The Ben Shapiro Show - America's Greatest Threat (It's Not What You Think)
Aired: 2026-04-30
Duration: 56:14


=== Epistemic Humility and Institutions (10:46) ===

[00:00:00]  The original amendments have nothing to do whatsoever with the state.
[00:00:03]  That you're not being influenced by your own biases.
[00:00:06]  The unbelievable and ignorant ingratitude that is spread across the country.
[00:00:09]  I've been really intrigued by what's gone on with Tucker Carlson over the last year.
[00:00:14]  This is the greatest place on earth.
[00:00:16]  It remains the greatest place on earth.
[00:00:18]  Hey, I'm out of the office today, but I wanted you to hear a speech I just gave at the University of Austin about the death of our institutions, why that matters, why it's breaking apart our politics.
[00:00:27]  I think it's pretty interesting and I think important stuff.
[00:00:30]  Give it a listen.
[00:00:32]  First of all, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here at one of the most important institutions in America, University of Austin.
[00:00:43]  It takes tremendous innovation, creativity, and courage to put together a brand new institution dedicated to the restoration of what a university was originally supposed to be.
[00:00:53]  And the people at University of Austin are, I think, maybe the only people in the country who had the balls to do it, so good for them.
[00:01:04]  Well, today, I want to talk a little bit.
[00:01:05]  About why we seem to hate each other so much here in the United States.
[00:01:10]  I want to talk about why we are obsessed with conspiracies and steeped in anger and apparently ready to spend large segments of our day fulminating on the internet about people we don't know on topics that we know nothing about.
[00:01:26]  And the simple answer is the failure of our institutions.
[00:01:29]  Trust in our institutions in the United States is at an all time low that is across the board.
[00:01:33]  Trust in the media is at an all time low.
[00:01:36]  Trust in church is at an all time low.
[00:01:38]  Trust in the scientific establishment.
[00:01:40]  Is it an all time low?
[00:01:41]  Trust in government is at an all time low, and of course, trust in academia is at an all time low.
[00:01:46]  And because of our lack of trust in institutions, Americans also mistrust one another.
[00:01:51]  Now, you might think that it would be the opposite that we mistrust one another, therefore, we mistrust our institutions.
[00:01:56]  That's not really the case.
[00:01:57]  Our institutions shape us.
[00:01:59]  The way that we interact with the world is through the mechanism of institution.
[00:02:05]  If you grew up in a religious community, going to church helps shape you, the rules of the church shape you.
[00:02:10]  The people you hang out with shape you.
[00:02:12]  The institution of your family shapes you.
[00:02:13]  Your school shapes you.
[00:02:15]  Your university shapes you.
[00:02:17]  And as we lose faith in all of those institutions to shape us, we are incapable of coming together anymore.
[00:02:24]  See, you don't mistrust the people with whom you are oriented.
[00:02:28]  Institutions tend to foster a common orientation.
[00:02:31]  This is, of course, why Alexis de Tocqueville was such a big fan of them.
[00:02:34]  It's why in Democracy in America, he made the suggestion that one of the things that made America so different from all other countries was the plethora of social institutions in which Americans were enmeshed.
[00:02:45]  That in most other countries, people had formal institutions that they were forced to interact with, but in America, everybody was a member of a social institution or many social institutions, and that created this extraordinary social fabric that was durable, that allowed for innovation, that allowed for freedom.
[00:03:00]  Because without trust, there really can't be freedom at all.
[00:03:05]  If the institutions, which provide the shaping function that set the rules for our lives, the way we interact with the world, if those die, so too does the social fabric.
[00:03:14]  And then when the social fabric dies, we stop.
[00:03:17]  Attributing to each other decent motivation.
[00:03:20]  Instead, we start engaging in what the philosopher Alastair McIntyre called emotivism this belief that everybody except for you is motivated by something nefarious.
[00:03:29]  And so instead of having a political conversation, what you do is you just attribute a motive to the person's policy.
[00:03:36]  So, just to give a quick example, last week, a couple weeks ago, I was speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, and there was a student who got up, and that student started asking about Obamacare.
[00:03:46]  And started off the question, Talking about the differences in policy between Republicans and Democrats on healthcare.
[00:03:52]  Now, it's a very complicated topic because obviously the United States has a very heavily regulated and subsidized system.
[00:03:57]  Even if you wanted to unwind it, it's very difficult to do so.
[00:04:00]  There are a lot of moving parts.
[00:04:01]  It's not an easy question.
[00:04:03]  But what made the question, I think, sort of telling is that he finished the question by saying, Why do people who want to change the healthcare system want tens of thousands of people to die?
[00:04:15]  That's emotivism.
[00:04:17]  That is the idea that the person who disagrees with you on policy does so not because they have an honest, differential assessment of the evidence or different premises from which they are working.
[00:04:27]  Instead, that person disagrees with you because they actually want people to die.
[00:04:32]  And that's what happens when you lack trust in the people around you.
[00:04:35]  You've never actually said this, unless you're a very young child in my family, to other members of your family.
[00:04:41]  My kids say it to each other, but that's because my kids are, you know, 12, 10, 6, 2, and in the womb.
[00:04:48]  So it takes a second when you have that many.
[00:04:52]  But unless you're a child, you shouldn't be attributing motivations to other people unless you have good evidence that their motivation is malign.
[00:04:59]  But that's what we jump to when there is no trust.
[00:05:01]  I trust my wife.
[00:05:02]  I'm not worried that when she criticizes me, it's coming from a terrible place.
[00:05:05]  I trust the people that I go to synagogue with.
[00:05:07]  If they have a critique or we have a disagreement, not even a critique, I don't immediately jump to, they do it because they hate me.
[00:05:14]  And you're doing it because you hate me is the death of politics.
[00:05:17]  Because if that's the case, then how exactly are we supposed to live together and work together and create policy together?
[00:05:23]  Our institutions have been rotted out.
[00:05:26]  They've maintained a lot of their power, but they've retained none of their original philosophy.
[00:05:33]  These sort of foundations upon which they were built have been rotted away.
[00:05:37]  I've said before on my show that a lot of our institutions are being worn around kind of like a Hannibal Lecter skin suit.
[00:05:42]  They're still only animate because they're being worn around by something foreign.
[00:05:46]  Our truth making institutions used to be rooted in truth, and now they're rooted in power.
[00:05:54]  And in the world of truth, power is narrative.
[00:05:57]  And so, for example, if you look at how the media covers stories, the media is no longer interested predominantly in facts and evidence.
[00:06:03]  Instead, the media are interested in What are the narratives?
[00:06:06]  How do we exercise power?
[00:06:07]  And then how do we mobilize some small number of facts and evidence, or maybe not even facts and evidence, in order to support that narrative?
[00:06:15]  It's all reverse engineering of the factual reporting of the evidence that is presented.
[00:06:20]  And the most egregious form of this, of course, in the social media sphere, is when you move from narrative to outright conspiracy theory, where you just jettison the evidence entirely and you just go with whatever is the purest form of narrative that gets you where you need to go.
[00:06:33]  That's how you get to the idea, for example, that Erica Kirk must have been involved in the murder of her husband, right?
[00:06:37]  There's no evidence of this.
[00:06:38]  It is factually unbased, it is insane, but there are an enormous number of people who believe it because for some other narrative reason they wish for it to be true.
[00:06:47]  There's some manipulation of the American system by malign foreign powers, or the entire institution of TPUSA has been perverted from the inside.
[00:06:55]  If you have a narrative in your head and evidence and fact no longer matter to you, then you can push any narrative using any conspiracy theory that you want.
[00:07:04]  Churches used to be truth making institutions, spiritual truths, like baseline morality.
