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Dec. 22, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:37:55
Stefan Molyneux's Christmas Spectacular with Jordan Peterson, Michelle Malkin, Mike Cernovich, Rev.
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
I hope you're doing well. Don't look at the total length of the video.
It may be too intimidating for you, but this is a collection of people I love, worship, and adore talking to you about what Christmas means to them, how their year has been, and what they're thinking about and what they're looking forward to next year, which I do believe is going to be a pretty exciting and tumultuous year.
So... When you listen to people talk about politics and ideas and abstractions and so on, it's kind of easy to forget that there's a whole other life that people lead off camera and off the internet.
And I wanted to give you a glimpse into the lives of people who I care about, my friends, and what the season means to them.
And this is a wonderfully uplifting conversation.
I've had enormous...
Joy and pleasure having these conversations over the last week or two.
So we're going to put links to the timestamps down below if you want to check out individual conversations ahead of time.
I really recommend, really recommend listening to the whole thing, right?
Watch it straight through, no blinking, because it's a very uplifting conversation.
And I do want to thank everyone who took the time out of a very hectic time of year to share thoughts about Christmas with myself and with you and everyone else, of course.
So I also want to thank you guys for an amazing year.
You know, we're well north now of half a billion views and downloads, and we've grown about 20 percent over the last year.
So it has been a magnificent and exciting year.
Thank you, everyone, for contributing, for liking, for disliking, for sharing.
Every part of this conversation is essential.
And thank you guys so much for the honor and the privilege of serving the world in this philosophical capacity.
It is the greatest thing that I can be doing with my life, and it is you who make it possible successfully.
So, in the spirit of the season of giving, if you would like to help out the show, I would massively, massively appreciate it.
And if you want to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate, that's freedomainradio.com slash donate, you can help us out.
You can use PayPal. You can use cryptocurrencies.
You don't need a PayPal account.
You can use a Visa or a bank card.
I really, really thank you.
It's been an amazing 10 or 11 years of doing this work in the public sphere.
I am honored and very impressed with the caliber of the audience and everyone who calls in and everyone who gives us feedback.
So thank you everyone so much for the last decade or so.
I really, really look forward to the next 30.
But first, please enjoy this Freedom Aid Christmas Spectacular 2017.
And a very, very Merry Christmas to you all.
And here we have Gavin McInnes.
He is an original co-founder of Vice Media and is the host of Get Off My Lawn on CRTV at CRTV.com.
Also, Twitter.com forward slash Gavin Underbar, McInnes, M-C-I-N-N-E-S, Gavin.
Thanks so much for taking the time today.
Salut, Stéphane. Je suis vraiment content de être ici avec vous.
Mon! Now, with a couple of kids, a couple of Rugrats in the house, and a history of Christian festivities, what does Christmas mean to you?
Has it changed? You know, the sort of cycle from being a kid to having kids is a big change for Christmas.
What does a season mean to you?
What are its most essential elements?
Massive changes. I mean, as a kid, it was just about presents, obviously.
And even then, you get kind of bored by noon.
And none of your friends want to come out and play because they have to do family stuff.
So... I remember from noon on being kind of bored by Christmas, but now that I have kids, obviously it's exciting, we're pushing the Santa thing.
I used to pay a guy, don't tell anyone this, to come over dressed as Santa, and then I would, in my other house, we had like a look down from above thing, and I would wake up the kids and, look, there he is!
There he is! And he had a $350 suit on, it was amazing.
Sometimes they wouldn't even remember those, so we're not doing that anymore.
The problem with hiring any reasonably accurate Santa is the healthcare costs, because to be an accurate Santa, you have to have really stuffed up arteries and quite the belt buckle, bulging belly, and so we'll cover the costs.
We just can't do the health insurance.
It's just not possible. Yeah, and he was fat, and I didn't want him to park his car nearby, so he would have to run down the driveway with all his gear on and his big bag, and by the time he got to the door, he'd be drenched in sweat.
There's a reason he's race raced.
That's a lot of exercise for a fat guy.
And of course, he's fat and jolly, because he can't run, and he can't fight.
So, it's got to be funny.
Now, I'm glad you asked, though, because I was thinking about this all weekend.
And I think Christmas, a lot of it is the same thing that people feel when they say, make America great again.
And make America great again means, let's stop being ashamed of ourselves and take some pride in our surroundings and enjoy our surroundings.
So they're not saying, make America like slavery.
They're talking about sort of like 1984.
They're talking about, no, not the Orwell.
83, we'll say. I would go with a different year myself, but it's your choice.
Not the best choice.
They're talking about the 80s.
They're talking about, you know, short t-shirts and feathered hair and ski-doos and sea-doos and fun stuff.
Big shoulder jackets for women and leg warmers for the exercise queens.
Yes! Cocaine and getting into trouble and fistfights and stuff.
And I know this sounds crazy, but that's what I think Christmas is.
It's the entire Western world going, you know what?
We have a great family.
We can afford to buy some presents.
This is awesome.
Isn't this amazing that we can buy our kid a toy?
This is so fun.
And they love the story behind it.
I love seeing them happy.
I'm going to stop worrying for a week and really just enjoy myself and everything I have.
So it's like Thanksgiving in many ways.
It's a way for all of us to recognize that our world rocks.
No, that's true. And, you know, I do think that for a lot of our ancestors coming as they did from sort of Northern Europe and the UK, there is this, well, we got a long way to go till spring comes, so we better make something fun.
You know, I remember when I was a kid, we used to not eat for a while, you know, that would be, was it Lent?
And then it was like Ash Tuesday or Ash Wednesday or whatever it was, where it'd be like break out the pancakes and so on.
And it's not coincidental to me that these...
These vacations, these holidays, these feel-good things occur at times when, you know, it's kind of grim.
You know, the days are very short.
It's very cold. And then you don't have a lot of food in the late winter.
So, hey, why not just have a don't-eat kind of holiday?
And then, you know, when the food comes back, when you can finally harvest some stuff, or at least you know you're going to make it, break out the ladder and enjoy the remains.
So, I like the deep...
It's analogies with the origins of our people, so to speak.
Like the fact that these, I mean, what does December mean in the Middle East?
Not that much, but it means a lot when you're from a very cold climate.
So I like the deep interweaving of Christmas with sort of the evolution of our tribe and our people, and I think that's a very powerful thing.
Yeah, the austerity of the cold is very good for you.
And I was reading this book, That Which Does Not Kill Us, and he pushes cold showers.
And I started taking them, and it just improves your life's fasting.
And every time some guy is down on his luck or he doesn't know what to do with his life, I say, take 30 cold showers in 30 consecutive days and call me back.
And you're right, part of Christmas is a sort of confrontation.
I think it comes from pagans celebrating the shortest day of the year.
So we just took Jesus' birth and we said, well, let's say it was December 25th and get the pagans in on the mix.
And the reason that the pagans chose that day is because they worship the sun, they worship nature, and that's what Christianity sort of got intertwined with, is this sort of thankfulness that we have life.
I don't know, I'm going off a tangent here, but I really feel like it's like a lot of Native American traditions are about, you know, let's go to the sweat lodge and let's boil in here so when we come out and we can finally breathe and we can finally appreciate what's around us.
So austerity and indulgence are heavily linked.
Yeah, and I mean, a lot of our culture, the Northern European culture, a lot of it comes fundamentally out of this confrontation with winter.
And the need to survive.
Like, why are we so good at planning?
Why are we so good at deferring gratification?
Because those who weren't generally did not make it grasshopper style through to the spring.
So there was a huge whittling down, which was very tragic.
But the winter is very foundational to the origins of where we came from and where our culture came from.
And It is something to celebrate because it was a harsh mistress.
Winter is a very harsh mistress, but it does tend to produce some pretty fantastic cultures.
Yeah, it does. And, you know, especially in Montreal, I remember we would sit in bars from January to March, and the only topic of conversation, it was probably the only time that we weren't talking about French versus English, and it was, how the Hades happened.
How in hell did the pioneers survive here?
It took me 30 minutes to get dressed to come to the Biff Tech on Saint Laurent.
I put my jacket down, the seat falls backwards.
How did they survive in those cabins?
Jesus, it must have been brutal!
Oh, I had, so when I was at McGill, I had a class on World War II. It went for the whole semester.
It started at 8.30 in the morning.
Because when you're studying World War II, some austerity and some privation seems kind of relevant.
But I'd have this alarm clock.
This is back before cell phones.
I'd have this alarm clock that would wake up and it would be like, Good morning, everybody.
It's 7.30 in the morning now.
First thing you need to know about today is don't leave your flesh exposed for more than 60 or 70 seconds or it's going to freeze solid.
And it was like... Oh yeah, and we're studying the Russian front this year, or this month.
So actually that kind of works in.
Yeah, you'd have to wrap yourself up like a sandman just to get out of the house.
It's incredibly cold.
And even like, because you breathe it in and your lungs get like this frost.
It's inside you.
It goes into your bones. It's so foundational.
And I will just say...
Montreal has a special kind of witch's boob frigidity to it that is truly breathtaking.
I've worked in northern Ontario, northern Manitoba, up near the Arctic Circle where the trees are thinning out.
I have never felt as cold as I did in Montreal when I lived there off and on for four years.
So I went to the theatre school and then I went to McGill.
And in the winter there, I mean, none of us spent summers there because I'd come back to work in Toronto because I don't speak French that well.
But man alive, that is the coldest I've ever been.
But... It was some of the most beautiful weather in terms of, you know, get some tomorrow, get some skiing, some skating, and stuff like that.
Bracing, as they say.
You kind of have to reuse the... Can't call it cold.
Invigorating, refreshing, bracing.
You've got to have those words, otherwise you just don't step foot outside at all.
I was dating this woman, Stephanie Chabot, and she was just on welfare, because French people are lazy.
And she would just sit there and get checks from the government, but I was a bike messenger in the winter.
And I'll never forget, you'd come down that hill, Saint-Laurent, and you'd turn right on...
Avenue de pain or whatever it was, and the cold would just go right through your bones.
It was like being murdered.
But yeah, the spring in Montreal, when these women finally get off their parkas and they can wear short shorts and high heel shoes again, you become a Roadrunner cartoon going boing-oing-oing-oing-oing.
I had this, uh, when I was in school, I got a check for a hundred dollars, which, you know, man, when you're in school, that's, that's a, that's like a huge number of falafel meals.
And, but I had to go to a particular bank in the middle of nowhere to cash it.
And I was, I was looking at this check and it was like, this was like January.
So I was looking at this check. It was like, does the bus go there?
No. Subway? No.
Can't afford a cab. I'm going to have to walk a good portion of the way.
And it was like a hundred bucks. Frostbite.
A hundred bucks. Frostbite.
And I did eventually go, but I'm telling you, it was a toss-up.
I'm like, you know, wait, can I stale date this thing to the spring?
I don't know if I can make it that long, but yeah, those kind of decisions, you don't have to make a lot of those in Jamaica.
I guess a big part of Christmas, too, is reverence.
It's thankfulness, and thanks for the pioneers.
So I think you're sort of appreciating what you have.
And hey, we got a house here.
We built this family. That's why, by the way, when someone can't afford presents, it's such a big deal.
Because the whole point of this is to celebrate that we can buy presents.
So when someone doesn't have them, we got to do a toy drive.
They've got to be part of this because it's not a minor detail, enjoying your wealth.
And if you're poor, this is where charity is really needed.
But... Another big part of it is saying, thanks, pioneers.
Thanks for being so hungry.
You had to go dig up your grandmother and eat her face because you were starving to death.
I don't believe I've seen that Hallmark card.
A little pop-up, half-eaten zombie grandma face.
But, you know, it's a market opportunity.
You know, it's a market opportunity.
I just feel like we should be more in awe of everything around us.
Maybe that's having kids. I think there's a lot of childless people on the internet bitching about everything.
But once you see a little foot work and the little toes go like that, you tend to appreciate everything a lot more and just go, thank you, God.
Thank you for everything I have.
Oh, there's nothing like that first moment in parenting when you lose an argument to your child.
I mean, that is a road less traveled for a lot of people.
I just had that the other day.
I said, I'm constantly enforcing screens.
Get off your screens, no iPads.
And it's like being a corrections officer.
Like, you'll hear silence and you'll go to their cell and you'll find it under the bed.
And I'm constantly with my baton swirling it around trying to find screens.
And I caught her, my daughter, with the screen.
And I go, hey! It's not screen time!
You just lost your screen time!
And then so she's crying because she's mad.
And she says, well, why?
Why are screens bad? I go...
There's been study after study showing that it stunts your creativity, especially teenage girls.
They tend to be suicidal.
You're impairing your imagination.
And she goes, scientists say it?
And I go, yes, tons. And she goes, well, you laugh at climate change.
You say that's all a lie.
That's scientists saying.
So why are scientists wrong with climate change but right about screens?
Oh yeah. No, my daughter is like, well, Dad, why do I have to quit sugar just because you're quitting sugar?
Because you had sugar until you were 50 and I'm only 8.
Well, I can't disagree with you there and I'm not going to shake the giant patriarchal fist of authority, so I guess we're back to negotiating.
And this is something too as well, you know, the left seems to really dislike Christmas and I always wonder whether they dislike Christmas as a whole because it's a Christian thing and they just seem to have a big hate on for Christianity as a whole because Christianity means smaller government or Or they just don't like spending time with their own family.
And that, to me, is particularly tragic.
I mean, one of the great things for me about Christmas is more time with my family.
Not so much my family of origin, but the family that I have now, the friends that I have now.
If you love your social circle, isn't Christmas a beautiful time and a way to spend more time with those people?
But if it's like the eye-rolling, oh, mama's gonna ask me why I'm not married yet and don't have children yet, and it's gonna be tense, and it's like...
Then I can understand why you wouldn't like Christmas because it puts you in contact with people you kind of have a lot of issues with.
Yeah, it's the same with Thanksgiving where they call it Friendsgiving and it's all these gay guys and spinsters getting together who don't get along with their families and you just go, you can pretend that that's fun, but it's profoundly sad.
And I think, yeah, I think the left hates Christmas because the left hates families because, and I'll throw them a bone here, There's divorce.
Baby boomer dads were the worst dads in the history of dads.
They left their spouse.
A lot of these women left.
We've only had divorce for, what, a couple generations?
And these baby boomers just went and they shattered it.
And I believe the impetus for the left's vindictiveness and their spite, it's a daddy issue.
And the daddy issue comes from the dad not being around.
In a way, their anti-white male, anti-patriarchy stuff has some foundation because they got screwed over by these crappy liberal dads.
Well, that's true. And these Franken families, like these stitched together families, they don't really tend to work out that well and there doesn't tend to be a lot of, you know, you kind of got to grow up with people to get that bond.
And, you know, these sort of stitched together brothers and half sisters and distant cousins and a Darth Vader helmet thrown in for good measure.
These are very complicated things to navigate and negotiate.
And the great thing about family is if you get along, you really get along.
The problem with family is if you don't get along, you really don't get along.
And there doesn't tend to be much in the middle.
Yeah.
Well, try having Scottish parents, man.
There's never a day that goes by where a glass isn't smashed or someone storms out.
In fact, we only have them visit here Because that way we don't have to leave and go to the airport on Christmas Day.
So I'm not saying I don't fight with the original fam, but it's still crucial to be there with them.
And yeah, my heart breaks for all these co-parenting homes where we go to my mom's house in the morning and we go to my dad's house.
That's 50% of families that are divorced.
And it's really an understated virus that has affected the whole psyche of the entire Western world.
And the attitude to marriage is just getting worse.
In fact, I was just arguing with someone on Twitter the other day, and they go, dude, why are you yelling at me?
Your wife left you. And I go, what?
My wife left me.
I ran upstairs and checked.
There she was. I'd like to know first.
Yeah. And she was basing it on some tweet where I said, my wife isn't speaking to me now because of you dunces calling me a Nazi.
And I realized to young people, to millennials, they go, well, they had a fight.
They're clearly divorced. Like the go-to to divorce is just bad week.
End it. Oh, you're a person of color and your husband likes Trump.
End it. Just throw it away.
It's not worth it. Well, and this is the thing too, like when it comes to family and Christmas, mom's new unshaven boyfriend in a bathrobe giving you a yo-yo is not exactly what you're looking for when it comes to family connections over Christmas.
You kind of want people that you're a little bit more comfortable and familiar with and where you're pretty sure that Christmas brunch is going to go by without any nausea-inducing groping of your mom's veiny legs.
That is just my particular way of looking at things, but I think it's going to resonate with some.
But Frankenfamilies too are the lesser of two evils.
So I think no matter what happens to you, whether it's you're a widow or you just married the wrong guy, we still got to keep trying.
And I always say, like Mary Catherine Hamm, She lost her husband.
She's got two kids. Obviously, a brutal tragedy.
Get married. Go out.
Those kids need a dad.
If you made a mistake in the past and you're stuck with a Franken family, okay.
But don't be single.
Children need a father figure to say, don't do that.
You're stupid. That's horrible.
And a mom to go...
Look, that was weird that you pooed your pants, but it happens.
It's okay. Because that's what's a part of a balanced human being is, you dummy, why'd you do that?
And, oh well, I had some bad luck.
You need both. Yes, for sure.
You need the general encouragement of early childhood combined with the paternal-based reality check of later childhood.
There's an old tradition that women are great at raising toddlers, but men are kind of needed to raise young adults.
Right. Yay!
Good job walking!
Good job learning how you need all of that when you're a kid.
But you don't need like, yay, that's another terrible lollipop drawing of a human being.
You're eight. You should have outgrown it by now.
You kind of need that as well.
And hopefully that yin and yang is going to be available for more people throughout Christmas.
So let's get your final Christmas message to your audience or our combined audience.
What do you want people to focus on over this festive season?
My final message to everyone at home is appreciate what you have.
We spend so much of our lives, so much of the year saying the grass is greener, so much of our lives being vindictive and jealous and spiteful and looking at Instagram at someone else's life.
And living in someone else's universe, Christmas is a time to stop, take stock of what you have, even if you're a single mom with one kid, even if there's just three friends together, and that's the best you could do.
To stop, take stock, and say, thank you very much, powers that be.
I appreciate everything I have.
Christmas is a great time to be the kind of person at Christmas that people want to spend time with the rest of the year as well.
And I hope that people will take that message.
Just want to remind people, check out CRTV.com.
The show is Get Off My Lawn!
I assume that comes with an implicit exclamation mark.
And you can follow Gavin at Twitter.com forward slash Gavin McInnes, G-A-V-I-N, underbar M-C-I-N-N-E-S. Thanks so much and very, very Merry Christmas to you and yours as well.
Thanks, Stefan. And now we move to Roaming Millennial.
This is probably the last time she's slumming it on this show.
She's a political commentator, and coming up next year, she will be the host of the new show, Roaming Millennial, colon, don't forget the colon, uncensored, which means, I guess, that we're only getting her censored on this show.
You can check out her website at roamingmillennial.com.
YouTube.com slash Roaming Millennial, at least for now.
And Twitter.com, the astonishingly shortened Roaming Mill, M-I-L. And, of course, soon CRTV. What are you on with?
They've got Steve Crowder.
They've got Michelle Malkin.
Lots of great company that you'll be keeping.
I'm sorry? Yeah. Gavin McInnes.
Gavin McInnes, yeah, of course.
So how did this come about?
It's very cool. Yeah, so actually this has been something that we've been talking about, me and CRTV, since this summer.
So, you know, it's been in the works for a while and I'm glad we're finally being able to announce it because I've been so excited about it.
But I wasn't able to, you know, say anything.
So I thought if we would have had to wait any longer to announce it, I probably would have exploded just from pent up excitement.
Yeah, but it's really exciting.
You know, first we were kind of playing around with the podcast and they were kind of asking me, so what do you want to do?
What do you feel like you're not able to do on YouTube?
What's your creative vision?
And for Roaming Millennial, like uncensored, the colon in there, like you said, I can't forget it.
Yeah, I'm going to be able to talk about things, you know, more like news, more politics, you know, a faster turnaround time that, you know, so far when I'm just a solo YouTuber, it's a little bit harder to do.
Okay, so what took so long?
I mean, are you exquisitely hard to get?
Are you, like, holding out for, like, you know, a handful of M&Ms of the same color in your dressing room?
I mean, what was the delay?
Well, I think a lot of it was, first, you know, is it going to be a podcast or is it going to be kind of televised with the video?
Are you going to have a co-host?
And there's a lot of questions about that, as well as, I mean, I'm...
A little bit of a stickler when it comes to legal documents.
I actually read everything I signed, so there was a little bit of a back and forth about that.
Wait, wait. Are you saying that when you upgrade your iPad, it takes you more than like 10 seconds of like, yeah, I'm sure that's fine.
Yeah, I'm sure that's fine. You can have my kid be my firstborn, go for it.
My first child, yeah. Whatever. Yeah, especially with something, you know, like a...
A contract for a show.
I just wanted to make sure I was doing everything right, but I'm really happy with where everything's at.
We're in the middle of building a new set for the show.
That's really exciting. Everything's coming in right now, and we're hoping to get it, I guess, on air for people to be watching mid-January.
Oh, that is fantastic. Well, congratulations.
You know, one of the great things about being young is that you're not afraid of additional lights.
You know, that's the cool thing.
Like, I've got a fairly nice lighting setup here.
I guess it's relatively all right.
But when I was on the Rubin Report recently, he's got, like, the landing gear.
It's like close encounters of the third kind, like the lighting rig that he's got set up.
And I was like, ooh, hey, look, I've got a vein I didn't even know about.
And it's like I got little... X-wing fighters flying in the trenches around my eyes, but you don't really notice until you get that kind of lighting.
So what do you think it's going to be like going from solo to working with a team?
Do you get to handpick the team?
Are they going to wear the minion suits?
I mean, how much dictatorial power are you going to have?
Do you have a high thorny throne of vampiric domination?
I mean, how's that going to work? Well, it's actually pretty cool.
So I'm kind of in charge of everything on my end, and then CRTV will get the finished episode.
So I've hired a producer who's actually been helping me with my YouTube channel.
We got a nice little, I guess, lead up before the show is actually starting.
So he's been helping me throughout this process, and he's actually been helping me edit my YouTube videos lately, which is great because otherwise, three videos a week on top of everything else I'm doing would never be able to happen.
And it's a little bit intimidating for me, kind of passing off the unedited footage from my videos.
Like, okay, so by the way, just ignore the fact that I essentially have a speech impediment when I'm trying to film, and you can just cut that out.
If I say anything accidentally bigoted, you can just cut that out, too.
You know, whatever.
Do what you think is best. But it's been really great, and it's exciting having another person kind of being part of the project.
So wait, sorry. I just got a little bit confused because you used...
What's that word? Edit?
Edit. Edit?
Edit. How do you spell that?
I should write that down because...
I sadly don't have your, I guess, like flair for the theater and performance.
I'm awful when I'm filming.
Trust me, I get mixed reviews on the length of my videos, let's put it this way.
People feel like there's a topic and I'm like this shark that just circles and circles and circles until the topic dies and I eat it after it's dead.
I like the long videos, though.
I can listen to them as I'm cooking, and it's nice.
You know, I mean, I don't know that people are going to sit and stare at me talking about postmodernism for an hour and 20, but, you know, there's lots of people on the move who don't want...
You know, if you've got a good workout going, you don't necessarily want to interrupt every 10 minutes, and the autoplay can be a little random, so...
Well, yeah, that's fantastic.
Congratulations. What an exciting step up, and I'm sure you're going to do magnificently, and...
It would be fascinating to see somebody in the media who's actually read the contracts.
Boy, that's pretty unprecedented.
And wise, I might add, wise as well.
So we're going to talk a little bit about, as you know, Christmas.
So Christmas for you growing up, what was it like, the highs, the lows, the ups, the downs, and what does your family do around Christmas or did?
So Christmas for me when I was growing up, I feel like a lot of people, it was always this really big deal.
My parents always went extremely, you know, hit it out of the park with the decorations and the presents.
I've been really lucky with, you know, how generous my parents have been for us over the holidays, over the years.
And As we've kind of grown up, it's strange.
Our Christmases have been in a lot of different countries.
When I was little, they were always in Hong Kong.
We've had a Christmas in Shanghai.
Now, since I think I was maybe 13, they've always been in Canada.
Right now, everybody lives all over the world.
Usually, my parents, I only see them twice a year right now.
It's actually that much more special because it kind of signifies everyone coming back together.
We get to see each other when we haven't for months.
And one of the traditions we have is that we always watch a ton of Christmas movies, you know, Christmas Eve, like a bunch of them.
Even the bad ones, one of our favorites is actually Jingle All the Way, which if you haven't seen it...
Wait, Schwarzenegger? Yes.
I'm not happy that I know that.
I mean, I know that there's some important piece of information in my life that has been displaced by the fact that I know that.
I like Schwarzenegger comedies.
I think he's an excellent comedian.
I mean, you should have seen him in his role as governor of California.
Okay, go on. No, no.
No, but it's funny.
Like, it's awful, but at the same time, it's campy, greatness, holiday fun.
So that's always something we do.
And of course, you know, Huge dinners and everything, and actually this Christmas I'm most excited, and this has never happened to me before, but I'm most excited to actually give people my presents because, you know, there have been previous Christmases, especially when I was a student, where unfortunately due to funds, presents may or may not have included, you know, written songs by me, artwork, things that...
I've made a haiku and an interpretive dance for you.
It's going to be beautiful. It's from the heart, which means I'm broke.
Exactly. But yeah, this year I'm really excited to get everybody their presents and it's just, it's nice having everyone together and right now we're four together right now.
We're just waiting on my brother to finish his exams and then he's going to be driving out from Maine, so exciting stuff.
Very nice. Very nice. And it's funny because last year, I think it was, I watched for the first time since I was quite young, It's a Wonderful Life.
And that is really quite an amazing movie.
I actually want to sort of sit down and do a full review of it, but I kind of have to watch it slowly with notes.
I'm assuming that your family has chewed their way through that one.
That is one of my dad's favorite ones to actually fall asleep during.
It's the eggnog catch-up, you know, like, I'm alert, I'm alert, I'm alert, I'm alert.
Yeah, actually, my favorite line of his is, like, this has happened more than once.
You know, we'll be in church, like, Christmas mass or something, and you'll see him bowing his head.
And his excuse is he's praying, but then, of course, the snoring starts, and that's a little bit harder to kind of justify as prayer, the snoring and the head lolling, the drooling.
Oh, it's tough. When I was a kid, I was in choir in church, and we had a priest who had, I don't know, this weird step up and step down in terms of volume.
And so he would lull you with like this real, it's like 45 Barry White on 33, which is an analogy that makes no sense to the young, but it's to do with record players, which is something after the phonograph.
And he would kind of murmur, and he was really big into begats, you know, and Methuselah begat so-and-so, and so-and-so begat so-and-so.
And after a while, they would just be like, especially the mid-afternoon stuff, you know, when you had a big lunch or whatever.
So as a kid, they'd be like, you lull, you lull.
And then, and you say, you know, you startle, where am I? Who am I? Am I dead?
So tell me about the church experience you had when you were growing up.
Because a lot of kids, it's like, ah, you know, it's uncomfortable, it's itchy, it's boring.
I always really liked it.
I liked the peace of mind. The stained glass was beautiful.
The music was beautiful.
Everybody sounds fantastic.
And people always seem to be in a good mood.
So my church experience growing up was very positive.
But I know that's not the case for all the kids.
No, I've always enjoyed it, and especially something that I love the most, you mentioned you're in choir, is the music, especially when it's Christmas, Hannah's Messiah is just so, I don't know, it just brings back every single Christmas I've ever had in my life.
So I think it's a nice experience, and it's something that I really look forward to, especially having everybody together and being able to do something that we've done since I was little together.
It kind of ties up Christmas nicely for me, and it It really reminds me what I have to be thankful for, you know, everything that's happened since the past year, and especially this year, it's going to be probably, you know, I hope I don't get too emotional, but I've been very, very fortunate this past year, and so I guess, you know, remembering Christmas and, like, going to church, you really, it kind of humbles you, the fact that, like, wow, you have so much to be thankful for.
You were blessed in so many ways, and just having your entire family around you and being able to give thanks like that, it's, yeah, it means a lot to me.
Well, and it's funny too, and I don't know what your experience is directly, and feel free to share away, but for me, the alternative media, as it's called, slowly becoming mainstream, the alternative media was scary before it was great.
In other words, sort of when I went public with some opinions that I guess one or two people found a smidge on the challenging side, it was like you get a lot of negative feedback before this momentum of positivity occurs.
You kind of got to grit your teeth and get through that.
It's like when you get a plateau when you're exercising, you kind of got to burn your way through it.
And did you experience that sort of like a, I'm putting out ideas or arguments that are controversial to some people, there's this big tsunami of negativity, and then you kind of grit your teeth, stand your ground, and after that it's like, wow, this is a beautiful and great place.
Trial by fire, that's kind of what I'm talking about.
Yeah, and especially, I find it, you know, I still get a lot of, I think I actually get more negativity now than when I was newer, just because if more people are aware of your work, you're kind of more likely to encounter people who really disagree with you, but I find it's interesting.
I've kind of noticed a pattern with my videos.
When I initially release them, there's a lot of positivity.
My subscribers are amazing.
Some of the nice notes they write, they really make me feel better about what I'm doing, that I'm actually making a difference for some people, providing people with insight that they maybe wouldn't have had otherwise.
But then there will sort of be like a quiet period.
And then I'll always know when my video has been shared by someone or has a response video done by someone because then there will be this wave of like, oh, you suck, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, why don't you debate this random YouTuber with three subscribers?
Are you joking? Are you? Are you?
Are you? It's like, oh, man.
No, but I can count. Yeah, and so, but, you know, the internet moves on quickly, right?
There's a cycle of drama, and so that ebbs away after a while, and yeah, and then I think overall I've been fortunate with my channel.
I think even when people have disagreed with me, we've been able to have some pretty good conversations about the issues, so I think overall, pretty lucky.
Anything you would have done differently?
Because, you know, emerging from this cocoon of being like a person with friends and family to a person with a general audience, particularly in the controversial realm, I mean, I may have made a few missteps along the way.
Is there anything that you sort of rewind to this time last year that you'd say, well, maybe a little bit more of this, a little bit less of that?
Yeah, well, it's been interesting for me, especially since I started off doing just slideshow powtoons, you know, with a little South Rock avatar, which is actually still my Skype avatar, and then kind of moved into video cams like this, and I, for a while,
sort of played with the two formats, and just sort of thinking back, knowing what I know now, channel growth, and I guess, like, branding, getting people interested in your videos, I probably would have just started like this, just speaking to people.
But I mean, it's easy for me to say that now.
Things have worked out really well for me.
But when you're someone with, I guess, unpopular opinions, it can be scary to put your face out, especially to ideas people don't like right away.
But I think... That's something that overall I would have done a little bit differently, just being a little bit more bold and courageous with what I'm saying.
I was so afraid to offend people at first.
I would spend hours and hours looking over a script to make sure like, oh, you know, I better explain this really well so no one misinterprets.
I better, you know, don't make this joke.
Don't be too edgy. But the thing is, people are going to get mad either way is what I've learned.
So you might as well just say what you mean.
So there's two words here.
I'm just going to edit and script.
I think that's...
Isn't that the free money that you get in university to buy stuff from the cafeteria?
Right. Okay. It's very educational for me.
This is probably why I don't have a show on CRTV. But anyway.
And I think that's interesting because what I sort of learned...
And I came out pretty bold out of the fence or out of the gate.
Because I sort of had the feeling that...
It's sort of like bullying.
Like if you show weakness, you invite, you know, and if you just come out like, you know, zero F's given and, you know, do your worst and I'll do my best kind of thing.
I think that kind of helps, but it's a very, very tough thing because if you kind of don't feel it inside, it's almost like, and it's the same thing with sort of hiding your face or, you know, some people disguise their voice or whatever.
Either you don't become very successful, in which case, what was the point?
Or you do, in which case weird people become obsessed with finding out who you are and you're at a disadvantage because you've shown a weakness.
So, I don't know, you just need this like Sherman tank hide being out there and people are like, well, you know, we'll go find easier targets, I guess.
Yeah, definitely.
And that's something that I'm still learning is that because I, you know, I'm the kind of person, you know, A, I'm an introvert, B, I'm non-confrontational.
So a lot of these things, like, I should know by now that when someone calls you like, ooh, a racist or something like that, just like, yeah, whatever.
But some of that stuff, it still bothers me.
But because of that, like you said, they see weakness and they'll go for it.
I'll end up getting more flack for something way less controversial than someone who's a little bit more fearless would be able to do it and no one would say anything because it's like, oh yeah, it's this person.
He does whatever he wants.
So that's something that I need to be better at.
It's funny because, I mean, this is an old saying.
I think it was Eleanor Roosevelt that said, no one can make you feel bad about yourself except you.
And The purpose, of course, of the trolls and the haters and so on is to try to get you to attack yourself.
And if you have a good relationship with yourself, if you know you're acting out of love and compassion and humanity and positivity and so on, then if they can't get you to turn on yourself, they don't have a weapon.
You know, okay, if someone's in the room with a club, they have a weapon.
But if it's just typing somewhere out there on the Internet, if they can't get you to turn against yourself, they actually have no weapon.
And then what happens is their own weakness is revealed to themselves because they require your participation.
I think that's no one can make you feel bad about yourself without your own participation.
And people are bullies because fundamentally they feel helpless.
They can't create positive things in the world.
They can't make good arguments.
So they feel helpless.
Now, if they try to attack you, but you won't turn on yourself, they feel that helplessness arises within them and they flee you because you're reminding them of how helpless they are.
And that is it's kind of like one of these fortune cookie things.
You read this and say, well, you know, that's right and that's a good point.
But actually doing it in the world when you're facing, you know, those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is another matter entirely.
But once you get the hang of it, it's very empowering and it gives you access to being able to act from a place of love, even when you're sometimes receiving a lot of hatred.
And actually something that I've just recently started implementing that's also, I guess, helped me deal with, you know, a lot of negativity, a lot of criticism, is that I don't always need to have the last word.
And that's something, you know, I guess I'm sort of like that kind of person, like, no, no.
Great, I get to end this segment!
Okay. Yeah, but, you know, I kind of realized at the end of the day, it's like, okay, well, I don't need to respond, like, you know, whatever this is.
Like, that's not... I can just let it be like, okay, whatever.
You said what you needed to say, I said.
What I needed to say, people can, it's fine.
That actually has saved me a lot of headache within the past few weeks, just being able to be like, okay, well, I don't need to have to, quote, win in the eyes of the spectators, this internet fight or whatever this is.
I can just totally walk away.
It's fine. And that's something I need to remind myself, especially on Twitter, where I'm quite feisty.
Well, when I was younger, starting out of my career, you know, if somebody sat down and made a video about something I did, and then, of course, they get their friends to think, he's called you out, he's wrecked you, he's destroyed you, and you've got to fight.
And it's like, part of me was like, there's this old joke when I was a kid, you know, okay, you and I, we're going to meet out back at the school at 4.30 for a fist fight, and we're going to settle this one for all.
And if I'm not there, you just get started without me.
And that's sort of what I was thinking of.
I actually, believe it or not, I recorded, I remember this a couple of times, people did videos really calling me out, and I would actually record a response video, notes and details and counter-arguments and so on, and then delete it.
And not publish it.
Because like, okay, I've satisfied myself that this person is in the wrong.
And I've also satisfied myself, because I don't really feel like publishing it, that they're not going to engage with me in a productive way.
I love a good debate. I mean, a great debate is a fantastic and wonderful work of art.
You know, it's like fencing.
You know, you really want to be good at it or martial arts or whatever.
It's a beautiful thing. But I don't show up to people who aren't going to fight with the right weapons, you know?
Like, I don't want to show up like that guy in the Harrison Ford movie, like Indiana Jones.
He's got that scythe whirling all over the place, a scimitar, and then Harrison Ford just shoots him in the gut.
It's like, I'm not showing up with scimitars to a gunfight.
And being able to say, just because somebody wants to engage with me intellectually or non-intellectually, you don't have to do anything about it.
And, of course, they'll escalate and they'll try and get your attention.
You know, you could just keep moving.
And as you say, stuff which is important in the moment is like, the good thing about the internet is stuff's really important right now, but there's 10,000 really important things coming along tomorrow that are going to just sweep it right off the deck.
And what I love about, you know, you talk a lot about like debate and, you know, your book, Art of the Argument and stuff like that.
That's something that I've, I guess, also kind of come to terms with a little bit more this past year in my channel, because I love having people on who disagree with me.
I love having like that conversation, discussing ideas.
You know, debates and stuff like that.
But I've also lately also had these bad experiences where it's like, oh, this person is just yelling.
This person is actually, you know, lying, being really disingenuous in the way they're talking to you.
So I've kind of had to learn to distinguish, like, all right, why do I want to talk to this person?
Is it because I want to prove them wrong and make a spectacle out of it?
Or do I actually think it'll be productive?
We'll get, you know, good conversation of ideas.
And I'm kind of having to teach myself, like, okay, if it's just going to be a Circus, for lack of a better word, and I've kind of, you know, when I'm watching other channels as well, I've been like, oh, okay, so this is what I look like when I'm doing this to other people, and it's not great.
Okay, yeah, so it's been some introspection.
Right. No, I think that's right.
And I wanted to ask you, though, because I think you mentioned last time we talked that you have an introvert and so on.
So for a lot of people who feel like what we do is insane, why would you do it?
Why would you put yourself out there?
And who do feel introverted as well, what is the technique or the approach that you take to vaulting over sort of acid walls of your own introversion to be able to do something publicly in this way?
Well, for me, something that helped initially was that I sort of did it gradually, and I think that's always nice.
I would never want to be someone who's thrown in the spotlight immediately.
I mean, like Lindsay Shepard, for example, if that had been me, I would have a really hard time with it, because, you know, she went from just this TA to all of a sudden she's in these newspapers, things like, I think, the Toronto Sun and stuff.
Like, they're actually writing these defamatory pieces about her.
That would have been really hard for me to deal with, just because, you know, you're going from zero to 100, and And you don't have that, I guess, time to mentally prepare for that.
So something that's, I guess, helped me is that, yeah, it's been something I've been doing gradually.
I used to just do, you know, one or two videos a month.
And I didn't really have any subscribers.
People were really giving me, you know, much attention or there was no controversy.
And so I've kind of been able to adapt a little bit better to it.
And with that being said, something else, like now that I'm lucky enough to have an audience who actually watches my videos, something that helps me a lot is just being able to turn off And I personally, the way I try to look at it is that I do try to still separate, you know, YouTube as work versus my actual real family life.
And the fact that I'm so close with my family and friends and I have, you know, these amazing people that I see every day.
It helps put things into perspective to me because at the end of the day, that's what's important.
And, you know, if it wasn't for them and trying to, I guess...
Being able to provide for my family and the future and my future as well, the YouTube stuff wouldn't really matter and there'd be nothing to it.
So I guess putting the emphasis on the positive things, positive people in your life helps me kind of deal with all of the kind of being out there as a personality.
Oh, yeah. No, I mean, there's one snowflake on the top of Mount Everest, and if you don't see Mount Everest, you say, how does that snowflake levitate so high?
It's like, no, there's a whole support thing that's going on underneath.
Now, when it comes to time with family over the Christmas, well, a few people in my audience, and I'm sure yours as well, Are navigating the challenges of red pill, blue pill people, of woke people, non-woke people, of people who are propagandized versus people who are thinking for themselves.
Is that a challenge in your family?
How does that work? So it's funny, growing up, my parents are socially very conservative, but we never really talked about politics.
And I think part of that also had to do with the fact that we were living in Asia, and just like the political climate is very different.
Um, than, than it is in, you know, the States or even Canada.
But, you know, now that I'm older and, you know, I certainly have a lot of focus on politics and social issues in, in my life, I've kind of realized that, uh, yeah, my, my father and my grandmother super, super left.
My mother was pretty left.
She's actually been red pilled.
So it's like, yeah, one out of three.
Um, and my brother is, is, is like me, he's sort of a conservatarian.
So we're all, we're actually all, all pretty Different out there, but I think why we don't really fight about this kind of stuff is that we all understand that we're all good people.
We all care about each other.
We all want what's best.
We just have different interpretations of how that should be done.
I'm lucky enough to say that big, heated political arguments aren't really a thing in my family, thankfully.
Yeah, I mean, you don't want the turkey dinners to be a kind of cardio workout of just sitting there and getting cortisol through your system.
But it is tough, you know, I mean, in an increasingly fractious environment and in a very, very challenging cultural conflict that's going on.
And the fact that it can so often spill over into people's family lives is a big challenge.
You know, it's funny, you know, it sort of reminds me of something that Jesus said when he first, I guess, showed up with his...
His arguments was that he said, I have come here to set, you know, son against father and brother against brother and so on.
And when you have a set of ethics, either that's new or has remained dormant or lain dormant for quite a long time and they sort of come back to life, some people are like, yay, my favorite person has come back to life.
And other people are like, enemy zombie approach.
And it is really tough.
So do you guys just, you don't talk politics really at all.
Wait, wait. We talk politics, but it never gets very confrontational on a personal level.
And I think something that I've learned from the fact that most of my friends are honestly kind of leftist, SJW-ish.
I think that just kind of has to do with my age group.
You always don't make things personal if you don't have to.
Don't make personal attacks based on someone's political views.
Hopefully you can try to keep things practical, theoretical, without applying any assumptions about the friend or family member you're talking to.
And so since I'm a really non-confrontational person, whenever I'm talking to someone who has different beliefs than me, or if I'm saying something that I think is going to be controversial and I'm not sure what the other person thinks, so you kind of, like, you want to try to feel out who you're talking to, maybe.
I always try to phrase things in positive ways.
Like, I find it, if you go into a conversation with someone who doesn't agree with you, you're talking about, oh, you know, the illegal immigrants coming, taking our jobs, drugs, rapists...
That is a pretty, I guess, inflammatory way to go about things.
Whether or not it's true, if the other person doesn't agree with you, that's kind of one of the easiest ways to push someone's buttons, I find.
So I try to frame things in a positive way, like, again, with the immigration thing, if you're talking about...
I just really want to make sure that American families are safe.
I really want to do as much as we can to protect low-skilled workers who are from here to make sure that they have the access to the jobs that they need, that there isn't too much competition or too much extra supply of labor, that they're left without jobs.
And I find people respond better to that because it doesn't feel like you're attacking anybody and it kind of at least lets them know that you're coming from a place of actual caring and not just If you're on the right, race is bigotry.
So that's kind of my technique.
Yeah, you don't want people to mentally be able to check off the list of all the groups you're just supposed to despise because you're not.
The poor, minorities, women, anything carbon-based, mountains, trees, unicorns, rainbows, happiness, butterflies.
Anyway, the list kind of goes on and on.
And trying to find and frame ways that people are going to benefit from freedom is kind of a challenge because people are, they have a love-hate relationship with freedom.
They want freedom for everyone else because when other people have freedom, they produce wonderful technology and art and music and books and so on.
But for themselves, they kind of want security.
So we have this kind of very ambivalent relationship with freedom.
Like if you're a woman who's married to a guy and you're a stay-at-home mom and your husband's out there working in the world, you want freedom and low taxes.
But if you're a single mom, you don't really care that much about taxes.
In fact, you probably want them to be raised on others so there's more benefits can flow your way.
And finding ways to sell freedom to that ambivalence can be quite a challenge.
Right, definitely. And even with just this gay wedding cake that's been...
I did a video about it and a lot of people are very I take the stance of freedom of association, freedom of businesses to do whatever they want, whether I agree with it or not.
And that's apparently not that popular of the stance because I think people they see things like security as a net good.
They see things like equality as a net good.
A lot of people don't consider freedom or liberty in and of itself as a net positive for society.
So, you know, they'll argue something like, oh, but someone gets discriminated against that.
You know, that's bad.
You should have to...
They should have to serve everyone, regardless of how they feel.
Because, like, you know, in their minds, it is more moral to force someone to provide labor that they don't want to than it is to say, sorry, you have to go somewhere else.
Because, you know, that equality is what they care about.
I find in the younger generation especially, they don't really see freedom or liberty as this, like, a net positive, like they do these other things, like equality or safety.
All you have to do is have them picture the bakery shop as a woman's womb.
And then they'll be completely fine with it.
Because like my body, my choice, my bakery shop, my choice.
You know, I mean, this idea, this discrimination thing, it's kind of funny.
Of course, as a non-leftist, as a free market guy, I was rampantly discriminated against in school, in universities, in graduate school and so on.
It's very leftist and so on.
And also in the art world.
Pretty socialist, pretty leftist in the art world, and as a free market objectivist guy, very much discriminated against.
We discriminate all the time.
I mean, think of the number of people who've wanted to go out with you that you say no to.
That's all. You don't have to service everyone, to use that sort of double entendre, you don't have to service everyone in the world, and in fact, demanding that people do so is very much a violation of I mean, really, what was slavery but forcing people to serve others in perpetuity?
And what is national debt but forcing the unborn to serve your greed in perpetuity, it seems.
So trying to remind people that it's fine if you want to force other people to do what you want, but you have to remember, this is the great pendulum.
It swings both ways.
