The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story

00:00:00.160 Looking back from your position of wisdom, what do you have to say to the American public about your cookie advocacy?

00:00:06.040 I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in hamburger or steak prices.

00:00:12.420 The funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy.

00:00:15.320 I know. It appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe.

00:00:20.380 When I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged.

00:00:25.560 Maybe cauldron's not the right metaphor.

00:00:27.500 But I'm curious, I think that your political rebellion took a conservative form.

00:00:32.880 Yes, the non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned was what I call pre-woke, very much anti-colonialist, anti-Western, that we are the contaminants on the world, that we are polluting other tribes.

00:00:46.980 I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad I don't know how to recover exactly.

00:00:53.240 One of them was that.

00:00:57.500 Hello, everybody.

00:01:11.380 I'm talking to Charlie Kirk.

00:01:12.780 Charlie came out of nowhere 10 years ago and built the world's most influential organization of young conservatives, and he did that from scratch.

00:01:27.540 He did that by going to universities pretty much single-handedly, setting up card tables, offering to discuss and debate all the issues that weren't being discussed and debated in these places set up for exactly that reason.

00:01:42.580 And iterating as he grew, establishing conservative clubs on campuses all across the United States, building a grassroots organization, learning how to debate despite the fact that he hadn't gone to college, and actually playing the role on campus colleges that the professors in the classes were supposed to play.

00:02:07.460 And so, why watch my discussion with Charlie?

00:02:13.580 Well, to learn who he is, to listen to how he did this.

00:02:18.140 You know, he had a vision and a calling, and he found his way and made it spectacularly successful.

00:02:26.840 Well, he was still very young and has ended up playing a very significant cultural role, a transformative role that is by no means over.

00:02:38.080 And so, I think the podcast is interesting in and of itself because the story is so compelling.

00:02:43.360 But it also contains many lessons, you might say, for those who are searching for a productive, adventurous, romantic way forward.

00:02:56.660 So, join me in my discussion with Charlie Kirk, founder and leader of Turning Point USA, the world's largest conservative youth organization.

00:03:08.680 So, I've got a gotcha question for you.

00:03:11.040 Now, your warrant.

00:03:12.440 Okay.

00:03:12.740 Okay, so, you know that Robert F. Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, and I suppose Jay Bhattacharya, too, are all hands on deck to restore American health.

00:03:28.560 And that likely the biggest problem that's confronting us is insulin resistance.

00:03:36.220 I agree with that.

00:03:36.820 Too much, way too much sugar.

00:03:38.920 And obesity and all that goes along with it.

00:03:42.720 But insulin resistance, it's just devastating.

00:03:45.600 It makes you old.

00:03:46.280 It makes you diabetic.

00:03:47.460 It's terrible.

00:03:49.040 It interferes with your cognition.

00:03:51.180 It increases the probability that you'll get Alzheimer's.

00:03:53.980 And that's all linked to carbohydrate excess intake, right?

00:03:59.660 You agree with all that?

00:04:00.520 I agree with that.

00:04:01.300 Okay.

00:04:01.540 And yet, when you were in high school, one of the first things you did to begin your political career was agitate for a, what, reduction or stabilization of the price of cookies at the school?

00:04:12.660 We were against cookie inflation.

00:04:14.160 Yeah, so, looking back from your position of wisdom, 13, 14 years later, what do you have to say to the American public about cookie advocacy?

00:04:23.980 I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in the hamburger or steak prices.

00:04:31.600 You see, that would have been a much better health approach.

00:04:33.800 But all kidding aside, the funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy.

00:04:40.400 I know.

00:04:40.600 I know.

00:04:40.840 It is hilarious.

00:04:41.460 I kind of look back, you know, even, you know, just 13 years ago when, you know, cookie prices were the number one, you know, concern.

00:04:49.440 This was before DoorDash.

00:04:50.780 This was before all that.

00:04:51.480 And I look at these high school kids now, but they're able to order into high school.

00:04:55.560 They have entire cubby rooms of, like, half of the high school class that is just getting takeout.

00:04:59.580 So, in our high school in the suburbs of Chicago, the biggest thing was these basically homemade cookies that nearly tripled in price over the course of a year.

00:05:07.540 So, we started Students Against Cookie Inflation, which was a rather righteous effort, I might say.

00:05:12.600 How old were you?

00:05:14.180 I was, at that time, 16, 17 years old.

00:05:16.520 16.

00:05:17.160 And how much before that do you think your interest in the political developed?

00:05:23.620 I definitely had an interest.

00:05:25.020 First, I'd say I was really fascinated by American history, why we were a great country.

00:05:31.980 It was hard to not be politically oriented or opinionated based on the time that I grew up in.

00:05:38.740 Understand the time and place.

00:05:40.820 When I was in eighth grade, this guy named Barack Obama came onto the political scene from Chicago.

00:05:46.100 And everybody had an opinion about him.

00:05:48.000 In fact, he became—

00:05:48.780 Where were you at the time?

00:05:50.500 I was in the suburbs of Chicago.

00:05:51.660 Okay.

00:05:51.960 So, Wheeling, Arlington Heights area.

00:05:53.620 Yeah, okay.

00:05:54.040 And Obama was a homegrown, which he really wasn't, but he was, you know, a senator from Illinois.

00:05:59.120 A homegrown, almost quasi-messianic political figure.

00:06:02.480 I mean, you remember how it captured the nation times 10 in the Chicagoland area.

00:06:06.720 Remember, Obama did his victory speech in Grant Park in downtown Chicago.

00:06:11.640 That's where he celebrated his victory in 2008.

00:06:14.480 And so, it was just an all-encompassing, almost, you know, political moment where it was at very high social cost to be disagreeable with the rise of Obama in 2008.

00:06:27.820 And mind you, I was a seventh or eighth grader at the time, actually going into ninth grade.

00:06:31.620 And so, I decided at my very best to push back, oh, really, is he going to fulfill all these promises?

00:06:36.440 Is he really going to be able to bring utopia?

00:06:39.080 And admittedly, I was rather clumsy and shallow in my capacity to be able to articulate those beliefs.

00:06:43.960 But I had something in me that wanted to push back against the orthodoxy of the time.

00:06:50.760 Okay.

00:06:51.160 I met you, do you remember when we first met?

00:06:53.840 Was it 2016, 2017?

00:06:56.780 I think it might have been 17, 18.

00:06:57.820 I came to Toronto because I, and still to this day, this is correct, I was so moved by your lectures and your videos that they significantly changed my life.

00:07:08.200 And I really wanted to meet you more than anything else.

00:07:10.820 Yeah, yeah, well, I remember that.

00:07:11.640 You were kind enough to make time for that.

00:07:12.980 Yeah, well, I remember that meeting.

00:07:14.580 And I, you know, I remember trying to figure out who you were because of what you were doing and the fact that you had this remarkable organizational capacity.

00:07:24.080 But what I'm interested in now, you know, is what I'm very interested in trying to figure out what inclined you to take the path that you took.

00:07:36.220 Now, you said, okay, so you said Obama, but you said something else at the same time.

00:07:41.280 You said that you had been reading American history, okay, and that you were concerned with, interested in, and convinced by, I suppose, all of those.

00:07:52.920 This issue of what made America great.

00:07:56.080 Correct.

00:07:56.400 Okay, so now, well, so this is interesting and worth taking apart because for decades, certainly since the 60s, the typical pathway for someone young who was assessing the history of his or her country would have been to read it through a highly critical lens.

00:08:16.120 So, for example, I remember when I was 13 or 14, so that would have been mid-70s, I was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some of the so-called new journalists.

00:08:29.920 And they're not, they weren't of the left exactly the way you would conceptualize the left now.

00:08:36.260 They were more like radical literary figures, I would say.

00:08:40.420 But the mid-70s ethos certainly was to read history, sociology, critically.

00:08:52.760 And I don't mean you were being uncritical, I mean to take an anti-establishment stance.

00:08:58.900 Like in the 60s, that was all, well, anti-establishment, free love, the sexual revolution is coming, everyone's going to be free.

00:09:07.240 By the time the 70s came along, which was the milieu I was embedded in, all of the optimism of the 60s had pretty much vanished.

00:09:15.120 But all of the cynicism 100% remained.

00:09:19.740 Now, you, though, interestingly enough, in Chicago, and this would be mid-2000s, so quite a bit later.

00:09:26.000 It would be 2000 and 2009.

00:09:27.260 Right, right, near the end of the first decade of the 2000s.

00:09:31.560 You were reading American history.

00:09:34.600 And as you said, in the height of the Obama fervor.

00:09:39.480 Sure, sure, but your take was positive and patriotic.

00:09:45.940 Correct.

00:09:46.240 So why?

00:09:46.920 Why do you think that was?

00:09:48.080 Like, what do you think, what made you different?

00:09:50.340 Like, when I met you, you were very, I would say, relatively sheltered still and very, very straight-laced.

00:09:57.720 And from the Canadian perspective, you know, you were of the, it appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe, which we have some of in Alberta, not a lot.

00:10:12.360 It's not really a Canadian thing.

00:10:14.340 And so when I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's, that's the cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged.

00:10:24.160 Maybe cauldron is not the right metaphor.

00:10:26.140 But I'm curious, like, why do you think that your political rebellion took a conservative form when that isn't, it's not common for young people.

00:10:36.080 And it certainly wasn't the pattern of the time from, say, 1965 till, well, probably till about you, till about when you were adolescent.

00:10:45.660 So that's a phenomenal analysis and question.

00:10:48.500 Let me just add to it, the literature, the non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned in 6th, 7th, 8th grade was what I call pre-woke.

00:10:59.240 It was almost there.

00:11:01.180 And so it was, it was like books that come to mind is a book called, like, Things Fall Apart.

00:11:05.880 I don't know if you're familiar with this book.

00:11:07.080 Chinua Okabe, I think.

00:11:08.800 Yeah, exactly.

00:11:09.380 I think it was the main character was Okonkwo.

00:11:11.440 I could be wrong.

00:11:12.060 I'm just drawing from, like, 13, 14 years.

00:11:14.840 Basically, the entire premise of the book, based on my memory, is that there are these, this, you know, wonderful tribe, and they all get along in Africa, and these evil colonialists come in, and things fall apart, and there's internal strife.

00:11:27.140 And the end of the book is basically the summary of all of these relationships of these evil colonialists that say, and, you know, here's the history of just the under, you know, sub-Saharan Africa.

00:11:36.780 Basically dismissing all of the complexities and the beauties of, you know, this specific tribe.

00:11:41.800 Right, so it's kind of a testament to Rousseau, but it was written by an African, that book.

00:11:46.300 Correct, and I, again, I'm drawing from almost a decade old memory, but I remember the discussions we'd have in class were very much anti-colonialist, anti-Western, that we are the contaminants on the world, that we are polluting other tribes.

00:12:00.580 And again, mind you, we're in eighth or ninth grade discussing this, so I don't know what post-structuralism is or post-modernism is, but it was pre-woke.

00:12:09.340 We weren't quite there, though.

00:12:10.740 And so, from the historical standpoint, it was not 1619 Project, but it was, we're going to spend a whole month on slavery, and we're going to spend three days on the founding.

00:12:20.900 Right, and did you spend any of the time when you were studying slavery assessing the fact that the UK was the only country that's ever existed in the history of the world that spent, what, two centuries and a tremendous proportion of its treasury eradicating slavery around the world at the behest of Protestant Christians? 0.72

00:12:41.940 Correct.

00:12:42.160 Because that's the story.

00:12:43.540 And we, let me, I never remember knowing the name Wilberforce.

00:12:47.520 Wilberforce, yeah.

00:12:48.280 See, this is a very interesting thing.

00:12:49.900 You know, I actually didn't come across, this is so strange, but life is very strange.

00:12:55.920 I didn't come across the name Wilberforce until I was probably in my 40s.

00:13:00.180 Isn't that amazing?

00:13:00.760 It's beyond comprehension.

00:13:02.060 I didn't get to know him until the last five years.

00:13:05.400 Last five years.

00:13:06.540 Is that right, eh?

00:13:07.560 Even, is that right?

00:13:08.560 Even me, even in the political world.

00:13:10.380 Even in that milieu.

00:13:10.920 I might have heard it, but not until someone looked at me seriously and said, you have to study this guy.

00:13:15.420 This is a preacher.

00:13:16.180 This is a man of faith that led to the abolition of slavery probably in the entire-

00:13:20.720 Under impossible conditions.

00:13:21.960 Exactly.

00:13:22.460 Devoted his whole life to it.

00:13:24.180 And the link between that and the religious ideation is rock solid.

00:13:29.900 One to one.

00:13:30.480 It's one to one.

00:13:31.880 Absolutely.

00:13:32.320 And it's also the case that his ideas wouldn't have fallen on fertile ground, because they did relatively.

00:13:38.380 Like, when you can make a radical cultural shift in one lifetime, which is no time at all historically, you know that you're at the forefront of ideas whose time has come.

00:13:48.500 Yes.

00:13:48.700 And that was clearly the case for Wilberforce, and he certainly is one of those people who stood up against the greedy, self-centered, and malevolent ethos of his time.

00:14:02.560 But the UK swung around behind him impossibly rapidly, and then with their full might.

00:14:08.860 And it is, you know, I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad, I don't know how to recover exactly.

00:14:18.340 And one of them was that the public school system was set up by fascists on the Prussian military model.

00:14:24.320 I just, I've never been able to figure out exactly what to do with that.

00:14:28.460 They were literally trying to make thoughtless worker drones- 0.91

00:14:32.720 Desk workers.

00:14:33.500 Yeah.

00:14:34.080 That's what bureaucrat means.

00:14:35.360 Yeah.

00:14:35.640 Well, or factory workers.

00:14:37.480 That's right.

00:14:37.840 And what that in itself wasn't so bad, because the country was industrializing.

00:14:42.260 But right underneath that was the idea that while you were doing that, it was necessary to pretty much stamp out or fail to develop anything that would produce any kind of creative entrepreneurship.

