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

the great light we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us, they are a class apart, all those who have sinned in history are very different people from me, Robert George, the Princeton philosopher, to whom He likes to do a kind of thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hands if they had lived in Alabama in 1861 how many of you would be abolitionists and everyone raises their hands he says of course that's not true of course that's not true true the best protection against evil is to recognize that it is found in every human heart and the possibility of it taking over you.

Do you ever sit in the silence of your mind and think: Am I participating in evil? The following is a conversation with Ben Shapiro, a conservative. Political commentator host Ben Shapiro, co-founder of the Daily Wire and author of several books, including The Authoritarian Moment. The right side of history and facts don't care about your feelings, whatever your political leanings. I humbly asked you to try to put it aside and listen with an open mind trying to give the most charitable interpretation of the words we say. This is true across the board for this

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, whether the guest is Ben Shapiro or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump or Barack Obama.

I will talk to everyone, from everywhere, from the far left to the far right, from presidents to prisoners, from artists to scientists, from the powerful to the powerless, because we are all human, all capable of Good and Evil, all with fascinating stories and ideas to explore. I just seek to understand and in So I hope to add a little love to the world. This is the live streaming

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to support you. See our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here is Ben Shapiro. Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think of the comments made by? yay, formerly known as Kanye West, about Jews, they are horrible and anti-Semitic and seem to get worse with time.

They started with the weird deathcon 3 tweet and then went into even more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators. I think it was the Pete Davidson Kim Kardashian thing and then the Jews running all the media educating in charge of the financial sector. Jewish town. I mean, there's no, I mean, I called it on my show, there's German Nazism and it's, I mean, it's right. from Protocols of the Elders of Zion, things like do you think those words come from Pain where they come from and you know it's always difficult trying to read someone's mind, what it looks like to me just having experience in my own family, people who They are bipolar.

He seems like a bipolar personality. He looks like someone who is in the middle of a manic episode and when you are manic you tend to say a lot of things that you shouldn't say and you tend to believe that you should. These are the most brilliant things ever said: Washington published an entire article speculating about how bipolarism influences the kind of things that yay was saying and, um, it's hard for me to think that it doesn't influence it, especially because even if he is an anti -Semitic and I have no reason to suspect that he has not given all his comments.

If he had an ounce of common sense he would stop at a certain point and bipolarism tends to take you way past the point where common sense applies, so I mean, me. I imagine it comes from that, I mean, from his comments. I also imagine that he is making the logical mistake that many anti-Semites, racists or bigots make, which is that someone hurt me. That person is a Jew, therefore all Jews are evil. That jump of a person did something to me. I don't like who is a member of a particular race or class and therefore everyone of that razor class is bad.

I mean, that's textbook bigotry and that's pretty obvious what he's engaging in here, so jumping from the individual to the group that's how he's been expressing it, right, he keeps talking about his Asian Jews and I saw your interview with him and you kept saying it so just name the agents correctly, just name the people who are screwing you and he wouldn't do it, instead he kept coming back to the general, to the group, to the Jews in general, I mean , that's textbook bigotry and if we put it in any other context, I'd probably recognize it as such for what it's worth. it fuels hate in the world uh what is the way to reverse that process?

What is the way to alleviate hate? The reality is that I think that for most people who are in some way involved with these issues, I don't think they are being convinced to be anti-Semitic for the sake of it. I mean, I think there's a group of people who can get carried away with that. Anti-Semitism is acceptable because yay says what he says and he says it very loudly and he says it over and over again, but yeah, I think, for example, posters appeared in Los Angeles saying that yay is right, well, that group They've been posting anti-Semitic science on highways for years and their groups like to post on systematic billboards where I live in Florida, they've been doing that for years long before they said this kind of stuff, it's like the last chance to It's like getting on that particular train, but listen, I think people have a moral duty to report those things, so there's a degree to which that kind of idea that Jews control the media is normalized.

Jews control of Hollywood agents, higher than statistically represented in the population, are probably Jewish a higher percentage of lawyers in general are probably Jewish a high percentage of accountants are probably Jewish also a higher percentage of engineers are probably Asian as if statistical truths are truths statistics, it does not necessarily mean anything about the nature of the people who are. There is talk of an infinite number of reasons why people may be disproportionately in one area or another, from the cultural to, sometimes, the genetic. I mean are there certain areas of the world where people are better long distance runners because of their genetic adaptations in those particular areas of the world that are not racist, that's just a fact and what starts to get racist is when you attribute it to a bad characteristic to an entire population based on the notion that some members of that population are doing bad things, yes, there is a jump between It is also possible that record label owners as a group have a type of culture in which artists F's over surely don't treat artists fairly and it's also possible that there is a high representation of Jews in the group of people who own record labels, but it's a small but very big leap that people make from the group who own labels record labels to all Jews, and I think one of the other problems as well is that anti-Semitism is fascinating because it breaks down into so many different parts. meaning that if you look at different types of antisemitism, if you're racist against black people, it's usually because you're racist based on the color of their skin, if you're racist, if you're racist against Jews. you are anti-Semitic, so there are actually a few different ways that break down, you have anti-Semitism in terms of ethnicity, which is like Nazi anti-Semitism, you have Jewish ancestry, you have a Jewish grandparent, therefore, it is your blood that is corrupt and you will inherently have bad properties, then there is a kind of old school religious anti-Semitism, which is that Jews are Christ-killers or Jews are children of pigs and monkeys and therefore Judaism is bad and therefore the Jews.

They are bad and in some ways the way you get out of that anti-Semitism, historically speaking, is a mass conversion, and most of the anti-Semitism for a couple of thousand years was actually not ethnic, but much more deep-rooted. on this kind of thing, right? if you convert it out of the faith, then the anti-Semitism is alleviated, quote, unquote, and then there is a kind of strange political anti-Semitism, which is that the members of a group that I don't like are disproportionately Jewish, therefore all Jews . are members of this group or are predominantly represented in this group, then you will see Nazis saying that communists are Jews, you will see communists saying that Nazis are Jews or you will see communists saying that capitalists are rather Jews and that en The strange thing about anti-Semitism is that there are Jews behind every corner.

It's basically one big conspiracy theory, unlike many other forms of racism that aren't actually conspiracy theories. Anti-Semitism tends to be a conspiracy theory about believers in power. controlled by a shadowy group of people who meet behind closed doors to control things, yes, the most absurd illustration of anti-Semitism and just like you said is Stalin against Hitler over Poland, that every bad guy was a Jew, right?, like that was each enemy, there are many different enemy groups, intellectuals, politicians, etc. Military and behind any movement that is considered an enemy of the Nazis and any movement that is considered an enemy of the Soviet army are the Jews, what is the fact that Hitler took power? he teaches you about human nature when you look back at the history of the 20th century, what do you learn from that time?

I mean, there are a lot of lessons about Hitler's seizure of power. The first thing I think people should recognize about Hitler's takeover. is that power had been centralized in the government before Hitler took it over, so if you really look at the history of Nazi Germany, the Weimar Republican effectively collapsed, power had been centralized in the chancellery, uh, and really under Hindenburg for a couple of years before. that and that's why it was only a matter of time until someone who was evil took power and that's why the struggle between the reds and the browns in Nazism in pre-Nazi Germany led to this kind of upward spiral of radical sentiment that allowed Hitler enter through the front door, not the back door, right, he was elected, so you think the communists could have taken power too.

I mean, there's no doubt they'll bring him to power. There was a lot of force when speaking to Germany. Do you think there was an underlying current that would have led to an atrocity if the communists had taken power, it wouldn't have been the same atrocity, but obviously the communists in Soviet Russia exactly at this time were committing haladimir, yeah right, so That's how it was, where there were very few good ones. guys, in terms of good parties, the moderate parties were being dragged by the radicals into an alliance with them to avoid the worst case scenario from the other, so if you look, I'm a little fascinated by the history of this period because It really speaks to how a democracy breaks down.

I mean, the Republic of the 1920s was a very liberal democracy, how does a liberal democracy decompose into outright fascism and then into genocide? And there is a character who, as you know, was very prominent in the history of that time. and in Franz von Papen, who was actually the penultimate Chancellor of the Republic before Hitler, so he was the chancellor and then he handed it over to Schleicher and then he was done. Schleicher ended up collapsing and that ended up handing power to Hitler. daddy was perplexed by Hitler becoming Chancellor uh daddy was a Catholic democrat, he didn't like Hitler, he thought Hitler was a radical and a madman, but he also thought that Hitler, being a buffoon, as he saw it, was essentially going to be usable by the right forces to prevent the communists from taking power perhaps to restore some sort of legitimacy to the regime because it was popular for Papin to retain power and then immediately after Hitler took power Hitler basically kills all of Hitler's friends Peyton, daddy in quotes, loyalty remains and ends up helping the Angeles and Austra.

You know, this is all really interesting, mainly because it speaks to the great light that we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us, they are classified people who do bad things people who support evil people people who are not like us and that's an easy call everyone everyone in history who has sinned is a person who is very different from me, Robert George, the Princeton philosopher, likes to do a kind of thought experiment in his classes in which he asks People raise your hands if you had lived in Alabama in 1861, how many of you would be abolitionists?

And everyone raises their hand. He says, of course. That's not true, of course, that's not true, right? The best protection against evil is to recognize that it resides in every human heart and the possibility of it taking over you, so you must be very cautious when approaching these problems and back and As for

politics

, the type of bipolarity of

politics

, or polarization in politics might be a better way to put it, you know, it makes it very easy to fall for the Rock'em sock'em robots that, intheory, they could eventually allow You have to support someone who is really scary and awful to stop someone you think is more scary and awful.

By the way, you see that this type of language now predominates in almost the entire Western world. TRUE? My political enemy is an enemy of democracy. enemy is going to destroy the Republic, my political enemy is going to be the person who destroys the country we live in and then that person has to be stopped by any means necessary and that is a dangerous thing, so the communists had to be stopped in the Nazi Germany and that's why they are the devil and any useful buffoon, as long as it is effective against the communists, would do, have you ever wondered?

People who participate in evil may not understand that they are doing evil. Do you ever sit in the silence of your mind and think: Am I participating in evil? I'm serious, my business partner and I, one of our favorite memes is uh, from a British comedy show The Name Escapes Me of these two guys who are members of the SS and they're dressed in SS uniforms and uniforms black people with skulls and they say to each other. he says to the other guy, you notice like the British, the symbol is kind of cute and it's like it's like an eagle and, but it's a skull and crossbones, you see the Americans, you see that they have blue uniforms, they are very pretty and quite awesome jet black we're the bad guys and you know, that's it and the truth is we look back at the Nazis and say well of course they were the bad guys, they wore black uniforms, they had Jack Boots and they had this and of course Of course, Of course, they were the bad guys, but evil rarely presents its face so clearly, so yeah, I mean, I think you have to constantly think along those lines and hopefully you try to avoid it, yeah, you can just do the best a human being can do, but Yes, I mean the answer is yes.

Yes I would say that I spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on whether I am doing the right thing and I may not always do the right thing. I'm sure a lot of people think I'm doing the wrong thing on a daily basis, but it's definitely a question that has to enter your mind as a historically aware person and, hopefully, more women in person. Do you think you are mentally strong enough if you realize that you are? on the wrong side of history, to change sides, very few people in history seem to be strong enough to do that.

I mean, I think the answer, I hope, would be yes, you never know until the time comes and you have to do it. To say that holding unorthodox opinions in a wide variety of areas is something I've done before. I'm the only person I've ever heard of in public life who has a list on his website of all the fools and idiots. things I've ever said, uh, so where do I go and say, is this why I still believe this or is this why what I said was terrible and stupid, yeah, um, and I'm sure the list will be a lot. longer, yes, look. go ahead and continue on top of that, yes exactly, yes it's actually a super long list, people should check it out and it's pretty honest and raw.

What do you think? Interesting to ask given how pro-life you are about Yay's comments about comparing. the Holocaust to the 900,000 abortions in the United States a year, so I'll take this from two angles as a pro-life person. I didn't actually find it offensive because if you believe, as I do, that the unborn and unborn lives deserve protection, then the slaughter of just under a million of them every year for the last 50 years is a historic tragedy on its face. pair of a holocaust from an outside perspective. I understand why people would say there is a difference in how they view the unborn.

As for how people view, say, a seven-year-old child being murdered in the Holocaust as if the visceral power and evil of the Nazis drove adult human beings and small children into gas chambers, you can't compare to a person who even from a pro-life perspective may not fully understand the consequences of their own decisions or from a protective pro-choice perspective fully understands the consequences but simply does not believe that person is a person who is actually different , so I understand both sides. However, I was not offended by Yay's comments in that way because if you are a pro-life human being then you believe that what is happening is a large-scale tragedy that involves the dehumanization of an entire class of people. the preborn then the philosophical you understand the comparison I do it for sure so in your comments in the jump from the individual to the group I would like to ask you are you one of the most effective people in the world who attacks the left and sometimes they can fall into attacks in the group Are you concerned that there's the same kind of oversimplification that yay is doing about the Jewish people that you can sometimes do with the left as a group?

So when I talk about the left, talking about a philosophy, I'm not really talking about individual human beings as a group of leftists and then I try to name who the members of this individual group are. I also make a distinction between the left and liberals, there are many people who liberals who disagree with me on taxes disagree with me on foreign policy disagree with me on many things the people I'm talking about in general and I'm talking about the left in the United States are people who believe that alternative views should be adopted that are silenced because they are harmful and harmful simply because of disagreement, so that's a distinction, the second distinction again is when I talk about right versus left , I'm usually talking about a battle of competing philosophies, so I'm not talking about typically It would be difficult if you put a person in front of me and said whether this person is left or right, I just met them.

I couldn't label it in the same way that if you met someone in the name of Greenstein, you immediately got yourself or made a black person into a black person and adherence to a philosophy makes you a member of a group, if I believe that philosophy is bad, that doesn't necessarily mean that you as a person are. bad, but it means I think your philosophy is bad, yeah, so the grouping is based on philosophy versus something like a race like this, the color of your skin or race is in the case of the Jewish people, so it's something different. you can be a little more indifferent and careless and attack a group because you are ultimately attacking a set of ideas.

Well, I mean, it's really indifferent to attack the set of ideas and I don't know if indifference would be the way I would say it. I tried, I tried to be exact when you know you don't, you don't always get it right, but you know, if I say that I oppose the communist right and then presumably I'm talking about people who believe in the communist Philosophy now the question is whether I'm mislabeling, whether I'm taking someone who is not actually a communist and then putting him in that group of communists, that would be inaccurate, the dangerous thing is that it expands the group in opposition to you. talking about philosophy you're throwing out everyone who's ever said I'm curious about communism I'm curious about socialism because there's like a gradient you know it's like throwing something at you I think Joe Biden said MGA Republicans right you know I think it's a very careless statement because what you immediately jump to is like for Trump, right?

