Ben Shapiro dismisses alt-right mislabeling, citing the Anti-Defamation League’s 2016 data pinning him as a top target of anti-Semitic abuse while rejecting extremist ideologies. He critiques media cherry-picking past errors—like a Hamas tweet—and argues modern discourse punishes accountability, comparing tech censorship to inconsistent bans (e.g., Farrakhan vs. Alex Jones). On UBI, he clashes with Joe Rogan over dependency risks, favoring personal responsibility over government guarantees, like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy critique of welfare. Shapiro defends religious opposition to same-sex marriage as private morality, not state enforcement, while Rogan questions outdated biological justifications. Both warn polarization deepens when voices are silenced, even if beliefs clash, and Shapiro challenges Sam Harris’ atheist ethics, arguing determinism undermines free will. The episode ends with Shapiro’s The Right Side of History book, blending faith, reason, and Western philosophy to reframe cultural debates. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, yeah, because I used to, I mean, if you look at the old photos of me, I have, like, the Hitler hair.
I've got, like, the hair, that's the only thing about me that's hilarious, was my old hair, and I've got the hair that kind of comes down over the forehead, and I still walk into the office wearing basically an undershirt every day, because I'm incredibly lazy when it comes to that stuff, but we have...
But this is one of the things that bothers me so much about you being so misrepresented.
When I read things about you, there was the article that we were just talking about, the alt-right sage without the rage, they called you, and you're not even remotely alt-right.
In fact, you were the leading target of anti-Semitic abuse for all of 2016, weren't you?
Yeah, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which is no ally of mine, so...
Yeah, I mean I'm – not only am I not alt-right, I've spent the last four years like legitimately battling the alt-right, talking about how evil I think their ideology is, how evil I think white supremacy is.
I mean first of all, like people with yarmulkes, typically not the favorites of the alt-right.
And then beyond that, I mean I think their ideology is legitimately a devastatingly awful – Twist on what Western civilization is supposed to be.
What's amazing is a review of my new book, and my new book has several sections in there dedicated to how terrible the alt-right is.
And then the interview they did with me doesn't talk about alt-right stuff at all, but they just assume I'm on the conservative right.
People are labeling people in a very simple manner to try to categorize them as the enemy.
And instead of just addressing these points, like, I love watching your debates where you do Q&As with college students and with people in the audience.
Because you can see you agree with you or disagree with you.
You have well-formulated ideas.
This isn't just some bullshit that you're spouting out.
I've been doing this for legitimately more than half my life.
I'm 35, and I started when I was 17, and I started writing a syndicated column at that point.
And when you're 17, you think a lot of dumb stuff.
And then you get older and you educate yourself and you spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time studying.
Hopefully you have some cogent arguments after 20 years of doing anything.
But the demonization is pretty astonishing.
We had Andrew Yang.
He's the only Democratic candidate who has agreed to go on the Sunday special that I do.
We did a full hour on UBI. It was perfectly nice.
It was perfectly coherent and...
And conciliatory, and yet people will suggest that everything I do is about destroying people on the other side because of all the Ben Shapiro destroys videos and all that kind of stuff.
Some of those things were taken out of context, like that one particular tweet, which is a bad tweet.
It was a tweet that was part of a tweet thread in which I was specifically contrasting Israel and the Hamas leadership and saying that the Israeli government likes to build and the Hamas leadership would prefer that their citizens live in sewage and bomb things.
But that was a bad tweet, obviously.
My entire history on Muslim relations is one – like I supported the ability of Ilhan Omar to wear a hijab on the floor.
I opposed President Trump's originally proposed Muslim ban.
In the last three weeks, I've had on Majib Nawaz.
I've had on Kanta Ahmed.
I had on yesterday, a reformed Muslim.
Like, these are conversations that have to be had.
But to take—this is one of the things that bugs me so much.
I've tweeted, I think, 140,000 times.
I've written millions of words.
I'm sure you can find something I don't even remember having written.
That is bad.
I have a running list, by the way.
I try to be honest about this.
I'm one of the only people I know who has – I have a running list.
It's called So Here's a Giant List of All the Dumb Stuff I've Ever Done.
And I actually go through all this.
You can look it up.
This is not me saying this now.
I mean you can go and look up all the things that I think I've done wrong, and I'll apologize for some, and I'll say some were dumb, and I'll say some I'm fine with, and you're just taking it out of context.
But I mean I hope that's what honest people try to do.
When people are trying to categorize you as alt-right or they're trying to put you into this category of internet goon, they're taking some little tiny phrase that you said seven years ago and trying to say, this is you.
And even if somebody tweeted something bad like 10 years ago, bringing it up now is not an attempt to actually make the public space better.
And you're not actually offended by that thing the person tweeted 10 years ago that you didn't notice.
What it is is that you want to get rid of this person or hurt this person.
So you're going to bring up something from 10 years ago, and then you're going to try and club them into submission with it.
Because if you actually ask them their opinion about it, they might have a more nuanced view on what they said.
Maybe they apologize.
Maybe they think, I don't even remember saying that.
I mean, I felt the same way, by the way.
I try to be consistent.
I really do about this stuff.
I said the same thing about, for example, Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, who is excoriated for having this terrible racist photo on his yearbook page back in medical school in 1987. And people are saying, well, this is evidence he's racist now.
It's like, well, no, that's evidence that he was doing a racist thing then.
That's not evidence that he is racist now.
You sort of have to look over the broad course of his career.
And he ended up doing what everyone now does, which is you just don't apologize for anything.
You just try to pass it off as a nothing.
The public space is actually getting worse.
Let's say that you did something bad in the past.
There are a few human responses, too.
I did something I don't like in the past.
Human response number one is, you know what?
I apologize.
That was wrong.
These days, that gets your face step done.
You say, I apologize.
I was wrong.
It means, well, why did you do it in the first place?
Because you're a bad person.
Apologies are not accepted.
And then number two is you brazen it out.
You do the Trump.
I never did anything wrong, ever.
I'm perfect.
And then you get your defenders to come and surround you, and then nothing ever gets cleansed.
Or opportunity number three is you do what Barack Obama did, which is you come out preemptively, and you try to remember all the bad stuff you do, and then you confess it in public.
So in Dreams from My Father, he says, When I was back in high school, did a little blow.
And everybody's like, oh, okay, so he did cocaine when he was in high school.
That's cool.
Whereas if it comes out during the campaign, then he's boned, right?
Then he's got a real problem.
The problem is that right now, even if you preemptively come out and say I did something wrong, like, for example, Liam Neeson talking about years ago when he had a racist thought that he didn't act on, when he had a racist thought.
This is now—we're going to try and ruin your career for something that you admit was bad, that you did 30 years ago.
We're going to try and ruin you over that.
If you apologize for something that you did 30 years ago, which you would have preferred, just got forgotten because it was embarrassing and stupid, then we say you're bad.
And so all you're left with is, like, the most shameless people in the world who are in the public space, right?
The incentive structure is to be deeply shameless, to just say, yeah, man, I own that, and it was great when I said it.
Well, it's just the culture of going after people for things and finding anything to categorize them as someone who's a viable target.
And this is what I've seen thrust your way.
It's like there's nothing wrong with being conservative.
There's something wrong with wanting everyone to think the way you think, though.
This is the difference.
What I like that you do is you debate your points, you state your positions, you have a philosophy.
And what I don't like is when people try to pretend that that philosophy is somehow hateful or somehow regressive, that you condemn people for their thoughts.
Kara Swisher, they were talking about removing you from YouTube, and I thought it was the CEO of YouTube, but it was actually Kara who said, I would if I could.
She was trying to do the same thing that they do with you or with Dave Rubin or Jordan Peterson, which is that anybody who is sort of heterodox, because in that group I think I'm the only registered Republican, Anybody who's heterodox is now being portrayed as a – Meaning just thinks differently from kind of the down the line Democratic Party platform.
You're not like down the line with Hillary.
Like Sam Harris is a Democrat.
Sam Harris is heterodox because he disagrees that Islam is by necessity a religion of peace, for example.
Or he thinks that we have to look at actual statistics in order to make evidentiary based points about discrimination and disparity.
And this makes him an enemy of people like Ezra Klein at Vox.com.
This sort of stuff, they then say that you are a feeder for white supremacy.
They can't actually get you on what you say.
So it turns into, well, some members of your audience do things that are really bad.
It's like, well, dude, I have like millions of people who are members of my audience.
I have 5 million Facebook followers.
I have 2 million on Twitter.
And you're way bigger than I am.
I assume that some of those people are going to be crazy.
Am I supposed to have some dude with his itchy trigger finger standing by in front of a keyboard just waiting for something offensive to pop up?
And this was in response to something that happened with them where there was pedophiles who were watching videos of children doing things and they were commenting stuff in the, you know, like children's gymnastics and stuff like that.
They were commenting and, like, communicating with each other through the comments.
And it was sort of discovered that there was this connection, that they were doing this in many, many videos.
And YouTube rightly panicked.
They're like, holy shit, we have to stop this.
So the response, I guess, was we just have to make people responsible for their comments.
And that was shooting of legislators, like elected people.
One nearly died, and that kind of went away.
We didn't talk about Bernie's responsibility, but there's a shooting in Christchurch, and it's Jordan Peterson's fault.
And Jordan Peterson has no relationship with the shooter whatsoever.
It's my fault.
I have no relationship with the shooter and denounce everything that that piece of crap stands for.
And suddenly, it's really ugly.
And it will come home to roost.
I mean, here's what's going to happen is Facebook and YouTube are going to fall prey to their own standards.
Because if their standard is that you're responsible for your followers, or I'm responsible for my followers, or Jordan, or anybody else is responsible for all the people who view their stuff, okay, then why isn't Facebook responsible for all the people posting on its platform?
If they are, if Facebook becomes responsible for all the people posting on its platform, they'll be bankrupt in a week.
They've got a problem.
They really do because they have to decide whether they are a platform or whether they are a do-gooder publication.
