The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage: Don’t Call It A Recession

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

How long can the Biden Administration go before they have to acknowledge we’re in a recession? Will the President ignore the polling of his own Party and run for a second term? If the Dems dump Joe, is Michelle Obama their only hope to retain the White House? Who wins a Trump vs DeSantis primary?  Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing to find out! Become a Daily Wire member TODAY and enjoy all of our incredible ad-free content by clicking here⇒ https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody, it's Michael Knowles. You're about to listen to Daily Wire Backstage featuring me, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Claven. We're going to be talking about the trans recession. We're going to be talking about why I love my heart arrhythmia medication and so many other things. You're not going to want to miss this one. Thanks for listening. You're not the boss of me, and therefore I shall not do a fake laugh in 321. Hello and welcome to Daily Wire backstage. I'm the lowercase God King, Jeremy Boring, joined as always by the Andrew Claven, the Matt Walsh, The Michael Knowles and Ben Shapiro, The Beaming in today from the Holy Land of Israel. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers? I know you don't. None of us do. Get ExpressVPN right now at ExpressVPN.com slash backstage. Guys, the last time we were together, there were throngs of ignoring fans. They cheered at everything that we said. They laughed at all of our jokes. Candace was there.

Dennis Prager was there. Jordan Peterson was there. Now we can't even get Ben Shapiro to actually show up. It's just, I'm just saying it's a little anticlimactic. It's a bit of a letdown. So the big news today, obviously, is that the United States is absolutely not in no way, shape, or form entering into a recession. The very people who created the definition of recession have now changed the definition of recession. You know, it's actually a very modern word. In the beginning of the 20th century even, as recently as, as, as, the early 20th century, there was no such concept as an economic recession. And if you look at the

average age of our political class now, it's likely that the actual human beings who came up with the term itself are now saying, no, absolutely nothing to see here. And yet, obviously, if you, you know, aren't living in Iraq and if you don't make as much money as I do, you're probably experiencing an increase in prices. You know, milk must be up to like thousands. A little less. Milk has gone way up. You know, oil has more than doubled. You know, people are really feeling this. And apparently, Joe Biden's reelection, the Democrats' election position is pay no attention

to the absolute horrors of your life. Things are going just fine. You know, the one thing I have to say is we all know about the Great Depression, but the word depression was invented to keep from saying it's a bust or a crash. So they do this all the time. I mean, it's just. And they did say, they actually. used the word. While we're all joking about we're living in an age where we can't say what a woman is,

where we can't say what a baby is, where we can't see any of that, they actually said, no, it's not a recession. It's a transition. So they're actually transing our economy, and they think that's going to work. But, you know, I did suggest to Walsh before the show started that he make his next film should be called, what is a recession, you know? So you're talking to, have economists throw you out of rooms. If only we could afford to make it. We have more dollars than ever, and they're worth less than they've ever been. We're in just. such an acceleration loop, though. It's worth pointing out that the director of the National Economic Council at the White House,

Brian Dees, he was the one who's been all over TV, he's been all over at the White House saying this is not the economic, technical definition of a recession. It is not two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. In 2008, Brian Dees himself said almost verbatim that the technical definition of economists of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. But this transition thing is kind of scary because what it means is they have this vision that by driving everybody into poverty and the gas prices up, we're going to transition into this clean, new energy world, actually doesn't exist. They have no technology to do this.

They could be researching it. They could be creating it, but instead they're just telling us it's going to happen. For sure, one of the great untold stories is just how many people are expected to die this winter from starvation. Yeah. Because of the impact of these policies, the impact of the war that's happening in Europe. You hear numbers that range all the way up to almost a billion people. Probably it is not the case that a billion people will die. It's certainly the case that many millions of people are going to die,

all in service of virtue. That's the thing that's the most interesting to me about our culture today is that the elite are willing to subject almost any level of pain, including death on people, all in the name of looking good, of having the right, of being perceived to have. It's one of the fake virtue, right? A fake virtue. No, but it's one of the pre-being of the,

of original sin, I think. Everybody says, oh, you know, the great driver is sex, the great driver is money. Virtue is one of the greatest drivers, pretend virtue is one of the greatest drivers of human motivation. You will be like God. Yeah. That's the great problem is that the people that are in charge of fixing the problems don't see them as problems.

They are opportunities. And that's because, well, as we talked about, now this is an opportunity to switch over to green energy, but also they see just humanity, the existence of humanity as a problem. And so mass starvation is not really a bug. It's a feature of their policies. You also see the inherent contradictions in all of their beliefs, right? Because on one hand, they print money at a rate, never imagined in all of human history, they shut down the world, they do all the things that they did over the first two years of, you know, the worst pandemic in human history. Then they're shocked that there's inflation. But

Then they realize that that inflation is actually useful to the government. It's essentially a tax on the people. The more debt you have, the better inflation is for you, and no one's got debt like the United States government. But then there are other instruments of the government who've now gone full board to stop the inflation. So on one hand, you've got the federal government probably benefiting from the inflation. On the other hand, you've got the Fed ratcheting up interest rates at a rate at a velocity

that we've probably never experienced. another 0.75 points yesterday, which is the highest it's basically ever gone up, except that they had just done it the previous time that the Fed met. So it winds up creating this almost death spiral on the economy that there isn't even a unified theory of what they should be doing right now. Should the government be in favor of this inflation? Should it be taking radical measures to stop the inflation? The way you stop inflation is by causing a recession. I mean, Reagan did it. This is the way, this is one of the things you have to do. Well, yeah, the Fed is trying to stop the inflation of it. At the same,

time, we're going into an election. I don't want to, spoiler alert. They're going to start talking more and more about giving us all another bailout between now and the election because the Dems have nothing else to run on. So yes, the way that you stop, if your goal is to stop the inflation, what the Fed is doing is accurate. But what the Dems in Congress and Biden are about to do is the opposite. If you want to cancel student debt, for example, if you want to give out trillions of dollars of new money, that causes the inflation. Don't forget, though, they've already given us an election bailout, and it's specifically for the election, that was the major release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that no one is talking about.

But the gas prices would be even higher right now, except Joe Biden is releasing a million barrels a day. He announced it back in, what was it, April or May, six months of release takes you right up to the midterm elections. So what's going to happen after the midterms, the prices are going to get even worse. Yeah, that's right. What's playing out right now at big tech companies and social media sites says a dangerous precedent. Everyone should have the right to express themselves freely, but big tech monopolies have instead opted for silencing tactics and censorship.

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ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your network data to protect you from eavesdroppers and cybercriminals. All it takes is just one click to protect all of your devices. So stop allowing Big Tech to revoke our right to free speech. Revoke their right to your data instead. Secure your internet with a VPN that I trust for online protection. Visit expressvPN.com slash backstage. That's expressvPN.com slash backstage, you'll get three extra months free with our exclusive link. Again, expressvpn.com slash backstage. Go there right now to learn more. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I mean, they're already giving away a million barrels of oil a day. Million barrels of oil a day.

That gets them right through the election. The funny thing is, they're so bad at their jobs. Biden is such a bad spokesperson for the government. People don't even realize they're doing it. Like this huge giveaway, and he's getting no political what points for it. Did you guys see that thing where he didn't blink for 40 seconds? I'd only bothered you guys because you weren't taking cocaine, but you're sniffing up of that stuff. I think we have the clip. Oh, good. Insurrection and pro-cop.

You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-American. Donald Trump lacked the courage to act. The brave women and men and blew all across this nation should never forget that. Dr. Fieldgood's got a dial. back of it. Yeah. We have to remember the Democrat Party tweeted that out.

They were so proud of it. They thought that that's like the kind of thing that we need to see. Ben, Ben, what do you think? He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, Donald's eyes.

It's like we've got Coraline for president here. He's got the button eyes instead of the human eyes. And I don't know what we're supposed to believe that this human is in control. I mean, he looks like he put on the doctor doom eyes from, who framed Roger Rabbit, and then they just kind of trotted him out there. He's going to get smushed flat by a cartoon roller. It's so bizarre to watch him. But going back to the economic discussion for just one second there, one of the things that is worth noting, and it's true on the

environment, it's true on the economy also, is that when it comes to policy here, they basically just do what they want to do, and then they have to backfill the solution. So there are things they don't want you to do, and then there are things that they don't mind you doing. And if there are things they don't mind you doing, I mean, there are things they kind of want you to do. So during COVID, for example, you couldn't take your kids to playgrounds. You couldn't go to your job. You had to shut down your business. You had to shut down all the schools.

These were all things that were verboten. But you were allowed to protest in the streets for George Floyd. During COVID, you couldn't go out in public and you couldn't breathe anywhere within remote. I mean, Joe Biden is literally today saying that you should still be wearing masks in crowded places. Meanwhile, when it comes to monkey pox, they won't even just say stop the gay orgies, right? They won't say these things because there are certain things that you're allowed to do and that are apparently good to do. And then there are things like, you know, taking your kid to a playground where if the health risk is this big, then you have to make sure that you definitely, definitely don't do that. And it's the same thing with the economy.

