961: Are Conservatives WINNING the Culture War?

Brian Nichols  0:08  
Music. Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, hey there, folks, Brian Nichols here on another fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols Show, I am, as always, your humble host joining you from our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in eastern Indiana. The Brian Nichols Show is powered yes by cardio miracle, the best heart health supplement in the world. If you want to learn more how to lower your resting heart rate, lower that blood pressure, while improving your pump at the gym, stick around. We're gonna talk about that more in today's episode later on. But first, conservatives, you're you're actually winning. Question mark, Well, today's guest is arguing. It's time to stop the whining and, in fact, continue the winning to discuss all that and more. Joining me here in The Brian Nichols Show is Isaac. Will our Isaac, welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. How you doing? Hey Brian. Thanks for having me. Great to have you, man. Isaac. I'm really looking forward to digging into, yes, this overarching cultural battle that we've been seeing here not take place just for a past few years, but really, I think it's a generation or two at this point that we've been seeing this cultural battle really pick up. But before we dig into where we started and where we are today, and hopefully you can talk about where we're headed, Isaac, do us a favor. Introduce yourself here first The Brian Nichols Show audience, and while you're focused on the cultural side of the political aisle,

Speaker 1  1:38  
sure. So first of all, thanks for having me. This is great. It's great it's great to be here. So my background is, I currently work in corporate engagement, shareholder engagement specifically. So I work for a firm called Boyer research. We're based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A lot of our clients are shareholders of major companies. Think meta, Apple, Microsoft, etc. And what we do is we use shareholder influence, right? There are pathways for that to happen. And basically, I help depoliticize America's biggest companies for a living, right? So we talk, we there are a lot of hotbed debates, hot button debates, we'll talk about, I'm sure, about ESG and Dei. We're very much in the trenches of those debates, but from kind of a different angle than a lot of people who are kind of on the outside, people like Robbie Starbuck, and compared to that, we're very much on the inside. All of our clients own shares in this, in these companies, and we use that financial leverage to push for real time policy change. We've not wins at JP Morgan Chase. We've not wins at PepsiCo. That list will probably be longer by the time we're done recording this episode. Who knows? And certainly by the time you're listening to it. So that that's, that's my background, that is. It's a somewhat unorthodox background, right? So I when I was in college, I absolutely assumed I was going to be a journalist, and then that changed very quickly, very, very quickly in senior year. But I think it's somewhat changed my perspective from a it allows me to get a little bit more of a macro level view of where people on the right and where the right generally is headed. I think despite being in the trenches, I can still see momentum changing. Obviously, the the election of res, the re election of President Trump, contributed to that, and we can talk about that for sure, but yeah, the reason I wrote this piece was I wanted to combat, especially on the the more Trump critical wing of the kind of conservative movement in America, there is a real sense of what, the kids call doomerism, right? There's this whole idea that, well, everything's going to hell in a hand basket, and we should just stop and we're gonna have to wait four years before any meaningful change happens, because the party that is in power doesn't agree with us on the minutia. And my essential point is, no, that's not correct, because the reality is, for the past several decades in this country, institutions institutional control and the momentum within institutions, whether it's the boardroom, whether it's the classroom, in the higher ed world, the the balance of control shifted to the left for the for a very, very long time. If that was in the classroom, it kind of happened with some of the critical race theory stuff and just general leftism on campus, which I'm sure we can talk about in the boardroom. It happened with things like ESG. It happened with things like dei right. The balance of power shifted to the left for years and years and years, if not decades. And as of recently, the past couple of years, we are seeing a resurgence of the backlash right. The other side the right. The balance of power in these institutions is very rapidly shifting right. But we have to do the right things to ensure that this is not just a flash in the pan, right? Because we talk about this every presidential election cycle, there's a shift back to the right or the left, depending on who won. A lot of those gains are not, in my opinion, totally realized. Right? We had opportunities to capitalize on gains in 2016 that we just didn't know were there, and we didn't capitalize on them effectively. 2024 and 2025, and beyond, is the moment to do that for conservatives of all kind of general political stripes, is a big tent situation with the right obviously, this is the time to lock in those gains. And if we're going to be in the mindset to allow us to lock in gains, right, you mentioned, you mentioned working out in the gym, right? If you want to be in the right mindset to lock in gains, you have to absolutely know what it is you're doing and the big rocks of how you actually do it. But more importantly, you actually have to believe. Leave that you can and that, I think, is the moment we're in right now. And that's why I wrote the piece. Love

