Lex Fridman Podcast - #336 – Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, host of the Ben Shapiro show, co-founder of the Daily Wire, and author of several books, including the authoritarian moment, the right side of history, and facts don't care about your feelings. Whatever your political leanings, I humbly ask that you try to put those aside and listen with an open mind, trying to give the most charitable interpretation of the words we say. This is true in general for this podcast, whether the guest is Ben Shapiro or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Donald Trump or Barack Obama. I will talk to everyone from every side, from the far left to the far right,

Starting point is 00:00:47 from presidents to prisoners, from artists to scientists, from the powerful to the powerless, because we are all human, all capable of good and evil, all with fascinating stories and ideas to explore. I seek only to understand and in so doing, hopefully, add a bit of love to the world. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got ExpressVPN for privacy, policy genius for life insurance, better help for therapy and inside tracker for biological monitoring. Choose wisely my friends. And now onto the full ad reads, as always no ads in the middle.

Starting point is 00:01:31 I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors I enjoy their stuff maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a long time beloved sponsor of my and ExpressVPN. I've been using them for many, many, many years. It has brought joy to my heart for many reasons, some of which you can infer. Because it has opened my mind and my spirit to the internet while keeping me protected, which is what a great VPN does. And that's

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Starting point is 00:02:53 I do wonder, since on this podcast we talk about immortality sometimes, what happens to the left insurance when you're genetically guaranteed to be immortal. I mean, because there's not going to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to the life of your body and everything within it, but you want to ensure the data, the information inside your brain. If it gets corrupted and destroyed, the people you love will get some money. That's a really interesting future idea, but unfortunately, unfortunately,

Starting point is 00:03:36 depends where you land on the debate. We live in a time when all of us do face mortality and it always comes too soon and unexpected. So for that, you should have life insurance. With policy genius, you can find life insurance policy that started just $70 a month for $500,000 of coverage. Head to policy genius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-H- movie, but I really enjoy it. There's something about a man alone against the elements faced

Starting point is 00:04:28 with the sort of explicit manifestation of his loneliness. Most of us walk about our lives with our loneliness on the inside. Here that loneliness is made explicit, it's real, it's made unavoidable. We can't lose ourselves in the daily busyness of life with the people around us. We have to face that loneliness when you're alone in an island. And even then, we find camaraderie with a volleyball. There you go, and write, help on the sand,

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Starting point is 00:06:18 do I do in this world? Please tell me, please tell me, oh, oh, why is Oracle? Of course, the Oracle is not going to be able to tell you everything. You're going to have to figure out some of it on your own. But it's always nice to have a mentor. Somebody to give you words of advice, even if you choose to ignore them. Anyway, get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com-lex. This is the Lex Freedom & Podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description.

Starting point is 00:06:47 And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro. Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think about the comments made by Yeh formally known as Kanye West about Jewish people? They're awful and anti-Semitic and they seem to get worse over time. They started off with the bizarre Deathcon 3- three tweet and then they went into even more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators. I think that was the Pete Davidson Kim Kardashian stuff and then Jews running all of the media, Jews being charged with the financial sector, Jewish people. I mean, there's no, I mean, I called it on my show. There's Sherman Ossiaism and it is. I mean, there's no, I mean, I called it on my show, there's Sherman Ossiism,

Starting point is 00:07:45 and it is. I mean, it's like right from protocols of the elders' desire and type stuff. Do you think those words come from pain, where they come from? And you know, it's always hard to try and read somebody's mind. And what he looks like to me, just having experienced a man family with people who are bipolar is he seems like a bipolar personality. He seems like somebody who is in the middle of a manic episode and when you're manic you tend to say a lot of things that you shouldn't say and you tend to

Starting point is 00:08:12 believe that they're the most brilliant things ever said. The Washington Post an entire piece speculating about how bipolarism played into the kind of stuff that Ye was saying and it's hard for me to think that it's not playing into it, especially because even if he is an anti-Semite and I have no reason to suspect he's not given all of his comments, if he had an ounce of common sense, he would stop at a certain point. And bipolarism tends to drive you well past the point where common sense applies. So, I mean, I would imagine it's coming from that. I mean, from his comments, I would also imagine that he's doing the logical mistake that a lot of anti-Semites or racist or bigots do, which is somebody hurt me, that person is a Jew. Therefore, all Jews are

Starting point is 00:09:00 bad. And that jump from a person did something to me I don't like, who's a member of a particular race or class. And therefore, everybody of that race or class is bad. I mean, that's textbook bigotry. And that's pretty obviously what Yez engaging in here. So jumping from the individual to the group. That's the way he's been expressing it, right? He keeps talking about his Jewish agents. And I watched your interview with him and you kept saying it, so just name the agents, right? Just name the people who are screwing you. And he wouldn't do it. Instead, he just kept going back to the general, the group, right? Just name the people who are who are screwing you and he wouldn't do it instead He just kept going back to the general the group the the Jews in general

Starting point is 00:09:29 I mean that's that's textbook bigotry and if we're putting any other context He would probably recognize it as such To the degree is words fuel hate in the world What's the way to reverse that process was the way to alleviate the hate? I mean when it comes to alleviating the kind of stuff that he's saying, obviously debunking it, making clear to what he's saying is garbage. But the reality is that I think that for most people

Starting point is 00:09:59 who are in any way engaged with these issues, I don't think they're being convinced to be anti-Semitic by, yeah, I mean, I think that there's a group of people who may be swayed, then anti-Semitism is acceptable because Ye is saying what he's saying, and he's saying so very loudly, and he's saying it over and over. But I think that, for example, there are these signs

Starting point is 00:10:20 that are popping up in Los Angeles saying, yeah, he's right, well, that group's been out there posting anti-Semitic signs on the freeways for years. And their groups like that posting anti-Semitic signs where I live in Florida, they've been doing that for years. Well, before yay was saying this sort of stuff, it's just like the latest opportunity to kind of jump on on that particular bandwagon. But listen, I think that people do have a moral duty to call that stuff out. So there is a degree to which it normalizes that kind of idea that Jews control the media, Jews control X institution. Is there a way to talk about a high representation of a group,

Starting point is 00:10:58 like Jewish people in a certain institution like the media or Hollywood and so on, without it being a hateful conversation. Of course. A high percentage of higher than statistically represented in the population, percentage of Hollywood agents are probably Jewish. A higher percentage of lawyers, generally, are probably Jewish. A higher percentage of accountants are probably Jewish. Also, a higher percentage of engineers are probably Asian. Statistical truths are statistical truths. It doesn't necessarily mean anything about the nature of the people who are being talked about. There are a myriad of reasons why people might be disproportionately in one arena or another ranging from the cultural

Starting point is 00:11:41 two, sometimes the genetic. I mean, there's certain areas of the world where people are better long distance runners because of their genetic adaptations in those particular areas of the world. That's not racist. That's just fact. What starts to get racist is when you are attributing a bad characteristic to an entire population based on the notion that some members of that population are doing bad things. Yeah, there's a jump between it's also possible that record label owners as a group have a kind of culture that F's over artists, doesn't treat artists fairly and it's also possible that there's a high representation of Jews in

Starting point is 00:12:22 the group of people that own record labels, but it's that small, but a very big leap that people take from the group that own record labels to all Jews. For sure. I think that one of the other issues also is that anti-semitism is fascinating because it breaks down into so many different parts, meaning that if you look at different types of anti-semitism, if you're a racist against black people, it's typically because you're racist based on the color of their skin. If you're racist against the Jews or anti-Semitic, then there are actually a few different ways that breaks down. You have anti-semitism in terms of ethnicity, which is like Nazi-ask anti-semitism.

Starting point is 00:13:00 You have Jewish parent age, you have a Jewish grandparents. Therefore, your blood is corrupt and you are inherently going to have bad properties. Then there's sort of old school religious anti-semitism, which is that the Jews are the killers of Christ or the Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys, and therefore Judaism is bad and therefore Jews are bad. And the way that you get out of that anti-semitism historically speaking is mass conversion, which most anti-semitism for a couple thousand years

Starting point is 00:13:25 actually was not ethnic. It was much more rooted in this sort of stuff, right? If you converted out of the faith, then the anti-semitism was quote unquote alleviated. And then there's a sort of bizarre anti-semitism that's political anti-semitism and that is members of a group that I don't like, are disproportionately Jewish,

Starting point is 00:13:45 therefore all Jews are members of this group or are predominantly represented in this group. So you'll see Nazis saying the Communists are Jews. You'll see Communists saying the Nazis are Jews, or you'll see Communists saying that the capitalists rather are Jews. And so that's the weird thing about anti-Semitism. It's kind of like the Jews behind every corner. It's basically a big conspiracy theory. Unlike a lot of other forms

Starting point is 00:14:07 of racism, which are not really conspiracy theory, anti-Semitism tends to be a conspiracy theory about the levers of power being controlled by a shadowy cadre of people who are getting together behind closed doors to control things. Yeah, the most absurd illustration of anti-Semitism, just like you said, is Stalin versus Hitler over Poland, that every bad guy was a Jew. So every enemy, there's a lot of different enemy groups, intellectuals, political, and so on, military, and behind any movement that is considered the enemy for the Nazis, and any movement that's considered the enemy for the Soviet army are the Jews.

Starting point is 00:14:48 What is the fact that Hitler took power? Teach you about human nature. When you look back at the history of the 20th century, what do you learn from that time? I mean, there are a bunch of lessons to Hitler taking power. The first thing I think people ought to recognize about Hitler taking power is that the power had been centralized in the government before Hitler took it. So if you actually look at the history of Nazi Germany, the Vimer Republic had effectively collapsed.

Starting point is 00:15:14 The power had been centralized in the chancellery and really under Hindenburg for a couple of years before that. And so it was only a matter of time until someone who was bad grabbed the power. And so the struggle between the Reds and the Browns in Nazism in pre-Nazi Germany led to this kind of upspiraling of radical sentiment that allowed Hitler in through the front door, not through the back door, right? He was elected. So you think Communist could have also taken power? I mean, there's no question Communist could have taken power. They were a serious force in

Starting point is 00:15:46 pre-Nazi Germany. Do you think there was an underlying current that would have led to an atrocity if the communist taken power? It wouldn't have been quite the same atrocity, but obviously the communist and Soviet Russia at exactly this time were committing the halatimar. Yeah, right. So they, so it was there were there were very few good guys in terms of good parties. The moderate parties were being dragged by the radicals into alliance with them to prevent the worst case scenario from the other guy. So if you look at, I'm sort of fascinated by the history of this period because it really does speak to how does a democracy break down. I mean, the 20s, Vimer Republic was a very liberal democracy.

Starting point is 00:16:22 How does a liberal democracy break down into complete fascism and then into genocide? And there's a character who was very prominent in the history of that time, and in Francois Papan, who was actually the second to last chancellor of the Republic before Hitler. So he was the chancellor, and then he handed over to Schleicher, and then he ended up, Schleicher ended up collapsing and that ended up handing power over to Hitler. It was Papan who had stumped for Hitler to become chancellor. Paypin was a Catholic Democrat. He didn't like Hitler.

Starting point is 00:16:52 He thought that Hitler was a radical and a nut job. But he also thought that Hitler being a buffoon, as he saw it, was going to essentially be usable by the right forces in order to prevent the in order to prevent the commoness from taking power Maybe in order to restore some sort of legitimacy to the regime because he was popular in order for paper to retain power himself And then immediately after Hitler taking power Hitler basically kills all of Papin's friends Papin out of quote-unquote loyalty stays on he ends up helping the Anshulus and Austria Now all this stuff is really interesting mainly because what it speaks to is The great lie we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us. They're they're a class apart people who do evil things people who support evil people people

Starting point is 00:17:34 They're not like us and that that that's an easy call everybody Everybody in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me Robert George the philosopher over at Princeton He's he's fond of doing a sort of thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hand if they had lived in Alabama in 1861. How many of you would be abolitionists? And everybody raises their hand. He says, of course, that's not true. Of course, that's not true. The best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over.

Starting point is 00:18:07 And so you have to be very cautious in how you approach these issues and the bad can forth of politics, the sort of bipolarity of politics, the, or the polarization in politics might be a better way to put it, you know, makes it very easy to, to kind of fall into the rock of the sock and robots that eventually could theoretically allow you to support somebody who's truly frightening and hideous in order to stop somebody who you think is more frightening and hideous. And this is kind of language, by the way, now predominating almost all over the Western world, right?

Starting point is 00:18:38 My political enemy is an enemy of democracy. My political enemy is going to end the republic. My political enemy is going to be the person who destroys the country we live in. And so that person has to be stopped by any means necessary. And that's dangerous stuff. So the communists have to be stopped in Nazi Germany. And so they're the devil.

Starting point is 00:18:57 And so any useful buffoon, as long as they're effective against the communists would do. Do you ever wonder because the people that are participating in evil may not understand that they're doing evil? Do you ever sit back in the quiet of your mind and think am I participating in evil? I mean, so my business partner and I, one of our favorite memes is from, there's a British comedy show that names G escapes me of these two guys who are members of the SS and they're dressed in the SS uniforms and the black uniforms

Starting point is 00:19:30 that the skulls on them and they're saying to each other, one says to the other guy, you notice like the British, the simple is something nice and it's like an eagle. But it's a skull and crossbones, you see the Americans, you see the blue uniforms, very nice and pretty awesome jet black. We the baddies. And, you know, that's it. And the truth is we look back at the Nazis and we say, well, of course, they were the baddies. They wore black uniforms.

Starting point is 00:19:55 They had jackboots and they had this. And of course, they were the bad guys. But evil rarely presents its face so clearly. So yeah, I mean, I think that you have to constantly be thinking along those lines and hopefully you try to avoid it. You can only do the best that a human being can do. But yeah, I mean, the answer is yes. I would say that I spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on whether I'm doing the right thing. And I may not always do the right thing. I'm sure a lot of people think that I'm doing the wrong thing on a daily basis But it's definitely a question that has to enter your mind as a historically

Starting point is 00:20:30 aware and hopefully more ladies in person. Do you think you're mentally strong enough if you realize that you're on the wrong side of history to switch sides very few people in history seem to be strong enough to do that I mean, I think that the answer I hope would be yes. You never know until the time comes and you have to do it. I will say that having heterodox opinions in a wide variety of areas is something that I have done before. I'm the only person I've ever heard of in public life who actually has a list on their website of all the dumb stupid things I've ever said So where I go through and I either say this is why I still believe this or this is why what I said was terrible and stupid And I'm sure that list will get a lot longer. Yeah, look forward to new additions

Starting point is 00:21:18 It actually is a super super long list people should check it out and it's quite honest and raw What do you think about it's interesting to ask you, given how pro life you are about Yays comments about comparing the Holocaust to the 900,000 abortions in the United States a year. So I'll take this from two angles. As a pro life person, I actually didn't find it offensive because if you believe, as I do, that unborn and pre-born lives deserve protection, then this slaughter of just under a million of them every year for the last almost 50 years

Starting point is 00:21:55 is a historic tragedy on par with a Holocaust. From the outside perspective, I get why people would say there's a difference in how people view the pre-born as to how people view, say, a seven-year-old is being killed in the Holocaust, like the visceral power and evil of the Nazi shoving full-grown human beings and small children and the gas chambers can't be compared to a person who, even from a pro-life perspective, may not fully understand the consequences of their own decisions or from a pro-choice perspective, fully understands the consequences, but just doesn't think that that person is a person that that's actually different.

Starting point is 00:22:27 So I understand both sides of it. I wasn't offended by Yez comments in that way though, because if you're a pro-life human being, then you do think that what's happening is a great tragedy on scale that involves the dehumanization of an entire class of people, the preborn. So the philosophical you understand the comparison. I did. Sure. So in his comments in the jumping from the individual to the group, I'd like to ask you, you're one of the most effective people in the world that attacking the left. And sometimes they can slip into attacking the group.

Starting point is 00:23:02 Do you worry that they're, that's the same kind of oversimplification that Yeh is doing about Jewish people that you can sometimes do with the left as a group? So when I speak about the left, I'm speaking about philosophy. I'm not really speaking about individual human beings as the leftists like group and then try to name who the members of this individual group are. I also make a distinction between the left and liberals. There are a lot of people who are liberal who disagree with me on taxes, disagree with the unformed policy, disagree with me on a lot of things. The people who I'm talking about generally, and I talk about the left and the

Starting point is 00:23:34 United States are people who believe that alternative points of view ought to be silenced because they are damaging and harmful simply based on the disagreement. So that's one distinction. The second distinction again is when I talk about the right versus the left, typically I'm talking about a battle of competing philosophies. And so I'm not speaking about typically, it would be hard to, if you put a person in front of me

Starting point is 00:23:55 inside as this person of the left or of the right, having just met them, I wouldn't be able to label them in the same way that if you met somebody that had been in a greenstein, you immediately got you, or you made it a black person, black person. And the adherence to a philosophy makes you a member of a group. If I think the philosophy is bad, that doesn't necessarily mean that you as a person are bad, but it does mean that I think your philosophy is bad.

Starting point is 00:24:17 Yeah. So the grouping is based on the philosophy versus something like a race, like the color of your skin or race is in the case of the Jewish people. So it's a different thing. You can be a little bit more nonchalant and careless in attacking a group because it's ultimately attacking a set of ideas. Well, I mean, it's really nonchalant and attacking the set of ideas.

