The True Meaning of Wealth — My Interview on the Iced Coffee Hour Podcast
Graham Stephan and Jack Selby's Iced Coffee Hour podcast has become one of the most popular podcasts discussing business, entrepreneurship, politics, health and more, and they recently had Charlie on as a guest. They discuss how Charlie built TPUSA from scratch, the top three things he would change in America, what society gets wrong about wealth, the Gen Z religious revival, and more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
They interview me about dating, about marriage, about investing, and more.
Happy Sunday, everybody.
Email us as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
Get involved at turningpointusa at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
Thanks to Alan Jackson Ministries for your continued support.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
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.
That's why we are here.
Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
That is noblegoldinvestments.com.
It's where I buy all of my gold.
Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.
Charlie Kirk, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour.
Thank you, guys.
I'm a big fan.
I've seen a lot of your clips, and so it's great to be sitting down.
That means a lot.
In 2012, when you were just 18 years old at the Republican National Convention, you approached billionaire Foster Freeze.
Yes, I did.
And you asked him to help you out with your idea, Turning Point USA.
What was the conclusion of that conversation?
And what did that teach you about life and risk?
Wow, it's a great question.
So I was just recently graduated from high school.
I wanted to go to West Point before that.
Didn't get in.
And it ended up being one of the greatest things that never happened to me.
And so I went to the Republican National Convention.
I studied like all the major donors.
I had to kind of like sneak my way into the RNC grounds, if you will.
And I, after the fourth day, I was so demoralized.
I was like, oh, this is not working.
I have this idea for Turning Point USA, which basically the idea was to try to win over young people around conservative ideas.
And I was in a stairwell, literally a stairwell.
And so, and then I saw Foster Freeze doing like a podcast interview with this major cowboy hat on.
And I gave him the stairwell pitch.
You know, people talk about the elevator pitch.
I gave him a stairwell pitch.
And he told a couple jokes.
He was the sweetest, most godly, incredible person ever.
He actually took me seriously because here I was 18 years old, no money, no connections, no idea what I was doing, and no reason that he should be listening to me.
And this guy, for the people that know, Foster Freeze started from nothing in rural, I think it was like Rice Lake, Wisconsin, became like the top mutual fund manager for like 30 years, the Brandewine Fund out of Delaware, like legendary stuff, right?
So he's someone that gets pitched all the time.
His life is to listen to pitches.
10 times a day, top companies would come in and try to pitch Foster Freeze.
Can you have your couple billion dollars assets under management to buy Coca-Cola or to buy United Airlines?
He's constantly getting pitches.
So here I am pitching a guy, a legend about, you know, this organization that I wanted to start, Turning Point USA.
And he took me so seriously.
And he wrote me a $10,000 check.
And that was like the seed funding.
It wasn't shares.
It wasn't like equity.
It was just a donation because we were 501c3.
And it might as well have been $100 million, right?
It finally was enough for me to be able to start a website to have gas in the car.
And yeah, then from there, the journey just started and he became a bigger and bigger donor.
What do you think he saw in you?
Well, he probably saw someone that was passionate enough and crazy enough.
And honestly, he probably saw someone that was really like naive to a great extent that I still wanted to get into this like broken political space, but I didn't know any better.
And in Foster's own words, he said he saw someone with focus and determination and a Midwestern work ethic.
So he was from Wisconsin.
I was from Northern Illinois.
So we kind of had that in common.
And look, I live in Arizona now and I love Arizona, but I have like a huge Midwestern bias.
I think Midwestern work ethic is like the best on the planet and nothing against other people in the country, but there is something very special about how we're raised in the Midwest and kind of that idea that we're going to outwork everybody.
And that's always been who I am.
I'm going to do more events and more speaking and more podcasting, more radio interviews and more donor meetings.
And that's kind of been the ethos.
So yeah, I mean, I don't want to put words in his mouth.
He passed away, unfortunately, a couple of years ago.
And so, but no, he was a great friend.
And you asked the question, what did it teach me about risk?
Risk in life.
Yeah.
Well, honestly, I had nothing to really risk because I had nothing to lose.
And so that's like.
Well, it's, I mean, that's a nerve-wracking thing.
A lot of people are presented with opportunities to talk with someone, get their foot in the door for some opportunity.
So what are you losing, though?
Like your own, like getting over the embarrassment of rejection.
But like, that's not losing anything, right?
I mean, that's in life.
If you think about it, like, okay, if you're actually, if you're second mortgaging your house, like some entrepreneurs are, I don't have like one of those stories, right?
I'm sure you guys talked to some of these people.
I was on the second mortgage in my house and I couldn't feed my kids.
That's actually not my story.
That is something to lose.
This is like the only thing you have to lose is your own sense of comfort.
That's kind of weird when you think about it, right?
Oh, I'm not going to ask that girl out.
Why?
Well, because I'm comfortable in my own corner.
Comfort will not bring you success, actually.
It won't bring you excellence.
Like only in that place of uncomfort and discomfort do you actually get to the next level.
So why know this?
So why do so many people believe the exact opposite of that?
That they feel like that's a big risk for them to go and do that.
Like, why don't more people think like you?
Because I agree with you, I think.
First of all, like, I mean, it is risk in the sense that we as human beings do desire comfort and we want to kind of be in a place where we can have certainty above uncertainty and going and asking a question or going and asking a top billionaire for money, you have the probability of failure.
And we are very failure verse as a species.
And honestly, we should be.
Like you think about 5,000 years ago, you have, you know, two kids and you're living in like Mesopotamia and you're like, well, I hope there's food over that hill.
And if you're wrong, your whole family could die.
So like that's embedded into our species, right?
God designed us in a way where there was not a lot of food all the place.
So now you kind of extrapolate that kind of genetic wiring where we used to be in the wilderness to Foster Freeze.
And you think you're like, wow, Foster tells me no, my whole life's going to actually, no, you're going to be fine.
Like you could go and still eat food and you're not going to die.
And so I think we have to overcome our genetic hardwiring where so many people think that it's like a life or death situation.
I can't ask this girl out.
I can't go ask for a raise.
I can't go to my boss.
I can't assert myself.
And you have to overcome that because it's actually not that much risk.
Now, what is risk is like if there's a material or a reputational thing you're putting on the line.
Like, for example, if like you're working for a company and they're like, you know, you're not allowed to express your conservative views and you're like, all of a sudden wearing a MAGA hat, that's a risk.
Like, I totally get that.
But if you're 18 years old and you have no money, no connections, no idea what you're doing, I had nothing to lose.
And that's actually one of my main arguments for like why we have so few entrepreneurs nowadays.
We have less and less.
Entrepreneurship rate, entrepreneurship rates are going down is we're sending all these kids to college and they're telling you to be risk averse.
Like the whole incentive structure in college is to not pursue big broad ideas is actually to stay rather cloistered in place.
Speaking of that, that's where I first found your content was you on the college campuses Debating.
When did that start?
And what was the most surprising aspect of that?
Yeah, so I've been doing that for 13 years.
I haven't been doing that on camera for 13 years.
And so, look, the Lord has been so amazing to us and has blessed us in amazing ways.
And so I never would have imagined, like, honestly, ever since I met Foster Freeze, that we'd be somewhat of kind of like a household name.
I don't want to overextend it, but I mean, there's some serious virality and some real punch behind what we're doing.
So I started doing that without even filming it.
And so that's what people are like, you have to, and that was before like mass social media is 13 years ago.
It was still there.
Honestly, I should have filmed it.
It would have gone like their trajectory probably would have been even faster.
But 2012, right?
Yes.
I mean, like, because that was like a raw internet and like it would have been really interesting.
But that's how you know I actually believe this stuff is I used to go and debate kids when there was no incentive structure for virality.
I just did it because I loved it and I love the battle of ideas.
And I did it to try to start like a turning point group on campus.
And so I've been doing it for 13 years.
We started filming it around 2017.
We started perfecting the model really around 2021.
And then 2023 is when all of a sudden it kind of became a somewhat a culture phenomenon.
And then of course the last year seems like I can't get out of people's algorithm.
So you mentioned that you like the battle of ideas, but one thing that I tend to notice is that whoever has stronger rhetoric, persuasion skills, you know, quick on their feet, quick on their toes, that's going to be the person to win the argument, the debate.
Do you feel like these debates have turned into a battle of ideas or just who has stronger rhetoric?
That's a good point.
I actually have to think, I think about that a lot.
So I try to do a couple things and I fail.
But if you notice, I've, in the viral videos, I try to put my microphone down literally physically on the table when the person is asking their question because I want to try to give them uninterrupted time to be able to make their argument.
Number two, there is an advantage that the person coming up to the mic has that they're allowed to ask any topic and I don't know what that topic is going to be and they could prepare profusely on it.
But you're right.
Of course it's advantage to the guy that does it for a living, right?
But understand, like I have to go to a college campus and defend ideas that are in the minority of a lot of these kids' worldview.
I have to go to college campus and argue against abortion.
Most kids are not against abortion.
Right.
Have you ever had your mind changed from one of these college campuses?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, so mine changed is in over a period of time, probably, yes.
I would say that I definitely have grown respect for like the thoughtfulness of a lot of international students when it has come to the Russian-Ukraine war.
Like definitely, like I'm very against U.S. involvement, but like talking to, and they're all public, you can watch them, like very thoughtful German students and like very thoughtful students from Eastern Europe.
Like for them, it's a very existential crisis what's happening.
And so like to hear that was something that was very, let's just say different than what you would hear just on like the usual American political landscape.
But yeah, no, look, I'd say over, I would say that I learn a lot too.
And that's what's important.
I do 100 hours of this a semester, 100 hours.
In addition to two hours of podcasting, radio, right?
250 speeches a year.
I got to raise $130 million a year and I got a thousand employees.
I got a lot going on, right?
I still do 100 hours of content a year.
So 200 hours of campus content.
And I'm not just like, I try and I fail.
Everyone would fail at this, but I try not to just be ready to say what I want to say next.
I try to really learn and listen.
And then I try to listen back to the footage.
And so this is one of the reasons why it's a little bit unfair when I go to these campuses because I've been doing it for literally a thousand hours and these kids are like a college, you know, freshman.
So I try to have at least somewhat of a teacher role to them and try to be a little bit softer.
Unless if they're coming after me and they're like insulting me and you've seen it, right?
Like they're just being like totally blitzkrieg.
It's nice because I feel like you do tend to do that where they might have a hard time articulating a certain philosophical argument, but then you take it for that strongest, you know, derivative or representation of that strongest philosophy.
And I try to do a better job of that.
So look, I look, everyone fails, right?
I mean, look, sometimes it's like 98 degrees outside and I didn't sleep well because my kids were up all night.
And like, it's like the ninth time they're asking me about Israel.
And I love Israel, but I'm tired of answering questions in Israel.
Okay.
Like, I love it.
It's fine.
Like, it's just, but this is not the debate Charlie Kirk on Israel hour.
And I'm like, can we add, can we have another topic here?
And I might get a little bit miffed.
Who wouldn't, right?
I mean, that's just human.
But I will say, like, I try to meet you at the frequency you're at.
So if they're coming after me and they're like insulting my appearance or whatever, like I'm going to, I'm not going to let myself get run over.
But if a liberal student comes and they're like, hey, I really seek to understand this or help me know, or I try to, I try not to like pummel them, if that makes sense, because at least I think that's effective, right?
Now, if they come with like a uniquely grotesque idea, then I'm going to try to expose it to the audience and to the online community.
But no, look, I learn a lot and I hope the audience does too.
And I mean, the physical crowds are now 3, 4,000 people almost every time we do this.
Now, in those cases, when have you found that college is really worth it for someone?
Yeah, it's a great question.
So I'm a big proponent of Hillsdale College.
So Hillsdale, I think, is America's greatest college because it's what college should be, which is it's the development of the soul and character.
So character is one of the most important things that you can invest in when you're 18, 19, 20, 20 years old.
And I guarantee you, if you go to most colleges, they're about preparing you for your career, but they're not about preparing your character.
And character is really, really important, right?
Character literally comes from the Greek word tattoo or to etch into you.
Character will define every decision, right?
From what you eat to what you drink, how you communicate to people to the decisions you make, way more important than whatever you have a skill.
Having a skill is important.
I'm not diminishing that.
But wouldn't, I mean, if you guys are building a business, wouldn't you rather have people of high character, high skill?
