Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Did you see that Kanye West just released a video, a y- music video for his song, "Heil Hitler"? 0:18 Who? Kanye West. I don't know her. There's a, a y- a, a YouTube video for the song "Heil Hitler." It's actually very catchy, unfortunately. 0:28 How did we get to this point where this, one of the biggest stars in the world, one of the people that people call, like, a music genius, is now making songs titled that and about that kind of content? 0:39 I mean, it's called mental illness, and the reason I'm being shady to Kanye is because it really pains me to my core to see the way he is going out so sadly. Like, I'm from Chicago. I'm from South Side Chicago. 0:51 As a kid, I used to think that I was Kanye. Like, Kanye is one of the absolute GOATs, undisputed legend, and to see him take this toll on his own career is really sad. 1:03 I mean, he's been on a steady decline for a while, especially ever since his mother died. He started, you know, drinking more, doing drugs more, allegedly, hanging out with P. Diddy. P. 1:14 Diddy has always been a toxic individual. It's not something that's new. So all of this going on has been problematic. 1:20 And then, you know, I don't know if you've heard about the whole woke right thing, and not to get too political too quickly, but, you know, when it comes to this woke right, and you look at some of the shady characters that Kanye had been hanging out with, a couple that I'm not even gonna name, 'cause I don't want these people coming after me at this point. 1:35 I don't have the time for it this week. He started hanging out with some shady characters who really like to push this idea that he has to be as erratic as possible in order to get his point across. 1:49 It's sad to see that he's taken the bait. 1:52 We're gonna talk about the woke right in a second, because I've been totally obsessed with, like, following and trying to figure out exactly what woke right means, who it entails, why it's happening. 2:00 But one of the interesting things about the whole Kanye saga is that once Kanye went off the rails, he had those first set of tweets about, like, the Holocaust and about going after Jews and Death Con and all that stuff. 2:11 I notice that people still listen to Kanye, and, like, if you go somewhere and, like, people are partying, there's still Kanye songs that are playing. What does that say about our, like, society? 2:20 Does it mean that we're just, like, disassociating the artist and, like, the crazy stuff that they say, or is there, like, something deeper there? I have gone back and forth on this for a while. 2:30 A lot of the times I'll just skip a Kanye song because as I'm listening to him, I can't help but think about how disappointed I am as a longtime, lifelong fan. 2:38 When it comes to art, there is a level of being able to differentiate the art from the artist. 2:43 I would be lying to you if I sat here and said that if I heard Kanye West classics, like, I wouldn't still sit there and vibe. 2:50 I can't sit here and pretend like I haven't loved this artist for so long, but at the same time, it's like, I don't subscribe to the ideology, obviously, that Kanye West has. 2:57 Would I run and listen to a new album of his at this point? No, but the music that I already have a relationship with, the mu- like, I'm not going to allow him to take that away from me. 3:06 The joy that I have gotten from a lot of his hit songs, I'm not gonna take that away. Am I going to promote a Kanye West song anytime soon? No. 3:14 So I don't think that it's necessary for people to go so out of their way as to never listen to him again. It's important to realize this is not someone that we used to look up to in the same way. 3:27 Kanye used to be one of those people, not only did I listen to his music, I would love to hear his cultural commentary. 3:32 I would love to know what Kanye thought about certain situations or what he thought about fashion or what he thought about all these different things that transcend throughout culture. 3:40 But now, I would never seek his approval for anything or his guidance for anything or his perspective on anything. I have completely shut that part of my fan behavior of Kanye West. 3:53 Like, that's just totally gone for me, and I've realized just in general when it comes to celebrities, it's really important to stop subscribing to so much of their ideology. 4:02 As influential as they may be, you have to know that these are human beings, and sometimes human beings lose their absolute mind. 4:10 One of the things that we've seen in tandem with all this stuff, and you've been at the forefront of this, is young Americans moving towards the right, leaving the liberals and this whole vibe shift that's happening, especially on social media that you've been at the forefront of and leading. 4:23 What are you seeing now that there's, like, this woke right, which we can try to define in a second, but it looks like the right is now getting a little bit more complicated with what it believes. 