Starting point is 00:24:39 And I don't know that nonchalant would be the way I'd put it. I tried to be exact when you're, you know, you don't always hit, but, you know, the, if I say that I oppose the communists, right? And then presumably I'm speaking of people who believe in the communist philosophy. Now the question is whether I'm mislabeling, right? Whether I'm taking someone who's not actually a communist and then shoving them in that group of communists, right? That'd be an accurate. The, the, the dangerous thing is it expands the group as opposed to you talking about the philosophy You you're you're throwing everybody who's ever said. I'm curious about communism. I'm curious about socials

Starting point is 00:25:11 There's because there's like a gradient, you know, it's like To throw something at you. I think Joe Biden said Mago Republicans, right? You know, I think that's a very careless statement because the thing you jump to immediately is like all the public For Trump right versus I think in the in the charitable interpretation that means a set of ideas Yeah, my man actually problem with with the Magga Republicans line from from Biden is that he went on in the speech that he made in In front of a dependent tall to actually trying to find what it meant to be a Maga Republican who is a threat to the Republic was the kind of language that he was using. And later on in the speech, he actually suggested, well, you know, there are moderate Republicans.

Starting point is 00:25:52 And the moderate Republicans are people who agree with me on like the inflation reduction acts. Like, well, that can't be the dividing line between a Maga Republican and a moderate, like a moderate Republican somebody who agrees with you, you got a name made like a Republican who disagrees with you fairly strenuously, but is not in this group of threats to the Republic. You make that distinction, we can have a fair discussion about whether the idea

Starting point is 00:26:12 of election denial, for example, make somebody a threat to institutions. That's a conversation that we can have, and then we'll have to discuss how much power they have, what the actual perspective is, what delve into it. But I think that he was being overbroad and labeling all of his political enemies under one rubric. Now, again, in politics, this stuff sort of happens all the time.

Starting point is 00:26:31 I'm not going to plead clean hands here because I'm sure that I've been inexact. But somebody who would be good in that particular situation is for somebody to sort of read me back the quote and I'll let you know where I've been inaccurate. I'll try to do that. And also, you don't shy away from humor and occasional trolling and mockery and all that kind of stuff for the for the for the chaos, all that kind of. I mean, I try not to do trollery for trollery, but you know, if the show's not entertaining and not fun, people aren't going to listen.

Starting point is 00:26:58 And so, you know, if you can't have fun with politics, the truth about politics is we all take it very seriously because it has some serious ramifications. Politics is deep. It is not house of cards. The general rule of politics is that everyone is a moron unless proven otherwise. That virtually everything is done out of stupidity rather than malice. And that if you actually watch politics as a comedy, you'll have a lot more fun. And so the difficulty for me is I take politics seriously, but also I have the ability to sort of flip the switch and suddenly it all becomes incredibly funny. Because it really is. Like if you just watch it from a pure entertainment perspective I take politics seriously, but also I have the ability to sort of flip the switch and suddenly it all becomes incredibly funny

Starting point is 00:27:32 because it really is like if you just watch it from a pure entertainment perspective and you put aside the fact that it affects hundreds of millions of people then watching you know President Trump being president. I mean, he's one of the funniest humans who's ever lived watching Kamala Harris Be Kamala Harris and talking about how much loves Venn diagrams or electric buses. I mean, that's funny stuff. So if I can't make fun of that, then my job becomes pretty morose pretty quickly. Yeah, it's funny to figure out

Starting point is 00:27:51 what is the perfect balance between seeing the humor and the absurdity of the game of it versus taking it seriously enough because it does affect hundreds of millions of people. It's a weird balance to strike. It's like, I am afraid with the internet that everything becomes a joke. I totally agree with this. I will say this. I try to make less jokes about the ideas and more jokes about the people in the same way that I make jokes about myself. I'm pretty self-effacing in terms of my humor. I would say at least half

Starting point is 00:28:21 the jokes on my show or about me. When I'm reading ads for Tommy John and they're talking about their no-wise you guarantee, I'll say things like, you know, that would help me in high school because it would have, I mean, just factually speaking. So, you know, if I can speak that way by myself, I feel like everybody else can take it as well. Difficult question. In 2017, there was a mosque shooting in Quebec City. Six people died. five others seriously injured. The 27-year-old gunman consumed a lot of content online and checked Twitter accounts, a lot, a lot of people, but one of the people he checked quite a lot of was you.

Starting point is 00:28:56 93 times in the month leading up to the shooting. If you could talk to that young man, what would you tell him? And maybe other young men listening to this that have hate in their heart in that same way, what would you tell him? You're getting it wrong. If anything that I or anyone else in mainstream politics says drives you to violence, you're getting it wrong. You're getting it wrong. Now again, when when it comes to stuff like this, I have a hard and fast rule that I've applied evenly across the spectrum. And that is I never blame people's politics for other people committing acts of violence unless they're actively advocating violence.

Starting point is 00:29:32 So when a fan of Bernie Sanders shoots up a congressional baseball game that is not Bernie Sanders's fault. I may not like his red record. I made a severe thing on everything. Bernie Sanders did not tell somebody to go shoot up a congressional baseball game. When a nut case in San Francisco goes and hits

Starting point is 00:29:45 Paul Pelosi with a hammer, I'm not going to blame Kevin McCarthy, the house speaker for that. When somebody threatens Brett Kavanaugh, I'm not going to, I'm not going to suggest that that was Joe Biden's fault because it's not Joe Biden's fault. I mean, we can play this game all day long and I find that the people who are most intensely focused on playing this game are people who tend to oppose the politics of the person as opposed to actually believing sincerely that this is driven somebody into the arms of the God of violence. But, you know, I have 4.7 million Twitter followers, I have 8 million Facebook followers, I have 5 million YouTube followers. I would imagine that some of them are people who are violent. I would imagine that some of them are people who do evil things or wants to do evil things. And I wish that there were a one that we could wave that would prevent those people from deliberately

Starting point is 00:30:33 or mistakenly misinterpreting things as a call of violence. It's just a negative byproduct of the fact that you can reach a lot of people. And so, you know, if somebody could point me to the comment that I suppose, quote unquote, drove somebody to go and literally murder human beings, then I would appreciate it. So I could talk about the comment, but I don't, mainly because I just think that if we remove agency from individuals, and if we blame broad-scale political rhetoric for every act of violence. We're not gonna

Starting point is 00:31:07 The the the people who are gonna pay the price are actually the the general population because free speech will go away If the idea is that things that we say could drive somebody who is unbalanced to go do something evil The necessary byproduct is hate is that is that speech is a form of hate is a form of violence. Speech is a form of violence. Speech needs to be curved. And that to me is deeply disturbing. So definitely he, that man, the 27-year-old man is the only one responsible for the evil he did. But what if he and others like him are not in uncases? But what if he and others like him are not in the not cases? What if there are people with pain, with anger in their heart? What would you say to them? You are exceptionally influential and other people like you that speak passionately about

Starting point is 00:31:56 ideas. What do you think is your opportunity to alleviate the hate in their heart? If we're speaking about people who aren't mental ill and people who are just misguided, I'd say to him, the thing that I said to every other young man in the country, you need to find meaning and purpose in forming connections that actually matter in a belief system that actually promotes general prosperity and promotes helping other people. And this is why the message that I most commonly say to young men is it's time for you to grow up mature, get a job, get married, have a family, take care of the people around you become a useful part of your community. I've never at any point in my entire career suggested violence as a resort to political political issues and the whole point of having a political conversation is that it's a conversation if I didn't think that that you were worth trying to convince people of my point of

Starting point is 00:32:49 You I wouldn't do what I do for a living So violence doesn't solve it. No, it doesn't As if this wasn't already a difficult conversation Let me ask about Ilhan Omar. You've called out her criticism of Israel policies as anti-Semitic. Is there a difference between criticizing a race of people like the Jews and criticizing the policies of a nation like Israel?

Starting point is 00:33:18 Of course. Of course. I criticized the policies of Israel on a fairly regular basis. I would assume from a different angle than Ilhan Omar does. But yeah, I mean, I criticized the policies of Israel on a fairly regular basis. I would assume from a different angle than El Han Omar does. But yeah, I mean, I criticize the policies of a wide variety of states. And to take an example, I've criticized Israel's policy and giving control of the Temple Mounts,

Starting point is 00:33:33 the Islamic Wok, which effectively prevents anybody except for Muslims for praying up there. I've also criticized the Israeli government for their COVID crackdown. I mean, I didn't criticize the policies of any government. But that's not what El Han Omar does. El Han Omar doesn't actually believe that there should be a state of Israel. She believes that Zionism is racism and that the existence of a Jewish state in Israel is in and

Starting point is 00:33:52 of itself the great sin that a statement should make about no other people in no other land. She would not say that the French don't deserve a state for the French. She wouldn't say that Somalis wouldn't deserve a state in Somalia. She wouldn't say that that German is supposed to deserve a state in Germany. She wouldn't say for the 50 plus Islamic states that exist across the world that they don't deserve states of their own. It is only the Jewish state that has fallen under her significant scrutiny. And she also promulgates lies about one specific state in the form of suggesting, for example, that Israel is in a part-tide state, which is most eminently not considering that the last unity government in Israel included an Arab party, that there are Arabs who sit on the Israeli Supreme Court and all the rest.

Starting point is 00:34:32 And then beyond that, obviously, she's engaged in some of the same sort of anti-Semitic tropes that you heard from Yeh, right? The stuff about, it's all about the Benjamin's that American support for Israel is all about the Benjamin's. And she's had to be tried by members of her own party about this sort of stuff before. Can you empathize with the plight of Palestinian people? Absolutely, I mean, I you know some of the uglier things that I've ever said in my career are things that I said very early on when I was 17 18 I started writing a syndicate a comment on 17. I'm now 38

Starting point is 00:34:56 So virtually all the dumb thing. That's a virtually all many of the dumb things the binge the plurality of the dumb things that I said came from the Ages about say 17 to maybe 23 Yeah, and they are rooted again in sloppy thinking. I feel terrible for people who have lived under the thumb and currently live under the thumb of Hamas, which is a national terrorist group, or the Palestinian Authority, which is a corrupt oligarchy that steals money from its people and leaves them in misery, or Islamic Jihad, which is an actual terrorist group. And the basic rule for the region, in my view, is if these groups were willing to make peace with Israel, they would have a state literally tomorrow. And if they are not, then there will be no peace.

Starting point is 00:35:36 And it really is that simple. If Israel, the formula that's typically used has become a bit of a bumper sticker, but it happens to be factually correct. If the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow, there would be a state. If the Israelis put down their guns, there would be no Israel. You get attacked a lot on the internet. I got to ask you about your own psychology. How do you not let that break you mentally?

Starting point is 00:36:02 And how do you avoid letting that lead to a resentment of the groups that attack you? I mean, it's so there are a few sort of practical things that I've done. So for example, I would say that four years ago, Twitter was all consuming. Twitter is an ego machine, especially the notifications button, right? The notifications button is just people talking about you all the time and the normal human tendency is wow, people talking about me, I got to see what they're saying about me, which is a recipe for insanity. So my wife actually said, Twitter is making your life miserable.

Starting point is 00:36:30 You need to take it off your phone. So Twitter is not on my phone. If I want to log on to Twitter, I have to go on to my computer. And I have to make the conscious decision to go on to Twitter and then take a look at what's going on. I could just imagine you like there's a computer in the basement. You descend into the Czech Twitter. That's pretty much it. I mean, if you look at when I actually tweet, it's generally computer in the basement you descend into the check Twitter. That's pretty much in darkness.

Starting point is 00:36:46 If you look at when I actually tweet, it's generally like in the run up to recording my show or when I'm prepping for my show later in the afternoon, for example, that doesn't affect you negatively mentally, like put you in a bad mental space. Not particularly if it's restricted to sort of what's being washed out. I will say that I think the most important thing is you have to surround yourself with a group of people who are, who you trust enough to make serious critiques of you when you're doing something wrong, but also you know that they have your best interest at heart. Because the internet is filled with people who don't have your best interest at heart and who ate your guts. And so you can't really take those critiques seriously or it

Starting point is 00:37:18 does wreck you. And the world is also filled with sycophants, right? Then the more successful you become, there are a lot of people who will tell you you're always doing the right thing. I'm very lucky. I got married when I was 24, my wife was 20, so she's known me long before I was famous or wealthy or anything.

Starting point is 00:37:34 And so she's a good sounding board. I have a family that's willing to call me out on my bullshit as you talk to you about. I have friends who are able to do that. I try to have open lines of communications with people who I believe have my best interest at heart, but one of the sort of conditions of being friends that when you see me do something wrong, I'd like for you to let me know that so I can correct it. I don't want to leave bad impressions out there.

Starting point is 00:37:57 The sad thing about the internet is just looking at the critiques you get. I see very few critiques when people that actually want you to succeed and want you to grow. I mean, they're very, they're not sophisticated. They're just, they're, I don't know, they're cruel. The critiques are just, it's not the actual critiques. It's just cruelty. And that's, that's most of Twitter.

Starting point is 00:38:16 I mean, as a, as a, Twitter is a place to, to, to smack and be smacked. I mean, that's the, anybody who uses Twitter for, uh Twitter for an intellectual conversation, I think, is engaging in category error. I use it to spread love. I think it's the possible. You're the only one. It's you. It's you and no one else, my friend.

Starting point is 00:38:33 All right. On that topic, what do you think about Elon buying Twitter? What do you like? What are you hopeful on that front? What would you like to see Twitter improve? So I'm very hopeful about Elon buying Twitter. I mean, I think that Elon is significantly more transparent than what has taken place up till now.

Starting point is 00:38:52 He seems committed to the idea that he's gonna broaden the over 10 window to allow for conversations that simply were banned before everything ranging from efficacy of masks with regard to COVID, to whether men can become women and all the rest, a lot of things that would get you banned on Twitter before, without any sort of real explanation, it seems like he's dedicated to at least explaining what the standards are going to be and being broader in allowing a variety of perspectives on the outlet, which I think is wonderful.

Starting point is 00:39:18 I think that's also why people are freaking out. I think the kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth and wearing of sat cloth and ash by so many members of the legacy media, I think the kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth and wearing of sat cloth and ash by so many members of the legacy media, I think a lot of that is because Twitter essentially was an oligarchy in which certain perspectives were allowed and certain perspectives just were not. And that was part of a broader social media, reimposed oligarchy in the aftermath of 2017. So in order for just to really understand, I think, what it means for Elon to take over Twitter, I think that we have to take a look at sort of the history of media in the United States in two minutes or less.

Starting point is 00:39:53 The United States, the media for most of its existence, up until about 1990, at least from about 1930s until the 1990s, virtually all media was three major television networks, a couple major newspapers and the wire services. I ever had a local newspaper with the wire services that basically did all the foreign policy and all the national policy mcclatchy roiders a p a f p etc. so that monopoly or oligopoly existed until the rise of the internet there were sort of pokes at it and talk radio and fox news but there certainly was not this plethora of sources then the internet explodes and all the sudden you can get news everywhere and the way the people are accessing that news is

Starting point is 00:40:27 your I believe significantly younger than I am but we used to do this thing called bookmarking where you would bookmark a series of websites and then you would visit them every morning and then and then social media came up and you know or yeah exactly you have the dial up and you actually it it was actually a can connected to a string and you had actually just it would go and and and then There came a point where social media arose and social media was sort of a boon for everybody because you no longer had a bookmark Anything you just followed your favorite accounts and all of them would pop up and you followed everything on Facebook And it would all pop up and it was all centralized and for a while everybody was super happy because this was the brand new wave of the future Made everything super easy suddenly outlets like mine were able to see new eyeballs because it was all centralized in one place Right, you didn't have to do it through Google optimization

Starting point is 00:41:12 You could now just put it on Facebook and so many eyeballs were on Facebook you'd get more traffic And everybody seemed pretty happy with this arrangement until precisely the moment Donald Trump became president at that point Then the sort of pre-existing supposition of a lot of the powers that be, which was Democrats are going to continue winning from here on out, so we can sort of use the social media platforms as ways to push our information and still allow for there to be other information out there. The immediate response was, we need to reestablish this siphoning of information.

Starting point is 00:41:43 It was misinformation and disinformation that one Donald Trump the election We need to pressure the social media companies to start cracking down on misinformation and disinformation and actually see this in the historical record I mean you can see how Jack Dorsey's talk about free speech shifted from about 2015 to about 2018 You can see Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown in 2018 which he talked about free speech and its value and by 2019 He was going in front of Congress talking about how he was responsible for the stuff that was on Facebook, which is not true. He's not responsible for the stuff on Facebook, right? It's a platform.

Starting point is 00:42:11 It's AT&T responsible for the stuff you say on your phone. The answer is typically no. So when that happened, all of these, because all the eyeballs had now been centralized in these social media sites, they were able to suddenly control what you could see and what you could not see. And the most obvious example was obviously leading up to 2020, the election, the killing of the Hunter Biden story is a great example of this. And so Elon coming in and taking over one of the social media service and saying, I'm

Starting point is 00:42:35 not playing by a rule, right? There's not going to be this sort of group of people in the halls of power. We're going to decide what we can see. And here instead, I'm going gonna let all thousand flowers bloom. There'll be limits, but it's gonna be on more case by case basis. We're going to allow perspectives that are mainstream, but maybe not mainstream in the halls of academia or in the halls of media, let those be said.

