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Oct. 2, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
37:41
Ask Charlie Anything 162: The Roman Legacy? AOC's Tesla? 4-Day Workweek?
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roman Empire Architecture 00:09:38
Hey everybody, happy Monday.
How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
Blake Neff, producer of the Charlie Kirk show, goes off on Rome and so much more.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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It has been a long month this week.
Dennis Prager, Arizona State University, traveling over.
So I've asked the brilliant Blake Neff.
Say hi, Blake.
Hello.
And Blake, we have a lot of questions here, but I thought it was just a perfect question to have you join when a young lady says, how often do you think about the Roman Empire?
Now, so Blake, fill our audience in on this internet phenomenon.
Okay, so we talked about this on Thought Crime, which if you guys don't watch ThoughtCrime on Rumble, definitely check it out every Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern.
Yes, and download the podcast.
So we talked about this last week.
This went viral on Twitter, X, I guess we call it now.
I can't get over that.
Instagram, all the other places, where some woman basically discovered, she's like, you know, I asked my husband, like, how often he thinks about the Roman Empire, and he replied, like, every week or so.
And, you know, this blew her mind.
You know, she probably hasn't thought about the Roman Empire ever.
And so she's like, ladies, is this true?
Like, are men thinking about this all of the time?
And the answer is yes.
We are.
We are thinking about it all the time.
Like, multiple times a day all the time.
Yeah, yeah.
I could maybe miss a day here or there.
And then they made this a topic.
Now it's just, we're, I can't escape the Roman Empire.
Well, so first, you know more about Roman Empire than like the Roman Empire than like professional historians, which I think we should riff a little bit.
Can you name all the emperors in order?
All of them in order.
I could probably get pretty far.
So like Augustus, Octavia.
Augustus.
Octavian is Augustus.
Then Tiberius.
Augustus, Tiberius.
And then I lose it, then like Caligula.
Caligula's next.
Oh, is that right?
Okay.
All right.
Tiberius Caligula.
And then Nero is somewhere in the next three or four, right?
Claudius.
Okay.
Nero.
Oh, so I wasn't too far off.
Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Tetus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Pius, Marcus Aurelius, also with the last of the good emperors, Commodus.
Commodus.
Yeah, I got that.
And then he gets choked out by a wrestler in the bath.
Not making that up.
And so then it's...
Otherwise known as Joaquin Phoenix, by the way, for those of you keeping score of it.
And then we get Pertinax.
That's an obscure one.
Pertinax.
At this point, it was after Pox Romana.
Yeah, this is where it's starting to break down.
And so then we have Pertinax, then we have Didius Julianus.
Just so you guys know, he's not reading a screen.
Yep, no, no, I'll turn the computer down there.
Didius Julianus, then Septimius Severus, and then Geta Caracalla, our brothers.
Caracalla kills his brother, Gaeta.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.
I don't actually read Latin.
I just have to read translations like a normie.
Get a Caracalla.
And then, okay, now it starts to get tough.
And then I think it's Elagobalus.
No, we have Macrinus, then Elagabalus, then Severus Alexander.
He gets murdered by his soldiers.
And then things get really kooky.
And if you read the lists, it's like it's all inconsistent.
You know, we have guys with weird names like Pupianus, Pu Pupiana, Pupianus, that's a dumb name.
And then like Gordian 1, 2, N3, Philip the Arab.
I can't.
Now this is where the order breaks down for a while.
It gets really...
So the females are stunned that we think about the Roman Empire so much.
Why do men think so much about it?
By the way, incredibly impressive play.
Very impressive.
Maybe people disagree.
They're like, this is a sad person.
I think it's amazing.
I could name like five, which I think it's more than most Americans.
But I mean, why do men think so much about the Roman Empire?
Well, so it's a lot of things.
Like men, I mean, we love it.
Like, it is like the apex of everything that men aspire to build.
It was an institution that was the bedrock of civilization for a thousand years.
You know, it's what we still aspire to today, what still, you know, what still gives shape to our society today.
Like, what is the most common religion in Western civilization?
It's Christianity.
Who adopted Christianity?
The Roman Empire.
What form does our government, I mean, you know, our republic is publica for 400 years, right?