They're telling you, don't drive. You know, it doesn't matter that you have to get to work. Make sure that you don't drive. Make sure that you don't use the air conditioner during heat waves. Make sure that you don't use your heater when it gets really cold. They just have a list of activities that they don't like you doing. That's all this really is. There are a bunch of activities they don't like you doing. And they'll use any excuse to make you not do those activities. And then there's a list. list of activities that are the approved activities. And these approved activities all happen to be on like the left wing fun list. It's like twerking in the streets at a protest or making sure to go to a bar where no one knows one another and then have as much promiscuous. But don't call it monkeypox,

guys. If you call it monkey pox, that might be stigmatizing to people. It's truly amazing. And then when it comes to the actual policy, they have to backfill policies to fix all of this. So they wreck all the businesses. They wreck all the schools. And then later, they're like, man, you know what? Probably we should think about what we can do to fill in the gaps there. They wreck the economy with spending. Spending is an approved activity. We must spend lots and lots of dollars, but we must make sure that we also shut down your business in case anybody ever gets COVID. And then they have to backfill with the Federal Reserve. So instead of seeing it as sort of part and parcel of a plan, I think that the best way to see a lot of left-wing policy is approved activities,

unapproved activities. Approved activities have bad consequences. Well, we'll figure out a way to use our bureaucratic power to sort of cram down some sort of solution that's not going to work long term. I have no other way of putting this together because otherwise it doesn't make any sort of logical sense to me. I think the one thing though to avoid stigmatization, we should we should call it gay monkey pox so we don't stigmatize all the monkeys. Some monkeys are straight. I mean, not many. They have to shut down our churches because they don't like our churches. Yeah. But they can't shut down the bathhouses because those are their churches and those are sacred to them. The other irony as are riots in the street. Yes, that's their liturgy as well. The other irony here is

that everyone has had COVID. I think now every single person in America has had COVID at least once, maybe multiple times. Whether they locked down, whether they wore the mask, whether they got 10 injections, everyone gets COVID. It's very, very transmissible. Monkeypox is not transmissible. It's very easy to shut down. You don't need to lock down the entire economy. You don't need to lock down much of anything other than the bathhouses and the fetish parties and the orgies. So you could do that very easily, and yet we're being told that this is now a national- You just don't like to have fun. Yeah, that's right.

You don't like people. Old wet blanket, Michael. What's interesting about this is during the worst of the gay crisis, the AIDS crisis, I lived in New York. So, like, you'd be talking to a guy and he'd just die. You know, like everybody was dying. The gay crisis was denim on denim, right? That's right. Good night, everybody.

But, you know, one of the things was everybody was everybody was yelling at Reagan, they were screaming at Reagan, close the bathhouses. The gay people were saying this. The gay people were saying, what's wrong with you? And I was saying, like, well, why don't you just not go? You know, why does Reagan, why is Ronald Reagan's fault, you know, whoever they were yelling at? Why was it his fault of the bathhouse? And this is an important distinction, by the way.

But now they're saying you can't even say close the bathhouse. It is an important distinction because I know homosexuals who are monogamous with ones. Yes, yeah. And they're the ones who are most loudly, just like we're talking about in the 80s, saying, no, we actually do need to shut down these orgies. because it is the case that pretty much only homosexuals get monkeypox. Anywhere from 95 to 98% of the transmission is among homosexuals and secret homosexuals. But it's not that all homosexuals are getting monkeypox. It is specifically promiscuous homosexuals who are having lots of sex with lots of different guys.

But it's also, but it's basically only homosexuals who are going to origins. That's the other thing. Well, all orgies are. Wait, wait, wait. It's very disappointing. In fairness, the rest of us. Exactly, that's the point. I don't think of my dreams.

I know the message is, well, it's not just about, we're not targeting gay people. It's just don't engage in orgies and that sort of thing. But it is true that predominantly the people that are doing these kinds of activities. I mean, the people who are, if you're having random sex with 15 different people in the course of a week, that's generally not straight people who are doing that in the first. No, it requires exclusively men. Yeah, because there's no one to say no. because women have a shred of sanity. Women are not idiots.

I mean, like, as a general rule, women are not willing to engage in random sex with enormous numbers of strangers, whereas men are pretty much willing to screw anything in any time. And so, you know, you take women out of the... Women were always the sort of check on male insanity. You take the women out of the picture.

And, again, that doesn't do with stray, gay, or anything else. Men, you know, we tend to be rather aggressive in this area, like, just as a general rule. But it's also, you know, you brought up AIDS. And one thing we're hearing from the left is they are tying this into AIDS and saying, let's not make the same mistake that we made with AIDS by stigmatizing gay people. But actually, the reverse is true. The mistake made with the messaging about AIDS is that anyone can get it whatsoever.

That's the message that we all right. AIDS actually, in the long run, obviously, it was a horrible. It was a plague. I remembered, and it was traumatizing to everybody if you were in an area like New York where there were a lot of gay people. However, after it was over, that was when gay people started to really come out because people, you know, your cousin was dying or somebody you didn't know is gay was dying. People started to say, oh, well, there's more of this than we thought there was. There's people that we actually know.

And, you know, it's Rock Hudson. It's actual movie stars that we like. It actually, you know, helped the gay cause, even though it doesn't help gay people. Gift ever! A Lego set is a gift that always clicks. And clicks. Woo! Next level.

And clicks. For kids who love gaming, choose a Lego set. The gift that always clicks. Yeah, I think to your point, though, Matt, I grew up being a century and a half younger than Drew. I was in school during the AIDS crisis, and they never once used the word homosexuality ever in reference to AIDS. I thought that AIDS was the thing that once Bobby kissed Susie, we were all going to die of AIDS. That is how it was presented to me. It's one of the great, you know, one of the great myths.

of the second half of the 20th century as heterosexual AIDS. And they did it in the beginning because they didn't think that they could get buying in. They didn't think the American people were capable of sympathizing with or bringing funding to bear on behalf of gay people. And so instead, they had to turn it as they always do. I mean, obviously we've seen it at a scale. We've never seen it before over the last three years. They have to put, they can't say, you know, if you have diabetes, if you're overweight, if you're in your 80s, you probably need to take this COVID thing particularly seriously. They'll never say anything. like that. Instead, they have to say, you're all going to die, use disinfectant on your

fruits and vegetables after they're dropped off on your doorstep before you eat them. They have to create this sort of mass panic to advance any piece of their agenda. What's interesting about it, too, is, of course, most people, you know, heart disease is what kills more people than anything else. And still, they're putting out magazine covers where they tell you that being fat is healthy, which is, that will really kill you. Obesity will really kill you. Yeah, how dare you? Yeah. I can distinctly remember. By the way, I mean, if you're talking about my monkeypox and the risk factors of monkeypox. I mean, it's worth noting at this point that I believe

that in the West, fewer than 10 people have died of monkeypox this entire time. Yeah. They're talking about this as a global pandemic and it's going to wipe out hundreds of thousands, millions of people. The grand total number of people who have died, last I checked according to the Associated Press, I believe it was five. It was like 16,000 identified monkeypox infections in Western countries. I think the plurality of them in the United States, five people total have died. And this is this is a word that everyone is supposed to know. So, again, the idea here is that the health establishment is going to scare the living hell out of you, but not enough to actually tell you that probably you shouldn't engage in the one activity that is likely to transmit the disease.

Yeah, Matt. So the message I'm taking from Ben there is that you can still go to the orgies because you're going. I can remember being in fifth grade and learning about AIDS. And the message was anyone could get it. And they watched some video or something like that. And just like you, they never said anything about gay people. I can remember going. I was so traumatized by this.

I went home and I brought up to my mom. And I said, I'm afraid I might have AIDS. I might get AIDS. And she told me, so, well, you're not gay and you're not, you're not, you're not intravenous drug users, so you're not going to get it. But I think that actually, this is kind of a significant moment for a generation that grew up in the 90s, having this AIDS panic shoved down your, down your throat. It kind of, I don't know, maybe it ties into why millennials are so susceptible now to panicking over COVID.

It's just, we were all raised to be hypochondriacs. Have you noticed a phenomenon now on the right? It used to be that all the crunchy granola people who ate all the weird stuff and didn't trust the doctors, they were pretty much all on the left. And I've noticed recently it's at least an equal number, if not mostly conservatives, who were saying no seed oils, or I'm not going to trust this doctor, or I'm going to go to this kind of, I don't know, a doula instead of a midwife or something instead of a doctor. And the reason for this, it actually ties back right with our public health issues,

is who was the face of the public health response to AIDS. You know who it was, baby, it was old me. Mr. Mistophiles, you know, he was there in the 80s. It was his first big public health campaign, and he blew it, and it was just a disaster, as we discuss in Fauci on Masked, available on Daily World Plus. But it was a, it was, the messaging was all ridiculous. He's the guy who said you could get it from close contact. Yeah, he was.