Starting point is 00:42:58 I think it's a really good thing. Now, that comes with some responsibilities on Anaglan's personal part which would be you know to be For example, I think more responsible and dissemination of information himself sometimes, right? Like he got himself in trouble the other day for tweeting out that That story about Paul Pelosi that that was speculative and and untrue and I think I don't think what he did is You know horrific. He deleted it when he found out that it was false But and that's actually a free speech working, right? He said something wrong, people ripped into him, he realized he was wrong, he deleted it,

Starting point is 00:43:28 which seems to be a better solution than preemptively ban and content, which only raises more questions than it actually stops. With that said, as the face of responsible free speech, you know, and that's sort of what he's pitching at Twitter, he, I think, should enact that himself and be a little more careful in the stuff that he tweets out. Well, that's sort of what he's pitching at Twitter. He, I think, should enact that himself and be a little more careful in the stuff that he tweets out. Well, that's a tricky balance. The reason a lot of people are freaking out is because one, he's putting his thumb on

Starting point is 00:43:51 the scale by saying he is more likely to be Republican. He's showing himself to be Senate right and sort of just having a political opinion versus being this amorphous thing that doesn't have a political opinion. I think, if I already guess, I haven't talked to him about it, but if I already guess he's sending a kind of signal that's important for the Twitter, the company itself, because if we're being honest, most of the employees are left leaning. So you have to kind of send a signal that like a resisting mechanism to say like, since most of the employees are left, it's good for Elon to be more right to balance

Starting point is 00:44:28 out the way the actual engineering is done to say, we're not going to do any kind of activism inside the engineering. If I were to guess, that's kind of the effect of that mechanism. And the other one, but posting the Pelosi thing, is probably to expand the over-to-window, like saying, we can play, we can post stuff, we can post conspiracy theories, and then through discourse figure out what is and isn't true. Yeah, again, like I say, I mean, I think that the, that is a better mechanism in action than what it was before. I just think it gave people who hate his guts, the opening to kind of slap him for no reason, but I can see the strategy of it for sure. I just think it gave people who hate his guts, the opening to kind of slap him for no reason.

Starting point is 00:45:05 But I can see the strategy of it for sure. And I think that the general idea that he's kind of pushing right where the company had pushed left before, I think that there is actually unilateral polarization right now in politics, at least with regard to social media, in which one side basically says the solution to disinformation is to shut down free speech from the other side and the other side is basically like people like me are saying the solution to disinformation is to let a thousand like I'd rather have people on the left also being able to put out stuff that I disagree with than for there to be anybody who's sort of in charge of these social media platforms and using them as editorial sites.

Starting point is 00:45:43 I mean, I'm not criticizing MSNBC for not putting on right-wing opinions. I mean, that's fine. I run a conservative site. We're not gonna put up left-wing opinions on a wide variety of issues because we are a conservative site. But if you pitch yourself as a platform,

Starting point is 00:45:56 that's a different thing. If you pitch yourself as the town square, as Elon likes to call it, then I think Elon has a better idea of that than many of the former employees did, especially now that we have that report from the intercepts suggesting that there are people from Twitter working with DHS to monitor quote unquote disinformation and being rather vague about what disinformation meant. Yeah, I don't think activism has a place in what is fundamentally an engineering company

Starting point is 00:46:20 that's building a platform. Like the people inside the company should not be putting a thumb in the scale of what is and isn't allowed. You should create a mechanism for the people to decide what isn't allowed. Do you think Trump should have been removed from Twitter? Should his account be restored? His account should be restored. And this is coming from somebody who really dislikes an enormous number of Donald Trump's tweets. Um, again, he's a very important political personage, even if he weren't.

Starting point is 00:46:51 I don't think that he should be banned from Twitter or Facebook in coordinated fashion. By the way, I hold that opinion about people who I think are far worse than Donald Trump. People, I, everyone knows I'm not an Alex Jones guy. I don't like Alex Jones. I think Alex Jones. Oh, I think Alex Jones. Oh, I think Alex should be back on Twitter. I do actually, because I think that there are plenty of people who are willing to say that what he's saying is wrong.

Starting point is 00:47:14 And I'm not a big fan of this idea that, that because people I disagree with, and people who have personally targeted me, by the way, I mean, Alex Jones has been, has said some, some things about me personally that I'm not real fond of. You guys know, well, we're not besties. Now, it turns out, yeah, you know, all I've said is I don't really enjoy a show. He said some other stuff about the anti-Christ and such, but that's, that's, that's a bit of a different thing, I suppose. You know, even so, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm just not a big fan of this idea.

Starting point is 00:47:40 Like, I've defended people who have really gone after me on a personal level, have targeted me that the town square is online. I've defended people who have really gone after me on a personal level, have targeted me, that the town square is online. Bending people from the town square is unpersoning them. Unless you violated a criminal statute, you should not be unpersoned in American society as a general rule. That doesn't mean that companies that are not platforms don't have the ability to respond to you.

Starting point is 00:48:04 I think Adidas is right to terminate its contract with Kanye, for example, or with the A. You know, that's, but Twitter ain't Adidas. So the way your stance on free speech to the degree it's possible to achieve on a platform like Twitter is you fight bad speech with more speech, with better speech. And that's, so if Alex Jones and Trump was allowed back on in the coming months and years leading up to the 2024 election, you think that's going to make for a better world in the long term? I think that on the principle that people should be allowed to do this and the alternative being a group of thought bosses telling us what we can and cannot see, yes.

Starting point is 00:48:49 So I think in the short term, it's going to mean a lot of things that I don't like very much. Sure. I mean, that's, that's the, that's the cost of doing business, you know? Like I think that one of the, one of the cost of freedom is people doing things that I don't particularly like. And I would prefer the freedom with, with all the freedom with all the stuff I don't like than not the freedom. Let me linger on the love a little bit.

Starting point is 00:49:10 You and a lot of people are pretty snarky on Twitter. Sometimes to the point of mockery, derision, even a bit of, if I were to say, bad faith in the kind of mockery. And you see it as a war. I disagree with both you and Elon on this. Elon sees Twitter as a war zone or at least has saw it that way in the past. Have you ever considered being nice around Twitter?

Starting point is 00:49:36 As a voice that a lot of people look up to that if Ben Shapiro becomes a little bit more about love that can inspire a lot of people or no, is it just too fun for you? The answer is yes, sure, it's occurred to me, let's put it this way, there are a lot of tweets that actually don't go out that I delayed. I'll say that Twitter's new function, that 30 second function is a friend of mine. Every so often I'll tweet something and I'll think about it a second time. Do I need to say this?

Starting point is 00:50:03 Probably not. Can you make a book published after you pass away of all the tweets that you didn't send? Oh no, my kids are still gonna be around. I hope so. That's true. You know, the legacy. But yeah, I mean, sure, the answer is yes, and there's a good piece of what we'd call

Starting point is 00:50:21 an orthodox shoot is a musser. This is like, he's giving you a musser schmooze right now. This is like the kind of of you know be a better person stuff I agree with you I agree with you and and yeah and I will say that Twitter is sometimes too much fun I try to be and I try to be at least if not even handed then equal opportunity to my derision and I remember that during the 2016 primaries, I used to post rather snarky tweets about virtually all of the candidates of Republican and Democrat. And every so often I'll still do some of that.

Starting point is 00:50:54 I do think actually the amount of snark on my Twitter feed is going down fairly significantly. I think if you go back a couple of years, it was probably a little more snarky. Today I'm trying to use it a little bit more in terms of strategy to get out information. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going to make jokes about, for example, Joe Biden, I will make jokes about Joe Biden.

Starting point is 00:51:11 He's the president of the United States. Nobody else will mock him. So the entire comedic establishment has decided they actually work for him. So the president of the United States, no matter who they are, get the snark from the president. Yes. And President Trump, I think, is fairly aware that he got the snark from me as well. Like this, when it comes to snarking, the president, I'm not going to stop that. I think the president deserves to be snarked.

Starting point is 00:51:31 So you're not afraid of attacking Trump? No, I mean, I've done it before. Can you say what your favorite and least favorite things are about president Trump and president Biden on at a time? So maybe one thing that you can say is super positive about Trump and one thing super negative about Trump. Okay, so the super positive thing about Trump is that because he has no preconceived views that are establishmentarian, he's sometimes willing to go out of the box and do things that haven't been tried before.

Starting point is 00:52:00 And sometimes that works. I mean, the best example being the entire foreign policy establishment telling him that he couldn't get a Middle Eastern deal done unless he centered the Palestinian Israeli conflict. And instead, he just went right around that and ended up cutting a bunch of peace deals in the Middle East or moving the embassy into Jerusalem. Right? Sometimes he does stuff and it's really out of the box and it actually works. And that's kind of awesome in politics and neat to see. The downside of Trump is that he has no capacity to use any sort of... There's no filter between brain and mouth. Well, whatever happens in his brain is the thing that comes out of his mouth. I know a lot of people find that charming and wonderful, and it is very

Starting point is 00:52:38 funny, but I don't think that it is a particularly excellent personal quality in a person who has as much responsibility as President Trump has. I think he says a lot of damaging and bad things on Twitter. I think that he seems consumed in some ways by his own grievances, which is why you've seen him focusing on election 2020 so much.

Starting point is 00:52:58 And I think that that is very negative about President Trump. So I'm very grateful to President Trump as a conservative for many of the things that he did. I think that a lot of his personality issues are are pretty severe what about joe by so i i think that the thing that i like most about joe by yes

Starting point is 00:53:16 i will say that by didn two things one by didn seems to be you very good father by all available By all available evidence, right? There are a lot of people who are put out, you know, kind of tape of him talking to Hunter and Hunter is having trouble with drugs or whatever. And I keep listening to that tape and thinking, he seems like a really good dad.

Starting point is 00:53:37 Like the stuff that he's saying to his son is stuff that God forbid, if that were happening with my kid, I'd be saying to my kid. And so, you know, you can't help but feel for the guys. An incredibly difficult go of it with his first wife and the death of members of his family and then bowdying. I mean, that kind of stuff obviously is deeply sympathetic and he seems like a deeply sympathetic father. As far as his politics, he seems like a slap on the back, you know, kind of guy. And I don't mind that.

Starting point is 00:54:04 I think that's nice. So far as it goes, it's sort of an old school politics where things are done with handshake and personal relationships. The thing I don't like about him is I think sometimes that's really not genuine. I think that sometimes, you know, I think that's his personal tendency, but I think sometimes he allows the prevailing winds of his party to carry him to incredibly radical places. And then he just doubles down on the radicalism in

Starting point is 00:54:27 some pretty disingenuous ways and and there I would cite the the independent state speech with or the independence hall speech which I thought was truly one of the worst speeches I've seen a president give so you don't think he's trying to be a unifier in general not at all. I mean I that's that's what he was elected to do. He's elected to do two things not be alive and be a unifier those were the two things and like and when I, not be alive and be a unifier. Those were the two things. And like, and when I say not be alive, I don't mean like physically dead. This is where the snout comes in. But what I do mean is that he is,

Starting point is 00:54:54 he was elected to not be particularly activist. Basically the man that was don't be Trump, be sane, don't be Trump, call him everything down. And then said he got in, he's like, what if we spend $7 trillion? What if we pull out of Afghanistan without any sort of plan? What if I start labeling all of my political enemies? enemies of the Republic? What if I start bringing

Starting point is 00:55:13 Dillamel they need to the White House and talking about how it is a moral sin to prevent the general mutilation of minors? I mean like this kind of stuff is very radical stuff and this is not a president who is pursued a unifying agenda Which is why his approval rating sank from 60% when he entered office to low 40s or high 30s today. Unlike president Trump, who never had high approval rating, right? Trump came into office and he had like a 45% approval rating. And when he left office, he had about a 43% approval rating. It bounced around between 45 and 37, pretty much as a higher presidency Biden went from being a very popular guy coming in to a very unpopular guy right now.

Starting point is 00:55:45 And if you're job Biden, you should be looking in the mirror and wondering exactly why. Do you think that pulling out from a guy's thing could be flipped as a pro for Biden in terms of he actually did it? I think it's going to be almost impossible. I think the American people are incredibly inconsistent about their own views on foreign policy. In other words, we like to be isolationist until it comes time for us to be defeated and humiliated. When that happens, we tend not to like it very much. You mentioned Biden being a good father.

Starting point is 00:56:12 Can you make the case for and against the Hunter Biden laptop story for it being a big deal and against it being a big deal? Sure. So the case for it being a big deal is basically twofold. One is that it is clearly relevant. If the president's son is running around to foreign countries picking up bags of cash because his last name is Biden while his father is vice president of the United States. And it raises questions as to influence pedaling for either the vice president or the former vice president using political connections. Did he make any money? Who was the big guy right? All these open questions that obviously implicates the questions to be asked.

Starting point is 00:56:50 And then the secondary reason that the story is big is actually because of the reaction of the story. The banning of the story is in and of itself a major story. If there's, if there's any story that implicates a presidential candidate in the last month of an election and there is a media blackout, including a social media blackout, that obviously raises some very serious questions about informational flow and dissemination in the last month of an election and there is a media blackout, including a social media blackout. That obviously raises some very serious questions about informational flow and dissemination in the United States. No matter how big of a deal the story is, it is a big deal that there's a censorship of

Starting point is 00:57:14 any relevant story. Well, there's a coordinated, collusive blackout. Yeah, that's a serious and major problem. So those are the two reasons why it would be a big story. The two reasons, a reason why it would not be a big story, perhaps, is if it turns out, and we don't really know this yet, but let's say that that Hunter Biden was basically off on his own doing what he was doing, you know, being a derelict or drug addict or acting badly. And his dad had nothing to do with it. And Joe was telling the truth. And he really knew, but the problem

Starting point is 00:57:43 is we never actually got those questions answered. So if it had turned out to be a nothing of a story, the nice thing about stories that turned out to be nothing is that after they turned out to be nothing, they're nothing. The biggest problem with this story is that it wasn't allowed to take the normal life cycle of a story, which is original story breaks. File-on questions are asked. File-on questions are answered.

Starting point is 00:58:01 Story is either now a big story or into nothing. When the life cycle of a story is cut off right at the very beginning, right when it's born, then that allows you to speculate in any direction you want. You can speculate, it means nothing. It's nonsense. It's Russian laptop. It's disinformation. Or on the other hand, this means that Joe Biden was personally calling Hunter and telling

Starting point is 00:58:20 him to pick up a sack of cash over in Beijing, and then he became president and he's influenced pedaling. So, this is why it's important to allow these stories to go forward. So, this is why actually the bigger story for the moment is not the laptop. It's the reaction to the laptop because it cut off that life cycle of the story. And then, you know, at some point I would assume that there will be some follow-on questions that are actually answered. I mean, the house is pledging if it goes for public insight to investigate all of this. Again, I wouldn't be supremely surprised if it turns out that there was no direct involvement

Starting point is 00:58:48 of Joe in this sort of stuff because it turns out, as I said before, that all of politics is weak. And this is always the story with half the scandals that you see is that everybody assumes that there is some sort of deep and abiding clever plan that some politician is implementing it. And then you look at it and it turns out, no, just something dumb right this sort of perfect example of this you know president Trump with the classified documents in Marlago so people on the left like it's probably nuclear codes probably he's taking secret documents and selling them to the Russians of the Chinese

Starting point is 00:59:15 and the real most obvious explanation is Trump looked at the papers and he said I like these papers and then he just decided to keep them right and then people came to him as a Mr. President you're not allowed to keep those papers. Who are those people? I don't care about what they have to say. I'm putting them in the other room in a box. Like, which is what it is, it is highly likely that that is what happened. And it's very disappointing to people, I think, when they realize the human brain, I mean, you know this better than I do, but the human brain is built to find patterns. Right? It's what we like to do. We've liked to find plans and patterns because this is how we survived in the wild.

Starting point is 00:59:44 As you found a plan, you found a pattern, you crack the code of the universe. When it comes to politics, the conspiracy theories that we see so often, it's largely because we're seeing inexplicable events, unless you just assume everyone's more on. If you assume that there's a lot of stupidity going on, everything becomes quickly explicable. If you assume that there must be some rationale behind it, you have to come up with increasingly convoluted conspiracy theories to explain just why people are acting the way that they're acting. And I find that I won't say 100% of the time, but 94% of the time, the conspiracy theory turns out just to be people being dumb, and then other people reacting in dumb ways to

Starting point is 01:00:20 the original people being dumb. But it's also, to me, in that same way, very possible, very likely that the hundred-biden getting money in Ukraine, I guess, for consulting all that kind of stuff is a nothing burger. He's qualified, he's getting money as he should. There's a lot of influence peddling in general in terms that's not corrupt. I think the most obvious explanation there, probably is that he wasn't fake influence peddling, meaning he went to Ukraine and he's like, guess what? My dad's Joe.

Starting point is 01:00:48 And they're like, well, you don't have any qualifications in oil and natural gas and you don't really have a great resume. But your dad is Joe. And then that was kind of the end of it. They gave him a bag of cash hoping he would do something. He never did any like that. I think you're making it sound worse than it is. I think that in general consulting is done in that way.

Starting point is 01:01:02 Your name, it's not like you're through. I agree with you. It's not like he is some rare case, and this is an illustration of corruption. If you can criticize consulting, which I would, which they're basically not providing, you're, you're, you're looking at a resume and who is who? Like if you want to Harvard, I can criticize the same thing. If you have Harvard on your resume,

Starting point is 01:01:24 you're more likely to be hired as a consultant. Maybe there's a network there of people that you know and you hire them in that same way. If your last name is Biden, there's a lot of last names that sound pretty good at it. For sure. And so, and it's not like you've admitted that much by the way, right? An open interview. He was like, if your last name weren't Biden when you got that job and he's like, probably not. And you're right. And you're right. I agree with you. It's not like he's getting a ridiculous amount of money.

