The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - How Dangerous are Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson?

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by Jesse Arm, vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute.  Jesse’s writing and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York Post, Fox News, City Journal, NPR and more.  How Dangerous are Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson?   What do Zoomers think? Can you trust Chat GPT?

Okay, this is my music there. Oh, okay. Well, when do I do my thing? I'll cue you. This is live from the table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy seller. Available wherever podcasts are available, including YouTube, which is how most people like to see it. This is Dan Naderman. We have Noam Dwarman with us, owner of the comedy seller, and a new location on West Third and Sixth Avenue to be opening in early March.

Music is throwing them off. I see it. No, I don't think so. Perial Ashen brand is with us. Hello. And we also have Jesse Arm, the vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, where he oversees communications, government relations, and polling. Welcome Jesse Arm to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Okay, so first of all, in his credits was not the article that we invited Amman to talk about. Listen. This is like, first of all, I'm fit to be tied today because since I got to work, everything's been wrong. The brick arches in the club of been wrong. The AI is wrong. They used the wrong guitar amp the other night. But I'm using,

I had that bio checked by both the Manhattan Institute and Jesse. That's what he sent me. I don't give a shit what you want. No, if we invite. I'm going to start putting the actual, I'm going to start sending the link to be mentioned in everybody's body. This is what we're talking about today. I think if we invited somebody in to discuss a new novel that they wrote.

And you did a bio. that didn't mention the new novel, that would be... That's fair. I accept that. If we contact Jesse... Recording in progress. Is that bad news? We're good.

We're good. That's a Zoom recording of progress. Yeah, I want to start the call at the phone. I see. If we invite Jesse, can call you Jesse? Yeah, you can call me whatever you want. What else are you going to call him? Mr. Arm?

Yeah, no, you don't need to call him. Mr. Arm. When you were young, did they make... Like, fast-hans-rich money, like, there's Mr. Hand and your Mr. Arm. Is that the kind of... Arm just means poor in German. I like it because it's a last name for somebody Jewish that you can't detect their Jewish at all. Oh, that's awesome.

I wish I had that. Am I supposed to be hearing anything, by the way? I don't hear the noises you say you're hearing. Do you hear anything? No, I just hear... Oh, you didn't hear... You didn't hear the intro music? No, I didn't hear anything.

Oh, okay. Maybe the volume could... Are you not plugged in? Hold on. Let Thomas Edison handle it. Did you try the flux capacitor? It was working. We did a sound check.

Uh-huh. Anyway, so, um, so the point is that if we invite someone out to talk about their article, you think you say, and author of the new article. Okay, fine, we're going to start.

Okay. So you're the author of, what's the article? Well, I, you have to tell me what the article is. You did a focus group. The focus group of a bunch of like,

fire breathing, Trump supporters, and you found out they all love Nick Flintas. They all. all love Tucker Carlson. That's the article. That's overstating it a little bit. But no, I think the article you're referring to is, well, it actually follows on some polling work we did in the beginning of December that we released. We polled the entirety of the Trump Coalition. That includes both Republican voters nationwide, anyone who is registered as or calls themselves

a Republican or people who voted for Trump in 2024. We wanted to get an understanding of who that group is, what they believe in, and we asked them the kinds of questions that public-facing media pollsters wouldn't typically ask. We ask them about all kinds of conspiracy theories. Do they believe in the 1969 moon landing? Do they believe numbers from the Holocaust are fake? There's a contingent that doesn't. But it's not an ideologically coherent one that Tucker Carlson might tell you, these people all believe the same things, or they all think like Nick Fuentes. They're actually a, they are a younger, they are a more diverse group of new entrants. to the Republican Party, meaning they either haven't voted in previous elections or they were

voting for Democrats in previous elections. So the biggest through line that we noticed with that group was not that they were just conspiratorial, but they were conspiratorial and they were like more left wing on average. They're all together constitute something like 29% of what we define as today's GOP. But two-thirds of the GOP is what we call core conservative. People who have been voting Republican for a long time don't really believe in a lot of these conspiracy theories and are just conservative across the board on issues. But this new entrant group is much more liberal on economic policy, on foreign policy. Those things might not surprise you, but they're also much more liberal on social issues. They're more liberal on DEI. They're more liberal on trans. And yet they're also much more conspiratorial and they're calling themselves Trump supporters or Republicans in today's America. So we wanted to follow up that quant work with a little qual work. Quant work? Quantitative versus qualitative. Okay, yeah. Qualitative work is like a focus group. You just grab 20 people at random. We were interested particularly in this younger audience. So we got zoomers, people between the ages of 18 and 29. We went to Nashville and did these focus groups. We ran it

in City Journal as one continuous transcript. It was actually two focus groups, 10 and 10, separated only by college educated and not. Wait, wait, hold us. So, so, because I'm confused now. But I, you know, I didn't have, you didn't have my, I wasn't looking at my, I wasn't looking at you for a second because I had closed the thing. So the name of the article is just everyone wants to know what Gen Z Republican think, we ask them. And later on you have all the participants. But I'm, but what I gleaned from the article is that there's a lot of sympathy for, and even sympathy and tolerance, like support and tolerance of people like Nick Fuentes in that group.

Yeah. But then you're saying also at the same time. It goes above tolerance. It's like genuinely, half the group didn't know who he was. Half the group did know who he was. And a lot of them weren't willing to come out and full sale disavow him. They said he was funny. They said they see him.

They don't necessarily watch his show in its entirety. I think it's like a three-hour long stream or something like that. But they encounter him sort of passively. But are some of these people also the people you're describing as liberal? Or is that the divine? Yeah, I mean, sometimes these are the same people who, well, look, polling. Maybe liberal on DEI and be interested in Nickville. And I think Fuentes is a goof.

Like, we hear people saying that he's joking or people think that he's joking. Yeah. I mean, Fuentes himself is sometimes all over the map on different ideological. Well, but they just think he's playing a character and he's not actually a political player. Out of the 20 Gen Z Republicans that we spoke with, one, I would say could be earnestly categorized. as a griper or a real follower and admirer of Nick Fuentes. The others were more, yeah, I've seen his stuff. He makes me laugh.

He says kind of crazy things. One guy is quoted in there. I think he's like a 28-year-old guy. He actually referenced a trust fund that's waiting for him. So he's not your typical doom and gloom, Gen Z, Red State Republican who's attracted to these radical beliefs because he thinks his economic future is all going to be rotten. he just said, I think he used the term out of pocket at one point.

He described Fuentes as somebody who's sort of all over the place, and it's probably a good thing, this guy said, that Fuentes says he's never going to pursue political office, but I think he's kind of fun, and I enjoy spending time with him. And I think you've got to remember that for these zoomers, these are people who grew up in a political environment where they're by and large, this group that we spoke with, they're all really Christian, they wear their religiosity on their sleeves,

They live and grew up in red states in the South. And for a lot of these folks, they've heard every Republican that they've ever encountered in their lives be described by typical mainstream media outlets, whether it was John McCain or Mitt Romney or Donald Trump or Ben Shapiro as an unrepentant racist. So when they hear the same charge leveled at Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes, I think there's a part of them that makes that rolls right up. I mean, I certainly think so. I think Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson are bigoted in a way that all of those other people I previously mentioned just aren't.

But I'm telling you from kind of an analyst's perspective, maybe they're not even telling you the truth. Maybe they understand that's a good way to excuse. I mean, they're not idiots. They hear this stuff going around. And maybe they, they, they understand that that's a way of dressing up their transgressive beliefs in some sort of justification. I mean, any idiot knows that what John, if you were offended by John McCain being,

having been called a racist, it's very easy then to hear Nick Flentes calling people the N-word and calling people the jeet and say, that's a racist. You don't have to say, oh, I can't call him a racist because that wasn't true about John McCain. So I think that you- I guess it's not true about Nick Flentis. I'm an idiot. I think they view, I think a lot of people in Gen Z, especially Gen Z, Republicans, view Nick Fuentes in the same light as people who might use the N-word or G in this club downstairs.

And these people weren't even old enough to be aware when John McCain was being called a racist. Like, how could they even be reacting to that? Well, they were kids. I mean, they're reacting to the political milieu in which they grew up. I mean, if you're 28 years old, you certainly were around and cognizant of the 2008 presidential election, you were you were a man 13 years old holologically speaking so uh if you're if you're 20 in 2008 you were we were 10 right if you're 20 28 and okay yeah I don't think any 10 year old is walking around

upset that they're calling John McCain a racist I don't I don't think I think it's all I don't I don't buy it at all that I don't buy that reason there's nothing I remember for when I was 10 years old that could get me to react in some political way today at when I was 10 I heard blah blah blah blah blah And that's why I'm embracing the Nazi. I think the point is you've never heard anything other than mainstream Republicans referred to as racists. Well, okay. Maybe. I mean, you never heard anything, but that generation has heard Trump being called a racist for their, you know, as far as they can remember. For more than 10 years now.

Yeah. But that doesn't seem to be what they said. They seem to be saying John McCain. And I feel like that's just something they repeated because they heard it from Ben Shapiro or something. No, no one is bringing up. bringing up John McCain in this focus group. That's me. Oh, that's you.

