← The Michael Knowles Show
The Michael Knowles Show
Friendly Fire: Defeating Doomerism, Defending America & Ending Time Zones
01:01:51
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- [00:00]
Ben Shapiro
I have a question. Are we supposed to literally do 15 minutes on Joe Biden's book and Trump coin? Because I was stupid that, that like, I have no idea how you sustain that. Also good. I mean, okay. I mean, well, I mean, you know, I'm going to take it to.
- [00:22]
Michael Knowles
I think that's me.
- [00:23]
Ben Shapiro
Oh, yeah, no, I'm going to take it directly to the struggle session for Michael. I mean, last week was. Last week. It was a bad, it was a bad moment, Michael.
- [00:32]
Domenech
It was a great. Frankly, it was a good time to be on vacation, which I was all week. But no, I'm actually, I'm on board with like this stage of this whole saga I think is great because it's like it actually does go along well. We'll get into it on the show. But like, it gets into my thesis that the thing that's gonna, the thing that'll stop all the kind of crazy theories is, is just gonna be like the courts and it's gonna be like actual acts that occur. And what was crazy to me about the preliminary hearing was not even all the evidence from the prosecution. It was the defense. It was like the defense had very weak moves, wasn't bringing up any of the conspiracy theories and explicitly rejected those theories. So you're like, at that point, you're like, is the defense in on it too? Is Tara Robinson in on it?
- [01:23]
Ben Shapiro
You know, it was the, I think it was the combo of that. And also, I mean, I will say that the, the shift to mockery was definitely a big thing.
- [01:31]
Domenech
Yeah.
- [01:32]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah. Because I think that we had to get to a place where we, we could move beyond the. How evil it is for this person to be doing this to how absurd and retarded all of this is. Because it is a big deal we got. And I think that Dominic, we, maybe we may be getting back into the world of, of actual humor, which, which is going to be nice. I mean, it feels like it's been about a 10 year period since you were allowed to make jokes.
- [01:55]
Domenech
Yeah, yeah.
- [01:56]
Ben Shapiro
And so I'm, I'm very much, I'm very much into the idea that we're allowed to make jokes about things. Again, it was like only a particular type of joke that you could tell. And remember during like the Obama era, you couldn't tell jokes about Obama. It was real bad. Like, like he was, he was the sainted one and you could never tell jokes about him. And then during the Trump era, you could only tell certain types of jokes surrounding President Trump, but not really. Like, you couldn't make fun of President Trump when he said a dumb thing or something, because that'd be a sign that you were with the liberal elites. And now I think we're kind of getting beyond all of that and we're going back to a certain semblance of normalcy where you can just make fun of retardation wherever it exists. And that, I think, is this period
- [02:33]
Michael Knowles
where he couldn't make jokes. I may not have been paying attention. I'm not sure.
- [02:37]
Ben Shapiro
Well, that's usual.
- [02:38]
Domenech
No, we're back. It's like the 2000s are back. We've got Congress fighting to pass a budget. We've got war in the Middle East. We can make jokes again. We're back, baby. This is it. And you know what? We're back on. We're back on friendly fire. Yeah. So, okay, just off the bat, they want us to talk about this Joe Biden book, but if we were to do that, we would be the only people talking about the Joe Biden book, including Joe Biden.
- [03:13]
Michael Knowles
And you can't.
- [03:13]
Domenech
I kind of like hearing it for the first time. Joe Biden has a book out.
- [03:18]
Michael Knowles
I know the jokes kind of write themselves, but they're not that good. That's the problem.
- [03:22]
Ben Shapiro
Well, the auto pen writes the jokes as well as.
- [03:29]
Domenech
I'm just proud.
- [03:30]
Andrew Klavan
In a new era of artificial intelligence, we are prioritizing our most important politicians to have their insights on the day as it stands, namely one Joe Biden. If you were going to pick one politician to put into the AI box and just sort of have something to spew out auto pen wise, wouldn't it be Joe Biden? I mean, just like you're welcome stories, the big fish sales, you know, I want an entire chapter on corn pop. Somebody pop that into grok or quad and figure out what. What Joe Biden would actually say, you know, today about corn pop.
- [04:08]
Ben Shapiro
Maybe.
- [04:09]
Andrew Klavan
Maybe take the. Take the intelligence level down a couple of notches from. From his. From his heyday in the U.S. senate.
- [04:15]
Lyndon
The.
- [04:15]
Ben Shapiro
The title of the title, no matter what it is, by the way, promise me America. Which is. Which is basically like an answering title
- [04:23]
Michael Knowles
I can't say on the air.
- [04:25]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, exactly. It's. Well, it's like Jacob on his deathbed. It's like. It's like he's asking all of us to promise him. He has promises that we have to keep to him. And I'm not sure which one I am looking forward to less. The Joe Biden new autobiography, or am I looking forward less to life with mtg? The New online series where camera people follow around the world's dumbest ex congressperson, which is really exciting.
- [04:51]
Andrew Klavan
Is this real?
- [04:52]
Domenech
Did I miss a new show?
- [04:55]
Andrew Klavan
Oh, my gosh.
- [04:55]
Domenech
It used to be the people to get into Congress to get shows.
- [05:01]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, no, it's exciting. She. She apparently in the, in the trailer which we played today, she actually, like, visits the Statue of Liberty, as though this is newsworthy. And she also, I think, walks around New York and talks to humans, which is exciting. I'm just glad that we allighted the episode where she goes and visits her tantric yoga instructor. I think that's good. I don't think we needed that episode.
- [05:23]
Domenech
Behind the table right past that one.
- [05:27]
Andrew Klavan
Is this Netflix, Ben?
- [05:30]
Ben Shapiro
I have no idea what outlet will be bringing this to your screen.
- [05:34]
Andrew Klavan
What we need, obviously, is a crossover with the new Netflix Kevin Hart show because they bought the cold as balls show where you sit in, like, an ice bath and talk to Kevin Hart, which to me sounds like the worst experience any human could imagine in their entire life. But we now need those two shows to meet. Like Kevin Hart, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
- [05:59]
Domenech
On the contrary, I have just a rebuttal to that. Do we. Do we need those shows to meet? I'm not. So, you know, there are two, like, kind of firm lines.
- [06:07]
Andrew Klavan
I'm just saying it would do bigger numbers than Moana's been doing this weekend. It's been a complete disaster for Disney. Everybody's desperate for content these days. Let's just make it the more ridiculous, the better.
- [06:19]
Domenech
My two sort of firm political takeaways on both of these stories that actually do relate is one, it is kind of sad. People used to run for Congress either to do some good in the country and to advance legislation, or more likely, just to advance their political careers, make it to the Senate, run for president, take over the whole world, whatever. But now it seems that the end goal for the right, not necessarily for the left, but for the right, the end goal of being in politics is to be in political media. Like, it's not. It should be the case that you start a podcast so that you can run for office, but now people are running for office to get a podcast
- [06:55]
Michael Knowles
and people are trying to be commercial.
- [06:58]
Andrew Klavan
You are leaving out one key political figure here, Michael, which is that Donald Trump ran for president out of the greatest motivation ever, which is spite. I just, I think that's one of the most admirable things about his entry.
- [07:12]
Ben Shapiro
I mean, listen, the podcast.
