Will Spencer [00:00:00]:

But something that you noted, even some of my content as maybe I was becoming desensitized to what was sort of a growing antisemitism and even an aesthetic of anti Semitism. Some people were looking at my content and starting to think that I was anti Semitic. And that wasn't the message that I was trying to push across, but it definitely sowed confusion, which is not really what I'm about. And it was kind of a wake up call that led to.

Will Spencer [00:00:41]:

Hello and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast. This is a weekly interview show where I sit down and talk with authors, thought leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world. New episodes drop every week. My guest this week is Paul Brown. Paul is the founder and co owner of Wasson Watch Co. Which he started in 2018. He has a diverse background that spans from the Marine Corps and civil defense intelligence to financial compliance, politics, writing, abortion, abolition, and of course, running a watch company. Most importantly, he is a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband, a father, and a Texan. Paul, welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.

Will Spencer [00:01:20]:

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Will Spencer [00:01:23]:

You know, you and I met, I think briefly at Fight Laugh Feast in it would have been Dallas about a year ago. And I've been so happy to see the success of your company since then, your growth on Twitter or X and just the continuous expansion of Christian entrepreneurship in reformed circles. So congratulations on all your success.

Will Spencer [00:01:46]:

Thank you. It's definitely been a wild ride and it's really happened largely over the last year. So it's been interesting for me to experience as well and to get to share that experience with others. It's a lot of fun.

Will Spencer [00:02:01]:

So before we get into sort of the wildness of the ride, I actually was curious, what led you to start a watch company? What's the history of Wasson Watches? What's behind the name? Like, where did all this come from and how did you move into that field specifically?

Will Spencer [00:02:16]:

Yeah, good question. So I've always been very entrepreneurial, so I've always had an interest in starting businesses, running businesses. I'd started a few side businesses over the years that were kind of partially for fun, partially to make a little bit of spare change. But in 2018 and leading up to 2018, I knew I was really interested in starting something bigger, something that I could move into full time. At the time I was working in compliance in the financial industry. I was in anti money laundering and know your customer work for a large financial institution. And I was seeing a lot of different businesses, a lot of Our customers were business customers. They were, you know, anywhere from like mom and pops to mid size to, you know, massive $10 billion kind of companies. And I was getting a lot of ideas about businesses to start. And I knew, you know, there's this. Sorry, is there an issue? I see your hand.

Will Spencer [00:03:22]:

No, no, I was just adjusting my microphone. Please go ahead.

Will Spencer [00:03:25]:

Okay. So I knew that there were a lot of different kind of ways you could go. I could start something that is a purely financial decision. Like I see an opportunity in a market and something I'm capable of delivering on. But my preference was to do something I was actually interested in, you know, something that I liked. And I've always liked watches. And I started to learn about automatic watches, which, if you're not familiar with that, an automatic watch is also known as a self wound watch or self winding watch, is a watch that uses the movement of your wrist in order to power it. So it doesn't have batteries. You know, it's similar to a watch you may be familiar with where you manually wind it, you know, by turning the crown. But instead of just being able to wind it by turning the crown, there's a rotor in there that every time you move, that rotor moves and that winds the watch. And so I had not been familiar with those for most of my life. Interestingly enough, it seems that most people in this day and age are not familiar with them, even though it's an old technology. And as I dove into that world, I found, you know, there's this whole niche market for automatic watches and especially for high end Swiss automatic watches, though, they can come from anywhere, right? They come from all over the world. And so I, I had a specific idea in mind for a watch that I wanted to buy. Frankly, it was like I was looking for this watch and I just couldn't find it. I found a number of watches that were similar, but not exactly what I was looking for. And so I thought, you know what? I want to make this watch. And I think I could make this into a business. And the name Wasson actually is my great grandfather's last name. So I had a great grandfather named Harold Wasson. He was born in the late 1800s in Iowa, was a mining engineer in World War I. He joined the army, went to France as a captain, came back and then was a petroleum engineer. Went all over Latin America buying land with oil on it to sell to governments and to large companies. So he had a very adventurous life, you know, one that involved engineering, business, military travel, you know, entrepreneurship, all things that I felt, you know, were kind of ideas or topics or themes that I wanted my brand to evoke that I wanted baked into the brand. And since he's my great grandfather, you know, there's a real story connection there. Right. It's not just kind of a story I pulled out of a hat. I like the name Wasson, and so I went with Wasson Watch Company. And our logo looks kind of like a W that's also a castle, and I wanted that for one. I think a castle evokes power, wealth, sort of an old school, old world vibe, which is the kind of thing that you want to evoke with a luxury brand. But also, the castle is the insignia for the Army Corps of Engineers. Now, technically, I don't know what Harold Wasson did in the Army. We don't have those records, unfortunately. We just have his enlistment paperwork, but. And no one thought to ask him after the war, like, hey, what did you do? Sadly. So I don't know if he was in the Army Corps of Engineers, but I know he was an engineer, and he was in the army, and so that's just another kind of layer of meaning on the logo itself.

Will Spencer [00:07:04]:

What an awesome story to tie a lot of the pieces together from your life and your family's legacy and to sort of bring. Bring a bit of the past forward into the future in a way that, like, you know, if only. If only he could know. If only your. You said it was your great grandfather, I believe, Right?

Will Spencer [00:07:20]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:07:20]:

Yeah. So, you know, it does. It's not like you come from a family history of watchmaking where he would have expected his name. Somehow. It's like, no, I'm gonna. I'm gonna bring my. My great grandfather back to life, you know, quite a long time after his death. That's a beautiful story.

Will Spencer [00:07:34]:

Thank you. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. After I started it, you know, a lot of people don't know how long it can take to get a business off the ground, but I started in 2018. I spent three years in product development. So that's going from idea to idea on paper to prototypes, different rounds of prototypes. And one of the reasons it took so long is I worked for two years with a company that unfortunately just couldn't deliver according to the specifications I had. They're very helpful with the design, but in terms of getting the product that I wanted, we just couldn't do it. And so I had to make a real difficult decision about two years in, like, either one. Maybe I just need to quit Because I can't. What I thought I could do, it looks like I'm not able to do. I'm not able to get there. Or two, I could just lower my standards. I could say, well, I want this, but I'm just not able to achieve that. Let me go with this down here. And the third option was to just pivot and start from square one and figure out how to get where I was going along a different path. And so I ended up identifying some different companies to work with and transitioned to that. And it was about another year from moving over with them to getting my final prototype done. So July 2021, I had my final prototype. Took another year to go to market. And so we've been selling since about the summer of 2022, just going on three years now.

Will Spencer [00:09:09]:

Yeah. A lot of people have no idea how difficult it is to ship a product of any sort, whether it be software as a service or a physical product, like a watch or just the sort of thing you'd buy off a shelf at a store. It's an incredible amount of effort that goes into manufacturing, Envisioning, designing, prototyping, manufacturing, and then shipping and then selling the things that. The things that we buy every day.

Will Spencer [00:09:31]:

Yes, absolutely, yes. And as someone who has a background in writing, you realize you have a context for everything, right? Writing, typically, there's an editorial process where the writer submits something, the editor looks at it, they either make changes or they recommend changes, send it back, make those changes, it goes back. It might go through a few rounds, but the changes that occur are relatively simple because it's words on paper. Right. But when you're talking about a product, like, I have an idea in my head, I need to communicate that idea effectively to someone else, who then needs to work with a team to turn that idea into a physical product. And the layers of complexity, there's way, way more things you can get wrong. And it's not. Whereas on paper, it's not really abstract. It's like this word says this, let's change it to that. But you're describing ideas that are abstract, and then they come out physically. And it's not like you can just edit it in the same way you change words on paper. Like, there's tooling, there's machining, there's all kinds of stuff that goes into it. And so it's been a learning experience for me without a background in manufacturing, but. But I have definitely an appreciation for product development and the ability to roll out products. People do crazy stuff, and it's Amazing.

Will Spencer [00:11:01]:

Yeah. I have a friend who is the co founder of Field company. They make cast iron pans which you can buy on Amazon, but they're bred from their website. And it's just. It's a $100 plus cast iron pan, and I have one of them. And to talk with him about, you know, what he and his brother started the company about coming up with the idea about prototyping the pan, about foundries and shipping and marketing, and, like, it's just. It's a mass and it's a small company. You know, it's not a massive multinational corporation. It's a small company. But the amount that really goes into it to create a finished product that you're proud of is like, yes, this has my name on it. And I'm grateful that it has my name on it. It's exactly what I wanted it to be. It's a remarkable accomplishment, even if you never sell one watch, and praise God, you've sold more than one watch. But there is something to be said like, no, I shipped a product, I did the thing, and, you know, the fruits are up to God, but to create something from nothing, from out of your own mind, and then to be able to wear it on your wrist is. What was that feeling when you got the first finished one in the box ready to. Ready to go to market and be shipped from your website?

Will Spencer [00:12:05]:

Man, it was. It was a good feeling. It was. You know, I'm not a person that. That usually celebrates wildly, if that makes sense. Like, I'm a person who a lot of times I've seen, like, mountaintops or peaks, and I've thought, like, oh, if I make it there, it's gonna be the best. Like, I used to run marathons, and I remember thinking, like, if I ever run a marathon, I'm gonna get a 26.2 tattoo. And I ran a marathon, and I was like, oh, no, I'm not gonna get a tattoo about this. It is just. This feels too normal, right? There's all these other things. And so honestly, it wasn't like this great mountaintop experience, but it was very satisfying. And I think what was most satisfying about it was knowing that I'd chosen not to quit and I had chosen not to compromise. And, you know, just before the very last iteration, I had, like, one last opportunity to compromise. I'd gotten the prototype back, and it was almost perfect. But the hand, I felt that the hands, the minute hand, the hour hand were just a hair too thin and that the logo was a hair too small. And I mean, just a hair, right? Just to where it was, like, the balance felt just slightly off to me. And when I had that prototype in hand, I took a week to really think about it, and is this really what I think about it? And before sending it back for one last iteration. And that was. That was a hard decision because I was excited to go. But at the end of the day, I think just having standards and maintaining them, it ends up being worthwhile in the long run.