I think in the charitable interpretation that it means a set of ideas, yes, my real problem is with the mega Republican line. The thing about Biden is that he continued in the speech he gave in front of Independence Hall to try to define what it meant to be an American Republican, who is a threat to the Republic, what kind of language he was using and more. late. In the speech, he actually suggested, "Well, you know there are moderate Republicans and moderate Republicans are people who agree with me that reducing inflation works well, that that can't be the dividing line between a mega-Republican and a moderate like a moderate Republican, someone who agrees with you that you have to name me as a Republican who disagrees with you quite strongly but who is not in this group of threats to the Republic You make that distinction We can have. a fair discussion about whether the idea of ​​denying elections for example, turning someone you know into a threat to the institutions, that's a conversation we can have and then we'll have to discuss how much power they have, you know what the real perspective is. , what to delve into it, but you know, I think he was being too broad and labeling all his political enemies under one rubric, now again in politics, things happen all the time.

I'm not going to claim Clean Hands here because I'm sure I've been inaccurate. um, but someone, what would be nice in that particular situation is for someone to read the quote to me and I'll let them know where I've been inaccurate. I'll try to do that and also don't shy away from it. from humor and occasional trolling and mockery and all that kind of stuff to fun and chaos, all that kind of stuff. I mean, you know, I try not to trollery for trollery's sake, but you know if the show isn't entertaining and it's not funny, people aren't going to listen, so you know, if you can't have fun with politics, the truth about politics is that we all take it very seriously because it has some serious ramifications.

Politics is Veep, it's not House of Cards. The general rule of politics is that everyone is an idiot unless proven otherwise, that practically everything is done out of stupidity and not malice, and that if you really see Politics as a comedy you will have a lot more fun, so the difficulty for me is I take politics seriously, but I also have the ability to flip the switch and suddenly everything becomes incredibly fun because it really is like you look at it from a pure entertainment perspective and leave aside the fact that it affects to hundreds of millions. "And then a lot of people watch, you know, President Trump is president.

I mean, he's one of the funniest human beings who's ever lived, watching Kamala Harris be Kamala Harris and talking about how much he loves diagrams." of Venn or electric buses. I mean, that's kind of fun, so I can." If I don't make fun of it then my job gets pretty moody very quickly, yeah it's fun to figure out what the perfect balance is between seeing the humor and absurdity of the game and taking it seriously enough because it affects hundreds of millions of people . People, it's a strange balance to achieve, it's like, eh, I'm afraid that with the Internet everything will become a joke.

I totally agree with this. I will say this. I try to make less jokes about ideas and more jokes about people in the same way I make jokes about myself. I'm pretty modest in terms of humor and I'd say at least half of the drugs on my show are about me reading Tommy John ads and I'm talking about his no since you guarantee me that I'll say things like you know that would help me in the high school because I would have. I mean actually speaking, um, so you know if I can speak that way for myself, I feel like everyone else. i can take it too hard question in 2017 there was a shooting at a mosque in quebec city six people were killed five others were seriously injured the 27 year old gunman consumed a lot of online content and checked a lot of people's twitter accounts, but One of the people he searched quite a bit is you 93 times in the month before the shooting.

If you could talk to that young man, what would you say to him and perhaps other young people who hear this and have hate in their hearts in the same way? What would you tell them? You are wrong if anything I or anyone else in mainstream politics says leads you to violence. You're wrong. You are wrong now again when it comes to things like this. I have a hard and fast rule that I have applied uniformly across the spectrum and that is that I never blame people's politics for other people committing acts of violence unless they are actively advocating violence, so when Ghost Bernie Sanders shoots a congressional baseball game that isn't It's Bernie Sanders' fault I may not like his rhetoric I may not agree with him on everything Bernie Sanders didn't tell someone who was going to shoot himself at a congressional baseball game Congress when some crazy guy in San Francisco goes and hits Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

IM not going to do it. Blame Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, for that when someone threatens Brett Kavanaugh. I'm not going to suggest that that was Joe Biden's fault because it's not Joe Biden's fault. I mean, we can play this game all day and I find that the people who are most intensely focused on playing this game are people who tend to oppose the person's politics rather than sincerely believe that this has led someone to the arms of the god of violence, but you know, I have 4.7 million Twitter. followers I have 8 million followers on Facebook I have 5 million followers on YouTube I imagine some of them are violent people.

I imagine some of them are people who do bad things or want to do bad things and um,I wish there was a wand that we could wave to stop those people from deliberately or mistakenly misinterpreting things as a call for violence, it's just a negative byproduct of the fact that you can reach a lot of people and therefore you know if someone could point out. to the comment that I guess, quote, it led someone to go and literally murder human beings. So I would appreciate it so I can talk about the comment, but I don't mainly because I think if we eliminate agency. of individuals and we, if we blame large-scale political rhetoric for every act of violence, we are not going to the people who are going to pay the price is actually the general population because freedom of expression will disappear if the idea is that things What we say could drive someone who is unbalanced to do something bad, the necessary byproduct is hate, that is, speech is a form of hate, hate is a form of violence, speech is a form of violence, speech must being stopped and that to me is deeply disturbing, so definitely, that 27-year-old man.

The man is the only one responsible for the evil he did, but what if he and others like him are not cases? What if they are people with pain and anger in their hearts? What would you tell them? You are exceptionally influential and other people like you. You who speak passionately about ideas, what do you think is your opportunity to alleviate the hatred in their hearts? If we're talking about people who are not mentally ill and people who are just wrong, I would tell you the same thing I told you. Every other young person in the country needs to find meaning and purpose by forming connections that really matter in a belief system that truly promotes overall prosperity and promotes helping other people, and that's why you know the message I most commonly tell you. young men, it's time for you to grow up, mature, get a job, get married, start a family, take care of the people around you, become a useful part of your community.

I have never, at any point in my career, suggested violence as a resort to political issues and the point of having a political conversation is that it is a conversation if I didn't think it was worth trying to convince people of my point of view, I wouldn't do what I do to live in a way that violence doesn't solve anything no, it doesn't, as if this isn't already a difficult conversation, let me ask you about uh ilhan Omar, you've called his criticism of Israel's policies anti-Semitic. , is there a difference between criticizing? a race of people like the Jews and criticizing the policies of a nation like Israel, of course, of course, I criticize Israel's policies on a fairly regular basis, I guess from a different angle than Noah Omar does, but yeah, I want say.

I criticize the policies of a wide variety of states and, to take an example, I want to say that I have criticized Israel's policy and given control of the temple mounts to the Islamic drive, which effectively prevents anyone, except Muslims, from repair there. I have also criticized the The Israeli government for its colored right of repression can criticize the policies of any government, but that is not what Ohio actually does not believe there should be a state of Israel; believes that Zionism is racism and that the existence of a Jewish state in Israel is itself the great sin is a statement she would make about no other people in any other land should she not say that the French do not deserve a state for the French she would not say that the Somalis would not deserve a state in Somalia she would not say that the German sources of a state in Germany would not say that the 50+ Islamic states that exist around the world do not deserve states of their own;

It is only the Jewish state that has fallen under its significant scrutiny and it also promulgates lies about a specific state by suggesting, for example, that Israel is an apartheid state, which eminently fails to consider that Israel's last Unity government included a party of the era that her Arabs said in the Supreme Court of Israel and everything else and then beyond that, obviously, she is involved in the same kind of antisymmetry that you heard, yeah, right, the thing about It's all about the Benjamin, that American support for Israel is about the Benjamins. and she has had to be exchanged by members of her own party for this sort of thing before she can absolutely empathize with the plight of the Palestinian people.

I mean, you know some of the ugliest things I've said in my career are things I said very early on, when I was 17 18. I started writing syndicated comments. I was 17. Now I'm 38. So pretty much all the dumb things I say practically make me sick, a lot of the dumb things, the plurality of dumb things I've said came from the ages of, I would say, 17 to maybe 23. and they're rooted again in careless thinking. I feel terrible for the people who have lived under the control and currently live under the control of Hamas, which is a domestic or Palestinian terrorist group.

Authority, which is a corrupt oligarchy that steals money from its people and leaves them destitute, or Islamic Jihad, which is a real terrorist group and, in my opinion, the basic rule for the region is that if these groups were willing to make peace with Israel, they would. they will have a state literally tomorrow and if they are not then there will be no bees and it really is that simple if Israel, the formula that is typically used has become a kind of bumper sticker, but it turns out that it is objectively correct if the Palestinians they put down their weapons tomorrow there would be a state if the Israelis put down their weapons there would be no Israel yes, they attack you a lot on the Internet.

I have to ask you about your own psychology, how do you not let that break you mentally and how? Do you avoid allowing that to generate resentment toward the groups that attack you? I mean, there are some kinds of practical things that I've done. For example, I would say that four years ago Twitter consumed Twitter is an ego. machine, especially the notification button, just the notification button is just people talking about you all the time in normal human tendency, also people talking about me. I have to see what they say about me, which is a recipe for madness, so, my wife, actually. said Twitter is making your life miserable, you need to remove it from your phone so Twitter is not on my phone, if I want to log into Twitter I have to go to my computer and I have to make a conscious decision to log into Twitter and then take a look at what's going on.

I imagine there is a computer in the basement and you go down to Czech Twitter which is practically in darkness. If you look at when I tweet, it's usually like before I record my show or when I'm preparing my show later in the afternoon, for example, that doesn't affect you negatively mentally, like putting you in a bad headspace, not particularly if it's limited to what that is being seen now. I will say that I think the most important thing is that you have to surround yourself with a group of people that you trust enough to give you serious criticism when you do something wrong, but you also know that they have your best interests at heart because the Internet is full of people who They don't have your best interests at heart and they hate your gods, so you can't take those criticisms seriously or they ruin you, and the world is also full of sycophants at that time, the more successful you become.

There are many people who will tell you that you are always doing the right thing. I am very lucky to have gotten married when I was 24 years old. My office 20. So she knows me long before I was famous or rich or anything. a good sounding board I have a family that is willing to criticize me for my nonsense while you talk about it. I have friends who can do that. I try to have open lines of communication with people who I believe have my best interests at heart, but one of the conditions of being friends is that when you see me do something wrong, I would like you to let me know so I can correct it and not I want to put those impressions aside.

That's the sad thing about the Internet, just looking at the reviews you get, I see very few reviews from people who really want you to succeed, want you to grow, I mean, they're very, they're not sophisticated, they're just them. re, I don't know, they're cruel, the criticism is just, it's not real criticism, it's just cruelty and that's most of Twitter, I mean, like Twitter is a place to hit and be hit, I mean, that's . Anyone who uses Twitter for intellectual conversation, I think, is engaging in a category mistake. I use it to spread love. I think so, you are the only one, it is you, it is you and no one else, my friend, very good on that topic.

What do you think of Elon buying Twitter? What do you like? What hopes do you have on that front? What would you like Twitter to improve? So I'm really hoping Elon buys Twitter. I mean, I think Elon is significantly more transparent than what has taken place so far, he seems committed to the idea that he will expand the Overton window to allow conversations that were simply prohibited before on everything from the effectiveness of masks regarding to covid to whether men can become women and everything in between. There are many things that would previously get you banned from Twitter without any real explanation.

It seems like he's dedicated to at least explaining what the standards will be and being broader in allowing for a variety of perspectives on the medium, which I think is wonderful. I think that's also why people are freaking out. I think the kind of crying and gnashing of teeth and the use of sackcloth and Ash by so many members of Legacy Media. I think a lot of that is because Twitter was essentially an oligarchy where certain perspectives were allowed in certain perspectives just weren't and that was part of a broader oligarchy reimposed on social media, um, after 2017.

So to really understand, I think, what it means for Elon to take over Twitter, I think we have to take a look at the history of media in the United States in two minutes or less. United States, the media for most of its existence until about 1990, at least from about the 1930s to the 1990s, virtually all media were three major. television networks, a couple of major newspapers in The Wire Services, they all had a local newspaper with news services that basically did all the foreign policy and all the domestic policy McClatchy Reuters AP AFP, etc., so the monopoly or oligopoly It existed until the emergence of the Internet. he kind of pushes it and talks on the radio and Fox News, but there certainly wasn't this plethora of sources, then the Internet explodes and all of a sudden you can get news everywhere and I think the way people access those news is significantly younger than me, but we used to do this thing called bookmarking where you would bookmark a bunch of websites and then you would visit them every morning and then social media would come up and just AOL or yeah, exactly you had the dial. and it was actually a can connected to a string and actually they just went away and and uh and then uh there came a point where social media came along and social media was kind of a blessing to everyone because you didn't have to mark anything anymore. as a favorite, you just followed your favorite accounts and they all showed up and you followed everything on Facebook and everything showed up and everything was centralized and for a while everyone was super happy because this was the new wave. of the Future made everything super easy, suddenly outlets like mine could see new eyes because everything was centralized in one place.

You didn't have to do it through Google optimization. Now you could put it on Facebook and there were so many eyes. on Facebook you would get more traffic and everyone seemed pretty happy with this Agreement until precisely the moment that Donald Trump became president at that time, so the kind of pre-existing assumption of many of the powers that be that the Democrats were is going to continue. win from now on so that we can use these social media platforms as ways to push our information and still allow other information to be available, the immediate response was that we need to restore this information siphoning. misinformation and disinformation that won Donald Trump the election, we need to pressure social media companies to start cracking down on misinformation and disinformation and actually see this in the historical record.

I mean, you can see how Jack Dorsey's talk about free speech changed from about 2015 to about 2018. You can see that Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown in 2018 where he talked about free speech and its value and in 2019 he appeared before Congress talking about how he was responsible for the things that were on Facebook and that were not. It is true that he is not responsible for the things on Facebook, true, he is a platform and he is responsible for the things you say on your phone. The answer is usually no. So when that happened, all this because all eyes have now been centralized on these social media sites.

We were suddenly able to control what we could see and what we couldn't see and the most obvious example was obviously the run up to the 2020 election and thatThe hunter Biden murder story is a great example of this, so Elon came in and took over one of the social media services and I say I'm not following the buyer's rules, right? There won't be this kind of group of people in the halls of power who are going to decide what we can see and hear. Instead, I'm going to let a thousand flowers bloom. There will be limits, but it will be more on a case-by-case basis, let's allow perspectives that are conventional but perhaps unconventional in the halls of the Academy or in the halls of the media.

Those, let it be said, I think is a really good thing now that it comes with some responsibilities on Onigon's part, which would be what you know he should be, for example, I think he himself is more responsible and disseminates information sometimes, as if he had gotten into trouble. the other day for tweeting that that story about Paul Pelosi was speculative and false and I guess I don't think what he did was horrible, he deleted it when he found out it was false, but that's actually free speech. true, he said something wrong, people trashed him, realized he was wrong, is elated, which seems to be a better solution than preemptively banning content that only raises more questions than he actually stopped with that said like the face of responsible free speech, you know, and that's what he's launching on Twitter, I think.

He should enact it himself and be a little more careful about the things he tweets, well that's a tricky balance. The reason a lot of people are freaking out is because you're putting your thumb on the scale by saying you're more likely to vote. Republican, he's coming across as right-of-center and like he just has a political opinion instead of being an amorphous thing that doesn't have a political opinion. I think if I guessed, I wouldn't have talked to him about it, but if we were to guess it's sending some kind of signal that's important to Twitter, the company itself because, if we're honest, most of the employees are left-wing, so that you have to send a signal that is like a resistance mechanism to say like uh.

