Conservatism, Catholicism, and Good Cigars w/ Michael Knowles

g'day and welcome to pints with Aquinas lovely to have you with us today I'll be interviewing Michael Knowles from the Michael Knowles show maybe you've heard of it but before we get to that interview I want to invite you to follow us over on locals Matt frad.locals.com locals is like other social media but it's actually social it's excellent It's nonsensorial I'm not gonna get banned there the way I might on YouTube after this interview so please go follow us over there you don't have to support financially to follow us but I'm doing a giveaway uh this week if you become an annual supporter at matfrad.locals.com right now for any amount the first 100 of you will receive a free Rosary from Catholic woodworker if you live in the United States we'll even pay shipping but if you live abroad we'd ask that you pay for that shipping if you're one of those first 100 now we may not even get 100 of you signing up so we're gonna give it a week so it's not just today but it's for the next week the first 100 of you that become annual supporters over at matfred.locals.com will get a free rosary and when you do support us on locals you get a bunch of free things in return like monthly exclusive spiritual Direction videos from father Gregory Pine or my quarterly newspaper which I send out and don't even pay you you don't have to pay for shipping even if you live in Australia or Yemen or wherever what else do we do we have awesome courses from like Dr fazer on the five ways and others and these are all exclusively uh for our local supporters oh also right after today's interview with Michael Knowles I'm going to be doing a bonus segment where we discuss three things that would probably get us banned from YouTube uh so that will only be available to local supporters after today's interview Matt frad.locals.com halfway through sentence go so you wrote the book which congratulations oh thank you you need to do a book where you just have the Amazon reviews because those are the funniest things about the book it was very very uh very odd way to get a career writing and speaking to publish how did the idea come to you I well you know just a stroke of Genius yeah I will say it's been done before okay so there's a book called Everything men know about women sold a million copies I think more than I've sold uh the wit and wisdom of the German people that was another one uh it actually goes back to 1880 okay in the United States there was a five-page blank book published by James Garfield and Chester Arthur which was the Republican ticket which is called the political achievements and statesmanship of forget the guy's name General Hancock or something it was the Democrat nominee five blank pages so it's got a long tradition in the United States uh but as a result of this I get a show and I get the speaking career and I and I come to Franciscan of Steubenville and I I thought wow this is so totally different from my college experience because my college experience uh not to tell Tales out of school but everything seemed to be oriented toward confusion and vice and falsehood you know and here at Franciscan it's like sort of yeah the peer pressure is to be holy that's right yeah yeah I remember I was I was going around with some of the kids who invited me I said so what do you guys do for fun here well you know we have chapels in our dorms [Laughter] yeah it's a great School no map your talk honestly your talk was excellent last night I said this to you before you came in I was thank you yeah yeah I was really I was really edified by it it was really good I appreciate it I I never know with these speeches uh how they're going to be received because I I try to write a new speech for every event and most people don't because it's a big hassle and so they give a kind of a stump speech but I just feel the speech is being live streamed so I don't want the audience to get bored yeah I don't want to get bored giving the same thing and I like to take it as an opportunity but I I didn't know how it would be received because the thesis of the speech is that science is fake yes and that's the name of the title if you want to look up the video Neil maybe you could put a link in the description it's good science is fake great great title it's a little bit baby title though that is the thesis of the speech but then the meat of the speech is kind of going through all of these sort of scientific and mathematical problems and theories and and really getting more into oh and Barfield and uh his understanding of representation and symbolism and idolatry and we're sitting here in the Chesterton Cigar Lounge so the inkling oh and Barfield would fit right in but but I I I had a fear with the speech which is the title is total you know lowest common denominator click bait but then the speech itself is a little um esoteric and so I I didn't I thought I might I might have completely screwed myself on both sides here yeah no one's going to watch it now is this a toy you say you write it um every year when you introduce do a kind of speaking circuit with uh yeah yeah is it yeah yeah so I do it really varies especially because of covid during covid I had something like 20 schools that were scheduled for the year and then after number two that diminutive technocrat from Brooklyn shut the world down and so they all were canceled uh and uh so that would have been too much and it gave me an opportunity to write a book with words and it I was having a child and it was it was actually uh helpful in a certain way now I try to keep it to about six or seven schools per semester yeah but if you write a new speech every time but is the speech for every tour or is it for every different school yeah it's for every school basically I mean occasionally I'll use Parts yeah yeah but I just sort of feel if I'm going to do it if I'm going to get on an airplane and fly somewhere and I want to say something you know I don't want it to just be a sort of pep rally or did you hear that crazy thing AOC said or whatever uh and also part of it is because the the speeches are for the people in the room but let's say there's 500 people in the room or whatever it is you know maybe even a thousand people in the room but online you're gonna get tens of thousands of people and they're the ones who have seen all the other talks so just from self-preservation if you give them the same thing every time no one's gonna watch it anymore I was telling you before we recorded that you have security at your talks and I want to ask you what that's like and halfway through the talk my wife suggested that I run up and hug that dude with the mustache to see if he would tase me or what would happen his bark is much worse than his wife would have happened though if I had gotten up and tried to hug him he would have killed you yes yes so the bite is bad too I'm not but the but the bark is just especially okay so when did you start traveling with security and what was that like what is that well I love our security agents so it's a great pleasure to do it and we go out and have cigars and have a great time but I I think it's mostly unnecessary uh because it looks cool though it look yeah it looks it looks very cool I look much more important than I am and but I think it's mostly unnecessary because Matt I'm so lovable who would want to attack me or not and the other the other reason it's unnecessary in certain places is we're at Franciscan University the the biggest threat the biggest threat is probably single girls who are going to want to hold you and not let go I was assuming it'd be some sort of stray Jesuit you know it gets in there and starts to attack me or something but I I was attacked once at a speech this is when it all started yeah I was giving a speech at the University of Missouri Kansas City this was years ago and the speech was called men or not women I'm going to sue Mount Walsh for copywriting French intellectual property theft but this was probably five years ago or so and there was an organized protest the kids were very raucous but I had because I had written my speech down it didn't matter they were screaming like banshees in the room which you can't really hear on the tape but I could just read the speech at a certain point they gave up and went out but someone tripped a fire door and I guess they had planned some stunt and a guy comes in with a super soaker filled with who knows what yes do you say I remember this now it smelled like bleach so in the room the people organizing the event thought it was bleach and uh so the cops obviously cops were involved I I don't think it ended up being bleach it it did smell like bleach then there were rumors that there were all sorts of fluids in it that no one wants to think about uh you know yeah it was not not a cocktail that one would enjoy but uh as a result of that now we we travel with security everywhere is that like a daily wire kind of mandate for all speakers when they go out yeah it's a total mandate and so but it can be somewhat embarrassing though because I I for almost three years I hosted a podcast with Ted Cruz and Ted Cruz is a very serious guy prominent Senator presidential candidate one time he and I were in an event and uh the Senator's Deputy Chief of Staff transmit goes Michael is that your detail or is this Army of special operators I said yeah yeah I said why do you have a bigger detail than the senator who gets the real threats you know and I thought that's but but daily wire takes it very seriously which I guess is good if I'm gonna if I'm gonna get popped off you know I I I I want to make sure that it's not frivolous you know I want it to be a real political attack go out in Flames so I would imagine all of this um kind of excitement and protests surrounding your events and you as an individual is really good for business right I think it was um I think Shapiro quoted uh somebody who's saying whatever doesn't kill you makes you more famous that's right um that's right so what's it like having to live that life and you know it's kind of like the Scandal surrounding you right brings you to the surface again as far as clicks and popularity and well so there's a lot of Truth to that if people go out and have a big protest it obviously calls more attention to your events so you know when that's happened those are the speeches that get get viewed the most but you've got to be really careful not to chase that because if you chase that then really you just become a performance artist and I don't think that's particularly good for the soul and I don't think it's good for your career in the long run I mean then you've and I won't name names in years past so there have been plenty of people on the left and the right who who have done that and they really sort of flame out yeah that's what I was gonna I was gonna say that must be exhausting so let's try to lift that up keep that up yeah yeah and and also then you're just you're so tempted to do and say things that you might not even believe just to get a reaction yeah and so I consider myself one of the least owned the libsy okay kind of conservatives out there it's kind of funny because I did this joke book that was just 100 owning the labs but but I try not to do that I mean I probably spend half my time or more criticizing the conservatives for being incoherent and cowardly uh that then I spent making fun of AOC or something like that uh basic fundamental question what is conservatism hmm Roger scrutin said in his just beautifully Roger scrutiny way I don't have the accent so I can't really do it he said I don't know you would imagine that a conservative wants to conserve things and that's a large part of my answer the the answer that you're supposed to give in the American conservative movement context is you know you push your glasses up on your nose and you say well actually to be a conservative is to you you want to reduce the size and scope of the government you want to cut taxes and you want to let people do whatever they want to do and that's what you know that's just silly I mean that's libertarianism which did come to dominate the conservative movement for much of the last half of the 20th century and the results have been a disaster so I don't think that's what conservatism is I think we want to conserve things we want to conserve the good and the true and the Beautiful we do want to conserve our traditions we want to conserve our way of life we want to conserve our families and our communities we want to conserve our very identity you know I think half of my families of these swarthy Sicilian persuasion and so food is very important to our culture right food is a big part of the Italian-American identity when Klaus Schwab comes in and says you are going to eat the bugs you are not going to eat the cannoli anymore you will eatsy bugs that is an attack not just on Gastronomy or it's an attack on identity and there are so many other facets of our identity our sexual identity our national identity or and then ultimately of course our religious identity that's if we will ground our identity either in I am who I am or we will be left with the pathetic question which is who am I like a teenager trying on different personalities that's a observation from my friend Father George rutler and so that's where your your identity ultimately uh has to be and you're seeing a concerted attack on that in particular I mean we're speaking now hours after the passage of this Preposterous Bill to redefine marriage and we we knew it was going to pass because 12 Republican Senators squished on it and they allowed it to get past the filibuster which meant that the Democrats needed a bear majority not 60 votes so at the very last moment Mike Lee Marco Rubio I think Lankford there were a few Senators who tried to throw some amendments in the bill to not have this thing completely destroy Christian business owners and and Jews and Muslims and ordinary sensible atheists who recognize what marriage is and the amendments were all shot down and so the amendments were shot down by the Democrats yeah they were shouted by the Liberals yeah they were shot down by the Republicans though you know we're just always one or two votes short aren't we there's always that Mitt Romney out there there's always that squish who is going to come out and prevent you from having any kind of Victory and I think with Republican Senators like that who needs Democrats if if that's what conservatives are doing then truly they're not conserving a damn thing because marriage is the fundamental political institution yeah if you can't conserve that you simply are not a conservative so as it feels like the left has been dragging us in that direction such that people like Joe Rogan are thought of to be conservative or even Dave Rubin so you know you talked about conserving what's true good and beautiful which is quite General you talked about marriage which is specific but I suppose what's something that Catholic Christians should want to conserve that would upset people who are thought to be conservative like Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin well to use those examples uh and and Dave in particular probably marriage would be a good example of this though I tell you I know Dave and Joe Rogan and even other people who are Center left who now reviewed is on the right people like Elon Musk and others they catch a lot of flack because they hold plenty of liberal views and some of their political vision is is a little inconsistent or incoherent but uh I'll take it you know I'll I mean I'm friends with Dave Rubin I don't know Joe personally I don't know Elon Musk but Dave has good inclinations meaning he recognized he was a big lib he recognized something was seriously wrong Dave has become much more conservative every year that I've known him and I've only known him six seven