The following is a conversation with Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, host of the Ben Shapiro show, co-founder of the daily wire and author of several books, including the author at Aaron moment. The right side of history and facts. Don't care about your feelings, whatever. Your political leanings. I humbly asked that you tried to put those aside and listen with an open mind trying to give the most charitable interpretation of the words. We say
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Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think about the comments made by yay, formerly known as Kanye West about Jewish
people? They're awful and anti-semitic and they seemed to get worse over time. They started off with the bizarre Defcon three tweet and then they went into even more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators. I think that's the Pete Davidson Kim Kardashian stuff and then Jews running all of
The media just be in charge of the financial sector Jewish people? There's no, I mean, I called it on my showed their Sherman Nazism and it is. I mean, it's like right from Protocols of the Elders of Zion type
stuff. Do you think those words come from Pain where they come from? And,
you know, it's always hard to try and read somebody's mind and what he looks like to me just having experience in my own family, people who are bipolar is, he seems like a bipolar personality. He seems like somebody who is in the middle of a manic episode and
When you're manic you tend to say a lot of things that you shouldn't say and you tend to believe that they're the most brilliant things ever said the Washington Post an entire piece, speculating about how bipolarism played into the kind of stuff that he was saying. And it's hard for me to think that it's not playing into it, especially because
Even if he is an anti-semite and I have no reason to suspect, he's not giving all of his comments. If he had an ounce of Common Sense, he would stop at a certain point and bipolarism tends to drive you well past the the point where Common Sense applies. So I mean, I would imagine it's coming from that. I mean from his comments I would also imagine that he's doing The Logical mistake that a lot of anti-semites or racist or bigoted to do, which is somebody hurt me. That person is a
A Jew. Therefore, all Jews are bad and that that jump from a person did something to me. I don't like who's a member of a particular race or class and therefore everybody of that razor class is bad men. That's textbook bigotry in. That's pretty obviously what he is engaging in here. So,
jumping from the individual to the
group that's the way he's been expressing it, right? He keeps talking about his Jewish agents and I watched your interview with him and you kept saying I so just name the agents, right? Just name the people who are, who are screwing you and he wouldn't do it instead. He just kept going back to the, the general, the group, The the
The Jews in general. I mean that's that's textbook bigotry. And if we're putting any other context, he would probably recognize it as such
to the degree is worth fuel hate in the world. What's the way to reverse that process was the way to alleviate the hate?
I mean when it comes to alleviating the kind of stuff that he's saying, obviously, debunking it making clear that what he's saying is is garbage.
But the reality is that I think that for most people who are in any way engage with these issues, I don't think they're being convinced to be anti-semitic by. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a group of people who may be swayed, then anti-Semitism is acceptable because he is saying, what are you saying, anything? So very loudly and he's saying it over and over. But yeah I think that for example there were these signs that were popping up in Los Angeles saying yeah, is right? That that groups been out there posting
Like science on the freeways for years and their groups like that posting anti-semitic science where I live in Florida. They've been doing that for years. Well before ye was saying, this sort of stuff is just like latest opportunity to kind of jump on that particular bandwagon. But wasn't, I think that people do have a moral duty to call that stuff out.
So there is a degree to, which it normalizes that kind of idea, that Jews control, the media Jews control X Institution
Is there a way to talk about a high representation of a group, like, Jewish people in a certain institution, like the media, or Hollywood? And so on without it being a
hateful conversation, of course, a high percentage of higher than statistically represented. In the population, percentage of Hollywood agents are probably Jewish higher percentage of lawyers generally are probably Jewish high percentage of accountants.
Probably Jewish also a higher percentage of Engineers are probably Asian like it statistical truths are statistical truths. It doesn't necessarily mean anything about the nature of the people who are being talked about. There are a myriad of reasons why people might be disproportionately in one Arena or another ranging from the cultural to sometimes the genetic. I mean, are there certain areas of the world where people are better, long-distance Runners because of their genetic adaptations in those particular areas of the world?
That's not racist, that's just fact. And what starts to get racist is when you are attributing a bad characteristic to an entire population, based on the notion that that some members of that population are doing bad things.
There's a jump between, it's also possible to record label owners as a group. Have a kind of culture that FC over artists. Sure doesn't treat artist fairly, and it's also possible that there's a high representation of Jews.
In, in the group of people that own record labels but it's that small, but a very big leap that people take from the group that own record labels to all Jews.
For sure. And I think that one of the other issues also is that anti-Semitism is fascinating, because it breaks down into so many different parts. Meaning that if you look at sort of different types of anti-Semitism, if you're a racist against black people, it's typically because you're racist Dick based on the color of their skin. If you're racist,
If you're racist against the Jews you're anti-semitic, then they're actually a few different ways that breaks down, right, you have anti-Semitism in terms of ethnicity, which is like Nazi asked anti-Semitism, you have Jewish parentage of Jewish. Grandparents therefore you are your blood is corrupt, and you are inherently going to have bad properties, then there's sort of orders old-school, religious anti-Semitism, which is that the Jews are the killers of Christ or the Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys and therefore Judaism is bad. And therefore Jews are bad and it's sort of in the way that you get out of that anti-semitism.
Berkeley speaking is mass conversion by which most anti-Semitism for couple thousand years actually was not ethnic. It was, it was much more rooted in this sort of stuff, right? If you converted out of the faith, then the anti-Semitism was quote, unquote alleviated. And then there's a sort of bizarre anti-Semitism that's political anti-Semitism. And that is members of a group that I don't like, are disproportionately Jewish. Therefore, all Jews are
are members of this group or are predominantly represented in this group. So you'll see Nazi saying the Communists are Jews, as he communist saying the Nazis are Jews, or you'll see communist saying that the capitalist rather are Jews. And so, the that's the weird thing about anti-Semitism. It's kind of like the Jews behind every corner. It's basically a big conspiracy theory, unlike a lot of other forms of racism which are not really conspiracy theory. Anti-Semitism tends to be a conspiracy theory about the levers of power, being controlled by a shadowy, Cadre of people who are getting together behind closed, doors to control things.
Yeah, the most absurd, illustration of anti-Semitism, and just like you said, is Stalin versus Hitler over Poland. That every bad guy was a Jew, right? Was like, so every enemy, there's a lot of different enemy groups intellectuals political and so, on Military. And behind any movement, that is considered the enemy for the Nazis, and any movement is considered the enemy for the Soviet Army are the Jews. What is the
That Hitler took power. Teach you about human nature. When you look back at the history of the 20th century, what would you learn from that time?
I mean, they're a bunch of lessons to Hitler taking power. The first thing, I think people ought to recognize about Hitler taking power is that the power had been centralized in the government before Hitler took it. So, if you actually look at the history of Nazi Germany, the vine Republic had effectively collapsed, the power had been centralized in the chancellery and
And really under Hindenburg for a couple of years before that. And so it was only a matter of time until someone who was bad, grab the power. And so, the struggle between the Reds and the Browns in Nazism, in Pre Nazi, Germany led to this kind of up spiraling of radical sentiment that allowed Hitler in, through the front door, not through the back door, right? He was elected.
So you think Congress could have also taken
Power by. There's no question comments going to take him out, there were serious force in Pre Nazi Germany, do
There's an underlying current that would have led to an atrocity if the Communists taken
problem in quite the same atrocity. But obviously the Communists in Soviet Russia at exactly this time we're committing the holodomor right? So they so it was there were there were very few good guys, in terms of good parties, the moderate parties were being dragged by the radicals into alliance with them to prevent the worst case scenario from the other guy, right? So if you look at, I'm sort of fascinated by the the history of this period because it really does speak to. How does Adam
Chakra. See, breakdown, and in the 20s by Marta Republic was very liberal democracy. How does a liberal democracy, break down into complete fascism, and then into genocide and there's a character who was very prominent history that time named Franz von papen, who was actually the second-to-last chancellor of the Republic before Hitler. So he was the chancellor and then he handed over to like her and then he ended up just like her ended up collapsing, and that ended up handing power over to Hitler. It was paid been Hood stumped for Hitler to become Chancellor. Papen was
He was a Catholic Democrat. He didn't like Hitler. He thought that Hitler was a radical and a nut job. But he also thought that Hitler being a buffoon as he saw, it was going to essentially be usable by the right forces. In order to get the in order, to prevent the Communists from taking power, may be in order to restore some sort of legitimacy to the regime because he was popular nor for papen to retain power himself. And then immediately after Hitler, taking power, Hitler basically kills all the
Ben's friends papen out of quote-unquote loyalty stays on, he ends up helping the Angeles in Austria. All this stuff is really interesting mainly because what it speaks to is the great lie, we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us, they're their class apart people, who do evil things, people who support evil people people, they're not like us. And that that that's an easy call everybody. Everybody in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me. Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton he's fond of doing a sort of thought experiment in his classes where he asks
To raise their hand, if they had lived in Alabama, in 1861, how many of you would be able to shyness? And everybody raises their hand. He says, of course. That's not true. Of course, that's not true. And the, the best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over. And so, you have to be very cautious in how you approach these issues and the bad can forth a politics, that the sort of bipolarity of Politics. The, the or the polarization in politics might be a better way to put it.
It makes it very easy to kind of fall into the Rock'em sock'em robots. That eventually could theoretically allow you to support somebody who's truly
Frightening and hideous in order to stop somebody who you think is more frightening and hideous. He's kind of language, by the way. Now, predominating, almost all over the Western World, right? My political enemy is an enemy of democracy. My political enemy is going to end the Republic. My political enemy is going to be the person who destroys the country we live in. And so that person has to be stopped by any means necessary. And that's, that's dangerous
stuff. So the Communists had to be stopped in Nazi Germany. And so they're the devil and so any
Useful buffoon as long as they're effective against the Communists, would do, do you ever wonder? Because the people that are participating in evil may not understand that they're doing evil, do you ever sit back, you know, in the quiet of your mind and think, am I participating in
evil men, that sell my business partner and I one of our favorite memes is from, there's a British comedy show The Name Escapes Me of these two guys who are members of the SS and their
Resting the SS uniforms and the black uniforms, then the skulls on them. And they're saying to each other one says to the other guy and you notice that the British the the simple is something is something nice and it's like, and it's like an eagle and but it's a skull and crossbones. You see that the Americans, you see that their blue uniforms? That very nice and pretty awesome jet. Black are we the baddies? And you know, that's it. And the truth is we look back at at the Nazis and we say, well, of course, they were the baddies, they were black, uniforms and jackboots and they had this in it and of course they were the bad guys.
But evil really presents its face. So clearly, so yeah, I mean, I think you have to constantly be thinking along those lines and hopefully you try to avoid it. You can only do the best that human being can do. But, yeah, I mean, the answer is yes. If I would say that I spent an inordinate amount of time, reflecting on whether I'm doing the right thing and I may not always do the right thing. I'm sure a lot of people think that I'm doing the wrong thing on a daily basis, but it's definitely a question that has to enter your mind is
as a historically aware and hopefully more ladies in person.
Do you think you're mentally strong enough? If you realize that you're on the wrong side of History to switch sides, very few people in history seem to be strong enough to do
that. I mean, I think that the answer I hope would be yes, you never know until the time comes and you have to do it. I will say that having heterodox opinions in a wide variety of areas is is something that I have done before. I'm the only
Person I've ever heard of in public life, who actually has a list on their website of all the dumb stupid things I've ever said. So right, go through and I either say, this is why I still believe this, or this is why what I said was terrible and stupid and I'm sure that list will get a lot longer. Yeah, I look forward to our continued additions to the eggs. It
actually is a super, super long list. People should check it out and it's quite honest and raw. What do you think about? It's interesting to ask you given
No.
How pro life you are about iets comments. About comparing the Holocaust to the 900,000 abortions in the United States a year. So
I'll take this from two angles as a pro-life person, I actually didn't find it offensive because if you believe as I do that unborn and preborn lives deserve protection, then the slaughter of just under a million of them. Every year for the last, almost 50 years is a historic tragedy on par with a holocaust.
From the outside perspective, I get why people would say there's a difference in how people view the preborn as to how people view, say, a seven year old is being killed in the Holocaust like the visceral power and evil of the Nazi shoving. Full grown human beings in and small children in the gas, Chambers can't be compared to a person who even from pro-life perspective, may not fully understand the consequences of their own decisions or from a pro-choice protective fully understands the consequences, but just doesn't think that that person is a person that that's actually difference. I understand both sides of it.
Wasn't offended by you guys comments in that way, though, because if you're, if you're pro-life human being, then you do think that what's happening is, is a great tragedy on scale, that involves the dehumanization of an entire class of people the the preborn. So the philosophically understand the comparison, I do
sure. So in his comments in the jumping from the individual to the group, I'd like to ask you, you're one of the most effective people in the world that attacking the left.
And sometimes it can slip into attack in the group.
Do you worry that the that's the same kind of over simplification that yeah, he's doing about Jewish people that you can sometimes do with the left as a group.
So when I speak about the left, I'm speaking about a philosophy. I'm not really speaking about individual human beings as the leftists like group, and then try to name, who the members of this individual group are, I also make a distinction between the left and liberals. There are a lot of people who are liberal, who disagree with me on taxes discreet than foreign policy disagree with me on a lot of
Of things, the people who I'm talking about General. And I talked about the left in the United States. Are people who believe that alternative points of view, ought to be silenced because they are damaging and harmful simply based on the disagreement. So that's one distinction. The second distinction again, is when I talk about the right versus left, typically I'm talking about a battle of competing philosophies. And so I'm not speaking about typically it would be hard if you put a person in front of me and said is this person of the left or the right having just met them, I wouldn't be able to label them in the same way that if you
Met somebody that him Greenstein, you'd immediately got you romantic a black person's black person and that the adherence to a philosophy makes you a member of a group, if I think the philosophy is bad, that doesn't necessarily mean that you as a person are bad. But it does mean that I think our philosophy as bad.
Yeah. So the grouping is based on the philosophy versus something like a race, like this, the color of your skin or race as in the case of the Jewish people. So it's a different thing. You can be a little bit more.
Nonchalant and careless and attacking a group because it's ultimately attacking a set of
ideas. Well, I mean it is really nonchalant and attacking the set of ideas and I don't know, that nonchalant would be where I'd put it. I tried, I tried to be exact, when you're, you know, you're you don't, you don't always hit. But, you know, the if I say that I oppose the Communists, right? And and then presumably, I'm speaking of people who believe in the Communist philosophy. Now the question is whether I'm Miss labeling, right? Whether I'm taking someone who's not actually a communist and then shoving them in that group of communist, right? That'd be an accurate,
the, the day,
This thing is that expands the group as opposed to you talking about the philosophy. You you're throwing everybody who's ever said. I'm curious about communism. I'm curious about socials there because there's like a gradient. You know, it's like to throw something at you. I think Joe Biden said Maga Republicans. Right. You know, I think that's a very careless statement because the thing you jump to immediately is like, alright. I'll do an insert for Drought for Trump, right versus a, think in the
In the charitable interpretation, that means a set of ideas.