Since most employees stay, it's nice that Elon is more right in balancing how actual engineering is done and saying that we're not going to do any kind of activism within engineering if he had to. I guess that's the effective aspect of that mechanism and the other, by publishing the Pelosi thing, is probably expanding the Overton window, like saying we can play, we can publish things, we can publish conspiracy theories and then, through the speech , figuring out what is and isn't true, yeah, again, like I say, I mean, I think that's a better mechanism in action than it was before.

I just think he gave the people who hate his guts a chance to slap him for no reason. right, but I can see the strategy for sure and I think you already know the general idea that he is, you know, pushing to the right where the company had pushed to the left before. I think there's actually a one-sided polarization right now. in politics, at least with respect to social media, where one side is basically saying that the solution to misinformation is to end the other side's free speech and the other side is basically like people like me saying that the solution to this information is to let a thousand like I'd rather people on the left also be able to post things that I agree with than have someone be in charge of these social media platforms and use them as editorial sites, I mean, they are I'm not criticizing MSNBC for not expressing right-wing opinions.

I mean, it's okay. I run a conservative side and you know we're not going to express left-wing opinions on a wide variety of issues because we're conservative. site, but if you present yourself as a platform, that's a different thing if you present yourself as the Town Square, as Elon likes to call it, then I think Elon has a better idea of ​​that than many of the former employees, especially now. that we have that report from The Intercept that suggests that there are people at Twitter working with DHS to monitor, quote, misinformation and being pretty vague about what this information means.

Yeah, I don't think activism has a place in what is fundamentally an engineering company. that's building a platform, uh, like people within the company shouldn't put their thumb on the scale of what is and isn't allowed, you should create a mechanism for people to decide what isn't allowed, right? ? I think Trump should have been removed from Twitter if his account had been restored. His account should be restored and this is coming from someone who really doesn't like a huge amount of Donald Trump's tweets. Again, he is a very important political figure even if he wasn't. I don't think he should be banned from Twitter or Facebook in a coordinated way because of the way I have that opinion about people who I think are much worse than Donald Trump, the right people.

Everyone knows I'm not an Alex Jones guy. I don't like Alex Jones, I think Alex Jones, oh I think Alex should get back on Twitter. Actually yes, because I think there are a lot of people who are willing to say that what he says is wrong and I'm not a big fan. of this idea that because people that I disagree with and people that have addressed me personally, by the way, I mean, Alex Jones has said some things about me personally that I'm not very fond of You guys, no, we're not okay. best friends no, turns out yes, you know, all I've said is that I don't really enjoy a show, he said some other things about the Antichrist and stuff like that, but that's something a little different, I guess you still know that , Yeah.

I know I'm just not a big fan of this idea, as I've defended people who have really gone after me on a personal level, pointing out that Town Square is online. Banning people from Town Square is taking away their personhood unless you violated a criminal statute, you shouldn't be depersonalized in American society as a general rule, that doesn't mean non-platform companies don't have the ability to respond to you. I think Adidas is right to terminate their contract with Kanye for example with the guy, you know, but Twitter is not Adidas, so the way your stance on freedom of expression to the extent that it is possible to achieve on a platform like Twitter is that you fight bad speech with more speech with better speech and that is, then, if Alex Jones and Trump were allowed to return in the coming months and years leading up to the 2024 election.

You think that will contribute to a world better in the long term. I think on the principle that people should be allowed to do this and the alternative is a bunch of thought bosses telling us what we can and can't see, yes, so I think in the short term It's going to mean a lot of things that I don't like very much, of course, that's the cost of doing business. You know, I think one of the costs of freedom is that people do things I don't particularly like, and I'd rather have freedom with all the things I don't like than not allow freedom.

I Stay a little in love uh you and a lot of people are quite sarcastic on Twitter uh sometimes to the point of mocking even a little if I said bad faith in the type of mockery um and you see it as a war, I don't agree with you Not even with Elon in this. Elon sees Twitter as a war zone or Lisa saw it that way in the past. Have you ever considered being nicer on Twitter as a voice that many people admire? that if Ben Shapiro becomes a little more about love, that will inspire a lot of people or not, this is too funny for you, the answer is yes, it sure occurred to me, let's put it this way, there are a lot of tweets. that doesn't actually come up, I delete it uh, I'll say Twitter The new Twitter feature, that 30 second feature is a friend of mine every once in a while I'll tweet something and think about it for a second I'll be like I need to say this, you probably can't make a book published after you pass away with all the tweets you didn't send, oh no, my kids will still be around, you know the legacy, um, but Yeah, I mean, I'm sure the answer is yes and there's a good chunk of what we would call orthodox.

This is like I'm getting a mild mustard right now. This is like the kind of person you know how to be a better person. I agree with you. I agree with you and uh and yeah, and I will say that Twitter is sometimes too funny. I try to be and I try to be at least, if not impartial, then um equal opportunity in my mockery and I remember that during the 2016 primaries. I used to post pretty sarcastic tweets about pretty much every Republican and Democratic candidate, from time to time . I'll still do some of that. I think the amount of sarcasm on my Twitter feed has actually decreased quite significantly, I think.

If you go back a couple of years, he was probably a little more sarcastic. Today I'm trying to use it a little more in terms of strategy to get that information. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going to make jokes about it. For example, you know Joe Biden. I will make jokes about Joe Biden, he is the president of the United States, no one else will make fun of him, so the entire comedy establishment has decided that they really work for him, so the president of the United States, no matter who I mean, the sarcasm of yes, yes and President Trump, I think he is quite aware that he also got this mark for me, so when it comes to making fun of the president, I am not going to stop, I think the president deserves to be sarcastic, so you're not afraid to attack Trump, no, I mean, I've done it before.

Can you say what your favorite and least favorite things are about President Trump and President Biden, one at a time, so maybe one cool thing you can say? positive about Trump and one super negative thing about Trump. Well, the super positive thing about Trump is that because he doesn't have preconceived views that are institutionalist, sometimes he's willing to go outside the box and do things that haven't been tried before and sometimes that works, I mean, the The best example is the entire foreign policy establishment telling you that you couldn't get a deal in the Middle East unless you focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and instead you just turned that around and ended up cutting a bunch of Middle East deals. peace. deals in the Middle East or moving the embassy in Jerusalem right, sometimes he does things and it's really out of the ordinary and it really works and that's an amazing thing in politics and it's great to see that Trump's downside is that he has no ability. to use any type of uh there is no filter between the brain and the mouth well, whatever happens in his brain is what comes out of his mouth.

I know a lot of people find him charming and wonderful and very funny from time to time, but I don't think that's a particularly great personal quality in a person who has as much responsibility as President Trump has, I think he says a lot of harmful things and bad on Twitter, I think he seems you know, somewhat consumed by his own grievances, which is why I've seen him focus so much on the 2020 election and I think that's very negative about President Trump, so I'm very grateful to the president Trump as conservative for many. From the things he did, I think a lot of his personality problems are pretty serious.

What about Joe Biden? So I think what I like most about Joe Bides, I will say that Biden, two things, one, Biden seems to be a very good father, from all the evidence available, there are a lot of people who are upset, you know, by a tape of him talking to Hunter and Hunter has a problem with drugs or whatever, and I keep listening to the tape and thinking that it seems like A really good father likes the things he says to his son, those are things that God forbid, if that was happening to my son, I would be saying to my son, uh, and then you know you can't help but feel like the guys had an incredibly difficult time getting by with his first wife and the death of members of his family and then dying, I want I mean, that kind of thing is obviously deeply understanding and he, you know, seems like a deeply understanding father, um like.

As far as his politics, he seems like a pat on the back, you know, type of person and I don't care, I think. That's good so far, it's a kind of old school politics where things are done with a handshake and personal relationships. and what I don't like about it is that I think sometimes that's not really genuine. I think sometimes, you know, I think it's his personal tendency, but I think he sometimes allows the prevailing winds of his party to carry him to incredibly things. radical places and then he just doubles down on radicalism in pretty disingenuous ways and there I would quote the Independence Day speech or the Independence Hall speech, which I thought was really one of the worst species I've ever seen a president give. so you don't think he's trying to be a unifier in general, at all, I mean, that's what he was elected to do, he was elected to do two things, not be alive and be a unifier, those were the two things and I like it and when I say not being alive I don't mean being physically dead, this is where the scenario comes in, but what I do mean is that he was chosen not to be particularly activist, basically the Mandate was notbe Trump. sane, don't be Trump, calm down everything and instead he came in, he says: What would happen if we spent seven trillion dollars?

What would happen if we left Afghanistan without any kind of plan? What if I start labeling all my political enemies as enemies of the Republic, what if I start bringing Dylan Mulvaney into the White House and talking about how it's a moral sin to prevent the wholesale mutilation of minors? I mean, this kind of thing is very radical and this is not a president who has pursued a unifying agenda, which is why his approval rating fell from 60 when he took office to 40 or 30 today, unlike President Trump, who never had a high approval rating, right when Trump came into office and had a 45 approval rating and when he left.

In office, he had an approval rating of about 43 and it hovered between 45 and 37 for almost his entire presidency. Biden went from a very popular guy to a very unpopular guy right now and if you're Joe Biden, you should be looking. in front of the mirror and wondering exactly why. Do you think getting a way out of Afghanistan could be an advantage for Biden in terms of him actually doing it? I think it's going to be almost impossible. I think the American people are incredibly inconsistent about their own views on foreign policy; In other words, we like to be isolationists until the time comes for us to be defeated and humiliated.

When that happens, we don't like it very much. You mentioned that Bond is a good father. Can you defend and defend the Hunter Biden laptop story for being a big deal and against it? It's a big deal, so the argument for it being a big deal is basically twofold: one is that it's clearly relevant if the president's son is running around foreign countries collecting bags of cash because his last name is Biden, well, his father is Vice President of the United States and it raises questions about influence peddling, whether for the vice president or the former vice president using political connections, did he make any money?

Who was the great man? All these open questions that obviously imply that you know the questions to ask yourself and then the secondary reason why the story is great is actually because the reaction of the story. The banning of the story is itself a major story if there is any story involving a presidential candidate in the final month of an election and there is a media blackout, including a social media blackout, which obviously raises some very serious questions about the flow and spread of information in the United States, so no matter how important the story is, it's a big deal that there is censorship of anything. relevance when there is a coordinated collusive blackout, yes, that is a serious and important problem, so those are the two reasons why it would be a great story, the two reasons, one reason why it would not be a great story, perhaps, um, it's if it turns out and we don't really know this yet, but let's say that Hunter Biden was basically just doing what he was doing, you know, being a bum or a drug addict or acting out, and his father had nothing to do with it and Joe yes. telling the truth and really, but the problem is that we never got answers to those questions, so if it didn't turn out to be a story, the good thing about stories that turn out to be nothing is that after they turn out to be nothing, It's nothing, the biggest problem with this story is that it was not allowed to take the normal life cycle of a story, which is the original story, it is interrupted, follow-up questions are asked, follow-up questions are answered, the story is now one big story or in nothingness one when the life cycle of a story is cut from the beginning right when it is born then that allows you to speculate in any direction you want you can speculate it doesn't mean anything it's nonsense it's Russian it's a Russian laptop it's disinformation or, for example On the other hand, this means that Joe Biden personally called Hunter and told him to pick up a sack of cash in Beijing and then he became president and has influence in pedaling, so you know, that's why it's important to allow these stories continue.

So this is why actually the biggest story at the moment is not the laptop. It's the reaction to the laptop because it cut off the life cycle of the story and then at some point I would assume there will be some continuation. questions that are actually answered, I mean, the House is committed if it goes Republican to investigate all of this again. I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out that there was no direct involvement of Joe in this kind of thing because it turns out that As I said before, all politics is Veep and this is always the story with half of the scandals you see is that everyone assumes that there are some kind of deep, long-lasting smart plan that some politician is implementing and then you look at it and it turns out it's kind of dumb now, this kind of perfect example of this, you know President Trump with the classified documents at Mar-A-Lago. , so the people on the left leg, it's probably nuclear codes, they're probably taking secret documents and selling them. to the Russians or the Chinese and the real most obvious explanation is that Trump looked at the documents and said: I like these documents and then he decided to keep them in order and then people came in and said: Mr.

President, you are not allowed to keep those papers he said who those are the people I don't care what they have to say I'm going to put them in the other room in a box it's very likely that's what happened and I think it's very disappointing for people when they realize, the human brain, I want I mean, you know this better than me, but the human brain is designed to find patterns, right, that's what we like to do, we like to find plans and patterns because that's how we survive in the wild. a plan, you found a pattern, you crack the code of the universe when it comes to politics, the conspiracy theories we see so often are largely because we are seeing unexplained events, unless you assume everyone is idiots, if you assume that there are many. of stupidity, everything quickly becomes explainable if you assume there must be some reason behind it, you have to come up with increasingly complicated conspiracy theories to explain why people act the way they do and I find that I don't say 100 of the time, but 90 94 of the time the Conspiracy Theory turns out to be just people being dumb and then other people reacting dumbly to the original people being dumb, but for me it's also very possible in the same way.

Hunter Biden Hunter Biden is very likely to get money in Ukraine. I guess for Consulting all that kind of stuff is nothing. Burger is rated. He is getting money like he should. There is a lot of influence peddling in general on terms that are not corrupt. I think the most obvious explanation is probably that he was pedaling under false influence, meaning he went to Ukraine and says, guess who my dad's Joe is and they say, well, you don't have any qualifications in oil and natural gas and you don't really. I don't have a great resume, but your father is Joe and that was it.

They gave him a bag of cash hoping he would do something. He never did anything. I think you're making it sound worse than I am. I think that's in general consulting is done that way your name it's not like you're done with you you're not it's not like he's a rare case and this is an example of corruption if you can criticize consulting which I I would say it's fair that they basically don't give you look at a resume and who likes it if you went to Harvard. I can criticize the same if you have Harvard on your resume you are more likely to be hired as a consultant, maybe there is a network.

There are people you know and you hire them the same way if your last name is Biden, if you're the last one, there are a lot of last names that sound pretty good, sure, and it's not like I'm that committed, by the way. right, in an open interview, he said if your last name Warren bites when you got that job and he said probably not, it's not like he was getting a ridiculous amount of money, he was getting like a pretty standard kind of consulting money that also I would criticize because I get a ridiculous amount of money, but I even roll back the life cycle or steal Madness from the side that was worried about the Hanaban laptop story.

I don't know if there is a natural life cycle of a story because there is something about Internet virality that we can't predict, that a story can just take hold and the conspiracy around it is built especially around politics, where interpretation , some popular, sexy interpretation of a story that might not be connected to reality at all, will go viral and that, from Facebook's perspective, is probably what they're worried about is an organized misinformation campaign that makes up a sexy story. or a sexy interpretation of the vague history that we have that has an influence on the population, I mean, I think. that's true, but I think the question is who is the big judge, who decides when the story should be allowed to go through even a bad life cycle or a lab should be allowed to go viral instead of not doing so now.

