Russell Brand & Ben Shapiro "Respectfully Disagreeing"

hello i recently spoke to ben shapiro on my luminary podcast under the skin which is available on luminary the app and on apple if you want to get the rest of this conversation go over to luminary or apple and subscribe to luminary where all my episodes have under the skin as well as dave chappelle's podcast and countless other brilliant subscription model podcasts are available to you in this conversation ben shapiro and i talked about a wide range of cultural issues and people that are interested in hearing conversations with people with differing views i think will enjoy this conversation i also went on to ben's show to continue this conversation i hope you enjoy it let me know what you thought in the comments below like subscribe turn on the notification bell if you want to listen to the rest of it remember over to luminary or apple to subscribe the link is in the description ben thank you for joining me on under the skin hey thanks for having me i'm excited to talk to you i appreciate that back at you this is i suppose a peculiar time for us to be having a conversation sort of culturally geopolitically you've probably got a like i i watch a lot of your content as i said just in our brief chat before and like i'm sure you even if you don't watch my content and i would never assume i imagine you sort of know who i am so how do you generally approach conversations with people where there is an assumption that we're on across some real or imagined cultural line does it make any particular difference to you uh only in the sense that that i like to actually you know read about or at least watch some of your stuff so that i know kind of how you approach interviews because some people have a different approach and i've had experiences in the past that have gone quite viral in which i had no idea what the interview was going to be and then it goes sideways and so you always want to know kind of what you're walking into but aside from that i don't care at all i speak with people who who disagree with me on a regular basis and frankly i kind of find it more fun it's it's more interesting i suppose you were referring um with the uh with the misstep with andrew neal one of the things i like that i admire about you is your deafness and ability to handle confrontational conversations piers morgan and other englishmen that i've seen you with but yeah it's amusing for english people to watch you with andrew neal because we're all thinking this dude is conservative he's the editor of the sunday times and unless yeah i'll be honest dude i had no clue who he was which is clearly obvious and as i said even before the interview came out i was tweeting about how he kicked my ass and that was because he did i mean i had no idea who he was uh he had the the interview was booked and it was booked by my publisher and they were like yeah some guy on the bbc i'm like okay i don't really watch the bbc i'm from america and uh and then he started questioning me and i didn't know anything about his interview style which of course is is very aggressive and he likes to play devil's advocate and so about 15 minutes into the interview when he was just kind of reading my old tweets at me and i was like i'm i'm out i still had no idea who he was then i looked him up and i was like oh yeah i probably should have researched who he was my mistake yeah yeah you'd probably get on all right with him i've never met andrew neil but like he's a serious broadcaster um one of the areas where i reckon you and i perhaps have a lot in common obviously like you know we've both got families i feel your family is pretty young and also you're you believe in god and you're a pretty religious man hey yeah uh so we're orthodox jews um my uh my wife and i are both orthodox we raise our kids orthodox my family became orthodox when i was maybe 11. we were always very interested in religious judaism but we became fully kosher you know eating kosher food and and not driving on sabbath and such uh when i was about 11 years old so i've been doing that since then and i i find you know great solace and and comfort and virtue in in my religion and uh hopefully that that comes out and how i raise my kids how do you find solace and aside from the observances and protocols around orthodox judaism how does it affect your outlook and interactions particularly i suppose as a polemicist and a highly regarded and widely followed orator how does it affect you there how the i suppose the intersection between your religious faith and your political views and your yeah i mean in terms of sort of how it works in my personal life i mean i i would say that religion provides me the opportunity to constantly be stepping outside of whatever is sort of the daily news cycle if religion is supposed to be eternal uh then the idea that there is uh an eternity in which this is just one moment and that you can step away for a moment from twitter and the world won't end and things will the world will continue to spin and there are people before you who have known more than you there are people who are after you who will know more than you presumably and there's a god above you who also knows a lot more than any of those people is definitely comforting uh for for a lot of jews and for me particularly sabbath is a big deal being able to physically turn off all electronic devices and not be connected at all to the news starting friday night ending saturday night is a huge thing because i'm sure as virtually everybody feels now you know if i'm at dinner with with my kids on a weeknight the temptation to reach into your pocket and just start scrolling the news or checking your emails is really high on sabbath everything shuts off and so that's it's kind of a wonderful way to reconnect with family it's a way to reconnect with religion you go to synagogue for a couple of hours you spend some time contemplating your place in the universe and and contemplating what you think god requires of you uh and uh and it really kind of regrounds you in terms of the the what i think judaism provides me in terms of values i i i'm a big believer that much of enlightenment philosophy is rooted in in certain unspoken assumptions about the world about the nature of truth about the nature of of the human mind to understand broader objective truths uh and and that those ideas spring from a judeo-christian world view historically in the west wow when you um like i can see this how the practical application of a sabbath and the ability to cut off from tech and creating a period of contemplation particularly now the tendrils of cultural life have bled into so much of domesticity that i can see that that would be a boon a benefit and in fact in my own life i'm continually having to create those kind of spaces i essentially live a a secularized version of a religious life i believe in god but i'm a 12-step person and that means that you know obviously i'm abstinent from drugs and alcohol but also other sort of behavioral addictions i have a lot of um protocols around and increasingly i think that like that the tech experience has become so ubiquitous that it will that everyone will have to have some kind of conscious plan around tech or risk having your consciousness kind of blended even if that's not in a sort of a literal elon musk neurolink way with kind of the incentives and imperatives of whoever is most dominant in that field is that something you feel 100 agree i totally agree with this i mean so much so that you know twitter used to be on my phone i removed twitter from my phone because really for for people in public life twitter is sort of an ego machine because it's not just that you're tweeting things out into the ether you're always constantly