- [07:14]
Andrew Klavan
No, I'm not. I'm not going to get laughed at.
- [07:17]
Ben Shapiro
And then the podcasters have all the power. I mean, obviously we spent all of last week talking about a psychotic podcaster who thinks that Charlie Kirk's ghost talks to her. And it turns out that actual evidence in reality sunk in last week. And then we all got to make fun of her for being conspiratorial nutcase, which. Which of course she is. And. And some of us took full advantage of that, I will admit.
- [07:37]
Michael Knowles
Wait, but it's so much better than arguing with her, though, because, like, arguing with her just made the people look like they were hurt. I mean, I've always tried to explain this to our old friend Jeremy, that when you argue with an irrational woman, she doesn't become rational. You just go nuts. You know, and I think it's so much better that people are just shrugging her off and making fun of her and basically saying, then even reacting with moral, you know, getting on your moral high horse and saying she's evil. I mean, she's too crazy to be evil. Who are the people? People are always sight writing her numbers to me. Who are those people? I mean, she's being listened to in Iran, probably by guys in a bunker, you know, hiding out with a phone. I think we're getting news from America. You know, I just, like, I disagree with that.
- [08:18]
Andrew Klavan
Andrew is the only person on this podcast feel very hurt by your commentary.
- [08:26]
Ben Shapiro
I think that, listen, I mean, I think that we should. We should recognize that the. The wine mom contingent who listens to Candace is very real. There are a lot of people who listen to Candace because that sort of conspiratorial. Let me connect all of these bizarre dots for you. And it looks like one of those, you know, children's games from Highlights where you have all the dots and you're supposed to connect them in order and she just skips all of the dots and draws a Jewish star. That's. That's pretty much what her show is at this point. And I have to say that, you know, that that does have. There is something seductive about the idea of an almost Plato's cave figure who is going to come in and bring you the truth.
- [08:59]
Andrew Klavan
Be careful. Be careful there, Ben. You're going to get a. You're going to get a cut image of you. Ben Bureau calls Candace Owen seductive. That's absolutely going to go on.
- [09:13]
Ben Shapiro
Bizarre sort of bizarre idea that you can. You can string together all of these dots and then that will. A new theory of the world will emerge. It is strangely, weirdly seductive to people. So when I did the episode on Friday where I basically imitated Candace, and I used all of her tactics and put together a theory whereby Candace had killed Charlie. And the. And what I got from a lot of people was, wow, that's strangely plausible. I was like, guys, I'm joking. Like, it's. If you use her tropes, if you use all of these kind of bizarre tactics, it actually does have this sort of appeal to the limbic system where people go, oh, now. Now I can kind of see what was previously hidden. To me, it turns out that Maroon 5 and the Maroon shirts and Kanye west and Candace, it's all in it together. And. And I. I think that that that sort of let me find words in my Alphabet soup thing. It does work, unfortunately. And it's only because she was so completely declowned by reality that this was. That this was put to bed. But I don't think it'll be the end of it. I mean, there's conspiracy theories about everything. People immediately went to conspiracy theories about Lindsey Graham that were. That were completely insane. Not even the ones like where the
- [10:17]
Michael Knowles
Russians killed him about this. I don't mean to be fair to crazy people, but it has been insane, the disinformation coming from people from whom we expect information, like the government, the newspapers, the news. I mean, we just went through this entire period of people telling us that the pandemic didn't come from China, where, you know, from the Chinese labs where they were studying the exact thing that was released into the exact place it was released. And we were being told that if we said that, we'd be taken off our social media. I don't blame these people for looking at the world and thinking, everybody's lying to me. Oh, but this person is telling me the truth. I can't blame them for that. I mean, we've been living in a true echo of lies for a long time.
- [10:58]
Andrew Klavan
And just to echo that, I mean, some of the people who were saying things along those lines, Ben included, people like Bill Browder, who I respect on these kinds of things, there's a lot of people who are. Look, you know, I have friends, Vladimir Kiramuza, other people who have been legitimately poisoned by the Russians. They have been poisoned. They have survived, thankfully, knock on wood. And so I think that people raising that kind of thing about Lindsey, I understand why. I don't agree with it at all. I think it is crazy, but I do. Can I just say the thing that's.
- [11:33]
Ben Shapiro
No, no, I don't mean that. By the way, I should clarify. I don't mean the theory, I don't mean the theory that Lindsey was, was poisoned by the Russians while he was in Ukraine or something, which does have a smattering of theoretical plausibility to it, given what the Russians actually do. I'm talking about the theory that Mossad did it. Right. Like Alexander Dugin went right to. It was the Jews. Right. And so I will say that there is a range of plausibility when it comes to conspiracy theory.
- [11:55]
Andrew Klavan
But the thing that, I mean, his funeral for next week and, and the big thing they're trying to figure out is which day they can do so that Bibi can come. Like, I mean, like, why would you. That's.
- [12:04]
Domenech
You know what's interesting, I saw the Dugan tweet that immediately said you. It seems like it was Mossad, which you think, no, it probably was like red wine and cheeseburgers. I mean, that's what would take out most, like older senators. You know, it's not a very healthy lifestyle.
- [12:20]
Andrew Klavan
You're close. He actually liked White Russians.
- [12:24]
Domenech
White Russians, that's right. Yeah, yeah. So it was the Russians. There you go. But you know, when I saw that post from Dugan, I thought, this is a really brilliant tweet because to your point, Drew, first of all, there is reason for people to entertain conspiracy theories. One, the right always entertains them a little bit more than the left, in part cuz the left conspires more than the right. And so you've always had like coast to coast am, and you've always had, you know, the Alex Jones, that kind of stuff. But you also had Covid. So there was a big conspiracy. They lied to us about a lot of stuff. So, you know, you just have to be discerning to know which theories are more plausible than others. And some are totally outlandish, obviously. But in the case of Dugan, a lot of people don't know that much about this guy. He's a Russian philosopher. He's very close to the Kremlin in the West. He's called Putin's Brain. That might be a little bit of propaganda, but he's obviously very close to the Putin regime. And his political theory is interesting. He advocates a fourth political theory beyond the ideologies of the 20th century. So it's not communism, it's not Nazism or fascism, it's not liberalism. It's some kind of fourth thing. But ultimately what it is is a kind of Russian hyper nationalism and Russian
- [13:33]
Michael Knowles
chauvinism and so mixed with Islamism though.
- [13:37]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah.
- [13:37]
Domenech
Well, here's the key. I Guess on this point is when you read a tweet like that from Dugan, he's not actually saying the Mossad killed Lindsey Graham, which nobody believes. What he is doing is acting as an operator for the Russian government because his political ideology is basically Russian greatness. And so what he's doing is he's playing on these divisions that he sees within the American right that comes from the Israel issue or anything else. But he's not making an observation as a philosopher. He's doing a thing as an operative. And it's pretty clever what he's doing, because some people are going to entertain.
- [14:13]
Michael Knowles
How did he become the voice of America, though? There's absolutely no distance between Alexander Dugan's philosophy and Tucker Carlson's. I mean, they're basically saying the exact same things. How did that happen?
