Ep. 1912 - Boomers Scold Gen Z For Eating Rotisserie Chicken
Ep. 1912’s host mocks The Wall Street Journal for criticizing Gen Z’s rotisserie chicken spending amid $1.7T in student debt and AI-driven job instability, framing it as boomer hypocrisy akin to millennial avocado toast attacks. He defends Christianity against a Youthscape survey calling Jesus "condescending" and "violent," tying Gen Z’s rejection to leftist autonomy rooted in Diderot’s French Revolution-era atheism. Meanwhile, he promotes grass-fed protein bars (Equip Foods), skincare (Tupes & Co.), and men’s health apps (JoinRelay), while accusing CodePink of being a CCP-funded tool undermining U.S. credibility—echoing Soviet-backed civil rights tactics. The episode blends economic scorn, theological defense, and conspiracy claims, culminating in a warning against acting’s "morally dubious" emotional demands despite its superficial appeal. [Automatically generated summary]
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The Wall Street Journal is lambasting Gen Z for wasting all of its money on frivolous luxuries like rotisserie chicken to eat so that they can live.
Also, according to a new survey, Gen Z is lambasting Christianity because Jesus has a God complex.
The kids, I think we can safely conclude, are not all right.
Something's a little wrong.
And for the most part, actually, I don't think it's their fault.
I'm Michael Knowles.
us The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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No, he wasn't.
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He wasn't.
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He was a black Jewish woman.
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First up, Wall Street Journal.
Do you remember this was probably seven or eight years ago now, maybe more.
There was this meme going around of stodgy boomers criticizing millennials.
This was before the Zoomers really hit the scene.
Criticizing millennials back when we was young and lambasting us for being profligate and wasteful because we would order avocado toast at brunch.
And I didn't order avocado toast at brunch, but apparently the millennials were doing this.
So they'd go out and they'd spend 15 bucks on a piece of toast with avocado on it.
And at that time, before Joe Biden's inflation, 15 bucks was a lot of money.
So the boomers were attacking the millennials because they said that's a waste of money.
Now they weren't attacking the millennials for eating avocados or eating toast, which are relatively basic foods.
Avocado is a little fancier, a little more exotic, but it's relatively basic.
The criticism was that they were overpaying for it.
You could buy a piece of toast and an avocado and that meal should cost you like 60 cents, not $15.
That was the criticism.
Now we have an update.
And the update is care of the Wall Street Journal, still attacking millennials a little bit, but Gen Z is the prime target.
Gen Zers and millennials are swimming in student debt and may never own homes, but they're splurging on gut healthy juices.
There is a lot of overpriced juice.
I agree.
That is unnecessary usually.
They're splurging on gut-healthy juices and rotisserie chickens.
Now, the thing about rotisserie chickens is not only are they not particularly expensive, I think they're like six bucks for a whole cooked chicken at the grocery store.
They used to be five bucks when I was buying them, but inflation.
Still, six bucks is a pretty good deal for a whole chicken.
The thing about a rotisserie chicken is not only is it inexpensive for relatively nutritious food, a lot of protein and stuff.
Also, rotisserie chickens specifically are loss leaders.
So grocery stores and places like Costco, which has great rotisserie chicken, they price the cooked chicken below market value.
And the reason they do this, as with all loss leaders, like Costco does with the $1.50 hot dog and Diet Coke, they do it to get you in the store so that you feel like you're getting a good deal because you are and it's awesome and I love it.
The Costco hot dog is one of my favorite lunches.
And then you go in and you buy a lot of higher profit margin goods or goods with any profit margin.
And then the store makes money.
That's what a loss leader is.
Gen Z's Religious Complex00:12:08
So we have gone from millennials are paying an order of magnitude or more extra for some stupid brunch food to Zoomers are eating anything but gruel.
You profligate Zoomers, eat your porridge.
Go out into your field, pick your oats or whatever you grow there, make your porridge.
And if you eat any, if you ever dare to eat protein, you are a decadent and luxurious spendthrift.
This ain't it, man.
This really ain't it.
The Zoomers should be allowed to eat chicken.
They should be allowed to eat chicken priced under fair market value, I think.
And this is a little bit of a correction.