[00:07:11]  The whole purpose of a church, the whole purpose of any religion. is to present eternal truths that stand the test of time.
[00:07:17]  Now, of course, all churches, all synagogues, are going to stick and move with the application of those morals.
[00:07:24]  There can be lots of arguments, and there always are, on the application of eternal morals to temporal principles.
[00:07:30]  But the question of whether the church ought to pursue truth has sort of been supplanted by the idea that churches ought to do politics.
[00:07:37]  And again, I don't believe that my rabbi shouldn't sign into politics when it's relevant, but the idea that churches have basically become, in many instances, sort of progressive bastions Where people go to eat pizza and play guitar rather than unite with some internal value, that is why people don't go to church anymore.
[00:07:53]  Why go to church?
[00:07:54]  You can go to a ball game.
[00:07:55]  There's no reason.
[00:07:56]  The scientific establishment moved from evidence to narrative, from truth to narrative.
[00:08:01]  We saw that most obviously during COVID.
[00:08:03]  And the result of that was not a sort of moderate critique of science.
[00:08:08]  The result for an enormous number of people was to completely discard science in favor of woo woo nonsense that has zero evidence to back it.
[00:08:17]  Again, the slide from truth to narrative is almost invariably followed by a slide from narrative to conspiracism or nonsense.
[00:08:25]  You can see that in the world of science very, very clearly.
[00:08:28]  We were told a lot of lies about, for example, the efficacy of masks or the ability of vaccines to prevent transmission of the COVID virus.
[00:08:37]  And the backlash to that was all in pursuit of a narrative.
[00:08:40]  And the backlash to that was what if we don't do vaccines ever again?
[00:08:44]  People just won't take vaccines.
[00:08:46]  Vaccines must be bad.
[00:08:47]  And instead, we're going to rely on whatever we heard on some third rate podcast from a person who doesn't know a kidney from a spleen.
[00:08:55]  And then, obviously, when it comes to academia, this is clearly true.
[00:09:00]  The destruction of truth in favor of social engineering has been ongoing for decades in the United States.
[00:09:05]  This is nothing new.
[00:09:07]  We watched the apotheosis during the sort of woke revolution that happened over the course of the last 10, 15 years, but it's been going on for a very long time.
[00:09:15]  The first book that I ever wrote, I'm now middle aged.
[00:09:16]  So when I started this, I was your age.
[00:09:18]  When I started working in this field, I was 17.
[00:09:20]  So I've been doing this now for 25 years because I'm now 42.
[00:09:23]  The first book that I wrote was a book called Brainwashed How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth.
[00:09:28]  That book was written in 2004.
[00:09:29]  Okay, and that book was all about liberal indoctrination on college campuses.
[00:09:34]  I was at UCLA at the time, I was a junior when I wrote it.
[00:09:37]  And not much has changed, except that it's gotten in many ways worse.
[00:09:41]  And that happened because professors decided, back in the 1960s essentially, professors and administrators decided to cave to activist students because they did not have the courage of their own principles.
[00:09:51]  And in doing so, they turned over the purpose of a university, which is emblazoned on pretty much all of the insignia of every major university, which they then all ignore.
[00:10:02]  Where I went for law school, Harvard, the insignia says Veritas on it.
[00:10:06]  The last time that Harvard met Veritas, it's been a century.
[00:10:10]  It's been a long, long time.
[00:10:13]  The move from truth to we are going to engineer a population of discontented people who believe that the system must be turned on its ear, that is what college became.
[00:10:22]  It was still good in some STEM areas, obviously, when it came to science and tech, but when it came to the liberal arts or to the idea that you were actually trying to generate good, productive citizens.
[00:10:33]  Citizens, in the fullest sense of the word, people who are engaged in their community and who believed in the fundamental principles of their civilization, these universities decided to discard all of that.
[00:10:42]  And so, naturally, people don't trust the universities anymore.

=== The Cost of Losing Trust (09:06) ===

[00:10:46]  And this was mirrored in a radical distrust of our government.
[00:10:50]  See, the thing about the way the American government is built is that it was built to really pursue one fundamental principle above all.
[00:10:56]  And it wasn't even freedom as much as epistemic humility.
[00:10:59]  Because freedom is rooted in a certain level of epistemic humility.
[00:11:02]  What I mean by that is the idea you might not be right.
[00:11:05]  If you think you're always right, Then you might want to be a tyrant because you're always right.
[00:11:10]  I'm a tyrant with my children.
[00:11:11]  I'm always right, they're always wrong.
[00:11:13]  With my wife, I have to have a little bit of epistemic humility because mostly she's right and I'm wrong.
[00:11:18]  And I'll save that one for tape, so I can show her later.
[00:11:22]  But humility with regard to other people in your society, the idea that maybe they're right on occasion, maybe you're wrong on occasion, that again has to be rooted in trust of our fellow citizens.
[00:11:32]  So if all of those truth making institutions that allowed us to orient towards something useful and good and powerful together, if those all go away, And all you're left with is government.
[00:11:42]  And the fundamental basis of your government is respect for your fellow human beings, such that sometimes you might lose.
[00:11:48]  And not only might you lose sometimes, you might have legitimately lost sometimes.
[00:11:51]  And sometimes, even if you win, you don't get what you want because we have checks and balances in the United States government to prevent the system from swinging side to side radically.
[00:12:00]  The whole point of the American government is to stop things from happening.
[00:12:04]  That is legitimately the point of the American government.
[00:12:06]  Read the Federalist Papers.
[00:12:07]  This is the entire thing.
[00:12:08]  The entire thing is unless we have very broad agreement on something, it should not happen.
[00:12:13]  That is why we have a bicameral legislature, it is why we have three branches of government.
[00:12:18]  There are lots of other countries that don't have these systems.
[00:12:20]  This is why we have a Federalist system in which the powers of the federal government are enumerated.
[00:12:24]  And the powers of the state government are significantly broader.
[00:12:26]  The whole idea is lots of people live lots of different kinds of lives.
[00:12:30]  And you may not like that, but you might also be wrong.
[00:12:33]  And so, in order for us to determine what right looks like, there better be a broad agreement on us, between all of us, to do that thing.
[00:12:41]  And when that wears away, when that wears away, what we end up with when we hate each other is a battle to the death in the blood sport of politics.
[00:12:50]  We get angry at the checks and balances because it's not possible that people who oppose me are right.
[00:12:55]  Those people are malign.
[00:12:56]  Those people want bad things to happen to me and to my family.
[00:13:00]  And so I'm going to grab the government.
[00:13:01]  I'm going to kill the filibuster.
[00:13:02]  I'm going to stack the Supreme Court.
[00:13:03]  I'm going to add states willy nilly to the United States Senate.
[00:13:06]  And then I'm just going to run right over everybody.
[00:13:10]  And by the way, the sentiment is not a pure left wing sentiment, although it's very, very often expressed at the top levels of the Democratic Party.
[00:13:15]  It's also expressed at the top levels by some on the Republican side.
[00:13:18]  Sometimes you'll hear it phrased in preemptive tones.
[00:13:21]  The left will do it.
[00:13:22]  Therefore, we must do it first, which is always a get out of jail free card.
[00:13:26]  But the reality is that in the absence of rebuilding trust in the institutions, what you will end up with is a war of all against all on the governmental level.
[00:13:35]  And things will not go well.
[00:13:38]  And you can see this with regard to how the government is now approaching a wide variety of issues, how Americans want things from the government they never used to want.
[00:13:45]  Checks and balances, when you get rid of the fundamental epistemic humility of the government, give way to a centralized tyranny.
[00:13:53]  Free markets, which are rooted in the idea of epistemic humility, the entire Marginal theory of value, the idea that was promoted by the Austrian school thinkers in economics.