Brian Nichols  5:05  
it well. And Isaac, you know, let's, let's talk about this cultural moment, right? Because you're right. You look to the left, they have absolutely been winning this cultural game, at least, you know, in my, in my growing up this, it was the left dominated culture. You know, everybody's walking on eggshells. It's the, you know, did I say something offensive? You see the cultural change from the Hollywood perspective of the different shows we're watching and the narratives weaved in through throughout. You see it in the corporate governance structures, as you mentioned, ESG, which is environmental, social and governance practices and procedures are being pushed down from from a lot of these, I would say more left leaning. I'd say more left absolutely left leaning. Folks in in corporate America, also Dei, as we see it, right? Go throughout both academia and, you know, putting itself into the the corporate sphere as well. And you mentioned Robbie Starbuck, right? He's been going out and really pressuring these, these companies, from an outside perspective, to help, you know, at least shine the spotlight first and foremost on what's actually happening behind the scenes, and then using that social pressure to help make some substantive changes from from a policy and procedure standpoint in these orgs, right? I think of John Deere, for example, that was one of the big ones. I think Tractor Supply was another one that Robbie Starbuck really went after. And you saw a an actual, like real change in policy when that took place. So it does show that there is, there is a backlash that's happening. But to your point, it's not just good enough to say, Okay, here's the backlash. You actually have to be building towards something different. And this is where I think the left has really eaten the right's lunch. Isaac is that the left has goals, right? They have a mission in mind, like this is what we view as win, getting these certain policies and procedures put in place right and and to take over these different institutions, to take over these bureaucracies. So I guess for me and for a lot of the folks listening today, I would guess the number one question they ask Isaac is, what does winning look like from the conservative standpoint? Is it just pulling back and always playing defense and trying to take us back a little bit away from the insanity? Or is there something we can actually look to as this is a win, and it's something that we can concretely build upon. Sure? Yeah,

Speaker 1  7:26  
I think that's exactly right. The reality is that your observation about the left having ground game and the right not having ground game is absolutely correct, right? You looked at this, we you saw this, right? So I live in I live in western Pennsylvania, right? In Pennsylvania was kind of a real testing ground for how much ground game the right really had, especially electorally this past November. And it turns out, because of people like Scott Pressler, the right really learned a valuable lesson in the importance of ground game, because they flipped the swing state that was pivotal to the election when it comes to what winning looks like. Yeah, that's a good question. You mentioned Robbie. I loved Robbie. He was on our podcast a couple months ago. He's great. He has the second best hair in the anti ESG movement, right? Only kidding, but I'm not when it comes to the idea of what winning looks like at the corporate space, yeah, because when it comes to the idea of always playing defense, I think the right has been, I think more incisively, more precisely, the right has always been reactionary to we are reacting to the things that the left does and the strategy that the left has. This is a mistake for for many reasons, one, because we allow them to set the terms right. So even when we're even we, I just use the term right that I'm about to complain about people using, which is a great example of itself. We talk about being anti ESG or anti Dei. Are we so anti so ESG really quick background for people who don't know, right? So a lot of ESG mandates involve things like greenhouse gas emissions. Mandated carbon emissions, right? Not necessarily because it's in the best interest of the company or shareholders, but because activists told you you have to cut your you have to cut your greenhouse gas emissions, right? What's that? I said? Logical. Yes, no, I know. Right. Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah. Especially when they take this to companies like Exxon Mobil there, you have to cut your carbon emissions really. Like, what do you think, dude here, yes, right. What exactly do you think is happening behind these doors? We're not, we're not, like, petting kittens, all right, this is an oil and gas company, and our shareholders expect us to be an oil and gas company, because, guess what? We make money from being an oil and gas company. No, that's pretty much how it goes. But to that point, is opposing that vision where Exxon Mobil magically gets out of the oil and gas industry. Is opposing that anti ESG? The answer is, it kind of is, but it's kind of not right. It is more specifically pro fiduciary. It's pro shareholder, and it's pro success of free enterprise branding ourselves as merely anti ESG or anti Dei, I think is part of the semantic game that plays into this whole momentum question, right? Because we are not simply anti anti dei many of its modern iterations. We are pro meritocratic selection. We are pro merit. We are pro competency, and if that makes us anti dei as a consequence. Of advancing an ideology of our own, sure, but we are not simply defined by by what we what we hate and what we're against. So back to your question, what does winning look like? Winning looks like? What are the things necessary, whether it's in corporate America, whether it's in higher education, whether it's in electoral politics, what are the markers that our ideology or our vision for the future is winning, right and for us right in the anti, see, I said it against the problem in the pro fiduciary world, some of the markers are