Will Spencer [00:13:52]:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. In a previous life, I was a marketing manager, so I'd managed teams of designers to produce various creative products from websites to brochures and physical materials. And there's always that draft that comes back where it's like, this could be good enough, but there is something that's off just by a hair. And, like, I just can't let this out the door. And so we gotta go around the merry go round one more time until we just fix this. Just one click in this direction of having PTSD flashbacks, respectfully of that. But I mean, you have to do it, you know? Cause if you push it out the door and. And you're looking at the physical thing on your wrist and it's bothering you, that's not the feeling you want to have.

Will Spencer [00:14:36]:

No, not at all. Not at all. Yeah.

Will Spencer [00:14:40]:

So maybe you can. Maybe you can talk about, you know, one of the. One of those moments where you were. You were tempted to quit because you, you mentioned not compromising. And that's a certain. That's a feeling that I think a lot of men are.

Will Spencer [00:14:50]:

Are.

Will Spencer [00:14:51]:

Are blessed to have. Like, no, I'm not compromising on this, but so many times in our life and so many different ways we get to a place where it's like, maybe I should just give this up entirely and pivot and go do something else. So can you talk about one of the moments where you were really tempted or you really felt like, ah, maybe I should pack it in or. Yeah, just. Just talk about that for a moment.

Will Spencer [00:15:09]:

Probably the, the most compelling one was, was a situation I mentioned earlier where I realized this first company wasn't able to get it done for us. Right. Yeah, it was. And it was a really. That was. That was so tempting because without some creativity, like, there wasn't an apparent way out. There wasn't an apparent way around. I knew I was going to have to dig for it. I knew I was going to have to search for it, and there wasn't any guarantee I was going to get there either, you know, and so you. There's also like this, man, maybe, maybe this idea, maybe I've just kind of dodged a bullet here because I only got so far with it, you know, at least I didn't invest more. And. And now, now is my chance to get out. And then another time was I wasn't really quite to that point where I was considering giving up, but I was starting to wonder if I was going to have to give up at some point leading up to October of last year. So the beginning of October is when my content on X really started to go, you know, sort of viral or semi viral, whatever you want to call it. And I started to get a lot of traction, which started to lead to more sales. But leading up to that moment, my sales were very slow. I mean, just like the fir in the first nine months of 2024, our sales were so slow, we were basically just barely making ends meet month to month in terms of our expenses. And I started to realize, like, hey, the rate we're selling, if this continues, even if we do make ends meet for three, four, five years, however long it takes us to sell through our existing inventory, we're gonna get to the end of that time period and we're gonna have no money to show for it, you know, no money to do our next production run, no money for anything else. Like, this isn't a business, this is a hobby, you know, and it was something that I was wanting to become a business. And so I was starting to ask myself those hard questions like, what will I do if sale doesn't increase? And if it doesn't increase soon, I mean, it's not going to matter how much it increases because we'll have spent all our money that we made for so long, right? There's going to have to be a period of growth. And I prayed about it a lot. You know, that's really what it came down to is I didn't know the answer, but I prayed and I asked God for help. And I told God, I don't hear a booming voice from heaven saying, do this or don't do that on the matter. But I told God, I believe this is what you have for me to be doing. I believe that you've helped me to get to this point. I really felt like some of the success I had with the product development, with the design, even with the company name and things like that, that God had helped me to get to that point. And so I was just kind of asking God for help and asking God, hey, if this is going to grow, if it's going to be successful. I think it's going to need to start that soon. And it was really sort of shortly after that that it did start to grow. And so, I mean, I can't really take much or any of the credit for it because at the end of the day, all good things are from God. And I really think God has given me a lot of help here.

Will Spencer [00:18:38]:

Yeah, I definitely know that feeling for sure. And it's funny because when you and I met at Fight Left Feast, I noticed that it was not long after that that your social media really began to take off. And I'm happy to see because I think at the time you had just like seven or eight, maybe 10,000 followers on X. And then it just started rocketing up from there, something like that. And so I was very happy to see that. It's like, oh, we crossed paths at a. At a crossroads, I guess, in the history of your business.

Will Spencer [00:19:09]:

Yeah, I was in the thick of it. That was because Fight Laugh Feast was right at the end of October, beginning of November. So I think it was like October 31st through November 2nd or something like.

Will Spencer [00:19:20]:

That for the election.

Will Spencer [00:19:21]:

My account had just started to grow at the beginning of, like, literally on October 1st, I had this post that went sort of semi viral. And I went from 800 followers. I had 800 followers in September to 5,000, like, a few days into October. And then in the middle of October, some pretty notable accounts, mostly Peaceful Memes and Jesse Kelly both posted about. About me and about, you know, my watches. And I went from like 5,000 to just under 20,000. Right. So that's. And that's where we met at Fight Laughter Feast. And it just kept going up. And there were definitely some lulls here and there, but, I mean, there's been a lot of traction. Absolutely.

Will Spencer [00:20:10]:

Now, how did you decide to market Wasson to the communities that you did? Because obviously you could have gone a bunch of different directions. You could have tried to reach a bunch of different audiences. What made you decide on the audiences that you ultimately chose?

Will Spencer [00:20:25]:

You know, I came to realize at some point that the identity of Wasan Watch Company is my identity, you know, And I think when you're trying to start a company, you're trying to figure out what the identity of your company is. And I just tried to stay true to myself and my beliefs, which in my case, my. My most defining belief is my belief in Jesus Christ as my savior. You know, it's. It's a. As a Christian, and on top of that, I'm, you know, I'm also conservative. I'm a Marine Corps veteran. I'm patriotic. You know, these are just sort of things about me, but I'm also very outspoken. Yeah, yeah. Who knew, right? I wish there were some kind of hint.

Will Spencer [00:21:14]:

Those who are just listening, there's a giant American flag behind him.

Will Spencer [00:21:18]:

Yeah, just a wee bit patriotic, you know, So I, you know, a little bit of background. I've been involved with a movement known as the abortion abolition movement since 2018. And prior to that, I started doing what's called sidewalk counseling or sidewalk advocacy at abortion facilities. I started that in 2015. I also ran for US Congress in 2016. And so, I mean, I've been very comfortable putting myself out there with bold stances in the face of opposition, in the midst of controversy. Like, abortion is a controversial topic. It's one that obviously you have people on the other side. There's controversy in that they disagree with it. But even people that are ostensibly on my side, you know, or to some extent on my side, they agree that abortion is bad and stuff. A lot of people just aren't comfortable with the topic. So I maybe have already had a propensity towards being outspoken, being bold in different things, but exercising that in that the area of not just politics, but politics around abortion, it really desensitizes you. It really builds up. If, you know, you go from thick skin to rhino skin, if you will, and you kind of just expect to be attacked and you don't let it bother you. You don't ask the question, typically, is this going to result in me being attacked? You ask the question, is this the right thing to do and is it prudent? Which sometimes, you know, there can be. There can be a gap between those two things. There can be. This is right, but it's not necessarily prudent. But so from really kind of the very beginning, I was outspoken about my faith with the business. And what changed probably between say like beginning of 2024 and end of 2024 was just, I think, my ability to leverage the platform X effectively, you know, because there is a learning curve on that platform and it takes time to build up traction. And, and some of the building traction is building relationships. You know, you get to sort of know people a little bit on X and you're commenting on their stuff and they're commenting on your stuff, and, and eventually you get enough of a core of a following and of. Of trust and everything that you put something out there and enough people see it and they repost it, and it sort of starts to snowball. And so I think while my. My messaging was always bold, it was always openly Christian, it became sharpened and honed on X over. Over the. The period of time that I was using it.

Will Spencer [00:24:12]:

Then, yeah, X is that. That's what I try to tell people is that X and YouTube are prestige platforms. A hundred thousand followers on X is. Is equivalent to, you know, 10 times as many on Instagram. 100,000 subscribers on YouTube is similar in many ways. And the reason why that's the case is that there's massive learning curves for Both X and YouTube in a way that isn't necessarily true in other ways. But if you can hack it through the jungle and pick up the way the language works and how to write and how to post and all that X, you can be wildly successful on both platforms. They're good for different things, but that success is unparalleled, particularly networking. I appreciate that you mentioned it's about meeting people. X is a super. You and I connected on X really in many real ways. But it's a superior platform for networking. Very, very powerful. So I can see how that fueled your company's growth and success in a. In a. In a big way.

Will Spencer [00:25:06]:

Yeah, well, and just kind of another note on X is it really has become, in my opinion, the. The public square, the true public square, and that it facilitates public conversation so well and like an open public conversation, because it's not just a conversation between two parties that everyone can sort of watch. It's a conversation between all the parties in which all people can particip. Certainly there'll be more prominent parties involved based on follower count and things like that, but I really appreciate that about it. And when I try to sort of replicate the same thing on other platforms, you can't. Like, Facebook is nothing like it. Instagram is nothing like it. It doesn't facilitate sort of a public conversation in the same way. But it's got some dangers that come along with it.

Will Spencer [00:26:02]:

Absolutely, it does. And it's funny that you started making a big impact on X at the time that you did, which would have been the second half of 2024, leading into the end of 24, and then now into 25. And so as you say that it's a public conversation. Yes. And it's also. I like it to think of it as gang warfare. Like, I think X is fundamentally gang warfare where the gangs all know who's on their own gang, but you can't necessarily see the gangs and they're just warring with each other in dialogue and speech. And language and it's a shouting match as much as it is a public square based on dialogue.

Will Spencer [00:26:40]:

Yeah, yeah, I'd say gang warfare is a good way to describe it. I describe it as information warfare. You know, it is a battlefield in which different groups and parties are trying to gain the upper hand in how information is disseminated, how it's received, you know, what people believe. And if you get on X and you're just kind of this unwitting, you know, new person or whatever, you need to know that people are battling for your mind on X. A lot of different people, a lot of different groups. And it, it's what's really fascinating and also sort of terrifying to me is X went, it went through this crazy fast evolution from this closed off platform like many platforms were, to this free speech platform that, that was almost like the shining example of the public square that we've been discussing. And then eventually the big entities who have a say so in things recognized what it was and started figuring out how to have an impact to there. Because for a while they were kind of lost. They didn't know how to have an impact on X, but they are figuring it out through the leveraging of influencers and bots and foreign influence and all the rest.