He left out the fact that it has to do sodomy. Real close. You have to get really close. But it's also, I'm also, I'm not. I mean, a huge, it's not one news story, but a series of news stories just in the last week. You know, the number one most influential study on Alzheimer's and it turns out to be fraudulent. Fraudulent. Yeah.

The antidepressant studies that have governed how we treat depression since 1970 are fraudulent. There's another big one. I'm not remembering off the top of my head this way. It seems to happen like every six days now at the point. That's some major aspect of the public health establishment. is fake. And so in that, in that environment, when someone comes up to me, who I used to write off as a hippie, it says, hey, don't eat those seed oils, man, or hey, don't trust the doctor

on this or don't take this drug. 20 years ago, I would have said, yeah, whatever, okay. Now, I am frankly more likely to trust an African shaman witch doctor than I am to trust someone in a white lab code at the NIH. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, actually, this is a really interesting point, because one of the things that I think happened to Western society generally over the course of the 20th century,

is the substitution of science for religion. The idea was that your religious leaders were not trustworthy because they provided you with certain solutions to life, and then they couldn't even uphold their own standards. This is, I think, what led to so much rage at the Catholic Church in the early 2000s after all of the scandals regarding pedophile priests and such. The idea was that these were the people who were supposed to lead us, and suddenly they've let us down.

Well, the story of the 20th century is the substitution of scientists for kind of cultic leaders. The idea was, these were the people who were going to lead us to a better tomorrow. they were always going to fix all of our problems. And there was some truth to it because, you know, science has advanced enormously the ability of human beings to live longer and more healthfully. But one of the things that has happened is the scientists forgot about epistemic humility. There's no humility to them at all. And so they make claims that are well beyond what they can actually, what they can actually prove. And you see it in virtually every area. They're just not willing to say the truth about what they know and really what they don't. That is most true in the

area of psychiatry, where honestly, the understanding of the human brain is extraordinarily rudimentary at this point. And yet you're told by the experts that they know like every jot and tittle of how neuroscience works. No, they don't. They really, really don't. And so because of that, people expect magic from folks. And you can't expect magic because there's no such thing in magic. So when the magic dissipates, then you're treating them exactly like you would treat a religious leader who you're disappointed in because he's violated your sense of faith in them. You should read this book. It's called Desperate Remedies, I believe, which is a history of psychiatry, which is one atrocity after another, completely outside of science,

but every single one of them is picked up by the establishment and touted as a great thing, including sticking an all of people's nose and taking part of their brain out, which was a lobotomy. And, you know, it makes Freud, who I believe was a brilliant quack. It actually makes him kind of a hero, because at least he was only talking to people. He wasn't electro-shocking them. He wasn't drugging them.

He wasn't doing all these terrible things. But it is one history of failure after another. And, you know, there's one other thing about what Ben is saying, when you look back at the 20th century, and because most of us lived in the second half of the 20th century, you forget what an absolute nightmare of the 20th century was. Hitlerian fascism and Soviet communism were both scientific movements in a sense. That's right. In a sense, they were both based in non-god, non-religious-based science. There's got to be some kind of clue here that science is a wonderful thing, but it's not the only thing. I have two thoughts.

One is that it's not just, you said it, it's not just science. it's experts generally. Yeah. And in the same way that in the Middle Ages, the Catholic priesthood sort of soaked up all the 120 IQs in Europe

because there was nowhere else to be. So if you had any smarts whatsoever, you went into the Catholic priesthood. And then that creates all kinds of problems across time that you've completely centralized all of the people probably capable of having critical, you know,

any substantial level of critical thinking into one institution that has a very rigid set of parameters on which you're allowed think. And so you've almost removed critical thought from society. We do the same thing now. We just do it through the institution of higher learning. And in the name of liberalism, it became the least liberal of all institutions. It is a religious institution that has very strict parameters on what you're allowed to think. And we placed everyone with 120 plus IQ

in that system. And so now the people who should be having not critical theory, but actual criticism, actual critical thought about day-to-day life, critical thought about how we live, critical thought about the things that we've thought historically, the things now, the things that we might think in the future, they've all been institutionalized, as it were, into thinking one set of things. And you see this everywhere. So if you had said, if you said during COVID, that you doubted, for example, that hankies over your face was going to make a substantial dent in the spread of this respiratory viral disease, it's not just that, you know, that virologists would come out and tell you you were wrong.

It's that all experts at all levels would come out and tell you that you were wrong with absolute authority and absolute certainty about things that they knew absolutely nothing. You see it, I think about this in every level of the expert class right now. You know, if you question the narrative on anthropogenic global warming, and they'll say 98% of scientists agree, right? But 98% of scientists have absolutely no knowledge about climatology. You mean that, like, heart surgeons agree, and they do. And you mean that lawyers agree, and they do.

And you mean people with gender studies degrees agree, and they do. The institutionalization requires that whatever my degree is in, for it to have any value, I have to accept that you're as expert about your degree as I am about my degree, and it creates this unbelievable echo chamber. And the rest of us have just deferred all. All of our critical thinking to the institution. It's a brilliant insight. The greatest example of it is NASA, the moonshot.

They sucked all the talent out of the room. And after the moonshot, basically the space program died. Right. It died because they were all in the government instead of somewhere saying, you know, I have this other idea. And it took 40 years to challenge that. The other part of the story that makes this such a problem is that you have the experts saying, leave everything to us.

And you have the American public, many of which have been conditioned to sort of look for the easiest answer. And so a lot of people are more than happy to just farm that out to the so-called experts and let them deal with it. That's especially the case with psychiatry and the antidepressant study, which, by the way, what's so sinister about that is it's not like this study just came out revealing that all these antidepressants were prescribed on a faulty basis, and we just found this out this week. No, this has been known for decades. Psychiatrists and doctors have known for decades that the chemical imbalance theory of depression is not true. That was basically a guess that someone came up with decades ago, and it's been known that it wasn't true.

Well, here's one evidence that it's not true, is the antidepressant use has skyrocketed ever since they started since. We're the most mentally ill generation in human history and the most medicated. Usually when you come up with a cure for things, it goes away. And they've done study where they've compared antidepressants against, against placebos and found that, especially if it's an active placebo that gives you some kind of, kind of irrelevant side effect, there's no distinction between the two. But the problem is, even after the study came out, and I was talking about it on my show, and what I heard from a lot of people is, well, maybe this is all false, but it makes me feel better to take it. Yeah, no, I know. So that's it. My feeling is take the placebo.

Well, I mean, I will say, I will say that on the antidepressant issue, I mean, I think that there's a slightly more complexity to antidepressant use than what the study actually claims. So But the study actually claims correctly, of course, is that there's no relationship between low serotonin and depression, which was the chemical imbalance theory, right? It was that low serotonin was invariably connected with depression. Well, psychiatrists have known for a while, and this, again, demonstrates that all they do is the platonic lie. And this is the biggest problem. That disconnect between what they know and what they tell you is so great that the vast majority of the American public believes that the chemical imbalance theory is the going theory. I mean, if you poll Americans about that, they think that that's what is going on in the human brain because they watch a bunch of people.

I think that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, they watch a bunch of commercials about Prozac in 1997, and it said this, right, in the commercials. And so everybody still believes that that's how this works. But psychiatrists will tell you that depression, like cancer, is actually a bundle of things, right? There are a bunch of different types of depression ranging from mild to severe. There are a bunch of different causes of depression. We don't know the chemical causes of depression. Now, what you'll see from some psychiatrists and from some studies, is that some antidepressants,

depending on circumstance, may have a better effect than other antidepressants depending on the person. And here's the key, though. They don't know why, right? And they can't just say that. The truth is that a huge amount of medicine is trial and error, right? Antidepressants actually started off, SSRIs started off as tuberculosis drugs. In the same way that Viagra started off as a drug for heart arrhythmia, for heart arrhythmia. So very often, I mean, this is true right now for a huge number of medicines that we use.

They're being used for the not original purpose of the medication. Because, again, we are not that much farther advanced, except in some of our study techniques, from the days when it was like, pick the redberry or pick the blackberry and see who dies and see who lives. And so, very often what you're doing, and so what you're doing very often with antidepressants, and this is true, is you'll see a person and it'll take three or four different antidepressants in a row until they get to the one that works for them. Part of the problem, again, with studies of depression, is that also the effects are self-reported. There's no objectively verifiable metric to determine whether an antidepressant is working other than I tell a doctor that I feel better. So all this is really

vague and really difficult, and it got simplified down into, you have a chemical imbalance, take an SSRI, it'll cure you. And that's not true. The Black Box warnings, by the way, and SSRIs are really, really troubling. I mean, you should really, what I've said on the show is, listen, there may be SSRIs that work for some people, but in the best of all possible circumstances, you should at least go through cognitive behavioral therapy and do your best via not drugs before you even start looking along those lines. Now, I say the only way, the only way to treat depression, and never useful, because that's not true. Rectile dysfunction in COVID-19 is a potential oils.

Yeah. Great point. I've just found just a little peppermint. Can I, I think, I know we had this conversation a few shows ago about mental illness and not to retread that ground again, but there's this, I just think there's some flawed fundamental, a flawed fundamental premise that we're starting with. And when we talk about, well, do the, do the, do the antidepressants work? What do we mean by that?