- [14:24]
Andrew Klavan
Oh, I think Dugan is more entertaining. I have to defend Dugan a little bit. I think of him as, like, political philosophy. Like, the stuff that he comes up with is so wild and bonkers. I don't know how he does it without the influence of drugs. I don't. You know, but it's one of these things where it's like, at least Dugan has the advantage of being someone who I think you can identify on the spectrum as being, as you said, Michael, an operator, an operator for a specific country and a specific type of nationalist agenda. And, yes, that is what he was trying to do there. I do think. And I would just ask people who are listening to. To come to the site tomorrow at the Daily Wire, because we should have an interview up with one of Lindsey Graham's oldest friends, a consultant who worked for both him and John McCain. Bob Heckman, who I interviewed this morning. And he told me this story, which I had never heard before. His daughter was going to school at the. Going to college at the College of Charleston. And he went down there, and Lindsey met her for the first time. He had been giving her advice about Charleston and South Carolina, where I grew up. And Bob told me that he walked away with my daughter, and he had this very deep conversation with her, and I didn't know what they were talking about. And then she walked back to me, and she said. And I said, what did Lindsay say to you? And she said, well, he asked me if anybody was bothering me at the college and if anyone was giving me a hard time. And I said no. And then he told me, well, if anybody does, just let me know and I'll have them killed because I'm a senator. Lindsey, that is exactly where his form of humor would go, I only met
- [16:18]
Domenech
Senator Graham one time. I met him in the early days of the Verdict podcast when Senator Cruz and I were covering the impeachment. And he brought Lindsey Graham over one day. And something that really surprised me, but it goes along with your story, Ben, is the guy was uproariously funny. Like, he comes in. I always thought of him as just a kind of milquetoast, kind of neoconservative, whatever kind of senator. And he just walks into our basement studio, he goes, what the F is this shag carpet? Am I on the set of an effing 70s porno? What is this guy? He said, no, this is a podcast studio, Senator. What the F is a podcast? And he's like, he was so funny, very gracious, very generous, really knowledgeable guy, and just a killer, killer politician. You can see all that trial lawyer training really came out in his personality. And the thing I'll say about him, I know a lot of people hated his foreign policy and his immigration policy, and he was kind of a neocon. Me, too. Yeah, including me, by the way. So I get all of that. But the one real political virtue he had, and I know a lot of people think this is a vice. He was a partisan. He was a loyal party man who understood that politics is a team sport, and he would work with people. It's how he survived into the Trump era. After running against Trump, he was a very talented politician. He did a lot of good even amid bad things that we don't like about his career. And I think he'll be sorely missed.
- [17:37]
Michael Knowles
I also think he'll be sort of missed. I disagree with his foreign policy, too, but I thought it was important that he was there. I thought. I thought that's a voice. You know, every. Everybody in America only has half an opinion, so you have to have the other half of the opinion there as well. And I always thought it was good to have somebody close to Trump saying, just. Just bomb him. Just kill him. You know, I think it was. I mean, just wasn't as bad. It wasn't as bad as John.
- [18:00]
Andrew Klavan
One point, I would just think about
- [18:01]
Michael Knowles
him, but I think he would bomb the toilet. But it was. It was useful to have him around.
- [18:05]
Alan Morrow
This.
- [18:05]
Andrew Klavan
This is. This is one thing. And. And I don't want to dominate this, even though. I mean, I knew Lindsey for almost 30 years, and my opinions about him changed a lot over that time. But one of the things that I think people underappreciate is that as a partisan and you're both right. Michael and Drew, as a partisan, a lot of the role that Lindsey had was keeping weak Republicans in line, and that's something that he was actually doing. I think people underappreciate this iconic moment that has been repeatedly shared since his death of him defending Brett Kavanaugh. Everyone sort of focuses on the fact that he is attacking the Democrats with moral authority and with total strength in his argument. He's also sending a message to the guy who's sitting at the end of that committee line, Jeff Flake, about, you better not be a pussy on this, because you've got to hold the line, and we will judge you if you don't hold the line. And I think that that's a role that he served within this Trump era to great effectiveness. And I think without his voice in the room, Trump's gonna have some problems with the Senate that he. That he maybe could have had helped by the fact that Lindsey was the guy who was advocating in the room and who could convince people that, yes, this is the right thing to do, this is the right way to make a stand.
- [19:24]
Ben Shapiro
And, you know, when it comes to Lindsey Graham, I know there are a lot of people who are extremely critical of his sort of overall foreign policy. Leave it to me to be significantly less critical of Lindsey Graham's overall foreign policy. There are places where I disagreed with him, for example, intervention in Libya and all of that. But here's the thing about Lindsey Graham, the guy that American power in the world is a good thing, that American power in the world is actively a good thing. And he may have erred on behalf of the idea that there was sort of an over optimism about what American power could accomplish when applied in different places. But there's no question that he believed that America was a force for good in the world, and that an expansion of American power was better for the United States and better for the world, which is a far cry from a huge percentage of our current population on the horseshoe right and the left, all of whom seem to agree that America power. American power in the world is bad. You want to know why Tucker agrees with Dugan? Because he believes that American power in the world is actually a bad thing. And it's why all of the same people, from Nick Fuentes to Anna Kasparian were out there literally celebrating Lindsey Graham dying. It's because, actually, Lindsey Graham was very, very pro America. And that manifested again sometimes in a sort of chauvinistic politics abroad, but it also manifested in the idea that actually, when it's between the United States and Iran, that's not a choice. When it's between America's allies and our enemies, Ukraine and Russia, that's not really a choice. And I think that that's a good thing. I think that's going to be sorely missed. I hope there are people who are going to help fill that gap politically. Obviously, there's going to be a special election in the fall. His sister has been appointed by the governor to fill that slot, at least for the moment. I'm not sure she's actually going to run to fill that slot. The Kalshi markets and again, Kalshee is one of our sponsors that they have the odds on on who exactly is going to be running in that race to fill that seat. Ralph Norman is up for that seat. I believe that Fry is up for that seat. Fry has a heavy advantage in the calcium markets right now. And Darlene is way down at like 6%, which I assume just means that no one expects that she's actually going to run to filler brother seat. Well, guys, as you know, I spent most of this week not sleeping. But had I been sleeping, I would have been on my Helix sleep mattress because never have I missed my Helix sleep mattress like I have this week. We had a baby earlier this week. That means that we're up and down, mostly my wife, but also I've been up and down. And that means when I get on that mattress, I need to sleep and Helix makes it happen for me. Helix has over 20 mattress models with cooling upgrades built for nights like the ones that we are currently experiencing in Florida, meaning way too hot. Free shipping anywhere in the US a 120 night sleep trial, a limited lifetime warranty. That's the Happy with Helix guarantee. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand in the country. It's recognized by Forbes, Wired, all the experts have looked into it. None of the horror stories about, you know, sleeping on a sticky mattress. They don't have to be reality anymore. The solution exists. It ships free. And right now it is 27% off. There is no excuse. So head over to helixleep.com dailywire for 27% off site wide exclusive for listeners of the show. That's helixsleep.com dailywire for 27% offset wide exclusively for you helixleep.com dailywire did we
- [22:21]
Michael Knowles
talk about Joe Biden's book enough? Wait, I want to hear about this a little bit more. Ben, just a minute. This thing about American power not being a good thing and I'm not a Big war guy. I'm not happy to have war going on. But as opposed to what? I mean, Alexander Dugin, as Knowles points out, is looking for a re dominant Russia, new Russian empire. But part of his theory is that the wonderful Christians in Russia have to team up with the Islamists, who seem to me. Who seem to me just, you know, to coin a phrase, batshit crazy. I mean, they seem like absolutely just a destructive force. And so where does this come in? Where does it come into America? Where suddenly we have guys like Tucker Carlson basically saying the same thing. Oh, the Muslims love the Christians and the Russians are wonderful. And they're just. Things are going so well in Russia. It's all nonsense. I mean, you talk about laughing at Candace. I mean, it's like laughing at this stuff would be a good ide as well. It's just complete nonsense. So how does that seep in? How does this propagandist for the Russians seep into American politics?