I'm actually problem with, with the mag Republicans line from from Biden, is that he went on, in the speech that he made in front of Independence Hall, to actually, trying to find what it meant to be a MAG Republican, who's a threat to the Republic, was the kind of language that he was using and later on in the speech, he actually suggested. Well you know there are moderate Republicans and the moderate Republicans are people who agree with me. I'm like the inflation reduction act like. Well, that that can't be the dividing line between a Maga Republican and a moderate like
Republican somebody who agrees with you that you got a name me like a republican who disagrees with you fairly strenuously, but it's not in this group of threats to the Republic. You make that distinction. We can have a fair discussion about whether the idea of election and I'll for example, make somebody, you know, a threats institutions. That's that's a, that's a conversation that we can have and then we'll have to discuss how much power they have. You know what, the actual perspective is delve into it. But, you know, I think that he was being over Broad and sort of labeling all of his political enemies under one rubric now again, in politics, this stuff sort of
All the time. I'm not going to plead Clean Hands here because I'm sure that I've been in exact. But somebody what would be good in that particular situation is for somebody to sort of reading back the quote and I'll let you know where I've been inaccurate, I'll try to do that. And also you don't shy away
from humor and occasional trolling and mockery and all that kind of stuff for the, for the farm, for the chaos, all that kind of
stuff. I mean, yeah. I try not to do troller E4, drollery sake. But, you know, it, if the shows not entertaining and I find people aren't going to listen. And so, you know, if you can't have fun with politics, the truth about
Texas. We all take it very seriously because it has some serious ramifications politics is Veep. It is not House of Cards. The general rule of politics is that everyone is a moron unless proven, otherwise then virtually everything is done out of stupidity rather than malice and that if you actually watch Politics as a comedy, you'll have a lot more fun. And so the difficulty for me is I take politics seriously. But also I have the ability to sort of flip the switch and suddenly It all becomes incredibly funny because it really is like if you just watch it from a entertainment perspective, and you put aside the fact that it affects hundreds of
Millions people then watching, you know, President Trump being present, I mean, he's one of the funniest humans who's ever lived watching. Kamala Harris, be Kamala Harris and talking about how much she loves Venn. Diagrams are electric, buses. I mean, that's, that's funny stuff. So if I can't make fun of that, then my job becomes pretty morose pretty quickly.
Yeah, it's funny to figure out what is the perfect balance between seeing the humor, in the absurdity of the game of it or says taking it seriously enough because it doesn't
Affect hundreds of millions of people. It's a weird balance to strike is like a. I am afraid with the internet that everything becomes a
joke. I totally agree with this. I will say that I tried to make less jokes about the ideas and more jokes about the people in the same way that I make jokes about myself. I'm pretty self-effacing in terms of my humor and I would say at least half the jugs on my shower about me, right? When I'm when I'm reading ads for Tommy John and they're talking about their no, was you guarantee I'll say things like, you know, that would help me in high school because it would have, I mean, just
Actually speaking. So in a bit, if I can speak that way by myself, I feel like everybody else can take it
as well.
Difficult question in 2017. There was a mosque shooting in Quebec City, six people died, five other seriously injured. The 27 year old gunman consumed, a lot of content online and check Twitter accounts, a lot of, a lot of people but one of the people, he checked quite a lot of is you 93 times in the month, leading up to the shooting. If you could talk to that young man, what would you tell him and maybe other young men listening to this that have hate in?
Our heart in that same way. What would you tell him? You're
getting it wrong. If anything that I or anyone else in mainstream politics, says drives you to violence, you're getting it wrong, you're getting it wrong. Now, again, when it comes to stuff like this, I have a hard and fast rule that I've applied evenly across the Spectrum and that is, I never blame people's politics for other people committing acts of violence unless they're actively advocating violence. So when Phantom, Bernie Sanders shoots up a congressional, baseball game, that is not Bernie Sanders is fault.
I may not like his rhetoric. I made it bigger than mine. Everything Bernie Sanders. Did not tell somebody to go shoot up, a congressional, baseball game. When a nutcase in San Francisco goes and hits Paul Pelosi with a hammer. I'm not going to blame Kevin McCarthy the house speaker for that. When somebody threatens Brett Kavanaugh, I'm not going to, I'm not going to suggest that was Joe Biden's fall because it's not Joe Biden's fault. I mean, the we can play this game all day long and I find that the people who are most intensely focused on playing, this game are people who tend to oppose the politics of the person as opposed to actually believing sincerely.
That this is driven somebody into the arms of the, the god of violence. But, yeah, I have four point seven million Twitter followers. I have 8 million, Facebook followers, I have five million YouTube followers. I would imagine that some of them are people who are violent Out. Imagine that some of them are people who do evil things or want to do evil things. And I wish that there were a lawn that we could wave, that would prevent those people from deliberately or mistakenly misinterpreting things as a call to violence.
It's just a negative byproduct of the fact that you can reach a lot of people. And so you know if somebody could point me to the comment that that I suppose quote unquote drove somebody to go and literally murder human beings. Then I would appreciate it so I could so I could talk about the comment but I don't mainly because I just think that if we remove agency from individuals and we if we blame broad-scale political rhetoric for every
Silence. We're not going to do the the people who are going to pay the price or actually the general population because Free Speech will go away. If the idea is that things that we say, could drive somebody, who is unbalanced? Go do something evil. The necessary byproduct is hate, is that, is that speech is a form of hate hate, is a form of violence. Speech is a form of violence, speech needs to be curbed and that to me is deeply disturbing.
So definitely he that man. That's 27 year old man.
Is the only one responsible for the evil he did. But what if he and others like him are not not cases.
What if they're people with pain with the anger in their heart? What would you say to them? You are exceptionally influential and other people like you that speak passionately. Bought ideas. What do you think? Is your opportunity to alleviate the hate and our
heart? If we're speaking about people who are mentally ill and people who are just misguided, I'd say to him. The thing that sets at every other young man in the country, you need to find meaning and purpose in forming connections.
Is that actually matter in a belief system that actually promotes General prosperity and and promotes helping other people. And this is why the message that I most commonly say to young, men is it's time for you to grow up mature, get a job, get married, have a family, take care of the people around you, become a useful part of your community. I've never at any point in my entire career suggested violence as a resort to political
Political issues in the whole point of having a political conversation is that it's a conversation. If I didn't think that that it will worth trying to convince people of my point of view, I wouldn't do what I do for a
living, so violence doesn't solve anything. No, it doesn't.
As if this wasn't already a difficult conversation, let me ask about Johanna more. You've called out her criticism of Israel policies as anti-semitic. Is there a difference between criticizing a race of people like the Jews and a and criticizing the policies of a Nation like
Israel? Of course, of course, I criticize the policies of Israel on a fairly regular basis, how did assume from a different angle than no no martos. But yeah, I mean, I could
The policies of a wide variety of state and to take an example, I mean I've criticized Israel's policy and giving control of the temple. Mount's the Islamic lock which effectively prevents anybody except for Muslims repairing up there. I've also criticized the Israeli government for the covid. Crackdown rightly can criticize the policies of any government, but that's not what I want Omar does. So why don't our doesn't actually believe that there should be a state of Israel? She believes that Zionism is racism and that the existence of a Jewish state. In Israel is in and of itself, the great sin, that is a statement should make
About no other people in no other land should not say that the French don't deserve a state for the French. She wouldn't say that somalis wouldn't deserve a state in Somalia. She wouldn't say that that German soldiers of estate in Germany. She wouldn't say for the 50-plus Islamic states that exist across the world that they don't deserve states with their own. It is only the Jewish state that has fallen under her significant scrutiny. And she also promulgates lies about one specific states in the form of suggesting. For example that Israel is an apartheid state which it is most eminently. Not considering that the
Last Unity government, Israel included an Arab party that they're Arabs, who said on the Israeli Supreme Court and all the rest and then beyond that. Obviously, she's engaged in some of the same sort of anti-Semitic tropes that you heard from you, I write stuff about It's All About the Benjamins that American support, for Israel is All About the Benjamins, and she's had to be tried it by members of her own party about this sort of stuff before.
Can you empathize with the plight of Palestinian people?
Absolutely. I mean, II, you know, some of the uglier things that I've ever said in my career things that I said, very early on, when I was 17 18, 19, I start writing syndicated comic, I was 17.
Now 38 so virtually all the dumb thing that's a virtually all many of the dumb things. The been the plurality of the dumb things that I've said came from the ages about a 17-2, maybe 23 and they are rooted again in sloppy thinking, I feel terrible for people who have lived under the thumb and currently live under the thumb of Hamas, which is an actual terrorist group, or the Palestinian Authority, which is a corrupt oligarchy that steals money from its people and leaves them in misery or Islamic Jihad. Which is natural terrorist group and the the
Accrual for the region in my view is if these groups were willing to make peace with Israel, that would have a state literally tomorrow, and if they are not, then there will be no Bees and it really is that simple. If Israel, the formula is typically used, it's become a bit of a bumper sticker, but it happens to be factually correct. If the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow, there would be a state if the Israelis put down their guns, there be no Israel.
You get attacked a lot on the internet.
I got it. I got to
ask you about your own psychology. How do you not let that break you mentally? And how do you avoid, letting that lead to a resentment of the groups that attack
you? I mean, it's so there. There are few sort of practical things that I've done. So for example, I would say that for years ago, Twitter was all-consuming, Twitter's Inigo machine, especially the notifications button, right there notifications button is
Just people talking about you all the time and the normal human tendency as well. People talking about me I got to see what they're saying about me which is a recipe for Insanity so at my wife actually said Twitter is making your life miserable you need to take it off your phone so Twitter is not on my phone. If I want to log on to Twitter, I have to go onto my computer and have to make the conscious decision to go onto Twitter and then take a look at what's going on. I could just imagine you. Like
there's a computer in the basement as you descend into the check
Twitter, that's pretty funny. And I'm Darkness if you look at when I actually tweeted is generally like in the run-up to recording my
Or when I'm prepping for my show, later in the afternoon, for
example, that doesn't affect you negatively, mentally, like, put you in a bad mental space,
not particularly if it's restricted to sort of what's being watched. Now, I will say that I think the most important thing is, you have to surround yourself with a group of people who are, who you trust enough to make serious critiques of you when you're doing something wrong. But also, you know that they have your best interest at heart because the internet is filled with people who don't have your best interest at heart, who ate your gods. And so you can't really take those critiques seriously or does wreck you
You and the world is also filled with sycophants, right? Then the more successful you become there, a lot of people who will tell you, you're always doing the right thing. I'm very lucky. I got married. When I was 20 for my wife was 20, so she's known me long before I was famous or wealthy or anything and so she's a good sounding board. I have a family that's willing to that's willing to call me out. On my bullshit. Is you talk to you too? Yeah, about I have friends who are able to do that. I try to have open lines of communications with people who I believe, have my best interest at heart, but one of
Sort of conditions being friends that when you see me do something wrong, I'd like for you to let me know that so I can correct it. I don't want to leave that Impressions out there. The
sad thing about the internet, just looking at the critiques, you get. I see very few critiques from people that actually want you to succeed once you tomorrow. I mean, they're very they're not sophisticated, they're just there, I don't know, they're cruel. The critiques are just there, it's not an actual
critiques, it's just cruelty. And that's that's most of Twitter. I mean, as I said, Twitter is a place to
Smack and be smacked. I mean that's the, the anybody who is this Twitter for for an intellectual conversation, I think is engaging in category
error. I used it to spread the love. I think the
say you're the only one. You're it's you, it's you and no one else, my friend. All
right, what on that topic? What do you think about you on buying Twitter? What do you like? What are you hopeful on that front? What would you like to see Twitter
improve? So I'm very hopeful about Elon buying Twitter, I mean, I think that Elon is significantly more.
As a parent then what has taken place up till now? He seems committed to the idea that he's going to broaden. The Overton window to allow for conversations that simply were banned before everything, ranging from efficacy of masks with regard to covid to whether men can become women and all the rest, a lot of things that would get you banned on Twitter before, without any sort of real explanation. It seems like he's dedicated to at least explaining what the standards are going to be and being broader and allowing a variety of perspectives on the outlet, which I think is wonderful. I think that's also
Why people are freaking out? I think the the kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth and wearing a sack cloth and a Schmo, many members, the Legacy Media. I think a lot of that is because Twitter essentially was an oligarchy, in which certain perspectives were allowed in certain perspectives, just were not. And that was part of a broader social media re-imposed oligarchy in the aftermath of 2017. So, in order for us to really understand, I think what, what it means for Ilan to take over Twitter, I think that we have to
Take a look at sort of the history of media in the United States and in two minutes or less, the United States. The media for most of its existence up until about 1990, at least from about 1930s until the 1990s virtually. All media was three major television networks. A couple of major newspapers in The Wire Services every Hill, local newspaper, that's wire services that the basically did all the foreign policy and all the national policy McClatchy. Reuters AP AFP Etc. So that Monopoly or oligopoly existed until the rise of the internet. There were sort of pokes at it and talk radio and Fox News.
But there certainly was not this plethora of sources, then the internet explodes and all the sudden you can get news everywhere. And the way that people are accessing that news is your, I believe significantly younger than I am, but we used to do this thing called bookmarking, where you add a bookmark, a series of websites. And then you would visit them every morning and then, and then social media came up and it was from AOL or yeah, exactly. You had the dial up and you'd actually was actually a can connected to a string, and you had actually just it would go. And, and, and then there came
Where social media arose and social media was sort of a boon for everybody because you no longer had a bookmark. Anything you just followed your favorite accounts and all of them would pop up and you follow everything on Facebook and would all pop up. And it was all centralized. And for a while everybody was super happy because this was the brand new wave of the Future made everything. Super easy suddenly Outlets like mine are able to see new eyeballs because it was all centralized in one place, right? In have to do it through Google optimization and you could now just put it on Facebook and so many eyeballs were on Facebook. You get more traffic and everybody seemed pretty happy with this Arrangement until precisely the moment on.
Trump became president at that point, then the sort of pre-existing supposition of, a lot of the powers-that-be which was Democrats are going to continue winning from here on out. So we can sort of use the social media platforms as ways to to push our information and still allow for there to be other information out there. The immediate response was we need to re-establish this this siphoning of information. It was misinformation and disinformation that one's own Will trump the election. We need to pressure, the social media companies to start cracking down on misinformation and
Information. And actually see this in the historical record, and you can see how Jack dorsey's talk about Free. Speech shifted from about 2015, it's about 2018. You can see Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown in 2018, which you talk about free speech and its value. And by 2019, he was going in front of Congress, talking about how he was responsible for the stuff that was on Facebook, which is not true. He's not responsible for the stuff on Facebook, right? It's a platform is a Teensy responsible for the stuff you say on your phone. The answer is typically, no. So when that happened, all of these because all the eyeballs and now be centralized in these social media sites,
They were able to suddenly control. What you could see and what you could not see. And the most obvious example was obviously leading up to 2020 the election that the killing of the hunter. Biden story is a great example of this, and so Elon coming in and taking over one of the social media service and saying, I'm not playing by your rules, right? There's not going to be the sort of group of people in the halls of power organ, decide what we can see and hear instead, I'm going to let open a thousand flowers bloom there will be limits, but it's gonna be on more case-by-case basis. We're going to allow
Perspectives that are mainstream but maybe not mainstream in the halls of Academia or in the halls of media. Let those let those be sad. I think it's a really good thing. Now that comes with, you know, some responsibilities on anyone's personal part, which would be, you know, to be, for example, I think more responsible and dissemination of information themselves sometimes, right? Like he got himself in trouble. The other day for tweeting out that that story about policy that was speculative and and untrue. And I think, I don't think what he did.
Did is you know horrific, he deleted it. When he found out that it was false but and that's actually free speech working, right? He said something wrong, people ripped into him, he realized he was wrong. He deleted it. Which seems to be a better solution than preemptively ban and content which only raises more questions than it actually stops. With that said, as the face of responsible, Free Speech, you know, and that's sort of what he's pitching. It's better, he I think should enact that himself and be a little more careful in the stuff that eats
out. Well, that's a tricky balance of the reason a lot of people freaking out.
Because one, he's putting his thumb on the scale by saying he is more likely to vote Republican, he's showing himself to be Santa, right? Sort of just having a political opinion, versus being this amorphous thing. That doesn't have a political opinion. I think if I were to guess, I haven't talked to him about it, but if I were to guess he's sending a kind of signal, that's important for the Twitter, the company itself. Because if we're being honest, most of the employees, a left-leaning. So you have to kind of send a signal that like a resisting.
