Friendly Fire: A New Host & Mr. Knowles Goes to Washington

Summary

The Ben Shapiro Show: "Friendly Fire: A New Host & Mr. Knowles Goes to Washington"

Date: October 30, 2025
Host: Ben Shapiro (The Daily Wire)
Guests: Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Drew Holden, Matt Fradd

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Overview

This episode marks a lively, multi-host roundtable edition of "Friendly Fire" on The Ben Shapiro Show, featuring regular Daily Wire personalities and welcoming a new addition: Matt Fradd of "Pints With Aquinas." The hosts dive into a broad mix of topics including marriage, political violence, the evolution of pop culture, the Catholic revival in America, and the implications of new technology for society and community—all with the Daily Wire’s signature blend of irreverent banter, cultural conservatism, and a sense of camaraderie (and friendly roasting).

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Main Discussion Topics & Key Insights

1. Anniversaries, Marriage, and Masculinity (00:00–07:39)

• Banter about each other's marriage styles:
  The hosts riff on their respective approaches to wedding anniversaries, poking fun at traditional (and untraditional) celebrations, wife’s tolerance, and gift-giving.
• Debunking ‘Marriage is Hard’ trope:
  • Michael Knowles: "I'm fourteen years into it with six kids... I'm waiting for the hard part still... Parenting can be really hard... but just the marriage part, I honestly don't know what people are talking about." (04:36)
• Masculinity & fatherhood:
  • Ben Shapiro: "I judge a man and his masculinity by how many children he has, and so Matt is leading the pack here... I've said many times that Matt cheated because he has two sets of twins." (06:29)
• Book plug for Drew Holden's latest—handled with self-deprecation and sarcasm.

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2. Political Violence & the Senate Hearing (09:10–20:17)

• Michael Knowles' testimony at a Senate hearing on political violence:
  Recaps criticism of Democratic rhetoric and how it frames only right-wing violence as legitimate concern while excusing or ignoring left-wing violence.
  • Michael Knowles: “Senator Booker... should practice what he preaches. So there was a Cory Booker-shaped hole in the wall.” (11:12)
• Left vs. Right on violence:
  • Matt Walsh: "The actual data show increasingly so that the violence is a left-wing problem—even The Atlantic had to admit it." (10:00)
  • Ben Shapiro: "The permission structures of the left are more deeply rooted than anything remotely similar on the right... It's disproportionately represented on the left, this permission structure for violence." (13:39)
• 'Recategorizing’ of violence and crime statistics:
  • Michael Knowles: "...All of the political violence is on their side and they do it by recategorizing their political violence as not political violence." (16:02)
  • Adds that leftist violence includes “tens of millions of babies... killed because of left-wing policies." (19:17)
• Policy solution—consequences matter:
  Stricter enforcement and categorization are required to address left-wing political violence.

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3. Pop Culture Peak and Decline (22:23–36:05)

• Did pop culture peak in 2006–2008?
  • Matt Walsh launches the popular conservative argument:
    • "Culture peaked...in 2007, but you could go a year before or after... The monoculture, the shared cultural experience, is gone... thanks to the iPhone and rise of social media." (22:23)
    • The fracturing of culture into algorithm-driven micro-communities kills the collective experience and stifles quality.
  • Drew Holden counters:
    • "There have been many great peaks... The current collapse is real, but AI will democratize and reshape culture—I think you’ll see revival." (28:51)
  • Ben Shapiro critiques loss of communal entertainment:
    • "Comedy must be experienced communally... the death of communal experience means comedy was the first to go."
    • On art: "As we removed pretty much all the boundaries, the art got significantly worse... I'm not a big fan of the democratization of art... most people aren't very good at art." (33:04)

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4. Catholicism, Christianity, and the Daily Wire’s New Host (39:13–56:00)

• Introduction of Matt Fradd as new Daily Wire host:
  • Jokes about the Catholic “takeover” and Matt Fradd being “a great cigar man.”
• Is Catholicism or Christianity resurging?
  • Drew Holden: “The numbers don't show it, but smart people and intellectuals are becoming Christians because ‘the science’ argument has fallen apart.” (40:25)
• Religious trends: less numbers, more commitment:
  • Ben Shapiro: “Seeds are planted for the numbers to go up... people re-engaging are doing so in very, very strong and vibrant ways." (41:56)
  • Michael Knowles: "The church is getting smaller but it's also getting more conservative... there's no incentive anymore for cultural Christians to go through the motions." (46:31)
• Faith, rational argument, and meaning:
  • Matt Fradd: "Maybe it was that the New Atheists overplayed their hand... arguments for atheism aren't good... we're just cultureless monads adrift and we are desirous for a culture, preferably one that was once our own." (43:42)
  • General consensus: Disillusionment with "woke" and scientific materialism is opening the way for a more robust return to traditional, meaningful religions and communities.

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5. Faith, Reason, and What Brings People Back to Religion (57:56–68:40)

• Is belief a pragmatic or intellectual decision?
  • Matt Fradd: "If I can't decide whether the arguments for atheism or Christian theism are better, I still could have a pragmatic reason for preferring one over the other." (59:50)
  • Ben Shapiro echoes a Jewish (action-first) model: “Do the mitzvot and then you end up believing in God...” (61:20)
• Fake it till you make it and pitfalls of shallow conversions:
  • Michael Knowles: “People were doing that in the culture when there was a social incentive... they were kind of faking it but they didn't make it." (66:32)
• Seeking rootedness and particular truths:
  • Matt Walsh: "There's truth in natural religion... but then there's particularity to it too... on that Catholic propaganda, Matt, I'm very much looking forward to Pints with Aquinas..." (67:08)

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6. Final Segments: New York Politics and Membership Pitches (69:01–71:48)

• Zoran Mamdani and New York City politics:
  • Ben Shapiro: “He’s a Marxist, pro-jihadi terrible person... do the people of New York deserve this? In the theory of democracy, people deserve what they get and they should get it good and hard.” (69:01)
• Promotion of new Daily Wire products and memberships:
  The team closes with light-hearted ad pitches and promises of more content with new hosts.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I’ve reached zen—I became Buddhist. I didn’t tell you guys.”
  – Michael Knowles (65:25), in a rare moment of deadpan self-parody.
• “The yarmulke is optional, the ads are mandatory.”
  – Ben Shapiro (68:44), mocking the true ritual of joining The Daily Wire.
• “There was a Cory Booker-shaped hole in the wall.”
  – Michael Knowles (11:12), after critiquing Booker’s hypocrisy at the Senate hearing.
• “Culture peaked...in 2007…the monoculture is dead.”
  – Matt Walsh (22:23)
• “The permission structures of the left are more deeply rooted than anything remotely similar on the right.”
  – Ben Shapiro (13:39)
• “My wife has really sensitive skin and doesn’t enjoy kissing me when I have whiskers...I had to decide—do I want the respect of men, or the kisses of my wife?”
  – Matt Fradd (51:35)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00–07:39] Marriage, anniversaries, masculinity
• [09:10–20:17] Political violence, Knowles’ Senate appearance
• [22:23–36:05] Did pop culture peak in 2008? Social media and the loss of monoculture
• [39:13–56:00] Catholic revival, new host Matt Fradd, religion and intellectualism
• [57:56–68:40] Pragmatism in faith, how people rediscover God, “fake it ‘til you make it” in religious life
• [69:01–71:48] Zoran Mamdani, New York, and membership promos

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Final Thoughts

This episode exemplifies the Daily Wire formula: combining cultural pessimism with occasional bursts of hope, humor at each other's expense, and confident advocacy for conservative values—with a distinct Catholic flavor thanks to the hosts’ theological leanings. Matt Fradd's arrival sets the stage for even more faith-infused content ahead. Fans of culture war debates, religion-and-society intersections, and no-holds-barred panel discussion will find this episode to be classic Friendly Fire.

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Listen to this episode for:

• Comic camaraderie and sharp, sometimes irreverent, back-and-forths
• Genuine insights on the fracturing of American culture
• Discussions about the future of faith and communal meaning amidst technological shifts
• Analysis of current political violence narratives and media hypocrisy
• A peek at Daily Wire’s evolving cast and content future

Transcript

[Matt Walsh]

Matt you're all about you know clobbering your enemies into political submission i've reached.

[Michael Knowles]

Zen i became buddhist i didn't tell.

[Ben Shapiro]

You the yarmulke is optional the ads.

[Michael Knowles]

Are mandatory i object on the record.

