your background, but you come from the arts.
00:05:52.000 You come from the media world, the performing arts world.
00:05:56.000 And you are an artist at heart.
00:05:58.000 You really are one of those artists that made it out of the malaise of the urban core.
00:06:03.000 And now you're proudly Americana.
00:06:05.000 And one of the things, if you know Libby Emmons at all, you realize that when you ask her, like, what's your family ethnicity or back?
00:06:13.000 She goes, I'm American.
00:06:16.000 You might be the most American American that there is, Libby.
00:06:20.000 And so just one final note on this, and then I have a couple other topics I want to hit with you guys.
00:06:24.000 But what does it mean to be American?
00:06:26.000 Is Puerto Rico America?
00:06:29.000 You know, is it just another country?
00:06:31.000 Is it a colony?
00:06:31.000 Is it, you know, I know he's got a passport.
00:06:33.000 That's not what I'm asking.
00:06:34.000 But what does it mean?
00:06:36.000 And, you know, what is our culture that we're sort of like defending here?
00:06:39.000 Yeah, I mean, American culture is very broad.
00:06:42.000 There's a lot of pieces to it.
00:06:44.000 And I think if you look back at past Super Bowl halftime shows, you see something that's much more American than this.
00:06:50.000 Prince, I'm thinking Michael Jackson, Madonna.
00:06:53.000 You know, I think the Rockettes were there one time, Chubby Checker.
00:06:57.000 You know, this is a lot more of what we're looking at.
00:06:59.000 This is a shared culture that we have.
00:07:02.000 And Puerto Rico is part of America for sure.
00:07:04.000 So is Guam.
00:07:05.000 So is lots of places.
00:07:07.000 Perhaps Greenland someday.
00:07:08.000 You know, we have a lot of territories.
00:07:10.000 We're a big, massive empire, and that's awesome.
00:07:14.000 But Puerto Rican culture is niche culture, right?
00:07:17.000 It's not part of our shared culture.
00:07:19.000 It's not something that we are all part of.
00:07:22.000 And as the NFL pursued their vision of having a Spanish-only halftime show, I couldn't help but think of all of the other Americans who don't speak Spanish.
00:07:32.000 And I'm not just talking about people like me, you know, basic white Americans.
00:07:37.000 I'm thinking of Chinese Americans.
00:07:38.000 I'm thinking of Korean Americans, Filipino Americans, you know, people who have come from other places, kept their own language, still have that, and also have learned English.
00:07:48.000 Lingua franca, right?
00:07:50.000 This is a concept that we have in America where English is the language we all speak.
00:07:55.000 English is the language where we all come together and do our government business and all of the rest of it.
00:08:00.000 And so that is really a huge part of our culture is our shared language.
00:08:04.000 Spanish is spoken by a bunch of people.
00:08:07.000 It's still niche.
00:08:08.000 It's not our shared language.
00:08:10.000 You know, I studied Spanish for three years.
00:08:13.000 I've got nunka or whatever the word is.
00:08:15.000 Nada, I don't even know, right?
00:08:17.000 Like it's a problem.
00:08:18.000 So, so I think that that's a big deal.
00:08:20.000 Being American is about sharing our culture.
00:08:24.000 It's about speaking English.
00:08:25.000 That's certainly part of it.
00:08:27.000 We all share that.
00:08:28.000 It's about being big and loud and boisterous and loving this country.
00:08:32.000 And that's those are things that I love about, you know, I love about our country.
00:08:36.000 And the Bad Bunny halftime show, which like Will, I went back and watched.
00:08:40.000 I was way too excited for the Turning Point show to sit and watch the Bad Bunny show and come back later for Turning Point.
00:08:46.000 So I definitely made that switch.
00:08:49.000 But looking at the Bad Bunny halftime show, there were a bunch of things about it that were oppositional to American culture.
00:08:56.000 And that was really too bad.
00:08:58.000 You know, you had a big sign and they had a bodega, fake bodega up there that said, you know, we accept EBT.
00:09:04.000 Why is that what we're doing at the Super Bowl?
00:09:04.000 Why?
00:09:06.000 Hey, yay.
00:09:07.000 You know, sucking up.
00:09:08.000 They needed authenticity.
00:09:10.000 They needed authenticity.
00:09:12.000 They had this sugar cane stuff, which is very, you know, it's talking about how America is imperialist and there are a lot of different elements that, yeah.
