Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan critique California’s governance—from Shapiro’s June 2021 move to Florida due to worsening conditions, including COVID lockdowns and riot curfews under de Blasio, Garcetti, and Lightfoot, to the state’s bullet train flip-flops and failed homelessness policies. They debate vaccine mandates for low-risk groups, media suppression of inconvenient truths (like Shapiro’s horse dewormer claim), and Florida’s shift from 50-50 to Republican dominance. On education, they dismiss de Blasio’s expressive dance revival and Adams’ magnet school reversals, questioning standardized testing bans and the value of liberal arts degrees. In Israel-Palestine, Shapiro rejects "genocide" claims, citing Hamas’s refusal to negotiate despite Israel’s two-state offers, while Rogan highlights media oversimplification. Both agree: societal strength comes from duty, not just comfort or subjective identity politics. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, I was in LA all the way up until last year, basically.
And the only three years I wasn't in LA, I was in Boston for law school.
So I've only been in, like, big blue cities my entire life.
And when you grow up in LA, it's like there's no other place.
It's like growing up in New York.
There's no other place that exists in the country.
And then you leave.
You're like, whoa.
The rest of this country is kind of fantastic.
And people are.
They're way nicer.
Just way nicer.
Like...
In LA, there's a thing you do where you walk down the street, if you're not driving, you walk down the street, you spot somebody who you don't know, you kind of lock eyes with them.
The first thing you do is you look away, right?
You don't catch eyes with somebody and have a conversation with them just in the normal course of business in LA or New York.
You move outside LA or New York, you're walking down the street, you lock eyes with somebody, like, hey, how are you?
They're really fascinating because what they do is they've taken rats and they take them and they have a certain number of these rats together.
And they behave fairly normally.
And then as they increase the population of rats, you start seeing what you see in large cities.
You start seeing rats huddled in the corner nodding and shit.
You see mental illness.
You see violence.
You see all kinds of stuff that you see in populations of humans.
And it's just...
They become a factor and a negative factor instead of, you know, obviously rats aren't communicating like people do where it becomes a community and you look forward to seeing those people, but they have some sort of a communal relationship with each other.
It feels like there's sort of a background level of threat that just exists when there are tons of people who you don't know who are around you all the time.
And in small communities it's not replicated that way because you actually know your neighbors, you know the people you're dealing with on a regular basis, but if you're walking around a big city, It's crazy.
If you were a real conspiracy theorist, if you're a real tinfoil hat, dyed in the wool conspiracy theorist, you would look at the LA district attorney and you would go, what the fuck is going on here?
And by the way, not doing anything good for the people who are actually mentally ill and drug addicted.
Just leaving them out on the street and pretending that sleeping on a street corner is the highest form of freedom and definitely have to leave their shit just lying around on the streets while they poop on a corner.
It's just, it's unbelievable.
And at some point, you would imagine that people would have to wake up to this.
And you see this a little in New York, right?
I mean, Eric Adams is a big change from Bill de Blasio.
And I'd been saying for a couple of years, look at this tax bill.
Look what we're getting in public services.
Look how bad things are getting.
And she's like, no, it's fine.
You're making a lot of money.
You pay a lot of taxes.
That's fine.
I said, right, but we're not getting anything back.
And in five years, you think this place is going to be better or you think this place is going to be worse?
And then you got the COVID lockdowns where LA just went out of its mind and they shut all the parks and they put the yellow tape on the turnoffs off Mulholland.
Like people are going to gather on the turnoffs off Mulholland, just mack on each other and spread COVID like crazy in those three foot square turnoffs off Mulholland drive.
And so she was already like, this is getting crazy.
And then, during the riots, when they locked everybody in their house at 6pm, you remember this?
They just curfewed the entire city at 6pm.
And then, on Rodeo, they curfewed it at 1 so people could just run up and down Rodeo Drive, breaking shit.
And we heard gunshots at night.
We were not in a bad area.
We heard gunshots at night.
Like, they hit a footlocker half a mile this way and a Walgreens half a mile that way.
She's like, okay, I guess we can check out Florida.
Yeah, once the riots hit, that's when the mass exodus really started.
Because when people started realizing that there's this weird idea that some politicians had, de Blasio was the worst example of it, to let the people just break the law and get it out of their system.
Like, I don't understand.
Apparently, there's some sociological theory behind this.
I've heard there's some theory about, and it was a widely dismissed theory from the 60s, and the idea about, like, letting people rioted out of their system, almost like letting a child throw a temper tantrum.
So when you saw people on Saks Fifth Avenue smashing windows and all that, the idea, and the cops were literally told to stand down.
There was a running gun battle for the last couple of years over who was the worst mayor.
You had like Jenny Durkan in Seattle who was allowing Chaz Chop to happen, and then you had Garcetti in LA who was allowing riots to happen in de Blasio, New York.
You had Lori Lightfoot in Chicago.
It was like a running gun battle over who was going to be the worst public servant.
I'm happy to show Ben Shapiro some news that's going to make you angry.
Pull this up because it's so fucking crazy.
One person was dead.
I believe two other people were shot.
They expelled 70 rounds.
So 70 shots were fired on a fucking street.
There's video footage of this happening where people were just driving by freaking out.
There's a dead body on the ground where a guy got shot.
No charges.
No charges, because they said it was mutual combat.
Chicago's lost its fucking mind.
Prosecutors reject charges against five suspects in deadly gun-related gunfight, gang-related gunfight.
Now scroll up so you can see what it says.
Where it says about mutual combat.
See if you can find where Suspects have been released without charges.
Cook County State's Attorney's Office explained the prosecutors had determined that the evidence was insufficient to meet our burden of proof to approve felony charges for a fucking gunfight where 70 rounds were shot on a public street.
The state's attorney spokeswoman said, adding that the police officials agreed with the decision.
I think the cops just threw their fucking hands up in the air and they're like, we're done.
But they used the term mutual combat in one of the articles that I read.
What he's done is amazing because he's changed a lot of people's ideas about the way this should be handled.
Because so many people, even people that came on my podcast today were talking about criminally incompetent, not today, but in the past rather, were saying how criminally incompetent he is and people are dying on the streets.
Now you look at the COVID cases.
He has less COVID cases than most other states.
I think it's only second to California.
If you look at the overall deaths, people were talking about the deaths, but when you make it...
I don't have to run that fast, but, you know, I can kind of, like, speed walk.
It's a strange time because I don't know why people are behaving the way they are, why they are not just actively engaging in conflict but encouraging it, nonsensical conflict, why people have gotten so tribal that they branched off into these These groups that, you know, our group can do no wrong and that group can do no right.
And we've abandoned this idea that we're supposed to be all in this together.
I thought the pandemic was going to bring people together.
I really did.
I thought it was going to be like 9-11 and that people were going to recognize like, hey, this is a threat to all of us and let's all try to work together and figure this out.
And I thought that if people got better, And if people took a certain medication and it helped them or they had certain lifestyle choices that were better, like things like vitamin supplementation and exercise, all these different things that I've always been talking about, that maybe we would look at that and go, hey, we should probably look into this because it seems like there's some people that get hit really hard by this and there's some people, like Aaron Rodgers, who just...
Because it really is, you know, I think all of our society is built on the notion of risk seeking.
People who build societies tend to be, people who build companies tend to be risk takers and people who are willing to fail, right?
Most people who take a risk in business fail.
They don't succeed.
We feature guys like you or people like me or people like Jeff, people who build big companies and win.
Those are the people who make the covers of magazines or get ripped up on CNN for no reason.
But the people who fail, I mean that's most of the people who try to take a risk.
Risk is risky.
There's a whole group of people in America who no longer want to take a risk and they've been sold a lie.
I saw a really good piece by Scott Alexander who used to write for Slate Star Codex before they outed him and now he runs something called Astral Star Codex and he was reviewing a book.
And the basic thesis of the book is that since the beginning of the 20th century, there's been a big promise made to Americans, and that is there are authorities, and they live in Washington, D.C., or in your city, and they have a big button right here that they can hit that solves all your problems.
And if they just hit it hard enough, it's going to solve all your problems.
And for a long time the media kind of went along with that because the media were part of an elite group that agreed with a lot of those ideas.
And then the rise of the internet basically shattered that.
People could get their own information, you could see through the screen that actually that button didn't exist.
And so then the elites in the society had to make a choice.
They could either admit that that button never existed and they couldn't smash that button and fix all your problems, which would destroy their power, or they could say it's actually your neighbor.
If it weren't for your neighbor, I could hit this button.
But your neighbor is in here making me not hit the button.
And so you have to hate your neighbor.
This is why it's been so bewildering to me.
So I am, again, I took the vaccine.
My wife took the vaccine.
My parents took the vaccine.
I have young kids.
I have no intention of them taking the vaccine.
They're seven, five, and one.
There's no track record of the vaccine for kids and the risk to them is below minimal.
But you and I can disagree on the vaccine and I don't care what you do so long as you're not posing a threat to me.
And yet there's this whole idea out there that if you don't do what I want you to do, you're going to kill me.
I'm vaxxed.
I'm not worried about it.
As soon as I was done with that second dose, I'm free and clear.
And by the way, I can get a mask if I'm all that worried about it.
But there's a whole group of people who never want to think like that.
They want to mask up forever.
