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July 12, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:26
The Intellectual Dark Web | Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and More
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Welcome, this is the Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday's special.
This week's episode is the Intellectual Dark Web edition.
So on this week's Sunday Special, we're going to recap some of the conversations I've had with fellow members of the Intellectual Dark Web.
This is a term coined by my friend Eric Weinstein.
Basically, the Intellectual Dark Web is just a bunch of people with a wide variety of political viewpoints who are willing to hash out conversations in decent fashion.
Now, we used to just call this America, but that's not the reality anymore.
The way that it works in America now is that if you disagree with any sort of prevailing narrative, you will immediately be canceled.
A group of us sort of got together in informal fashion originally and then started talking in maybe slightly more formal fashion.
It's really a network of friends who are willing to talk about things we disagree about.
Like Sam Harris and I, we disagree about nearly everything.
And Eric Weinstein and I, we disagree about nearly everything.
And Joe Rogan disagrees with everybody about everything.
That's what makes these conversations fun.
It's what makes the relationships fun.
See, this used to be part of the fun and games of American politics and of American thinking, is that we would all pursue truth together by examining each other's ideas, turning them over, and debating them with one another.
This obviously has become such a unique phenomenon in American public life that we actually gave ourselves the name, right?
Eric gave us the name Intellectual Dark Web.
It sort of stuck.
And then it grew, and there are a bunch of different figures who are members or adjunct members of the Intellectual Dark Web.
One of the things you're going to hear us talk about a lot here is the value of freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of discussion.
It's one of the reasons the intellectual dark web originally formed.
It's something there are so many people who really want to destroy.
I call them disintegrationists in my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
That one is out July 21st.
There's a whole group of people in America who believe that a culture of free speech and discussion is really about power differentials and preventing people who are dispossessed from speaking.
That's an absolute lie, but it's become an incredibly powerful talking point.
It's why you see cancel culture on the rise.
I mean really on the rise these days.
I talk about all that and how to destroy America in three easy steps.
People ask me, what is the intellectual dark web?
All I think it is, is people who are open minded.
That's all.
People who are willing to have conversations that you're really not supposed to have these days.
And by that, I mean any conversation at all.
And that means that a lot of the people in this group are liberals.
I believe I'm the only person in the group who plans on voting for Trump in 2020.
It's funny, the media have obviously characterized the entire group as rabid right-wing fascists, which is unbelievable.
You're talking about in Brett Weinstein a socialist, in Eric a quasi-socialist, you're talking about in Sam Harris a lifelong Democrat, with Joe Rogan you're talking about a guy who alternatively would vote for Bernie Sanders or maybe Donald Trump or Whoever the hell knows, right?
Joe kind of switches on a moment's notice.
You got Jordan Peterson, who might be considered conservative except that he's Canadian and doesn't vote in American elections.
You got Dave Rubin, who was a gay liberal who became a gay quasi-conservative.
So it's all over the place, the intellectual dark web.
But it gained importance again at a time when cancel culture seemed to be in the offing.
When it gave, I think, people a sense of comfort that, yeah, maybe we actually can talk with one another.
It's the distinction I commonly make on my own show between the left and liberals.
I say that there are people who I know, who I like, who are liberals.
They disagree with me on everything, but they are still willing to stand up for my right to say things.
And then there's the left, which wishes to just shut down all conversation in a fascistic fashion and make sure that nobody can ever say anything.
In this episode, you're going to hear me talk with my friends Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, and Christina Hoff Summers.
All of these people are very controversial.
I'm not supposed to be friendly with them.
Each of these conversations was a blast.
We actually are all friends off the air as well.
I think you'll enjoy this window into the kind of conversations that we actually do have in real life.
These ones are just on camera.
The last compilation Sunday special we made was on the topic of Judeo-Christian values.
One of the people we talked to in that conversation was my friend Michael Shermer.
Looking back on being part of the Sunday special and being part of that conversation, Michael wrote us this letter.
Quote, my conversation with Ben was one of the best I've had among the thousands of media interviews I've done over the past quarter century.
One reason is it wasn't an interview, but a conversation.
Ben is one of the most informed minds I've encountered in a long time, the fastest talker west of the Mississippi, the toughest man south of the picket wire next to me, to quote John Wayne's character Tom Donovan describing the scurrilous Liberty Valance whom he shot.
Even though Ben and I disagree on many things, we agree on the most important thing of all.
The free speech and open dialogue are the royal road to truth, and I suspect he would, like me, reject the sentiment behind one of the most memorable lines in filmic history, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Not only do facts not care about your feelings, as Ben says, facts also don't care about your legend.
I can't wait to face Ben again, high noon on Main Street in Shinbone, Arizona.
I appreciate that, Michael.
We hope to hear from some of the other guests that we've talked to over some of these prior shows, and we can give you their reactions to the conversations, which I think are really fascinating.
In some cases, maybe they'll rebut some of my points.
We'll bring those to you when they come in.
It turns out, you don't have to agree with everybody in order to get along with everybody.
And if we all had a little bit more of that, you too can be a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.
Again, what we just used to call First Amendment normal conversation in the United States.
So I hope you really enjoy the episode.
These conversations were some of the most stimulating that we've had on the Sunday special, specifically because there is disagreement and good natured disagreement about the biggest issues in life.
From me talking about atheism and religion with Sam Harris to me talking about free markets with Eric Weinstein.