- [23:25]
Ben Shapiro
Because I think what he's done is actually really smart. Well, I think what he's done is really smart. What, what, what Dugin has done is he has targeted the idea that secular liberal globalism is the dominant force in American politics since World War II. Right. This is the argument he makes. And that ignores a wide swath of American history, ignores the very religious 1950s. It ignores the strength of the 1980s. It ignores the fact that America has been much more religious than Russia for legitimately the entirety of America's experience. It ignores the fact that as. As you say, Drew, I mean, who else is on the block? But the thing that he is doing is he is critiquing what he sees or what he portrays as a sort of LGBT flags on the bombs that were dropping. And you see Tucker mirroring that sort of perspective. And so the idea is that American power abroad is a flex on the part of a globalist left. And by globalist, Tucker means about three different things, none of them correct. But, you know, he kind of lumps those all together. And then the counter to that is supposed to be this new anti Reformation, early Eastern Orthodox Church kind of stuff that is linked up with Russian nationalism. And Tucker looks at that and he sees a bunch of crossover, which is why you'll see Tucker promoting feudalism, or you'll see Tucker, you know, promoting the idea that the economics of the United States have to be brought back to agrarianism. You'll see him promoting kind of all this revanchist bullshit that is being promoted by our enemies because our enemies are smart enough to recognize that if we actually did that, we'd be screwed as a country. But Tucker is either too stupid or complicit to realize that. And so he's perfectly happy to mimic the nonsense of people who legitimately want to destroy the country. I mean, Alexander Dugan would be ecstatic if united. If the United States fell, so would the Iranians, so would the Chinese. And Tucker has spent legitimately the last two years propping up pretty much every propagandist he can find on behalf of those three countries especially, which is pretty insane.
- [25:12]
Domenech
Hold on.
- [25:13]
Andrew Klavan
Whenever these people talk
- [25:16]
Michael Knowles
about the beginning
- [25:17]
Andrew Klavan
of Monty Python, talking about being in anarcho syndicalist commune, it's like. It's just like, this is absurd. It's absolutely absurd. It denies everything that we know about America's history, and it creates a complete facade about the way that Russian history has played out. Look, I love the Russian people. I think that they are a wonderful literary people. I love Russian literature, and I love, you know, the things that they've created that comes out of tragedy, tragedy that has been repeatedly created by their. The people who govern them. I just don't see that. There's just not something there that you can, you know, find any way. Any path forward that is beneficial to people. But the other aspect of this, and this. Just one more note on the Lindsay point. As much as you can say you can disagree with Lindsay's optimism or his hubris, I would say when it comes to the things that he thought could happen in the Middle east, what I think that Lindsey got right and what all these people get wrong is that Lindsay understood who our true enemies were around the world and that we should take them seriously, that we should listen to them when they say things about us, that we should believe them when they threaten us. So when Iran says we want to kill President Trump, it means they want to kill President Trump. They're not exaggerating that they actually want to do that. And they've tried multiple times. This is not. You know, and that's. I mean, by the way, that came as a shock to Tucker, as I recall when it. When it came up on a podcast with Mike Huckabee. But it's like, this is. This is the kind of thing that Lindsey understood. And I think, you know, for, again, we cannot play innocence abroad in a world that is not innocent. We have to understand, take these threats as they are, appreciate how much we have to respond to them in order to defend our people, to defend American values. And that doesn't mean we need to be the policeman of the globe. It does mean that we need to use American military might to great effect, which I think the President has done very effectively in his second term. And that's something that, you know, is, is at odds with all these different people who I think are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes about the threats that actually exist from.
- [27:21]
Domenech
But the thing.
- [27:22]
Ben Shapiro
I have a question for you. Yeah, so actually there's a question that I'm interrupting you with. I think a thing you're about to say. So you're about to start talking about how the Reformation sucked in all of this, which, which we know, we know you believe that you had a tweet a little bit earlier this week in which that I thought was kind of fascinating. You say, you know, conservatives are always talking about where history went wrong. And some people will say the Reformation and some people. And it was a half joking tweet, obviously, but only half joking. And you say that nominalism is the place where sort of history went wrong. And I kind of want to get a little bit deeper on this for a second because I actually do think that this is a great way of distinguishing between various strands of thought. I think that if you ask Tucker Carlson where he thinks that history went wrong, I think that Tucker Carlson would say that history went wrong in about 1939, that we sided with some of the wrong people and that when that. America before the, before World War II. I think I was actually saying women
- [28:10]
Andrew Klavan
had the right to vote.
- [28:12]
Ben Shapiro
No, I mean, but Tucker has overtly had on people who actually make this argument. I mean, he says that America lost its soul, for example, when we dropped the A bomb on Japan. He says that, you know, the World War II didn't have to go like it didn't. It robbed the west of its, of its forward momentum and its soul. So he clearly thinks something went wrong in that period of time. And there are other people, obviously. Michael, you can give your own theory. I think that one of the aspects of American conservatism that makes it different maybe from other strands of conservatism is that we don't think everything went wrong. Okay, Like, I don't think everything went wrong. I think some things have gone wrong and many things have gone right. And I think that the idea that America is a place where everything went wrong leads you down this black pilled path of maybe Dugin is right. Maybe actually America should cede power in the world. Maybe we are dominated by secularist forces that make us evil and terrible or Maybe a lot of things in America have gone right, making them the most prosperous and powerful country in the history of the world. And yes, we've strayed from many of our founding principles, but we've also maintained a lot of those founding principles. And that makes us still the best bet on the block. And so I think that the sort of tendency, and again, I'm by nature a pessimist, but the sort of conservative tendency toward pessimism can lead you down some really black pilled and bad paths when it comes to the United States, which is a pretty white pill place. I mean, America is a place where opportunity and prosperity and power are all combined, historically speaking. And the kind of idea that quote, unquote, everything went wrong. So take all the things that are good and junk them, because everything is bad now. It's just bullshit. And I think it's a demoralization op.
