← The Michael Knowles Show
The Michael Knowles Show
Ep. 1802 - I'm Officially The First Podcaster To Attend A Cabinet Meeting
00:49:08
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- [00:00]
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- [00:23]
Michael Knowles
These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer. During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems or opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice. How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility? How do you repair this kind of damage? My daughter Michaela guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives. Everyone has their own destiny. Everyone. I am at the White House and it has been an historic day. It's been historic on two levels. One, I have learned, and I'm deeply honored to learn, that I am the first podcaster ever invited to attend a Cabinet meeting. So we'll get into that because of the second historic fact of the day, namely that it was the longest cabinet meeting in the history of the presidency. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. I have so much to tell you. I'm here at the White House now. I can sort of say I'm in the Oval Office right now. I'm not in the real Oval Office, but I'm in the fake Oval Office that they built for Joe Biden. They've taken down some of the. It's a different background now, but this is it. This was the fake Joe Biden Oval Office. So I'm at least as much the President of the United States as Joe Biden was, which I suppose is sort of damning. With faint praise, we will get to everything the President talked to. He talked about everything from war to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. That's probably the biggest news, frankly. First, though, I want to tell you about Armra. Go to armra.comknowles we are living in a world that our bodies were not exactly built for. EMFs, artificial light, endocrine disruptors, Chronic stress. Fake Oval offices built by Joe Biden. These modern threats are disrupting our cellular signaling, damaging our gut health and accelerating aging from the inside out. What if there were a way to revive your body's natural defenses? What if armor colostrum is nature's first whole food packed with over 400 bioactive nutrients that work at the cellular level to reactivate your body's innate capacity to regenerate and thrive. Unlike probiotics that only address one part of your gut wall, armor, Colostrum fortifies your entire gut wall system. It strengthens immune barriers throughout your mouth, sinuses, lungs, gut and reproductive tract, while optimizing your microbiome and combating bloating. What more could you ask for? Plus, it ignites your metabolism by guarding against toxins that drive inflammation and slow you down. Are you ready to to claim your health back? Well, we've worked at a special offer for my audience. Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to Armra.comKnowles that is Armra.comKnowles K N A W L E S or enter Knowles to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's a r m r a dot com k n o w l e s doit n o w Where to begin, where to begin? All anyone wants to talk about is Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, and the president weighed in on that as well. But we should get to slightly weightier matters first, because as I was flying out to D.C. the president was making a lot of waves in part over his decision now to accept 600,000 students from China. So do you remember back in May, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who I was going to interview, but then this Cabinet meeting went on for about four hours and he had other things that he had to do. Back in May, the secretary of state came out and he said that the United States was going to start revoking visas for Chinese students. We just take too many Chinese students in. We're going to get rid of it. This is going to be part of a broader immigration restriction policy and also not a decoupling from China, but getting a little bit more intentional about our relationship with China. Anyway, fast forward to two days ago and the president comes out and sends Howard Lutnick out, his commerce Secretary, onto cable news to say that the US is going to take 600,000 Chinese students. When asked about the flip at the Cabinet meeting, here's what the president had to say yesterday. You said you want to allow 600,000 Chinese students to study in the United States. Could you and the secretary clarify what.
- [04:57]
Donald Trump
Is the policy on Chinese students in the United States? Well, we think we're, you know, look, we're getting along very well with China, and I'm getting along very well with President Xi. I think it's very insulting to say students can't come here because they'll go out and they'll start building schools and they'll be able to survive it. But I like that their students come here. I like that other country's students come here. And you know what would happen if they didn't? Our college system would go to hell very quickly. You'd have. And it wouldn't be the top colleges, it would be colleges that struggle on the bottom. And you take out 300,000 or 600,000 students out of the system. I like having, and I told this to President Xi, that we're honored to have their students here. Now, with that, we check and we're careful and we see who's there. And Marco wants there we spoke. We're in the same position, but we have a tremendous college system, the best in the world. Nobody even close. That's why China sends him here.