00:09:22.000 Yeah.
00:09:23.000 Speaking of anti-American sentiment, we wanted to throw this in.
00:09:26.000 This went extremely vital over the weekend, but people were a bit distracted by the Super Bowl.
00:09:30.000 And we'll play it and we'll discuss in the next segment.
00:09:32.000 We had this commentary from Democrat Representative Gene Wu, born in China, immigrant to America, basically just saying, guys, we should all unite and get whitey.
00:09:43.000 Let's play clip 299.
00:09:45.000 I always tell people the day the Latino, African-American, Asian, and other communities realize that they are, that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning. 1.00
00:09:58.000 Because we are the majority in this country now.
00:10:02.000 We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair.
00:10:08.000 I want to be blunt.
00:10:09.000 He should get his citizenship taken away and he should be kicked back to China. 1.00
00:10:13.000 Screw you.
00:10:14.000 That is disgusting.
00:10:15.000 Like the thought that that person is in Congress should make every single person in America shudder of all races.
00:10:22.000 Like that that exists.
00:10:24.000 Utterly repulsive.
00:10:28.000 Listen, I'm going to be honest.
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00:11:34.000 All right, guys, you saw this Representative Wu clip, which was, I totally agree with Blake, one of the more obscene, repulsive statements I've ever seen.
00:11:44.000 But it reminded me of this other really obscene, repulsive statement.
00:11:48.000 It was a few weeks ago, maybe a few months ago from Wajaha Ali.
00:11:52.000 I think I said that right.
00:11:53.000 Cut 300.
00:11:54.000 You have lost.
00:11:55.000 You lost.
00:11:56.000 The mistake that you made is you let us in in the first place.
00:11:59.000 That's the thing with brown people. 1.00
00:12:00.000 And I'm going to say this as a brown person.
00:12:02.000 There's a lot of us.
00:12:03.000 Like a lot.
00:12:05.000 And we breed.
00:12:06.000 We're a breeding people.
00:12:07.000 Your story is a story filled with misery.
00:12:10.000 It's filled with bland chicken.
00:12:12.000 It's filled with terrible, terrible dry meat.
00:12:15.000 Your music sucks.
00:12:16.000 All your culture sucks.
00:12:18.000 Nobody, that's why the kids like listen to black people and their music. 1.00
00:12:21.000 That's why the kids love Latinos.
00:12:23.000 Your parties suck because they're monochromatic.
00:12:25.000 Our parties have better food, better music, better looking women. 1.00
00:12:28.000 And now imagine that guy got elected to Congress and said that we need to overthrow all of the oppressors.
00:12:34.000 And then we have Gene Wu.
00:12:35.000 And then you get our halftime shows celebrating foreign flags, traipsing around on our biggest stage.
00:12:35.000 Yeah.
00:12:43.000 It all starts to feel like a big up yours to people like us.
00:12:49.000 My interpreting this wrong.
00:12:51.000 Go ahead, Will.
00:12:52.000 I mean, the thing about the Bad Bunny show, I don't know if you guys hit on this in previous segments, the way he said, God bless America, but then the framing was he's talking about America, the hemisphere, America, the continents.
00:12:52.000 Yeah.
00:13:04.000 And so we need to only, you know, you will think God bless America only makes sense in the context of praising every single country in the hemisphere.
00:13:10.000 Okay.
00:13:11.000 You're part of our country, right?
00:13:12.000 This is the idea.
00:13:13.000 You're supposed to be proud to be an American, and yet the only way you're proud of it is in the same context as every other country.
00:13:19.000 So you think we're totally, we're just basically an unexceptional melting pot here for your economic exploitation.
00:13:25.000 This doesn't sound like much of a great deal.
00:13:26.000 And, you know, when I hear Gene Wu and well, particularly Wajahat Ali talking about how much we suck, I'm like, well, clearly we should just denaturalize and deport you as a favor to you.
00:13:35.000 I mean, you're so miserable here.
00:13:36.000 We just are, you know, might as well send you back to Pakistan or wherever it is where you can be much happier and much enjoy all your delicious food and beautiful women that will be our we horrible white people are just not in a position to enjoy. 0.99
00:13:51.000 Totally.
00:13:52.000 Go ahead.
00:13:52.000 Go ahead, Libby.
00:13:53.000 No, that was the other piece, Will, that you were just bringing up.