I run a publication, Daily Wire.
It's openly conservative.
We make no bones about that.
And we are responsible for the content that appears on our platform.
And if we say something defamatory, we will be sued.
If we say something that is false, then we will be sued presumably.
If you post something false on Facebook, Facebook doesn't get sued.
But now Facebook has deemed itself the morality police, and they'll ban people they don't like, and they'll decide what editorially ought to be elevated and what ought not to be elevated.
Does that sound more like the phone company to you?
Or does that sound more like my website, where I decide what gets published and what doesn't, right?
Because Facebook's case for exemption from these laws is, well, we're like the phone company, right?
When you're on the phone with somebody, if that person says something criminal, AT&T isn't responsible for the person saying something criminal.
It's not criminal or terrible.
It's just the phone company.
But Facebook isn't doing that.
Facebook is jumping into the middle of conversations and then saying, well, we don't really like this conversation, so we're just going to kind of shut it down.
Not because of legal threat, but because we just don't like it.
So they've done it in the past to some conservative – it's pretty controversial because they're not transparent at all.
I can tell you that at the beginning of 2018, we lost about 35 percent of our traffic because Facebook started cracking down on mostly conservative sites.
They said that it was kind of news sites generally, but that's not what the statistics – They're doing it more often with things that we all sort of agree are bad.
We all agree white supremacy is bad.
White nationalism is bad.
Now they say they're going to censor that stuff.
But here's where I'm uncomfortable.
I think that that stuff is awful and evil and those people are the ones – they're the reason I have personal security.
Once you get into the business of Facebook gets to decide which speech is good and which speech is bad, they're an editor.
They're an editor.
Even if I agree with their assessment of what stuff is good and what is bad, I am not comfortable with them in the driver's seat there.
And if they are going to be in the driver's seat, then they should be held liable for all the stuff that's on their platform.
I mean why is it that – Twitter, same thing.
Why is it that Louis Farrakhan is still on that platform but Alex Jones is not?
I don't like Alex Jones' material.
I've been very, very critical of Alex Jones.
I didn't think he should get banned from Twitter unless he actually violated the law, unless he was responsible for a violent threat, unless he was defamatory or something.
They're definitely going down this road of being the moral arbitrators.
They're the ones who get to decide what the conversations are.
And that's an insane responsibility.
The responsibility of getting to dictate what should and should not be discussed and to have it be a handful of people and have these people almost exclusively live in the Pacific...
You know, north of San Francisco.
That whole tech community.
I mean, it's all tech liberals who really, if you're around those people, they live in this really strange, uber-wealthy bubble of super-genius people.
Spectrum people who are coders and super capitalists and people that are raising money all over the place and designing technology, and they have an ideology.
And it's not necessarily a bad one, just being honest and upfront about what it is.
It's incredibly progressive, which is very unusual for big business, right?
For big business to be just openly, transparently progressive and pushing social justice, it's very unusual.
Well, so I think that there are a lot of people – listen, I think that the vast majority – I think Mark Zuckerberg is ruthless with Facebook and he's progressive.
I think Jack Dorsey is as ruthless as the next guy when it comes to profit.
I mean he's still got to be answerable to his shareholders.
So I think a lot of the progressivism is sort of a way to excuse your own – Your own involvement in the capitalist market.
I think that if our tech companies were honest, they should take that stuff off.
Like, stop pretending you're do-gooding.
You're not do-gooding.
You're providing a platform.
And maybe the platform is the good, right?
In a capitalist economy, the product that you provide is the good.
I don't need additional good to come from your product, right?
If you want to provide me a solid morning drink, right, I don't need your politics along with that.
I just need the drink.
Well, if I want a social media company, I don't give two craps about what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about politics.
Dude hasn't studied it.
I don't care at all what Jack Dorsey, who vacations in Malaysia and gets bitten by a million mosquitoes while meditating, has to say about the nature of life.
Like, why do I care about Jack Dorsey's political view?
He has provided me a good.
The good is this basic chat room where I'm consuming news.
How about that would just be enough?
But it's not enough for a lot of these folks.
It's the The kind of Hooli from Silicon Valley, we're gonna pretend that we're here to do good.
And it's not enough just to acknowledge that maybe the thing that you provided is the good.
Like Bill Gates has done more good with Microsoft than he has done with any of his charities.
He's given a lot of money to charity, but Microsoft has provided legitimately hundreds of thousands of jobs and created enormously productive lines of business and made enormous profit for a lot of people.
A lot of people have stock in Microsoft.
As a basic factual thing, he has done more good doing that than giving tens of millions of dollars to various outside causes.
So it feels like a lot of the progressivism in corporate halls in Silicon Valley is bifurcated mentally.
It's like people have – they're like dolphins.
It's one side of the brain on at a time.
Here's my capitalist side where I go out and make money and profit, and then here's my other side where I show people what a great person I am by proclaiming that I'm for Bernie Sanders while parking my money offshore to make sure that it's shielded from the tax man.
What I'm saying is that the don't be evil thing, like, one of the things that I thought was, what if that was like a legal decision?
Me being cynical that they were pulled into some sort of an office and said, if we say, don't be evil, and you take someone off the platform, you're accusing them of evil.
I talk about social standards and how people should behave in their personal life.
But when it comes to government and when it comes to me imposing my views on you, I am way less of a top down tyrant than any of the people in Silicon Valley.
I am not here to tell you that you are not allowed to be on a platform because we disagree.
It's one thing if you're threatening violence, which is an actual violation of law, but this crap where people like me, because I believe in a social fabric built on certain Judeo-Christian values, but I'm not forcing you to be part of that, and I don't think the government should compel you to be a part of that, or I'm the tyrant, but the person who sits at the top of Twitter or Facebook who is saying that they get to police what you see And they're going to nudge you in the right direction, nudge you in the right direction without your consent, without them even telling them what you're doing, right?
They're going to push you a little bit because they know better than you, and they can sort of massage you into better views if we control your channels of information.
This is something the Obama administration was very fond of.
There's a scholar named Cass Sunstein.
He's a legal scholar, and he wrote a book called Nudge.
He was very famous.
It was used as sort of a handbook during the Obama administration.
And the idea is, well, if we can just use...
Non-forceable means to sort of nudge people in a particular direction without them even knowing they're being nudged.
Then shouldn't we do that?
And I think, no, you shouldn't.
You shouldn't.
Because transparency is the only way I can tell what kind of bullshit you're trying to sell me.
As soon as you're trying to silence this other voice, if you believe one thing and another person believes a different thing, you should probably talk about it.
And the way that I know for sure there's something wrong with your argument is if what you're trying to do is you're sneakily trying to silence these voices.
And again, as long as we're not talking about threats of violence and as long as we're not talking about harassment or doxing, we're just talking about conversation.
You're just talking about people with differing points of view.
If you want to silence differing points of view, I have to wonder about your intent.
I have to wonder about whether you're going into this conversation with good faith.
I have to wonder whether you've really objectively assessed whether or not your argument does hold up against scrutiny.
Because this is also part of the problem.
When you're in an echo chamber, you often don't formulate these arguments very well.
When you confront people about certain biased beliefs that they have, and you have an opposing belief, if they're part of a bubble, sometimes they might not have even ever considered some of the things you have to say.
One was just a general sense the government sucks at everything, and the more I see the government try to crack down on things, the more prevalent it becomes.
I mean people were dealing pot.
Welcome to LA. Again, there's you ruining your own life through use of drugs, and there's drugs that legitimately ruin other people's lives.
There are drugs that remove your ability to even reason or think.
I think there are only two reasons to criminalize drugs in any fashion.
One is if there are drugs like, for example, PCP that legitimately make you violent, and then you are going out and committing acts of violence against people.
Then there's a case.
Or if you're talking about a drug where it legitimately robs you of your capacity to reason, heroin, if you're able to actually crack down on it successfully.
But even there, I'm not sure that the proper government solution is criminalization because we've criminalized it and it's still incredibly prevalent.
And the reason that I say that is because as a religious person who believes in traditional marriage, I have two marriage certificates.
I have the one from the state that I don't give two craps about.
It's buried somewhere in my garage.
And then I have my religious marriage certificate, which meant, among other things, that I got to shit up my wife.
I mean like this was the one that mattered to me.
And I think that's true for most religious people.
The religious ceremony matters a lot more than the state saying a thing.
And the state isn't incentivizing marriage.
People aren't getting married because they're like, yeah, I need the tax break.
So that's a bunch of nonsense.
And once the government decides what version of marriage it wants to push, that then comes into conflict with other values.
So for example, once the state of California decides that same-sex marriage is on legal par with heterosexual marriage, now I'm worried about the externality of I have a religious day school or I have my synagogue.
My synagogue It's a religious institution.
It doesn't approve of same-sex marriage.
Now is the government going to come in and tell my synagogue how it ought to act with regard to same-sex marriage?
I don't think that's the government's business.
So how about this?
How about everybody gets to do basically what they want, associate with whom they want, and it's none of the government's business.
I'm just talking about the statistical overuse of marijuana among teenagers does have detrimental brain effects that have some long-term after effects.
It's pretty proven, and that's one of the things that I really – I'm glad you said that because I wanted to cover that when you were in the middle of a rant when we were joking around about 6th and 7th graders selling pot.
Don't smoke pot when you're young.
You really should.
It's not good for the development of your brain.
Same thing with drinking.
You know, I didn't smoke a lot of pot when I was a kid.
I did it a handful of times until I was 30 years old.
But I did drink a bunch of times when I was young and in high school.
There was an article recently that I posted from BBC that was saying that you probably shouldn't be considered an adult until you're 30. Right, they're saying brain development doesn't even stop until you're 26 or 28. This is why when people are saying, let's lower the voting age to 16, I'm like, what the?
They jump down for a little when a bunch of chickens jump off the boat, but then they come right back up.
The marijuana thing is, in my opinion, it's another one of those things where people have this categorized box that they like to put marijuana users in.
Like, this is the category, lazy, stoner, stupid, delusional.