ISM to say like, since most of the employees are left is good for for Ilan to be more right to balance out the way the actual engineering is done to say. We're not going to do any kind of activism activism side the engineering. If I were to guess that's kind of defective aspect of that of that mechanism and the other one. But posting the Pelosi thing is probably to expand the Overton window, like, saying we can play
Post of look at post conspiracy theories, and then through discourse, figure out what is and isn't
true. Again, like I say, I mean I think that the that is a better mechanism in action than what it was before. I just think it gave people who hate his guts, the opening to kind of slap him for for no reason. But I can see the strategy of it for sure. And I think that the the general idea that he's, you know, kind of pushing right where the company push left before. I think that there there is actually unilateral polarization right now in politics.
Least with regard to social media in which one side basically says, the solution to this information is to shut down free speech from the other side and the other side is basically like people like me are saying, the solution to this information is to let a thousand. Like I'd rather have people on the left. Also, being able to put out stuff that I disagree with then, for there to be anybody who's sort of in charge of these social media platforms and using them as editorial sighs. I mean that the planet I'm not criticizing MSNBC for not putting on right-wing opinions and that's fine. I run a conservative side. Mmm.
We're not going to put up left-wing opinions on a wide variety of issues because we are conservative side, but if you pitch yourself as a platform that's it, that's a different thing. If you pitch yourself as the Town Square, as, as you on likes to call it, then I think Ilan has a better idea of that. Then then many of the former employees did, especially now that we have that report from The Intercept suggesting that there are people from Twitter working with DHS to, to Monitor, quote-unquote, disinformation, and being rather vague about what this information meant.
Yeah, I don't think activism has a place in what is fundamentally an
Engineering company that's building a platform like the people inside. The company should not be. Putting a thumb on the scale of what is and isn't allowed. You should create a mechanism for the for the people to decide what isn't isn't a lot. Do you think Trump should have been removed from Twitter? Should his account be restored?
His account should be restored. And this is coming from somebody who really dislikes, an enormous number of Donald Trump's tweets again. He's a very important political personage.
Even if he weren't, I don't think that he should be banned from from Twitter or Facebook and coordinated fashion. By the way, I hold that opinion about people who I think are far worse than Donald Trump. People everyone knows I'm not now, Alex, Jones guy, I don't like Alex Jones, I think Alex Jones. Oh, he's got Alex, should be back on Twitter. I do actually because I think that there are plenty of people who are willing to say that, what he's saying is wrong. And I'm not a big fan of this idea that that because people I disagree with
and people have personally Target me by the way, I mean, Alex Jones. This has been his said some things about me personally that I'm not real fond
of but you guys know we're
not besties now it turns out. Yeah you know, all I've said is I don't really enjoy the show, he said some other stuff about the Antichrist and such but that's that's a bit of a different thing I suppose and even. So now I'm just not a big fan of this idea. Like I've defended people who have really gone after me on a personal level. I've targeted me that the Town Square is online.
Banning people from the Town Square is on personing them, unless you violated a criminal statute, you should not be unperson in American society. As a general rule, that doesn't mean that companies that are not platforms. Don't have the ability to respond to you. I think Adidas is right to terminate his contract with Kanye, for example, with the a, you know, that's but twittering Adidas.
So the way your stance on Free Speech, does it agree?
It's possible to achieve on a platform like Twitter is you fight bad speech with more speech with better speech. And that's so if Alex Jones and Trump has allowed back on in the coming months and years leading up to the 2024 election, you think that's going to make for a better world in the
long term? I think that on the principle that people should be allowed to do this and the alternative being a group of thought bosses telling us what we can and cannot see.
Yes. So I think in the short term it's going to mean a lot of things that I don't like very much. Sure. I mean that's them's the them as the cost of doing business, you know? Like I think that one of the one of the cost of freedom is people doing things that I don't particularly like and I would prefer the freedom with with all the, with all the stuff I don't like. Then the not the freedom.
Let me linger in the love a little bit. You and a lot of people are pretty snarky. I'm Twitter sometimes to the point of mockery duration, even bit of if I were to say
Say bad faith in the kind of mockery. And you see it as a war like Eli disagree with both you and he'll on on this you on sees Twitter's a war zone or at least has saw it that way in the past have you ever considered being nicer on Twitter like as a voice that a lot of people look up to that if Ben Shapiro becomes a little bit more about love. That's going to inspire a lot of people are no. It's just too fun for
you. The answer is yes.
Sure. It's occurred to me like it. Let's put it this way. There's a lot of tweets that actually don't go out that I delete. I'll say they put it on Twitter. Twitter's new function that 30 second function is is a friend of mine every so often, I'll tweet something. And I'll, I'll think about it. As how about do I need to say this? Probably
not. Can you make a book published after you pass away of all the tweets that you didn't
send my kids are still going to be around? I go. Oh, so that's what it's all right. You know, the Legacy. But yeah, I mean sure, the answer is
Yes, and this is a good piece of what we would call an Orthodox. Judaism muster. This is like they is giving a mustache modes right now. This is a like the kind of be a better person stuff. I agree with you. I agree with you and and yeah, and I will say that Twitter is sometimes too much fun. I try to be, I try to be, at least, if not even handed, then equal opportunity in my Division. I remember that during the 2016 primary has, I used to post rather snarky tweets about virtually all of the candidates Republican and
Crap. And every so often I'll still do some of that. I do think actually the amount of snark on my Twitter feed is going down fairly significantly. I think if you go back a couple of years is probably one more snarky today, I'm trying to use it a little bit more in terms of strategy to get out information. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going to make jokes about, for example, you know, Joe Biden. I will make jokes about Joe Biden. He's the president of the United States. Nobody else will mock him. So the entire comedic establishment has decided they actually work for him,
so the
Resident United States. No matter who they are. Get the snark
from? Yes. Yes. And President Trump, I think is fairly aware that he got this rock for me as well like this when it comes to starting the president going to stop that, I think the president deserves to be smart so you're not afraid of attacking Trump. No, I mean, I've done it before.
Can you say what your favorite and least favorite things are about President Trump and President Biden on at a time? So maybe one thing that you can say super positive while Trump and one thing super
- about Trump.
Okay. So the super positive thing about Trump is that because he has no preconceived views that are establishment, Aryan, he sometimes willing to go out of the box and do things that haven't been tried before and sometimes that works. I mean, the best example, being the entire foreign policy establishment, telling him that he couldn't get a middle eastern deal Dawn, unless he sent her the palestinian-israeli conflict. And instead, he just went right around that and ended up cutting a bunch of Peace deals in the Middle East or moving the embassy in Jerusalem, right? Sometimes he does stuff and it's really out of the box and it actually works and that's
That's kind of awesome and politics and, and need to see the downside of trump is that he has no capacity to to use any sort of. There's no, there's no filter between Brandon mouth. Well, whatever happens in his brain is the thing that comes out of his mouth. I know a lot of people find that charming and wonderful and from time to end, it is very funny. But I don't think that, that it is a particularly excellent personal quality in a person who has much responsibility as President Trump has. I think he says a lot of damaging and bad things,
Twitter. I think that he seems consumed in some ways by his own grievances, which is why I've seen him focusing in on Election 2020 so much. And I think that that is very negative about president from. So I'm very grateful to President, Trump has a conservative for many of the things that he did. I think that a lot of his personality issues are pretty
severe. What about Joe Biden?
So I think that the thing that I like most about Job ideas, I will say that Biden,
Two things. One Biden seems to be a very good father by all available, by all available evidence right there. A lot of people who are put out, you know, kind of tape of him talking to Hunter and Hunters having trouble with drugs or whatever. And I keep listening that tape and thinking
he seems like a really good dad, like the stuff that he's saying to his son and stuff, that God forbid. If that were happening with my kid, I'd be saying to my kid and so, you know, you can't help but feel for the guys had an incredibly difficult go of it with his with his first wife and the death of members of his family and then Bo dying. I mean like that kind of stuff obviously is deeply sympathetic and his, you know, he seems like a deeply sympathetic father as far as his politics, he seems like a slap on the back, you know, kind of guy. And I don't mind that. I think that's that's
So far as it goes, it's sort of an old school politics where things are done with handshake and personal relationships. The thing I don't like about him is I think sometimes that's really not genuine. I think that sometimes, you know, I think it that's his personal tendency but I think sometimes he allows the the prevailing winds of his party to carry him to incredibly radical places and then he just doubles down on the radicalism in some pretty disingenuous ways. And and there I would cite the Independence Day speech which are the Independence Hall speech which I thought was truly one of the
species. I've seen a president gift so you don't think he's trying to be a unifier in general. Not at all. I mean, I that's that's what he was elected to do. He was elected to do two things. Not be alive and be a unifier. Those were the two things and like, and when I say not be alive, I don't mean like physically Dad. This is where the smart comes in. But he, but what I do mean is that he is he was elected to not be particularly activist. Basically the Mandate was don't be Trump, be saying don't be Trump, calm everything down and instead he got in and he's like what if we spend seven trillion dollars? What if we, what if
A lot of Afghanistan without any sort of plan. What if I start labeling all of my political enemies enemies of the Republic? What if I start suggest bringing Dylan Mulvaney to the White House and talking about how it is a mortal sin to prevent the genital mutilation of minors me like that. Like this kind of stuff is very radical stuff and this is not a president who has pursued a unifying agenda which is why his approval rating saying from 60% when he entered office to low 40s or high 30s today, I'm like president who never had high approval rating, right. Trump came into office and have like a 45 percent approval rating and when he left
Office yet about a forty, three percent approval, rating, and bounced around between 45 and 37. Pretty much his entire presidency Biden went from being a very popular guy, coming in to a very unpopular guy, right now, and if you're Joe Biden, you should be looking in the mirror and wondering. Exactly. Why
do you think that pulling out from Afghanistan could be flipped as a pro for Biden? In terms of he actually did it?
I think it's going to be almost impossible. I think the American people are incredibly inconsistent about their own views on foreign policy. In other words, we like to be isolationist until that time comes time for us to be defeated.
Millie ated. When that happens, we tend not to like it very
much you mentioned by and being a good father. Can you make the case for and against the the hunter Biden laptop story for it being a big deal and against it being a big deal
for. So the case for being a big deal is basically twofold, one, is that it is clearly relevant. If the president's son is running around to foreign countries, picking up bags of cash, because his last name is Biden. Well, his father is very
Vice President of the United States, and it raises questions, as to influence peddling for either. The vice president or the former vice president using political connections. Did he make any money? Who was the big guy, right? All these open questions that obviously implicates the the questions to be asked? And then the secondary reason that the story is because X because the reaction of the story, The Banning of the story is in and of itself. A major story if there's if there's any story that implicates a presidential candidate in the last month of an election, and there is a media blackout including a social media
Like out that obviously raises some very serious questions, about informational flow and determination in the United States, no matter
how big of a deal. The story is it is a big deal that there's a censorship of any relevance to
when there's a coordinated. Collusive blackout. Yeah, that's that's that's a serious and major problem. So those are the two reasons why it would be a big story. The two reasons reason why it would not be a big story perhaps is if it turns out and we don't really know this yet. But let's say that a hundred Biden was basically off on his own doing what he was doing.
Doing being a derelict, or drug addicts, or acting badly, and his dad had nothing to do with it. And Joe was telling the truth, and who really knew. But the problem is we never actually got those questions answered. So if it had turned out to be nothing of a story, the nice thing about stories that turned out to be nothing, is that after they turn out to be nothing there, nothing. The biggest problem with this story is that it wasn't allowed to take the normal life cycle of a story which is original story breaks. Follow-on questions are asked follow-on, questions are answered, story is either now big story or into nothing one when
Life cycle of a story is cut off, right? At the very beginning, right? One of the born, then that allows you to speculate in any direction you want, you can speculate. It means nothing, it's nonsense, it's Russian. It's a Russian laptop. It's disinformation, or on the other hand, this means the Joe Biden was personally calling Hunter and telling him to pick up a sack of cash over in Beijing and then you can press it and he's influence peddling. So this is why it's important to allow these stories to go forward. So this is why actually the bigger story from the moment is not the laptop. It's the reaction to the laptop because it cut off that life cycle of the story and then,
Then, you know, at some point, I would assume that there will be some follow-on questions that are actually answered in the house is pledging if it goes Republican to investigate all of this. Again, I wouldn't be supremely surprised. If it turns out that that there was no direct involvement of Joe in this sort of stuff, because it turns out, as I said before that, all of politics is V. And this is, this is always the story with half the scandals that you see. Is that everybody assumes that there's some sort of deep and abiding clever plan, that some politician is implementing it. And then you look at and it turns out now, it's just something dumb.
Render this sort of perfect example of this, you know, President Trump with the classified documents in Mar-A-Lago. So, people on the left, like it's probably nuclear codes, probably he's taking secret documents and selling them to the Russians or the Chinese. And the real most obvious explanation is Trump looked at the papers and he said, I like these papers and then he just decided to keep them, right? And then people came to visit mr. President, you're not allowed to keep those papers and who are those people? I don't care about what they have to say. I'm putting them in the other room in a box like like which is what it is. It is highly likely that that is what happened and it's very disappointing to
People, I think when they realize the human brain, I mean, you know, this better than I do, but the human brain is built to find patterns, right? It's what we like to do. We like to find plans and patterns because this is how he survived in the wild. As you found a plan, you found a pattern, you crack the code of the universe and it comes to politics the the conspiracy theories that we see. So often it's largely because we're seeing inexplicable events unless you just assume everyone's moron. If you assume that there's a lot of stupidity going on everything becomes quickly explicable. If you assume that that there must be some rationale behind it, you have to come up with increasingly convoluted conspiracy.
Your theories to explain just why people are acting the way that they're acting and I find that I dont say 100% of the time but ninety ninety four percent of the time. The, The Conspiracy Theory turns out just to be people being dumb and then other people reacting and dumb ways, the original people being dumb,
but it's also to me in that same way, very possible, very likely that the hundred Biden, hundred, Biden, getting money in Ukraine, I guess, for Consulting. All that kind of stuff is a. Nothing Burger is a
He's qualified, he's getting money. As you showed, there's a lot of influence peddling, in general. In terms of that's not, I think dropped this explanation. There
probably is that he was fake, influence-peddling meaning he wants Ukraine and he's like, guess what? My dad's Joe and they're like, well, you don't have any qualifications, and oil and natural gas, and you don't really have a great resume, but your dad is Joe. And then I was kind of the end of it, they give him a bag of cash. Hoping you would do something. You never did anything,
think you're making it sound worse than it is. I think this in general Consulting is done that way your name.
It's not like you're through with you, you're not
It's not like he is some rare case and this is an illustration of corruption. If you can criticize consulting
which I would as fat, which they're
basically not providing
your look at a
resume and who's who? Like, if you went to Harvard, I can criticize the same thing. If you have Harvard on your resume, you're more likely to be hired as a consultant. Maybe there's a network there of people that you know and you hire them in that same way. If your last name is Biden, if you last there's a lot of last names that sound
pretty good.
That's for sure. And so and it's not like you admitted that much by the way, right? And open interview he was like if your last name weren't bad when you got that job and it's like probably not and he writes an honest, the I agree with you. It's not like
he's getting a ridiculous amount of money. He was getting like a pretty standard Consulting, kind of money, which also would criticize because they get a ridiculous amount of money, but I sort of even to push back in the life cycle or two steel Madness. The the side that was concerned about the hunter behind laptop story, I don't know.
There is a natural life cycle of a story because there's something about a the virality of the internet that we can't predict that a story can just take hold and the conspiracy around. It builds, especially around politics, where the interpretation, some popular sexy, interpretation of a story that might not be connected to reality. At all, will become viral. And that from Facebook's perspective, probably what they're worried about is a organized misinformation campaign.
That makes up a sexy story or sexy interpretation of the, the vague story that we have and that has an influence on the
populace mean. I think that's true, but I think the question becomes, who's the great adjudicator there, right? Who adjudicates when the story ought to be allowed to go through, even a bad life cycle, or a lap may be allowed to go viral as opposed to not know, it's one thing if you want to say, okay, we can spot the Russian accounts that are actually promoting this stuff. They belong to the Russian government. Got to shut that down. I think everybody agrees. This is actually one of the slides that happen.