Bringing in John McCain. I'm the one saying that I think part of the reason that this group isn't willing to say that the mainstream media is right about Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, but wrong about Ben Shapiro and Donald Trump, is because these are people who are right of center, nominally, by the way, they are left of center on other issues, right? What do they write a center on? What are they right of center on?

Well, they're Republicans. So everything, for the most part. Gen Z Republicans who voted for Trump, their right of center on culture, their right of center on religiosity, their right of center on guns. Yeah, but I was talking on, in aggregate. On abortion as well?

No. When we ask about abortion with this focus group, even though this is a highly Christian room, I don't think there was one person we encountered who was willing to take the maximalist position on abortion, the Mike Pence position. that life begins a conception, end of story, and there are no exceptions to that rule.

All right, so you want that something on? No, I was just going to say, when you mentioned the N-word at this club, is nobody uses it except black people here. Okay, yeah, I mean, but in the context of comedy, right? I think, I only meant that to say that, I think... What's that? On stage.

On stage, okay. No, no, no, I only meant that to say in the context of, I think these people view Fuentes as an entertainer. I think they view Tucker Carlson the same way. I think they view Donald Trump in the same way. I think these are kids who, by and large, you ask them about their economic conditions, and they give you the kind of shibolids and talking points

that mainstream media often trots out when they're talking about Gen Z and why Gen Z is attracted to radical politics, whether it's relating to Zoro and Mamdani in this city. That's funny said it because I had the same reaction. They remember the 2008 financial... They don't remember the 2008 financial... No, no, no, no, no. They just only know a politics where Republicans are tagged

as radical racists. And so now, but their lives aren't that bad. Okay? So you press them and they say, awesome. Yeah. And they say, I'm, I'm so angry because I can't buy a house because that's what they've read, why they should be angry. But in practice, if you ask them, how many of you are prepared to buy a house? And remember, this is a very religious room and a very right wing room. And like none of them are married, like one of them out of the whole group. And they're actually, we're married to each other. We had a married couple in the focus group. Everybody else is sort of one of the particular. One of the participants actually self-diagnosed it as Peter Pan syndrome affecting their generation. You ask them, so you ask them about the economy and they say, yeah, we'd never be able to buy a

home, yada, yada, yada. But then you say, okay, how many of you, if you had the means, would buy a home right now? Where would you buy it? And you press them on it. And you start to get answers like, well, my job might move me around. Or, well, I really want to be in the city now, but I want to live when I'm ready for a home out in the country. Or I'm not married yet. I'm waiting to settle down and build a family and then I'll go ahead, Dan. Well, it could be that one reason Zoomers, if this is representative of Zoomers are marrying later, is it's an embarrassment of riches out there with Bumble and Tinder and all that. Yeah, and TikTok, by the way, and Twitter and Instagram and all of these things.

I think these kids also self-diagnosed with BrainFry a little bit. We asked one of them, you know, about Fuentes and about time spending on his phone and estimating his hours on social media. and, you know, he says, I've got, he says, yeah, I'm guilty of all of these things. I didn't say that I'm not someone who's impacted by this brain fry. You represent the City Journal. We come to you for hard analysis, okay, and I'm not getting any yet. What I need to know is, and you, I'm sure you want to know, is this Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens thing, is this something we should be worrying about?

It appears to us, let's use Candice, Nick Flintez, that J.D. Vance had to think 10 times before he uttered his first negative remark about Nick Fentz, I don't know, it was a couple months after he called his, Fentz called Fentz's wife a jeet, and it called him a race trader. And then finally he slipped in a criticism, you know, in somewhere where wouldn't even be that noticed. So obviously, or not obviously, it seems to me that J.D. Vance believes that this is a political movement, he best not get on the wrong side of. But you seem to be saying,

don't worry about it, JD. This is just entertainment for these people. They're just bullshitting with this. Is that right? Which part of it is not there. Are these people, like, yes, the answer to your first question? If he blasts, if he says,

nobody's going to talk about my wife that way, if I see you, at one of my, I'm going to punch you in the nose. Oh, yeah. You and Nick Flentes can all take a hike. If he were to come out and say that, would he... Would he go down in the midterms?

Would he go down in the primaries? Well... I presume he'd get more votes popularly, but I don't think that's where he's worried about right now. The first question you asked was, are we worried about... Should we be worried about Nick Fuentes, Candice Owens, and Tucker Carlson?

The answer to that is definitively yes. They have massive audiences. They have widespread appeal. Yes, but are the audiences taking them seriously? No, probably not. I mean, a lot of them, I mean, we have data

that suggests that a pretty sizable contingent of Tucker Carlson's audience, or at least the audience, a little bit different. But the people who say they have a favorable view of Tucker Carlson will also tell you

they have very pro-Israel views. So that's, there's wide crossover there. There's a residual chunk of people who just aren't paying that close of attention and are just going to say, you know, Tucker Carlson,

oh yeah, he's on the right, I'm on the right. I'm for him. Oh, yeah, Israel. That's generally someone who's on the right. I'm an evangelical. They haven't heard Tucker Carlson say that he hates even, you know, Christian Zionists or white evangelicals with every fiber of his being. But I do think he apologized for that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Well, he did, just to be fair. What did he say? He said, I'm sorry. He said, he said, I was, he said, my, I think he was, you know, my wife says this about me. I get mean when I'm, you know,

angry or something like, something like that. He says, it's my worst quality. I, I don't, I don't, I don't hate them more than anything. I was just expressing my, you know, peak or whatever. But it makes a lot of sense for Tucker Carlson to say something like that in the first place when you factor in the fact that Tucker's audience extends well beyond the American right and well beyond America. But if you're running for president in 2028 as a Republican, running on a campaign of open hostility or antagonism toward white evangelicals is just about the stupidest thing you could conceivably do. It would be like running as a Democrat for president on a campaign of open hostility to black people. Those are similarly sized demographic blocks within each respective party primary.

So again, so what percentage of took, well, I mean, I can ask you the same way. If the Republican candidate were to just really blast Nick Fuentes, would that be bad for him politically or positive for him politically? I think it depends on how you do it, right? I mean, the left-wing press, large chunks of it during the first Trump administration, spilled a lot of ink and spent a lot of airtime hammering Trump endlessly on every controversy under the sun. I don't think ignoring every egregious thing that Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, and Nick Fuentes do in perpetuity is the right approach. These people have massive audiences, and to completely ignore them at all times, I think, is a sign of weakness. But it does beg the question of, like, what's the best approach for disavowing these people? Do you bang your hand on the table and clutch your pearls and just some of the question?

simply say, this is anti-Semitism of the highest order. You have, sir, invoked a trope, I don't like. Have you no decencies? Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. It's left-coded, right-wing audiences, for many of the same reasons why they like raunchy comedy or edgy comedy, they have a high tolerance for crazy in their punditry. Matt Iglesias, who is a center-left political commentator and analyst, said recently, just honestly

speaking, and it's kind of ironic because his substack is called slow boring, but he made the observation that these days you really are rewarded more for being fast and sometimes wrong than you are for being slow but always right. And I think that's something that we have to keep in mind when doling out advice for how to deal with these audiences. I mean, clearly, even here in New York City, right, anchoring the campaign against Zoran Mamdani all about anti-Semitism, specifically anti-Semitism,

was a bad tactic strategically. There's just not enough people who are going to turn out and vote because of perceived anti-Semitism, heavily loaded through the Israel frame. and then it just begs, like, I mean, look, APAC is now operating differently, right? They have a super PAC now that is taking out candidates who are hostile to their agenda, but they're not running every ad in these districts about Israel. That would be stupid.

They're running polling. They're determining what the best messages are that are going to resonate with voters about why these candidates are bad, and then they're making investments to hit on that. So APAC, through a secondary. vehicle or whatever might be running an ad targeting, you know, a Republican because they were too soft on trans or DEI. Or they might be running an ad targeting a Democrat because, you know, they were insufficiently progressive on a given economic issue or whatever. But it's just, it's just not necessarily advantageous to hammer these people every single time on everything

they say from a strategic standpoint, not to say it wouldn't be the morally correct thing to do, But the strategically correct way to defeat these people, I think for right of center audiences, is to code their anti-Semitism as low IQ, something of the third world, something that is almost like spiritually Islamist. And I just think that's going to be a more compelling narrative for beating these folks back.

I don't know if I agree, but Liz, you want to take some calls now? Liz isn't here. Oh, who's doing it? There's only me. Me. We don't have anybody on right now. Okay. If anybody's listen, we could take some calls.

Now, where's Liz? She's letting me push the buttons today. I don't know. Okay. All right. So, listen, I don't know. I think that I feel like they need to stand up against this stuff more strongly. I think that we learn that populations blow like a feather in the wind.

They're not that anchored in anything. And once a certain line of reasoning and a certain worldview becomes socially acceptable, the firewall is gone. And we're seeing it spread like crazy. And I don't think people should try to get too clever about it. We're not dealing with ordinary things. I mean, Mamdani, was it the wrong thing? Did they anchor everything on his anti-Semitism?

I don't know that they did. I don't know if there's anything else that, like, you think, like, there was some magic words that could have beaten him. I mean, Cuomo was a terrible candidate. Yeah. Damaged from day one and Sliwa wouldn't back out. So, you know, was the anti-sept? Was there some message that was going to beat Mom Dani? Or were we assuming that the anti-Sem-Sem-you almost made it sound like, well, if they'd been smarter about their opposition to Ma Dhani, I mean, they could have won.