There are plenty of problems with the Zoomers.
Like some of them are doing meth and hitting themselves in the head with hammers.
Like they have problems.
I grant that.
But a lot of those problems come from the insane political context into which they were born, including, I mean, I'm making a little joke about Mr. Icular, who was on my show, this live stream guy, Clavicular.
But even that guy, as I think came out in the interview that I had with him, the immediate source of all of his problems is that he was bred entirely on the internet.
It's where he got the idea to shoot himself up with illegal testosterone and mess up his puberty and sterilize himself and cause all these other downstream problems.
That was all from the internet.
So the Zoomers grew up on the internet and even beyond that social context of social media, say, they grew up in an economy that was a little different than their parents or their grandparents grew up in.
So they're saddled with a ton of student debt because tuition has gone through the roof for a variety of reasons, largely including government subsidies.
They can't really afford homes.
A lot of their parents were divorced, so they don't have a really good model of marriage.
So they put off getting married.
They grew up essentially without religion.
That's also kind of their parents' fault.
And it's society's fault broadly, the society which dismisses religion, kicks religion out of the public square.
So they don't have a good moral framework.
So they think that narcissism is a virtue.
They've replaced God with whatever Nietzsche wanted to replace God with, you know, just the tyranny of the will and of the self and all of these problems.
I'm not saying they don't share any responsibility for it, but those are the circumstances into which they were born.
And it legitimately constitutes a tougher upbringing than millennials or Gen X or boomers or even the greatest and silent generations had.
It does.
I know some of my friends and colleagues, they like to say, these dumb kids need to shut their mouths and quit it with the maxing and the gooning and the selling and whatever.
And they need to shut up and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
And yeah, like, yes, I would like people to pursue virtue and cooperate with God's grace, but you got to give the kids a little bit of a break.
They grew up in broken homes in a culture that radically promoted sexual deviancy and other kinds of deviancy as well, without religion and in an economy that really rigged the system against them after they were told to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to get a degree that was effectively worthless.
It didn't give them a professional education or a liberal education.
And now they're entering into an economy that is in the midst of a revolution caused by a one in at least a century technological development such as AI.
So like give the kids a, let them eat chicken.
Like Enlightenment propagandists pretended that Marie Antoinette said, let Zemit brioche, let them eat cake, when they were talking about the peasants and the hoi polloi.
This is kind of the opposite version of that.
Let them eat chicken.
They can have chicken, all right?
I'll beat up on the Zoomers as much as the next guy, but give the kids a break.
Good grief.
Okay, now here's a problem for the Zoomers.
The Zoomers, according to a new survey, this is just published in The Spectator, which I really enjoy.
The Zoomers are put off by Christianity.
Very interesting article, why Gen Z is troubled by Jesus.
And the reason is, well, I'll just read, I'll read the first paragraph or two.
Many teenagers today find Christianity off-putting because Jesus seems too fond of mansplaining.
He appears to have a God complex while the Almighty is alienating on account of being really violent and aggressive.
Okay, now I know what people are laughing at just in the first two sentences.
They say they don't like that he mansplains and that he has a God complex.
Well, this would probably make sense because he is both God and man, fully God and fully man.
He is the God-man.
So that would make sense.
Though I have to point out, he actually does not have a God complex because what he has is divine simplicity.
In other words, you know, God is not divisible into parts, you know, but is wholly simple.
You know, he's wholly integrated.
So anyway, you would say he has a God's simplicity, maybe.
In any case, yes, he is God.
He is God.
So if he were to have a God complex, I suppose that would be justified.
And he is man.
He is a man.
So if he were to mansplain, that would make sense.
They go on, these are the findings in the report Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape's Translating God Project, based on a survey of British 14 to 17 year olds, drawing on five reading groups in which teenagers reacted to passages of scripture, traditionally understood as conveying good news.
Youthscape faced reactions radically different from what it says might have been expected.
How is it different?
Well, Jesus was not only seen as a condescending male chauvinist and God the Father as a bully, many youths discerned other issues in the readings.
One respondent found an unequal power dynamic at play in the scriptures.
Gee, you don't say the transcendent God who created everything out of nothing is unequal in power to like you.
Yeah, interesting.
