TRIGGERnometry - Jeremy Boreing On Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes

00:00:00.000 There's a huge civil war going on on the right right now, and the question is, you know,

00:00:05.040 what direction is the country going to go? I certainly think that hiring Candace is probably

00:00:09.540 the biggest mistake of my professional life so far. I've asked Candace on two separate occasions,

00:00:15.000 what do you actually believe? And on both occasions, she told me, I believe what the

00:00:20.160 people believe. I am the voice of the people. But she's essentially, she's articulating audience

00:00:26.080 capture as a virtue. She's now talking about doing expose documentaries on Charlie Kirk's widow.

00:00:32.900 You know, that's, that is evil. I see a huge alignment between, you know, Antifa thugs tearing

00:00:42.580 down statues of Christopher Columbus and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and people on the

00:00:48.860 so-called new right saying that Churchill is the chief villain of the Second World War or that

00:00:53.880 America shouldn't have used the atomic bomb to end the Second World War. That's just rhetorically

00:01:00.240 tearing down our statues in the same way that Antifa is physically tearing down our statues.

00:01:05.260 I think that Tucker is doing an enormous amount of damage to the Trump coalition.

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00:01:52.560 Term Supply. Jeremy Boring, welcome to Trigonometry. Man, happy to be here.

00:01:57.060 It's great to have you on. We've been meaning to have you on for the first time. In fact,

00:02:00.320 I believe we're the first video interview you're doing since leaving The Daily Wire.

00:02:05.220 Yes, this is my first, I think, I believe you call them podcasts?

00:02:08.940 No, we call it the show. I don't know. Francis and I were talking about it the other day.

00:02:13.260 Why do people still call these podcasts? It's like a full-on visual show, right?

00:02:17.100 Well, you know, it's interesting. When we first started The Daily Wire with the Ben Shapiro show

00:02:20.500 and The Andrew Klavan Show, we shot the first two episodes on the same day with video.

00:02:24.760 And it was important to us from the very beginning to be video first. And for the first five or six

00:02:28.940 years after that, that we would go to the big podcast conferences, they would criticize us for

00:02:33.380 having video. And they would say, well, you're not real podcast. Real podcasts are audio only.

00:02:39.560 And then the last three or four years of going to podcast conferences, every single panel is,

00:02:44.220 how to add video to your podcast.

00:02:46.040 Right. No, totally. I've always thought of, we've always thought of Trigonometry as a show.

00:02:51.340 Of course.

00:02:52.120 I think podcast is a kind of legacy term, but we've got right into the conversation. We want to talk

00:02:56.780 also about the Pendragon cycle, which is super exciting that you've just released. And you've

00:03:04.860 got straight into the conversation we wanted to have first, which is about new media. There's something

00:03:10.280 that you were kind of at the roots of from the very beginning. So talk to us about that and how you see

00:03:14.840 the landscape, because obviously there's been a lot going on, as I'm sure you're aware.

00:03:18.300 Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, when we started the Daily Wire in 2015, all of this was very new.

00:03:24.400 Obviously, there were people involved on the right in America in new media long before we were,

00:03:30.920 you know, Andrew Breitbart, obviously a mentor to both Ben and I. Matt Drudge, charging the way.

00:03:38.660 You had the sort of bloggers who were really instrumental in fighting off a lot of early

00:03:44.940 left-wing narratives online, like little green footballs and some guys like that. But I think

00:03:49.440 that what we really brought to the table was we were one of the first to really see the opening

00:03:54.960 in social media. And we were the first to see the opportunity in podcasting, to see these two new

00:04:00.860 areas. One, which we thought could be incredibly effective for marketing and distribution. And the

00:04:05.860 other, which we thought could be a great medium for actually getting our message out. And we married

00:04:09.920 those two things and had a huge amount of success in the early days, particularly around

00:04:13.860 Facebook, because it was the Wild West back then. You know, people particularly on our side

00:04:18.460 weren't fast to adopt. And they were as consumers, of course, but not as content creators and marketers.

00:04:27.620 And people on the other side hadn't figured out yet that we would become very good at it. So

00:04:32.440 this sort of cancel culture and all of the tools that later were developed

00:04:36.200 to try to limit the reach of conservatives in those spaces hadn't happened yet. So the world was

00:04:41.740 sort of our oyster. It was wide open in front of us and we took it. I think one of my criticisms of

00:04:48.860 conservatives, broadly speaking, is that we're typically so late to adopt new technologies and

00:04:54.800 new opportunities when they present themselves. And that's interesting because we purport to really

00:04:59.600 believe in free markets. You know, we purport to believe in the mechanism of profit motive,

00:05:05.840 of incentive, of finding efficiencies in the market and taking them. But then we're also sort of

00:05:11.220 constitutionally afraid of new technologies, afraid of new, of change. And so we sometimes

00:05:18.040 allow the conservative part of our conservative DNA to out,

00:05:21.800 to sort of outvote the part of us that would be sort of economically motivated. And for that reason,

00:05:28.160 we wind up not being players in some of the big areas. I think we're seeing it probably right now

00:05:31.680 already in AI, but it was certainly true in social media at the very beginning. And I think that's one

00:05:37.640 of the things that set Ben and I apart is that we were either had the foresight to realize that there

00:05:44.080 was an opportunity here or had the foolishness not to realize that there were dragons. And so we just

00:05:49.000 charged right off the map and went into that area. Well, but what's happened since that time when

00:05:54.420 you were early pioneers is I don't think there's any shortage of right off center, center right

00:06:00.520 voices now in new media. Oh no, we dominated. And in fact, there's so many now that there is a civil

00:06:06.360 war going on, I think it's fair to say within it. And I imagine you have some insights on that,

00:06:11.940 given that some of the big players are people that you've either worked with directly at the Daily

00:06:15.620 Wire or just know through other ways. Well, obviously the movement is small. And if you're

00:06:20.400 in it for very long at all, you know, everyone is you guys. I'm certain know everyone.

00:06:25.320 And yeah, there is, of course, there's a huge civil war going on on the right right now. And in part,

00:06:29.180 it's happening because Donald Trump is a one-term president. You know, it's a unique thing in our

00:06:36.000 history. There's only been one other example of non-consecutive terms for a second-term president.

00:06:42.600 It essentially means Donald Trump was a lame duck from the day he was elected to this second

00:06:47.160 term. Now, he's made a lot of moves to make that less true. He had a great, particularly around

00:06:54.580 foreign policy, he had a great first year of his second term, which you might not always see from

00:06:59.180 a second-term president. But you can tell that, like, the buzzards are circling. People understand

00:07:04.560 that, you know, a lot of a politician's power is in their ability to win the next election. Donald

00:07:08.880 Trump doesn't have constitutionally the power to win the next election. And everybody wants

00:07:13.180 now to define what's going to happen next in the conservative movement. And there's an

00:07:17.320 opportunity for people to make a lot of money, an opportunity for people to seize a lot of power,

00:07:21.400 an opportunity to advance new visions for what the future of conservatism in America and globally

00:07:26.660 can be. And then there's structural issues around social media and how we're incentivized as

00:07:33.240 creators of content within that framework. You know, I think those two things and the sort of

00:07:39.340 inherent problems in both are creating this really confluent moment where we see almost open civil war

00:07:44.620 and in some cases very open civil war on the right as people are both trying to make money, build their

00:07:49.660 own brands, and compete for actual true political power in a post-Trump world, which is rapidly

00:07:57.020 approaching. You know, we'll have our midterms this year, and then you will immediately be in the

00:08:03.540 next presidential cycle. I mean, starting in 2027, we'll be trying to figure out who the next

00:08:08.640 president of the United States is going to be. And because we know it can't be Donald Trump,

00:08:13.300 the question is, you know, what direction is the country going to go?

00:08:16.560 It's very difficult, isn't it, Jeremy, to remain pure in inverted commas, or to have your

00:08:22.820 intentions remain pure when you've got so many, how can I put this, competing incentives when you're

00:08:31.960 a podcaster or you have a company like The Daily Wire? How do you ensure that the choices you make

00:08:38.820 are the right ones? Well, you can't ensure that your choices are always going to be the right ones,

00:08:43.060 and you probably have to accept in life that some of your choices will be the wrong ones,

00:08:47.120 both because you're reacting to incentives, because at times you have limited information,

00:08:51.980 because at times all sin fall short of the glory of God. We certainly made our share of mistakes

00:08:57.940 at The Daily Wire during my tenure. I think we hit a lot more than we missed, but when you're a big

00:09:03.620 company and when you're helping people navigate the complexities of worldview, of politics, of

00:09:10.920 even theology, your misses are consequential, and some of our misses were quite consequential.

00:09:16.720 I think that to your question, one has to have a vision for what it is that they're trying to

00:09:22.300 accomplish, and one has to rightly order their priorities. Of course, we all have a lot of

00:09:27.400 competing priorities. The Daily Wire was deliberately set up to be a for-profit organization because part of

00:09:36.420 our premise in setting up the company was recognizing that conservatives too often rely on non-profit

00:09:40.560 mechanisms to promulgate their worldview, while the left, which purports to hate market economics,

00:09:46.120 almost exclusively uses for-profit institutions to promulgate their worldview. So by our own

00:09:52.320 definition, we chose the less efficient and therefore less successful mechanism. We wanted

00:09:56.540 The Daily Wire to be a corrective to that from the very beginning, which necessarily means that making

00:10:02.000 money has to be a high priority. But making money can never be the highest priority. When you're

00:10:08.140 ordering the priorities of a company like The Daily Wire, when you're ordering the priorities of

00:10:12.800 a business like the business you have with trigonometry, you have to keep the mission

00:10:17.720 as your number one priority because definitionally, all the other priorities will subordinate to it.