Res publica.
That is a, you know, a Latin Roman term.
And it's, you know, what architectural style are we imitating?
We're imitating Greco-Roman architecture.
If you go to D.C., it's basically little Rome.
Yeah, like, and like what created what drove the Enlightenment, a huge proportion of it is essentially aspiring to what these ancient Romans and ancient Greeks wrote about and did.
The Renaissance was a rediscovery.
The Renaissance, the rebirth, was the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman learning.
And then the Enlightenment was sort of a continuation of that.
All of these guys would say, you know, like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, all of these guys would read these ancient Roman political thinkers.
Cicero, for example, one-year Roman Council had a huge impact on the founders.
Exactly, exactly.
And so it's very much the model they would look towards both for good and bad things.
It is the cultural template that we operate off of.
You could almost say like we're in Judeo-Christian Roman civilization, if you wanted to.
Yeah, and it's forgetting the male-female part of it, because we've been through that macro-micro.
Men are more focused on history and philosophy, women more focused on relationships and feelings, poetry, stuff like that.
That's not a sexist thing, it's just a fact.
But so what I find interesting, though, is that when people say Rome is the goal, what does that mean?
And by people, you mean when Jack tells us that Rome is the goal?
Well, so it is, obviously, men do love the idea of building.
Is this like the Bronze Age thing?
A little bit like that.
You know, we love to build things that endure.
And, you know, we love to imagine what would the United States, you know, we feel like the United States is in decline.
And the Roman Empire declined and fell, but it lasted a very long time.
That's the amazing thing.
477 years, right?
It had a run of 500, 600 years where it was the most powerful, important thing.
People, by the end of it, they couldn't imagine a world without Rome.
It had never existed.
No one could imagine a history of what it was like before Rome was a thing.
That's how much it shaped everything.
And for thousands of years afterwards, that's what they wanted.
We'd have these pale imitations.
In the Middle Ages, they had the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire wrote, was like not holy, not Roman, not an empire.
It actually was all three of those things.
But that's another matter.
And because they were just to a Middle Ages person, they were like, this is Rome restored.
We are the Roman Emperor in their bad, pale understanding of it.
And, you know, even when they're found in the United States, a lot of them would view this as like, oh, this is our, you know, our restoration of the ancient republican principles of Rome.
Like, that's always the goal, is to create a state and society that can be as robust and enduring as what happened 2,000 years ago.
And it's all really cool.
Like, they fight all these wars, and there's all these inspirational, like, moral fables that you get from Rome, which we mostly get because all of their history gets burned up, and we have like one book left, and it's like Roman propaganda and stuff.
And meditation.
Exactly.
And some stuff like that.
But, like, you know, they fight this war against Hannibal.
And there's a battle where the Romans lose the Battle of Cannai, where 60,000 Romans die in one day, which would be like, imagine if we fought a war with, you know, Britain or Germany and, you know, 2 million U.S. troops get killed in one day with the president and a third of Congress in like North Carolina and he's like marching on Washington.
And like, that is what happens to Rome.
And like they don't make peace.
And according to the histories, they don't even think about making peace.
Like, it doesn't even enter their mind.
And they just, they just tank right in the face.
Like, they're a boxer who does nothing, get punched in the face, and they keep going.
And that just is the sort of thing that if you're a man, you're like, wow, those guys are awesome.
Not to mention the architectural achievements, aqueducts, architecture, the domes, right?
The arch and the dome.
So the pantheon.
Everyone wants to imitate this.
So there's.
It is the standard still of architecture.
The famous thing is the Duomo in Florence, Brunelleschi's Dome.
It was the first dome they made in 1,500 years that was bigger than the dome of the Pantheon.
And when the Ottoman, when the Muslims take over Istanbul, their big thing is we want to be able to build a dome that is as large as the one in Aja Sophia, which had been built a thousand years before then.
And all of these achievements.
And it's like, how many buildings do you know from a thousand years ago?
Not really as many as we have from Rome 2,000 years ago.
Empowerment Through Weight Loss 00:03:40
I want to stay on this because I think it's super interesting.
There are some misconceptions about the fall of Rome that you correct sometimes.
