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

the great light we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us they're they're a class apart everybody in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me Robert George the philosopher over at Princeton 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 the best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over do you ever sit back you know in the quiet of your mind and think am I participating in evil 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 asked that you tried 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 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 this is the live streaming podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Ben Shapiro let's start with a difficult topic what do you think about the comments made by yay formerly 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 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 educating in charge of the financial sector Jewish people I mean there's no I mean I called it on my show there's German Nazism and it is I mean it's like right from Protocols of the Elders of Zion 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 what what he looks like to me just having experience in my own family 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 that you shouldn't say and you tend to believe that they're the most brilliant things ever said the Washington posted an entire piece speculating about how bipolarism played into the kind of stuff that that yay was saying and um 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 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 bad and that 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 razor class is bad I mean that's textbook bigotry and that's pretty obviously what he is 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 Asians and I watched your interview with him and you kept saying it so just name the agents 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 the general the group The the Jews in general I mean that's that's textbook bigotry and if we're put in any other context he would probably recognize it as such to the degree is worth fuel hate in the world uh what's the way to reverse that process what's the way to alleviate the hate I mean when it comes to alleviating the kind of stuff that he's saying obviously debunking it you know making clear that what he's saying is is garbage but the reality is that I think that that for most people who are in any way engaged with these issues I don't think they're being convinced to be anti-semitic by yay I mean I think there's a group of people who may be swayed that anti-Semitism is acceptable because yay is saying what he's saying and he's saying so very loudly and he's saying it over and over but yeah I think that for example there were these signs that were popping up in Los Angeles saying yay is right well that group's been out there posting anti-semitic science on the freeways for years and their groups like that posting on systematic 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 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 uh idea that Jews control the media Jews control X Institution is there a way to talk about a high representation of a group 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 of higher than statistically represented in the population percentage of Hollywood agents are probably Jewish a higher percentage of lawyers generally are probably Jewish high percentage of accountants are probably Jewish also a higher percentage of of Engineers are probably Asian like the statistical truths are statistical truths it doesn't necessarily mean anything about the nature of the people who are being talked about they're a myriad of reasons why people might be disproportionately in one Arena or another ranging from the cultural to sometimes the genetic I mean are there 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 and what starts to get racist is when you are attributing a bad characteristic to an entire population based on the notion that that some members of that population are doing bad things yeah there's a jump between it's also possible to uh record label owners as a group have a kind of culture that F's over artists sure doesn't treat artists fairly and it's also possible that there's a high representation of Jews uh in in 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 and I think that one of the other issues also is that anti-Semitism is is fascinating because it breaks down into so many different parts meaning that if you look at sort of 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 if you're racist against the Jews you're anti-semitic then they're actually a few different ways that breaks down right you have anti-Semitism in terms of ethnicity which is like nazi-esque anti-Semitism you have Jewish parentage you have a Jewish grandparent therefore you are 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 sort of in the way that you get out of that anti-Semitism historically speaking is mass conversion which most anti-Semitism for a couple thousand years actually was not ethnic it was it was much more rooted in in this sort of stuff right if you convert it out of the faith then the anti-Semitism was quote unquote alleviated and then there's a sort of bizarre anti-semitism political anti-Semitism and that is members of a group that I don't like are disproportionately Jewish therefore all Jews are 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 of racism which are not really conspiracy theory anti-Semitism tends to be a conspiracy theory about Believers 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 and just like you said is Stalin versus Hitler over Poland that every bad guy was a Jew right it was like so every enemy there's a lot of different enemy groups uh 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 uh the Soviet Army are the Jews 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 what do you learn from that time I mean there are a bunch of lessons to Hitler taking power the 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 Weimar Republican effectively collapsed the power had been centralized in the chancellory uh and 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 in pre-nazi Germany led to this kind of up spiraling of radical sentiment that allowed Hitler in through the front door not through the back door right he was elected so you think Communists could have also taken power I mean there's no question coming it's going to take him power there were serious force in pronouncing Germany do you think there was an underlying current that would have led to an atrocity if the Communists have taken power wouldn't have been quite the same atrocity but obviously the Communists in Soviet Russia at exactly this time were committing the haladimir 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 right so if you look at I'm sort of fascinated by the the history of this period because it really does speak to how does a democracy break down I mean the 20s Republic was a very liberal democracy how does a liberal democracy break down into complete Fascism and then into genocide and there's a character who you know was very prominent in the history of that time and in Franz von papen 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 papenhood stumped for Hitler to become Chancellor uh papin was a was a Catholic Democrat he didn't like Hitler 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 get the in order to prevent the Communists from taking power maybe in order to restore some sort of legitimacy to the regime because he was popular in order for papin to retain power himself and then immediately after Hitler taking power Hitler basically kills all of Peyton's friends papin out of quote unquote loyalty stays on he ends up helping the Angeles and Austra you know all this stuff is really interesting mainly because what it speaks to is the great light we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us they're they're classified people who do evil things people who support evil people people 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 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 right the the best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over and so you have to be very cautious in how you approach these issues and the back and forth of Politics the sort of bipolarity of Politics the the or the uh 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'em sock'em 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 you see this kind of language by the way now predominating almost all over the Western World right 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 that's dangerous stuff so the Communists had to be stopped in Nazi Germany and so they're the devil 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 you know in the quiet of your mind and think am I participating in evil I mean that so my business partner and I uh one of our our favorite memes is uh from there's a British comedy show The Name Escapes Me of these two guys who are members of the SS and they're dressed in the SS uniforms and the black uniforms the skulls on them and they're saying to each other one says to the other guy you notice like the the British the the symbol is something is something nice and it's like it's like an eagle and but uh it's a skull and crossbones you see the Americans you see that they're blue uniforms they're very nice and pretty awesome jet black are we the baddies and you know that's it and the truth is we look back at at the Nazis and we say well of course they were the baddies they wore black uniforms they had Jack Boots 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 you have to constantly be thinking along those lines and hopefully you try to avoid it yeah you can only do the best that a human being can do but yeah I mean the answer is yes if it 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 um it's definitely a question that has to enter your mind as a as a historically aware and hopefully more ladies in person do you think you're mentally strong enough if you realize that you're on 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 uh is something that that I have done before I'm the only person I've ever heard of in in public life who actually has a list on their website of all the dumb stupid things I've ever said uh 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 yeah um and I'm sure that list will get a lot longer yeah look forward continue addition to that yeah exactly yes it actually is a super super long list people should check it out and it's quite honest and raw uh what do you think about it's interesting to ask you given how pro-life you are about yay's 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 the slaughter of just under a million of them every year for the last almost 50 years 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 who's being killed in the Holocaust like the visceral power and evil of the Nazi shoving full-grown human beings and and small children into gas Chambers can't be compared to a person who even from pro-life perspective may not fully understand the consequences of their own decisions or from a pro-choice protective fully understands the consequences but just doesn't think that that person is a person that that's actually different so I I understand both sides of it I wasn't offended by yay's comments in that way though because if you're 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 the pre-born so the philosophical you understand the comparison I do it 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 attack in the group do you worry that there that's the same kind of oversimplification that yay 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 a 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 on foreign policy disagree with me on a lot of things the people who I'm talking about generally and I talk about the left in the 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 and said is 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 in the name of Greenstein you'd immediately got you or you made a black person's black person and the 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 yeah so the grouping is based on the philosophy versus something like a race like this the 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 and attacking a group because it's ultimately attacking a set of ideas well I mean it's really nonchalant in attacking the set of ideas and I don't know that nonchalant would be the way I'd put it I tried I tried to be exact when you're you know you don't you don't always hit but you know the if I say that I oppose the Communists right and 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 would be inaccurate 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 socialism there's because there's like a gradient you know it's like uh to throw something at you I think Joe Biden said MGA Republicans right right you know I think that's a very careless statement because the thing you jump to immediately is like for Trump right versus I think the in the in the charitable interpretation that means a set of ideas yeah my actually problem with with the mega Republicans line from from Biden is that he went on in the speech that he made in in front of Independence Hall to actually try and Define what it meant to be American Republican who's 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 and the moderate Republicans are people who agree with me on like the inflation reduction acts like well that that can't be the the dividing line between a mega Republican and a moderate like a moderate Republican somebody who agrees with you that you got to name me 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 of election denial for example make somebody you know a threat to institutions that that's that's a that's a conversation that we can have and then we'll have to discuss how much power they have you know what the actual