While another had, quote, concerns about consent and abuses of power.
She saw in the relationship between man and the divine.
In the minds of some young people, the report concludes Jesus is, quote, a troubling figure, arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated.
Jesus is religiously motivated.
He is, in fact, and more so than they even understand, because religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves.
Christ is God.
He is the second person of the Trinity.
And yet, what does he say?
Not my will be done, but the will of the Father.
No one knows the day or the hour, not even the Son, only the Father.
So he is constantly receiving from the Father.
He is eternally begotten of the Father.
He processes from the Father and is God himself in this central mystery of the Christian faith, which is the Trinity.
So yes, you know, he is both a subject of religion and the end of religion.
Yes, that's very true.
Arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated, and male.
He's male, and that's a problem.
Okay.
And they go on to say, this is different than traditional interpretations.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
However, I think people are getting the direction wrong here.
So with Gen Z, first of all, you can't give any simple singular description ever because Gen Z's distinctive feature is that it is polarized.
It is much more polarized than other generations.
For the millennials, say, you have the kind of Obama libs and you have the center-right conservatives.
Some of whom have come around to like Trump.
They were maybe a little skeptical of Trump.
But, you know, the chasm between the boomers today in politics is like this wide.
It's like if you're only listening to this, I'm holding my hands an inch apart.
And then the chasm between Gen X, maybe a little more, roughly the same.
Chasm between the millennials, it's a little more, but it's still, it's kind of the Obama generation, right?
When it comes to the Zoomers, it's not that the Zoomers are picking between Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, okay?
With the Zoomers, they're either like Antifa agents with septum piercings who are trans, or they're Nazis.
It is like, it is just a much further degree of polarity.
So you have some Zoomers, and this is where the kids are totally right, and they're doing a great job.
You have Zoomers who are deeply drawn to religion.
You have Zoomers who are deeply drawn to very traditional forms of religion.
You see a spike in, especially Catholicism, especially among thoughtful Zoomers.
And you have transgenderism, which is the most radical modern form of Gnosticism, and including aspects of New Age and the occult.
So when we read this, we read about these teenagers in the UK, we say, well, they don't like God because they don't like authority and men and religion and I don't know truth.
They don't like hierarchy.
Okay.
They don't like those things.
So therefore, they don't like God.
It's actually the other way around.
And this is a key to understanding political history.
All of leftism comes down to a rebellion against God.
And I'm not being hyperbolic and I'm not reading too deeply into things.
That is where it starts.
As I've mentioned on the show, and many of you I'm sure are familiar with, the term political left comes from the French Revolution when the atheists sat on the left side of the National Assembly.
And when they won, they ransacked the churches.
They destroyed altars and statues.
They erected a statue to the goddess reason in Notre Dame de Paris.
It's a rebellion against God because leftism endeavors to put man in the place of God.
Diderot, who inspired the French Revolution, said that man will only be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priests.
So that's what it's all about.
The reason that the left pushes this nonsense on kids, that you have to hate men, you have to hate Europeans, because you're, you know, Hilaire Belloc said that the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith, you know, that Europe really spreads Christianity throughout the world.
And, you know, the church is seated in Rome.
Some opinions vary on that these days, but that's traditionally the understanding.
That the reason that they hate the Europeans and the men and authority and disparate power dynamics and claims of truth that minimize the consent and agency and autonomy of individual men, the reason they hate all that, the reason that they ran that down the throats of kids in school is because they hate God.
The goal that they have in mind, whether it is witting or unwitting, is to turn people against God.
That's what it's all about.
And if God were, I mean, it's kind of silly, but like if God were a woman, if God were a black woman, I don't know, if God were, whatever, if religion were other than it is, if our understanding of God were other than it is, if revelation were other than it was, that would be the thing that the left opposes.
That's ultimately what it comes down to.
The other accidents of the left's hatreds come from hatred of God.
Okay, now, before we get to leftism in a very practical way in the U.S. Congress, this is a very fitting ad to follow up.
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The Worst Aren't Immigrants00:06:27
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Democrat Representative Steve Cohen has a very interesting pitch for Democrats as the midterms approach.
President Trump is cracking down on illegal immigration because he won the popular vote running on mass deportations against the illegal immigrants in 2024.