Westerly that I really objective, is the slide between disinformation and misinformation. You notice, there's this evolution in 2017. There's a lot of talk about disinformation was Russian. Disinformation, the Russians were putting out deliberately false information or to school election results was the accusation and then people started using this information or misinformation and misinformation is either mistaken information or information, that is quote, unquote out of context. That becomes very subjective, very quickly as to, what out of context means, and it doesn't necessarily have to be from a foreign Source. It can be from a domestic Source, right? Could be somebody
Interpreting something. Here, it could be somebody interpreting something correctly by PolitiFact thinks that it's out of context and that that sort of stuff gets very murky very quickly. And so, I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook, I mean, Zuckerberg was on with Rogan and talking about how the FBI had basically said, look out for Russian interference in the election and then all of these people were out there saying that the laptop was Russian disinformation. So he basically shut it down. That sort of stuff is frightening, especially because it wasn't Russian disinformation. I mean the laptop was real and so the the fact that
You have people who seem to let's put this way. It seems as though, maybe this is wrong. It seems as though when a story gets killed preemptively like this, it is almost universally a story that negatively affects one side of the political aisle. I can't remember the last time. There's a story on the right. That was this information or misinformation? Where social media stepped in and they went we cannot have this. This cannot be distributed. We're going to all concludes that. This information is not distributed, maybe in response to the store being proof also gets taken down but
The what made the hunter Biden thing so amazing is that it wasn't really even a response to anything. It was like the story got posted. There were no actual doubts expressed as to the verified falsity of the story. It was just supposition that it had to be false and everybody jumped in. So I think that confirmed a lot of the conspiracy theories people had about about social media and how it works.
Yeah, so if the reason you want to slow down the viral, spread of the thing is, at all grounded, in partisanship. That's a problem. Like, you should be very honest with yourself.
And ask yourself that question, is it? Because I'm on the left, or on the right that I want to slow this down versus? Is it hate bipartisan hate speech? Right? So that's, but it's really, it's really tricky. But I like you. I'm very uncomfortable in general but then you kind of slowing down with any kind of censorship. But if there's something like a conspiracy theory that spreads hate that becomes viral,
I still lean to let that conspiracy theory spread because the alternative is dangerous and more dangerous.
It's sort of like the ring of power, right? Like everybody wants the ring is with the ring. You can stop the bad guys from going forward, but it turns out that the ring gives you enormous power. And that power can be used in the wrong way, is to
you had the daily wire, which I'm a member of.
So, I appreciate that. Thank you.
I recommend everybody signed up to it. Should be part of your regular diet, whether you're on the
Left and the right the far left or the far, right? Everybody should be part of your regular diet. Okay. That said, do you worry about the audience capture aspect of it? Because it is a platform for conservatives and you have a powerful voice on there. There it might be difficult for you to go against the talking points or against the stream of ideas, that is usually connected to conservative. Thought, do you worry about
that?
I mean, the audience would obviously, be upset with me and would have a right to be upset with me. If I, suddenly flipped all my positions on a dime, I have enough faith in my audience, that I can say, things that I think are true and that may disagree with the audience, you know, on a fairly regular basis outside. But they understand that on the deeper principal, we're on the same side of the, at least, I hope that much from the audience. It's also why we provide a number of different views on the platform's. Many of which I disagree with, but are sort of within the generalized range of conservative thought and that, you know,
No, it's something. I do have to think about every day though. Yeah, I mean you have to you have to think about like am I saying this because I'm afraid of taking off my audience or am I saying this? Because I actually believe this. And, you know, that's a, that's a delicate dance, a little bit. You have to be sort of honest with yourself.
Yeah. Somebody like Sam Harris is pretty good at this at fighting at saying the the most outrageous thing that he knows he almost leans into it, he knows will piss off a lot of his audience sometimes you almost have
Test the system is like, if you feel, you almost exaggerate your feelings, just to make sure that the send the signal to the audience that you're not captured by them. So speaking of people you disagree with what is your favorite thing about Candice Ellen's and wood is one thing you disagree with her on?
Well, I hear a thing about Candice is that she will say things that nobody else will say my least. Favorite thing about canvas is that you will say, things that nobody else will say. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, listen she she says things that are audacious and I think need to be said, sometimes sometimes I think that she is morally wrong, right? I think the way she responded to Kanye, I've said this clearly was dead wrong and morally wrong. I don't know, sir response, her original response, was that she preferred confusion of what ye was actually talking about and then she, you know, was defending her friend. I wish that the way that she had responded was by saying, he's my friend and also, he said something bad and anti-Semitic.
I wish that you'd said that and so right away, right away.
Yeah, I think you can. Also this the interesting human thing you could be friends with people that you disagree with and you can be friends with people that's actually say hateful stuff and and one of the ways to help alleviate hate is being friends with people. That's that, say hateful things
and then calling them out on a personal level. When they do say
wrong or hateful things from a place of love and respect and privately.
At least also a big thing, right? I mean, like the public demand for, you know, denunciation from friends to friends is difficult and I certainly have compassion for Candace given the fact that she's so close with you.
Yeah, breaks my heart. Sometimes the public, the public fights between friends and broken friendships. I've seen quite a few friendships publicly break over covid. Covid-19 people made people behave their worst in many cases which
Yeah. Breaks my heart a little bit because like the the human connection is a prerequisite for Effective debate and discussion and and battles over ideas. Has there been any argument from the opposite political aisle that has made you change your mind about something? If you if you look back
So, I will say that the
and think it through, because the, I think that my views probably on foreign policy of more somewhat, I would say that. I was much more interventionist when I was younger. I'm significant, the less interventionist now. I probably have my sample. Sure, I was, I was a big backer of the Iraq War. I think, now in retrospect, I might not be back of the Iraq War, if the same situation arose, again, now based on the amount of evidence that had been presented or based on, you know,
The sort of willingness of the American public to go it. If you're going to get involved in a war, you have to know what the end point looks like and you have to know what the American people really are willing to Bear. The American people are not willing to Bear open-ended occupations and so knowing that you have to consider that going in. So on foreign policy I become a lot more of a samples, Henry, Kissinger realist and in some ways and when it comes to social policy, I would say that I'm
A fairly strong where I was. I may have become slightly convinced actually buy more of the conservative side of the aisle on things like drug legalization. I think I was younger I was as much more pro drug legalization. Then I am now, at least on the local level, on a federal level, I think the federal government can't really do much other than close the borders with regard of fentanyl trafficking, for example. But when it comes to how drugs were in local communities, you can see how drugs were in local communities, pretty easily.
She's weird because you, I saw you smoke a joint right before this
conversation is my biggest thing. I mean I tried
Keep that secret. All
right, well that's interesting about intervention. Can you come out about the war in Ukraine? So as for me it's a deeply personal thing but I think you're able to look at it from a geopolitics perspective. What is the role of the United States in this conflict before the conflict during the conflict and right now in helping achieve peace
I think before the conflict, the big problem is that the West took almost the worst possible view which was
Encourage Ukraine to keep trying to join NATO and the EU, but don't let them in. And so what that does is it achieves? The purpose of getting Russia. Really, really, really ticked off and feeling threatened, but also does not give any of the protections of NATO or the EU to Ukraine. I mean, zelanski is on film when it was a comedy actor, making that exacto greatly as Merkel on the other line and she's like, oh, welcome to the, welcome to Nato. And he's like great, it's like wait, is this Ukraine on the line? And oops, but so yeah, that's sort of policy.
Is sort of nonsensical, if you're going to offer Alliance to somebody offer Alliance to them and if you're going to guarantee their security, guarantee their security, and the West failed signally to do that. So that was mistakes in the run-up to the war. Once the War Began, then the responsibility of less began became to give Ukraine as much material as is necessary to repel The Invasion and the West did really well with that. I think we were late on the ball in the United States. It seems like Europe led the way a little bit more than the United States did there. But
in terms of effectuating American interests in the in the region, which being an American is, what I'm chiefly concerned about. And the the American interests were were several fold. One is preserved borders to is degrade the Russian aggressive military because Russia's military has been aggressive and they are geopolitical rival of the United States three recalibrate the European balance with China Europe was sort of balancing with Russia and China and then because of the war they sort of rebalanced away from China and Russia which is real Jesus.
You should opportunity for the United States. It seemed like most of those goals have already been achieved at this point for the United States. And so then the question becomes, what's the offer? A and what are the, what is the thing, you're trying to prevent? So what's the best opportunity? What's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario and then what's realistic? So best-case scenario is Ukraine forces Russia entirely out of Ukraine, including the handstand asking Crimea, right? That's the best-case scenario virtually. No one thinks that's accomplishable including the United States, right? The White House is basically said, as much, it's still close to imagine particularly Crimea the
Is being forced out of out of Crimea. The ukrainians have been successful in, pushing the Russians out of certain parts of alaskans and ask. But the idea they're going to be able to push the entire Russian army, completely back to the Russian borders that would be at best. A very, very long and difficult Wog in the middle of a collapsing Ukrainian economy, which is a point. The zalenski has made, is like, it's not enough for you guys to give us military aid. Were in the middle of a war. We're going to need economic aid as well, so it's a pretty open-ended, and strong commitment.
Could take a small changes on that and your best case scenario, if that does militarily happen.
Including Crimea. Do you think there's a world in which Vladimir Putin would be able to convince the Russian people that this is? This was a good conclusion to the
war, right? So the problem is that the best case scenario might also be the worst case scenario. Meaning that there there are a couple of scenarios that are sort of the worst case scenario and this is sort of the puzzlement of the situation. One is that Putin feel so boxed in. So on able to go back to his own people and say we just wasted tens of thousands of lives here for no reason that he unleashes attack.
To kill a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield. Nobody knows what happens after that. So we put NATO planes in the air to take out Russian assets to Russian, start shooting down planes. Does Russia then threatened to escalate even further by attacking, an actual NATO civilian Center, or even Ukrainian civilians center with nuclear weapons and where it goes from there. Nobody knows because nuclear weapons have been used since 1945. So, that's, you know, that is a worst-case scenario. It's an unpredictable scenario that could devolve into really, really significant problems. The other worst case scenario could be
Best case scenario could be worse, we just don't know. Is Putin Falls? What happens after that? Who takes over for Putin? Is that person more moderate than Putin? Is that personal liberalize? ER it probably won't be too violently. If he's going to be. Ousted, it'll probably somebody who's a Top member of Putin's brass right now and has capacity to control the military or it's possible. The entire regime breaks down. What you end up with is Syria in Russia where you just have an entirely out of control region with no centralizing power, which is also a disaster area. And
So, in the nature of risk, mitigation, in sort of an attempt at risk mitigation, what actually should be happening right now, is some off ramp, has to be offered to Putin. The off-ramp likely is going to be maintained in Crimea and parts of lands. Can then ask, it's really going to be a commitment by Ukraine. Not to join NATO formally but a guarantee by the West to defend Ukraine in case of an invasion of his borders Again, by Russia, like an actual treaty obligation. Now, like the BS treaty
And when Ukraine give up its nuclear weapons in the nineties and and that is likely how this is going to have to go. The problem is that requires political courage, not from not from zelanski, it requires courage from from probably Biden because the only is always the ones. He's not in a political position where you can go back to his own people have made unbelievable sacrifices on behalf of their nation and freedom and say to them guys. Now I'm calling it quits. We're going to have to give them a handstand asking computed in off-ramp. I don't think that's an acceptable answer to most ukrainians at this point in time from the polling data. And from the available data,
we have on the ground. It's going to actually take Biden biting the bullet and being the bad guy and saying to zalenski, listen, we've made a commitment of material Aid. We were offering you all these things, including essentially a defense pact. We're offering you all this stuff, but if you don't come to the table, then we're going to have to start weaning you off. Like there will have to be a stick there. It can should be a carrot and so that will allow zalenski. If I had more to do that would allow zelanski to blame Biden for the solution, everybody knows has to happen. So once again, go back to his own people and you can say listen,
This is the way it has to go, like I don't want it to go this way but it's not my I'm signing other people's checks, right? I mean like this is, it's not my money and Biden would take the hit because he wouldn't then be able to blame Ukraine for never happens. Next, which has been the easy Road off. I think for a lot of politicians in the west is for them to just say well this is up to the ukrainians to decide, it's up to the ukrainians to decide well, is it totally up to the ukrainians to decide? Because it seems like the West assigning an awful lot of checks and all of Europe is going to freeze this winter.
So
this is the importance of great leadership, by the way. That's why the people we elect is very important. Do you think, do you think there's power to just one on one conversation or by insist on his own skin by and sits down with Putin almost in person? Because I maybe I'm romanticizing the notion, but having done these podcasts in person, I think there's something fundamentally different than through a remote call and also like a distant kind
Of recorded political type, speak versus like man to
man. So I'm deeply afraid that Putin out plays people in the one-on-one scenarios because he's done it to multiple presidents. Already, he gets in one-on-one scenarios with bush with Obama with from with Biden. And he seems to be a very canny operator in a very sort of hard-nosed operator in those situations. I think that if you were going to do something like that, like an actual political face-to-face Summit, what you would need is for Biden to First have a conversation with zalenski. Where's olinsky knows? What's going on? So,
He's aware and then Biden walks in and he says to Putin on camera. Here's the offer. Let's get it together. Let's make peace. You get to you, get to keep this stuff and then let Putin respond how Putin is going to respond. But yeah, the the big problem for Putin, I think and problem with public-facing fora, maybe it's a private meeting, it's a private meeting, maybe that's the best thing. There's a public-facing for him. I think it's a problem because Putin's afraid of being humiliated. At this point, if it's a private meeting,
Then sure except that again. I just I wonder whether when it comes to and a person as canny as Putin and to a politician that I really don't think is a particularly sophisticated player in in Joe Biden. And again, this is not unique to buy and I think that most of our presidents for the for the last 30, 40 years have not been particularly sophisticated players. I think that that's, that's a that's a risky scenario.
yeah, I still believe in the power of that because otherwise
I don't know, I don't think stuff on paper and political speak will solve these kinds of problems because From zelinsky's perspective, nothing but complete Victory will do, right? He is as a nation, has people sacrificed way too much and they're all in. And if you look at because I traveled to Ukraine, has spent time there, I'll be going back there. Hopefully also going back to Russia, just speaking to ukrainians, they're all in there all in. Yeah.
Nothing. But
complete Victory. Yep, that's right. And
so forth at the only way to achieve peace is through like honest, human to human conversation. Giving both people a way to offer up to walk away Victorious and some of that requires speaking honestly as a human being but also for America to the actually, not even America. Honestly, just the president be able to eat their own ego a bit.
And be the punching bag, a little just enough for both presidents, to be able to walk away and say, listen, we got the American president to come to us, and I think that makes the president look strong, not
weak. I mean, I agree with you. I think it would also require some people on the right. People like me, if it's Joe Biden to say, if I'm does that, I see what he's doing and it's the right move. I think, one of the things that he's afraid of to steal my on him, I think one of the thing he's afraid of his he goes and he makes that sort of deal. And the right says you just coward in front of
Russia, you just you just gave away Ukraine, whatever it is, but it's going to require some, some people on the right to say that, that move is the right move and then he'll buy it. If I'd actually performs that
move, you're exceptionally good at debate. You you wrote how to debate leftist, destroy them. You kind of known for this kind of stuff, just exceptionally skilled, the conversation and debate, and getting to the facts of the matter and using logic to get to the, to the conclusion in the debate, you ever.
Way that this power talk about, the ring this power you were given has corrupted, you and your ability to see what's like to pursue the truth versus just winning debates.