I'm telling you, because it's not what people think it is.
If you've never smoked marijuana, this is going to be a very difficult thing to grasp, but marijuana enhances jiu-jitsu because it eliminates the rest of the world.
When you're rolling, which rolling is like, say, if you and Jamie were going to have a sparring match, that would be rolling.
Like, you'd slap hands, and then you'd go.
And you're trying to choke him, and he's trying to get you in an armbar, and you're going after it.
When you do that on marijuana, it's like you don't...
Think of anything else other than those movements and it becomes like this very intense meditation and violence.
Like it's not violent in terms of most of the time you don't really even get hurt.
It's like you get to the point like one of the beautiful things about jujitsu is you can grab ahold of someone and choke them to the point where they're going to go to sleep and you would kill them if you kept going and they tap and then you're friends again.
And everybody's cool.
And you try to do it to me and I try to do it to you.
And you really can do it reasonably hard without people getting hurt.
And it happens every day all throughout the world.
A lot of these people are high.
And they're doing this jujitsu practice in this almost like, it's a transcendent state.
Okay, so then, you know, but again, that's not a case for- I agree.
So I don't think there's anything we disagree about here because I'm not talking about criminalizing marijuana use.
I think that we should honestly discuss the evidence that for a subset of the population, there is some evidence that marijuana is addicting, but it's a subset.
It's not everybody who's on marijuana.
The vast majority of people on marijuana are not addicted to marijuana.
I think- In the same way, alcohol, I mean, it's true of alcohol as well.
Yeah, but with that said, I mean Alexis de Tocqueville talks about this early on in the American Republic.
The idea is that what makes America very different is the idea you don't need a big government when you do have a supportive social fabric where people feel like they're at least oriented toward a common goal.
It's one of the problems that I think we have in the country right now.
I'm not sure people are oriented toward even a common sense of conversation.
Yeah.
I mean it's – you don't have to agree on everything in order to have a common sense of the important values that unify the country or should.
I always use Sam Harris as sort of my bet noire here because he's obviously a militant atheist.
I'm in equally – Strong believer.
And yet when it comes to the things that we would like to see happen in the country, not on a government policy level, but on a let's have a conversation level and discuss on evidence level, we're on the same page.
There are certain core assumptions you have to make in order for that to happen.
My argument about America and the West is that those core assumptions are built on Judeo-Christian foundations.
Sam's core argument seems to be that they're built on evolutionary biology.
I don't want to let this marijuana thing go just yet.
One of the things that I wanted to bring up to you was this idea that if you're a religious person...
Don't you think that there's certain things that maybe God put here for us to consume, to change your perspective, to allow you to reach new levels of consciousness?
Don't you think it's entirely possible that some of these things that are here, and I know you haven't experienced them, but they might literally have been put there by God.
And there's some evidence to say that a lot of the texts from the Bible, that in particular there was, I think it was the University of Tel Aviv, Somewhere in Jerusalem where these scholars were, they were trying to decipher what it meant when Moses encountered the burning bush.
And they believe that it may have been the acacia tree, which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is a psychedelic substance that actually that the brain produces and it's very common in plants.
And they think that this might have been, when he met God and God was a burning bush, that this might have been some Crude translation of them being involved in some sort of a psychedelic experience.
Now, it sounds outlandish unless you've had that psychedelic experience.
And when you have, you very well could think that you were in a conversation with God.
This is on earth.
And this is something that may very well have been lost information, or this may very well have been rituals that people participated in to bring them closer together and to reinforce that sense of community that you do get from a church and you do get from a group of people that share moral beliefs and values.
And there's real good discussion.
That a lot of these experiences that became these religious doctrines came from psychedelic experiences.
Now, as someone who's never experienced that before, I know this is probably a very strange thing to try to even wrap your head around.
It is entirely alien until you experience it, but it might very well be religious.
I mean, I've heard that from other people who have used those kinds of drugs.
Sam actually made this argument to me, too, about the use of psychedelics.
I mean, maybe.
God made apples.
Well, okay.
So this argument, I will say I'm not super fond of the argument that God made something and therefore it's ours to use or – I mean like I keep kosher.
God made pigs.
I don't eat them.
So I am not a huge fan of the argument that because something is here or because an urge is natural, therefore we ought to imbibe or therefore we ought to participate in a particular activity.
One of the things that I'm very big on – A rationalist when it comes to religion as much as you can be a rationalist with regard to religion to the extent that I think that it's up to us to use our reasonable faculties to determine the proper use of things, which is why you shouldn't overuse drugs even if you're going to use drugs, for example.
But this is part of the problem of making things illegal.
You make things illegal, then you really don't know what it is or how it affects the body or what's the right dose or the wrong dose, and then people get involved in these terrible situations where they're taking things and they're just guessing with you.
I mean, when it comes to prohibition, prohibition with alcohol didn't work, prohibition with drugs is just making the cartels bigger, and it's causing more problems with organized crime.
I think our perceptions of what is good for you and is bad for you is also based on laws that the government created ignorantly.
The sweeping psychedelic act of 1970, which made virtually everything psychedelic.
They missed a few things.
A few things slipped through the cracks.
But all of the tryptamines, or most of them, Psilocybin, LSD, all that stuff was made completely illegal by people who really didn't even know what it was.
And a lot of that is why we base our ideas of what's good or bad for you.
It's based on what is legal and what other people have done with it.
That we all could use between conservative thought and liberal thought, particularly for people that are dying.
It's one of the things that Johns Hopkins found and there's been other studies done and there's been therapy done on people that are dying.
Mm-hmm.
And when they give them these mushroom trips, they have these beautiful experiences where they completely accept death, and it's almost a universal reaction to it.
Like the amount of people who still experience a positive benefit months and months after the experience while they're dying, that they say this was an incredibly moving and powerful moment in my life that allowed me to accept the fact that my time here is done.
I mean, like, let's say that— I could guarantee you that tomorrow you're going to be a happier person.
All you have to do is take this regimen of drugs that you're going to take every day, and it's going to make you a happier person, a more well-rounded person, but it's going to permanently change your brain chemistry.
Is that something that you think is good, or is it something you think is bad?
Because from a religious perspective, there's an argument to be made that this is work you need to do on yourself without outside aid, if possible.
He said that there was a joke about there was a monk and he met Buddha because Buddha came to town and he said Buddha he wanted to impress him he said I practiced the city of levitation and I have done this for 10 years and now I can walk on water and the Buddha says but the ferry is only a nickel.
What are you fucking wasting your time?
You can aid the progression rapidly with psychedelic drugs.
Do you know about MAPS and their work with MDMA and soldiers that have had PTSD? Not too much, no.
It's phenomenal.
By giving these soldiers MDMA therapy, meaning they give them MDMA, which is essentially what people think of as ecstasy, the street name.
They give them pure MDMA, and then they assist them with – they actually have a psychologist, sit with them, a therapist, and they go over all these details of these traumatic events, and they come to peace with everything.
And they've had profound benefits for soldiers and for some combat journalists, different people that have been over there and have experienced the horrors of war and just general PTSD, maybe for people who have experienced violence attacks.
It is shown to be one of the very best things we've ever discovered for helping people get past something.
To me, and I'm thinking about this on the fly because this is stuff I don't think about very much, but there's a complex moral equation to the extent that If you're talking about somebody who has PTSD, somebody who has a condition, and the only way to help that condition is to use these drugs, I've never had a problem with any of that stuff.
My grandfather was schizophrenic.
Maybe bipolar, maybe schizophrenic.
The diagnosis is not exactly clear.
They prescribed him lithium.
It made him a lot better.
Would he have been better off struggling with the schizophrenia?
Of course not.
It's much better that he should have the lithium and then be able to live in his rational mind.
So when there's a problem, using drugs to get past it and work with it is a good thing.
You do run the risk of the sort of brave new world situation where you have a group of people who have a certain level of ersatz happiness that is not driven by a point of view but more by just the chemicals in their body.
But are you – Yuval Harari talks about maybe this is the future, right?
He talks about the idea that maybe the future is we just drug ourselves until we're happy basically or that happiness is the drugs because if you're a scientific materialist, that's what it is.
Happiness is just a bunch of chemicals flowing throughout your body.
So if you can bring them in without self-change.
But I do wonder whether that robs people of a certain level of purpose, that the struggle is part of being human.
I think we're changing what it is to be human just by carrying around phones and just— Is the idea that you are struggling.
I think the struggle is actually meaningful.
And I think that's why religions tend to set prophylactic rules, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill.
So, for example, I'm addicted to my phone.
I mean, there's just no question, right?
It's in my hand all the time.
But from Friday night to Saturday night, it's off.
I can't look at it.
I'm forbidden from looking at it.
And this breaks the cycle, at least for one day a week.
And that's a good thing that makes me better as a human being, because a limit I set for myself, and then a limit that I abide by, And if you believe in self-mastery, where's the happy medium between self-mastery and I need a little bit of aid?
And I think that there is a happy medium there, but I'm not sure that drugs are the answer to – I don't think you're suggesting drugs are the – No, I'm not suggesting that.
And I think there's also a problem with the word drugs.
Everything is under that blanket, and that blanket can be entirely negative or extremely positive.
I know, but there's a problem.
I use it too.
It's not accusing you, but that term, it's a problem.
It's a problem term.
Because what these are are substances that are psychoactive, and some of them can be extremely beneficial, and some of them have short-term experiences that last with long-term results.
And I don't think that there's enough knowledge that I don't think the people that are negative against it have experienced enough of it or have looked at it in an objective, rational way, because I think it's something that could be here to aid perspective,
to give people a chance to think outside of their normal Conditioned way of thinking that might have been established by their community or by their church or by their neighborhood, whatever it is, sometimes a little bit of a break, a little bit of a mental break from what you're experiencing and the vibration that you exist on almost every day to separate from that and to get a look at it from the outside, sometimes it allows you to have a renewed perspective that can enhance your life greatly.
