The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 317. Radical Leftist turned Conservative Activist | Amala Ekpunobi

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

Dr. Peterson's extensive catalog is available now on DailyWire+: https://utm.io/ueSXh Dr Jordan B Peterson and Amala Ekpunobi discuss her early life being raised in a far left household, the instances that caused her to question the all-encompassing ideology she had been fed, and her rise to providence as an internet and podcast personality, advocating for the truth across party lines. Raised in a far-left activist household, twenty-two-year-old Amala Ekpunobi was once a student organizer for the left. Unanswered questions–and a search for the truth–led her to a complete ideological transformation. Passionately sharing her new conservative values online, Amala became a viral social media sensation. Now the host of PragerU’s popular show “Unapologetic with Amala,” she inspires millions of young people every day to discover the truth, defend their values, and lead better lives. - Sponsors - Black Rifle Coffee: Get 10% off your first order or Coffee Club subscription with code JORDAN: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/ Exodus90: Is it time for your Exodus? Find resources to prepare at https://exodus90.com/jordan. Hallow: Try Hallow for 3 months FREE: https://hallow.com/jordan Shopify: Sign up for a free trial: https://shopify.com/jbp Shopify: Sign up for a free trial: https://shopify.com/jbp - Links - For Amala Ekpunobi Amala Ekpunobi on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theamalaekpunobi/ PragerU on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prageru/ Amala's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AmalaEkpunobiUnapologetic PragerU's Website: https://www.prageru.com/ - Chapters - (0:00) Coming up(1:34) Intro(4:36) Amala and PragerU(9:00) Being a voice of reason(11:10) Notoriety helps(15:30) Viral vitriol(17:40) Pressure under truth(20:05) Ego and humility(21:00) Young Peterson and the NDP(25:00) Siren calls of the left(29:00) Fault in the ethos of compassion(35:35) Argument and affirmation loops(43:30) Bullies and reaction(45:50) The axiom behind pride(50:20) Greta Thunberg, making an oracle(53:43) Starting early, rise of the activist(56:56) Then and now, self verification(1:01:30) Knowing your thoughts(1:04:34) Argument and the cycle of growth(1:13:28) Peterson on managing his humility(1:17:00) Importance of reminders(1:20:00) Behavior and the public eye(1:24:00) Nobility despite tragedy(1:27:00) Trait neuroticism, Wim Hof(1:29:14) Accountability(1:34:46) Conflict delayed is conflict multiplied // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL //Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.com/youtubesignupDonations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate // COURSES //Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com // BOOKS //Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-lifeMaps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning // LINKS //Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast // SOCIAL //Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson #JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus  #prageru #politics #psychology #criticalracetheory #pride #amalaekpunobi #podcast #liberal #conservative

Hello everyone on YouTube and it's associated platforms and podcasts. I'm talking today to Amola Epinobi. She was a radical leftist activist as a young person and has undergone quite a political and philosophical transformation in recent years. And so we're gonna talk to her about that and about her work with Prager You today. She's an American YouTube commentator. As I said, working under the Prager You brand.

Her channel, Unapologetic, has a massed over half a million subscribers in a very short time, by the way, spearheaded initially by her story. Her mother is a left-wing pundit who works on professional fundraising. Amalah grew up fully believing in leftist ideology before having a radical change in thought. Recognizing the hate coming from those around who were tolerant, she made a hard choice to confront her bosses in a leftist organization on these thoughts and was not only shut down, but belittled by being told, you don't even realize how oppressed you are. And this was the final straw.

From here she left her workplace, dived into her own education on the founding fathers and the institutions as they were originally designed in America and how social media works. Using these new skills in tandem, she launched a conservative TikTok channel of all things and found herself going viral regularly. It wasn't long after, she joined Prager You as the host of her own show. Raised in a far left activist household, 22-year-old Amela Epinobi, was once a student organizer

for the left. Unanswered questions and a search for the truth led her to a complete ideological transformation. Passionately sharing her new conservative values online, Amela became a viral social media sensation. She is now the host of Prager Use Popular Show Unimpaulajetic with Amalab. She inspires millions of young people every day to discover the truth, defend their values, and lead better lives.

I met her at a Prager You Gala about a month ago. It's December 2022 at the moment, so a month ago, would have put us in November, I think that's about right. And I was there talking to Dennis Prager, and she had a speech after me, and it was really quite compelling. And I thought it would be very interesting to talk to on my podcast as a consequence. So she's quite young. She's made a bit of a splash

online, maybe more than a bit. And so when I listened to her talk, I thought, well, here's someone who seems to have a clue and who's probably going somewhere. So let's find out exactly who she is. And so that's the plan today. I want to get to know her a little bit and to walk all of you through it. So let's start with what you're doing now. You're working for Prager You. And that's a very evil thing to do, as you know, full well. And so I'm quite curious about how you, how that came about, and how old are you?

I'm 22 at the moment. Right, okay, okay, okay. So you're not, you're not a pop. You're just, but you're out of that. You're out of pop hood a little bit, anyways. So, okay, how did you, how did it come to be, how did you come to start doing videos for Prager? Tell me exactly what you're doing at Prager You.

Sure, yeah, so at the moment, I, my job title is Prager You Personality, which I guess is just, but I have some sort of personality. And what that involves now is I do podcasting and social media content and just talk about cultural issues, today's politics and news from a young person's perspective and particularly a young conservative leaning perspective. So that's what I do now and Prager, you found me because I started making videos on the

internet about a journey that I had from being what I considered to be a really radical leftist to a now sort of right of center person. Right, right. So you're a conservative personality. That those two words haven't gone together that well during the entire span of my life. So that's kind of a funny thing all together. And so how often are you making, how often are you making videos for Prager? Every single day we put out content. So we're constantly staying on our toes and keeping up with everything that's going on in the world.

And that's our daily life right now is just looking at what's happening, looking at the conversations that people are having and what's trending, and then hopefully giving a reasonable perspective on it. Right, so how much content are you producing every day? At least, I would say three short form videos that are about 60 seconds long as well as one long form video that will be anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. And then we do a live podcast on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays that goes for about an hour. And then we do a live podcast on Monday, Wednesdays and

Fridays that goes for about an hour. Oh yeah, okay, okay. And on the short form. So those are about 60 seconds long. Yeah, yep. We'll pick a trending topic or a new story and then just give you a 60 second rundown of what's happening as well as a little bit of opinion on it. Right, and so what platforms are you using for the short forms? Everything. We're on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. You name it. We're there. Are you on TikTok? Yes, TikTok. I have an up and down relationship with TikTok

as I get banned probably every other week for the content that I put out. Congratulations being banned by the Chinese communists is always a really good thing. Yeah, yeah, we should return your favor in spades. Yes, yes, definitely. And so where do you have the biggest following? My biggest following is now on YouTube.

My TikTok account is currently banned. That would have been my biggest following at about 640K, I believe, but now we've reached that on YouTube. My TikTok account is currently banned. That would have been my biggest following at about 640k, I believe, but now we've reached that on YouTube. Oh, congratulations. How fast are you growing on YouTube? Well, we started our channel. I want to say about in April of this year. So, that's how quickly it's been about been about nine months. And you said you were making videos before a Prager picked you up. And what platforms were you using for those videos? When did you start doing that? I started out on TikTok of all platforms and I was say I started there at the end of 2019.

And I, in a matter of months, managed to amass a few hundred thousand followers because I think I was speaking to a perspective that people weren't used to on the platform. And I have a particular look, being a biracial female. I think it's not to be ignored in having a factor in me growing so quickly on these platforms, but TikTok is where things really started to take off. Yeah, so what do you think you were doing that made what you were saying relevant vital to people?

I mean, you pointed to a couple of things, hey, your youth and your biracial status, and I suppose the combination of those two things and the fact that you were offering a counter narrative, but that doesn't seem to me to be enough. When you see that kind of explosive growth across multiple platforms, you have to think that you're saying something in the right way for the moment. And so what is it about what you're doing that is attracting attention?

Is it mostly positive attention? Are you getting a lot of trouble? And so that would also be in your personal life as well as your online life, because those aren't the same things. So what are you doing right? What am I doing right? That's a big question.

You know, when I started out on the platform, it was just a leisurely thing. I unfortunately, a downloaded TikTok as a form of entertainment and started scrolling through this curated for you page, which of course takes in your demographics and realizes somewhat of who you are as a person and then feeds you videos that they think you'll like.

And the videos that I was being fed were just a lot of leftist radical ideology really reducing me down to my gender, my race, talking about how pivotal it was that I was to be a member of the feminist movement or of Black Lives Matter. And I saw that in thought, wow, it's very interesting that this app took in my demographics and this is what it fed me. I wonder if there's anybody saying anything contrary to this.

So one day, I took out my phone and I filmed a video talking about how I used to be a former leftist and now I'm on the other side of things and that part of me sort of died off, but spoke to it a little bit. And my videos started taking off purely due to hatred. People were very upset at me, espousing these views. I was called a race trader and Uncle Tom, a coon. I got every single name you can think of for what I was doing. And then with...