I hope not. I mean, so I think one of the things that that's kind of funny about The Branding versus the reality is the most of the things that get characterized as destroying and debates with facts and logic. Most of those things are, basically me having a conversation with somebody on a college campus. It actually isn't like a
A formal debate, where we sit there and we critique each other's positions, or it's not me insulting anybody. A lot of the clips that have gone very viral is me making an argument and then they're not being like an amazing counter-argument, many of the debates that I've held have been extremely cordial. Let's take the latest example like about a year ago. I did an experiment from Young. Turks is very cordial. Is very nice, right? Yeah, that's it. That's sort of the way that I like to debate and that might my rule when it comes to debate and or discussion is that my opponents actually gets to pick the mode in which we work. So,
So if it's going to be a debate of ideas and we're just going to discuss and critique and clarify, then we can do that. If somebody comes loaded for bear, then I will respond in kind because one of the big problems I think in sort of the debate / discussions fear is very often miss diagnosis of what exactly is going on people who think the discussion is a bait and vice versa. And that can be a real problem. And there are people who
Treat what ought to be a discussion as for example, and exercise and performance art. And so, what that is, is mugging or trolling or saying, surely things in order to just get to the, like, that's something I actually don't do during debate. I mean, if you actually watch me talk to people, I don't actually do the drawing thing. The wrong thing is almost solely relegated to Twitter and making drugs on my show. When it comes to actually debating people. That sounds actually a lot like what we're doing right now is just the person may be taking Justin obverse position to mine and so that's, that's fine.
Unusually half of the debate or discussion is me just asking for clarification of terms, like what exactly do you mean by this? So I can drill down on where the actual just one room a lie because some of the time people think they're disagreeing and they're actually not disagreeing only when I'm when I'm talking with Ana kasparian and she's talking about corporate and government have too much power together. I'm like, well, you Sonic is he part you and I are on the same page about that, that, that sort of stuff does tend to happen a lot in discussion. I think that when when discussion gets term debate, it's a problem. When the baby gets term discussion, it's even more problematic because debate is it?
Thing and I find that your debate and your conversation is often good faith. You're able to steal my on the other side. You able to actually you're actually listening. You're considering the other side the times when I see that you you know Ben Shapiro destroys leftist. It's usually just like you said the other side is doing the trolling because they've didn't I mean the people that do criticize you
For that interaction is the people that usually get destroyed are like 20 years old and they're usually not sophisticated in any kind of degree in terms of being able to use logic and reason and facts and so
on. And that's that's totally fine by the way. I mean, if people want to criticize me for speaking on college campuses where a lot of political conversation happens, both right and left, that's fine. I mean, I've had lots of conversations with people on the other side of the aisle to. I mean, right, I've done podcast with Sam Harris and we've talked about atheism or I've done debates with Ana kasparian or I've talked to the, I've done it.
Date with Cheng uyghur. I've had conversations with lots of people on the other side of the aisle. In fact, I believe I'm, the only person on the right who recommends that people listen to shows on the other side of the aisle, right? I mean, I say, on my show on a fairly regular basis, that people should listen to positive America now. No one I'm positive. America will ever say that somebody should listen to my show. That is verboten, that is not something that can be had. It's one of the strangenesses of our politics. That's what I've called. The happy birthday problem which is I have a lot of friends who are of the left and are publicly of the left and on my birthday, they'll send you a text message happy birthday but they will never tweet.
Birthday. Lest they be acknowledging that you were born of women? And the this can't be allowed. So on the Sunday special, I've had a bevy of people who are on the other side of the aisle, a lot of them are ranging from people in Hollywood, like Jason Blum, to Larry Wilmore to Sam to, you know, just a lot of people on the left. I think we're in the near future. Probably going to do a Sunday special with Rokon up in California. The California congressperson, very nice guy, had on the show, I like that, that kind of stuff is, is fun and interesting. But, you know, I think that
The easy way out for a clip that people don't like is to either immediately clip the clip. I'll take a two minute clip and clip it down to 15 seconds or somebody insults me. Then that goes viral, which is, you know, welcome to the internet or or to say, well, you're only debating colleges, you're only talking to 20. I mean, I talk to a lot more people than that. That's just not the stuff you're watching.
You lost your cool in an interview with BBC's. Andrew, Neil, and you're really honest about it after which was kind of refreshing and enjoyable as the internet said, they've never seen anyone.
An inch. So to me, honestly was like, seeing like Floyd Mayweather, Junior. Somebody like, knockdown, what was the, can you take me to that
experience? Here's that day. That day is I have a book release, didn't get a lot of sleep the night before and this is the last interview of the day and it's interview with BBC I don't know anything about you see. I don't watch BBC on only the host so we get on the interview and is supposed to be about the book and the host Andrew Neil doesn't ask.
Ask virtual a single question about the book. He just starts reading me battles weeds, which, which I hate. I mean, it's annoying and it's stupid. It's the worst form of interview. Yeah, when somebody just reads, you battle tweets, especially when I've acknowledged battles weeks before. And so I'm going through the list with him and this interview was solidly 20 minutes. I mean it was it was a long interview and we get to and, and I make a couple of particularly annoyed mistakes in the interview. So annoyed. Mistake number one is the ego play, right? So there's a point in the middle of the interview where I say, like, I don't even know who
Our, which was true. I didn't know he was, he turns out, he's very famous person and yeah, in Britain and so you can't make that eagle play it, even if he's not famous, that's it, doesn't it writes a dumb thing to do and it's an ass thing to do. So like the so saying that was was you know, more just kind of peak and selling us and so that was that was a mistake. I enjoyed
watching that was like oh man is human.
Yeah but somebody enjoyed it. So there is there's that and then the other mistake was that I just don't watch enough British TV. So the way that interviews are done there are much more
Adversarial than American TV. In American TV of somebody is adversarial with you. You assume that they're a member of the other side, that's typically how it is. And so, I'm critiquing some of his questions at the beginning and I thought that the critique of some of his questions, actually Fair, he's asking me about abortion and I thought he was asking it from way of framing, the question that wasn't accurate. And so I assumed that he was on the left because again, I never heard of him and so, you know, I mischaracterized him, and I apologize later for mischaracterizing him. We finally go through the interview, it's 20 minutes. He just keeps going with the battle tweets. And finally, I got
I took off the microphone and walked out and immediately I knew it was a mistake like, within 30 seconds of the end of the interview. I knew it was a mistake, and that's why even before the interview came out, I believe, I corrected the record that Andrew Neil is not on the left, that's a mistake by me. And, and then, you know, took the hit for for a bad interview. And so, as far as you know what, I wish I had done differently. I wish I'd known who he was. I wish I'd done my research, I wish that I wish that I had treated it as though there was a possibility that was going to be.
Or adversarial than it was. I think I was in cautious about the interview because it was pitched as it's just another book interview and it wasn't just another book interview. It was treated much more adversarial than that. So I wish the that's on me, I got to research the people who are talking to me and watch their shows, and, and learn about that. And then obviously the, you know, the kind of gut-level appeal to Ego or arrogance, like that's a bad look and and shouldn't have done that and losing your cool is always a bad look.
So the fact that that sort of became somewhat viral
instead out just shows that it happens. So rarely to you. So just to look at like the day in the life of Ben Shapiro, you speak a lot.
Very eloquently about difficult topics, what goes into the research, the mental part, and you always look pretty, like energetic and you're not exhausted by the burden, the heaviness of the topics you're covering day after day, after day after day. So what what goes through the preparation mentally diet-wise anything like that
like when you when you wake up. Okay, so I wake up when my kids wake me up. Usually, that's my baby daughter, who's 20?
And a half. She's right here, we are on the monitor usually about 6:15 6:20 a.m. So I get up my wife sleeps in all about, I go get the baby and then my son gets up and then my oldest daughter gets up 586 and to the the boys, the the middle child is that
both the source of stress in
happiness. Oh my God, it's the, the height of both, right? I mean, it's the source of the greatest happiness it so the way that I characterize it as this when it comes to sort of kids in life. So when you're single you're boundaries of happiness and unhappiness, you can be a 0 in terms of Happiness can be like a 10 in terms of
- then you get married and goes up to like a 20 and a negative 20 because they're happiest, stuff is with your wife. And then the most unhappy stuff is when something happens to your spouse. It's the worst thing in the entire world, then you have kids in all limits are removed. So the best things that have ever happened to me are things where I'm watching my kids, and they're playing together and they're being wonderful and sweet and cute and I love them so much and the worst things are. When my son is screaming at me for no reason, because he's being insane and and I have to deal with that, right? I mean like or or something bad happens to my daughter at school or something like that. That stuff is worth it. So yes the source of my greatest happiness the source of my greatest threat. So they get
Me up at about 6:15 in the morning. I feed them breakfast. I'm kind of scrolling the news while I'm making the mags and and you know, just updating myself on anything may have happened overnight, I go into the office, put on the makeup and the Wardrobe, whatever, and then I sit down and do the show. A lot of the prep is actually down the night before because the new cycle doesn't change all that much between and of late at night and in the morning, so I can supplement in the morning. So I I do the show.
So a lot of the preparation like, thinking through
To the big issues in the world is done the night
before. Yeah, I mean and that's reading you know, pretty much all the Legacy Media. So I rip on Legacy Media a lot, but that's because they a lot of what they do is really good and I love what it is really bad. I cover a lot of Legacy Media so it's probably covering in a Wall Street Journal, New York Times Washington, Post Boston, Globe, Daily Mail, and then I'll look over at some of the alternative media. Look at my own website daily, why I look at Breitbart a look at the blaze. Oh, look at, oh, look at maybe The Intercept. I'll look at a bunch of different sources and then I will look at different clips online.
So media, I comes in handy here, gravy and comes in handy here, that sort of stuff because my show relies very heavily on being able to play people, so you can hear them in their own words. And, and so that's sort of the media diet. So I sit down, I do the show and then once I'm done with the show, I usually have between now it's like eleven fifteen in the morning maybe because sometimes LP record the show. So, it's 11:15 in the morning. I'll go home. And if my wife's available grab lunch with her, if not, then I will
And work out. I try to work out like five times a week with a trainer some like that and and then I will
just regular gym stuff just
the gym. Yeah. Weights and Plyometrics and some CrossFit kind of stuff. And yeah I mean but beneath this beneath this mild steel as a hulking monster and and so I'll do that then I will do reading and writing so I'll
I'm usually working on a bucket at any given time or
shut off the rest of the world.
Yes. So I put some music in my ears. Usually Brahms or Bach sometimes Beethoven or Mozart. That is those four and see if those are on rotation. They'll wrap nowrap nowrap, despite my extraordinary rendition of whap. Yeah, I'm not, in fact around. You
still, do you still hate WEP the song?
It's I will say, I do not think that it is the peak of Western civilized art. I don't think that a hundred years from now. People will be gluing their faces to a whap and protest at the
environment but
Brahms and the rest will be still
around. Yes, I would assume if people still have a functioning, prefrontal cortex in any sort of taste on words for measuring
Pure Ice. All right, so you got some classical music in your ears and your focusing are you at the computer when you're writing?
Yeah I'm at the computer. Usually we have a kind of a room that has some sun coming in so it's nice in there or I'll go up to a library that we just completed for me. So I'll go up there and I'll write and quick physical books. Yeah, I love physical books because I because I keep Sabbath I had
I don't use Kindle because when I'm reading a book and I had Sabbath, I have to turn off the candle so that means that I have tons and tons and tons of physical books. When I moved from Los Angeles to Florida. I had about seven thousand volumes. I had to discard probably 4,000 of them and then I built that back up now. So I'm probably gonna have to go through another round where I put them somewhere else. I tend to tab books rather than highlighting them because I can't highlight on Sabbath. So I have like the little stickers and I put them in the book. So a typical book for me, you can see it on the book club will be like filled with tabs on the side things that I
Take no. Actually I got an A person who I pay to go through and write down in files. The quotes that I've that I like from the book. So I have those handy, so, which is a good way for me to remember what it is that I've that I've read Because I read probably somewhere between three and five bucks a week, and then the in a good week 5. And then I write I read, and then I go pick up my kids from school at 3:30, so a quarter. Mike is I have no job?
Job there. I'm there in the mornings until they leave for school. I pick them up from school. I hang out with them until they go to bed which is usually 7:30 or so. So I'm helping them with their homework and I'm playing with them and I'm taking them on rides in the brand-new Tesla, which my son is obsessed with and and then I put them to bed and then I sit back down. I prepped for the next day go through all those media sources talking about compiled kind of a schedule for what I want the show to look like and and run of show. It's very detail-oriented, nobody writes anything for me, I write all my own stuff. So every word that comes out of my mouth is my fault.
And and then you know hopefully I have a couple hours to or an hour to hang out with my wife before before we go to the wards you right? Do I
detect a lot or just has just come out your thinking like what are the key ideas? I want to
express. I know, I don't tend to edit a lot, so I thank God, I'm able to write extraordinarily quickly. So I write very, very fast. In fact, in a previous life I was you also speak fast so similarly exactly and I speak in paragraphs so it's exactly the same thing in a previous life. I was a ghost writer. So I used to be sort of know.
As a turnaround specialist in the publishing industry and be somebody who came to the publisher. And says, I've three weeks and to get this book done. I don't have a word done and they would call me up, and be like, this person needs a book written and so in three weeks, I had knockout 60,000 hours or so,
is there something you can say to the process of that? You followed think like how you think about ideas like you stuff is going on in the world and trying to understand what is happening? What are the explanations? Were the forces behind this? You have a processor or just
You wait for the Muse to give you the
interpretation. I mean, I think that it I don't think the formal process but because I read. So there's two ways to do it. One is sometimes, you know, that sometimes The Daily Grind of the news is going to refer back to core principles that are broader and deeper. So I thank God because I've read so much on so many different things of a lot different point of views. Then if something breaks and a piece of news breaks, I can immediately sort of channel that
Into in the mental Rolodex, these three big ideas that I think are really important and then I can talk at length about what those ideas, aren't, I can explicate those. And, and so, you know, for example, in you're talking about must taking over Twitter before, and I immediately go to the history of media. Right? That's, that's me. Tying it into a broader theme. Yeah. On, you know, and I do that I would say fairly frequently. Well, we're talking about say subsidization of industry and I can immediately tie that into, okay, what's the history of subsidization?
United States going all the way back to Adam Wilson and forth through FDR's, industrial policy. And how does that tie into sort of broader Economic Policy International? So the it allows me to tie into bigger themes because the, the what I tend to read as mostly, not news, but I tend to read as mostly books out in most of my media diet is actually not the start. Like that's that's the icing on the cake but the actual cake is the hundreds of pages in history, econ geography, that I'm that I'm social science that I'm reading every week and so that
Sort of stuff allows me to think more deeply about these things. That's one way of doing the other way of doing it, is Russia breaks in the news. I don't know anything about Russia, I immediately go and I purchased five books about Russia and I read all of them. And so one of the unfortunate things about our are the fortunate thing for me. And the unfortunate thing about the world is that, if in the unfortunate thing about the world's, if you read two books on a subject, you are now considered by the media and expert on the subject. So that's, you know, sad and shallow. But that is the way that it is the good news for me is that my job isn't to be a full expert on.
Of these subjects and I don't claim to be around, I'm not a Russia expert. I know enough on Russia, to be able to understand when people talk about Russia, what the system looks like, how it works and all of that, and then to explicate that for the common man, which a lot of people who are infused with the expertise, can't really do if you're so deep in the weeds that you're like a full-on academic expert on a thing. Sometimes, it's hard to translate that over to a mass audience which is really my job.
Well, I think you can actually, it's funny with the two books, you can actually get a pretty deep understanding if you read and also think deeply about it. It allows you to
Approach it thing from first principles. A lot of times if you're a quart of called expert you get you carried away by the momentum of what the field has been thinking about versus like stepping back. Alright what is really going on that the challenge is to pick the right to
books. Right? So that usually what I'll try to find somebody who knows the topic pretty well and have them recommend or a couple people and have them recommend books. So a couple years ago I knew nothing about Bitcoin. I was at a conference and a couple of people who you've had on your show
Were there and I asked them. Give me your top three books on bitcoin and so then I went I read like nine books on bitcoin and so if you're nine books on bitcoin you at least know enough to get by. Yeah. And so that so I can actually explain what Bitcoin is and why it works or why it doesn't work in some cases and and what's happening in the markets that way. So that's you know very very helpful with
Putin is an example. That's a difficult one to find the right books on. I think the new Tsar is the one I read. Where was the most
objective?