And at some point, if you surrender that, someone's going to come along and force you to do something that's against your values or, in the left, against the values you might imagine you have.
Oh, sorry. Annoying, immature burn, but, you know, I'll try and aim for the high road.
I think these authoritarian types, they always like to imagine themselves as the ones in control of the government.
Absolutely. Right? I mean, they never picture themselves as the opposition.
Well, this isn't all... I think it's Harry Brown who used to say this, is that...
Whatever power you want to give to the government, imagine it being in the hands of your worst enemy when you're helpless.
We see this with the left now.
They've been very much against due process, against Biff and Todd, the stereotypical white frat boys in some university.
But now that this lack of due process is blowing back against them, suddenly they're all about innocent until proven guilty and confront your accuser and don't rush to judgment.
It's like, you see why we were telling you about this for so long?
Now maybe you'll understand.
Exactly. So I want to thank you very, very much for your time and wish you a very Merry Christmas.
And listen, let's talk when your show is up and running and let's drive some eyeballs.
I assume you're going to have a couple out there to lure people in, a couple of mints in the dark forest to lead to the house made of candy.
I may have stretched that metaphor a little too far, but I think we understand where we're going.
So very best of luck preparing for it.
What an exciting time. What an exciting set design.
Who's doing your set design? I must know.
My set design was done by The Color White.
I'm quite sponsored.
The entire show is sponsored by The Color White, which I'm sure is racist in some manner.
But who is doing your set design?
How's that going to work? Actually, it's been me, my producer, my mom.
We've been looking at tile swatches, different fireplaces and stuff like that.
CRTV has actually been really great about allowing me, like, yeah, I kind of, I want it this way.
So I'm hoping it looks good.
But if it doesn't, you can completely go ahead and blame me.
I will take full responsibility.
Helicopter landing pad, volcano, teleporter, jetpack, you know, you just got to throw enough riders in there that it makes it worth your while.
So looking forward, the show that is coming up is going to be Roaming Millennial, colon, Uncensored, and that's on CRTV.com, the website, roamingmillennial.com.
Thanks again so much for your time this year on this show.
Congratulations on your next step.
I can't wait to see it. Thank you, and thanks so much for having me on again.
And Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Take care.
And now we turn to the man who it is impossible to buy a surprise gift present for at Christmas because he's got someone embedded with you shopping there.
There's no question of that.
James O'Keefe, an award-winning journalist and the founder and president of both Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action nonprofit organizations dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste and fraud in both the public and private institutions.
Let me tell you, they're not about to run out anytime soon.
He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Breakthrough, Our Guerrilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy, and the upcoming book, American Pravda, My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News, which will be released on January 16th, 2018.
I think you can get the audiobook in pre-order right now.
We'll put the links to all that below.
ProjectVeritas.com.
Give them a bit of a Merry Christmas.
Help them out.
And Twitter.com forward slash James O'Keefe, I, I, I.
James, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Great to be with you again. So as public-facing figures, sometimes the private relationship, family, community, Christmassy stuff can be both exciting, rewarding, and a little bit of a challenge.
Is there much bleed over from what you do publicly to what happens around Christmas for you?
You know, not really, I think.
In the beginning years of my life, I was very close with my grandfather, James O'Keefe Sr.
I'm the third. And my grandparents lived with me.
My parents always had a very close, familiar relationship.
In the last few years, as this war has intensified, I think, and I moved into a new facility, I've become a lot more independent.
But Christmas season is always one where I go back home I always spend that time with my family and completely avoid talking about this war.
I guess in the beginning, there was no discussion about the war.
In my mid-twenties, we were always talking about it, and now we're back down to, okay, I need to retreat from this war and into this private Christmas moment where we just talk about life and happiness and family.
And it's funny, too, because in a sort of traditional war, not the sort of war of ideas and words and exposure that we're engaged in, in traditional war, you're overseas, you come back for Christmas, and there's massive support for what you're doing.
There's no ambivalence. Every family member is behind you, 150%.
But for a lot of people, the seams or the cracks in this culture war go through the family.
And so, you know, you're out there fighting on D-Day.
You come home for Christmas, man.
There's no one who's going to say a bad word about anything that you're doing.
But it's a little bit different engaging in the cultural wars because it seems, as I said, they run through families and can cause a lot of tension.
I will tell you an anecdote without getting too deep into it, but my sister got married recently to a Canadian.
She got married to a guy from British Columbia.
And her parents had...
I had a few drinks, the in-laws from my sister's family.
I come over to their house for an event and I was not anticipating talking about politics at all or talking about Veritas.
I actually go into these situations with a sort of humility, not wanting to ever be divisive.
I just want to be avoided almost.
People are upset and I don't want to upset my sister's in-laws.
And they just came out, I mean, attacking and very emotional.
And it got really emotional.
And I can tell you on a human level that it hurt a lot to me because I love my sister and I want my sister to be happy and I don't want to cause any turmoil.
But they pushed so hard, the in-laws did, that I don't know what it is with the coastal places, man. Is it like sea salt air?
Bringing socialism to people?
Because it's the same. For those who don't know much about British Columbia, it's basically the California of Canada.
So it is on the left coast.
I guess they look at the left on the map and say, well, that's where I have to be, and pretty ferocious.
And it's funny, too, because, I mean, the work that you do, whether you're on the left or the right, doesn't particularly matter because you are speaking truth to power.
You are repeating what people, like you're giving people the chance to say what they want to say, and you're repeating it publicly publicly.
I mean, how could they possibly get that mad without openly exposing their motive of shooting the messenger?
Well, I'll say two things about that, Stephan.
That day, actually, I was going on the Rush Limbaugh show to be interviewed, and I honestly said, I believe sincerely in what I'm doing, and I'm not going to stop.
And they felt so bad for attacking me so hard, they actually listened to the Rush Limbaugh interview, and they came back and said, okay, maybe there's...
In other words, I think that the...
Not to get too far off track, but I think the enemy or the opposition to the truth, I think they want to dehumanize and delegitimize someone's humanity.
And I think the more they actually talk to you and the more they actually get to know you and what motivates you and what your passions are, I think the less they can hate you.
And these people had never met me before and now we're family.
We're going to be family forever.
And I think the first time I ever met them, They're coming out attacking me and I'm like, why don't you listen to me talk?
And when they did, they said, okay, this guy really sincerely believes in what he's doing and we love him for it.
So it was kind of just getting to know each other on a personal level and everything's okay now.
But the turnaround, that is quite a...
It's like watching a disaster movie where the plane just lands perfectly even though it's like three feet from the ground, nose down.
So that kind of turnaround, that's pretty remarkable, whether that's a Canadian thing or not.
Because I think that what is important is to recognize that the motives...
The motives are good. Now, people might disagree with the outcomes and so on.
Like, this standard people, oh, if you're not on the left, you just hate the poor.
It's like, nope. Kind of love the poor.
Kind of want to help the poor. Want to have to have opportunities to have jobs and build meaningful lives and have stable families.
Really love the poor.
Or, you know, the Trumpets are racist.
And it's like, but the numbers just came out?
And... Unemployment is down in black and Hispanic communities.
So that's wonderful. That's exactly what you would want, to have those communities grow and be more stable and happy and positive and so on.
So I think...
Disagreement on outcome is different from attacking existential motives, and if people take the latter course, it's really tough to recover.
Well, and that's a great point.
I believe we are in a war.
It is an existential war.
I would call it an electronic civil war.
It's a war of information, and our end is truth.
Some people's end is an agenda.
Some people's end is, I don't know, getting someone elected or defunding their program or so forth and so much.
Our goal is to just expose truth.
That is our end. And the thing about war is that all means are justifiable if you believe in the end.
I mean, in war, it's moral or ethical to kill someone to fight the enemy.
And if you're in an alley and a policeman shoots someone, well, it's justified depending upon whether he acted in self-defense.
So I, of course, believe that our techniques are...
are justified and ethical and morally necessary for purposes of the most paramount thing, which is the truth.
But if you don't accept the premise that there's anything wrong with our media, then you don't think these techniques are justified.
The media cannot abide us.
I don't mean to put them on the spot.
I love my sisters-in-laws and we've had this conversation and everything's fine, but if you don't accept the premise that the media is broken, You certainly won't accept the premise that the means that we utilize are justified in exposing the media.
But, of course, when Upton Sinclair did, when the meat was spoiled and rotting and people were poisoned, use any means necessary.
When you're exposing the chickens in the slaughterhouse, use any means necessary.
So it's a situational ethics, and we are at war, but what makes it so Interesting is that our end is simply the truth, revealing things for people.
And so you're right, motivation, means and ends, humanizing someone, these are all the things that go into this sort of calculus when people make their judgments.
It is one of the great tragedies of, I guess, human history, certainly of American history and Middle East history, that I genuinely believe if someone like you was around in 2002, 2003, and the distribution mechanisms were available, that the invasion of Iraq could have been prevented.
Because the number of lies that were being fed to the general population regarding Saddam Hussein, his regime, his history with the United States, his supposed weapons of mass destruction, and so on.
And this fantasy that you're going to wave your wand of violence and create a Jeffersonian democracy in such a tortured land.
If someone like you or you had been around, you know, it's like the Terminator back tumbling backwards through time to save the world kind of thing.
This and who knows what other wars may be averted or what other disasters may be averted.
Because if we had this kind of unraveling of a mainstream narrative back in 2002, 2003, I think that hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved.
An entire region might have been prevented from destabilization, even with Syria and Libya and so on.
There may be no migrant crisis threatening the survival of Europe and so on.
Yeah. It is one of these things that it's been absolutely necessary throughout history and the fact that it's happening now should give everyone great relief that somebody's feet is being held to the fire who have lied to great negative effect in the past.
The medium has been the proximate cause.
That is to say, the dissemination of information circumventing the mainstream media has been the proximate cause for people to distrust the media.
So, you know, the method, like, I read this Glenn Greenwald piece right before I came on your show about how broken the media was with the CNN thing went through last week with the WikiLeaks fake news about Don Trump Jr.
I mean, the media is, people are seeing the media is broken because there's a mechanism by which to bypass the media.
And now, it's starting to become mainstream.
And this is the war that I'm fighting, if you want to know what the actual inflection point is.
Whether it's justified to investigate and expose the mainstream media.
And they buy ink by the barrel.
So we haven't quite reached the tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell would call it.
The media has lost all of its power.
I still think the media has power.
I think you would say that too. I think they're losing power.
If our methods, if social media and the hidden camera and the dissemination were available 15 years ago, we simply would have accelerated this trend towards truth.
And that's where we are right now.
Although, Stephan, the social media companies, what's going to happen next is they're going to start censoring Right.
It's funny how in war the only success is increased opposition.
That's how you know that you're winning.
That's it. Now, when it comes to growing up, what kind of kid were you with regards to...
Christmas. Because when I was growing up, the kids were just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll go to church.
It's uncomfortable. But it's all about the toys, man.
I'm going to get up earlier to get those toys.
And there were other kids who, you know, the toys were nice, but there really was a kind of spirit of the season that was imbuing their heart and mind.
Where were you on that sort of continuum?
Well... I was very much into video games as a child.
I was an introverted child.
I loved playing Legend of Zelda and these types of games.
I was totally focused on that as a child.
But Easter, Christmas, the religious holidays, my grandfather and my dad and I We'd actually work on these holidays.
We'd actually go out and my dad had a couple of rental properties and I would fix plumbing, roofing, tile.
We worked on holidays as a child and I actually credit my grandfather with instilling Sort of a very ridiculous drive and work ethic into me.
And I would always wonder, why the heck do we have to do this on the holiday itself?
Like, we're on Christmas Eve until 11 o'clock painting a wall.
And now it's, you know...
What would be ironic sort of became normal to me and other people not working on these holidays was odd.
But that was just sort of the odd sort of upbringing that I had.
And we took a few hours to actually open gifts and then we went back to work.
Because the holiday season was a time when you could work interrupted, right?
So anyway, that's... But it's funny because then you go to your friends and your friends are all like, you know, you ask your friends, well, what did you do on Christmas?
They're like, oh, you know, I stayed up late, I watched a whole bunch of movies, then we slept in, we had pancakes, and you're like, well, I was fixing a toilet, and that's my Christmas experience, and let me tell you that.
Actually, it was actually a septic tank once.
I'm not making this up.
There was a septic tank on one of these properties in New Jersey, and my grandfather and my father would, you know, They came up with an ingenious way to empty the septic tank through a PVC pipe and a pump.
For like a hundred bucks at Home Depot, we bought these tools.
And I know this is kind of gross, but we emptied whatever it was, I don't know, a hundred metric yards of poop through a tube.
And I'm just doing this like on Easter.
And I'm thinking to myself, and it's not ironic.
It's just like another day in the life, you know, other people are looking for Easter eggs.
But I really do, and I say this, you know, I've said this a couple times, I really do credit my upbringing, and I sort of resented my grandfather a little bit for how hard he pushed me, but I think it...
It really taught me the value of hard work and that whole cliche about just drive, driven, to do whatever it takes.
So when Trump starts talking about the drain the swamp thing, that has a pretty visceral connection to you.
Like, oh yeah, I can send him some PVC pipe and some children's tears and next thing you know.
It was like an erector set.
They put the thing down there and we build a pipe and for a hundred bucks you got resourcefulness, you're saving money, you're solving a complex problem, and yes, draining the swamp.
And it is a funny thing, you know, because the stuff that you hate as a kid turns out to be annoyingly valuable when you get older.
You know, it's like that old Mark Twain thing where he says, you know, I left home when I was 16 because my dad was such an ignoramus, I came back two years later.
I was amazed at how much he'd learned in the intervening two years.
Because, I mean, yeah, I got my first job when I was 10, and I was always kind of resentful that...
Not always. Sometimes I got the value of it.
But, you know, my friends who is like...
Oh, they got to read economics books sitting by the pool over the summer and I'm just sitting there working three jobs to pay the rent and all of that.
But you have to work really hard.
I don't know.
A crap full of swimming pool gunk, in a sense, gives you a great life when you get older, a life of meaning and purpose and power and virtue, but it's a pretty hard passage to get through at the time.
There was one time when I was peeling off wallpaper.
My dad owned a couple of houses, and we would do all the work ourselves.
Sure. There's no illegal labor.
There's no assistance. It's just me, my dad, and my grandfather.
It was actually kind of a – we get into a pickup truck.
Him, the three of us, James O'Keefe III, James O'Keefe Jr., and James O'Keefe Sr., running around New Jersey doing some of the most dirty jobs you can imagine.
And one time, I must have been, it was 1996, I was 12 years old, and I was peeling wallpaper off the wall with my fingernails all day.
And my grandfather would supervise me.
Okay, you missed a spot.
With your fingernails?
With my fingernails, because we didn't have the requisite tool to...
It's a long time ago. Are you sure you weren't actually in prison at the time?
Were you trying to get like Birdman of Alcatraz?
It wasn't a form of abuse.
There was some carpenter justification for using a fingernail.
It was like a corner or something.
There was a purpose behind it.
It sounds like the way a ferret would try and get out of an overturned aquarium or something like that.
I'm peeling the thing and I'm thinking, my grandfather looks at me and I And he goes, you gotta do what you gotta do to survive.
And I'm thinking, survival? I'm just trying to get the wallpaper off the wall.
But there was this sort of deep understanding of doing whatever it takes.
And I'll say something else about the Christmas season as you grow older.
And I'm 33 now.
This incident was now 20 years ago.
I think in life, you mentioned the Mark Twain quip.
I think you, you know, what I've What I've discovered in my life is being a young man, yes, you think, oh, my dad doesn't know anything.
And then you have this moment in life where maybe it's the 20s, midlife crisis, you know, because I've had a lot of experiences as a young guy.
I mean, I was interrogated by the FBI and arrested, and there's a whole story there, and it's terrible.
And then you have this respect for your parents.
Oh, my God, they knew everything.
I can't believe... But sometimes in life, you actually...
You have experiences that are even beyond what your parents have experienced.
And you learn things that they don't know.
And you become learned in ways that they aren't.
And that's yet another test for someone in life.
Yes, there's that twink quip about learning from your dad and respecting him.
But what happens when you learn too much?
And then you have an additional challenge on your relationship.
And then you go back.
So it's family life when you're a public figure engaged in this battle is very complex and very unique.
But I think that that's an argument, James, that that's the result of successful parenting.
The fact that you can outstrip the necessities of life that your parents did not need to outstrip.
The fact that you can go further than they did means that they gave you a kind of foundation that gives you the strength to do what you're doing.
So in a sense, you know, if my daughter vastly outstrips me going forward in life, I'd...
Yay! Good!
That would be fantastic.
I would take some small part in the credit for that.
Yes, that's a very good point.
And that's the fourth, I suppose, the fourth climax or the fourth wave of this installment.
And we've got a long ways to go.
But my parents, my family, my sister, all of us are so incredibly close.
I'm very fortunate to have a family that we truly understand And frankly, my sister has reminded me, especially in the holiday season, of who I am.
The media has a tendency to build up an archetype and tear it down.
And it's all just a fiction.
It's all just a faguzi.
The media just manufactures consent.
And in the beginning, now I have people like you.
There's a whole community. There's just a whole movement of people.
But you have to remember that in 2009, things were a little bit different.
And you have to be reminded of who you are by the people that you love.
And that's the importance of family.
Oh, it is an amazing thing, James, that the people who see us in public, it is easy.
And I think of the things that you've gone through and the way in which you're attacked.
And you have this basically a fluttering cape and tight pants in my mind.
But it is important for people to remember that the public-facing people who you view as very courageous, absolutely, there's courage involved.
But it's like tip of the iceberg of the support structure underneath.
You know, the fact that you have your family, that I have my support structure, I'm able to do what I do, not because of the sheer force of will that I have, which is not inconsiderable, but it's because of the people around me, because of the support structure.
Because if you look at the way in which you're portrayed, in particular by the media, I mean, the media, it's like looking at one of those weird, ripply, funhouse mirrors, except you've got horns and you're eating babies or something like that.
You know, like when you look at how you're portrayed in the media.
Yeah. They try and infect you with that self-image so that you feel immoral in your own conscience.
And, of course, you need to go to the people who love you and who respect what you're doing and treasure what you're doing to refuel.
And so having that kind of support system is, for me at least, it's why I'm able to do what I'm doing.
And people don't see that from the outside.
Yeah, and the Project Veritas team here is solid as a rock.
My core team, we're pretty much a family.
I mean, the administrative team, the media team, the fundraising team, the production team, and many of our UCJs, undercovers, we are so solid.
And when we're going through these media fights, it's amazing.
I have to be kind of a leader to them, but in many ways, they're kind of a leader to me because we remind each other of the core principles and the raison d'etre of what we're doing.
And it fuels us.
We went through a pretty – the last two weeks, media has thrown more at us in the last two weeks than we've ever really seen, the hatred and the animosity.
And every one of our donors, Stephan, this Christmas season, has told us that they're going to renew.
The New York Times called every donor foundation that's ever supported us There's actually this front page story in the New York Times a few days ago.
And they called every donor and they said, are you going to keep supporting James?
One of these donors sent me an email with the query from the New York Times and said, F the New York Times, I'm giving you 10 times what I gave you last time because I've never had the New York Times call me and that's how I know that you guys are doing good work.
So when I see messages like that, I'm reminded Why we're doing what we're doing.
The people that are my family, that is our supporters, our team, our donors, they remind me the existential nature of what it is that we're doing.
And I get empowered.
Because I'm human, it's not going to feel good when you're pilloried by all these people.
Well, and here's the thing that's interesting to me about that as well, James, is that the New York Times and these other mainstream media outlets will be better off as the result of this process.
It's almost like you're taking someone off heroin and they're going to fight and they're going to kick and they're going to scream and so on.
And when you're trying to wean people off ideology, and the problem to me with the mainstream media is not the ideology.
Fine, have your ideology, have your biases, but damn well be honest about it.
Don't claim to be objective.
So the fact that they are false to themselves, false to their ideals, false to their readers, false to their audience, and false to the freedoms that give them protections, they will be better off...
I don't remember a single...
False story about Barack Obama for eight years that they had to retract.
I mean, it's amazing. They had this perfect editorial process when there was a Democrat in the White House.
So they'll be better off.
They will be better journalists.
They'll be more honest people. They'll be happier with themselves.
And this is why these kinds of attacks, it is kind of understandable.
But if you have to wean people off a dangerous drug, they're going to get mad.
But eventually, at some point, They or their readers or their shareholders, whoever, is going to thank you.
Well, I want to make one point about this Washington Post item.
I know that this is a Christmas episode, but this is all...
It's happening around Christmas.
You know, we're blended in. It's all interrelated.
You know, my family, my supporter, we have 20,000 donors at Project.
We're crowdsource funded. Even if 10% of my supporters go away, which they won't, nothing is ever going to stop this train from leaving the station.
And the Washington Post, we did a few series of undercover videos in the Washington Post.
One guy, Dan Lamoth is his name.
And Dan Lamoth is a reporter, national security writer.
So I want to say something about Dan.
Dan Lamoth is a good reporter, okay?
He's the national security writer for the Washington Post.
He's the subject matter expert on all things Russia and all things national security.
And this is what he says in this hidden camera to our guy.
And this is, we released this video in the week of all the negative publicity about Project Veritas.
He says, quote, I work for this place, the editorial section.
He goes, they're so biased.
He said, quote, on the Russia, you're spending a ton of time on this thing that's sensational.
And he's aghast, Dan Lamothe is, that the people at the paper who are not the factual reporters, they are the opinion reporters, are embellishing, quote, it's over the top, always over the top, Lamothe comments.
In fact, the other reporter says the Russia story, quote, maybe doesn't exist.
Now, these things were said in private to our hidden cameras.
They were being honest.
They were being true. These are the subject matter experts on all things Russia.
So we released a story. What does Dan Lamothe say?
The guy that we caught on tape, he goes, and I'm going to read his statement.
He says, quote, I regret being so open with strangers.
That's the big lesson I've learned here.
So he's apologizing for being truthful about The actual Russia story.
Again, this guy is the subject matter expert on the story.
So the opinion people who come up with their crap about Russia's a big thing, their story's not based in any fact.
It's based in conjecture and narrative.
The guy who's the subject matter expert puts out a statement saying that he's apologetic for being honest.
And that is why, Stefan, what we're doing is so important at Veritas.
Because that is the heart of the matter.
That right there.
is the reason why people distrust the media because if their own subject matter experts are apologizing for being honest What is it?
If it's not based on the facts of the subject matter experts, what is it based on?
What is it based on? That's what we exposed, and the media says, O'Keefe's a failure, that doesn't matter.
Well, if it's a failure, why is he apologizing?
That is so interesting to me.
Well, and don't you kind of want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs from the mainstream media to what's called the alternative media?
Out here among the stars, you can tell the truth.
Out here, you know, with a direct connection with your audience, you can be honest, you can be critical, you can think for yourself, you can challenge your audience.
You are not dependent upon selling products.
a fairy tale narrative.
You're not dependent upon political considerations.
You can just tell the truth.
And I kind of want to leave these breadcrumbs because until you've experienced the sheer joy of being able to be honest in the world without fear of immediate death-defying consequences or getting fired or whatever, I mean, geez, we'll be fired if we don't tell the truth These guys seem to be fired if they do tell the truth.
I can't want to leave these breadcrumbs out and say, you know, like to the alcoholics, like, you think alcohol is good.
You got to try being sober.
It's fantastic. And it's like, you think that having this kind of power is good.
Come out into the real world, have the power of truth, and you will never, ever be tempted to go back.
Yeah, Solzhenitsyn says, live not by lies.
Live not by lies.
That was the message of the Samizdat, the alternative publication of the Soviet Union.
Lamoth says, quote, I'm generally an open, friendly person, but I need to be more cautious.
So it's like saying, I'm generally a truthful person, but I need to be careful about being truthful.
That's all he's saying.
And that was amazing.
It was very overlooked. No one talked about it.
I was facing an onslaught of a thousand blue checkmarked Twitter accounts from the mainstream media attacking us.
That doesn't matter.
That's everything.
That is everything.
The fact that they say the truth in private, but they're unwilling to say it in public.
That's why Veritas doesn't just uncover fraudsters.
We uncover truthful people.
People in the establishment who are not willing to go public with their truths.
And that would be a great Christmas present for people.
The opportunity to be honest, because it is a war and the liars are on one side and the people really genuinely curious about the truth and willing to pursue it to the end of the earth in order to get it.
That is the real war.
And defection, you know, you defect in a war, you're in big trouble.
You know, you defect in this, defect from the liars to the truth tellers, you're welcome with open arms.
And I just sort of want to put that out there for people.
That's also part of the history of the Soviet Union when they created this sort of terrifying state where Stalin – by the way, all of its history repeating itself.
I think all of these lessons are in history, but Stalin, the courageous people went to rot in the gulag.
It was the traitors and the sellouts and the people who sold out their friends and testified against their own family.
That's why Solzhenitsyn said, live not by lies.
And we face the same test in media today.
That praise of the mainstream media, it is such a treat for people and such a temptation for people to get the praise from the New York Times.
And I've seen it. I've seen it in my life.
I've seen people sell me out just because they know that if they do, they will be positively quoted I mean, it's like that scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson is unmasking the opposition and he realizes that under the mask is his own friend.
It just makes you rethink everything.
And it's probably the most damaging thing that I have seen thus far.
Oh, I've seen people betray half their life principles for a positive byline in Newsweek.
And what a terrible deal.
You know, you get one positive byline, it doesn't end up meaning anything.
And then you have to live with your own betrayal for the rest of your life.
And you have to justify it.
And you have to justify it.
And I can't live with that.
We can't defy our conscience, right?
We can't live with ourselves.
It's that Thomas Paine quote, you know, that let them call me rebel and But I would suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul.
And that is really how we feel.
It separates the men from the boys.
And it's the character building aspect of this process where you really figure out Who has character and who doesn't?
Because when the stuff hits the fan, you're going to see that pretty quickly.
So there is a silver lining to this process, and it's only making us stronger and better as we proceed into our next foray.
We're putting the finishing touches on our next big sting, so that should be fun.
Is that going to be out before Christmas, do you think?
Oh, I don't think so, but it'll hopefully be out in the new year very soon.
Listen, you opened the segment by saying we'll never be out of work.
Short words have never been said.
We will never be out of work in this country.
Well, philosophy manufactures a lot of honest people, but unfortunately the government schools, the indoctrination camps of higher education and the mainstream media are cranking out a lot of freedom-hating zombies.
But, you know, we've got the cure for that as well.
So if you do want to help out James with what he's doing, I'm sure a Christmas present would not go amiss.
You can go to projectveritas.com to help them out and support what they do.
Thanks, of course, for a fascinating year.
I mean, I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl on Christmas morning when you post new videos, and the work that you're doing is amazing.
And thanks so much for taking the time today.
And pick up a copy of American Pravda, our book, if you want to support us, American Pravda at Barnes& Nobles or wherever else.
Thank you.
Duke Pesta, a tenured university professor and author and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school, offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
For more from Dr.
Duke and the Freedom Project Academy, please go to fpeusa.org.
Dr. Pesta, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Merry Christmas, Steph.
Merry Christmas to you, too. And to your vast audience.
And I want to clarify, I'm not an anti-happy holidays guy.
I'm more than willing to wish happy holidays for anybody's holiday for any reason.
But Merry Christmas is its own thing, and so I want to make sure we say that.
I agree with that, too.
So, how has your year been?
How is your Christmas shaping up, and what kind of things do you get up to?
It's been a busy year.
I've enjoyed talking to you a few times over the course of the season.
I always look forward to that.
We're blessed. The school's growing by leaps and bounds.
The university hasn't untenured me yet, although I think they're eager to do so at their earliest convenience.
Life is good, and I'm looking very much forward to Christmas.
It is my favorite holiday of the year, too, so it's a good way to end the year.
Yeah, it's funny. I went to go and get the Christmas tree last night.
Of course, up here in Canada, you can just go out to somebody's farm where they're selling them.
You can drive around in a tractor.
You can pick out the tree.
And then, of course, I karate chopped them down with my bare hands just to stay tough and get into the Christmas spirit.
And when we uncurled the tree and got it home, it was like, whoa, that is a big tree.
You know what we need now?
More ornaments. That will help.
Do the Canadians actually let you cut down your own tree?
Well, if it's on somebody's farm and they're selling it to you, then yes.
But I really like that process of just getting...
Because it was a cold...
You know, like in Canada, you just have to apply more ridiculously self-delusional superlatives to the cold.
It's brisk! It's refreshing!
It's bracing! Bracing is when you just don't want to go outside at all.
You brace, actually, your door against the wall of snow.
But it is a beautiful thing to be out there, especially if you do it at night.
And it's a moon and star kind of night out there with the light bouncing off the little snowflakes like an endless carpet of shimmering diamonds and the trees.
Of course, you have to be careful what you chop because, of course, you touch one finger to the bark of those trees and you get six tons of snow, which seemingly always seems to end up going down the back of your neck.
But that is a beautiful part of the season and something I think I'd really miss if I was ever in a warmer climate.
We're in northern Wisconsin and I love that too.
I love those nights. Where there's such a layer of snow on the ground that quiets everything, but it illuminates everything, too.
It's kind of like you're in the dark, darkness visible, as Milton would have called it, I think, and it's a beautiful thing, I agree.
But I'm surprised the Canadians don't have some kind of a tree-cutter force to protect its citizens from their own harm.
I know the English do something.
Somebody's telling me that the English have a ladder police, that in certain communities in England, if you need to get something off a top shelf in a store or a shop, The shop owner is not allowed to do it.
They have a ladder service that the community sends out to make sure it's done safely and well.
So I'm glad to know that there is still some of the pioneering spirit up there in Canada.
Well, it's funny because when you do things in Canada from that standpoint, I think that the general goal seems to be if we replace existing Canadians with non-Christians, the trees will be safe because then nobody will be celebrating Christmas anymore.
But of course, we aim to put a kibosh to that particular plan.
So for you, where do you sit in terms of spiritualism versus materialism in the Christmas season?
It seems to me that you have, with the hypostatic union, the argument that God becomes man, you have a really good argument for both, don't you?
You have the ineffable, inessential, bodiless God, the creator of the universe, entering material reality in the person of a little baby.
For me, that gets navigated by humility.
C.S. Lewis pointed this out.
Others have as well.
It's not new to me. But to me, that's the big missing virtue here that helps us mediate.
To what degree is Christmas both a material and a supernatural, a spiritual holiday?
Think about the premise of Christmas for a moment, and it's a beautiful premise.
I think it's the most beautiful idea.
If it's only an idea that's been invented by men, as Dostoevsky said, then we have to ask ourselves how fallen men could have come up with an idea that beautiful.
That's the paradox, right?
But what I love about it is that you have the creator of the universe, the divine God, that which is completely bodiless, pure spirit, occupying the body of a human being.
And what's so beautiful about the idea is that he who is all-powerful makes himself not just a baby, the most vulnerable possible of all human animals, right?
I mean, we've talked before in different contexts on your show about how almost every other animal species, when it gives birth, Within a few short months or even days, that animal, the baby colt, can get up and gallop away.
Many animals are born with rudimentary teeth and claws, but not that poor, bare, forked animal, man.
And so not only did God become the most humble possible aspect of human creation, the most utterly dependent aspect of human creation, but he also was born a slave in a slave nation to the Romans.
And so the idea that humility, and C.S. Lewis called it humility, What separates Christianity from all other religions, all religions, and even many secular philosophies, pay attention to the idea of humility and why it's important.
Pride goeth before a fall.
We've got the idea of hubris and pagan Greek culture.
But Lewis is right, that only Christianity makes it the defining virtue of its faith.
That when our own God entered material reality...
And talk about, by the way, what a humbling step that was for divinity to become material...
That alone was a huge mark of humility by the Creator God, but yet a baby, helpless, dependent to a slave family.
When you think about all of that, humility is really the primary virtue of Christianity.
It is the one virtue that Christianity cannot exist if you don't have it.
It's at the core of everything that's done.
And if you look at the life of Christ as he matured and then began his ministry, he was a servant.
You cannot be a servant.
You cannot be a servant unless you have that spirit instilled at the core of you.
And throw this back to you, but my final comment on that idea that's been running through my head is, yeah, service depends on humility.
And when you think about how modern culture moves farther away from God, intellectual culture, and certainly Christianity in the Western world is under tremendous intellectual attack.
When you think about that, it's not surprising that we can't talk to each other anymore.
It's not surprising that we have become much more tribal.
Our politics has become a blood sport.
We look at the kinds of vanity.
What's going on in Hollywood with all these serial abusers is vanity, right?
These are people with untrammeled wealth and power who are unable to see themselves as other people, and they exploit people.
I think that as Christianity pulls away, or we pull away from Christianity, I should say, in Western culture, you begin to see all this fraying at the seams.
And I don't think people have realized quite what that installation of humility at the center of our culture for the last 2,000 years, what it really meant to us over and above our religious perspectives.
This question of humility to me is very, very powerful.
And it is true that most human infants are born helpless.
I'm actually, not many people know this, I'm only six days old, but it has been an extraordinarily difficult six days, as you can see.
But humility to me is fascinating because it is one of these paradoxes that...
Really begs and rewards deep contemplation that to feel insignificant is to achieve peace and not peace through inaction, through abstracting yourself or absconding from social discourse on virtue.
But for me, I am absolutely insignificant relative to philosophy, relative to principles, relative to ethics, relative to virtue.
I don't exist as a public figure, as an intellectual.
I mean, there's aspects of my private life and so on, but as far as making arguments go in the public sphere, I try not to have sort of ego investment in particular outcomes.
And this focus on humility to me is really powerful because humility is the opposite of compulsion.
Compulsion is when you know damn well what is so good for someone that you must force them to do it.
I know. The best way to help the poor is redistributing trillions of dollars through state power at the point of a gun.
I know the best way to deliver healthcare is to force people to buy government-mandated healthcare insurance.
I know the best way to bring peace to the Middle East is drop bombs everywhere.
That is, of course, well, satanic in terms of its hubris, its pride.
My sort of fundamental approach, I don't know the best way to organize society.
I don't know the best way that the poor should be helped.
I don't know the best way that healthcare should be delivered, which is why we need a free market of things and ideas and people and labor.
I don't know. And having that humility to say, I never have the confidence in my arguments and in my ideas to the point where I'm willing to inflict them on others at the point of a gun.
Now, self-defense is another matter, and I'm willing to defend myself using coercion, but it is that fundamental humility to say, I will never gain enough confidence in the right course to force other people to do it.
And that humility, which is the fundamental reason why Christianity spread more with the word than the sword, unlike a number of other religions, that humility is really powerful, and it was that humility that gave us the smallest government the world has ever known.
It's beautifully said, and I think that's right.
And I would go further and say that humility is perhaps engaging in acts of humility, personal humility.
It may be the single most free way we express our free will.
There can be no other virtue requires that kind of freedom.
You can compel to some degree chastity, you can compel to some degree generosity, but you can't compel humility because that is entirely driven by your own free will.
I think that the virtue of humility and the virtue of free will, they are so inextricably linked together that they do form the core of a remarkable philosophy.
They're even more beautiful when you look at it as a spirituality.
Many people won't go there. You think about the modern world, Stephan, as we as a culture pull away from Christ in particular and religion in general, We see a diminution of our humility.
Think about self-esteem education, the idea that in many of our universities, middle schools, high schools, we're replacing genuine academic achievement with the sense that we have to make kids feel safe.
We have to make them feel important.
And if we're doing that to education, if we're not making kids uncomfortable, because uncomfortable, willingness to be uncomfortable is a kind of humility, right?
If we are stripping that away from our education process, what do you get?
You get unbridled arrogance in our students, right?
Unbridled arrogance and unwillingness to be placed out of their comfort zones, which means they don't learn anything.
That's part of the problem here.
The humility aspect of things, it drives so many things.
You think about how in our sporting events right now where some defensive lineman makes a tackle for no gain or Some garden basketball scores two points on a breakaway layup, and immediately you're pointing and you're calling all this attention to ourselves.
I think the logical consequence of pulling away from those ideas...
Is to more increased vanity, more increased sense of self.
Nietzsche was right. If God is dead and we have killed him, we philosophers have killed him, then we've got to become gods to replace that, right?
And that's where humility gets lost.
And I think that's the great trick of Christianity.
The pivot point for Christianity is that recognition.
2,000 years before Nietzsche, 1,800 years before Nietzsche stated the obvious, right?
That in the absence of God, some man's going to have to occupy that position.
God himself chose to become man in an act of sympathetic humility which becomes the cornerstone of what we're supposed to do if we follow those ideals.
And let's talk a little bit about the relationship between pride and hatred, because that seems to be very strong as pride goes up, particularly in America with the very fractious political environment.
As the pride goes up, the hatred seems to go up as well.
And I think this is more from the left than the right.
I don't see leftists gathering for rallies and the rightists hitting them with bike locks and setting off fire alarms and disrupting and so on.
And so when you have...
That kind of pride, to the point where you're so right that you're willing to use violence rather than debate, then that pride, that vanity, that insecurity all seems to co-join into a Macbeth-style witch's brew of hatred.
And I think the hatred comes from the fact that you know that you've built your mental house on sand, not on stone, on pride rather than humility.
Have you noticed that as people become more proud, they seem to become more full of hate, like everyone who disagrees with them as a Nazi and the Russians stole the election and there's just this irrational hatreds that they use to advance their ideas when they can't win a debate?
Yeah, I absolutely see that connection.
The left, when you make yourself everything, when you make the argument that you are so absolutely morally correct and politically correct, that you lose your tolerance, you lose your ability to tolerate people who are different, and it results in hate.
And you're absolutely right. Those of us who are not on the left, we tend to be more anchored in philosophy or religion, theology.
In other words, humility, right?
To be a progressive these days is to sort of eschew pride, right?
To eschew humility in favor of pride.
And that's the danger, right?
There's something very inquisitorial in a religious sense about leftist pride.
They're so cocksure of everything.
They're so convinced that theirs is the only conceivable way of relating to other people and That they've lost the ability to debate.
They don't want to argue with you anymore.
They aren't willing to take you on face-to-face in an attempt to show you the logic of their positions.
It's pure emotionalism.
All Who Disagree With Me Must Be Evil is really a dark portal to walk through.
And there seems to be just a never-growing number of fairly hysterical people who seem to have that approach.
And I think it comes down to the replacement of ethics with kind of Darwinism, with this sort of base biological survival.
As we know, there are close to half the population Is significantly or totally dependent on the state for their income and for their revenue.
And that has caused their genuine self-respect, their work skills, their economic efficacy to dwindle and atrophy.
And so what happens now is there's an old line from the movie Risky Business, which I'll paraphrase.
And the guy says, in a recession, don't ever F with another man's business.
Don't ever F with another man's income.
And I think it's got to that now that people have become so dependent on the state that a kind of Praetorian guard of hate-filled intellectuals is now ringing them and trying to rage and slander and attack anyone who might interfere with this sort of free flow of purloined goodies to the masses.
And that, I think, is because people have said that what's important for me is money, is material survival, not productivity, not ingenuity, not hard work and so on.
And I think that, you know, the growth of dependence on the state combined with the growth of hyper hysterical hatred towards people who want smaller government has turned, I think, into a cultural civil war and… And one side is still reasoning and the other side is merely escalating.
And either the escalating side has to start reasoning or the reasoning side has to start escalating because right now it's a losing position to be on the side of reason.
Yeah, I think that's wonderfully said.
And we have history on our side in these analyses.
I mean, look at what happened in the socialist countries go back to 150, 170 years ago.
All of these socialist... We're good to go.
But then Vladimir Lenin died, and they buried, they didn't bury him, they embalmed him.
They put him in the middle of where the altar used to be, in the great church in Red Square, and people came from all over the Soviet Empire to weep and cry over their dead god.
I mean, or think about the May Day parades in places like China and North Korea.
Where you've got these 50-foot tall posters of Kim Jong-un, right?
And everybody's weeping and following him.
This idea that you destroyed the idea of humility that was the essence of the Christianity that the Soviet Union rejected, but you replaced it with this kind of status centralized federal government, social government, that does exactly that.
It deifies the state.
It deifies man. And it seems to me that for all the dangers in history...
For people deifying God or believing in a deity, the dangers of deifying men are much more significant in the long run than the dangers of worshipping a God, be he real or false.
So let's, I guess, close off with, I think, some good advice for peace and tranquility and get-alongingness over Christmas.
One of the things that I think...
The loss of humility has given to people is this manic desire to change everyone around them and a complete unwillingness to recognize that you can't do it.
I don't care how powerful your car is, if your wheels are in mud, you're just not going anywhere.
And people spend so much of their time and their effort trying to change those around them rather than accept common values and lead by example rather than by nagging or pressure or bullying or slanderer.
Humility is, if you live a good life, people who desire that will find you and will be inspired by you and will attempt to emulate you.
But it is not the place of a virtuous person to nag and hound people.
And that, I think, is a very powerful thing.
I get a lot of messages from Christians saying, open your heart, Jesus will find you, open your heart, and so on.
Not, you're going to hell, and that kind of thing, right?
And I think this virtue of humility and recognizing what you can affect and what you can't affect.
Humility is beautiful because it creates a very high bar for applying personal energy to something.
And you have to be really, really sure that what you're going to do is going to be effective.
And trying to change other people through negative feedback is a very – it's a huge waste of time and energy.
So for me, what I sort of wanted to get across to people and let me know what you think – Strive to improve yourself.
Don't strive to alter the world directly.
It is one of these indirect things that you have to do.
Most people try to move a shadow by just pushing at the shadow rather than moving the statue.
The statue is yourself. And if you can improve that, the world that is interested will follow, and the world that isn't interested will be repelled, which is, I think, good either way.
And I think that's exactly right.
Again, C.S. Lewis said, humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.
And so it's about us, not other people.
The best missionaries in the world, whether it's for socialism or whether it's for Christianity, are people who can demonstrate through the virtue of the idea rather than hector people, like you said.
It's why socialism is always bullying, ultimately, and has to be done with guns in the final analysis.
Christianity, while Christians haven't historically in the past resorted to those tactics, as you said earlier, that's not the way Rome was won by violence.
It was won by example.
And I always like to look at it this way in a Christmas context, that the wisest kings only got a star to follow, but the lowly shepherds got an angel.
And that the constant lesson of Christmas for me is that lesson, that the humble, the broken, the lost, the disabled, the sick, the dying, those were the ones that he came to minister to.
That their lowliness, their need, was what his humility reached out to.
And think about it.
When kings lose their humility, we get tyrants.
When philosophers lose their humility, we get pedants.
When scientists lose their humility, we get Dr.
Frankenstein's. And when politicians lose their humility, we get Al Franken's and John Conyers, right?
We get that. Humility, it seems to me, is the only way you can receive truths that make you grow, whether they be from God or from men.
And that's why the ideology of the left is so ultimately doomed.
And all they can do is resort to violence.
Again, like religious inquisitors, all they can do is seek to destroy and censor.
So as long as we keep in the idea of Christmas, that wonderful...
Avatar of humility that the Christmas story saved for us that was at the core of Western culture for so many years.
Go ahead and throw out Christianity if culturally you can't put your heart in it.
Go ahead, but try to at least keep that idea of Christianity that wrapped itself around humility without, I think, the metaphysical, without the spiritual dimensions of it.
I think we're beginning to see that you can't have humility In a meaningful sense.
For that reason, if you can muster no other love for Christmas, if you can muster no other sensitivity or no other joy in the holiday season, you can at least recall that the Christian ideal of humility is the only one, I think, that's going to carry us forward and keep us humble to the point that we can learn and grow from each other rather than attack each other.
Beautifully said. So, thank you very much for your time in the spirit of openness, honesty and Christmas.
I just also wanted to thank you for your friendship and the conversations that we've had over the last few years.
They are a core and central part of my intellectual delights and I really, really appreciate the spirit in which we've been able to communicate about very important, very powerful things, invoking people a love of literature and a love of deeper thinking.
So, I really, really appreciate your friendship and I wish you and your family, of course, the most merry of Christmases.
Right back at you. I'm looking forward to the new year, too.
I was talking more and more. Stay well.
Keep your family well.
To Mike, your producer, thanks for all your hard work.
Guys, love you, and have a great Christmas and a happy new year.
Take care. And now we turn to the delightful Rebecca.
Blonde in the belly of the beast.
And you can find her at youtube.com forward slash blonde in the belly of the beast.
Minds.com forward slash blonde beast.
Nothing to do with Nietzsche. And gab.ai forward slash blonde underbar beast.
Rebecca, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
So Christmas, a time of good cheer, good friends, good food, good family, and somewhat of a challenging time for people with reasoned arguments and evidence.
I mean, for myself, when I was growing up, when I was much more unformed as a child, like I kind of grew up in lefty, goopy, kind of socialism...
It's nice, it's kind, and has a kind of cool aspect to it.
When I first got into objectivism and Ayn Rand, ooh, Christmas has got just a little bit more tense, because when you're kind of going with the flow, it's a lot easier to get along, as we all know.
But for me, at least, when I started to get some really strong, I don't want to say opinions, because that just makes it sound too subjective, but when I started to have really strong arguments based on evidence that began to define really who I am, Who I am is like a scaffolding of philosophy with an identity that survives inside.
And for that, it can be a challenge with family.