perspective is what delve into it but you know I think that he was being overbroad and sort of labeling all of his political enemies under one rubric now again in politics the stuff sort of happens all the time I'm not going to plead Clean Hands here because I'm sure that I've been inexact um but somebody what 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 fun for the chaos all that kind of stuff I mean you know I I try not to to do trollery for trollery sake but you know it if the show's not entertaining and not fun people aren't going to listen 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 Veep it is not House of Cards the the general rule of politics is that everyone is a [ __ ] 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 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 it really is like if you just watch it from 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 he loves Venn diagrams or electric buses I mean that's 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 what is the perfect balance between uh 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 uh I am afraid with the internet that everything becomes a joke I totally agree with this I I will say this I 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 and I would say at least half the drugs on my show are about me right when I'm when I'm reading ads for for Tommy John and they're talking about their no as 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 um so you know that 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 of a lot of people but one of the people he checked quite a lot of is you 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 them 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 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 so when uh Phantom Bernie Sanders shoots up a congressional baseball game that is not Bernie Sanders's fault I may not like his rhetoric I might disagree with him on everything Bernie Sanders did not tell somebody to go shoot up in Congressional baseball game when a nutcase in San Francisco goes and hits 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 gonna I'm not gonna 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 has driven somebody into the arms of the the god of violence but you know I 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 want to do evil things and um I wish that there were a wand that we could wave that would prevent those people from deliberately or or mistakenly misinterpreting things as a call of violence uh it's 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 that I suppose quote unquote drove somebody to go and literally murder human beings uh then I would appreciate it so I could so I could talk about the comment but I I don't mainly because I just think that if we remove agency from individuals and we if we blame broad-scale political rhetoric for every act of violence We're Not Gonna the the the people who are going to 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 hate is a form of violence speech is a form of violence speech needs to be curbed and that to me is deeply disturbing so definitely he that man that 27 year old man is the only one responsible for the evil he did but what if he and others like him are not not cases what if they're 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 ideas what do you think is your opportunity to alleviate the hate in their heart if we're speaking about people who aren't mentally ill and people who are just misguided I'd say to him the thing I said to every other young man in the country you need to find meaning and purpose in forming connections that actually matter in in a belief system that actually promotes General prosperity and and promotes helping other people and this is why you know 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 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 it were worth trying to convince people of my point of view I wouldn't do what I do for a living so violence doesn't solve anything no it doesn't as if this wasn't already a difficult conversation let me ask about uh 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 uh and criticizing um the policies of a Nation like Israel of course of course I criticize the policies of Israel on a fairly regular basis I would assume from a different angle than Noah Omar does um but yeah I mean I criticize the policies of of a wide variety of states and to take an example I mean I've criticized Israel's policy and given control of the temple mounts the Islamic walk which effectively prevents anybody except for Muslims repairing up there I've also criticized the Israeli government for their colored Crackdown right they can criticize the policies of any government but that's not what Ohio 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 of itself the great sin that is a statement she would make about no other people in no other land should 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 sources of 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 and she also promulgates lies about one specific state in the form of suggesting for example that Israel is an apartheid state which is most eminently not considering that the last Unity government Israel included an era party that their Arabs who said on the Israeli Supreme Court and all the rest and then beyond that obviously she's engaged in in some of the same sort of anti-symmetrics that you heard from yay right the stuff about It's All About the Benjamins that American support for Israel is All About the Benjamins and she's had to be traded 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 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 syndicated comment I was 17. I'm now 38. so virtually all the dumb things I say virtually ill many of the dumb things the plurality of the dumb things that I've said came from the ages of I would say 17 to maybe 23. and they are rooted again in sloppy thinking I 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 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 Bees and it really is that simple if Israel the 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'd be no Israel yeah you get attacked a lot on the internet I gotta ask you about your own psychology um how do you not let that break you mentally 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 in the normal human tendency as well people talking about me I gotta see what they're saying about me which is a recipe for Insanity so uh my wife actually said Twitter is making your life miserable you need to take it off your phone so Twitter is not on my phone if I want to log on to Twitter I I have to go onto my computer and I have to make the conscious decision to go onto 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 in the darkness 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 what's being watched now I will say that I think the most important thing 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 interests at heart because the internet is filled with people who don't have your best interests at heart who hate your gods and so you can't really take those critiques seriously or does wreck you and the world is also filled with sycophants right then the 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 office 20. so she's known me long before I was famous or wealthy or anything and so she's a good sounding board I have a family that's willing to that's willing to call me out on my [ __ ] as you talk to yay about I have friends who are able to do that I I try to have open lines of communications with people who I believe have my best interests at heart but one of the sort of conditions of being friends is that when you see me do something wrong I'd like for you to let me know that so I can correct it and I don't want to leave that Impressions out there the sad thing about the internet just looking at the critiques you get I see very few critiques from people that actually want you to succeed I want you to grow I mean they're very uh they're not sophisticated they're just they're I don't know they're they're cruel the critiques are just they're it's not the actual critiques it's just cruelty and that's that's most of Twitter I mean as Twitter is a place to to smack and be smacked I mean that's the anybody who uses Twitter for uh for an intellectual conversation I think is uh engaging in category error I use it to spread love I think yeah you're the only one it's you it's you and no one else my friend all right well on that topic what do you think about Elon buying Twitter what do you like um 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 he seems committed to the idea that he's going to broaden the Overton 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 I think that's also why people are freaking out I think the the kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth and wearing of sackcloth 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 in certain perspectives just were not and that was part of a broader social media reimposed oligarchy uh in the aftermath of 2017. so in order for just to really understand I think what 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 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 in The Wire Services everybody had a local newspaper with wire services that basically did all the foreign policy and all the national policy McClatchy Reuters AP AFP et cetera 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 of a sudden you can get news everywhere and the way that people are accessing that news is you're I believe significantly younger than I am but we used to do this thing called bookmarking where you would uh bookmark a series of websites and then you would visit them every morning and then uh and then social media came up and just from AOL or yeah exactly you had the dial up and you'd actually it was actually a can connected to a string and you would actually just they would go and and uh and then uh there came a point where social media arose and social media was sort of a boon for everybody because you no longer had to 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 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 these social media platforms as ways to to push our information and still allow for there to be other information out there the immediate response was we need to re-establish this this siphoning of information it was misinformation and disinformation that won 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 Georgetown in 2018 in 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 is a 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 have 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 and that 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 services and saying I'm not playing buyer rules right there's not going to be this sort of group of people in the halls of power who are going to decide what we can see and hear instead I'm going to let a thousand flowers bloom there will be limits but it's going to be on a more case-by-case basis we're going to allow perspectives that are mainstream but maybe not mainstream in the halls of of Academia or in the halls of media let those let those be said I think it's a really good thing now that comes with you know some responsibilities on onigon'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 was speculative 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 free speech working right he said something wrong people ripped into him he he realized he was wrong he's elated it which seems to be a better solution than preemptively Banning content which only raises more questions than it than it actually stopped with that said as the face of of responsible free speech you know and 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 a tricky balance uh the reason a lot of people are freaking out is because one he's putting his thumb on the scale by saying he is more likely to vote Republican he's showing himself to be center right and sort of just having a political opinion versus being this amorphous thing that doesn't have a political opinion um I think if if I were to guess I haven't talked to him about it but if I were to 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 uh since most of the employees are left is is good for uh for Elon to be more right to balance out the way the actual engineering is done to say we're not going to do any kind of activism activism inside the engineering if if I were to guess that's kind of the effective um aspect of that of that mechanism and the other one by posting the Pelosi thing is probably to expand the Overton 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 to kind of slap him for for no reason but I can see the strategy of it for sure and I think that the you know the the general idea that that he's you know kind of pushing right where the company had pushed left before I think that there there is actually uh 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 this information is to let a thousand like I'd rather have people on the left also being able to put out stuff that I just agree with than for there to be anybody who's sort of in charge of these social media platforms and using them as editorial sites I mean they're plenty I'm not criticizing MSNBC for not putting on right-wing opinions I mean that's fine I run a conservative side and you know we're not going to 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 that's a that's a different thing if you pitch yourself as the Town Square as as Elon likes to call it then I think Elon has a better idea of that than than many of the former employees did especially now that we have that report from The Intercept suggesting that there are people from Twitter working with DHS to to monitor quote unquote disinformation and being rather vague about what this information meant yeah I don't think activism has a place in what is fundamentally an engineering company that's building a platform uh like the people inside the company should not be putting a thumb on