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

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0:00- The great lie we tell ourselves,
0:00is that people who are evil
0:02are not like us.
0:03They're a class apart.
0:04Everybody in history who has sinned is a person
0:06who's very different from me.
0:08Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton,
0:10he's fond of doing sort of thought experiment
0:12in his classes where he asks
0:13people to raise their hand if they had lived in Alabama
0:16in 1861, "How many of you would be abolitionists?"
0:19And everybody raises their hand and he says,
0:20"Of course that's not true.
0:22"Of course, that's not true."
0:24The best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies
0:28in every human heart and the possibility
0:30that it takes you over.
0:32- Do you ever sit back,
0:35in the quiet of your mind and think,
0:37Am I participating in evil?
0:41The following is a conversation with Ben Shapiro,
0:44a conservative political commentator,
0:46host of the Ben Shapiro Show,
0:48co-founder of The Daily Wire,
0:50and author of several books,
0:52including The Authoritarian Moment,
0:54The Right Side of History,
0:56and Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings.
0:59Whatever your political leanings,
1:01I humbly ask that you try to put those aside and listen
1:05with an open mind,
1:07trying to give the most charitable interpretation
1:09of the words we say.
1:11This is true in general for this podcast.
1:14Whether the guest is Ben Shapiro
1:16or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
1:19Donald Trump or Barack Obama.
1:23I will talk to everyone from every side,
1:26from the far left to the far right,
1:28from presidents to prisoners, from artists to scientists,
1:32from the powerful to the powerless.
1:34Because we are all human, all capable of good and evil,
1:39all with fascinating stories and ideas to explore.
1:44I seek only to understand, and in so doing,
1:47hopefully add a bit of love to the world.
1:51This is Lex Fridman Podcast, to support it,
1:54please check out our sponsors in the description.
1:56And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro.
2:01Let's start with a difficult topic.
2:04What do you think about the comments made by Ye,
2:06formerly known as Kanye West, about Jewish people?
2:09- They're awful and antisemitic,
2:12and they seem to get worse over time.
2:14They started off with the bizarre death con 3 tweet,
2:18and then they went into even more stereotypical garbage
2:23about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators.
2:26I think that was the Pete Davidson, Kim Kardashian stuff.
2:28And then, Jews running all of the media,
2:31Jews being in charge of the financial sector, Jewish people.
2:34I mean, there's no, I mean,
2:36I called it on my show, there's Sherman Nazism,
2:38and it is,
2:39it's like right
2:40from Protocols of the Elders of Zion type stuff.
2:43- Do you think those words come from pain,
2:45where do they come from?
2:47- It's always hard to try and read somebody's mind,
2:49what he looks like,
2:50to me, just having experience in my own family
2:52with people who are bipolar is,
2:54he seems like a bipolar personality.
2:55He seems like somebody who is in the middle
2:58of a manic episode.
3:00And when you're manic you tend to say a lot of things
3:03that you shouldn't say,
3:05and you tend to believe that they're the most brilliant
3:07things ever said.
3:08The Washington Post,
3:09did an entire piece
3:10speculating about how bipolarism played
3:12into the kind of stuff that Ye was saying.
3:15And it's hard for me to think that it's not playing into it,
3:20especially because even if he is an anti-Semite,
3:24and I have no reason to suspect he's not,
3:25given all of his comments.
3:27If he had an ounce of common sense,
3:29he would stop at a certain point.
3:30And bipolarism tends to drive you well past
3:33the point where common sense applies.
3:37So, I would imagine it's coming from that.
3:41From his comments,
3:42I would also imagine that he's doing the logical mistake,
3:46that a lot of anti-Semites or racist or bigots do;
3:48which is somebody hurt me, that person is a Jew,
3:52therefore all Jews are bad.
3:54And,cthat jump from a person did something to me,
3:57I don't like,
3:58who's a member of a particular race or class,
4:01and therefore everybody of that race or class is bad.
4:04That's textbook bigotry
4:05and that's pretty obviously what Ye's engaging in here.
4:07- So jumping from the individual to the group.
4:09That's the way he's been expressing it, right.
4:10He keeps talking about his Jewish agents,
4:11and I watched your interview with him and you kept saying,
4:13"So just name the agents."
4:14Just name the people who are, who are screwing you.
4:17And he wouldn't do it.
4:18Instead, he just kept going back to the general,
4:20the group, the Jews in general.
4:22I mean, that's textbook bigotry.
4:25And, if we're putting any other context,
4:27he would probably recognize it as such.
4:30- To the degree is worth fuel hate in the world.
4:33What's the way to reverse that process?
4:35What's the way to alleviate the hate?
4:37- I mean, when it comes to alleviating the kind of stuff
4:40that he's saying, obviously debunking it.
4:45Making clear that what he's saying is garbage.
4:48But, the reality is that I think that for most people
4:53who are in any way engaged with these issues,
4:56I don't think they're being convinced
4:57to be antisemitic by Ye.
5:00I think that there's a group of people who may be swayed
5:02that antisemitism is acceptable
5:04because Ye is saying what he's saying,
5:06and he's saying so very loudly,
5:08and he's saying it over and over.
5:10But yeah, I think that for example,
5:12there were these signs that were popping up in Los Angeles
5:15saying, Ye is right.
5:16Well, that group's been out there posting antisemitic
5:18signs on the freeways for years.
5:20And, there are groups like that
5:22posting antisemitic signs where I live in Florida.
5:24They've been doing that for years.
5:25Well before YA was saying this sort of stuff,
5:26it's just like latest opportunity
5:27to kind of jump on on that particular bandwagon.
5:29But listen, I think that people do have a moral duty
5:33to call that stuff out.
5:34- So there is a degree to which it normalizes
5:37that kind of idea that Jews control the media,
5:41Jews control X institution.
5:45Is there a way to talk about
5:49a high representation of a group like Jewish people
5:54in a certain institution like the media
5:57or Hollywood and so on,
5:59without it being a hateful conversation?
6:02- Sure, of course.
6:03A high percentage of, higher than statistically represented,
6:07in the population,
6:08percentage of Hollywood agents are probably Jewish.
6:11A higher percentage of lawyers generally
6:13are probably Jewish.
6:14A high percentage of accountants are probably Jewish.
6:16Also, a higher percentage of of engineers
6:18are probably Asian.
6:20Statistical truths are statistical truths.
6:22It doesn't necessarily mean anything about the nature
6:27of the people who are being talked about.
6:29They're a myriad of reasons
6:30why people might be disproportionately
6:32in one arena or another;
6:34ranging from the cultural to sometimes the genetic.
6:37There are certain areas of the world
6:39where people are better long distance runners
6:41because of their genetic adaptations
6:43in those particular areas of the world.
6:44That's not racist.
6:45That's just fact.
6:47What starts to get racist
6:48is when you are attributing a bad characteristic
6:50to an entire population based on the notion
6:55that some members of that population
6:57are doing bad things.
6:58- Yeah, there's a jump between.
7:00It's also possible that record label owners
7:03as a group have a kind of culture that F's over artists.
7:09- Sure.
7:10- Doesn't treat artists fairly.
7:11And, it's also possible that there's a high representation
7:13of Jews in the group of people that own record labels,
7:19But, it's that small,
7:20but a very big leap that people take from the group
7:24that own record labels to all Jews.
7:27- For sure.
7:28I think that one of the other issues also is that
7:32antisemitism is fascinating
7:34because it breaks down into so many different parts.
7:36Meaning that, if you look at sort of different types
7:38of antisemitism, if you're a racist against black people,
7:41it's typically because you're racist based on the color
7:43of their skin.
7:44If you're racist, against the Jews, you're antisemitic.
7:47Then, there are actually a few different ways
7:48that breaks down, right.
7:49You have antisemitism in terms of ethnicity;
7:51which is like Nazi-esk antisemitism.
7:54You have Jewish parentage, you have a Jewish grandparent,
7:57therefore you are,
7:58your blood is corrupt
7:59and you are inherently going to have bad properties.
8:01Then, there's sort of old school religious antisemitism;
8:04which is that the Jews are the killers of Christ,
8:07or the Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys,
8:09and therefore Judaism is bad and therefore Jews are bad.
8:12And, the way that you get out of that antisemitism
8:14historically speaking is mass conversion;
8:16which most antisemitism for a couple thousand years actually
8:19was not ethnic,
8:20it was much more rooted in this sort of stuff, right.
8:23If a Jew converted out of the faith,
8:25then the antisemitism was quote unquote alleviated.
8:28And then, there's a sort of bizarre antisemitism
8:32that's political antisemitism,
8:33and that is members of a group that I don't like
8:37are disproportionately Jewish.
8:39Therefore all Jews are members of this group
8:44or are predominantly represented in this group.
8:46So, you'll see Nazis saying the communists are Jews.
8:49You'll see communist saying the Nazis are Jews,
8:50or you'll see communist saying that the capitalists
8:53rather are Jews.
8:54And, so that's the weird thing about antisemitism.
8:56It's kind of like the Jews behind every corner.
8:58It's basically a big conspiracy theory.
9:00Unlike a lot of other forms of racism;
9:01which are not really conspiracy theory,
9:03antisemitism tends to be a conspiracy theory
9:05about the levers of power
9:06being controlled by a shadowy cadre of people
9:09who are getting together behind closed doors
9:11to control things.
9:12- Yeah, the most absurd illustration of antisemitism,
9:15just like you said, is Stalin versus Hitler over Poland.
9:20That every bad guy was a Jew, right.
9:24It was like, every enemy,
9:26there's a lot of different enemy groups, intellectuals,
9:28political and so on.
9:29Military, and behind any movement that is considered
9:33the enemy for the Nazis,
9:35and any movement that's considered the enemy
9:37for the Soviet army are the Jews.
9:41What is the fact that Hitler took power
9:45teach you about human nature?
9:48When you look back at the history of the 20th century,
9:50what do you learn from that time?
9:52- I mean, there are a bunch of lessons
9:54to Hitler taking power.
9:55The first thing, I think people ought to recognize
9:58about Hitler taking power
9:59is that the power had been centralized
10:01in the government before Hitler took it.
10:03If you actually look at the history of Nazi Germany,
10:05the Weimar Republic had effectively collapsed.
10:08The power had been centralized in the Chancellery,
10:12and really under Hindenburg
10:14for a couple of years before that.
10:16And so, it was only a matter of time until someone
10:19who was bad grabbed the power.
10:21And so, the struggle between the reds and the browns
10:23in Nazism, in pre-Nazi Germany,
10:27led to this kind of up spiraling of radical sentiment
10:31that allowed Hitler in through the front door,
10:33not through the back door.
10:34He was elected.
10:35- So you think communists could have also taken power.
10:37- I mean, there's no question communists
10:38could have taken power.
10:39They were a serious force in in pre-Nazi Germany.
10:41- Do you think there was an underlying current
10:43that would've led to an atrocity,
10:45if the communist had taken power?
10:47- Wouldn't have been quite the same atrocity,
10:48but obviously the communists in Soviet Russia,
10:50at exactly this time were, were committing the Holodomor.
10:52- Yeah.
10:53- So it was, there were very few good guys
10:56in terms of good parties.
10:57The moderate parties were being dragged by the radicals
11:00into alliance with them
11:02to prevent the worst case scenario from the other guy.
11:05So if you look at,
11:06I'm sort of fascinated by the history of this period,
11:09because it really does speak to,
11:11how does a democracy break down?
11:13I mean, the 20's,
11:14Weimar Republic was a very liberal democracy.
11:16How does a liberal democracy break down
11:17into complete fascism, and then into genocide?
11:21And, there's a character who was very prominent
11:24in the history at that time named Franz von Papen,
11:26who was actually the second to last chancellor
11:29of the Republic before Hitler.
11:30So he was the chancellor,
11:31and then he handed over to Schleicher.
11:32And then, he ended up, Schleicher ended up collapsing,
11:35and that ended up handing power over to Hitler.
11:37It was Papen who had stumped for Hitler
11:39to become chancellor.
11:41Papen was a Catholic Democrat.
11:44He didn't like Hitler.
11:45He thought that Hitler was a radical and a nut job,
11:48but he also thought that Hitler being a buffoon,
11:51as he saw it,
11:52was going to essentially be usable by the right forces
11:57in order to prevent the communists from taking power.
12:00Maybe in order to restore some sort of legitimacy
12:02to the regime because he was popular.
12:05In order for Papen
12:06to retain power himself.
12:08And then, immediately after Hitler taking power,
12:11Hitler basically kills all of Papen's friends.
12:12Papen out of quote unquote loyalty, stays on.
12:15He ends up helping the Anschluss in Austria.
12:18All this stuff is really interesting,
12:19mainly because what it speaks to is the great lie
12:22we tell ourselves that people who are evil
12:24are not like us.
12:24They're a class apart.
12:25People who do evil things,
12:26people who support evil people; they're not like us.
12:29That's an easy call.
12:31Everybody, in history who has sinned
12:34is a person who's very different from me.
12:36Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton,
12:38he's fond of doing a sort of thought experiment
12:40in his classes where he asks people
12:42to raise their hand if they had lived in Alabama
12:44in 1861, "How many of you would be abolitionists?"
12:47And everybody raises their hand.
12:48And he says, "Of course that's not true."
12:50Of course, that's not true.
12:52The best protection against evil is recognizing
12:55that it lies in every human heart,
12:57and the possibility that it takes you over.
13:01And so, you have to be very cautious in how you approach
13:04these issues, and the back and forth of politics,
13:07the sort of bipolarity of politics,
13:09or the polarization in politics
13:11might be a better way to put it,
13:13makes it very easy to kind of fall
13:16into the rock 'em sock 'em robots
13:18that eventually could theoretically allow you to support
13:20somebody who's truly frightening and hideous
13:24in order to stop somebody who you think
13:25is more frightening and hideous.
13:27And, you see this kinda language, by the way,
13:28now pre-dominating almost all over the western world, right.
13:31My political enemy is an enemy of democracy.
13:33My political enemy is gonna end the republic.
13:35My political enemy
13:36is going to be the person who destroys the country
13:38we live in.
13:39And so, that person has to be stopped
13:42by any means necessary.
13:44And, that's dangerous stuff.
13:46- So the communists had to be stopped in Nazi Germany,
13:49and so they're the devil.
13:51And so any useful buffoon,
13:54as long as they're effective
13:55against the communists would do.
13:58Do you ever wonder,
13:59because the people that are participating in evil
14:01may not understand that they're doing evil.
14:04Do you ever sit back, you know,
14:06in the quiet of your mind and think,
14:08Am I participating in evil?
14:10- I mean, my business partner and I,
14:12one of our favorite memes
14:14is from there's a British comedy show,
14:17the name escapes me.
14:18Of these two guys who are members of the SS,
14:21and they're dressed in the SS uniforms
14:23and the black uniforms with the skulls on them.
14:25And they're saying to each other, one says to the other guy,
14:27"You notice like the British, their symbol is something,
14:30"It's something nice.
14:31"And it's like, it's like an eagle,
14:33"But ours, it's a skull and crossbones.
14:34"You see that the Americans,
14:36"You see the, the blue uniforms very nice and pretty.
14:37"Ours are jet black, are we the baddies?"
14:41And you know, that's it.
14:42(hearty laughing)
14:44And the truth is, we look back at the Nazis and we say,
14:46"Well, of course they were the baddies.
14:47"They wore black uniforms and they had jack boots
14:49"And they had this..."
14:50And, of course they were the bad guys.
14:52But, evil rarely presents its face so clearly.
14:55So yeah, I mean,
14:56I think you have to constantly be thinking along those lines
14:59and hopefully you try to avoid it.
15:02You can only do the best that a human being can do.
15:04But yeah, the answer is yes,
15:07I would say that I spend an inordinate amount of time
15:11reflecting on whether I'm doing the right thing,
15:15and I may not always do the right thing.
15:16I'm sure a lot of people think that I'm doing the wrong
15:18thing on a daily basis.
15:19But, it's definitely a question
15:20that has to enter your mind,
15:22as a historically aware and hopefully morally decent person.
15:27- Do you think
15:27you're mentally strong enough, if you realize,
15:30that you are on the wrong side of history to switch sides?
15:34Very few people in history seem to be strong enough
15:37to do that.
15:37- I think that the answer, I hope would be yes.
15:41You never know until the time comes and you have to do it.
15:43I will say that having heterodox opinions in a wide variety
15:47of areas is something that I have done before.
15:51I'm the only person I've ever heard of in public life,
15:55who actually has a list on their website
15:57of all the dumb stupid things I've ever said.
16:00Where I go through and I either say,
16:03this is why I still believe this,
16:04or this is why what I said was terrible and stupid.
16:06- Yeah. - And I'm sure that list
16:08will get a lot longer.
16:09- Yeah, look forward to new additions to that.
16:11- [Ben] Yeah, exactly.
16:12- It actually is a super, super long list.
16:15People should check it out.
16:16And, it's quite honest and raw.
16:18What do you think about,
16:20it's interesting to ask you,
16:21given how pro-life you are,
16:25about Ye's comments,
16:26about comparing the Holocaust to the 900,000 abortions
16:32in the United States a year.
16:35- I'll take this from two angles.
16:35As a pro-life person,
16:36I actually didn't find it offensive
16:38because if you believe as I do,
16:40that unborn and pre-born lives deserve protection,
16:44then the slaughter of just under a million of them
16:47every year for the last almost 50 years,
16:49is a historic tragedy on par with a holocaust.
16:53From the outside perspective,
16:54I get why people would say there's a difference
16:56in how people view the pre-born as to how people view,
16:59say a seven year old, who's being killed in the Holocaust.
17:01The visceral power and evil of the Nazis
17:04shoving full grown human beings
17:06and small children into gas chambers,
17:08can't be compared to a person who,
17:11even from pro-life perspective,
17:12may not fully understand the consequences
17:14of their own decisions or from a pro-choice perspective,
17:16fully understands the consequences,
17:17but just doesn't think that that person is a person.
17:19That that's actually different.
17:21I understand both sides of it.
17:23I wasn't offended by Ye's comments in that way though,
17:26because if you're a pro-life human being,
17:28then you do think that what's happening
17:30is a great tragedy on scale that involves the dehumanization
17:32of an entire class of people, the pre-born.
17:36- So the philosophical, you understand the comparison?
17:39- I do, sure.
17:41- So in his comments,
17:43in the jumping from the individual to the group,
17:46I'd like to ask you,
17:47you're one of the most effective people in the world
17:49that attacking the left,
17:51and sometimes it can slip into attacking the group.
17:56Do you worry that that's the same kind
17:58of oversimplification that Ye's.
18:00doing about Jewish people?
18:01That you can sometimes do with the left as a group?
18:05- So when I speak about the left,
18:06I'm speaking about a philosophy.
18:09I'm not really speaking about individual human beings
18:11as the leftist group,
18:14and then try to name who the members of this
18:16individual group are.
18:16I also make a distinction between the left and liberals.
18:19There are a lot of people who are liberal who disagree
18:21with me on taxes, disagree with me on foreign policy,
18:24disagree with me on a lot of things.
18:25The people who I'm talking about generally,
18:26and I talk about the left in the United States;
18:29are people who believe that alternative points of view
18:31ought to be silenced
18:32because they are damaging and harmful
18:35simply based on the disagreement.
18:36So that's one distinction.
18:38The second distinction,
18:39again, is when I talk about the right versus the left.
18:40Typically, I'm talking about a battle
18:42of competing philosophies.
18:44And so, I'm not speaking about,
18:45typically, it would be hard to,
18:48if you put a person in front of me and said,
18:49"Is this person of the left or of the right?"
18:51Having just met them, I wouldn't be able to label them
18:53in the same way that if you met somebody
18:55with the name of Greenstein, you immediately got Jew.
18:57Or you met a black person, black person.
18:59And, the adherence to a philosophy
19:02makes you a member of a group.
19:05If I think the philosophy is bad,
19:06that doesn't necessarily mean that you as a person are bad,
19:09but it does mean that I think your philosophy is bad.
19:12- Yeah, so the grouping
19:12is based on the philosophy versus something
19:15like a race, like the color of your skin,
19:18or race, in the case of the Jewish people.
19:20So it's a different thing.
19:22You, can be a little bit more nonchalant and careless
19:26in attacking a group
19:27because it's ultimately attacking a set of ideas.
19:29- Well, I mean, it is really nonchalant
19:31in attacking the set of ideas.
19:32And, I don't know that nonchalant would be the way
19:33I'd put it.
19:35I try to be exact.
19:36When you don't always hit,
19:37but you know, if I say that, I oppose the communists,
19:41And then, presumably I'm speaking of people who believe
19:45in the communists philosophy.
19:47Now, the question is whether I'm mislabeling.
19:49Whether I'm taking somebody who's not actually a communist
19:50and then shoving them in that group of communists.
19:52That would be inaccurate.
19:53- The dangerous thing is it expands the group as opposed
19:57to you talking about the philosophy.
19:59You're throwing everybody who's ever said,
20:01"I'm curious about communism, I'm curious about socialism."
20:05'Cause there's like a gradient,
20:07it's like to throw something at you.
20:10I think Joe Biden said, "MAGA Republicans."
20:12- Right. - Right.
20:15I think that's a very careless statement
20:16because the thing you jump to immediately is like all-
20:20- Vote for Trump. - All Republicans, right.
20:22- Right. - Versus, I think,
20:24in the charitable interpretation,
20:26that means a set of ideas.
20:28- Yeah, my actually problem
20:30with the MAGA Republicans line
20:31from Biden is that he went on in the speech that he made
20:34in front of Independence Hall
20:35to actually trying and find what it meant
20:37to be a MAGA Republican,
20:39who was a threat to the republic,
20:40was the kinda language that he was using.
20:41And later on in the speech he actually suggested, well,
20:44there are moderate Republicans.
20:45And, the moderate Republicans are people who agree with me
20:47on like the Inflation Reduction Act.
20:48It's like, well that can't be the dividing line
20:51between a MAGA Republican and a moderate.
20:54Like a moderate Republican
20:55is somebody who agrees with you,
20:56that you gotta name me,
20:57like a republican who disagrees with you fairly strenuously,
21:00but is not in this group of threats to the republic.
21:03You make that distinction,
21:04we can have a fair discussion
21:05about whether the idea of election denial,
21:07for example, makes somebody a threat to institutions.
21:11That's a conversation that we can have.
21:13And then, we'll have to discuss how much power they have,
21:15what the actual perspective is, delve into it.
21:17But you know,
21:18I think that he was being over broad and sort of labeling
21:20all of his political enemies under one rubric.
21:22Now again, in politics,
21:23this stuff sort of happens all the time.
21:24I'm not gonna plead clean hands here,
21:26'cause I'm sure that I've been inexact.
21:28But, what would be good
21:31in that particular situation is for somebody
21:33to sort of read me back the quote,
21:34and I'll let you know where I've been inaccurate.
21:36I'll try to do that.