Speaker 1  10:33  
leaving, some of these general alliances that did that control decarbonization, right, things like the net zero emissions, Net Zero Bank Alliance, these sorts of things, the net zero asset managers Alliance, right? And we are seeing that. We're seeing that in real time, right? Morgan, Stanley, even BlackRock, is pulling out of net zero alliances. This is a really big sign that the that the we could call it the anti fiduciary movement, if we really want to do some Jiu Jitsu, flip it on its head, it's, it's a the idea of this whole anti carbon, anti energy ideology is losing at a broad scale. But to your point about Robbie. Right? Robbie operates on the external game, right? He has a ton of he has a megaphone on on x, right? He's blown up to millions, millions of people on x. That's great, right? That that is one of the best examples of the the external game possible when he gets a concession. There is that question that happens afterwards, right? He went after John Deere. And we could, we could talk about John Deere, if you want. Because, like, we work with John Deere a lot, and the situation is not simply as is not as simple as they just stopped being woke when Robbie went away, right? Um, when Robbie gets concession out of a company, there's always that question, what happens next? Right? How does that actually get handled? Because it's very easy to put out it's relatively easy to put out a PR statement, right? Companies are very good at putting out PR statements to make people go away. The question always, and Robbie's aware of this, Robbie's not ignorant of this, is that, how do we actually know what's happening behind the scenes? Because you actually have to know, if you want to get a company to ditch bias policies, you have to know what the bias policies are. You have to know how they're measured, and that's what we do for a living, right? So we look at proxy statements, right? The filings that come out in advance with companies annual meeting, we look at, we look at the policy of the company, with regards to a wide variety of things. We can talk about that if you'd like, the what winning looks like is when a bunch of those metrics look more the way that we would want them to look and the way that shareholders, authentic shareholders, who invest for purposes of return and not activism, want them to look that is what winning looks like. And I think that's hard because it's not real winning. And again, I I hate to, like riff off the ad to create the show, but it's fine. Um, anyone who's ever lost a ton of weight gained a ton of muscle nose. Winning isn't super sexy, right? The process of winning is not super sexy. It's you dragging yourself out to at like five in the morning to the gym, getting on the bike that you don't want to be on, and just kind of rage, pushing your entire way through, like the first five miles. And that's fine. That's kind of what winning looks like, because it's just doing the right things for longer than anybody else would be willing to stick with it, right? So for conservatives, that means we can't bail on the institutions, right? We can't just, if we want to fix Harvard, we can't all bail on Harvard, which is easy for me to say, because I didn't get into Harvard. But when it comes to things like corporate America, right? We can't just bail on corporate America, are we? This is why the boycott thing is kind of it. And I have thoughts on that, right? The boycott strategy, while it certainly is good for emotional feel good, and sometimes that's that's the strategy you need to to adopt. There's that question of, when you boycott, what are you doing? You're giving up your seat at the table, right? Because just, does target know why you're leaving? No, they just know that you're not buying. I don't what is target so shirts, and I don't know, overpriced, like, marked up tech and whatnot, right? They just know that you're not doing it. But if you own stock in target, you have influence. You definitionally have influence by virtue of being a stockholder in the company. And what we discovered, what we learned, and what we worked to correct for your research, is this idea that for years, people have people on the right, people in the center right, have left that influence on the table. Right? They have, they have let it go, or they have outsourced it to asset managers that are not in alignment with their values. And it's created a ton of leftward drift, even if it, even if it's not the primary driver, right? We can talk about the the activists are the primary driver. But remember that quote about the triumph of evil and good men doing nothing, when people who have our values, when people who have conservative or simply non political values, they want companies to do business, not politics, when those people step out of the influence game, when they leave their influence on the table, the only people left to actually drive momentum are the people on the left who do not want business to do its fundamental court duty. They want it to do ESG and dei and so people left that influence on the table. People left the influence that would stop those people on the table for a very long time. They did