But I don't, we don't know if they could have won. I mean, if I was, there are like. lot of things that could have happened. I mean, theoretically, Cuomo could have been pressured. I mean, we could go down hypotheticals until it gets late. But no, I mean, they could have pressured Cuomo to exit the race. They could have given the independent ballot line to somebody else. But tactically speaking, a lot of money was invested by donors. Exit the race and what happened then? After he lost the primary. Theoretically, if he moved out of New York City, someone else could have taken the independent ballot line that Corom ran on.

Do you? Do you? Go ahead. Yeah, if these people view, at least the people in your focus group, view people like Fuentes and Candace Owens as entertainment, why would a politician condemning them be a factor? What, what, what, how important to them is it? I don't know. How does it look when politicians, uh, condemn a comedian for a joke they don't like or a performance in a country they don't like? It doesn't resonate often that well. It looks like you're a, you're a, you're a, you're a pearl clutching prude. in some ways. I just, I'm, I, I, I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing it this way at all because you see Megan Kelly.

Yeah. Totally, uh, defending and wrapping herself protectively around Candice always. Well, would you like me to condemn in no uncertain terms, Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens? No, that's, no. Because I can do that. I mean, I'm just, I mean, because there's, I watch your conversation with, uh, Josh Hammer, okay? I didn't, I wasn't familiar with the podcast. That was the first one I tuned into.

And Josh is, you know, Josh is a friend, but I thought, no, no, but I, but I, but I, but I liked your pushing him. Let's talk about him. I like you're pushing him because, you know, I think. Are you pals like on Jew stuff? I just, I just, I don't know, read him, know him, go ahead, DM with him every now and then. He called me a moron. Oh, that's not great. No, go ahead.

I didn't, well, I only listened to like half, but. No, not on the show. On Twitter, where it's even bigger following. Go ahead. Oh, no. That's no good. No, but like what I felt like got lost between the two of you is, is Josh, you know,

Josh has like a real perch on the right. He doesn't, I do get sensitive because I don't want to sound like one of these like Jewish Obama flacks. That's like in full-blown defense mode. The Iran deal is actually. What did you say? Half Jewish. Half Jewish.

No, I'm asking you. Oh, what do you mean? Well, you don't look that Jewish. I thought maybe you were happy. No, I'm full blood, full breed. Anyway. Do you want to take a caller? Yeah, I'll take hold a call.

Go ahead. Finish your defense of Josh Hammer. No, no, no. It's not a defense of Josh Hammer. Take another sip of whiskey. It's not a defense of Josh Hammer. It's only to say that I don't want to go on the defensive for like any GOP politicians, but I am saying purely from an analyst standpoint.

Yeah. I don't know what works, right? I don't know that it works to slam. Like, Ted Cruz is going to try that in 2028. That's going to be his political strategy running affirmatively on the offensive against anti-Semitism, and he's going to hammer that line constantly. I just don't know that it worked. It didn't work in New York City when we had someone who I thought was like an egregious

candidate who had trafficked in all kinds of anti-Semitic tropes and just blatant anti-Semitism and Zora and Mamdani. But he still got it. across the finish line. The problem is, hold that caller, the problem is that, and very few pundits actually seem, hold up, seem to control for this stuff. They seem to say, this guy lost, he had these views, therefore we can score these views. But in reality, what we know, everybody knows is true, the views are only part of it. It's the personality, it's the charisma, it's the whole package. I just, I just wrote a piece on this, like,

last week about Newsom. I mean, like, there might be a, I see similarities between Newsom and Trump in the sense that, like, in 2015, GOP voters knew that Trump had donated to a bunch of Democrats and they knew that Trump had a mixed record in business at best, but they liked how they were shaking everything up. And Newsom is kind of doing the same thing right now. He's retconning his record in governance, and he's just turning around and doing the smooth. Let me give you a thought experiment. Sure. What if Mamdani was the Democratic nominee as he was, and was the centrist politician, the traditional Bloomberg-type centrist politician, and Cuomo was running as the third candidate, as the socialist saying, property is theft. Wouldn't Mamdani have won by a much

bigger margin? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's not, the views wouldn't have helped Cuomo. It's not like Mamdani's view. He, Momdani won despite his wacky left-wing views, not because, in my opinion. And Cuomo was all, did only as well as he did, because he was kind of down to earth, common sense, and centrist despite all. And if, if you'd reverse the views, but, you know, kind of controlling, it would have been much worse. So I don't see it as any endorsement of the power of those views. I think that what Jesse's saying, which I don't disagree with, is that, like, anti-Semitism

is not enough to make somebody not vote for the candidate. Like, they don't, it's, it's not a deal breaker. Well, you know, and they gilded the lily a bit on their claims about Mamdani's overt anti-Semitism, although we all kind of feel... What does that mean? Gilder lily. Yeah. I mean, they exaggerated things. They built up cases against him that if I was being fair, well, he didn't really say that.

It's not quite what he meant, that kind of thing. I mean, having said that, it should be lost on no one that the very first thing he had to take care of when he got. into office was, you know, vetoing some, which was probably the right thing to do from a First Amendment point of view, but this kind of definitions of anti-Semitism and law, I'm not even sure what they were, but the fact that it was the very first thing, which, you know, there's a symbolic importance of the very first thing I do when I sit down in office is supposed to be something of profound importance. And this guy who had said, who would, who would avoid it every question about anti-Semitism, I'm saying, I'm focused on New York and New York's problems and all that

kind of stuff. As soon as he was sworn in, the very first thing he had to take care of that was burning a hole in his heart was some arcane regulation about anti-Semitism. Yeah, he even did that in a kind of clever where he just did away with all actions that the Adam administration had done post-Adams's indictment. It just happened to be that a lot of them had to do with codifying certain definitions of anti-Semitism into law. But let's take this call. I mean, it's outrageous. Go ahead, sir. Hey, everybody, how's it going? Hey, how you doing? Yeah, I'm joining the conversation so far. So something I find particularly... Wait, I know we're supposed to talk about your name first. Oh, sorry, my name's Nate. I'm calling in from France, from France. Okay, go ahead. Shoot.

Yeah, so something I find particularly off-putting about Tucker Carlson is. is that I don't think he's genuine at all. I remember he did this tour of Moscow or a tour of Russia. And I don't really believe he believes what he said. He believes what he says about Russia being this fantastic place and the grocery stores are amazing and everything's amazing and streets are clean. And I think like if you think back to, it's interesting, Jesse, that you mentioned John McCain and Obama.

So I also think it's important to think about like what people don't say. And I wish more people were like John McCain in that there was a I think it might have been a town hall where Some lady complained that Obama was was an Arab or was Muslim or something like this and John McCain could have done what might have been the more popular thing and just made some sort of You know, I either avoided the comment or or made some sort of passive agreement, but but he stopped and he and he said look Obama's a decent man. He's a good man for America. I don't remember the exact quote, but I'm not sure if you remember this moment. Yeah, and he said the thing that was I'm wondering if there's people on the right that you see that say the thing that they need to say even though it might not be popular.

Okay, Jesse, go ahead. I'll let you answer, but I can just say, like, my parents, who we talked about extensively, they always point out that they don't agree with the racist further to the right than they are. So even though I disagree with them politically, they always point out, I don't agree with these racists. Who in the media is pointing this out consistent? I think he called his parents slightly racist there. Go ahead, go ahead.

I didn't call them racist. I said they point out that they don't agree with the racist. I mean, my parents aren't slightly racist. You said anybody who is more racist than they are. It's how I told you. Anybody to the right of them. My mom whispers. All right, I knew it.

People do that all the time. You read between the lines. And they put, no, I never said that. He said, well, I kind of heard you say it when you said, yes, you're right. That's what I meant. Why did you just cop to it in the beginning? Go ahead, go ahead. Go ahead, Jesse. No, no, you're done. You're done. Jesse, come on. And then I want to ask you what

it's like to have a government of two LGBT, a couple. Go ahead, go ahead. I think Tucker Carlson's a pretty sophisticated operator. So the observation that he may not believe everything he says is obviously correct. I mean, he's someone who got burned at Fox News, got pushed out within the organization and then in short order adopted a kind of whole new worldview on every issue. No, no, he'd already had that worldview on five. Well, he was tiptoeing there. No, he was already a great replacement. But it's not unusual for Tucker Carlson to reorient his worldviews, even on a figure

like Zoran Mamdani day to day, right? Like where he sees a potential ally, he will write the ship. And when he's hitting the Trump administration, which is basically every day, if you know how to look for it. He never aims it at the president. But this is important. I mean, I don't want to, but this has to be said. Then you can continue. Sure. I've heard a lot of people say this. He got burned and this, what we're seeing now is this kind of reaction to his disillusionment and resentment. And I think, no, that's not the case at all. If you watched him on Fox, he was already flirting overtly with many of these ideas and a much more intuitive take on it all is,

As soon as he no longer had Fox to worry about, he let it all hang out things he'd been feeling all along. And in that Fox Dominion case, we saw his personal text messages, where he saw some white people beating somebody up. He said, that's not the way white people fight. You remember this? Yeah, I think that's a fair counterpoint.

