Transcript of Ben Shapiro Predicts the 2024 Election Winner and Goes IN on Andrew Tate!

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All right, we got amazing guest. Second time he's been on the Fulsend podcast. Me and Steinier are both huge fans of you been fans for a while, so it's great to have you back.

Thanks so much.

How's the last few weeks been for you? Busy.

I'm so tired. Yeah, I've been out on the. On the trail with a bunch of candidates. So I went to Wisconsin with Eric Hovde, went to Nevada with Sam Brown, Ohio with Bernie Moreno, went to Pennsylvania with Dave McCormick, went to New York with Trump. So it's been a lot.

How was it in New York with Trump?

That was fun. I mean, it wasn't a fun day, obviously. It was October 7th, and we were paying tribute to the people who had fallen, and I brought a hostage family to meet him. But he's always a kick. I mean, President Trump is a character, as everybody has seen. If nothing else, the guy is the master of memes. More memes have emerged from this election cycle than will ever emerge for the rest of time. The cornucopia has been uncorked, and now we just have a wealth of memes for the rest of human history.

What do you think about the garbage truck troll?

It's great. I mean, it's hilarious. I mean. And what was great about it is that he went on stage and then explained it. Right? And the explanation was hysterical. I mean, he gets up there and he's. He's talking about how, like, oh, my God, look how high the step is. Am I going to be able to get up there? Oh, he's a funny dude. I mean, that's the secret sauce for Trump is that he's always been a standup comedian, and that hasn't stopped anywhere along the line. But wouldn't you just think about the images from this campaign? It's like the mugshot to the assassination photo, McDonald's to McDonald's to him in a garbage truck. Like, what?

Imagine people looking back in, like, 50 years. What they're going to think of this.

Election, you know, all that. It underscores for me, it's something I said to a foreign leader. Actually, at one point is right after the Biden Trump debate, before Biden dropped out, and the person was like, in despair about, oh, my God, look at that debate is so terrible. I said, listen, let me explain how awesome America is, how much we kick ass. Here's how awesome we are. We can run two 80 year olds against each other. Whichever one golfs better will make the president. Then he'll do a speech at the RNC, introduced by Hulk Hogan. He'll jabber for 93 minutes. No one will understand what the is going on. And you'll love it. You'll love it because we're America, bitch. Like, that's it. America's great. Like, it's a great country. We're powerful, we're strong. Our institutions are fine. Like, you know, for all of the kind of panic that's out there, the reality is that this country still is just amazing. It's an amazing country.

Yeah. I want to go back real quick to Madison Square Garden. The Tony Hinchcliffe stuff's everywhere.

Yeah.

So I just want to get your opinion on that.

I mean, he's a roast comedian and he told the roast joke. So, you know, don't. Don't hit the roast comedian for telling a roast joke. Hit the guy who booked him. Whoever's at the RNC is like, you know who we need to open? The guy who is telling, like, super, super edgy jokes at the Tom Brady Rose. Like, that's the one. I mean, come on.

Like, just someone's getting fired on the.

I mean, somebody should be. I mean, that's like politics 101 is, don't insult ethnic groups in your closing event like that. That's not Trump's fault. I mean, if you think that Trump is micromanaging his. Trump has. Yeah, he is.

No.

Well, do you think. Do you think Tony was vetted at all?

No. No. I mean, no one in the back room was like, this joke is too much. Tell Tony to cut it like he was. I assume that Tony wasn't going to submit his material to be cut like that. First of all, he's a comedian. He's a talent. A lot of those folks are not really fond of people cutting their jokes. So my guess, he probably said, listen, here's my routine. You know, load it in the teleprompter, we're good.

Yeah.

And that was kind of it. So, yeah. Again, I think he's hysterical. I think Tony Hinchcliffe generally is really funny. The stuff that he's been. The stuff that he's been doing with the Biden Trump fake personally. Oh, my God. It's the Shane Gillis stuff. It's so funny. But that's a weird move. It's a weird move. It's like strippers at a funeral. I'm not sure exactly what's happening.

It just was not the right setting.

No. And you could tell the audience was awkward about it. It wasn't like the audience was roaring at these jokes. You say, oh, my God, he made a Puerto Rico joke. Just what I've been waiting, like, the audience, like, I don't think I should be laughing at this at this time, like this.

Do you think something like that has a big enough impact?

No, I don't think anybody's changing their vote based on that. And I also don't think actually that the Biden, Trump supporters are garbage thing has a big impact, except on Republican turnout. So Trump. Trump is really like, no swing voter is going, man, I just don't know who to vote for. But now that Biden called Trump supporters garbage, I'm gonna pull the lever for Trump. Like that. That's not how that works. What it really is is a bunch of low propensity dudes who are like, should I go to the polls today? Should I not go? I kind of like Trump, but also, like, it's kind of a schlap. Do I really want to get up and, like, go to the polls today? Like that son of a bitch. He just, you know, he just called me. He called me garbage. Fine. You know what? F it. I'm going. I'm going. Like, I think that that drives out votes for Trump.

Does that not surprise you, though, how, like, the Tony thing was a big deal and he cut a lot of heat, and then everyone thinks, like, this is this monster deal. And then Biden's dumb enough to come back and say something like that. I bail him out.

I have a theory of this election cycle, which is that God totally wants Trump to win, and Trump is like, hold on a minute, God. Like, I think that there's a lot of that happening where it's like, you know, God is like, I will turn your head at the last minute right here. So you just go. You don't get shot in the head. And Trump's like, well, what if I go to the RNC and talk for like, 93 minutes? And then. And then there's like another Assassination attempt. God's like, I'm gonna make sure that you don't get shot. Trump's like, what if I have Tony Hinchcliffe open for me? And of course, you know, the Tony Hinchcliffe thing isn't Trump's fault, but. Yeah. To pretend that either of these campaigns is being run like clockwork is ridiculous. That's obviously not true.

You think there's any beef, actually between Biden and Harris?

Oh, yeah. He hates her. He absolutely hates her. Now, I don't think that he's, like, attempting to undermine purposely. I'm not sure that he has the level of intention necessary to do anything right now, but he clearly despises her. I mean, he picked her because she was foisted upon him during BLM in 2020. And then Jill despises her. Like, Jill hates her. Really? This has been well reported. Yeah. I mean, she cannot stand her because.

How do you know that?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that was.

That's interesting.

Which book was this? This was. There's a book by Charlie Spearin where he talks specifically about how Jill does not get along with Kamala, specifically because Jill was angry that. You remember that first Democratic primary debate, Kamala labeled Jill racist. Right. She said, if it were people for people like you, I never would have been able to go to an integrated school. And that was, like, the opener. Right. And so Jill, since then, I think rightly so, has thought, this woman's terrible. Like, I don't want her any. And then she became the vice president, and she still doesn't like her. And so for Joe. Joe's entire case was Kamala's super weak. What's your proof that she's gonna run well ahead of me in this election cycle? And so, you know, the incentive structure is weirdly set up for Joe to be kind of happy if she loses. Like, if she loses, then Joe Biden goes down as the guy who is unfairly deposed in favor of a candidate who then lost to Donald Trump. If she wins, then he's just a transitional president who is there for a few years as a placeholder for Kamala Harris.

So if you're Joe Biden and you want to be remembered as a transformational, tragic figure, you kind of want her to lose a little bit.

Damn, that's interesting.

This is a total. We're going to switch real quick, but I have to. I have to talk to you about it, bro. The jubilee video, you didn't want to talk about the genitalia, right?

Well, I mean, the trans. I was. I mean, why would I. I mean. No, no, that was crazy. Under no circumstances. Whoa, whoa. That was. That was the thing I did not want to even have. That's not an image I wanted. That's not. No, none of that. None of that.

Actually, that was probably the most viral clip I've seen in a long time, like all over TikTok.

And it was. It was, you know, a psychotic break. I mean, the, you know, this person got up and was not making an argument. There was no argument there. And so she started, you know, talking, and I started trying to interject to try and, you know, have a conversation. And she was growling and moving the chair around and just yelling. At a certain point I was like, you know what I got. There's. I can't interject. There's nothing I can do to interrupt this stream of consciousness nonsense. What's kind of shocking to me is that obviously the format there is that people can raise the red flag and cut this thing short.

It's a pretty good setup.

Right. But because of the intersectional nature of the thing, this was the thing that kind of shocked me about the jubilee video, is people who are making truly awful arguments. If they had intersectional qualities, people would let them go for a long time. And people who are making half decent arguments, very often, like, the flags would come out right away. And so I was kind of shocked by that, like the kind of informal intersectional structure of the entire event. Like this person. Well, because she's a trans man, that means we're just going to let her go for like six minutes. Just ranting and raving nonsensically.

Yeah.

I mean, so much so that segment finished. I'll be honest, I haven't actually watched the whole thing through because I experienced it in real time. After that finished, that had run down the clock entirely on the abortion debate. Right. We'd done 20 minutes on abortion. Other people were like, I still want to comment on. Like, I still wanted to do the abortion debate. And so the producer said to me, like, can we put some more minutes on the clock? I was like, I feel like that would be fair to put some more minutes on the clock for all these other people if they want to comment on it, because that had nothing to do with the topic. That was an emotional rant and I really don't have anything to respond to it. I mean, what am I supposed to respond to? Somebody who's clearly having an emotional meltdown in front of me.

So it's you versus 25 people, right?

Yeah. So you're sitting in the middle of the circle, it was like 20. It was actually closer to 30. I think they may have called it 25, but I think there were actually 29 sitting in this circle. And the way the format works is that they sort of race. They race to the chair, sort of, which is always amusing. And whoever gets there first gets to sit there and debate until a majority of the people in the circle raise a red flag and say, it's time to switch that person out After a certain point. There were people who obviously were slower to get to the chair who wanted to talk. So I sort of started choreographing the thing where I'd be like, okay, you know what? This person hasn't talked yet. You've talked already. I want to be fair to everybody in the circle. Just, guys, I promise I'll get to you. Let this person run up and do it.

Do you think anyone gave you a run for your money?

I wouldn't say run for my money, but some people made some interesting arguments that I thought were sort of out of left field. There was the dude who tried to compare the electoral college to dei. I thought that was a weird, strained argument, but I could kind of see.

That's your boy. No, one kid.

Dean. I know him, maybe.

Yeah. I mean, he's, like, best friends with that kid.

I mean, I don't know about best friends.