Yes, but that's a discipline thing, and this is what we share.
You and I are both disciplined people, and it's one of the things I really respect about you.
You're a very hard worker.
You're always on the ball.
You're very disciplined.
And I know that a lot of conservative people admire that, and they admire that in folks, and they think that people who are liberal are not disciplined.
They think that they're lazy.
It falls into this, like, weak, Beta male sort of category of people that are progressive and liberal.
And I think that's a misunderstanding.
I think you and I both agree that the struggle is very important.
But I'd struggle physically so that I don't have to struggle mentally.
I struggle physically so that I can have a better way of looking at things with less stress.
So we have this shared belief that things should be a struggle.
I force my struggle on myself so that I can have a better perspective.
Struggle is an important part of understanding yourself.
If you do not push yourself, if you do not struggle, you're not going to really get who you are or what your boundaries are.
And if you're self-indulgent, if every day you're stuffing things in your face that you want to, it's good to have a rule.
Like, hey, for this next month, you can't eat this, or you can't do that, or I want you to start fasting 16 hours a day.
Is it that hard?
Just eat for eight hours a day and fast for 16?
No, but just doing something like that and setting these guidelines for yourself and putting yourself into a disciplined state can be extremely beneficial.
Like Jocko Willink always says, discipline equals freedom.
What makes you a virtuous person is acting repeatedly in accordance with right reason, and that is setting rules for yourself.
That is not violating every rule.
I think when we talk about, on the conservative side, folks on the left being lazy, I don't mean that in terms of work.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg is a hard worker, I assume.
I think Jack Dorsey, when he's not getting bitten by mosquitoes, seems like a hard worker.
But most of the people – most people who have jobs are hard workers.
I don't think it's about that.
I think it's a certain perspective on the necessity of rules and the mindset that if I don't know what a rule is for, I'm going to remove it.
So G.K. Chesterton has this very famous...
Kind of contrast that he draws between people who tend to be right-wing politically and people who tend to be left-wing politically.
He says people who tend to be left-wing politically, you're walking through the woods and you come across a fence.
You don't know why the fence is there.
You say, I don't know why this fence is here.
I'm removing it.
And the person who's right-wing walks through the forest and sees the fence and says, I have no idea why the fence is here.
I'm going to go find out why the fence is here and then maybe I'll remove it.
And that's the kind of Berkey and conservative attitude toward rules, the attitude that this rule was put here for a reason.
Now, maybe the rule sucks.
Maybe the rule has to go.
But let's try and figure out what was at the root of the rule before we just wipe out all the fences and then try to rebuild from the ground up all these new fences.
And that's especially true in a civilization that's the most prosperous and free civilization ever created.
I mean, if the system really sucked, that would be one thing.
But I think people are kind of ungrateful about the fact that we live in the best possible time in the best possible place.
It's one of the reasons why I think there's a certain point where the Trumpian populist right meets the Bernie Sanders populist left, and that is them walking around saying how much things suck.
It's an amazing time for people to kind of understand other people's perspectives and points of view, which is one of the reasons why deplatforming and silencing of conservatives, even though I'm not conservative, bothers the shit out of me.
I mean this should be the time when we are having more conversations and more fun with each other and where we are feeling more entrepreneurial.
We have a better social safety net than ever.
So one of the statistics that really bothers me is that the level of American mobility has declined rapidly in the United States.
So the number of people who are leaving their home state to go somewhere else to work a job, for example, is at decades low.
Why?
It's easier to get anywhere.
Now, there's seven million unfilled jobs.
I keep hearing from folks who I personally like, people like Tucker Carlson, that you grew up in this small town and the town is dying, the industry left.
Well, the government somehow owes it to you that you get to grow up in this town and stay in that town even if all the industry left.
And I just think to myself...
By whom?
Who gave you this guarantee that you get to stay there?
And I know, listen, I'm a lucky guy.
I grew up in a two-parent household.
We didn't grow up wealthy, but we were middle-middle class.
Like, I grew up in a small house in Burbank with two bedrooms, and I had three sisters.
It was me and my three sisters in one bedroom and one bathroom for six people.
That's not poor.
That's middle class.
That's a great life.
And I understand some people don't have that life.
But one thing that is guaranteed to you is the opportunity for adventure in this country.
Go and move.
Like, why are we inculcating a feeling of victimhood in a society where if you make the right decisions, you will do well?
I mean, not you might do well.
If you make basic, basic right choices, you will finish better than you started in American society.
I mean, we're talking like the most basic choices, like finish high school and don't have a baby out of wedlock and get a job.
Like you do those three things and the Brookings Institute says that you will not be in permanent poverty in the United States.
Like that's amazing.
That was not true for the vast majority of human history.
For the vast majority of human history, you did all of those things.
There wasn't high school, but you did all the other things.
And then you lived like a surf on a farm until you died at age 37 of diphtheria or something.
So it's just the lack of optimism in a society where it should be running rampant is kind of astonishing to me.
I mean, rich kids grow up with this perspective of constantly being rich, and people grow up with this perspective of how they view the United States as this negative thing or that they don't know how to change their life, they don't know how to take action because they haven't had anyone around them that's done it.
That's part of the problem with small-town mentalities is that you kind of inherit the vibe of the people that are around you.
And if they're ignorant or if they're shallow-minded or if they're stuck in this one town and they're never going to leave and you get caught in that vibe, you can one day wake up and you're 32 and you've never done anything.
There's nothing morally deficient about going on welfare.
It's actually one of the bigger problems I have with the welfare state generally is that it disconnects the person receiving the aid from the person giving the aid.
In our religious community, to take an example, there's a time a few years back where a guy came to me.
I bought some art from him.
He's an artist.
And...
Really does good work.
He came to me and he said, my family doesn't have enough money to make the rent this month.
Can you offer me in advance on art that you'll buy somewhere down the road?
And of course I'm like, sure.
So I signed him a check.
And he understood that five years later he came back to me and he said, you know, you still haven't bought that piece of art.
I owe you a piece of art because he knew who gave him the money.
And so he was willing to understand that that was an act of charity and he wanted to make sure that that was paid back.
You see this in Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe, that moment where he makes his money, he walks back into the welfare office, and he rolls out a wad.
That feeling that the government isn't just a giant cash machine that exists to pay you money, but that that money actually comes from somewhere.
Either it's coming from the future because we're going to have to pay back the debt, or it's coming from somebody's tax money, and that we all owe something to each other.
By the same token, what I owe to my neighbors is that if they're in trouble, Then it is my obligation as a good person to try and help them out on a personal level.
Charity in religious communities is extremely high.
That's the social fabric that I'm talking about.
Without that sort of dutiful sense to one another, you can't have rights.
Because if you just have rights and no duties, then there will be no one to take care of each other.
It's why, while I'm libertarian when it comes to government, I'm very conservative when it comes to the need to build a social fabric and communities and have people...
With working families and communities of working families.
Yeah, I really think that that's one of the best things that comes out of religion is when you have a tight-knit community like yours and you do have that sense of charity where you really are a community of people that care for each other and look out for each other.
The problem is, of course, doing that large scale.
And then the problem is doing it in some sort of a non-denominational way where people, they don't have to have the exact same beliefs, but they still share these core values of community and taking care of each other.
I mean, that's what people really benefit from.
When they've done studies with people, when they show happiness and what is happiness correlated with, it's almost always correlated with friends and loved ones and family.
And when it comes to diversity, you know, there's this slogan that diversity is our strength.
Well, there's Robert Putnam, who's a sociologist over at Harvard.
He wrote an entire book about the social fabric called Bowling Alone, who's kind of the pioneer in the idea of social capital.
And what he said is that he went in to writing this book with the idea that diversity is our strength.
And then he did some research, and what he found is that ethnic diversity only correlates with two things.
These are his words.
Increased TV watching and increased protest marches.
That's all it – unless it is within the boundaries of a common goal.
So if you walk into a church, very diverse ethnically, everybody's got the same general goal, which is we're worshiping God in one particular way, and we believe in a certain core set of values.
And now diversity is great.
Your experiences come to bear.
You're all aiming in the same direction.
He gives the example of the army.
You see a bunch of people who go in, diverse group of people, diverse races, different backgrounds.
And when you talk to those guys while they're serving or after they leave, they don't give a crap about the diverse backgrounds of the people they were serving with.
They're all aiming their guns in the same direction.
Well, in the United States, we have to be aiming our guns in the same direction, or we can't really have a functioning social fabric at all.
I'm perfectly willing to give charity to people who I don't know who still believe like I do that America is a fantastic country rooted in immutably good principles.
But that starts to break down when I'm being asked to give charity just on a personal level to somebody who believes that America is fundamentally evil and needs to be torn out at its roots and replaced with something better.
Because now we're not aiming in the same direction.
So on a human level, I care about you.
But on a social level, if I have a choice between somebody who basically agrees with me about fundamental values and somebody who is diametrically opposed, I'm going to give my money to the person who basically agrees with me on those fundamental values.
And again, I don't think those fundamental values have to be religious.
I don't think you have to be a God believer to receive charity from me, or I don't think I should have to be an atheist to receive charity from you.
But I do think that you do have to take into consideration a few things, and now we're on the same page.
Personal responsibility.
The idea that you do live in a free country, just historically and relatively speaking, this is a free country, which means decision-making is on you.
So man up a little bit.
The decisions that you make, we should all have sympathy for people who have had worse lives and worse experiences.
But in the end, if you are capable, if you are not fundamentally disabled in some way, that you need to make a plan for your own life.
Are you more willing to give charity to somebody who has a plan for how to get themselves out of the hole?
But I also think that what you're talking about with charity within the community is so much more—there's so much more connection than charity from the government.
When you're talking about welfare, the problem is that there's this dissolving of responsibility because it's just a check that comes in that you feel like, well, this is a rich country.
I'm owed this anyway.
When I was a kid, we were on welfare, and we used food stamps, and I remember being very ashamed of it.
And feeling really weird that we were that poor, that we needed help from the government.
