Joe Rogan Experience #1276 - Ben Shapiro

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yes well I've been Shapiro has Gandhi very good how's it going with you man it's good well I love I love the new digs I haven't been here since you finished it over and I walked in I thought to myself I've been doing my business wrong I mean you got what three employees yeah there's not that many folks working on this yeah I mean so in my offices we have like 80 and our offices are not nearly this cool so I'm gonna go back to my office and fire everyone have your folks come in and design because I mean it's either a lot of people or I could have cars in my office yeah but you wouldn't go down this route you're you're more of a conservative gentleman know myself you're wearing a suit jacket you're your own boss nobody tells you how to dress and yet you dress like a grown-up yeah well you know I won't pretend that nobody tells me how to dress we have people who tell me how to dress we have people who do my hair do you have all that stuff you have like fashion folks yeah because I used to I mean if you look at the old photos of me I have like the Hitler hair I've got like the hair that's the only thing about me the tellurian was my old hair and I've got the hair that kind of comes down over the forehead and I still walk into the office wearing basically an undershirt every day because I'm incredibly lazy when it comes to that stuff but we should be able to yeah I mean that's that's the prerogative of being the boss maybe you'd be more relatable if you showed up wearing like flip-flops and t-shirt that kind of kills my brand oh no does it like what is your brand exactly very nice guy you're just conservative that's the dirty little secret though yeah about that but this is one of the things that bothers me so much about you being so misrepresented when I read things about you there was a the article that we were just talking about the alt-right sage without the rage they called you and you're not alright in fact you were the leading target of anti-semitic abuse for all of 2016 weren't you I'm going to the anti-defamation league which is no la mine so yeah I mean I'm not only am I not all right I've spent the last four years like legitimately battling the alt-right talking about how evil I think their ideology is how evil I think white supremacy is I mean first of all like people with yarmulke is typically not the favorite of the alright and then beyond that I mean I think their ideology is legitimately a devastatingly awful twist on what Western civilization is supposed to be was amazing as a review of my new book and my new book has several sections and they're dedicated to how terrible the alt-right is and then the interview they did with me doesn't talk about all trite stuff at all but they just assume I'm on the conservative write that must mean that I am alright it's like no you stupid labels they're disingenuous people are labeling people in a very simple manner to try to categorize them as the enemy and instead of just addressing these points like I love watching your debates where you do q and A's with college students and with people in the audience because you can see you agree with you or disagree with you you have well formulated ideas this isn't just some bullshit that you're spouting out you've thought these things through I've been doing this for legitimately more than half my life I'm 35 and I started when I was 17 and I started writing a syndicated column at that point and when you're 17 you think a lot of dumb stuff and then you get older and you educate yourself and you spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time studying hopefully you have some cogent arguments after 20 years of doing anything I mean but it's the the demonization is pretty astonishing me we had ant on Andrew yang he's the only Democratic candidate who has agreed to go on the Sunday special that I do we did a full hour on ubi it was perfectly nice it was perfectly coherent and and conciliatory and yet people will suggest that everything I do is about destroying people on the other side because of all the Ben Shapiro destroy his videos there's there are certain groups of people where that's their stick they're like they're goons right they just go after people online for attention yes this is a stick this is not you and this is what bothers me so much and I know that you've said some things in the past like particularly about Arabs and like when you were a younger man he said I should have said that yeah that's exactly right that's exactly some of those things were taken out of context like that one particular tweet which is a bad tweet was a tweet that was part of a tweet threat in which I was specifically contrasting Israel and the Hamas leadership and saying that the Israeli government likes to build and the Hamas leadership would prefer that their citizens live in sewage and bomb things but that was a bad tweet obviously in my entire history on on Muslim relations you is one like I supported the ability of Ilhan Omar to wear a hijab on the on the floor I opposed president Trump's originally proposed Muslim ban in the last three weeks I've had on machine awaaz I've had on contact med I had on yesterday a reformed Muslim like these are conversations that have to be had but to take this is one of things that bugs me so much I've tweeted I think a hundred and forty thousand times I've written millions of words I'm sure you can find something I don't even remember having written it is bad I have a running list by the way I try to be honest about this I'm one of the only people I know who has I have a running list it's called so here's a giant list of all the dumb stuff I've ever done right and I actually go through all the see like you can look it up this is not me saying this now I mean you can go and look up all the things that I think I've done wrong and I'll apologize for some and I'll say somewhere dumb and I'll say some I'm fine with and you're just taking out of context but I mean that I hope that's what honest people try to do but this is the problem you're not dealing with honest people when people try to categorize you is alright or they're trying to put you into this category of internet goon they're the and they quote tweet there's taking some little tiny phrase you said seven years ago and trying to say this is you this is you now it's so that's such a disingenuous thing to do I hate it and i hate it across the aisle by the way i was a defender of james gunn I thought James Gunn should have been fired from guardians of the galaxy jokes and even if somebody tweeted something bad like ten years ago bringing it up now is not an attempt to actually make the public space better and you're not actually offended by that thing the person tweeted ten years ago that you didn't notice what it is that you want to get rid of this person or hurt this person so you're gonna bring up something from ten years ago and then you're gonna try and Club them into submission with it because if you actually ask them their opinion about it they might have a more nuanced view on what they said maybe they apologize maybe they think I don't even remember saying that right I mean I felt the same way by the way I try to be consistent I really do about about this stuff I said the same thing about for example Ralph Northam the the governor of Virginia who was excoriated for having this terrible racist photo on his yearbook page back in medical school in 1987 and people were saying well this is evidence he's racist now I was like well no that's evidence that he was doing a racist thing then that's not evidence that he's racist now you sort of have to look over the broad core of his career and he ended up doing what everyone now does which is you just don't apologize for anything you just try to pass it off as and nothing the public space is actually getting worse because let's say that you did something bad in the past there are a few human responses to I did something I don't like him past human response number one is you know what I apologize that was wrong these days that gets your face stuff done right you say I apologize I was wrong it means well why did you do it in the first place because you're a bad person apologies are not accepted and then number two is you brazen it out you do the Trump you know what I never did anything wrong ever I've never perfect right and that and then you get your defenders to come and surround you and then nothing ever gets cleansed or opportunity number three is you do what Barack Obama did which is you come out preemptively and you try to remember all the bad stuff you do and then you confess it in public so in dreams from my father he says right well you know when I was back in high school did a little blow and if it's like oh okay so you did cocaine when you was in high school that's that's cool whereas if it comes out during the campaign right Stan he's boned right then he's got he's got a real problem the problem is that right now even if you preemptively come out and say I did something wrong like for example Liam Neeson talking about years ago when he had a racist thought that he didn't act on when he had a racist thought this is now we're gonna try and ruin your career for something that you admit was bad that you did 30 years ago we're gonna try and ruin you over that if you apologize for something that you did thirty years ago which you would have preferred just got forgotten because it was embarrassing and stupid then we say you're bad and so all you're left with is like the most shameless people in the world who are in the public space right the incentive structure is to be deeply shameless to just say yeah man I own that and it was great when I said it or I didn't say it at all and you're just full of it I never said that stuff who you gonna believe your eyes or me and it makes it makes for a really bad politics well it's just this the culture of going after people for things and and finding anything to categorize them as someone who's a viable target and this is what I've seen thrust your way it's like there's nothing wrong with being conservative there's something wrong with wanting everyone to think the way you think though this is the difference like you we what I like that you do is you debate your points you state your positions you have a and what I don't like is when people try to pretend that that philosophy is some some somehow hateful or somehow regressive or something like your that you condemn people for their thoughts you you just you don't this is what not what I see with you I appreciate it and I appreciate the accuracy exciting that's true I mean I've come out against virtually every Twitter ban including people who have personally targeted me I've come out against that I've come out against virtually every what you know let's talk about that because what do you what are your thoughts about this idea of deep platforming and you know this is something that we were just discussing before the podcast where the CEO of YouTube and Kara Swisher yeah from Rico I think Kara Swisher they were talking about removing you from YouTube and I thought it was the CEO of YouTube it was actually Carol who said I would if I could yeah she's pissed because her son apparently listens to that's kind of funny she's being funny saying I could but I thought it was the CEO of YouTube mister she was trying to do the same thing that they do with you or with Dave Rubin or Jordan Peterson which is that anybody who is sort of heterodox because in that group I think I'm the only registered Republican ever anybody who's heterodox is now being exposed really dogs meaning just thinks differently from kind of the down the line democratic party platform you're not like down the line with Hillary yeah like Sam Harris is a Democrat Sam Harris is heterodox because he disagrees that Islam is by necessity a religion of peace for example right or he thinks that we have to look at actual statistics in order to make evidentiary base points about discrimination and disparity mm-hm and this makes him an enemy of people like Ezra Klein at voxcom right the this sort of stuff they then say that you are a feeder for white supremacy right they they can't actually get you on what you say yeah so it turns into well you know some members of your audience do things that that are really bad there's like well dude I have like millions of people who are members of my audience have five million Facebook followers I have two million on Twitter and you're way bigger than I am I assume that some of those people are gonna be crazy yeah yeah the idea that your response what YouTube tried to do you know about the comment thing where the YouTube was gonna try to make people responsible for the comments in their videos which what is a normal Jamie like a normal do that we get how many comments is a good like 10,000 that's like a average one how the fuck am I supposed to have subdued with this itchy trigger finger standing by in front of a keyboard just waiting for something offensive to pop up and this was in response to something that happened with them where there was pedophiles who were watching videos of children doing things and they were commenting stuff in the you know like the children's gymnastics and stuff like that they're commenting and like communicating with each other through the comments and it was sort of discovered that there was this connection that they were doing this in many many videos and YouTube rightly panicked they're like holy shit we have to stop this so the response I guess was we just have to make people responsible for their comments someone said oh yeah good idea you didn't think through it at all right you know certain people that can't do that it's totally insane and it's insane and in virtually every respect and it's it's funny how it's only applied kind of by the media on one side of the aisle so to take an example the Congressional baseball shooting happens a couple of years ago guy happens to be a Bernie fan is that Bernie Sanders is fault right no that is not Bernie Sanders is that went away right literally people stopped talking about in and that was shooting of legislators like elected people one nearly died and that kind of went away we didn't talk about you know Bernie's responsibility but there's a shooting in Christchurch and it's Jordan Peterson's fall and Jordan Peterson has no relationship with the shooter whatsoever it's my fault I have no relationship with the shooter and denounce everything that that piece of crap stands for and suddenly is my it's it's really ugly and it's gonna it will come home to roost I mean here's what's gonna happen is Facebook and YouTube are gonna fall prey to their own standards because if their standard is that you're responsible for your followers or I'm responsible for my followers or Jordan or anybody else is responsible for all the people who view their stuff okay then why isn't Facebook responsible for all the people posting on its platform if they are right at Facebook becomes responsible for all the people posting on its platform they'll be bankrupt in a week they've got a problem they really do because they have to decide whether they are a platform or whether they are a do-gooder publication yeah I run I run a publication daily wire it's openly conservative we make no bones about that and we are responsible for the content that appears on our platform and if we say something to family Tory we will be sued if we say something that is false then we will be sued presumably if you post something false on Facebook Facebook doesn't get sued but now Facebook has deemed itself the morality police and they'll ban people they don't like and Moe the decide what editorially ought to be elevated and what ought not to be elevated does that sound more like the phone company to you or does that sound more like my website where I decide what gets published and what doesn't right because Facebook's case for exemption from these laws is well we're like the phone company right when you're on the phone with somebody if that person says something criminal AT&T isn't responsible for the person saying something criminal or terrible it's just the phone company right but Facebook isn't doing that Facebook is jumping into the middle of conversations and then saying well we don't really like this conversation so we're just gonna kind of shut it down not because of legal threat but because we just don't like it so are they actually doing that are you to say if you put a post up on Facebook and they don't like the way you worded things or described things where they actually shut down your post what will they do so they've done it in the past to some conservative public controversy because they're not transparent at all right I can tell you that the beginning of 2018 we lost about 35% of our traffic because Facebook started cracking down on mostly conservative sites they said that it was kind of new sites generally but that's not what the statistics showed they're doing it more often with things that we all sort of agree are bad right we all agree white supremacy is bad white nationalism is bad now they say they're gonna censor that stuff but here's where I'm uncomfortable I think that that stuff is awful and evil and I those people are the ones are the they're the reason I have personal security but once you get into the business of Facebook gets to decide which speech is good and which speech is bad they're an editor yeah they're an editor even if I agree with their assessment of what stuff is good and what is bad I am not comfortable with them in the driver's seat there and if they are gonna be in the driver's seat then they should be held liable for all the stuff that's on their platform I mean why is it the twit Twitter same thing right why is it that Louis Farrakhan is still on that platform but Alex Jones is not like I don't like Alex Jones his material or I've been very very critical of Alex Jones I didn't think he should get banned from from Twitter unless he actually violated the law unless he was responsible for a violent threat and let's use the fam'ly Tory or something they're definitely going down this road of being the moral arbitrators there they're the ones who get to decide what the conversations are and and that's an insane responsibility the responsibility of getting to dictate what shouldn't should not be discussed and to have it be a handful of people and have these people almost almost exclusively live in the Pacific that whole tech community I mean it's all tech liberals who really if you're around those people they live in this really strange uber wealthy bubble of super genius spectrum people who are coders and super capitalists and people that are raising money all over the place and designing technology and they have an ideology and it's not necessarily a bad one just just being honest and upfront about what it is it's it's incredibly progressive which is very unusual for big business right for big business to be just openly transparently progressive and pushing social justice it's very unusual well I think that there is a sort of misunderstanding of when we say what big business is what big business is so I think that there's a wide variety of owners of businesses and how they think about politics obviously you know Gates is a progressive guy Warren Buffett's a progressive guy they are now he's ruthless with Microsoft so I think that there are a lot of people listen I think that the vast majority are Crocker Berg is ruthless with Facebook and he's progressive I think Jack Dorsey is as ruthless as the next guy when it comes to profit I mean he's still got to be answerable to his shareholders so I think I think a lot of the progressivism is sort of a way to excuse your own in your own involvement in the capitalist market Facebook took off don't be evil that was their thing don't be evil they decide to remove that yes Google right Google yeah when Google did that I met Google it's funny when you think something but you're saying when they did that it's like why would you ever take off don't be evil like that but here's my thing here's my thing I think that if our tech companies were honest they should take that stuff off like stop pretending you're do Gooding you're not do Gooding and providing a platform and maybe the platform is the good right in a capitalist economy the product that you provide is the glue I don't need additional good to come from your product right if you want to provide me a solid morning drink right I don't need your politics along with that I just need the drink well if I want a social media company I don't give two craps about what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about politics dude hasn't studied it I don't care at all what Jack Dorsey who vacations in Malaysia and gets bitten by a million mosquitoes while meditating it has to say about the nature of life like why do I care about Jack Dorsey's political view he has provided me a good the good is this basic chatroom where I'm consuming news how about that would just be enough but it's not enough for a lot of these folks it's it's the the kind of Huli from Silicon Valley we're gonna pretend that we're here to do good and it's not enough just to acknowledge that may be the thing that you provided is the good like Bill Gates has done more good with Microsoft and then he has done with any of his charities he's even a lot of money to charity but Microsoft has provided legitimately hundreds of thousands of jobs and created enormous ly productive lines of business and made enormous profit for a lot of people a lot of people have stock in Microsoft as a general thing he has done more good doing that than giving tens of millions of dollars to to various outside causes so it feels like a lot of the progressivism in in corporate halls and in Silicon Valley is bifurcated mentally it's like people have they're like dolphins it's one side of the brain on at a time here's my here's my capitalists side where I go out and make money and profit and then here's my other side where I show people what a great person I am by proclaiming that I'm for Bernie Sanders while parking my money offshore to make sure them there it's shielded from that from the taxman yeah well that's a good assessment what I'm saying is that the the don't be evil thing like one of the things that I thought was a what if that was like a legal decision was me being cynical that they were pulled into some sort of an office and said if we say don't be evil and you take someone off the platform you're accusing them of evil I mean then we should slow that maybe I mean again this this this self-assessment of you are the moral police I find really troubling it's so funny I'm the I'm the supposed more or less right right I'm the religious guy I'm the Orthodox Jew right I talk about social standards and how people should behave in their personal life when it come to government and when it comes to me imposing my views on you I am away less of a top-down tyrant than any of the people in Silicon Valley I am NOT here to tell you that you are not allowed to be on a platform because we disagree it's one thing if you're threatening violence which is an actual violation of law but this crap where people like me because I believe in a social fabric built on certain judeo-christian values but I'm not forcing you to be part of that and I'm not I don't think the government should compel you to be a part of that well I'm the tyrant but the person who sits at the top of Twitter or Facebook who is saying that they get to police what you see and they're going to nudge you in the right direction nudge you in the right direction without your consent without them even telling them what you're doing right they're just they're gonna push you a little bit because they know better than you and they can sort of massage you into better views if we control your channels of information this is something the Obama administration was very fond of there's a scholar named Cass Sunstein as a legal scholar and he wrote a book called nudge he was very famous it was it was used as sort of a handbook during the Obama administration and the idea was well if we can just use non-forcible means sort of nudge people in a particular direction without them even knowing they're being nudged then shouldn't we do that and I think no you shouldn't you shouldn't because transparency is the only way I can tell what kind of bullshit you're