- [05:57]
Michael Knowles
From the beginning, I have assumed that most everything Trump says is part of a negotiation. Obviously, what the Chinese students issue is about is about a trade deal with China. It's the whole thing. That's what a lot of the tariffs are about. That's what a lot of America now starting to kick start some manufacturing again is about. That's what the student issue is about. That's what the Confucius Institutes are about. It's all kind of a negotiation. This is why when President Trump says things, you know, he'll say, I'm going to end the war on day one or something. I don't take that literally. He obviously doesn't mean that literally. He's speaking like a New Yorker and he's speaking like a wheeler and dealer, and everything's a negotiation. And this really is difficult for ideologues to understand, because for ideologues and for people who view politics in a strictly academic, abstract way, they just think it's all about five bullet points on the back of a napkin. When everything is this act of negotiation. This is why. And actually, this is another topic Trump touched on. When it comes to the war in Ukraine, the libs and the squishes in the Republican Party are constantly going off about how Trump is too nice to Putin. Trump is too. And Trump actually, at the Cabinet meeting, he said, look, I have a very good relationship with President Putin. In fact, here he is describing just.
- [07:23]
Donald Trump
That I had a very good relationship with President Putin. Very, very good. That's a positive thing again. And I think I'm probably the only. Steve Witkoff would tell you I'm the only one that can solve it. I don't know. He's told me that a few times. Unless he was saying that just to build up my ego. But it's not really. I have no ego when it comes to this stuff. I just want to see it. Thousands of young people, mostly young people, are dying every single week. If I can save that by doing sanctions or by just being me, or by using a very strong tariff system that's very costly to Russia or Ukraine or whoever we have, you know, But I stopped seven wars.
- [08:05]
Michael Knowles
George W. Bush tried to have a good relationship with Putin. It didn't work. Then he gets really, really tough. And where did really, really tough, harsh rhetoric get us? Putin invaded Georgia. Then Barack Obama, he was real. Well, he tried to be nice. He tried to do this stupid Russian reset where Hillary Clinton shows up to the foreign minister of Russia and it misspells the word reset in Russian. They couldn't fact check or spell check one word, and that didn't work. So then you have Barack Obama talking real tough. He's a real tough talker. And where did that get us? That got us an invasion of Crimea. And then Trump comes in being accused of being a KJB Russian stooge because of a completely fictitious narrative cooked up between the Democrats and Obama's do. And what does Trump do? He speaks a little softer. He does what Teddy Roosevelt says. He speaks a little more softly and carries a big stick. And he tries to have a good relationship with Putin. And you know what happens? Putin does not further invade a country. Then Biden comes in. Biden's a tough talker. And Putin goes all the way into Ukraine. So on the Ukraine, Russia war, he says, look, I have a pretty good relationship with Putin. And then he threatens him. He says, if Putin doesn't give us a deal, then it's going to be really, really tough. And here is President Trump clarifying what toughness means.
- [09:26]
Donald Trump
I'm talking about economic, because we're not going to get into a world war. I'll tell you what, in my opinion, if I didn't win this race, Ukraine could have ended up in a world war. We're not going to end up in a world war. But it would have ended up possibly in a world war. That would have been. That would have been a. They were ready to trot.
- [09:50]
Michael Knowles
That was in response to a question, which was a tough question and maybe a question that misunderstood the situation. Said you. You told us that we were going to get a ceasefire as a precondition of further meetings, and we didn't get the ceasefire. We haven't had this. So where does it all stand when Trump says, I demand a ceasefire? Well, actually, sorry, Trump himself says this when he explains what everybody's doing right now, in this case specifically Vladimir Putin, when he says, we're not gonna get a deal.
- [10:21]
Donald Trump
Everybody's posturing. It's all bull, okay? Everybody's posturing.