You're starting to see it morph now.
It's like we can't give each other flu, so we have to make sure that we mask forever.
One of the things I think that really is important to note also is that when it comes to the risk calculation, most of the people who are really paranoid about COVID are people who live more like me than like you.
What I mean by that is you're a guy who's kind of in the fight arena.
You do physical conflict, right?
You put yourself at physical risk all the time.
Most people who are deeply afraid of COVID are people like me.
They're in air-conditioned offices, right?
They have security.
They've spent their whole life in a bubble.
And if you spend your whole life in a bubble, then any risk penetrating that bubble...
And the human brain is not, we're not set up to calculate relative risk, right?
We just tend to think of things as risky or not risky.
We don't tend to think of things as like, it's a one in 10,000 chance.
How do you even calculate that in your head?
Does that mean like every 10,000 times I step out the door, I might die in a car accident?
What does that mean exactly?
We just tend to think of activities in one of those two binary categories.
And so if COVID goes into the risk category, and then the media just keep pounding away every day that you are probably going to die if you get this thing.
Which is not true.
That's not even true for old people, right?
Even for old people, the chances of death if you're above 75 from getting COVID with nothing else, they're high.
It's like 1 in 20. It's like 5 in 100. But if you are a 20-year-old guy who's healthy, your chances of dying from COVID are extremely low.
And if you are an unvaccinated child, your chances of dying of COVID are lower than that of a vaccinated adult.
And so this notion that all this is the same level of risk, which is peddled by the media to try and pay.
It's all the platonic lie.
You can't control your own life, and so we are going to tell you what's best for you by scaring the hell out of you.
And then, when it turns out people get the actual facts, when the fact shield that they've created is broken, when it turns out that it was not true, then people lose all faith in the institutions, and then the only way that they can try and reestablish the faith in the institutions is to keep doubling down.
They have to keep doubling down and keep trying to control you.
They can't let go and say, we made some mistakes here, we shouldn't have lied in the first place, we overestimated our ability to know what was going on.
It's trying to make it far more difficult to get this stuff because it discourages people from getting vaccinated.
It's the same thing that we were just talking about.
It's one treatment option.
This is it.
The vaccine.
This is one binary option.
And that's how people are looking at it.
And they're not taking into consideration all these other points of data that show that obesity is a factor, that diet and exercise are a factor, that vitamin supplementation is a factor.
There's a lot of factors that are involved in keeping your body healthy.
But it's not conducive to this brought to you by Pfizer.
It's relatively new and there's no long-term safety data.
It doesn't exist.
And we're in the middle of...
Obviously, it's important to do something, right?
And so we're essentially in the middle of an experiment.
This is a long-term experiment with people.
And we're going to find out...
Whether it's five years from now or ten years from now, but if you look at the vast majority of FDA-approved drugs, if you look at all of them, who knows how many thousands of drugs have been approved, do you know how many have been pulled out once they found out there's adverse side effects after years and years of use?
It's fucking nuts.
It's a crazy number.
Let's find out what the number is.
FDA-approved drugs That were, how would you Google this?
I was reading an article about this because the article was a pro-vaccine article, but they were saying, you've got to understand how these things work.
There's a reason why they do these trials over five, ten years.
There's a reason for this.
So everybody that's saying, you know, safe and effective, safe and effective.
But that's why it was always, for me, about relative risk of COVID versus whatever you think the risks might be of the vaccine, which is why for people who are old, you really needed to get it.
If you're 65 and up, it was you do whatever you have to do to get it.
And then once it got to lower ages, it was like, use your own best judgment.
Well, also, you're seeing people administer it incorrectly all the fucking time, including when they did it to the president.
When they jabbed the president and I said, I don't even think they gave it to him.
I was joking around and everybody was outraged.
Joe Rogan is a conspiracy thief.
What is he saying?
Well, you're supposed to aspirate.
You fucks.
When you see someone get injected and they just go like that right into his arm, that is an incorrect way of vaccinating the fucking leader of the free world.
Okay?
If you're going to do it to the leader of the free world, maybe you should pull it back to make sure you didn't hit a goddamn vein and then push it through because that's what you're supposed to do.
I mean, he is just sometimes there, and he's mostly not, and he's losing his train of thought in the middle of press conferences, and he's getting very cranky and crotchety with people.
Like, in the space of a week, he went from yelling at Peter Doocy on Fox News...
For saying that he was paying illegal immigrants or thinking of paying illegal immigrants like almost half a million dollars per person for the family separation stuff.
He's like, we would never consider that.
That's terrible.
How could you report that to his own administration having to walk it back and then yelling at another reporter for saying that it's bad to pay people.
The only thing that the Democrats are praying for, really, just on a political level, is they want Trump to come back because he has high-the-negatives.
Yeah, I think it's hard to say that they're going to supplant her at the top of the ticket with Buttigieg because then what do you do with the whole intersectional coalition of all of it, right?
You're supplanting a black woman.
I'm not sure what the current math is on intersectionality.
Like, who ranks higher, the gay man or the black woman?
I mean, I think that was the plan with Afghanistan.
I think that's the plan with everything.
I think everybody is under the misimpression that there is no long-term memory.
And there isn't a long-term memory, but it's almost like T-cell memory, like it exists back there and when it gets activated, like the immune system spins up, you know?
Something happened and there's this new wave of media like your show and like Breaking Points.
There's so many shows out there now where people actually talk about the real facts in a nonpartisan way and explain what's going on and what moving pieces are in play and how these bills are getting passed and what are the special interest groups that are forcing this through and What's happening?
But I think that, again, until people let go of the core notion that government is going to solve their problems, it's just going to keep bouncing back and forth.
Because if you're on the right, you think the federal government's going to solve your problem if Trump is president again.
And if you're on the left, you think that as long as Biden's in control, federal government's going to solve all your problems.
And so we can be as dissatisfied with the system as we want to be on all sides of the aisle.
But until we recognize that really we need to stop pretending that these people are capable of solving our problems and just they should leave us the hell alone in the main, it's just going to get worse.
I mean this is what Benjamin, wasn't it Benjamin Franklin that had that quote about people who choose- Surrender liberty for a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.
I think that what people say to pollsters, and even how they vote, and then how they act in their daily lives are just not connected.
I think you vote how you want to perceive yourself very often.
It's like, I perceive myself as a good person, therefore I voted for X. Keep those masks forever.
And then in your personal life, I mean, this is what you see from Democratic mayors.
They're like, yeah, we're going to push mask mandates.
And then if the spirit moves you and you're London breed, the mayor of San Francisco, and you're at a concert and the spirit moves you, then off comes the mask.
Meanwhile, you're masking up my five-year-old in class.
So we were having this kind of knock-down, drag-out fight in our local area about some institutions that had mask mandates.
And my wife, who's very anti-mask mandates, particularly for kids, She is a doctor and she was talking to some people who are part of this institution and she wrote up this long document with all the links and all the data about how mask mandates for kids are ineffective, how they don't do anything, how they're really stupid, how they're counterproductive, how there's no data to back them.
And I said to her, if you send that, they're going to get madder at you.
They don't want the data.
The data makes them angry.
And she was like, no, no, no, they'll want the data because she's a nice person and naive.
And she sent it and sure enough, people got madder because the idea is that once the data come up And kind of bite the perspective.
People get very angry if their perspective is the one that got bitten.
And so they have to suppress it.
I honestly think that's part of what's happening with big tech right now.
I think that there's almost two battles with regard to big tech.
One is just the size and scope and the social effect of big tech and all of that.
But the other one is there's a group of people who really don't like alternative viewpoints being out there.
And so they are going to stump as hard as they can to get people deplatformed and to use big tech as a way of siphoning off perspectives.
Well, you see that in those Project Veritas videos where the people who work for these organizations are so nonchalant about the way they're discussing.
Look, they're at dinner discussing how they suppress conservative voices.
And if you're a person who has an understanding of the importance of free speech, which is one of the cornerstones of this country, You know that free speech works both ways.
You have to hear an other person's perspective and then you argue your perspective and you see which perspective makes more logical sense.
This is what free speech is all about.
This is what growth is about.
This is how we understand each other's Points of view and we learn about other other people's opinions and ideas and this is how you change your own opinions ideas You encounter some that enter into your mind that you go I never considered that that's actually a good point and then you shift your judgment you shift your perspective This is important for humans.
It's always been important for humans echo chambers are fucking terrible They're terrible in every way shape and form and this idea that We're giving up these echo chambers.
We're giving control of them to these fucking wokesters that work for corporations that can arbitrarily just decide, oh, this person talks about that.
Let's fucking shadow ban her.
This person talks about this.
Let's ban their YouTube page.
This person says data that's inconvenient for our narrative.
There's something perverse that's happened, too, and that is, you can spot it in the language.
So, until 2016, remember, social media was everybody's friend.
Everybody loved social media until 2016. The media were, like, big on social media.
It was great.
It had been used to reach out to new voters, and it had helped people in the Arab Spring, and all this kind of stuff.
And then Trump wins.
And all of a sudden, on a dime, everybody switches to social media facilitated the spread of Russian disinformation.
Now, my company is an online company.
We spend a lot of time on places like Facebook, so we know what the numbers look like when you have high engagement.