4:31 Anti-Israel stuff, pro-Israel stuff, isolationism, stuff like that. Do you see people that are kind of joining your brand of conservatism, which I think is, like, more traditional in a way, right? 4:42 Rather than this more extreme woke right? The woke right has always been there. It's just now suddenly there's a buzzword that defines them. 4:51 It's this fringe side of the right that, and but it is growing in prominence, obviously. 4:55 And how I define woke right is people on the right, t- typically the far or the fringe right, who are displaying the same behaviors of the far and the fringe left, 'cause we all know the horseshoe theory. 5:07 If you don't, it's basically the further you go, whether it's further left or further right, it tends to horseshoe and become a mirror of each other, just from different, different perspectives, but same approach essentially. 5:19 So woke right behavior, typically it has to do with excessive cancel culture, refusing to fact-check, blatant hypocrisy, just refusing to examine anything with nuance. 5:30 And I say the way that you can tell that you're about to hear something that's woke right is you will usually hear it prefaced with the phrase, "If the roles were reversed," or, "If it was the other way around," because what that inherently is saying is that you are going to take the foundation and the approach and the mentality of the far left and use that as the standard of your own perspective. 5:51 And that's what we're seeing a lot of on this far fringe woke right. And what I will say to people is don't be too disheartened. I mean, it's definitely something to fight. 6:00 Like, it's something that frustrates me because my full-time job is being in the political commentary space. 6:06 So it's very frustrating for me as someone who has tried to bring more people from the left over to the sane side of the right, and then they're coming over, they go on Twitter, and then they see these woke right characters. 6:18 And the reality is, is most of these people are just online. Most of these people live in basements. They're fringe. They don't go outside or see air. 6:27 These are not people who actually you would interact with more often than not. These are the basement incels. That's how I describe them. 6:34 The people that you will meet out and about in public or, like, dur- during your day-to-day more often than not, if they are conservative or right-leaning, they're the more sane side of the right wing, and that's the side that's popular. 6:46 That's the side that's MAGA. That's the typical conservative is going to be somebody who is much more practical. The majority is still practical. The majority of the right is still right of center. 6:56 This far fringe woke right They might be the loudest, but they're s- they're surely not the majority. And it's the same thing with the left. 7:05 You meet your average liberal, your average person who leans left, they're not the radical leftist that you see online. 7:11 It's just the ones that are radical tend to be the loudest, so we can't allow the fringe side of either side to define that entire part of the spectrum. 7:20 When I was first getting into politics, what I was looking for was interesting things, and those interesting things kind of ended up being on the fringe, right? 7:28 So I would see, like, a normative type of political take, and I'd, like, scroll past it. That's not very interesting. 7:33 But as soon as I saw something that was, like, ridiculous and ou- clearly insane, then you'd have my attention, and I'd start, start looking into it. 7:39 And so when I put myself in, like, the shoes of these, like, young people that right now might be getting into politics and might be starting to pay attention after, like, the podcast election and all that stuff, and I go on Twitter and start looking through what people are saying, the woke right are saying some pretty crazy things. 7:53 It's picking up engagement. It's looks interesting. It's more different than regular mainstream political conversation. 8:01 Do you think that causes, like, a problem in terms of, like, these, this newer, younger generation maybe being attracted to that type of stuff? Or what do you think is gonna happen there? It definitely does. 8:11 It is very concerning because so many people are coming over to the right, and two things can possibly happen. There are going to be people who come to the right, and then they just go down that, 8:22 that rabbit hole and become the far fringe right because that is what's entertaining online. 8:27 Or there's going to be people who start to come over to the right, and this is where I think it's going to be more common if it doesn't get addressed properly, is a lot of the young people that are coming over to the right, they're going to see the far fringe right and be completely turned off and then go back to the left. 8:41 I always say as quickly as we won culture, we can lose culture 10 times faster. I need people to understand that reality. 