Jan. 3, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:28:55
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| Alright people, we are live on the YouTube and we're kicking off 2018 with the editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire and a man whose facts don't care about your feelings, Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| How's it going dude? | ||
| I am doing well. | ||
| We just did a major download on Star Wars for the past half hour. | ||
| We did. | ||
| We should have been streaming. | ||
| We should have. | ||
| I'd much rather talk Star Wars than anything else we're going to talk about today. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to talk about empires building and crumbling and evil and good and light and dark. | ||
| I don't know how much is going to be related to the Force. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know either. | ||
| And how much is going to be related to that horrible subplot on Cantina Flight or whatever it is. | ||
| The gambling planet. | ||
| That was the gambling planet. | ||
| What were they doing? | ||
| Okay, first of all, when they free the kangaroo camel, okay, and then she finally says, now it's worth it. | ||
| It's like, you should die in a fiery ball of hate. | ||
| That was just, that entire subplot, just garbage. | ||
| All they had to do was change two things and the movie works. | ||
| They have to make Kylo call off the attack on the transports and Rey sides with him. | ||
| And then we don't know what's going on. | ||
| We don't know if there's a light side and a dark side. | ||
| We don't know if they've finally created the unified force or what the deal is. | ||
| And Luke and Leia are still alive out there going, what is going on? | ||
| It would've been so interesting. | ||
| They do that and also they just get rid of that entire horrifying subplot | ||
| that never should've happened and all could've been done away with | ||
| by Lord Dern just saying to Poe, first of all, I know I love Lord Dern's there, | ||
| but they should've been by Lord Dern saying to Poe, by the way, we're going to fly to that planet | ||
| right there that we're looking at, that one. | ||
| as opposed to will now have a 35 minute waste of my time. | ||
| Look, the lightspeed thing was pretty cool, but that should have been Ackbar. | ||
| You know, Finn should have- It's a trap! | ||
| Yeah, Finn should have died in both movies. | ||
| Not even one explanation about Snoke. | ||
| So here's my lightspeed thing, okay? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If that is a weapon, if lightspeed is a weapon, then why wouldn't they have used it in the first Star Wars film, right? | ||
| Ooh, against the Death Star. | ||
| Episode four, right? | ||
| They get in and it's this whole thing about how they have to shoot the photon torpedo down the hole. | ||
| Instead, why didn't they just go to that place and then shoot through the Death Star? | ||
|
unidentified
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Why? | |
| Do you ever get tired of being so factual, Shapiro? | ||
| Does it ever get exhausting for you? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's why we talk about Star Wars. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| All right, we got a lot to do here. | ||
| I do have a few of these. | ||
| I don't know that I'm gonna get to any of them. | ||
| Now, first off, I want you to know, in the years that we've been doing the Rubin Report, I've never had to spend money on security, but it cost me $600,000 to secure my home and this studio, my garage, just for you to be here. | ||
| That's how controversial it is. | ||
| I hope it's worth it. | ||
| I mean, that's a high cost. | ||
| I have the Mossad on the roof, the whole thing. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Well, thank you for that. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| I feel very secure. | ||
| Did you ever think, if I would have talked to Ben Shapiro five years ago, before I knew you and before so much changed in these last couple of years, that talking about the things that you talk about, that to me are, whether I agree or disagree, and we're gonna get into both of those, But that are basically mainstream conservative views. | ||
| Did you ever think you would be thought of as so controversial? | ||
| I can safely say that the last five years have been one giant WTF. | ||
| One giant WTF. | ||
| The idea that they would require over half a million dollars of security and hundreds of police officers for me to go and say that identity politics is stupid at Berkeley. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Do you see a moment when it happened? | ||
| I literally said that the year before with no security. | ||
| Right, so it's all bizarre and it just shows you that everyone has lost their minds. | ||
| I think that we're through the looking glass at this point. | ||
| Do you see a moment when it happened? | ||
| Because I think there's a couple points we can all look to that it started to happen and I think a little bit | ||
| of our old former friend or whatever you want to call him, Milo, had a lot to do with it and Trump | ||
| and just the trolling and it reaching out into the real world and all that. | ||
| I actually think that if I were gonna peg a moment when I think that it really, when America may have jumped | ||
| the shark, when things started to go awry, In a serious way, I probably would look to Ferguson, what happened in Ferguson, because having the President of the United States basically say that riots are justified, if you like what the rioters are standing for, even if the facts don't even support the story that the rioters are standing for, I think that drove people out of their minds on both sides. | ||
| I think that it made people feel like the narrative was more important than facts on one side, and if the narrative is more important than facts on your side, then it must be more important on my side too, and so we'll just hunker down in our respective identity politics bunkers and snipe at each other. | ||
| and get very angry over without any common basis of facts. | ||
| Because I mean, this is why I focus so much on facts. | ||
| And listen, I'm not going to pretend that every opinion I have is a fact. | ||
| But when there's a fact, I try to distinguish it from my opinion. | ||
| I'll try to give you the fact and then say, and now here's my opinion on the fact. | ||
| Once we got away from the common basis of facts, it's very difficult to have a conversation at all. | ||
| And that's why I think people are always surprised when I speak on campus. | ||
| And then when I speak with people who I disagree with on politics all the time | ||
| and we can have a nice cordial conversation so long as we agree what's a fact and what's an opinion. | ||
| But that's getting harder, right? | ||
| I mean, even just getting people to agree on the set of facts is becoming virtually impossible. | ||
| Well, people are offended so much by the fact that they feel like a fact is offensive to who I am as a human being. | ||
| And this is the one that I've run into the most, obviously. | ||
| Whenever I say, if I say that I think that, you know, poverty is largely caused by human behavior as opposed to by identity, then people take that as though I'm casting aspersions against their identity. | ||
| If I go on campus and I say that according to the Brookings Institute, right, just get married before you have babies, hold a job, graduate high school, and you won't be permanently poor in the United States, people get offended, because they say, well, but I'm poor, and I didn't fulfill maybe one of those rules, but I'm still a good person, so why would you say something like that? | ||
| So it's much easier, I think, to be offended than to take responsibility for your own actions. | ||
| And that has, unfortunately, I think, fallen on all sides, too. | ||
| Where do you think the conservatives then dropped the ball on this? | ||
| Like, the fact that so many people are turning to you right now, and I think I messaged you, my husband was at Home Depot and there was a guy working there who was, you know, a stock guy, Mexican stock guy, and he was blasting Ben Shapiro's show on his iPhone. | ||
| And every, like, you know, blasting it, no headphones, just blasting it, and it's like, I'm two aisles over and I'm like, is Shapiro over there? | ||
| But something happened, obviously, to conservatives that they got completely tuned out, and then you sort of have led this, I think, resurgence of this. | ||
| Is there a fault guy on that? | ||
| I mean, in terms of fault, I think that... | ||
| Conservatives have never spoken well in terms of morality in terms of with regard to politics. | ||
| They've always spoken in terms of statistics and data, and they do the Paul Ryan accountant routine. | ||
| And so when people think of conservatives, they think of one of two things. | ||
| They think of Paul Ryan with an accounting briefcase, or they think of Pat Buchanan or maybe Donald Trump saying something that they find offensive. | ||
| And those are the ways that people identify with conservatism or identify what conservatives are. | ||
| And what I've tried to do is say that there is a moral tenor to the facts. | ||
| Here's my moral narrative, but here are the facts that I'm drawing them from. | ||
| And I'm less concerned about how you feel about that than I am about whether it's true or not. | ||
| And that seems to be in an era where people's feelings are so high, somebody just coming out and saying, listen, your feelings don't matter to me, like at all. | ||
| And here's what I think is true, and if you like, you like, and if you don't, you don't. | ||
| I'm not coming out to try and hurt you or anything. | ||
| I'm just saying what I think is true. | ||
| If you're offended, tough badoogies. | ||
| That seems to have found a place for some people. | ||
| So I was actually gonna do this a little bit later, but since you just emphasized the feeling things, I thought we'd dive into this now. | ||
| So one of the things that a lot of people like you for, and I think a lot of people criticize you for, is some of the trans stuff. | ||
| Now, I think we're in complete agreement on what actual biology is, and, you know, in that very chair, and she sat on this side once, I had Blair White, you're probably familiar with Blair, right? | ||
| Okay, so Blair is a good friend of mine, she just had dinner here. | ||
| She, look, biologically, she is a man, and I think she would... As much as he acknowledges it, yes. | ||
| Okay, so that's the part that I want to talk to you about. | ||
| So when I say that, when I say she. | ||
| I figured you, I figured that that is, which is why. | ||
| Because I think we can get to a place here that might actually be positive for people that view this both ways. | ||
| So when I say she on that, I, to me that is, I know this person, I respect this person, I like this person, and I'm just showing them a little bit of grace and dignity what I'm doing. | ||
| Now, if the government, so if you take like the Jordan Peterson problem in Canada, if the government was saying to me, you have to use this pronoun, now I have a major problem with that. | ||
| But your knee-jerk response to that is where I think the Conservatives maybe are missing something here, and I think you can bridge this gap, and I want to get you there. | ||
| Well, that big damn deal. | ||
| So your desire to say he, I just think... That's only because I'm a public figure. | ||
| Meaning that when we're discussing policy issues in public and when we're discussing whether a man is a man or a woman is a woman, which is the reason you're having Blair on, right? | ||
| If Blair were not discussing trans issues, unless you were talking tax policy with Blair, which is probably a secondary priority, I would think, then the reason you're having Blair on is that you can talk specifically about these issues. | ||
| And so in the context of discussing those issues, I think that it is very necessary to draw definitional lines. | ||
| And that doesn't change based on who I'm talking to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, like, I wouldn't—and there are issues of self-identity, and then there are issues of what is the definition that we are currently using. | ||
| Like, if Rachel Dolezal—we're sitting across from her. | ||
| Rachel Dolezal thinks that Rachel Dolezal is a black person, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I assume that you wouldn't say Rachel Dolezal is a black person in front of Rachel Dolezal just to make Rachel Dolezal feel better. | ||
| You'd probably say, no, you're a white person. | ||
| Why are you making the argument that you're a black person? | ||
| Okay, so this is where you're giving me a good dose of Ben Shapiro logic. | ||
| So if I was to compare these two, right? | ||
| Rachel Dolezal is white, says she's black. | ||
| No one in their right mind thinks she's black. | ||
| I don't, so this is, so it's, I got you. | ||
| You're talking about something. | ||
| I call Blair Blair, by the way. | ||
| If Blair doesn't want to be called he, then I'll just call Blair Blair, right? | ||
| But, and I'm happy to do that in interpersonal relations, but it's a different thing. | ||
| We're constantly interacting in the public sphere, and so interacting in the public sphere means that I have to use these definitions because otherwise the way the game is played is the minute that I say that Blair White is she, then it's that I'm now acknowledging that Blair White is a female, which Blair White is not. | ||
| Okay, so I'm glad you said that. | ||
| So, okay, so you're making a distinction between the public way we talk about things and sort of your own... | ||
| Private interactions with people. | ||
| Private dignity or interactions or something. | ||
|
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100%. | |
| And I think that's important, because that's the part here where I see this happening. | ||
| I mean, you know this personally, right? | ||
| You and I have talked about public policy with regard to same-sex marriage. | ||
| You know that when it comes to same-sex marriage, I don't believe that same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage are on a par, even though I don't think the government should be involved in that. | ||
| But I'd have you and your husband over to my house, right? | ||
| I've been to dinner with you and your husband. | ||
| It's different talking about public policy or how you judge society. | ||
| And we judge your marriage accordingly. | ||
| You should. | ||
| It's stellar, by the way. | ||
| My wife is a charming human being. | ||
| So is your husband, by the way. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| In terms of that part, though, do you think it in some way does you a slight disservice? | ||
| That you're staking out a position, that I understand why you're staking it out, and also, right, you're staking it out sort of because your enemies will take advantage of it, if you're not intellectually honest, and I respect that and I understand that, but the other piece of this, to me, and maybe this is where I just still have a little guilty liberal in me, you know what I mean? | ||
| Perhaps it is, but where I see this as sort of, this is just sort of grace and dignity, and where I want to judge people as the individual that they are, And I would also like to judge people, obviously, as an individual, which is why I say that when we're not in public setting, then, you know, things may change. | ||
| But the entire purpose of bringing people forward to discuss trans issues who are trans themselves, the entire intent of doing that is to prevent you from having an honest conversation sometimes about the issue. | ||
| Not because of the expertise, per se, because there are plenty of experts on trans issues who are not themselves trans. | ||
| I mean, there are professors who I think know a lot more about trans issues than some of the trans spokespeople who are out there who are making some absurd claims. | ||
| And we can argue about the data, but usually the reason that you have this argument with somebody who's trans, or a trans advocate who happens to be trans, is specifically so that there is this element of shame that's injected into the conversation where, if you really felt that way, would you call this person a he? | ||
| And the answer is, yes, I would call that person a he, because the person's a he. | ||
| Yeah, as you say, that's where I think I'm polarizing, right? | ||
| That's where my popularity may come from in some of these areas, and it's also where my unpopularity may come from in some of these areas. | ||
| But it's not meant to be, I'm here to offend you, it's we are literally here discussing the issue of whether you are a he or a she. | ||
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Right. | |
| That is the entire basis of this conversation, is are you a he or a she? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I'm not going to grant you the point in the middle of a conversation about this, By giving you the opposite of what my opinion is on the issue. | ||
| Like, that completely defeats the purpose of the conversation. | ||
| Right, and I do understand that line of thinking. | ||
| It's just so interesting to me because you're conceding the fact that because as a public person you're held to a different level of honesty, or at least in your own mind, right? | ||
| Like, you're trying to be honest. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, exactly. | |
| You're trying to be intellectually honest. | ||
| It would be interesting if we had this conversation and neither of us were public people at all, if maybe your thoughts on honesty would be slightly different. | ||
| I think my thoughts would probably be almost entirely the same. | ||
| But I think the question is, what level of politeness is necessary for a public conversation about a public issue? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's why I don't like the game that's played by the media. | ||
| This is the problem that I had with, you know, when originally what launched me to prominence was the Piers Morgan interview. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| It was my problem with Piers Morgan doing the whole, here's a gunshot victim. | ||
| Now talk to the gunshot victim about gun control. | ||
| And the answer is, well, why do I have to talk to a gunshot victim? | ||
| Why can't we just talk about the policy? | ||
| Whenever a shame tactic is brought into the conversation as a way to make me not give my true opinion because I'm supposed to be ashamed of my true opinion in front of this person, I'm not ashamed of my opinion and I'll say exactly what my opinion is in front of this person and the camera. | ||
| It changes the conversation slightly when you're having a public discussion about a public issue with a public person. | ||
| Yeah, how much of this is just the way that, I mean, it's that type of thing that happened with Piers Morgan that I'm sure most of these people have seen, it's like that the media has used shame, it's used soundbites, it's used selective editing, all of the tricks that we know about that you and I are constantly mocking CNN for, that they brought this upon themselves. | ||
| I mean, they did, and one of the things that I will admit, I get a kick out of calling out their bullshit on this kind of stuff, that when you have, When you have Jimmy Kimmel bringing out his kid and using his kid as a lever for his politics, that bothers me no end in the same way that the gunshot victim bothers me, in the same way that a trans advocate who may not know that much about actual biology talking about trans issues but it's supposed to be from a position of sympathy. | ||
| Injection of emotion into political issues does not make things better. | ||
| It makes things worse, typically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For people that didn't see your bit on that, can you just do like a quick two-minute download on what Kimmel did and why you thought it was so ridiculous? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I thought it was disgusting. | ||
| I mean, Jimmy Kimmel, who is, from what I hear, I mean, he's friends with Adam Carollo, a guy with whom I'm very friendly. | ||
| You know, he seems like a nice person, but what he does is he brings his kid into it | ||
| by suggesting that his kid, who had open heart surgery at Children's Hospital with Dr. Vaughn | ||
| Starnes, that his child was a good reason why Obamacare should be upheld in current | ||
| form. | ||
| Now, Jimmy Kimmel doesn't know anything about Obamacare. | ||
| It's obvious he knows nothing about Obamacare. | ||
| And then, after the Republicans were trying to repeal part of Obamacare, then he actually brought his child on air with him to make the case that they shouldn't repeal Obamacare. | ||
| He actually brought his little kid, who's gone through surgery. | ||
| Now, I have a few problems with this. | ||
| Number one, I have two kids who are under the age of four. | ||
| I would never inject them in a public conversation, ever. | ||
| I don't even post public pictures of them because I don't think they should be subjected to that. | ||
| I think using children like that is cruel. | ||
| Beyond that, My daughter had an open heart surgery at the same hospital with the same doctor. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And I've never used that as an excuse for my opinions on Obamacare because just because my daughter had an experience, a medical experience, and thank God, by the way, she's totally fine. | ||
| She'll never have to have another surgery. | ||
| She's great. | ||
| Starnes is fantastic. | ||
| Great hospital. | ||
| Good. | ||
| But just because... | ||
| I went through an experience does not make me an expert on public policy. | ||
| If I were going to debate Obamacare, I would just tap in Havoc Roy at that point. | ||
| I'd rather tap in somebody who actually studies the policy. | ||
| And this is one of the things that drives me nuts. | ||
| We've reached such a point, we talked at the beginning about narrative versus fact. | ||
| We've reached the point where if you have a narrative on a particular topic, this gives you credibility. | ||
| As opposed to, you have the fact, you've studied, you've read a book. | ||
| If you've done any of those things, that's secondary to, but it's not my lived experience. | ||
| Well, your lived experience is not statistically significant. | ||
| Sorry to break it to you, but your anecdotal experience in life may not be a good. | ||
| It may be an outlier, maybe an anomaly, or it may be representative. | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| But your specific experience, while may tug on my heartstrings, I don't know what that has to say about public policy decisions we all have to make together other than attempting to shame me into feeling bad for you. | ||