We generally don't grow up with very strong philosophical opinions.
How is it for you the transition from when you were a kid to where things are now?
I mean, it's definitely been painful, but I look upon my childhood and it was just a totally different world because I was able to engage in this naivete that I can't anymore.
You know how it is. People say that the red pill, it's like discovering that Santa Claus isn't real.
There's really no going back after that.
So, you know, I look upon those times as, you know, they were more innocent times, more family oriented.
Yeah. And now it's difficult.
My nuclear family, they're into my channel.
They love it. But my extended family, not so much.
So that's definitely causing some problems.
So I thought that we could talk a little today about how people can deal with their political opinions in the holidays and how you can deal with extended family and nuclear family that are just beyond reason and evidence.
Because it's not always up to you, right?
I mean, you sit down and you can be like, what's it, Donald Trump Jr.
tweeted something over Thanksgiving.
I don't know if you saw it, but it was like, I vow not to talk about politics over Thanksgiving.
And then like three drinks later, it was a picture of all the founding fathers marching across a field or whatever.
We can sort of say, I'm not going to bring this stuff up.
But if there's people who are kind of boiling over on the other side of the table...
Oftentimes they won't call you out directly.
They'll just make these kind of pointed comments and then you have this problem of what do you say and do you respond and where's your integrity but you don't want to call a fight and really it really does get quite complicated.
Yes, it does. And I'm amazed, consistently amazed at people's, how fiercely they defend Islam and other things like this that don't directly affect them.
They're not Muslim. And so my problem with the extended family, or what they said the problem with my channel was, was this anti-Islam, anti-feminist stance.
And I'm, you know, I know that some of them are feminists, but the Islam thing, I'm like, gosh, why would you have such a huge, tremendously huge problem with this, enough to, you know, bring it up at a family function?
Well, it's also like they don't particularly relate to the first syllable of Christmas.
That seems somewhat relevant to the season.
That's definitely true.
I mean, nobody's really an atheist.
We kind of say that we're half-assed Catholics, but not having that religious element, it creates this environment where there's no true binding force between extending and extended a nuclear family.
And that's really problematic, I think, for a lot of Americans.
Yeah. Well, then, of course, it used to be that blood bonds came with a conformity of belief system that meant that where you would go to get your most nutrition for support of your beliefs would tend to be your family, Like if you all grew up Catholic or in my case, we all grew up Protestant.
That is where you would go for your greatest refill, so to speak, of belief systems.
But now, particularly with the Christian atheist or the left-right or the Trump-Hillary or the Republican-Democrat split in America in particular, it is very, very difficult.
And you can see the people who are into the alternative media versus the people who, say, are taking arts degrees.
You know, like, you can really see this divide.
And it is no longer, really, that you can go to, for a lot of people in their families, and Christmas really brings this out, as does Thanksgiving, it's not necessarily that you can go to your family and say, well, you know, I've spent a lot of time around leftist atheists, but I'm going back to my big extended Catholic family to drink deep of the wine and cap and blood of Christ.
Yeah. Or whatever belief it is that you have.
And this schism of beliefs within the family is a really big challenge for people, particularly around the holiday season.
So it's kind of a mixed blessing.
You want to see the people, but it's kind of a landmine.
Yes, and how do you cope with that?
How far do you go in going against their belief system?
I don't want to cause controversy in my family, but I think my channel has already done that.
I feel compelled to defend myself, but at the same time, I also feel a lot of guilt.
For this rift. But I do kind of feel like this was inevitable.
I'm seeing the red pill kind of tear families apart.
And people that formerly were apathetic about politics now can barely coexist in the same space because they feel like they are so absolutely fundamentally opposed.
And that's a huge change I've seen, especially in this last year.
And I don't see it a lot on the other side.
I feel like my conservative friends are more willing to accept liberalism, but my liberal friends, the ones that have endured, are less accepting of conservatives.
Yes, I think that is true.
And I would say, though, the language we use is important.
And much though I love to nag people, I'm going to nag you.
Because this question is because red pill tears families apart.
I don't think that's accurate.
it.
I think the way that I would phrase it, and let me know if you disagree, of course, but the way that I would phrase it, Rebecca, is that if you're willing to think and express your arguments using reason and evidence, then there are some people who are going to rail against that aggressively.
The fault is not the red pill.
The fault is not the reason or the evidence or the argument or the person making it.
The fault lies with the people.
I mean, we all disagree with this things you and I would disagree on and so on.
We'd have a civilized conversation about it.
It's the people who escalate who use this aggressive emotional rhetoric, who start name-calling and so on.
It's the verbal abusers who...
can't reason their way out of a paper bag, but think that they're the Mike Tyson of the debating world, the people who escalate and become aggressive, I just think it's important to put the fault where the fault lies.
Because what is their choice?
Is there a choice then to say, "Well, I'm just not going to have any opinions.
I'm not going to have any ideas that conflict with the least emotionally mature people around me." That's just a form of self-erasure.
And if then the choice is, I either kind of fundamentally don't exist, and then everyone gets along with me because I'm not there.
Or I have some thoughts and ideas of my own, in which case people escalate verbal abuse against me.
Neither of those are fun, but it's not the fault of the person who thinks that the unthinking attack.
The temptation to blame the red pill is because, I guess it's because I reflect on, you know, before this year, and I see that there was a relative peace in my friendships and my personal relationships, and then this last year, which just happened to coincide with, you know, the majority of my red pilling.
So, you're definitely right, and I agree with you, but it's hard to differentiate these different aspects of what has happened this last year.
It's just been so transformative, I think for most families.
Yeah, I mean, if you look at that old saying, they made a desert and called it peace.
And in that sense, sure, if forests are arguments, you can blow away the forest and call it peace, but you've just removed the life.
And I think, you know, it's funny, too, because in families, there are the reasonable, there are the anti-rational, and then there are the people who could make a difference.
And that, to me, is where the biggest fault lies.
Because... In a family, let you sit down, you have your family dinner or whatever, and something comes up, whether it's you or something, it doesn't really matter, right?
Something comes up. And someone's going to escalate.
Like, someone's going to get snarky or bitchy or mean or escalate or whatever, or just name-calling and so on.
And the question to me is always, well, how does the other family members who aren't so invested, how do they deal with it?
In other words, do they blame you for provoking the abuser?
Or do they say to the abuser, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, slow down, she's just got some arguments, she's got some ideas, there's no need...
To take that approach.
And that to me is the big challenge.
My relationship with the people who escalated was not quite as challenging as my relationship with the people who blamed me for the other person escalating when I was simply either responding to a barb or an argument.
Right. I do think we get a particular amount of blame because we've chosen to be public figures.
And so I think that perhaps, I'm not sure of this, I haven't corroborated this, but I think the perception is that because I've chosen to state these things publicly, that I've kind of exposed them to some danger.
I presume that they found out about all of my videos by Googling me or just hearing about it through the family.
So I don't know.
I haven't talked to anybody. Nobody's called me.
Yeah. Well, that's a shame too, because of course the idea is, I think the ideal is, that if you have people that you claim to care about, and you think that they're heading down some wrong ideological path or someone, that you would call them.
That you would have a conversation, pick up the phone, it's free for the most part, you know, just have a conversation and hash it out.
Because this, you know, blood is thicker than water.
This is where families should sit down and hash things out and should sit down and have conversations.
But this kind of, well, we're not going to talk to her directly.
We're going to talk smack about her behind her back and we're going to get angry off in the distance and we're going to try and discredit her.
Take it off with her mom, yeah. Yeah, you know, I mean...
Do you know what your daughter is saying?
This is not how adults are supposed to be.
If you have a problem with someone and you don't really like them, like some troll or whatever, I don't have anything to do with them.
But if it's family, shouldn't you make the effort to try and work things out?
Right. I mean, there's this adherence to politeness, this relentless adherence to politeness.
I mean, I told you before about Thanksgiving, not a peep about this.
It was all pleasantries just asking me about my channel.
They knew about it. This presumably was before they saw any of the videos, which apparently changed everything.
The nice lighting comments.
Yeah. Boy.
But like I mentioned earlier, I've been doing Ancestry, and so this has given me some cognitive dissonance because I feel like I'm simultaneously learning about my family and kind of tearing my family apart with my political philosophies.
And so I feel a little lost, and I'd imagine that a lot of people share this sentiment.
If you can give us any advice, Stefan.
Yeah. We look to you.
Well, you know, as far as ancestry goes, like I did a show, boy, I learned about this when I was in undergraduate psychology class way back in the day.
And it's funny because at least, well, it's on my mother's side as well, but definitely on my father's side.
The Molyneux, we kind of rose to fame as political dissidents, as people who were arguing against the power of the aristocracy, who were arguing for shrinking the state and were arguing for separation of church and state and so on.
on.
And my ancestor William Molyneux was best friends with John Locke, and they had to hide from the government in Ireland, where apparently you can just disappear like a four-leaf clover in the wind.
And so for me, when I look at my family of origin, and they were hostile to sort of free thinking, to rational thoughts, to skepticism about the power of government, to me, it's like, no, no, no, you guys are not part of the family.
I'm definitely part of the family, because we have a long history in this family of thinking for yourself, of reasoning from first principles, of being skeptical of state power and opposing arbitrary state power, which is to say state power.
So from my standpoint, it's like, no, no, no, I'm not out of step.
You guys are out of step.
This whole courtroom is out of order.
You guys are out of step.
And so for me, the ancestry is free thinking and philosophy.
And the people who've let that go, the people who've now set themselves against reason and evidence, they're in a sense deviating from the family tradition that I in fact represent.
That's exactly how I feel, and I was lucky enough to discover this book with all of the research compiled from the last several centuries on my mom's side, and it had this quote about my family.
as far as our observations and acquaintances has extended um we find them high-minded self-reliant energetic and decided in character fearless in the expression of their thoughts and feelings and very little influenced by the frowns or the flatteries of the world their class as a class domestic in their habits exemplary in their lives over and above these traits through every branch of the family far and wide there's a parent and indomitable will which bears up to its possessor and leaves its impress on character in life and so i read this it's It really connected me to my family.
And then we had this big argument.
And I'm like... What happened to this spirit, this will that's gone through all of these centuries of our family?
And I feel like has arrived at me and it's manifested itself in this channel.
Like, what happened to you?
Where's your fight?
And so it's been gravely disappointing more than anything.
It is. And it's saddening.
And that does tend to coalesce and concentrate around Christmas time.
And that is a big challenge.
And you know, Rebecca, I just fundamentally cannot understand people who choose the state over the family.
Like, that just seems kind of weird to me.
Like, you would choose, what, Islam over your family?
You would choose the state over your family?
You would choose some government union over your family?
Like, it's family. Like, I've got this against me argument, which I've been talking about for years, that if, you know, if the family, if somebody around you, it doesn't matter if family or not, somebody around you argues for bigger government and more taxes, and they're arguing for more coercion against you.
They're arguing for the initiation of force against you.
Now, when I first put this argument out, I guess in my optimism, I was thinking that people would say, whoa, wait a minute, I'm choosing an abstract agency of coercion called the state over my own flesh and blood.
No way would I do that.
And the weird thing is, like, I thought that would just be kind of like a wake-up call and bring families closer together, get them to reject this addiction to state violence.
I guess, I don't know, I underestimated the power of propaganda.
I don't know. I underestimated how many shiny heads on television could make people believe irrational things.
Because what happened was people are like, oh yeah, totally choosing the state over you, flesh and blood, you know, fruit over ancestors' loins, you know, the together tribe in times of trouble.
And that to me is really astounding.
I cannot fathom. It's like saying, well, there's this wonderful guy I could marry, but there is this orc.
And it's like... The auric?
What are you talking about? It's abstract, doesn't exist, the agency of violence, and, you know, not terribly pretty.
So, I just, I can't understand how people bond with the state over and above their own family.
And I guess maybe it's just resources, maybe the state is there.
Yeah, and we've been propagandized through state school since we were very, very young, just undoing The indoctrination that I've experienced has taken nearly a decade now, and I'd imagine that everybody else is in kind of the same situation, where they just have to go through their childhood and just kind of systematically dismantle almost everything that they've learned in public schools.
And, you know, it's a lot of the political climate that is...
It's compelling us to move away from genetic and biological urges.
So this really baffles me.
We see this in feminism, women rejecting their most basic instinct to have children.
That's how we know how deep this propaganda really runs.
We know what's good for us.
We know family's good for us. Women know that children are good for us.
But we're not doing it because we've been so deeply propagandized.
And I would say, you know, you're sort of asking for advice and I'm trying not to dance too much around the topic because the advice can be challenging.
For me, Rebecca, what happened was I did really demand, I really did demand that people in my family of origin accept, whether they disagreed with my conclusions, whether they disagreed with all of that, that they did have to respect that I was motivated by positive things.
I just tweeted this the other day that black and Hispanic unemployment is down fairly significantly under Donald Trump.
So, you know, the people who supported Donald Trump are a racist.
It's like, well, not very good at being racist if I'm cheering and celebrating the fact that black and Hispanic unemployment has gone down.
More blacks and Hispanics are working.
Fantastic. That's going to make the black family stronger.
Hispanic family stronger is going to make them more keen on smaller government because they're paying taxes rather than receiving.
Wonderful stuff. So people who would just say, oh, you hate this or you hate that or whatever, I did really demand the respect of saying, look, you can disagree.
I will not accept that you think I'm motivated by hatred or negativity or xenophobia or racism or whatever.
I will not accept that because that is simply a slur upon the very essence of my character.
I don't automatically assume that all leftists are driven by a hatred of the good for being the good or a desire to destroy the free market because they can't compete and hate the successful.
There are those elements, and I've certainly criticized those elements, but there are a lot of leftists, a lot of liberals who are motivated by they think this is good for people, they think this is going to help people.
I don't automatically assume that they are motivated by ill intent or bad motives.
And I really do expect the same respect in return.
So to me, it is not so much about the disagreement on policy or individual positions.
It is really demanding the respect, which is true and earned, which is that you and I and other people are coming from a place of love, a place of positivity, a place of really trying to solve social problems.
And whether people disagree with our prescriptions, they can't say that we want to kill the patient.
That is really a slur.
And that I could not accept.
Because if you give that up, then the individual positions don't matter because they've already portrayed you as some nasty, horrible person.
Right, right.
And then...
Getting into the details doesn't matter.
You have to start from that place.
You have to demand that respect and offer it too to people because if you think someone in your family is motivated by hatred, then you can't have a debate with them.
So I think asking for that mutual respect is the first place to start.
If you can't get that, well, that becomes, I think, an unsolvable problem.
But if you can get that, at least you can have a disagreement based upon mutual respect for motives, which I think is the basis.
I presume that they think that I am racist, and then that's my motivation.
But there's an irony in this, because the course of their lives and my own life, those are the things that have reshaped my worldview.
And so, like, I'm looking at how modernism has been detrimental to all of their lives, and I'm like, wow, I want to make the next generation better.
I want people's lives to be improved upon.
That really is my motivation.
So the fact that they think that it's because, you know, I'm racist, I'm like, no, I'm just looking at all your lives.
And I'm like, whoa, we gotta Well, it's funny how if you criticize feminism, and I think, I don't know what it is all over the world, but certainly in England, the number of women who self-identify as feminists is below 10%.
And in America, I'm sure in certain places, that it's even lower than that.
And so this idea that, well, I'm criticizing feminism, well, now you hate women and don't want women who equal.
It's like, no, no, that's...
That's not it at all.
And so I needed that too.
So when I went to talk criticizing feminism, people would say, well, that just means you hate women.
It's like, well, I'm kind of married to one.
I have a wonderful daughter, female friends, and so on.
And women love calling into my show for talking about philosophy and ideas.
So I really had to have that as the baseline.
And if I could not get that as the baseline, I had to make my decisions accordingly.
But I really had to have that.
I also had to be willing to extend that as well until proven otherwise.
But yeah, if somebody thinks like, oh, you're just a racist or you hate the poor or you hate women or whatever, then you cannot have a civilized breaking of the bread with someone.
And if they have any integrity and they genuinely believe that about you, they should never want to sit at the same table with you because you're a nasty, horrible, blah, blah, blah.
So, if it's an emotional manipulation tactic, it needs to be dropped.
If they genuinely believe it, I don't know how you can have a relationship with someone who really thinks that you're evil.
I think that it's not possible.
I mean, at this point, it's just that they had kind of a visceral, emotional reaction, so I suppose I should probably wait until, you know, that fizzles out and everything.
But I'm not super confident that they're going to be able to see what my real intention is.
And once again, nobody's talked to me, and I feel like I could discuss this with them.
I could reason with them.
Is that how you did it? You just, like, contacted these people, and you're like, these are my motivations for them.
I try to be as proactive as possible when there's disagreements if I want to continue or pursue a relationship.
So call up. If you can sit down face-to-face, that's the best.
Phones are terrible for this stuff.
Phones are good for arranging when you're going to meet.
And that's about it.
Because phones for conflict are really bad.
Because in a pause, you don't know if someone's thinking.
So you need a face-to-face, you know, in the big blue room, as they call it.
Like face-to-face in the flesh world is the best way to have these kinds of conflicts because it's a lot easier to be hostile to people who aren't breathing the same air in the same room.
Exactly.
So you have that.
If you can't make that, at least video calls, Skype or whatever it is.
Like that's really, really important because, again, if you're looking into someone's eyes and you're going to call that person evil, it's actually good news if they don't call you.
If they call you and say that you're evil face-to-face or they sit down in the same room and scream that you're evil across the table, well, I don't know what there is to do about that.
I don't think that that would be the outcome.
I'm not really sure how this would play out.
I think that they would be meek in person.
Yes, so it's good that they're not going direct, because it means if there's direct, there's a way to diffuse things.
So yes, I sat down with the people I had differences with, and I said, you know, here's the trouble.
And you know, Bring feelings in it too because it's unpleasant.
It's difficult. It's not just abstract.
I mean, as you know, it's like you want to look forward to a Christmas dinner.
You want to look forward to family gatherings.
So sit down face-to-face with people as much as possible.
And I found what was interesting was I found that it was kind of like holding a balloon underwater.
So while we were sort of sitting there face-to-face, they were reasonable.
But then what happened was they kind of...
They would bounce back to Troll Central within a day or two afterwards.
I don't know who or what got to work.
There was some brain virus that I was able to tamp down, spread back out again.
And so I made my decisions accordingly.
But for me, this is one of the many great things I took from Aristotle.
Some of the oldies but the goodies, the greatest hits of 2,500 years ago.
Aristotle said, with regards to his critique of Plato and Plato's theory of the forms, which is a little abstract, but we're dealing with very visceral stuff here with family.
He said, we love our friends, but we must love the truth more.
And that has been sort of my guiding principle.
I cannot sacrifice the truth for relationships because then I can't have a relationship because I'm not there.
If I've given up that which I treasure, that which I've worked for, that which I love, that which I'm very passionate about, that which I believe, if I give that up in order to have a relationship, I only have a relationship with my own self-loathing because I have given up that which I treasure to conform to people I do not respect.
And I don't think fundamentally we're built that way to find that productive or positive.
And that's been my guiding principle, which again came out of reading Aristotle decades ago.
And it doesn't just sort of work abstractly, it kind of works in my heart as well.
Because I can't let go of Philosophy has become such a core part of me that to abandon it is to no longer be myself.
It's literally now for me trying to live a relationship where philosophy is not allowed would be like me trying to give a speech to people in Japan.
I don't speak the language.
I can't do it.
Shouldn't that be an indication to your family of your motivations though?
Your adherence to truth, that you incorporate this philosophy into all of your life's decisions.
I mean, that seems like it would be enough, and that's what I want my family to see.
Like, having a channel like this is very, it's difficult.
It detonates your personal relationships.
You can't have a normal career ever again.
I want them to see that I've given things up for this, for the truth, so that I can tell people the truth.
And I want that to be my perceived motivation.
I think that that isn't unfair, especially if they've seen my videos.
Well, and if you're Christian, don't you kind of worship a guy who rocked the boat?
Don't you kind of worship a guy who questioned the value of state power?
Don't you kind of... Worship a guy who spoke truth to power and was willing to sacrifice personal relationships in pursuit of a greater truth and a greater good.
So it always seemed to me kind of, it always seemed to me odd in particular when Christians get social justice warrior-y, when they get really, really upset at people who speak basic truth.
It's like, I don't think that you're really being a very good Christian, frankly, because, no, it's kind of like, and I had the same thing when I was in university, when I took philosophy courses, that I was supposed to Worship and respect all of these great philosophers who spoke truth to power and who reasoned against social approval and so on.
But then the teachers would get pretty mad at me if I asked questions that annoyed them.
And it's like, why are you studying these people?
The only reason you're studying them is because they did the exact opposite of what you as a teacher are doing right now.
Oh, exactly. And so I do find that it's a wonderful opportunity for a conversation about religious faith and theology, because the question is, okay, so if you were around when Jesus was around, would you be on the side of Pontius Pilate, or would you be one of the disciples?
That's a very, very important question, and really there's no better time to ask it than Christmas.
I will do that and see how it goes over and report back.
All right. Well, I appreciate it and I wish you the very best, as I do, you know, with people.
It is a tough season.
You know, we've got conversations about how much fun it is and there is that, but for the fun to be present, the basic human respect has to be present first.
And Rebecca, I really appreciate this because there are a lot of people who are having challenges.
Mine are fortunately in the rear view for reasons I've talked about in the show, but that's just a function of age.
Just a couple more tree rings around the old bark, and it makes a difference.
But I do wish the very best to people.
And look, if you're listening to this and you have some family member you think has gone off the deep end as far as reason and evidence goes, dig down deep into the residual nature of the love that you had and ask yourself if it's possible that your family member could have just turned evil.
It's not really very feasible or very possible.
Be open to thoughts.
Be open to ideas. Be open to questions yourself.
It is a beautiful thing. I don't know how intimate we can be with people in terms of Knowing who they are if we don't think for ourselves.
Who is there to know if they're just a big bag of cliches and echo chamber nonsense that they've got from academia and the mainstream media?
That's not really a person.
That's just like a pamphlet.
And so think for yourself.
It's really the only way we can be intimate.
And thanks so much.
I wish you the best. And please let us know how it goes over this Christmas season.
And I really do put out an appeal to those who are listening to this who have a family member like this, maybe even your family themselves, that she's a great person.
She's thinking for herself.
She's doing a lot of good in the world.
There's no problem with disagreement.
But escalation and abuse will not solve anything and is very much against the spirit.
If you're Christian, even if you consider her an enemy, you've got to love her because she loves your enemies.
I'm sorry.
Those are the rules.
I didn't make them.
Don't shoot the messenger.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
You too. Thanks, Stefan. And now we have the one, the only, Sticks Hacks and Hammer 666.
You know, when you're named that way by your parents, you pretty much have to end up in this kind of lifestyle.
He is an independent political commentator and YouTube content creator.
YouTube.com forward slash Sticks Hacks and Hammer 666 and Twitter.com forward slash Sticks 666.
Official Sticks, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Glad to be aboard, and Merry Early Christmas, by the way.
Indeed, and I also wanted to give you massive props for overtaking the 70s and 80s band Styx in the YouTube search.
That is a wonderful thing, a great band, but I will say I listen to you a little bit more than I listen to them now, so come fly away with Styx to the New Frontier.
So we're going to talk a little bit about Christmas.
Those of us who have sort of public facing personas, a lot of times people don't have much of a sense of what we do away from the camera.
So what was Christmas like for you when you were growing up and what was the environment that shaped how you enjoy this season?
Well, always when I was a kid, you know, we were more on the impoverished side, so it wasn't, you know, it wasn't anything elaborate.
It was basically me, my parents, occasionally, you know, someone else would wander by.
But for me, it was mostly about the food.
And it always has been, it always will be.
Like, tomorrow, it's going to be, like, it's probably going to be deviled eggs time.
Got to make those.
A Christmas dinner is usually a boiled dinner, like a big, big chunk of ham, a bunch of cabbage pieces.
When I was a kid, I would slather ketchup all over everything.
That was, you know, hilarious.
Now a little bit less.
But it's basically the food.
You know, when you're a kid, you want to receive gifts.
You know, Legos were always my favorite when I was a kid.
When you get older, you're more, you're giving gifts more.
But it can be an interesting time of year.
I don't like the commercial Santa side of it, like, you know, all the radio stations.
It's nothing but Christmas music, even the rock stations.
It's like, please, give me something else, anything else.
I don't care if it's something else. Bruce Springsteen said the word Santa once during a three-hour concert.
We're going to play you that bit over and over again.
Yeah, I don't care if it's the softest rock of all.
It's better than the really sappy stuff.
But I will say I do like the sappy sort of like Year Without a Santa Claus, Rudolph's Shiny New Year.
I admit I've got a soft spot for that sort of stuff.
All right. Did you ever have a present?
Wait, sorry, just one moment here.
To complete the soul transfer.
There we go. Your other rumor will remain unexplored in this video segment.
Okay, did you ever have a present where you really had to grit your teeth and put on a happy face but you just weren't feeling it?
Yes, sometimes I got clothes.
Oh, man, that's got to be an aunt.
That's an aunt thing.
Here's some underwear and a sock.
That was a mom thing, actually.
No, I loved the hand-knitted clothes.
I always got hand-knitted socks, and they're so warm, they're comfy.
And the added bonus, if you shuffled across a rug with them on, you could shock your father.
And that was great, because you say, whoops, sorry, that was an accident.
Now, hang on a sec, just a sec.
So when you were, because we used to do this when I was in grade school, you shuffle, when you get the carpet, you get the library time one afternoon, you shuffle, especially in winter, when the air is like Kalahari dry, you shuffle across and you build up a truly X-Men style charge.
And were you an earlobe guy?
Because that to me was the one, I mean, if you get the earlobe with that kind of shock, you get a really exciting jump out of people.
No, I would always try to shake their hand, and then I'd brush against their fingertips, and they'd be like, oh, it's so great!
That's magic! It's magic, and that led you to your later pursuits.
Yeah, the handmade clothes were always good gifts.
Like handmade, I had handmade hats, some of the sweaters and stuff.
I loved that. I just didn't like, you know, the regular, like, oh, here's a bunch of socks.
It's like, okay, that's great, but you could have gotten me more Legos with that money, honestly.
Did you have a Lego ceiling?
In other words, did you ever say, before the Lego thing faded away, did you ever say, well, I know I think I have enough Legos for everything I need to do, or was it just like absolute accumulation without limit?
No, it was infinite Legos.
I still like Playmobiles, actually, because I have the nativity scene, and I realized that they had Roman Playmobiles.
And so there are going to be some kind of weird posts on Twitter, I think, over the next week regarding this.
And what was the best present that you remember getting as a kid?
Oh, that's a hard one.
I would say... Oh, I was always into science, so it would have to be a tie between...
I got a microscope one time, and it was a pretty good one.
And I was like, yes, this is great.
And then I actually got also a video scope set.
Now, the video scope was less powerful, but it's like a microscope, but it has a screen.
And it came with all these samples, little bug parts and stuff, extra slides you could fill with things.
Actually, one time I got a cut...
And my first thought wasn't, oh, you know, I need to band-aid.
My first thought was, I need to get this on the slide!
So I'm sitting there, I'm like trying to get it to keep bleeding enough to put a drop on the slide, and I got that, and I'm like, yes, I can look at my blood!
And it was like the greatest time ever.
I would spend hours and hours looking at all this stuff.
I had chemistry sets, an ant farm, those were the best gifts.
Oh, yeah. No, I remember getting a telescope one year and learning how to map sunspots.
You know, like you point the telescope, but the sun never looked through it.
And you get a white sheet of paper and you can and they spent like a week and a half mapping sunspots thinking I was contributing to science.
And then, of course, the thought struck me that there might in fact be other people in the world doing this as well.
And of course, pre intranet, you had no way to get this information to anyone.
So that was a fairly short lived career as an astronomer.
But I love that stuff. Use a fax machine.
That's right, broadcast fax.
Here's the sunspots for you lucky people.
Sorry about all the ink use, but you know, it's science.
It needs that. Now, you've talked about, like, being a skinny guy and so on, because Christmas for a lot of people is like, I'll indulge in the food and then I'll spend all of January dieting.
Do you ever bulge out at Christmas or do you pretty much stay needle thin?
No. No, I've stayed a consistent weight for so many years.
I mean, it's literally since middle school.
I haven't really changed weight.
I sort of buffed up a little bit then, and I had a stomach, and then I shot up several inches, and it exhausted all of that fat, and I've stayed basically the same since.
I think I've gained like five pounds since I stopped smoking, but then I evened out, and I'm like, oh, this is fine.
I'm still skinny, dude. How long did you smoke for?
How hard was it for you to stop?
For three days it was hell.
And after that it got better. Actually, it wasn't as difficult as I originally thought.
See, before I had always failed in the first day or two, like the last two or three times I had tried.
But once I got over that hump of the third or fourth day, it was like, oh, I can do this.
And I basically stayed drunk for that first week nonstop.
I am drunk, and in basically every video that I made in that period, I'm totally sauced, and almost nobody even noticed.
That's interesting. So you're a high-functioning alcoholic when you quit cigarettes.
That's good to know. Now, of course, I assume the alcohol consumption has tapered down a little bit because that's one sick vice to exchange for another otherwise.
Yeah, I was drinking off probably 15, 16 servings a day for that week.
Wow. Glass after glass of wine all day.
Is that a recommended approach to...
I don't think so.
Usually it apparently causes people to want to smoke more, but I was never like an, oh, I'll have a drink and then go smoke person.
For me, it was always driving or after a meal.
So the drinking didn't really cause me to crave it more.
It's funny, you know, you have to watch this too as an ex-smoker because I met a guy, this is many, many years ago, he was in his 50s and he was smoking.
And, you know, often you don't see people who are that old smoking.
But he said to me, he said, I quit for 15 years.
He said, I quit for 15 years, and then in the middle of the night, for no reason, I didn't, you know, they need to have warnings.
If you're quitting smoking, they need to have warnings unlike movies.
Warning! People are going to be smoking in this movie, and they will be smiling, and it will make you twitch.
But he said, I quit for 15 years, said, I woke up in the middle of the night.
I just had to have a cigarette.
I went in my pajamas to a 24-hour convenience store, bought a pack of cigarettes, and I'm like, I'm just going to have one or two, you know, just for old time's sake.
And then, boom, the hooks were back in.
The ring had taken hold of him.
And so, yeah, you've got to watch that backsliding, even if it can happen a long time later.
And I also think if you run a convenience store and a guy shows up at 3 o'clock in the morning in pajamas desperate for cigarettes, it might be okay to say no.
Yeah.
Well, if I get to the point where I'm older and, like, I crave it, I wouldn't even necessarily care because I'm like, well, you know, big worry is, like...
You get cancer at 40.
You're falling apart. You're like, oh, I had so much to live for.
And then when you're older, it's like, maybe.
Who cares? So how has the year been for you for this?
I think, you know, I said this in the other segments as well.
Christmas is a pretty good time to reflect.
How has gaining increased public exposure affected your life, your relationships, your family, your friendships?
What's it like for those who aren't out there, so to speak?
What's it like from that promontory?
Well, people around me, like the very small number of people in my personal life, which I don't really talk about online because I want to keep that 100% private.
I never talk about other people for the most part, just for their own security, because I realize there might be an Antifa member out there that wants to blow my head off, so I don't want to drag anyone else into that.
Mostly, they're happy about it.
And, you know, as you make more money, too, you get more exposure.
I sell more books.
More donations come in.
I'm paying down my student loans.
That really helps me actually to make, I think, even more content because I'm under less stress.
The fact that there's less stress means like, oh, yeah, I could take it easy, but now I'm just more ambitious because you sleep better, you eat better, things are generally okay in life, and it's like, well, I'm going to make more content because this is great.
It's kind of funny, too, because I think that the camera has a tough time lying for people who are perceptive on the other side of it.
So if you're kind of wound up and stressed and worried, you just can't have the same show as if you're relaxed and happy.
And to me, that even is like, if I have a good night's sleep versus not such a good night's sleep, it has an effect.
Much though I try to sort of be professional and produce the same quality, it is kind of tough to be as spontaneous and positive.
And this is one of the reasons why success breeds success, because you get that positive feedback.
You get the income to the point where you can focus and be positive about things, and that allows you to do higher quality shows.
The people who are kind of skimming on the edge, it's tough for them to be positive enough to attract new watchers and listeners.
The sleep is the biggest thing for me, because I do have insomnia.
So I'm like, it is a never-ending struggle to get enough sleep.
I've got enough leisure to be able to do that so I can do at least the basics of what I need to do.
But if I'm under more stress, like there were months and months that went by where I was like, I had to force myself to do work.
And I was still doing it.
In fact, I was doing literary, in a literary sense, more than I am now.
But it was out of desperation.
It wasn't out of, hey, I want to do this.
It was just basically, hey, I'm going to be screwed if I don't, honestly.
Now, what was going on at that?
Was that when the demonetization stuff hit so many content providers?
Because you don't monetize, do you? No, demonetization didn't affect me.
It was before that with my grandfather.
Being in a nursing home, and one of our relatives was like, hey, you know, trying to do a legal challenge for the property.
So I was sitting there, I'm like, well, my income's not very high, I need to work ten times harder, because if shit hits the fan, I don't want to be, you know, living off ramen for the next six months.
Been there, done that, not going to happen again.
So I rammed through as much as I could, and, you know, by the time it was over, and then that stress went away, I was actually doing fairly well.
I'm like, oh, okay.
I guess I'm the agent of my own fortune.
Now, when it comes to your sort of public presence, public persona, what do you think are the biggest misconceptions that people have about who you are and where you're coming from philosophically?
The biggest one is they think I'm still a Satanist.
Definitely. I get comments on...
I did want to deal with that on the Christmas show, because if you get hit by lightning, I know that your windows are closed.
If that were to happen, people need to know why.
Yeah, I haven't been a Satanist for many, many years.
I'm a pagan. I don't have a problem like I did in the past with Christianity.
I still oppose all organized religion.
That includes the pagan ones.
But a lot of people think that I'm still like, you know, I worship LeVay or something like that, or I believe in an actual devil.
I don't. I'm just not into that sort of stuff.
If someone believes in the devil, okay, that's fine.
Just, you know, I'm not part of that.
But it's really... Paganism for me is more cultural anyway.
It doesn't have so much to do with, oh, those Christians killed my ancestors.
I'll get them back. I'm going to worship Odin.
It's not so much that.
It's just a togetherness.
It's basically the same as the Christmas thing.
A lot of people. They don't even really believe in Jesus.
They certainly don't believe in Santa.
But they get together as a family, they eat, and they have fun.
Paganism delivers that for people, I think, too.
In many cases, religion in general can.
In a cultural sense. Even some of the religions that we criticize often.
Someone's a Muslim. Someone might be just a cultural Muslim.
They're like, yeah, I don't believe in Allah, but the food's good.
I think that's a positive thing for people, generally.
Oh, people, you need a framework of belief.
You need a framework of how to organize your life.
How do you know if you're succeeding or not?
Well, it has to be relative to some standard of value, to some standard of virtue.
You have to have a way to organize your life.
And one of the great mistakes of atheism was to ditch the framework of self-organization that religion offered without providing a compelling understanding.
Well, I guess the substitute that the atheists generally provided was very compelling in that it was the state.
The state will now organize your life and how to get things done.
Instead of charity helping the poor, we're going to have a giant welfare state to make everyone dependent on it.
And instead of sexual morals being enforced by the community, we're going to have the welfare state, a single motherhood.
So I think that was one of the great mistakes and trying to erect a framework of values.
And of virtues in a relatively post-religious world is one of these significant challenges, I think, that thinkers face.
Yeah, it's like I like to do some blasphemous stuff at Christmas, but it's not like I have a stick up my ass about Christianity.
It's just something that I happen to find fun.
The atheists abandoned now, it seems, classical liberalism.
There's not so much, as there was maybe ten years ago, a belief in personal freedom.
It's going over to the other side.
I see this with people on, you know, the far left.
They used to be like, stop the war and, you know, press freedom.
Now it's more like, you know, you can only say what we want you to say.
Proxy war is okay. You know, that's a side issue.
The world's going to hell, basically.
Biggest challenges that you see coming across the West in 2018.
What do you think you're going to be spending your time pushing back against the most?
Fighting censorship, definitely.
Censorship and also if the right wing does continue to win, which I think that it will in the midterms, I expect the conservatives so-called to do okay here in the United States.
If they gain dominance and keep it too long, they'll become the authoritarians.
We've seen it before.
The Bushite Republicans who aren't even far right, they were abusive to people.
They wanted mass surveillance.
They wanted warmongering.
My big fear is that even the alternative, not the alt-right, but the alternative right as a spectrum, my worry is that they'll become just as abusive as the alt-left has become.
That's my biggest worry because then we're screwed either way at that point, especially if it seeps over into the internet.
People who are independent commentators like you and I, it would be a total screwiness for us.
Right. And it really is this kind of soft censorship.
There is, of course, the kind of...
There's so many different layers of censorship.
You know, there's sort of the personal attacks and the slander and the attacks and you're a Nazi kind of stuff, which is designed to cast a magic repulsion spell around your content so that people won't even look into it.
But to me, although distasteful and immoral, that's kind of fair game as far as free speech goes.
But this...
Suppression of videos and screwing around with algorithms and ditching sometimes subscriber counts and so on.
There is that mechanical soft censorship that is occurring that...
I mean, it's kind of tough sticks because in a way, it's like, ooh, that's unfair.
Ooh, that's terrible. In another way, it's like...
Challenge accepted. I will now have to become better and faster and stronger and more polysyllabic and with better jokes than ever before.
I will do this show topless.
I will get an afro.
I will do whatever I need.
I kind of like the challenge.
You know, if you're going to train for a race, if you have to run uphill, it's a crab at the time, but it might help you win in the end.
Yeah, that's a great point, too, and it helps alt tech a lot.
See, I'm still very, very optimistic long-term.
It's just short-term. We're going to suffer.
For the next year or two, I don't see any real change in that.
I think maybe it gets even worse in 2018.
Our hope is that it doesn't, that we don't have to go through a sort of purifying fire to justify our own content.
But in the long term, I think that any significantly abusive force gets laid waste to.
It's like net neutrality as of the last, like, hour.
It's gone. It no longer exists in the United States.
It was voted down by the FCC. I'm sure you've seen that.
But it's not going to matter, because any ISP that actually tries to abuse people, it's going to get crushed underfoot by other ISPs.
Even other corporate firms will edge in.
They'll be like, ah, we can make more money.
So we'll just shove them aside without too much trouble.
We're going to expand into their states.
Yeah, I mean, all of these giant corporations that appear so monolithic, and are, of course, at the moment, well, they go the way of all things.
You know, if you look 100 years ago, the top Fortune 100 companies, there's only about four left.
And so there is a natural churn of creative destruction in the free market realm.
Sears is definitely not one of them.
Look at their tower.
Oh, yeah. No, I mean, just up here in Canada, I was going to the mall.
My daughter and I love to play hide-and-go-seek in department stores.
And we have so many memories about Sears, and she's like, she's broken up that it's closing down.
And it's rough, you know.
So all of these monoliths, they rely upon the goodwill of consumers and reputation, particularly for high-tech companies.
I mean, I co-founded and grew a software company, and you know the basic reality.
You have almost no hardware infrastructure relative to your value.
The entire value of your company goes down the elevator shaft every night on their way out of the office.
And the goodwill of consumers, everything.
And if they mess with that too much, they will go the way of the dodo, and other institutions will arise to take their place, which will have a formal commitment in their EULA, in their commitment to their shareholders.
They will have a formal commitment to non-censorship.
That is how it's going to have to go.
And I'm very optimistic.
Again, in the short run, I agree with you.
I think it's going to be a bitch and a half.
But in the long run, I think either these companies will reform themselves or they will be replaced.
Yeah, it's going to be nice to see an internet that's run more by companies that are like, okay, we get it.
We can't make as much money if we censor things, because it takes a lot of effort.
It takes a lot of time.
It's going to boil down to their wallets.
Governments aren't going to be willing to subsidize that crap forever.
It's going to be wonderful.
So, Christmas message for your listeners, I guess, and my listeners as well.
What would you like for people to take away in their thought parcel, so to speak, this Christmas season?
Peace on Earth is wonderful, but oddly enough, sometimes you have no choice but to fight for it.
That's very, very true. Do you mind if I take us out?
Do you mind if I close things off? Oh, that's fine.
All right. What's up, you beautiful bass?
Oh, wait, no, that's the wrong guy.
Hang on. Hang on. Here we go.
Here we go. Are we going to do one more?
One more, because people are going to say Spoonclang Intensifies.
There you go. And all right next to the mic.
There you go. And that's about all.
Peace out. In this part of the fabulous Christmas Extravaganda 2017, we're going to talk to Michael Malice.
And let's start off with your sort of history with Christmas as a Jew and what it meant.
Did you feel excluded? Was it part of the general celebration of how we get to make it through winter that happened in most Northern European countries?
So what's your history with Christmas itself?
We came here from the Soviet Union when I was two years old, here to Brooklyn.
So, the war on Christmas has been a reality of mine for my entire life.
I went to Yeshiva, which is a Jewish school.
My parents were smart enough not to send me to public school, because having been from the Soviet Union, they knew exactly what that meant, and God blessed them for it.
So, for Christmas, when you're a New Yorker, it's not a day.
It's a season. And it's absolutely wonderful.
So, Russians, we didn't celebrate Hanukkah.
We were not religious at home.
Russians have something called Yedmaroz, who's basically Santa Claus, and instead of coming on Christmas, he comes on New Year's.
And I remember very well, I must have been five or six, being told by my parents that he's going to come in the middle of the night and leave a present under my pillow.
And I made sure to try to sleep as lightly as I could so that I'd sense this.
And when I woke up and there was a present there, I was...
Flabbergasted. I didn't really think he was real, but the evidence is that you can't argue with this present.
Well, it's like when you're watching a really good magician.
You're like, I know it's fake, but I can't tell you how he does it.
Right! That was exactly it.
And the thing is, when you're a New Yorker, Christmas is...
Really, for me, my second favorite part of the year.
I love winter New York because, I mean, it gets dark early, but there's a beauty when the snow hits the streets.
There's a cleanliness, there's a purity.
There's a beauty in bleakness, which I think makes me sound like hipster, but I don't think it really does.
And there's an energy in the air when you walk around the streets in New York because it's not that, that cold, and you get cozy inside, and people are smiling at each other, and there's lights everywhere.
And in a sense, New York City itself becomes that Christmas display people have in their homes.
So it's something I look forward to.
And there's a lot of great parties and people are very friendly.
So it's something that means a lot to me.
And it's something I look forward to very much.
Ayn Rand, who I know you're also a big fan of, she spoke about it as her favorite holiday because she meant it's a season of benevolence.
And I think that's very true.
And I don't think people appreciate how much the Christmas season means for New Yorkers.
Oh, I love what Rand said, too.
She said, I won't try and imitate her accent or voice mannerisms because it'll blow my throat out completely and I've got other work to do today.
But she was talking about, you know, people say it's become too materialistic.
She said, that's what the beautiful thing is about...
Christmas is that it is materialistic.
We take pleasure in our senses.
We take pleasure in the food and the drinks and the company, and we take pleasure in the useless stuff that we get.
I mean, gift-giving is so ridiculous because, I mean, it's very hard to find something for someone that they would rather have that they didn't even think that they wanted.
It's possible, but it's really, really tough, particularly the longer you know people.
So you should know them better, but it's harder because they've already got what they want if they've had any success.
But, you know, but the idea of just giving people money is kind of cold in a way.
So, you know, we do have this useless trinkets that go back and forth, which are lovely and delightful and pointless, and this sensuality of the season.
I mean, I know it sort of comes from a religious thing.
I remember as a kid saying, okay, so we're celebrating the birth of a guy born in a desert by playing in the snow.
Okay, I guess I've given up on some of this cause and effect here, and we're celebrating a guy who was really poor his whole life, Jesus, by giving each other useless trinkets and gifts.
And, you know, like, we're celebrating an aesthetic religion by singing, eating, and drinking to, like, insane levels.
And I just, I really love the sensuality of the season.
And sensuality is one of these words that's been associated with sex, which is kind of a shame because sensuality is...
You can enjoy that in your day at times when you're not even having sex, in the odd occasions.
And the sensuality of the season I find particularly beautiful and has been with me since I was a kid.
And the idea, of course, that wouldn't it be great if we'd live our whole year in that sort of glow and that camaraderie?
Well, I also love how if you have these parties and people you maybe haven't seen in a year, and they're a year older, you're a year older, and you're seeing that they're thriving, And it's this great sense, you know, Rand always talked about the benevolent universe premise that you have to believe that things will happen.
And when you see people you haven't seen in a while, and you know that they're in a better place than they were a year ago, that they're doing well.
It is the spiritual fuel knowing that, you know, people who you think good of that you don't necessarily have to have any kind of day-to-day relationship with, that they're out there doing their own thing and that the world isn't as, you know, for those of us who are interested in politics and who see, you know, the awful things that government does, it's good to have that reminder that on a micro level, people are doing wonderful things and they're happy and their lives are getting better all the time and that's just absolutely wonderful and great.