And Democrat Steve Cohen comes out.
He says, you people are arguing that the worst of the worst criminals in America are illegal aliens.
No, no, no.
O contra, May Frère.
The worst of the worst are native-born Americans.
We need people working in the front lines and local law enforcement to protect our citizens from the worst of the worst.
The worst of the worst are not the immigrants.
The worst of the worst records show are native-born Americans, and they are committing crimes that hurt our citizens and our cities.
And you're working against it.
And thank you for that.
But by trying to get our local law enforcement where we have an undercount of officers in Memphis to leave Memphis and go to work for ICE to deport people is a wrong priority.
Print it.
Print it.
Cut it.
Print it.
Run it in every midterm congressional race.
Democrats say the worst of the worst are not illegal aliens.
The worst of the worst are American citizens, native-born Americans.
They're the worst.
And look, they do believe that.
Steve Cohen accidentally admitted this.
But what is he saying particularly?
What is he even intending to say?
What he's intending to say from his perspective is almost as bad.
When he says it's not the illegals we have to worry about, especially in cities, the worst of the worst violent criminals are not the illegal aliens.
They're native-born Americans.
What he is really saying amid all those euphemisms is don't worry about Hispanics, worry about blacks.
That's what he's saying.
He's talking about Memphis.
He's talking about crime specifically in any city, but if you want to really drill down in Memphis, what native-born Americans is he talking about?
Is he talking about the WASP Methodist family down the street living just a few blocks off Beale?
I don't think so.
What he's talking about specifically is black people.
And so his pitch to voters, I guess, on why they secretly don't want the mass deportations that they voted for in 2024, his pitch to voters is, Hispanics aren't the problem.
It's blacks that are the problem.
Let's go after them.
Now, of course, he would never say that.
He's trying to speak in euphemisms to say, no, no, no, it's really a dichotomy between the illegal aliens and the native born Americans.
But if we're talking about the particulars that he's bringing up here, we're talking about Memphis, Tennessee.
That's what he's saying.
And furthermore, he is missing the whole point of the illegal immigration crime conversation.
Because y'all hear these libs sometimes.
They'll say, actually, do you know that the illegal aliens commit crime at a lower rate than the native-born population?
And that's also not really true.
Depends on how you slice the statistics, but it's not really true.
Regardless, even if it were true.
The difference here is that we have to deal with the people born in America.
We have to deal with the American citizens.
There are plenty of American citizens across all races, across the country, in cities and country, that I would love to deport to Bukele to get them out of here because they're bad for America.
There are plenty of them.
But we can't do that because they're American citizens and they're entitled to certain rights.
So the best we can do is have a robust police presence, enforce the law, keep them off the streets so that they can't harm innocent Americans, also of all backgrounds throughout the country.
That is not true of illegal aliens.
None of those illegal aliens should be here.
Every single crime that an illegal alien commits in America was needless.
It didn't have to happen.
Every single American who is victimized by an illegal alien is victimized specifically because of the perfidy, the treachery of Democrats who insist that the illegal aliens stay.
Every rape, every murder, every robbery, every drug deal, every, was unnecessary.
We don't have to deal with those illegals.
They're not supposed to be here.
If we followed the law, none of them would be here.
That's the difference.
Even if you could argue, well, really, the worst violent criminals aren't the illegal aliens.
They're those native-born Americans in Memphis, wink-wink, Steve Cohen, little dog whistle there.
Even if that were true, you're missing the point.
All of the illegal alien crime is needless.
And you, Steve Cohen, you and people like you, every Democrat in Congress and every Swiss Republican who doesn't vote for immigration enforcement, you are responsible for every one of those crimes.
The same cannot be said of crimes committed by native-born Americans.
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Ideas on Self-Deportation00:15:11
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Now, there is some good news on immigration.
We have a report now from CBS.
So they've made a move a little bit more toward the center.
They were pretty left-wing.
Now Barry Weiss is running CBS.
Barry Weiss, though, is center-left.
She's not center-right.
She's not a conservative in any way, really.
She's center-left.
She's just much more reasonable than the other guys who are running it.
Well, CBS has a story on a record number of illegal alien detainees giving up their cases and voluntarily leaving the country.