| So now I'm supposed to not look now and I'm supposed to kind of overlook the logical holes in your argument. | ||
| Yeah, do you think some of this is just brain chemistry, like that some of us are simply wired to think the way you think, where you sort of want logic and reason and you want to really go to it and you'll sort of go where it gets you, where I think most people, at least most people these days, are wired the other way, where it's like we're in this constant state of like, what happened when and where am I supposed to be outraged? | ||
| Like, it's actually something going on in the brain, or it's just the way we think, perhaps. | ||
| I mean, I think there's some of both. | ||
| I mean, look, I think everyone is drawn to narrative more than they are drawn to fact. | ||
| It's just a typical rule. | ||
| I mean, this is why people spend literally hundreds of dollars a year going to movies. | ||
| I was gonna say, this is why we could have done three hours on Star Wars. | ||
| And I would have preferred it, right? | ||
| I would also rather talk with you about narrative story, because it's more fun to talk about narrative story, and it's more engaging. | ||
| It's why people love the Trump reality show, because it's more narrative story than it is necessary. | ||
| I feel like the amount of time that you or I spend talking about the actual policy in | ||
| and out of tax reform, it's going to be a lot less than the amount of time we spend | ||
| on Trump's Twitter feed, because narrative is just more interesting to human beings than | ||
| anything else. | ||
| That's just the way it is. | ||
| But the question is, when it comes time for us to make good decisions about our own lives, | ||
| are we more concerned about the narrative of the grocer and what he's gone through, | ||
| or are we more interested in the price of the box of cereal? | ||
| And so we're going to need to make these decisions on public policy by moving the narrative out | ||
| And so I've spent a lot of my time trying to separate the two, trying to say, OK, listen, I can tell you stories too. | ||
| We can do stories all day long, but I don't think it gets us anywhere. | ||
| This is why I hate when people say, well, you're denying my lived experience. | ||
| You're denying my experience. | ||
| I'm not denying your experience. | ||
| I'm denying that your experience is representative of the public policy that we should follow. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| This is why whenever I say, when I'm talking about police bias, for example, and somebody says, well, you're denying that I've been discriminated against by the police. | ||
| No, you may very well have been discriminated against by the police. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I wasn't there. | ||
| I don't have all the records. | ||
| I don't have it on tape. | ||
| I don't know what the cop was doing five minutes before and five minutes after. | ||
| I don't know whether he's just a jackass to everyone and you happen to be black. | ||
| Like, I don't know any of that. | ||
| But I do know that the statistics show that the number of arrest reports Directly correlate with the number of arrests, with the suspect descriptions being reported by people who have actually been victimized by crime, which suggests to me that there is no wild disproportion between who the cops are looking for and what they are told to look for by the victims of crime. | ||
| But people don't want to hear that, right? | ||
| When you say that, then it's like, well, no, you're saying that. | ||
| I've never experienced this. | ||
| Again, you may very well have experienced it, or we live in a subjective world. | ||
| Maybe it's possible you misinterpreted events. | ||
| Then that's always one that we never want to think about. | ||
| Maybe we just misinterpreted the event that we were a part of. | ||
| Maybe it wasn't that the cop was discriminatory. | ||
| Maybe it's the cop's a jerk. | ||
| Maybe he's having a bad day. | ||
| Maybe he's that way to everyone. | ||
| Right, we think we can know the absolute truth about all of these stories all the time, and when we find one that doesn't fit our narrative, we ignore that one. | ||
| That's one of the most interesting things that I think the media does now, where they pick which stories to ignore as much as the ones they decide to blow up, and it's like, that is a version of fake news to I totally agree. | ||
| To take perfect example, the media will focus endlessly about Michael Brown, but there was that horrible story at that hotel, I'm trying to remember where it was, where the cop legitimately gunned down a guy who was trying to surrender to him. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And it's a white guy. | ||
| So it's a white guy? So instead of us having, or Kelly Thomas out here in California, right, | ||
| the homeless man who was beaten to death by the cops, right, instead of us having a conversation | ||
| about whether maybe we have a problem, if we do have a problem with the police, maybe | ||
| the problem with the police is in generalized training to respond to crisis scenarios, instead | ||
| it turns into, oh no, it's endemic of American racism going back to slavery. And it's like, | ||
| well, show me the data and then we can have that conversation, but don't give me Ta-Nehisi | ||
| Coates talking points about black bodies and tell me that that's an argument because it's | ||
| It's interesting because the one you mentioned in the hallway with the cop from just two months ago or so, I mean, it's a flat-out execution. | ||
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It's brutal. | |
| I mean, for people that haven't seen it, I don't know that you should watch it because it's pretty horrible to watch. | ||
| But it's like, what I wonder on a story like that, because you're right, it didn't catch the national narrative the way it should, it's like, look, somebody at CNN saw that. | ||
| So how does that not then get to, I'm just picking somebody, how does that not get to Jake Tapper, for example, and he's like, let's show it. | ||
| Now maybe he did. | ||
| Yeah, maybe he did. | ||
| So I don't know specifically. | ||
| The disproportion between the coverage of that and the reaction to that. | ||
| So what do you chalk that up to as someone that's the editor-in-chief of a site? | ||
| It's not as narratively interesting. | ||
| The narrative that's being pushed by the left is that the cops are racist and they're shooting black people disproportionately. | ||
| But do you think that's just sort of collective hive mind at these organizations? | ||
| Like, they just hire people that sort of ideologically buy into all of that? | ||
| I mean, they know it gets ratings. | ||
| They know it's interesting. | ||
| It's not as interesting a story. | ||
| Cops do something wrong is not as interesting a story as racist cops gunned down black men. | ||
| And also, they know that the response from the public is not quite the same. | ||
| When a white guy gets shot, For by the police for unjustified reasons, because there is no long racial history of white people beating on white people. | ||
| I mean, the truth is there is, right? | ||
| The vast majority of white people who are murdered are murdered by white people. | ||
| But because there is no long, contentious racial history among whites in the same way there is between whites and black people, they know that if a story like that is on the evening news, There aren't going to be 100,000 people in the streets protesting that or 10,000 or 5,000 or 100 protesting that in Orange County for any severe length of time. | ||
| But in Ferguson, if they tell that story for two days, there's going to be a full scale riot and then they can bring the camera to the riot. | ||
| So I don't think that it's I don't think it's quite as malicious as Nightcrawler. | ||
| I don't think it's like they're trying to set up the scenario just so they can cover the aftermath. | ||
| But I think that there is a sense in which they feel like it is more newsworthy if it's more likely to lead to a conflagration. | ||
| And so that actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. | ||
| Right, it's more newsworthy because it's more likely to lead to a conflagration, then they're more likely to cover it, leading to a conflagration, which makes it more newsworthy, which makes it more likely to lead to a conflagration. | ||
| So this thing is just constantly feeding itself, basically, and everyone wants these clicks and all that. | ||
| How do you, as someone that not only is doing your own show, but you're the editor-in-chief of the site, you've got many writers now, and you guys just got new offices, and you have shows and all that. | ||
| Yeah, 100 billion page views a month. | ||
| Yeah, you guys are doing great. | ||
| How do you manage to not become part of the problem in that? | ||
| I mean, it's hard because there's stuff that people want to click on and stuff people don't. | ||
| I mean, you try to exercise as much editorial discretion as possible, so I will knock down stories that I think are not completely newsworthy or that I think are badly sourced, but I think that You know, as a conservative side, a lot of what we do is counter narrative. | ||
| So a lot of what we do is covering CNN, covering a story wrong, right? | ||
| A lot of what we will do is point out the hypocrisy and we'll cover like we have a guy, a couple of guys on staff who are obsessed with Las Vegas shootings, and they'll keep coming back to why the media just completely forgotten about the war shooting in American history. | ||
| I mean, truly forgot about it. | ||
| We had about three days of it. | ||
| Nobody's still clear on almost anything. | ||
| There's been almost no video release. | ||
| The story's been shifting. | ||
| We don't know even what happened inside the hotel, like who got shot. | ||
| The whole thing's crazy. | ||
| But what does that say about it? | ||
| You think that's just Twitter generation, like our attention spans are so short? | ||
| I mean, our attention span is definitely short. | ||
| I got one of these notes about one of my videos being too long the other day, and the video's 68 seconds long. | ||
| Well, then we're in a lot of trouble here. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But some of it is attention span stuff. | ||
| And some of it is just what catches your eye and what people click on. | ||
| And there is a disconnect between what people are interested in and necessarily what is, I think, in a more objective sense, newsworthy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, what's going on in Iran is a lot more newsworthy than what's going on, you know, in Donald Trump's Twitter feed with North Korea, obviously. | ||
| But the coverage has been not proportionate. | ||
| Yeah, so I actually want to touch on both of those, so let's jump to Iran first. | ||
| One of the things on the media front of this is that it's becoming pretty obvious that the BuzzFeeds of the world, and HuffPo, and CNN, and much to my chagrin, the New York Times, they're sort of all pro-regime right now. | ||
| It's pretty insane. | ||
| They're actually against the people. | ||
| And who's for the people suddenly? | ||
| It's those evil Republicans, those evil conservatives. | ||
| You guys are suddenly all for freedom of all of these people. | ||
| But I thought you were the bad guys. | ||
| Tell me out here, Shapiro. | ||
| I think there are two things that are happening that are both really egregious. | ||
| One is that anything Trump does must be evil, right? | ||
| And conversely, that anything Obama did must be great. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And because one of Obama's agenda items was making Iran a regional power, then we have to defend his agenda at all costs. | ||
| The only way to do that is to say that the regime was never fragile. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| Because then it would be on Obama to try to push it over. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| No, the regime was always going to be there. | ||
| It was always durable. | ||
| It was just a question of trying to moderate them. | ||
| And that's what Obama was trying to do. | ||
| So if Trump would just try to moderate them instead of trying to push them, then things would all be better. | ||
| Why doesn't he just shut up? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So that's angle number one. | ||
| Angle number two is- Which is patently a lie. | ||
| It's all nonsense. | ||
| Did you see that tweet from John Brennan, the former CIA head? | ||
| And basically he was saying, well look, this is because of the way Trump acted | ||
| for the last year, if we would have only let the moderates do their thing. | ||
| The moderates never do their thing. | ||
| I mean, the moderates- I'm not saying we should intervene. | ||
| I'm just saying let the people- The moderates were legitimately shooting people | ||
| in the streets in 2009, right? | ||
| I mean, at the same time that Obama was talking about Hassan Rouhani was a moderate, | ||
| and he was the new moderate regime. | ||
| He's lying to the American people blatantly, right? | ||
| I mean, Ben Rhodes admitted they were lying to the American people blatantly about the raw nuclear deal. | ||
| They're shooting Neta in the streets at the same time. | ||
| So the whole thing is crazy. | ||
| But that's number one. | ||
| Number two, there's always been this aspect of the far left. | ||
| And I don't want to attribute it to the entire left because I think there are a lot of liberals | ||
| who don't feel this way. | ||
| But there are a few people on the hard left who actually believe that America's a nefarious, | ||
| negative force in the world. | ||
| And so that means the Iranians are just, the Iranian government is standing up to this brutal regime. | ||
| So when you see Ayatollah Khamenei tweeting out, Black Lives Matter is talking points, which he did. | ||
| Literally two days ago, he literally tweeted out about how U.S. | ||
| police forces shoot men, women, and children who are black for no reason at all. | ||
| And you're thinking, well, that sounds an awful lot like leaders of BLM. | ||
| It's because he knows that there are a bunch of people in the United States who are happy to crap all over the legacy of the United States and suggest that Trump, regime Trump, is going to be just like regime Iran. | ||
| All these people who are marching the streets wearing handmade tails outfits. | ||
| These are the people who drive me up a freaking wall. | ||
| I didn't vote for Trump, right? | ||
| I wasn't supportive of Trump during the election cycle. | ||
| It doesn't matter to suggest that we are on the verge of Mike Pence making some woman of Mike and then dressing her in that crazy outfit and that we're about to become Iran. | ||
| There are analysts on the far left who are suggesting this sort of thing. | ||
| And then they say, OK, well, then Trump can't talk because, I mean, look how terrible things are here. | ||
| And even people I respect, like Maggie Haberman, who I think is a very good reporter at The New York Times, Maggie Haberman tweeted out something. | ||
| And I'm not sure she meant to do it. | ||
| She sort of clarified later. | ||
| But what she originally tweeted out. | ||
| Oh, this is the Trump. | ||
| The Trump blocking thing on Twitter, right? | ||
| Where Trump had tweeted out that Iran is legitimately blocking Twitter and Facebook and all social media across Iran. | ||
| They're blocking internet sites across Iran to prevent the dissemination of information. | ||
| And so Maggie Haberman tweeted out that Trump had blocked a few people from the real Donald Trump account. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'd tweet out like, these are not alike in any way. | ||
| I don't like that Trump blocks people. | ||
| I don't even block people on Twitter, right? | ||
| I mute people on Twitter. | ||
| I do block people. | ||
| Well, yeah, I don't block them because, you know, if they wanna, I think mute is much more frustrating to them, frankly. | ||
| Like, if they can see me and they think they're tweeting at me and that I care, then it's, I just enjoy the idea of them furiously tweeting in the middle of the night and I have no, I can't even see it. | ||
| But I do- I do like that one, too. | ||
| My policy on the block, though, is sometimes people are dedicated to just fighting with people who are trying to have an honest conversation. | ||
|
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Oh, that's fair. | |
| So that's the only way you can really remove them from that. | ||
| Okay, but in any case- Let's put that aside. | ||
| But Trump blocking people, he's the President of the United States, he should probably have better things to do. | ||
| It's not something that I'm a big fan of, But to equate him blocking some people he doesn't like on Twitter, who can legitimately just open an incognito window or go to Google and just Twitter, Google Trump's account, and equating that with Iran shutting down the Internet is totally insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you see the one from Samantha Power also? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| That was another doozy, implying that, you know, well, Trump doesn't want to let any of these people in here. | ||
| There's literally, I mean, for a guy who likes logic, this is a jump that's just a bit too much. | ||
| Well, I mean, not only is it a jump, it's a backwards jump, right? | ||
| I mean, she's actually leaping backwards, because the whole point of changing Iranian policy is so people don't want to leave and come here. | ||
| That's the whole reason, right? | ||
| If you want to knock over the regimes, that there's a better regime in place, that people are not coming here, and we don't have to deal with an influx of people we can't vet, then it seems to me that Trump should be doing exactly what he's doing. | ||
| Samantha Power should be one to talk. | ||
| She writes a book about genocide and then oversees one in Syria. | ||
| I mean, it's just, it's all insipid. | ||
| So when we do the foreign policy thing, I think this is where you and I have a bit of a difference of opinion. | ||
| For me, I'm not purely an isolationist and I believe in strong defense so that we don't have to use it would be my general policy. | ||
| I believe in a big stick, that's it. | ||
| I don't think we should be doing regime change. | ||
| Wait, are you for the U.S. | ||
| doing regime change? | ||
| I'm not for invasion of Iran. | ||
| I'm for doing whatever we can covertly to knock over the regime. | ||
| So basically helping the popular uprising. | ||
| So my feeling is we should forward American interest by any means necessary, and sometimes those means are too costly, and sometimes those means are not too costly. | ||
| And that's a calculation that you have to do on a case-by-case basis. | ||
| But America, as the most moral force on planet Earth, Whatever we do to pursue our interests and preserve our strength, and those are sometimes at odds, is something that we should do. | ||
| For example, I was not in favor of the invasion of Libya. | ||
| I was not in favor of getting deeply involved in Syria in the first place. | ||
| I was critical of President Obama for the implication that he was going to get involved in Syria. | ||
| I didn't really see what our interest was there. | ||
| The same thing is certainly true of Libya. | ||
| So I'm not full Bush, you know, kind of conservative wing. | ||
| I'm more of a realist than that, I think. | ||
| What do you make of the fact that we do these things like Libya, which we call the kinetic military action? | ||
| No one had even ever heard of that phrase before, but suddenly kinetic military action, | ||
| or Syria where it's obviously a war. | ||
| But we don't ever declare war anymore. | ||
| We've ceded all of this power to the executive. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm in favor of the use of the War Powers Act. | ||
| I think the Congress should come back in and vote. | ||
| I think I'm on Rand Paul's side of that, even if I'm not on his side generally with regard to foreign policy. | ||
| But has the ship sailed on all of that stuff? | ||
| So, like, we can discuss this intellectually, and Rand Paul can keep fighting for it and keep losing. | ||
| But, like, is it really over in terms of things working the way they're supposed to? | ||
| Yes, that's over. | ||
| I mean, Trump campaign basically is a neo-isolationist in many ways, and then he's basically I mean, I think a lot of this sounds a lot easier in philosophy than it is in practice. | ||
| then it looks like a happy canon. | ||
| You could probably make the same argument for Obama that he actually governed in a lot of ways like Bush, | ||
| that we did tons of things all over the world and kicked a lot of people out of the country | ||
| and all sorts of things. | ||
| I mean, I think a lot of this sounds a lot easier in philosophy than it is in practice. | ||
| I mean, I'm assuming that they get some information from military intel that suggests to them | ||
| that there's a higher risk of danger that requires military intervention. | ||
| I don't think it's that everyone who steps in the Oval Office is shot in the butt with a Woodrow Wilson injection and suddenly you want to invade everywhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just, for me, I guess it's the idea that if any country, if Canada tomorrow put two ships, or forget ships, if they started launching a couple of rockets from Toronto into Detroit, We would say it's an act of war, even if it wasn't the government. | ||
| It was like some group, some offshoot group there. | ||
| So it's like, if we park boats outside of Syria and we're shooting things in and droning and all that other stuff, it's like, to me, that's an act of war, if we're being honest here. | ||
| You're right, it's clearly war. | ||
| I mean, the only question is whether that's in our interest or not, because the question of what is a declared war versus a not declared war, that ship sailed a long time ago, because now that we've basically declared everything the president does in exigent circumstance, Then everything is immediate and necessary. | ||
| We have to fire first, and Congress gets to ask questions later. | ||
| Even the War Powers Resolution suggests that there's a 60-day period where the president can do what he wants before Congress even gets to cut off funds and intervene, basically. | ||
| I think, unfortunately, the legislative impact on war-making power has basically gone by the wayside. | ||
| Yeah, this is where the libertarians just could never get it together, right? | ||
| Like, if they would have, and we would have cared about the separation of powers and all that, that things would be a little bit different? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that, again, most Americans, and this is just a general movement, have signed off on the idea that if the government's doing something that they like, they don't care how the government goes about doing it. | ||