21:37- And also, you don't shy away from humor
21:39and occasional trolling and mockery,
21:41and all that kind of stuff
21:42for the fun, for the chaos, all that kind of stuff.
21:44- I mean, I try not to to do trollery for trollery sake,
21:48but, if the show's not entertaining and not fun,
21:50people aren't gonna listen.
21:52And so, if you can't have fun with politics,
21:54the truth about politics is we all take it very seriously.
21:56'Cause it has some serious ramifications.
21:58Politics is Veep,
21:58it is not House of Cards.
22:00The general rule of politics is that everyone is a moron
22:04unless proven otherwise.
22:05That virtually everything is done out of stupidity
22:07rather than malice.
22:08And that, if you actually watch politics as a comedy,
22:11you'll have a lot more fun.
22:12And so, the difficulty for me is I take politics seriously,
22:14but also I have the ability to sort of flip the switch
22:16and suddenly it all becomes incredibly funny
22:18because it really is.
22:20If you just watch it from a pure entertainment perspective
22:23and you put aside the fact that it affects
22:24hundreds of millions of people,
22:25then watching President Trump,
22:30I mean, he's one of the funniest humans
22:32who's ever lived watching.
22:33Watching Kamala Harris be Kamala Harris
22:35and talking about how much she loves Venn diagrams
22:37or electric buses.
22:38I mean, that's funny stuff.
22:40So if I can't make fun of that,
22:41then my job becomes pretty morose pretty quickly.
22:43- Yeah, it's funny to figure out
22:45what is the perfect balance between seeing the humor
22:49and the absurdity of the game of it,
22:51versus taking it seriously enough
22:54because it does affect hundreds of millions of people.
22:56It's a weird balance to strike.
22:58It's like, I am afraid with the internet that everything
23:01becomes a joke.
23:03- I totally agree with this.
23:04I will say this,
23:05I try to make less jokes about the ideas
23:08and more jokes about the people in the same way
23:09that I make jokes about myself.
23:11I'm pretty self-effacing in terms of my humor.
23:13I would say at least half the jokes on my show are about me.
23:17When I'm reading ads Tommy John
23:18and they're talking about their no wedgie guarantee,
23:20I'll say things like,
23:21"That would help me in high school, because it would've."
23:24I mean, just factually speaking,
23:26if I can speak that way about myself,
23:28I feel like everybody else can take it as well.
23:31- Difficult question.
23:32In 2017, there was a mosque shooting in Quebec City.
23:36Six people died, five others seriously injured.
23:39The 27 year old gunman consumed a lot of content online
23:43and checked Twitter accounts of a lot of people.
23:46But, one of the people he checked quite a lot of is you,
23:5093 times in the month leading up to the shooting.
23:53If you could talk to that young man,
23:55what would you tell him and maybe other young men listening
23:58to this that have hate in their heart in that same way,
24:02What would you tell?
24:03- "You're getting it wrong.
24:05"If anything that I or anyone else in mainstream politics
24:08"Says drives you to violence, you're getting it wrong.
24:11"You're getting it wrong."
24:13Now again, when it comes to stuff like this,
24:15I have a hard and fast rule that I've applied evenly
24:17across the spectrum.
24:18And that is,
24:19I never blame people's politics for other people
24:22committing acts of violence;
24:23unless they're actively advocating violence.
24:25So when a fan of Bernie Sanders shoots up a congressional
24:28baseball game, that is not Bernie Sanders's fault.
24:30I may not like his rhetoric.
24:31I may disagree with him on everything.
24:32Bernie Sanders did not tell somebody to go shoot up
24:34a congressional baseball game.
24:35When a nut case in San Francisco
24:38goes and hits Paul Pelosi with a hammer.
24:40I'm not gonna blame Kevin McCarthy,
24:42the house speaker, for that.
24:43When somebody threatens Brett Kavanaugh,
24:45I'm not gonna suggest that that was Joe Biden's fault
24:48because it's not Joe Biden's fault.
24:49We can play this game all day long.
24:51And, I find that the people who are most intensely focused
24:54on playing this game are people who tend to oppose
24:57the politics of the person,
24:58as opposed to actually believing sincerely
25:01that this has driven somebody into the arms
25:03of the god of violence.
25:05But, I have 4.7 million Twitter followers,
25:09I have 8 million Facebook followers,
25:11I have 5 million YouTube followers.
25:13I would imagine that some of them
25:15are people who are violent.
25:18I would imagine that some of them are people who do evil
25:19things or want to do evil things.
25:22And, I wish that there were a wand that we could wave
25:25that would prevent those people from deliberately
25:27or mistakenly misinterpreting things as a call of violence.
25:31It's just a negative byproduct of the fact
25:33that you can reach a lot of people.
25:34And so, if somebody could point me to the comment
25:39that I suppose quote unquote drove somebody to going
25:42literally murder human beings, then I would appreciate it.
25:45So I could talk about the comment.
25:49But, I don't, mainly because I just think
25:52that if we remove agency from individuals,
25:56and if we blame broad scale political rhetoric
26:00for every act of violence, we're not gonna...
26:01The people who are gonna pay the price are actually
26:04the general population because free speech will go away.
26:07If the idea is that things that we say could drive somebody,
26:10who is unbalanced, to go do something evil,
26:13the necessary byproduct is hate.
26:15Is that, speech is a form of hate.
26:18Hate is a form of violence, speech is a form of violence.
26:21Speech needs to be curbed.
26:22And that. to me is deeply disturbing.
26:25- So definitely, that man,
26:29that 27 year old man,
26:30is the only one responsible for the evil he did.
26:33But, what if he and others like him are not nut cases?
26:38What if they're people with pain, with anger in their heart?
26:42What would you say to them?
26:44You're exceptionally influential and other people like you,
26:48that speak passionately about ideas.
26:51What do you think is your opportunity to alleviate the hate
26:54in their heart?
26:55- If we're speaking about people who aren't mentally ill
26:57and people who are just misguided,
27:00I'd say to him, the thing I said to every other young man
27:03in the country,
27:04you need to find meaning and purpose in forming connections
27:07that actually matter,
27:09in a belief system that actually promotes general prosperity
27:15and promotes helping other people.
27:16And this is why,
27:18the message that I most commonly say to young men is,
27:20it's time for you to grow up, mature, get a job,
27:23get married, have a family,
27:24take care of the people around you,
27:25become a useful part of your community.
27:27I've never at any point in my entire career suggested
27:31violence as a resort to political issues.
27:37The whole point of having a political conversation
27:39is that it's a conversation.
27:40If I didn't think that it were worth trying to convince
27:42people of my point of view,
27:43I wouldn't do what I do for a living.
27:45- So violence doesn't solve anything?
27:47- No, it doesn't.
27:49- As if this wasn't already a difficult conversation.
27:55Let me ask about Ilhan Omar.
27:58You've called out her criticism
28:00of Israel policies as antisemitic.
28:03Is there a difference between criticizing a race of people,
28:06like the Jews, and criticizing
28:10the policies of a nation like Israel?
28:12- Of course, of course.
28:13I criticize the policies of Israel
28:14on a fairly regular basis.
28:15I would assume from a different angle than Ilhan Omar does.
28:18But yeah, I mean, I criticize the policies
28:20of a wide variety of states.
28:22And to take an example,
28:23I've criticized Israel's policy in giving control
28:26of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf;
28:28which effectively prevents anybody except for Muslims
28:30from praying up there.
28:31I've also criticized the Israeli government
28:33for their COVID crackdown.
28:34They can criticize the policies of any government,
28:36but that's not what Ilhan Omar does.
28:37Ilhan Omar doesn't actually believe
28:39that there should be a state of Israel.
28:40She believes that Zionism is racism
28:42and that the existence of a Jewish state in Israel,
28:45is in and of itself the great sin.
28:48That is a statement she would make about no other people
28:50in no other land.
28:52She would not say that the French don't deserve a state
28:53for the French.
28:54She wouldn't say that Somalis wouldn't deserve
28:56a state in Somalia.
28:57She wouldn't say that that Germans
28:59don't deserve a state in Germany.
29:00She wouldn't say for the 50 plus Islamic states
29:03that exist across the world,
29:04that they don't deserve states of their own.
29:06It is only the Jewish state
29:07that has fallen under her significant scrutiny.
29:09And she also promulgates laws about one specific state
29:14in the form of suggesting, for example,
29:16that Israel is an apartheid state;
29:17which it is most eminently not considering that
29:20the last unity government in Israel included an Arab party.
29:22That there are Arabs who sit
29:23on the Israeli Supreme Court and all the rest.
29:25And then, beyond that,
29:26obviously she's engaged in some of the same sort
29:28of antisemitic ropes that you heard from Ye, right.
29:29The stuff about,
29:31it's all about the Benjamins,
29:32that American support for Israel is all about the Benjamins.
29:34And, she's had to be chided by members of her own party
29:36about this sort of stuff before.
29:38- Can you empathize with the plight of Palestinian people?
29:41- Absolutely.
29:43Some of the uglier things that I've ever said in my career
29:45are things that I said very early on, when I was 17, 18, 19.
29:47I started writing a syndicated comment, I was 17.
29:49I'm now 38.
29:50So virtually all the dumb things,
29:51I'd not say virtually all, many of the dumb things,
29:53the plurality of the dumb things that I've said came from
29:55the ages of, I would say 17 to maybe 23.
29:58- Yeah.
29:59- And they are rooted, again, in sloppy thinking.
30:01I feel terrible for people who have lived under the thumb
30:05and currently live under the thumb of Hamas;
30:07which is a national terrorist group,
30:09or the Palestinian authority;
30:10which is a corrupt oligarchy that steals money
30:12from its people and leaves them in misery.
30:15Or Islamic Jihad,
30:16which is an actual terrorist group.
30:18The basic rule for the region in my view, is if these groups
30:23were willing to make peace with Israel,
30:25they would have a state literally tomorrow.
30:27And if they are not, then there will be no peace.
30:29And, it really is that simple.
30:30If Israel, the formulas typically used,
30:33it's become a bit of a bumper sticker,
30:35but it happens to be factually correct.
30:36If the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow,
30:38there would be a state.
30:39If the Israelis put down their guns,
30:40there'd be no Israel.
30:45- You get attacked a lot on the internet.
30:47- Oh yeah, you noticed.
30:49- I gotta ask you about your own psychology.
30:52How do you not let that break you mentally?
30:56And, how do you avoid letting that lead to a resentment
31:00of the groups that attack you?
31:03- There are a few sort of practical things
31:04that I've done.
31:05For example, I would say that four years ago,
31:07Twitter was all consuming.
31:09Twitter is an ego machine,
31:10especially the notifications button, right.
31:12The notifications button is just people talking about you
31:14all the time.
31:15And the normal human tendency as,
31:16"Wow, people talking about me,
31:17"I gotta see what they're saying about me."
31:18Which is a recipe for insanity.
31:20So my wife actually said,
31:22"Twitter is making your life miserable.
31:23"You need to take it off your phone."
31:24So Twitter is not on my phone.
31:26If I wanna log onto Twitter,
31:27I have to go onto my computer
31:29and I have to make the conscious decision
31:31to go onto Twitter and then take a look
31:33at what's going on.
31:33- I could just imagine you like,
31:34there's a computer in the basement,
31:36you dissent into the check Twitter.
31:38- That's pretty much-
31:39- In the darkness.
31:40- If you look at, when I actually tweet,
31:40it's generally in the run up to recording my show
31:43or when I'm prepping for my show,
31:45later in the afternoon, for example.
31:47- That doesn't affect you negatively mentally?
31:49Like puts you in a bad mental space?
31:50- Not particularly if it's restricted,
31:52to sort of what's being watched now.
31:54I will say that I think the most important thing
31:56is you have to surround yourself with a group of people
32:00who you trust enough to make serious critiques of you,
32:03when you're doing something wrong.
32:04But also, you know that they have
32:05your best interests at heart.
32:07'Cause the internet is filled with people
32:08who don't have your best interests at heart,
32:09and who hate your guts.
32:10And so, you can't really take those critiques seriously
32:12or it does wreck you.
32:14And the world is also filled with (indistinct), right.
32:17The, the, the more successful you become,
32:18there are a lot of people who will tell you,
32:20"You're always doing the right thing."
32:21I'm very lucky.
32:22I got married when I was 24, my wife was 20,
32:24so she's known me long before I was famous
32:26or wealthy or anything.
32:27And so, she's a good sounding board.
32:30I have a family that's willing to call me out
32:32on my bullshit, as you talk Ye about.
32:35I have friends who are able to do that.
32:38I try to have open lines of communications
32:40with people who I believe have my best interest at heart.
32:42But, one of the sort of conditions of being friends,
32:45is that when you see me do something wrong,
32:46I'd like for you to let me know that, so I can correct it.
32:49And, I don't wanna leave bad impressions out.
32:51- The sad thing about the internet,
32:52just looking at the critiques you get,
32:54I see very few critiques from people that actually want you
32:57to succeed, want you to grow.
32:58I mean, they're very, they're not sophisticated.
33:01They're just, I don't know, they're cruel.
33:05The critiques are just, it's not actual critiques,
33:07it's just cruelty.
33:08- And, that's most of Twitter.
33:09I mean, as I said, Twitter is a place
33:13to smack and be smacked.
33:15I mean, anybody who uses Twitter
33:16for an intellectual conversation,
33:19I think, is engaging in category error.
33:21- I use it to spread love.
33:22I think it's still possible.
33:23- Yeah, you're the only one.
33:24It's you, it's you and no one else, my friend.
33:26(hearty laughing)
33:26- Right, well, on that topic,
33:28what do you think about Elon buying Twitter?
33:30What do you like?
33:32What do you hope for on that front?
33:34What would you like to see Twitter improve?
33:36- So, I'm very hopeful about Elon buying Twitter.
33:40I think that Elon is significantly more transparent,
33:43than what has taken place up till now.
33:46He seems committed to the idea that he's gonna broaden
33:48the Overton Window to allow for conversations
33:50that simply were banned before.
33:52Everything ranging from efficacy of masks,
33:54with regard to COVID,
33:55to whether men can become women, and all the rest.
33:58A lot of things that would get you banned on Twitter
34:00before without any sort of real explanation.
34:02It seems like he's dedicated to at least explaining
34:05what the standards are going to be and being broader
34:08in allowing a variety of perspectives on the outlet.
34:10Which I think is wonderful.
34:12I think that's also why people are freaking out.
34:14I think the kind of wailing,
34:15and gnashing of teeth, and wearing of sack cloth and ash
34:18by so many members of the legacy media,
34:20I think a lot of that is because Twitter
34:23essentially was an oligarchy
34:26in which certain perspectives were allowed
34:27and certain perspectives just were not.
34:29And, that was part of a broader social media reimposed
34:33oligarchy in the aftermath of 2017.
34:36So in order for just to really understand, I think,
34:39what it means for Elon to take over Twitter,
34:42I think that we have to take a look at sort of the history
34:44of media in the United States in two minutes or less.
34:47The United States, the media,
34:48for most of its existence, up until about 1990,
34:51at least from about 1930s until the 1990s,
34:53virtually all media was three major television networks,
34:56a couple major newspapers and the wire services.
34:58Everybody had a local newspaper with wire services,
35:00that basically did all the foreign policy
35:02and all the national policy.
35:03McClatchy, Reuters, AP, AFP, et cetera.
35:06That monopoly oligopoly existed
35:08until the rise of the internet.
35:10There were sort of pokes at it; in talk radio and Fox News,
35:13but there certainly was not this plethora of sources.
35:15Then, the internet explodes and all of a sudden
35:18you can get news everywhere.
35:19And, the way that people are accessing that news,
35:22I believe, significantly younger than I am.
35:23But we used to do this thing called bookmarking,
35:25where you would bookmark a series of websites,
35:28and then you would visit them every morning.
35:30And then, social media came up.
35:32- Was this on AOL or?
35:34- Yeah, exactly.
35:35You had the dial up,
35:35it was actually a can connected to a string
35:37and you would actually, it would go.
35:39(high pitched squeaking)
35:41And, then there came a point where social media arose.
35:45And, social media was sort of a boon for everybody
35:47because you no longer had to bookmark anything.
35:48You just followed your favorite accounts,
35:49and all of them would pop up,
35:51and you followed everything on Facebook
35:52and it would all pop up and it was all centralized.
35:54And, for a while everybody was super happy
35:55because this was the brand new wave of the future,
35:57made everything super easy.
35:58Suddenly, outlets like mine were able to see new eyeballs
36:02because it was all centralized in one place, right.
36:03You didn't have to do it through Google optimization,
36:05you could now just put it on Facebook,
36:07and so many eyeballs were on Facebook,
36:08you'd get more traffic.
36:09And everybody seemed pretty happy with this arrangement,
36:11until precisely the moment Donald Trump became president.
36:13At that point then the sort of preexisting supposition
36:18of a lot of the powers that be;
36:20which was Democrats are gonna continue winning
36:22from here on out.
36:23So, we can sort of use these social media platforms
36:25as ways to push our information
36:28and still allow for there
36:29to be other information out there.
36:31The immediate response was, we need to reestablish
36:34this siphoning of information.
36:36It was misinformation and disinformation
36:38that won Donald Trump the election.
36:39We need to pressure the social media companies to start
36:41cracking down on misinformation and disinformation.
36:44And, actually see this in the historical record.
36:46You can see how Jack Dorsey's talk about free speech shifted
36:49from about 2015 to about 2018.
36:51You can see Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown
36:53in 2018; which he talked about free speech in its value.
36:56And by 2019, he was going in front of Congress
36:57talking about how he was responsible for the stuff
36:59that was on Facebook; which is not true.
37:01He's not responsible for the stuff on Facebook.
37:03It's a platform.
37:04Is AT&T responsible for the stuff you say on your phone?
37:06The answer is typically no.
37:07So when that happened, all of these,
37:10because all the eyeballs had now be centralized
37:11in these social media sites,
37:13they were able to suddenly control
37:15what you could see and what you could not see.
37:17And the most obvious example
37:18was obviously leading up to 2020,
37:21the election, the killing of the Hunter Biden story,
37:23is a great example of this.
37:25And so, Elon coming in and taking over one
37:27of the social media services and saying,
37:28"I'm not playing by your rules."
37:30There's not gonna be this sort of group of people
37:34in the halls of power who are gonna decide
37:35what we can see and hear.
37:37Instead, I'm gonna let 1,000 flowers bloom.
37:39There'll be limits,
37:40but it's gonna be on a more case by case basis.
37:42We're going to allow perspectives that are mainstream,
37:46but maybe not mainstream in the halls of academia
37:49or in the halls of media,
37:50let those be said.
37:52I think that's a really good thing.
37:54Now, that comes with, some responsibilities
37:56on Elon's personal part;
37:58which would be, for example,
38:01I think more responsible and dissemination of information
38:03himself sometimes, right.
38:04He got himself in trouble the other day for tweeting out
38:06that that story about Paul Pelosi,
38:08that that was speculative and and untrue.
38:11And, I don't think what he did is horrific,
38:14he deleted it when he found out that it was false.
38:16And, that's actually a free speech working, right.
38:18He said something wrong, people ripped into him.
38:20He realized he was wrong and he deleted it;
38:22which seems to me a better solution
38:23than preemptively banning content,
38:25which only raises more questions
38:26than than it actually stops.
38:28With that said, as the face of responsible free speech,
38:33and that's sort of what he's pitching at Twitter.
38:35He, I think, should enact that himself
38:37and be a little more careful in the stuff
38:38that he tweets out.
38:39- Well, that's a tricky balance.
38:41The reason a lot of people are freaking out is because one,
38:44he's putting his thumb on the scale
38:46by saying he is more likely to vote Republican.
38:49He's showing himself to be center, right.
38:52And sort of just having a political opinion
38:53versus being this amorphous thing
38:56that doesn't have a political opinion.
38:58I think, if I were to guess,
39:00I haven't talked to him about it,
39:01but if I were to guess, he's sending a kind of signal
39:03that's important for Twitter, the company itself.
39:06Because if we're being honest,
39:07most of the employees are left-leaning.
39:09So you have to kind of send a signal that,
39:11like a resisting mechanism to say,
39:15since most of the employees are left,
39:17it's good for Elon to be more right
39:21to balance out the way the actual engineering is done.
39:24To say, we're not going to do any kind of activism
39:27inside the engineering.
39:28If I were to guess, that's kind of the effective aspect
39:32of that mechanism.
39:34And, the other one, by posting the Pelosi thing
39:36is probably to expand the Overton Window.
39:39Saying we can play,
39:42we could post stuff,
39:43we could post conspiracy theories,
39:45and then through discourse,
39:47figure out what is and isn't true.
39:48- Yeah, again, like I say,
39:49I mean I think that is a better mechanism
39:51in action than what it was before.
39:54I just think it gave people who hate his guts the opening
39:56to kind of slap him for no reason.
39:59But, I can see the strategy of it for sure.
40:01And, I think that the general idea
40:04that he's kind of pushing,
40:06right where the company had pushed left before.
40:08I think that there is actually unilateral polarization
40:12right now in politics,
40:13at least with the regard of social media.
40:14In which one side basically says,
40:16"The solution to disinformation is to shut down free speech
40:21"From the other side."
40:22And the other side is basically like,
40:24people like me are saying,
40:25the solution to disinformation is to let a thousand,
40:28I'd rather have people on the left also being able to
40:30put out stuff that I disagree with than for there to be
40:33anybody who's sort of in charge of these social media
40:35platforms and using them as editorial sites.
40:37There are plenty,
40:38I'm not criticizing MSNBC
40:39for not putting on right wing opinions.
40:40I mean, that's fine.
40:41I run a conservative site.
40:43We're not gonna put up left wing opinions on a wide variety
40:46of issues 'cause we are a conservative site.
40:47But, if you pitch yourself as a platform,
40:50that's a different thing.
40:51If you pitch yourself as the town square,
40:52as Elon likes to call it,
40:54then I think Elon has a better idea of that
40:56than many of the former employees did.
40:58Especially, now that we have that report from The Intercept
41:01suggesting that there are people from Twitter
41:02working with DHS
41:04to monitor disinformation,
41:06and being rather vague about what disinformation meant.
41:08- Yeah, I don't think activism has a place
41:11in what is fundamentally an engineering company
41:14that's building a platform.
41:17The people inside the company
41:18should not be putting a thumb on the scale
41:20of what is and isn't allowed.
41:21You should create a mechanism for the people
41:24to decide what is and isn't allowed.
41:26Do you think Trump should have been removed from Twitter?
41:31Should his account be restored?
41:33- His account should be restored.
41:34And, this is coming from somebody
41:35who really dislikes an enormous number
41:37of Donald Trump's tweets.
41:39Again, he's a very important political personage.
41:43Even if he weren't,
41:45I don't think that he should be banned from Twitter
41:47or Facebook in coordinated fashion.
41:49By the way, I hold that opinion about people
41:51who I think are far worse than Donald Trump.
41:55Everyone knows I'm not an Alex Jones guy.