The number of people who are actually affected by so-called Russian disinformation over the course of the 2020 election, the number of people who access those posts is less than the number of people who access posts from my personal Facebook page over the course of maybe three weeks or a month.
Okay?
It was not a massive...
Huge wave of Russian disinformation that shifted the 2016 election.
There had to be some excuse for why Trump had won.
And so it was Russian disinformation.
And then you saw there was this really interesting linguistic shift.
They went from disinformation, which is an active thing, right?
That's like the Russian government spreading things that are not true in order to subvert our politics, to misinformation.
It's only one letter different, but it's completely different.
Disinformation is a state actor or a terrorist group or some organized group pushing a perspective that is false in order to undermine the comedy and cohesiveness of a community.
Misinformation is just, it can be true, but if it's missing context or if it's presented in a way I don't like, it's misinformation.
And so now we have to target misinformation and that can be anything.
And not only that, we will set up A group of fact checkers, fact checkers who all happen to align with one political point of view, and these fact checkers will determine whether or not you have violated the ban on misinformation, and then we'll downgrade you on that basis.
And it doesn't matter if the fact checkers shift their own opinion on this sort of stuff, right?
We'll ban you for six months from social media if you talk about the Chinese leak.
But then, if everybody flips on a dime, then, well, you know, the fact checkers are okay with it so long as it's the right people who are saying it now.
And the same monoclonal antibodies or hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, right?
It's all the same kind of stuff.
It's misinformation when it's deemed inconvenient for a particular narrative.
And then as soon as something is convenient for the narrative, it's not misinformation.
So that shift has been really dangerous and really ugly.
And again, if they think that it's going to end well for them, that somehow this is going to reestablish social capital, that people are going to get back together because you force them to only listen to one point of view, good luck with that.
I don't think they're thinking that, but I do think that intelligent people are waking up to the reality that being a part of these groups that are doing this, that are silencing opposing views, there's no long-term future in this.
Because people recognize what is actually happening now.
A growing number of people.
There's still a lot of people that watch CNN that think I actually took horse dewormer.
But there's a lot of people that recognize, like, oh my god, this is just a lie.
Like, oh my god, the news is lying.
About all kinds of things, and they're pushing a very limited perspective, a very limited point of view, and they're demonizing anything that has an opposing perspective.
You're seeing more and more courageous journalists step out, and then you're seeing things like Substack, and you're seeing podcasts, and shows like yours, where people have the ability to express themselves without any worry about editorial control from all these other companies.
And this is where the legacy media, they try to jump in and they try to put boots on the throat, right?
So, you're over at Spotify.
And the minute you signed over at Spotify, the legacy media went and tried to find a couple of malcontents over at Spotify to try and get them to say, oh, we're going to walk out.
It's going to be blood in the streets over at Spotify.
Now, in reality, it's like a couple of people who are bitching.
A lot of online websites did that, but they did that because it's good clickbait.
It's good for the news.
This is part of the problem with journalism today, is that There's no money in print anymore.
So people aren't just buying newspapers.
You can't look for the New York Times to be this complete unbiased source of information with very clear and concise headlines.
Now it's about what kind of engagement do you get online?
Well, the way you get engagement online is things have to be outrageous.
Do you know how many people write really good articles and then their fucking editor comes along and writes some bullshit headline for it?
And so it gets submitted with something that has...
It's completely different than the tone of the actual article itself because this is the way you can get people to click on it and they'll change things.
I do think there's something else though and it's why I mentioned the legacy media and that is I do think that there are actors in the legacy media who want to see their sources of competition cut off at the knees.
They started talking about regulating podcasts not all that long ago.
People like Kara Swisher at the New York Times talking about, you know, why can't the same rules that apply to journalism apply to podcasts?
Why doesn't Facebook crack down on the dissemination of podcasting information?
Like, I don't think it's a coincidence that you have the Kevin Rooses.
Every single day, Kevin Roos over at the New York Times puts out a list of what he says are the top traffic links at Facebook.
Okay, and he does that specifically because it names like me or Dan Bongino or a few other people on the right, the idea being that Facebook is pushing really hard right-wing propaganda content.
The only reason he's doing that every day is to try and pressure Facebook into not doing that anymore, right?
That's the whole goal.
I think there is a real concerted effort by legacy media to basically say the only approved sources should be us and anybody else who's out there is not an approved source.
It's a bunch of people from a bunch of different sides of the political aisle.
You've got Larry Summers and Aideen Strossen.
Then you've got Barry Weiss and Andrew Sullivan and Saurabh Amari, who's very right wing.
And you've got all these people who are founding a university.
It'll take them years to build.
But they're trying to provide an alternative to a sort of propagandistic worldview that's being taught in a lot of college campuses.
Like, the possibilities for building alternatives have never been higher.
And that is the thing that makes me optimistic.
And again, I think part of that is just living around people who don't Think of themselves as reflections of the federal government every day.
I was trying to explain this to people who are from Florida who think of themselves as Floridian.
Same thing in Texas.
If you talk to Texans, they think of themselves as Texans.
In California, you think yourself as a Californian kind of culturally, but it's not like the state of California stands against the federal government.
The state of California has its own prerogatives.
If you live in LA, LA and the federal government are kind of just the same.
I mean, they just mirror reflections of one another.
It would never occur to you that there's sort of a separate cultural identity that exists as California versus the federal government.
I had seen it happening because, again, I'm conservative, so I feel that kind of stuff maybe more deeply, but as soon as the pandemic kicked in, and they started doing just crazy shit, right?
Like, I could not take my kids to a public park.
I couldn't take them to school, and I also could not take them to a public park.
Right, they put sand all over the skate park, right?
Like, I'm not going to skate there, but I'm just telling you, like, when you dump sand all over the skate park, because you think that people who are skating past each other at 15, 20 miles an hour are going to...
Exactly!
When we went to Florida, and then we were visiting, and the first couple nights we just went to an outdoor restaurant, because they're eating outdoors at the restaurants, and you couldn't do that in LA. My wife and I looked at each other and we hadn't been out to dinner with each other for two months because of this.
They started calling them the unhoused, which is always a red flag.
As soon as they tried to use a more innocuous term, To deal with like, which is a public health crisis.
It's a mental health crisis.
It's a public health crisis.
I mean, it's also like a wheelchair access crisis because these poor people that are in wheelchairs, like they can't get through the fucking sidewalks because they're covered in tents.
Like the ADA should deal with something like that, right?
Well, I mean, for years in California, the rule has been that you weren't allowed to take people's shit off the street.
Because there was a ruling from the federal courts, the ACLU was the one that did the case, there was an ordinance on the books in LA that the police were not allowed to move the quote-unquote personal property of people who were living on the streets.
It was like garbage bags just filled with garbage and you weren't allowed to take them away because this was the personal property.
of the people who are living on the streets.
How in the world this is seen as some sort of empathetic move on behalf of the homeless is beyond me.
And you saw, I mean, it was kind of incredible, like the power of human innovation.
I mean, people have built like two-story buildings, like tents, and I was amazed sometimes at the creativity.
I mean, you'd see like, I remember we drove past and there was a guy there with a turntable.
He had somehow hooked it into one of the light posts, like he'd actually broken into the The light post on the street.
He was using it for electricity, and he had a turntable.
I was like, kudos to him for really liking his vinyl.
But I just wonder if that's the best way that you want people to live in California, is on the street with an old turntable so they can play their authentic music without the perversion of digital.
Because what's incredible about that is that is one place where you would assume that people in a left-wing state like California would put all their focus, right?
I mean, like, that's a place where I'm a super right-wing guy.
The state does have a role in making sure that people who literally cannot take care of themselves have a place to go and get their medication.
How in the world has that been the big failure in California?
Why is it that we are not making it easier to involuntarily commit people who are actually a danger to themselves and or others living on the street?
So we would have an insane amount of cases in front of these already bogged down courts where we try to figure out whether or not we should put people in some sort of a cage.
Anyway, he was on this morning radio show that I was doing, and I asked him, this is when Jerry Brown was still the governor, and he was lieutenant governor, and I said, so, you know, this whole bullet train thing is really stupid and a waste of money, right?
And he's like, yeah.
And like a year later, he's like, we need a bullet train.
Well, in a certain sense, Jordan Peterson and I are coming at it from very different angles.
Jordan's coming at it from a kind of spiritual and psychological angle, and I'm coming from it from a very practical angle, like what's going to bring you success in life.
As a society, we sort of have said to young men that you...
We actually don't want you to be responsible.
Responsibility is somehow connected with toxic masculinity and maybe you're assuming too much.
It's part of the patriarchy and I think that's bullshit.
I think that one of the chief obligations in life for a young man is to become a provider, is to become a protector of their family.
The way that I judge masculinity And maybe it's self-serving, it's not by how many push-ups you can do, but by how you provide for your wife, how you provide for your children, what are you doing for your community, right?
These should be pretty simple things, but people get like super pissed when you talk about that because you're speaking up against the notion that I guess the chief and core of all human aspiration ought to be your individual identity.
If you just are solipsistically looking at how do I feel today and what do I feel about myself and my identity, that that's actually a really bad way to live your life.
And I think that that's seen sometimes as, if I'm trying to kind of steel man my opponents, that's seen as unempathetic.