There was obviously a genuinely held ideological movement in Tucker Carlson over time. Certainly he was far away from when, he's far away today from where he started at with Fox. And I would argue he's still far away today from even where he ended at Fox. But it's a fair point taken that this is genuinely held ideological movement. But I think the point still stands that Tucker is fundamentally an operator. So to complete that thought about what I was saying before, when he hits the administration,

he never hits the president squarely. And he knows that by doing that, he can continue to go to the White House. And whoever's bringing him in, whether it's the vice president or somebody else, he can deal with Trump because even though he has feuds with people in the administration and he expresses disagreement with certain policies, he never aims it squarely at the president. And that is evidence of a tactician who is not an ideologue first and foremost. Also, he's clearly like bought and paid for to a certain extent by interests in the Middle East. From the standpoint of this guy is going to Saudi Arabia, he's going to Qatar and he's positioning himself at, a communicator and advocate for rich interests in the Gulf.

And I think fundamentally, Tucker is offended by the notion of gatekeepers. And he views gatekeepers in American life as the sort of Jewish centrist establishment. That is norm policing and language policing him. That is the fundamental thing he is most offended by. So whether or not he believes 100% in chem trails or, you know, whatever. it is. Water's making the frogs gay. That was Alex Jones. But any conspiracy under the sun, he will take it there because it's pushing on the outer bounds of, you know, what is, what is appropriate, what is within the bounds of normalcy. So I, um, I don't, I don't like when people

say things like he's bought and paid for. I don't think we have any evidence of that. And, um, that's where he crumbles. I mean, you see in these, like, when he does a big speech on campus with Turning Point USA, somebody, you know, talks about. his personal issues, his family. You know, he's got a difficult upbringing with his parents and stuff. He was in boarding school, whatever. We don't need to get into that. But if someone brings that up or someone brings up his net worth and says he's worth,

you know, many tens of millions of dollars, these are the points at which he folds. And I think even in maybe that apology to the Christian Zionists for what he said, he may have alluded to this too. He's like, I do tend to do that. I tend to kind of fall apart and get hysterical, and that's when the laugh comes out. So I think from a diagnosis standpoint, that when I say bought and paid for, it's not to say that he's not choosing to be bought and paid for by some of these interests, but he's making... Because we'll pay him more.

Like, it was that easy. It was a right to check. By the way, Brigitte Macron, man or woman? Obviously, obviously a woman. You hesitated there. Did you know Art Bell back in the day? I used to love listening to Art Bell. But who?

There was this AM radio guy, Art Bell. And he had crazy conspiracy theories. And I feel like Candice Owens is the new Art Bell. Yet somehow, like, people have started to believe what she, you know, for me, it was fun. It's fun to hear about aliens coming to contact us. But nobody actually believes that. And I feel like- I actually- there's something to do that.

We're going to let you go. we like when you call. We're going to let you go. And you call us again next week. We're going to talk about your conspiracy. Thanks a lot, dude. He's not a real Frenchman. He's not a real Frenchman.

He has an American accent. His name is Jenkins. All right, Dan. I'm just saying. Harsh. So, yeah. So I don't think Tucker Carlson is bought and paid for. But there was something to that, by way, about the conspiracy theories at the end there.

There's an entertainment factor with all of this. Again, it brings us back to the old point. And Americans, I don't know. plugged to my thing again. Okay, I got it back. Americans have a higher tolerance for conspiracy theories than most of the world does, and Americans on the right have an even higher tolerance relative to other audiences. And, yeah, I mean, you look at Candace Owens' stuff on platforms other than X or other than her podcast. You scroll through her TikTok or her Instagram, and you'll see celebrity gossip,

or you'll see makeup tutorials. Let's try this for a hot take. Okay. The reason that Americans are turning towards these crazy Nazi races, anti-Semites, all this stuff, is not because they have all this anger at people calling John McCain names and that their generation is not going to be as good as their do as well as their parents. And it's not about, what was the other thing you talked about? About the financial crash and all this stuff. No, but that's what I said.

Yeah, but maybe it's that. well, maybe this is what you meant and didn't actually spell it out so an idiot like me understood it. But maybe it's just that they have no real problems. The past is a black and white movie, including the Holocaust and racism

and anti-Semitism and Jim Crow and all of it. Nothing is serious to them. They can't actually conceive of anything truly bad happening like it happens in their social studies textbooks in high school. and so they just think it's inconsequential to dabble in this kind of totally callow, unsurious way, you know, in all these ideas that are actually quite dangerous,

but they don't know the difference anymore. Totally agree. The end of history. It's like, oh, whatever. Yeah, totally agree. The point I was trying to make earlier is that they're not actually deeply economically frustrated. 20 out of 20 in that group. Are they frustrated in any way?

Every single one raised their hand when we asked them if they thought they would be upwardly mobile relative to where they're not. their parents are in life. They all thought they were actually going to do better in the end. Also, all of these politics are going to scatter when we have like the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history when these boomers start dying. It's tens of, it's trillions and trillions of dollars. I mean, but look, it's going to be a real thing. It's going to be a real thing. And the people coast playing at any given protest in Union Square or whatever are also like, that crowd's going to thin out a little bit on the question of a wealth tab. when half of them are going to be the beneficiaries of it.

Listen, I, you know, are we having another call, Steve? Yeah, he's sitting right there. Oh, that's it. I have, I have, as I get older, I'm not, you know, in touch with the zeitgeist of youth as I once was. But I don't sense that people are so angry. I think that life is really, I don't know how people afford to live in New York. I don't know that, but somehow they do manage.

And there's so much good about life in the 21st century. You can focus on their problems. And I don't think that what we're seeing is a burning rage. I don't sense that. You don't spend enough time on social media. Well, I mean, yes, but it's easy to get worked up on social media. Yeah, that's true. What people need to do is have children.

This is a thing. Like, people need to have children and they need to, Like, these people who have financial pressures, if they're single, this is only so much of a financial pressure. Any financial pressure you have when you're single, although it might seem very important to you. It is nothing like having kids at home that need to be fed. You know, it's like, you know, so, you know. With both the Gen Z population that is breaking to this, like, scary, you know, conspiratorial right and the population. here in New York City, maybe a little bit more millennial heavy that broke for Zoro and

Maldani in the last mayoral election. I think it's less financial insecurity, deeply felt, and more financial envy, motivated heavily by time spent on social media, comparisons to influencers of... And my politicians putting logs on that fire. Matthew, come on, Matthew. Yeah, so I wanted to say, I was watching Nick Fuentes kind of a say, over the last year. And I was starting to get pretty terrified that how could a figure like this actually become somewhat mainstream? And I stopped worrying after I saw him on Pierce Morgan. And I thought Pierce did a pretty lousy job. But my big takeaway was like, this guy's an absolute joke. And I just can't possibly take him seriously. And I just get the impression that most people don't. And then like,

about J.D. Vance J.D. Vance told him to eat shit at one point. And then Fuentes' response was to pretend like it was an invitation to come over for dinner and be served shit by his Indian wife. And it's like, do you really want to get in the gutter even fighting with someone like this? He's just

a lowbrow entertainer shock jock. And I just, I don't know. I don't think he's worth really engaging with from a politician's standpoint. But they do. They think it is worth it. I don't know. Yeah, lowbrow entertainer shock jocks have a place in our politics.

So why did Megan Kelly just make the dumbest move that any major media figure has made in ages when she declined to just separate herself a little bit from Candace always? Yeah, and Megan Kelly's not running for office. Megan Kelly wants to share audience share with these people. That's the dividing line. She had the audience already, and now she's discredited. Now, I mean, she's now become one of the circus acts. The circus acts pay well.

Yeah, but she was paid. Is that all you people think about? No, I don't. Once again, I'll condemn all of them anyway. Dan, can you tell the joke? The joke is, is two Jewish guys pass in front of a church said we'll pay a $500 to convert to Christianity. So one Jewish guy goes in and he comes out.

And his Jewish friend says, do you get the 500? And he says, is that all you people think about? So, okay, finally a little comedy on the comedy-styleer podcast. I mean, it's not all money. I don't think Meg and Kelly did that for money. She might have done it to be relevant to stay in the good races of Jay Z. Vance, to stay part of MAGA 2028, all that stuff. I don't think.

No, look, there are other motivations. I mean, Tucker Carlson, or sorry, the vice president. J.D. Vance. Yeah, isn't going to condemn Tucker Carlson partially because of loyalty. I mean, Tucker Carlson was a guiding force for bringing J.D. Vance on. onto the political scene as a real entity. He told Trump that unless you take vans, the neocons are going to have you assassinated.

Well, was that reported? Yes, that was reported. That Trump, that... Oh, assassination proof. Yeah, that's legit. That Tucker told Trump this, which, you know, belies the notion that this is all an act.

Like, he told Trump that behind closed doors in apparently a serious conversation. The neocons are going to have you assassinated. You need J.D. Vance. Okay, who's this guy? Because a serious guy. Uh-uh.

Yes, sir. Joe. You're talking to me? Yep. Is it me? Go ahead. No, I saw my wife thought I was talking to her. Yeah, I didn't think I was getting on here to ask a question, but I will.