Yeah, there's a few of them.
And then I also want to talk about how did they get so great, so excellent, such an outlier?
Because I think that's interesting.
Was it the form of government?
Some people say it was the nutrition.
Have you ever heard that theory?
That they were able to have such reliable agrarian base in a time when food was largely scarce?
I don't know if that's true or not.
Blake Neff is with us as we do our Ask Me Anything episode.
How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
I think about it.
I have a bust of Marcus Aurelius in my office.
If you don't know who Marcus Aurelius is, you should.
He was really special.
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Rome's Fall and New Capital 00:04:30
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Here with Blake Neff.
He can name all the Roman emperors.
He went to Dartmouth and he's single.
And he's taking.
We're taking applications.
I'm not going to give up, Blake.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
But that's not what we're here to talk about.
Blake, what are some of the lies, some of the misconceptions?
Sometimes we find them, our guests will pepper them in, and you say, no, that's not true.
What are they?
So a big fascination of Rome is like the fall of Rome.
And everyone's like, is America falling the same way Rome did?
Are we the late Republic?
Are we the late empire?
And one that does come up a lot is there will be this idea that the Roman Empire fell because it was incredibly morally dissolute.
I think it's part of even like the Nixon tapes where, you know, he goes off to Henry Kissinger or something.
He's like, homosexuality, destroyed them.
And he says something like that.
And what's fascinating to me is like, it's not that that drives them into the abyss.
And that's why I sometimes like to say what's impressive with Rome isn't that they fall.
Everything falls.
What's impressive with Rome is how long they last.
And when they are falling, they actually are, you know, we talk about how Christianity is a legacy of Rome.
And they actually convert to a very puritanical version of the world.
Of the Eastern Christian Empire, right?
Like King Justinian, right?
Emperor Justinian is a big one for that, but it is like...
His conversion, which is unclear.
Constantine.
Constantine converts.
Okay, but was Justinian a Christian?
He was.
Justinian, but this is earlier for him.
This is how long Rome is.
Justinian is 250 years after Constantine.
So, you know, in the 300s, there's a big civil war in the Roman Empire.
Byzantium is created, effectively.
Byzantium is a city that is in Eastern Rome, and he, Constantine, builds a new city, Constantinople, on modern-day Turkey, which is now Turkey.
Yep.
And it's Istanbul today, still a huge city.
But this is the nerve center of the Roman Empire for hundreds and hundreds of years afterwards.
He kind of builds a new capital.
He shifts the power center east.
He builds it as a more consciously Christian city.
So there's these big churches that he builds in it.
Eventually we get Aja Sophia.
That is now the, well, it's still Aja Sophia.
It is a mosque now.
Don't lose wars.
Don't lose wars.
It's a mosque and name only.
Yeah, well, now it is unfortunately a mosque actually.
They're practicing math.
I didn't change it.
It was a museum.
And then sort of they have a more kind of Islamic government in Turkey now.
And so they've taken a lot of these musicians.
Under Erdogan, right?
Erdogan, yeah.
So there was Aja Sophia and a few others.
They've made them mosques again.
And so he adopts Christianity.
And kind of what's very compelling and I think noteworthy is Christianity takes a very long time to really entrench itself in the in among the masses.
The word pagan actually comes from a word for like rustic farmer because those were the people who remained pagan for so long in Rome.
Whereas it's like it's elites actually who adopt Christianity, like the imperial class, the people around the imperial family, the people becoming bishops.
And it's kind of, I read a book on it earlier this year called The Barbarian Conversion.
I can't remember who wrote it off the top of my head, but that's the name of the book if anyone wants to look it up.
And it's just these, you know, these elites in the Mediterranean world just think Christianity is the coolest thing ever.
And they spend a thousand years pushing it everywhere they can.
It's like very inspiring.
Like, why does Ireland become Christian?
Well, this guy in the falling Roman Empire, Patrick, he's kind of, you know, it's still Roman Britain at the time.
He's a Christian, and he's like, I have to go spread Christianity to Ireland where I was enslaved for a bit.
And they're doing this all over the place.
And so Rome, you know, it is unfortunate it's falling.