Oh, that's fun. ...and read came. The red came. Yeah, yeah. It was something that I expected by virtue of having been on that side of things already. I knew what I was going to walk into with that, but with that came just this wave of support of people seeing the hate that I was getting

and wanting to be a part of the counter narrative of that. Right, well, that's interesting because it's certainly been the case that in respect to my rise to notoriety, let's say the most vitriolic attacks have been the ones that have done me the most good. Certainly. And that's pretty weird, you know, it isn't necessarily how you look at life, but the first video that really went viral in relationship to my political activity. I had put up a couple of videos criticizing the University of Toronto's idiot HR policies,

you know, predicated on diversity, inclusivity, and equity, and their half-begotten, dim-wit interpretation of human psychological functioning. The idea that you could use explicit anti-racist training to overcome implicit racist bias, which is like the most preposterous thing ever from a psychological perspective. Criticized that in this compelled speech law in Canada. Then some activists cornered me, I'd been speaking at a free speech rally, which I didn't arrange, by the way. And I got a lot of trouble there, a lot of white noise generation, a lot of almost violent pushback from the hypothetical, radical left.

And then a bunch of activists cornered me on the way into my building, my office building, and they filmed it, the encounter talking about all the Nazis that were at my free speech rally. And first of all, I don't know what it's like in the United States at the moment, although I've been there quite a bit, there aren't any Nazis in Canada. That's just not a Canada thing. I don't know anyone who knows anyone who's ever met anyone who claims to be a Nazi like it's just not an issue And so that was completely preposterous. Anyways, they filmed this encounter, you know claiming that I was attracting all sorts of Demented right wingers and that went viral. The idea was to

and that went viral. The idea was to damage my reputation, but exactly the opposite happened. And then I've had a number of encounters with journalists that have been definitely—the journalists were just—they're real vipers. You know, they're the sort of people. In fact, one of them eventually admitted that this is what she was doing. This was Nellie Bowles, bulls, who used to work for the New York Times. She actually wrote an apology, a public apology, although not specifically to me, saying that as a New York Times journalist, she made her career by going

out to purposefully destroy people. And so talking to journalists like that, it's really like, it's like walking through a nest of vipers because the people who do that sort of thing ask their questions in a way that is designed to make you say something that will be fatal to your reputation permanently so that their status can be elevated as the person that outed you. But interestingly enough, just to wrap this story up, is every time that's happened, although it made things shaky for a couple of weeks or a couple of months afterwards,

the positive consequences have eventually been far greater than the negative consequences. And so that being attacked, that can be a, well, first of all, forces forces you to get your arguments in line. But it also can be a real, well, as you said, you know, your sense is that had you not been subject to all that abuse, you probably wouldn't have grown as quickly.

Yeah, all of the pivotal moments in what has been a very, very short career so far have been when people have come at me with hatred and vitriol and painted this really evil of picture of me. And then people who want to believe that and want to see what I have to say in order to throw hate at me end up finding my message. And eventually having this reaction of, wow, she's really not that bad because I understand the people that I speak out against. I come forward and say, here's why you believe what you believe.

And with everything you're seeing right now, I completely understand it because I was there. I'm not going to shout at you about how you're stupid or brainwashed because, you know, that was me four years ago, even. So I try to approach all the conversations I have with that perspective. So people are expecting to meet this really evil bulldog abrasive individual. And then they find my videos and go, oh, it's not at all. What, what these hate comments were saying, it's totally different.

Yeah, well, so when this first viral video went out, I already had about 150 hours of YouTube content up because I posted a lot of my lectures because I was playing around with YouTube at that point trying to figure out how useful it was as a broad communication platform. And so what happened, again, parallel's your experience was people went to check up my YouTube video because they were assuming that I was, you know, foaming at the mouth and found out that, well, this is actually literally the case. I probably have 200 hours of lectures up. It might be more than that now. And the people who've been interested, say,

and mischaracterizing me and also in taking me out haven't been able to find in all of those hours one single statement that even taken out of context would indicate that, you know, I have any of the nefarious notions or motivations that have been described to me. And so, what's so interesting about that, it's really powerful in a paradoxical way, because people go looking for you, let's say, assuming that you're some kind of junior monster. So not only do they find out that's not true, they find out that the opposite is true. And so then they find out that you're being pilloried, not by people, not only by people who are lying and who are corrupt and malevolent because of their

lies, but they're doing something worse than lying because, you know, if you're a skillful liar, They're doing something worse than lying because, you know, if you're a skillful liar, you tell a lie that's very close to the truth, right? Because it can kind of slip by. But there are anti-truths which are different than lies, and an anti-truth is something that couldn't be farther away from the truth if you tried to make it farther away. are there a way. And so you had the benefit of that is that you were pilloried by people who were telling antitruths about you. And then people come and see, oh my God, she's nothing like I was led to believe. And then that starts to raise serious doubts in the back of their mind. It's like just what the hell is going on here because this isn't just the lie. This is, this is the complete opposite of reality itself. So that's very interesting

to watch that emerge. All right, so you started working on TikTok and you started to get a lot of hatred and then a lot of attention. What happened after TikTok? Within a matter of months, I received a message on my Instagram from somebody working here at PragerU and they said, you know, we've seen your videos and we're, we're very interested in you coming out here and telling your story. Is it possible that we could get you on a call? And I got on a call and told my story over the matter of a couple of minutes. And they said, let's fly you out to Los Angeles.

And we want you to do a video for a series we have called Stories of Us where you sit for an hour You tell us your story and we will chop that up and put that out to the internet and I got here I met with many of the higher ups who were working here and on the second day of my trip was offered a job and They said would you like to come here and and do this full time start making your videos and putting them out on social media and we'll support you and resource that for you. And at the time, that had really not crossed my mind. I was working at a medical clinic as a tech and had every intention of continuing my schooling

and going into nursing and midwifery. So I thought about it for a second and thought, you know, this is a pretty important opportunity that I get and that is just sitting at my feet right now. And I'd be pretty dumb to not take them up on it. So I dropped everything and moved out to LA within a matter of weeks. Yeah, well, good for you. I mean, yeah, when opportunity comes knocking like that, then, you know, it's sensible to take advantage of the situation in the most positive possible way.

What's it been like working with the Prager crew? Oh, it's been great. I think the best thing about working here is that I have freedom to really talk about whatever I want to talk about on any given day. And I think it's very rare to have a job that supports you in that sense. So I really wake up every day and get to look at things that I'm passionate about speaking about and then bring that to the forefront for other people to hear. There's certainly a lot of pressure that comes with it. As I'm sure you feel as well,

you want to be on the right side of things, you want to speak to things that are true. And that can be difficult because we make mistakes and sometimes we're wrong. And I'm very young to be doing this. So that's something that stays on my brain a lot. But other than that, it's a really great job. How do you keep your ego under control? Because I know how fallible I am as a human being. I think that's what keeps me in control. And I try to stay hyper aware of my shortcomings and my blinders.

And I really approach things with the sense that I could be wrong about anything I'm saying on any given day. And I want to have that sort of care for myself. So I'll give that care to other people. And it really keeps me humble because there's many times where I'm wrong or I'll come at a subject matter feeling super defensive about it or needing something to be right and I don't realize that until far later. So I try to keep that in mind whenever I'm doing anything. Yeah well it hasn't been this long that long since you've done a 180 on your belief system. And so that's also got to be kind of paramount in your mind. Let's talk about that a little bit.

So when I was a kid, 14, I worked with a woman named Sandy Naughtley and her husband Grant Naughtley. And Grant was the member of the legislative assembly for my home constituency, my writing in Fairview. And he was the only opposition member in the entire Alberta parliament, essentially. And he was a socialist. The entire province was conservative, except for him. He was a socialist.

Now, the reason he was elected in that writing wasn't because he was a socialist. In fact, he was elected, I would say, in spite of the fact that he was a socialist. He was actually a good man, and everybody knew that and trusted him. And so I worked for the NDP, the new Democratic Party for about three years. And I was a good friend of his wife. She was the librarian at our local junior high school. And she introduced me to serious literature. And I really liked her.

She was a real good mentor, kind of an eccentric New England woman, quite well educated by the standards of the little town that I grew up in. And so she pointed me to Huxley and Orwell and Solshnitz. And I in Rand as well to her credit, because of course, Rand is no socialist. And then, you know, because I had access to her and her husband and her husband Grant

was the leader of the socialists in Alberta. He had access to premures of Alberta provinces and the national leader of the NDP. And over about a three year period, I got to be a fly on the wall in many meetings between senior labor leaders and senior socialist leaders, is that it's kind of Fabian socialism that's got a British twist. It isn't really derived from the same, say, school of thought that the communists were derived from. And I stopped working for them when I was about 17 for reasons that I'll go into.

But I got to say a few things about the socialists of that time. First of all, most of them had been labor leaders. So a lot of them were working class guys, mostly guys, not all, mostly. Who, and this was the leaders, who had worked themselves up the working class hierarchy and then had adopted political responsibilities of one form or another. And most of those guys, when I listened to them, I actually had a fair bit of respect for them and admired them.

I actually thought that they were genuinely doing their best to put forward the interests of the working class. And at that time, the conservative party in Canada was pretty much middle class, upper middle class guys in three-piece suits, you know, banker types. It was clear that conservative party was a voice of the corporate world. And then the liberals who were genuine centrist liberals sort of played both ends against the middle

and they did that quite successfully. So everybody knew where the political parties stood in some real sense. They were different and the socialists did advocate for the working class. But even then, I used to go to the party conventions and there were a lot of activists there. I didn't like the activists at all.

