Michael J. Knowles dissects Trump’s 2024 Israel-Gaza remarks as a calculated move to force adversaries into unity, rejecting neoconservative democracy promotion while defending imperialist pragmatism—like Putin’s Russia, which he calls more stable than Biden’s U.S. He ties America’s decline to liberalism’s moral hypocrisy, from abortion to border chaos, and contrasts it with Catholicism’s enduring truth, citing Newman and Vatican doctrine. Knowles warns Polybius’ regime cycle risks collapsing into mob rule unless strong leadership restores order, praising Trump for restoring executive authority while mocking rigid conservatives. His own conversion from atheism to Catholicism—sparked by Lewis, Newman, and devout peers—frames religion as public truth, not private opinion, and blames universities for denying God while claiming universal knowledge. The episode ends with a critique of generational selfishness, immigration-driven cultural erosion, and YouTube censorship, promoting Mayflower Cigars as a patriotic antidote to modern decay. [Automatically generated summary]
And one of his conclusions, and it's something that we're coming to grips with today, is we can know things.
We can actually know things.
That this modern idea that religion is just a matter of private judgment, you know, and so you're a Shinto and I'm a Methodist and it's like, whatever, man, who knows?
You know, you just do you and it's all good.
And he says, no, religion is a public thing.
It's a scientific thing.
We can know something about it.
He wrote a great book.
You look at the crises of the universities today.
There's a remedy to it, which is a book that he wrote called The Idea of a University.
And in this book, he says, you know, it's so crazy.
We have these institutions that purport to universal knowledge.
And increasingly, they won't even acknowledge God.
But just on its face, even if you're like the most hardcore atheist you can imagine, how can you even pretend to universal knowledge while denying God, the source and summit of all knowledge?
Because we live in this world after the crackup of Christendom where everyone has their own private ideas, you know, there's just no way of knowing anything for certain.
So we're just going to settle on certain economic matters.
We're all going to try to get rich.
We're all going to try to live in relative peace and we're going to leave that heady stuff.
You do that on Sunday morning.
And that's obviously impossible.
Do you remember 20 years ago, there was this phrase?
And when you come to that conclusion about practical morality, which is ultimately derived from your understanding of religion, you are going to impose a moral view on someone.
Maybe someone else is very pro-jaywalking.
Maybe someone else deeply feels in their sincere religious beliefs they need to jaywalk.
But that, what happened to you, is a result of this epidemic of shallow but highly aggressive moralizing that took the place of something that we had before.
And that's why I think, okay, now we're going to get on our puritanical high horses about pronouns or whatever, you know, like where you must put rainbow flags, which is in front of every doorstep everywhere in the country.
We're going to get on our high horse about that.
But we're going to shrug our shoulders when it comes to murdering babies, when it comes to the meaning of marriage, when it comes to whether a people can have borders in a nation.
Oh, we can't know about that, but we can know about some ridiculous Gnostic heresy about pronouns and identity or whatever.
And I, of course, didn't know anything and hadn't read anything.
And my brain was.
You hadn't lived.
Hadn't lived, but I was quite wrong, but I was never in doubt.
And so I've been there.
Yes.
Yes.
I said, look, I just don't, I don't see God.
Bad things happen to good people.
And, you know, science has microscopes.
And anyway, and getting, actually getting back to the point on the reforms of the church and everything changing, it was kind of weak liturgically.
There were all these sappy, effeminate hymns that were like, you know, about eagle's wings and stuff that was not really appealing to a young boy and all this nonsense.
This is one of the arguments to go to a liberal college is even just in your own politics, if you can make it through and not be swept along the tide of liberalism, you make it through to the end, you will have heard every argument.
You will have heard every refutation of everything you believe.
You will either give up some of your beliefs, maybe some of you should, or you will become much stronger in your beliefs, which is what happened to me.
I left Yale much more right-wing than I went in without question.
And I'm not the only one.
So I was presented with an argument from a guy who's smarter than me.
And he said, you think God doesn't exist?