It's Mark. I mean, obviously he has my cue points. I thought that that was a real stretch of an argument, but it was an interesting one I hadn't heard before. And I always get kind of interested when I hear an argument that I haven't heard before that's always kind of interesting to me. So I thought that that was the argument that I heard that I was most kind of taken by. Because, again, I do this professionally, which means that I just spend all day reading arguments on both sides of every issue, and I could kind of, through a glass darkly, see kind of what he was getting at. But at least it made me think. At least it made me sit there and go, okay, is that true? Is that. Not like that? I thought was.

That's impressive if someone could do that to you.

Yeah, I mean, you hit me with something completely out of left field, and, you know, that's okay. At least. At least makes me pause and consider the argument.

So would you agree? You were 25 and.

Oh, I mean, I didn't see anybody defeat any of the arguments that I was making. So, you know, the way that I view these things is not about defeating me personally. When you go into these situations, the hardest thing to do is just stay emotionally, you know, kind of on even keel throughout this sort of stuff. I mean, you're being berated by some giant person who's yelling at you in your face, and you have to just be like, okay, you know, that's. That's life. Or when I was in Oxford and there are people who are literally arguing that genocide of Jews is okay, and you're like, okay, well, I guess I just have to kind of sit here and take it like that. That's the hard part. And when I talk to people about what I do for a living, everybody assumes the hard part of the job is the reading and the organization. And can you get on camera and talk for 45 minutes straight? How do you do that every day? I mean, that's what I do for a living. That's not the hard part. I'd say 80% of the effort I spend in life is not saying things, is not responding to things, is not just kind of like, I really want to clock this person.

But, like, don't do it. Just, like, just withhold. Just don't do it. When that trans person is yelling at me, I mean, they're like, it was six minutes long. So for me, six minutes. A long time. Like, a long time. I. I probably had 10 snarky responses that I could have given in that moment. And I made the active decision that that's not. That's not what I want to, you know, purvey on the air. That's not, that's not what I want. I don't want to be the person who's, like, snarking about somebody who's clearly having a meltdown. It's not sympathetic, it's not empathetic. Like, it's just not a good thing to do.

Yeah.

So even though that would make the clips go crazier and.

Yeah, I mean, like, a lot of.

Other people do that now, right. 100% kind of looking for.

There have been situations like this in the past that never make the camera. So I'd say must have been five, six years ago. I did a speech at University of British Columbia up in Vancouver, and. And there was a trans person who got up and started making the argument and the person started talking about it was a male to female about his personal experiences. And I said, listen, I really don't want to talk about that because I'm inevitably going to have to critique your personal experiences. And I don't think that that's good. And he insisted on doing this, he just insisted on going back to it, saying, my parents say that I'm female. And eventually, after a few minutes, I said, look, I really didn't want to do this. You brought up. You wouldn't stop talking about it. The reason your parents are saying that is because they're sympathetic to you as a person. They don't actually believe you're female. They believe that you're a male, but they're trying to be nice to you. And this person broke down in tears and, like, literally broke down in tears and went away crying. And, you know, obviously, that's a clip that goes super viral.

You've never seen that clip. Why did you never see that clip? Because I went to the camera people at the event, and the organizers of the event, I told them to cut it from the tape because it's bad for the mental health of the person. And then I called up the person, somebody who knew that person, one of the organizers knew who it was. And I said, I want you to check in on that person tonight and then invite them to breakfast with me tomorrow morning so I can make sure they're okay.

Did they come?

Yeah, absolutely.

Have the breakfast.

Gonna. I said. I said. I said, listen, I cut that from the tape. I wanna make sure you're okay. Like, you know, I don't have to agree with your assessment of yourself. I don't have to agree with what you believe about yourself, but you're a human being. I wanna make sure you're okay.

And how was their reaction?

I think they appreciated it. I think he appreciated it.

How long ago was that?

Five, six years ago, maybe.

What is, like, in your opinion, what's the whole answer to this? Like? I think you think it's like. I mean, we all kind of think it's some sort of mental illness or something. But what's the.

There's no. There's no answer to. So there's two questions. One is for people who legitimately have gender dysphoria, which is a minute percentage of the population. Unfortunately, there's no amazing answer to it. That's a real question.

Minute percentage of transgender people or.

Yes, I think that. I think a huge percentage of transgender people are now part of a social contagion. I mean, that's why you've seen this rapid increase.

A large percentage of transgenders don't have gender dysphoria.

Yes. I mean. I mean, I think most. I think a lot of people who are transgender will say they don't have gender dysphoria.

Right.

Especially as the current modern definition of gender dysphoria goes, which says including depression, which again is a very weird way to define a mental disorder. If I think I'm Napoleon, I walk around all day thinking I'm Napoleon. I'm actually pretty happy about being Napoleon. Apparently, According to the DSM 5, I don't have a mental disorder. That's a very weird way of describing a mental illness. See, to me, I think that if you walk around saying you're an Apollo Lane all day and believing that whether you're enjoying being Napoleon or not, something's wrong. But you cannot say that. If there is a condition known as gender dysphoria, and that condition has been present throughout time, which it has, I mean, there's been a vanishingly small percentage of human beings across all of human history who have had problems believing that they feel more like a member of the opposite sex. But that number was really, really, really low. And now you have, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20% of given populations who are saying that they're gender dysphoric. That's called the social contagion. And especially when you see a complete flip in the sex to which it applies.

So it used to apply mostly to young men who believe they were women, like teenagers, and then there was a complete flip and now it's a bunch of young girls who think they're boys. And so that's happened over the course of the last 5, 10 years. You're seeing like 100x increase in trans identification in areas of the west that doesn't wash. Doesn't wash. You've never seen anything like that. What condition, other than sort of like an actual viral contagion? What mental health condition have you seen that has increased so starkly without any sort of social contagion being a part of it? It doesn't work that way.

Is there any, is there any data on why that's why it continues to grow at that speed?

I mean, I think that there is. Abigail Schreier wrote a great book called Irreversible Damage about this, which was then banned from Amazon. Abigail has gone into a lot of research on this sort of stuff and her basic premise is that when you propagandize to a bunch of 12, 13 year old girls who are going through puberty and who are feeling uncomfortable in their own bodies and who are feeling like they. And so girls are. I mean, I have three younger sisters, I have a wife, I have two daughters. Girls get uncomfortable. Puberty is an uncomfortable time for girls. And so when they start Going through that, and they feel awkward and chubby, and they feel their hormones are starting to go a little bit crazy, and they feel uncomfortable. And then they're told, the reason you feel all that is not because this is sort of the natural way that you grow into physical maturity. The reason you're feeling that is probably because you might be a boy. And then what happens? You go to a gender clinic, and without pretty much any sort of screening procedure, they shoot you up with testosterone. What testosterone does, it makes you more aggressive and makes you more confident.

And so girls will do that, and they'll feel more aggressive and more confident. Temporarily, they'll think, oh, it's true. I am a boy, right? Because I feel better now. I feel better having the shots of testosterone. That's a hormonal thing. That's not because you actually were a boy. At no point were you a boy. And also, I think that because parenting has become so crappy and parents are totally unwilling to simply civilize their children, then I think that you end up with parents who treat their kids as though it's up to the kid to make these decisions. It is not up to the kid to make very important life decisions. I have four children. They don't make any important life decisions, nor should they. They're kids. They're stupid. Kids are innocent, and they are wonderful, and they're not good and they're not smart, right? And then it's your job to make them good and smart, right? That's. That's your job as a parent. And so I've told this story before. I have four. It goes girl, boy, girl, boy. So when my oldest girl was maybe three, and the second one, the boy, when he was maybe one.

So when you're one, his sister had some shiny princess shoes, and he was going around, he found the shiny princess shoes, and he put them on because they're shiny, and he was walking around in them, and I said, no, those are not for you. Those are girl shoes. And he did it again. And I said, those are not for you. Those are girl shoes. And he was kind of whining about it. I said, just hold up. So I drove him over to the country western store, and I bought him a pair of cowboy boots, and he put on the cowboy boots. He wore them for three years. Okay, now, is that sexist that I did that, or is that me teaching him that? Actually, yes, there are differences between boys and girls. And you weren't really interested in the femininity of the shoes because you're a girl. You just like cool shoes, you like cool shiny things and now these are other cool shoes that you can wear. Like there are ways to be a boy and there are ways to be a girl and they are distinct. And that's not a bad thing, that's a very good thing.

In a society that pretends that you're supposed to be raising boys as though gender is not supposed to be reinforced by stereotypical assumptions. That's a society doomed for failure because you got to teach boys to be men. And that does come along with some accouterments, like, you know, wearing pants and not dresses. Like I think it is good to teach boys that they ought to wear boy clothes. I don't think that that is a bad. Like the fact that this sort of stuff has become arguable, nay, bigoted in modern society that oh my God, I have a five year old boy and you won't let him wear a dress? Yeah, no shit I won't let him wear a dress because he's a boy. And it's good for him to learn that boys and girls dress differently. That is a good thing for him to know.

I know it's. So what do you think it is? Is it like, are they just crazy or is there some hidden agenda like you said with the gender clinics and all that? Like that's some weird shit.

There's an agenda.

Are they just like super woke or is it some secret agenda that they're trying to up our youth?

Well, I mean, I do think for some people there's that agenda to up the youth. But I also think that there's something else going on. And there's a great book by a philosopher called Carl Truman out of, I think he's the University of Utah at this point. And his basic premise is called the creation of the Modern Self. I believe it's a great book. He basically argues that the traditional way that human beings defined themselves was an interaction with the rest of the world. Right? The way that you defined yourself as a human being is how you interact with the institutions around you, right? So you're a member of your family, you define yourself as a dad, you define yourself as a son, you define yourself as a member of your church community, you define yourself as a member of your bro. Like whatever it is, you define yourself in relation to all these other peoples and to duties, right? There are things you are supposed to do in the world, these are roles you're supposed to fulfill. And then during the Romantic era there became this idea that basically what you are is not the things that you do, it's not the conscious decisions that you make, it's the feelings that you have on the inside.

That's what defines you. And anything that's an imposition on the feelings that you have on the inside is a denial of your authenticity. And so that sort of idea has permeated Western society. That second idea now sounds more natural, I think, to most people than the first idea. The idea that, like, if I ask people who they are, like, well, I'm a person who feels, and here's how I feel about things and here's what I feel about myself. Whereas if you ask a person who's religious, they'll say, usually if you ask a Christian, they'll say, well, I'm a Christian. It's the first thing they say. I'm a Christian, go to church, I'm a dad, got kids, and religious Jews, same sort of thing. It's not how I feel on the inside. But if you ask young people today what they are, it's how they feel. And so if you believe that all you are is a floating set of feelings, this sort of gnostic idea that you're not a physical body that is integrated with a soul, but you are actually just like a freely wandering soul that has a meat suit on and like Cartesian duality.