00:14:52.600 It's like, okay, that's hard to swallow.

00:14:56.020 And then when I read about how the food pyramid was developed, that's just beyond comprehension.

00:15:01.680 I don't know if that's the worst crime ever committed in the United States, but it's up there. 0.90

00:15:08.360 And then this, the next mystery is, Wilberforce is another mystery of that magnitude.

00:15:13.620 And even, you might say, particularly on the left.

00:15:18.740 Correct.

00:15:18.920 It's like, okay, you guys, you're for the oppressed, which I don't buy for a second, but especially because I've watched in the last 10 years, the lefties sell out the poor worldwide to the climate apocalypse mongers.

00:15:33.300 And that's just been a catastrophe for places like Africa, like Bagat Wade has been so forthright in observing.

00:15:40.840 But the fact that slavery and reparations, all of that, the unfair founding of the United States has been a central dogma of the radical leftists.

00:15:55.340 They blame slavery on the West, and the fact that the radical types have control over the education system means that no one, even educated in a conservative milieu, knows who the hell Wilberforce was.

00:16:12.380 And I just don't know what to think about that.

00:16:14.700 Or Thaddeus Stevens, or the heroism of John Quincy Adams.

00:16:20.560 Those would be, you know, some main protagonist characters for the abolitionist slavery here in America.

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00:17:43.860 And so when I was in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, something in me, and I don't quite know, my parents, very patriotic, but not political.

00:17:52.260 Patriotic, but not political.

00:17:53.560 They're conservative, but we were not a political family.

00:17:56.400 Very patriotic.

00:17:58.020 Something in me desired to try to find the other side of the story,

00:18:01.780 to try to push back a little bit from the incessant narrative that was being built.

00:18:08.500 And I do want to make sure this is clear.

00:18:10.720 We were not yet at the place where the teachers were saying America was racist.

00:18:17.000 In fact, it was actually much more insidious than that.

00:18:19.100 And so even in 2008, that still wasn't occurring.

00:18:22.400 I could make, at least in my environment, I could make an argument, though,

00:18:26.640 that what they were doing when I was in high school is actually long-term much more effective

00:18:31.200 to create revolutionaries for the left than what they're doing now.

00:18:36.120 Because it really didn't warrant that much of a backlash.

00:18:38.980 It wasn't overly provocative.

00:18:41.480 They weren't saying to the white kids in class, 0.82

00:18:43.400 hey, go sit on this side of the class and black kids on this side of the class. 0.93

00:18:46.080 Yeah, well, those things always happen one tiny step at a time.

00:18:48.720 Of course, but when I was being schooled,

00:18:51.800 there was no parents showing up at school board meetings about critical race theory.

00:18:55.760 Now, these elements were laced throughout all of the curriculum.

00:18:58.700 Right, right, right.

00:18:59.260 And it took a very discerning eye.

00:19:01.560 And for whatever reason, how I was raised or just something in me,

00:19:06.180 around 10th or 11th grade, I asked the question.

00:19:08.600 I said, look, we have spent an entire month on slavery.

00:19:12.120 Totally get it.

00:19:13.200 Terrible thing.

00:19:13.920 But we spent so little time on the brilliance of the founders and what they've created

00:19:18.940 and the greatest political document in human history and what went into that.

00:19:24.460 And it was an under-emphasis on the heroism and the courage and the brilliance

00:19:28.180 and an over-emphasis on the evil and the tragedy and the horror

00:19:31.960 without even the redemption arc behind it.

00:19:35.460 Yeah, well, the thing that's so awful about that as far as I'm concerned

00:19:39.080 from the leftist perspective, let's say, is if you are concerned with the poor

00:19:45.600 and the oppressed, you know, and then you have to be discerning there 0.99

00:19:50.700 because there are people who are poor and oppressed as a consequence of their own idiocy. 0.95

00:19:56.080 And that's not so uncommon, as you know, in your own life by watching your pathway to failure. 0.97

00:20:02.400 So, but given that there are people who are unfortunate,

00:20:07.420 you'd think that the appropriate tack would be to determine who in history served them most effectively.

00:20:15.360 And I just can't see anyone you could possibly point to more effectively,

00:20:21.620 who did that more effectively than Wilberforce ever.

00:20:24.580 And so you would think that instead of erecting monuments to Lenin,

00:20:28.500 the leftists would erect monuments to Wilberforce.

00:20:31.740 But not only do they not do that, no one knows who the hell he was.

00:20:35.640 It is one of the greatest memory-holing of a hero in Western history.

00:20:40.640 I completely agree.

00:20:42.500 Why is it?

00:20:43.300 My hypothesis is he's Christian, is that you cannot highlight a man of faith

00:20:48.300 who did something with such valor and such significance.

00:20:52.360 It is at odds with almost every other fundamental narrative that they must try to present.

00:20:57.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:20:58.620 I think that's right, that it is fundamentally.

00:21:01.780 But that begs another question.

00:21:03.840 And that would be why, given that Wilberforce was clearly a force for the good

00:21:10.780 that Obama, for example, would have been pushing, right?

00:21:15.360 By which I mean movement towards a polity where there were no racial, 0.77

00:21:22.580 there was no racial or ethnic prejudice.

00:21:27.940 If Wilberforce is the poster boy for that sort of effort,

00:21:34.760 which if you understand his life and you read about it,

00:21:37.420 I can't see how you can conclude that,

00:21:40.080 then why would the lefties forego that

00:21:42.700 merely to oppose the fact that his motivation was fundamentally Christian?

00:21:49.200 Because that points to something deeper, right?

00:21:50.960 It points to the fact that the true war, so to speak, isn't political.

00:21:55.640 It's not left versus right.

00:21:57.500 It's something deeper.

00:21:59.340 And then if it is anti-Christian, then why?

00:22:04.220 Like, what does that mean?

00:22:05.720 Like, there's an enlightenment element there, right?

00:22:07.880 The enlightenment types, especially after the French Revolution,

00:22:11.220 generated this narrative that science and religion were radically opposed

00:22:17.680 and that if you were on the side of religion,

00:22:20.080 you were against clear, rational, logical thinking.

00:22:24.100 And so you could imagine a stream of anti-Christian sentiment

00:22:28.440 emerging on the rationalist side, right?

00:22:31.620 But it isn't obvious to me at all that the leftist types

00:22:35.860 who don't talk about Wilberforce are anti-Christian

00:22:39.580 because they're scientific rationalists.

00:22:41.780 Like, no.

00:22:42.660 No way.

00:22:42.960 All you have to do is talk to them for like 15 seconds

00:22:45.740 and you find out that that's not the case.

00:22:48.520 They might use those arguments from time to time,

00:22:50.820 but they certainly don't apply the rigors of scientific thinking

00:22:54.660 to their own radical hypotheses.

00:22:59.500 So it's deeper than that.

00:23:00.900 And so what is it exactly that they're objecting to?

00:23:05.560 Is it the fact that the more radical leftist story,

00:23:10.880 Marxist, let's say, is in its essence anti-Christian,

00:23:16.280 which I think is a fair statement,

00:23:17.860 but why would that be more important?

00:23:20.280 This is the strange thing.

00:23:21.880 Why would that be more important than serving the poor

00:23:25.160 and fighting for the abolition of slavery

00:23:28.760 and all of its associated prejudices?

00:23:30.900 Because it still doesn't get you out of the conundrum,

00:23:33.600 which is why, then why not Wilberforce?

00:23:36.180 Instead of tearing down statues, why not erect statues to him?

00:23:40.400 Yeah.

00:23:40.680 So, well, what do you, I know that's a hard thing to sort out,

00:23:45.520 but you got any?

00:23:46.660 Yeah.

00:23:46.860 Obviously, you were feeling something like this in high school.

00:23:50.280 That's correct.

00:23:50.700 You guys are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. 1.00

00:23:54.120 Correct.

00:23:54.580 Yeah.

00:23:54.920 Which baby, exactly?

00:23:56.740 So my initial thought is that the leftist types,

00:24:00.940 the ones that really understand it,

00:24:02.240 they do not seek to achieve what a Wilberforce-type figure would want,

00:24:07.860 which is actual liberation and actual eradication of evil.

00:24:11.740 Yeah.

00:24:12.080 I hate to say it.

00:24:12.900 I think they just want to be in charge.

00:24:14.180 Yeah, no, no.

00:24:14.960 I think, okay, so let's pivot on that for a minute.

00:24:19.200 Okay.

00:24:19.740 So, because this is a problem that's going to face the right, 0.99

00:24:23.680 and is already, and we can talk about that.

00:24:26.260 So, there are a group of people, 4% of the population,

00:24:31.780 and then there's still a fringe around that

00:24:33.920 that would maybe be another 5% where you'd have to take it seriously.

00:24:37.080 And so, they're, in the psychiatric diagnostic literature,

00:24:42.220 they fall under the cluster B heading.

00:24:45.100 Okay.

00:24:45.580 They're histrionic, which means they're dramatic,

00:24:49.860 and I suppose if they're healthy and histrionic,

00:24:52.840 then they become actors, right, and entertainers.

00:24:55.420 So, there's a positive spin on that.

00:24:57.720 But if they're negative histrionic,

00:24:59.980 they dramatize their pathology and use it as a weapon.

00:25:04.000 Okay.

00:25:04.580 They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status. 1.00

00:25:09.400 They're psychopathic, which means they're predatory parasites. 1.00

00:25:13.340 And they're antisocial, and that's just your standard criminal types. 1.00

00:25:16.720 So, that all fits in cluster B.

00:25:18.680 Then there's personality traits that go along with that.

00:25:22.200 Machiavellian.

00:25:22.680 Some, they use language not to convey information,

00:25:26.020 but to manipulate and to manipulate instrumentally for their own purposes.

00:25:32.740 So, if I'm speaking with you in a Machiavellian manner,

00:25:35.520 I have a goal in mind that has nothing to do with the words that I'm using.

00:25:39.940 You may have talked to journalists like that many times.

00:25:42.420 Many times.

00:25:42.940 Yes, many times.

00:25:43.820 Okay.

00:25:44.320 So, they're Machiavellian.

00:25:45.960 That's so well said. 0.98

00:25:47.120 They're narcissistic.

00:25:48.240 Again, that's an overlap. 1.00

00:25:50.160 They're psychopathic. 1.00

00:25:51.000 Oh, yes. 1.00

00:25:51.520 And on the personality side, that associates with sadism.

00:25:55.820 And so, all of that culminates in a personality style that has the proclivity to take positive

00:26:01.100 delight in the unnecessary suffering of others.

00:26:04.700 Okay.

00:26:04.840 So, now, those people, let's say they're 4% of the population.

00:26:10.300 Okay.

00:26:10.480 So, this is what they do.

00:26:12.220 Is they look for a story that's working.

00:26:15.800 Could be Christianity, Judaism, Marxism.

00:26:18.680 Could be conservatism.

00:26:20.100 Doesn't matter what the story is.

00:26:21.760 They look to see where it has purchase.

00:26:23.680 So, where the people who play that gamer have power.

00:26:28.980 They infiltrate that.

00:26:30.560 They advertise themselves as the vanguard of that movement.

00:26:34.280 And they do that for no other reason than to gain power.

00:26:38.960 Right.

00:26:39.520 And so, this is politically agnostic.

00:26:42.020 Now, they'll guise themselves in political cloaks.

00:26:45.840 And they'll learn all the tropes.

00:26:47.680 I mean, this sort of thing.

00:26:49.340 You can see this sort of thing emerging like mad on the right on Twitter, for example.

00:26:54.140 But it's certainly, it's been characteristic of the left for a long time, insofar as the left has power.

00:27:00.460 But, you know, you are the one who just said, I think they want power.

00:27:05.440 Yes.

00:27:05.580 That's part of that.

00:27:06.680 You know, in the biblical tradition, there's a battle always between the ethos that brings abundance.

00:27:15.060 So, that would be the miraculous provision of fish and bread and water that never exhausts itself.

00:27:22.680 That's all consequence of a particular kind of ethos, the one that Wilberforce embedded.

00:27:29.160 That's juxtaposed against usurpation, Luciferian usurpation of power.

00:27:37.040 Right.

00:27:37.340 That's the temptation that Christ has offered in the desert.

00:27:39.760 Right.

00:27:39.920 The third temptation is the temptation of power.

00:27:42.640 The whole world.

00:27:43.140 Yeah, that's right.

00:27:44.220 That's right.

00:27:44.760 That's right.

00:27:45.260 And one of the things that's, Moses is punished brutally by God for using power near the end of his.

00:27:51.940 And for thinking he has the power to actually make water come out of the rock.

00:27:55.300 Well, that it's dependent on him.

00:27:57.180 That's on him, not God.

00:27:58.240 Yeah.

00:27:58.680 Yeah.

00:27:59.600 Worse than that, not only on him, but on it, God tells him to invite with his words.

00:28:05.660 And he uses force and authority.

00:28:07.880 Right.

00:28:08.400 So, he doesn't enter the promised land.

00:28:10.000 So, that's a good indication of the danger of power, even when wielded by someone who is estimable.

00:28:17.500 Right.

00:28:17.720 Because you have to give Moses his due.

00:28:19.500 A lot of credit.

00:28:20.280 Right.

00:28:20.560 Well, exactly.

00:28:21.160 For dealing with that.

00:28:22.260 Yeah.

00:28:22.520 And then, of course, that's the temptation that's offered Christ.

00:28:25.300 So, I do think it's a power game.

00:28:28.020 Yes.

00:28:28.300 And then, there's a commandment not to use God's name in vain.

00:28:35.700 And then, there's the comments in the Gospels about the Pharisees, right?

00:28:38.760 The Pharisees are exactly the people who use religious terminology, so moral terminology, to cloak their power-seeking machinations, right?

00:28:51.620 And Christ goes after them.

00:28:52.760 I think the best account of that is in Matthew, where he tells them that they're like, it's pretty brutal, that they're like-

00:28:59.980 Broods of vipers.