- [29:40]
Domenech
Yeah, no, I mean, that's actually kind of part of the joke I was making. Cause it was in response to this guy who I think is Eastern Orthodox. Jay Dyer was on Tucker's show and he did the thing that all of us, conservatives, myself included, I think all of us here, it's just part of the conservative DNA we love to do. Our favorite hobby is to try to point to the moment when everything went wrong. And it's this fun game. You say it was the 60s. No, it was the French Revolution. No, it was women getting the right to vote. No, it was the Prohibition. No, it was this, that or the other. And so the gold standard. It was the gold standard. Yeah, I know. I had all these people in the comments know it was the. You missed the gold standard, Michael. They were totally missing the joke. And so I guess Jay Dyer's point, he was making an argument from a Lutheran history of ideas and nominalism through the Protestant Reformation up to the present. And he was kind of connecting the dots between philosophical nominalism, which holds that there are no real, like, essences. And it's usually described oversimplified to say that there are no universals, but they're just particulars that happen to share traits, contrasted with philosophical realism, which says, no, there are real universals. The most hardcore form of realism would be Plato, who thinks that the forms exist in this separate realm as themselves. And St. Thomas Aquinas, who finally has come up on this show. I can't believe we made it this long without mentioning Aquinas. Aquinas has this kind of moderate realism which says, no, we can know real things, but they're in the world. Anyway, I was joking and I said, you know, of all of the culprits going from Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden all the way up through, like, I don't know, the election of Obama, nominalism is a good contender. That's one of the strongest contenders, which I think is true. But it's also to make a little bit of a mockery of the game because when you're trying to out baste each other, you eventually will end up back with Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden. And so we should take seriously these intellectual genealogies because we all think ideas have consequences. We all realize that sometimes it takes years or, or decades or centuries for ideas to bear really ugly fruit. But nevertheless, yeah, look, it's a fallen world, guys. I mean, to use a depiction of our pal John Milton, like when Satan rebels against God, sin births out of his head like Athena from the head of Zeus, and then death comes from sin. And like, it's this kind of like matricidal rape. I mean, it's really pretty ugly stuff. That was the world before Adam and Eve ate the apples.
- [32:02]
Michael Knowles
But when you talk about ideas that, when you talk about ideas mattering, obviously you're right. But you can get into the idealism too. Ben is absolutely right about this. As the one of us who was here during the Middle Ages, things are better now. They are much better now. And even while I look at, when I look at like every woman in Congress who's a lunatic, like every single woman in Congress is a lunatic, politics is not so much worse than it was. In fact, I would just say it's. I would say it's even better than it was. Now that women are saying the crazy things women say in our Congress, things have not gotten worse, you don't think
- [32:35]
Domenech
they've gotten substantial worse in many ways since like the 1950s, say.
- [32:38]
Andrew Klavan
Can I just say.
- [32:40]
Ben Shapiro
No.
- [32:41]
Michael Knowles
The 1950s was a unique period of post war unity. Not only our enemies, but our competitors were in ruins. And those things happen. We have those moments, but not everything is going to be the 1950s. It's just not always going to be like that. And it was, you know, there were plenty of things wrong, as always. And what it was was a certain moment of health and happiness that kind of brought everybody together. And that's great. It's wonderful. I hope it comes again. But those are the rare moments in history and certainly the rare moments in American history, which has been a crazy place since the year Dot. I mean, this is a place where the Future happens, which makes it a place of fervent and, you know, and chaos and experimentation. The Europeans, by the way, you know, it's not just that soccer stuff where they love, you know, Chick Fil A. The Europeans are fascinated with us and love us because this is the place where stuff happens. And I don't know, I find it exciting. I know this is a chaotic and dangerous period, but I think we're going through the rapids into some beautiful, beautiful possible futures where we wind up on Mars. And when AI starts to cure diseases. I don't think this is a bad time at all. It's just a time of transition and chaos.
- [33:50]
Andrew Klavan
I struggle a lot with the natural pessimism that I think a lot of conservatives have, and I understand it. And I think I've lived through a period when things have changed dramatically for the worse in terms of our politics in a lot of different ways. But then I also think about this line from David Bentley Hart, who is a little bit of a crazy guy, but is a great religious writer about, you know, we worship a God who has set us free from optimism and taught us hope instead. And that's something that I think is really important to have. I have hope for the human race. I have hope for the American people. I have hope that we can solve our problems not with some, you know, vast shift towards socialism, but through science and through the progress of the. Of. Of the intellect and of creative minds. And I feel like I live in one of the best times in history to ever live. And I don't want to go back to a point where I have to work for a year to save up for a refrigerator. So that's.
- [34:54]
Ben Shapiro
This is right. I mean, you know, when we talk about ideas have consequences, when we talk about ideas have consequences, so does black pilling. Black pilling is an idea, and that's an idea with consequences. It's an idea where. Where you end up taking the best things about America and you just toss them right out the window. I played on my show, actually led my show kind of in unique fashion. I never do this, but there was a clip that came across my feed from our friend Matt Fradd. I don't know if you guys saw this clip.
- [35:17]
Domenech
Amazing clip.
- [35:18]
Ben Shapiro
Unbelievable clip, right? This clip of Dr. Peter Cleft, where. Where Cleft is talking about his late wife, and he's talking about how he looked at her, at her corpse. I mean, she died and she. She had been in. In hospice, and she was desiccated and she was weathered and she was old, and he looked at her. And he thought. And he fell in love with her again and saw that she was beautiful because of her soul. Right? And he's talking about the soul. And you can see Matt get very emotional. Matt, by the way, beautiful job with that interview.
- [35:43]
Domenech
Yeah.
- [35:43]
Ben Shapiro
I'm stupid enough that I would have jumped in probably and tried to talk. Matt just kind of lets it sit the way that he should. We should play the clips that people can understand. We're talking about. If you missed it, I called it. The single best clip maybe in the history of the intern is here. Here is this clip.
- [35:58]
Domenech
What advice do you have someone watching this who's newly married or who is about to be. Do you think that when you are
- [36:11]
Michael Knowles
very old and your wife is very
- [36:13]
Domenech
old and ugly and wrinkled and fat
- [36:18]
Michael Knowles
and not very bright or even nasty that you will still find her beautiful?
- [36:25]
Domenech
If so, get.
- [36:26]
Michael Knowles
If so, marry her. The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home, about an
- [36:40]
Domenech
hour after she died, I fell in
- [36:43]
Michael Knowles
love with her again. Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body.
- [36:54]
Domenech
It's as beautiful as a crucifix. Because that body ain't going to last, but the soul is.
- [37:19]
Michael Knowles
So if you don't love her soul, but just love her body,
- [37:24]
Domenech
don't get married.
- [37:27]
Ben Shapiro
Now, the reason that I played this clip here and I played it on the show is because I think that when you talk about ideas of consequences, one of the ideas that he's talking about right there is this idea that the soul is key to who you are as a human being. And that obviously has its roots going all the way back to Genesis. Right. The first time that you mentioned spirit in the. In the scripture is at the. The second verse of Genesis where it talks about the spirit of God is hovering above the waters. And then that's projected forward into chapter two of Genesis where God forms a man from the earth, right? That's why Adam and Adama. So in Hebrew, Adam is man, Adama is earth. So God forms a man from the earth and then blows ruach, right, that same word into the. Into the body of the man. And this is what animates the human being, right? Is. Is the spirit that is blown into him, and that is then again projected into the idea that man is made in the image of God, right? This is all part of the same couple of chapters of the book of Genesis. The reason I brought this up is because this is not just a spiritual idea. This is actually baked into the foundations of the United States, like the United States, in a way that no other country really does recognizes this as a fundamental principle. I mean, this is legitimately baked into the Declaration of Independence. Right. When the Declaration of Independence says that we hold certain truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, right made by their creator, given by their creator certain inalienable rights. Right. Like that language, that we have rights as human beings. I know that a lot of traditional Catholic theologians have problems with these very ideas of rights and all this, but putting that aside, I think that the traditional.