Will Spencer [00:28:08]:

Yeah, and I'm looking forward to discussing all that with you because I definitely agree and you and I have been on the battlefield in similar ways. I want you to drill into something that you said though, real quick. What exactly? So in kinetic warfare there's all different kind of things that any military force is trying to achieve. From the destruction of hard targets, from the destruction of military forces to the capturing of territory and the securing of resources. But in information warfare, particularly on X, what is, what is the target, what is the aim, what is the given that we're dealing with posts of say 280 or so characters largely. What is the thing that people are fighting over? What is the territory that is attempting to be claimed? What is the, what is the objective?

Will Spencer [00:28:54]:

Absolutely. So, so it's, it's our minds, right? It's the mind of the individual and it's the collective mind. It's the minds of the people at large. And it could be, it's over a whole bunch of topics, but in many cases you can sort of boil it down to there's almost this large scale battle being waged between, you could say liberty and authoritarianism. Right. But then that's maybe one, one of, one of the things that's being fought. But you know, we're and we're going to talk about this more, I'm sure, but, you know, anti Semitism is, is a big thing. And within the topic of anti Semitism or really umbrella over anti Semitism, you have fascism, you have communism, right? And fascism and communism are two sides of the same coin and they're pitted against each other, but they're very, very similar. Right. And frankly, both, both of those camps are anti Semitic. But it's, it's about changing people's views by degrees. And it may not mean totally changing someone's mind from being, let's say, pro Israel, pro Jews, you know, opposed to anti Semitic all the way to being anti Israel, anti Jewish, you know, to being actually anti Semitic. It's more like, hey, can I move this person who's over here just a couple of steps to where they don't feel comfortable voicing their support for Israel or for Jews or an opposition to anti Semitism anymore? Right. If, if I can do that, you know, the, I being that the, the interested parties in this instance, then that's a win, right? For them. And the more people you can do that for, that's a win. And then you measure it on the larger scale. So I, I looked up the other day, Pew Research, what the, the attitudes of Americans towards Israel are, and they actually did a poll on it in April of this year, and they compared it with numbers in 2022. So in 2022, 42% of Americans had an unfavorable view of Israel and about 10% had a very unfavorable view of Israel. In just three years, coming to 2025, it's gone from 42% unfavorable to 53% have an unfavorable view of Israel. So it jumped 11 points from being a minority to being a slight majority. The group that is 10% saying they had a very unfavorable view of Israel, that jumped to 19%. So that nearly doubled. Right. And so you see how moving the population in a point of view by degrees over time can have a big impact on a mass scale like that. You know, I want to acknowledge that there can be inconsistencies in how questions are asked or, you know, who your target audience are and everything like that. But assuming things are generally the same like those are shocking numbers, that is a shocking move in just three years.

Will Spencer [00:32:14]:

Absolutely did. Now, real quick, did you figure all this out just over the course, we'll say the past year? Is it something that you've kind of had to think your way through over the past Several months. Or is this something that you were always aware of going into X or Twitter?

Will Spencer [00:32:29]:

I definitely knew that Twitter was an information warfare space. Going back a couple years. This, the specific topic of antisemitism was less on my radar, but I definitely knew as an information warfare space. And so when Elon Musk bought Twitter, which I want to say was in like October of 2022, I could be remembering that incorrectly. But it was around then I realized like, hey, this could theoretically be a free speech space again. I mean, part of the whole reason that Elon Musk purchased Twitter was because of the Babylon Bee, you know, having their account shut down for free speech. And it's like, okay, well if he's buying it for that, then that's a good sign. And so on my personal account, you know, the main account that I use is myson Watch, but I've got another account account called App paulbrowntx and that's an account I had started years and years ago. I just didn't use much because I'd been shadow banned on X for so long. Well, once I saw and started to hear like, hey, this might be a real free speech space, I got on and I was using X to talk a lot about abortion abolition. I was using my account a ton for that. And I didn't get as much traction, you know, in terms of like numbers as I've gotten with my Watson Watch account. But I was learned, that's really where I learned the platform was using that. And I started getting to know people and building the relationships that I end up sort of transferring to Watson Watch. But you know, you could see the power of the information warfare space exemplified in the summer of last year. Really, it was spring of last year. Donald Trump was of course running for president again and he, one of the issues that he was honestly not doing great on was abortion. He was signaling some really troubling kind of stances on abortion that were getting steadily worse as the spring progressed. And myself and others on X started to voice some really, I would say heavy handed, appropriately heavy handed pushback to what he was saying. And there was one particular day where Donald Trump said something along the lines that indicated that he was going to vote for the pro abortion amendment in Florida. Right. And a lot of us on X in that space went apoplectic like, like, this is a, this is a line you cannot cross. You are going to lose our vote. And it's, it's my belief and a lot of people who, you know, kind of watch this space carefully that, that caused him to take a step back and the messaging that he was delivering on that issue and he, he came out and said, no, he's not voting for the amendment. And he stopped making the kind of statements he'd been previously making on abortion. And so like, not only is it a, is it an information warfare space, but it's an effective one. You mobilize people who are passionate on an issue at large. It can have huge impacts, not only on public perception, but on specific policy outcomes because of the stakeholders who are also exposed to those ideas.

Will Spencer [00:35:58]:

Yeah, you can, if you use the platform well, or if you're part of a, say, organization or a gang that's effective in pushing their messaging, you can actually, you can actually move the needle or at least appear to move the needle on some key battlefields for good or for bad. That's right. That's right. So I'm glad you brought up the anti Semitism issue because I think that's something that obviously I can speak a lot about and have. When did you first start noticing that beginning to crop up on the free speech platform? Because I remember when Elon bought X, because I had a, you know, account back then and it wasn't right away. It took a bit of time.

Will Spencer [00:36:39]:

Yeah. So I, I probably started to notice and I noticed in stages right there I had a kind of a longer period of maybe a more dim awareness. But that kind of starting in April, May of this year just sort of shot up. If there's this, if you graph it, it's be like that. Right. But I started to notice it around the time my business started to gain traction in October of last year. As I gained traction, I got more followers, I got more people commenting on my content. And just every once in a while people would say either blatant or veiled anti Semitic things or they were, you know, people were just asking questions or people were, you know, kind of pushing me to take a position. You know, I might say something, you know, a lot of my content is very kind of specifically going after the left, going after communists or whatever. But I might make a post that says they like, they don't want you to know this or they want you to do such and such. And you know, people would respond with like, who's they? But like you could tell, you look at their account and they've got like an ss, you know, symbol in their profile picture. They got, they've got these kind of clues and you're like, okay, I think I know what this guy wants me to Say, and so my policy for a while, for good six, seven months or whatever, when I started to notice this was like, you know what? I'm not going to engage with these people. These people are fringe. And I just don't, I don't want anything to do with this. I don't, I'm not anti Semitic, but I feel like if I come out and they push me to, you know, be opposed to anti Semitic, it's going to be this big thing and you know, all this stuff. And I think there, if I'm, if I'm being fair to myself, I don't have to speak out on every single issue. Right. Technically I've, I've chosen to be bold in certain areas, but, but I don't have to. But then over time I started to feel guilty about this, that I'm not speaking up into what I started to see growing as a problem and something that, you know, I don't know if you kind of plan to talk about this or get into this, but something that you noted, even some of my content as maybe I was becoming desensitized to what was sort of a growing antisemitism and even aesthetic of anti Semitism. Some people were looking at my content and starting to think that I was anti Semitic. That wasn't the message that I was trying to, to push across but, but definitely sowed confusion, which is not really what I'm about. And it was kind of a wake up call that led to a couple of different posts on my part. One in May and then several in June. And what happened was in May I just came to this point where I realized one, I think there is some real anti Semitism on this platform that needs to be addressed. I'm tired of people commenting on my stuff and trying to goad me into this anti Semitic position. And two, I really want to clarify because some people are now questioning. It wasn't just the, the groipers and the Nazis who were needling me now. It was folks on the other side were needling me. Like, like, but are you anti Semitic? You know, kind of thing. And I wanted to clarify. So in May I just put out this post where I essentially said, hey guys, I don't hate Jews. The Holocaust is real and the numbers are real and Hitler was evil and the Nazis were evil. And if we disagree on this, like, we're not gonna agree. Like there's just, you're not gonna bring me over to that side. And that post did get some attention, you know, it got some views, it got Some negative comments. I lost some followers, but they were quickly made up within days. Right. It didn't, it didn't really. It was kind of a blip on the radar. And so it wasn't until June that the big, the, the real big posts came and kind of threw a real wrench in, in the system, so to speak.

Will Spencer [00:41:10]:

Yeah, let's. Let's start with that. Let's start with that first post. I appreciate you calling out some of, some of those themes because this is. That was the anti. Semitism was a phenomenon that I've seen not just on X, but in men's circles online for, I don't know, five, 10 years.

Will Spencer [00:41:24]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:41:25]:

And so it's sort of like this underground. Yeah. In the, in the masculinity movement that was called the manosphere, it was a subject of conversation in private circles, and that's just the jokes that men would tell of all different sorts. And so as the manosphere came into reform circles in particular, which began 2021-2020-2021-2022, and as that sort of started to happen, these manosphere ideas came into the reform world and it started kind of bubbling up on X in places. And I recognized it for what it was, but again, like you, I had been desensitized to it from having been in that world. I recognize it for what it was, but it seemed to explode, particularly after the election in 2024. It was happening a lot during summer of 2024, but it was after the election. I thought it was just an expression of everyone's angst. Everyone's just like, really worked up about this election. Is Trump gonna. Are they gonna steal it from Trump again? Are we gonna have four more years of Biden? And so as soon as Trump won, I'm like, oh, maybe everyone's gonna breathe this big sigh of relief and. And we're going to just kind of go on with our lives as usual and get back to some of the 2016, 2017, first Trump presidency vibes. But that's not what happened at all. Instead, it ramped up even more to the point where as you fast forward six or so months, six, seven, eight months to April, May of this year, it's. It's dominating conversation. And I appreciate. Oh, I appreciate that you took a stance on it, because as I was watching this take place, naturally have my own story with it. As I was watching this take place, I was starting to get very concerned about not the men who were talking about it, but the men who were silent in the face of it. And so I appreciate you kind of explaining your reasoning behind all of that.