They really made me nervous. I thought, and then I read George Orwell, and George Orwell talked about socialist activists back in the 1930s in the UK. What did he call them? Tweed wearing leather patch jacket, champagne socialists is like, well, what the hell do you guys have to do with the poor?

And the answer was nothing. you don't love the poor You just hate the rich now the leaders I saw they like they like the working class, you know They were advocating on their behalf, but these activist types they are motivated by pretty much nothing but resentment And that really graded on me and I stopped Well, I stopped working in anything that was political, pretty much from that point onward. So, I think it's really easy for young people to be attracted to leftist ideas because first of all, young people are looking for a cause and second, without much reflection,

it seems obvious that we should be advocating for the oppressed. And then, of course, the leftists always say that that's what they're doing. And so, given that your first moral impulse might be to advocate on the part of the disaffected, then it seems appropriate that if you were attempting to be moral that you would gravitate towards those who claim to be speaking for the dispossessed, the question is are they really speaking for them? So why do you think now you also have said and you need to explain this to people that your mother was and is a left-wing political activist? But so you have that reason for having been hooked into the ideology, let's say. Do you want to expand on that a little bit? Let's walk through your biography a bit here and

talk about the philosophical reasons you were attracted to it and also the personal reasons that this particular ideology. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I was raised by a single mother for much of my life. My parents divorced when I was around six years old. So my mom took care of me and two siblings. And through her single motherhood, really, I was super involved with her work. If we got a day off school, we were going to go to work with mom.

And I was going to see exactly what she was doing. And what she was doing was fundraising for a left-leaning organization out in Orlando, Florida. So that was her day in, in day out. She's politically quite obsessed with virtually everything that's going on in today's day and age. So I would go to work with my mom and she would give me markers to write on posters. Little did I know those posters were going to be used in protests that they were staging

in the city. So very deeply entrenched in that from a really young age. And my mom happens to be white, which I don't find to be particularly important, but it is important in that she taught me from a really young age that because I was biracial life, might be a little bit harder for me living in this country due to its history and how that history is reflected in the present. So I think more so than doing good for the world, I was attached to this sense of victimhood and I thought that it was really pivotal to my identity. So I was a really angry young person. I was getting an argument all the time with kids who knew nothing about politics, about

political issues. And I grew up in a very small rural conservative town. So, arguments were right for the picking with anybody I chose. And anger was the first thing that I think got me attached to the movement. But then it was going to my mother's work. And like you said, there was a lot of working-class people involved during the hurricanes in Florida. They would do food banking and give out food to the needy.

So it was a lot of very radical policy prescription mixed in with pretty pragmatic helping of people who happen to be lower income and living in lower income communities. So I think I just got my wires crossed in thinking that because we were doing good on a small scale, that meant that these radical prescriptions that we were calling for were also good. Yeah, well, that's a critical point, you know,

because, okay, so let's delve into that a little bit and think it through. So, look, one of the, it's definitely the case that one of the sources of sophisticated morality is compassion, right? Although we're making a big mistake in the modern world by elevating compassion to the, what would you call status of unique virtue, because there's lots of other more primordial building blocks of virtue that are as important as compassion. So for example, everyone's enjoined now to not be judgmental.

And that really means to be casually dismissive. And I do think casually dismissive is a mistake, but judgmental, discriminating, that's not a mistake. that's a virtue, because to be judgmental and to be discriminating means that you dispense with what isn't worthy and you pursue what is worthy. And truthful is a virtue. And well, we can start with that. Sensitive to beauty is a virtue. All of those things have to be melded into higher order virtues,

but compassion leaps out to dominate. So it's easy to assume that if you're motivated by something like a reflexive compassion, that everything you think and want is therefore both good, practical, necessary, and morally justifiable. Worse than that, and this might be the most toxic element of it, is that if you believe that you're motivated by compassion, and compassion is the highest virtue, and then you run into

anyone who opposes your views, then it's super easy to demonize them. And that's also a huge problem. Now, I think that's rooted to some degree in the neurology of maternal compassion. So think about it this way. When you're a mother of a young infant, you should be 100% compassionate. So let's say zero to six months, because the infant is completely helpless.

They can't move. So an infant can't be autonomous at all before that young person is capable of voluntary movement. So there's just no autonomy without voluntary movement. So till children can crawl, they're completely dependent on their mother. And what that means is their mother has to be a hundred percent compassionate.

Because everything the child wants when it's in that infantile stage has to be dealt with with no argument, 100% of the time. And so, and more than that, so because the child is so vulnerable, the cost of labeling something as a predator that isn't a predator is very low, but the cost of labeling something that is a predator, not a predator, is very high. And so along with that overarching compassion comes this proclivity to over label things as predatory. And that's protective, but it does not scale well into the political landscape.

Like I don't think that we can scale an ethos of compassion. I don't think you can actually scale it beyond the family. Ben Shapiro was talking to him about this recently and he said something quite witty, which was that, well, at home he's something quite witty, which was that, well, at home he's a communist, right, with his kids. Well, it's from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need. And that's right, because with your children, you're trying to keep things equitable in terms of outcome even, and you are calling on them to deliver what they can, and you provide to them what they need. And so, and then it's an open question, especially if you're not particularly mature in your thinking.

It's an open question, well, why can't we use exactly those principles to govern, well, large corporations or educational institutions or the world as a totality? And the answer to that seems to me to be something like the fundamental, the most fundamental feminine ethos does not scale. It's a local ethos. It's for infants and family members, fundamentally. And I think that's associated on the personality front

with the distinction between agreeableness and conscientiousness. So agreeableness is the compassionate, temperamental dimension. And women are more agreeable than men, quite reliably, although the difference isn't huge, it's big at the extremes, but it's not huge. It's not particularly large in the middle. If you pick a random man and a random woman out of the population and you ask, which one was more compassionate, if you pick the woman, you'd be right 60% of the time.

But you'd be wrong, 40%. So you can see that there's still a lot of overlap. But agreeableness does not predict success in the broader world. Conscientiousness does. And conscientiousness is a much colder virtue, right? It's seem it Because a conscientious person will call you out on your misbehavior even if it hurts your feelings Let's say and a conscientious person is someone who will

Forstall immediate pleasure or even undergo a certain amount of of immediate discomfort for a longer term gain. And our well-functioning institution seems to be predicated on an ethic of conscientiousness and not an ethic of compassion. And I don't think we've got that straightened out at all. Like we certainly don't communicate that idea to young people. Say, look, there's a place for compassion,

but it's a little local. And it's the local in infantile in some sense. And then that brings up another question, you know, and nobody's been able to have a serious discussion about this is, women have really entered the political sphere on mass in the last 60 years, let's say. I don't think anybody would dispute that particular idea. And we know there's all sorts of masculine political pathologies, right? Maybe overproclivity towards a kind of aggressive narcissism

that might result in the creation of stupid wars for egotistical reasons. How might be an expression of masculine psychopathology on the political front? But no one, we have an add a serious discussion at all about feminine psychopathology on the political front. And I think we miss a whole, I've been trying to formulate it as something like narcissism of compassion. Know the idea that just because you're feeling maternal, that your love can develop the whole world and now, by fiat, all your political opinions are correct merely because, you know, you feel sorry for kittens. So I'm not making light of that, right? Well, you get that. Exactly. That sort of, that

reflexive compassion is not a moral virtue. And the reason for that is that moral virtues are a lot more sophisticated. Okay, so we've gone over some of the ideas why young people might be attracted to the compassionate ideal. Now, you used to go to work with your mom. You were pulled into this. She had, do you, okay, and then, so when did the cracks start to show? And you were getting in a lot of arguments. That's interesting too, as an activist type,

because that's a weird loop to be in too, because your mother was teaching you, according to your own testimony, let's say, to view yourself as a victim, let's say, for your racial status, even though she was white herself. And that also compelled you to argue with people. And my suspicions are that why wouldn't that reinforce your feeling of alienation and isolation? Like, you know what I mean? So were you in a loop because of that? Yes, oh, absolutely. It was a complete loop of believing this,

getting into an argument with somebody that reinforced the ideas that I already had. And at every fork in the road that I had come to with, that was a little hypocritical or maybe there's something wrong there. I didn't seek out trying to find the cracks in what I was believing. I just sought reinforcement.