I mean, it's just all over the place, and that's the fun of it.
It's freewheeling, and it's interesting.
It is the podcast arena.
I mean, I will say that podcasting has made this sort of stuff possible.
The internet has made this sort of stuff possible, which is why you're seeing the left seeking to crack down on the internet and the means of distribution on the internet.
That's why we all have to fight back against all of that.
So, with that said, I hope you enjoy this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special compilation from the Intellectual Dark Web.
We're going to jump into it all in just a moment.
But first, I want to take a moment to give a shout out to all of our advertising partners who make this show possible.
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One of our first guests to join the show was Joe Rogan from Episode 4.
Joe's been a stand-up comedian for 20 years, an MMA commentator for almost as long.
Today, he's arguably most well-known for his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, a long-form conversation-style interview show that features guests from all walks of life, includes some of the biggest names in politics, technology, and entertainment.
Multiple times a week, often multiple times a day, he sits down for hours with people like Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk, Robert Downey Jr., and moi.
What started as a simple web stream backstage at his comedy shows has grown into a landmark of the podcasting industry.
Joe and I have become pretty good friends.
I will say that Joe is one of the most fun people I know, one of the most open-minded, and dude's a kick.
I mean, he really is.
When he came to the studios, obviously everybody was really enthusiastic about seeing Joe Rogan because, after all, he has this enormous crowd, and he's just the most down-to-earth dude I know.
I love the fact that Joe is down-to-earth, and he really doesn't take his fame and fortune for granted.
But you would never know if you just met him on the street that he was famous and incredibly wealthy.
He really is an incredible guy.
I'm a big Joe Rogan fan, and I'm proud to consider him a personal friend.
Here, Joe and I discuss how his podcast got started, how cultural differences affect the ongoing race conversation, the effectiveness of the American political system and his controversial opinion on voting, which I kind of agree with.
You're a really gifted guy.
I mean, you can sit there for three hours with somebody and talk about the most random topic and make it really interesting.
So I need the backstory.
So all of my listeners and people who are fans of mine might not know your work as well, might not know kind of your story.
So how did you get to be doing what you're doing right now?
Give us the whole history.
Well, with podcasting, it just started out doing a video thing with just Ustream.
We're just doing Q&A, like people would tweet questions, we'd answer questions, just for fun.
I did it once.
And I actually did it a couple of times backstage in between shows years before that.
There was a thing called Justin TV.
Which I'm not sure what that is now.
It became a new company.
But we would just show backstage.
We'd have like a webcam going and would just play around and talk to people and have fun.
And then we did the one Q&A and I said, all right, I'm gonna do it again next week.
We'll try to do it regularly.
So I did it again the next Monday and then it became a weekly thing.
Then we started uploading it to iTunes and then we started getting guests and then I said, OK, I got to get out of my house.
All these weirdos were coming over my house.
I'm like, I'll just get a studio somewhere.
So I got a studio.
And then after the studio, I'm like, well, the studio's kind of little.
Let's get a bigger studio.
So then I got a bigger studio.
And then now it's somehow or another it's a business.
There's a deep desire right now in a free society to try and figure out why some people succeed and some people fail and we're never allowed to say that there are natural issues at stake.
And I understand the resistance to it based on race.
So for example, you see a lot of people who will say you can't ever talk about racial differences in IQ because That is going to lead to toward this racist conclusion that your race defines your IQ, which is, you know, a silly conclusion.
Like there are racial differences in IQ based on kind of group statistics, but that has no relevance to the particular individual standing in front of you.
And so you saying this black guy is stupid because he's black is racist.
You saying there are group differences in IQ because every study ever done has shown group differences in IQ, not even based on racial groups necessarily, but based on different groups generally between Between, you know, age groups, there are differences in IQ actually.
If you show that, at least from young age 2 to like 12, if you mention any of these things, then you're overriding the idea of a tabula rasa human being who can be created in whatever image you want.
Like, what people really want is to correct the cosmic imbalances, as Thomas Sowell says.
I don't know, what do you think is behind it?
I think you're hitting the nail on the head, and I think there's a tremendous amount of white guilt involved in it as well.
I mean, because basically what the IQ tests are showing when they do study differences in IQ and races, you're showing the rise of the superiority of the Asian race.
I mean, Asians dominate those things, and everybody is sort of just like, well, let's not talk about that.
Let's talk about white and black, because that's more convenient, and it's easier, and they can find a victim, and they can find a perpetrator.
And what you're also seeing, like, there's a lot of Asian groups that are furious because they're getting discriminated against about getting into colleges and universities.
They have higher standards, because they have such a high percentage of Asians that are getting into the universities.
It's very strange because they're not vocal about it and they're not publicizing it and they're not screaming racism in the streets, but they're the victims of it.
They actually are the victims of hard work and success and excellent genetics.
That's a really good question.
And the differences in culture are really the place where we should be putting most of our focus, because when it comes to natural imbalances, there's only so much that you can do, right?
I'm not going to be fighting you in a ring anytime soon because I'd just get destroyed.
But when it comes to cultural differences, that's the stuff that we can correct for.
And instead of doing that, what we tend to do is we tend to pretend that the cultural differences are not brought about by immediate decision-making by parents.
Or by immediate communities.
It's something out there, right?
It's racism in the ether, or it's discrimination writ large.
It's something.
It's something out there.
We can't put our heads around it exactly, but it's something that's making us imbalanced.