Will Spencer [00:43:04]:

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting. Like, I want to encourage other people not to be silent on it, but I also, you know, was silent on it for a good while. And so I recognize where people can come from. And I don't want to be too quick to vilify those who are silent on it, but I want to goad them too. I want to be like, hey, like, this is a growing problem. And there may come a point where, like, you know, maybe you are a villain if you're being silent on it. And I say that, you know, try to muster all the grace that I can knowing, but, like, they're there but for the grace of God go I. And there but for the grace of God went I like for a while. Right. And so I want to. I want to be very clear about the evils of anti Semitism, that it is this gross, disgusting, horrific evil. And I also. But at the same time, I want to build a bridge to people who may be in that or who may be flirting with that and go like, hey, just, this is a gross, disgusting, horrific evil, but there is redemption. Like, you don't have to be identified by that. You can be identified in Christ. You can repent and you can come away from that and actually be someone who speaks up against it from, from experience in a way that will even have more weight.

Will Spencer [00:44:32]:

Yes, I appreciate that and I agree. And I equally want to build a bridge to men who are caught in communities where that is being expressed and they came into that community or that group of friends or whatever, and it's all just fun and good times until they see it take a very dark turn, like, this is not at all what I signed up for. And they feel trapped maybe by their own statements they've made in these group chats or maybe just not wanting to draw attacks from friends or who knows? And they feel like they can't just quietly slink out the door as they discover, as the lights come on and they discover what they're really in. I mean, you have to find your way out. Maybe you don't have to draw the sword and go to war, but, like, there is a bridge, there is a way to exit from those communities, as my pastor put it really well. He said that, you know, a lot of guys wanted to go for a ride for. In the. Go for a ride in the car with the cool kids, and they didn't know that they'd be involved in a drive by shooting. And so like, that's. I thought that was a great way of putting it. It's like, yeah, you didn't know what you signed up for, but you still got to jump out of the car. And I think there are a lot of men, a lot of men that are trapped in that position.

Will Spencer [00:45:38]:

Yeah, yeah. And it. Something that really has been weighing on me as I kind of think about how to frame the conversation. I put out a post the other day really addressed to people who are in those chat groups and who are in those friend groups that are seeing this stuff and not speaking up about it. One of the things I really noted, well, going back a little bit, and we can discuss this more later. You know, when things got really bad in June, I was being attacked by just mountains of people. You know, it was a real effort, an organized effort probably to take me down. At that point, I. I started kind of seeing some other players on the battlefield who were on my side. And I was, you know, posting some of their content, they're posting some of mine. And I got people reaching out to me saying, like, oh, don't, like, don't affiliate with those individuals. Like, they're this or that. They're, you know, their problems for these reasons. But they weren't saying anything about anti Semitism. These, you know, these same people, they weren't coming out and saying like, hey, Paul's right about this, or. Or, yeah, we do need to counter those things. They weren't being anti Semitic either, but they weren't speaking up about that. They just wanted to make sure I knew that I shouldn't be allying with these other folks. And it's like, man, there's this old saying in abortion abolition work that's true in other places as well. It's like, I like the way they're doing it more than the way you're not. And at this point, I think it's undeniable, it is undeniable that there is a real fight for our minds and for our nation on this issue. And if you don't like the way certain parties are fighting that fight, your best way to fix it is to get involved, Right? Come. Come into the camp and let's talk about it and even maybe argue about it, maybe even like, strongly disagree about it. But if you're on the outside saying, hey, this guy or that guy or that guy is not disagreeing with anti Semitism in the right way, but you're not taking a stance on it publicly, then I'm sorry, that just doesn't have as much Weight for me, you may mean. Well, like I'm not calling those people my enemies or anything like that, but it's, it's not going to change my approach at this juncture.

Will Spencer [00:48:09]:

Oh, there are so many examples of those hey brother kind of emails or DMS where it's like warning you away, you know, from, don't get involved with these folks. Okay. And you're silent, hiding in the background. Why should I, why should I listen to your guidance on this when there's a team actually taking this on. Right. I love that you mentioned that because a lot of what happens on X, maybe people know, maybe they don't know. This actually happens in DM groups. Like the, what surfaces on the timeline is just, you know, a small, a relatively small percentage of what's going on on the platform. Maybe not necessarily in DM groups on X, but also on Telegram or Discord or Signal or whatever. Or where the coordination happens behind the scenes. Like what we're watching on X every day. Even if you don't post a thing, what you're watching every day are in many ways coordinated plays that are done off the field and then brought onto the field. And that's what I mean about being gang warfare. It appears as if we're all just individual accounts interacting with each other. But that is not the case at all. And so know that as you're walking onto the battlefield, that's not like just a, it's not like a melee, it's not a battle royale in Fortnite. You know, it's actually coordinated warfare. You just can't see the coordination happening behind the scenes.

Will Spencer [00:49:22]:

Yes, yes. And coordination is valuable. It can work well. And it can also work against you. Right. When people start to see the coordination and you realize they're bad actors, you realize the level of determination you're dealing with and you realize like, hey, now it's time to go all in for this and, and put up or shut up, so to speak.

Will Spencer [00:49:48]:

Yeah. So let's talk about the big post that you made in June, which I think is probably the one that I saw.

Will Spencer [00:49:54]:

Yeah. So leading up to, I think the post was June 22 and leading up to that, if, you know, we all have 5 second memories now because of things like X and just our attention spans always. Like a racehorse. But, but going back to, to that week, you know, the big thing in the news was the potential at that point US military intervention with Iran because of their nuclear program.

Will Spencer [00:50:26]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:50:27]:

And leading up to that, there were a lot of folks saying like, we can't do this. This is going to lead to World War Three. Very notably Tucker Carlson. You know, he said it will almost certainly result in the thousands of American deaths and will result in, you know, the loss of billions of dollars and untold lost lives of Americans on US Soil due to terrorist attacks. You know, so I'm kind of still waiting for that stuff to happen. But, but so far it hasn't. But there were a lot of folks saying that. But what I noticed was really insidious for me is I noticed a very sharp, steep increase in anti Semitic comments and people voicing their opposition to the Iran conflict couched in that anti Semitism, anti Israel, anti Jewish statements. There was a lot of people sharing memes or whatever that I'm not dying for Israel, you know, of various kinds, like, I'm not dying for Israel. I noticed an account that has since been shut down because it was, it was a Pakistani account, apparently. It was called, like, Texas Patriot. And I was seeing his stuff on my platform all the time, just spouting off about Israel and about dying for Israel and not fighting Israel's wars. And, and I, you know, I try to be very objective about things. And I, I have a background in intelligence. You know, I've done a lot of work that has, you know, been directly looking at Iran and their activities, you know, both in the Marine Corps and in the Defense Intelligence Agency. And what's more, you know, I've, I've been, I've had an interest in foreign policy and foreign affairs my entire life and warfare my entire life. Like, one of my young childhood memories was watching Desert Storm, you know, unfold on television before me. I was like 5 years old when that happened. But it was a formative memory. My dad, you know, I mentioned I was in the Marine Corps. My brother was in the Marine Corps. My dad was in the Marine Corps. My dad, one of his best friends, with whom he went to officer candidate school for the Marine Corps, died in the 1983 barracks, Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut, which was carried out by Hezbollah, who was backed by Iran. So I know about Iran. I know that they hate America, that they are deadly to Americans, that they've been killing Americans as often as possible for decades. You know, thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan died as a direct result of Iran's support of insurgent groups in, in both those areas of operation. And so I recognize that Iran is a bad actor, that they're a malicious actor. And I also recognize that they're unstable in ways that most nations are not Most people are not familiar with Shia eschatology, right? There's sort of end times belief of Shia Muslims. And so Iran is unique because it is the only real powerful Shia nation, right? Yemen's Shia. You know, there's definitely some Shia populations in Iraq, but Iran is, is like Shia headquarters, if you will. And in Shia eschatology, they believe that there's this guy who's known as the 12th Mahdi or the 12th Imam, who's going to come, he's kind of their, like Messiah figure. He's going to come in some end time and establish a global caliphate, a global era of peace and, you know, global Islam essentially. But what's going to lead to his arrival, to his appearance is going to be a period of essentially terrible tribulation, death, war, etc. And so they don't only believe that that's going to happen, but there are, there's a large segment of people in Iran who believe it's actually their responsibility to help make that happen faster. So, so people will kind of do this false dichotomy of like, why does North Korea get to have nukes and Iran doesn't, you know, blah, blah, blah. Okay, first of all, I don't want North Korea to have nukes. You know, I don't think anyone does except for North Korea. But there's a big difference there in that Kim Jong Un we can expect is driven by sort of this normal incentive to live. If he pushes the button, we're going to turn North Korea into a lava field, okay? Like, he knows that there's no getting around that. So that gives him a good incentive not to push the button. The people in the leadership in Iran are not necessarily driven by the exact same incentive because they may be willing to die as martyrs or to take it upon their nation to die as martyrs in order to usher in the reign of the 12th Imam. And so not only do they hate America, not only do they have motives already to kill Americans, to kill, you know, all kinds of non Muslims, non Shias for that matter. As a, as a total aside, when I was in Iraq, what we were mainly, what I was mainly paying attention to was Sunni and Shia terrorists killing each other, bombing mosques of the, the opposing sects, but that we know that they're unstable, that they, they have shown malicious intent that they could use those nukes. So we had very real reasons as a nation, aside from Israel, regardless of Israel, to counter Iran. And so I knew that all these arguments were essentially fabricated and they were very, very heavily pushing on this Anti Israel narrative. So I know that's a long backstory, but I want to put you in the mindset of where I was coming from. I wasn't just this ideologue who had this like, you know, go Israel, Go America stance. I have a basis for these beliefs. And so I put out this, this post. It's funny, I've got the American flag behind me. I had a big picture of the American flag in this post too. But I said something along the lines of dear Nazis, Groipers and anti Semites, you are not welcome in the Republican Party and mega and conservatism, whatever. Like, we don't want you here, you need to get out. And then I addressed kind of the issue with their opposition to our involvement in Iran. And what was interesting about that post, as you'll note, is it was addressed to Nazis gripers and anti Semites. It wasn't addressed to anyone else. And I wasn't calling anyone who opposed US intervention in Iran a Nazi or grip or anti Semite. I do believe there were some good actors who in good faith opposed our intervention there, like for legitimate reasons, reasons I would disagree with, but you know, not anti Semitic reasons. So I wasn't addressing them. I was addressing the anti Semites. And I mean it just caused like the world to cave in. It felt like because the Nazis, Drapers and anti Semites came out of the woodwork and attacked me and of course twisted my words and started to push this narrative that I was calling anyone who didn't support the US war with Iran a Nazi or a Groip or an anti Semite. And like people piled on. I usually get between 1 and maybe on a big week like 3 or 4 million impressions on my content on X in a good week. And I got 11 million impressions that week, 22,000 comments on my content, which, you know, in a, in a good week, maybe it's 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000, right? Not 22,000. And the overwhelming response was heavily negative. I mean, I got death threats. All of it, all of it. It was, it was wild.