years now and so yes obviously they were still plenty of I think inconsistencies with his view it'd be hard to call Dave a conservative really but when you look at this insane culture that we're living in where we are being inundated constantly with confusion inanity false history absolutely incoherent epistemology ontology I you know and and on top of that all this insane sex stuff I can't really blame people for falling into it you know and I and I wonder what's the way out that we're going to give people obviously there's the marriage problem but take it even to its logical extreme the transgender issue what do you say to some poor girl who at age 16 was told chop your breasts off pump yourself full of poison destroy your voice have your hair all fall out just mutilate your body become sterile and then she figures out six years later I've made a horrible mistake bless her what do we do for those people what do we do even on the marriage question what do we do for a couple of guys who have indulged same-sex attraction and have taken on a gay identity and who have even gotten gay married and then a couple of years later they wake up and say wait a second this isn't what marriage is what do we do what is the what is the off ramp I love that it's a great question because we're all victims of this sexual Revolution even if it's just we've been inundated by porn since the time we were kids and that's affected us it's affected our relationships and so how do we I love that what's the offram it reminds me of a line of from Peter crafed who said when a maniac is at the door feuding Brothers reconcile and so I understand there is this desire to get really clear about what it is we believe and what it is we'd like to see happen in American society what we might like to see outlawed Etc but I think it is important that we we uh we find comrades wherever we can find them you know allies of course because the the maniac at the door is a really apt analogy especially because maniacs and lunatics are incoherent right there there is a huge gap between what they view reality to be and and uh reality itself and this is a problem for our culture because we're all kind of Maniacs this was the real point of my speech last night at Franciscan which is we we've had a total breakdown in representations and Owen Barfield this philosopher who was an inkling who I played a large role in converting C.S Lewis and who's underappreciated but he predicted all of this in 1965. he said as the Scientific Revolution moves forward what you're going to see is a diminishing of original participation in reality you're going to see an increase in the gap between the symbol and the symbolized and you're going to see a kind of idolatry of phenomena idolatry of matter because science only looks at the physical world and and so you obviously we see this in the way that we talk about sex right sex is um no longer we no longer talk about making love we no longer talk about sex really in the context of marriage as sex is just what some piece of Flesh does to another piece of Flesh to titillate oneself and uh or even you mentioned porn you know we have abstracted even further sex is the thing that we see on the pixels on the screen and and then we do something with ourselves you know in a dark corner of our apartment uh that that creates an an idol and what Barfield predicted was this would break down Collective representations such that there is no Unity of of pictures anymore we actually don't know what a woman is we actually don't people actually don't know what marriage is and so people will each be speaking their own language of Babylon that that's what's gone on so yeah obviously it's sort of like other than that Mrs Lincoln how'd you like the play we all know that the conservative movement is in really bad shape it's in so much worse shape than anybody thinks it is because we can't even agree on what the fundamental components of reality mean yeah it seems like there's less infighting among the left and the agenda they're trying to push than there is among conservatives is that because it's a lot easier to tear something down than to rebuild something or of course yeah that that's a big part of it but it's also because the left has replaced our representations our images our understanding of what reality means because it is replace those things so effectively they're all kind of on the same page we are the ones who are not because half of the concern more than half of the conservatives now the majority of Republicans believe that marriage is any Union of two people who like each other right this is radical this is radically to the left of Barack Obama in 2011. yeah so when you're in in that place the the libs have not only deluded themselves they've deluded half of us as well yeah man um what you said something last night that I thought was really interesting and that's that yeah leftists get it wrong when they're asked what a woman is but that conservatives don't get it much better you want to talk about that yeah I mean this is exactly on this problem that we're talking about of we've we've taken their premises without even knowing it I call it the dead end of DNA the leftist answer to what is a woman is well I don't know I'm not a biologist I'm not a scientist it's very very complicated women are so much more than just some genitals and chromosomes but the conservative answer now is women are just genitals and chromosomes yeah that's the same Soul denying scientism that the libs have been peddling to get us into this mess in the first place I don't think that women are just a couple of X chromosomes yeah I have a family member who has Turner syndrome Turner syndrome is where you've you're a woman but you've only got one X chromosome you're not a woman no she's obviously a woman uh I I know women who have had hysterectomies they don't have a womb not a woman no of course that's what what is what is a woman my friend Matt Walsh did this documentary what is a woman that did very very well and kind of poked fun at all these lips the most interesting part of the movie that a lot of people didn't pick up on is that a lot of glib conservatives are saying oh it's just you know breasts in a womb that's what a woman is but he goes to the Maasai people in Africa yeah and he says what is a woman and the Messiah people said a woman is someone who does the duty of a woman hmm right the the conservative line on transgenderism so far has been there is no distinction between sex and gender we get transgenderism because the libs tell us there's biological sex and there's gender which is a social construct and you can have the male gender but female sex and yeah and the conservative answer has been to deny that and say no it's all just physical but that's not true there's obviously gender expression you can have an effeminate man you can have a Butch woman okay there have been tomboys for all of history and a lot of that is socially constructed the conservative answer I think is there is a distinction between sex and gender and you have a duty to perform your gender in accordance with your sex you have an obligation to fulfill the natural roles that correspond with your sex because man is not this uh just dualistic being where your soul and which is when they talk about gender they're really just talking about the soul they just don't want to admit it where your soul and your body have nothing to do with one another no we're hylomorphic beings and our souls and our bodies are intrinsically United here on Earth and so we have an obligation to do those things this would have been commonly understood everyone would have agreed with this 20 30 years ago now even many conservatives if you say that if you give them the Don Corleone answer and you say you're a man what can you do You're Gonna Act Like a Man what's the matter with you you tell a woman you act like a woman they will back away from me they'll say oh my goodness you knuckle dragger you authoritarian oh my you sound like a fascist I don't sound like a fascist I sound like everybody in the 90s how is that then not just a criticism of tomboys because it sounds like what you're saying is a girl who's a tomboy needs to stop that or needs to grow into her Womanhood and begin to act like a woman where's the diversity where's where's the allowance for diversity among men and women then no yeah well it is basically what I'm saying is that yeah if you're if you're a man and you're feeling a little uh you know you you want to uh put on a dress don't yeah you're a woman who wants to perform your life as a man what does that look like though that's what I'm trying to get to what's like the dress looks like trousers on men and dresses on women you know yeah like no is that where you would draw the line then I'm trying to get you no I think women should be allowed to wear pants on occasion you know I'm not I'm not going that far but and of course there is diversity and this is a you know an eccentric world and and that adds a lot of spice to life yeah but we need to recognize what the center of life is a good a good image of this was put forward by Jonathan pegeot the iconographer in Canada who he he said we we've always understood in our civilization that there's weird stuff and that's kind of nice it adds spice to life yeah the weird stuff though needs to stay it needs to well yes you look at a medieval manuscript there's weird stuff I mean there's all sorts of like you know little elves with weird things coming out of their bodies you know riding on top of snakes and stuff but it's always on the edge yeah you go to a beautiful cathedral the Gargoyles are on the top you know and all these kind of interesting weird designs it's not all gargoyles it's not just in the Vatican last week that would have been really weird would have ruined the church it would have ruled and actually with some of the architecture I have done that when you put the gargoyle into the center of the church something has gone dramatically wrong and so what what the libs have been doing is they have not been as the conservatives pretend you know simply censoring our speech you know and we're the Defenders of free speech and there are the Defenders of censorship what the libs are really engaging in is an upending of norms and standards and taboos and um the the libs are actually the ones who tricked us into adopting the Free Speech absolutist position it happened in the middle of the 20th century when the libs launched the Free Speech movement at Berkeley and the people look at Berkeley now they say well how did Berkeley which is the center of the Free Speech women had it become so uh absolutely full of censorship against conservatives because the Free Speech movement was never about Free Speech there's no such thing as total Free Speech there's no such thing as absolute uh neutrality in the Public Square or anything like that that's never been true in any political community communities naturally have taboos standards yes political correctness is a code of speech so is chivalry okay and I'm all for chivalry uh so what the libs have done is invert those norms and standards and what the the conservatives have done is abandon them can you imagine that that conservatives are now the ones who say oh yes we need social media Networks where you can say anything do anything post all manner of obscenity and threats no of course that's insane now what we need is to promote good reasonable standards and to suppress unreasonable ugly evil wicked false things we talked a moment ago about being victims of the sexual Revolution and needing an off-ramp and that's true of people perhaps who are living in sort of subdomitic relationships or who have had their bodies mutilated but it's also true for those of us who have just imbibed the quote-unquote values of the sexual Revolution how did you and your wife make the choice or did you to begin to you to live more masculinely as it were and her to live more uh as a woman like you know what I mean over retired is really how it happened because I met my wife we don't remember meeting but we we met in fifth grade A District Orchestra she was from Bedford Village that was the nice side of the track so I was from the wrong side of the tracks Bedford Hills in New York right near AOC actually and uh but we we met I guess in fifth grade we were in the homeroom together in sixth grade started dating in high school uh I think it's now a federal statutory requirement you have to split for college if you're a millennial so we broke up for college unfortunately got back together after college I was an atheist certainly agnostic really atheist for like 10 years uh my wife was raised without any kind of real religious rigor at all and so this is why I have such sympathy for people who are looking around the world and they're they are kind of grappling towards the truth even though they don't know quite how to make sense of it because that was me too and now obviously we're quite traditional and we we look back and we say everything that everyone told us was wrong oh my goodness everything that we were told by our teachers and by our community and it was all just completely completely insane and it's that great description that that Ernest Hemingway has of bankruptcy right things happen gradually then suddenly you sort of go around for 10 years saying huh does God exist is there such a thing as objective truth should I maybe be doing good things and avoiding bad things and then you know then pretty soon you say oh yes I should we also need to go to Latin Mass frequently we also need to go to confession weekly in your pants that's right yeah okay so was it something of a conversion for both of you around the same time were you both yeah yeah I I reverted to this I was cradle Catholic but by 13. by my confirmation I I was convinced God didn't exist and it was all Huey and I uh well you sucked into the new atheist movement of course you were yeah ashamed why Matt would you force me to admit that on air I was I was sucked in by the clever little barbs of Christopher Hitchens he was so well spoken he was so enjoyable I listened to I saw him have a debate with Rabbi shmuli botayic at the 92nd y on the existence of God yeah and shmuly botayak was obviously right on the question but Hitchens won the debate because he was just so clever I'll tell you the only time I think that didn't happen that I've seen is when he debated William Lane Craig I was shocked I remember being afraid to watch that debate because I just couldn't stand to see another Christian be decimated by an atheist but when I watched it I thought oh my goodness Hitchens had nothing and I thought that Craig matched him in charm and wit I thought he was excellent yeah and if you go back now and you look at the new atheists who really were more of a publishing phenomenon than they were in intellectual movement and but there's just like a few books that were all extremely glib but if you go back now and and watch their arguments I pretty weak absolutely terrible but I was 13 when they came ice it was tailor-made I am 32. I'm an old man oh yeah I'm 39 but 30. so I had come to Christ to know he had came to me perhaps when I was 17 the year 2000 my senior year of high school in Rome Italy I was I went there as an agnostic to party meet girls met Jesus changed my life huh how did that happen how are you free trip free trip to Rome my mom said there's this thing called World Youth Day there'll be about 2.5 million people there this is now her accent would you like to go and I thought it was a trick question that maybe Rome was an obscure town in South Australia with a population of 15 or something so I said Rome where she said Italy you idiot right good yes I'd like to go I've done some thinking wow so I just met I mean I had the only Christians I had met prior to this trip were those that were really intense