It's one thing if you want to say, okay, we can detect the Russian accounts that are actually promoting these things, they belong to the Russian government, we have to shut them down. I think everyone agrees, this is actually one of the slides that's happened linguistically that I really object to is the slide between disinformation and disinformation. Note that there is this Evolution and in 2017 there is a lot of talk about disinformation there is Russian disinformation the Russians were publishing deliberately false information to skew the election results it was the accusation and then people started using disinformation or disinformation and disinformation is misinformation or information that it's in quotes out of context which becomes very subjective very quickly as to what it means out of context and it doesn't necessarily have to be from a foreign source, it could be from a domestic source, right, it could be someone wrong doing something here.

It could be someone interpreting something correctly, but PolitiFact thinks that's out of context and that kind of thing gets very murky very quickly, so I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook, i.e. Zuckerberg, was talking to Rogan about how You know, the FBI had basically been keeping an eye on Russian interference in the election and then all these people were out there saying the laptop was Russian disinformation, so they basically shut it down. You know those kinds of things are scary, especially because they weren't. t Russian disinformation, I mean the laptop was real and so the fact that there were people who seemed to fix this seems like maybe this is wrong, it seems like when a story is preemptively removed like this is almost universally a story that negatively affects one side of the political aisle.

I don't remember the last time there was a story about the right that was disinformation or misinformation where social media stepped in and said, we can't allow this, this can't be distributed, let's all conspire that this information is not distributed, maybe in response to the story being false evidence, it is deleted, but what made Hunter Biden so surprising is that he didn't feel relieved in response to anything, it was like the story was published. There were no real doubts expressed about the verified falsehood of the story, it was just an assumption that it had to be false and everyone chimed in, so I think that confirmed a lot of the conspiracy theories people had about social media and how it works. , Yeah. so if the reason you want to stop the viral spread of something is based on partisanship, that's a problem, you should be very honest with yourself and ask yourself that question: is it because I'm on the left or the right? that I want to slow this down versus it's hate uh bipartisan hate speech right, so that's it but it's really complicated um but I like you.

I feel very uncomfortable in general, but then you are slowing down with any kind of censorship. but if there is something like a conspiracy theory that spreads hate and goes viral, I'm still inclined to let that conspiracy theory spread because the alternative is dangerous and more dangerous, it's like the ring of power, like if everyone wanted the ring because with the ring, you can stop the bad guys from going any further, but it turns out that the ring gives you enormous power and that power can also be used incorrectly. You had the daily cable of which I am a member.

I appreciate it, thank you. I recommend everyone sign up, it should be part of your regular diet, whether you're on the left, the right, the far left, or the far right, everyone should be part of your regular diet, okay, that being said Do you worry about audience capture? Because it is a platform for conservatives and you have a powerful voice there, you may find it difficult to go against the talking points or against the flow of ideas that are generallyIt is connected to conservative thought. Are you worried about that? I mean the audience would obviously be upset with me and would have a right to be upset with me if I suddenly changed all my positions on a dime.

I have enough faith in my audience to be able to say things that I think are true and that they made us I agree with the audience that you meet pretty regularly, I would say um, but they understand that in the deepest principle we are on the same side at least I hope that a lot of the audience is also the reason why we offer a number of different points of view on the platforms, many of which I don't agree with, but they are within the general range of conservative thought and that, you know, is something I have to think about every day, although yeah, I mean, you have to think about it like it's me.

I say this because I'm afraid of turning off my audience or I say it because I really believe it and you know it's a bit of a delicate dance, you have to be honest with yourself, yeah, someone like Sam Harris. he's pretty good at this at fighting and saying the most outrageous thing he knows, he almost leans into it, he knows it will piss off a lot of his audience, sometimes you almost have to test the system, it's like you feel like you're almost overreacting. your feelings just to make sure you send a signal to the audience that you are not captured by them.

So, speaking of people you disagree with, what's your favorite thing about Candace Owens and what do you disagree with her about? Well What I like most about Katniss is that she will say things that no one else will say. What I like least about Candace is that you will say things that no one else will say, um, you know, I mean, listen, she says things that are bold and I think are necessary. It has to be said, sometimes I think she's morally wrong, right? I think the way she responded to Kanye. I have said that this was clearly completely wrong and morally wrong.

What was her response? Her original response was that she offered confusion about what she was actually talking about and then she, you know, was defending her friend. I hope it was. What she had responded was saying that he is my friend and he also said something mean and anti-Semitic. I wish you had said that right away, right away, yeah, I think you can too, this is an interesting human thing, you can be friends. with people you don't agree with and you can be friends with people who actually say hateful things and one of the ways to help alleviate hate is to be friends with people who say hateful things, yeah, and then call them out on a personal level, when when.

They say mean or hateful things, yes, from a place of love and respect, and in private, in private, that's a big deal too, right? I mean, like the public demand for, you know, the denunciation of friends to friends, uh, it's difficult and I certainly have compassion. for Candace, given the fact that she is so close to you, yes it breaks my heart, sometimes the public, public fights between friends and broken friendships, I have seen quite a few friendships break up publicly due to covid coverage, do that people make people behave in the worst ways in many cases where, yes, it breaks my heart a little because, like human connection, it is a prerequisite for effective debate and discussion and battles over ideas.

Have there been any arguments from the opposing political side that changed your mind? something if you look back, I'll say I'm thinking about it carefully because I think my views on foreign policy are probably even more in some ways uh I would say I was a lot more interventionist when I was younger. significantly less interventionist now I would probably get my sample, uh, it sure was. I was a big supporter of the Iraq war. I think now, in retrospect, I might not be a supporter of the Iraq war if the same situation arose again based on the amounts of evidence that has been presented or based on the kind of willingness of the American public to confront whether you're going to get involved in a war, you have to know what the end point is and you have to know what the people are really willing to put up with that the American people are not willing to put up with indefinite occupations, uh, and knowing that you have to do it. , considers that by entering foreign policy I have become much more realistic, it is almost like Henry Kissinger. uh, in a way, uh, and when it comes to social policy, I would say I'm pretty strong where I was.

I may have become a little bit convinced, actually, of the more conservative side of the island, things like drug legalization, I think when I was younger I was much more in favor of drug legalization than I am now at least. local level to federal level. I think the federal government can't do much more than close the borders with respect to fentanyl trafficking, for example, but when it comes to how there were drugs in local communities, you can see how drugs in local communities quite easily, which is weird because I saw you smoke a joint right before this conversation, that's the most important thing, I mean, I tried to keep that a secret, well, that's an Interesting thing about the intervention.

Can you comment on the war in Ukraine? For me it is something deeply personal. But I think you can look at it from a geopolitical perspective. What is America's role in this conflict before the conflict during the conflict and right now to help bring about peace. I think before the conflict the big problem is that the West took almost the worst possible view: encouraging Ukraine to keep trying to join NATO and the EU, but not letting them in and So what that does is achieve the purpose of making Russia really gets angry and feels threatened, but it also doesn't give any of the NATO or EU protections to Ukraine.

I mean, Zielinski is in the movie when he was a comedy actor doing that. The exact joke is Merkel on the other line and she says, oh, welcome to NATO, and he says great, she says, wait, there's Ukraine on the line and whoops, but you know that kind of politics doesn't have sense if We will offer the Alliance to someone, we will offer them the Alliance and if you are going to guarantee their security, guarantee their security and the West notably failed to do that, so they were mistakes in the run-up to the war, once the war started, Then the responsibility of the West began and became to give Ukraine all the material necessary to repel the invasion.

And the West did it very well. I think we were late in the United States. It seemed that Europe led the way a little. The United States did a little more there, but in terms of realizing American interests in the region, being an American is what I care about most and the American interests were several: one is to preserve the borders, two is to degrade Russia. aggressive military because Russia's military has been aggressive and they are geopolitical rivals of the United States three recalibrate the European balance with China Europe was in some ways in balance with Russia and China and then, because of the war, in some ways they rebalanced by moving away from China and Russia which is a real geostrategic opportunity for the United States.

It seemed like most of those goals had already been achieved at this point for the United States and so the question is what is the exit ramp here and what are you trying to accomplish? prevent then what is the best chance what is the best case what is the worst case and then what is realistic then the best case is that Ukraine forces Russia to completely exit Ukraine, including Lohanesque and Crimea , right, that's the best case scenario practically no one believes it's possible, including the United States is right, the White House has basically said the same thing: it's hard to imagine, in particular, Crimea, the Russians will be forced out of Crimea , the Ukrainians have managed to expel the Russians from certain parts of Johansen, but the idea that they will be able to push the entire Russian army completely back to the Russian borders, which would, at best, a very, very long and difficult job in the midst of a collapsing Ukrainian economy, which is a point Zielinski has made, it's like it's not enough for you.

To give us military aid, we are in the middle of a war, we will also need economic aid, so it is a fairly open and strong commitment. There may be some attention paid to that and the best case scenario is if that happens militarily. including Crimea, do you think there is a world in which Vladimir Putin would be able to convince the Russian people that this was a good conclusion to the war? So the problem is that the best case could also be the worst case, which means that there are a couple of scenarios that are in some way the worst case and this is kind of puzzling the situation.

One is that Putin feels so boxed in, so unable to go back to his own people and tell them that we just wasted tens of thousands. of lives here for no reason we unleashed the tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield, no one knows what happens after that, then we put NATO planes in the air to eliminate Russian assets, the Russians start shooting down planes, Russia then threaten to escalate further? Also, attacking an actual NATO civilian center or even a Ukrainian civilian center with nuclear weapons, no one knows where you go from there because nuclear weapons haven't been used since 1945.

So, you know, that's the worst of the cases, it is unpredictable. scenario that could lead to really significant problems the other worst case scenario could be the best case scenario could be worse, we just don't know if Putin falls, what happens after that, who replaces Putin is that person who is more moderate than Putin. That personal liberalizer probably won't be a novelty if he is going to be overthrown or probably someone who is a senior member of Putin's high command at this point and has the ability to control the military or the entire regime may collapse.

Syria and Russia right where they have a completely out of control region with no centralizing power that is also a disaster area and therefore in the nature of risk mitigation, in a kind of attempted risk mitigation, what really What should be happening right now is some off-ramp to be offered to Putin, the offer will probably be for him to keep Crimea and parts of Luhanskin Dennis, it will probably be a commitment from Ukraine not to formally join NATO, but a guarantee of West to defend Ukraine in case of an invasion of its borders again by Russia as a real treaty obligation now as the treaty obligation BS and when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the 90s um and uh and so on is how this will probably have to go, the problem is that it requires political courage not from his landscape it requires courage from probably Biden because the only zelensky who is not in a political position where he can return to his own people who have made incredible sacrifices in name of your nation and your freedom and tell you guys, now that I'm going to quit, we're going to have to stand on our hands and ask you to give Putin an off-ramp.

I don't think that's an acceptable answer for most Ukrainians right now, based on polling data and available data. data we have on the ground, it will actually be necessary for Biden to bite the bullet, be the bad guy and tell Zielinski, listen, we have made a commitment for material aid. We're offering you all of these things, including essentially a defense pact that we're offering. you all these things, but if you don't come to the table then we're going to have to start weaning all of you like there has to be a stick there, it should be a carrot and that will allow zelinski if I' If we did, we would allow the culprits blame Biden for the solution that everyone knows has to happen, so once you can get back to his own people and he can say listen, this is how it has to go, like I didn't.

I want him to be this way, but he's not mine. I'm signing other people's checks. I mean, it's not my money. And Biden would take the hit because then he couldn't blame Ukraine for what happens next. What has been the easy way out, I think for many politicians in the West, is to simply say, "Well, this is up to the Ukrainians to decide. It's totally up to the Ukrainians to decide." It seems that the West is signing a lot of controls and all of Europe is going to freeze this winter. By the way, this is the importance of great leadership.

That's why the people we elect are very important. Do you think there's power to just have a one-on-one conversation or buy six thousand furs Biden sits down with Putin almost in person because I or maybe I'm romanticizing the notion, but having done these podcasts in person I think there's something fundamentally different through of a remote call. and also as an aloof type of recorded political guy versus talking man to man, so I'm very afraid of Putin outmaneuvering people in one-on-one scenarios because he's already done it with several presidents, uh, he gets into one. one-on-one scenarios with Bush with Obama with Trump with Biden and he seems to be a very astute operator and kind of a very tough operator in those situations, I think if you're going to do something like a real face-to-face political summit, whatWhat he would need is for Biden to first have a conversation with Zelensky where Zelinski knows what's going on so he's in the know and then Biden comes in and tells Putin on camera, here's the offer, let's meet. let's make peace, you can stay with these things and then let Putin respond, Putin is going to respond, um, but you know, I think the big problem for Putin and the problem with public forums, maybe it's a private meeting if it's a private meeting maybe that's for the best that there is a public forum I think it's a problem because Putin is afraid of being humiliated right now um if it's a private meeting then sure, except again I wonder if when it comes to and a person as shrewd as Putin and a politician who I really don't think is a particularly sophisticated player like Joe Biden and again this is not unique to Biden.

I think most of our presidents over the last 30 to 40 years have not been particularly sophisticated players, uh, I think that's a risky scenario, yeah, I still believe in the power of that because otherwise, um, I wouldn't. I know, no, I don't think things on paper and political discourse will solve it. these types of problems because from Zielinski's perspective, nothing more than a complete victory will work well, he as a nation has people who have sacrificed too much and they are all in, and if you look because I traveled to Ukraine, I spent time there, I will be back there, hopefully, also return to Russia, just talk to the Ukrainians, everyone agrees, everyone agrees, yes, nothing but a complete victory, yes, that's right, and for that the only way to achieve Peace is through honest person-to-person conversation, uh. to give both people a way out to walk away victorious and some of that requires speaking honestly as a human being, but also so that the United States, really, not even the United States, honestly, just the president can eat his own ego a little bit and be the punching bag a little bit enough so that both presidents can walk away and say, listen, we got the American president to come to us and I think that makes the president look strong, not weak, I mean, I agree with you.

I think it would also require some people like me, the right people, like me, if I were Joe Biden, to say if Biden does that. I see what he's doing and it's the right move. I think that's one of the things he's afraid of. of robbing me with him, I think one thing he's afraid of is that he goes and makes that kind of deal and the right says you just cowered in front of Russia and just handed over Ukraine, whatever it is, um, but you know, en It's going to require some people on the right to say that move is the right one and then accept it if Biden actually makes that move.