41:57I don't like Alex Jones.
41:58I think Alex Jones-
41:59- You think Alex should be back on Twitter?
42:01- I do actually,
42:02because I think that there are plenty of people
42:03who are willing to say that what he's saying is wrong.
42:08And, I'm not a big fan of this idea
42:09that because people I disagree with,
42:13and people who have personally targeted me.
42:14By the way,
42:15I mean Alex Jones has said some things about me personally
42:18that I'm not real fond of it.
42:18- You guys are not?
42:20- Well, we're not besties.
42:21No, it turns out, yeah.
42:23All I've said is I don't really enjoy his show.
42:24He's said some other stuff about the antichrist and such;
42:27but that's a bit of a different thing I suppose.
42:30Even so... - Yeah.
42:32- I'm just not a big fan of this idea.
42:34I've defended people who have really gone after me
42:36on a personal level, have targeted me.
42:40The town square is online,
42:43banning people from the town square is unpersoning them.
42:46Unless you violated a criminal statute,
42:47you should not be unpersoned in American society,
42:51as a general rule.
42:52That doesn't mean that companies that are not platforms
42:55don't have the ability to respond to you.
42:57I think Adidas is right
42:59to terminate its contract with Kanye, for example,
43:02or with Ye.
43:05But, Twitter ain't Adidas.
43:08- So the way your stance on free speech
43:12to the degree it's possible to achieve on a platform,
43:14like Twitter is you fight bad speech with more speech,
43:19with better speech.
43:23So, if Alex Jones and Trump was allowed back on,
43:28in the coming months and years
43:30leading up to the 2024 election,
43:32you think that's gonna make for a better world
43:34in the long term?
43:36- I think that on the principle
43:37that people should be allowed to do this,
43:38and the alternative being a group of thought bosses
43:41telling us what we can and cannot see, yes.
43:43Do I think in the short term it's gonna mean a lot of things
43:45that I don't like very much?
43:47Sure, them's the class of doing business.
43:50I think that one of the class of freedom
43:53is people doing things that I don't particularly like.
43:55And, I would prefer the freedom
43:57with all the stuff I don't like, than not the freedom.
44:01- Let me linger on the love a little bit.
44:04You and a lot of people are pretty snarky on Twitter;
44:07sometimes to the point of mockery, derision,
44:10even a bit of,
44:12if I were to say bad faith
44:14in the kind of mockery,
44:17and you see it as a war,
44:18like I disagree with both you and Elon on this.
44:20Elon sees Twitter as a war zone,
44:23or at least has saw it that way in the past.
44:26Have you ever considered being nicer on Twitter?
44:29(hearty laughing)
44:30As a voice that a lot of people look up to,
44:33that if Ben Shapiro becomes a little bit more about love
44:38that's gonna inspire a lot of people
44:39or no, is it just too fun for you?
44:42- The answer is yes.
44:43Sure, it's occurred to me.
44:44Let's put it this way,
44:45there are a lot of tweets that actually don't go out
44:46that I delete.
44:48I'll say that Twitter.
44:49Twitter's new function, that 32nd function
44:51is a friend of mine.
44:52Every so often,
44:53I'll tweet something and I'll think about it a second.
44:55I'll be like,
44:56"Do I need to say this?"
44:57Probably not.
44:57- Can you make a book published
45:01after you pass away of all the tweets that you didn't send?
45:06- Oh no, my kids are still gonna be around it.
45:08I hope, so that's the legacy.
45:10But yeah, I mean, sure, the answer is yes.
45:13And there's a good piece of what we would call
45:14in Orthodox Judaism, Mussar.
45:16This is like,
45:17he is giving a Mussar schmooze, right now.
45:18This is like the kind of, be a better person stuff.
45:21I agree with you.
45:22I agree with you, and yeah.
45:24I will say that Twitter is sometimes too much fun.
45:26I try to be at least,
45:30if not even-handed,
45:31then equal opportunity in my derision.
45:35I remember that during the 2016 primaries,
45:37I used to post rather snarky tweets
45:40about virtually all of the candidates,
45:41Republican and Democrat.
45:44And, every so often I'll still do some of that.
45:47I do think actually the amount of snark on my Twitter feed
45:49has gone down fairly significantly.
45:50I think if you go back a couple of years,
45:51it was probably a little more snarky.
45:53Today, I'm trying to use it a little bit more
45:55in terms of strategy to get out information.
45:57Now, that doesn't mean I'm not gonna make jokes about,
46:00for example, Joe Biden.
46:04I will make jokes about Joe Biden.
46:05He's the president of the United States.
46:07Nobody else will mock him.
46:08So, the entire comedic establishment has decided
46:10they actually work for him.
46:12- So the president of the United States,
46:13no matter who they are, get the snark.
46:16- Yes, yes.
46:17And, President Trump, I think is fairly aware
46:19that he got the snark from me as well.
46:21When it comes to snarking the president,
46:22I'm not gonna stop that.
46:23I think the president deserves to be snarked.
46:24- So you're not afraid of attacking Trump?
46:26- No, I mean, I've done it before.
46:30- Can you say what your favorite
46:32and least favorite things are about President Trump
46:35and President Biden, one at a time?
46:37So maybe one thing that you can say is super positive
46:41about Trump, and one thing super negative about Trump.
46:44- Okay, so the super positive thing about Trump
46:46is that because he has no preconceived views
46:48that are establishmentarian,
46:50he's sometimes willing to go outta the box and do things
46:52that haven't been tried before.
46:54And, sometimes that works.
46:56The best example being the entire foreign policy
46:58establishment telling him that he couldn't get
47:00a Middle Eastern deal done
47:01unless he centered the Palestinian Israeli conflict.
47:03And instead he just went right around that,
47:05and ended up cutting a bunch of peace deals
47:06in the Middle East
47:07or moving the embassy in Jerusalem.
47:09Sometimes he does stuff and it's really outta the box,
47:11and it actually works.
47:12And, that's kind of awesome in politics, and neat to see.
47:16The downside of Trump is that he has no capacity
47:19to use any sort of...
47:23There's no filter between brain and mouth.
47:25Well, whatever happens in his brain,
47:27is the thing that comes out of his mouth.
47:28I know a lot of people find that charming and wonderful,
47:30and from time, and it is very funny.
47:33But, I don't think that it is a particularly
47:35excellent personal quality in a person
47:37who has as much responsibility, as President Trump has.
47:39I think he says a lot of damaging,
47:41and bad things on Twitter.
47:43I think that he seems,
47:46consumed, in some ways, by his own grievances;
47:49which is why you've seen him focusing
47:50in on election 2020 so much.
47:52And, I think that that is very negative
47:54about President Trump.
47:55I'm very grateful to president Trump, as a conservative,
47:56for many of the things that he did.
47:58I think that a lot of his personality issues
48:00are pretty severe.
48:02- What about Joe Biden?
48:06- I think that the thing that I like most about Joe Biden.
48:08- Yes. - I will say,
48:10that Biden, two things.
48:13One, Biden seems to be a very good father
48:18by all available evidence, right.
48:20There are a lot of people who are put out,
48:22kind of tape of him talking to Hunter;
48:24and Hunter's having trouble with drugs or whatever.
48:26And, I keep listening to that tape and thinking,
48:29he seems like a really good dad.
48:30The stuff that he's saying to his son
48:32is stuff that God forbid,
48:33if that were happening with my kid,
48:34I'd be saying to my kid.
48:35And so, you can't help but feel for the guy.
48:37He's had an incredibly difficult go of it
48:40with his first wife
48:41and the death of members of his family,
48:44and then Beau dying.
48:45I mean, that kind of stuff,
48:46obviously is deeply sympathetic in his...
48:48He seems like a deeply sympathetic father.
48:51As far as his politics,
48:54he seems like a slap on the back, kind of guy.
48:56And I don't mind that.
48:57I think that's nice, so far as it goes.
48:59It's sort of an old school politics,
49:01where things are done
49:02with handshake and personal relationships.
49:05The thing I don't like about him
49:05is I think sometimes that's really not genuine.
49:07I think that that sometimes,
49:09I think that's his personal tendency,
49:11but I think sometimes he allows the prevailing wins
49:14of his party to carry him to incredibly radical places.
49:17And then, he just doubles down on the radicalism
49:21in some pretty disingenuous ways.
49:23And, there I would cite
49:24the Independence Hall speech;
49:27which I thought was truly one of the worst speeches
49:29I've seen a president give.
49:30- So, you don't think he's trying to be
49:31a unifier in general?
49:32- Not at all.
49:33I mean, that's what he was elected to do.
49:35He was elected to do two things,
49:37not be alive, and be a unifier.
49:38Those were the two things.
49:39And like, and when I say not be alive,
49:41I don't mean like physically dead,
49:43this is where the snark comes in.
49:44But, what I do mean is that
49:46he was elected to not be particularly activist.
49:50Basically, the mandate was don't be Trump.
49:52Be sane, don't be Trump, calm everything down.
49:54And instead he got in, he is like,
49:55"What if we spend 7 trillion dollars?
49:57"What if we pull out of Afghanistan
49:59"Without any sort of plan?
50:00"What if I start labeling all of my political enemies,
50:03"Enemies of the republic?
50:04"What if I start bringing Dylan Mulvaney to the White House
50:08"And talking about how it is a moral sin
50:10"To prevent the general mutilation of minors?"
50:13This kinda stuff is very radical stuff.
50:15And, this is not a president who has pursued
50:17a unifying agenda;
50:17which is why his approval rating sank from 60%
50:20when he entered office, to low 40s or high 30s today.
50:23Unlike President Trump,
50:24who never had a high approval rating.
50:25Trump came into office,
50:26and he had like a 45% approval rating,
50:28and when he left office,
50:29he had about a 43% approval rating.
50:31It bounced around between 45 and 37
50:32pretty much his entire presidency.
50:34Biden went from being a very popular guy coming in,
50:36to a very unpopular guy right now.
50:38And, if you're Joe Biden,
50:39you should be looking in the mirror
50:39and wondering exactly why.
50:41- Do you think that pulling out from Afghanistan
50:43could be flipped as a pro for Biden,
50:45in terms of he actually did it.
50:47- I think it's gonna be almost impossible.
50:49I think the American people are incredibly inconsistent
50:52about their own views on foreign policy.
50:54In other words,
50:55we like to be isolationist until it comes time for us
50:58to be defeated and humiliated.
50:59When that happens, we tend not to like it very much.
51:03- You mentioned Biden being a good father.
51:06Can you make the case for and against
51:08the Hunter Biden laptop story?
51:11For it being a big deal
51:13and against it being a big deal?
51:15- Sure, the case for being a big deal is basically twofold.
51:18One, is that it is clearly relevant
51:20if the president's son is running around
51:23to foreign countries picking up bags of cash
51:25because his last name is Biden,
51:27while his father is vice president of the United States.
51:31And, it raises questions as to influence peddling
51:33for either the vice president
51:35or the former vice president using political connections.
51:37Did he make any money?
51:38Who was the big guy?
51:39All these open questions,
51:40that obviously implicates the questions to be asked.
51:44And then, the secondary reason that the story is big
51:46is actually 'cause the reaction of the story,
51:47the banning of the story is in and of itself a major story.
51:51If there's any story
51:52that implicates a presidential candidate
51:54in the last month of an election,
51:55and there is a media blackout,
51:57including a social media blackout,
51:59that obviously raises some very serious questions
52:01about informational flow and dissemination
52:02in the United States.
52:03- No matter how big of a deal the story is,
52:06it is a big deal that there's a censorship
52:08of any relevant story.
52:10- When there's a coordinated collusive blackout, yeah.
52:12That's a serious and major problem.
52:14So those are the two reasons why it would be a big story.
52:16The two reasons,
52:18a reason why it would not be a big story perhaps,
52:20is if it turns out, and we don't really know this yet.
52:24But let's say that Hunter Biden was basically off on his own
52:28doing what he was doing,
52:29being a derelict or drug addict or acting badly,
52:33and his dad had nothing to do with it,
52:34and Joe was telling the truth and he really knew.
52:36But, the problem is
52:37we never actually got those questions answered.
52:38If it had turned out to be nothing of a story,
52:40the nice thing about stories that turn out to be nothing
52:42is that after they turned out
52:43to be nothing, they're nothing.
52:44The biggest problem with this story
52:46is that it wasn't allowed
52:47to take the normal life cycle of a story;
52:50which is original story breaks,
52:51follow on questions are asked,
52:53follow on questions are answered.
52:54Story is either now a big story or it's nothing.
52:57One, when the life cycle of a story is cut off
53:00right at the very beginning, right when it's born,
53:02then that allows you to speculate in any direction you want.
53:04You can speculate, "It means nothing.
53:05"It's it's nonsense.
53:06"It's Russian, it's a Russian laptop,
53:09"It's disinformation."
53:10Or on the other hand,
53:11this means that Joe Biden was personally calling Hunter
53:13and telling him to pick up a sack of cash
53:15over in Beijing and then he became president
53:17and he's influenced pedaling.
53:18This is why it's important to allow these stories
53:20to go forward.
53:21So this is why actually the bigger story
53:22for the moment is not the laptop,
53:24it's the reaction to the laptop
53:26'cause it cut off that life cycle of the story.
53:28And then, at some point
53:30I would assume that there will be some follow on questions
53:32that are actually answered.
53:33The house is pledging, if it goes Republican,
53:35to investigate all of this.
53:36Again, I wouldn't be supremely surprised
53:38if it turns out
53:39that there was no direct involvement of Joe
53:43in this sort of stuff.
53:43Because it turns out, as I said before,
53:45that all of politics is Veep.
53:46And, this is always the story with half the scandals
53:48that you see is that everybody assumes
53:50that there's some sort of deep and abiding clever plan
53:54that some politician is implementing.
53:55And then, you look at it and it turns out,
53:57now it's just something dumb, right.
53:59This is sort of, perfect example of this,
54:01President Trump with the classified documents in Mar Lago.
54:03So people on the left lane, it's probably nuclear codes,
54:06probably he's taking secret documents
54:07and selling them to the Russians or the Chinese.
54:09And, the real most obvious explanation
54:11is Trump looked at the papers and he said,
54:13"I like these papers."
54:14And then, he just decided to keep them.
54:16And then, people came to him and said,
54:17"Mr. President, you're not allowed to keep those papers."
54:18He said, "Who are those people?
54:19"I don't care about what they have to say,
54:20"I'm putting them in the other room in a box."
54:25It is highly likely that that is what happened.
54:27And it's very disappointing to people, I think,
54:29when they realize it.
54:31The human brain, I mean,
54:31you know this better than I do,
54:32but the human brain is built to find patterns.
54:34It's what we like to do.
54:35We like to find plans and patterns
54:36because this is how we survived in the wild,
54:38is you found a plan,
54:39you found a pattern, you crack the code of the universe.
54:41When it comes to politics,
54:42the conspiracy theories that we see so often,
54:45it's largely because we're seeing inexplicable events.
54:48Unless, you just assume everyone's a moron.
54:49If you assume that there's a lot of stupidity going on,
54:51everything becomes quickly explicable.
54:53If you assume that there must be some rationale behind it.
54:56You have to come up with increasingly convoluted conspiracy
54:59theories to explain just why people are acting the way
55:00that they're acting.
55:02And, I find that,
55:03I don't say a 100% of the time, but 90,
55:0594% of the time,
55:07the conspiracy theory turns out just to be people being dumb
55:12and then other people reacting in dumb ways
55:14to the original people being dumb.
55:15- But it's also, to me, in that same way, very possible,
55:19very likely that Hunter Biden getting money in Ukraine,
55:24I guess for consulting and all that kind of stuff
55:26is a nothing burger.
55:28He's qualified, he's getting money as he should.
55:30There's a lot of influence pedaling in general
55:33that's not corrupt.
55:35- The most obvious explanation there probably is
55:37that he was fake influence pedaling;
55:39meaning he went to Ukraine.
55:40And he is like, "Guess what?
55:41"My dad's Joe."
55:42And they're like,
55:43"Well, you don't have any qualifications in oil
55:45"And natural gas and you don't really have a great resume
55:47"But your dad is Joe.
55:48And then, that was kinda the end of it.
55:49They gave him a bag of cash, hoping you would do something.
55:51He never did anything.
55:51- I think you're making it sound worse than it is.
55:53I think this in general,
55:54consulting is done in that way.
55:55Your name, it's not like you're-
55:56- I agree with you.
55:57- You're not,
55:58it's not like he is some rare case
56:01and this is an illustration of corruption.
56:03If you can criticize consulting,
56:05which I would.
56:06- [Ben] That's fair.
56:07- Which they're basically not providing...
56:09You look at a resume and who's who.
56:12If you went to Harvard,
56:13I can criticize the same thing.
56:15If you have Harvard on your resume,
56:17you're more likely to be hired as a consultant.
56:20Maybe there's a network there of people that you know
56:23and you hire them in that same way.
56:24If your last name is Biden,
56:26there's a lot of last names that sound pretty good at it.
56:28- That's for sure.
56:29For sure, for sure.
56:30- It's not like-
56:31- And, Hunter Biden admitted that much, by the way.
56:32In an open interview.
56:33He was like,
56:34"If your last name weren't Biden,
56:35"Would you have got that job?"
56:35And he is like, "Probably not."
56:37And you're right.
56:38- That's an honest, that's-
56:38- I agree with you.
56:39- It's not like he's getting a ridiculous amount of money.
56:42He was getting like a pretty standard consulting
56:44kind of money;
56:45which I also would criticize
56:47'cause they get a ridiculous amount of money.
56:49But, even to push back on the life cycle
56:51or to steel man the side that was concerned
56:56about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
56:58I don't know if there is a natural life cycle of a story
57:01because there's something about the virality of the internet
57:04that we can't predict that a story can just take hold
57:08and the conspiracy around it builds.
57:11Especially around politics, where the interpretation,
57:15some popular sexy interpretation of a story
57:17that might not be connected to reality at all,
57:20will become viral.
57:21And that, from Facebook's perspective,
57:22is probably what they're worried about,
57:24is organized misinformation campaign
57:29that makes up a sexy story or sexy interpretation
57:33of the vague story that we have.
57:36And that, has an influence on the populace.
57:38- I mean, I think that's true,
57:40but I think the question becomes
57:41who's the great adjudicator there.
57:42Who adjudicates when the story ought to be allowed
57:45to go through even a bad life cycle
57:47or allowed to go viral as opposed to not?
57:49Now, that's one thing if you wanna say,
57:51"Okay, we can spot the Russian accounts
57:52"That are actually promoting this stuff,
57:53"They belong to the Russian government.
57:54"Gotta shut that down."
57:55I think everybody agrees.
57:56This is actually one of the slides
57:58that's happened linguistically
57:59that I really object to,
58:00is the slide between disinformation and misinformation.
58:03You notice there was this evolution.
58:05In 2017, there was a lot of talk about disinformation.
58:07It was Russian disinformation.
58:08The Russians were putting out deliberately false information
58:10in order to skew election results, was the accusation.
58:12And then, people started
58:13using disinformation or misinformation.
58:16And misinformation is either mistaken information
58:18or information that is quote unquote out of context.
58:20That becomes very subjective very quickly
58:22as to what out of context means.
58:24And it doesn't necessarily have to be from a foreign source,
58:26it can be from a domestic source, right.
58:27It could be somebody misinterpreting something here.
58:29It could be somebody interpreting something correctly,
58:31but PolitiFact thinks that it's out of context.
58:33That sort of stuff gets very murky very quickly.
58:36And so, I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea
58:38that Facebook, I mean Zuckerberg
58:39was on with Rogan and talking about
58:42how the FBI had basically set lookout
58:45for Russian interference in the election,
58:47and then all of these people were out there saying
58:49that the laptop was Russian disinformation.
58:51So, he basically shut it down.
58:52That sort of stuff is frightening,
58:54especially 'cause it wasn't Russian disinformation.
58:55I mean the laptop was real.
58:57And so, the fact that you have people who seemed to,
59:02let's put it this way,
59:03it seems as though, maybe this is wrong.
59:04It seems as though when a story gets killed,
59:06preemptively like this,
59:07it is almost universally a story that negatively
59:10affects one side of the political aisle.
59:12I can't remember the last time there was a story
59:15on the right that was disinformation or misinformation,
59:18where social media stepped in and they went,
59:19"We cannot have this,
59:20"This cannot be be distributed.
59:21"We're going to all collude so that this,
59:23"Information is not distributed."
59:25Maybe in response to the story being proved false,
59:27it gets taken down.
59:28But, what made the Hunter Biden thing so amazing
59:30is that it wasn't even a response to anything.
59:32It was, the story got posted,
59:33there were no actual doubts expressed as to the verified
59:37falsity the story.
59:38It was just supposition that it had to be false
59:40and everybody jumped in.
59:41So I think that confirmed a lot of the conspiracy theories
59:43people had about social media and how it works.
59:46- Yeah, if the reason you want to slow down the viral spread
59:50of a thing is at all grounded in partisanship,
59:55that's a problem.
59:56You should be very honest with yourself
59:58and ask yourself that question.
1:00:00Is it because I'm on the left or on the right,
1:00:02that I want to slow this down?
1:00:04Versus is it hate,
1:00:07bipartisan hate speech?
1:00:12It's really tricky.
1:00:13But, like you, I'm very uncomfortable in general,
1:00:16with any kind of slowing down,
1:00:17with any kind of censorship.
1:00:18But, if there's something like a conspiracy theory
1:00:21that spreads hate, that becomes viral,
1:00:26I still lean to let that conspiracy theory spread
1:00:30'cause the alternative is dangerous, more dangerous.
1:00:34- It's sort like the ring of power.
1:00:35Everybody wants the ring.
1:00:36'Cause with the ring you can stop the bad guys
1:00:38from going forward.
1:00:39But, it turns out that the ring gives you enormous power
1:00:41and that power can be used in the wrong ways too.
1:00:44- You had The Daily Wire;
1:00:46which I'm a member of.
1:00:49(hearty laughing)
1:00:50- I appreciate that, thank you.
1:00:51- I recommend everybody sign up to it,
1:00:52it should be part of your regular diet;
1:00:54whether you're on the left and the right,
1:00:55the far left or the far right,
1:00:57everybody, should be part of your regular diet.
1:00:59Okay, that said,
1:01:01do you worry about the audience capture aspect of it
1:01:04because it is a platform for conservatives
1:01:07and you have a powerful voice on there.
1:01:12It might be difficult for you to go against
1:01:16the talking points or against the stream of ideas
1:01:19that is usually connected to conservative thought.
1:01:23Do you worry about that?
1:01:24- Well, I mean,
1:01:25the audience would obviously be upset with me
1:01:27and would have a right to be upset with me
1:01:28if I suddenly flipped all of my positions on a dime.
1:01:31I have enough faith in my audience that I can say things
1:01:33that I think are true and that may disagree
1:01:35with the audience on a fairly regular basis, I would say.