[00:14:05]  The basic idea that actually value is subjective at the margins.
[00:14:09]  I value a glass of water differently than you value a glass of water, and I value a glass of water differently if I'm in the Sahara Desert than if I'm here in Austin, Texas.
[00:14:17]  That basic idea suggests that there is no possibility of centralizing economics.
[00:14:21]  The entire basis of free market economics, as Hayek would argue, is diffuse knowledge.
[00:14:27]  That everyone in this room has a different idea of what things are worth.
[00:14:31]  And what the price is, is the aggregate of what we all think that thing is worth.
[00:14:34]  That's what a price looks like.
[00:14:36]  Well, what happens when we don't trust each other?
[00:14:39]  And when we think some of us are screwing other of us?
[00:14:41]  Then we say, well, what if there was a person right at the top who is deciding what's fair?
[00:14:46]  And again, I wish this were only a left wing phenomenon.
[00:14:48]  It is increasingly a right wing phenomenon.
[00:14:50]  This idea that somehow free market capitalism is eroding the soul of the American people.
[00:14:55]  Whenever people say that capitalism is what's responsible for the soul sickness in Americans, and you hear this from, I've seen this in.
[00:15:03]  Places like Compact Magazine, for example.
[00:15:06]  When you see this sort of argument, understand that trying to solve a sole problem with economics is like trying to change a baby diaper with a hammer.
[00:15:16]  It is the wrong tool.
[00:15:17]  That is not what economics are for.
[00:15:19]  Economics and free market economics are about the generation of new and better products at a better and lower price.
[00:15:26]  That is what economics are designed to do.
[00:15:29]  This is what they do better than anything else because of the preservation of private property and because of the diffusion of knowledge.
[00:15:35]  But if you don't trust your neighbor and you think your neighbor's screwing you, you might be very likely to say that maybe the government should just do what you want it to do.
[00:15:42]  Grab that brass ring and do exactly what you want with that power.
[00:15:47]  And in the realm of equal rights before law, which is of course what all freedom is predicated on and rooted in, the idea that all of us, we have different skills and abilities.
[00:15:56]  Some of us are tall and some of us are short, some are smart, some are stupid, right?
[00:16:00]  But we all have equal rights before the law.
[00:16:02]  Once we lose the trust in our institutions, you fall back on tribal solidarity, which is why you will see people saying that certain types of crimes from certain types of people should be excused.
[00:16:12]  If they look like you or if they're part of your tribe, it's fine.
[00:16:15]  As opposed to if they're part of the other tribe, in which case, the law.
[00:16:20]  Now, none of this is simply solved by jawing at one another.
[00:16:24]  This is another one of these great internet myths that if we have debates with one another on these particular issues, that it actually solves the problem.
[00:16:31]  There's this bizarre notion online, this sort of debate bro culture, that if you yell at each other a lot in short spurts, that somehow this solves the problem.
[00:16:39]  And this is based on a fundamental misreading of John Stuart Mill.
[00:16:41]  John Stuart Mill, of course, suggesting that liberty was the best pathway toward truth.
[00:16:45]  Well, it's the best pathway except for all the others, meaning it's the worst pathway except for all the others, meaning there is no guarantee that at the end of a debate, The best side wins.
[00:16:55]  That has never been the guarantee.
[00:16:57]  In order for a solid debate, a solid discussion to take place, there must be a fundamental sharing of values, rules of the road, you might call them.
[00:17:05]  Western civilization, there ought not be debate about fundamental propositions.
[00:17:10]  Truly.
[00:17:11]  Because if you are having to debate individual value, like the idea that individual human beings have individual worth, you are arguing with something outside the system.
[00:17:21]  If you have to argue with somebody about the worthiness of truth, That is not an argument that can ever be won because truth itself is an assumed value.
[00:17:31]  This is why, in the Declaration of Independence, when the founders say that there are certain rights that are self evident, they don't mean that they prove themselves.
[00:17:39]  They mean that these are the fundamental building blocks of a society, and if you question them, the society crumbles.
[00:17:44]  Because no values are self evident.
[00:17:47]  No baby comes into the world with values that are self evident.
[00:17:49]  That's not the way that it works.
[00:17:51]  But one of the things that we've decided as a sort of internet culture is that if we debate the fundamental propositions of things like Private property, or free speech, or freedom of religion, that somehow things get wildly better.
[00:18:05]  And I mean, I'd just like to point out that all of those things were actually come to, in a sort of Burkean sense, by human experience, not by logic.
[00:18:12]  We did not argue ourselves into freedom of religion.
[00:18:14]  We had a bunch of bloody wars, and then we decided, hey, you know what would be great?
[00:18:17]  Freedom of religion.
[00:18:19]  We did not argue ourselves into free speech.
[00:18:21]  We had a bunch of people who were burned at the stake, and then we decided, hey, you know what?
[00:18:24]  This is too much of that.
[00:18:25]  Let's not do that anymore.
[00:18:27]  Private property was not the outgrowth of people arguing themselves into private property.
[00:18:32]  It was the outgrowth of the experience of centuries of poverty and death and despair.
[00:18:38]  And if you have to argue your way back into private property, this doesn't mean you can't and shouldn't defend, you should.
[00:18:43]  But if the idea is that you can only win this debate on the fundamental basis of speaking it out, that's not right.
[00:18:51]  Human experience has something to say about this as well, which is why it is so dangerous what is happening right now, because it takes centuries to build the institutions that we are taking minutes to destroy.
[00:19:02]  Only.
[00:19:03]  A carefully cultivated moral culture that values truth and evidence and logic and moral decency, that actually protects free speech and property rights and equal rights under the law, is capable of restoring our institutions.
[00:19:15]  We shouldn't be debating about the fundamental moral matters.
[00:19:19]  Things like lying is wrong.
[00:19:20]  If I have to debate you about that, there's no debate.
[00:19:22]  Or that truth is superior to falsehood.
[00:19:24]  There can be no debate about this.
[00:19:26]  Or that individual human beings have moral worth and that their autonomy has moral value.
[00:19:30]  Those are the values that we begin with.
[00:19:33]  That needs to be embodied in institutions.
[00:19:35]  And that's why, bringing it all the way back to the beginning, that's why the University of Austin is really valuable.
[00:19:40]  Because the University of Austin takes as its fundamental presuppositions the building blocks upon which you can actually erect a civilization, the most important fundamentals of that civilization.
[00:19:51]  Now, they can give you all the justification for all those principles.

=== Constitutional Debates on Slavery (05:43) ===

[00:19:53]  I can too.
[00:19:53]  If you read the literature, you can do it.
[00:19:55]  But the point is that that is already there.
[00:19:58]  It doesn't have to be erected de novo, it doesn't have to be remade from nothing.
[00:20:03]  And so, the case for the University of Austin is that it is a brand new institution built on very old things, it is a brand new institution that is taking.
[00:20:11]  The foundations that have been cast aside by all of these institutions.
[00:20:16]  And it is taking those and it is building a new institution atop the foundations that have been discarded.
[00:20:22]  There is no more important work.
[00:20:24]  And if you're considering coming here, if you're already here, congratulations because you're making the right choice.
[00:20:28]  Thanks so much.
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[00:21:37]  In our American experiment class, we learned about how Lincoln connected the Declaration of Independence to why slavery should be ended, or by the end of his arguments.
[00:21:48]  Do you think it was a mistake to connect the ideals of the Declaration of Independence to law in the American imagination?
[00:21:57]  The ideals to law?
[00:21:59]  I mean, what Lincoln said about the Declaration of Independence is he suggested that the Constitution was the frame of silver surrounding the apple of gold, the apple of gold being the Declaration.