You are exceptionally good at debate. You wrote how to debate leftists and you destroyed them. uh, you're known for this kind of stuff, you just have exceptional conversational skills that debate, uh, and get to the facts of the matter and use logic to come to the conclusion, uh, in debate, do you ever Are you worried about this power talk? about the ring, this power you were given has corrupted you and your ability to see what it is like to seek the truth versus simply winning debates. I hope not, I mean, I think one of the things that's kind of funny about The Branding versus reality. is that most of the things that are characterized as destructive in debates with facts and logic, most of those things are basically me having a conversation with someone on a college campus, it's not really like a formal debate where we we sit there and criticize each other's positions, uh or it's not me insulting anyone, a lot of the clips that have gone very viral are me making an argument and then it's not like a surprising counterargument, a lot of the debates I've had They have been extremely cordial, let's take the last example, about a year ago I debated with Anna Kasperian from Young Turks, it was very cordial, it was very nice, you know, that's how I like to debate my rule when it comes to debating and or discussion is that my opponent actually chooses the way we work, so if it's going to be a debate of ideas and we're just going to discuss, criticize and clarify by then, we can do that if someone comes loaded with support. so I'll kindly respond because I think one of the big problems in the debate discussion sphere is very often the misdiagnosis of what exactly is going on, people thinking that a discussion is a debate and vice versa and that that can be a real problem. and There are people that you know that deal with what should be a discussion like, for example, in exercise and performance art, and what that is is mugging or trolling or saying trolley things to get to something like that, that's something that I actually don't. during the debate, I mean, if you actually watch me talk to people, I don't really do that trolling thing, the trolling thing is almost exclusively relegated to Twitter and me making drugs on my show, when it comes to debating people, that It sounds a lot like what we're doing right now is just the person maybe taking a position opposite to mine, uh, and that's okay, usually half of the debate or discussion is me just asking for clarification of terms like what do you want? say exactly this so we can dig deeper into where the real disagreement may lie because sometimes people think they don't disagree and they actually don't disagree and, like when I'm talking to Anna Kasparian and she's talking about business and government, also I have done. a lot of power together, I mean, well, you sound like a tea party, like you and I are on the same page about that, that kind of thing tends to happen a lot in discussions, um, I think when the discussion is called a debate , it's a problem. when debate becomes term discussion, it is even more problematic because debate is a different thing and I find that your debate and your conversation are often in good faith, you are able to rob the man, on the other side, you are actually able to do it. actually listen you're considering the other side the times I see you know Ben Shapiro destroys leftists it's usually like you said the other side is doing the trolling um because they don't I mean the people who do it do.

Criticizing you for that interaction is that the people who usually get destroyed are like 20 years old and generally not sophisticated to any degree, in terms of being able to use logic, reason, facts, etc., and that's totally Okay, so True, if people want to criticize me for speaking on college campuses where a lot of political conversations occur on both the right and the left, that's fine. I mean, I've also had a lot of conversations with people on the other side of the aisle. I mean, I've done podcasts with Sam Harris and we've talked about atheism or I've done debates with Anna Kasparian or I've talked with Chankweiger or I've had conversations with a lot of people on the other side of the aisle, in fact, I think I'm the only person on the right who recommends that people listen to their shows across the aisle, I mean, on my show pretty regularly. that people should listen to positive America now, no one in positive America will ever say that anyone should listen to my program that is banned, that is not something to have, is one of the oddities of our politics, is what that I have called the happy ones.

The problem with birthdays is that I have a lot of friends who are left-wing and publicly they are left-wing and on my birthday they will text you happy birthday, but they will never tweet happy birthday so they don't recognize that you were born. woman and that this can't be allowed, so on Sunday's special I had a group of people who were on the other side of the aisle, many of them, from Hollywood people like Jason Blom to Larry Wilmore, Sam and you know, a lot of people on the left, I think in the near future we'll probably do a Sunday special with rokana in California, the California congressional person, very nice guy.

I had it on the show like that kind of thing. It's fun and interesting, but you know, I think the easy way out for a clip that people don't like is to cut it right away, it's like a two minute clip, and cut it down to 15 seconds where someone insults me and then that's it. goes viral, which is, you know, welcome to the Internet, uh or uh, or saying, well, you're only debating colleges, you're only talking to 20, I mean, I talk to a lot more people than that, that's not what what do you want. I'm seeing that you lost your cool in an interview with the BBC's Andrew Neal and you're very honest about it, after which it was kind of refreshing and nice as the internet said they'd never seen anyone lose an interview, so to me Honestly, it was. like seeing Floyd Mayweather Jr or someone like knocked down um what was that?

Can you take me to that experience? Here it is that day, that day, I have a book published, I didn't sleep much the night before and this is the last interview. of the day and it is an interview with the BBC. I don't know anything about the BBC. I don't watch the BBC. I know some of the presenters, so we start the interview and it's supposed to be about the book and the host Andrew O'Neill. doesn't ask practically a single question about the book, he just starts reading me old bad tweets which I hate, I mean it's annoying and stupid, it's the worst form of interview, yeah when someone just reads your battle tweets, especially when I've acknowledged battle tweets before, so I'm going through the list with him and this interview lasted a solid 20 minutes.

I mean, it was a long interview and we got to and I make a couple of particularly annoying mistakes in the interview, such annoying mistake. Number one is the ego game, so there's a point in the middle of the interview where I say I don't even know who you are, which was true. I didn't know it was him. It turns out that he is a very famous person. Britain, so you can't make that eagle play, even if he's not famous, he never is, it's stupid and it's stupid to do it, like that, saying that was, you know more, just kind of peak and nonsense . uh and uh so that was a mistake I enjoyed watching that was like oh Ben is human yeah I'm glad someone enjoyed it uh so there's that and then the other mistake was I just don't watch enough British TV so The way The way interviews are done is much more conflictive than American television.

On American television, if someone opposes you, you assume they're a member of the other side, that's typically how it is, uh, so I'm criticizing some of their questions at the beginning and I thought the criticism of some of their questions is actually fair. . You're asking me about abortion and I thought you were asking me from a way of phrasing the question that wasn't accurate so I assumed I was on the left because again I'd never heard of it uh and so you know I mischaracterized it and I apologize later for mischaracterizing him finally we got through the interview it's 20 minutes he just goes on with the battle tweets and I finally got up and took off the mic and walked out and immediately knew it was a mistake, like within 30 seconds at the end from the interview, I knew it was a mistake, uh and uh, and that's why before the interview even came out, I think I corrected the record that Andrew Neal is not on the left, that's my mistake, um and uh , and then you know, he took the hit for a bad interview, uh, and as far as you know what I wish I would have done differently, I wish I would have known who he was.

I wish I had done my research. I wish I had. I wish I had treated it as if there was a possibility that there would be more confrontation than it was. I think I was cautious about the interview because it was presented as if it were just Another Book Interview and it wasn't just Another Book Interview, it was treated much more adversely than that one, so I wish that was up to me. I have to research the people that are talking to me and watch their shows and learn about it and then obviously. You know, the kind of knee-jerk appeal to ego or arrogance like that is a bad look and I shouldn't have done that and losing my cool is always a bad look, so the fact that that went kind of viral and stood out just shows that it happened to you very rarely, so just to look at what the day in the life of Ben Shapiro was like, you talk a lot, very eloquently about difficult topics, which goes into the research, the mental part and you always seem quite energetic and like you.

You're not exhausted by the load, the heaviness of the topics you're covering day after day, after day, so what about the preparation? uh mentally, diet-wise, kind of, like when, when, when you wake up, okay, then I wake up. I wake up when my kids wake me up, usually my youngest daughter who is two and a half years old. She's here on the monitor, usually around 6, 15, 6, 20 am, so I get up, my wife sleeps a little. I go to get the baby and then my my son gets up and then my oldest daughter gets up. I have eight, six and two, uh, children, the middle child, is that both the source of stress and happiness, oh my God, the height of both, of course, I mean, it is the source of the oldest. happiness, so the way I characterize it is this when it comes to the type of children in life,so when you're single, your limits of happiness and unhappiness can be a zero in terms of happiness, you can be like a ten in terms of happiness. then you get married and it goes up to 20 and negative 20.

Because you are happy with your wife and then the most unhappy thing is when something happens to your spouse, it is the worst thing in the world, so I have children and all the boundaries are removed, so the best things that have happened to me are things where I see my children and they play together and they are wonderful and sweet and cute and I love them very much and the worst thing is when my son yells at me for no reason because he is crazy and I have to deal with it, I mean, something bad happens to me daughter at school or something, those things are really like that.

So yes, the source of my greatest happiness, the source of my greatest stress, so they wake me up around 6 or 15 in the morning. I give them breakfast. I'm flipping through the news while I make the magazines. I know how to just update myself on anything that may have happened during the night. I go to the office, put on my makeup and wardrobe or whatever and then sit down and do the show. Much of the preparation is done the night before because the news cycle is not. It doesn't change much between late night and morning. I can supplement in the morning, so I do the program, so a lot of the preparation, like thinking about what the big problems in the world are, is done the night before, yeah.

I mean, and that's the reading, you know pretty much all of Legacy Media, so I use Legacy Media a lot, but that's because a lot of what they do is really good, it's really bad. I cover a lot of Legacy Media, so I probably cover it, you know? Wall Street Journal New York Times Washington Post Boston Globe daily mail um and then I'll look at some of the alternative media I'll look at my own website Daily Wire I'll look at Breitbart I'll look at the fire that I'll look at, uh, I'll look at maybe the apps of interest.

I'll look at, you know, a bunch of different sources and then I'll look at different clips online, so media is helpful here, Grabian is helpful here, uh, that guy. of things because my show relies heavily on being able to play people so you can hear them in their own words uh and uh and that's kind of the media diet so I sit down and do the show and then once I'm done with The program that I usually have between now is like 11 15 in the morning maybe because sometimes I pre-record the program so at 11 15 in the morning I go home and if my wife is available, I will have lunch with her, if not, I'll go exercise.

I try to work out five times a week with a trainer, something like that, and then I'll do regular stuff at the gym, just, yeah, the gym. yeah, weights and plyometrics and some CrossFit stuff and yeah, I mean, uh, but under this, under this smooth steel like a hulking monster, uh and uh, and so, uh, I'll do that and then I'll do, um , I will do reading. and writing, so I'm usually working on a book at any given time, or if you turn off the rest of the world, yeah, then I put some music in my ears, usually Brahms Orbach, sometimes Beethoven or Mozart, it's those. four, those are in rotation the rap no rap no rap despite my extraordinary performance of whap yeah, in fact, I'm not close to you yet do you still hate the web um the song is uh?

I will say that I don't think it's the peak of Western Civilized Art, okay. I don't think that in 100 years people will stick their faces together and protest against the environment, but Brahms and the rest will still be around. Yeah, I guess if people still have a functional prefrontal cortex. in any kind of Ben Shapiro wrong words, okay, so you've got some classical music in your ears and you're concentrating, are you in front of the computer when you're typing? Yes, I'm in front of the computer. We usually have some sort of room that gets some sun in, so it's nice to be there or I'll go up to a library that we just completed for me, so I'll go up there and write a physical book.

Friends, yes, I love physical books and because I keep Sabbath, I don't use Kindle because when I read a book and I press Sabbath I have to turn off the Kindle, which means I have tons and tons and tons. of physical books when you move from Los Angeles to Florida, I had about 7,000 volumes, I discarded probably 4,000 of them and then I've rebuilt them now, so I'll probably have to go through another round of putting them somewhere else. I tend to label books instead of highlighting them because I can't highlight on Saturday, so I have like little stickers and I put them in the book so that a typical book of mine you can see in book club.

It's going to be like full of tabs next to the things that I want to take now, actually, I have a person that I'm going to pay to go through it and write into files the quotes that I have and that I like from the book, so I have those. useful, so what's a good way for me to remember what I've read because I read probably three to five books a week, and then on a good week, five, and then you know, I write, I read, and then I'm going to pick up my kids from school at 3:30.

So, according to my children, I don't have a job. I'm there in the mornings until they go to school. I pick them up from school. I hang up. I hang out with them until they go to bed, which is usually around 7:30, so I help them with their homework, play with them, and take them for rides in the new Tesla that my son is obsessed with. with uh and uh and then I put them to bed and then I sit back down, prepare for the next day, go through all those media sources I was talking about, compile some kind of schedule of how I want the program to look and run . a show is very detailed no one writes anything for me I write all my stuff um so every word that comes out of my mouth is my fault and uh and then you know, I hope I have a couple of hours or an hour to hang out with my wife uh before before you go to the awards you write do you edit a lot or does it just come out?

Are you thinking what are the key ideas that I want to express uh no, I don't usually edit much so I thank God that I can write extraordinarily fast, so I write very, very fast, in fact, in a previous life I also spoke fast, of similarly, yes, exactly, and I speak in paragraphs, so it's exactly the same, uh, in a previous life. In my life I was a ghostwriter, so I used to be known as a turnaround specialist in the publishing industry and someone who would go to the publisher and tell them that I had three weeks and I didn't have a word to finish this book. and they called me and said that this person needs a book written and then in three weeks he would write approximately sixty thousand words.

Is there anything you can say about the process you follow to think the way you think about ideas? like there are things happening in the world and trying to understand what is happening, what are the explanations, what are the forces behind it, do you have a process or do you just wait for the Muse to give you the interpretation, I mean I think No. I think it is a formal process, but as I read, there are two ways to do it. One is that sometimes you know sometimes The Daily Grind of the news will refer to fundamental principles that are broader and deeper, so I appreciate that.

God, because I've read so much about so many different things and from so many different points of view. So if something comes up and a news story comes out, I can immediately funnel that into the mental Rolodex, these three big ideas that I think are really important and then I can talk at length about what those ideas are and I can explain them. So you know, for example, when we were talking about "we should take over Twitter" and I immediately go to the media story. right, that's me linking it to a larger topic, yeah, you know, and I do.

I would say quite often that we're talking about, let's say, subsidies to industry and I can immediately link that to, what is the history of subsidies in the United States? States going back to Woodrow Wilson and Ford through FDR's industrial policy and how that relates to sort of broader economic policy internationally, so that allows me to tie into broader themes because what I tend to read It's mostly not news, what I usually read is mostly books. I would say that the majority of my media diet is actually not those things that are the icing on the cake, but the cake itself is the hundreds of pages of history, economics, geography, that I am, that I am social sciences. that I read every week and that kind of stuff allows me to think more deeply about these things, so that's one way to do it and the other way to do it is that Russia is in the news.

I don't know anything about Russia. I immediately went and bought five books about Russia and read them all, so one of the unfortunate things about our uh, the lucky thing for me and the unfortunate thing about the world is that if you in the unfortunate thing in the world is you read two books on one topic and Now the media considers you an expert on this topic. So that's sad and superficial, but that's how the good news for me is that my job is not to be a total expert on any of these topics and I don't claim to be right.

I am not an expert on Russia. I know enough about Russia to be able to understand when people talk about Russia what the system is like, how it works and all that. and then explain that to the common man, something that a lot of people who are gifted with experience can't do if you're so deep in the weeds that you're like an academic expert on something that is sometimes difficult to translate that to a magisterial audience, which is really my job. Well, I think it could be fun. With both books, you can get a pretty deep understanding if you read them and also think deeply about them, it allows you to get closer to something. from first principles a lot of times, if you're a quote-unquote expert, you get carried away by the momentum of what the field has been thinking instead of taking a step back from, well, what's really happening.