And it really sickens me how if you live in an urban area, you have to have this cynicism and eye-rolling, and any kind of earnestness or any kind of veneration of happiness and benevolence is kind of beneath you, or it's silly, you shouldn't be taken seriously.
I think it's a very, very sick, dark attitude.
Oh, yeah. No, that kind of cynicism is the lazy man's excuse for not doing the self-work to become happy.
It's this pretend wisdom.
The world is dark and dangerous, and I smoke a galatoire, and I just don't worry about anything getting better because that would be...
I mean, this is like, I don't know, the French are getting their own just desserts for all that crap they introduced into the world.
But there is something to me interesting as well about Christmas in that I have, like I think most people do, you have to fly by relationships.
So these are people that you know.
You don't really hang out that much.
If they were gone from your life, it would be a shame.
But you're not like, oh, I've got some time this Sunday.
Let's get together.
And so you have these kind of bungee or fly-by relationships.
It's great to check in once every six months, once every year.
You care how the people are doing, but not really to the point where you get that much involved in their sort of daily decisions.
And I like those kind of, like, these events.
They can be birthdays or it can be anniversaries, but Christmas is a perfect time where you kind of coalesce with people.
You have these flyby relationships.
You're kind of checking in, making sure everything's going okay.
If they need something, you know, you're happy to provide and so on.
But it checks in on the pulse of the extended clan.
And that, to me, is a really great tribal thing.
Oh, I mean, that's what I just was talking about.
I absolutely love it. And it's It's also kind of, you know, you and I both have very interesting careers, to say the least, and are interesting people.
Interesting could have positive and negative connotations for both of us, I think.
So it's also funny. So wait, what you're saying is that bouncing around the media like a hyperactive cocaine-induced pinball is something called a career.
All right, I'll go with that.
I don't know which one of us that refers to, but I'll leave that on the table.
But it's also fun when you meet people and then they can't even wrap their heads around what it is that you do for a living.
So there's also that aspect, which is a lot of fun for me and I'm sure for you as well.
Yeah, no, it took a while for my daughter to understand that my camera was turned on.
She thought I just yelled in a white room for money.
That being insane is the same as being profitable, which I'm not saying there aren't people who don't agree with her, but she did actually manage to outgrow that.
Now, for you, how has the year...
Because this is another thing. Somewhere between Christmas and New Year, you get the time flash.
Like, you get that time flash where you look back.
Because, you know, my days...
I don't know about you, man. My days are just like...
I feel like I'm loaded into a cannon, like I'm in the Ringling Brothers Circus, like I'm loaded into a cannon, I get fired through the day, putting out 12,000 fires, come up with ideas, doing shows, meeting people, and then I basically just hit the wall, slam into bed, and go to sleep.
And it's really tough to do that kind of reflection.
but in the sort of downtime or the quieter time between Christmas and New Year's in particular, there is that capacity to do that.
You know that Scorsese Zoom, you know that freaky thing where they Zoom in while rolling out and kind of gives you that perspective?
How's the year been for you?
Like personally, in terms of your career, in terms of your family, how's the year been as a whole for you?
I mean, I hate saying this because it sounds obnoxious and it sounds insincere, but I'm at a point where I'm happy pretty much all the time because in the last year, I got my own show on Compound Media.
And as you know, having your own show, on a personal level, I can have anyone who I'm interested in talking to come to my studio and I could pick their brain for an hour.
And I get paid for this. Sign off on that.
I believe I will sign off on that with my own pen.
It's wonderful. It's like what a privilege that is.
My book on the new right is coming out in April.
I wrote that. Again, like we spoke on an earlier episode, I'm on all these shows that the president watches.
So, you know, when I did my book on North Korea, my hope was to inform and educate people and also to possibly move the needle in a positive direction for the plight of these 25 million slaves.
And I'm not saying I'm, you know, have Trump's ear day to day, but the fact that I'm having even a slight impact is a wonderful accomplishment.
And frankly, to have all the support from strangers.
On social media and so on and so forth is just...
And being like, thank you for saying what you're saying.
I mean, it sounds so hokey to say it's humbling and flattering because when you hear people say that at the Oscars, it's just like, you're not humble, relax.
And I'm not saying I'm particularly humble. Wait, wait, sorry.
Do you need a moment to thank Javi Weinstein?
Do you need to take that moment or should we just keep moving?
My plants are all fine.
They're thriving, in fact.
Very, very versatile. But, I mean, to have that happen is mind-boggling, especially as someone who...
Like myself, gets off on being obnoxious and kind of off-putting to people.
So I'm very, very, and I'm also, and I know you are as well, I'm very consciously grateful and I don't take it for granted because I think you and I really have something that a lot of people would aspire to and that's something, yeah, we worked hard for, but the fact that we still have it is still something that it's like, this is just absolutely wonderful and I'm never going to assume, oh, I deserve this, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right. Only this is weird balancing act of take risks, but don't really screw up.
And that, you know, it's easy to fulfill one of those two.
You know, like if you want to take risks and you don't care about screwing up or alienate your audience or, you know, then you can just go out and blurp, whatever.
But this sort of managed conversation, you want to take risks because otherwise it's kind of boring.
And I don't know these people who do the same show like day after day, year after year.
People have got like the one topic or the one thing.
So take risks. Love it.
But don't set fire to your own credibility and make sure you manage the conversation.
Lead your audience, have conversations with them and so on.
It's a wild balancing act, which is kind of taxing, but I think you get better at it as you go along and it becomes kind of easier as it goes forward.
And how's your personal life been over the last year?
I mean, you know what?
There's an expression from the Beach Boys from a song I've never heard.
But the expression is that you need a mess of help to stand alone.
And I think one of the things Rand gets most wrong is if you have a good network around you, people who you can call that said, hey, you know what?
I'm having a real bad time.
Can I hang out with you and just, you know, pick your brain?
To have that support system around you is really something that I have.
And I didn't have that growing up.
When you grow up in a Soviet household, you do not feel safe.
And I know you talk a lot about peaceful parenting.
I had Luis J. Gomez, who's a comedian.
He was discussing that on my show.
To have that feeling of safety is something that is something I did not have as a child, and I'm very, very grateful that I have now, that I have a lot of people who I can call off and be like, hey, you know, things are not going so well.
And they're like, yeah, I'll let you buy me dinner.
Like, boo-hoo! You know, like, that's the price?
You know, it's wonderful.
Yeah, I mean, this, of course, I mean, to dip into the objectivist world for a moment, this is, of course, one of the great challenges of objectivism is that all of the heroes are entirely isolated atomic individuals with no backstory.
I think they're just born these perfect, marble-esque gods of independence and reason.
And there is the old Aristotle saying that anyone who can live alone is either a monster or a god.
And of course, because people have these dual views of Ayn Rand as both.
And I think she had monstrous elements, particularly later in her life, that came out of a fundamental isolation and an inability to overcome her disappointment with the reception of her entirely brilliant works.
In fact, and I'm going to take it.
You know what?
I say take risks, but don't blow it.
I'll take a little risk here.
I've never heard anyone talk about Ayn Rand who say, her characters are too wooden.
Her characters are too predictable.
The dialogue is stilted and so on.
And first of all, I don't think that's true.
It's a style. It's like sort of looking at 50s movies and saying, well, nobody speaks like that.
It's like, well, that's... For Dr.
Seuss. Yeah, yeah.
So all of the people who say, like, who criticize Ayn Rand's writing style, she was a wooden writer.
It was not spontaneous. I've never heard them express an original idea or argument.
I just wanted to point, because it's such a talking point, a cliched talking point.
But I think that the great danger, and Ayn Rand did talk about this when she said, my characters are not prescriptions for living.
They're inspirations. They're ideals.
They're not supposed to emulate them.
You're supposed to look at them as an ideal.
But if the ideal is that kind of no history, atomic isolation, integrity that seems to erupt from one's spine like some spontaneous Bali-style volcano, that is one of the great challenges of objectivism that...
There is this purity, which I understand and I respect and I think it's important, but you also need a network of people to succeed with and you're not going to agree with them about everything.
And it takes the humility to approach that and to recognize that success is social as well as personal.
That goes against, I don't think, any of the particular philosophy, but it does go against its artistic portrayal.
And the one theme that's in common in all four of her novels is that the hero recedes from society.
And that is, I mean, that's like being a hoarder, that's being a shut-in, especially with social media.
Maybe it was hard being the one objectivist in your town back in her day, but now, I mean, you and I have never been in the same room, but, you know, we have these conversations.
Well, that you know of. By the way, you snore.
I just wanted to mention that. I'll send you the tape.
It's true, and I wet the bed for fun.
It's a very dangerous thing, especially for bright people, because when bright people get trapped in their own intellect, you start convincing yourselves of very dangerous things, and you need someone in your life to At least have that human side to share.
I mean, her characters aren't sitting around laughing.
And laughter and having, just you're laughing right now, having a good time is really, I mean, it's just wonderful.
And it's something that we need more of in our lives.
All right. Well, I really, really appreciate your time and thoughts.
I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, best of the season to you and yours, and let's cross our fingers and hope that we can continue to make the world an even better place through 2018.
And a very happy quantity to you, Stefan.
Now, we're pleased to chat with Dr. Jordan.
Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and the author of Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief, and the, I think, eagerly awaited upcoming book, 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos Set for Release.
January 23rd, 2018, the website is jordanbpeterson.com, youtube.com slash jordanpetersonvideos, twitter.com slash jordanbpeterson.
You can check out the excellent self-authoring at selfauthoring.com and a personality test at understandingmyself.com.
Dr. Peterson, thanks for taking the time today.
Thanks for the invitation.
Good to see you. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to you. As we have this conversation, I was having coffee this morning, looking at the beautiful gentle snow draping down around, I guess, here in southern Ontario.
It's a beautiful, peaceful time of year.
What was Christmas like for you growing up?
I know that you went fairly leftist in your teens.
Did that have any kind of prickly relationship to Christmas for you, and how has it changed since then?
Well, I think Christmas was complicated for me.
I mean, there's a personal element to it.
There's a very vicious streak of familial depression that runs in my family.
And so my father was quite prone to that, although that's been rectified to some degree.
And so Christmas could be a dark time for us, although it was also...
All of the positive things it was supposed to be at the same time.
Because my father had seasonal affective disorder.
And of course we didn't know what the hell was going on when I was growing up.
Nobody knew what that was.
And it took a long time to get that sorted out.
So it's been a very complex...
That time of year has been very complex over the years.
And then I guess the other thing is, so that's the personal end of it.
The more metaphysical end is, of course, that I've spent a lot of time over the last three decades trying to understand Christianity and what the rituals and routines and stories mean.
And so that's added another dimension to it.
I mean, I understand, for example, the mythological idea that at the darkest point of the year, that's when the hero emerges.
That's a very old mythological idea.
Of course, you don't need...
Hero unless the darkness is intense, right?
So it makes sense that that's what would call forth a hero and of course That's a lot of what's celebrated symbolically at Christmas the idea of the lights on the trees is the return of Illumination right because the Sun is starting to come back all these things are layered on top of one another and so it's it's it's a remarkable It's one of the things that's really made me so struck by As a consequence of studying Christianity is that so many levels of meaning stack on top of one another in an isomorphic manner and support one another.
You know, there's a cosmic story that's associated with Christmas, which is the death and rebirth of the sun.
And then there's, I mean, the actual solar orb.
And then there's the, you know, more prosaic story of the birth of a baby, which is, of course, a miraculous event in everyone's life.
So... Yeah.
And it's a, I mean, I feel for you at the family stuff.
Both my mother's and my father's side have terrible history of mental illness, which is one of the reasons why for me, it's sort of like if you come from a family that has terrible heart disease, you better eat well and exercise or you're going the way of the dodo.
So for me, knowing what was going on on both sides of my family...
Very high-functioning, very smart, but it's almost like the train is too fast for the rails for a lot of these people.
So I knew I was going to need a lot of mental structure.
I was going to need a lot of mental discipline.
I better have self-knowledge.
I better do therapy. I better get into philosophy because if you can harness that power, it's great, but it seems to destroy almost as many people as it empowers.
And when you have difficult family times at Christmas...
It's really hard because the expectation of joy and peace and the movies and the commercials and other people's houses you go to, it feels like everyone else is taking off in these multicolored starships of joy and you're kind of left down in a dungeon and I think this is why it's tough for a lot of people this time of year.
Absolutely, absolutely, and I think you put your finger on it exactly.
Well, I mean, what we hope is that the time around Christmas gives us a glimpse into what human relations could be like if we organize them very carefully, and I think that that can happen, but the problem is that you don't get peace and goodwill towards man merely by having the time of year.
year it's something that you really have to work at and i mean a lot of the problems that i've indicated that were characteristic of my family in my extended family we've actually addressed to quite with quite a bit of success over the last three decades as a consequence of well partly because i became a clinical psychologist and started to understand these things
and because the biochemistry has been more well understood and and but it is hard on people around christmas because as you said the hope and the reality it's it's a point of the year where hope and reality can war most most viciously and And it can be very, very hard on people.
Suicide rates go up around Christmas for exactly that reason.
It's a magnification season.
It tends to not exaggerate, but in a sense, reveal both the strengths and joys of your relationships and the weaknesses and challenges in your relationship.
And it's, to me, tragic, particularly because it's one of the few times in the year that you do have the time and the proximity to be able to work on your relationships.
But there are, of course, families that studiously avoid that and avoid the dysfunction, which really tends to hollow out any festivity in the season.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think you're right about it serving as a magnifier.
It brings out the best and the worst.
And I suppose that's useful, too, because you need to have the worst brought out so that you can hypothetically deal with it.
But it's no joke.
I mean, even in the Christmas story itself, you know, I mean...
So, Christ is the eternal infant, the eternal hope, let's say, and the eternal hope of mankind, just like an infant is the eternal hope of mankind, but, you know, he's born in lowly circumstances and in extreme peril, right, because all the firstborns are under death sentence,
essentially. And there's an archetypal element to that, too, which is really important to understand, which is that even if the hero is divine, Then he's always born in the extreme danger that characterizes existence itself.
And so in some sense that balance between tragedy and catastrophe and tyranny and hope that typifies Christmas in reality for day-to-day people is also built right into the story.
I mean they're in a manger for God's sake, right?
It's a stable. And so it's pretty unstable, so to speak.
And then of course there's all these radical political events going on and Well, that's the way of mankind.
Radical, political, and social events going on.
That's the way of mankind.
Now, the transition from a desert religion to Northern and Western Europe to me is really fascinating because people from Europe are essentially, in some ways, I think even biologically defined by the seasons.
And it's so fascinating to me.
That a desert religion, which doesn't have a huge amount to do with season, certainly not as much as, say, Germany or France or England, took root in Europe and flourished and changed in some ways to adapt to the seasonal rhythms.
You know, those who were not able to defer gratification and hoard and hold on to their food throughout the winter didn't tend to do very well.
Those who didn't work really hard when it was necessary to plant and to harvest and so on, and then rest when it was really necessary through the winter to conserve calories didn't do very well.
So I really find it fascinating how a religion that began in the Middle East ended up adapting so perfectly to the seasonal nature of European civilization.
Yeah, well, Christianity was like a giant vacuum cleaner in some sense.
It certainly integrated itself with and layered itself on top of existing pagan ceremonies, like the tree itself.
I mean, the tree is a very interesting symbol because, of course, the tree is the tree in the Garden of Eden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.
And the tree for Christmas is mostly the tree of life.
And the tree is also the structure that unites heaven with earth, and the lights on the tree symbolize or represent even illumination and the re-emergence of light in the darkness.
And a lot of that was extracted, in some sense, from the pagan symbolism that existed there prior to Christianity.
I mean, the tree idea, for example, that plays a The idea that there's a tree that unites heaven and hell, which is sort of something akin to Jacob's ladder, is a central tenet of shamanism.
And there are all sorts of strange shamanic echoes that permeate Christianity.
And the Christmas story, like Santa Claus, is a good example.
There's very interesting documentation about the relationship between the red and white of Santa Claus, for example, and the use of Amanita muscaria mushrooms among the shamanic In the shamanic tradition throughout Siberia and across the entire northern strata of Europe.
So yeah, it's a very, very deep and strange mixture of desert and frigid cold and celebration.
I guess that's also partly what's given it such longevity as a celebration, even though we also seem to be doing everything we can to undermine that as fast as possible.
Oh, this is fascinating as well to me, too.
The sort of power of myth and the power of culture.
I worked, you know, I was at the National Theatre School.
I wrote plays and novels and so on.
And so I worked a lot with allegory, metaphor, and character.
And I read my Jung about sort of collective unconscious and universal archetypes, but it wasn't until I got into my 40s and really began to strip myself of the merely secular self and focus on deep myth and focus on the power of these kinds of archetypes that I realized just how much had been taken from me, how much had been stripped from me, how much had been withheld from me about the origins of all of the symbols and the echoes of what I had received.
Well, it's a funny thing because you actually can't live without that.
You know, one of the things that's been unbelievable, unbelievable to me over the last year is there's a couple of things because I've been communicating with so many people in public and also online.
So, one stream of response that's quite remarkable is that many, many people tell me that when they listen to what I've been talking about with regards to these deep symbolic structures, That it's as if they already know it, but don't have the words for it.
And that's exactly right. And I would literally say hundreds of people have said that to me.
So, you say, well, you're reminding me of something I already know.
And, of course, that's actually the hallmark of archetypal thinking, because the idea of the archetype is the idea that your thinking is structured.
Underneath it, like there's a structure underneath your thinking.
And then your thinking can reflect that structure when you become aware of the archetypes, and then that kind of puts your conscious self-knowledge in alignment with who you most deeply are.
It's remembering in the platonic sense.
And... I think that you do experience a coming home, so to speak, when that occurs.
You know, Jung himself said that that was a better occupation for the latter half of life, and so the fact that it really started to hit home for you in your 40s actually makes sense, let's say, from a developmental perspective, because let's say you're in the last half of your life, what you're supposed to be doing with that part of your life is accruing wisdom, You know, and that for your own psychological purposes to stabilize yourself, but also so that you can act as a stabilizing force in society.
So, well, and this is the fascinating thing for me over this Christmas season.
I think one of the things that has occupied me particularly over the last year or two has been this question of why it seems so hard for the West to rouse itself to defend its own countries and institutions.
And I think where I'm sort of getting to, I don't know if it's a final destination, but where I'm getting to is I thought that we would defend reason, evidence, abstractions, freedoms, political institutions, but we don't seem to rouse ourselves much to defend those abstractions.
And I actually believe now that, and I think the left really understands this, because the left goes for stories, they go for archetypes, they pull down statues, they do all of this, they attack myth in a sense.
And I really think that fundamentally we only really defend stories.
We only really defend archetypes.
We only really defend myth.
That's what we can rouse ourselves to do, and that's why it gets stripped from us, so we're defenseless.
Well, that's actually the definition of archetypal.
Archetypal is precisely what would rouse you to its defense.
And I mean, I've been trying to understand, to some degree, what the proper level of analysis is with regard to the ongoing culture wars.
And as far as I can tell, this is why I did, you know, you may know that I did a series of 15 biblical lectures this year.
I only got through Genesis.
I'm going to start on Exodus next year.
But as far as I can tell, and this is sort of in keeping with the idea of A descent into the underworld to rescue the dying father, let's say, which is also part of the Christmas story, because that's the death of the sun, the solar orb, and then its rebirth.
We won't rouse ourselves to defend anything that we have unless we go back to the source of those things and understand what it is that we actually possess.
Now, I've been trying to make a case over the last year for the divinity of the individual, essentially, which is the central idea of the Christian story, right?
I mean, the divine child is only potential, even.
But given the symbolic importance of A world-redeeming figure.
That's what the new infant is.
And the thing about that, you can strip that of its dogmatic connotations, although there's reasons not to, but you can and read it purely psychologically.
And it's a story about the fact that what truly is the light in the darkness is the potential in each individual human being.
And that's the story of the West.
And the thing about that story is that it's right.
It's correct. We got it right.
Because otherwise, it's chaos or the group.
It's like, well, you don't want chaos unless you want chaos.
And believe me, man, if you want chaos, you better bloody well get prepared for it.
Because maybe you're not the kind of bloodthirsty monster that could really revel in it.
And maybe you are too.
And then if all you want is the group, well, you better bloody well be prepared for that, too, because the group is not you, and if push comes to shove, the group will sacrifice you for its own interests in no time flat.
And so if you think that salvation lies on those two ends of the distribution, you've got another thing coming.
Well, that's the mere Darwinian lust for power.
And this, to me, is one of the great stories that's important to remember about the first syllable of Christmas, which is Christ, which is that, to me, the elemental story, and it's not that there's one, but the one that's resonating for me most at the moment, Jordan, is this idea that if you reject material power, you achieve immortality.
Because that to me is the great temptation of the world.
And this to me is coming out of the Hollywood stuff where there is this basic satanic deal that's offered to a lot of these young actors and actresses, which is, you know, if you surrender to my earthly lusts, if you surrender to the humiliating subjugation to pretend to find me attractive, though I'm old and grizzled and look like half a shaved bugbear, if you surrender...
Then I will grant you material wealth, fame, and power beyond your wildest desires.
That, to me, is Jesus out in the desert.
This is a very strong thing that has happened.
But Jesus, of course, by rejecting that, achieved an influence far beyond anything he could have, even if he'd taken the entire world the devil offered.
It's really interesting, too, because it isn't even, I don't think, so much a matter of rejecting it.
It's formulating a better deal.
So, the story of Christ in the desert is, and I've spent a lot of time, in fact, I write about that a lot in my new book, in chapter 7, which is called, Do What is Meaningful, Not What is Expedient.
And I think of meaning as First of all, I think that meaning is the most real of all phenomena, with the possible exception of pain, but I think it might even be more real than pain, because it can supplant and transcend pain.
The notion of meaning is not something that modern scientists have dealt well with in the main, although many of them, especially the physiologists like Jeffrey Gray, have done a very good job of laying the groundwork, and Jak Panksepp, who's a great neuroscientist, Have started to lay the groundwork for a neuroscience-oriented understanding of the phenomena of meaning.
But what happens in the desert is that what Christ tells the devil is that the bargain that the devil is offering is nowhere near as good as it seems.
Because he's after something greater.
He says, well, man does not live by bread alone.
And the idea is that it isn't so much that That you should reject the attractions of wealth and status and privilege and power.
It's that there's something that you could pursue that's way better than that in every possible way.
And that has to do with, well, first of all, developing the sort of character that's capable of withstanding evil, and second, setting your sights on reducing the suffering in the world.
It's something like that. It's laid out quite nicely in the Sermon on the Mount, I would say, which is a very difficult document to parse through.
It's not all rejection.
It's like, why would you go for lead and weight when gold is right in front of you?
And I think one of the things I've really come to understand about these symbolic representations is that they are...
They're metaphorical, and you might call them abstract and ideal, even.
And so then they tend to be otherworldly.
They tend to be viewed as if they're otherworldly virtues.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The practical advantage of genuine virtue is so striking that nothing else even exists in the same category.
And that's part of the warning in the desert.
It's like, well, let me give you an example.
I don't know if this is quite appropriate, but I'm going to use it anyway.
I've been following what's been happening at Wilfrid Laurier, which I find surreally remarkable.
I can't see how the university could be handling the Scandal worse if they scripted it.
Can you just give a quick overview for the people who aren't aware?
What happened at Wilfrid Laurier was that a TA, Lindsey Shepard, was brought in front of what can only be termed a minor inquisition for having the temerity to show five minutes of a Canadian public television show about Bill C-16 and pronoun usage.
She was accused of breaking provincial and federal law, violating university policy, and of being a transphobic bigot.
And that broke because she recorded the story and leaked it.
I mean, there's been international outrage over this event, and yet the university hasn't...
I don't think it's learned a damn thing.
In fact, from what I've been able to tell, every move it's made In reaction to this scandal has actually made the scandal worse.
And that's very interesting.
But, well, one of the side stories is that on that very same TV show, The Agenda with Steve Pakin, the president of Wilfrid Laurier University, Deborah McClatchy, was invited to talk about the university's response to this scandal.
And I watched that, and I thought, it was so interesting to me, because Deborah McClatchy has...
Attained worldly dominion, let's say.
She's the president of a major university.
It's not a trivial position.
And then the interviewer, Steve Pakin, who's actually liberal left, I would say, in his fundamental orientation and inclined to be a decent interlocutor period and maybe even a friendly one to someone like Deborah McClatchy, he asked her a dozen questions about Whether she felt that Lindsay Shepard had actually made a mistake and what the university was going to do about it.
And what was so amazing to me was that despite her position of power and privilege, let's say, so-called, she didn't utter a single word that was her own during the entire interview.
It was like there was no person there at all.
And what that indicated to me was that in order to attain that position, which was hypothetically You know, an elevated position in the dominance hierarchy.
She had to give up everything that was actually powerful, including her own voice.
That's a great object lesson.
It's like, you know, you want power, let's say, and you want And you're willing to make a bargain with the devil to get it.
And what you think is that when you get that power, you'll still be the same person that you were when you started seeking it.
And the problem with that is you're not going to be the same person even a little bit.
There'll be nothing left of you.
And you'll be a puppet of the position rather than being the master of the position.
Well, you think it's feeding you, but it's eating you.
And this is one of the great and terrible consequences to me.
This is why censorship tends to escalate.
Because if you let a little bit of censorship in, then people's muscles for dealing with oppositional ideas become weaker, which means that they become more hostile to the oppositional ideas that reveal their weakness and must keep everything at bay.
And I don't know where this...
Well, we all know where this ends up in the long run, which then ends up in concentration camps and mass slaughter, which is then all ideas...
David Pérez, Ph.D.: Yeah. Ph.D.: Yeah.
And that means, of course, that we have vanity, because everybody thinks they have the final answer, and therefore they can just squelch all contrary opinions.
That is a demonic kind of vanity.
It's interesting, though.
I would say I'm more optimistic at the end of this year than I was at the end of last year.
And the reason for that is that what I've seen happening, like I think the state of free expression on university campuses is, to call it appalling, is to barely scratch the surface.
And I think that the forces that are corrupting the university are in fact spreading out into broader society.
I think in corporations they're doing that through human resources.
And I think the university is directly to blame for this because it's produced...
Let's say, investigative tools like the implicit association test, which has been misused beyond comprehension.
You know, one of the things that's interesting about that implicit association test is that one of the people who designed it, Brian Nozek, has really started to turn against it.
So there's a fractionation occurring within the little coterie of people who produce that appalling process.
I mean, the test itself is quite interesting as a measurement device, but when it becomes a political weapon, it's the thing behind all of this unconscious bias, right?
And by the way, there was a new review article published by Nozek himself, who was one of the founders of the IAT, that indicated quite clearly that attempts to redress unconscious bias by staff training have zero effect.
Zero effect, right?
So there's lots of corruption in the academy, and that's distributing itself out into broader society.
But one of the things that's happening is that...
Platforms like YouTube, particularly YouTube, but also the other social media platforms, are flipping that upside down.
So as the universities become more corrupt and more rigid, and as the old media sources become more ideologically driven and less competent, people are abandoning them at extraordinary rates.
And then you see what's happening instead is that on YouTube, you know, you get people like Joe Rogan, well, and yourself, But Rogan's a really good example of three-hour, lengthy, detailed podcasts that are so popular that it's beyond comprehension.
So much for the...
You don't need the reporter.
You don't need the soundbite.
It's like we're getting rid of the priesthood, in some sense.
Again, you can talk directly to the public with no intermediation.
And I think we're just starting to see how powerful a force that's going to be.
Oh, I think it was about 10 years ago I did a show, which was that the internet is the new Gutenberg.
It is that which allows you to bring the text directly to the audience.
It doesn't mean you don't need a priesthood, because you still need experts, but you're right.
I mean, as far as the opportunities for breaking down oligarchical hierarchies, we've never had.
This kind of opportunity.
And I think, I really truly believe that universities as they're currently instituted are done.
They simply will not survive this transition.
Philosophy in particular, where did it start?
I mean, if you don't really count the pre-Socratics, it started with Socrates.
And what did Socrates do? He wandered around the marketplace and talked with people about philosophy and said, if you buy me lunch, that would be great.
And what is the donation model other than a return to the origins of philosophy, people bringing their wisdom to the marketplace of ideas and saying, hey, buy me lunch if you like it.
Right, right, right. Well, yeah, you could really have your cake and eat it, too, on YouTube, because, I mean, you know, I decided last year, in April, thereabouts, before any of this scandal broke around me, that I was going to experiment with Patreon, which I thought was an... Because I've been interested in the monetization of creative production for a long time, from a research perspective, and, you know, my sense has always been to investigate things differently.
Personally to find out how they work so that that can feed what I'm doing from a research perspective say so I set up this Patreon account and I also decided not to monetize my YouTube videos because I didn't think that the advertising was appropriate given the content it was something like that and so I thought well I'll try Patreon instead because then I can see if it works and if I generate any income I can increase the quality of my offerings and And that's been unbelievably useful,
because I'm in this very weird situation where I give away everything I produce.
I mean, I've got some commercial programs, which are a different issue, but I give away everything I produce intellectually, and it's produced far more consequences, including financial consequences, than could have possibly been imagined.
Well, and I do.
Like, look at how quickly the new media, let's say, especially YouTube, has eviscerated the old media.
I mean, that's just going to accelerate over the next two or three years.
So I see, like, classic news institutions or media institutions like CBC, they're so dead in the water, they can't even imagine it.
Well, here's a funny thing, and I'd like you to talk about this, if you don't mind, Jordan, because it's an amazing perspective that you get when you're a public intellectual.
Because the mainstream institutions, I want to speak for you, the mainstream institutions that I've experienced are fairly hostile and negative towards this kind of stuff that we're doing.
And the people, though, the people that you're actually talking to are, you know, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, engaged, robust, positive about the interaction.
I think you have to kind of be at this fulcrum.
You have to be at this apex to see the difference between elite institutions and the people as a whole.
Because if you're kind of in between these two worlds and you're being attacked by the mainstream media and you're, in a sense, being beloved by the people you're talking to, I don't think that there's a view that shows the culture wars and the culture gap between the elites and the people more so than doing what we're doing.
I agree. It's funny, too, because I've been treated extremely, I would say, by the mainstream press.
And by that I mean I've had...
Stories about me that are so dreadful that they're hard to even take seriously because it's as if they're written by someone who I don't understand.
It's sort of like, I'd love to meet this evil twin of mine about whom you are writing.
They're so badly researched that even the accusations aren't...
It's hard to be offended by an accusation that doesn't even seem like it's about you.
But, by the same token, I've had many, many people, credible people in the mainstream press, mount extraordinarily strong defenses of what I've been doing, but also of the principles that I've been trying to put forward.
I would say that includes the most powerful columnists and media people in Canada.
It's not all of them, obviously, but it's been people like Margaret Wenta and Conrad Black and Rex Murphy, who's just deadly with the pen and with his voice, and Antonella Artuso.
And that's not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination, but I also get the impression from those people, some of whom I've got to know quite well, that they're They're cast adrift from a sinking ship in a very unstable life raft.
And those are people who wielded tremendous journalistic power.
They feel that there's no stability whatsoever in their future, because they can see the old media forms rocking and being pulled apart like mad.
The fact that this is happening so quickly to classic media, To me, indicates exactly what's going to happen to the universities.
Their model is so flawed.
So I've been thinking about...
I've watched major institutions fall apart, corporations, and I see how it happens.
And it accelerates once it starts to happen, rather than decelerating.
But imagine, it's way too expensive to educate a university student It's probably 10 times too expensive, about $50,000 a year in Canada and more in the US. It's administratively top-heavy beyond belief.
They're producing all these Kangaroo courts and emphasis on diversity, inclusivity and equity at the expense of actual intellectual endeavor.
The ethics committees are impeding high quality scientific research.
Students are being laden with debt loads that are absolutely unsustainable.
The faculty is being stripped of their power and replaced by adjuncts.
The accreditation process is becoming completely untrustworthy because of de-emphasis on qualitative distinctions.
And the universities itself, especially in the humanities, which is the heart of the universities, have become ideologically possessed to such a degree that they no longer even offer what it was that you were supposed to be paying for to begin with.
So as far as I can tell, They're done.
That's what it looks like to me.
A huge thing takes a long time to fall over.
Here's an example. If you're in an oil tanker and you see an iceberg in your path, let's say, it's too late to turn because the thing has so much momentum given its size that you can't make a course correction in time to stop from hitting it.
You have to detect it miles or tens of miles out.
And that's the same thing as far as I can tell that's happening to the universities.
Like Oberlin College, which is one of the places last year that we really flipped out from a social justice perspective, is just getting slaughtered in the marketplace right now because students are not going.
And that's what's going to happen.
As soon as there are viable alternatives.
Men are already doing this.
They're leaving the university in droves.
Well, I mean, I think everything, almost everything rots behind the high walls of state power and this protection from the marketplace.
The rawest and most productive intellectual exercises, I think, are happening on the edge of the marketplace of ideas.
And that's YouTube. That's where people do podcasting and so on, where there is not that filter.
There is not that self-censorship.
There is not that necessarily concern with long-term career, but there is a dedication to the truth and the audience.
And I think what's going to happen is...
Right now, having a university degree is still considered on the balance of positive by employers.
But I think that once they realize what's being taught, how much hostility towards whites, towards males, towards the free market, towards you name it, I think at some point there's going to be a tipping point.
And the employers are going to say, oh, you have an arts degree from XYZ institution.
Well, that means that you're going to be dangerous and a liability.
It's an inverse IQ test almost now.
And the other thing is... If you're smart enough to not go to university, that's going to be a kind of proxy IQ test for them as well.
Well, the corporations are learning.
I mean, they knew that they've known for a long time that, say, if you have an arts degree, you still have to be trained specifically to do whatever job you're being hired for, but they could assume a certain level of literary competence and capacity to learn, let's say.
So there was value there.
The corporations are certainly starting to understand that they could hire people younger, even before university, and train them themselves and just circumvent all that ideological idiocy.
And also offer people a lower starting salary because they're not burdened with debt.
And so, yeah, that's happening.
And I would hope, although I'm not certain of this, That CEOs in particular would start to wake up and realize that human resources has become an anti-capitalist fifth column in the middle of their organizations and that the human resources people in general are trained as social justice warriors and are pursuing an agenda that's absolutely antithetical to the principles upon which the corporation itself is founded.
Sorry to interrupt, but they also act as a powerful filter to keep non-leftists out of the organization, which is why you see big corporations lurching from social justice warrior crisis to social justice warrior crisis, because they don't have opposing voices in the institution pushing back because human resources is active as a giant filter to keep non-leftists out of the organization.
Well, and they do things like Apple, I think, most recently that had hired a vice president of Equity, diversity, and inclusivity or something.
They actually had to get rid of her because she turned out to be pretty damn sensible.
You know, and she said some things like, well, maybe we should consider diversity of opinion.
And like that mob just ripped her apart and she had to resign.
Or was fired. I don't remember which it was.
But I don't think that big companies understand how much trouble they're allowing themselves to get into by letting this ideological movement loose in the organization.
But on the upside, Stefan, I would say...
One of the things that's wonderful about capitalism is that corporations that make mistakes die.
It's hard. As a nimble mammal of the Internet, it's hard for me to look at the incoming meteor and the dinosaurs and their uniting with great sorrow because it's just going to open up a lot of opportunities.
There's two other things I'd like to touch on regarding Christmas.
The first is...
The question which I have wrestled with for many years and I have yet to resolve, the question of sacrifice.
So I come out of the sort of objectivist Ayn Rand tradition where sacrifice is considered a seventh deadly sin.
I've really revised that over time because there are certainly times as a public thinker that it does feel a little bit like there's some sacrifices involved, to put it mildly.
But it's worth it. And this question of sacrifice, Christmas is a lot about self-indulgence in terms of materialism, which I have no particular problem with in terms of good eating, which I also enjoy to do.
But I think this question of sacrifice has really been lost from Christmas and from a lot of people's thinking as a whole.
This kind of what's in it for me, how can I accrue material gains is very central.
So where does sacrifice sit in your mind at the moment?
Well, in these biblical lectures I did, I talked about sacrifice a lot because we walked through Genesis and, of course, especially from Cain and Abel forward, which is basically right from the beginning of the document, there's a tremendous emphasis on the rituals that are associated with sacrifice.
And sacrifice is an unbelievably powerful idea.
It's perhaps the most brilliant idea of mankind because the sacrificial idea is you can give up something of value now Strategically and carefully, ethically, and be rewarded for it manifold in the future.
And that's basically the discovery of the future.
It's the same thing.
Because when you discover the future, it means that you have to start to think strategically about your actions in the present in relationship to the future.
And that's a sacrificial attitude, because what happens is you realize that things that could bring you impulsive pleasure right now, getting while the getting's good, is not a good medium to long-term strategy, and might not be a good individual or collective strategy.
So here's one way of thinking about it, and this is where I think Ayn Rand was wrong.
There's very little difference between...
So there's the you I'm talking to, right?
But there's the you that hypothetically extends, let's say, 30 years out into the future.
And so you can think there's the day-to-day you 30 years into the future, and the week-to-week, and the month-to-month, and the year-to-year you.
And in some sense, that you that extends into the future isn't much different than other people.
So if you're acting in the moment to ensure that your long-term thriving is...
You're going to act in a manner towards yourself that's not much different than the way that you would react to others that you were treating properly.
And so I would say, like, Rand's problem is that I think that she draws too tight a line between competition, say competition selfishness and public good.
Those do not have to be antithetical.
In fact, I don't think they are.
I think that when you act most wisely in Your own best self-interest.
You simultaneously act in the best interest of the people around you and broader society.
And that's part of this stacking up of levels of analysis.
You can have your cake and eat it too.
And so the reason that you should regulate your impulses, let's say, and discipline yourself isn't so that you can...
Suffer the kind of privation and self-sacrifice in relationship to being an altruist that Ayn Rand complained about with good reason.
It's because you want to regulate and discipline yourself because that way you can serve a master, let's say, that serves everything at once.
And I've ceased believing that that's merely a metaphysical statement.
You know, like if I conduct myself so that my family maximally benefits along with me, how could that be anything but good also for me?
So, sacrifice properly understood isn't, again, it's back to our earlier discussion, it's not the rejection of worldly goods, it's not self-abnegation and flagellation.
It's the replacement of a relatively unsuccessful strategy, power, domination, like worldly pleasure, let's say, with an ethic that's inconceivably better on all dimensions.
Right. So here's the big challenge as well.
I guess this is maybe just asking for advice around the question of forgiveness.
So forgiveness to me has become very muddied of late.
And the reason for that is that I understand that if someone wrongs me and they show contrition, they apologize, they make amends, and I refuse to forgive them, that's giving me unfair and unjust power over them.
And that's a wrong thing for me to do.
On the other hand, if someone has wronged me, refuses to admit wrong, escalates, and so on, then forgiveness is not earned, and I think it's unjust to provide forgiveness to someone like that.
And so the idea that forgiveness is something to be earned, that forgiveness should be willed regardless of whether it's earned or not, that's something I'm still spinning kind of my wheels around.
Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, there's a couple of things there.
I mean, I would say in the Christian tradition...
Forgiveness and repentance have always been tightly allied.
You can't separate them.
And I would also say that the best source that I've found for walking through that particular dilemma is Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
Because, especially in the second volume, he addresses very specifically...
Okay, so here's the scenario.
So you're in a gulag concentration camp and that's not very pleasant.
And the newest inmate is a high-ranking communist official who's just been devoured by the system that he produced.
And he's now done in every possible way.
What do you do with him?
Because he's simultaneously victim and perpetrator.
And Solzhenitsyn walks through that very carefully.
And his fundamental...
Realization I think is something along the lines of don't cast pearls before swine.
So Solzhenitsyn's meditation led him to the conclusion that as long as the victim is still the perpetrator, so still...
Putting forward, say, these communist propositions and identifying with the state and feeling that they're an unjust but innocent victim and everyone else in the prison is guilty, then there's no communication with them.
They're still in the valley of the damned.
But as soon as they break and realize the catastrophe that's occurred to them and start to question the validity of the system, then you offer a hand and help pull them out of the mire, right?
Because that's when they repent.
And... Let's say you want to forgive someone.
Maybe there's two reasons for that.
One is because you could help redeem them.
But the other is so that you don't have to carry the weight of the hatred and resentment.
And so there's a certain amount of psychological utility in having a forgiving attitude just so you don't carry around any more slings and arrows than you have to.
So that's pure self-interest.
With regards to forgiving someone, though, in a deeper sense, it's like repentance is vital to that process.
I'll forgive you, assuming...
If you wrong me, I'll forgive you if you come and say, well, look, here's why I wronged you.
Here's... The specific things that I was thinking that were wrong and the specific things that I was doing that were wrong motivating me that led me to transgressing against you.
I've laid them out as my sins, let's say.
I've figured out a way that I won't do it anymore.
I've figured out why I shouldn't do it anymore and so can we wipe the slate clean?
And your answer in that situation should be, Well, absolutely.
It's like, yes. And sorry to interrupt, but the wrong, in my experience, Jordan, the wrongs that people do to you or the wrongs that you do to people can be part of making the relationship stronger and better.
Because when you've done wrong and repaired it and learned from it, you don't repeat it.
And the ties that bind you, we always think, oh, I've done something wrong to someone.
That's a bad thing. Sure, it's bad.
But if successfully resolved, it can make the relationship far stronger and far deeper.
Look, that happens with children and husbands and wives all the time.
Even Frans de Waal, who's done a lot of studies of chimpanzee behavior, has noted the same thing among chimps.
The issue isn't whether or not they fight, because they fight.
The issue is whether or not they make up.
And that is it.
It's like... There's going to be conflict in a relationship, and who's doing wrong to who is not often obvious to begin with.
A lot of arguments are about that.
Well, no, I think you did it wrong.
No, I think it's you.
No, I think it's you.
I mean, if you're smart, and it's someone you're tethered to, like a child or a spouse, then you're both wrong, and you should both be figuring out what you did wrong so you don't have to do it again, if you had any sense, because then it won't be replicated.
But it's definitely the case that having that conflict Laying out the repentance and forgiveness process and then re-tying those bonds makes the relationship way stronger.
Because that's what trust is.
You don't need trust if someone's behaving perfectly.
Like any more than you need to see the doctor if you never ever experience any ill health.
So trust to me is when people have problems and successfully resolve them.
That is the very basis of trust.
And one of the things that drives me nuts about the younger generation's relationships is they seem so volatile to the point where even if there's some ideological disagreement, there's this massive tearing and everybody just flees in opposite directions.
They don't build the trust of repairing that which they've torn.
Yeah, well, that's reconciliation, you know, and that's a very tough thing.
Well, I also think because the transaction costs of relationship transformation have fallen tremendously over the last 30 years.
I mean, you know, we're bombarded by so many technological and even biological revolutions that we can't even keep track of them.
You know, I would say for any society that hasn't gone completely manic in its rate of transformation, the mere introduction of something like Tinder is a major biological revolution.
I mean, think about Tinder.
Tinder has removed rejection from male sexual behavior for the first time in human history because you get rejected invisibly.
So you put out your profile, and thousands of women, in principle, look at you, and all of them reject you, except two.
But you don't know. And the fact that two didn't is fine, because all you care about is that two didn't.
And so the reason I'm bringing that up in relationship to what you said is that...
Because it's become less costly to just switch a relationship.
That's all surface. It's not less costly.
It's far more costly. But on the surface, it's become less costly.
Then there's no logical reason why people should have to stay together and fight it through.
You know, because if I think, oh, Jesus, you're such a pain.
I should replace you.
It's like, yeah, well, first of all, can I? Because why would anyone want to be with something as wretched as me?
And second... The transaction cost is going to be punishingly high, like maybe it'll take three years and there's no guarantee and I'm going to get older and so maybe like bad as you are, I might as well just stick it out with you.
But if I think, well I can replace you in 15 seconds, well then I don't have to fight with you.
And then you can also fall prey to the delusion that that next person that you find It's somehow going to be less problematic than the person that you've already traded in.
And the problem with that is that it's not the person that you traded in that's the problem, probably.
It's probably you, and you're going to bring yourself to the next relationship.
So, yeah, it's a...
It is really useful to teach children and to also understand that reconciliation is the answer to conflict, not the reduction of conflict, right?
You have to have conflict because otherwise you're not living.
Yeah, like I remember even when I was younger, like when I was a kid.
When people's parents would break up, and this was, I guess, in the 70s, this was happening a lot.
And I remember saying, well, I'm sorry that they failed.
And people were like, what do you mean?
They're just discovering themselves.
They're out there self-actualizing.
One of them's going to become a painter.
The other one's going to go pick grapes.
In Queensland. And I was like, no, no, it's a failure.
You made a commitment to stay together for your life.
You broke that commitment at the expense of your children.
That is a massive failure.
Now, it may be for the best in some, you know, he was horribly abusive and so on.
Then you've got to figure out why you were with an abusive person.
But can we call it for what it is a failure?
This seems to have gone out of the window.
I think you're, well, I think, like, I don't think there's any evidence that liberalizing the divorce laws was a useful move.
I think it was a catastrophic move.
I think the people who paid the price for that are children.
And we say, well, we're only staying together for the sake of the children.
It's like, hey, that's not so bad.