8:49 The reason I feel like it- it's becoming such a problem right now with the woke right gaining prominence is because how the pendulum tends to work is when you are in a position where you are going against the grain, when your perspective starts to become the mainstream, the only way that these political commentators feel like they can maintain relevance is if they go more extreme or become more unhinged. 9:16 So for the last four or five years, it was against the grain to have any conservative views at all. If you simply said that there are only two genders, then you were edgy and cool. 9:26 If you said that BLM was a scam, then you were just like, "Wow," like, "You are so rebellious. How dare you?" 9:32 But now that people are realizing, yeah, the gender stuff went too far, yeah, BLM is factually objectively a scam, now that that has become the normal popular opinion and something that's a normalized discussion, a lot of these people felt like they were losing relevance. 9:47 They were losing views. They weren't getting the clicks that they were getting once upon a time. 9:50 So they've decided to go more fringe and more extreme in order to keep themselves in the headlines, and unfortunately, it's working. That's a fascinating way to look at it. 10:00 Seeing a lot of those people that did decide to kinda take that route, especially after October 7th, and maybe take a serious, like, anti-Israel, anti-Jew type of rhetoric on their podcasts, they got so many viewers. 10:12 They're still leading the podcast charts. 10:13 First of all, it's scary that so many people are actually tuning into that and taking that in as, like, serious content and conversation, and the fact that these people are making money off of it, and it's like there's a really great incentive structure for them to do that, is pretty wild. 10:26 Another thing that you've been at the forefront of is this Israel conversation, and you've been leading the conversation online about the rhetoric coming from the anti-Israel left and right. 10:36 What do you see is happening there? How did the right just start going anti-Israel? Is it the same thing? I think a lot of it is fringe. I'm at the point, I will almost entertain any conspiracy. 10:46 I'll at least look into it because so many conspiracies come true. But the unfortunate thing is, or I shouldn't say come true, they are true, but tend to be overlooked for a long time. 10:56 But a lot of people have taken it too far. A lot of people have just gotten so excited at the thought of a conspiracy. 11:03 You throw any conspiracy out there, and they just take it, and they run with it, and they don't fact-check. 11:08 They just go with whatever is gonna be more entertaining and whatever just in their mind in the moment tends to make sense. So a lot of people, unlike this far fringe right, they take conspiracies. They don't fact-check. 11:19 They don't look deeper into anything. They don't look objectively at the other side. They only try to research for confirmation bias. So a lot of people have just gone this more conspiracy theory route. 11:29 Then you also have the reality of, unfortunately, the truth is really hard to find. We may live in the age of information, but the truth tends to be really inaccessible a lot of the time. 11:39 I feel fortunate that I went to Israel, and I learned the reality of what was going on over there in the conflict before October 7th. Post-October 7th, you go online, it is so difficult to find accurate information. 11:53 You go on TikTok, for example, and you search Israel. 11:55 It's gonna talk all these different things about apartheids and about it being racist, and you'll see that they have Muslim quarters, and people will start saying, "Oh, the Muslim quarters are where the Muslims are forced to live." 12:06 People don't dare to go and actually look deeper into it and start to realize, "Oh, it's factually not an apartheid. Oh, there's Arabs that are in Israeli government. There... 12:16 Oh, like the Muslim quarters, it's not where Muslims have to live. There are people who aren't even Muslim who live there." 12:22 It's kinda like in America where you have places like Little Italy, Little Haiti, Chinatown, Koreatown. It's just a concentrated area of that culture. So people don't look deeper and at actual substance. 12:33 They just run with the narrative that is more convenient to either their conspiracy or to the confirmation bias that they already seek. 12:40 Tell me, like, what you saw in Israel that surprised you or made you look at the whole conflict differently. 12:46 What are your takeaways from being someone that was actually there and able to compare what you see in the news versus what you see there on the ground? There's two sides to that. 12:54 When I went before October 7th, I didn't really have much of a perspective of Israel. I was literally just there on vacation, and I was there to learn what the culture all, there was all about. 13:03 I didn't know much of the history or anything. 13:06 And one of the first things that shocked me was that I expected to see Israel be this extremely white country, the way that people would try to make the Israel-Palestinian conflict look as if it was white people versus Black people. 