The challenge is choosing the right two books, so usually what I try to find is someone who knows the subject pretty well and they recommend it to me, or a couple of people and they recommend books to me, so a couple of years ago I didn't know anything about Bitcoin. I was at a conference and a couple of people that you've had on your show were actually there and I asked them to give me your top three books on bitcoin and then I went and read like nine books on bitcoin and so on. If you have nine books on bitcoin, at least you know enough to get by, yeah, and then I can explain what Bitcoin is and why it works or why it doesn't work in some cases and what's happening in the markets. that way, so you know it's very useful, Putin is an example that it's hard to find the right books on.

I think the new tsar is the one I read. Where was it most objective? The one I read. I think about Putin it was He was one called strongman, he was very critical of Putin, but he gave a good foundation about him, yeah, so I'm very skeptical about things that are very critical of Putin, uh, because it feels like there's activism . injected into history as the way the rise and fall of the Third Reich over Hitler is written. I like it because there is almost no criticism of Hitler, it is a description of Hitler, which is very easy to do with a historical figure than with William Shire with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it is impressive because you lived it, but it is very difficult to find objective descriptions about the history of the man and the country of Putin, of Zelensky, of any Trump difficult, it was the same and I feel that everyone who is the archetype of the hero-villain is correct and it is as if someone was completely a hero or completely a villain and the truth is that practically no one is completely a hero or completely a villain.

In fact, I'm not sure I like descriptions of people as heroes or villains in general. I think people tend to do heroic or villainous things in the same way that I'm not sure I like descriptions of people as geniuses. . My father used to say this when I was a kid, he used to say no. I don't think there were geniuses, he said he thought there were people with a genius for something because the people you know, yes, they are people who have a very high IQ and we call them geniuses, but does that mean they are good at EQ?

Not necessarily things, but there are people who are geniuses when it comes to equalization; In other words, it would be more specific to say that someone is an engineering genius than to simply say that they are a broad spectrum genius and that avoids the problem of thinking that They are good at something that they are not good at, it is a little more specific, because you read a lot of books and some you can look back on, so it was a difficult question because a lot of them are like your favorite song, but are there books? that have been influential in your life and that impact your thinking or maybe once you get back to that, um, that still inform you, the Federalist Paper is important in terms of how American politics works, the first economics book that I thought. it was really cool because it was written for teenagers, it's essentially called economics and a lesson from Henry Haslet is like 150 pages.

I recommend it to everyone, ages 15 and up, it's easier than, say, Thomas Hall's Basic Economics, which is four or 500 pages. and it looks like macroeconomics, that kind of thing um and uh and then uh in terms of that, there'sa great book by Carl Truman called Ryzen Triumph of the modern self which I think is the best book of the last 10 years and which has been somewhat impactful on some of the thoughts I've been having what's the key idea there, the The key idea is that we have changed the nature of how identity is done in the West from how it was done historically, that's basically for almost everyone.

In human history, the way we identify as human beings is as a mix of our biological drives and then how that interacts with the social institutions around us, so when you're a child you're an unfettered set of biological drives and they are your parents. The work of civilizing and civilizing you literally means bringing yourself into civilization, you learn the rules of the road, you learn how to integrate into institutions that already exist and are designed to shape you and it is the way you interact with those institutions that makes you your true self. . not just a set of biological impulses and then in the modern world we have really moved towards the idea that who we are is how we feel inside without reference to the outside world and it is the job of the outside world to celebrate and reflect. what we think of ourselves inside and what that means we are now driven to fight institutions because institutions are in positions, so everything around us social institutions are things that are hindering our style, we They make us not feel the way we want to feel and if we simply destroy those things then we will be freer and more liberated.

I think it's a much deeper model of how to think about why our particular social policies are moving in a particular direction. that a change of terrain has occurred and how people think about themselves and this has had some kind of impactful effect in terms of social policy, so in his opinion there are negative consequences of that, but there are also positive consequences of more power, more agency. to the individual, I think you can argue that institutions weighed too much on how people formed their identity, but I think what we have done has gone too far, on the other hand, we basically decided to blow up the institutions in favor of a feeling without restrictions that curtail identity and I think that's not just a big mistake, I think it's going to have Dior. ramifications for everything from suicidal ideation to institutional longevity in politics and in society in general.

So, speaking of one's nature, you have been an outspoken advocate of anti-life. Can you start by trying to rob me of the Pro-abortion arguments are not murder and a woman's right to choose is a fundamental human right, so I think the only way to rob a man of the pro-abortion argument is and to be ideologically consistent is to suggest that there is no interest in the life of The Unborn that counteracts freedom of choice at all, so what that means is that we can take the full example, we can get a sort of partial example, so if we take the complete example, what would it be?

What I mean is that up to the moment of birth, which is kind of a democratic party platform position, that a woman's right to choose should be extended for any reason up to the moment of birth. The only way to argue that is bodily autonomy. is the only factor, there is no compensating factor that will ever overcome bodily autonomy. um, that would be the stronger version of the argument. Another version of that argument would be that the reason bodily autonomy should matter so much is because women can't. We will be equal to men if the vicissitudes of biology are allowed to decide their future properly.

If pregnancy changes women in a way that it does not change men, it is a form of sexual discrimination that women ever have to do it. going ahead with the pregnancy, which is an argument that was made by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, um, those are the arguments, the softer the version, I would say the more emotionally resonant version of the argument, which is that bodily autonomy must prevail over interests. of the fetus to point x and then people have different feelings about what point American is right or, generally speaking, the American public is not state by state, where there are several very varied opinions, but generally speaking, it seems that the American public, when pulling data, one somewhere between an abortion restriction of 12 and 15 weeks, and I think until 12 or 15 weeks there is not enough to not be specific but how people feel about it to overcome a woman's bodily autonomy and then beyond that point there is enough interest in the life of the pre-born child uh, is developed enough so now we care enough to outweigh a woman's bodily autonomy what is the strongest case for life in your mind I mean, the strongest case for life is that from conception a human life has been created it is a human life with potential that potential human life with potential now has an independent interest in its own existence if I may ask a good question then conception is when a sperm fertilizes an egg yes ok just to clarify the biological beginning of What does concession mean?

I mean because that's the beginning of human life, now there are other standards that people have gotten right. Some people say implantation in the womb, some people will suggest responsibilities in the development of the brain or the heart, but the clear dividing line between a human being. life exists in human life, life does not exist is the biological creation of an independent human life with its own DNA strands, etc., what happens in the conception of the grant once you recognize that that independent human life exists with potential and I keep calling it that because people sometimes say potential human life, it is not a potential human life, it is a human life that is not yet developed to the extent that it will develop, once you say that and once you say which has its own interest, now you have to shoulder the burden of proof.

This is to explain why bodily autonomy should allow for the extinction of that human life if we believe that human life should not be killed because, quote, there is no good reason, you have to find a good reason for the burden of proof. . Now it has been changed, now you will find people who will say, "Well, the good reason is that it is not developed enough to compensate for the mental trauma or the emotional trauma that a woman goes through if, for example, she was raped or a victim of incest, she is Well, and that's a pretty emotionally resonant argument, but it's not necessarily all that positive, you can argue that just because something horrible and horrible has happened to a woman doesn't rob human life of its interest in life, one of the great problems in trying to draw a line.

Because the self-interest of life in human life is that it is very difficult to draw any other line that doesn't seem somewhat arbitrary if you say that the heartbeat is independent, yes, well, you know that the people have pacemakers, if you say that the brain function that people have various levels of brain function in adulthood, if you say viability, babies are not viable after they are born, if I leave a newborn baby on a table and I don't I care, he'll die in two days, so you know when he starts to have On these lines, it starts to get very confusing very quickly, so if you're looking for a kind of bright line moral rule, that would be the bright line moral rule, that's the pro-life case, well, there are still difficult scientific mysteries. questions about things like consciousness, so what do you do with the question of consciousness, how does it come into play in this debate?

So I don't think consciousness is the only criterion by which we judge self-interest in human life, which is why we are unconscious. a large part of Our Lives, right, that's not it, we will become conscious again, just when you are unconscious, when you are asleep, for example, presumably, your life is still worth living, if someone came in and killed you, that would be a serious moral. a dilemma to say the least, but the birth of Consciousness, the lighting of the flame, the initial lighting of the flame, there seems to be something special about that and it's a mystery when that happens, well, I mean, Peter Singer makes the case. that basically self-awareness doesn't exist until you're two and a half years right, so it says even infanticide should be fine or it's the Princeton bioethicist, so you're getting into some really dangerous territory once you enter Consciousness and also the The truth is that Consciousness is more of a spectrum than a dividing line, which means that there are people with varying degrees of brain function who we don't actually know how conscious they are and you can get into eugenic territory pretty quickly when we start to dividing us between lives that are worth living according to levels of consciousness and lives that are not worth living according to levels of consciousness.

Do you think about the aspect of women's freedom? Do you feel the tension between the ability to choose the trajectory of your own life versus the rights of the fetus in a yes situation in a no situation if you have had sexual relations with a person voluntarily and as a result of that you are now pregnant you have not taken an action with a perfectly predictable outcome even if you took birth control, this is the way humans have literally procreated for all of human existence and by the way, also how all mammals procreate, so the idea that this was a consequence completely unforeseen of your activity I find that I have less sympathy for you in that particular situation because you could have made decisions that would not lead you to this particular impasse, in fact this used to be the basis of marriage law when we were a seemingly more terrible society , we used to say that people should wait until they get married to have sex, a position I still hold and the reason for this was because then if you have sex and have a child, the child will grow up in a two-parent family with stability, so you know they There's not a lot of sympathy when it comes to rape and incest, obviously a lot of sympathy and that's why I think statistically speaking you see a large percentage of Americans, including many pro-life Americans, people who consider themselves pro-life would consider exceptions for Rape and incest, one of the dishonest things I think happens in abortion debates is arguing from the margins.

This tends to happen. Pro-choice activists will argue everything from rape and incest to the other 99.8 percent of abortions or you'll see people. On the pro-life side, they argue from partial birth abortion to full abortion, that you actually have to address the main case and then decide if that's acceptable or not, but for you the exception is just ethically without generalizing it, um, that is. an ethically valid exception. I don't expect there to be an exception for rape or incest because again I stick to the bright line rule that you want human life with potential to exist, then you have your own interest in life that cannot be stopped by your own interest. um, the only exception I hold is the same exception that literally her entire life is subject to which the mother's life is in danger, such a difficult and difficult topic because if you think that's the line then we're committing murder. mass or at least mass murder, so I would say that murder typically requires a level of mens rea that may be absent in many abortion cases, right?

This is because the next common question is: murder why not prosecute the woman and the answer is because the vast majority of people who abort do not actually believe that they are killing a person, they have a very different view of what that's happening exactly, so you know. I would say that there are all kinds of interesting hypotheses that come into play when it comes to abortion and, uh, you can interpret them any way, but levels, let's put it this way, there are gradations of error, I don't think that all abortions are equally reprehensible. , even if it was banned by practically everyone, right?

Well, I think they are extenuating circumstances that make some abortions, even if they are wrong, less morally reprehensible than others. I think you know there is a me. I can admit a difference between killing a two-week-old embryo in the womb and stabbing a seven-year-old in the face as best I can. I can acknowledge all of that while still saying that I think it would be a mistake to terminate a pregnancy, do you think? The One Life Begins question, which I think is a fascinating question, is it a question of science or a question of religion, I mean One Life Begins, is it a question of science, when does that life become valuable enough for people want to protect it.

It's going to be aquestion that goes beyond science. Science has no moral judgments to make about the value of human life. This is one of the issues that Sam Harris and I have had this discussion many times and it's always interesting. because Sam thinks that art can be achieved. To your right, what science says is that therefore we can learn, it's strange, so human flourishing is the goal of life and I always tell you that I don't see where you get that from evolutionary biology. . Yes, you can, you can, you can assume it, just say that you are assuming it, but don't pretend that it is a conclusion that you can draw directly from biological reality itself because obviously that does not exist in the animal world, for example, nobody assumes. the innate value of every ant I think I know your answer to this, but let's try it because I think you're going to be wrong, so there's a robot after you.

Do you think there will be a time in the future when it will? It would be unethical and illegal to kill a robot because it will have sentience. I guess you'd say there's no Lex because there's a fundamental difference between humans and robots and I just want to put it on the record because I think you'd be wrong, um. I mean, it depends on the level of development you would assume for the robots. I mean, you're assuming a complexity in robots that eventually mimics what we in religious life would call the human soul, yes, the ability to freely choose, for example, yes. which I think is a kind of capacity for human beings, the capacity to suffer, yes, if all of that could be approved and not programmed, that is, the voluntary capacity of a machine to do X Y or Z, you wouldn't be able to identify exactly where . happens in the show, right, yeah, it's not deterministic, yeah, um, so it would surely raise serious moral issues.

I'm not trying to answer that question. Are you afraid of that moment? I'm not sure. I'm afraid of that moment. I mean. It's more than I would fear if aliens came to the world and had these characteristics. Well, there are a lot of moral complexities and they don't necessarily have to be in the physical space, they could be in the digital space. There is a greater sophistication and number of bots on the Internet, including Twitter. As they become more and more intelligent there will be serious questions about what our moral duty is to protect those who have or claim to have an identity and that will be really interesting, actually what I fear is that the opposite will happen, i.e. that people, the worst thing that should happen is that we develop robots so sophisticated that they appear to have free will and then treat them with human dignity, that should be the worst.

That happens, what I fear is the opposite, is that if we are talking about this particular hypothetical, we develop robots that have all these apparent abilities and then we dehumanize them, which leads us to dehumanize other humans as well. all around us, which can easily be seen and the devaluation of life to the point where it doesn't really matter. I mean, people have always treated other, unfortunately newly discovered, humans this way, so I don't think there's actually a new problem. I think it's a pretty old problem. It will be interesting when it is made by human hands.

Yes, it is an opportunity to celebrate humanity or to bring out the worst in humanity. So mockery that happens naturally like you said by pointing out uh the other let me ask you about climate change there uh let's go from the meme to the deep philosophy okay the meme was there's a clip of you talking about climate change and saying that the Aquaman meme, you said that for the sake of argument, if the water level rises five to ten feet in the next hundred years, people will just sell their houses and move, and then the meme was Zelda, who can argue both sides of the argument? what they are doing is a straw man, the argument I am making is about time.

I don't mean that if a tsunami is about to hit your house you can list it on eBay, that's obviously not what I mean. What I mean is that human beings have an extraordinary ability to adapt, it's actually our best quality, uh, and that as water levels rise, real estate prices in those areas tend to go down, which Over time people tend to abandon those areas that they tend to abandon, they tend to do so right now. They sell their houses and then they tend to move and eventually those houses will be worthless and you won't have anyone to sell them to, but presumably there won't be many people living there at that time, which is one of the reasons the price would be low. because there is no demand, so it's over a hundred years, so all of these price dynamics are very gradual relative to the other correct price dynamics, so the joke, of course, is that, as I say, tomorrow there will be a tsunami at its source.

I pass by and you say, oh Bob is going to buy my house Bob is not going to buy your house as we all understand but he is a funny man, I laughed at that what is your view on climate change? Human beings can contribute to climate change. what we should do in terms of policy to respond to climate change, how has that changed over the years? I would say the truth is that for years and years I have believed that climate change was a reality in the sense that anthropogenic climate change is a reality, uh, I don't argue with the IPCC estimates.