And that figure only appears to be climbing.
So you look at, this is a great, great story.
The percentage of detained cases that end in voluntary removal, they're receiving their due process and they say, you know what, whatever, I give up.
I'm going back to Venezuela.
It started at 1985.
You're looking at like six, 7%.
Then it jumps to 19% by the end of the Reagan era.
But then after that Reagan amnesty, oh, it goes way, way down.
By the 90s, you're looking at 3%, 2%.
And it kind of hovers around there for a little while, jumps up a little bit again.
Best you're getting is right after Trump was elected.
You get it up to 21%.
And it starts to go back down as he has trouble enforcing the border.
And then look at this.
He gets reelected in 2024.
Spikes 28%.
So last year, Trump formally removed something like 525,000 illegal aliens, which is much better numbers than certainly than Biden and then Barack Obama even.
And they called, they, being the liberals, say that Obama was called the deporter-in-chief.
And that was kind of faking it because Obama was counting the illegals that he just turned away at the border.
So he artificially inflated those numbers.
In any case, 525,000, you say, all right, that's a good start, but we got something like 20 million illegals in the country.
The real story, though, was there were a lot of self-deportations, a lot of people who just chose to leave the country.
And I know some people on the right were skeptical of this.
They didn't totally believe it, but we're seeing this come up in numbers in labor numbers.
We're seeing this come up out of think tanks.
We're now seeing this reported by CBS News.
28% of these detainees just choosing to remove themselves.
Those are not counted in the formal deportations.
That's pretty good.
That's a pretty good number.
So why is this happening?
Other people on the right have criticized the White House for putting on a show of deportations, but not really carrying it out.
So they put on the show, you know, the cruelty is the point.
They have these really cool edits that come out from the social media accounts DHS and ICE.
And it's them, you know, smacking these illegals on the ground, cuffing them up.
You see this big show of force in Minneapolis, which the left tried to fight Trump on.
Ultimately, though, I think it was either a draw or Trump kind of won because he got the locals to start handing over the criminals.
In any case, some of those people on the right say, I don't want the show.
I want the deportations.
We all want more deportations.
But the show is important.
I mean, look down at Bukele.
I mentioned Bukele a lot, the wonderful leader of El Salvador, to whom we send a lot of these illegal aliens.
When Bukele started rounding up the criminals in his country, face-tatooed gangsters, in some cases, Satan-worshipping gangsters, when he started doing that, he didn't just kind of do it quietly and get the job done quietly.
He made these great videos absolutely humiliating these people.
He then made videos destroying the graves of their members and family members, like going in with sledgehammers and smashing up their gravestones and treating these people like cockroaches and then putting them on camera looking like cockroaches and sending a message.
The message was heard because El Salvador went from being the most dangerous country in the Western hemisphere, maybe the most dangerous country in the world, to one of the very safest countries in the hemisphere.
Very impressive.
The flamboyance was the point.
Sometimes the libs say the cruelty is the point as if Republicans are just, you know, sadists or something.
No, no, no.
The cruelty is not the point.
We don't want to be cruel.
We don't want to be unjust.
But the flamboyance is the point, actually.
The showmanship is the point.
It serves a practical strategic purpose.
When you have these videos of ICE showing up and getting a little rough with people, totally within the confines of the law, but a little rough, that sends a message.
When you show ICE not backing down, when you show leftists try to attack ICE, drive their cars into ICE, and ICE finally protects themselves, follows the law, ICE shoots back, that sends a message.
And the law is a real teacher.
So the question, of course, was, well, is the flamboyance really paying off or is it just a way to mollify conservatives who aren't getting enough deportations?
I think the numbers are pretty clear here.
They are resulting in self-deportations.
They are resulting in people voluntarily leaving as they're awaiting processing.
This is good stuff.
Folks, very exciting.
For President's Day, Daily Wire memberships are 47% off.
Don't let me convince you to subscribe to Daily Wire.
Well, you should let me convince you to.
But how about you take it on the advice of Roger Avery, who wrote Pulp Fiction and who is a very, very prominent writer and filmmaker, speaking to Joe Rogan just the other day.
Have you seen the Penn Dragon cycle, the rise of the Merlin?