the scale of what is and isn't allowed you should create a mechanism for the for the people to decide what isn't isn't allowed do you think Trump should have been removed from Twitter should his account be restored uh 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 I don't think that he should be banned from from Twitter or Facebook in coordinated fashion by the way I hold that opinion about people who I think are far worse than than Donald Trump right 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 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 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 not well we're not besties no 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 Antichrist and such but that that's that's a bit of a different thing I suppose you know even so yeah you know I'm I'm just not a big fan of this idea like I've defended people who have really gone after me on a personal level have targeted me that the Town Square is online Banning 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 I think Adidas is right to terminate his contract with Kanye for example with the guy um 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 um so if Alex Jones and Trump was allowed back on in 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 so I think in the short term it's going to mean a lot of things that I I don't like very much sure I mean that's that's the cost of doing business you know like I think that one of the one of the costs of freedom is people doing things that I don't particularly like and I would prefer the freedom with with all the with all the stuff I don't like than not the freedom let me Linger on the love a little bit uh you and a lot of people are pretty snarky on Twitter uh sometimes to the point of mockery derision even a bit of if I were to say bad faith in in the kind of mockery um and you see it as a war like I disagree with both you and Elon on this Elon sees Twitter as a war zone or Lisa saw it that way in the past have you ever considered being nicer on Twitter like um as a voice that a lot of people look up to that if if Ben Shapiro becomes a little bit more about love that's gonna inspire a lot of people or no this is just too fun for you the answer is yes sure it's occurred to me like it let's put it this way there are a lot of tweets that actually don't go out that I delete uh I'll say the Twitter Twitter's new function that 30 second function is is a friend of mine every so often I'll tweet something and I'll I'll think about it a second I'll be like do I need to say this probably not can you make a book uh published after you pass away of all the tweets that you didn't send oh no my kids are still going to be around you know the Legacy um but yeah I mean sure the answer is yes and there's a good piece of what we would call an orthodox this is like he's giving me a mustard smooth right now this is uh like the the kind of you know be a better person stuff I I agree with you I agree with you and uh 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 um equal opportunity in my derision and I remember that during the 2016 primaries I used to post uh rather snarky tweets about virtually all of the candidates Republican and Democrat uh and uh every so often I'll still do some of that I do think actually the amount of snark on my Twitter feed has gone down fairly significantly I think if you go back a couple of years it was probably a little more snarky uh today I'm trying to use it a little bit more in terms of strategy to get that information now that doesn't mean I'm not gonna make jokes about for example you know Joe Biden I will make jokes about Joe Biden 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 yes yes and and president Trump I think is is fairly aware that he got this Mark for 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 snarky so you're not afraid of attacking Trump no I mean I've I've done it before can you say what your favorite and least favorite things are about President Trump and President Biden one at a time so maybe one thing that you can say super positive about Trump and one thing super negative about Trump okay so the 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 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 in Jerusalem right sometimes he does stuff and it's really out of the box and it actually works and that's that's kind of awesome in politics and and neat to see the downside of trump is that he has no capacity to to to use any sort of uh there's no 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 from time to and it is very funny um but I don't think that that it is a 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 uh on Twitter I think that he um seems you know consumed in some ways by his own grievances which is why I've seen him focusing in on Election 2020 so much 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 Biden so I I think that the thing that I like most about Joe bides um I will say that Biden two things one Biden seems to be a 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's having trouble with drugs or whatever and I keep listening to tape and thinking he seems like a really good dad 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 uh and so you know you can't help but feel for the guys had an incredibly difficult go of it with his with his first wife and the death of of members of his family and then bow dying I mean like that kind of stuff obviously is deeply sympathetic and his his you know he seems like a deeply sympathetic father um as as far as his politics he seems like a slap on the back you know kind of guy and I don't mind that I think that's 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 and the thing I don't like about him is I think sometimes that's really not genuine I think that that sometimes um you know I think that's his personal tendency but I think sometimes he allows the the prevailing winds of his party to carry him to incredibly radical places and then he just doubles down on the radicalism in some pretty disingenuous ways and and there I would cite the the Independence Day speech with or the Independence Hall speech which I thought was truly one of the worst species 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 I that's that's what he was elected to do he was elected to do two things 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 scenario comes in but he but what I do mean is that he is he was elected to not be particularly activist basically the Mandate was don't be Trump be sane don't be Trump calm everything down and instead he got in he's like what if we spend seven trillion dollars what if we 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 what if I start bringing Dylan Mulvaney 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 has 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 a 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 and bounced around between 45 and 37 pretty much his entire presidency Biden went from being a very popular guy coming in to a very unpopular guy right now and if if you're Joe Biden you should be looking in the mirror and wondering exactly why yeah do you think that pulling out a form of Afghanistan 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 the time comes time for us to be defeated and humiliated uh when when that happens we tend not to like it very much you mentioned Bond being a good father can you make the case for and against the 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 well his father is Vice President of the United States and it raises questions as to influence peddling 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 you know the questions to be asked and then the secondary reason that the story is big is actually because 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 United States so no matter how big of a deal the story is it is a big deal that there's a censorship of any relevance when there's a coordinated collusive blackout yeah that's that's a serious and major problem uh 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 uh is if it turns out and we don't really know this yet but let's say that Hunter Biden was basically off on his own doing what he was doing you know being a derelict or a drug addict or acting badly uh and his dad had nothing to do with it and Joe was telling the truth and he really but the problem is we never actually got those questions answered so if it turned out to be nothing of a story the nice thing about stories that turn out to be nothing is that after they turn out to be nothing they're nothing the 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 follow-on questions are asked follow-on questions are answered story is either now a big story or into nothing one 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 it's a Russian laptop it's it's disinformation or on the other hand this means that Joe Biden was personally calling Hunter and telling him to pick up a sack of cash over in Beijing and then he became president and he's influence pedaling so you know 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 Republican to investigate all of this again I wouldn't be supremely surprised if it turns out that that there was no direct involvement of Joe in this sort of stuff because it turns out as I said before that all of politics is Veep and this is this is always the story with half the scandals that you you see is that everybody assumes that there's some sort of deep and abiding clever plan that some politician is implementing it and then you look at it and it turns out now it's just something dumb right this sort of perfect example of this you know president Trump with the classified documents in Mar-A-Lago so people on the left leg it's probably nuclear codes probably he's taking secret documents and selling them to the Russians or the Chinese 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 in and said Mr President you're not allowed to keep those papers he said 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 it is highly likely that that is what happened and it's very disappointing to people I think when they realize it 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 like to find plans and patterns because this is how we survived in the wild is you found a plan you found a pattern you crack the code of the universe when it comes to politics the the conspiracy theories that we see so often it's largely because we're seeing inexplicable events unless you just assume everyone's a [ __ ] if you assume that there's a lot of stupidity going on everything becomes quickly explicable if you assume that 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 don't say 100 of the time but 90 94 of the time the The Conspiracy Theory turns out just to be people being dumb and then other people reacting in Dumb Ways to the original people being dumb but it's also to me in that same way very possible uh very likely that the hunter Biden Hunter Biden getting money in Ukraine I guess for Consulting all that kind of stuff is is a nothing Burger is uh 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 was fake influence pedaling meaning he went to Ukraine and he's like guess what my dad's Joe 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 anything I think you're making it sound worse than it is I think that's in general Consulting is done in that way your name it's not like you're through with you you're not it's not like he is some rare case and this is an illustration of corruption if you can criticize consulting which I would that's fair which they're basically not providing you look at a resume and who's who like if you went to Harvard I can criticize the same thing if if you have Harvard on your resume 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 if you're last there's a lot of last names that sound pretty good for sure for sure and it's not like I committed that much by the way right an open interview he was like if your last name Warren bite when you got that job and he's like probably not it's not like he's getting a ridiculous amount of money 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 on the life cycle or to steal Madness the the side that was concerned about the hanaban laptop 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 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 is probably what they're worried about is uh uh organized misinformation campaign that makes up a sexy story or sexy interpretation of the of the vague story that we have and that has an influence on the populace I mean I think that's true but I think the question becomes who's the great adjudicator there right who adjudicates when the story ought to be allowed to go through even a bad life cycle or a lab allowed to go viral as opposed to not now it's one thing if you want to say 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 you notice there's this Evolution and in 2017 there's a lot of talk about disinformation there's Russian disinformation the Russians were putting out deliberately false information in order to skew election results was the accusation and then people started using disinformation or misinformation and misinformation is either mistaken information or information that is quote unquote out of context 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 misintered doing something here it could be somebody interpreting something correctly but PolitiFact thinks that it's out of context and that that sort of stuff gets very murky very quickly and so I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook I mean Zuckerberg was was on with Rogan and talking about how you know the FBI had basically set lookout 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 you know that that sort of stuff is frightening especially because it wasn't Russian disinformation I mean the laptop was real and so the the fact that you have people who seemed to let's put this right 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 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 relieved