What do you want? You'll make a statement? No, no, I'll ask you a question. It has to do with... Audition for the club. No, I'm not auditioning for the club. No, this has to do with sort of the permission structure that's going on with people making excuses for the Groyper's and the Nick

Fuentes of the world, you know, there's been a lie of that when Bridget Fetesey was on Mike Moynihan's show. It was like, you know, when she was being asked about it, you know, with this phenomenon, she was just like, what do you expect? And you're starting to hear a lot of that. And I feel like it's sort of co-signing this victimization on that side.

And I don't know. Okay, Jesse. What do you say about that? I think, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a real thing. It's, it's kind of reflective of what you were saying earlier, right? What can you do about this stuff? There's an argument for letting a fire burn out. There's another argument for rushing in and trying to put retardants on it or limit it entirely, but doesn't always work and people make mistakes. So the answer is not entirely clear to me. I kind of...

When you said retards, you meant fire. retardant, right? He said retarded. Did you guys see that New York Times piece about the, about saying retarded the other day? No, no. It was like a whole profile on it. What do you guys think about the word retarded? I don't know. Is that the time? I'm, I'm more against, I'm less against it because I think it's offensive. I mean, the word moron, the word imbecile, these words used to be used. Yeah, that was referenced in the piece, yeah. Were medical terms, and then they became offensive. Dumb. And then they became nothing. And then they became okay.

It's the euphemism escalator. I don't like people using retarded just because it's like they're jumping on a trend and they think it's cool. That's my only. That's a right way. What do you think about when you get a better price and somebody says, I jude them down? Oh, that's, I mean, not nice. What do you think about that? You have a great story about that.

You probably think like that's a five alarm fire. Tell it. Please tell it. It'll be a great clip for me. Just tell it. No, because the person involved in the story is not. going to like it, you idiot, you retard. So, but I had a friend who used to use that term and had no idea that she was saying

something they're not as well as to say. She said, yeah, I ju'd him down. She had a problem with that? I'm like, yeah, jude them down. J-U-D-E. But the problem is, as she said, am I supposed to say, shoot them down? But the problem is that I find myself saying I jukeed him down because it's, it works. Like I'm not, you know what I'm saying.

Like I'm not, I'm not, obviously I'm not an anti-Semite. I'm saying that some of these words like retard, but they stick for some reason. They stick because there's actually no better, more like pack-a-wallop way of saying that you want to say. So if you want to say to somebody, I knock the price down. I like wore them out and I negotiated the price down. If I say I jewed them down, if I say to a Jew, I ju'd them down. I get you. I know what you mean.

But if I have to say it to somebody not you, I have to try to explain that same thing. You know, so that's why retard works, is what I'm saying. So we're talking about... Despite our better judgment. Retard, jude them down, jipped, things like that. Yeah, jipped, which comes from gypsy. I'll tell you is if you brought this conversation

to that Gen Z focus group audience that we were talking about before, they'll tell you the same thing about the N-word. Or they'll tell you the same thing about the F word for gay people. And it's... I'm not in... Well, there's two versions of the F word for gay people, the long version and the short one. Okay.

You could say the F word. Listen, let's not expand the words you can't say. You can say people call it fag or faggot. I'm not calling anybody those words. But the idea that now we're going to have 26 different letters, 26 different words you can't say. You're starting to sound like one of the zoomers from my focus group. Well, of course, I have some sympathy with that. But you draw the line at the N word.

No, because actually he actually makes concepts. there. The thing about chewing them down or retard is that you, Jew them down is a bad example. But a retard is that we're not actually referring to people who are mentally retarded.

And but when you say the N-word, you describe it as calling people black the anyway. You can't call a retarded person. What's the matter of you? You retard? That, nobody is... Is it okay for you?

for a white person to call another non-black person the N-word? No, the N-word is a special case, but the F-word, this is also a schoolyard word used in a kind of analogous way by kids who don't even realize that it's a term for being gay. It's just like, and that word has been sticky because, if we all have to be, you know, ready to admit, because it packed a good wallop, And there's no other, no, don't call them that. Call them this if you're trying to make that point. And no word really comes to mind. In the school yard, it conjures up stereo. The word, they might not know what it means,

but they know that it means somebody who's a sissy, somebody who's not strong, somebody who conforms to the stereotypes of a gay person. Yeah, like, look, right-wing zoomers have just taken all of this stuff and accelerated it to a radical extent. there's basically nothing. And by the you should not say Jewed him down.

I just want to make the big clip. I don't think you should really say any of this stuff. And yet we're doing a podcast on it. But the point is that... You shouldn't say retarded. No, why do you have to? You know, I don't know. I don't like the public performative use of it.

Like, by the way, Ben Shapiro. I'm a huge fan of Ben Shapiro. I think, you know, we're honoring Ben Shapiro next week in Palm Beach. He's Jewish, right? at the City Journal Award Day we were doing. He's half Jewish. Oh yeah, what the half Jewish? Yeah, maybe half.

Those eyebrows don't look Jewish to me. In his big turning point speech, Ben Shapiro made like a declaration of if you believe, I can't remember specifically what it was, but like it was in a speech condemning banon and Megan Kelly and Tucker and Fuentes and all of these people, some of them on the turning point stage with him. if you believe these things, you are retarded, or that is retarded. I don't want to misquote. But it's like, it's interesting. It's like you said, it's like a little bit of like, that's the language of being cool.

Or that's like how you achieve purchase in certain corners of, I don't know if it's the Zuma world or right. This is what I think about those words. And I think this is actually very defensible. They're fine at a gathering, if we're hanging on the olive tree. It's a fucking faggot. Even if there's somebody here,

I think it's fine in that when you're surrounded by a bunch of people, you all know each other, you all understand what's going on, you can understand how it's meant. I think it's fine. And you've taken some steps to make sure that you're not using a word,

which might actually be triggering to somebody. Like, I wouldn't call you a retard at dinner if I knew you were, sitting next to a mom who just had a child with an issue. I wouldn't say that, right? But what if you said it and you didn't know? No, if I didn't know, that could happen. But for the most part, I'm just saying, like,

but when people like Ben Shapiro use this word publicly, I agree with you because it's gratuitous, it's brazen, it's, I don't give a shit who hears it or who might be hurt, maybe even be too strong way of putting it, but who just might find that the fact that I use that word intervened and crowded out their ability to just take in what I'm saying without distraction. Like, oh, you're a retarder, you know.

So why use it, right? Yeah. By the way, it's a little bit, it lacks a little class to say it publicly. I'm genuinely sort of of two minds on this, too, because on the other hand, it's like, is Ben Shapiro using the lexicon of the controversial edge lord, Zumer Right, for good?

like is he using that terminology to damn the other people who are within this realm who he's theoretically competing with the Tucker Carlson's world who are just clearly bad actors on a much greater scale so is he doing a little bit of a

you know edge-wordy thing to... On the Megan Kelly show when Megan Kelly said that they were talking about how Maduro was very socially conservative and Ben Shapiro says I don't give a shit and I was like really

like is that what we've come to now like everybody's got to use words like that. Obviously, I'm not offended by the word shit. I don't know. But I don't think Ben Chappelle here should be saying that on the Megyn Kelly show. Time and place. I mean, okay, yeah.

But I mean, just we tried Mitt Romney and John. Like, not to bring back Mitt Romney and John McKim. Like, they're, like, it's not popular. You know what I mean? Like, at some point, populism has a place. And you have to feed some chum in the water if you want to be able to win. because we can have all the principles in the world, but if we lose power and grip over every institution,

and that is why I come back to how you approach the condemnation of these folks, right? You've got to do it in a way that is positioning you best for winning the war. Okay, but it's just very important in that analysis to remember, to go back and picture that old man, John McCain and that young, beautiful, charismatic Barack Obama, and all it meant symbolically for the nation and the fact that the country was already fatigued from the Republicans and the wars

and the financial crisis and John McCain was following Bush and not make the mistake of thinking that there was more to John McCain's loss than what I've just described. John McCain was not going to beat Barack Obama, not because he didn't say shit, not because he didn't, you know,

there were no magic words. There was no very, expensive political, you know, advisor who was going to tell John McCain how to take down a once-in-a-generation talent like Barack Obama, especially coming on the heels of the Bush administration. Yeah, look. That wasn't going to happen. Trump won after. You take my point, right? Yeah, totally, totally.

But here's my point. But don't build reasoning on top of that outcome when the outcome really has nothing to do with that, in my opinion. I am, I'm in agreement with you on that. I'm only saying that the only reason I brought them up in the first place was to suggest that these kids have heard the same. Don McCain was being, you know, ridiculously defamed as a racist during that election. Or anybody who voted against Barack Obama was a racist. Like that was obviously crazy and that laid the groundwork for a lot of damaging stuff that would come forward. He did.

And as a rejection of... He did vote against Montluthorpe King Day as a holiday John McCain did, but go ahead. Well, there's a free market case for voting. against any additional new federal holidays. But in any event, what I was going to say was, like, Trump came onto the scene as a rejection of so many norms, and he coarsened the discourse with him. It's not to say that, like, the recipe for success moving forward politically

is always to just coarsen the discourse worse. I happen to think in this next upcoming election, if there is a Democrat who can strike the balance of Rahm Emanuel now has been talking line. I think he's got some really interesting policy ideas. Some of them are pretty good about social media ban for, you know, Australia style, kid 16 and under, uh, limitation on holding political office over the age of 75. It's so stupid. They couldn't even get marijuana at a kid 16 and under when I was a kid. You're going to somehow going to prevent them from getting on social media, but go ahead.

