The Charlie Kirk Show - America and the Art of the Possible with Chris Buskirk
Aired: 2023-01-12
Duration: 37:17


=== Defining Vital America (04:12) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today's Charlie Kirk Show, an entire hour with Chris Buzkirk.
[00:00:04]  We talk about national vitality, the art of the possible.
[00:00:07]  We talk about smoking.
[00:00:08]  We talk about high fructose corn syrup, why the food pyramid is upside down, and a lot more.
[00:00:13]  We cover a lot.
[00:00:14]  We also talk about the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Incans, and the Mayans.
[00:00:18]  If that does not capture your curiosity, I'm not sure what will.
[00:00:21]  Email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:24]  Check out Chris Buzzkirk's new book, America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay.
[00:00:31]  Get involved with Turning PointUSA at tpusa.com.
[00:00:34]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:00:37]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:38]  Here we go.
[00:00:39]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:40]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:43]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:46]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:49]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:50]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:51]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:00:53]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:00:58]  Turning point USA.
[00:01:00]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:08]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:11]  Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
[00:01:20]  I'm super excited for this entire hour with one of the clearest, smartest thinkers in the conservative movement, helps run American Greatness.
[00:01:28]  You run American Greatness, amgreatness.com.
[00:01:30]  And I do my clear thinking over there, too.
[00:01:32]  You do your clear thinking over there.
[00:01:33]  Your new book is America and the Art of the Possible, Restoring National Vitality in the Age of Decay.
[00:01:40]  Tell us about it.
[00:01:42]  So I, yeah, I'm trying to think what's the best place to start on the book.
[00:01:47]  I guess I would say this is I wanted to write a book about what had gone wrong in America.
[00:01:53]  And as I was sort of working through this, this is a couple of years ago.
[00:01:55]  I started to think through it, and I realized there was something really insufficient about writing that original idea for a book.
[00:02:02]  And that was I didn't want to just complain.
[00:02:06]  You know, I think everybody spends a lot of time saying, well, this went wrong or that went wrong or I wish it could be this way or wish it could be that way.
[00:02:15]  And there's lots of things that have gone wrong.
[00:02:17]  There's lots of things that we think we could improve.
[00:02:19]  I always think about, you know, that sort of like there's always that poll question they ask around elections, right direction, wrong direction.
[00:02:25]  And it's kind of one of those things that's super easy to say, like the country's wrong direction.
[00:02:30]  What do you do about it?
[00:02:31]  Right.
[00:02:31]  And so I started to think more about it.
[00:02:33]  And this is really where I came down with the thesis for the book is to say, look, and that's the way the book is divided roughly in half.
[00:02:40]  The beginning half of the book is descriptive.
[00:02:43]  It's like, let's be really concrete about the things that we think have gone wrong.
[00:02:48]  Like, what are they?
[00:02:49]  Not just, I don't like this, but like, how do you define it in a way that you could actually take action on?
[00:02:55]  And that's why the second half of the book really takes those things that I've identified that I think aren't working and have defined often in a very quantitative way and then come up with some potential solutions, not necessarily to solve everything, but at least to begin to solve problems.
[00:03:14]  And so that's why the use of the word vitality in the subtitle was intentional, because it was just a way for me to think about what does it mean when things are working?
[00:03:24]  What does a vital country look like?
[00:03:27]  And then I sort of went through and defined the concrete items that would define a vital America.
[00:03:33]  That's a word I don't hear very often.
[00:03:35]  What does a vital America look like?
[00:03:36]  So the way I think about it is this, is that, you know, there's like the ideological version of it.
[00:03:44]  And I say it in the book.
[00:03:45]  I say, you know, people in politics tend to be super ideological.
[00:03:49]  And I wanted to kind of stay away from that.
[00:03:51]  Like people on the left will always talk about like justice, right?
[00:03:55]  And people on the right will often talk about liberty or about freedom.
[00:03:59]  And I think, you know, on the everybody's like, well, I don't know, I'm kind of for both of those things.
[00:04:03]  But it's like insufficient.
[00:04:04]  And so I thought about like, what would what are the things that we would want in the country in order to be able to say like we're succeeding and things are going well?

=== Lessons From History (12:10) ===

[00:04:12]  And so I said, well, let's see.
[00:04:15]  So I think like, I think material prosperity is important.
[00:04:20]  And there is like from the right, there's always like a sort of spiritual critique, which, as you know, it's highly sympathetic to.
[00:04:27]  So am I.
[00:04:29]  And I do deal with that in the book, but I said, you know, material prosperity is a real thing.
[00:04:33]  Like, part of the American promise is that I do better than my parents.
[00:04:39]  My kids will do better than me.
[00:04:40]  Like, that is an explicit expectation that Americans have.
[00:04:43]  And that has spiritual implications.