trying to tell me well not just that like you you're closing down even conversation if as soon as you're trying to silence this other voice if you if you believe one thing and another person believes a different thing you should probably talk about it and the way the way that I know for sure there's something wrong with your argument is if what you're trying to do is you're sneakily trying to silence these voices and again as long as we're not talking about threats of violence and as long as we're not talking about harassment or daxing right we're just talking about conversation you're just talking about people with differing points of view if you want to silence differing points of view I have to wonder about your intent I have to wonder about whether you're going into this conversation with good faith I have to wonder whether you've really objectively assessed whether or not you your argument does hold up against scrutiny because this is also part of the problem and when you're in an echo chamber you often don't formulate these arguments very well like when you confront people about certain bias beliefs that they have and you you have an opposing belief if they're part of a bubble like sometimes they might not have even ever considered some of the things you have to say and I've seen that with some of your videos yeah I mean it does happen all the time and with sophisticated people I've spent my entire life literally my entire life in areas where everyone disagrees with me yeah I grew up in LA I went to Harvard Law School for three years I was in Cambridge where everyone disagreed with me and then I came back to LA so I have never spent more than a week at a time in a red state right whatever if your conservative values moved in one way or another of the I mean my personal valleys probably haven't shifted very much but my political values have shifted libertarian hmm I mean so I used to be a proponent of criminalization of marijuana I'm no longer I've been in favor for you a couple of things one was just a general sense the government sucks at everything mm-hmm and the more I see the government try to crack down on things the more prevalent it becomes I mean people were dealing pot on my sixth grade seventh grade playground in public school obviously and then just a general general perception not only the government sucks at everything but that you got to own your own actions and also examining more of the evidence about the impact of pot on people's lives and and you know again there's you ruining your own life through use of drugs and there's drugs that legitimately ruin other people's lives or there are drugs that remove your ability to even reason or think I think there are only two reasons to criminalize drugs in any fashion one is if there are drugs like for example PCP that legitimately make you violent and then you are going out and committing acts of violence against people then there's a case or if you're talking about a where it legitimately robs you of your capacity to reason if it were heroin if you were able to actually crack down on it successfully but even there I'm not sure that the proper government solution is criminalization because we've criminalized it and it's still incredibly prevalent so I agree with you I agree with on that and I agree with you in terms of drugs being extremely detrimental and the other part is that there's comparable drugs that are legal and comparable drugs meaning not even really comparable drugs that are far more devastating like alcohol like you could just go to any grocery store and buy a jug of whiskey and kill yourself with it yeah it's not difficult industry having books already that prevent externalities if you drive high it's the same as driving drunk so I'm not sure that you need additional laws to do that and also you know I'm not opposed to zoning laws like I don't think a pot shop should open up right next to my house right there residential zoning that's fine it's a mob of liquor stores though right man I don't want a liquor store right next to my house this is correct yeah so I become a libertarian in some ways on that sort of stuff the same thing is true by the way when it comes to the issue of same-sex marriage so on a personal moral level I'm opposed to same-sex marriage I'm an Orthodox Jew and I believe that a man and a woman were made for each other when it comes to government involvement I don't think that's anybody's business I think a lot of things I think adultery is bad too I don't think the government ought to be involved in adultery i I'm so strict I don't think premarital sex is a good thing right I've been very vocal about this I was a virgin until I was married my wife was a virgin until she was married I think that's a good thing so I think the government has anything to do with any of those things no I don't I don't think it's any of the government's business it's consensual activity there are no externalities so what exactly is the government getting involved in and when the government gets involved in stuff then there are externalities right once the government starts to cram down its vision on people then you start to get unintended externality so for example with the let with the legalization my view on marriage is that the government should get completely out of the business I don't think the government should be involved in straight marriage I don't think it should be involved in gay marriage I think the government should be out I agree 100% and the reason that I say that is because as a religious person right who believes in traditional marriage I have to I have two marriage certificates I have the one from the state that I don't give two craps about it's buried somewhere in my garage and then I have my religious marriage certificate which meant among other things that I got to shit up my wife right I mean like this is the one that mattered to me and I think that's true for most religious people the religious ceremony matters a lot more than the state saying a thing and the state isn't incentivizing their people aren't getting married because I'm like yeah I need the tax break right so that's a bunch of nonsense and once the government decides what version of marriage and wants to push that then comes into conflict with other values so for example once the state of California decides that same-sex marriage is on legal par with heterosexual marriage now I'm worried about the externality of I have a religious day-school or I have my synagogue my synagogue is a religious institution it doesn't approve of same-sex marriage now is the government going to come in and tell my synagogue how it ought to act with regard to same-sex marriage and that's the government's business so how about this how about everybody gets to do basically what they want associate with whom they want and it's none of the government's business this seems like a pretty good happy medium I I'm so glad you talked about the two things that I wanted to talk to you about that I'm sure we disagree one of them being marijuana and the other one being gay people marrying each other so let's start with the marijuana one do you think marijuana ruins people's lives is that one of your contentions I think that it can and I think experience with no I'm just talking about the I'm just talking about the statistical overuse of marijuana among teenagers does have detrimental brain effects that have long-term after-effects it's pretty proven and that's one of the things that I really I'm glad you said that because I wanted to cover that but you were in the middle of a ramp when we were joking around about six and seventh graders selling pot don't smoke pot when you're young you really should it's not good for the development of your brain same thing with drinking you know I didn't smoke a lot of pot when I was a kid I did it a handful of times until I was thirty years old but I did drink a bunch of times when I was young and in high school and it's terrible for brain development especially before you're 25 and you're your frontal cortex hasn't even fully formed your frontal lobe is like this it's it's it's a developing thing and there was an article recently that I posted from BBC that were saying that you should probably shouldn't be considered an adult until you're 30 right there saying brain development doesn't even stop until you're 26 or 20th this is why when people are saying let's let's lower the voting age you know what thought what the fuck are you talking about when I was 16 I was a chimp was a chimp in high school now when the the problem that I have with many people's perceptions on marijuana is that it's based on ignorance meaning not no personal experience with you know and I'll admit I've no personal energy marijuana so I know you don't I'm not to be probably should get I that's what I'm trying to say man I've seen the effects on on stock prices when people get high in the studio they jump off the vote then they come right back up the marijuana thing is in my opinion it's another one of those things where people have this this categorized box that they like to put marijuana users in like is the category lazy stoner stupid delusional it's too widespread for that I mean there are people I know who are doctors who yeah so well there's the jiu-jitsu community is a big one there's a giant percentage of the jiu-jitsu community it does jiu-jitsu high they have competitions party it's not mana I'm telling you it's because it's not what people think it is if you've never smoked marijuana this is gonna be a very difficult thing to grasp but marijuana enhances jiu-jitsu because it eliminates the rest of the world when you're rolling which rolling is like say if you and Jaimie we're gonna have a sparring match that would be rolling like you'd slap hands and then you go and you trying to choke him and he's trying to get you in an armbar and you're going after it when you do that on marijuana it's like you don't think of anything else other than those movements and it becomes like this very intense meditation in violence like it's not violent in terms of most the time you don't really even get hurt he's like you get to the point like one of the beautiful things about jiu-jitsu is you can grab a hold someone and choke them to the point where they're going to go to sleep and you would kill them if you kept going and they tap around your friends again and everybody's cool and you try to do it to me and I try to do it to you and you really can do it reasonably hard without people getting hurt it happens every day all throughout the world a lot of these people are high and they're doing this jiu-jitsu practice in this almost like trends it's like it's a dungeon state if you can function when you're using marijuana I don't care will you pans and perception things are off so I mean I would assume there's a small subset of the population for whom that's not true right who are overusing marijuana yes and and that's probably the majority in fact okay so so then you know but it's the same way with food I agree so I don't think there's anything we disagree about here because I'm not talking about criminalizing marijuana use I think that we should honestly discuss the the evidence that for a subset of the population there is some evidence that marijuana is addicting but it's a subset it's not in everybody who's on marijuana the vast majority of people on marijuana are not addicted to marijuana I think in the same way through alcohol as well it is there's people that are going to be addicted to almost anything and I think there's there's absolutely people that are addicted to sugar this for sure people that are addicted to nicotine and alcohol and all these things we let people have the material addictiveness of marijuana is not comparable to opioids go for it it's not even comparable to alcohol or nicotine it's it seems to be very rare when people become physically addicted to it extremely rare and what's what's common though is abuse and it's common in everything that human beings consume it's use is common as we said with food certainly common with alcohol it's certainly common with pills and this is why you know I really believe that the way to solve some of these problems is a social fabric problem like an embarrassing problem it's a social fabric problem it's a personal choice problem yes that's why virtually every solution I suggest is so funny you know I'm constantly conservatives like me who are libertarian leaning are constantly accused of being non compassionate no it's just our compassionate solutions don't involve the use of government you know it's like we're going to encourage people to make better decisions with their lives and if you choose not to do that it's a free country well you know coming from a religious background you have this community that reinforces this kind of behavior and thought and I think that's one of the major really one of the best benefits of religion yeah is that moral fabric and that community the sense of community even silly ones like Mormons you know they're the nicest folks right they believe something that is fucking patently insane if you go and read the Joseph Smith text from 1820 we use 14 years old the shit that he wrote you know with that said I mean Alexis de Tocqueville talks about this you know early on in the American Republic the idea is that what makes America very different is the idea you don't need a big government when you do have a supportive social fabric what do people feel like they're at least oriented toward a common goal it's one of the problems that I think we have in the country right now I'm not sure people are oriented toward even a common sense of conversation mm-hmm I mean it's you don't have to agree on on everything in order to have a common sense of the important values that that unify the country or showing us right now I always you see I'm Harris is sort of my bet no are here because he's obviously a militant atheist I'm I'm in equally an equally strong believer and yet when it comes to the things that we would like to see happen in the country government policy level but on a let's have a conversation level and discuss on evidence level we're on the same page there's certain core assumptions you have to make in order for that to happen in my argument about America and the West is that those core assumptions are built on judeo-christian foundations Sam's core argument seems to be that they're built on evolutionary biology we differ a little bit there hmm I don't want to let this marijuana thing go - yeah one of the things that I wanted to bring up to you was this idea that if you're a religious person don't you think that there's certain things that maybe God put here for us to consume to change your perspective to allow you to reach new levels of consciousness so you think it's entirely possible that some of these things that are here I know you have an experience but they might literally have been put there by God and there's some evidence to say that a lot of the text from the Bible that in particular there was a I think it was the University of Tel Aviv somewhere in in Jerusalem or these scholars were they were trying to decipher what it meant when Moses encountered the burning bush right and they believed that it may have been the acacia tree which is very rich and dimethyltryptamine which is a psychedelic substance that actually that the brain produces and it's very common in plants and they think that this might have been when he met God and God was a burning bush that this might have been some crude translation of them being involved in some sort of a psychedelic experience now it sounds outlandish unless you've had that psychedelic experience and when you have you very well could think that you were in a conversation with God this is on earth and this is something that may very well have been lost information or this may very well have been rituals that people participated in to bring them closer together and to reinforce that sense of community that you do get from a church and you do get from a group of people that share more beliefs and values and there's a there's real good discussion that a lot of these experiences that became these religious doctrines came from psychedelic experiences now as someone who's never experienced that before I know this is probably a very strange thing to try even wrap your head around its it is entirely alien until you experience it but it might very well be religious I mean I've heard that from other people who have been who've used those kind I'm actually made this argument to me too about use of psychedelics and I mean maybe apples well okay so this argument I will say I'm not super fond of the argument that God made something and therefore it's ours to use or I mean like I keep kosher right God made pigs I don't need them so so I am NOT a huge fan of the argument that because something is here or because an urge is natural therefore we ought to imbibe or therefore we ought to participate in a particular activity you know one of the things that I that I'm very big on I'm a rationalist when it comes to religion as much as you can be a rationalist with read religion to the extent that I think that it's up to us to use our reasonable faculties to determine the proper use of things mm-hmm so which is why you shouldn't overuse drugs even if you're going to use drugs this is prior to the problem of making things illegal you make things illegal then you really don't know what it is or how it affects the body or what's the right dose or the wrong dose and then people get involved in these terrible situations where they're taking things they're just guessing I mean there's truth but it's also true that on a social level I'm not talking about legal because we totally agree on legal level on the social level there's a couple of things that are true of for example the Orthodox Jewish community low rates of addiction because people have that social fabric they don't feel the necessity also yeah as you say substance use in moderation can actually be quite a good thing so low rates of alcoholism in the Jewish community and part of that is the fact that you are given kiddush wine from the time you're a kid right I mean you actually our D stigmatize yeah it's D stigmatized and the idea is that in its proper context this could be a good thing right so I'll admit I don't know enough about the proper context of marijuana to know when it would be a quote-unquote good thing and so can be a good thing so and also I'm you know I don't the truth is I don't enjoy drinking right I'm not I'm not a drinker I don't enjoy I like reality I like living and real and you know I like experiencing it totally sober so I've never really felt the urge to do any of that stuff I hear the pitch I hear the pitch but I've never really felt the interior designer need to understand that I think that what we're dealing with though is perceptions that have been molded by laws that were shaped by tyrants that's what I think I mean again that's totally possible and plausible yeah and it's historically accurate I mean when it comes to prohibition prohibition with alcohol didn't work prohibition with drugs is just making the cartels bigger that's causing men like drunk sir don't like drugs government intervention ISM is generally a giant fail I think our perceptions of what is good for you and is bad for you is also based on laws that the government created ignorant Lee the sweeping psychedelic Act of 1970 which made virtually everything psychedelic that they could they missed a few things evening slipped through the cracks but all of the tryptamines and most of them psilocybin LSD all that stuff was made completely illegal by people really didn't even know what it was and a lot of that is why we based our ideas of what's good or bad for you it's it's based on what is legal and what other people have done with it on this area I'll admit not only complete experiential ignorance but a complete evidentiary ignorance so I have an examined the evidence I really don't have strong opinions on any of this I think it's one of the bridges that we all could use between conservative thought and liberal thought particularly for people that are dying it's one of the things that Johns Hopkins found and so there's been other studies done and there's been therapy done on people that are dying of terminal diseases and they give them psilocybin and when they give them these mushroom trips they have these beautiful experiences where they completely accept death and it's almost a universal reaction to it that they'd like the the amount of people who still experience a positive benefit months and months after the experience while they're dying that they they say this was an incredibly moving and powerful moment in my life that allowed me to accept the fact that my time here is done mhm I mean listen if that's something that works for people and that's what it's designed to do then it's designed by God literally mine that that's fine I think there's also the generalized religious counter-argument that there are no shortcuts to nor no shortcuts to happiness so let's pose this I don't think well this is the question right I mean like let's say that I could guarantee you the tomorrow you're going to be a happier person all you have to do is take this regimen of of drugs that you're gonna take every day and it's gonna make you a happier person a more well-rounded person but it's gonna permanently change your brain chemistry's that's something that you think is good or is it something you think is bad because from a religious perspective there's an argument to be made that these are this is work you need to do on yourself without outside aid if possible if there's cases where you can't then you can't but yeah you know interesting experiment turns McKenna had a line about that he said that there was a joke about there was a monk and he met Buddha because Buddha came to town and he said Buddha he wanted to impress him he said I practiced the city of levitation and I have done this for 10 years and now I can walk on water and the Buddha says but the ferries only a nickel what are you fucking waste your time like you can aid the progression rapidly with psychedelic drugs and this is something that ma you know do you know about maps and their work with MDMA and soldiers that have had PTSD not so much no it's it's phenomenal by giving these soldiers MDMA therapy meaning they they give them MDMA which is essentially what people think of as ecstasy the street they give them pure MDMA and then they assist them with they actually have a psychologist sit with them a therapist and they go over all these details of these traumatic events and they come to peace with everything and they've had profound benefits for soldiers and for we some combat journalists different people that have been over there and have experienced you know the horrors of war and and just general PTSD maybe people who have experienced violence attacks there is shown to be one of the very best things we've ever discovered for helping people get past so here's to me and I'm think about this on the fly because this is stuff I don't think about very much but it's it's there's a complex moral equation to the extent that if you're talking about somebody who has PTSD somebody has a condition and the only way to help that condition is to use these drugs I've never had a problem with any of that stuff right I mean I've my grandfather was was schizophrenic and by may be bipolar maybe schizophrenic the diagnosis is not exactly clear they prescribed him lithium made him a lot better would he have been better off struggling with the schizophrenia of course not it's much better that he should have the lithium and then be able to live in his rational mind yeah so when there's a problem using drugs to get past it and and work with it is a good thing you do run the risk of the sort of brave new world situation where you have a group of people who have a certain level of air SATs happiness that is not driven by a point of view but more by just the chemicals in their their body the chemicals affect your point of view well that is a hundred percent true but are you Dhruva Hari talks about maybe this is the future right he talks about the idea that maybe the future is we just drug ourselves until we're happy basically more that happiness is the drugs because if you're a scientific materialist that's what it is happiness is just a bunch of chemicals flowing throughout your