And that you are, and that any imposition on you is a denial of yourself. That's how you get to this, right? That's why one of the questions, like, you'll hear it from every trans person that I talk to, they'll always say, why are you denying my existence? And every time I say, I'm not denying your existence as a person, I'm denying that what you maintain about yourself is true. But you see, for that person, what they're saying to their mind is true because what they are is how they define themselves, right? How they feel about themselves. If I deny that, I'm denying what they are as a human. What I'm saying is what you feel is not who you are. Who you are has many characteristics. How you feel is one of those things, but it's certainly not the majority of the things that make you you. I feel tons of things all the time. That's how it makes me me. What makes me me is the things that I do in the world, the person that I am to my family, right? And that's been a radical shift in the nature of how we perceive ourselves in Western society.

I think this is sort of the final outgrowth of that Has.

Has anyone ever Topped the og you getting pressed? The trans. Was it Zoe?

Her name was Zoe Turter.

Has anyone ever top that yet or no? Or is that still the biggest.

What did she do?

The biggest trans press of all time.

So he was a guy who had been a helicopter pilot and transitioned into a trans woman, whose name is Zoe Tur. And this is a pretty famous clip from CNN Headline news, I believe, 2014, Dr. Drew was hosting. And so this is very funny story, actually. So we were in the. In the green room, and they said, you want to come debate, like, a bunch of issues, including the trans issue. Okay. And so in the green room, I'm there. It's like me versus the entire room. It's like me and four other people, I think, are on the panel.

How long goes that? Sorry to interrupt.

Is now eight years. Well, 10 years ago, maybe. 10 years ago.

I remember that clip.

I think it's 2014. And so the producer comes over, and I should have known things. We're gonna go haywire. Because the guy's like, listen, I used to produce for Jerry Springer. At this point, I should be like, oh, God. But he's like, I want you to. I'm gonna sit you right next to Zoe, and you're going to. And you're going to talk. Say whatever you want. He's like, whatever you want to say, just say it. Don't hold back. Like, well, he's a good producer. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, well, you know, that's. That. That's my job. That's what I'm here for. Okay. And so. And so this is when I believe the subject was Caitlyn Jenner. And so everybody in the world is like, caitlyn Jenner is the bravest, most wonderful, most important, courageous person on Now.

She's kind of brave, though.

She's sticking up in the trans community for Trump and stuff.

Yeah.

What award did she win?

So I think ESPN gave Caitlyn Jenner the courage award.

Yeah.

Like, not because Caitlyn Jenner had, you know, like, won a medal serving the country or something, but because Caitlyn Jenner decided that Bruce was a chick. And so. And so the entire conversation was like, on a scale of one to Normandy, how brave is Caitlyn Jenner? People are, like, way better than Normandy. Like, oh, my God. Like, no one has ever been braver. Like, when you think of personal sacrifice, it's like, Jesus. And then Caitlyn Jenner, like, right up here. And that was, like, the entire conversation. They finally came to me and said, I Don't see what's courageous about that. There's a person saying what they feel internally, and then we're all supposed to sort of bow to that. But that. That, you know, somebody declaring that their gender dysphoric doesn't seem particularly courageous to me.

Right.

It's not. Storming beaches in Normandy.

Did you watch Bruce when he was competing?

I mean, like, back in the day.

Yeah.

I mean, when he was a great athlete. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Were you upset when he decided to make the.

No. I mean, it was a little before my time, so I was only born 84. He was really competing late 70s, early 80s. Yeah. So I've seen tape of him. I wasn't.

I like Caitlyn Jenner, though. We played golf with her.

That's really funny.

She's good. She's a beauty. Caitlyn.

Well, because. Because Bruce Jenner is a great athlete, so changing the name to Caitlyn doesn't make him not a great athlete.

Try to play from the reds, though.

That really.

Yeah, we called her out. We said get back to the.

Yeah, correct. Exactly that.

Yes. And she's a nasty, Olympic. Nasty golfer.

That. That is not shocking at all. You know, it turns out that Caitlin and Bruce. Exactly the same person, just a different name. I know. Crazy. Crazy to say that. I know. Bruce disappeared and we never know where Bruce went, but it turns out that Bruce and Caitlin. I know. Same human. Whoa. Whoa. Same physical capacity with just a little estrogen. Whoa. I mean, again, she still has her.

Balls, though, if she's coming out to, like, support Trump, even though, like, the whole Kardashian clan is probably super left.

I wasn't gonna comment on, like, what. What percentage? No, I'm just saying percentages. Like.

I'm just saying, like, I respect her.

For, like, coming out and still being.

I mean, listen, I think a lot of what. What Caitlin is saying is fine. And you'll notice that I characterize Caitlin as a he because people get to change their names. They don't get to. They don't get to choose their. Their genders. But in any case, the. You know, so anyway, this is the whole conversation, and the. And then at some point, I'm talking about gender dysphoria. I make this comment, and I'm saying gender dysphoria is a condition that doesn't make you heroic any more than having depression makes you heroic. Like, these. These are, you know, mental conditions. And. Okay, so this is a thing that's not heroism. And Zoe Turner turns to me and says, little Boy, you don't know what you're talking about, little boy. You know, and so. And I said, well, I mean, I do know that every single cell in Caitlyn Jenner's body, with the ironic exception of some of his sperm cells, has a Y chromosome in it. Like, I know that for a fact. That's a reality. And Zoe Turner's like, well, you don't know anything about genetics, little boy. And I was like, well, what are your chromosomes, sir?

And at this point, Zoe Turtle reaches across and grabs me by the back of the neck on live TV and goes, you stop talking like that or I'm going to. Or I'm going to send you. I'm going to send you home in an ambulance. I'm going to send you home in an ambulance. I remember the specific wording just because I remember the first thing that popped in my mind is that makes no sense. You don't go home in an ambulance. Right. But in any case.

And Zoe, just, just, just to clarify, Zoe was a guy, right?

Yes. So do you trans. Do you think, do you think you could have taken her, like, in a fight?

Yeah, well, Zoe, she's big.

Oh. Zoe's like, I think he's had some ex military background or police, I can't remember. It was a helicopter pilot. And so Zoe is like, hulking. And it's like, I'll meet you in the park. And like, no, I'm not going up. I wouldn't like to fight you.

Like, no.

I mean, also, I go to jail. Like, if I. That's what I'm saying.

What's the ruling there?

I lose. I lose lose. Like, if, let's say Zoe Turk kicks my ass, that's terrible just in and of itself. And let's say that I kick Zoe Turz ass. I go to jail because I just beat up a trans person. So, like, that's not. That's not going to work out. Well. Yeah, also, I'm not the one. Like, I don't feel like the adjudication of masculinity is whether you can win a physical fight. Like, I think that's a stupid way of adjudicating masculinity. I think the best way to adjudicate masculinity is how many good children you raise in a solid, stable home and make the world a better place while defending your family and creating things. Like, I think that the adjudication of masculinity by how many people you can punch is a really dumb way to do masculinity. It turns Out. We have guns now. So if people really want to get in that kind of fight, I can hire security. And I win, you lose. Like, I don't have to physically pummel somebody in order to prove that I'm a dude. I have a wife. I have four beautiful kids. I make a wonderful living.

I do things that I think are productive in the world. I try to help people in my community. I give a lot of charity. That's a better adjudication of masculinity than taking off your shirt, strutting around with a cigar, and pretending that you're doing something for the world because you can rent a lot of Bugattis.

Is that an Andrew Tate shot that was.

Yeah.

You don't like.

Oh, that wasn't subtle. I think he. Schmuck. I think. I think you don't like him at all. I think that Tate is. What I've always said about Tate is that because feminism is a target rich environment, he hits that target a lot. And I agree with a lot of the critiques. And I think he's like a terrible doctor. He's really good at diagnosis and he's horrible at prescription. Everything that he recommends for guys is pretty much the opposite of what they should be doing. At least I wouldn't say everything. Half.

He plays, he says some good shit, and then he says some crazy shit.

This is his game. His game is he'll say one thing that is perfectly obvious, and then he'll say one thing that is batshit lunacy. And then when you attack the batshit lunacy, he'll say, are you saying that that's not the perfectly obvious thing? Like. No, I'm saying that, like, what you just said is batshit loony. So he'll say things like, you know, that means that men should, like, work out and strive hard. Agreement. Totally agree. And then he'll say things like, and you should be judged by how many women you impregnate. It's like, no. Now. No, that's stupid. That's. That's bad. That's bad for society. That's stupid and unnecessary. And I'm getting kind of tired of the game where everyone is a political candidate. By this, I mean, when you're voting for a political candidate, it's a package deal, right? You only have. You vote for the person, you vote against the person. It's a package deal. When it comes to the people that you choose to consume, it's not a package deal. It turns out that to get the good stuff from Andrew Tate, I don't have to ingest all the trash that Andrew Tate puts out, including at his scam university.

I don't have to do any of that. I don't have to listen to a guy who made his money in cam girls and then proclaims his virtue at the same exact time.

Have you ever debated him or talked?

No. I mean, I did a 20 minute video on breaking down his Tate University and all of that kind of stuff. So, I mean, listen, that'd be a good.

That'd be an entertaining.

It'd be some great Internet. It'd be some great Internet.

Would you ever do that?

I mean, listen, I'd be happy to do that. What if we help set it up? I mean, that's fine. I mean, but I know what it'll turn into. It wouldn't be a debate. It would be me critiquing his specific ideas and then him just saying that I'm not man enough to take off my shirt and how many women have I impregnated? And can I fight people? And he can kick my ass. I'm sure Andrew Tate can kick my ass. I mean, like, so, so, so what? Like, okay, a lot of people can kick my ass. As it turns out, not that big. All right. But your ideas are still shit.

That'd be some good Internet, like you.

Said, it'd be amazing Internet.

That's great.

Yeah.

On that transgender subject, I've seen the clip, but I don't know if you've seen it. Did she actually really say that we should give transgender surgeries to prison inmates?

Yes.

There was no context before that.

No, no, that was part of. So she. What she did was on. It was on a, I believe is a questionnaire. So the questionnaire was, should inmates of prisons in California be given transgender healthcare, which means taxpayer funded surgeries? And she checked. Yes, on. It was like an ACLU questionnaire.