| And that's a real problem. | ||
| I see very few people who are honest enough to say, even if the government is doing something that I like, if I don't like how they're doing it, then I'm not willing to go along with it. | ||
| The means actually matter here, but not for most people, I think. | ||
| Do you think the reverse of that is actually starting to become true, where I see this new collection of people that we're sort of in this mix, this 20 or 30 people doing kind of what we're doing, where it's like, I think what people like about it is they see we're at least trying to be intellectually honest. | ||
| We will make mistakes, we will get things wrong, people will love to call us out on those things. | ||
| And I hope that when we get things wrong, we correct them and apologize for them. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But do you think that actually people want that? | ||
| I mean, it shows your rise in this past year was so, you've been doing this for a long time, obviously, but something happened in 2017, and I think it was directly because people are sick of the nonsense. | ||
| They actually want, and no one's giving it to them in mainstream, so they'll go to Joe Rogan and Sam Harris, who have many different views that you have, and then they'll come to me and go to Sargon of Akkad or whoever else it is. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| It's pretty cool, right? | ||
| It is really neat. | ||
| It is really neat. | ||
| And I like that a lot. | ||
| And I do agree with you. | ||
| I think that if I had to chalk up sort of what's happened over the last year in terms of my brand to anything, it's that I hope I've tried to be as intellectually honest as possible, especially in the era when everybody seems to be doing the rah-rah loyalist routine. | ||
| You know, I coined good Trump, bad Trump, which has now become a thing. | ||
| I mean, we had a jingle halfway through 2016. | ||
| So the idea that we're trying to at least give you my honest take on the issues, and I'll be honest and upfront about my biases, I think that's something that people appreciate. | ||
| It's true for you, too. | ||
| I mean, obviously, there are people... I've almost separated the media into two groups. | ||
| People who try and people who don't. | ||
| And it doesn't matter if I agree with them. | ||
| If they're people who I think are trying, like they're at least trying to look beyond their own knee-jerk reaction to events, toward what are the facts on the ground, and then make a decision, then I give them credit for that, even if we disagree, which is why I can have a really good conversation with Sam Harris, and we agree about nothing on religion or atheism, and we can have a really cordial conversation specifically about those issues, because we will acknowledge, I think, both what is fact and what is not fact, even if we disagree on the conclusions we reach from that. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so I wanna get into a little bit of what you and Sam did, and he just posted the audio on Monday, so hopefully some people that are watching this have seen it already. | ||
| But I want you to do a little psychology on me for a moment, because you made a comment about- I don't know why the beard. | ||
|
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They love the beard, it has its own Twitter, come on, man. | |
| You've got the Mark Hamill going on, young Mark Hamill, old Mark Hamill. | ||
| Young Mark Hamill better than old grumpy Luke, but that's separate. | ||
| So before you made a distinction, which I always try to make between the hard left and the sort of modern left and liberals. | ||
| And you know that I've hung my hat on this classical liberal idea. | ||
| In a way, do you think that, like, I feel like what I'm getting to, and maybe it's gonna hit me in this next year, is that I think I've done a nice job of trying to clean up what's going on on the left, and I think I've helped some of the liberals kind of escape leftism and some of that stuff. | ||
| But it's pretty obvious to me at this point that, even for the disagreements that we may have, that my allies in this space basically are mostly conservatives, really, for me, more libertarians at this point. | ||
| And I'm using a definition of liberalism, which, although correct, that classical liberalism is about the individual and all that, I'm using a definition from, say, 1940, where now, even if I'm 100% right, that I'm sort of swimming in a thing that I can't get out of here. | ||
| Yeah, welcome to the club. | ||
| Yeah, I guess you feel that too. | ||
| No, but I think it's true that you, you know, in a certain way have swum over to a side that you weren't intending to. | ||
| I mean, by trying to be intellectually honest and by trying to say that you are for the individual and not the collective, this has brought you to a couple of places. | ||
| One, away from the left, and two, you've been embraced by a couple of groups on the right. | ||
| One is the group of people who I hope are intellectually honest and say we have a lot in common because even if we disagree on specific policy, We all agree that the individual is the essence of the modern world. | ||
| But I think that what we all have to be careful of is the reactionary bent on both sides of our politics, which says, OK, Dave Rubin used to be on the left, and now he's hitting the left. | ||
| And that means I love Dave Rubin now. | ||
| Right, and the same thing is true for me from the left, right? | ||
| Because I wasn't very pro-Trump, and that meant that there were a bunch of people who were on the left who were like, suddenly, oh, I'll take a look at Shapiro. | ||
| And then they're surprised when I'm conservative, and say, well, I didn't change, really. | ||
| Like, you're perceiving the world through a prism that seems slightly flawed. | ||
| In the same way that I think a lot of people on the right perceive the world through the prism of the anti-left, which is a distinction that I don't like. | ||
| I don't think that conservative and anti-left are the same thing. | ||
| point that I've been making recently in the last year. | ||
| Which we see a ton of, just because of the way the online media world works. | ||
| I mean, Rush Limbaugh, who I love and who's the granddaddy of talk radio and all of that, you know, Rush changed the name of the Advanced Institute for Conservative Studies to the Advanced Institute for Anti-Left Studies in the middle of last year's election cycle. | ||
| And I thought, or two years ago, election cycle now, and I thought, that's not Yeah. | ||
| a change for the positive. I don't think that's a good thing. I think the conservatism and | ||
| anti-left are not the same thing. The Nazis were anti-left, they were not conservative. | ||
| There's a big difference. And by the same token, I think that the left has now decided | ||
| to recast the world purely in terms of Trump. So if you're anti-Trump, this means you're | ||
| an ally now. | ||
| And it's like, well. | ||
| So Romney now is an ally, even though they hated Romney. | ||
| Right, Jeff Flake votes with Trump 95% of the time, but he's an ally of the left now, because he's critical of how Trump tweets. | ||
| If that's your prism, I would humbly suggest that you really need to get a new prism, because your prism sucks. | ||
| It really does suck. | ||
| I mean, you could even tell, because now it's pretty obvious that Romney's gonna run for Senate in Utah, and he changed his Twitter location and all that. | ||
| And it's like, they hated him before, Binder's full of women, he's a rich elitist, but now, because he hates Trump, the media's gonna love him. | ||
| And it's even right now, just as we're doing this right now, there's all this stuff breaking about Bannon, and Trump hates Bannon now, and I bet you what's gonna happen over the next couple of months. | ||
| MSNBC will start interviewing Bannon, absolutely. | ||
| You can make a cottage industry out of being David Brock in this particular environment, right? | ||
| Just flip sides and boom. | ||
| It would not fully surprise me if Steve Bannon were campaigning for Bernie Sanders. | ||
| by this time next year, because that's the dynamic of our politics now, | ||
| is people ping-ponging from one side to the other, just off of the reactionary nature of each side. | ||
| And that's- So we're basically fighting | ||
| like a Terminator from T2, right? | ||
| Like we're fighting this thing that's constantly morphing in front of us, | ||
| because we're trying to basically, you know, stay ourselves, stay within something. | ||
| This thing's just changing at every moment, because it's not based in reality. | ||
| But I think that's also why, you know, not for us to be arrogant, but I think that's why we're doing well, is it feels like people are looking for things to grab onto, and in an environment where everything is liquid metal and moving all around you, the fact that there are a few poles of gravity, people saying, okay, here's where I stand, and guess what? | ||
| Where I stand has not changed and it's not going anywhere. | ||
| I have exactly the same positions that I had six months ago and it doesn't matter that the politics around me has shifted. | ||
| I think my ideas are correct. | ||
| I think people can gravitate to that because it gives them something to hold on to. | ||
| What people are looking for is some sort of port in what is a chaotic political storm at this point. | ||
| Yeah, it's so funny because I truly, and I say this all the time, I just think I'm doing a little common sense stuff. | ||
| I actually don't think it's much more than that. | ||
| I do like talking to people and my mind is still flexible and you've been able to shift me on a couple things and hopefully I've been able to shift you on a couple things. | ||
| I still think I can get you on this pronoun thing a little bit more. | ||
| It doesn't have to happen right now. | ||
| By the way, on the pronoun thing, I mean, I did an interview with a guy who is on the left, and what I said is, if you want to come up with a third pronoun, I'm happy to use that third pronoun. | ||
| I'm just not happy to use he for she and she for he, right? | ||
| So if you want to come up with a trans pronoun, right, where this identifies your gender, then, you know, if you want to say that you're a biological he but you identify as a she... I don't need more words. | ||
| That's a really, really long... Like, all I asked is a little bit of specificity. | ||
| Don't muddy the terminology is my thing there. | ||
| I mean, the last thing I want is more words and labels and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, that's true enough. | ||
| Do the labels have any meaning? | ||
| I mean, I know we have to keep saying these things and you have to say conservative is this and I'm talking about classical liberalism and all that. | ||
| But is all of that just out the window at this point because so much is being realigned? | ||
| I think that it's out the window insofar as people have misinterpreted what the labels mean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if by conservative you think everything Trump says. | ||
| Then that's not conservative. | ||
| If you think by liberal, you're talking about everything that Cornel West thinks, right? | ||
| Then that's not liberal, right? | ||
| So it's so the terminology is helpful only insofar as it has a set meaning. | ||
| And this is what's hard right now is that people keep shifting the meaning every five minutes of these terms, and it's really difficult to follow. | ||
| So that's why, you know, the fact that you're on so often and talking so often about your principles, it's easier for people, I think, to actually identify with. | ||
| I agree with the politics of so and so. | ||
| than it is to say I'm a conservative or a liberal, because those terms are shifting on a pretty regular basis now. | ||
| Is there anyone that you see on the broader left, or more specifically on the Democrat side, that you think, like, what happened to the blue dog Democrats? | ||
| Or just like, is there anyone that you think is moderate left there? | ||
| Because I would love to support that person if that, if that person, you know, if JFK was still alive, I'm sure I would be a JFK supporter. | ||
| If Daniel Patrick Patrick Moynihan was still around. | ||
| I would support him. | ||
| There's virtually none of those people left. | ||
| I wish they were there. | ||
| That's where my home should be. | ||
| Well, the states have polarized so much now that no elected official is basically from a purple area. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I mean, the number of purple Democrats is really, really low. | ||
| I think that there may be a couple. | ||
| There's a couple from Ohio. | ||
| There's a military guy from Massachusetts who I think may be slightly more moderate on the Democratic side. | ||
| When I knew it was over was the first debate when Jim Webb was still running against Bernie and Hillary, and it was as if, it was as if he came out of a time machine. | ||
| It was like, this man does not... Oh, yeah, the thing where he said that he'd killed a communist, which I was like, all right, okay. | ||
| And then everybody in the left's like, huh! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, well that was a communist trying to kill him in a jungle. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's supposed to do that, I thought. | |
| Right, right. | ||
| And Jim Webb looked around like, it was so funny because Jim Webb looks around triumphantly like he knows he got off a good line. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he did in 1984. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, in 1984 in a Democratic debate he got off a great line. | ||
| In 2016 in a Democratic debate he got off the worst line he could possibly get off. | ||
| It was not empathetic and it didn't recognize the value of multiculturalism and it was a little racist. | ||
| And he looks around and all of a sudden you can see it dawn on him, I am in the wrong bar. | ||
| It was that scene from Blues Brothers where they're playing the wrong dive bar. | ||
| Yeah, I mean to me that may have been the moment that I finally realized how this thing had shifted massively. | ||
| Whether I had shifted or not, the fact that this guy was thought of as the fringe guy really shows you Well, there was a chart. | ||
| I don't know if you've seen these charts that they make of how the political parties have moved. | ||
| And they sort of have these overflow charts. | ||
| They look like kind of bell curves. | ||
| And so they'll narrow or they'll broaden. | ||
| And what it shows is that since like 2008, the only thing that's happened is the Democratic Party has moved to the left. | ||
| So it shows the right kind of moving to the right slowly up till about 2008, 2010. | ||
| And then it shows the left going just way off the charts of the left. | ||
| And so you've seen this polarization in the parties that's been pretty radical. | ||
| It's interesting because I know that some people watching this will say, no, it's the reverse. | ||
| The right has gotten more right, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But it's like, look. | ||
| The right got more right up until about 2010, right? | ||
| At the Tea Party, at the point of the Tea Party, that's as right as they went. | ||
| And then it's been stagnant since 2010, right? | ||
| So from 2010 to 2018, there's been almost no movement in the Republican Party. | ||
| All the movement has been in the Democratic Party. | ||
| If anything, I think you could argue that the right has actually become more centered. | ||
| I mean, literally nobody is arguing against gay rights anymore. | ||
| No, but Mike Huckabee has to be right. | ||
| I mean, Mike Huckabee, right? | ||
| Like Ted Cruz does at this point. | ||
| It's moved in a more libertarian direction on a lot of social issues. | ||
| I think if they've polled Republicans now on POT, right, the number of Republicans who don't care about POT anymore is really high. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jeff Sessions is the last. | ||
| Where are you on POT? | ||
| I'm fine with decriminalization. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think that people who smoke pot are wasting their time. | ||
| I hate the smell of it, and I wish you'd do it away from me, but it's... You're living in the wrong town, man. | ||
| I know, but it's... But, you know, my view on this has always been the same, which is the government sucks at everything. | ||
| They couldn't even keep pot off the playground when I was in sixth grade, so obviously their efforts have been for naught. | ||
| And decriminalization and heavy taxation seems like a... If you want to restrict it, it seems like a better plan to me than anything else. | ||
| Although if you tax it too much, then you get a black market. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, as you can probably tell, I'm for decriminalization. | ||
| I just think the government has nothing to do with it and they couldn't do it well anyway. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Everyone, especially in this state, you know, I went and I told the guy my shoulder hurt and I got, you know, a license. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's been true for years, right? | ||
| I mean, it's like you just walk in like, oh, my back hurts. | ||
| I go, well, pot will solve that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I have gangrene. | ||
| Pot will solve that. | ||
| It's the magic. | ||
| It's like pepto. | ||
| It'll solve everything. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| I do love when people say, well, it's organic. | ||
| It's from the ground. | ||
| Cancer is organic, too. | ||
| I'm not comparing pot to cancer. | ||
| You know which thing will be wrongfully quoted out of this episode. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Now we know. | ||
| But I'm for decriminalization, people. | ||
| Do you get conservatives that give you shit for that opinion? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not really. | |
| I think the conservative movement's kind of split on this still, unfortunately. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I mean, because, again, on a personal level, I think that communities ought to fight the use of pot by teenagers, because I think that it is not good for teenagers. | ||
| I've never seen a teenager who's better off for smoking pot, unless you're talking about, like, a terminally ill teenager who has nausea or something, but that's not what we're talking about. | ||
| But, you know, I think that because most conservatives understand that What I've basically advocated for is conservatism in the social sphere, away from government, but government getting out of everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then I'm not advocating against social standards. | ||
| I'm just saying the social standards should be informal and community driven. | ||
| They should not be driven by a massive government infrastructure that is pointing the gun at somebody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right, so let's back up for a second. | ||
| So you did this event in San Francisco. | ||
| It was Sam Harris' podcast and everyone. | ||
| Yeah, really nice of him to invite me, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so it was actually, so I was there, and we all hung out before, and I was very secretly jealous that I was not on stage with you guys. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, that would have been fun. | ||
| But it's all right. | ||
| Right, but it was a really interesting evening because Sam sort of had to play moderator and panelist, right? | ||
| And Eric, and I think in most places Eric Weinstein, is sort of a bridge between you guys, especially on the religious stuff, which he has a sort of, I think, quirky spirituality. | ||
| Right, he's not a believer in a traditional sense, so that's more like Sam and yet he has a certain affinity for, | ||
| even practices I think at some level and that's more in line with you. | ||
| So I just thought it was a great couple hours. | ||
| Sam just put the podcast up, we'll put the link down below. | ||
| I don't wanna re-litigate the whole thing but I'm curious on a couple points. | ||
| When you talk about religion, I've never seen you try to push religion on anyone. | ||
| Yeah, it's not my thing. | ||
| Yeah, I've never seen it at all. | ||
| Do you enjoy that conversation, though? | ||
| Because to me, you're a political beast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I kept thinking when there was like an hour on religion. | ||
| I was like, Ben kind of really shines at politics. | ||
| And I was kind of wondering, do you actually really want to do that publicly? | ||
| Because it's not something you're trying to spread to the So I'm happy to talk about it because I think that it's interesting and I think it goes to deeper issues and it's fun. | ||
| Because it's not as effervescent as politics and there's never a headline to peg it to. | ||
| Politics is always like, Trump tweeted something exciting today. | ||
| Religion is like, the problem of theodicy. | ||
| Has anyone thought about it? | ||
| Except for every religious thinker for the last 3,000 years. | ||
| So you're always rehashing philosophies that are 1,000 years old. | ||
| I mean, in what other context are you going to be quoting Aristotle on a regular basis about the unmoved mover? | ||
| You know, something that's written at least 2,500 years ago or whatever it is. | ||
| So that's 2,300 years ago. | ||
| So in any case, it always puts you in a slightly more boring territory just to talk about that topic. | ||
| I do enjoy talking about it because I think that it goes to a lot of root issues in how people think that they really have not thought about before. | ||
| I think a lot of people don't take the most logically consistent positions with regard to even their own belief systems, with regard to religion, and with regard to how religion mixes with values and defines values. | ||
| So this was one of the points of contention with Sam, was there was one point when I said to him, you know, your values are based on my values. | ||
| And he said, no, they're not. | ||
| I said, well, you grew up in North Hollywood like five miles from me, I promise you. | ||
| You know, you grew up in the same milieu. | ||
| You grew up in the same society that's based on certain enlightenment notions that are based in turn on certain notions of God and reason that are inherent in both Judeo-Christian values and Greek thought. | ||
| And if you want to be an atheist, that's totally fine. | ||
| But you do have to recognize the implications of the atheism. | ||