Will Spencer [00:58:42]:

Yeah, I remember watching a lot of that go down and to really see it's difficult to get the beast to surface fully in the open. It's very good at hiding, it's very good at cloaking its language. It's very good at moving in kind of secret. It is very real. It's very difficult to get the thing. Thing to pop out and to show the, the mass of its bulk in the entirety. And when it happens, I mean I think a lot of people, I, I've tried for a long time in various ways to let people know what a significant problem this is. Again, I, I, and I've said this multiple times on the show, I strongly encourage everyone to read the book Black sun by Nicholas Goodrick Clark. And you will see the history of neo Nazi anti Semitism movements in the United States since, in Europe since the 1950s. And you will get a sense, as I did when I read the book, the massive scale of it, like, people don't believe it's fringe, it's not a big deal. That's huge. And so in your post it surfaced fully and I'm sure you got to see a lot of things that were quite shocking as the beast reveals itself in the open.

Will Spencer [00:59:52]:

Yes. Yeah, I was surprised by both the volume of the criticism and the, the just the nature of it, you know, how dark so much of it was, how attacking, how quick people were to spin lies and then how quickly those were disseminated as well. You know, like stuff that is still being said about me today that I can trace back to that, that week in June where it started off and it's like, man, it's, it's, it's insidious, it's evil. But there was also, it's isolating because don't get me wrong, there were definitely people who came to my side who were openly helpful and openly supportive, but there are a lot of folks who weren't who were silent either because maybe they didn't see it or maybe they didn't feel the same way as me about her. Maybe they just didn't want the Ireland of the negative attention that I was receiving. And it was kind of like this reality moment of like, oh man, this is bad. This is real bad.

Will Spencer [01:01:04]:

Yeah, yeah. And I think the part and the multiple people have talked about this over the years. I'm sure you've probably seen them say it. Just what happens when you see people who you formerly thought were your friends that you were close with, maybe you'd even met in person, either turn on you or remain silent in the face of the attacks that you know that they're seeing? Like, one of the ways that people get around in X is like, oh bro, I did totally didn't see it. And that's completely valid. Sometimes you can have posts, do millions of views and you know, your best friend doesn't see it and who knows why the algorithm works that way. But to see friends turn on you or you know, to counter signal or just to Remain silent in the face of it is a, it's a pretty shocking thing to experience.

Will Spencer [01:01:44]:

For sure. For sure. So that, that represented a big turning point in my perspective and my perception. And it happened in parts because it was like, okay, I was starting to see the anti Semitism. I started to address it in May. Not a lot came up from it. In June when I rep. When I addressed it more with maybe a, say, a sharper axe, if you will, that's when I went from like, okay, this is bad to this is a, an existential threat that I, I can't ignore at all. And what's more, it's, it's, it's something that I've spoken about a lot since then. And it, I, I use this analogy with someone the other day. Sometimes it feels like, you know, because my account, I do hit, do hard hitting stuff, but a lot of my stuff is kind of satirical, it's kind of light hearted, it's kind of funny, has been in the past. It feels like you're this fun like joker kind of a guy and you're at this house and you go into another room and you see a fire and you come back and you tell everyone like, hey, there's a fire in the next room. And everyone's like okay, whatever, sure. And you like keep bringing it up because it's a big problem. Like, no, there's a fire in the other room, we really need to address this fire. And people just like, dude, you used to be so cool, man. Like now all you talk about is this fire. And I'm like, yes, yes, yes. Like, yes, it's real. And so I want to be the, I want to talk about a wide range of important topics and I want to be fun and be able to, you know, make jokes and make people laugh and all this stuff. But I'm also like, we cannot ignore this fire. And I can't, I can't ignore it with on. You know, in my conscience. We all have to give an account, right? And my whole life, you know, I mentioned I've always had a big interest in foreign affairs. I've been aware of genocide for most of my life. And it's always been one of those things, even as a young child, where I was like, how could this happen? How could people let this happen? How could people not do anything about it? Why didn't people do anything about it? And obviously people have done things to try to prevent genocides historically. But I, I see this as a, just an important point in time where the time to Counter a potential genocide is now because frankly, if we get to the point where it starts, it's too late. It is too late. It is way too late. Certainly you can and should resist a genocide at the point where it's starting, where it's beginning to start, if it's ongoing. But you're not going to stop it at that point, certainly not as an individual. What stops genocides is larger armed groups or the bad actors running out of steam or choosing not to follow that as a policy objective anymore. So the time to stop it is now.

Will Spencer [01:04:55]:

I agree. It's funny, you know, I, as I've been looking at this for a while, I have heard people talking about genocide, about worries about it and I've always been sort of like, I'm not really sure where the energy is really going to come from to create that in the United States. But as you were saying that, I just remembered that someone had posted the other day about mass formation psychosis. Maybe you remember that term from COVID where it really doesn't take a whole lot of people to set off a chain reaction that suddenly crystallizes or catalyzes everyone's perceptions that suddenly we're facing this threat. Like ultimately, why did Covid become a thing? I think it ultimately became a thing because of flight attendants and public school teachers and nurses freaking out about it. And that was enough to create a mass formation psychosis. That's my theory. 100 me that those are three kind of bureaucratic choke points for around American culture. And it sort of catalyzed particularly through women. You know, it catalyzed the American population as a whole. That's my theory. Maybe for another time. But please, please jump in on that if you'd like.

Will Spencer [01:06:08]:

Yeah, no. One of the scariest things. So one of the reasons I've, I've had sort of a. My eye on international affairs is my dad's been involved in international missions my whole life. So, you know, he would travel to Sri Lanka or the Philippines or Bolivia or somewhere when I was very young and I, and I, you know, learn about these places. You know, most three, four, five year olds don't can't find Sri Lanka on a map. But I like, oh, that's true. Sri Lanka is. And this is what's going on in Sri Lanka. And I mean he's traveled all over the world. He's done a lot of work in Africa. He's done work in Sudan and Uganda and Kenya. And he, he went to Kenya shortly after that. And I can't remember what year this was. But there was like a mini, very localized genocide that occurred in this one region. He was at that. I can't remember what the numbers were, if it was 10,000 or tens of thousands of people were killed and this, this one small area. And my dad was there again just very shortly afterward. And he talked to people, you know, like about what happened. And one thing he kept hearing from people is we didn't believe that that could ever happen here. You know, and it's. If you've ever read Lord of the Flies, which, you know, that's been required reading in a lot of schools over the years. So a lot of people have read it. The whole point, the whole premise of that book was countering the concept or the idea that barbarism was something that only, you know, maybe specific people groups or specific segments of the population could fall into. Right. One of the prevailing theories after World War II. And it, this was, you know, among say British society, for instance, the author of Lord of the Flies was British. Was like, well, I mean that could never happen in England, obviously. Like that was, that was a German thing. It's those Germans, you know, in their Germanic ways or something. And he just, he just illustrated how people devolve into terror, into evil and to sin, into barbarism under certain circumstances. And obviously if you're Christian, you recognize all of us have that capacity. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Man is not basically good, so to speak. But a lot of us have trouble wrapping our minds around the capacity for violence, for mass violence that is inherent in individuals and in groups of individuals. I think most Americans really don't believe a genocide could happen here. You know, most Brits to this day probably don't believe a genocide could happen there where there probably certain specific circumstances that would be required to lead to it. So I don't expect it to happen spontaneously tomorrow. But under the right circumstances, if we stay on this path that we seem to be on today, it could be a very realistic prospect in 10 years. And that man, that, that is both terrifying and sobering. That's incredibly sobering.

Will Spencer [01:09:28]:

Absolutely. Yeah. Because maybe if the idea of a genocide didn't seem plausible to me thinking about it in terms of a preference cascade or mass formation psychosis that took place during COVID which we all watched not that long ago, that I could actually see happening and that you talk about the shift of the American public toward the anti Israel shift from 42% to 53%. And as the information warfare escalates on X And now that it's escalated, not even inside X, just on the platform, it's also outside with Candace Owens and so many other influencers. Now I think I would say that the information warfare battlefield perspective on this issue comes into focus much more clearly. That yeah, there is actually the possibility, there is actually the possibility for some sort of mass violence. Not out of like some underground communities that have been fomenting a plan like, like the, like the Day of the Rope or whatever. I can't remember the name of that book right now. Not like that, but just where, where the American public gets sort of captured by this idea that just runs like wildfire through the population that, that I could actually see happening. Okay, that was definitely sobering and scary.

Will Spencer [01:10:49]:

Yeah. And also like in my mind as I think about the potential for something like that, I don't see it as a spontaneous uprising of the citizenry to carry out. I see it as resulting in the capturing of our institutions. Right. If, if we're, if we're 10 years out from our population being at that level, I mean we're talking about then the rise of, of the 21st century American Hitler. Right. That precedes it, that then you start to see people voting for people based on the perspective of like, well, you know, they recognize the problem is the Jews, right. I mean that's an important sort of prerequisite for taking office. If they don't recognize that, then I can't vote for them and that then it's just only a few steps removed from there. But we know there are already people thinking like that, that kind of, that a basic prerequisite or requirement for them to be on the same problem, same page with people is to recognize that the Jews are the underlying problem. Right. You just see that rhetoric all the time. All they have to do is spread that belief to a larger percentage of the population. If they do that, then they've effectively won or they've set the stage so that they can win. On what, what, what, what has been the fundamental, I would say kind of just world changing shift in my mind is you go back a ways and obviously you have the anti Semitism that comes out of this sort of anti Israel, pro Palestine position that we often see. Right. But that has, has historically, and by that I mean going back a few years or more, been resigned to the left, you know, and so as long as the left was championing that position and it was the left exclusively, it wasn't the kind of thing that I ever thought was going to get that much traction at least not on the right, because it's the left. As long as the right, we just hold our position and we, you know, do the right thing, we're going to counter them. And if anything, especially because Trump won in 2024 is like we're winning and, you know, we're going to hold off the left and we're going to be able to defeat these things. But, but what was really terrifying is seeing these same talking points and same ideas begin to gain traction on the right or what is seen as the right with, as you mentioned, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and you know, tons of these influencers who are right leaning or right branded or whatever else that are now saying the exact same things that the left has been saying about Israel and Palestine for years.