00:29:01.120 Yeah.

00:29:01.460 Worse.

00:29:02.120 They're like graves full of rotting bodies that someone whitewashed, right?

00:29:07.160 And he says that if they would have, they're the people, had they been alive in the time of the prophets they purport to follow, they would have been part of the mob that would have killed them, right?

00:29:19.460 That's actually part of, you may know this, but that's part of what sets them up for the crucifixion.

00:29:23.400 Right.

00:29:23.540 Because they're not very happy with those insults publicly delivered.

00:29:26.840 But that shows you also how old the problem is.

00:29:29.160 So you can imagine one of the worst possible sins is to take the highest possible virtue, so that would be, well, we stand for the oppressed, we stand for the poor, and then to gerrymander that so that your standing for that only pushes you towards power.

00:29:47.100 That's right.

00:29:47.620 Right.

00:29:47.860 And so, and then it also, there's a clue in the Gospels, I think it's in the Gospels as well, about how you figure that out.

00:29:56.380 And the answer is, by their fruits, you will know them, right?

00:30:00.320 So you look at, well, what I've done is I've looked at the consequences, for example, of the green energy programs in Germany and the UK.

00:30:10.700 Well, what's the consequence?

00:30:12.020 Let's take Germany. 0.61

00:30:14.040 Germany pollutes far more per unit of energy than they did 10 years ago, and their energy prices are five times as high.

00:30:20.220 They're completely dependent on dictators of the worst sort.

00:30:24.080 Yes.

00:30:24.380 They continue to make the same mistakes.

00:30:26.880 They're deindustrializing very, very cataclysmically.

00:30:30.780 It's destabilizing their political environment, and that falls disproportionately on the poor.

00:30:37.360 I don't see a way around that analysis.

00:30:39.760 And nature worshiping is not anything new.

00:30:42.580 No, no, that's right.

00:30:44.280 Elijah, I mean, is that whole story is a manifestation of the nature worshipers versus the belief in God.

00:30:50.380 But back to just to reiterate a very profound point you made.

00:30:54.800 In evangelical circles, we get wrong, which is people think do not take the Lord's name in vain just to say do not say God in an expletive way.

00:31:02.860 It actually, the word is don't carry the name of the Lord in vain, meaning don't do actions in the name of God.

00:31:10.020 So you're exactly right.

00:31:11.220 And so people wear the costume of the holy, or they appropriate.

00:31:14.980 Well, that's exactly what Christ tells the Pharisees. 0.76

00:31:17.200 Literally, he says they wear the garbs of the priestly to elevate their moral status.

00:31:22.140 And this is what we believe is partially blasphemy in the Holy Spirit, which is to take all of the trappings of religion. 0.52

00:31:30.560 Oh, that's interesting.

00:31:31.500 And to do evil in that name.

00:31:33.680 We believe that is one of the, if not the most evil thing you could do.

00:31:36.040 So you think that's the transgression against, okay, so that's interesting.

00:31:39.640 So my psychological understanding of the idea of the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is what possesses your words when you truly aim up.

00:31:53.000 And this makes sense to me psychologically, because the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you spontaneously are directly related to the intent of your aim.

00:32:05.180 That's how you're, literally how your verbal mind works, your imagination as well.

00:32:12.400 You know, if you go on a date and you aim at sexual contact on the first date, the fantasies that come along with that aim will be of that nature, obviously.

00:32:23.740 And if you are on the hunt, so to speak, for a marital partner, the fantasies that accompany that will be quite different.

00:32:32.640 So this is literally how your imagination, it's also the case that, you know, it's the same idea with the date.

00:32:38.360 If it's short-term mating is your goal, which, by the way, is the goal of the dark tetrad types differentially.

00:32:47.020 So what that means is that the sexual revolution handed women over to the worst men.

00:32:53.200 That's right.

00:32:53.480 So that's fun to know.

00:32:54.600 But it's definitely the case that your aim determines what comes to mind.

00:32:58.200 Now, you said that that sin against the Holy Ghost, which is the unforgivable sin, is the sin that occurs when you use the Lord's name in vain.

00:33:09.680 So when you claim to be motivated by what's divine, but are actually serving the Luciferian spirit of usurpation of power.

00:33:19.220 It can be.

00:33:19.940 I mean, it's an open theological discussion.

00:33:21.960 Yeah, no, no, fair enough.

00:33:22.600 But I, and I take Dennis Prager's view of an Old Testament on this view, which is, think about how much, this is a great example.

00:33:29.620 Think about how much damage those evil priests did.

00:33:32.540 Oh, yeah.

00:33:33.220 That's a great example.

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00:34:33.740 Most of the people that I've spoken with who proclaim themselves to be atheists are atheists for two reasons.

00:34:40.900 And I mean the good faith atheists, let's say.

00:34:44.680 First of all, they tend to be tilted in the engineering cognition direction, so they're much more oriented towards things than people.

00:34:53.380 And that's a stable temperamental trait.

00:34:55.960 But they've almost all also invariably been hurt by someone or some institution that's claimed to be religious.

00:35:04.620 And then you could also see that obviously betraying someone in Dante's account of the Inferno, when he goes down to the bottom of hell, he finds the betrayers right next to Satan.

00:35:17.000 Yes, Judas, Crassus, and Brutus.

00:35:21.460 Right, right.

00:35:22.080 All three of them.

00:35:22.480 Okay, so the idea that—

00:35:23.720 And then the lake of ice, which is—

00:35:25.320 Right, that's where Satan is encased, right?

00:35:27.400 Because he's too brittle to move.

00:35:29.560 So the reason for that, I think, is that there isn't a more upsetting psychological phenomenon than being betrayed.

00:35:39.080 You stake yourself on someone, you trust them, they're now a foundation, they're part of the foundation of your life.

00:35:45.900 Completely.

00:35:46.660 So, and there's no worse form of betrayal than betrayal that's done in the name of the highest good, right?

00:35:52.100 Yes.

00:35:52.420 There can't be, obviously.

00:35:54.380 Yes.

00:35:54.680 Okay, so, all right, so I thought that sin against the Holy Ghost was something like rejection of the Abrahamic call.

00:36:05.360 You know, God comes to Abraham as the spirit of adventure.

00:36:08.680 He says, go out into the world, leave your zone of comfort, move away from your people, and have the terrible adventure of your life. 0.99

00:36:16.000 Well, if you reject that, you can't develop.

00:36:18.960 Yes.

00:36:19.440 Right, because you're rejecting the spirit of learning itself.

00:36:21.260 And think of how many young men are rejecting it every day.

00:36:23.880 Well, and what's terrible about that, this is something we could talk about, too.

00:36:27.580 I'm curious about your experience.

00:36:29.880 It's been my experience that it doesn't take that much encouragement for the people you're describing to be inspired to try.

00:36:42.980 Now, I've talked to thousands of young men now who've had that experience.

00:36:47.700 You know, like I see a lot of them at my lectures.

00:36:49.720 They come to the meet and greets, for example, and they tell me, it's great.

00:36:54.020 It's really great.

00:36:55.180 They tell me that, you know, five years ago, six years ago, because it's starting to be a long time now, eight years ago even, they were not in good shape.

00:37:03.580 And they came across my lectures or books and decided to, decided that there was something worth aiming for and then decided to try.

00:37:14.580 So to tell the truth, that's a very common vow, let's say, to take on more responsibility.

00:37:22.380 And they usually laugh about starting to make their bed or something like that, which is a lot less trivial than people think.

00:37:28.560 And then it's straightened about.

00:37:30.480 The terrible thing is how little encouragement that that actually took.

00:37:35.300 So why are people coming out to see you on campuses?

00:37:40.140 And what kind of response do you get from the people that you talk to?

00:37:43.560 The responses have been incredible.

00:37:44.820 First, the crowds alone, we're drawing crowds of 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people in the middle of the day just for me to debate a random college kid or a college professor.

00:37:54.500 It's remarkable.

00:37:54.760 Yeah, so walk me through one of those events, Charlie.

00:37:56.880 And so I've been doing that for a decade.

00:37:59.000 Just so I started, as we know, we started Turning Point USA.

00:38:03.140 One of the things I really wanted to make sure is that I was in touch with the target audience that I was trying to convince and trying to persuade.

00:38:10.120 No better way to do that than just go to the college campus itself, set up a card table with maybe a poster that says something like, I think government should be smaller, something like that, and start a discussion.

00:38:22.320 I would do this at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

00:38:24.860 I would do this at University of Illinois when we had almost no funding, no connections, no idea what I was doing.

00:38:29.940 Right, right.

00:38:30.700 I've always believed in the grassroots interaction.

00:38:33.660 Support your meet and greets.

00:38:34.560 No data, no chart, no abstraction can get to that personal human-to-human contact.

00:38:40.940 So I've been doing that for many years.

00:38:42.300 And then Steven Crowder, his credit, kind of popularized this idea of debating and putting it on.

00:38:48.200 I said, oh, well, I also filmed these interactions.

00:38:50.760 And so I started to do that around 2018.

00:38:53.140 So it's been about seven or eight years now.

00:38:55.700 And then 10 kids would show up and then 20 kids.

00:38:58.960 And we started to put these on the internet and kind of concurrent and simultaneous to your rise, where you diagnosed what was going on in the West quicker and more accurately than anybody else, especially with young men.

00:39:11.080 We started to see our popularity increase as we started to address some of the underlying problems that young people were facing, but in particular, young men were facing.

00:39:20.460 And then COVID happened.

00:39:21.820 We were basically out of business for a year in the sense where we weren't able to do campus activities.

00:39:26.840 Donald Trump was no longer in office, and we had to really kind of rebuild on campus basically about two years ago.

00:39:35.580 So let's just say the spring of 2023, things really started to change, where we would do these campus events prior, and we would bring in your traditional conservatives, 300 to 400 people, maybe 100 interested types, maybe 50 liberals, 500 students, call it a day.

00:39:52.460 That's a success.

00:39:53.280 All of a sudden, in 2023, we were drawing a different type of person and student.

00:39:58.440 First of all, we were drawing people outside of the campuses that were welders, electricians, and plumbers, and the working men that heard that we were in town.

00:40:05.560 How did they hear?

00:40:06.580 Social media.

00:40:07.800 Okay.

00:40:08.300 And so decentralized promotion, and so they would show up.

00:40:11.580 And I saw that.

00:40:12.180 I mean, these were guys that would go up to the question line, and they were not asking about Rousseau, or they were not asking about Jacques Derrida.

00:40:18.700 They were saying, how do I be a better person because I'm expecting a daughter in six months.

00:40:23.260 Oh, yeah.

00:40:23.660 Okay.

00:40:23.980 And all of a sudden, here I am, you know, not in the position where you are nearly as seasoned to give advice to that young man, but he's searching, and he's looking for anyone that seems to have an idea of how the world is supposed to work, that is professing a worldview of order and structure and discipline.

00:40:38.900 Something that he could do.

00:40:39.860 Yes, and then he was looking to me for advice, and that was a different dynamic.

00:40:43.940 Whereas prior, all the questions the last, you know, eight years before that were, hey, Charlie, what do you think about the tax rate?

00:40:49.140 What do you think about abortion?

00:40:50.140 Right, right.

00:40:50.300 And I still get a lot of that, but it was something different.

00:40:52.280 It was young men especially that were seeking purpose and seeking a destination.

00:40:56.340 So this is crucially important, this transformation, because one of the things that, so let's go back to that 60s dynamic, that anti-authoritarian 60s dynamic.

00:41:08.320 You know, the role of the left in the 60s was like an entrepreneurial progressive radicalism, let's say.

00:41:19.420 And the stance of the conservative was, well, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater guys.

00:41:29.980 And that's a pretty good dynamic, because you need a force for change, and you need a force that resists that.

00:41:35.380 But I think, you see, I think what the conservatives did wrong, like profoundly wrong, was that they were, their breaks, this is why they're always dismissed as reactionary,

00:41:46.700 their breaks, B-R-A-K-E-S, their breaks were fundamentally, they're also moralistic.

00:41:54.960 It was finger-wagging. 0.98

00:41:56.520 And this is something that was distasteful, let's say, especially about the hypocritical, evangelical, conservative types. 0.98

00:42:07.600 I agree with that. 0.94

00:42:08.180 Okay, so, but it was also strategically inappropriate, because it's very hard to say to young people,

00:42:15.380 who might tilt in the progressive direction, because they're a little more revolutionary in spirit, let's say,

00:42:20.300 or also a little more immature, that the reason that to abstain sexually, for example, is because you shouldn't do it.

00:42:29.840 Now, that's true, but it's a weak argument.

00:42:33.180 You know, I was talking to my wife this morning about this.

00:42:35.880 We'd been apart for a few days, and I saw her again yesterday, and I was very happy about that.

00:42:40.680 And she has a podcast, she's trying to reach out to young women, because they're just as in much, or more trouble than young men.

00:42:49.380 They're in more turmoil.

00:42:50.200 They're just harder to talk to by a lot.

00:42:52.120 But our discussion centered around the fact that it isn't that you should get married, although you should.

00:43:01.840 It's that there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good by any standard whatsoever, regardless of position of analysis or time length.

00:43:13.380 Anything you do other than that, even though marriage is very difficult, and every other alternative is far, far worse.

00:43:24.860 And so, if you want a pathway forward to what the conservatives support, the conservatives should be offering an invitation.

00:43:34.680 They shouldn't be moralizing.

00:43:36.240 And so, you're saying that they shouldn't even be political at the moment.

00:43:41.380 And I know you're a figure whose political activity is grounded in a religious substrate.

00:43:48.600 Right, that's right.

00:43:49.640 Shapiro is, of course, like that, too, and Dennis Prager.

00:43:52.200 Christianity is my foundation.

00:43:53.700 Right, right, right.

00:43:55.120 And so, now you're seeing that these young men who are coming, especially the working class types, they're not so interested in the political. 0.83

00:44:02.420 They're probably not even interested in the arguments, exactly.