13:17 Then you get to Israel, it's 50 shades of brown over there. It's the most multicultural place I have ever seen. You hear so many languages. You see so many people interacting. You see so many Black people there. 13:27 You see Christians there. You see Muslims there. You see a lot more than just Jewish culture there. 13:32 That was really fascinating to me, and also realizing how cool and helpful people are there, and how out of their way Israelis will go to help someone that's visiting or sel- help their neighbor or anyone like that. 13:47 It's a different type of community there compared to anything I've seen in my entire life. 13:51 Then after October 7th, I still to this day think a lot of people don't realize how disgusting October 7th was, and how just brutal the attack was. You know, I went to the Gaza Envelope twice. I went to... 14:05 Or actually more than twice, but I went on two different trips. 14:08 I watched a 47-minute film, which is a compilation of different footage from October 7th, seeing how Hamas would call their family members, bragging about the fact that they just killed all these Jewish people, and bragging about the horrors, and graping people, and all the different things that they were doing. 14:24 You see just how deeply rooted the hatred is when you go there and you actually see the reality of everything that happened over there. 14:31 And I do wish more people were educated about it, because there's a lot of people who are vocal about the situation who still to this day don't even know what October 7th was. 14:39 You know, I tell this story often about when I, I snuck in with my friend Cam Higbie into the UCLA encampments that were happening a year ago. 14:47 There was a Zionist counter-protest that was on the outside of that encampment, and I saw these students going over and pushing the plywood apart and saying, "What is this video? 14:56 Like, is this the IDF bragging about what they did to Palestinians?" They had no idea what it was. 15:01 And when I said, "That's footage from October 7th," these five kids who had spent two weeks inside of this encampment sharing gender neutral poop buckets, they looked me directly in the eye and said, "What's October 7th?" 15:13 And that blew my mind. These people are so passionate about what they've heard online, but they're passionate with no foundation of real credible research. That's insane. 15:25 It's very hard for me to wrap my head around how a lot of these people don't know about October 7th and the full extent of it. 15:32 The day when it was happening, the, on October 7th, Twitter was, like, filled with all these crazy, insane videos that people were like, "Is this stuff even real? What's going on there?" 15:40 The day after that, all those videos are pretty much, like, gone, and then, like, the anti-Israel narrative starts going. That's one way that those people were able to miss the crucial facts that are on the ground. 15:50 What do you think, uh, these people, maybe college students or people that are vehemently anti-Israel or even anti-Jewish after all this stuff, what do you think they need to see maybe in order to make them think differently? 16:02 It kinda depends on the person. There's some people who I wish they would actually go to Israel. I wish everybody would. I strongly encourage people, if they're truly passionate about it, go to Israel. 16:11 Go there and see it yourself. I think a lot of people think it's way harder to go to Israel than it is. It's like, just book the flight and go. Go do your research in person. 16:19 That's why I went 90 days after October 7th, because I wanted to see with my own eyes. People were even denying at that point that October 7th even happened, so I went there to see it for myself. 16:28 And then there's some people who really do want to see the truth. If that's the case, read book. Nobody wants to go to a library these days, okay? Going on TikTok for all of your research, that's, I get it. 16:42 I get that TikTok is the most convenient, but sometimes the most convenient is not the proper way to research. I mean, hell, you can even use ChatGPT. 16:50 That's going to give you a better perspective of research than going on TikTok. So stop researching with confirmation bias and maybe seek out sources that aren't inherently going to be biased. 17:02 Look at the more objective sources, 'cause there are some out there j- that you can find. Totally agree with you. And of course, I gotta plug PragerU. And specifically about- PragerU has a bunch of videos. 17:11 PragerU is, has a huge foundation, even pre October 7th, that'll teach you a lot about Israel. It teaches you about the fact that there were five different attempts for a two-state solution. 17:21 It'll teach you about the origin of Israel and what Israel stands for. 17:24 It's so funny that people try to make it seem like Israel's this oppressive state, when it, which is so ironic, because they are the beacon of light, bringing democracy and bringing tolerance to the Middle East. 17:37 A lot of the allegations that Israel get, that's everywhere around it, not actually in Israel. We're gonna link to the PragerU stuff in the interview, so we'll make sure that everyone sees it. 17:47 A- a- to your point about having people actually visit Israel, I think that is really critical, and I've been there a handful of times. I'll be there in a few weeks. 