That's just so crazy that a president, presidential candidate is like, running on.

Honestly, this is part of the thing that the Democrats are benefiting. There have been studies done on this like, that people like, you'll mention what the Democrats actually say, and people be like, no. Like, no, but really? Yeah. I'm like, no, that's no way. No, like, that's a real thing. So if you say, like, they're for abortion all the way till point of birth, people like, that's not true. It's like, no, but. But it is like, no, that's too crazy. That's not true. Unfortunately, it is.

What is your overall opinion?

Just as of Kamala She's a completely empty suit. She's a completely empty suit. There is nothing there. And you can see it anytime anybody asks her a follow up question. There is nothing there. She's got one layer of slogan and then you scratch beneath the surface and it's just vacuum. She's absolutely vacuous. I don't think she's smart. I don't think she's talented. I think that she is good at reading off a teleprompter in short spurts. I think the more you see her, the less you like her. Which is what the American public have been experiencing every time they're reintroduced to her. So you get like Kamala Harris 1.0 and it's like fresh faced senator out of California, hard charging, progressive within five minutes. Everybody's like, oh my God, she's insufferable. I can't. And then it's like, here she is running for president in 2019 and she's fresh and she's awesome and she's joyful and she's intersectional and she's doing great in the polls. And then she blows up and she doesn't even make it to California and she's out. And then they pick her up off the scrappy and they make her a VP and like third, look at Kamala.

She's probably amazing this time. She's gonna be so exciting and intersectional and she knows things and she's whip smart. And then she's the least popular vice.

President Ghost for the last four years. Yeah, because anything about it, she was.

So unpopular over the first two years. They just hit her. They just did. They were like, we can't let her out in public anymore. She's like the crazy first wife in Jane Eyre. They put her in the attic there and just left her there. And then finally he died. And they're like, we need somebody who's here. Let's grab Kamala. Let's do that. And so they grab Kamala. Fourth, look at Kamala Harris. There's like, oh my God, the brat and the joy and the dancing and Tim Walls in his crazy weird ass hands and. And all that kind of stuff. And they somewhat.

Not that we like her, but they somewhat succeeded in it a little bit.

For the first time, which was crazy.

I don't know how they did it.

Well, I mean, the answer was they never let her answer a question. I literally on my show held a counter every single day that she didn't answer an adversarial question. I think our count got up. To 48 days. Wow. That she didn't answer a single adversarial question. That's a long time to carry your campaign without answering a single adversarial question. And then she started having to do interviews, and it turns out that she didn't have much. And then she started, like. You can also tell that she's uncomfortable on the trail. She went from. Like, they told her, whatever you do, don't laugh. Like, clearly very early on in the campaign, because they knew that that was her kind of tick. Her nervous tick is the crazy laughter. And so they're like, don't laugh.

She does that every rally.

And now.

Yeah, right.

As. As. As she's letting it out, you're getting the crazy laugh.

Yeah.

And everyone's like, I cannot have that haunting my dreams for. For four years. Like that. I can't. I can't.

Like, I hope not. What's. What's your prediction? You're probably looking a lot into the early voting.

I'm actually not. So the early voting is a bad indicator. Really? Why? Well, the problem is that there's no good comp. So just data wise, I'm a big data guy, obviously. So listen, my gut is that Trump wins, and my gut's not worthwhile. So, like, I've been wrong on my gut before, so I don't trust it. So my gut is that Trump's winning. I've been in pretty much all the swing states with the exception of Michigan. My feeling is that Trump has the inherent advantage in that his base is very passionate and hers is passionate about him, but not about her. No one can make a case for her. I did a debate with Sam Harris about this recently on Barry Weiss's podcast, and he was making the anti Trump case, and I was making the pro Trump case, but no one was making the pro Kamala case because it's not makeable. You can't make a pro Kamala case. You can make a case for not Trump, and you can also make a case for Trump, but you can't make a case about Kamala. So that means that the real question is, are there enough people who are passionate about it being not Trump to overcome the number of people who are passionate about being Trump?

And I don't. I don't think so. But, you know, who knows?

Isn't there crazy early voting statistics, though? Like, I saw more Republicans have voted than Democrats in New Jersey.

Yeah. So that's why you can't take it seriously. He's not going New Jersey. Right. So, like, the same Thing. So the only one where early voting really matters because there are tons of mail ins, is Nevada. So John Raulston, who's a ballot analyst over there, he does a really good job, and he says that the Republicans are running very strong in Nevada, which makes sense. I mean, Nevada, he's been running strong the whole race in Nevada. But, you know, as far as these other states, the problem is there's no comp. So there are a few things you don't know about the mail in voting. Number one, you don't know if that's cannibalizing day of. Right. So if I was going to vote day of, like, normally I vote day of, right. I have to be out of town to cover the election in Nashville this year. And so that means I'm voting early. I can't vote twice. So if I vote early, that doesn't mean that Trump got an additional vote. It just means I voted early. So you don't know how much of the day of voting is being cannibalized by the early voting.

You also don't know how many of the people who are voting early are the low propensity voters. Those are the people Trump needs. So what's weird about Trump's electoral base is that basically between 2012 and 2016, Trump traded away all of the kind of suburban Republican votes in favor of rural Republican votes. Suburban Republican votes tend to be very high propensity voters, meaning they vote in every single election. Trump traded that away. Like, he lost a lot of that because of his personality. He's uniquely polarizing. And instead what he got was, like, a lot of loyalty from people who really don't vote for anyone, probably, except for Trump. And so that makes it really difficult to model the electorate, like, super hard to model the electorate. Which is why the polls were really off in 2022 in favor of Republicans. Right. The polls were saying, okay, well, in 2020, a lot of these people showed up, and then they didn't show up in 2022 because Trump wasn't on the ballot. So it's very difficult to model the electorate on that basis. So when it comes to mail ins, are the early ballots that are coming in mail in votes from low propensity voters, or is that coming in from like the high propensity voters like me?

And you now have to wait to see if the low propensity guys are going to show up day of? So it's very difficult to kind of model out what exactly is happening. Each campaign is trying to hit its numbers. The other thing Is that when you count the mail in ballots, all you can count is how many ballots have been mailed in by party registration. If you have people who are crossing over, it doesn't measure that. If I'm a Republican, I voted for Kamala or I'm a Democrat and I voted for Trump.

Just shows Democrat.

It shows you're a Democrat voter or Republican voter. Turning in your ballot. Yeah.

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What would your prediction be though? Like, what do you think is going to be the numbers? So if you had to predict.

If I had to predict, I think that Trump takes North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona. I think that he is going to win Pennsylvania. I think he is going to win Wisconsin. I think he's going to lose Michigan. And again, that's based on nothing. All these states are within margin of error. I could be wrong on all of those. I could be right on all of those. And this is one of the things, by the way, that drives me crazy about election prediction. So there's a game that goes on in the commentary, which is who can make the most outlandish prediction that comes true because then you get to be hailed as a prophet. Right. So if you're the guy who was like, trump's going to blow it out of the water in 2016, despite all the data, and then you hit jackpot. Right. Then you spend the next four years being like the election guru, because he called it right once. And so what I tend to do when I'm analyzing these elections is, I will say openly and honestly, the only thing the data said, which is this is a very close election. I don't know.

Again, my gut says Trump. I'm seeing a lot of enthusiasm on the ground for Trump, but of course, I'm Republican.

I don't have enthusiasm.

Right.

I don't see how Kamala win.

Yeah.

That's what I want to ask you is what factors you think are stopping Trump from winning this? Like, the most important things, I think.

Just his past and just past the.

Fact that he's Trump. The fact that he's Trump. I mean, like, people really. So I was at a. I was at an event for a Republican candidate, like, two days ago in Pennsylvania, and the. And there was a lady there who was clearly Trump oriented. Like, she's a Trump voter for sure. But she said, listen, I know I can't vote for Kamala. I can't. She's awful. I hate her. I want her to lose, but I can't bring myself on a personal level to vote for Donald Trump because of all the things that he said because of January 6th and because of all. Because of his tweets and because of the mean thin and because of his mannerism and his personality and his character and all this kind of stuff. There are a lot of people who are like that.

A lot.

Like, dudes don't have as much of a problem with this because we all understand, like, I think males inherently understand that males are like schmucks. Like, we're all like, we understand the down to eat males are all like, male, right?

Yeah.

And so, like, oh, that. You mean that dude just has no control of his id. Okay. That just makes him kind of a dude. Right. But. But I think that for a lot of suburban women, particularly, they look at him and they're like, I'm having a tough time. Even if I even. I don't like Kamala. And so the question for him is, will those people show up and vote for him? Because he does need some of those people to show up and vote for him. That's a systemic obstacle. Yeah. I think there's still open questions about how good the on the ground game is I've heard opinions on, like, all sides of this. Elon is obviously putting a lot of resources in. I've heard the Elon people are really good. I know Charlie Kirk's TP USA is putting in, you know, a bunch of resources. I don't know how that's doing. I assume that it's doing well. It's very difficult to tell the on the ground game from each of these campaigns, like who's door knocking, who's actually getting out the. We know Democrats are pros of this. They're really, really good at this. And so their systemic, mechanized organization is better than the Republicans in almost every circumstance.

And so that's an obstacle that Trump is going to have to overcome as well. But there are no undecided voters. I mean, the percentage of undecided voters in this election is incredibly, incredibly low. One of the weird things about this election cycle is that I think that one of the misperceptions about Trump is that he's a uniquely strong candidate, when the truth is he's just a uniquely unique candidate. I mean, there's no way to gage him. He's one of one. In the same way that kind of Obama, in his way, was one of one. Trump is one of one. So is he uniquely strong? People will say, okay, well, if you had swapped out, say, Trump for, let's say Nikki Haley had won the primaries, how would Nikki be running? It's all speculative. I can speculate that Nikki would have done a lot better with suburban women. I can also speculate that she wouldn't have done nearly as well with rural men. You know, who do you win, who do you lose? How many do you pick up? How many, like, he's got unique draw. He also tends to really, really push the buttons on the other side.