00:10:23.740 If you ever find yourself making profit or audience growth the number one priority,

00:10:31.540 then necessarily the mission will subordinate itself to that priority, and that's when you start making

00:10:36.020 really cynical decisions. And in my experience, I've made cynical decisions, of course, in my career.

00:10:40.980 Every time I make a cynical decision, it's come back to bite me. I think that that's not true if you

00:10:47.120 are a cynical person. I mean, there is a lane for the pure cynic. I call it the grift industrial

00:10:52.820 complex. Beware the grift industrial complex. It's real. It can be incredibly lucrative, and it can be

00:10:59.740 incredibly rewarding, too, in terms of the feedback that you get from audience. If you tell people what

00:11:04.580 they want to hear, they are always very happy with you. If you tell people always what they want to

00:11:09.560 hear, they reward you financially. They reward you by clicking and by liking, by giving you that

00:11:18.760 affirmation and that dopamine. And pretty soon, that becomes the thing that you serve. Pretty soon,

00:11:25.720 you don't wield cynicism. Cynicism wields you over time. I think we see a lot of people falling into

00:11:31.960 that trap right now. Well, we absolutely do. And I mean, well, let's talk about it. I mean,

00:11:36.740 one of the people who is at the forefront of the movement that you've just talked about,

00:11:40.520 let's call it the grift industrial complex, is Candace Owens. When Candace worked for you,

00:11:46.120 do you sometimes look back at the decision and think, that wasn't a good one when she was working

00:11:51.380 at The Wire? Yeah, well, I certainly think that hiring Candace is probably the biggest mistake of my

00:11:57.760 professional life so far. At the time, I had misgivings about Candace, but it wasn't a completely

00:12:06.260 cynical decision. I believed that Candace could be a great force for good in the world. I still

00:12:12.720 believe that. Candace is the most talented person I've ever met, not just in conservative media,

00:12:16.860 but in any media. She has it. She has that star quality. You know it the moment that you meet her.

00:12:22.420 She has her unbelievable charm, unbelievable charisma. The camera absolutely loves her. She

00:12:27.640 has incredibly unique gifts and skills in that area. And when she wields those gifts and skills

00:12:34.060 for good, she's incredibly effective. She was during the BLM movement in America. Some of the

00:12:39.540 content that we made when we first brought Candace on was focused on that topic. And I think she was

00:12:44.040 as good as anybody in the world and made a really positive impact. I've said before, Candace is like

00:12:50.640 nuclear energy. You know, if you harness it properly, she can power a city. If you lose

00:12:55.080 control, she'll flatten the city. And I think that's what we're seeing now. Candace, all those

00:13:00.820 same gifts that she has at various times used for good, she's now using for ill. And there's no one

00:13:07.380 better. The problem is, if what you're pursuing is bad and you're the best at it, you're going to do

00:13:12.920 an incredible amount of damage. And Candace is doing an incredible amount of damage.

00:13:15.860 Do you think one of the things that, and I've talked about this quite a bit in the past,

00:13:19.400 you've talked about the camera liking people, etc. We are in the business where charisma is so

00:13:24.680 over-indexed that people very often will confuse charisma with accuracy. They will say, well,

00:13:32.520 this person is very charismatic. Therefore, what they're saying is true. And that seems to be a big

00:13:39.940 problem. I don't know how much of a problem it is on the left, but within the right-wing media

00:13:45.400 ecosystem, there just seems to be the sense that if you get someone charismatic saying

00:13:50.680 something batshit crazy, that seems to get millions of views. Is there something about

00:13:56.660 the conservative mindset or is there something about the way people think about that they're

00:14:01.860 particularly susceptible? Or am I being unfair and are people on the left just the same?

00:14:05.300 Well, of course, people on the left are susceptible to this. There's a reason that

00:14:08.960 every actor in Hollywood, they are who they are because they have star power. They have gotten

00:14:15.540 the platforms that they have because they're incredibly charismatic and great on screen and

00:14:19.720 great at telling stories. And they're all batshit crazy. And they've been promulgating a horrible

00:14:24.660 worldview for decades. So, of course, that's a problem on the left. It manifests itself differently

00:14:30.200 on the right, though, because the left has almost hegemonic representation among the instruments of popular

00:14:38.440 culture and has for the lifetime of just about anyone who could be watching this now.

00:14:43.500 And so for that reason, a lot of their audience capture happened in places that were less

00:14:48.680 consequential. It happened in narrative fiction. I say less consequential and probably it's actually

00:14:53.420 more consequential over time, but less sort of urgent than, say, someone like Candace Owens might

00:14:59.740 be. And so you just don't see it in the same way because your average interaction with, say,

00:15:07.360 a radically left-wing Hollywood actor isn't them telling you their opinion. It's them

00:15:12.220 performing a role or playing a part. Because the right was sort of boxed out of that,

00:15:17.920 the major apparatus of culture formation for the last several decades, we found,

00:15:24.740 in part because of the work of Daily Wire and in part because of the work of others,

00:15:27.460 we found these alternative lanes which are much more direct, talking into the camera, saying what

00:15:32.580 you believe. And so that's where we've actually built our audiences. That's the kind of trust that

00:15:39.740 was placed in us from day one. And so I think you see the abuse of it a lot more clearly on the right.

00:15:45.060 And there may be something in the sort of conservative mindset that makes us more susceptible

00:15:49.640 to, say, conspiracy theory. You know, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

00:15:54.880 When I had a teacher in high school, had a poster on the wall that said, just because you're paranoid

00:16:00.700 doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

00:16:02.360 I think that's a Nixon quote.

00:16:03.600 It's a Nixon quote. It is, yeah. It's a great Nixon quote. But that is a conservative kind of

00:16:09.180 point of view that because we are in a sort of bunker mentality, we are hard done by and we are

00:16:14.160 beset. And so you do begin to see, you do begin to see probably threats that aren't there.

00:16:22.800 Patterns that aren't there. I mean, I think that's probably part of the bunker mindset is well put

00:16:26.600 because I think a lot of it is there's a sort of feeling on the right that I certainly see that

00:16:31.720 people feel like the world is moving in a direction they really don't like. And therefore, there must

00:16:36.740 be a small group of people that are in charge of this process. With very tiny hats.

00:16:41.560 Ideally, with very tiny hats. But actually, you could see this happening even before the explosion

00:16:49.120 in antisemitism that we've seen recently. They were looking for a framework to explain everything.

00:16:57.040 The theory of everything is a small number of people have got together and they've decided to

00:17:01.120 ruin our lives, which I think is a simplistic explanation of this thing. Why is that? I mean,

00:17:05.940 I guess throughout history, that's been a very appealing way of looking at things, right?

00:17:08.700 Yeah. Well, of course, because most people either don't have a lot of power or perceive

00:17:14.920 themselves not to have a lot of power. And I actually think the latter is far is the more

00:17:18.280 dangerous phenomenon that we're dealing with right now. And so the assumption is that somebody

00:17:24.440 has to be in charge. Somebody has to be running it. It obviously isn't me. I'm not getting the things

00:17:28.620 that I want. The world isn't working out the way that I think that it should. So it must be working

00:17:32.600 out the way someone else thinks that it should. Of course, the reality is that if you've ever met anyone in

00:17:38.280 government. Now, it's also funny to me that the billionaire who's been famous literally as long

00:17:47.840 as I've been alive with a gold toilet on his personal 767 is somehow not a part of whatever

00:17:53.240 the ruling elite is, even in his second term as president of the United States. So I think all

00:17:58.600 these sort of Illuminati elite kind of conspiratorial views do fall apart upon contact with the real

00:18:08.560 world. But that's not to say that there aren't actual conspiracies. And actual conspiracies do

00:18:12.140 make it harder to debunk the concept of the conspiracy theory. And one of the perhaps the biggest reason

00:18:19.780 we're living through what we're living through right now is because of COVID-19, because of the

00:18:24.200 reaction of the governments of the world to this novel coronavirus, it was, you know, one of the

00:18:30.260 most formative, especially for this young generation, imagine being in high school and being sent home

00:18:36.320 for a year or two years, or in some cases, three years, because of a disease that did not affect you.

00:18:43.980 Demographically, you are unaffected. And then learning over time how much of it was overreaction,

00:18:50.560 and that's generous. How much of it was opportunistic? And that's probably the most

00:18:56.600 true case. And how much of it was downright cynical and a power grab by governments? And I

00:19:00.800 think that's probably true in some aspects of it. But you take all of that together and now tell

00:19:07.280 people that conspiracy theories aren't real. And well, it's a losing argument because we just lived

00:19:12.140 through one of the great conspiracies really in human history. And of course, we're going to be

00:19:19.180 dealing with the damage of that overreach by governments for the rest of our lives. It was

00:19:24.320 a generationally consequential event. I try to be very careful and guarded with my language. I never

00:19:29.900 want to say, because of the coronavirus or because of COVID-19, because of course, none of these things

00:19:34.660 are because of COVID-19. They're all because of the reaction of governments and media organizations

00:19:39.500 and the apparatus of popular culture, which are almost completely dominated by the left,

00:19:43.840 to seize power, seize economic opportunity, and in some cases just panic and overreact. I mean,

00:19:54.080 sometimes there is no, obviously, conspiracy except stupidity. But I don't see how we,

00:20:03.020 in the short term, easily overcome the psychological damage done to free people across the West by our

00:20:09.900 governments in relation to COVID. It's such a profound point. And because I have this joke,

00:20:16.000 which is, we all treated COVID like a bad one-night stand. We're just going to walk away going,

00:20:21.860 no, that never happened. I never said this. I never did that. And we're just all going to walk away

00:20:26.900 and pretend like it was just one big dream. Yeah. Super normal to lock children in their houses for

00:20:33.260 three years. Couldn't possibly be a consequence for taking people in the most socially formative years

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00:23:54.440 issued by Celtic Bank. All card accounts subject to credit approval. One of the things that I wanted

00:24:00.900 to talk to you about is we talked a little bit about, touched on it almost like charisma. I've got

00:24:07.740 this theory, and I'd be very interested to hear your view on it, having worked with actors and

00:24:11.880 influences. To me, charisma and mental illness are kind of almost intrinsically linked. And I'll tell

00:24:19.740 you why. Because when you see someone in real life and you talk to them, and I've seen this with a lot

00:24:24.680 of actors, I'm like, oh my God, this guy's crazy. You put a camera on him, boom, it's charisma. That

00:24:32.100 edge, that I don't know which way he or she is going to go. In real life, you're like, that's scary.