Yeah, you know, you put up a regulatory bridge. Even if it lessens it, if it doesn't work completely, it's potentially a beneficial thing. I think, I think social media is a big part and a big accelerant of the problems here. But, you know, Rom paints the race in 28, as he sees at Democratic primary, as there'll be a renewal lane and there'll be a resistance lane. And I'm going to be the renewal guy. I'm pro-ed-reform. I'm a moderate. I'm cool-headed. I'm going to be temperamental. I'm not going to be scorched earth. And then there's going to be this resistance lane, and that's going to be Gavin in the resistance lane. Now, I as somebody who is, you know, center right, I, you know, if it's just Gavin and Rom, and those are like the worst possible options in 2020 from the Democratic side,

I'd say that sounds actually decently fine to me, like no AOC or whatever, or someone in the Zoron mold. Like that would be a relief in some ways. But more interestingly, like, I think actually Rom kind of gets it wrong and that what really will appeal to Democrats, we do have some evidence on the polling side, and we're actually in the midst of doing a big poll right now on the Democratic. coalition to kind of complement this work on the Republican coalition that we've done. But I think we have some evidence even from other polling to date that suggests that there is an appetite for renewal on the policy side among Democrats. They want some degree of moderation on policy. But as far as tone and tactics go, the resistance stuff is still in very high demand. They want to see a bomb

thrower who's going to be aggressive and anti-Trump. So if someone is able to kind of tap in to both of those impulses on the left. I think they have a good shot at being the standard barrier in 2028. And I think Newsom is trying to go there by being the guy who's at once saying, I hear you Ben Shapiro. I'm hosting you on my podcast along with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, and you got a point on transports, okay, with kids. And on the other hand, Scott Besson says I look like Sparkle Beach Ben,

or Sparkle Beach Ken, okay, and Patrick Bateman at Davos. my reaction is going to be, I'm going to throw up a meme on Twitter that heavily insinuates, you know, nasty things about the Treasury Secretary because he's gay. So that is, in some sense, trying to, I think, balance that moderation on policy while responding with coursing the discourse of the same Trump did. What are the odds that Trump, when he's mad at Bessent doesn't use the F word behind his back? I think, I think slim to none. Besson's hardcore, man.

He, like, took somebody out. He threatened to beat a guy up at a... Look, again, just along the same lines, I don't know if we have any other calls after this. Trump barely won, right? And he barely won against the most ridiculous opponent there has ever been. There has never been a worse candidate than Kamala Harris. Never. And she was a candidate after this whole debacle of Joe Biden self-destructing,

after this huge inflation. I mean, and he won. you know. But Trump itself is ridiculous. Well, no, he's not ridiculous in that way. And he's ridiculous in a way. And he's charismatic. And all I'm saying is that people are taking some profound lesson from the fact that Trump won. It depends what their baseline was. Yes, it's clear that he overperformed what many people would have like to have thought was even possible for Trump after January 6th and Trump and all that stuff. And he won every swing state and from an electoral college.

And the fact that he's Trump, the fact that he's a reality show guy. Well, he wasn't reality show guy anymore. He'd been president. But anyway, but if he had run against a solid Democratic candidate, I don't think he was going to win that race. Yeah, I don't know. Look, I don't know. It's totally a hypothetical up in the air. But what I will say is that as we look even beyond 2028, so much is going to scatter our politics. Like what it even means to be a social conservative? I don't know.

We're talking about abortion less and less these days. That is one thing that Trump has introduced to the Republican Party. I mean, in the convention this past year, the Trump people came in and told the policy committee, everybody lock up your phones, and we're going to basically write this abortion stuff out of our policy platform. and we're going to get rid of the language about gay marriage,

and we're going to toughen up the language on CRT and immigration and trans, but we're fundamentally changing the way we talk about some of these social issues and replacing them with newer cultural debates. That scattering effect is going to just metastasize to an even greater extent, because with the advent of AI, we're going to have a whole new host of energy issues to think about this data center, populist versus elite, debate is going to heat up to a great extent. And also, like, there's new things that are changing

America that I think there will be a socially conservative appetite for. You know, I know a lot of people who were, like, fiercely pro-marijuana legalization and fiercely pro sports gambling, widespread legalization on your phone and prop bets and all that stuff and who just have kind of basic barstool conservative or kind of libertarian instincts who are now rethinking that. who are, who are, feel like they live around, uh, porn addicted. Porn is another one of these. Why, pointing me? What did him?

Porn addicted, social media addicted, pot addicted, uh, young people. And, um, I don't know. There might be like a new moral majority moment once we start looking toward 2030 or 2032, because these problems are going to get really, really bad. And with the AI stuff, you're going to have like, okay, you talk about income inequality. How about information? We're going to have a problem where, like, half the population just doesn't read anymore. I mean, this started with the COVID stuff where you had kids who could afford to go to private

school who were learning in school with masks off, and kids who were too poor and went to public school were doing Zoom school with no parents accountable to watch over them. How does AI lead to information inequality? Well, it's just easier to not have to read anything anymore. You can spend all of your time watching video content exclusively. And you can, for any writing-related tasks you have to do in your day-to-day life, input everything into AI. The critical thinking skills that you develop as a young person,

absent the guardrails in the education system, absent teachers having the skills to root out this stuff. I mean, I think we might be headed toward a world in which, like, school is actually a place where you do more of the kinds of, like, homework you did previously, and home is the kind of place where you've got every single kid has a one-on-one AI tutor, so you do more of the kinds of things you would have done in school previously. So these things might flip where in school you're just basically being like proctored and monitored to make sure you can still capably do the math and do the writing and all of that.

But we're going to have a period of consternation before those norms take shape. And yeah, I mean, a lot of people have predicted that the advent of what happens with widespread adoption of AI is just like mass usage among lower income and lower education parts of the population. And yeah, I mean, ditto for like everything's

a podcast now. Everything is available as video content. You can be sucked into these, you know, algorithm. But video content can be very valuable. It can be very informative too. Sure, but you're not reading. I mean, reading is going to be a luxury item. Soon it's going to be like more expensive

than just, you know, looking to your phone, which everybody is going to have already baked in. I don't know. More expensive to read? If you're talking about buying books or collecting books. You don't think so? Does he know? What do I know?

What do I know? All right. I did one focus group and you invited me to talk here. What's your journey? How did you wind up? How did a nice Jewish boy like you wind up being a Nazi? Oh, man. No, I'm from Michigan, the Detroit area. I'm a product of one grandfather was a rabbi, conservative rabbi. And, you know, in my father's description, probably the rightmost conservative rabbi in North America on both politics and religion. So that's one side. And then my other grandfather was a economist, a university professor who was like changed his last name to sound less Jewish. So Arden, Athe,

atheist, very religious person. To arm? Yeah. No, no, no. It was Siegelman turned into Spencer. And what was arm originally? Arm was just arm. Okay, continue.

No, so I don't know. So you came from liberal background. Wait, tell them about the Eminem video and the Bar Mitzvah to... Oh, yeah, no. I, well, my fiancé was pretty excited that I was coming on this podcast and my parents because they were like, oh, you're back to your first pursuit in life, which was I was growing up in the Detroit area, like a child actor. I did a couple of commercials and was in like a kid rock and Uncle Cracker video. And then I dropped my...

So you don't want N-words. N-words? In that... Kid Rock? Oh, no. He's white. No, the other one. Uncle Cracker? Kid Rock and Eminem are all white. Eminem uses the N-word, right? No. Eminem has never used... POS for Shalom. Eminem should use the N-word. And who, I knew Kid Rock, we saw Kid Rock in D.C., but who was... The Eminem video I missed, uh, I missed because I was at summer camp, but I was cast in it Jewish thing ever. Yeah, I was cast to play a bully in an Eminem video, but I couldn't make it. Anyway, uh, no, so my, uh, my upbringing is that.

He doesn't use it in his recordings, Eminem. He doesn't use, he does not? No, no, maybe some early demos, that's it. That's, okay. Got no. So I did that. And then I dropped my camera down a flight of stairs. And my mom was like, you're going to have to buy a new one.

You want to keep doing anything film or creative. And then I got really into politics. And that was like around 2008, 2009. So that's why I was saying I was around bar mitzvah age. Because then my mom got up at my bar mitzvah, which was like Hollywood themed after doing all this movie stuff. And then she was like, said in her speech, like, but if we had just planned this thing three months later, it would have been Jesse's Republican National Convention. It was the theme. So that's my origin.

We didn't have themes in our day. Do you have a theme? My theme with frugality was a theme of my bummer. No, we didn't have a theme. I'm planning a wedding now, and that, I might borrow that. That's a good theme idea. Well, yeah, it's yours. How long you've been engaged?

We got engaged this summer. It's a woman? To a woman, yeah. Okay. No, I'm just, I, it's like a lot of accusations, coming from here. Half Jewish. Are you gay? Are you a gay goy? No accusation at all. No accusation at all. Not that there's anything wrong with it. Any other calls, Stephen? Not at the moment. All right. So, all right. So, I don't know how I feel about this issue now.