in 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 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 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 that's but it's it's really tricky um but I I like you I'm very uncomfortable in general but then you're kind of slowing down with any kind of censorship but if if there's something like a conspiracy theory that spreads hate that becomes viral um 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 ring 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 uh I appreciate that thank you I recommend everybody sign up to it should be part of your regular diet whether you're on the left on the right the far left or the far right everybody should be part of your regular diet okay that said uh 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 there it might be difficult for you to go against the talking points or against the stream of ideas that is usually 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 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 um but they understand that on the deeper principle we're on the same side of the at least I hope that much from the audience it's also why we provide a number of different views on the platforms many of which I disagree with but are sort of within the generalized range of conservative thought and that I I you know it's something I I do have to think about every day though yeah I mean you have to you have to think about like am I saying this because I'm afraid of taking off my audience or am I saying this because I actually believe this and you know that's a that's a delicate dance a little bit you have to be sort of honest with yourself yeah somebody like um Sam Harris is pretty good at this at fighting at saying the the most outrageous thing that he knows he almost leans into it he knows will piss off a lot of his audience um sometimes you almost have to test the system um it's like 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 uh So speaking of people you disagree with what is your favorite thing about Candace Owens and and what is one thing you disagree with her on uh well my favorite thing about Katniss is that she will say things that nobody else will say my least favorite thing about Candace is that you will say things that nobody else will say um you know I mean listen she she says things that are audacious and I think need to be said sometimes sometimes I think that she is morally wrong right I think the way she responded to Kanye I've said this clearly was dead wrong and morally wrong what was her response her original response was that she proffered confusion of what yay was actually uh talking about uh and then she you know 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 you'd said that right so 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's actually say hateful stuff and and one of the ways to help alleviate hate is being friends with people that's that say hateful things yeah and then calling them out on a personal level when when they do say wrong or hateful things yeah from a place of love and respect and privately privately is also a big thing right I mean like like the the public demand for for you know denunciation from friends to friends uh is is difficult and I I certainly have compassion for for Candace given the fact that she's so close with you yeah it breaks my heart sometimes the public the public fights between friends and broken friendships I've seen quite a few friendships publicly break over covid covered make peop made people behave their worst in many cases which um yeah it breaks my heart a little bit because like the the human connection is uh a prerequisite for Effective debate and discussion and and battles over ideas uh has there been any argument from the opposite political aisle that has made you change your mind about something if you if you look back so I will say that the I'm thinking it through because the I I think that my views probably on foreign policy even more somewhat uh I would say that I was much more interventionist when I was younger I'm significantly less interventionist now I'd probably get my sample uh sure I was 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 amounts of evidence that have been presented or based on you know the the sort of willingness of the American public to go at if you're going to 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 the American people are not willing to Bear open-ended occupations uh and so knowing that you have to you know consider that going in so on foreign policy I've become a lot more of a it's almost Henry Kissinger realist uh in in some ways uh and when it comes to um social policy I would say that I'm fairly strong where I was I I may have become slightly convinced actually by more of the conservative side of the island things like drug legalization I think when I was younger I was much more 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 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 around local communities pretty easily which is weird because you I saw you uh smoke a joint right before this conversation it's my biggest thing I mean I tried to keep that secret right um well that's an interesting about intervention can you can you comment about the war in Ukraine so for me it's a deeply personal thing um 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 EU to to Ukraine I mean zielinski is on film when he was a comedy actor making that exact joke right is Merkel on the other line and she's like oh welcome to the welcome to Nato and he's like great she's like wait is this Ukraine on the line and oops but so you know that that sort of policy is 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 uh and the West did really well with that I think we were late on the ball in the United States it seemed like Europe led the way a little bit more in the United States did there but in terms of effectuating American interests in the in in the region which being an American is what I'm chiefly concerned about and the the American interests were several fold one is preserve borders two is degrade the Russian aggressive military because Russia's military has been aggressive uh and they are geopolitical rival of the United States three recalibrate the European balance with China Europe was was sort of balancing with 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 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 what's the best case scenario what's the worst case scenario and then what's realistic so best case scenario is Ukraine forces Russia entirely out of Ukraine including lohanesque and Crimea right that's the best case scenario virtually no one thinks that's accomplishable including the United States right the White House has basically said as much it's difficult to imagine particularly Crimea the Russians being forced out of out of Crimea the ukrainians have been successful in pushing the Russians out of certain parts of johansenesque but the idea they're going to 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 point that zielinski has made it's 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 economic aid as well so it's a pretty open-ended and strong commitment can take a small attention on that and your best case scenario if that does militarily happen including Crimea do you think there's a world in which Vladimir Putin would um be able to convince the Russian people that this is 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 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 unleashed the Tactical 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 Russians start shooting down planes does Russia then threaten to escalate even further by attacking an actual NATO civilian Center or or even a Ukrainian civilian center with nuclear weapons like 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 devolve into really really significant problems the other worst case scenario could be a best case scenario could be a worse we just don't know is Putin Falls what happens after that who takes over for Putin is that person more moderate than Putin is that personal liberalizer it probably won't be novantly if he's going to be ousted or 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 what you end up with is Syria and Russia right where where you just have an entirely out of control region with no centralizing power which is also a disaster area and so in the nature of risk mitigation in 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 OfferUp likely is going to be him maintaining Crimea and parts of luhanskin Dennis 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 its borders Again by Russia like an actual treaty obligation now like the BS treaty obligation and when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the 90s um and uh and that is likely how this is going to have to go the problem is that requires political courage not from not from his landscape requires courage from from probably Biden because the only zelenski's 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 give Putin an off-ramp 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 it's going to actually take Biden biting the bulletin being the bad guy and saying to zielinski listen we've made a commitment of material Aid We're 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 all like there will have to be a stick there it can should be a carrot and so that will allow zelinski if I'd were to do that would allows the ones to get a blame Biden for the solution everybody knows has to happen so once you can go back to his own people and he can say listen this is the way it has to go like I don't want it to go this way but it's not my I'm signing other people's checks right I mean like this is it's it's not my money uh 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 is for them to just say well this is up to the ukrainians to decide 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 going to freeze this winter so this is the importance of great leadership by the way that's why the people we elect is very important uh do you think do you think there's power to just one-on-one conversation or buying six thousand skin Biden sits down with Putin almost in person because I or maybe I'm romanticizing the notion but having done these podcasts in person I think there's something fundamentally different than through a remote call and also like a distant kind of uh recorded political type speak versus like man-to-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 uh he gets in one-on-one scenarios with bush with Obama with Trump with with Biden and he seems to be a very canny operator and a very sort of hard-nosed operator in those situations I think that if you're going to 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 zelenski where zelinski 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 you get to keep this stuff and then let Putin respond have Putin is going to respond um but you know the the big problem for Putin I think and the problem with public facing fora maybe it's a private meeting if it's a private meeting maybe that's the best thing there's a public-facing forum I think it's a problem because Putin's afraid of being humiliated at this point um if it's if it's a private meeting then sure except that again I just I wonder whether when it comes to and a person as canny as Putin and to a politician that I really don't think is a particularly sophisticated player in in Joe Biden and again this 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 uh I think that that's that's a that's a risky scenario yeah I still believe in the power of that because otherwise um I don't know I don't I don't think stuff on paper and political speak will solve these kinds of problems because From zielinski's perspective nothing but complete Victory will do right he is as a nation has people sacrificed way too much and they're all in and if you look at because I traveled to Ukraine I spent 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 uh 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 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 uh I think that makes the president look strong not 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 and it's the right move I think one of the things that he's afraid of to steal me on him I think one thing he's afraid of is he goes and he makes that sort of deal and the right says you just cowered in front of Russia you just you just gave away Ukraine whatever it is um but uh you know it's going to require some some people on the right to say that that move is the right move and then he'll buy it if Biden actually performs that move you're exceptionally good at debate uh you uh you wrote how to debate leftist and destroyed them uh you're kind of known for this kind of stuff just exceptionally skilled the conversation that debate uh and getting to the facts of the matter and using logic to get to the to the conclusion uh in the debate do you ever worry that this power talk about the ring this power you were given has corrupted you and your ability to see what's like to to pursue the truth versus just winning debates I hope not I mean so I think one of the things that that's kind of funny about The Branding versus the reality is that most of the things that get characterized as destroying in debates with facts and logic um most of those things are basically me having a conversation with somebody on a college campus uh it actually isn't like a formal debate where we sit there and we critique each other's positions uh 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 counter argument many of the debates that I've held have been extremely cordial let's 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 um you know that's that 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 by then we can do that if somebody comes loaded for bear then I will responding 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 that a discussion is debate and vice versa and that can be a real problem and there are people who you know treat