[Drew Holden]

I want to turn to ben because you killed jesus right i want to.

[Ben Shapiro]

You make my life so difficult like seriously.

[Matt Walsh]

Hey everybody well hi there hey am i the only one smoking today as always smoking yeah that's what you.

[Drew Holden]

Mean by smoking i think we're all smoking in our own little way it.

[Ben Shapiro]

Looks like walsh is drinking oh no it's water water yeah okay well maybe maybe it's water maybe i moved so.

[Matt Walsh]

That i could smoke actually this whole it felt wrong if there was no smoking going on i don't have any booze unfortunately i fellas i have a lot that i want to tell you about because i was doing big important stuff yesterday while you were all just kicking your feet back up on the couches but there are a lot of questions to get to in this episode of friendly fire did movies peak in two thousand eight will zoran mamdani lead america into communism or jihad or why not both do we have a new daily wire host joining yes we do matt fratt of pints with aquinas and is catholicism rising in the united states all of that and so much more but fellas before we get into any of it matt today's a big special day did you know that i didn't what's today i was reliably informed that today i don't know why we keep doing these shows on big mat days but i believe today is your wedding.

[Michael Knowles]

Anniversary is that right now that you mentioned it yeah fourteen years and my my wife was thrilled when i told her that you know we couldn't we couldn't go out just now because i had to go do a friendly fire episode she i told her that she said matt get out there and do episode that's what that's that's the most.

[Ben Shapiro]

Important thing it's the best gift you could give her actually i mean when you think about it it really is.

[Michael Knowles]

I know you know we're going to shoot we're going to shoot this episode and then and then our big wedding anniversary plan is we're going to watch the episode back so that's what that's what we're going to do that's it.

[Matt Walsh]

What are you what are you going to do so after you finish watching the episode are you going to are you going to take her out to dinner in the middle of the woods.

[Michael Knowles]

Somewhere what's that is actually she wanted to go kayaking so we're going to go kayaking and that's that's a that's an activity we like to do as a as a couple and a lot of i like it because we'll go out kayaking and a lot of times once we get out on the water i'll discover that silly me i my my fishing pole is still in the kayak i didn't realize it was there and so then i got to i have to fish also because it's there so that's that's what we'll do and.

[Ben Shapiro]

Look her washing her watching you fish is like your anniversary that that's what it's going to be you have you have a very very generous wife i do that that's that's i mean we knew that already but that's kind of what she would unbelievable level of generosity i mean like like and i feel like drew for his anniversary doesn't have to do much i mean basically he's just a skeleton sitting across a table.

[Drew Holden]

From we have a very deep tradition which is every big anniversary and now we've been married one hundred thirty years i think every really important anniversary my wife turns to me and says should we have a party and i say nah and she says all right and that's what we do every important anniversary.

[Matt Walsh]

For my fifth wedding anniversary i said dua do you want to go somewhere and sweet little lisa said yes i do and i said well where do you want to go you want to go to the caribbean do you want to go and she goes i want to go to memphis i kid you not she said she want to go to memphis and i thought this is great i just saved like thousands of dollars and we did we went we went to graceland we saw the little ducks at that hotel and didn't get mugged actually so that was pretty good.

[Ben Shapiro]

I'Ll admit that for me i'm usually the one who remembers the anniversary my wife does not remember the anniversary almost ever and so it is completely reliant upon me what we will do that day and so usually it's it's probably a dinner although you know these days as as we get older you know we're the kinds of people who have never stayed up a single time for the ball drop on on new year's eve and so if it hits like nine thirty pm we're pretty much done i mean we have a bunch of kids i'm sure like matt i have to say that yours is really if i had predicted what your anniversary was was going to be like that actually was not i was not off by much i really feel like that was a a pretty good you know if i had to guess and i was like okay is it going to be matt like taking his wife out to dinner or in a kayak on a lake with a fishing pole not talking to anyone but just kind of like staring at the water and and musing about like like i i i def i wouldn't have been off that i i would like the the odds on that were pretty good i feel like.

[Michael Knowles]

Honestly they they were and can i let me just just one quick reflection if i may if i have if i have about thirty minutes i'd like to offer because you know fourteen years i do just want to say because i think this is important and i think everyone here is on the same page that you know fourteen years into marriage before i got married i heard the same thing that everybody always says which is it's so hard being married is so hard it's so difficult it's so so so hard i heard this over and over again i'm fourteen years into it i'm waiting for the hard part still you know i'm fourteen years into it with six kids and i mean there are challenges obviously when you're living with another human being but for the most part it's like it's great i mean you have a person that you that you like that you love that you're that is with you and sharing life with you and it is actually it is actually great it is now being parenting parenting can be really hard that's the part that is also great and wonderful but that there's that's the hard part but just the marriage part i honestly don't know what people are talking about for the most part.

[Drew Holden]

I always like when people say it's work i mean the one thing marriage is not is work it's marriage is.

[Matt Walsh]

Life drew's marriage is not work for him that's true but do you know what is work for him writing books like this after that the dark which if i'm is that at lord tennyson alfred lord tennyson very good you must.

[Drew Holden]

Have looked that up i can't imagine.

[Matt Walsh]

I remember that's like one of five poems i at some point probably had memorized do you know where you can.

[Drew Holden]

Get this book you can get this book anywhere you can get it signed from the daily wire shop if you go on dailywire dot com clavin you will find all the venues where you can get it and i hope people will get it i already put one book on the new york times list and when i say i put it on the audience put my book on the new york times list if i can do that twice i will stop calling the new york times a former newspaper and i'll just call it a.

[Ben Shapiro]

Crap paper well you know somebody gave me a gift here i don't know what it could be oh it's drew's.

[Drew Holden]

Book there you go there you go.

[Ben Shapiro]

Just what i've always wanted matt if you're seeking to get something for your wife for your anniversary i feel like there's nothing oh look at that wow wow look that's a man who thinks ahead right there look at that that's incredible by the way i will say that just a note about the marriage and anniversary discussion and all that i've been reliably informed that the best way to get people to live better lives is to tell them that they should never get married because women are absolutely awful in every possible way and and that that actually is heartening and makes her life better i've been informed of that by by reliable sources and their guests in any case yes i i i i'm i'm totally with like here you have sitting right here four very happily married men with a wide variety of children matt again i we've discussed this before publicly but i judge a man and his masculinity by how many children he has and and so matt is matt is leading the pack here matt has six i'm coming in at four i've said many times that matt cheated because he has two sets of twins and so that really is cheating that's really like a scoreboard you know.

[Matt Walsh]

What one of the downsides though to having a wife is one of the big downsides to having a wife is she's always shopping and buying stuff am i right well that can be really good for you if you own a business because when you go to shopify you can power your business you might say michael i don't know how to make a website doesn't matter shopify has great tools to do it for you you might say michael i don't know how to design things don't we trust shopify so much in the daily wire shop that we are even willing to risk selling drew's book on that platform powers everything we sell here it's really magnificent so right now you can turn your big business idea into with shopify you can sign up right now for your dollar one per month subscription it is a trial you will start selling today at shopify dot com shopify fire f i r e that is shopify dot com fire shopify dot com fire how you like that okay guys i want to talk about me for a second i feel like we haven't talked enough about me i yesterday was not in my studio i was in washington i was down at capitol hill because they were holding a hearing in the senate on political violence and most of the democrats i'd say about half the committee was smart enough not to even show up because they know that they've got blood on their hands and they have absolutely nothing they can say about political violence but some of them peaked in every now and again including the thracian senator spartacus here's what cory booker.

[Michael Knowles]

Had to say there is political violence extremists who have left wing ideologies and right wing ideologies to say it's just one and not the other is to deepen the problem but we have an administration right now who is eviscerating the people that should be keeping us safe and who is pulling down from the website as they did earlier this year when the department of justice removed from its website a government funded a report published last year that found that the number of far right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violence extremism if we can't accurately describe a problem and do it without partisan rhetoric or seeking to score partisan points we will not solve this problem.

[Matt Walsh]

We need to stop all this awful partisan rhetoric okay and recognize that violence occurs on both sides of the right which commits all of the violence stop it stop it stop it so they're pushing this whole time it's both sides both sides and then they just spend all their time hitting the right meanwhile the actual data show increasingly so that the violence is a left wing problem even the atlantic had to admit it and that's with the data sets not even counting most left wing violence so as booker is making his remarks he goes on he says we need to be introspective we need to be willing to take back some hot things that we say so we need to be willing i said okay this is great because you still endorse j jones who's running for attorney general in virginia who's called for the murder of republicans and our kids says we're breeding little fascists and he wants to urinate on the graves of republicans so booker makes his point then senator blackburn asks me something and this is what i had to.