It's unempathetic because what I really should be focused on is how do you make people feel the most authentically them that they can feel?
And my answer is my...
My definition of what a healthy human identity constitutes I think is fundamentally different from a lot of people who oppose me.
I don't think that human identity is in chief just your feeling of internal subjective authenticity about what you're doing today.
I don't think that it's all about your feelings.
I think that it's very much about how you interact with society.
It's about the things that you do.
What kind of accomplishments are you taking part in?
How are you building your community?
How are you innovating?
What kind of risks are you taking?
What kind of obligations are you undergoing?
And once you do that, then people see that as judgmental because we're in a society where the thing you're supposed to care most about is what you feel here and then if everybody else accepts that.
We're supposed to be a society that's chiefly built on us all accepting our own internal self-definition and I'm saying there's an objective reality out there and it's unpretty.
That objective reality is filled with things you're not going to like and then the question is how do you deal with that objective reality while acknowledging that no one has the utopian capacity to magically wave a wand and fix all those problems.
Well, there's also the issue, look, I think your feelings are important, but I also think that people have a tendency towards self-indulgence.
And if you deny that tendency if you ignore that fact you're gonna create a bunch of people that think that the world does revolve around every single nuanced feeling that they have also There's this rejection of responsibility and discipline and this equation they're equating discipline with not just toxic masculinity but cruelty and
That, you know, you're cruel if you impose discipline or if you encourage discipline.
And I say, you know, I follow Jocko Willink's advice.
Discipline equals freedom.
And I think that's real.
And I think that if you can figure out a way to work hard, you will feel satisfaction from the results of that work.
It makes you feel better.
For a society that's so concerned with feelings, You should be looking at all the different ways that the life that you choose affects the way you feel about things.
And if you have really accomplished goals and actually exerted discipline, done things that were difficult to do that you didn't necessarily want to do but you knew had long-term benefits, that is a part of being...
Like an actualized human that's a part of being a man.
It's part of being a woman.
It's a part of being a person who accomplishes things in life and People don't want to hear that sometimes because they want to hear that you've done enough.
You're amazing You're a winner.
You're a perfect person.
You don't need to work harder.
People need to accept you, and we need the government to step in and fill in all the holes, fill in all the blanks.
And this income inequality idea, like there's an income inequality problem in this country.
Well, guess what else there is?
There's a fucking effort inequality problem in this country.
Some people don't put forth as much effort.
Does that mean that everybody should work 12 hours a day, seven days a week?
No, it doesn't.
It doesn't mean that.
But it does mean that you probably You probably can do more.
You can probably work harder or think harder.
And if you do that, you will be rewarded with success.
Not always, because there's a lot of complications to life and you've got to figure your way through these things and a lot of times you're going to try things and fail.
And this is what we were talking about earlier when it comes to risk.
No, I was just thinking the risk kind of throwback to the conversation because I was talking to some students recently and I was saying that most of the decisions that are important that you make in your life are big risks and the ones that you don't think about are really big risks.
So people tend to think that, you know, when people say you lead a risky personal life, what they tend to mean is that you're, you know, having profligate sex with a lot of people.
The actual riskiest decision you can make in your personal life, there's two.
One, getting married.
Two, having kids.
These are very risky decisions.
They're risky decisions because you are foregoing current benefits for future benefits.
When you get married, you're saying, I'm foregoing all these other possibilities that are out there, and I'm putting all my chips in the center of the table with this one person, that this one person is the person I'm going to want to spend the rest of my life with.
That's a very risky decision, and you have to make it on incomplete information because who the hell knows who you're going to be in 20 years or who this person is going to be in 20 years.
But you're making that decision because in order to gain anything in life, you have to take that risk.
The same thing with kids.
Kids are a huge source of risk.
I mean, I've said to folks before that, you know, as life progresses, you take on sort of broader risks emotionally.
So when you start off and you're single, I would say that your emotional range is like a 10 to maybe a negative 10. Like, happy is like a 10. Bad is like a negative 10. Then you get married, and the emotions now are like 20 on the upside, like when you're very happy with your spouse, and then negative 20 when something bad happens to your spouse, right?
And then you have kids and all limits are removed.
The worst things that happen in your life are with your kids, and the best things that happen in your life are with your kids.
That is broadening your scope of risk.
Having a kid, not knowing what that kid is gonna turn out to be like in 18 years, It's a disaster.
When you get pregnant with a kid, you have no idea what that kid is going to be like when they're born.
It's a huge risk.
And that's true in business.
That's true in education.
Every time you plan for the future, you're taking a risk.
And people who are risk-averse say, well, I don't really want that risk.
I want to be cared for.
I want there to be something without me taking.
But it's the risk-taking, it's the choice that makes you a fulfilled human being, even if the risk fails.
Even if the risk fails, if you took the shot, You still get credit on, I think, a certain moral and even on a subjective self level.
I think you get credit for taking the risk and for taking the shot.
And I think people sometimes resent that.
And so that's why we speak about, to take it to economics for a second, when people, it drives me up a wall when people describe people who have made a lot of money as the privileged.
That drives me up a wall.
Because you don't know their life story.
Maybe they really weren't privileged.
Maybe they were super not privileged.
And maybe they just invented a really cool product that a lot of people wanted to take advantage of.
Maybe they weren't born rich.
The vast majority of people who got rich in the United States were not born rich in the United States.
There's a philosopher named Michael Sandel who has a new book out called The Tyranny of the Meritocracy in which he basically argues that there's a cadre of people who, because they got wealthy, they believe that they get to rule the rest of society because they merited being wealthy.
He wrote a book that was, I'm trying to remember the name of it.
And the basic gist of the book is a sci-fi book.
And it was that there would be a future in which people who considered themselves the most intelligent and most hardworking would rule society on behalf of everybody else.
And I think that the mistake that we've made is that, and there's truth to this, there are people who believe that they are morally better because they are richer, for example.
That definitely exists.
But there's a distinction to be made between a skillsocracy, which is really what a free market economy is.
It's a skillsocracy.
And a meritocracy, which says that you're more moral because you have these skills.
When it comes to, like, there's certain baseline things where if you're a hardworking person who happens to have been born of mid-IQ, You'll do better than the mid-IQ person who is not as hardworking, but you probably won't do as well as the guy who has two standard deviation IQ ahead of you who worked like mildly hard.
And you didn't earn your intelligence, right?
That's sort of the point of the critique of meritocracy.
I think that when you have a community, you have needs for all these values of compassion and this connection with your neighbors and the idea that you're all in this together.
And when you're just ruthlessly competitive, The problem is you abandon all of those in seeking a path for yourself, a selfish path.
This is what people on the left are terrified of, about people that use the term meritocracy and people that are in this pursuit of business and of success and monetary gain.
And this is where I think the mistake is made on both the right and the left.
The people who say meritocracy undermines social capital on the right and the people who say that meritocracy undermines your ability.
Kind of the same critique.
Meritocracy undermines you getting along with your neighbors and makes you ruthlessly selfish and non-altruistic.
I don't think those are the same thing.
I mean, I think that you can be meritocratic, believe that intelligence, hard work, innovation should all be rewarded.
And then on a moral level, Honestly, the way that we repay people on a moral level for doing what we think are moral things, it's typically not financial.
It's typically in terms of honor.
It's typically how we treat people with honor and respect in your community.
How many people go to somebody's funeral is a good way to sort of judge that.
And so there are a lot of people in, I think, every community who are not the wealthiest, but the most people will show up at their funeral because those are people who were good people, who helped out their neighbors, who really worked hard at doing that.
And I think that we have to work on both tracks.
I think that there's a temptation right now in society to...
Say that because there are people who are wildly successful and people who are less successful, that the entire system by which success is charted monetarily is wrong.
I think that's incorrect.
And at the same time, I think we can't forget that the way that we actually measure human value is not only by how much Monetary success you have and the kind of transactional value you create in a society, which is a big thing, but also by how you treat other people.
Don't you think that people do get obsessed with quantifiable things, though?
For sure.
When you look at numbers on a sheet and it shows, oh, you've made X amount.
Next year you should try to make Y. And this is one of the problems with corporations, right?
This diffusion of responsibility that happens of being a part of a gigantic group that's just set out for universal and continual growth.
Like this idea that you're going to continue to make money and this is what you focus on and if you do that you're a winner and if you don't do that you're a loser.
And when people obsess on something that's as simple and as singular as the amount of money that you make, That's the mark of excellence.
It's very difficult to quantify how well you're doing for your community.
It's very difficult to quantify whether or not your employees are loved and feel happy and you feel like you provide an environment where they feel like they're a part of something.
I agree, but I think that the mistake that we're making very often Is we try and solve what...
I think, honestly, what you're describing, there's a spiritual problem, and we try to fill it with economics or with monetary recompense or something like that.
I don't think it only has to be done through religion.
I think traditionally it's been the largest driver of social cohesion, but it's certainly a major thing, right?
But those decisions are made every single day, right?
You decide on a given day whether you want to do a show or whether you want to stay home with your family.
And sometimes you probably reject the show and you give up the money and you say, I'd rather be home with my family because it's more important for me to invest in the time with my family.
I do this a lot too.
I will not speak.
I will not go out of town for Sabbath.
I just won't.