[00:04:45]  It has all kinds of.
[00:04:46]  Yes, 100%.
[00:04:47]  That's something that we believe in.
[00:04:49]  Like, we want to achieve things.
[00:04:52]  We want to make our living standards better for ourselves and our kids.
[00:04:55]  We want our kids to be able to achieve things.
[00:04:57]  And so, and it's also something you can quantify.
[00:04:59]  Like, what does that look like if living standards are improving?
[00:05:02]  Like, it's kind of like, you know, you're doing more with less.
[00:05:05]  You know, this, like, this is technological progress.
[00:05:08]  So I say there's that.
[00:05:09]  Say, like, health and longevity is really important.
[00:05:14]  We need to have an America where lifespans are expanding and where chronic disease is declining.
[00:05:20]  And we actually have the exact opposite of it right now of that rate.
[00:05:24]  Went down, went down for the first time last 30 years, right?
[00:05:26]  Well, lifespans, longevity has been declining for a decade.
[00:05:29]  Oh, is that?
[00:05:29]  In this country.
[00:05:30]  Yeah.
[00:05:31]  I did a thread about this on Twitter the other week because, and I just wanted to draw the contrast because, for instance, I use the example of France, and this is actually broadly true in Western Europe.
[00:05:42]  France's lifespans have been increasing.
[00:05:44]  Like the average lifespan or median lifespan in an American right now is a little bit over 75 years.
[00:05:51]  In France, it just increased, again, to like 80.3 or 80.4 years.
[00:05:57]  The heavy cigarette smoking France and wine and cheese France?
[00:06:01]  One in three people is a regular cigarette smoker in France.
[00:06:04]  So regular cigarette smoker, I have a whole theory on cigarettes.
[00:06:07]  I find them to be repulsive to be around.
[00:06:10]  However, I actually think cigarette smoking was a narcotic hedge against obesity.
[00:06:17]  Yeah, that's probably right.
[00:06:18]  I think that's right.
[00:06:19]  There's like, I'm a little provocative, like at my thread, and I kind of alluded to this in the book too about the cigarette smoke.
[00:06:24]  I think that's probably right.
[00:06:25]  When you think about it, like if you had, if you have to choose.
[00:06:28]  A vice.
[00:06:29]  If you have to choose a vice, like it turns out like maybe the cigarette smoking is better for you than like the seed oils and the polyoxide.
[00:06:38]  I can see the argument.
[00:06:39]  And I don't like being around cigarettes.
[00:06:40]  I don't like the smell of them.
[00:06:42]  But the country was actually macro healthier when cigarette smoking in certain areas was wider spread.
[00:06:48]  Now they say, well, lung cancer and all that.
[00:06:50]  That's legitimate.
[00:06:51]  It's true.
[00:06:52]  You know, you're inhaling a lot of carcinogens.
[00:06:54]  But countries that still, like France, that have way higher cigarette smoking populations actually have higher life expectancy.
[00:07:02]  They have higher life expectancy and they have lower incidences of chronic inflammatory disease like heart disease, diabetes, et cetera.
[00:07:09]  And so I said, well, in terms of when we're talking about national vitality, like one of the things that is pretty obvious, it's not just like the material prosperity.
[00:07:17]  I think that's obviously important.
[00:07:18]  It's one of my criteria, but also are we living longer and healthier?
[00:07:23]  And not only are we not living longer, Americans as they get older are sicker than they were in the past.
[00:07:30]  And they're sicker than our peer countries.
[00:07:31]  Like, Lane, the example I used was France.
[00:07:34]  So that's another one.
[00:07:35]  That's another one of my criteria.
[00:07:37]  And then I have another criteria about like, you know, is there high social trust?
[00:07:43]  Are we able to achieve things as a country?
[00:07:46]  One of the elements of this, I think, is, you know, are people, are they having families?
[00:07:50]  Do they get married?
[00:07:51]  Do they have kids?
[00:07:53]  As you know, that is less true now than it has been in the past.
[00:07:58]  And it is just an indicator, in my view, of what's the general health.
[00:08:04]  Like if people are generally optimistic about the future, if they feel like they have opportunities, they are more likely to have a family.
[00:08:13]  And if you have, and countries that are based on a family as the basic building block of their country tend to have higher social trust.
[00:08:21]  And as a result, and this is another element of, like, this is like my macro version of what is civilizational or national vitality look like.
[00:08:29]  It's you have the high capacity for collective action.
[00:08:33]  In other words, can you identify, agree upon, and achieve big goals.
[00:08:40]  So the big one for the United States historically was we conquered the frontier.
[00:08:44]  Like we start off as like these 13 colonies sort of clinging to the Atlantic coast, and everybody agrees we should get to the Pacific.
[00:08:53]  Go westward.
[00:08:54]  Go westward.