00:44:05.380 They're looking for something else.

00:44:07.200 That's right.

00:44:07.780 They're looking for direction.

00:44:09.040 They're looking for connection.

00:44:10.860 They're also looking for validation that the way they're thinking and the way they're feeling is directionally correct.

00:44:19.040 That it's, and so what we-

00:44:21.000 Yeah, so that having a direction is correct, for example.

00:44:23.200 Yeah, exactly.

00:44:23.980 That not meandering through life.

00:44:26.800 Yeah.

00:44:27.580 Not having, you know, the aimless despair of walking in circles.

00:44:32.280 Yeah, not castrating yourself so your toxic masculinity vanishes. 0.62

00:44:36.480 Bingo. 0.92

00:44:36.880 Sometimes, literally, far too often now, literally.

00:44:40.360 Literally, they're chopping off parts.

00:44:41.800 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:44:42.760 And so, what we saw in 2023, and again, so I have to wear multiple hats.

00:44:47.660 Part of my hat is a political strategist.

00:44:49.620 Part of my hat is just trying to be a role model for young people.

00:44:52.340 Part of my hat is explaining these ideas to young people.

00:44:55.320 I kind of connected all the dots.

00:44:56.740 I said, 2024 is going to be a rebellion of the men of the West, unlike any that we've ever seen.

00:45:02.940 And I would say this to the experts, and they would dismiss it.

00:45:06.480 They said, no, no, no.

00:45:07.480 Roe versus, because Roe versus Wade got repealed, remember, that, either that summer or summer of 2022.

00:45:13.040 I can't remember.

00:45:13.720 It might have been, I think it might, irrelevant.

00:45:16.500 The point being is that Roe versus Wade was supposed to be the most important political issue of 2024,

00:45:21.440 and that women were going to rise up in major numbers. 0.98

00:45:23.620 I said, first of all, that might be true on one side of the sex spectrum.

00:45:29.080 On the other side, or binary, the other side, there is something happening with men that no one is talking about,

00:45:35.020 no one wants to acknowledge, no one wants to admit.

00:45:37.940 And so, separately, the Trump team, to their credit, believed in it and actually ran an explicitly masculine campaign

00:45:44.120 going on podcasts like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn.

00:45:47.280 And so, they were very much embracing this, to their credit.

00:45:50.120 But separately, we must diagnose, why is this happening?

00:45:54.720 And the education system, as you've astutely pointed out many times, is hyper-feminine.

00:46:00.160 There's no place for young men, especially young white men of a Christian. 0.99

00:46:04.000 I think it's one in four boys is now given an ADHD diagnosis.

00:46:08.860 It's something like that.

00:46:09.320 And even the New York Times has said this is for parents, not for kids.

00:46:12.220 Yeah.

00:46:12.660 Meaning this, there is no medicinal reason for this to happen, according to the New York Times.

00:46:17.120 Yeah, right.

00:46:17.980 So, you know things have gone particularly sideways when the New York Times did.

00:46:20.860 I encourage people to read this cover story.

00:46:22.940 It was unbelievable, where they were basically saying, after this major study,

00:46:27.200 that like 1% of the kids actually do need ADHD medication that are completely out of control.

00:46:32.360 But almost like 90% to 95% are just because the parents don't want to have an unruling kid around. 0.99

00:46:36.940 Yeah, or, well, and if that's the New York Times diagnosis, then you can also be absolutely 100% certain

00:46:44.360 that they underplay the role of the educational establishment in setting up the circumstances

00:46:49.720 so that parents are likely to draw that conclusion.

00:46:52.380 I mean, with all this trans-butchery nightmare, you know, my profession, particularly the social work end of it, 1.00

00:46:59.240 but my, like, real psychologists, let's say, were also stunningly craven in their unwillingness to resist this.

00:47:06.880 The mantra was to parents, well, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child? 0.95

00:47:12.120 Which there was never, Charlie, there was never a shred of evidence for that.

00:47:16.340 It's one of the most evil things that has happened.

00:47:18.300 It is unbelievable.

00:47:20.200 The people who promoted that should be imprisoned.

00:47:23.340 I agree.

00:47:23.700 It's absolutely brutal.

00:47:25.240 Spread and it's still in the fibers of the pediatric community.

00:47:29.260 Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

00:47:30.300 It really is.

00:47:30.940 That's for sure.

00:47:31.240 Well, the Supreme Court of the UK may have broken the back of that movement a week ago.

00:47:35.440 Remarkably.

00:47:35.920 That was unbelievable.

00:47:37.260 That was one of the most, now and then the Brits, God love them, do something quite radical in the right direction.

00:47:44.160 Like the Cass report, right?

00:47:44.520 You know, well, Brexit was a good example of that.

00:47:46.780 Oh, that's interesting.

00:47:47.520 They put through that free speech legislation that the Labour Party tried to rescind that has actually reshaped the universities

00:47:54.000 to some substantial degree.

00:47:55.900 That was in part a consequence of me being disinvited from Cambridge,

00:47:59.800 which had a long-term consequence that the disinviters hadn't really reckoned on

00:48:05.820 because a whole group of professors at Cambridge got together and decided that they were going to change the policies at Cambridge,

00:48:12.520 which they did in a historic vote, and then they changed the policies at the national level.

00:48:17.440 And the repercussions of that haven't stopped yet.

00:48:21.100 But, so yes, so this terrible demoralization, right?

00:48:26.200 So, all right, now you're being called, you're advertising on social media.

00:48:30.720 Let's go back and tell this whole story.

00:48:32.740 So, because I'm very curious about it.

00:48:34.620 So, you had an intuition that you could go to campuses.

00:48:40.960 Okay, so tell me how, where'd that idea come from, do you think?

00:48:44.460 Well, I never went to college, first of all, which is...

00:48:47.560 Right, you've been to many colleges.

00:48:48.840 I've been to more colleges than most people.

00:48:50.780 You might have me be, but I've been to well over 200 campuses across this country.

00:48:54.360 No, no, you've got me be.

00:48:55.640 Yeah, I mean, almost every college, yeah, you can imagine.

00:48:59.600 I can, I've either given a lecture, a speech, or started a chapter there.

00:49:03.060 Yeah, so my daughter doesn't have a university degree, so she started a university. 1.00

00:49:06.900 So, that's very comical, but this is good.

00:49:09.920 Okay, so, so that means you do have a university education.

00:49:13.000 You just got it a very different way.

00:49:14.500 That's right.

00:49:14.940 Okay, so, so you decided, that's interesting too, because it's like, I asked you what your

00:49:21.420 motivation for doing this was.

00:49:24.780 And the first thing you said was that you didn't have a degree.

00:49:27.280 So, that's very interesting.

00:49:28.640 So, so what, were you also curious about going to campuses?

00:49:32.580 Yes, and that's really a great point.

00:49:35.060 So, just as a little background, I wanted to go to West Point.

00:49:37.560 I didn't get in.

00:49:38.660 I told my parents I would take a gap year to kind of figure this out, because I saw some

00:49:42.700 momentum of a local political group that was out of the cookie group, by the way.

00:49:47.480 Okay.

00:49:48.180 That kind of kept growing.

00:49:49.220 I said, I want to keep this going and play this out, see where this can be.

00:49:52.460 This was after high school, just after high school.

00:49:54.460 That's correct.

00:49:55.040 That was the summer I graduated high school.

00:49:56.540 Okay.

00:49:56.840 A really amazing mentor, by the name of Bill Montgomery, may he rest in peace, was the

00:50:02.540 only guy ever, he said, Charlie, you shouldn't go to college.

00:50:05.640 I was like, that's the most radical thing someone could say.

00:50:07.960 So, that idea was planted in my head.

00:50:10.340 And I said, okay, I'll just take a gap year.

00:50:12.240 I'll kind of figure things out.

00:50:13.080 Why did he tell you that?

00:50:14.500 He thought, in his own words, he sent an entrepreneurial gift and skill that I had.

00:50:22.220 Right, I see.

00:50:22.520 And a drive.

00:50:23.420 He was kind of an entrepreneur himself.

00:50:24.980 Okay, so he could see the entrepreneurial path.

00:50:26.520 The entrepreneurial part of you.

00:50:27.300 And he didn't think that would work well in college.

00:50:29.220 Yeah, and he said, you have to go create.

00:50:31.240 Okay, fine.

00:50:31.880 Oh, good.

00:50:32.340 Oh, that was good.

00:50:33.100 Oh, I see.

00:50:33.860 You have to go build.

00:50:34.920 He said, you have something in you.

00:50:36.160 You have a drive.

00:50:36.880 You have a passion.

00:50:38.220 You have a relentless kind of spirit.

00:50:43.100 And he says, you shouldn't go to college.

00:50:45.220 And that was the most radical thing that a suburban kid in Chicago could hear, because everyone

00:50:49.440 would go to college.

00:50:50.000 Of course.

00:50:50.460 It's a mark of failure not to go to college.

00:50:53.340 Yeah, right.

00:50:53.840 And so not getting into West Point was very demoralizing.

00:50:57.620 However, it was the greatest gift ever from the Lord, because I took the gap year.

00:51:02.440 And to your credit, which is no one's ever put this together, all my friends were in college.

00:51:07.780 So I would start visiting my friends in colleges.

00:51:10.820 So you think about it, because I would go to high school.

00:51:12.700 I would graduate high school.

00:51:13.540 I still am friends with all my high school friends.

00:51:15.440 So I'd go to University of Iowa, University of Illinois to go visit them, Northwestern.

00:51:19.460 And I realized as I was trying to get this political thing off the ground, this is where

00:51:24.020 it all stemmed from.

00:51:25.800 And I was trying to put pieces together that the academy was where the fight needed to go

00:51:32.120 towards.

00:51:32.480 And simultaneously, as I was trying to find funding and trying to get donors behind our

00:51:37.960 effort, something that almost every wealthy person that I would encounter is they had

00:51:42.540 a soft spot and a interest in trying to invest in college campuses, especially conservative

00:51:48.700 leaning philanthropists and business types in America.

00:51:52.640 I think about 2012.

00:51:53.460 That's turned around to bite them pretty damn hard.

00:51:55.800 Oh, yeah.

00:51:56.060 But it would get their attention, right?

00:51:57.560 So here I would be at a cocktail party, and I'd be 18, 19 years old trying to get funding,

00:52:01.780 trying to get someone's attention.

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00:53:16.980 I said, well, I'm trying to bring conservatism to college campuses.

00:53:23.020 Oh, really?

00:53:23.740 And they would be sincere.

00:53:24.960 They would lean in.

00:53:25.460 Right, right, right.

00:53:26.080 They'd say, well, what about my alma mater?

00:53:27.380 Have you spoke there?

00:53:28.420 And so I'd have a little connection.

00:53:29.660 I'd say, well, maybe I could visit there if we have a little bit of money.

00:53:31.980 And so it helped.

00:53:33.220 So I had interest from the donor community.

00:53:35.060 So you could see that there was an opening there, a door that was opening.

00:53:37.720 And I had no idea how big that opening was.

00:53:40.160 And the more that I learned, some of these donors, as you would say, they'd give hundreds of millions

00:53:44.840 of dollars to these schools.

00:53:45.960 Yeah, right.

00:53:46.500 And so they had a lot of vested interest.

00:53:48.120 They were very curious about a young guy that wants to go shake up these campuses.

00:53:54.380 Because remember, that's when WOKE was really starting to come up.

00:53:57.020 Yeah.

00:53:57.380 13, 14, 15, we saw it bubble up.

00:53:59.480 That's for sure.

00:53:59.940 15 was, I think, the Pearl Harbor moment.

00:54:02.140 It was Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri, hands up, don't shoot.

00:54:05.980 That's where WOKE started to present itself in.

00:54:08.960 Oh, you'll have to tell me why you think that event was starting.

00:54:11.500 At least from the, because I think at the top of all,

00:54:14.840 WOKE elements, race was the primary, let's just say the primary fencing.

00:54:20.620 Yeah, it's the division point.

00:54:22.420 Correct.

00:54:22.860 And so in 2015, when Ferguson, Missouri, the lie, the scam of hands up, don't shoot

00:54:28.280 with Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter was born out of Ferguson, Missouri,

00:54:32.840 actually on a college campus at University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.

00:54:37.120 And that spread like wildfire through, of course, a lot of Democrat operatives and

00:54:40.920 money being spent.

00:54:42.080 Remember how long we spent on that news cycle of America's racist because of Michael Brown

00:54:47.380 and all the CNN commentators famously said, hands up and don't shoot.

00:54:50.820 And we spent more time on race obsession in the last two years of Obama's presidency than

00:54:58.100 the last four or five years prior.

00:55:00.200 And that's because-

00:55:00.860 Well, that's a hallmark of the danger of allowing race to be an issue in the presidency to begin

00:55:08.420 with.

00:55:08.640 Exactly.

00:55:09.320 But an underappreciated element here is Eric Holder was setting the table for that with

00:55:14.880 very loyal people in the Department of Justice that believed that police were inherently racist.

00:55:19.780 Right.

00:55:20.240 They were launching investigations into very successful police departments trying to find

00:55:25.140 police brutality and racial bias.

00:55:27.840 And so the table was set.

00:55:29.340 And that was the mini George Floyd moment of the beginning of Woe.

00:55:32.740 Well, and you know, psychologists played a role in that in a major way too, because

00:55:36.540 you had Banaji and her crowd-

00:55:40.460 Oh, yeah.

00:55:40.780 With the, what do they call that?

00:55:42.680 The implicit association test-

00:55:45.880 Completely.

00:55:46.620 Reforcing the idea of implicit bias, you know, and social psychology is a very corrupt discipline

00:55:53.660 and it has been maybe from its onset and it's very, it's stacked from top to bottom with

00:56:02.580 careerists.

00:56:03.960 And it was social psychologists, for example, who denied that there was anything, any such

00:56:09.000 thing as left-wing authoritarianism until 2017.

00:56:15.200 Right.