body so if you can bring them in without self change but I do wonder whether that robs people of a certain level of purpose that the struggle is part of being human I think we're changing what it is to be human just by carrying around phones and just I mean that's that's true but I think that that's again one of the things that I think makes being a human worthwhile is the idea that you are struggling I think I think the struggle is actually meaningful and I think that's why religions tend to set prophylactic rules sometimes for good and sometimes for ill so for example I I'm addicted to my phone I mean there's just no question right it's it's in my hand all the time and but from Friday night to Saturday night it's off I can't look at it I'm forbidden from looking at it and this breaks the cycle at least for one day a week and that's a good thing that makes me better as a human being it's a limit I set for myself and then a limit that I abide by and if you believe in in self mastery where's the happy medium between self mastery and I need a little bit of aid and I think that there there is a happy medium there but I'm not sure that that your drugs are the answer to I don't think you're suggesting drugs or no there's also a problem with the word drugs that everything is under that blanket and that blanket can be entire we're extremely positive there's a priori it too I mean not accusing you but that that term it's a problem it's a problem term because what these are are substances that are psychoactive and some of them can be extremely beneficial and some of them have short-term experiences that last with long-term results and I don't think that there's enough knowledge that I don't think the people that are negative against it have experienced enough of it or have looked at it in an objective rational way because I think it's something that could be here take a perspective to give people a chance to think outside of their normal conditioned way of thinking that might have been established by their community or by their church by their neighborhood or whatever it is sometimes a little bit of a break a little bit of a mental break from what you're experiencing and the vibration that you exist on almost every day to separate from that and to get a look at it from the outside sometimes it allows you to have a renewed perspective that can enhance your life greatly as long as when people re-engage their re-engage thing this is what we share you and I are both discipline people it's one of things I really respect about you you're a very hard worker you're always on the ball you're very disciplined and I know that a lot of conservative people admire that and they mire that in folks and they think that people who are liberal are not disciplined they think that they're lazy it falls into this like weak beta male sort of category of people that are progressive and liberal and I think that's I think that's a misunderstanding I think you guys you and I both agree that the struggle is very important but I'd struggle physically so that I don't have to struggle mentally I struggle physically so that I can have a better way of looking at things with less stress so we have this shared belief that things should be a struggle Meister I forced my struggle on myself so that I can have a better perspective and this is something that you and I differ on like I think you exercise right yes often you do it every day yeah makes a big deal yeah it's yeah I mean I think we we both understand that struggle is a it's an important part of understanding yourself yeah if you do not push yourself you do not struggle you're not gonna really get who you are what your boundaries are and if you're self-indulgent if every day you're stuffing things in your face that you want to like it's good to have a rule like hey for this next month you can't eat this or you can't do that or I want you to start fasting 16 hours a day is it that hard just eat for 8 hours a day and fast for 16 but no but that's just doing something like that and setting these guidelines for yourself and putting yourself into a disciplined state can be extremely beneficial like Jocko Willie coy says discipline equals freedom it's a great formula and it's real well it and again it is the basis of a lot of religion I mean a lot of religion is very practice based it's one of the reasons I like Judaism as opposed to other religions they very practice based religion you know sometimes you can take that too far in one direction which as I say you need to balance reason with with dictates right that are meant to make you better but that goes all the way back to Aristotle I mean Aristotle talks about how you have to practice to be good right you have to practice to be virtuous what makes you a virtuous person is acting repeatedly in accordance with with right reason and that is setting rules for yourself right that is not violating every rule and I think when when we talk about on the conservative side you know folks on the left being lazy I don't mean that in terms of work I mean Mark Zuckerberg is a hard worker I assume I think Jack Dorsey when he's not getting bitten by mosquitoes seems like a hard worker but you know most most of the people most people have jobs are hard workers I don't think it's about that I think it's it's it's a certain perspective on the necessity of rules hmm and and the mindset that if I don't know what a rule is for I'm going to remove it so G K Chesterton has this this very famous kind of contrast that he draws between people who tend to be right-wing politically and people who tend to be left-wing politically he says people who tend to be left-wing politically you're walking through a walking through the woods and you come across a fence you don't know why the fence is there and you say I don't know why this fence is here I'm removing it and the person who's right-wing walks through the forest and sees the fence and says I have no idea why the fences here I'm gonna go find out why the fence is here and then maybe I'll remove it and that's the the kind of Burke and conservative attitude toward rules the the attitude that this rule was put here for a reason now maybe the rule sucks maybe the rule has to go but let's try and figure out what was it the root of the rule before we just wipe out all the fences and then try to rebuild from the ground up all these new fences and that's especially true in a civilization that's the most prosperous and free civilization ever created I mean if the system really sucks that would be one thing but I think people are kind of ungrateful about the fact that we live in the best possible time in the best possible place yeah that's just that that's the reality and everybody who's so negative about living in America it's like okay in 1900 one in ten American children died in the first year of life in 1850 the average life expectancy in Europe was under 40 so what are you talking about what are you talking about like our biggest problems today really for the vast majority of people is that we are too fat or that we are we don't have a job but we still have somebody who's basically making sure we have food like starvation is not a serious problem in the United States there's a problem of poverty there's not a problem of widespread starvation in fact poverty tends to align with obesity you know that this is a pretty unbelievably great society so maybe you ought to look back at the roots of that society before we start willy-nilly tearing up all of the all of the moral boundaries I think you and I agree that this is the greatest time ever to be alive I think what these other folks are saying is that we can do better and I think we all agree with that but sure but to classify this time as being a terrible time is I think wholly inaccurate by the way I hate it right and left that's one of the reasons it's one of the reasons why I think there's a certain point where the trumpian populace right meets the Bernie Sanders populist left and that is them walking around saying how much things suck and it's like no no that's that's just wrong I'm a long time it's amazing time for communication - it's amazing time for people to kind of understand other people's perspectives and points of view which is one of the reasons why deep platforming and in silencing of conservatives even though I'm not conservative bothers the shit out of me yeah I just think it's it's a it's a non harmonious action in a time that I think could lead to people having much more open and much more balanced communication I mean this should be the time when we are having more conversations and more fun with each other and where we are feeling more entrepreneurial we have a better social safety net than so what one of the statistics that really bothers me is that the level of American mobility has declined rapidly in the United States so the number of people who are leaving their home states who go somewhere else to work a job for example is that decades low why it's easier to get anywhere now there's 7 million unfilled jobs I keep hearing from you know folks who I you know personally like people I talk to Carlson that you know you grew up in this small town and the town is dying the industry left well you have the government somehow owes it to you that you get to grow up in this town and stay in that town even if all the industry left and I just think to myself by whom who gave you this guarantee that you get to stay there and I know listen I'm I'm a lucky guy I grew up in a two-parent household we grew up wealthy but we were middle middle-class like I grew up in a small house in Burbank with two bedrooms and I had three sisters those me and my three sisters and in one bedroom and one bathroom for six people that's not poor that's middle-class that's a great life and I understand some people don't have that life but one thing that is guaranteed to you is the opportunity for adventure in this country so go and move like why are we inculcating a feeling of victimhood in a society where if you make the right decisions you will do well I mean not you might do well if you make basic basic right choices you will finish better than you started in American society I mean we're talking like the most basic choices like finish high school and don't have a baby out of wedlock and get a job like you do those three things and the Brookings Institute says that you will not be in permanent poverty in the United States like that's amazing that was not true for the vast majority of human history for the vast majority of human history you did all of those things there wasn't high school but you did all the other things and then you were lived like a serf on a farm until you died at age 37 of diphtheria or something so it's it's just the the lack of optimism in a society where it should be running rampant is kind of astonishing to me well it's perspective right I mean rich kids grow up with this perspective of constantly being rich and people grow up with this perspective of you know how they view the United States is this negative thing or that they don't know how to change their life they don't know how to take action because they haven't had anyone around them that's done it that's part of the problem with small-town mentalities is that you kind of inherit the vibe of the people that around you and if they're ignorant or if they're their shallow-minded or if they're they're stuck in this one town and they're never gonna leave and you get caught in that vibe you can one day wake up and you're 32 and you've never done anything I mean this is Vance talks about in hillbilly ology the people who are in these small towns and they've basically been told that they have two choices they can go on welfare or they can leave yeah and it's like a final going welfare you know everybody around me is why not there's nothing morally deficient about going on on welfare it's actually one of the the bigger problems I have with the welfare state generally is that it disconnects the person receiving the aid from the person giving the aid the one that like in our religious community to take an example there there's a time a few years back where a guy came to me I bought some art from him he's an artist and really does good work he came to me and he said my family doesn't have enough money to make the rent this month can you offer me in advance on art that you'll buy somewhere down the road and of course make sure so I assign him a tract and he understood that five years later he came back to me and he said you know you still haven't bought that piece of art I owe you a piece of art because he knew who gave him the money right and so he was willing to understand that that was an act of charity and he wanted to make sure that that that was paid back he said this in Cinderella man right with Russell Crowe that moment where he makes money he walks back in to the welfare office and he rolls out a wad yeah like that that feeling that the government isn't just a giant cash machine that is exist you pay your money but that that money actually comes from somewhere either it's coming from the future because we're gonna have to pay back the debt or it's coming from somebody's tax money and that we all owe something to each other right and by the same token the what what I owe to my neighbors is that if they're in trouble then it is my obligation as a good person to try and help them out on a personal level yes right and the charity and religious communities is extremely high that's that's the social fabric that I'm talking about yeah without without that sort of dutiful sense to one another you can't have rights because if you just have rights then and and no duties then there will be no one to take care of each other it's why while I'm libertarian when it comes to government I'm very conservative when it comes to they need to build a social fabric in communities and and and have people with working families and in communities of working families yeah I really think that that's one of the best things that comes out of religion is when you have a tight-knit community like yours and you do have that sense of charity well you really are a community of people that care for each other and look out for each other the problem is of course doing that large-scale and then the problem is doing it in some sort of a nondenominational way where people they don't have to have the exact same beliefs but they still share these core values of community and taking care of each other I mean that's what people really benefit from when they've done studies with people when they show happiness and what is happiness correlated with it's almost always it correlated with friends and loved ones and family rights the most important thing can have and when it comes to diversity know there's the slogan that diversity is our strength well there's a Robert Putnam as a sociologist over at Harvard he wrote an entire book about the social fabric called Bowling Alone he was kind of the the pioneer and the idea of social capital and what he said is that he went in with the to writing this book with the idea that diversity is our strength and then he did some research and what he found is that ethnic diversity only correlates with two things these are his words increased tv-watching and increased protest marches that's all it unless unless it is within the boundaries of a common goal so if you walk into a church very diverse ethnically everybody's got the same general goal which is we're worshipping God in one particular way and we believe in a certain core set of values and now diversity is great your experiences come to bury or you're all aiming in the same direction he gives the example of the army you see a bunch of people who go in diverse group of people diverse races different backgrounds and when you talk to those guys while they're serving or after they leave they don't give a crap about the diverse backgrounds of the people they were serving what they're all aiming their guns in the same direction well in the United States we have to be aiming our guns in the same direction or we can't really have a functioning social fabric at all and I'm perfectly willing to give charity to people who I don't know who still believe like I do that America is a fantastic country rooted in immutably good principles but that starts to break down when I'm being asked to give charity just on a personal level to somebody who believes that America is fundamentally evil and needs to be torn out at its roots and replaced with something better right because now we're not aiming in the same direction so on a human level I care about you but I'm a but on a social level if I have a choice between somebody who basically agrees with me about fundamental values and somebody who is diametrically opposed I'm gonna give my money to the person who basically agrees with me on those fundamental values and again I don't think those fundamental values have to be religious I don't think you have to be a god believer to recieve charity from me or I don't think I should have to an atheist receive charity from you but I do think that you do have to take into consideration a few things and now we're on the same page personal responsibility the idea that you do live in a free country just historically and relatively speaking this is a free country which means decision making is on you so man up a little bit they that the decisions that you make we should all have sympathy for people who have had worse lives and worse experiences but in the end if you are capable if you're not fundamentally disabled in some way that you need to make a plan for your own life and then you need to do that like are you more willing to give charity to somebody who has a plan for how to get themselves out of the hole of course um of course you know that but that relies on that person feeling an obligation to do that I also think that we you're talking about with with charity within the community is so much more there's so much more connection than charity from the government when you're talking about welfare the problem is that there's this dissolving of responsibility because it's just a cheque that comes in that you feel like well this is a rich country I'm owed this anyway right and you know and when I was a kid we were on welfare and we used food stamps and I remember being very ashamed of it and feeling really weird that we were that poor that we needed help from the government but my parents worked their way out of it they were young they had a kid my guess is that my guess is that the the social stigma probably has something to do with that meaning that I'm sure didn't it didn't want to be on welfare they don't want to be on food seems like contrast your story with Adam Carolla's right Adam talks all the time about how his parents were also on food stamps and Welfare and they just didn't give a shit they were just and he always resented that he thought that was bad yeah he said like you could work why aren't you and that gave him the impetus to get up and do what what Adam has done so you know that that kind of it's not pick yourself up by the bootstraps helping hands are good but it is if I if I were capable of picking myself up by my bootstraps would I do so yeah and if the answer is yes then we're all on the same team well there's this is a real problem too and that some people just get a horrible hand dealt to the pressure at birth they're with parents that really are doing a terrible job raising them they're fucking them up every step of the way you're around a bunch of people that have crammed everybody's fuckin up there's no examples of anybody that's doing well I mean it's one of the unique things about the Internet today is that a kid that's in that environment can get a hold of maybe something that you said or something that you know someone else has said and start reading books and start taking in information that gives them a different perspective and fuel that perspective with more motivational stuff and more information in education and sometimes kids just like you were saying with Adam Carolla they grow up with these parents that are just not ambitious at all so they become very ambitious and they work very hard to not be like them I mean sometimes it's good to see that example but most the time it's it's just fucking hard for them to reprogram their head well for sure it's hard to do that it's also hard I really think that there's there's a lot of focus in the country right now on raising awareness which is fine you know raise it raising awareness of our history and all the bad things that we've done you know good I mean people people should know about all the good things and all the bad things right it's its history its history but this this incessant focus on the idea that people's lives are getting better by suggesting that their perennial victims in the United States I just don't I don't understand how that's a good thing yeah like as a historically a member of a historically persecuted group if I had grown up and my parents had said to me no matter what you do you will be put under the thumb of the dominant society that's a pretty horrible message to tell to a kid and I think that's true for politicians again on both sides of the aisle I think you get it from from president Trump when it comes to some rural areas where it's like well it's the Mexicans and the Chinese coming in to steal your jobs and you're under the thumb of people who are trying to destroy you and on the other side of the aisle people who say well you're in the inner city and therefore the cops are racist against you and want to destroy you and everybody is out to get you and it's like well how about this how about like again the single best thing you can do for yourself is make basic decisions that are entirely within your control okay unless you are unless you are raped god forbid single motherhood is a choice that you get to make about your life this is a choice you got to make about your life finishing high school unless you are legitimately disabled in some way I mean especially in LAUSD where you basically have to be able to read a third grade level to finish high school you know just just like these are these are decisions personal decision making if you want I've never seen somebody's life get better by complaining about reality I've seen a lot of people's lives get better by acknowledging that reality is what it is and then making personal decisions to make their lives better and that's considered non compassionate but it seems to me the the essence of compassion sometimes is saying at least make the baseline just say if you make the baseline decisions and then you fail we can talk about what happened I don't think it's non compassionate I think it's pragmatic and I think you're right but I also think that there's some people that are there in situations that require something external to assist them there they're the way their life has been set up and this is what I think when people think about compassion and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps if you have a real if you really have an honest and accurate assessment of extreme poverty and terrible neighborhoods it's not as simple as do something good to better your life part of it is you got a fucking stay alive certainly you're surrounded by people who either have committed crimes or will commit crimes you mean one out of every four people you run into might be a criminal in the worst neighborhood in the country for sure and but I think we have to this is where we recognize what government is good at government is good at two things cutting other people cutting checks from other people's money they're great at it and they'll see that they're right on top of those parking tickets by the way to make sure that they and they're amazing at it so seizing your money and paying money they're very good at and and pointing a gun at people right these are the two things that government was built to do was collect taxes and pay out money and then point guns at people right this is what government does so which of those two things would you apply in a situation where there's just a complete lack of social capital because cutting a check isn't going to do it alone where does that check go to the parents who are not doing not able to protect their kids it's one thing if you're enabling the parents to move out of that community or something right but that's why I say you have to attach if you're gonna do the government welfare thing