[00:08:55]  It's the Abraham story.
[00:08:56]  Get up and go.
[00:08:57]  Get up and go.
[00:08:58]  Call to adventure.
[00:08:59]  Right.
[00:08:59]  Build, build, build.
[00:09:00]  There's something over the next hill.
[00:09:03]  And everybody participated in that in this country.
[00:09:07]  Not just the people in the covered wagons, not just the people who were building the railroads, but there was somebody back home who was building spikes that went into the railroad.
[00:09:19]  Everybody sort of had some share in the national project.
[00:09:23]  And the idea that a country, a civilization, needs to be able to, A, agree on what that goal is, like, is almost foreign to the way we act as a country now.
[00:09:38]  But if we want to be able to sort of sustainably, it's a funny word to use, but you know, in order to be able to sort of sustainably achieve what we understand as the American dream over the long term, we really need to figure these things out.
[00:09:53]  And what I like, I don't use the term intentionally, like rebirth or restart or return.
[00:10:00]  I think we need to inaugurate.
[00:10:04]  In other words, we need to begin again an age of American.
[00:10:09]  It's not your new birth of freedom speech.
[00:10:11]  It's no, it's not that.
[00:10:12]  No, it isn't that at all.
[00:10:14]  I feel like, and this is like a little critique for my own side, which is I think we're often too backwards looking.
[00:10:22]  There are a lot of great things in our history.
[00:10:24]  I am sympathetic with that argument.
[00:10:26]  Yeah, but like we're not going to go back to 1790.
[00:10:30]  We can't.
[00:10:31]  We can honor 1790 and we should, but we need to continue doing what those people in 1790 did, which was built.
[00:10:39]  You know that we are too backward facing, where in every political convention or conversation, our own included, 50% of the speakers mention World War II.
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[00:11:54]  America and the art of the possible restoring national vitality in an age of decay.
[00:11:58]  Chris, we were talking about World War II and the hearkening back to.
[00:12:02]  Yeah, I mean, everybody brings up World War II.
[00:12:04]  I mean, you bring up this good point: is that so often there's these sort of reference points, which are appropriate, right?
[00:12:12]  Don't get me wrong about these.
[00:12:13]  We sort of have these reference points with, and they're often wars, right?
[00:12:16]  The War for Independence, the Civil War.
[00:12:20]  For some reason, the War of 1812 gets George.
[00:12:22]  It was remarkably heroic.
[00:12:24]  Totally heroic, yeah, but it gets no love.
[00:12:27]  But then you get World War I gets no love.
[00:12:29]  World War II gets a ton of love.
[00:12:31]  And people talk about it all the time.
[00:12:33]  And this sort of goes to my theme in the book about the Capacity for Collection Act, collective action.
[00:12:39]  In other words, what are the big things that a country, our country, or any civilization can agree that they need to do because they're good, because it's an existential necessity, whatever it is.
[00:12:52]  And World War II was maybe the last really big thing this country did.
[00:12:56]  I would argue maybe that Apollo, the moon landing, is but even that is not at the same scale as World War II, obviously.
[00:13:04]  It was very precise.
[00:13:05]  It was a smaller group of people.
[00:13:07]  There was national agreement, but it was probably a couple thousand people that were involved in that project.
[00:13:12]  It was a few thousand people, many of whom were, you know, had been involved in World War II, you know, sort of famously that NASA, NASA imports, the German rocket program.
[00:13:22]  So people from both sides of the war moved to America or were already here to came here and participated in this big project, which was legitimately a huge project.
[00:13:32]  But what my argument here is in the book is that people hunger for that.
[00:13:39]  Like it is a necessity for a country.
[00:13:42]  And what we a lot of times are seeing with the political polarization, political tension, and friction that occurs in the country is that that's sort of an outgrowth of the fact that we don't have a big national project.
[00:13:57]  The example I use, or one of the examples that I use in the book, is that very often there have been religious motivations behind big civilizational projects.
[00:14:08]  And you think about all of the big monuments that have been built around the world.
[00:14:14]  They are very often religious artifacts, effectively.
[00:14:18]  Think about like the pyramids, the Sphinx of Giza.
[00:14:21]  The oldest pyramid was built in like 4,500 BC.
[00:14:25]  The Sphinx was built around 2500 BC, so like a thousand years before the Iliad.
[00:14:30]  The Mayan temples, you have just Stonehenge.
[00:14:34]  There were all these huge projects, the ziggurats of the Sumerians and the Akkadians.
[00:14:39]  These are massive projects that required really, you know, huge logistical feats, organization, but also buy-in from people.
[00:14:48]  And we wind up, you know, you go to Egypt, what do you see?
[00:14:51]  You see the pyramids.
[00:14:51]  You go to Europe, what do you see?
[00:14:52]  You see cathedrals.