But it is actually, they adopt Christianity as like this unifying measure as the empire is sort of fraying apart at the seams.
And this becomes like their state ideology, even as Rome is crumbling apart.
And that's actually what makes Rome kind of so enduring for us is even after Rome is gone, this, you know, the faith that they adopted Christianity is still what binds these very different groups together.
So, you know, Rome still matters today.
Why does Rome still matter today?
Because that was where, you know, the Pope was, and that was the unifying figure for all of Western Christianity for 1,500 years.
And so I think it is too dismissive to say like Rome fell because it was just ultra immoral.
Like, you know, our entire moral code derives from Rome.
Is it true that there was like an immigration problem, the Visigoths?
That is a much better example.
Christianity Binds the Empire 00:09:13
Is that fair?
And how about the inflation that they deteriorated there?
They did both those things.
So those are good comparisons.
Those are good comparisons.
Yeah.
The immigration, so they don't have immigration in the way we necessarily.
But they had loose, relaxed borders with foreigners pouring in.
They were loose borders.
Kind of the big moment, actually, if you want to really compare it to today, in I think 409 or 410, there's a civil war in Rome, and they pull the legions along the Rhine, like they're the troops who guard the border of the empire.
They get pulled back to fight in this civil war.
And these Germans just bust the border and they just run into France.
And after that, it takes 50 years for it to really fall.
But after that, that's when it's kind of all over for Rome.
You know, they've let too many people loose in the interior.
For 400 years, the Rhine River was like the border between civilization and barbarism.
And they let all the barbarians over.
And after that, it's like their army is all barbarians.
They would just recruit these barbarians into the army.
So the quality of the army goes away.
The unity of the army breaks apart.
No one's loyal.
And that's really what breaks them apart.
So enforce your borders, everyone.
That's what kills Rome.
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So, Blake, I want to go to other topics here, but I just want to make sure I what are the major lessons then from the fall of the Roman Empire?
I mean, you say enforce your borders, the inflation, the other one.
So, the sexual degeneracy is not a strong argument, you don't think that's it would actually be the opposite.
Like, they're super degenerate in like the early Roman Empire, you know, like Tiberius does live on this island with all these.
Caligula was super sick, and then, you know, they had 400 years of, they had a good run after that.
Yeah, so they're actually far more pious.
But what about this idea that there were the Roman bathhouses and like young boys being raped a lot?
I mean, is that just like mythology of it?
Existed.
I mean, you know, this is a period, it is before Christian morality.
Christian morality definitely is more like sexually pagan for sure.
It is sometimes overblown where, like, you know, like everyone, it'll be like everyone was like gay by default unless, you know, they would only have women for babies, that sort of thing.
And it's actually kind of funny.
Like, even the ancient Greeks, there's actually a split where you have the people who are like okay with it, and you have a lot of Greeks who are like, this is gross.
And they would write these things attacking it.
You mean like that boys are for pleasure and women are?
Yeah, and you know, because they would discuss, it's actually, a lot of it is actually kind of like the groomer stuff today, where like, you know, they'd be like, this person's a famous teacher, but, you know, like, they basically, you know, say the ancient Greek equivalent of like, well, but he like molests his students, so he's like not looking out for the good of them.
And you'd have other guys writing defenses.
Like, that's just a, you know, that's a lie.
Like, we don't actually do all of that.
That's like the New York Times.
Yeah, basically.
And, you know, it goes back and forth.
It's very funny how that.
But, you know, the key thing to take away is like, you know, don't outsource your military to a bunch of foreigners.
Don't let your border fall apart.
Don't inflate away your currency.
And figure out how to run your government and don't have a civil war every 10 minutes.
Was there something also, so the other comparison is Bread and Circuses, this idea of the Coliseum games being a distraction, comparing that to like NFL football or that comparison?
Do you think that's fair?
I think that's, I mean, at the, you know, as the Roman Empire is falling apart in the 300s, like the biggest thing everyone cares about is their stupid chariot races in the amphitheater.
Yeah.
Or Justinian is this guy who launches a campaign to reconquer as much of the empire as he can.
And he does pretty well.
He does very well, but an early blow that almost knocks him out of power is there is a chariot.