[00:22:10]  The basic idea that the Declaration is law, it's law in the sense that it is a guiding principle, but it's very hard to derive black letter law from the Declaration of Independence.
[00:22:19]  And so you have to read that in.
[00:22:21]  Consilience with the Constitution was the case that Lincoln was making.
[00:22:24]  And it is a really complicated legal case, frankly.
[00:22:26]  I mean, it's very interesting to read the arguments and counter arguments leading up to the Civil War about the application of the Constitution to the issue of slavery.
[00:22:34]  But the idea that what Lincoln was doing was reading the Constitution in light of the Declaration, that I think is correct.
[00:22:39]  I think that the sort of hard divide that was made by the secessionists between the Declaration saying this is not law and the Constitution saying this is law, that's ideologically wrong and un American.
[00:22:50]  And so I think Lincoln was right to link the two.
[00:22:52]  And again, I think that.
[00:22:54]  The mistake would be to de link in the other direction the declaration from the Constitution.
[00:22:58]  Say the Constitution is not important, the principles of the declaration are what's important.
[00:23:02]  That's how you end up with the idea that on the basis of vague pursuit of happiness standards, the government can do whatever it wants, as opposed to the actual limitations of that frame of silver.
[00:23:12]  Thank you.
[00:23:18]  Hi, Ben.
[00:23:19]  I'm a Noah Hyde from Houston, and I've always been fascinated by government.
[00:23:24]  One of our seven laws in our religion is to establish courts of justice.
[00:23:29]  In other words, to make good government.
[00:23:31]  Where would you say that is most needed in our government, whether state or federal?
[00:23:39]  Where is it most needed?
[00:23:41]  The biggest thing that's needed in government is for the federal government to go back to its constitutional boundaries, which of course is never going to happen, but it's a nice idea.
[00:23:51]  The truth is that the state governments were given extraordinary powers under the federal constitution.
[00:23:56]  The original amendments have nothing to do whatsoever with the states.
[00:23:59]  So, for example, the First Amendment, which declares freedom of speech, says literally Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
[00:24:05]  It does not say that states shall make no law abridging it.
[00:24:08]  Now, there are mirror provisions in virtually every state constitution in the original colonies.
[00:24:12]  But the idea that there's a strange sort of balance.
[00:24:16]  I actually have a political philosophy book that I wrote that has not been published yet and may one day.
[00:24:22]  But the basic thing that I talk about in that book is the idea that the place where you can do and it's appropriate to do the most legislation is the place where you need the least and vice versa.
[00:24:32]  So in your local community, in your HOA, there are a lot of informal things that don't need to be codified because you know all of your neighbors and you know your family members, but that would also be the place where theoretically a lot of rules could theoretically apply because there's a lot of agreement.
[00:24:44]  As you abstract up the chain, there should be fewer rules because there's less agreement.
[00:24:49]  And instead, we seem to do the reverse.
[00:24:50]  The idea being we don't need any rules at the local level, but we need lots of rules at the federal level.
[00:24:54]  That's a huge, huge, huge mistake.
[00:24:55]  It's one of the reasons why we have such knockdown, dragout battles over the federal government.
[00:25:01]  Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who, again, I was actually originally supportive when he ran for president in 2012, and then his campaign flamed out over his inability to name agencies.
[00:25:10]  Governor Perry had, I thought, the best line of the campaign, which was he wanted to make Washington, D.C. irrelevant to your life.
[00:25:17]  That sounds fantastic.
[00:25:19]  I would love to not care who the president is, truly.
[00:25:21]  I would love to not care.
[00:25:22]  And instead, we spend every minute of every day caring who the president is, whether it's Democrat or Republican, whether he is, you know, comatose or whether he's tweeting, which seems to be the only two possible options for each party, variously.

=== Vague Politics Create Divisions (15:44) ===

[00:25:37]  Thank you.
[00:25:37]  Thank you, Ben.
[00:25:42]  Hey, Ben.
[00:25:43]  I am an evangelical Christian and a huge.
[00:25:47]  Fan of yours, listened to you about every single day for eight years.
[00:25:49]  So I wanted you to know that before I asked this question.
[00:25:51]  And this is maybe a softball of sorts, but I've been really intrigued by what's gone on with Tucker Carlson over the last year.
[00:25:59]  I can't figure it out.
[00:26:00]  I told a friend of mine in California, Matt, I said something switched.
[00:26:03]  I can't, I don't know what's going on with him.
[00:26:06]  And now I just hear him like say one thing one time and something else three weeks later.
[00:26:10]  I mean, he recently said Israel was a beautiful country, gorgeous, wonderful place.
[00:26:15]  Hideously ugly, five seconds later, yeah.
[00:26:16]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:17]  So I just didn't, I thought I would like to hear your theory.
[00:26:20]  Because it's such a radical thing to have a reasoned critique of Gaza and how, whatever, but this seems so crazy and such a 180.
[00:26:27]  I would love to hear your thoughts.
[00:26:28]  So I try not to get into Tucker's head, although I seem to take up an enormous amount of space in his head, Renfree.
[00:26:37]  But when it comes to what Tucker has been doing, when I spoke about truth, making way for a narrative, making way for conspiracy, I think that's clearly what's happened with Tucker.
[00:26:46]  I think that the first indicator that I thought that Tucker Carlson was going off the reservation.
[00:26:51]  Was actually significantly earlier than anyone else.
[00:26:54]  I've been saying that I think that Tucker's ideas are quite dangerous and that he's demagogic since I believe 2018, 2017, 2018.
[00:27:00]  He was still on Fox at the time.
[00:27:02]  And there are a couple of early indicators.
[00:27:04]  One of them, he did a monologue where he was just launching into an investor who had made the signal moral error, in his opinion, of buying a firm that was going out of business.
[00:27:15]  He had bought the firm, it was in Wisconsin, some industrial firm, and he basically sold off the pieces that made it indebted, and then he had tried to relaunch the business or sell it.
[00:27:23]  And this was a great sin, according to Tucker, and he used all sorts of terms like vulture capitalism to describe all of this because the idea is that if free markets don't work the way that Tucker Carlson wants them to work, then free markets are immoral and wrong and evil.
[00:27:35]  About a year later, Tucker was on my show and he was talking about self driving cars.
[00:27:40]  And I asked him whether he would outlaw self driving cars.
[00:27:42]  He'd made the case to do so.
[00:27:43]  And I said, on what grounds, on what governmental grounds would you outlaw self driving cars?
[00:27:49]  And Tucker said, I would do so on the basis of safety.
[00:27:52]  And I said, Tucker, that makes no sense.
[00:27:53]  You can watch this, it's on tape.
[00:27:54]  I said, Tucker, that makes no sense.
[00:27:56]  Self driving cars will be significantly safer than human driven cars.
[00:28:00]  And he said, You asked me on what grounds I would ban them, not what's true.
[00:28:05]  And I, you know, that's kind of the whole story.
[00:28:08]  So I think that Tucker Carlson is steeped in grievance.
[00:28:11]  He believes that America is fundamentally bad in some of its founding principles.
[00:28:14]  He thinks it has gone completely wrong.
[00:28:16]  It is not a misnomer to say that he thinks pretty much everything America has done since World War II has been wrong, nefarious, and indeed evil.
[00:28:23]  Satanic, he might call it, right?
[00:28:25]  I mean, that's the kind of language that he uses.
[00:28:27]  I think he feels himself to be part of an aggrieved group of people who have been ground underfoot by a nefarious coterie who may have certain types of last names.
[00:28:37]  And while proclaiming, obviously, obviously, that he is not in any way discriminatory, of course.
[00:28:46]  It's all just a tap and stance.