[00:14:54]  One of my favorite examples that I cite in the book about how a people can undertake a very long-term project and why they do it is you have the Duomo, the cathedral in Milan.
[00:15:07]  So this cathedral is construction is built.
[00:15:10]  I've been there.
[00:15:10]  It's spectacular.
[00:15:11]  It's unbelievable, right?
[00:15:12]  It's like it is one of these, like it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site for a reason.
[00:15:17]  It's underrated in the Italian portfolio.
[00:15:19]  I could not agree with you more.
[00:15:20]  I was there in 2019 before COVID, and it's just like what you, it's one of those things where it exceeds expectations.
[00:15:27]  Like your expectations up here, but what you see is actually up here.
[00:15:31]  It was begun in 1385 or 1383, I think.
[00:15:35]  They finished construction in 1965.
[00:15:38]  Okay.
[00:15:39]  It was 600 years to build the cathedral from beginning to end.
[00:15:43]  And what did they do when they finished?
[00:15:46]  They began the restoration.
[00:15:47]  Like that project is ongoing since the late 14th century.
[00:15:51]  By the way, that site is built upon a very early Christian site from the Roman era.
[00:15:56]  But the cathedral itself was a 600-year project to get from groundbreaking to, okay, ribbon cutting or whatever.
[00:16:04]  And then they just started saying, okay, well, we continue on because like the stained glass is old and like this thing has been weather worn or whatever.
[00:16:13]  And there is buy-in in Milan, in Italy, you know, and Milan has changed hands during that 600-year period.

=== Glorifying God Through Art (06:47) ===

[00:16:23]  Everybody agreed that that was something that was important.
[00:16:27]  Now, some of those people were Christians and some of them weren't, but they thought it was important regardless, and they continued to do it.
[00:16:36]  And that is the sort of social cohesion that makes a civilization successful over the long haul.
[00:16:45]  I want to explore this.
[00:16:46]  I think this is really interesting.
[00:16:47]  I'm a big believer in the tactile and the physical.
[00:16:50]  I think that Christianity, obviously I'm a Christian, so are you.
[00:16:56]  Modern Christianity is very focused on the invisible, and that's okay.
[00:17:00]  The Old Testament, though, is a very tactile, tangible religion, right?
[00:17:06]  And I think we lose part of that, which is part of what we are doing, in my opinion, to glorify God, should also be building temples, cathedrals, works of art, music, statues that glorify him.
[00:17:20]  Because things that you could physically see, what the Old Testament equivalent of the tabernacle or the Shabbos or the Kaddush are ways that you could physically be able to keep what is holy and sacred.
[00:17:32]  That's an interesting thought to explore.
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[00:18:36]  For those of you that listen to our podcast with regularity, you know that I have been bashing against Gnosticism.
[00:18:44]  And we don't have to go too far too deep down that rabbit hole.
[00:18:47]  However, it does tie into our conversation.
[00:18:48]  Chris, you wanted to pick this up about glory be to God, to do big things in the physical world that glorify God.
[00:18:54]  Yeah, I think this is actually super important.
[00:18:57]  Just to sort of recap, you know, one of the things that has always and every place united civilizations is some common religion.
[00:19:08]  Now, I know, like, probably not with your listeners, but for some people, when they hear that, it makes them itch a little bit because they think it means like intolerance or pogroms or something like that.
[00:19:17]  Obviously, that's happened in the past, but you think about like places like, I know Rome, like the Roman Empire or something, you know, Rome was actually pretty tolerant, particularly by ancient standards.
[00:19:28]  Correct.
[00:19:29]  Yes, were they intolerant of Christians?
[00:19:31]  Sometimes is the answer.
[00:19:32]  It depends on who the emperor was.
[00:19:34]  Dependent on who the emperor was, but Christianity within the Roman world was kind of unique because Rome's typical standpoint with foreign gods was just incorporate them.
[00:19:45]  Yep.
[00:19:45]  The problem with Christianity for Rome was like Christ can't be incorporated into the pantheon.
[00:19:51]  Yes.
[00:19:52]  He did wind up, as it turns out, taking over.
[00:19:55]  Constantine, I think, eventually allowed Christ to take over everything.
[00:19:59]  Right.
[00:20:00]  So, but you think about like what has motivated people to do these big projects and hold these civilizations together.
[00:20:06]  We talked about Egypt and we talked about the Sumerians and we talked about obviously Christians, but it goes any place in the planet.
[00:20:13]  Like there's these massive Buddhas built all over Asia, which are these big problems.
[00:20:17]  Mind-blowing.
[00:20:18]  Mind-blowing.
[00:20:18]  Yeah.
[00:20:20]  But the point I think that you were driving at is really important is that, you know, America is a country that has a Christian heritage.