My guess is that the social stigma probably had something to do with that.
Meaning that they didn't want to be on welfare.
They didn't want to be on food stamps.
Contrast your story with Adam Carolla's, right?
Adam talks all the time about how...
His parents were also on food stamps and welfare, and they just didn't give a shit.
And he always resented that.
He thought that was bad.
He said, like, you could work.
Why aren't you?
And that gave him the impetus to get up and do what Adam has done.
It's not pick yourself up by the bootstrap because helping hands are good, but it is if I were capable of picking myself up by my bootstraps, would I do so?
And if the answer is yes, then we're all on the same team.
This is a real problem, too, in that some people just get a horrible hand dealt to them at birth.
They're with parents that really are doing a terrible job raising them.
They're fucking them up every step of the way.
You're around a bunch of people that are criminals.
Everybody's fucking up.
There's no examples of anybody that's doing well.
I mean, it's one of the unique things about the Internet today is that a kid that's in that environment can get a hold of maybe something that you've said or something that, you know, someone else has said and start reading books and start taking in information that gives them a different perspective and fuel that perspective with more motivational stuff and more information and education.
And sometimes kids, just like you were saying with Adam Carolla, they grow up with these parents that are just not ambitious at all, so they become very ambitious and they work very hard to not be like them.
I mean, sometimes it's good to see that example, but most of the time, it's just fucking hard for them to reprogram their head.
It's hard to do that, and it's also hard—I really think that there's a lot of focus in the country right now on raising awareness, which is fine, raising awareness of our history and all the bad things that we've done.
I mean, people should know about all the good things and all the bad things, right?
History is history.
But this incessant focus on— The idea that people's lives are getting better by suggesting that they're perennial victims in the United States, I just don't understand how that's a good thing.
As a member of a historically persecuted group, if I had grown up and my parents had said to me, no matter what you do, you will be put under the thumb of the dominant society, that's a pretty horrible message to tell to a kid.
And I think that's true for politicians, again, on both sides of the aisle.
I think you get it from President Trump when it comes to some rural areas where it's like, well, It's the Mexicans and the Chinese coming in to steal your jobs, and you're under the thumb of people who are trying to destroy you.
And on the other side of the aisle, people who say, well, you're in the inner city, and therefore the cops are racist against you and want to destroy you, and everybody's out to get you.
And it's like, well, how about this?
How about, like, again, the single best thing you can do for yourself is make basic decisions that are entirely within your control.
Unless you are raped, God forbid.
Single motherhood is a choice that you get to make about your life.
This is a choice you get to make about your life.
Finishing high school, unless you are legitimately disabled in some way, especially in LAUSD where you basically have to be able to read at third grade level to finish high school.
These are decisions, personal decision making.
I've never seen somebody's life get better by complaining about reality.
I've seen a lot of people's lives get better by acknowledging that reality is what it is and then making personal decisions to make their lives better.
And that's considered non-compassionate.
But it seems to me that the essence of compassion sometimes is saying, at least make the baseline decision.
If you make the baseline decisions and then you fail, we can talk about what happened.
But I also think that there's some people that are...
They're in situations that require something external to assist them.
The way their life has been set up, and this is what I think when people think about compassion and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, if you really have an honest and accurate assessment of extreme poverty and terrible neighborhoods, It's not as simple as do something good to better your life.
Part of it is you gotta fucking stay alive.
Part of it is you're surrounded by people who either have committed crimes or will commit crimes.
I mean one out of every four people you run into might be a criminal in the worst neighborhood in the country.
I think that the plan very often when it comes to a crime-ridden area – Is the other side of what the government does, which is you need more cops in that area.
I think that the great lie that these communities that are crime-ridden—I'm talking about white Appalachia and I'm talking about black inner cities—these communities do not need fewer cops.
They need more cops.
Because the precondition to investment in those communities and increased tax dollars in those communities and increased social capital in those communities is people not getting shot every five seconds.
The worst thing that can happen to law-abiding minorities It's for the cops to abandon areas where crime is high.
It just doesn't make any sense.
And that's not just me saying that.
Jane Levy is a reporter at the LA Times, very much on the left, has said the same thing.
Law-abiding people want crime rates to go down.
Conditions have to change in a community for conditions to change in the community.
Dude, it's about this family that lives in West Virginia that is just a bunch of psychotic criminals, these crazy white people, the kids drinking Mountain Dew and doing backflips on the bed, and they're all on pills.
It's bananas.
And it gives you this insight, like if you are in this community, if you are in this family, and this is obviously a very extreme family, but there's many more of them out there that have not been documented.
If you are in that community, Good fucking luck getting out.
Good luck.
The money that you get other than welfare is from selling pills.
You know, everybody's on these pills, so you're all whacked out.
You don't know what the fuck is going on half the day.
You're on opiates.
I mean, it is a bananas environment.
And there's a lot of people like that in this country.
For sure.
In poor Latino communities, in poor white communities, in poor black communities.
The idea that these people are just going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is crazy.
I just think they don't have a plan.
And I think if we really want to help them, there's got to be some way where you can give these people the opportunity to step out of that pattern.
For sure.
Community centers, outreach programs, whatever it is.
I don't think you can create sort of a fake social fabric with just a government welfare system.
It hasn't worked.
Disability exists.
It's been increasing every year.
It's a question I asked Andrew Yang, actually.
Our episode comes out on Sunday, and obviously Andrew is a big fan of I mean I said it to him.
People are on disability.
I don't know what they're doing.
If you're on disability, the people you're talking about who are suffering, they're not out there writing poetry.
I mean the rise of the opioid epidemic and people who are ODing on drugs and all this stuff, that's in precisely the same demographic you're talking about.
You're just talking about a check from one place as opposed to another place.
I don't really see how that solves the problem.
I think we have a crisis of purpose right now, and I don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable.
On the one hand, by changing our trade rules, and I also don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable by cutting a government check.
I just don't think that that's how people are wired.
I absolutely agree with you that there is a crisis of purpose.
My concern is about automation, and my concern, and obviously I haven't really studied this other than talking to Andrew Yang and talking to Elon Musk and a few other people that are proponents of universal basic income, they think that there's going to be such a massive loss of jobs in such a short period of time From people that are non-skilled laborers, it's going to go away.
There's millions and millions of jobs, and these people are not going to have anything, and that it could be chaos.
But yeah, I mean as far as automation, there's constantly people saying this is the Nicholas Nassim Tlaib view of reality, which is that the black swan incident can happen any second.
So watch out for it versus the sort of Steven Pinker view of reality, which is the black swan incident is called a black swan incident because it's a black swan incident, meaning that it happens incredibly rarely.
The idea that we are on the verge of a catastrophic drop in job numbers because of the automation of trucking, for example, I'm not sure that I buy it.
The reason I don't buy it is because you still are going to need someone sitting behind the wheel of that truck.
There are human drivers on the road.
There will be a gradual transition away from some of these jobs.
Andrew Yang talks about radiologists and how radiologists are going to be priced out of the market by computers that can do a better job of diagnosing tumors.
First of all, awesome.
I mean, that's good.
First of all, that brings down cost and you won't get cancer as advanced.
That would be a good thing.
But second of all, what...
A lot of technology studies have tended to show is that technology just gets integrated in a different way in particular careers.
So there will be jobs that are eliminated for sure.
There will be jobs we haven't heard of that will be created also.
And mostly technology will become more of a productivity aid to people.
So this is true in factories.
Jobs have been lost in factories.
It's the best example of where jobs are lost.
But it's mostly true in offices, right?
How many office jobs have been created because you have computers?
Would more office jobs exist because I write by hand?
Do you think that this is akin to, like, a government bailout?
Like, the idea of the government bailout was, like, the banks are too big to fail.
And some people thought, you know what, you gotta let them fail so you figure out why they failed and we'll never have it happen again.
If there is this thing and the government steps in and says, wait a minute, I know you lost all your jobs, we're gonna give you $1,000, you don't have to figure it out.
$1,000 a month, and some people go, okay, I'm not gonna figure it out now.
Whereas those people might have gone on A fear-filled journey to try to figure out their purpose in life because now they're stuck where their job doesn't exist anymore, so they're put in a corner and they have to act.
Listen, Milton Friedman made an argument for universal basic income as a replacement for the welfare system.
There is another problem with universal basic income that I asked Andrew about also, and that was One of the big issues is that poor people, very often, people who are permanently impoverished, not people who are temporarily poor, but they tend not to spend money where we think they ought to spend money.
They're not taking that money and they're not putting it into education or into...
I mean, the average person who is making less than, I think it was $16,000 a year, is spending $400 a year on lottery tickets.
That's legitimately just flushing your money down the toilet.
So how do you...
Aren't you just going to end up back in the same place in six months where people took that money and used it in ways that actually didn't benefit them?
And at a certain point, the question is, do you own your decisions or do you not own your decisions?
And at what level of incompetence or inability do we say, you no longer own your decisions and so we're just going to take care of you on a permanent basis?
I think we're looking at, when you're talking about welfare, we're looking at worst case scenario, right, where someone does get dependent upon the welfare state and does use that money frivolously and does make poor decisions.
But then there's got to be other people that are single moms that maybe had a kid with some fucking asshole that doesn't want to pay and is a piece of shit and they have to hide from him.
People buy these and then they lend them out on loan to world's great violinist.
God, it's so pretty.
In the end, it really is the quality of the player.
There's a famous Yasha Heifetz story where he was playing at Carnegie Hall and some lady came up to him afterward and she said, you know, your violin, it sounds so beautiful.
And he picks up the violin, puts it to his ear and he says, funny, I don't hear it right now.
So the religious point of view on this, and I think this is actually just the general conservative point of view on human action generally, is I don't know, meaning that for the vast majority of people, I would assume that they have a biological drive to engage in that behavior, but the traditional sort of will point of view is that Biological drive does not necessarily match up to the activity you ought to engage in.
Men, for example, have a biological drive to impregnate many women.