And so the way to fix that is by getting rid of all imbalances that we see.
And so if there's an imbalance between men and women, we'll just pretend that that doesn't exist anymore, and that it must have been caused by something that we can't quite control.
Yeah, it's definitely not an objective way of approaching the issue.
I think there's a host of different factors that play into every community, right?
There's the echoes of the poor behavior of the people that live there before you, all the consequences of other people's actions that have affected all the people around you.
People going to jail, people that have experienced racism, people that have experienced poor treatment by law enforcement, massive distrust around you, very difficult to excel in those environments.
You're constantly like running away from gangs and headed home.
I don't think we should hold those people up to the same standards as we should.
People that grow up in very safe middle class communities where they don't have to worry about all this stuff.
I think there's a bunch of different factors, and everybody's looking for one.
Exactly.
And the one factor that appeals to their ideology.
Yeah.
I think that's a real problem.
It's a problem also.
Anytime you mention IQ, everybody goes nuts because immediately they suggest that what you're saying is racist.
And the truth is that whatever IQ differentials there are, it's unclear how much is explained by genetics and how much is explained by environment.
But some is clearly explained by genetics and some is clearly explained by environment.
As soon as you say that, everybody suggests that you are operating in a racist space.
So it's as you say, when it comes to data, like this happened with Sam Harris when he was being interviewed by Ezra Klein.
Ezra Klein just went after him for suggesting that science is science.
Well, science is still science, even if you don't like the science.
And it seems like the same thing should apply when it comes to biological differences.
Do you want to see a more active government or a less active government?
Because I'm kind of happy with the gridlock, I'll be honest with you.
I kind of like the fact the government isn't doing anything.
There's definitely some pros to that.
I think it would be better if we had a more competent system.
And I agree with you that the checks and balances have... We've shown that he can't just throw everything out and just run Trump mania all across the country.
I think there's definitely some positive to that gridlock.
All of the above.
- So, okay, so what changes would you make to the system?
'Cause you talk about the system being a process.
You talked about online voting.
Do you mean online voting direct on issues or you mean online voting for representatives? - All of the above.
- Okay, so you like the referendum system in California? - I think if you have opinions on things, I mean, first of all, this is really unpopular.
I think you should have to show that you have an understanding of what you're voting on.
You should probably have to take a test.
I'm fine with this.
If you want to get rid of the ID requirements and retain the actual you need to know what you're talking about requirement, I think I could live with that.
I think you should take a test.
And if you understand what the consequences of your decision are, you understand what What is being voted on?
Then you can vote on it.
But if you just read, if you just go check yes, check no, just do it haphazard just because you're a crazy person and you happen to be 18.
I think that's pretty ridiculous.
But to have a test and have someone say, well, you have to be required to understand, have a rudimentary understanding of what you're talking about in order to make an opinion that could literally affect 300 million people.
A lot of people would say that's bad, because then what about, are you saying that people have to have a certain intelligence level in order to vote?
Is this like, are you at the door of eugenics?
Like, where are you going with this?
Well, I think it's not a bad idea to say that if you're going to vote on really important issues, like whatever those issues are, whether it's funding the military or abortion or whatever it is, you should have an understanding of the subject.
I don't think that's unreasonable.
But people don't want any extra work, and they want things to be very, very convenient.
They want the virtue signaling also.
Being able to vote, half of voting right now is just virtue signaling, like demonstrating to the public at large, to people at large, what this vote means to you.
So as Hillary Clinton campaigning on, if you vote for me, you'll show that you voted for a woman.
And if you vote for Barack Obama, you've shown that you vote for a black guy.
If you're voting for Donald Trump, you're sticking a middle finger to the system.
It's all symbolic voting.
Very little of it seems to be about like, what's this guy actually going to do once he's there?
And that's a serious problem.
One of the biggest episodes ever on Joe's podcast was with our next guest, Jordan Peterson.
Jordan is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, which is where he was when his first book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, came out.
Jordan's career took a new direction in 2016 when he became a vocal critic of a new law passed in Canada, Bill C-16, which made gender identity and expression prohibited grounds of discrimination.
Jordan published a YouTube series on the law and argued it was compelled speech, meaning it was requiring people to express thoughts they disagree with.
The series created tons of controversy and a lot of media coverage for Jordan.
Jordan's second book, the bestseller Twelve Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, was still quite new when he joined me on the premiere episode of The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
Over the course of 2018, the book exploded.
It sold 3 million copies around the world, which took Jordan around the globe, speaking to hundreds of thousands of people and made him a household name.
Jordan is an incredible, incredible guy.
One of the things I love most about Jordan is that he really is, in person, exactly the same way that he is when he speaks.
He's introspective.
He is thoughtful.
He listens.
I've gotten personal book recommendations from Jordan.
I've taken them to heart.
I think that Jordan has an incredible amount of wisdom and, honestly, one of the most humble people I know.
For about a year now, Jordan has been going through some challenging medical times.
We've been happy to hear he is doing a lot better.
Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family.
Hopefully, we'll see his quick recovery and get a chance to sit down and talk with him soon again.
From our Sunday special, listen to Jordan give the argument that the human race determines the direction of evolution through their logos, their consciousness, and how we have to value the individual in order to build up and maintain the structure of society or face the consequences of society becoming totalitarian.
He and I also discussed the debate of free will and how the existence of consciousness informs it.
Well, we already walked through the fact that the heroes of the past acted on potential to extract out the world of actuality.