So whenever I was in an argument with somebody, it wasn't really about the crux of what I was saying or what I was advocating for. It was always their racist, their misogynist. So anything that they say doesn't even matter, and I shouldn't even take into account as far as questioning my own self and having a healthy degree of skepticism. So I was in this constant loop of, yes, I believe

this, this is what my identity is. If somebody argues with me, it's because they're not on the same page as me. And they in fact hate something about my identity. And it just looped back in four, three years. Well, people who are listening might be asking, well, why should you subject your own beliefs to criticism? And when I wrote my first book, which was called Maps of Meaning, I spent a lot of time writing it,

but then I spent a lot of time with hammer and tongs trying to break every sentence. So I'd read a lot of Nietzsche by that point, and Nietzsche could describe himself as someone who philosophized with a hammer. And so what he meant by that, first of all, was that he was capable of delivering devastating philosophical blows, which is certainly the case. I don't know if there's ever been a philosopher who was more explosive than Nietzsche in the psychological and social sense. But it also meant that whenever he put forward a proposition,

he would spend a tremendous amount of time trying to throw every possible argument he could formulate at that proposition to see if he could break it. And then he'd only keep the propositions he couldn't break. So I tried to do that with maps of meaning. I figure I rewrote every sentence about 50 times. Trying to see, is there any way, is there any argument I can come up with that will get underneath this proposition and make it feel weak and unsteady to me? And I only kept the, now you might say, well, why bother with all that? Why not just be comfortable

in your beliefs? And the answer is, look, there's going to come in your time in your life, for sure, might happen every day to some degree, where what you believe and how you predicate your actions is going to be subjected to unbelievably severe stress. And that might be in an argument, or especially if the argument gets vicious and intense, or if it's a long-term argument in a relationship, or it might be that you encounter something tragic in your life. If your beliefs aren't stress-tested, like in some

serious manner, then they're going to fall apart just when you most need them, and then you're going to be in serious trouble. So finding yourself in one of these loops where you don't test your beliefs and you just discount everything that might be a challenge because of the hypothetical, you know, quasi-satanic nature of the person who's questioning you means that you're allowing yourself to live inside a house of cards, essentially. And then as soon as you are stressed, in some real sense, you're going to just fall apart. Now, you said you were miserable and angry. And so, was that most of the time?

Yeah, it was, it was most of the time. And that could have been due to other factors, but I do think what I believed was really a part of that. And the lack of true testing of what I believed, I think a lot of people misconstrued a test with having a cause of stress. And I think the more you test your beliefs, the more comfortable you will be in them. So now I'm way more comfortable going into back and forth with people and debating whereas before I wasn't.

And I think it's because I was really insecure in what it was that I believed, but so confident and espousing it and just so strong in being really forthright. I was the person who would wear those activist t-shirts to school every day, knowing that it was going to rile people up and that it was going to cause some sort of discussion to happen. So what really had made me upset in the life that I was leading was just waking up every day, looking at the world through this lens of injustice. Every cross look was racist. Every off-comment was misogyny. And when you view the world that way and you're looking for those things, not just saying that you believe that they are real, but looking

for them, everything you see is going to be that thing. So, the world is really evil place. Right. Well, you also put yourself in a position. Yeah, that's interesting too, because you put yourself in a position then when even, when casual interactions, let's call the microaggressions for lack of a better word, are, and casual misunderstandings are instantly elevated in your perception to the status of high moral crimes.

So it isn't someone, it isn't just that someone's annoyed at you or someone's just having a bad day, it's that you're dealing with a racist or a misogynist, right? Which is a core evaluation of their character. And I can give you an example of just how bad it was because people will think about things and go, well, that probably wasn't microaggression. And that probably was racism, but I was so obsessed with it that as a kid, I had learned that

if somebody wanted to touch my hair, which is very curly and very odd for the place that I was living in because I was surrounded by a lot of white people with straight hair, I was told that if somebody asked to touch my hair or somebody came and wanted to look at my braids, that was racism being played out in real time and that they were trying to express how different I was and really belittle me. So this would happen all the time to me in school. Kids would walk up and go, oh, I love your curly hair. Can I touch your hair?

And that was evil to me. That was racism shining right in my face. So you can imagine probably how bad that was for me, believing these things as a young person. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's, yeah, that's tough. Now, interesting that tone of voice that you use there, when you were talking about those kids that would come up to you, when you mimic them, the way you mimic them was by what would you call it? Acting out the vocal intonations of a curious kid, not as someone who's being mean. And so what do you now think those kids were doing?

How do you look at, and what do you think would have been a better way for you to look at that when you were a kid? Oh, the best way I could have looked at that as a child was, oh my gosh, somebody is displaying interest in me. How wonderful a thing that somebody saw something that was different to what they normally saw and felt the need to point that out and to ask me about it, they were genuinely curious

about how my hair came to be this way. And if I had viewed the world in that light, I would have been such a happy little child. And unfortunately, I had the exact opposite experience. Yeah, you know, I read a great book a long while back called Bullying, What We Know, and What We Can Do About It. And, you know, we have this idea that bullies find kids who have something abnormal about them and then target them because of that abnormality. But this gentleman, Dan Oalweiss, great psychologist, pointed out that at least 75% of kids have some obvious, let's call it, deviation from the norm that could be picked out by a bully. You know, it could be as something as simple as wearing glasses or having red hair or

being a little shorter, being a little taller, being a little thinner, being a little fat. You know, you can just multiply the peculiarities endlessly. And that that in and of itself isn't enough to generate bullying. The bullies tend to focus on an identifiable anomaly, but then they're looking for kids who overreact when they're teased a little bit. And then it's that combination of sensitivity, hypersensitivity to provocation, plus perhaps an anomaly that makes someone into a bully victim. And so, well, you can kind of see there, you have this situation where there was something about you, about your hair that made you identifiably different, but the kids could have been both

testing you and checking you out in a curious way, and then whether that would spiral into something that would be true bullying and intimidation would be dependent in large degree to a large degree on your own reaction. Yeah, and I've struggled with a long time, for a long time of just going back and taking accountability for my part in things. And when I went through this journey of realizing,

oh, maybe I don't believe in this leftist sort of woke dogma. A lot of that time I spent blaming other people. Why were people teaching me these things? What institutions were at play when it came to me getting this information? And I took no accountability for my part in being susceptible to the information. And what made me want to believe these things? Why was I ripe for the picking as far as a person who was willing to fall for some of the stuff that I was hearing? And that's still something that I'm thinking through to this day. Well, you did say something interesting, and this is probably worth diving

into too. You said that despite the fact that your knowledge was shallow, well, you're not very old, and you weren't, you know, 10 years ago, particularly you weren't very old, despite your knowledge being shallow, and despite it not being your knowledge, you were very confident about displaying it, and displaying it in some sense proudly. And pride has always been regarded as one of the cardinal sins. And so it seems to me that part of what set you up for this,

apart from the characteristics of your particular background, was also that there was something in it that was an appeal to like a prideful narcissism, right? And I'm not diagnosing you as a narcissist, right? Don't get that wrong. I'm really not. I'm trying to understand why, well, as you said, Carl Jung said, you know, that every projection needed a hook. And so, so you always have to ask yourself, even if you were enticed down the garden pathway by woke educators and by your own mother to some degree, what was it in you that helped you respond in a way that made you even more vulnerable

to that kind of propagandization than you might have otherwise been? And you said you wore these shirts proudly, you were looking for a fight in some sense. So what do you think was at the bottom of that pride? What were you taking pride in? Was it you standing up for the underdog? Like what is it that wearing those shirts was doing for you, do you think? Yeah, I think I felt really different as a child's growing up

in the environment that I grew up in. And I always felt like I had sticked out regardless of what I did. So I think I just leaned into that a little bit more and it thought, okay, well, if I'm going to stick out for these things that I can't control, I'm going to take control of something and I'm going to stand out even more and couple that with feeling very virtuous for doing it.

I think it was just a recipe for disaster because it made me feel like I'm a good person doing a good thing plus I'm standing, plus all these other people aren't willing to do this good thing that I'm doing, and I get to tell them about it in any given moment. And it was just a mixture of feeling really insecure. And yeah, yeah, well, so that's an interesting thing, eh, because we all do believe, I think, in some real sense that a good person should do good things.

And some of that would be a certain amount of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. You know, and if you're sensible about that, you would say, well, you shouldn't sacrifice yourself to the point of being a martyr because that becomes counterproductive. But the problem with that goodness, I guess this is why there's an injunction in the gospels

against praying in public. The problem with that virtue or that goodness is that you can start to trump it as a differentiating moral virtue, right? And so you can start to use your hypothetical care for the poor and oppressed as a marker for your superior social status and the inviolability of your beliefs. And so then it starts to move. You can see that there's a slippery slope there from compassionate virtue to over-weaning pride.

And you said in your case, it was also exaggerated by the fact that, well, man, if you were going to be different, if you were fated to be different in some ways, then by God, you were going to play that hand to its fullest. And that's also an attraction, you know, and an adaptation. Sure, yeah, and that's exactly what happened. It was just me playing into something, but also being reinforced that it was right all the time. I was super involved in the activism that I was doing.

So when I was in at school, I go to work with my mom and volunteer there and I ended up graduating high school. And I was so involved that I got a job at her organization. So when we go back to that loop, it was just my own negativity and insecurity, my own willingness to want to be different for the sake of just being different, making myself feel virtuous and doing so.

And then being reinforced by the adult structures that were around me for being a young person willing to do the work, which is really so often what we see with the David Hoggs that have marched for our lives and the Greta Thunbergs. It was just older people saying, this is so great that you're doing it, and you're just like Obama.

How do people told me at the time? Oh my God, oh my God. Yeah, well, you know, I was thinking about Greta last night. So it might be worth just talking about her a little bit. So I was trying to put myself in her shoes. So imagine, first of all, that you're 13. And then imagine that you're a little on the autistic side. And then imagine that you have a very domineering mother

who's perfectly willing to use you for her political purposes. And then, so now she's instilled this terror into you that the world is coming to an apocalyptic end, and that there are evil and malevolent forces conspiring to make that happen. And that basically constitutes the entire patriarchal structure of Western civilization and all of its industry and all of that. So that's the background you come out of. And now you're 13 and you start to parrot some of your mother's ideas. Of course, they're not really her ideas, but their ideas that have possessed her too.