Like there's two factions, like the kind of two big sports teams of ancient Rome, is the blues and the greens.
And like their riots cause all these problems.
And eventually they team up and launch a huge riot.
And he finally puts it down by just sending in the army and killing everybody.
So imagine if you just had like a Washington, they're the commanders now, the Washington Redskins have a game and they decided to like overthrow.
It'd be like if the Washington Redskins decided to like do a January 6th and then they had to kill everyone and like pretty, pretty hardcore.
And so you look historically, you know, the people in the academy will say, but there's other ancient civilizations that don't get as much attention as Rome.
You guys are white supremacists.
Is there a civilization that was ever as influential, excellent, and enduring as the Roman Empire?
They would say, oh, the Chinese Empire, but I mean, it.
Nothing, certainly nothing for the West, which is like, okay, that is our heritage.
The West is the best, though.
The West is the best.
The West is, I mean, it is not merely like Rome itself was so enduring, super, super long-lasting.
I mean, ignoring, you know, the West falls, like, the Eastern Romans, they just keep going for another thousand years.
And all of that influence weighs on us.
You know, the religious legacy, the, you know, the state.
Well, you can make the argument Rome never actually fell.
It just, the energy transferred into a thousand different ways, right?
It's just, it just, it is, it is the bedrock of our civilization.
Like I said, Judeo-Roman, you know, Judeo-Christian Roman civilization.
It is those two together.
If you were to make a hypothesis, how did they get so excellent?
What did they do?
Was it, how did they go from Romulus being a regional guy to everything that was discovered controlled by Rome?
How did that happen?
You know, you could debate that even longer than you can debate why.
Debate, I'm asking him.
I'm just asking.
I don't know.
It is very difficult to answer that.
I would say, I mean, some of it is really just they were really good at fighting and they won over and over again.
In Rome, in Rome, you gained status by winning, by being a successful military commander.
And they were like the most militarized society ever.
More than Sparta, you know?
They had a temple.
Yeah.
More than Sparta.
They had a temple, the Temple of Janus, what January comes from.
I think it was Janus.
And they would open the door.
It was like they'd open the door anytime they were at war and close it when they were at peace or vice versa.
I mix up the details.
It was always open.
It was always open.
From when we have Roman history to when the Republic falls, Rome is almost permanently at war because that was how you gained status in Rome.
It was like you'd have to lead a successful military campaign.
And very importantly, you could only get the really cool things, like a triumph, where they would basically give you a parade and talk about how awesome you were if you like gained territory for Rome from like off an enemy.
And so if you've ever seen the HBO show Rome, they have a triumph for Caesar where they take these the Gauls, the ancient Frenchmen that he captured and they parade them and they strangle them and do all this like messed up stuff.
But that was how you gained all the respect, the dignitas in Rome.
But it was very diffused.
So like you had a republic.
So normally in a system, the only guy who gets credit is like your emperor, your king.
But in Rome, anyone could become the consul, as they called it, which is kind of their equivalent of the president.
They're one-year president.
Yep.
And you only have one year.
So you've got to make it count.
And so you have a lot of people who are incentivized to be soldiers, be successful soldiers, be successful soldiers quickly.
And that was how you gained honor and status.
And I guess, you know, you don't really want to imitate that necessarily because we don't want to be at war all the time.
That causes huge problems.
Yes.
But they also did war differently, right?
They did.
Without being brutal, they didn't really care about rules of engagement.
Yeah.
And I think the way you maybe have an equivalent today is like you gained status in Rome by serving the state and also like offering things up to the state.
Like they didn't have this massive budget, you know, where you didn't take other people's money and use it to do things.
You gained status in Rome by I, a rich citizen, pay for these things.
Like what was the start of Bread and Circuses?
A rich citizen would put on these games in the amphitheater for everyone to show how awesome they were.
Or they would pay for the graindole that they would hand out to people to show like I care for the poor.
That was how you gained status.
It was kind of like an ancient equivalent of Bill Gates giving away his money, but he would imagine if Bill Gates spent all of his money on Americans instead of on, you know, I don't need to go into what Bill Gates does.
Modern Status and Service 00:10:22
All right.
For more on Rome, well, you just got to follow Blake.