Of course you want people of high character.
Skills can come.
Character is the hard thing.
And so I think that we as the college world has done a really bad job with developing character.
They don't even prioritize it instead.
Why?
Why do you think it's failed so many people?
Well, those are two separate questions.
So why do they not teach character?
Well, first of all, they don't think that's their reason for existing.
Most of them, it depends, like the super left-wing colleges, which is most of them, they're all like, we're here to create global citizens for an ever-changing world, like some sort of pablum.
Or they're like, we want to have you very specific, you know, skill.
Like we want you to be able to like turn a widget, which by the way, if AI replaces that job, what do you have?
That's a cool thing about developing character.
Like if AI replaces jobs, you still have the most important of all things, which is you know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, beauty and ugly, right?
You know the difference between the most, the high things and the low things.
Like that's what we should strive for in higher education.
That's why I think Hillsdale does a great job.
But yeah, most, I mean, if you want to become a doctor or a lawyer, of course you have to go to college, right?
You still have to go through this ridiculous environment of left-wing social indoctrination.
But I will say, though, that I've debated all around the world, though, I debated at Cambridge and Oxford, all across the country.
The other problem is that they're not in the pursuit of wisdom.
And this is one of the more important things.
Like if you ask a regular college kid, what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?
They like they'll just trip over themselves.
And it's not a semantic thing, but semantic means meaning, but it's not a semantic thing.
It's actually important.
Knowledge is just facts.
Like, okay, I know the capital of, you know, California, Sacramento, whatever.
Wisdom is the knowledge of things that never change.
It's the understanding of things that never change.
It's like, what is human nature?
What does it mean to be a good person?
What is beauty?
What is goodness?
What is the best way of living?
What is a society in its fullest form?
Is it good to have children?
Wisdom is understanding that is even playing with the idea, like, is there a God?
Like, who are we?
How did we get here?
I think that's what college should be all about, is the cultivation of wisdom.
As a Christian, we believe wisdom starts with the fear of the Lord.
But yeah, I mean, I don't mean to talk uninterrupted for 10 minutes straight, but yeah, I think that college has completely derailed its purpose.
In terms of college as an application for the average person, I think it's really interesting.
Ben Shapiro claims to be wealthy in America, you need to do three things: graduate high school, get a full-time job, and get married before you have children.
Oh, yeah, and he's right.
And that's the Brookings Institution.
He's right on all three.
Do you think he's missing anything?
First of all, I like Ben a lot.
We disagree on some big things, but Ben's great and he's been a good friend for a while.
Yeah, I would say like become a person of high character.
Again, I'm going to kind of go back to a main thing.
Do you think that that is essential to be wealthy in America?
That's a good question.
I don't think being wealthy is that important.
Like, do you want to be wealthy of the soul or just have like a bunch of money?
Well, that's that would be a different question, but I guess I mean, like, the question is, fine, if you want to be rich, I can tell you how to get rich.
Like, that's actually not that hard.
I mean, you would get rich, like work relentlessly and solve a problem for people and like dedicate your entire life to it and like become an insane person.
Do you think it's possible to still do all of those things, though, and then not become rich?
Of course, but like if you, if your whole reason for living is to become rich, you will become rich.
Most people that think like most people I meet that want to be rich, they actually don't want to be rich.
They want to have the lifestyle of being rich.
They don't actually want to be rich.
They're like, you have to sacrifice everything to want to become actually rich, unless you're born into it.
Like, no nights, few weekends.
I traveled 3,000 days over a decade.
I'm a million-miler in American Delta United.
I'm in all 50 states multiple times.
Like, it's thankless, gritty work.
Like, Shapiro hosted two radio shows, plus like Breitbart.com and Truth Revolt.
Like, not easy.
So, if you actually want to be rich, then there is a path for you.
You have to like sacrifice immensely.
I don't drink alcohol.
Like, Tucker Carlson doesn't drink alcohol.
Donald Trump doesn't drink alcohol.
That doesn't mean that, like, you can't be rich if you don't drink alcohol, but you must sacrifice stuff.
Now, it might be that you create a good widget or like you might a good social media app, or you might get good venture funding.
But even those guys will tell you you have to fail a lot.
You have to sacrifice a lot.
You have to be really gritty.
I just challenge the premise of like, what is the most important?
Like, I think if getting material wealth is the most important thing, I think there actually is a playbook for that.
That absent of like committing crimes, like being a really crappy person, being sociopathic, it depends also what you define as rich.
Like, there is a way forward for if it's your number one reason for living to earn $500,000 a year.
Like, that's very conceivable in America.
But if you're like, hey, actually, the most important thing is to have kids, which I think actually think having children is more important than having material success.
And I have both.
And I can tell you kids are way better than having money.
Like, honestly, not being poor is awesome.
That's like the best thing I could tell you.
Like, being super rich, and I'm not super rich, but I would consider to be successful under American terms is great.
But up to a place, it's kind of like, you know, you're blessed.
You're wealthy.
It's fine.
Not being poor is the true blessing.
Not worrying about like medical bills or being in debt is like really bad.
But yeah, it depends on what you want.
If you want to be rich, like actually like have your bank account big, then America, of course, you can do that.
How much of people being poor is their fault versus just the circumstances of their life?
It's both.
It's very case dependent.
A lot of it is agency.
So we as conservatives tend to blame free will, agency, and the person a lot more than circumstance.
But of course, circumstance play a role.
Of course it does.
We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries.
And today I want to tell you about a book by Pastor Allen that you'll want to read.
It's called God Bless America again.
It tells the truth about our history, how our nation was formed on biblical principles, and the importance of protecting our Judeo-Christian foundations as we move forward.
God has given us an assignment to bring our faith into our world today.
And here's the catch: it starts with focusing on our own attitudes.
When you take time to understand how God has consistently blessed America, pouring his grace and mercy on us over and over again, it will give you hope for the days ahead.
We cannot afford to forget our past, good and bad, or we will forfeit the best opportunities of our future.
God bless America.
Again, this book will sharpen your perspective on what it means to bring God's truth into our nation today.
Allen Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring back biblical truth back into our culture.
Go to alanjackson.com slash Charlie for free shipping on God Bless America.
I love what I learned from Alan Jackson, and you will too.
AlanJackson.com slash Charlie.
Why do you think conservatives generally stay silent on wealth inequality?
Well, I don't know if we're silent on it.
I mean, I think that we're finally starting to talk about it.
I'd say that we would say that don't throw rocks at the top of the building, fix the elevator.
So the question shouldn't be like how many rich people are.
The question is how easy is it to move up the socioeconomic ladder?
That's the more important metric.
And that's actually becoming harder.
So that's a really important conversation.
But I could probably agree with a liberal that it's not good to have like an entrenched permanent oligarchy that's running the country and that people have to go into debt and go into credit to pay for their groceries.
Like I actually don't want to live in that country.
So I can agree that we should talk about it more.
But is there anything like inherently wrong with a billionaire?
No, like most billionaires actually have solved big problems for us.
Like, you know, people love hating on Elon Musk.
I like Elon a lot.
He's become a friend.
I know there's been like a lot of social media talk about it, but I refuse to say anything negative about Elon.
Like, okay, you tell me the next time you're able to launch a rocket and land it.
Like, actually, that's pretty cool.
Like, okay, you're able to revolutionize the electric car industry.
Like, you deserve a lot of money if you do that.
One of the things that I've been confused about is why financial literacy is never taught in schools.
Like, you think that this would be something taught throughout middle school, high school, college.
Why is that?
I mean, if you want an actual conspiracy theory, that's the best evidence of a conspiracy.
If you want to have people remain super poor and dependent on the government, don't teach them financial literacy.
It's inexcusable.
And who do you think is in charge of that?
No, I'm not.
Like, I'm just saying, like, I don't know who's like the designer of that conspiracy.
Right.
The incentives are aligned.
But I'm just saying, like, if you want a generation to like have to go to the payday lending people, and if you want to have them like filling out credit cards at 25% interest, don't teach financial literacy.
I don't know who, I mean, it's convenient.
I'm a big school choice advocate.
I think that we need school choice.
I think the public sector teacher unions and the public sector cartel have done a huge damage to this country.
But yeah, I mean, look, there's how many young kids right now that are 17 can tell you the difference between credit and debit?
They can't.
It's one of the things I like about Trump's upcoming big, beautiful bill is that every new baby born in America will get a $1,000 loan from the federal government in, I don't know if you guys know about this, but in a investment account that they can't touch.
They're 18 invested in the Dow Jones Industrial Average that they'll be able to monitor throughout the 18 years.
I think it can be grown by philanthropists, family members, grandparents.
So they'll actually be able to see their wealth increase.
They're stakeholders.
So if we have two kids, if we have another kid, that kid will immediately have an investment account that's only a one-way Dropbox.
You can't access this money Until you're 18.
So it actually creates ownership units for the next generation.
I think it's a funny thing.
I wish they did that with Social Security.
Oh, of course they should.
We were told it was a lockbox and it wasn't.
Of course.
But no, I mean, look, there's, so if you want like the secret to get rich, it's actually like not super hard.
It's like live below your means, save your money, invest in good companies, and then find good ideas and read a lot, like read a lot.
If you just read a lot and you understand, like all of a sudden you'll see trends and you'll be well informed.
Again, I don't want to make it seem like it's super easy, but it's, it depends what you define by rich.
But I'll say one final thing.
People are so bad with money.
Like, again, if you, if your top priority is getting drunk, okay, then go do that.
Like, I know a lot of people, they're like, I want to be rich.
I spent $700 going out this weekend.
Like, oh, yes, you don't want to be rich.
Okay.
You want to feel good and you want to have a bunch of, you know, toxins go through your liver, but you actually don't want to live a life of happiness and contentment.
And if you want to, if you, I'm not a moralist.
If you want to drink, go ahead.
It's a free society.
Go do that.
But then don't all of a sudden complain to me that you're not materially wealthy.
It just seems like it's such low lift to make a huge change in terms of wealth inequality if there was just one course taught in high school about financial literacy.
And so like, let's just say hypothetically, I'm just a casual viewer of, I mean, I've been watching for a very long time.
How difficult would it be for you to just, you know, reach out to Trump or reach out to someone and be like, what do we got to do to put some incentives into the school system to teach financial literacy?
Well, you know what?
It might hurt a lot of businesses if people were smart with their money.
Oh, it would totally be the credit card companies would freak out.
They would freak out.
Could you imagine like Visa and Masters?
Apple people are asking questions about 25% interest.
I mean, how difficult would that be?
I mean, is there just way too much interest out there?
No, no, no.
It would just be difficult.
It's very hard for the federal government to control curriculum.
But to imply incentives.
Yeah, the states should do it.
Like, there have been some ideas to do this.
I know that there's big companies that have tried to do this because they're like, oh, yeah, we're giving money towards financial literacy.
I'm sorry.
Like, it's not working.
Whatever you guys are doing, it's not working.
Okay.
Whatever program you think that's going on in financial literacy, you guys are all a failure.
You should all be shut down because it's just not working.
Because I deal with the next generation.
They know kaputs about financial literacy, like very little to nothing.
And this is one of the things that I just want to caution everybody about, which is like, I'm very, very pro-crypto, but I know a lot of people that have lost money on crypto.
I'm sure you guys, I'm very, very pro-crypto.
I think there's a huge opportunity.
I think it's incredible technology more than anything else.
But like the best way to build wealth is over long periods of time, saving money and doing boring stuff.
It's not get rich quick.
It's not big meme coins, right?
It's not big spikes.
It's just going to work, saving money and living below your means.
I know that's not the sexy answer everyone wants, but that's what Warren Buffett did.
Warren Buffett's one of the world's wealthiest men.
He started with like very little money 70 years ago.
And the eighth wonder of the world, you know, the eighth wonder the world is compound interest.
Compound interest.
And no one wants to hear that, right?
They want to hear about like, what's the next NVIDIA?
Okay, I don't know, but I can tell you that in 40 years, if you put 100 bucks a week into a moderately managed, you know, wealth account, you're going to be great.
100 bucks a week, man.
I can't afford that.
Okay, well, let's talk about how much money do you make?
Oh, I make $91,000.
You can afford $100 a week.
Stop getting your Frappuccino.
Stop going out to drink with your friends, right?
I've been saying this.
You sound exactly like that.
I don't know.