That's not something religion is cool with either.
So I can give you the religious explanation and I can give you the secular explanation.
So the religious explanation is that there is something different about a woman than there is about a man, and a man is made better through his union with a woman, and that if you pervert the sex drive to pursue...
Mere pleasure instead of a lasting relationship upon which the basis of society is built, then you are foregoing the proper use of your sex drive.
Right, but if you wanted to step in and argue against that, you would say that just because someone can't get pregnant doesn't mean that they don't have a loving relationship that contributes to society.
Well, that's true, but it is also foregoing the more productive relationship of being able to bear and rear children and also recognizing that the sexes are not different and recognizing also the sexes are not the same.
So being with a man is in a relationship different than being with a woman, I would assume.
I mean, I assume that's why gay guys are gay.
If it weren't, then I assume that they would be fine with being with a woman.
So that relationship from a religious perspective is more valuable because women have different qualities than men.
You round off each other's harsh edges.
It changes you.
I mean, you're married.
Being married changes a man in a different way than being married to a member of the same sex would.
And I keep making this distinction because whenever I talk about my moral perspective on things, then people immediately assume that I'm a theocratic fascist.
And I just want to keep underscoring my personal views.
On Dave Rubin's marriage are of no consequence to public policy in any way whatsoever.
But I agree with you on that and I don't think it should be a part of public policy and I think people should absolutely be allowed to marry and divorce and do whatever the fuck they want to do no matter who it is.
But why do you care?
Like, as a person who's a rational thinker, it's pretty clear that people are gay.
And I don't really think that this is a decision they make in terms of, like, I'm going to make a clear choice to defy God and be gay.
So in religion, if a man is gay, in your religion, if a man is gay and they're in love with another man, they should just squash those thoughts and find a woman.
New Testament— It gets a little harsher in the New Testament in some places, Romans, Corinthians.
But in any case, again, what I'm puzzled by is the idea that this is a unique area of human behavior that religion is supposed to treat differently.
Meaning religion treats virtually every human activity like this.
Sin is a failure to abide by a covenant, right?
That's the definition of sin.
When you commit a sin in Judaism, in Avera, in Judaism, what you are doing is failing to do a mitzvah, which is a commandment.
You're violating a commandment.
Well, there are lots of commandments that go directly against what people are driven to do.
Just because the drive is stronger does not make it more morally...
Non-culpable to violate that commandment.
So when people pick this one out and they say, well, this one is particularly intolerant, for example, I don't see why it's more particularly intolerant than saying to a man that you have to marry one woman or saying to a Jew that you are not allowed to eat this stuff.
It may be harder.
I don't think there's any question.
It's harder to abide by those commandments.
But it is well within religious tradition, like literally every religious tradition, that there's a bunch of stuff you are driven to do that you can't.
Now, again, you don't have to agree with my program.
I'm not trying to convert you.
It's one of the nice things about my religion.
I don't give a crap whether people are Jewish or not.
We actively discourage converts.
But if you're going to proclaim that you are – Abiding by traditional Judaism, this is the buy-in, right?
There's lots of buy-in.
You have to wear a funny hat sometimes.
You have to go to shul on Saturdays.
You have to keep Shabbat.
There's a lot of buy-in.
And as long as I'm not bothering anybody else, I frankly don't see what business it is of legitimately anybody's, what I think about personal relationships.
And I fully acknowledge that when the value of marriage shifted from it's about production and rearing of children to it's two people who love each other, the case for same-sex marriage against same-sex marriage went completely out the window.
So you are just sticking to your rigid ideology in terms of what you believe to be a sin and not believe to be a sin based on your religion, based on this very strict moral fiber that this religion is operating in.
Right, but is there any room for growth in that when people have a better understanding about biology?
If it was proven, if there's proven like, oh, this is why a person develops blue eyes, this is why a person is gay, this is why, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just a variation.
It's red hair, it's freckles, it's gay, it's straight.
But again, it's a question that I've always found actually not particularly interesting simply because it doesn't take into account the worldview generally, which is that a biological drive does not equal – Excuse for behaving in a certain way.
Even if it were—I mean, because I am an Orthodox Jew, I believe that at the very least it's God-inspired and God-written, right?
But even if I believed on a secular level that human beings wrote that stuff, do I think that people— 3,000 years ago had never seen a gay person before?
Or a person who had homosexual tendencies?
Like the very reason to have a commandment is because certain people in your community are behaving in a particular way, presumably.
There's no commandment not to take your head and shove it in a meat grinder.
There's a kid who just died in India, and there was horrific x-rays of his head.
He had parasites from pork that had gotten into his body, and they had nested in his brain, started developing all these cysts inside of his head, and they couldn't do anything about it, because it was so deep in his head...
That if they gave him the anti-parasitic medication, it would cause swelling of the brain.
Well, I think that the reversal of the kosher laws in the New Testament, you know, from a Jewish point of view, where we don't believe in the divinity of Christ, I think that there you can make an argument that the Gospels, which were written...
I mean, what I think he was historically, I think he was a Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans and got killed for his trouble, just like a lot of other Jews at that time who were crucified for trying to lead revolts against the Romans and got killed for their trouble.
That is the problem with these texts, right, is that you're trying to decipher translations from original texts which were written in ancient Hebrew thousands of years ago and were told in an oral tradition for longer than that.
Well, no protest yet, but suffice it to say the New York Times book reviewer didn't like it, but I'm not super shocked by that.
But the basic contention that I make is that Judeo-Christian values on the one hand and then human reason on the other, Greek reason really, that that tradition is a tension and that that tension is where Western civilization lives.
That basically civilization is a suspension bridge.
It takes certain fundamental precepts of Judeo-Christian values on the one hand and then takes Greek reason and they're pulling against each other.
And sometimes reason feels like it's going to dominate religion and sometimes it feels like religion is going to dominate reason.
But in the best of all available worlds, you have a bridge that is capable of...
Building upon, where you can actually have a functional civilization.
And if you lose reason in the name of theocracy, then you end up with tyrannical theocracy.
And if you lose religion in the name of reason, you end up in some pretty dark places because human beings don't have a very good track record of creating their own purpose, creating their own meaning, creating their own systems.
We tend to get very utopian very quickly, and things get really ugly, which is sort of the story of particularly the first half of the 20th century.
So this is the benefit of sticking to the rigid ideology that's prescribed by religion, is that you don't allow the human beings to keep updating it and changing it, because if you do, they will eventually slide into chaos.
Yes, which is not to say there's not play in the joints.
Religion has morphed over time.
Judaism, as it was practiced originally, probably in many ways does not resemble Judaism as practiced now.
In fact, the Talmud even says this.
Kind of fascinating and counterintuitive section of the Talmud where Moses is—it's what is called the Gadotah, which are some of these stories that are just kind of put into the middle of the Talmud, where Moses comes back and he's watching from on high as a bunch of rabbis in, you know, second-century Palestine are talking about— Judaism, and he's like, I don't recognize any of this stuff.
Like, I brought down these books from the mountain, and I do not recognize any of this stuff.
And God says to him, you know, God says to him, right, I mean, this is how this is morphed, and Moses is pleased.
In other words, he's not—Judaism has always had a common law tradition where you're using reason to try and develop the ideas behind the commandments and then try and extend them or broaden them.
them, and I think that's a good thing, but you have to be careful not to completely undermine fundamental roots or get rid of basic precepts.
In other words, you have to acknowledge there are certain fundamental truths that exist there, and then there's play as far as how those are implemented.
Say, what would you do if you were— Not to sin, but again, sin is a thing that everybody does, meaning that masturbation is not okay according to Judaism.
I assume that a vast majority of young Jewish men, even the Orthodox, are masturbating.
People sin.
I mean, that's a recognition.
It's always...
Again, I think I can speak on behalf of...
I will audaciously speak on behalf of both Jews and Christians here.
I think that religious people are told that when they say that something is a sin, this means that they are looking askance at the people who are committing the sin.
And that is not correct.
I mean, what Judaism and Christianity say is that we are all committing sins on a fairly regular basis.
Where we get uptight is when people start saying because I have a desire for the sin the sin is no longer a sin.
Well, this one, you would say, if you're a fundamentalist or at least somebody who believes in the idea that the Torah was given by God, it was given literally by God.
But, again, that doesn't...
The logic behind the rules, which...
People like Maimonides have tried to explicate.
The idea is, as I said, this you can do without God.
This part you can do without God.
The human sex drive was made to procreate within a stable relationship in order to progenerate and have future generations of people.
Misuse of that sex drive in any way, whether you're talking about from masturbation to homosexual activity, is therefore a diminishment of the use of that drive.
That's the natural law case against homosexual activity.
And again, I will reiterate for Media Matters for the one millionth time, I'm not in favor of any of this being encoded into American law because freedom is freedom.
People should be able to sin how they choose so long as they're not harming anybody else.
So yes, because there are ancillary benefits to married couples having sex, like relationship building, but that's not a generalized case against the favored view of sex.
Right?
That's sort of like arguing that intersex people mean that there's no such thing as two separate sexes.
There are two separate sexes and also there are intersex people who have a condition.
The problem with that sin, though, it seems to me that it was defined by people that didn't understand biology because they were dealing with humans that existed thousands of years ago, no books, no real understanding of why people were gay.
I mean, again, I really don't think that biblical commandments are linked, and religious commandments generally are linked to a view of biology, meaning that— You don't think so?
No, I think that all sin is a recognition that we have drives that we are supposed to forego.
And one of the things that I – the reason I keep coming back to the governmental regulation point is because my view is that if your view of discipline is not my view of discipline, good on you.
Go do what you want to do.
I've never had a conversation with Dave Rubin about him being a gay guy.
As a religious person, I can't actively participate in something that I consider to be a sin, but I would go out to dinner with Dave and his husband any time.
Yeah, that is a disturbing one when they'll just lump you in with a bunch of fucking psychopaths just because it's convenient for them and it's an easy way to diminish you.
That is a thing that I see more from the left than from the right, and it's really disturbing.