17:54 And my biggest impressions the first few times I was there is that you kind of see a society where people just wanna live. 18:00 They're clearly very serious about building a very solid society, taking this country that didn't exist 80 years ago and building it into something that looks like it's modern. 18:09 And then you're eating in different establishments, or you're driving past the road, and these places were the places where, like, terrorist attacks happened. 18:16 I remember I was getting ice cream at some mall, and there was some plaque on there because a few years ago there had been a massive terror attack and many people died there. 18:23 Or you drive past different, like, schools and elementary schools or preschools that were, like, exploded, and the remains of the, the schools are still there. 18:30 So it's just hard, I think, for a lot of people to imagine what the reality is in Israel, where the threat to life is such a real thing, and that people are at, like, just defending themselves most of the time, whereas for some reason, is it right to think that these people view Israel as attacking for no reason? 18:49 Do they actually see it that way? I mean, they do. It's like a lot of people don't realize that Israel is a- Always just trying to defend themselves. This was how it was described to me. 18:58 I went to a military base while I was just there this last week, and something that was said to me that really stuck out to me was the IDF fights because they love the people behind them. 19:09 Hamas fights because they hate the people in front of them. And that really shows just the difference in their approach. And then you learn true stories about the IDF. 19:18 On my show, Respectfully Xavier, I actually have a interview coming out very soon with an IDF soldier named Noy Le- Lieb. 19:25 And he was explaining to me just, like, the amount of integrity that the IDF goes out of their way to have, the way that they do everything possible to save life. 19:34 I saw this with my own eyes, where there are Palestinians and even people who try to conduct terrorism who get hurt in Israel and they get taken to the hospital, and they're still given care. 19:45 It's a huge debated topic in Israel, but these hospitals will take care of them. 19:49 When I was there 90 days after October 7th, there were Palestinians there that came over to conduct terrorism that were being treated in Israeli hospitals. Me personally, I would never. 20:01 [laughs] They're better than me in that sense. My hat's off to them, but this is the type of preservation of life and forgiveness that Israel has on their side of the aisle that the other side just does not reflect. 20:14 To that point, so many people don't realize that the, the south of Israel that was attacked on October 7th, those people were the absolute most leftist part of Israel that wanted peace with Gaza. 20:24 They wanted to bring the two, two-state solution to make it happen. They wanted to live with them side by side. 20:29 They had this really fairy tale vision of being able to live together, and those were the people that the Palestinians attacked. So pretty crazy stuff. Question for you. 20:38 Have you seen the whole Dave Portnoy thing that's been happening recently? I have not. I'm a little bit off the grid right now. And I actually do wanna say one more part about the conversation we were just having. 20:49 This interview I had with Noy, one of the stories he told me that really stuck out to me, just to show the difference in the mentality. 20:54 If you go to a seven-year-old girl's home a- in Israel, and they have a seven-year-old daughter, and you see the posters that she has on the wall. 21:04 She's likely going to have pop stars or maybe Justin Bieber or different people that you would expect a young child to be looking up to. 21:11 When Noy, this IDF soldier, went to Gaza and he was going into different homes, he saw a seven-year-old girl or a young girl's room, the posters that they had on the wall were actually of Hamas members, of literal terrorists. 21:25 So you have little boys that are looking at these Hamas members who literally put nothing but hate into the world. That's who they're looking up to, like, "Oh, I wanna be like them." 21:33 That's what they're educated to idolize. 21:35 And then you have little girls that romanticize terrorists, and that's part of why just fundamentally, their baseline values are rooted in hatred, and that is something that needs to change before you can even think about having a two-state solution. 21:50 And just look at their chants. Chanting, "River to the sea." They have no intentions of having coexistence or peace with Jews, Christians, or anybody Israeli. 