I mean, the reason why we're called the iced coffee hour is because he had a joke on his channel called the 20-cent iced coffee, and you could save $3 a day, which is $100 a month.
And if you just invest that in $200,000, $120 a year.
Yeah, a Roth IRA, you know, assuming 10% interest, you have some inflation.
When you're, you know, 60 or whatever, you'll be a millionaire.
And it all came from a guy who was spending $500 a month at Starbucks.
No, I'm probably that guy.
You're that guy?
Well, now I am, but like, oh, no, I know.
It's terrible.
It's, it's not good.
But you have amazing coffee makers upstairs.
Aren't they incredible?
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
I also drink a lot of tea.
And Starbucks, like, so I need to travel a lot.
The one thing about Starbucks is consistency, right?
So it's just like, I don't know what mom and pop, you know, place there is in Laramie, Wyoming.
I don't just think about it.
It's a coin flip if it's good or not.
Exactly.
So the only argument for like mass proliferation of Starbucks when you travel is.
You do the rewards, though, right?
Yeah, Mike, you do.
It's funny.
I actually have coffee socks on, believe it or not.
Well, I like coffee is really good for you.
I'm very pro-coffee.
I think coffee gets a bad rap.
It's very, very good for you, actually.
Let's talk about the average American.
Do you think it's possible to build wealth when you're making $40,000 a year?
That's a great question.
Boy.
First of all, if you're earning $40,000 a year, you're in a tough spot.
And I don't envy that.
And you might be there because your own choices, you're an agency.
That's really, that's a really hard question.
Depends where you live.
Depends your age.
And also depends on your circumstances.
And so if you have kids and $40,000 a year, it's very hard to build wealth.
And that's a real problem that we have to tackle.
But if you're 18 years old earning $40,000 a year and you're you have four roommates, yeah, you can build wealth for sure, actually.
Like if you have four roommates and you're living in downtown Phoenix and your rent's a thousand bucks a month because you're splitting it four ways, you absolutely can build wealth.
I mean, so it's a very case-dependent answer.
But if you have $40,000 a year with two kids, I don't know how you'd support two kids or $40,000.
You have to go to government assistance, right?
Which by the way, we as conservatives, we bash government assistance a lot.
So I'm a huge Oregon Ducks fan, like massive Oregon Ducks fan.
My dad went to University of Oregon.
My uncle did.
My aunt did.
Like, I know every player.
So Dan Lanning, the coach of, I don't know if you care about a college triple or not, but the coach of University of Oregon, like there was a moment in his life where he was like what they call like not an assistant coach.
What do they say?
Like you're kind of like a coach's assistant, basically.
He was on food stamps as a coach.
He's like, and it was like, I was ashamed by it.
I felt guilty.
But he's like, we needed it.
And now he's earning like 11 million bucks a year being the University of Oregon football coach.
And so I think that's like a great case story of like, okay, we want this to be a safety net, not a hammock.
And like, here's a guy who really needed it.
He had two kids.
And so if you're earning 40,000 bucks a year, you know, it's a tough, that's a tough spot.
So I always think about this study, this data, where the U.S. military during World War II and Vietnam War conducted aptitude and psychological evaluations showing that 10 to 20% of new recruits were only ever positively counterproductive in any sort of work.
And then this is also backed by corporate research as well, showing that 10 to 20% of individuals will only ever be toxic and contribute to less efficiency in the work environment than them just being gone in the first place.
As someone that runs a massive company, how do you find these people and then seed them out?
It's a great question.
They kind of reveal themselves.
So it's a really, it's a really important question.
So we have highly intensive events, the best in the movement, I would say.
They are objectively the biggest, 15,000 people, 20,000 people.
Last year, we hosted the Bobby Kennedy Donald Trump event where Bobby Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump.
We hosted President Trump six times last year.
We had our student action summit, our Young Women's Leadership Summit, Amfest, tons of campus stuff.
So pressure is a beautiful thing.
Pressure will reveal those 20% very quickly.
They cannot hide in high-pressure situations.
What do you look for specifically?
Complaining, asymmetrical behavior, suppressive personality, anti-social personality behavior for sure.
Gossiping, leaking, being late, trying to divide, things of that nature, disobeying orders.
When do you know?
When do you know how to cut and maybe give them a chance?
Maybe they just had a bad day.
They didn't sleep.
Their kids are.
So if there's a pattern for sure.
I mean, it goes to like levels of defiance, right?
If somebody is directly defying orders or if somebody has a really bad attitude, and again, events are a great way to flush this out.
I always say when I have our all-staff meeting, I said some of you guys are going to move up in the company in the next four days and some of you guys might not be here in four days.
And like there's a lot of silence in the room.
But, you know, when you have 700 people in a room, it's just the odds, right?
And so, you know, we have very strict policies at turning point USA of certain things that we expect and certain things that drive success.
And it's a great way to kind of see what people are made of.
Now, when you say disobeying orders, how can you tell if they're truly just being defiant for the sake of being defiant or if they're an entrepreneur at heart and doing what they feel is the best move for the company, even though it's not popular?
So let me give you an example.
If there is a, if there is a rule, which is like, during these three days, you are not to drink alcohol because you have to be on call and that we're hosting high schoolers, totally appropriate.
And we find out that you're at a bar drinking alcohol.
That's that's disobedience, right?
Defiance.
Whereas if they're trying to find a more creative solution, yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, like we kind of run our stuff like the military in a sense where like the four days, we appreciate your creativity.
We want you to kind of within bounds.
But for example, if I'm hosting President Trump and I need like bike racks up and all of a sudden, you know, you show up with cones, like I didn't need your creativity there.
Okay.
I need you to follow the orders.
Okay.
Right.
Like, so, you know, if I'm hosting the biggest speakers in the movement and I need an intro video done and all of a sudden I see Dolly Parton, like, no, no, no, I need, I need an intro video.
I don't need Jolene.
Okay.
So like, I appreciate the creativity, but you got to be creative within, you know, by the way, we also have, there's, there's, there's times to be maximally creative, right?
But understand our events.
Our events team is the greatest in the country in the movement.
They deserve so much credit.
You guys should come by the way.
You'll love it.
It's unbelievable.
It's life-changing.
And just from the audiovisual to the music to the attendees to the experience to the exhibitors to the sponsors, it's unbelievable.
What we put on is second to none.
It's just one of the many things we do.
And like, there's a long lead up, but it's like, it's literally a military operation.
It's a 24-hour operation, right?
From the security to the students.
We have 5,000 students that we have to look after, right?
High school kids from McCrotten coming across the country.
Yeah, I will say I'm extremely impressed.
I mean, we've filmed with a lot of different businesses, corporations, et cetera.
I mean, you do run a tight ship.
We do run a tight ship.
That is a good way to put it.
But for those people that aren't able to be a deckhand of a tight ship, those people that 10 to 20% of people that will only ever be positively counterproductive, what do we do with them as a society?
Or you can't just let them job hop for their entire life, right?
If they're like, if they're never going to make it out of poverty, poverty is just not good for anybody.
Some of them end up in prison.
I mean, that's an honest answer.
Unfortunately, I mean, there is an anti-social component to going to prison.
I don't know the answer to that.
Honestly, some of them end up getting married and they don't re-enter the workforce.
So that's an answer.
But look, this is not a problem unique to America.
It seems as if it's built into the species, right?
I don't know.
Now, you've started making quite a lot of money going from the beginning to where you are now.
I'm very blessed.
Have you handled your own personal finances?
Very carefully.
I mean, I'm a big investor.
I have a great team that does it.
So, I mean, just to be clear, I didn't take a salary from Turning Point, you say, the first five years.
So, and I didn't want it.
I mean, all the money went back into the company.
And so my test of a founder is always like, what do you pay yourself the first couple of years?
And unless you have kids at home or else you have like a family to support, like, you know, a mom that's sick, you should not be taking money out of the company.
Like, it all should be going back in because it's just, it's so precious at that point in that period of time.
And so I would say that probably over 75, 75, 80% of all the money I make is invested.
What do you invest in?
I mean, it's very diversified from private equity, which is great.
So once you're able to make enough money, you're able to kind of get access to private equity deals, which is great.
I'm super boring with some stuff too.
I'm just like, hey, you know, buy this mutual fund, buy, you know, buy the DAO, buy this index and just kind of put it aside.
I went all in and bought the dip during the tariff stuff and COVID.
Fantastic.
During COVID, I bought triple leverage, triple Q. No, you voice.
Yes, I did.
What do you mean?
What do you force you did?
I mean, like, what are you doing?
You should become a financial advisor, man.
You got to start doing fun.
Okay, why was that so obvious to you to go triple leverage?
It was the easiest bet I've ever made in my life.
Why?
You're in a bet against America.
I think the argument was that it could get a lot worse.
If you believe there's going to be $2 trillion printed into the business.
Well, first of all, that's true.
And I was against that.
But I mean, my whole premise at the time was this is so self-inflicted.
We decided to shut down the country.
A meteor didn't strike.
It's not an alien invasion.
We could reverse this immediately.
And so I said, by the way, I'm investing for the next 30 years.
You're trying to tell me the Dow is going to remain about 17,000 points for the next 30 years.
So basically, I was like, I'm buying triple Q, triple leverage.
I mean, it was like kind of ballsy when you think about it.
Yeah.
I guess what you don't know is that how far can it go before businesses start flat out.
Sure.
So to be clear, I started to buy it when I started to see a little bit of signs of hope, right?
Like I try to see the bottom.
If I remember correctly, it went down to like 17, 18,000.
And then, yeah, I just kind of plowed a bunch of money into it.
By the way, I was like, fine.
I wasn't even married at the time.
I had no kids.
Do you manage your own money or do you have to do that?
No, I have a great guy that does, but I call a lot of shots.
Like, I make macro decisions, not micro decisions.
That's the way I say.
I'm not a good micro investor.
Buy this company, not that company.
The only thing I'll say is like when Elon's company went on Tesla, I want to buy Tesla just as kind of a symbolic philosophical thing because I thought he was being treated so terribly.
But like macro stuff, I'll get involved in.
So, for example, if there's like, hey, I want to invest in, you know, more artificial intelligence or, you know, I think that, you know, oil is undervalued, you know, we'll have a conversation.
The guy that does it is a guy named Doug DeGroot.
He's phenomenal.
And so he's just a great family office, really sweet guy.
And what about Bitcoin?
Oh, yeah, no.
So I don't buy individual Bitcoin, but I hadn't, I bet.
I'm an investor in a thing called Anagram, which is the fundamental technology below crypto.
So it's kind of like buying the plumbing of the crypto industry, if you will.
And so like Solana and all these companies, anytime they wanted an ICO, you have to basically have the fundamental technology beneath it.
I don't even understand it that well other than you're kind of buying a philosophy, if you will.
And then look, I'm in a very unique, blessed place where there is a lot of deal flow that comes my way, where a lot of people want to, you know, have me invest in stuff.
And I say no more than I say yes.
And then I'll do a little bit of real estate here or there.
But no, I mean, look.
In terms of rental properties or what?
No, like flipping homes and stuff like that.
Do you have like guys that you work partner with to flip homes or?
Yeah, I mean, I do.
I have a couple guys and they've actually been very successful.
Did a couple in Chicago trying to do a couple here in Arizona.
Where do you have the time for that?
Look, I mean, that's the thing.
It's like, it seems like it just takes away from everything.
It does, but like, I mean, if you, time's a very interesting thing.
And if you meticulously plan out your day, there's so much waste in people's schedule, right?
How much time do things actually take?
Do you really need two hours for a meeting?
Do you really need an hour and a half for that?
And so I'm like a time efficiency maximalist.
And I still get nine to 10 hours of sleep a night, amazingly.
So, yeah, I mean, we were talking with your team and they were saying you work crazy hours.
And I was like, why does he work so hard?
And their answer was he's just extremely mission focused.
That's correct.
I'm very driven.
Does it, does it exhaust you ever to the point of regretting it?
Oh, no, no.
I mean, so I'm right.
I'm actually finishing a book.
So I actually don't week.
I work one day out of the week.
So that's, I take a Sabbath every Saturday.
Turn my phone off, no work, just kids, just family.
It's an amazing blessing.
So every Saturday, totally off.
It's amazing how much work you can get done in six days, though.
And so I wake up early, you know, wake up around 6:30.
You know, again, I usually feel really good in the morning.
I don't have any hangover or any of that stuff, right?