What do you mean work? How do we know if they work? And what we mean is that it works if you take it and you just feel, I guess, kind of numb, you feel okay, you feel content. I don't know exactly. But is that even how people are supposed to feel every single second? That's the question. How are people supposed to feel? Like, how are people supposed to experience the world? And I think before you even think about prescribing a drug, obviously you got to go down the checklist of lifestyle choices, diet, sleep, all that. They don't do that. They just go right. to the drug. But there's another, hold on a second. There's another thing on the checklist. Are you a mortal being living in this fallen world that is full of just misery and sorrow? And so my point is that, yeah, I think depression is actually, it's a rational response to our condition as human beings, which isn't to say that we should always be depressed, but it takes more effort. It's a rarer thing to be happy and content. No one asks the question. No one asks the question. No one asks the question.

is telling people that they are bags of chemicals that can be adjusted, depressing in and of itself. Because as we say, from the invention of these things, and I'm not totally against all drugs, all medical, you know, psychotropic drugs, I'm not completely against it, but I'm against the idea. What you just said, I'm against the idea that that should be your first guess.

It should definitely be your very last guess, that there's no other reason to be depressed, and even the existential pain of life is not what's depressing you. Something's wrong. I think this is an important topic, and we have spent some time, but I want to spend a little bit more time. But first, I am obliged by economics and by character to suggest that you get a good night's sleep.

For me, personally, I can't function. Drew does not sleep. I don't sleep. I know this to be a fact that Drew. Except sometimes during the show. Drew's productivity is at an unbelievable high because statistically he got all this sleep in the first hundred years of his life. And now he's good for the next. But for me, I need Helix.

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mattress that will give you the best sleep of your entire life. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for just, this is an unbelievable deal. You get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free. They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it. That isn't going to happen because you will. For a limited time, Helix is offering up $350 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners. This is the best offer they've offered yet, so hurry over to helix sleep. That's helixleep.com slash backstage. This is a really important topic. How is a person to feel? How are we supposed to feel? What's our reaction to our lives supposed to be? We, I say it all the time. We live in the most

diagnosed and most drug generation in all of human history, but not the happiest. Well, I will tell you something. I feel, when I'm walking around, I'm just talking about my feelings, I feel as though I am taking heart arrhythmia of drugs almost all the time. I feel really excited. Invigorated. Invigorated. Two messant. So part of the reason for this is, and this really gets to Matt's point on there being a spiritual or metaphysical basis here. I was an atheist for about 10 years, and then I was not an atheist anymore. And it happened in kind of a whirlwind of a few years in there. And I will tell you, I'm way less depressed. I'm not taking any drugs. And I'm not, and it really is just a way of viewing the world. I'm not saying I don't get sad, not saying I don't feel grief or pain or

stress or anxiety or any, I feel all of those things, but it is a huge change. I've taken a handful of chemicals in my life, especially in my college years, and that shift, that spiritual and metaphysical shift is far more powerful. And you know what's interesting to go back to what you were saying about just the existential state of the world is religion is joy. I mean, and it's increasing joy all the time. But it makes you more realistic. And this is the thing that the brief against the attack on religion was always, it was a fantasy. It was always, you know, you have the sky daddy, whatever they say. But it's actually the opposite.

You see the world so much more clearly. You know more what people are going to do, you know, why they're going to do it. And you understand that it is what you say. It's a veil of tears. By the way, and I think... Well, there's something else here, too, and that is that one of the things that we've found in Western societies, and Western societies have extraordinarily high rates of mental illness, suicidal ideation, depression. One of the reasons for that is something called choice theory.

The idea is that when you provide people with too many choices, they freeze up in the faces of those choices, and they freak out, and they don't know what to do about that because it turns out that people really do need structures, right? They really do need the roles that religion tends to provide. Religion is inherited wisdom of the past, and what they found, and again, this is all scientifically based, what they found is that cultures that actually have fairly strict roles in which you're expected to do things and you have duties, and we kind of know what you're going to do on a day-to-day basis. Those cultures have far lower rates of mental illness and suicidal ideation and depression, because again, you know what you are, you know where you lie in society. What we really have sort of discovered about human identity is that it's a combination of your biology, combined with your sociological kind of inheritance, your cultural inheritance, combined with what choices you make for yourself. But we, in the West, we've basically done away with the first two things. We've done away with biology and the biological constraints placed upon you. And we've done away with your cultural inheritance.

and all you are is just sort of a wandering bag of feelings in which you get to choose all of your own adventures. Well, the problem with that is that that's actually quite depressing. People are not built for precisely that. Now, again, I think that there are people who are severely depressed to the point where they're losing weight, they can't sleep ever. And it's not just sort of a malaise. It's something much deeper. But I think that just like with any other mental illness in the West, we have now expanded the boundaries of that description to include a bunch of behavior that really is either transatlantic. transitory or borderline normal. I mean, this has happened in nearly every major mental illness in the West,

and the most obvious example being gender dysphoria, right? There are people who actually do have gender dysphoria, and then there is 21% of the population of people under the age of 18 identifying as LGBTQ, right? Not the same thing. And so what you see is, Ben, I'm not sure that, I'm not sure that 25% of people don't have gender dysphoria. I'm not sure that 50% of people don't have gender dysphoria. I mean, I think that most children have some amount of gender confusion during their childhood. And some of its fantasy and some of it's much deeper than that and much more prevalent than that. But one of the things that I think is that diagnoses themselves

amplify the phenomenon. So I know many, many people who, for some brief period of their childhood like to wear their mom's shoes or little girls who like to play in the dirt outside and would literally say things like, I want to be a boy when I grow up. And they didn't have anything that needed to be diagnosed. They didn't have anything that needed to be identified and therefore substantiified.

Like in the very act, I think this with other kinds of mental illness too. I think with depression, I know many, many, many people who, and I think, Matt, this goes to your point. I don't want to be too broad with this and suggest that there is no mental illness because, of course, there is. I don't want to suggest that I'm opposed to all medical intervention because I'm not. But I do think in the vast majority of cases, the person who has the problem is in some ways the least credible voice on the nature of the problem. Right? And so many people who I think

are good, thoughtful, I have respect for them, I have affection for them, will say, well, you don't understand what I'm going through. And I always want to say back to them, well, you don't understand what I'm going through. Like, it's the nature of being a human being that we don't understand other people, you're expecting me to accept that your plight is completely distinct from my plight, which I doubt. I find that somewhat unscriptural, and nothing in my observation of life really holds that up, and worse, which I, you know, with some very specific physical, you know, maybe you're physically being abused or something, I think what's really happening for many people is that they're dealing with the confusion that

comes from being a human on the earth, and then as soon as you draw a bar, box around it and give a label to it and provide even the hope of a way out by way of these medical interventions. In many ways, you've now subjected them to the horror of this thing forever. I've said it for, I want to kick it to Matt, so I'll end with this, but I hate Alcoholics Anonymous. I know many people who've been helped by Alcoholics Anonymous and thank God for it. When I say I hate it, I mean it kind of on a philosophical level. I hate the idea of someone who has not had a drink in 25 years saying, I am. an alcoholic. Because what they're doing is that they're taking their problem and making their

problem central to their identity, even decades after having, in a practical sense, overcome the problem itself. I don't think you could ever have healing from alcoholism if you are an alcoholic. I grew up around Catholics and Baptists. I came from a very little, a very German-influenced town, and it's all German Catholics and German Baptists in my little hometown. The Baptist, always say, and listen, I go to a Baptist church today, I love many, many Baptists, I guess myself included, Seth. But the Baptists will commonly say, I'm a sinner saved by grace. And there's a kind of humility to that statement that I really like, except for the emphasis. I think that if one identifies themselves primarily as a sinner, then the natural expectation from them

is sin. If one identifies themselves as depressed, the natural thing that you might expect from them is depression, if one identifies themselves as an alcoholic. The natural state of being for them is to imbibe large amounts of alcohol and healthy amounts of alcohol. When we make someone's identity their problem, we cannot possibly expect them ever to have relief from that problem. I think to the point about, and I hear this all the time too, that, well, you should be talking about depression or anxiety because you're not going through it. There's such an arrogance to that, because I always say, do you really think that I've never experienced depression or anxiety? Do you think there's any human on earth who hasn't?

And then the response is, well, it's not like I experience it. First of all, how the hell do you know that? Yeah. And second, if you have any understanding of human nature, you should know that everyone struggles with all of these things all the time. Now, I don't, I think we talk about, well, how should a human feel? And that is that, that is the question that we have farmed out to the psychiatry industry. we farmed it out to the pharmaceutical companies. And we've decided that, oh, they have an answer to that.

Even though it's a deeply philosophical abstract question, there's no reason why they would be experts on how people are supposed to feel or think. My answer is, I think people are supposed to be happy. We're supposed to be joyful even. We're supposed to be content. But that is not a natural automatic response to just raw human existence.