not exercise it. And what do you know when conservatives woke up to that a couple years ago? The moment. Has been swift, right? We can talk about the the ramifications of the Eos, right, Trump's various EOS that are targeting businesses that are federal contractors, that sort of thing. But the backlash in the private sector has been growing too. The momentum of pro, genuinely Pro, fiduciary actors in the private sector is also growing, and that's, that's a key sign, right? What does winning look like winning starts with momentum. What? Sorry, no, winning does not start with momentum. Winning starts with doing the things, getting the victory, getting the first victory right. It's the same thing as getting yourself into the gym the first time right. And now you have momentum. You did the thing, and now you have the momentum right, if you fake it, until you make it, and then you get the first thing. Well, now now you're the person that makes it, and now you just keep going. I think that's the momentum thing. But to the point of the piece, which I meant to talk about earlier, there is, I think the title of the piece is the conservative case for quitting the whining and getting the culture back, which is, I wrote that as a draft title and then thought it was funny enough to keep it, which I think it's pretty accurate, because a lot of conservatives tend to fall into this trap of kind of being, not not only very Doom ish, but very whiny, right? A lot of our media really appeals to people who like to whine about stuff, even especially in the corporate space. We see this all the time, like, can you believe this thing that Amazon is doing? They ban Brian Anderson's book about trans transgender ideology. Oh, that's terrible. What are we going to do about it? Did you see what target? Right? You get this idea what we should be doing. This moment is not whining, right? Because whining is cathartic and it appeals to an emotional side of us that just wants to be right about things, and, more importantly, wants to be angrily right about things, and that means that other people can be wrong about things. It's a deep human need. But that is not the ideology that should be governing us going forward. It doesn't really matter if you're the cost for being bold in this current environment, as a as a conservative, as someone on the right, the cost for being bold in the public square is arguably lower than it's ever been, and is going to be in years, right? Because we can talk about the Biden presidency, and some of this maybe was overblown, but a lot of it wasn't. The eggshell walking of the left, dominance and stranglehold on a lot of our cultural institutions was very real. Right? People who were conservative kind of just had to keep that to themselves, especially if they were working in, well, if they're working in large companies, or they're working at a really large state university, right? The ideological capture was real. The ideological bias was real, and it led to this environment where people just couldn't speak up. This is the moment, right? This is a moment of, really, at least, of recently unprecedented ability to be bold and actually accomplish things if we're not, if we don't speak out. Now, when are we going to do it? Right? That's the whole question that we ask.

Brian Nichols  17:51  
Well, and this Isaac, I'll take a step back from necessarily looking at this. You know that this overarching question, I'll actually, I'll put my, my sales guy hat on, because I'm a sales executive by trade, sure and and one of the things I coach my my teams, is the structure in which we we enter into conversations to help curate interest, right? And I'm a big fan of, like, your traditional copywriting styles that are out there, and one of those styles that I've incorporated, and kind of I've made my own in the sales world is looking it's called pas pain, agitate, solve, right? So when you're going out and you're trying to uncover a potential opportunity, and you're talking to one of your your target target markets and your buyer personas, and you know exactly what their issues are like, what, what are the main problems that they're facing, both as an organization, a vertical, but also them specifically as a buyer persona. Are they a champion? Are they an economic buyer, or whatever it may be, and understanding these are the the main issues that the drivers that would make them enter into a conversation. So let's talk about that pain. Then once we get them actually engaging in the pain, let's agitate that pain. Let's make it real, and then let's show them how we can help solve it, not by just saying we can solve it, by showing how we've done it for other people. Right? I say that because, going back to we mentioned the earlier the leftist on campus, and you see the more left leaning progressive folks who have, in a very activist sense, they've taken over these institutions. They've been more or less doing this for generations at this point, Isaac, by following this exact model, they see a very real pain. They try to take advantage of that pain in this case, and then they solve it by creating these, these, you know, dei, ESG, types of solutions. And you look at, you know, from the conservative more just culturally right leaning, common sense folks, I think we almost have to not enter in with the let's just solve it. And let's also kind of reverse engineer, because the old expression from the late, great Andrew Breitbart is that politics is always downstream. Stream of culture, which to the point of your article, is time for conservatives to quit the whining and start winning the culture again. So how do we win the culture? And this is where I think the we have to be able to have a yin and a yang for