- [10:26]
Michael Knowles
I love this because I'll wrap up the point on war here. All the abstract ideologues, all the neocons, the liberal imperialists, the radical progressives, all these ideologues, they. I don't know, they're like automatons. They're like robots. They think that you live like a white paper coming out of a think tank. Trump realizes that in geopolitics and statecraft and foreign policy, you have an end that you're trying to get to. And if you have an end that you're trying to get to and you're not transgressing the moral order, then everything else is in negotiation. Everything else is up not to ideology, but to prudence. Everything else, you're just trying to get to the end. And so for Trump, the end is peace. He says he wants peace. He talked extensively in what felt quite sincere, quite sincere way about the 7,000 guys who were dying every day. And he says, you know, you go out, you say, mom and dad say goodbye to their son. You know, son goes off to war. One week later, he's zapped by a drone. Totally new form of warfare. We can't let that go on. That's not. That's not good. He didn't quite say blessed are the peacemakers, but that's what he was getting at. This is how Trump approaches all of the issues. It's how he approaches Chinese students and Chinese trade and European trade and the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. He says, we're trying to wrap it up really soon. This is another one a reporter tried to get him on. You said you were going to wrap it up immediately. He said, there's no immediately. There's no totally final conclusion to this conflict. It's been going on for thousands of years. But we're just going to try to get the best solution for now that we possibly can. And then President Trump was asked about what really matters. You know, the question that was actually on everybody's mind, and that, of course, is the engagement between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. We'll get to that in one moment. First, I want to tell you about Shopify. Go to shopify.com knowles. You know, I am sitting right here in at the pinnacle of the public sector. But I have worked my career in the private sector and if you're in the private sector, do you know what you need? Shopify Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US. We even use it for our own daily wire shop to make sure things are running smoothly and efficiently so you get all the goods. Now you might be asking what if I can't design a website? What if I'm worried people haven't heard of my brand? No problem. Shopify's got you covered from the start with beautiful ready to go templates that match your brand style and help you find your customers through easy to run email and social media campaigns. And if you need a hand with everyday tasks, their AI tools created specifically for commerce can help enhance product images, write descriptions and more. Plus their award winning customer support is available 24. Seven to share advice if you ever get stuck, turn your business idea into With Shopify on your side, shine up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com knowles Ken W- that is shopify.com knowles shopify.com knowles Most important news Broke even more pop culture than the question that I was trying to ask. I was a little miffed. I had a good question, but I'm not one of these scrum reporters. I'm a chivalrous guy. If a lady is speaking, I don't want to shout over her. But anyway, my question I was going to ask President Trump was, and who knows, maybe the White House can answer this separately. I was going to say, Look, Mr. President, you've invested in intel to build a sovereign wealth fund and you said you're going to invest in more companies. When are you going to acquire Cracker Barrel? That was what I want to know. We need to federalize Cracker Barrel, as I said on the show last week. But there was actually a more memey pop culture development while we were in this Cabinet meeting and it was finally, at long last, the engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Here is what President Trump had to say.
- [14:27]
Donald Trump
Well, I wish him a lot of luck. I think it's I think he's a great player, I think he's a great guy and I think that she's a terrific person. So I wish them a lot of luck.
- [14:40]
Michael Knowles
Never let it be said that the man is not disciplined, Trump has said. How much has he said? Taylor's no longer hot. She's a Democrat. She voted for Biden she's dead to me. I'm hot. She's not. But he said, no, we want to make peace. We want to bring people together. We want to build these nice, strong coalitions. But he's up on it. You know, this reminds me of, I think it was Chris Rock was talking about Joan Rivers before Joan Rivers was murdered by the Obamas for revealing the truth about Michelle. I'm joking, I'm joking. I'm joking. That was a joke. But she was making jokes about Michelle and Beyonce and whatever. And Chris Rock said, He said, man, you know, Joan Rivers, a woman's like 80 years old and she's so hip that she can make Beyonce jokes. She's so with it. She's so. That's what you see with Trump because he's a showbiz icon. Is he? Can he gets. He already made the Cracker Barrel line. I think he posted on Truth Social or something. He said, you know, Cracker Barrel must change the logo back. Bring back Uncle Hershel. Same thing with Taylor and Travis. Well, Cracker Barrel, which is all I really want to talk about today. Anyway, they finally responded. They finally responded. And I, in my official capacity, this feels very official given where I am right now, but this is in my official capacity as the host of the Michael Knowles Show. I am now calling for a full fatois on Cracker Barrel. I was previously, I said, maybe we can forgive them. They fire the glasses lady and they'll go back to Uncle Herschel and they'll bring back the cracker and the barrel and it'll be nice and