When I read I think about Putin was is one called strong, man. It was, it was very highly critical of of Putin, but it gave like a good background on him.
Yeah. So I'm very skeptical sort of things that are very they're critical Putin because it feels like there's activism injected into the history. Like the way the rise and fall of the Third Reich is writing about Hitler I like because there's almost not a criticism of Hitler, it's a description of Hitler which is very it's easier to do about it.
Oracle figure which with William, Shire with the rise and fall of the Third Reich. It's an impressive because you live through it, but it's very tough to find objective descriptions about the history of the man and a country of Putin of zalenski of any difficult. Trump has the same and he I
feel like every, that's the hero villain archetype. Yeah. It's like either somebody's completely a hero or a completely a villain. And the truth is pretty much. No one is completely a hero or completely a villain people. In fact, I'm not sure that I
Love descriptions of people as heroes or villains. Generally, I think that people tend to do heroic things or do villainous things in the same way that I'm not sure. I love descriptions of people is a genius. My dad used to say, as I was growing up, he say they didn't believe that there were Geniuses. He said, he believed that there were people with a genius for something because people, you know, yes, they're people who are very high IQ and we call them Geniuses. But does that mean that they're good at EQ stuff? Not necessarily, but they're people who are geniuses at EQ stuff. In other words, it would be more specific to say that somebody is a genius at engineering than to say, just broad spectrum their genius. And that does have
Problem of thinking that they're good at something that they're not good at, right? It's all more specific.
So because you read a lot of books, other can you look back and so it was a tough question because so many is that your favorite song, but are there books that have been influential in your life that an impact in your thinking, or maybe ones you go back to that, that still carry inside for you,
the Federalist Papers been one in terms of sort of how American politics Works another, the first econ book that I thought was really great because it was written for teenagers. Essentially is one called the economics.
And one Lesson by Henry hazlitt 150 pages. I recommend it to everybody sort of 15 and up. It's easier than say, Thomas, holes, basic econ, which is for 500 pages.
And it's looking for it, like, macroeconomics microphone, that kind of
stuff. And, and then, in terms of that, there's, there's a great book by Carl Truman called rise in crime, for the modern self, which I think is the best book of last 10 years. That's been sort of impactful on some of the thoughts have been having, like, what's the key idea in there? That's are the key ideas that we've shifted, the nature of how identity is done.
In the west from how is historically done, the basically for nearly all of human history, the way that we identify as human beings is as a mix of our biological drives and then how that interacts with the social institutions around us. And so, when you're a child, you're a bunch of unfettered biological drives and it's a parent's job to civilize you and civilize. You literally means bring you into civilization, right? You learn the rules of the road. You learn how to integrate, into institutions that already exist and are designed to shape you and it's how you interact with those institutions that makes you you it's not just a set of biological.
Logical drives. And then in the modern world, we have really driven toward the idea that what we are, is how we feel on the inside without reference to the outside world, and it's the job of the outside world to celebrate and reflect what we think about ourselves on the inside. And so, what that means is that we are driven now toward fighting institutions because institutions aren't positions so everything around us societal institutions, these are, these are things that are cramping our style, they're making us not feel the way that we want to feel. If we just destroy those things then will be Freer and more liberated and say it's a I think much deeper
Model of how to think about why, our social politics particular moving in a particular direction, is that a ground shift has happened and how people think about themselves and and this has had some some some what kind of shocking effect in terms of social politics.
So there's negative consequences in your view of that but is there also positive consequence of more power, more agency to the individual.
I think you can make the argument that institutions were weighing too heavily and how people form their identity but I think that what we've done is
Gone significantly too far, on the other side, we basically decided to blow up the institutions in favor of unfettered feeling / identity. And I think that that is not only a large mistake. I think it's going to have dire ramifications for everything from suicidal, ideation to institutional laundry, tivity in politics, and in society more.
Broadly. So, speaking about the nature of self, you've been an outspoken proponent of pro-life. Can you, can we start by you? Trying to?
The amend. The case for pro-choice that abortion is not murder and a woman's right to choose. It's a fundamental human, right Freedom.
So I think that the, the, the only way to steal manly pro-choice case is 2 and be ideologically. Consistent is to suggest that there is no interest in the life of The Unborn that counter ways at all freedom of choice. So the so what that means is
is we can take the full example, we're going to sort of the partial example. So if we take the full example, what that would mean is that up until point of birth, which is sort of the democratic party platform position that there is that a woman's right to choose ought to extend. For any reason whatsoever up to point of birth, the only way to argue that is the bodily autonomy is the only Factor there is no countervailing factor, that would ever outweigh bodily autonomy that that would be the strongest version of the argument. Another version of that argument would be that the reason that bodily autonomy ought to weigh. So heavily is because women
Can't be the what the equals of men, if the vicissitudes of biology are allowed to decide their Futures, right? If the if pregnancy changes women in a way that it doesn't change, man, it's a form of sex discrimination for women to ever have to go through with pregnancy, which is an argument that was made by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Kind of those are the arguments. The the kind of softer version is the more out a emotionally resonant version of the argument, which is that bodily autonomy ought to outweigh the
It's of the fetus up till point x and then people have different feelings about what point x looks like. Is it up to the point of viability? Is it up to the point of the heartbeat? Is it up to 12 weeks or 15 weeks? And that really is where the American public is where the American public is. Broadly speaking, not not state by state, where there are various really, really varied opinions. But like broadly speaking, it seems like the American public by polling data want somewhere between a 12 and 15 week abortion restriction. They believe that up until 12 or 15 weeks, there's not enough there for to not be specific but to be kind of how people feel about it to outweigh a woman's body.
Autonomy and then beyond that point, then there's enough of an interest in the life of the preborn child. It's developed enough then now we care about it enough that it outweighs a woman's bodily autonomy.
What's the strongest case for pro-life in your
mind? I mean the strongest case for pro-life is that from conception, a human life has been created. It is a human life with potential that human life potential. With potential now has an independent interest in its own
existence. If I may just ask
A good question. So conception is when a sperm fertilizes, an egg? Yes.
Okay, just to clarify the biological beginning. What confession is?
I mean with that because that is the beginning of human life. Now there are other standards that people have drawn, right? Some people say implantation in the uterus, some people will suggest viability something brain development or hard development. But the the clear dividing line between a human life exists in human life does not exist is the biological creation of an independent human life, its own DNA, strands, and etcetera, which happens at concession conception. Once you acknowledge that there is that independent human
If with potential and I keep calling it that because people sometimes say potential human life, it's not a potential. Human life is a human life that is not developed yet to the full extent that will develop. Once you say that and once you say that it has its own interest. Now, you have to now the burden of proof is to explain why bodily autonomy ought to allow for the snuffing out of that human life. If we believe that human life ought not to be killed for for quote unquote. No Good Reason, you have to come up with a good reason. Why the burden of proof is now shifted. Now you will find people who will say, well the good
In is that it's not sufficiently developed outweigh the mental trauma or emotional trauma that a woman goes through. If for example, she was raped or the victim of incest and that that is a fairly emotionally resonant argument, but it's not necessarily dispositive. You can you can make the argument that just because something horrific and horrible happened to a woman, does not rob the human life of its interest in life. One of the problems in trying to draw any line for the self-interest of life in the in the
Human life. Is that it's very difficult to draw any other line that doesn't seem somewhat arbitrary. Have you say that independent heartbeat? Yeah, well you know people have pacemakers if you say brain function, people have various levels of brain function as adult. If you say viability babies are not viable. After they are born, if I left a newborn baby on a table and did not take care of, it would be done in two days. So, you know, once you start getting into sort of these lines, it starts to get very fuzzy very quickly. And so if you're looking for sort of a bright line, moral
rule
That would be the bright line, moral Rule. And that's, that's sort of the pro-life case,
but there's still mysterious difficult scientific questions of things that Consciousness. So what do you does the question of Consciousness? How does it come into play into this
debate? So I don't believe that Consciousness is the sole Criterion by which we judge the self interest in human life. So we are unconscious a good deal of Our Lives. All right that does not mean we will be
Yes, again, right? When when you're unconscious, when you're asleep, for example, presumably your life is still worth living. If somebody came in and killed you, that'd be a serious moral quandary at the very least, but the
birth of Consciousness. The the lighting up of the flame, the initial lighting of the flame, there does seem to be something special about that and it's a mystery, it's a mystery of when that happens.
Well, I mean, Peter sooner makes the case that basically self consciousness doesn't exist until you two and a half. All right, so he says that even infanticide should be okay or it is the Dubai. Oh Alice.
Silver Princeton. So the you getting some real dicey territory once you get into conscious. Also the truth is the Consciousness is more of a spectrum than it is. A then it is a dividing line, meaning that there are people with various degrees of brain function. We don't actually know how conscious they are and you get into eugenic territory, pretty quickly. When we start dividing between lives that are worth living based on levels of consciousness and lives are not worth, living based on levels of
consciousness. Do you find it? The, the aspect of women's
Freedom. Do you feel the tension between that ability to choose
The trajectory of your own life versus the the rights of the unborn child.
In one situation is in one
situation. Now, if you've had sex with a person voluntarily and as a product of that, you are now pregnant, know you've taken an action with a perfectly predictable result, even if you took birth control, this is the way that human beings appropriated for literally all of human existence. And by the way, also how all mammals procreate. So the idea that this was an entirely unforeseen consequence of your activity, I find, I have less sympathy for you in that particular situation because you could have made decisions that would not LED you to this particular impact.
In fact, this used to be the basis of marriage, right? Was when we were apparently more terrible Society, we used to say that people should wait until they get married to have sex position that I still hold. And the reason for that was because then if you have sex and you produce a child, then the child will grow up in a two-parent family with stability. So, you know, they they not a ton of sympathy there when it comes to rape and incest, obviously, heavy heavy sympathy. And so, that's why I think you see statistically speaking a huge percentage of Americans, including many pro-life Americans people who consider themselves pro-life.
Would consider exceptions for rape and incest. One of the sort of dishonest things that I think happens in abortion, debate is arguing from the fringes so this tends to happen. A lot is pro-choice activists, will argue from rape and incest to the other 99.8% of abortions, where you'll see people on the pro-life side argue from partial birth abortion, to all of abortion that you actually have to take on sort of the mainstream case and then decide whether or not that's acceptable or not. But
to you the exception just ethically with all generalizing it. That is a valid ethically acceptable.
Action. I don't hold that. There should be a an exception for rape or incest. Because again I hold by the bright line rule that once a human life with potential exists, then it has its own interest in life. That cannot be curbed by your self interest. The only exception that I hold by is the same exception that literally all pro-lifers. Hold by, which is the life of the mother is put in danger.
So, this is a tough tough topic because if you believe that that's the line that we're committing mass
murder well, or at least Mass killing. So, I would say that murder typically requires
A level of men's Rhea that may be absent. And in many cases of abortion, there's the because the usual following question is, will have to murder want to prosecute the woman. And the answer is because the vast majority of people who are poor. Having abortions. Don't actually believe that they're killing a person. They have a very different view of what is exactly happening. So, you know, I would say that they're all sorts of interesting hypotheticals that come in to play when it comes to abortion and you can play them Any Which Way. But
Levels, let's put it this way. There are gradations of wrongs, I don't think that all abortions are equally blameworthy even if I would, even if I would ban virtually all of them right. Ike, I think that there are mitigating circumstances that make well-being wrong, some abortions less morally blameworthy than others. I think that you know, there is a I can admit a difference between between killing a two-week-old embryo in the womb and stabbing a seven-year-old in the face. Like I
I can recognize all that while still saying, I think that it would be wrong to terminate a pregnancy.
Do you think the question of when life begins, which I think is a fascinating question, is a question of science or question religion,
when life begins to question of science, when, when that life becomes valuable enough for people to want to protect it, is going to be a question that is beyond science, science, doesn't have moral judgments to make about the value of human life. This is one of the problems that Sam Harrison. I've had this argument many times and it's always kind of interesting because Sam is of the opinion that you can get to Art From.
Is right. That science says is therefore, we can were not so human. Flourishing is the goal of life. And I always say to him. I don't see where you get that from evolutionary. Biology you can you can, you can assume it just say you're assuming it but don't pretend that. That is a conclusion that you can draw straight from biological reality itself because obviously that doesn't exist in the animal world. For example, nobody assumes the innate value of every and
I think I know your answer to this but let's let's test it because I think you're going to be wrong.
So there's
Robot behind you. Do you think there will be a time in the future when it will be unethical and illegal to kill a robot because they will have centurions
My guess is you would say no Lex there's because there's a fundamental difference between humans and robots. And I just want to get you on record because I think you'll be
wrong. I mean, it depends on that the level of development, I would assume of the robots mean, you're assuming a complexity in the robots. That that eventually imitates. What we in the religious life would call the human soul. Yes, the ability to choose freely. For example. Yes. Which I believe is sort of the capacity for for human beings. The ability to suffer. Yeah, if
All of that, could be approved and not programmed. Meaning, the freely willed capacity of a machine to do X, Y, or Z. You could not
pinpoint exactly where it happens in the program, right?
Yeah, it's not deterministic then it would raise serious moral issues for sure. I'm not trying to answer that question.
Are you afraid of that time
that you're afraid of that time? I mean it's any more than I'd be afraid of failing.
Arrived up in the world and had these characteristics. What's there's just a lot of moral
complexities and they don't necessarily have to be in the physical space that can be in the digital space. There's an increased sophistication and number of bots on the internet including on Twitter as they become more and more intelligence. There's going to be serious questions about what is our moral duty to protect ones that have or claim to have an
identity. And that's really, really interesting. Actually what I'm afraid of is the opposite happening meeting. I that people the were
Worst, that could happen is that we develop robots. So Sophisticated that they appear to have free will and then we treat them with human dignity. Actually the worst, that happens what I'm afraid of is the opposite, is that, that we, if we're talking about this particular hypothetical that we develop robots, that have all of these apparent abilities and then we dehumanize them which leads us to also dehumanize the other humans around us which you could easily see happening and the devaluation of life to the point where it doesn't really matter. I mean people have always treated unfortunately newly discovered other humans this way so
I don't think there's actually a new problem. I think it's a pretty old problem. It'll just be interesting. One is made of human hands.
Yeah. It's it's an opportunity to celebrate Humanity or to bring out the worst in humanity. So, the derision that naturally happens, like you said with pointing out the other, let me ask you about climate change. There's a, let's go from the meme to the to the profound pure philosophy, okay. The mean was there's a clip of you talking about climate change and saying
that
At the Aquaman maim, you said that for the sake of argument, if the water level
rises 5 to 10 feet, in the next hundred years, people will just sell their homes and move and then the mean was sell to, who can you argue both sides of
that the argument that they're making a strawman the argument that I'm making is over time? I don't mean that if it's tsunamis about to hit your house, you can list it on eBay. That's not that's not what I mean. Obviously, what I mean is that human beings have an extraordinary ability to adapt. It's actually our best quality and that as water levels, rise real estate prices,
Those areas tends to fall that over time, people tend to abandon those areas, they tend to leave, they tend to right now sell their houses, and then they tend to move and eventually those houses will be worthless and you won't have anybody to sell to. But presumably not that many people will be living there by that point which is one of the reasons why the price would be low because there's no demand. So it's over a hundred
years. So all of these price Dynamics are very gradual relative to the other price Dynamic correct.