what ought to be a discussion as for example in exercise and performance art and so what that is is mugging or trolling or saying trolley things in order to just get to the like that's something I actually don't do during debate 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 drugs 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 obverse position to mine uh and so that's that's fine usually half the debate or discussion is me just asking for clarification of terms 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 when I'm talking with Anna kasparian and she's talking about corporate and government have too much power together I'm like well you sound like a tea party like you and I are on the same page about that that sort of stuff does tend to happen a lot in discussion um I think that when when discussion gets termed debate it's a problem when debate gets term discussion it's it's even more problematic because debate is a different thing and I find that your debate and your conversation is often in good faith you're able to steal man on the other side you're able to actually you're actually listening you're considering the other side the times when I see that you you know Ben Shapiro destroys leftist it's usually just like you said the other side is doing the trolling um because they've they don't I mean the people that do criticize you uh for that interaction is the people that usually get destroyed are like 20 years old and they're usually not sophisticated in any kind of degree uh in terms of being able to use logic and reason and facts and so on and that's 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 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 kasparian or I've talked to I've done debate with chankweiger or I've I've had conversations with lots of people on the other side of the aisle in fact I believe I'm 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 positive America now no one on positive America will ever say that somebody should listen to my show that is verboten that is not something that can be had it's one of the strangenesses 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 lest they be acknowledging that you were born of woman and that this can't be allowed so on the Sunday special I've had a bevy of people who are on the other side of the aisle a lot of them ranging from people in Hollywood like Jason Blom to Larry Wilmore to Sam to you know just a lot of people on the left I think we're in the near future probably going to do a Sunday special with rokana up in California the California Congress person very nice guy I had him on the show like that kind of stuff is is fun and interesting um but um you know I think that the easy way out for a clip that people don't like is to either immediately clip the clip it's like a two minute clip and clip it down to 15 seconds where somebody insults me and then that goes viral which is you know welcome to the internet uh or uh or to say well you're only debating colleges you're only talking to 20 I mean I talk 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 uh Andrew Neal and you're really honest about it after which was kind of refreshing and enjoyable um as the internet said they've never seen anyone lose an interview uh so to me honestly was like seeing like Floyd Mayweather Jr or somebody like knocked down um what was that can you take me to that experience here's that day that day is I have a book released 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 I don't know anything about BBC I don't watch BBC I know any of the hosts so we get on the interview and it's supposed to be about the book and the host Andrew O'Neill doesn't ask virtually a single question about the book he just starts reading me bad old tweets which which I hate I mean it's annoying and it's stupid it's the worst form of interview yeah when somebody just reads you battle tweets especially when I've acknowledged battle tweets before and so I'm going through the list with him and this interview was solidly 20 minutes I mean it was it was a long interview and we get to and 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 he was he turns out he's a very famous person in in Britain and so you can't make that eagle play even if he's not famous it doesn't ever it's a dumb thing to do and it's an ass thing to do so like so saying that was was you know more just kind of peak and silliness uh and uh so that was that was a mistake I enjoyed watching that it was like oh Ben is human yeah glad somebody enjoyed it uh so there is there's that 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 uh and so I'm critiquing some of his questions at the beginning 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'd never heard of him uh 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 I walked out and immediately I knew it was mistake like within 30 seconds at the end of the interview I knew it was a mistake uh and uh and that's why even before the interview came out I I believe I corrected the record that Andrew Neal is not on the left that's a mistake by me um and uh and then you know took the hit for for a bad interview uh and so as as far as you know what I wish I had done differently I wish I had known who he was I wish I'd done my research I wish that I I wish that I had treated it as though there was a possibility there 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 adversarially than that um so I wish that that's on me I got to research the people who are talking to me 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 look and and shouldn't have done that and losing your cool is always a bad look so the the fact that that sort of became somewhat viral and stood out just shows that it happened so rarely to you uh 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 the mental 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 so what what goes through the preparation uh mentally diet wise anything like that like when do you when do you wake up okay so I wake up when my kids wake me up uh usually that's my baby daughter who's two and a half she's here on the monitor usually about 6 15 6 20 am and so I get up my wife sleeps in a little bit I I go get the baby and then my son gets up and then my oldest daughter gets up I have eight six and two uh the the boys the the middle child is that both the source of stress and happiness oh my God the height of both right I mean it's it's the source of the greatest happiness so the way that I characterize it is this when it comes to sort of kids in life so when you're single your boundaries of happiness 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 it goes up to like a 20 and a negative 20. because you're happy as stuff is with your wife 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 so the best things that have 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 and 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 uh and I have to deal with that right I mean like or or something bad happens to my daughter at school or something like that that stuff is really that so yes the source of my greatest happiness the source of my greatest stress so they 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 mags uh and uh 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 news cycle doesn't change all that much between kind of late at night and in the mornings I can supplement in the morning so I I do the show so a lot of the preparation like thinking 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 they a lot of what they do is really good it's really bad I I cover a lot of Legacy Media so it's probably covering you know Wall Street Journal New York Times Washington Post Boston Globe daily mail um 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 Breitbart I'll look at the blaze I'll look at uh I'll look at maybe the interest apps I'll look at you know a bunch of different sources and then I will look at different clips online so media it comes in handy here grabian comes in handy here uh 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 uh and uh and so that that's sort of the media diet so I sit down I 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 I'll 11 15 in the morning I'll go home and if my wife's available I'll grab lunch with her if not then I will go and work out I try to work out like five times a week with a trainer something like that and uh and then I will just regular gym stuff just uh yeah the gym yeah weights and and Plyometrics and some CrossFit kind of stuff and yeah I mean uh but beneath this beneath this mild steel as a hulking Monster uh and uh and so uh I'll I'll do that then I'll um I will do reading and writing uh so I'll I'm usually working on a book at any given time uh or if you shut off the the rest of the world yes so I put some music in my ears usually Brahms Orbach uh sometimes Beethoven or Mozart it's those four those are on rotation the rap no rap no rap despite my extraordinary rendition of whap yeah I'm not in fact around you still do you still hate web um the song it's uh I will say I do not think that it is the peak of Western civilized art okay I I don't think that 100 years from now people will be gluing their faces to a whap and protest at the environment but uh Brahms and the rest will be still around yes I would assume if people still have a functioning prefrontal cortex in any sort of wrong words from Ben Shapiro all right so you got some classical music in your ears and you're focusing uh are you at the computer when you're writing yeah I'm I'm at the computer um 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 uh so I'll go up there and I'll and I'll write physical book folks uh yeah I love physical books and because I because I keep Sabbath I I don't use Kindle because when I'm reading a book and I hit Sabbath 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 a discard probably 4 000 of them um and then I've built that back up now so I'm probably gonna have to go through another round 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 like 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 uh I got a person who I I um 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 um so which is a good way for me to remember what it is that I've that I've read because I I read probably somewhere between three and five books a week uh and then the uh in a good week five uh and then I you know 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 there 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 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 in the brand new Tesla which my son is obsessed with uh and uh 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 and run a show it's very detail-oriented nobody writes anything for me I write all my own stuff um so every word that comes out of my mouth is my fault and uh and then you know hopefully I have a couple hours to or an hour to hang out with my wife uh before before we go to the awards you write do you edit a lot or does it just come out you're thinking like what are the key ideas I want to express uh no I don't tend to edit a lot so I I thank God I'm able to write extraordinarily quickly so I write very very fast in fact fact in a previous life I was you also speak fast so similar yeah exactly and I speak in paragraphs so it's it's exactly the same thing uh 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 be somebody who came to the publisher and says I have three weeks and 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 sixty thousand words or so is there something you can say to the process that you follow to think like how you think about ideas like you stuff is going on in the world and trying to understand what is happening what are the explanations what the forces behind this do you have a process or or just uh you uh wait for the Muse to give you the interpretation I mean I think that it 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 that 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 um then if if something breaks and a piece of news breaks I can immediately sort of channel that into in the mental Rolodex these three big ideas that I think are are really important and then I can talk at length about what those ideas are and I can explicate those uh and and so you know for example when we were talking about must taking over Twitter before and I immediately go to the history of media right that's that's me tying it into a broader theme yeah uh on you know and I do that I would say fairly frequently we're talking about um say subsidization of industry and 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 Ford through FDR's industrial policy and how does that tie into sort of broader Economic Policy internationally so it allows me to tie into bigger themes because the 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 that's the icing on the cake but the actual cake is the hundreds of pages in history econ geography that that I'm that I'm social science that I'm reading every week and so that that sort of stuff allows me to think more deeply about these things so that's one way of doing 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 and so one of the unfortunate things about our uh our the fortunate thing for me and the unfortunate thing about the world is that if you in the unfortunate thing about the world is you read two books on a subject you are now considered by the media and expert on this subject uh 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 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 Master 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 it allows you to approach a thing from first principles a lot a lot of times if you're a quote-unquote expert you get um you get carried away by the momentum of what the the field has been thinking about versus like stepping back all right what is really going on the The Challenge is to pick the right two books right so that usually what I'll try to find is somebody who knows the topic pretty well and have them recommend or a couple people and have them recommend books