1:01:39But they understand that on the deeper principle
1:01:41or on the same side,
1:01:43or at least I hope that much from the audience.
1:01:45It's also why we provide a number of different views
1:01:48on the platforms, many of which I disagree with,
1:01:50but are sort of within the generalized range
1:01:52of conservative thought.
1:01:55It's something I do have to think about every day though.
1:01:57Yeah, I mean you have to, you have to think about ,
1:01:58"Am I saying this because I'm afraid
1:02:00"Of ticking off my audience
1:02:01"Or am I saying this because I actually believe this?"
1:02:04And you know, that's a delicate dance a little bit.
1:02:07You have to be sort of honest with yourself.
1:02:10- Yeah, somebody like Sam Harris is pretty good at this,
1:02:14at fighting, at saying
1:02:16the most outrageous thing that he knows.
1:02:19He almost leans into it,
1:02:21he knows will piss off a lot of his audience.
1:02:24Sometimes you almost have to test the system.
1:02:27It's like if you feel,
1:02:28you almost exaggerate your feelings just to make sure
1:02:32to send a signal to the audience
1:02:33that you're not captured by them.
1:02:36So speaking of people you disagree with,
1:02:39what is your favorite thing about Candace Owens,
1:02:42and what is one thing you disagree with her on?
1:02:46- Well, my favorite thing about Candace
1:02:47is that she will say things that nobody else will say.
1:02:50My least favorite thing about Candace
1:02:52is that she will say things that nobody else will say.
1:02:54(hearty laughing)
1:02:56I mean, listen,
1:02:57she says things that are audacious
1:02:58and I think need to be said sometimes.
1:02:59Sometimes, I think that she is morally wrong,
1:03:02I think the way she responded to Kanye,
1:03:03I've said this clearly, was dead wrong and morally wrong.
1:03:07- What was her response?
1:03:08- Her original response was that she proffered confusion
1:03:11of what Ye was actually talking about.
1:03:14And then, she was defending her friend.
1:03:17I wish that the way that she had responded was by saying,
1:03:19"He's my friend.
1:03:20"And also he said something bad and antisemitic."
1:03:23I wish that she had said that.
1:03:25- [Lex] Right away.
1:03:26- Right away.
1:03:27- Yeah, I think you can also,
1:03:30this is the interesting human thing.
1:03:31You can be friends with people that you disagree with
1:03:34and you can be friends with people
1:03:35that actually say hateful stuff.
1:03:37And, one of the ways to help alleviate hate
1:03:40is being friends with people
1:03:41that say hateful things.
1:03:44- Yeah, and then calling them out on a personal level,
1:03:47when they do say wrong or hateful things.
1:03:50- Yeah, from a place of love and respect and privately.
1:03:53- Privately is also a big thing, right?
1:03:54I mean, the public demand for denunciation,
1:03:58from friends to friends, is difficult.
1:04:02And, I certainly have compassion for Candace,
1:04:05given the fact that she's so close with Ye.
1:04:07- Yeah, it breaks my heart sometimes,
1:04:08the public fights between friends and broken friendships.
1:04:12I've seen quite a few friendships publicly break over COVID.
1:04:17COVID made people behave their worst, in many cases.
1:04:21Which yeah, breaks my heart a little bit.
1:04:26'Cause like the human connection
1:04:29is a prerequisite for effective debate
1:04:32and discussion and battles over ideas.
1:04:35Has there been any argument from the opposite political
1:04:38isle that has made you change your mind about something?
1:04:41If you look back.
1:04:45- So I will say that,
1:04:50I'm thinking it through
1:04:51because I think that my views probably on foreign policy,
1:04:54morphed somewhat.
1:04:56I would say that I was much more interventionist
1:04:57when I was younger.
1:04:59I'm significantly less interventionist now.
1:05:01I'd probably-
1:05:02- Can you give an example?
1:05:03- Sure I was a big backer of the Iraq War.
1:05:04I think now, in retrospect,
1:05:06I might not be a backer of the Iraq War,
1:05:07if the same situation arose again,
1:05:10based on the amount of evidence that had been presented
1:05:13or based on the sort of willingness of the American public
1:05:17to go it, right.
1:05:19If you're gonna get involved in a war,
1:05:20you have to know what the end point looks like,
1:05:21and you have to know what the American people really are
1:05:23willing to bear.
1:05:24The American people are not willing
1:05:25to bear open-ended occupations.
1:05:28And so knowing that, you have to consider that going in.
1:05:32So, on foreign policy,
1:05:33I've become a lot more of,
1:05:35I'd say almost Henry Kissinger realist
1:05:37in some ways.
1:05:39When it comes to social policy,
1:05:43I would say that, I'm fairly strong
1:05:46where I was.
1:05:48I may have become slightly convinced
1:05:50actually by more of the conservative side
1:05:51of the isle and things like drug legalization.
1:05:53I think when I was younger,
1:05:54I was much more pro-drug legalization then I am now,
1:05:57at least on the local level.
1:05:57On a federal level,
1:05:58I think the federal government can't really do much,
1:06:01other than close the borders
1:06:02with regard to fentanyl trafficking, for example.
1:06:04But, when it comes to how drugs were in local communities,
1:06:06you can see
1:06:07how drugs were in local communities pretty easily.
1:06:09- Which is weird because I saw you smoke a joint
1:06:12right before this conversation.
1:06:13- It's my biggest thing.
1:06:14I mean, I try to keep that secret.
1:06:16- Well that's interesting about intervention.
1:06:19Can you comment about the war in Ukraine?
1:06:21So for me, it's a deeply personal thing,
1:06:25but I think you're able to look at it
1:06:27from a geopolitics perspective.
1:06:29What is the role of the United States in this conflict
1:06:31before the conflict,
1:06:32during the conflict,
1:06:33and right now, in helping achieve peace?
1:06:38- I think before the conflict,
1:06:39the big problem is that the West took
1:06:42almost the worst possible view;
1:06:43which was encourage Ukraine to keep trying to join NATO
1:06:47and the EU, but don't let them in.
1:06:48And so, what that does is it achieves the purpose
1:06:51of getting Russia really, really, really ticked off
1:06:53and feeling threatened.
1:06:54But also, does not give any of the protections of NATO
1:06:57or the EU to Ukraine.
1:06:59Zelensky is on film when he was a comedy actor
1:07:02making that exact joke.
1:07:04He has Merkel on the other line and she's like,
1:07:05"Oh welcome to NATO."
1:07:07And he's like, "Great."
1:07:08And she's like,
1:07:09"Wait, is this Ukraine on the line?
1:07:11"And, oops."
1:07:12But so, that sort of policy
1:07:14is sort of nonsensical.
1:07:15If you're gonna offer alliance to somebody,
1:07:17offer alliance to them.
1:07:18And if you're going to guarantee their security,
1:07:19guarantee their security.
1:07:20And, the West failed signally to do that.
1:07:23So, that was mistakes in the run up to the war.
1:07:26Once the war began,
1:07:27then the responsibility of the West became to give Ukraine
1:07:32as much material as is necessary to repel the invasion.
1:07:36And, the West did really well with that.
1:07:39I think we were late on the ball in the United States.
1:07:41It seemed like Europe led the way a little bit more
1:07:42than the United States did there.
1:07:44But, in terms of effectuating American interests
1:07:47in the region;
1:07:48which being an American,
1:07:49is what I'm chiefly concerned about.
1:07:52The American interests were several fold.
1:07:54One is preserve borders.
1:07:56Two is degrade the Russian aggressive military
1:07:59because Russia's military has been aggressive,
1:08:01and they are geopolitical rival of the United States.
1:08:04Three, recalibrate the European balance with China.
1:08:07Europe was sort of balancing with Russia and China.
1:08:09And then, because of the war they sort of rebalanced away
1:08:12from China and Russia;
1:08:13which is a real geostrategic opportunity
1:08:15for the United States.
1:08:17It seemed like most of those goals
1:08:19have already been achieved at this point
1:08:20for the United States.
1:08:21And so then, the question becomes, what's the off ramp here,
1:08:24and what is the thing you're trying to prevent?
1:08:25So what's the best opportunity?
1:08:26What's the best case scenario?
1:08:27What's the worst case scenario?
1:08:28And then, what's realistic?
1:08:29So best case scenario is Ukraine forces Russia entirely out
1:08:33of Ukraine; including Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea, right.
1:08:35That's the best case scenario.
1:08:36Virtually no one thinks that's accomplishable;
1:08:38including the United States.
1:08:39The White House has basically said as much.
1:08:41It's difficult to imagine, particularly Crimea,
1:08:43the Russians being forced out of Crimea.
1:08:46The Ukrainians have been successful in pushing the Russians
1:08:49out of certain parts of Luhansk and Donetsk.
1:08:51But, the idea they're gonna be able to push
1:08:52the entire Russian army
1:08:53completely back to the Russian borders.
1:08:56That would be at best a very,
1:08:57very long and difficult slog,
1:08:59in the middle of a collapsing Ukrainian economy.
1:09:01Which is a point that Zelensky has made.
1:09:03It's not enough for you guys to give us military aid.
1:09:05We're in the middle of a war,
1:09:05we're gonna need economic aid as well.
1:09:06So it's a pretty open-ended and strong commitment.
1:09:09- Can I take a small tangent on that?
1:09:10- [Ben] Sure.
1:09:11- And best case scenario?
1:09:12If that does militarily happen, including Crimea,
1:09:16do you think there's a world in which Vladimir Putin,
1:09:19would be able to convince the Russian people
1:09:24that this was a good conclusion to the war?
1:09:26- Right, the problem is that the best case scenario,
1:09:29might also be the worst case scenario.
1:09:30Meaning that there are a couple of scenarios
1:09:32that are sort of the worst case scenario.
1:09:34And this, is sort of the puzzlement of the situation.
1:09:36One, is that Putin feels so boxed in,
1:09:38so unable to go back to his own people and say,
1:09:40"We just wasted tens of thousands of lives here
1:09:42"For no reason."
1:09:43That he unleashes a tactical nuclear weapon
1:09:46on the battlefield.
1:09:47Nobody knows what happens after that.
1:09:48So we put NATO planes in the air to take out Russian assets.
1:09:51Do Russians start shooting down planes?
1:09:54Does Russia then threaten to escalate even further
1:09:56by attacking an actual NATO civilian center,
1:09:58or even a Ukrainian civilian center with nuclear weapons?
1:10:01Like where it goes from there, nobody knows.
1:10:02'Cause nuclear weapons haven't been used since 1945.
1:10:05So, that is a worst case scenario.
1:10:08It's an unpredictable scenario that could devolve
1:10:09into really, really significant problems.
1:10:12The other worst case scenario,
1:10:14could be a best case scenario,
1:10:14it could be a worse,
1:10:15we just don't know is Putin falls.
1:10:17What happens after that?
1:10:19Who takes over for Putin?
1:10:20Is that person more moderate than Putin?
1:10:22Is that person a liberalizer?
1:10:24It probably won't (indistinct),
1:10:25if he's gonna be ousted.
1:10:27It'll probably somebody who's a top member of Putin's brass
1:10:30right now, and has capacity to control the military.
1:10:33Or it's possible the entire regime breaks down,
1:10:35and what you end up with is Syria in Russia.
1:10:37Where you just have an entirely out of control region
1:10:40with no centralizing power;
1:10:42which is also a disaster area.
1:10:43And so, in the nature of risk mitigation,
1:10:47in sort of an attempt at risk mitigation,
1:10:49what actually should be happening right now is some off ramp
1:10:53has to be offered to Putin.
1:10:55The off ramp likely is going to be him maintaining Crimea
1:10:57and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk.
1:10:58It's probably gonna be a commitment by Ukraine,
1:11:01not to join NATO formally,
1:11:04but a guarantee by the West to defend Ukraine
1:11:07in case of an invasion of its borders, again, by Russia.
1:11:11Like an actual treaty obligation, not like,
1:11:12the BS treaty obligation and win-win Ukraine gave up
1:11:15its nuclear weapons in the 90s.
1:11:18And, that is likely how this is gonna have to go.
1:11:21The problem is that requires political courage,
1:11:23not from Zelensky.
1:11:25It requires courage from probably Biden
1:11:27because the only, Zelensky is not in a political position,
1:11:30where he can go back to his own people,
1:11:31who have made unbelievable sacrifices on behalf
1:11:33of their nation and freedom and say to them,
1:11:35"Guys, now I'm calling it quits.
1:11:37"We're gonna have to give them Luhansk and Donetsk
1:11:38"And give Putin an off ramp."
1:11:39I don't think that's an acceptable answer to most Ukrainians
1:11:41at this point in time,
1:11:42from the polling data and from the available data we have
1:11:44on the ground.
1:11:45It's gonna actually take Biden biting the bullet,
1:11:48and being the bad guy and saying to Zelensky,
1:11:49"Listen, we've made a commitment of material aid.
1:11:53"We're offering you all these things,
1:11:54"Including essentially a defense pact.
1:11:57"We're offering you all this stuff,
1:11:58"But, if you don't come to the table,
1:12:01"Then we're gonna have to start weaning you all."
1:12:02There will have to be a stick there,
1:12:03it can't just be a carrot.
1:12:05And so, that will allow Zelensky, if Biden were to do that,
1:12:08it allows Zelensky to blame Biden for the solution
1:12:10everybody knows has to happen.
1:12:10Zelensky can go back to his own people and he can say,
1:12:12"Listen, this is the way it has to go.
1:12:15"I don't want it to go this way, but it's not my,
1:12:17"I'm signing other people's checks.
1:12:19"I mean, it's not my money."
1:12:22And Biden would take the hit
1:12:23because he wouldn't then be able to blame Ukraine
1:12:26for whatever happens next.
1:12:27Which has been the easy road off,
1:12:28I think for a lot of politicians in the West.
1:12:29Is for them to just say,
1:12:31Well, this is up to the Ukrainians to decide.
1:12:32It's up to the Ukrainians to decide.
1:12:33Well, is it totally up to the Ukrainians to decide?
1:12:36Because it seems like the West is signing an awful lot
1:12:39of checks and all of Europe is gonna freeze this winter.
1:12:42- This is the importance of great leadership by the way.
1:12:45That's why the people we elect is very important.
1:12:48Do you think there's power to just one on one conversation?
1:12:55Where Biden sits down with Zelensky,
1:12:56and Biden sits down with Putin, almost in person.
1:13:00'Cause I, or maybe I'm romanticizing the notion,
1:13:03but having done these podcasts in person,
1:13:04I think there's something fundamentally different
1:13:06than through a remote call,
1:13:09and also a distant kind of recorded political
1:13:14type speak versus like man to man.
1:13:16- So I'm deeply afraid that Putin outplays people
1:13:20in the one-on-one scenarios
1:13:21because he's done it to multiple presidents already.
1:13:23He gets in one-on-one scenarios with Bush, with Obama,
1:13:26with Trump, with Biden;
1:13:27and he seems to be a very canny operator
1:13:29and a very sort of hard-nosed operator in those situations.
1:13:33I think that if you were gonna do something like that,
1:13:35an actual political face-to-face summit,
1:13:36what you would need is for Biden
1:13:37to first have a conversation with Zelensky.
1:13:39Where Zelensky knows what's going on.
1:13:40So he's aware,
1:13:42and then Biden walks in and he says to Putin on camera,
1:13:46"Here's the offer, let's get it together,
1:13:50"Let's make peace.
1:13:52"You get to keep this stuff."
1:13:54And then, let Putin respond,
1:13:56how Putin is going to respond.
1:13:59But, the big problem for Putin I think,
1:14:01and the problem with public facing forum,
1:14:03maybe it's a private meeting.
1:14:04If it's a private meeting,
1:14:04maybe that's the best thing.
1:14:05If it's a public facing forum,
1:14:06I think it's a problem 'cause Putin's afraid
1:14:08of being humiliated at this point.
1:14:09If it's a private meeting, then sure, except that again,
1:14:14I just wonder whether,
1:14:17when it comes to a person as canny as Putin,
1:14:21and to a politician that I really don't think
1:14:24is a particularly sophisticated player in Joe Biden.
1:14:27And again, this is not unique to Biden.
1:14:29I think that most of our presidents for the last 30,
1:14:3340 years have not been particularly sophisticated players.
1:14:36I think that's a risky scenario.
1:14:40- Yeah, I still believe in the power of that.
1:14:42'Cause otherwise,
1:14:45I don't think stuff on paper
1:14:47and political speak will solve these kinds of problems.
1:14:50Because from the Zelensky perspective,
1:14:52nothing but complete victory will do.
1:14:55- [Ben] Right.
1:14:56- As a nation has people sacrificed way too much
1:14:59and they're all in.
1:15:00And if you look at,
1:15:02'cause I traveled to Ukraine, I spent time there,
1:15:04I'll be going back there hopefully.
1:15:06Also, going back to Russia, just speaking to Ukrainians.
1:15:10They're all in, they're all in.
1:15:13- Yeah.
1:15:14- Nothing, but don't complete victory.
1:15:15- Yep, don't blame them, that's right.
1:15:17- And so for that,
1:15:18the only way to achieve peace
1:15:21is through honest human to human conversation.
1:15:26Giving both people a way to off ramp,
1:15:29to walk away victorious.
1:15:31And some of that requires speaking honestly
1:15:35as a human being,
1:15:36but also for America to actually,
1:15:39not even America, honestly,
1:15:40just the president, be able to eat their own ego a bit,
1:15:44and be the punching bag a little,
1:15:46just enough for both presidents to be able to walk away
1:15:49and say, "Listen, we got the American president
1:15:53"To come to us.
1:15:54"And, I think that makes the President
1:15:57"Look strong, not weak."
1:15:58- I mean, I agree with you.
1:16:00I think it would also require some people on the right,
1:16:02people like me, if it's Joe Biden to say,
1:16:04"If Biden does that, I see what he's doing.
1:16:05"It's the right move."
1:16:07I think one of the things that he's afraid of,
1:16:08to steel man him.
1:16:09I think one of the things he's afraid of is,
1:16:11he goes and he makes that sort of deal,
1:16:12and the right says "You just coward in front of Russia,
1:16:14"You just gave away Ukraine."
1:16:16Whatever it is.
1:16:17But, it's gonna require some people on the right
1:16:19to say that that move is the right move,
1:16:21and then hold by it.
1:16:22If Biden actually performs that move.
1:16:24- You're exceptionally good at debate.
1:16:27You wrote How to Debate the Leftist and Destroy Them.
1:16:32You're kind of known for this kind of stuff,
1:16:33just exceptionally skilled at conversation,
1:16:35at debate, at getting to the facts of the matter
1:16:39and using logic to get to the conclusion in the debate.
1:16:43Do you ever worry that this power,
1:16:45you talked about the ring,
1:16:48this power you were given has corrupted you
1:16:52and your ability to see what's...
1:16:55To pursue the truth versus just winning debates?
1:16:58- I hope not.
1:16:59So I think one of the things
1:17:00that's kind of funny about the branding versus the reality,
1:17:03is that most of the things that get characterized
1:17:05as destroying in debates with facts and logic,
1:17:08most of those things are basically me having a conversation
1:17:11with somebody on a college campus.
1:17:13It actually isn't like a formal debate where we sit there
1:17:15and we critique each other's positions,
1:17:17or it's not me insulting anybody.
1:17:19A lot of the clips that have gone very viral
1:17:20is me making an argument,
1:17:21and then there not being an amazing counter argument.
1:17:23- [Lex] Yep.
1:17:24- Many of the debates that I've held
1:17:26have been extremely cordial.
1:17:27To take the latest example like about a year ago
1:17:29I debated Ana Kasparian from Young Turks.
1:17:31It was very cordial,
1:17:32it was very nice.
1:17:34Yeah, that's sort of the way that I like to debate.
1:17:36My rule when it comes to debate and or discussion,
1:17:40is that my opponent actually gets to pick the mode
1:17:42in which we work.
1:17:43So if it's going to be a debate of ideas
1:17:46and we're just going to discuss and critique and clarify,
1:17:49then we can do that.
1:17:50If somebody comes loaded for bear,
1:17:51then I will respond in kind.
1:17:55Because one of the big problems,
1:17:57I think in sort of the debate slash discussion sphere
1:18:00is very often misdiagnosis
1:18:02of what exactly is going on.
1:18:03People who think that a discussion is debate
1:18:05and vice versa.
1:18:06And that can be a real problem.
1:18:09And there are people
1:18:10who will treat what ought to be a discussion,
1:18:14as for example,
1:18:15an exercise in performance art.
1:18:17And so what that is,
1:18:18is mugging or trolling,
1:18:19or saying trolley things
1:18:20in order to just get,
1:18:22that's something I actually don't do during debate.
1:18:23If you actually watch me talk to people,
1:18:25I don't actually do the trolling thing.
1:18:26The trolling thing is almost solely relegated to Twitter
1:18:29and me making jokes on my show.
1:18:30When it comes to actually debating people,
1:18:32that sounds actually a lot like what we're doing right now
1:18:35is just the person
1:18:36maybe taking just an adverse position to mine.
1:18:39And so, that's fine.
1:18:40Usually half the debate or discussion
1:18:42is me just asking for clarification of terms.
1:18:44What exactly do you mean by this?
1:18:46So I can drill down on
1:18:48where the actual disagreement may lie.
1:18:49Because some of the time people think they're disagreeing
1:18:51and they're actually not disagreeing.
1:18:53When I'm talking with Ana Kasparian,
1:18:55and she's talking about how corporate and government
1:18:56have too much power together, I'm like,
1:18:57"Well, you sound like a tea party."
1:18:59Like you and I are on the same page about that.
1:19:00That sort of stuff does tend to happen
1:19:01a lot in discussion.
1:19:03I think that when discussion gets termed debate,
1:19:06it's a problem.
1:19:07When debate gets term discussion,
1:19:08it's even more problematic
1:19:09because debate is a different thing.
1:19:11- And I find that your debate and your conversation
1:19:13is often in good faith,
1:19:14you're able to steel man on the other side.
1:19:15You're actually listening,
1:19:17you're considering the other side.
1:19:19The times when I see that you,
1:19:21venture pure destroys leftist,
1:19:23it's usually just like you said,
1:19:24the other side is doing the trolling
1:19:27because they didn't...
1:19:29I mean the people that do criticize you for that interaction
1:19:34is the people that usually get destroyed
1:19:36are like 20 years old,
1:19:38and they're usually not sophisticated
1:19:40in any kind of degree,
1:19:42in terms of being able to use logic and reason,
1:19:44and facts and so on.
1:19:45- And, that's totally fine by the way.
1:19:47If people wanna criticize me for speaking
1:19:48on college campuses,
1:19:49where a lot of political conversation happens,
1:19:51both right and left, that's fine.
1:19:53I've had lots of conversations with people on the other side
1:19:55of the aisle too.
1:19:56I've done podcasts with Sam Harris,
1:19:57and we've talked about atheism.