[Ben Shapiro]

Say.

[Matt Walsh]

I think senator booker made a good point just a moment ago when he said we have to self examine we have to be introspective and i can't help but think of a line today jay jones has the vision commitment and integrity to keep families safe and make sure every virginian gets a fair shake in the justice system i'll be working every day to ensure jay wins this race that's the endorsement of senator booker for a man who would seek to be the attorney general of virginia this is a man who if people have not been reading the news has called for a republican to be murdered for his children to be murdered for the children to die in their mother's arms in order to persuade the republican to change his policy views and a man who says that he would urinate on the graves of multiple republicans senator booker in this spirit of introspection is standing by this endorsement so i suppose i would invite perhaps i should have looked because senator booker has left the room and i think i can guess why senator booker i think should practice what he preaches so there was a cory booker shaped hole in the wall anyway drew you were around for the caning of sumner as i recall you know you've seen plenty of political violence in america do the democrats have any kind of point here at all on saying it's about both sides and not being partisan or no do we just have to say it's a leftist problem.

[Drew Holden]

Well i think it's good that cory booker did not kill kirk douglas with the trident when he was spartacus i actually watched you on tv and i was thinking oh there's my friend michael knowles who probably dropped by my house cuz he's in dc probably dropped by my house for a drink and a cigar i'm still waiting by the phone but nothing happened here's the thing there's always going to be incidents of violence on both sides but that is a very different thing than an atmosphere of violence when when you scratch go around scratching teslas because you don't like elon musk when you riot every night in in seattle these are things that are not happening on the right you can get a crazy right winger but nobody on the right in the center right is calling for violence with the constant drumbeat that steady drumbeat of calls and entitlement as the left does i mean when they were burning down cities because of george floyd an editor from the new york times from the new york times editorial board went on tv and said well it's not violence when you're just burning down buildings but you know what yes it is and people were killed in those riots and as you said quite well i thought in your speech it's the only nice thing i'll ever say about you you pointed out that they just don't count that as political violence they don't count the people who threaten matt because they're transgender that's not left wing political violence but it is and when you count all of that stuff it dwarfs any incident of right wing violence so you were totally in the right i hate to say.

[Matt Walsh]

It but oh right and i looked handsome too is i think you were.

[Ben Shapiro]

What you wanted that was a nice tie i kind of i kind of i kind of like the striped tie there though that was good you know i will say that yes of course you can find violent people all across the political spectrum it is true that the permission structures of the left are more deeply rooted than anything remotely similar on the right you don't see any sort of mainstream political right winger who's not willing to denounce generalized political violence from from their side or anything like it but you do see it on the left all the time this sort of the kind of feeding of the revolutionary left this idea that that violence that's coming from the left well yeah we don't we don't love it but at the same time you can totally see where it's coming from and the conditions that give rise to the violence must be alleviated and that's why the violence is really it's like we don't love it but it's kind of predictable and and that that sort of excuse making that permission structure for violence is very much in tune with i think the entire left wing infrastructure at this point which is why they're so comfortable with for example the dsa which is a revolutionary group i mean i think that the attempt to foster the revolution on the left is deeply entwined with the violence it's why when charlie got shot and we talked about this i think when michael you and matt and i we were on charlie's show we talked about the fact that there was a clip of charlie talking with some sort of trans radical and the trans radical said you're just so hateful and it's like that is the pro like your entire structure is we oppose your point of view therefore we are hateful therefore we are a threat to you therefore you can kill us therefore you can do violence to us and that is deeply embedded in the left wing ideology now i think there are parts of the right that do have very similar horseshoe theory ideas about the world i would hope that those parts of the right would remain marginalized i can't think of a single sort of mainstream elected political official on the right who gives credence to this it's given credence by pretty much all the mainstream elected officials on the left i think there are people in the commentary to give credence to it but i don't think it's like a mainstream part of right wing elected kind of republican talk but as sort of a mainstream phenomenon yes it is disproportionately represented on the left this permission structure for violence well this.

[Matt Walsh]

Is what so senator schmidt you know a very mainstream republican figure he calls this hearing to try to address the problem i think that was really good shining a light on it we really haven't seen that from the senate before a lot of great republicans the white house is trying to do stuff about it matt you're all about you know practical solutions as well as clobbering your enemies into political submission what do we.

[Michael Knowles]

Do well i mean consequences you know that's the first thing actual consequences for people who commit this violence i mean this is one of the when you when you categorize rightly i think antifa as a domestic terrorist organization which is exactly what it is by any reasonable definition of the term well that means that there should be consequences to that and what do we do if you're calling it a terrorist organization then you're putting it in the same category as al qaeda or isis and how do we handle those groups and what would we do if those groups were operating openly in the united states outside of ice facilities and that sort of thing well we know how that would be handled and so that's how it should be that how it should be handled here and you're also correct i think that this is and it's a point that's not made enough about how the left gets around this reality which is that all of the political violence is on their side and they do it by by recategorizing their political violence as not political violence and by the way this is a trick they pull with all forms of violence okay this is how they've they have tried to get away with claiming that some of these cities that we can all tell have descended into total violent chaos have actually they claim that oh well violent crime is going down well how do they get away with that it's because when you look at it oh well they're just recategorizing violent crime as nonviolent crime there was a case in kentucky recently of a child that was stabbed to death in his home and the rest of the family was also attacked and somehow the guy who committed that crime was categorized under the law as a non violent offender and so this is the game they play on so many different levels and it's really important to.

[Matt Walsh]

Point that out no this was you know the actual incident that i was there to testify about yesterday was this antifa attack at the university of pittsburgh where two antifa operatives showed up they had been members of a cell they were claimed by torch antifa network the guy was caught with explosive material going through tsa multiple times they were there they threw an explosive seriously injured a cop and luckily there was an fbi agent there who was really forcing this up through the doj i don't think the doj wanted to move on it at all and then what happened the doj classified it as obstructing law enforcement gave the wife probation let her almost entirely off the hook and the guy got something like five years in prison what he did was attempted murder you know it calls for a much more serious sentence i go through all of the sets data sets on political violence it doesn't show up i look at the blm riots that killed dozens of people left over a billion dollars worth of property damage it doesn't show up as left wing political violence some of the most prominent examples you can think of it's just not there and so what's so crazy is even given the fact that they hide all of these data in their sets and in the federal statistics even so today the atlantic has to admit the left wing violence still exceeds the right wing violence even when you exclude most of the left wing violence so matt you say all right we got to treat them like al qaeda i'm inclined to do that too but there is a distinction between a foreign terrorist organization and a domestic one and so do you handle them like al qaeda or do you handle them like i don't know the mafia or the kkk or something i i'll.

[Michael Knowles]

Take any of those handle handle them like an organized violent threat you know that's that's how you handle them and and also there's a there's another point about the about left wing violence which is that in fact when we're talking about left wing violence in general there's one entire like category of it that is left out of the conversation which would be the tens of millions of babies that are killed because of left wing policies and have been killed in this country over the last sixty or seventy years and that's relevant because it is violence tens of millions of babies but also it shows it's one of the reasons why left wing violence is a much bigger problem it's because they don't recognize fundamentally the dignity and sanctity of human life they just don't wreck it they see it as well if you're inconvenient to them that you actually don't have a right to exist in the first place and if they're going to apply that to their own children well then of course they're going to apply it to charlie kirk they're going to apply it to any one of.

[Matt Walsh]

Us right right okay well that's true it's been building for a long time it's by my count you know decades because you can go back through even the sixties the seventies frankly even earlier than that but i want to go back to where pop culture ended which is two thousand seven according to mister walsh we'll get to that and i want to go all the way back a decade thinking about a decade of daily wire and i want to offer you the deal of the decade because we got really exciting stuff we even have a new host here joining the daily wire.

[Matt Fradd]

The merlin died long before.

[Michael Knowles]

You and i were born.

[Matt Walsh]

G' day.

[Matt Fradd]

Everybody my name is matt fratt welcome to pints with aquinas.

[Ben Shapiro]

It wasn't if.

[Drew Holden]

It was gonna happen it was when.

[Ben Shapiro]

The united states was gonna be attacked.