One thing that I think, you know, Nikki would have done is probably suppress Democrat votes, meaning that people aren't going to show up just to vote against Nikki Haley. If you're a Democrat, people are going to walk over broken glass in California just to vote against Trump. So these are all factors that go in. But, you know, there's, there's a weird thing that's happened over the course of the last three election cycles that never used to happen. So before that, I'm old enough to remember in 2000 when Bush won, the reason Bush was deemed to have won is because Al Gore had failed. Al Gore was not a good candidate. In 2004 when Kerry lost, it was like, well, because he wasn't good enough. He couldn't Win because he wasn't good enough. When it was McCain versus Obama, it was like McCain just wasn't good enough to beat Obama. Obama was a better candidate in 2012. Romney wasn't good enough. That's why he lost. In 2016 for the first time, the side that lost decided that it wasn't that their candidate wasn't good enough. It had to be some sort of extraneous factor that had led to her losing.

It wasn't that Hillary Clinton lost to Trump because she was just a bad candidate, which is the actual, real reason. The reason that she lost is because Russian interference and because of the Internet and because of. And because of Trump being corrupt and all these different excuses that they used which ended up plaguing his presidency for the next three and a half years with the Mueller report and all that garbage that was originally concocted by Hillary. Now, when that happened, we now went into a different kind of matrix that's actually quite bad for the country, I think, generally, which was in 2020, when Trump lost, the Republican response was he didn't lose because he wasn't a good enough candidate. He lost because of all of these external. By the way, I agree with the analysis that there were many external factors that led him to lose. Also, he did not run a good race in 2020. He ran a very, very poor race in 2020. I mean, he was all over the place on Covid. He was all over the place on BLM. It was like 2020 was a very rough year for President Trump.

In 2024, if Kamala loses, Democrats are not going to attribute that to her being a poor candidate, even though everyone knows it. They're going to attribute that instead to, well, she had a short campaign window. Maybe it's Biden they're going to attribute it to. Well, the Internet. Well, Elon. Well, you know, Trump was probably colluding with Russia. Again, that's what they're going to go back to. And if Trump loses, it won't be on the right that Trump, you know, wasn't a good enough candidate. He alienated a lot of people. The excuse will be, well, you know, probably they rigged the voting procedures or the media is really. By which, of course, they are. Again, the extraneous factors are real, but those are real in every election. The problem is that when you have a matrix that's set up where the easy answer for all Americans isn't the same, right. For Democrats and Republicans in 2005 said Kerry was a bad candidate. In 1996, Democrats and Republicans After Dole got clocked, they're like, wasn't a good candidate. The good news about that particular take on elections is that it means, okay, well if I run a better candidate next time, then maybe I'll win.

When you don't do that, then you start to think there's no way I can win. And that's when you see desperation setting in. People getting more and more radical, saying no matter what I do, no matter what kind of great candidate I run, I'm just going to lose. The system stacked against me. Maybe I disassociate from politics entirely, or maybe the country can't last because if I can never win an election again, one of the sort of preconditions to a successful democracy is the possibility that your side may win. If you believe that you are going to lose from now until the end of time, why would you buy into that system? You start to opt out of the system. So it's kind of a dangerous metrics that we've been in for the last 10 years.

Yeah. My biggest thing why I want him to win is just the wars.

I mean, I desperately want.

Even though the old Republicans too, they were always like George Bush, they were like warmongers too.

So now it's not a take I particularly like. So the warmonger take, I think that this is a straw man. As somebody who was, you know, politically active during this period, every single president would have gone into Afghanistan. Everyone El Gore done it, everyone would have done it. Okay? The only one who was talking about like letters of mark and reprisal was Ron Paul. Okay? And first of all, the idea that a letter of mark and reprisal would have single handedly gotten rid of Bin Laden I think is a fantasy. It took, you know, a decade to find him anyway, the ever after 9, 11, we were going to destroy Al Qaeda and we should have destroyed Al Qaeda and by the way, we should not have pulled out Iraq. So Iraq was a bit of a different story. There was more controversy over that. But Afghanistan, of course, but Afghanistan, of course, that doesn't make him a warmonger. Iraq was a response to a broader geopolitical theory which is really kind of about look at the map. So if you look at the map in the Middle east, really, so there are a few levels of Iraq.

And again, in retrospect, if you know that Saddam doesn't have weapons of mass destruction, the beautiful thing about history is you can look back in retrospect and say we shouldn't have done this. Right? But in the Time. Here are the factors that led to the war in Iraq. The things that led to the war in Iraq were the fact that pretty much every international institution was saying that Saddam was in fact developing weapons of mass destruction. And he had attempted to do so in the past. And he was lying about it, right? It turns out that he was lying. And the reason he was lying is because if it had come out that he wasn't developing weapons of mass destruction, it would have put his regime on really shaky footing. In the same way the Iranian regime right now, because they're perceived as non powerful, is on kind of shaky footing. So he was afraid of his own people and so he was putting out information suggesting that he was in fact developing weapons of mass destruction. So the Bush administration looked at that and they had a theory which was, okay, when you get clocked like 9, 11, your next move is who might clock me next and how do I clock them first?

That's what preemptive war is, right? People are down on preemptive war. But you know what, actually sometimes preemptive war, the thing about preemptive war, very easy to catch to sort of hindsight, 2020 those things because the counterfactual never happened, right? So let's say that we had gone to preemptive war with al Qaeda in 2000 and there's no 911, right then. And then things go wrong in 2004. You never see 9 11, so you never know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Right? It's all these sort of what ifs in history. So we go into Iraq on the perception that he's developing weapons of mass destruction. There's also a sort of geopolitical theory that if we could transform the government of Afghanistan. Again, this is where I think that the theory was mistaken. I think the way that they approached Afghanistan and Iraq was wrong because they approached it with the, with the mindset of we're going to implant a constitutional democracy in Afghanistan. Iraq. I think that's way too starry eyed for like you can't just people. Again, this is where knowledge of history is useful. After the Korean War, when we had liberated South Korea from North Korea, right?

The North Koreans were wanting to take over the entire Korean peninsula. We liberated South Korea. It took full on 20 years for there to be an election in South Korea that was a dictatorship for solidly 20 years. In Taiwan. The first real elections were held in Taiwan like the early 90s. So it takes a long time to transition from sort of authoritarian control of an area to democracy. We tried to do it overnight in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and of course that failed. That is not fertile soil for that sort of institution building. So that was a mistake. But geopolitically, I think the theory was, look at a map. Afghanistan is here, Iran is here. Iraq is here. If you can build two American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, you've now contained Iran. Right. So the idea was that you were going to solidify and stabilize the Middle east by actually building friendly governments in these places. Now it turns out that the strategy to actually pursue that was deeply flawed. The war making strategy in Iraq was actually not particularly flawed at the beginning. I mean, we defeated the fourth largest army on earth in three weeks.

It was what came after that was a disaster area. And the same thing was true in Afghanistan. We defeated the Taliban within the first month of the war. The American military is unparalleled. It's the most powerful military force in the history of the world. And we kicked the shit out of them. The problem was that afterward, the plan for rebuilding Americans, we always have this idea that the process of transforming a country is much easier than it is. And we forget again our history. We still have military bases in Japan, we still have military bases in Germany. John McCain was ripped up and down in 2008 when he said, listen, if you want Iraq to be a stable place, you're going to need to leave American troops there for 100 years. As a descriptive matter, that is correct. If you are going to transform a place, you do in fact have to leave American military presence there for a very, very. So you should take that into consideration before you go in and determine whether that's a thing that you want to do or not, as opposed to trying to do it on the cheap and sort of wishing and hoping that it'll transform itself.

Okay, the sort of description though, of like everyone who voted for the Iraq war is like they're warmongers. So the question I always ask is, so what was the ulterior motive? Everyone has these sort of bizarre ulterior motive. We went into Iraq for oil. We clearly did not. We got no oil out of Iraq. We did it because of the military industrial complex. The military industrial complex does not control the United States military or military policy. The political wings of the government people.

They don't have any influence at all.

I mean, they're not lobbying. They're not lobbying for war per se. They're lobbying for war buildup which doesn't necessitate war very often. Again, I think the sort of Idea that there are these shadowy powers outside that Lockheed Martin is calling up George W. Bush, dude, we need war. Like, pick a country, let's do this shit. That's not how politics works. That's not how politics works. I mean, the reality is that Lockheed Martin is a supplier to the American military. Republicans tend to fund the military better than Democrats do because they have a theory about peace through strength. Now, of course war companies are gonna make more money off war, but the notion that because a war company makes more money off of war, it was the war company that drove the war is generally untrue. I think that one of the great disservices Dwight Eisenhower ever did was use of the phrase military industrial complex, which was actually hijacked from some left wing thinkers at the time. This sort of idea that, I mean, think there is such a thing as regulatory capture. You see it in the agencies, right? You see it. RFK talks about this all the time.

You'll see.

Yeah, I was going to say.

Yeah, and he's right about that. I mean, in the regulatory agencies, that's where you see institutional capture. It's like the fda and you'll see a company that works outside the FDA lobbying people inside the FDA to do X, Y and Z. You'll see military contractors who are lobbying the DoD to contracts with them for particular types of weapon systems. But that's not quite the same thing. As I'm going to call up my local congressperson, I'm going to tell them I want them to vote for a war in Iraq so I can make $100 million off a weapon system like that is way too rudimentary for.

I mean, it's evil.

Yeah, it's evil, but that's not actually what's happening is what I'm saying. That's not how war gets done. Because again, these people are answerable to their constituents. It's not that easy to talk Americans in a war. We tend to be a pretty isolationist people. We don't like war, we don't like being in wars. Which is why every single president of my lifetime has run as an isolationist and then ended up being kind of interventionist. It turns out that the world is filled with terrible, horrible people who want to fill that vacuum. And President Trump knew this too. The thing is that President Trump took the position that the best way to avoid a war was to basically threaten to kick everybody's ass. Everybody's acting as though Donald Trump is an isolationist. Donald Trump is an isolationist. I did a fundraiser for President Trump. And he was talking to me about the war in Ukraine. And he's like, you know, Ben, Ben, the reason that Vladimir Putin never invaded Ukraine is because I called him up. I said, vlad, Vlad, Vlad, Vlad, don't go into Ukraine, because if you do, I'm going to bomb the shit out of you.

And Vlad said to me, Mr. President, no, you won't. And I said, well, I might. And then he said to me, because, Ben, that's how you do it. If you think there's a 5% chance the most powerful military on earth is going to blow the shit out of you, you don't do it, okay? That's how you actually do foreign policy. Now, is that an isolationist foreign policy, or is that actually a building up of military strength and use of credible threat of force, which is what Trump could do? Because everyone thinks he's crazy. Which is a great way to be, right? Because everyone thinks, like, I don't know if he's going to shake my hand or just shoot me in the head. I really have no clue. Right? One day he's threatening to press his little button on Kim Jong Un, the next day he's written love letters to him. I don't know. That's actually not a terrible place to be. The sort of wild man theory of politics. It's not bad. That is not isolationist. Like, the way to dissuade people from doing things is the credible threat of the use of force. Joe Biden makes threats of force all the time.