Will Spencer [01:13:43]:

Yes. And that's the part that's shocking is that I had seen that process taking place in the underground of the Internet, through the Manosphere and 4chan and the Donald on Reddit and all of these, all these various sub communities. I had seen that happening. And I always thought, this is my mistake. I always thought that men of virtue and rationality would be able to put brakes on their train, which is to say that they would be able to understand that, okay, I'm now exposing myself to bad ideas or fringe ideas and I need to maintain a sense of skepticism around them and be as skeptical as what I'm seeing online as I would be from what I'm seeing from the New York Times or CNN or whatever. But I have not seen that. I have consistently not seen that. In fact, I have seen men that should know better, that should be able to keep their minds and their rationalities and their passions in check. Absolutely. Just rip the brakes off the train and start going, maybe slowly at first, but at an accelerating pace ever more into more radical ideas to the point where they become. Their character is no longer recognizable. They're not the same guys six months, nine months down the road. They were that I met them. And so that was kind of what I was worried about. What had been happening with you when we talked about that image from American History X is that, you know, that's what I was. Had seen that so many times, I'm seeing it today. I could name names of men that I'm watching it happen to. And I saw that happening to you and I was quite sad about that. And so when you finally. And so we chatted about that and when you finally did your post, I was like, oh, praise God. Either it ultimately wasn't you being seduced by Radical ideas and having to put brakes on your train. It was you clarifying the position that you had always held, which is equally, if not more, noble. But so many men never think to like, okay, maybe I need to slow down. Maybe I need to jump out of the car. Maybe I need to turn the wheel and take a look at where I'm going. Men are just not doing that. And so many, I would say firewalls that would ultimately at one point have protected men in particular from bad ideas have failed to the point where these bad ideas and the passions that they inspire are now in flames. Up to some of the highest levels of politics and culture. And it's happened in a year. I'm baffled by it.

Will Spencer [01:16:11]:

Yeah, yeah, you know, one, I, I'm baffled by it as well. And I'm. I'm. I'm sad about it, but I'm also, you know, optimistic. I tend to be optimistic. You know, one of the things that my. I don't. I don't just kind of have a propensity towards being bold. I have a very specific design in mind. I want to be bold in order to inspire others to be bold. So. And I've gotten to have some really rewarding experience in that where, you know, whether it just be on a specific topic or just across a wide range of topics, being bold in my faith, being bold in my beliefs, and seeing people go, you know what? Like, I can do that too. If this watch company can be bold about truth, like, why not me? Either other business owners or individuals even, you know, we can speak the truth on controversial topics. We don't have to, you know, let the. We don't have to sort of live in this destiny we've created by the. Don't talk about religion or politics at the dinner table. Which I think is an absurd kind of construct. It's like, hey, you know, there are people talking about politics and religion. The way we understand it as a society is by having these difficult conversations at the dinner table. But I digress. You know, I hope that people see I've taken a hit because of these perspectives. I mean, my follower account was going up as much as a thousand or more per day in the middle of June. Like, I was on this growth streak and, you know, you go in streak, so it wasn't necessarily going to stay at that level forever, but, you know, I was increasing that. My, my sales were going great. I took a big hit in my sales, and I had a lot of pre orders that were canceled during that week. And in the week or so afterwards, as a direct result of the position I decided to take. And so for folks out there who are like, hey, you know you're going to take a hit if you take this position, for most people on X, it's not going to be a business hit, it's going to be a hit to their follower account, or it's going to be a hit to like the number of impressions and likes they get. Whatever, it's. It's basically an ego thing. What I encourage you is just as there's no dollar amount that you can put on doing the right thing. There's no number of followers, there's no number of clicks or likes or shares or social capital that you can use to justify not doing the right thing.

Will Spencer [01:18:53]:

Amen.

Will Spencer [01:18:53]:

I'm going to keep being bold and, and I don't believe I'm going to lose my business because of this. I think that Watson Watch is going to be successful and continue to be successful and grow over the next couple years. But if I do, it will have been worth it. It'll have been absolutely worth it because at the end of the day, I can't take it to heaven with me. Right. I know where my treasure is, and I would encourage all men to remember where your treasure is and to act accordingly.

Will Spencer [01:19:23]:

Amen. Amen. I relate to that very much. Between July leading up To July of 2024, my podcast was growing at a pretty reliable clip. I was comfortable with where my numbers were going. They were on an upward kind of hockey stick trajectory. And since over the course of the past year, particularly between July and October, that turned sharply because it was July and October, that I not only started calling out a lot of the anti Semitism, I also started calling up, calling out what would ultimately be labeled the woke. Right? And those two things in particular appear to have angered what were once a large percentage of my listeners. YouTube has made up a huge bit of that, which has been a big blessing. Maybe a conversation for another time, but like, yeah, bye guys, go listen to something else. I was ready to lay it all on the line and say, if I need to lay down my platform as a result of this, well, guess what? I'm going to speak the truth and I'm going to speak for what's good and right and beautiful and true and. And if that cost me everyone I was listening to, then I must have been doing something wrong to begin with.

Will Spencer [01:20:24]:

Yeah, yeah, right. It's like, what was, what was I doing? And again, in my case, you know, I can probably point to some of the things I was doing, what was I doing that like so, so many of my followers were, were so ready to unfollow me as a result of opposing anti Semitism. But I'm glad you brought up the term woke, right, because I think this is a really important term for our time. And it's one, you know, we've talked about the dynamics between left and right a little bit. And you know, one of the things that has shaped me is this kind of recognition that the left lies incessantly, right? That you just, you, that the left is not reliable. The left, you can't trust them. And so for a long time the term woke right up to two or three months ago or even less possibly I would have rejected the term woke, right as just some made up leftist propaganda, right? That because the left, they're all. The left has always calls the right bigots and racists and Nazis as because of my work in opposition to abortion, I've been called a Nazi hundreds if not thousands of times. No exaggeration, right, for that stance. And so I was just like, I mean it's made up guys, you know, just, they're just calling us that to get a rise out of it, out of us. And so, so I'd heard the term woke, right? It wasn't really real to me until like midway through that week where I was getting, you know, ganged up upon and I, I not only saw just that, the depths of depravity in what people were saying to me, but it started to become really clear that the vast majority of those people are embedded in the right. You know, whether you want to call them truly right leaning or not or truly conservative or not. You could have all kinds of debates around it, but they see themselves as on the right and to a large extent they're accepted by, if not leveraged by many people on the right as well. And so that was that sort of aha, moment of like, oh, there is a woke, right? And it's very active and it's growing. And that truth has only become more relevant and more clear to me over the last couple months as I've been continuing to stay engaged in this topic.

Will Spencer [01:22:55]:

James Lindsay, if you're watching, I'm going to make a deposit in the James Lindsay was right jar.

Will Spencer [01:23:00]:

Yes, absolutely. Man. He's been banging this drum for, for a long time. And what, what's really, you know, to me, what, what is really sad is, you know, there are a lot of Christians out there who are afraid to talk about this. And James Lindsay is not, at least as of yet, a professing Christian. And he's talking about this. And James Lindsay is someone who. He made enemies of the left years ago, all right? He. He attacked their sacred cows and he made enemies of them, and now he's got enemies on both sides. And I. I cannot tell you how much I respect what he has done and what he is doing. It doesn't mean I agree with him on, you know, every nuance of every topic or whatever, but he has moral courage, and he's. He is exemplifying a lot more moral courage than I'm seeing in a lot of Christians. And that. I mean, I don't say that to, like, be this angry kind of. I don't. I'm not trying to nag people about this, but be inspired by that and have the moral courage to do the same.

Will Spencer [01:24:15]:

Amen. Amen. And I agree. I've had a lot of people who are not happy about the fact that I interviewed him for, like three or so hours on the podcast. And I was like, look, you know, he was talking about. I'm interviewing him based on a series of six hours of lectures he gave in 2022. That's what we're. That's what we're talking about. This is a man with moral courage who's calling these things out. And I think he's worthy of talking to. And a lot of people, you know, say, oh, they don't trust him or whatever. It's like, well, yeah, I mean, he. Maybe he made enemies on the left because he called their stuff out. But a man who's good at calling out one set of problems should also be good at calling out another set of problems. And you can fight two front wars. You know, it's not like we have to pick sides in this way. I think as Christians or people inspired by a Christian moral character, their enemies. There are ditches on both sides of the roads on the road, and we can talk about both of them. And I think that there's a habit, I would say, of many Christian leaders today. They're happy to call out the sins on the left, but when it comes to the sins on the right, they. They're silent on it. It's almost like they don't exist like this. No enemies on the right thing.

Will Spencer [01:25:17]:

Exactly. The woke right loves no enemies on the right. Or the. The friend enemy distinction that they derived from Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political legal architect, so to speak. Yeah, I found that that's been a whole kind of rabbit trail. I'VE gone down is, is seeing how many, you know, supposed conservatives, you know, folks on the new right are willing to quote Schmidt or reference Carl Schmidt in their sort of political positioning of this friend, enemy distinction. And, and, you know, they don't have to is. That's the interesting thing. You could just describe the no enemies to the right position without invoking Carl Schmidt's name, but they choose to invoke his name. And to me, that's very telling. I think, I think it's a really ob. In my opinion, it's a very obvious dog whistle that, like, yeah, I'm quoting a Nazi here. Maybe he wasn't the best Nazi, but he was a Nazi.