And I just get straight to work and I do my show from 9 to 11, local time in Arizona.
Once I'm done, I try to just kind of, you know, just eat a little bit, maybe take a 10-minute, 15-minute nap, maybe.
I try not to do more than that.
It's amazing, like the power of like a 12 to 15 minute nap.
And then I'll just work all day.
And then I'll try to train a little bit, go for a walk.
But again, I'm in a very blessed position where things really come to me where I used to have to go to things.
Have you always been this way?
Like you've had laser, laser sharp focus.
You've never felt like you dealt with poor motivation.
You've always just been that way.
You don't do anything to try to cultivate this motivation and laser focus.
No, that's a really good question.
No, I've always been very driven, like very, very driven.
So that's a really interesting point.
I thought when I first started this, everyone wanted to be equally successful.
Like everyone had equal drive.
So I thought that was like an equal, equally distributed ingredient amongst the population.
And that was my nébé.
I didn't realize that like motivation and like drive and grit and hustle was actually like an exceptional quality.
And so then quickly I realized like, whoa, I'm just going to outwork everybody.
Like I'm not the most charismatic person.
You know, I can speak.
I got a good thing going, but I'm not the most.
I'm not the smartest person.
I go to Harvard Law.
Right.
I don't have the highest IQ, but I can compete with the best of them.
But I am going to outwork you.
Like I'll put in more hours.
I'll read more books.
I'll listen to more podcasts.
Like I will do more meetings.
I'll travel to more cities.
Like that I can do.
Have you done an IQ test?
I did when I was young.
Yeah.
And what did it come back at?
It was, it was well above average.
I don't want to misspeak on the spec on the, but I think it was like, I don't want to, I don't, I don't want to say a number because it's going to get cut up and all that, but it was.
300.
No, no, no, it wasn't high.
No, but it was, it was not like quite meant.
So, but it was high.
Like, I mean, I have a good memory, but like, I'm not like, I'm not like an international chess champion, right?
I'm not like a perfect SAT guy.
I had good ACT scores, right?
We took the ACT where I was from, you know, 31, 32 was it respectable.
Was like a 36.
But so I'm not dumb.
I mean, that's not, but I, I, I, I'm a unique combination now that I'm, I can see it, which is, you know, I'm like a heat-seeking missile towards what I want to achieve.
And that and that alone can be an incredible differentiator in this space.
So what are some of the sacrifices or compromises that you make because of that heat-seeking missile nature that people may not recognize?
My life's configured now in a way where the biggest sacrifice I have to make is not being home with my kids.
And that like that's, that sucks.
I don't have to do that as much.
I get to say no to a lot of stuff.
By the way, thank you guys for coming to Phoenix.
It's one of the main reasons why this was like.
Thank you for doing this.
Yeah, absolutely.
By the way, I'm going to do this more with more shows.
I'm like, you want to interview me?
Come to Phoenix.
Yeah.
Because my kids are my most important thing in my world.
My wife, my kids, my relationship with God, top three things, right?
God, wife, kids, in that order.
And so that's a sacrifice that I just am not willing to make.
So I'm just saying no to a lot more stuff.
And so, but in the early days, it's so interesting.
Like people think like, oh, you know, you had a bunch of donors that wanted to give you money.
Like, yeah, that's, that's not the story, actually.
The story was I was going to find a lot of donors and tried to have to scrap and hustle and get like elementary funding because we could barely make payroll for the first five to six years, right?
We could barely pay the bills.
This building that we're sitting in right now was not even open till our sixth year.
Okay.
We barely had an office the first couple of years.
And so, yeah, I mean, like, you want to be successful, you think is easy.
Okay, I'll show you my flight logs.
200 red eye flights.
You want to go do that?
200 red eye flights where you have to go sit and perform and give a speech and be on and go all day and be interesting.
1,200 cable news interviews, Fox News at 3 o'clock in the morning, Fox News at 3:30 in the morning.
Get up, get on a flight, conference calls, remember the donor's name, write a thank you note, show up, report for the donor.
They have questions.
They're critical.
They're skeptical.
Like, fine, okay.
It sounds easy, right?
And I'm not here to like brag on it, but like, there's a lot you have to sacrifice for all this.
And it's really easy to look at Turning Point USA because people think they can like recreate it.
Like, oh, yeah, I can recreate.
Like, it's fine.
I mean, look, it's the Lord's blessing and providence of all this.
Like, I'm telling you, man, like, there's a hustle behind the scenes.
And not just me, it's our team too.
Our team works there.
Tail off.
Because now what's so cool is like my like maniacally driven purpose is now shedding off on people.
And like not everyone can sustain it.
They're like, this is too much for me.
I'm going to go work for an insurance company.
I'm like, that's fine.
Like, cause the pace here is first class.
That's why we get more done.
That's why we have more chapters.
We have more donors.
That's why our budget is bigger.
It's because we're just going to keep on growing.
We're going to keep on expanding.
Because we do not set up for media.
We do not settle for mediocrity.
Your excellence is the only thing that will settle.
What do you do now to save as much time as possible?
So I'm a huge scheduler, big time.
And so I schedule out days in advance.
And so I will block out like, this is when I'm going to have conference call time.
This is when I'm going to have, I'm just going to train.
This is where I'm going to eat lunch.
Like I go down to like the 15 interval, 15 minute interval.
And, you know, this is the time that I'm going to go try and, you know, go see this friend.
This is the time where I'm going to go just turn my phone off and go for a walk.
So I'm very, very precise with time.
And then the biggest hack, and you guys know this, nothing new.
It's called layering.
You know this.
So anything you're doing, try to fit two or three things on top of it.
So if I'm traveling to go speak, listen to an audio book, right?
I mean, obviously.
So then all of a sudden I'm getting two things done at once.
If I'm training or working out, okay, I'm also going to be trying to listen to a podcast that I need in preparation.
I take all my calls on the treadmill.
100%.
It's amazing, right?
Or like, so I try to, you know, do a lot.
I'm a big walker.
I think there's a couple of health hacks out here that are right in front of us that nobody ever wants to talk about, right?
I'm a huge, big, I'm a huge believer in sleep, like massive believer.
I think it's totally undervalued.
I'm a major believer in walking.
I think we don't talk about walking enough, just walking, not running, not deadlifting, not cold punging, just walking, okay?
I'm a big believer in fasting.
I think fasting is like untapped power.
And then I just think like not eating terribly.
Those four things, you're actually going to be pretty relatively healthy.
Yeah.
We used to come up with their best ideas taking walks.
Oh, walking is definitely a one, two mile walk.
There are studies I think that show if you have forward movement.
Like If you're walking, your brain actually functions at a higher capacity than if you're sitting sedentary.
My best ideas are when I'm walking.
My best ideas are when I'm moving.
And I go for walks with my kids.
So that's another layering, right?
So, I mean, you want to talk about like a triple layering.
When my daughter was six months old, she can't yet communicate, but she'd want to go for a walk and she'd fall asleep.
So I'd listen to a podcast while getting a walk while spending time with my kid.
Like that's that's the trifecta, right?
Um, and so I'm really, I'm really big on that.
And and so as far as time, you just also have to be able to say no.
There's so much wasted time.
And look, I'm also in a very blessed position.
I'm incredibly blessed.
Most people don't have this.
A lot of entrepreneurs do.
I don't have to sit around at a desk and do just like wait for stuff to come to me.
I constantly can set the terms of my own schedule.
Now, it comes at great cost and great consequence, right?
Because with great freedom comes phenomenal responsibility and enormous responsibility.
Private student loan debt in America totals about $300 billion.
WhyReFi refinances private student loan debt and they do not care what your credit score is.
Many clients aren't even able to make the minimum monthly payment on their private student loans when they first contact YReFi.
Go to whyrefi.com.
That is why F-Y.com.
You don't have to ignore that mountain of student loan statements on your kitchen table anymore.
So go to whyrefi.com.
Do you have a co-borrower?
Well, whyRefi can get them released from the loan and you can give mom or dad a break.
Go to whyrefi.com.
Can you imagine being debt-free and not living under this burden anymore?
So go to yrefi.com.
That is why.com.
Let's face it, if you have distress or defaulted private student loans, there's no better place to go than whyRefi.
They provide you with a custom loan payment based on your ability to pay.
They're not a debt settlement company.
So check it out right now at YRefi.com.
May not be available in all 50 states.
Go to YRefi.com.
That is YREFY.com.
In terms of your own material success, where is the money coming from in terms of like percentages?
Because I know you have like a store, you have a for-profit merchandise company, you have your nonprofit, you have, you know, your YouTube channel, all of these things.
Where's the money coming from?
Very small percentage is my salary at Turning Point USA.
So Turning Point USA is $120,000 USA, Turning Point Action, $120,013 million budget.
My salary there is about $300,000 a year, and I donate $350,000 back to Turning Point USA.
So it's basically a wash, right?
So it literally is a wash.
And you might say, well, why do you donate it back?
Well, my wife and I, we're, you know, we try to be charitable.
We try to give 10% of our income a year.
What better place to give it back to Turning Point USA?
Why even take a salary?
Honestly, that's a really good question.
Number one, it's very important from just an IRS standpoint.
If the CEO is unpaid, it just kind of looks very weird on the form.
But also, I do believe in like different buckets for different things.
I still think I should earn a salary for my work here.
And then if I want to give it back, then so be it.
It's a psychological thing more than anything else.
Like it comes in.
And then if I want to give it back, I can give it back.
I know that might sound like strange to people, but I'm talking just wasted payroll tax.
No, it's fine.
It's true.
I mean, that's a good point.
All the FICA tax money going out the window, right?
It's better to go back into the company than not.
No, the revenue streams is the show.
The show is a for-profit entity.
Charlie Kirk show podcast.
As of the recording right now, we're either number two or number three in all of Apple News.
Incredibly blessed.
We stream on Rumble every day, on X every day.
We're on 250 radio stations on over 400 affiliates.
We are on Real America's Voice every single day, which is a great fast channel, which is also on Pluto and Roku.
It easily estimates two to three million people a day, tune into some part of the Charlie Kirk show.
We cut it up.
We socialize it.
And then, of course, we have a beast of a YouTube channel.
We do very, very well on TikTok.
And so you kind of compile that all together.
And then, of course, I do speaking.
I try to write a book a year, which, you know, I'm able to make personal money on.
Has life gotten a lot better since becoming wealthy?
Yes.
I mean, look, my life has gotten a lot better since I got married and I had kids.
I will tell you, the best thing about being wealthy is not being poor and not having to worry about money.
Like, just like not get to a place where you don't have to worry about money.
It's funny.
When you get to a place where you have like billions of dollars, you're actually worrying about money all the time because then you have like lawsuits and it's like your identity.
I'm not joking.
Like they actually, it's kind of like a weird like horseshoe, which is like you have no money, you worry about money all the time.
And you have a ton of money, you worry about money all the time.
It's best to be like somewhere in the middle where you have like a lot of cash flow.
The best thing is this, I have purpose in what I'm doing and the money is a nice reward.
Like it's not, money is not the number one driver for me.
It's not like I mean that.
Like I have the skill set where if I quit all of this right now, I could probably go start a company right now.
And after 10 years, I could probably sell it for like a couple hundred million bucks.
That's not, I mean, that's not like a crazy thing for me to say, the fact that we've started Turning Point USA in action.
We have $130 million years in revenue, right?
I have the Charlie Kirk show.
If it was all about getting rich, I could go start some app and probably go be successful.
What makes me so happy is I get to impact people's lives.
I get to speak truth.
I have purpose.
I get to help save the civilization.
And then I also get to make some money while doing it.
And that, quite honestly, is the most enormous blessing.
I have the greatest job in the world.
I'm the happiest person in the world.
I mean that.
Now, in terms of disclosures like this and being so open about your finances, AOC recently disclosed that she has no individual stock holdings.
Tim Waltz famously said he doesn't have any investments.
Do you think this is just financial irresponsibility?
Or do you think it's a good thing that they don't have a financial interest in maybe some of the measures that they're putting forward?
So, I mean, I'll talk about the Tim Wallace and AOC thing.
I don't know enough about it.
She's young.
But like Tim Wallace, it's very interesting.
It's like, so on one hand, you're like, wow, he can't be bought.
On the other hand, it's like, wow, you're like really bad with money.
Like, you're kind of old and like you don't have any stocks.