That's not so bad. I think the children prefer that.
After all, and you have a primary moral obligation.
Once you have those children, who cares about you?
You're an epiphenomena.
Your well-being is to be put clearly secondary, not to be eradicated completely, because you don't want to be a martyr to your children, and your children don't want that from you, that's for sure.
But the idea that relationships are infinitely divisible and fractionable, and you can You can pop out of your primary commitment and go find yourself, especially once you've had children.
I find that morally reprehensible, and I think it's done incalculable damage to our society.
I learned this from Jung a fair bit.
One of the things he keeps pointing out is that there are some games that you do not get to play unless you're all in.
And marriage is one of those games.
The idea behind marriage is, I'm not going to leave.
Period. But what should be understood along with that is the unspoken subtext, which is, you're fucking horrible.
You're malevolent.
Life is tragic. The complexity is going to overwhelm us.
This is going to be terrible.
But I'm not going to leave.
So, what would you like?
I'm not going to leave as long as I'm happy.
Oh, yeah. No.
No. I mean, you don't need virtue.
I mean, you don't need nutrition if you only eat what you want and what you like.
I mean, you need these disciplines because we have to act against their instincts from time to time.
And, of course, as you know, the studies are very clear that couples who are considering divorce who stay together, five years later, they're like, well, thank God we never got divorced.
That was great. Well, the studies with regards to...
The proper construction of a family, let's say, are also clear.
It's way better for kids to have an intact family with two parents, period.
There's just no debate about that.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't some single parents struggling valiantly who do a better job than some intact families.
But on...
Looked at from any reasonable objective perspective, the data is crystal clear and painfully self-evident.
Do you realize how much of the internet would be saved?
How much bandwidth and typing would be saved if we just taught statistics starting in grade school so that you wouldn't have to put these qualifiers in all the time?
It's a bell curve. I know there are exceptions, but yeah.
So let's close with what you would like to say to, I guess, the millions of people who are going to end up listening to and watching this.
What's your Christmas message, particularly, I guess, looking forward into, I think, what's going to be an extremely exciting year in 2018?
Well, let's... Let's think about it sociopolitically.
Let's manifest some hope and say, well, it is a dark time and we're badly polarized and this is the perfect time for the rebirth of the hero.
And that's what Christmas is about.
And it's about that at every level.
So you can allow that to be reborn in your own heart.
And the birth of Christ is the birth of the Logos, right?
The word that sets, that extracts order out of chaos.
It's the thing that always, always, eternally sets things right.
That's what we're celebrating at Christmas.
And you want to welcome that into your heart and into your family.
Because if you don't, you're lost.
This stuff is so...
These ideas are so...
Necessary and so vital that you cannot live without them.
And so it's useful to understand profoundly what Christmas means.
It means that the Logos is eternally reborn at the darkest period of time.
And if you're not on your knees in gratitude for that, then you know very little about the horrors of the world.
Well, thank you very much.
I also want to thank you, of course, at a personal level for the work that you're doing out there in the world for some of the great conversations we've had.
I look forward to many more to come, and thanks so much for your time this season.
Good talking to you. Thanks for the invitation, and Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas. And now we turn to Michelle Malkin, one of my favorite writers and reporters.
She is a syndicated columnist, a senior editor at Conservative Review, the host of The Most Excellent and who said I enormously envy Michelle Malkin Investigates on CRTV and a New York Times bestselling author, writing six powerful books, including her most recent,
Sold Out How, High Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels, Oh, it's my pleasure, Stefan. Thank you. So we're doing the kind of fly-by Christmas special at the moment.
And, you know, for those of us who are public figures, I think it's worthwhile opening a little bit of the lid and having a sense of what we do off camera and outside the glare of public scrutiny, hostility and praise.
So what's Christmas like?
Well, let's start with growing up.
What was Christmas like for you growing up?
Well, it was a very sensual and sensory experience, I'd have to say.
I grew up in a very tight-knit and devoutly Catholic family.
My parents are from the Philippines, and so they imported sort of the big family experience of Christmas.
Midnight Mass was something that marked every Christmas.
So staying up, getting through Mass, and then digging into a huge feast with my family.
As I grew older, I became more of a participant in Mass and actually played the organ.
So I always looked forward to the end of Mass where I could blast out Joy to the world and hit the carillon stop and really go crazy.
Now, are we talking one of those big, beefy, like, all the way to the sky organs where the bass just makes you burp if you play it loud enough?
I wish. It was somewhat more modest.
Sister Regina would only allow a certain level of volume, but we pushed it to the max.
Well, there is all that stained glass to protect.
The last thing you want metaphorically is to blast out a Christmas carol and blow out the stained glass windows.
I think that would be pretty sacrilegious on many levels.
Yes, that's true.
So, you know, I think when I say sensory as well, it's really just the sights, the sounds, and the smells of Christmas that I remember.
You know, the sort of iconic, maybe cliched, smells of gingerbread and holly and fur and And my mom and dad were very much into the tchotchkes.
I don't know what the Tagalog word is for tchotchkes, but the statues and the nativity sets and the Christmas train set that would come out and the fluffy fake snow.
So very warm and just very charming memories of childhood Christmas.
It's a funny thing, too, because when I talk about the sensory nature of Christmas, it's kind of funny because, I mean, the writers, the thinkers, the speakers, we kind of live in our head a lot of times.
It sort of reminds me of that old story of Adam Smith that he was kind of walking along explaining something to someone and fell into a hole in the ground because he was so invested in his ideas.
He forgot to see what was in front of his feet.
The wonderful thing about Christmas, I think, the music, the food, the company, the wine, is how much it sort of gets you back into your body, gets you back into your senses, out of these wild platonic abstractions that we all dance through on a daily basis and sort of reattaches you to the base of the spine cord that you kind of need to have a fulfilled life.
Yes, yes, I love that.
You know, I participate in homeschooling of my ninth grader, my son.
And I'm teaching classics and composition this year for him.
And so he's read A Christmas Carol for the first time.
And it's always good to reread A Christmas Carol through fresh eyes.
And so this idea of just the sensual, sensory...
The feasting nature of Christmas does come out, and no one describes that with better and richer imagery and iconography, I suppose, than Charles Dickens.
The descriptions of what's on the table, both inside and outside of Christmas.
That's another tradition, I think, that is so wonderful, too, is the rereading of A Christmas Carol every year.
When did you start learning to play piano?
It doesn't. I actually feel like I'm playing something microscopic with a pair of meat hooks for hands.
So when did you start and how did you keep the enthusiasm going to get to the level that you're at?
That's a great question.
I started when I was in second grade and it was not voluntary.
My mom was the vicarious pianist in the family.
I actually wrote a column once many, many years ago about...
An injury that she sustained to her fourth ring finger of her right hand.
It had been caught in a rice grinder.
She worked in her mom and dad's little You know, family kind of convenience store in their village in the Philippines.
And she was not able to get medical care to fix this damaged finger.
But she always dreamed of playing the piano and was a special lover of the Romantic period.
So Chopin and Rachmaninoff.
So I'm sure she had it in her mind as soon as she had her firstborn child.
She was going to dragoon that child into...
Becoming a pianist.
And I would say that her ambitions were larger than my skills and talent.
But I did end up going to Oberlin College, which, as you know, the reputation of the political...
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why do I think of a crazy guy wrapped in a flag?
Am I completely off the base there?
Shouldn't you be screaming more?
Isn't they just have basic, they have primal scream, public therapy, that seems to be the whole approach.
They do. Yes, and of course, they are the originator of the safe space.
Also, I would say, of the campus rape hoax.
I mean, essentially, the campus at Oberlin College is what Tawana Brawley was, you know, 30 years ago.
They set the stage for that.
But they have a wonderful conservatory of music that has yet to be corrupted by all of that ideological craziness, and I was able to hang in for a semester there.
Which was gratifying for my mom before I switched over to the College of Liberal Arts.
And I still play, and occasionally when I have opportunity, I'm able to belt out some tunes on the piano for Instagram, my pianograms.
And then I have a very musical son, so the talent all went to him.
Was your mom the sort of classical stereotypical tiger mom sitting there with the ruler and making sure you didn't get any notes wrong?
And was there a ferocious kind of approach to this?
Or was it, you know, if you love it, it'll just happen?
She was definitely not the love it.
For its own sake and for your own edification.
No, I always joked that she was a mountain lion mom and I hope that she can giggle along with me about that now.
But you know, as an intellectual exercise and for the discipline of it, you know, as well as the aesthetics, I'm glad that I I had not only my mother on one shoulder, but also a very strict old-school Turkish piano teacher and concert pianist to train me on technique.
So yeah, I survived.
Now, when you were younger...
Where were your politics when you were sort of in your teens and earlier?
Because a lot of people that I've talked to this holiday season, Michelle, have this kind of challenge of the more extended the family, the more varied the politics, and whether to get into it, whether to dodge it, whether to sidestep, you know, when people make their snarky comments, what do you say?
Do you bite your tongue and have a steady diet of conservative politics?
Well, I grew up in a congenitally conservative family that wasn't necessarily defined by partisan politics.
My parents, as I said, were devout Catholics, so I grew up in a very socially conservative environment.
They were lovers of Ronald Reagan, but they were not active in the Republican Party.
I think that both of them had a very strong sense of family, of individual liberty.
They were not politically persecuted in any way, but they were Very, you know, classically wedded to the idea of the American dream.
And, you know, very much proponents of teaching thrift and individual responsibility.
It wasn't, though, until I went off to Oberlin College and was exposed to the worst kind of radical identity politics, collectivism, and And where I was forced to get my true education outside of the classroom and be exposed to ideas of limited government, individual liberty, reading Milton Friedman.
I had encountered Ayn Rand in my teenage years but really didn't appreciate it until it came to life on a college campus and I had to see it up close and personal.
I personally liked my life when I was in the early chapters of Atlas Shrugged.
Now it feels like we're kind of in the latter third of the novel and it's like, boy, that was great.
It was a great, great novel when it was still fiction.
Now it seems to be more of a documentary and I know how this thing ends.
And it's funny too because if you come into college...
And you have non-leftist, like, again, objectivism and Ayn Rand was sort of my introduction to limited government, small government, a free market, and so on.
And I mean, I took to it like a fish to water.
And it's funny, too, because it's not even a debate.
Like, up here in Canada, it's, I don't know, it's about this, probably about to say, maybe even worse, because it's just...
Such a, it's like living in lukewarm water and you say to people, hey, we're in water.
And they say, water? What water?
I don't even notice. It's just like, it's like you're questioning physics.
And so the people who've gone through higher education either end up really intellectually strong because they've been swimming against this current and they've had to navigate and negotiate a lot of bias in terms of how you, like, how do I get marks from a Marxist professor?
Ooh, that's a challenge and a half.
And so you either end up Really on the left or really a free thinker.
I don't find that there's a lot of people in the middle who come out of college that way.
That's interesting. You know, to answer the rest of your question about what it's like in the family setting and whether we can talk about politics during the holidays, you know, either members of my family are very engaged and agree with me vehemently and just want confirmation of their views.
Or I have, you know, members of my family who are completely apolitical.
And then because of marrying into a family of Berkeley born and bred Democrats, you know, it was very tricky navigating it early on.
But I think... Over time, you just learn to appreciate people outside of that political and ideological context.
And I would say that over the years, it seems like such a paradox, you know, because I've made my life and public career so much about ideology and And yet, you know, I moved out of the Beltway in large part because, you know, I've come to an appreciation.
I want my kids to know that there's so much more to life than what I say on cable TV. Yeah, no, when it comes to family dinners, you need a separate table for the people with like man buns, elbow patches who are chowing down on the vegan tofurkey because that can be...
A bit of a challenge to give me the people who are eating red meat like it or not.
At least they're going to have ideas probably a little closer.
So if you're going to give or you have the opportunity, which I guess you do, we're going to have a couple hundred thousand people listen to and watch this.
The Christmas message.
You know, Christmas is a wonderful, wonderful time to reflect and to think about your relationships, your life, your path, your purpose, your virtues, your vices and so on.
What does Christmas mean to you in terms of self-knowledge, of commitment to virtue, of standing up for the right and opposing the wrongs and so on?
What would you like for people to most reflect about this Christmas season?
Well, I started out by talking about family.
And in the end, everything that I do is driven by my...
Passion and my impulse to protect my own family and to make sure that the world that we live in is one of peace, love, and joy.
And you can appreciate that, you know, in both a secular and religious context.
And in fact, going back to A Christmas Carol, there's dialogue where, I believe it's Fred, the nephew...
It's trying to explain and reinforce to Ebenezer Scrooge that beyond whatever deity you believe in or whatever religion you embrace, that there is a sense of companionship among men and a sense of compassion and empathy that extends to humanity.
And again, I think because people see and perceive me as someone who's always criticizing or attacking or, you know, being a thoroughly political animal.
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that Beltway Crap Weasels is not a compliment?
Let me just make a note of that because I may have missed that subtlety.
I missed that footnote.
Yes, right. Exactly.
But that there's nothing beyond, you know, that field of living.
And You know, I've lived my life in public for 25 years, and I have to say that some of the most enriching experiences I've had are with people who are completely on the other side of the aisle.
And, you know, you're only cheating yourself.
You know, you're only losing out and denying yourself, you know, those connections and that humanity and Whatever knowledge other people might impart upon you if you exclude them merely because of political and ideological disagreements.
Well, you know, I think all people of good conscience, good hearts and good minds, Michelle, to some degree are maddened by the proximity of a great world, the great world that we could live in, the great world of peace and reason and freedom, property rights and free markets and progress and lifting the poor out of poverty, not through making them dependent on the swinging lactose tentacles of government power, but empowering them to live on their own and through their own efforts.
This world is so close.
It is so close.
All we have to do is, you know, make the right arguments with reason and evidence.
That's been sort of my public position for my whole life.
And it's so close.
And if we get a little frantic sometimes, it's simply because we know how close it can be and what a great world we can all live in.
And we are, of course, wielders of words, not of weapons.
And it is sometimes frustrating.
It's like trying to convince a kid to take a pill that you know is going to be good for them, but the taste might not be that great, you know?
And you can't jam it down their throat because you're going to be a good parent no matter what.
And if people get a sense of tension or frustration sometimes, at least for me, I don't want to speak for you, but for me, it is because it is as close as tomorrow.
It is as close as next door.
And you have to try and get people there through words.
And that can be a very empowering but sometimes frustrating thing.
So I do sometimes ask for patience from the world because I know what the right thing to do is.
I know the right world to live in.
But we can't make anyone do it.
We can only lead them to water, so to speak.
We can't make them drink.
So true.
And it's one of the reasons why I relish getting up every day.
What a gift it is to be able to change the world through communication.
My mother was an English teacher, and in addition to being a lover of music, a lover of language, and she impressed that upon me, that the ability not merely to communicate through the written word, but through the spoken word in order to achieve my goals, in order to effect change, in order to Make an impact on other people's lives.
And in fact, of course, it's not just a one-way street.
It's a two-way street.
What a miracle that is.
And what a joy, really, too, Stefan, as we're reflecting on this past year, to have been able to connect with you.
You are such a gifted communicator.
And I love listening and watching you and knowing that You know, you have this incredible platform to change the world.
So, thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. And I really appreciate your time today.
I want to wish you and your family, of course, an enormously wonderful and happy and Merry Christmas.
And I look forward to you.
Do you want to do another book coming up soon?
Anytime? Anything? Possibly.
Always got projects in the works.
All right, all right, because it's been a while.
I don't want to nag you, but I will be standing here with the ruler until you start typing.
All right. Thanks so much.
Don't forget, michellemalkin.com, CRTV.com.
Michelle, thanks so much for your time today.
today.
It was a great pleasure.
Merry Christmas, Stefan.
And now we turn to the one, the only, Lauren Southerner, independent journalist and the author of Barbarians, How the Baby Boomers, Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation, a highly recommended read.
You can follow her on Twitter.com forward slash Lauren Underbar Southern and Facebook.com forward slash Lauren dot Southern dot 589.
Lauren, thanks so much for taking the time.
I know you've been traveling, I think, this Christmas season more than Santa himself.
So thanks for taking the time in your busy schedule to drop by for a Christmas chat.
Of course. Thank you for having me.
Christmas growing up.
I got to imagine that Christmas in the Southern household was a fairly delightful affair.
Absolutely. I mean, I think back to opening up a VHS tape of Lord of the Rings.
I got Return of the King and it was on multiple tapes.
That was one of the best Christmases ever.
They got me a bunch of Lord of the Rings action figures and we watched It's a Wonderful Life and that's kind of a theme we have every year.
And it makes me think back, every Christmas I think back to this one quote from Lord of the Rings, the world may be full of darkness and peril but still there is much beauty to be found and I always just kind of get back from the battle zone of filming all these protests and everything and sit and remember what we're fighting for when I'm with my family every Christmas.
The honorary Eowyn of the non-leftists.
I think that's how we have to go with it.
Now, is it food?
Is it drink? What does the Southern family orbit around when it comes to Christmas?
Storytelling, communication, I imagine, good conversation.
What's at the center of it?
Oh, man. Definitely food.
We have lots of, every year we do a traditional Danish dish, lepsa and satsuba.
I think we even talked about this last year.
I'm always excited for that.
And then lots and lots of storytelling debates.
Just kind of catching up.
It sucks because I'm traveling a lot more.
My sister's out of the house. Everyone's moved out.
So it's lots of catching up right now.
But it's really nice to come back to my family because I kind of see them as someone who, something that has overcome Modernism as kind of the end stage of when you overcome all this.
Like my parents are happily married.
They never divorced, nothing like that.
And both of them had terrible adverse childhood experiences.
I have more sets of grandparents than I can even name.
Like I don't even know some of them because they're in jail.
I'm not kidding. Yet both my parents kind of overcame that and created such a beautiful family and community and all of that.
It gives me hope after everything else that I see and all the kind of family unit being destroyed, relationships being destroyed.
That can be fixed when I watch my parents and what they build every Christmas.
I didn't know that. I'm trying to do sort of the decade math in my brain, which is not a particularly math-enabled brain.
Well, certainly for my family, the parents were messed up by the war, in particular.
And with your grandparents, was it the war, Second World War?
Was it some other cultural revolution, do you think, that caused, or was it just really inherited, like, medieval, post-medieval dysfunction?
Well, my grandma, for example, she...
She was abused as a child in the UK. She went through all the orphanages there where there was obviously sexual assault, beatings, everything.
And at 17, she ran away on a boat to Canada and then, I guess, kind of carried some of that damage.
And throughout that, my...
Like, I literally, on my mother's side, there are so many parents on that side that I just...
I can't even track them.
I've never even met my grandpa on that side, my biological one.
And yet, both my...
Same with my father. I... I have so many sets of grandparents on that side as well, just because a lot of them...
Yeah, the war displaced my family in Denmark, and they came to Canada as well, which caused for a rough childhood for my grandparents on that side as well.
And yeah, both my parents somehow overcame all that.
And we're talking, like, abuse, all this kind of stuff, never being settled down in one place, and they both...
Overcame that and have been happily married, had kids, settled down, figured it out.
And it shocks me to this day.
I don't even understand how they managed to do it.
Have you talked about it much with them to sort of figure out the path that they took to heal that kind of cycle of dysfunction?
Well, they'll attribute it to religion.
They'll attribute it to the church and just kind of healing through the church and going to...
Lots and lots of community groups constantly and always working through the problems.
Both of them are quite big fans of your show, actually.
My dad donates to you and not to me.
He did give you the gift of life, which could be considered a fairly substantial donation.
Yeah, they're both quite big fans of the show, actually.
Yeah, but whenever I ask them, I'm like, How the heck did you overcome all this?
Like, my mom was moved out of the house at like 17 as well.
She couldn't stay there.
And yeah, they would 100% attribute it to religion.
Now, people who are not religious, I mean, could attribute that to things like having a community, having a strong sense of morals and ethics and values, which obviously stem from Christianity, which is what a lot of people would attribute to the success of the West in Europe.
They'd say it's just the values that stem from that.
And that could very well be it.
But they will always go back to spirituality when you ask them.
Well, it's funny because religion...
Religion, I shouldn't say all religion, the Christianity that I grew up with, the Christianity that I know, does have some seriously long-lasting communities.
You know, for those of us in the alternative media, oh, I don't know if we want to dip into this particular well of fire, but, you know, there is a lot of fractious back and forth and infighting and tension and stress and eruptions and so on going on.
It's like watching a, I don't know, like an entire Best Buy wall of television series of soap opera dramas going on with the occasional clatter of small arms intellectual firepower.
But the Christian communities that I know of are remarkably long lasting.
People stay in them their whole life.
They obviously have their differences, but they find ways to work them out or smooth them over or maybe just ignore them.
I'm not sure exactly. But compared to Christian communities, other communities seem to have, I guess, a little bit more of a challenge remaining stable and long-lasting.
Yeah, I mean, the guy who, when my mother was a teenager, kind of converted her to Christianity or bought her church, his name is Sam, and he lives way up north in Canada.
He still comes and visits, and he visited...
All the time when I was growing up, just come and say hi, and they're living two very different lives, but they still feel that sense of kind of...
I don't know if it's as much as duty as it's...
They see it as a just important thing to do to...
Develop these relationships and have that long-lasting community.
It's funny that a lot of the statistics that prove to create a good community, a happy life, and a successful society are so in line with the values of Christian religion and how they go through things.
I mean, just all the studies about having that community, having those people you meet with.
My dad has a group of guys he meets with for a Bible study every week, and they talk about overcoming a lot of Their challenges.
And they have crazy problems.
Of course, everyone has insane problems, whether it be divorces, getting in fights, money, and they all work them out together.
And I just, I don't know how often you see that in atheists, or not even just atheists, like other communities.
Let's just say non-Christian communities.
It sort of reminds me, if you've ever seen the movie The Life of Brian, where they talk about all of the splinter groups that have happened in the various rebellious gatherings and so on.
In Christianity, there does seem to be something that allows people to not betray each other, to not turn on each other, to not be best friends and then greatest enemies, depending on which way the wind is blowing.
I don't know, maybe it's Judas and the 30 pieces of silver, or maybe there's a unity with so much of the higher values that divisions can be healed through appeal to humility and so on.
But it is something that if you've not experienced it, it's hard to imagine.
And if you place your social matrix into non-Christian communities, a lot of times it seems that it's a countdown to disappointment.
Right, and I have trouble with it because I'm someone that grew up asking so many questions, and unfortunately I didn't always have the pastors or the youth group leaders that could answer them, so I kind of rejected Christianity for a long time because I didn't have the answers.
I didn't get the answers I wanted to my questions, and I'm still...
Constantly reading and asking those questions and trying to figure it out logically.
But what I see before my eyes, like the healing in these communities, how happy these people are when I attend church with my family, and just seeing, like I said, my two parents who have these terrible childhood experiences successfully living a traditional lifestyle, it's logic kind of defying what should happen because of that religious aspect.
So it's... It's too big for me.
I can't understand it. I'm trying to figure it out.
I really am. You know, one of the things I think that could happen...
Ooh, let's spitball, shall we?
So one of the things I think that could happen, Lauren, is when you grow up with a harsh childhood, you have an antagonistic relationship to the world and your culture and your society because there is that sense of like, well, everyone stood by and let it happen and so on.
But I do think that in Christianity, the focus on humility and generosity and in a sense, grit your teeth and be kind, even if you've not received kindness.
And sometimes, of course, it's a greater virtue if you've not received kindness to be kind in turn, gives you the peace that comes from generosity.
And the people I've seen who were harmed in childhood who weren't religious don't seem to lose that fractious and hostile relationship with the world that they feel either enabled it or abandoned them to their abusers.
But the people who are Christians, because they focus on humility and kindness and charity, they create in the world what was not provided to them as children.
And that seems to be part of the healing process.
That's really interesting. I was just having this conversation with my mother.
I actually kind of had a bit of a breakdown because I've been traveling so much, meeting so many people, meeting a lot of my heroes, meeting a lot of people that I felt were building up kind of this movement I cared about, and I've had so many of my, you know, they say never meet your heroes.
I've had so many of these men that I've put on pedestals, those visions of them crushed, and kind of a lot of my childhood dreams Dreams and visions and how I saw goodness as this kind of battle against Mordor being just all the heroes of the fellowship.
That whole dichotomy of good versus evil kind of crashed down for me in the last couple years of traveling and meeting people and just constantly hitting and seeing imperfection.
And like my mother just sat me down and she's like, you'll never find a perfect...
Man, man will always disappoint.
Man will always fall short.
Man is always full of sin.
And if you look to man as your guide of goodness and something that you see as the ultimate being, you will always be disappointed.
So she's always trying to have these religious higher conversations with me.
And yeah, it's tough.
It's rough. No, it's true.
So idealization followed by disappointment.
Sometimes I think you have the self-knowledge to avoid that, followed by hostility.
I mean, I remember, oh, I think I was even younger than you when I was reading Nathaniel Brandon's expose on Ayn Rand and Objectivism.
I think it was called Judgment Day.
And just seeing how petty and vicious Ayn Rand could be, you know, when you see this rational goddess on this high pedestal and so on, it is quite devastating because...
When you have someone you can emulate, it gives you a path.
If you find that the person that you can't really emulate because you don't want to end up like them, you kind of turn from a path that's somewhat carved to like the stony scorpion infested, you know, like creeping vines and choking quicksands and all that.
You've got to go your own route.
And, um... It's a lot easier to go through a path that's already carved than to carve out your own root, although it's, you know, yeah, yeah, it's satisfying in the long run.
You look back and you say it was the best, but, you know, that doesn't do much in the moment.
So I know what you mean. I think if we do have that standard that there are ideal people out there, that disappointment is part of what undermines sometimes our own commitment to virtue.
And if you have, of course, the Christian sense that man has fallen, then you have an ideal of Jesus, of God, that You can't be disappointed and thus stays as a North Star you can navigate by.
Precisely. You have to have something ideal that is truly higher than any man on earth because man will always disappoint and fall short.
And yeah, that's tough for me because I still struggle with religion.
I certainly do. I struggle with spirituality and I have a lot of unanswered questions still, but I also see so much failure in The man-made solutions.
It's the great Nietzschean problem of what do we replace God with now that man has killed him.
Philosophy! Still working on it, though.
We're working on that.
And this, you know, I was talking about this with another guest.
I wanted to get your thoughts on it, because the one thing that's wonderful about Christianity is that humility.
The humility combined with an exquisite sense of the corruptibility of man is one of the reasons why Christianity stands between the socialists and their big, giant, murderous government that they want so desperately.
And so, first of all, Christians want to give people free will, therefore they don't want to compel people, which means small government.
For Christians, it's not a virtue if you're forced to do it.
So, if you want to help the poor, guess what?
You have to get off your ass and go and help the poor.
You have to give them money, you have to give them time.
It has to be chosen in order for it to be virtuous, and therefore the welfare state is immoral because it compels.
Mm-hmm. And the idea that there's a deep humility in intellectualism, that I don't know the best way to help the poor.
I don't think anybody knows the best way to help the poor.
Any more than anyone knows what is the best cell phone or the best computer or whatever.
This needs to be into the free market of ideas, and this is why charities should compete at the best way to help the poor.
And so this aspect of Christianity, you know, let people have free will, don't compel them, And that the state is a necessary evil and also that the state will be filled with corruptible human beings.
And it's weird because socialism or the left has both a very negative and a ridiculously positive view of human nature.
It's rape culture. It's patriarchy.
It's corruption. It's nasty.
So let's give all the power in the known universe to a small cadre of people who are going to be just plain wonderful.
And it's like, you've got to pick one.
You know you can't have both, right?
There's no way you get that buffet on the same table.
And so from that standpoint, it's hard to argue that Christianity's focus on free will and its suspicion of aggregations of power, particularly political power, It is one of the big bastions that stands between the socialists and the prize that they want, which is the undoing of the rest of us.
It's interesting because I see a lot of the young, new right taking on kind of a different form of Christianity.
And it's not the same Christianity that I grew up with because I think what they're finding is they're almost frustrated with that free will side of Christians because what Christians have done is they've...
I love them. I love them.
This is something that makes them amazing.
And I also... Would align a lot with it, but they, like, you meet these pacifist Christians, and that was something that frustrated me so much with my dad.
He is such a wise, good man, but he would let people walk over him sometimes, I felt like, because he would always take the high road.
He'd always turn the other cheek.
He'd always be like, Lauren, it's not worth it.
I'm not going to let this person get to me, and I'm like, punch him in the face!
He's being such a dick!
Like, why would you just punch him So wait, wait, wait.
He has Christianity as the angel on one shoulder, and then there's you, the blonde little devil on the other shoulder, saying, Come to the dark side, Father.
Come to the dark side.
Precisely. You get this very pacifist group of Christians that are...
They know what is happening in the world.
They're very aware of it, but they're just...
I don't want to rule with an iron fist at all because there's so much freedom.
It's almost like the libertarian crisis.
If you allow open borders, if you allow all this degeneracy and everything to take over because you don't want to step on anyone, you want to be kind and always offer kindness, I worry that evil will take over in some cases if we don't push back.
So a lot of Younger Christians, which I think are lacking.
They're very clever, a lot of the young right, but they're not very wise, I think.
A lot of us are lacking in wisdom right now.
We don't quite have that kind side of turn the other cheek.
We're all kind of crusade now.
The violent First Testament rap of God against the Muslims kind of thing.
And there has to be a balance between it, I think.
But I still need to figure out the whole religion part.
I don't know. Just thoughts.
Christmas is a great time for asking this.
Now, your public life, should it ever branch out into anything controversial, do you think that those controversies might have any effect on the peace, quiet, love, and serenity of your family gatherings?
Oh, boy. Let's just go purely theoretical here.
You know, just in case you ever did or said anything that might be controversial.
Yeah, what's the saying?
Never talk about sex politics or religion.
That is certainly a motto that we've had to take on the last two years, depending on which side of the family we meet with.
My mother's side is fairly liberal.
My father's side is a little more conservative.
So when we're meeting with my mother's side, my dad and I are given gig orders the entire time.
Really? Pretty much.
It's like the handy maternal plunger right there, just in case the syllables start to spill out.
There you go. Precisely.
Sorry, one other alternative is to have the, I guess, elephant-sized tranquilizer gun underneath the table, you know, hand solo style, so that...
If anyone gets a There's a video.
It's on college humor.
Diffusing Thanksgiving conversations.
And it's about a guy in a bomb suit.
He's with his family. He's invited a friend.
And every time a topic comes up, the NFL will be on.
And someone will mention Colin Kaepernick.
And he just has to diffuse the bomb and try to divert it to another topic.
And then Trump comes up and the bomb is strapped and wired on the whole table.
He doesn't know what to do.
I think a lot of people have that family experience.
And what's your approach to it?
I mean, is it, you know, peace for the sake of community?
Is it a lot of tongue biting?
Or do you basically just drink?
Because that's some people's thing.
I think it's more, I do, I talk about politics all the time.
I have so many people I can discuss politics with.
I have a whole audience that listens to me talk about politics.
So if I can do anything, if it's just shut up and bite my tongue and enjoy some time with family, I think Christmas is the time to do that.
Yeah, I mean, it's okay to take a break.
That's important, you know. I have this weird healing hands with computer stuff, so every time I go to someone's house, they're like, you know, this thing happens when I print that's kind of weird.
Do you mind having a quick look? And it's like, most times I don't mind, at least when I was younger, but around Christmas it's like, dude, I'm off the clock.
And from that standpoint, there's a lot to connect with people outside of political differences.
I certainly would say, though, I don't think...
All year. You should be quiet.
Because, I mean, depending on what you consider political opinions, like opinions on relationships and family and how one votes, I do think you should talk to your family about that.
Because if you have this extreme politeness all the time, you're going to watch members of your family suffer.
I mean, you look at liberals and they always have this sense of freedom for everyone.
Like, oh, women should be...
Free to be hookers and whores and all this, but they never want their mother, their daughter, or anyone in their family to go down that path, right?
All of the advice that they tell the rest of the world, they can do all this generously, but they never want the people close to them to go down that road because they know it doesn't lead to happiness.
They know it's not something that's good for them.
And I don't think we should have that liberal mindset with people we care about.
I think we should talk to them and have tough conversations with them.
I just had a very difficult...
I had a conversation with my mom the other day, but she helped me work through some serious life problems of my own.
And if she had not had the guts to kind of bring it up with me, then I would be worse off even though she had that tough conversation with me, right?
So I think caring is being a little tough with people sometimes.
Well, I think that's very true.
Like, I do this call-in show, and people call in, and they've just made the most astounding series of obviously terrible decisions.
And, you know, one of my questions is always, well, where was everyone who claims to love you in your life?
Why weren't they telling you?
Well, this is obviously not going to work out well.
Like, my own life, in my 20s, late 20s, early 30s, I came within, like, a couple of months of marrying entirely the wrong woman.
And it was a friend of mine.
It was a friend of mine, and she said something wrong.
It wasn't even that big a thing.
It wasn't like she was staging an intervention and, you know, like throwing herself bodily in front of my path to the altar.
But she said, in my experience, she said, in my experience, people who are engaged to be married are generally happier than you seem to be.
I remember that phrase very...
And it was one of these, huh, it doesn't take a lot.
You don't have to have a bit...
I mean, if the person's sensitive and open.
And I remember thinking about that.
And I remember thinking like, ah...
And you get to step off the conveyor belt of inevitability and past decisions and, you know, fallacy of sunk costs and all of that and say, well, am I happy doing this?
And you get in touch with your instincts.
And we had conversations about it and ended up breaking off the engagement.
It was a big mess.
But... One of the best decisions I ever made as an adult.
So you really don't want to let people just drift.
I mean, it doesn't have to be about immigration policy, although I'm not opposed to that.
But it doesn't have to be that.
It can be the kind of personal life stuff.
Because if we want people to be strong in the pursuit of virtue, if they're dragged down by bad relationships, by debt, by unwise investments, by lending too much money to the wrong people or whatever it is, they're not really that available to help in the fight for truth, justice, and the Western way.
Help keep their decks clear of rubble, and they're going to be much more available.
And that does mean, yeah, bringing up stuff they may not be that comfortable with.
It may even mean a week or two of them being really upset with you, but it's really worth it because, boy, look back in your own life, the decisions that you've made that were wrong.
I mean, how much would you give for someone to say, don't do it?
Absolutely and you know it's funny my mother and I were listening to your episode the other day talking to that woman with the two children about how she got pregnant at 18 and I can't remember what the episode was called but we were the entire time we were like why would you do that?
Why would you make that decision?
It's so obvious he was terrible but obviously you're in your own bubble sometimes and you can't see that you can't see the mistakes you're making in your own life and Having family there.
This was a video I just made recently.
Having family there to pull you out of that situation, whether it be a bad engagement where you're scared, you've invested so much money, you've moved in, you've done all this, and you have nowhere to go.
You're stuck in that if you don't have your family to go to in a lot of cases.
Your family to pull you out both emotionally and a place to stay, whatever it may be.
It's so important.
I was just talking about this.
That's why I think the government wants to get rid of the family because if you don't have your family, then You are alone in this world.
Who are you going to depend on or your community?
You have to go on welfare.
You have to go to state-sponsored counselors.
All your most desperate needs go to the state and therefore you're always going to want it to grow.
Family is the original safety net, right?
I mean, they're the ones... I remember when I was in theater school, there was a director there.
He was a good director, very courageous.
He was a young guy. He was in school.
I was in there for acting and playwriting.
He was there for directing.
And I remember him saying, he said, you know, when I decided to go into the arts, my parents were like, okay, it's risky.
It's really, really risky. But go for it with the full and certain knowledge that no matter what happens, you will always have a place to land called us.
We will always help you out if necessary.
And it did give him, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit too much, like, sure, I'll pay all your bills, you don't have to do it.
But in terms of having that original safety net, the stronger families are, the stronger communities are.
Then the less we are afraid of failure and the less we feel, well, we've got to have that government-run safety net.
And I think that's another reason why.
If you don't have the soft cushion of original biology, then you are going to feel like you need the government to keep you from death's door.
And I think that's another reason why they're not keen on families.
Absolutely. And, you know, it's weird that...
People think, oh, I'll make a family out of all my girlfriends.
I'll be a 35-year-old single woman and we can go drink and party and they'll be my family.
But there really is an aspect to biology and blood, I think.
My sister and I, we have...
Like, had fights where we dragged each other off counters, pulling each other by the hair when we were growing up.
Like, we have had serious fights.
But she's my family to this day.
Like, I love her. She is a wonderful human being.
And that blood bond is something that is so unbreakable.
And that's something I can't wait to do myself.
I can't wait to have a family because I've watched how beautiful it can be through what my parents have created.
All the ups and the downs.
And you see this all the time in movies, right?
Or TV shows. Where some woman, she's a single mom, right?
And she's like, I'm scared.
And all of her friends are like, don't worry, we're going to be there with you every step of the way.
And it's like, no, you're not.
Like, I'm sorry, you're just not.
Because you're not going to come over for the third time in the middle of the night when the baby's got colic.
You're just not.
And there is...
This fantasy that somehow you can replace, you know, friends who move or friends who get busy or friends who fall into the well of some dysfunctional relationship or friends who are tired or friends who are hungover.
It's like, no, if you're a family, you kind of got to be there for each other.
But your friends have a lot of choices and options that get up their own busy lives and they're just not a substitute.
Friends are great, but their tier two, tier one, is your family.
It's crazy. Every time I'm flying, I watch the movies that are on the suggested popular list, and I watch a lot of the chick flicks, How to Be Single, Girls' Night Out.
Girls' Night Out was the last one I watched, and it was about a woman who got divorced with a guy and all her girlfriends.
She did a huge speech at the end, because I realized what's really important in my life is my girls, and they're like, yeah!
They're all like 40 single mothers, you know, and it's like, Some of them are going to get married, and they're going to realize that relationship is unfortunate, and there you go, one friend gone.
Another one is going to move for a job.
Another one is also going to get married, and you're going to have been convinced to be alone by yourself, and you're totally right.
They're not going to be there at 4 a.m.
to feed the baby. They're not going to be there by your deathbed, probably.
Friendships drift apart. Family doesn't.
Yeah, I mean, or some friend's gonna become a Donald Trump supporter and then...
Yeah. It's all over.
There's no real commitment, certainly not the marriage, certainly not financial, certainly none of these things, certainly not blood.
And, I mean, friendships are great, they're wonderful, they're beautiful, but it's just not the same as family.
I've seen far, far more, as much as people rag on marriage these days, I've seen far more friendships fall apart than marriages, despite the high rates.
So what, I guess, so two other questions, if you don't mind.
The first is Christmas message for, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of people can end up watching or listening to this.
No pressure. But Christmas message, what would you like people to think about and to focus on both over the Christmas season and going into next year?
I think myself included.
A lot of us focus on a lot of negativity all through the year we've seen and Our statues being torn down, churches destroyed, mass immigration destroying communities, death, terrorism.
It's been horrific. And watching the news, it can really get you down.
And it can really put you into this mood of anger and hatred and just wanting revenge.
And I completely understand that.
It's a natural reaction to seeing all of this.
But I would...
Advise people to remember what we're fighting for, what we're trying to preserve, and that it is goodness.
It is this kindness.
And if we let ourselves become savages to defeat savages, are we really protecting anything at all?
Are we really defending anything at all?
And that while all of this is going on, we should still be creating and contributing and building Western civilization as it is, and its ideas and its beauty, and remembering why we fight and preserving that while we do.
And compared to the Second World War or the First World War, just about any other war, it is really the most fun battle in history.
And that is something to look forward to.
And what are your biggest excitements or hopes for 2018?
I'm just always excited to see where the younger generation is headed, the ones in high school that are being raised on YouTube, the people that are watching the failures of cultural Marxism and seeing that cultural transformation happen.
And although there's a lot of pessimism I think we are making huge cultural advances.
Just watching Piers Morgan laugh about genderless, non-binary snowmen on mainstream television while triggering the other guests.
He was a huge liberal, right?
Watching those changes happen and repeatedly seeing the culture shift in the Overton window moving, it's going to be an amazing 2018, I think.
We've never had a better chance to save the world.
We've never had this kind of communications technology.
This is big stakes win-lose, but we've never had this kind of opportunity.
And while it does give us some challenges, man, we've got jetpacks to skywrite truth.
And so thanks a lot, Lauren. I wish you and your family a very, very Merry Christmas.
Thank you for your friendship over the last couple of years.
And I really look forward to seeing what you're doing in 2018.
Thanks so much.
Merry Christmas.
Now we're going to talk to a man who I guess spends about as much time as I do in his life spelling his last name, Milo Yiannopoulos.
He is fresh of a very successful tour of Australia.
Milo is an award-winning journalist, provocateur, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, which comes with its own paper cuts, Dangerous, and the upcoming book, Despicable, where he and others will name the names.
Of various powerful Hollywood abusers.
You can find more of Milo's work at milo-inc.com and of course, Dangerous.com.
Milo, thanks for taking the time today.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so much for having me.
So I was really impressed by the article that you wrote recently in November about your history of predation and exploitation at the hands of your mentor.
So I was really impressed by the article that you wrote recently in November about your history of predation and exploitation at the hands of your mentor.
And one of the great Christmas gifts, I think, that is coming out this year and which, of course, will be part of your upcoming book is this exposure of how many people seem to seek power.
And one of the great Christmas gifts, I think, that is coming out this year, and which of course will be part of your upcoming book, is this exposure of how many people seem to seek power, merely it seems, to have the power to exploit others and control others and dangle fame and fortune and notoriety in front of them in return for subjugation to have the power to exploit others and control others and dangle fame and fortune and notoriety Thank you.
Merely, it seems to have the power to exploit others and control others and dangle fame and fortune and notoriety in front of them in return for subjugation to, I guess, often unwanted sexual advances.
Can you tell the people who haven't read this article a little bit about how this Me Too phenomenon has, I guess, awoken memories for you and put you on this particular path?
Certainly.
Well, I had alluded to things that had happened in my past and that got me into quite a lot of trouble last February, as some viewers will remember.
I And people have been asking me, well, are you going to talk about this?
Are you going to talk about this? Are you going to tell us what happened?
And I was thinking about it, and I floated this article to see if this Me Too movement was as it claims to be, as it presents itself.
Politically agnostic and about victims, or if there was some sort of politically charged element to it.
So I dropped an article about a very prominent, very famous journalist in London, Damien Thompson, who was my journalistic mentor, with lots of detail, shared that detail with journalists to see if it would get picked up.
And it didn't. Now everybody in London has read that piece.
The piece has done hundreds of thousands of views.
Everyone has read it, but no journalist wanted to follow it up.
And this got me thinking...
I had already decided to write my book at this point, but I sort of floated it just as an experiment to see if anybody would pick it up or whether there was some political dimension to all this.
And it turns out, of course, that there is.
There is such a thing as the wrong victims, unlike what feminists constantly tell us.
And my... My experience with this guy was very heavily redolent of the Weinstein stuff as I had seen it from women and various other things that I'd seen in Hollywood.
So I had decided, after my last book was such a big success, that the next book was going to be about the entertainment industry, about Hollywood and the media.
The extraordinary double talk and hypocrisy of both those industries.
And also, my...
The real insight, I suppose, in this book is that the creative collapse and the financial disasters that Hollywood is now experiencing come from the same source as the Me Too, Weinstein, Spacey apocalypse.
They come from a collapse in moral foundation.
They come from a sort of descent into moral nihilism.
The insight of this book is really that Hollywood's present troubles, its creative crises, and its sexual assault crises come from the same place.
And so I have a few A-list friends who Do not want to talk to other journalists because they don't believe that they'll get a fair hearing.
They think they will be turned into the bad guys, as Matt Lauer tried to do with Corey Feldman.
Now we know why. You know, so there's some people who only want to talk to me, and they will be in this book.
I'll tell my story of what I've seen over the course of working media in Europe and in America and living in Hollywood in 2008.
And, yeah, it's my contribution to...
The literature around this incredible, amazing moment is bigger than Game of Game.
It's the biggest moment in culture probably in decades.
The left's, you know, the left's biting itself.
Oh, it's astonishing.
I mean, when I think of the moral nihilism and empty materialism and mere physical sensuality that's kind of been vomiting out of Hollywood over the past couple of decades, like sickness out of an ancient Roman overeating festival, it is amazing to see just how much it has turned like sickness out of an ancient Roman overeating festival, it is amazing to see And the very weapon that they have used against non-leftists, this weaponization of sexual accusations, has really been like an ancient musket that you're aiming at someone just goes off in your own face.
And you know, much as I hate to say it, you have to give credit where it's due.
And, you know, I'm not a blindly partisan guy.
I try to be honest and try to say it like I see it.
You have to give a lot of the credit for this to BuzzFeed.
BuzzFeed has developed this appetite, this willingness to defecate where it eats.
This is a family show, so I won't swear, but...
You know, to start pointing its guns at people on its own side.
And I think, you know, BuzzFeed has written terrible things about me.
Long articles full of misrepresentations, distortions, disingenuousness and lies.
But they have been prepared to...
Practice what they preach. So you have to give BuzzFeed some credit for this, much as I hate to say it.
It's been remarkable watching it happen.
I guess they see that there's some sort of editorial or commercial advantage to going after their own side, which is sort of inevitable, I guess, given how badly BuzzFeed is doing in terms of traffic and business and all the rest of it.