So I give up gigs on Friday afternoons if I can't get back home in time for Sabbath or on Saturday nights if I can't get out after Sabbath in time.
And it's just important to me to build the social capital at home with my kids and with my wife and with my parents who live in the same community and with the other members of my community.
Let's talk about the Metaverse because I'm really fascinated by this decision of Facebook to change the name of Facebook to Meta and to the Metaverse, which I think people are just going to...
They're gonna realize that this is a crazy idea, that you're gonna give your life to some sort of augmented or virtual reality world that's created by a guy who's involved in this Company whose algorithms are sowing the seeds of distrust and hate although But now we're gonna fucking let him take over what you see and feel Because you're gonna have a new company and this new company is gonna be virtually reality based where
he's literally he Reenacted a scene from black mirror Yeah.
I think that you and I are of a different generation, dude.
I think there are a lot of kids who are growing up in Fortnite world and spend a lot.
And I think the pandemic really accelerated this.
There are a lot of people who lived online for the entire pandemic.
And so for people like me and for people like my parents, not seeing other humans for a long time was actually quite painful and terrible.
Like we actually did want to get out and be with the community and see friends and do that sort of stuff.
What if you spend your entire life from the time you're a little kid interacting with screens?
What if those screens are getting increasingly sophisticated so that they are interacting with you in ways that humans would?
What if you get to be whatever, like we're a society, we're just talking about this, where you get to be whatever you want to be.
What if there's a world where you actually can be and everybody sees you the way you want to be seen?
Would you rather live there where you're rich and good looking and everybody likes you, or would you rather live in the real world where you're disconnected from all that and you end up with Ready Player One world?
As long as it can become indistinguishable from reality, which it will be able to be.
It's going to take time, whether it's five years or ten years.
If you go back and look at Pong, which was the first game that I ever saw when I was a child, it's ridiculous.
It's like a white ball that bounces across and you have a straight line that's a paddle.
And it's the dumbest game you could never convince a child to play today.
They'd be like, get the fuck out of here with that stupid game.
I can go play fucking Halo, right?
But back then when I was a child, that was a big deal.
If you extrapolate, if you just go in the future from now, what they're available, what they have available now with these insane video graphics, the Unreal Engine, and then move yourself 20 years in the future, yeah, it's going to be indistinguishable.
And what I fear is that when you do that to a civilization, it's basically the equivalent of you bring in a wild animal and you put it in a cage for a long time, and now you can't release it back in the wild, right?
It's gonna get eaten.
What happens to you is a civilization.
What happens if you've taken an entire generation of people, told them that their entire life exists online, they don't have to interact with other humans, they don't have to interact in human ways with other humans, and then there's like an entire other earth out there that isn't doing any of this.
By the way, China's not doing this.
China is banning it.
China's saying you're not allowed to go online certain days of the week if you're a kid.
We're going to ban the kind of stuff that you can see.
So, in the long run, which civilization is going to be more durable?
The one that actually understands the vulnerabilities of human nature or the one that says, we're going to use those vulnerabilities to make you feel subjectively happier?
I'm amazed at the level of conditioning.
Here's what killed me about the pandemic, honestly.
What killed me?
The level of conditioning that it took in order to rejigger how people think was so low.
It shocked the hell out of me.
It really shocked me.
I was talking to my business partner, Jeremy Boring, about this, and early on in the pandemic, he was like, people aren't going to stand for this.
Like, when they shut everything in, it's like, three months from now, people are going to be losing their minds.
They're going to be out on the streets protesting to get rid of the masks, and they're going to be out at ballgames again.
I was like, that's not right.
I think it'll take a year.
We're like a year and a half in, and half the country's still like...
Oh, you know, what if this just continues?
Like, all right, I guess.
Like, the amount of dependency that was bred by people saying, just go back to your house.
And people, like, human beings are really adaptable.
And this is something that Brett Weinstein and Heather Heiden talk about, right?
So if we change our social circumstances radically in a way that's unhealthy for us, and we are now interacting with technologies that were built to take advantage of our lizard brain, then what happens when there are people who are just not engaging in the same, they're not playing the same game that we are, right?
We're essentially drugging ourselves.
Robert Nozick is the libertarian philosopher.
He talks at one point About what he calls the experience machine.
It's the thought experiment.
And the experience machine is basically VR. He's writing this in the early 1960s.
He says, what if there was a machine where you could plug into it, you'd feel the illusion of choice, you'd feel as though your choices had some sort of significance, and it would give you the dopamine hit that you get in regular life.
Would you plug into it or would you not?
And his theory was you wouldn't plug into it because you still want to feel like your life has real-world consequences.
But what if everybody you know is in that experience machine?
I do wonder if there's going to be, and I wonder what you think about this, if there's going to be a bifurcation in the same way there's been a bifurcation about so many issues between the people at the top of sort of the elite spectrum and the rest of the population, where the people at the elite spectrum are making the metaverse, but their kids aren't actually in the metaverse.
Again, all I can say is I think that a lot of the media, whether it is in the United States or whether it is abroad, works in cahoots with whatever government is in power.
And if the government says, jump, a lot of the media say, how high?
Because, you know, Italy has protests and they literally have like these cameras where you can see the area where the protests are.
And either they're shutting these cameras off, or they're using old footage.
Like, if you look at where these protests are taking place, see if you can find that, because some people have done, like, a deep dive on that, Jamie, where there was a large-scale protest in Europe, and then there were some cameras where you could watch it online, and they weren't showing any of it.
They could theoretically say that it's a violation of civil rights and then it would be reviewed probably under rational basis review, if I'm getting this correct, meaning that all the city or state would have to show is that there's a rational basis for what they're doing because they are given really broad power.
Yeah, according to Marty McCary, who's my guy on this over at Johns Hopkins University, the epidemiologist, he says, grand total, the entire pandemic, the number of kids who have died who are healthy is between 10 and 20. Over the course of the entire pandemic, 700,000 people have died in the United States.
That's kids under 18, by the way.
That's not five-year-olds.
That's kids under 18. 10 to 20. That's a subgroup of 73 million people in the United States.
And because of that, if all your constituents are scared out of their minds and you say, we're going to do everything we can, that means vaccinating the kids, that means making sure everyone wears a mask, even post-vaccination, that everybody wears a mask everywhere...
They'll do it, right?
They will.
And if you're in a red area, conversely, it actually takes some balls to say, listen, I'm not going to do what that guy's doing.
He's saying he can protect you.
I think he can't.
I think that you're just going to have to assess the risk on your own and make a decision yourself.
It's actually kind of a ballsy decision.
It was amazing.
Like in the early days of the pandemic, when the media were trotting out Andrew Cuomo as the greatest governor in America and Ron DeSantis as Satan, The one who was actually making a ballsy call was DeSantis, not Cuomo.
I mean, the revolt over schools is like a very, very real revolt.
But the point is that if you were going to do something rational without the vaccines, what you'd have to do is tranche the healthier percentages of the population back in.
Even if you don't start with kids, you start 20-year-olds.
You start 25-year-olds, under 30, right?
And that's what Sweden did, essentially.
Sweden was like, okay, if you're above 65, you should stay home.
You should wear a mask.
If you're young and you're healthy, you should probably just go about your life and live like normal.
We forbade that from the outset.
I mean, I got just ripped up on Twitter for suggesting that we ought to treat people differentially based on age with regard to COVID. Because I was saying, like, it's kind of absurd that we are treating 20-year-olds the same way that we're treating 80-year-olds.
Like, the risks are not the same.
And to treat this as a disease that's supposed to shut down the entirety of human society because you refuse to treat people differentially based on age is totally crazy.
It's just, you know, there's obviously the people that have a higher propensity.
There's people that have a tendency to gain weight.
There's people that have real issues with their immune systems, real issues with their endocrine systems, real issues with their thyroids, and it's easier for them to gain weight.
They have a slower metabolism.
All that's real.
But it doesn't force you to eat.
And it also doesn't force you to seek medication to take care of yourself.
So it is similar, because you're saying to people that, you know, you could have taken this medication, you could have avoided this problem, so we're not going to treat you.
Well, same thing could be said for obesity.
And even easier, because, like, exercise is free.
Like, you can just walk around the block.
There's a lot of things you could do.
You know, I'm not saying that you should not be treated because you're obese, but there are so many fucking problems that people have when it comes to risk-takers, when it comes to alcoholism.
There's a lot of injuries that could be avoided if you just stayed home.
If you're a BMX rider who's had 15 broken bones, why the fuck should that hospital take you into the emergency room?
You're on your own, buddy.
You're the guy who decides to do backflips off of a fucking ramp somewhere.
Well, it's because we're in the middle of this thing and the idea is that...
Well, first of all, here's another part of the problem.
The reality is the vaccines only work...
They don't work exactly how they were advertised.
The original take on the vaccine was this is going to be 95% effective and there's an extremely rare incidence of a breakthrough case and even in those cases you're going to be fine.
I know 15 fucking people that have had breakthrough cases.
They're not rare at all.
Especially not after five, six months, and then with variants, you know?
So the idea is that you're going to be able to give it to other people.
But if the vaccines were effective, that wouldn't be a problem.
More effective than not, but there's a lot of other things that people could be doing, too, that would make them even more effective, and those aren't even encouraged because they're easy and free, like exercise, losing weight, vitamin D. There's a lot of factors that aren't taken into consideration at all.