Well, he has a pension.
Okay, fine.
But I mean, like, okay, I get it that he was a football coach or whatever.
But I mean, is that a good example?
I guess.
I mean, again, I just kind of the idea, which is you're of that age.
You haven't played into compound interest.
You haven't like really tried to, I mean, by the way, you could have, you could have blinded trusts and, you know, different ways of building wealth.
I don't think you should go as far as Nancy Pelosi and basically like trade stocks after committee hearings.
I think that's probably a little ambitious, right?
But I actually prefer my politicians to be successful.
I know that's a weird statement, but people that own nothing, like own nothing, it might be like really appealing on the surface.
But then I wonder, do they know how wealth is created?
It's indicative of something deeper that can be done.
I think so.
Again, there's plenty of good Republicans, I'm sure, that own nothing and they run for office and that's great.
But generally, I do want someone that knows here's the key.
Poverty is human norm.
Go to any country around the world.
Most people are in poverty.
Wealth is the exception.
How do you get wealthy is the most important economic issue in front of us.
It's actually a really hard issue to solve.
We know how to solve it.
Markets is how you get wealthy.
That's it.
Okay.
Private property, trade, rule of law, can't steal people's stuff.
We're going to enforce those laws.
It works.
Decent, virtuous society.
Okay, so we know how to go be poor.
Not hard.
I actually want people in office that know how to create wealth.
I think that's a really important question.
And then the opposite of that, though, with tickers like NANC that track the trades of you should totally follow Nancy Pelosi's trade.
That is grotesque.
That's a totally different thing.
So how do we crack down on that?
And to what degree.
We should make it illegal.
Josh Hawley's act is very good.
I think it's called the Stock Act or something.
See, here's what I think.
I made this in a video years ago when the whole Nancy Pelosi tracker came up.
I thought it would be a great idea for just anyone in Congress to signal their trades publicly in real time 24 hours before they plan to make them.
And that's it.
And they could trade whatever they want to, but they just have to signal 24 hours in advance.
That's it.
I have no issue with that.
I think it's great.
I would go a step further.
I don't think any member of Congress should be trading stock period whatsoever.
Individual stocks, but they could buy ETFs.
Sure.
I think, yes, fine.
I think it should be complete moratorium on individual stocks.
They know way more than they're telling.
I think that would be impossible to enforce because they would claim that, well, I don't trade.
I have a financial advisor who's trading on my behalf in an irrevocable trust that I don't own.
And they just happened to buy all these defense stocks before Iran started bombing his.
Yeah, I know.
That was coincidence.
I bought all the pharmaceutical stocks before COVID, right?
Exactly.
I don't know the enforcement.
I just, I spent a lot of time in D.C. It's a disgusting city.
It's repulsive.
There's a lot more information that these people know than they're ever letting on.
And they're getting wealthier while most Americans don't have access to that information.
I think your idea is great.
The kind of public beacon, if you will.
We have insider trading laws for a reason.
And what these congressmen do is like the definition of insider rights.
But the penalty is so small.
Like if they don't report their trades, they have 30 days to report them.
And if they don't do that, the fee, I think, is either 200 bucks or it's $1,000.
It's pennies, basically.
It needs to be severe criminal penalties, in my opinion.
I'm very populist on this question because, look, most people in this audience, they would love to know what's going on in a skiff.
They would love, which is a secure compartmentalized information facility where there's no phones and just a bunch of generals giving you class and information about, I don't know, a new Wuhan leak or a new war, or they would love to know whether or not an electric vehicle mandate is going to be attached to the reconciliation bill or not.
And then they're able to make trades on that information.
So I don't know.
I'm very populist on this thing.
I think we should just put an end to all of it.
What do you think about things like Trump's meme coin?
Do you think something like that was an overall smart or not?
I don't know.
I know Eric really well.
He's the one that's pushing it.
I mean, look, I know the Trump family, so I'm not going to speak against them.
They're all friends of mine.
I don't know enough about it.
I get a lot of questions about it on college campuses.
I know people that have made money on it.
Like, I don't know.
Like, I'll say this, when it comes to like crypto in general, I'm very supportive of it.
I know it's largely like a Trump family endeavor.
Technically, he did promote it before he came president.
I know a lot of people kind of rolled their eyes at it.
Here's my statement, and people can laugh at it.
He got shot, so he's allowed to launch a meme coin.
That's my statement.
So anybody who gets shot.
No, I'm half kidding.
It's sarcasm.
Look, I'm not going to get into the details of defining it.
That's a question for Eric or Don.
What are your thoughts on Bitcoin?
I'm a big fan of Bitcoin.
Should the U.S. do a Bitcoin reserve?
Absolutely, yes.
Yes.
The United States should have a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
And who should pay for the Bitcoin reserve?
That's a good question.
Hopefully, some of the tariff money could potentially be that.
The reason why I think we should have a strategic Bitcoin reserve, I know you guys had Michael Saylor on your show, and I think he's onto something.
There is something called like the mass adoption theory, which is over a period of time, like the English language U.S. dollar, things just catch on and they're just kind of volitional and there's no stopping it.
I think Bitcoin is that.
You got to watch out, though.
Quantum computing could potentially crack cryptography.
If they do that, then they're also cracking bank accounts.
Right.
Stock trading.
Yeah.
So Quantum is the only asterisk on all this.
But I think Saylor is onto something very profound, which is that because Bitcoin is a scarce, legitimately scarce resource, that it's probably going to go nowhere but up.
So Saylor makes a very provocative argument that Bitcoin could go up 10X over the next 10 years or something like that, which therefore, if we start a Bitcoin strategic reserve, it could pay for the national debt and basically cover our losses on the deficit.
But I think that we should, I think the United States government should be invested in crypto without a doubt.
I tend to agree with Michael Saylor that it's more likely to go to a million than zero.
Yes, I think that's right.
And by the way, so you have a problem with the world's richest people.
They don't know where to put their money.
So there's only so many penthouses in London and Paris that they could buy.
There's only so many ranches in Wyoming that they could buy.
And so we've had this problem.
So you create all this money.
The money goes upwards to wealth inequality point to your earlier point.
The question is then, well, what do rich people do with money?
There's only so many equities they can buy.
There's only so many shares in NVIDIA and Apple and Microsoft that they could justify.
Well, money needs to find a home and it's found a home in Bitcoin.
And so once it has mass adoption and literally the wealthiest families on the planet are starting to park serious monies in Bitcoin.
And because it's scarce, it's easy to transfer and it's just a winner.
Sometimes there's a mass adoption and it just rises to the surface.
And I think Bitcoin is that.
Speaking of the national debt, at what point do you think it's going to become a major problem?
I think it already is.
I think it already is.
Do you see any solvable way that we could address this?
Because it seems as though if Trump's big beautiful bill passes, it's just going to get $2 trillion higher.
Yeah, so that's over 10 years.
So I do find issue with some of those estimates.
I don't want to get too deep into that.
That's kind of a wonky.
We'll lose the audience on CBO estimates, congressional budget office estimates.
I think we need to cut a lot more spending.
I wish more Republicans wanted to agree.
I know Donald Trump agrees.
He's just very frustrated with some of the Republicans on Capitol Hill that don't want to cut it.
So here's the worst thing we could do, though.
The worst thing we could do out of all the options is not grow.
So the worst of all the options is not grow.
So when you have a big debt, that's bad.
Not growing with a big debt is catastrophic.
Growing with a big debt is somewhat manageable.
Growing with cutting your debt is awesome.
That would be the best possible scenario.
So the calculus is, okay, we have a big debt.
Let's at least try to have the debt outpace two things.
The rate of the increase of the debt to GDP ratio and the rate of inflation.
If GDP can grow faster than inflation and grow faster than the rate of the debt to GDP ratio, then we're in a manageable place.
So that's what the premise of a lot of these tax cuts of the bill is, right?
No tax on tips, no tax and overtime, right?
The depreciation, the extension of the Trump tax cuts, all of which I support because you need a pro-growth agenda because when you're a debtor nation and you have no growth, then you're going to be in a really bad spot.
What happened to Doge?
It's just a lot.
I think it's done.
But first of all, I think Elon did a lot of good work.
I really did.
First of all, I think Elon's greatest contribution was a philosophical one.
I think Elon made us all realize how much waste there is and how much we really need to kind of get into the details of how much the government is inefficient from a technological standpoint, from a efficiency standpoint.
So I don't think it's over by any means.
I think Doge is a cultural mindset that is going to be hopefully around the Republican Party for years to come.
It just seemed like Congress didn't really have that big of an incentive to do anything about it.
What was most surprising, Elon said that he just wanted people to code and write in a description of where the money went, because right now you could basically just leave it blank, send money, and not write what the purpose of the money is for.
And he just puts something in there.
And he said he was up against just a wall that they didn't even mandate that.
It's a very complicated, so yeah, that's right.
And so there's common sense to just type what it's for.
There is so much waste in the federal government.
And my hope is that we can start to rein it in in the next, you know, couple of months and couple of years.
It's a beast, though, guys.
I mean, this is a, it is a wild monster that is hard to rein in.
And I know that sounds like cope and an excuse, but you have an entrenched permanent bureaucracy of millions of people.
And then you have judges that are preventing literally the Trump administration from doing some of this stuff.
You have federal judges that are coming in and preventing, you know, President Donald Trump from being like, nope, I want to lay off these workers.
Nope, I want to cut this aid.
Nope, I want to cut this, which of course is unconstitutional.
So, yes, I mean, like, it would be nice.
Here is the goal.
The goal would be we need to blockchain the entire federal government, put the entire federal government on blockchain.
And then, number two, every dime of federal spending online in real time.
We should know what everybody is spending in real time, no different than a transparent federal database.
Could that be a national security risk in any way?
There are certain things you could blockbox for sure.
But, like, I think that people deserve to know on a day-by-day, month-by-month basis, like, what is the Department of Interior spending?
Like, are they going, what is the Department?
What are the Veterans Affairs spending money on?
We should know.
Like, are they buying $50 hammers?
Like, are they buying $200 bandages?
Like, I think it's our money.
This is the whole problem I have with this whole thing.
This is our money.
It is you watching money.
We are the ones that earn the money.
It is not the government's money.
We are the sovereign.
We create the government.
We earn the money.
And then the government extract it from us with our consent, right?
Because we vote, we have elections, whatever.
So we have a right to know where that money goes.
It doesn't magically become the government's money.
I guess part of the problem is that there's no penalty for overspending.
It's like a credit card.
The limit just keeps getting higher and higher and higher.
So why is it?
No, it's actually even worse than that.
There's an incentive to keep spending more.
In fact, the incentive in Washington, D.C. is that you have one wing that wants to spend money on more war, which is the Republican Party warmongering caucus, which I'm at war with.
And then you have a whole nother thing, which is the welfare caucus.
So you have the warfare welfare caucuses.
So the warfare guys want to go invade the world.
The welfare caucus wants to go put the entire world on welfare.
What can they both agree on?
We'll authorize your warfare if you authorize our welfare.
We all spend more money and we get our pet projects done.
And then we're going to go invade the world.
And they're like, oh, so the war, the welfare people say, don't invade the world.
But if you invade the world, can we invite the world?
They say it's okay if you go invade the country, but then we can have a couple million more people into the country.
And then the warfare people are like, ah, we don't like that.
We'll do that.
But the welfare people, but then we got to put them on welfare.
And literally, this is the uniparty bipartisan agreement last 30 years.
Every major public policy budgetary debate comes down to an agreement between the warfare and the welfare wing of the two parties.
No, there's no, there's no way to do it.
on that, right?
First of all, I would not, no.
I agree with you completely.
The reason I say no, no, no, is that I am not a cynic.
I'm like a super optimist.
I've never been more optimistic on the country.
Let me tell you why.
I saw insane doomerism like a year ago.
They're never going to let Trump win.
They're going to try to take him out.
And like, I saw doomerism die.
And so I think what Trump's, one of his greatest contributions is he's really pushed the art of the possible.
Like, actually, no, you can do dramatic things.
You can change stuff.
But yes, to your answer, it's going to be very big.
It is climbing a major mountain.
Massive.
Do you worry about the U.S. dollar?
Of course, absolutely.
And what do you think is the most likely outcome?
Because I would like to think positively, but at the same time, I think realistically it's just going to be pressure.
As one of my friends and heroes, Tony Robbins would say, I don't tell you to go to your garden and say, there's no weeds, there's no weeds, there's no weeds.