But I don't know.
Is it encouraging? Is it great?
Who knows? But one thing that is happening now is this This ludicrous suspension of due process and of all of the usual rules of accusation, inquiry, sentence, consequence, you know, the usual order of things when somebody is accused of doing something wrong has been completely inverted by the progressive left as part of their psychotic man-hating.
And now it's being brought to bear on the left.
And guess what? Who knew?
Well, we all knew. Hardly a surprise.
The people who behaved the worst weren't conservatives.
There are a couple of stories of Republicans and Libertarians, you know, behaving badly.
But the worst offenders are, of course, all on the left.
Because these hysterical shrieking banshees with their aggressive public displays of virtue were the most morally deplorable of all.
And they showed us who they were.
I mean, They goaded us.
They wanted us to challenge them.
They were desperate for us to call them.
I mean, look, putting out things like American Beauty, that movie, where they showed us who they are and dared us to call them on it and to find it repugnant.
And we didn't, and we couldn't, and we would not, because it was just this...
We weren't ready for it yet.
We weren't ready to go up against them.
But Spacey himself, in this movie, American Beauty, where Hollywood showed us they had Bared it all.
They displayed to us who they were, and we didn't do anything about it, to our great shame.
Well, how could we? I mean, without the alternative media to hold their feet to the fire, it certainly wasn't going to come out of the mainstream media.
And I've kind of been jumping up and down on my show, talking about what an incredible moment this is, and you sort of alleged to this earlier, Milo, about what an amazing cultural gift this is.
I mean, I, to some degree, come out of the art world.
Like I went to theater school and wrote novels and plays and so on and was a director briefly.
And the power that art has to shape our consciousness is very hard to overestimate.
And the paralysis and self-doubt and crippling self-flagellation that must be occurring in Hollywood these days.
I mean, for all of these predators to be, you know, tweet scrolling in terror about the next time and the next someone and the next trail that's going to lead to their very fetid bedroom doors.
This is throwing a whole industry into paralysis and this is creating opportunities for other more wholesome people to bring their art to the fore which really wasn't available before.
I think that's true. The whole thing is delicious.
It's wonderful. Watching people hoist by their own petard, as Hamlet has it.
This is a great moment of seeing people reaping the consequences of something awful, which is this suspension of due process, this man-hating, this culture of fear, this climate of antagonism between the sexes.
But here's the thing.
Whenever you set men against women, You know, a lot of women making allegations against a lot of powerful men.
It becomes instantly politicized, rightly or wrongly.
I guess it's a pity.
You know, people on the left tend to gang up with the women.
People on the right tend to gang up with the men.
Something cultural in there for another day.
But Hollywood isn't just guilty of that.
And in fact, most of the allegations, you know, from women against men are situations in which there are no heroes.
I mean, these women willingly did deals.
I mean, Rose McGowan was talking about a seven-figure settlement and the second settlement to stay quiet eventually decided not to take it because she thought there might be more commercial opportunity, more professional advantage in speaking up than staying silent.
There are no heroes here.
You know, these women are willing participants in a system they then turn to their advantage later.
These women are not heroes. But this is not the worst that Hollywood has been up to.
When I was there in the mid-2000s, I saw stuff that I'm going to be writing about in this book.
I was never sure.
I didn't go to the authorities. I was never sure that I had seen anything illegal.
And I never really saw anybody, you know, I never saw anybody abused or whatever with my own eyes.
But, you know, the gay stuff...
And the stuff with very young children, as Corey Feldman has been trying to tell us for decades, that is the stuff that will really destroy Hollywood.
That's the stuff that's going to leave Los Angeles in a smoldering crater.
And it's already happening.
I mean, you know, university administrators and professors think I'm some kind of Voldemort figure.
Well, wait until Hollywood publicists get a load of me when I start going out for comment for this book.
Because I've already reached out to a couple of them, and they've told me that they are recommending that everybody they represent...
We're going to avoid award shows and they're trying to push the award shows to go closed, no red carpet, no public audiences.
These things are going to become hermetically sealed little worlds in which, you know, the celebrities are bust in, applaud themselves, you know, say some social justice shit, and then get bust back out again.
Because they can't bear the thought of being confronted with the public or with journalists.
Because all any journalist is going to want to know on the red carpet is, what did you know, when, and why didn't you say anything?
And they created this environment.
They did it to themselves.
And so it's delicious and it's wonderful.
I would just, you know, say there are some very clear cut and horrific abuses which are not part of them.
Which everybody, you know, is going to be horrified by.
Involving underage people and a lot of the gay stuff too.
There are specific horrific abuses that nobody is going to be able to justify, and there are no political dimensions to, and all of that is yet to come out.
Well, and what has struck me too, Milo, is if you are a decent moral person and you go into this Sodom and Gomorrah of Hollywood, into this, you know, wretched Dantean hellscape of predation and exploitation, it's almost like, you know, in academia, if wretched Dantean hellscape of predation and exploitation, it's almost like, you know, in academia, if you're not on the left, there's this force field that just, you They won't give you tenure.
They'll try and get rid of you.
Should you be lingering?
It's almost like this repulsion of virtue force field that has gone on for decades after decade in Hollywood, that no decent man can draw breath in that fetid swamp and survive.
And this concentration of evil and corruption and collusion is going to break apart in the coming year in ways that are impossible to fathom.
But my God, it is going to bring a breath of fresh air to the cultural landscape, the like of which we have not seen probably since the 50s.
Of course, in the 50s, there were codes about what could be shown on screen and what couldn't.
Unmarried people couldn't go to bed together and stuff like that.
Why do you think it's worse to be a Republican in Hollywood than it is to be a child molester?
And I say that, and it sounds sensational, but Meryl Streep is calling Roman Polanski a god.
Knowing what he did.
You know, R. Kelly is excused, all the rest of it, because they have a little talent or because they have good connections or money or all of the above.
People are excused the most appalling things.
Whereas if you're a Republican, you become totally blacklisted in Hollywood.
Why is that? Well, it isn't just because they disagree with these people on ideological grounds.
It's because Republicans are far more likely to be absolutely repulsed and horrified about what's going on and expose it.
I mean, the reason you get blacklisted in Hollywood if you have the wrong politics is because...
Because you might not enjoy the spectacle of what's going on and threaten those power structures.
It's very obvious that it goes far, far beyond, deeply, deeply beyond, you know, having disagreements about the size of the state or being Christian.
Or, you know, that's not why Republicans are boycotted and marginalized and, you know, and written out of the story in Hollywood.
That is not what is going on.
It's very obvious. It would be nice for Hollywood to rediscover some moral foundation.
I don't believe it's going to happen.
I think the industry is just going to collapse in on itself and effectively evaporate.
Unscathed from these sensational scandals are going to disappear into high-quality TV. There's a huge and growing market, whether it's Amazon Prime and Netflix, all the original content from tech companies, Apple's trying to get into it, Comcast, all the ISPs and tech companies who build other kinds of products, they're all trying to get into content.
And there will be a lot of talent around in front of and behind the camera when Hollywood effectively...
Closes for business.
And it seems inevitable to me.
It's a nice end.
I think it's a just and fitting end to an industry that has lectured the rest of us, that has finger-wagged and bossed us about, presumed to dictate to the rest of us how we should vote in elections, whilst at the same time turning a blind eye for the most appalling abuses on their own doorstep and producing garbage.
I mean, garbage. I really want to like You know, superhero movies.
Everybody loves superhero stories and all the rest of it, but enough already.
And when they try to reach for something creative or interesting, they come up with mother.
You know, there's no, it seems to me, space for...
Provocative, interesting, wholesome storytelling.
You know, there's no space in Hollywood for stories that tell us about ourselves, stories that investigate who we are and what we believe and our place in the world and all the rest of it without being completely depraved and exploitative like Mother is.
I mean, this is Hollywood telling us who they are over and over again.
And the reason, by the way, that all of these women in Hollywood are so desperate to sign up to Me Too and so aggressively anti-men is they think the rest of us are like their men.
Right. Hillary Clinton hates men because she thinks we're all like Bill Clinton.
Huma Abedin thinks we're all like Weiner.
The reason liberal women hate men so much is they think we're all like liberal men and we're not.
Well, okay. Let me ask you this, though, because you kind of brush past the Christian thing.
And I'm going to pause on that, Milo, because not only do I want to weave it into the Christmas theme of the conversation, but also this is sort of Ann Coulter's thesis.
Yeah, this is sort of Ann Coulter's thesis that the left has something demonic about it.
And let's just go full Christian.
It seems to me that the hatred they have is not for big or small government, but the hatred they have is for Christian values, is for Christian morals.
I mean, can you think of the last time in which a priest...
It was portrayed sympathetically in the media.
Or if you look at the amount of energy that the media, both Hollywood and even academia and newspapers, how much energy they poured into exposing Catholic sexual abuses, whereas they skate right over it when it comes to the dangers for children in single mother households, the dangers for children in government schools, and the dangers for both adults and children in Hollywood.
It's satanic. Well, you have to just ask yourself one simple question.
If Hollywood was not run by the devil, how would it be doing things any differently?
How would Hollywood look if it wasn't being orchestrated by Satan?
How would they behave differently?
How would the movies be different?
How would the way they operate be different?
This sinister, sick, abusive, corrupt system where women have to prostitute themselves, have to debase and prostitute themselves in exchange for temporary fleeting fame and riches.
I mean, and that's exactly what the devil did with Jesus in the Bible, is he takes him out to the desert and he says, I'll give you the whole world if you bow down towards me.
It's exactly the same deal that goes on in these casting couch rooms.
That's Weinstein. We're being slightly facetious, but not really.
If Hollywood were an instrument of the diabolical, how would it not be doing all of the stuff that it's doing now?
It's right what you say.
One of the last big depictions of the Catholic Church, the Da Vinci Code, where religion isn't just painted suspiciously, but it's painted as sick.
You know, that albino monk who's whipping himself, who's evil.
Not just, you know, sick and sinister and somehow otherworldly.
I mean, you know, the Catholic Church is presented as this weird alien death cult, you know?
No, I think there is a weird alien death cult.
It's called Islam. But the Catholic Church, that's how the Catholic Church is portrayed in Hollywood, because as you correctly say, they hate Western Christian values.
Those same Western Christian values that made capitalism possible, that make all of the Western countries that we know and love nice places to live.
I mean, you know, Canada, USA, Germany, France, the UK, Australia.
I mean, at least all these countries used to be nice places to be born and nice places to live.
What do they all have in common? Christianity.
You know, it's an immutable, you know, unarguable fact that the nice bits of the world are Christian and the horrible bits of the world are.
Yes, and of course, Christianity, as I think statistically these days, Milo, by far the most persecuted religion in the world, but all the left can come up with is made-up terms like Islamophobia.
Yeah I mean like that isn't just a completely normal rational response if you're a woman or black or Christian or gay or anything other than a oh yeah straight white male that practices Islam anything other than a straight white male Islam is the most terrifying belief system the most the most mortifying horrifying idea structure available you know anywhere in the world and and I'm sorry, Islamophobia is irrational. No, it's not an irrational.
It's a completely normal, predictable, and healthy response to something that wants to kill you.
We are evolutionarily programmed to avoid things that want to exterminate us.
Islamophobia is like a natural evolutionary immune response to something horrifying.
So, Christmas to Christmas, it's been quite a year for you of ups and downs.
What are your plans for Christmas?
What does Christmas mean for you?
What was Christmas growing up?
And I guess last but not least, Milo's Christmas message to the planet.
Yes, 2017 was an interesting year.
We have just come back from a tour in Australia.
So we did 12,500 tickets across, I think, eight shows, five cities.
We grossed $1.2 million, $1.3 million.
Massively successful. Just a couple of weeks tickets on sale.
I was only out there for, I think, eight or nine days.
And that is this size market compared to what we're going to do in America in 2018.
So I'm looking forward to doing a lot of live touring.
I'm about to announce something quite exciting on that front with a very well-known left-winger.
We're going to be going head-to-head live on stage, which is going to be very exciting, and I'm going to do my own tour in 2018.
The book was a New York Times bestseller, as everybody knows.
I will hope to replicate that next year.
Look, the feral left on the streets and the organized establishment left In the media and in politics, has done everything possible to punish everyone it considers responsible for Trump's election, and they've thrown everything they have, up to and including doing sinister and illegal stuff to us.
Tommy Lahren, Bill O'Reilly, me, they have come for all of us.
With varying degrees of success across the board.
Now, fortunately, I have the kind of, like Bill and like Tommy, I have the kind of fan base where it's difficult to take somebody out when they have millions of fans.
You just kind of, you know, you might force them from platform to platform, but it doesn't, you know.
You're never really going to destroy them and there's no getting rid of Milo.
But they have come for me really hard this year.
And I think it's just a mark of how absolutely horrified they are.
They cannot get over Trump.
They can't reconcile themselves with the reality, with the fact that Donald Trump is sitting in the White House.
They still don't understand why he's there.
Well, I'm sorry to just interrupt very briefly.
I would say that the left understood how bad Trump was going to be for them even more than the right understood how good he was going to be for them.
Well, I don't even think that's true.
I mean, what has he done?
You know, like, not to be rude, but, like, what has he really...
This apocalyptic event that the left was prophesying, it hasn't happened.
I mean, you know, maybe they would have more of a case if he had actually built a wall yet.
No, but contrary.
I mean, all the stuff we've been talking about with the Me Too stuff and the exposure of this predation, I think they had some sense of that.
And certainly, if the Russian investigation is ever blown wide open, then the corruption within the DOJ, within the FBI, if that's ever blown open, that's going to take a significant weapon out of their hands, I think.
I think that's probably true.
I think the secondary effects of Trump, which were always the reason I liked him in the first place, are going to be wonderful.
The effect on free speech, the effect on culture.
That's the real legacy of the Trump presidency, and it will never...
Because presidencies are interrogated according to policy success, Trump will never get credit for what he's done in culture, because it's too soft and broad and wide and nebulous a criterion to judge people on.
But he has done...
He's already accomplished everything that he could be expected to do in two terms, which is permanently shattering the authority and strength of the entertainment industry, the academy, and the news media.
Their ability to shape The direction of the country has been, if not utterly destroyed, at least terminally damaged.
And Trump's election did that, and all the things that happened before, like Game Again, all the things that are going to happen over the next couple of years.
Trump's election is, you know, the apotheosis of this, and it's a wonderful, important, and fantastic thing.
So yes, I do agree with you on that.
But there's no existential death.
What I'm talking about is, you know, you're saying Trump's election has dealt a blow to the strategies the organized left uses.
It's made them less effective warriors.
I agree. I'm saying Trump has done nothing bad for women, bad for black people, bad for, you know, whatever.
Maybe he's stopped a few people who shouldn't be in the country from coming in.
What I'm saying, you know, the left professed victimhood groups have not suffered as a result of the Trump presidency.
Good heavens, Milo. I mean, I'm sure you've seen the statistics that black unemployment is down, Hispanic unemployment is down, and of course all of the people who support Trump are still going to be called racist, even though these groups that we supposedly dislike are doing far better under the candidate we advocated for.
Right. I mean, Hispanic unemployment is its lowest level in American history.
Amen. Thanks to the policies of this government.
Anyway, as far as Christmas goes, I never really celebrated Christmas before because I had a fairly rocky relationship with my family and I was kind of always living on my own and going to Austria for Christmas or just having blowouts and whatever.
I have, in a tumultuous and...
An interesting year.
I got married this year, so I now have my first family Christmas this year.
So I've discovered a more compassionate and humble and human side of myself this year, which I'm looking forward to exploring more in my talks and in my books next year.
I would say that if I have a Christmas message of 2017, it is, if you look at all of the fireworks and theatrics, the spectacular explosions that have been going off on the left and the right in 2017, all of these are signs of the progressive left imploding.
Now, for 30 years, we were bullied and cajoled and controlled by the nannies and the scolds, and we were edged into positions we didn't really believe.
We were forced to say things in public which we did not believe in private.
And this created this sort of tension, this preference falsification, this huge tension, and it was a sort of bitterness that we all had towards the elites who were forcing us to live in bad conscience.
They were forcing us to live...
Differently from the way that our beliefs and our consciences were telling us to.
That changed with the Trump election, with Gamergate, with all kinds of other little things that are happening.
2017, all of these pyrotechnics in culture and in politics and the academy and all the rest of it, they are all signs that the stranglehold that the progressive left had on debate, on policy, on culture, on literature, art, music, all these things, it's fracturing.
Now, it's not gone. It's going to take 15, 20 years to go, which is why people like us and all the people in politics and all the rest of it who support us and all of our friends, whether it's Tommy or Lauren or Gavin or whatever, we now have 30 years ahead of us of dismantling the legacy of political correctness and of the social justice left.
This is the new era now.
2017 is when the pendulum just clocked over to the other side.
And now, after 30 years of being policed, For our beliefs and our language and our dressings and what hairstyle we're allowed to have.
Now things are going to begin to swing very, very hard and very heavily in the other direction.
Politicians who don't get behind that will lose.
You know, journalists who do not embrace that will lose, which is all of them.
You know, Everything is going to look really, really nice for us over the next 15 to 20 years, provided that we continue to support one another and continue to build this movement after the Trump presidency.
Who knows what spectacular drama and chaos and crisis the Trump presidency is going to lurch, you know, from blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, over the next, well, seven years, I guess.
But as long as we ensure that this anti-political correctness, populist, nationalist, anti-feminist, you know, all the rest of it, as long as we ensure that this movement survives any particular political candidate or any particular spokesperson or media figure or whatever, so long as we're all pushing in that direction,
The trajectory of change is inevitable because there is 30 years of pent-up desire for freedom and freedom of expression and creativity and mischief and all of that just bubbling up and waiting to explode.
And it hasn't even come. We've seen nothing.
Trump's election was just the first indication that Americans might be ready for it someday.
We haven't seen it. Anything yet.
And it is coming and it's going to be glorious.
And 2017 was the year that we were made...
2017 was the year it became clear that it was coming, that it was possible, and that we were on the right side of history.
Well, and I think 2018 is going to be lit.
Lit beyond imagination.
And I do sort of invite people, you're going to have to pick a side and you're going to have to fight hard because there's no such thing as inevitability in victory.
No, but 2017, they threw everything they had at us in 2017, and it didn't work.
It didn't work. Trump is still in the White House.
Tommy is back on Fox News.
I'm doing sell-out multi-million dollar tours.
It didn't work.
Like, they threw everything they had at all of us, and it didn't work.
So what are they going to do next year?
I mean, I used to... I was like, okay, so you've tried racists, you've tried sexists, you've tried homophobic, you've tried pedophile apologists, you've tried white supremacists, neo-notists.
There's literally nothing left.
There is nothing left.
Nothing left. I like the double entendre of that, nothing left.
The left has nothing, because there's nothing left.
The left has nothing. There's nothing left on the left.
2018 should be about us, every time they come for us with a new set of allegations or a new set of names, just saying, sorry, go fuck yourselves, and concentrate on empire building, because we're We're only going to win if we build parallel and more powerful, more persuasive, more effective institutions to the ones they already have, which means university departments, it means movie makers, it means novelists, stand-up comics.
We have to now build a completely parallel entertainment industry and it is the business of the next 50 years to do that.
That's the task ahead, and we can only do that if every time they come for us, we just go, oh, go fuck yourself, and get on with the job.
Because too often, liberals are effective at this, they're good at this.
They'll come at you and they will tie you up in defending yourself about some new bogus charge, and before you realize it, you haven't actually achieved anything in the last three weeks because you've been too busy furiously backpedaling and panicking and trying to reassure your supporters and all the rest of it.
Just tell them to go screw themselves and get on with the job.
Finish your book. Pump out content every day.
Get it done. When is Despicable coming out, do you think?
It is out May 1st on May Day.
So it'll be available for pre-order, I think, three months before that.
And we're just putting...
I'm doing some of the heavy interviews now with people who are ready to name names.
So I'm doing that. That's what I'm spending most of my day doing.
Then it's endless rounds of legal-ing and editing and all the rest of it.
But it will come out May 1st.
And I'll start to talk a little bit more specifically over the sort of February, March.
Who's in it? Make some suggestions about what they're going to say.
I think a book is the right package to do this in because if you want to make statements and release stories of this magnitude, I think they kind of have to live in a home worthy of it to get the proper level of scrutiny and attention.
So a book is the right place to do this.
I'm not going to be naming names until the book itself does come out.
But I will tell you a bit more about the sorts of stories that are going to be in it.
And also, the book is my attempt to explain how Hollywood got itself into this mess in the first place, which I think a lot of people are going to find very interesting, because it vindicates a lot of what libertarians and conservatives, you know, and basically anyone non-crazy, has been saying about the entertainment industry for many decades.
Beautiful. Well, Milo, I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas.
Congratulations on your marriage.
Thank you so much for your time today, and I look forward to hearing more about what's coming up for you in the spring.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
We have our good friend Mike Zunovich, a lawyer, filmmaker, and the best-selling author of Gorilla Mindset, How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms, and MAGA Mindset, How to Make You and America Great Again.
Mike is also the producer of the film documentary Silenced, A War on Free Speech, and I highly anticipate this, the upcoming film, Hoaxed.
The media is War on Truth.
Twitter.com forward slash Cernovich.
That's C-E-R-N-O-V-I-C-H. Facebook.com forward slash Mike Cernovich and of course Cernovich.com.
Mike, how are you doing today? Merry Christmas, everyone.
Merry Christmas. Now, it's a short amount of time until Christmas.
What's going in your house?
How are you cleaning out the chimney?
How many milk and cookies are you setting out for the big fat guy?
What's going on? Well, because Cyra's birthday is early December, we already had her big one-year party with all these presents.
I don't know where we're going to put the other stuff.
But we do have a big tree, and we do have the stockings and everything.
Sean is very into that kind of stuff, and it'll be fun.
First Christmas, really. Last year, we had a newborn, three-week-old baby, and this year we have a full baby.
It's funny, yeah, that first year with the new baby, because I have a December baby too, my...
That first year with the new baby, I don't really remember much of it at all.
I mean, everything kind of went out the window because it is truly, at least it was for me, a deep shock how much...
Oh, they're going to be like cats.
They sleep a lot and so on.
But the amount of time, focus, energy and effort you need on a newborn, it's like it's amazing in the modern world.
It makes you it's hard to imagine how anyone survived like 5000 years ago, given how much work and resources new babies consume.
But that first year is kind of a blur.
The second year was more fun because she was toddling around and was opening stuff and was really interested in stuff.
And we have, of course, lots of friends over.
And the difference between the first year with a baby and the second year with a toddler is really quite a magical transition.
Well, they say that the days are long, but the years are short.
Well, that's a good way of putting it.
That's a good way of putting it. And so, for you, what was it like for you?
I know you talked a little bit about your childhood and guerrilla mindset, but what were Christmases like for you when you were growing up?
Christmas for me, actually, one of the only childhood stories that sticks with me is that Even though we grew up quite poor, one year my parents sold their wedding bands to buy Christmas presents for us kids.
And so it was always important to them.
My grandparents were well off, relatively speaking, for a working class town.
And me and my grandma always took Christmas very seriously.
So we would do Christmas Eve at Grandma and Grandpa's house with everybody, the full extended family.
And then Christmas Day would be with our parents, individually.
And then we would go have Christmas Day sort of lunch or dinner at Grandma and Grandpa's again.
So I grew up in a family.
It's always weird when people call me like a misogynist or something.
We clearly haven't really like looked into who I admire the most in my family, which would be my grandmother, who was sort of this family matriarch who dealt with all the immature male egos and kept everybody in line when the brothers were fighting or the It's funny,
too, because Christmas should be the time to sort of bury the hatchet and resolve differences and so on.
Because, you know, when everybody's busy with the general shotgun canon of life itself, you can let differences or disagreements kind of fester.
But around Christmas, It should be, I think, a time for people to sit down and work things out.
But a lot of times, it just seems to make things worse.
You get people across the table kind of sniping at each other, passive-aggressive stuff.
And I guess every family needs some kind of hero who's going to put a stop to that nonsense and just have people sit down and work things out.
And Christmas is a wonderful time to step up for people and be that hero.
Yeah, there was never a fight during Christmas or any kind of holiday event At my grandma's house.
Zero. That's why when I read all these articles, how do you deal with, you know, Thanksgiving Day arguments, Christmas arguments, to me that is just unfathomable.
What do you mean, how do you deal with it?
You don't deal with it.
You don't argue with people on these days.
You can't go one day without just being an acrimonious person, right?
I don't talk politics or argue with anybody at my in-laws.
When people try to bring up politics and stuff, I'm like, look, man, I go, you're kind of talking to a porn star off the clock.
I do what I do and entertain and educate and inform, but when I'm off the clock, man, I'm here to talk about the wine or whatever.
I have no interest.
So I even had one time, I was at a friend's house, and this is before the election, so his brother-in-law came in, and he was just itching to argue with me, and it was Christmas time, and he was itching to argue with me about the election, and I was like, look, dude, I don't care.
I don't talk about this stuff off the clock.
Leave me alone. Can't we just talk about life, something general?
And a lot of these people know they live very nasty lives, very high-conflict lives.
I even see it on Twitter. If you've noticed on Twitter, I've been a lot nicer to people for most of the year, in fact, but especially this month.
And people are – my notifications, especially by the verified people, are just nasty.
And I thought – Don't you people have families or something?
Or don't you have something else you want to be doing?
And the answer, unfortunately, for these people is no.
But anyway, there was no nonsense at any kind of holiday gathering that we ever had at my grandmother's.
And to this day, I won't argue with anybody during the holidays.
And in fact, in real life, I have no interest.
And I don't understand people.
I was thinking about this yesterday. I was kind of thinking...
What is wrong with these people?
You can't just go and interact with people, go to wine tasting, and just say, oh, isn't the vineyard beautiful?
What a nice day.
What a good life that we live that we can afford to do this kind of stuff, and we can just all kind of drive in our Volvos and, you know, how the great life is going.
And for a lot of people, they just can't do it.
It's kind of... Well, it's a funny thing because I know that that idea has kind of been floating around.
I think you've talked about it some other people and I think it's worth mentioning here.
It's not just on the left, but it does seem like a lot of the leftists have significant problems with any celebration or holiday that puts them in close contact with their family of origin.
And I mean... I guess maybe if you've been propagandized that everyone's like a bourgeois pig and an exploiter and a patriarch, you live in this kind of cactus universe of collision and evisceration, and it must just be exhausting.
You know, talk about burning out your adrenals and your cortisol levels are always high.
Like, what an exhausting, debilitating, conflict-ridden life seems to be kind of infesting the minds of people so much.
Yeah, I mean, I think a question I think about a lot, really, is...
I'll give you an example.
Last night, there's a tweet going around.
On November 13th, I said Roy Moore is going to win.
Spring cap it. Because at the time, that was 100% true.
And I never endorsed Roy Moore.
So last night, people are going, oh, you loser.
One guy goes, you supported a pedophile, and I can't wait for the FBI to kick down your door.
And I thought for a second, and I go, this was like a verified person.
And I thought, well, I have a wife and a newborn daughter, and you want...
Federal agents to kick down my door because I'm good at Twitter, because I say things that you don't like to say.
And I really do just think about, like, what is wrong with these people?
What makes them – I don't want – if you're a liberal, like, I don't want the feds to kick down Matty Iglesias' door, Dave Weigel's door, Jim Acosta.
I think he makes a lot of stuff up.
I don't want anybody to kick down his door, the feds.
So I spend a lot of time thinking about what is wrong with these people that you don't understand the consequences of using the force of the state against political enemies.
To me, that's anathema to everything that I believe in, and I get that all the time.
I can't wait until you're in prison.
I'm like, well... Chill out a little bit.
I can understand if you would say, I hope you get fired.
Maybe I hope you can't sell books anymore.
I get that. Maybe I hope you get banned from social media.
Okay, that I can all kind of understand.
But they're so quick to just say, I can't wait until you go to prison.
And I'm thinking, because you don't agree with me?
What is wrong with these people?
And that does come from the left.
I don't see people on the right, for the most part, saying that we need to imprison journalists simply because we don't like their stories or don't agree with them.
It's like they've been deeply trained in the dark arts of bottomless hatred.
And everybody needs to have that check on their emotions.
That, of course, is what guerrilla mindset is about to some degree.
But you need to be able to reason with your emotions.
You don't want to crush your emotions completely because they are there to give you sort of immediate biofeedback on values and opportunities and risks and dangers and hopes and so on.
But you really need to be able to reason with your emotions.
And I think the degree to which some people just like, wouldn't you type that even if you were in like a fit of rage?
And then the next day, look at it and say, what the like, where's that check?
Where's that pause where people say, where am I in my life that I thought this was a great thing to type to someone?
And that kind of check and balance just doesn't seem to be there as much.
No, it doesn't.
There is something wrong with them because I've gone hard on Twitter with people who actually deserved it.
And then a year later, people go, oh, I can't believe you said that about the guy.
And I was like, Yeah, you're kind of right.
I shouldn't go around saying people have man boobs and stuff, you know?
That isn't cool. That was just what I was doing at the time and the moment.
And you should reflect and just say, yeah, you know, he was going at me and he asked for it or whatever, but the point is that, and this is what I'm aspiring to going forward in the future and what I've been really working hardest in 2018 is just not letting them drag me down to their level because that did happen a lot and it does bring out the worst in you, so I've been trying to bring out the best in other people and And then here's what I noticed, Stefan.
This has blown my mind.
I will never troll again, and I will tell you why I will never troll again.
Not because it's morally wrong, necessarily, but because I've learned that being happy, having a wonderful family, being successful, makes them so much angrier than any insult you could ever share with them.
So it's the super troll of personal majesty and success, right?
But that's the old saying, right? The best revenge is a better life.
Yeah, living well is the best revenge.
So I realized last year, I was like, you moron!
You wasted all this time thinking of barbs and insults when all you have to do is be successful and break news and have accomplishments and live a good life.
That makes them way angrier.
That trolls them way more than any kind of personal insult.
I thought you said to myself, you've been doing it wrong, man.
Well, but I'll tell you, Mike, I mean, I think that's a good decision and I applaud it.
I think it's a wise decision, but I'm just going to miss it a little.
I'm just like, you know, like Freddie Mercury gets off cocaine.
It's really great, but he's not writing Bohemian Rhapsody anymore.
And like, I'm glad that he's off cocaine.
I'm glad that he's put that aside.
But on the other hand, that was some great music.
And I just wanted to point out that there were some wonderful flourishes that you had on the web.
I'm glad they're in the review, but they were fun to watch at times.
I'll tell you that. Well, it was like pro-wrestling, you know, the characters and everything.
So I made a great heel because what I learned early on, and this is a thing everybody on the right needs to learn, especially people like Mitt Romney, is if you're on the right, Mitt Romney, you're Hitler.
Unless you want to go against Trump, and now you're a well-respected statesman and everything else like that.
So I learned they're going to make me a bad guy anyway.
So I might as well just embrace the heel rule.
So I'm still going to be a bad guy.
But I'm going to be a bad guy more like Ted DiBiase, the Million Dollar Man, kind of is a bad guy, right?
So he's just saying, look at me.
Look at how great my life is.
Don't you wish you had this kind of thing, you liberals?
So it'll still be fun, but, you know, fat-shaming, things like that.
I haven't fat-shamed in a while, and I'm really working hard not to do that because I figure, you know, you're fat.
You know you're fat. Everybody knows you're fat.
You don't feel good about it. I don't need to add that into your life.
There are other ways that I can...
You know, annoy people. So by being in shape, you annoy them because when you're in shape, they have to reflect on their own lives.
So it's more effective that way anyhow.
That's a funny thing, too, because I miss the feedback that could come from the left.
I mean, the left does have good criticisms on foreign policy and other things that I've talked about before.
But the problem is it's just such a concentrated, monotonous symphony of hatred and abuse that you just tune all of it out.
And that's the shame. It's like this sort of stereotypical nagging wife that you just kind of tune out completely.
It's just like, and another thing.
She might have some great criticisms, but it's the monotony and endlessness of the attacks that have you tune that person out.
And if the left wanted to have an effect, and I wish that they would, you know, we need as many voices to get to the truth as possible, they'd pull back or oppose some of this escalation, this giant...
It's like... Any noise in your house, you know, like there's some drilling out front of your house, like for the first 10 minutes, it's like, oh, that's kind of annoying.
And then you just tune it out.
And I miss that kind of feedback from the left when they were good anti-war, good anti-imperialism critics and so on.
Now they're just, a lot of them are just concentrating this monotonous hatred that I'm like, I just got to give up with the entire spectrum of feedback, which is kind of a shame for both parties.
Yeah, and the left, they do great microbrews.
They make great food.
There's always been something, I don't know if I invented this concept, but like 20 years ago, I was talking to my best friend from growing up, and I go, I'm a red man who wants to live in a blue state.
Well, that's changing now because California is becoming a mess, and actually, liberals are leaving California for Colorado and Texas, and they're trying to ruin those states with their mind virus.
The idea is that, yeah, liberals used to be, you know, that's the avant-garde art.
Now it's degenerate.
So what happened is that they're the ones who are the artists, the artisans, and then post-modernism came in and destroyed liberalism.
So that's why a lot of the effective critiques, especially people like Jordan Peterson, who I would consider liberal based on my political views anyway, is post-modernism came in and then destroyed liberalism.
So liberalism would be, hey, be creative, right?
You know, be creative.
Do art. Think, you know, think alternatively.
If you're gay, be gay, right?
But then postmodernism comes in and says, well, no, it's not enough to think creatively because thinking creatively is still within these hetero-orthodox structures.
What you need to do is poop on a piece of paper and then call that art.
That's where we are now with liberal ideology, the idea that, hey, we should, you know, Hey, it's a human impulse to want to help people.
Now, you're on the right and you should say, well, charity should do it, it shouldn't be the government.
There's an argument to be had there.
But collectively, we agree that helping people is a good thing to do and we should do it.
But you can't help the whole world.
And you have to be really careful who you help, because otherwise some people will manipulate you to get resources.
Yeah, or you end up with an attempted terrorist attack in New York.
That person was brought in under chain migration.
So it's like, okay, the people you're trying to help are trying to blow us up.
Hey, hold on. Maybe we ought to just think about this, have some kind of moratorium.
And the left isn't willing to have this debate.
They won't even... Like, for example, I got this from Gavin McInnes.
Gavin McInnes. And it stumps them every time.
They said, if you want to stump a liberal or a leftist on immigration...
When they tell you that we need to let more immigrants, then say, okay, how many a year?
Well, we need to let in more.
No, no, no. How many immigrants should be let in every year?
And what percentage of these people should come from what countries?
They don't have any answer.
They don't. They just, well, I mean, immigration is good.
It's like, no, no, no. Immigration can be catastrophic.
If you have a million people come from Liberia, In your neighborhood, those people are going to leave the neighborhood.
Let's just be honest. They go into San Francisco, you're going to be like, what is this?
This is so different to me that I don't understand.
And they don't have an answer.
So that's why we can't have arguments with the liberals.
I would gladly debate them.
But if you can't answer the question, how many immigrants should be allowed into America every year, and where should they come from by percentage, then there is no conversation to be had.
This would be my Christmas present to the world if I could give one, Mike.
It would be a big giant lever.
And that big giant lever would stop the momentum of movements that were productive before they went genuinely insane.
Because, you know, there was some really great stuff in the 60s.
Fantastic art and literature, music in particular, this eruption of creativity from some of the stodginess of the 50s.
It's like, that was great!
And then you've got people choking to death on their own vomit.
You've got the nihilism and family destruction of the late 60s and the 70s.
You have, like, postmodernism takes.
So it's great to loosen the rules and think outside the box, but, you know, sawing your own head off, leaning over so that it falls down a well, your entire brain.
It's like It's the same thing with feminism.
Let's aim for equality between the genders.
It's like, nope, the pendulum has to go too damn far, and then it has to be about female supremacy and man hatred.
It's like, I wish that there was just some momentum, just a big switch saying, okay, you've reached the Aristotelian means.
Stop here, or you're going to go nuts.
But the revolution never seems to know when to stop, and then it just ends up eating itself.
It's a horrible cycle. Well, again, alternative media is pushing back against that a lot, I think.
Well, yeah, fundamentally, it goes back to Hegel and Nietzsche and Will the Power and the Dialectic.
So the left, any movement, the right's going to go too far.
Just like the right went too far, we're trying to put gay people in jail, right?
I mean, come on, get out of here.
Roy Moore, you know, that's why I love when people are like, oh, you really must be sad Roy Moore won.
Like, no, not really.
Why? Because he thinks being gay should be illegal.
So for me, that's just a little bit much.
Now, I know people needed a Republican seat, so I understand the politics of it.
So you lose a Republican seat.
So for me, I was always in the middle of the election, like, well, whatever.
I think that the hope was that he would have spent more time building a wall and less time trying to unjustly put and immorally put gays in jail.
Yeah, I think he would have been kind of a mess, actually.
He would have been a hot mess in there.
Whatever the case, though, is that's where I could just say, hey...
The right went too far.
It's one thing to have morals and structures.
It's another thing to be an intolerant person who can't respect other people's morals and structures.
I'm glad that there was pushback against that.
We went from it shouldn't be illegal to be gay to gay.
Make the gay wedding cake or we're going to make you go out of business.
Right, right. Well, that's too far on the left.
They don't want to make a cake. Well, and now there is, of course, all of this gender blending that's going on with five-year-olds and all of this kind of stuff.
So, again, just stop it in the middle.
Now, I think, and I made this case in another...
I think Christmas is a better time for resolutions and for bigger picture stuff.
New Year's Eve is too chaotic and too much fun and too much partying.
A lot of people wake up with a hangover and they've eaten too much food and so on.
So it's not always the best.
I think Christmas is a really, really great way.
Now, you've talked about some of the ways that you want to change over the coming year.
What is the message that you would like to give to people who are going to have some chance for self-reflection over this holiday season?
Yeah, you always want to reflect on what you did in 2017.
Whether you did good, bad, or ugly, you've got to reflect on it.
And then think, how are you going to create new habits to improve in 2018?
So me, for example, I did a great job of content, great job of showing up every day, great job of pushing news cycles, great job of doing a lot of things.
But this green background, you know, it's like, okay, it's got to go.
We've got to come up with some green screens, and we've got to come up with some nicer things, make it more professional.
So for me, I'm thinking, well, okay, I know how to get on a mic.
I know how to talk. I know how to analyze facts and present them in a coherent way for people.
Well, now I need to do that in a way that looks more professional, clean, polished, more likely to go viral, more likely to be shared.
So that's what I'm thinking more towards in 2018.
And that's what people need to do is, what did you do in 2017?
Do you want to build on what you did and go to another level?
Or do you want to not do what you did in 2017?
In which case, you can't not do something.
You just have to do something else.
That's the mistake people make. People go, I'm going to quit overeating.
Here's what I always tell people.
Don't quit overeating.
Go to the gym for an hour.
You're like, what? But I want to quit overeating.
I'm like, just trust me. Just go to the gym for an hour, lift hard, You're not going to want to eat the same kind of food.
Your body is going to crave more food.
You're just going to feel sick. You can't just eliminate a pattern.
You have to replace it with another pattern.
Lately, I was drinking a lot of wine.
Instead of drinking wine, I drank kombucha out of a wine glass.
Why? Because I don't drink alcohol.
I'm not giving shots and everything.
I just enjoy the process, the aesthetic, the calmingness.
In the same way a lot of people who smoke, it was not the nicotine because you can chew nicotine gum.
It was the process.
So I go, well, I'll just drink kombucha because you can't really chug a kombucha.
So I pour kombucha into a wine glass and I sip on the kombucha and I feel every bit as relaxed and winding down as I did with wine.
So rather than just say, I'm going to drink less wine, I just said, no, I'm just going to drink kombucha instead of wine.
It doesn't feel like I've lost anything at all.
Well, yeah, because you want to avoid anything that's going to trigger willpower.
Because willpower is unsustainable.
Everyone's got to live and get things done.
And any time you just say, well, I'm going to white-knuckle it, I'm going to grit teeth it, I'm going to change, it's never going to last.
You need substitutes, you need replacements.
Like for me, getting off pop, I used to love pop, and I just had to say, okay, I'm going to have some soda water with a shot of juice or something like that.
I need something different, and then I can transition to water from that.
But yeah, try and avoid anything that's just white-knuckle willpower because you're going to erode.
Life gets busy.
Habits take over.
You can't just sit there the whole time.
It's like trying to walk around all day on your tippy toes.
Like you're just not going to be able to sustain it.
So I think that's great advice.
Well, listen, I really want to thank you for your time and, of course, for your friendship The relationships that I've built up over the last couple of years are one of the great prides of my life, and I count you as a very good friend.
And I really want to wish you the best, of course, Shauna and Syra, the best for this holiday season.
And take advice. You know, there's no need to fight over Christmas.
And Christmas can be a time where we do put aside differences and find out what there is to appreciate about the people in our lives.
Not always focus on the hot button issues of where we disagree, but find a way in which we can end up agreeing by respecting each other.
So thanks so much, Mike.
I really, really appreciate your time today.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
My pleasure.
Merry Christmas to you and everybody listening and watching.
Merry Christmas.
. you Alright, here we have our good friend, the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson.
He is the author of The Antidote, Healing America from the Poison of Hate, Blame, and Victimhood.
He is also the founder and president of Bond, the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, a nationally recognized nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding the family by rebuilding the man.
Jesse is also a counselor, activist, media commentator, and host of radio and TV talk show on NewsmaxTV.com.
You can find out more at jesseleepeterson.com and or rebuildingtheman.com.
Reverend, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me on again.
It's an honor to be with you and Merry Christmas to you and everybody and their mama.
Wait, rebuilding the man, you're not going to throw a dad in there at all?
Well, that includes the father.
Everybody and their mama.
Now, it's funny, you know, because I think for a lot of people, I'll just talk personal experience.
So for me, Christmas is kind of bittersweet.
So... I love the Christmases I have as an adult, but Christmases due to divorce and family stresses and money stresses and so on, Christmases as a kid weren't quite as much fun.
And I wonder sometimes when people have problems about Christmas, they get tense around Christmas, whether it's sort of family history that is kind of rising up, the disappointment of maybe not having the kind of Christmases they wanted as a kid.
Because I notice that people get very happy and a lot of people get kind of sad around Christmas time as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I've always enjoyed Christmas.
Even as a kid growing up in Alabama on the plantation, it was always fun for me because the adults around me seemed to have enjoyed it.
I remember I had wanted a little red wagon for Christmas, and I asked my grandparents to ask Santa Claus to bring me a little red wagon.
I was around six years old or so.
And I woke up the next morning, and under the tree, I had a little red wagon.
I've never required a lot for Christmas, but the fact that the family is together and a few toys, and I feel the same way now.
You know, whether I'm alone or with someone, most of the time I'm with family, but whether I'm alone or not, I appreciate Christmas because it gives me a chance to reflect on the year, you know, what God has done for me and the things He has brought me through.
And the fact that He loved me and guided me in life.
And so that's what I tell people, those who might not have family members or somehow or another haven't overcome the fallen state that they're in.
You know, I tell them to just take the time to reflect on their lives and realize the situations that they have made it through and they still have a chance to have a better life.
And I think a lot of people will do that.
And you know, it's funny because I've always found Christmas is a much better time for reflection than New Year's.
New Year's, especially when I was younger, you know, it's just what's the most magnificent party I can attach myself to and how many brain cells can I kill off in any particular evening, whereas Christmas is a time more, I think, for calm contemplation and for a shutting out of the outside world, for focusing on relationships and connecting with those you love.
And I've had the most amazing conversations about the year, much more so over Christmas than I have over New Year's.
I agree. Christmas is the ending of a year, and New Year's is the beginning.
And so I always get the feeling, the first of New Year's, that I'm waiting to see what that year would bring, what I have to go through, what life would bring that year.
And Christmas is like a winding down.
I absolutely agree that it's definitely a time for reflection.
You know, it's unfortunate that there are people who get depressed, they feel lonely, but I tell them, you know, this is like, you've made it through a whole year, whether you went through that year the way you thought you should have gone through it, it's a different story.
But it is a winding down and a new beginning.
I absolutely agree with that.
Now, was that the best present you got, was the Red Wagon?
Is that the most memorable present that you got in your life?
For some reason, it is.
It's your rosebud sled, right, like from that old movie?
I can remember. Oh, you know what else?
Well, that was on my birthday.
I was about to mention that I got a rifle on my birthday because in Alabama when I was growing up, we were told that once the boys turned 15 years old, they could get their first rifle.
And so I remember waking up that morning on my birthday, 15th birthday, and I had a rifle for my birthday.
I went right out into the woods and I killed a squirrel in the tree.
I remember that.
And likewise, I remember the wagon.
For some reason, it was just so important to me.
And it was a little red wagon.
And I still have that in my memories.
And when I wake up on Christmas, I sometimes think about that.
I think that's the best way to know if there's a father in the house, is whether the child gets a rifle in his mid-teens, because that's pretty much a father-to-son thing as a whole.
The moms are all like, it's going to put your eye out, you're going to trip and it's going to go off, it's going to shoot your brother.