[00:28:47]  And so, again, without getting into why he is saying what he's saying, I will say any person who is now making the overt case that the world would be better off if the United States ceded power to Russia and China, which they think he is saying, overtly, right now, and that the president, he's making the case that the president of the United States is the Antichrist.
[00:29:04]  He's literally doing that.
[00:29:06]  I don't know what's going on with him, but.
[00:29:08]  It's a very, very strong case against ingesting numbers of Alp pouches.
[00:29:14]  Thank you.
[00:29:21]  Hi, Ben.
[00:29:22]  Before I ask my question, I want to say thank you.
[00:29:25]  I found out about the University of Austin five years ago from your channel.
[00:29:28]  Oh, good.
[00:29:28]  I would not be here if it wasn't for you.
[00:29:33]  I did not apply anywhere else.
[00:29:35]  I wanted to be here because of you and you presenting this to me.
[00:29:40]  The preamble established the foundational terms of our country 250 years ago, laying out the self evident truths.
[00:29:46]  The challenge for us today in 2026 is whether we'll respond to the concluding appeal in the Declaration and commit our, just as the Founding Fathers did, lives, fortune, sacred honor to the proposition that these truths remain self evident.
[00:29:58]  And throughout time, as countries grow and got more diverse, Frederick Douglass did not share in that promise of 1776, but he believed in it more fervently than many who did.
[00:30:09]  What can we do 250 years now?
[00:30:11]  To recultivate a generation of American citizens to help want to pledge their lives, sacred and honor to the commitment of these self evident truths, that they remain self evident?
[00:30:22]  So it's a great question.
[00:30:23]  I think that the most important thing that we express in our daily lives and in our action is gratitude for the country we live in.
[00:30:31]  The massive ingratitude that is.
[00:30:33]  The unbelievable and ignorant ingratitude that is spread across the country, it's beyond, honestly, it's beyond reason to me.
[00:30:43]  It makes no sense at all.
[00:30:44]  It requires an extraordinary amount of ignorance about the way the rest of the world works, or indeed how all of human history has worked, in order to come up with the idea that America is somehow in outlier fashion terrible.
[00:30:55]  America is in outlier fashion unbelievably wonderful.
[00:30:59]  And there is a reason why literally billions of people would kill to get into the country.
[00:31:04]  Because this is the greatest place on earth.
[00:31:06]  It remains the greatest place on earth.
[00:31:07]  We are all lucky to be here.
[00:31:09]  And anybody who refuses to say that is lying.
[00:31:15]  Now, there's a corollary to that, which I do think that we should do some tough.
[00:31:19]  Talk to people who are not grateful for what they have.
[00:31:24]  I think there are an enormous number of people who sit around, for lack of a better word, bitching about their lives and pretending they don't have the ability to rise or that bad decision making is somehow excused by the evils of the system.
[00:31:36]  And that seems to me an aspect of weakness that needs to be called out at every turn.
[00:31:40]  That doesn't mean there aren't terrible things that happen in life.
[00:31:43]  It doesn't mean some people aren't unlucky.
[00:31:44]  It doesn't mean that every decision is going to be met with success, even if it's a good decision.
[00:31:47]  What it does mean is that if you make more right decisions than wrong in the United States, You have a better chance than anywhere on earth at any time in human history of succeeding than anyone.
[00:31:58]  And so if you're failing, the first place you should be looking is in the mirror, not out the window.
[00:32:10]  Thank you.
[00:32:11]  Good afternoon, Mr. Shapiro.
[00:32:12]  Thank you so much for being here.
[00:32:13]  It's a pleasure to have you here and speak to you today.
[00:32:17]  I wanted to ask that in a world that politics is so polarized right now, And at the end of the day, we're all humans, but we seem to be assigning these labels to our identities I am a Democrat, I am a Republican, and this is furthering us more and more and polarizing our society.
[00:32:35]  I wanted to ask you, from everything that you've learned, what do you see as the common ground and the common vision that can reunite both extremes to furthering America, to furthering our institutions, and ultimately lead to less polarization, more collaboration between two sides when it's so polarized now?
[00:32:52]  So the truth is that I think the vast majority of Americans actually want, still, when you're not online.
[00:32:58]  And online is a massive problem.
[00:33:00]  I think the vast majority of Americans still want basically the same thing.
[00:33:03]  They want to get married, they want to have kids, they want to have a job, they want to have a family, they want upward mobility for themselves and for their children, they want to go to a church where people care about them, they want to be part of a community where people care about them, and they want a country where their freedoms are still capable of being exercised.
[00:33:17]  I think Democrats and Republicans want that in the main.
[00:33:20]  And I think that this is why one of the things that I've said very often is I think that we should try to avoid words like they without mentioning the antecedent.
[00:33:29]  This happens a lot.
[00:33:30]  Something bad happens in America, and we say, they did it.
[00:33:33]  And you don't say who they is, which allows somebody else to fill in the blank of what they is.
[00:33:36]  They could be the left, it could be the right, it could be the Jews, it could be whatever.
[00:33:39]  And the reality is that we should be very specific about our critiques because specificity is a friend to unity.
[00:33:46]  Vagueness is a friend to chaos.
[00:33:50]  When you're vague, it allows people to take it any way that you want, and it allows them to put themselves on your side or on the other side, and it creates artificial divisions.
[00:33:58]  When you're very specific about the things that you're talking about, and this is why I try to be as meticulous as I can about my language on my show, for example, because of that, I think that you end up with a strange amount of bipartisanship.
[00:34:10]  Because if you say to somebody, listen, here's what I want to do with the healthcare system, then you list 10 things.
[00:34:14]  It may be that they agree with you on four of them.
[00:34:16]  Okay, well, great.
[00:34:18]  That's more than they thought they did before.
[00:34:19]  Whereas if you just say they want to kill 20,000 people with their healthcare program, who is they?
[00:34:24]  Why do they want to kill you?
[00:34:26]  And that creates also, by the way, permission structures for violence.
[00:34:28]  I think one of the reasons we've seen this massive uptick in violence in the United States on a political level is because we're creating these gigantic permission structures where we basically say there are a group of people out there.
[00:34:39]  They want to hurt you.
[00:34:40]  They're an existential threat to you.
[00:34:42]  Therefore, the only thing that is justified is violence against them, or at least violence is justified against them.
[00:34:48]  And certain structures of thought lend themselves to this more than others.
[00:34:51]  But yeah, I think you're right.
[00:34:54]  When you meet a human being, the first thing you tend not to ask them is listen, we all use shorthand, right?
[00:34:58]  I mean, when somebody says they're a Democrat, okay, we understand they're probably pro choice, they're probably for higher taxes, they're probably left on social issues.
[00:35:04]  Yeah, but we really should, if you have the time, you should dig below the label.
[00:35:10]  Because sometimes what you'll find is that many of the reasons they think they're a Democrat are reasons they probably should not be voting that way.
[00:35:16]  And that's a strange thing that happens in a lot of conversations, you'll notice.
[00:35:20]  Somebody will say, What I really want is flourishing families.
[00:35:22]  And you'll say, Okay, well, which policies best match that?
[00:35:25]  Again, specificity allows you to get somewhere in a conversation.
[00:35:29]  Thank you.
[00:35:34]  Hello.
[00:35:36]  At UATX, it's an example of rebuilding the institution of education.
[00:35:41]  Instead of repairing Harvard, instead people sought out to make their own institution of education.
[00:35:47]  But there's a lot of other institutions that have failed us, like medicine or government, which are going to be a lot harder to rebuild, and instead we need to repair them.
[00:35:54]  What are the avenues that we need to use to repair our institutions which have failed us?
[00:35:59]  So, first of all, I think that some of them will actually be easier to replace than repair.