And if they did that properly, then the world they extracted was good and that that is a divine principle.
And then we might say, well, is it a divine principle?
And you might say, well, what is it that's acting through people in the good?
Like, the Christian theological answer to that would be the Logos, right?
That's the idea.
That's the idea of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking.
You might think, well, is that a real thing?
It's like, well, to me, it's real the same way that consciousness is real.
And we don't know the role of consciousness in determining reality.
But even if you're an evolutionary biologist, And this is so interesting, because the evolutionary biologists actually differentiate themselves from Darwin on this point.
Darwin was very, very forthright in his claim that sexual selection was as powerful as natural selection, or even more so.
So here's where that goes.
And because that brought consciousness into the world as an active player, the materialistic evolutionary biologists ignored that.
for like 150 years and only concentrated on natural selection where they could play, well this is all chance.
Right.
It's like sexual selection is not chance.
Okay, so here's a hypothesis.
Human beings separated themselves from chimpanzees.
One of the reasons they did that was because human females are sexually selective.
Chimps aren't.
Chimps will, female chimps in estrus will mate with any chimp.
The main chimps, the dominant ones, chase the subordinate males away, so they're more likely to have offspring, but it's not because of female choice.
Now, human females have done this whole different thing, is that they have hidden fertility, and they're much more likely to go after guys who have climbed up the hierarchy.
So let's say heroes will give the women some credit for intelligence, right?
And say that that's what they're after.
Even if they're using wealth and so forth and status as a marker, they're actually using those as a marker for competence.
Yeah, it's a standard.
And I think the evidence for that is clear.
Okay, so you might say, oh well, it was human female conscious choice that selected us.
Okay, and you think, well that's not random.
That's not random at all.
It's the farthest thing from random that there is.
And that means consciousness is making its choices with regards to what propagates.
But then it's even more complex than that.
So here's what happens among men.
The men all get together in their hierarchy.
They posit a valued goal.
They all accept that as the goal, because otherwise they wouldn't be cooperating.
Then they arrange themselves into a hierarchy, and they let the most competent guys lead, because they want to get to the promised land.
They want to get the most competent leaders leading.
Competent, defined by that value.
Okay, so here's what happens, essentially.
The men all get together and vote on the good men.
And the good men are then chosen by the women, and those are the people who propagate.
And so, it's like men are voting on which men get to reproduce, and women are going along with the vote, and being even more stringent in their choices, let's say.
And so then what you get is that the consciousness, that through its active expression transforms the potential of the world into actuality, also selects the direction of evolution Right, and that's where the meme, Dawkins' term, turns into the biological reality.
So, yeah, this is something that's so cool about Dawkins.
It's like, I've often thought this about Dawkins, is if he would push his thinking to the limits, he would fall right into Jung.
Well, and then he'd be lost, of course, because that's a whole other universe.
But if you take that meme seriously, and I mean really seriously, you think, yeah, there's some ways of conceptualizing that become so All encompassing that they...
Powerful that they hardwire themselves.
That's right.
They start to become an actual force of evolution itself.
And so then, here's the case you could make.
Consciousness extracts the proper world of being from potential through truth, and then it's good.
It's like, okay.
That's a hard one, man.
That manifests itself in human beings at the level of individual consciousness.
That's the logos within.
That's the metaphysical foundation of the idea of natural right and responsibility.
That's a bloody killer idea.
That's expressed in the Hero of Heroes, that idea.
That Hero of Heroes is the driving force behind human evolution.
So not only do you get the action of the Logos metaphysically as the process that extracts order out of chaos at the beginning of time, you also get it as the major driver of evolution.
And so then you ask, Okay, then what kind of reality does that have?
Because you chase consciousness back, like it disappears into the mystery of the past and we have no idea what its relationship is with matter.
But it's the force that gives rise to the cosmos and drives evolution.
It's like you're getting pretty close to God there.
Even just pragmatically speaking.
You know, not close to, but in the midst of an argument about free will, because obviously if you make the hard determinist argument that free will doesn't exist and that consciousness is merely a sort of trick that your brain is playing on itself, then how exactly does, how does culture propagate?
How do these memes propagate?
How are people choosing?
Sexual selection and natural selection become one and the same as soon as you boil sexual selection down to natural selection.
Well, and also, I think the free will argument, I mean, I see why Harris gets tangled up in that, you know, because, well, first of all, deterministic arguments are unbelievably powerful.
And when we use deterministic models for many things, they really work.
So you could say, well, we're going to use that by default.
It's like, fair enough.
We're going to deviate from that with care.
But I don't see people as driven like clocks winding down.
First of all, we don't wind down in any simple way.
We're dissipative structures.
He wrote Schrodinger.
What is life?
A human being is a dissipative structure.
We're not an entropic structure like a clock running down.
I mean, we are in some sense.
But as living beings, we pull energy in.
And so we're not winding down like a deterministic structure.
We're something other than that.
And the way we treat each other is as logos, as far as I can tell.
The way I treat myself, if I'm going to be good to myself in the proper sense, is that I'm an active agent of choice confronting an infinite landscape of potential and casting that potential into a reality for good or for evil.
Okay?
And if I treat myself that way, then I have proper respect for myself and proper fear of myself.
Because I can make bad decisions and warp the structure of reality.
And I think if you read Frankl, for example, or Solzhenitsyn, and you see how your bad decisions can warp the structure of reality, then that wakes you up, right?