every Isaac will our who's working behind the scenes with these these organizations trying to help create a more meritocratic system, a more fiduciary, responsible system. The only reason I would argue that you're having that success inside those orgs is because there has already been external pressure outside of those orgs, with the changing culture, with the changing environment, where now it's not so much like a hey, we're not gonna touch that whatever. It's just there to Yeah, this is a real issue. People, both in the org and outside the org, are giving us pressure, whether that's target, whether that's Bud Light, name your favorite organization who's faced outside pressure over the past few years? You do see that when the culture starts to change, when the culture starts to push these issues, that there is both the public response to your point. Yes, anybody can slap a nice PR article to try to make something go away, but when the issue is so it's so intense, and there is such a drive to make things different. And then you couple that with what you're hearing behind the scenes inside of the orgs. I really think, you know, we have to, kind of, in this world, embrace both approaches, because each won't have success without the other. In order to make substantive changes in the orgs, you have to have people who are behind the scenes making the changes, but in order for those folks to feel the need to make those changes, there has to be people on the outside with that cultural, you know, bully pulpit pressure to kind of push them in that way. At least that's my perspective. Am I on the right path here? Isaac, I think you absolutely are on the right path. I want to really quickly

Speaker 1  21:51  
talk about that. And I want to talk about the sales thing you mentioned, because there's an interesting point there. So, yeah, I think that's right. So we talked about the extra we talked about this a little bit before we went on air. But the whole idea of what we do at Boyer research, and what a lot of shareholders do is the internal game, right? The stuff that involves pathways, working with the SEC, all that kind of stuff, what Robbie does is the external game, right? The media, the we call it bully pulpit, but he's pretty nice, right? In a perfect world, right? In a world where momentum is maximized, where winning is maximized, even the the internal game and the external game are played together, right? Robbie gets this right, and we do too. There you need both, right? Because the the place where we can put maximum pressure on an institution is when you have people who are invested in the institution, pushing for that change, right, from the from the bottom up, and then you have people who are outside the org with big platforms, right? This is the Robbie Starbuck in this example, pushing from the top down, and that creates that pressure, right? But I want to go back to the DEI thing, the sorry, the the pain, agitate, solve thing, because I think it actually explains the DEI moment very well. So when you go back to right after the death of George Floyd in May of 2020 right? Yeah, obviously there is pain there. We all know there is pain there. And we can have, we can have debates on how legitimate that pain was, right there. There was certainly moments of it that were very not that was, that was very over realized, and was perhaps an over personalization of something that maybe was, wasn't nearly as racist as people made it out to seem. That's a different, that's a different that's a different argument, right? We're talking about the tactic of people who tried to push dei because they used that framework, right? Pain. We know what the pain is, right? There's, there's a ton of pain being put out on America's streets right now, Minneapolis and Kenosha and whatever, um, and then there was other pain being put out on the Kenosha streets. But that's a different story, right? Um, what is the agitating game? Right? Well, the agitating game is we're going to create this whole new ecosystem of dei consulting, whether it's McKinsey, whether it's right, whether it's Deloitte, right? We're going to create this whole ecosystem of people that we're going to hold up as dei experts who can come in, certify your entire organization and not how and how to not be racist, right? And I have a piece in the works right now talking about this, the whole process of how this happened. Um, what happened is that corporate America pledged, they didn't sink, but they pledged $60 billion to fix this problem. Why? Because the pain was being very agitated. You were being told that it was everywhere. You're being told that it was in your workplace, you're told that it's in your school. In some cases, you were being told that it that racism existed, whether you're on time or not, right? This is the over realization of the pain, because when you start to see the pain, especially when it's a personal pain, you see it everywhere. That was the start of the DEI moment, right? This idea of there's a pain here, there's money to be made here. Let's be very real. Some of the people behind dei were not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, right? They're doing this to make money. Which the goodness of their piggy bank? Yes, right? Yeah, yeah, right. There is nothing. There's nothing wrong with there's nothing wrong with making money. But you know, when you're making money off of, you know, agitating people's pain by lying to them specifically, then it's a different story. But this is what the DEI play. It was for a lot of people, right? You get the consultant come in, they do the certification, and then, like, Okay, you're done, maybe. And then if there's another issue, they can sell you another course, they can