checking you're messing uh your your incoming messages and and how people are responding to you and creates a real sort of echo chamber of people who are talking about you all the time which is the most unhealthy thing you can have is you thinking you're the center of the universe is pretty much the worst thing as a human being that you can think and so the internet tends to do that to you or alternatively you felt frozen out of the center of the universe and so you feel like you're on the periphery which is bad in very very different ways uh and so kind of turning off and and being with people is is a really important thing and and you find that you know i i've i've said to my wife before i'll come home on a given day and she'll say how's your day i'll say well i didn't trend on twitter so it was a good day uh and increasingly what i found is that even though i do trend on twitter probably once every three weeks or so it can still be a good day as soon as i turn off twitter because there is this real world out there where nobody who is around you is spending their day on twitter following you so you're thinking about yourself a lot but nobody else really is and recognizing that not everybody is thinking about you i think is the sign of a healthy mind yeah that's a kind of perhaps analogous to how culture can operate more broadly this that it can as you have said it can make you feel included or even centrifugal or it could make you feel banished and an outcast you mentioned in like the in your on the sabbath one of the things you contemplate what god wants from you um would you share with me and us of course what kind of revelations you get and then i'm not trying to paint you as like a religious seller i'm not a person who thinks that that god speaks to me um yeah i tend to be much more of a rationalist with regard to religion sort of a a a mystic or my monadian you know religious approach so everything would you explain those terms to me so so to mystic meaning thomas aquinas or maimonidean meaning rambam in hebrew maimonides so these are two philosophers who attempt to essentially um merge a lot of aristotelian ideas about how the world works with religious thought so the idea is there's a basic logic to the universe that you don't see god in miracles as much as you see god in the everyday workings of of nature uh and the way that the world works around you and that there are certain laws of of how to live a healthy life that can be discerned from the natural world around you this is the idea of natural law uh as sort of recapitulated uh after the historically speaking natural law uh was an idea that was very prevalent uh in ancient greece aristotle talks about this and then that sort of philosophy disappeared for a long time it was rediscovered around the year 1000 and so that kind of created this religious reawakening because the christian world started to integrate that via thomas aquinas the jewish world started to do that via maimonides the islamic world even actually at that time started to do that via people like alfa robbie and then the the idea was how can you balance reason and revelation and what maimonides and aquinas basically said is that the way that you balance those things is by suggesting that there are rational reasons for the commandments that are given via revelation for example so when i'm reading the bible every every saturday what i'm searching for is ancient wisdom that applies to me and that has roots in in deeper truths because one of the things that that i believe and this goes to some of my political conservatism as well but certainly my my sort of religious conservatism one of the things that i believe is if things have stuck around for several thousand years not always but very often there's a good reason they've stuck around for several thousand years uh there's a there's a famous uh gk chesterton quote that i think really sums this up or he he's i'll paraphrase it cause i'm not gonna quote it properly but the basic idea is that the difference between somebody who is conservative in orientation versus somebody who is not is somebody who's conservative in orientation he walks across a field he sees a wall in the middle of the field and you can't understand why there's a wall in the middle of the field and his first move is to think okay why is the wall there who built this wall was it built there for any good purpose whereas if you're not of conservative orientation very often you look at the wall you see that it's not there for any good reason that you can see and you immediately dismantle the wall and it's only later you find out that maybe the wall needed to be there or maybe we need to build the wall in a different place um but that's sort of my view on on biblical revelation is you look there for eternal human truths uh and then you attempt to use you know human logic to suss that out because if god is is giving any sort of revelation to humanity or if god is attempting to speak to humanity through the bible he's speaking in language that we can understand he understands we're going to apply our own reason that he gave us uh to the words of the bible do you find it applicable in your actual daily life though i can see that you have a a deep and broad understanding of theological principles from a variety of disciplines but in this period of contemplation of 24 hours like do you ever have cause to think am i ben shapiro on the right path as a father and as a professional man and like and and do you ever feel a an intimate and meaningful connection you're doing a really good job in my view of um navigating that difficult territory that exists in mysticism you know which i guess we would have to say religion could be refor referred to as broadly and and these principles that tether it to rationalism so that we can't just dismiss mysticism and the results i'm sure that the results of diminishing the role of religion in cultural life is probably something where you and i would have a lot of common ground the creation of nihilism materialism commodification i bet that we agree on loads of stuff there i i wonder though how your personal ethics are impacted like can you think of an example of how you've would have have moderated your own behavior as a result of something that's touched you biblically so i mean i i i think that religion especially if you grow up with it is something that sort of exists at the baseline of the iceberg that is your life you're living most of your life at the top of the iceberg but most of your values live underneath the water and so you don't really examine them all that often um i think that you know in in my daily practice you're supposed to pray three times daily as a jew you pray in the morning in the afternoon in the evening uh i'll admit i am not very good at prayer uh i tend to be very impatient and uh i tend to kind of rush through prayers more often than i should for sure um but your the goal is that you're gonna take out in the mornings 25 minutes uh in and then in the afternoons in the evenings maybe 10 minutes a piece to actually sit there and think about your life and try and reevaluate you know the day what you're doing wrong what you're doing right uh and you know as far as raising my kids that i do end up thinking about a lot because kids as you know you know ask you all sorts of difficult questions that sort of force you to rethink a lot of the things that you've thought about and so i've got a seven-year-old a five-year-old and a one-year-old and so my seven-year-old and five-year-old at the ages where they start to ask really kind of interesting theological questions right they're starting to ask things like what happens after you die and and in really kind of interesting and fun ways and so my five-year-old son