No.
Okay, so I had a chip on my shoulder when I started watching this.
I was like, okay, this is very unlikely that I'm going to enjoy this production.
But they did it for like a, for a micro budget, effectively.
They made something that is absolutely kind of reinvents the mythology.
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You know, they're spending billions making these Lord of the Rings things and like nobody cares.
They're just awful to watch.
And in the meantime, these guys just, you know, without anybody paying attention, cranked this out.
And I've only seen four episodes of it, but I am like completely blown away by it.
That's so interesting.
The Daily Wire, anything about this is, to me, as good as classic television.
Okay, you don't need to take my word for it.
Take one of the great men of Hollywood's word for it, Joe Rogan.
Go check it out.
Go become a Daily Wire Plus subscriber.
And most importantly, follow me when you do that.
There are two stories I have to get to.
I'm going to have to fly through them because I know I have to get to the mailbag.
But the State Department has identified Code Pink and other far-left groups as Chinese tools.
These left-wing groups as just fronts, basically, serving the purpose of foreign adversaries.
And also, Shakespeare might be a black Jewish woman.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Jay Sumner6999 says, this lawyer, oh, the lawyer in the case of that squatter, the squatter in Maryland, I think it was, that lawyer who went on and just didn't know how to say anything.
It was great.
If you missed the clip, go check out the show yesterday.
Anyway, the comment is he adds an interesting connotation to the term criminal lawyer.
Yes, that's true.
There are a lot of criminal lawyers, aren't there?
A lot of double criminal lawyers.
Okay, real quick.
The State Department has just identified CodePink.
CodePink is an anti-war group.
It's been around since I was a kid.
As a tool of the Chinese Communist Party.
Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers says, partisan hacks spent years peddling the phony Russia collusion hoax while turning a blind eye to the sprawling web of far-left activist organizations who push the agendas of the Chinese Communist Party.
Organizations like CodePink and the People's Forum denigrate the United States, whitewash the violence of Marxist regimes, and run cover for China while enjoying an influx of cash from a donor network with connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
The State Department will pursue complete transparency for the donor and NGO networks that lobby for our adversaries and seek to weaken the resolve of the United States.
The department assesses that China, Iran, and Russia aggressively use state media proxies and digital platforms to spread propaganda and falsehoods, undermine U.S. credibility and policies, and expand their influence.
This is a little bit of a complex issue because you're going to have to hold multiple ideas that are in tension with one another in your mind at the same time.
But this is part of growing up.
And we all have to grow up politically.
Idea number one, Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians.
The suggestion that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, that the Russians rigged the 2016 election, is Democrat propaganda, ironically cooked up by the Democrats with Russian intelligence.
The idea of the Russia hoax is in a certain way a Russia hoax, but that was fake.
That isn't real.
Next thing to know.
Certain groups that are on the left, that in some cases now are even being embraced by the right can have serious ideas.
Maybe not serious ideas, but if they're really sincere ideas.
Code Pink sincerely hates it when America goes to war.
And there are people on the right.
I mean, look, we all kind of hate it when we go to war, but some wars are justified, other wars are not justified.
The Code Pink idea is that basically whenever America goes to war, we're always in the wrong.
But they might sincerely believe that.
Students for Justice in Palestine, another great example.
There is a serious conversation to be had about the rights or overstated rights or underserved rights of the Palestinian people and the political solution to the problems in the Middle East and the legitimacy of the Israeli state and on what grounds the Israeli state is to be justified.
And there is a serious conversation to be had about all of that.
And here's the third part you have to hold in your head.
Our foreign adversaries actually do use sincere ideas and political candidates to advance their agenda against America.
They actually do that.
The Russians did not collude with Trump.
Trump did not collude with the Russians.
Trump was much harder on the Russians than the Democrats were.
But it benefited Russia when the Democrats cooked up the Russian narrative.
And again, Russian intelligence like indirectly kind of worked on that.
But that is true.
That whole thing was beneficial to the Russians.
They had a stake in the Russia hoax.
Our adversaries, Russia, Iran, China, do fund and promote these groups like Code Pink or Students for Justice in Palestine or whatever.
They do it.
That is why I'm real loath.