sell you another certification. What was the actual result of that? Right? So I sat down. This is, this is weird. Now I'm talking about a piece. It's not out yet, but whatever, it's interesting, and it's very relevant to what you just described. And I want to get your read on this. The question is, okay, corporate America pledged $60 billion to rid itself of racism. After George Floyd died, we were five years out from that about who benefited, actually, and I talked to a bunch of people, and the consistent answer I could get was that consultants at McKinsey benefited a bunch that weird, what? I don't know if it's named after Ibram X Kennedy, the one at Boston University, the Center for anti racist studies. They benefited a bunch, and we saw what they did with that money. Did America's workplaces ever become less racist, right? It feels like where it was almost better before 2020 because this wasn't, we weren't being told this was the soup du jour every single day. Because when it is like it changes the workplace a lot, right? When you start talking about it all the time, the power of suggestion is very real. And you get and you can get people to Naval gaze and over, intellectualize and over and just attribute things that they do to racism when it's not, in fact, the case, right? This was a large portion of what a lot of dei certifications ended up being. There's a ton of work on this. You can look at some of the stuff that Chris Rufo has turned over about what dei programs, in practice, actually did. There was that study that came out from things Rutgers. Relatively recently, I wrote about the daily wire before this whole idea that a lot of the tenants contained in a lot of anti racist training, this is in academia, not in corporate but a lot of the concepts are the same. So it's somewhat of a carryover that if you give people a lot of texts about containing a lot of anti racist, 10 anti racist tenants, like systemic racism, this sort of stuff, they actually become more hostile. Their group judgments become less less precise. They actually become less just. They're more inclined to make unfair decisions based off of pre existing categories that didn't exist before, right? So the text, the reading of the text, about like systemic racism, puts up these pre existing parameters, and then they make arguments off of those, and they end up actually being more prejudiced, which is wild. All of that to say, This is why that model works, and this is why we need to be careful with that model. Because, yes, you absolutely can use that model. This is how, this is the model of every political party ever, right? The other party did this, America is going to hell in a hand basket. Therefore you need to vote for us, and we'll fix it, right? So it's, it's not even pain, agitate, solve. It's pain agitate kind of purport to solve, and then we'll see what happens, right? That that is, it's a super, super impactful model, right? And it, but it is also the model that every, every dei consultant after 2020, was using. So we have to be careful, right? You don't want to agitate pain. It's not there. There is. There are some ethical guidelines to that. But, yeah, I think that that model people, if you think about that, right, that pain agitate, solve model, right? It's like hearing a new curse word. You'll hear it everywhere. Now think about all the political comms and political mailers and whatever you get in your life, right? If you're not like me, and you actually still get, like, physical mail delivered to your house, right? Think about all of those through that pathway of what pain is there? What, how, how, exactly are they agitating? If they're telling me that it's important, why and what is their solution, that's the model, right? You'll see it everywhere. So I'm super glad you brought that up.

Brian Nichols  28:31  
Yeah. Well, and listen, I've been saying this now since 2019 here on this show, because everything in life is sales, right? Whether you're selling an idea, a product, a service, your politics, right? You're always selling, whether you realize it or not, and and either you're selling or you're being sold to, right? And this is the part that your average person just needs to be more aware of. Like when we go to a car dealership, our, you know, our our reservations are up, and we're like, hold on. I know this guy is trying to sell to me, and yet, when we hear somebody promoting dei or ESG in the name of social justice, we're like, oh, they're just doing it because they have some altruistic motive. Like, oh, it's so nice of them. No, they're selling something to you. And we have to stop pretending, I would say, in this greater political world, especially when we start talking about the topics that were deemed, like, undebatable, like Dei, like racism. And I'm using very big air quotes there, because over the past five years, everything was racism, to the point now I'm seeing people almost like tongue in cheek, like, Sure, now what? And I'm like, Okay, this is getting a little scary, right? Because, to your point Isaac, when you start to propose promoting a solution that isn't actually a solution, and by the way, might make things worse, that might make people a little jaded, right? That might make people a little less trustworthy of your solutions in the future, which, by the. Away, I would dare say, is part of the reason that Trump and the Republicans had such a, you know, strong 2024 because people were like, Okay, we we bought Obama from 2008 to 2016 and then we said, let's try this guy named Trump. And we gave him four years. And then we were like, the adults. Let's put the adults back in charge. Again, very loose air quotes, and then we put Obama, or Obama, yeah, Biden, which is Obama