00:13:55.000 You brought up the halftime show and bringing that back around to Wajahat Ali and Gene Wu.
00:14:01.000 There was definitely a piece of this whole, you know, Puerto Rican festival that hates America that was telling Americans, and this is not for you.
00:14:10.000 We are here taking over your stage, but this is not for you.
00:14:13.000 We're not going to speak your language. 1.00
00:14:15.000 If you try and dress like us, that's cultural appropriation.
00:14:18.000 If you like Puerto Rican trap, house music, whatever, that's cultural appropriation.
00:14:23.000 So we're going to exhibit ourselves and let you watch it, but it's behind glass.
00:14:27.000 You can't be part of it.
00:14:28.000 And I thought that was really revolting as well.
00:14:30.000 And this whole Wajahat Ali or Gene Wu, like, go home, you know, like you're saying, Andrew, just go home.
00:14:36.000 Like, if your country is so much better, then why do you keep pushing for everybody to come here if it's so terrible?
00:14:42.000 And I would put my grandmother's chicken up against anybody else's chicken in the whole world.
00:14:47.000 I will tell you that, because that's ridiculous.
00:14:49.000 New Jersey took Italian food and made it good.
00:14:52.000 You know what I'm saying?
00:14:53.000 Like, Italian food is good or whatever, but it's not Jersey.
00:14:55.000 Come on.
00:14:56.000 It's ridiculous.
00:14:57.000 I totally agree.
00:14:58.000 By the way, my grandma's Italian cooking.
00:15:00.000 Oh, boy.
00:15:02.000 That is top-notch stuff.
00:15:04.000 Yeah, up there.
00:15:05.000 Anyways, so I'm going to pivot here.
00:15:09.000 What are you doing?
00:15:10.000 Like, what are you doing?
00:15:11.000 Yeah, but why are these same people?
00:15:13.000 These local fighters are so miserable.
00:15:15.000 If you hate it, why are you?
00:15:16.000 Well, I want to answer that.
00:15:18.000 The dark thing, like, if you hate it, why are you here?
00:15:20.000 Well, he's advocating like let's all team up to dispossess the people we hate.
00:15:26.000 That is what he's saying.
00:15:26.000 He's saying these, like what Gene Wu is saying is these white people who are descended from the people who founded America were dumb enough to let us in.
00:15:35.000 Let's take power from them and take their stuff. 0.82
00:15:38.000 That is what he is saying.
00:15:39.000 Well, and that's why he should be kicked out.
00:15:41.000 You don't have a democracy if it's not for America creating this democracy.
00:15:45.000 You don't have like all of the amazing capitalist enterprises.
00:15:48.000 You don't have the bounty of our supermarkets.
00:15:50.000 Like do you walk into our supermarkets?
00:15:52.000 Do you see what we have access to every day in our sweatpants?
00:15:57.000 Like this is insane.
00:15:58.000 Nowhere else has this.
00:16:00.000 Our women are free.
00:16:01.000 If you want to be gay, you can be gay. 0.83
00:16:03.000 You're totally free to do that.
00:16:04.000 You can do pretty much whatever you want in this country so long as you don't squash the rights of others.
00:16:08.000 And Ali and Wu want to squash everybody else's rights.
00:16:11.000 They're not satisfied to just be part of this amazing thing that we have all created.
00:16:16.000 They're not satisfied with that.
00:16:17.000 They want to destroy it so that they're the only ones who have any rights.
00:16:21.000 And that's that's insane.
00:16:23.000 That's so un-American as to be, yeah, treasonist.
00:16:27.000 I love what you're saying.
00:16:28.000 And I think this ties in.
00:16:29.000 Will, there was an important, I think it was First Court of Appeals, First Circuit.
00:16:35.000 Fifth Circuit.
00:16:36.000 Fifth Circuit.
00:16:37.000 All right.
00:16:38.000 So they had, there was a really important ruling that plays into this whole conversation.
00:16:42.000 Can you just make sure that our audience understands it?
00:16:45.000 Because I don't want us to miss this.
00:16:46.000 It's a big story.
00:16:48.000 Yeah.
00:16:48.000 So the question is, if you're an illegal alien who crossed the border legally and you're founded in the United States by ICE, the question is, do you get bond or not?
00:17:00.000 And the answer from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is yes.
00:17:04.000 In fact, you're sorry, no.
00:17:06.000 The answer is no, you don't get bond anymore.