1:19:58Or I've done debates with Anna Kasparian,
1:20:00or I've done debate with Cenk Uygur,
1:20:02or I've had conversations with lots of people
1:20:04on the other side of the aisle.
1:20:05In fact, I believe I'm the only person on the right
1:20:07who recommends that people listen to his shows
1:20:09on the other side of the aisle.
1:20:10I say on my show on a fairly regular basis,
1:20:12that people should listen to Positive America.
1:20:14Now, no one on Positive America will ever say
1:20:16that somebody should listen to my show.
1:20:17That is verboten.
1:20:18That is not something that can be had.
1:20:20It's one of the strangeness of our politics.
1:20:22It's what I've called the happy birthday problem;
1:20:24which is, I have a lot of friends who are of the left,
1:20:26and are publicly of the left.
1:20:28And, on my birthday they'll send you a text message,
1:20:30"Happy birthday."
1:20:31But, they will never tweet happy birthday,
1:20:32less they be acknowledging
1:20:34that you were born of woman and that this can't be allowed.
1:20:37So, on the Sunday Special,
1:20:38I've had a bevy of people
1:20:39who are on the other side of the aisle,
1:20:41a lot of them ranging from people in Hollywood,
1:20:44like Jason Blum to Larry Wilmore, to Sam,
1:20:47to just a lot of people on the left.
1:20:50I think, we're in the near future
1:20:52probably gonna do a Sunday Special
1:20:53with Ro Khanna in California.
1:20:54The California Congress person.
1:20:55Very nice guy, I had him on the show.
1:20:57That kinda stuff is fun and interesting.
1:21:00But, I think that the easy way out
1:21:02for a clip that people don't like,
1:21:04is to either immediately clip the clip.
1:21:06They'll take a two minute clip
1:21:07and clip it down to 15 seconds.
1:21:08Where somebody insults me and then that viral;
1:21:10which is, welcome to the internet.
1:21:12Or to say, "Well you're only debating in colleges,
1:21:15"You're only talking to 20."
1:21:16I talked to a lot more people than that.
1:21:18That's just not the stuff you're watching.
1:21:20- You lost your cool in an interview
1:21:21with BBC's Andrew Neil,
1:21:24and you are really honest about it after;
1:21:26which was kind of refreshing and enjoyable.
1:21:29As the internet said,
1:21:30"They've never seen anyone lose an interview."
1:21:34So to me, honestly,
1:21:36it was like seeing like Floyd Mayweather Jr.
1:21:39Or somebody, knock down.
1:21:43Can you take me through that experience?
1:21:44- Here's that day.
1:21:45That day is, I have a book released,
1:21:47didn't get a lot of sleep the night before.
1:21:48And this is the last interview of the day,
1:21:50and it's an interview with BBC.
1:21:51I don't know anything about BBC,
1:21:52I don't watch BBC, I don't know any of the hosts.
1:21:54So we get on the interview
1:21:56and it's supposed to be about the book,
1:21:58and the host Andrew Neil,
1:22:01doesn't ask virtually a single question about the book.
1:22:04He just starts reading me battled tweets,
1:22:06which I hate.
1:22:07I mean, it's annoying and it's stupid,
1:22:08and it's the worst form of an interview.
1:22:09- [Lex] Yeah.
1:22:10- When somebody just reads you battled tweets,
1:22:11especially when I've acknowledged battled tweets before.
1:22:14And so, I'm going through the list with him
1:22:16and this interview was solidly 20 minutes.
1:22:17It was a long interview.
1:22:19And we get to,
1:22:20and I make a couple of particularly annoyed mistakes
1:22:24in the interview.
1:22:25So annoyed mistake number one, is the ego play,
1:22:29There's a point in the middle of the interview
1:22:30where I say,
1:22:31"I don't even know who you are."
1:22:32Which was true, I didn't know who he was.
1:22:33It turns out he was a very famous person in Britain.
1:22:35And so you can't make that ego play.
1:22:37- But even if he's not famous, that's not-
1:22:39- It doesn't, it's a dumb thing to do
1:22:40and it's an ass thing to do.
1:22:41So saying that was more just kind of peak in silliness.
1:22:46And so, that was mistake number one.
1:22:48- I enjoyed watching that.
1:22:49It was like, oh Ben is human.
1:22:51(hearty laughing)
1:22:52- Glad somebody enjoyed it.
1:22:54So there was that.
1:22:55And then, the other mistake
1:22:56was that I just don't watch enough British TV.
1:22:59So the way that interviews are done there,
1:23:01are much more adversarial than American TV.
1:23:03In American TV, if somebody is adversarial with you,
1:23:05you assume that they're a member of the other side.
1:23:06That's typically how it is.
1:23:08And so, I'm critiquing some of his questions
1:23:10at the beginning
1:23:10and I thought that the critique of some of his questions
1:23:12is actually fair.
1:23:13He was asking me about abortion,
1:23:14and I thought he was asking it from a way
1:23:16of framing the question that wasn't accurate.
1:23:18And so, I assumed that he was on the left.
1:23:19'Cause again, I'd never heard of him.
1:23:21And so, I mischaracterized him,
1:23:23and I apologize later for mischaracterizing him.
1:23:26We finally go through the interview.
1:23:28It's 20 minutes, he just keeps going with the battle tweets.
1:23:31And finally, I got up and I took off the microphone.
1:23:32I walked out.
1:23:33And immediately, I knew it was a mistake.
1:23:35Like within 30 seconds of the end of the interview,
1:23:37I knew it was a mistake.
1:23:39And, that's why even before the interview came out,
1:23:42I believe I corrected the record that Andrew Neil
1:23:44is not on the left.
1:23:45That's a mistake by me.
1:23:47And then, took the hit for a bad interview.
1:23:51And so as far as, what I wish I had done differently,
1:23:55I wish I'd known who he was.
1:23:57I wish I'd done my research.
1:23:58I wish that I had treated it as though
1:24:00there was a possibility
1:24:01that it was gonna be more adversarial than it was.
1:24:02I think I was incautious about the interview
1:24:05because it was pitched as,
1:24:06it's just another book interview,
1:24:07and it wasn't just another book interview.
1:24:09It was treated much more adversarially than that.
1:24:11So I wish that, that's on me.
1:24:13I gotta research the people who are talking to me,
1:24:15and watch their shows, and learn about that.
1:24:18And then obviously, the kind of gut level appeal to ego
1:24:22or arrogance, that a bad look,
1:24:24and shouldn't have done that.
1:24:25And losing your cool is always a bad look.
1:24:28- The fact that that sort of became somewhat viral
1:24:31and stood out,
1:24:32just shows that it happens so rarely to you.
1:24:36So just to look at the day in the life of Ben Shapiro,
1:24:39you speak a lot, very eloquently, about difficult topics.
1:24:46What goes into the research, the mental,
1:24:48and you always look pretty like energetic,
1:24:51and like you're not exhausted by the burden,
1:24:55the heaviness of the topics you're covering day after day
1:24:58after day after day.
1:25:00What goes through the preparation mentally, diet-wise,
1:25:05anything like that?
1:25:06When do you wake up?
1:25:07- Okay, so I wake up when my kids wake me up,
1:25:09usually that's my baby daughter who's two and a half.
1:25:12She usually, we hear her on the monitor,
1:25:13usually about 6:15, 6:20AM.
1:25:16So I get up,
1:25:17my wife sleeps in a little bit.
1:25:18I go get the baby,
1:25:20and then my son gets up,
1:25:21and then my oldest daughter gets up.
1:25:23I have eight, six, and two.
1:25:24The boy's the middle child.
1:25:26- Is that both a source of stress and happiness?
1:25:28- Oh yeah, it's the height of both, right.
1:25:30I mean, it's the source of the greatest happiness.
1:25:32So the way that I characterize it is this,
1:25:34when it comes to sort of kids and life.
1:25:36When you're single,
1:25:37your boundaries of happiness and unhappiness,
1:25:39you can be a zero in terms of happiness,
1:25:40you can be like a 10 in terms of happiness.
1:25:42Then, you get married and it goes up to like a 20
1:25:43and a negative 20;
1:25:44because your happiest stuff is with your wife.
1:25:46And then, the most unhappy stuff
1:25:47is when something happens to your spouse,
1:25:48it's the worst thing in the entire world.
1:25:50Then, you have kids and all limits are removed.
1:25:51So the best things that have ever happened to me
1:25:53are things where I'm watching my kids
1:25:55and they're playing together
1:25:56and they're being wonderful and sweet and cute,
1:25:57and I love them so much.
1:25:58And, the worst things are when my son is screaming at me
1:26:01for no reason because he's being insane,
1:26:03and I have to deal with that.
1:26:05Or something bad happens to my daughter at school
1:26:07or something like that.
1:26:08That stuff is really it.
1:26:09So yes, the source of my greatest happiness,
1:26:10the source of my greatest stress.
1:26:11They get me up at about 6:15 in the morning.
1:26:13I feed them breakfast.
1:26:14I'm kind of scrolling the news;
1:26:15while I'm making the eggs.
1:26:19Just updating myself on anything
1:26:20that may have happened overnight.
1:26:22I go into the office,
1:26:24put on the makeup and the wardrobe or whatever,
1:26:27and then I sit down and do the show.
1:26:29A lot of the prep is actually done the night before
1:26:31because the news cycle doesn't change all that much
1:26:33between kind of late at night,
1:26:35and in the morning.
1:26:36So, I can supplement in the morning.
1:26:37So, I do the show.
1:26:39- So a lot of the preparation,
1:26:40like thinking through what are the big issues in the world
1:26:43is done the night before?
1:26:44- Yeah, and that's reading pretty much all the legacy media.
1:26:47I rip on legacy media a lot,
1:26:48but that's because a lot of what they do is really good
1:26:50and a lot of what they do is really bad.
1:26:51I cover a lot of legacy media.
1:26:53So that's probably covering, Wall Street Journal,
1:26:55New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Daily Mail.
1:26:58And then, I'll look over at some of the alternative media.
1:27:00I'll look at my own website, Daily Wire,
1:27:02I'll look at Breitbart.
1:27:02I'll look at The Blaze.
1:27:03I'll look at maybe The Intercept,
1:27:06I'll look at a bunch of different sources
1:27:08and then I will look at different clips online.
1:27:11So media comes in handy here,
1:27:13(indistinct) comes in handy here, that sort of stuff.
1:27:16'Cause my show relies very heavily
1:27:17on being able to play people,
1:27:18so you can hear them in their own words.
1:27:20And, that's sort of the media diet.
1:27:22So I sit down,
1:27:25I do the show and then once I'm done with the show,
1:27:27I usually have between,
1:27:30now it's like 11:15 in the morning maybe,
1:27:32'cause sometimes I'll prerecord the show.
1:27:34It's 11:15 in the morning,
1:27:36I'll go home and if my wife's available,
1:27:38I'll grab lunch with her.
1:27:40If not, then I will go and work out.
1:27:42I try to work out five times a week with a trainer,
1:27:46something like that.
1:27:47And then, I will-
1:27:49- Just regular gym stuff?
1:27:50Just going to the gym?
1:27:52- Yeah, weights and plyometrics,
1:27:54and some CrossFit kind of stuff.
1:27:59Beneath this mild astute lies a hulking monster, yeah.
1:28:03And, so I'll do that.
1:28:06Then, I will do reading and writing.
1:28:12I'm usually working on a book at any given time.
1:28:13- Do you shut off the rest of the world?
1:28:16- Yes, I put some music in my ears.
1:28:18Usually Brahms or Bach,
1:28:19sometimes Beethoven or Mozart.
1:28:21Those four it's usually, those are on rotation.
1:28:23- No rap?
1:28:23- No rap, no rap.
1:28:25Despite my extraordinary rendition of WAP.
1:28:27I'm not in fact a rap fan.
1:28:29- Do you still hate WAP, the song?
1:28:32- I will say,
1:28:33I do not think that it is the peak of western civilized art.
1:28:35- [Lex] Okay.
1:28:36- I don't think that a hundred years from now,
1:28:37people will be gluing their faces to a WAP
1:28:39and protest at the environment.
1:28:41- But, Brahms and the rest will be still around?
1:28:44- Yes, I would assume.
1:28:45If people still have a functioning prefrontal
1:28:47cortex in any sort of taste.
1:28:48- Strong words from Ben Shapiro.
1:28:50All right, so you got some classical music in your ears
1:28:53and you're focusing.
1:28:54Are you at the computer when you're writing?
1:28:56- Yeah, I'm at the computer, usually.
1:28:59We have a kind of a room that has some sun coming in,
1:29:01so it's nice in there.
1:29:02Or I'll go up to a library that we just completed for me.
1:29:05I'll go up there and I'll write and read.
1:29:06- Like with physical books?
1:29:08- Yeah, I love physical books
1:29:10and because I keep Sabbath.
1:29:11I don't use Kindle.
1:29:13Because when I'm reading a book,
1:29:15and I hit Sabbath,
1:29:16I have to turn off the Kindle.
1:29:16So that means that I have tons and tons and tons
1:29:19of physical books.
1:29:20When we moved from Los Angeles to Florida,
1:29:21I had about 7,000 volumes.
1:29:23I had to discard probably 4,000 of them.
1:29:26And then, I've built that back up now.
1:29:27I'm probably gonna have to go through another round,
1:29:29where I put them somewhere else.
1:29:30I tend to tab books rather than highlighting them
1:29:32because I can't highlight on Sabbath.
1:29:34So I have the little stickers and I put them in the book.
1:29:37A typical book from me, you can see it on the book club,
1:29:39will be filled with tabs on the side.
1:29:41Things that I wanna take notes, I actually,
1:29:42I've gotten a person who I pay to go through
1:29:47and write down in files the quotes
1:29:50that I like from the book.
1:29:51So I have those handy.
1:29:53Which is a good way for me to remember
1:29:54what it is that I've read.
1:29:56'Cause I read probably somewhere
1:29:59between three and five books a week.
1:30:01And then, in a good week five.
1:30:04And then, I write, I read.
1:30:07And then, I go pick up my kids from school at 3:30.
1:30:10According to my kids, I have no job.
1:30:12I'm there in the mornings until they leave for school.
1:30:14I pick them up from school,
1:30:15I hang out with them until they go to bed;
1:30:17which is usually 7:30 or so.
1:30:19I'm helping them with their homework,
1:30:20and I'm playing with them.
1:30:21And, I'm taking them on rides in the brand new Tesla;
1:30:25which my son is obsessed with.
1:30:27And then, I put them to bed and then I sit back down,
1:30:29I prep for the next day.
1:30:30Go through all those media sources
1:30:31I was talking about,
1:30:32compile kind of a schedule
1:30:33for what I want the show to look like,
1:30:34and run a show.
1:30:36It's very detail oriented.
1:30:37Nobody writes anything for me.
1:30:38I write all my own stuff.
1:30:40So every word that comes outta my mouth, is my fault.
1:30:42And then, hopefully I have a couple hours
1:30:45or an hour to hang out with my wife before we go to bed.
1:30:48- The words you write,
1:30:49do you edit a lot or does it just come out, you're thinking?
1:30:53What are the key ideas I want to express?
1:30:54- No, I don't tend to edit a lot,
1:30:57I thank God I'm able to write extraordinarily quickly.
1:30:59I write very, very fast.
1:31:01In fact, in a previous life I was.
1:31:02- You also speak fast, so similarly.
1:31:04- Yeah, exactly.
1:31:05And I speak in paragraphs,
1:31:06it's exactly the same thing.
1:31:08In a previous life, I was a ghost writer.
1:31:10So, I used to be sort of known as a turnaround specialist
1:31:12in the publishing industry.
1:31:13There'd be somebody who came to the publisher and says,
1:31:16"I have three weeks to get this book done.
1:31:18"I don't have a word done."
1:31:19And they would call me up and be like,
1:31:21"This person needs a book written."
1:31:23And so, in three weeks, I'd knock out 60,000 words or so.
1:31:25- Is there something you can say to the process
1:31:27that you follow to think?
1:31:30How you think about ideas,
1:31:32stuff is going on in the world and trying to understand
1:31:36what is happening.
1:31:36What are the explanations?
1:31:38What are the forces behind this?
1:31:39Do you have a process or just you wait for the news
1:31:43to give you the interpretation?
1:31:44- Well, I don't think it's a formal process,
1:31:47but because I read...
1:31:50There's two ways to do it.
1:31:51One is sometimes, the daily grind of the news
1:31:56is going to refer back to core principles
1:31:59that are broader and deeper.
1:32:01I thank God because I've read so much
1:32:03on so many different things
1:32:05of a lot of different point of views.
1:32:07Then, if something breaks, and a piece of news breaks,
1:32:09I can immediately sort of channel that into,
1:32:11in the mental Rolodex.
1:32:13These three big ideas that I think are really important.
1:32:17And then, I can talk at length
1:32:18about what those ideas are
1:32:19and I can explicate those.
1:32:20And so, for example,
1:32:22when we were talking about Musk taking over Twitter
1:32:25before and I immediately go to the history of media.
1:32:27That's me tying it into a broader theme.
1:32:30- [Lex] Yeah.
1:32:31- And, I do that, I would say fairly frequently.
1:32:34We're talking about, say subsidization of industry,
1:32:39and I can immediately tie that into,
1:32:40okay, what's the history of subsidization
1:32:41in the United States,
1:32:42going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson
1:32:44and forward through FDR's industrial policy.
1:32:46And, how does that tie into
1:32:47sort of broader economic policy internationally?
1:32:50It allows me to tie into bigger themes
1:32:52because what I tend to read is mostly not news.
1:32:54What I tend to read is mostly books.
1:32:56I would say most of my media diet
1:32:57is actually not the stuff.
1:32:58Like, that's the icing on the cake.
1:33:00But, the actual cake is the hundreds of pages in history,
1:33:04econ, geography, social science,
1:33:09that I'm reading every week.
1:33:11And so, that sort of stuff allows me
1:33:13to think more deeply about these things.
1:33:15So that's one way of doing it.
1:33:16The other way of doing it is, Russia breaks in the news.
1:33:18I don't know anything about Russia.
1:33:19I immediately go and I purchase five books about Russia,
1:33:21and I read all of them.
1:33:27The fortunate thing for me,
1:33:28and the unfortunate thing about the world
1:33:29is you read two books on a subject.
1:33:33You are now considered by the media,
1:33:34an expert on the subject.
1:33:36That's sad and shallow.
1:33:37But, that is the way that it is.
1:33:39The good news for me is that my job
1:33:40isn't to be a full expert on any of these subjects.
1:33:42I don't claim to be.
1:33:43I'm not a Russia expert.
1:33:44I know enough on Russia to be able to understand
1:33:47when people talk about Russia,
1:33:48what the system looks like, how it works, and all of that.
1:33:50And then, to explicate that for the common man;
1:33:52which a lot of people who are infused
1:33:55with the expertise can't really do.
1:33:56If you're so deep in the weeds,
1:33:57that you're like a full on academic expert on a thing;
1:33:59sometimes it's hard to translate that over
1:34:00to a massive audience; which is really my job.
1:34:02- Well, I think it can actually,
1:34:04it's funny with the two books,
1:34:05you can actually get a pretty deep understanding
1:34:08if you read and also think deeply about it.
1:34:10It allows you to approach a thing from first principles.
1:34:13A lot of times if you're a quote unquote expert,
1:34:16you get carried away by the momentum of what the field
1:34:22has been thinking about versus like stepping back,
1:34:25"All right, what is really going on?"
1:34:27The challenge is to pick the right two books.
1:34:29- Right, usually what I'll try to find
1:34:31is somebody who knows the topic pretty well
1:34:32and have them recommend,
1:34:33or a couple people, and have them recommend books.
1:34:35So a couple years ago I knew nothing about Bitcoin.
1:34:37I was at a conference and a couple of people
1:34:40who you've had on your show, actually,
1:34:42were there and I asked them,
1:34:43"Gimme your top three books on Bitcoin."
1:34:45And so then, I went and I read like nine books on Bitcoin.
1:34:49And so, if you're nine books on Bitcoin,
1:34:50you at least know enough to get by.
1:34:51- [Lex] Yeah.
1:34:52- And so, I can actually explain what Bitcoin is
1:34:54and why it works,
1:34:55or why it doesn't work in some cases,
1:34:57and what's happening in the markets that way.
1:34:59So that's very, very helpful.
1:35:02- Well, Putin as an example.
1:35:04That's a difficult one to find the right books on.
1:35:07I think The New Czar is the one I read,
1:35:10where it was the most objective.
1:35:11- One I read, I think, about Putin was,
1:35:12it was one called Strong Man.
1:35:15And, it was very highly critical of Putin,
1:35:17but it gave a good background on him at the very least.
1:35:20- Yeah, so I'm very skeptical sort of things
1:35:22that are very critical of Putin
1:35:25because it feels like there's activism injected
1:35:28into the history.
1:35:29Like, the way The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
1:35:31is written about Hitler,
1:35:32I like because there's almost not a criticism of Hitler.
1:35:36It's a description of Hitler, which is very,
1:35:40it's easier to do about a historical figure;
1:35:42which with William Shirer
1:35:44with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
1:35:45it's impressive because he lived through it.
1:35:48But, it's very tough to find objective descriptions
1:35:51about the history of the man and a country of Putin,
1:35:54of Zelensky, of any difficult,
1:35:57Trump was the same.
1:35:58And, I feel like-
1:36:00- That's the hero villain archetype, right?
1:36:01- [Lex] Yeah.
1:36:02- It's like, either somebody's completely a hero
1:36:03or completely a villain.
1:36:05And, the truth is pretty much no one is completely a hero
1:36:09or completely a villain.
1:36:10People, in fact,
1:36:11I'm not sure that I love descriptions of people
1:36:12as heroes or villains, generally.
1:36:14I think that people tend to do heroic things
1:36:16or do villainous things.
1:36:17In the same way that I'm not sure
1:36:17I love descriptions of people as a genius.
1:36:19My dad used to say this when I was growing up,
1:36:20he used to say he didn't believe that there were geniuses.
1:36:23He said he believed that there were people with a genius
1:36:24for something because people, yes,
1:36:27there are people who have very high IQ
1:36:28and we call them geniuses,
1:36:29but does that mean that they're good at EQ stuff?
1:36:32Not necessarily,
1:36:33but there are people who are geniuses at EQ stuff.
1:36:34In other words,
1:36:35it would be more specific to say that somebody's a genius
1:36:38at engineering than to say just broad spectrum,
1:36:40they're a genius.
1:36:41And that, does avoid the problem of thinking
1:36:42that they're good at something that they're not good at.
1:36:44It's a little more specific.
1:36:46- So because you read a lot of books,
1:36:48can you look back, and it's always a tough question,
1:36:50'cause so many, it's like your favorite song,
1:36:52but are there books that have been influential in your life
1:36:55that are impacting your thinking?
1:36:56Or maybe ones you go back to that
1:37:00still carry insight for you?
1:37:02- The Federalist Paper is a big one
1:37:03in terms of sort of how American politics works.