Yeah, it's such a strange time for sorting out what's the best way to approach life.
Because, as you said before, there's some people that just are completely averse to taking risks.
They don't want to take any risks and they want the world set up for them.
I mean, I've seen this argument that, you know, the government should provide essentially everything for you.
It should provide food and shelter.
The government, if they care about you, there's enough money in the world to provide food and shelter to every person on this country, if not the entire planet, and that's what we should do, and that's how we should redistribute wealth.
Well, you saw actually that the good economic stats from last month, that was not a coincidence, right?
The federal unemployment ran, and then all of a sudden there were a bunch of people who wanted to get back in the workforce, because when you pay people to stay home, they will stay home.
There's another factor when we talk about people with anxiety and depression and all these different things that haunt people today.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this society has made it where we don't value Trying to work hard and solve things and do things that are difficult.
Because I think in the pursuit of doing things that are difficult, your mind becomes engaged, you have a lot of commitment to these tasks, you have a lot of investment in it, and if you succeed, you feel great.
And I think that as a society, one of the things that we've done is we've demeaned duty.
We've said that duty is bad.
If you have an obligation or a duty, that's because something in society has put something upon you.
Because duty and obligation are placed upon you.
But here's the thing.
If you willingly undertake a duty or obligation, or even if you don't, Even if there's just a duty or obligation that is put upon you by life, not by like some evil person out there who's trying to hurt you, but by actual life because life is filled with hardship and terrible things.
You actually facing up to a problem and then defeating the problem or fighting the problem, it makes you stronger.
It makes you more confident.
It makes you a better person.
Exactly.
It does make you a better person because very often you have to become a stronger and more capable human being in order to overcome those problems.
Eliminating problems doesn't make people happier.
There's this...
Weird idea out there that if we just cared for everybody, we just gave everybody what they need, we'd all sit around and we'd just create art and we'd just like be poets in our free time.
He was telling me that we should tax First of all, he's saying there should be no inheritance.
And I was like, what are you talking about?
He goes, it just creates douchebags.
And I go, it doesn't always create douchebags.
I go, it can, but if you're a good person and you develop good values in your child, and then that child inherits money and uses it to create a great business and actually creates value for the community and for people around you, that's possible too.
And he's like, they should do it on their own.
I go, well, what would you propose that that money go to?
And he said, the arts.
And I go, look, people sell art.
Any art that you can't make any fucking money off of means nobody finds value in it.
Like, if you're talking about doing Shakespeare in the park and making $100,000 a year, how about fuck you?
Remember that video that de Blasio made where he was talking about bringing arts back to New York City and had people doing this, like, expressive dance?
Well, the stuff that he's doing, that he was trying to do with the schools, that Adams is going to walk back, this is like case in point, where he's trying to get rid of the magnet schools because they're not racially proportionate.
So it was this article in the New York Times, and I'm trying to remember all the details.
They said, you're not allowed to talk about naturally gifted kids.
You're not supposed to reward right answers or punish wrong answers.
What?
Yeah, so there's like a big kind of parents' revolt going on in California over this, because the idea was that There was too much racial disparity in math performance in California.
And so, changed the standards.
Which, by the way, I can't think of anything more racist than that.
That is so super racist.
It's like, not enough black kids are scoring well on the test.
That means that black kids, I guess, are too dumb to do well on these tests.
Get rid of the tests.
Or, alternatively, there's an explanation where kids need to study more.
By the way, I think the scam that is college is predicated on society trying to get around the basic truth that you just said, which is we can tell by test scores whether you know things and are good at things.
Well, I mean, obviously there's some tests that favor people that have grown up in certain environments because you have more access to certain kinds of information.
But once you teach people and then you test them, there's only one way to find out.
Whether or not they know the information.
They have to be tested.
The idea that you're going to eliminate tests and somehow make things more equitable or more even is kind of crazy.
Actually what you're going to do is you're going to make people more racist is what you're going to do.
And the reason for that is because Thomas Sowell talks about this.
He talks about different types of discrimination.
And he says there's group discrimination where you base your perception of an individual on the group data that is available.
And then there's like discrimination, discrimination, which is you know that a person is smart and they're a group you don't like and so you just ignore the fact they're smart because they're from that group.
So the two examples that he gives, right, is let's say that you're walking down the street at night and it's in an inner city neighborhood and there's a black guy walking down the street and he's wearing a hoodie and he's a young guy, 17 years old.
Are you going to cross the street or not if the opposing example is an 80-year-old white woman?
And he says, well, you know, based on the group statistics, you're probably going to cross the street more often if it's the 17-year-old black kid than if it's the 80-year-old white woman.
Now, let's say that that 17-year-old black kid you know.
You know the kid.
He's a nice kid.
If you still cross the street, that's what makes you like a supergiant racist.
In the former case, you're just using the group data available.
The problem is that using the group data available very often is wrong, right?
What if the 17-year-old kid is a nice kid, right?
You shouldn't be doing that either.
You need specific data.
Test data is specific data.
So, let's say now that you are an administrator at a college, and you're not allowed to use test data.
All you know is that, on average, black kids score lower than white kids.
So who do you let in?
How do you make that decision?
Wouldn't it be better for black kids for you to have the test data because you know which black kids definitely deserve to get in as opposed to which ones don't deserve to get in?
So you start using stupid generalizations.
The whole point is more specific data is better.
More specific data fights discrimination.
And yet we have this whole weird idea that if we get rid of specific data, if we get rid of test data, objective data, this is going to end discrimination, precisely the reverse will occur.
Yeah, I think the real problem is the disproportionate amount of schools that are good that are in places where people have money.
Schools where people don't have money aren't funded as well and a lot of them suck and that's a real issue.
Also the crime issue.
If you're terrified of going to your school because your school is riddled with gang violence and like something needs to be done about that because you have to create an environment where children feel safe enough to go to school and learn.
And I think there is a disparity that needs to be adjusted and accepted and approached in a way where we're realistic about it.
I mean, we've said this.
You and I have had this conversation before about what do you do with gang-ridden neighborhoods like what we talked about earlier with that fucking scene in Chicago, which is so insane.
And you made a really good point.
And the point is...
More police presence is actually better.
More police presence actually lowers crime, makes things safer, and gives people an opportunity to do things that they don't have.
And that point is very hard for people to grasp, but I talked to a cop about this, and he was explaining to me that statistically, when you look at it, more cops, and Michael Schellenberger talked about this as well, more cops actually make an environment where you have less police brutality.
Less cops Make more stress on the cops, it's more difficult for them to do their job, and you actually wind up with more police brutality.
So by having this idea that you're going to defund the police because of police brutality, you're actually increasing the opportunity or the possibility.
Of police brutality.
It's totally counterintuitive, but this is what needs to be done.
Like, we need to figure out a way to establish law and order in these communities where a lot of these folks, they don't want to be in a fucking gang.
They're just hardworking families that are trying to get by and these kids are growing up in this environment where that seems to be the only realistic option.
I mean, between the need for police officers in these communities and then this is a growing problem across all demographic groups, but it is not even by demographic groups.
Single motherhood is a major problem in the United States.
If you want kids to be better educated, if you want them to take school more seriously, if you want them to do better in school, what every study shows, every single one, so far as I'm aware, is that it's not even the presence of a father in the home.
It's how many fathers are in the neighborhood.
So this is a Roland Fryer study.
He did a study on this.
And what he found is that a father in the home makes a huge difference, obviously, but it's percentages of fathers in homes in the neighborhood that makes a huge difference for kids.
I mean, and again, this is not a racial thing because there are parts, this is something Charles Murray talks about a lot when he talks about white Appalachia versus, for example, rich white areas.
Like, there are huge cultural differences with regard to education between white Appalachia and rich white areas.
There are a lot of poor Asian communities where kids are studying their ass off, and that's why they're doing amazing in school is because they're studying their ass off.
Like, he was studying, and in the middle of studying, he would take all his books, throw them in his backpack, and he would run up the stairs of the school.
I also just have questions about the general way in which we determine what is now quote-unquote equitable in terms of how we break out groups.
So, for example...
Too many Asians getting into college because they only comprise, what, 5-6% of the American population and therefore, and they comprise 20% of the degree holders or whatever it is.
And it's not proportionate.
Whereas black people comprise 13% of the population, but they only comprise 6% of the degree.
That's very unequitable.
And so they have to be a reflection of the general population.
What about the fact that women who are 50% of the population now represent a vast majority of degree holders and graduate degree holders?
I have a very good friend who's a very smart guy, but he made the mistake of making that argument.
We were actually talking about divorce, and he was saying maybe the reason why women get more money in divorce, maybe the reason why it's fair is because of income inequality.
And I go, what do you mean?
And he goes, well, you know, women and men work together, and women make 75 cents to every dollar a man makes.
I go, do you know that they have different jobs?
Do you know how that's calculated?
And he's like, no.
I go, yes.
And he's like, is that really it?
I go, yeah.
And then I sent him a bunch of shit, and he's like, oh.
One of my favorite conversations is Jordan Peterson having a conversation with a feminist where she brings up male privilege, and he's like, well, for God's sake, what privilege?
We get murdered more?
We go to war?
And he just starts rattling off all these different things.