turned to my wife and said the other day and he said so after you die what happens to you and she said i said well you don't have a body anymore you're kind of liberated from your body and she said what did that mean do you fly around and she said they don't really fly around you know it's like you have wings or something you say okay so what what exactly does that mean and trying to boil down sort of the idea of reunification with a higher being to a five-year-old makes for a really interesting conversation trying to explain what is what makes you you is is really interesting and enforces you to think about it more deeply and sometimes you don't have all the answers and there i think that the best thing that you can do and this is true in in most versions of everything and this is a lesson where when i fail to learn it you get smacked by life is acknowledging when you don't know something i mean that to go back to the bbc interview if i don't know something i'd be better off just saying i really don't know who you are and i don't know much about this interview rather than trying to kind of blow my way through it uh and the same thing is true in a wide variety of areas in life every time you get arrogant and you think that you know something life is going to punish you for that yes i found this to be true um like yeah see i can see how quickly in a conversation with the kids you can end up dealing with things like essence the nature of consciousness i was trying to think how i would handle that my children are three and five uh look she's gonna be five in a a little while and um yeah already it's like it's it's pretty easy to drop into the lower part of that iceberg and to see what underwrites the the limited bandwidth of ordinary egoic everyday consciousness you know you can be brought there quite quickly quite swiftly by a child's interrogation for sure and my son asked you know so what makes he got into you know so what what am i right if i'm not my body and i said well you know uh you know if if god forbid you were to lose a hand you'd still be you right he said yeah i said if you were to lose a foot you'd still be you so your body really isn't you in terms of your soul right there's a there's a part of you that is a conscious ability to choose that is a i didn't use exactly those words because he's five um but you have the ability to to do the right thing or do the wrong thing and that part of you is really not connected to your body that's there's something special about you that god implanted in you and that you'll return to god after you die and this this is sort of understood um but it's it's not that uh it's not a sad speaking about death to children is always a really you don't want to give them nightmares and at the same time they're asking very deep and abiding questions that require answers yeah i approach in the same way i'm plain about the idea of death of finality and i've tried not to make it uh you know gory or gruesome or overly sentimentalize it but we found like a dead mole in the garden and my daughter was just so fascinated with it we we gave it a burial but she i'm afraid to admit exhumed that mole a further three times to re-engage with the corpse with a mole less and less cute on a h subsequent visit you know and like but i don't want to i don't want her to be sort of squeamish about life hey don't you find uh are all your children boys or male 1 i know so it grows it goes uh girl boy girl do you find like anything in the kind of stuff that i've watched you analyze and critique around the culture wars where you feel like uh empowerment of females and like like for example myself right like sometimes when i send say i watch a movie and i see even a kind of a trivial joke about boys saying something like oh girls they're rubbish and i'm watching that with my kids i feel like furious like how dare you how dare you say that i don't that going into my daughter right so even though there are many things that you have said that i would agree with on lots and lots of subjects that's one of the reasons i want to talk to you one of the one of the areas where i thought that would be interesting for us to discuss is do not sometimes find things that are being talked about by eg trans community feminist community that you think have value and worth when it comes to individuals being um sort of acknowledged heard honored perhaps even so the the idea that that you should be you know acknowledged for your feelings particularly depends on whether i think that the feelings are rooted in something good or something bad right your children are constantly doing things that you don't want them to do and you're constantly telling them not to do them right your job as a parent is to help guide them through the world uh in in terms of valuable things that feminism has done for for girls and women i mean i'm fully cognizant of that my wife as i've said many times the doctor my when i was growing up my mom worked and my dad stayed home my daughter happens to be incredibly bright and i hope that she picks the career that she wants and is able to do exactly what she wants and we try to foster that in everything that she does you know that anything uh that a an anything that a a boy can do in terms of picking a career you can do although she is fully aware that uh you know that that typically there are certain things physically that where women are different than men right girls have babies and boys don't have babies and men pick up heavy objects and and are dumb uh this is what she knows about boys um so this is yeah which which yeah again is not a bad thing for her to a bad thing for her no um but the idea that women are are not relegated to to you know their biology alone in terms of what what they can do for a career of course i think is is very much true and i have no objection to that at all what i do have objection to is the idea that there are no fundamental differences between men and women that there is no difference that that can be named uh between a boy and a girl that i would for example have to not be able to say i have a girl a boy a girl i'd have to say i have children of unspecified gender until they reach the age of which they pick their gender which theoretically could change all the way until the time they become a dead mole yeah there i i have serious objections and i'm not gonna either confuse my kids with that notion or promulgate that falsity to them i think that it's important to to reinstill certain realities about their biology and and note that you are my to my son that he is a boy and to my daughter that she is a girl and if she wants to be a tomboy and be a girl that's fine and if my son you know is a little bit more effeminate and he's a boy he's still a boy you know there are certainly characteristics that where boys can you know have non-traditional male interests and and that's fine and girls can have non-traditional female interests and that's fine too i don't have any problem with that where i draw the line is where people start to suggest there are no fundamental differences between boys and girls which if you have boys and girls as children you know is not true or if you live in the world and have ever met either a man or a woman seem fundamentally untrue do you think that not dealing with i'm not talking about individuals here i'm talking about the way that the media is mobilized around this issue these issues do you think that there is something fundamentally disingenuous do you think that they have an agenda or objectives beyond the protection of people's rights to express themselves however they want to to identify however they want to to feel that they are accepted by a culture all of which to me seem like perfectly reasonable objectives for any individual