What about the ontological argument?
And I won't be tedious with the art, but the argument is basically God's the maximally great being.
That's this definition.
He has all the great making characteristics, none of the corrupting characteristics.
It's better to exist than not to exist.
We would all agree with that.
We'd go off ourselves right now if we disagreed with that.
He'd say, it would be prideful for me not to take you up on your offer because, Michael, I'm not an educated man.
You're an educated man.
I don't have an undergraduate degree.
I'm not an educated man.
I didn't really go to college.
And then he would do this thing where he'd make it seem like he's just some old chunk of cold.
And then he'd use a word that I didn't know.
He was certainly much better read than I am and love the Russian novelists.
And we were talking about religion basically the whole time.
And he said to me, I don't know his, I still don't know his particular, the particulars of all of his religious views, but he said, you know, for me, I told him how I converted, reverted.
And he said, oh, yeah, for me, I just, I've just always known the Bible's true.
I just always knew.
I just, I'd read it.
I just knew.
So anyway, that's it.
And I thought, well, that's that's the better, that's the better way.
You know, it's like Christ to Thomas the Apostle.
He says, you know, blessed are you.
You've seen and believed, but blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.
And that was Norm.
And yeah, that's another example, too.
Of you think, okay, the whole culture and all these smart people are atheists.
Norm is one of the smartest pop culture figures that's been around for decades.
Yes.
And, but he knew.
And it's just like, everyone kind of knows deep down.
No, I remember thinking that even in early high school with the question of abortion and, you know, people just get hysterical about it, like hysterical.
How dare you judge me?
And all this is like, whoa, I wasn't even really judging you, but like clearly you're judging yourself.
If you ever watched a shout your abortion event, it's always like fascinating, weirdly fascinating.
To me, and I always feel so bad for the girls because they, but they never really can muster enthusiasm for the abortions they had because, and you can see it right in their faces.
Well, this, to make it fully religious, Peter Craft made this observation that even the language of the abortion, this is my body, is a satanic inversion of the Eucharist.
So, you know, you all know, because everyone does have a conscience, even if it's darkened by sin and a little bit and drugs and porn and dumb classic shiny like stainless steel.
And then the other impulse, which is, you know, centuries in the making, well, it really goes back to the fall, but especially politically with liberalism, is this notion that we are really to be gods.
So if you ended up extending human life to 150 years, like the last 80 years of the life would just be like living hell.
Do you know what I mean?
I mean, for one thing, I've always thought this is like one insight I did have when I was young, which is the problem with getting old is not like bladder control and it's not even dementia.
It's, it's instead, it's remembering your youth and how much has changed.
And it's the burden of the past becomes unbearable.
And any old person will tell you this in their moments of lucid thought, they'll tell you, like, I'm just, I can't believe how fast it went.
And people are, I think, also increasingly aware that something might happen next.
They're kind of clinging on to this hope that, well, I hope this is all there is, you know, and I just turn to worm food and take a dirt nap, you know?
And, and I, I don't think that makes sense at all.
And the smartest people in history didn't think it made any sense.
So, what, okay, so if all these young people are becoming Catholic of all unfashionable things, like that's probably the most unfashionable, you know, but by the standards of 30 years ago, becoming a Catholic.
This is why I think, you know, the vice president is probably the most famous convert in recent years.
And people, his political enemies are always saying, oh, he's cynical.
He's just changing his views with the times or whatever.
I think, hold on.
You're telling me a guy who had a tough upbringing who graduates law school wants to start, is in Silicon Valley, then goes back, he wants to launch a political career in Ohio.
The way he thinks he's going to do that is by becoming Catholic.
You think that's going to help you?
No, that's like the craziest thing to do if you were thinking cynically or opportunistically.
Well, on the political level, and I think this also touches on part of the conversions, we're beginning to realize that history didn't start in 1965.
History didn't start in 1865.
History didn't start in 1776 or even 1620.
We're part of something that's much bigger and much broader and much more beautiful, you know, and even just in our political order, we used to call it Christendom.