[Matt Walsh]

I'Ve seen what you can do edward.

[Drew Holden]

I'M not edward i'm a demon the whole purpose behind this is to overturn.

[Michael Knowles]

Western civilization bin laden was getting.

[Matt Walsh]

Ton of new stuff at the daily wire including the fact that we have hired yet another catholic host that's right pints with aquinas matt fradd the labor department is going to investigate us for anti protestant discrimination maybe we'll get some protestants around there too i don't know but in any case i'm very excited you know i've been buddies with matt for a long time and he's a great cigar man and so pints of colonis being on the platform is gonna be great if you want it then you need to give us seven bucks a month which is nothing after bidenflation that is absolute that's chump change okay but we're going back to our prices from ten years ago to celebrate a decade of daily wire if you want it go to dailywire dot com subscribe matt in the spirit of nostalgia did pop culture peak in two thousand eight it.

[Michael Knowles]

Did yes it's funny you asked me that question so i was actually surprised i was talking to the producers of this show and we were talking about topics and i pitched this topic i didn't think we'd talk about it but we are and that's great cause i actually find it we finally stumbled on a topic that i find interesting so i was talking about it on my show this past week i kind of laid out this theory it's not just my theory but something i've been thinking about for a while and i am legitimately interested to hear what you guys have to say about it so the theory is basically this that pop culture and the culture itself peaked almost at a precise moment in time and i would say two thousand seven but you could go a year before that and a year after so from like two thousand six to two thousand eight was was the peak of of culture the peak of what you know some have called what i think is a good term for it monoculture so it's our it's our shared cultural experience and it peaks right then and there and you can kind of pinpoint the peak with pop culture with with the things that hollywood was putting out i mean this was you know two thousand six two thousand eight it was there will be blood no country for old men children of men apocalypto the dark knight and a bunch of other great films came out at the same time this is also television i mean it was like some of the arguably maybe the five of the eight greatest television shows of all time were airing overlapping with each other the wire breaking bad the sopranos mad men mad men the shield the office was in its prime i think in its prime probably the greatest comedy of all time and then a bunch of others we could name so all of this was happening at the same time with pop culture and what you find is this decline that started right around that time in particular with comedies there were also great comedies superbad was like the last great teen comedy came out in two thousand seven i believe some some other tropic thunder came out in two thousand eight i think the last great comedy period and and then and you see it there and it starts to decline and then it completely falls apart and over the next you know pretty much from twenty ten until now there have been some good some good films there have even been some great films i would say even some great television series chernobyl i think is one of the one of the best miniseries of all time came out in twenty nineteen but you're never gonna find that kind of volume all at one time and i think it's because culture declined and then collapsed and right now when we're looking around and this is really a starting point for me i'm trying to figure out why does everything suck now everything just sucks and everybody can feel it and why is it and it's because we don't have a we don't have a culture anymore there is no culture the monoculture the shared cultural experience is gone it's dead it doesn't exist anymore and it's only going to get worse i'm afraid to say and that's because if we go back to two thousand seven two thousand eight range some other things were happening at that moment when hollywood was reaching i think like its pinnacle other things were happening that would prove to be its demise and a lot of people on the right will point to well what happened in two thousand eight barack obama came in and that was kind of the beginning of this era of wokeness that we're still living in and yeah that is part of it but that's not even close to the biggest part of it in fact i would argue that if obama was never elected we would still be seeing a lot of these things today because the other thing that happened in two thousand seven in june of two thousand seven is when the iphone was released and the iphone was released and at that point within a few years social media took over i mean there were already of course facebook was on at this point twitter was in two thousand six instagram i think was a couple of years later but within a few years of the iphone coming out everybody now has the internet of course on their phone they're bringing it with them everywhere they go and social media comes online it dominates the culture and then you have the algorithms and now because of that we don't have a shared cultural experience anymore now we have what we have in our phones we have this algorithmic personally designed experience and rather than it being like a radio station that you listen to with a dj who's your local dj and says hey listen to this great song you know and everyone's listening or you go to mtv back in the nineties for the nineties kids rather than that we have this algorithm that just was it just it just feeds us content and the algorithm doesn't care you know the algorithm doesn't care what kind of content it is it doesn't care whether you like it or not the only thing the algorithm cares about is that you keep watching it and so it'll serve you up a cute cat video and then it'll serve you up a video of somebody getting shot in the head and then it'll serve you up a video of somebody falling on a skateboard and then it'll serve you up a taylor swift music video it does not give the slightest damn what it is it just wants you looking at it and this thing becomes more and more personalized to the kinds of things that you tend to look at even if you don't like them you tend to look at it and so now we have this weird scenario where if you go to you know if you're if you're a parent you have a you have a fifteen year old son your son has his own celebrities he he has his own culture that he's in that that is almost entirely inaccessible to you it's it's incomprehensible to you it's not like when i was a kid in the nineties and my parents knew that mtv and they didn't really approve of a lot of the a lot of the pop music and the rap and all that but they knew who those people were because they were the celebrities they were the stars and they might not have liked them but they knew who they were we all shared the same kind of we were in the same atmosphere of the same stars and celebrities and films and now you can have someone who their favorite celebrity is some influencer who's got twenty million followers but if you're not one of those twenty million followers you have no clue who that person even is at all and so things are becoming you know narrower and narrower and now we bring ai online and we extend that out another five years and now we're going to be in a world where five years from now your favorite film may be a film that no one else on earth has seen because ai will just generate it for you and your favorite pop star will be someone who no one else has heard your favorite song is something no one else has listened to we're already seeing that starting to happen i think it's going to get worse and and the monoculture is dead and now we have this kind of fractured culture that is broken into a billion different pieces and and i'm not sure how we pull ourselves out of it depressing thanks matt it is quite depressing i want to go first to to drew so did anything i said make any sense at all to you whatsoever it.

[Drew Holden]

Made some sense but i think it's too narrow i mean there have been many great peaks into popular american culture nineteen thirty nine if you look at the list of movies nominated for oscars they're not only the best the biggest box office movies they're also some of the greatest movies ever made including you know the wizard of oz and mister smith goes to washington real genuine classics had another go with the wind what's that yeah gone with the wind gone with the wind you have another big peak in the nineteen seventies when all the spielberg pictures came out and you had the godfather and you had people lining lined up around the block lines i haven't seen since the seventies so that every single person in america had seen it and what you had at the time that you're talking about most especially is that surge in television when one form the movies became kind of obsolete and it played out you had this incredible what everything you said about television was true like the shows were on it was like dazzling my eyes were spiraling at what's happened and you're also right about this utter collapse which i've been talking about on my show for almost five years of this absolute collapse of the culture but i think that what you're seeing but i totally disagree with the negative prediction that you're making and here's why i think what we're really seeing is we're seeing the death of my generation i'm hoping they can leave without taking me with them but we're sick of them and they're going away and all of their ideas have come a cropper and all of these left wing ideas that just completely dominant i mean had a stranglehold a monopoly on our our culture all of them turned out to be untrue so you had this woke moment which was the what they thought was a discovery of a totally new morality that every generation before them had missed but in fact was just calling good evil and evil good and you can't make movies out of that you can't make movies in which women aren't women you can't make movies in which abortion is good you cannot tell stories in which what is actually evil is portrayed as good you just can't do it i think this whole ai thing yeah is it going to change everything i think it is but ultimately i i see it already people are using ai it's going to democratize the the culture people are already using ai to make films who would never have been able to make films now right now they're small stupid films but soon they'll get better and better and i think that because of the power of quality and because of the tendency of things to coalesce you will see what right now is indeed a dead and scattered culture and has been for several years you'll start to see it coming back together with new forms and this is the thing i'm worried about with conservatives i'm afraid conservatives are still back in the movie making days and they don't understand that people are going to be wearing oculuses or oculi or whatever and are going to be seeing three d things they're going to be sharing things that were made with ai with the help of ai and we're i i think we're in the past i think we're doing christian rock you know we're saying like you know oh here's a form that's already there we're going to do it except we're going to do it on the right wing and that's not what we need what we need is fresh new ideas and fresh new minds to make new stuff that no one's ever seen before i think it's coming i would even give it only two years before you're sitting around going wow i never even saw anything like that that's pretty cool so i'm much more optimistic than.