I always thought, until this clickbait generation came along, I always thought that especially, well, you know, the New York Times is obviously the higher standard, but that you would never see that kind of shit from progressive people.
You would never see willful distortion of reality to define their narrative in a really disingenuous way.
And it happens so often now that people get called, my favorite is alt-right adjacent.
It's – again, trying to lump everybody into one group for purposes of castigating their motives is really what this – you don't have to have an argument with somebody if you assume they're a Nazi.
So I guess if you call everybody a Nazi, you don't have to have an argument.
But I think – When it comes to the gay marriage thing, what people really worry about is other people trying to stop people from doing what they want to do.
You don't have that in you.
That's not you.
What you are doing is opposing it from your religious beliefs.
I wouldn't expect to walk into a mosque and expect them to change their standards on religion.
I find it really audacious when people actually expect other people to view the world the same way that they do and then expect that they're going to be catered to in that way.
I wouldn't walk into a gay-owned bakery and expect them to Bake a cake that has verses from Leviticus on it.
Well, I think the goal is to shame a business into submission and also to put it out there in the public eye so that people understand that this is a discrimination that does happen with gay folks where they will go somewhere and someone won't make a cake for them.
Yelp review it, talk about how much you don't like them.
Fine.
I may disagree with you or I may agree with you.
Whatever.
That's fine.
But once you start going to the government and having the government levy $100,000 fines on family bakeries because you couldn't find a gay baker in Colorado, supposedly.
Yeah.
No.
I'm sorry.
That's not cool.
And I feel the same way.
If I walked into a bakery and they're like, you're Jewish.
We're not serving you.
I'd be like, okay, you're an a-hole.
But, all right.
I mean, it's free country.
And there's a bakery across the street.
Or maybe I'll just open a bakery next door to you and take all your business.
And if we can't have a system where we acknowledge that those beliefs can coexist and we can still have conversations with each other or be friends, it's going to be real hard to have a society.
And I value people talking and trying to understand each other.
And I've seen so much conflict that's unnecessary because I see so much conflict that's rooted in people not communicating instead of communicating.
And I think this is one of the things that I'm most nervous about with all this De-platforming and censoring people and the silencing of people on the right.
And it's not that I agree with these people.
It's that I see how this is just going to shore up these two sides and it's going to make it a much more difficult...
Much more difficult atmosphere for communication, for real understanding, and coming to agreements on things, and recognizing the things that we all, all good people seem to agree.
You should try to help each other.
You should be kind to each other.
You should work hard.
You should have good morals and ethics.
You shouldn't steal.
You shouldn't take from people.
You shouldn't lie.
You shouldn't try to cheat the government.
You shouldn't try to cheat people.
Just be a good fucking person.
And that this transcends religious ideologies.
It transcends political leanings.
It really does.
It should.
And we can have a truly diverse community.
Truly diverse.
Not forced diversity.
Diverse meaning some people are progressive.
Some people are conservative.
Some people are libertarian.
You can joke with each other.
We can all get along together and disagree with things, just not be fucking hateful towards each other.
This is possible, but it becomes less possible when people feel like they're being silenced or censored.
Okay, but you're coming back to the same moral distinction, which I've repeated a few times, which is that I'm not a believer that a natural desire to do something therefore makes an activity okay.
But that's- A view that has no externalities.
My view has no externalities.
So in the same way, listen, I have beliefs about people who eat too much and get obese because they eat too much.
I think when it comes to the gay thing, what people are looking for is for other folks to be accepting of who they are.
And I think for a lot of these gay folks that have been in the closet their whole life, that's the big thing is they're always worried about someone treating them differently or someone diminishing them because they're gay.
Then when they hear someone like you say that you think it's a sin and that you shouldn't act on your biology even though you have these urges that you should instead find a woman, they feel the same pangs of rejection.
I for sure get that, but the confluence between activity and identity is actually kind of a dangerous one, meaning that the idea that if I disapprove of an activity in which you engage, that I disapprove of you, I disapprove of lots of activities in which lots of people engage, including most members of my family, including my children a lot of the time.
That does not mean I disapprove of them as a human being or that I'm saying they are lesser as a human being.
Right.
We all interact with people this way.
You disapprove of my view on this.
I don't get the feeling you disapprove of me as a human being.
What I do know is that it's a historical interpretation of stories that were as much as they could or as little as they wanted to be accurately defined and written down and then passed on from generation to generation to generation.
But there are certain things of which I believe or practice that you probably disapprove or you don't think they're the smartest or you think that they're – I might not think it's the smartest, but as I've gotten older and hopefully wiser, I give a fuck less about why you do what you do, but whether or not the benefits seem to be worth—the juice is worth the squeeze.
And in your case, I think the juice is worth the squeeze.
I think you're a very successful person.
You're very reasonable.
You're very intelligent.
You're an outstanding debater, and I enjoy talking to you and listening to you on YouTube.
I think part of that is because of the fact that you're a religion.
I think it's cross-training.
I think in a lot of ways it's like if you lift weights for jiu-jitsu, it makes you stronger, it'll make you jiu-jitsu better as long as you keep training.
I think your discipline from your religion has – there's psychological benefits to it.
And Michael Shermer I've had on my show to talk about religion and skepticism and all that.
I'm not shy about talking about it.
I just...
Sometimes I find that it's kind of a dead end because sometimes it just turns into, I believe in God.
And then the other person is like, I don't believe in God.
And it's like, well, okay, fine.
Now can we talk about the stuff we think are the – what are the fundamental building blocks upon which you can base a society or base a politics?
And if we agree on those, then the God stuff, I think God is a better base for those fundamental – I don't think that you can actually get to human beings are of inestimable value from scientific materialism.
If you believe that human beings are effectively just animals, then I don't know why they would be of infinite value, nor why I should respect somebody's belief system simply because they're human.
I don't respect animals, and if we're just another animal, there's nothing that necessitates that logical line.
In fact, for most of human history, it was not the logical line of thinking.
It was, if you're a member of my tribe, then we like you, and if you're not a member of my tribe, then we get to kill you.
It's not necessarily a greater existential value, but as we were talking about the value of community and the value of having a group of people that you care about, that this is a core component of being human.
It's a core component of this understanding mind, this rational, intelligent interfacing with the universe in a way that no other animal is capable of.
I'm saying that I think it's less convincing than Sam thinks it is.
Meaning there's an alternative line of thought that says, okay, you're right, social fabric is great.
You know where that social fabric is particularly awesome?
Among me and my friends.
You know where it ain't that great?
Those guys over there.
Let's go kill them and take their shit.
That was pretty much how humanity works for a very, very long time.
And the simple and effective idea that the reason that human beings are of value is because we are more than just our material bodies, that there's something that is us that is of inestimable value.
That's a religious concept, and it has a lot of weight.
Now, if Sam wants to get to the same place and we can build a political conversation from there, that's fine.
My real argument with Sam is Sam and I go down to the bottom of the iceberg about 90% of the way.
We have the same fundamental values about free speech, diversity of opinion, about I think to mostly an extent free markets.
I think that we agree on a lot of these fundamental principles.
He then says that he gets those from pure reason.
I have serious questions about whether pure reason necessitates those conclusions.
He tends to think that Those are the only conclusions a reasonable person could come to if you properly apply your reason.
I think that the mechanism is that we are – what I said to Sam when we were debating this in San Francisco is it's real weird.
He's a materialist, a scientific materialist atheist who is sitting across the stage from me, a religious Jew.
We agree on 95 percent of our values.
So how?
His answer was, well, you know, here's where I've studied.
I've studied Buddhism.
I've studied these philosophies and I've studied science and all this.
He said, right, I haven't studied a lot of those things, but we have the same values.
So why?
It seems to me a better historical explanation is that we grew up 10 miles from each other in Los Angeles after 3,000 years of common history of Judeo-Christian development balanced with reason in the West.
Like location has something to do with this, and that location was rooted in commonality of interest and philosophy.
So I'm less – it's – there's a weird nexus.
I don't want to get too kind of deep in the weeds here.
There's a weird kind of nexus on what truth is, where you've heard Sam and Jordan Peterson debate this.
What makes it true as opposed to just evolutionarily beneficial for us to think so?
Meaning what evolution does is it creates a series of thoughts in our mind presumably if you're a materialist that are beneficial to your preservation and promulgation of the species.
They're not actually true.
So if it's beneficial, this is Sam's explanation for the prevalence of religion, for example.
He'll say religion isn't true, but evolutionary biology sort of drives people toward religion so you can have group bonds that are beyond 150 people or whatever.
So why doesn't that apply to math?
Why is it that two and two—how do you know that two and two actually equals four?
As opposed to it is evolutionarily beneficial for you to believe that two plus two equals four.
So Sam believes there's an objective truth somewhere out there that two plus two equals four.
I don't know what evolution has to do with that sort of stuff.
So I think that what is happening is that human beings were placed in an orderly universe through the processes of biology and have a unique capacity to understand that universe because we are made in the image of God.
This is where I think that the religious viewpoint diverges pretty strongly from Sam's evolutionary viewpoint.
And there's all sorts of fine-tuning arguments about how implausible it would be for just atoms roaming around the universe randomly to end with human creation.
The alternative explanations seem no less implausible to me.
The multiple universes theory, plausible, but we have no way to prove it because we can't get to those multiple universes, so how is that testable?
Or the now popular theory that we're living in an AI simulation, not sure how that's more testable than God.
Not sure how it's more testable that aliens put us here.
Why is that more testable or more plausible than the idea that there is a force behind that which we see that has mind?
There's obviously something that went from the Big Bang to planet Earth in 2019 with cellular communication and satellite dishes.
And obviously something happened, something pretty radical.
Why is it happening?
Is it happening because of random events that sort of coincide with biology and technology and all these things come to fruition to you and I standing across from each other talking on this podcast in front of millions of people?
Or is this just how things go?