you got to attach it to a plan it can't just be here's a check enjoy your life because what is the plan look I don't think one of those terrible communities you live in an apartment complex so I mean here's the reality I think that the plan very often when it comes to a crime-ridden area is the other side of what the government does which is you need more cops in that area I think that the the great lie that though that these community is that our crime-ridden I'm talking about white Appalachia and I'm talking about yes a black inner cities these these communities do not need fewer cops they need more cops because at the precondition to investment in those communities and increase tax dollars in those communities an increased social capital in those communities is people not getting shot every five seconds yeah I mean that's that's why the worst thing that can happen to law-abiding minorities is for the cops to abandon areas where crime is high it just doesn't make any sense and that's not just me saying Jane Leeves reporter at the LA Times very much on the left has said the same thing while abiding people want crime rates to go down like conditions have to change in a community for conditions to change in the community did you ever see the wild wealth the whites the wild and wonderful whites of West Virginia no it was a it was a johnny knoxville did he produce that documentary i think he did right dude it's about this family that lives in West Virginia that is just a bunch of psychotic criminals is these crazy white people the kids drinking Mountain Dew and doing backflips on the bed and they're all on pills it's bananas and it gives you this insight like if you are in this community if you were in this family and this is obviously a very extreme family but there's many more of them out there that have not been documented if you are in that community good fucking luck getting out right good luck the the money that you get other than welfare is from selling pills you know everybody's on these pills so you're all walked out you don't know what the fuck is going on half the day you're on opiates I mean it is a bananas environment and there's a lot of people like that in this country for sure in in poor Latino communities and poor white communities and poor black communities the idea that these people just gonna pull themselves up by their bootstraps it's crazy I just think they don't have a plan and I think if we really want to help them that there's got to be some way where you can give these people the opportunity to step out of that pattern whatever that sure community centers outreach programs whatever it is I don't know what it is I mean the truth is the truth is that historically speaking it was people actually going to church yeah I mean and there means there's a good lot of good I've searched going person right absolutely recognize that there's a lot of good involved and having that framework right and that I'm not sure that that's yeah I don't think you can create sort of a fake social fabric with just a government welfare system like it just it hasn't worked I mean disability exists I've been increasing every year it's it's not this is it's question I asked Andrew yang actually sorry our episode comes out on Sunday and obviously andrew is a big fan of ubi you know basic income and I'm not averse to the idea of ubi in a future where legitimately 50% of the population can't work cuz they've all been automated out of existence and all of this but there's one section in his book where Andrew talks about how if we cut people a check for ubi then they will spend their extra time creating art and engaging in hobbies that they like and I just thought to myself I mean I said it to him like people are on disability I don't what they're doing right if you're on disability the people you're talking about who are suffering they're not out there written poetry I mean the the rise of the opioid epidemic and people who are OD'ing on drugs and all this stuff that's in precisely the same demographic you're talking about you're just talking about a check from one place as opposed to another place I don't I don't really see how that solves the problem I think we have a crisis of purpose yes right now and I don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable on the one hand by changing our trade rules and I also don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable by by cutting a government check I just don't think that that's how people are wired I absolutely agree with you that there is a crisis of purpose my concern is about automation and my concern and obviously I haven't really studied this other than talking to Andrew yang and talking to Elon Musk and a few other people that are proponents of universal basic income they think that there's going to be such a massive loss of jobs in such a short period of time from people that are non skilled laborers and it's gonna go away there's millions and millions of jobs and these people are not gonna have anything and that it could be chaos right so there's there's two problems that come up there and this is where Andrews book is interesting because problem number one is that the people will be poor they won't have a source of income ubi solves that the other sort of but does it even that gives them $1,000 a month if you have did right I mean even if even if you just had a Swedish redistribution system and the average tax rate when I was at 60% or something it might let's say we could solve the money problem for a second which you know without tanking the economy which is questionable but let's say we could do that we could add trillions of dollars to the budget year and we could solve that I'm still not sure that that solves the deeper problem which is that when people lose jobs they lose purpose yes right so I'm not sure that ubi solves that problem as I say we have we have a rich social welfare network in the United States and we're seeing this stuff happen anyway you know I'm a little bit I'm a little bit less catastrophic by a little bit I mean a fair bit less catastrophic and my thinking about automation then then either Andrew yang or you London I think that people will be able to adapt quick enough to avoid the problems they'll realize the jobs aren't there anymore and they'll just naturally gravitate towards other profession I think over time that people will do that but they're not always the same people when there's always shift in the economy and the the ideal economic model has a trucker becoming a coder right but that's that's not read that was that whole learn to code drive people kicked off of Twitter right apparently if you say to journalists then that's that's very bad if you see those codes truck yeah that's what it was that's you learn to code to a trucker if you say learn to code to a trucker then that's just you being helpful right if you say learn to code to a journalist then that is targeted harassment on Twitter that's where this is it to me well care about you I can say whatever but it's but yeah I mean I think that but if you just say it's a friend hey fuckface learn to code to take people out for it's one of the best examples of like how censorship step over steps its boundaries in becomes almost like satire yeah it's Israel it's really really like this is the biggest aggression ever learn to code later code like that's something look this is a stupid thing that someone said about coal miners they really said that about coal miners it maybe they can learn to code and so everywhere what the fuck and so learn to code became a joke and became something that you would mock people right there is their explanation for it was so crazy it was like no then learn to code got connected with ok premises are bad they used the phrase learn to code that means if you say learn to code you're a white supremacist look what he lost the frog that fucking frog that feels good man the Frog they turn the freakin frog a mean look yeah yeah yeah I mean as far as automation you know there's constantly people saying this is the the Nicolas Nassim Taleb view of reality which that the Black Swan incident can happen any any second so watch out for it versus the sort of Steven Pinker view of reality which is the Black Swan incident is called the Black Swan incident because it's a Black Swan incident meaning that it happens incredibly rarely you know the idea that we are on the verge of a catastrophic drop in job numbers because of the automation of trucking for example I'm not sure that I buy it the reason I don't buy it is because you still are going to need someone sitting behind the wheel of that truck there are human drivers on the road it's gonna there will be a gradual transition away from some of these jobs with the Andrew yang talked about radiologists and how radiologists are gonna be priced out of the market by computers they can do a better job of diagnosing tumors first of all awesome right I mean that's that's good first of all that brings down cost and you won't get cancer as advanced that'd be a good thing and then second of all what what a lot of Technology studies have tended to show is that technology just gets integrated in a different way in particular career so there will be jobs that are eliminated for sure there will be jobs we haven't heard of that will be created also and mostly technology will become more of a productivity aid to two people so this is true in factories jobs have been lost in factories it's the best example of where jobs are lost but it's mostly turn offices right how many office jobs have been created because you have computers what's the War Office jobs exist because I write by hand do you think that this is a kin to like a government bailout like the idea of the government bailout was like the banks are too big to fail and some people thought you know what you got to let them fail so you figure out why they failed and we'll never have it happen again if there is this thing and the government steps in and says wait a minute I know you lost all your jobs are going to give you $1,000 you don't have to figure it out $1,000 a month and some people go okay I'm not gonna figure it out now whereas those people might have gone on a fear filled journey to try to figure out their purpose in life because now they're stuck where their job doesn't exist anymore so they're put that corner I mean they have to act there is there is innovation that comes from from a welfare check I mean there are people who become dependent on government then there used to be I mean that stuff is true it does happen and listen Milton for made an argument for universal basic income as a replacement for the welfare system there there is another problem with universal basic income that I asked Andrew about also and that was you know one of the one of the big issues is that poor people very often people who are permanently impoverished not people who are temporarily poor but they tend not to spend money where we think they ought to spend money they're not taking that money and they're not putting it into education or into the righteous people hose and cigarettes I mean the average the average person who is making less than I think is $16,000 a year spending four hundred dollars here in lottery tickets right minutes legitimately just flushing your money down the toilet so it's so how do you aren't you just gonna end up back in the same place you know in six months where people took that money and used it in ways that actually didn't benefit them and at a certain point the question is are you do you own your decisions you do not own your decisions and what level of incompetence or inability do we say you no longer own your decisions and so we're just gonna take care of you on a permanent basis that's that's really the the question here I think we're looking at when you're talking about welfare we're looking at worst case scenario right where someone does get dependent upon the welfare state and does use that money frivolously and does make poor decisions but then there's got to be other people that are single moms that you know maybe had a kid with some fucking asshole that doesn't want to pay and yeah it's a piece of shit and they have to hide from them and they're just trying to feed their kids first those people exist 200 have a community to help them out maybe they're not a part of a church and maybe they don't have a good group of neighbors maybe they've had to move somewhere for work and they got stuck in some place where they don't know anybody but I think part of this is to recognize that incentives matter on both ends so the idea is that you give some people more money and they'll they'll do well it's also true that if you create a welfare system that benefits single motherhood you will get more single motherhood I mean the the single motherhood right in the black community before welfare was twenty percent now it's seventy percent in the white community it was like five percent now it's forty person you've said that like out of wedlock children and having a kid when you're young is like it's a terrible idea for your life but what do you recommend to have kids avoid that are you one of those people that think they're without that thing on it no condoms as we're saying right like don't have don't don't have unprotected sex I mean like this this is not it's not my my fake cursing it's not effing rocket science I mean like yeah it's it it's not rocket is make mistakes I mean that's what happens okay but and then if the government pays for those mistakes it becomes less so what should what should happen should the kids suffer no I mean presumption it be I mean actually be worked out I mean it depends on the situation yeah you know if there are parents available to the kid presumably the parents the grandparents would take a pretty active role in the in the raising difficut also there there well how about this how about we assume that if you are old enough to get pregnant then you are old enough to let's let's talk about seventeen year old or eighteen year old used to be shotgun marriages were thing that's a good idea I think the idea of parents staying together for the sake of a kid that they accidentally bore is absolutely a good idea yes I think that I think that it's a better idea than the man walking away and the kid being without a man in the house so you figure a way to work it out yes and if they were both reasonable they could do that yeah and I think that that by the way a huge percentage of American births in the 40s and 50s were exactly this or a lot of 7-month babies in the 40s and 50s like it's something like 30 to 40 percent of all kids born in the 30s and 40s and 50s were 7-month babies somebody got knocked up and then the expectation was nagging like you did that you did the crime now you do the time right I mean puts people in relationship prison good find somebody to have sex with who you actually think is worthy of a relationship right now or online pornography is available to you like figured and you're okay with that on a moral level yeah no but if I'm going to if I'm going to compare that to having a baby out of wedlock then yeah this is what I think about pornography they could stop now and we're good forever there's no supply and demand problem I think you like making it you guys are a bunch of freaks I mean there's no it's like a business it's almost like you have excess houses that stack up to the moon like there's no way everyone gonna live in all those houses why do you keep making house there's no way one person has ever jerked off to every video that ever existed it doesn't it's not possible and it's also like other forms of media where they just stack up I never really thought of that until we have the backlog of Internet pornography I'm you know I'm a month behind now just think about music right there's all the music that existed before in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s in the 80s and there's new shit every goddamn day it never ends it's this overwhelming library of stuff that we have to it would be good if that music changed from time to time the same song recorded seven different ways you know it should do you listen to what do you think I listen to you do I listen to classic jazz in classical of course yes you're so interesting I was I was a concert level violinist until I was until I was like 17 you still practice yeah I mean that the only expensive object that I own other than my house is violin oh really yeah is it a Stradivarius it is not it is it is a it's not that's all I know yeah they're the two that people may know or stradun and like a Guarneri but those those ones are like hundreds of thousands of dollars this is in the tens of thousands of dollars Stradivarius is hundreds of thousands oh yeah I had a guy who we knew my family knew had a million-dollar Stradivarius now it was so big about it was the big deal well I mean aside from the historic value of the thing they're not making any more of them it does play very differently I mean very differently look I had a crappy violin for most of my like really until the last two years I had a violin that was handed down for my grandfather that was worth maybe 1,300 bucks and it was a piece of crap I mean it was a not a good violin if you're good enough then you can tell the difference between a really great violin to play and one that is a piece of garbage and I was good enough to do that so that's yeah I mean I was I was a classical guy I played I played violin for years my dad was a growing up my dad was a pianist look at what Jamie just pulled up the most expensive violin in the world sold for an estimated 16 million dollars yep for a Stradivari I never lose value I mean really they don't this is it this is it's a good investment the person I know this guy who offered he's offered a strat it think it was 250,000 dollars maybe 10 years ago and he's like know that it's worth like three million dollars to know what is the deal like what if you had to explain what's the difference between the sound that this makes so I mean it has to do with the acoustics of the instrumenting the wood quality there's there's slight variations in the construction of the instrument certain parts of it are thicker or thinner and it is also it's easier to play a better violin so it almost covers for your mistakes when you play a bad violin it tends to scratch and screech more it's why when you get in the upper register with a violin you hit very high notes it can either be very screechy or it can be very beautiful some of that a lot of most that's the player some of that's the violin Jascha Heifetz who's widely considered the greatest violinist to ever live you got a Strad lady blunt Stradivarius cost fifteen point nine million dollar buy these and then they lend them out on loan to you know world's great violinist so there's a button in the end it really is the the quality of the player there's a famous Jascha Heifetz story where he was playing at Carnegie Hall and some lady came up to him afterward and she said you know your violin just it sounds so beautiful and he picks up the violin puts it to his ear and he says honey I don't hear it right now so do you listen to any other kind of music yeah I mean I like some classic rock do you yeah I mean see rocking out yeah I went to Doobie Brothers concert with my parents no that's a band that was named after a joint that's true that's accurate I know did you feel like like a sinner I was a rebel that day Dulli Brothers concert with the other boomers so the other thing is same-sex marriage there's the other thing that I think that we disagree with well I we agree with the marriage thing right should be involved they don't I think where people should be protected is through assets and you know the contract yes yeah I think that that all makes sense to me that all that's though in terms of like alimony and child support and all those things make sense to me and that then the idea that the community reinforces it which would then become the government reinforce and all that stuff that all makes sense to me I understand it but why do you care if two gay guys want to get married um so from a religious point of view sure let's go family just so you know I would need a secular point of view first so the the idea is not that I care deeply whether two gay guys want to get married to each other the idea is that it do I prefer traditional marriage to say to same-sex marriage okay well let me let me phrase it this way what do you think a gay guy is do you think someone's there making a choice or do you think that this is how they were born so the religious point of view on this and I think this is actually just the general conservative point of view on human action generally is I don't know meaning that for the vast majority of people out assume that they have a biological drive to engage in that behavior but the traditional sort of will point of view is that biological drive does not necessarily match up to the activity you ought to engage in right men for example have a biological drive to impregnate many women that's not something religion is cool with either right so the the idea is that rapid religion is cool with the man being with one woman and impregnating her but you're not cool with a man being with a man so I can give you the religious explanation and I can be the second one explanation so these are the religious explanation is that there is something different about a woman then there is about a man and a man is made better through his union with a woman and that if you pervert the sex drive to pursue mere pleasure instead of a lasting relationship upon which the basis of society is built then you are forgoing the proper use of your sex drive right but if you wanted to step in and argue against that you would say that just because someone can't get pregnant doesn't mean that they don't have a loving relationship that contributes to society well that's true but it is also forgoing the more productive relationship of being able to bear and we're children and also we're recognizing that the sections are not different right and and recognizing also the sexes are not the same well you know being with a man is in a relationship different than being with a woman I would assume I mean I think that's why gay guys are gay if it works then assume that they would be fine with being with a woman right so that's so that relationship from a from a religious perspective is more valuable because women have different qualities than men you round off each other's our edges it changes you I mean you're married being married changes a man in a different way that being married to a member the same sex would write but I don't want people to have to do it but if you're not forcing anybody right but I want them to have the option if you're a gay person and of course legally we agree right yeah leave and I keep making this distinction cuz yes whenever I talk about my moral perspective on things mm-hmm then people immediately assume that I'm a theocratic fascist and I just want to keep underscoring yes my personal views on Dave Reubens marriage of no consequence to public policy in any way whatsoever right but I agree with you on that and I don't think it should be a part of public policy and I think people should absolutely be allowed to marry and divorce and do whatever the fuck they want to do no matter who it is but why do you care like as a person who's a rational thinker it's pretty clear that people are gay and I don't really think that this is a decision they make in term in terms of like I'm gonna make a clear choice to defy God and be gay I think they're just good everyone it's a conflation of identity and drive with activity which is something that religion fundamentally reject okay right so the religion fundamentally rejects the idea that you're driven to do something therefore it is your identity therefore you get to participate in the behavior that's it that's a chain of thinking that really so religion if a man is gay in your religion yes a man is gay and they're in love with another man they should just squash those thoughts and find a woman well ideally they would be honest with the woman that marries they're not like we would want ideally ideally you would still get married and have children in a heterosexual relationship if you're not up to that then you wouldn't get married at all - when you describe this to a gay man they will tell you imagine ben shapiro someone said to you you should