That's right. And, you know, I do want to add that we have a lot to be grateful for this year, you know.
We've gone through a lot in so many different ways.
And we have, you know, yet God is taking care of us, even though sometimes people might not appreciate it, or maybe life seems a little difficult, but the fact that we're making it through life, you know, and learning and overcoming, we have a lot to be grateful for.
We live in a great country.
We can pretty much do what we want.
You can be as rich or as poor as you want, whatever type of job you want.
If you put your mind to it, you put in the effort.
Don't worry about what someone else thinks about it, whether they agree or disagree.
You put the time in to do your best.
You're always going to come out on top.
Whatever top means to you, you can make as much money as you want, or friends or no friends.
It's really up to you.
So we really, in a great country, given to us by God, I think there are a lot of people who have a lot to celebrate this year.
I mean, unemployment is down.
You've got new jobs sprouting up like weeds.
There's a lot, I think, of opportunity.
Growing up under Trump's America, I think that there is quite a bit that people have to be happy about.
Except people who wanted him to fail.
They have good reason to be unhappy.
But through that valley of the shadow of death of unhappiness, they can emerge a wiser person and wonder why they oppose somebody who seems to be doing so much economic good to America.
I totally agree.
If you're not happy under this president, you just don't want to be happy.
And there are some people, it doesn't matter what you do, how great things are, they're just not going to be happy.
And so we will have that situation.
But you're absolutely right.
Right now, you can start a business if you want, because he's gotten rid of the restrictions and regulations, so a lot of people have great ideas for business, to start a business, and they can start it up now.
Start it up fresh in the coming year.
Taxes are going down, as you mentioned.
There's so much freedom in this great country right now, so I'm grateful.
Now, what is the best received present that you've ever given to someone?
The absolute clapping, doing cartwheels and couldn't be happier.
Well, on my network, I've always wanted young millennial men to start a radio show so that the world can see what we're doing at Bond and helping men overcome that anger, doing the right thing, judging people based on character and not color.
but yet have their own thinking, think freely.
And so there are three young men on my network now who have started the HAKE, H-A-K-E report, HakeReport.com.
And those young men are like blown away that they can put together a radio show themselves.
They've never done it before, nor have they thought about doing it, ever doing it before.
And so they started their own radio show on the Bar Network, and they're like jumping up and down.
So to see them and hear them putting together a radio show, creating the ideas for them, doing the marketing themselves, to see how happy they are.
It makes me happy to see that because I see them developing into good young men.
One is a black guy, one is white, and one is Honduras, I believe.
And they're doing it.
And so I think that's the greatest gift that I've given someone and I see that they really love it.
I think in a lot of families, I was just talking about this with another guest for the Christmas show, I think in a lot of families there is a schism that seems to come a lot out of politics.
You know, you got your Hillary supporters, you got your Trump supporters, you got your independents.
And from what I've been hearing, Jesse, there are a lot of people who are...
A little bit tense about the old family dinner table, about what's going to come up and if there are going to be, you know, those snarky little comments that you're like, should I respond?
Do I lose my integrity if I don't?
Do I cause problems if I do?
I don't mean to continually orbit the Jesse Lee Peterson School or planet of forgiveness, but basically you are the master and commander of that world.
So what would you suggest for people to heal divisions, to bring people closer together this Christmas?
Because it has been pretty fractious for a lot of people, I think, over the last year and a half.
I would encourage them, if that should happen at the dinner table where politicians should come up, Donald Trump, Hillary, whomever, is that they speak the honesty about what they think about it, but don't overreact to the situation.
You know, if the Hillary supporters or whomever get upset, Just be patient with them.
On Thanksgiving, I have a Trump shirt that I wore to family dinner and most of my family members are Democrats and liberals and they supported Hillary Clinton.
So I wore my Trump shirt.
And because I don't overreact to them, I don't take it personally, they too can handle it in a good way.
You know, instead of getting angry going off, they make jokes about it, they can deal with it better.
And so you show people love by not getting angry at you when they disagree.
And don't you get angry at them when you disagree with them.
And when you show that kind of love, that non-judgmental love, That non-anger love, intend to calm them down, and you can discuss those issues a little better.
And that, I think, is the big challenge.
You know, Jesus, of course, was love your enemies.
If your enemy asks you to walk a mile, walk two.
If he asks for your shirt, give him your cloak as well.
If he strikes one side, turn the other side.
And so I think a lot of people are losing track of that love your enemies stuff, and they're a little bit more like everyone is the money changers at the temple, and out comes the whip, and whew!
You know, they go all Indiana Jones on everyone.
And I think that there is a little bit of that love.
And I fall into that myself as well.
The sinner walks here.
But how can people help remember that lesson?
Well, the only way I'm able to do it now is that about 28 years ago now, God took away my anger.
I had that spirit of anger inside of me, and it came from resenting my mother and yearning for my father.
Because all people who do not love their earthly father cannot love God.
No man can get to the father unless he goes through the son.
And whether we know it or not, accept it or not, believe it or not, or live it or not, The man, the father, the man is the son of God.
He may be a poor example of it, but he's still a son of God.
And if you resent that father, then you're never going to go through the father to return to your creator.
And then you have to love your mother as well, because any anger that you have in your heart, it separates you from God.
You can read the Bible.
You can go to church.
You can hoop and holler until the cows come home.
You can give tithing and offering.
But if you have any aorta of anger, that spirit of anger, you're of your father, the devil, and not of God.
But when you forgive your parents by getting to know yourself, understanding yourself, it helps you to understand your parents.
And you realize that they were wrong in many areas, but they did the best that they could do.
Because you're wrong with that anger, and there are horrible mistakes you're making, and you wouldn't want your kids to resent you.
And that will help you forgive your parents.
So when you go to them and apologize to them for being angry, that's what forgiveness is.
And when you forgive them, God will forgive you, and He will take away that spirit of anger and restore you to your original nature.
Because whomever have anger, you're not yourself.
You become like who you hate.
You become like who you're angry at.
And so once you forgive them, God will forgive you and restore you and give you perfect peace.
And so I absolutely have perfect peace.
And I was an angry person before.
Very emotional. I had a lot of doubt and fear.
I didn't know what I wanted to do in life.
I just, you know, I was lost.
But when I went and forgave my mother who tried to turn me away from my father and lacked patience, And I forgave my father for not being there because I had this yearning for him.
God forgave me, and 28, 29 years have gone by, and I still have perfect peace.
I don't take things personally.
I understand that people can't help themselves.
I learn to speak up, but not to resent.
And that's what they have to do.
The most simple thing in life to do is to forgive.
Once you do that, you can become a free man or a free woman.
But people get concerned, I think, about the question of forgiveness and say, okay, if the parent is still abusive, doesn't forgiveness mean that you're laying yourself open and vulnerable to continue to be exploited or abused in some manner?
No, it's not like that at all.
Once you forgive, you then have the power to protect yourself.
True power is in forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not a weakness.
It's a power. It's an authority over your enemy, whomever it might be.
And so once they forgive their parents, they can then deal with their parents in the proper way.
They can speak up. They can say yes and no when they need to.
They could be around them or not be around them.
They have the choice to do what they want at that point.
But as long as you have that anger, you're subject to whomever you're angry at.
And so a lot of men and women are subject to their, most of the time it's the mother that they resent, and they are subject to their mothers.
And so it doesn't matter where they live, what they do, mama will still control you.
But once you forgive her, she no longer has control over you.
Well, that is a fascinating thing because I am very much about pushing back everything that gets in the way of free choice, of free will, of self-responsibility.
And one thing that I really dislike in myself and in other people as well, which is not always a good thing, but one thing that I react strongly to...
Is this idea that if you're around someone who pushes your buttons, you know, like you ever see those old videos of like these guys in China doing this typing on this wall of like they're just pushing buttons all over the place or like the old switchboard operators from way back in the day, right?
That if you're around someone who's pushing your buttons, you don't really have free will because you're just reacting.
You know, it's like people shooting arrows at you.
All you're doing is you're dodging.
You don't actually get to choose where you're going.
You're only reacting to what you want to avoid.
That's right. Well, you cannot, you cannot, cannot, it's impossible to control a man or a woman who does not have anger.
But a man or woman or a child or whomever who has anger, you can control them.
You can make them feel good or you can make them feel bad.
You can pick them up and let them down.
You can absolutely control an angry person, but you cannot control a person, a man or woman, who does not have the spirit of anger inside of them.
And that way you can make your own choices.
But when you have anger, It's impossible to do what you really want to do because with parents, for example, if you don't do what they want to do, especially the mother, the fathers normally don't do this, but the mother can make you feel guilty.
I did this for you.
I'm your mother.
I had you. I carried you for nine months.
Right. Look what you did to my hips.
And if you have that guilt, she can control you.
But if you have forgiven them, you have no guilt.
They cannot control you.
You do what you want.
As a matter of fact, two quick examples.
I'm counseling with a man right now who is about 58, 59 years old.
And he had wanted to move away from his mother for years.
And every time he tried to move, she would make him feel guilty.
And I warned him when he was very young, you need to get away from her now, otherwise she's going to kill your soul.
He allowed her to manipulate, manipulate, and manipulate him, and now he's in his late 50s, and he's stuck with her, and he hates his mother with a passion.
And because of that anger, he cannot get away from her.
And on the other hand, there's a young man who was in his 30s who his mother controlled him and made him feel guilty and made him stay home with her.
And he heard about me.
He called me up and told me what was going on.
And I said to him, forgive your mother for worshiping.
What she's done to you.
She cannot help herself.
It's wrong, but she can't help it.
Forgive her. And he went and forgave her.
He told her, you know, Mom, I resented you.
You've always been trying to manipulate my life and control me.
I've become something to you.
I'm just like you, emotional and doubtful and have fear.
But I realize I'm wrong for being angry at you because it's that anger that connects him to her.
And once he apologized for being angry, We're good to go.
And I think this is really true, Jesse, for the sons of single moms.
Because my experience has been...
Well, tell me what you think.
But my experience has been that the sons of single moms often get promoted into a kind of pseudo-husband.
And, you know, the mother-child bond should diminish over time because you grow up and, you know, you become closer in age to your mom.
You're both adults and so on.
But that kind of, you know, you grow into a sort of kind of half...
Kid, half, husband role.
That's really, really tough for a lot of men to get away from.
And also because the mom then invests so much into that pseudo-husband relationship.
She bypasses other relationships and then you're like the only person who will hang out with her.
And then if you go, she's like got no social life.
And it really, I think it's kind of claustrophobic for a lot of people.
And I think that shows up around Christmas as well.
You're absolutely right, man.
It's so sad. I've seen that over and over and over again.
It's a horrible way to live.
When I was growing up, my grandparents, especially my grandmother, she told me that we're going to teach you the Word, we're going to be a good example for you, and at 18 years old, you're out of here.
And they would just remind me, okay, 18 years old, you're out of here.
And I'm like, where am I going?
I'm like, where am I going?
And they said, well, I don't know, and I don't care.
You're out of here. But I know where you ain't going, which is down to the kitchen for some food.
That's right. And so when I turned 18...
I graduated from high school in May.
I turned 18.
I graduated that summer.
I moved to Indiana.
I got a job, and I wanted to come back to California, so I got a job.
I worked for two weeks, made a paycheck, moved out to California on my own, and I've been here ever since.
And I'm so grateful that they prepared me that way.
They taught me to work, taught me how to save some money, taught me how to treat others, and I've been able to survive in California.
I left home at 18 years old.
They did not addict me to them.
And I see that happening with a lot of mothers right now.
The sons, they are addicted to their mothers and they feel guilty when they have to leave because she has turned it into like a husband and wife relationship.
And the only way they're going to get away, they're going to have to forgive her.
Well, and it's kind of claustrophobic for both people.
The mother is losing opportunities to move on with her life.
The son is losing opportunities.
And I also think, too, like you get a quality woman around you, and you kind of got that weird Hamlet bond with your mom that's kind of like the umbilical has kind of turned into a slow noose that's choking off your earways.
You get a quality woman around that.
She looks at that relationship, and she says, I think, to the man, or she says to herself about the man, Well, I'm going to get involved with this man.
He's basically wrapped around his mother's legs for the rest of his life, which means I can't win in any conflict, which means I'm not going to have authority in the marriage.
So, nice guy, great conversationalist, a bit too on the mama's aprons, I gotta keep moving.
And it really does reduce opportunities for both people to find quality partners moving forward.
I highly recommend women that runs into those type of guys, whenever you run into a mama's boy, go the other way.
Because it's not going to work.
It just cannot work.
The mother's going to be too involved.
The man is going to be too weak to keep his mother out of the relationship.
And it's just not going to work.
So don't even get tied up in that kind of relationship.
It's a waste of time.
It really, really is.
I've seen it over and over and over again.
Find a man that's independent, who is free to speak up, can make his own decision, that you have a better chance of having a good, long-lasting relationship.
But if he's a mama's boy...
And eventually, if he's a mama's boy, it's not going to work.
And even if he should get away from his mother a little bit, he's going to become your son.
He and that woman will develop a mother and son relationship.
It's like that. You know that song, Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss?
It's like, meet the new mom, same as the old mom.
I think that can be rough.
Now, it's interesting too because I can really tell pretty quickly when I meet people, and I think this is why we get along so well, but I can really tell people pretty quickly if they were either encouraged or took their independence early versus the people who are kind of hanging out, they make bad decisions, they move back home.
Half of people in their 20s are now living with their parents again, and this incredibly delayed Adulthood.
It really does cause people's spiritual strength to atrophy.
It's like being out in space, you know, like your bones and your muscles just start dissolving no matter what you do.
And I think that is really, really tough for people.
It becomes a kind of addiction, you know, how people get dependent on government money, they get dependent...
house to go to the small apartment, even though the small apartment would be theirs.
They kind of want to hang on to all of the nice stuff that the parents have.
And again, that's the kind of thing where a quality woman or man comes along, sees that kind of person.
It's like, well, I don't know if I could really compete with that at this point in my life.
That's right.
I totally agree.
Men and now young women, once you turn 18 or 19, you need to move out on your own.
You need those tough challenges.
You need those experiences to cause you to grow.
You need the situations.
I remember at one point when I moved to California, things got a little rough for me.
I moved into a motel because I couldn't afford a hotel or anything.
But I moved into a motel, and it had so many roaches in there that I'm sure I had some for meals and breakfast, lunch, and dinner at times.
But I was grateful, and I was in my early 20s, and I was grateful for that because I was on my own.
I had my own place.
I was working my own job.
I couldn't afford to get the kind of I had an appointment that I had wanted at the time, so I had to go through that.
And those challenges helped to make me who I am today.
Whenever you have suffering in your life, If you relax in that suffering and don't complain about it, don't worry about it, but allow yourself to just go through it, you become a better man or woman.
You become independent.
You feel better about yourself because it brings out the best in you.
You can see your way clear, but if you don't allow yourself to go through hard times or through suffering, you're right.
You become a wheat jello kind of a person.
Well, I think that wisdom is just suffering plus self-reflection plus time.
Like, if you add enough time to suffering, it usually turns into comedy.
Like, you were talking about the roaches.
I don't know if you ever had this. I had an apartment when I was younger where you would turn on the stove And the roaches would all like run inside the dials of the...
And you know, I've never been a leaner human being because every time I'd want to cook something, the roaches would be all over the place and be like, okay, I'm not hungry because I don't know what's laid eggs where.
I don't have enough money to eat out.
I'm just going to stay lean.
And it's like even that kind of suffering, you know, is one of the reasons I didn't end up accumulating a lot of body fat.
It's like every time I turn on the stove, there'd be roaches everywhere.
Okay, I'm not going to eat.
I can't take it.
That is totally amazing, man.
I know exactly what you mean.
And I tell my roaster a lot to the young guys.
You have to go through that.
I remember sleeping and I would feel the roasters crawling on me sometime at night and just, you know, I had to knock them off.
Did you put the stuff in your ears so they wouldn't crawl in your ears?
Because I read these stories. I think it was in New York.
Some kid got roaches or something, and the antennae was waving over the inner ear, causing this huge, horrible jet engine sound.
So I'd go to bed with stuff in my ears just to keep the bugs out.
It's like, oh man, this is a hard way to make a living.
I find myself quite ambitious at the moment.
That's right. Well, I didn't put this thing in my ears, but I did.
I went through that whole process of dealing with the roaches.
And whenever I would meet a girl, I would never bring her to the hotel room because I did not, the motel room, I did not want her to see what I was going through.
We would have to go to a cafe or take a walk in the park and do something different.
But that lasted for about six months or so, maybe a year, but six months or so.
And I made it through that.
And I have to tell you, I have no regrets about going through that at all.
I was determined to make it in California.
I didn't want to go back home.
I wasn't going back because I had been trained on your own.
You know, my family didn't have a lot of money, so I couldn't borrow money.
And I made it through that, man.
I worked hard. I learned to save my money.
And I finally got an apartment, one-bedroom apartment on my own, and one thing just led to another one.
And I really, really encourage young men and women to do that today, and especially young men.
And young men, unless there's some Some type of serious emergency has no business of staying home at 18.
Once he finished high school, if he's going to school, once he turned 18, he can get a job.
He can find a little room somewhere to live in and just start growing through those situations.
A mother and a father, or a mother of a single mother, should not allow her son to stay home once he turned 18.
And let it be known, you cannot come back.
Now, you can come and visit, but you cannot move back in.
And he would develop that mindset, and she would never have to worry about him again.
Well, I also became a vegetarian for quite some time because the only room I could afford was next to an abattoir.
And the smell and the sounds and the...
Oh, it was just... It was horrifying.
But cheap. You know, it's one of these rooms where you go, wow, this is a really, really great price.
I'm a good negotiator.
And then you move in and a week or two later, it's like...
Oh, that's why.
That's why nobody wanted this room.
Well, I'm stuck here now because I can't afford anything else.
And it is important to get that kind of self-reliance going.
And to know that you can survive hardship makes you less anxious.
Makes you less anxious because, you know, you could be dropped in a foreign city in a language you didn't speak.
You'd find some way to make it work.
And it just makes you less anxious.
I find the people who grow up, you know, they call them the bubble-wrapped kids, you know, that the kids are all just covered in bubble wrap and Don't do anything dangerous, which again, I think is father absence.
Fathers encourage their kids to take risks.
Two great services.
Once I made it through the roasting, I had always wanted to have a brand new apartment.
I wanted to live in an apartment where no one had lived before.
And I finally was able to get a brand new apartment.
It had the bedroom upstairs where you could look over the balcony down into the living room.
And it was so nice.
And I was about 23, 24.
And it was so nice.
And then I had been taught that a man should, at 25, he should buy a home.
Get married and start his family if he wanted a family.
And so when I turned 25, this is so true.
When I turned 25, I woke up that morning and I said, hey, I'm 25 years old today.
I got to go out and buy a house.
I want my home. I have to get me a home.
I had no money.
You know, I had some, but not enough to...
To get a house, but my mindset was that I was going to get one.
I never doubted for a second that I wasn't going to get a home at 25.
So I went out and I introduced myself to a realtor, a black woman, a realtor, and I told her, look, I'm 25 years old today.
I need to get a house.
Can you help me? And she said, well, how much money do you have to put down?
I said, none. But I want this house.
And so she said, okay.
She signed me up and she started showing me different homes that, you know, maybe I could get.
And one day I walked into a house.
It was just what I wanted.
And I said to her, this is my home.
This is the house I'm going to get.
And she said, okay, let me talk to the seller, find out what the deal is.
And the seller was looking for someone to just take over the payments.
No money down, just take over the payments because they were losing their home and they want, you know, bad credit.
And I said, right on.
And so we signed the dotted line.
At 25, I got my first home.
And I ended up giving the seller, later on when I saved up more money, I gave the seller about $2,000 to show my appreciation.
But because of my mindset, and I had no doubt, and I had been trained and taught that way growing up, I bought my first home when I was 25 years old.
Wow. Oh yeah, and I got my first real job when I was completely out of money, and I just phoned around, and I'm like, you know, I mean, because nothing spells concentration like knowing that you have no place to live if you don't make rent, and you just make your phone calls, and you beg, you plead, you cajole you, you know, like, I mean, you really act as an agent in your own life, you're no longer reacting, those kind of extremities really give you a sense of purpose.
And I think for a lot of people, and I don't know if it's this bubble wrapped childhood thing, or maybe the father absence, but I think Christmas for a lot of people, let me know what you think, though, Jesse, but I think Christmas for a lot of people brings about a certain feeling of spiritual emptiness and, you know, they stuff themselves up with food or sex or, you know, other materialistic pursuits.
Because when you have this sort of rich Christian life around you, the carols, which remind me so much of church as a child and so on, I think people feel empty around Christmas because there is, in a sense, in the air a Such a depth of spiritual meaning and history that they've let go of.
And I think it gets highlighted a lot, like you don't see the shadow until the light comes on.
I totally agree. That's why I encourage people, they should always be working on themselves.
The most powerful thing you can do is to know thyself.
And when you know yourself, it's the beginning of knowing your relationship with God.
It's the beginning of returning back to peace.
And so if you're constantly, without freaking out or overly doing it, if you're constantly aware of yourself and dealing with life in the right way, when Christmas time comes, you won't feel spiritually lost or lonely.
You will be fulfilled within and the rest of the world, rest of the world.
Rest of life will fall in place for you.
But if you don't do that during the, you know, the year, at the end of the year, when the light, as you said, the light shine on you, you can see that you're empty.
I, you know, I have to get up every morning at 4 a.m.
because I do my radio and TV show at 6 a.m.
from 6 to 9 Pacific time.
So I get up every morning.
I have my quiet prayer.
You know, I take my time and get ready, meet the producer.
We go over the show.
But I put seeking prayer.
The Kingdom of God first.
Seek God in His right way before I do anything else.
And it's just been so rewarding in my life in so many ways because I put that first.
I love God with all my heart, soul, and might, along with nothing else.
I love my neighbor as myself.
I have no resentment, no anger toward anyone, even my worst enemies.
I feel the same way about my enemy as I do my friend because I have no resentment.
And as a result of that, I have a full life.
My life is great because it started from within rather than without.
And my life is not based on anything physically.
That I have or don't have.
It's not based on friendships, because friends come and go.
But it's based on being fulfilled within.
I have no fear. I have no doubt.
I have no worry.
Within my soul, I have perfect peace.
And that's where my real joy comes from.
And so if someone makes me a promise, that's nice.
If they keep their promises, Promise, that's nice.
Or if they don't, that's nice.
Because it's based on from within and not without.
I know a lot of people say that, but I'm serious.
If you get to know yourself and don't resent what you see about yourself, you can become a whole person or a free person or have perfect peace.
And I have absolute perfect peace.
And I go through a lot in life, but it's not personal.
Okay, so I love what you said there about you wake up and you pray, that your day has a shape and a purpose.
People look at successful people like yourself, and I don't think they understand that very little about success is accidental.
It has to be thought about.
You have to say, okay, how am I going to shape my day?
What is my goal? What is my larger purpose?
This day of this hour, this day, this week, this month, this year, this decade, this life as a whole.
And if I, you know, I'll let you take it from here, but I think that what people could really stand to hear is don't just live a life where you get up and just do stuff, you know?
Like, don't just live a life where you're kind of in a hamster wheel, just going through the days, like you're just photocopying these days and a decade goes by, you look back and you can't tell anything apart except when you fell asleep on a beach in Jamaica.
And so the only thing you can remember about your life is escaping from it, you know?
And so how do people...
Get a sense of a larger purpose.
How do you know if you succeed in life, if all you're doing is surviving?
There's no way to actually know.
What is it that you do that helps generate a sense of success and satisfaction that you think people are often missing out on?
I highly, and a very good question by the way, I highly recommend, as I've done for the last 27 years for men and women, boys and girls around the world, that you put prayer first.
I even made a silent prayer on my website, rebuildingtheman.com.
And when you download that, what you do, you get up in the morning, the first thing I do is have my silent prayer.
Just be still and know God so that I would know His will for me, that He would guide me through the day.
And whatever He has for me, I'm able to see and do.
I put that first.
And then I go through my day being aware of what I'm doing and not complaining and being, you know, I have a great appreciation for everything that happens in my life.
And so when my life is well, I'm already well because I have an appreciation for whatever's going on.
I don't call it good or bad, you know, if things seem tough.
I'm okay with that because that's what I need in that moment.
And if things are easy, I'm okay with that because that's what I need in that moment.
I move that way. And then at the end of the day, I have that silent prayer before I go to bed because I want to show my appreciation for that day.
And then I want to have a restful sleep.
Because when you're sleeping, you need, because our battle is a spiritual battle, we wrestle against good and evil all the time.
Even when you're sleeping, you need the spirit of what is right to watch over you and guide you through your sleep.
And so I make sure I have that silent prayer beforehand.
Going to bed at night.
And I sleep like a baby every night.
Doesn't matter what I've gone through.
And even when I travel and I get to maybe the hotel late at night or have to get up early in the morning, I still make time to have that prayer because I want God's will to be done in my life and not my will.
And so because I know His will, His plan for me is already laid out.
And so I want His light to guide me.
And so that's why I keep that connection with Him by making sure I have that quiet prayer time before my day is started and at the end of my day.
So if you see Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson at an airport and he's kneeling, do not interrupt him.
When he's done, I'm sure he'd love to chat with you, but do not interrupt him because that's how you build a purpose-driven life.
And so many people, they just react to what's happening.
They react to their emotions. They react to other people.
They react to good news and bad news.
and they really are out of control of their own inner state.
And if you all, all you are, this is sort of an old analogy, but you know, like the pinball from the, when we were kids, you know, like the ding, ding, ding, the pinball just bouncing around off these bumpers and so on.
If you know yourself and you're willing to be the author of your own destiny, then you can have a life where you get the satisfaction of knowing whether you've succeeded or failed professionally.
But if all you're doing is reacting, all you're doing is surviving, and you're barely better than an animal.
The worst thing you can do, and there are many worst things, but the worst thing that you can do in your own life is to overreact.
Because every time you overreact, you lose.
No matter what it is that you're overreacting to.
But when you can learn to be still and go through the situation, then you grow.
To stillness cause you to grow, the overreaction destroys you.
It brings on fear and doubt.
It brings on everything, sickness and diseases.
But when you can be still through a situation, not take it personally and don't overreact to it, you can overcome and life is amazing.
And you're so right.
I wish... That people understood, and I hope that they do what you and I are talking about.
Stop overreacting.
Allow yourself to go through it.
Speak up, but don't resent, and you cannot fail.
And then you're developing the life that is inside of you, given to you by God, and it's better than anything that you can ever imagine.
Yes, amen to that. Stop overreacting, stop being hysterical, and stop believing that the Russians hacked the election.
All right. Well, thanks very much, Dr.
Peterson, sorry, Jesse Lee Peterson and Reverend Peterson.
A fantastic conversation, a very, very Merry Christmas to you and yours, and I'm sure we'll talk again in the new year.
Thank you so much and Merry Christmas to you and your family and everyone who's listening to the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jack.
Jack Posobiec, a writer, filmmaker, political operative, and the author of Citizens for Trump, the inside story of the people's movement to take back America.
He is, what, Europe at the moment?
And you can also find him on Twitter.com forward slash Jack Posobiec.
That's P-O-S-O-B-I-E-C. We'll put the links to those below, Jack.
Thank you for taking the time from your honeymoon to have a chat with us about Christmas.
Devin, thank you so much for having me on right now.
And I also, of course, thank my wife, the lovely Sonia Tay, for giving me about 30 minutes or so here to be able to sit down and chat with you.
We are in the middle of our honeymoon.
We just finished up. We spent about a week in Israel.
We got to be there while President Trump actually named Jerusalem the capital of Israel, basically unanimously.
And, of course, too much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
And now we're over in Europe, so we just finished up a couple days in Poland, and we're in Vienna right now.
Wow, what a tour.
So I guess the greatest Christmas present, you got married pretty recently.
When was it? Just one month ago in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, pretty much my hometown outside of Philly.
Oh, that's fantastic. And how are you enjoying married life so far?
It's great, to be honest.
It's everything that I've hoped for, and it's funny because, you know, you always hear in, especially in media, right, there's these stories about, like, oh, we're not supposed to like marriage, or marriage is terrible, and, you know, the old ball and chain, and marriage ruins your life, and that whole joke about, well, your life's over now, buddy.
I haven't really experienced that because my wife literally is my best friend.
I mean, that would be like the old cliche, but...
We have a great time.
We're just going on adventures.
We haven't stopped moving since.
I think we haven't really slept a lot.
Because we're exploring.
I should add. Because we're exploring so much of Europe.
Exploring. I think you've said enough there.
We're trying to keep it clean here.
Whatever you're doing with your spelunking gear is entirely between you and your wife.
And it's a funny thing, too, because I don't know if it was the case with you, Jack, but when I was growing up, You heard a lot of crabbing about marriage from married people, you know, and oh, you know, the toilet seat is left up and, you know, all this petty crap and nonsense and detritus and so on.
And it's like, man, marriage is like the greatest thing ever.
And I really sort of felt when I got married that I had joined the great chain of civilization and the great chain of being.
And, you know, they say, well, it's just a piece of paper and so on.
I did not find that to be the case at all.
It was... An adult, mature commitment for the rest of her life to create a haven for the safe upbringing of children and the support in better and, for worse, in sickness and in health until death do you part.
That's some serious stuff.
That's some dark magic of commitment, and there just doesn't seem to be any other way to get it.
Because, actually, on our wedding day, that was...
I don't even think I've mentioned this, you know, to anybody before, but...
I remember thinking to myself, wow, this is your wedding day, Jack.
This is the day that you are going to be doing something that, you know, everyone else throughout history has got married, you know, eventually got set up to have their family, have kids.
We absolutely want kids.
And this is it. You know, this is your history.
So you're moving. It's a generational thing.
You know, my father was there. My mother was there.
But that is a historic thing in terms of my life.
But creating, you know, actual human history that day as well.
Well, and it is a public declaration to everyone to say, don't let us screw it up.
You know, like if you're going out, like your boyfriend, girlfriend, and so on, it's like, well, you know, maybe it's going to work out.
But if you go to people and say, I don't think it's working out, they're like, hey, you know, whatever makes you happy, you're just boyfriend, girlfriend.
But when you stand there in front of everyone and you make that public thunderclap of commitment, till death do us part, you're basically telling everyone, if we drift...
Hurt us back together. We are making this commitment, so we need the community to help support and respect and reinforce what it is that we're doing.
And it really is an invitation to an entire community to keep you at your word and to make sure that you stay together.
And that's a beautiful thing. Absolutely.
And it's great, too, because, you know, we talk about the culture wars and, of course, the culture war we find ourselves in these days.
And it's like, Here's one of the most traditional and it used to be considered normal things you could do to young people just getting married and saying they love each other, wanting to have a regular monogamous relationship.
But oh no, the forces of progressivism and the SJWs can't and the cultural Marxists, they can't have any of that.
This flies in the face of their whole program.
And how are you enjoying the leveling up of the patriarchy that you are now experiencing?
Now that your hands, your ass, your legs are humming with the electrical X-Men power of the patriarchy, how are you finding it?
It's interesting, you know, there's times where I don't realize the level of my own power.
Sometimes I have to, you know, kind of, when I'm talking to women, and of course, you know, they obey my every command.
It's interesting when they just sort of, you know, bend to my will.
But, you know, sometimes you just have to kind of sit back and say, I'm a man, I deserve this.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's amazing.
Beds get made, sandwiches magically appear, feet get rubbed.
It's all exactly what the SJWs think it is as soon as you get married.
And of course, you know, the reality is that as a man, you are, when you get married, particularly if you're going to end up having children, you are saying, well, I'm going to be the shelter, the protector, and the provider.
For this family unit from here to kingdom come, it is really, in a sense, a public commitment of service rather than it is an accumulation of penis-based power.
And I think it's pretty hard for people to accept that.
No, I think it is, too, because, you know, in our relationship, we're both Christian.
We're both pretty traditional.
And we sort of do follow those normal traditional roles in terms of the marriage.
You know, I always kind of say that, you know, I'm driving the ship, but I'm a Navy guy, so I always talk about, you know, naval references.
So I would say I'm driving the ship, but the ship wouldn't be running if it wasn't for her.
And that's kind of the roles that seem to fit so well for us.
And you look at these are the same roles that have been thousands of years in Western civilization and human civilization writ large.
So, how did you meet the woman who became your wife, and how long did you date before you really began to get the sense that this was it?
She was the one. We actually met at a Bible study organized in Washington, D.C., area.
My uncle is involved with them.
He had invited me on, and one of her friends that she used to work with had invited her.
And it was probably the second one I'd gone to, I think third or fourth for her.
So we were both part of that Bible study for about a few weeks after we'd met.
It was the first time we started dating.
But even from that first moment, we had a really, really big spark.
And it actually came from, of all things, so one of our partner Bible studies is in Beijing, China, and they're one of the They call them house churches there because Christianity is extremely persecuted in China.
So what they'll do is they'll pipe in over Skype, much like we're doing right now, and they'll actually have a way to interact with the Bible service throughout what's going on just live there.
And because it was in Beijing, I have to speak Mandarin Chinese, I still live over there, and I was doing a little bit of translation for it.
Well, along comes This girl, Tanya, young, blonde, whatever.
And she starts speaking Chinese, too, to the people over in Beijing.
And I look at her like she's got two heads.
I mean, I've never met someone else who could do that.
Well, it turns out that she learned Mandarin on her own while she was in school.
And then spent some time doing a study abroad over there.
And from that moment, it just clicked because there was so much we had in common in so many different random seemingly ways.
And then from that moment, I'd say we dated for about two and a half years until we got engaged.
And then six months after that, we got married.
So, wait, Bible study, is that similar to Tinder?
Is that an app? No, I'm just kidding.
No, people always ask me that.
I'm serious. People constantly, they're like, is that an app?
Is that like mingled?
It's kind of an old app.
Kind of a hard copy old app.
No, we sit around.
It's at Tom's house.
We have finger foods. Pastor is there.
There's a guitar. It's usually...
Regular thing. And then, of course, because I live in the Beltway, then they look at you, oh, you're one of those.
They sort of get really scared, you know.
And it's funny because if I had said, oh, well, we met at one of these flesh markets, you know, like one of these bars with the one-night stands and, you know, extremely alcohol-fueled dating scene, that's perfectly fine for the millennial crowd, the Jet Set crowd in D.C. But if you say, well, no, we just met at a Bible study and then we We went out for a few dinners and we started dating.
That's craziness. It's weird how the sort of elites, the political and cultural elites, how foreign basic Christianity has become to them.
Like you say, oh yes, I met my wife at Bible study.
I think they genuinely think something like, ah!
So after two and a half years and passing the monkey brain test at the Council of Elders, her father gave you the key to her chastity belt and you made love to her through a sheet with a hole in it.
Like they genuinely have no cultural or philosophical or theological understanding of the very ideas that kind of helped shape Western civilization at its core.
Exactly. So you talked to them about that and you tried to set it up and I really don't push it very hard in my work.
In terms of what I do in my video or what I'm doing on Twitter, every once in a while I'll bring it up if it comes up in a relevant sense.
But I really think that mentioning it every once in a while, they say, oh, by the way, I'm Christian.
But then showing by example, it can be a lot more persuasive to people than when you're constantly beating them over the head with religion or doctrine.
And I get that. I totally get that.
But at the same time, it's me saying, hey, Just look at how I live my life.
Number one, as a personal decision, I don't drink alcohol.
We live a very healthy lifestyle.
We are monogamous.
We're together with each other. And for better or worse, we absolutely do love each other.
We spend almost every minute of the day together when we're not working.
And I've never had a problem.
I mean, we have our little...
Our moments. I mean, life isn't perfect.
No two humans are ever going to agree on everything, but we really do get along extremely well.
We travel. This is our third time in Europe this year.
We've been blessed to be able to come over many times, both for work and now for honeymoon.
Of course, since I'm doing some work on the honeymoon, I'm able to declare it as a work trip for tax purposes for the business.
It's amazing to just show people that And to be living through it this way in sort of the reality TV way that we all sort of live each other's lives now.
And so I take it as kind of a responsibility to show, and I know that in my audience, you know, I've got people that are watching that are saying, hey, we want you to succeed.
So I want my marriage to succeed because I obviously want to have a strong family, but also because I want to be able to be someone that people can point to and say, you know what, I'm not like that guy, but...
He's trying to do the right thing with his marriage.
He's trying to do the right thing with his wife.
Maybe that's something that I could do to find happiness in this world, too.
It's funny, too, because a lot of people think that freedom in relationships has to do with a lack of commitment.
But in my experience, Jack, and I want to know what you think about this, the real freedom in relationships, the real freedom in marriage is knowing that you have that ironclad commitment to be together, which means you can be free to disagree.
You can have strong disagreements knowing that it's not going to break the bond.
Lots of people, you have friends, and it's like, well...
Or on early dates, you've got to put your best foot forward and so on.
Maybe you're faking it a little bit and so on.
But when you have that commitment that you know is going to be there for life, you can truly be yourself, and you can truly allow for disagreements to manifest and to be dealt with, knowing for certain that nothing you do is going to break the bond in any foundational way.
And for the people, like myself when I was younger, who thought that there was freedom...
In a lack of commitment, you will find that when you have that commitment, you are more free to be yourself than you could have a dream of in transitory relationships.
Oh, my goodness. When I was single, you know, I look back at that, and the dating scene, it's terrible.
You don't want to be in it, especially in Washington, D.C., where, you know, one wrong move, and I hear this with people.
I used to be in the military, so I hear it all the time.
One wrong move, one wrong tech message, wrong...
Misunderstood communication and suddenly you're getting hit with sexual harassment complaints.
You're getting hit with, oh, I have consent issues.
You're getting hit with all sorts of stuff.
So you're putting yourself in a place where you're thinking, is it okay to go out with this person?
And then when you do go out with them, you're trying to constantly show this best side of yourself because you're trying to win them over.
But in this case, because we have our ironclad commitment, because we have committed to each other heart, mind, and soul, that we know we're together now.
We can have arguments. We can disagree.
We're actually just out to dinner before this interview.
We're talking about it. We saw a couple sitting Not too far from us, a couple tables over.
And we could tell that it was one of their first dates, and we were sort of joking and sort of like analyzing their first date and saying, oh, this guy, you know, he looks pretty nervous, but, you know, he's kind of talking a little bit too quickly and telling a story a little bit too animatedly to make her seem interested.
And she was kind of going along with it.
But then they got to this point where they had an awkward silence.
Man, he was looking into his drink, and he was sort of stirring it, and she was sort of scratching the back of the neck, looking around.
You know, and I turned to her and I said, It's amazing that when you find somebody you have that commitment with, the silence doesn't become awkward anymore.
That you can be together and just be happy in that moment, knowing that you're together.
I can talk, but there are times when we're together and we're not talking, but we're perfectly at contentment.
Right. And sorry, for those who are watching, I do apologize for Jack's bandwidth.
It's actually not a bandwidth issue.
He's just practicing his ventriloquism.
So I just wanted to mention that.
Now, what are you guys going to be doing for Christmas this year?
Your first Christmas together as a married couple.
It's a wonderful time. It is our first Christmas.
So we are most likely going to be going to celebrate it with my parents up in Philadelphia.
So I've got my parents there, my brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, they're all there.
Her family is all over still in Europe.
So we'll usually Skype in with them or do a video with them to be able to say Merry Christmas kind of at the same time.
Right.
And, well, I guess you can't really say what you've got for your wife, but are you looking forward to you?
Do you think you've bagged the perfect present?
Do you think it's going to be like tears of joy?
She is going to be so incredibly happy come December 25th this morning.
Excellent. Now, what was it like for you when you were growing up in terms of Christmas and family time?
Very traditional in terms of, you know, we had the tree.
We had my mom, my dad, my little brother.
You know, we were Catholic.
Growing up, so Midnight Mass, and then my father, and it's great that he, even before the age of the internet and Periscope and live streaming and YouTube and everything, he always had the video camera act.
So I have my own memories of Christmas, but I've also got videos of just about every single Christmas for my entire life.
My dad would set up the camera in the living room there, And just sort of we go throughout our day and we've cut VHS tapes of it and we've now converted it over to DVDs and we've got digital versions and it's amazing.
I'm so glad that we have them that I can go back and look at my dad just sort of pulling me around in the wheelbarrow on my first, or I guess a wagon, on my first Christmas and then my brother comes along with the presents and then We would always go forward to, we always sort of had like three or four different Christmases.
So we'd start Christmas at my house and then it would be lunch at once with one side of the family on my dad's side and then maybe dinner with my mom's side or, you know, one iteration thereof.
But always really big in terms of interaction with our extended family outside of the nuclear family.
Oh, very nice. Very nice indeed.
And what do you do for New Year's?
Are you going to be going out?
Are you staying in? What's your New Year's plans?
It depends. We've got a lot of events that people are actually talking about for this year.
A lot of different Trump-related or MAGA movement type events happening.
One, it's in D.C. Another one's getting off the bat in New York, so we might actually be going to one of those.
I'm looking at it right now because I haven't actually mentioned it to her yet.
She's like, we're doing what now?
Yeah. But we're going with the president where?
Yeah. We might be doing one of those political events for New Year's this year, but hopefully it's more a party and social get-together with the politics, kind of as the reason why we've all come together, but really something that we're there celebrating.
We're just celebrating life, we're celebrating America, we're celebrating the movement as it is.
Now, for you, coming up, I guess, so retrospective for 2017, what's it been like for you, the highs and lows, and what are you looking forward to most for 2018?
Well, yeah, it's a really not complicated question.
Well, we also have to include the retweet from Trump.
That's got to be kind of a feather in the cap.
That's got to be in there. That's definitely in there.
So, that, I mean, in terms of highs this year, I've It has to be the number one for me.
And personally, professionally speaking, the retreat from Trump was absolutely amazing.
You know, kind of getting in there.
And it was interesting because he doesn't follow me.
He does. And I hadn't seen anyone else really in his circle from the White House spot that had retweeted it before then.
And it was sort of in the wake of the Charlottesville violence.
And I tweeted out why You know, there is a lot of violence there.
Yes, it was true. One person died.
It was terrible. But why are we talking about the...
There were over 50 shootings in Chicago in the same weekend, and it's become almost a litany of shootings in Chicago every weekend with nine homicides at the time.
But no national media outrage.
No discussion about this.
Lives lost. Bodies in the streets.
But we're not talking about that.
I think it retweeted by the president.
So for me, it was suddenly like, It's shocking because this is, take all of it aside and take all the, you know, Donald Trumpism and everything else.
That's the President of the United States reaching down from, you know, the White House and acknowledging you.
And that's pretty...
Pretty amazing for me, having really only started politics on Twitter, at least, in about a year prior to that is when I really got into the game.
And it was definitely a huge feather in a cap.
Of course, the media went completely insane.
And I think the weirdest part of it, though, was so they tried to bring my Navy service up into it after they said, well, the person the president retweeted, he's actually a naval intelligence officer And he's a reservist, and he used to be active duty, so he's a veteran now. And I said, not really sure why that's an issue with you, but I appreciated you putting up all the pictures of me in uniform.
So I didn't quite understand what the issue was with that.
It's like I was trying to hide it or something.
No, it's from there in the bio.
You guys can go read it.
I'm pretty open about it. Oh, it's like when they say, you know, controversial thinker, and it's like, controversial?
Why, thank you very much. I sure as heck would not want to be non-controversial, because that's also called not being a thinker.
So, if the things that they think are insulting, to me, I take as an enormous compliment.
Right, right. You know, conformist and regular Joe.
Completely uninteresting vanilla blatherer, known as right now.
Call me controversial, absolutely.
That's kind of the job if you're a philosopher.
No, that's exactly it.
So why wouldn't we want to shake this up?
So then, of course, they're trying to call the Navy and get the Navy to say, oh, is Jack still in?
Is he doing stuff? And they turned back and said, he wrote something on his Twitter account.
There's nothing against the rules that say he can't do that.
His civilian capacity has nothing to do with this.
We don't have an issue with it.
Well, it's wonderful, sorry to interrupt, but it's wonderful to see the left dealing with the rational priorities and attacking the person who's pointing out how many people are getting killed in the inner city, rather than, say, I don't know, doing something to reduce the number of people getting killed in the inner city.
Correct, because, and I mentioned it before, how I feel that we're in a cultural war right now, and I would argue with anybody who says that we're not, because we just have to call it for what it is.
That's what we're in right now, and there's no way that you can measure 2017 in terms of anything other than the cultural battles that have been waged, whether it be NFL, whether it be military, whether it be all the Russia stuff, married, you know, the marriage stuff.
Violence of the left, all of this.
And it's really interesting because we were talking about retrospective of 2017.
I was going through the year and I was thinking, wow, you really can't think almost of anything that happened in 2017, news speaking, without putting it in terms of Trump.
This person, this one person has found himself at the center of just about everything that goes on in our world today.
And people, you know, the movies come out and they say, what's the movie say about Trump?
What did the director say about Trump?
Why hasn't Taylor Swift talked about Trump yet?
She needs to talk about Trump.
We need to do Taylor Swift's opinion on Trump.
So my question is, why is Trump the definition for everything?
But at the same time, it shows that Incredible amount of power that one individual has, and it's amazing to see him using it so very often for good, so very often for turning back towards traditional American, traditional Western values.