| So, yeah, that's an area where I'm pretty passionate about that because I think that, again, I'm not trying to make Sam believe anything. | ||
| Sam can believe whatever he wants. | ||
| I also don't believe that you have to be a religious person to be a good person. | ||
| I think acting well is what's more important to me than believing like I believe. | ||
| I'm always an action-driven person as opposed to a belief-driven person. | ||
| So at the individual level, you don't believe that you have to base your beliefs or your rules on Judeo-Christian values. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| But you think at a societal level that you think we have to or that we're just doing it? | ||
| I do think you have to. | ||
| I think that if you're going to peg morality to anything beyond what you feel like today, then you're going to have to at some point arrive at an objective sense of where that morality comes from. | ||
| So whether you base that on the notion of revelation in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or if you Based that on the basic notions of teleology from Greek tradition, the notion of a telos, and that the universe is created in a certain way so that we can discover its meaning, and therefore we know that a glass is for drinking from, and we know that a good human being is for reasoning. | ||
| That is sort of the Aristotelian notion. | ||
| Then, you're going to have to base it on something. | ||
| Something either discoverable and objective in nature or not. | ||
| And so what I was trying to push Sam on was, where are you getting the notions that underpin your morality? | ||
| I agree with Sam that there's a possibility, I would say a significant possibility, that we live in a meaningless universe where balls of meat with no free will. | ||
| I won't say that that's not a possibility because I think that is a possibility. | ||
| But what I will say is that you cannot build any sort of morality as a society on the basis of that. | ||
| You might be able to come up with some Interesting ways of finding morality for yourself. | ||
| But I would say this, that Sam's morality, which values the same things that I value as a general matter, I find it weird that he comes to the same conclusions that I do, for the most part, on what is good and what is bad morally. | ||
| But he just did it from what? | ||
| Pure reason, which doesn't exist in the world of free will? | ||
| You know, like the idea of a self-willed person making moral decisions does not exist in a world where your Spinoza's You know, meatball flying through the universe with a little bit of self-awareness. | ||
| So, in effect, a self-willed person, again, on the micro level is fine, but the macro, it just, over time, you just feel, I mean, this is, I had Prager, I had Prager and Michael Shermer on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I watched them. | ||
| This very issue. | ||
| That's where I think it got to the most meat, that, again, they're both individualists also, which is interesting. | ||
| So it's like, at the individual level, you can figure out a way to live well and good and morally and all of that. | ||
| Epicureans did, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think that you can. | ||
| What I don't know, and I still am waiting to hear a good answer on, is in a world where we are just an agglomeration of cells and environment with no capacity for free choice, How do you make a moral decision? | ||
| Where does morality even come into it? | ||
| And it was interesting, I thought that the best moment of the debate, really there was more discussion than debate, was at the very end when a woman got up and asked Sam, you know, I agree with everything you say, I have a five year old son, what do I teach him? | ||
| To boil it down, Sam basically said lie to him. | ||
| I actually don't remember what the answer is. | ||
| He essentially said lie to him. | ||
| Maybe Sam will dispute that, and I don't want to put words in Sam's mouth, so go listen to it. | ||
| But my impression, the takeaway was, Sam basically said, well, you can't really teach him he has no control over his life and no free will, so you should probably tell him that he should make good choices. | ||
| And I thought, well, now you're talking my language, right? | ||
| You don't get to burn down my house and then use the planks from my house to build your own flock. | ||
| I think this also gets, not I think, I know this gets a little bit into the nuance of the free will argument, and where you guys obviously disagree, and I think his- I think his position on free will is more honest than the compatibilist position, right? | ||
| There are a bunch of people who say they have the compatibilist position on free will, which is, yes, we're all a bunch of biological functions, and we don't have any sort of capacity to overcome that, but somehow we still have free will. | ||
| I think that's crap, and I think Sam does a good job of debunking that, but I think the problem is, once you've debunked it, where do you go from here? | ||
| Right, so his point on free will basically would be, if I say to you, name a color. | ||
| Blue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Did you just do that yourself? | ||
| Was that your free will that did that? | ||
| Or was it everything that led you to this very moment, the primordial, all of your experiences, all of that? | ||
| you said blue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And my answer is, I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| I believe, you know, in sort of the William James proposition, | ||
| I choose to believe, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the ability to choose, right? | ||
| And so the idea here would be, I chose blue. | ||
| It depends on the level of choice too. | ||
| I think it's a little more complex than that. | ||
| I don't think I choose to, you know, scratch my head in the same way | ||
| that I choose to marry my wife. | ||
| I think that these, Daniel Kahneman, you know, | ||
| who thinks of the kind of fast systems of thinking and the slow systems of thinking, | ||
| he talks about how slow systems of thinking involved more well. | ||
| Kahneman himself says you have to believe in free will in order to believe in any capacity for self-change. | ||
| I've seen too many people change. | ||
| You're in the business of changing people. | ||
| This is the thing about the free will debate that I find so puzzling. | ||
| If you really don't believe in free will, if you really believe that It's just all the things that happened throughout history to lead you here. | ||
| If you had Laplace's demon, right, that can reconstruct every element of the universe and therefore decide when you're going to sneeze. | ||
| If you really had that, then what was the point of having the debate in San Francisco? | ||
| Like, did people just randomly show up there, and I randomly showed up there, and we all had a debate, and we enjoyed ourselves, and it wouldn't have mattered if you'd wanted to not show up. | ||
| There wouldn't have been that want, and the want never would have existed. | ||
| There is no choice to be otherwise. | ||
| Like, what do you do with your life when you feel like You are just there, right? | ||
| You're this glass or you're that bottle. | ||
| It's just that you have an awareness that you're a glass or a bottle. | ||
| Right, so I don't want to speak for Sam, but I think he would say that that's not exactly what his position is, that he's still in control of all of those things, but that the behind-the-scenes guy... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I wouldn't like that phrase either, but. | ||
| Yeah, but this is the point, I think it's true of Dawkins too. | ||
| And whenever you talk about the selfish gene, when you talk, there's a language of purpose | ||
| that's constantly being used by Daniel Dennett or Dawkins, that nature has a purpose or that the gene has a purpose. | ||
| It's all this purpose of language. | ||
| And that's a hallmark of my system of thought. | ||
| And you're now hijacking and using for your system of thought. | ||
| And that's the part that I find really, I think it's a disconnect. | ||
| And I think that when it's applied broadly, it's very difficult not to become a sort of | ||
| SART existentialist, except without. | ||
| Sartre's belief that you can, the thing about existentialist belief, | ||
| through Sartre at least, is that in the end you can cry out | ||
| against the meaninglessness of the universe, but I don't know how you can cry out | ||
| against the meaninglessness of the universe if you are destined to either cry or not. | ||
| So the beauty of it is that you described it, you said debate and then you paused and said conversation, | ||
| and that really was what it was, and you're right. | ||
| There was a sense of mutual respect up there. | ||
| I'll let people who's doing it, I do wanna ask you one other thing about the event, which is that we mentioned Eric briefly, and that he sort of splits the difference, I think, between you guys. | ||
| Do you think that position makes sense? | ||
| Someone that can say, sort of, on the intellectual side, I'm not a believer in a traditional sense, but that I see all of the value that, Religion or tradition or whatever you want to call it has brought, and I'll try to incorporate that. | ||
| So I think this is a perfectly honest position. | ||
| I've said for a long time that if you're an atheist but you recognize what Judeo-Christian values have brought to your world and that they provide the foundation upon which you stand, we have very little to argue about. | ||
| You know, I think that if you recognize that there is a system of thought that you are basing your own system of thought on, and you say, I disagree with a lot of the fundamental premises of that, but I can pick out the good parts, then at least that's honest. | ||
| And I think that where I have a problem is some of the more militant language about You know, all religious belief being inherently harmful, or all religious belief being equal, or all religions being equal. | ||
| I don't know that Eric does that. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Eric does not do that, actually. | ||
| But there are people who sort of do that, and they'll say anybody who's promulgating religion, even moderate religion that makes people's lives better, is really just shilling for the man, basically. | ||
| And I think that that's not only a problem, I think that takes the heart out of society. | ||
| I don't think increased secularism in Europe has been particularly good for the forward-leaning growth of that continent. | ||
| Isn't that the continent's crumbling? | ||
| Yes, and I think those two things are not unrelated. | ||
| I think religion without reason turns into tyranny, and reason without religion completely collapses in on itself and also turns into tyranny. | ||
| I think the two are supposed to go arm-in-arm, and there is a tension, and that tension will always exist, but I think that that tension is what animates life, right? | ||
| It's these moments between faith and reason that we spend most of our life making decisions based on faith. | ||
| In a weird way then, and I kind of predicted this, I think I said it on the show about four months ago, I sense that America might start becoming more religious, but I don't know that that will be, I don't mean in the good sense that I think you mean. | ||
| This is possible too. | ||
| What I fear more so is that because reason has been so destroyed in the public discourse, because there's so few of us trying to act with some intellectual honesty, that the secular world won't be able to hold up its end of the bargain, and that people then will just go to religion for the wrong reasons. | ||
| And I don't mean that in the broad sense of that religion is always wrong. | ||
| No, you mean in the tribal sense, that it'll just turn into a tribal place of gathering as opposed to a generator of good values. | ||
| Yeah, I think there's some truth to that. | ||
| I think that in the 19th century there was an effort by reason to basically destroy religion. | ||
| I think it largely succeeded in Europe. | ||
| I think it took until the 20th century to really succeed in large measure in the United States, take the heart out of religion. | ||
| And then I think reason ate itself. | ||
| I think that people felt unfulfilled in this regime of supposed reason, in rationalia. | ||
| I think that a lot of people looked at reason itself and they said, well, where are you getting the basis for the idea that our minds reflect the universe? | ||
| Where are you getting the idea that we even have an identity? | ||
| Like, where does this I come from? | ||
| The Cartesian notion that I think, therefore, I am. | ||
| Who's this I that you're talking about? | ||
| Because there is no such thing as identity, right? | ||
| By the time you're, you know, your cells are replacing themselves at a rapid rate and you're changing every day. | ||
| By the end of this conversation, you will have a different brain structure than you did at the beginning of this conversation, right? | ||
| And that's not just because I'm going to clock you at the bottle. | ||
| Spoiler alert. | ||
| It's because our brains actually change as time goes on. | ||
| Are you the same person? | ||
| What makes you the same person? | ||
| Science starts asking all these hard questions, and it ends up destroying a lot of the fundamental premises upon which science itself is based. | ||
| And so people just revert back to, no, I know who I am. | ||
| I am this guy, and I'm this guy who's friends with that guy. | ||
| And if you don't like that, the two of us are just going to F you up. | ||
| I think that there is that aspect of humankind. | ||
| I don't think that we're capable of existing in this world where we can live with the cognitive dissonance of, We may not exist as individuals, but we can have an individualistic morality. | ||
| We may not exist in a world where reason matters, but we can have a rational conversation. | ||
| I'm not sure that that exists. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's very much sort of where we're at at the moment, which is ironic, because it also, it's why, on a personal level, we're both succeeding, because we're giving some of that, and yet, in terms of a society, it's a kind of dangerous place. | ||
| All right, so we're gonna do some questions on Patreon and on Super Chat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sounds good. | |
| You said you want no advance notice. | ||
| No, no, it's always more fun. | ||
| You're on the fun, but I do want to do a couple others that I think we have some disagreement on. | ||
| So you are pro-life, I'm pro-choice. | ||
| I would describe myself at this point, I'm begrudgingly pro-choice. | ||
| To which point? | ||
| I believe that, first, on the most libertarian side of it, I believe that the government shouldn't be able to tell a woman or a man with what they want to do with their body. | ||
| Now, I understand also that if you believe that there is a life there, then the government is supposed to protect life. | ||
| So, I'm going to concede you something at the same time why I'm saying I'm not pro-life. | ||
| The reason I'm asking to what point is I'm asking to what point in the pregnancy. | ||
| Oh, to what point in the pregnancy. | ||
| From everything I have read, I think that basically until 20 weeks, that 20 weeks they've done enough studies that they know that that fetus can feel pain, basically. | ||
| And that I would say at that point, I mean, this is where- So you're not actually pro-choice, right? | ||
| I mean, you're pro-life beyond 20 weeks. | ||
| Because people who proclaim they're pro-choice are generally pro-choice all the way to point of birth, right? | ||
| No, I've had people on the show who have told me that literally till the week before a nine-month term they're pro-choice. | ||
| That's in the Democratic Party platform, yeah. | ||
| Is it quite in the Democratic Party platform? | ||
| Oh yeah, it's in point of birth. | ||
| It's in the Democratic Party platform. | ||
| That really is, I mean, okay. | ||
| So it's pretty radical. | ||
| So that's true radicalism. | ||
| That to me, look, if a normal pregnancy happens at six months for whatever, a woman gets in a car crash and whatever, and there's a pregnancy, a six-month-old baby most of the time lives. | ||
| So I would argue that basically for the first 20 weeks, that it's a shitty thing. | ||
| It's an unfortunate, horrible thing that no one wants to do. | ||
| But I would say that the woman should be allowed to choose what to do with her body. | ||
| So I'm asking you why on that. | ||
| Why is it a bad thing? | ||
| You said it's a terrible, terrible thing you said up to that point, so I'm asking why. | ||
| Because I do believe that, look, I can't tell you, no one can tell you where the genesis of life begins. | ||
| So I do believe it is a life. | ||
| Some of this is just a little bit of belief. | ||
| No, no, no, that's fine. | ||
| So you're acknowledging that it's at least a potential life. | ||
| Yes, without question. | ||
| But you think that the woman's right for any reason or for some reason to do an abortion? | ||
| Well, this is where I wouldn't want the government moralizing people, and I wouldn't want the government telling people what to do. | ||
| So, in the best way that I can be intellectually consistent, I would say that for any reason, up until 20 weeks, where science has proven the fetus can feel pain, that I think you should be allowed to have an abortion. | ||
| And here's where I think the real argument is, is, well, all right, if the government is now gonna come in and say, you can't have an abortion, does the government now owe you anything? | ||
| Which I also think is a very untenable position because I don't want the government having to give you things. | ||
| Well, I mean, I can't, I have a duty not to kill you, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I assume. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| So if we agree on this, if I don't have a duty, if I have a duty not to kill you, that doesn't mean I also have a duty to support you. | ||
| I mean, you have a husband to do that. | ||
| Right, but if... Right, but if... It's Patreon that does that, actually. | ||
| But if the government tells you... Okay, so I get that point, but if the government tells you... But if the government says you cannot do this... No, the government says I can't kill my child, but it's not my job. | ||
| It's not the government's job to support me in supporting my child. | ||
| Right, but if you were trying to kill your child, I think the government has a right to... To come in and take away my child? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, and that's what the pro-life position would be, is that if you're trying to kill your child, the government has a right to come in and protect the child. | ||
| Okay, so you think basically my position here is... I don't think it's perfectly, I mean, I think you have to set these, I think the beyond 20 weeks thing, you're gonna have to do better as far as your rationale for not being pro-life, like formally pro-life, as in the government should restrict it. | ||
| So square me on the libertarian part of this. | ||
| Okay, so the libertarian part of this is that libertarians believe that life is worthy of protection. | ||
| This is like the one thing government is supposed to do, right? | ||
| It's supposed to stop me from killing you. | ||
| Okay, so it's either a life or it's not a life. | ||
| You just suggested that life beyond six months is basically, is a life, not basically, is a life. | ||
| I'll go 20 weeks. | ||
| Right, so 20 weeks. | ||
| Beyond 20 weeks, it is a life. | ||
| And I'm not even arguing that before 20 weeks it's not a life. | ||
| I'm just arguing that... But you're arguing that it's a fully-fledged life in the same way that you or I are a fully-fledged life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, well if that's the case, then the government obviously has a role in restricting. | ||
| I mean, at that point, there's literally no difference except the location. | ||
| And the location five inches this way or five inches this way does not seem to make much of a difference. | ||
| And the government overreach part of this. | ||
| Is the government just telling you what to do with your body? | ||
| No, the government's not telling me. | ||
| I mean, the government may be telling me what to do with my body, but it's also telling me what to do with my body when I'm not allowed to stab you, right? | ||
| I mean, like, it's telling me not to take my arm and put a knife in it and stab you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, the bodily integrity argument ceases to exist once you're talking about doing harm to another. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I mean, that's the whole rule. | ||
| That's the whole, I'm allowed to wave my arm in any direction so long as I don't hit your face. | ||
| You know, it's interesting, because I know this argument won't compel you, but I'll give you something that's based on feeling and an anecdote from a moment. | ||
| I love feelings and anecdotes. | ||
| It's my favorite. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's my favorite. | |
| I love it. | ||
| Just go. | ||
| Just make it happen. | ||
| I know two girls that in the last year that I'm friends with that had abortions, and that it was a horrible choice for both of them, one in a committed relationship, and I don't know all the specifics of their sex life, but whatever, and one that it was just a one-night stand. | ||
| And in both cases, it was a gut-wrenching, horrible thing that they did, but they truly felt that in their own lives, that they either wouldn't be able to support the child, or in one case, it had a lot to do with finances, but in the other case, just at an emotional level and all that stuff. | ||
| And the idea that we would then force them to do that, and then at the same time, where Republicans don't wanna then offer any help. | ||
| Again, I don't love the idea of government help, It all just doesn't square for me in a cultural way. | ||
| To me, the most dangerous thing here is not the government restricting, it's the suggestion that human beings have the subjective capacity to define as life that which they wish to preserve. | ||
| That's a really tough one. | ||
| There is a whole group of people in America who defined people arbitrarily as property for hundreds of years. | ||
| And if you said, the government's going to remove your property from you, the libertarian position, the way that you're articulating it, might have been, OK, well, they define that as property. | ||
| Who are you to tell them that it's not their property? | ||
| That black human being is not the same as a plow, and I'm not accusing you of being pro-slavery. | ||