[00:20:28]  It has a, if you sort of take all Christians, regardless of denomination, as a single block, as a country that has a Christian plurality, and it has Christian ethics, like even there's even a version of like very left-wing ethics, which are sort of secularized Christianity, which is, by the way, a bad idea, right?
[00:20:49]  Because when you take the Christ out of Christianity, it becomes really abusive.
[00:20:53]  My point here is that when you do things to glorify God, and I think this was a point you were driving at, you can undertake these big projects.
[00:21:03]  We were talking about the Duomo, the cathedral in the center of Milan.
[00:21:07]  People were trying to create a work, and they did, in fact, create a work of unimaginable beauty, creativity.
[00:21:16]  Even when you get down below just the very sort of high element of it, that's the beauty.
[00:21:22]  You think about the people whose, their job was to organize it, the logistics.
[00:21:26]  Like that was people using the talents that they had been given in order to do everything, you know, for Christians think about the world this way, you do everything in order to glorify God, as unto him, as scripture says.
[00:21:43]  And these are things where we should not be bashful about building things in the physical world that are good, that are beneficial, that are beautiful.
[00:21:54]  What would be more beautiful if the Bible tells us looking on the face of God, which we can't now, but we will after the glorification and the consummation.
[00:22:05]  But to do these things with a conscious attitude that they are being done not to glorify the maker, meaning the person, but to glorify the creator.
[00:22:18]  That's a good thing.
[00:22:19]  The Latin phrase is sole deo gloria.
[00:22:23]  Bach and Handel, before they wrote a musical note, wrote that on the top of every single one of their pieces of music.
[00:22:33]  And essentially what they were getting at is we're going to have this point towards something.
[00:22:39]  It's going to point towards the glory of what is absolutely good, true, and beautiful.
[00:22:44]  Why is our art so terrible now?
[00:22:46]  It's not pointing towards anything.
[00:22:48]  And so, Chris, you mentioned something.
[00:22:49]  I want to get kind of back to some of these themes of the book.
[00:22:52]  You say the social trust thing, I think, is the most interesting point you make because some of this is, you know, really profound.
[00:22:59]  All of it's profound, but I think that's the one that's really interesting and collective action.
[00:23:04]  If everybody has their own truth, how on earth could you ever get towards a purpose of collective action?

=== Revitalizing Puerto Rico (05:08) ===

[00:23:11]  This is the problem, right?
[00:23:12]  This is exactly the problem.
[00:23:13]  And so I was talking with a friend yesterday about this who had just been reading the book.
[00:23:18]  And he says, well, how do you, he hadn't gotten to the second half, right?
[00:23:21]  The first half is the problems.
[00:23:22]  The second half of the book is sort of my attempt at solutions.
[00:23:26]  He says, well, like, what do you, like, what's the solution?
[00:23:28]  He's like, tell me, I haven't gotten there yet.
[00:23:30]  So, like, one, I want to temper expectations.
[00:23:33]  Like, I don't have the solution because I don't think there is a single like silver bullet that says, like, oh my gosh, we have all these problems.
[00:23:41]  If we just do this, it's going to be fine.
[00:23:42]  Like, I think that's too simplistic.
[00:23:44]  But what I did was, is I went through things that are very concrete that are achievable.
[00:23:48]  I would try, I'll give you an example in just a second because social trust is very important, but you don't get a country of 330 million people that spans like this massive continent that goes from sort of dysfunction and polarization.
[00:24:03]  And then it's kind of like the internet thing.
[00:24:05]  With this one weird trick, we got everybody to have social trust again.
[00:24:10]  But rather, what I put forward in the book is plans that I think are like audacious but achievable so that you can have that sort of functioning and that sort of trust and those sort of big goals, but things that you can do at a meaningful but still kind of small scale.
[00:24:26]  So one of the examples that I use in here in the book is I propose building new cities in the country and that these cities, like brand new de novo cities, like Sahilo, out of nothing.
[00:24:38]  Out of nothing, but that they should exist within a different purpose-built political rubric so that they would have, they would exist within the United States.
[00:24:52]  They would exist under the rubric of the Constitution, but they would be given a pretty broad latitude to try different things.
[00:25:02]  And I have talked to a couple of people about this and sort of they scratch their head.
[00:25:06]  They say, like, that's not possible.
[00:25:07]  There's not even an analog to that.
[00:25:09]  And to which my answer is, actually, there's a few analogs to this.
[00:25:13]  One of which is in the Holy Roman Empire, there were so-called free cities.
[00:25:16]  There were like 100 some odd, maybe 150 free cities.
[00:25:21]  And they operated, you know, they were within the empire.
[00:25:24]  They owed allegiance to the emperor.
[00:25:27]  They had to pay taxes.
[00:25:28]  If there was a war, they had to send troops.
[00:25:30]  Or if they were attacked, the empire would protect them.