- [38:50]
Domenech
Not a huge problem necessarily, but yeah, there's a.
- [38:53]
Ben Shapiro
Not necessarily some. Not. All right. I mean, obviously if you read Harvey Mansfield or if you read Robert George most prominently, he talks about rights a lot and John Finnis and there are
- [39:02]
Domenech
a lot of Catholics, for instance.
- [39:04]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, yeah, sure. But, but the bottom line is that the, the sort of American idea which is that at the core of our system are individuals that are created with equal, equal rights and those, those equal rights spring from the fact that you have a godly soul that was imbued in you. Right? Like that is the spirit of America. And when you throw away all that, because there's a huge foundation there that is then built upon by our system, our entire system of government is built on the idea that the individual's rights are unalienable and that we consent to form a government because we have these unalienable rights, because we are spiritual creatures, because we have souls and are individually valuable, not as instruments, but we have inherent actual value. And so when you take all the outgrowths of that, which by the way include things like private property, they include things like freedom of speech, they include things like freedom of religion. When you take all of that and you toss that aside because you're so black pilled about America and you decide what we really need is sort of collectivist tyranny like they have in Russia or like they have in China or a theocratic tyranny like they have in Iran, like that's the thing that's going to give people a feeling of fulfillment and soul. That's a huge category or it's a huge mistake because again, I'm not talking about radical Randian isolationism and individualism. Because we all exist at various levels of our being, right? We're individuals, but we're also members of families and members of communities, of course. But at the core of all of us, the thing that makes us valuable is the soul that Kreft is talking about. And that's an individual thing. That is not a collective thing, that is an individual thing. That makes you individually special and worthy of recognition and systems built around that are. Systems that are worthy of keeping.
- [40:31]
Domenech
No, yeah, sure, but one. I think there's a little bit of a strawman to the people who think there need to be more of an over religious sense in government or a greater focus on community. But I think you're missing one of the great points that Dr. Kreeft is making, which is that he says, you know, will you still love your wife when she's ugly and wrinkled and fat and old? But he says he falls in love with his wife again an hour after she's died, this emaciated, desiccated corpse, because she's as beautiful as the crucifix, which is not merely an immaterial soul that's eminently physical. You're actually not divorcing the soul from the physical here. It's not that you love your wife in spite of the sort of weatheredness and age. You love it in part because of that, you know, because of the vision of love, the perfect vision of love, which is the crucified Christ. So there is this physical aspect. And where that plays into the political theory here is I don't think that people who say we need to bring the Bible back to schools or prayer back to schools, or, you know, a little more religion and public life. I don't think they're calling for a theocracy like Iran, one that's a different religion. I don't think they're calling for a totalitarian state like you have in Russia, or an authoritarian state, at least. I think what they're calling for is the kind of government that we had largely in the United States from the beginning, up until the middle to late 20th century, where you taught the Bible in school, where we had blue laws, where we had established churches for decades after the ratification of the Constitution, where we had cohesive communities, where we had, as John Jay writes in Federalist Number two, we had a people descended from a common stock with a common language, with a common religion, thank God. The common experience of the independence, the War of Independence, he's writing. You know, it's not to say that you're going to become an ethnostate. It's not to say that you're going to have some mandatory sort of religious requirement or anything like that. Not at all. But there must be in these United States some kind of unity, some sense
- [42:23]
Michael Knowles
of community that's not a whole community. You're agreeing with Ben here. I think that obviously the fact that we allowed this conversation about souls and the Bible. To be pushed out of the open square was a huge, huge mistake. But I have to say, I gotta say two things. One, first of all, to hear Ben speak so optimistically, I feel my work here is done.
- [42:44]
Domenech
It's crazy.
- [42:44]
Michael Knowles
I feel like I should just go off.
- [42:46]
Ben Shapiro
I had a baby. I had a baby. I don't know what you guys want. I had a baby that was just.
- [42:51]
Michael Knowles
That will cheer you up.
- [42:52]
Ben Shapiro
That will, by the way, not just that I had a baby. I think I was uniquely vulnerable to that clip in that moment because we've all watched our wives have babies. And I'm not sure that your wife is ever more beautiful than in literally the moment after the baby comes out and they put the baby on her chest. And she's not the most physically beautiful person at that point. She's the most beautiful human being you've ever seen at that point in time. I got to see that this week, so I'm in a very good mood
- [43:11]
Michael Knowles
about that, which is to Knowles, his point as well. But I have to tell you something else. I'm doing the show with Spencer about the culture. We've had these six episodes. It's a great show. If you haven't watched it, I'm amazed at how good it is. But we did a show on the summer movies. I feel that our culture, our artistic culture flatlined over the last five years. And I was just appalled. I'd never seen anything like it in my life except for the books I was writing. Like literally nothing good was coming out and I was tossing things over my shoulder and going to the movies. Couldn't stand it. This summer everything changed. Steven Spielberg brought out a film that was like being in an old age home. I felt like this is killing me. It's like so old fashioned, it's so out of date. And you know, Spielberg is a genius director, but this was just. His time has passed. But then these two films by two young white men who had been putting out stuff on the Internet came out, one called Back Room and the other called Obsession, that were actually new visions. You know, they were, they were just old horror movies. Well done and all this stuff. But this film backrooms, if you haven't seen it, I'm not going to tell you it's a great movie. It's not a great movie, but it is a new movie. It's. It's a new vision by young people. And it's a story of people being trapped through the Internet in their own brains in a place where the world is being reproduced without the soul, essentially a completely materialist universe. And I thought this is so precise because what I look for is vision. I look for an artist working and this is an artist working. And it's so precise that we're just an inch away from them figuring out that this is where things went wrong. In other words, once people start to see it, that's what the arts do. Once people start to show it to you. So after five years of just death, where it would have been easy to sit here and say the arts are over, they're never going to come back, these plants are growing up through the ice and it's a beautiful thing to see. And that's what I think the other Ben I think you should be looking at is not that this is a more chaotic time and probably a more diseased time than the 50s, it is, but that we're passing through something. And I think we're coming to the end of that passage when a lot of these extreme and self destructive movements will, God willing, pass away.
- [45:21]
Andrew Klavan
I think you're touching on something which I truly agree with. And by the way, both of those movies are great and people should watch them. The thing that is, I think, happening is that we see these trends in American society burn out. We saw the overreaction that happened in the wake of George Floyd. We saw the overreaction that happened around the entire MeToo scandals and everything else like that. We saw the overreaction that has happened repeatedly backed by the left when it comes to America's racial reckoning and the like. And they burn themselves out because fundamentally they're at odds with what most Americans think about each other and their neighbors. And that to me is the thing that gives me hope because I think that we understand that most of our neighbors aren't racist. Most of our neighbors who are flying a flag, you know, on the 250th, they are not doing so out of some racial animus. Most of the people, I mean, the idea that, you know, you have ABC News program the View where Sunny Hostin says, if I see an American flag, I think that it's racist, you know, and it's like, that is not real life. That is not the way that Americans think about each other. And, and no matter their degree of patriotism, no matter the way that they vote, I just think that this nation is actually a lot healthier than it seems like it is online and in the pages of our media. And I think that the people who have a relationship with each other, who can cross Those kinds of lines, they're. The real people in America don't believe for a second that there are a lot of people who are like Taylor Lorenz. They do exist. But there are not a lot of people who are signing up for that religious experience.