[Matt Walsh]

That i do also share i'm kind of like yes obviously the technological changes are going to kill certain media just like premium digital tv in the early two thousands really supplanted movies but yeah i'm kind of with you drew on the hopefulness in that like the fourth we've made it this far into the show with only mentioning aquinas well we already mentioned aquinas because of matt fred but the fourth primary precept of the natural law is that human beings are inclined to live in an ordered society and i think that's true and liberalism sometimes tells us we're not inclined to live in society that we're all just individuals and you know we just fell out of a coconut tree like kamala harris but no we're inclined to live in society so i'm with you even if we make our own weird ai stuff that really only tickles our fancy i think we're gonna be impelled to share it with other people it's just part of human nature and so yeah we're in a kind of the gutters of culture right now but i agree history goes on there's no end of.

[Ben Shapiro]

History until there is so i fell asleep i don't know how you somehow.

[Matt Walsh]

Made this particular we're on the fourth primary precept of the nature of the.

[Ben Shapiro]

You made a topic about pop culture this boring guys i have to admit it was a unique contribution to our own cultural moment to make it that unbelievably boring like really really well done i mean i generally agree with matt's take i think that the rise of the cell phone has made it incredibly difficult for us to have communal experiences the only communal experiences we have are live sporting events other than that people don't just get like the reason comedy died is because comedy must be experienced communally you cannot really truly experience comedy by yourself like it's very rare to watch something unless you're a naturally garrulous person just start laughing out loud you might chuckle to yourself but like the only time you really laugh super hard is when you're with other people and so i think that the death of sort of that community experience means the comedy was the first to go i think when it comes to sort of the big blockbusters because cgi got so prevalent then stuff that used to kind of blow you away where so you got to go to the theater and see it you just don't feel that way anymore and you can watch it on your screen if you wait for two weeks and so i think covid killed a lot of that but as far the biggest thing that happened i think is that as we removed all these limitations so i'm a big believer in the idea that when it comes to art limitations are actually quite useful limitations force you to do creative things within boundaries and i think that as we removed pretty much all the boundaries the art got significantly worse so if you go back to the writing of the nineteen thirties and forties much of which was taking place on sound stages in hollywood with a cast of rotating characters the writing had to be really good because you had all of these limitations that had been placed upon you and as we started to go to one hundred million dollars budgets most of which was cgi it was like okay well now i can do whatever i want whatever my whatever catches my fancy it's like well what if i just write slop right it's slop that i can just put money into and then it turns out that it's utterly forgettable and so for a while tv was the place because tv actually had limitations right you actually had a budget that you had to hold to for tv particularly in the breaking bad era you could shoot those aside from the actors pretty cheaply it's not like a production that requires vast quantities of cash same thing was true for sopranos right these are all dramas that are very well written because of the limitations as you remove the limitations things get significantly worse now you don't have the limitation of having to for example write a minimum time you can write a thirty second thing and it can go viral and so that doesn't require you to be good at it you can dump ai in there just make it sloppy so don't have to actually be good at it so the quality goes down i'm not a big fan of the democratization of art in this way because frankly i don't think most people are very good at art i think that i think that the kind of idea that everyone can be a poet everyone can make a movie now we had this with facebook right well we're all going to make new friends on facebook and then what did it turn out it turned out that everyone used the internet for pornography and none of your friends on facebook are your actual friends and i feel like the same exact thing is going to happen with art most people are not going to be sitting around thinking about how do i write the next godfather for me or my friends most people are going to think around think about how do i how do i like make the next piece of bizarre tentacle porn and i just like i have such a low opinion of human ability and human artistic capacity and self control that if there are no external checks i think it gets.

[Matt Walsh]

Worse i want to get back to thomas aquinas but before we do that with matt fradd i have a question for you matt in spanish what's the number after uno dos yes is that.

[Ben Shapiro]

The dose yes uno is it trace no it's dose no it's dose it's dose stop it we're in the middle of an ad for dose look we've all seen it every week there's a new miracle supplement promising to fix everything overnight but that doesn't work one thing that does work is using herbal supplements like cumin or ginger dandelion like if you take these in the proper dosages actually these are quite good for you and this is where dose for your liver comes in behold behold right here yes dose i don't know if i have a bigger liver than michael but like michael has a tiny liver apparently give me a bit where's my we have a normal like this is a man sized dose for your liver michael.

[Drew Holden]

Mine is begging not to be put in my liver please please it's a.

[Ben Shapiro]

Liver health supplement that promotes daily liver function so your liver can do its job think about energy production digestion fat metabolism vitamin storage it's taken in a daily two ounce shot it tastes like fresh squeezed orange juice that's what the ad copy says and we're about to find out right now because we're going.

[Michael Knowles]

To taste it oh we have to drink it we get to drink it.

[Ben Shapiro]

Man you are you are wow wow matt what do we even bring you on for i know you're asking yourself the same question let's try this okay.

[Michael Knowles]

Same question every time it's good hold on i can't get the thing off.

[Matt Walsh]

Of it yeah can i say something weird i love turmeric i love it i'm like i'm like from the hills of thiruvanantapuram i love it i'm a little i'm an indian in my taste.

[Drew Holden]

For turmeric my liver singing i've come back to life i'm back it's alive.

[Michael Knowles]

I still haven't got my paper off.

[Ben Shapiro]

I take back matt saying manhood he's got to get his wife in here to open the cap dose is a delicious way to get those great nutrients some ingredients in ginger which helps relieve nausea and supports the immune system turmeric which supports detoxification and supports brain function and promotes healthy liver cell function dandelion root extract which helps muscle recovery milk thistle promotes sugar metabolism zero sugar zero junk zero calories you're going to reduce sluggishness you're going to get rid of the midday crashes support your metabolism even aid that daily digestion new customers can save thirty five percent on your very first month of subscription by heading on over to dosedaily co friendly fire or entering friendly fire at checkout that's d o s e d a i l y co friendly fire for thirty five percent off your first month of subscription by the way yeah we taste it it's kosher that's that's why i'm allowed and it actually is quite good i like the taste of it and i feel fine and fit as a fiddle and ready for love that's the just tmi yeah yeah well you know hey.

[Matt Walsh]

You know what's one of the greatest changes in culture i've seen is that all of the political cartoons from the nineteenth century of the tentacles of the roman octopus stretching out all over the country and the pope just coming to conquer the world that is happening here at the daily wire because we are bringing on the beloved host of pints with aquinas matt fratt matt welcome g'.

[Matt Fradd]

Day fellas it's nice to be here i've admired you guys from afar and i've seen that admiration just steadily plummet as i've gotten to know you but here we are.

[Ben Shapiro]

Well i mean first of all i have to say i've done a terrible job here with my jew propaganda outfit where apparently i hire and am involved in hiring only catholics.

[Drew Holden]

You have space for that only catholics.

[Ben Shapiro]

It'S like knowles and walsh and isabel and umat i don't know what's either it's an unstoppable force or i'm really bad at my job and it could be both i mean it could be it could be both of those things.

[Matt Fradd]

Actually clavin you texted me and said that you texted me and said that there are more catholics at daily wire than at the vatican and i wasn't sure if you knew that that may have been a dark joke about the vatican or not but it was goodbye.

[Drew Holden]

I i actually am impressed that the catholics are actually getting nicer i mean i actually like matt which is as opposed to these guys and it's getting it is getting to me it's like the vatican except for straight people it's you know so it' exciting there is.

[Michael Knowles]

The clip now i object on the record to that.

[Drew Holden]

Here'S a subject that i want to talk about are people becoming more christian are we in the middle of a christian revival with a sort of a sort of emphasis on catholicism and the thing is i've been predicting that for over a decade and the numbers don't show it the feeling is there but the numbers don't really show it more people are going out of the catholic church than coming in more people are going out of protestant churches you know the tragic and disgusting murder of our friend charlie kirk did cause a sort of surge but it's hard to know whether something that is gonna last and i feel that we're looking at the wrong thing i think the thing that's important is that smart people intellectuals are becoming christians and i think the reason they're becoming christians is because the thing that we were told which is that the science had made that impossible the science had made it impossible for smart people to believe has all fallen apart and as that has filtered into the universities it's filtered into the humanities departments you're getting guys like charles murray one of the most brilliant people alive going oh yeah you know it actually doesn't hold together that there's no god so i want to turn to ben because you killed jesus right i want to ask you a question.

[Ben Shapiro]

You make my life so difficult like seriously guys it wasn't me i didn't do it okay like seriously all right.

[Drew Holden]

Anyway where you stand on the revival and will you will you is it isn't it time for you to accept.