00:17:08.000 And this was contrary to the rulings of something like 300 district court judges.
00:17:12.000 But in my view, it's the correct textual decision.
00:17:14.000 The context of this decision is enormous because many ICE detention facilities are in the Fifth Circuit.
00:17:20.000 And the only way to challenge this is through habeas corpus.
00:17:23.000 And you can only file habeas corpus petitions in the district where you're detained.
00:17:26.000 So what this means is if you're an illegal alien and you are caught and you crossed, you never presented yourself at a port of entry, then you, if you're caught by ICE, that's it.
00:17:34.000 You're done.
00:17:35.000 You get to go straight.
00:17:37.000 You can either sit in immigration detention while your lawyers file frivolous claims trying to get you to stay, or you can just take the first flight home.
00:17:44.000 Up to you.
00:17:45.000 But there's no more getting out on bond and just sort of waiting for things to play out and dragging things along.
00:17:50.000 And this means that, one, you'll have a lot more people give up their legal challenges because if they have to sit in immigration detention while those challenges are ongoing, it's a lot less appealing to just let months, years go by while to play it out.
00:18:03.000 And then second, you'll start to see a lot more self-deportation because if people realize that if ICE finds them, that's it.
00:18:09.000 They don't get to go back home and pack up their things.
00:18:11.000 They're just gone.
00:18:12.000 That's a big deal in terms of making self-deportation a more attractive option.
00:18:16.000 Yeah, I love that.
00:18:17.000 You call it one of the most important decisions, judicial decisions of the year of Trump's Trump 2.0.
00:18:24.000 So this is a big, big story, guys.
00:18:25.000 It gives DHS a lot more power to deport illegals. 0.70
00:18:29.000 Libby Emmons, Will Chamberlain, thank you guys so much.
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00:19:41.000 His heart for this country, his heart for what we do here at Turning Point is second to none.
00:19:46.000 Mark Mattson, founder and CEO of Mattson Money, author of Experiencing the American Dream.
00:19:52.000 And there's a good subtitle to this: How to Invest Your Time, Energy, and Money to Create an Extraordinary Life.
00:19:58.000 And the subtitle to me is really important because if I, and the four words by Rob Lowe, by the way, it's just fantastic.
00:20:05.000 If I had to describe what made Charlie so extraordinary, that subtitle is probably one of the ways I would do it.
00:20:12.000 Obviously, his faith in Jesus Christ, his love of country, his energy.
00:20:17.000 But how to invest your time, energy, and money to create an extraordinary life.
00:20:20.000 That is the perfect descriptor of Charlie Kirk because he did it in 31 years.
00:20:25.000 Everything that he did and the amazing success that we had last night with the halftime show was all downstream impacts of his life.
00:20:33.000 And so, anyways, welcome to the set, my friend.
00:20:37.000 Great to be with you.
00:20:37.000 Yeah.
00:20:38.000 So why don't you, okay, got to start here.
00:20:41.000 All right.
00:20:41.000 You went a little viral yesterday because you were just pumped about the halftime show.
00:20:46.000 Tell us about that first.
00:20:47.000 Well, I was.
00:20:47.000 I mean, obviously, I wasn't interested in watching Bad Bunny and super psyched about the show to begin with.
00:20:55.000 So I just jumped on.
00:20:56.000 I had my wife.
00:20:57.000 I gave her my cell phone.
00:20:58.000 I got in front of our TV screen in our living room.
00:21:00.000 And I'm like, okay, let's go.
00:21:02.000 We got an alternative.
00:21:03.000 If you love America, if you love this country, you love country music, which I do, and my family does.
00:21:10.000 You know, Melissa made her gold star awesome chili.
00:21:14.000 And we were going to sit down, watch the show, turn when the halftime show came on.
00:21:19.000 And we watched it.
00:21:19.000 It was so good.
00:21:21.000 We watched it during the halftime.
00:21:23.000 And then after the game, which was a kind of a crappy game, we also watched, we watched it again after the game.
00:21:30.000 And it was just, we cried.
00:21:32.000 We laughed.
00:21:32.000 We loved it.
00:21:34.000 I want to play it again just because I think it was so powerful.
00:21:40.000 And this is this moment from Kid Rock.
00:21:43.000 I just looked during the break, and it is by far the most viral clip.
00:21:47.000 And 222, we'll just play it again just because it's wonderful.