Will Spencer [01:26:25]:

That's right. That's right. It's. And it's, it's so strange to me that so many men, they say things like, well, I've been called a Nazi so many times, I might as well become a Nazi. It's like, well, congratulations then, you're a Nazi. How is that proving any point? All you've done, and this is what makes me so upset, is that so many men are proving, right. Everything that feminism said about men for decades, that's what they're doing. Feminism said men are this, this, this, and this. And so women need their independence from men in order so that they cannot be under the tyrannical rule of these men. And so men listen to that. It's like, okay, well, you know what? You've been calling me that, so now I'm going to be it. Well, congratulations. You just proved the left right. And that's the part that I don't understand why men can't seem to find. I think it's the inner moral courage, the moral strength, discipline, whatever word you want to use to take a higher road and to say, I'm not going to become the monster that people call me, no matter how many times they call me that. I don't get it.

Will Spencer [01:27:27]:

You know, I think some of it's satanic, right? Satan wants to always drive people to sin. And Satan, you know, he's not God. But as far as our understanding of the universe and different entities works, you know, it's generally people's belief that Satan is maybe the highest creation of God, that he, you know, so we should expect that Satan has a certain amount of intelligence, right? And that he watches human behavior and, and you can see when society no longer has momentum in one direction of sin, okay, what you figure out what's on the other side of that and push that direction. I've been saying this for a while, as we've seen a decrease in public acceptance of LGBTQ stuff, especially the trans stuff, we're starting to see some real pushback to that. And, you know, I would point to, like, in 2024, during June, pride Month, which I call Biblical Marriage Month, a lot of companies change their logos to these, you know, Pride logos or whatever. That didn't happen this. This year, for the most part. The. The Major League Baseball changed it for one day, and they got attacked so much that they took it down in the same day. I mean, so. So what? But what I've been telling people is I've been seeing this, which is encouraging that, you know, people are moving away from this, you know, public move towards transing. Everything is like, hey, what the companies are going to do is they're going to go back to the hyper sexualization of everything, of this, like, this, you know, heterosexual, heterosexual sexualization and push us back that way, which, frankly, was the foundation of our move into the lgbtq. Right? Like, right, you hollow out people's morals sexually, and then you just push down and down until you get more and more and more depraved, which is how we've ended up where we are today. You know, and it happened in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you know, after the. The sexual revolution in the 60s, right? So what do you see come right after Pride Month? You see Sydney Sweeney's jeans commercial, right? You see this overt sexualization in order to make sales. And, you know that the American Eagle ad campaign was successful enough that we're going to start to see way, way more companies jump onto that. And because men, humans, people lack discernment, we're just jumping on board, like, oh, yeah, this is showing the left. What's up? Like, no, dude. Like, this is. This is insidious. This is evil. They're. They're leveraging your lust to try to get you to buy things. But more importantly, Satan is seeing how the tides are changing, and he's using Jiu Jitsu. He's using his opponent's weight and movement against them. It's like, okay, well, the homosexual stuff's not working. Back to the heterosexual. Hey, it's all sin, man. It's all sin. And we've got to be on our guard.

Will Spencer [01:30:40]:

So I was. I was gone for my wedding and for my honeymoon, and I deleted X off my phone for about three weeks just so I could be fully in the moment. Because what could possibly be happening on X that would be even close to the level of importance of A wedding and a honeymoon. So I came back to X earlier this week to find everyone talking about the Sydney Sweeney ad, which I haven't seen. I was like, what is everyone arguing about? Sydney Sweeney, Beyonce. I had to ask Rock what was going on. So for those who haven't seen it, and I don't want to go look. Can you describe what the Sydney Sweeney ad was? As far as. All I know is that she was wearing a pair of American Eagle jeans. It said something about the play of pun between jeans and, like, blue jeans and genetics and Sydney Sweeney being a woman of, we'll say, ample assets, let's put it that way.

Will Spencer [01:31:27]:

There's a series of ads, right? And so there. I think there's some videos and probably some. Some photos and stuff. And I haven't gone looking for. So I haven't seen them all, but I have. I have seen some of them. And, yeah, she's just dressed in an overtly sexual way that highlights some of her features. And she's like, Sydney Sweeney has good genes. She's not. She's not topless. No, no. But I think there's one where she has, like, a jean jacket and it's like, you know, pulled down, like, pretty low or whatever. That kind of cleavage.

Will Spencer [01:32:01]:

Okay, got it.

Will Spencer [01:32:02]:

Yeah. I'm not, like, I'm not going to go into too much detail describing it all, but. But it's very clear, like, what the appeal of the commercials are. And I probably. Since most folks didn't delete their ex for three weeks, like you, almost everyone who watches this will. Will have seen that. Will have seen these ads. You know, they're happy to be announced, familiar with them. And, you know, I'm grateful that I'm not seeing them every day because there was like, a week or two where it just seemed like they were just popping up every single day, you know, in. In one way or another. And I think Babylon Bee did a great job of satirizing it. They. They said something along the lines of, like, you know, big companies go back to sexualizing women to sell crap, you know, or something. Something like that, you know, and it's like, that's. That's what it is, man. That. But. But we have to. And I can't even remember how we got on this topic, but. But I think it was something along the lines of, you know, you're talking about the way that society shifts and movements shift and so on, but Satan wants to destroy us, and he wants to destroy us with our own sin. Like, people think Satan can make Them do things. Satan's proven approach is to lie. He lied in the garden, right? He lied to Jesus in trying to tempt him. He's called the father of lies. Satan can't make you believe lies, but he can and he will tell you lies. And the purpose of those lies is to pull you into a trap of sin, to destroy you. And Satan wants to pull America into the trap of anti Semitism. And he does that with lies about Israel and lies about Jews, lies about history, lies about what's going on today. And he can't make anyone believe them. But if we're not on our guard as speaking about the collective we, our nation, we will believe them and we will fall into that trap and it will be utterly destructive for us.

Will Spencer [01:34:11]:

Why does Satan want to pull America into lies about anti Semitism, Satan?

Will Spencer [01:34:17]:

Well, several things. Satan hates the image of God, so he hates all mankind. You know, when as soon as God identifies man as being made in his image, well, Satan hates God. So just as we are to love God with all our heart, soul and might, we're to love our neighbor as ourself. Because man is made in God's image. That's why. That's right under that same command. Satan is the inverse of that. He hates God with all his heart, soul and might, and he hates mankind almost just as much. But Satan can't destroy God. You know, what he can do is work to bind up souls, to bring them to dwell in the lake of fire with him for eternity. Not so he can have companionship, just so he can see them destroyed out of hate. And so not only does he hate all mankind, but he especially hates the Jews because they are God's chosen people, which is another theological conversation around dispensationalism and covenantal supersessionism etc etc. But, but there are people that God set aside right for his worship and for his glory. Glory and to proclaim him to the nations. And Satan hates that just as he hates children. I think one of the reasons that human sacrifice is so prevalent in so many corrupt societies is because starting in Genesis 3:15, when God said that Satan would bruise the heel of the offspring of the woman and his heel would bruise his head, right, the head of the serpent. Satan recognized who his enemy was. It was the offspring of the woman. All right, let's kill all the children through human sacrifice through abortion, right? So in the same way Satan has identified this people group, the Jews, and he wants to destroy them, but he wants to destroy all of us. And he knows that, you know, again, this is my specific theological interpretation. I know there are those out there who disagree, but God said he'll bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. So if we're applying that promise to Israel, well, if America curses Israel, it's really not going to work out well for us in the long run.

Will Spencer [01:36:37]:

That's right, yeah. No, these eschatological issues are not things that I've explored deeply, but I understand definitely as a result of something that Spencer Smith, who's a guest I've had on my podcast several times, he's an independent fundamentalist Baptist preacher and documentary filmmaker. The Third Adam series. Highly recommended. He said in one of his Twitter posts, he said that the end result of all conspiracy thinking is a hatred for the Jews. And having been in the conspiracy world from before I was a Christian, I thought that was very interesting because it's actually true. And so I've looked into that world and I see all the different ways that all the different ways that antisemitism pops up in the conspiracy world. And then there it is in the left, and then there it is in the Middle east, and then there it is here, here, here, and now here it is on the right. And it seems like so much of the world, not necessarily in a technical every human being on the planet sense, but so many different, we'll say, subcultures that reject Christ in various ways all end up hating the Jews. That seems to be the consistent theme. And I'd never really thought about that before. Like, how interesting. And I thought that took on a spiritual significance once those pieces clicked into place.

Will Spencer [01:37:54]:

Yeah. When you look at how the Bible offers a really clear example of the same pattern in the Book of Esther, Right. You look at Haman, Haman ends up being the victim, I use that term loosely, of his own anti Semitic conspiracies.

Will Spencer [01:38:14]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:38:14]:

He sees Mordecai, and Mordecai, because he's a Jew, refuses, and he's an observant Jew, and he refuses to bow to Haman in a way that Mordecai believed would result in an over exaltation of Haman in a way that would be kind of putting him on a level of God, you know, putting him above humans. So Mordecai refuses to do that. And Haman sees this, doesn't like it, and has this just burning hatred for him that is not exclusive to Mordecai. He blames it on all the Jews. Right. And he doesn't just go for like going to get Mordecai he goes for, I'm going to kill all the Jews, not just all the Jews here in my town or my country. I want to kill all the Jews in the known world is what he ends up going for, which is essentially the Persian Empire at its extent at that time period. What's interesting, too, is the pattern that we've seen play out through history. He follows through, it's gonna happen. It looks really bad for the Jews. God, in his divine mercy, rescues the Jews and then turns it around and turns it on the enemies of the Jews. And, you know, a lot of people. A lot of people will talk about, you know, especially as they get into sort of crypto history or whatever, and they talk about Germany and they say, well, a lot of people don't talk about what the Russians did to Germany after World War II and the atrocities that were committed there. And like, as a human being, it's not for me to take things into my hands and to, you know, cause destruction and suffering and violence in a malicious nature. But in the same way that Haman and his allies were destroyed by the Jews, in the same way that God pronounced judgment on the nations, that he used to judge Israel in the Old Testament, you see him talking about Babylon, the Assyrians, which he used to judge the Northern kingdom, and then he judges them for it. He uses Babylon to judge Judah and then he judges them for it. And Germany, you know, Germany, you know, perpetrates the Holocaust against the Jewish people. And you look at what happened to Germany after that, and you look at the death and the mayhem and the destruction that took place. And I'm not justifying communists or communism or the Russians for doing that. What they did is evil. And. And they should be judged for the. The evil that they did. But we shouldn't be surprised when that happens to Germany. Right? And we shouldn't be surprised that if anti Semitism takes up, picks up in a meaningful way in America and grows and. And gets worse, that the exact same thing won't happen to us too.