Starting point is 01:01:48 He was getting like a pretty standard consulting kind of money, which also would criticize, because they get a ridiculous amount of money. But I sort of even to push back in the lifecycle or to steal madness, the side that was concerned about the Hunter by and Laptop's story, I don't know if there is a natural life cycle of a story because there's something about the virality of the internet

Starting point is 01:02:10 that we can't predict that a story can just take hold and the conspiracy around it builds, especially around politics, where the interpretation, some popular sexy interpretation of a story that might not be connected to reality at all will become viral. And that from Facebook's perspective, probably what they're worried about is an organized misinformation campaign that makes up a sexy story or sexy interpretation of the vague story that we have.

Starting point is 01:02:42 And that has an influence on the populace. I mean, I think that's true, but I think the question becomes, who's the greatest adjudicator there? Right, who adjudicates when the story ought to be allowed to go through even a bad life cycle or allowed to go viral as opposed to not? Now it's one thing if you wanna say,

Starting point is 01:02:57 okay, we can spot the Russian accounts that are actually promoting this stuff, they belong to the Russian government, gotta shut that down. I think everybody agrees. This is actually one of the slides that's happened linguistically that I really object to, is the slide between disinformation and misinformation.

Starting point is 01:03:10 I noticed there is this evolution, and in 2017, there's a lot of talk about disinformation. It was Russian disinformation. The Russians were putting out the liberately false information in order to skew election results was the accusation. And then people started using disinformation or misinformation. And misinformation, easy to mistake in information or information that is quote unquote out of context.

Starting point is 01:03:27 That becomes very subjective very quickly as to what out of context means. And it doesn't necessarily have to be from a foreign source. It can be from a domestic source, right? It could be somebody misinterpreting something here. It could be somebody interpreting something correctly by politic fact things that it's out of context. And that sort of stuff gets very murky very quickly.

Starting point is 01:03:42 And so I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook, I mean Zuckerberg was on with Rogan and talking about how the FBI had basically set look out for Russian interference in the election. And then all of these people were out there saying that the laptop was Russian disinformation. So he basically shut it down. That sort of stuff is frightening,

Starting point is 01:04:00 especially because it wasn't Russian disinformation. I mean, the laptop was real. And so the fact that you have people who seem to, let's put this way, it seems as though, maybe this is wrong. It seems as though when a story gets killed preemptively like this, it is almost universally a story that negatively affects one side of the political aisle. I can't remember the last time there's a story on the right that was disinformation or misinformation where social media stepped in and they went, we cannot have this. This cannot be distributed. We're going to all colludes

Starting point is 01:04:29 that this this information is not distributed. Maybe in response to the story being proof false, it gets taken down. But the what made the Hunter Biden thing so amazing is that it wasn't really even a response to anything. It was like the story got posted. There were no actual doubts expressed as to the verified falsity of the story. It was just a supposition that it had to be false and everybody jumped in. So I think that confirmed a lot of the conspiracy theories people had about about social media and how it works. Yeah. So if the reason you want to slow down the viral spread of a thing is at all grounded in

Starting point is 01:05:00 partisanship, that's a problem. Like you should be very honest with yourself and ask yourself that question. Is it because I'm on the left or on the right that I want to slow this down? Versus, is it hate? Uh, bipartisan hate speech. Right, so that's, but it's really, it's really tricky. Um, but I, like you, I'm very uncomfortable in general with any kind of slow and down, with any kind of censorship.

Starting point is 01:05:24 But if, if there is something like a conspiracy theory that spreads hate that becomes viral I still lean to let that conspiracy theory spread Because the alternative is dangerous and more dangerous It's sort of like the ring of power right like everybody wants the because with the ring, you can stop the bad guys from going forward. But it turns out that the ring gives you enormous power and that power can be used in the wrong ways too. You had the daily wire, which I'm a member of. I appreciate that, thank you.

Starting point is 01:05:57 I recommend everybody sign up to it. It should be part of your regular diet, whether you're on the left and the right, the far left or the far right, everybody. It should be part of your regular diet. Okay, that said, do you're on the left and the right, the far left or the far right, everybody should be part of your regular diet. Okay, that said, do you worry about the audience capture aspect of it? Because it is a platform for conservatives, and you have a powerful voice on there. It might be difficult for you to go against the talking points or against the stream of ideas that is usually

Starting point is 01:06:27 connected to conservative thought. Do you worry about that? I mean, the audience would obviously be upset with me and would have a right to be upset with me if I suddenly flipped all of my positions on a dime. I have enough faith in my audience that I can say things that I think are true and that made us agree with the audience, you know, on a fairly regular basis, I would say. But they understand that on the deeper principle, we're on the same side of the outlets. I hope that much from the audience. It's also why we provide a number of different views

Starting point is 01:06:54 on the platforms, many of which I disagree with, but are sort of within the generalized range of conservative thought. And that I, you know, it's something I do have to think about every day, though, yeah. I mean, you have to, you have to think about like, day. I mean, you have to think about, am I saying this because I'm afraid of taking off my audience or am I saying this because I actually believe this? That's a delicate dance a little bit. You have to be honest with yourself. Yeah, somebody like Sam Harris is pretty good at this at fighting.

Starting point is 01:07:22 It's saying the most outrageous thing that he knows, he almost leans into it. He knows will piss off a lot of his audience. Sometimes you almost have to test the system. Is that if you feel you almost exaggerate your feelings just to make sure to send a signal to the audience that you're not captured by them. So speaking of people you disagree with, what is your favorite thing about canis Owens? And what is one thing you disagree with her on? Well, my favorite thing about canis is that she will say things that nobody else will say.

Starting point is 01:07:56 My least favorite thing about canis is that she will say things that nobody else will say. Yeah. I mean, listen, she says things that are audacious and I think need to be said sometimes. Sometimes I think that she is morally wrong. I think the way she responded to Kanye, I've said this clearly, was dead wrong and morally wrong. I'd say response.

Starting point is 01:08:15 Her original response was that she profored confusion of what, yeah, it was actually talking about. And then she was defending her friend. I wish that the way that she had responded was by saying he's my friend. And also he said something bad and anti-Semitic. I wish that she had said that. Right away. Right away. Yeah. I think you can also, this is the interesting human thing. You can be friends with people that you disagree with. And you can be friends with people that actually say hateful stuff. And one of the ways to help alleviate hate is being friends with people that say hateful things.

Starting point is 01:08:50 Yeah, and then calling them out on a personal level when they do say wrong or hateful things. From a place of love and respect and privately. Privately is also a big thing, right? I mean, like the public demand for denunciation from friends to friends is difficult. And I certainly have compassion for Candice giving the fact that she's so close with the A. Yeah, breaks my heart sometimes. The public fights between friends and broken friendships. I've seen quite a few friendships publicly break over COVID. COVID made people behave their worst in many cases, which yeah, breaks my heart a little bit because like the the human connection is a few requisite for effective debate and discussion and battles over ideas. Has there been any argument from

Starting point is 01:09:43 the opposite political aisle that has made you change your mind about something? If you look back. So I will say that the, I'm thinking it through because I think that my views probably on foreign policy have morphed somewhat. I would say that I was much more interventionist when I was younger. I'm significantly less interventionist now. I probably give myself more. Sure, I was a big backer of the Iraq war. I think now in retrospect, I might not be a backer of the Iraq war if the same situation arose again. Based on the amount of evidence that had been presented or based on the sort of willingness of the American public to

Starting point is 01:10:24 go at. If you're gonna get involved in a war, you have to know what the endpoint looks like, and you have to know what the American people really are willing to bear, and the American people are not willing to bear open-ended occupations. And so knowing that, you have to consider that going in. So on foreign policy, I've become a lot more of a,

Starting point is 01:10:41 it's almost Henry Kissinger realist in some ways. And when it comes to social policy, I would say that I'm fairly strong where I was. I may have become slightly convinced actually by more the conservative side of the aisle and things like drug legalization. I think when I was younger, I was as much more pro drug legalization than I am now, at least on the local level. On a federal level, I think the federal government pro drug legalization than I am now, at least on the local level. On a federal level, I think the federal government can't really do much other than close

Starting point is 01:11:08 the borders with regard to fentanyl trafficking, for example. But when it comes to how drugs were on local communities, you can see how drugs were on local communities pretty easily. Which is weird because I saw you smoke a joint right before this conversation. It's my biggest thing. I mean, I tried to keep that secret. Right. Well, that's interesting about intervention. Can you come out about the war

Starting point is 01:11:27 in Ukraine? So for me, it's a deeply personal thing. But I think you're able to look at it from a geopolitics perspective. What is the role of the United States in this conflict before the conflict during the conflict? And right now in helping achieve peace. I think before the conflict, the big problem is that the West took almost the worst possible view, which was encourage Ukraine to keep trying to join NATO and the EU, but don't let them in. And so what that does is it achieves the purpose of getting Russia really, really ticked off and feeling threatened, but also does not give any of the protections of NATO or the

Starting point is 01:12:04 EU to Ukraine. I mean, Zelensky is on film when he was a comedy actor, making that exact joke, right? He has Merkel on the other line and she's like, oh, welcome to the, welcome to NATO. And he's like, great, just like, wait, is this Ukraine on the line? And whoops, but so, you know, that sort of policy

Starting point is 01:12:20 is sort of nonsensical. If you're gonna offer alliance to somebody, offer alliance to them. And if you're going to guarantee their security, guarantee their security, and the West failed signally to do that. So that was mistakes in the run-up to the war. Once the war began, then the responsibility of the West began and became to give Ukraine as much material as is necessary to repel the invasion. And the West did really well with that. I think we were late on the ball in the United States.

Starting point is 01:12:47 It seemed like Europe led the way a little bit more than the United States did there. But in terms of effectuating American interests in the region, which being an American is what I'm chiefly concerned about. The American interests were severalfold. One is preserve borders. Two is degrade the Russian aggressive military because Russia's military has been aggressive and they are geopolitical rival of the United States. Three, recalibrate the European balance with China. Europe was sort of balancing with

Starting point is 01:13:15 Russia and China and then because of the war they sort of rebalanced away from China and Russia, which is a real geostrategic opportunity for the United States. And seem like most of those goals have already been achieved at this opportunity for the United States. It seemed like most of those goals have already been achieved at this point for the United States. And so then the question becomes, what's the off ramp here? And what is the thing you're trying to prevent? So what's the best opportunity? What's the best case scenario?

Starting point is 01:13:34 What's the worst case scenario? And then what's realistic? So best case scenario is Ukraine forces Russia entirely out of Ukraine, including Lehanes, and Esk and Crimea. That's the best case scenario. Virtually no one thinks that's accomplishable, including the United States, right?

Starting point is 01:13:46 The White House has basically said as much, it's still cool to imagine, particularly Kremia, the Russians being forced out of Kremia. The Ukrainians have been successful in pushing the Russians out of certain parts of Lohansk and Dinesk, but the idea they're gonna be able to push the entire Russian army completely back to the Russian borders, that would be at best a very, very long and difficult slog. In the middle of a collapsing Ukrainian economy, which is a

Starting point is 01:14:08 point that Zelensky has made, is like it's not enough for you guys to give us military aid, we're in the middle of a war, we're gonna need to economic aid as well. So it's a pretty open-ended and strong commitment. Can take a small change on that in your best case scenario. If that does militarily happen, including Crimea, do you think there's a world in which Vladimir Putin would be able to convince the Russian people that this was a good conclusion to the war? Right. So the problem is that the best case scenario might also be the worst case scenario, meaning that there are a couple of scenarios that are sort of the worst case scenario.

Starting point is 01:14:40 And this is sort of the puzzlement of the situation. One is that Putin feels so boxed in. So unable to go back to his own people and say we just wasted tens of thousands of lives here for no reason, that he unleashes a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield. Nobody knows what happens after that. So we put NATO planes in the air to take out Russian assets, do Russian start shooting down planes, does Russia then threaten to escalate even further by attacking an actual NATO civilian center or even new Ukrainian civilian center with nuclear weapons.

Starting point is 01:15:07 Where it goes from there, nobody knows because nuclear weapons haven't been used since 1945. So that's, you know, that is a worst case scenario. It's an unpredictable scenario that could evolve into really, really significant problems. The other worst case scenario could be a best case scenario, it could be a worst we just don't know is Putin falls. What happens after that? Who takes over for Putin?

Starting point is 01:15:27 Is that person more moderate than Putin? Is that person a liberalizer? It probably won't be in a volume. If he's going to be outstead, it will probably somebody who's a top member of Putin's brass right now and has capacity to control the military, or it's possible that the entire regime breaks down and what you end up with is Syria and Russia, where you just have an entirely out of control region with no centralizing power, which is also a disaster area.

Starting point is 01:15:50 And so in the nature of risk mitigation, in sort of an attempt at risk mitigation, what actually should be happening right now is some off ramp has to be offered to Putin. The off ramp likely is going to be him maintaining Crimea and parts of Lohansk and Dinesk. It's probably going to be a commitment by Ukraine not to join NATO formally, but a guarantee by the West to defend Ukraine in case of an invasion of his borders again by Russia like an actual treaty obligation, not like the BS treaty obligation and when when

Starting point is 01:16:21 Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the 90s. And that is likely how this is going to have to go. The problem is that requires political courage, not from Zolansky. It requires courage from probably Biden because the only, Zolansky is not in a political position where he can go back to his own people who have made unbelievable sacrifices on behalf of their nation and freedom and say to them, guys, now I'm calling it quits, we're going to have to give them a handstand asking to put an offer. I don't think that's an acceptable answer to most Ukrainians at this point in time from the polling data and from the available data we have on the ground.

Starting point is 01:16:51 It's going to actually take Biden, biting the bullet and being the bad guy and saying to Zalinsky, listen, we've made a commitment of material aid. We were offering you all these things, including essentially a defense pact. We're offering you all this stuff, but if you don't come to the table, then we're going to have to start weaning you out. Like there will have to be a stick there. It can't be a carrot. And so that will allow Zalansky, if Biden were to do that, it would allow Zalansky to blame Biden for the solution. Everybody knows has to happen. Zalansky can go back to his own people and he can say, listen, this is the way it has to go. I don't want it to go this way, but it's

Starting point is 01:17:23 not my, I'm signing other people's checks, right? I mean, like this is, it's not my money. And Biden would take the hit because he wouldn't then be able to blame Ukraine for whatever happens next, which has been the easy road off, I think, for a lot of politicians in the West. It's for them to just say, well, this is up to the Ukrainians to decide.

Starting point is 01:17:39 It's up to the Ukrainians to decide, well, is it totally up to the Ukrainians to decide? Because it seems like the West is signing an awful lot of checks and all of Europe is gonna freeze this winter? so This is the importance of great leadership by the way. That's why the people we elect is very important Do you think Do you think there's power to just one-on-one conversation or buying sista was the and Biden's sista on with Putin almost in person. Because I, maybe I'm romanticizing the notion, but having done these podcasts in person,

Starting point is 01:18:11 I think there's something fundamentally different than through a remote call and also like a distant kind of recorded political type speak versus like manda man. So I'm deeply afraid that Putin outplays people in the one-on-one scenarios because he's done it to multiple presidents already. He gets in one-on-one scenarios with Bush, with Obama, with Trump, with Biden. And he seems to be a very canny operator and a very sort of hard-nosed operator

Starting point is 01:18:37 in those situations. I think that if you were gonna do something like that, like an actual political face-to-face summit, what you would need is for Biden to first have a conversation with Zelensky, where Zelensky knows what's going on, so he's aware. And then Biden walks in and he says, to Putin on camera, here's the offer, let's get it together, let's make peace, you get to keep this stuff, and then let Putin respond, have Putin is going to respond.

Starting point is 01:19:05 But the big problem for Putin, I think, and the problem with public facing for a, maybe it's a private meeting. If it's a private meeting, maybe that's the best thing. If it's a public facing forum, I think it's a problem because Putin is afraid of being humiliated at this point. If it's a private meeting, then sure, except that, again, I wonder whether when it comes to a person as cany as Putin and to a politician that I really don't think is a particularly sophisticated player in in Joe Biden. And again, this

Starting point is 01:19:34 is not unique to Biden. I think that most of our presidents for the for the last 30, 40 years have not been particularly sophisticated players. I think that that's that's a that's a risky scenario. have not been particularly sophisticated players. I think that that's a risky scenario. Yeah, I still believe in the power of that, because otherwise, I don't know, I don't think stuff on paper and political speak will solve these kinds of problems. Because from the Zelensky's perspective,

Starting point is 01:19:58 nothing but complete victory will do. Right. As a nation, as people sacrificed way too much. And they're all in. And if you look at it, because I travel to Ukraine, I spend time there, I'll be going back there, hopefully also going back to Russia, just speaking to Ukrainians, they're all in. They're all in. Yeah. Nothing but complete victory. Yep, that's right. And so for that, the only way to achieve peace is through like honest human to human conversation, giving both people a way to off ramp, to walk away victorious. And some of that requires speaking honestly as a human being, but also for America to the actually not even America.