Now we call it the West.
And there has been an attack on that.
Going back many decades now, I think of Jesse Jackson marching down Stanford.
Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.
And people are beginning to realize, you know, it's not that I just want to preserve my town or my 90s liberalism or my what I want to preserve this great cultural patrimony that I've been given.
And that cultural patrimony has to go deeper than just aesthetics.
It has to go deeper than just abstract ideology.
You know, cult and culture come from the same root word.
So what you worship is going to define your culture.
I think people, you know, even beyond questions of conviction of the Holy Spirit and rational arguments and all that, they're just saying, well, you know, this thing's pretty sturdy.
It's been around a long time.
Belloc, again, Belloc keeps coming to mind.
He had this line.
He says, I am, he said it more eloquently.
He said, I'm required as a matter of faith to hold that the church is divinely instituted.
But for those who doubt it, one proof of its divine institution is that no other group conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.
Yeah, the best thing I ever heard from a practicing Catholic in the last five years, I was, there was no one around as a very close friend of mine and I, and he was going on about Catholicism.
I was like, okay, but that pope is just, I just can't, I won't even tell you what I said, but it was hostile because that's how I felt.
It might have been in reaction against many of the things that Pope Francis was said to stand for.
I don't know exactly how it worked.
That's above my pay grade.
But that's, you think of like the progress of the church and our whole civilization, and we think of it as just like a straight line, but I think it's a little bit more kind of like this, you know, and the papacy goes to have a yoon for a little bit.
And there's some king is like arresting the pope.
And you know, it's like kind of a little bit more circuitous, but it's always pointed in the same direction.
So there's not, it just reminds me of God using Pharaoh, blinding Pharaoh to the truth in order to save the Jews from slavery, which is what's described.
And I always imagine that there's a direct line between the quality of the leadership and the quality of the people.
I mean, is it H.G. Wells who said democracy is the theory that was it?
No, I don't know.
Who was it?
I forget who it was.
Who said democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard?
Is this why I can't get into?
I have many, I love the populist movement.
I was so into the rise of Trump.
I remain into the rise of Trump.
I think this has been the healthiest political awakening in my lifetime.
I think I'm all about it.
But I can't throw too many stones merely at the leadership class because one, the civil authority is there for our own good.
It's in that way appointed by God in a certain sense.
And also, we kind of get the government that we deserve.
And if you don't know anything about your country and you don't care about your civic life and you're just going to be greedy, you're either going to, on the left side of things, just indulge in weird social stuff that's purely selfish.
And on the right side of things, you engage in economic selfishness and no one cares about the common good and no one cares about the body politic, then that's kind of where we are right there.
I mean, I have a lot of young people who work for me.
I have children and all that.
But like every month or two, I'll run into like a younger person like in an airport or something and always strike up a conversation and they'll say things that, you know, super nice or whatever, but like you just feel like, wow, the attitudes are people are getting by my middle-aged standards pretty freaking radical.
Well, every wedding service in the country has reds.
Yeah.
1 Corinthians 13.
So, no, I think that's exactly right.
But I just wonder as like a political matter, here are a few of the things that I sense.
People feel free to say what they think in a way that is so inspiring and great and refreshing, but also a little shocking because what they think is like not what they're supposed to think at all or have been supposed to think.
I feel like there's a recognition that the whole like, let's put women in charge of everything just didn't work.
Well, when you go back to the framers of our constitution, you'll recognize that they use the phrase democracy in a derisive way and as a warning of impending peril, because even the notion that our country is a liberal democracy, that is a self-conception that came up in the 20th century.
It started a little bit in the 30s.
It really took off after the World War, and then it reaches its peak in the 80s.
That's when it gets escape velocity.
We're not a liberal democracy.
We have a democratic element, a healthy democratic element to our country.
Actually, in large part, I think it comes in because of Tocqueville's great book, Democracy in America, best study of America ever.
But even there, our regime is a mixed regime.
Our regime has a strong democratic element.