And you see this woman not prepared for this conversation, and Well, again, this is one of those things where it's like, your ideas of what the world should be are not in any way reflective of what the world is.
Like, one of my favorites along these lines is when you talk about, people will talk about, you know, women and men, and they really have exactly the same interests.
Like, first of all, have you ever met a woman?
Have you ever met a woman, right?
So they'll say, the fact that there are not enough female engineers is evidence that there's discrimination in society against female engineers.
I mean, this is why they have essentially affirmative action programs for females in places like Google.
The idea is there are not enough female engineers.
This is an act of discrimination and it must be rectified.
And then when Larry Summers says, well, no, it probably is not about that.
It probably is about job selection, whether women want to go into engineering, maybe test performance.
Then he gets thrown out as president of Harvard University over that.
I was there when that happened.
But the stat that I love the most is that if you go to the much vaunted Nordic countries, right, where they have all sorts of great social welfare benefits and all of this, the gap in earnings between men and women is larger than the gap in earnings.
In like a developing country like Latvia or Lithuania.
And the reason is because when women work in countries where income is highly prized and you don't have a big social safety net, they choose the high income jobs.
And when they are in a social safety net country, they get to choose what they actually want to do, which is not engineering, generally speaking.
They tend to pick the stuff they like to do, which are more...
Human connection oriented jobs women tend to like those men like machines women like people This is just a general for every woman true on average obviously this goes back to what we're talking about before that the we put so much value unfortunately in this country on success being quantifiable by bank accounts and Many people don't look at the world that way and when you force people to look at the world that way because you say this is our own only metric that we count and The metric that we count is how much money you're earning.
Well, we're looking at men and women, and we're saying, well, men are making more, so we have an inequitable society.
Like you were saying about these Nordic societies, if you give women the opportunity, when you have more equality, they tend to take more gender-specific roles.
It's also, it's not just reality, it's the only reality that provides positive externalities.
So what other metric are we going to use for success?
So the way that we measure success in terms of monetary exchange is the most goods, services, products that you provided to somebody else and they paid you for willingly.
Which is why you can be an NBA star and you're really not producing anything except your own skill level on TV and we pay you lots and lots of money for this.
You've created something that is non-replicable and we will pay you for that.
You've created a good product or service that's not replicable, and so we'll pay you money for that.
This has positive externalities because the more skilled people we have doing skillful things, the more cool things that we have on the market.
We actually want to incentivize the guy who created the stupid thing that sold a billion units because that's going to bring the price of that thing down because people are going to now compete in that market to undercut that guy.
And they're going to develop new products in that market, which is why a poor person now lives better than the king of France did in 1300.
That's because of all that innovation.
The positive externalities of us rewarding innovation and effort and intelligence are very high.
So you say that's not fair.
On a moral level, maybe it's not fair.
Maybe if you were God, you could figure out a different way that would make it more fair where it was based purely on how many hours of sweat labor you put into a thing.
The problem is that if you actually try to create a system where you reward people based on the pure number of sweat hours they put into things, It's a wildly negative externality because now you're incentivizing people to just put in work at the thing that is the easiest for them to do without regard to pleasing anybody else, without regard to trying to create a product, good, or service that somebody else will willingly buy from you.
This is why when people say that capitalism is selfish and it's non-altruistic, I've been ripped by the Ayn Rand crowd for saying this, but it actually is a form of forced altruism.
If I create a product, a good, or a service, and nobody wants to buy it, but I really satisfied myself, That's selfish.
What's not selfish is I now create a product or service.
I now have to provide something to you that you want and you have to provide something to me that I want, right?
There's a stock market like manipulation, hedge funds, people moving money around, moving numbers around, getting insanely wealthy by betting on companies failing, things being public.
The ability to manipulate stocks and find a way to skirt the system and use computers to make these little quick transactions back and forth and back and forth and generate insane amounts of wealth, essentially doing nothing.
So you think that it's good that these companies get funded because they could, in turn, provide goods and services that people want and appreciate and we should tolerate all these fucksters.
Who are figuring out how to get insanely wealthy and do blow off the assholes of Russian strippers because they've figured out a way to use this system to generate money.
By having these people around that will raise capital because of the stock market, because of the fact that there's an amazing opportunity for people that have no business being in that company.
You have nothing to do with that company other than the fact that you're funding them and you're moving capital around.
And in some cases, you are hedging against the possibility of loss in the company, which allows other people to read the signal and then allocate their capital elsewhere.
You're short-selling a company.
You're saying this company is not worth as much as people are saying it's worth.
People are going to draft off of you, presumably, and then they're going to sell their stock, and maybe they're going to put their money in a more successful company, which allows the company to raise more money, buy back its stock, reinvest, do all that sort of stuff.
Right, there's no centralized allocative resource that is capable of doing that sort of work.
So do I think that, like, on a pure level, this goes back to the whole difference that we were talking about earlier between meritocracy and skillsocracy that I was trying to make.
We tend to think of, like, does that guy deserve it?
I mean, he's just sitting in a room and he's playing with numbers.
Does he really deserve it?
On a moral level, no, I don't know whether he's going to heaven or hell.
I mean, like, I don't know.
But on a skills level...
I suppose he deserves it because he's adding positive externalities to the system.
Now, what about Bernie Sanders' concept that you could take a very small amount of each of these transactions, these speculative transactions, like a fraction of a penny, and you could apply that To free college education, universal basic income, or universal healthcare at least, that you could use, like this is his concept of democratic socialism, that you would apply this in a way that's not punitive to these companies.
It's a small amount in each transaction, but overall does a net good for the culture, for society, for the communities.
I like how these, that's how these people, you were saying that's how these people, these fucking democratic socialists, that's how they slippery slope.
I don't know how large the transactions that we're talking about are on average and what percentage of that transaction he's trying to grab.
So until I know that, I don't know, are we talking about very marginal amounts or are we talking about not at all marginal amounts that are crucial to how that business operates?
I don't know the answer to that.
By the way, I don't agree with free community college, period, because I think too many people are going to college.
So I think that's a bad example.
I think he should pick something better to spend on if he wants to spend the money.
Do you think that if we did not subsidize college, and private loans did, do you think the same...
Rules should apply that are currently in place where you can never get out of your student loans.
It's one of the weirder things.
You take a child that's essentially, their brain is not fully formed yet, and you saddle them down with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan that they have to pay for the rest of their life.
There's people today that are getting their Social Security docked because they owe student loans.
You want to talk about being at the end of the game and realizing you're a fucking loser?
When you get your social security docked, the money you're supposed to live on, and the country's like, no, fuckface, you owe us money because you have to pay for that school you didn't use.
So I think that if you are a private institution, just like any other loan, you should be forced to take the risk of the loan.
So education is a little weird in that there's no collateral, right?
I mean, like if you get a loan on a house- Can't take the house back.
It wouldn't even take the degree.
Right.
But that's why you're going to get a lot more loans in areas where people expect high income return.
And a lot fewer loans.
There was a study that came out recently and it said that something like 28% of all degree holders end up significantly financially worse off for having had the degree than for getting the degree.
Depends on the industry and it depends on the major.
So majors make a huge difference.
You major in ed, that's not going to do you a lot of good.
You major in engineering, it's going to do you a hell of a lot of good.
So one of the big problems is trying to treat all degrees as equivalent, which they are not.
We also have a major credentialing problem in the society where a lot of people are now requiring a college degree where they shouldn't have to have a college degree.
There are a lot of jobs in the United States that do not require a college degree, and we'll only take a college graduate.
So at our company, we don't screen for a college degree.
But isn't the idea that during those four years he's going to learn about life and have a more nuanced perspective of the world because he's going to be educated in all sorts of different things like history.
Yeah, I think there's something to find if there's something that you're really actually interested in, you know, and then we start developing apprenticeship programs in all these different industries.
I mean, if you want to talk about how other countries do it, there are a lot of countries that are tracking kids a lot earlier than 18. It's a stigma at 14, 15, saying what are you interested in, getting them sort of – are you into math?
There's a little bit of that, but we've lost the value of actually just being educated, of learning things, of expanding your understanding of the world itself.
Like, that's not that valuable to people anymore for some strange reason.
Yeah, religious and then obviously very pro-Israel household.
And so you go on campus, that's a big issue there.
And so when you go up in a religious household, that comes along with certain values like hard work, reward and punishment.
There are certain things that are sort of baked.
The value of education is very big in the religious Jewish community.
And then when it comes to foreign policy issues, when you get on campus, and campus is a lot more variable when it comes to Israel, for example, then you realize that you might not be in friendly territory on some of those issues.
And you can tell because Israel's successful and its enemies are not.
So therefore, Israel must be super bad.
You saw a lot of this rhetoric, actually, during the last Gaza War, where people were saying things like, well, the Palestinians are just like Black Lives Matter.
And it's like, well, they're not exactly like Black Lives Matter.
Like, as much as I dislike Black Lives Matter and as much damage as they did, they weren't firing like 10,000 rockets into the middle of populated areas.
The problem is that they haven't had an election since 2006 in Hamasistan, in the Gaza Strip.
They haven't had an election in the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank since 2005, 2006. Mahmoud Abbas is in the 15th year of a four-year term in the West Bank.