and wide-eyed and asking you if you'd been saved and God bless them it's perhaps a fair question to ask me but I uh was just turned off by them yeah but it wasn't until I went to Rome that I was now surrounded by young intelligent Catholics who are cool and normal and were saving sex for marriage who believe what the church taught in all of those areas I was just stunned like how how do you exist what are you be like uh finding a platypus for the first time like I don't I didn't think these things could exist you know you know it's funny you mention that because around 13 or so 12 or 13. my mother I think was trying to make a last-ditch effort to Veer me away from atheism and she said you should join this youth group at the local church and this was you know I don't want to speak yellow but here we go but no I I had some wonderful CCD teachers and people along the way but this was the most felt bannery of felt bannery churches and this youth group was extraordinarily I guess they would call it charismatic and it had all those sappy ridiculous hymns from the 70s you know like eagles wings which is heretical as far as I can tell because you were the one singing I Will Raise You Up On Eagle's Wings which I will never do I promise you that I will never raise anybody Up On Eagle's Wings but and I think they they changed that pronoun because they didn't want to say he will raise You Up On Eagle's Wings because that's very patriarchal and so is you know it was this it really had the opposite effect it really turned me off I said how how is any man supposed to you thought that at the time as a 13 year old boy not in not retrospectively looking back and finding it a family you thought that at the time I was so repelled by by the whole aesthetic and and by the soft soap weakness of that that particular kind of catechesis you know I I just I I thought this is the this is the worst kind of worldliness it's pop music that's worse than the pop music we're getting on the radio it's not even good it's not even good I mean to quote to quote Hank Hill from King of the Hill the problem with Christian rock is that it makes both Rock and Christianity worse oh my gosh that is so insightful I was so repelled by that and I remember this one time was this one substitute teacher came into one of my CCD classes and he was a smart serious guy and he gave for us 10 year olds or whatever a really good answers to all of our glib questions about the Book of Genesis yeah yeah and I thought oh there's something here that's intellectual and especially if you're a precocious 13 year old and you think that you're the smartest person who's ever lived uh you know you've got a little learning and you know some of those yeah we have children that you may have met a few in your home you know that the the the glib sort of catechesis of that era and and the glibness of the new atheists both were really uh formative yeah for a precocious 13 year old who thinks he's smarter than he is Little Learning is a dangerous thing and I thought wow there's just no intellectual depth here and my way back was this long period of steadily being convinced wait a second smart people believe this can you break that down for us I'd love to hear that story yeah yeah so I was freshman at college and went to one of the most liberal universities in the country and but I was randomly assigned to this roommate who was who remains you know my best friend to this day best man in each other's weddings and he was quite conservative and he was a cradle Catholic whose family became kind of mega church Protestant and he was sort of agnostic at the time but he was really taken with the ontological argument for God and specifically the modal ontological argument for God as formulated by Alvin Plantera the calvinist guy at Notre Dame and so he presented this to me and I got such a kid he's not a Christian yet he's just philosophizing or he well he was raised kind of broadly Christian but he was agnostic but he said you know I really get a kick out of this argument I said and I had this moment like Bertrand Russell right that's the stupidest argument I ever heard but I can't quite say why it's wrong wait a second maybe it's not the stupidest argument I've ever heard and uh that got me even more than what the argument was seeking to prove it it convinced me oh thoughtful people think about this and then one of these you know are you saved kind of friendly Evangelical guys had a free book table on campus and I'm a sucker for free books and it was all this silly kind of Pop apologetics and Mere Christianity and I said that that's a nice looking cover that looks like the sort of cover a serious smart person would pick up okay so I picked it up and I read it and you know the thing about C.S Lewis is he's so intelligent so insightful but a three-year-old could understand so clear he's so clear in his writing and I read that book I was sitting out this is summer freshman year maybe I was sitting out like true white trash in a beach chair I'm in my yard in my little little house in New York we have a we have a couch chair at the front of our house we brought it out so we're gonna go throw it in the big dumpster and then we sat on it we're like this is actually pretty good this is great I don't care what the neighbors say go get me a beer yeah so I spark up a cigar I'm sitting in the air I'm reading C.S Lewis for whatever it was a week or two I thought I think God might exist and that led me to Chesterton we're here in the Chesterton Cigar Lounge and that led me to all sorts of other reading and it it took me from the age of 18 until probably 21 or 22. to be really convinced that God exists little children know this intuitively but people who fancy themselves really intelligent it takes them years to understand something that is self-evidently true from the natural world yeah wow that's amazing we so were you in University at the time and so then what was the what was the progression there at that point did you decide okay God exists but I'm not sure if Christianity is true or Christianity is true but I'm not sure how it is Catholicism thing no I I I took as long a time as I possibly could just bumping my head every step of the way and so I said okay God exists now I have to I guess I have to Grapple with this person of Jesus Christ uh because you know God exists and so religion I guess is good but why is there this person why has it got to be about this person that's kind of weird I've got to pray to this person and I don't know can't we just take the person out of it turns out you can't spoiler alert okay and not take the person out of God and uh so any of them yeah that's right that's any of the three persons in one Divine unity and so at that point it's probably around 22 I guess okay I I said you know maybe I should read this Bible you know this book The the font of like all western civilization and so the most important book ever written I guess I should read that at some point uh so I started reading it from kava from Genesis no I I had read the book of Genesis before I was assigned it when I was a teenager and whenever I had this inkling that I should maybe start reading the Bible I'd always start with Genesis so I've read the book of Genesis about a thousand times but I would never make it through the Bible in a year I'd sort of Peter out somewhere in Deuteronomy or something and so I started with the gospels when I because I said I wanna grapple with this person Jesus Christ okay start with the gospels and as you know it's just so obviously true you know C.S Lewis has that argument Christ is Lord liar or lunatic and it's so clear yeah even in the most spectacular scenes in the gospel this guy is the most sane person in the room whatever he is he is not a lunatic and whatever he is he's not a liar because what he is saying is sounds so sane and therefore it sounds so true and I know that I can recognize it as truth huh I guess he's got to be that third option and some doubters have have said well there's a fourth L and that's uh Legend right it's all just Legend but you know that really does not hold up it doesn't make sense of 11 Apostles you know going going to die all sorts of terrible deaths doesn't make sense 500 witnesses eyewitnesses to the resurrection and that doesn't really hold up at all and and so I said gosh I guess I guess this guy is who he says he is I had a conversation I don't know that I've ever said this publicly I've been I've mentioned it but I've never really gone into it I had a few weeks of very intense private correspondence with the comedian Norm Macdonald you know Norm I want you to take an hour to detail exactly how that went down because he is one of my absolute favorite comedians so he was always a he's my favorite comedian and I noticed on Twitter I I was one of the first people he followed when he got on Twitter he was say it again he followed you were you father well I was following him yeah he he followed me and I and I don't know when he started following me but I was just checking through normal space Oh Norm's following me that's and he was following at the time I think 60 people wow and and I thought and I I don't know why I don't know where he saw something it wasn't a mistake a happy mistake if it was but I really didn't get it and so the thing about Twitter is when you each follow each other you can send private messages but I said I was so in awe I've met plenty of celebrities yeah truly truly in awe of this man I said I don't want to abuse my follow privileges here I don't want to send him a private message and one day he sent out a tweet where he said I'm just in such pain it's just so hard it's so hard knowing now that he had been fighting cancer for 10 years secretly bless him I now recognize that's what he was talking about at the time I read that as this is an eccentric Wild guy I mean it's maybe he's suicidal and I said okay I'm going to reach out and I just messaged him and I said Norm I've never messaged you before because I'm simply in awe of your Genius but if I can be of any help in what appears to be a moment of despair please just let me know and he writes back and he said he says thank you Michael um appreciate the note I'm okay but I I would like to talk because to not accept your offer would be would be prideful or something I said okay all right Norm would and instantly we're talking about religion and I haven't I haven't published these I mean when I say these were messages I mean these were they became essays that we would write to each other every night for weeks like 800 900 word essays in some cases you know and and was it what you trying to convince him of something I didn't have to convince him of a thing so when you say they were like essays what were you going back and forth about suffering well I I asked him about suffering I said you know do you Norm do you have a view of the world you know that sort of can help you make sense of this suffering he said oh yeah Michael I you know I know you're a Christian he said yeah I'm I've just always known that the Bible is true I've always known that Christianity is true and he says and he can never tell with him because you never know if he's like playing with you because he always played so dumb but he was so so brilliant and he said I'm not an educated man which is true he's not an education in the sense that he never had really formal schooling he read everything I mean he could probably quote utol story forwards and backwards but his mind is actually one of his most famous jokes is this joke about a moth going into a podiatrist but it's a it's done in the style of the death of Yvonne Ilyas by Leo tolster right A lot of people don't don't get that but you you would have to read so deeply in the Russian novelists to even think to put that joke together and but he says to me I'm not an educated man he says my son is much more educated than I am he's got schooling I don't but uh I've just always known that it's true and I thought well you're ahead of the head of me buddy because I do have some schooling and I didn't know it was true for years and I went on for about two weeks or so and I kind of blew it because I didn't write our nightly response one night I was just busy I was traveling whatever and then it kind of petered at us sort of sort of kicked myself for it he was supposed to come on my book show at prageru and had uh he'd agreed to do it but he I said okay well Norm I'm leaving California so you got to come on this month basically and he did he didn't drive he you know he he was a quirky guy he'd always send a car for him and he said Michael I'm happy to do it can we do it on Skype I said no it's not a Skype show Norm it's an in-person show you got to come in person because I can't go into a studio right now and I thought this was yeah I mean sort of it was famously somewhat agoraphobic and germaphobic it seemed and so I just said okay well Norm whenever we get past this coveted thing you can come on the show and then he died and I realized then in retrospect he was undergoing pretty serious treatment at right at that time but we got on the topic because this was a guy This brilliant guy who just knew it who just opened the Bible and just knew that it was true intuitively and I had a less in intense but similar reaction which is you're reading the gospels yeah and you it just Sparkles and you just know that it's true unlike any I've read lots of good books it's like that question that somebody asked you last night about you know how do you argue for what is beautiful and Aquinas actually does that and he actually has this very unhelpful lion he says the beautiful is that which when scene pleases or something but I liked your point that it's like some things like we can discourse about these things but we can also look at them and understand them to be so and something similar was happening with you it seems like with the gospels I love uh Saint Thomas aquinas's answer because it's it's almost like a norm joke well you know beautiful things are things that when you look at them you know they seem beautiful to you you know that's kind of what he's saying yeah and uh yeah but when he writes in this beautiful way uh but yeah I kind of go more to the Justice Potter Stewart answer I know it when I see it and I I don't mean to be cute with that answer I think it's actually important that we that we become more comfortable speaking in that way and thinking in that way there is a Breaking Point in the really shallow pseudo-conservatism that has bedeviled Us in this country for the past few decades and the breaking point was when David French then a columnist for National Review defended drag queen Story Hour as a Blessing of Liberty and so rabba Mari attacked him for it said whatever this is we got to move past this and it became a whole big debate and David French's argument was well who's to say who's to say if you tell me that I can't have a drag queen Story Hour at a public library why maybe maybe someone will say that you can't have church on Sunday and just who's to say you know one man's drag queen Story Hour is another man's Church I thought no I can say and you can say and we can all say we all know the difference between a drag queen twerking for kids and a pastor preaching we just have to stop lying and we have to stop lying by the way if you can't know the difference between those things you certainly cannot have self-government self-government is predicated on the idea that we have reliable faculties of reason and a reliable moral conscience and we can discern between true and false and Good and Evil and beautiful and ugly we we actually can and we've we've simply deluded ourselves into denying the the very faculties that make us human yeah and so when did you so you you read the gospels and and at what point did you decide Catholicism is the ticket or was it more just a natural