You start to parrot them. Okay, and then what happens? You're 13. Well, what happens is, like 50-year-old adult male leaders all over the world fall at your feet and treat you like you're the oracle of delty. And so then what the hell do you think if you're 13 and confused and a bit autistic and your mother's a bit domineering. You think, oh my God, all these things she's telling me that are so terrifying must be true because all these well-positioned men who run the world are treating the revelations of my childhood fear as if they're so important that they should be broadcast

on every news station and should start to become fundamental government policy. And so, how the hell would you possibly respond if you were 13, except with a massive magnification of your terrors? Like, oh, the world's in such bad shape that I, the 13-year-old, autistic child from Scandinavia now seem to be the leading oracle in the world on the environmental and economic front. It's so sad for her. I can't imagine how someone in that situation couldn't be on the edge of existential terror constantly. Yeah, I relate to her a lot. I feel a lot of compassion and sympathy for her mother as well, because from my perspective with my mom, having gone through this really twisted journey

of having to come to her and say, you know what, that stuff that I learned when I was younger really did have a negative effect and here's how, and her just being shocked in that, oh, I'm so, you know, I thought I was doing the right thing, I thought I was doing the compassionate thing, and I thought I was alerting you to the snake that's sitting out in the front yard,

and that's my responsibility as a mother to do that. So I feel for Greta's mother, I feel for her and I also feel for the people who look at a young person and say, look at this young person leading the way and using the power of a 13 year old which is just really very much misplaced to push forward a movement, but it is just a twisted cycle. Yeah, well, I mean, she's in an impossible situation because I don't see how she could possibly question herself or her doubts given the unbelievably overwhelming response to her revelations.

So she's in an awful situation. Okay, so we talked a little bit about the role that your own temptations played in setting you up for this propaganda, although you were pretty much surrounded by it too, which is, you know, that makes it also very difficult to, let's say, escape from. So how old were you when you started working after schools at your mom's organization, and then how old were you when you started working after school as at your mom's organization? And then how old were you when you started working for her full time? I was 15 when I had started volunteering

and 17 when I started working full time. Okay, and you did that after you graduated from high school? Yes, as soon as I graduated from high school, I thought, no college for me, let's make myself a full-time activist. And that's what I did, yeah. Right, well, okay, that's okay. A couple of things there. So another thing that really used to bother me at the universities, and I started to discuss

this with some of my professional peers just before it became impossible for me to continue working at the university. We have this idea that we tell young people all the time and I really do think this is an insidious invitation to their prideful narcissism, that the way, first of all, that they should be changing the world, you know, which is a lot to change for people who haven't even been able to live independently yet. And also that if you do want to change the world, which is what you should do and what you could do,

the way you do that is by being an activist. And activist has been come professionalized since the mid-60s. And so an activist seems to me to be someone who hypothetically advocates for the oppressed, which is already a moral danger, because like, what the hell made you advocate for the oppressed? Did they elect you? Why are you the spokesman? And what gives you that moral virtue? So, you know, those are major questions. But also, it comes with it this temptation, because if you're an activist,

you're almost always against something, right? You're against industry, you're against fossil fuels, you're against the patriarch, you're against the racists, like you're always identifying the problem with the world as being something that some other person who isn't good like you is doing. And then what we do is we present young people in high school and in university with the notion that well there's if you really care about the world there's nothing more honorable than you could do that you could possibly do than to become an activist. And I really kind of think that in some sense, there are almost no lower calling than activist. Yes, I would agree with you. And I think it's within our nature,

especially as young people, to get obsessed with this idea of radical transformation and this lure of transformation. And it wasn't until I met Dave Rubin, who I'm sure you're familiar with, and he put out this quote of, you know, when I was on this side of things, I was trying to control the world. Now that I'm out of it, I'm trying to understand the world. And that's something that a lot of young people are not obsessed with. They don't want to understand the world and their place with it. Within it, they feel a sense of discomfort.

And they want to attribute that sense of discomfort to something else and find what is a common enemy. And it's really easy to find a common enemy if you listen to anybody who is obsessed with this woke ideology. Okay, so maybe someone might level a criticism at you and say, okay, look, you know, for a long time you're left-wing activist, but now you're just a right-wing activist. And so, how would you defend yourself? How do you defend yourself? Because I'm sure that ideas occurred to you. How do you investigate that charge? And what do you think is different about you working for Prager, which is a well-known, hypothetically right-wing,

conspiratorial organization, which seems, in some sense, activist on its surface, how do you distinguish between what you're doing now and what you were doing before? And how do you know that you're not equally deluded, but on the other side of the political spectrum? Yeah, sure. The way that I know I'm not as diluted as I was before is that I did go through a period of delusion when I recognized that I was not a leftist. I immediately went, oh, well, I must be on the right then.

And I self-subscribed myself to the right-wing talking points for quite some time. And then I don't know what happened, but a moment came to me where I went, wait a second, I must have this propensity to just latch myself onto things because I've just done the same thing on the other side. And I really had to look within myself and find where, where do I truly disagree with my, my previous self? And where do I agree with my previous self and where do I agree with my previous self?

And there are plenty of back and forth that we'll get into with the employees here at Prager U where we disagree on many things. And that was certainly not an experience that I had when I was working for that left leaving organization. Now that could be that organization on its own, making people subscribe to themselves for nothing. I don't think so. I'm right. I'm moving the New York Times wrote an article this week

talking about how leftist organizations all across the United States are collapsing in and up into themselves because they can't handle any internal dissent. So I think that, OK, so one of the things you said about Prager was that you get to say what you want and that you can disagree. And so, and you also implied that, imagine that you're trying to make your way. And so, first of all, you're on the left, you have an oversimplified worldview, and then

you find out some errors and then bang, you vacillate over to the right and an oversimplified view and you find some errors. Like, what you're're doing is you're trying to develop a much more differentiated and detailed oriented political philosophy, right? Because that's part of being matured, wise. And so you're going to oscillate back and forth like that. Now you said you don't think you're merely being an activist now because you're working for an organization where where disagreement is actually, is it tolerated or encouraged and do the Prager people actually, do they let you say what you need to say, do they encourage you to do that? And how do you know that you're not just pulling yourself into alignment with their views for instrumental reasons? I mean, people have asked me the same questions about

my work with the Daily Wire, let's say. Yeah, I'd say it's both tolerated and encouraged, and we can be both at the same time. And when I come and do my show, I know that my show is my words, and I know that it's my thoughts. And I feel comfortable now, whereas I didn't before, saying, you know what, I don't agree with maybe that five minute video that we put out this week, or I don't before saying, you know what? I don't agree with maybe that five-minute video that we put out this week, or I don't want to have a certain guest on the show to discuss this sort of view of things, and that is always encouraged and taken to heart,

and they go, okay, great. We don't ever want you to put your name on something that is not your thinking or your belief. So I have much more freedom today than I had before when I was working for that left-leaning organization and I was having these thoughts that were dissident to the subscribed narrative. I didn't feel comfortable even saying that

or even coming to a point of confrontation with anybody because I knew that my job was contingent upon me believing the list of things that I was meant to believe. And now I get to come and say, I don't think I agree with you on that. And it's actually taken in stride and people want to talk about it. Okay, okay. So one of the ways you know that you're not merely towing the party line now is that you have a wider range of play available to you without getting into trouble. Okay, so how else do you know? Here's a good question. How have you learned to

distinguish between those words that are yours and those words that merely make you a mouthpiece of an ideology? Yeah, I mean I guess I'm not afraid to disagree. I think if I was your typical right leaning conservative person, I would be talking about I don't know, Christianity, I don't happen to be a religious person. I'm agnostic atheist, I guess is what you would say. And I always just try to take in information and really deduce down where people are right, where people are wrong on both sides of things. Like I'll take in both narratives, both the left and the right and see, okay, where are

they right on this and where are they wrong and why is that the case and on the right, where are they right on this and where are they wrong and that's the case. And I take it upon myself to hopefully be even handed in criticism of both sides. So there will be episodes that conservatives watch my show and they go, I absolutely do not agree with anything you said. And here's why. And there's episodes that I put out where we're leftist disagree with what I have to say. So I don't know that I have a particular process for discerning whether or not I'm truly using the words that come

from my own mind, but I can certainly tell that with reactions to the content that I'm saying that, well, I must be saying what's true to myself because I'm pissing off two groups of people equally. Okay, well, that seems to be a reasonable marker. I mean, you said you also implied something, as we talked. You said that when you were a mouthpiece for the party line as a young person, a lot of the time you were miserable and angry and you had a chip on your shoulder and you saw a lot of hostility in the world.

There isn't any evidence of that in the way that you conduct yourself, certainly not in this discussion and not when I saw you on stage. Like you don't seem to be carrying around a lot of bitterness and resentment. And so, you know, I have this byline on my email response. Truth is the antidote to suffering. And you know, one of the things that I think is reasonable is to note that if you are using your own words That gives you a sense of solidity

Internal solidity and confidence in what you're saying like there's a there's an element that's foundational there Doesn't have that sense of falseness and narcissistic pride that go along with claiming false moral virtue for merely mouthing the dictates of a given ideology. Sure, you know what? That's a very great point. And that's something that hadn't come to mind. Yeah, I would say I'm far more sound in myself. And far more comfortable, I think, with admitting that I was wrong or saying I don't know when it comes to something. Right, right, right, right. That's the one. I would, you would never hear me say I don't know when it comes to something. Right, right, right, right. That's the one. You would never hear me say I don't know, which is really scary to think about in retrospect.