He's just not credible. Okay? So, yeah, again, the question with the Iraq war, again, in a period that was right after 9 11, there was a lot of focus on how do we stop the next 911 from happening? You know, you guys are really young, so I don't know how old you were during 9 11.

Very young. Probably seven.

Yeah, right. So if you're too young to really remember and remember what 911 was, 911 was the worst thing to have ever happened in this country since Pearl harbor, and worse than Pearl harbor because it was an attack on a civilian site. It was terrifying. It scared the shit out of everyone. It should have. It killed 3,000 people. It should have killed probably 80,000 people. If they decided to fly those planes in those buildings at 11am that morning instead of at 8:56am that morning, then probably 80,000 people die. That's how many people were working the buildings. Tens of thousands of people working in those buildings. It took out lower Manhattan. I mean, it was horrifying. It was absolutely. And so the first thing that every American was thinking is, I don't care who we have to clock. I don't give a shit. I don't care if we have to clock Iraq. I don't care if we have to clock Iran. I don't care who we have to clock. Clock whoever you have to do. So we don't see giant towers in the United States collapsing in on American citizens and pulverizing them into dust, and American citizens jumping off the 88th floor and landing on their head.

Right. That was, like, the number one priority. And so does that mean that every decision that was made was good? No. If I could have retrospect, of course you undo the Iraq war. Of course you do. Because there's no purpose and it ends up badly. But the sort of retrospective of, well, because it went badly, that means that the original intent of the war was warmongering and military industrial complex. That's such Noam Chomsky bullshit. I don't like it when it comes from Republicans. I don't like it when it comes from Democrats.

Before Trump, I feel like. Weren't we in, like, Libya? We were in Syria, so Libya was.

A bad intervention, and Libya we shouldn't.

Just seems like Trump's really good at preventing the wars is what I meant.

Yes, I totally agree. So this is what Trump has. The best foreign policy in my lifetime. The only point that I'm making is it's not because the people who were his predecessors were quote, unquote, warmongers. It's because some of. I mean, I think, frankly, the. Maybe the biggest warmonger in terms of just getting us involved in random wars, we had no place in being. Was Obama. Right? Obama was getting involved in Libya, and then he was sort of halfway getting involved in Syria. Not really getting involved in Syria like that. Like, that's a disaster area. Because when you put your finger in all the pies, but none of them. Well, that's the worst for Trump, it was like, don't put your finger in the pie unless you're really willing to go. And I think that's a great way to approach foreign policy. But it's not that Trump will never put his finger in the pie. He absolutely will. I mean, Trump authorized the kill on Qasem Soleimani. Right. Who's the Iranian general who's in charge of their terror program. It was President Trump who was brokering deals in the Middle east that were explicitly based on containing Iran.

Donald Trump threatened to use force more than any president in my lifetime and used it Less than any president in my lifetime. Which is, which is actually a really good strategy, 100%.

How big of a threat is Iran right now?

I mean, to whom? So to Israel. A very serious threat in the sense that if they develop a nuclear weapon, Israel's a tiny state. If they were to use a nuclear weapon on Israel, Israel would nuke them back. Then you have a major conflagration, obviously in the Middle East. So it's a threat to sort of global security. Iran is a threat to shipping lanes. Obviously. You've seen that in the Red Sea. They shut down all shipping through the Red Sea, which means that all your products are more expensive because now they're getting shipped around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. So that's a real problem. Iran is a threat to American allies abroad and in the United States. I mean, they have a pretty extensive terror apparatus in South America. Hezbollah agents are over there. You saw that Iran was actually attempting to foster assassination attempts against Trump himself. So they're dangerous in that sense. Are they dangerous in the sense that they're like an existential threat to the United States? They're clearly not an existential threat to the United States, which is why my preferred policy would be to let the Israelis do whatever they have to do to take out the Iranian nuclear program and then tell the Iranians.

And by the way, if you hit too hard back then we'll give the Israeli more material and they'll do it. Never put an American troop on the ground. Never get an American troop involved in harm's way. The Israelis are perfectly capable of handling it if you give them the weaponry with which to do it. What's weird about the Biden administration approach is they're doing precisely the opposite. They're giving tons and tons of weaponry to the Ukrainians with no actual end goal. And then they're slow walking the aid to the Israelis, who clearly are capable of militarily achieving the thing if they have the weaponry, like Israel is the greatest military and tech power in the world.

What do they need to achieve? Like, what do you think needs that?

Like in Israel? I mean, the thing that they need to achieve is they need to. There's going to be a long term military presence in the Gaza Strip to solidify security in the Gaza Strip. That's not going to end. There's going to be a buffer zone that goes around the edge of the Gaza Strip. There's going to be control of the Philadelphia corridor, which is the barrier between. Barrier. It's the, it's the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, because that was being used as a go between by Hamas to use those tunnels to get people and materiel in and out through Egypt. So Israel is now in control of that. They're going to maintain control of that. And they're not going to give it up, nor should they. They're going to build that buffer zone. So that means that people can't walk up to the border again and cross it and then murder 1200 people. They're going to have a significant security presence inside. Israel would love to hand it off to somebody, but nobody will take it. They've literally offered it to everybody. They offered it to the Egyptians. The Egyptians, like, no way.

They offered it to the Qataris. Qataris are like, no way. Like, they offered it to the Saudis. No. No one wants a piece of this. No one. And so everybody's like, well, why can't Israel just, like, get out? Well, because then Hamas takes over again, that's why. So they're not going to do that. That would be idiotic. So they're not going to do that. They're going to maintain a military presence over there, a policing presence and intelligence presence. The biggest problem they had before October 7th is that because of the pull out From Gaza in 2005, they had no intelligence apparatus inside the Gaza Strip. They do have intelligence apparatus in parts of the west bank, like Jenin, Nablus, like the big Palestinian cities over there. They have a unit called Duve Duvan, you see, Non Fauda. And they do have intelligence presence over there. So that's what will be in the Gaza Strip, in southern Lebanon. There'll probably be either a military occupation of southern Lebanon, or you would hope, maybe the French get involved. I mean, the French do have sort of a historic stake in Lebanon that was a French territory until it gained its independence.

And they still have a very strong relationship with France. You would hope that the Lebanese government would tell Hezbollah they need to stay the hell out of the area in the south of Lebanon, south of the Litany River. That would be, by the way, in accordance with UN Resolution 1701, which says there's not supposed to be a Hezbollah presence in that area. It's supposed to be clear of military apparatus. So then Israel can move its citizens back into the north of Israel. And then with regard to Iran, Israel's chief goal with Iran is to cripple its nuclear program. Because if Iran were to gain nuclear program, it's not just that they might fire a missile tipped with a nuclear weapon at Israel it's also that they could then activate all of their terror proxies and say to Israel, if you go too hard then we will fire a nuclear weapon at Israel. In my opinion, what Israel just recently did, which was largely knocking out their ballistic missile capacity, was the first step. I would be surprised if Israel does not try to take out their nuclear facility sometime in the next few months.

Did they destroy all their defense?

Yes, they destroyed any. They destroyed the S300 system from Russia, which was sort of the anti aircraft stuff. They destroyed all of those. And the Israeli military has performed amazing performance, like truly, just on a military level, amazing performance by the Israeli military. Like the only other military on earth who does it this well is the US military. And Israel is, you know, they have to be even more meticulous because of all the world pressure, the United States. The beautiful thing is we don't give a shit. So it doesn't matter. But you know, for Israel, when they knocked out. So they knocked out the anti aircraft and anti missile defense stuff over there and they also knocked out a lot of their long range ballistic missile technology. So there's a factory that makes a lot of parts of that. They knocked that out as well. So they're knocking out preliminarily all of the retaliatory stuff that Iran could fire at them if Israel were to take out say the Natanza nuclear facility.

That shit's scary. Is that recent strike by Iran, is that like the biggest escalation there's been in like a long time?

I mean there's 181, you know, that.

Has never like really happened.

No, and between Iran and Israel and then, and then the Biden administration was like, well, Israel has to be proportionate. I was like, by proportionate you mean that Israel now gets to fire 181 ballistic missiles that are on like. What do you mean by proportionate? Like that? Proportionate is such a stupid word. When people use proportionate in foreign policy, traditionally what they mean is your, the means you use to achieve a goal must be proportionate to the goal you are seeking to achieve. So for example, you want to kill Osama bin Laden, you can go into his compound, you can kill everybody who's in the compound to get bin Laden, but you can't just drop a nuke on his compound and kill 50,000 people because that's disproportionate to the goal you're seeking to achieve. So use the minimum possible necessary force in order to achieve the goal. But the way that morons use it is they fired 181 missiles. That means you get to fire 181 missiles. Or maybe it means, gets like, what proportion are we talking here? It's very stupid. It was, it was a massive escalation. I will say that the Israelis are quite used to it by this point.

I called up a very close friend of mine during the missile attack, which I was covering live, and I called him up while I was on the air, like, how are you doing, Nadav? And I was like, this so irritating. It's so irritating. I was like, irritating. I was in the shower and I had to think to myself, do I get out of the shower? Do I not get out of the shower? Like, they're so used to that at this point. It's crazy. It is crazy. And it's a different thing. I mean, the people over there, because they're constantly in a state of war, because every person who's 18 or older, with the exception of some of the ultra orthodox who should be drafted, is drafted because of all of that. An 18 year old in Israel is not the same as an 18 year old in the United States. They're just not. I mean, like, and that's true in a lot of places in the world where, you know, reality exists. And then the nice thing about America is really doesn't exist here. I mean, we are the richest, freest people in the history of the world.

And that means that we have. Many of us are the most irresponsible people because it turns out that when you're rich and you're free and you have no duty, very often people don't tend to do their duty.

I feel like there's never going to be like a happy solution where both sides are happy in that area.

Right.

Because we went to, we went to Israel, they brought us out there, we had a great time. And then I never even, because I'm not too educated on that specific, like, you know, area. And then, yeah, obviously when we went there, we were getting a ton of hate. I was, like, shocked. I was looking at my DMs, just like, you, you, blah, blah, blah. So then after I got home, I actually watched your video on just the history of thousands of years on that region. It's how many times it's traded.

Yes.