I know climatologists at places like MIT or Caltech and they know these things better than I do, so you know the notion that climate change just isn't happening or that humans haven't contributed to climate change. I find it dubious, the question is to what extent humans are contributing to climate change, which 50 is 70 is 90. I think there's a little more play in the joints there, so it's not entirely clear the only thing that I know and I know this with factual accuracy is that all the measures that are currently being proposed are unviable and will not happen, so when people say about the climate Paris climate accords, even if they were imposed, you are talking about reducing the potential trajectory of climate change by a fraction of a degree if you're talking about the Green New Deal Net Zero by 2050.

Carbon is in the air and climate change is going to happen. You are also assuming that geopol makes it geopolitical. The dynamic doesn't exist so everyone will magically be on the same page and we'll all impose massive carbon taxes to get to Net Zero by 2050. I mean, hundreds of times higher than they currently are and that's not what I'm saying. I'm Cloud Schwab saying this from the World Economic Forum, who is a big proponent of exactly this type of policy and the reality is that we're going to have to accept that at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change is included in the kick. again the end of the century I'm not talking William Nordhaus The economist who just won the Nobel Prize on the subject speaking and what that suggests to me is what we have always known that human beings are bad at mitigation and excellent at adaptation , TRUE?

We are very bad at mitigating our own failures. We are very good at adapting to problems as they exist, which means that all estimates say that billions will die, that there will be mass famine, that we will see migration in just a few years. hundreds of millions of people are wrong what they will see is a gradual change in way of life people will move away from flooded areas on the coast they will see people building sea walls they will see people adapting new technologies to sell carbon In the air they will see geoengineering, this is the kind of thing we should be focusing on and the kind of weird focus on what if we keep throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at the same three technologies over and over again in the hope that if we subsidize it this will magically make it happen. will make it more efficient.

I haven't seen any evidence that that's going to be the way we get out of this need to be the mother of invention. I think humans will adapt because we have adapted and we will continue to adapt, so to the extent that we invest in the common thread of this should be in policies that help with adaptation versus mitigation, adequate levees, geoengineering, developing technologies that pull carbon out of the air again, if you thought about it. that there was more hope for green technologies currently in play. Then the subsidization of those technologies might be a little more favorable, but I haven't seen a lot of progress over the course of the last 30 years in the reliability of, for example, wind power. energy uh or or the ability to store solar energy to the extent necessary to power a grid what do you think about nuclear energy?

Is it nuclear energy? Nuclear energy is a proven source of energy and we should radically expand the use of nuclear energy. one of one for me that, honestly, this is like a litmus test question about whether you take climate change seriously, whether you're on the right or the left and you take climate change seriously, you should be for the nuclear energy if you are not. I know you just have other priorities, yes, the fascinating thing about the climate change debate is the dynamics of fear-mongering over the last few decades because some of the nuclear energy was tied to that, in some ways, there is a lot of fear. about nuclear energy, it seems like there are a lot of social phenomena, social dynamics involved versus just dealing with science, it's interesting to see and yes on my darkest days it makes me feel cynical about our ability to use reason and science to deal with I think our ability to use reason in science to deal with the world's threats is almost a matter of time frame, so I think, again, we're very bad at looking into the future. and say: you know, because people can I don't handle, for example, even things like compound interest, yeah, right, like the idea that if I put a dollar in the bank today, in 15 years it will be worth much more than a dollar, people can't really see it, and so the idea of ​​let's foresee a problem and then we'll fix it right now, instead of 30 years from now, we usually let the problem happen and then we fix it and it's bloodier and worse than it would have been if we had solved it. 30 years ago, but in fact it is effective and sometimes it turns out that the solution that we propose 30 years in advance is not effective and that can also be a major problem, that is then the case of the Man of Steel.

Fear-mongering for the sake of irrational fear-mongering, we have to be scared shitless to do anything, so you know, I'm generally against that, but maybe on a population scale, maybe some of that is necessary for us to respond appropriately. . For a long time, two long term threats we should be afraid, jealous, I don't think we can do that, although, firstly, I like it, I think platonic lives are generally bad, and then secondly, I don't . I don't think we really have the ability to do this. I think people like you know the kind of Elites in our society who gather in rooms and talk about these kinds of things and I have been to some of those meetings. in my synagogue on Friday night not really, but uh, but I didn't make the joke, but I'm glad you did, yeah, you know, I've been in rooms like Davos and when people discuss these kinds of issues and They wonder: What would happen if we told people that it was going to be a disaster with two nominees and the day after tomorrow it was like you didn't have that power that you don't have and, by the way, you would dramatically undermine your own power? because of covid to do this kind of thing because a lot of the things that happen if we scare you to the point that you stay in your own house for two years and we tell you that you can't send your children. to school and then we tell them that the vaccine is going to prevent transmission and then we also tell them that we need to spend seven trillion dollars in one year and it won't have any inflationary effect and it turns out that they are literally wrong, all of those things in the last few years They have done more to undermine institutional trust than at probably any other time in American history.

It's quite surprising, yes, I tend to agree that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, let me ask you. Going back to the God question and a big ridiculous question, who is God, who is God, so I'm going to use a kind of Aquinas formulation of how God is right, if there is a cause of all things. not physical things, if there is an underlying cause to the reason of the universe then that is what we call God, so not some big guy in the sky with a beard, you know he is the force underlying the logic of the universe. there is a logic to the universe and he is the legal Creator of that universe and he has an interest in our living according to the laws of the universe which, if you are a religious Jew, are codified. in the Torah, but if you are not a religious Jew, it would be included in national and natural law by a kind of Catholic theology, why do you think God created the universe or, as is popularly asked, what do you think the meaning is?

Behind this, what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of life? So I think that theThe meaning of life is to fulfill what God created you to do and that is a series of roles. I think that human beings and here you have to look to order. of human nature instead of looking at big questions. I've developed something that I've really been working on. You know, I'm writing a book about this, actually, what I colloquially call Role Theory and basically the idea is that the way we interact with the world is through a series of roles and those are also the things that we find more important and more implementable and they are a kind of virtue ethics, which suggests that if we act according to virtue like Aristotle then we will live the fullest and most meaningful life and then you will have a kind of deontological effects, like content effects, that it is a rule-based ethics, if you follow the rules, then you will find the meaning of life and then what I What I propose is that there is something that I would call role ethics, that is, there are a series of roles that we play throughout our lives, which are also the things we tend to put on our tombstones and find the most meaningful, so what? to a cemetery you can see what people found most meaningful because it's the things that they put on the stone that has like four words like beloved father beloved mother sister brother and you might have a job from time to time a Creator, you know? a religious person, these are all roles that have existed in all societies and throughout humanity and those are the things that we really find meaning in and the way we navigate those roles brings us meaning and I believe God created us to fulfill those roles. for purposes I cannot begin to understand because I am him and the more we are, the more we recognize those roles and the more we live those roles and then we can express Freedom within those roles.

I believe that Freedom exists within each of those roles and that is what makes our lives different and fun, we are all parents in different ways, but being a parent is a significant role, we all have spouses, but you know how you interact, that relationship is what makes your life meaningful and interesting, yes, that's what we were put on Earth to do and if we play those roles properly and those roles include things like being a Creator, having a creative instinct as human beings. , being a Creator or being an innovator, being an advocate for your family, you know, being someone who builds yourself by being a social member of your community, which is something we are made to do, if we fulfill those roles properly, we will have made the world a better place than the one we inherited and You will also have had the joy of experiencing the type of flow they talk about in Psychology, where when you take on these roles you really feel a flow, so these roles are a fundamental part of the human condition, yes , then you are the the book you are working on is to build a system that helps us understand, is to look, let's assume that all of that is true, the real question in the book is how do you build a flourishing and useful society and politics, uh so at the level of society if This is our understanding of a human being, how do we build a good society?

Exactly because I think a lot of political theory at the moment is based on JS Mill's kind of thinking, which is all that makes good politics, it allows you to wave your hand. until you punch someone in the face or a rosy thought, which is, what if we built society around achieving the most for the least essentially, do you know what would happen if we built society around what really makes humans the most fulfilled and it is the fulfillment of these particular roles and where does freedom come into that right? How do you avoid the idea of ​​tyranny in That's Right, How Do You Have to Be a Mother?

You must be a father. You should be. Where does freedom come in? Can you reject those roles entirely as a society and be okay? The answer is probably no. So you need a society that actually promotes and protects those roles, but also protects freedom within those roles and that raises a more fundamental question of what exactly freedom is for and I think both the right and the left tend to make a mistake. when they talk about freedom. The left tends to think that freedom is a supreme good, that simple choice turns bad into good, which is not true, and I think the right sometimes talks about freedom in almost the same terms and I think that's not true either. it's true.

The question is whether freedom is useful. Inherent value or instrumental value is good for Freedom in itself or is good for Freedom because it allows you to achieve X Y or Z and I've thought about this a lot and I tend to stay on the back side of the aisle, I mean. This is the area of ​​the US where I'm moving This may be an area where I've moved Is there something we tend to think about when you think more superficially about politics or maybe more quickly? Because that's how we talk in America. It's about freedoms and rights. that the right is what makes it not like the political right the rights do things well the freedoms do things well the question really is what are those rights in the Freedoms for now you have to be careful so that this does not become tyranny the right that you can only have Freedom to do what I say you can do, but there have to be spheres of Freedom that are turbulent, interesting and full of debate, but without threatening the main institutions that surround those Freedoms because if you destroy the institutions, Freedoms will also disappear.

If you tear down the pillars of society, the freedoms that are on top of those pillars will collapse and I think that's if people feel like we're on the brink of tyranny. I think that's why it's a fascinating instrumental perspective on freedom. I'm going to have to give myself a lot to think about. Let me ask you a personal question. Was there ever a time when you had a crisis of faith where you questioned your belief in God and I would? I call it less a crisis of faith than an ongoing question of faith, which I think is, I hope, most religious people and the word Israel in Hebrew Israel means to wrestle with God, that's literally what the word means and that's why the idea of ​​wrestling with God, right, if you're Jewish or Banay Israel, right, the idea of ​​wrestling with God I think is endemic to the human condition, if you understand what God is doing, then I think you're wrong and if you think that the question doesn't matter then I think you are also wrong I think that God is a very necessary hypothesis it is a struggle the struggle with God is life that is the process of life that is correct because you will never reach that answer of Otherwise, your God, you are not, so why does God allow cruelty and suffering in the world?

One of the tough questions, so let's dig deeper here. There are two types of cruelty and suffering, so if we are talking about human cruelty and suffering. because God does not intervene to prevent people from exercising their free will because to do so would be to deprive human beings of the choice that makes them human and this is the center of the Garden of Eden basically it is that God could make you an angel in which case no you would have the choice to do the wrong thing, but as long as we allow cause and effect in a universe shaped by your choice, cruelty and evil will exist and then there is the question of natural. cruelty and vicissitudes of life and the answer there is I believe that God becomes dark.

I think if God appeared in all his glory to people on a regular basis I think they would make faith and you wouldn't need it there. It wouldn't be such a thing as faith, it would just be reality, no one has to prove to you that the sun rises every day, um, but if God allows us the option to believe in him, that is the ultimate choice from a religious point of view. . from sight, then you will have to hide behind tragedy and horror and all those other things. I mean, this is a fairly well-known Kabbalistic concept called Tsum Tsum in Judaism, which is the idea that when God created the universe, he sort of withdrew. to make room for all these things to happen, so that God doesn't have an instrumental perspective on freedom, in a primary sense, He does because the best use of freedom will be to believe in it and you can misuse it. your right to freedom helps, there will be consequences if you believe in an afterlife or if you believe in some kind of generalized better version of life guided by faith.

So freedom has a purpose, but he also believes that it has to be given to people from a cosmic point of view. perspective the freedom to do evil without threatening all the institutions of society, I mean, that is why it says in the Bible that if man sheds blood for man, his blood will be shed rightly, there are punishments that are in thought biblical for doing things. that is wrong, for a human being who lacks faith in God, if you are an atheist, can you still be a good person of course? 100 and there are many religious people who are bad, how do we properly understand that tension?

From a religious perspective, what I would say is that it is perfectly plausible to live by a set of rules that do not harm other people without believing in God. Maybe you are understanding that the reason for doing that wrong is what a religious person does. I would say um, there's that conversation I had with Sam again, it's basically you and I agree. I told him this. You and I agree on almost everything when it comes to morality, like we probably don't agree on 15 or 20 of the things, the other 80 are because you grew up in a Judeo-Christian society and so did I and we grew up 10 miles away. from each other, you know, around the turn of the millennium, so there's that, so you can perfectly well be an atheist living a morally decent life because I can live a morally decent life relative to other people without believing in God.

I don't think I've built a society on that because I think you know it depends on this kind of goodness of humanity. Natural goodness of humanity. I don't think so. I believe in the natural goodness of humanity, no, no, I believe in, I believe that man has created both sinners and those with the capacity to sin in the capacity to do good, but if you let them be alone, right? without social institutions to shape them, I think that's very likely to go wrong, oh, interesting, well, we come to something we don't agree on, but that may be reflected in our approach to Twitter as well.

I think if humans are left alone. uh, they tend to good, they definitely have the capacity for good and evil, but I, when I leave them alone, um, I tend to believe that they are good, I think they could be good with limits, what I mean by that is the evidence. I think this tends to show that humans are quite tribal, so you will end up with people who are good to their immediate family and perhaps their immediate neighbors and then when they are threatened by an outside tribe, they kill everyone, which which is a kind of history of civilization in the pre-civilization era, which was a very violent era, the pre-civilization era later was quite violent.

Do you think on the topic of tribalism in our modern world, what are the pros and cons of tribes? We should try to improve ourselves as a civilization. I don't think it will ever be possible to completely overcome tribalism. I think it's a natural human condition to want to be with people who think like you or have a common set of beliefs and I think trying to erase that in the name of universalism probably leads to utopian results that have devastating consequences. A kind of utopian universalism has failed every time it's been tried, whether you're talking about it now, it seems to be a kind of liberal universalism that's being rejected. by a large number of people around the world in different cultures, whether they are talking about religious universalism that typically comes with religious tyranny or whether they are talking about a communist or Nazi type of universalism that comes with mass water, as well that this is what you know.

I don't believe in universalism. I think you know some values ​​that are quite limited that all human beings should have in common and that's it. I believe everyone should have the ability to join their own culture. I think the way we define tribes is a little bit different, yeah, so I think tribes shouldn't be defined by innate physical characteristics, for example, because I think thank God as a civilization we've moved past that and I think that's um, that's a childish way of looking at the world and all tall people are not a tribe, all black people know that all white people are not a tribe, so tribes must be formed on ideas versus physical characters, that's right, for that's we really come back to start the conversation when it comes to Jews, you know, I'm not a big idea, I'm not a big believer in ethnic Judaism, right?