[00:36:03]  So, I think in the institutions of medicine, for example, there's no reason why the AMA needs to be the charter organization for medicine, for example, or the AMA.
[00:36:14]  Those institutions are eminently replaceable.
[00:36:16]  It just takes some courage and some solidarity in order to make that happen.
[00:36:19]  And there are, in fact, competing organizations in that space.
[00:36:21]  Again, the private sphere, it's a lot easier to do this.
[00:36:24]  When it comes to the government, much, much more difficult.
[00:36:27]  And the reason that it's much more difficult than the government is because politicians make bank from lying to you.
[00:36:31]  And again, I think most of the politicians that I know are not willfully trying to lie, but I think that the way that most people get elected is not by telling you, I can't solve your problems, you can solve your problems.
[00:36:41]  That's a pretty bad electoral pitch.
[00:36:42]  It also, by the way, happens to be the only true electoral pitch.
[00:36:46]  The vast majority of problems in your life are solvable by you.
[00:36:49]  And if you're looking to government to solve those problems, you're looking to the wrong place.
[00:36:52]  The best pitch would be something like, I can get government out of the way so you can solve your own problems.
[00:36:58]  That would be the best electoral pitch.
[00:36:59]  But politicians, that's very likely to be defeated in many cases by somebody who's going to say, no, no, no, you sit back, I'll take care of it for you.
[00:37:07]  Now, I think that at a certain point, the American people are going to get tired of people telling them they're going to fix it.
[00:37:11]  What we seem to be doing right now, politically, is swiveling between parties telling you that only they can fix.
[00:37:19]  I love President Trump for a lot of reasons.
[00:37:20]  There are a lot of things he does that are really, really good.
[00:37:22]  But I will say that President Trump's approach to government, which is, I'm going to fix it for you, at least rhetorically, I think is wrong.
[00:37:28]  I don't think it's his job to fix the economy for me.
[00:37:31]  So whenever I hear presidents say, I'm creating jobs, you're not creating jobs.
[00:37:35]  Presidents don't create jobs.
[00:37:36]  They suck money out of the private sector and then they redistribute it to places they think it ought to go.
[00:37:39]  But they're not creating the jobs.
[00:37:42]  It's private entrepreneurs and markets that are creating those jobs.
[00:37:45]  So it's going to take an awakening on the behalf of the American people.
[00:37:48]  I think the most likely scenario, honestly, Is the federal government keeps growing and growing and growing.
[00:37:52]  People keep moving down to places like Texas, to places like Florida.
[00:37:55]  You end up with a massive divide in the country politically between blue states, which get bluer, and red states, which get redder.
[00:38:00]  And then probably the impossibility of governing a country as divided as that means that there has to be a kind of renewed baseline federal redistribution of power back down to the state level just as a solve.
[00:38:14]  Which, by the way, wouldn't be the craziest thing.
[00:38:15]  I mean, it's kind of funny that now we think of, oh, when the United States was founded, everybody was unified.
[00:38:19]  Nobody thought of themselves as an American at the beginning.
[00:38:22]  If you go back and you read the way that all the founders talked about themselves, they talked about themselves as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, as a Bostonian.
[00:38:28]  They talked about themselves as the state that they were from, which is why the South referred to the Civil War as the war between the states.
[00:38:35]  It wasn't that we are Confederates and they are Unionists, it was a war between states.
[00:38:38]  And so the sort of grand federalization scheme or nationalization scheme in politics will have to, I think it will be naturally reversed because it's unlivable.
[00:38:53]  Howdy, my name is Noah, and I'm very excited to.
[00:38:55]  Finally, see you on the screen.
[00:39:00]  You're definitely a big part of my childhood, so I thank you for that.
[00:39:03]  You're welcome, and now I'm old.
[00:39:04]  So, one of the most important things that you have is that you always say you go approach things with facts and logic.
[00:39:13]  What I'm curious is there are oftentimes really huge contexts to debates.
[00:39:18]  So, how do you know when you've gotten to what's important, like you've gotten enough context to what's important, and that you're not being influenced by your own biases?
[00:39:26]  So, I think we're all influenced by our own biases, obviously.
[00:39:30]  I think that you have to have a good feedback loop in terms of people who are going to check you on those and tell you when you're wrong.
[00:39:35]  And that's something you should have just in your personal life, let alone your political life.
[00:39:39]  People who will tell you the truth about things, even when they're hard, and you have to cultivate people who care about you so it's coming from a good place.
[00:39:46]  It's the way to stay sane, it's the way to have a good life, let alone a sort of good political outlook.
[00:39:51]  Obviously, when it comes to cultivating the proper context for things, the best thing that you can do is read and Truly.
[00:40:00]  Just reading history, reading books.
[00:40:02]  I know books have gone out of fashion.
[00:40:04]  I know they're not out of fashion here, which is great.
[00:40:06]  Exactly, not here.
[00:40:08]  But in a lot of other places, they've gone totally out of fashion.
[00:40:10]  You can only have context when you know a broader context.
[00:40:13]  You can only have broader context when you actually know a broad panoply of things, and usually you should read an entire book to even get one look at that.
[00:40:20]  It is kind of insane.
[00:40:21]  Like, what I do for a living is I talk about an enormous number of topics, okay?
[00:40:23]  There are experts on those topics who are more expert than I in pretty much all of those fields.
[00:40:28]  What makes you an expert in the public commentariat space in politics is you read two books on a thing.
[00:40:35]  Because most Americans have read zero books on a thing, right?
[00:40:38]  And the ones who are fairly informed have read one book on a thing.
[00:40:41]  So, if you've read two books on a thing, this makes you so much more knowledgeable than the vast majority of the population.
[00:40:46]  I mean, honestly, if I'm going to talk about a thing and really not bring on an expert to talk about it, I'd like to have read five or six books on a thing minimum.
[00:40:51]  But I think that that's going to provide you the proper context.
[00:40:54]  And again, I think it's totally fair to say that the three most important words in the English language I don't know.
[00:41:02]  You're just allowed to say, I don't know.
[00:41:05]  One of the things that happens on X, which is always hilarious, is that somebody who Was a Ukraine expert since 30 seconds ago will suddenly become an Iran expert when they didn't know what the Strait of Hormuz was or where it was on the planet until 10 seconds ago.

=== Populism in Modern Coalitions (13:15) ===

[00:41:21]  They shift expertise to expertise, of course, not having achieved any expertise in those particular areas.
[00:41:26]  I think it's definitely possible to say, I don't know enough about that.
[00:41:29]  Maybe I should do some reading before I come back on that one.
[00:41:31]  Thank you.
[00:41:38]  What do you think of how the last two elections became fairly populous?
[00:41:44]  And then the UK's Reform Party is also a very populist movement.
[00:41:50]  How do you think we can come back from populism as the West, or do we need to fundamentally move to different parties and create new parties instead of move back from populism?
[00:42:05]  So I think Britain is obviously constituted governmentally very differently than the United States, right?
[00:42:10]  You can have a third or a fourth or a fifth party in Britain that can be successful.
[00:42:14]  I mean, the Reform Party didn't exist until five seconds ago.
[00:42:17]  So, you can do that in Britain.
[00:42:18]  In the United States, it's a two party system, much easier to take over one of the established parties than it is to remake a third party, which is why Trumpism is different than Bushism.
[00:42:26]  It's why what comes next for the Democrats is likely to be even more left than Obamaism, which was significantly more left than Clintonism.
[00:42:33]  So, I think that when it comes to populism itself, I do not like populism.
[00:42:39]  I think that populism is not a philosophy, it is an approach.
[00:42:43]  And that approach tends to be, again, lowest common denominator.