That's why the joke of it, of course, is that like I'm saying the Tomorrow, there's a tsunami on your Source step and you're like,
Ah Bobble by my house Bob and come by your house like it. We all get that but it's a funny Maymay I laughed at it. How is your view on
climate change? The the human of contribution to climate change what we should do, in terms of policy to respond to climate change. How has that changed over the
years? I would say, the truth is for four years and years, I've believe that climate change was a reality and that app anthropogenic. Climate change is a reality. I don't argue with the ipcc estimates, I know climatologists at places like MIT
Attack and they know this, uh, pattern I do so. You know, the notion that climate change is just not happening or that human beings are not contributing to climate change. I find doubtful. The question is to what extent human beings are contributing to climate change? That 50% 70% is at 90%. I think there's a little bit more play in the joints there so it's not totally clear. The one thing I do know and this I know with with factual accuracy is that all of the measures that are currently. Being proposed are unworkable and will not happen. So when people say parent climate Paris, climate Accords, even if those were imposed, you're talking about lowering the
initial trajectory of climate change by a fraction of a degree. If you're talking about the, if you're talking about Gael Greene New Deal Net Zero by 2050, the carbon is up there in the air and the climate change is going to happen. Also you're assuming that GOP the geopolitical Dynamics don't exist. So everybody's going to magically get on the same page and we're all going to be imposing. Massive carbon taxes to get to Net Zero by 2050. I mean like hundreds of times higher than they currently are. And that's not me saying that's Klaus Schwab saying this if the
Genomic Forum was a big advocate of exactly the sort of policy. And the reality is that we're going to have to accept that at least one point five degrees Celsius of climate change, is baked into the cake by the end of the century. Again, not me, talking William nordhaus The Economist who just won the Nobel Prize in the stuff talking. And so what that suggests to me is, what we've always known human beings are crap. It mitigation, and excellence and adaptation. We are very bad at mitigating our own fault. We are very good at adapting to the problems as they exist, which means that all of the estimates, that billions will die, that there will be Mass starvation, that will see the migration.
And in just a few years of hundreds of millions of people, those are wrong. Well you'll see is a gradual change of living. People will move away from areas that are inundated on the coast. You will see people building seawalls, you'll see people. Adopting new technologies to suck carbon out of the air. You will see geoengineering and this is the sort of stuff that we should be focused on and the sort of bizarre focus on. What if we just keep tossing, hundreds of billions of dollars at the same three Technologies over and over in the hopes that if we subsidize it this will magically make it more efficient.
No evidence whatsoever. That that is that is going to be the way that we got ourselves out of this necessity. Being the mother of invention, I think human beings will adapt because we have adapted and we will continue to adapt. So to the degree, we
invest in the threat of this, it should be into the policies that help with the adaptation versus the
mitigation, right? Seawalls, geoengineering, developing technologies, that carbon out of the air again, if I thought that there was more Sort of, hope for the green technologies currently in play than subsidization of those Technologies. I might be a little bit more for but I haven't seen tremendous
this progress over the course of the last 30 years in the reliability of, for example, when energy or the ability to store solar energy to the extent necessary to actually power
grid. What's your thoughts on nuclear energy
is declarative great, nuclear energy is a proven source of energy and we should be radically extending the the use of nuclear energy its 1 in 12 Min the honestly this is like a litmus test question as to whether you take climate change seriously if you're on right or left and you take climate change, seriously you should be in favor of nuclear energy, if you are not, I know that you're just
You have other priorities. Yeah,
the fascinating thing about the climate change debate is the Dynamics of the fear-mongering over the past few decades because some of the nuclear energy was tied up into that. Somehow there's a lot of fear about nuclear energy, it seems like there's a lot of social phenomena social dynamics involved versus dealing with just science. It's interesting to watch. And if I, my darker days, it makes me cynical about our ability to use reason and science to
deal with the threats of the
world. I think that our ability to use reason and science to deal with threats of the world, is almost a timeframe question. So, I think the world again, we're very bad at looking down the road and saying it because people can't handle for example, even things like compound interest. Yeah. I like the idea that if I put a dollar in the bank today, that 15 years from now, it's going to be worth a lot more than a dollar. People can't actually see that. And so the idea of let's first see a problem then we'll deal with it right now. As opposed to 30 years down the road, typically we let the problem happen and then we solve it and it's bloody or, and worse than it would have been if we had solved it.
Years ago, but it is in fact effective. And sometimes it turns out the solution that we're proposing, 30 years in advance is not effective. And that's, that's a, that can be a major problem, as well. Well, that's
than to steal men. The the case for fear-mongering for irrational, fear mongering, we need to be scared shitless in order for us to do anything. So that's that, you know, I'm generally against that but maybe on a population scale maybe some of that is necessary for us to respond appropriate for long too, long term.
Threats. We should be scared
shitless, but I don't think that we can actually do that though. Like I like I very first of all, I think that it's platonic lies are generally bad. And then second of all, I don't think that we actually have the capacity to do this. I think that the people who are, you know, the sort of Elites of our society who get together in rooms and talk about this sort of stuff. And I've been in some of those meetings at my, at my synagogue Friday night. Actually nobody. But yeah, but I didn't make the joke but I'm glad you did. Yeah. You know, I've been in rooms like Davos like rooms and when people discuss these
Sorts of topics and they're like what if we just tell people that it's going to be a disaster with tsunamis and day after tomorrow? It's like you guys don't have that power. You don't. And by the way, you dramatically undercut, your own power because of covid to do this sort of stuff, because a lot of the sort of what if we scare the living, hell out of you to the point where you stay in your own house for two years and we tell you, you can't send your kids to school. And then we tell you that the vaccine is going to prevent transmission. And then we also tell you that we need to spend seven trillion dollars in one year and it won't have any inflationary effect. And it turns out you're wrong. I'm literally
All of those things in the last few years, have done more to undermine institutional trust than any time in probably American history. It's pretty, pretty amazing. Yeah,
I tend to agree with the the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Let me ask you back to the question of God and a big ridiculous question, who's
God, who is God? So I'm going to, I'm going to use sort of the Aquinas formulation of what God is. Right? That if you, if there is
Cause of all things, not physical things. If there is a cause underlying, the reason of the universe then that is the thing we call God. So not a big guy in the sky with a beard, you know, like he is the force, underlying, the logic of the universe if there is a logic to the universe and he is the creator in the, you dig view of that universe and he and he does have an interest in us, living in accordance with
With the laws of the universe that, if you're a religious Jew are encoded in the, in the Torah. But if you're not a religious Jew would be included in the National and the natural law by sort of Catholic theology.
Why do you think create the universe or as is popularly, asked, what do you think is the meaning behind it? What's the meaning of
life? What's the meaning of life? So, I think that the meaning of life is to fulfill what God made you to do. And that is a series of roles.
I think that human beings and here you have to look to sort of human nature rather than looking kind of two big questions. I've evolved something that I really working on a, you know, I'm writing a book about this actually that I call colloquially role Theory and basically the idea is that the way that we interact with the world is through a series of rolls and those are also the things we find most important and most implementable and there's sort of virtue ethics right which suggests that if we act in accordance with
Virtue like Aristotle. Then we will be living the most fulfilled and meaningful life and then you have sort of deontological Ethics like content FX that it's a rule-based ethic. If you follow the rules, then you'll then you'll find the meaning of life. And then, what I'm proposing is that there's something that I would call roll ethics, which is there, a series of roles that we play across our lives, which are also the things that we tend to put on our tombstones and find the most meaningful. So what when you go to a cemetery, you can see what people found the most meaningful because it's the stuff they put on the stone that has like four words on it, right?
Like beloved, father, beloved mother, sister brother, and you might have a job once in a while a Creator, a religious person or these are all roles that have existed across societies and across humanity. And those are the things where we actually find meaning and the way that we navigate those roles brings us meaning and I think that God created us in order to fulfill those roles for purposes that I can't begin to understand because I in him and the more we the more we recognize those
Roles in the more we live those roles and then we can express Freedom within those roles. I think that the Liberty exists inside each of those rules. And that's what makes all of our Lives different and fun. We all parents in different ways, but being a parent is a meaningful role. We all have spouses but you know how you interact that relationship is what makes your life meaningful and interesting that that is that is what we were put on Earth to do and if we perform those roles properly and those roles do include things like being a Creator. Like we have a creative Instinct as human beings being a Creator. Being an innovator, being a being
I'm a defender of your family being somebody who builds up being a social member of your community, which is something that we're built to do. If we fulfill those roles properly, then we will have made the world, a better place. Then we then we inherited it. And we will also have had the joy of experiencing the, the sort of flow. They talked about in Psychology where when you engage in these roles, you actually do feel a flow.
So these roles are fundamental part of the human condition. Yes. So you're the book you're working on as constructing a system to help us.
And it's looking at, let's assume that all, that's true. The real question. The book is, how do you construct a flourishing and useful
society and politics? So, Society level, if this is our understanding of a human being, how do we construct a good
Society? Right. Exactly. Because I think that a lot of political theory is right now based in either JS, Mill kind of thought which is all that. A good politics does allows you wave your hand around until you hit somebody in the face or rawlsian thought which is what if we
Constructed Society in order to achieve the most for the least essentially. What if we constructed side around what actually makes humans the most fulfilled and that is the the Fulfillment of these particular roles and where does Liberty come into that, right? How do you avoid the idea of a tyranny in that, right? How do you you have to be a mother? You must be a father you must be. Where does where is freedom come into that? Can you reject those roles totally as a society and be okay? The answer probably is not. So you need to society that actually promotes
And and protects those roles. But also protects the freedom inside those roles and that raises more fundamental question of what exactly Liberty is for. And I think the both the right and the left actually tend to make a mistake when they discuss Liberty, the left hands to think that Liberty is an ultimate good. That Simple Choice makes a bad thing. Good, which is not true. And I think the right talks about Liberty in, almost the same terms sometimes, and I think that's not true either. The question is whether Liberty is of inherent value, or instrumental? Value is Liberty good in and of itself or is it?
Liberty good, because it allows you to achieve X, Y or Z. And I've thought about this one a lot and I tend to come down on the ladder side of the aisle. I mean, this is you ask me areas where I move this may be an area where I've moved as I think when you think more shallowly about politics, or maybe more quickly, because this is how we talk in America is about Liberties and rights. We tend to think that the right is what? Meg? Not like the political right rights, make things good Liberties make things good. The question really is, what are those rights and Liberties for? Now you have to be careful so that that doesn't shade into tyranny, right? You can only have Liberty to do the thing.
That I say that you can do but there have to be spheres of Liberty that are roiling and interesting and filled with debate but without threatening the chief institutions that surround those Liberties, because if you destroy the institutions Liberties will go to. If you knock down the pillars of the society, the Liberties that are on top of those pillars are going to collapse. And I think that that's if people are feeling as though we're on the verge of tyranny. I think that's
why
This is fascinated by the way. Since instrumental perspective on Liberty, let's connect the give me a lot to think about. Let me ask a personal question, was there ever a time that you had a crisis of Faith? Where you question your belief in God?
If you're and I would let's call it a crisis of faith and an ongoing question of Faith, which I think is, I hope most religious people and the, the word Israel, right in Hebrew. You sir, IL means to struggle with God. That's, that's the, that's literally
They toured means. And so the idea of struggling with God, right? We're if you're Jewish or b'nai Israel, right? The the idea of struggling with God, I think is endemic to The Human Condition. If you understand what God's doing, then I think you're wrong and if you think that that question doesn't matter. Then I think you're also wrong, I think the God is very necessary hypothesis. So
struggle, the struggle with God is life. That is the process of light. That's
right, because you're never going to get to that answer. Otherwise you're gone yearned.
So why does God allow
Cruelty and suffering in the world, one of the tough
questions. So we're going deep. Here are the there. There's two types of Cruelty and suffering. So if we think about human cruelty and suffering, because God does not intervene to prevent people from exercising, their free will because to do. So would be to deprive human beings of the choice. That makes them human. And this is the center of the Garden of Eden. Basically, is that God could make an angel in which case you wouldn't have the choice to do the wrong thing. But so long as we are going to allow for cause and effect.
In the universe shaped by your choice, cruelty and evil are going to exist. And then there's the question of just the natural cruelty and vicissitudes of life. And the answer there is, I think the got upstairs himself. I think that if God were to appear in all of his glory, to people on a regular basis, I think they would make faith and you wouldn't need it. There'd be no such thing as Faith, right? It would just be reality, right? Nobody has to prove to you that the sun rises every day. But if God is to allow us the choice to believe in.
Which is the ultimate Choice from religious point of view. Then he's going to have to obscure himself behind tragedy and horror and and all those other things. I mean this is a fairly well-known kabbalistic concept called Tsum Tsum in Judaism which is the idea that when God created the universe, he sort of withdrew in order to make space for all of these things to happen.
So God doesn't have an instrumental perspective on Liberty,
not in a cheap sense. He, he does because the the best use of Liberty is going to be belief in him and you can misuse your Liberty, right? Hope there will be
Be consequences if you believe in an afterlife or if you believe in a sort of a generalized better version of Life led by faith, then Liberty does have a purpose but he also believes that you have to give people from a cosmic perspective, the Liberty to do wrong without threatening all the institutions of society. I mean, that's that's why it does say in the Bible that if, man, sheds Blood by man, shall his blood be shed, right? There are punishments that are that are
In biblical thought for doing things that are
wrong. So for a human being who lacks the faith in God, so if you're an atheist, can you still be a good person?
Of course 100% And they're a lot of religious people were crappy. People,
how do understand that tension?
Well, from a religious perspective, what you would say is that it is perfectly plausible to live in accordance with a set of rules that don't damage other people without believing in God, you just might be understanding the reason for doing that wrong, is what a religious person would say this.
Reception again that I had with Sam, basically, as you. And I agree, I said, this is him, you and I agree on nearly everything when it comes to morality, like probably disagree on 15 to 20% of things. The other 80% is because you grew up in, in judeo Christian Society. And so do I and we're up 10 miles from each other, you know, around the turn of the Millennium. So there's that. So you can perfectly well, be an atheist, living good, moral, decent life, because you can leave a good moral decent life with regard to other people without believing in God. I don't think he's built a society on that because I think that, you know, that relies on these sort of
Goodness of mankind, natural goodness of mankind. I don't believe in the natural dentist Mankato. You don't know. I believe in. I believe that man is created both sinful, and with the capacity for sin in the capacity for good,
but if you let them be on their own isn't
doesn't that social institutions to shape them? I think that that's very likely to go poorly
functioning. Well, we came to something we disagree on but that maybe that might reflect itself in our approach to Twitter as well. I think of humans are left on their own.
So they tend towards good, they definitely have the capacity for good and evil but I will left on their own there. I tend to believe they're good.
I think they might be good with limits, what I mean by that is that what the evidence? I think tends to show is that human beings are quite tribal. So what you'll end up with is people who are good with their immediate family and maybe their immediate neighbors and then when they're threatened by an outside tribe, then they kill everyone.
Which is sort of the history of civilization, in the pre civilizational era, which was a very violent. I'm pretty civilization later was quite violent.
Do you think on the topic of tribalism and our modern world? What are the pros and cons of tribes is that something we should try to? I'll grow as a
civilization? I don't think it's ever going to be possible to fully outgrow tribalism. I think it's a natural human condition to want to be with people who think like you or have a common set of beliefs.
And I think trying to obliterate that in the name of universalism, likely leads to utopian results that have devastating consequences utopian. Sort of universalism has been failing. Every time it's tried whether you're talking about. Now, it seems to be several liberal universalism which is being rejected by a huge number of people around the world in various different cultures or they're talking about religious universalism, which typically comes with religious tyranny, or the timeout communistic or not see, is sort of universalism which comes with mass water.
So this is universalism, I'm not a believer in. I think that you have, you know, some values that are fairly limited that all human beings should hold in common. And that's pretty much it. Like, I think that everybody should have the ability to join with their own culture. I think how we Define tribes a different thing. Yeah. So I think that that tried should not be defined by innate physical characteristics for example, because I think that thank God, is a civilization. We've outgrown that, and I think that that is
That is a childish way to view the world and all the tall people aren't a tribe, all the black people knowing all the white people aren't your tribe.
So the tribes should be formed over ideas versus physical character.