00:24:37.760 On camera, that's magic. Yeah, well, I think of it as, in aerodynamic terms, there's a concept called

00:24:44.780 aerodynamic instability, right? That you want your fighter jets to be unstable. Dynamic instability,

00:24:52.800 I think they call it. Because the whole point of a fighter jet is that when it's in a dogfight,

00:24:58.400 it has to very quickly move. And as it turns out, an airplane is designed not to do that. The whole

00:25:04.880 purpose of an airplane is to go straight for a long time. It's not like the movies. You know,

00:25:09.220 I mean, if you were ever on a giant jumbo jet, and all the engines went out, do you know what would

00:25:13.760 happen? Almost nothing. You would go, because the wings are doing the work, right? Now, you will

00:25:21.120 eventually crash, because there's not enough thrust to create lift. But those wings are going to keep

00:25:25.780 you, it's not like you just go into the ground. No, you'll go straight for a long time. The pilots will

00:25:30.500 have a ton of time to try to find someplace where they can put down safely, because a plane is meant

00:25:36.120 to be very aerodynamically stable. But a fighter jet, no. A fighter jet, if the engine goes out,

00:25:40.920 it crashes into the ground instantly, because it needs all of that thrust of those giant jet engines

00:25:46.740 to keep it going straight. Because at any moment, it could want to go in a different direction.

00:25:51.420 And so what makes a great fighter jet a great fighter jet? What makes a great rock star a great rock

00:25:56.040 star? What makes a great actor or public speaker or show host charismatic and great is dynamic

00:26:03.820 instability. It is that very idea that at any moment, right when you think you've got them in

00:26:08.120 your crosshairs, they're going in a completely different direction. So yeah, I think there,

00:26:13.140 I've never heard anyone kind of frame it up as mental illness, but yeah, it's probably true.

00:26:18.240 We're not the same as fun.

00:26:19.200 I'm offended here, because you're either saying I'm not charismatic or it's meant to be ill.

00:26:23.200 Which one is it? Maybe both.

00:26:25.680 Maybe a little bit of both. But, and that's fine for an actor. That's fine for a comedian. That's

00:26:32.220 fine for, you know, a lot of, a rock star. I kind of want my rock stars to be on edge. I don't want

00:26:36.920 my rock star to go home or to go to a hotel and have a, you know, a cup of cocoa in an early night.

00:26:42.140 I want him to be out living my dreams, right? Yeah.

00:26:45.320 My political influences? I don't want my political influences to be like that. I want my

00:26:50.920 political influences to be like someone like Ben. I may disagree with Ben on certain things,

00:26:55.600 but I know that he's consistent. He's logical. The same with Constantine.

00:26:59.980 But when you have political influences like Candace and Tucker, that's another package entirely,

00:27:09.300 isn't it?

00:27:09.700 Yeah. Well, I'd be careful about conflating Candace, uh, with Tucker. You know, Candace Owens is engaged

00:27:18.220 in a, as I, as I see it, Candace isn't engaged in, um, a project of self-aggrandizement.

00:27:25.340 I've asked Candace on two separate occasions, what do you actually believe? And on both occasions,

00:27:31.860 she told me, I believe what the people believe. I am the voice of the people.

00:27:37.740 Never mind that that's a completely amoral statement. Never mind that, uh, I don't know

00:27:42.760 who the people are in this conversation. Uh, never mind that the people, whoever they are,

00:27:46.860 can obviously be wrong. Candace is actually saying something somewhat profound. She's,

00:27:51.360 she's saying, I will say whatever gets the most reward. She may not even know that that's what

00:27:56.780 she's saying, but she's essentially, she's, uh, articulating audience capture as a virtue.

00:28:02.980 Tucker Carlson, I don't believe, I don't believe Tucker Carlson's engaged in, uh, in audience capture.

00:28:07.980 I think Tucker Carlson is part of a small cohort of people. Uh, cohort includes Marjorie Taylor Greene.

00:28:15.140 Cohort includes Steve Bannon. Uh, cohort includes Nick Fuentes. Although I'm not saying that Nick Fuentes

00:28:20.160 and Tucker Carlson, uh, believe all of the same things, but these are people engaged in an actual

00:28:25.660 political project. You know, these are people who are engaged in trying to create a new American

00:28:32.680 majority premised on left-wing economic populism and right-wing social populism.

00:28:39.600 You can say what you want about that, whether it's good or bad, you can say what you want about it,

00:28:43.320 but it, it is a political enterprise. They believe that they can create a majority and that that

00:28:48.300 majority can rule the country. Uh, and it's a new vision in terms of the ruling class in our country.

00:28:54.540 You know, we, it's not that there's never been people who put forward that vision, but it's never

00:28:58.680 been as poised to seize, uh, to seize that actual political power as it is right now in the hands of

00:29:04.360 those, uh, of that group of people. So I, I don't, you know, some of the sort of superficial qualities

00:29:11.520 look the same, but I don't think it actually is the same. Candace is not engaged in a political

00:29:15.640 project. Tucker Carlson is very much engaged in a political project. So flesh, flesh out the

00:29:20.440 political project, left-wing economic populism, that is protectionism at home, uh, redistribution

00:29:25.800 of wealth. Yes. Uh, protection of the, the ordinary man against the corporate powers, et cetera, that

00:29:32.780 kind of stuff. Uh, and on the right, it would be a kind of nativist, uh, identitarian worldview, or

00:29:40.140 tell us more. Yeah. Well, I think you, you summed it up well. I would add that on the right, it's also,

00:29:45.180 uh, conservative social policy. I mean, you'll hear Tucker when he talks about, uh, Maduro and

00:29:51.720 he'll say things like, well, he may be a communist. I don't know if he is a communist, he may be a

00:29:55.140 communist, but he, but he outlawed gay marriage in his country and he, you know, outlawed abortion in

00:30:01.040 his country. Uh, I think Tucker has rightly recognized that right-wing social policy tends to be

00:30:07.680 very popular among working people. Uh, he's also recognized that redistribution of wealth,

00:30:16.900 people like getting checks, people like, um, and it's also very easy, especially in the wake of COVID,

00:30:22.620 I think, and in the wake of other sort of failures of what, whatever the elite is, I don't think that

00:30:27.600 there is a, you know, sort of secret cabal of, uh, of, you know, Jewish billionaires running the

00:30:35.800 world or anything, but obviously there is sort of a ruling class. There is a sort of, you know,

00:30:39.680 people who have more power or more agency in the country than others. Uh, and I think he realizes

00:30:46.240 that because that group is necessarily small and because envy and resentment are very real

00:30:50.080 parts of, of man's nature, it's always easy to stir people up economically against that group.

00:30:56.800 Uh, even when that group, which in the case of Tucker, it's funny because a lot of the

00:31:01.180 sort of tech billionaires agree with Tucker's political project, but nevertheless, it's very

00:31:06.540 easy to, you know, get the bulk of people angry at that group of people, angry at unchecked immigration,

00:31:13.720 which you should be angry at unchecked immigration, angry at the excesses of the left social policy,

00:31:19.520 uh, over the last 50 years, angry about the divorce rates in the country, uh, about the illegitimacy

00:31:25.620 rates, uh, in the country, the, the, the fatherhood crisis happening in the country, the collapse

00:31:29.920 of masculinity that's happening in the West, the, the, those are all each and every one

00:31:35.520 real problems. If you marry these things together, perhaps there's a majority, uh, that will have

00:31:42.000 a politics that's new. You know, when Tucker says, I'll, I'll end with this. When Tucker says,

00:31:45.740 J.D. Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene and I can change the foreign policy of this country.

00:31:50.040 Well, believe him, he's telling you what his project is. He's trying to change, uh, the sort

00:31:55.380 of historic politics of the country. That's it. Candace isn't.

00:32:00.680 Well, that's, that's, no, it's a very good distinction you make. And I suppose, I mean,

00:32:04.200 if you take it at the level of, um, being angry at certain things that have been done,

00:32:11.080 there is a majority of people, not just in America, I think across the Western world actually,

00:32:14.920 who are rightly, I think, uh, frustrated with open border immigration policies, uh, the, the

00:32:22.140 destruction of masculinity as a positive force in the world, I think is, I think it's atrocious

00:32:26.940 and has been horrific for, for our societies and on many other things. And that's not something

00:32:31.360 that even right wing people or left wing people have to agree. It's, it's kind of a majority

00:32:35.300 opinion. It's a majority opinion. And lots of other things we could talk about. Uh, my issue,

00:32:40.240 I suppose, is, is more about whether being angry about stuff becomes a productive force or whether

00:32:45.660 it remains a destructive force, because if you don't convert anger into solutions that

00:32:50.460 are forward-looking, then all you're doing is stirring people up for, and you talk about

00:32:55.660 Candace being self-aggrandizing. Well, as you said, there's an incentive structure in the,

00:32:59.900 in the media game. You know, I always tell this story and we joke about this. So when, when,

00:33:05.180 when Francis and I first started trigonometry, had a girlfriend, a very smart woman. And whenever

00:33:10.220 we used to complain about the state of the world or look, this thing happened or that thing happened,

00:33:14.380 she'd always say to us, look, whatever's bad for the world is good for trigonometry. Right.