I mean, first of all, the Students for Justice in Palestine thing is just kind of silly.
The notion that we need some grand alliance with Islamists is, I think, contrary to the historical experience of Christendom.
The notion for Code Pink, the notion that wars cannot be justified and that America is always on the wrong side of wars, I think is ridiculous.
But I am sympathetic to the people in the traditional territory of Palestine, especially to Christians there, what Christians remain.
I am sympathetic to the idea that we don't want to go to war frivolously.
I'm sympathetic to all of that.
Also, foreign adversaries are using those groups to destabilize America.
This has been going on for a long time.
Probably the clearest example from recent history is the civil rights movement.
There were great aspects to the civil rights movement.
There were some bad aspects to the civil rights movement too, but there were some great aspects and motivations to it, without question.
And also, the Soviet Union was funding the civil rights movement.
I know it's difficult to hold those ideas in tension, but that's growing up is recognizing that.
Growing up is that there are legitimate domestic political concerns that are exploited by our foreign adversaries.
And so we need to be a little careful when we talk about those domestic concerns.
In fact, the reason that they can be exploited by our adversaries is because they're real concerns.
There is a certain reality to it.
Nevertheless, we don't want to inadvertently be promoting the propaganda of people who have ICBMs pointed at us.
Okay.
Rethinking Acting Morality00:06:28
Last question.
Is Shakespeare a Jewish black woman?
Here is a recent news report.
What if the bard wasn't a white man from Stratford at all?
What if William Shakespeare was actually a Jewish black woman?
Yes, quaintly outlandish theory that is all being published in a new book by historian Irene Causlett, and it's titled The Real Shakespeare.
And in this, Irene argues that Amelia Bassano, a Jewish woman of North African descent, one of the first women to actually publish poetry in the early 1600s, well, she was actually the man we all refer to as Shakespeare.
Some of the most beloved works of all time, some of the most famous, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet.
Yes, those are all actually Amelia.
That's according to this new theory that's been put forward by Irene.
What if?
What if ifs and buts were candy and nuts?
Well, then we'd all have a Merry Christmas.
The answer to the question, just to wrap it up, the answer to the question, was Shakespeare a black Jewish woman?
No, he wasn't.
What if, wouldn't that be wacky if he were?
I love this story.
And the news anchor here is kind of winking at it because she knows it's totally ridiculous.
But I just love, it matters politically because so much of the way that we treat literature, philosophy, history, so much of how we treat our education these days, it really just boils down to, what if it were opposite day?
Yes, yes, yes.
I know what thinkers have always thought and what the wisest men of history have always believed and considered.
Yes, I know.
But what if it were the opposite?
That's like, that's modern education.
So anyway, what if?
What if?
What if?
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You'll get 50% off your first month.
Take it away.
Hi, Michael.
I have a question for you and Mr. Ben Davies.
I'm really interested in pursuing acting as a career, and I know that both of you had had experience in that field.
I'll be graduating high school with an associate's degree in two years, and I'm ready to put in all the hard work and effort required into getting into the industry.
I know acting can be very tough in many ways, but I'm willing to go through that journey along the way.
What is your advice on getting into the industry and making myself known while avoiding the pitfalls common with actors?
Thank you for your time and thank you for your show.
Good question.
Run, run, do anything else, run in the opposite direction.
No, look, I really enjoyed the craft of acting, especially as a student.
You know, I really enjoyed it in the same way that I enjoy playing ukulele or piano or something like that.
And more so even.
I took it very seriously.
I was at very serious acting conservatories.
I really delved into it, especially following the modern form of acting, which comes from Stanislavsky in the Moscow Art Theater, up through the group theater in New York, teachers like Stella Adler, Harold Klurman, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner.
I studied with one of Meisner's assistants for a long time.
I have rethought the morality of acting in recent years.
After I quit it, I sometimes say I'm the only guy in history who ever got cured of the acting bug, but I've rethought the morality of it in part because of modern acting.
Because in order to act well, especially for the screen, but in the style of acting that came about in the 20th century, it's not enough to just like put on a silly show and be representational and wear silly masks or something.
To do the new form of acting, which is now predominant, the more naturalistic form of acting, you have to cultivate desires in you.