progression since you were raised that way no it wasn't natural if anything I was sort of uh let's see I'm I'm giving up on this lighter that's all right would someone like getting us one thanks yes Michael needs a lighter I need a lighter where's my I need blue M M's thank you so much uh no if anything the fact that I was raised that way made me skeptical of it and the fact that I was sort of brought back into the Faith by a calvinist philosopher by a by a mega church roommate and a calvinist philosopher at Notre Dame curiously enough NCS Lewis who was he might have made it had he lived longer but you know it was obviously not not Catholic yeah uh it made me skeptical I also I didn't get the Mary stuff okay and just get the need for the Saints I didn't get the need for the icons I didn't get the need for the Liturgy um now I'm really into all of those things yeah and this is actually why I think it's important that we give an off-ramp to people who have been going so far down the road of liberalism and they recognize that something's gone wrong but they're going 100 miles an hour you've got to give them that off ramp and for me you know the off-ramp from atheism was was sort of paved with Protestants that led me back to uh the one true church so I did start going to church at this point and I said okay if I'm going to go to church what church should I go to and this was a bit of a numinous experience a coincidental experience I was in New York at a dinner and the dinner was at this bar in in Midtown and they were giving away some conservative books it was a conservative group and you had your book by Sean Hannity and you had your book by these other writers where I thought I don't know that's okay I've read these things before I don't need to get one then I saw this little book and it had a very interesting cover it's we can judge books by their cover this is another no I am 100 in agreement with this we judge cigars by the band Yes we judge we judge people by their looks yes we probably shouldn't at least if we know them for more than an hour but in the beginning what else do you have what else do you have I mean that's just what what it's you know Prejudice yes is is defended by Edmund Burke for good reason because you're not going to you know write some 50-page uh uh analysis of every single decision you have to make you wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning right and so I see this cover and it says uh at the top all nature is but art unknown to the all chance Direction which thou cast not see which is a line from Alexander Pope titles coincidentally the author father George rutler okay I look on them but it doesn't say father it just says George rutler I look on the back I see it's got a blur by Bill Buckley and I was the first uh an inaugural Buckley fellow at Yale okay and I just just left college and then I I look and I say it's a Catholic priest and then I see as a Catholic priest at a church two blocks away wow and then I sit on the front and on the front flap it says it's a wicked generation that seeks signs and wonders but it's a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders said wow okay and then there's another coincidence he had left the church that was two blocks away he was now a pastor in Hell's Kitchen at a church called the church of Saint Michael so that's a coincidence and anyway I start going to church yeah and it really clicked and this was a reverent novusordo very very Revenue sort of at orientum yep smells and bells Ultra rail ultra rare I actually don't know if at that time there was an altar because the church was in disrepair father Rutter was actually sort of rebuilding the place put a balderkin and you know he was bless him but this this thing they were going to sell it they were going to knock it down and he he really revived it he and the Holy Spirit revived it but and I thought oh this makes sense and it's why I'm really angry at the people who destroyed the Liturgy because I I don't know if I would have remained in the church throughout my teenage years had we had a serious liturgy but I suspect I might have yeah when we were renovating this cigar lounge we had five layers of shag carpet and tile over these beautiful wooden floors and a awful drop ceiling and when we explain this to people they say who would do that and and my answer is the same people who invented liturgical abuse let's make it awful yes yeah yes because how can you expect people to take an hour or two out of their Sunday to go get exactly the same thing just slightly worse just slightly worse the jokes of the priest aren't that good like no McDonald's actually better yeah of course your guitar band not as good as what I could be listening to like the Eagles or whoever else like they're way better than you right why am I here why am I here you know that uh the jokes by the priest remind me of a line from father rutler who is very instrumental in my reversion who he wrote he said in in these New Liturgical abuses you see priests telling jokes like a ham actor in a dying Vaudeville show and those priests would do well to limit their repertoire to the jokes that Saint John told the Blessed Mother while her son bled on the cross the other thing that does is it makes the priest job a lot easier like you don't have to be funny isn't that great like you don't have to be entertaining you just have to celebrate the holy sacrifice of the mass reverently you just look all the promises from the liturgical reforms after Vatican II not synonymous with Vatican II as they would have us believe but that occurred after Vatican II and which were made easier by Vatican II obviously but which are separate the promise was it's going to bring the youths back to Mass the youngins the youngins did that happen it didn't happen I don't think that happened in fact it feels like there is an Unstoppable uh movement towards tradition of course like the the young Trad men and women with their 800 children in oversized suits yes at Holy Mass breastfeeding without shame oh yes they're like little weeds that will not be stomped down I don't think that you're going to be able to stop this movement towards what's beautiful of course I I do go when I'm traveling I sometimes have to go to the 1970s brutalist churches uh with the I try to find Reverend liturgies and sometimes I'm more successful than others but and but I and I will also go for confession just if I needed need a confession I'll go to the nearest church yeah and so I go into these churches and they're empty and they're they're the median age is 96 and there are no children anywhere to be found and then I go to my Latin mass and they're it's packed to the gills you can't get a seed you can't even stand often you have to stand in the Sacristy and you know the median age is 25 and they've all got a thousand kids and and I think okay obviously the we're going to win the Utes back that part was crazy and then all of the rest of it the participation you know we're going to participate more in the mess that's not true the people who attend the the crazy liturgies their eyes are glazed over they're they're sort of thinking about their lunch they're they're not they're performing for one another when there's oh we're going to make the sign of the piece for goodness sakes I went to a one of these parishes in LA and at the sign of the piece people would traips up and down the aisle giving peace signs to one the worst is when they do the uh slingshot peace sign those people should be immediately excommunicated if I were Pope I assume it's automatic and I think so I'm no Canon lawyer but I think you know so that you give this performance but you're not really participating where are people participating people are participating in the Latin Mass when they're focused so intently on what is happening at the altar in this holy sacrifice and so the participation thing that that was you know just totally bogus and and all of these all of the promises that that were made did not come true yeah or yeah so much so that he even if you want to find a nervous Auto church that's filled it's the one that's being celebrated reverently so we have Latin Mass here on the weekends but we also have a 10 a.m novusordo but it's at orientum uh you know Nila and uh it's like how how can we be expected to take this religion seriously if you weren't of course kind of thing and the thing is too when you when you eradicate the Church of its Traditions you invariably invent new ones so when we lived in Ireland my wife and I I remember when the gifts were brought gifts were brought up they brought up like a field hockey stick and a cardboard painting from the children because we offer everything to God so it's like you still have Traditions they're just hokey of course not ancient or beautiful right we need we need to get rid of the chanted Kyrie and really all of the chain we need to get rid of that that's just people are just doing it as a sort of rote uh ritual so instead what we're going to mumble our way through Iowa Raise You Up On Eagle's Wings and no I mean that that becomes not only a rote ritual that no one is really paying any attention to but it's ugly it's depressing I think of Christopher Alexander this writer on architecture and design who made a simple observation that people seemed to have forgotten every space that you are in will either slightly Elevate or slightly depress your spirits Wilmot Walmart I cannot go to Walmart we're talking about this my wife I cannot go into Walmart without getting depressed within three minutes of course yeah the the fluorescent lighting yeah I insist my wife is going to kill me because it raises our our costs on because there's you know the incandescent bulbs go out yes every week but I don't care they're more beautiful they're so much more beautiful Michael let me ask you what happened to your spirits when you walked into Chesterton and Company cigars I walked in like a king walking in you know when you would walk into the old Penn Station in New York which we can get a little glimpse of in Grand Central which was the other beautiful train station yeah they didn't tear down you walk in Sky High ceilings beautiful ornamentation you walk in like a king yeah when they knocked down the old Penn Station they built this rat maze which was the New Penn Station underneath Madison Square Garden and you and you feel like a rat and when you feel like a rat you behave like a rat yeah and when you feel like a king you behave like that's right you look at modern courthouses this is one of the clearest examples old courthouses big beautiful solid and they give you the sense I bet even if you're the criminal himself that there is a real solidity to the justice that is being done here you walk into a modern Courthouse it's a little office room with some cork board on the top and you know you're right probably scraping your head as you walk it's not fitting yes it's not fitting and you just you have this sense ah this is just little men and what what are they hiding in here what what is going on in the dark recesses that I can't see so as you were kind of coming into the church had you I mean you'd met your wife uh much earlier but were you in a relationship at this point we were and I I told her she was coming up to visit New York she was in DC at the time I was in New York and I said hey I know we're going to have this weekend and you can see your other friends but Sunday morning I'm I'm going to go to Mass she goes what I said yeah I'm gonna I'm I was convinced last week that it's all true and I have an obligation and a desire actually to go to mass is that you know but you don't have to go but you should probably you should go because it's all true by the way but uh you don't have to okay uh right and so we go to Mass she was freaked out where she thinks she said I did not sign up for this who I I started dating this agnostic sort of you know atheist kind of normal guy I did not what I said I I don't know tell me you've been dating at this point well we because we broke up for college you know there's a pretty big gap in there but we started data we've we've now it has now been half of our Lives since we started dating because I was 16 and she was 15 and a half my much younger child bride yeah and so we had then started dating again really only I don't know for about a year or so or less so it was still I bring it up because obviously that there's more involved to you embracing Catholicism than simply we have to go to mass on Sundays right there's this whole moral component that perhaps you had to introduce her to yes and intellectual component and historical component and and all of it which I had touched on a little bit I hadn't it's not like we did this together yeah at that point and so she was totally understandably really freaked out by it I just said look isn't that funny because sometimes you'll take someone to the Latin mass and you just expect the sheer Beauty will convert them on the spot that was awful yeah I don't speak that language I don't have any idea what's going on here it's so funny though you're thinking our crazy culture because the reaction is sort of like I took her to you know a drug-fueled orgy you're like hey what the hell I didn't sign up for this you're a weirdo yes I said no we're going to church actually and so but I just was so convinced it was just so once you see it it's really hard to unsee it and so I said I I don't know what to tell you it's just I'm the same guy in some ways I guess uh but I so if you if you trusted my faculties of Reason previously I still have those I'm just really convinced this is true she was open-minded to it but it was a it was a long process yeah if she hadn't have converted do you suspect you still would have married her yeah yeah because I well it's it's hard to it's hard to say because you grow together or you grow apart yeah right so we have been growing together with a little break in the middle uh for 16 years yeah and so I could see that happening but father rutler who celebrated our wedding Mass he said he said oh you know don't when he was giving us advice on this he said no one you know you shouldn't convert for the wedding don't do it just to check a box these days you get a dispensation I don't know you could probably do you could be a Buddhist or something and get a dispensation I said convert when you want to convert you know convert when you when you believe it and which is really a smart approach I think because you know sometimes if you if you push too hard people are going to be very skeptical if you say look here it's open for you eternal life you know goodness truth is open for you well hell whatever you want um there's a saying he who is convinced against his will is of the same opinion still and so sometimes we can do a great job at kind of beating people over the head with our brilliant logic but if I'm not actually bought into what you're saying then I right maybe you've won the argument but I still can't get on board with it right right and then there was kind of a Tipping Point too where and this happened with me from the kind of vaguely Protestant view to the Catholic view which is okay I still don't get most of this but I get enough to trust to submit my Instagram yes to submit my intellect to the authority of the church and I forget who said it I I always assume anything I'm quoting is John Henry Newman Fulton Sheen Chesterton or Ronald Knox or something worst case Saint Francis is a repository of all misattributed quotes I think as Winston Churchill famously said yes uh but there's that line uh 10 000 questions don't make one doubt and that one sort of got me as well you know uh I was actually that was Norm's idea ten thousand he said I don't really know much of anything at all but I do trust that this is true yeah which in in our highly rational rational stage but we don't know what