do you feel that that there are secondary or ulterior agenda that are being pursued culturally that cause you some kind of disease other than the kind of the sort of what you've just asserted ideologically about you know your interpretation understanding of what you would just say is absolute biology yeah so i mean there are a few things so one is there there's a great book called the rise in triumph of the modern self by carl truman that i think is well worth reading on this particular subject there's been a redefinition it really doesn't start with transgenderism or even the modern era a redefinition of what it means to be an individual and where you get your individuality what what makes you you right what what is your identity about for most of human history your identity was about you living within the within the boundaries of a particular community how you interacted with the world was part of what shaped your identity how you interacted with your community was part of how you shaped your identity if you read aristotle it's all about producing good citizens in the palace for example or if you read the founding fathers they're talking about how to live within your community and the importance of communal bonds and as communal bonds have sort of broken down and i think that this relationship is sort of symbiotic as as our version of what identity is has changed people have stopped associating what i am with what society expects of me what are the rules of society and how do i interact with those rules of society and instead they've said i am what i feel right my authenticity is key authenticity is the thing that matters the most it doesn't matter whether there's no good and there's no bad there's just authenticity and the rules of the road have to be changed around me in order to foster my own sense of authenticity which means everybody else has to change their behavior because i feel a particular way well that to me is not a way to build a society i'm not sure that you can build a society in which everyone's individual identity is rooted in forcing everybody else to change their ideas about the world and and how they wish to address the world that doesn't seem like a smart way to do it if you can't have any sort of at all mutually agreed rules of the road uh other than presumably just saying yes to everything it's going to be very difficult to build a society around anything like that i mean that's on a very abstract level and more practical level one of the things that you've seen in the united states for example is an attempt to tell religious americans that if they don't raise their children with particular values then they're doing abuse to their children and that presumably the state should step in now you've seen bakers who have been sued for saying i don't wish to participate in this particular activity right now i'm i'm very libertarian when it comes to this stuff i feel that freedom includes freedom of association and freedom of association means that people i don't like can not associate with me that is their choice i i'm fully libertarian on this to the point where if somebody wants to not have jews in their business i think they're a bad person but i think that they should be free to do that because frankly i don't want any overarching authority telling people who they must and can must and can't associate with that seems to me more dangerous um but there is an outright attempt to change the nature of language to to make it so that we can't agree on even simple terminology to make language entirely subjective which makes it very difficult to talk to one another to turn every political problem into into an identity problem so we instead of having discussion about for example what is the proper treatment for gender dysphoria instead it turns into you're attacking my identity if you disagree with me about the proper treatment for gender dysphoria well what if i'm just arguing about what's the proper treatment for gender dysphoria based on the data or if i'm just discussing the differences biologically between males and females that's not an attack on your identity but the conflation of everything that i believe and everything that i feel internally on a subjective level with who i am uh is uh is a very it's very difficult to see how you reach common ground there you need to be at least able to put yourself out of the conversation enough to discuss things in a mutual space where the terminology is agreed upon when you discuss the um your own certainty around your judaism and orthodoxy um and your um and then sort of outline your critique of as some of these somewhat modern cultural phenomena but perhaps abiding phenomena more broadly even if the kind of emphasis and uh wasn't the discourse wasn't granted do you feel perhaps that there are fishers appearing culturally culturally that can't ever really be abridged and that possibly the best kind of solution might be that a kind of a confederacy of like well people just live how you want to live just live how you want to live and allow other people to live how they want to live which i can see that within somewhat within the remit of libertarianism yeah i mean i've said for a long time that i think that that this is the direction in which we're moving the question is are we going to share a a culture or not because that libertarianism only lasts as long as nobody grabs the gun at the top of the of the food chain right i mean whoever whoever controls the gun controls the policy unfortunately and and when i say the gun i just mean the government because the government to me is just a giant machine for compulsion that's in essence what the government is designed to do every law at the very end of the road is backed by some guy coming to your door with a gun and putting you in jail if you don't obey the law so it depends on on whether there can be a common agreement to leave people alone and i think that that agreement is is pretty much what is missing right now if if you are an adult and you choose to live however you want to live and you're not bothering me i may disagree with what you do i may think that what you're doing is religiously sinful i may think that on a non-religious level you are living a dissolute life and that you could be doing better with your life but i also understand that you're in adults and you have the capacity to to build your own life if you can't understand the same about me then we've got a problem because then we don't have a shared space at all then it's just a matter of who wins right then it's not a matter of we can have an agreement to leave each other alone which frankly i my ideal life is just to be left alone this seems great to me um but if there can't be that sort of fundamental agreement then there will just be this continuing war of all against all and then the question just becomes who wins that war because i don't think that war can be won i have been i've been thinking about it a lot man and like i sort of you know like i when i think about conservatism republicanism sort of like the you know enlightenment informed uh type of politics that led to the foundation of your country um my the challenge i have with it sort of in some way sounds oddly comparable to some of the uh criticisms you've offered about other um enclaves of culture and identity is that for me it seems that conservatism becomes too easily alloyed with concentration of power it facilitates and expedites the uh the progress of powerful interests and institutions it leads to inaccessible and fortified power centers i i for me more in the financial and corporate world rather than the sort of the world of state and government not that i'm a big state person either by the way so i've often like the same way i guess you're probably