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- [00:02]
A
Guess what day it is. It's French Friday. It's French fry day. So grab your fries and say hooray. David French is here to play on French Friday. It's French fry day.
- [00:18]
B
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Skypod, brought to you by Holy Post Media and Zorin Industries. Today is a French Friday, so David French is here to play. Hi, David.
- [00:26]
A
Hi, Sky. It's always great to be with you.
- [00:29]
B
Okay, so we got a lot to cover. I should let everybody know we are recording this a little bit earlier than we normally record French Fridays. We're recording this on Friday. Is it the 16th? 17th? 17th.
- [00:40]
A
Friday, the 17th, 17th, 17th.
- [00:43]
B
And so it's a week before people are actually gonna be hearing this. And given the speed at which the news is happening and the craziness of the world, no doubt events have transpired in the last week that everyone's like, oh, I wonder what sky and David French are gonna say about this. I don't know what we're going to say about it because we haven't lived it yet. So we're going to cover some stuff that's already happened, but also some evergreen things. But I want to begin with just your take on this past week with multiple things. Donald Trump posting the AI image of himself apparently either as Jesus and. Or a doctor who could tell sky his war of words with the Pope. And I don't know if you saw the more recent moment of Pete Hegseth citing a prayer he thought was from Ezekiel, which actually came from Quentin Tarantino in the Pentagon. Like, all the. Just the weird religious stuff coming out of this administration. Do you have a thought, a take, a framework for understanding this?
- [01:41]
A
So first, I'm going to, I think, partially exonerate Pete Hexith. And goodness knows, that's not my normal practice. I think he was, knowing what he was doing, that essentially that this is what some of the pilots who are rescuing the. The downed flyer in Iran were reciting, that knowing it was Tarantino.
- [02:00]
B
Yeah, but he actually says. He says this is from Ezekiel 25:17, which is what Samuel Jackson's character says in the movie, but it's not right. That's the part that's kind of weird.
- [02:10]
A
No, it's not. Yeah, yeah, he fumbled the handoff on a handoff on that. But I think that that's what he was referring to. Just trying to be charitable here. But the other stuff. And goodness knows there's countless other things we could talk about with Pete Hegseth. But here. Here's the one thing I want to focus in on. On the blasphemy conversation, because I really can't. I saw your. Your conversation about it on Holy Post podcast, where you very accurately laid out this reality of, wait, for 10 years, people have been telling Trump he's God's appointed man. And the analogies run from David to Cyrus to. To Christ himself. I mean, we. We've seen, you know, you remember the video, God made Trump, Right. Based on the God. God made a farmer, you know, and it talks about him as being a shepherd who will never let down the sheep. And he talks about him, you know, in these. These Christlike terms. Similarly, like Paula White before Easter, just comparing Trump's journey through criminal indictment to Jesus's journey through accusation, death, resurrection.
- [03:23]
B
We heard that actually quite a bit during the Biden years when Trump was facing numerous indictments and trials and things. He's being persecuted the way Jesus was. That was a common talking point.
- [03:36]
A
Common and common. And so from your state, when you said, he's got to be puzzled that he now gets heat for doing what other people have already done, you know, that. Doing it himself, what others have done. And I think you nailed that. I think that's exactly right. This. This was blasphemy in many ways. The church built the blasphemer.
- [03:56]
B
Yeah.
- [03:56]
A
If that makes sense. And. But there's something I want to focus on that I've seen some focus, but not as much, and that is okay. There's a lot of focus on the church. What are you guys going to do? Church. All right, here, look right in front of your face. Yet another blatant Ten Commandments violation. I mean, come on, what are you going to do? So there's a lot of rightful focus on the church, but I think there's been a little bit less focus on. Wait, what does it mean if this guy actually believes this stuff? Like, if he actually. And he has said more than once, you know, he believes he's on a mission from God, that he was saved by God and all of this. He has a sense of divine purpose about him. He has been filled with this sense of divine purpose. So why don't we just take this seriously for a moment? Like, what if a guy has these kinds of delusions of grandeur? What would that look like? How would that manifest itself in the world? Well, grabbing as much power as you can, right, because you're on a mission from God. It would mean things like picking fights with rival religious leaders, because if they're critiquing you and you believe you're On a mission from God. Well, then you've got to defeat that religious leader. So picking a fight with a Pope, I mean, this is the kind of stuff you would absolutely see. You know, the kind of drunk on power where you would start a war all on your own, for example, with no. In disregard of the law. And it. It makes me wonder, sky, how much are we taking it seriously? Enough that he would say that about himself. He would put these memes out there. And I really wonder if we are.
- [05:33]
B
Yeah, that's a great point. I'm sure you saw the reporting that came out of. Was it the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, and I forget who her co author was. They're working on this book about the Trump administration and they did the reporting about what was going on in the Situation Room before the decision to attack Iran. And at one point, one of the president's advisors. I forget if it was military or someone in the cabinet was basically saying to the President, hey, what if? And then listed all these different things that could possibly go wrong with the idea of attacking Iran, all the reasons why prior administrations did not attack Iran, basically. And Trump's response, I don't have the quote in front of you. His response was something like, it always works out for me. Like, it'll be fine, because everything I do, it always works out for me. And maybe he was referring to the raid against Maduro in Venezuela, or maybe he was thinking back to his assassination attempts that he survived. I don't know. But you remember in. Was it Deadpool 2, there was that he was putting together a team, and that person comes as my superpowers. I have good luck. And he's like, that's not a superpower. And they're like. She's like, yeah, it is. And she always says, good luck. And I think Trump kind of carries that attitude of no one else was able to successfully wage a war against Iran, but I will. I'll be the one that can do it. Because he thinks he has some kind of divine good luck. And, I mean, you can make a case for it.
- [06:51]
A
It's destiny.