we can go have our chicken and dumplings and play the good old peg game. No. Cracker Barrel has not learned its lesson. Cracker Barrel has doubled down. This is their promise to you. I don't even want to read it. This reads just like the 40 something glasses wearing, saccharine, liberal, probably cold as ice. HR lady. Okay, this is. If the last few days have shown us anything, it's how deeply people care about Cracker Barrel. We're truly grateful for your heartfelt voices. Can you just hear the sarcasm dripping off the sheer contempt for the customer base, for all of us. This is a little tangential. I was in the airport. I was in Nashville Airport two days ago flying out to D.C. and a nice couple of a certain age stopped me, said, well, hello, you know, in the southern from Tennessee and Alabama. We were just at Cracker Barrel. Really? Yeah. They changed the menu. They're changing. Sheer contempt for these people. Yeah. Oh, wow. You really care. Thanks. Thanks for Showing how much you care. Yeah. Now shut up. Up. Shit. We're going to turn this into a Panera. We're going to take your beloved cultural institution and make it a hospital cafeteria. We are. But thank you. Thanks for thanks. They go on. I'm never going to get through this at this rate. They go on. You've also shown us that we. Sorry. You've also shown us that we could have done a better job sharing who we are and who we'll always be. What has not changed and what will never change are the values. This company was built when Cracker Barrel first opened in 1969. Blah, blah, blah. The things people love about our stores aren't going anywhere. Rocking chairs, a warm fo. Blah, blah, blah. We love seeing how much you care about our old timer. That's the cracker. The cracker in the barrel. And we love him, too. Uncle Herschel will still be on the menu. Welcome back, Uncle Herschel's favorite breakfast platter. And on our road signs. And he's not going anywhere. He's family. Ha ha. We've heard you. Shut up. Now, while our logo and remodels may be making headlines, our bigger focus is still right where it belongs. In the kitchen and on your plate, serving generous portions of food you like. Okay, again, first of all, I made this point yesterday, and I'm not the only one. You don't go to Cracker Barrel for the food. I like the food. I think the food is pretty good at Cracker Barrel, but it's not, you know, it's not gonna get a Michelin star. Okay? It's not. There are better places. Mom and pop places, delis, diners. It's not for the food. You're going there because it hasn't changed. Look, they say it right there. When was cracker barrel founded? 1969. 1969. After the summer of Love. Radical cultural revolution going on. Cracker Barrel is quite intentionally and overtly founded to say no to that, to be countercultural, to say you're in this period that fetishizes change. We're going to remain frozen in time. You want to take a trip back in time to the old country store where you can buy your kids a Tootsie Roll pop and play the peg game. You come down to us and we're going to have the wood tables and the rocking chairs. And then this clueless woman comes in and says, yeah, you know what this is missing? Sterility. You know what? This thing where your only product is not changing, your only valuable product is not changing. You say we're just going to change now. Totally misses the point. They go on. We want to be sure the Cracker Barrel is here for the next generation of families. At the end of the day, our promise is simple. You always find comfort here. Thank you for caring so much. And come see for yourself the country hospitality. Love Cracker Barrel. No, no. The values this company was built on will never change. They did. You don't, you don't Cracker Barrel lady. You don't understand what this country was built on. So I'm confusing it because the reason I care so much about Cracker Barrel is because what is happening with this private company is being mirrored in the political space. I think you see this a lot with President Trump's flag burning, anti flag burning executive order. A big reason that people voted for President Trump is because there have been a lot of changes recently and we don't like them. That's it. And then we are mocked and derided by the so called progressives because we don't like their changes. We don't like that they've castrated our children. We don't like that they've diminished the strength of our military. We don't like that they've abolished our police departments. We don't like that they've opened our borders. We don't like that stuff. We don't like that they've degraded our curricula. We don't like that they've made our kids dumb. We don't like that they're flooding our country with poison that's killing people. Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of changes and we don't like it. And we want a guy to come back and undo those changes and make our country great again. That's what it's about. And the kind of person that that requires is not an ideologue, is not a radical, it's not a revolutionary. It's someone like Trump. Who was I talking to? I was talking to a reporter earlier today over coffee and I said people call Trump a populist or a this is or a that is. He really is in many ways a traditionalist in the vein of Edmund Burke. He doesn't wear tweed, he doesn't wear bow ties, he doesn't put on a kind of foppish accent, but he has a gut level traditionalism. He operates on prejudice and that's going to be clipped and taken out of context, but whatever, who cares? That's fine. Prejudice in the good sense of the word. Not unjust prejudice, not prejudice. That expresses some irrational animosity toward groups of people. The prejudice. That is just the prejudgments that we all operate on all day long that you can't get out of bed without. I can't pour a cup of coffee without prejudice. I have to. It's not like I'm chemically testing every pot of coffee I