so a couple years ago I knew nothing about Bitcoin I was at a conference and uh a couple of people who you've had on your show actually uh 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're nine books on bitcoin you at least know enough to get by yeah uh and so that so I can actually explain what Bitcoin is and why it works or why it doesn't work in some cases and and what's happening in the markets that way so that that's you know very very helpful well the Putin is an example that's a difficult one to find the right books on I think the new Czar is the one I read where was the most objective the one I read I think about Putin was it was one called strong man it was very highly critical of of Putin but it gave like a good background on him yeah so I'm very skeptical sort of things that are very uh they're critical of Putin uh because it feels like there's activism injected into the history like the way the rise and fall 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 um it's easier to do about a historical figure which with William Shire with the rise and fall of the Third Reich it's impressive because you lived through it but it's very tough to find objective descriptions about the history of the man and a country of Putin of zelenski of any difficult Trump was the same and you I feel like everybody that's the hero villain archetype right and it's like either somebody's completely a hero or completely a villain 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 or villains generally I think that people tend to do heroic things or do villainous things in the same way that I'm not sure I love descriptions of people as a genius my dad used to say this when 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 you know yes they're people who are very high IQ and we call them Geniuses but does that mean that they're good at EQ stuff not necessarily but there are people who are geniuses at EQ stuff in other words it would be more specific to say that somebody's a genius at engineering than to say just broad spectrum they're a 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 so because you read a lot of books other can you look back and so it was a tough question because so many it's like your favorite song but are there books that have been influential in your life that an impacting your thinking or maybe once you go back to that um 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 the economics and one Lesson by Henry Haslet it's like 150 pages I recommend it to everybody sort of 15 and up it's it's easier than say Thomas Hall's basic econ which is four or 500 pages and it's looking what like macroeconomics that kind of stuff um and uh and then uh in terms of that there's there's a great book by Carl Truman called ryzen Triumph of the modern self which I think is the best book in the last 10 years and that's been sort of impactful on some of the thoughts I've been having 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 was 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 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 that we are driven now toward fighting institutions because institutions are in positions so everything around us societal institutions these are 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 it's it's a it's a I think much deeper model of of how to think about why our social politics particular are moving in a particular direction is that a ground shift has happened and how people think about themselves and and this has had some somewhat kind of shocking effect in terms of social politics so there's negative consequences in your view of that but um is there also positive consequence of more power uh more agency to the individual I think that you can make the argument that institutions were weighing too heavily in how people form their identity but I think that what we've done has gone significantly too 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 Dior ramifications for everything from suicidal ideation to institutional longevity in in politics and and in society more broadly So speaking about the nature of self you've been an outspoken proponent of pro-life um can you can we start by you trying to steal me on the case for pro-choice that abortion is not murder and uh a woman's right to choose is a fundamental human right freedom so I think that the 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 counterweighs at all freedom of of choice uh so the so what that means is we can take the full example we can get sort of 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 uh that there is that a woman's right to choose ought to extend for any reason whatsoever up to a 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 um that that would be the 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 well the equals of men if the vicissitudes of biology are allowed to decide their Futures right if if the if if pregnancy changes women in a way that it 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 kind of um those are the arguments the 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 right or the American public is broadly speaking not not state by state where there are various really really varied opinions but like broadly speaking it seems like the American public by pulling data one somewhere between a 12 and 15 week abortion restriction and they believe that up until 12 or 15 weeks there's not enough there for 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 pre-born child uh it's developed enough 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 uh ask a good question so conception is when a sperm fertilizes an egg yes okay just to clarify the biological beginning of what concession means I mean that 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 liabilities brain development or heart development but the the clear dividing line between a human life exists in human life does not exist is the biological creation of an independent human life with its own DNA strands and Etc which happens at concession 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 you have to now the burden of proof is 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 for quote unquote No Good Reason you have to come up with a good reason right the burden of proof is now shifted now you will 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 okay and that that is a fairly emotionally resonant argument but it's not necessarily this positive you can 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 in the human life is that it's very difficult to draw any other line that doesn't seem somewhat arbitrary if you say that independent heartbeat yeah well you know 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 you know when once you start getting into sort of these lines it starts to get very fuzzy very quickly and so if you're looking for sort of a bright line moral rule that would be the brightline moral rule that's that's sort of the pro-life case well there's still mysterious difficult scientific questions of things like 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 right that does not we will be conscious again right when 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 the the lighting up of the flame the initial lighting of the flame there does seem to be something special about that and it's a it's a mystery of when that happens well I mean Peter Singer makes the case that basically self-consciousness doesn't exist until you're two and a half right so he says that even infanticide should be okay or is it the bioethicist over Princeton so you're getting some real dicey territory once you get into Consciousness also the truth is the Consciousness is more of a spectrum than it is a than it is a 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 eugenic territory pretty quickly when we start dividing between lives that are worth living based on levels of consciousness and life that are not worth living based on levels of consciousness do you find it the the aspect of uh women's freedom do you feel the tension between the ability to choose the trajectory of your own life versus um the the rights of the unborn child in one situation yes 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 have 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 I have less sympathy for you in that particular situation because you could have made decisions that would not LED you to this particular impasse in fact this used to be the basis of marriage right was when 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 they not not a ton of sympathy there when it comes to rape and incest obviously heavy heavy sympathy 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 is pro-choice activists will argue from rape and incest to the other 99.8 percent of abortions or you'll see people on the pro-life side argue from partial birth abortion to all of abortion that you actually have to take on sort of the mainstream case and then decide whether or not that's acceptable or not but to you the exception just ethically without generalizing it um that is a valid ethically exception I I don't hope that there should be a an exception for rape or incest because again I hold by the bright line rule that wants a human life with potential exists then it has its own interest in life that cannot be curbed by your self-interest um the the only exception that I hold by is the same exception that literally all of her life is hold by which is the life of the mother is put in danger such a tough 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 right this is because the usual follow-on question is we'll have to murder why not prosecute the woman and the answer is because the vast majority of people who are who are having abortions don't actually believe that they're killing a person they they have a very different view of what is exactly happening so you know I would say that there are all sorts of interesting hypotheticals that come in to play when it comes to abortion and uh you can play them any which way um but levels it 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 even if I would ban virtually all of them right okay I think that they're mitigating circumstances that make while being wrong some abortions less morally blameworthy than others I think that you know there there is a I can admit a difference between killing a a two-week-old embryo in the womb and stabbing a seven year old in the face like I can 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 um is the question of science or a question of religion I mean One Life Begins it's a question of science when when that life becomes valuable enough for people to want to protect it uh is is going to be 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 Harris and I have had this argument many times and it's always kind of interesting you know because Sam is of the opinion that you can get to Art From his right that science says is therefore we can learn odd 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 yeah you can you can 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 I think I know your answer to this but let's let's test it because I think you 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 because 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 um I mean it depends on the level of development I would assume of of the robots I mean you're assuming a complexity in the robots that that eventually imitates what we in the religious life would call the human soul yes the ability to choose freely for example yes which I believe is sort of the capacity for uh for human beings the ability to suffer yeah if if all of that could be approved and not programmed meaning the freely willed capacity of a machine to do X Y or Z you could you could not pinpoint exactly where it happens in the program right yeah it's not deterministic yeah um 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 if aliens arrived on in in the world and had these characteristics well there's just a lot of moral complexities and they don't necessarily have to be in the physical space they could be in the digital space uh there's an increased sophistication and number of bots on the internet including on Twitter uh as they become more and more intelligent there's going to be serious questions about what is our moral duty to protect ones that have or claimed to have an identity and that'll be really interesting actually what I'm afraid of is the opposite happening meaning that people the word 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 that we if if we're talking about this particular hypothetical that we develop robots that have all of these apparent abilities and then we dehumanize 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 matter I mean people have always treated unfortunately newly discovered other humans this way so I I don't think there's actually a new problem I think it's a it's a pretty old problem it'll just be interesting when it's made of human hands yeah it's uh it's it's an opportunity to celebrate Humanity or to um to bring out the worst in humanity uh so the derision that naturally happens like you said with pointing out uh the other let me ask you about climate change there's uh let's go from the meme to the to the profound philosophy okay the meme was there's a clip of you talking about climate change and saying that the Aquaman meme uh you said that for the sake of argument if the water level arises five to ten feet in the next hundred years people will just sell their homes and move and then the meme was Zelda who uh can you argue both sides of that the argument that they're making is a 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 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 uh and that as water levels rise real estate prices in those areas tends 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 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 like I'm saying that tomorrow there's a tsunami on your Source step and you're like oh Bob will buy my house Bob ain't gonna buy