If you don't treat yourself like an active agent, imbued with logos, then your life doesn't go well.
But more, if you don't treat other people that way, they do not want to play with you.
If we set up societies that aren't predicated on the idea that people are like that, then the societies become, they dissolve or they become totalitarian almost instantly.
So then I would say, well, you've got the problem of determinism.
It's like, fair enough, man.
How do you reconcile the fact that if you lay out a society at every level of analysis on strict deterministic grounds, it fails?
So doesn't that mean your hypothesis has a flaw?
I mean, maybe not.
Maybe you can say, no, the facts are independent of the ethical consequences.
Right, exactly.
This is where the truth pragmatism question comes back into being, right?
Because Sam would say, well, it's true regardless of what the effect is.
And you would say, well, it's obviously not true if morals are constructed for a pragmatic reason and if this pragmatism doesn't work, if it falls into nothingness.
Well, it also depends to some degree on how you're willing to test your hypothesis, because I might say, well, if your hypothesis is factually correct, wouldn't you assume that if people based their behaviors, individually and familial and socially, on that set of facts, which is basically what Sam claims about facts to begin with, if you base your ethos on those facts, wouldn't it work?
Right.
Well, he claims that that's a test, and I'd say, well, then it fails that test.
It doesn't work.
We have to treat each other like divine centers of consciousness in order for society to work.
Yes.
And I think, well, that's... I can't see any way out of those arguments.
Sam Harris's writings and lectures span a wide array of topics.
Neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, human violence, rationality.
But mainly, they focus on how understanding more about ourselves and the world around us changes our sense of how we should live.
He's written five New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance.
Sam also hosts the podcast Making Sense with Sam Harris, where he explores important questions about the human mind, society, and current events.
As a practicing meditator for over 30 years, Sam created the Waking Up app for those who wish to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.
Sam and I agree on a lot, but we do tend to come at things from very different angles.
Sam, of course, is a self-proclaimed atheist.
I actually mentioned near the end of our interview how I wish we could go on for another couple of hours discussing how our beliefs shape our worldviews and opinions.
It was such an interesting conversation.
And one of the things that I really like about Sam is that Sam is a practical thinker.
He is very, very clear in his thinking.
He doesn't like to muddy the waters, and that clarity is really informative.
It leads to really fascinating conversations in which it is pretty obvious what we believe.
Some people who are philosophers tend to try and hide the ball.
Not Sam.
Sam is very blunt about what he believes, and that's something I greatly appreciate about him personally.
With that said, listen to some of Episode 9, where Sam and I cover whether his success and the success of the intellectual dark web generally makes him optimistic or pessimistic for the future of the country.
Sam also argues for why rationality is the most important element of persuasion we have when we talk with other people.
What we should all be anchored to is a good faith, intellectually honest, non-smear merchant approach to analyzing non-smear merchant approach to analyzing what we think we know and why we think we know it.
And those principles of rationality and an empirical engagement with reality simply are not susceptible to an identity or even a political interpretation.
This is why reason is the only thing that scales.
If I have a good enough argument based on clear enough evidence, it should persuade you if you are being reasonable no matter what your background, no matter who your parents were, no matter how you were mistreated or not as a child, You know, if we build a reasonable robot, it should be persuaded by the right arguments and the right data.
So, rationality is the mode of argument where it doesn't depend who you are in order to reach the right answer.
Where do you think that the United States is going?
Because obviously we've seen, you know, the rise of your audience is enormous.
You have a huge audience.
I think a lot of folks, you mentioned Joe Rogan, has an enormous audience.
Jordan Peterson obviously has a very big audience.
A lot of these people have a very big audience.
Do you think that the rise of these new conversations is... Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
Do you think that these new conversations are going to...
Turn into a new sort of brand of politics that ends up saving the country?
Or are you pessimistic and you think that the identity politics machines that are now operating at seemingly full blast on all sides, you think that those end up winning the day for the moment?
I don't know.
The future is a big question mark for me.
The present is fundamentally surprising to me.
I didn't think we would get Trump.
And getting Trump, I didn't think we would get the kind of reaction we see to Trump.
I could have predicted the reaction on the left, but it just amazes me every day that he is as untouchable based on his own missteps and gaffes and crazy utterances.
I mean, just the fact that nothing sticks to him, it surprises me every day.
So I don't quite know how we got here.
I think we, I mean, I think you and I will be fine, right?
I'm very optimistic about our having conversations like this and this channel and media having a durable interest for people.
But whether it will affect any real political change in the near term, I don't know.
Because I see the left is fully capable of of playing what should be a fairly good hand so badly as to just amplify white populism and Trumpism for well beyond Trump's next four years.
I just think there's no mistake so idiotic that the left isn't capable of it at this moment.
And as you point out, or as we'll discover, I'm on the left on virtually every relevant question, except the ones we've been talking which is the virtues of identity politics and victimology.
Rationality, and I think I might have said this to you on stage, At our event.
Rationality is not a... Successful moments of reasoning are not examples where freedom of will is even tempting to ascribe.
So it's... If I give you an argument, if you strongly believe one thing, and I give you an argument that persuades you, that just knocks down the row of dominoes in your mind, that leads you to think... Right, now I understand your argument, which is that it's a naturalistic response to a reasonable argument, and you don't have any control over that.
Well, you don't have any control over any moment where you finally see the light.