[00:42:49]  There are certain areas where I think populism There's a case to be made for it.
[00:42:53]  The case that I would largely make for populism is in moral populism, but that is because most people get their morals from their parents, and most parents get their morals from the sort of Western, I would say the gas left in the tank from Western civilization.
[00:43:07]  And so, if you want to do a moral populism, it's sort of like the William F. Buckley, I'd rather listen to the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than the professors at Harvard.
[00:43:14]  I agree with that kind of populism because the first hundred names in the Boston phone book probably went to church more often than the professors at Harvard.
[00:43:21]  When it comes to things like economics, No.
[00:43:24]  I mean, no.
[00:43:25]  Because the true populism in economics would be we all have the same, we get to all each have our independent opinions.
[00:43:30]  It's like the most populous thing in economics is called private property and free markets, where we all have our individual opinions.
[00:43:35]  But that's not what economic populism is.
[00:43:37]  Economic populism is 51 of us think the other 49 of you should pay our bills.
[00:43:42]  Right?
[00:43:42]  Or 80 of us think that you 20 over there are screwing us, and so we're going to confiscate your property.
[00:43:48]  Or 90 of us don't like this one guy over there, and so what we're really going to do is we're going to regulate the hell out of him or subsidize his rival in order to destroy him.
[00:43:55]  So, yeah, I'm not a fan of populism, but I think, again, it takes a long time to build the wonders of Western civilization, a very short time to break them.
[00:44:04]  And populism has been a tactic used for literally millennia at this point, so, nothing new.
[00:44:16]  All right.
[00:44:16]  Hey, thank you very much for coming here.
[00:44:18]  God bless you.
[00:44:19]  Keep doing the good work.
[00:44:21]  All right.
[00:44:21]  So I've noticed the problem, right?
[00:44:24]  The big problem that's being described is mass indoctrination, which naturally leads to mass change of opinion if it succeeds.
[00:44:31]  So I'm wondering, what do we do if the mass opinion is changed?
[00:44:35]  Because if you've noticed in other countries like Canada, for example, guns were outlawed.
[00:44:39]  Why?
[00:44:40]  I believe at least there was a change in opinion.
[00:44:42]  So the government, when it's able to use that and outlaw guns.
[00:44:46]  So, an equivalent thing in America, what would we do?
[00:44:49]  I mean, obviously, what I'm in the business of is trying to change opinions back the other way, right?
[00:44:53]  So, we started a company specifically in order to prevent this, and we need to grow.
[00:44:57]  And there are other people in this space, Barry Weiss being one, who is trying to move away from sort of the traditional left wing narrative towards something that's more centrist and more interesting.
[00:45:07]  There are a lot of people in this space.
[00:45:08]  I would say in the media space, I'm a lot more hopeful than I was even when we started the business because so many avenues have been opened.
[00:45:15]  I'm a lot more pessimistic when it comes to social media.
[00:45:17]  I think social media has been a bane and a curse.
[00:45:19]  And if I could somehow, I mean, again, here's the only area in life in which I'm a Luddite is when it comes to social media.
[00:45:25]  If I could hit a red button today and destroy it, I would do it.
[00:45:29]  I think social media has been a blight on human existence.
[00:45:32]  I think it's hacked our lizard brains and turned us into morons and taught us that smarts are to be found in unity.
[00:45:41]  It's used all of the flaws in human thinking and then exacerbated those flaws in order to hit our dopamine receptors.
[00:45:47]  And it's really, really bad.
[00:45:50]  I think there can be changes that are made there.
[00:45:52]  I would hope that some of the social media tech bros would do something about that.
[00:45:56]  I don't have a lot of hope for that.
[00:45:58]  But in the meantime, this is one area where I do think state legislation would be good.
[00:46:01]  I'm very much with Jonathan Haidt.
[00:46:03]  I think that social media should be banned for people under the age of 16.
[00:46:06]  I think that I have, again, I have four kids going on five.
[00:46:09]  I think that those four kids going on five, I'm not going to give them access to anything remotely like social media until they hit 18.
[00:46:16]  I see zero good to it, like zero.
[00:46:21]  Not like there's some good and there's some bad.
[00:46:22]  Zero good.
[00:46:24]  They should go and they should hang out with actual human beings and be with those actual human beings.
[00:46:33]  I agree with you, Ben.
[00:46:34]  Over here.
[00:46:35]  Two people to do three more.
[00:46:36]  What's funny, Joe, is that all the tech bros agree with me.
[00:46:39]  Many of the tech bros who designed a lot of this infrastructure banned their kids from using it.
[00:46:43]  The incentives are very bad for how to make money on these things because it does a dopamine.
[00:46:47]  It's a drug, right?
[00:46:48]  It's not good.
[00:46:48]  Yeah.
[00:46:50]  Good evening.
[00:46:51]  Earlier today, Sir Neil Ferguson described domestic Israeli politics as the hardest thing in the world for him to understand other than astrophysics.
[00:46:59]  I was wondering if you had some insight as to why it's so hard for even a sympathetic outsider to understand the political climate, and if you have any views on the upcoming general.
[00:47:09]  Okay, so I mean, okay, I can try to explain the.
[00:47:11]  I actually know a lot about this, okay?
[00:47:16]  So, without going into a massive disquisition, basically, we can say this.
[00:47:20]  When it comes to the Israeli population, the Israeli population is center right, okay, very center right.
[00:47:26]  What I mean by this is that there was a poll recently done of Israelis between the age of 18 and 29.
[00:47:30]  78% identified as right wing.
[00:47:32]  Okay, so there are three main issues in Israel right now that have 70 to 80% agreement on.
[00:47:38]  One, military independence.
[00:47:39]  They never want to get caught up short again by somebody denying them military capacity in a time when they need to win a war.
[00:47:44]  Two, everyone needs to serve in the military.
[00:47:47]  This is the most divisive issue in Israel.
[00:47:49]  Basically, you have 10% of the population, which is Arab, and 10% of the population, which is ultra orthodox in English, called Haredi in Hebrew, who don't serve in the military.
[00:47:57]  The other 80% say this is crazy and everyone needs to serve in the military.
[00:48:01]  And third, economic deregulation.
[00:48:03]  Okay, so those are the three issues, and 80% of the population agrees on them.
[00:48:07]  The reason that you've had a significant breakdown in Israeli politics is because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in his heart agrees with all three of those things, cannot form a coalition based on all three of those things.
[00:48:19]  So he's got a coalition right now that agrees that Israel should be militarily independent and agrees to a large extent on economic deregulation, although there's part of his coalition, the ultra orthodox, that are heavily welfare dependent and oppose a lot of the economic deregulation.
[00:48:31]  Okay, that third issue, the one about everybody serving in the army.
[00:48:36]  He would love for the Haredim, particularly the ultra.
[00:48:39]  No one is expecting the Arabs to serve in the army, right, left, or center.
[00:48:42]  When it comes to the ultra Orthodox, people in Israel want the ultra Orthodox to serve, except for the ultra Orthodox, who, again, are taking a disproportionate share of welfare and also are not serving in the military.
[00:48:51]  But they're part of the coalition because nobody in the center or center left will join Netanyahu's coalition because they despise Netanyahu.
[00:48:58]  And that is a result of Netanyahu being the most effective single politician in Israeli politics for the last 25 years.
[00:49:04]  Right?
[00:49:04]  He just is.
[00:49:05]  I mean, that's not even descriptive of whether you like him or hate him.
[00:49:07]  Just as a political Machiavellian player, Benjamin Netanyahu is unbelievable at this, which is why all the parties in the opposition, I'm not even kidding, two thirds of the parties in the opposition are started by people who used to be deputies to Benjamin Netanyahu.