00:33:18.620 And in the media game, ultimately that is unfortunately true. And so,

00:33:23.740 stirring people up to be angry while offering no practical solutions is a perfectly good game

00:33:29.980 plan. If what you're trying to do is make money, build a platform, make a bigger audience for

00:33:34.380 yourself, et cetera. Is there a constructive vision behind all of this, or is it more of a,

00:33:39.900 just a destructive force at this point? Again, I just wouldn't conflate the two

00:33:44.140 categories. The, the, the grift industrial complex and the people who belong to that category

00:33:50.460 probably don't care about the political outcome. They, as you say, whatever's bad for the world is

00:33:57.500 good for the bottom line. Whatever's bad for the world is good for the subscriber count. Whatever's

00:34:01.980 bad for the world is good for my engagement. The people engaged in the political project that I

00:34:08.860 suggested, you know, they do have a constructive vision. I'm using constructive here in,

00:34:16.700 definitionally, not connotatively. I don't think that it's contrary. I think it's a bad vision.

00:34:22.380 But it is a vision to seize power and remake the world order. You know, it is a, it is a vision to,

00:34:27.180 um, end the post-war consensus. It is a vision to, um, have a post-liberal West with, at the fringes,

00:34:37.180 they talk about this fairly openly, post-liberalism and sort of a reduction in human freedom because

00:34:42.220 they blame human freedom for the excesses, uh, of the West over the last generation or two generations.

00:34:48.140 Um, and this is, this is why I, I see a huge alignment between, you know, Antifa thugs tearing

00:34:58.540 down statues of Christopher Columbus and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and people on the

00:35:05.900 so-called new right saying that Churchill is the chief villain of the second world war or that America

00:35:11.660 shouldn't have used, uh, the atomic bomb to end the second world war or that man didn't, you know,

00:35:17.500 America didn't walk on the moon or that 9 11 was an inside job. That's just rhetorically tearing down

00:35:24.380 our statues in the same way that Antifa is physically tearing down our statues. It's saying that

00:35:29.100 the narrative structure on which the country is premised or more broadly, the West is premised,

00:35:35.820 um, our sort of, our short sort of shared legacy was either a lie, um, told by evil men to gain

00:35:47.100 power over you. Uh, or in some cases it was, uh, well, I'll say it essentially they're saying that

00:35:55.980 those structures were a lie. Um, and therefore there is nothing to conserve.

00:36:03.180 That's why I think it's a fundamentally anti-conservative proposition. It's a very radical

00:36:07.420 and reactionary proposition. It's saying everything that has been great about the country was wrong.

00:36:12.860 All of our greatest achievements were actually immoral. Uh, because when you, when you have a

00:36:19.340 sort of national identity, that national identity, as it turns out, is an immune system against tyranny.

00:36:25.740 If you want to bring about a tyrannical post-liberal, uh, authoritarian order, you have to get rid of

00:36:32.860 that underlying narrative, that story that people tell themselves that allows them to see themselves as

00:36:37.740 free, to see themselves as being on the side of freedom, to see themselves as being on the side of

00:36:41.740 human advancement and human flourishing. So I, it is constructive insofar as they are constructing

00:36:48.540 a, a new governing philosophy, uh, and implementing it. I think, um, it's destructive in the sense that

00:36:54.860 I think everything that's, that actually is good and true about our role in the world is the very thing

00:37:00.700 that will be the first casualty of, of this new political project.

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00:38:25.420 Well, you say that they're having an impact. I don't remember the exact word you used.

00:38:29.980 And you mentioned J.D. Vance. I mean, so far, the Trump administration's foreign policy has been

00:38:34.860 utter repudiation of that entire worldview, I would argue. But do you see J.D. Vance as a champion of that

00:38:42.460 movement and potentially taking over and implementing that vision? Is that what you're saying?

00:38:47.820 I don't know. I think that J.D. Vance is a unique figure in my lifetime in American politics because

00:38:53.020 he plays it incredibly close. I don't know, and I think very few people know what J.D. Vance,

00:38:59.980 what his actual political North Star is. Tucker Carlson claims him when he says Marjorie Taylor

00:39:10.460 Green, J.D. Vance, and I will change the foreign policy or can change the foreign policy of this

00:39:16.140 country. That's one side claiming J.D. Vance. Now, do they actually have a claim on J.D. Vance?

00:39:23.580 I don't know that they do. I think one has to look at the fact that J.D. has apparently a very

00:39:30.140 close relationship with Tucker, that he has not repudiated Tucker, as Tucker's rhetoric has gotten

00:39:37.420 more and more and more outside of any sort of traditional American conservatism,

00:39:44.860 and ask themselves, why? Why does J.D. remain so close to Tucker? I think it's premature to say

00:39:51.180 it's because he is a part of that new political project. I think it's just as likely that it's

00:39:59.820 a sense of loyalty. J.D. owes a lot of his political career to Tucker. Tucker took a bet on J.D. Vance when

00:40:07.260 very few other people would, both in his run for Senate and in helping, by all accounts, helping

00:40:14.460 point Donald Trump toward the idea of selecting J.D. as his running mate.

00:40:18.460 J.D. It may be out of, you know, and listen, I respect that. Friendship is actually a really

00:40:25.660 important concept to me. J.D. And gratitude and loyalty. J.D. Gratitude and loyalty are very

00:40:29.740 important values. I don't think that we should, you know, there's sort of this other debate on the

00:40:34.140 right and people who I normally align with very much, you know, people who I respect greatly like

00:40:39.980 Dennis Prager, Ben, have made the case recently that friendship should not trump

00:40:48.460 people who are in our business actually holding other people to account for the things that they

00:40:54.860 say. And I think that that is, I understand why they've taken that view. And I think there's a lot

00:41:01.740 of truth to the view, but I don't think that the view is entirely true. I think friendship should

00:41:06.460 cause us to give people a lot of latitude, a lot of rope to try to deal with things privately before

00:41:12.700 we try to deal with them publicly. And friendship is an incredibly important virtue. Right. And of

00:41:17.660 course, friendship can't ultimately prevent us from being publicly critical when we've exhausted

00:41:24.700 all these other mechanisms. So probably I have a more nuanced perspective on that maybe than some

00:41:30.220 others. But all of that to say, yes, maybe that's why J.D. Vance seems so aligned with Tucker. And

00:41:37.260 and if so, understandable. There's also a political reality. J.D. Vance has to keep together the Trump

00:41:42.860 coalition in order to have a chance to be president in three years. And that means that he probably

00:41:49.660 politically, from his point of view, needs all the people who listen to Tucker just as much as he

00:41:53.660 needs all the people who listen to Ben Shapiro. Donald Trump, particularly in 2020 and 2024, did a

00:41:59.180 great job of building that coalition. I think, and others have said as much, so this is not an original

00:42:05.980 thought. I think that Tucker is doing an enormous amount of damage to the Trump coalition.

00:42:11.820 And I think that that will become a political liability if left unchecked for J.D. Vance.

00:42:17.420 But right now, if I'm J.D. Vance, I can understand politically why you wouldn't want to get into the

00:42:22.540 business of dividing up the coalition, drawing lines, which makes it harder, presumably, to become

00:42:29.420 the next president. Or he's actually a part of their political project. It could be any of those three

00:42:34.140 things. And I think that only time is going to help us understand which of those three

00:42:38.700 things it is. But I think it would be cynical to assume right out of the gate that just because

00:42:44.220 J.D. Vance is friends with Tucker Carlson, and just because Tucker Carlson claims J.D. Vance,

00:42:49.660 that's politically advantageous for Tucker Carlson to do, right? That doesn't mean that J.D. Vance is a

00:42:55.260 part of Tucker Carlson's political project. And obviously, I certainly hope he's not. I think that,

00:43:00.460 you know, sometimes it's easy to say, well, Donald Trump, poor Donald Trump, what a buffoon that he

00:43:07.820 chose J.D. Vance. And J.D. is actually part of this project to take apart his coalition. And he only

00:43:12.780 picked J.D. Vance because Tucker Carlson told him to. That's sort of like saying George W. Bush only

00:43:18.540 invaded Iraq because the Jews told him to. But you don't become the president of the United States and not have

00:43:23.260 your own judgment and your own opinions. I like to think that probably Donald Trump isn't

00:43:30.460 some puppet that can be wielded by by other nefarious political actors. He chose J.D. Vance

00:43:36.780 in the end, maybe on Tucker's recommendation, but he chose him. I'd like to think that he believes,

00:43:41.180 therefore, that J.D. Vance can be a good steward of the coalition that Trump built.

00:43:48.700 We've been talking about this movement and I'm loving the conversation. We've talked about the

00:43:52.220 intellectual side of it, the political side of it. But there's I think there's one element that we

00:43:56.220 haven't spoken about, which is the spiritual, religious side of it. A lot of these people in

00:44:01.020 this movement are Christians. They're very, very devout Christians or hardline, however you want to

00:44:05.900 describe it. And when they talk about America, it's almost to me like they're talking about a modern day

00:44:11.980 Sodom and Gomorrah. And the only way that to deal with a Sodom and Gomorrah is what God did,

00:44:18.780 which was to burn it to the ground. Fire. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, there

00:44:26.940 there is a religious component to a lot of what's happening. You know, people like Nick Fuentes like

00:44:33.180 to lead with Christ is King as a as a sort of tribal rally cry, right? Rallying cry. I think that that's

00:44:41.820 anathema to I think what they're actually the term Christ is King is not anathema to Christianity or

00:44:49.980 the gospel message. But what they are admittedly doing by invoking the term Christ is King is Nick

00:44:57.100 Fuentes is very clear about what he's doing when he uses Christ is King. He chose a rallying cry that

00:45:02.780 would exclude Jews. That's why he chose it. So therefore, Christ is King is a way of excluding

00:45:11.260 Jews from the political project that that he's engaged in creating. I think that is anathema to

00:45:17.660 the gospel. I think it's using the name of the Lord in vain. I've said as much

00:45:21.420 publicly before. I think one should be very careful about wielding the name of God for personal or tribal

00:45:26.540 gain. Does that mean that there? So that is a religious component to what's happening.