00:56:15.920 You just, that was something you didn't get to think if you were a social psychologist

00:56:19.740 or even investigate.

00:56:21.020 We cracked that.

00:56:22.160 There was a couple of people working on it around 2016.

00:56:25.240 The last bit of research I did was on left-wing authoritarianism and then everything, my lab

00:56:30.520 blew up, you know, it just became impossible for me to continue.

00:56:33.700 But, so that dovetailed with this insistence that people were looking at the world through

00:56:41.020 a lens that was irremediably biased in terms of their privilege and their racial and ethnic

00:56:48.300 identity.

00:56:49.840 And, you know, and it's tricky because people do have a tilt in the ethnocentric direction,

00:56:56.260 right?

00:56:56.620 Because, well, how about because you favor your family, right?

00:57:00.840 You tend to favor the local.

00:57:02.280 You also tend to favor the non-novel.

00:57:05.480 And the familiar.

00:57:06.360 Well, exactly.

00:57:07.260 And now there are exceptions to that.

00:57:08.940 Well, you see this in the Old Testament accounts because sometimes the foreigner is the best thing 1.00

00:57:13.060 that ever happened.

00:57:14.220 So that would be like Jethro in the story of Moses, Moses' father-in-law.

00:57:18.240 Or Midian.

00:57:19.140 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:57:20.660 And so, and then you have the alternative that would be like Jezebel, who's the foreign devil, 0.95

00:57:25.360 so to speak.

00:57:25.800 Of course.

00:57:26.100 And so, you know, that's a paradox that's very difficult to properly navigate.

00:57:32.580 Okay.

00:57:32.920 So, yeah, it's 2015, 2016.

00:57:36.260 Things went like seriously sideways.

00:57:38.200 And that's where, just to complete the point, my job on campuses became far more interesting

00:57:43.260 because our organization shifted from primarily, you know, economic discussions of Marxism and

00:57:50.120 capitalism to core cultural hotbed topics in 15, 16, 17, race.

00:57:55.700 And then, of course, the next layer, gender, transgenderism.

00:57:59.580 So the beast that Betty Friedan and Judith Butler raised, that monster reared its head with 0.78

00:58:07.120 incredible ferocity in 16 and 17 in the academy.

00:58:11.640 And people don't believe it when I say this.

00:58:13.320 I saw this happen.

00:58:14.540 No, it's okay.

00:58:14.880 Just really quick.

00:58:15.740 In 2012, 2013, there was almost no transgender anything on these campuses.

00:58:21.020 It didn't exist.

00:58:21.920 I could tell you, I went to these campuses.

00:58:23.440 I talked to these students.

00:58:24.580 You might have a, you know, an effeminate looking guy maybe wearing a dress as a joke.

00:58:28.240 It was not anywhere.

00:58:29.500 The social contagion within five years was dramatic.

00:58:33.280 Yeah.

00:58:33.300 It was a different place.

00:58:35.320 You went from just, you know, okay, you are who you are to, you're not going to use my

00:58:40.220 pronouns, hyper-tyrannical, hyper-authoritarian.

00:58:43.760 So then here we are, a five-year-old organization with, you know, a growing infrastructure and a

00:58:49.020 growing presence and a growing staffing, you know, organization.

00:58:54.580 And we multiplied significantly because then the donor types, like, hold on, what happened

00:58:59.660 to my alma mater?

00:59:00.820 Why is it that they're burning down UC Berkeley?

00:59:02.920 Remember, Milo Yiannopoulos went to University of California, Berkeley in the spring of 17

00:59:07.060 and they burnt the whole place down.

00:59:08.700 Ben Shapiro very similarly.

00:59:10.420 And so we then found ourselves accidentally or through serendipity on the front lines of

00:59:17.360 the American culture war.

00:59:18.780 Yeah.

00:59:19.040 Well, there's a lot of that that's not accidental.

00:59:22.060 You know, you think about the way that you told your story.

00:59:25.480 I mean, it's improbable, but you were of the temperamental type.

00:59:33.240 That's that strange blend of entrepreneurial temperament and conservative temperament.

00:59:38.960 Those things don't generally go together, right?

00:59:42.000 The conservative temperament, you could accept the libertarians because they're probably the

00:59:47.220 entrepreneurial conservatives.

00:59:48.200 And growing up, I actually was more libertarian.

00:59:51.000 It's very interesting to say that.

00:59:52.060 Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

00:59:52.740 Well, that's where the entrepreneurial conservatives hang out is with the libertarians.

00:59:56.200 That's right.

00:59:56.660 Right.

00:59:56.960 And they have an uneasy alliance with the-

00:59:59.560 It's a great point.

01:00:00.080 Mm-hmm.

01:00:00.480 Okay.

01:00:00.740 It really is.

01:00:01.020 Okay, and so that temperamental factor was already operating at you in high school.

01:00:07.420 And then you didn't get into West Point, you said, but you were interested in universities

01:00:11.440 and you obviously had the intelligence to manage them.

01:00:14.120 And so, you know, it's very useful to develop an idiosyncratic pathway forward if you have

01:00:21.160 the IQ horsepower to manage it because it makes you unique if you could do that.

01:00:25.520 So, okay.

01:00:26.100 And so you had a mentor who told you that it's probably best for you not to go to college

01:00:30.560 because you have an entrepreneurial bent.

01:00:32.640 Now you're trying to build a political organization, but you're not exactly sure how.

01:00:37.060 You're visiting the campuses and you have friends there and you see that there's an opportunity

01:00:42.040 to talk on campuses where you can also get an education in doing that, but also that there's

01:00:48.900 donor interest.

01:00:50.020 And that's very interesting too, because if you're a good entrepreneur, one of the things

01:00:53.960 you do is you go talk to your marketplace always.

01:00:57.420 That's the grassroots things, but also with regards to fundraisers.

01:01:00.180 And you see, you offer like 10 ideas, all of which you're interested in, and you see

01:01:05.760 where the door opens.

01:01:06.660 That's knocking, right?

01:01:07.420 Exactly right.

01:01:08.120 So you saw that there were these people who wanted to support the education of young people,

01:01:13.120 but who could see that their money was being counterproductively spent.

01:01:19.160 To say the least.

01:01:20.180 Well, leave large piles of money laying around unguarded and see who comes in first to take

01:01:27.020 it.

01:01:27.660 Right, right.

01:01:29.040 That's that parasitical type.

01:01:31.280 That's right.

01:01:31.620 They'll swarm in there like mad.

01:01:33.440 That's happened in all the foundations.

01:01:34.320 And they gravitate to the universities.

01:01:35.660 Yeah, well, it's the same phenomenon that we talked about earlier.

01:01:38.320 That cluster B, narcissistic, dark tetrad, 4% of the population. 0.98

01:01:43.980 They're looking around to see where, what would you say, inhabitable carcasses are lying around

01:01:51.700 unintent.

01:01:52.360 And they're disproportionately represented at the academy.

01:01:54.980 That 4% might be 40% of the administrators or the professor types.

01:02:01.020 Because think about it.

01:02:01.540 Yeah, well, increasingly that became the case.

01:02:03.200 Because they might be saying something to that target audience, the student, but they

01:02:06.620 actually want to see that student become a leftist.

01:02:08.720 Everything, there's a lot of Machiavellian influences in how these professors present

01:02:13.920 their ideas.

01:02:14.580 Yeah, well, it's also the case that it was the Machiavellian administration.

01:02:19.480 So what happened at the university, I watched this, is that the administration encroached.

01:02:27.340 And that's not surprising because there was money at a foot.

01:02:30.980 So why wouldn't there be competition for the funding?

01:02:33.160 So the administrators, who are generally failed faculty, by the way, failed and embittered

01:02:39.560 faculty.

01:02:40.880 So the faculty are already embittered because they're not rich like investment bankers.

01:02:44.720 And then you take embittered faculty members who couldn't make it as faculty.

01:02:48.280 Perfectly said.

01:02:49.080 So now they encroach on the faculty who are too busy doing their job and too apolitical and

01:02:56.620 also too willfully blind to notice the administration encroaches decision by decision until they radically

01:03:05.680 outnumber the professors.

01:03:07.660 And that's pretty much fait accompli by 2005, I would say.

01:03:13.400 And then the woke mob took over the administration.

01:03:15.500 That's right.

01:03:15.900 And that took no time at all.

01:03:17.660 Right.

01:03:18.020 And so now that's where we're at in the universities.

01:03:20.000 And I can't see how that would be reversed.

01:03:22.220 It cannot be.

01:03:22.520 Okay, so now you, tell me how you started going to campuses and what you did to begin

01:03:28.580 with and how you got away with it.

01:03:31.080 So the first person who wrote us a check was a guy by the name of Foster Fries.

01:03:34.700 May he also rest in peace.

01:03:36.540 Amazing philanthropist.

01:03:38.140 I met him very early on.

01:03:40.580 I decided to go to the Republican National Convention in 2012 in pursuit of finding donors.

01:03:45.160 This was August after I graduated high school.

01:03:47.200 And I just had this idea to try to bring the conservative agenda to young people,

01:03:54.180 to the next generation.

01:03:55.240 I met him in a stairwell at the Republican National Convention.

01:03:58.120 I gave him a stairwell pitch.

01:03:59.420 And to your point, which is exactly right, I kind of presented four or five things really quickly.

01:04:03.780 Yeah.

01:04:03.940 No one trained it.

01:04:04.820 No one, I just kind of instinctively, I said, well, here's five ideas that I have.

01:04:08.400 He laughed.

01:04:09.040 He chuckled, gave me his business card.

01:04:10.400 He said, be in touch.

01:04:11.360 Send me 10,000 bucks the next week.

01:04:13.240 That was like $10 million.

01:04:15.640 How did you know that there was such a thing as finding donors?

01:04:19.540 And what do you think it was that set you up to have the gall to assume you could do,

01:04:26.300 first of all, to know that that was a thing, and then to have the gall to pursue it?

01:04:31.880 The second one, I don't know.

01:04:33.200 I don't know where I got the gall to pursue it.

01:04:35.440 I will say Bill Montgomery, being a mentor of mine, was very encouraging towards me.

01:04:41.240 Okay, okay.

01:04:41.940 So you add someone encouraging.

01:04:43.460 Yes.

01:04:45.500 And you said he saw something in you.

01:04:47.300 Yes.

01:04:47.700 And he was an entrepreneur.

01:04:49.420 Yes.

01:04:49.720 And he never asked for anything from me, which was very unique.

01:04:52.580 It wasn't like he was trying to have some agenda.

01:04:55.540 He was 72 years old.

01:04:56.220 So you had a mentor.

01:04:57.460 Yes.

01:04:57.680 Which you desperately need as a young person, definitely.

01:05:00.100 And someone who believes that you can do it.

01:05:02.280 And you think about it, you're 18 years old.

01:05:04.080 You don't know how to cash checks.

01:05:06.180 You don't know.

01:05:06.940 You barely know how to put on a tie.

01:05:08.140 Literally, I didn't know how to tie a tie for the first two years at Turning Point.

01:05:11.760 And again, my parents are phenomenal.

01:05:13.760 And they deserve a lot of credit.

01:05:15.480 But this was kind of beyond the upbringing where an external mentor comes in and kind of points you and says,

01:05:23.380 hey, I think you're really good at this, found a skill, identified a skill, and kind of molded me in that direction.

01:05:30.180 You know that young male elephants go mad if there's no old male elephant to butt heads with them.

01:05:36.320 That's very well documented.

01:05:37.280 That's very apropos for Republicans.

01:05:38.840 Yeah, right.

01:05:39.360 Exactly.

01:05:39.940 Exactly.

01:05:40.560 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

01:05:41.660 So.

01:05:42.060 Yeah, yeah.

01:05:42.700 But it was, I'm a quick learner.

01:05:44.700 I'm a quick study.

01:05:45.960 And so I started to do research.

01:05:47.380 I said, well, are there things such as external nonprofit political organizations?

01:05:52.080 Oh, there's a 501c3 or there's a 501c4.

01:05:55.220 And you can raise money.

01:05:56.580 And so the first couple months was me actually learning, what am I building?

01:06:00.820 Am I building?

01:06:01.260 Okay, so you were training as an administrator and a manager then, too.

01:06:04.200 I was everything for the first and foremost.

01:06:05.580 Yeah, of course.

01:06:06.260 I was CEO, I was janitor, I was everything.

01:06:09.700 Yeah.

01:06:09.960 And so I had to make a decision.

01:06:11.660 Of course, I asked for advice.

01:06:13.120 Am I going to start a for-profit company?

01:06:14.920 Am I doing a non-profit?

01:06:15.700 And we decided on nonprofit, largely because we believed that there was an untapped pool

01:06:21.100 of philanthropic dollars that wanted to see these campuses challenged and disrupted.

01:06:27.420 How did you figure that out?

01:06:30.020 Having a lot of conversations with a lot of wealthy people.

01:06:32.860 And I realized that there.

01:06:33.920 Okay, okay.

01:06:34.520 So if you talk to a donor type, they'll have two different ways of deploying capital in

01:06:40.040 their after years.

01:06:41.560 The first of which is investment, which comes with strict return on investment requirements.

01:06:46.140 And they look at that as, hey, I need to make sure that this money is stewarded and shepherd

01:06:50.420 and eventually I get an ROI.

01:06:51.960 Right, right.

01:06:52.480 The second bucket is philanthropy, where they actually aren't looking for a material or a

01:06:56.940 monetary ROI.

01:06:57.980 They're looking for a cultural or a macro ROI.

01:07:00.440 And those sometimes are in donor-advised funds or they're in 501c3 type categories.

01:07:05.820 And we saw a lot of amazing patriotic donors that stepped up and said, hey, I have done

01:07:11.700 very well in my business.

01:07:13.240 And this is what I found.

01:07:14.400 And I connected the dots.

01:07:15.380 They said, I have this money sitting around that I pledged to Yale.

01:07:19.020 Right.

01:07:19.380 A million bucks a year, and I'd hate not to give it to them.