Yeah. The natural human response to just... I mean, you know, one of the things... Yeah, the natural human response to existence itself, especially if you take out any sense of meaning, you take religion, you take all that out of it, the natural response is despair and anxiety and dread. There's a, Norm MacDonald has a bit that I saw, I was making the rounds recently where he was saying, oh, you know, when someone commits suicide, everyone always says, well, I don't understand why they did it.

But really, you don't understand it? And it's, you know, it sounds kind of morbid. First of all, it's actually very empathetic. It's true. Its point is that, well, of course, at some level you can understand why somebody would despair of existence, if you're a human being and you've lived this life. To be or not to be actually is the question. Ben? You know, there's something else here, too, and that is that when it comes to mental illness, and I've unfortunately had to deal with mental illness and my family, extended family, you know, when you deal with mental illness, one of the ways that I, you know, I can speak sort of personally here, one of the ways that I think you can tell when somebody really does need help. And we're not talking about, you know, somebody who is just feeling some sort of

Aonks and goes to the doctor for a pill, is that outsiders can tell. There are verifiable signs from the outside. You can tell by behavioral characteristics that this person needs help. And one of the main characteristics that I've seen, at least in dealing with people who are friends and family who are mentally ill, is that they themselves can't tell. This happens a lot where people are so they're extraordinarily deeply anxious and they can't even tell how anxious they are because they're so inside their own head or they're so deeply depressed that they can't tell they haven't been meeting for days on end, or they're so obsessive about things that they can't tell that this is coming from outside. They think it's a true desire to just, you know, for example, organize and

organize and organize. These are all things that have some verifiable component. One of the things that we've done with mental illness is something that we've done generally, which is we've looked to the emotional self-definition of people and said, you get to be your own best resource. One thing we know from every social science study ever done is that the worst form of social science is self-reports. Whenever you're self-reporting about your own status, people are really really, bad at this. You actually, when we say, I know myself the best, that's actually not true. Probably the people who are closest to you know you better than you do, because you have a bizarrely subjective view of yourself, right? You tend to inflate certain parts of yourself

and deflate certain parts of yourself. And so when it comes to, you know, the sort of mental condition you're in, one of the dangers that we have very often is people who are self-diagnosing and then they go to the doctor. And the doctor actually isn't diagnosing them. They're coming in and they're saying, I feel depressed, I need a pill. And the doctor, because the doctor doesn't have the the sort of humility to say, you know, I'm not sure that that's the case, right? We actually have to check into this. They just say, okay, well, you say that. You're your own best advocate, right? You're taught that patients are supposed to be their own best advocate. If a patient comes in complaining of knee pain, you don't go, well, you know, let's assess whether you really

do have the knee pain. You assume the knee pain is real. But knee pain is not quite the same thing as, as, you know, psychic or emotional pain. Those are not the same thing at all. And very often, the people who are the ones who require the most help, are the people who actually can't even recognize that they have the problem in the first place. That's particularly true. I saw my grandfather of schizophrenia. People who are schizophrenic cannot tell they have a problem. They think they're acting perfectly normally and perfectly naturally, and they're not. They're delusional. And that's why they won't take their meds. Very often the people who most need the meds are the people who don't take the meds, for example. Between what Matt is saying and what Ben is saying, there's this vast territory that I

think is really the problem we have, because there's going to be mentally ill people, and there's going to be people in despair. But yesterday I was talking at Yaff, and I cited Ben's fantastic creation, the rap song Lap. He did write that. He did right. And I was saying that what a despairing view of human life that is, what a terrible, ugly view of life that is. And it's one thing for some rapper to come out with that. But it's another thing when the New York Times and the L.A. Times says, this is a wonderful song. This is the song of the year. This is a great expression of women's sexuality. And you think, well, now you've got to be a new York Times. And you've got to people who are facing the existential pain of life with no support from the authorities,

no support from the establishment, they're being told that this is what you are, this is what you are, you are, you're a whap, you know, and that's the central thing. You end up then in a state of mental illness that is actually verifiable. That's caused by the... Choice hotels get you more of what you value. Comfort in, it's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Book direct at storeshiltails.com. I actually, by the way, have a lot more respect for Megan the Stalion than I do for the New York Times because she knows that the song is tongue and cheat.

You and I can say that we still think it's vulgar, we don't like it, we don't approve. That's all fine. But she's obviously being cheeky. Only the New York Times elevates it to being an absolute serious work apart. My whole point is, I do not mind there being an obscene little ditty on the radio. It doesn't bother me in the least. bothers me that there's no old men around to say, that's a terrible thing to say. That's not what you are at all.

You know what the whap of it actually ties into something Ben said, and it ties into your movie, Matt, which is, it's probably the most interesting part of the movie, and no one has talked about it, which is when you asked the African tribe, you said, what is a woman? They gave a different answer than the libs did, and a different answer than the conservatives give, right? The libs say, blah, blah, blah, women's, whatever a woman is, whatever a woman is, whatever. And then the conservatives say, well, if you have two ex-chromonomes and breasts and womb, you're a woman. And the Africans didn't say that. They defined it in the way Ben was just talking about.

They said, well, a woman is someone who does the role of a woman. A man is someone who does the role of a man. That it's being defined outside of you by other people and by the functions that you have in a political community, which is a deeply, obviously, you expect it to the African tribesman. That's a deeply, deeply, deeply conservative point of view that even many Americans, and conservatives shy away from this is why I think it's hilarious when the trans lefty wackos will say things like gender is a social construct and there are 72 of them and one of them is gender queer so I'm supposed to believe that this society which has men's and women's rooms exclusively for going all the way back to the invention of the restroom also constructed gender queer like the thing itself is so if it's a construction then those are out yeah

There are only two genders, especially if it's a social construct, right? That's all the social is created. I think the answer that they gave me, because they did go right to the duties and responsibilities, and it took a little bit of talking before they got to, well, yeah, obviously, a woman has breasts. But they didn't even think to answer on that level, because they figured, well, why would anyone ask that question? They were actually answering the question of, what ought a woman be? Like, what should a woman be? They're acknowledging gender expression.

And it's actually, maybe conservatives should grant that premise. Yes, obviously there's such a thing as gender expression. And I guess that's a distinct concept from sex. It's just there's a relationship. They should be pretty close. But because they have, so they have an idea of what a woman should be, what she should do. And same for a man. And that's one of the reasons why they don't have, like Ben pointed out,

in these societies where they have a strict idea of roles and responsibilities. They don't have the mental illness and depression. That's a question I actually asked the woman. I can't remember if I'm made into the film or not. Do you guys have depression here? And she said, no, we don't have that. And I think she was being quite, quite sincere. They just, they don't have it because if you're not, you know, in our society where people

are wandering around in this haze all the time, they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing or do or saying or anything. And that's going to create anxiety. I mean, anxiety is the, it comes from the unknown. It comes from ambiguity. And so, of course, we're a society totally besought by anxiety. If you're wondering what your duty is, it's to get life insurance, in particular, if someone depends on you.

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move on to other topics. But one thing I want to say here is that anytime we have these conversations as conservatives. We can be fairly absolutist as conservatives, because we're reactionary but definitionally and we're reacting to over, to overreaching positions taken by the left. One thing that I think is important is that we not let our ideology actually create a framework and suggest that God has to operate in it. There are obviously people who have experiences that we can't relate to, that we can't observe. There are people. Also, we do live in a society. We don't live on the plains of Africa. I'm fairly grateful for that because they have all kinds of problems that we don't have, and I'm glad that we don't have. In our society, whatever the root cause of

things like mental illness is, we can't deny that we're a mentally ill society and that there are a lot of people who need our empathy. So I know that a lot of people watching us have this conversation, Phil, that in some ways we're saying that they are wrong. And perhaps in some ways we are suggesting In what sense? That they may be, well, because... That they shouldn't take all these drugs. They shouldn't take these drugs, or they just need to get over it, or they just need to go to church more, they need to pray.

Whatever it is, people often think that we're trying to reduce their experience out of existence. That's not right. That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is, in a funny way, we're saying there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our current philosophy, and that a lot of the things that people are experiencing are not caused by the things that they've been told that they have been caused by. answers may not lie in the direction that they've been told. We're also a point, Jeremy.

You know, Marx famously said that religion is the opium of the people. And in a way, I guess that's true. It's at least a good medicine that is fixing something. But when you take religion out of the picture, when you take God out of the picture, do you know what the opium of the people is? Opium. It's opium. It's literally opioids in our culture.