women are or what marriage is that's what sex is for yeah we know if you can't you know if you can't write some 100 page dissertation on this you do yeah but no that's how you have to get along in the world our faculties of Reason are relatively small and uh I I don't know I don't really know Advanced calculus very well you're telling me that I need to be able to totally comprehend the Triune God who by definition I can't tell you I don't even know how they make plastic yeah that's right yeah someone's doing it someone's doing it I know I have it in places but right and it I mean it reminds me of that legend about uh Saint Augustine when he's writing ditra nitatis and he's have you heard this Legend I'm not familiar I have but I'm not familiar with the story you're about so he's he's walking along the beach oh sure right and there's the the little boy who's yes taking the ocean he's putting it into a hole yes Saint Augustine says Hey kid what are you doing he says oh I'm gonna fill this hole with the entire ocean he says well you can't do that you dumb kid I'm paraphrasing the legendary I mean it never happened so you know you dumb kid and uh you can't do that yeah the whole Ocean's not going to fit in that little hole and the child transforms into an angel and he says that's right Augustine and you're not going to fit God into your little head you're not going to fit the Trinity into your little head and if you could it wouldn't be the it wouldn't be worthy of the name God that's right that's right that's beautiful when did you start at the daily wire how did that even happen and and I'd love you to share with us how you've handled the kind of exponential success of the platform and being kind of thrust into the Limelight more and more it was unexpected the whole thing was unexpected I knew the guys before the daily wire started who are the guys uh Ben and Ben Jeremy Andrew klavin I knew Drew because I was friends with his son in college by the way my sister told me to tell you Emma she loves your reading of clavens oh thank you you did such an excellent job on that what was that called again he was uh the another kingdom another kingdom yes yeah my wife's a big fan too oh thank you very much he did a great job Drew has written a thousand novels he's unreal we just bought his new book so shout out for Clavin here um what's good uh uh if a Turn of Mind or a habit of mine well because we're just saying his new book it's hard to know because he has like three of them it just came out but strange habit of mind so he was a novelist here right and with another kingdom he had never written fantasy but he just said I don't know I just this just popped into my head what a weird head what a weird head he's got you know no hair it's all brains in there and he he wrote it in this beautiful Christian story uh that you might not know about LA and this other magical sort of kingdom and the reason I did that is I I was an actor you know I was I had I didn't realize that I met Spencer clave and we were in college together I directed him in Opera we did plays together and had no idea it was conservative had no idea he was Christian and had no idea that his father was Andrew Clavin even though I knew you know clavin's not a very popular name but I just didn't put two and two together I was a little bit thick and so one day he called me said Michael my father needs a little help with his Communications mailing lists those things I know that you're the only person I know who works in conservative politics and show business and other than my father who has been is very into this territory could you help him I said who's your father he said he said hey dummy my father's Andrew Clavin who do you think he is I said oh wow okay and so we became friends coincidentally we were moving to La at the same time I was moving there to do all these sorts of low budget movies and things that are still on Amazon Prime I'm sure no one should watch them no they should what's one low budget film I need to look up on Amazon today to watch this no I did I did this movie the last movie I did called Holly weird write it down Cameron that's kind of a funny it was shot on a shoestring budget but I think it's a Charming movie and uh I'm sure it's going to destroy my political careers but dreams of President that's right yeah but we we moved there at the same time and they were starting up the precursor company to daily wire and I was friends with Jeremy also through I knew him through show business because he was running the friends of Abe which was the conservative secret society in Hollywood so secret that it has a Wikipedia page and that had been started by Gary Sinise and Jon Voight and a few other conservatives and so I was in that in New York and one of my first dinners in La was with my then girlfriend now wife at Drew's house with Ben and his wife and said oh Ben Shapiro I've seen you on TV or say you know oh hey so we sort of became Pals so we knew everybody and then when daily wire gets started Jeremy calls and he says hey can you come and basically be the Pizza Boy of the daily wire the real job was to help start the social media Department because I'd done that for political campaigns I was hesitant to take the job and I said you know man I didn't move to LA to get a real job I moved to LA to be a derelict actor and I can keep making money running my political campaigns and I I don't need this and he said you stupid idiot please let me give you health insurance just who is saying this to you Jeremy Jeremy I say yeah you dummy I said okay whatever I'll take the job but I was still you know still I was shooting a movie on Election Day 2016 when straight from the film set to the Daily wire election coverage and I got my show oddly and it wasn't just the blank book that was an excuse to for them to give me a show but I actually got my show Jeremy and the co-ceo Caleb told me later because of a cigar review that I wrote in my and actually wow no Tabernacle yeah it was this cigar wow that's that's the way the world works I guess I I was I said you know I'd like to maybe write a little something for the website but I don't want to just write some cheap column I want to write a cigar review and I sent it to Jeremy and it was about this cigar actually and it was but it was about more than the cigar you know it was about all sorts of things relating to the Tabernacle and culture and all this and they know they didn't publish the review they read it and they said wow this guy has something to say which I found out later and they gave me a show for it and uh but again the company was still so small yeah and at that time when you had the Ben Shapiro show it was Andrew klavan doing his Daily Show yeah and then I was the third show so they launched technically they only launched with the Ben Shapiro show but Drew's show was in the works so the company really launched with two shows I was the first new show that they added but still a small company at the time I remember you know we'd get 10 000 viewers on our shows we thought oh my gosh we're famous oh wow this is really working it's a relatively small number as you know having a very popular show but we thought wow this is amazing can't get any bigger than this huh and then the company just took off like a rocket ship do you remember when you began to realize that it was happening yeah I remember every six months I had the realization whoa because the company was doubling it was doubling in size every 18 months and it continues to do that wow so now the company is a million subscribers not a million listeners we have way or millions and millions of listeners but even just a paid members to The Daily wire it's a million all this stuff many new shows and you know wow this thing is taking off like a rocket ship and no one could have predicted it because the company didn't make any sense it was this conservative company started in Hollywood that had a cultural Focus so the point of the company was to make movies our day job was talking about politics but the point was not just to comment on culture but to create culture which people I didn't realize that from the get-go that was always it's not an afterthought that's what it appeared to me having followed Joel for a while that oh they're now getting older movies but this was the this was the plan what was the vision in fact we got frustrated so we said we are not doing it in the first year or two of the company and we had no cash we're not doing it Jeremy said guys give it a minute you know I mean this takes a while to spin up something that has not existed before and the other reason the company didn't make sense is it had a something of a religious Focus too we all had totally different religious views Ben was an orthodox Jew Jeremy called himself an antinomian Protestant that's how he defined his Pro super duper Protestant Caleb was non-trinitarian in his views at the time Ben obviously Orthodox Jew uh claven Clavin was an Anglican sort of like and now he's sort of more anglo-catholic okay and I was Catholic and all we ever wanted to talk about was religion that's all we we'd argue about Donald Trump and then we'd you know talk about religion and somehow it's all taken off we we all have as divergent views on even conservative Politics as you possibly could have I mean I think every view that anyone who might call himself a conservative is represented at the daily wire I'm the Trad Jeremy is this Uber libertarian with some fondness for the bush years uh Drew is Drew comes at politics for completely from Left Field you know Ben has now has a very very broad audience that even speaks to the center a lot then we added Matt Walsh Matt you know has this just incredible deadpan dry sort of comedic demeanor that you saw come out and I remember I wrote to my friend John Henry and I said yeah I've been listening to Shapiro but I need to I need to give it a break it's just uh it's it's a lot of negativity going on in the world he said oh you got to come over to Matt Walsh it's way worse over here the whole idea when the company started was Ben was going to depress you and then Drew was good and then Matt comes in and Ben looks quite that's right actually yeah which is funny to do with Matt because he he is so funny you know I he is like you know I always try if we're hanging out I try to say it's like can I get him to crack that giggle you know can I get it yeah sort of a little uh yeah all right I got him I got him you know um but so it totally took off and I remember at the time we'd say wow if only we could get the page views that National Review has or if only we could get the listens that conservative reviews conservative review TV has or whatever Fox News oh my gosh and now that you know the companies it wouldn't really be compared to any of those it just does it does a totally different thing how did you handle the success of it and you know what's it like being you walking through an airport how often are you well I obviously you know developed a huge drug problem uh you know you hide it well it's very functional I tried to yeah you know groupies everywhere um you know real Rock and Roll Lifestyle no it was the thing that was really fortunate for me obviously all those guys were established and married when they got any notoriety so it's and which is good that's what you want and I was the kid you know and I guess I remained sort of the kid of the company um but I was engaged to be married I was settling down which is good I would it would not have been good for my soul or life or career had I had that kind of notoriety it's very important to have somebody in your life like my darling wife who can just tell you exactly the way things are isn't it it's just good it's just and even beyond that when you don't have someone in your life who's like Donald you're here really there's no one in his life who's you know and you know sweet little Elisa she is that I mean she's is she yeah she's the only person his wife oh no Elisa is that your wife so her name is Alyssa her name is it's very confusing her name is Alyssa I oh I see yeah so Walsh and my wife have the same name with the same odd spelling oh interesting yeah and uh but she's a Powerhouse too Alyssa oh she is she's wonderful and you know I I've always referred to my wife as Elisa I don't know why I pronounce it like an Italian and but she's the only one I allowed to write my show ever or to I just did right before Thanksgiving I just did this little uh Instagram video that was a little joke on the conservative Uncle at Thanksgiving how to be the conservative uncle and that was just an idea she had the night before we film it the next day and then it got seven or eight million views but probably did better than the content daily wire has a team of writers putting out and so her gut on this is so right and I really trust her advice too because she'll just I'll come home some days and she'll say mac say yeah what because that thing you said it was lame it was lame that was weak that was not come on come on mate that wasn't so it wasn't smart well I love her voice it's sort of like a Hispanic Cartman but uh but you know she's got that that real real solid political gut see you you really need that the other reason that it's not good and I always caution whenever I give these speeches and inevitably some 18 year old comes up to me and says how do I do this how do I do this how do I how do I you know I just want to pontificate all the time I say well the first thing you should do is not do that you should maybe work on a campaign I think campaign work is really good especially for congress because it's a national level Campaign but it's campaigned at the local level so you're going to VFW Halls you're talking to real people you're seeing how things actually work it's not very glamorous they're usually running a shoestring so you can if you're willing to work for little money you can Advance pretty high up and so that gives you some practical experience and then you need to read a ton of books and the reason for this it's important is if you make a big splash with the views that you hold as a 22 year old know nothing and then you finally read some books well either you'll just be pigeonholed into that and remain sort of intellectually stunted forever or you'll recognize that you were wrong about all those things and then you look like you don't have any principles or know anything at all so that that was really important that by the time we took off we all kind of knew who we were that would that is not the case in a lot of places a lot a lot of media Outlets on the left and the right will just try to churn Talent you know so they'll just pluck up some 18 year old and then they wash out two years later and it's through no fault of their own it's just not a good time for them how do you deal with criticism and angry people on the Internet it's easy to joke about especially after you've been through this for a while but in the beginning at least for me it was quite unsettling I wasn't sure what to do with it um you I think the humble approach is to do some soul searching like yeah maybe I am a horrible person like that's certainly possible in fact I'm quite convinced that I am I'm just not sure I am for the reasons you're saying but maybe you're right how did you deal with that how do you deal with that now it is sanctifying it actually is sanctifying I almost never block people on Twitter I only block people if they attack my family or something that's the reason so I'm not I'm no free speech absolutist I have no problem with the block button but I don't use it because it is humbling there is a guy some troll on Twitter who every post I ever made this guy would respond and say Here's Little Mikey again with his hashtag white power racist sexist phobic whatever all the things that they call us and but it was so funny the diction was so