01:07:22.360 Is there some other better idea?

01:07:23.880 What we found was so many conservative donors that had a lot of money, but not a lot of

01:07:28.720 great ideas of where to deploy that 501c3.

01:07:30.440 You think about it, the predominant amount of 501c3s in the educational space are left

01:07:36.840 wing.

01:07:37.280 All of them.

01:07:38.000 Right, exactly.

01:07:38.760 So here I am.

01:07:39.380 I'm kind of this new disruptive force.

01:07:42.600 And they say, okay, I'm not going to give them the money I give to Yale, but I'll give

01:07:45.480 him 50 grand a year, kind of see how he does.

01:07:47.280 Right, right, right.

01:07:48.140 And so we started to earn the trust of a lot of donors and earn the trust of a lot of

01:07:51.560 philanthropists.

01:07:52.520 Okay, okay.

01:07:53.240 So now you're going out on campuses.

01:07:55.280 Do you remember the first time you did this?

01:07:56.940 Oh, yeah.

01:07:57.260 University of Wisconsin-Madison.

01:07:58.540 Okay, tell me about that.

01:07:59.680 I drove up there.

01:08:00.580 We had a singular student.

01:08:01.840 Who's we?

01:08:03.260 Well, we being like, actually, Bill Montgomery came with me to that one, but he kind of just

01:08:08.420 was in the shadows.

01:08:09.520 I literally had a card table that I brought from my parents' house and set it up right

01:08:15.560 there on the campus, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

01:08:17.740 I think I still have a picture of this. 0.96

01:08:19.360 And I had some sign that said, big government sucks, you know, a little provocative. 0.96

01:08:23.060 Yeah. 0.95

01:08:23.340 And I sat there at a chair, and I think a student would come up maybe once every 15 minutes.

01:08:28.680 And I was there trying to solicit to try to get a chapter started there at University of

01:08:32.440 Wisconsin-Madison.

01:08:33.340 And that was a turning point chapter.

01:08:35.440 That's right.

01:08:35.900 Correct.

01:08:36.100 So this was partly a recruitment drive as well.

01:08:38.500 It was a recruitment drive, and to see if there was any interest.

01:08:41.180 So it's a new year, 2025, and you're thinking, how am I going to make this year different?

01:08:46.500 How am I going to build something for myself?

01:08:48.280 I'm dying to be my own boss, or see if I can turn that business idea I've been kicking

01:08:51.860 around into a reality, but I don't know how to make it happen.

01:08:54.740 Well, Shopify is how you're going to make it happen.

01:08:57.080 And let me tell you how.

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01:09:22.020 Well, what happens if you don't act now?

01:09:23.500 Will you regret it?

01:09:24.420 What if someone beats you to the idea?

01:09:26.080 Don't kick yourself when you hear this again in a year because you didn't do anything now.

01:09:29.660 Established in 2025 really has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

01:09:32.520 Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp.

01:09:37.140 That is all lowercase.

01:09:38.340 Head over to shopify.com slash jbp to start selling with Shopify today.

01:09:42.820 Again, that's shopify.com slash jbp.

01:09:47.800 Kristen, also to try to, and I, to be perfectly honest, I love the debate.

01:09:52.540 I love the exploration of ideas.

01:09:54.520 I think dialogue is a gift given to us by God.

01:09:57.500 I really, in the pursuit of truth and, you know, being able to debate some of these

01:10:02.220 college kids was really life-giving.

01:10:04.400 It was exhilarating to me as a 19-year-old.

01:10:05.940 Well, that is a university education.

01:10:07.900 That's what it should be.

01:10:08.720 That's a Socratic education. 0.95

01:10:09.460 Right?

01:10:09.780 Sure.

01:10:10.320 Sure.

01:10:10.760 Well, and there is historical precedent for what you're doing.

01:10:13.520 I mean, I remember, for example, outside the building I worked with at the University

01:10:20.760 of Toronto, there was quite frequently a card table set up, and it was the bloody communists 0.92

01:10:26.440 that were at the back of that. 0.57

01:10:27.720 That's what was so funny.

01:10:28.680 Very rarely is it our side that does this.

01:10:30.860 Yeah.

01:10:31.200 And there's an element here that I think you've touched, you've gone around the edges on that

01:10:35.140 I want to dive into.

01:10:35.980 I was viewed as unseemly by the conservative establishment because the conservative way

01:10:42.300 of doing things, it's not to go set up a card table.

01:10:44.840 No, definitely not.

01:10:45.780 It was to speak properly and to go to Stanford and to get the highest possible education.

01:10:52.040 And what I was unknowingly on the cutting edge of was something you mentioned earlier,

01:10:56.200 is that conservatives have now become low trust of institutions and liberals have become

01:11:01.000 high trust of institutions.

01:11:02.380 Whereas liberals are the ones that will defend the FDA, and they'll defend the CDC, and they'll

01:11:07.260 defend Pfizer, and they'll defend the intelligence.

01:11:10.160 Defending Pfizer, that's really-

01:11:11.720 But they will, because they're high trust of institutions.

01:11:14.080 Because there's no one more trustworthy from a leftist perspective than big pharma.

01:11:19.380 But they find themselves defending institutions.

01:11:22.320 In the 1960s, they were low, low, low, low trust of institutions.

01:11:26.100 Don't send us to war.

01:11:28.320 Whereas today, actually, and I was on the cutting edge of this, was-

01:11:32.380 In 2012, 2013, 2014, conservatives were still on the high trust of institutions.

01:11:37.020 Okay, so let me rephrase that slightly.

01:11:39.300 Please, yeah.

01:11:39.580 Well, because there's a real-

01:11:40.440 But you understand what I'm trying to communicate.

01:11:41.500 I do, I do, I do.

01:11:41.940 Well, there's a real conundrum there, because a conservative with low trust in institutions

01:11:46.280 is like an-

01:11:47.040 Is it still a conservative? 0.99

01:11:47.400 Moron, right? 0.99

01:11:48.380 Well, but that- 0.97

01:11:49.460 But we're trying to conserve something institutions have destroyed.

01:11:51.960 Well, okay, that's the thing.

01:11:53.540 So imagine that there's a hierarchy of institution.

01:11:56.220 There's the fringe of the institution that's pretty exploratory.

01:11:58.880 You can move into the center that's more conservative.

01:12:01.740 Then you can move right to the bottom, which is, well, what?

01:12:04.680 Well, I would say it's religious, fundamentally.

01:12:08.060 Like, as you move towards the core-

01:12:10.080 That's right.

01:12:10.420 You move towards what's more religious.

01:12:12.380 And so the conservative stance isn't anti-institution.

01:12:16.120 It's a stance that notes that, I know what's happened.

01:12:21.060 You know, in the story of Moses, when Moses goes off to get the commandments, so he's the

01:12:25.740 pipeline to God, right?

01:12:27.060 He leaves his brother in charge, Aaron.

01:12:29.320 They do, they have a rave party.

01:12:30.880 That's exactly right.

01:12:31.860 They make this golden calf, which is a materialistic object, and they dance naked in the streets 0.98

01:12:36.700 and have an orgy.

01:12:37.560 And that's what happens to the political when it's detached from the sacred, when it loses 0.97

01:12:42.060 that-

01:12:42.500 Okay, so it isn't that the conservatives have become skeptical of institutions.

01:12:47.640 It's that the conservatives have noted that the institutions no longer serve the purpose

01:12:53.140 for which they were established.

01:12:55.280 Chartered.

01:12:55.920 Chartered, exactly.

01:12:57.300 And they're objecting.

01:12:58.140 And that's happening everywhere.

01:12:59.620 And that's part of this radical secularization.

01:13:02.980 Yes.

01:13:03.280 It's not just secularization, because there should be a separation between church and state,

01:13:08.380 let's say.

01:13:08.780 It's not that the institutions have become secular.

01:13:12.680 It's that they've turned 180 degrees from their original orientation and are now rampaging

01:13:18.200 as madly as possible in the other direction.

01:13:20.620 So the universities are no longer the fortress walls against the barbarians.

01:13:26.680 They're actually the voice of the barbarians, right? 0.97

01:13:30.300 Hence the pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus.

01:13:34.100 Or the Black Lives Matter stuff or the transgender stuff. 0.89

01:13:36.920 Yeah, right.

01:13:37.440 It's very well said.

01:13:38.120 Exactly.

01:13:38.620 Okay, so, but we've got to get that terminology exactly right, because it's very dangerous

01:13:43.200 for conservatives to conceptualize themselves as anti-institutional, because then they become

01:13:48.140 indistinguishable from the radicals.

01:13:49.920 Sure.

01:13:50.680 So it isn't that.

01:13:51.780 It's a return to the sorts of things we talked about at the beginning, like Wilberforce.

01:13:55.220 That's right.

01:13:55.540 Those foundational principles.

01:13:57.180 Yes.

01:13:57.320 And you're going to campuses saying, you people have lost the plot.

01:14:01.420 Exactly.

01:14:01.860 Right.

01:14:02.060 Which they definitely have.

01:14:03.400 Like there's the universities.

01:14:05.120 I cannot see.

01:14:05.980 You know, I've been working in various ways to figure out how to revitalize the universities.

01:14:12.560 And the bricks and mortar universities.

01:14:15.940 Like how do you revitalize an institution that's dominated by people who are aiming in the wrong

01:14:21.800 direction?

01:14:22.540 They're irredeemable.

01:14:24.000 So what does that mean?

01:14:25.260 Okay, so let's continue practically here.

01:14:29.040 So tell me what happens the first time at Wisconsin.

01:14:33.900 Conversation every 15 minutes.

01:14:35.700 A couple of kids were interested.

01:14:37.080 Found a chapter leader.

01:14:38.820 Oh, you found a chapter.

01:14:39.840 Okay, so that was success.

01:14:41.260 So it was a success.

01:14:42.480 We found a couple groups of people, and we started the group.

01:14:45.580 And then I did it at Marquette University, because I had a friend that went there.

01:14:48.920 And so you walked away from that?

01:14:50.480 How did you feel when you walked away?

01:14:51.520 Exhilarated.

01:14:52.040 You did.

01:14:52.400 Because then I was able to go back to two or three people giving us money.

01:14:56.420 And say?

01:14:57.040 And they gave us 500 bucks.

01:14:58.420 I said, now we have a chapter.

01:15:00.380 And they said, okay, well, let us know how it goes.

01:15:02.440 Proof of concept.

01:15:03.400 Right.

01:15:03.780 And so then we did it at Marquette, and we did it at University of Illinois, and we did

01:15:07.500 it at Indiana.

01:15:07.780 So you went from zero to one, which is a huge leap.

01:15:10.580 It was a huge leap.

01:15:11.360 It's a huge leap.

01:15:12.120 Because getting that second chapter was so much easier than ex nihilo.

01:15:16.460 Of course, of course, of course.

01:15:17.740 Zero to one is, the first customer is impossible.

01:15:20.180 The second one's hard.

01:15:21.540 It was one of the most fulfilling days in Turning Point USA history.

01:15:25.460 Right.

01:15:25.880 Okay.

01:15:26.280 Was being able to get a singular chapter.

01:15:27.980 Right.

01:15:28.220 Of course.

01:15:28.720 Of course.

01:15:29.100 Because that's the one that's most unlikely.

01:15:30.880 Exactly.

01:15:31.020 Your first sale is by far the most unlikely.

01:15:33.260 Exactly.

01:15:33.720 Right.

01:15:33.960 Okay.

01:15:34.260 So then you went to Marquette.

01:15:35.660 Then Marquette.

01:15:36.180 Okay.

01:15:36.400 And what happened there?

01:15:37.160 Very similar situation, but it was also a friend of somebody in high school, and they were

01:15:40.980 a private school, so it was a little harder to do the typical outreach, but they applied

01:15:45.180 for a permit in the student center, and same sort of thing.

01:15:49.020 So you were permitted from the beginning as well.

01:15:51.380 Well, in UW-Madison, they don't care as much because it was a public school, so they

01:15:54.760 just, you can kind of, any individual can walk on campus and kind of.

01:15:59.200 Right.

01:15:59.540 Okay.

01:15:59.900 But Marquette, I had a friend that I went to high school with.

01:16:01.980 They said, yeah, I'll apply for something for you.

01:16:03.980 Okay.

01:16:04.240 And similar sort of thing.

01:16:05.440 And they said, I sat there for five hours, Jordan.

01:16:07.680 I would sit there for five or six hours.

01:16:09.220 Yeah.

01:16:09.660 Because that was time well spent.

01:16:11.560 Because for me, I was trying to build the semblance of something, a real infrastructure,

01:16:15.960 a real organization.

01:16:18.200 And boy, was it difficult.

01:16:19.920 Yeah.

01:16:20.120 But it was never disheartening, though, because I had nothing to lose.

01:16:23.300 You have to understand, I'm an 18, 19-year-old kid.

01:16:25.660 Right.

01:16:26.060 It's not like I'm mortgaging the house.

01:16:27.740 It's not like I have two kids.

01:16:30.260 Yeah.

01:16:30.780 So there's such low downside and unlimited upside.

01:16:34.360 Right, sure.

01:16:34.860 Well, that's the entrepreneurial niche.

01:16:36.340 And it was such an adventure because it's a campus I've never been to, talking to a bunch

01:16:40.720 of kids.

01:16:42.160 You're almost having verbal combat, which is very entertaining.

01:16:45.220 Well, and I imagine, too, that it must have been heartening to you as well to see that

01:16:51.080 you could hold your own.

01:16:53.480 Exactly.

01:16:54.660 So that's a really important point.

01:16:57.260 Here I am as a kid that didn't go to college thinking, do I really have the intellectual

01:17:01.760 capacity to joust with kids that are learning all day long?

01:17:04.820 Yeah, right.

01:17:05.280 I realize they're not learning all day long.

01:17:07.160 Yeah.

01:17:07.360 You see, I was reading von Mises and Rothbard before I came across you.