So if you're in love with some woman on screen, you have to really fall in love with her.
In order to achieve some objective on the stage or on the screen, you have to really desire that objective.
So you're messing around, not just with the things you're playing pretend at, you're messing around with your heart, with your soul, with your loves, with your desires, which I think is damaging at least, and very likely immoral.
So I am discouraging you from doing that.
It's a great craft.
There are a lot of great stuff.
I'm thrilled that I was an actor and that I studied acting.
It gave me a lot of great stuff.
I can memorize things.
It makes me more persuasive.
It teaches you about human nature because you really have to try to figure out how human beings tick.
It's very helpful to politics.
It's why a lot of actors go into politics.
But you need to be very careful.
I was just listening to a lecture as I was driving into work this morning about St. Augustine, how St. Augustine invade against the theatrical productions of Rome.
Should we ask Mr. Davies?
Mr. Davies, are you there?
Is Mr. Davies in the room?
Hello?
I'm here.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Michael?
Yes.
What do you think?
Are you going to encourage him to do acting or should he quit?
I think you are being an entirely wet blanket.
However, I do think that, yes, you should run.
I think if there's anything else that you find interesting in your life, you would rather spend five to 10 years mastering that craft and having success versus risking everything, spending a ton of money, working in bars, trying to like make a living while you're trying to be an actor in the process.
Like when I was doing it.
So hold on, hold on.
I just want to clarify.
Your argument differs from mine.
We're giving him the same practical advice, which is don't be an actor professionally.
But yours differs from mine in that, yeah, I mean, I totally agree.
The reason I have actually a fair bit of respect for actors, even though they're nuts, is because actors really are staking everything on the lottery, basically, and which is either a sign of madness or a sign of courage.
And the line is a little blurry.
But my argument is that the craft of acting as it has been practiced for the last hundred years or so is morally dubious at best and not conducive to you living a great life.
In other words, I know very successful actors, like top of their profession, and even they are like not that happy.
So it's not just that not making it will make your life miserable, but actually making it might make it even more miserable.
Your argument is just you're not likely to succeed.
Well, I was going to get to that.
Per usual, you are correct, but there's a lot of actors that I know that have perfectly terrific lives and families and love their craft and are terrific what they're doing.
Your example, though, of like wanting to fall in love with the person because you have to almost in these intimate scenes, you don't actually have to do that.
You just have to have a really strong feeling towards that person.
So I actually know an actor I'm not going to name, but he did a terrific romantic performance, but his goal was to actually hate this person.
Strong Feelings Matter00:03:20
Interesting.
And so if he was passionately hating that person, not falling in love in those scenes, it was intense and awesome.
So that was almost something he did to guard himself in those scenes, but still give a great performance.
That's very, wow, that's very interesting.
Now, one could make a moral argument that it's actually bad to cultivate hatreds of people too, because if you hate your brother, you're like, you've murdered him.
But that's very interesting.
I hadn't considered that.
Okay.
Well, anyway, the upshot of all of those aspects of advice is you should not.
I mean, I think it's worth studying acting because it teaches you about human nature and it gives you actual practical skills.
Maybe the only quasi-practical skills I actually possess, but it's as a good lawyer friend of mine told me some years ago, it's not conducive to a distinguished life.
That's true.
That's definitely true.
Okay.
All right.
It's fake headline Friday.
I want to get to more mailbag, but maybe we'll get to more mailbag in the membrane segmentum.
The rest of the show continues now.
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What was it like, Merlin?
To be alone with God.
Is that who you think I was alone with?
Maradin, I knew your father.
I am yet convinced that he was not of this world.
All men know of the great Taliesin.
Who are my father?
The gods should war for my soul.
Princess Garris, savior of our people.
I know what the Bull God offered you.
I was offered the same.
And there is a new pirate work in the world.
I've seen it.
A god who sacrifices what he loves for us.
We are each given only one life, singer.
No.
We're given another.
I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower.
He's waiting on a miracle, and I think you can give him one.
Trust in Yezu.
He is the only hope for men like us.
Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Life.
Great Light, Great Darkness.
Such things mattered to me then.
What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies?
You, nephew.
The sword of a high king.
How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield?
Still clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you.