00:45:35.420 And where there is religion, there is a spiritual component as well. I say that as a believer. I'm a

00:45:40.540 Christian. I therefore believe that when one invokes Christ, they're invoking something real. Now, whether

00:45:46.780 they have the power to actually make such an invocation, your mileage may vary. But they're certainly playing

00:45:56.140 with forces. Hamlet might say, you know, there are more things in heaven and earth than are present in

00:46:04.620 our philosophy, right? They're playing with something that's real, whether they think it's real or not.

00:46:13.820 But I don't think that it is, hmm.

00:46:16.700 You know, sometimes you just talk because it's your turn to talk and what you should really

00:46:25.180 do is think for a second. What I would say is,

00:46:35.020 the language of religion is being used right now to the benefit of people who, as far as I can see,

00:46:42.060 are not engaged in a project that's consistent with the gospel of Christ. But it is very powerful tribal

00:46:52.540 language. They're wielding sort of elemental forces that have existed in all cultures throughout time,

00:47:02.300 and in the case of Christianity, I believe forces that are quite true. They're wielding them for

00:47:06.620 personal gain and to great effect because they are greatly effective tools.

00:47:16.300 I don't think that what's being expressed is any sort of true Christian religion. And I don't think

00:47:24.540 that the fruit that will be born out of this political project is fruit that's consistent with

00:47:30.060 any sort of Christian fruit, as might be described in Scripture. But they're giving God quite a bad

00:47:40.300 name at the moment by using Him in the way that they are.

00:47:47.340 Because to me, as somebody who was raised Catholic, I went to Catholic school from the age of four right

00:47:51.500 through to the age of 18, Jesuit school, so I know a little bit about Christianity and Catholicism

00:47:56.620 in particular. It seems to me an incredibly vengeful movement. And that is not corresponding with the

00:48:05.500 teachings of Jesus Christ as I was doing.

00:48:08.140 Very Old Testament.

00:48:08.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:48:10.140 Well, I would say that a big part of what's happening

00:48:15.580 is a sort of, I don't mean this in the church sense of schism, because of course Protestants and

00:48:24.380 Catholics are in schism. But I mean, in a political sense, there's an effort to create schism between

00:48:29.340 Catholics and Protestants, particularly in America, because Protestants in America are supportive of

00:48:36.300 the state of Israel, broadly speaking. And this sort of trad Catholic movement that's very popular in the

00:48:45.660 country right now among this group of people in particular. Young, male, you know, Gen Z men,

00:48:53.820 white men, are being really drawn to Catholicism, in part because of the failures of American

00:49:02.060 evangelicalism over the last 20, 25 years. And in part because of the excesses of,

00:49:08.860 well, what they would say are the excesses of liberalism over the last 40 years,

00:49:17.100 they're being drawn to something that's more liturgical, that's older, that's more structured,

00:49:22.300 that's more, that emphasizes works more than it emphasizes vagaries like faith, what they might

00:49:27.420 perceive as vagaries like faith. They want something that they can do, something they can belong to.

00:49:32.380 They want to be part of a tribe. Not everything about tribalism is bad. You know,

00:49:36.460 we do belong to tribes. But they want that sense of feeling and purpose. They've been ostracized from

00:49:42.300 the country in which they are the historic majority. They've been told every day that everything

00:49:46.460 that's wrong with the world is because of them, when, of course, that can't possibly be true.

00:49:50.300 They were, they've been children for most of the time they've been on the planet. And so they're,

00:49:55.420 they're drawn to things that feel to them, uh, substantive. And, you know, of course,

00:50:01.740 Catholicism is not antisemitic. Uh, but Catholicism has had, uh, struggles with antisemitism throughout

00:50:13.020 history, uh, struggles that have been addressed even in, even in the 20th century by the church,

00:50:19.420 you know, that they've, that they've acknowledged and that they've taken enormous, I think, steps to

00:50:23.580 try to mitigate against. A lot of these Catholic, young Catholics in the country right now are sort of

00:50:29.340 evoking a Catholicism, uh, before those changes were made. Uh, and I think it's just sort of,

00:50:39.500 I think that it's a confluence as we were discussing earlier. It's kind of this, this moment where,

00:50:46.460 the appeal of trad Catholicism is connected to, uh, the fear of these conspiracies is connected to the,

00:50:54.780 the, the blaming of a smaller and smaller group, which eventually ends up with the smallest group,

00:50:59.260 which is Jews, you know, uh, uh, uh, a skepticism and, and, um,

00:51:09.900 sort of aversion to the idea that there are powerful elites who run things, you know.

00:51:14.700 I think that all that has sort of conflated in this moment where there,

00:51:17.660 there is this tribal spiritual and very Catholic move.

00:51:20.460 I say very Catholic because not because it's broadly, not because Catholicism is broadly this,

00:51:29.100 but because this is broadly Catholic, if that makes sense. Uh, and it's a, it's an open effort to

00:51:35.020 separate off, um, Protestants from political power on the right. You know, when Tucker Carlson says that

00:51:44.060 he hates Christian Zionists more than he hates anyone, he walked that back. But, but what he is talking about

00:51:49.740 is Protestants in the country saying that people who have historically voted Republican in the country

00:51:54.220 aren't the Republicans that we want as part of this new conservative right wing coalition.

00:51:59.340 And so there is this very religious component to it all. Um, I don't think that it's being motivated by

00:52:06.380 religion. I don't think that what's happening is an expression of religion in the country.

00:52:10.780 But I think religion is being used as a tool. This kind of goes to a broader

00:52:14.780 thing that I think about, which is both for audience capture, both for overthrowing, uh, liberal

00:52:23.900 democracy and, and ushering in a more authoritarian form of government in the country, um, both for

00:52:30.460 getting clicks and getting views, both cynicism, both antisemitism, which is being wielded by so many

00:52:36.380 people, uh, left and right right now. In all of these instances, people are, I think, trying to wield

00:52:44.140 evil tools, wield evil as a tool to advance their agendas. And what they're missing is that you cannot

00:52:51.340 wield evil. You are the tool that's wielded by evil. Everybody thinks that they can kind of ironically,

00:52:58.140 or, well, I'm smart. I can use these tools, but they won't impact me. But

00:53:01.500 you can't, you know, you grew up Catholic, like evil is an active force, not a passive force.

00:53:09.580 Evil can be personified. It has opinions. It has agenda. Uh, and it, and it gets the final vote

00:53:15.820 when you start trying to wield it for your own personal gain. I, I think we see that so clearly

00:53:21.420 with what Candace has become. I mean, she's now, you know, talking about doing expose documentaries on

00:53:28.460 Charlie Kirk's widow. You know, that's, that is evil. Is Candace evil? That I'm not, I'm not the

00:53:37.340 judge of Candace's soul, but Candace is doing evil and she's doing evil. I think because she

00:53:42.220 cynically believed that she, and maybe still believes that she can wield these evil tools to

00:53:45.980 her own gain. And that works in the short term. Sometimes it doesn't ever work in the long term.

00:53:51.020 No, because what you're talking about fundamentally is your soul. Yeah, that's right.

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00:56:06.620 Every day as a human being you have a choice whether to do the right thing or to do the

00:56:11.980 thing that will serve you in the short term. But ultimately the thing that will serve you in the

00:56:17.180 short term will ultimately lead to somewhere you really don't want to be. And the problem is,

00:56:23.500 and we've touched on this before, is we have now got a media ecosystem that incentivizes the short term.

00:56:31.020 It incentivizes the clicks so that you can make those short term choices. But eventually what you end up as

00:56:38.220 is something deeply awful in the way that human cells can mutate and turn into cancer cells.

00:56:45.980 And it seems to me we need to have this conversation, which is when we look at our

00:56:53.340 influences, do we go, is this politics or is this entertainment? Because I talk to a lot of people

00:56:59.340 who go, you know what? I listen to Candace Owens and I watch her and I love her.

00:57:02.780 And I'm like, why? And they go, look, I know she's mad, but it's fun and it's entertaining. And you go,

00:57:10.940 so what is she? Is it politics? Is it entertainment? Nick Fuentes, is it politics or entertainment?

00:57:17.740 Tucker is far more to the political side. That's clear. But there's this whole raft of other people

00:57:23.340 and you can't actually understand or pigeonhole what they are. And you get this with other people

00:57:29.420 as well. People who go, Bassem Youssef, former guest on the show, talks about Gaza. When he's exposed,

00:57:35.420 he goes, I'm just a clown. Clown knows on. Yeah, clown knows on. Politics or entertainment? What is

00:57:40.460 it? What are you? Well, again, on the specifics, I think Nick Fuentes is engaged in a great political

00:57:47.100 project. I think he's a formidable opponent for anyone who believes in human freedom. But yes,

00:57:52.940 for many on the sort of grift industrial complex side of things, it is primarily entertainment.

00:58:02.460 You say people tell you that they listen to Candace. I had a guy tell me recently,

00:58:05.660 he said, what should I say to my wife? She keeps telling me about things that she hears Candace say

00:58:11.660 and I don't even know how to respond to them. I said, well, I would just respond by telling her

00:58:16.380 fun things that you saw in some porno video that you watched. He said, whoa, what are you talking

00:58:20.780 about? I said, well, the same level of shame should accompany both statements. One should be ashamed to

00:58:26.700 say publicly that they're watching Candace Owens now. And Candace Owens, who is at war with the

00:58:32.620 widow of her purported best friend, Charlie Kirk. This is so far beyond the pale. The fact that

00:58:42.060 people can say with a straight face, oh, what do you make of what Candace said? What I make of it is

00:58:47.100 that it is a kind of pornography. It is rhetorical pornography. It does the same thing that regular

00:58:54.540 pornography does. It titillates, it stimulates, it's slightly naughty. It's great for getting clicks and

00:59:01.020 it makes tons of money on the internet. And you shouldn't be able to look at it if you're under 18.