As it was initially instituted, it has an aristocratic element in the Senate, and it has a monarchical element in the president.
So you even think today, of all the kings around the world, the president of the United States probably has more practical monarchical authority than, say, King Charles, right?
Adrian Vermeule made this point the other day.
I'm pretty sure the president of the United States is a more robust king than like the king of Norway or whatever.
And so our regime, this was intentional, by the way, and it's outlined as the ideal regime in the Summa Theologia, but it goes all the way back to Polybius, this notion that there's a cycle of regimes, because it's a fallen world.
And so maybe you have a monarchy, but it's going to degrade over time and it's going to become a tyranny.
What's the difference between a monarchy and a tyranny?
A monarchy is for the common good.
Tyranny is for private interest.
You can have an aristocracy, you know, government by lots of, you know, a small number of good people.
That will degrade into an oligarchy.
I think we've seen a lot of that in recent years.
Common good versus private interest.
And you can have a democracy and a democracy can be quite good.
You know, the virtue of the early American Republic, that can degrade into a kind of mob rule where it's just people pulling for their own factions and their own private interests.
And so you're going to have this cycle of revolutions that's going to go on.
What the framers of the Constitution tried to do was escape that cycle by instituting a mixed regime, no matter what they called it, a republic if you can keep it or a constitutional system or whatever.
And it has held pretty well.
It has been increasingly democratized.
So it's probably like leaned a little bit too much onto that side.
Trump, I think, now is trying to restore, and this is part of a program that had been going on for decades, restore a little bit more executive authority to balance the whole thing out.
But regimes fall.
You know, that's the norm in world history.
And so we are at a real risk of that if we don't correct some of the degradations in our own regime.
You know, some people on the right, they'll say, well, I want a civil war.
You heard this a lot during BLM and COVID.
Want a civil war.
On the left and the right, they say, I say, I don't want a civil war.
If there's a civil war, I'm going to have to like shoot my cousins.
Do you, do you know what you're saying?
I want a civil war.
Do you know what a civil war is like?
So, you know, Dante is one of my favorite writers.
Civil war ruined his life.
He said, it's like the worst thing that can happen because the whole point of a political community is to secure peace and order for the common good so that we can flourish.
And when you crack that, I mean, the whole political community is just an extension of a family.
This is why, talk about the changes in the 60s into the 70s.
You know, this is why they had to get Nixon.
They never forgave Richard Nixon because he got Alger Hiss.
Richard Nixon knew that there were actual communists in the government at the highest levels of the State Department helping to found the United Nations.
And he knew it.
And he believed Whitaker Chambers and he got him dead to rights.
Well, I think we need strong leadership, which we are getting in Trump.
We actually do have an executive on the right who's willing to do things.
This has been a big problem for the right because of ideologies that were essentially liberal, where the right said, you need to elect us so that we do nothing.
That was their explicit pitch.
If you elect me, I won't do anything because I want to principally, with great dignity and integrity and principles, give away all the power.
Because if I ever do anything, then the minute the Democrats come into office, they might do all the things they've been doing for 50 years.
But, but that, look, there's always been this hodgepodge on the right of disparate groups, as you well know, that don't totally make sense together.
So you have the traditional conservatives.
Well, the fusionist coalition was the traditional conservatives and the libertarians and some warhawk Democrats who wanted to take down the Soviet Union.
I have one of my favorite lines recently was from Norman Pethoretz, who said, they said, you're the founder of neoconservatism.
He said, no, no, I'm so old that I'm now a paleo-neoconservative.
I'm too old for that.
And this is, you know, there's the paleos and the neos and the libertarians and the traditionalists and the this and obscure political monikers are the right-wing version of gender pronouns.
This is a man who has brought together a disparate coalition of like weirdo, crunchy hippies and bow tie-wearing traditionalists and libertarians and Silicon Valley tech futurists.
And like, it's the craziest coalition ever.
And he has brought them together and won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years as a Republican.
And it's an amazing thing to see in action because he's got a vision and he's just a force of nature.