How many times it's been under dispute. And I just feel like it's been going on for thousands of years.

So that there will be. So that there will be peace in the region when people acknowledge Israel's existence. I mean, this is actually the math here. Is actually fairly simple. If Israel put down all of its guns tomorrow, then everyone in the region, in Israel will be slaughtered. I mean, that's just the reality. If the IDF were to disband tomorrow, every Jew is dead. If the Palestinians would have put down all of their guns 20 years ago, there would have been Palestinian state in the west bank and the Gaza Strip already. But that's not the goal. I mean the key thing to remember is that the Palestine Liberation Organization, the plo, which became the Palestinian Authority, which was the peace partner supposedly with Israel and the oslo Accords. The PLO was founded in 1964. Why does that matter? Because the liberation of the west bank and the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defense force was in 1967. So what exactly was the Palestine Liberation Organization trying to liberate if they were already in control? Jordan was already in control of the west bank and Egypt was in control of the Gaza Strip. So if you're already in control of those things and you say I'm liberating Palestine, what are you talking about liberating?

You're not talking about liberating the West Bank. You're not talking about liberating Jerusalem, which was under control of the Jordanians, the Old City. What are you talking about liberating? You're talking about liberating Tel Aviv, you're talking about liberating Haifa, you're talking about wiping out the state of Israel. And unfortunately that has been indoctrinated into generations of Palestinians. That basically the thing that you are looking for is not living side by side in a state of peace and security. We all want the same thing. We want economic prosperity. If it were that simple, it already been done. It really is about an identity that says that Israel should not be in that area, it should be extirpated and it should be destroyed. And unfortunately, no matter how many times Israel tries to keep giving things away to make it happen, it ain't happening. I mean, this is why October 7th, I think was such a shock to the Israeli psyche. The Israelis wish that were true. You think the Israelis want to send all their 18 year old kids to the army? They don't want to send all their 18 year old kids to the army.

They hate it. It's the worst thing in the world. You're literally sending your kid into the line of bullets. The number of soldiers who have been wounded or killed in this war is in the. It's like five to six thousand. In Israel right now. There have been I think 750, 800 young soldiers who've been killed and there are thousands who have been wounded. And I've seen them. I mean, like last time I was in Israel, which was in June, I was at afternoon prayers on a Jewish holiday. And I look over next to me and there's a 20 year old kid and the 20 year old kid's in a wheelchair. He's missing both legs above the knee, he's missing one arm at the elbow and the other hand. He's had two of his fingers blown off. His parents are American. He had moved there and he joined the idf. And you think his parents want that? No one wants that, at least not on the Israeli side. So if that were, that's why they pulled out of Gaza in the first place. So the great shock of October 7th is that it happened from an area that Israel completely abandoned in 2005.

What territory were they attempting to liberate? When they crossed that border, they already were in control of the Gaza Strip. What were they attempting to liberate? Not the Gaza Strip. They're attempting to liberate everything else. So when you have one side that is eliminationist and one side that is not, there's no deal to be made there. Which is. And what the Abraham Accords acknowledged is that's insoluble. Right. The Bahrainis and the UAE and the Moroccans and all the other countries that were members of the Abraham Accords, what they recognize is this issue isn't going anywhere. So let's have all the other issues. Let's economically cooperate, let's have some defense cooperation against Iran, let's foster technological cooperation. And we'll ignore the fact that there's one group here that wants to kill the other side and the other side refuses to be killed. And that's how you get the Abraham Accords and the Saudis are on it too. I mean, like the grave mistake the Biden administration made was elevating the insoluble issue back to the top of the pile as opposed to saying that's insoluble, let's solve all the other issues.

So crazy.

Yeah.

I was going to ask about what do you think about North Korea bringing troops to Russia too?

Again, I think that Russia is a staggeringly weak country, technologically speaking.

That's kind of never. That hasn't happened in a while too. Where North Korea is actually putting ground troops?

Well, I mean, the opposite. Right. I mean, the worry during the Korean War is that Soviet troops were going to go into North Korea and be used against Americans. The idea that they have to like draw on North Korea for troops demonstrates how weak Russia is militarily. And I think that what the last few years of war have shown is that it's really good to be a first world country or at least associated with first world countries. It's not that a first world country can't, you know, can't get surprised or hit or anything. It's that first world countries or allies of first world countries can kick the shit out of everybody else. I mean, like Israel gets hit with October 7, and then Israel proceeds to launch some of the most sophisticated military operations in human history. And Ukraine gets hit with a full scale Russian invasion. And with drone technology and some parts provided by the west, they've been able to push off one of the world's largest armies. Like, the thing that people forget is that capitalism, free enterprise, private property, these things generate awesome military power. Awesome military power. Like, that's why if you want America to remain strong, like in terms of foreign policy, you have to have a thriving economy.

It's really important. You need to be able to pay for this sort of stuff. You need innovation. You need geniuses who are working on this sort of stuff all the time. People like Palmer Luckey, who's, he's a founder of a defense company that's sort of in competition with Lockheed Martin. Like he's constantly innovating. You need that. That doesn't happen in Russia. In Russia, they're using like World War II era armaments. One of the, I mean, look, Iran, same kind of thing. Iran is like flying its. They're flying their president around like a 1980American helicopter with no replacement parts, which is why it goes down in the forest. It turns out that technology is indeed a weapon, but it takes two things, technological superiority and willingness to use it. Which is how the Houthis, who don't have either of those things are really harassing shipping. If the United States wanted to end that tomorrow, we totally could end that tomorrow. But that would require an actual commitment to being brutal and harsh. Because war is brutal and harsh. And the thing that Westerners and we in the first World have to get through our head is that war doesn't become unbrutal and unharsh.

When you delay it, it becomes worse and it takes longer. You're better off just punching somebody so hard in the head that they go down and then that's the end of the fight. If you're talking militarily, do you think.

There'S going to be unrest with this election?

No matter what happens, hard to See how it's not. I mean, unless it blow out from one side or the other.

What do you think would be worse? I feel like. I feel like it'd be worse if Trump loses this time. I don't typically. I know typically the left is known for rioting more, but I think this time it's going to be like, this is kind of the last chance.

Let's. Let's give you a scenario.

Yeah.

Kamala wins.

Okay.

How do you react to that?

I'm pissed.

It depends under what circumstances. So let's say that Kamala wins. It's really, really, really tight. And, you know, she is. She's declared the victor. As long as I don't see the proof of widespread electoral fraud, then she's the winner. And there are going to be a lot of good reasons why she was the winner, including the weakness of the ground game. We'll analyze it and we'll figure out exactly why what happened, happened. Let me get. You want worst case scenario? Here's a really great worst case scenario. And since we live in a timeline in which God clearly hates us, we may as well assume this will be the reality. So here's the worst case scenario. In 2020, there was a census. That census was done wrong. Okay. That census radically overcounted states like New York, Delaware, I believe Michigan, and it radically undercounted states like Florida and Texas. Like, this has been openly acknowledged by the census.

What do you mean by that?

So whenever they do the census, they can't survey everybody. Right. They take a sample.

Okay.

And so, like, they try to get everybody and they get about 67% of people, but the estimate is very often wrong. Okay, okay. So in 2020, they acknowledged, like, afterward, they're widespread. I mean, the government acknowledged that they had gotten the census wrong. The problem is, how do you apportion congressional seats and electoral votes? You do it based on the census. Right. So theoretically, Florida should have two more electoral votes, New York should have one fewer, and Delaware should have one fewer. So here's your worst case scenario. Your worst case scenario is Donald Trump wins North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada. Okay? If he wins those and he loses Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the final electoral college tally is Kamala Harris, 270. Donald Trump, 268. Now.

God, yeah.

Now you have the state of Florida say, guys, you up the census. The census is that we should have two more electoral college votes. And you failed to. And you acknowledge this. You know this. So you need to rejigger. We've now been Damaged, we now have standing. This election really should be Donald Trump. 270 Kamala Harris. 268 Based on the population shifts in the country, that goes to the Supreme Court. Now you have a Supreme Court in which six of the justices were appointed by Republicans, including three by Donald Trump, deciding whether the Electoral College count should be reversed based on the census failure. Okay, you want to, like, that's a.

Very, you want, like, a possible thing that could happen for sure right now.

I mean, by the way, the polling right now shows Trump ahead in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

And those other three.

Those other three are like that. Even so, like, so not only is that. And because God hates us, I think that that's. It's not a crazy possibility. So my tendency in these circumstances is to try and figure out first people get on my case because I try to suss out the reason why things happen before I go crazy, as opposed to going crazy first and then sussing out the reason things happen. So during the last election cycle, Trump declared himself the winner on election night. And I said, that's not true. On election night. I said, that's not true yet. They haven't counted all the mail ins. So maybe he won, maybe, I don't know. But it's not true that he won right now. And people were really, really mad at me because he had said he won. And so then I waited. And then when he started launching lawsuits, I was like, okay, well, I mean, that's his legal right. Maybe he'll show evidence. And then I didn't see him show any real credible evidence that 12,000 votes were switched in Georgia and 20,000 were switched in Wisconsin. And I was like, okay, well, I mean, if you can't show the evidence, then it ain't there.

And people got really, really mad at that. And so I think the tendency for a lot on the right because the incentive structure is such is that if Trump were to lose, I think there would be a lot on the right who would immediately jump to the election stolen. And it may be, but I'm going to wait to make that adjudication until I see actual evidence of how and why it was. It was like who did the thing, Right? If you show me the thing was done, I'm perfectly willing to say the election was stolen. But you actually have to show me the thing happened and how it happened. And it can't just be assumptions and it can't just be speculation. I can give you a whole range of sort of informal reasons why the election was stolen. Okay? One of them would be, how the hell do you switch out your nominee in the middle of a race? One would be the media actively attempting to suppress bad stories about Kamala Harris, about Doug Emhoff, about Tim Walls, like just covering none of it while magnifying everything that Donald Trump like. All that's true, but those are all informal reasons that don't impact the actual count of the electoral college.

Right. So, you know that, that'll be my reaction if Trump loses is to try and analyze all the reasons why and then come to sort of some sort of conclusion. If Trump wins, I think the left is going to lose their ever loving mind. I think that they're, you know, it'll be a section of the left. I actually think. I think that, you know, you're right in the sense that if Trump wins, I think there'll be some brief rage that comes out of them and then they'll just be like, well, at least in, you know, at least for the next four years, like, we can rebuild and then Trump will be gone and then we'll move on with our lives. So that, like, I think it all.