- [06:52]
B
It is. It's destiny. But that's not how you should be governing a country or leading the world's greatest superpower.
- [07:02]
A
I'm getting a big Ozymandias vibe off of him right now. Look at my works, ye mighty, and despair, says the crumbling statue. The level of hubris here is we are at the moment of look at my works, ye mighty, and despair. But I feel like we're on the precipice of the crumbling of the statue, and that in many ways, for those who have eyes to see as we record this, and who knows what will happen in a couple of weeks that the Strait of Hormuz is open, the ceasefire allegedly has been fully implemented, et cetera. And at the end of the day, you're looking at it and going, wait, we just fought this conflict on his sanction, his command. Lots and lots and lots of people died. There was lots of disruption to the economy that will be ongoing and that will be continuing. And what did we really, truly accomplish here? Like, was, was it Trump being lucky or destined again, or was this just a giant blunder who. Who won this conflict? And again, you know, in two weeks, we might have more visibility on it, but as of right now, he took us into war, was apparently shocked by the response, even though he was warned about it, very clearly and plainly warned about it again, if all the reporting is correct. And he did it anyway. And we paid a serious price, and we are still paying a serious price for it. And so that's what I mean when I say, how shouldn't we take this mindset seriously? Because the biggest mistake that a lot of people have made with Trump is believing. He can't possibly believe what he says. Like, when he's making stuff up about an election, he can't possibly. I mean, this is all hyperbole, Right? But we learned, and we've been learning for 10 years. No, no, no. He intends to be taken seriously. Yeah.
- [08:51]
B
There was some pundit who years ago said the problem with the media is they take Trump literally, but they don't take him seriously. And I think. I wonder if we've overcorrected and we're not taking him literally or seriously anymore. And you're calling us to say, maybe we need to take this seriously. This may be exactly how he does perceive himself, and it is what's guiding his decision making. And that's terrifying.
- [09:18]
A
Well, yeah, I think in hindsight. Yeah, I think in hindsight. That was a Selena Zito piece from, I believe, 2016. I will never forget it, because her basic point was that his supporters take him seriously, but not literally, and the media takes him literally but not seriously. And the bottom line is he has always meant himself to be taken literally and seriously. So in a way, both of those 2016 sides got it wrong. I thought that was a good insight on the front end, but I think now the whole process has evolved to the point where his supporters take him seriously and literally. Now he takes himself seriously and literally. And in some cases, the media has caught up now as well and takes him seriously and literally, as we saw during all of the outcry over his threat to destroy the civilization.
- [10:10]
B
Right.
- [10:11]
A
This was something that, you know, 10 years ago, if you're going through the Selina Zito analysis, you would immediately discount that to some extent. However, there would be some weight behind it. But now, after January 6, after launching unilateral wars, after all of these things, you really begin to wonder how much, how much, how many of his words really are meant as literally as they are said. And every other president, we've applied a test where we look at what they literally say. There is no reason not to do that with him.
- [10:54]
B
Okay. Well, it's a good transition as we think about the risks under which we live to transition over to online gambling. You did a debate recently at the University of Chicago center for Politics. Is that what it's called?
- [11:11]
A
Institute of Politics. Institute of Politics.
- [11:13]
B
My bad. Institute of Politics. I should know that. I was in attendance. You debated Governor Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey, former GOP presidential candidate, current commentator, I think, for ABC News. And Chuck Todd, the former host of Meet the Press, was the moderator of this debate. I was lucky to be able to go attend. And I ran into your wife outside beforehand and some of your kids and grandkids, and she invited me to sit with her in the front row. So I had an up close and personal view of the whole debate.
- [11:46]
A
Absolutely, Sky. Absolutely.
- [11:48]
B
It was wonderful. And you've written an article kind of rehashing some of what went on in that debate. But first off, before we jump into this, let's cover some of the history on how we got to this place. I'm sure everyone listening to this is old enough to remember a time before you were bombarded with online gambling ads during every single sporting event you watch on television. Before there was DraftKings and FanDuel and all the other online stuff that's going on these days. Why do we now see this proliferation of online sports gambling that we didn't see a few years ago? What got us here?
- [12:27]
A
Well, sky, the, the short answer is we stumbled into it. The long answer is there was a. The longer answer is that gambling has always been very heavily regulated in the United States. I mean, some of the first anti gambling laws date Back to the 1630s in the Massachusetts colony. So some of the Puritan restrictions on gambling, you know, George Washington had choice words for gambling. So for most of American life, yeah, we never, we never have successfully eliminated gambling. But for Most of American life. As McKay Coppins wrote this really wonderful
- [13:01]
B
piece, it is a great piece for
- [13:02]
A
the Atlantic talking about his own gambling journey where he was given money to gamble for a year and what, what that did to him. And he was talking about, you know, for forever gambling was kind of confined to riverboat casinos, the state of Nevada, Atlantic City, etc. And what we saw with federal law was that federal law was trying to ban gambling while also accommodating historic centers of gambling. So federal law that. A federal law that was passed in 1992 essentially banned gambling like sports gambling nationwide, but it had some limit, it had some exceptions for specific states like Nevada. And when New Jersey, home of Atlantic City, wanted to change its laws to really kind of match what Nevada was able to do, the federal government said, no. Now that's a very poorly written law, Sky. That's never going to really survive. If you say, well, 46 states or whatever get these privileges and I mean these restrictions and four states get. Or whatever get these privileges, that was never really going to fly. And so Paspa, the law is struck down in 2018 and this is the rest, as they say, is history.
- [14:16]
B
The challenge to this law was actually driven by Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey.
- [14:22]
A
All of this launched when, when Chris Christie, that's why I called him the. In the column, the unintentional founding father of modern sports gambling. Because I don't, you know, think for a minute he imagined that all this would occur and he was defending the interests of his state. Right, yeah.