stop being with your beautiful wife and you need to now marry a man because this is what God wants you to do so you're gonna have to stoop this man and he's gonna stoop you and because this is how the rules are set up so far the shirts right well this is how it sounds - gay folks when you're telling them they have to find a woman and I like one I'm not saying you have to find a woman I'm saying this guy well I'm saying you can't do X right I'm not saying we must but say can't but by whose determination if you decide to participate in this religion right then there a buy-in to the precepts of the religion and the buy-in is okay well no the buy-in is that you can have whatever sexual orientation you please but there's certain activity you can't participate in so you can be gay but you can't have gay sex correct that's that by the way that's what the Bible I mean if we want to go direct to the Texas revival it's what the Bible actually says right I mean even the parts of the Bible that people really hate mm-hmm those parts say that a man shall not lie with a man it doesn't say a man can't be attracted to another man that's Old Testament right yeah that's right that's our stuff right New Testament it gets a little harsher in the New Testament in some places Romans but in any case you know again when it comes to this is what I'm puzzled by is the idea that this is a unique area of human behavior that religion is supposed to treat differently meaning religion treats virtually every human activity like this sin is a failure to abide by a covenant right that's what that's the definition of sin right when when you commit a sin in Judaism in Avera in Judaism what you are doing is failing to do a mitzvah which is a commandment you're violating a commandment well there are lots of Commandments that go directly against what people are driven to do just because the drive is stronger does not make it morally more morally non culpable to violate that commandment so when people pick this one out and they say well this one is particularly intolerant for example I don't see why it's more particularly intolerant than saying to a man that you have to marry one woman or saying to a Jew that you are not allowed to eat this stuff aurilla like it's it may be harder yeah I think there's any question it's harder to abide by those Commandments but it is well within religious tradition like literally every religious tradition that there's a bunch of stuff you are driven to do that you can't now again you don't have to agree with my program I'm not trying to convert you there's one of the nice things about my religion I don't give a crap whether people are Jewish or not like we we actively discourage converts but if you're going to proclaim that you are you know abiding by traditional Judaism this is the buy-in right there's lots of buy-in you have to wear a funny hat sometimes you have to you have to go to shul on Saturdays you have to keep Shabbat like there's there's a lot of buy-in and as long as I'm not bothering anybody else I frankly don't see what business it is of legitimately anybody's what I think about personal relationships I'm not imposing my view on anybody else well I do acknowledge that out of all the religions Judaism probably makes it the the most obvious they don't give a fuck what you do go ahead do you think like they're not trying to my uncle converted and when he convert it was a grind man he had to learn wash it like three years it's a long time so that was the religious perspective on that and the secular perspective when it comes to valuing traditional marriage over over same-sex marriage that's a very simple calculation which is one type of marriage produces traditional children produces children in the traditional biological way and then you have one parents in the house to take care of the kid right that's the value of marriage and and I fully acknowledge that when the value of marriage shifted from it's about production and rearing of children to it's two people who love each other the case for same-sex marriage against same-sex marriage when completely out the window right so you are just sticking to your rigid ideology in terms of like what you believe to be a sin and not believed to be a sin based on your religion based on this very strict moral fiber that this religion is operate in a religious context to me it applies to my family it doesn't apply to you right is there any room for growth in that when people have a better understanding about biology like it if it was proven if there's proven like oh this is why a person develops blue eyes this is why a person is gay this is why there's nothing wrong with it it's just a very oh shit it's red hair it's freckles it's gay it's straight tell me that that homosexual orientation is a hundred percent biologically driven and I will almost completely agree with that I think that there are some cases where it's not but those are rare but this particularly by the way the research tends to show that there's more sexual fluidity among females than males males it tends to be either heterosexual or homosexual research is all done by dudes want their wives to hook up with you the paperwork but but again that it's it's a question that I've always found actually not particularly interesting simply because it doesn't take into account the worldview generally which is that a biological drive does not equal excuse for behaving in a certain way but this that's where it brings me back to this like is it possible that these laws in this religion were written when they're what mean - who do you think wrote the stuff do you think people wrote the stuff or do you think God wrote I think either way even if it were I mean because I am a an Orthodox Jew and I believe that at the very least it's got inspired and God written right but even if I believed on a second level that human beings were that stuff so I think that people 3000 years ago had never seen a gay person before like the very reason to have a commandment is because certain people in your community are behaving in a particular way presumably right there's no commandment not to take your head and shove it in a meat grinder well this is also the argument against pork it's because they didn't understand trichinosis they understand you have to cook the meat to 145 degrees and pork parasites which are very dangerous for people so I'm not a huge fan of naturalistic explanations for religion I think that's a good one though for pork I mean I don't know like I think you could make an argument maybe that it just died in India and there was horrific x-rays of his head he had parasites from pork that had gotten into his body and they had nested in his brain started developing all these cysts inside of his head and they couldn't do anything about it because it was so deep in his head that if they gave him the ante and I parasitic medication it would cost Wehling of the brain and they were there like it was it was so the story it's actually pig shit apparently because people accidentally coming in contact with the pig shit produces this particular type of parasite yeah it's not kosher it's more rare but but trichinosis was pretty common the their attempts to sort of paint back into the Bible certain rationalistic explanations like this make sense though I I think why else would you would it be bad II pigs like Jesus loves pigs so what's going on well III think that the the reversal of the kosher laws in the New Testament you know from from point of view or we don't believe in the divinity of Christ and that there he can make an argument that the the Gospels which were written he was just about fit and no no we don't believe he's a prophet what do you think he was what do you guys mean what I think he was historically I think he was a Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans he got killed for his trouble just like a lot of other Jews at that time who were crucified for trying to lead revolts against the Roman and got killed for their trouble so he became legend in story and it became a bigger and bigger deal as time with a group of followers and then that gradually grew and then do the resurrected no that's not that's not a Jewish belief in Christ once ya know Jesus then they're their ones the ultimate yeah you've got Moses splitting the sea and all that what do you think happen there what do I think happened there yeah well I'll go with my mana D and explanation that there was a I mean it says in the Bible there was a strong east wind so there was a naturalistic explanation for a physical phenomenon that makes sense I mean that's so that's what Maimonides is constantly trying to do is read nature back into the Bible mm-hmm yeah that that is the problem with these texts right is that you're trying to decipher translations from original texts which were written in ancient Hebrew thousands of years ago and we're told an oral tradition for longer than that right I mean this is this is where you know my book which I always hesitate to pitch my own stuff because it sounds gauche pitch away but the new book the right side of history number one New York Times best-selling non-fiction but William a you got number one in the New York Times bestselling really yeah we sold enough that we knocked Michelle Obama out of the woods live for a week so is there protests well no protests yet but suffice it to say the New York Times Book Review or didn't like it but I'm not super shocked by that but the the basic contention that I make is that judeo-christian values on the one hand and then human reason on the other Greek reason really that that tradition is attention and that that tension is where Western civilization lives that basically civilization is the suspension bridge and take certain fundamental precepts of judeo-christian values on the one hand and then takes Greek reason and they're pulling against each other and sometimes reason feels like it's going to dominate religion and sometimes it feels like religion is going to dominate reason and the best of all available worlds you have a bridge that is that is capable of building upon where you can actually have a functional civilization and if you lose reason in the name of theocracy then you end up with tyrannical theocracy and if you lose and if it was religion in the name of reason you end up in some pretty dark places because human beings don't have a very good track record of creating their own purpose creating their own meaning creating their own systems we tend to get very utopian very quickly and things get really ugly which is sort of the story of the particularly first half of the 20th century so this is the benefit of sticking to the rigid ideology that's prescribed by religion is that you don't allow the human beings to keep updating it and changing it because if you do they will eventually slide into chaos yes but there's there which is not to say there's not playing the joints remember they're certainly religion has morphed over time I mean ISM as it was practiced originally probably in many ways does not resemble Judaism as practice now right in fact the Talmud even says this I mean there's there's this kind of fascinating and counterintuitive section of the Talmud where Moses is it's it's what it's called the gotta tie which some of these stories that are just kind of put into the into the middle of the Talmud where Moses comes back and he's watching from on high as a bunch of rabbis in you know second century Palestine are talking about Judaism and he's like I don't recognize any of this stuff like I brought down these books from the mountain and I do not recognize any of this stuff and and God says to him you know if a God says to him right I mean this is how this is more if Moses is pleased in other words he's not Judaism has always had a common law tradition we're using reason to try and develop the ideas behind the commandments and then try and extend them or broaden them and I think that's a good thing but you have to be careful not to completely undermine fundamental roots or or get rid of basic precepts in other words you have to you have to acknowledge there are certain fundamental truths that exist there and then there's play as far as how those are implemented does Judaism have one of those pray the gay away traditions no that's not a thing I mean it's what do they want guys to do like what say what would you do if no not to sin but again soon is a sin is a thing that everybody does meaning that masturbation is not is not okay according to Judaism I assume that a vast majority of young Jewish men even the Orthodox are masturbating so people sit I mean that's that's a recognition it's it's always again I think I can speak on behalf of I will audaciously speak on behalf of both Jews and Christians here I think that religious people are told that when they say that something is a sin this means that they are looking askance at the people who are committing the sin and that is not correct I mean what Judaism and Christianity say is that we are all committing sins on a fairly regular basis where we get uptight is when people start saying because I have a desire for the sin the sin is no longer a sin hmm yeah the real problem is like what why is it a sin like who says it's a sin so again who again this these rules you were assuming are influenced by God right but clearly written by people well the this one you would say if you're a fundamentalist or at least somebody who believes in the the idea that the Torah was given by God was given literally by God but again that doesn't the the logic behind the rules which you know people like Maimonides have tried to explicate the idea is as I said a second this you can do without God right this part you can without God the human sex drive was made to procreate with in a stable relationship in order to project and have future generations of people misuse of that sex drive in any way whether you're talking about from masturbation to homosexual activity is therefore a diminishment of the use of that drive that's the natural law case against against homosexual activity and again I will reiterate for Media Matters for the one millionth time I'm not in favor of any of this being encoded into American law because freedom is freedom people should be able to send how they choose so long as they're not harming anybody else right no but what about people that have had vasectomies and what about women that also she isms not cold vasectomies not cool with it but neither is Catholicism from what I understand right right yeah well I'm not a big fan of that one year experience with but so if what if a man is sterile and the woman sterile are they allowed to have sex both no so yes because there are ancillary benefits to married couples having sex like relationship building right that's not a generalized case against the favored view of sex right mmm that's it's sort of like arguing that intersex people mean that there's no such thing as two separate sexes there aren't two separate sexes and also they're intersex people who have a condition yes right and that that's the same thing here the case in favor of heterosexual sexual activity does not change based on the fact that some people can't actually participate in that what would you do if a young gay guy came to you for advice if someone said hey Ben I'm an admirer of yours I love the way think and follow your philosophies but I've got a problem I'm a young Jewish man and I'm gay and I don't know what to do what would you tell him to do I mean I can't tell them to do anything what would you advise would you tell it would you what help them to not act out on those feelings I would say you do the best you can as a human being and from my moral perspective you try to avoid sin as best you can mm-hmm but everybody sins the problem does that sin though it seems to me that it was defined by people that didn't understand biology because they were dealing with humans that existed thousands of years ago I mean again I really don't think that biblical Commandments are linked and religious Commandments generally are linked to a view of biology meaning that you don't think so no I think that all sin is a recognition that we have drives that we are supposed to forego okay that's pretty mean that's that's fundamental to certainly Judaism and it's Christianity as well I would say Islam even as this basic precept right when I think we can agree that there's some real benefits to discipline there's real benefits to having structure and and it doesn't mean that you can't be creative it doesn't mean that you can't be free and do whatever you want some of the time too but I think we can both agree that this is one of the one of the best benefits of an ideology and what hopefully a positive ideology right and one of the things that I the reason I keep coming back to the governmental regulation point is because my view is that if your view of discipline is not my view of discipline good on you right like go do what you want to do like I've never had a conversation with Dave Rubin about about him being a gay guy right but you did say that you like wouldn't go to his marriage right well I said right as a religious person I can't say I can't actively participate in something that I consider to be a sin but I would go out to dinner with Dave and his husband anytime like my wife and I would do that of course we'd have him over to our house with his husband there's no you don't find any contradiction between your religious perspective and your personal perspective in that regard that you would though you wouldn't be there for religious reasons but that you would be there for personal reasons like if it wasn't would you go to the after-party like if you wouldn't go to the wedding would you go to the after-party anything that was a celebration of same-sex marriage no wow so anything but like if we go to the party no I mean there's a barbecue the next day you know it's and again like I'm not sure why I'm not a good party person so I'm not sure why anybody would want me at their party I haven't been to a party with you but I went to a dinner party with you that's right we had a great time that was a good time that's good that's a funny picture man that isn't I don't know what the fuck to think about that picture it's certainly true Erik Jordan yeah that that is a disturbing one when they'll just just lump you in with a bunch of fucking psychopath just because it's convenient for them and it's an easy way to diminish you that that that is a that is a thing that I see more from the left than from the right and it's really disturbing I always thought until this clickbait generation came along I always thought that especially well you know the New York Times is obviously the higher standard but that you would never see that kind of shit from progressive people you would never see willful distortion of reality to define their narrative in a really disingenuous way and it happened so often now yeah the people get called my favorite is all right adjacent I don't know that means it doesn't mean anything it's a new thing people trying out to try it out it might go away it's again trying to lump everybody into one group for purposes of castigating their motives is yeah you don't have to have an argument with somebody if you assume they're not see so I guess if you call everybody a Nazi you don't have to have an argument it is goofy but you know I think when it comes to the gay marriage thing what people were really worried about is people trying to stop people from doing what they want to do you don't have that in you that's not you what you are doing is opposing it from your your religious beliefs right like if you want to join into my show that show has religious beliefs right that's their business by the way they're like I can't join a church I assume I don't believe the things that people in the church believe you probably could donate you've got to give the right amount of money well I don't believe in the Jesus so there's that there's a Jesus yeah that's not my thing right I mean so that's I wouldn't expect to walk into a mosque and expect them to change their their standards on religion I find it really audacious when people actually expect other people to view the world the same way that they do and then expect that they're gonna be catered to in that way like I wouldn't walk into I wouldn't walk into a gay own bakery and expect them to bake a cake that has verses from Leviticus on it is a weird story you know that bacon cake story because it gets bandied about they those folks went to several Baker's until someone said no this is correct yeah they were looking for a court case yeah yeah and honestly like that's not you being a civil rights hero that's you being a jackass seriously like go to the other bakery what does people do to you they didn't have anything to do with you they don't owe you their cake and if you want a boycott then boycott them right you want to get all your friends to say we're not gonna go buy a cake from these discriminatory humans fine it's a free market have at it but this this notion that somebody owes you their services that's that's me it's not even a freedom of religion case to me that one's a freedom of association case well I think what the the goal is is to shame a business into submission and also to to put it out there in the public eye so that people understand that this is a discrimination that does happen with gay folks well they will go somewhere and someone won't make a cake for him right you know and so I think they wanted to highlight it so if I was being very charitable and I didn't think there be an attention horse I would say maybe that's what they're doing maybe they're just trying to highlight this very real problem it's fine but they actually like took it to the government once you start pointing government gonna people I get real uptight so again it's a weird one if you're if you were just - yeah we do yeah right exactly right talk about how much you don't like them fine you know like I I may disagree with you or I may with you whatever that's that's fine but once you start going to the government and having the government levy like a hundred thousand dollar fines on family bakeries because they because you couldn't find a gay Baker in Colorado supposedly like um no I'm sorry that's that's not cool and I feel the same way if I walked into a bakery I know like you're Jewish we're not serving you I'd be like okay you're you're an a-hole but all right I mean it's free country and there's a bakery across the street or maybe I'll just open a bakery next door to you and take all your business yeah well it's unfortunate that anyone would ever think like that but should it be a law to force someone to think differently you can't it doesn't work this isn't this is my point is it my religious beliefs nobody oh you're a theocratic and I keep coming back to I'm not though like I don't want to force my beliefs on anybody those those are my beliefs so leave me alone and those are your beliefs so we'll leave you alone and if we can't have a system where we acknowledge that those beliefs can coexist and we can still have conversations with each other or be friends it's gonna be real hard to have a society when you told Dave Rubin that you wouldn't go to his wedding did he get butthurt no pun intended because because Dave and I were friends he knows that I have no anger or upset about him doing fuck Ben come on man I don't know I'm not a friend's person so I don't have any friends I mean I have friends but they're it's like very close friends and then acquaintances mm-hmm I tend to keep a pretty close social circle that's smart you have so much time in this life that's pretty much how I feel yeah like if you're the kind of person where it feels like a true obligation for me to drive you to the airport oh not a thing man I'm not drunk correct there are people who make money on driving that's those people but that that kind of went away for the most part so if you find someone who's still asking for a ride at the airport that's a greedy motherfucker at this point your wife or your girlfriend she wants to talk to you when you drop over the airport that's totally cool this is but that's what I mean by my circle of friendship like somebody where I'm in the car with them for half an hour and it doesn't feel like an obligation but I value community and I value value people talking and trying to understand each other and I I've seen so much conflict that's unnecessary