I want to feel better, but I think it's worrisome. Yeah. But are you coming away from this feeling? It's less worrisome than you had initially thought. what Jesse has said about these people kind of not taking... No, because simultaneously, we read that article by... What's the name? Ron Dürmer? Who has it wrote the article? Ron Dermmer? One of the ambassador?

No, not Drier. Oh, Rod Dreher. Rod, yeah. Who wrote, like, behind the scenes, everybody's, like, totally into Nick Flintes and stuff. So, you know, Rod Dreher is an interesting guy. Rod Dreher, Nick. He lives out in Hungary. He comments on conservative politics, very traditional Catholic guy, very tight with Vice President Vance. Good guy, good guy on anti-Semitism fundamentally. But his circles in D.C. are very, if there are going to be circles in D.C. that are going to

listen to Fuentes and some of the more radical types, they're probably adjacent to Rod Dreher. So I think, you know, I think he estimated. it's something like 30 or 40% of junior hill staffers were Groyper's. I think that is maybe a fair estimate of Rod Dreyer's network. I don't think it's probably actually that accurate. You look at the way the median GOP member of Congress votes on these things and ask yourself, like on things relating to Israel, on things relating the anti-Semitism, and ask yourself if you think they are employing scores of Internet Nazis in their midst, unbeknownst to them.

I don't think it's quite the case. And with this, do you agree as a center-right person that you don't want J.D. Vance as president? I think I have 501C3 limitations. I'm looking at my Manhattan Institute. Two people over here. I don't think I can comment on. Okay. If I were a center-right person, what reasons might- Are you not a center-right person? What I was saying if I were- You certainly seem like a center-right person? What reasons might I have for not wanting J.D. Vance to be president? I might have to call Manhattan Institute General Counsel

I can answer that Perry L, if you had a no-nothing woman who Let's go to Perriol, author of The Only Bush I Trust is my own, is that right? Yeah, that's it. Very good. Because he surrounds himself with rabid anti-Semites.

That's your answer. And so you have to... Like cool. Well, like Tucker Carlson. and Candace Owens and Alex Jones and surrounds himself with Tucker Carlson, yes. I mean, these people are right next to him and you have to judge people to some degree by the company they keep, don't you? My honest assessment? Careful.

They're shaking their heads. No, they're not. No, first of all, Vice President's Chief of Staff is a very nice Jewish boy who participates in the West Wing minion on a periodic basis. That's an exclusive to you on the Comedy Seller podcast. And I think that VP's going to go where the incentives are. I mean, the VP wants to be president in 2028. And a lot of the work that I'm doing on the polling and public opinion and focus group side of things is to assess where the base really is.

No one in their right mind is going to carry the exact same coalition that Donald Trump carried in 2024 with them in 28. I mean, he had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Maha granola crunchy moms, and he had Warhawks, and he had isolationists. A lot of those people have died of the measles now, so they don't be able to vote. Exactly. Exactly. So for a GOP standard bearer to be successful in 28, they're going to need to be creative, develop their own entrepreneur, you know, be a political entrepreneur, develop their own new coalition. and, you know, that's going to require some math. And I think all the people who are thinking about running in 2028 are probably still doing that math in their heads right now.

Problem is he's an isolationist. And this is the most dangerous... Yes, go ahead. This is me, Kevin Brennan. Hang it up. Oh, what here? Kevin, hang it up. Kevin, hang it up.

Why are you talking about the Jews? The Shulis? Is this a schick on the show? It's Kevin Brennan. Huh? What? Okay. It's not really Kevin Brennan, is it?

Obviously. Kevin Brennan doesn't sound so masculine. No, obviously not. I feel like I'm missing something. I'm out of me, huh? Anyway, yeah, I think this isolationism like, like, like, well, look, he's going to be an isolationist who has to defend the Trump administration's record in Venezuela, in Iran, in, you know, Houthi controlled Yemen. And he's going to be, you know, to the extent that he's an economic. populist, he's going to be an economic populist who is all in on AI and who is tight with Silicon Valley

and is for deregulating and growth in that sector. Do you use AI when you write articles now? Tell the truth. It's like a research assistant. Of course. I mean, I'm using AI perpetually through my day. I barely use Google. What about you?

Is AI good at comedy? Not really. I mean, it can do basic jokes, but it's not going to. It's not going to be great. What about comedy writing? Well, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, I mean. I think it's the same answer as Dan.

I think it's the same answer as that. Like, you can't do anything. But if you need like a reference, you know, if you need a reference, then it... I feel like when I'm stuck and I have like a very long sentence and I say to chat you but do like, how can I cut this up? I get like decent recommendations back about how I could. Or if I say like, I need... Like, I have two examples. of something, what would a third

might maybe be? Like, those are the instances in which it's most useful. I can't say, like, write me an article about Gavin Newsom, and it comes up with a good original idea, or original take that I wouldn't have come up with myself. It lacks originality, but it's a great research. Now, is it you,

are you a hypochondriac with chat TBT? I don't know. I don't get your question. Well, no, because it's like Jewish stereotype is hypoch and drive. So I'm on chat GPT all the time. Oh, like with my own health? Are your pals putting in your No, I have, my fiance is in medicine, so I just...

You have a resource. I have a resource. I have an in-house. Okay, I don't know if you have to go. I don't know if everybody still is saying, but I want to say two things. Well, I used, hold the medical thing. I use chat GPT all the time. I, everything I write now, I put into chat GPT, and I say,

please edit this. You can't just say just edit it because it'll start, it won't even sound like you anymore. I say, please lightly... I write that. I say light edits. Lightly edit this, edit. it in my style making only necessary changes, and if you have suggestions, put them afterwards.

So it'll correct punctuation, you know, words, whatever. It'll sometimes, it'll do what you tell it, and then it'll give me some suggestions that I can look at. And I find it to be very, very helpful, and I learn a lot from it. And also, I will then ask it to give me the best critical, response to my arguments. Right.

Using all research available. And, you know, and it's a very, it's very sophisticated at critiquing arguments. It's very, very good. I'm astonished at how good it is. I do it for that, too. Light edits recommended changes, and I'll probably like reject nine. Yeah, I just used it mostly to find out if I have cancer, but. Now, as far as the medical thing, I just want to say,

I've gotten so many bad, incorrect pieces of advice from doctors. Well, the doctors are all using chat chagip-t, you know. Well, I wish they would. They are. I mean, this is going back to my son. I'm not going to tell these stories. Well, I tell us one story because it's a good one. And Steve, take that off.

The delay is messing with me. this isn't the bad piece of, well, so for instance, my son was gaining weight. We took him nutritionist. She says, don't let him drink sparkling water. It's bad for his bones. I said, Patras was the most, I look it up. You can look at all. No, that was some, you know, crank piece of advice that went around.

It was totally discredited. This is not the bad piece of advice, but it's a horrifying story. So my son at his ultrasound, the angle of his spine or something was put him in a, not a higher risk, but a higher risk than otherwise of having like spinal bifeter or something. So they had to give this genetic test and my wife didn't even know if she wanted it because the baby was too far along and she didn't have the heart to end the pregnancy even if he did have spinal bifida. Anyway, so it's the most agonizing like 10 days we went through waiting for these results

wherever long it took. And finally we get to the doctor sitting there and you know, you can imagine what you're, what you think you might be up against. if you have a child that needs that kind of daily care, that's it. Your whole life is just going a different direction. That's it, right? So it's a lot of stress. The doctor, Dr. Gupta or something.

And he says, so... Janja Gupta? I don't know. I think it was a name Gupta. And I'm not going to do the Indian accent, although I would like to. Anyway, because it would make the story better. Anyway, he says, so this test is a new test. And, you know, we take the DNA based on the following...

control groups and then we put it in the lab and then statistically and I said doctor I said honestly I can't even focus on what you're saying right now because I'm so worried about this can you just tell me what the results were and then you can tell me whatever it is I'll be able to take it in and he goes no I'm not going to do that and then he continued on telling me all this spiel like you know, the inside of the label on a thing for like another two minutes. And afterwards, okay, he says, your son's fine. Terrible. Yeah.

I mean, this is the single most cruel act I've ever experienced in my life. Do you still go to that doctor? No, no. Did you vocalize it at the time? What he did was... No, I meant to complain. It was, whatever. Anyway.

Why did he do that, though? Because he's a fucking sadist. Is there any other reason? Luckily, there are probably like enough Dr. Gupta's in New York City that you're not going to personally like ruin anyone's practice with this story. It was in White Plains. Dan would say, Dan would say that he was a anti-Semite. But anyway, I was so I got a bad advice about the nutrition. I got bad advice to myself, but most recently, I haven't said this publicly, I had a small kidney stone. and but it was a whole rigamarole and afterwards I met with a doctor

and a doctor says well one thing you should really not have anymore is coffee. I said oh fuck I love coffee. So I put into chat GPT and says no coffee's absolutely fine and all the studies show that coffee I was like can they get didn't they get so I don't even know like am I supposed to trust the doctor trust chat TBT they identified the type of stone

is ox, oxalated, calcium oxalate stones. Yeah, I mean, you can also look up the studies themselves. I did. You know, and, okay. And so, coffee's, by the way, supposed to be great for you in many, many aspects. Yes, but the doctor who spends his whole life dealing with kidney stones is supposed to know whether. I've had horrible. He's supposed to know so much so I think, but maybe he does know.