And Hamas took over the Gaza Strip after Israel completely pulled out in 2005. So Israel completely pulled out of the Gaza Strip.
Israel has no military presence in the Gaza Strip, right?
I did a fairly long, actually a 45-minute informational video about the history of Israel going all the way back to biblical times, all the way forward through the Roman period, through the Ottoman Empire, through the British Empire, etc., To the modern era as well.
It's one of the sadder things in modern life is to see the rubble of those houses after they get missiled, you know, after they get smashed and, you know, you see the difference in the firepower that Israel has and the Iron Dome and all these things.
And what was the argument that they – because I've heard her discuss the whole Israel versus Palestine thing, and she seems about as educated about it as I am.
Well, again, I think it goes to there's this feeling broadly writ on the hard left that whenever there is an imbalance of power, that means that some deep injustice has been done.
If somebody is powerful and somebody has less power, the person who's powerful must have victimized the person with less power.
Again, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 in its entirety.
Well over 90% of the Palestinian population in the West Bank lives under complete Palestinian control in Area A of the West Bank, right?
Under Oslo, there's Area A, there's Area B, there's Area C. Area C is the area that's still under total Israeli control, right?
And if the Oslo Accords had proceeded with the Palestinians not pursuing terrorist attacks, then that would now presumably have been in the process of further negotiation.
It's not.
Area A has been under complete Palestinian control for a while, right?
If you actually drive in Israel, there's signs on the roads in Israel and the West Bank where it says the Israeli government can no longer guarantee your safety if you drive off this road and into this Palestinian city.
This is now Palestinian Authority-controlled territory.
You're taking your life in your hands if you drive into this area.
So it's a very difficult situation.
All I can say is that the number of Arabs living inside Israel, Israeli Arab citizens, who wish to be members of the Palestinian Authority-ruled areas or the Gaza Strip, is nearly zero.
You'd have to demonstrate certain prereqs, like you would if you were immigrating to the United States, presumably stricter, because they have to have security concerns.
But what about people that move into Palestinian territory?
What about settlers that take over people's homes?
I've seen these videos where people are complaining or having these mass grievances that Israel— So if we're talking about Sheikh Jarrah, that was the one that came up most recently.
The real reason for the Gaza war is because Mahmoud Abbas, who's the dictator slash president of the Palestinian Authority, who hasn't been up for election since 2006, Mahmoud Abbas He said that he was going to have an election in March, the first election they'd held in 15 years.
It became very clear to him that if he held an election, he was going to lose.
And he was going to lose to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who are both terrorist groups.
He was going to lose to that coalition.
And so he canceled the election.
And then to misdirect from the fact that he had canceled the election, he decided to essentially gin up an enormous controversy over the Temple Mount.
Now, I've been up to the Temple Mount.
The Temple Mount is the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, okay, and the Dome of the Rock.
It's also the holiest site in Judaism.
The Western Wall is not the holiest site in Judaism.
The actual Temple Mount is, because that's where Solomon's Temple used to be.
And that area is essentially run by the Islamic waqf.
So if you're a Jew, you're not allowed to pray up there.
By Israeli law.
If you go up there and you pray, you have to do it quietly or surreptitiously.
They have sort of a wink-wink, nod-nod situation going on.
But only Muslims are allowed to pray openly up on the Temple Mount.
And that's in Israeli territory because they wish to prevent further conflict.
So there are two issues that happened.
One was Sheikh Jarrah.
Sheikh Jarrah is a little outskirt of Jerusalem.
And there's a big legal controversy over essentially two apartment buildings.
Back in 1948, these had been Jewish-owned apartment buildings.
And then in 1948, there's a big war between the Jews and the Arabs.
The Jordanians end up in control of that area.
These apartment buildings are then lived in by some of the Palestinians.
No legal deed is ever granted to them by the Jordanian authorities.
Okay, if the Jordanian authorities had given them legal deed, they would have retained that sort of deed after 67. So in 67, there's another war.
There's like a war every 10 years in Israel.
In 67, there's another war.
Israel wins back all of Jerusalem.
They unify the city of Jerusalem, right?
That's why old and new Jerusalem are now in Israel.
So Sheikh Jarrah, a lot of the people who had owned the apartment buildings prior to 48, they now come in.
You have basically a legal dispute in which the Palestinians who have been living there for 15, 20 years because of the war, they say, we live here, we own it.
And the Jews say, here's our deed of property, we own it.
This goes through the Israeli court system.
There was an agreement that was reached where the Palestinians would have to pay rent to the Jews because the Jews still had the legal deed.
The Jordanians had transferred.
I know this is very complex, but this is how everything is over there.
Okay, and so bottom line is that the Palestinians there stopped paying rent and there's a court ruling that comes down saying you haven't paid rent in 10-15 years and now you're going to be evicted.
That started a war.
Okay, that's really what we're talking about.
Okay, and then there are a bunch of people who went up to, quote unquote, pray and also protest up on the Temple Mount.
They started assaulting Israeli soldiers from the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
There's video of them throwing rocks from the Al-Aqsa Mosque at the soldiers.
This turns into a major issue.
And then, again, all generated, at least in part by the Palestinian Authority, trying to distract from the fact they hadn't had an election.
And then Hamas gets in on the act because they have to be kind of louder than the Palestinian Authority.
They start firing rockets in the middle of Israel.
So the public reason, what they said is Israel is attempting to evict Palestinians from Palestinian territory, and this is just the beginning of the Judaization of all of Israel.
Now, again, if this were the Judaization of all of Israel, you'd have to explain why there are some...
Four million Palestinians who are living in this area?
Like, what you'll hear from critics of Israel is, Israel's engaged in some sort of genocide, Israel's trying to wipe out the...
It's the worst genocide in human history.
Like, the number of people who are living in the Palestinian areas is a multiple of what it was.
Yes, because if Hamas wished to make peace with Israel, then Israel would be perfectly willing to have an open economic relationship with the Gaza Strip.
Your perspective, the way you're describing it, is not...
I don't hear it anywhere.
What I'm hearing from the mainstream is essentially the narrative over the last few years, and even by some of my guests...
Has been that Israel is imposing its might on the Palestinian people.
They've created this open-air prison.
And the reason why Hamas exists in the first place is because the people feel powerless and they need something to counter this regime of the Israeli government that's controlling them and keeping them in this spot.
And they continue to encroach on Palestinian land and move their city and their people closer and closer to the point where they're going to eventually wipe out the Okay, it's crazy to think they're gonna wipe out the Palestinians.
And Israel made an offer in 2001 to give the Palestinians essentially all of the West Bank with some land swaps, because there's a lot of very populated areas in the West Bank, right?
So right now, again, not to get technical, Area A is about...
Area A is essentially...
Well, it's all Palestinians, and it's about 90% of the Palestinian population in the West Bank.
Area B is sort of jointly governed.
Area C is solely Israeli control and there are actually more Jews than Arabs living in Area C of the West Bank.
It's like 365,000 Jews, about 300,000 Arabs living in that part of the West Bank.
It's very complex.
Everything is very like right on top of each other, territorially speaking.
Israel in 2001 offered a full peace deal including shared control over the old city of Jerusalem, or at least parts of the, over East Jerusalem, I should say, not the old city, East Jerusalem.
Israel offered in 2008 a similar deal under Ehud Olmert.
Mahmoud Abbas got up and walked away from the table without a counteroffer.
Israel has multiple times offered to settle the conflict with a separate Palestinian state.
It has never materialized because the problem is that when you promise people what is promised in the actual Palestinian Authority original charter, which is the destruction of the state of Israel, havesies won't do it.
The fact is that the Palestinian Authority, which is the governing authority in the West Bank...
These are the moderates.
The Palestinian Authority is supposedly the moderates against Hamas.
It was founded in 1964. It's called the Palestine Liberation Organization.
1964, you'll notice, before 1967. In 1964, Jerusalem was under the control of the Jordanians.
The West Bank was under the control of the Jordanians.
So when you say you're going to liberate Palestine...
In 1964, you don't mean Jerusalem.
You mean Tel Aviv.
You mean Haifa, right?
You mean full Israeli cities.
So the notion that what you have here is an intractable conflict in which if Israel put down all of its guns tomorrow, there would be no Jews.
And if the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow, there would be a Palestinian state.
It's a fascinating conundrum because we spend so much time in America thinking about it and concerned about it, but very few people know the actual complicated details of it.
There are civil and human rights inside of Israel.
If you are living in the Palestinian authorities, there are not.
And when it comes to the domestic rule, I'm not talking about the foreign policy, the travel, or the ability to deliver weapons in or something, which again, Israel keeps control of that because they're afraid of the terrorism.
When you're talking about domestic law inside the Gaza Strip, you're talking about a place where gay people are literally dragged around the streets on the back of ropes.
I mean, it operates more like the Islamic Republic of Iran than it does like a full functioning Western democracy.
In Israel, one of the governing parties right now in the coalition is Arab.
There are Arab judges who sit on the Israeli Supreme Court.
Arabs comprise about 20% of the entire population of Israel.
Arabic is one of the official languages of the state of Israel.
So when people talk about discrimination, what they should note is that there are well over a million Arabs who live inside the state of Israel and are Israeli citizens.
And in the Palestinian areas, where they would hope to be a Palestinian state, there are zero Jews, and there is a reason for that.