1:37:07The first econ book that I thought was really great
1:37:09'cause it was written for teenagers,
1:37:10essentially, is one called
1:37:11Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.
1:37:13It's like 150 pages.
1:37:14I recommend it to everybody sort of 15 and up.
1:37:17It's easier than say Thomas Sowell's Basic Econ;
1:37:19which is four or 500 pages.
1:37:20- And it's looking what, at like macroeconomics,
1:37:22microeconomics, that kind of stuff?
1:37:24- Macro, macro.
1:37:25And, then,
1:37:28there's a great book
1:37:29by Carl Trueman called Rise and Triumph for the Modern Self,
1:37:31which I think is the best book in the last 10 years.
1:37:34That's been sort of impactful on some of the thoughts
1:37:36I've been having lately.
1:37:37- What's the key idea in there?
1:37:38- The key idea is that we've shifted the nature
1:37:40of how identity is done in the West,
1:37:42from how it was historically done.
1:37:44That basically, for nearly all of human history,
1:37:46the way that we identify as human beings is as a mix
1:37:50of our biological drives,
1:37:51and then how that interacts
1:37:52with the social institutions around us.
1:37:54And so, when you're a child,
1:37:55you're a bunch of unfettered biological drives,
1:37:57and it's your parents' job to civilize you.
1:37:59And, civilize you
1:38:00literally means bring you into civilization, right.
1:38:02You learn the rules of the road,
1:38:03you learn how to integrate into institutions
1:38:05that already exist and are designed to shape you.
1:38:07And it's how you interact with those institutions
1:38:09that makes you, you.
1:38:10It's not just a set of biological drives.
1:38:12And then, in the modern world,
1:38:14we've really driven toward the idea that what we are
1:38:17is how we feel on the inside
1:38:18without reference to the outside world.
1:38:19And it's the job of the outside world
1:38:21to celebrate and reflect
1:38:22what we think about ourselves on the inside.
1:38:24And so, what that means is that we are driven now
1:38:27toward fighting institutions
1:38:29'cause institutions are in positions.
1:38:31So everything around us, societal institutions,
1:38:33these are things that are crimping our style.
1:38:34They're making us not feel the way that we wanna feel.
1:38:36And, if we just destroy those things,
1:38:38then we'll be freer and more liberated.
1:38:40It's, I think, much deeper model
1:38:42of how to think about why our social politics
1:38:45particular are moving in a particular direction.
1:38:47Is that a ground shift has happened
1:38:48in how people think about themselves.
1:38:50And, this has had some somewhat kind of shocking effect
1:38:55in terms of social politics.
1:38:56- So there's negative consequences in your view of that.
1:38:59But, is there also a positive consequence of more power,
1:39:03more agency to the individual?
1:39:05- I think that you can make the argument
1:39:06that institutions were weighing too heavily
1:39:08in how people form their identity.
1:39:09But, I think that what we've done
1:39:11is gone significantly too far on the other side.
1:39:13We basically decided to blow up the institutions
1:39:15in favor of unfettered feeling slash identity.
1:39:20And I think that that is not only a large mistake,
1:39:22I think it's gonna have dire ramifications for everything
1:39:24from suicidal ideation to institutional longevity
1:39:28in politics and in society more broadly.
1:39:31- So speaking about the nature of self,
1:39:33you've been an outspoken proponent of pro-life.
1:39:38Can we start by you trying to steel man,
1:39:42the case for pro-choice?
1:39:44That abortion is not murder,
1:39:46and a woman's right to choose
1:39:48is a fundamental human right, freedom.
1:39:51- So I think that the only way to steel man,
1:39:54the pro-choice case is to, and be ideologically consistent,
1:39:59is to suggest that there is no interest in the life
1:40:02of the unborn,
1:40:05that counter weighs at all, freedom of choice.
1:40:09So, what that means is we can take the full example,
1:40:13we can sort of the partial example.
1:40:15If we take the full example.
1:40:16What that would mean is that up until point of birth;
1:40:18which is sort of the democratic party platform position,
1:40:22that a woman's right to choose ought to extend
1:40:24for any reason whatsoever up to point of birth.
1:40:26The only way to argue that is that bodily autonomy
1:40:27is the only factor.
1:40:28There is no countervailing factor
1:40:30that would ever outweigh bodily autonomy.
1:40:32That would be the strongest version of the argument.
1:40:35Another version of that argument would be that the reason
1:40:38that bodily autonomy ought to weigh so heavily
1:40:40is because women can't be
1:40:43the equals of men,
1:40:45if the vicissitudes of biology are allowed
1:40:47to decide their futures.
1:40:49If pregnancy changes women
1:40:52in a way that it doesn't change men,
1:40:52it's a form of sex discrimination for women
1:40:54to ever have to go through with pregnancy;
1:40:56which is an argument
1:40:57that was made by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, kind of.
1:40:59Those are the arguments.
1:41:00The kind of softer version is the more,
1:41:04I would say emotionally resonant version of the argument;
1:41:07which is that bodily autonomy ought to outweigh
1:41:10the interests of the fetus up till point x.
1:41:14And then, people have different feelings
1:41:15about what point X looks like.
1:41:15Is it up to the point of viability?
1:41:17Is it up to the point of the heartbeat?
1:41:18Is it up to 12 weeks or 15 weeks?
1:41:19And, that really is where the American public is.
1:41:21Where the American public is broadly speaking,
1:41:23not state by state,
1:41:24where there are various, really varied opinions.
1:41:26But, like broadly speaking,
1:41:28it seems like the American public by polling data
1:41:29wants somewhere between
1:41:30a 12 and 15 week abortion restriction.
1:41:33And, they believe that up until 12 or 15 weeks,
1:41:35there's not enough there for, to not be specific,
1:41:38but to be kind of how people feel about it,
1:41:40to outweigh a woman's bodily autonomy.
1:41:42And then, beyond that point,
1:41:44then there's enough of an interest in the life
1:41:46of the pre-born child, it's developed enough.
1:41:49Then now, we care about it enough
1:41:50that it outweighs a woman's bodily autonomy.
1:41:52- What's the strongest case for pro-life in your mind?
1:41:57- I mean, the strongest case for pro-life
1:41:58is that from conception,
1:42:00a human life has been created.
1:42:02It is a human life with potential.
1:42:04That human life potential with potential,
1:42:06now has an independent interest in its own existence.
1:42:09- If I may just ask a quick question.
1:42:12So conception is when a sperm fertilizes an egg?
1:42:15- Yes.
1:42:17- Okay, just to to clarify the biological beginning
1:42:19of what conception means.
1:42:20- I mean, because that is the beginning of human life.
1:42:23Now, there are other standards
1:42:24that people have drawn.
1:42:25Some people say implantation in the uterus,
1:42:28some people will suggest viability,
1:42:31some brain development or heart development.
1:42:33But, the clear dividing line
1:42:34between a human life exists
1:42:36and a human life does not exist,
1:42:37is the biological creation of an independent human life
1:42:39with own DNA strands and et cetera;
1:42:41which happens at conception.
1:42:43Once you acknowledge that
1:42:44there is that independent human life with potential,
1:42:48and I keep calling it that
1:42:49because people sometimes say potential human life,
1:42:50it's not a potential human life.
1:42:51It's a human life that is not developed yet
1:42:53to the full extent that it will develop.
1:42:55Once you say that,
1:42:56and once you say that it has its own interest.
1:42:58Now, the burden of proof is to explain
1:43:01why bodily autonomy ought to allow
1:43:04for the snuffing out of that human life.
1:43:06If we believe that human life ought not to be killed
1:43:08for quote unquote, no good reason,
1:43:11you have to come up with a good reason.
1:43:13The burden of proof is now shifted.
1:43:14Now, we'll find people who will say,
1:43:16"Well, the good reason is that
1:43:18"It's not sufficiently developed to outweigh
1:43:19"The mental trauma or emotional trauma
1:43:21"That a woman goes through.
1:43:22"If, for example, she was raped or the victim of incest."
1:43:25Okay, and that is a fairly emotionally resonant argument,
1:43:28but it's not necessarily dispositive.
1:43:30You can make the argument
1:43:31that just because something horrific
1:43:33and horrible happened to a woman,
1:43:35does not rob the human life of its interest in life.
1:43:40One of the big problems in trying to draw any line
1:43:42for the self-interest of life,
1:43:45in the human life is that it's very difficult to draw
1:43:49any other line that doesn't seem somewhat arbitrary.
1:43:52You say that independent heartbeat,
1:43:55people have pacemakers.
1:43:56If you say brain function,
1:43:58people have various levels of brain function as adults.
1:44:00If you say viability,
1:44:02babies are not viable after they're born.
1:44:03If I left a newborn baby on a table,
1:44:05and did not take care of it,
1:44:06it would be dead in two days.
1:44:07So, once you start getting into sort of these lines,
1:44:10it starts to get very fuzzy very quickly.
1:44:12And so, if you're looking for sort of a bright line
1:44:15moral rule, that would be the bright line moral rule.
1:44:18And, that's sort of the pro-life case.
1:44:19- Well, there's still mysterious
1:44:21difficult scientific questions of things like consciousness.
1:44:25- So what does the question of consciousness,
1:44:30how does it come into play into this debate?
1:44:33- So I don't believe that consciousness
1:44:35is the sole criterion
1:44:37by which we judge the self-interest in human life.
1:44:40So we are unconscious a good deal of our lives, right?
1:44:45That does not, we will be conscious again.
1:44:47When you're unconscious, when you're asleep,
1:44:49for example, presumably your life is still worth living.
1:44:52If somebody came in and killed you,
1:44:53that'd be a serious moral quandary at the very least.
1:44:56- But the birth of consciousness,
1:44:58the lighting up of the flame,
1:45:01the initial lighting up of the flame,
1:45:03there does seem to be something special about that.
1:45:05And, it's a mystery of when that happens.
1:45:08- Well, I mean, Peter Singer makes the case
1:45:10that basically self-consciousness doesn't exist
1:45:11until you're two and a half.
1:45:13He says that even infanticide should be okay.
1:45:15He's the bioethicist over at Princeton.
1:45:18You get into some real dicey territory
1:45:19once you get into consciousness.
1:45:20Also, the truth is that consciousness is more of a spectrum
1:45:23than it is a dividing line.
1:45:26Meaning, that there are people with various degrees
1:45:29of brain function.
1:45:30We don't actually know how conscious they are.
1:45:32And you can get into eugenic territory pretty quickly,
1:45:35when we start dividing between lives that are worth living
1:45:37based on levels of consciousness,
1:45:38and lives that are not worth living
1:45:39based on levels of consciousness.
1:45:41- Do you find it,
1:45:43the aspect of women's freedom,
1:45:47do you feel the tension between that ability
1:45:50to choose the trajectory of your own life
1:45:53versus the rights of the unborn child?
1:45:59- In one situation, yes.
1:46:00In one situation, no.
1:46:01If you've had sex with a person voluntarily,
1:46:04and as a product of that, you are now pregnant, no.
1:46:08You've taken an action with a perfectly predictable result.
1:46:10Even if you took birth control.
1:46:11This is the way that human beings have procreated
1:46:13for literally all of human existence.
1:46:14And by the way,
1:46:15also how all mammals appropriate.
1:46:17So the idea that this was an entirely unforeseen consequence
1:46:19of your activity,
1:46:20I find, I have less sympathy for you
1:46:24in that particular situation
1:46:25because you could have made decisions
1:46:27that would not lead you to this particular impasse.
1:46:29In fact, this used to be the basis of marriage.
1:46:31Was when we were a, apparently more terrible society,
1:46:35we used to say that people should wait
1:46:36until they get married to have sex,
1:46:38a position that I still hold.
1:46:40And, the reason for that
1:46:41was because then if you have sex and you produce a child,
1:46:43then the child will grow up
1:46:44in a two parent family with stability.
1:46:46So, not a ton of sympathy there.
1:46:49When it comes to rape and incest,
1:46:50obviously heavy, heavy sympathy.
1:46:51And so, that's why I think you see, statistically speaking,
1:46:54a huge percentage of Americans,
1:46:55including many pro-life Americans,
1:46:57people who consider themselves pro-life,
1:46:58would consider exceptions for rape and incest.
1:47:01One of the sort of dishonest things that I think happens
1:47:03in abortion debates is arguing from the fringes.
1:47:06This tends to happen a lot,
1:47:07is pro-choice activists will argue from rape and incest
1:47:10to the other 99.8% of abortions.
1:47:13Or you'll see people on the pro-life side argue
1:47:14from partial birth abortion
1:47:16to all of abortion that you actually have to take
1:47:19on sort of the mainstream case,
1:47:20and then decide whether or not that's acceptable or not.
1:47:22- But to you, the exception,
1:47:23just ethically without generalizing it,
1:47:26that is a valid ethically exception.
1:47:29- I don't hold that there should be an exception for rape
1:47:32or incest because again,
1:47:33I hold by the bright line rule that once a human life
1:47:35with potential exists,
1:47:36then it has its own interest in life that cannot be curbed
1:47:39by your self-interest.
1:47:42The only exception that I hold by is,
1:47:44the same exception that literally all pro-lifers hold by;
1:47:46which is the life of the mother is put in danger.
1:47:48- Such a tough, tough topic.
1:47:50'Cause if you believe that that's the line,
1:47:53then we're committing mass murder.
1:47:55- Well, or at least mass killing.
1:47:56So I would say that murder typically requires a level
1:47:59of mens rea that may be absent
1:48:02and in many cases of abortion.
1:48:03Because the usual follow on question is,
1:48:05"Well if to murder, why don't prosecute the woman?"
1:48:06And the answer is because the vast majority of people
1:48:09who are having abortions, don't actually believe
1:48:11that they're killing a person.
1:48:12They have a very different view
1:48:15of what is exactly happening.
1:48:18I would say that there are all sorts of interesting
1:48:20hypotheticals that come in to play
1:48:21when it comes to abortion.
1:48:23And you can play them any which way.
1:48:26But, let's put it this way,
1:48:28there are gradations of wrongs.
1:48:30I don't think that all abortions are equally blameworthy.
1:48:33Even if I would ban virtually all of them.
1:48:39I think that there are mitigating circumstances
1:48:41that make, while being wrong,
1:48:43some abortions less morally blameworthy than others.
1:48:46I think that,
1:48:49I can admit a difference between killing
1:48:52a two week old embryo in the womb,
1:48:55and stabbing a seven year old in the face.
1:48:57I can recognize all that while still saying,
1:48:58I think that it would be wrong to terminate a pregnancy.
1:49:00- Do you think the question when life begins,
1:49:02which I think is a fascinating question,
1:49:06is a question of science or a question of religion?
1:49:08- I mean when life begins, is a question of science.
1:49:10When that life becomes valuable enough for people
1:49:12to wanna protect it is is gonna be a question
1:49:16that is beyond science.
1:49:17Science doesn't have moral judgements
1:49:18to make about the value of human life.
1:49:19This is one of the problems that,
1:49:21Sam Harrison and I have had this argument many times,
1:49:22and it's always kind of interesting,
1:49:24'cause Sam is of the opinion
1:49:26that you can get to ought from is.
1:49:28That science says "Is, therefore we can learn ought."
1:49:30So human flourishing is the goal of life.
1:49:32And I always say to him,
1:49:33I don't see where you get that from evolutionary biology.
1:49:36You can assume it,
1:49:38just say you're assuming it,
1:49:39but don't pretend that that is a conclusion
1:49:41that you can draw straight from biological
1:49:44reality itself because obviously that doesn't exist
1:49:47in the animal world, for example.
1:49:48Nobody assumes the innate value of every ant.
1:49:51- I think I know your answer to this,
1:49:53but, let's test it
1:49:53'cause I think you're going to be wrong.
1:49:56(hearty laughing)
1:49:57So there's a robot behind you.
1:49:59Do you think there will be a time in the future
1:50:01when it will be unethical
1:50:03and illegal to kill a robot,
1:50:05because they will have sentience?
1:50:08My guess is you would say,
1:50:10"No, Lex, 'cause there's a fundamental difference
1:50:13"Between humans and robots."
1:50:14And I just want to get you on record
1:50:16'cause I think you'll be wrong.
1:50:18- It depends on the level of development
1:50:20I would assume of the robots.
1:50:22You're assuming a complexity in the robots
1:50:24that eventually imitates what we in the religious life
1:50:28would call the human soul.
1:50:29- [Lex] Yes.
1:50:30- The ability to choose freely, for example.
1:50:31- [Lex] Yes.
1:50:32- Which I believe is sort of the capacity
1:50:33for human beings.
1:50:35- The ability to suffer.
1:50:36- Yeah, if all of that could be
1:50:42proved and not programmed,
1:50:44meaning the freely willed capacity of a machine
1:50:47to do X, Y, or Z.
1:50:50- You, could not pinpoint exactly
1:50:52where it happens in the program.
1:50:54- Right.
1:50:55- [Lex] Yeah.
1:50:55- It's not deterministic.
1:50:56- [Lex] Yeah.
1:50:57- Then it would raise serious moral issues, for sure.
1:51:00I'm not sure I know to answer to that question.
1:51:02- Are you afraid of that time?
1:51:03- I'm not sure I'm afraid of that time.
1:51:05I mean, any more than I'd be afraid if aliens
1:51:08arrived in the world,
1:51:09and had these characteristics.
1:51:11- Well, there's just a lot of moral complexities
1:51:12and they don't necessarily have to be in the physical space.
1:51:14They can be in the digital space.
1:51:16There's an increased sophistication and number of bots
1:51:19on the internet, including on Twitter.
1:51:22As they become more and more intelligent,
1:51:24there's going to be serious questions
1:51:25about what is our moral duty
1:51:28to protect ones that have or claim
1:51:31to have an identity.
1:51:32- And that'll be really interesting.
1:51:33Actually what I'm afraid of is the opposite happening,
1:51:35meaning that people,
1:51:37the worst that should happen is that we develop robots
1:51:39so sophisticated that they appear to have free will
1:51:41and then we treat them with human dignity.
1:51:44- [Lex] Yeah.
1:51:45- That should be the worst that happens.
1:51:45What I'm afraid of is the opposite, is that,
1:51:47if we're talking about this particular hypothetical,
1:51:50that we develop robots
1:51:51that have all of these apparent abilities
1:51:52and then we dehumanize them,
1:51:54which leads us to also dehumanize the other humans
1:51:56around us; which you could easily see happening.
1:51:59And the devaluation of life to the point where
1:52:01it doesn't really matter.
1:52:02I mean people have always treated,
1:52:04unfortunately, newly discovered other humans this way.
1:52:08I don't think there's actually a new problem.
1:52:10I think it's a pretty old problem.
1:52:12It'll just be interesting when it's made of human hands.
1:52:14- Yeah, it's an opportunity
1:52:16to either celebrate humanity
1:52:17or to bring out the worst in humanity.
1:52:22The derision that naturally happens,
1:52:23like you said with pointing out the other,
1:52:26Let me ask you about climate change.
1:52:29Let's go from the meme
1:52:32to the profound philosophy.
1:52:34The meme is,
1:52:35there's a clip of you talking about climate change
1:52:37and saying that-
1:52:38- Ah, the Aquaman meme.
1:52:39- You said that, "For the sake of argument,
1:52:40"And if the water level arises five to 10 feet
1:52:43"In the next hundred years,
1:52:45"People will just sell their homes and move."
1:52:48And then, the meme is sell to who?
1:52:51Can you argue both sides of that?
1:52:52- The argument that they're making as a straw man,
1:52:54the argument that I'm making is over time.
1:52:56I don't mean that if a tsunami is about to hit your house,
1:52:58you can list it on eBay.
1:52:59That's not what I mean, obviously.
1:53:00What I mean is that human beings
1:53:01have an extraordinary ability to adapt.
1:53:03It's actually our best quality.
1:53:05And that as water levels rise,
1:53:07real estate prices in those areas tends to fall.
1:53:09That over time people tend to abandon those areas.
1:53:13They tend to leave,
1:53:14they tend to, right now,
1:53:15sell their houses.
1:53:16And then, they tend to move.
1:53:17And eventually, those houses will be worthless
1:53:19and you won't have anybody to sell to.
1:53:20But presumably not that many people
1:53:21will be living there by that point,
1:53:23which is one of the reasons why the price would be low
1:53:25because there's no demand.
1:53:26- So it's over a hundred years.
1:53:27So all of these price dynamics are very gradual relative
1:53:31to the other price dynamics.
1:53:32- Correct, that's why the joke of it,
1:53:34of course is that like I'm saying that tomorrow
1:53:36there's a tsunami on your so step and you're like,
1:53:37"Oh, Bob will buy my house."
1:53:39Bob ain't gonna buy your house.
1:53:40Like we all get that.
1:53:42But it's a funny meme, I'll admit,
1:53:43I laughed at.
1:53:44- How's your view on climate change,
1:53:46the human contribution to climate change?
1:53:50What should we do in terms of policy to respond
1:53:52to climate change?
1:53:52How has that changed over the years?
1:53:54- I would say the truth
1:53:55is for years and years,
1:53:57I've believed that climate change was a reality
1:53:59and that anthropogenic climate change is a reality.
1:54:03I don't argue with the IPCC estimates.
1:54:05I know climatologists at places like MIT or Caltech,
1:54:08and they know this stuff better than I do.
1:54:11The notion that climate change is just not happening
1:54:13or that human beings have not contributed to climate change,
1:54:15I find doubtful.
1:54:16The question is to what extent human beings are contributing
1:54:19to climate change, that 50%, is it 70%?
1:54:20Is it 90%?
1:54:22I think there's a little bit more play in the joints there,
1:54:24so it's not totally clear.
1:54:25The one thing I do know,
1:54:26and this I know with factual accuracy,
1:54:28is that all of the measures that are
1:54:29currently being proposed are unworkable and will not happen.
1:54:32So when people say, Paris Climate Accords,
1:54:35even if those were imposed,
1:54:36you're talking about lowering the potential trajectory
1:54:39of climate change by a fraction of a degree.
1:54:41If you're talking about
1:54:45the Green New Deal, net zero by 2050,
1:54:48the carbon is up there in the air and the climate change
1:54:50is going to happen.
1:54:51Also, you're assuming
1:54:52that geopolitical dynamics don't exist.
1:54:55Everybody's gonna magically get on the same page
1:54:57and we're all gonna be imposing massive carbon taxes
1:55:00to get to net zero by 2050.
1:55:03I mean like hundreds of times higher
1:55:04than they currently are.
1:55:05And that's not me saying that, that's Klaus Schwab saying
1:55:07this at the World Economic Forum;
1:55:08who's a big advocate of exactly this sort of policy.
1:55:11And the reality is that we're gonna have to accept
1:55:13that at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change
1:55:15is baked into the cake by the end of the century.
1:55:16Again, not me talking William Nordhaus,
1:55:17the economist who just won the Nobel Prize
1:55:19in this stuff, talking.