Blake doesn't have social media.
He's like a shadow.
He just comes and he goes.
But follow Thought Crime for more on Rome.
I find it interesting.
Email is freedom at charliekirk.com, and that is freedom at charliekirk.com.
Okay, let's go to another question here.
AOC.
You ever meet AOC?
I have never met AOC.
Okay.
Heard much about her.
Ask about her Tesla.
Let's play Cut Three.
You were quoted back in July saying you look forward to buying a union-made electric vehicle, but you buy, but you currently have a non-union-made Tesla.
UAW already makes some electric vehicles.
Why wasn't that?
Is it a problem with the quality?
Is it a problem with the style?
Is the market just not there?
No, our car was purchased during the pandemic when travel before a vaccine had come out.
So travel between New York and Washington, the safest way that we had determined was an EV, but that was prior to some of the new models coming out on the market that had the range available.
But we're actually looking into trading in our car now.
So she's funding Twitter X. I'm very grateful for that, I'll say.
And so she said she's trading in it.
But there's a whole thing.
I want to talk about Elon with you because this is a good segue.
I'm more pro Elon than most people on the right because he pursues excellence and he produces actual value.
What I love about that clip is AOC's little, she's ideological, but the market will always win in the sense that even the most ideological person wants excellence.
She just can't help it.
She wanted the Tesla because that's the thing.
Because it's the better product, regardless of Elon's politics.
And didn't AOC tweet something out like, I'm never going to buy a Tesla again?
She still owns the Tesla.
If you have excellence, you kind of have an ability to say like, F you to your politics, right?
Elon almost has outgamed the game in that way.
He is a remarkable figure.
And I just, I know a lot of people are anti-Musk.
And I just, I feel like you, in a way, he's almost like Trump, where there's like positive and negative aspects to it.
But like, more importantly, you like, you live in Elon Musk's world.
Like, he's just such a dynamic figure.
Yes, no, that's true.
That's a good point.
That there's kind of, we live in kind of this almost kleptocracy where like five or six people control like everything.
But in his case, it's like it's so deserved personality-wise.
Like it'd be one thing if he got lucky off one company and you're like, okay, he's a smart businessman, but we can't categorically say he's smarter than some other businessman.
But this is a guy who got rich off PayPal and then he got richer off Tesla and even richer off SpaceX.
And he also is one of the first investors in one of the big AI companies.
And now he's buying Twitter and making this like the, he's like the most, as you said, the most important like private sector purchase in American history.
And when you said it, I was like, oh, that kind of sounds crazy.
And then I was like, what's more important?
Like Jerry Jones buying the Dallas Cowboys?
But no, I mean, and he's kind of going to make, he's going to make Twitter X a success.
Yeah.
Like he's going to make it happen.
And he really, it's like there's an entire industry of trying to explain like, why is Musk successful?
Kind of like with Trump again, where like, because he breaks all these rules.
And you're like, there's so many things that Musk does where you're like, okay, objectively, that seems not smart or like that was a mistake.
Like he doesn't bat a thousand.
He actually makes mistakes all the time.
And yet, you know, three years later, oh, he's even richer than before and he's super successful.
Much like Trump, you know, like we're like, oh, that Trump tweet wasn't good.
That Trump thing seems like a strategic error.
And he's going to win the nomination again.
He'll be president again.
And so there are a lot like that.
And they're both also alike.
And they're sort of difficult to corral.
And that is clearly what makes the regime despise Musk so much.
And that, I think, is why we have to be at least mildly disposed towards him.
Because if he upsets the right people, he makes the right enemy.
I love big risk takers.
I don't like people that just ride off beds all day long and complain.
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So many questions here, Blake, that we are kind of pouring through here.
Let me try to find one that pertains here.
Okay, let's go to this one.
I think this is a good one.
Charlie, do you think that we should go down to a four-week workweek, four-day workweek?
It's an interesting question.
Let's play cut 30.
One of the other items that labor workers are asking for more controversially is a four-day work week with five days of pay.
Would the president support that?
Does he think that's right?
Well, again, he supports them getting a record deal.
He and the administration are not at the table, right?
We're not part of the negotiations.
We're not doing the numbers.