your house like we all get that but it's a funny man I laughed at it how's your view on climate change the the human um can contribution to climate change what we should do in terms of policy to respond to climate change how has that changed over the years I would say the truth is for for years and years I've believed that climate change was a reality in that anthropogenic climate change is a reality uh 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 you know the the notion that climate change is just not happening or that human beings have not contributed to climate change I find doubtful the question is to what extent human beings are contributing to climate change that 50 is 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 with factual accuracy is that all of the measures that are currently being proposed are unworkable and will not happen so when people say 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 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 geopol the geopolitical Dynamics don't exist so everybody is going to magically get on the same page and we're all going to be imposing massive carbon taxes to get to Net Zero by 2050. I mean like hundreds of times higher than they currently are and that's not me saying that's Cloud 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 going to have to accept that at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change is baked into the kick by the end of the century again not me talking William nordhaus The Economist who just won the Nobel Prize in the 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 right we are we are very bad at mitigating our own faults we are 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 will see the migration in just a few years 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 are inundated on the coast you will see people building sea walls you'll see people adapting new technologies to sell carbon out of the air you will see geoengineering right this is the sort of stuff that we should be focused on 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 in the hopes that if we subsidize it this will magically make it more efficient I've seen no evidence whatsoever that that is that is going to be the way that we get ourselves out of this necessity being the mother of invention I think human beings will adapt because we have adapted and we'll continue to adapt so to the degree we invest in the the thread of this it should be into the policies that help with the adaptation versus the mitigation right sea 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 I 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 uh or or the ability to store solar energy to the extent necessary to actually power a grid what's your thoughts on nuclear energy is nuclear energy right nuclear energy is a proven source of energy and we should be radically extending the the use of nuclear energy it's one of one to me that 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're not I know that you're just 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 uh some of 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 it's interesting to watch and if on my darker days it makes me cynical about our ability to use reason and science to uh to deal with the threats of the world I think that our ability to use reason in 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 right 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 foresee a problem then we'll deal with it right now as opposed to 30 years down the road 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 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 the Steel Man the the case for fear-mongering for irrational fear-mongering we need to be scared shitless in order for us to do anything so that 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 two long-term threats we should be scared jealous I don't think that we can actually do that though uh like I like first of all I think that it's it's platonic lives are generally bad uh 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 the sort of Elites of our society who get together in rooms and talk about this sort of stuff and I've been in some of those meetings at my at my synagogues Friday night actually no but but uh but I didn't make the joke but I'm glad you did yeah you know I've been in rooms like Davos like rooms and when people discuss these these sorts of topics and they're like what if we just tell people that it's going to be a disaster with two nominees and day after tomorrow it's like you guys don't have that power you don't and by the way you'd 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 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 going to prevent transmission and then we also tell you that we need to spend seven trillion dollars in one year and it won't have any inflationary effect and it turns out you're wrong on literally all of those things the the last few years have done more to undermine institutional trust than any time in in probably American history it's pretty pretty amazing yeah I tend to agree with that 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 um I'm gonna use sort of the Aquinas formulation of of what God is right that if you if there is a cause of all things not physical things if there is a cause underlying the the reason of the universe then that is the thing we call God so not a big guy in the sky with a beard you know like he he is the the force underlying the logic of the universe if there is a logic to the universe uh and he is the Creator in the judic view of that universe and he uh and he does have an interest in us living in accordance with the laws of the universe that if you're a religious Jew are encoded in the in the Torah but if you're not a religious Jew it would be included in the National and the natural law by sort of Catholic theology why do you think God created the universe or as as popularly asked what do you think is the meaning behind it what's the meaning of life what's the meaning of life uh 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 I'm writing a book about this actually uh that 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 and they they're sort of virtue ethics right which 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 ethic if you follow the rules then you'll 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 a 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 so what 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 like beloved father beloved mother sister brother and you might have a job once in a while a Creator you know a religious person right these are all roles that have existed across societies 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 the more we recognize those roles and the more we 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 we all have spouses but you know how you interact that relationship is what makes your life meaningful and interesting yeah that that is that is what we were put on Earth to do and 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 uh being a defender of your family you know being somebody who builds up 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 than we inherited it and we'll also have have had the joy of experiencing the the sort of flow they talk about in in Psychology where when you engage in these roles you actually do feel a flow so these roles are fundamental part of the human condition yes so you're the the book you're working on is is constructing a a system to help us understand it's it's looking at let's assume that all that's true the real question in the book is how do you construct a flourishing and useful society and politics uh so a society level if this is our understanding of a human being how do we construct a good Society right exactly because I I think 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 allows you wave your hand around until you hit somebody in the face or a rosian thought which is what if we constructed Society in order to achieve the most for the least essentially you know what if we constructed society around what actually makes humans the most fulfilled and that is the the fulfillment of these particular roles and where does Liberty come into that right how do you avoid the idea of a tyranny in that right how do you you have to be a mother you must be a father you must be 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 so you need a 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 uh tend to make a mistake when they discuss Liberty the left tends to think that Liberty is an ultimate good that Simple Choice makes a bad thing good 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 and I I tend to come down on the latter side of the aisle I mean this is the US me areas where I move this may be an area where I've moved is there anything when you think more shallowly about politics or maybe more quickly 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 in Liberties for now you have to be careful so that that doesn't shade 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 too 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 this is fascinating by the way instrumental perspective on Liberty I'm just gonna have to give me a lot to think about um let me ask a personal question uh was there ever a time that you had a crisis of Faith where you questioned your belief in God sure and I I would less call it a crisis of Faith than an ongoing question of Faith which I think is I hope most religious people and the the word Israel right in Hebrew Israel means to struggle with God that's that's the that's literally what the word means and so the idea of struggling with God right we're if you're Jewish or banay Israel right the 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 then I think you're also wrong I think that God is a very necessary hypothesis it's a struggle the struggle with God is life that is the process of life that's right because you're never going to get to that answer otherwise your God you aren't so what does 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 so if we're talking about human cruelty and suffering because God does not intervene to prevent people from exercising their free will because to do so would be to deprive human beings of the choice that makes them human and this is the center 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 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 they would make faith and you wouldn't need it 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 um but if if God is to allow us the choice to believe in him which is the ultimate Choice from a religious point of view then he's going to have to obscure himself behind tragedy and horror and and all those other things I mean this is a fairly well-known kabbalistic concept called Tsum Tsum in Judaism which is the idea that when God created the universe he sort of withdrew in order to make space for all of these things to happen so God doesn't have an instrumental perspective on Liberty uh right in in a chief sense he does because the the best use of Liberty is going to be belief in him and you can misuse your Liberty right help 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 uh then Liberty does have a purpose but he also believes that you have to give people from a cosmic perspective the Liberty to do wrong without threatening all the institutions of society I mean that's that's why it does say in the Bible that if man sheds Blood by man shall his blood be shed right there are punishments that are that are in biblical thought for doing things that are wrong so for a human being who lacks the faith in God 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 we understand that tension well from a religious perspective what you would say is that it is perfectly plausible to live in accordance with a set of rules 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 um there's the conversation again that I had with Sam basically is you and I agree I said this to him you and I agree on nearly everything when it comes to morality like we 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 so there's that um 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 he built a society on that because I think that you know that relies on these 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 I believe that man has created both sinful and with the capacity for sin in the capacity for good but if you let them be on their own isn't doesn't it without social institutions to shape them I think that that's very likely to go poorly oh interesting well we came to something we disagree on but that may be uh that might reflect itself in our approach to Twitter as well I think if humans are left on their own uh they they attend towards good they definitely have the capacity for good and evil but I when left on their own there um I 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 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-civilization later 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 we should try to outgrow 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 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 whether you're talking about religious universalism which typically comes with religious tyranny or they're talking about communistic or a nazisk sort of universalism which comes with mass water so this is you know universalism I'm not a believer in uh 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 a different thing yeah so I think that that tribes should not be defined by innate physical characteristics for example because I think that thank God as a civilization we've outgrown that and I think that that is um that is a childish way to view the world and all the tall people aren't a tribe all the black people know all the white people aren't a tribe so the tribes should be formed over ideas versus physical characters that's right which is why actually to go back to sort of the beginning of the conversation when it comes to Jews you know I