1:55:20And so, what that suggests to me is what we've always known
1:55:23human beings are crap at mitigation
1:55:24and excellent in adaptation.
1:55:26We are very bad at mitigating our own fault.
1:55:29We are very good at adapting to the problems as they exist.
1:55:31Which means that all of the estimates that billions
1:55:34will die, that there will be mass starvation,
1:55:36that we'll see the migration in just a few years
1:55:39of hundreds of millions of people, those are wrong.
1:55:42What you'll see is a gradual change of living.
1:55:44People will move away from areas that are inundated
1:55:46on the coast.
1:55:47You'll see people building sea walls,
1:55:48you'll see people adapting new technologies to suck carbon
1:55:51out of the air.
1:55:52You'll see geoengineering,
1:55:54this is the sort of stuff that we should be focused on
1:55:56and the sort of bizarre focus
1:55:58on what if we just keep tossing
1:55:59hundreds of billions of dollars at the same three
1:56:02technologies over and over in the hopes
1:56:04that if we subsidize it,
1:56:05this will magically make it more efficient.
1:56:07I've seen no evidence whatsoever that
1:56:09that is going to be the way that we get ourselves
1:56:12out of this, necessity being the mother invention.
1:56:14I think human beings will adapt because we have adapted
1:56:16and we'll continue to adapt.
1:56:17- So to the degree we invest in the threat of this,
1:56:21it should be into policies that help with the adaptation
1:56:24versus the mitigation?
1:56:25- Right, sea walls, geoengineering,
1:56:27developing technology to suck carbon out of the air.
1:56:29Again, if I thought that there was more sort of hope
1:56:31for the green technologies currently in play,
1:56:33than subsidization of those technologies,
1:56:35I might be a little bit more for,
1:56:36but I haven't seen tremendous progress
1:56:38over the course of the last 30 years
1:56:39in the reliability of, for example, wind energy.
1:56:42Or the ability to store solar energy to the extent necessary
1:56:46to actually power a grid.
1:56:48- What's your thoughts on nuclear energy?
1:56:50- Nuclear energy is great.
1:56:51Nuclear energy is a proven source of energy
1:56:52and we should be radically extending the use
1:56:57of nuclear energy.
1:56:58To me, honestly, this is like a litmus test question
1:57:01as to whether you take
1:57:02climate change seriously.
1:57:02If you're on right or left and you take climate change
1:57:04seriously, you should be in favor of nuclear energy.
1:57:06If you're not, I know that you're just,
1:57:08you have other priorities.
1:57:09- Yeah, the fascinating thing
1:57:10about the climate change debate is the dynamics
1:57:12of the fear mongering over the past few decades,
1:57:15'cause some of the nuclear energy
1:57:17was tied up into that somehow.
1:57:18There's a lot of fear about nuclear energy.
1:57:21It seems like there's a lot of social phenomena,
1:57:24social dynamics involved versus dealing with just science.
1:57:28It's interesting to watch and if, on my darker days,
1:57:32it makes me cynical about our ability to use reason
1:57:35and science to deal with the threats of the world.
1:57:39- I think that our ability to use reason and science
1:57:41to deal with threats of the world,
1:57:42is almost a timeframe question.
1:57:45So I think, we're very bad at looking down the road
1:57:47and saying, because people can't handle, for example,
1:57:50even things like compound interest.
1:57:51- [Lex] Yeah.
1:57:52- Right, the idea that if I put a dollar in the bank today,
1:57:53that 15 years from now,
1:57:55that's gonna be worth a lot more than a dollar.
1:57:57People can't actually see that.
1:57:58And so the idea of let's foresee a problem then we'll deal
1:58:00with it right now,
1:58:01as opposed to 30 years down the road.
1:58:03Typically, we let the problem happen
1:58:04and then we solve it,
1:58:05and it's bloodier and worse than it would've been,
1:58:07if we had solved it 30 years ago.
1:58:08But, it is in fact effective and sometimes it turns out
1:58:11the solution that we're proposing 30 years
1:58:13in advance is not effective.
1:58:15And that, can be a major problem as well.
1:58:17- Well that's then to steel man,
1:58:18the case for fear mongering, for irrational fear mongering,
1:58:22we need to be scared shitless
1:58:24in order for us to do anything.
1:58:27I'm generally against that.
1:58:29But, maybe on a population scale,
1:58:31maybe some of that is necessary for us to respond
1:58:35appropriate to long-term threats.
1:58:39We should be scared shitless.
1:58:40- But, I don't think think
1:58:41that we can actually do that though.
1:58:43First of all,
1:58:45platonic lives are generally bad.
1:58:46And then second of all,
1:58:47I don't think that we actually have the capacity to do this.
1:58:49I think that the people who are,
1:58:51the sort of elites of our society who get together in rooms
1:58:54and talk about this sort of stuff,
1:58:55and I've been in some of those meetings.
1:58:56At my synagogues Friday nights,
1:58:58actually no, but...
1:59:00- I was gonna make the joke, but I'm glad you did.
1:59:03- Yeah, I've been in rooms, Davos like rooms.
1:59:06And, when people discuss these sorts of topics,
1:59:09and they're like,
1:59:10"What if we just tell people that it's gonna be a disaster
1:59:11"With tsunamis and the day after tomorrow?"
1:59:12It's like, you guys don't have that power.
1:59:14You don't, and by the way,
1:59:16you dramatically undercut your own power because of COVID
1:59:18to do this sort of stuff.
1:59:19Because a lot of the,
1:59:21what if we scare the living hell out of you
1:59:22to the point where you stay in your own house
1:59:24for two years,
1:59:25and we tell you you can't send your kids to school,
1:59:27and then we tell you that the vaccine
1:59:29is gonna prevent transmission,
1:59:31and then we also tell you that we need to spend $7 trillion
1:59:34in one year,
1:59:35and it won't have any inflationary effect.
1:59:36And it turns out,
1:59:37you're wrong on literally all of those things.
1:59:39The last two years have done more to undermine
1:59:41institutional trust than any time
1:59:43in probably American history.
1:59:44It's pretty, pretty amazing.
1:59:45- Yeah, I tend to agree with the only thing we have to fear
1:59:47is fear itself.
1:59:49Let me ask you, back to the question of God
1:59:54in a big ridiculous question.
1:59:55Who's God?
1:59:57- Who is God?
1:59:58I'm gonna use sort of the Aquinas formulation
2:00:02of what God is.
2:00:05That, if there is a cause of all things not physical things,
2:00:10if there is a cause underlying the reason of the universe,
2:00:14then that is the thing we call God.
2:00:16So not a big guy in the sky with the beard,.
2:00:20He is the force underlying the logic of the universe,
2:00:24if there is a logic to the universe.
2:00:26And He is the creator in the Judea view of that universe.
2:00:33And He, does have an interest in us
2:00:36living in accordance with the laws of the universe
2:00:39that, if you're a religious Jew, are encoded in the Torah.
2:00:42But, if you're not religious Jew,
2:00:43it would be encoded in the natural law
2:00:45by sort of Catholic theology.
2:00:47- Why do you think God created the universe
2:00:49or as is popularly asked,
2:00:52what do you think is the meaning behind it?
2:00:55What's the meaning of life?
2:00:56- What's the meaning of life?
2:00:58So I think that the meaning of life
2:01:00is to fulfill what God made you to do.
2:01:03And that is a series of roles.
2:01:06I think that human beings,
2:01:07and here you have to look to sort of human nature
2:01:09rather than looking kind of to big questions.
2:01:13I've evolved something
2:01:14that I've really been working on.
2:01:16I'm writing a book about this actually,
2:01:17that I call colloquially role theory.
2:01:21And basically the idea is that the way that we interact
2:01:24with the world is through a series of roles.
2:01:26And those are also the things we find most important
2:01:29and most implementable.
2:01:31There's sort of virtue ethics,
2:01:33which suggests that if we act in accordance with virtue,
2:01:36like Aristotle, then we will be living
2:01:38the most fulfilled and meaningful life.
2:01:41And then, you have sort of deontological ethics,
2:01:43continent ethics, that it's a rule-based ethic.
2:01:46You follow the rules,
2:01:47then you'll then you'll find the meaning of life.
2:01:49And then, what I'm proposing is that there's something
2:01:52that I would call role ethics,
2:01:53which is there are a series of roles
2:01:54that we play across our lives;
2:01:56which are also the things
2:01:56that we tend to put on our tombstones,
2:01:58and find the most meaningful.
2:01:59So when you go to a cemetery,
2:02:01you can see what people found the most meaningful
2:02:03because it's the stuff they put on the stone
2:02:04that has like four words on it.
2:02:06Like beloved father, beloved mother, sister, brother,
2:02:10you might have a job once in a while;
2:02:13a creator, a religious person.
2:02:15These are all roles that have existed across societies
2:02:17and across humanity.
2:02:18And those are the things where we actually find meaning.
2:02:21The way that we navigate those roles brings us meaning.
2:02:24And I think that God created us in order to fulfill those
2:02:29roles for purposes that I can't begin to understand
2:02:31'cause I ain't him.
2:02:32And, the more we recognize those roles,
2:02:36and the more we live those roles,
2:02:38and then we can express freedom within those roles.
2:02:40I think that liberty exists inside each of those roles,
2:02:42and that's what makes all of our lives
2:02:44different and fun.
2:02:44We all parent in different ways,
2:02:46but being a parent is a meaningful role.
2:02:48We all have spouses, but you know,
2:02:50how you interact with that relationship
2:02:52is what makes your life meaningful and interesting.
2:02:54That is what we are put on earth to do.
2:02:57And, if we perform those roles properly,
2:02:59and those roles do include things like being a creator,
2:03:00like we have a creative instinct as human beings,
2:03:02being a creator, being an innovator,
2:03:05being a defender of your family,
2:03:07being somebody who builds up,
2:03:08being a social member of your community;
2:03:09which is something that we're built to do.
2:03:11If we fulfill those roles properly,
2:03:12then we will have made the world a better place
2:03:13then we inherited it.
2:03:15And, we'll also have had the joy of experiencing
2:03:19the sort of flow they talk about in psychology.
2:03:23Where, when you engage in these roles,
2:03:24you actually do feel a flow.
2:03:26- So these roles are a fundamental part
2:03:28of the human condition.
2:03:29- [Ben] Yes.
2:03:29- So, the book you're working on
2:03:32is constructing a system to help us understand.
2:03:37- It's looking at, let's assume that all that's true.
2:03:40The real question in the book is how do you construct
2:03:42a flourishing and useful society in politics?
2:03:46- Ah, so a society level.
2:03:49If this is our understanding of a human being,
2:03:51how do we construct a good society?
2:03:52- Right, exactly, because I think that a lot
2:03:54of political theory is right now based in
2:03:56either J.S. Mill kind of thought,
2:03:59which is all that a good politics does,
2:04:01allows you wave your hand around
2:04:02until you hit somebody in the face.
2:04:03Or a Rawlsian thought,
2:04:05which is what if we constructed society
2:04:07in order to achieve the most for the least, essentially.
2:04:10What if we constructed society around what actually makes
2:04:13humans the most fulfilled?
2:04:15And that is the fulfillment of these particular roles.
2:04:20And where does liberty come into that?
2:04:21How do you avoid the idea of a tyranny in that?
2:04:24"You have to be a mother, you must be a father,
2:04:25"You must be a..."
2:04:26Where does freedom come into that?
2:04:28Can you reject those roles totally as a society and be okay?
2:04:31The answer probably is not.
2:04:32So you need a society that actually promotes
2:04:36and protects those roles,
2:04:37but also protects the freedom inside those roles.
2:04:39And that raises a more fundamental question
2:04:41of what exactly liberty is for.
2:04:43And I think that both the right and the left
2:04:44actually tend to make a mistake when they discuss liberty.
2:04:47The left tends to think that liberty is an ultimate good,
2:04:50that simple choice makes a bad thing good,
2:04:52which is not true.
2:04:54And I think the right talks about liberty
2:04:55in almost the same terms sometimes.
2:04:57And, I think that's not true either.
2:04:59The question is whether liberty is of inherent value
2:05:02or instrumental value.
2:05:03Is liberty good in and of itself or is liberty good
2:05:06because it allows you to achieve X, Y or Z?
2:05:09And, I've thought about this one a lot,
2:05:11and I tend to come down on the latter side of the aisle.
2:05:13I mean this is,
2:05:14you asked me areas where I moved,
2:05:14this may be an area where I've moved.
2:05:15Is that I think when you think more shallowly about politics
2:05:18or maybe more quickly because this is how we talk in America
2:05:21is about liberties and rights.
2:05:22We tend to think that the right
2:05:23is what make, not like the political right,
2:05:25rights make things good,
2:05:26liberties make things good.
2:05:28The question really is
2:05:28what are those rights and liberties for?
2:05:30- [Lex] Yeah.
2:05:31- Now, you have to be careful,
2:05:32so that that doesn't shade into tyranny.
2:05:34You can only have liberty to do the thing
2:05:35that I say that you can do.
2:05:37But, there have to be spheres of liberty that are roiling
2:05:40and interesting and filled with debate,
2:05:43but without threatening the chief institutions
2:05:46that surround those liberties.
2:05:47Because if you destroy the institutions,
2:05:48liberties will go too.
2:05:50If you knock down the pillars of the society,
2:05:51the liberties that are on top of those pillars
2:05:53are going to collapse.
2:05:54And, I think if people are feeling as though
2:05:56we're on the verge tyranny, I think that's why.
2:05:59- This is fascinating by the way.
2:06:00It's an instrumental perspective on liberty
2:06:04that's gonna give me a lot to think about.
2:06:07Let me ask a personal question.
2:06:09Was there ever a time that you had a crisis of faith,
2:06:12where you questioned your belief in God?
2:06:14- Sure, and I would,
2:06:16less call it a crisis of faith,
2:06:17and an ongoing question of faith;
2:06:19which I think is,
2:06:20I hope most religious people.
2:06:23The word Israel, right, in Hebrew,
2:06:25Israel means to struggle with God.
2:06:27That's literally what the word means.
2:06:29And so, the idea of struggling with God.
2:06:33Where if you're Jewish or Bene Israel,
2:06:35the idea of struggling with God I think is endemic
2:06:37to the human condition.
2:06:39If you understand what God's doing,
2:06:40then I think you're wrong.
2:06:42And, if you think that that question doesn't matter,
2:06:45then I think you're also wrong.
2:06:46I think that God is a very necessary hypothesis.
2:06:49- So struggle, the struggle with God is life.
2:06:52That is the process of life?
2:06:53- That's right, because you're never gonna get to that
2:06:55answer otherwise your God, and you aren't.
2:06:57- Why does God allow cruelty and suffering in the world?
2:07:00One of the tough questions.
2:07:02- So we're going deep here.
2:07:03There's two types of cruelty and suffering.
2:07:07So if we're talking about human cruelty and suffering,
2:07:09because God does not intervene to prevent people
2:07:11from exercising their free will
2:07:14because to do so would be to deprive human beings
2:07:16of the choice that makes them human.
2:07:18This is the sin of the garden of Eden, basically.
2:07:21Is that God could make you an angel,
2:07:23in which case you wouldn't have the choice
2:07:24to do the wrong thing.
2:07:25But, so long as we are going to allow for cause and effect
2:07:28in a universe shaped by your choice,
2:07:31cruelty and evil are going to exist.
2:07:33And then, there's the question of just the natural cruelty
2:07:36and vicissitudes of life.
2:07:38And, the answer there is I think that God obscures himself.
2:07:40I think that if God were to appear in all of his glory
2:07:43to people on a regular basis,
2:07:45I think that would make faith,
2:07:47you wouldn't need it.
2:07:48There'd be no such thing as faith.
2:07:50It would just be reality.
2:07:52Nobody has to prove to you that the sun rises every day.
2:07:55But, if God is to allow us the choice to believe in Him,
2:07:58which is the ultimate choice from a religious point of view,
2:08:01then He's gonna have to obscure himself behind tragedy
2:08:03and horror and all those other things.
2:08:05I mean, this is a fairly well known capitalistic concept
2:08:08called tzimtzum in Judaism;
2:08:09which is the idea that when God created the universe,
2:08:11He sort of withdrew in order to make space
2:08:14for all of these things to happen.
2:08:16- So God doesn't have a instrumental perspective on liberty?
2:08:20- Right, in a chief sense,
2:08:22He does because the best use of liberty
2:08:24is going to be belief in Him.
2:08:26And you can misuse your liberty, right?
2:08:27There will be consequences
2:08:30if you believe in an afterlife
2:08:31or if you believe in sort of a generalized better version
2:08:34of life led by faith, then liberty does have a purpose.
2:08:37But, He also believes that you have to give people,
2:08:39from a cosmic perspective,
2:08:40the liberty to do wrong without threatening
2:08:44all the institutions of society.
2:08:46I mean, that's why it does say in the Bible
2:08:48that if man sheds blood by man,
2:08:49shall his blood be shed, right.
2:08:50That there are punishments,
2:08:51that are in biblical thought for doing things
2:08:55that are wrong.
2:08:56- So for a human being who lacks the faith in God.
2:08:59So if you're an atheist, can you still be a good person?
2:09:02- Of course, 100%.
2:09:04And there are a lot of religious people
2:09:05who are crappy people.
2:09:06- How do I understand that tension?
2:09:08- Well, from a religious perspective,
2:09:09what you would say is that it is perfectly plausible to live
2:09:13in accordance with a set of rules that don't damage
2:09:15other people without believing in God.
2:09:17You just might be understanding the reason
2:09:19for doing that wrong, is what a religious person would say.
2:09:22This is the conversation, again, that I had with Sam.
2:09:25Basically, is you and I agree, I said this to Sam,
2:09:27"You and I agree nearly everything
2:09:28"When it comes to morality.
2:09:29"Like we probably disagree on 15 to 20% of things.
2:09:31"The other 80% is because you grew up
2:09:33"In a Judeo Christian society and so do I.
2:09:34"And we grew up 10 miles from each other,
2:09:36"Around the turn of the millennium."
2:09:37So there's that.
2:09:39So you can perfectly well be an atheist
2:09:42living a good moral decent life
2:09:45because you can live a good moral decent life
2:09:47with regard to other people
2:09:48without believing in God.
2:09:49I don't think you can build a society on that
2:09:50because I think that that relies on
2:09:52the sort of
2:09:55goodness of mankind.
2:09:56Natural goodness of mankind.
2:09:57I don't believe in the natural goodness of mankind.
2:09:58- [Lex] You don't?
2:09:59- No, I believe that man was created
2:10:01both sinful and with the capacity for sin,
2:10:03and the capacity for good.
2:10:04- But, if you let them be on their own, doesn't-
2:10:09- Without social institutions to shape them,
2:10:10I think that that's very likely to go poorly.
2:10:13- Oh, interesting.
2:10:14Well, we came to something we disagree on, but that may be,
2:10:18that might reflect itself in our approach
2:10:20to Twitter as well.
2:10:21(hearty laughing)
2:10:22I think if humans are left on their own,
2:10:26they tend towards good.
2:10:28They definitely have the capacity for good and evil.
2:10:31But, when left on their own,
2:10:33I tend to believe they're good.
2:10:36- I think they might be good with limits.
2:10:38What I mean by that is that what the evidence
2:10:39I think tends to show
2:10:40is that human beings are quite tribal.
2:10:42So what you'll end up with is people who are good
2:10:45with their immediate family,
2:10:46and maybe their immediate neighbors.
2:10:47And, then when they're threatened by an outside tribe,
2:10:49then they kill everyone.
2:10:51Which is sort of the history of civilization
2:10:53in the pre-civilizational era;
2:10:54which was a very violent time.
2:10:56Pre-civilizational era was quite violent.
2:10:58- Do you think on the topic of tribalism
2:11:00in our modern world,
2:11:02what are the pros and cons of tribes?
2:11:05Is that something
2:11:05where we should try to outgrow as a civilization?
2:11:08- I don't think it's ever gonna be possible
2:11:10to fully outgrow tribalism.
2:11:12I think it's a natural human condition
2:11:14to want to be with people who think like you
2:11:17or have a common set of beliefs.
2:11:19And, I think trying to obliterate
2:11:21that in the name of a universalism,
2:11:22likely leads to utopian results
2:11:24that have devastating consequences.
2:11:25Utopian sort of universalism has been failing every time
2:11:30it's tried, whether you're talking about now
2:11:31it seems to be sort of a liberal universalism;
2:11:34which is being rejected by a huge number of people
2:11:36around the world in various different cultures.
2:11:38Or you're talking about religious universalism,
2:11:40which typically comes with religious tyranny
2:11:44or they're talking about communistic
2:11:45or Nazistic sort of universalism,
2:11:48which comes with mass slaughter.
2:11:49So this is, universalism, I'm not a believer in.
2:11:52I think that you have some values
2:11:55that are fairly limited, that all human beings
2:11:58should hold in common, and that's pretty much it.
2:12:01I think that everybody should have the ability
2:12:03to join with their own culture.
2:12:06I think how we define tribes is a different thing.
2:12:08So I think that tribes should not be defined
2:12:10by innate physical characteristics, for example.
2:12:13Because I think that, thank God,
2:12:15as a civilization we've outgrown that.
2:12:17And I think that that is a childish way to view the world.
2:12:22And, all the tall people aren't a tribe.
2:12:24All the black people aren't,
2:12:24all the white people aren't a tribe.
2:12:26- So the tribes should be formed over ideas
2:12:28versus physical characteristic?
2:12:29- That's right, which is why,
2:12:30actually to go back to sort of the beginning
2:12:31of the conversation when it comes to Jews,
2:12:34I'm not a big believer in ethnic Judaism.
2:12:38As a person who takes Judaism seriously.
2:12:41Judaism is more to me than you were born with a last name
2:12:43like Berg or Stein.
2:12:45And so I-
2:12:45- Hitler would disagree with you.
2:12:47- He would disagree with me.
2:12:48But that's 'cause he was a tribalist.
2:12:49Who thought in racial terms.
2:12:51- So maybe robots will help us see humans as one tribe,
2:12:55maybe that, as long as-
2:12:57- This is Reagan's idea, right?
2:12:57Reagan said, "Well, if there's an alien invasion,
2:12:59"Then we'll all be on the same side.
2:13:00"So I'll go over to the Soviets and we'll talk about it."
2:13:01- There's some deep truth to that.
2:13:05What does it mean to be a good man?
2:13:08The various role that a human being takes on
2:13:12in this role theory that you've spoken about.
2:13:14What does it mean to be good?
2:13:17- It means to perform,
2:13:19now I will do Aristotle.
2:13:20It means to perform the function well.
2:13:23What Aristotle says is the good, is not like moral good,
2:13:25moral evil, in the way that we tend to think about it.
2:13:28He meant that a good cup holds liquid,
2:13:31a good spoon holds soup.
2:13:33It means that, a thing that is broken
2:13:35can't hold those things, right?
2:13:36So the idea of being a good person means that you are
2:13:38fulfilling the function for which you were made.