Where I give you a chain of reasoning and it works, that's a moment where you are changed by something extrinsic to your own volition.
So, my basic response to that is, Yes and no, because you see people who clearly resist the impact of a reasonable argument on themselves.
Yes, but the resistance is what it is to be unreasonable or to be under the sway of wishful thinking or confirmation bias.
Right, but the bottom line is that, from my perspective, if the idea is that reason is basically just eliciting a particular response, then people have the capacity to override their ability to listen to reason.
If you're going to ascribe that to free will, that's a different thing to ascribe.
But that, again, you don't need free will to explain that.
But that is, take the reasoning piece.
If I give you the quintessential moment of it, I give you a column of numbers to add up, you have zero degrees of freedom if you're going to actually be doing arithmetic.
So then the final question here, because we're going to have to have you in for like a four-hour session here in Jishmoos.
But is the argument in favor of reason a moral reason is good argument?
Or is the argument a utilitarian reason is useful argument?
Or is it both?
Because I...
I can imagine a lot of ways to convince people of things that don't involve me making arguments to them and that historically have been used to great success with horrible, horrific human carnage, obviously.
Well, you're not necessarily convincing them in that case, you're just... Forcing them, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Although, I would say that you can indoctrinate fully millions of people into... You would think this too, right?
That it's possible to indoctrinate people not using reason into fully formed belief systems.
Yeah.
So, when you make the argument for reason, are you saying that reason is morally better?
And if so, why is reason morally better than, for example, the appeal of passion, which has obviously motivated millions of, billions of people over time?
Right.
Well, again, I don't think they're as separable as many people think.
I think you can't reason, and there's neurological evidence to back this up, and Antonio Damasio did this work decades ago, where if you have certain neurological injuries in the orbital medial prefrontal cortex, you can't You can't be moved by the products of your, quote, reasoning.
Because, I mean, reason has to be anchored to emotion in a very direct way.
And, I mean, you can actually feel this in yourself.
So if I say something that starts to sound like bullshit to you, right, that feeling of doubt, you know, the feeling that you have detected errors in my chain of reasoning, that feels like something.
That is an emotion, right?
And if you couldn't feel that, you know, if it was all just cold and calculating and just... That's why sociopaths, you know, can't reason their way to virtually anything.
Well they can, well... Or the reverse, can't reason their way to everything.
They can reason fine, unfortunately, they just don't care about other people's experience.
So they're very manipulative in ways that you and I wouldn't be comfortable being.
The reason itself doesn't arrive at a moral answer in any case.
Well, so for me, reason is the only thing that, as we talked about at the top of this, it's the only thing that takes us out of who we are and scales to some universal point of view.
It's not, you're not reasoning, if you're actually reasoning, what you're arriving at is not just true for you, it's true for anyone who could be in, it's true from essentially above on any given topic.
You know, it does offer the view from above or the view from any possible perspective, or at least it takes into account the effect of perspective, you know, so it's like if, Again, reason and scientific rationality generally is the thing that explains why, if you're colorblind, you don't see colors the way I do.
It's not that we can't get at what's actually real, we can, because we can explain divergences of opinion, and otherwise you just have those divergences.
Christina Hoff Summers has spent her career defending classic first-wave feminism and critiquing modern feminism.
She's known as the Factual Feminist and hosts a blog by the same name where she uses a data-driven approach to cover all subjects related to feminist philosophies and practices, including the MeToo movement, microaggressions, the wage gap, and the supposed patriarchy.
As a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Dr. Summers also studies free expression, due process, and the preservation of liberty in the academy.
Previously, she was a philosophy professor at Clark University, and has written books such as Freedom Feminism, Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today, and The War Against Boys, which we'll get into here.
Christina is just a delight.
She is upbeat, she is optimistic, and again, she's very, very data-driven, which is something I think everyone in the intellectual dark web is.
I mean, if you are going to convince somebody of your arguments, you have to present data, and that is something Christina Hoff Summers is very much into.
She's sort of been mischaracterized as a classical conservative.
I don't think that Dr. Summers considers herself that way, and you'll see some interesting disagreements along the way in this particular episode.
In this segment from episode 18, Christina covers the failings of the women's movement to find common ground amongst all women, how we're going to thrive if we develop the men in our society, and where we need to put our focus to do this, and why focusing on men, in turn, is going to help women.
Well, the thing is that...
Women's problems are talked about a lot because for good reason.
We had a women's movement.
We have lots of organizations.
Everywhere.
And I actually see more problems for men right now.
And men don't have a lobby.
Especially little boys.
And I wrote a book, The War Against Boys, what's happening with little boys in school.
So right now I'm mainly concerned about the men in, you know, the vast numbers of men in prison.
The boys that are dropping out of school.
The men that have not just dropped, that aren't just unemployed.
They're not looking for work.
We've got, you know, able-bodied men in their prime earning years who are not in the workforce.
And we have an educational system that is not meeting the needs of men as well as women.
And when I look at women's problems, because women do have serious problems, especially the feminization of poverty issues, If you are alone with children, it's very hard for women.
And given the jobs women do, they need men.
We need each other.
So I don't really see it as separate at this point.
I think we need kind of an egalitarian movement that looks at areas where we could help men.
Because when you help men, you help women.
At this point in the United States.
And if you help women, you help men.
We need to, we're in this together.
So the problem of poverty, the problem of single motherhood and all that, you've got to, they've got to be marriageable men.