- [14:39]
B
He said as much in your debate. So. And it makes sense because you have Atlantic City, Atlantic City, New Jersey, where there were casinos but they couldn't do sports betting, but Vegas could and thought this is just an unjust law. They challenged the law, but that the Supreme Court ultimately rules and opens up the regulation of gambling. I haven't studied this closely, but my understanding of it is opened up the regulation of gambling to make it a state's issue, basically. So state by state could decide, yeah, what gambling do we want to allow here and which do we want to outlaw? Which suddenly opens up the possibility for sports betting virtually anywhere in the United States, including through our phones.
- [15:17]
A
Exactly. And what happens, and I'll share some numbers with you, Sky. These are some of the numbers in my column and it's just eye popping. So you go to 2018 and in 2018. So the case is decided in 2018. And the, the gaming revenue from sports betting, in other words, the amount of money wagered minus winnings in 2018 was $400 million. That's a lot of money.
- [15:44]
B
And that's what we know about. Obviously there's illegal sports betting that's going on somewhere off the books. Right, but this is what we know about, right?
- [15:52]
A
What we know about. 400 million in 2018, 17 billion in 2025. Sky, that is what you would call a growth industry. And that reflects a total of. And this is legal. We don't know how many illegal bets there were. You know, there's still illegal betting. $167 billion were bet on athletic contests. So is it any wonder, is it any wonder that all of these networks have a sports book and they are advertising it non stop? And then this, check this out, sky. And I did not have this statistic because it had not come out yet. The study had not come out yet. When I debated Chris Christie, I would have loved if it had because it would have really enhanced my case. 52% of young men defined as 18 to 49. I as a 57 year old, think 49 sounds pretty young. But 18 to 49 year olds, 52% of them have an account with an online sports book.
- [16:58]
B
Yeah.
- [16:58]
A
So most men, adult men below the age of 50, have an online sportsbook account. And here, this was staggering to me, Sky. 31% of betters overall. So that's including younger and older betters. So overall betters had someone express concerns to them regarding their use of online sports books. So here you have vast millions of people, vast millions. And, you know, the studies just keep coming. You know, there was a Maryland study that found that 19.8%, almost 20% of sports bettors in the state were engaged in disordered gambling. An additional 31% of gamblers were at risk of disordered gambling. So that's right. There you've got 51% of people who are either engaged in disordered gambling or at risk of disordered gambling. And it just goes on and on and on. And the way I tried to describe it is like, this is a failed experiment here. It really wasn't even an experiment. We sort of stumbled into it and then we had like, you know, the, the online betting version. Have you seen those videos of like the land rushes in like Oklahoma, where everyone's like behind their sooner schooner and they're sprinting out to find their plot of land to stake their claim. It's like that. It was like the gold rush of casinos just flooding into America and it's really changing our country. And without ever any. I mean, honestly, sky, when has this been until recently discussed as sort of a real truly important national political and cultural issue. But it needs to be.
- [18:35]
B
I was a little bit surprised by Chris Christie's defense that he, that he tried out early on in your debate. I won't say he, I don't disagree with him entirely, but it was a shrewd sort of non defense in a way because his argument was, yeah, there's online gambling. This isn't what he anticipated happening with this court case and he thinks it's problematic for some people. But his primary argument, people will probably link to the full video. People can watch the YouTube video video of this whole debate. But he essentially said there's lots of really bad and addictive things that people access through their phones, including pornography, including social media, especially for teenagers and young people. And we've seen all the terrible effects these things are having. And for some people it's gambling. But the real problem is the phone. So you shouldn't just focus on the negative impact of one particular thing the phone is delivering. In this case gambling. It's the phones themselves are the problem. And let's attack the real problem not focusing on one specific element of it. And it felt to me a little bit like a what about ism going on, don't pay attention to the gambling issue. What about these other things that are going on? They're just as bad, if not worse and you're focusing your attention in the wrong place. But he wasn't really defending gambling as much as he was saying these other things are way worse.
- [20:05]
A
Well, you know, it's interesting because I feel like he'd have a stronger argument if what we were dealing with here was juvenile gambling, in other words, kids. And so you were having 14 year olds, 15 year olds, 16 year olds. And if the argument is, well, we want to cut off access to adults so that kids won't get fall into it, well then you might say, wait a minute, before we restrict adult activity, what can we do? And this is some of the arguments made about like age gating porn sites. They say, well wait a minute, you know, why are you going to make it harder for adults to see things they have a right to see, to protect children, you know, pornography. But you know, we just had a Supreme Court case on that that said, you know, look, you can impose some obstacles on adults if you're going to, you know, to age gate pornography. But that argument would have been I think much more interesting if it was aimed at kids. Because there is a big and an important debate right now and about how Much can or should the state regulate the ability of children to own these things just flat out, or be on social media on them, flat out. And you can't do that with adults. So it's a deflection that's ineffective because you're never going to be able constitutionally, nor would we want the government to be able to constitutionally choke off all American adults from access to one of the primary information delivery vehicles that exist in the world, the free speech delivery vehicles.
- [21:30]
B
Right. We're suddenly. And limiting everyone's access to content.
- [21:35]
A
Right, exactly. So when it comes to adults, it really is about the activity more than the phone, and we really need to be focusing on the activity. And then I think his backup argument really was much more, well, people should be able to do what they want to do if they're having fun with it, if they enjoy it. Sort of a classic, I'm not going to call it. It's a combination of libertarian and libertine. You know, the, the I get to do what I want to do, and the law shouldn't prevent me from doing what I want to do. And unless you can show me that what I'm doing specifically is like harming another person. Right. You know, and it's sort of like drinking. You know, I can drink. I can't drink and drive, but I can drink, you know, and so that's a classic vice that, you know, has been regulated by the state on occasion. And so I think his argument was, well, you kind of get to do what you want to do in this country. And, you know, that led to. And it really was a sort of a central goal of mine to actually back up and talk about liberty generally and how should we approach liberty. And to me, that was the most sort of interesting part of thinking through the whole thing.