- [47:07]
Domenech
That's too positive. We're getting rid of Domenech. Sorry. Out of here.
- [47:11]
Michael Knowles
Get out.
- [47:11]
Domenech
No way. I can't handle it. You know what I wanna talk about? Not all that happy stuff. Actually, one happy thing I wanna talk about, and that is peer talk. Every once in a while, a deal comes along. It's so good, your first instinct is to assume you misunderstood it. I had the same reaction when I saw what PeerTalk is doing. For the first time ever, they're offering any plan. Yes, any plan. For just $15 a month for your first three months. Not just the entry level plan, not just one special plan. They hope you'll overlook any plan, including their unlimited high speed data plans, including their top tier plan. $15 a month. So my recommendation is get the best one because it's 15 bucks a month. I'm not an economist, I'm not an accountant, but that's the best deal. It's already a great deal at its usual rates. The deals are it's a very inexpensive plan. It is the best service you're gonna get on the best towers. You heard me say very good towers. I didn't say that. I said the best towers. You have US based customer service. So they will speak English. That will be a novel change. The people who run the company support all good stuff. It's a veteran led company. They support all sorts of good stuff. They believe what you believe. Right now you could save up to 150 bucks over those first three months. So go do it. Cure tosh right now. 15 bucks a month. Puretalk.com knowles k n a W L E S To make the switch. What is that? Purtalk? P U R E T a l k.c o m/k n o W L E S. Start saving. Have you guys subscribed yet? Have you? You better have. I've had my PureTalk phone for like six years. Okay, before we go, we're supposed to play some. Are we doing a new game? Are we doing some new segment? Is that real? I heard we're doing this. It's a new. It's a segment where we're kind of like Shark Tank mostly. They just looked at Drew and they said, you're bald. That kind of reminds me of Shark Tank. Okay, so the new bit, this New hip, cool bit is we are gonna take pitches from all of you. All of you brilliant, wonderful people out there. Your pitch, not on some new business where we're gonna actually invest our money. You're not getting a single penny from me. But your pitch on a policy, some political idea that would help the country and improve the world. And so to start us off, we have Alan Morrow. Take it away.
- [49:34]
Alan Morrow
What's up, guys? It's great to be here. We need Daylight Savings time all the time. Congress is finally doing something.
- [49:41]
Domenech
I'm getting rid of him already. He already lost me. He already lost me.
- [49:46]
Alan Morrow
Michael, bear with me. Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection act, which would make Daylight Savings time permanent and end the dreaded twice yearly time changes that are forced upon us. Some of the consequences that we deal with and think are normal. In the immediate aftermath of this, fatal car crashes increase. There's an increase in heart attacks, 8% increase in strokes. And Michael, people's cortisol surges.
- [50:10]
Domenech
You're surging my cortisol right now with this stupid proposal. But sorry, finish before I show the
- [50:16]
Alan Morrow
benefits of more evening sunlight. It reduces seasonal affective disorder. It increases economic spending in the afternoons and activity. And it gives ice more sunlight to catch illegals. Okay.
- [50:27]
Domenech
Hey, I have a question for you. Okay, so in parts of North Dakota and Minnesota, if Daylight Savings time is permanent, what time would the. Would the sun rise?
- [50:36]
Andrew Klavan
I am not entirely sure.
- [50:38]
Domenech
Yeah. Didn't do any research, did you? 9:45 in the morning. Does that sound like a good time for the sun to rise? Doesn't sound so. For me.
- [50:45]
Alan Morrow
Think of it like this. Right now, when the sun rises really early, a lot of people are missing out on all of the sunlight that the day has to offer.
- [50:54]
Domenech
Really early. This is such a zoomer thing. 9:45 is really early for a zoomer. Roll into work about 1pm I hate this pitch. Do you guys have any other thoughts?
- [51:02]
Michael Knowles
No. I like this idea. Can't we just get rid of Minnesota? I think we just can't.
- [51:06]
Domenech
It's a good caveat.
- [51:07]
Michael Knowles
Just kind of saw off the top of the state. Yeah. No, I like this idea. I hate the fact that I have to wake up at different time and figure this stuff. Why must it be like that? I mean, I'll tell you what, I don't care when we do. I actually don't care when we do it, as long as we actually don't have to change.
- [51:22]
Domenech
The thing is, this is Chesterton's fence, guys. Like, this actually drives me crazy. I was reading the stupid House bill. I think the White House is even backing it. This is the one time out of a thousand where I really disagree with, like, everyone in the gop, but this is Chesterton's fence. We have daylight savings time and standard time for a reason. It is seasonal. It's so that you don't have the sun come up at 9:45 in Minnesota or whatever. In some places it works. In Arizona, the earliest. They're now on permanent mountain time in most of Arizona, and the earliest the sun comes up is 5:30. The latest is 7:30. It kind of works there, but in a lot of parts of the country it doesn't work. So daylight savings and the time change, it kind of helps. But then my cultural point on this is it's kind of a fun, weird, delightful thing that we do. We set the clocks back, we set them forward. To me, making it permanent one way or the other is just like the metric system. It's revolutionary. France, it's cold, cold, it's sterile. I hate it. And I want the Senate to kill the bill just like Tom Cotton did last time.
- [52:22]
Ben Shapiro
So apparently, by the way, so Kalshee suggests, and Kalsh, of course, one of our sponsor, that very, very high percentage, huge jump in the percentage that daylight savings is going to become permanent. And Knowles will be permanently forced to get up well before the sun rises where. Where he lives. I will say, as someone with kids. Kids, it does get very weird, right? Like, if I have to get my kids up two hours before the sun rises in order to get them to school, and they're in the middle of like third period, by the time the sun rises, it's definitely weird. Now, I assume that what will happen is that everyone will just adjust to it the other way that what will happen is that businesses will start opening later and staying open later. And so what you're actually doing is you're. Instead of having, you know, the clock adapt to the businesses, you're just going to have the businesses adapt to the clock. And same thing with schools. You'll have schools that open later and close later. And it's just gonna weird out everybody's brain for a few years. It doesn't make any actual difference, guys. The sun comes up when the sun comes up and it goes down when the sun goes down. So, yeah, I lived in England for
- [53:21]
Michael Knowles
a long time, and at Christmas time, you could literally stand in Hastings and watch the sun rise and fall in about 15 minutes or just the entire day went by like a fast motion and look, they had Shakespeare and built an empire, so it didn't keep them back. I think we can live with it here. Here in. In Minnesota. I mean, come on. How many people are even in Minnesota?
- [53:39]
Domenech
It sounds like you guys are both somewhat in favor, but I'm moderating. So, Alan, you lose. We're bringing on Brent now. Brent, what is your pitch?
- [53:50]
Alan Morrow
Man, if you thought. Here I am. If you thought.
- [53:55]
Domenech
Alan.