We're also, to borrow a phrase from the left, I think what we're talking about, validates. It's actually very validating to someone. If you're struggling with depression, you hear this conversation. Yeah, oftentimes people will respond by saying, well, you're saying, I don't really have this, or you're minimizing. I think it's quite the opposite. It's the people that medicalize it automatically that I think are minimizing it. I mean, what they're saying is, you feel this way, you shouldn't feel the way, that's crazy. Here's a drug to make it go away. What I'm saying is exactly the opposite. It's like you're not crazy for feeling this way. It's a very deep and serious problem, but I think we need to explore solutions to it that are different

from just a tilt. But it's important to say that what Ben says is absolutely true. There are people that the drugs help. There are people who have a chronic condition that is not related to life. It's not related to their situation. However, I will say, as somebody who in my youth suffered from a true mental illness, I mean, I believe that I'm the subject of a miracle. I mean, I was actually cured of mental illness. I'm so glad that. drugs hadn't been invented then because they would have given to me. I was sleeping like 12. You talk about the fact that I got all my sleep. It's true. I was sleeping like 12, 13, 15 hours a day. I was incredibly depressed. And just talking to somebody who knew what he was doing and who inspired me and who gave me a father figure that I'd never had.

You know, that actually healed me. That actually miraculously healed. Well, I'm so glad that they weren't drugging us. I'm so glad that they weren't diagnosing us with transgenderism. I'm so grateful that they didn't say that we were all gay every time that we had a, uh, uh, outside of orthodox thought, I grew up in a time where you had the, where you had the opportunity to go through the human experience without suddenly having it become your identity. And I'm so, I think the great tragedy of our time. That's really, that's really such a key is the idea that it's very funny. We're a society that focuses in a lot of choice, but then it's kind of a one-size-fits-all

approach to all of these problems, is to pathologize and medicalize all the problems. I think what we're all saying, I hope, is sort of the same thing, which is, you know, why not investigate all the options before you get to, before you get to this last one? And I think that these sort of fundamental move of the medical establishment for a long time here has been to make this first priority. Now, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to go through a bunch of different options and, you know, so those people may need medicine, those people may need drugs in order to help. But I think that the worst.

And after. And after. Why not explore a range of different potential. to your problem before being medicated and and after being medicated. It may very well be the case that a person needs something to help them reset. Yeah, that was always the argument when they started, yeah. That's right. But you know, it does, I keep going back to the culture because I think we, it's not so much about the individual with mental illness, as we're all saying, I think there could be a variety.

I think the culture is mentally ill. I think we are living in a culture and it's not just the freedom, it's not just the idea that we can do more things than people could do before. It's that our system of elders passing down traditions, our systems of loving our traditions, of paying tribute to the fact that we're human beings and that we can love and that we do have these spiritual experiences, all of that has been like brutally, I think, destroyed just in the last 20 to 30 years. But yes, even the conservatives have done this. I mean, this is...

Yes, I agree. When we make fun of Hillary Clinton because she says it takes a village, and what she means by that is give me your kids and do whatever I want to. But it obviously takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to trans a child, too. And that's what the village is doing right now. And that's why one in five kids are saying that they're queer or transgender. And so it is beyond just a personal or even a family issue.

It is a political problem as well, and it's a cultural problem, to your point. We need to reset those kinds of roles and that just basic normality if we want to improve. So, you know, there's a joy in being rooted. You know, this is something that every kid inherently knows, which is why divorce really is so devastating for children. Emil Durkheim, who is one of the founders of sort of psychological societal study, Durkheim suggested that societies could suffer from anemite, which was this condition of sort of malaise that led to very high levels of suicidal ideation.

And one of the things that he said led to this was a society that had rejected traditions and had made people feel not embedded in any sort of culture or system that gave them that feeling of rudeness. And we used to get that feeling of rudeness from a thousand. in different places. You got it from your grandparents who lived probably with you. You got it from your parents who were bringing you up. You got it from your neighbors who all knew your name and followed you when you were a child over the course of your childhood. You got it from your church and from your synagogue where you used to go every day and where everybody knew each other.

You got it from your school where the same teachers taught there for 20 years and you knew the teacher and you'd see them in the supermarket 10 years after you graduated and still say hello. You got it from your job because the truth is that you'd go into an office. You'd know most of the people you'd work with and then you'd go to a bowling league after that. Well, how many of those, how many of the threads of that fabric have now been cut by a society that is decided that in the name of freedom, we have to, because all of those things fixed you into place. Well, it's true. All those things fix you into place. But you know what? People need fixedness. I know that we like to think of ourselves as sort of atoms that are freely floating out there. This is what choice is about. Even we on the right, we use the notions of rights and liberty. And this is what is supposed to make us most fully human, human is the rights and liberty. But the truth is, rights and liberty have to exist within the fixed confines of an embedded existence. Human beings. are meant to be embedded in bodies politic. They're meant to be embedded in families, in communities, in churches, in synagogues. We all get a feeling of fulfillment from that. And when we don't have those feelings of fulfillment, we look for them in really, really bad and ugly places. And if we don't

find it anywhere, then we just end up kind of wandering around aimlessly. And that has some really serious psychological consequences. And bouncing around in the physical world is, to Matt's point, uncomfortable. One of the major problems with this new world where we find all of our community, not in community. We find a all of our community digitally, meaning we never really have to interact in real physical space with our community. And one of the results of that is that we never develop actual, the sort of social, the robust social skills, right? The ability to deal with discomfort, to deal with insecurity, to deal with anxiety. And roles. To deal with roles. Who are you in your friend group?

Who are you? Every friend group, this guy is that guy, and this guy is the one you make this joke about. the one who goes and whatever. But online in the virtual world, you just don't have that. And it's even worse than that because it doesn't just deprive you of social skills and community bonds, but it also deprives you of a real interior life. You know, we're being deprived of our inner life. Now, you farm not only your social connections, but your inner life and existence out to the internet. The internet even does all the thinking for you, which is one of the reasons why kids these days who grow up just with their heads into the phone all the time aren't even able to, aren't able to think on a certain level because they do all their thinking

through the internet. To what Jeremy was saying before, I think one of the problems with the internet, and I love the internet, I think it's a wonderful tool if you use it right, but it also deprives you of one of the hardest things to develop in life, and I think it is developed by the kinds of structures that Ben is talking about, is the idea that other people have an inner life. like yours and it's not that different you don't have a lived experience that is so different from mine I mean everything including the golden rule do unto others is based on the idea that you know I have some sense of what's going on in there

you know you have unique experiences but if they're unique human experiences and my experiences are also human I think the internet has stripped us of that which is why you get the stuff on Twitter where I just think to myself the things you're saying even to me who you don't know are degrading to you it's gonna change me because I have people who love me and I have a structure in my life and I have people around me and I have a very deep sense of other people's lives. But when you say to somebody, I mean, I've heard things that they've said to all you guys at speeches where they stand up and they say these horrible things to you.

And I think, you know, that's not going to change Matt. That's not going to change Ben. It degrades you. It makes you less of a person because what you have done is erased that other person and thereby erased yourself. Actually, it does hurt my feelings. Well, you're a sensitive guy. So, you know, here I'm going to say one thing here because I'm, I'm, I'm going to say one thing here because I'm I'm in the Holy Land and I never proselytize on behalf of my religion because I'm literally

prohibited by my religion from proselytizing on behalf of my religion. But here's the good news. I don't actually have to proselytize on behalf of my religion. I can now proselyteutize on behalf of your religion. So if, and mine as well, everybody needs Sabbath. Okay, I know Sabbath has gone out of style. Yeah. Everybody needs Sabbath. Seriously, if everybody in the United States and in the Western world started taking Sabbath seriously. I don't mean like Sabbath as as in, it's a Sunday, I'm going to go to church for an hour and then I'm going to leave. I mean, like, you make it the day where you are just with your family and just with your community. Like, I will say in my community, this is the thing we do right. Friday night to Saturday night,

all the phones go off, all the TVs go off. And I'm spending every waking moment with my family, with members of my community, finding friendships, finding that rooted structure. We need that. And I think you need it more forcibly now than ever. So, yeah. In your situation, there's no online. I mean, like, we don't turn on and off lights, right? I mean, like, nothing. But you don't have to be even that extreme, right? I mean, in order to experience the joys of sad, there's a reason that God rested on the seventh day. And once you've spent the rest of the week working, there comes a time when Sabbath, in some ways, is the hardest work

because you have to disconnect from all of those things that you found meaning in, and you have to find the real meaning. And that is, again, in God and community. If we all, I firmly believe this, if Western civilization did about one month of actual Sabbath time, it would make a transformative difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Yeah.

And as an employer, God also commanded that you have to work six days. You make a great point. The N-O-R-B will be hearing this. The actual text says, six days you will toil, and on the seventh day, you will rest. You know, even to Ben's point on the Sabbath, I think it's so important. And it reminded me, there was a discussion that cropped up recently about Sabbath laws, and a lot of them are going away, even in the Deep South, which used to take them pretty seriously. And a lot of people think Sabbath laws are just about wagging your finger and no buying beer on Sundays or something. Sabbath laws are not about how beer is bad because people are buying beer every other day of the week.

Sabbath laws are not about wagging your finger and pretending to be a good person on Sunday when you're not a good person the rest of the week. Sabbath laws are about exactly what you're talking about, Ben. They're about don't go to the bar all day. Don't go just like hang out and do your job and do commerce all day. It's actually about forcing you, or at least strongly encouraging you, to be with your family, be with your community. I actually got to witness this when I lived in England because when I got there, there's seven years when I got there, Sunday, everything shut down. Every Sunday, it was London, it was empty and you couldn't get into a store, you couldn't find anything, you couldn't buy anything. And slowly over the course of those seven years, they retracted those laws, and the society got worse.