- [22:48]
B
Yeah, and that was my favorite part of the discussion and the debate because it did turn into a two different visions of what liberty really means. We'll get into that in a second. But what came to mind when Governor Christie made his argument of, hey, adults should be allowed to do what they want to do if it's not hurting anybody. What came to mind was something that your colleague at the New York Times wrote a while ago, Ezra Klein, who's a progressive liberal Democrat. And as I followed his work over the years, I've noticed a change in him, and I'd love to talk to him sometime about it, because my hypothesis that his perspective has changed as he's had children and as they're getting a little bit older, they're still young, but I think it's changed his perspective. And one of the things he's brought up is how a lot of secular progressive arguments about what a good life looks like has a very difficult time constructing any kind of ethics beyond just don't hurt other people. And there's no more specificity than that other than, like, in sexual ethics, it's just consent alone is the only thing they can hang their hat on.
- [23:53]
A
Or.
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B
And he brings up online gambling as an example of like, it's doing tons of harm, but we don't have any larger ethical system to draw from to say why it should be limited. And it was interesting hearing a conservative Republican like Chris Christie basically make the exact same argument as a progressive liberal in going, it's consent alone. It doesn't harm anybody. Let them do whatever they want. And you are the voice on the stage arguing for a different vision of liberty, both historical and ethical. So present an argument for why we ought to be taking things that have historically been seen as harmful vices and putting some friction and limitations on them, even if it does infringe on liberal libertine ideals.
- [24:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really interesting and a great question and it's very fun to sort of think through it and very important to think through it. And, and let me just be clear. I am libertarian minded. I'm not libertarian. I'm, I'm, I'm libertarian minded. And to the extent that, if you're talking to me about liberty now, I take the Bill of Rights and I put them in, in the Civil War amendments and I put them in their special category. These are like, these are the paramount liberties. These are the paramount virtues. They are, I mean, the paramount elements of American freedom. They're set out and articulated and written down for a reason. So I'm not messing with free speech. I'm not committing cruel and unusual punishments. So you take the Bill of Rights and you put them in the Civil War amendments, equal protection. These are special. These are special. For this American experiment to survive, these things have to be jealously guarded. But there's a whole bunch of other things that people want to do right and that are not encompassed by free speech or religious liberty or don't implicate due process. And so what do we do with that? And for that, you know, you really go back and you sort of start to think about what was the founder's vision of liberty. And when you look at it, it is actually inseparable from virtue. They talked about liberty and virtue all the time. Right. And so, for example, Benjamin Franklin famously had 13 virtues, right? That list of 13 virtues where he tried to live according to those virtues. Thomas Jefferson would keep lists of virtues. John Adams very famously, you know, wrote in his letter to Massachusetts militia, talked about that our Constitution isn't closed with the power to eliminate human vice. And that vice, and you know, greed, ambition, et cetera, could cut through the cords of our Constitution like a whale goes through a net. So there was always this view of liberty and virtue side by side.
- [26:42]
B
If I can interrupt one other example that comes to mind, the book by Jeffrey Rosen, the Pursuit of Happiness, I think you had him on advisory opinions at some point. He takes that phrase from the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and then explores what did the founders mean by happiness. And in its context, understanding at the time, all their writings, happiness was the pursuit of virtue. It wasn't the pursuit of pleasure, it was the pursuit of virtue. So what Jefferson and the other signers of the Declaration meant by life, liberty and the pursuit, pursuit of happiness was we have this God given right to pursue life, freedom, to pursue virtue. It wasn't to pursue the indulgence of our appetites and desires. It's a very different understanding from the modern sense.
- [27:26]
A
Exactly. And that's what you mean when people talk about a term like ordered liberty that's sort of encompassed within that term. In other words, it's not anarchy, what we're dealing with. Ordered liberty is not anarchy. And, and so the way I put it is the orientation of the founders would be greater liberty for virtue, greater friction for vice. And so you've seen this throughout American history where there's been vice regulations about alcohol, about gambling, et cetera. They have a very long history in this country. At the same time that in establishing, for example, a market economy and providing a lot of economic freedom, we have given people a lot of liberty to engage in industry. And when I say the word industry, I mean it in the sense of the, one of the 13 virtues that Benjamin Franklin outlines. It means like purposeful diligence, to be industrious, to be industrious. Like to put it in Gen Z language, rise and grind, right? Like, get out there and get after it. But what we've done and what we've done is sort of through a whole host of long term developments, we have created a lot of barriers to industry and we have created, we have dropped and destroyed the barriers to vice. And so right now, you know, you have a situation where it's easier for a young man to get pulled into pornography and gambling than probably any time in human history.
- [28:55]
B
For sure.
- [28:55]
A
Yeah, but in a lot of places. Yeah, but in a lot of places it's harder to go to college or start a business than it's been in even the relatively recent past. So the way I put it is what we're doing in this country was sort of if you want to start a business, you want to go to college. And I talked about these just massive college costs. The wind is in your face, right? Especially if you're working class, etc. If you want to gamble or watch porn, the wind is at your back, brother. It is the easiest thing to do in the world. And so what does that do when a society is constructed like that?