I'm not a big idea I'm not a big believer in ethnic Judaism right I'm I'm as a person who takes Judaism seriously Judaism is more to me than you were born with the last name like Berg or Steen and so I just agree with you but he would disagree with me but that's because he was a tribalist right who thought in racial terms so uh so maybe robots will help us see humans as One Tribe maybe that as long as 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 there's some deep truth to that uh what does it mean to be a good man the various role that a human being takes on uh 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 what Aristotle says is the good is not like moral good moral evil in the way that we tend to think about it he he meant that a good cup holds liquid and a good spoon hold soup it means that like a thing that is broken can't hold those things right so yeah the idea of being a good person means that you're fulfilling the function for which you were made it's a teleological view of 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 allowing for the capacity for Innovation that'd be being a good father right 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 they it becomes actually much easier to 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 I don't know what that looks like sometimes being generous might be being not generous to other people right when when Aristotle says that you should be benevolent 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 well they have a gut level understand what it means to really be a really bad dad uh 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 I've said before that you know because I engage a lot with public and all this you know the word great comes up a lot what does it take to be a great leader what does it to be a great person and I've always said to people it's actually fairly easy to be great it's very difficult to be good and a lot of it there are a lot of very great people who are not very good and they're not a lot of good people and one of them 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 uh Jordan Peterson have been there it's very like lobster with Jordan exactly I think people quote you for years and years to come on that um what advice would you give a lot of young people look up to you what advice um despite the better judgment no I'm just kidding I'm just not maybe I'm only kidding only kidding they uh they seriously look up to you and draw inspiration from your ideas from your bold thinking what 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 in others I would be the first piece of advice second piece of advice don't go on Twitter until you're 26. uh because your brain is fully developed at that point uh you know the the as I said early on you know I was on social media and writing columns from time I was 17. uh you know it was a great opportunity and as it turns out a great temptation to say enormous numbers of stupid things uh when when you're young I mean 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 found me on social media be on social media but don't post like watch uh if you want to take an information and more importantly you should read books um 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 that will soften you and make you a better person I become a better person since I got married I become an even better person since I've had kids so you can imagine how terrible I was before all these things uh and uh uh engaging your community it does 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 fulfillment that I was talking about earlier is a lot of localism because the roles that I'm talking about are largely local roles 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 I get 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 flow bottom up not top down what about mentors and maybe Role Models have you had 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 for me I'm very lucky I grew up in a very solid two-parent household I'm extremely close to my parents I've lived near my parents literally my entire life with the exception of three years of Law School uh and uh like right now they live a mile and a half from us uh that's so would you uh learn from about life from from your parents and your father um so oh man so many things from from my parents that's good and bad that's a hard one um I mean I think the the good stuff for my dad is that you should hold true to your values he's very big on you have values those values are important hold true to them did you understand what your values are what your principles are early on fairly quickly yeah yeah um and so you know he 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 it is uh 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 the the sort of lessons that I learned from my dad are that you can have this is sort of the 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 the 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's that's a big thing so I'm I'm very lucky I have wonderful parents as far as sort of other mentors you know in terms of media Andrew Breitbart was was a mentor uh Andrew obviously he was kind of known in his latter days I think more for the militancy than than when I was very close with him so for somebody like me who doesn't who knows more about the militancy can you tell me what is what is a great what makes him a great man what made Andrew great is that he engaged with everyone I mean everyone 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 like that's actually who Andrew was what was the thinking behind that just just what he was he was just careless he was he was much more outgoing than I am actually he was he was very warm with people like for me you know I would say that with Andrew I knew Andrew for say I remember when I was 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 I knew Andrew because he was just all out front like everything was out here and he was he loved talking to 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 one of the lessons I learned from Andrew was the counter lesson which is Twitter Twitter can poison you know Twitter 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 a series of sort of circumstances it can actually affect your mind it can actually make you resentful all that kind of stuff I I tend to agree with that so but but the lesson that I learned from Andrew is engage with everybody take joy in sort of the the mission that you're given and you can't always fulfill that you know sometimes it's really rough and difficult I'm not going to pretend that it's all fun and and rainbows all the time because I didn'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's that happens but it's uh but that's what I learned from Andrew as far are sort of other mentors I had some I had some teachers when I was a kid who uh you know said things that stuck with me I had a fourth grade teacher named Mr nutty who said don't let potential be written on your Tombstone which was uh which is a pretty that's a good line it's a great line particularly to a fourth grader uh but uh it was that that you know that was good in 11th grade English teacher named Anthony Miller who is terrific really good writer he'd studied uh with James Joyce at Trinity College in Dublin and so he and I really got along and he he helped my writing a lot did you ever have doubt in yourself I mean especially as you gotten 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 I doubt my ability to handle the emotional blowback of saying it meaning that that's 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 that's not fun that's unpleasant and when you take critiques not from anti-semites but when you take critiques from people generally we talked about near the beginning how you surround yourself with 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 motivated or poorly motivated and if you are trying to be a decent person you can't cut off the mechanism of feedback and so what that means is sometimes you you take to heart the wrong thing or you take a tart too much uh you're not light enough about 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 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 shortcut so uh Rogan has talked about taking a lot of mushrooms since you're not since you're not into the mushroom thing um 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 the writing for me is cathartic I love writing uh that that is a that is a huge one spending time with my family uh 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 uh exercise is also a big one I mean if I go a few days without exercise I tend to get pretty grumpy pretty quickly I mean I could keep the six-pack going somehow man there you and Rogan agree uh 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 for Love Too Much in fact um I was uh I was you don't get that question on college campus no I typically don't actually uh in fact we were at an event uh recently as a daily wire event and in the middle of this event was a meet and greet with some of the audience in 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 what is happening right now like I was your choice of cupid here like so well you know we actually like got together because we listened to your show and I said I can perform it like a Jewish marriage right now I'm gonna need like a glass we're gonna need some wine it's gonna get weird real fast yeah but uh yeah so so love doctor I'm typically not asked too much about the the role the role of Love um 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 and 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 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 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 that's all normal and that's all good the problem of empathy can be when that becomes so tight-knit 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 either are not going to love you back or are uh are going to slap you in the face for it or who you're just not that close to it's either it runs the the risk of being air SATs and fake or it uh 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 this whole project that we're a part of and actually sort of another thing we 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 the that to me is what it means to be a good man to live the a good life is to have that compassion toward strangers because to me it's almost it's easy and natural and obvious to love people close to 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 my parents or my siblings I love friendship uh or the love of my close friends yeah okay but I'm but I think that it's that using that same term to describe how I feel about strangers I think would just be inaccurate and so that's why I'm I'm suggesting that respect might be a more solid and realistic foundation for the way that we treat people far away from us for people who are strangers respect for their dignity respect for their priorities respect for their role in life uh 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 uh because everyone is deserved everyone deserves that respect I think that you get to the same end without without forcing people into a position of of unrealistically expecting themselves to feel a thing they don't feel you know one of the big questions in religion that comes up is God makes certain requests that you feel certain ways right you're supposed to be this Sinclair you're supposed to be happy about certain things or you know you're supposed to love that neighbor as thyself right you'll notice that in that in that statement it's a Thy Neighbor right it's not just like generally anyone it's love that neighbors that's in any case the the I think that extends to anyone that follows you on Twitter Thy Neighbor because God anticipated The Social Network aspect that doesn't is not constrained by geography yeah I'm gonna differ with you on the interpretation on that but in any case yeah uh the the sort of uh you know the the kind of extension of love outwards might be too big and ask so maybe we can start with respect 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 were talking about universalism is when people say like I'm a world citizen I love people of 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 cram down utopianism uh that I think can be kind of difficult because with love comes a certain expectation of of solidarity and I think right I mean 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 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 um utopianism I mean this is this is the way that for example religious theocracies very often work we love you so much we have to convert you so let's start with respect what I would love to see um after our conversation today is to see a Ben Shapiro that continues the growth on Twitter of being even more respectful than you've already been and uh maybe one day uh 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 if I can make that happen for love in the world for me as a gift for me 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 can I just run your Twitter from now on you just send it to me I'll pre-screen you the jokes and you can tell me if this is a loving joke or if this is a hateful to be very surprised before by the all the heart emojis this are popping up on your Twitter but thank you so much for being bold and fearless and exploring ideas and uh your Twitter aside thank you for being just good faith 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 from Ben Shapiro himself freedom of 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 in thought it dislikes thought crime becomes a reality thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 7,259,602

Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, andrew breitbart, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, ben shapiro, candace owens, elon musk, kanye west, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mit ai, politics, religion, twitter

Id: AF8DOS4C2KM

Length: 151min 25sec (9085 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022