There was no question about it. Yeah. And that was 16. 1622, yeah. This is Bill and I used to sit around. I like that. Good play, Bill. So Congress voted this week to protect gay marriage. Really urgent.

Urgent vote. Yeah, if there's one thing that's definitely happening in our... Clarence Thomas was going to take over the Supreme Court. Just at any moment. They're also threatening to take away Clarence Thomas's actual seat on the court and pass term limits because the left's answer to anything not going their way. Destroy the country. Troy, it's end at all. And before the show started, we were talking a little bit about this sort of move towards social conservatism that's happening in the country. The pushback even from within the GOP, it's like we've been told my entire time in the conservative movement, my entire adult life, I've been told that we should avoid social issues, that social issues are losing issues. We now see that almost the only winning issues in the West at all, the thing that unites the West from Israel to Eastern Europe to, to, to, to, to, Los Angeles itself, actually are these social issues, and yet a lot of Republican politicians

are still very afraid to go near them. What do we make of this moment? How should we think about it in terms of the upcoming election, the presidential that will follow two years later? How do we navigate these social issues, not as authoritarian, not as tyrants, but as conservatives? The Republicans, especially the ones in Congress, can never be counted on to have any courage or moral clarity. So get that out of your fantasies. However, they can be counted on to do what is in their political interest. And I am firmly convinced, after Virginia, after Yonkin, after what's going on with Ronda Santos, after what we're seeing around the country, I am firmly convinced. The social issues are overwhelmingly winners for conservatives. They will be rewarded.

Obviously, there's some nuance to this, and you've got to pick some of your battles. I think conservatives and Republicans will be rewarded for standing for them. And vote, like integrity. If you say for the last, I don't know, ever, from the dawn of time until a week ago, conservatives said marriage is between a man and a woman, and then 47 Republicans in the House overnight, they say, no, never mind, that's terrible, that's a horrible, bigoted view. I think even the people who agree with gay marriage are going to look at those people and say, well, you don't stand for anything. You don't believe a damn thing, and you blow in the wind. This is to me the great message of Donald Trump. This is what Donald

Trump, the Donald Trump's gift to the Republican Party is that he did show you that these could be winners and just having courage to come out and say these things makes you a better, a more attractive political personality. You know, I watch this, I know we have this overblown rhetoric, you know, Donald Trump's talks too loud, so he's Hitler and George W. Bush is Hitler and all this stuff. But I've been sitting watching some of this gender stuff. And I think like if Joseph Mengele had gone to Adolf Hitler with gender affirming surgery, Hitler would go like, ah, that's a little far away.

I don't want to get cruel, you know. The social issues are political winners. I believe that. So we should make the argument for that reason. But we also have to make the argument. You can't abandon these issues, even if they weren't political winners. You cannot abandon them without giving up on civilization. And that includes marriage.

And I think what we've learned with the social issues is that the only way we lose them is if we're too afraid to make the argument and to explain them. But when we do explain them, people find that the explanations are actually, they make a lot of sense. And so, for example, it's not that hard to say. You know, there's a lot more that can be said about the marriage issue. But, you know, we're told that there's marriage equality and that the, you know, so-called marriage between a man and a man is equal to the marriage between a man and a woman. Well, that's obviously not true because equal means the same. And so is the union, the union between a man and a man, is it the same as in substance and function as the union between a man and a woman?

obviously not, because the union between a man and a woman has within itself, in principle, the capacity to create people. And so clearly, like, even if human society was erased and we're building everything up from the ground up, and we didn't have any memory of anything else, and we looked around and we saw people kind of coupling off, and some of these couplings created people, and then others didn't. And we were trying to think of names to give these things. We'd probably give them different names because they're very clearly different things. And that's, I think it's just kind of a logical argument. before you even get into the morality of it,

but conservatives so often are afraid to even go there. Did you see what Rubio said? This was... I think that there's something to the... There's something to the notion that there's deep... There's something to the notion, obviously, that deep fear is what drives the Republican Party, which is why they've run headlong

from these issues for years, despite the fact that, by the way, when it comes to the social conservative issues like marriage, marriage being a huge one, obviously, if you want to win minority votes, actually, minorities tend to be significantly more socially conservative on these issues than white people. So, you know, for all the talk about a progressive party, the reality is that Republicans are being anti-progressive in a lot of ways when they are being progressive in a lot of ways when they embrace gay marriage, but they're actually not working with the people that are the diverse parts of the coalition.

But there's something else here that actually gives Republicans a second bite at the apple. And that is that all the arguments that were made by the left were predicated on the idea that the slippery slope was a lie. And that if we just, if we get X, we certainly won't go for Y and Z. If we get civil unions, we definitely won't go for gay marriage. If we get marriage, it's not going to affect your marriage. If we get gay marriage, it's not going to affect how we teach our kids in school. And here's the problem. All of that now rings hollow because it's not true, right?

We've seen the other side of the slippery slope. And so in Republicans now fight back and they say, listen, we were perfectly willing to allow you to do whatever you wanted in the privacy of your own bedroom because we don't believe government should have the kind of power that allows them to just break down your door and find out what you're doing in there. But by the same token, it is totally insane that you won't indoctrinate our kids with the idea that all forms of human sexual experience are morally equivalent on every level or societally equivalent in terms of utility. That is a very strong argument that has become only

stronger because the left has pushed so far on this sort of stuff. Did you see what Rubio said on this issue? I have two cheers for Marco Rubio over the past week because this ridiculous House bill about defining marriage, which obviously there is no threat whatsoever from the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is not the Emperor of America, unfortunately. And so it's not going to happen. The House votes for this, goes to the Senate. They ask Rubio, are you going to vote to codify same-sex marriage? And he said, I'm not going to because it's a waste of time.

And I thought you're right on the first part, but it's not because it's, sure, it's a waste of time. But Marco, that's not why you oppose same-sex marriage if you do oppose it. And Pete Buttigieg, because he's a fairly clever politician, called him out for it. And he said, that's BS. All you politicians, all you do is waste time. You're lousy with time. You are not voting for this because either you don't think that that's what marriage is, and you're afraid to say it, or you do think that's what marriage is,

but you don't want to upset your conservative base. And he called him out, and he said, Rubio, you're not going to make the substantive argument. And to your point, Ben, yeah, of course, and to your point, Matt, you have to make that substantive argument. I don't think there's anything hateful or bigoted in saying men and women are different. If men and women are different, then that institution is different, essentially different from the same-sex institution. And the reason that we oppose same-sex marriage

is because we believe it's ontologically impossible. So we're saying, be nice to gay people, don't go out of your way to be mean to gay people, but there are differences in reality that we are going to respect and we're not going to lie. It's a political winner. It requires like two ounces of courage. The New York Times is going to hate you.

By the way, that's a political winner too. But, you know, this argument has been, just like the abortion argument was distorted by Roe, this argument has been so disordered by Obergfell. Scalia, in his brilliant dissent, which may be my favorite piece of legal writing in all of history, says, you know, the state can make any arrangements about marriage at once,

and they're going to be bad reactions to it and good reactions to it, and the state can make all kinds of dumb laws, and he said the Supreme Court should have a stamp that says stupid but not unconstitutional. And the thing is, we can't even have that argument. We're arguing about a decree from these justices, that says that they had no right to make,

and their argument is totally absurd. And so the Democrats are cleverly putting Republicans in a position where they either have to say, I'm for this or against this, instead of getting up, as we're supposed to do, and make our arguments in our states, you know, and win or lose. And also put them in an uncomfortable position too,

because even before we make our argument for what marriage is, our response should be, well, hello, what are you, what are you saying marriage is? Because you can, you know, humans. This next movie. Yeah. Right, exactly. What is marriage?

Human society basically agreed for thousands of years what marriage is. And you came along and said, well, it's not that. Okay, what is it then? What exactly is it? And they never provide an answer to that because they're never required to it. No one ever asks them. Like what exactly, even if I'm willing to go with you for a second and say, well, maybe we were wrong about this whole marriage thing for thousands of years.

What is the new, what's the new definition? They never provided it. Yeah, and on a legal level, it's also just the complete erosion of contract law, right? Part of what they're after in the redefinition of marriage is this idea that only the government gets to decide what your contractual relationship to another person is. It doesn't even matter what the two of you have agreed. There are all these places now where the government will not allow you to enter into an agreement that they don't like. Or the government will forfeit an agreement that you did make that they now don't like. and this kind of comes full circle to something Ben was saying earlier,

which is essentially that the, and we've said this before, but the essential premise of the left is anything that isn't illegal is mandatory, that they can't abide you existing in any sort of free state. They can't handle, and this is a very human thing. People hate tension. They can't live in tension. They can't say, you know, this is, I actually don't want to make that political point because people get hung up on it,

but people hate tension. and they reject it. And so you go from no-fault divorce, which is essentially a way of saying the contractual relationship that you made with your spouse has now rendered doesn't exist. It's meaningless. And now that can't be enough. It has to be. And also, any variety of other people have to be able to enter into the same meaningless contractual relationship. It's all just a way of the state, to Ben's point, moving you from the behaviors that they like and a way to, from the behaviors that they do not like. That's all any of this is...