- [29:31]
B
Yeah, this is something that when you talk to, how do I say this? Kindly non crazy MAGA people, One of the positive spin on that movement is some people look back to an era in America where it was easier to own a home, where it was easier to work, have a supportive family without a college education, where it was possible to work one job for 40 years and retire comfortably. Like they remember that American mid 20th century American dream, at least that was available to some part of our country, not everybody, and look back on that with nostalgia and they go, what happened? Like why is it so hard to support a family? Why is it so hard to send a kid to college? Why is it so hard to buy a home? All those things? Well, we have all these headwinds against us and to your point, all the tailwinds are driving us into self destructive behaviors and the things that don't support families and to destroy marriages and ruin children and the mental health crisis that's happening with young people, with social media, all these different things. So you're right, we've completely inverted this. But let me ask you, is part of the reason, at least this part of the reason we've removed the friction and the barriers to vice is because as a society we no longer generally agree on what vices are vices. You go back 100 or 150 years, most people would agree, hey, prostitution and gambling are vices. And today you have a significant number of people that think prostitution is just sex work. It's just an admirable vocation that should be regulated but legal. Or same thing with gambling, it's a vice, but oh come on, it's fun and innocent, who cares? We just don't agree anymore. So it's hard to gather as a society and say we are universally going to put more Friction and barriers against these things because we all agree they're harmful.
- [31:16]
A
So, Sky, I'm going to agree with you 1 billion percent on that. And I'm also going to say things are changing. So I would say I have been arguing against pornography, and I've been talking about the destructive nature of pornography for a very long time. And I mean, you know, my entire adult life, and for years and years and years when I would talk about it, I would get so much angry pushback from the secular left. Stop being such a prude. This is ridiculous. Stop telling people how to live. All of this. When I write about it now, except for fringes out there, it is. You're so right. This is out of control. And I think what happened is an awful lot of people who had sort of been more libertine in their youth or more libertarian, socially libertarian in their mindset, had kids, and a lot of their kids got into this stuff, and it was awful. It was horrible. And porn became something that they never thought it would become, as dark and depraved as the human mind can imagine. And so all of a sudden, a lot of people who maybe 25 years ago would have said, stop being such a prude and a puritan and all of that are going to, how do we save our kids from this dark plague? And so I'm seeing that. And then it's already happening with gambling. When gambling was legalized in 2018, broadly, the polling was. People were pretty happy about it. There was a lot of. This was not something that was super controversial for state after state after state to do. They would say, look, you get to do what you want. It's fun. People have been gambling on sports forever. We're going to make all this money. And then now the public approval is just boom, going down, down, down, down, down. And sky, this fits so much with so many other areas of struggle we have in our country, which is when you ignore the wisdom of the past, you have to experience the pain again to restore it. Right? And so, you know, like in foreign policy, for example, the memory of a world war is so distant to people. It's just. It's movies. The last living World War II veterans are dying off at, sadly, at such an alarming rate. And so that living memory of worldwide conflict is just disappearing. And what are you seeing? You're seeing people being more reckless. They're being more reckless with world peace. And I don't want to strain these analogies, but if you grew up in a world where you could take for granted that Porn was kind of narrowed and contained. It was never eliminated. But let's just say when I was 16, it was harder to get to it than when I'm 57 for a median 16 year old. And so I think that people didn't know what was being held back, they didn't realize it. And so you just blow through it and the next thing you know you're swimming in a tidal wave of sewage that is destroying people's souls and you're like, how did we get here? And hopefully, hopefully, God willing, America can one of the. I heard this recently. Democracy has a self healing property and hopefully there's some self healing that starts to take place as we indulged in these experiments and got the predictable results.
- [34:45]
B
Yeah, there's that old statement, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And we've not done a great job in this country of teaching people history, let alone geography. But we don't teach history well. We certainly don't teach civics well. And people have short memories. And when you combine that, then with the consumerism rhetoric of increasing choice is the definition of freedom. And your life will be better the more options you have, the more choices are available to you. And so the attitude has been, well, we're going to make every imaginable form of pornographic content available to you. You don't have to engage any of it, but just to know it's out there, you should be happy about, because it makes the world more free or every conceivable form of gambling is now available at your fingertips any time of day, anywhere you go 24, 7, you don't have to engage it, but knowing it's out there is a better world because it offers people more choice to do what they want to do.
- [35:44]
A
And.
- [35:44]
B
And you kind of get this applause going. Yeah, that makes sense. We're moving beyond the prudish ways of our ancestors who weren't as enlightened and understanding of human freedom as we are. And now we're all shocked to discover the fallout of this on individuals and families and bank accounts and relationships and our children and the mental health. And I think you're right, we are seeing a backlash.
- [36:06]
A
Now.
- [36:06]
B
One thing we talked after the debate and I was sitting in the front row, like I said, so I couldn't see the audience behind me as much as you could see them obviously sitting up on the, on the stage as you were making your argument for limits and greater barriers and frictions to online gambling. And Chris Christie was essentially saying, let adults do whatever the heck they want. What were you seeing from the audience? What kind of reaction were you getting? Did you get any vibe of how people were reacting to the two, the two points of view?
- [36:36]
A
Yeah, you know, that's a, that's a great question. And I'm just gonna say, like, I'm not the most objective person on this because I was one of the debaters. Right. So I'll leave others who watch it, you know, I would urge you all to watch it. I thought it was an interesting debate and, and tell us who, who do you think won? But I, my perception, sky, was that people were not picking up what Governor Christie was laying down. That my perception, as I was looking at the audiences, they were very much more into a lot of the points that I was making, which was a little bit surprising because I thought a college age crowd, it was overwhelmingly college age, would be made up of like most of the guys who were in there are gambling on sports.
- [37:17]
B
Yeah.
- [37:18]
A
And probably don't, don't feel bad about it, you know, if they're doing it. But I don't know. It could have been a self selecting audience guy, but I felt walking in the door that this audience was more receptive to my arguments than Governor Christie's. I think it was a crowd that was maybe pre. I'm not saying pre selected. Pre. Self selected in a way that maybe has more concern over it. Whereas unless maybe you're like a gambling zealot, you have no desire to go to a, to see a critique of gambling unless you want to go to, you know, defend it. And virtually all the questions were pretty sympathetic to my point of view. I thought so. Yeah. But again, I'm the. I am not a reliable narrator. Right. When it comes to evaluating my own
- [38:06]
B
debate, one of the things I was interesting was Chuck Todd, who moderated the debate. Again, former host of Meet the Press on NBC. I listen to his podcast regularly, the Chuck Todd cast. I enjoy it. And he is a huge sports fan.