[Ben Shapiro]

Your lord and savior oh my god he will not stop i mean as i've said before whoever converts me gets a million well infinity heaven points actually is what is my understanding of the theology but when when it comes to you know are people going back to church i think the overwhelming broad answer is no but the people who are going back to more traditional churches i'll speak for my own religious community on this one obviously in america the jewish population is declining because the number of people who go to synagogue is declining however the number of people who are going to synagogue who are going to orthodox synagogues is radically increasing because the orthodox are maintaining their own and their kids are staying orthodox and they're having lots of kids and people who want to be invested in the religion want a form of religion that actually teaches the religion and i suspect the same thing is happening in the catholic community there are a lot of people who are lapsing away from catholicism as sort of mainline catholic churches in some areas liberalize or their disagreements with the last couple of popes particularly pope francis in terms of some of his politics but the people who are re engaging are re engaging in very very strong and vibrant ways and so i think what we're seeing is not that the numbers are going up right now but that the seeds are planted for the numbers to go up very rapidly in the future because the people who are sticking around are bringing their friends and they're and they're keeping their families catholic but you know i don't want to i don't know why you went to me why why am i speaking to the catholics i mean you really should go to you know like matt frad or matt walsh or michael knowles all of whom are catholic and like why just leave me out of this i want.

[Matt Walsh]

To stay on ben for a minute.

[Drew Holden]

I want to wait wait wait i want to i want to talk to matt froud because he's you know it's not just an intellectual pose like with knowles you actually have faith and i want to i want to know what you feel about the current situation.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

I think back in two thousand eight during the height craze of the new atheism we were assured that as people gave up their primitive knuckleheaded belief in god that a golden age of reason would be ushered in and then you've got some sheila named carol marrying a train station in san diego and more recently men can have periods and i think we've sort of just woken up in the wreckage that these lies have brought about and we don't want to live in a completely meaningless universe and so if there is an argument that's moderately convincing it's better to go with that than to live a life in despair which is what i think atheism gets you so maybe it was that the new atheists overplayed their hand they were very cool but there wasn't much in the way of argumentation on their side and so it was like a smoke bomb going off in culture and people couldn't see straight we didn't know if we were abusing our children for teaching them the christian faith as dawkins said and these sorts of things but i think over time we've realized that arguments for atheism aren't good that there are compelling arguments for theism and also i think we're just cultureless monads adrift and we are desirous for a culture preferably a culture that was once our own which is a sort of.

[Ben Shapiro]

A.

[Matt Fradd]

Sort of piety a sort of natural piety a desire to live the way that my ancestors lived you know so i think that might be part of.

[Matt Walsh]

It.

[Drew Holden]

All right knowles nobody really cares what you have to say but say.

[Matt Walsh]

Something go ahead good i want to contradict your premise here which is the notion that more people are leaving the catholic church and are coming in which i guess is literally true because we have infant baptism as christians have practiced for two thousand years that's a debate for another time i suppose but because of that you know there are people who they'll baptize their kids so that they can have a nice lunch with you know aunt sheila but they don't have any intention of practicing the faith and so yeah a lot of those people will fall away echoing a little bit what ben said but if you look at adult conversions especially young adult conversions those really are spiking and more traditional forms of christianity and especially catholicism you are seeing a real surge there in america and in france and this got me wondering how mister walsh would react to this because it's a frequent tension in matt's thinking is there you know the natural instinct toward pessimism which is you know things are collapsing and we're all going to be raving baboons or is there this sense of victory that after many centuries of oppression the catholics are finally coming out of augsburg and westphalia and now we're actually going to retake all of the west what.

[Michael Knowles]

Do you think matt well i i mean there's always the ultimate optimism because we've read you know the last page of the book and we know how the story ends and and we know it ends with triumph but in in the in the medium term before we get there what's going to happen i i think i i have a i have a mixture of pessimism and optimism because i i do think that kind of to the point that's already been raised that the church is getting smaller but it's also getting more conservative it's getting more faithful at the same time and that's kind of what the statistics show us but then also what you realize is that you can't really trust the stats because i think what's actually happening is that now that we live in this godless heathen world there's no real cultural incentive to just show up to church even though you don't believe and you don't care so there's no there's you don't really have the cultural christians anymore because there's no incentive for that you could just not go to church you could you could not claim any faith and you'll be fine and i so i think that that is falling off now twenty years ago thirty years ago if you look at church attendance or whatever else people that were claiming to be catholic claiming to be christian it was higher but a lot of those people you know they didn't really believe they didn't actually care they were just showing up they were going through the motions because there was a certain cultural and social there's a social advantage to it and now that the social advantage is gone a lot of those people are falling off they didn't have the faith they weren't faithful to begin with and now the people that are showing up like they really believe they're there because they really believe and i also think to someone's point i wasn't really paying attention there's this need for meaning and so what you have especially with gen z they came into a culture that there's no meaning there's there's there's there's it's directionless and so they have this this real hunger for meaning which means that that's why you have some gen z that they're super catholic they're super conservative they're really traditional and that's great and you find that they're going to the latin mass and all that kind of stuff and then you also have gen z they've gone to the other extreme and they're getting into lgbt and trans and all that but it's it's all it is all this intense hunger for for meaning and some of them are finding the right place some of them are finding the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Wrong place i mean here i want to compliment our new acquisition matt fradd here because i think that one of the things that is happening and it's been happening in religious communities for a while is that what you said there matt which is that so many young people for a while in sort of the new atheist movement they figured that it was just dumb to be religious that if you were a smart person you could not be a religious person because science said and because if you were the kind of person who went to church or you went to synagogue that meant that you believed in some like weird old man in the sky who was manipulating the the marionette strings and and i think that one of the things that that matt fradd in particular has done because you dedicated your life to making logical arguments on behalf of of faith and on behalf of the bible because of that even if people don't necessarily believe because of those arguments they understand that intelligent people do believe those arguments and i think that this is actually a really really important thing because there was sort of a cultural dichotomy that was placed for most of my childhood between sort of the dumb rubes who who went to church and believed in god and then the the very intelligent university goers who who really believed you know the the smart things and the smart people would never hang out with the church people and the church people were a bunch of backwater kind of like how barack obama described them right the bitter clingers and all of this and i think that two things happened one the expert class completely fell on their face with with so many of their beliefs and it ended in men can be women and and at the same time there was a new class of people like you to to who are out there intellectually saying hold up a second like here's an a high iq defense of of what of what god is and how people believe in god and in fact i don't have to make that up i can cite some of the smartest people who ever lived including aquinas to actually explain all of this and so even if people don't necessarily understand the ontological argument they understand that very intelligent people make the ontological argument and therefore it is not stupid to believe in.

[Matt Walsh]

The ontological argument yeah this is such a great point ben because it just gives a kind of permission this happened to me like it's not like i certainly not when i first encountered them that i understood these arguments for god it just was enough to say oh wait smart people can articulate things in a smart way maybe i should give that a go and to your point matt yes you know thirty years ago maybe the number was higher or the percentage was higher of supposedly practicing catholics but to me that the test is well how many go to confession you know and like thirty years ago like everyone stopped going to confession and we believe as a matter of faith that you can't receive our lord in a state of mortal sin and if you're in a state of grave mortal sin you know you're really in danger of hellfire and so if you're not taking that part seriously you know you do have to wonder how seriously you're taking the faith i think it was padre pio said that the confessional is like a bath for the soul and mister frad i can't help but notice that when you get out of the bath you unlike the other people on this panel right now you shave what would be your beard well first of all.

[Matt Fradd]

It should be i want to just state for the record that i said to daily wire don't you think it's a bit tacky for me to shill your merch on the on day one they just they just showed me a whip and told me to shut up so no not at all man i mean i'm a big fan of jeremy's razors myself i know matt walsh has made fun of the likes of me and i don't think he's he's wrong to have done that but my wife has really sensitive skin and doesn't enjoy kissing me when i have whiskers and so for a while i had to decide do i want the respect of men or the kisses of my wife and i don't know what it says about me but it was a tough call but when i decided i got jeremy's razor and shaved the face there.