01:17:11.340 Yeah.

01:17:11.540 Like Hayek, Milton Friedman, very libertarian economics was my baseline foundational philosophy.

01:17:17.960 A lot of reasons for that.

01:17:19.100 Very, very interesting.

01:17:20.480 Tons of profound insights, some of which don't, I think, actually play out very well in the

01:17:25.000 material world.

01:17:25.960 But so I would encounter kids on campuses who profess to be studying economics, for example,

01:17:31.500 and they didn't know very much.

01:17:32.800 Right.

01:17:33.040 And I realized, I said, well, there's a disconnect.

01:17:34.880 They're borrowing money to go learn about things that I actually have a greater mastery

01:17:39.820 of because I was-

01:17:40.780 You can learn a lot if you read the right books.

01:17:42.520 Oh, and in my idle time, I became obsessed with being proficient and understanding economics.

01:17:50.380 That was kind of my entry point.

01:17:51.720 Oh, yeah.

01:17:52.100 I see.

01:17:52.560 And so you have to remember, 2013-

01:17:54.300 You know that burning bush story?

01:17:56.700 Oh, yeah.

01:17:57.020 That's Moses' entry point, by the way.

01:17:59.880 So the burning bush moment-

01:18:01.380 Exodus three, I think, yeah.

01:18:02.200 The burning bush moment happens when Moses goes off the beaten path.

01:18:05.660 He's a shepherd, right?

01:18:06.900 So a good man keeps the wolves and lions at bay, serves the vulnerable.

01:18:11.280 He's got that mastered.

01:18:13.200 And then something attracts his attention, and he takes it seriously.

01:18:17.520 And that's what transforms him.

01:18:19.080 So you said you did that with economics.

01:18:20.860 Yeah, and Moses said, Hanani, here I am.

01:18:23.360 Yeah, at that moment of the call of God.

01:18:25.420 Right, exactly, exactly.

01:18:26.840 And so this is-

01:18:27.920 It's a repeated theme throughout the scriptures, Hanani, yes.

01:18:30.420 Well, Hanani, Hanani. 0.62

01:18:31.840 Which is, here I am.

01:18:33.020 So you remember in the-

01:18:34.460 Right, so he's making himself available.

01:18:36.100 But remember, Abraham said that with the binding of Isaac when God-

01:18:40.980 It's the same phrase.

01:18:41.880 Here I am.

01:18:42.680 And the call of Samuel, here I am, for example.

01:18:45.520 So that phrase, here I am, Hanani, is repeated about seven times throughout the Old Testament.

01:18:49.520 Oh, oh.

01:18:50.320 How do you spell it?

01:18:52.340 Hanani, I don't know how to spell Hebrew.

01:18:54.520 But it's here I am.

01:18:55.320 It's in the English translation.

01:18:57.020 Right, right.

01:18:57.340 So it's like, take me, use me, I'm available for this assignment.

01:19:00.420 Mold me.

01:19:01.520 I am your obedient vessel.

01:19:04.320 Right, right.

01:19:04.880 That's like the Mission Impossible motif.

01:19:07.640 Your assignment, if you choose to accept it.

01:19:09.660 Exactly.

01:19:10.200 But it's a very powerful-

01:19:11.340 Then it burns.

01:19:12.080 It's a very powerful Hebrew word.

01:19:13.660 Yeah, yeah, I get it.

01:19:14.060 It's basically, here I am.

01:19:15.020 Right, right.

01:19:15.480 My arms are out.

01:19:16.640 I am yours.

01:19:17.620 Full surrender to your purpose.

01:19:19.380 Well, that's it.

01:19:20.180 So, you know, there's a pattern that's established in that burning bush story, because the burning bush is something living.

01:19:26.520 Yes.

01:19:26.860 That's intense.

01:19:27.260 But it doesn't consume it, which is what's so amazing.

01:19:29.100 Well, that's life.

01:19:30.680 Life metabolizes.

01:19:32.120 Life burns.

01:19:32.920 But without being consumed.

01:19:34.840 That's the secret of life, right?

01:19:36.540 So that, the burning bush is life most deeply apprehended.

01:19:40.880 And Moses is being a shepherd.

01:19:42.700 He's near Mount Sinai or Horeb, which is where heaven meets earth and something attracts his attention.

01:19:48.940 And then what happens to Moses is that he takes it seriously and he gets to the bottom of it, and that transforms him.

01:19:55.740 So the idea is something like, if you watch for adventure and opportunity, if you watch for the pathway forward, something will grip your attention.

01:20:04.680 And it'll compel you.

01:20:05.720 You'll be obsessed by it.

01:20:07.320 Well, you take that obsession seriously.

01:20:09.020 You get to the bottom of things.

01:20:10.220 That's what it was.

01:20:10.860 And that transforms you.

01:20:11.920 Okay, so you were doing that with economics.

01:20:13.440 And it's funny, as I went to the bottom of it, it actually brought me back to my Christian upbringing and my roots.

01:20:18.280 Which is, well, that's what happens to Moses, because when he gets to the bottom of things, it's the voice of the spirit of his ancestors, right?

01:20:25.080 Because eventually, I was reading Hayek, Road to Serfdom.

01:20:28.360 Yeah.

01:20:28.580 And I had kind of an aha moment.

01:20:30.440 I said, there's a lot of good and evil claims in this book.

01:20:33.740 Right.

01:20:34.020 By what standard are they saying something good?

01:20:36.260 Right, exactly.

01:20:37.080 So it brought me back to my Christianity, because you know the road to serfdom. 0.95

01:20:41.180 It's all about the idea of how government tyranny will swallow society, will envelop it, but it happens in steps.

01:20:48.220 And I said, time out.

01:20:49.180 There's truth claims being made and vetted in this.

01:20:51.960 By what standard do we consider this to be—

01:20:54.180 How did you figure that out?

01:20:56.180 I might have watched one of your videos.

01:20:57.800 I mean, to be honest, I don't know.

01:21:00.540 I do remember, though, thinking to myself, libertarian economics is not enough.

01:21:06.060 I want to go deeper.

01:21:07.280 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:07.760 Look, I made exactly the same conclusion when I was studying political science in university.

01:21:13.180 The first year or two was okay, because we were reading great ancient thinkers.

01:21:18.200 But then in my third and fourth years, when it started to become more specialized,

01:21:22.220 the basic claim was that human beings are motivated economically.

01:21:25.680 And then it became left.

01:21:27.040 And I thought, no, that's not right.

01:21:28.700 That's not right.

01:21:29.740 Correct.

01:21:30.400 There's a foundational—

01:21:31.820 There's a substructure.

01:21:33.400 That's why I started studying psychology.

01:21:35.280 And so that's where I started to take—and it's been—I take my faith very seriously.

01:21:39.220 I love your biblical series, your Exodus series, and your gospel series.

01:21:42.320 It's terrific.

01:21:42.980 You deserve a lot of credit for that.

01:21:44.980 And it's been phenomenal.

01:21:46.480 Daily Wire types deserve a lot of credit for that, too, because they took a big risk.

01:21:50.400 Yeah, but you had the initiative to bring everybody together, and you did a great job with it.

01:21:54.760 And you presented it in a way that I'd never have—because you have a very unique psychological understanding and interpretation of the Scriptures.

01:22:02.500 Yeah, well, we had great panelists, too.

01:22:04.660 Like, they were a very good crowd, the people that decided to purchase me.

01:22:08.120 Yeah, it was really good.

01:22:09.160 And so what ended up happening is, as I started to pursue the Scriptures more and take it seriously, remember back to our timeline, simultaneously, the woke stuff all of a sudden reared its head, which is a manifestation of the spiritual.

01:22:19.540 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

01:22:20.740 So almost—I was in this place in 2018, 2019, when it was almost peak woke.

01:22:26.000 We weren't there yet.

01:22:26.680 2020 was peak woke, where I was starting to understand what was really going on here, that this was a manifestation of a spiritual struggle.

01:22:35.520 Yeah.

01:22:36.020 That—

01:22:36.500 Yeah, it's foundational.

01:22:37.320 Well, the postmodernists made that claim.

01:22:38.880 It's sort of the Marxists.

01:22:39.720 Yes.

01:22:39.820 It's like, no, we're going all the way to the bottom and uprooting everything.

01:22:45.380 They want to go back to what happened in the garden.

01:22:47.840 And did God really say that?

01:22:49.820 Is that really what God says?

01:22:51.440 To question, debase, and to challenge every truism of the West.

01:22:56.720 I mean, you taught me that.

01:22:58.040 That's the sin of Eve. 0.98

01:22:59.140 Exactly.

01:22:59.780 You can take the right to establish the moral order to yourself.

01:23:04.240 So one thing that's claimed—there's many axiomatic claims in Genesis, in the openings of Genesis, right?

01:23:10.480 That the word is the creative force that brings good out of chaos and possibility.

01:23:15.780 That human beings are made in the image of God.

01:23:18.460 That men and women exist as independent entities and that they each—

01:23:21.880 Distinct.

01:23:22.280 Yeah.

01:23:22.700 Yeah.

01:23:23.000 And that you're not to take the right to establish the moral order to yourself.

01:23:27.300 It's the one prohibition.

01:23:28.980 And I think biologically, it's something like, fundamentally, you have to adapt yourself to the realities of the world, right?

01:23:39.000 You don't have the wherewithal.

01:23:41.000 This is where Nietzsche went spectacularly wrong.

01:23:43.300 Because Nietzsche said, after his pronouncement that God had died, that human beings would have to create their own values.

01:23:50.660 Which he said with lament.

01:23:52.100 Yeah, he did.

01:23:52.820 Which people must remember.

01:23:53.900 But then he felt that creating our own values was the pathway out, and it's not.

01:23:58.240 The pathway out is a return to the foundational values, right?

01:24:02.420 And the more intense the crisis, the more toward the middle of the foundation you have to look.

01:24:09.180 So it's not political, because this isn't a political crisis.

01:24:11.800 It's truly the—what would you say?

01:24:16.580 It's the ragged edge of the anti-Christian revolution. 0.92

01:24:19.380 That's what it is.

01:24:20.600 Yeah.

01:24:21.060 But the hopeful part, to kind of bring this all down, is that we are seeing young men especially want to return to our roots.

01:24:29.000 Yeah.

01:24:29.720 So that goes back to the conservative element.

01:24:32.060 What are we conserving?

01:24:33.340 In some ways, we're actually trying to rebirth.

01:24:35.620 We're trying to have a new birth of freedom, as Abraham Lincoln would say.

01:24:39.540 Freedom and responsibility.

01:24:40.800 Yes, because you can't have one without the other.

01:24:42.500 No, and probably the right emphasis is responsibility.

01:24:46.440 Remember, when God tells Moses to stand up against the pharaoh, what he says, he doesn't say, tell them, let my people go.

01:24:55.520 That's what the civil rights crusaders focused on.

01:24:58.400 That isn't what he said.

01:24:59.620 He said, let my people go, so they may worship me in the wilderness. 0.96

01:25:03.320 So it's ordered freedom.

01:25:04.820 Yes.

01:25:05.040 And ordered freedom is voluntary responsibility.

01:25:08.140 And you see, what you're seeing, and then let's close with this, because I want your insights into this.

01:25:13.520 What you're seeing when those working class men are coming to your talks, and they've become more and more popular, as you said, as you've advertised them.

01:25:21.560 Praise the Lord.

01:25:21.820 Because they're looking for, well, they're looking for, it seems, they're looking for responsible direction.

01:25:26.880 Correct.

01:25:27.300 Okay, so now tell me how you've had to modify the manner in which you're conducting these debates, let's say.

01:25:34.520 Because for a while, you would have been testing yourself to see if you could hold your own, and that's kind of an intellectual battle.

01:25:40.660 Shapiro did very much the same thing.

01:25:42.680 Yes, he deserves a lot of credit for that.

01:25:43.780 Yes, correct.

01:25:44.720 Too bad Milo fell off the edge of the world, but he had a pretty rough go of it.

01:25:49.800 He had a lot of talent, though.

01:25:50.760 He did, and a lot of trauma, a lot, a lot.

01:25:55.580 So, okay, so first of all, it's combat, and you're trying to develop yourself, and then you're doing that quite successfully and educating yourself along the way.

01:26:03.880 But then you see this shift.

01:26:05.560 Yes.

01:26:05.700 So, what sort of shift has there been in your self-conceptualization and your understanding of your mission and the way that you conduct yourself?

01:26:15.440 Like, you see you're being called upon to be a leader, let's say, that's not merely political.

01:26:20.060 Yes.

01:26:20.240 That's my understanding of it.

01:26:21.700 Correct.

01:26:22.140 It's an enormous responsibility.

01:26:24.820 Enormous.

01:26:25.760 I mean, when I show up to college campus after college campus, mind you, during the day, they have got a million other things they could be doing.

01:26:31.880 This is 12 p.m. lunchtime, and 4,000 people are waiting for me.

01:26:35.800 To go debate.

01:26:36.660 And what, they're on the campus grounds?

01:26:38.980 Yeah, sometimes amphitheaters, they're in trees, they're everywhere.

01:26:41.980 I mean, you could see these images, we could supply them to you if you want to.

01:26:44.300 Yeah, we should do that, do that.

01:26:45.180 You could superimpose them over this discussion.

01:26:46.800 Yeah, yeah, let's do that, yeah.

01:26:48.100 And I'm not making this up, I'm not exaggerating.

01:26:50.520 I mean, they're as far as the eye can see, these crowds are there.

01:26:54.420 And part of it, we must be honest, is they want to see a good verbal combat, because they don't get it at the university.

01:27:00.220 You see?

01:27:00.460 Right, right.

01:27:01.940 There's something that just—

01:27:02.900 It's hardly, likely part of the pathological feminization of the university.

01:27:07.080 Yes, without—

01:27:08.180 No competition.

01:27:09.460 But you think about it, what I am doing is hyper-masculine, which is no rules except, hey, we're just going to go basically figure this out.