funny and I just kept reading it finally I responded to him one day I said I know you mean to uh you know irritate me but I have to tell you your addiction is so funny I really get a kick out of these tweets he deleted his account I was kind of upset because I thought these are very funny tweets and sometimes people will make real criticisms you'll hear people say never read the comments I don't think I read the comments I don't read all of them obviously it waste your whole day but I do try to read some comments after that speech last night Franciscan I scrolled through the comments just to see and there was one really good criticism what was that in my speech so the premise of my speech for I I would hope the entire audience has already poured it down watched everywhere but the premise of the speech is uh science is fake in that it it just creates representations of the world that do not correspond as well to reality these are the old ones right so uh a classic example would be to look up the scientific definition of a kiss you know what I mean like that is not at all right what a kiss is and right or you might mistakenly believe that it is the true definition of a kiss but human beings no different what does that mean it's the objective definition you know these sort of lips slurping on each other yeah that's not quite it or what is a woman I mean that's the question that everyone seems to be talking about what is a woman the scientific answer is a woman has two X chromosomes my answer is a woman is sugar and spice and everything nice the latter is more accurate the latter tells you more about what a woman actually is than 2x chromosomes I don't know what that means yeah what is man's position in the universe the ancient view is the man is the center of the universe the the scientific view is that man is this little dot on a rock circling this ball of gas in this galaxy in the supercluster in a super cluster in a supercluster complex man is the center of the universe is more accurate because man is the Nexus of the of the physical world and the metaphysical world through his rational Soul we're the only being in this world that has that right animals have bodies but they don't have a rational Soul that's why we don't put kittens on trial for scratching people and you know ideas exist and they have great power but they aren't bodies Angels and Demons exist and they have great power but their own bodies we are that Nexus we actually are at the center of the universe and you see this perfectly in the Incarnation right then incarnation of Jesus Christ is that is that perfect meaning and you see this in in the sacraments so that tells you more about what things really are and and so at that point people say well no no but Michael the difference is literally speaking literally uh man is on this ball circling in the middle of nowhere in space I said well is that literally true what do you mean by literally and this was where the criticism came in I said you're saying literally to mean not figuratively not symbolically but there's a problem because the word literal is a paradox because literal refers to letters which are symbols right and so I don't I really don't know what you mean when you say literally or figuratively my view of the world is a semiotic view I think everything has meaning and so you can for you to tell me no I'm talking about the things without meaning well that's nothing everything is meaning and the criticism was Michael you dummy you have confused signs and symbols and that's why your speech falls apart sign is a something that signify that denotes a signified a sign has a direct relation to what it represents that's why signs or languages in in themselves like a stop sign or like letters and words whereas a symbol you see is that which connotes the symbolized meaning it has a less direct relationship to bring it to Earth a sign is commonly understood by everybody the meaning of it a symbol is not necessarily commonly understood different people can have different interpretations of symbols which is a really really good criticism you get to scroll through 8 000 comments to get an intelligent amazing though I mean that's a great but the reason that criticism Falls flat is because of the rest of the speech because the premise is off that criticism would have been true in another time in another place when people had common language when those signs of letters and words really did have a direct relation to where Representatives understood by everybody the problem with our time is we no longer have a Common Language so they the word woman does not denote yes woman it's it has it has ceased to be a sign and become a symbol that is now controversial man same thing so so because of the breakdown of language that no longer holds up but I thought wow I'm so grateful for that criticism because it at least made me think to work through the that distinction which I would would not have given much thought to and it actually helped me to make sense of my own thoughts and that is true that happened to be a beautifully written criticism but it's true of all of them it's true of even hey Knowles stop talking like that stop using that dumb word hey hey Knowles you look like a jerk hey that actually makes me think oh maybe I need to button my jacket oh maybe I need to but but I mean surely you have people in your life who do a better job giving you these criticisms than having to scour through YouTube comments some yeah I mean is that the advantage of having a team around you at the daily wire who get to tell you like don't say that again or are they not as micromanaging yeah they're not as micromanaging and and sometimes people are wrong too you know and committees rarely uh do anything good individuals often have good perceptions and insights committees not so much uh so yeah obviously they're close people in my life that I turn to for that sort of advice but I also turned to the trolls on Twitter because the the trolls on Twitter have no care for my feelings they actually want to hurt my feelings and so sometimes you get blunter harsher more precise criticism from them very good let's take a quick break Neil and then when we come back I've got some Stellar questions and we might have some questions from our locals too all right hey I want to take a break to say thank you to two of our sponsors the first being hello which you've obviously heard of by now it's the best most downloaded Catholic app ever I think it is a prayer and meditation app so if you're looking to learn how to pray the rosary or if you want to listen to sleep stories if you want to do Bible studies if you want to have Mark Wahlberg pray the rosary with you hallow.com Matt frad we have a link in the description below by signing up at that link you'll get three months for free so if you want to go try it for three months if you don't like it you can cancel you don't have to pay a cent but I think you'll really like it I have it on my phone my wife has it on hers I think this is changing the way people do adoration though I don't know about you but ever since Hallows become popular I go into adoration and people do have earbuds in they might be listening to Metallica but they might be listening to hello .com Matt frad the second thing I want to tell you about is Exodus 90 which is a 90-day aesthetical program for men to help you get your spiritual life in order it starts again this January so go to exodus90.com Matt click the link in the description below to learn more about it if you really do want to take your spiritual life to the next level seriously consider Exodus 90 for 90 days you give up things that you'd rather not give up like warm showers and happiness and then you that's you can still be happy but you have to take on things that maybe you don't get do like praying a holy hour every day so go check them out exodus90.com Matt and you and a few guys for 90 days can go through this grueling but very rewarding process together uh people who've been through it say that it's really blessed their marriages their their lives their spiritual lives Exodus 90.com Matt person it was so it was such an honor to be with him but uh yeah are you liking Nashville I love Nashville yeah I would did not expect myself to live in Nashville what was that like when the news came down that y'all had to leave La all right by the way do you want some bourbon or is it too early Matt that's Matt here's the thing for you I will make an exception It's Five O'Clock in Rome right at least anyway so uh yeah what are we drinking this is from my good friend Andrew here who's over here and this is Jefferson's Reserve all right thank you I hope you don't think less of me if I add a splash of water not at all if I had ice I'd use it um yeah what was that like when it came down the pike that y'all had to move to Nashville that was great or did you know that you were moving and not yet know which state we had talked about moving for years just because we knew California was coming to an end it will either break off into the sea or just be decimated in a shower of fire and brimstone so you know good old Gamora by the Sea there in Los Angeles and the the real turning point was covid where we said we can't stay here and my wife at the time was six months pregnant seven months pregnant and we we lived in this nice little apartment and we needed a bigger apartment obviously with the kid and but it was a nice really nice neighborhood Brentwood in in La where she could go on these walks in beautiful residential areas and very far away from everyone so she's walking one day and she's on one side of the street there's some guy on the other side of the street sunshiny La never a rainy day beautiful temperate and this man yells at her and says you need to put your mask on yeah this is my wife my wife at this point is very petite woman she's at this point wider than she is tall because she's got this giant baby in her and she's you know sort of hobbling up just to get a bit of exercise what and we we never locked down I mean I think the company had to send people home by the law in California but I didn't do it I made it I was 36 hours at home Jeremy didn't spend one day at home he just went back to the office and I I called him and I said bro I gotta come I can't I'm not getting work done we live in this shoebox apartment I'm waking up at 6am to do the show waking my wife I'm not doing this it's like yeah come back of course and so we never really locked down we said we need we need we're doing something here this is this is hard to churn up a business like this so the options were Texas Nashville or Florida that's where everybody was going yeah and uh they they asked me where do you want to go and I said well given those choices I would say Nashville and they said good that's where we're leaning I said damn I just ruined my negotiating position and then it was fast I said I said because I was looking to buy a house I said so should I buy a house don't buy a house he goes when are we going to move to Nashville he goes like two weeks pack your bags I was like okay pal and we did wow the flight Yeah final day I was invited to host the Rush Limbaugh Show actually it's the end of his he was dying yeah and so I did it it was the last thing I did in LA and uh I was gonna host it more but I had a radio contract of my own kicking in on a rival Network a few days later so it was Bittersweet and then I would have liked to would like to keep doing this show but wrapped The Rush Limbaugh Show got in a car went to the airport left and have not looked back wow and and I mean we used to live in San Diego uh but is it is it true this Mass Exodus have you found that to be true in your own life everyone you know is something to move or many of them when I was moving out of L.A I couldn't find moving tape I would go to the moving shops they would say we're sold out no way yeah and the other thing was you couldn't get U-Hauls because they weren't coming back yeah and so the weird thing about Nashville is I thought well I'm leaving all my friends but I wasn't first of all 80 of daily wire moved with us we told the the staff you can stay you can go but that's what's happening 80 said we're leaving and since then many of my friends either for the daily wire or just for other reasons have moved to Nashville so we didn't lose any we lost the beach and we lost the sunshine and we gained the Sweet Air of Freedom do you find that many people in Nashville are aware that daily wire has moved uh and for the most part are they supportive or do you have your haters there very supportive when people would come up to me in La it was usually friendlies usually sometimes not but usually it was and uh 70 30. in Nashville everybody's cool everybody is on the team because the other the other thing is in Nashville and Texas and Florida you'll hear the locals say Don't You California my state right leave your values at the door but you don't need to worry about us okay the people who are moving you're really seeing just a balkanization of the country the the conservatives are moving to the red States the Liberals are staying in or moving to the blue states and it's fine by me yeah I wanted to ask you how your Catholicism affects how you comment on the news uh and on politics you know I was reading what Thomas Aquinas had to say about detraction the other day and I thought to myself isn't that 95 of what you do like you kind of speak ill of people and even if you're right how can you as a Christian justify doing that I try not to I I'm sure I've done it plenty of times but I I actually try not to it's very common in the conservative commentaria to just say so and so it's a big dumb stupid evil idiot and I hate this person or whatever I I don't do that for that reason is because I just don't want to have to go to confession every day and uh so yeah keep going sir I I try to I try to take a little bit more of a sympathetic approach to these people you know these poor AOC is a wounded Soul she really is a wounded soul and and so we should uh criticize her rightly but but not be gratuitous or cruel or mean or anything like that and do you find that's a continual balancing act that sometimes you think went too far or no I mean I think it uh in some ways I'd have a bigger show if I were more willing to call people dumb stupid idiots but yeah my other handicap as a conservative pundit is that I don't really get angry I get angry about three times a year it happened yesterday actually I was at TSA and I had this lighter not this exact one but very similar as a pipeliner okay so it had these little doodads in it and the thing about pipeliners is it's a soft flame cigar lighters have that jet flame this is a soft light you cannot take a jet flame on an airplane you can take a soft flame and this TSA I didn't realize that yeah yeah she found my oh and they got rid of my pre-check didn't go through so I had to go you know in the long line where they're digging through all your stuff and this person just wanted to take my lighter and and the guy pulls it out this woman she says you can't have that on the plane I said I can I'm just telling you I know for a fact I've flown on this very Airline twice in the last five days that is TSA complex because no it's not it is actually no it's not no it's not back and forth back and forth and she goes to the supervisor and the supervisor said yeah that's fine she's so angry at this thing I gotta get this lighter from him and so they say well I'm not joking I said well this this doodad here this could be a knife yeah kid this one knife it's a pipe cleaner is it what could I do I couldn't break my own skin with this I said no it's not you can I said it's I promise you this is fine and luckily the supervisor let me through oh she did so you kept it I did keep it I was not leaving without it I would have shut down that