That's right. Which is why I actually go back to sort of the beginning, the conversation when it comes to Jews, you know. I'm not a big idea. I'm not a big believer in ethnic Judaism, right? I'm as a person who takes Judaism, seriously, Judaism is more to me than you were born with the last name, like, Berg or Steen and so I said maybe Converse agree with you but he would disagree with me, but that's because he was a tribal as, right?
I thought in racial terms. So
so maybe robots will help us see humans as One Tribe maybe that
as long as this is Reagan's idea, right Reagan said well if there's an alien invasion then we'll all be on the same side. So I'll go over to the Soviets will talk about
is some deep truth. What does it mean to be a good man? The various role that a human being takes on. In this role theory that you spoken about. What does it mean to be good?
It means to perform now, I will
Do Aristotle. It means to be performed the function, well, and what Aristotle says, is the good is not like moral good, moral evil in the way that we tend to think about it. He, he meant that a good cup holds liquid and a good spoon, holds soup. I mean, is that like a thing that is broken can't hold those things, right? So the idea of being, a good person means that you are fulfilling the function for which you were made. Is it teleological view of humanity? So, if you're a good father, this means that you are bringing up your child, endurable values that is going to bring them up.
Up healthy capable of protecting themselves and passing on the traditional wisdom of the ages to Future Generations. While on for the capacity, for Innovation and being a good father, being a good spouse would mean protecting and unifying with your spouse and building a safe family and a place to raise children being a good citizen of your community means protecting the fellow citizens of your community, while incentivizing them to build for themselves and the it becomes actually much easier to think of how to this is. Why I like the role Theory.
It's very hard since sort of in virtue Theory. Say, be generous. Okay, how does that manifest? I don't know. I don't know what that looks like. Sometimes being generous might being being not generous to other people, right? When Aristotle says that you should be benevolent like, what does that mean? This is very vague. When I say be a good dad. Most people sort of have a gut level understanding of what it means to be a good dad, mostly what they have, a gut level understand what. It means to really be a really bad dad. And so what it means to be a good man is to fulfill those roles as many of them as you can properly. And at full function,
Ian and that's a very hard job, as I've said before that, because I engage a lot with the public and all of this will work. Great, comes up a lot. What it takes to be a great leader, was to be a great person, and I've always had a people is actually fairly easy to be great. It's very difficult to be good. There are a lot of, there are a lot of very great people who are not very good and they're not a lot of good people and most of them. Most of them, you know, frankly most good people.
Die mourned by their family and friends and to Generations later they're forgotten, but those are the people who incrementally move the ball forward in the world. Sometimes much more than the people who are considered great,
understand the role in your life, that involves being a cup and be damn good at it. Exactly. That's what that's right. Hold the soup. It's very,
Jordan Pederson. A very, very like lobster with Jordan. Exactly,
like, people quote you for years and years to come on that. What advice would you give a lot of young people will come to you? What advice?
Despite their better judgment now.
Okay. And just maybe only kidding,
only kidding, they they seriously look up to you and draw inspiration from your ideas from your bold thinking, what advice would you give to them? How to have how to live a life worth living, how to have a career, that can be proud of and everything like that. So,
live out the values that you think are really important and seek those values and others would be the first piece of advice, second piece of advice.
Ice. Don't go on Twitter until you're 26. And I mean, because your brain is fully developed at that point. You know, the the, as I said early on and I was on social media and writing columns from time, I was 17, it was a great opportunity and as it turns out a great temptation to say enormous numbers of stupid things. When you're young, I mean, you're kind of trying out ideas and putting them on, you're taking them off and social media permanent sizes, those things and in Graves them in stone and then that's used against you for the rest of your life. So, I tell young people this all the time, like gonna be on social media be on social media, but don't pose.
Like, watch if you want to take in information and more importantly, should read books. As far as you know, other advice, I'd say, engaging your community. There's no substitute for engaging, your community and engage in interpersonal action, because that will soften you and make you a better person. I've become a better person since I got married. I become even better person since I've had kids so you can imagine how terrible I was before Elvis things and engaging your community. Does does allow you to build the things that matter on the most local.
Level. I mean the outcome by the way of this sort of politics of the politics of filming that I was talking about earlier is a lot of localism because the roles that I'm talking about are largely local roles, so that stuff has to be protected locally and then we focused way to much in this country and others on like world-beating Solutions. National Solutions, solutions that apply to hundreds of millions people, how we get to the solutions that apply for like five and then we get to the solutions that apply to like 20 and then we get to the solutions that involve, 200 people or 1,000 people. Let's all of that stuff and I think the solution is at the higher level flow, bottom up not top down
What about mentors? And maybe Role Models, have you had, have you had a mentor and maybe people you look up to either you interact on a local scale, like actually knew them, or somebody
really looked out for me and I'm very lucky. I grew up in a very solid two-parent household. I'm extremely close to my parents. I've lived near my parents literally my entire life with the exception of three years of law school. And like right now they live a mile and a half from us. That's so weird. You
learn from about life, from from your parents and
your
Father um so man, so many things from my parents, that's good and bad. It's a hard one. Um, I mean, I think the good stuff for my dad is that you should hold true to your values. He's very big on. You have values. Those values are important. Hold true to them. Did you understand what your values are? What
your principles are early
on fairly quickly? Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, he was very big on that, which is why, for example, I get asked a lot in the Jewish Community. Why I wear a cape on? The answer, is it never occurred to me to take off the keeper. I always wore it.
I take it off at any point, that's the life that I want to live and you know, that's that's the way it is. So that was a big one from my dad, for my mom practicality, my dad is more of a dreamer. My mom is much more practical. And so, you know, the the sort of lessons that I learned from my dad are that you can have this sort of the the the counter lesson is that you can have a good idea, but if you don't have a plan from implementation, then it doesn't end up as reality. And I think actually he's learned that better over the course of his wife to, but my dad from vary from time I was very young. He wanted me to engage with other adults and he
Wanted me to learn from other people and his one of his roles, as if he didn't know something, he would find somebody who he thought did know the thing for me to talk to that's a big thing. So, I'm very lucky. I have wonderful parents as far as sort of other mentors. You know, in terms of the media, Andrew Breitbart was was a mentor. Andrew, obviously, he was kind of known in his latter days. I think more for the militancy, than when I was very
close with him. So for somebody like me, who doesn't, who knows more about the militancy? Can you tell me what is, what is a great?
What makes him a great man.
What made Andrew great is that he engaged with everyone? I mean, everyone. So there are videos of him rollerblading down the Boulevard and people would be protesting who would literally like, rollerblade up to them. And he would say, let's go to lunch together and he would just do this. Hey, that's actually who enter was.
What was the thinking behind that just just as
you just careless he was used much more outgoing than I am. Actually he was he was very warm with people like for me. Yeah, I would say that with Andrew, I know Andrew for Samurai 16.
He passed away when I would have been 28. So I knew hundred for 10-12 years, and people who met Andrew for about 10 minutes, new Andrew, 99% as well as I know, Andrew because he was just all out front, like, everything was out here and he was, he loved talking people. He loved engaging with people. And so this made him a lot of fun and unpredictable and fun to watch and all that and then I think Twitter got to him, I think bio, you know, Twitter is one of the lessons I learned from Andrew is the counter last night just wizard controller can poison you.
I can really wreck you. If you spend all day on Twitter, reading the comments and getting angry at people who are talking about you, it becomes a very difficult life. And I think that, you know, in the last year of his life, Andrew got very caught up in that because of the series of sort of circumstances,
it can actually affect your mind. It can actually make you resentful all the kind of
stuff. I, I tend to agree with that. So, but the lesson that I learned from Andrew, is engage with everybody, take joy in sort of the, the mission that you're given and you can always fulfill that, you know, sometimes it's really rough and difficult. I'm not going to pretend that it's all fun.
And and rainbows all the time because I didn't. And some of the stuff that I have to cover, I don't like. And some things I have to say, I don't particularly like, you know, like that that happens. But it's, but that's what I learned from and Rome as far as sort of other mentors. I had some heads and teachers when I was a kid who said things that stuck with me, I had a fourth grade teacher named mr. Natty. Who said, don't let potential be written on your Tombstone, which was, which is a pretty good line. It's great line, particularly the fourth grader, but it was that, that, you know, that's guy, had an 11th grade English.
Teacher named Anthony Miller who is terrific. Really good writer had studied with James Joyce at Trinity College in Dublin and so he and I really got along and he helped by writing a
lot. Did you ever have doubt in yourself? I mean, especially as you gotten into the public eye, with all the attacks, did you ever doubt your ability to stay strong to be able to be a voice of the ideas that you represent?
You definitely aren't out my ability to say what I want to say. I doubt my ability to handle the emotional blowback of saying it meaning that that's, that's difficult. I mean,
I mean again in to take just one example in 2016, the ATO measured that I was the number one target of anti-Semitism on planet Earth. You know? That's, that's not fun. It's unpleasant. And when you take critiques, not from anti-semites. When you take critiques from people. Generally, we talked about here, the beginning how you surround yourself with with people who are going to give you good feedback, sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes people are giving you feedback, you know, whether it's well motivated or poorly motivated. And if you are trying to be a decent person, you can't cut.
The mechanism of feedback. And so what that means is sometimes you take to heart the wrong thing or you take it to heart too much, you're not light enough value. Take it very, very seriously. You lose sleep over it man. Can't tell you the number of nights where I've just not slept because of some critique, somebody's made me and I thought to myself I maybe that's right. Maybe that and sometimes it is right and you know that's that's
some of that is good to Stew in that criticism but some of that can destroy, you have a short Castle Rogen has talked about taking a lot of mushrooms since you're not since you're not into.
The mushroom thing. What's your escape from that? Like when you get low when you can't sleep,
usually writing is a big one for me. So I had the writing for me is cathartic. I love writing that. That is a that is a huge one spending time with my family again night. I usually have a close circle of friends who I will talk with in order to sort of bounce ideas, off of them. And then once I've kind of talked it through, I tend to feel a little bit better. Exercise is also a big one. I mean, if I go a few days without exercise I tend to
Get pretty grumpy, pretty quickly. I mean, I could keep this six-pack going somehow, man.
There you enroll going to agree. Well, we haven't aside from Twitter mentioned, love. What's the role of Love In The Human Condition? Ben Shapiro,
man? Don't get asked for Love Too Much. In fact, I was I was you don't get that question on College Camp. No, I typically don't actually I in fact it we were at an event recently as daily wire event and in the
middle of this venison meat and greet with some of the audience and the middle is event. This guy walks by with this girl they're talking and they're talking to me and their time kind of runs the Securities moving them. He says, no, no wait hold on a minute and he gets down on one knee and he proposed the girl in front of me. And I said to him, this is the weirdest proposal in human history. What is happening right now. Like I was your choice of cupid here, like it so. Well, you know, we actually like, got together because we listened to your show and I so I can perform it like a Jewish marriage right now. Any like a glass, we're gonna need her some wine. It's gonna get weird real fast.
Yeah, but yeah. So soul of doctor. I'm typically not ask too much about the role the role of Love Is
Important in Binding Together.
Human beings who ought to be bound together. And the role of respect is even more important in Binding Together. Broader groups of people, I think one of the mistakes that we make in politics is trying to substitute love for respect, respect for love and I think that's a big mistake. So I do not bear tremendous. Love in the same sense that I do for my family for random strangers. I don't, I love my family, I love my kids. Anybody who tells you? They love your kid as much as you love. Your kid is lying to you. It's not true. I love my community more than I love other communities. I love my state more than
than I love other states. I love my country more than a lot of other countries, right? Like that's that's all normal and that's all good. The problem of empathy can be when that becomes so tight-knit that you're not outward-looking that you don't actually have respect for other people. So in the local level, you need love in order to protect you and shield you and give you the strength to go forward and then beyond that, you need a lot of respect for people who are not in the circle of love. And I think trying to extend love to people who
Either are not going to love you back or are are going to slap in the face for it or who you're just not that close to it's either, it runs the risk of being are SATs and fake or it or it can actually be counterproductive in some senses.
Well, there's some sense in which you could have love for other human beings just
Based on the humanity that connects everybody, right? So you love this, this whole project or a part of, and actually, sort of another thing we disagree on. So, loving a stranger like having that basic empathy and compassion towards a stranger, even if it can hurt you, I think is ultimately like a
That is the that to me is, what means to be a good man? The to live, the good life is to have that compassion toward strangers. Because to me, it's almost it's easy and natural and obvious to love people close to you, but to step outside yourself into love others. I think that's what that's the fabric of a good Society. You don't think there's value to that? I
think there can be, but I think we're also discussing love almost in two different senses, meaning that when I talk about love and I think of immediately is the love. I bear, for my wife and kids.
Or my parents or my siblings or friendship or the love of my close friends. Yeah. Okay. But I'm but I think that it's that using that same term to describe how I feel about strangers. I think would just be an accurate. And so that's why I'm suggesting that respect might be a more solid and realistic foundation for the way that we treat people far away. From Oscar. People who are strangers respect for their dignity, respect for their priorities respect for their role in life. It might be too much when asked in other words and it made of it.
It might be the rare human being who's capable of literally loving a homeless man on the street. The way they do have his own family, but if you respect the homeless man on the street, the way that you respect your own family because everyone is deserved. Everyone deserves that respect. I think that you get to the same end without without forcing people into a position of of unrealistically expecting themselves to feel a thing. They don't feel, you know, one of the big questions in religion that comes up is God, makes certain quests that you feel certain ways, right? You're supposed to be this Empire supposed
be happy about certain things or, you know, you're supposed to love thy neighbor as thyself, right? You'll notice that in that, in that statement, it's a Thy Neighbor, right? It's not just like generally anyone, it's love the neighbors that's in any case. The
the I think that extends to anyone that follows you on
Twitter, maybe the neighbor
because I never got anticipated. The Social Network aspect that doesn't is not constrained by geography
and I am a different interpretation on that. But in any case the the sort of the, the kind of extension of
Love outwards might be too big and ask so maybe we can start with respect and then hopefully out of that. Respect can grow something more if people earn their way in, because I think that one of the big problems when we're showing universalism, is when people say, like, I'm a world citizen, I love people of the other country. The, as much as I love myself or as much as I love my country, it tends to actually lead to an almost cramdown utopianism.
That that I think can be kind of difficult because with love comes a certain expectation of solidarity. And I think, right? And when you love your family, love your wife like there's a certain level of solidarity. That is required inside the home in order to preserve most loving kind of home. And so if you love everybody, then that sort of implies a certain level of solidarity that may not exist. So maybe the idea is for me start with respect and then maybe as people respect each other more than love is an outgrowth of that as opposed to starting with love. And then hoping that respect
develops. Yeah. There's a danger that, that word
It becomes empty and instead is used for dogmatic kind of utopianism Berman
is this is this is the way that, for example, religious theocracies, very often work, we love you so much, we have to convert you.
So let's start with respect. What I would love to see after our conversation today is to see a bunch of beer that continues the growth on Twitter of being even more respectful than you've already been. And maybe one day converting That Into Love on.
That would, if I could see that in this world, that would make me die a happy
man. Wow, that's a little bit of fact. Make that happen for love in the world for me as a gift for me. I'll try to make that happen but I do have one question. I'm gonna need you to tell me. Can I like which jokes are okay. Our jokes still. Okay,
so yeah, can I can I just run your Twitter from now on? You
just send it to me. I will I'll pre-screen you the jokes and you can tell me if this is a loving joke or if this is a hate Freedom, not very
surprised before by the all the heart emojis.
This are popping up and your Twitter but thank you so much for being bold and fearless and I exploring ideas and your Twitter aside, thank you for being just good faith and all the arguments and all the conversations you're having with people is a huge honor. Thank you for
talking. Hey, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ben Shapiro. The sport this podcast please. Check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ben, Shapiro himself, freedom of speech and thought matters.
and especially when it is speech, and thought with which we disagree the moment, the majority decides to destroy people for engaging, a thought it dislikes thoughtcrime becomes a reality,
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