called a fascist and with the obvious ironies um you know acknowledged in referring to you with that loaded word um but i'm kind of something's called a communist and i think well i don't believe that there should be centralized state power at all that's something i really strongly disavow if anything i'm trying to find some fusion between anarchism in a literal sense i.e some sort of small collectives that are democratically run and libertarianism where the rights of the individual are honored and it seems to me that both of those ideas would require i mean who knows how we get to this utopia ben but in but even in raising it it seems to me that isn't it worth at least addressing the flaws within the kind of conservatism for which you are such an outspoken and admired uh uh orator like for example the way that you support like you must surely have had an uneasy relationship with trump because of the kind of perhaps the ethical and moral concerns around trump but because he was like the republican guy you know and i find him like a fascinating figure and i felt like a lot of the critiques and attacks on trump were revealing about the the real conservatism being within the liberal neo-liberal domain now that neo-liberalism abandoned its commitment to working-class people of any color in favor of cultural politics that uh which i've had explained to me has no real impact on true power centers creates division and conflict on both sides and enables the powerful to continue to pursue their interests i suppose amidst this storm of language ben what i'm saying is what kind of uh do what kind of doubts and concerns do you have about conservatism and republicanism where do you see there being room for change from what you would refer to mostly derisively on your show as the left is can you give me some stuff out of that hurricane i think that one of the big problems with conservatism is that conservatism in sort of the traditional american sense which looks more like classical liberalism in the european sense uh is it it's it's rooted in a certain fundamental assumption about the values that are going to be held by the community and if those values fall away then this then the institutions themselves are not going to be enough to protect the citizenry right this is something that john adams noted very early on he said that the constitution of the united states was made only for moral and religious people if if if the people became no longer moral or religious then they would move right through the boundaries of the constitution like a whale would through a net right so there are certain unspoken assumptions about the nature of community life and if we read de tocqueville very early on he talks about how in the united states people are constantly forming social organizations associations they're going to church a lot they're interacting with each other a lot they're building communities strong communities with real social fabric and that replaces the sort of government compulsion that otherwise you would need in order to provide for law and order right there's a lot of social pressure not to break the law there's a lot of social pressure not to be rude or impolite there's a lot of social pressure to do all of these things and if people stop acting that way then government compulsion is suddenly looking a lot more attractive because as things disintegrate people want the government to do all the things that society used to do and government starts to fill that gap so that's been a problem with conservatism and you're seeing that uh kind of break down within conservatism even with this sort of debate that's happening right now between a sort of libertarianish conservative wing and a more uh interventionist conservative wing people who think that the government actually should replace a lot of those social institutions in cramming down particular social values attempting to restore social fabric from the top down which i frankly don't think uh is is possible now when you talk about the centralization of power and institutions russell i i kind of want to know how the power was was centralized and what the power is being used to do so whenever i hear centralized power it sort of depends to me on what is being traded away in return for the centralized power so when i look at government i see centralized power in government i understand that you're trading away your rights to the government presumably in exchange for a certain level of protection and i have serious objections to that because those rights belong to me they are inalienable under our declaration uh and i think according to natural rights theory so government scares me when it comes to corporations the question is how are they gaining that power so if a corporation got really big because the corporation has a hand-in-glove relationship with the government and the government is there's regulatory capture the government is creating regulations specifically to quash the competitors of this particular giant corporation or the corporation is working in cahoots with the government to write the rules in such a way that it makes it pretty much unpalatable for anybody to get into that business that to me is deeply scary right when the occupy wall street movement started in the united states my big problem with the occupy wall street movement is i wasn't sure why they were occupying wall street as opposed to occupying dc considering that dc has the power of the purse and the power of the gun wall street is just a bunch of businesses so that's that's one arena of of centralized power the other arena of centralized power is just businesses getting bigger because they are good at what they do and i don't have a problem with businesses getting bigger because they are good at what they do or or operating in a free market space in order to negotiate for example with labor nor by the way do i have a problem with private labor organizing and opposition to to businesses so long as they're not kneecapping people who wish to work for a lower wage my problem with centralized power when it comes to corporate world is that centralized power in the corporate world very often involves hand-in-glove relationships with the compulsory power of the government enshrining these corporations permanently at the top of the hierarchy and that i have a real problem with perhaps it's inevitable that at the elite levels these kind of relationships are abiding that there is a that you cannot attain that degree of influence and for the definition of power a very simple one i heard is the ability to reward people who align with your interests and punish people who do not and on that basis we can see that there are certainly powerful emergent forces in the world of tech that are centralized that are able to to a degree it seems at least moderate themselves decide who can use their platforms in what way um but the reason one of the sort of real fundamental and gosh so rudimentary it's almost child-like queries that i have about the the way that you um conduct your channel and is that when you refer to the left as kind of um you know marxist and extreme leftist i feel like well they don't seem like they're on the left at all as ever as i've understood the left i either left about redistribution of resources the empowerment of ordinary people in the case obviously of your country ordinary americans of all colors and creeds having the ability to have power in their own lives free from cultural or political or economical or economic imposition this this for me is the role of a true opposition party however you want to colour it and one of the other issues i wanted to bring to you is it seems to me that there is now a kind of dissipation of these systems of categorization within the republicans