Depends on how you're right. Like if it's, if it's a landslide for Kamala, right.

If it comes to 7 by 5.

Million popular votes and he wins by like 2 votes in each state, they're going to lose it. Yeah, absolutely lose it. So again, like, the best case scenario for America is that Trump wins big. That's like the best case scenario for America is Trump sweeps all the swing states and wins the popular. Right. That's like, that's what I'm praying for. I'm not just praying for him to win. I want him to win big.

Yeah, right.

Like that, that'd be best for my party. It's best for, it's best for the country. Like, that's the thing I'm hoping for. The second best case scenario is that Trump wins small. The third best case scenario is that Kamala wins big. Because if she wins big, then you don't at least get the insane breakdown of the country. And the worst case scenario, worst, worst. Worst case scenario, she wins really narrow like that one. Right. Like, that's, that's. If I'm just gaming out, like, where I think that there could be a lot of conflagration inside the United States. That, that's kind of how I gave it out.

What do you do on election night?

So we're, we're broadcasting all election night, right? I mean, so we're going to get in at like 4pm so basically my schedule for the next week is I'm flying to Texas to join the trail with, with Senator Cruz because he's running a pretty competitive race with Colin. All right. Over there. Then I'm flying to Nashville to our headquarters, and I'm going to be doing, we'll prep for election night on Monday. We'll be on the air. I'll do the show Monday morning, Tuesday morning, then we will that afternoon get in the chair and we will just stay there for the rest of our lives. We're gonna, we're gonna be covering that until all hours of the morning, maybe grab a couple hours of sleep, do the podcast again Wednesday morning, get back in the chair, sit there for hours on end, hope to God that these jackasses can count the votes in anything, like a timely fashion.

You think it'll be that night again?

It really depends on how close this stuff is. You're gonna be able to tell pretty early there. There are a few at least, whether it's gonna be a long night or not. If there is bad turnout in urban areas, she's toast. If the vote count starts to come back from Philadelphia, for example, and it turns out low, she's toast. It's over. There are a few. There are two counties in Pennsylvania, I think one's Erie County. I think they've been kind of bellwether counties. They've gone for the presidential winner since 2008. It was like, Obama, Obama, Trump, Biden, whomever. So I'm sure we'll be watching those. But Michigan is saying they're not even going to have preliminary results until early morning Wednesday. Wisconsin saying the same thing. So it could be long. I mean, I was reading an interview with the guy who calls the elections for Fox because obviously Fox got ripped up and down for calling Arizona early last time for Biden. And he said, like, I'm not sure we call this election before Saturday. This shit is terrible for the country. It really is. And it's really stupid. Like, it's totally unnecessary. I mean, we're here in the great state of Florida, the best run state in the country.

And in this state, we're going to know within five minutes of the polls closing who won legitimately, within like half an hour, you know, who won. Because all the electron, all the battling is electronic in person, and all the early voting is counted up before election day. So they already counted all that shit. And then they just add in the day of and they're done. And it's done day of. Like, it's bewildering to me that states across the country don't just imitate what Florida does. And we could have like a clean election result literally within like two hours of the polls closing on the east Coast.

Where can people watch your election coverage? Is it on YouTube?

It'll be on YouTube. It'll be on what? We'll put up on x.

Live on YouTube?

Yeah, live on YouTube. Live on X. I'm gona everywhere. Daily Wire, you know, plus everywhere. Everywhere that we normally put our stuff will be live streaming.

What's new with the business of the Daily Wire? It's obviously just become a absolute machine.

Yeah. Thank God it's, you know, so we have well over a million subscribers at this point. Paid subscribers.

That is crazy.

Yeah. Thank God it's become a really, really great business. We have a lot of support. Last year we did $220 million in business. We, you know, what, what's new? We're always launching new stuff, so. And I think there are certainly undercapitalized areas of our company that we're going to really focus on, on, you know, moving those up the chain. So if you look at our business, a huge, a huge swath of our business, probably 60% of our revenue is from those subscriptions. And then probably 25% of our revenue to 30% of our revenue is from the advertising dollars. That's like on my show and you know, Matt's show, Matt Walsh's show, Jordan Peterson show, Tiny bit from Michael Moles. And then we make some money off merch. We have Jeremy's Razors. Right. Which we hilariously launched and now has like 125,000 people who subscribe to our razor company.

Wow.

And so that's like a $25 million business a year. And we have under capitalized that. We need to, we need to raise more money for that. We need to break that off as its own separate sort of entity and really pour money into it because that's a real brand and the razor actually really nice. It makes good Prof. Product. So we think that could be a really solid line of business. You know, we are still making documentaries like Matt's, right. Am I racing?

We had him on last week talking about the movie and stuff.

The movie's great. Yeah. Matt is. Matt's a true talent. He's a really, really talented guy. And that movie, like you think it's hard for me to be in a room like, you know, with 25 people surrounding me? The stuff that Matt does, I couldn't do that. That's a skill set. Yeah. That's really cool. It's incredible. It's incredible. So Miracist obviously did great at the box office. Think did 12, $13 million at the box office on an original $3 million budget. That doesn't mean that we made $9 million of profit because that's not how the business works. Right. You have marketing fees and distribution fees and all this kind of stuff. But it is also responsible for our single best movie launch day in the history of the Daily Wire. So in terms of when we brought on streaming on Monday, tons of subscribers signed up just for the extras or because they missed it when it was in theaters. So that's going to continue to be a line of business. We have our whole children's network, Mentkey, which we've been giving away to our subscribers for free. I would assume at some point it becomes not free because we can't just give away tens of millions of dollars of material for free.

So that will become not free, probably. And then we're expanding. We're looking for other shows that we want, other hosts that we want. So that's kind of the future for us, obviously.

How much are you involved in bringing on Matt Walsh or Jordan Peterson?

So I certainly have a voice in who I like and who I don't. I'm not a member of man. I'm. I'm a manager of the company, but I'm not an executive of the company. So I'm. So the co. CEOs, Jeremy and Caleb are the ones who actually make the hard and fast decisions. They might seek my input like a 30,000 foot level or for making like a big company decision, since I'm an owner of the company, then I have a voice in that sort of stuff for sure. But you know, when it, when it comes to. So, you know, I mean, on a personal level, I sort of recruited Matt, right? Matt was working for the Blaze at the time. I'd read his stuff and I said to Jeremy, this is like very early on in the company. I said, he's a real talent. I think we should grab him. And Jeremy looked at him too and was like, yeah, I totally concur. We should totally try and make an offer to him. And so we grabbed Matt. If you watch his original podcast, he was doing it from his car. It's really funny. And all of our stuff was really bootstrapped.

The story of the company is kind of amazing. We originally had a $4.8 million investment from an angel investor and we did not take any Outside money. For the first eight years of the existence of the company. We spun it up from, from $4.8 million of initial investment to a $200 million a year company just on cash flow. We were profitable 18 months in and we just kept reinvesting in the company and reinvesting in the impressive.

That's crazy.

Yeah, it's a credit to Jeremy and Caleb. They're the ones doing the day to day. You know, I get to do the talent stuff. Every so often I have like a good business idea but you know, they're the ones who are really running the ship.

Where do you see it? Like what's the ultimate goal with it in like five years?

I mean I want to double, triple, quadruple it. They want to do the same thing. I mean, so that's, so that means extending, you know, our reach in politics, but it also means extending our reach outside of politics. It's one of the reasons why we're enthusiastic about brand opportunities like a Jeremy's Razor, because we think that that can actually expand outside of the political realm. We're just like normal dudes who don't care about politics really like the razor. So you know, put it in, put it, it's already in Amazon but you know, put it in grocery stores, for example. We would love to expand. We've tried a couple of times expanding sort of the entertainment offering, but it's. That's more delicate. You have to. Our audience is trained to want politics. So if we just make a straight movie, is that something our audience is going to dig?

Probably not.

Probably not. So you have to gradually expand what the audience wants. We have the capacity to launch new brands at a particular level, but it's not going to be at Netflix level. So we're constantly probing to see where the opportunities are in each of these areas and then wherever you see the opportunity, you push. But they require independent marketing efforts. So like when you launched the children's network and then we made the faulty assumption, for example, that you could kind of politically market to parents and say, listen, you don't want woke crap on Disney. You should check us out. And it turns out the parents are kind of lazy about this sort of stuff and they just want to buy what their kid wants them to buy.

Without having stops crying and stuff.

Yeah, exactly. And so that requires an independent market. Also it's marketing to a different market than we typically do. We tend to skew mail in terms of our consumers. But if you're doing kids product that tends to skew grandparents and Moms. So that's a different marketing contingent. You have to. You have to market in a different way and in different places. So all these things require, like, actual business plans and constantly breaking and remaking the machine. It's a business is like, you know, breaking bones and resetting them and breaking bones and resetting them. It's just. That's all it is. Over and over and over.

That's super impressive, though.

That's crazy.

Anything else new coming up?

What about the Aquanaut? Is that new?

Oh, yeah, super new. This is like a year old. Yeah, I got the watch game going on. Yeah, exactly.

There you go.

How many watches you have?

10. Damn. Not all at this level.

What do you drive to work?

Because I have 24. Seven security, unfortunately, an Escalade, but I'm not driving it. The cars that I have at home, I have a Honda Odyssey. So my joke is that Andrew Tate walks into his compound. He's got a Bugatti, and he's got a Lamborghini. And this is my version of masculinity, is I walk into my compound, there's eight Honda Odysseys, but of different colors, but we've got that. And then we have a Tesla Model X, which my. Which my son is just in love with.

We should set up this roundtable with Andrew Tate, too.

Let's do it.

Go for it.

Yeah.

Would you do it one day if we zoom them in or something?

I don't.

You want to fly to Romania?

Yeah. Flying to Romania seems like a long schlep, but that would be some good Internet. No, it would be. It would be great.

It would be an interesting debate, like, just to, like, watch again.

I think as a fan, my only. My only proviso is that, like, you know, I would like to have a good intellectual conversation with Andrew Tate without maybe some of the, you know, bluster, if that's achievable. That sounds great. If it's just going to be me, you know, talking about the vision of masculinity that, you know, and him talking about how he can kick me in the head, I fully accept as a proviso, just right up front, Andrew Tate can, for sure kick my ass. Yeah. I don't think. That doesn't mean, like, also his ideas are bad. So that's it. That's all.

Yeah.

Sweet. All right, well, Ben Shapiro, thank you so much, bro. Thank you.

Thanks so much, guys. Awesome.