Starting point is 01:20:46 Honestly, just the president be able to eat their own ego a bit and be the punching bag a little just enough for both presidents to be able to walk away and say, listen, we got the American president to come to us. And I think that makes the president look strong now weak. I mean, I agree with you. I think it would also require some people on the right, people like me, if it's Joe Biden, to say if Biden does that, I see what he's doing, it's the right move. I think one of the things that he's afraid of, to steal man him. I think one of the things he's afraid of is he goes and he makes that sort of deal. And the right says, you just coward in front of Russia, you just, you just gave away Ukraine, whatever

Starting point is 01:21:22 it is. But, you. But it's going to require some people on the right to say that that move is the right move and then a whole buy-it, if Biden actually performs that move. You're exceptionally good at debate. You wrote how the debate left this and destroyed them. You're kind of known for this kind of stuff. Just exceptionally skilled the conversation at debate at getting to the facts of the matter and using logic to get to the conclusion in the debate. Do you ever worry that this power talked about the ring? This power you were given has corrupted you and your ability to see what's like to pursue the truth versus just winning debates. I hope not.

Starting point is 01:22:05 I think one of the things that's funny about the branding versus the reality is that most of the things that get characterized is destroying in debates with fax and logic. Most of those things are basically me having a conversation with somebody on a college campus. It actually isn't like a formal debate where we sit there and we critique each other's positions or it's not me insulting anybody. A lot of the clips that have gone very viral is me making an argument, and then they're not being like an amazing counterargument.

Starting point is 01:22:31 Many of the debates that I've held have been extremely cordial. I'd take the latest example, like about a year ago, I debated Anna Kasperian from Young Turks. It was very cordial, it was very nice, right? Yeah, that's sort of the way that I like to debate. My rule when it comes to debate And or discussion is that my opponent actually gets to pick the mode in which we work So if it's going to be a debate of ideas and we're just going to discuss and critique and clarify

Starting point is 01:22:59 Then we can do that if somebody comes loaded for bear then I will Respond in kind Because one of the big problems I think in sort of the debate slash discussion sphere is very often misdiagnosis of what exactly is going on people who think the discussion is a bait and vice versa. And that can be a real problem and there are people who will. You know. Treat what ought to be a discussion as for example an exercise in performance art. discussion as, for example, an exercise in performance art. And so what that is, is mugging or trolling or saying troly things in order to just get to the, like that's something I actually don't do during debate.

Starting point is 01:23:30 I mean, if you actually watch me talk to people, I don't actually do the trolling thing. The trolling thing is almost solely relegated to Twitter and me making jokes on my show. When it comes to actually debating people, that sounds actually a lot like what we're doing right now. It's just the person maybe taking just an obvious position to mine. And so that's fine. Usually half of the debate or discussion is me just asking for clarification of terms.

Starting point is 01:23:51 Like what exactly do you mean by this? So I can drill down on where the actual disagreement may lie because some of the time people think they're disagreeing and they're actually not disagreeing. And like when I'm talking with Anna Kasperian and she's talking about how corporate and government have too much power together, I'm like, well, you sound like a tea party.

Starting point is 01:24:05 You're like, you and I are on the same page about that. That sort of stuff does tend to happen a lot in discussion. I think that when discussion gets termed debate, it's a problem. When debate gets termed discussion, it's even more problematic because debate is a different thing. And I find that your debate and your conversation is often good faith. You're able to steal mad on the other side. You're actually listening.

Starting point is 01:24:24 You're considering the other side. The times when I see that you know, Ben Shapiro destroys leftists, it's usually just like you said, the other side is doing the trolling because they've, I mean, the people that do criticize you for that interaction is the people that usually get destroyed are like 20 years old. They're usually not sophisticated in any kind of degree in terms of being able to use logic and reason and facts and so on. That's totally fine by the way. I mean, if people want to criticize me for speaking on college campuses where a lot of political

Starting point is 01:24:56 conversation happens, both right and left, that's fine. I mean, I've had lots of conversations with people on the other side of the aisle too. I mean, right, I've done podcasts with Sam Harris and we've talked about atheism or I've done debates with Anna Kasperian or I've talked to them. I've done debate with Chiang Quigar or I've had lots of conversations with people on the other side of the aisle too. I mean, right, I've done podcasts with Sam Harris and we've talked about atheism or I've done debates with Anna Kasperian or I've talked to the, I've done debate with Chiang Quigar or I've, I've had conversations with lots of people on the other side of the aisle. In fact, I believe I have the only person on the right who recommends that people listen to his shows on the other side of the aisle, right? I mean, I say on my show on a fairly regular basis that people should listen to Pods

Starting point is 01:25:19 Ave America. Now, no one on Pods Ave America will ever say that somebody should listen to my show. That is verboten. That is not something that, that can be had. It's one of the strangeness of our politics. It's what I've called the happy birthday problem, which is I have a lot of friends who are of the left and are publicly of the left. And on my birthday, they'll send you a text message, happy birthday, but they will never tweet happy birthday, unless they be acknowledging that you were born of woman and that this can't be allowed. So

Starting point is 01:25:43 on the Sunday special, I've had a bevy of people who are on the other side of the aisle. A lot of them are ranging from people in Hollywood like Jason Blum to Larry Wilmore to Sam, to, you know, just a lot of people on the left. I think we're, we're in the near future probably going to do a Sunday special with Rokana up in California, the California Congressperson, very nice guy, had him on the show. That kind of stuff is fun and interesting. But I think that the easy way out for a clip that people don't like is to either immediately clip the clip. I'll take a two minute clip and clip it down

Starting point is 01:26:14 to 15 seconds where somebody insults me and then echoes viral, which is, welcome to the internet, or to say, well, you're only debating colleges, you're only talking to 20, I mean, I talked to a lot more people than that. That's just not the stuff you're watching. You lost your cool in an interview with BBC's Andrew Neil and you're really honest about it after which was kind of refreshing and enjoyable.

Starting point is 01:26:36 As the internet said, they've never seen anyone lose an interview. So to me honestly, it was like seeing like, flame-may, whether junior or somebody like knocked down. What was the, can you take me to that experience? Here's that day. That day is, I have a book release, didn't get a lot of sleep the night before, and this is the last interview of the day. And it's an interview with BBC.

Starting point is 01:26:58 I don't know, I think I have a BBC, I don't watch BBC, I don't know any of the hosts. So, we get on the interview, and it's supposed to be about the book. And the host Andrew Neil doesn't ask virtually a single question about the book. He just starts reading me battle tweets, which I hate. I mean, it's annoying and it's stupid. And it's the worst form of interview when somebody just reads you battle tweets, especially when I've acknowledged

Starting point is 01:27:19 battle tweets before. And so I'm going through the list with him and this interview was solidly 20 minutes. I mean, it was a long interview and we get to and I make a couple of particularly annoyed mistakes in the interview. So annoyed mistake number one is the ego play, right? So there's a point in the middle of the interview where I say like I don't even know who you are, which was true. I didn't know who it was. It turns out he's a very famous person in Britain. And so you can't make that ego play. But even if he's not famous, that's not. It doesn't even, right, it's a dumb thing to do. And it's an ass thing to do.

Starting point is 01:27:47 So like the, so saying that was, was, you know, more just kind of peak in silliness. And so that was, that was mistakes. I enjoyed watching that. It was like, oh, but it's human. Yeah. That's not, that's not, that's not what I enjoyed it. So that there is, there is that.

Starting point is 01:28:01 And then the, the other mistake was that I just don't watch enough British TV. So the way that interviews are done there are much more adversarial than American TV. In American TV, if somebody is adversarial with you, you assume that they're a member of the other side. That's typically how it is. And so I'm critiquing some of his questions at the beginning.

Starting point is 01:28:17 And I thought that the critique of some of his questions is actually fair. He's asking me about abortion. And I thought he was asking it from a way of framing the question that wasn't accurate. And so I assumed that he was on the left because again I never heard of him. And so you know I mischaracterized him and I apologize later for mischaracterizing him. We finally go through the interview it's 20 minutes, he just keeps going with the battle tweets and finally I got up and I took off the microphone

Starting point is 01:28:39 and walked out and immediately I knew it was a mistake like within 30 seconds of the end of the interview I knew it was a mistake and and that 30 seconds of the end of the interview, I knew it was a mistake. And that's why even before the interview came out, I believe I corrected the record that Andrew Neil is not on the left, that's a mistake by me. And then took the hit for a bad interview. And so as far as what I wish I had done differently, I wish I had known who he was, I wish I had done my research,

Starting point is 01:29:04 I wish that I had treated it as though there was a possibility that was going to be more adversarial than it was. I think I was in cautious about the interview because it was pitched as it's just another book interview and it wasn't just another book interview. It was treated much more adversarial than that. So I wish that that's on me. I got to research the people who are talking to me

Starting point is 01:29:22 and watch their shows and learn about that. And then obviously, you know, the kind of gut level appeal to ego or arrogance like that. That's a bad luck and shouldn't it done that and losing your cool is always a bad look. So the fact that that sort of became somewhat viral and stood out just shows that it happens so rarely to you. So just to look at like the day in the life of Ben Shapiro, you speak a lot very eloquently about difficult topics. What goes into the research that meant a part and you always look pretty like energetic and like you're not exhausted by the burden, the heaviness of the topics you're covering day after day after day after day.

Starting point is 01:30:06 So what goes through the preparation? Mentally, diet wise, anything like that. Like when do you wake up? Okay, so I wake up when my kids wake me up. Usually that's my baby daughter who's two and a half years old. We are a monitor usually about 6, 15, 6, 20, I am. So I get up, my wife sleeps in a little bit, I go get the baby, then my son gets up,

Starting point is 01:30:28 and then my oldest daughter gets up, I've 8, 6 and 2, the boys, the middle child. Is that both the source of stress and happiness? Oh my God, it's the height of both, right? I mean, it's the source of the greatest happiness. So the way that I characterize it is this when it comes to kids in life. So when you're single, your boundaries of happiness

Starting point is 01:30:45 and unhappiness, you can be a zero in terms of happiness, you can be like a ten in terms of happiness. Then you get married and it goes up to like a 20 and a negative 20 because the happiest stuff is with your life and then the most unhappy stuff is when something happens to your spouse. It's the worst thing in the entire world. Then you have kids and all limits are removed.

Starting point is 01:30:58 So the best things that have ever happened to me are things where I'm watching my kids and they're playing together and they're being wonderful and sweet and cute. I love them so much. And the worst thing is when my son is screaming at me for no reason because he's being insane and I have to deal with that, right? I mean, like, or something bad happens to my daughter at school or something like that. That stuff is really, so yes, the source of my greatest happiness, the source of my greatest stress. So they

Starting point is 01:31:17 get me up at about 6, 15 in the morning. I feed them breakfast, I'm kind of scrolling the news while I'm making the megs and, you know, just updating myself on anything that may have happened overnight. I go into the office, put on the makeup, and the wardrobe, or whatever. And then I sit down and do the show. A lot of the prep is actually done the night before because the new cycle doesn't change all that much between kind of late at night and in the morning, so I can supplement in the morning. So I do the show. So a lot of the preparation,

Starting point is 01:31:47 I think, through what are the big issues in the world is done the night before? Yeah, I mean, and that's reading, you know, pretty much all the legacy media. So I rip on legacy media a lot, but that's because a lot of what they do is really good and a lot of what they do is really bad. I cover a lot of legacy media.

Starting point is 01:32:00 So that's probably covering, you know, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Daily Mail, and then I'll look over at some of the alternative media, I'll look at my York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Daily Mail. And then I'll look over at some of the alternative media, I'll look at my own website, Daily Wire, I'll look at Bright Bar, I'll look at the Blaze, I'll look at maybe the Intercept, I'll look at a bunch of different sources. And then I will look at different clips online.

Starting point is 01:32:17 So media, I come in handy here, Gregian comes in handy here. That sort of stuff, because my show relies very heavily on being able to play people, so you can hear them in their own words. And so that's sort of the media die. So I sit down, I do the show, and then once I'm done with the show, I usually have between, now it's like 11, 15 in the morning maybe, because sometimes I'll pre-record the show. So it's 11, 15 in the morning. I'll go home, and if my wife is available, I'll grab lunch with her. If not, then I will go and work out. I try to work out like five

Starting point is 01:32:51 times a week with a trainer, something like that. And then I will just say good gym stuff, just start the gym. Yeah, weights and and plyometrics and some crossfit kind of stuff. And yeah, I mean, beneath this, beneath this mildly, I was a hulking monster. And so I'll do that. Then I'll do reading and writing. So I'll usually working on a book at any given time. Or you shut off the rest of the world.

Starting point is 01:33:22 Yes. So I put some music in my ears, usually Brahms or Bach. Sometimes Beethoven or Mozart, those four. Those are on rotation. No rap. No rap. No rap. Despite my extraordinary rendition of WAP, I'm not in fact a rapper.

Starting point is 01:33:35 Do you still hate WAP? The song. I will say, I do not think that it is the peak of Western civilized art. Okay. I don't think that 100 years from now people will be gluing their faces to a weapon protest at the environment. But Brahms and the rest will be still around. Yes, I would assume if people still have a functioning prefrontal cortex and any sort of taste. Strong words from Ben Shapiro. All right, so you got some classical music in your ears and you're focusing. Are you at the computer when you're writing? Yeah, I'm at the computer.

Starting point is 01:34:04 Usually we have a kind of a room that has some sun coming in, so it's nice in there, or I'll go up to a library that we just completed for me, so I'll go up there, and I'll write and read. Like with physical books? Yeah, I love physical books. Because I keep Sabbath, I don't use Kindle. Because when I'm reading a book and I hit Sabbath,

Starting point is 01:34:22 I have to turn off the Kindle, so that means that I have tons and tons and tons of physical books. When you move from Los Angeles to Florida, I had about 7,000 volumes. I had to discard probably 4,000 of them. And then I've built that back up now. So I'm probably gonna have to go through another round

Starting point is 01:34:35 where I put them somewhere else. I tend to tab books rather than highlighting them because I can't highlight on Sabbath. So I have the little stickers and I put them in the book. So a typical book from me, you can see it on the book club, will be like filled with tabs on the side, things that I want to take. Now actually, I got a person who I pay to go through and write down in files, the quotes that I've that I like from the book. So I have those handy. So which is a good way for me to remember what it is that I've read, because I read probably some routine,

Starting point is 01:35:06 three and five bucks a week, and then the, in a good week, five. And then I write, I read, and then I go pick up my kids from school at 3.30. So according to my kids, I have no job. I'm there in the mornings until they leave for school. I pick them up from school. I hang out with them until they go to bed,

Starting point is 01:35:24 which is usually 7.30 or so. So I'm helping them with their homework and I'm playing with them and I'm taking them on rides in the brand new Tesla, which my son is obsessed with. And then I put them to bed and then I sit back down, I prep for the next day, go through all those media sources, I was talking about compile, kind of a schedule for what I want the show to look like and run a show. It's very detailed oriented, nobody writes anything for me, I write all my own stuff. So everywhere that comes out of my mouth is my fault. And then hopefully I have a couple hours to or an hour to hang out with my wife

Starting point is 01:35:54 before we go to the show. The words you write do you edit a lot? Or just come out, you're thinking like, what are the key ideas I want to express? No, I don't tend to edit a lot. So I thank God I'm able to write extraordinarily quickly. So I write very, very fast. In fact, in a previous life, I was...

Starting point is 01:36:09 You also speak fast, so it's similar. Yeah, exactly. And I speak in paragraphs. So it's exactly the same thing. In a previous life, I was a ghost writer. So I used to be sort of known as a turnaround specialist in the publishing industry. And it would be somebody who came to the publisher

Starting point is 01:36:22 and says, I have three weeks to get this book done. I don't have a word done. And they would call me up, I have three weeks to get this book done. I don't have a word done. And they would call me up and be like, this person needs a book written. And so in three weeks, I'd knock out 60,000 words or so. Because there's something you can say to the process that you've followed to think, like how you think about ideas, like, you, stuff is going on in the world and trying to understand what is happening.

Starting point is 01:36:43 What are the explanations, what are the forces behind this? Do you have a process or just you wait for the muse to give you the interpretation of it? Well, I mean, I think that I don't think it's a formal process, but because I read, so there's two ways to do it. One is sometimes, you know, sometimes the daily grind of the news is going to refer back to core principles that are broader and deeper. So I thank God because I've read so much on so many different things of a lot of different point of views. Then if something breaks, a piece of news

Starting point is 01:37:15 breaks, I can immediately sort of channel that into in the mental role at X, these three big ideas that I think are really important and then I can talk at length about what those ideas are, and I can explicate those. And so, for example, when we were talking about must taking over Twitter before, and I immediately go to the history of media, that's me tying it into a broader theme. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:37 And I would say fairly frequently, what we're talking about, say, subsidization of industry. I can immediately tie that into, okay, what's the history of subsidization in the United States, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson and forward through FDR's industrial policy and how does that tie into sort of broader economic policy and so on. So it allows me to tie into bigger themes because what I tend to read is mostly not news, what I tend to read is mostly books. I would say most of my media diet is actually not the stuff. Like that's the icing on the cake,

Starting point is 01:38:07 but the actual cake is the hundreds of pages in history, econ, geography that I'm social science that I'm reading every week. And so that sort of stuff allows me to think more deeply about these things. So that's one way of doing it. The other way of doing it is Russia breaks in the news. I don't know anything about Russia. I immediately go and I purchase five books about Russia and I read all of them. One of the unfortunate things about our

Starting point is 01:38:32 ... The fortunate thing for me and the unfortunate thing about the world is that in the unfortunate thing about the world is that you read two books on a subject. You are now considered by the media and expert on the subject. That's sad and shallow, but that is the way that it is. The good news for me is that my job isn't to be a full expert on the subject. So that's, you know, sad and shallow, but that is the way that it is. The good news for me is that my job isn't to be a full expert on any of these subjects and I don't claim to be, right? I'm not a Russia expert. I know enough on Russia to be able to understand when people talk about Russia, what the system

Starting point is 01:38:55 looks like, how it works and all of that, and then to explicate that for the common man, which a lot of people who are infused with the expertise can't really do. If you're so deep in the weeds that you're like a full-on, academic expert on a thing, sometimes it's hard to translate that over to a massive audience, which is really my job. Well, I think it can actually, it's funny, with the two books, you can actually get a pretty deep understanding if you read and also think deeply about it.