[00:25:33]  There's sort of all these basics, right?
[00:25:35]  But they were, in a way, in a way, they were sort of similar to Hong Kong.
[00:25:40]  Like they would, you know, they had different trade rules.
[00:25:42]  They were able to be very much self-governing and they created their own sort of systems that were very specific to their hybrid system.
[00:25:51]  And they say, ah, okay.
[00:25:52]  People say, okay, well, that was a long time ago, Chris.
[00:25:55]  I don't know if you could do that today.
[00:25:56]  Say, ha, but there's actually an analog within the United States now, and that's Puerto Rico.
[00:26:01]  And Puerto Rico, again, everybody in Puerto Rico is a U.S. citizen.
[00:26:06]  They pay federal taxes, though, at a much lower rate than people on shore do.
[00:26:10]  They exist.
[00:26:11]  They have all the rights of the Constitution, which are protected by the courts, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:26:16]  But they have a much lower regulatory burden and with it, particularly within certain industries.
[00:26:23]  And that's actually an opportunity for Puerto Rico.
[00:26:25]  Like, I know people on the left try and say, you know, Puerto Rico needs to be a state because it's bad for the Puerto Ricans and it's not fair.
[00:26:32]  And in actuality, it's actually pretty good for Puerto Rico.
[00:26:35]  Like, that's, they've got a great deal.
[00:26:38]  And there are, there are businesses in Puerto Rico that are just really in the past maybe five or 10 years have realized what a good deal they have.
[00:26:45]  And there's these burgeoning industries down there.
[00:26:48]  But my point about the cities is, you know, like these are just analogs, right?
[00:26:52]  To show what's possible.
[00:26:53]  Like, if you, if we were to say, let's build a new city wherever, and I don't really care if it's in New York, Blue State, Texas, Red State, California, Blue State.
[00:27:04]  Or Kansas.
[00:27:05]  Yeah, or in Salinas, Kansas.
[00:27:07]  The act of doing that in and of itself is a good thing that shows that we can undertake big projects.
[00:27:15]  You talked about Constantine in the Roman Empire.
[00:27:17]  What did he do?
[00:27:18]  He split it, East and West.
[00:27:20]  He split it east and west.
[00:27:21]  Out of necessity, too.
[00:27:22]  It wasn't all.
[00:27:23]  But he built a new city.
[00:27:25]  He built Constantinople.
[00:27:26]  And the people became Istanbul, yeah.
[00:27:27]  Right.
[00:27:28]  Stood for hundreds of years.
[00:27:29]  Stood for hundreds of years.
[00:27:30]  It was a big project that showed the strength and the vitality of that civilization.
[00:27:36]  Hagia Sophia lives to today.
[00:27:38]  It's actually one of my examples in the blog of that.
[00:27:40]  I was talking about things that were built.
[00:27:43]  So the Hague Sophia was a church and that it is now a mosque.
[00:27:47]  And in between, when Turkey was officially secular, it was a museum for many years.
[00:27:52]  But there's even under all of these different regimes, there was an agreement that it was something beautiful and that it should be preserved.
[00:28:00]  Yeah, and I, let's, let's explore that together.
[00:28:03]  We live in an ugly country right now.
[00:28:06]  The art is ugly.
[00:28:07]  The music is ugly.
[00:28:08]  The people are increasingly ugly.
[00:28:11]  Is that part of the national revitalization plan?
[00:28:15]  Aesthetics matter.
[00:28:17]  Let me say that.
[00:28:17]  Aesthetics matter a lot.

=== The Truth About Fats (08:58) ===

[00:28:19]  I talk about the, we talked at the beginning of the show about the physical aspect to vitality.
[00:28:25]  Yes.
[00:28:26]  There is a national version of that, the whole country.
[00:28:29]  There's a personal version of that.
[00:28:32]  Like if we want, this is one of the projects I say the country should undertake.
[00:28:36]  Like we should state as a national priority that the median age of an American should be 100 and we should try and do that within 50 years.
[00:28:44]  Wow.
[00:28:45]  That's like semi-insane to say because it's 75 now and it's been declining.
[00:28:52]  But it's only semi-insane.
[00:28:54]  Like it's just crazy enough to say, okay, we should actually take a hard run at that and we should be devoting resources to that.
[00:29:00]  And not only do we want Americans to be living to 100, we want them to be healthy in their old age.
[00:29:06]  It is achievable.
[00:29:09]  And to your point about the aesthetics, if you are living older and you are healthier, you will look better, right?
[00:29:18]  You have to take care of yourself.
[00:29:21]  And that contributes to a culture of beauty.
[00:29:26]  Yes.
[00:29:26]  And that's something that I think is important because people are happier.
[00:29:30]  We talked about France earlier.
[00:29:33]  France, BMI there on average, much lower.