00:21:52.000 There's a book that's sitting in your house somewhere that could use some dusting off.
00:21:59.000 There's a man who died for all our sins, hanging from the cross.
00:22:06.000 You can give your life to Jesus and to give you a second chance till you can.
00:22:15.000 I wish it would keep going, to be honest.
00:22:17.000 I get drills every time.
00:22:18.000 I got him too.
00:22:19.000 I got him too.
00:22:20.000 It was amazing, but it wasn't in your face.
00:22:22.000 It wasn't like too over the top.
00:22:23.000 It was just mostly great music, zero agenda.
00:22:26.000 But I think it was a really important moment for the culture and for the country.
00:22:30.000 Well, you know, look, we live in the greatest country that has ever existed on the face of the planet during any time in previous history.
00:22:42.000 That's part of the American Dream my dad built into me.
00:22:45.000 And I've spent a lot of time thinking about people that have the American Dream as a screen by which they live their life versus the opposite.
00:22:53.000 And I learned it from, we were born in West Virginia.
00:22:54.000 I was born in West Virginia.
00:22:56.000 My grandpa worked the coal mines and the factories there, the chemical factories.
00:23:01.000 And my dad and my, this is when Rob Lowe helped me write the beginning of the book.
00:23:06.000 He said, you got to put your family story in there because it really hits.
00:23:09.000 And my dad eventually got out of the hollers.
00:23:13.000 And he believed this was a great country, that if you worked hard, that if you were industrious, if you created value for other people, and he would always tell me from a low age, young age of like eight years old, no one owes you anything.
00:23:27.000 And you don't get anything in this world until you create value for other people.
00:23:32.000 And so I always was like, well, then how did the rest of my family get help left back in the hollers?
00:23:38.000 And it's because they had a completely different screen.
00:23:40.000 They believed that they were victims.
00:23:43.000 They believed they were entitled.
00:23:46.000 They felt sorry for themselves.
00:23:48.000 They lived a very jealous life of other people.
00:23:52.000 And so you have these two screens, the American Dream as a great country of opportunity and hard work and faith.
00:24:00.000 And then you have this other, this other negative self-victim, victimization, entitlement.
00:24:08.000 And so the book largely talks about how you can get out of one screen, create the other screen, and then create a massive amount of opportunity, relationships, creativity, expression.
00:24:19.000 So why don't you tell the audience what you did with yourself?
00:24:22.000 So you were raised in West Virginia in a pretty hard scrabble, like, you know, blue collar, at least you could say, background.
00:24:30.000 And yet, I mean, I know a thing or two about what you've done with your life, but tell our audience.
00:24:35.000 Yeah, so I always wanted, you know, a lot of kids want to grow up and be like football and baseball players and athletes.
00:24:41.000 And my dad sold insurance and was a financial planner.
00:24:45.000 And I was a weird kid.
00:24:46.000 I wanted to grow up, be just like my dad.
00:24:48.000 So I got a degree in finance, a degree in accounting from Miami University, went to work at 21 as a financial planner, started selling insurance products, mutual funds, commissions, all that stuff, doing what the big broker dealer told me to do.
00:25:02.000 And after about four years of doing that, I knew that most people were being taken advantage of because stock picking and market timing and track record investing were really just gambling with people's money.
00:25:12.000 And I went out and I started my own company when I was 27 years old with $30,000 in debt and an overhead projector and a yellow pad.
00:25:20.000 That's all we had back then.
00:25:21.000 No internet, no technology, no smartphones.
00:25:26.000 And then today we have $13.8 billion that we manage for investors all over the United States.
00:25:31.000 With a B. With a B.
00:25:32.000 Yeah, with a B.
00:25:33.000 Yes, sir.
00:25:34.000 That's a little bit of cash there.
00:25:36.000 We worked hard.
00:25:36.000 Yeah.
00:25:37.000 Started from zero.
00:25:38.000 And you're based here locally.
00:25:39.000 Yeah, we're based in Scottsdale.
00:25:41.000 Yeah, that's amazing.
00:25:43.000 I mean, so you have been a fan of Charlie's for a while.
00:25:48.000 We almost got you guys together, right?
00:25:50.000 But I mean, that's one of these in a long list of tragic things that almost happened and, you know, that didn't because he was taken from us.
00:26:01.000 What was it about Charlie that drew you to him?
00:26:04.000 Because I know, again, I've had dinner with you, so I know the backstory here, but just maybe explain what it was about Charlie that was unique.