They've got to be guys.
And it's not enough just to, it used to be you could graduate from high school and work hard.
You could make it into the middle class.
Now you, You're almost required to have college beyond high school, some specialization.
And far more women are getting that than men.
So we may end up closing the wage gap just by having better educated women.
But socially, the projections are not good for a stable society.
It's not good for the workforce.
And other countries are addressing that problem.
So, anyway, I do see the financial problem with women, but I think it's connected to men.
The most serious problems for women, though, as you said, they're not in the West.
I think there are many parts of the world where they have not had two major waves of feminism.
They haven't had so much as a trickle.
And I go to international women's conferences and I meet women coming from Somalia and Egypt.
Iran, which is a kind of, you know, talk about a handmaid's tale.
I mean, that's 1984 for women in many ways, although it's terrible for men, too.
But I meet the women that are sort of the freedom fighters, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth of those countries, and it's very exciting.
But American women right now, especially on the campus, Who have so much to give and who are so gifted and, you know, there you are at Wellesley and you're at Swath and they're turned in on their own oppression and not making common cause with these women around the world that need help and they come to these conferences they want.
Help from American women because we did liberate ourselves and they want to do the same.
And I don't understand why our women's movement wouldn't be so focused on making those connections.
And, you know, you go back in the 80s on the college campus with apartheid in South Africa and, you know, the students were very focused on the social justice in South Africa.
Where are they today on gender apartheid in, you know, Saudi Arabia or something?
They're mostly talking about apartheid, gender apartheid in the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts or, you know, that we have separate, you know, the language is all about, you know, of crisis for our society, which is not a patriarchy.
Let's come back to the United States for a second.
It seems to me one of the big problems that I've seen, particularly among men, since we're going to talk about men, is this feeling of lack of purpose.
And that seems like that's been exacerbated a lot by the false perceptions regarding gender and sex.
My contention has always been that young men particularly either create or destroy, and there's not a lot in between.
And I can see it with my two-and-a-half-year-old boy.
He's either building blocks or he's knocking them down.
Those are the only two things that he's doing at any given time, and usually he's knocking them down.
Usually he's just a suicide machine.
He's trying to kill himself full-time, and it's my job to stop him from doing that.
And a society that fails to recognize that men actually have to be thrust into positions of responsibility, including the responsibility to protect women, shouldn't be all that surprised when it turns out that men are destructive in the absence of those responsibilities.
Well, all societies who want to thrive and survive have to spend and have spent a lot of time civilizing their young males.
Because if you don't do that, they have some very unpleasant ways of making themselves noticed.
And if you have a lot of sort of under-socialized young men, they can develop.
And there is, I don't like to use the term anymore, but they say toxic masculinity, I'll call it protest masculinity.
And a young man that's in that mode will show his masculinity by destroying, by tearing down, by preying on vulnerable people.
And in fact, it's just the opposite of healthy masculinity.
Healthy men who invent a healthy masculinity, they don't destroy, they build.
They create, they invent, and they protect.
And, you know, society's everywhere.
Men have largely been the protectors and the warriors and defend from attack.
And there are a small number of men who are the predators and they defend the society from them.
We put effort into that.
How do you get these young men to develop a healthy masculinity?
Well, it helps to have a father.
We don't hear that much about fathers.
In fact, you often hear that denigrated.
Oh, that's just an old-fashioned idea that children need fathers.
Well, they do, and little boys especially.
It seems to take an extra toll.
They've looked at single family homes and the girls overall fare better.
First of all, they have this heroic mother who's working so hard and the boy finds his identity elsewhere.
So you need the father.
And then there are ways through sports and through athletics and so forth with the coach and there are ways to focus that energy and that, you know, creative into healthy masculinity.
Now, overall, we've done a pretty good job.
We don't like to admit it, but most people are not out committing crimes and, you know, it's all gone down.
We're doing something right.
But we are, what we're really failing, where I see we're failing most seriously is engaging young men academically.
And I see a lot of evidence that our schools are increasingly, they favor kids who are happy to be sedentary and talk about their feelings.
There's a lot of writing and reading is about shared feelings.
So a kid that comes in that likes rough and tumble play and can't sit still, it's almost as if girls are the gold standard and boys are being measured.
So their first experience with school is frustration and sometimes failure.
Much higher rates of boys getting suspended and thrown out, even in preschool.
People say, I mean, as I said before, we don't have these groups.
We don't have activist groups for boys.
We have a lot for women and girls.
And they've done good.
They've done a lot of good.
I mean, girls were faltering in math and science, and boy, have we improved the quality of math and science education for girls.
Where were the programs for boys who are behind in reading?
All the scores show.
I mean, the boys score slightly better in math, but girls score higher in reading around the world.
You need to put extra effort into engaging a boy in the world of the written word.
Where is that?
In these schools of education where they're still teaching I don't know, you know, radical theories about women's oppression.
No, they're not learning it.
So there's a whole field.
There's a lot of work to be done.
I tell when I go to schools, there's a lot of work like male pedagogy, how to teach boys.
And they're already starting in Australia and Canada because they're worried about their workforce.
They don't want to have, you know, 20 or 25 percent of, you know, men, you know, in some, you know, who can't cope in an information economy.
So there we could look at what the Australians and the British are doing.
but I don't know if you tried to do it They'd say that's backlash.
That's the patriarchy No, it's not I don't want to speak that language anymore.