- [53:55]
Alan Morrow
I agree with everything Ellen said. I actually don't think Alan goes far enough at all. My pitch is to get rid of time zones altogether. Sounds really radical at the begin, but when you think of it, it obviously makes sense. First of all, we all decided that England was going to be the center of the time universe in 1884, and it was because England was already where, you know, nautical roots were based on, and everybody was going off that today. That is useless. And all time zones are. Is a confusion. I mean, I don't. I know with the three of you, you and me, I don't go through a single day where I'm not talking to somebody in a different time zone. And it's like we're going to talk at 9. Is that 9 CST or EST? Oh, you're in California today. The confusion here. And before you weigh in on whether you think I'm right or not, I'm not saying that everybody goes off New York time, which should be the center eastern time zone is correct. We start at 9am if you live in California, you start your day at probably about noon time.
- [55:11]
Domenech
Time you're out. Sorry. You should have tightened it up a little bit. I love the humble bragging there, too. Not a day goes by that I'm not speaking to my friends in Paris, France.
- [55:22]
Lyndon
Yeah.
- [55:22]
Domenech
Okay, gentlemen, any thoughts on abolishing all?
- [55:25]
Michael Knowles
Yeah, that's the silliest idea. Idea I've ever heard. I mean, what. What. What difference does it make? What difference does it make if people are waking up at 9am in the dark? You know, if they're. What?
- [55:35]
Ben Shapiro
What?
- [55:36]
Michael Knowles
You know, 9:00am is still the middle of the night.
- [55:38]
Domenech
Because Brent doesn't want to do a conversion. That's it. He just doesn't want to look at
- [55:41]
Michael Knowles
his gal a couple of hours. Yeah, get. Get him out of that couch. I don't like the couch.
- [55:48]
Alan Morrow
It should be the same time everywhere.
- [55:52]
Ben Shapiro
So I'm. I'm actually kind of warm to this idea mainly because. Because it is very confusing when you fly to figure out where the hell you are, and it doesn't. It definitely screws with your brain and if you've got, you know, a nice watch the way that I do, and it doesn't automatically reset, you have to reset it every time you get on a plane, which is a mild inconvenience. And I admit that I'm perfectly willing to. Mildly inconvenience or massively inconvenience, as it turns out. 340 million Americans to prevent the mild inconvenience of having to reset my watch every time I get on a plane. My proposal is actually to abolish time completely. We'll just get rid of time. I feel like this is. This is actually. It solves the daylight savings issue. It solves. Right? And then. And then Drew is just stuck in time forever.
- [56:30]
Michael Knowles
He just lives forever.
- [56:31]
Ben Shapiro
We never have to deal with that. I mean, as long as we're doing things, let's just go all the way.
- [56:35]
Domenech
Ben goes fully to immunitizing the eschaton. That's we've made in about 11 minutes on this show. We've now made it to the end. We've exhausted this segment. There is now nothing further that anyone can pitch.
- [56:48]
Alan Morrow
I think I need five minutes with Donald Trump, and this will be a reality. It just makes too much sense. And he just does things. He's not working.
- [56:56]
Michael Knowles
Unfortunately, that's probably true.
- [56:57]
Alan Morrow
There's going to be two months.
- [57:00]
Domenech
Bye, bye, bye, bye, Brent. Now we've got Lyndon on. Lyndon, what's your pitch?
- [57:06]
Lyndon
I think there should be no social media until you're 18 years old, and no one can disagree with that because this is the downfall of our society.
- [57:16]
Domenech
Yeah, okay.
- [57:17]
Ben Shapiro
See, that's a great pitch, and I agree with that. Do we have unanimity on this? Yeah, I feel like absolutely. There's, like, it. Easy pitch. Done. That was great. See, Lyndon got that in, like, 15 seconds or less. That's the kind of picture.
- [57:30]
Michael Knowles
45 seconds, she could sing a song.
- [57:32]
Lyndon
You know, let me keep going. Kids don't have the opportunity to make mistakes. Kids need to be caught by their parents doing something that they shouldn't be doing. They don't need to be on TikTok and their parents, like, see them on the local news to find out that their kids smoke their first cigarette. It's awful. Let kids be kids. Let them go ride bicycles. My dad's in a great group. Pictured our family group text the other day of just four kids without shirts on riding bikes. And he goes, you know, this is a rare sight these days, but I'm glad these kids are riding bikes. And I'm like, yeah, because all these Kids are chronically online in their basement, and they never leave their basement. So I try to say living in their mom's basement, they never get married, they never have kids or have this world of just weirdos.
- [58:13]
Michael Knowles
It.
- [58:14]
Lyndon
It needs to end. Social media is great for our business. It's great as an adult. You can monetize it, you can stay in touch with your high school classmates if you want to. You may not want to, but there is no need for teenagers, and especially children to be on social media.
- [58:27]
Domenech
Okay. You know, I kind of like this. Cause it harkens back to the nominalism, to trannies, genealogy. You went from Facebook to the extinction of the human race. Cause no one's having kids. And I frankly, I kind of buy both of them. So I'm in. Where do I invest?
- [58:41]
Michael Knowles
Yeah, it really is being locked in high school. School. It's like being locked in high school. It's like that thing, back room, where he's stuck in this maze behind the scenes. It's like being online for kids. It's like being stuck in high school, which, if anybody has a actual true memory of it, is as close to hell as we know on Earth. So, I mean, this is absolutely a good idea.
- [59:01]
Ben Shapiro
Then the biggest risk is not that we lose a bunch of shirtless kids riding their bikes around the neighborhood. The biggest risk is that now you see a bunch of shirtless adults on your kids, social media, riding bikes around the neighborhood. And this is the biggest, biggest problem that we've got right now.
- [59:15]
Domenech
Yeah, easy. Those guys had such dumb pitches. And then Lyndon had a good. Like an obvious.
- [59:22]
Michael Knowles
Lyndon had a good pitch. I know. Yeah.
- [59:23]
Domenech
This is. Wow, good. Scoring one for the women quickly.
- [59:27]
Michael Knowles
It takes to put a good idea forward, right? You can stop talking after 10 seconds.
- [59:31]
Domenech
Yeah, I know. I. I feared that when she said, no, let me keep talking, I thought, oh, she's gonna ruin the sale. This is not. It's like when you get the yes. You gotta take yes for an answer.
- [59:40]
Ben Shapiro
But she made many others good points.
- [59:42]
Alan Morrow
Okay.
- [59:42]
Ben Shapiro
By the way, I do. I mean, it is. It is weird to me. Like, why hasn't that been put forward by anybody in Congress? Seriously, Like a federal ban on social media for people under the age of
- [59:51]
Michael Knowles
16 in England, aren't they?
- [59:54]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah. It exists on a state by state basis in the United States also. There's been some states that are pushing it as well. But if. If you're talking about something that affects interstate commerce in, like, the classical sense, the Internet would seem to be it. So I, I don't know, man. I feel like that that would be a pretty good bipartisan.
- [60:08]
Domenech
Yeah, well, the problem is that Congress is extremely old and half of them are perverts. So you have double incentives. Like they don't know what TikTok is and the ones who do are like, on it and dming the kids. Yeah, you don't. The incentives are not aligned in any case. All of our minds were aligned on that. We will whatever it is that we're supposed to do for Lyndon. Cause she won. We probably will forget to do it. But we won't forget to. See you next time on Friendly Fire.