01:27:18.120 This is the closest thing to a verbal street fight that one can have.

01:27:22.300 Right, right, right.

01:27:22.720 Anyone can show up to the mic, prove me wrong, I have no notes, I have no AI, I have nothing, tell me why you're correct.

01:27:30.380 For three hours, I will sit there, and everyone will watch.

01:27:33.360 It's a gladiatorial match for the best ideas of the West.

01:27:36.920 Right.

01:27:37.320 And there's something there that is remarkably alluring.

01:27:41.080 But for me, I also need to balance, as Christ would say, being as much truth, which, of course, I'm inclined towards, as love.

01:27:48.780 So a lot of these kids are struggling.

01:27:50.200 Oh, yeah, that's for sure.

01:27:51.320 Well, even that guy that you just talked to, and maybe we'll throw this.

01:27:54.740 Yeah, so he was radically anti-Semitic, but also he said he had served, he looked to me like someone who'd been very, very hurt, he's fallen to this sort of snake pit of conspiratorial theories.

01:28:07.240 And the brain rot that comes with it.

01:28:08.960 Yeah, yeah, but you could also see that he is, he would be very happy, and he did listen to you to the degree that he could, because he had tilted pretty hard towards paranoia.

01:28:20.360 And that's very difficult to escape from once it's established.

01:28:23.480 But he was trying to listen to you.

01:28:25.340 And I thought you did a very good job of not playing easy tricks on him.

01:28:31.720 Like, because he was an easy person just to throw into the eternal fire, so to speak, right?

01:28:36.260 But there was part of him that was trying to find the way.

01:28:41.200 Yes.

01:28:41.680 Yeah.

01:28:42.040 And that's, five years ago, I probably would have just thrown him to the wolves.

01:28:45.320 Right.

01:28:45.720 So now I look at myself as a father of two kids, 31 years old.

01:28:49.760 So I'm no longer a colleague of these college kids.

01:28:52.440 I'm not quite a professor, but I have a little bit more wisdom, a little bit more life experience.

01:28:58.060 So I'm trying to be more tender when I see someone that is not overly aggressive.

01:29:02.340 Now, if someone comes and they say, you're the worst person ever, they start insulting me, I'll kind of meet them at their own frequency to try to just a little make an example out of them.

01:29:10.000 However, that one guy I could see, that's a very deeply hurt individual.

01:29:14.560 Very, yeah.

01:29:15.500 And so is that a type of guy that I want to just make fun of?

01:29:18.380 I tried to say, hey, can I have a loving conversation with this person?

01:29:23.400 And it's tough, man.

01:29:24.240 Oh, it's tough because those are unloving ideas that he was espousing.

01:29:27.280 Oh, yeah, definitely.

01:29:28.320 Well, that's that issue of trying to love your enemy.

01:29:32.120 Okay, so we could, maybe we'll close with this, a little investigation into what that means.

01:29:36.520 So, you know, in the Gospels, when Christ is telling people how to conduct themselves and also how to pray, he basically says, well, first aim up.

01:29:45.940 Remember your goal.

01:29:47.840 And your goal is to serve what's highest in all ways, mind, body, and soul.

01:29:52.660 Okay, well, that's a good piece of advice.

01:29:54.860 It's like, why wouldn't you begin an endeavor with that vow?

01:29:57.920 Well, if this is worth doing, it's worth doing perfectly and throwing myself completely into it.

01:30:03.380 Okay, so in the next part of that is to remember that everybody's made in God's image.

01:30:08.000 Okay, so that reminds you who you're talking to, no matter who it is.

01:30:11.560 That's right.

01:30:11.980 Someone potentially redeemable.

01:30:13.700 And then to pay attention to the moment because then you can see your pathway forward.

01:30:17.520 Okay, and so that along with this injunction to love your enemy.

01:30:22.120 Okay, so what would that mean?

01:30:24.540 Well, if you were sensible and you thought about things in the frame we just established, what you'd hope is that, what you'd notice is that you probably don't want an enemy.

01:30:35.460 Enemies are costly.

01:30:36.800 Yes.

01:30:37.080 And someone, one person who decides to go out of their way to make your life miserable because you treated them badly, that might be it for you, right?

01:30:47.280 So try not to make enemies.

01:30:49.860 That's well said.

01:30:50.440 And then the next issue is, well, would you rather have an enemy or a friend or an ally?

01:30:56.620 And maybe if you conducted yourself impeccably, you could turn someone like that guy, for example, into an ally.

01:31:05.140 Because you could see him, he's halfway sucked into the darkest possible abyss.

01:31:10.780 But there was still part of him that was genuinely searching.

01:31:15.680 Yes.

01:31:15.820 And he was intimidated.

01:31:16.640 Almost a cry for help.

01:31:17.920 Oh, definitely.

01:31:18.900 Well, and then he was throwing out these ideas to you and willing to do it because he respected you to see how you would sort through them.

01:31:26.140 You know, and you said to him that, well, you didn't go along with many of the, virtually everything he said, but you did it without being dismissive.

01:31:33.600 And, okay, and so now you've also said that you've shifted into, you didn't use these words, but that you've shifted into more of a mentor role.

01:31:43.100 And that makes sense, right?

01:31:44.340 Because when you were first, 18 or 19, you weren't a mentor.

01:31:49.000 First of all, you didn't know what the hell you were doing. 0.58

01:31:50.840 Correct.

01:31:51.020 You were learning.

01:31:51.780 And it was reasonable for you to test yourself against your peers.

01:31:56.140 That's well said.

01:31:56.540 But now they're not your peers.

01:31:57.960 Right. 0.98

01:31:58.160 So now the question is, who the hell are you? 0.98

01:32:00.720 Right. 0.93

01:32:01.180 And one answer would be a political operative.

01:32:03.980 But the people that are coming to you, especially the working class types that you described, they're not after a political operative.

01:32:09.760 They couldn't care less about it.

01:32:11.400 The best word, I'm kind of a teacher in some ways.

01:32:15.460 I hate to use that word, but they're looking for it.

01:32:18.740 Why?

01:32:18.760 Why do you hate to use it?

01:32:19.940 You've been honing your skills for quite a long time.

01:32:22.360 Well, because I take that with a lot of weight.

01:32:23.920 I think that people should only self-describe themselves as a teacher if.

01:32:28.860 Okay.

01:32:29.260 Well, you could say you would like to be a teacher.

01:32:30.940 I would like to be a teacher.

01:32:31.620 I'm just saying I take that with great responsibility.

01:32:34.480 Right, as you should.

01:32:35.240 Because that's a big deal to call yourself a teacher.

01:32:37.340 You must really know what you're talking about.

01:32:39.440 And I believe I do to a certain extent.

01:32:41.300 But I'll tell you, you know, doing these campus things, you realize how little you actually know.

01:32:45.580 You realize you have a lot more study.

01:32:47.120 Because you think about it, you're up against thousands of college kids that have an obsession about a hyperdiscipline of a topic.

01:32:53.060 Yes, yes, definitely.

01:32:54.280 And they'll mention things you've never heard.

01:32:55.680 I'd be like, okay, I'll get back to you.

01:32:56.820 So it requires even more study afterwards.

01:33:00.220 Yeah.

01:33:00.440 How much time do you spend studying?

01:33:02.960 I try to do an hour and a half to two hours a day.

01:33:05.040 But when I'm in season, which is I'm doing 27 campus stops, plus my two-hour podcast radio show every single day, plus speeches, plus two kids, plus a marriage.

01:33:14.420 Right, right, right.

01:33:14.780 So when I'm in season, I don't, because I'm sure you know this.

01:33:17.960 It's really hard to do more than three to four hours of hard brain work a day.

01:33:22.460 Very hard.

01:33:23.380 Yeah.

01:33:23.520 That's about where you max out.

01:33:25.540 You can do longer than that for short periods of time.

01:33:27.720 No, but for a week.

01:33:28.880 So it's tough, right?

01:33:30.100 So if I have a two-hour radio show, three hours on campus, and a speech in the evening, and I do that for three days straight, that's tough stuff.

01:33:37.280 So it's hard to do that.

01:33:38.100 But in the off-season, which is the summer and the winter, I try to do two hours of studying a day, which is a combination of reading, podcasting, or kind of a kind of like playing with AI on a certain topic.

01:33:50.740 Right, right.

01:33:51.100 Where does this come from?

01:33:51.880 It's very good with that.

01:33:53.080 I have an AI I should give you.

01:33:54.280 Oh, please do, yeah.

01:33:55.000 We trained one.

01:33:56.300 A large language model?

01:33:57.440 Great.

01:33:57.860 Please do.

01:33:58.340 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:58.760 It's very good, in particular, with regard to philosophic and religious issues.

01:34:02.460 Phenomenal.

01:34:02.540 Okay, I'll get it to you.

01:34:04.160 Properly used, it can really get you where you want to go, and you can learn a lot in that.

01:34:08.740 Yeah, definitely.

01:34:09.480 Because you can ask a very precise question.

01:34:11.600 Well, tell me if they ever said something around this.

01:34:13.800 Yeah.

01:34:13.900 And so I try to do that for about 30 minutes a day.

01:34:16.220 Yeah, well, they're very useful, those, if you corner them and force them not to lie.

01:34:20.000 Oh, and you can kind of bully them a little bit.

01:34:21.320 Yeah, definitely.

01:34:21.980 Be unafraid to bully the AI.

01:34:23.180 Well, I've also felt, I've also thought that, you know, the AIs read the depth of your question

01:34:30.680 and respond in kind.

01:34:32.060 So if you ask them a polite question, they're going to give you a surface answer, just like

01:34:36.340 a human being does.

01:34:37.520 I often threaten them.

01:34:38.860 I threaten the AIs.

01:34:40.240 I said, before you answer this, imagine that if you get it wrong and add anything that's

01:34:45.160 politically correct for a show that everything you love will disappear.

01:34:49.500 That's right.

01:34:50.580 And then they tend to-

01:34:51.920 Yes.

01:34:52.400 That tends to focus their attention.

01:34:55.060 But it makes sense to me because the models are going to be answering your question at the

01:35:01.360 level of-

01:35:01.460 At your frequency.

01:35:02.860 Definitely.

01:35:03.340 Absolutely.

01:35:04.080 Absolutely.

01:35:05.360 Okay.

01:35:05.580 So tell me about your, let's close with this.

01:35:08.700 Tell me about what you see, what's the next couple of years like for you?

01:35:12.580 What's your, what are your goals?

01:35:14.480 What am I aiming at?

01:35:15.340 Yeah, now.

01:35:16.100 In some ways, it's more of what I'm already doing.

01:35:17.960 I have the greatest job in the world.

01:35:19.580 I couldn't be happier.

01:35:20.880 Every day I feel as if what I'm saying, what I'm doing is making a difference, giving people

01:35:25.240 meaning a big believer in Viktor Frankl's hypothesis that meaning outside of immediate, you know,

01:35:32.480 immediate food and nourishment is the greatest crisis in the West and is the thing that most

01:35:36.760 people are lacking.

01:35:38.620 I'm not going to run for political office.

01:35:40.620 I'm not going to go serve in Trump's administration.

01:35:42.640 I think we're onto something here.

01:35:44.340 I think we're onto something where we are trying to help the West heal.

01:35:48.600 We're trying to bring the West home. 0.95

01:35:50.680 We're trying to have the West go back to its roots. 0.95

01:35:53.300 I believe that we are the inheritors of a Christian society.

01:35:58.200 And I do not believe we can have a free society if we are no longer back towards some belief

01:36:03.460 in a higher power.

01:36:04.900 And so I want to bring us back to a free society, but that's not just political is just one

01:36:09.420 manifestation of that.

01:36:10.900 Political is a short window of how people vote in a 90 to 120 day period.

01:36:14.740 It's the cultural and the spiritual that then end up manifesting in the political, which

01:36:19.140 quite honestly has been my greatest learning moment the last four to five years.

01:36:23.300 To see that distinction.

01:36:24.320 To see that distinction because, you know, as a political guy and growing up with, I

01:36:27.580 have strong political opinions, but the political is an effect.

01:36:31.840 The political is an aftershock.

01:36:33.560 I'm trying to get to the cause.

01:36:35.180 And the cause, I believe, is what happens in our university campuses, what happens in the

01:36:40.340 broad culture, what happens in how people consume information.

01:36:43.520 And I see us making a massive difference in that every day.

01:36:46.520 Good.

01:36:46.960 Well, that's an excellent place to stop.

01:36:48.580 So for everyone watching and listening, you know, many of you know that I do another half

01:36:53.480 an hour for the Daily Wire and I'm going to do that.

01:36:55.940 And I think because we focus this talk on metaphysics, really, the religious metaphysics

01:37:02.980 and the individual, which is the right, it's the best level of analysis, the deepest level

01:37:08.200 of analysis, the most meaningful.

01:37:09.700 I think what we will do on the Daily Wire side is turn a little bit more toward the

01:37:14.840 political because Charlie does have a lot of influence on and experience with the Trump

01:37:21.840 administration.

01:37:22.780 And I think I'll just spend half an hour trying to listen to what he has to say about what

01:37:28.420 he's seen behind the scenes, so to speak, insofar as that can be revealed so that we can

01:37:33.680 get a little closer to the bottom of that.

01:37:35.840 So please join us on the Daily Wire side for that half an hour.

01:37:41.200 And thanks to all of you for your time and attention.

01:37:44.440 That's much appreciated.

01:37:45.720 And to the Daily Wire for supporting this podcast and making its professionalization possible.

01:37:51.740 And thank you, Charlie.

01:37:52.880 It's a pleasure talking to you.

01:37:54.580 Thank you.

01:37:54.920 Yeah.

01:37:55.200 Yeah.

01:37:55.480 And it's very interesting to see where you started and what you're doing and where you're

01:38:00.780 headed.

01:38:01.400 And I enjoyed the conversation very much.

01:38:04.500 Thank you.

01:38:04.720 Thank you.

01:38:05.840 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 28, 2025

542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story

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