And now, I'm so comfortable looking at an issue and going, you know what? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, well, there's two terrors there, right? There is a terror in not knowing because it means you have to face your ignorance and there's no shortage of that. But there's also the totalitarian terror, which is the opposite to that, which is, well, if I had my act together, I would have an answer for everything. And that's a hell of a burden, especially when you're 15 because, or 16, it's like, what the hell do you know? And it's hard to understand that there's

actually a relief in being able to throw up your hands and say, well, I don't know what the answer to that is. And I could go investigate. But it's also okay that I don't know. And that opens up doors of exploration for me. But you know, this, this, this is something I learned when I was probably about your age, you know, and maybe you'd find it useful. I understood it was in 1982, 1983, something like that. So I was about 21, yeah, I just bought exactly your age. I liked to win arguments, you know, and I had gone a lot of positive attention

for being smart and being verbal when I was a kid. And so I had a fair bit of, let's say, intellectual pride, which I doubt I've shaken completely. And I like to be able to win arguments, and I could usually win an argument if I set out to do so. And so I thought that if you won an argument, you were right. And certainly being married has disabused me of that notion, by the way. And then I realized that I was often saying things just so that I would win arguments and be right. And then I also noticed that when I was doing that, I had a deep sense of falsehood and

disquiet, right? And I felt that when I was really paying attention, I could see that doing that made me weak. It made me weak and defensive and prideful and narcissistic, all of those things. And then insistent that I was right and kind of totalitarian. And so then I started to listen to what I was saying and to feel it out.

Now I was reading Karl Rogers at the same time because I was starting to get interested in the clinical world. And he talked about the necessity of authenticity. He believed that your actions and your words should be in alignment, but not only that, that your physiological being and your words should be in alignment. He said, if you paid enough attention, you could tell when you were, let's say, not being true to your core self, something like that. For me, that manifested itself as a sense of weakness

And so I kind of learned to feel my way along. I always think about it as sort of trying to find Imagine you're walking across a giant swamp and there are Stones under the surface, but you can't see them in the murky water But you can feel them out so you can feel where you could step, you could take the next step and find solid ground. And you can do that with your words. You know, you can feel, and I think that's a test for the authenticity and the truth of the words, is that they're not prideful, they're not designed to win, they're designed to provide you with

a firm foundation under your feet. And I think to some degree, while I'm wondering, I suppose to some degree, if that's how you know, to what degree that's how you know, for example, at Prager U, when you should hold your ground and say what you need to say. Certainly. and say what you need to say. Certainly, and it's interesting because I think I've managed to learn that, at least in the political sense, when it comes to the job that I do, but in a personal sense, I still struggle with exactly what you were talking about, sort of feeling the stones and recognizing things in yourself before the words come out of your mouth.

So, now politically, because I've gone through all of this back and forth and really having to contend with myself and with other people. Now I'm fine and I'm calm and I'll listen to a story and I'll have this idea of well let's wait. Let's wait to find more information even though something immediately wants to attack somebody else. Let's wait and hear more. Whereas sometimes in my personal life my turn around on recognizing my defensiveness is about a 24-hour period, which my boyfriend is struggling with right now. Right, right.

Well, that's interesting. You know, like that's played itself out in our marriage. And I would say, I'll talk about my wife momentarily. I would say that when we first got married, the turnaround for her was about 24 hours. And she's got that down to about 30 seconds now. Yeah. And that's, I hope to be just like her. Well, you know, well, if you practice that, you know, and if you practice, and it is that kind of, that's humility, by the way, really. It's like, if you listen with humility, you're always listening with the idea that you're probably still pretty

stupid and maybe this person will say something that will make you slightly less stupid if you listen hard enough. And that's such a gift, right? Because if you're stupid, you're going to run into a wall because of it at some point. And so if someone who's talking to you can tell you where you're stupid, well, what a deal for you. And the thing that's so interesting about that too is that you're way more likely to be told where you're stupid by someone who doesn't agree with you.

Yes, 100%. It's interesting that when I meet people like protesters who have this very shallow depiction of myself and are telling me that I'm stupid or racist or all these things, for some reason, I treat this person who is so far removed from my life with far more compassion than if somebody who I care about is coming forward and saying, hey, you did this stupid thing. And I don't know if it's because the relationship that I have with a person that is that is deep and in caring has a little bit more sting when criticism is given and and that's why I immediately jump to defense. Whereas with this person, you know, it doesn't truly matter all that much what

somebody on a college campus thinks. So it's something that I continue to struggle with, but I've I've turned a two week period of turn around into a 24 hour one. So that's pretty good. Well, no, no, it should. Like if you practice that diligently, you can get to turn around really quick. You know, and that's really, we were talking about the religious front, you know, that's really confession and repentance, by the way.

That's a compressed confet. Well, because the confession is, so first of all, you can think about it as recognition of sin. Okay, so what does sin mean? Technically, it means to miss the mark. There's two derivations. There's homartia from the Greek, which was an archery term. So, to sin means to miss the mark. And there's one from the Hebrew, which was chat, if I remember correctly. And it also meant to miss the target. So, you imagine that the religious transformation in its microstructure is something like admission of sin, which is while I missed the target. And then there's a confession element to it, which is

well, here's how I missed the target, you know, I wasn't aiming at the right target, I wasn't careful enough, etc. And then there's the repentance, which is while I'd rather not do that again. And then the religious vision, at least on the Christian side, and it's not unique to Christianity, is that if you go through that process of recognition of sin and confession and repentance, then there's redemption. And that is, I really think that's the cycle of growth, right? I don't think you ever learn anything important without going through those four things. That's sort of being routinized in the,

and made mythological in the religious context. But it's a useful thing to know, because that's a place where the learning that you're undertaking and your explicit description of the learning and that religious system of ideation, that's a place where they dovetail. Yeah, and I can imagine pride is the one thing that is standing as a barrier to all the force of those steps. Yeah.

Yeah, well, good. Well, that's a various two-dobb observation because the precondition for that cycle of transformation is humility. And, you know, there's my wife prays this Jesus prayer, and I'm gonna mangle it because I don't know what that will, my wife prays this Jesus prayer, and I'm gonna mangle it because I don't know it that well, but it's something like Jesus crazed

to have mercy on my soul, a sinner. And the Orthodox Christians, some of them pray that continually. And you might say, well, what exactly are they doing? And the answer is, well, they're trying to remind themselves that they're stupid and fellable. And you might say, well, that sucks, because who wants to be reminded constantly that they're stupid and fallible. And you might say, well, that sucks because who wants to be reminded constantly that they're stupid and fallible.

But if that makes you more attentive and more able to go through this cycle of transformation, because now you're attending to the places where you might be in error, then it's a facilitator of growth. And it is a facilitator of growth to understand that there's a lot more possibility in what you don't know than there, then there is power in what you do know. Yeah, I'm curious. Did you ever struggle with pride getting in the way by virtue of having the job that you have? Because so many people are looking to you and taking in your words as very much right. And in this very dedicated fashion, does that that ever come as a barrier in your personal life with your own argument?

Well, I think that I sort I was fortunate, you know, in some sense, because I didn't become well known till I was pretty old, like I was in my mid 5050s, you know? And I'd been a professor at Harvard and at the University of Toronto for 20 years. And so I had a pretty good reputation among my students, and I had some practice at what that was like. And then I developed a bit of a media following in Ontario, and I got a bit of experience on the broader social landscape before things burst, you know, things burst forward around me.

Now, so I was older when this all happened and that was helpful. But also, as I indicated in our conversation, I started to sort a lot of this out when I was about your age and I realized that I had a lot of intellectual pride. You know, and that's the problem with being smart is that when you're smart, because you get a lot of positive attention for it, it's really easy to overvalue it, to confuse intelligence

with virtue, and to confuse the fact that you're intelligent, let's say, with the idea that you're valuable and good. And that's dangerous because it means that people who aren't as intelligent aren't as valuable and good, and that's not a very good conclusion to draw. But it also draws you in in a prideful way. And like I said, I like to win arguments, and I always thought, well, if I won the argument, I was smarter and better.

And I realized around your age that not only was that not true, like seriously not true, because just because someone can't formulate an argument doesn't mean they don't have a point. This is something you definitely learn when you're married. You know, because your partner might be upset with you and unable to articulate it and you might be able to mount a pretty damn good defense, but they still might be right and you should listen. So because maybe they'll stop you from falling into a pit. But I also started to understand too that in that intellectual pride, well, the figure of Lucifer and Satan, Lucifer in particular. So he's a variant of the idea of what satanic

and evil. Lucifer is the morning star in the spirit of enlightenment. And Milton characterized Lucifer as God's highest angel, gone most spectacularly wrong. And Lucifer is like scar in the Lion King, you know, scar is smarter than Mustafa. But he's alienated and isolated and bitter. And part of that is intellectual pride, a huge part of it. And there's a tremendous intellectual pride in the totalitarian impulse. And so I started to understand that to the degree that I was characterized by intellectual pride and capitalizing on a talent that was given to me in some sense by God, let's say, by the transcendent, because I'm not responsible for my own intelligence, whatever it might be. That's just who I am.