I am a person who takes Judaism seriously. Judaism is more To me, you were born with a last name like Berg or Steen, so I agree with you, but he wouldn't agree with me, but that's because he was a right-wing tribalist who thought in racial terms, so maybe Robots help us see humans. like One Tribe, maybe as long as this is Reagan's idea, Reagan said well, if there's an alien invasion, then we'll all be on the same side, so I'll go to the Soviets and we'll talk about it. There issomething deep The truth is, uh, what does it mean to be a good man?

The various roles that a human being assumes. uh, in this role theory that you've talked about, what does it mean to be a good? What does it mean to play it now? I will do Aristotle. means to perform the function well what Aristotle says is that good is not like moral good moral evil in the way we tend to think about it meant that a good cup contains liquid and a good spoon contains soup means that as a thing that is broken cannot keep those things in order, so yes, the idea of ​​being a good person means that you are fulfilling the function for which you were created, it is a teleological view of humanity, so if you are a good father , this means that you are raising your child with lasting values ​​that will educate him in a healthy way, able to protect himself and pass on the traditional wisdom of the ages to future generations, while allowing him the capacity for innovation that would be Being a good father.

The right thing to do is to be a good spouse would mean protecting and unifying with your spouse and building a safe family and a place to raise your children. Being a good citizen of your community means protecting your fellow citizens in your community while encouraging them to build for themselves and become that. It's actually much easier to think about how to do it, that's why I like the Theory role because it's very difficult since in a way under Theory it says to be generous, okay, how does that manifest? I don't know, I don't know what that looks like.

Sometimes being generous can be not being generous to other people just when Aristotle says you should be benevolent, what does that mean? This is very vague when I say be a good parent, most people have a visceral understanding of what that means. to be a good father and, above all, they have a visceral level that understands what it means to be a really bad father, um, and what it means to be a good man is to fill those roles as many as you can appropriately and at the same time . complete function and that is very hard work.

I've said it before, you know, because I interact a lot with the audience and all this, you know, the word cool comes up a lot. What does it take to be a great leader? What does it take to be a great person and I've always told people that it's actually quite easy to be great, it's very difficult to be good and for the most part there are a lot of wonderful people who are not very good and they are not very good people. and one of them, most of them, you know, frankly, most good people die mourned by their family and friends and two generations later they are forgotten, but those are the people who progressively move the ball forward in the world, sometimes much more than people who consider themselves great understand the role in your life of being a cup and be very good at it exactly that's right, hold the soup it's very uh Jordan Peterson has been there it's very like lobster with Jordan exactly I think people quote you for years and years To start, um, what advice would you give to a lot of young people who look up to you?

What advice? um despite better judgment no, I'm just kidding, just no, maybe I'm just kidding, just kidding, they, uh, seriously look. it's up to you and get inspiration from your ideas from your bold thinking what advice would you give them how to have how to live a life worth living how to have a career that they can be proud of and all that so live the values ​​that you believe are really important and look for those values ​​in others. I would be the first advice. The second piece of advice, don't get on Twitter until you're 26 years old.

Because your brain is fully developed at that time. You already know. Like I said at the beginning, you know I was on social media and writing columns since I was 17 years old. You know it was a great opportunity and it turns out to be a great temptation. to say an enormous amount of stupid things, uh, when you're young, I mean, you're trying out ideas and you put them in and out and social media permanentizes those things and records them. in stone and then that is used against you for the rest of your life, so I say this to young people all the time, like if you find me on social media, stay on social media but don't post, look, uh , if you want to get information and most importantly, you should read books um, as far as you know, another piece of advice I would say: participate in your community, there is no substitute for participating in your community and participating in interpersonal actions, because that will soften you and it will make you a better person.

I become a better person since then. I got married and became an even better person since I had kids, so you can imagine how terrible I was before all this stuff, uh and uh, involving your community allows you to build the things that matter as locally as possible. . At the level level, I mean the result, by the way, of the kind of political compliance policy that I was talking about before, there is a lot of localism because the roles that I talk about are very much local roles, so things have to be protected locally . I think we focus too much in this country and others on solutions like world-beating ones, national solutions, solutions that apply to hundreds of millions of people, how do I get to the solutions that apply to five and then we get to the solutions that apply to 20. and then we get to the solutions that involve 200 people or a thousand people, let's solve those things and I think the solutions at the top level flow from the bottom up, not from the top down, what about the mentors and maybe role models that you've had, you've had a mentor or maybe people that you admire or interact with on a local level like you really know them or someone you really admire for me.

I am very lucky to have grown up in a very strong two-parent home. I am very close to my parents. I've lived near my parents literally my entire life with the exception of three years of law school uh and uh like now they live a mile and a half from us uh that's right, would you learn about your parents' lives and your father, um, oh man, so many things about my parents, that's good and bad, that's hard, um, I mean, I think the good thing for my dad is that you have to stay true to your values, he's very big on your values. values ​​are important, stay true to them, did you understand what your values ​​are, what your principles are from the beginning, pretty quickly, yeah, yeah, um, and then you know he was very important in that, that's why, why For example, I get asked a lot in the Jewish community?

Why do I use a Keep? The answer is: it never occurred to me to take off the Keepa. I always used it. Why would I take it off at any time? That's the life I want to live and you know, that's just how it is. yeah, that was a great question from my dad from my mom practicality my dad is more of a dreamer my mom is much more practical and you know, the kind of lessons that I learned from my dad are the ones that you can have. The counter lesson is that you can have a good idea, but if you don't have an implementation plan, it doesn't end up being a reality and I think he's actually learned that better as well throughout his life, but my Dad since he was very young he wanted me to interact with other adults and he wanted me to learn from other people and one of his roles was that if he didn't know something, he would find someone who he thought did know.

The thing that I can talk to is a very important thing, so I'm very lucky to have wonderful parents in terms of other mentors, you know, in terms of media. Andrew Breitbart was a mentor. Andrew was obviously kind. As I met him in his last days I think more about militancy than when I was very close to him, so for someone like me who doesn't know more about militancy, can you tell me what makes him great? A great man, what made Andrew great is that he interacted with everyone, I mean everyone, so there are videos of him skating down the Boulevard and people were protesting and he would literally like to skate up to them and say: "come on to have lunch together." I would just do this like that is actually who Andrew was what was the thinking behind it just what he was he was just careless he was he was much more outgoing than me actually he was he was very warm with people like for me, ya you know, I I would say that with Andrew I met Andrew because, let's say, I remember when I was 16 years old.

He passed away when I was 28 years old. So I knew Andrew for 10 12 years and the people who knew Andrew for about 10 minutes were new Andrew 99, as well as I knew Andrew because he was in the front, like everything was here and he loved talking to people, he loved it. he loved interacting with people and that made him very funny and unpredictable and fun to watch and all that, and then I think. Twitter affected him, I think Twitter is one of the lessons I learned from Andrew, it was the counter lesson, which is Twitter. Twitter can poison you.

Twitter can really ruin you if you spend all day on Twitter reading comments and getting angry. with people talking about you it becomes a very difficult life and I think you know that in the last year of his life, Andrew got very caught up in that because of a series of circumstances, it can actually affect your mind, it can actually affect you. They make you resent all that kind of stuff. I tend to agree with that, but the lesson I learned from Andrew is to get involved with everyone, enjoy the mission they give you that you can't always fulfill.

I know that sometimes it is very hard and difficult. I'm not going to pretend that everything is fun and rainbow all the time because I didn't and some of the things I have to cover I don't like and some of the things I have to say I don't particularly like, you know, that happens. , but that's what I learned from Andrew. Until now, there are other mentors. I had some, I had some teachers when I was a kid who, you know, said things. That stuck with me. I had a fourth grade teacher named Mr Nutty who said don't let potential be written on your Tombstone, which was, uh, how nice, that's a good line, that's a great line, particularly for a fourth grader, uh, but uh, it was That you know, that was good in grade 11.

An English teacher named Anthony Miller, who is a fantastic writer, very good. He had studied with James Joyce at Trinity College Dublin, so he and I really got on well and he helped me a lot with my writing. Have you ever had doubts about yourself? I mean, especially when you came out with all the attacks. Have you ever doubted your ability to stay strong and be a voice for the ideas you represent? I definitely don't doubt it. my ability to say what I want to say, I doubt my ability to handle the emotional impact of saying it, which means that's hard, I mean again, to take just one example, in 2016, the ADL measured that I was the target number one of the anti-Semitism attacks on planet Earth, you know, that's not fun, that's unpleasant and when you receive criticism not from anti-Semites but from people in general, we talked near the beginning about how you surround yourself with people who suit you to provide something good. feedback is sometimes hard to know, sometimes people give you feedback and you don't know if they are well motivated or poorly motivated and if you are trying to be a decent person you can't cut off the feedback mechanism and what that means is sometimes you you take the wrong thing seriously or you take too much cake uh you're not light enough about it you take it very, very seriously you lose sleep over it I mean, I can't tell you the number of nights I just haven't slept because to some criticism that someone made of me and I thought to myself that maybe that's right, maybe that and sometimes it's right and you know, that's some of it that's good for Stew in that criticism, but some of it can destroy you. . you have a shortcut, so Rogan has talked about taking a lot of mushrooms since you don't like mushrooms, what's your escape from that?

It's very big for me, so writing for me is cathartic. I love writing. Hey, that's very important. Spend time with my family. Again, I usually have a close circle of friends that I talk to so I can talk. I bounce ideas off of them and then once I've talked it over, I tend to feel a little better. Exercise is also important. I mean, if I go a few days without exercising, I tend to get cranky pretty quickly. I mean I could keep the six-pack somehow, dude, you and Rogan agree, well, Twitter aside, we haven't mentioned love, what's the role of love in the human condition?

Ben Shapiro, man, they don't ask you too much love in In fact, I was, uh, I was, you don't ask that question on a college campus, no, I usually don't, in fact, we were at an event, uh, recently like a daily cable event and in the middle of this event there was a meet and greet with some audience members in the middle of this event this guy walks by this girl they're talking and they're talking to me and their time is running out security is moving he says no, no, wait a minute and he gets down on one knee and proposes to the girl in front of me and I said: this is the strangest proposal in the history of humanity, what is happening right now, as if I were your choice of cupid here, so good, you know we actually like it.

We got together because we listened to his show and I said, "I can interpret it as a Jewish marriage right now. I'm going to need like a glass, we're going to need some wine. It's going to get weird."very quickly, yes, but yes, so, love, doctor." I usually don't get asked too much about the role of Love. um, it's important in Binding Together, human beings who should be united, and the role of respect It's even more important in Binding Together, broader groups of people. I think one of the mistakes we make in politics is trying to replace love with respect and respect with love, and I think that's a big mistake, so I don't feel tremendous love in the same sense that I feel for my family, for random strangers I love my family I love my children Anyone who tells you they love your child as much as you love your child is lying to you, It's not true.

I love my community more than other communities. I love my state more than other states. That's right, all that is normal and everything is fine, the problem. Empathy can arise when that becomes so close-knit that you don't look outward and don't really have respect for other people. So on a local level you need love to protect you and protect you and give you the strength to move forward and then beyond that you need a lot of respect for people who are not in the circle of love and I think trying to spread that. Loving people who aren't going to love you or who are going to slap you for it or who you're just not that close to, or you run the risk of being airborne and fake SAT or uh, or it can actually be counterproductive in some ways, well , there's a sense in which you could have love for other human beings just based on the humanity that connects everyone, so you love this whole project that we're a part of and actually organize.

Another thing we don't agree on is loving a stranger, like having that basic empathy and compassion towards a stranger, even if they may hurt you. I think that's ultimately what it means to me to be a good man to live with. A good life is having compassion towards strangers because for me it is almost easy, natural and obvious to love the people close to you, but to go outside yourself and love others. I think that's what makes up the fabric of a good society. I don't think that has value, I think it can have value, but I think we're also talking about love almost in two different senses, which means that when I talk about love, what I immediately think of is the love I have for my wife and children or my parents. or my brothers I love friendship uh or the love of my close friends yeah, that's fine, but I think using that same term to describe how I feel about strangers I think would be inaccurate and that's why I'm suggesting that respect could be a more solid and realistic basis for the way we treat people who are far from us, people who are strangers, respect for their dignity, respect for their priorities, respect for their role in life, eh , might be too much.

In other words, there may be a rare human being who is capable of literally loving a street bum the same way he loves his own family, but if you respect the street bum the same way you respect your own family. uh, because everyone is deserved, everyone deserves that respect. I think you get to the same end without forcing people into a position of unrealistically expecting them to feel something they don't feel. You know, one of the big questions that arise in religion. above is that God makes certain requests that make you feel a certain way, right, you're supposed to be this Sinclair, you're supposed to be happy with certain things or you know you're supposed to love that neighbor as yourself, Right?

You will notice that in that statement it is your neighbor, the truth is that it is not like in general anyone is love for that neighbor, that is in any case, I believe that it extends to anyone who follows you on Twitter, your neighbor because God anticipated the aspect. of the social network that is not not restricted by geography, yes, I will differ with you in the interpretation of that, but in any case, yes, the kind of extension of love outward might be too great and I wonder, so maybe we can start with respect and Then, hopefully, something else can come from that respect if people make a living because I think one of the big problems when we were talking about universalism is when people say that I am a citizen of the world and that I love people from another country as such.

As much as I love myself or as much as I love my country, it actually tends to lead me to an almost overcrowded utopianism. I think that can be a little difficult because with love comes a certain expectation of solidarity and I think that's true, I mean when you love your family, you love your wife like there's a certain level of solidarity that's required within the home. to preserve the most loving type of home and therefore if you love everyone, that implies a certain level of solidarity that may not be. exists so maybe the idea for me is to start with respect and then maybe as people respect each other more then love is a consequence of that instead of starting with love and then expecting respect to be develop, yes, there is a danger of that word becoming empty and instead being used for a dogmatic type of utopianism.

I mean, this is the way that, for example, religious theocracies very often work. We love you so much that we have to convert you, so let's start with respect. What I would love to see after our conversation today. It's seeing a Ben Shapiro who continues to grow on Twitter being even more respectful than he already has been and maybe one day turning that into love on Twitter, that would be if I could see that in this world, that would make me die . a happy man wow that's a little bit if I can make that happen for love in the world for me as a gift for me.

I'll try to make that happen. I have a question. I'm going to need you to tell me. Can? What jokes are good? Are the jokes okay? So yes, can I? I'll just run your Twitter from now on, just send it to me. I will review the jokes beforehand and you can tell me if it is a love joke or not. It hates being so surprised before by all the heart emojis that are popping up on your Twitter, but thank you so much for being bold and brave and exploring ideas and, aside from your Twitter, thank you for just being in good faith and for all the discussions and all the conversations you're having with people it's such an honor thank you for talking to me thank you for having me I really appreciate it thank you for listening to this conversation with Ben Shapiro to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some In the words of Ben Shapiro himself, freedom of expression and thought matters, especially when we do not agree with the expression and thought, at the moment when the majority decides to destroy people for engaging in thoughts they do not like, the crime becomes a reality, thank you.

Thanks for listening and I hope to see you next time.