And so the question, I think, on a lot of our minds, now, I think this is what all this Trump is dead discourse is about.
There was this viral meme that Trump died because he got a bruise on his hand or something.
I was actually in the Middle East that day when that happened, and I was eating with a bunch of, you know, local residents who run the government in the country it was in.
And I'm like, dude, what?
You know, and I was actually sitting at the table and they played that.
Everyone's staring at this.
And I thought, I don't know, what the hell is that?
In the sense that it's in the cabinet meeting the other day, Trump was asked, I said, you promised that this war would be over permanently in five seconds after you were inaugurated.
And so when are we going to get a definitive conclusion to the war?
And he laughs.
Definitive conclusion.
He turns to Steve Wickoff.
He says, Hey, Steve, how long this conflict, this has been going on thousands of years, is it?
Yeah, there's no definitive conclusion.
We're just trying to stop the bloodshed.
We're trying to establish some kind of peace.
And it was this brilliant move because in what other way are you going to get the Israelis and the Arab League and the Iranian regime all united in not liking this one plan by suggesting we're going to go in and take it?
And so, you know, it's basically an intractable situation.
There will not be any permanent resolution probably until the second coming.
So what you want to do is just establish some modicum of political order.
What I would especially like to see happen is a preservation of the holy sites and pilgrimage access and all that.
It seems to me that the holy sites still seem to be okay.
In Gaza, there was unfortunately the attack on St. Porphyrius, which I grant was accidental.
I don't think it was.
I don't see why, from a strategic perspective, it would be beneficial to the Israelis to particularly stick a finger in the eye of the Christians when America is your last political protection.
I think his vision of America first is that America will take due care to prioritize her national interests, part of which is accepting the political reality that we're the global hegemon, and we need to maintain some modicum of world order.
And this goes back to the really ancient conception of the political order, which is that the purpose of empire is to just have peace and order.
This is, you know, this is in the Aeneid in book six of the Aeneid.
Aeneas goes down to his dad in the underworld and the dad gives him this whole view of what's going to happen to Rome.
And he says, you know, look, different peoples are given different arts.
The, I don't know, the Greeks are good at making souflaki.
But in a different way, like, because the neocons, at their most extreme, would say, we have an obligation because of the demands of history with a capital H to spread liberal democracy around the world.
But like the smart, like I remember David Brooks, who was impressive, I know it's hard to believe, but at one point, when I knew him 30 years ago, he was smart.
And he would say, look, someone's got to take control because there has to be order at the center.
And that's not stupid.
Where I began to really hate the neocons, where my whole politics began to revolve around opposing them as an ideology, not as individuals, but just the idea is bad.
And the main takeaway for me is we're not good at it.
We're just like leaving aside the dumb spread democracy and all that nonsense, turned Baghdad into Belgium was stupid.
But what's not stupid is the idea that you can't have disorder because it metastasizes.
And I'm getting there, my assessment and has not changed in 25 years is we're not suited for this at all because we don't have the self-confidence required to do it because our society at its core is really thin.
There's nothing really there, actually, other than some distorted version of capitalism, which is kind of disgusting.
I think the fight, you know, the Cold War, the battle against the Soviets gave a kind of clarity and purpose.
But even then, you know, the U.S. sided with the Viet Minh, actually, in 1954 at Dien Ben Phu against the French.
Like there was never really a kind of consistent that's little known.
Yeah, but not even great in strategy, but like a consistent worldviewer instinct.
Like the English, for all their many faults, at the height of empire, the height of the Victorian period, like they really believed they were superior.
Now we deride that as racist.
But you have to have that.
You have to believe my way is the better way, or why are we doing this in the first place to extract minerals?
And so it is so ironic that these people who accuse Trump of being like a KGB agent or whatever, that these people would knock Trump for saying the same thing that they were parroting for years.
I mean, I spent a lot of time talking to the guy on the road, traveled to various countries with him, knew him, I think, as well as I've ever known a politician.
And there was so much to like about the guy.