I don't think it's helpful what's helpful is to recognize one another men and women as As I said just working together and mutual civility and respect and Even love has been known to happen.
The term intellectual dark web was first coined by Eric Weinstein, who said he was half-joking at the time.
But the name stuck, becoming popular after a New York Times article by Barry Weiss highlighted supposed members of the group, four of whom we've talked to here, and includes yours truly as well.
Eric is a managing director of Teal Capital in San Francisco and a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University.
He speaks and publishes on a variety of topics, including gauge theory, immigration, the market for elite labor, management of financial risk, and the incentivizing of risk-taking in science.
Eric is maybe the smartest dude I know, just on a raw IQ level.
Eric is nearly impossible to compete with.
Eric is all over the place, and he is fun to talk to because he's all over the place.
I feel like I spend most of my time talking with Eric, trying to bring him down to a level where I can understand him, which actually makes for some pretty great conversation when we do it publicly, because Eric will be floating above the Earth 30,000 feet in a hot air balloon, and I'm trying to drag him down with a rope so people can understand what the hell he's talking about.
But he's really sophisticated in his approach to science and politics and human thought.
He's really open-minded and just a fascinating all-around dude.
In this conversation from episode 11, Eric and I discussed where the name and concept behind the intellectual dark web came from, why it's perceived to be a right wing group when I'm the only registered Republican, and how the dangerous strains of leftism have invaded news and media, universities and tech.
So, Eric.
First of all, welcome.
Thanks for coming.
Thanks for having me.
And second of all, how did you, who started off and still work in the world of physics and mathematics, end up creating at least the name for the intellectual dark web?
You did it, I know, we were on stage together when it happened.
So what's the back story here?
Well, I think it's actually sort of an interesting one.
I have been tracking various political and social issues since the 1980s and have inserted myself or fought through a number of topics, including high-skilled immigration, mortgage-backed securities, and various issues having to do with my concerns over the loss of objectivity in the major press organs.
So in some ways this is not my first rodeo.
There have been a few before.
And what's been really interesting for me is that this is the first one where I've had great company.
So a lot of these previous iterations have been really one or two people.
Like Nassim Taleb was a Co-fighter in the mortgage-backed security question.
A guy named Norm Matloff was one of the few people who was really a critic of high-skilled immigration from an intelligent position.
So what's really interesting about this is that this is the first time that there's a large number of interesting voices with a few new technologies and wrinkles to explore.
And I think the best thing I could think to do with so many independent voices was to try to use language to identify what was already occurring And have the language sort of help people see what was already happening and that would allow us to direct this a little bit for more powerful aims.
What do you think has changed?
I mean, what sort of brought all of this together?
Because obviously it's a pretty politically disparate group.
You're on the political left.
You voted Democrat, I believe, virtually all the time, no?
I don't think I've ever voted Republican.
Oh, you've never?
Okay, so you're on the left.
And, you know, obviously your brother, Brett, who's a member of the IDW in good standing, he also is on the left.
People like Sam Harris are on the left.
And then I may be the only overt conservative in the group, actually.
It's been actually perceived as this wild right-wing group.
And as far as I know, I'm the only registered Republican in the group.
So far as I know, and I think that has to do with the fact that something very peculiar happened on the left.
And so in many ways this is a response from an older left to what is viewed as almost certainly a Very brief, very intense, and very crazy bout of bad judgment, I would say, from the American left.
It's not that these strains haven't been present before.
But what's really new, to me, is the idea that this new sort of woke network, which practices something which I've called Left Carthiism, has invaded the major organs Of civil society and the most important examples of this I would say first and foremost is not the universities but the major media companies that form our sense-making network, so news bureaus let's say.
The next thing that's infected, in my opinion, is the tech companies that are public-facing, which are under constant pressure to show that they are sufficiently in line with what are called progressive values.
But I think most of us with a longer timeline would say are very regressive values.
And the intelligence community, which scares me no end, almost certainly has a relationship with these tech companies given that we deposit all our secrets into our Gmail accounts and our browsing histories, as you were just talking about in your latest plug, you know, as you were just talking about in your latest plug, you All of these things come together in what I call TIM, technology, intelligence, and media.
The universities are certainly a serious problem, but I think the most important problem is that we can't trust our sense-making organs, because, you know, as we just, I tweeted out today, the New Yorker, you know, ran a tweet saying, conservative orators like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and Richard Spencer, and then dot, dot, dot, and I thought, wow, I mean, you just put Ben Shapiro next to Richard Spencer as if none of us are gonna notice what you just did.
This has gotten really dirty, really negative, and conservatives have complained about excesses on the left, for a long time, and I think that's been fair.
But I also think that there have been a lot of excesses on the right.
What we're seeing is something really, really new.
The new left is much more dangerous.
And I think those of us on the old left who weren't happy with some of these strains before take it upon ourselves to say, how do we clean this up?
This is in some sense our problem.
And you know, that was not fair to do to you.
So if the New Yorker is not going to apologize to you, uh, I prefer not to apologize.
I'm just going to fight back because it's just not right.
That's all for this week's Sunday Special.
If you've enjoyed hearing from our past guests in this collection, be sure to check out their full episodes and hear more of the conversation.
Links to those are in our description.
Also, be sure to leave us a comment about who some of your favorite past Sunday Special guests have been, and who you'd like to see me talk with next season.
Thanks for listening, gang.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer, Katie Swinnerton.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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