because I see so much conflict that's rooted in people not communicating and and instead of communicating and I think this is one of the things that I'm most nervous about with all this deep platforming and censoring people and the silencing of people on the right and it's not that I agree with these people it's that I see how this is just gonna shore up these two sides and it's gonna make it a much more difficult much more difficult atmosphere for communication for real understanding and kind of coming to agreements on things and and recognizing the things that we all all good people seem to agree you could try you should try to help each other should be kind to each other you should work hard you should have good morals and ethics you shouldn't steal you shouldn't take from people shouldn't lie you shouldn't try to cheat the government you shouldn't try to cheat people right just be a good fucking person and that this this transcends religious ideologies it transcends political leanings it really does it should and we can have a truly diverse community truly diverse not force diversity diverse meaning some people are progressive some people are conservative some people are libertarian you can joke with each other we can all get along together and disagree with things just not be fucking hateful towards each other this is possible but it becomes less possible when people feel like they're being silenced or censors it totally right and it's also true that when you when you castigate somebody as morally unequal what you're really doing is you're giving an excuse to get into their shit I mean it's like this is what's really happening here like if I had a slogan beyond the facts don't care about your feeling stuff so just leave me alone you know right don't get into my shit like I'm not bothering you so why are you bothering me and if I have a belief system that's different than yours then so the hell what as long as I'm not bothering you what difference does it make to you how I feel about things the only thing about the gay thing is that it's not you you have a belief about things that's not you but I have lots of beliefs about things that are not me right but they're people that aren't hurting each other but it's so what I mean I can believe that people who aren't hurting each other like I'm not a fan of prostitution so like so I'm not a fan of people here's some prostitutions clearly more of a choice than I think gay people are okay moral distinction which I've repeated a few times was that I'm not a believer that a natural desire to do something therefore makes an activity okay but that's but that's a view that has no externalities my view has no externality so in the same way listen I beliefs about people who eat too much and get obese because they eat too much I think it's a bad thing to do I don't think it's my business you want to do it your problem like you want to you want to F up your life that's what freedom is called resonate one of the seven deadly sins yeah again a Christian thing but yeah I think but it's but yes I mean and I have I have lots of beliefs about lots of things that people do and by the way so do you things that don't affect you right now this is we all do but as long as I'm not forcing that on you because they're no externality is your behavior I don't see why it bothers you like they're legitimately I would assume tens of millions of people in this country who believe that when I die I will go to hell right I don't I don't believe in Jesus and so there are a lot of people believe I don't believe in Jesus therefore I am bound for hell that does not bother me one iota cuz no one's bothering to me so what do I care I don't understand why everyone doesn't take this view if I'm not legitimately bothering you why should why should you care what I think like this is this is what would be puzzling me if somebody came to me and they wanted my opinion on something because they valued my opinion that much I'd give my opinion but it's a you don't have to care about my opinion I think when it comes to the gay thing where people are looking for is to people for other folks to be accepting of who they are and I think for a lot of these gay folks that have been in the closet their whole life that's the big things they're always worried about someone treating them differently or someone diminishing them because they're gay then when they hear someone like you say that you think it's a sin and that you shouldn't act on your biology even though you have these urges that you should instead find a woman they feel the same pangs of rejection and I get that I for sure get that but the confluence between activity and identity is actually kind of a dangerous one meaning then the you know the the idea that if I disapprove of an activity in which you engage that I disapprove of you I just approve of lots of activities that in which lots of people engage including most members of my family including my children a lot of the time rather not me I disapprove of them as a human being or that I'm did and saying they're lesser as a human being Brian that like we all interact with people this way like you disapprove of my view on this I don't get the feeling you disapprove of me as a human being no I don't practice religion you obviously think my religion is bullshit but that's okay I don't care I don't think it's bullshit I wouldn't say I think it's bullshit I think somebody in the mountains bullshit right well I don't even know if that's bullshit what I do know is that it's a historical interpretation of stories that were as much as they could or as little as they want it to be accurately defined and written down and then passed on from generation to generation example you think the fact that I won't eat pork is kind of stupid bull no I don't think it's stupid bullshit first of all I think pigs are intelligent I wish they weren't wild I have a deep affinity to pigs but I also kill them well I mean I killed wild pigs let me be broader about this you're not north excuse my soup there are things about well but I there are certain things of which I believe or practice that you that you probably disapprove or you don't think there's a smartest or you think that there or you might not think is the smartest but as I've gotten older and hopefully wiser I give a fuck less about why you do what you do but whether or not the benefits seem to be worth if the juice is worth the squeeze right and in your case I think the juice is worth the squeeze I think you're a very successful person you're very reasonable you're very intelligent you're an outstanding debater and I enjoy talking to you and listening to you on YouTube I think part of that is because of the fact that your religion right of your religious I think it's cross-training I think in a lot of ways it's like if you lift weights for jujitsu it makes you stronger it'll make you jujitsu better as long as you keep training I think your discipline from your religion has there's psychological benefits to it totally benefits to it there's it's right I guess that the point is that we're different people so there are certain activity in which I that you probably think well that's I wouldn't do that skin' dumb okay but I wouldn't though I would but I wouldn't I wouldn't I don't want to do it I don't want to wear yarmulke I get it I understand why you blew it what would appall dudes do they put double stick tape they're not allowed to know you can you totally can oh it seems painful and uncomfortable yeah the point is that in living in a society we all are constantly disapproving of each other right politics is just as disapproving of each other all the time and so long as we're not forcing that on anybody else I really don't see the problem and I think everybody should sort of get over it like if I don't approve of your personal behavior welcome to the club I disapprove of 99% of people's personal behavior including my own half that do you how often do you bait people on the merits of religion or the merits of your belief system um you know not not super frequently but not infrequently I mean like I mentioned that I've had this conversation with Sam a couple of different times yeah like well he's he's so rabid as an atheist but you guys Sam is more religious than I am salmon salmon or for religious atheist than I am like I'll admit questions about my own religion Sam is very very convinced of his of his correctness and in his viewpoint salmon Sam's religious dude he's a fast moving guy he is I liked him a lot and and Michael Shermer I've had on my show to talk about religion and skepticism and all that I'm not shy about talking about it I just sometimes I find that it's it's kind of a dead end mm-hmm because sometimes it just turns into I believe in God and then the person's like I don't believe in God it's like well okay fine now can we talk about the stuff we think are the what are the fundamental building blocks upon which you can base a society or base of politics and if we agree on those then you know the gods stuff I think God is a better base for those fundamental policies and and and belief systems I think free speech individualism democracy these are based on a simple verse in Genesis that human beings are made in God's image I think that that's a logical leap this is the case I've made too Sam I don't think that you can actually get to human beings are of an estable inestimable value from scientific materialism if you believe that human beings are effectively just animals then I don't know why they would be of infinite value nor why I should respect somebody's belief system simply because they're human I don't respect animals and if we're just another animal I there's no there's nothing Tate's that logical line if the in fact for most of human history it was not the logical line of thinking it was if you remember of my tribe then we like you and if you're not a member of my tribe then we get to kill you but is that a logical comparison like is isn't there a difference between single-celled organisms and the way a primate interacts with its environment I mean yes but I'm not sure why that would indicate any sort of greater existential value it's not necessarily a greater existential value but as we were talking about the value of community and the value of having a group of people that you care about this is this is a core component of being human this is a it's a core component of this understanding mind but that's that's rational intelligent interfacing with the universe in a way that no other animal is capable of I'm not saying you can't get to the point where Sam agrees with me I'm saying that I think it's less convincing than Sam thinks it is meaning there's no there's an alternative line of thought that says okay you're right social fabric is great you know that social fabric is particularly awesome among me and my friends you know ain't that great those guys over there let's go kill them and take their shit like that that was pretty much how humanity works for a very very long time and the simple and effective idea that the reason that human beings are a value is because we are more than just our material bodies and there's something that isn't us that is of inestimable value that's a religious concept and it has a lot of weight now if Sam wants to get to the same place and we can build a political conversation from there that's fine my real argument with Sam is Sam and I go down to the bottom of the iceberg about 90% of the way we have the same fundamental value about free speech diversity of opinion about I think to mostly in extent free markets you know I think that we agree on a lot of these fundamental principles he then says that he gets those from pure reason I have serious questions about whether Pure Reason necessitates those conclusions he tends to think that those are the only conclusions a reasonable person could come to if you properly apply a reason I don't think that's right what do you think is happening there what's the mechanism I think that the mechanism is that we are common what I said to Sam when we were debating this in San Francisco is it's real weird he's a materialist a scientific materialist a theist who is sitting across the stage from me a religious Jew we agree on 95% of our values so how and his answer well you know here's where I've studied I've studied Buddhism I've studied these philosophies and I've studied science and is that right I haven't studied a lot of those things but we have the same value so why it seems to me a better historical explanation is that we have grow up we grew up ten miles from each other in Los Angeles after 3,000 years of common history of judeo-christian development balanced with reason in the West like location has something to do with this and that location was rooted in commonality of interest and philosophy so I I'm less it's it's there's a weird nexus I don't want to get too kind of deep in the weeds here there's a weird kind of Nexus on what truth is but where you've heard Sam and Jordan Peterson debate this that wasn't saying it was it's wild right and the truth is I'm closer to Sam than Jordan on this I'm closer to Jordan than Sam when it comes to the value of religion and I'm closer to Sam than Jordan when it comes to objective truth Sam believes that there is such a thing as objective truth Jordan tends to be more of a pragmatist he tends to believe that truth is sort of what is useful to a certain extent and my I agree with Sam but I'm not sure how he gets to objective truth from a scientific materialist worldview why is there objective truth as opposed to what you think is what you think being evolutionarily beneficial how do you get from that to it's a universal principle that is objectively true it's it's it's a bit of a jump well it depends on what the concept is right like what are you talking about in terms of I'm talking about I'm talking about anything that Sam says is true what makes it true as opposed to just evolutionarily beneficial for us to think so meaning what evolution does is it creates a series of thoughts in our mind presumably if you're a materialism hmm that are beneficial to your preservation and promulgation of the species they're not active actually true so if it's beneficial this is Sam's explanation for the prevalence of religion for example say religion isn't true but evolutionary biology sort of drives people toward religion so you can have group bonds that are beyond 150 people or whatever so why doesn't that apply to math why is it the two into how do you know that two and two actually equals four as opposed to it is evolutionary been evidently beneficial for you to believe that two plus two equals four so Sam believes there's an objective truth somewhere out there the two plus two equals four I don't know what evolution has to do with that sort of stuff so what do you think is happening that he disagrees with so I think that is happening is that human beings were placed in an orderly universe through the processes of biology and have a unique capacity to understand that universe because we are made in the image of God this is where I think that the religious viewpoint diverges pretty strongly from from Sam's but you should leave in evolution yes you believe that evolution was a process that was created by God to formulate human beings yes interesting yeah I mean that's that's the nice thing about being religious you can attribute most most everything to God is it's nice well here's the thing it's not that implausible if there was some sort of a grand plan there would be no regard for like oh we got to get a rush on this right making the evolutionary being you know we're gonna process there's all sorts of fine-tuning arguments about how implausible it would be for just atoms roaming around the universe randomly to end with with human creation you know the alternative explanation seem no no more no less implausible to me like the multiple universes Theory plausible but we have no way to prove it because we can't get to those multiple universes so how's that testable or the or the now popular theory that we're living in an AI simulation not sure how that's more testable than God not sure how it's more testable that aliens put us here like how is any of this time why is that more testable or more plausible than the idea that there is a force behind that which we see that has mind well let's let's just break this down slowly there's obviously something that's happening there's obviously something that went from the Big Bang to Planet Earth in 2019 with cellular communication and satellite dishes and obviously something happened something pretty radical why is it happening is it happening because of random events that sort of coincide with biology and technology and all these things come to fruition to you and I standing across from each other talking on this podcast in front of millions of people or is this is this just how things go is things compete constantly try to get better and then in this gigantic ecosystem of all these things competing and trying to get better one super successful organism us rises above and continues right and continues and by far passes all these other creatures below it and moves we in our estimation I mean if you if you really believe in evolution you can't think we're done right it's got to be moving towards some rate or product keeps going until it creates so this is why I say that Sam is more religious than I am I think that there's a plausible argument for atheism I just don't think that there is a plausible argument for Sam's moral vision of atheism meaning that what what but Sam tends to do is it like for example you and I have talked a lot on this particular podcast about the value of self betterment and making decisions and being responsible for those decisions how does that work in an area where you don't have very well so Sam actively says we do not have very well yeah that's a weird it is it is a weird conversation and sort of a self-defeating one Sam suggests when it comes to the scientific method that we are using science to find out truths about the universe and we're using reason seems very big unreason I also have a gun reason but I don't know how Sam is defining reason as opposed to just an evolutionarily beneficial firing of neurons meaning that that's what we are at were balls of been wandering purposeless through the universe and then he'll talk about making our own meaning or seeking human human prosperity or flourishing is the morning like Shias these are all very active verbs right this is this is an active vision of man in the universe right and I'm not sure how that flows from were a ball of meat that evolved from another ball with me that evolved eventually if you go back far enough from non balls of meat without any without any free will without any capacity to choose I don't know how you build a civilization on that well there's two different conversations here one is determination or determinism rather whether or not you have free will or whether or not your life and your actions are being dictated by the past by your biology by your learning experiences by external pressures what is causing this very clear decision that you make is this freewill are you deciding I'm gonna get my shit together or all the factors around you pushing you and funneling you into this this direction that you it's unavoidable to you right and that you are not a product of free will you're just a product of a lot of different factors right or is it both is it that you are the product of your environment and your life experiences and you also have free will right and I'm in the latter group I'm in the latter group I think as well I think we also experience great benefit from making positive choices and then experiencing like whatever you meet someone has lost a lot of weight one things they have this fucking tremendous feeling of accomplishment yep you know yeah I lost a hundred pounds like holy shit man a hundred pound right like they get this positive feedback from it there's there's real good and making good choices and when people decide to get their shit together and make a good choice they were rewarded the question is are you doing that because of determinism or are you doing that because of free will or are you doing that because of a combination of both of those things and can you fuel that free will purposely through like outwardly seeking things that are motivational or things that are educational things that allow you to kind of remap the way you process reality right which can be extremely beneficial and can aid in you taking steps towards exercising your free will right well this and this is why I think that in the end it and right but I think it's pretty fundamental question and I think that that's why in the end I'm religious and I'm not sure why Sam isn't because he agrees with the same premises mmm right he'll he'll talk about self betterment and decisions that you can make and then he'll write a full book about why freewill doesn't exist and I just don't understand how those two things can coexist yes it's well I think it's a thought experiment first of all I think the whole determinism thing is a thought experiment because there's really no way to determine right so you can know for sure right I mean like there's just no way to act otherwise I've absolutely act as if I have freewill right and we all do and I get angry at myself when I fuck things up I don't say well it's just determined as a man right no that doesn't get you in and but maybe it's determinism that has put me in this position where I'm the kind of guy that gets upset if I fuck things up right I don't know man I don't know but I don't know if you know either that's my take on all these things but people get really rigid with their ideology yeah like okay I want to hear it out I want to hear the whole thing you know I want to hear it all I think if you know I think there's a I think there's no I think there's a lot that I don't know but I think that there's more plausible and less plausible I agree this is where I think people misunderstand you you have your beliefs but you're not a god that imposes them on people and I think we need to be way more reasonable in terms of the way we address people's beliefs and I've been guilty of this in the past I'm sure everyone has but I think it's a core component to a healthy community is to allow people to have their own beliefs and you know who knows man maybe your beliefs on gay people will adjust and move over time as you get older and move into a gay neighborhood and yeah it's it it's it's a difference between understanding people are as as whole people and then saying that I don't like some of the things that they do and simply saying the making the assumptions because I don't like some of the things that you do we can't be friends or I disapprove of you as an entire human being which i think is not true it's a good belief system to have if you're straight and then you go look lock down don't need to worry about that I got a problem but if you were gay God down there'll be opinion yeah absolutely I mean it would be annoying if you just always wanted to bang dudes and everyone's saying no nobody said religion is easy man it's all what's the value in it though if you're if you're a giant homo all right and all you want to do is go to gay discos a part of your ass off that's what you enjoy some people like golf okay some people some people like parasailing some dudes just want to fucking get it on man you want to dress up like the Village People and go have a fucking party that's why Santa Monica Boulevard such a hot spot and you find each other hey you know do whatever you want to do honestly do whatever you want to do cuz menu don't ask me to think that you know don't ask me to like put my stamp of moral approval I understand but do you want to do the like it's free country this should be a free country not just it is a free country it should be a free country it should not be my job to police your personal behavior right right right like you doesn't mean I have to improve it on a personal level right but I'm a jerk if I want to impose my belief system on your personal behavior that affects no one else that's the and I'm a hypocrite if I continue to braid you about your your opinion on gay folks what do I give a fuck with your opinion correct because you are a reasonable person and you do you're very polite and either you're in friends with Dave Rubin so there you go