round three, basically, super adult. Exactly super, yeah, that's right. And, and the entire bureaucratic institutions behind the scenes, let's, let's really give them, you know, the full, you know, full support and the full force to do what they need to do. And then folks are like, Okay, we gave you a second shot, and you dropped the ball even worse. Yeah, let's, let's try something else, right? And this is the danger that I would, I would say, as we go towards the tail end of the episode here Isaac, this is absolutely the danger that the Republicans, the conservatives, the Libertarians need to pay attention to, especially, and I'm going to be talking about this with your buddy, Aiden there, from young voices, like when we're talking about tariffs right now, I've taken a very different position from most libertarians that you know you'll see out there. It's not that I'm in favor of tariffs. I think tariffs are horrible. They have obvious economic negatives. I'm talking about from a true like if we're going to look at the world and our vision is, let's have a true free trade society, right? Let's get rid of tariffs across the board. And if the if the argument was from the Trump administration that tariffs are only in pursuit of getting other countries to lower their tariffs, I would be on board with that 1,000% why? Because it's pushing us towards a true free market solution that we libertarians should embrace. But when, when you're using tariffs just for the sake of saying, I love big, beautiful tariffs like that's when shit starts to get a little scary and a little in, a little hairy, right? Scary and hairy. Because what happens is, if the outcome of these solutions actually makes things worse. People are going to set to say, Well, geez, a Lou, I didn't trust the dems. I trusted Trump. And I was like, Okay, well, trust the Dems again, and then they burn my trust even more. And I said, Okay, well, I'll trust Trump and the Republicans again, and then they burn my trust even more. There's only one other, well, say one or two other outcomes, right? Isaac, either they're going to swing hard back to the left, and I'm afraid, from an economic standpoint, we're going to get somebody like an AOC or a Bernie Sanders in there who is a true economic socialist, right? Or they're just going to throw their hands up and become apathetic, and we're going to see well, and a lot of my anchor anarchist audience members, they're going to be like, Woohoo, because then maybe they're gonna start just saying, you know, what, heck with all this whole, you know, government thing, we're just gonna start focusing on what matters, our localities, our communities, right? And maybe that's a I'd say that probably is a better, a better outcome, but that's also talking about a big collapse of of what is America today, which, for better or for worse, I would say, is coming down the the pike here, but that was my final thoughts for today. Isaac, what do you have for us on your end as you bring us home today? Yeah, I think

Speaker 1  33:06  
that's exactly right. I mean, this is why the doge stuff matters, right? The Doge cuts have to be done well, or else it's going to mess up our reputation for the rest of for the rest of time, and any attempt at creating additional government efficiency will will fail, right? So the thing I will close with, though, is because the piece is relatively optimistic, I feel like I should close on something optimistic, instead of just talking about how bad tariffs are at the end of the day. Right? If you for people who are maybe in on the right, but are not specifically in that world of federal restructuring, that sort of thing, crafting federal policy, which is, which is to say, most of us right. It is not whether that goes down or not that doesn't negate our responsibility to do things well, right? Because the reality is, there are a ton of Institute right? You talk about the whole end game, which I see is totally plausible, where people kind of bail out of the federal scene and, um, kind of recommit in local institutions. I don't think it's going to go down the way your anarchist friends think, because your anarchist friends, surprisingly, are wrong again. But how about that? All that to say, if you want to get if you want to build a playbook for how to actually influence local institutions, we have to start with an actual commitment to action. I think so many times, especially, I will say especially on the Never Trump wing. But a lot, a lot of times it happens in the Trump side too. Ideological purity tests are just killer. The perfect becomes the enemy of the good. We have a unique opportunity for the next four years to not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Now that doesn't mean that you specifically do bad things and just run with them, right? That is not what that playbook means at all. It means that if you have the choice between moving an institution, whether it's the boardroom, whether it's the classroom, if you have a chance to move it back to its core function and away from things that are distracting, like politics and you're struggling with the idea of, do we take the plunge or not? Right? People like the University of Austin, at u at x, that new thing. If you have the choice between whether to do that or not, do it, do it. Because this is the moment. This is. A moment to create change. The electoral politics of this are relevant. They are going to always be relevant. But they are somewhat tangential to the actual question of if Trump, and I don't want this, if Trump fails for whatever reason, if there's some big economic thing, whether that's due to him, whether it's not due to him, if that fails, that does not mean that everything that was done