| But the argument is strikingly similar in that once you say that someone gets to define a human life based on their own emotional state, That's a really dangerous place to be. | ||
| There's got to be some sort of objective definition of human life at which time is protected. | ||
| And you agree with that, because you agree that it's past birth, right? | ||
| But I'm saying that it's not past birth. | ||
| I'm saying it's much earlier than that. | ||
| And as far as the financial point, this is what adoption is for. | ||
| Again, the difficulty that you will have in bearing a child, no one's ever ready, first of all, to have a kid. | ||
| You know, when you have kids, if you're lucky, you make decisions. | ||
| If you're not lucky, there's an accident. | ||
| But then you're lucky because there's a kid. | ||
| Kids are wonderful. | ||
| I have two of them. | ||
| Doesn't mean that you're going to be happy with your kid. | ||
| Maybe you'll be unhappy with your kid. | ||
| Maybe your kid's a crap. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We can also revisit this in ten years. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But your level of personal discomfort with having children has no impact morally on the definition of whether that person is alive or not. | ||
| So the difficulty argument cuts no ice with me. | ||
| So okay, so even if I jump on board that, does the government or does society have any role then in making sure that life is protected as a life? | ||
| So the answer is yes, but the government's role is not in terms of positive rights, it's more in terms of negative, meaning if you mistreat the child, if there's malnourishment, if you're not taking care of the kid, the government will come in and take the baby away from you. | ||
| And the government should come in and take the baby away from you. | ||
| You shouldn't be allowed to starve your baby. | ||
| Right, which is also, it's just hard for me to square that on the libertarian side. | ||
| It's like, I don't want the government doing that. | ||
| I don't want this kid malnourished or killed or abused or any of those things. | ||
| But if you malnourish your kid, I mean, I assume that you're not in favor of the government leaving a kid in the house who's going to die of malnutrition. | ||
| No, of course, what I mean is I would always prefer that done by law. | ||
| Yeah, of course, of course. | ||
| I mean, this is what religious communities are there for. | ||
| I mean, my view of this, when it comes to charity, my view is you first go to your family, then you go to your church or community, then you go to the local government, then you go to the state government, then you move up the chain in terms of where you seek aid. | ||
| But the abortion debate is really not a particularly complex one, and it's always been bewildering to me that people want to make it so complex. | ||
| Bottom line is, if this is a life, if this is a thing of value, Then your arbitrary decision that it is inconvenient for you does not trump the independent rights of that life. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's really that simple. | ||
| And any attempt to obfuscate that, you're going to run into all sorts of problems that are equally applicable to adults. | ||
| As soon as you say that, you know, I didn't want to have a kid because I can't afford the kid, how many couples can afford a kid when the kid's one? | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're not ancient Spartans. | ||
| We're not going to take our children and start throwing them off cliffs, right? | ||
| The pro-life position, it seems to me, is pretty clear. | ||
| I don't think that it's a vague argument. | ||
| I don't think it's a particularly complex argument. | ||
| I think that people try to make it more complex because they're looking for a way to make it more morally palatable or emotionally palatable for them to do something they want to do in the first place. | ||
| What do you make of how sort of the left, or at least Hollywood... Nobody ever has a gut-wrenching decision to have the child. | ||
| You only hear the stories about the gut-wrenching decision to terminate a child. | ||
| You never hear the gut-wrenching, you say, I was really struggling with should I have an abortion or not, and then I made the gut-wrenching and ultimately really difficult decision to have my baby. | ||
| No, it always turns out that it's like, you know, I was thinking about getting an abortion, then I decided that was a bad mistake, and then I had the kid and it's been great. | ||
| It's never gut-wrenching to choose to have... You only hear people speaking in the terms of gut-wrenching and difficult and all the hassle I had to go through to make this decision when they make the eventual decision that they want to have an abortion, which says to me a lot of people know deep down that they're doing something that has moral weight and they don't want to acknowledge it, so instead they just rewrite the logic and say this thing has no moral weight at all. | ||
| And this is why I was asking at the very beginning, why is it bad that somebody has an abortion at 19 weeks? | ||
| Right? | ||
| If you acknowledge... I am acknowledging. | ||
| I know. | ||
| If you take the safe, legal, and rare position... This is why I think the Democratic Party position from the 90s makes no sense. | ||
| When they say safe, legal, and rare, the question is why rare? | ||
| You wouldn't say removal of a polyp. | ||
| Safe, legal, and rare. | ||
| You'd say safe and legal, right? | ||
| I mean, it's a polyp. | ||
| If your position is a baby's not a baby, then who cares if you kill it? | ||
| If your position is the baby's a baby, then you got a whole world of hurt on your hands, morally speaking, by saying it's okay to kill it. | ||
| Yeah, and as I would have said to you when we started this portion of the conversation, I mean, this is why I say begrudgingly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I jife. | ||
| I'll get you over here eventually. | ||
| All right, we'll do this again. | ||
| I'll keep gathering you on this issue. | ||
| I'm nothing if not flexible mentally, you know? | ||
| All right, let's just do one more, actually, and then we'll jump to the Patreon and Super Chat questions. | ||
| Death penalty, which I actually don't think we've ever discussed, the two of us. | ||
| So see what you can do here. | ||
| Again, this is where I go to the libertarian side quick. | ||
| I don't think that the state has the right to kill people. | ||
| I'm not even gonna make the argument that they make mistakes, which that's where everyone usually goes. | ||
| That's the easy one. | ||
| Well, we kill people that we shouldn't. | ||
| And that's the best argument against the death penalty. | ||
| The state definitely has a right to kill you if you kill another person. | ||
| So square your small government libertarian side of Ben Shapiro with your conservative side that is- I mean, is the state of the right to jail people? | ||
| Yeah, we've got laws. | ||
| Because they can deprive you of liberty, so why can't they deprive you of life, depending on the nature of the crime? | ||
| There is a difference. | ||
| Why? | ||
| There is simply a difference that ending a life is different than... I agree, but that's why I'm saying, depending on the nature of the crime, I'm not suggesting that the state has the right to remove your life from you for stealing a shoelace. | ||
| I am saying that if you're Hitler, the state definitely has a right to take you out and shoot you. | ||
| Is that a... | ||
| Sort of a functionality of the government, like a... So there is a functional argument. | ||
| The functional argument is that if you have a bunch of people who commit murder and then are running around, then you end up in tribal warfare very quickly, right? | ||
| The family, you end up basically with Godfather 1, right? | ||
| I just watched it last week. | ||
| It's perfection. | ||
| It's such a great film. | ||
| But you do end up with basically two battling street gangs that you killed Sonny, okay, so now I'm going to kill your son, and you know, we both lost sons and now we can make peace, but don't worry, the peace will not last for long. | ||
| Tribal societies rest on the notion there's no centralized authority that is the ultimate arbiter of power with regard to judicial crimes. | ||
| The idea there is that You kill a member of my family. | ||
| Okay, I'm going to come kill a member of your family. | ||
| You're going to come kill them all. | ||
| And then this is how you end up with this, what a true cycle of violence where people just keep going back and forth, killing members of each other's family. | ||
| So the state says, instead of doing that, how about the guy commits murder? | ||
| This is not just a crime against your family. | ||
| It's a crime against the people at large because you've destroyed a member of the community. | ||
| And so we have the collective capacity to put that member of the community to death in the same way that we have the capacity to put that member of the community in jail. | ||
| I think that if you're going to make the completely anarchist argument that nobody should ever be jailed by the state, that's a... So I'm not making that argument. | ||
| But once you make the argument that the state has the capacity to do justice, then removing the death penalty on the grounds that the state doesn't have, that that's where you draw the line for the state, I'm not sure why that line should exist, other than sort of a gut-level feeling, like you don't want the state killing people. | ||
| And that's more of a gut thing than a logic thing, I would say. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, to me, it's just giving the government that much power. | ||
| But I understand your argument. | ||
| You're saying, look, if you're giving them the power already to jail you for life, you've already ceded the power argument. | ||
| So again, I find my position on both of these, I know, is not complete. | ||
| The best argument against the death penalty is it's just applied crappily, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the best argument against the death penalty. | ||
| There are systems where death penalty is applied in a much quicker fashion. | ||
| You know, it's 16 years on death row. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And a system of appeals, and it's not arbitrarily applied by juries and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| Well, they say it costs more to put someone to death than it does to keep them in jail for life, don't they? | ||
| Yeah, I'd heard that as well. | ||
| That's one of those stats where I've always been puzzled by it, like I'm always, it's really like. | ||
| They're getting a lot of good food, I guess. | ||
| Like, do they make their food crappier if they're there for 35 years? | ||
| But if you know they're 16, we just get them like a steak every night. | ||
| Like, I just don't know how that stat works, but I wanna look into it. | ||
| All right, we're gonna check on that. | ||
| All right, I actually do wanna do one more with you because I mentioned to you earlier, | ||
| so I was after this Turning Point USA thing that we both did. | ||
| And by the way, on that, even that to me showed the change that's happening right now. | ||
| I wasn't there the night you spoke, I spoke I think the next night, but I saw the video of you walking out there and it was like a rock star performance. | ||
| It was pretty cool, yeah. | ||
| People were going bananas, and then when I was there the next day, I talked about being I talked about gay married, I talked about being pro-choice, I talked about all the differences I had with this group of people, and I got a standing ovation for it. | ||
| So this idea that these are somehow the intolerant people is so lost, it's so over and done, that I just think that's worth mentioning. | ||
| But when I was driving across the state, and I happened to turn on the Glenn Beck Show, and you were guest hosting, you said something about taxes that I thought was really interesting. | ||
| You were talking about the tax cuts, which had just come through, I think, the day before. | ||
| And you said, all right, well, that's easy. | ||
| Okay, fine, I'm with Trump on that. | ||
| But what this is really about is spending. | ||
| And this is the part that no one talks about. | ||
| And I thought you framed it really interestingly because basically now they're gonna go in and they're gonna do some infrastructure stuff or whatever it is, but that in effect will never actually get the spending down because you can say tax cut, tax cut, tax cut, and you can actually do it and that's good. | ||
| People get more money in their pocket. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| But in effect, it's a spending issue, not a cutting of costs. | ||
| Not a taxing issue. | ||
| Right, that's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, the fact is that it is always politically convenient to do a tax cut for Republicans. | ||
| It is never politically convenient to actually do the stuff that has to be done. | ||
| Until it gets to the point like Germany, where you just have to make austerity cuts. | ||
| But the idea that any of these political parties have the brass to actually come out and say, listen, we're going to have to restructure Social Security. | ||
| Sorry about this. | ||
| If you're already on Social Security, you'll get your benefits. | ||
| But if you're under the age of 50... | ||
| It's up to you now. | ||
| We're going to privatize this stuff. | ||
| You can put it in an account, you can take it and you can put it in the stock market, you can save it. | ||
| But you're not getting in, you're not getting out what you put in and you're certainly not getting a multiple, right? | ||
| We're not going to let you do this routine where you put in 80 bucks like my grandmother a month and I take out 3,000 a month. | ||
| Money didn't have babies. | ||
| It didn't just magically multiply that way. | ||
| If nobody does that, then you and I, we're not going to see our social security, right? | ||
| That money's gone. | ||
| And the same thing is true of Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| 66% of the budget, 70% of the budget is in these social programs. | ||
| That's why when people talk about the defense budget is too high. | ||
| I agree in many ways the defense budget may be too high. | ||
| I mean we should go through and we should line item audit it. | ||
| But to suggest that we're going bankrupt because of the war in Afghanistan or Iraq | ||
| is just completely ignorant. | ||
| I mean the amount of money that we're spending on entitlements is, it dwarfs that. | ||
| So I'm curious, so I heard you actually made that point when I was listening to you. | ||
| If someone was to come across and just say, let's just do a 10% across-the-board military cut. | ||
| Like, let's just do that. | ||
| Figure out ways to be more efficient. | ||
| We're not gonna hamper, you know, I know certain people will say, well now you're handicapping the military. | ||
| But just really like 10%, we know you guys have an insane amount of money. | ||
| Let's figure out ways to be more efficient. | ||
| Does even that, is there a flag for you on something like that? | ||
| I mean, the only thing that's a flag for me is that I don't know enough about the military budgeting to know what the proper percentage would be. | ||
| So it's hard for me to speak to that. | ||
| But inherently you're not against a cut, potentially? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I'm not against looking at all of the waste and whether the bidding is competitive or whether each operating system is absolutely necessary to national defense. | ||
| I just think that when it comes to the proper functions of government, defense is one of them, and I don't think that Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are proper functions of federal government. | ||
| Yeah, on the military side, there was the problem that we just never do that, right? | ||
| Like, we never actually check the bidding stuff. | ||
| So, right. | ||
| I mean, we did actually do that with sequestration, right? | ||
| Sequestration actually put a hard cap on military spending. | ||
| We actually did. | ||
| That was the deal that the Boehner Congress made with Obama, was that we were going to have across-the-board cuts, but those cuts were going to be 50% defense and 50% everything else. | ||
| The problem is, why are you doing 50% defense and 50% everything else? | ||
| It should be what the percentage is if you're going to do that, right? | ||
| It should be like 80% everything else and 20% defense. | ||
| But in any case, that's why when people say, you know, are you for small government or big government? | ||
| What I really say is I'm for the proper function of government being properly funded and for the defunding of all non-proper function of government, which would inherently make it a lot smaller. | ||
| Yeah, so what are some things that you would cut costs on? | ||
| Oh, everything. | ||
| I mean, I would keep the military. | ||
| I'd get rid of the Department of Education. | ||
| I'd get rid of the National Park Service. | ||
| I would get rid of the EPA. | ||
| I would get rid of virtually everything in the executive branch of the federal government. | ||
| And then I'd have Congress actually legislate. | ||
| Like, if you want all these things, if you want National Park, let Congress legislate for the National Park. | ||
| And then we can hire five people to take care of that national park, and everything will be better. | ||
| Instead, we have all of these plethora of multiplying agencies that are almost completely useless. | ||
| And it really is just a way for Congress to abdicate its duty. | ||
| Congress doesn't legislate on anything anymore. | ||
| They pass a thousand-page bill no one's ever read, then the regulators rewrite everything, and so it's a bunch of regulators you've never heard of who are enthralled to lobbyists, who are writing all the regulations that actually govern how we live, which is insane. | ||
| And it all ties back into where we started with this about how everyone flips on everything because of the team thing. | ||
| So it's like, I had so little sympathy two weeks ago for the Democrats that were screaming, you Republicans never, no one read the tax bill. | ||
| Meanwhile, five years ago, all the Republicans screaming, nobody read Obamacare! | ||
| And they were mocked. | ||
| So it's like, you're all doing it. | ||
| We all see it. | ||
| And it's partly why I think that the short attention span we have is so dangerous. | ||
| That the social media part of this is so dangerous because it's making us actually forget What we did just a couple years ago, where we all then are saying the reverse of what we said. | ||
| Not because we've evolved, but because we've devolved. | ||
| When people say, you know, if you could have one constitutional amendment, what would it be? | ||
| The one that I always say is, I would have a constitutional amendment that no bill passed through Congress can be on more than one topic or longer than 10 pages. | ||
| Right, that everything should be this long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And let's vote on this stuff in bite-sized chunks, because that way we can actually have time to digest it and look at it. | ||
| These omnibus packages never work out well for the American people. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's just, they just stuff in all the, you know, defense things, have things, you know, it's just... It's crazy. | ||
| It's bananas. | ||
| On that note, we're gonna take a one-minute break. | ||
| You want some booze during the break? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| People would like to see Shapiro get drunk. | ||
| Maybe we can get Shapiro drunk, people! | ||
| Give us 60 seconds. | ||
| We're taking questions on Patreon, which you guys have already submitted a whole bunch. | ||
| And we're gonna be doing the super chat thing, so jump in there right now, give us 60 seconds, | ||
| and we'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
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And we're gonna be doing the super chat thing, so jump in there right now, give us 60 seconds, | |
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| And we're gonna be doing the super chat thing, We have roughly 400,000 questions. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you have the stamina? | ||
| How fast can you talk? | ||
| Let's find out. | ||
| All right, Patreon first. | ||
| Any good Bannon stories from when you worked for him? | ||
| Well, let's see, the ones that will get me sued or the ones that won't get me sued. | ||
| The problem is that my entire relationship with Steve Bannon spanned from when I was working at Breitbart. | ||
| Originally, I joined Breitbart two weeks before Andrew died, and then Bannon really became instrumental there about two weeks after Andrew died. | ||
| And then the last time I talked to Bannon was the weekend before I quit, which was in March 2016. | ||
| I'm wary, he's a litigious fellow, and I'm wary of telling, let's put it this way, I do have magnificent Bannon stories. | ||
| I mean, they are grand, and once the camera goes off, I will tell you all of them. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| I'll repeat them at another time. | ||
| This is good. | ||
| Basically the question is, any thoughts on cryptocurrency? | ||
| I haven't really heard you talk about it. | ||
| I mean, so what I've said on cryptocurrency is that I really like the idea of cryptocurrency. | ||
| I don't like the idea of the government being in control of inflation of the monetary supply. | ||
| And George Gilder has an excellent book in which he basically recommends blockchains and cryptocurrency as sort of the wave of the future. | ||
| I've never understood it as an investment as much as a hedge against government failures. | ||
| So in the same way that I treat gold or real estate as sort of a hedge against government inflation, it's a hard asset. | ||
| That's sort of how I see it. | ||
| Right now it seems like more of a marketing opportunity than anything else. | ||
| Like if you bought now and then this happens to be the cryptocurrency everyone picks up, then you do great. | ||
| But I'm not expert enough with the market to know whether it's peaked at $19,000 or whether it's peaked at $13,000 or whether it's going to take another hit when another cryptocurrency rises and has a better security system than Bitcoin. | ||
| I've got a little bit and it's just like you watch it go up and down and you just kind of see what happens. | ||
| All right, I'm doing these in literally no order, so we'll do some super chats here. | ||
| If it's the government job to stop the individual from aborting a child, doesn't the government have the right to levy increased taxation to support lower cost child adoption and orphanage protection services? | ||