00:59:05.900 Well, it's interesting. I'm curious about the political project side of things, because

00:59:13.740 I think it's fair to say, actually, that what you call the grift industrial complex,

00:59:18.540 there have always been people, and the more attention they can get, the more crazy stuff

00:59:22.140 they'll say. And that is something, actually, we can talk about the influences. I honestly think it

00:59:28.060 comes down to personal responsibility. You, as an individual, have a choice about whether you consume

00:59:32.620 this or not. And pornography is the same. I don't want to ban pornography. It doesn't mean I think

00:59:36.460 people should consume as much of it as possible. No, right? And there's a lot of room for personal

00:59:41.820 responsibility within this. This is one of the things that people like us get accused of, is like,

00:59:45.900 we want to censor these. I don't want to censor anyone. I'm just saying that this is,

00:59:51.020 I don't want to prevent McDonald's from being sold. I'm just saying McDonald's is probably not good

00:59:54.380 for you, you know, or as good for you as other food, at least. I'm going to get sued by

00:59:58.300 fucking McDonald's. Anyway, you get my point. But the political side of it is interesting,

01:00:03.180 because I think whatever we may say about the direction that these people want to take the West

01:00:10.220 in, I think many of the critiques of the status quo, as we've discussed before, are actually quite

01:00:15.740 legitimate. And James Orr, who we've had on the show, who's now a big influence within reform, but

01:00:20.780 he's very good friends with J.D. Vance, as I'm sure you know. He's one of the smartest people I've ever

01:00:25.180 met, one of the best people I've ever met, too. When he was on the show, he talked about the fact

01:00:29.420 that in his view, or at least the view he was putting forward, woke is the inevitable consequence

01:00:34.620 of liberalism. And so if you hate woke, as I think we all do, his argument will be, well, you have to

01:00:41.660 look at where it came from. And therefore, this calling for a post-liberal worldview and post-liberal

01:00:47.180 order is a natural reaction, I think, to that. So why are they wrong? Well, they're not,

01:00:52.060 they're not wrong in diagnosing that we have a problem. I think that they're wrong in that

01:00:57.820 they remove human agency. All these sort of isms are looking for an original sin. You know,

01:01:04.940 communism says the original sin is class. And libertarianism says the original sin is

01:01:11.340 government coercion. And, you know, this new right says the original sin is liberalism.

01:01:17.580 But, of course, the original sin is original sin. Original sin is pride and the fall in the garden

01:01:22.780 and the thing that leads to all of the other problems that these people are trying to diagnose

01:01:26.780 as the problem. But where I find fault with that is that it removes any agency after the problem.

01:01:34.540 You know, people will say, I supported the Iraq War in my early 20s. Now people will say,

01:01:39.100 well, obviously the Iraq War went very poorly. And so people will say, well,

01:01:43.580 was it a mistake to invade Iraq? And their evidence that it was a mistake will be a bunch of things

01:01:47.900 that happened that they basically imply were inevitable once the decision to go to Iraq was

01:01:55.020 made. But it wasn't inevitable that we would send too few troops. It wasn't inevitable that we would

01:02:01.340 disband the Bathurst army and therefore there'd be nobody to hold the country. It wasn't inevitable that

01:02:07.100 Barack Obama would win the presidency. Two presidential elections later, running on a

01:02:12.620 promise to pull all the troops out of Iraq no matter what, and then did so, which gave rise to

01:02:16.220 ISIS and required us to send troops back in and retake cities that we'd already taken. None of those

01:02:21.580 things were inevitable. Those were other decisions that also got made. To actually get to the heart of,

01:02:26.380 was it a mistake to go to Iraq? You almost have to ask that question after working your way

01:02:32.860 backward through all the other mistakes. And I would say the same with liberalism. We live in a world

01:02:39.020 of problems. Many of those problems you can trace back to, you know, the Enlightenment and the beginning

01:02:49.020 of the sort of liberal movement in the West. But at each one of those points along the way, humans were,

01:02:55.420 humans, fallen from the actual original sin, were making any number of decisions that all compiled

01:03:03.580 to bring us to this moment that we're in. And it was not necessarily, I just can't say that there was

01:03:08.140 only one thing that, there's only one moment of true human agency that ever existed, and it was the

01:03:12.380 moment that your political philosophy got inspired by. Oh yeah, man, yeah, just if Caveman Joe had never

01:03:19.260 had, you know, two rocks when Caveman Tom only had one rock, then we wouldn't have all these problems

01:03:24.220 today. I don't buy that kind of an argument. We have the excesses of the liberal order today that

01:03:33.100 we're rightly trying to figure out how to deal with. I don't think that one has to go all the way back

01:03:37.900 and say liberalism itself has failed. Liberalism just means human freedom. Human freedom has not

01:03:43.420 failed. Human freedom is consistent with the gospel. It's for freedom that Christ has made you free.

01:03:47.980 The idea of man's relationship to God being governed by law, as it turns out, was never God's actual

01:03:54.860 design to be fulfilled in man. And so he brought about human freedom in Christ, and that's a picture

01:04:01.420 of what's also true in government. You know, the liberal order also gave us everything, like the entire

01:04:06.940 modern world, to say, well, we have to get rid of the thing that has allowed us to lift billions of

01:04:12.220 people out of poverty, that's allowed us to create these unbelievable technological advancements and

01:04:18.220 increase human flourishing in so many ways, to say that it is the fundamental problem. I just think

01:04:24.060 that's a mistake. I think we could look, I think we could look back at all the, what is inevitable because

01:04:31.100 of actual original sin is that whatever system is put in place is going to degrade over time and bear,

01:04:38.060 uh, and collapse under its own weight over time. The, the illiberal order that, that some of these

01:04:44.380 people want to put in place, and listen, I think some of them probably want an illiberal order that's

01:04:48.860 virtuous. I think some of them want an illiberal order that is not virtuous. Uh, but even if I grant

01:04:54.620 that the illiberal order will be a virtuous illiberal order, that it'll be a strong man for good,

01:05:00.540 that is still going to break down. I think it'll break down much faster than liberalism broke down.

01:05:04.140 Um, the, the, the, um, again, because there's an actual thing called actual original sin and,

01:05:11.180 and it isn't class and it isn't government coercion and it isn't, uh, democratic politics and it isn't,

01:05:17.420 uh, human freedom. It's, it's sin and sin just corrupts everything as it goes. So, you know, I,

01:05:24.060 I think people are looking for a simple solution to what is actually an unsolvable problem, which is the

01:05:30.940 problem of man. And one of the beautiful things about particularly America's, uh, form of liberalism,

01:05:37.500 as, as, um, sort of created by our two founding documents, the Declaration and then the Constitution,

01:05:43.740 is it, it's sort of built into its understanding of the world, the problem of original sin,

01:05:49.980 actual original sin. And it sought to constrain or mitigate some of the worst excesses of actual

01:05:55.100 original sin by, uh, strong protection from minority rights, not just populism, by not allowing

01:06:05.260 one branch of government, uh, to hold in, in itself too much of the power, too much authority,

01:06:10.780 to actually require government to be small, to require government to be slow so that people can't

01:06:15.580 react out of impulse in every moment. And I would say it's, it seems just as, uh, likely to me that

01:06:22.300 most of the problems we face now are because of the, the erosion of those systems, which were meant

01:06:27.820 to positively channel liberalism, uh, breaking down, uh, as they are to, uh, I would blame that long

01:06:36.140 before I would blame the concept of liberalism itself. Well, and that really, I think is the

01:06:40.700 question now, uh, before we move on to other things is how do you articulate a positive vision

01:06:46.460 of how to deal with the excesses of liberalism that have become woke and embedded themselves in

01:06:52.060 institutions, et cetera, without going to the simple solution, the scapegoat, this group's to

01:06:57.980 blame, et cetera. What is the positive vision, uh, to address all this without going tyrannical,

01:07:03.500 without going into this, into this type of, uh, worldview? Well, I think that we can look back at

01:07:08.460 moments when Western civilization was functioning much more, uh, in a much more healthy way. And you

01:07:14.620 don't have to look back all that far. You know, we, we were discussing a little bit before the show

01:07:20.780 in, in the brief time that we got together, uh, how different the world was before, just before

01:07:26.300 COVID-19. How if we could get in a time machine and go back to 2019, we probably would be shocked

01:07:31.500 by the reality, even though it was only, you know, six years ago and we all lived through it and were

01:07:36.940 adults and fully formed and had laid down with ladies and, you know, gone to war. And we can't even

01:07:42.780 remember what the regular world was like before they stopped it spinning on its axis and then tried to

01:07:47.900 hit control alt delete and reboot the whole damn thing. Uh, history, I say this all the time, history for,

01:07:55.500 people will ask me, I'm particularly bad at this. People say, do you remember when this person did

01:08:00.700 this? And I'll say, yeah. And do you remember when this person did this? Yeah. Which came first? I don't

01:08:04.780 know because history becomes very two-dimensional to me. History flattens. It does, it does for all of us.

01:08:11.020 You should probably get a little longer than I get out of it, but history becomes very flat. But history

01:08:15.580 wasn't flat. History was just as complex and robust as the present, obviously. And if you could go back

01:08:21.660 just a little ways, the West was doing great. You know, the Reagan-Thatcher moment in the 1980s

01:08:28.380 was an unbelievable moment of economic growth, economic prosperity, uh, strength, the defeat of

01:08:35.340 the Soviet Union, the, the, uh, victory of liberalism and democracy over tyranny. Um, you don't have to

01:08:45.020 look back. You don't have to even look back at all. You only have to look across land masses or across

01:08:49.980 oceans to see the results of tyranny, to see the results of strongman government and how it actually

01:08:54.860 fails in practice. It, of course, it's true that in the kingdom of God, it won't be a democracy.