Is things compete constantly, try to get better, and then in this gigantic ecosystem of all these things competing and trying to get better, one super successful organism, us, rises above and continues.
So this is why I say that Sam is more religious than I am.
I think that there's a plausible argument for atheism.
I just don't think that there is a plausible argument for Sam's moral vision of atheism, meaning that what Sam tends to do is – For example, you and I have talked a lot on this particular podcast about the value of self-betterment and making decisions and being responsible for those decisions.
How does that work in an area where we don't have free will?
It is a weird conversation and sort of a self-defeating one.
Sam suggests when it comes to the scientific method that we are using science to find out truths about the universe, and we're using reason.
Sam's very big on reason.
I also am big on reason, but I don't know how Sam is defining reason as opposed to just an evolutionarily beneficial firing of neurons, meaning that That's what we are.
We're balls of meat wandering purposeless through the universe.
And then he'll talk about making our own meaning or seeking human prosperity or flourishing is the word he likes to use.
These are all very active verbs.
This is an active vision of man in the universe.
And I'm not sure how that flows from we're a ball of meat that evolved from another ball of meat that evolved eventually, if you go back far enough, from non-balls of meat without any free will, without any capacity to choose.
I don't know how you build a civilization on that.
Whether or not you have free will or whether or not your life and your actions are being dictated by the past, by your biology, by your learned experiences, by external pressures.
What is causing this...
Very clear decision that you make.
Is this free will?
Are you deciding, I'm going to get my shit together?
Or are all the factors around you pushing you and funneling you into this direction that it's unavoidable to you?
And that you are not a product of free will.
You're just a product of a lot of different factors.
Or is it both?
Is it that you are the product of your environment and your life experiences and you also have free will?
I think we also experience great benefit from making positive choices and then experiencing like whenever you meet someone who's lost a lot of weight, one of the things they have is this fucking tremendous feeling of accomplishment.
Yeah, I lost 100 pounds.
You're like, holy shit, man, 100 pounds!
They get this positive feedback from it.
There's real good in making good choices.
And when people decide to get their shit together and make a good choice, they're rewarded.
The question is, are you doing that because of determinism or are you doing that because of free will?
Or are you doing that because of a combination of both of those things?
And can you fuel that free will purposely through outwardly seeking things that are motivational or things that are educational, things that allow you to kind of remap the way you process reality?
But I think that's a pretty fundamental question, and I think that that's why in the end I'm religious and I'm not sure why Sam isn't because he agrees with the same premises.
He'll talk about self-betterment and decisions that you can make, and then he'll write a full book about why free will doesn't exist, and I just don't understand how those two things can coexist.
It's a difference between understanding people as whole people and then saying that I don't like some of the things that they do and simply saying – making the assumption that because I don't like some of the things that you do, we can't be friends or I disapprove of you as an entire human being, which I think is not true.
The thing that, when it comes with religion in defining whether or not other people's behavior is sinful, where it doesn't involve you, that's where a lot of folks start thinking that maybe these ideas are bigoted.
There's the truth and then there's your opinion and we do have to – for purposes of conversation at the very least, it's deeply irritating when people say living my truth because then it's like I disagree with you and then they're like, well, you're disavowing me as a human being.
No, I just disagree.
You can be you.
You can do what you want.
Whatever, man.
Calm down.
How did I become the most loosey-goosey, libertarian, lean-back guy in the world in this society?
You meet these crazy people that are just completely connected to their idea of being correct, and they take the most rigid stance on all these issues on the left side or on the right side, and it's so goddamn common.
And that's one of the reasons why it's so disgusting when people mislabel people.
Like, so there was an article that connected me with Richard Spencer.
Like, what in the fuck?
Like, that is such a disingenuous thing to do.
And they know what they're doing.
They're either trying to get me to react to it and talk about it and get more clicks.
But it's horseshit.
But if you are locked into that far-left ideology, as far-left as you can go, and it's one of the problems with ideologies that have these extremists, is that you believe in a percentage of the things these people say, but then they go way too far with it.
But you're connected with them.
You're connected with them because you're a part of that, even though you don't have a similar notion.
Failure to ask questions and give plausible answers gives credence to the alt-right.
So he did a whole speech where he said, listen, there are lots of conversations about IQ and race, and the alt-right loves these conversations because then they suggest wrongly that black people are inherently unfit and white people are more fit and all that kind of stuff.
And he says there are great ways to explain how much of IQ is cultural, how much can be changed, how much is genetic, how much that actually matters in terms of real-life outcomes.
We can do all those things, but when you say, don't ask the question, stop asking the question, then you make people Google, and the only thing that they will Google and find are answers that are given by people who are actually alt-right.
And he got ripped as alt-right for this.
His entire argument was don't allow people to push into alt-right answers by failing to give them proper responses or by throwing them out the window.
And then people are like, well, you're alt-right now because you're saying that people should be able to ask questions.
It's the exact same version as people in the religious community where it's like, you know, I used to go to Sunday school and then I asked too many questions and they kicked me out.
And there's also – when you're investigating anything, any measurable thing, when you find a number, whatever it is, like these people, like Asian folks are better at mathematics – European folks are better at this.
What's the reason for that?
Let's find out.
Is it cultural?
Is it biological?
Can we learn about how human beings evolved and adapted?
Why are Nigerians so smart?
There's so many Nigerians that come to this country.
They thrive.
They thrive in business.
They're extremely motivated.
They're extremely disciplined.
It's almost like Korean folks.
Why are they so hardworking?
Why do they strive?
Obviously, these are big generalizations.
But what is it about Italians?
What makes them wear gold chains and love mafia movies?
What is it?
Those are my people.
What the fuck?
Why do they all talk like that?
What is that?
What causes any sort of ethnic group to turn out the way they turned out?
Why are so many European Jews Nobel Prize winners?
And also, what is the impact of the measurable on how we live our lives?
How much should this stuff matter?
Is this a result of discrimination or is this a result of something else?
Is it true that when you group any group of people together, racially or non-racially, there will be disparities between those two groups of people?
This is just true statistically.
But not asking those questions and then saying, shut down the questions.
What that actually does is it leads people to only get the answers to the questions from the people who don't know what they're talking about in many cases.
who are giving convenient, easy, and self flattering answers about the nature of themselves.
Well, the disingenuous media that's being less and less taken seriously, taken less and less seriously.
It seems to me that that trend, which is a common trend that's existed for the last few years of these clickbaity bullshit articles and mislabeling people, it's going to go away.
Because your perspective is not going to be appreciated.
It's not going to be respected if you're obviously making disingenuous statements like that.
And I think we're in this weird position where it's very difficult to find real journalism and real objective takes on things that aren't flavored by their ideology.
And everybody's trying to shape everybody and they feel like it's their obligation.
They feel There's many people that write things that feel like it's their obligation to change your perspective on national subjects and things that are important to us.
It's not their obligation to just report what's going on, but also their obligation to flavor things in a way that'll make one side look favorable to the other.
Well, it's just so many people were so convinced, and there were so many people that were making statements that, in retrospect, are probably – you could probably – I mean, I don't want to say I'm not a litigious person, but if I was a guy like Donald Trump, there's so many people to sue.
I mean, I remember I was on Bill Maher's show, and we were supposed to talk about free speech stuff, and like five minutes before, and he's like, let's talk about Russia.
And we get on stage and he's talking about Trump-Russia collusion.
And I said what I've always said, which is I'll wait for the evidence to come out and then I will make a decision as to whether Trump-Russia collusion was a thing.
Well, it's because people have this need to let everyone know that they're on the right side.
And they want you to know that they do believe in the collusion.
If you disagree with that for whatever reason, you must either be a right-wing person, a Trump supporter, someone who's in denial, someone who doesn't look at the evidence, and you're a part of the problem.
But the real problem was jumping to conclusions.
There obviously seemed to be some attempts.
There's obviously some fuckery with that IRA company, the internet research agency that is responsible for millions of interactions with people online where they pretended to be different supporters.
They caused conflict.
Like, constant conflict in regards to political opinion, and that's all real.
That was a coordinated effort to try to change people's opinions.
But how much did that have to do with Donald Trump?
The real problem, and this is something that is very similar to what we were talking about earlier, when you say something, and you say it over and over and over again, and you say it with such conviction, and it becomes a giant part of your news narrative, and then that something turns out to be horseshit, you just massively empowered Trump.
I've said for a long time that I'm not a big fan of Trump's fake news shtick because I think he applies it too broadly.
I think that whenever there's a bad piece of news, he's like, fake news.
And it's like, well, sometimes yes and sometimes no.
But now that you just blew a two-year narrative where he was clearly in Putin's pocket, how many people do you think are going to listen to the nuanced view of fake news now?
And how many people do you think are going to actually believe Trump when he says that a bad piece of news is legitimately a fake piece of news?
I mean Andrew McCabe, the former FBI director, was asked whether Trump was legitimately a Russian asset and he's like, I don't know.
It's like you're using the power of the institution you used to run to spread this nonsense.
And you got that from John Brennan.
You got it from James Clapper.
These are all former heads of the intelligence agencies.
It just makes me think the intelligence agencies need to be wildly curved back if these were the heads of them.
I mean, if, like, the heads of the intelligence agencies are using their platform to proclaim that they have inside information about Trump that turns out to be utter nonsense, I'm not sure these people should have that much power to, like— Is that what he's saying, or is he saying he doesn't know?
He didn't say—I don't know.
He was saying, like, I have—basically, I expect that Mueller is going to indict as a former intelligence professional.
I expect—yeah, there's a lot of that.
It was ugly.
Adam Schiff on the Intel committee doing the same thing.
Do you think that they became a Russian front group to try to stay operative and stay safe because they were obviously being attacked by the United States government and in danger of being shut down?
I mean, it's a terrible place to be, and I don't know if it's better than prison, because it's like the stress of him never knowing when they're going to come knock down the door and pull him out of there.
One of the things that I was thinking when Trump got into office with all this drain that swamp shit, I was like, I wonder if Trump would be a WikiLeaks supporter.