something there it's it's a strange thing though this this need that people have for everyone to think the way they think and I understand the need to reinforce your own thoughts and we're in and and and argue them and try to figure out a way to debate that the other person's perspective is incorrect and your perspective is correct I understand all these inclinations that people have but I think that they conflate that with bigotry right you know and I don't exactly I don't think you're a bigot I don't agree with you about gay folks but that's one of the few the marijuana thing is just I just don't think you have any experience in it right and as far as as far as disagreeing I think that we probably don't disagree on gay folks I think we disagree on identity in gay and all the rest of it I mean as human beings you know these are human beings I know many gay people who I think are significantly better human beings than religious people that I know yeah you know I'm glad you said that yeah I think it did theirs in a way I don't have a defined religion but in a way I have some pretty rigid ideas that I have in my head about behavior and ethics and morals and how you treat people you care about those those are like they're pretty rigid and I think one of the things that religion does is it allows you to have the sort of ethical framework sort of like uh you know what is it cost Kapil ding when you're building like it allows you to develop a more disciplined life and it just shows you this is good and this is bad and it's clear and there's there's most different in for the most part it's good for the most part these are these are good patterns to follow and I think that I've most certainly sort of adopted my own somewhere along the line I think we all do yeah I mean honestly a value system effectively is usually a form of religion right so when you're saying that Sam is religious he's a religious yeah you're not being inaccurate there's a lot of folks do that we we do develop these sort of principles that we found we're not just free willy-nilly just doing every walk all day long no one does that and the reason I say it is sort of facetiously but I think that we all make fundamental assumptions about the nature of human life and we have to recognize that those are assumptions you can't it's it's not reason all the way down you know that because that tends to actually become even more inflexible then it's I'm the only reasonable person in the room my reasons are the only ones that matter though it's my reasons all the way down acknowledge that we're all making some assumptions and then we can discuss whether those assumptions are worthwhile or not yeah the thing that when it comes with religion in defining whether or not other people's behavior sinful where it doesn't involve you that's where a lot of folks start thinking that maybe these ideas are bigoted right but it does involve me meaning that at times well I'm enjoying every sin that I say is a sin is a sin that it joins me it's just that I may not have a desire for that particular sin meaning I'm not I'm not holding people to a different standard than I hold myself nor am i saying that I never sinned right but you know that you have different biological desires than they do you kind of acknowledge that of course that's true yeah of course that's true by the same token I assume that a gay guy doesn't have the desire to strip a thousand women which most straight guys do yeah why do you think if if God has a plan well I do think you'd create gay people I mean I think that God creates first of all I don't think that I'm in a position to evaluate God's plan if you like gods if I had to guess people with all sorts of different challenges and those challenges span the spectrum mmm I mean I I'm not so God sneaks it up on you hey man I know this is gonna be fucked up but you're gonna just like dudes like forget about women you're gonna like dudes and not I want you to ignore that which I listen to my old book I don't know why God gives people drives I don't know why God gives kids cancer I don't know a lot of things about God wish I did it would make my life a lot easier so you think that that is a challenge akin to any other challenge that a human being might face in this life that the challenge of but a lot harder yeah and a lot more difficult and a lot more straining and a lot yeah of course you think there's value in following that challenge and not acting on Gator jizz I think that I think there can be and having sex with one plug your nose go make a face because your disgust did you create it did you create a baby out of that then that is that baby like a part of your life now that is it that it's deep in meaningful mmm maybe what about in pass there's a lot of gay guys having kids what about people saying living their truth I'm living my truth bench pure oh well I mean as a general rule living my truth is there's living your opinion which is fine like live your opinion how you want again that gets back to do what you want as long as it's not bothering me living my truth is a different thing that's one of them social media creations like living my truth such that's just bullshit I'm sorry it's there's no such thing as your truth there is not truth and then there's your opinion and we do have if we're purposes of conversation at the very least it's deeply irritating when people say living my truth because it's like I disagree with you and then like well you're you're disavowing me as a human being no I just disagree like you can be you you can do it you on like you do that whatever man yeah like I'm how did I become the most loosey-goosey libertarian Leanback guy in the world in this society how is this possible the most uptight person I know how is this a thing well you know as well as I do that the further you go left you you you you reach the same sort of gsella tree that you do when you go all the way rice is correct you meet these crazy people that are just completely connected to their idea of being correct and they take the most rigid stance on all these issues on the left side or on the right side and it's so goddamn common human behavior Saul so incredibly boring yes I mean there's just nothing to discuss with with yeah I agree and that's one of the reasons why it's so disgusting when people mislabel people like there was an article that connected me with Richard Spencer like what in the fuck like that is such a disingenuous thing to do yeah they know what they're doing they're they're trying to get me to react to it and talk about it and get more glitz but it's horseshit yeah like anybody who but if you are locked into that far-left ideology as far left as you can go and it's one of the problems with ideologies that have these extremists is that you believe in a percentage of the things these people say but then they go way too far with it but you're connected with them you're connected with them because you're a part of that even though you don't have a similar notion steven pinker got browbeaten over suggesting that failure to ask questions and give plausible answers gives excuse-me credence to the alright that that if you do a say he did a whole speech where he said listen there are lots of conversations about IQ and race and they all write loves these conversations because then they then they suggest wrongly the black people are inherently unfit and white people are more fit and all that kind of stuff and he says there are great ways to explain how much of IQ is is cultural how much can be changed how much is genetic how much that actually matters in terms of real-life outcomes we can do all those things but when you say don't ask the question stop asking the question then you make people Google and the only thing that they will Google and find our answers that are given by people who are actually all right right he got ripped as alright for this yeah it was don't allow people to push into all right answers by failing to give them proper responses or by throwing them out the window and then people like well you're all right now because you're saying that people should be able to ask questions it's almost like it's just like it's the exact same version as people in the religious community where it's like you know I used to go to Sunday School and then I asked him any questions and they kicked me out right that's that's not how religions supposed to work that's not how reason is supposed to work that's not how any of this is supposed to work right and there's also when when you're investigating anything any measurable thing there when you find a whatever it is like these people like Asian folks are better at mathematics European folks are better at this and like what is what's the reason for that like what what's let's find out is it cultural is it biologicals it's something can we learn about how human beings evolved and adapted why are nigerian so smart like there's so many Nigerians that come to this country they thrive they thrive in business they're extremely motivated they're extremely disciplined it's like it's like almost like Korean folks why do Koreans like it's why are they so hard-working why are they strive and obviously these are big generalizations but what is it about Italians what wouldn't make some where gold chains and love mafia movies like what is it those are my people what the what the fuck why they all talk like that like what is that what causes a any sort of ethnic group to turn out the way they turned out what are so many European Jews Nobel Prize winners right what the fuck is going on over there and also like what is the impact of the measurable on how we live our lives like how much should this stuff matter is this is this a result of discrimination or is this a result of something else is it true that when you group any group of people together racially or non racially there will be disparities between those two groups of people this is just true statistically like but not asking those questions and then saying shut down the questions what that actually does is it leads people to only get the answers to the questions from the people who don't know what they're talking about in many cases and who are giving convenient easy and sell flattering answers about the nature of themselves the fear is it being used by racists to reinforce their position right but what you find out is that those appear your race right and they'll do that anyway one of the one of the funniest things about white supremacist is they're so fucking stupid and pardon the language like the the white supremacists are invariably not the Nobel Prize winners it's it's go to a white supremacist compound you're not looking at a bunch of people who are curing cancer these people pissed me off in it and this is and now I'll say all that won't matter the media label me outright tomorrow except this goes well the disingenuous media that's being less and less taken seriously taken less loss seriously it's it seems to me that that trend which is a common trend that's existed for the last few years of these clickbait t bullshit articles and mislabelling people it's going to go away because you're your perspective is not going to be appreciated it's not going to be respected if you if you're obviously making disingenuous statements like that and I think we're in this weird position where it's very difficult to find real journalism and real objective takes on things that aren't flavored by their ideology and everybody's trying to shape everybody and they feel like it's their obligation they feel there's many people that write things that feel like it's their obligation to change your perspective on national subjects and things that are important to us it's not their obligation to just report what's going on but also their obligation to flavor things in a way that'll make one side look favorable to the other yeah well I'm very much in favor of journalists revealing their biases I think that the greatest lie in media is that objective journalism is a thing so I'm conservative you don't go to my site you'll get a conservative spin on the news that's the way it's gonna work and guess what CNN's liberal and they are going to give you the liberal spin on the news and that's just the way this is going to work did you see the video when the Mueller report came out they look like somebody here killed oh my god he's crazy shouldn't you be happy if you guys believed in Mueller everybody was like Mueller is the fucking man he's gonna go get Trump this guy is methodical he's precise he's voted everything votive candles with his face on it they could like bird they were pumped yeah and then he came out and was like well no collusion it was like well I guess that now to cover up it's like what wait a minute yeah maybe maybe the narrative has it maybe the narrative has has trumped the actual job you were supposed to do guys well it's just so many people were so convinced and there were so many people that were making statements that in retrospect are probably like you could probably I mean I don't want to say I'm not a litigious person but if I was a guy like Donald Trump oh man yeah there's so many people to sue is it like it was amazing I mean I remember I was on Bill Maher's show and we were supposed to talk about free speech stuff and like five minutes before and he's like let's talk about Russia as producer Kevin let's talk about Russia and that's like okay fine so we get yeah this is like right before they switch the topic for your TV shows well they just tell you what you have to talk and I comes in with a clipboard yeah it was it was a little bit it was a little bit strange and we got onstage and he's talking about Trump Russia collusion and I said what I've always said which is I'll wait for the evidence to come out and then I will make a decision as to whether Trump Russia collusion was a thing and Bill Maher was like oh I know and Bill Maher goes you don't you don't believe it was a thing and I was like well I don't see any evidence yet that it was a thing like I see some evidence of attempts to collude like Don jr. I see some attempts of people trying to get information but I don't see evidence of like actual legal collusion and why don't we just wait like you guys keep wanting Muller to give us it like let's just wait on it and Mark could not believe that this was my perspective right it was like it was like shocking to him why should why should the perspective I'm waiting for more evidence be shocking to anyone when it is obvious the evidence is not out like why is that in any way controversial it's but wildering to me well it's because people have this need to let everyone know that they're on the right side and they want you to know that they do believe in the collusion if you disagree with that for whatever reason you must either be a right-wing person a trump supporter someone who's in denial someone who doesn't look at the evidence and you're a part of the problem yep but the the real problem was jumping to conclusions they're obviously seemed to be some attempts there's there's obviously some fuckery with that IRA company that the the internet research agency that is responsible for millions of interactions with people online where they pretended to be right different supporters Rossum they caused conflict like constant conflict in regards to political opinion and that's all real that was coordinated effort to try to change people's opinions but how much that had to do with Donald Trump how much did he ask for you got no evidence also I was always bewildered by this theory like did you watch that campaign that was not the most well coordinated campaign it was chaos it was chaos I mean I knew everybody who's in the campaign like it was a it was a shit show then the idea that they're sitting there but they're but when the mask comes off at night they call it Vladimir Putin and then put together a point-by-point plan on how they're going to swing this particular precinct in rural in rural Michigan what are you are you guys hi what are you talking about what like if you could attribute this to any here's a good rule of thumb for politics attribute everything to you pity unless you can prove malice the real problem and this is something that is very similar to what we were talking about earlier when you say something and you say it over and over and over again and you say it with such conviction and it becomes a giant part of your news narrative and then that something turns out to be horseshit yeah you just massively empowered Trump that's that's exactly right I said for a long time that you know I'm not a big fan of Trump's fake news stick because I think he applies it too broadly I think that whenever it's there's bad piece of news is like fake news it's like well sometimes yes and sometimes no but now that you just blew a two-year narrative where he was clearly in Putin's pocket how many people you think and listen to the nuanced view of fake news now and how many people do you think are going to actually believe Trump when he says that a bad piece of news is legitimately a fake piece of news yeah it empowers him in a in a spectacular manner they made a giant mistake oh yeah and they blew that they blew this one in spectacular fashion and people are still hanging in there well all they had to do this is true for so many people right now all you have to do is not be crazy just stop it it was talking about the possibility that Trump has been a Russian asset since like 1987 or so is that I mean Andrew McCabe the former FBI director was asked whether Trump was legitimately a Russian asset he's like I don't know it's like you're using the power of the institution you used to run to spread this nonsense and you got that from John Brennan he got it from James clapper these are all former heads of the intelligence agencies it just makes me think the intelligence agencies need to be wild like her back if these were the heads of them I mean if like the heads of the intelligence agencies are using their platform to proclaim that they have inside information about Trump that turns out to be utter nonsense I'm not sure these people should have that much power to like is that what he's saying or is he saying he doesn't know he didn't say I don't know he was saying like I have basically I expect that Miller is going to indict as a former intelligence professional I expect that yeah there's a lot of that it was ugly Adam Schiff it's crazy now cuz like what do they do now like how do they rebound from this if this is there's no let you say once this is something you said for two years right you've seen the compilation video they've done them - rap music so they're like they put a beat behind it have you seen it now I know there's some great ones some great companies compilations of people saying possible collusion possible collusion pop yeah yeah and there's music that goes with it and they just cut to possible collusion with the Russians possible Russian collusion yeah possible Russian collusion it's yeah they blew it in a major way yeah I mean there's plenty of shit to complain about you didn't have to go with that like the idea was that he was a treason target-rich environment he decided to go to he's a Russian traitor what like it's no way out or something and it's Kevin Costner he could have ever beaten Hillary sorry I mean I do a little bit right now like I wanted to ask you one more question what do you think about this Chelsea Manning situation because I don't know exactly what happened other than she's in contempt of court and so they've got her in solitary confinement now this is about testifying closely I mean my understanding is that Chelsea Manning who okay so here's where we get cuz you call her Bradley no he changed his name to Chelsea he is a biological male are you dead naming as well unless we were talking about when he committed his crime to which point he was actually Bradley as opposed to trustee right so if we're talking about so he person was convicted that was a male and then Bradley Manning personally known as Bradley hey if we're talking about a human being who's currently in jail that is a male who is currently known as Chelsea so so my understanding is that Bradley is that Chelsea Manning is a refused to hands over information that he was legally bound to hand over about WikiLeaks mm-hmm and now there were complained that he's being held in solitary but that's not true apparently and that he's being mistreated I do find it weird that the same people who are complaining about Donald Trump coordinating with WikiLeaks are very upset about Chelsea Manning going to jail for coordinating with WikiLeaks you're gonna need to pick one of the others WikiLeaks Bators WikiLeaks not bad yeah what is WikiLeaks it's only dependent upon whether or not they're supporting the narrative that you want that's exactly right and it's the anti few leaks was very good remember exactly was right and left by the way like their people on the right where's like Julia saw Julian Assange is the worse and then 2016 happened like Julian Assange now there's a person I can really talk to it's like well no I'm pretty sure Julian Assange is a WikiLeaks good information suggest they are Russian front group and take make of that what you will end of story do you think that they became a Russian front group to try to stay operative and stay safe because they were obviously being attacked by the United States government and in danger being shut down and then they've no enough about WikiLeaks to really get into it I don't historical but I know that he's been trapped in that embassy for since 2012 yeah I mean I hope that he's got some video games or something in there fuck man he's been in there for like seven years now right that's a long time I can't go outside no sunlight Pamela Anderson visits every now and then he's fucked man I mean it's it's a terrible place to be and I don't know if it's better than prison because it's like the stress of him never knowing when they're gonna come knock down the door and pull him out of there I was like how well does that guy sleep yeah seven years in that embassy it can't be great can't be great gotta be awful they took his internet away right I think they did that's front to elbow to be fair WikiLeaks was releasing information on specific American soldiers in lines of combat so were they yes they didn't redact any of the names that was the problem that's why people were pissed really yes Chelsea Manning was that he dumped all the information to WikiLeaks including the stuff that was unredacted and WikiLeaks just released it if you find differently then let me know because I'll be happy to correct oh yeah you know I'm sure you would I just don't know if it that is I don't know I don't have the information in front of me do you want to check no I'll take too much time that'll do folks you're gonna have to google this one but so when one of the things that I was thinking when Trump got into office with all this drained that swamp shit I was like wonder if Trump would be a WikiLeaks supporter I wonder if Trump would be happy depends but if it helped him yeah sure or even and Snowden as well about that yeah I mean it's same sort of thing I mean unfortunately politics very often has little to do with principle and everything to do with convenience yeah so if it's helpful sure if not god like him who's always anti deep state and talking about the the these extremely critical yes but once you actually sit in the big seat I think that tends to change remember Obama was - yeah then five minutes later whose drone in people listen I know you gotta get out of here so let's just wrap this up tell people about your book yes you can check out my book the right side of history talked about a lot of the sort of deeper issues we were talking about judeo-christian values and reason and sort of the it's it's a kind of short form philosophical history of the west from Sinai through Greece and talking about all the major enlightenment philosophers some of the things we talked about on the show or in the book it's number one bestseller on the New York Times nonfiction list at least at the moment really pretty spectacular exciting set your show also Ben Shapiro show you can get the Ben Shapiro show on iTunes you can get it on YouTube your Sunday review which I did once yeah it Sunday's special special nice to have you on again thank you thanks for being here and your books available on Amazon everywhere Ben Shapiro ladies and gentlemen [Music] [Music]