- [38:19]
A
Yeah, it's a great podcast.
- [38:20]
B
Massive sports fan. And he began by talking about how he does sports gambling. He bets online, and yet he has young adult kids. And I think he has seen the effects of the online gambling on the sports world things. And I think he was a good moderator for multiple reasons. He's just gifted at that. But he's also somebody who's engaging in online sports gambling. But he also acknowledged this is a problem. And he also believes there needs to be greater restrictions and limitations. And I think that's whether it's online gambling or Pornography. And I've had conversations with a lot of men over the last gosh, 20, 30 years about online pornography. And I'm increasingly having conversations with men, including young men, about online gambling. And one of the things I universally hear from all of them is the same thing. It's sort of a collective action problem where what society has said is you, the individual need to exhibit enough self control not to engage in any of this stuff and certainly not to a destructive level. And what I hear from all these men is I need help with society putting some limits on my access to this stuff. And that's the problem is we're putting it all on the shoulders of every individual believing that they should be able to handle it. And I think that's my question to you though is what is the collective action solution to this if it's not just totally ban it for everybody?
- [39:52]
A
Yeah, I'm so glad you raised this, especially with young men because one thing that I said both in my piece and in the debate was I think the problem of online gambling and online pornography is hurting men, young men. Far more than 10,000 anti male woke professors writing a hundred thousand essays on toxic masculinity like this is something that, that's just reaching every level of society. Like you know, my, my son's peers who were growing up in the last place you're going to find wokeness like rural Tennessee or some of the least woke colleges, college campuses in America. Just gambling is omnipresent, it's just everywhere. It sort of defines the interactions in, in, you know, at sports, at games now. It's just unbelievable. And a lot of young men are coming out of their mid-20s hopelessly addicted to porn, addicted to gambling, and wondering why no one protected them when they were developmentally at the mode of least impulse control combined with most sensation seeking. So teenage young men are not the people you say. Well, you have total responsibility. You have the capacity right now to exercise the exact kind of maturity that a 50 year old man does. And so young men, it is known that young men, this is not a hard call. Young men don't develop really excellent quality. I mean, I'm sorry, impulse control combined with resistance to sensation seeking until they get older. And so we've put them, there's this phrase we use in the army, it's not exclusive to the army, but we've set them up to fail. We have created the conditions, we have set them up to fail. And so I think one of the principal goals of anyone who's leaning into trying to deal with the crisis of young men really has to be to address pornography and gambling. It sounds less glamorous and sexy than taking on woke ideologies or whatever, or you name it, it's less glamorous than getting in a big fight with the manosphere. But it's the hard, grimy work of political reform and change that's going to do more than even owning Andrew Tate online. You know, totally. It's it. This is. This is where the work is, is what I'm saying.
- [42:23]
B
I think if you were to do a very simple survey of Americans and you asked every single American, male and female, would your life be better, worse or unchanged if online pornography and gambling disappeared tomorrow?
- [42:37]
A
I think.
- [42:38]
B
I think the overwhelming majority would say my life would be better. I don't think you'd get a majority to say my life would be worse if these things disappeared from my phone. And you and I had a very brief exchange with Chuck Todd afterwards after the debate. And we were talking about how this is a unifying political message. This is something in this super polarized moment between right and left, blue and red. This is a message that would unite a lot of Americans to reform technology, social media, access for kids to social media, online gambling, access to pornography, all these things. I'm not saying eliminate all of it for all adults all the time, but like sensible restrictions, create more barriers and frictions to protect young people, to protect families, to protect the people who don't want to have to bump into this garbage all the time. Limit the amount of advertising that sports gambling can do during athletic events, put greater restrictions on all the things like just regulate it the way a vice should be regulated. That is a winning political message right now. And you add to it the profiteering that's going on by the technology companies and the gambling companies who are exploiting these young men at their weakest moment with bad brain development and weak executive functioning, frontal lobe activity.
- [44:02]
A
It's exploitive.
- [44:03]
B
And then all the other things and the mental health crisis with young people because of Instagram and TikTok, and these people are making billions and billions of dollars off of the destruction of the minds and souls of the American people. Where is the political voice standing up saying, that's the platform that we are gonna pursue in the next administration? I would think they're gonna build a huge coalition of people from across the spectrum, but neither party's really talking about it.
- [44:32]
A
Yeah, sky, it's such a great point. And let me have a little hope here, because I think you're accurately describing the present, the present is you have two parties who really are not reaching decisively for and placing as a priority what I would call almost 80, 20 or 70, 30 issues right now around just some of the basics of our life. Do we want. I was looking at some polling around the Supreme Court decision about upholding the Texas to the Texas law age blocking porn sites, which is a great law. And as I recall the approval rating for that opinion and now the spring, that should be irrelevant to the Supreme Court, but it's politically indicative. The approval rating for that opinion was say in the 70s. I mean this was not a, this was not a divisive decision. Right. You're seeing the approval rating for gambling just plummeting. And so I think that there is an enormous amount of pin up demand. And the problem is you right now have parties that are built around tailoring themselves to the demands of their core base supporters. And then once you satisfy the base, if you got anything left over for, oh, I don't know, 70% of America, well, that comes later. But what you're creating, sky, is an enormous amount of pent up demand for common sense reform. And I know, I hate that word, I hate that phrase, common sense reform. Every politician says it. Yeah, I almost got, I almost threw up a little in my mouth when I said it, but. Because it's been overused. But no, really, like really the idea of age gating pornography nationally, the idea of, you know, I proposed at the end of the debate, okay, if Chris Christie and, and I both agree there's some more regulation, can we agree to a few things like 25 and older to bet? No prop betting which turns your phone almost into like a slot machine during a game. Regulate these infernal prediction markets that are subject to insider trading and can create national security implications at the end of it. You know, he jokingly said, yeah, I'd agree to the Christie French plan as long as you took your name off of it, which was funny. But the, the appetite is there. And I really do think a lot of people ask me who is going to break the logjam this 50, 50 logjam. And I'm really coming around to an answer and I'm going to say it is a person who combines two things. One, it is a decent demeanor. One that a demeanor that, that turns, that's 180 degrees from the cruelty of the moment, foregrounding decency and who's strongly grabbing for these. And it's not reaching to the middle sky, it's like reaching to the majority it's reaching to the real concerns that people have for their kids. Where there's a unmet demand for reform, there's just this giant unmet demand. And I could probably think of three or four or five laws just that are layups, like, right off the bat that I think could do a great deal of good for America.