I tell you to spot the weeds and pull them out.
So I'm not like delusional.
I'm an optimist.
I try to find the best case story of how things can be told.
Then have us have human agency and action to actually do it.
So with the U.S. dollar, look, the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency has gone down dramatically in the last 20 years.
President Donald Trump is focused on breaking up BRICS.
So BRICS is Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
South Africa is the DEI pick.
Why South Africa is considered to be some sort of world, that's a joke for the record.
Some sort of like world currency power.
It's like a freaking joke.
Okay.
All right.
India.
Easy to peel away.
We already have great relations with India.
J.D. Vance did a state visit to India that was very, not very reported.
Donald Trump, by the way, he stopped the India-Pakistan war.
He deserves huge credit for that.
That thing was like simmering up and was going to be incredible and big.
And so then Brazil.
Brazil's a disaster.
Lula is a complete Marxist and communist.
Bolsonaro should still be prime minister.
So then you have Russia and China.
That's a, so Brazil, Russia, China.
The best case telling is we can end this Russian-Ukrainian war and hopefully try to create a little bit of separation in daylight between the ever-growing marriage of Russia and China, which is bad for America.
It's bad for the West.
It's bad for the world.
And so we should want the U.S. dollar to remain the world reserve's currency status.
It is imperative.
Our, I think, reckless involvement in the United States with the Russian-Ukrainian war has only led to de-dollarization.
We took Russia out of the SWIFT banking system.
Basically, we took their dollars out of their bank accounts.
We confiscated their dollars.
What does that do to every other nation that uses dollars as their world reserve currency status?
We're no longer a safe haven.
We never should have done that, guys.
Regardless of how bad Putin is for invading Ukraine and all that stuff, basically we de-incentivized people to trust the dollar as a safe haven.
Basically, we said, oh, if you misbehave, we might take away your dollars, which then has led to an incentive structure away from the U.S. dollar, which is very destructive.
It seems like we're always facing several cataclysmic level issues at the exact same time.
Welcome the modernity.
And so I'm just curious, what would you say are the top three issues that if they could be immediately addressed and fixed, we would be leagues, leagues better off.
I'm going to give you probably some unexpected answers.
I have some answers here.
Let's see if you can answer what I have here.
Okay, so the question is cataclysmic actual like what you would say are the biggest issues facing America right now.
And if you could provide three answers.
Yeah.
So number one, it's the fertility crisis.
Interesting.
Yeah, we're having less children ever before.
We're mating less.
It's a major problem.
We're on the verge of a population collapse.
It's a huge issue.
No one wants to talk about it.
Everyone's like, oh, I'm single and 32 without kids.
Like, no, you have a moral obligation to get married and have kids, actually.
And if you don't, that's fine.
If you don't want to, you have to make the case that we're doing is more important.
And there is a case for that.
Like, if you're a Catholic father, like a priest, I'm not Catholic.
Okay.
You're actually helping society.
You're doing something.
But I come from a worldview that you have a moral obligation to help society and to help people through something that you do.
It's not just all about yourself and pursuing your own self-interest.
I mean, that's the death, the death of modernity.
I think part of it is getting married and having children.
I'm a very traditionalist in that way.
So that's number one.
Other cataclysmic things.
We are incredibly sick in this country.
And this is why I love Bobby Kennedy.
Like, I'm a huge Bobby Kennedy fan.
We're a fat country.
We're a sick country.
We're an obese country.
We're a depressed country.
We're a poisoned country.
We are not physically fit to fight a war, let alone be able to stand up and even go for a walk for two miles.
We are a fat country and it's a major problem.
And so I actually think that physiology is directly related with how you act and how you feel.
I got that again from Tony Robbins.
And so if all of a sudden you're kind of this like obate, obese, sad country, of course you're going to kind of just fall apart and you're going to collapse.
The last one is the most provocative of the three is that we have a major issue of this country that we become a nation of foreigners and we're strangers in our own country.
We have not assimilated the third world well into our country.
We have 20 million illegals that I believe invaded the country under Joe Biden.
And so you kind of come, I could go to 456 if you want me to, but we are increasingly not a nation or a country.
We look more like a colony where no one talks to their neighbor and we have to lock our doors at night.
We're like a high, our cities are all super high crime.
So people say, Charlie, what does success look like?
I get asked all the time.
Very easy.
I want fertility rates to go up.
I want church attendance to go up.
I want people to be less fat.
And I want to be able to not have to lock my doors at night.
I want to be able to talk to my neighbors and really have a connective bond with them.
My final one, I want to feel safe that my daughter can walk the streets of LA unaccompanied at night.
That's it.
Can you walk LA at night?
She can walk Tokyo at night.
Why can't you walk New York at night or LA or San Francisco or Denver?
We are a failed country.
What did Newsom say to that?
I loved your debate with him.
Thank you.
Yeah, it was something.
Why did he agree to do that?
It seems so weird.
It was maximally entertaining.
Yeah.
It did very, very well.
It got millions and millions of views.
And so I don't really know what his incentive was, to be honest.
I think he wants to be president, obviously.
But he just, so to the left, he looked weak and to the right, he looked fraudulent.
And so who did he win over exactly?
Because the right's not going to believe.
I mean, we can't stand him for obvious reasons.
And to the left, they're like, look at this weak guy who's trying to find common ground with Charlie Kirk, who they think I'm terrible.
So, but to his credit, I mean, there were no gotchas.
But I mean, look, I'll kind of go back to the point I say, like, it's a failure of governance if you cannot walk your greatest cities at night.
That's my politics.
I know that sounds like, I don't care if it's Republican or Democrat.
I want to be able to walk America's greatest cities at night.
The five greatest cities in America are New York, Chicago, San Francisco, LA, and what's you, maybe Miami, okay?
It's fine.
Whatever.
And people in Dallas are going to like email us.
Sorry, Dallas is not one of America's greatest cities.
Dallas is fine, but it's not one of America's greatest cities, right?
And no, Seattle's not.
But Seattle used to be one of America's like most interesting cities.
But you should be able to walk your major cities at night.
This is insane.
You go to Seoul, South Korea.
Amazing.
You can eat off the streets.
You go to Tokyo.
Go to Singapore.
This is a choice.
We are deciding to have our cities dangerous and we shouldn't put up with it.
I think it's really just being tough on crime.
And people know they could get away with it.
We're choosing to be soft on crime, though.
We're choosing that.
It's a choice.
Yeah.
What was the biggest takeaway from Newsom?
His backpedaling on the transports issue was fascinating to me.
I did not expect that.
Where all of a sudden he kind of agreed with me and then, you know, went super viral where he was saying that, of course, it's deeply unfair for men to compete in female sports.
What kind of insane stuff is this, right?
Yeah, I think I would say that was probably one of the biggest takeaways.
Have you kept in touch with him since then?
I've texted him a couple of times.
Does he get back to you?
He does.
Yeah.
My biggest text was him was being like, hey, you said that it was no big, you know, you were unfair for trans athletes to win state championships.
Why are you not doing anything about it?
Because a man just won the girls' championship in the state of California.
So you were still poking the bear.
Poking the bear, but I was just calling him out.
And by the way, I wasn't even publicizing it.
Now I'm finally having to publicize it.
I was like, why are you not doing like, and by the way, during this whole Trump-Newsome feud, I've just like, you know, I was like, fine.
This guy's a total, he's a catastrophic failure.
Does he ever reach out to you for help?
No, and I wouldn't give him help.
You wouldn't?
No.
Why?
He's a Democrat.
But what if he wanted your insights in terms of policy and you could somehow eke him a little bit?
Colonel, yes.
No, no, for sure.
Yes, that's right.
If he's asking like how to better govern and help people, without a doubt, yes.
If he's asking me like how to get political power, I will not have it.
What's your advice to him in terms of turning around the state of California?
He would argue the state's doing fantastic.
They're doing great revenue.
So great.
We left California in 2020.
Unfortunately, the issues just got so bad with homeless, crime, the taxes.
We're out of this world.
They've just raised the sales tax in the city of Santa Monica.
Which is a tax on guys like you.
It was really bad.
It got to a point where Vegas was so welcoming.
I made a video announcing that I was moving to Las Vegas and someone from like the business administration within the city of Vegas found my email and sent me like, hey, we're really happy to have you.
If there's anything we could do, like they were happy to get the business.
We love it there.
So since Gavin Newsom has like no core beliefs, he's just like a slippery politician that wants to be in power.
He's literally somebody that could pass a lie detector test easily.
Like this guy has no guiding principles at all.
Just leave the Democrat Party.
That's my advice to him.
If you really want to like be an elected office that bad, just leave the Democrat Party and just go run as like a moderate Republican and just have some sort of like conversion story.
Like, oh, yeah, I'm some sort of progressive.
Like you just want political power.
You have no guiding beliefs at all whatsoever.
You'll say whatever it takes, whenever you want.
You're captured by your left flank, but you won't do that.
But and finally, like, I don't know.
I mean, I would say that more practically.
Don't be afraid, Gavin, to like go lock up a bunch of criminals and make your state better.
I just, the whole premise of California is so sad.
Every time, I love California.
I love California.
Every time I land in California, I say the same thing to my team.
It is a shame that they messed up heaven on earth.
It is without the most, it's the most beautiful place in the world, right?
I mean, Orange County, can you think of a better microclimate than that?
The mornings are just like gifts from God.
They do have pockets.
Orange County has gotten gorgeous.
It's like Santa Barbara.
You have certain cities.
61 degrees in the morning.
It's just like, you just can like, anything is possible.
It's kind of got this miss.
But I think they're sending all the people to LA.
It seems like LA is kind of like the stomping grounds for a lot of the issues.
And then other cities are actually getting better.
Yeah, I hope so.
I think Orange County has some real some bright spots.
But generally, look, LA is the beast of California, right?
And LA is just a dump.
It is just disgusting.
And it's too bad I say that.
It never used to be that way.
LA used to be a really interesting city 30 to 40 years ago.
Yes, it had crime, but a better example of a city that has fallen apart is the city that he was the mayor of, San Francisco.
When I was a kid, I could walk the streets of San Francisco.
It was gorgeous.
It was fun.
It was unique.
It was interesting.
It was artistic.
It was boundary pushing, but it was safe.
You would, again, Gavin Newsom, if you're listening to this, would you let your son walk the streets of San Francisco unaccompanied at 1 a.m.?
No, you wouldn't.
Of course not.
You're a failure.
If your own kids can't walk your city at night, then what have you done?
I don't want to hear about like how you oversaw gay weddings or whatever stupid thing that you're talking about.
Or, oh, yeah, we're taking you to wreck-it revenues.
I'm sorry.
Your son can't walk the streets of the city that you were in charge of.
You're a disgrace.
Like, don't, don't lecture me about like how you're some sort of progressive beacon.
How much of that do you think is Gavin Newsom's fault versus other people's fault?
He was the mayor of the city.
I put a lot of fault on mayors.
I think mayors have a lot of power.
And I know this because of New York.
Look at Bloomberg and Giuliani and how well they did in New York versus de Blasio.
New York crime went up.
It got dirtier.
Homelessness went up.
Like mayors are actually some of the most powerful people in the country that we don't spend enough time or attention on.
The police are responsive to the mayor.
The building codes responsible mayor.
The homeless, like mayors are very, very powerful.
So he was mayor of San Francisco.
Then he ran for lieutenant governor and then he ran for governor.
And he was mayor of San Francisco like during the collapse of San Francisco while it started to go down when all this progressive woke stuff started to pop up.
If you want to make sense of the change and the chaos happening around us, you're going to need God's help.
That's why Alan Jackson Ministries, a friend of mine, created the Culture and Christianity podcast, the Culture and Christianity Conference, and their weeknight news show, Alan Jackson Now.
Millions of people also listen to Pastor Alan Jackson's powerful sermons each week.
I do on radio, television, satellite, and online.
In today's world, there's desperate need for truth.
And Alan Jackson Ministries feels a sense of urgency to deliver God's truth and a biblical perspective to anyone who will listen.
We can't afford to be complacent.
Their mission is to help people become more fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ, which is the most important thing, giving your life to the Lord, including here on the Charlie Kirk show.
Go to alanjackson.com/slash Charlie.
That is alanjackson.com/slash Charlie to find recent podcasts, shows, and sermons.