He just really was a charming, very aristocratic bearing, hilarious, vulgar in a way that I always enjoy.
But if you pushed him on any issue, like he hadn't spent 15 minutes thinking about anything.
And when you listen to that interview, this is a man.
Say what you will about his yarn that he spun.
It was a very compelling yarn.
He had a view of his own country that was a very strong view.
And I wonder, look, Trump, in his own way, tells a story about America.
He hugs the flag.
He kisses the flag.
He's got it really in his gut.
How many American statesmen today, after all these decades of just dissolution and hatred of country, how many of them can tell a compelling story about what the country is, why we ought to love the country beyond mere filial piety and where we're going?
And it's a skill that is, I mean, this is why I keep coming back to empire is because our country looks more like an empire than it does like a yeoman republic.
Russia certainly looks like an empire.
You know, it's got all spanning a continent and it has all these peoples.
But when you, when you think with this quote, what is America now?
You know, in 2025, there was this line where it's, America's just an idea, you know, or diversity is our strength or what all these kind of slogans from the 90s and 2000s.
You think, well, no, it's not.
A country is not just an idea.
There is a crucial aspect, but it's not like an idea floating in outer space.
What are you talking about?
And so there has to be a real grappling with, okay, well, look, a country is also geography.
You know, like there is no America without the rivers, for instance.
If someone can just like show up from Delhi and like start lecturing me about American values, can't even speak American English and no one says anything like, hey, son, settle down.
You just got here.
Don't start lecturing someone whose family's been here 400 years about what America is.
Then there's kind of no America actually at that point.
Even the grappling with ethnicity, you know, like what we've come out of this very liberal period where we have been told there's no such thing as ethnicity or race or anything like that.
There's nothing wrong with recognizing that there are differences between peoples.
There are two simultaneous errors, which we fall into.
It seems actually at the same time, which is we say ethnicity means nothing at all whatsoever, and ethnicity is totally deterministic and means everything.
And the reality is, I mean, this is where our Christian heritage, Christianity, which animates the whole civilization comes in.
You say, no, we are in a very real way all children of God.
Like in a very real way, there's only one race, the human race, or whatever like the liberals like to say.
That is true.
And also, there is vibrant diversity among peoples.
As long as that is ordered toward charity, as long as a proper love of that which is similar to one is not ordered toward cruelty and is ordered within charity for the common good.
And so you get to kind of look at it, which is, I mean, even early on, I got these WASP ancestors and I got some Irish ancestors in there.
The Italians came in a little bit later.
And so there's a little mixing of all of Europe in there.
And the reality is, in order to have a sense of a country, you do need to have some kind of a sense of a common people.
And so to your point on the guy from Delhi, it's not even that the guy from Delhi can't be like quite American three generations from now, but you can't just like land in a place and because you read a book about America or because you watched a YouTube video, you just totally get America.
To have a country is to have a lived experience that has passed sometimes ineffably, you know, without words from generation to generation.
I'm looking around your house here.
I mean, there's like pretty old stuff and you just kind of do it.
And there are habits that are inculcated in people.
And there are inclinations that the American people have observed by Tocqueville back in the 19th century that they're not even aware of, that it takes some random Frenchman to come in and notice it.
I'm like probably the most pro Indian right-winger you'll ever meet, but sincerely, but it's not even lecturing, but showing up and lecturing me about what it is to be an American.
And not just, it wasn't just Indians, but like people would, immigrants would show up, you know, taking all these benefits from the country and the permanent population here and then start immediately attacking whites.
Now, they attack whites because they were encouraged to do that by a ruling class.
Like they got into Stanford.
Schools and 100%.
And then they get to Stanford and it's like, oh, you want to succeed?
You have to attack the whites.
And they just, they're status oriented.
All immigrants just like want to fit in and want to do the get the merit badges that this society demands they get.
And one of those merit badges required them to denounce whites.
And I felt like that is the most destructive thing that you could ever do.