- [47:48]
B
I agree entirely. I recently was talking to Bree Steenstrud, who leads an organization called Women of Welcome, and it's all about immigrants and refugees. And she's leading a lot of evangelical women towards caring about these issues. And she was talking about how in their polling, this is a totally different topic, but the folks in their organization want a secure southern border and they want immigrants and refugees treated with human dignity. Those are the 2 and 80% of Americans tend to agree on this. Model secure borders, layup and treat people with dignity. But our politics says, oh, if you want secure borders, then you got to vote for the party that's going to treat immigrants with contempt and dehumanizing them. Or if you want the party that's going to treat immigrants with dignity and respect, then you got to put up with open borders and lack security. That's the choice that's presented to us. And to your point, there is an opportunity, there is a very wide lane here for political leadership to step forward that comes with a compelling and inspiring vision of what America has been at its best and what it can be in the future, along with appealing to the majority of Americans who do have some common sense on these issues, whether it's online pornography or gambling or border security, and say, you know what, you're actually right. And it's your politicians and the system by which we are selecting them, which doesn't actually reflect the true wisdom and decency of this country anymore. It's not that hard to figure out.
- [49:19]
A
I know I've been agreeing with you so much today, Scott. We need to do. I know we need to do one of these other, like, gun control debates
- [49:27]
B
or something, but where it all started.
- [49:31]
A
Where it all started. That's right. Where it all started. That is right. I think it did all start there. But I'd say I'm just so with you on this. And that's why I actually have this weird. I don't know. Even as we had this unconstitutional war, even as we have a president carrying him, comparing himself to Jesus or a doctor who can tell in all of this, this, you know, what we saw in Minnesota, what we've seen, there's a lot of terrible, there are a lot of terrible things happening. But I've had this weird sense of hope lately, sky, and I don't know if it's irrational, but I have just felt a turning, a changing in the wind, maybe a beginning of a little bit more openness to this idea that we've got to get out of this cycle, that we just have to get out of the cycle. And so to me, you know, arguing about having a debate with a great turnout over sports gambling at a college, to me is a really interesting and positive sign that what we're doing here is what we're trying to really engage with what matters to people on the day to day basis. And what is it that is actually impacting people's lives in the day to day and how can we engage on that? And the, the party that solves for that. The party. And I love how you put it about like sort of the thoughtful MAGA people who really do critique the modern moment. It is absolutely the case. And I wrote about this in a piece that just generated a huge amount of interesting feedback to me about how many Americans wake up in the morning and they just generally feel the wind in their face. They just generally feel as if there is a lot coming against them that's preventing them from achieving what they want to achieve with their family and with their lives. And a lot of those of us who are in the upper middle class world of America, we don't feel like that because our purchasing power has grown so Great. The top 10% of American income does is 50% of the consumer spending. Top 10% of income is 50%. So the entire economy is warping to accommodate and ease the lives of this top 10. If you go to the top 30%, it's almost 70% of all income, I mean, of all consumer spending is to the top 30%. And so you have this whole economy that is warping to protect, help, serve, service the upper middle class and is leaving about 70% of Americans, even though we're a prosperous country and a prosperous nation, to feel like I'm shut out of this in some way. There's something about this that is just not set up for me. And if I could say there's a lot of people who will say things like, well, you live better than people did in the 50s. True, right? Absolutely. You have more room, you probably have central heat and air, you've probably got two cars, you've got more stuff, like just stuff. But do you have a greater sense of forward momentum? And I think if I had to define the American dream It isn't really, truly the amount of stuff you get. I think the American dream really is, I can move forward here. This is a place where I can do better. And in the absence of that feeling, people feel real despair.