| So this is a little bit about what I asked you, is what role then does the government have If the government is going... So the government, so my view is that the government has a lot of negative police power, but not a lot of positive power, meaning that to levy, so yes, the government has the power to levy taxes to remove a child from the home because the government has the police power, so that's a police power. | ||
| Does the government have the capacity to force, to raise lots of money to put this kid in a plush mansion? | ||
| I think this is where the government is best off working with private adoption agencies | ||
| to ensure that parents who are capable of taking the child in do so. | ||
| That's one of the major problems that we have in the country that nobody talks about ever | ||
| is this vast disconnect between the adoption system, the adoptive parents, and the kids | ||
| is just insane. | ||
| There are literally millions of parents who are seeking kids and can't get them, in large | ||
| part because the government stands between parents and kids. | ||
| In many cases, it's more of a wall than a window, unfortunately. | ||
| Oh, it's my man, Rukka. | ||
| He asked a couple things here, but I think the most interesting one, the Prager lawsuit that's happening right now, it's obviously directly related to what you do, to what I do. | ||
| It's very personal for us. | ||
| We both know Dennis. | ||
| Where do you stand on this? | ||
| Again, this is where my libertarian side is not happy about this, and yet I do think there's a counter-argument. | ||
| I think you and I are on the same page here. | ||
| So I have a libertarian side that says YouTube has its contract, they're a business, as long as they're not violating their own contracts with their clients, they can do what they want. | ||
| On the other side, I agree that YouTube can be extraordinarily discriminatory in how they demonetize videos and all of that, and that should be a spur for us to create our own Businesses that basically mimic that and, you know, there are ways that you make money that are not subject to YouTube. | ||
| There are ways that I make money that are not subject to YouTube. | ||
| And I think that's good. | ||
| So, you know, my libertarian side tends to win out here. | ||
| I think that the power of the free market, if YouTube forces a bunch of people out, then I think that they're going to be cruising for bruising. | ||
| And I think that's true for a lot of these corporations. | ||
| Everybody talks about Facebook and Google and all these places rule the world. | ||
| Look at the Fortune 500 from 30 years ago and how many of those companies are still in the Fortune 500. | ||
| And the answer is not a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, super chat. | ||
| What do both of you think about the Trump tax plan, specifically how much disproportionately more rich pay than the rest of us? | ||
| So it's so funny when I was listening to like just anyone talk about it, it's like people say literally the opposite things. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's like, How do you get any truth out of this thing? | ||
| I'm wildly confused by people who think that rich people are significantly benefiting in places like California. | ||
| I'm actually paying more tax. | ||
| Under the Trump tax plan, which I supported, I'm paying more tax because they got rid of the state and local tax deduction. | ||
| And so that means that we pay 1,000% tax in California, and then we also pay 1,000% tax from the federal level. | ||
| So I'm one of the few people in America who actually gets smacked by the Trump tax plan. | ||
| What do you make of the general argument that the rich should always pay more? | ||
| I disagree with this completely. | ||
| I believe in a flat tax. | ||
| So if you're going to have either a flat tax or a sales tax, those seem to me the only things that are even morally arguable. | ||
| The idea that I ought to pay a higher percentage of my money because I'm making more money makes no sense to me at all. | ||
| I've made not a lot of money. | ||
| I've made a lot of money. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| I'm the same person at both times. | ||
| And this idea that I became somehow morally bereft when I made lots of money and now I deserve to have my money confiscated, The whole point of me working harder was to make more of that money so that I can spend it on frivolous things for my children. | ||
| And by the way, me spending the money on the frivolous things for my kids keeps people in those frivolous business in business. | ||
| It's also interesting to me because if you take it to the most personal level, like you and I do a very similar thing as a living, right? | ||
| I suspect you probably have more money than me. | ||
| I don't deserve your money if you'd like to give me some. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| But like really, if you just take it to that personal place. | ||
| Well, they go up and down, and people go up and down. | ||
| I mean, this is the other thing. | ||
| People will say, well, he's a one percenter. | ||
| Like, now I'm a one percenter. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| Three years ago, I wasn't a one percenter. | ||
| Four years ago, I wasn't a one percenter. | ||
| And there will be a time, I'm sure, in the future when I probably won't be a one percenter again. | ||
| And by the way, the one percenter thing, I mean, when they say that, | ||
| I think it's something around 400,000, which obviously is a lot of money, but you don't know. | ||
| When they say, right, they say. | ||
| It makes it sound like it's $5 million a year or something. | ||
| That you're pulling the levers of power. | ||
| I mean, with $400,000 or whatever it is... Non-California, right? | ||
| In Texas, you're a wealthy, wealthy man. | ||
| In California, that means that you can afford a two-bedroom apartment in Studio City. | ||
| Right, if you're lucky. | ||
| All right, Super Chat, I'm planning on joining the Army and I'm struggling with the morality of taking part in a war with such high civilian death rates and interfering with the country's right to self-determination. | ||
| Thoughts? | ||
| This is a good question. | ||
| I mean, I think that obviously you're the only person who can really define kind of what your morality is on these things. | ||
| I think those are good things to think about, is what you'll have to do. | ||
| Whether it's something that you're willing to do. | ||
| I'm grateful to you that you're considering it because I didn't do it. | ||
| And so anybody who does is making a sacrifice I didn't make. | ||
| So I'm grateful for that consideration. | ||
| You know, look, I think that every war is going to be fought differently. | ||
| I think that it depends on the war. | ||
| It depends on whether you trust the leadership. | ||
| In the end, there is a fairly solid foreign policy consensus, even if you disagree with particular wars, between right and left. | ||
| It seems to have been exaggerated in recent years because of the war in Iraq. | ||
| But the truth is that until it was George W. Bush who wanted to fight the war in Iraq, it was Bill Clinton who wanted to fight the war in Iraq. | ||
| So I think some of the gaps here are a little bit exaggerated. | ||
| Hey, Ben, do you have any thoughts to offer up on the works of Ayn Rand and objectivism? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, you've talked about this a little bit, and I know you said we were gonna try to work a sit-down with Jeroen Broek. | ||
| Yeah, which I think would be fun. | ||
| I know Jeroen's been critical of my terminology of capitalism, where I've said that it's forced altruism, because anytime you say the word altruism in the presence of an objectivist, then it's like water on the Wicked Witch of the West. | ||
| They just start melting, and it's all crazy. | ||
| But what I mean by forced altruism is the sense that If I don't give you something that you want, then I starve. | ||
| Meaning that there's an externality to me living that I have to generate for you in order for me to get something in return. | ||
| So, whether you use altruism or not, we have the same perspective on capitalism. | ||
| I think that on capitalism, there's been very few expositors of capitalism who I think are better than Ayn Rand. | ||
| As far as her life philosophy and her relationship philosophy, I think that's Pretty garbage. | ||
| I don't think objectivism applies in personal relationships. | ||
| Now, the way that a lot of objectivists get around the idea that, like, you're going to abandon your wife and children because there's a hot chick at the bar. | ||
| Because objectivists... Well, they would say that's not rational self-interest, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they'll redefine the terminology, right? | ||
| They'll say that you're not making a sacrifice for your wife and children. | ||
| You've made a decision that it makes you happier to be with your wife and children, and the rational person would make that decision that it's better to be with your wife and children. | ||
| A lot of 40-year-old men driving Corvettes would disagree. | ||
| I really don't think that's correct. | ||
| I wonder if they disagree or they just have a moment of stupidity. | ||
| I mean, maybe, but you know, it's the president's married three times each time to a younger, hotter model. | ||
| So it's, you know, I think that I have less faith in human nature than to believe that the reason I stick with my wife and kids is because it always makes me happy. | ||
| There's plenty of times when I'm with a screaming child in the middle of the night, when what would best serve my interests is to thrust the child upon my wife and go drinking, so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| All right, well, we'll facilitate that conversation at some point when you guys are both around. | ||
| All right, Super Chat, if both sides regard, quote, the other as evil, is it inevitable that we will eventually destroy each other as the result of our differences in the concept of morality? | ||
| I'll just add one little piece to this, that I sort of see something like this happening. | ||
| That a whole bunch of us good, decent people, which I actually think is most of us, are going to keep trying to hold some sort of sane middle thing. | ||
| But the inevitability of the two sides that want to destroy each other, that believe the other side is evil, is sort of something that we can't ultimately guard against from both sides. | ||
| I mean, I think this is right. | ||
| The politically driven, this is something where The narrative of politics is strongest and most useful when it is these stark terms. | ||
| When you talk about good and evil, this is what motivates people, right? | ||
| Every war speech ever given in any film is all about how the other guys are really evil because it's motivating. | ||
| And that's going to be true in politics also. | ||
| When it gets to individuals, and this is why you talk about individuals, why I talk about individuals, a lot of that goes out the window. | ||
| There's a study that I heard Arthur Brooks talking about recently on a podcast where he was talking about how in the 1930s, there was a Chinese couple that went around the United States staying at hotels, and they were never discriminated against. | ||
| They went to like 250 hotels, one of them turned down service. | ||
| Then afterward, they called all 250 hotels on the phone and said, we're a Chinese couple, we want to stay. | ||
| And 240 of them said, we don't serve Chinese couples. | ||
| Meaning that when people were actually confronted with the actual human being that they were talking to, Then they weren't willing to follow through on their ideological discrimination and their stereotypes about the evil of Chinese people. | ||
| Then they were just willing to treat you as an individual. | ||
| And I think that's one of the things that's been lost with the lack of community. | ||
| Like, how many times do you actually talk with a person who you don't talk with every day in today's society? | ||
| And the answer is not very often. | ||
| On social media, it's always behind a Twitter handle, which is really more for insulting people. | ||
| Or on Facebook, where you never see the people. | ||
| But, you know, this is what Robert Putnam talks about in terms of the social fabric dissolving and bowling alone, and we don't have communal places anymore. | ||
| And that's why the people who you find who are the friendliest, contrary to, in my experience, contrary to the public opinion put forth by Hollywood, are people who are in church groups, right? | ||
| You go to a church group, these people treat you like gold, right? | ||
| I mean, I'm an Orthodox Jew. | ||
| I walk into a church group. | ||
| They're friendly. | ||
| They're all used to each other. | ||
| They see each other on a regular basis. | ||
| They do things for each other. | ||
| And maybe that only extends as far as the in-group, but I think that the more often you're interacting with various different in-groups, the more often you're going to be willing to count on somebody who disagrees with you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, I mean, my own personal experience is, and I said in my direct message from this morning, I will give the exact same speech that I gave at Turning Point USA in front of all those conservatives. | ||
| I'll give it to any progressive group if they'll invite me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I suspect they will not invite me. | ||
| Dave and Ben, you guys red-pilled me, and I can't thank you enough for that. | ||
| I've learned too much to express my appreciation in 200 characters, but I genuinely can't thank you enough. | ||
| All right, not a question, but that's nice. | ||
| It reminds me of the girl that, when I was at the local store over here, picking up bug spray, and the girl said she was a big fan of mine. | ||
| She goes, but I really like Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Well, she'll have her check-in now. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Hi Dave and Ben, do you guys, it disappeared for a second. | ||
| Do you think more states will join the US in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital? | ||
| I'll answer it first. | ||
| I mean, I definitely think. | ||
| I think there's a lot of reasons that states are quietly lining up to right now. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| And I think that some of the states that want to do it the most are actually the states that you think about the least, right? | ||
| I think Saudi Arabia would love to do it, but they can't, right? | ||
| The fact is that what Trump did is smart in a lot of ways. | ||
| One of the ways it's smart is he just re-enshrined the Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian-Israeli alliance against Iran. | ||
| And he basically said, listen, let's get on the same page here. | ||
| Jerusalem's off the table. | ||
| Israel's not going to give that up. | ||
| So deal. | ||
| And Saudi Arabia is fine with it, by the way. | ||
| Saudi Arabia, like Mohammed bin Salman, he's going around telling the Palestinians, shut. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just be quiet, how about be nice for a change, and we can actually move to some sort of real | ||
| solution here. | ||
| I think there will be more states that join up, but this goes to a fundamental disconnect | ||
| that I think the left and the right have about American leadership in the world. | ||
| The left believes that morality on the world stage is defined by majority vote, particularly | ||
| majority of the Europeans. | ||
| And the right believes that morality is defined by certain internal principles that we believe in for whether religious or ideological reasons. | ||
| And then we say America has to do its best to try to promulgate those principles. | ||
| And people like Obama will say, well, we have to lead from behind because those principles are really malleable on the face of the world stage. | ||
| So if the Europeans don't like us moving our embassy to Jerusalem, that means that we've done something terribly wrong. | ||
| Right, this is where they always talk about, well, what about international law? | ||
| Or what about what the UN said? | ||
| Or what about what the Europeans will say about us? | ||
| International law is crap. | ||
| International law is garbage. | ||
| Leon Uris has a line, and I think it's in Mila 18, he's a novelist, and Mila 18 is a really good book about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where he says, international law is that which the good refuse to enforce and the evil refuse to abide by. | ||
| That is good. | ||
| Putting aside even the moral argument and historical argument of why Jerusalem should be controlled by the Israelis, where, by the way, it's an international city, and there are literally men, or ultra-Orthodox men, walking next to women in burqas, as I saw not too long ago. | ||
| But even putting all of that aside, and that Palestine as a state never existed, and the Jordanians used to occupy Jerusalem, and that the Jews can occupy Gaza. | ||
| Putting back all of that stuff that the left refuses to acknowledge, any of that, just on a purely strategic point, it strikes me as a good move by Trump because it's like, the Palestinians literally refuse to negotiate. | ||
| Bibi every year walks around going, I'll meet you anywhere Abbas, anywhere, and he never does. | ||
| So to me, it's like, all right, well, like this is where Trump, the good negotiator Trump, I think actually makes sense. | ||
| I think this is where the F.U. | ||
| Trump comes in. | ||
| I'm not even sure it's about him being a great negotiator. | ||
| It's just like, I'm going to say what I think is true here, and we're done. | ||
| And this is where the good Trump, bad Trump dichotomy that I have been promulgating for a while comes in. | ||
| When he's good, he's really good. | ||
| I mean, this is what he said, where he said, listen, this is the reality. | ||
| We can futz around with this, but you guys turned down two separate offers in the last In the last 10 years, to take Jerusalem as part of your capital and you turn it down both times, right? | ||
| Ehud Barak offered it in 2001 to Yasser Arafat. | ||
| Arafat started the Second Intifada instead. | ||
| Ehud Olmert offered the internationalization of the old city of Jerusalem, which is insane. | ||
| Yeah, which is completely insane. | ||
| And Abbas walked away from the table without even a counteroffer in 2007. | ||
| I don't know exactly what you want from Israel or from the United States on that. | ||
| Ben, how are you dominating Twitter? | ||
| Do you have a second moderator, or are you actually living within Twitter as an artificial intelligence that Sam Harris warns us about? | ||
| I did want to ask you something about that. | ||
| You play the game of saying a lot of smart stuff on Twitter, but you're also a pretty damn good troll. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the memes and all that. | |
| Those are all me. | ||
| I mean, I handle my own Twitter account. | ||
| So on my Facebook account, then I have a couple people who work for me who will post articles from time to time. | ||
| But on my Twitter account, that I enjoy too much to give up. | ||
| So, you know, when I'm doing the MeMory and, you know, when I decide to do 2017 in one GIF and all that, that's just because I get a kick out of Twitter. | ||
| It's too much fun. | ||
| Oh, this is a good one from Super Chat. | ||
| Ben, what is your opinion on centrism and people who identify as centrists? | ||
| I thought I saw a little movement with centrists in the last year. | ||
| Now I'm not sure where it's at. | ||
| I don't know what it means. | ||
| This is my big problem. | ||
| I'm not fond of terminology that I have no clue what it means, and sometimes centrist just means I'm too lazy to pick a side. | ||
| So on what issue generally, I don't know what that means. | ||
| I think generally people mean it to be like socially liberal, fiscally conservative, like something like that. | ||
| Right, so if they say that, then I get clarification usually on what you mean by socially liberal. | ||
| And then we can have a conversation about where you're right and where you're wrong. | ||
| That's a more specific way to boil it down. | ||
| What I get the feeling from is centrists is like moderate or independent. | ||
| It's something somebody says when they really don't want to talk politics or when they just want to say, I don't like the Democrats, I don't like the Republicans, a pox on all of you, I'm an independent. | ||
| I'm better than everybody. | ||
| Just want to say how handsome you both look. | ||
| Love listening to both of you. | ||
| Great way to start the New Year. | ||
| Cheers! | ||
| Let's start the fanfiction there. | ||
| We agree. | ||
| Oh God, there we go. | ||
| This is a good one from Super Chat. | ||
| What do you think the country would look like right now if Hillary had won the election, politically and culturally? | ||
| Well, so I think that we'd be about as riven as we are now. | ||
| I don't think that we would be significantly less riven. | ||
| The right was not happy with the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency, and Hillary is a very off-putting human being who has a nasty tendency of being terrible to other people. | ||
| So I don't think that—like, people are saying, oh, Trump is so alienating. | ||
| There was this lady named Hillary, and she was not—like, I think Trump is more overtly alienating than Hillary. | ||
| But the difference is the difference that the media would have treated her like the queen, basically. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So it would have been much more in small quarters where the anger would have been. | ||
| I mean, I think that's true. | ||
| I think the fact that that's a great point. | ||
| I think the fact the media have been so all over Trump all the time has ratcheted this up to 11 all the time. | ||
| I think for the right, it would be a constant 11 because I think there would be sheer panic in a lot of quarters. | ||
| Like, are we ever going to win another election? | ||
| This is totally crazy. | ||
| On the other hand, would Hillary be getting a lot of stuff through? | ||
| No, she'd have Republican Congress. | ||
| And by the way, the Republicans probably would gain in the midterms. | ||
| So I think that on domestic policy, it would be worse because Trump's done some affirmative good. | ||
| On foreign policy, I think it would be a fair bit worse because Hillary was committed to the Iranian policy of the Obama administration, which is one of the worst policies in the history of the United States. | ||
| Ben, do you think there's a link between IQ and career success and family stability? | ||
| Do you think there is such a thing as cognitive elite? | ||
| So, I mean, the studies tend to say yes, right? | ||