00:26:13.000 Well, I love the way that he spoke out for what he believed, and it was courageous, and it was loving.
00:26:22.000 You know, I think about a lot of the people that I work with in the financial world complain about kids, and even kids, I'll say kids in college.
00:26:31.000 I'm 62, so I can say kids in college.
00:26:35.000 But they didn't do anything about it.
00:26:37.000 Yes, they were being woke.
00:26:38.000 Yes, they were being turned into communists.
00:26:40.000 I'll say it.
00:26:40.000 Yes, they were being destroyed.
00:26:42.000 Yes, you know, they were believing that you shouldn't even talk about God.
00:26:46.000 But his courage to talk about his faith and Jesus Christ as his savior, and then his courage to go on a campus, a college campus, and starting up not with tons of money, just a card table and a folding chair.
00:26:59.000 I mean, that kind of courage and to build a coalition that actually changed his impact the world.
00:27:06.000 Even though he's so much younger than me, he's a hero of mine.
00:27:09.000 And I just, and I'm kind of a role model.
00:27:12.000 And my family experienced, I was supposed to meet him the week after he was martyred.
00:27:19.000 I was doing a Zoom call with some of our investors.
00:27:24.000 And I said that shortly after he was assassinated, that he was martyred.
00:27:30.000 And one of the clients from the Seattle area put a post-it up and said he was not a martyr.
00:27:37.000 And I said, you know what?
00:27:38.000 We'll just agree to disagree on this.
00:27:41.000 And the guy jumped off of the feed, and then I'm pretty sure he had about $2 million.
00:27:48.000 And I think he moved the $2 million.
00:27:50.000 And I don't care.
00:27:52.000 When I watched, and something snapped in me.
00:27:56.000 When a money management company, you're trying not to alienate people and so forth.
00:28:00.000 And when they attempted the first time to assassinate Donald Trump, and I'm watching this rally with him, and he gets shot, and he jumps back up and he says, fight, fight, fight.
00:28:12.000 And my 10-year-old son says, Daddy, what's going to happen to this country?
00:28:16.000 And I thought, Mark, you've been a coward.
00:28:19.000 You haven't been taking a stand for what you really believe.
00:28:23.000 And I thought about Charlie.
00:28:26.000 And that day I made a post about that I supported Donald Trump.
00:28:30.000 He had my support.
00:28:31.000 And that I gave, I was going to give, and I did give $100,000 to Super PAC to help promote his presidency.
00:28:39.000 And that really opened up my voice to talk about such great men like Charlie that are just a strong stand for saving this country.
00:28:48.000 And it's not just a fight for the American dream for Charlie.
00:28:50.000 I think, and for me, it's a fight for Western culture and Western civilization.
00:28:56.000 Well, Mark, I mean, God bless you for your courage.
00:28:59.000 If we had more Titans of business and finance that had your courage, this would be a much better country.
00:29:06.000 So thank you for taking a stand.
00:29:08.000 And it seems like you're living up to some of the words of one of your heroes, Charlie Kirk, displayed at the halftime show last night, 304.
00:29:17.000 I want to honor God in all that I do.
00:29:19.000 I want to be a great husband, a great father.
00:29:22.000 I want to serve this country.
00:29:24.000 I want to try to continue to lead this movement and to speak truth and to never lie.
00:29:29.000 To stop thinking about yourself all the time and said, think about what you should do to help other people and to defend this country above yourself.
00:29:38.000 I'm so inspired.
00:29:39.000 This army of freedom fighters.
00:29:41.000 We're going to be around for the next 100, 200 years because we know in the end our ideas will win.
00:29:45.000 God should be the most important thing in your life.
00:29:48.000 But then beyond that, it's getting married, having children, building families.
00:29:52.000 My kids are my most important thing mother of my wife and my kids in our relationship to God touch three things.
00:29:56.000 And the more often that you choose the deep, the difficult, but the right path over the easy path is one that will reward you, your family, and this beautiful nation.
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00:31:45.000 You proved it was possible to take on the juggernaut.
00:31:48.000 You proved that the machine does not always win.
00:31:51.000 And yeah, maybe they got more viewers, but that's not the point, guys.
00:31:55.000 We probably, I'm just saying, 40 to 50 million people on a night where, you know, 125 to 127 million people are expected to have tuned in to that show.