during the Age of Trump has to fail, right? That That part is solely within our control as the movers of culture and the movers of institutions and the protectors of institutions. We should be focusing on those things, right? We have an opportunity right now. Some of it's because people are more willing to listen to the right because of just the political and regulatory framework that exists. We should take advantage of that. We should seize that with both hands, and that's how we're going to get because the reality is, right, we talked about some of the companies we've made wins at, right? We secured an anti politicized de banking policy at Chase, whether Trump wins or not, Chase still has a policy that says no more politicized de banking right that we have. This is the time to get wins that out last presidents right that are not four year scale wins, because there's a lot to be said for four year scale wins. Some of them are really good. Some of them are less good. This is the time to be focusing on wins that out last four years. This is really, really important stuff, because this is what the left did, and this is not an argument of left did it, therefore we should do it. This is, this is, this is a relevant, legitimate pathway of action that the left used and we didn't for years. What are the wins that will outlast four years? What are the wins that will outlast Trump? He's only here for three and a half more years, right? Think about those wins. Pursue those wins almost single mindedly. That is how we win. That is what winning looks like. Because when you make because winning does not look like we had cultural relevance for four years, and we squandered it brutally, because we just trusted in the federal government and the vibe shift to fix these institutions on our own. No those gains have to be locked in. They have to be locked in on technical grounds, which means you have to understand the game that you're in. You have to understand the institution that you're in. It's called for wisdom, discernment, understanding and better you better exemplifying the pioneering spirit that has come to define all Americans and should in this moment, now more than ever,

Brian Nichols  37:09  
Isaac will our this has been an absolutely fantastic conversation. It was strategy, it was context, it was all important things if we want to actually make things better for the long term. So folks, this is one of those episodes when we wrap up today, make sure you hit like a little star button so you can save this for next time, like, go back and listen to this in a year, in three years, in five years, because I guarantee the the overarching themes that we've woven throughout this episode, they will be pertinent and they will be important going forward, and I can almost guarantee you're going to look back and see exactly how some of this stuff has played out, both for good and unfortunately for bad, depending on which way the political the political pendulum swings going next. So thank you, Isaac for joining the show, and obviously, folks, I want you to please continue the conversation with Isaac. He's got an amazing piece here over at sub stack, the conservative case for quitting the whining and winning the culture back. I'll include that in the show notes. Isaac, where can folks go ahead, reach out to you if they want to continue the conversation. Post

Speaker 1  38:09  
episode today. Yep, reach out on x. Isaac, will our i, s, A, A, C, W, i, l, l, o, u, r, it's on x. We talk. We feel free to shoot me a message. Let's talk more. Fantastic.

Brian Nichols  38:19  
And folks, if you got some value from today's episode, which I know you did, please go ahead and give it a share when you do tag yours truly at B Nichols liberty, you can find me over on X, on Facebook and on Instagram. By the way, for The Brian Nichols Show, we are both a podcast and a video show. So if you want to go ahead and check out The Brian Nichols Show on your favorite podcast, catcher, because, you know, we're all on the go in 2025 head over to Apple podcast. Spotify YouTube music, wherever it is. You consume your podcast. Hit subscribe to The Brian Nichols Show, and, of course, download all unplayed episodes. We have over 950 episodes here dating back to 2018 a lot of stuff we've been talking about here that we're experiencing today. We were talking about five years ago. So go ahead check out some of those past episodes and ask for the video show of The Brian Nichols Show. You can find us over on YouTube, over on Twitter, on X, excuse me, on Facebook, on rumble, wherever it is. You like to watch your video content, but heads up The Brian Nichols Show does live stream on Monday nights and Friday nights, 9pm Eastern. We turn on the the stream around like 830 Eastern or so. Let folks get into the lobby. We go live right around 9pm and we have that live stream over on X, on rumble. And yes, I have been live streaming it over on Facebook as well. So go ahead, give that a check out if you like to consume your content live. And other than that being said, folks please support our sponsors, because they are the folks who support us. Like cardio miracle, our phenomenal studio sponsor. Over my shoulder here, you've been seeing a QR code go back and forth. These are the different sponsors we have here, The Brian Nichols Show, like blood of tyrants, wine evils, CBD, we have our liquid freedom energy team, of course, cardio miracle, the best heart health supplement in the world. With that being said, we're going. Go ahead and put a pin in today's conversation. Brian Nichols, signing off here on The Brian Nichols Show for Isaac will How are from young voices, we'll see you next time bye.

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