That's for the companies and the unions to do.
But what the president is making clear is that he is leading an economy where people need to, as he says, where the economy needs to grow from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down.
Okay, so you know, gay jet GPT aside, right?
The guy's an automaton.
It is an interesting question, though, Blake.
Would America be better if we had four long workdays than five skimmed, mediocre, dreaded workdays?
I would personally like that.
Like four, just yeah, four.
Like if you just told me, yeah, like if we did, you know, if we did the Charlie Kirk show.
In at seven, out at like 6:38, like seven.
Yeah, it's long days.
Yeah.
And then, but then the other ones are off.
Yeah, I would, I think I would prefer that.
I think a lot of people would prefer that because there's like such a sunk cost to any day that's a workday in terms of like psychological like, you know, effort you need to put into it.
Yes.
Decompressing after work.
Just the commute.
You know, the more times you have to commute, the more time you put into that.
But it's very telling to me because it's just obvious, like a lot of jobs just can't as easily work that way.
Like anything that requires the ability to just handle so many people coming in, like a medical office or something, like is going to need to be open more often.
Or a show.
Okay, are we only going to make four episodes of our show if we're a live show each week?
Right.
Or each day.
And so it's like very telling.
I feel like this appeals the most.
Like the idea of like, oh, I'd rather have only four days of work rather than five probably appeals the most to people who kind of really only have one day of work a week.
And then they're also just physically present in an office the rest of the week.
I'm open-minded to it, but I just, I don't know.
What I'm not open-minded to is just further making America a lazy country.
That's what I, that, for six days you shall work, one day you shall rest, is what the scriptures say.
Here's another question.
Charlie, did you see the Hunter Biden, I'm sorry, the Joe Biden impeachment, Hunter Biden hearings?
I want your thoughts.
Blake, I know you're probably still catching up on this.
Lackluster, right?
I mean, lackluster to say the least.
Do you disagree?
They're definitely not so far not succeeding in the objective where, you know, we've talked that, okay, we can't make Joe Biden be removed from office.
The Senate will not convict him, even if we impeach him.
So the value of this is not looking like it's PR.
It is PR-based.
It is that we force people to talk about what Joe Biden has done, what Hunter Biden has done, what Hunter Biden has done on behalf of the big guy, Joe Biden.
And we force people to just know about this by making it a big story.
And, well, so far, they've been blacked out by the media, which that's difficult to engage with.
But they've even looked silly while doing it.
You know, they've had witnesses who are just like, well, I don't really think impeachment is warranted yet.
Why are we doing this?
Like, you need to make sure that if you're going to do it, that it's very damning.
And there didn't need to rush it out.
Like, right now, you know, as we discuss this, they're doing the 9:30 thing that might be over by the time they hear this.
But, you know, there's no need to rush this because it's essentially a 2024 issue.
You could have done this in the spring.
You could do this in the summer.
Just make sure that you do it right and make sure that the evidence is very robust.
Don't rush it out.
Don't do it to like get your, you know, one, you know, your nice article in.
Or a five-minute soundbite, right?
Make it very, I mean, but yeah, you're right.
So if it is, if it is something that we think we're running against Joe Biden, wouldn't we want this to crescendo in like June or July of next year?
Exactly.
And, you know, look to the left for inspiration here.
Where they think about the discipline it required for the left, where everyone wants Trump to go to jail.
They all want to prosecute him.
And everyone has the incentive to be the first one to do it.
Yes.
And yet they didn't get any charges out till after the midterms.
They sat on it for two years.
And I think the cases against him are weak, but they spent that two years making sure it was as strong as they could make it.
So, you know, if you're Jack Smith, they put in the effort to make it look very bad for Trump on January 6th or whatever.
And, you know, and then they got it out so that this trial and everything about it will crescendo at the exact right moment, early next spring, into the summer, possibly into the fall.
And we need to think that same way with our stuff.
You can't just pop off and not be ready to roll.
Blake Neff, everybody.
Email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
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We will be in San Jose.
I think Blake's coming with us.
You can come say hi.
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Building a Strong Case 00:00:16
It's the best.
He's got a great smile, doesn't he?
Jiminy Christmas.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
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