21:59 They simply want to wipe all of Western society off of the map, not just Israel, but they wanna come after America next. Uh, going back to Dave Portnoy, 22:08 I have not, because while I was in Israel, I tried my best to not look at politics. I needed a break. Good for you. So we're not gonna get into that. 22:15 Then probably the final question here is it's been crazy since October 7th in terms of watching all of the sentiment in America. We're still battling it today the same way we were two years ago. 22:27 Do you think this somehow goes away? Has America changed forever in terms of now we know that there's this very radical young element in this country? Or what do you think? 22:36 What are the next few years, what do the next few decades look in terms of this issue? 22:40 Not to sound pessimistic, but there's never going to be a point in America, at least not in our lifetime, where there aren't going to be radicals. 22:47 Unfortunately, the American system of politics is inherently designed to keep us divided. One of the difference between Israel and America, and not saying that Israel's political climate is perfect by any means. 23:00 You just said there's, there's definitely a big divide between the left and the right there, and mind you, there are 40 different registered political parties in Israel, in that small country. 23:09 So not saying that their politics are perfect by any means, but because they have such an existential threat at all times, they're arguing for how they can move their country forward and try to unite. 23:21 They're fighting for the ability to try to actually make their country better. In America, we're not fighting to make our country better, we're fighting to win. We're fighting to stomp out the other side. 23:33 The left's entire goal is to eradicate the right, and a lot of the right's entire goal is to eradicate the left. Unfortunately, our system is not designed for us to try to figure out what is the best compromise. 23:44 It's only to try to win. It's perpetuated by the media. 23:48 A lot of the same large organizations and entities and individuals that are the biggest donors or even, like, the owners of a lot of major right-wing media outlets, they're also owning the left wing. 24:01 And what is the best way of getting them to be the most profitable? If they're more divided. People like to see this reality TV version of politics, and that's why our political climate has gotten so unserious. 24:14 You have people who voted in the presidential election not on policy, but on vibes, on personality. I don't care about the personality of a politician. 24:25 I wanna know, are you going to be the best thing for our country as we are the leader of the free world? But that's not where we are anymore. Politics is all theatrics. It's literally political theater. 24:36 And all that to say, the more our politics becomes unserious, the more you're going to see these radical characters trying to make themselves the center of the spotlight. 24:49 Is Gen Z going to bring more seriousness back into the American political landscape, or is it going to make it worse? 24:56 Gen Z is at the very least going to make politicians become more authentic um, or at least more transparent. 25:05 Because a big reason why Kamala Harris fell through is because a lot of Gen Z saw through her, especially Gen Z males. It's like constantly being told, "Hey, look over here at the social justice causes. 25:18 Totally ignore the fact that our policies on the border and the economy and all these different things have destroyed our society. Don't pay attention to that. Pay attention to the vibes over here. 25:27 Why would you care about the economy crumbling when we have Beyoncé on stage? We have Meg The Stallion twerking." It's like that doesn't work anymore. That's not going to work with Gen Z. We wanna actually see substance. 25:40 And Gen Z tends to get this bad rep of being totally unserious. 25:44 And yes, there's high schoolers that are, but when it comes to those that are college age, so I'm the very first month of Gen Z at 28 years old, what is my age range looking at? 25:55 We're looking at Jubilee videos, for example. The reason that Jubilee became so popular is because people like to see a range of discussion. 26:02 People like not being adamantly told what we need to think rather than having the ability to make decisions for ourselves. We are the first generation to grow up knowing that you can't just trust the mainstream media. 26:17 Because back in the day, the media used to give you the information so you can make your own conclusion. 26:22 But for far too long, what Gen X and millennials became comfortable with is mainstream media was giving them the conclusion, and then they just never sought out the actual information. 26:32 Gen Z is shifting that culture back. Gen Z is making it where politicians realize they need to come with more substance. 26:39 That's why you saw President Trump going on podcasts, sitting down and having conversations with people that are going to ask straightforward questions. 26:48 Yes, people wanted to see the vibes, but people actually cared about what it is that Trump had to say, and I think that is why he ultimately walked away with the win in 2024. 26:56 [upbeat music]