00:32:07.000 And then you get 40 or 50, that's a shot across the bat.
00:32:10.000 That is literally earth-shattering, tectonic shifting kind of stuff.
00:32:15.000 So thank you again to everybody in this audience that spread the word, that tuned in, that changed the channel, and said, hey, we love our country and we love our God.
00:32:24.000 And that's okay.
00:32:25.000 There's no hate, no agenda.
00:32:26.000 We just wanted to watch something that reflected our values.
00:32:29.000 And so this is a day for you.
00:32:31.000 We basically devoted the whole show to it because I want everybody to understand what just happened.
00:32:36.000 It was that extreme, that important, that big.
00:32:39.000 Like, I don't know if you're going to be able to do it.
00:32:39.000 Yeah, well, it was just, it was classic.
00:32:42.000 It really is perpetuating Charlie's vision, not just in what he cared about, but in his ambition to try something really gutsy and on a very short turnaround time, as we learned.
00:32:56.000 Yes.
00:32:57.000 There was a lot of drama behind the scenes.
00:32:59.000 Like, oh, can we actually do this in the time span required?
00:33:01.000 And, you know, Charlie would bowl through all of that.
00:33:04.000 I love telling that story of when we put that Nebraska event together in six days.
00:33:10.000 And the similar deal here, they turned around the largest entertainment YouTube live stream that we've ever seen in a matter of weeks, essentially.
00:33:23.000 They took over a lot of the storyline from the NFL on basically the biggest public sporting event of the year.
00:33:31.000 We drank their milkshake, as they say in a movie.
00:33:34.000 I want to play one clip here for you.
00:33:36.000 And I feel like it's tied in.
00:33:38.000 It's a partner of the show Hillsdale, but like Charlie's favorite college.
00:33:43.000 And I think it ties into your personal story and what you're trying to do too.
00:33:46.000 So I'm going to play it here.
00:33:47.000 I think this should have been one of the top 10 ads according to Ad Week and whatever, you know, how they rate them all.
00:33:53.000 It was a beautiful spot from Hillsdale.
00:33:56.000 We played it in the All-American Halftime Show stream.
00:34:00.000 Check it out.
00:34:01.000 290.
00:34:01.000 It's a minute long, and then we'll have Mark react on the other side.
00:34:04.000 290.
00:34:05.000 I see him speak.
00:34:08.000 I see him lean.
00:34:11.000 What concrete steps can I take now in order to achieve the goal of doing my part to make America great again?
00:34:17.000 You should go to Hillsdale College, America's greatest college.
00:34:29.000 So I just, I listened to your podcast.
00:34:31.000 I'm taking Hillsdale online courses.
00:34:34.000 That's what I'm talking about.
00:34:35.000 I love it.
00:34:37.000 What should I leave?
00:34:40.000 How do I set my generation free?
00:34:44.000 I need to know.
00:34:47.000 How do I grow strong?
00:34:52.000 If I could learn like Charlie, I wanna learn.
00:34:55.000 I wanna learn.
00:34:56.000 I'm on pace to complete every single Hillsdale online course.
00:35:05.000 So that, this is a backstory on that.
00:35:07.000 It was a complete riff off of the Be Like Mike 1990s viral commercial.
00:35:13.000 And, you know, the folks over at Hillsdale think Charlie is like the MJ of Hillsdale, of learning, of, you know, he was proudly an autodidact.
00:35:22.000 He didn't go to school.
00:35:23.000 He learned all this stuff.
00:35:24.000 He took the classes.
00:35:25.000 He took it seriously.
00:35:26.000 And I wanted, I thought the tie-in made a lot of sense to me because you are somebody that is bringing all these people in saying, hey, you can actually live out the American dream.
00:35:36.000 You can do this.
00:35:36.000 You can be a victor, not a victim.
00:35:39.000 And that was a central core of Charlie's message.
00:35:41.000 Yeah, I think so.
00:35:42.000 I love this.
00:35:42.000 I love this clip, and it reminds me of, I talk about in the book that money can't make you happy, which is an odd thing for someone who is a money manager to say.
00:35:52.000 But when I was very young, I had one client with $5 million.
00:35:55.000 She was very miserable.
00:35:56.000 She was worried about the economy, worried about her money getting stolen, worried about everything.
00:36:01.000 And then I had another client with about $500,000, and she was just delightful. 0.96
00:36:05.000 She gave to charities.