Be informed, find encouragement, hear the truth delivered in a way that just makes sense.
You'll also find books, studies, prayers, and other tools to help you grow in your faith.
Now, you get a lot of people just on the street, and you have a good pulse of what's really going on with younger people.
What's something that you've noticed that mainstream media either gets wrong or is just out of touch on?
I would say that something that mainstream media really misses with young men, especially, is they desire to be more religious than I think they give them credit for.
There is a return to religion.
You're seeing a little bit of these news reports, but there's definitely a curiosity for God and for going back to the church in a very serious and significant way.
What's causing that?
Well, modernity is a failure.
I mean, modernity has given us a lot of great stuff, right?
I mean, praise God that we have modern medicine and surgery and that we have antibiotics.
Like, these are all amazing things, right?
No one debates that.
But modernity has like the core of modernity is what?
You are in charge of your own life and you could do whatever you want to do, and you're the center of the universe.
Sounds good, leads to highest depression ever, highest rates, highest anxiety, and hopelessness.
In Victor Frankl's amazing book, Man's Search for Meaning, he said that outside of food and water, the greatest need for man is meaning.
And so, we see modernity constantly changing around us at all times.
Things are changing, people are changing their genders, there's constant change.
And I think young people want to go to a church environment that isn't changing.
They want to go to a place that is stable, that is consistent, that is beautiful, that is ancient, that is everlasting, and that is eternal.
What would you say is the biggest non-issue that people make out to be a massive issue?
You already spoke about the issue that you think is extremely important that people don't really talk about, which is the birth rates.
What about that?
I mean, by the way, the birth rate's so big.
I mean, the fact that no one wants to talk about it-it's just not really discussed.
Yeah, so okay, great.
So, I would say, it's not a surprise, but I'd say, racism.
It's like the most ridiculous.
I mean, we are the least racist controversy that exists in the history of the world.
I don't like racist.
You don't like racist.
I don't like running into them.
I have no tolerance for it.
I would put it as like issue number 22,800 on issues of like what's pressing facing America.
How about the fact that our public schools can't educate our kids and we can't find a single kid that can read at grade level in Maryland or Chicago?
Probably a bigger deal than racism.
How about the fact that in this country that we have an average family cannot afford to go buy groceries in major cities and have to go into debt?
Like, these are much major problems.
Young people can't buy homes.
Like, the dollar is being deteriorated.
We have 110,000 drug overdoses every year.
That's a much bigger problem than racism.
Like, woo.
And, like, we have like entire social and cultural institutions that are trying to propagandize us.
That racism is like the biggest problem.
I'm sorry, it's not.
In fact, I would argue that not only is it not a problem, it's a massive psychological operation against us to not actually talk about the major economic, cultural, and political forces that should be addressed in this country.
And what do you think makes someone conservative or liberal in the first place?
Do you think it's rich or nurture?
It's both, obviously.
Again, I'm actually, the older I get, I do give a little bit more, I give a little bit more weight to community than I did probably 10 years ago, just because I see how much my daughter and my son absorb around me and my wife.
So, I get kind of how you're a product of your environment, but it's not, you're not solely a product of your environment.
You're not.
You have agency, you have decision, you have free will.
You could break free of your environment.
You're not only your environment.
That's very important.
You're not only your upbringing.
So, conservative, it's just a worldview difference.
So, left-wingers generally look at things through a prism of what they look at a prism of oppressor-oppressed, whereas we look at prisms of things versus just and unjust,
right and wrong, and good and evil, and moral and immoral, where they look at things as more as like who's in power and who is not in power, which group wants sympathy, deserves sympathy, and what other group deserves sympathy.
But look, we know that people that tend to be liberal tend to have temperament that is far more on kind of the openness and acceptance of, you know, how people are and how they act.
We're conservatives, we tend to be much more order and discipline and let's just say structure-driven.
A great example of this is crime.
So, when we as conservatives see someone that commits a crime and we don't think they're necessarily a product of their environment, we say, you shouldn't have committed that crime.
You're being an idiot.
You're going to jail.
Whereas liberals are like, well, we must have sympathy for them because the schools are broken.
And of course, there is some truth to that.
You still decided to commit the crime.
It's an insult to every other person that's not committing a crime that comes out of that environment to act as if that person should be given an exception.
As someone who works very closely with young voters, do you think that we should change the rights for who can vote?
Should we increase the age?
Should we apply a civics test to it?
I mean, probably not.
I'll say this, like we won the youth vote this last cycle.
And it's funny, like we in certain states, not across the country.
And it's just an amazing thing that you can actually win the youth vote and you could do it with mass virality and mass popularity and reaching out in ways that people would never have imagined.
And so, No, I probably wouldn't put any more restrictions on it.
You mentioned earlier in this podcast that one of the biggest sacrifices that you have to make is running this massive business at the same time as trying to be the leader in a family.
Yes.
I'm curious, what do you think is the biggest issue with modern dating?
As a single guy, I would love some advice.
You know, Graham, he got married a year or so.
Congratulations.
So he's looking to start a family.
Have as many kids as you can afford.
Probably two.
Have more than you can afford.
That's what I should say.
I'll stick with you.
What is wrong with modern dating?
Yeah.
The biggest problem with modern dating is very interesting.
We had a women's summit.
The young ladies all raised their hands.
They're like, how many of you are unhappy with the dating pool?
Every woman raises their hand.
I'm like, funny.
All the young men I talked to are unhappy with you too.
So who's wrong?
Those seem like kind of select groups of people, though.
You know, like if you're asking women that are attending a women's summit, they might be in a very specific situation.
Yeah, I mean, like, I would say generally, I hear more complaints about the dating pool than, you know, like, wow, there's so many options.
Maybe you're right.
I don't know.
I think it's more of an options issue is that you could go online and just, if you, if you, if you don't like someone, instead of working through it, it's just you go back and you start swiping again.
So there's, so let me, what's the problem with women?
And then I'll go to the problem with men.
The problem with women is that many of them, A, have unrealistic expectations of the man that they want, a lot of them.
And I deal with this all the time.
I'm like, I want a guy that's earning a million dollars a year and he's six foot four and I want him to have a, you know, a perfect jaw.
And I'm like, yeah, that's never going to happen.
How about, by the way, you know where on your list is like, I want someone who will be a good father or someone with good character.
So I guess like really disgusting, actually, that you just want someone that's like super rich and looks good.
Like, why don't you want someone that's going to be loyal to you, not cheat on you?
Like, oh yeah, I want that too.
Oh, okay.
Got it.
So basically, you want like Ken Barbie doll, and then you'll have like all the good virtues.
Notice they don't, they don't lead with the virtue.
And a lot of things lead to that.
But number two is women need to be very clear that we need to tell women more clearly that if you do not have children before the age of 30, there's only a 50% chance that you will have children.
That's a fact.
It's a fact.
You can fact check me on that.
Isn't that, though, that women are becoming very intentional about whether or not they want to have kids and just it's it's more socially acceptable miserable because of it though I mean it's not just mine you go fact check me put the numbers up the most depressed people in America are women without children they're the most likely to be on antidepressants they're the most likely to be anxious again people that experience severe depression are people people that say they are very unhappy are people young single women in their early 30s without children who are the happiest women in America married women with children I
I think there is a, and by the way, of course they have the agency to do that.
I'm not trying to like make a law like you must get married and have kids.
But I think that we've gone wrong here, that women should prioritize family and children way above career, that they should try to find their husband before they're 25, that they should try to get married way younger.
But then that also goes back to just finances.
No, that's a huge one.
You can't quite have a husband going out making a salary to have a stay-at-home.
I completely agree with that.
That's the best argument.
It's not a winner argument, but it's the best argument.
Because at some point, you go to like sub-Saharan Africa, they have like eight kids and they live in like a dirt hut.
You can figure it out.
Having children, I believe, is a blessing of the Lord.
It's the most amazing thing.
You should try to have as many children as you can.
Much more important than traveling to Thailand or having a big apartment or a bunch of cats.
Having children are a gift from the Lord.
But as far as like the dating pool problem.
So young ladies, they need to be very clear about what they're expecting in a man and date with the intent to marry.
And not just date to, you know, have a good time.
And quite honestly, both need to do this.
But young women need to do a much better job of saving themselves for marriage.
They need to prioritize purity again.
Young men need to too.
But if young women do it, then young men will.
So if that's what the women need to do in order to make themselves worthy of dating, what do you think is the main thing men need to do to make themselves worthy?
The most attractive quality in a young man that young women can't ever articulate is self-control.
So how does this look in application?
A woman needs to be able to know that you can control your impulses when things get really crazy.
They can't articulate it, but that's what they want.
So, for example, they want to be able, when you go on a date, can you control your mouth?
Can you control your tongue?
Can you control your eye?
Are you going to cheat on her?
Are you going to have a wandering eye?
Are you going to get drunk every night?
Are you going to kind of go into like a drug, you know, abyss?
Women can't always put that into words, but that differentiates a boy from a man.
A boy is someone that has no self-control.
I would argue it's confidence and ambition.
And if you had those qualities, I think everything else falls into place because you have to have self-control if you're going to be ambitious.
Sure.
To have a North Star that you fly.
I totally agree.
Confidence is true.
Look, again, it's just if you look at it, though, you can be very confident, ambitious, but you could also then cheat on your wife like 10 years later, right?
So you have to be able to control your flesh.
We have we as men have very different problems than women, right?
Different temptations as men.
We have problems controlling our flesh.
That's why adultery is literally in the Ten Commandments.
You had to command an entire people not to cheat on their wives.
It was easy.
God would not have to command us not to do it.
And so when women are when men are dating, if you want to make yourself more attractive to a woman.
First of all, like demonstrate self-control and also women want to be able they want to be taken care of.
I know this like super provocative, but like deep down, they want a man to be able to provide.
Provide for them financially.
Should a man pay on the first date?
A hundred percent.
Like what kind of a wuss beta male is splitting the check?
Like, who are you?
Do you agree with me?
Listen, with Macy, I pay for the check.
On the first.
Yeah, the first.
It's like, I'm just sorry.
It's so.
I would go into debt and like scrub dishes before a woman.
Let's see.
Let's see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Let's see.
What is this?
So didn't you go on a date like years ago, like a decade ago with this woman whose mom gave you $20 to take her to the movie theater?
Yes.
Yeah.
I made money on that date, actually.
Well, so there's a good financial deal for you.
No, no, no.
Explain how you made money on a date.
That sounds different, though.
That's not what we're talking about, though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Her mom gave her.
And by the way, this was in high school.
Okay.
So that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about like 24 years old, like serious dating.
Right?
I split the check quite a lot.
Quite a lot.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to offend you.
You guys are great.
That's incomprehensible to me.
I think that's-To me, I thought it was a great financial decision.
Okay.
So from your prism, I totally get that.
And like you have really good financial discipline.
I'm sorry.
Like I would be so humiliated if I-I'm more-I did not care.
No, no.
I mean, I find that to be like the greatest beta male like humiliation.
To save money?
No, no.
To like the idea that a woman that you're trying to court.
Now, if it's like a friend thing or-As a first date, you don't even know if she's like the quality.
It doesn't matter.
It does not matter.
I'm sorry.
I was-By the way, that money you save is not worth the honor that you compromise.
It's such a big deal.
It's a massive deal.
I'm not trying to give it a hard time.
But no-I don't know.
I'm sorry.
But here's the thing.
In fairness, for your point with Macy, I paid for the whole first date.
Well, hold on.
Why'd you do that one though?
I think I was- was at a level where like that felt like the right choice to make but throughout my early 20s was it because you felt more serious with her or i was also in a point where i was ready to be able to like financially yes legit i get that early 20s like i still think saving five bucks here and there i would do it i would go to save you're you're manic with saving money.
I am.
We have Blake on my team is like you.
Yeah, no, he goes and he'll eat like the snacks for lunch to save money here at the end.
You know, it's funny.
I brought food from home.
No, no, that's by the way.
And coffee from home.
Frugality is a virtue.
Yeah.
But so we as Christians believe that there is an order of virtues and above frugality is honor.
And so we as men must lead.
We must provide.
Under no circumstance ever should a man ever let a woman pay for a date or you should have ever, ever.
No, even on the third, fourth, fifth.
What if it's the first date and you're just not paying for anything?
Okay, well, let me, period.
Well, let me, okay, so what kind of world are we living in?