- [53:09]
B
I think one of the appeals of MAGA and Donald Trump is he came along and he identified that, hey, a lot of you feel like the headwinds against you. And he primarily gave a message of, I will help you advance materially if you put me on. I'm a business guy. I know the system, I know it's corrupt, it's against you. I'm gonna fix it, and you're gonna advance materially. And he also did a lot of scapegoating of who's to blame for all this, which was kind of ridiculous. But he's like, the headwinds were real, and a lot of people felt that, and they voted for this guy. But the exchange was, you are going to advance with Donald Trump materially if you can tolerate the fact that he is gonna put us backwards morally with his rhetoric, with his dehumanization of people, with his crazy posts, all that kind of stuff. And I think we're in a moment right now where, for a bunch of people, they're realizing, number one, he has not advanced us materially. When you look at the economy, when you look at the price of gas, all that, and they're realizing he has really set us backwards morally as a society, as a people, everyone's exhausted on that. And when you talk about sports, gambling or the pornography or the mental health crisis that's going on with young people through social media, you're right. There is this massive gap between the upper class and upper middle class and the rest of America, financially and materially. But what equalizes all of us is these stupid phones. And the effects they're having, the effects they're having on us, the effects they're having on our kid. Whether you are a. A wealthy family that's got a teenager at a private school, or you're at a public school on the south side of Chicago, all of us are being destroyed by these devices, and we're all experiencing it. And this is the political opportunity. I think somebody can rise up. A party, a leader, a voice, a movement can rise up and say, we have all this economic disparity and it needs to be addressed. And there are people like Bernie Sanders and AOC on the left, and there's Donald Trump and others on the right who are trying to play this political game, saying, we're going to. We will help you advance materially, but we also have to advance morally as a people. And the phone issue is one that we can unify around and say this is the link between the two. We can rally together to save ourselves from what has been ailing us as a people by putting regulations on these. The wealthiest companies on the planet that are driving these devices and these services on our phones that are destroying us. And at the same time, we can also address the headwinds that are coming against you materially. But this country's really only going to advance if we get the wind at our back, both morally and materially. And I think that's what, you know, when I look back on American history in our finer moments, that's exactly what we did coming out of World War II with the GI Bill. Though it was unfairly distributed and a lot of GIs of color that didn't get access to it, the GI Bill materially advanced this country in a significant way. At the same time, that was happening for the first time in world history. To my understanding, in here, we are the victors of World War II. And rather than drawing tribute from the nations that we defeated, we rebuilt them. We paid for them to be rebuilt. We were advancing morally as a country by saying, we're not just gonna grow materially, we're gonna be the good people that we know we can be. But we need the support of government putting the wind at our back to do that. Right now, the government is putting the wind in our face, materially and morally, because it's allowing these devices to go unregulated and destroy us. And we're putting people in positions of power to represent us who are destroying the moral reputation of this country internationally and within our own society. Both of those things have to be addressed by whatever regime comes next.
- [56:46]
A
I mean, if I could wave a magic wand sky, I would ban online gambling. If you're going to gamble, it's got to be in person. Because I do think that it's impossible to just ban. You know, I'm very wary of clothing a government with the power to ban all vice. That's your prohibition. You know that. So I'm very. But. But. Or at the very least age, limit online gambling to, to a. A level where people are not growing up gambling. But I, I would have no problem with a ban on online gambling. Massive regulation of prediction markets. You know, the idea that insiders can reap millions of dollars of rewards because they know what is going to happen in the world because they're part of the Architect. You know, they're making it happen, right? It's stunning. I mean, you talk about the potentials for corruption and national security problems. They're just through the roof.
- [57:38]
B
Or how about banning. How about banning stock trading from elected representatives in Congress? That would be a little helpful as well.
- [57:45]
A
Another layup. Another layup. A national law age gating porn sites. A national law saying phone free schools for every school that is funded by the Department of Education. You know, one thing that I think one thing that's promising is we've started to see the cost curve on college bending down. But there's about 17 states or so that don't have free public education through community college. Tennessee does. It's called the Tennessee Promise. It's free public education all the way through community college. That's a wind at your back kind of reform. The next 17 states should do that, you know, and so you can go again. And then, you know, occupational licensing is something that's not a very glamorous subject, but we need to be looking at how many barriers do we place in front of a poor American who wants to start a business? Like, how hard should that be? Right. And then the other thing is we've got to build more houses because this idea that young people who want to live in a home and start a family are being pulled back and being delayed from that process because it's very difficult, especially at a younger age, to find affordable housing where you can put a family. I mean, these are things that you say them, and it's just sort of like in the abstract, it's layup after layup after layup after layup. But in the concrete, because the parties are captured, just captured by the culture war. It's like Wimby. It's like Wimbanyama is just standing there like partisan Wimby and Yana, just swatting away the layups. Because, no, what we really have to do is focus on vengeance, and what we really have to do is focus on tearing each other down pieces.
- [59:25]
B
Well, this gets back to a topic we touch on frequently, which is political reform and election reform. Because our election system, our primary system, does not produce the candidates that actually reflect the. The morals and desires of the American people. When 17 million people in the primary in 2016 gave us Donald Trump in a country of 340 million, something's broken. So we're not getting the leaders that we deserve. And that's by design, because it serves the parties. Why would they want to reform it when they benefit from this ridiculous system? So My hope is, you're right, that there's a change occurring right now and it results in a new era of reform. And those reforms, some are going to be structural, some are going to be political, some will be electoral, some will be moral, and some will be legislative. But it can't just be one. We're probably going to have to see reform sweep through a whole bunch of, of the structures that we've inherited.
- [60:20]
A
Absolutely. Absolutely. But I do think there's hope and talk to me in a year and I might be. Sky. Why? Why? But I just, you know, from where I write and where I sit, and I see the openness of people who would be formerly hostile. And it's not just that they're open anymore. They're crying out, they're crying out for reform. And at some point, that demand has got to be met with a supply. There is a demand for legal reform, and we got a gap here in the law of supply and demand. We've got demand for legal reform and we've had no supply yet. And in those circumstances, supply usually arises. It takes time, but it usually does.
- [61:09]
B
Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I think Trump, to put the best positive spin on it, I think he was an attempt to address the demand. He was just the wrong answer to the some very legitimate questions and desires.
- [61:24]
A
Yeah. It's like, you know, you're thirsty in the desert and somebody hands you a can of motor oil to drink. That's it's going to do more harm than good. Yeah.
- [61:31]
B
All right, David. Well, thank you for doing that debate with Chris Christie. We'll link to the the video that everyone can watch, the full thing and the audience engagement and stuff and come to their own conclusion of who had the better argument. And thank you for your ongoing writing on this. We also did a piece recently in the New York Times about gambling that covers some of the stuff we covered here. But we'll link to that as well. And come back, everybody, next month for hopefully another edition of French Friday. And we'll see you then, David. French Friday is a production of Holy Post Media featuring David French, who and me, Sky Jatani. Music and theme song by Phil Vischer. This show is made possible by Holy Post patrons. To find out how you can become a Holy Post patron and to find more common good Christian content, go to holypost. Com.