[00:29:37]  They do not have the obesity epidemic that we have here.
[00:29:40]  Smoking is an appetite suppressant.
[00:29:41]  It is.
[00:29:42]  It's a strong appetite suppressant.
[00:29:44]  It's awful for you, but it also is an appetite suppressant.
[00:29:49]  Yes, it is.
[00:29:50]  Because I'm thinking about the, it's awful for you.
[00:29:53]  Like, yes, it is.
[00:29:54]  Carcinogens are.
[00:29:55]  No, it is.
[00:29:55]  It's a real thing.
[00:29:56]  It's arguably bad.
[00:29:57]  That does do stuff to you.
[00:29:59]  No, I agree.
[00:30:00]  I'm not going to be the thanks for smoking guy, right?
[00:30:02]  You got to be the thanks for smoking.
[00:30:04]  But I will say, for some people that are morbidly obese, I think it would be better for them to be doing a pack a day than to be eating saturated fat and McDonald's and Burger King.
[00:30:16]  We believe in science here on the Charlie Kirk show, right?
[00:30:19]  Just look at the data.
[00:30:20]  Over the past 50 years, smoking has declined.
[00:30:24]  Obesity has risen.
[00:30:25]  I know that I guarantee you.
[00:30:27]  You get accused of correlation.
[00:30:29]  Yeah, I don't know for sure.
[00:30:30]  I'm going to be getting the correlation and causation memes in my Twitter feed in like five seconds.
[00:30:34]  I get it.
[00:30:35]  I get it.
[00:30:36]  But like something obviously changed.
[00:30:38]  It's a proven appetite suppressant, though.
[00:30:40]  Anyone who has smoked in their life will tell you that a substitute for a meal could be a cigarette, where now it's a crispy cream donut or a Big Mac.
[00:30:51]  Your body is demanding some form of sensory saturation and nicotine with some, you know, let's just say what becomes a dopamine rush and a noreperephine rush is actually a pretty good substitute instead of I'm going to just fill my body with caloric serotonin.
[00:31:10]  So let me take that one step further.
[00:31:13]  Eating has become an activity.
[00:31:15]  Yeah.
[00:31:15]  It's become a hobby.
[00:31:17]  So you're talking about like with the thing with smoking, like people sort of get bored and want to do something with their fingers.
[00:31:21]  If they smoke, they just smoke.
[00:31:22]  But there's people who just say they just start eating.
[00:31:25]  And not only are they eating more what they're eating, like industrial food is just demonstrably bad for you.
[00:31:35]  I did not anticipate this hour to be talking about what the potential downsides to the war on smoking would be.
[00:31:42]  But Chris, you had a thought on this?
[00:31:45]  Yeah, I'll bundle up.
[00:31:46]  Gosh, a bunch of thoughts on this subject.
[00:31:48]  Ida, look, the, I guess the point I wanted to drive at was like we sort of focused on the smoking, which is, I think it's, it's fun because it's, it's at least partially true and it's super provocative.
[00:32:00]  So it's fun to do.
[00:32:01]  It's probably contrarian.
[00:32:02]  And again, I personally hate cigarette smoke.
[00:32:05]  I've never smoked in my life.
[00:32:06]  So I'm an interesting defender of it.
[00:32:08]  Yeah.
[00:32:08]  Because I actually think it's obnoxious to be around.
[00:32:12]  That's my own take.
[00:32:13]  Yeah, nobody likes, like, the thing about secondhand smoke is that like it doesn't give anybody cancer, but it smells bad.
[00:32:18]  So it's like, it's like it's annoying, but not dangerous.
[00:32:21]  Yeah.
[00:32:21]  And so let me just make sure my position is clear.
[00:32:24]  I just don't want to be around your cigarette smoke.
[00:32:26]  But if you have a choice between morbidly obese or a high-functioning cigarette smoker.
[00:32:31]  That's an easy one.
[00:32:32]  And the morbid obesity, like this is, this is another part of my argument is, and this, and this, like, you think about the big projects the United States should undertake if we want a country that is both working together on something that's important and beneficial, but it's where are we getting our food and what are we eating?
[00:32:49]  You and I have talked about this.
[00:32:50]  A bunch.
[00:32:51]  A bunch.
[00:32:52]  We've talked about this because it's so important is, you know, like there was a conscious decision made in this country in the early 70s to industrialize American agriculture.
[00:33:04]  I think there were good reasons for it, to be honest with you.
[00:33:06]  Like, I don't want to sort of be Pollyanna and come along 50 years later and say, like, you mean, you wanted to make sure people had enough to eat?
[00:33:15]  Gosh, you're a bad person.
[00:33:16]  Like, the Secretary of Agriculture who undertook this project was a Republican.
[00:33:20]  His name was Earl Butts.