Well, hold on a second.
I agree with you.
If I'm dating a girl, I would pay for everything.
Everything.
Yeah, everything.
However, I could see for other people that might be in a different financial position.
You know, you pay for 10 dates and then she's like, you know what?
I want to treat you.
Well, that's totally different.
No, no, what we're told what we're talking about is like, oh, we're going to alternate.
Like, once you're serious and she wants to take you out to something for a nice dinner.
And you might, by the way, if you have the intent to marry, you're already like kind of blending finances.
Like, I get that psychologically.
But like, if you're like, oh, we'll take turns.
Like, oh, well, you know, you pay this time.
I pay this time.
What's your advice to a girl who's who the guy she's currently seeing?
He says that.
Oh, do not marry that man.
But here's the thing.
I feel like they should always break it off.
But they should offer.
They should pull out the credit card.
The woman?
Of course not.
Just to offer.
No.
It's a nice gesture.
No, no, by the way, no, no, no.
This is feminism.
Feminism is that you have to be this like self-independent.
This is not a nice gesture.
It's you trying to be like egalitarian.
No, you as women should want to be provided for.
In fact, you should have an expectation that you as a woman are so important and so critical and so necessary and beautiful that it shouldn't even be a question that if you're in a date.
Now, if it's a business lunch or like friends-owned stuff, 50-50.
We're not talking about that, right?
Like it's all of a sudden you're like, hey, I want to buy insurance or like, you know, you're going to, you know, I want to go do business.
It's totally different.
I still think the man should pay, but that's that's.
But see, to me, when I was dating, it would be a huge turnoff if the check comes and she just looks at it and then looks at me and looks at the children.
I totally disagree.
I at least want to see like I'm reaching for something and I'm like, no worries.
I want a woman that wants to be led by a man.
I don't want a woman that's all of a sudden going to be competing financially in a marriage.
I don't want a woman that's going to be like, oh, you know, questioning financial decisions or a woman that's going to be like, all of a sudden, Jeff.
No, the man is the leader of the household.
The man is the leader of all the financial decisions.
The man is the, is the primary, should be the primary provider.
Again, there's exception to this.
That's all, oh, Charlie, you're so sexist.
Sorry, it worked for 2,000 years, for 5,000 years, and it should work again.
And by the way, what we're doing right now is not working.
Let me just repeat again.
This is not working.
And I'm not trying to like bash you.
Like, this is fun.
It's in really good state.
No, I love the banter.
No, it's great.
But like this idea, if a woman on a date were to pull out a credit card to go pay for something, like I would be, I would be like, oh, so you're like one of those boss babes.
No, that's, that's not what that's saying for us.
That is, no, that is completely messed up.
That's catastrophic turnoff.
I, I think, no.
I think if I'm on a date and she reaches for it, like, I just think, oh, that's really nice.
You're trying to be kind here.
You're trying to alleviate what you perceive to be a financial burden on me.
That's a generous interpretation.
And so, so bring me something to the table.
And so I think they're not bringing money to the table.
They're bringing something else.
It's a nice gesture.
I agree with Graham.
I think it's a nice gesture.
However, I agree with you.
I think the guy should pay.
I think the woman going into that should have an expectation that the man takes care of her.
But should she be grateful if the guy takes 100%?
Oh, okay.
Because it should be immense gratitude.
No, no, no, no.
The woman should be like, you know what?
She should say, she's like, thank you so much for doing that and not having to put this unnecessary pressure on me because you have just freed me.
That's what women want, by the way.
Freedom?
No, no, no.
Or like, like, what?
Number two at Red Robin.
Do you know how many women are secretly miserable that they have to be as financially successful as men?
A lot.
Like a lot.
It drives them insane.
Deep down, a lot of women want to be mothers.
They want to be wives.
I tend to agree with that.
Not every woman, by the way, if you want to, but if you want to go be a boss maid, go do that.
Like, it's a free society.
There's a lot of great people that do that.
But generally, we have overcorrected, okay?
We have a lot of women that deep down want to go be moms and they would love to have their man come in and just grab the check and be like, no, I got it.
And by the way, you know what they see that as a signal?
It's going to be okay.
When the bullets start firing and there's chaos and things start falling apart, this man is going to protect the family.
Boom.
Wallet on the table.
Wallet on the table.
No, even better.
Paying 26% interest on that.
It's got to be even more alpha.
You go to the waiter before the meal and you just give them the credit card.
It's not even a conversation.
It's paid for.
It's done.
Like, you don't even allow it to be a thing that is introduced there.
I would agree with that.
I actually agree with that.
Whole alpha is like, you go straight up where you are like smooth move and the girl is so stunned and she'll be like, oh, don't we have to be like, no, I got it.
It's done.
Boom.
Are you kidding?
From a woman's perspective, they'll be like, that's the most attractive thing ever.
I would love to hear some woman's perspective in the comments here.
I think they're going to be agreeing with you for the most part.
If they disagree, it's fine, but like you'll end up with, by the way, some women want to marry weak men because they are the bosses.
What other tips do you have like that?
Like that was a good suggestion.
Oh, I have a lot of tips.
So for marriage or for dating, I have both.
Let's start with dating and then move our way to marriage.
So in dating, look, I don't, I do not think you should have sex before marriage.
I know, I know that's a provocative take.
I think sex is holy.
And by the way, it's not just a religious take.
I actually think that if you introduce sex into dating, then all of a sudden there's kind of like a dilution of what exactly will be the ultimate physical crescendo of marriage.
You can actually make a rational, reasonable, non-religious argument for that.
Anyway, that's like a whole other topic that we could discuss another time, but I will defend that.
I actually think bring back purity, bring back segment of yourself for marriage.
Okay, but other top other things is this.
You should go on a road trip with the person you're dating.
It's very important.
So you should find uncomfortable, high-pressure travel situations.
That's not just like flying first class to a Ruba.
And you should try to be in places of discomfort intentionally with who you are dating.
And you'll find out a lot with that person.
Number three, this is going to sound incredibly sexist.
I don't care.
If it is a woman that you want to get married to and she says that she wants to be a traditional wife, see if she's actually up to it.
Say, okay, treat me, cook me a meal.
I'm not kidding.
No, I think that's like.
No, no, no.
Honestly, like, she says she wants to be a traditional wife.
Like, and by the way, be like, does she enjoy it?
This is important, though.
Like, and then ask her.
No, I'm not even just, is she a good cook?
Be like, did you enjoy doing that?
Like, was, and she's like, oh, I loved it.
I love getting the ingredients.
I love looking at the cookbook.
I love the recipe.
I love thinking about you when I was cooking the food.
You're like, okay, this is going to be awesome.
Right.
Or otherwise she's like, it was a disaster.
It was this.
I'm like, okay, well, then we might have a little bit, you know.
And by the way, I'm not saying that every wife has to cook every meal for husband, but honestly, a lot of women out there want to do that.
A lot of women want to provide for their man in that way.
They want to run the house.
They want to shepherd the kids.
Going into marriage, though, I'm a big believer in premarital counseling.
I think that there are several questions That are not answered when most people go into marriage that should be answered.
And I might freak you out with this because I don't know if you can.
No, we did this.
Yeah, okay, great.
I looked at every divorce statistic and we did everything we could to lessen the chances of a divorce.
So, yeah, money is number one, right?
Who's going to handle the finances?
Here's one that you might not have done that you should do while you're still in the honeymoon phase.
Are you going to have an open or closed house?
I don't even know what that is.
See, it's big.
So, were you raised in a house where a lot of friends came over all the time, or were you raised in a house where almost no friends came over?
A normal amount.
It wasn't, you know, open or closed.
It was, you know, maybe like once a week.
We'd have like a do you know what kind of house your wife was raised in?
Probably about the same.
Okay, it's an important question because I was raised in a very closed house, right?
I know people that are raised in open houses and it's destroyed their marriages.
You know, the type where they're always having people over.
Yeah, that was my family.
Okay, so you get that.
Yeah.
Imagine if you were to marry a closed house person and all of a sudden you were like, hey, we're going to constantly have a stream of people and you don't talk about that before marriage.
All of a sudden, you're like, it's total chaos for a closed house person because they're raised in a place where evenings are very quiet.
Make sure, this is another important thing, make sure that you get along with each other, that you really like each other, not just love each other, that you like spending time with that person.
One of my favorite words in the English language is like.
It's very unique.
Only the English language actually has that.
Do you like spending time or do you just love that person?
That's because liking is like, hey, do you, can you talk to that person seven hours uninterrupted on a park bench if you needed to?
Or is it just kind of like an annoyance and is it just purely physical?
Other questions and other pieces of advice that I think are really important.
In-laws matter.
They really do.
They shouldn't always necessarily be deal breakers, but boy, you should know the in-laws because your wife will take the form of the mother more times than not.
So you should at least get along with your in-law, kind of know the in-law.
Children, how many children?
When are you going to have children?
Is it a priority?
Will it be early?
Will it be late?
Religious questions.
Are we going to raise them religiously?
Are we going to raise them secular?
Other questions that I think are really important that actually don't always get flushed out.
How many vacations are we going to take?
What type of vacations?
Are we an RV family?
Are we a go-to-a private, you know, island family?
Are we a, are we going to splurge on one vacation a year?
Or are we going to do like three or four?
This is important before you get married.
All of a sudden, you're kind of in the marriage thing and you're like, hey, I just booked us a vacation.
Like, what?
I didn't want to.
That's not because it's different philosophies of time off.
Last one, which is the biggest, you want the biggest of all.
What are acceptable and unacceptable vices for our marriage?
For example, is it acceptable for the husband to smoke a cigar?
Has she smelled cigar before you get married?
And does she know what that is?
Will marijuana be allowed in the marriage?
I would say no, of course.
Is it okay for alcohol to be around?
If yes, how often?
Will you drink on weeknights?
Are more than one drink acceptable?
Will we drink socially?
Will you drink once you have kids?
Will you drink around the kids?
Here's another question: Will you watch TV at night?
Will you be okay if there's our rated kind of sexual nudity that your partner is watching?
Is completely off limits for your relationship?
I think it absolutely should be.
You should talk about that because some couples are like perfectly okay with what I think it's kind of weird, to be honest, right?
These are questions that honestly, all the time that people do not always flush out before marriage.
In the course of dating, though, I could go on for like infinite.
No, I really enjoy this.
Yeah, like, yeah.
Um, again, we have an amazing marriage, my wife and I. Obviously, it's not perfect.
No marriage is perfect, but we actually like each other.
We prioritize date night.
We're actually doing it right after this tonight, which is awesome.
Um, but I find so often that people in dating don't date with the intent to marry.
And when they end up do wanting to marry, they don't even ask the tough questions before they get married.
Could we do a couple rapid-fire questions real quick?
Okay, what's your biggest insecurity?
Forgetting something I should know.
Will you run for president?
I'm not running for president.
What's more dangerous?
Ignorance or apathy in voters?
Oh, apathy for sure.
Should there be a maximum age to be president?
No.
What is a worst policy idea?
Universal basic income or open borders?
Open borders.
One government agency you'd shut down right away.
That's a great question.
Department of Education.
Would you rather have dinner with AOC or Bernie?
AOC.
Is it a sin to fly Spirit Airlines?
A sin?
No.
But whoever started Spirit Airlines is in great defiance to God.
Do you think you could win in a fist fight against Gavin Newsom?
Probably not.
If I'm being honest, I don't think so.
Do you believe in aliens?
Maybe.
Debater a podcast.
I like this.
I like podcasts.
It's way better.
It's more human.
Censorship or chaos?
What's more destructive?
Censorship, without a doubt.
Absolutely.
Do you have a random pet peeve?
I have a lot of pet peeves, actually.
One of my pet peeves that I can't, I literally cannot stand.
And I'm actually a violator of it, is when I'm trying to talk to somebody and then they check their phone.
I'm really bad with that with my team.
So I'm sure you guys, it bothers you, but I got to be a lot better about that.
And finally, oh, sorry.
No, no.
And then when people say at the end of the day, they don't even know what they're saying when they say it.
It's just at the end of the day.
It's just literally a linguistic crutch, is all that it is.
Linguistic crutches are very annoying, in fairness.
Yes.
And that is one that drives me nuts.
If everything completely goes away, how do you want to be remembered?
If I die?
Everything just goes away.
How would you, if you could be associated with one thing, how would you want to be remembered?