I didn't do that. I had no more to do without in some sense than how tall I am. It's just how it is. And then I started to understand that being prideful in that manner was participating in the same process that led to totalitarian atrocity. And then that just scared the hell out of me. I hope. You know, I hope. You would have.

You would have. Well, I hope. Well, you do hope. Well, you know, my house for years was covered with Soviet paintings, these realist paintings. And a lot of them featured Lenin and Marks and Trotsky. A lot of the real intellectual accolades of the Communist movement. And they were huge paintings. Some of them were 9 by 12. And literally, my house was covered with them. And, you know know much to the chagrin of my wife to some degree although she played along

but part of that was to remember you know to remember how attractive these totalizing ideologies can be how much of a temptation they are to pride, especially allied with something like compassion, and how unbelievably brutal and terrible that is. And so I try to have that in the back of my mind all the time. I want to step forward carefully. I don't want to fall prey to that intellectual or moral pride.

And like I said, I'm old enough, so I think I can handle it. And then I would also say, I have a lot of people around me who keep me in check. I have good friends, many of whom have been, have had incredibly successful careers, extremely intelligent people and capable and blunt. And if I deviate, some of them on the left and some of them on the right,

and if I deviate, they phone me and say, you know, I don't think you handled that very well You should get your act together and then we fight about it I did a video with Greg Hurwitz and Jonathan Pazio about my the tweets that got me banned You know where we tried to delve into? the Utility and morality of my behavior Twitter makes you impulsive and I can be impulsive on Twitter. And so, and I made some nasty comments on Twitter. And I

spent a lot of time talking to my friends and my family about, you know, was that straight and right? Or was it prideful and impulsive? And well, so I have lots of people around me who help. And then I'm also, I'm hoping I'm terrified enough of where intellectual pride goes to, you know, to keep my ego in check. Sure, and there's also this element of being a person who thinks you're always trying to do the right thing and trying to do the right thing

is different from doing the right thing. And I've learned that very recently. And as far as having people, having people who keep you in check, it's been, it's been majorly important for me as well. I mean, I've been with a man for a year who now whenever I do something that is wrong or could even be misconstrued as wrong, he goes, Hey, you know, I saw that you did this thing. And having so much of your life being filmed, which I'm sure you're accustomed to, it's really something that you have to keep in mind, because on a 30 second moment you've had,

which would normally be seen by nobody, can be seen by millions, and you will be held to that belief or that statement for the rest of your life, whether or not that's a rightful thing to do or not with the cancel culture that we're dealing with right now. So, to have somebody there to say, you could have said it this way, or I know what you meant to say, but here's how it could have been done better is just such an important thing to have for everybody. Yeah, well, you know, there's advantages to that. I mean, I've

Yeah, yeah, well, you know, there's advantages to that. I mean, I've been required, let's say, to temper my public behavior more in a more civilized manner since I've been in the situation that you described, which is, so there's two elements to that. First of all, if I'm ever rude to anyone who knows me, who knows of me, first of all, they will never forget that for the rest of their life and they will tell everyone they know. And you don't need that to happen very many times before your reputation deservedly takes a major hit. So I do my best to be hyper alert when I'm in public in places that I might be irritated, normally like airports and so forth,

because I really don't like airports and not that anybody particularly does, but it is kind of useful to be called to be on your best behavior all the time like that, but it is definitely useful to have someone around who is watching you and helping you modify your behavior so that you aren't being impulsive and prideful any more than is absolutely necessary. Yeah, you're gonna be in a rough situation, eh, because you're really young and you do have to assuming that your career trajectory stays

upward, which seems, you know, reasonably probable barring catastrophe. You're really gonna have to watch yourself constantly. And so that could be good, but it's not nothing to have to do that. Yeah, I think the moments where I'll find the most pressure and it is probably when we're doing live shows, because you never know what's going to come out of your mouth for the most part when you're live. And I have been known to be a very fast-paced person. And that is helpful and hurtful in so many ways. But as far as meeting people, you spoke to something interesting,

there are times where you meet people in your most uncomfortable moments in life. And there have been moments where, I've been at the hospital seeing a loved one and someone walks in and wants to say, hi, or a nurse or something like that. And it's just so interesting to have to take that in and go, well, this is a moment.

And you have to make this moment for this person despite what's going on in your personal life. And there's something so powerful about having to do that as a person, not to step out of the realm of humility, but it's very meditative to take on an uncomfortable moment and make it comfortable for somebody else. It's a very powerful thing to be able to do in a skill that I hopefully have learned.

Yeah, right. Well, you know, it'd be a good skill for everyone to learn, you know, because the idea there is something like, you are required to be good, regardless of whatever tragedy happens to be unfolding in your life at the moment. And I think that's right.

I mean, you know, part of the reason that people are inclined not to be good, so they become resentful and bitter is because terrible things have happened to them. And that's genuinely the case. Now, you can blow out of proportion something and find a reason for resent. But lots of times people have been really hurt.

And you might say, well, don't I have a reason to be resentful and bitter? And the answer is, bloody well, right? You have a reason to be resentful and bitter? And the answer is bloody well, right? You have a reason to be resentful and bitter. And it might be a good reason. But two things, first of all, that doesn't mean that you get to stop trying to be good. And second, it also doesn't mean that everybody's had a rough time is now no longer good. Now, in my life, I've met lots of people because I was a clinician and a professor and well, and now, you know, I met literally hundreds of thousands of people.

But I learned, at least 25 years ago, that it's often the best people who've been through the worst things. Now, if you go through something terrible, it can really imbiter you and take you out and make you malevolent. And you have your reasons. But I've met people who had lived so brutal that they're almost beyond imagining who were so deep and good that it was literally a miracle to meet them. And I met a lot of people like that. I had people in my clinical practice who were just, Jesus, I had this one woman. She, she didn't have anything going for her.

Like her family was utterly insane. Her mother was a delusional alcoholic schizophrenic, whose boyfriend was paranoid and used to torture to death about being possessed, literally possessed. She was very intellectually impaired. She was overweight, she was unattractive. She dressed like a street person. She just Jesus, she had a roughive, she dressed like a street person. She just, Jesus, she had a rough life, man, in every way.

She'd been in a mental hospital inpatient ward for like years, and she came to me hypothetically, because she was afraid of other people. She used to kind of walk up to people like this, you know, she was so shy, she couldn't even look at people And it turned out that the real reason she came this outpatient clinic that I was working out at a place called the Douglas hospital She'd been in an inpatient ward and Man the people in those inpatient wards. They were so devastated They'd been there for like 30 years. These were people who hadn't been let back on the streets during deinstitutionalization And so it was like Dante's in Fernel walking through those wards, man. And one flew over the Cougars nest,

had nothing on that place, I tell ya. And she had been in that ward, and she had a dog that she took care of, and she had this idea that she could take her dog out for a walk, and then maybe she could take some of those in-patients out for a walk. And that's why she'd come to see me. So he had this woman whose life was

Jesus, man. She was, she was facing an impenetrable wall everywhere she looked and yet her attitude was, you know, I've met some people who had it worse than me and maybe there's something I could do to help. It was stunning. And so, those people that you meet are so powerful. Yeah, well, you know, the fact that that your suffering doesn't justify your immorality. And that's, you're called upon to act nobly regardless of your catastrophe. And not only is that a good thing to learn. That's a good thing to learn. Better for the world. Yeah, it's going to be better for the world around you.

And it's going to be better for you. I mean, I don't know that this has been studied or anything, but feeling hatred and being super reactive or sensitive to things that have gone wrong in your life, I truly believe eats away at your body and mind as a person and all the people that I've met who have been the most powerful in my life have had some of the worst things happen to them and they approach people with a smile and they are calm

and they are collected in some of the worst moments you could possibly imagine. And to be able to master that as a person, I think, is probably one of the most powerful journeys that I will go on or anybody will go on in their life. Well, it has been studied, I would say, to some degree. It depends on how broadly in some sense, it depends on how far you can see the research extending. So, here's an example. There is a trait neuroticism, which is sensitivity to negative emotion.

And that's anxiety and pain, let's say. And people differ in their sensitivity to those at baseline. One of the things that makes people more neurotic, so experienced negative emotion, is self-consciousness. And so really what that means is literally what it means is the more you think about yourself, the more miserable you are. And so that's worth knowing. So if you're always wondering how the world's treating you, and if you're a victim, and if you're always concerned about your emotional state, you will be miserable because those concerns are the same thing as being miserable. And so there's that bit of research that bears on this issue, but it's also the case that we know that if you take a stance in life that's predicated on the idea that what you're doing is voluntarily

confronting a challenge, then that's completely different, psychophysiologically, neurologically, pharmacologically, that's completely different from having a stress thrust upon you. So if you're an active contender, you're actually a different psychophysiological organism than you are if you're a passive recipient, even if it's the same level of challenge. You know, and that'd be the difference between stress and challenge. That's clearly documented all the way to the cellular level. Okay, so sitting in the ice bath willingly is better than having ice water thrown at your face.