| The studies tend to say that, the data tend to say that you will probably earn more money if your IQ is higher, up to a point of diminishing returns, actually. | ||
| I think that the statistic that I saw was something like, once you get 160, then the income starts to come down again because you forget how to talk to humans. | ||
| You're so smart that you turn into Eric Weinstein, and Eric's like one of the only people with an IQ above 160 where it's like, He's doing really well for himself, or Peter, right? | ||
| There are a few people who are like geniuses, geniuses, who make tons of money, and it's usually in industries where they've never had to talk to another human. | ||
| But overall, the answer is yes. | ||
| I mean, if you're smarter, you're going to have advantages. | ||
| As far as making better life decisions, I think that the answer is also yes, but I think it's a matter of degree rather than a matter of kind, meaning that The decisions that you have to make in order to have a mildly successful life in the United States are not supremely difficult ones. | ||
| It's why I say you don't have to get straight A's, you don't have to go to Harvard, you don't have to do any of those things to lead a happy life in the United States. | ||
| All you have to do is get a job, and don't have babies before you get married, and finish high school. | ||
| And finishing high school in the United States is not that big a deal, and don't put that thing there without that thing on it, and you're fine. | ||
| And, you know, getting a job. | ||
| Like, there are jobs available. | ||
| You may not want to take the job, but there are jobs available. | ||
| I don't think everyone's going to be equally successful, because I don't think everyone is equally given capacity. | ||
| But this has been true throughout human history, and that doesn't mean that you get to punish some people for the benefit of others, particularly because in a capitalist system, the benefit of others benefits you. | ||
| Let's say Bill Gates is the cognitive elite. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| He's a very smart guy. | ||
| Cognitive elite. | ||
| How many people have jobs because of Bill Gates? | ||
| Whereas if we had just said to Bill Gates when he was young, you're a member of the cognitive elite. | ||
| Now we're going to chain you to this machine and you're going to work right next to that other guy who's not cognitive elite. | ||
| But now you're both equal. | ||
| How many people would work for Bill Gates? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| And so the fact is that it is good that... I thought about this actually before. | ||
| This is a weird kind of thought question for you, Dave. | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| So would you rather be the stupidest person in a really smart society or the smartest person in a really stupid society? | ||
| I'd rather be the stupidest person in a smart society and hope that I could get something out of it. | ||
| I think that's the moral answer, and I think it's also the more effective answer, because the truth is that if you're the smartest person in 11th century Britain, you're still going to die at age 35 of dysentery, right? | ||
| But if you're the stupidest person alive today in the United States, you're going to live to 70 and you're going to have a TV and a microwave and a car. | ||
| So this is the general point about cognitive elites. | ||
| What makes industry go? | ||
| What makes capitalism happen? | ||
| What makes you have a job and a better life and all the cool stuff that you have around? | ||
| What allows you to watch this show on a magic connection that goes up to space and back down to your computer? | ||
| I have no freaking clue, Adam. | ||
| Right, I don't know how that works either. | ||
| But it's because they're cognitively smarter than I am who put that together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We kinda hit on this one. | ||
| This is Patreon. | ||
| Hi, Ben. | ||
| As a libertarian who's socially conservative, I'm curious if you think conservatives will ever actually stop the growth of government scope, spending, and debt. | ||
| Virtually all conservative politicians campaign on shrinking government, but virtually all of them are satisfied with the power and spending once in office. | ||
| So we did hit on this. | ||
| Is there anything that you can say about that? | ||
| I mean, the only thing I would add is I think that the calculation for getting elected and staying elected are two different calculations. | ||
| Getting elected, you can make a lot of promises. | ||
| Staying elected, you actually have to bring home the bacon to your district in many cases. | ||
| And the only way that this is going to happen, I know people have suggested a convention of states. | ||
| I think that might be a good idea, to have an actual constitutional convention where we legitimately restrict the powers of the federal government again. | ||
| But it'll take some politicians of courage who aren't afraid to only serve one term. | ||
| Because serving two terms after saying, I'm going to cut your social security is not always the easiest thing. | ||
| Yeah, you think the founders would all be rolling on their graves knowing how many lifetime politicians we have? | ||
| And even, you know, from McCain to, you know, it's all over the map. | ||
| So I'll say McCain, and I'll also say Bernie, and a guy like Bernie, who actually never really accomplished anything in 30 years. | ||
| Right, Warren Hatch, he's been in the Senate for 41 years, right? | ||
| He just retired. | ||
| They would all hate this, right? | ||
| I mean, they would absolutely hate this. | ||
| I mean, they all had other jobs. | ||
| I mean, John Adams was a lawyer, and George Washington was a general. | ||
| And Thomas Jefferson was a thinker and a farmer. | ||
| I mean, they all had other jobs. | ||
| That doesn't mean they didn't love politics, but what they really would be appalled by is the size of government. | ||
| I mean, even the Federalists would have looked at this and gone, what in the world is this? | ||
| Remember, they rebelled over tax rates that were lower than a California state tax rate, probably. | ||
| The idea that- Well, it was pretty close to the no taxation without representation thing, so they were really- That's right. | ||
| Super Chat, what are both of your predictions for the upcoming midterm elections? | ||
| I mean, it's hard to look at the data and not conclude Republicans get shellacked. | ||
| Right now, the Republicans in an off-year elections, the party in power in the White House typically loses anywhere from 23 to 25 seats. | ||
| Right now, the Republicans have a 23-seat majority, which means that if they lose the average number of seats, they probably lose the majority in the House. | ||
| Right now, it doesn't look like they're going to lose an average number of seats. | ||
| The enthusiasm on the left is extraordinarily high. | ||
| The enthusiasm on the right for showing up is mediocre at best. | ||
| And President Trump's personal toxicity is not helping the situation. | ||
| If he would just shut up, then I think that Republicans would have a better shot of holding the House. | ||
| But I think that the fact that he's in the headlines every day for saying whatever crazy thing he said today is not helpful to him. | ||
| Which is a problem for me because I actually like a lot of things he's doing now. | ||
| Like now I have a stake in him doing well. | ||
| Right, but is there a problem with that argument because he did what no one said he could do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| So then to say, well now do it the right way, No one would ever do it. | ||
| I did what none of you said I could do. | ||
| But as I just said, there is a difference between getting elected and staying elected. | ||
| And not only that. | ||
| Trump did not win that election. | ||
| Hillary Clinton lost that election, okay? | ||
| Trump won, but nobody in Trump camp thought they were going to win. | ||
| I mean, that day they were like, I mean, I know people in the camp. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And that's not a rip on Trump. | ||
| Trump did do something incredible, but that is an accomplishment, not a strategy, right? | ||
| And there was no strategy. | ||
| To pretend that there was any strategy to the Trump campaign at all, other than we're going to actually visit some swing states, which was strategic, Hillary Clinton was the worst candidate in the history of the United States by an enormous margin. | ||
| How do we know? | ||
| Because she lost to Donald Trump, right? | ||
| We had an approval rating of 36% at the time of the election. | ||
| You can't do that and hope to sustain. | ||
| I mean, at least maybe you can hope that the Democrats are stupid enough to run Kamala Harris or something. | ||
| But if they run Joe Biden, I think he's got a problem in 2020, which pains me because I think that right now Trump is doing a lot of things that I like personally, even as much as I dislike the tearing apart of the social fabric. | ||
| Good God, I mean, if it's Joe Biden at that age and everything else, what a sad state of affairs. | ||
| It probably will be. | ||
| I mean, I think it'll be Biden versus Trump, and the baby boomers will never leave. | ||
| And then they'll be artificially propped up like Darth Vader, and they will remove their masks at the end of the election, and they'll be, you're right! | ||
| That was pretty good. | ||
| There was a good one here, I just lost it. | ||
| Oh, how did we not touch on universities at all for the first hour? | ||
| But what would you do to un-reform the universities? | ||
| How would you fix that? | ||
| So the first thing you have to do is you have to go to the alum and you have to say, listen, your money is going for a bunch of crap. | ||
| And then you have to have the alum go and pressure the universities on this. | ||
| Second, if you're hiring, you shouldn't hire based on just the credentialing of what university somebody went to. | ||
| The truth is, the simplest way to kill the university system would be to reverse the Supreme Court decision that prevents employers from using IQ tests. | ||
| That's basically what university systems are. | ||
| They're just filtration systems for various people of IQ. | ||
| So that's how you know that someone who went to CSUN is probably not of the same IQ level as somebody who went to Harvard. | ||
| Not a rip on CSUN, but that's just the way it works, right? | ||
| Different SAT scores. | ||
| All the SAT is is a basic IQ test. | ||
| What if we didn't have that? | ||
| What if we just said, okay, you know, from now on, we're going to give you a basic IQ test, and you'll do an apprenticeship. | ||
| You don't have to do any of this lesbian dance theory nonsense in college. | ||
| You know, we'd first of all cut out an enormous amount of time and energy and money from the system. | ||
| And then if you actually want to go to college and study something that requires higher learning, like, you know, my wife's a doctor, as I've mentioned 1,000 times each episode, you know, if she, you know, goes to medical school, she requires training. | ||
| If I am a lawyer, I basically require six months at a law firm before I'm You know, qualified to do that kind of work? | ||
| I don't need three years of law school and four years of undergrad for that. | ||
| Well, that's also why this is the free college for everyone. | ||
| It's like, actually, there's a lot of good jobs you can have where you make good money that you don't need to, and you can learn a trade, and it may not be the sexiest thing in the world, but you can live an actually really good life and do invaluable work. | ||
| And what I'm saying is the vast majority of trades shouldn't require, like white collar jobs, should not require going to college. | ||
| Anything that you can get with a poli sci degree is something you could have gotten without a poli sci degree. | ||
| I know, I have a poli sci degree. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| That's so sad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was sad for both of us. | |
| Let's see. | ||
| Ben, what are your thoughts on the danger of UN Agenda 21-2030? | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| I seem to recall that it had something to do with... Opposes to our country and individual rights. | ||
| Yeah, you know, again, I'm not sure what it is. | ||
| So, Agenda 21 was something a lot of people were talking about, I'd say, three or four years ago, where they're talking about an actual regime of international law in which the United States surrenders some of its sovereignty to international institutions. | ||
| Any deal under which the United States would surrender any of its sovereignty to international institutions is problematic to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, us giving real authority to the UN is, I don't think, going to happen, considering that we fund them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, there's a better shot now that Trump knocks the place over and builds a parking lot, which I would be very much in favor of. | ||
| I mean, the fact that we're cutting their funding already is spectacular. | ||
| I want to see. | ||
| Like, I'm not in favor of eminent domain being used for private purposes, but if Trump bulldozes the U.N. | ||
| and builds a Trump Tower on it, I will, I may make an exception. | ||
| That's some pretty prime real estate right there. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Just seize it. | ||
| And I mean, that's a self-enrichment deal I'd be willing to countenance as long as it involves knocking down the U.N. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm with you on that. | ||
| Hey Ben, if the government got out of marriage, how would that affect divorce, child custody, etc.? | ||
| And does marriage have to be a religious institution? | ||
| Are there any negative effects of it being an institution of love? | ||
| So the, okay, so those are really two separate questions. | ||
| One is sort of the- We can do the first part. | ||
| Yeah, so the first part is that marriage should be governed by contract law. | ||
| Meaning that, in the same, I have a contract with my wife. | ||
| It's called the ketubah, right? | ||
| And that ketubah means that it states in there how much I owe her upon divorce. | ||
| I believe it's $10 million. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Wait, that's in the ketubah? | ||
| So this is a good story. | ||
| So in the Jewish community, when you write the Ketubah, in the Ketubah it says if you give a woman a divorce, then you have to pay her basically liquidated damages. | ||
| And so very often you'll get negotiations between the wife's family and the groom as to what that number is going to be. | ||
| So my father-in-law comes in one day and he's like, what number do you want in the Ketubah? | ||
| I said, I don't care. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I'm not getting divorced. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| And he says, well, what would you want? | ||
| I said, I don't care. | ||
| Put $100 million. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It's not going to make any difference to me. | ||
| And he goes, my daughter's not worth $100 million. | ||
| $10 million is good. | ||
| So he put $10 million. | ||
| And he was very happy. | ||
| But in any case, it's a contractual relationship. | ||
| It's governed by contract law under private religious courts in the Jewish community. | ||
| And that works just fine. | ||
| It's worked just fine for several thousand years at this point. | ||
| So the idea that A contract cannot be had between you and your husband or between me and my wife. | ||
| Like, just because I wouldn't have same-sex marriages take place at my synagogue doesn't mean that you guys can't have a contract between yourselves. | ||
| Like, I don't care. | ||
| A contract's a contract. | ||
| Enjoy. | ||
| And by the way, I wouldn't force your synagogue to marry me. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| I mean, this is the beauty of living in a free country. | ||
| As I say, I can think that, you know, what you're doing is sinful and you can not care. | ||
| Like, this is the beauty of it. | ||
| Like, who cares? | ||
| I'm sure that you don't like things I do, whatever. | ||
| Like, it's a free country. | ||
| I mean, that's the truth. | ||
| It's like, obviously we like each other, we're friends, but I genuinely, like, if truly in the, | ||
| some recess of your mind, you think I'm like an evil sinner or something, | ||
| like, I genuinely, first off, I don't get that feeling, but I genuinely don't care. | ||
| Like, I'm living my life, you're living your life. | ||
| All right, we're in a great country. | ||
| Let's do it after all. | ||
| This is the part that I've always been puzzled by is all the people who seem to desperately crave my approval. | ||
| Like, why, like, Do you know me well enough that you want my approval? | ||
| My own children barely earned my approval. | ||
| That could be your first stand-up bit. | ||
| Oh, this is good. | ||
| Ben, my girlfriend is a big Milo fan who hates you. | ||
| How do I fix her? | ||
| First of all, have her watch a tape from Joe Rogan. | ||
| You don't have to have her watch the Him Defending People tape. | ||
| What I would say about Milo's shtick is that Milo is somebody who is very much driven by a desperate need for attention. | ||
| I've been making very clear for years that I think this leads him down some pretty dark roads into associations with some people who I think are very bad for conservatism. | ||
| I don't think he has a thoroughgoing worldview, other than just to be a troll and gain attention. | ||
| And it doesn't, you know, I'm not surprised a lot of Milo fans are not fans of mine, because I've made very clear that I have an affirmative worldview that I stand up for, whereas I think that Milo can basically be classified as anti-left, rather than as conservative, per se. | ||
| Like, if you asked Milo, what would you do in government, it would all be stuff that was anti-left, I think. | ||
| But I don't think he thinks about any of that stuff anyway. | ||
| I don't think that Milo is a big reader. | ||
| I don't think Milo is somebody who spends a lot of time with ideas. | ||
| Now, it's not ripping out his intellect. | ||
| I think Milo seems to be a smart guy. | ||
| But again, he embraced some really terrible, awful people who did some pretty terrible, awful things in the last few years to make his name. | ||
| And that's something that I have a deep and abiding disgust with. | ||
| Yeah, so I'll throw in a bonus one for me here on that, because I wanted to get to this anyway. | ||
| Where do you draw the line on who you can interact with or talk to? | ||
| So, for example, I've done Alex Jones' show, and I got a lot of shit for it, but my feeling was, well, if it's live, Yeah. | ||
| They're not editing me. | ||
| And if I can talk about the things that I care about, well, I might just get some of those people to come here and start hearing new ideas and all that. | ||
| So that's my general policy. | ||
| Sometimes I sit, you know, I've had other controversial people like Stefan Molyneux and a slew of other people, probably on both sides of people don't want me to talk to you. | ||
| Do you have a general rule for who? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I mean, so I mean, the truth is on my podcast, on my podcast, I don't do guests. | ||
| So it's me monologuing for 45 minutes, take it or leave it. | ||
| As far as guesting on other people's programs, my general tendency is that if I feel like the conversation is going to be productive and it's not me elevating somebody who I believe to be morally deficient in a serious way, then that's the latter one. | ||
| And that's the hard one. | ||
| I mean, there are people who you wouldn't have on because you'd feel like you're elevating them to a certain point. | ||
| I have the same issue, but my kind of white list may be a little bit broader just because You know, my ideology is a little bit more well defined in some ways. | ||
| Ben, would you care to have a discussion on how to automate the U.S. | ||
| Congress? | ||
| Would you care to? | ||
| Robot Congress? | ||
| It sounds like Futurama. | ||
| I think you're into it. | ||
| I'm definitely into it. | ||
| Actually, this is one that I think we should definitely do, is we should just abolish Washington, D.C., and everybody should vote for their home district. | ||
| I don't know why everybody has to be... We have conference calls, right? | ||
| We have Skype. | ||
| I don't know why we have to have all these people living 3,000 miles away, shtupping their assistants, and going to whorehouses. | ||
| Isn't it weird that something like seven of the nine richest counties in the United States are all within that 20-mile radius? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How bizarre. | |
| I know. | ||
| Weird that it works that way. | ||
| I can't quite put it together. | ||
| Help me with some logic there. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Superchat. | ||
| I'm noticing at Cornell that conservatives are afraid to share their opinions in class. | ||
| How much of this transcends to the workforce? | ||
| What can we do? | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is a big tough one. | ||
| The workforce particularly. | ||
| Because I get this question a lot. | ||
| Like, I want to speak out at work, but I'm afraid of the blowback. | ||
| And the answer is I can't give you guidance on that because it depends on the value of your job. | ||
| I mean, I've told people in Hollywood to shut up and not lose their job because I don't think that you should give people the hammer to beat you with, basically. | ||
| Does Mark Hamill drive you crazy on Twitter? | ||
| Because he's a lefty, lefty, lefty loser. | ||
| And I'm like, come on, man, leave Luke alone. | ||
| Like, I'm already pissed at Luke because of the movie. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But now it's like it's doubly, you know? | ||
| This entire year has been so bizarre. | ||
| I mean, I was sexually harassed by Rosie O'Donnell, right? | ||
| Like, things are weird, dude. | ||
| So, like, Mark Hamill was not high on my list. | ||
| For the record, I've broken bread with both you and Rosie, and I do not want that to happen, but... | ||
| Have you really broken bread with Rosie O'Donnell? | ||
| How'd that go? | ||
| You know, it's actually a pretty great story. | ||
| Right before I was, you know, I was doing my thing on SiriusXM, but, you know, I was much smaller, I guess, than I am now in that sense. | ||
| And I tweeted at her, and I had heard her once say that on The View she ate wings at this place, Blondie's, on the Upper West. | ||
| And I tweeted a picture of a wing in my mouth, and I said, Rosie, I'm at Blondie's if you want to get dinner. | ||