And you're going to good doctors. Not like, I go to people that, you know, I mean, I couldn't even. even get an MD, I got a DO. I don't know if that's a DO. It's like a doctor of osteopathic medicine. Yeah. They get very offended if you do,

which you just did. Yeah. Well, she's not listening. But I mean, but I like an MD. I don't know. For me, because nobody was... An MD from America, not like the Bahamas.

Oh, well, take it easy. Oh, no, no, not ethnically. We know what you meant. They're education. He doesn't want to see the word university dad on the diploma on the wall. Universidad. All right.

kind of medicine is your wife practicing? She's a D.O. No, no, nurse anesthesia. Wow. A doctor of nurse anesthesia? A doctor of nurse anesthesia? Yeah, it's one of these like in between things. It's in, it's in the, it's in D.O.

You know, it's like not quite, it's not, she's not an MD. But she would get upset if I, like, pointed that out. I'd say she's a doctorate. Well, not yet. She's a PhD. Uh, no, doc, D-NAP, doctorate of nurse anesthesia practice. What is that mean? Is she going to medical school and become, no, no, no.

It's like a three, you go to nursing school and then you become an ICU nurse. And then you do three years of a doctorate in nurse anesthesia. And then you administer anesthetics. And actually, they get into big lobbying fights with the anesthesiologists because they can basically do the anesthesiologist job. And in half the states, you can administer anesthetic without an anesthesiologist if you're a nurse anesthetist. And in half the states, you can't. But it's bullshit. And the doctors want to make more money.

It's the same thing. they're doing with the nurse practitioners and stuff like that. I always take it back to public policy. But if you could pick and you were about to go under general anesthesia, would you rather have a nurse or a doctor administer your anesthesia? I think a doctor's still going to sign the paper. No, no, not asking about. But a nurse anesthetist is going to do the work.

I think. I think. I don't know. Well, I mean, initially I would be, you know, would be hesitant. but I would look at the statistics and I would, you know, if the nurse is... You'd ask Chad GBT. I would ask Chad GBT if there's any greater, you know, risk with a nurse practitioner giving the anesthesia. So when I had the stone, you got his heart.

So the doctor looks at my thing. This is a different doctor. Not Gupta from White Plains. No, not. Dr. Anand. And he says, Dr. says, yeah, yeah, I looked at it. You're probably going to pass it.

Don't worry about it. You'll probably pass it. I'm like, okay. Then the nurse practitioner comes over and she says, well, it's probably a, or just a nurse, 50-50 chance, you'll pass it. So the doctor comes back over. I said, doctor, you told me

50-50 chance. I mean, you told me I'll probably pass it, like not to worry about it, but the nurse said it's like 50-50 chance. And he says, yeah, you'll probably pass it. And I said, Okay, I don't want to be like, you know, too fussy, but I know, you know, that's a nurse, but you're actually an MD, and I know you understand statistics, and 50-50 doesn't mean you'll probably pass it.

50-50 means it could be, it could go either way. And he says, yeah, yeah, that's true. 50-50 means going either way. He said, and he says, but you're probably passing. So he's saying it's not 55. I don't know what he, like at that point, you know, you don't want to keep pushing these people. like I didn't it's like it's it's it's it's ridiculous it these are doctors these are scientific people yeah 50 50 50 supposed to mean 50 50 which is not great odd the doctor didn't say 50 50 50 50 yes but then he but then he

backed and then he said you probably pat that may I didn't tell a choir he's like yeah like in other words he endorsed with the nurse said yeah 50 50 you know I just want to tell you can't both be true I have had horrible medical um advice and gotten horrible suggestions and just blown off by doctors. So it's, I think it's like actually like pretty sketchy. My son, Benny had like, my son Benny had, my son Benny when his baby had a pimple. And the doctor says, this is a pimple. And God bless my wife.

She's like, I don't think this is a fucking pimple. I've had pimple. And she took, this before chat, GPT, she went all through the internet. And she diagnosed this as some sort of, um, um, uh, vessel issue, what do you call the blood vessels? Varica vein. There's a word for this system. Anyway, and she looks up the specialist who deals with this very unusual thing.

And she makes an appointment. She goes to see him that day. And the doctor says, how did you find me? People usually go to six or seven doctors before they finally get, like, that's always diagnosed incorrectly. And he says, you're absolutely right. That's what it is. And they removed it right.

Wow. So he was just, you know, testing to the fact that doctors get it wrong. They get everything fucking wrong. Listen, I almost died after I had a C-section. I had antibiotic resistant MRSA at the site of my incision and got completely blown off by the doctor. Like, I had to go to my dermatologist for something else. And he looked at my incision. He was like, oh, my God.

So I don't know. I mean, I think that these people, like, that doctor should have lost her license. Like, she really should have. Yeah, they're all terrible. Not all terrible, but they're just people. No, they are. They're really bad. They're getting worse.

They're getting worse. DEI. So. I'm kidding. No, we do that too. That's our other thing. Yeah. We can refer you someone else for DEI if you want.

So is it better to listen to chat than to some of these doctors or like you always have to take what they're saying with a grain of sauce? No, absolutely. You should, you should tell. Well, if Chachy-B-T says anything other than what your doctor says, you should ask the doctor, why does Chachy-B-T disagree? What? And then get an answer like the one that you got,

which is some, like, cockamamie, like, backpedaling non-answer? Well, you can always get a second opinion from GROC. Grog is like Ivermectin for every ailment. Yeah. So, and I didn't pass the stone. It was a whole issue. Also, like, passing a stone is, like, incredibly painful.

Isn't it supposed to be... Wait, like, ever? No, they lasered it. Oh, wow. But, like, you're saying, like, passing... Like, they're saying passing the stone, like, casually. Like, passing a stone is like... Scrutating.

Well, it's better than... It's supposed to hurt, but it's better than the alternative, which is the laser in the urethra. Why was that also very painful? No, but they put me to sleep for that. But it was... I don't know. Whatever. A doctor or nurse administer your anesthesia. Oh, that's a good question.

Well, it's funny because... I don't want to talk about it. It was a nurse. Enough about your urethra already. I just have had one... I just don't trust doctors at all anymore. I'd much rather be diagnosed by a computer. Well, that's probably the way it's going anyway.

Yeah. No, do you think, like, being diagnosed by a computer is more just you diagnosing yourself? No, why say that? Oh, yeah, because the chatchip is often like, you're the best, yeah, you're right. My chat GPT is unsupportive. I don't believe chat GPT operates that way.

No, I don't think it does that. That's not my experience with... When you diagnose yourself, does it say you should start a business off of it? No. First of all, you don't even necessarily have to tell that it's you, but even if you did, I don't think it would matter. But you say, what do the following symptoms indicate?

Now, are you feeding it the same information that your doctor is getting? I'll sometimes feed it my test results from like my blood test. If some, you know, say, what do you think? And it'll tell me, you know, what it would think. Do you do it in speech mode? Does it tell you, talk about it? No, I don't do speech mode.

But it's not infallible chat, right? Like, you have to be like pretty careful with it too. It's a resource, but, you know, you think. Well, first of all, I only use deep research. I use the, every time. For things that I can't afford having a hallucination. I need any, and it'll also have link. but I got not going on what I haven't had anything

What's a what are you saying? What do you mean a hallucin? It definitely starts a trip on itself. ChatGBTGBT will sometimes say things that are wrong, especially in like the automatic mode. But deep research, which you know, you get a certain amount for free, but I have the Rolls-Royce chat GPT account that I pay for if you ever need something, just ask me.

No, I want to do. And, you know, but it takes a long time. It can take like even 15, 20 minutes to come back with an answer in deep research. Okay. Anyway. All right. Are we done here?

I think so. It was a fun little digression at the end. Yeah, it's actually more interesting than the politics. I don't like having those people just like sitting on that screen. They hung out for a while. As though they're like, I don't know, some like extra guest or a host on the show. It's like it's kind of unnerving. I didn't mean to have them up on the TVs the whole time.

They weren't on the show. They seemed to like it though. I didn't know if you wanted to go back to them. Yeah, I understood. I don't care. It doesn't bother you to have some like random person just like in studio with us?

It's not the end of the world to me. Okay. All right. What do you think ladies? Good? Yeah, we got a few random people in studio. Can we still say ladies? No, no. Don't assume their gender. Dave Smith did a whole comedy routine about like, now he can say retard. Did you hear it? Like, this is so stupid.

I didn't even know he does comedy anymore. I thought it was just... Oh, you haven't seen his viral comedy clips going around? No, I mostly just see the, the stuff. we were talking about earlier. All right. Anyway, thank you very much. Jesse Arm.

You know, I'm terrible with him. Jesse Arm. That's right. That should be a name that's relatively easy to remember, though. Dan Natterman,

Pariel Ashenbrand. Good night, everybody. Good night. Thanks for having me. We need a, like, a good night and good news. That was so funny for the first, like,

five minutes. I just, I couldn't hear any. I was just, like, muffled. I didn't even know. Hey.