01:09:01.340 There'll be one guy in charge, but he'll have the advantage of being perfect and also being God.

01:09:05.660 He'll know everything. Uh, he won't make mistakes. He will be truly virtuous. Uh, until you get to

01:09:12.940 that system, I think a far better system is a channeled liberalism channeled by what channeled

01:09:18.220 by rule of law channeled by, uh, cultural institutions. We've destroyed all of our cultural institutions.

01:09:23.900 Um, channeled by the family. We've destroyed the family. Did liberalism destroy the family? No,

01:09:29.020 we destroyed the family. And when we destroyed the family, liberalism became unchanneled. Um,

01:09:36.780 so, you know, I think, I think the real problem that we face as a people is that the work,

01:09:43.980 the work is us. We're actually the thing that's gone wrong. But liberalism is not,

01:09:49.980 by the way, some sort of, I think we derive our sense of liberalism from Christian religion.

01:09:54.940 Um, and so I do think that there's a spiritual component, uh, a spiritual example of liberalism

01:10:01.260 being good, seeing what, what virtuous liberalism can look like in, but liberalism itself is not,

01:10:07.100 uh, some innate virtue. It's like capitalism is not an innate virtue. Um, but channeled by virtue,

01:10:17.660 capitalism and liberalism are the two most successful and most virtuous, um, sort of

01:10:23.580 philosophies that we can have for governing society. We've got to put those, we've got to

01:10:28.300 bring back the virtue part that constrains them and channels them. I would much rather do that than

01:10:32.860 try to just form a government where, uh, or, or some governing order, wherein the unvirtuous rule over

01:10:40.060 the also unvirtuous, that's not gonna, that's not gonna fix things. This episode of Trigonometry is

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01:11:39.900 Well, one of the things that causes us to be where we are, I think as a culture and across the

01:11:46.460 Atlantic actually is we've become very split. And one of the reasons is that particularly people on the,

01:11:52.620 on the right have really got into a thing, which is we, you know, there's a, it's very easy to

01:11:59.980 criticize culture. It's very hard to make culture. And one of the things that you guys were really ambitious

01:12:05.100 with when you were at the Daily Wire and I hope, I hope still, um, now is creating new things,

01:12:11.020 is creating culture. The Pendragon cycle is a massive project that you've been working on.

01:12:15.740 The trailer looks incredible. Uh, it was absolutely fantastic to see. Um, tell us about that and,

01:12:21.740 and what, you know, how the, I, I, I have heard it was a pain in the ass to make everything went wrong,

01:12:27.820 you know, actors falling off things, breaking things, you know, having to be replaced by people

01:12:32.540 who've never acted in LA, et cetera. Uh, tell us about that.

01:12:36.060 Yeah. Well, I often think when people are critical of, of movies that I make,

01:12:39.900 that while I know that the movie I actually made is nowhere near as good as the movie that

01:12:43.740 they would have made if they had ever made a movie, making movies is impossible.

01:12:49.420 Yeah. Yeah. My friend Phelan McAleer told me, uh, years ago, he said,

01:12:54.300 directing a movie is a job that is so difficult. It's actually impossible. And therefore it mentally

01:13:00.380 breaks every person foolish enough to endeavor to do it. And he's right. You just go mad. Um,

01:13:06.540 because it's so complex and you're just in a war against reality the entire time. You, you,

01:13:11.980 you say you've heard about these horrors that happened on our set. It's true.

01:13:14.860 We had a guy, uh, a good friend of mine, Jeff Don, had a massive heart attack on set.

01:13:19.580 We had a horse roll over one of our actors and break his legs. Amazingly, he had an identical twin,

01:13:25.660 man also living in Budapest at the time, um, who wasn't an actor, but, uh, who was very kind

01:13:31.740 and stepped up and, and made sure we were able to continue. Um, we, one of our producers fell on the

01:13:36.860 ice and broke her arm, uh, horribly, like, you know, required surgery. Uh, and those were the good days.

01:13:45.260 Those are the days where the production itself mostly kept working. Uh,

01:13:49.020 uh, and yet, you know, there's nothing more rewarding than creation. You know, I, I, I'm one

01:13:56.860 who believes that, uh, you know, in, in the New Testament, in the book of John, it says in the

01:14:01.740 beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God and through him, all things were

01:14:06.140 made that were made and apart from him was nothing made. Uh, and to me, that says that if you take the

01:14:13.100 Christian view that Genesis one says God created the heavens and the earth and John one says that

01:14:20.300 all things were made through Christ, uh, and the Christian perspective is that Christ is the part

01:14:25.980 of God most associated with man. He's the part of God that walked the earth as man. And what that,

01:14:31.420 what you can draw from all of that is that man is that, that God associates creation with man.

01:14:39.740 That the part of God that is creative is the part of God that identifies and walks as man.

01:14:45.180 You take Adam naming the animals in the garden, um, a thing without a name may not even exist. If you,

01:14:52.220 if you read Spencer Clavin's terrific book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, you know,

01:14:57.180 this entire quantum concept that exists now in science, human observation is an active participant

01:15:04.540 in God's creation. We're literally creating the world as we observe it. God creates through man.

01:15:11.820 And so I think that we have a responsibility, uh, to be active participants in creation, not just passive,

01:15:17.580 not just through looking around, are we creating, but through getting our hands dirty.

01:15:20.780 Um, and that might, you know, I think creating business is a beautiful thing to do. People,

01:15:25.020 when I first started the daily wire, my Hollywood friends would say, oh, how's it feel? You used to be a

01:15:29.340 creative. Now you're a suit. I said, no, I am a creative. I'm creating something different than what I used to try to create.

01:15:33.900 You know, um, creating a family, uh, is part of the act of creation, maybe the most important part

01:15:39.180 of the act of creation, but we, we're not here, um, to consume and die. We're here to create.

01:15:47.980 And for me, there's an artistic component to that. I've been fortunate in my life to get to make movies,

01:15:53.340 to make music, to make businesses. Um, but I think for whoever you are, wherever you are,

01:15:59.500 you should be a part of that. And as, as conservatives, and all of these words have

01:16:03.980 become very tricky in modern time, right? The word conservative has about 18 different definitions,

01:16:08.860 and we are part of the conservative civil wars for the definition of the word.

01:16:14.140 But I don't want to conserve the past. I want to conserve the best things about the past while

01:16:21.980 building a better future because of the wisdom that we've inherited. I don't want to throw out the

01:16:27.260 wisdom of the past and try to build a whole new world based on my impulses or my instincts,

01:16:31.900 um, divorced from all the great hard-won creation of the people who went before us,

01:16:36.380 but I also don't want to keep the stuff that sucked. Uh, and, and I think that that is what

01:16:41.740 we're called upon to do as people, as, as people who are part of this, um, right of center movement

01:16:48.700 in the country. The left understands creating the future. They just reject the past. And the right

01:16:53.100 tends to understand holding onto the past, but fails when it comes time to build the future.

01:16:58.460 I've always said, you know, at the Daily Wire, I would say our job is to, uh, fight the left and

01:17:04.220 build the future. I, I think my kind of updated Jeremy 2.0 view of it is fight for freedom and

01:17:10.620 build the future. We have to continually be building. And Penn Dragon's the biggest artistic project I've

01:17:17.580 ever gotten to be a part of building. A thousand people worked on it. A thousand artists worked on it.

01:17:21.740 I worked on an unbelievable cast. I, I think truly there may have never been a better cast of

01:17:27.980 relatively unknown actors that ever came together to make a project. I think when people see the show,

01:17:33.820 they'll think I'm exaggerating here, that I'm, uh, that I'm sort of bragging. I take no credit

01:17:39.580 for it. The way the cast came together was miraculous. And I think when people see the show,

01:17:43.340 they'll be like, damn, these guys are terrific. And we told a story, the most told story in the

01:17:50.220 Western canon outside of stories directly from the Bible is the Arthurian myth. And we told it in a

01:17:57.260 way that I think is sort of true to its actual Christian origins. And you know, to the extent

01:18:04.620 that maybe Game of Thrones was subversive in its time because of its nihilism, I think the Penn Dragon

01:18:09.260 cycle is subversive in its time because of its rejection of nihilism. It's a very hopeful project.

01:18:14.860 And it's sort of about this moment that we live in. It's a, about a moment of great political upheaval,

01:18:20.460 of great spiritual and religious upheaval, uh, and about how we prioritize our values. And so to,

01:18:30.620 to that extent, even though we made something that's about the deep past, I think we made something

01:18:33.900 that's really urgently relevant to the world in which we live. Um, I couldn't be more proud of it.

01:18:38.460 Jeremy, what a pleasure it's been to have you on. An incredible conversation.

01:18:43.020 Thank you.

01:18:43.820 Final question is always the same. What's the one thing that we're not talking about

01:18:47.420 as a society that we really should be?

01:18:49.660 Before Jeremy answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure you head

01:18:53.420 over to triggerpod.co.uk where you get to see him answer your questions. How did the death of

01:18:59.260 Charlie Kirk affect you and other senior people at The Daily Wire? And what do you think his lasting

01:19:03.340 impact will be? You know, I, I should have fired Candace much earlier than I did.