Info

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 5,545,904

Rating: 4.6756444 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, Joe Rogan, JRE #1277, 1277, Ben Shapiro, comedy, comedian, jokes, stand up, funny, mma, UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship

Id: sCD9zjf_YRU

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Length: 154min 20sec (9260 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019

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👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/AutoModerator 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies

lol Joe is trying so hard to get Ben to smoke

👍︎︎ 308 👤︎︎ u/CoupGardener 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies

It took Joe 29 minutes to talk about chimps lmao

👍︎︎ 215 👤︎︎ u/Enmulteh 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies

I think where Ben talks about the difference between a progressive (or did he say liberal?) and a conservative upon finding a fence in the middle of nowhere is in the right ball park but not the best example. It also only really applies for someone like him who is always engaged in debate over these issues.

Both Thomas Sowell on the right, and Steven Pinker on the left, had a similar observation about the left and right intellectual debate over society, policy etc. They just used different words to describe it. According to them, in "A conflict of visions" from Sowell and "the blank slate" by Pinker there are two conflicting visions. For Sowell they are the unconstrained vision (left) and the constrained vision (right). For Pinker, they are the utopian vision (left) and tragic vision (right).

Paraphrasing but it comes down to basically... the unconstrained vision that appeals to the left is based on ideas like there are problems and solutions to those problems, and enacting the solutions is a matter of will, that human nature can be improved (in a moral sense) to bend to it and that there can be people who put aside self interest that will make decisions for society that are a benefit to all, even if there is collateral damage. There is less weight given to experience and tradition.

The constrained vision is less optimistic about human nature which it sees as inherently self-interested. There are not often solutions to problems but instead trade offs, making compromise inevitable. Experience and tradition and rule of law are the center of the vision.

Obviously there are crossovers everywhere and it's not quite as simple as above (after all, they both wrote full books on the subject!) but it does seem to strike about right in political debate. It's why politicians so easily talk past each other.

Even just recently I saw Dan Crenshaw (the republican dude with the eye patch) talk about how people on his side of the debate tend to be incorrect when they think those on the left are wrong about problems they perceive. He said they aren't usually wrong about the problems at all, they just propose solutions that are wrong or off target etc. The same can be said for the left too, the right wing isn't always wrong about problems they point out in society, but to the left because of their vision of the world their solutions (or trade offs) seem wrong, or off target.

Some shit like that anyway :P

👍︎︎ 145 👤︎︎ u/JamieD86 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies

Joe: Hey Jamie pull up one of Shapiros debate videos on YouTube for the folks at home who don't know him.

Jamie: pulls up

"BEN SHAPIRO SKULL FUCKS LIBERAL SNOW LEOPARD WITH FACTS AND LOGIC; FACTS DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR MICRO PENIS EDITION (TURN YOUR VOLUME DOWN OR YOUR ASS WILL BLEED)"

👍︎︎ 194 👤︎︎ u/Mongoosemancer 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies

"When you told Dave Rubin you wouldn't go to his wedding, did he get butt hurt?"

Joe said no pun intended, butt fuck me that's funny out of context

👍︎︎ 126 👤︎︎ u/Crockpotspinner 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies

I wish that Joe brought Ari on with Ben, i think it would be interesting to hear them discuss their differing experiences as orthodox jews. I think that would make for a really interesting and entertaining podcast.

👍︎︎ 458 👤︎︎ u/tesaract 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies

I'd love to see Ben Shapiro and Tim Pool in a contest to see who could read off the Micro-machine commercial the fastest.

👍︎︎ 337 👤︎︎ u/Wallyworld1977 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies

Eddie Bravo is on his way

👍︎︎ 164 👤︎︎ u/SaiFromSd 📅︎︎ Apr 03 2019 🗫︎ replies