Starting point is 01:39:16 It allows you to approach a thing from first principles. A lot of times, if you're a quote-unquote expert, you get carried away by the momentum of what the field has been thinking about versus like stepping back. All right, what is really going on? The challenge is to pick the right two books. Right. So that's usually what I'll try to find is somebody who knows the topic pretty well and

Starting point is 01:39:39 have them recommend or a couple people and have them recommend books. So a couple of years ago, I knew nothing about Bitcoin. I was at a conference and a couple of people who you've had on your show actually were there and I asked them, give me your top three books on Bitcoin. And so then I went and I read like nine books on Bitcoin. And so if you read nine books on Bitcoin, you at least know enough to get by.

Starting point is 01:39:58 Yeah. And so I can actually explain what Bitcoin is and why it works or why it doesn't work in some cases and what's happening in the markets that way. So that's very, very helpful. Well, Putin is an example. That's a difficult one to find the right books on. I think the news is that the one I read where was the most objective.

Starting point is 01:40:18 When I read it, I think about Putin was one called Strong Man. It was very highly critical of Putin, but it gave like a good background on him. Yeah, so I'm very skeptical sort of things that are very critical of Putin because it feels like there's activism injected into the history. Like the way the rise and fall of the third Reich is written about Hitler, I like because there's almost not a criticism of Hitler. It's a description of Hitler, which is very, it's easier to do about a historical figure, which with William Shire, with the rise of all the Therryk, it's impressive because he lived through it.

Starting point is 01:40:54 But it's very tough to find objective descriptions about the history of the man and a country of Putin, of Zelensky, of any difficult, Trump is the same. And I feel like... Everybody that's the hero of villainensky, of any difficult, Trump is the same. And I feel like- That's the hero villain archetype, right? And it's like, either somebody's completely a hero or a completely a villain.

Starting point is 01:41:11 And the truth is, pretty much no one is completely a hero or completely a villain. People, in fact, I'm not sure that I love descriptions of people as heroes are villains generally. I think that people tend to do heroic things or do villainous things. And the same way that I'm not sure I love descriptions of people as a genius, my dad used to say, that's when I was growing up, he used to say, they do heroic things or do villainous things. In the same way that I'm not trying to love descriptions of people as a genius,

Starting point is 01:41:25 my dad used to say this and I was growing up, he used to say, they didn't believe that there were geniuses. He said he believed that there were people with a genius for something. Because people, yes, there are people who are very high-accuents, we call them geniuses, but does that mean that they're good at EQ stuff, not necessarily, but they're people who are geniuses at EQ stuff. In other words, it would be more specific to say that somebody is a genius at engineering than to say just broad spectrum there are genius and that does avoid the problem of thinking that they're good at something that they're not good at, right? It's a little more specific.

Starting point is 01:41:52 So because you read a lot of books, can you look back? It's always a tough question because so many is like your favorite song. But are there books that have been influential on your life that impact in your thinking or maybe once you go back to that, that still carry insight for you. The Federalist Paper is a big one in terms of sort of how American politics works. The first econ book that I thought was really great because it was written for teenagers, essentially, is one called Economics and One Lesson by Henry Haslet. It's like 150 pages.

Starting point is 01:42:20 I recommended to everybody sort of 15 and up. It's easier than, say, Thomas Holts basic econ, which is four or 500 pages. And it's looking like macro economics micro economics stuff macro. And then in terms of there's a great book by Carl Truman called Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which I think is the best book of the last 10 years. That's been sort of impactful on some of the thoughts I've been having lately. What's the key idea in there? The key idea is that we've shifted the nature of how identity is done in the West from how it's historically done. That basically for nearly all of human history, the way that we identify as human beings is as a mix of our biological drives and then how that interacts with the social institutions around us.

Starting point is 01:43:00 And so when you're a child, you're a bunch of unfettered biological drives and it's your parents job to civilize you and civilize you literally means bring you into civilization, right? You learn the rules of the road, you learn how to integrate into institutions that already exist and are designed to shape you. And it's how you interact with those institutions that makes you you. It's not just a set of biological drives. And then in the modern world, we've really driven toward the idea that what we are is how we feel on the inside without reference to the outside world, and it's the job of the outside world to celebrate and reflect what we think about ourselves on the inside. And so what that means is that we are driven now toward fighting institutions, because institutions are in positions.

Starting point is 01:43:37 So everything around us, societal institutions, these are things that are crimping our style. They're making us not feel the way that we want to feel, and if we just destroy those things, then we'll be freer and more liberated. And I think it's a much deeper model of how to think about why our social politics, particular, moving in a particular direction, is that a ground shift has happened and how people think about themselves. And this has had some somewhat kind of shocking effects in terms of social politics. So there's negative consequences in your view of that, but is there also a positive consequence

Starting point is 01:44:08 of more power, more agency to the individual? I think that you can make the argument that institutions were weighing to heavily in how people formed their identity, but I think that what we've done is gone significantly to far on the other side. We basically decided to blow up the institutions in favor of unfettered feeling slash identity. And I think that that is not only a large mistake. I think it's going to have diorama vacations for everything from suicidal ideation to institutional longevity in politics and in society more broadly.

Starting point is 01:44:37 So speaking about the nature of self, you've been an outspoken proponent of pro life. Can you can we start by you trying to steal man the case for pro choice that abortion is not murder and a woman's right to choose as a fundamental human right freedom. So I think that the the only way to steal man the pro-choice case is to, and be ideologically consistent, is to suggest that there is no interest in the life of the unborn that counterways at all, freedom of choice. So what that means is, we can take the full example, we can take the partial example. So if we take the full example, what that would mean is that up until point of birth, which is sort of the democratic party platform position, that there is that a woman's right to choose ought to extend for any reason whatsoever,

Starting point is 01:45:31 up to point of birth. The only way to argue that is that bodily autonomy is the only factor. There is no countervailing factor that would ever outweigh bodily autonomy. That would be the strongest version of the argument. Another version of that argument would be that the reason that bodily autonomy ought to weigh so heavily is because women can't be the equals of men if the the institutes of biology are allowed to decide their futures. Right? If the if pregnancy changes women in a way that doesn't change men, it's a form of sex discrimination for women to ever have to go through with pregnancy, which is an argument that was made by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Starting point is 01:46:06 Those are the arguments. The kind of softer version is the more, I would say, emotionally resonant version of the argument, which is that bodily autonomy ought to outweigh the interests of the fetus up till point X. And then people have different feelings about what point X looks like. Is it up to the point of viability? Is it up to the point of the heartbeat? Is it up to 12 weeks or 15 weeks? And that really is where the American public is, where the American public is, broadly speaking,

Starting point is 01:46:30 not state by state, where there are really, really, very opinions. But like broadly speaking, it seems like the American public by pulling data on somewhere between a 12 and 15 week abortion restriction. And they believe that up until 12 or 15 weeks, there's not enough there to not be specific but to be kind of how people feel about it, to outweigh a woman's bodily autonomy. And then beyond that point, then there's enough of an interest in the life of the preborn child. It's developed enough.

Starting point is 01:46:56 Then now we care about it enough that it outweighs a woman's bodily autonomy. What's the strongest case for pro life in your mind? I mean, the strongest case for pro life is that from conception, a human life has been created. It is a human life with potential. That human life potential with potential now has an independent interest in its own existence. If I may just ask a quick question. So conception is when a sperm fertilizes a egg.

Starting point is 01:47:22 Yes. Okay. Just to clarify the biological beginning of a concession means. I mean, because that is the beginning of human life. Now, there are other standards that people have drawn, right? Some people say implantation in the uterus. Some people will suggest viability, some brain development or heart development, but the clear dividing line between a human life exists and a human life does not exist is the

Starting point is 01:47:43 biological creation of an independent human life with Sony and a strands and etc. which happens at conception. Once you acknowledge that there is that independent human life with potential and I keep calling it that because people sometimes say potential human life, it's not a potential human life. It's a human life that is not developed yet to the full extent that it will develop. Once you say that and once you say that it has its own interest, now the burden of proof is to explain why bodily autonomy ought to allow for the snuffing out of that human life, if we believe that human life ought not to be killed for no good reason. You have to come up with a good reason.

Starting point is 01:48:19 The burden of proof is now shifted. Now we'll find people who will say, well, the good reason is that it's not sufficiently developed outweigh the mental trauma or emotional trauma that a woman goes through, if for example, she was raped or the victim of incest. And that is a fairly emotionally resonant argument, but it's not necessarily despositive. You can make the argument that just because something horrific and horrible happened to a woman does not rob the human life of its interest in life. One of the big problems in trying to draw any line for the self-interest of life in the human life is that it's very difficult to draw any other line that doesn't seem somewhat arbitrary.

Starting point is 01:48:58 If you say that independent heartbeat, well, people have pacemakers. If you say brain function, people have various levels of brain function as adults. If you say viability, babies are not viable after they are born. If I left a newborn baby on a table and did not take care of it, it would be dead in two days. So, one once you start getting into these lines, it starts to get very fuzzy very quickly. So, if you're looking for a bright line moral rule, that would be the bright line moral rule. That's the sort of the per life case.

Starting point is 01:49:25 Well, there's still mysterious, difficult scientific questions of things that consciousness. So what do you, does the question of consciousness, how does it come into play into this debate? So I don't believe that consciousness is the sole criterion by which we judge the self-interest in human life. So we are unconscious, a good deal of our lives. That does not, we will be conscious again, right? When you're unconscious, when you're asleep, for example, presumably your life is still worth living. If somebody came in and killed you, that'd be a serious moral quandary, at the very least. But the birth of consciousness, that'd be a serious moral quandary at the very least. But the birth of consciousness, the lighting up of the flame, the initial lighting of the flame,

Starting point is 01:50:09 there doesn't need to be something special about that. And it's a mystery of when that happens. Well, I mean, Peter Surner makes the case that basically self-consciousness doesn't exist until you're two and a half. Right, so he says that even in fantasy side should be okay. He's a bioethicist over a Princeton. So you get in some real dicey territory

Starting point is 01:50:26 once you get into consciousness. Also the truth is the consciousness is more of a spectrum than it is a dividing line, meaning that there are people with various degrees of brain function. We don't actually know how conscious they are. And you can get into the genetic territory pretty quickly. When we start dividing between lives that are worth living

Starting point is 01:50:43 based on levels of consciousness and lives that are not worth living based on levels of consciousness and lives They're not worth living based on levels of consciousness. Do you find it? the the aspect of women's freedom Do you feel the tension between that ability to choose? The trajectory of your own life versus the the rights of the unborn child in

Starting point is 01:51:05 One situation doesn't one situation, as in one situation, no. If you've had sex with a person voluntarily, and as a product of that, you are now pregnant, no. You've taken an action with a perfectly predictable result. Even if you took birth control, this is the way that human beings are procreated for literally all of human existence, and by the way, also how all mammals procreate. So the idea that this was an entirely unforeseen consequence of your activity, I find I have less sympathy for you in that particular situation because you could have made decisions

Starting point is 01:51:33 that would not led you to this particular impasse. In fact, this used to be the basis of merit, right? When we were a apparently more terrible society, we used to say that people should wait until they get married to have sex, a position that I still hold. And the reason for that was because then if you have sex and you produce a child, then the child will grow up in a two-parent family with stability. So you know, they, not a ton of sympathy there when it comes to rape and incest, obviously heavy, heavy sympathy.

Starting point is 01:51:58 And so that's why I think you see statistically speaking, a huge percentage of Americans, including many pro-life Americans, people who consider themselves pro-life would consider exceptions for rape and incest. One of the sort of dishonest things that I think happens in abortion debates is arguing from the fringes. This tends to happen a lot. His pro-choice activists will argue from rape and incest to the other 99.8% of abortions, or you'll see people on the pro-life side argue from partial birth abortion to all of abortion. You actually have to take on sort of the mainstream case and then decide whether or not that's

Starting point is 01:52:27 acceptable or not. But do you have the exception just ethically without generalizing it that is a valid ethically exception? I don't hope that there should be an exception for rape or incest because again I hope by the bright line rule that once a human life with potential exists then it has its own interest in life that cannot be curbed by your self-interest. The only exception that I hope I is the same exception that literally all part of life is hope I which is the life of the mother is put in danger.

Starting point is 01:52:54 It's such a tough topic because if you believe that that's the line, then we're committing mass murder. Well, or at least mass killing. So I would say that murder typically requires a level of mens rea that may be absent in many cases of abortion. Because the usual follow-on question is, well, if it's a murder, why don't you prosecute the woman? And the answer is because the vast majority of people who are having abortions don't actually believe that they're killing a person. They have a very different view of what is exactly happening.

Starting point is 01:53:23 So I would say that there are sorts of interesting hypotheticals that come in to play when it comes to abortion, and you can play them any which way. But levels, let's put it this way, there are gradations of wrongs. I don't think that all abortions are equally blameworthy, even if I would ban virtually all of them. I think that they're mitigating circumstances that make well-being wrong. Some abortions less morally blame-worthy than others. I think that I can admit a difference

Starting point is 01:53:56 between killing a two-week-old embryo in the womb and stabbing a seven-year-old in the face. I can recognize all that while still saying I think that it would be wrong to terminate a pregnancy. Do you think the question of one life begins, which I think is a fascinating question? Is a question of science or a question of religion? One life begins as a question of science. When that life becomes valuable enough for people to want to protect it, is going to be

Starting point is 01:54:21 a question that is beyond science. Science doesn't have moral judgments to make about the value of human life. This is one of the problems that Sam Harrison, I've had this argument many times and it's always kind of interesting. Because Sam is of the opinion that you can get to ought from is, that science says is, therefore we can learn to ought.

Starting point is 01:54:36 So human flourishing is the goal of life. And I always say to him, I don't see where you get that from evolutionary biology. And you can assume it, just say you're assuming it, but don't pretend that that is a conclusion that you can draw straight from biological reality itself. Because obviously that doesn't exist in the animal world, for example, nobody assumes the innate value of every ant.

Starting point is 01:54:57 I think I know your answer to this, but let's test it, because I think you're going to be wrong. So there's a robot behind you. Do you think there will be a time in the future when it will be unethical and illegal to kill a robot because they will have sentience? My guess is you would say no, Lex, there's a fundamental difference between humans and robots and I just want to get you on record because I think you'll be wrong. I mean, it depends on the level of development

Starting point is 01:55:26 I would assume of the robots. I mean, you're assuming a complexity in the robots that eventually imitates what we in the religious life would call the human soul. The ability to choose freely, for example, which I believe is sort of the capacity for human beings. The ability to suffer. Yeah. If all of that could be proved and not programmed,

Starting point is 01:55:51 meaning the freely-willed capacity of a machine to do X, Y, or Z, you could not pinpoint exactly where it happens in the program. Right. Yeah. It's not deterministic. Yeah. Then it would raise serious moral issues, for sure. I'm not trying to answer that question. Are you afraid of that time? I'm not sure I'm afraid of that time. I mean, it's any more than I'd be afraid of failions arrived in the world and had these characteristics.

Starting point is 01:56:17 Well, there's just a lot of moral complexities and they don't necessarily have to be in the physical space. They can be in the digital space. There's an increased sophistication and number of bots on the internet, including on Twitter, as they become more and more intelligence, there's going to be serious questions about what is our moral duty to protect ones that have

Starting point is 01:56:36 or claim to have an identity. And that'll be really interesting. Actually, what I'm afraid of is the opposite happening, meaning that people, the worst that should happen is that we develop robots so sophisticated that they appear to have free will, and then we treat them with human dignity. That should be the worst that happens. What I'm afraid of is the opposite is that if we're talking about this particular hypothetical, that we develop robots that have all of these apparent abilities, and then we dehumanize

Starting point is 01:57:00 them, which leads us to also dehumanize the other humans around us, which you could easily see happening. And the devaluation of life to the point where it doesn't really, I mean, people have always treated, unfortunately, newly discovered other humans this way. So I don't think this actually a new problem. I think it's a pretty old problem. It'll just be interesting when it's made of human hands.

Starting point is 01:57:20 Yeah, it's an opportunity to celebrate humanity or to Bring out the worst in humanity So the derision that naturally happens that you said with pointing out the other let me ask you about climate change There's a let's go from the meme to the to the profound Philosophy, okay, the meme is there's a clip of you talking about climate change and saying that. Ah, the aquaman meme. You said that for the sake of argument, if the water level rises five to ten feet in the next hundred years, people will just sell their homes and move.