01:19:09.100 Why? What for? Why was she actually fired? There are so many, of course, one who's going to go on

01:19:14.540 trigonometry thinks about the answer to this question. I came up with like a whole list of

01:19:18.780 things that we should be talking about that we aren't. One of them is just the left. You know,

01:19:22.860 this right wing civil war seems to be all consuming right now. Meanwhile, the left is

01:19:29.180 reassembling after the political defeats, their recent political defeats. And they've gone completely

01:19:35.340 mad and they're poised to grab great political power in the coming years. I'm very concerned about

01:19:40.220 that. I'm concerned that we're, we've been too triumphalist and we're about to have real

01:19:45.260 challenges again on our hands. But, but I think the biggest thing that people should be talking

01:19:49.100 about that we're not talking about right now is the negative impacts of social media. It's like we've

01:19:57.740 skipped it completely and we've moved on to worrying about AI. And AI is still an abstraction,

01:20:02.620 largely. Unbelievable advancements. It's an unbelievable tool at the moment, although an

01:20:07.740 imperfect one. And it may be as disruptive and horrible as everybody fears, but, but it's not

01:20:13.820 the moment we actually live in. The moment that we live in is, is the moment created by a cell phone

01:20:19.020 in every pocket and social media on every cell phone and what it's doing to us as a people. You know,

01:20:24.460 all of the things we've discussed today have been empowered by this moment, this moment of social

01:20:30.060 media. Some of them are good. There'd be no daily wire. As I said at the very beginning, what we,

01:20:34.700 what we realized was the opportunity in social media. That was our, that was our sort of founding

01:20:40.620 observation. Um, Pendragon wouldn't exist without social media. It's an alternative to the way Hollywood

01:20:47.020 does things. That's an opportunity that we were afforded because of social media. Obviously, we have access to

01:20:52.620 information, uh, access to friends who in previous generations, we might have lost touch with access

01:20:58.060 to family who we might not have been, uh, as close to access to data and information. And, you know,

01:21:03.660 I got sick recently and was able to so quickly understand things that would have taken so much

01:21:07.900 longer in any system that went before. And yet all of the audience capture, all of the political

01:21:15.340 disruption, much of the things that have happened in the last 20 years that are blamed on liberalism,

01:21:19.580 uh, are actually because of the excesses created by this new technology. And when new technology

01:21:26.540 emerges, it's always the same. Yes, it brings about the opportunity for huge good. And in fact,

01:21:31.900 the reality of huge good, and it brings about the opportunity and the reality of huge ill.

01:21:35.500 It's incredibly disruptive. You know, the printing press led to 30 years of sectarian violence across

01:21:40.220 the entire continent of Europe, uh, because suddenly people could read the Bible. And so what they do,

01:21:45.980 like everybody who first reads that God so loved the world that he sent his only son,

01:21:49.820 that whoever believed in him would have eternal life, they start killing each other.

01:21:54.140 The first thing, um, it takes a long time to adapt to these kinds of disruptions to socially evolve.

01:22:03.100 Uh, and I think you can make an argument that we've, we haven't fully evolved to embrace the

01:22:09.100 printing press yet. The printing press. And in our lifetime, how many of printing press level

01:22:16.460 advancements technologically have happened? Nothing, no one's ever lived through more disruptions

01:22:21.020 than the people on the planet right now. Uh, and you see what's happening. There's been great reporting,

01:22:27.180 even done this in the last week, about the political gap between male and female, um, the,

01:22:33.820 uh, huge changes in attention span, um, the changes in the nature of tribalism that now we have more in

01:22:42.860 common with strangers who have no geographical connection to us than we do with our neighbors.

01:22:47.820 Mm-hmm. You know, if your kid's on their bike and they get hit by a car,

01:22:52.540 your Facebook friends aren't going to do shit. Mm-hmm.

01:22:55.740 You need your neighbor to come out of their house when they hear the noise

01:22:59.020 and call emergency services and provide CPR. Like, it's the people who are, who are around

01:23:04.460 us that are the people who should be the most important in our lives. And social media for

01:23:10.220 the first time in all of history has disrupted that. And what it's doing to children, again,

01:23:15.420 great reporting this week on what's happened just since computers became ubiquitous in classrooms.

01:23:20.940 And we've gone so far past computers being ubiquitous in classrooms. There's a computer in every

01:23:24.380 child's pocket. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, we talked briefly about pornography and you said you don't,

01:23:28.780 you don't believe it should be banned, uh, but that, um, obviously people use too much pornography.

01:23:34.380 Uh, we, we could have an argument as to whether or not pornography should be banned,

01:23:39.100 obviously, but I, I will say that there are some things that people can't self-regulate about.

01:23:48.620 Um, and there are some things that some people can't self-regulate about. And we have always,

01:23:57.100 as a culture, even in the freest societies in the West, we have always provided some guardrails

01:24:03.180 around those things. Mm-hmm. Uh, maybe not yes or no guardrails, but certainly some guardrails have

01:24:11.260 existed. And we live in a time where most of the most destructive things are online and aren't,

01:24:17.660 there are no guardrails at all. You know, I've, I've noticed, uh, some conversations since being

01:24:23.980 here that maybe Britain recently put a age gate in front of pornography. Some states in America

01:24:30.780 are doing that. Obviously there's challenges with it. Are you giving the government access to

01:24:34.860 information about who views pornography or who doesn't? Um, are you making it so, you know,

01:24:39.340 I think there's some real concerns about the way that that's gone going about, but obviously you can't

01:24:43.820 live in a society where the average 12-year-old is seeing more breasts than King Solomon.

01:24:48.940 And we do. And that's just a fact. Uh, just like shutting down the world and then hitting restart

01:24:56.460 is going to have an impact that we have not even begun to really reckon with yet.

01:25:00.300 Mm-hmm. The ubiquity of pornography for, for men in particular and for children especially,

01:25:07.820 of course that's going to have unbelievable consequences. And we've not even begun to grapple

01:25:11.420 with those consequences. And I would just say, as I said earlier about Candace Owens,

01:25:16.460 so much of what we engage with online now is just rhetorical pornography. It's just the same

01:25:22.460 dopamine-inducing narcotic. And we have not, we have not solved it. It, it seems so obvious to me,

01:25:30.540 uh, that children should not have access to technology, that adults have not yet figured out how to

01:25:35.580 condition themselves to use. And listen, I'm one of the great beneficiaries of, uh, social media. You

01:25:41.900 guys are among the great beneficiaries of the social media age. I do not cavalierly say,

01:25:47.900 oh, we should outlaw, so of course we shouldn't outlaw social media. But I, I, I think the true

01:25:54.940 negative impacts of social media, we're only beginning to understand them. And I think that if

01:25:59.420 we want to preserve all of the good created by the ubiquity of the computer in your pocket,

01:26:03.660 and social media on the computer, um, we, we have to get serious about understanding the

01:26:09.180 negative consequences and figuring out how to mitigate against them. I, I suspect that there's a

01:26:13.740 world, probably not too far in our future, uh, where everyone having the Bible and being able to read

01:26:21.980 the gospel is only good. And all of the, but first we killed each other, is behind us. Um, but we're just

01:26:31.420 not there. And I don't think, I don't think that there's enough emphasis on trying to get us there.

01:26:36.060 I think that we, we all like the dopamine. And so we basically don't want to talk about these. And

01:26:42.220 there's some guys, Jonathan Hyatt and others who do, of course. But I think that, I think the impacts

01:26:48.700 are so terrible right now for the culture that it's shocking that it isn't the biggest thing that we

01:26:53.660 talk about. Well, we had Jonathan on to Jonathan Hyatt. Our interview has done really good numbers,

01:26:58.940 because I think a lot of people recognize this, particularly when it comes to children, as you,

01:27:03.100 as you point out. Uh, and again, I, I also think, again, it's an error that comes down to personal

01:27:07.900 responsibility. Are you going to let your children have a smartphone and at what age? And all of these

01:27:12.060 conversations, I think parents should think really carefully about. Well, I agree about personal

01:27:15.660 responsibility, but I also think that it's good that we say, um, kids under 18 can't have cigarettes.

01:27:20.860 And, uh, and I think that we will look back. You know, you see pictures sometimes from the turn of the

01:27:27.740 century where there's like a 12 year old boy on a street corner with a sell, selling newspapers with

01:27:32.460 a cigarette in his mouth. And you think that's when our countries were great. Maybe we need to bring

01:27:37.660 back smoking for 12 year olds. Well, I will say I would rather my daughter smoke than have social

01:27:41.660 media. Agreed. I think that we will look back at kids having smartphones and social media today

01:27:48.060 with an even worse pit in our stomach than looking back at those kids smoking and the...

01:27:52.380 Yeah. I actually think the movement is in that direction in terms of schools banning

01:27:56.140 phones, countries banning certain things for under 18s, et cetera. So I, I think,

01:28:00.940 um, I'm grateful you bring that issue up because I think it's really important.

01:28:05.260 Hopefully we are moving in the right direction, but there's a long way to go. I totally agree with

01:28:09.180 you. Please follow me. Jeremy, great to have you on. Uh, before we head on over to Substack where

01:28:16.060 our supporters get to ask you their questions, just tell everybody how they can watch the Pendragon

01:28:19.580 cycle if they want to. The Pendragon cycle premiered on January 22nd at Daily Wire Plus. You can head over

01:28:24.700 there and buy a subscription and, uh, it's a seven episode series. And I can say with all honesty,

01:28:31.020 every single episode is better than the last. By the time you get to episode five and six,

01:28:35.580 uh, it's really unbelievable what the cast accomplished. Um, so hope everybody will give

01:28:41.020 it a shot. All right. Well, before you head over to Daily Wire Plus, head over to triggerpod.co.uk,

01:28:45.340 where Jeremy's going to answer your questions. Like many right-wing commentators, I think the

01:28:50.860 Daily Wire does a great job of offering legitimate criticism of the woke left and casting stones,

01:28:56.540 but almost nothing in the form of offering solutions. Does Jeremy agree?

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TRIGGERnometry - January 28, 2026

Jeremy Boreing On Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes

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