you said there's that libertarian sort of post-tea party type of republicanism post-trump god knows what it looks like now and you know with the sort of traditional sort of christian riot that exists loosely corralled into that and with the left my biggest uh sort of concern about leftist politics is that there is no agenda to reorganize society beyond certain cultural inflections which you know you spend a lot of your time critiquing and a doubtlessly having a big impact but my my problem with that is it's not dealing with you for example what happened post 2008 the amount of poverty the amount of suffering the amount of loss there's no one in like joe biden's government saying what are we going to do about that how are we going to have ordinary americans comfortable in their own homes own their own homes if that's the model that you want to go with work with dignity if that's the model you want to go that doesn't seem to be on the agenda so i wouldn't really call that left-wing in any sort of marxist or economic sense at all well i think that here we have to distinguish goals from means so they're they're the the goals of having more people living in their own home or the goal of having more people have work and there are a couple of different approaches to that i think that we all hopefully share that goal uh the question is the approaches and there is sort of a broadly left-wing approach which is the government takes capital the government takes that that money from people who have earned it or invested it and takes it and then uses it to buy people homes or subsidize loans or hire people for jobs that's sort of the left-wing top-down approach and then there is the more conservative approach traditionally which is you basically allow the free market to work and then you incentivize people to make good decisions that allow them to get out of poverty more permanently in other words signing people a check is actually not a way of getting them out of poverty it's a way of of temporarily relieving poverty but does not change any of the incentive structures that allow people to truly escape poverty in in the long term those are two different approaches i i would say that that on the show when i speak about the left one distinction that i that i make very frequently on the show are between people who i i say are of the uh are leftist and people who i say are liberals people who i say are liberals are people who believe in bigger government and higher taxes and maybe nationalized healthcare but who don't actually wish to shut down the debate and and treat dissent as though it's a criminal act and then there are people who are really hardcore on the left who wish to engage in those sorts of activities so i try to make that distinction as much as possible um because i do think that the the great danger and we may be jumping out ahead of something else we're going to talk about but i think one of the big dangers right now is that as the overton window shuts it's very difficult to have honest conversations about any of these topics without somebody jumping out of the woodwork and uh calling you uh a name and then the debate shuts down and if you even have this conversation then you're gonna get hit i'm sure that russell after we have this conversation you're going to get hit with a wave of why would you even talk to that person for example and that sort of stuff happens fairly routinely in fact when i invite people on my show who disagree i say to them beforehand just recognize you're getting a lot of text from from your friends being very angry that you took me up on that but as far as sort of the broader rubric of trying to make life better for people there are a bunch of different approaches to how you make life better for people uh and i tend to take the approach that suggests that when you treat people as responsible individuals capable of making decisions that better their lives and you put the responsibility with the individual with adult individuals to do that that you are better off than if you treat them as basically just a pocket being [Music] requiring being being filled and that's obviously not talking about people who have some sort of serious disability or are literally unable to take care of themselves i feel that both of those approaches have problems and in a sense this is where i wonder if the spiritual values that we were talking about a little if not in particular detail with regard to their uh this the specificity of those values but like for me compassion kindness love and and you know when we touched upon the idea of like contemplation of how god would have us be for me in a sense there is in the kind of social darwinism that underwrites a lot of free market ideology natural competition services the market will look after itself but those kind of ideas for me are sort of like an aspect of of like i don't know rationalism say should we call it that i'm not particularly fond of because it seems to me that it has unleashed a set of processes that are leading to individualism commodification uh a kind of a a loss of meaning a loss of purpose and a side effect the consequence of that i i believe is it is yes economic poverty but a kind of a deeper poverty still a poverty of meaning i don't think capitalism in alliance with conservatism can provide that kind of meaning i sometimes query then whether even secularism can fulfill that role so when i am mentioning perhaps glibly in this context given the breadth of your knowledge when i talk about sexual centralization whether it's at a state level or an economic level these sort of juggernauts of power with incredible influence that can shape and make the world to their convenience i feel that these forces are largely in both cases whether you know like it's sort of like neo-liberal or leftist statist kind of centralized redistribution models that i don't ever see as being particularly effective and more focused on the kind of censorship and stuff that we've talked about even though i'm sympathetic in a way that perhaps that you are less inclined to be to the kind of you know that stuff about feelings i was like yeah i kind of care about people's feelings i guess you know we can get into that a little bit if you want to but more what i'm sort of interested in is how can we here now create a a kingdom that is a reflection of whether you believe in god or not the kind of values that god is undergirded by if one could ever come to such a conclusion but perhaps in sort of terms of sesame street ethics we could talk about love oneness kindness allowing people to be who they are and i don't see how free market capitalism is heading in that direction now i'm not talking about you like a self-made man building a what looks like an enviable media empire i'm talking about uh uh out of control power and financial power particularly the type that you alluded to and that is you know handing glove with like lack of government regulation so do don't you agree with me ben that neither of these options are in alignment with our higher principles uh you know you and i as both as men who like self-declared men of god and and therefore why are you out to bat so vociferously for one of those sides right so i i think that there have a couple of points to make here one i bet you do oh yeah one is that um i i think that frankly look if you're looking for love in economics you're looking for love in all the wrong places uh what i mean by that is that economics is is designed to generate wealth and innovation right the best economic systems are the ones that generate presumably the most wealth and the highest level of growth for populations broadly distributed and certainly capitalism has done the job there if you look at the the global gdp or the gdp of any