Will Spencer [01:41:15]:

Absolutely. I'm so glad you're saying that, because last year I interviewed Dr. Mark Musser in his book Nazi Ecology. And one of the things that became clear from this book, 550 pages, he wrote it like a textbook. Took him 10 years. And the book is entirely about how the Nazis were informed by pagan nature worship. You know, they were not Christian. They used Christian language early on in their campaign for power. But once they had achieved power, became clear that they were very much, very much rejected. The. The biblical dominion Mandate. That's what the book is about. And about how all throughout the 19th century of the 1800s, Germany, which had been blessed with the light of the Reformation, just started throwing all of its Christian heritage overboard in, in various, in various ways. And so it was that discarding of their Christian heritage that allowed for the rise of the Nazi attempt at empire. And so, and so the Nazi attempt at empire had a distinctly ethnic character to it. So the Nazis viewed themselves as the superior race, particularly superior to the Slavic peoples, the Slavs to their east. Then this is all in Nazi ecology. They were going to conquer eastward because they wanted to turn Eastern Europe into their factory grounds. Like we kind of use China today and Mexico and Pakistan. They wanted Eastern Europe to be where they would keep all of their manufacturing so they could keep their lands pure. So they looked down at the Slavic peoples as subhuman and the Russians as well. So when the Nazis invaded eastwards trying to conquer Russia, they were pillaging and raping and destroying and committing all these war crimes against the Russian people on explicitly ethnic basis. It was that they regarded these people as subhuman beneath them in an evolutionary Darwinistic kind of sub evolved kind of way. And so when Germany went ahead and lost the war, what happened? Well, you have the Red army come through and now, you know, I could use graphic language for this, but I won't. But now forever, the Slavic blood is forever now mixed with the proud German ethnic blood. Right? That through forcibly. So that's judgment down to a genetic level. And that doesn't make it right, that doesn't make it good. That doesn't make it, you know, something to advocate for. But it is God's justice if we believe God is sovereign over all things.

Will Spencer [01:43:37]:

Yes.

Will Spencer [01:43:38]:

So I'm glad to hear you saying that. Germany was judged probably never to rise again, actually.

Will Spencer [01:43:43]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, and it's, it's sad because Germany does have such a rich history of information and, and there's so many things like I've, I've not been to Germany except briefly on my way to and from Iraq. You know, we stopped there for a couple hours at Ramstein. I believe I'm remembering right, but, but I mean literally just got out of the plane in, in the airport, got back on and left and, but I've learned a lot about Germany and their culture. There's so many lovely things about Germany. But again, it's a shame that that's a part of their history. We don't have to make that a part of our history.

Will Spencer [01:44:23]:

That's right.

Will Spencer [01:44:24]:

And in fact, we are obligated to do what we can to stop it. And so I think for us, kind of the next steps, you know, for conservatives, for Christians, for people who see themselves on the right is primarily like one, first and foremost, look after your own heart. Like, have your heart to heart with God and be in prayer. And are you harboring some lies in your heart that could lead to hate or already harboring some hate? But then let's hold our own accountable, our family members, our friends, but other people around us who are conservative, who are, who profess to be Christian, who are branded as being on the right. And let's reject these lies, this false unbiblical position of no enemies to the right, of the friend, enemy distinction, this idea that you can't criticize people on the right because of the rise of what's on the left, what is happening within the right now is making us as bad or worse than the left. There's no point. If you think that having these fights within the right is going to undermine our ability to fight the left, it's really irrelevant because we're becoming indistinguishable from the left through this apparent evil. And it's just not biblical, right? God says Jesus at a little leaven leavens the whole lump. God very clearly makes it clear to us in his word that we should be directly talking to our brothers about sin and even gives us a whole process by which to do it, one that does end up with it being talked about publicly. So we have the, we know what we should do. We have the tools to do it. And now we just need to do it. We can't sit back on our laurels and watch things unfold around us. We have to take action, particularly as men.

Will Spencer [01:46:26]:

We have to have courage to stand up to the bullies in our midst. Doesn't matter who you are, whether you think of yourself in that way, you don't have to adopt the identity as the man who stands up. But I think men are called to stand up and say, no, we won't participate in this, and sort of commit themselves to a higher moral order. Because, you know, I hear a lot of guys, and I'm surprised it took me this long to make this joke. You know, they talk about knowing what time it is, right? And, and, but there, there is a degree where that's true. But ultimately, no matter what time it is, we still have eternity to think about. And if the things that you're doing because of what time it is means that you lose eternity, which a lot of men are, seem to be on that path. You know, I'm not one to judge hearts or eternal destinies. Who knows, right. But certainly to watch men's moral character change as they try to quote, save the west because of what time it is. That seems to me to be a profoundly short sighted mistake. And I think more Christian men need to stand up and start saying these things.

Will Spencer [01:47:28]:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Will Spencer [01:47:31]:

Yeah. So what does the future look like for Wasson watches?

Will Spencer [01:47:36]:

Well, you know, we just, I've had my watches on pre order for several months. The next round of the Watson automatic field watch, which I'm wearing one of the old ones, but I got my first box of them the other day and so I've started shipping those out the next round that were pre ordered. We've got a few different models in the works. We've got a women's watch that we're working on that I believe we'll have a prototype ready in the next week or two. As soon as I have those in hand, you know, I gotta evaluate them and see if they're ready or if we need, they need more work. But once they're ready, I'll be, you know, kind of publicly showing those. We're also working on a dive watch called the Dominion. It's named after Genesis 1:28. Right. You know, where God tells man to be fruitful and multiply and to take Dominion. So it's kind of based on, on that and I'm excited about it from just a messaging perspective, but also just, it's going to be an awesome watch and it's going to be our first watch that's assembled in the United States. If you know much about manufacturing, it's difficult. You know, there's a lot of especially cost barriers and there's also some talent barriers that we've lost some of our manufacturing capabilities in the US but, but I really do want to manufacture in the US and long term I want to bring more of my manufacturing here, but that'll be our first one that's, that's assembled here. And so on the watch front, those are the big things we, we have at least in this sort of near term developing. But beyond that, man, I just, I'm gonna stay in this fight. I, I'm hoping that this fire I referenced in the other room that we can get it put out so that I'm not always having to talk about the fire that's going on, so to speak. But as long as it's going, you know, I'm here for it. I'm. I'm not gonna give it up.

Will Spencer [01:49:36]:

What are some of the positive things that have come out of. Out of your experience of trying to wake people up to the fire?

Will Spencer [01:49:43]:

Man, I've had a lot of people reach out who are Jewish or of Jewish descent. And also just for the casual listener out there, Jew is typically, people think of it and they don't know if you're talking about the religion or the ethnicity, but Jew is an ethnicity. There are a lot of Christian Jews, there was a lot of atheist Jews, and of course there are Jews who follow Judaism. But. So I've had a lot of Jews reach out and just express their gratitude that they, that, you know, I talked about feeling isolated. A lot of times they feel isolated as a people group and they feel like they look around and they don't feel like they see a lot of allies. They kind of see the world closing in on them. And so it's been an opportunity for me to, you know, to project the light of Christ on them and to, to point them to Christ and to share the gospel with some of them or some of them who are believers, to encourage them right in. In. In our brotherhood in Christ. You know, I've met. I've made some new friends and I. I've met some people who, who I've gotten to witness their, Their moral courage. You know, like, I'd mentioned James Lindsay as someone who, Who I would call a friend at this point. I didn't know anything about him before, but. But he's someone I'm honored to call a friend. You're someone I would call a friend that, you know, we. We don't talk all the time or anything, but you're. You're an ally that I see. You're out there across the battlefield and, and it's like I do look forward to a time it. When in glorification, where there's no more death and no more pain and Christ wipes every tear from our eyes. I look forward to that. But there's also something about being in the fight and knowing that you're fighting the good fight, that's rewarding. And if this is like what God made me for and the time that he made me for and I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, then that's great. I can do that all day as long as God will have me do it, as long as I'm alive to do it. To live as Christ and to die is gain.

Will Spencer [01:51:51]:

Sounds like you certainly didn't expect that this was the journey that starting a watch company would take you on.

Will Spencer [01:51:57]:

Definitely not. Definitely not, man. Not. Not even close. I couldn't, I could not have predicted this. The longer I live, the more things I've experienced in life, the more I know that I cannot predict what's coming. Right. You look forward. There have been so many points in my life where I've stopped and I've looked back like five years prior and said like, no, I never would have seen myself here. And that, that only becomes more extreme and how true it is over time. So I don't, I don't know what's going to happen five years from now, man. I'm not even. I'm not even going to try to predict that.

Will Spencer [01:52:36]:

Right. You make watches, not time machines.

Will Spencer [01:52:38]:

Yes. So far.

Will Spencer [01:52:41]:

So far. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Well, Paul, I really appreciate your generosity of time, the generosity of telling this story and of course, your courage, speaking up and being morally convicted about what you're seeing and saying something like, hey, I'm not with those guys. This is where I stand. And then riding out what I can only imagine was a massive wave of hatred that I don't know that we're necessarily as people meant to endure and yet endure it we must. So I thank you and congratulate you on that.

Will Spencer [01:53:11]:

Thank you, Will. I appreciate you. I appreciate your courage and just you as an ally and for having me on the show. It's definitely been fun and yeah, I look forward to people getting to check it out, definitely.

Will Spencer [01:53:23]:

So where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do?

Will Spencer [01:53:26]:

Yeah, so two places. Wassonwatch.com, w a s s o n watch dot com, that's our website. You can buy our watches there, find out more about our company and then on X. You know, we've talked about X a lot. My, my Twitter handle on X is Awson Watch. Follow me there. That's where I'm definitely most active online. You can read about me on my website, but you can actually sort of witness what I'm saying and doing and thinking day to day on X.

Will Spencer [01:53:55]:

Wonderful. I'll be sure to send people that way. Thank you so much, Paul.

Will Spencer [01:53:59]:

Thank you, Sam.