Starting point is 01:57:55 And then the meme is, sell to who? Can you argue both sides of that? The argument that they're making is the straw man. The argument that I'm making is over time. I don't mean that if a tsunami is about to hit your house, you can list it on eBay. That's not what I mean, obviously. What I mean is that human beings have an extraordinary ability to adapt, it's actually our best quality,

Starting point is 01:58:11 and that as water levels rise, real estate prices in those areas tend to fall. That over time, people tend to abandon those areas. They tend to leave. They tend to, right now, sell their houses, and then they tend to move. And eventually, those houses will be worthless, and you won't have anybody to sell to,

Starting point is 01:58:26 but presumably not that many people will be living there by that point, which is one of the reasons why the price would be low, because there's no demand. So it's over a hundred years, so all of these price dynamics are very gradual, relative to the other price dynamics. Correct. That's why the joke of it, of course, is that,

Starting point is 01:58:41 like, I'm saying that tomorrow, there's a tsunami on your source step, and you're like, oh, bobble Bob will buy my house, Bob being kind of by your house. Like, we all get that, but it's a funny mate. I'm on the left at it. How is your view on climate change, the human of contribution to climate change? What was she doing in terms of policy to respond to climate change?

Starting point is 01:58:58 How's that changed over the years? I would say the truth is for years and years, I've believed that climate change was a reality in that anthropogenic climate change is a reality. I don't argue with the IPCC estimates. I know climatologists at places like MIT or Caltech and they know this stuff better than I do. So the notion that climate change is just not happening or that human beings have not contributed to climate change,

Starting point is 01:59:22 I find doubtful. The question is to what extent human beings are contributing to climate change? That 50% is at 70% is at 90%. I think there's a little bit more play in the joints there, so it's not totally clear. The one thing I do know, and this I know with factual accuracy, is that all of the measures that are currently being proposed are unworkable and will not happen.

Starting point is 01:59:38 So when people say, parent climate, Paris climate accords, even if those were imposed, you're talking about lowering the potential trajectory of climate change by a fraction of a degree. If you're talking about the, if you're talking about, you know, green new deal, net zero by 2050, the carbon is up there in the air and the climate change is going to happen. Also, you're assuming that geopal, that geopolitical dynamics don't exist. So everybody is going to magically get on the same page and we're're all gonna be imposing massive carbon taxes to get to net zero by 2050.

Starting point is 02:00:09 I mean, like hundreds of times higher than they currently are. And that's not me saying, that's Clash Schwab saying this, of the world economic forum, who's a big advocate of exactly this sort of policy. And the reality is that we're gonna have to accept that at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change is baked into the cake by the end of the century. Again, not me talking, we'll ignore it house,

Starting point is 02:00:24 the economist, who just won the Nobel Prize in this stuff talking. And so what that suggests to me is what we've always known. Human beings are crap at mitigation and excellence in adaptation. All right, we are very bad at mitigating our own fault. We are very, very good at adapting to the problems as they exist, which means that all of the estimates that billions will die, that there will be mass starvation, that we'll see the migration in just a few years

Starting point is 02:00:46 of hundreds of millions of people, those are wrong. What you'll see is a gradual change of living, people will move away from areas that areundated on the coast, you'll see people building seawalls, you'll see people adapting new technologies to suck carbon out of the air, you'll see geoengineering, and this is the sort of stuff that we should be focused on,

Starting point is 02:01:03 and the sort of bizarre focus on, what if we just keep tossing hundreds of billions of dollars at the same three technologies over and over, and the hopes that if we subsidize it, this will magically make it more efficient. I've seen no evidence whatsoever that that is going to be the way that we get ourselves out of this. And the necessity being the mother of invention, I think human beings will adapt because we have adapted and we will continue to adapt. So to the degree we invest in the threat of this, it should be into the policies that help

Starting point is 02:01:29 with the adaptation versus the mitigation. Right. C-walls, geoengineering, developing technologies that carbon out of the air. Again, if I thought that there was more sort of hope for the green technologies currently in play, then subsidization of those technologies might be a little bit more for, but I haven't seen tremendous progress over the course of the last 30 years in the reliability of, for example, wind energy or the ability to store solar energy to the extent necessary to actually power a grid. What's your thoughts on nuclear energy?

Starting point is 02:01:56 Nuclear energy is a proven source of energy and we should be radically extending the use of nuclear energy. To me, honestly, this is like a litmus test question as to whether you take climate change seriously. If you're on right or left and you take climate change seriously, you should be in favor of nuclear energy. If you are not, I know that you're just,

Starting point is 02:02:14 you have other priorities. Yeah, the fascinating thing about the climate change debate is the dynamics of the fear mongering over the past few decades. Because the nuclear energy was tied up into that somehow. There's a lot of fear about nuclear energy. It seems like there's a lot of social phenomena, social dynamics involved, versus dealing with just science.

Starting point is 02:02:35 It's interesting to watch. If I'm my darker days, it makes me cynical about our ability to use reason and science to deal with the threats of the world. I think that our ability to use reason and science to deal with threats of the world is almost a time frame question. So I think that we're, again, we're very bad at looking down the road and saying, you know, because people can't handle, for example, even things like compound interest. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:02:58 I like the idea that if I put a dollar in the bank today that 15 years from now, that's going to be worth a lot more than a dollar, people can't actually see that. And so the idea of, let's first see a problem, then we'll deal with it right now as opposed to 30 years down the road. Hmm. Typically, we let the problem happen and then we solve it. And it's bloodier and worse than it would have been if we had solved it 30 years ago. But it is, in fact, effective.

Starting point is 02:03:17 And sometimes it turns out the solution that we're proposing 30 years in advance is not effective. And that's that's a that can be a major problem as well. Well, that's then to still man the case for fear mongering, for irrational fear mongering, we need to be scared, shitless in order for us to do anything. So that's that, you know, I'm generally against that, but maybe on a population scale, maybe some of that is necessary for us to respond appropriate for long to long term-term threats, we should be scared, jealous.

Starting point is 02:03:46 I don't think that we can actually do that though. Like, first of all, I think that it's, it's platonic lies are generally bad. And then second of all, I don't think that we actually have the capacity to do this. I think that the people who are, you know, the sort of elites of our society who get together in rooms and talk about this sort of stuff,

Starting point is 02:04:01 and I've been in some of those meetings, at my synagogue, Friday night, actually, no, but I like it. But I'll make the joke when I'm glad you did. Yeah, I've been in rooms, Davos like rooms. And when people discuss these sorts of topics, and they're like, what if we just tell people that it's gonna be a disaster with tsunamis and day after tomorrow?

Starting point is 02:04:19 It's like, you guys don't have that power. You don't. And by the way, you dramatically undercut your own power because of COVID to do this sort of stuff. Because a lot of the sort of, what if we scare the living hell't. And by the way, you'd randomly undercut your own power because of COVID to do this sort of stuff. Because a lot of the sort of, what if we scare the living hell out of you to the point where you stay in your own house for two years, and we tell you you can't send your kids to school. And then we tell you that the vaccine is

Starting point is 02:04:35 going to prevent transmission. And then we also tell you that we need to spend $7 trillion in one year and won't have any inflationary effect. And it turns out you're wrong. I'm literally all of those things. The last few years have done more to undermine institutional trust than any time in probably American history. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, I tend to agree with the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Let me ask you back to the question of God and a big ridiculous question. Who's God? Who is God? So I'm going to use sort of the Aquinas formulation of what God is, right? That if there is a cause of all things, not physical things, if there is a cause underlying

Starting point is 02:05:18 the reason of the universe, then that is the thing we call God. So not a big guy in the sky of the beard. You know, like he is the the force underlying the logic of the universe. If there is a logic to the universe, and he is the creator in the Judea of that universe, and he does have an interest in us living in accordance with the laws of the universe that if your religious Jew are encoded in the Torah, but if you're not a religious Jew, it would be encoded in the natural law by sort of Catholic theology. Why do you think God created the universe? Or as is popularly asked, what do you think is the

Starting point is 02:05:59 meaning behind it? What's the meaning of life? What's the meaning of life? So I think that the meaning of life is to fulfill what God made you to do, and that is a series of roles. I think that human beings, and here you have to look to sort of human nature rather than looking kind of to big questions. I've evolved something that I've really been working on, you know, and I'm writing a book about this actually, that I call colloquially role theory. And basically, the idea is that the way that we interact with the world is through a series of roles. And those are also the things we find most important and most implementable.

Starting point is 02:06:37 And there's sort of virtue ethics, which suggests that if we act in accordance with virtue, like Aristotle, then we will be living the most fulfilled and meaningful life and then you have sort of deontological effects like content effects that it's a rule-based effect. We follow the rules, then you'll find the meaning of life. And then what I'm proposing is that there's something that I would call role ethics, which is there are series of roles that we play across our lives, which are also the things that we tend to put on our tombstones and find the most meaningful.

Starting point is 02:07:05 So when you go to a cemetery, you can see what people found the most meaningful because it's the stuff they put on the stone that has like four words on it, right? They like beloved father, beloved mother, sister, brother, and you might have a job once in a while, a creator, a religious person, right? These are all roles that have existed across societies

Starting point is 02:07:24 and across humanity, and those are the things where we actually find meaning. And the way that we navigate those roles brings us meaning. And I think that God created us in order to fulfill those roles for purposes that I can't begin to understand because I am Him. And the more we recognize those roles and the more we live those roles, and then we can express freedom within those roles. I think that the liberty exists inside each of those roles, and that's what makes all of our lives different and fun. We all parents in different ways, but being a parent is a meaningful role.

Starting point is 02:07:54 We all have spouses, but how you interact that relationship is what makes your life meaningful and interesting. That is what we were put on Earth to do. If we perform those roles properly, and those roles do include things like being a creator, like we have a creative instinct as human beings, being a creator, or being an innovator, being a defender of your family,

Starting point is 02:08:13 being a social member of your community, which is something that we're built to do. If we fulfill those roles properly, then we will have made the world a better place than we inherited it. And we also have had the joy of experiencing the sort of flow they talk about in psychology where when you engage in these roles you actually do feel a flow. So these roles are a fun method part of the human condition. Yes. So you're

Starting point is 02:08:36 the book you're working on is constructing a system to help us understand. It's looking at, let's assume that all that's true. The real question of the book is, how do you construct a flourishing and useful society in politics? Ah, so a society level. If this is on understanding of a human being, how do we construct a good society?

Starting point is 02:08:58 Right, exactly. Because I think that a lot of political theory is right now based in either J.S. Mill kind of thought, which is all that a lot of political theory is right now based in either JS Mill kind of thought, which is all that a good politics does, the last you wave your hand around until you hit somebody in the face, or a Rawlsian thought, which is what if we constructed society in order to achieve the most for the least essentially? What if we constructed society around what actually makes humans the most fulfilled, and that is the fulfillment of these particular roles? and where does liberty come into that right how do you avoid the idea of a tyranny and that how do you have to be a mother you must be a father you must be a where does where does freedom come into that can you reject those roles totally as a society and be okay the answer probably is not

Starting point is 02:09:38 new society that actually promotes and and protects those roles but also protects the freedom inside those roles. And that raises a more fundamental question of what exactly liberty is for. And I think that both the right and the left actually tend to make a mistake when they discuss liberty. The left tends to think the liberty is an ultimate good that simple choice makes a bad thing good,

Starting point is 02:09:59 which is not true. And I think the right talks about liberty in almost the same terms sometimes. And I think that's not true either. The question is whether liberty is of inherent value or instrumental value. Is liberty good in and of itself or is liberty good because it allows you to achieve x, y or z. And I've thought about this one a lot. I tend to come down on the latter side of the aisle. I mean, this is a USME area is where I move. This may be an area where I've moved. Is that I think when you think more shallowly about holostics or maybe more quickly,

Starting point is 02:10:26 because this is how we talk in America is about liberties and rights. We tend to think that the right is what make, not like the political right, rights make things good. Liberties make things good. The question really is what are those rights and liberties for? Now, you have to be careful so that that doesn't shade

Starting point is 02:10:40 into tyranny, right? You can only have liberty to do the thing that I say that you can do. But there have to be spheres of liberty that are roiling and interesting and filled with debate, but without threatening the chief institutions that surround those liberties. Because if you destroy the institutions, the liberties will go to. If you knock down the pillars of the society, the liberties that are on top of those pillars are going to collapse. And I think that that's if people are feeling as though we're on the verge of tyranny, I think that's why.

Starting point is 02:11:03 to collapse. And I think that that's if people are feeling as though we're on the verge of tyranny, I think that's why. This is fascinating. By the way, it's instrumental perspective on liberty. Let's get to give me a lot to think about. Let me ask a personal question. Was there ever a time did you have a crisis of faith? Were you questioned your belief in God? Sure. And I would less call it a crisis of faith and an ongoing question of faith, which I think is I hope most religious people. And the word Israel, right in Hebrew, Yusra'el means to struggle with God. That's literally a word means. And so the idea of struggling with God, right, if you're Jewish or Banei Israel, right? The idea of struggling with God, I think, is endemic to the human condition. If you understand what God's doing, then I think you're wrong. And if you think that that question doesn't matter,

Starting point is 02:11:51 then I think you're also wrong. I think the God is a very necessary hypothesis. So struggle, the struggle with God is life. That is the process of life. That's right, because you're never gonna get to that answer. Otherwise, you're God and you aren't. What is God allow Cruelty and suffering in the world one of the tough questions. So we're going deep here Uh, there there's two types of cruelty and suffering

Starting point is 02:12:13 So if we're talking about human cruelty and suffering because God does not intervene to prevent people from exercising They're free will because to do so would be to deprive human beings of the choice that makes them human And this is the sin of the Garden of Eden basically, is that God could make you an angel, in which case you wouldn't have the choice to do the wrong thing. But so long as we are going to allow for a cause and effect in a universe shaped by your choice, cruelty and evil are going to exist. And then there's the question of just the natural cruelty and vicissitudes of life. And the answer there is, I think that God obscures himself. I think that if God were to appear in all of his glory to people on a regular basis, I think that would make faith, and you wouldn't need it.

Starting point is 02:12:54 There'd be no such thing as faith, right? It would just be reality, right? Nobody has to prove to you that the sun rises every day. But if God is to allow us the choice to believe in Him, which is the ultimate choice from earlier, at this point of view, then He's going to have to obscure Himself behind tragedy and horror and all those other things. I mean, this is a fairly well-known cabalistic concept called Sim Sum in Judaism, which is the idea that when God created the universe, He's sort of withdrew in order to make space for all of these things to happen.

Starting point is 02:13:22 So God doesn't have an instrumental perspective on liberty? for all of these things to happen. So God doesn't have an instrumental perspective on liberty. In a chief sense, he does, because the best use of liberty is going to be belief in him, and you can misuse your liberty, right? There will be consequences if you believe in an afterlife, or if you believe in sort of a generalized, better version of life, led by faith, then liberty does have a purpose. But he also believes that you have to give people

Starting point is 02:13:46 from a cosmic perspective, the liberty to do wrong without threatening all the institutions of society. I mean, that's why it does say in the Bible that if man sheds blood by a man, shouts blood, be shed, right? That there are punishments that are in biblical thought for doing things that are wrong. So for a human being who lacks the faith in God,

Starting point is 02:14:06 so if you're an atheist, can you still be a good person? Of course. 100%. And there are a lot of religious people who are crappy people. How do I understand that tension? Well, from a religious perspective, what you would say is that it is perfectly plausible to live in accordance with the set of rules

Starting point is 02:14:21 that don't damage other people without believing in God. You just might be understanding the reason for doing that wrong is what a religious person would say. This is the conversation that I had with Sam basically is you and I agree, I said this is Sam, you and I ran nearly everything when it comes to morality. Like probably disagree on 15 to 20% of things. The other 80% is because you grew up in a Judeo Christian society and so do I and we grew up 10 miles from each other, you know, around the turn of the millennium.

Starting point is 02:14:44 So there's that. So you can perfectly well be an atheist living a good moral decent life, because you can live a good moral decent life with regard to other people without believing in God. I don't think you can build a society on that because I think that, you know, that relies on the sort of goodness of mankind, natural goodness of mankind. I don't believe in the natural goodness of mankind. You don't. No, I believe in the, I don't believe in the natural goodness of mankind. You don't. No, I believe in the man has created both sinful and with the capacity for sin and the capacity for good. But if you let them be on their own, doesn't it lead to the social institutions to shape them, I think that that's very likely to go poorly.

Starting point is 02:15:19 Don't you think? Well, we came to something we disagree on, but that may be that might reflect itself in our approach to Twitter as well. I think if humans are left on their own, they tend towards good. They definitely have the capacity for good and evil, but I will left on their own there. I tend to believe they're good. I think they might be good with limits. What I mean by that is that what the evidence I think tends to show is that human beings are quite tribal.

Starting point is 02:15:49 So what you'll end up with is people who are good with their immediate family and maybe their immediate neighbors and then when they're threatened by an outside tribe, then they kill everyone, which is sort of the history of civilization in the pre-civilizational era, which was a very violent time. Pre-civilizational era was quite violent. Do you think on the topic of tribalism in our modern world, what are the pros and cons of tribes? Is that something we should try to all grow as a civilization? I don't think it's ever going to be possible to fully outgrow tribalism. I think it's a natural human condition to want to be with

Starting point is 02:16:22 people who think like you or have a common set of beliefs. And I think trying to obliterate that in the name of a universalism likely leads to utopian results that have devastating consequences. Utopian sort of universalism has been failing every time it's tried, whether you're talking about now it seems to be sort of a liberal universalism, which is being rejected by a huge number of people around the world in various different cultures, or whether you they talking about religious universalism, which typically comes with religious tyranny, or at the time of a communist or a Nazi

Starting point is 02:16:52 sort of universalism which comes with mass water. So this is, you know, universalism, I'm not a believer in. I think that you have, you know, some values that are fairly limited, that all human beings should hold in common, and that's pretty much it. Like I think that everybody should have the ability to join with their own culture. I think how we define tribes is a different thing.