airport I was not sometimes but so that aside and I I actually the whole time I was thinking of the headlines on daily wire right now yeah it all shuts down here it all shuts down airport over pipe lighter and I I was so and at the time I was thinking don't lose your temper because then you will have to go to confession like tomorrow and then it's just don't do it you know because I dread the loss of Heaven in the Pains of hell but I also don't want to offend you Lord and so don't you know on the bridge of my seat but that happens rarely I I really don't get angry in in politics and in conservative media you either have to be extremely funny or extremely angry that's usually the real interesting and I I say with no false modesty I don't think I'm extremely either of those things and but but whatever even if it costs me some views I am conscious of that because one it doesn't suit my disposition but but two you know don't don't call another man raqqa or he'll be he'll be like you'll be liable to the fire well I mean that's right and and yet I I unders I mean I'm so glad daily wire exists I think one of the things daily wire does is it reminds those of us who listen that we're not the insane ones who are being continually gaslit by the left uh you come in and remind us actually no you're right here don't worry you know and here's why you're right oh thank God I thought I was insane you know yep so I so I understand I guess why we have to comment on these things and I suppose what would be the justification for calling somebody out perhaps if somebody says something publicly it now is in the public domain and can be can be refuted publicly and also this was almost certainly apocryphal but there is this Legend we have which has a lot of Truth value to it that uh Saint Nicholas Santa Claus you know goes up and smacks areas across the face and I think that can be a good thing but it was a corrective slap according to the legend he wasn't slugging him you know his corrective slap and so we should give corrective slaps and we should speak the truth in love but we should speak the truth as well and uh I think if you do so in a calm way maybe you even laugh a little bit about it I think that can be pretty effective and I don't think there's anything immoral about doing that I mean when when uh Balenciaga runs an ad for their products that it alludes to child pornography I think we should say this is evil and the people who are doing this are really confidential these are they're doing really evil things and they really need to cut it out so how do you think how does your Catholicism affect how you comment on politics just just in the way you've said yet yes and it broadens it out in in the way that John Henry Newman said uh to read history is to cease to be Protestant which I try not to say on the show I don't want to be too mean to the you know how beautiful we're often doing a better job than weak athletes that's right right but what really helps there is conservatives are very reactive to everything you know we mock the left for calling everyone a Nazi but we do it too sometimes and uh people make two historical comparisons ever Hitler and the fall of Rome that's it that's it that's the only it was the only events that ever happened in history and the thing is people who only make those two historical comparisons don't understand those two things either but you know if you don't have any sort of sense of History then uh your your like you're liable to make really sort of shallow fashionable observations and claims about politics but if you're Catholic you know things are very complicated you know and there's so a good example of this we're talking about Free Speech earlier is it became really fashionable over the last five years for conservatives to adopt this free speech absolutist position I did not fall into that whereas many other conservatives did and I did not fall into that in part because I'm a Catholic you know we have a list of banned books okay I know that uh we mock book burning as the greatest of all evils there's book burning in the book of Acts you know people ban their sorcery books I know that Plato advocated Banning the books of of his uh philosophical Rivals and I know that there's a position to be there's a good argument for restricting certain views I mean Saint Thomas Aquinas that Heretics ought to be executed you know so that that does not uh I I haven't you know called for AOC to be executed because of her horrible political views but it just it it shows you that things are a little bit more complicated than whatever stupid five-point Manifesto you read on the back of a napkin these days and and there's there's a good argument for standards and for suppressing things I mean if if you're a Catholic you believe that error has no rights and I know we're not supposed to say that anymore because we're marrying ourselves to the spirit of the age but if you marry yourself to the spirit of the age you'll find yourself a widow in the next stage and so an argument for Catholicism Beyond you know uh the prospect of heaven and living heaven on Earth is also it will protect you from from the errors of passing fashions um who's more likely to convert Ben Shapiro or Dennis Prager if you had to put money on it I would have said Dennis because Dennis Dennis is what a lovable guy by the way I don't know anything about him I've watched a few videos I just think I would love to have a cigar with this fella it is a wonderful experience to have a cigar with Dennis breaker one time we were having a cigar and Drew and I were trying to convert him and he said now fellas I have a great deal of respect for Christians I hold views that many Christians hold but I have to tell you this Grace thing this Heaven thing I cannot do it I said Dan what do you mean Heaven Heaven's your problem raises you no fellas you Christians have this idea that you do not earn heaven I said well that's true you know we do work to cooperate with God's grace and other things but yeah that's true we don't earn our Salvation yes that will not work for me fellas I am a capitalist I believe in earning things okay that's a tough one to get over and it's okay and then Ben has has read quite a lot and when he was writing one of his books a few years ago he got really into Thomas Aquinas so this is good it's amazing you're really into CS Lewis What specifically was he reading in these authors the Suma it was really yeah but what specifically I mean this is right yeah I don't I don't remember what specifically he was reading for his book and then Lewis he read a lot of Lewis Christianity but lots and lots of Lewis and we thought all right Ben are we going to get you but I don't know I mean it would be difficult because Ben has a fairly rigorous and systematic religious thought uh and so it's it's not that he doesn't know why he thinks what he thinks yeah and because there's such a cultural component to it you know but we're working on it hope springs eternally yeah well it was great to see him have Ed fazer on the show you know it's funny for all the criticism Ben gets um online among even Catholics and and Christians I mean here he is hiring two out and out Catholics and giving Ed fazer a platform and there's the other thing you know occasionally we'll see some comment from probably some bot or troll or something that says how how dare you Catholics work for that dirty rotten Jew Ben Shapiro I think well you know that dirty rotten Jew Ben Shapiro has given quite a platform to Christians and they don't tell me what to say they never say you know Michael uh you need to drop this tenet of your faith I think you know if if Ben is this great oppressor or suppressor of Christians he's certainly not doing a very good job failing in this company is overwhelmingly Catholic and almost entirely Christian and so I I just that but the criticism of Ben really is because he's successful that's what it comes from you know yes people disagree with this views I disagree with lots of things you know all of us at Daily wire bicker all the time but the reason he gets the hate that he gets is because he's the we call it dog tool poppy syndrome in Australia you know if you're doing well we need to cut you down so you come back down here with us yeah that's right yeah yeah good for him I remember when he was on a Dave rubin's show back in the day Dave said well I'm certainly not in the top one percent you know financially and Ben's like oh I am I'm super proud of that that's fantastic good for him and the other the other thing about Ben also because he was so grounded when he really became a sensation it has not gotten to him that's why he can say oh yeah I'm super rich now yeah oh yeah I just bought a new car it's great I love my new car he can say it because he doesn't fall into false modesty yeah he doesn't fall into you know my mother washed more floors for less money than your mother did he says yeah it's amazing can you believe this but Ben is still a guy who carries his own suitcase you know which is not true of most guys who become really big we have some questions here from our locals supporter I've basically moved pretty much over from patreon to locals have you it's been a much more speaking of ourselves that's right no I I actually love Dave he he I think that's one thing Cameron you'd probably say of both Dave and Knowles well you enjoy listening to them more than others is you do have this sort of light-hearted you know you said you're not especially angry and yeah there's a big market for that actually because I hope you don't listen to anger for so long before you kind of get burned out on it and I just can't do it I mean I I bet I would have a bigger show I think maybe not but I think I would have a bigger show if I got angrier but it would just be so false yeah it just is I just got to be who you are you really do yeah and there's that line from Chesterton you know the angels can fly because they can take themselves slightly right well let's see we'll just scroll through here now I haven't read these questions ahead of time so apologies for any that uh we'll see Michael says Veritas do you think the time spent on your hair is sinful or is it a manifestation of God's glory well I just reject the premise time spent on my hair I wake up like this like this right and so therefore because it has no human artifice to it obviously a manifestation of God's glory uh Wilhelm says Michael do you and Matt Walsh go to the same church yes and no uh Matt was coming to our church wonderful Latin Mass Parish in in Nashville but Matt loves to live in the Hinterlands Matt I mean when we first started working with him he was living in the woods somewhere near an fssp Parish actually and he was doing a show in his car yeah and so Matt lives his house is so far away and so I think often he will go to a church that's nearer to his but and the other problem with our Parish right now in Nashville is we don't have a church because it got blown away by it yeah George was saying that in my interview with him it's amazing yes because George Candace's husband and I uh go to the same church yeah and we meet in the upper room we we meet up it's just very biblical thank you Rob Rob has brought us some Port here to drink some important did you know that I I'm a port fanatic that's exactly why I brought it I love it I love it it's not true I didn't know that at all but we'll have some all right and we'll carry you back to the car that's good yeah uh Devlin says I have followed Michael since he did reviews on Andrew Clavin show I really appreciate the work they all do at Daily wire thank you for your Catholic faith oh thank you there's no question Michael says does it bother you Michael that daily wire plus hosts blatantly anti-catholic content targeted at children I am specifically referring to prageru history for kids episode about Galileo unrelated side note well it's let's not do the unrelated side note because that was a pretty intense question yeah content but but curious that that question would be raised about prageru because I I have a show on prageru which is also hosted on daily wire plus called the book club and we covered Galileo so I did uh what is it that two World Systems the sort of famous Galileo book and I was pretty harsh on Galileo actually so I don't know who did the video for prageru but uh you know you're also not a Catholic company when prayer use early isn't it it certainly right I would think that like the diversity among the commentators is actually a strength of yours like you said earlier you can kind of find yourself in there yeah of course even with uh Candace and uh her relationship with yay and the things he said recently I mean in some companies Candace might be fired by an insecure boss who doesn't want her disagreeing with yeah I mean goodness the way that they handled that all of the guys at the company and especially Ben obviously because he's the guy with the yamicon I thought it was just masterful and she said yeah I disagree with Candace I disagree with Kanye but she's he said the the multiplicity of views is a feature not a bug of the daily wire and so I I think yeah I'm sure I disagree with plenty of people who are on daily well I know I disagree with plenty of people on daily wire and Prager you but uh I don't know they let me talk right they let me so I I think what more do you want do you have people who try to keep their finger on the pulse as far as here's what YouTube will ban you for don't don't trip over this wire oh yeah well we all know it a team to tell me that we all know what that is I mean the social media companies told us but it feels like you flirt with that line frequently and I'm glad for it I'm glad you do it yeah I do because I I mean what would happen if Michael Knowles got banned tomorrow from YouTube the world would collapse what would we do it it uh Shapiro would have to quit he would have to quit find a different joke he would quit in disgust at the Banning of me uh I do flirt with the line more I am I am drawn like a moth to a flame to to that line I had episodes of my show taken down because of the big Tech censorship uh especially during covid when some of us knew early on that it was all a political operation and then a lot of the claims that were being made about covid were just ridiculous and so I had episodes taken down but people didn't tell me Michael how dare you say that they would just say okay you got to say that in the member section yeah because the the you what you will not be able to say it period that's the that's the world we live in and that's not unique to our times that's been true for all of history Haley says when you write Michael do you spend a crazy amount of time editing and whittling the thoughts down or is it generally easy to construct and organize your thoughts before putting pen to paper figuratively I am such a slow writer so I don't spend as much time editing I spend ages writing and and I'm I I refuse uh ghost writers which is common in the industry but I refuse any ghost writers or I even refuse much editing though I have editors but I I just I reject a lot of the edits because I really I am obsessive about addiction and syntax and prose and I want to precisely uh say exactly what I'm going to say so the downside of that is my output is relatively low I've only written one book my colleagues have written like a thousand but but I I make sure that pretty much every syllable is exactly what I want to say do you feel that do you find that do you feel pressure like you got to keep cranking up oh yeah yeah I totally fail at it yeah but I don't I don't care I mean I I Publishers have pitched me so many books that they want me to write some of which might have been fine yeah I just think no I had this other problem going into writing which is that I got notoriety for a blank book and so I just knew have you been thinking