have. It's not like I'm measuring out every little bean. I just kind of go with it. I kind of go with it. I do things because they've worked well before. That's what Russell Kirk means. That's what Edmund Burke means. That's what a kind of conservatism is. The opposite of that is rationalism in politics, where you try to scrutinize and subject every single aspect of politics to the most abstract examination. You don't want that. We love the flag. You shouldn't burn the flag. It should be okay if people want to ban burning the flag, this doesn't violate the First Amendment. We had the opportunity to ban flag burning for all of our Nation's history until 1989, and we did ban burning the flag at various times in 48 out of 50 states, and with two federal laws for over 100 years. It's not. That's not a problem. There's nothing wrong with that. And we can go. We went in yesterday into all of the reasons why it's perfectly fine to burn a flag, but that's the kind of conservatism that we're getting back to, kind of conservatism where we say, yeah, we do stuff because it's worked really well in the past and it's not dispositive that if you've done something for 5,000 years, that it's going to work into the future. But it's a pretty good guess. And innovation for innovation's sake isn't any good. And you couple that paradoxically with wanting to pursue innovation in a circumscribed way, in a way that is intentional and likely to benefit us. Which is why President Trump, for much of the Cabinet meeting yesterday, focused on investments in AI, which is why when I sat down with the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant, he focused on investments in AI. This is why the intel acquisition was obviously geared toward technology, because these are ways that America can come to dominate now. There's much, much more I have to tell you, because while we're all celebrating Travis and Taylor finally tying the knot, I think she's 35. A lady never tells, but these days, 35, you're like a child bride. By historic standards, it's not that young. But by today's standards, I don't know, it's like one of these Middle Eastern countries where you get married off at 12. So congratulations to them. But here's the wrinkle. New study has come out. Men with high status jobs are more likely to cheat. How do you avoid it? How do you. How does sweet little Elisa avoid it? Is being a cigar salesman a high status job? I don't know. We'll get to all of that momentarily. First, I want to tell you about StopBox USA. Go to stopboxusa.com and use code Michael. You know, I have a number of children. I've mentioned that you probably have a lot of children too. And if you're a gun owner, you really, really want to be responsible. 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Get 15% off your entire order when you use code Michael M I C H A E L For even better savings, shop their bundles for the best deals on their best selling products, check out their bundles and save an exclusive 15% off site wide. When you use code Michael M I C H A e l@stopboxusa.com Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with Stopbox. Men with high status jobs are more likely to cheat. Here are the three takeaways from this study. I can link to it if you want to read more. In the 1990s and 2000s, about one in five ever married men so includes divorcees, reported engaging in extramarital sex. Now I think this also I think that excludes premarital sex. I think it means you have to have been married for this to count. So one in five guys who've gotten married have cheated on their wives. That share fell to 17% and has continued to drop in recent years. So that's good. Still pretty high number though, 1 in 5, 20% and then 17% and then it's fallen a little bit, but that's bad. Second part, men in high prestige occupations, CEOs, physicians and surgeons, for example, are more likely than others to have cheated on their spouse. This is the part that might surprise some people because they say, well, no cheating on your spouse, that's like, that's low class behavior. That's not what the really fancy guys would do. Or some people might say, well, the really fancy guys, you know, the CEOs and the surgeons and stuff, they, they have so much to lose. They have so much to lose. Why would they risk it all, subject themselves to kompromat, potentially lose their whole family just to have a fling? Why would they do it? I see a guy who doesn't have anything to lose, but why a guy who has a lot to lose? Finally, among ever married, ever, even if you're divorced now, prime age adults who have cheated on a spouse, about half are currently divorced or separated. That's really scary. That's really, really scary. Because now what that puts together is a warning. If you are married, if you're planning to get married and you haven't cheated on your spouse yet, you probably shouldn't because if you cheat on your spouse, you have a 50, 50 shot of divorcing. And if you divorce, especially if you have kids, you're going to seriously damage your life. No one's ever passed redemption, but you're going to seriously, seriously damage your life. And having that little fling is going to greatly increase the odds that you get divorced and have a terrible life. One in five men ever, and the guys in the high prestige positions are more likely to do it. This, it really doesn't surprise me at all. And it doesn't surprise me because the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth. That's one reason why it doesn't surprise me. And two, because as you start to enjoy more luxury, as you start to feel a little more power, as you start to actually, as you start to feel stresses in your jobs, as you start to rise in prominence and as you're able to make demands, you begin to put yourself in the position of God, that's really what you do. You begin to say well, look, I no longer have to wait online for the customer service line because