2:13:41It's a teleological view of humanity.
2:13:44So if you're a good father,
2:13:45this means that you are bringing up your child in durable
2:13:47values that is going to bring them up healthy,
2:13:50capable of protecting themselves and passing on
2:13:52the traditional wisdom of the ages
2:13:53to future generations;
2:13:54while allowing for the capacity for innovation.
2:13:56That'd be being a good father.
2:13:57Being a good spouse would mean protecting and unifying
2:14:01with your spouse and building a safe family,
2:14:04and a place to raise children.
2:14:07Being a good citizen of your community
2:14:09means protecting the fellow citizens of your community;
2:14:11while incentivizing them to build for themselves.
2:14:15And, it becomes actually much easier to think of how to,
2:14:18this is why I like the role theory because it's very hard,
2:14:21since in sort of in virtue theory,
2:14:22to say be generous.
2:14:23How does that manifest?
2:14:24I don't know.
2:14:25I don't know what that looks like.
2:14:26Sometimes being generous might being not generous
2:14:29to other people.
2:14:30When Aristotle says that you should be benevolent,
2:14:33what does that mean?
2:14:34This is very vague.
2:14:35When I say be a good dad,
2:14:36most people sort of have a gut level understanding
2:14:38of what it means to be a good dad.
2:14:38And mostly, they have a gut level understanding
2:14:40of what it means to be a really bad dad.
2:14:42And so, what it means to be a good man is to fulfill those
2:14:45roles as many of them as you can,
2:14:48properly and at full function.
2:14:49And that's a very hard job.
2:14:51And I've said before that,
2:14:52because I engage a lot with the public and all of this,
2:14:55the word great comes up a lot.
2:14:56What is it to be a great leader?
2:14:57What is it to be a great person?
2:14:58And I've always said to people,
2:14:59it's actually fairly easy to be great.
2:15:01It's very difficult to be good.
2:15:03There are a lot of very great people, who are not very good,
2:15:05and they're not a lot of good people.
2:15:06And most of them,
2:15:08frankly, most good people
2:15:11die mourned by their family and friends.
2:15:13And two generations later, they're forgotten.
2:15:14But, those are the people who incrementally move the ball
2:15:16forward in the world sometimes much more than the people
2:15:18who are considered great.
2:15:20- Understand the role in your life that involves being a cup
2:15:24and be damn good at it.
2:15:25- Exactly, that's right.
2:15:27- [Lex] Hold the soup, it's very-
2:15:29- Jordan Peterson.
2:15:30- Yeah, it's like lobster with Jordan Peterson.
2:15:32- [Ben] Exactly, exactly.
2:15:33I think people quote you for years and years
2:15:35to come on that.
2:15:37What advice would you give,
2:15:38a lot of young people look up to you,
2:15:40what advice, despite their better judgment.
2:15:43No, I'm just kidding. (hearty laughing)
2:15:45Only kidding, only kidding.
2:15:47They seriously look up to you and draw inspiration
2:15:50from your ideas, from your bold thinking.
2:15:52What advice would you give to them?
2:15:54How to live a life worth living?
2:15:57How to have a career
2:15:59they can be proud of and everything like that?
2:16:04- Live out the values that you think
2:16:05are really important
2:16:06and seek those values in others,
2:16:08would be the first piece of advice.
2:16:10Second piece of advice,
2:16:11don't go on Twitter until you're 26.
2:16:14- Why 26?
2:16:14- Because your brain is fully developed at that point.
2:16:18As I said early on,
2:16:19I was on social media and writing columns
2:16:21from the time I was 17.
2:16:23It was a great opportunity.
2:16:24And as it turns out,
2:16:25a great temptation to say enormous numbers of stupid things.
2:16:28When you're young,
2:16:29you're kind of trying out ideas
2:16:30and you're putting them on,
2:16:31you're taking them off.
2:16:32And, social media permenatizes those things
2:16:33and engraves them in stone,
2:16:35and then that's used against you for the rest of your life.
2:16:37So I tell young people this all the time,
2:16:38if you wanna be on social media, be on social media,
2:16:40but don't post, watch.
2:16:42If you wanna take in information, more importantly,
2:16:44you should read books.
2:16:45As far as other advice,
2:16:47I'd say engage in your community.
2:16:50There's no substitute for engaging in your community,
2:16:52and engage in interpersonal action
2:16:53because that that will soften you
2:16:55and make you a better person.
2:16:57I've become a better person since I got married.
2:16:59I've become an even better person since I've had kids.
2:17:01So you can imagine how terrible I was
2:17:02before all these things.
2:17:05Engaging your community does allow you
2:17:08to build the things that matter
2:17:09on the most local possible level.
2:17:12The outcome, by the way, of the sort of the politics
2:17:13of fulfillment that I was talking about earlier
2:17:15is a lot of localism.
2:17:16Because the roles that I'm talking about
2:17:18are largely local roles.
2:17:19So that stuff has to be protected locally.
2:17:21I think we focus way too much in this country and others,
2:17:23on world beating solutions, national solutions,
2:17:26solutions that apply to hundreds of millions of people.
2:17:28How about we get to the solutions that apply for like five?
2:17:31And then we get to the solutions that apply to like 20,
2:17:33and then we get to the solutions that involve 200 people
2:17:35or a thousand people.
2:17:36Let's solve that stuff.
2:17:37And I think the solutions at the higher level
2:17:40flow bottom up, not top down.
2:17:41- What about mentors and maybe role models?
2:17:45Have you had a mentor or maybe people you look up to,
2:17:49either you interacted on a local scale,
2:17:51you actually knew them or somebody you really looked up to?
2:17:53- For me, I'm very lucky.
2:17:54I grew up in a very solid two-parent household.
2:17:56I'm extremely close with my parents.
2:17:58I've lived near my parents literally my entire life,
2:18:00with the exception of three years of law school.
2:18:03Right now, they live a mile and a half from us.
2:18:07- What'd you learn from about life
2:18:09from your parents and your father?
2:18:13- Oh man, so many things from my parents.
2:18:16- [Lex] Good and bad.
2:18:16- That's a hard one.
2:18:17I mean, I think the good stuff from my dad
2:18:21is that you should hold true to your values.
2:18:22He's very big on, you have values.
2:18:24The values are important and hold true to them.
2:18:25- Did you understand what your values are?
2:18:27What your principles are early on?
2:18:29- Fairly quickly, yeah.
2:18:31And so, he was very big on that,
2:18:33which is why, for example,
2:18:34I get asked a lot in the Jewish community,
2:18:36why I wear a kippah.
2:18:37And the answer is,
2:18:38it never occurred to me to take off the kippah.
2:18:39I always wore it.
2:18:41Why would I take it off at any point?
2:18:42That's the life that I wanna live.
2:18:43And, that's the way it is.
2:18:46So that was a big one from my dad.
2:18:48From my mom, practicality.
2:18:49My dad is more of a dreamer.
2:18:50My mom is much more practical.
2:18:51And so, the sort of lessons that I learned
2:18:55from my dad are that you can have,
2:18:57the counter lesson is that you can have a good idea,
2:18:59but if you don't have a plan for implementation,
2:19:01then it doesn't end up as reality.
2:19:02And I think actually he's learned that
2:19:04better over the course of his life too.
2:19:06But, my dad from the time I was very young,
2:19:09he wanted me to engage with other adults
2:19:11and he wanted me to learn from other people.
2:19:13And, one of his rules was if he didn't know something,
2:19:15he would find somebody who he thought did know the thing
2:19:17for me to talk to.
2:19:19That was a big thing.
2:19:20So, I'm very lucky.
2:19:21I have wonderful parents.
2:19:22As far as sort of other mentors,
2:19:24in terms of the media, Andrew Breitbart was, was a mentor.
2:19:27Andrew, obviously, he was kind of known in his latter days,
2:19:30I think more for the militancy
2:19:32than when I was very close with him.
2:19:34- So for somebody like me who doesn't,
2:19:36who knows more about the militancy.
2:19:38Can you tell me what makes him a great man?
2:19:42- What made Andrew great is that he engaged with everyone.
2:19:45I mean, everyone.
2:19:46So there are videos of him rollerblading down the boulevard,
2:19:50and people would be protesting,
2:19:51and he would literally roller blade up to them
2:19:53and he would say,
2:19:54"Let's go to lunch together."
2:19:54And, he would just do this.
2:19:55That's actually who Andrew was.
2:19:57- What was the thinking behind that?
2:19:59- That's who he was.
2:20:00He was just garrulous.
2:20:01He was much more outgoing than I am actually.
2:20:02He was very warm with people.
2:20:04Like for me, I would say that with Andrew,
2:20:07I knew Andrew for, let's say I met him when I was 16.
2:20:11He passed away when I would've been 28.
2:20:14So I knew Andrew for 10, 12 years.
2:20:17And people who met Andrew for about 10 minutes
2:20:22knew Andrew 99% as well as I knew Andrew
2:20:25because he was just all out front.
2:20:26Everything was out here.
2:20:27And, he loved talking to people.
2:20:28He loved engaging with people.
2:20:30And so, this made him a lot of fun and unpredictable,
2:20:32and fun to watch and all of that.
2:20:34And then, I think Twitter got to him.
2:20:36Twitter is one of the lessons I learned from Andrew
2:20:38is the counter lesson.
2:20:39Which is Twitter can poison you.
2:20:41Twitter can really wreck you.
2:20:41If you spend all day on Twitter,
2:20:43reading the comments and getting angry at people
2:20:45who are talking about you,
2:20:46it becomes a very difficult life.
2:20:47And I think that, in the last year of his life,
2:20:49Andrew got very caught up in that
2:20:51because of a series of sort of circumstances.
2:20:54- It can actually affect your mind.
2:20:55It can actually make you resentful.
2:20:56All that kind of stuff.
2:20:57- I tend to agree with that.
2:20:59But, the lesson that I learned from Andrew is
2:21:01engage with everybody.
2:21:02Take joy in sort of the mission that you're given.
2:21:06And, you can't always fulfill that.
2:21:07Sometimes, it's really rough and difficult.
2:21:09I'm not gonna pretend that it's all fun
2:21:11and rainbows all the time,
2:21:12'cause it isn't.
2:21:13And some of the stuff that I have to cover I don't like,
2:21:15and some of the things I have to say,
2:21:16I don't particularly like.
2:21:18That happens.
2:21:19But, that's what I learned from Andrew.
2:21:22As far as sort of other mentors,
2:21:23I had some teachers when I was a kid,
2:21:25who said things that stuck with me.
2:21:27I had fourth grade teacher named Ms. Genetty who said,
2:21:30"Don't let potential be written on your tombstone."
2:21:32Which is a pretty...
2:21:34- That's a good line.
2:21:35- It's a great line, particularly to a fourth grader.
2:21:40There was guy, an 11th grade English teacher
2:21:41named Anthony Miller, who was terrific, really good writer.
2:21:43He had studied with James Joyce
2:21:45at Trinity College in Dublin.
2:21:46And so, he and I really got along.
2:21:48And, he helped my writing a lot.
2:21:51- Did you ever have doubt in yourself?
2:21:53Especially, as you gotten into the public eye
2:21:56with all the attacks.
2:21:56Did you ever doubt your ability to stay strong,
2:21:59to be able to be a voice of the ideas
2:22:01that you represent?
2:22:03- Definitely, I don't doubt my ability to say
2:22:05what I wanna say.
2:22:06I doubt my ability to handle the emotional blow back
2:22:08of saying it.
2:22:09Meaning that, that's difficult.
2:22:10I mean, again, to take just one example.
2:22:14In 2016, the ADL measured that I was the number one target
2:22:17of antisemitism on planet Earth.
2:22:19That's not fun, that's unpleasant.
2:22:22And when you take critiques, not from Antisemites,
2:22:24but when you take critiques from people generally,
2:22:27we talked about near the beginning,
2:22:29how you surround yourself with people
2:22:31who are gonna give you good feedback.
2:22:32Sometimes it's hard to tell.
2:22:33Sometimes people are giving you feedback
2:22:35and you don't know whether it's well motivated
2:22:36or poorly motivated.
2:22:38And if you are trying to be a decent person,
2:22:40you can't cut off the mechanism of feedback.
2:22:42And so, what that means is
2:22:43sometimes you take to heart the wrong thing
2:22:45or you take it to heart too much,
2:22:48you're not light enough about it.
2:22:49You take it very, very seriously.
2:22:51You lose sleep over it.
2:22:52Man, I can't tell you the number of nights
2:22:53where I've just not slept
2:22:54because of some critique somebody's made of me.
2:22:55And I've thought to myself, maybe that's right.
2:22:58And sometimes it is right.
2:23:00- Some of that is good to stew in that criticism,
2:23:03but some of that can destroy you.
2:23:05Do you have a shortcut?
2:23:05So Rogan has talked about taking a lot of mushrooms.
2:23:09Since you're not into the mushroom thing.
2:23:13What's your escape from that?
2:23:14Like when you get low,
2:23:16when you can't sleep?
2:23:17- Usually writing is a big one for me.
2:23:19The writing for me is cathartic.
2:23:20I love writing that.
2:23:22That is a huge one.
2:23:24Spending time with my family.
2:23:26Again, I usually have a close circle of friends,
2:23:29who I will talk with
2:23:30in order to sort of bounce ideas off of them.
2:23:32And then, once I've kind of talked it through,
2:23:35I tend to feel a little bit better.
2:23:37Exercise is also a big one.
2:23:39I mean, if I go a few days with that exercise,
2:23:40I tend to get pretty grumpy pretty quickly.
2:23:43I gotta keep this six pack going somehow, man.
2:23:45(hearty laughing)
2:23:46- There you and Rogan agree.
2:23:49Well, we haven't, aside from Twitter mentioned love.
2:23:52What's the role of love in the human condition?
2:23:55Ben Shapiro.
2:23:57- Man, don't get asked for love too much.
2:23:59In fact, I was-
2:24:02- [Lex] You don't get that question on college campuses?
2:24:04- No, I typically don't, actually.
2:24:05In fact, we were at an event recently,
2:24:08it was a Daily Wire event,
2:24:09and in the middle of this event,
2:24:11was a meet and greet with some of the audience.
2:24:13And, in the middle of this event,
2:24:14this guy walks by with this girl.
2:24:16They're talking and they're talking to me
2:24:17and their time kind of runs, the security's moving them.
2:24:19And he says, "No, no, no, wait.
2:24:20"Hold on a minute."
2:24:21And he gets down on one knee and he proposes to the girl
2:24:22in front of me.
2:24:23And I said to him,
2:24:24"This is the weirdest proposal in human history.
2:24:27"What, what, what is happening right now?
2:24:29"I was your choice of cupid here?"
2:24:31He said, "Well, you know,
2:24:32"We actually like got together
2:24:33"'Cause we listened to your show."
2:24:35And I said,
2:24:35"I can perform it like a Jewish marriage right now.
2:24:37"We're gonna need like a glass, we're gonna need some wine.
2:24:39"It's gonna get weird real fast."
2:24:41But yeah, so love doctor.
2:24:43I'm typically not asked too much about.
2:24:46The role of love
2:24:50is important in binding together human beings,
2:24:54who ought to be bound together.
2:24:55And the role of respect is even more important in binding
2:24:58together broader groups of people.
2:25:00I think one of the mistakes that we make in politics
2:25:01is trying to substitute love for respect
2:25:03or respect for love.
2:25:03And, I think that's a big mistake.
2:25:05So I do not bear tremendous love
2:25:09in the same sense that I do for my family,
2:25:10for random strangers.
2:25:12I don't, I love my family.
2:25:14I love my kids.
2:25:14Anybody who tells you they love your kid
2:25:16as much as you love your kid
2:25:16is lying to you.
2:25:17It's not true.
2:25:18I love my community more than I love other communities.
2:25:22I love my state more than I love other states.
2:25:24I love my country more than I love other countries.
2:25:26That's all normal and that's all good.
2:25:29The problem of empathy
2:25:30can be when that becomes so tight knit
2:25:32that you're not outward looking,
2:25:34that you don't actually have respect for other people.
2:25:36So in the local level,
2:25:38you need love in order to protect you and shield you,
2:25:40and give you the strength to go forward.
2:25:41And then beyond that,
2:25:42you need a lot of respect for people
2:25:43who are not in the circle of love.
2:25:46And I think trying to extend love to people
2:25:48who either are not gonna love you back
2:25:52or are gonna slap you in the face for it,
2:25:55or who you're just not that close to.
2:25:56It runs the risk of being arsehats and fake.
2:26:01Or it can actually be counterproductive in some senses.
2:26:04- Well, there's some sense
2:26:06in which you could have love for other human beings
2:26:09just based on the humanity that connects everybody.
2:26:14So you love this whole project
2:26:17that we're a part of
2:26:19and actually, sort of another thing, we disagree on.
2:26:23So loving a stranger,
2:26:26like having that basic empathy
2:26:28and compassion towards a stranger,
2:26:30even if it can hurt you,
2:26:32I think it's ultimately...
2:26:36That to me is what it means to be a good man.
2:26:39To live a good life is to have that compassion
2:26:42towards strangers.
2:26:43'Cause to me, it's almost,
2:26:44it's easy and natural and obvious
2:26:47to love people close to you.
2:26:49But, to step outside yourself and to love others.
2:26:52I think that's the fabric of a good society.
2:26:54You don't think there's value to that?
2:26:56- I think there can be,
2:26:57but I think we're also discussing love
2:26:58almost in two different senses.
2:27:00Meaning that when I talk about love,
2:27:02what I think of immediately is the love I bear for my wife
2:27:05and kids or my parents or my siblings.
2:27:08- [Lex] What about friendship?
2:27:09- Or the love of my close friends.
2:27:11But, I think
2:27:13that using that same term to describe how I feel
2:27:16about strangers, I think would just be inaccurate.
2:27:18And so, that's why I'm suggesting that respect
2:27:21might be a more solid
2:27:22and realistic foundation for the way that we treat people
2:27:26far away from us or people who are strangers.
2:27:27Respect for their dignity, respect for their priorities,
2:27:30respect for their role in life.
2:27:33It might be too much of an ask, in other words.
2:27:36There might be the rare human being
2:27:37who's capable of literally loving a homeless man
2:27:39on the street the way they he loves his own family.
2:27:41But, if you respect the homeless man on the street,
2:27:42the way that you respect your own family,
2:27:46because everyone is deserved,
2:27:48everyone deserves that respect.
2:27:49I think that you get to the same end
2:27:51without forcing people into a position
2:27:53of unrealistically expecting themselves
2:27:56to feel a thing they don't feel.
2:27:58One of the big questions in religion
2:28:00that comes up is God makes certain requests
2:28:02that you feel certain ways.
2:28:04You're supposed to be (indistinct).
2:28:05You're supposed to be happy about certain things
2:28:07or you're supposed to love thy neighbor as thyself.
2:28:10You'll notice that in that statement,
2:28:12it's thy neighbor.
2:28:13It's not just like generally anyone.
2:28:15It's love thy neighbors, in any case.
2:28:17- I think that extends to anyone that follows you
2:28:19on Twitter, thy neighbor,
2:28:21because God anticipated the social network aspect
2:28:24that is not constrained by geography.
2:28:27- Yeah, I'm gonna differ with you on the interpretation
2:28:29on that, but in any case.
2:28:32The kind of extension of
2:28:35love outwards might be too big an ask.
2:28:37So maybe we can start with respect
2:28:39and then hopefully out of that respect can grow
2:28:41something more,
2:28:43if people earn their way in.
2:28:45'Cause I think that one of the big problems
2:28:46when we were talking about universalism
2:28:47is when people say,
2:28:48"I'm a world citizen.
2:28:49"I love people of the other country.
2:28:51"As much as I love myself or as much as I love my country."
2:28:54It tends to actually lead to,
2:28:56and almost cram down utopianism.
2:28:59That, I think can be kind of difficult
2:29:01because with love
2:29:02comes a certain expectation of solidarity.
2:29:06And I think,
2:29:08when you love your family, you love your wife,
2:29:09there's a certain level of solidarity that is required
2:29:11inside the home in order to preserve
2:29:13the most loving kind of home.
2:29:14And so, if you love everybody,
2:29:16then that sort of implies a certain level of solidarity
2:29:18that may not exist.
2:29:18So maybe the idea is for me,
2:29:21start with respect,
2:29:22and then maybe as people respect each other more,
2:29:24then love is an outgrowth of that as opposed to starting
2:29:26with love and then hoping that respect develops.
2:29:27- Yeah, there's a danger that that word becomes empty
2:29:30and instead is used for dogmatic kind of utopianism.
2:29:36- I mean, this is the way that, for example,
2:29:38religious theocracies very often work.
2:29:40We love you so much,
2:29:41we have to convert you.
2:29:42- So let's start with respect.
2:29:44What I would love to see after our conversation today,
2:29:48is to see a Ben Shapiro
2:29:50that continues the growth on Twitter
2:29:52of being even more respectful than you've already been.
2:29:55And maybe one day, converting that into love on Twitter.
2:29:59If I could see that in this world,
2:30:01that would make me die a happy man.
2:30:04- [Ben] Wow.
2:30:05- A little bit more.
2:30:06- If I can make that happen for you.
2:30:07- Love in the world, for me, as a gift, for me.
2:30:10- I'll try to make that happen.
2:30:10I do have one question, I'm gonna need you to tell me.
2:30:14Which jokes are okay?
2:30:15Are jokes still okay?
2:30:16- So yeah, can I just run your Twitter from now on?
2:30:19You just send it to me.
2:30:20- 100%, I will pre-screen you the jokes,
2:30:22and you can tell me if this is a loving joke
2:30:24or if this is a hate filled.
2:30:26- People will be very surprised
2:30:27by the all the heart emojis that start popping up
2:30:29on your Twitter.
2:30:31Ben, I thank you so much for being bold and fearless,
2:30:33and exploring ideas, and your Twitter aside.
2:30:37Thank you for being just good faith and all the arguments
2:30:40and all the conversations you're having with people.
2:30:41It's a huge honor.
2:30:43Thank you for talking to me.
2:30:44- Hey, thanks for having me.
2:30:45I really appreciate it.
2:30:46- Thanks for listening to this conversation
2:30:47with Ben Shapiro.
2:30:49To support this podcast,
2:30:50please check out our sponsors in the description.
2:30:53And now, let me leave you with some words
2:30:55from Ben Shapiro himself.
2:30:56"Freedom of speech and thought matters,
2:30:59"Especially when it is speech and thought
2:31:02"With which we disagree.
2:31:04"The moment the majority decides to destroy people
2:31:07"For engaging a thought it dislikes,
2:31:09"Thought crime becomes a reality."
2:31:13Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

About this transcript

This page contains the full transcript of Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #336 by Lex Fridman, generated from the public captions YouTube serves with the video. The transcript has 31,350 words across 4,373 segments, with the original timestamps preserved so you can click any line to jump to that moment in the embedded player.

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