If we controlled the universities, if we controlled the culture, and if the incentives in the corporations and all of the DEI offices, we can rename them, if all the incentives were not to be like America-hating, gay, liberal, elderly.
This is, look, this is purely my gut telling me this.
He would be like waving the stars and bars, doing dips.
Like whenever incentive were there, he would go to it.
And so I think this is where the Trump, a little more muscular view of politics comes in.
He says, no, forget about this stupid, like, oh, everything's just going to be organic.
That's never how culture has changed.
We're going to go in.
I'm going to pummel Harvard into the dirt.
I'm going to go in.
I'm going to pummel these bureaucracy, the Kennedy Center, whatever, and I'm going to create new incentives such that the best and the brightest and the most ambitious are incentivized to like our country and do good stuff.
I'm at the inauguration January 20th, sitting there and it was indoors for some, I can't remember why, but I'm sitting there chatting away, of course, Setex Laura Ingram, gossiping about Fox.
And all of a sudden I look up and there's Jeff Bezos sitting like right in front of me.
I noticed all of a sudden after the inauguration, after the election, really, my phone starts ringing from news networks that have never been interested in talking to me before.
And it is incumbent upon statesmen on the happy occasions that they get power through from the people that they actually use it in a good way and make hay while the sun shines.
She could tell me something not only that I don't agree with.
She could tell me something about myself that you tell me I had blonde hair and I would I would just the whole time, I'd just be like, go on, tell me everything.
We say, I've lived now that I've lived, now that I've had sex with 100,000 people and I've made a million dollars and now that I've done everything, traveled all over the world.
But it seems to me that if you're a whole set person and you marry someone and you sign a prenup and you keep separate bank accounts and you just, you're kind of setting yourself up to prepare for when you're just going to crack apart.
But if you do it a little bit younger and you're just totally in mesh.
I also think, you know, young men especially are really concerned about the economy, which has like basically been designed to exclude them.
And they feel like they're not going to be able to succeed and provide for their children the lives that they had from their parents.
Just as a math question, getting married is like, it just, there's a lot of research on this is the single most effective thing you can do to be more successful.
It even made not that I ever robbed any liquor stores, but like I said, I might still.
When we got married, I was a little older.
I was 27 when we got engaged, 28, we got married.
I kind of wish we'd gotten married younger.
We were kind of moving.
We're long distance, all that stuff.
And it's all works out in Providence, but it's one regret I had.
We should have got my wife says it too.
We should have got married younger and started having kids younger.
And I remember, though, I started my show after I got married or right around the time I got married.
And I thought, man, thank goodness I'm not single in this career in particular because you're probably, can you imagine you just, all you do is just like stay up late and go drink and screw around.
And that's not, and when you're married and you have kids, you have a sense of purpose that you're doing things for something.
And if you're under like real stress, if you have, you know, performing in public or whatever, any job where you're like under pressure and you're feeling on a tightrope all the time.
But if you didn't have a wife, I don't know how you would do that.
That is really smart because it is, of course, it's true that boomers, which again is everybody born between, you know, the end of World War II and just before Woodstock.
There are a lot of nice people who really care about their kids and grandkids.
And I, so the story of this company, I wanted to start that for a long time because despite my swarthy appearance, I do have this kind of wasp Mayflower ancestry.
And I said, I want it to be Mayflower.
I want it to be patriotic, but I don't want it to just be like, you know, I don't know, guns and fried chicken cigars.
I want it to be a little more elevated.
But there's this paradox with the Mayflower, which is kind of like the founding stock.
And they're, but they're a premium hand rolled long filler, so it's not a cigarillo or something.
I just love them.
And they sold out immediately.
It was a good problem to have because I sold like four months supply in one day and was out of stock for Black Friday, out of stock for Christmas.
We're picking up production.
Now we're in retail stores.
This brings us all the way back to the top of our conversation because one of the reasons I started this company is I want people, especially guys, to get out in the physical world and spend time together and speak the best conversations I've had in my life are over cigars.
So, it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
But on another level, it's shocking with everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now.
Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
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