[00:33:22]  He came out of, you know, he grew up on a farm.
[00:33:25]  He came out of that world.
[00:33:26]  And I'm super sympathetic to the idea, the reality that for most of human history, the major problem with food hasn't been obesity.
[00:33:35]  It's been people starving.
[00:33:37]  It's been people not getting enough to eat.
[00:33:39]  That's correct.
[00:33:40]  Well, now 14 million kids are morbidly are obese.
[00:33:42]  I don't know if morbidly, they are obese.
[00:33:44]  Yeah, and there'll be some set of those that are morbidly obese.
[00:33:47]  It's like the percentages with adults are horrible.
[00:33:52]  There's, I think the number is something like 40 or 45% of Americans are obese and something like maybe 20% are morbidly obese.
[00:34:02]  The food itself, we talked about the smoking, the appetite suppression, but the food itself is garbage.
[00:34:07]  It's void.
[00:34:08]  These high fructose corn syrup, these seed oils.
[00:34:10]  The seed oils with the linoleic acid, which is inflammatory.
[00:34:13]  It causes inflammatory disease.
[00:34:15]  The pyramid, I think, is a conspiracy to make America fat.
[00:34:18]  It's just, it's basically based on the idea that you should just be eating grains.
[00:34:23]  Carbohydrates are way overrated, especially grain carbohydrates.
[00:34:27]  Right.
[00:34:27]  Grain carbohydrates are the worst form of carbohydrates.
[00:34:30]  You're going to need all you need carbohydrates in your diet.
[00:34:33]  You have three ways to nourish yourself, proteins, fats, or carbohydrates.
[00:34:36]  If you ask Americans which one's the worst for you, 90% would say fats.
[00:34:39]  When in reality, good fats are actually the best thing for you.
[00:34:42]  Are very good for you.
[00:34:43]  Yeah.
[00:34:43]  That's right.
[00:34:45]  It's funny.
[00:34:45]  There's this, there's one of these reality shows that my wife and I watched like a year ago.
[00:34:51]  It's called Alone.
[00:34:52]  And the point of the show is like, they put you alone in the wilderness someplace and it's like a competition show.
[00:34:57]  And you get to bring like, I don't know, two matches and like nail clippers or something.
[00:35:02]  Who can live the longest and just live off the land?
[00:35:05]  And it just always strikes me.
[00:35:07]  We watched like three seasons of it, but I love these reality shows.
[00:35:12]  Everybody's always saying on the shows, we need to get more fat in our diet or we're going to die.
[00:35:18]  There's a great, got a great story.
[00:35:20]  It's actually tragic of some of these guys that were in the back mountains and all they ate was rabbits.
[00:35:25]  Yep.
[00:35:25]  And they died.
[00:35:26]  Tons of protein, zero fat.
[00:35:28]  Zero fat.
[00:35:29]  I mean, when you, some of these folks who like on this show, and this, I think, goes to the idea of like, what's actually good for people?
[00:35:35]  What's necessary when they, when they're hunting, the first thing that they eat, which is what, you know, traditional people would eat, what do they like?
[00:35:42]  What does the chief get?
[00:35:44]  The organs.
[00:35:45]  Yes.
[00:35:45]  Right.
[00:35:46]  They're nutrient-dense.
[00:35:47]  There are fats, and you need those for your body to function.
[00:35:51]  Weirdly, just as an aside on this, one of the strategies on the show to win is there's certain people who will try and gain a huge amount of weight before they start the show.
[00:36:00]  So they just store fat on their body and then they feel like they don't have to eat.
[00:36:03]  And one of them actually won after gaining like 100 pounds and just let himself sort of wear down and wore everybody else out.
[00:36:10]  But the point is, the point for what we're talking about here is that the idea that you are being healthier by just chowing down on grain carbs is just false.
[00:36:22]  You can go with almost zero carbohydrates.
[00:36:24]  They're largely unnecessary for daily function because your body can turn fat into energy.
[00:36:29]  Correct.
[00:36:30]  Protein you need for obviously muscle growth and for development of hair and anything that has amino acid-based.
[00:36:38]  But we now have carbohydrates as the basis.
[00:36:41]  Some people say, well, exercise needs carbohydrates.
[00:36:43]  No, it does not.
[00:36:45]  You can exercise at a high level with just fats, and that's where you get your body into ketosis.
[00:36:50]  We're out of time, Chris.
[00:36:51]  Sorry.
[00:36:52]  America and the art of the possible restoring national vitality in the age of decay.
[00:36:56]  We are going to bring back fats and smoking, and there's nothing you can say about it.
[00:37:00]  Chris, God bless you, man.
[00:37:01]  Thanks a lot.
[00:37:04]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:37:05]  Email me your thoughts as always.
[00:37:06]  Freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:37:08]  Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
[00:37:13]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.