sorry yeah no I have you been thinking like we needed another book like this what else can we another anniversary edition yeah the the critical Norton Edition I just knew ioc's brilliant insights into politics or something Joe Biden's you know brain or something I knew going into writing a real book the bar would be much higher for me because the headline wrote itself right Noel should stick to what he knows go back to his first genre right and so yeah there's there is an intense pressure but I I think of a guy like Owen Barfield actually who keeps coming up yeah he didn't publish a ton uh but his books really count and I think I'd much rather write five books that really count than 20 books that are yeah you know some things come up a couple of times in this interview that I've just loved and I'm going to reflect on more and more and that's this idea of giving people an off ramp right like how do we love those who like us have been raised in this Society you know and sometimes I'm afraid that those struggling with gender dysphoria are like the children of uh fighting parents who are just yelling at each other but the child gets overseen how do we tend to their needs and and genuinely love them and seek to help them while at the same time excoriating the insane worldview well they're not they're not just like the children of fighting parents they usually are the children of fighting parents were kind of broken homes or in a way we all are in this this culture where the family has collapsed so a yes I go back to Porsche's monologue from The Merchant of Venice which will probably get me canceled like Kanye you know that they're all you know all those accusations about that play but she says no justice be thy plea consider this in the course of Justice none of us should see salvation and and so you know you you really do have to look at that and say there but for the grace of God go I and try to give people uh you know the grace that you would like to see extended to you yeah uh let's see here I am says I don't know if it's the great I am but it's the Lesser I am says I still think my favorite brand is Southern draw maybe because it's a Texas have you had Southern draw no it's an excellent cigar I thought I'd had every cigar ever made I'll give you some to go um yes it's really good I think I think it's a Nicaraguan made I think based in in Dallas what's your favorite cigar what do you if you Cuban or non-cuba uh I know we're not allowed let's do both let's do you know when I was here with George farmer I hope he doesn't mind me saying this he was sitting there I was sitting here we're smoking he's like do you like that cigar because he brought me a hole I'm like yeah this is great that's about eight hundred dollars my gosh I'm The Godfather to George's okay yeah so we fly to London and George he he doesn't really drink usually he doesn't but his real expensive taste is cigars he has only the very best and always Cuban so we're sitting there after the baptism after the dinner and we're sitting here and he says let's have some cigars and he pulls out bahike 52s explain this to me I don't know this is probably about an 800 cigar and he pulled out how everybody he had three or four passes them out one for me one for him and I know that only he and I knew what this cigar was and everyone else just smoking that Swisher sweet they probably would have thought the same thing but to you know life is very short potentially shortened by these though I actually think that cigars have great health benefits and we'll get back to that we'll get back to that in a second but I think life is too short to smoke bad cigars not saying that you or I should purchase but here's my theory right when it comes to Whiskey when it comes to Cigars boys don't enjoy whiskey nor should they but I mean like 18 year olds and 20 year olds you know and when they finally develop a taste for it they immediately become pretentious and try to buy the most expensive bottles they can but what I think would be helpful is if we all began with really bad cigars so we could then tell the difference because when you start with excellent cigars where do you go it killed me my first cigar was a Cuban cigar a cheaper Cuban I'm gonna Cuban and so I went in and I loved it right away I hate I'd never smoked cigarettes never got into pot but I loved cigars and it is tough I would be a much richer man had I not started with good cigars yeah I agree with you on the the whiskey stuff I don't I'm just not sophisticated enough so I'll go cheap on Whiskey relatively cheap on wine my my thought is that all Bourbons are identical and anybody who tells you different is just lying so I like to buy the kind of bourbon where one liter is actually bigger than the brand because that's their selling point but it's a liter of cheap 12 bourbon I think all Bourbons are the same so I think the plastic that's the higher end that's what you want with a grip on it so you don't doesn't easily slip out but Scotch is not that's not true I mean lagavorn is the greatest Scotch yes I someone gave me a bottle of Macallan 18. yeah and I'm sipping it very slowly but I did have this thought for people who don't know anything about whiskey once I finish it I've got to pour the swill into that and then I pour it to people and they'll think they're having a wonderful would that be immoral would it be a lie is the question because I would suppose that lying is always immoral maybe if you didn't tell them necessarily and just said this is really quite good this is quite good you put anything in a crystal decanter yes and it's great that's right yeah that's right yeah so health benefits of cigars I smoke probably a cigar a day I'm about there yeah and which what what's your response to criticisms about that does it relax you does it allow you to contemplate things do you smoke alone or do you smoke with other people I usually smoke in the morning do you I much prefer a morning cigar over coffee than a night cigar so I usually am alone here yeah I like it very much I love cigars but this is very enjoyable yeah I mean a good conversation I I read somewhere it was one of those quotes in a cigar lounge somewhere that a cigar is as good as the experience you're having while you're smoking and sometimes we can have good experiences alone but I like it with people too so probably 60 40 alone and with people but the cigars are very good because they allow you to contemplate eternity they do there's a great song by The Mills Brothers where do they go these smoke rings I blow each night where do they fade these Circles of blue and white oh smoke rings I love please take me above take me with you so very good thank you I'm gonna have some Port here I know I've got to catch up you go to they do that and also this is not an original idea but I'll claim it for myself I'm sure I read it in first things or something cigars like other forms of smoked tobacco correspond to the tripartite soul let's do it so the pipe as I use this pipe lighter then I see a pipe over there nice Merchant pipe corresponds to the logical part of the Soul right you see it's got the joint of the masculine and The Feminine the masculine stem the feminine Bowl you you think of the professor smoking the pipe the philosopher attempts it it's a very involved experience the cigarette corresponds to the appetitive part of the Soul right I need it now should I need it give it give me give me it and the cigar corresponds to the Thematic part of the soul the cigar corresponds to that spirited part the chest the cigar is is frankly more about what you blow out than what you take in you don't inhale a cigar ordinarily and so I I like that's why I'm drawn I've tried pipes barely tried cigarettes but the cigar really does it and I think to quote Winston Churchill I've taken more out of cigars than cigars have taken out of me I like it Tobacco is a dirty weed I like it it satisfies no normal need I like it it makes you sick it makes you lean it takes the hair right off your bead it's the worst damn stuff I've ever seen I like it yeah very good I do too I remember the first time I smoked to see my my father-in-law was a big cigar smoker and uh I remember once love my wife left with the kids to shoot somewhere overnight I thought I'm gonna get a good cigar I'll sit out the front and smoke this is the first time I really smoked a cigar and I didn't realize how old were you tall 25 26 I didn't realize just how sick you could get from a cigar but I now know so now at the first hint of a head rush I put the cigar down I've learned my lesson I started smoking cigars at 15. down the Jersey Shore with a bottle of port and I didn't think I would like it and I really did like it and I I really got into it I wrote my college essay about how much I love cigars did you it's called The Count of Monte Cristo oh fantastic I found out later the the admissions Department debated whether or not to let a guy in who wrote but that's not something I care about quite a lot started cigar clubs you know and all these sorts of things and uh well I I'm a fan of anything that forces people to sit even uh board games when people sit down for multiple hours and look at each other and there's no screens involved I'm a fan totally and by the way if we're debating you know whether it's immoral or something because it's uh unhealthy some argue obviously not me uh let's not forget the many Saints and popes who've used tobacco Saint Philip nieri one of the arguments from The Devil's Advocate against his canonization was that his body was not corrupt you know what because he was missing part of his nose part of the symptom yeah why was he because he took so much nasal snuff during his lifetime it was not that it had been corrupted after he died it was during his life that's amazing you think about Pope Benedict I think the man still smokes Marlboro Reds he's like a thousand years old he still smokes fired by me well I think we should all smoke in moderation and by that I mean no more than one at a time honestly I think more than one at a time is probably excessive yeah yeah I mean even sweet little Lisa hates it but she she knows it is actually an important part of my day because I smoke at night and I sit out well now it's freezing in Nashville but I try I said I'll put earmuffs on sit out and I have a book and it's I try to do it every night maybe it's more like four or five times a week but I do it it's the only time I get to read I get to think I get to look at it and it's a commitment isn't it you like that cigar you're now there for an hour hour and a half yeah you can't rush your cigar right right and without it too it's it's important for my job in that if all I do is read the news I'm going to have some stupid reactive take to whatever you know they just pass this bill or whatever if I sit out at night and I read I don't know whatever Dante or I read I like reading poetry but it could be stranger poetry it could be or it could be just some bizarre book about whatever that will inform my commentary you know um these guys keep cropping up we talk about Chesterton or Lewis or belloch or Barfield or whoever they they have informed my political commentary much more than yeah I don't know even Thomas so I like Thomas so it's not a knock on your soul but it they have informed my commentary frankly probably more than Edmund Burke or people like that so what do you do to relax then how do you because I would imagine in your job Twitter is an essential part of your job you kind of have to be yeah it's going to add quote tweeting people it's going to add 10 million years to Purgatory for me Shapiro told me to that's right and just to interject here talking about cigars slowing things down we're right at two o'clock okay thank you yeah we'll wrap up here and then we're gonna do a bonus section for our local supporters that'll be the port section that's gonna be the port session and I'm going to ask you three questions that I think would get us banned on YouTube so mathfred.locals.com support become a supporter to watch the video great now obviously everybody uh is familiar with you probably who watches my show but maybe for those who aren't how can they find the stuff that you do the Michael Knowles show for now oh you've probably gotten me banned during this conversation yeah you can find me on Twitter at Michael J Knowles if you can find me at of course at the daily wire at michaeljnolls.com I sort of list all the stuff that I do there uh you can find my books on Amazon again for now I don't I don't know how long that's going to last uh and and you could find me at Chesterton Cigar Bar smoking a cigar and I would say like you know I think it is important that people support daily wire I you didn't ask me to do this obviously but I do think it's important I mean whether or not you agree with everything that daily wire is putting out like don't you want to invest in a company that's at least trying to push back and has the has the wherewithal to push back against the the big the big Tech Giants well this is I always get into big debates with Jeremy over Ein Rand he loves Iran I think it's the worst book ever written and he just adores it and the Insight I have to hand it to Jeremy I have to hand it to Ein Rand is that you need to have money okay money talks and Bs walks when we're talking about politics okay and and on the right the model had been non-profit you just whine whine whine and you raise money and then you raise money and then you lose so that you can wind some more and raise some more money you saw a lot of this in some of the way Republicans would raise money on pro-life issues they usually wouldn't want abortion to be banned or often would not want abortion to be banned because that would hurt their fundraising right there's this horrible perverse incentive to lose and or you'd have some cable networks that were just bundled up and whatever they just give you schlock Jeremy and Daly wire have made a point we need to make money we need to make one dollar more than we spend so when we put out movies I did a documentary on Dr fauci Candace just did a documentary on George Floyd Matt did the documentary on what is a woman but we have all this content out there and people will say well you have to put it out for free you're Dr fauci documentary you've got to put it out for free because it's so important that I said okay I could put it out for free then there's no more content you have to support it you have to put your money where your mouth is I do it you know luckily they give me a free subscription to daily wire but I do it with plenty of other organizations yeah you know I but I support those organizations where I want to see more of this and so far the business model of conservatism especially in the culture has worked and it's worked Beyond most people's wildest imaginations and so hand over that Mammon please you don't even need the Mammon by the way you know give to Caesar what does Caesar give to God what is God said give to Jeremy what is Jeremy very good very good well brother thank you so much it's been an absolute pleasure pleasure is mine I want to go for like six hours because I know Sheamus Coughlin he what did he do five hours I was just over four maybe four and a half four I guess it was Joy please it was George 17 hours or something 17 hours exactly I think that's brutal and I'm like a little boy here we've only done what we'll have to do is we'll have to we'll have to fly down with our equipment to Nashville and sit in George's uh man cave and they'll have a week-long show try to do a week-long show yeah we each take naps one at a time all right pleasure thank you thank you

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 566,197

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: 6mNnyt21NHw

Length: 128min 28sec (7708 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022