I'm a fancy person. I have the really high status at the company so I can get right through. I don't have to inconvenience myself for that. I don't have to make appointments anymore. I have secretaries and assistants to do that for me. I don't have to drive myself. I get driven around in a limo or an suv. I don't have to do this. Why should I have to respect the limits that are imposed by my marriage? It's very dangerous, Very, very tempting. It's Icarus. It's just the closer you get to the sun, the more likely you are that your wings are going to melt and you're going to fall to the ground. You know, final point on this, it's Drew Clavin's favorite joke. It's the orange for a head joke. The short version of it is this guy walks into a bar, has an orange for a head, says, how did it happen? He said, well, I found a genie's lamp, I rubbed it, said I get three wishes. I said, no way. Okay, I want a million dollars. Knock on my door, guy shows up, check for a million dollars. Second wish, I won every Playboy playmate of the year. Knock, knock, knock. 12 half naked women walk into my room. Wow. Okay, what happened next? Well, this is the part that is hard to explain. I asked to have an orange for a head. The appetite that people have for self destruction, the ability to resist that requires an abundance of grace. And more and more grace actually the further along you get, don't let it happen to you. Little bit of a warning sign, but it's a liberalism. If you are a political liberal or an anthropological liberal, this study doesn't make any sense to you because you think that the more advanced you become, the more a master of yourself you become and the harder it is to sin and the easier it is to do good. If you're a Christian, if you understand that human nature has fallen, you recognize that actually the further along you get, in certain ways you're more in control of yourself. But sin is crouching in the corner waiting to devour you. You recognize that actually the temptations only get worse. Speaking of men seeking status, this brings me to a story I've wanted to cover for a week and this is a really rough one. It's being reported in the Guardian that men are surgically lengthening their legs. Have you heard about this? Have you seen this on Tiktokers? I think I saw it. On Instagram or something like that. Men are flying to other countries with fewer medical regulations and they are having doctors break their legs and then pull their bones apart and then insert metal into their legs and then hope that the bone will grow back so that they can go from being 55 to 57 or something like that. Well, it's actually, it's worse. It's also so that they can go from being 6:3 to 6:4. That's the key to this whole story. So because you figure it's just these short guys and it's tough out there for the short kings sometimes. I mean, listen, I'm not the tallest guy in the world either. I'm a fairly moderately sized person, not quite Napoleon, but I'm not LeBron James either. And if you're. If you're below average height, if you're significantly below average height, it probably is tough for you. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm not going to deny it is a little tricky to go dating. Is it worth permanently disabling yourself and having both of your legs broken? And no, I wouldn't say it is. And the evidence that this is disordered is it's not just the shorties that are doing it. It's guys who are over six feet. So just a little touch from this article. Frank. Frank is determined to become taller than amelia. Amelia is 5 foot 5 by gaining 9 centimeters. I don't know, it's a British thing. So they do centimeters. Try to convert just above the. So he wants to gain 9cm. Just above the 8.5cm doctor told him is the maximum his muscles and tendons can safely handle. That would make him 5, 9, 5 9. Not like the biggest guy in the world. But that's probably about average height. A little below. His dream is simple. Yeah, okay, it is average height being average height. Speak with any patient at the Wannabe Taller clinic in Istanbul where Frank chose to undergo leg lengthening, and it becomes clear that shortness is relative. Men over 6ft have had the procedure. One tells me he needed surgery to correct his bow legs and decided to add some height at the same time. Over six feet, he's going to break his legs to become six two or something like that. This is just anorexia for men. Men can be anorexic too, but. But this is particularly anorexia for men. And it reminds us of maybe the most forgotten of the virtues, and that is to cultivate a spirit of resignation. This modernity and liberalism hate a spirit of resignation. The spirit that says, you know, I strive for things, I have ambition, I want to achieve, but if it doesn't work out, so be it. If it doesn't work out, I accept my lot in life. I'm not going to be the tallest guy. I'm not going to be the basketball player. I'm not. That kind of a spirit is very important. And it actually gets to something that the President mentioned in the cabinet meeting, which is he had this great line. His lines, they just kind of come out sometimes. He says, everybody has his place. Everybody has his place. Not everyone is going to be. It might have been related to. He was talking about Bobby Kennedy and Pete Hegseth's challenge where they do a bunch of push ups and they do a bunch of pull ups or, I don't know, more exercise than I've ever done in my entire life. And I think Scott Turner, the HUD secretary, is currently winning it. He's a former professional athlete, so it kind of makes sense. But he was going off. Oh, no. You know, now I remember what it was about. It was when he was talking about war, Ukraine and Russia, and he said, you know, Ukraine, they got to come to the table too, because you're not going to win a war against a country 15 times your size. It's not going to happen. It's no knock on you, but you're Ukraine and Russia's 15 times your size and you're not going to. If I walked up to Mike Tyson, even today, Mike Tyson's like 100 years old. If I walked up to Mike Tyson today and I poked him, he could kill me. He could rip my head off and eat it like he ate Evander Holyfield's ear. He could do that. He's bigger and stronger than me even today. And he said, you gotta. He goes, look, I have limits, too. I can't do everything either. This is Trump. You know, it's that kind of humility where he said, I want to end this war because I want to go to heaven. Right now. I don't think I'm that high on the list. I think I'm low on the totem pole. I want to go to heaven. It expresses a deep humility. Humility is the beginning of wisdom. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. You have to accept limits. Limits are the one thing that liberalism will not tolerate. But people are transforming out of liberalism toward more traditional and religious points of view, which we'll get to in one second because a major actor is converting. Here's a not so fun Fact. Disney, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount, they're all raising prices again. I'm sure you've noticed. Then there's DailyWire plus, doing what we love to do, which is the exact opposite. We're not raising prices, we're dropping them. Right now. You can grab an annual DailyWire plus membership for 40% off with code Summer. That unlocks everything we've got, including the new episode of the Pope and the Fuhrer, the Secret Vatican Files of World War II. Everyone's talking about it. Also, on September 8th, you'll be the first to watch the Isabel Brown Show. Have you heard? That's coming to Daily Wire. Plus you'll get exclusive first looks at our brand new flagship show, Friendly Fire, where the entire Daily Wire crew goes head to head live, uncensored, unfiltered, naughty. I don't know if it'll be. I hope it won't be naughty. Go to DailyWirePlus.com now and lock in 40% off your annual membership before this deal is gone. My favorite comment Yesterday is from Rossneamer3142 says Michael's snoop Dogg impression sounds like his Ronald Reagan impression. Wow. You and I, you and Izzle have a rendezvous with destitizzle. You dig? Hey, hey, hey. Smoke weed every. Eat jelly beans every day. Yeah, maybe I didn't notice that before. That's shocking. Wow. They're both great showmen. Both had a lot to say about politics. Okay, well, speaking of show business, an actor is becoming Catholic. Everybody's becoming Catholic. Have you noticed? Everybody's becoming Catholic. I did it slightly before. It was cool. I feel that I was. I mean, I was cradle Catholic, but I was an atheist for 10 years and I reverted. About a dozen years ago, I was kind of in this first wave. Now everybody, everybody and their grandma's converting to Catholicism, including this guy. Michael Iskander is in the Amazon show House of David. He plays King David. It's a prime series, and I saw it reported that one of the lines that jarred this was the line from 2 Samuel 6, 9. It's a lovely parallel. And David was afraid of the Lord that day. And he said, how can the ark of the Lord come to me? This is sometimes non Catholics, they don't like that. Catholics really like Mary, you know, and I don't know why. I mean, you're nice to your friend's mother. All right? Like Beth. You go to, like, Johnny's house and Beth is there, and you're not mean to her. You don't hit Beth. You don't disrespect Beth. You're nice to her. How much more so should you be nice to the mother of our Lord and venerate her and honor her? Anyway, it's a tangent. This is one of these parallels in Scripture because the Old Testament is figurative. It's a figure of the New Testament, so there's a carnal reality to it, but it's also figurative, and it's fulfilled in Christ. So in 2 Samuel, you read, and David was afraid of the Lord that day, and he said, how can the ark of the Lord come to me? This is paid off in Luke 1:43, where Elizabeth says, during the visitation, Mary goes to visit and John the Baptist dances in the womb when the Lord in the womb comes to him. And Elizabeth says, and why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Because Mary is the new ark. She's the true ark of the new covenant of Christ himself. So I don't know. I haven't spoken to this actor. I don't know if that line in particular got him or if it was just a broader trend, but it's happening. The conversions keep on coming. I'm in Washington, D.C. right now, and the conservative movement always kind of punched a little above its weight with Catholics and Orthodox Jews, conservative Jews, relative to the country. It always. There are a lot of Protestants in it, too, but the Protestants were proportionally smaller in the conservative movement. You know, the think tanks and the government. Anyway, now they're all Catholic. The Protestants are becoming Catholic, the Jews are becoming Catholic. There aren't that many Muslims to begin with, but maybe they would become Catholic. Hollywood's becoming. It's. But this was predicted, you know, not to beat a dead horse, but this was predicted by Tocqueville because of a paradox of democracy. Democracy inclines people to make themselves into gods. Liberalism inclines people especially to make themselves into gods. And so to throw off all authority. In democracy, we say we're the people, we rule. Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. It's not really true. There's a kind of a truth to it, but it's not literally the voice. The voice of God is the voice of God. So on the one hand, they're inclined to throw off the shackles of authority. On the other hand, if they don't throw off all religion, if they don't become atheists, Tocqueville says they're going to become Catholic, and they're going to become Catholic because it's the most democratic of religions. Because if they don't throw off all authority, they're going to want to all be under the same religious system. They're going to want unity, they're going to want a single kind of religion. And that's what Rome offers that the others don't expect more. Tocqueville was right about many things. He's right about this. Okay, Speaking of big transformations before we go, it's kind of a sad story. Denmark is ending letter deliveries. Post Nord. If you want to get your letters to Denmark, send them now. Post Nord announced that it will cease letter services at the end of this year. That will end 400 years of letter deliveries by this state owned operation. A third of its workforce is going to be fired. That's losing 2200 positions, though. This Danish parcel service is now going to focus just on packages. So no more letters, just packages. Since the year 2000, the volume of letters that the business handles has declined by more than 90%, from around one and a half billion to around 110 million last year continues to fall rapidly. So there's another thing that's going to happen. People don't send letters because they send emails and texts. Yet we saw kind of a recoiling against that. You've seen for a quarter century now a moving of society toward ever more digital and virtual forms of engagement. This reaches its peak during 2020, 2021 because of two simultaneous phenomena. One was Covid, where you had to say goodbye to your granny from a hospital room through Zoom. You couldn't even go hug her. You couldn't go to Christmas. And two, transgenderism, which says that your true self has nothing to do with your body, that you can just live as some kind of avatar floating in outer space. And this bled over into ideologies and absurdities like transhumanism, uploading your body to the cloud, whatever, all that nonsense. Two things hit at the same time. People have recoiled against that tremendously. They hated the COVID restrictions. They want to go back out. They want to see people in person. And they hated the crazy trans stuff, which is deader than disco. It's almost not worth speaking about anymore. But you're not going to start sending letters, are you? You're still sending your emails, you're still sending your texts. You're not. You can't totally avoid technology. I am as conservative as it gets. I am Mr. Conservative, okay? And yet I don't write letters. And people write me letters. I don't respond in order to conserve. You have to keep up with certain things. And what you want to preserve is the aspects of life that are required for human flourishing, that are in coordination with your human nature, that help preserve your identity. But you don't need to preserve every single technology. And this is again where it seems to me, especially now, having seen the man up close and listen to him speak about every issue for about four hours straight, I'm more convinced than ever that Trump is a kind of a traditionalist, because out of the one hand of his mouth, he's saying, we're going to prosecute people for burning the American flag and we're going to make America great again. We're going to go back to the old ways. By golly, these cities used to be so great, and now they're bad, and we're going to make them great again. And then on the other hand, he's talking about all these investments in AI, including First Lady Initiative, a first lady AI competition, and new investments in AI and the potential sovereign wealth fund that will look at strategic industries like AI and how we need to beat China in AI and how we need to be the world's leader in these things, because there's no standing still. And maybe the best image I've heard of traditionalism comes from Chesterton who Two related images, one from Chesterton, one from Lewis, I think it is. And they both involve fence posts. One is Chesterton's fence, where he says, if you walk into the middle of a field, you see a fence, you have no idea why it's up, what it's doing. Don't tear it down. Your impulse is going to be to tear it down. Don't tear it down. First you have to figure out why it's there. Only once you figure out why it's there, why it was put up in the first place, can you tear it down. Second one is Lewis. I think it was Lewis. Might have been Chesterton, too, though. It's easy to confuse those guys. It says if you put up a white fence post and you just leave it there, you leave it alone. You're not leaving it as it is. You're leaving it to a torrent of change. And if you just leave it and don't fix it up every now and again, you're going to have a black fence post pretty soon because the dirt and the wind and the muck and the gunk is going to age and the decay is going to age it. You have to keep up on these things, and that's a fine balance. And that balance is more an art than a science. The ideologues on the left and the right, the libertarians and the neoconservatives and the thisists and the thatists, they want everything to be a neat, fine, clinical science that you can plug into an AI system and you won't even need politicians anymore. The traditionalists understand that politics really is much more of an art. And it's about. It's about balancing different virtues. Not to be too Chesterton heavy today, but that, you know, heresies come about when you take virtues away from all the other virtues. You choose one to the exclusion of the others. You have to balance these things, though. It's a fine balance. What you need really, is an art of the deal. Which is why, to the great shock and consternation of the political class in Washington thus far and now, we're pretty much 10 years into this thing. The president, who everyone said was going to be just awful, has done a better job than any of them in my lifetime. Okay, well, that's a final message here from the White House. I'll be back in Nashville very, very shortly. There's no member block. Secret Service won't let you in. So, anyway, I'll see you back in the studio tomorrow. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Nol Show.