All the behaviors they like... There's something else here, too. That's right. All the behaviors they like make you a slave. Every single thing that they do guides you into addiction and to self-destruction and to pain where you become dependent.

And I don't even know if they consciously do that. But certainly there must be some concept of humanity that they understand that we can't live like this and be free. Ben? You know, there's something else here too when it comes to the arguments about marriage. One of the things that you'll hear from the left always is, well, what's the argument for marriage?

What's the argument for marriage? And there are. There are plenty of fantastic natural law arguments for marriage. It is, in fact, one of the easiest things to explain in all of human behavior, as Matt explained in about three sentences. I mean, this is not very difficult. Men, women create babies. Babies should be raised by biological parents as an ideal. There, we just did marriage.

Okay, this is not tough at all. However, what the left likes to do and they play this game is they never have to have a rationale for why they're doing what they do. they demand a rationale for why you're doing what you do. And what they're attempting to do by doing that is really undermine one of the fundamental bases of conservatism and of life in general, which is inherited wisdom. We use heuristics all the time in life. We don't re-explain everything that we do on a daily basis because there's just not enough time to do that. We say, well, yeah, my dad did it that way.

If you ask people agricultural techniques in the third world, and they might not know why they've been doing crop rotations, right? They can't explain to you the replenishment of the materials in the soil. They just know that their dad did it. This goes back to some of the stuff we were saying about science. One of the ways that we actually determine what works and what doesn't is we try stuff until we find something that works and then we just keep doing the stuff that works. And hopefully over time, you build up this giant bulwark of things that work and life gets

better progressively over time. That's the basic idea of inherited wisdom. What the left does is they come along and they say, inherited wisdom is moot. You cannot use that. You can't say, we've had this thing and it's worked for thousands of years and it's been a fundamental basis of our society for thousands of years and that's enough of an argument. the burden of proof is on you to prove that a thing that has worked for thousands of years, why has it worked? You have to explain how it's worked. Well, what if I just say it's working?

So you're going to have to explain to me why it should be destroyed. You're going to have to explain to me how it's fundamentally not working. I think that's really important because it is important to be critical of inherited wisdom. It isn't wisdom if it can't withstand criticism. The idea that we should do what our parents did because our parents did it is a beginning, perhaps, of wisdom, but it's certainly not the end of wisdom. You shouldn't just ditch it because your parents did it, but you can think about it. You can think about it. And some of the things that our parents did are wrong. It's good to challenge historic notions. But the second part of what you said, I think, is the really important piece, which is it is a satisfactory answer

to say that something works. And so it isn't that every person has to be an expert and an apologist for every single piece of inherited wisdom. I think that it is important that people like us sit around and critique traditional inherited wisdom as much as we would critique a new idea that we test it, that we see if it stands the test of time, not everything does. Some things do get better with time because we do challenge those historic notions.

But something working is a pretty good recommendation of it. But also you should challenge it within the context to Ben's point, I think, of the traditions and the ideals of your country and your culture. The idea of the Martin Luther King line, you should live into the meaning of your... creed is much, much different than saying this is an inherent, there's a racism in our DNA. You know, that's a very two different...

There's also, there's an argument that conservatives made for a while. I think tactically, because they thought it was going to work, but it doesn't work because it doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny, which is they thought the way to beat the marriage issue was to say, well, let's just get government out of marriage altogether. And I think what we've seen, certainly in recent years, but for all of human history, is that government at some level, to some degree, is always involved in marriage because the marriage is the fundamental political institution.

That's the basic unit of political society. And so sometimes you'll hear people say, well, George Washington didn't need to get a marriage contract, which is, I guess, sort of true, except there was an established church in Virginia when George Washington got married. So the church was very closely associated with the state, and this has been true throughout history.

So obviously, the political community has to have something to say about marriage. If it's going to have something to say about anything. It's going to have something to say about marriage. And so I would just encourage that, I don't mean to pick on Marco Rubio, but I would encourage the Republicans who want to get out of this issue. You can't avoid it. You might not be interested in the culture and the politics, but the politics and the culture is interested in you. As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like,

yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold. I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet, no. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 7-11. Valley through 62326 participating stores only while supplies last the app for full terms. That compromise, well, let's just get government out of marriage. It reminds me of the compromise that conservatives tried for a while in the bathroom issue by saying, well, let's make a separate bathroom for trans people. It's a compromise. And it goes to Ben's point about, well, why are we even talking about compromises?

You're coming along and challenging this historical notion. I agree with Ben, the burden of proof, before I even explain anything, the burden of proof is on you. You have to, why are you challenging it? Why should we change the bathrooms at all? It's up to you to explain why. And if you want to tear down the definition of marriage that has stood for thousands of years, before I explain why I believe in that definition, why should we do it? The ball's in your court.

We're giving you the microphone. You explain yourself. I shouldn't have to explain it. Same thing with pronouns. Someone comes along and says, oh, my new pronoun is this. You have to use this pronoun. Why should I have to do that? Well, if you're not going to use the pronoun, you need to explain to me why you're not going to use it.

No, I don't have to explain anything. You are the one coming with this absurd new notion. It's up to you to explain it. And feelings are not an explanation. No. Now there's lived experience. You know, this is one of the things that gets me. Every bigot I know when you challenge him on his bigotry,

cites lived experience. I was mugged by a black guy, you know, so I don't like black people, or I was cheated by a Jewish guy. I don't like, whatever it is. And you think, like, let's not really a good reason. But feelings can be an explanation. It's just that they lead to another question. Because if the person says, use this pronoun,

I say, why should I do that? They say, well, it makes me feel better. My next question is, why do I care about that? Why do I care how you feel? And what are the actual ramifications of the policy that you're advancing? The one thing that you see on the left, I used to think that it was unintended consequences. Now I'm actually not even sure that they're unintended

by the people who actually create the policy, but they're certainly unintended by most of the people who support the policies, is that people don't, they only think about their policy preferences in a vacuum. They never think. So in a vacuum, create a bathroom for the people who aren't comfortable in either of the other.

two vacuum, restrooms. If that's the only question, then it's a fine compromise. It makes perfect sense. But it doesn't just exist in that vacuum. There are implications of what you've just done. There are political implications. There are moral implications. They're very practical implications. When they talked about doing a way with Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the military, One of the thoughts that I had about it was eventually everyone in the military will have to have a private restroom because it is the right of a human being

to take a shower without being actively concerned that they are being sexually assessed. That's why we don't let men and women take showers in the military together. That's why I don't want to listen to the bathroom in the morning, get out, I don't want to feel like I'm being... Even in the military where we make people do all kinds of things they don't want to do, we don't make men and women take

showers together. Well, making men and men take showers together stops being different than that if you know that the person next to you is potentially sexually attracted to you. That is a fundamental change. And so I still believe we will see over time, the only two alternatives now are that women can't actually have a safe place to shower in the military, or everyone must have an individually safe place. So it's not that you get that, you don't get to all these outcomes in a day. But just give it a minute. You're going to get to one of those two outcomes. You know, there's a game that the left has been playing really since the 1960s, where they would always say that the personal is political, right? How you live your life is actually a statement about the political world.

But there's something that the left has also done, and they've done it in reverse. What they've basically said is that the political is the personal. And what they mean by this. And they don't say it in these words, but this is really what they're doing, is they pick their particular case, and then they suggest that we ought to change the societal rule, and then we pretend that that has no ramifications at all. So when it comes to same-sex marriage, for example, they'll say something like, well, why do you care about, you know, me and my boyfriend getting married? After all, what does our gay marriage have to do with your marriage? And the answer is, well, it doesn't have anything to do with my marriage, but I'll tell you what does have to do with my marriage is the entire societal rule for what marriage is that, like, you've generalized to a level that, of course it has an impact on my marriage.

And what the left likes, they do this on every, on pretty much every score, right? They'll do it on gender as well. They'll say, what does it matter to you if you just call this man by a woman's pronoun? Why does it matter to you? Well, that doesn't really matter to me very much, which is why I've said that if I'm at dinner with somebody and it's going to really insult them or something, I don't really care. I'll call them whatever they want. I'll call them Napoleon. It doesn't matter to me. But what does matter to me is the societal standard with regard to what is truth. That, of course, has ramifications for me. And so what the left again likes to do is they like to evade the argument that societal rules have societal impact by pointing to singular cases. And they say the singular case has no impact on you. Well, of course, the singular case has no impact on me. The societal rule does. And we're not talking about the case, we're talking about the societal rule. Well, on that bleak note, we're going to let Ben go to bed because it's very, very late in Israel, where he is currently. Thank you guys for joining us.

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