individual nation since 1800 it has risen exponentially with the increase of free trade and private property rights and free markets and before then the the level of subsistence was extraordinarily high the the in terms of living at subsistence level life expectancy was extraordinarily low in europe it was still below the age of 40 was the average life expectancy in the year 1800 now everybody who's growing up in the left can expect to live 80 years in a level of wealth even at the poverty line that would be unimaginable to people who are middle class or even upper class in say 1900 right we have devices available at our fingertips even if you're very poor in the most in western societies that would boggle the mind of somebody living in 1900 like the richest guy in 1900 maybe had a couple of telephones the guy now has more computing power in the palm of his hand being on welfare than nasa had putting a man on the moon right that's the power of economics and the power of capitalism but if you're looking for meaning in economics uh i think that you're right to say that you can't find deeper meaning in in economics i i will say that i think that if you read adam smith and i don't mean just the wealth of nations which which a lot of people have referred to i mean the theory of moral sentiment he fully acknowledges that there has to be a moral underpinning to a recognition of individual human striving in individual human ability so take it from from this perspective i i know this is by the way there's a very rich debate obviously as you know in inside the religious community if you read the writings of francis right now versus the writings of benedict they're very different on economics obviously or certainly versus uh john paul ii so you know the the my view of this is that when in genesis god says that human beings are created in his image uh and that when god suggests that we have the individual power to choose as he suggested kane at the very beginning of genesis this is voicing responsibility on individuals and you have power over your own life you have power over your own labor now if there's somebody who's pressing you that's a different story right if there's somebody who's literally oppressing you then it is the job of government and others to step in and stop that person from oppressing you but the idea that it is the government's job to provide some sort of utopian vision on earth uh or that forced redistribution is the way to do that seems to me to really be a moral problem that infringes fundamentally on your ability to choose uh infringes on your infringes on your creative abilities uh and so the argument for free markets for me i don't you know capitalism is a term that that frankly was was coined by by marx to a certain extent but the the free market idea which is really that you own your own labor and that you are able to alienate that labor you're able to sell it you are able to work with it and then use the products of that labor to buy other things that comes down to fundamental human dignity in in a way as well and so my ideal is that everybody is able to own their own labor and alienate that labor as they see fit and that they find meaning in the social connections that they make with others and in the way that they bring up their family but i don't think that you can solve a spiritual problem with an economic answer is i think what i would say here and and the reason i say that is because we are richer than any time in human history and yet as you are pointing out a lot of people feel empty a lot of people feel lack of meaning in their lives a lot of people feel alienated from the culture it would be very difficult to take a person from 2021 plunk them down in 1850 and say are you better off materially in 1850 than you are in 2021 no one would take that trade but the forget about all of the other you know various social issues ranging from race to sex in 1850 i'm just talking about just the pure material lifestyle i think that it's important to recognize what economics can do and what economics can't and when we think that economics can fill hearts as opposed to filling pockets i think that we start to make a rather large scale mistake if it is inhibited in the ways that you have outlined in its capacity to provide meaning it or that in my view be relegated to a less potent social role rather than occupying as it does at the moment the pinnacle i.e even the metrics ben that you espouse gdp for example are determined in accordance with the ideals of this particular not necessarily science but this set of ideals and and rules and principles i'm not suggesting that there could ever be one centralized body although religiously of course you believe that there could be and indeed is that provides you with all of your meaning and your sort of personal and familial and professional regulatory systems and you know in your religious life you believe that there is and i feel like i suppose in another way i do but where perhaps we see things distinctly is i feel that there is a kind of an obligation to promote these values to the forefront of our lives to the point where these again these are sort of somewhat gooey terms like compassion and kindness are prized above economic growth and gdp and like the fact that these sort of regulatory measures are the sort of the dominant means for evaluating our culture i think that give us a set of biases that i think might be very very difficult to overthrow and i i feel that by having like the false markers of scientific technological and economic growth as the determinates for progress we fall into a trap that neglects air great vast territories of unimagined endeavor that could alter the human experience i feel that what i have been is a kind of deep optimism that we can create different worlds and part of that might be finding ways to curtail the potency of the some of the goliaths of the tech economic and even older energy-based sort of uh you know behemoths of economics and also though i i acknowledge and the many many um areas where we have to look at and and recognize that you know no one wants to revisit the failings of 20th century like in communism fascism all of those dead late industrialist ideas shouldn't be revived can't be revived but i feel that there is something within us and i feel that it lies within the currently in the domain of the religion and of religion and it needs to be released from there and allowed to become a a dominant cultural force not an oppressive one but things that i think is so fun about this is that we're kind of going deeper and deeper uh under the water line and i think that's that's great because i think that one of the things that you just said there uh is is something where we do sort of disagree about the the fundamental nature of optimism with regard to human capacities well i hope you enjoyed that part of my conversation with ben shapiro there is another hour available on luminary as an audiocast audio podcast and you can get it from apple or you can get it from luminar you can get it on apple wherever you are in the world it's another hour of conversation between ben and i it gets very very interesting and pretty intense so if you're interested in hearing that go over and subscribe to luminary which i've said you can get from apple thanks very much if you enjoyed that podcast please like subscribe turn on the notification bell go over to russellbrand.com sign up to the mailing list and remember i'm doing live shows at the moment there are tickets available go to my web site for those and also i've got a live streaming shakespeare show yeah me doing shakespeare talking about life it's pretty amazing which is available on live now details for all this stuff is on my russellbrand.com website thanks