Well, in fact, they're not only different, they're opposites. So the ice bath idea is an interesting one. I mean, Wim Hof, who's the world's master at ice baths, and he's been plunging himself into cold water for decades. And he is so resistant to cold and so in control of his autonomic nervous system, that it's kind of miracle. And so, you know, we actually don't know the limit here. Like, so here, I'll tell you something on the religious front that's worth thinking about too in relationship to this discussion.

You know, there's an idea that's deep in Western culture, in so far as Western culture, is Christian is that the world is founded on a sacrifice. And that's what the crucifix represents. And European towns were built around a church, and the church was built around an altar, and the altar was built around the idea of sacrifice. So the sacrifice, the proper sacrifice, is at the center of the community. That's what that idea means. Now you might ask, well, what's the proper sacrifice? And the answer is something like the voluntary willingness to bury your cross.

And then you might say, well, what is your cross? And the answer to that is, well, that's the catastrophe of your life. Right? That's the fact you'll be betrayed, the fact that you're going to die, the fact that you're going to be in pain, the fact that your loved ones will see you suffer, the fact that the mob will come after you, the fact that criminals might be preferred to you, et cetera, it's all the potential catastrophes of your life. And then the sacrifice is the idea that you have to let your, what would you say? You have to let your narrow ego go enough so that you pick all that up voluntarily, all of that. And then that transforms it.

And I think that's literally true. I think that's what all the psychological evidence points to is that if you adopt a stance of voluntary challenge, even in relationship to tragedy and malevolence, that that's the pathway to transcendence, like truly. Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting that you say that because my mother, she struggles with borderline personality disorder. And in a lot of the therapy that she's underwent, they talk about this deep attachment to traumatic events

and not only the traumatic events of your own life, but of other people's lives. And her attachment to that is often from the perspective of being somebody outside of the traumatic event and bearing no responsibility or accountability. Now, whether that's the illness to blame or your own personal ability to contend with yourself,

it truly does change your entire outlook on life and it can be a very powerful thing to take accountability for actions that maybe had nothing to do with you. Well, okay, so I've got a practical example that might be helpful with your relationship. So, and maybe not, but maybe it'll be helpful to someone. So, now and then when my wife get into an intractable battle,

you know, we'll both have that proclivity to want to be right. So, you want to be right because you don't want your beliefs to fall apart, and you want to be right because then you don't have to go through the inconvenience of having to change. So, you have your reasons for wanting to be right. The problem with that is you might not be right, and plus you have your reasons for wanting to be right. The problem with that is, you might not be right. And plus, you have to live with this other person. And so, you better sort out your differences. I don't think that's compromised, by the way. I think that's joint union in a higher vision. But one of the things we learned to do, if we could pull

ourselves away from the fight, you know, because you think things like, well, you know, some of the time I'm wrong, but this time she's definitely in the wrong. And I'm going to make that point. She feels the same way. And so, you know, then we, you know, come to log her heads. We learn to leave each other and go into our separate rooms and then to meditate for some period of time. And here's the meditation.

It's like, okay, we're having this stupid argument. Definitely, my wife is wrong this time, for sure. But there's some possibility that I've done something stupid, sometime in the recent past, or maybe even in the distant past, that made this argument somewhat more likely, somewhat, even though she's mostly wrong. And so what's so interesting about that is, if you said you know, somewhat, even though she's mostly wrong. And so what's so

interesting about that is if you sit, you ask yourself that, it's like, what, what did I do imperfectly to increase the probability of this event? You will absolutely get an answer. You'll get some little fantasy, some memory, some thought about something you did. And then if you go tell the person that, then it takes all that pride out of it. So she'll say, you know, what she did wrong and I'll say what I did wrong. And then we're both confronting the situation

like stupid people who have something to learn instead of like intellectually prideful people who are definitely right. And then we can, well, so far, inevitably, inevitably, we've been able to construct a joint vision out of the argument, you know, that's better than either of our A-priori positions. And that's also a hallmark of a healthy relationship. It's not like you meet in the middle or that you compromise.

It's that you bring the conflict together. It's thesis and tithesis synthesis, essentially. You bring the conflict together and you's thesis, antithesis, synthesis, essentially. You bring the conflict together and you bring your two viewpoints together and you meld a third viewpoint that's better than either of the viewpoints you brought to bear on the problem. And you can generally do that and have an out humility that enables you to examine what stupid thing you did to mock up the relationship. That's... You can meditate on that pretty much forever, right? What stupid thing you did to mock up the relationship. That's, you can meditate on that pretty much forever, right? What stupid thing did you do to mock things up?

That's an inexhaustible treasure trove of wisdom, that is. Right. And one of the worst and most uncomfortable things that we'll have to go through in our life, too. That's yet another challenge to face an awful force and something that will admittedly say I struggle with. Well, here's something I learned as a therapist. This is also useful to know.

It's not surprising that people shy away from conflict, especially if they're agreeable and somewhat neurotic because you don't wanna have conflict with someone if you're agreeable and if you're higher in neuroticism, it makes you pretty upset. So you have your reasons not to want to have the discussion, but here's the rub, man, and this is something

I learned as a therapist. Conflict delayed is conflict multiplied. And if you have a problem with you or with your partner, then if you don't sort it out, then you're going to have that bloody problem for the rest of your life. And maybe it'll be a problem that comes up every week. So that's like 50 times a year and you're married for 30 years. That's going to, you're going to have that problem 1500 times, 1500 times. And maybe it'll take an hour per time.

So that's 1500 hours. And so that's 30 work weeks. That's basically a year of work of your life. That's like 2% of your life. So then you think, well, should I have a fight? And the answer is, damn right. Right now, man, four hours. Let's hash this out.

Right, let's figure out how we're stupid. And then let's figure out how we cannot do this again. And that we're both by into, because you have to both by into it. It has to be voluntary. But you see, so you have that fear of not being right, and you have the fear maybe of having the fight, and you have the fear of discovering what's wrong with you, and find those are all valid fears. But you need to balance that against the fear of having the same fight 1500 times. Yeah, that's not good.

Yeah, even worse, it's just remaining silent and never making that person aware of the problem that you have. I mean, what a disservice to whoever you're in a relationship with to for them to remain ignorant to something that you are having such trouble with. It's just a really difficult thing to do, but it must be done. Yeah, well, yeah, it is kind of polite to, you know, one of the things I often hear people say,

couples used to say this to each other, because now and then I had couples in my therapy session, I was always concentrating on a particular individual, but sometimes it was useful to have their partner in. You know, people would often say something when they were talking to the partner like, well, if you loved me, you'd know what I wanted. It's like, well, sometimes that's true,

and you're not just paying attention, but you know, first of all, you don't even know what you want. So how the hell would you expect someone else to know? And maybe you could be polite enough to let them in on the secret. You know, that'd be kind of nice. Now, you have to make yourself vulnerable, right? Well, here's the problem with that.

If you let me know what you want, need, then I can manipulate you and I can deny that to you, right? See, if I don't know what you want, need, then if I'm gonna torture you, it's kind of hit or miss. But if you let me in on the secret, then I know where you're vulnerable and I can really misuse that. And so you have to trust someone to let them know

what you want, need. You really have to trust them. And then you might say, well, that's naive to trust like that. But it's not unless you're naive. Once you're past being naive, that sort of trust is courage, not naive. It's like, I know you could hurt me, I know it, especially if I tell you this, but I'm going to do it anyways because that's an invitation to the best in you, right? And then maybe we could sort out this problem and maybe, you know,

you'll have the same luxury with me. You'll be able to tell me something that you need and want. And so that's the sort of trust you have to have in a relationship in order for it to progress properly. And if you don't, I mean, what is your relationship? Who is the person dating if they don't know you, if they don't know your wants and needs? I mean, so often people reach out to me on the political end of the spectrum and say, I'm so scared to come to my friends and tell them that I agree with some of the things that you say. And I'm sure you run into this a lot.

But to that, you just say, well, what friends are they if they don't know you and they don't know how you think and feel about certain things. And what are you truly giving people in this relationship and what are they getting from you in this relationship if they don't know who you are? Yeah, well, that's the thing, you know, if you're in the grip of an ideology and you're falsifying your own experience to be an agent of that ideology, then it's the ideology that has your life and not you. Right.

And that's not really is a form of possession. It's like you don't get to say what you want to say, you don't get to feel what you need to feel. The friends you have don't know who you are. They're not really your friends. They're allies, they're ideological allies. They're really comrades, you know, in some real sense. And it's a lot better to have friends than comrades by any stretch of the imagination.

So. Absolutely. All right, well, we're out of time. That went biologically. And so for everyone who's listening, I'm going to go over to the Daily Wire Plus platform and talk to Amalus on the more biographical front. And in the meantime, I'd like to thank all of you

who are watching and listening for doing exactly that and hope you found, especially young people who might be listening, hope you found this discussion useful in guiding you through the swamps of your philosophical journey. And I hope you found it helpful in terms of helping you find the courage to have your own voice and to find your own friends and to make your own way, in truth and to be very careful about the pride

that goes along with ideological possession. It's a very bad thing. It is definitely the cardinal sin. And so anyways, thanks to all of you who are watching and listening. Thanks, Amalam. It was good talking to you. We'll continue on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I'm going to ask Amalabudshap, biographical questions, and delve a little bit more into the dark secrets of her past.

Thanks everyone. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much, hey. Yeah, yeah, you bet, you bet. It was pleasure. Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com. conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.