00:36:06.000 She had great relationships.
00:36:08.000 And I said, well, my life at 25, when I discovered this, would be very diminished or maybe even wasted if I spent my whole life just helping people get more money, but it actually didn't make them happy.
00:36:21.000 And then I started on a journey.
00:36:24.000 Well, why doesn't it make people spend so much of their life trying to get more money?
00:36:28.000 Why doesn't it make them happy?
00:36:30.000 And the reason it doesn't make them happy is because it's temporary.
00:36:33.000 You know, you get something new, a new house, a new car, toyo, you just have a commercial.
00:36:38.000 Oh, what a feeling.
00:36:39.000 And it feels good for a little while.
00:36:41.000 But then you start comparing that to new things.
00:36:44.000 The new cell phone, the new laptop, the new bubble driver, the new pair of shoes.
00:36:49.000 And you're never going to have the most money.
00:36:52.000 You're never going to have the most power.
00:36:53.000 You're never going to have the most fame.
00:36:55.000 So, as a result, when you chase those things, and the default position for money is more money.
00:37:02.000 And that's why people end up speculating and gambling with their money.
00:37:05.000 And what I teach them to do in class is, let's discover a purpose and define a purpose that's more important than money itself.
00:37:14.000 And then once we have that purpose, people with the purpose live longer, they have better relationships.
00:37:18.000 They have better health.
00:37:21.000 They have more fulfilling lives.
00:37:23.000 I mean, purpose, there's a whole science, a brain science to purpose.
00:37:26.000 And there's no greater purpose than having a relationship with Jesus Christ.
00:37:31.000 And so I teach people how to define their purpose.
00:37:36.000 And then once you have your purpose, then let's talk about how you should invest your money to fulfill on that purpose.
00:37:42.000 And if people get it turned the other way around and twist it the other way around, then they end up gambling and hurting themselves, and money becomes a burden and not a blessing.
00:37:53.000 Yeah, well, and this was like, this is just to be clear to the folks at home, this is not some promotional spot, but I mean, we just want to talk to you because you are an embodiment of the American dream.
00:38:04.000 But if people do want to get involved in what you're doing, where do they go?
00:38:07.000 What do you offer?
00:38:08.000 I mean, you are a, I'm just going to say it.
00:38:12.000 You have been successful financially.
00:38:14.000 You've built a business.
00:38:15.000 You are living the American dream, but you offer purpose, or at least finding purpose.
00:38:21.000 You've seen it go bad and seen people do it right.
00:38:24.000 So how do people plug into what you're doing?
00:38:27.000 Yeah, thanks, Andrew.
00:38:28.000 Yeah, one thing is you can get my book.
00:38:30.000 It's called Experiencing the American Dream.
00:38:32.000 You can get it anywhere online.
00:38:34.000 You can also, if you like to listen, you can get it on Audible.
00:38:37.000 That's a great place to start.
00:38:39.000 I also have a two-day workshop called the American Dream Experience.
00:38:43.000 And in that workshop, we work people through something I call breakthrough thinking.
00:38:48.000 There's the things they know about investing.
00:38:50.000 There's things they don't know that they want to learn about.
00:38:54.000 But where the breakthrough thinking comes is in the area of where they don't know they don't know.
00:38:58.000 And we teach them that there is an academic, empirically tested way to invest money that eliminates gambling.
00:39:03.000 You get pretty technical, but you also kind of ask the more philosophical questions as well.
00:39:08.000 Yeah, and help break through the no-talk rule.
00:39:10.000 Most people have a no-talk rule about money.
00:39:12.000 And I created it for families.
00:39:14.000 So it's a two-day workshop where couples usually attend.
00:39:17.000 Sometimes they bring their kids if they're high school or above.
00:39:22.000 And we spend two days talking about money.
00:39:23.000 So many people just need that.
00:39:25.000 Yeah.
00:39:25.000 And it's a great time.
00:39:26.000 Yeah, no, that's huge.
00:39:28.000 I mean, money is kind of that no-go zone.
00:39:30.000 And so when you break that down and you invite people to go where they're not supposed to, like the forbidden fruit kind of thing, you know, I bet it's really a relief for a lot of people.
00:39:38.000 Mark Mattson, Mattson Money, you are living the American dream.
00:39:43.000 So God bless you.
00:39:44.000 Thanks for sharing that message and for your courage.
00:39:45.000 Thanks, bro.