Channel: Russell Brand

Views: 2,752,114

Rating: 4.9031024 out of 5

Keywords: Russell Brand, Brand Russell, BrandThe, Russell Brand video, Russell Brand news, Russell Brand politics, News, Brand, politics, Russell, russell brand podcast, russell brand ben shapiro, ben shapiro, ben shapiro show, the sunday special, under the skin, russell brand interview, ben shapiro interview, ben shapiro video, ben shapiro news, russel brand ben shapiro, political podcast

Id: xMiug2sZ4Io

Length: 50min 35sec (3035 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021

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[u/Big-Teach-5594]

Like and subscribe, the conservatives are better parasocial friends and love liking and subscribing, plus they've usually got more money, click the bell, remember to like and suscribe.

[u/Cornflake1981]

I listened to his podcast and enjoyed some of his stuff up until he went to the paid site. Recently he's come back on my YouTube and i don't know what happened. Can't tell if it's covid that messed him up or his drive for attention and went this route. To me, he just seems angry and mad, which is totally against what he used to speak of.

[u/Goatboyjones]

Become?

[u/DollopSplash]

Was he ever anything else?

[u/TagierBawbagier]

He's not a leftie, his content is controversy based. I don't think there's any point in being offended by this - he's had candace owens and peterson on before.

But he's also had marxists on, like yanis varoufakis on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_93O62aKMNA

[u/InquisitiveCitrus]

He always was an egomaniac slimy little shit, why is anyone surprised?

[u/BobbyCostner]

He's chatting to Shapiro now? What a fucking sell out

[u/chowyunfacts]

He only ever went Poundland Guevara once his Hollywood career tanked.