When he went to Poland this year, for example, and I actually have a hand in In teeing up some of the ideas that were used in the Warsaw speech from the president through my work with the Polish-American Coalition for the Trump campaign, that I really thought it was amazing because he was able to talk about religion, he was able to talk about history, and he was able to talk about Western society all together in one direction.
A very special place that's thrown off the shackles of it.
Being Polish, of course, I just loved it.
Because talk about a place that faced socialism, faced communism, and also faced fascism, and have lived through both, so can understand the issues with both extremes, knowing how to live through that, surviving, defeating it, winning their own cultural war, getting their country back.
It really echoes what America is facing today.
I really was able to echo so much of what's going on, including Poland is facing right now with the EU trying to cram migrants down their throat, and Poland will turn around and say, well, we've accepted a million people, refugees from Ukraine, but apparently you guys have an issue with that.
You want us to accept these other refugees because there's something wrong with those refugees, that they weren't the right refugees?
Well, why do you want us to accept those?
And, of course, Merkel is, oh, no, no, no, no, or No, it's not that.
It's not that. Well, it kind of is.
Well, I think, Jack, that's the amazing thing about what's happened with Trump, which is that the left had kind of given up post-1960s.
They'd given up on debating because socialism had failed.
Communism had failed in so many different ways.
And the theoretical underpinnings as to why it was failing had been amply revealed by, you know, von Mises and all of the other Austrian economists.
So they kind of gave up on debating.
And then they just imported people who were going to vote for the left.
They took over the cultural institutions and they spent decades dragging the Overton window to the point where you couldn't discuss anything objective or rational with regards to nationalism or race differences and so on.
And Trump, not directly, but simply through what he was talking about, was able to drag that Overton window back to the point where you can talk about things that before were not possible to talk about, really.
not possible to talk about, really.
And the Internet certainly helped with that.
And the Internet certainly helped with that.
And it is exposing a grave weakness in the left that they simply attempted to stifle debate rather than improve their arguments.
Since debate is back on, largely as a result of Trump, their weaknesses are being exposed, and that makes them very aggressive.
And this is why, you know, there's this violence, there's this Nazis, there's this lock swinging at people and pulling fire alarms and shutting down speeches.
And there's all this violence, because they've lost the capacity for rational debate.
They have been stuffing the ballot with migrants and third worlders.
And this weakness has been exposed.
And this is why it is both a very exciting, but a very perilous time as well.
Because when weakened animals are threatened, or feel threatened, they can really lash out.
So, you know, I urge people to stay strong and stay hardy in this fight, but remember that it can be a very dangerous environment.
I'm certainly seeing that.
Myself being in D.C., I can't go very far without facing Either the violence in the streets from Antifa, groups that have assaulted me, have tried to assault my wife, or other producers that I've been working with at different events, or so that sort of the violence in the streets that's going on.
Then we're also facing more and more now What essentially amounts to a soft coup by, and we use the term de-state a lot, but it's really the unelected bureaucracy that really controls Washington, that is totally institutionalized by the left, that is totally part and parcel of the left, and they are doing everything they can to take out.
Well, I think we're going to talk a little bit about Donald Trump, and we now have these text messages, sort of a window into that world through the FBI, this guy who was having an affair on his wife with one of the other FBI lawyers, and this guy who was in charge of the FBI's investigation into the Clinton email scandal, her classified information that she was leaking out, and then also basically has been put on the task force for Mueller to investigate the president.
And what I find so interesting In these text messages that we're reading between them, they're openly talking about colluding to remove the President of the United States using – they're talking about an insurance policy.
They say we have to stop it.
And it's very interesting because, based on your point there, You talk about how they have no debate.
They don't talk about, well, you know, maybe we can work with him, maybe we can put up some different kind of ideas that he might be interested in or find some kind of compromise.
There's no talk of compromise.
There's no talk of coming to get to the table.
There's no talk of saying, well, the American people voted and now we have this president and it's our duty as We've sworn officers of federal law enforcement to uphold the Constitution and obey the will of the people because that is how our democracy works in this republic.
No! There's none of that.
We have to stop them. We have to shut them down.
And regardless of the risks, we're going to use any means necessary.
So they unleash the full power of the federal law enforcement apparatus that would vastly, of course, you know, as Edward Snowden has showed us, increase under Bush and Obama.
So they use these warrantless firetaps.
They use all sorts of lawfare attempts against him.
And now we're seeing this Mueller investigation.
It's a complete bitch hunt to try to take out the president of the United States.
I was caught up in this in a very small way.
They did take away my security clearance in the Navy.
So a lot of people have talked about that.
I don't even really know why.
I was never actually told why my security clearance was taken away, but it happened around the same time that a lot of Trump supporters saw their clearances taken away or promotions taken away or different assignments.
You know, they were either going to be in the White House and suddenly you're sent over to, you know, Huma, Arizona, you're sent to Alaska, you're sent far, far away.
Nobody can really answer the question why.
And so we see all of this going on because the machine, right, the system, the The left, which has been so in control of these institutions, is really at the idea that they might be faced with an other, that they might be faced with forms that they can't own, can't co-opt, so they have to just strike a climate in terms of that, like a pipeline.
Who would have imagined?
Who would have imagined that when the Republicans controlled the Senate, the House, and the White House, that the only people being investigated are Republicans?
I mean, this is just an astonishing thing.
And it reminds me of this old saying, one of the reasons I was somewhat skeptical about political activism or political action prior to Trump.
It was this old saying, no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.
And that's because there was this idea, I had it before, and I think other people have had it too, that political representatives, like the visible people you vote for, they're just like hood ornaments.
They don't really change the direction of the state.
And here we have one man who's really trying to do that, who's really trying to wrestle the wheel from pretty sinister forces.
And yeah, in my view, a man needs a lot of support.
And he can't do it alone any more than any of us can do it alone.
And the degree to which we can all band together to reveal the truth to people, to bring the facts to the eyes of the people, is the degree to which we really can save everything our ancestors fought and suffered so hard to accumulate.
That's absolutely it.
This is a huge turn back to the way things, quote-unquote, used to be.
I mean, his slogan, highly persuasive, make America great again.
The reason that makes so much sense is because people believe in this ideal of sort of the Norman Rockwell version of America.
They want that version of America.
And then, of course, the left will go back and, well, it wasn't exactly like that.
There were issues back then.
We didn't have this labor law.
We didn't have that labor law. We had, you know, this issue, that issue with women in the workforce.
And, okay, we have those things, and those are great, and the values that we have today are great, too.
But at the same time, there are some ironclad underpinnings of our civilization that have been eroded Or in some cases deliberately subverted that now we have an actual chance to take back or bring back or simply say, you know what? It's okay.
It's okay to have those things.
It's okay to want to get married and have kids.
It's okay to want to be able to defend yourself, to defend your family.
It's okay to say, I don't think we should invade that country over there that has nothing to do with us, and I don't want my kids or my friends to go over there.
It's okay to say those sort of things, because as a country, we used to say that sort of stuff.
We said it about Vietnam, but suddenly after Iraq, oh, no, no, no, no, after 9-11, well, Iraq, Afghanistan, we've got to go there, we've got to go there.
I know we have people in Niger and Sudan and Somalia, all over the world, and nobody really is sitting back and asking the question, or at least they're starting to now, I guess.
Why do we have all of these troops?
Why are we fighting everywhere?
Why are we in Syria?
Why are we in these places?
Why can't we just take care of our own problems, take care of our own infrastructure, our own issues, our own debt, and let the rest of the world deal with their own issues?
That's right. Peace on earth and goodwill to all.
Well, thanks very much for your time, Jack.
I want to give you huge congratulations on your marriage.
It sounds like you guys are going to be happy forever, and that's a wonderful and beautiful thing.
Thank you so much for your time, taking time off for your honeymoon.
Man, that's taking a bullet for the old course, and have yourselves a very, very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, my friend.
Thanks so much, Stefan.
Same to you and the whole crew.
We are back with a good friend, Kaya Jones, a platinum recording artist and was one of the lead singers for the Pussycat Dolls who sold over 15 million albums and 40 million singles worldwide.
I just wanted to mention, if it's Christmas and there is a Christmas sing off, I'm on Kaya's team and no one else is doing it.
Just wanted to mention that right up front.
No subs. Since leaving the group, Kaya has published several successful albums, including Confessions of a Hollywood Doll, Kaya, Rise of the Phoenix, the Crystal Neria album, and What the Heart Doesn't Know, kayajones.com and twitter.com forward slash kayajones.
Thanks so much for taking the time today.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I'm excited. So Christmas, Christmas growing up, I gotta imagine there was quite a bit of singing and music and all kinds of good stuff, so let's hear a bit about your Christmas history.
There really wasn't. No one in my family can sing.
Really? Nobody.
So basically you stole everyone's singing ability.
That's very Grinchy of you.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know what that was.
Nobody sings.
Wow. And so what was it like for you growing up?
Christmas, the good, the high, the low.
It doesn't all have to be, you know, good stuff.
Some Christmas can be challenging for some families as well.
But what was it like for you? Yeah, we traveled a lot growing up because my mom was a single mom and she was a graphic designer.
So it was wherever her accounts were.
So we traveled a lot. And then there was like right around, I would say, maybe from six or seven onward, it wasn't as much traveling time.
And we were in Vegas and we were able to have like...
But there were... Growing up like before that, I remember there were a couple of Christmases where we couldn't have a Christmas because we didn't have the money.
Now that's funny too because...
The original guy, the original Christmas guy, was Christ himself and not a lot of shekels in that particular manger.
So it's funny how we say, well, we can't have Christmas if we don't have money.
Yeah, but you know what I mean?
For a little kid, that's what I mean.
I feel like Christmas is for kids in the aspect of giving gifts, but for me it's more of the reason and not the season.
I don't know if that makes sense. Right, right.
So when you were a kid and there wasn't a lot of money kicking around, do you remember any particular gifts or moments that for you captured most of the spirit of Christmas?
Yeah, there's one Christmas that comes to mind where I got a Barbie beanbag and I was obsessed with Barbie.
So to this day, I actually collect Barbies from all over the world.
So whatever country I go to, I have, you know, Singapore Barbie and Indonesian Barbie, Indian Barbie.
Whatever country I'll go to, I like to collect them.
It's just my little thing.
And so, and I give them away.
Now I've been giving them away to friends who have children.
But I got a Barbie bean bag and I got, it was the Barbie Dream House.
It was like the mansion for Barbie.
And so... That was a big deal for me.
I was all excited. Okay, so explain to me something as a guy.
Because I don't quite follow the Barbie thing.
Now, I mean, because there are action figures for guys and all of that.
I remember getting a couple and it's like, arms up, arms down.
Can hold gun. Can remove gun.
And it's like, okay, I think I've done.
I've done the four poses.
So tell me what the Barbie thing, because I know it's a big popular thing.
Barbie Dreamhouse, what did you do?
How do you play with the Barbie?
That's my fundamental question. Well, me and my sister Alicia, we, you know, so we each got one of the gifts, but it was ours, right?
So we had to share everything.
And so...
Yeah, we would just play.
Like, you know, I was obsessed with Barbie.
She was obsessed with Barbie. I don't know what it is.
I think it's because, you know, but now there's so many other dolls.
There's brass. There's all different types of stuff now.
It was just, you know, a really beautiful doll, and she was an astronaut and a teacher and all the things, you know, even president.
So it just kind of was like a very empowering doll, I think, for a lot of young women.
Yeah. For sure, yeah.
So I don't know. It just was something pretty that we like to play with.
And I've also, growing up in Jamaica for a period of time with my mom, when we'd go back and forth from here to there, we would sometimes have a lot of different orphanages would bring kids over to play with me.
Because I was a brat at one point, and I was really mean.
And so my aunt, who was adopted, she...
We're going to bring some kids over, and then it became a thing where they became my really good friends.
But the initial first visit, they ripped my Barbie heads off.
We didn't like each other.
I was like, they're in my pool, and they were taking my Barbie heads off.
We then became really good friends.
The following summer, we became really good friends.
We hated each other because we didn't understand each other.
I didn't understand them, and they definitely didn't understand me.
But we ended up becoming friends.
So the good news is it has a good ending.
But initially I was like, my babies!
I was freaking out. Yeah. Yeah, no, I gotta think that'd be a pretty tough movie studio pitch, you know?
I see Decapitation Christmas Barbie, and a lot of people would be like, I don't, I don't, no, that's not how it's gonna roll.
Okay, so I'm trying to, so I'm trying to picture, so Mean Kaya, tell me a little bit about Mean, because, you know, there's nothing wrong with the Grinch showing up in a Christmas show, so what was Mean Kaya all about?
I, you know, it really was, I wouldn't say it was more mean, that it was a brat.
Yeah. You know, I went through a period of time where I'd been exposed to so much.
I'd had, you know, my dad removed from the home and my grandmother overdoing it was spoiling me, my mom financially not being able to really make anything meet, her really trying and struggling.
And I think I just, you know, and I'd also gone through, we'd spoken about this on the last interview about, you know, being molested.
And so that, I think...
I was very precocious and thought that I was more of an adult than I was.
And yeah, I just didn't like to share.
I just was a bit of a brat.
I went through this, you know, but I had so much kind of grief.
I drummed it up to a lot of that, that I was just acting out.
And so my aunt was like, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to take you to an orphanage in Jamaica.
And this is when we were there for about three months because my mom was doing a job for a company there.
And so She dropped me off and left me there for the day and then came back and got me and I was like, never take me back there again!
It was horrible! And they had no toys and they had no parents and all of these people that were taking care of them.
I was traumatized, really traumatized.
And then she was like, well, no, every weekend they're going to come to the house and they're going to swim.
You know, you're going to have them over. We're going to invite them to your home.
Yeah. And I was like, no, in my pool, like I was just so...
So just attached with, like, you know, sharing and being a bit more open-minded.
And then, of course, the Barbie heads came off.
And then by the end of that summer, we were all friends because they explained to me where they came from and that they didn't have, you know, they didn't have toys, they didn't have Barbies.
And so that was a lot of the reason why they hated my Barbies.
And, you know, I had been given so much but lost a lot.
So I had this kind of not sure but sure of what...
I, you know, came from and then it was kind of just, you know, getting a reality check Well, and so that kind of tough love where you look at a life that's harsh and then you look at a life that's harsher.
It's interesting, too, because when you grow up poor, I mean, from what I've seen, and from what I've seen, there's kind of like this fork in the road where you can look at the people who have stuff and you can say, oh, I hate those people.
That's terrible. I'm going to smash it all.
Or you can look at it and say, hmm, well, that looks fun.
Maybe we can try that road instead of the road my parents took.
Yeah, well, it definitely changed me and shaped me to this day.
I'm really happy that my godmother, I call her my aunt, but it was my godmother who did that because she's since passed away and that completely shifted my perspective on what I thought was just normal for every kid.
And understanding, you know, that I was very fortunate, even though I had a lot of strife, and there were Christmases where we didn't have the money to have a tree or gifts and things like that, for my mom anyway, but my grandmother, aunts and uncles, things like that. So it was a good kind of assessment of, you're really blessed.
You know, even though you think your life's been hard and difficult, you know, some of those kids had Right.
Yeah. Right.
What about Christmas when you're famous?
What's that like?
Because, I mean, of course, everybody, you know, you crack over in the celebrity magazines, you know, like, ooh, everyone's having so much fun!
Ooh, it's so bright!
Everyone looks so pretty! And what's life like at Christmas?
Because Christmas, when you're supposed to have these meaningful connections and deep thoughts and deep experiences, Christmas looks fun when you're famous.
We talked a little bit about fame last time, Kea, but what's it like from the inside?
I wish I could say it's like this glamorous thing, but I've had more nothing for Christmas, like no tree, because I'm either touring or have work coming up for the new year, coming around. More times than not, artists that our year starts in January, first quarter.
And so... As you know, in January, being in media, it's the award shows.
It's, you know, pilot season.
It's a bunch of stuff that's going on in the industry.
So, yeah, you're usually getting ready for things that are coming next year.
So, I've had to shoot music videos through Christmas time and not eat any of the fat foods that I wanted to eat and have a show at New Year's and you definitely have to be in shape.
Yeah, it's very rare when you have That time for family, unless you make it purposeful, like we have to.
So I think, you know, maybe when I become a mother or a wife or something, I would definitely reassess and change things.
But for right now, this is my marriage, so my career.
So that's kind of... Yeah, it is.
So that kind of takes precedence.
But then there are times where you can have like a really big tree and a lavish Christmas, you know?
It just depends. Two years ago, I had a really...
Huge tree, big Christmas.
It was amazing. It reminded me of when I was a child.
Like, you know, when I said that my sister and I had gotten the Barbie thing.
This is the first big Christmas I had.
And two years ago, I wanted to bring that back.
So I did. This year, I don't have a tree.
Because I've been recording.
And I've been in Nashville. And so now I'm coming back.
And it's like, well, it's like two weeks left.
You know, do I want to...
Do all that. For me, it's more about God and connecting and doing things.
This funny thing, you know, and I remember once, years ago, when I was in a bar, and I was chatting with a guy who was, like, drop-dead gorgeous.
And, you know, you could tell, like, lean as a bone.
And he was a Calvin Klein model, and I was chatting with, because, you know, I always find people's lives kinds of fascinating, right?
Yeah. And he's like, you know, and he's like, wow, Calvin Klein underwear model, man.
I mean, you must feel fantastic.
You must look great. And he's like, he said, let me tell you what it's like being a Calvin Klein underwear model.
Yeah. You can eat.
And even before you do a shoot, you can't even drink any water.
Because, Lord forbid, you bloat up like one-tenth of one percent.
This is before the days of Photoshop, so you couldn't just shrink it all down.
So being famous, having to be pretty and all of that, combined with food, they kind of collide over Christmas, right?
Yeah, they do. I mean, I've been really bad because when you're recording, that's the thing, too, is how the vocal cords and everything work.
When you're recording, you...
You have to pay attention to what you eat.
You take a journal.
I would keep a journal of what worked and didn't work, things that give you hiccups, things that dry out the throat.
You eat a lot of oily stuff because it's a natural lubricant for the throat.
Not really good because I've been recording.
I've totally been bad.
I didn't go to the gym for two weeks while I was in Nashville.
I was freaking out. I'm like, oh my god, what am I going to do?
Because I actually really love the gym.
Now I have a little bit like a week, I think, of downtime.
So I'm going to be, you know, dancing this morning for about an hour and a half and be in the gym tonight.
But yeah, that's kind of what our job is.
Our job is to try our hardest to look at least halfway decent.
And you know what it is? I think it's also because you're seeing yourself constantly on camera.
You You start to want to...
You're like, oh, I look horrible.
Or, oh, that's not right enough.
You know, we're our own worst critic, right?
Well, it's funny, too, because...
Even people who are not on camera, they do it.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's funny for me, at least.
I'm north of 50, and the resolution just keeps getting higher and higher.
As I get older, it's like, 4K, oh, I can't wait for 8K. I'm going to look like the Crypt Keeper.
I'm like something that's shambling through.
You're looking for brains or something.
Ah, you got a long way to go.
And this...
Looking good stuff is obviously key.
As I play with my hair when you're saying that.
Yes, hang on just a sec.
Let me just tidy up my hair a little bit here.
When you said looking good and I was touching my hair, I'm like, what?
Oh, it's funny. Like every now and then, it's like, oh, I got little tufts up here in my little halo hair.
And it's like, I have to go to the bathroom.
And it's like literally 30 seconds.
People say, do you mind being bald?
I'm like, do you know how much time it saves me?
I've got to be on camera every day.
I don't have to have any. Anyway, just a little bowling ball thing and I'm good to go.
It's pretty awesome because you just shower and Shave and put some lotion on.
Nobody cares. Yeah, nobody cares.
I can have like nose hairs coming out like I got little cousin It's living in my nostrils and nobody cares.
I can wear the same shirt.
Did you ever see there was this guy, he was a newscaster, and he wore exactly the same shirt, suit, and tie for a year.
Just curious if anyone would notice.
Now, of course, every time one of his female co-anchors had a slightly misaligned, you know...
the same shirt and tie exactly for a year.
Nobody cared.
When you're a guy, you're like invisible as far as that stuff goes.
Well, not really.
Girls like if a guy takes care of himself, but they don't really pay attention.
I would say they pay attention more to like if he cleans his nails or cuts his, you know, that kind of stuff or cuts his hair or grooms himself.
It's more grooming, I think, than clothes with men.
Now, when you're recording, because I watched an interview with Rod Stewart from a while back ago where he was like, oh, Oh, you know, you're on tour.
You can't be around anyone who smokes.
You can't do this.
You can't do that. I mean, how do you take care of the instrument when you're recording?
Because it must drive you nuts.
Well, I shouldn't say. I don't want to plant that seed if it doesn't already.
But, you know, you're singing once, but it's going to be there until the end of time.
You know, that one take is going to...
And to get the voice ready must be quite a challenge.
A lot of vocal warm-ups.
Because it's a muscle.
So... A lot of vocal warm-ups, a lot of singing, singing, singing.
Just, you know, that's the best way is just kind of getting your instrument prepared for the race that you're going to run when you go in.
And for tour, you train even harder for a tour than you do for the studio, oddly enough, because you have to be able to sing full out and move around.
And, you know, the first thing that happens, of course, we talked about this in the last one, is that your throat goes when you're nervous.
So when you get out on stage, you can't really be nervous.
And if you're emotional, like I've seen footage where I'm emotional, like of course for the tribute for the 58 people in Vegas with the tragedy that happened here.
I had to do God Bless America and I look at it and I'm like, oh my gosh, I was so pitchy and so off because I was holding back tears, literally.
So, you know, your emotions come out in your sound, in your throat.
So that's the one thing is that if you're doing a tour, you have to be so...
No fear. You're prepared.
You've rehearsed and you've done it a million times and it's just natural and you just do it.
But yeah, it's always the odd one moment performances that you're like, I'm not ready.
You know, you get kind of nervous. I'm not ready.
But for a tour, you train almost the amount of the tour.
I mean, it just depends.
Sometimes, you know, people prepare six months before a tour.
Sometimes it's two months before a tour.
So it's pretty extensive, and you're usually singing on a treadmill or you're opening up your lungs.
We should be doing that before we go into the recording studio, though.
We don't. Well, it's funny, too, because I don't know about your voice, but the voice when it comes to singing is a really fickle son of a gun.
Because sometimes it's like, oh, do you feel like hitting those high notes?
Here they are delivered to you, like FedEx.
It's effortless. It's easy.
And other times it's like, oh, high notes?
No, sorry, not today. Yeah.
You just won't be getting them, I'm afraid.
I'm going to give you full-on Coco Taylor vocals no matter what you want.
And it's like, can you just make up your mind and do something the way it's supposed to happen?
That's why you have to have a mental note, like a journal of what you ate or things that didn't agree with you because that's actually what hurts your system.
Some artists don't want to have any dairy.
I do a shot of olive oil before I sing.
Um... It lubricates the throat and tea, no lemon.
Lemon dries you out. So there's your things.
But yeah, there have been times where I've had laryngitis and a lot of singer friends of mine that have had, you know, you're sick and you have to sing anyway.
I was doing the NASCAR All-Star and I had a sinus infection.
I was very sick.
For me being sick, I'm really happy with the way that it came out.
But yeah, I mean, there's so many times where you have to be sick or you have to Take a cortisone shot because you have no voice at all.
There is nothing coming out.
My particular trick, which I found to be foolproof, maybe you can find it helpful, is my warm-up and my execution of singing is I put on Michael Bublé and lip-sync.
And I find that 100% of the time, people are like, that's amazing!
That's wonderful! That is amazing!
Well, also, I don't know if you know, like, one of the most famous performances in sort of rock history is Freddie Mercury at Live Aid, and his doctor told him not to sing.
His doctor, like, your throat is messed up.
He was really, really sick, and he's, like, knocked off one of the greatest performances in history.
Yeah, no. Yeah, artists, we tend to not listen.
I've never missed a show, not a single show.
I've literally been sick in China, profusely sick.
Went... To perform.
Performed half of the show.
Then there was another artist on tour with us.
He comes on.
He has about five songs.
And then we did a whole bunch of stuff together.
So in his five songs, they raced me to the ER. ER put me on a drip.
Gave me medicine.
That then is finished.
They raced me back. I go back on stage.
I finish the show. So the end.
And it's funny, too, because, you know, when you are...
Yeah, when you are your own instrument, you know, whether it's, you know, podcasting or singing or whatever, people are like, oh, you know, it must be great to be your own boss.
And it's like, it kind of is, but when I'm my own boss, I'm kind of a jerk.
I'm kind of a slave master.
I'm kind of a slave driver.
Like, I've never had a tougher boss than myself, which is kind of maybe what you need to succeed.
It's so true, isn't it?
It's so true, yeah.
When you... And of course, you know, everyone's aware of the establishment I came from.
So, you know, I had R. Kelly that was like, he was a stickler about work ethic.
And then going into being with Capitol and them being tough too.
And then with the Pussycat Dolls, that was like, that was literally like slavery.
So when I finally left that, I'm programmed in my head to just...
Do it. So I don't really need to hear anyone tell me I've gained weight.
I can tell.
I can see it. I don't really need to hear anyone say, oh, you're off.
I'm like, no, I know.
I can hear it. So then you just start to go into that autopilot of understanding.
And I'm lucky that I've been doing it for so long that you start to realize that you know what you need to do.
You're not there yet.
You need to be here.
You need to be better. But yeah, you're hard on yourself.
And then you're hard on others sometimes too, but I think it's, you know, you just want everyone to give their best, otherwise we wouldn't be doing it, you know?
Well, and to really motivate, I should speak just for myself, but to motivate myself means that I want to have a very big goal.
And that makes it very motivating, but that also makes it pretty hard to rest.
It's like, oh yeah? Yeah, feel like playing Candy Crush?
I don't think so. You've got Western civilization to save.
And it's like, okay, I'm motivated, but I'm also kind of tyrannized by my own ambition.
And it's like, well, you know, it's a balance, I guess.
That's awesome. But yes, I agree with you.
I do. So what are you most looking forward to in 2018?
We'll talk again, I hope, Christmas 2018.
Looking back, how will you most judge whether you got what you wanted or did what you needed?
Oh, no.
I'm grateful that I'm alive and I'm here.
I think, if anything, this year has taught me just to be very humble and grateful.
The Route 91, you know, is something I... It doesn't matter how many days have passed.
It's, you know, something that I think will for the rest of my life affect me.
It's totally changed me for the better, I believe.
But, you know, yeah, there's no way to want anything than exactly what I have right now, which is air in my lungs, and I'm fine.
Yeah, no, I'm fine.
I have a friend whose sister's passing away today.
Tomorrow, they've given her 24 to 48 hours.
What happened? Her battle with cancer has just come to an end.
One of my producers, his sister is passing as well.
I think that's the thing.
If anything, I just feel really grateful.
I think that's the one thing is if you don't lose a family member in the holiday season, And, you know, you have a roof over your head or you have a tree or you have family or you can...
You know, I posted something yesterday and it goes through all of the list of things.
If you can read, you know, you're better than, you know, the two billion people in the world who can't.
And it goes through just a linear of tons of different things that you think it's bad, but, you know, how many people on this planet are starving right now or dying right now?
And, you know, if you have family, friends, or somebody that you can...
Hold someone's hand or hug them or give back in some way.
That's what we should be doing because, you know, be grateful.
Just be grateful and be mindful of that.
Well, I'm not going to try and top that.
It's a beautiful Christmas sentiment.
I want to wish you and your family an extraordinarily Merry Christmas.
Thanks so much for your time and your presence on the show.
And when is the recordings you're doing now?
When are you aiming to release them into the wild?
Oh, soon.
Well, I just did Jason Crabb's record, so I just did a duet with him.
So his might come out before mine does, and I'm not certain, but we've already started about four or five songs for me.
I'm writing every day, and there's a lot we have to go through, and then we have to narrow it down, but we're figuring out what the sound will be.
We're experimenting. We're having a lot of fun.
So I think Jason Crabb's record might come out before mine, but I'm going to try my hardest to have something come out.
Within, you know, February, March, I hope.
I hope. Well, fantastic.
I can't wait to hear it.
And do let us know when it's out.
We'd love to help spread the word.
Have a very, very Merry Christmas.
I'm sure we'll talk to you in the new year.
Yes, have a Merry Christmas.
All right, we are here by the good friends Diamond and Silk and their tree.
I feel so underprepared for the Christmas festive season.
Thanks so much, ladies, for taking the time today.
Thank you for having us.
So, I really just want to compliment you on the amazing year that you've had.
I mean, from the beginning of the year to now, what an arc it's been.
Let's share a little bit of how this year has gone for you.
This year has been amazing.
I mean, we, you know, saw our man when he was sworn in to become the President of the United States.
Throughout the year, we've been to the White House a few times.
We've been doing our speaking engagements and traveling a whole lot and still keeping the train to move.
That's right. Meeting a lot of new people, seeing a lot of new faces.
And still doing the grassroots work.
Yes, educating people.
Right. It's been amazing.
And then we got to see President Trump the other night.
Yeah, we went to the Christmas party, the holiday Christmas party.
And as soon as he saw us, he grabbed us and Brought us up on stage.
Right. So we was able to speak to the crowd.
I mean, the White House was beautiful.
Beautiful. Our First Lady, Melania Trump, did a wonderful job with all of the decorations.
Everything was decked out. It was amazing night.
Yes. It was an unforgettable evening.
Yes. I hear that Melania cleans up real nice.
So I'm sure that you saw all of that.
Well, she's always lovely.
She's always beautiful. Yes, that's true. But the White House was beautiful.
So was it, I mean, you think of Christmas at the White House, of course, and you think that, like, nothing is left, no detail is left unattended to, everything is about as pretty as it can be.
Is that sort of what you experienced as well?
Oh, yes, yes.
It was like a winter wonderland.
It was beautiful. It was beautiful.
The music. The music.
You know, the White House is historic, too.
Very historic, yeah. And so when they take you into different rooms and let you see, okay, this room, this is what this room means, and represent, I found it amazing.
I was so honored.
To be there. Oh, it was amazing.
And it was just an amazing night.
Well, I do hear that the tour of the White House is wonderful.
As long as you steer clear of the Bill Clinton sex dungeons, you're likely to have a wonderful, wonderful tour and really drink in the history without stepping in anything too unsavory and sticky.
Oh, wow. Okay, well, now you said that, but it may be the truth.
So what has been some of the big highlights of this last year as you've moved front and center on the Trump train?
Well, you know what? We just had these tax cuts passed today.
And I think that's amazing.
It keeps more money in the American people's pockets.
It helps corporations and businesses.
And if you want to become an entrepreneur They're creating the atmosphere for that to happen.
So I find that really, really, really amazing.
Some of those mandates that was boggling the American people down where they have to pay these penalties if they don't get Obamacare, that's going to go away.
And I'm excited about that.
And I would say, you know, seeing the unraveling of the real collusion between the FBI and Hillary Clinton, and we'll say allegedly...
And for everybody to see that there was no collusion against no Russia.
None whatsoever. And if they want to talk about Russia, maybe they must be talking about our Russian dressing that we use whenever we make our corned beef sandwiches.
Because here's the funny thing, you know, with this tax cut, I guess this is a pretty historic day for that.
I mean, it's been decades since the last revision of this horribly complicated tax code.
But the amazing thing is, he's cut the corporate tax rate, like 40 to 20% or something like that.
And immediately, the corporate coffers are opening up.
I mean, it's a beautiful moment.
Listen, and when we look at the Democrats, you know, they keep complaining about the tax bill, the tax cuts, and they didn't come to the table.
They had no solution.
None. They're all talking no action.
They will never be able to build the economy the way President Trump has built it.
That's right. You know, we had eight years of Obama, a Democrat.
He couldn't get it as close.
To what President Trump has got the economy booming and everything, how it's going.
President Obama, yeah.
He was in office for eight years and he couldn't do what President Trump managed to do in 11 months.
That's right. So I find that like, whoa.
And I'm particularly impressed with all of these manufacturing jobs coming back because that's something that a lot of economists, and Obama himself, there's no magic.
Those jobs aren't coming back.
So it's kind of like those scenes in, like, you know, the hospital dramas where someone's on the operating table and they're dying and then they die and the guy's trying to keep them alive and then the nurse is like, he's gone.
You have to, he's, call it, call it.
And these jobs are coming back in a way that was utterly unprecedented.
They're coming back. Well, you know, the reason why Obama said the jobs weren't coming back because he was intending on outsourcing them anyways.
That's right. He was going to put measures into place like TPP to keep those jobs from coming back here.
And our president now, Trump, said, oh no, we're going to scrap all of that.
We're not going along with that so that our jobs can come back.
And that's what I so love.
You know, he said that he would be the best job creator.
That's what he said. And it has proven itself out.
And the left, they can get mad.
They can do whatever they want to.
I have a feeling that we will never elect another career politician to run nothing else in this country.
Because President Trump is truly making America greater than we've ever seen it before.
And also, you know, just to piggyback off of what Diamond just said, you know, Obama wanted to take credit for this growth that's happening right now.
How can he take growth for something he didn't know how to make happen?
Right. You know, so, like Diamond said, this has been amazing.
President Trump is doing a phenomenal, awesome job, and it's time for everybody to get on board because those tax cuts do not just benefit Diamond and Silk.
It also benefits the liberals, the lefts, Everybody get a tax cut.
No matter who you are, as long as you are an American citizen.
Right. So don't complain about the tax cuts.
Right. Especially when you didn't come to the table.
That's right. To give your opinion about anything.
Yeah. And another thing, you know, what I found amazing this year, for these 11 months.
Yeah. You have the liberals running around here, but they haven't pushed not one piece of legislation that will help an American citizen.
I really want the American people to see that.
Not one.
That's right. But then you have our president, President Trump, trying to make things better for the average American people.
And that is what we love.
That's why we elected him.
And you know what? He is going to be up in office for, what, eight years?
We're going to see eight years.
Yes. Well, here's the funny thing, and it's kind of heartbreaking to see.
Let me know what you guys think.
But when I look at the left, at how they are railing against the successes in the American economy, the Dow and the Nasdaq being super high, unemployment, particularly among blacks and Hispanics, falling to all – well, it hasn't been this low for decades, the unemployment – And people being happier, people having optimism, people saving more, people getting more jobs, and they oppose it so much.
It's hard to not think, for me at least, that they don't want America to succeed.
That there's something that they've just become so set against the freedom, against free market, against people having control over their own money, that almost like America's success is their failure.
Well, you know, when it comes to the left, they are afraid.
See, Whenever you come up and you can think for yourself and you can make it on your own, they can't control you.
They want ways to control you.
So what they do is say, well, hey, they'll bring you down a notch.
You could be making enough money to take care of yourself, but they'll make you feel that you're not making enough.
So we have to give you this handout and that handout.
Because when they give you the crumbs, they can control you.
Okay? And that's what their problem is.
They don't have a leg to stand on because they can't control the masses anymore.
And when you can't control the masses, that means you don't hold the power.
That's right. Okay? It's part of the Democrat playbook.
You know, it's going to be fun seeing everybody go from welfare to work.
That's right. People getting it for themselves.
And being happy with working for money to be able to feed their families.
And doing it themselves instead of waiting on somebody to do it for them.
And the entrepreneurial spirit is back.
If you want to create a job, a business, if you want to create a business, he just opened up the playing field so that you can do so.
So I'm grateful.
And it's amazing.
And we elected the right guy.
I am so happy we went.
We betted on Trump. And we went with the businessman.
And that's why he's our president.
That's why. Well, and the funny thing is, too, is I don't think there's ever been a bigger choice in political history anywhere across the world.
Because, like, Trump is a plus 10, and Hillary was like a minus infinity.
So it's not just that it's Trump, which is great, but it's also that it's not Hillary, which I think would have been a complete disaster.
So I think all of those who helped out in that particular fight have a lot to be proud of.
Now, I guess we talked...
Around the time of the inauguration when there was still some concern among people that, you know, Trump was the big talker, but he wasn't going to be able to get things done or that, you know, either he was going to give up on his promises or the deep state was going to be like too strong for his agenda.
Looking back now, I guess we're close to a year.
How do you think he's done relative to what you hoped for?
Oh, he has done an amazing job.
Yeah. The one thing about President Trump, he went up there, this is what we need to do.
We need to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Now, it is Congress' job to act.
That's right. They have to do their part so that the president can sign it into law.
So, anything that did not get passed this year, do not blame our president because it's not like he didn't try.
That's right. He went up there, this is what we need to do, but I'm so happy today that tax cuts.
We got our Christmas present.
We got our Christmas present.
And with our president being in a swamp, I'm telling you, he's fighting his way through every rat, alligator, through the thick mud.
He's fighting his way right on through it and getting some stuff did that's going to benefit the American people.
That's right. And what do you think, because this creepy Hollywood stuff that's been going on, not just Hollywood, but there seems to be a lot of Democrats swept up, a lot of these guys who are kind of creepy and grabby and harassment prone and all that, I literally can't imagine that that would have come out under Hillary.
I sort of get a sense of why a lot of people really were opposed to a Donald Trump presidency, because I think this kind of wholesomeness and this kind of integrity is casting some pretty bright light in some pretty dark places that I don't think would have been illuminated under Hillary.
Well, you know, these people sit on their soap boxes not realizing that we can now see what's in their box.
And they try to have this type of high ground morality as if you need to do it my way or no way.
And now look.
And yes, all of this would have been covered up under Hillary Clinton because you have to understand, the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, she took money.
They took money from Hollywood.
That's right. That they haven't given back.
And some of these people that they took money from are being accused of the most horrific things.
Yeah. And with the Harvey Weinsteins, you know, we heard him on tape trying to lure someone in his hotel room.
So I think that if these men are guilty, they really do need to step down.
You know what I mean? But the hypocrisy on the left is real.
You know, they try to point that finger at somebody, but those other three fingers in that thumb is always pointing back at them.
And I said the other day, they may not pay what they owe, but they're going to reap what they sow, the way they've treated this administration, the way they've treated this president.
The way they've treated his supporters, the people that got out and voted him, those people are going to reap what they saw.
And guess what? They are reaping it today.
I mean, I've never seen so many people just fall from grace like this here.
One by one. But all of these people, they sit on their platform and say the most derogatory and dandable things about this president.
And they're reaping what they saw.
They're reaping it. Well, and it always seems to me that the left picks up this grenade and they want to throw it, but it ends up being stuck to their hand.
And they can't get it off.
So let's talk a little bit about Christmas, your plans for Christmas, who you're going to spend it with, and what does the season really mean to you in this particular year of all years?
You know what? First of all, this season means blessings, prosperity, and being able to say Merry Christmas.
You know, I walked into a store and The other day, and they had signs up, Merry Christmas.
Up under Obama administration, it was Happy Holidays, and if you said Merry Christmas, it was almost like you just committed a crime.
So I'm so happy that we're bringing back our culture, the things that we hold dear, that puts us in the Christmas spirit.
All because of this president, President Trump.
And what would I be doing?
Probably spending time with family, just snuggling up, resting, because we've traveled the whole year, and getting prepared for 2018.
Yeah, and I basically second everything that Diamond said.
And if I was to include anything, I would just include being with family, most definitely, eating a lot of food, Catching up on some good old collard greens and ham hogs.
I mean, because traveling the whole lot, you don't get to eat a whole lot of that good old food.
But just really being with family, loving one another.
And I'm not talking about politics.
You know, you've got a lot of people that's going to be sitting at the dinner table, okay, and they've got to know what to do whenever politics come up.
That's right. And so whenever some politics come up and people want to take it there, this is what you say to them.
He's your president.
Okay? That's what you said.
Period. Donald Trump is your president.
And I would also like to encourage everybody.
Go over there to the Diamond and Silk store and get your bowl of stupid.
Yes. Because there's a lot of people that's been doing a lot of stupid stuff this year.
And we know it ain't going to end.
It's not going to end and we're going to take it all the way into 2018.
That's right. And also that He's Your President song is on iTunes, you all.
That's right. So Google it on iTunes and y'all can go and download that.
It's time for people to understand that we elected the businessman.
That's right. The man that said he had the master plan to make America great again.
And for those that you all that don't like him, he is your president.
Trump is your president. And one more line.
Can I just say one more thing?
Yes. To all of the haters, the race baiters, the agitators, and the demonstrators, Trump's your president.
And if you don't like it, pack your coat and your hat and you don't have to come back.
Because for America, Donald Trump is your president no matter who you are.
If you are an American citizen, to the left, to the right, the Democrats, the Republicans, the elites, the Trump Republicans, Trump is your president and recognize that.
So go get it. Go download it.
Yes. We'll put links to all of that on the show notes.
And it's funny too because I can almost see there are a lot of people who are on the left, who are on the Democrats, and I think they genuinely believed that the programs the left wanted to offer, you know, raising minimum wage, more regulation, more taxation and so on, that that was somehow going to genuinely help the poor, help the downtrodden. And now that there's a lot of help Moving out and moving among the downtrodden and the people who have been less fortunate, I think they're kind of genuinely baffled, like you've let go of a ball and just kind of floating there.
It's not falling. It's like this is defying the political laws of physics that they believe in.
So if there are people kind of teetering and who are genuinely baffled and confused and somewhat excited by what's going on in America these days, what would you guys say to them to try and tip them over in towards embracing and becoming enthusiastic about what's going on?
Listen, you're going to have to let go.
You're going to have to let go of what feels familiar.
And we understand up under the Democrats, it feels familiar to cry racist, to want to beat up the statues, to want to kneel on a flag, to want to be disrespectful.
That feels familiar.
And what I will offer you today It's to, look at what's going on.
That's right. If you have a 401k plan, it's affecting you in a good way because the stock market is up.
That's right. Home ownership is up.
Yes. Unemployment rate is down.
Yes. Especially for black people.
That's right. Okay? So it's time for you all to get off the fence.
Get off the fence. Get out the bully pulpit with the rest of them.
That's right. Because you know they're like a bucket of crabs.
They want to keep you down. They want to keep you down.
Get outside so that you can experience and taste the Some of this goodness.
That's right. Because the goodness is spreaded around for all Americans.
All of us. But if you stay in your box, you're not going to see it.
All you're going to hear is the race baiters and the agitators telling you that somebody is against you.
That's right. Okay? So it's time for you.
If you want to come out, hey, get out of your box and experience the goodness.
That's right. Because the president is laying it out for us.
For all of us. And I feel so happy and grateful to be an American today.
Yes, and it is not about color.
You know, look past the color, okay?
Be an American first and bring yourself to the process of Of the goodness that's being laid out for all Americans.
As long as you segregate yourself in the box, that's where you're going to remain stuck.
And you're going to be sitting back waiting on somebody to give you something.
No. Get outside of the box and get it for yourself.
That's right. The opportunity is there for all Americans.
Be an American first and then you won't have to sit back and think, That somebody is doing something to you.
Or against you. Or against you.
Well, this president really want to help you.
All of us. All right.
So biggest things that you're looking forward to in 2018.
I really can't believe that. Every time I say that, I feel like I'm in a science fiction novel.
Where's my jetpack? But what are you guys most looking forward to in 2018?
And what do you think the high points are going to be?
You know what? I think that they're probably going to start trying to revitalize some of these entering urban cities.
Yeah. I really think that they're going to probably start working on that.
He's probably going to reform welfare.
Yeah. Because he's creating an atmosphere where you don't just go to any job.
You can go pick and choose what job you want to.
That's right. And it's going to pay a good wage.
Yeah. So I'm looking forward to seeing that.
And we'll probably get that repealed and replaced.
And some stuff about that border wall, too.
Because he hadn't forgotten about that.
The wall is going up.
Basically, I'm excited about the newness that's happening.
With a lot of people's mindset unraveling.
And them seeing something totally different.
Diamond and Silk being there to educate people so they can understand this is what you're feeling.
This is what you're going to go through in order to get to.
So with us being there to help guide people along, this is going to be an amazing ride, America.
You know, where you get to experience goodness for yourself in your own home.
That's what I see happening for Americans.
All of this fussing and fighting and resistance and out in the street burning up your neighborhoods, I believe that that's going to just be over because people are going to start enjoying what they worked hard for.
They're going to start accepting and being happy for what they worked hard for.
And created and received from the fruits of their labor.
So that's what I foresee happening.
And I'm really excited about that.
When we see that, we're just going to be so happy and just be cheerleaders, I guess.
Yes. I got to tell you, I appreciate your energy and enthusiasm.
Every time we talk, I want to burst into song and throw some money in a collection plate.
So thanks so much for your conversation, your friendship over the last year.
Congratulations enormously on your success.
I really look forward to seeing what you guys are up to in 2018.
And big hug. Merry Christmas to you both.
Thank you.
Merry Christmas to everybody.
The angel Gabriel from heaven came.
His wings as drifted snow, his eyes as flame.
All hail said thee, though lonely maiden Mary, most highly favored lady, Gloria.
For know a blessed mother thou shalt be.
All generations, Lord, and honor thee.
Thy son shall be Emmanuel, my seer's foretold.
Most highly favored Lady Gloria.
Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head.
To me be as if pleaseth God, she said.
My soul shall lord and magnify his holy name, most highly favored Lady Gloria.
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