[Drew Holden]

You are nobody understands jeremy's razors better than i do because i have much more real estate to shave than the rest of you and i actually use and subscribe to jeremy's razors know if you guys remember that harry's razors i think it was you knowles they canceled you because what did you say men can't become women some kind of subversive trash like that and they actually cancelled their ads and so we started jeremy's razors we named them after jeremy irons i think and we we started to put out razors that actually support the idea that men should be men and should be you know have have a razor that can not just cut the beard it should just take their skin right the hell off you know i think that that's why we're so tough that we can use you know jeremy's razors they're absolutely terrific and right now you can get two full years of premium shaves for just twenty one cents a day which for me is like i mean you gotta prorate that that's like a penny a minute almost that's seven hundred thirty days of a shave as uncompromising as as you are go to jeremy's razors dot com and get the razor that works as hard as you do and be a man for crying out loud be just an unrepentant man because that's what it's about that's what jeremy's razors are all about yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Let me let me jump i mean there's no there's no if there was a clever segue i wouldn't be the guy to find it anyway but in this case there isn't one i do want to tell you though about when.

[Matt Walsh]

You use jeremy's razors your face will be softer than a baby's bottom there.

[Michael Knowles]

You go that's terrible that's exactly what i meant when i said that there's no good segue so that i'd already gotten into it we could have just moved on i want to tell you about one of my favorite sponsors of ours which is preborn because look we're talking about we are talking about the culture and of course we talk about all the time and the most important fight in the culture still has always been for the last sixty years and still is the fight for life the pro life fight and you know we're living in a time when lies are easy and truth is costly and that's especially true in the fight for life and you know the thing is many women's initial reaction when they have an unwanted pregnancy is is they think that because this is the lie they're they get from the culture and they get from the abortion industry they feel they feel a lot of fear they don't know what to do they go and they talk to an abortion clinic they talk to planned parenthood and what do they get they get someone who preys on that fear and on that you know not knowing what's going to happen next and tells them that this is this is the this is the kind of the morbid irony of the so called pro choice movement is that they get women to have abortions not by telling them they have a choice but telling them they have no choice at all that you're screwed your life is over and so your only way out is to kill your child well preborn provides women with love with support with the resources they need during pregnancy and with your support preborn can continue in their work and helping women choose life which is their work which is the most important work we can do in the culture it costs just twenty eight dollars to sponsor an ultrasound and we know that ultrasound doubles a baby's chance at life because if a woman gets a chance just to see the baby to see the child chances that she will choose life are drastically increased your tax deductible donation of fifteen thousand dollars will place a machine in a needy women's center saving countless lives for years to come so you can give now dial pound two hundred fifty and say the keyword baby that's pound two hundred fifty baby or visit preborn dot com fire that's preborn dot com fire okay.

[Matt Walsh]

Matt i've had enough matt brad i've had enough talk about just generic theism and everything i want to know it's been a little bit of a rough five hundred years for holy mother church and there have been ups and downs really great art actually and the counter reformation so i feel great i feel really good and i know there's some people who always just want to be down and anything the pope does is bad and anything that seems good about the culture the christian culture or you know for the church i don't know somehow is bad or i don't know maybe i'm a little too rosy about it but are you feeling good me.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah i feel fine yeah i think the reason i'm a catholic is that i think catholicism is true i think that god exists that christ is the second person of the blessed trinity the long awaited messiah i think he established a church and i think he gave that church authority and that that church is the catholic church you know we live in a day and age where we're constantly bombarded with the latest scandals and that can be very demoralizing and it makes sense you know and you think well how could this possibly be the true church of christ when we see scandals when we see abuses when we see cowardice but i was thinking this morning that that would also invalidate the true religion in the old covenant you know i mean rahab the prostitute moses the murderer solomon has his heart turned towards baal by his foreign wives david the adulterer so i think if you're looking for the true church and by the true church you mean the church of perfect people then you won't find it and if you did and then joined it it wouldn't be because you're abysmal so i think when people are evaluating whether or not the catholic church is the true church they should think of they should think of it that way does god exist has he revealed himself definitively in the person of jesus christ and has he established a church and which church is that is that too serious no no that's fair.

[Matt Walsh]

Did that bring you over you're already almost there you're peering over the tiber just dipping your toe in but i.

[Matt Fradd]

Do join us cleveland everything's on fire.

[Drew Holden]

We need you yeah one thing that almost everybody has hit on is the fact that you know ideas trickle down ideas do trickle down from the top and i talk to people as you all do all across the country one thing you hear people say all the time is well i'm not smart i'm not educated but you know i have this opinion and the opinion is usually far smarter than any university professor and now i think what you're getting is permission to believe because the science is simply very it's not dispositive you never can prove a spiritual truth proof is an actual material thing that you do a material process but the science just shows that one consciousness is almost certainly separate from material it does not come from the brain it comes through the brain and the other thing is that the world is simply built for us it is built for life the odds of this world being what it is are the same odds as a wind blowing across a junkyard and assembling a seven hundred forty seven it's just not going to happen and the the fingerprints of the creator are everywhere i mean the heavens declare his glory and all of that stuff is true once you start getting into your own personal religion i think things you know then you get into the old arguments and i believe those should be solved by violence i think the thirty years war we should just bring that back and just have utter like warfare and death across the different the different belief systems until the last man is standing i think that's the only that's the only way right i mean otherwise we have to be nice to one another and kind of listen to each other's ideas and it would be like the show we wouldn't be able to stand it.

[Matt Walsh]

That'S a great point unfortunately i can't reach.

[Michael Knowles]

Through the screen i can only can.

[Matt Fradd]

I say something else oh you go.

[Matt Walsh]

No yeah no please okay i was.

[Matt Fradd]

Going to say there's like a pragmatic reason to believe in god and christianity as well pascal gets into this in his penses the basic idea being if i can't decide whether the arguments for atheism or christian theism if i can't decide that one's better than the other then i still could have a pragmatic reason to preferring one over the other the second vatican council said that when god is forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible and i think if you look around in our what we call our culture i don't think we have a culture but when we look around today i think we just see a lot of people who don't know where they're from what they're for or where they're going so but i think the advantage the opposite is true too right so if i can come to believe in god and his revelation then i know that i've come from somewhere that i'm for something and that there's a way in which i should live and that when i act in accordance with that whether or not i know how to out debate atheists on the internet if i put that into effect in my life and my life becomes better if people around me if my wife starts liking me more because i'm patient and kind then that's maybe do that i remember i met several people like i just i just can't believe i'm like just just choose to do it just because if god doesn't exist what are you afraid of being a hypocrite that wouldn't be immoral just get over it just be a hypocrite but but if there's good reason to believe in god start acting like that although i think.

[Drew Holden]

Your your first statement i i prefer i prefer to believe because it is it is true and then let the benefits of it come i actually believe.

[Ben Shapiro]

I agree with matt frad's second statement there actually you're a cynical tactical person well no i mean i might be so bold as to call it the jewish approach to religion which is do the mitzvot and then you end up believing in god right like basically do the thing and it turns out that when you do the thing and it enriches your life in a particular way then you end up actually with a deeper belief system about the nature of the system into which you are buying than if you had never done the thing i know there have been some jokes about you know if i were to convert would i end up as a catholic or a protestant and i've i've offended both parties by suggesting that well i have tremendous sympathy for the rules based order that the catholics provide if i were going to ditch an even more rules based order i'd go all the way and it'd be party time and i'm going full protestant so i've pissed off everybody with that particular answer but the sort of acts based form of finding religion i think it actually is the way i think that most people actually end up believing in religion i think that the intellectual frameworks that all of us spend time creating around god and around the bible i think that it provides that permission structure but i think that the way that most people actually engage in religious life is they just engage in religious life and it's why even the very notion of i believe in god is such an intellectualized form of how most people actually behave with regard to god that i don't think it has tremendous value in the way that i think that our overly intellectualized society you know sort of promotes our society well do you believe in god or do you not believe in god if you believe in god why do you believe in god what are all the reasons you believe in god and that's sort of like saying you know do you believe in gravity do you not believe in gravity if you do believe in gravity please explain the physics of how gravity works like well no i live in a world that has gravity in it and and so for me i live in a god created world and i act in a way that i would only act if god were a part of my world and i think that even people who are atheists or agnostic very often are living in that same world without recognizing that they're living in that god created order and so i think that that you know did you have.

[Drew Holden]

A problem i mean i have a problem when i hear christians say things like you know they'll say things like nobody is born imperfect and you think like i've seen some pretty tragic births in my life you know and i i don't think that that's true if i found myself spouting untruths in the name of god i would i would begin to have doubts my experience was that having reasoned my way to the probability of god i began to engage with god and found that everything made sense everything made more sense suddenly i wasn't talking nonsense anymore i mean i.