[00:49:22]  Naftali Bennett used to be a deputy to Benjamin Netanyahu.
[00:49:24]  Avidor Lieberman was a deputy to Bibi Netanyahu.
[00:49:27]  Benny Gantz was a deputy to Bibi Netanyahu.
[00:49:30]  So basically, you have a bunch of personality conflicts that are preventing a unity government from doing the things that ought to be done.
[00:49:37]  Now, I think that will end.
[00:49:38]  I do.
[00:49:39]  I think that there will come a point here where a government will arise that actually just moves Bibi 76 years old.
[00:49:45]  Right?
[00:49:46]  His dad lived to 101, Benzian lived to 101.
[00:49:48]  So he could theoretically be around for a while to the consternation of Americans, many Americans on the left.
[00:49:54]  But the reality is that there will come an administration that is beyond Netanyahu in which the center left, all the way out to the right, is basically unified because the left does not exist in Israel.
[00:50:04]  It was destroyed by October 7th.
[00:50:06]  And so then you will have all three of those policies pursued.
[00:50:10]  The truth is, Israel is not in existential trouble.
[00:50:12]  Israel is actually domestically in quite good shape.
[00:50:15]  Israel's shekel is trading right now at three to one to the American dollar.
[00:50:18]  To understand how insane that is, you have to understand that for the last 30, 40 years, the shekel was trading well north of four, sometimes up to five.
[00:50:26]  That as of two years ago, it was trading at four.
[00:50:29]  The Israeli economy, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, has gained more in the last three years since October 7th than any stock exchange by percentage on planet Earth.
[00:50:39]  So Israel is doing fine.
[00:50:41]  The fact that you can't get a domestic coalition together is, again, a factor of a pretty poorly put together governmental system.
[00:50:47]  There are real problems with it.
[00:50:48]  They kind of took half from the Brits and they took half from the communists.
[00:50:51]  I'm not even kidding.
[00:50:52]  Their judicial system was taken from the communists and their parliamentary system was taken from the Brits.
[00:50:56]  And their cutoff point is like if they have four seats and you get into Knesset out of 120, it's a mess.
[00:51:02]  It's a mess.
[00:51:02]  That was a little detail, but there you are.
[00:51:03]  Thank you.
[00:51:04]  Let's do two more.
[00:51:11]  Hi, I have two questions.
[00:51:13]  I'm Jonathan, I'm from California.
[00:51:15]  The second question is meant for both of you, but the first question is where would you point to.
[00:51:23]  The starting point of the American culture, like disagreements.
[00:51:27]  And the second question is in such a time of uproar, like during, okay, so if you want to preserve American exceptionalism during our era, I've read that a couple of texts by Ray Dalio that suggest that great powers fall every 250 years.
[00:51:49]  We're nearing that period of time.
[00:51:53]  We are at that period of time.
[00:51:56]  What are two main metrics that America needs to succeed on in order to preserve our exceptionalism?
[00:52:05]  Okay, so I'll answer the second question first, mainly because I don't remember the first question.
[00:52:11]  The second question so, first of all, anybody who sells you a nostrum based on years, like at 250 years, everything will collapse.
[00:52:22]  I'm sorry, it's nonsense.
[00:52:23]  It's nonsense.
[00:52:24]  I mean, the Roman Empire lasted a hell of a lot longer than 250 years.
[00:52:29]  And the United States is going to last a hell of a lot longer than 250 years, I think.
[00:52:33]  So, the sort of like, oh my gosh, he's giving us the date.
[00:52:36]  The beautiful thing about making predictions like that is if you're right, you make bank off it for the rest of time.
[00:52:40]  And if you're wrong, nobody remembers.
[00:52:42]  It's one of the beauties of the political sphere.
[00:52:44]  If you make a terrible prediction, nobody remembers it.
[00:52:47]  If you get it wrong 99 times, but that one time you said Trump was going to win in 2016, you can make bank off that forever.
[00:52:53]  It's fantastic.
[00:52:54]  Anyway, so as far as what America needs to do, a couple of things that America needs to do it needs to re embrace the principles of free market capitalism.
[00:53:03]  Re embrace them.
[00:53:04]  No one, right or left, no one, and this is the part that drives me crazy, no one is making a moral defense of free markets.
[00:53:11]  Even free marketeers make a utilitarian defense of free markets.
[00:53:13]  They work really well.
[00:53:14]  That's true.
[00:53:15]  But guess what?
[00:53:16]  Most people who have grown up under a free market don't even understand the alternative to a free market, so they think that the natural state of mankind is prosperity, which is not true.
[00:53:25]  The natural state of mankind is penury, starvation, and death.
[00:53:29]  All you have to do to check that out is take an airplane most places on earth.
[00:53:33]  But the thing that we need to defend is the idea.
[00:53:36]  That free markets are inherently good.
[00:53:38]  They are, because they're a reflection of human innovation and human creativity, the fact you own your own labor.
[00:53:42]  They're an outgrowth of your honor and dignity as an individual.
[00:53:45]  That's what free markets come from.
[00:53:46]  And we need to defend it on those grounds.
[00:53:55]  And then, secondly, we need to obviously defend the principles of equal justice before law, equal rights before law.
[00:54:02]  If you had to pick two, these would be the two private property and equal rights before law.
[00:54:08]  Life, liberty, and property, you might say, if you're John Locke.
[00:54:11]  If you defend life, liberty, and property, you're in pretty good shape.
[00:54:14]  A country that gets away from any of those three is going to be in serious trouble.
[00:54:17]  I think America can defend and should defend all three of those things.
[00:54:21]  Awesome.
[00:54:26]  I'll answer offline, but I think fighting for our principles.
[00:54:29]  And fixing our institutions, which is what we're trying to do with UATX.
[00:54:31]  You better build some new ones, and we gotta fix some other ones.
[00:54:34]  But let's do the last question here.

=== Defending Life, Liberty, Property (01:37) ===

[00:54:36]  So, this was touched on earlier with having a support system of people that you can trust to fact check you for bias.
[00:54:43]  I wanted to ask if you have any practical advice for students that want to inform ourselves.
[00:54:49]  There's a lot of information, some of it is true, some of it is medium, some of it is really not true, and it can be really overwhelming wanting to inform yourself, but wanting to find the truth in facts.
[00:55:03]  And what advice do you have?
[00:55:06]  I mean, listen, we all have heuristic shortcuts, as I say.
[00:55:08]  You have to find people that you can trust because you can't be an expert on everything.
[00:55:11]  And so, what I would say is if people keep making bad predictions, those people should not be listened to.
[00:55:16]  If people keep making, based on their ideas, predictions that keep coming false, then probably they're not worth listening to.
[00:55:24]  If their response to a request for evidence is to be offended or upset or to claim that you are doing something wrong, then you shouldn't listen to them either.
[00:55:33]  Well, what I usually say to people is that you should read legacy media publications, then you should read Conservative publications, and usually where there's crossover, that's the basis of fact, and then everything else is the opinion.
[00:55:43]  So, I have some friends on the left, like I'm friendly with Van Jones, I'm friendly with Bill Maher.
[00:55:48]  If you listen to my show and then you listen to what Van says, Van and I come at it from very different angles, but our basis in fact is going to be pretty similar because Van is a reasonable human, even if we disagree.
[00:55:56]  And the same thing is true for a Bill Maher or, say, for a John Fetterman.
[00:56:00]  They're going to be operating off the same basis of fact.
[00:56:02]  So, where we agree, that would usually be the basis of fact, and where we disagree, that's usually the opinions that we're drawing from the facts based on a different lens on the world.
[00:56:10]  That's a good way to get informed, I think.
[00:56:13]  Thank you, Scott.