Starting point is 02:17:15 So I think that tribes should not be defined by innate physical characteristics, for example, because I think that thank God is a civilization we've outgrown that, and I think that that is, that is a childish way to view the world. And all the tall people aren't a tribe. All the black people, all the white people aren't a tribe. So the tribes would be formed over ideas versus physical characters?

Starting point is 02:17:36 That's right, which is why actually to go back to the beginning of the conversation when it comes to Jews, you know, I'm not a big believer in ethnic Judaism, right? I'm as a person who takes Judaism seriously Judaism is more to me than you were born with the last name like burga or steam and so I Can't wait to agree with you, but he would disagree with me But that's because he was a tribalist right he thought in racial terms, so

Starting point is 02:17:57 So maybe robots will help us see humans as one tribe. Maybe that this is Reagan's idea right Reagan said well If there's an alien invasion, then we'll all be on the same side. So I'll go over to the Soviets and we'll talk about it. It's some deep truth to that. What does it mean to be a good man? The various role that a human being takes on in this role theory that you've spoken about. What does it mean to be a good? It means to perform, now I will do Aristotle. It means to be perform the function well. And what Aristotle says is the good is not like moral good,

Starting point is 02:18:32 moral evil in the way that we tend to think about it. He meant that a good cup holds liquid, and a good spoon holds soup. And he means that a thing that is broken can't hold those things, right? So the idea of being a good person means that you are fulfilling the function for which you were made.

Starting point is 02:18:47 It's an atelialogical view of humanity. So if you're a good father, this means that you are bringing up your child in durable values that is going to bring them up healthy, capable of protecting themselves and passing on the traditional wisdom of the ages to future generations while lying for the capacity for innovation.

Starting point is 02:19:02 That'd be being a good father. Being a good spouse would mean protecting and unifying with your spouse and building a safe family and a place to raise children. Being a good citizen of your community means protecting the fellow citizens of your community while incentivizing them to build for themselves. And it becomes actually much easier to think of how to, this is why I like the role theory because it's very hard since sort of in virtue theory to say, be generous. Okay, how does that manifest? I don't know what that looks like. Sometimes being generous might being being not generous to other people, right? When Aristotle says that you should be benevolent,

Starting point is 02:19:39 like what does that mean? This is very vague. When I say be a good dad, most people sort of have a gut level understanding of what it means to be a good dad. And mostly what they have a gut level understanding of what it means to really be a really bad dad. And so what it means to be a good man is to fulfill those roles as many of them as you can, properly and at full function. And that's a very hard job.

Starting point is 02:19:57 I've said before that, because I engage a lot with the public and all of this, the word great comes up a lot. What does it give you a great leader? What does it give you a great person leader. What does it give you? A great person. And I've always had to people is actually fairly easy to be great. It's very difficult to be good. There are a lot of it.

Starting point is 02:20:09 There are a lot of very great people who are not very good. And they're not a lot of good people. And most of them, you know, frankly, most good people die mourned by their family and friends and two generations later they're forgotten. But those are the people who incrementally move the ball forward in the world sometimes much more than the people who are considered great. Understand the role in your life that involves being a cup and be damn good at it. Exactly. That's right. Hold the soup. It's very,

Starting point is 02:20:35 Jordan Peterson of it. It's very like lobster or Jordan Peterson. Exactly. I think people will quote you for years and years to come on that. What advice would you give? A lot of young people will look up to you. What advice, despite their better judgment? No, I'm just kidding. I'm just maybe only kidding only kidding. They seriously look up to you and draw inspiration from your ideas from your bold thinking. What advice would you give to them? How to have how to live a life worth living, how to have a career, they can be proud of and everything like that. So, live out the values that you think are really important and seek those values and others. It would be the first piece of advice, second piece of advice, don't go

Starting point is 02:21:18 on Twitter until you're 26. Because your brain is fully developed at that point. As I said early on, I was on social media and writing columns from the time I was 17. It was a great opportunity, and as it turns out, a great temptation to say enormous numbers of stupid things. When you're young, you're kind of trying out ideas and you're putting them on, you're taking them off, and social media permanentizes those things and engraves them in stone, and then that's used against you for the rest of your life. So I tell young people this all the time, like if you're gonna be on social media, be on social media, but don't post, like watch.

Starting point is 02:21:49 If you wanna take in information, and more importantly, you should read books. As far as, you know, other advice, I'd say engage in your community. There's no substitute for engaging in your community, and engage in interpersonal action, because that will soften you and make you a better person. I've become a better person since I got married.

Starting point is 02:22:05 I've become even better person since I've had kids. So you can imagine how terrible I was before all these things. And engaging your community does allow you to build the things that matter on the most local possible level. I mean, the outcome by the way of the sort of politics of the politics of the film that I was talking about earlier is a lot of localism because the roles that I'm talking about are largely local roles.

Starting point is 02:22:25 So that stuff has to be protected locally. I think we focus way too much in this country and others on like world-beating solutions, national solutions, solutions that apply to hundreds of millions of people. How it gets to the solutions that apply for like five? And then we get to the solutions that apply to like 20. And then we get to the solutions that involve 200 people or a thousand people. Let's solve that stuff. And I think the solutions at the higher level

Starting point is 02:22:46 flow bottom up, not top down. What about mentors and maybe role models? Have you had a mentor or maybe people you look up to, either you interact on a local scale, like you actually knew them or somebody you really looked up at? For me, I'm very lucky. I grew up in a very solid two parent household. I'm extremely close to my parents.

Starting point is 02:23:04 I've lived near my parents, literally my entire life with the exception of three years of law school. Right now, they live a mile and a half from us. What'd you learn about life from your parents and your father? So, man, so many things from my parents. That's a hard one. I mean, I think the good stuff from my dad is that you should hold true to your values.

Starting point is 02:23:28 He's very big on, you have values, those values are important and hold true to them. Did you understand what your values are, what your principles are early on? Fairly quickly, yeah. And so, he was very big on that, which is why, for example, I get asked a lot in the Jewish community why I wear a keep on the answer is it never occurred to me to take off the keepa I always wore it why would I take it off at any point? That's the life that I want to live and you know, that's that's the way to Yeah, so that was a big one from my dad from my mom practicality my dad is more of a dreamer my mom is much more practical And so you know

Starting point is 02:23:59 The the sort of lessons that I learned from my dad are that you can have the counter lesson is that you can have a good idea, but if you don't have a plan from implementation, then it doesn't end up as reality. And I think actually he's learned that better over the course of his life too. But my dad from very, from time I was very young, he wanted me to engage with other adults and he wanted me to learn from other people. And his, one of his roles was if he didn't know something, he would find somebody who he thought did know the thing for me to talk to That was that was a big thing. So I'm I'm very lucky I have wonderful parents as far as sort of other mentors

Starting point is 02:24:30 You know in terms of the media Andrew Breitbart was was a mentor Andrew obviously he was kind of known in his latter days I think more for the militancy than then when I was very close with him So for somebody like me who doesn't who knows more about the militancy was very close with him. So for somebody like me who knows more about the militancy, can you tell me what is a great, what makes him a great man? What made Andrew great is that he engaged with everyone. I mean, everyone.

Starting point is 02:24:53 So there are videos of him rollerblading down the boulevard and people would be protesting and he would literally like rollerblade up to them and he would say, let's go to lunch together and he would just do this. That's actually who Andrew was. What was the thinking behind that? Just a very sexualized. He was just careless. He was much more outgoing than I am actually. He was very warm with people.

Starting point is 02:25:10 Like for me, I would say that with Andrew, I knew Andrew for, say I'm gonna say I'm gonna wear a 16, he passed away when I would have been 28. So I knew Andrew for 10, 12 years and people who met Andrew for about 10 minutes New Andrew 99% as well as my new Andrew because he was just all out front like everything was out here And he was he loved talking people he loved engaging with people and so this made him a lot of fun and unpredictable and fun to watch and all that And then I think Twitter got to him. I think by you know Twitter is

Starting point is 02:25:43 One of the lessons I learned from Andrew is the counter lesson, which is Twitter can poison you. Twitter can really wreck you. If you spend all day on Twitter reading the comments and getting angry at people who are talking about you, it becomes a very difficult life. And I think that, you know, in the last year of his life, Andrew got very caught up in that because of the series of sort of circumstances. I can actually affect your mind. I can actually make you resentful, all that kind of stuff. I tend to agree with that. But the lesson that I learned from Andrew is engage with everybody, take joy in sort of the mission that you're given.

Starting point is 02:26:12 And you can't always fulfill that. Sometimes it's really rough and difficult. I'm not going to pretend that it's all fun and rainbows all the time because it isn't. And some of the stuff that I have to cover, I don't like, and some of the things I have to say I don't particularly like. You know, like that happens. But that's what I learned from Andrew. As far as sort of other mentors,

Starting point is 02:26:30 I had some teachers when I was a kid who said things that stuck with me. I had a fourth grade teacher named Miss Jeanette, who said don't let potential be written on your tombstone, which is a pretty, it's a great line. It's a great line, particularly to a fourth grader. But it was, that was a guy had an 11th grade English teacher named Anthony Miller,

Starting point is 02:26:48 who is terrific, really good writer. He had studied with James Joyce at Trinity College in Dublin. And so he and I really got along and he helped me writing a lot. Did you ever have doubt in yourself? I mean, especially as you got into the public eye with all the attacks, did you ever doubt your ability to stay strong, to be able to be a voice of the ideas that you represent? You definitely, I don't doubt my ability to say what I want to say.

Starting point is 02:27:12 I doubt my ability to handle the emotional blowback of saying it, meaning that that's difficult. I mean, again, in to take just one example, in 2016, the ADL measured that I was the number one target of anti-Semitism on planet Earth. You know, that's, yeah, that's not fun. You know, that's unpleasant. And when you take critiques, not from anti-semitism, but when you take critiques from people generally, we talked about in the beginning, how you surround yourself with people who are going to give you good feedback. Sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes people are giving you feedback. You don't know whether it's well-mode-vated or poorly-mode-vated. And if you are trying to be a decent person, you can't cut off the mechanism of feedback.

Starting point is 02:27:48 And so what that means is, sometimes you take to heart the wrong thing or you take it to heart too much. You're not light enough about it. You take it very very seriously. You lose sleep over it. I mean, I can't tell you the number of nights where I've just not slept because of some critique somebody's made of me. And I've thought to myself, maybe that's right, maybe that, and sometimes it is right. And you know, that's, that's some of that is good to stew in that criticism, but some of that can destroy you. Do you have a short guess? So Rogan has talked about taking a lot of mushrooms.

Starting point is 02:28:15 Since you're not, since you're not into the mushroom thing, what's your escape from that? Like when you get low, when you can't sleep. Usually writing is a big one for me. So I, writing for me is cathartic. I love writing. That is a huge one. Spending time with my family. Again, I usually have a close circle of friends who I will talk with in order to sort of bounce ideas off of them. And then once I've kind of talked it through, I tend to feel a little bit better. Exercise is also a big one. I mean, if I go a few days with that exercise,

Starting point is 02:28:46 I tend to get pretty grumpy, pretty quickly. I mean, I gotta keep the six pack going, so I'm having a. There you and Rogan agree. Well, we haven't, aside from Twitter, mentioned love. What's the role of love in the human condition, Ben Shapiro? Man, don't get asked for love too much. In fact, I was, I was, you don't get that question on college camp. No, I typically don't actually.

Starting point is 02:29:12 In fact, we were at an event recently as a daily wire event. And in the middle of this event, it's a meeting group with some of the audience. And the middle of this event, this guy walks by with this girl they're talking and they're talking to me and their time kind of runs, the security's moving them. He says, no, no, wait, hold on a minute. And he gets down on one knee and he proposes the girl in front of me. And I said to him, this is the weirdest proposal in human history. What is happening right now? Like, I was your choice of Cupid here. So, well, you know, we actually got together because we listened to your show. And I said, I can perform it like a Jewish marriage right now. We're gonna need like a glass. We're gonna need some wine. It's gonna get weird real fast.

Starting point is 02:29:47 But yeah, so love doctor, I'm typically not asked too much about. The role of love is important in binding together human beings who ought to be bound together. And the role of respect is even more important in binding together broader groups of people. I think one of the mistakes that we make in politics is trying to substitute love for respect or respect for love and I think that's a big mistake. So I do not bear tremendous love in the same sense that I do for my family for random strangers. I don't. I love my family.

Starting point is 02:30:21 I love my kids. Anybody who tells you they love your kids as much as you love your kids lying to you, it's not true. I love my community more than I love my kids. Anybody who tells you they love your kid as much as you love your kid is lying to you, it's not true. I love my community more than I love other communities. I love my state more than I love other states. I love my country more than I love other countries, right? Like that's all normal and that's all good.

Starting point is 02:30:35 The problem of empathy can be when that becomes so tight and it that you're not outward looking that you don't actually have respect for other people. So in the local level, you need love in order to protect you and shield you and give you the strength to go forward. And then beyond that, you need a lot of respect for people who are not in the circle of love. And I think trying to extend love to people who are not going to love you back or are going to slap you in the face for it, or who you're just not that close to, it's either it runs

Starting point is 02:31:04 the risk of being airsats and fake, or it can actually be counterproductive in some senses. Well, there's some sense in which you could have love for other human beings just based on the humanity that connects everybody, right? So you love this whole project that we're a part of. And actually, sort of another thing would disagree on. So loving a stranger, like having that basic empathy and compassion towards a stranger, even if it can hurt you, I think it's ultimately like a, that is that to me is what means to be a good man, to live a good life, is to have that compassion towards strangers. Because to me, it's almost, it's easy and natural and obvious to love people close to

Starting point is 02:31:54 you, but to step outside yourself and to love others, I think that's what, that's the fabric of a good society. You don't think there's value to that? I think there can be, but I think we're also discussing love almost in two different senses, meaning that when I talk about love, what I think of immediately is the love I bear for my wife and kids, or in my parents, or in my siblings, or in my friendship, or the love of my close friends. But I think that using that same term to describe how I feel about strangers, I think we just be inaccurate. And so that's why I'm suggesting that respect might be a more solid and realistic foundation

Starting point is 02:32:30 for the way that we treat people far away from us or people who are strangers, respect for their dignity, respect for their priorities, respect for their role in life. It might be too much of an ask in other words. There might be the rare human being who's capable of literally loving a homeless man on the street, the way they do love his own family. But if you respect the homeless man on the street, the way that you respect your own family, because everyone deserves that respect. I think that you get to the same end without forcing people

Starting point is 02:32:58 into a position of unrealistically expecting themselves to feel a thing they don't feel. One of the big questions in religion that comes up is God makes certain requests that you feel certain ways, you're supposed to be disinclined, you're supposed to be happy about certain things or you're supposed to love that neighbor as thyself. He'll notice that in that statement,

Starting point is 02:33:18 it's thye neighbor, right? It's not just like generally anyone, it's love thye neighbor as thyself. In any case, the... I think that extends to anyone that falls you on Twitter. The neighbor because it's got anticipated the social network aspect that doesn't, it's not constrained by geography. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to differ with you on the

Starting point is 02:33:35 interpretation on that, but in any case, the, the, the sort of, you know, the, the kind of extension of love outwards might be too big and ask. So maybe we can start with respects and then hopefully out of that respect can grow something more if people earn their way in. Because I think that one of the big problems when we're talking about universalism is when people say like I'm a world citizen, I love people over the other country as much as I love myself or as much as I love my country. It tends to actually lead to an almost crammed down utopianism that I think can be kind of difficult because with love comes a certain expectation of solidarity. And I

Starting point is 02:34:13 think right and when you love your family, you love your wife, like there's a certain level of solidarity that is required inside the home in order to preserve the most loving kind of home. And so if you love everybody, then that sort of implies a certain level of solidarity that may not exist. So maybe the idea is, for me, start with respect, and then maybe as people respect each other more, then then love is an outgrowth of that as opposed to starting with love and then hoping that respect develops. Yeah, there's a danger that that word becomes empty. And instead is used for dogmatic kind of utopianism. I mean, this is the way the way that for example religious theocracies very often work. We love you so much. We have to convert you.

Starting point is 02:34:49 So let's start with respect. What I would love to see after our conversation today is to see a bench appear that continues the growth on Twitter of being even more respectful than you've already been. more respectful than you've already been. And maybe one day converting that into love on Twitter. That would, if I could see that in this world, that would make me die a happy man. Wow, that's a little bit more. If I could make that happen, love in the world for me. As a gift for me.

Starting point is 02:35:16 I'll try to make that happen. I do have one question. I'm gonna need you to tell me, can I, like, which jokes are okay? Are jokes still okay? So, yeah, can I just run your Twitter from now on? You just send it to me. I will pre-screen you the jokes.

Starting point is 02:35:28 And you can tell me if this is a loving joke or if this is a hate-filled message. People will be very surprised by all the heart emojis this bad popping up on your Twitter. But thank you so much for being bold and fearless and exploring ideas. And your Twitter aside, thank you for being just good faith

Starting point is 02:35:46 and all the arguments and all the conversations you're having with people. It's a huge honor. Thank you for talking to me. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ben Shapiro. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words

Starting point is 02:36:01 from Ben Shapiro himself. For any of us speech and thought matters, especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging a thought it dislikes, thought crime becomes a reality. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Lex Fridman Podcast - #336 – Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War

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