[Ben Shapiro]

Am i think that it's a great point but i also think that's why it's very important and this actually is i think a general statement about religion that i'll be interested to hear you guys take on i think one of the problems with sort of the internet subculture around religion is that people go very quickly from new convert to preacher and that i think is actually a gigantic mistake i don't think that you get to convert to catholicism tomorrow and become pope the day after and i don't think that you actually have to spend some time and become comfortable with the ideas to the point where you actually live the ideas believe the ideas and understand them to be true in your heart in order for you to promote them rationally and i think that you can start off by not fully believing the thing that you're working through but i do think that you actually have to spend a lot of time with the thing before you actually believe the thing to the point where you can say to other people this is true and not be dishonest about it.

[Drew Holden]

Yeah and as you say the smartest people in history have all believed and there's you don't want to throw away their thoughts which is what guys like dawkins do it's what those new atheists did it's like oh that's ridiculous and then you realize they've never read aquinas they've never read the people who thought these thoughts you know they just have no idea it is simply a club a sophisticated elite club of unbelievers that i grew up in but i think it's falling apart and i think the reason it's falling apart is because of science i think science has just made it it untenable to hold those opinions with that kind of sneering superiority i think that's all over now and i think that just frees people into belief you know it frees people to bringing.

[Matt Walsh]

Yourself have you noticed that mister walsh have you noticed that mister walsh is sitting there like some kind of hindu like a baba just meditating is it because you've reached a sort of spiritual.

[Michael Knowles]

Enlightenment i have i've reached zen i became buddhist i didn't tell you guys i do think well i was thinking about matt your the point you made about not not to not to oversimplify but it's a little bit of like fake it till you make it like you know maybe maybe you don't fully believe this but if it's if it's not true you got nothing to lose by sort of acting as though it is and then maybe as you act as though it is you'll you'll you'll come to believe it if i understand kind of your point and i think that in many cases in life i actually think fake it till you make it is is is maybe one of the wisest cliches that's ever been uttered because that is true for a lot of things i mean i've said this many times about depression you know people say well i'm so unhappy i don't know how to be not depressed well just pretend you're not like just act like you're not pretend you're not unhappy just go around totally fake it be completely fake and phony and act like you are not depressed and and you will find that that that you actually become less depressed because you're acting like it so i think that that is often true with a lot of things.

[Ben Shapiro]

Matt how's that working out with you for the show.

[Michael Knowles]

But i'm not i'm not faking it though that's a thing i'm not faking it at all but i but so but the so i think there's a lot of truth to that but the counterpoint when it comes to religion in particular is that like i i said what feels like two and a half hours ago that it's like people were doing people people were doing that in the culture when there was a when there was a social incentive they were going to church they were going they were going through the motions and then as a social incentive fell off they just stopped going and so in a way they were kind of faking it but they didn't make it you know so it didn't it that didn't seem to quite work on a societal scale in our countries yes.

[Matt Walsh]

And you know look a lot of what this a lot of what we're talking about is actually natural reason right you know a lot of it is okay we can know things about human nature even to your point matt on you know fake it till you make it there's just things about human nature and human behavior that will conduce to some kind of flourishing and maybe make you happy and in all this talk of like if you if you live in accord with the truth that's gonna get you somewhere and look there's truth in natural religion even matt's baba swami stuff from the far east but i think this also gets to the point we were talking about earlier when we were alluding to relitigating the thirty years war is look there's a lot we can know from abstract reason and from nature but then there's particularity to it too and certainly christians believe in a very particular religion jews do also a particular people a particular god speaks to a particular people and on a particular mountain and so i think that's what's really interesting about this moment is we've gone from this bland generic gnosticism that says not even our bodies really matter to us at all that's where you get transgenderism down to well hold on does god exist okay well what is god like okay there's this god and did he really reveal himself is he really incarnate as a real individual particular person and then to your point mister fradd and does he really establish a particular church and does he really encourage us to do particular things leave us particular sacraments that in a particular way and on that catholic propaganda matt i'm very much looking forward to pints with aquinas launching i think in january is.

[Matt Fradd]

That right on daily wire correct i'm pumped as well thank you in a.

[Matt Walsh]

Particular year which is twenty twenty six very good matt thank you i'm very excited about this i will see you.

[Ben Shapiro]

And he's already been initiated i mean he read his first ad here which as we all know is the actual real initiation ritual of joining daily wire this the yarmulke is optional the ads are mandatory yeah they do tell you.

[Drew Holden]

Have to become jewish right discuss that.

[Matt Walsh]

With you that's on the contract renegotiation i think okay matt thank you very.

[Ben Shapiro]

Much so we're all obviously super pumped to have matt fradd with us here at daily wire matt is awesome his show is great one of the smartest people around one of the dumbest people around and one of the most horrific people around is about to be the mayor of new york that zoran mamdani according to the latest kalshi odd apparently he is an eighty seven percent favorite to become the democratic nominee and that's people putting their money where their mouth is because that's a that's essentially a betting market and and yeah it looks like he's very likely to become the next mayor of new york and my perspective on that i believe we don't even have to talk about this i think we all know that he's a marxist pro jihadi terrible person and i think it it speaks ill of an enormous number of people in new york and i think the only question really is you know do the people of new york deserve this because you know they are voting for it and the theory of democracy is that people deserve what they get and they should get it good and hard and so you know i guess if that's the direction they choose to go that's the direction they can choose to go we'll be covering that obviously all the rest of this week next week as well yeah he's terrible and you know on that truly dark note i'm gonna give you a note of light and that is that lifetime memberships are available so if you want an entire lifetime of watching this show i know that matt feels like he's already experienced an entire lifetime of participating in this show but if you want an entire lifetime membership you know you get to like come here whenever you want for literally the rest of your natural life which you know depending on your age should be well beyond drew's natural lifespan so you get to see who we replace drew with which will be exciting i think for all of us actually then you'll be able to check it out with the lifetime membership here at daily wire you know we announced this ten thousand lifetime all access members only ten thousand already seven thousand five hundred of those are gone so there are twenty five hundred left you can do the math unless you're a new yorker in which case you're electing a socialist for no reason but twenty five hundred lifetime memberships left you can go get those right now don't miss this opportunity to help us build the next decade of daily wire and beyond you've seen all the amazing content we're going to be putting out just in the next couple of months and they tell you we have such a content schedule stack for you for next year all right like amazing unprecedented stuff in the history of independent media really truly this is your exclusive opportunity to become the backbone of a movement to build the future and ensure that the best is yet to come claim one of those two thousand five hundred remaining lifetime memberships as well as your gold daily wire forward flag pin which none of us brought with us we have them in our safe they're being guarded by armed guards actually and that so you know but you can have one you can have one if you go to dailywire dot com lifetime i see that drew has his hat on which is you can get that at our daily wire shop as well by the way the hats are very very cool so go check that out right now dailywire dot com lifetime and there's.

[Matt Walsh]

Nothing else here are we doing anything else together or no we're leaving them desiring something more yeah that's right leave.

[Drew Holden]

Them wanting more that's true i think.

[Ben Shapiro]

We can all run screaming from the building now right sounds good that's friendly.

[Matt Walsh]

Fire everybody see you gentlemen next time.

[Ben Shapiro]

This land is in a welter of confusion there are more kings than sheep more princes than crows on a battlefield all seeking to snatch what they can when they can without a care for who suffers and until this island is ruled by one who wields both justice and mercy there will be no peace.

[Michael Knowles]

Look at them boys playing the game.

[Ben Shapiro]

Of kings they say they have the.

[Michael Knowles]

Merlin with them.

[Matt Fradd]

The merlin died long.

[Ben Shapiro]

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[Matt Fradd]

This is where it begins.

[Ben Shapiro]

Folks there's a reason you're seeing this message it's intentional because this moment is different it's both a thank you and also an invitation thank you for choosing courage over fear thank you for standing when silence would have definitely been easier and thank you for believing in a brighter future for the.

[Matt Walsh]

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[Michael Knowles]

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[Ben Shapiro]

Of your support let's be clear none of it happens without you if we became the fight the left never expected to show up and they certainly didn't expect us to win and now as we launch the next decade of the daily wire we're offering something we've never offered before a lifetime all access membership it's more than exclusive access it's belief in the power of this movement to direct the course of our nation and to light the way during dark times.

[Drew Holden]

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[Ben Shapiro]

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