| And she showed up five minutes later, and we spent a couple hours. | ||
| It was actually great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Okay. | ||
| You know, she's changed a lot also. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know when she lost her mind then. | ||
| I mean, like, that's... | ||
| That was a very weird interaction. | ||
| Yeah, you've had some strange things happen to you. | ||
| This year, man, we entered a portal that was not the right portal. | ||
| As I've been saying for a while, I think that we're now living in the alternate timeline where Biff actually traveled back to 1955 with the sportsbook and changed everything and Marty was unable to prevent it. | ||
| Yeah, oh man, there we are. | ||
| On the workforce college part of it, I think I've heard you say on the college part that if it's the classes that you're majoring in, you should shut up, right? | ||
| No, so what I've said is that you have to gauge it by professors. | ||
| So some professors are willing to hear debate. | ||
| So one of the people who wrote a law school recommendation for me, or a job recommendation for me, is Lani Guinier. | ||
| Lani Guinier is as far left as is possible to be. | ||
| She was, I think, Wow. | ||
| nominated for undersecretary of labor under Clinton and was refused by a Democratic Senate | ||
| because she's kind of a socialist. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And she and I got along famously. | ||
| We would have debates in class. | ||
| She loved it. I loved it. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| And she ended up writing a letter of rec for my job stuff. | ||
| And then there are other professors where it's like, you don't cross this professor | ||
| because the professor's a jerk. | ||
| So button it up. | ||
| And so I think you really do have to gauge it on a case by case basis. | ||
| In the workplace, we are entering a really scary place now, | ||
| particularly social media, where the outrage machine is so strong | ||
| that they will basically destroy your career for anything. | ||
| And it keeps me up at night. | ||
| I'm sure it keeps you up at night. | ||
| There's this constant feeling of being on edge because it's a really scary place. | ||
| If at any time the media decides to crank up the social outrage machine for no reason at all, it can be for nothing, then is there anything that you can do about it? | ||
| You can sort of hold on for dear life. | ||
| I mean, that's why I want to be my own boss. | ||
| I had offers this past year for a lot more money to do all sorts of different things, but I'm my own boss. | ||
| The chances that I fire myself are pretty slim. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| What issues do you think Justice Gorsuch will have the biggest impact on? | ||
| Well, I mean, right now the court is split 4-4-1, right? | ||
| Because Anthony Kennedy is a crazy person. | ||
| So Justice Kennedy, it depends whether he had his Metamucil that morning, how he rules. | ||
| As far as where he should have the most impact, I think administrative law is an area where he can have a lot of impact. | ||
| So he is not for something called Chevron deference. | ||
| Chevron deference is the idea that administrative courts are unreviewable by the court except in cases of clear error. | ||
| He is against, which I agree with. | ||
| I don't think that you can have these kind of kangaroo administrative courts set up by regulation and then you can't appeal that to an actual court in the judicial system. | ||
| Like, I don't think the executive system should be the judicial system. | ||
| So that's one area that not a lot of people will talk about. | ||
| Also, in religious freedom areas, I think that he should be quite good. | ||
| That'll be good, yeah. | ||
| Net neutrality post-mortem. | ||
| I mean, we're all dead, right? | ||
| We're all dead, the internet's slow, nobody's watching this, it's all over, it's all over, we're dead. | ||
| What do you make of the hysteria around that? | ||
| That's the part that's crazy. | ||
| I actually really tried to dip this one out, because I was just like, no matter what I say on this, it's just gonna be endless hate. | ||
| Frankly, I was shocked by the level of interest in it. | ||
| That's what I was shocked by, is I gave a little commentary about why I was against net neutrality, and it had six million views on Facebook, and I was thinking to myself, Really? | ||
| All I said is that I think that there should be free and open competition among ISPs, but I see the arguments for both sides. | ||
| I mean, the argument for one side is that the ISPs are already operating on the basis of oligarchy, and therefore you should restrict their capacity to discriminate on the basis of content. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I also don't necessarily know that re-enshrining oligarchy through regulation is the best possible solution. | ||
| So I'm against that neutrality because I think that we should remove all these regulations in the same way that, you know, we are constantly looking for regulatory solutions to regulatory problems, and I just think we should wipe away regulations generally. | ||
| So it's really the same argument that you were making sort of on the Prager lawsuit before, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That basically competition is the thing that will save us, not just imaginary regulation. | ||
| Right, and I also think that when people were tweeting out crazy stuff like, every Google search is gonna go to 199, how stupid are you people? | ||
| Do you think that AltaVista wouldn't then immediately become the biggest engine on planet Earth? | ||
| Is AltaVista still around? | ||
| It wouldn't matter. | ||
| It wouldn't matter, right? | ||
| They'd be back. | ||
| I did Vascon and I had to take all my money and put it in Ask Jeeves in Bitcoin. | ||
| Oh, let's do this because we didn't do anything on healthcare. | ||
| Hi Ben, hi Dave. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of you both. | ||
| I have a question for Ben. | ||
| How do I convince my Australian boyfriend that universal healthcare is horrible? | ||
| He likes you but won't waiver on healthcare. | ||
| You and Cenk, my old boss, who I'm a huge fan of, really got into this. | ||
| Yeah, we debated this. | ||
| So the Australian healthcare system is, if I'm not mistaken, more like the Canadian system than it is like the British system, meaning that you are People buy supplementary insurance, I believe, in Australia. | ||
| So there's a universal health care system that provides the minimum, | ||
| and then you can buy supplementary insurance. | ||
| This is good for emergencies. | ||
| This universal health care typically is good for emergencies, | ||
| but it means longer waits for particular surgeons. | ||
| The problem of health care is one of supply, not demand. | ||
| It seems like everybody is trying to look for demand-side solutions to supply-side problems. | ||
| If you actually want to create more of a supply of healthcare, you actually need to allow the free market to operate just like it does in every other area of Western life. | ||
| If you wanted to make sure that everybody was able to get a bar of soap, you can either redistribute the soap that you have on the shelves, or you can allow people to bid for that soap, and then new soap companies will come into being that generate more soap to go for the extra profit. | ||
| The best example of this in the healthcare sphere, when you have deregulation and not a lot of insurance companies that are acting as the middleman, is in laser eye surgery. | ||
| So in laser eye surgery, it used to be like $20,000 an eye for laser eye surgery. | ||
| People saw it. | ||
| There's a lot of money in that. | ||
| They got into optometry and ophthalmology, and then it's down to like $3,000 an eye, and it's much better. | ||
| That's because there's actual price transparency. | ||
| The biggest problem with the American system is that there's no price transparency. | ||
| If you walk into your doctor's office today and say, I want an x-ray, they will not give you a price. | ||
| They don't know the price. | ||
| They don't know what your insurance company will say. | ||
| It's all messed up. | ||
| I think the reason people like universal healthcare is because it's simple in concept. | ||
| Meaning I walk into the doctor, and the doctor either takes care of me or tells me to come back in eight months with my hip replacement, and he'll take care of me, and I don't have to worry about anything after that. | ||
| But the simplicity is sometimes a mask for lesser service. | ||
| The best framing that I've seen of this comes from Dan McLaughlin in National Review. | ||
| He basically says that there are a few things that you can have in healthcare, but not all of them. | ||
| So you can have universality, quality, or affordability. | ||
| Those three things, right? | ||
| So everyone can have it. | ||
| It can be affordable, or it can be quality. | ||
| You can have two of those three things, he says, but not all three. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I would assume that Australia has universality and affordability, but not necessarily quality. | ||
| In Switzerland, you have universality and quality, but not necessarily affordability. | ||
| In the United States, you have affordability and quality, but not, well, debatable. | ||
| You may not have any of them because there's so many middlemen. | ||
| But in a free market system, you'd basically have affordability and quality, but not necessarily universality. | ||
| And then you'd have social institutions to fill the gap. | ||
| Whew! | ||
| That's a lot there. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| Ben and Dave, do you have any comments on the Rabashkin Hanukkah miracle? | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Should I know what that is? | |
| They're talking about a guy named Shalom Rabashkin, who is a rabbi in Iowa who was given a 25-year sentence for, I believe it was bank fraud. | ||
| He was an Orthodox rabbi who is famous for running the biggest kosher slaughterhouse in the United States. | ||
| And he had been employing illegal immigrants, and then there were some bank issues. | ||
| Oh, this is a couple years ago, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He was convicted, and he served eight years, so it was a while ago. | ||
| He was given a 25-year sentence, and so the argument was basically, by Alan Dershowitz and a lot of other people, the sentence was wildly disproportionate to the crime. | ||
| He committed the crime, but you don't get a 25-year sentence for bank fraud. | ||
| And that's wildly disproportionate. | ||
| He was pardoned by the Trump administration on the last day of Hanukkah. | ||
| So here are my thoughts on this. | ||
| My thoughts are that a crime is a crime. | ||
| I don't think celebrating a pardon for a crime is worthy of people, meaning that I | ||
| think there are wild celebrations in the streets in certain places. | ||
| I think that a subdued welcome home would have been more appropriate. | ||
| I think that when someone commits a crime and then gets out of prison, that you can be happy they're out of prison if you think the sentence was disproportionate. | ||
| But it's not a good look to have thousands of people celebrating somebody who just got out for bank fraud. | ||
| And so that's my that's my general take. | ||
| I think that the Trump administration did do the right thing, according to at least Dershowitz, who seems to have a closer look at the case. | ||
| What do you make of the way the left has turned on Dershowitz? | ||
| Like, there is such a visceral hatred for him now. | ||
| I'm trying to get him on the show. | ||
| Well, I mean, they hate him like they hate you, right? | ||
| I mean, like, anybody, anybody who's a quote-unquote turncoat is hated the most. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so Dershowitz, you know, has said things that are legally true about Trump, and you're not allowed to do that. | ||
| Trump is, you're better off if you're Luis Mench, suggesting that Trump is going to be lassoed by aliens and dragged to the Marshal of the Supreme Court, where he'll be executed by laser firing squad. | ||
| To his credit, I mean, I'm sure you've seen them, but on Twitter, when he gets attacked by a lot of former colleagues or former academics, he challenges them all publicly to a debate, and as far as I know, no one will do it. | ||
| So this is just the world we live in. | ||
| Twitter, you attack everybody, and... Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I would like to see him debate Larry Tribe, because Larry is off the rails, and Professor Tribe is... Ooh, I like this one. | ||
| Ben, I find your witty and dry humor hysterical. | ||
| Have you considered touring with Dave doing a stand-up duo comedy routine? | ||
| I'm going back into stand-up. | ||
| I did stand-up for about 12 years in New York, and I've just booked a couple things in January and February in L.A., and it's all coming back. | ||
| So I'll be honest, I'm very nervous about getting out of my zone. | ||
| So I think there's a big difference between a political commentator who is funny and a comedian who is political. | ||
| And I don't think I'm of the talent level, frankly, to do a full-on comedy routine. | ||
| I think that's stepping out of my lane. | ||
| Let them not say that Ben Shapiro is not humble. | ||
| Hey, Ben, the only reason I oppose the death penalty is that it's irreversible. | ||
| If you jail an innocent person, you can at least set them free to live a life later on. | ||
| But if you posthumously discover someone is innocent, you can't do it. | ||
| Okay, so I agree with the idea that the application could be flawed of the death penalty. | ||
| That's not an argument in principle against the death penalty. | ||
| It's an argument in principle against You know, any irreversible system. | ||
| Well, let's put it this way. | ||
| There's two arguments against the death penalty. | ||
| One is the effectiveness argument, which is, okay, you killed the guy, now you found out he's innocent. | ||
| Everyone admits this is a bad solution, right? | ||
| But then there's the second question, which is, you know the guy's guilty. | ||
| Is the death penalty inappropriate? | ||
| And that's a second level of anti-death penalty that some people are and some people are not, right? | ||
| Like the Pope is anti-death penalty for Hitler. | ||
| For me, I'd put two bullets in Hitler and then beat his head with the butt of the gun. | ||
| So, I have no problem with the death penalty in concept, but in application, I agree that there are problems. | ||
| I don't know that you want to answer this, but I will ask. | ||
| Are either of you active investors, and if so, what do you invest in? | ||
| I'm not, really. | ||
| I'm not either. | ||
| I sort of have an investment firm that does it for me. | ||
| I will say that I have most of my money, the vast majority of my investment money is in stocks, and I have sought a particularly high-risk portfolio because I'm young and I figure that if things go to hell in a handbasket, I can still have some time to make it up. | ||
| Or I have a good life insurance policy, so. | ||
| You can rent my room or something. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| You'll be alright. | ||
| Thanks for all the effort, guys. | ||
| Appreciate both of you. | ||
| It's great that you may not agree about everything, but we can still talk, okay? | ||
| I think we agree on that. | ||
| Do we agree on that? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| We don't agree on that. | ||
| You go, you go, you go! | ||
| That's the one we don't agree on, okay. | ||
| What are your opinions on Clash of Civilizations and Robert Kaplan's theory of breakdown in his book, Balkan Ghosts? | ||
| So I don't know the Robert Kaplan book. | ||
| Clash of Civilizations is Huntington, and I think that's more true than Fukuyama. | ||
| I mean, that was the big debate in the 90s was Fukuyama versus Huntington, right? | ||
| Samuel Huntington basically posited that there were these civilizations that were eventually going to come into conflict. | ||
| I think one of them was Islamic, one of them was Chinese, one of them was the Russians, one of them was Western civilization. | ||
| that seems to have been borne out pretty well, that these civilizations may change their borders, | ||
| but they still will continue to exist and they will fight with one another. | ||
| And then there was the Fukuyama theory, the end of history, | ||
| which is basically we reached the end of history, that the liberal democracy was gonna take over the globe | ||
| and everything would be hunky-dory and a giant fail. | ||
| And a giant fail. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I read Clash of Civilizations, my mind immediately goes to Clash of Titans, | ||
| which is, the original is one of the great movies of all time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And again, on automating US. | ||
| Congress, Ben, do you think that libertarians and conservatives would entertain automating the U.S. | ||
| Congress on a blockchain? | ||
| I sense people just want me to say certain things. | ||
| I think that's, I'm getting that impression. | ||
| That's what's happening here. | ||
| I don't know what that means. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what that means exactly either. | ||
| Or maybe Eric Weinstein is tweeting at us and he's speaking the language neither of us understand. | ||
|
unidentified
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Probably. | |
| Eric, stop, please. | ||
| This is kind of interesting. | ||
| Hey, Ben, big fan. | ||
| You've talked a lot about cultural values and a little bit about the stereotype of the wealthy Jew. | ||
| Is there one cultural value in Judaism slash culture that you would point to as a cause? | ||
| You know, it's interesting. | ||
| If I read this question with a different tone, it could sound anti-Semitic, but I think he's actually saying... What is the cause of civilization? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But he's actually saying, what's the reason culturally that Jews tend to be successful? | ||
| And the answer is that Jews have always had an extraordinarily high focus on education. | ||
| So the literacy rate in the Jewish community back in ancient times is nearly 100% for men and women. | ||
| So Jews have always been very into study, which is why we have giant sets of Talmud that sit on our shelves. | ||
| And so the focus on education and literacy was always a big focus for people coming to the United States, particularly immigrants coming to the United States, Jewish immigrants coming here. | ||
| Focused really heavily on get educated, make something of yourself. | ||
| And if you focus on it, and this isn't just unique to Jews, I mean, this is true for... Thomas Sowell has a theory and he basically says that people who are middlemen in any civilization are the people who are going to rise to the top because they're not... | ||
| Benefiting from the home ground of being natives, and yet they're doing all the transactional work. | ||
| And so that means that they have their own sort of in-group where they can negotiate with one another. | ||
| So they'd say, like, Hasidic diamond merchants, for example. | ||
| They don't need contracts, so they can cut out the middleman. | ||
| And so they can keep costs low, and they can do well that way. | ||
| But also, because they don't have that ground, they're forced to Use the system as best they can, which usually means playing by the rules of the system in the most efficient possible way. | ||
| And so you see that with a lot of Korean immigrants, for example, who will come to the United States and then education is all they care about and just get educated and rise in the system. | ||
| And cultures that focus on education do well. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| There's been a slew of questions asking me about Cenk in general and the debate and these revelations just in the last couple weeks. | ||
| You can hit that if you want, but I'd rather talk about the debate. | ||
| I really don't have a lot to say about the revelations. | ||
| They sort of speak for themselves and Cenk is Cenk. | ||
| Yeah, so I would agree with that. | ||
| But on the debate side, because a lot of people obviously watch the Politicon debate, it's hard to debate certain people who don't play by the standard rules of debate, right? | ||
| I mean, that in and of itself is sort of... So I thought that the debate went about as well as it was going to, meaning that, you know, shouting Google it, Over and over is not, I think, a great debate tactic. | ||
| But it was interesting. | ||
| I prepared for that debate very differently because I'd watched the debates that Cenk did with Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter a couple of years before. | ||
| And in both of those debates, Cenk's tactic, because the crowd was with him, was to basically find a quote that was 10 years old and then use it against Ann or use it against Dinesh and then yell at them if they defended themselves or attempted to answer a different question. | ||
| And so I prepared for that. | ||
| One of the best career moves Cenk ever made was not going low on me. | ||
| Like, if he had done that in debate, it would have been a very, very large mistake. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure that you had your budget prepared. | ||
| I prepped for debates. | ||
| I mean, I don't, you know, so it didn't go that direction. | ||
| And so we were able to have, you know, a relatively, I think for Chang, you know, decent and normal conversation about health care and taxes. | ||
| The only thing that annoyed me about it is I wish we had covered a broader gamut because it turned into like a health care debate for no reason. | ||
| It basically was a health care debate. | ||
| 60 minutes, which I hadn't prepared for, but I don't care, I can still do it, but it wasn't something that I was like, who came to listen to a 60-minute healthcare debate? | ||
| It was kind of weird, but. | ||
| Right, I think I said this to you after that, but that moment, that debate, which obviously I was watching with particularly keen interest, it wasn't even anything that you both said up there that I thought was the biggest takeaway, it was the audience. | ||
| The fact that the audience, young people, were so behind the conservative, You know, I've gone to Politicon events and I've gone to, I used to go to events with the Young Turks where it was like, you know, it's only these lefties and progressives and young people that show up. | ||
| But the cultural shift now where it's like the young people- We were shocked by that. | ||
| Look, we just did this turning point thing. | ||
| These kids were incredible. | ||
| I mean, and they're passionate and alive. | ||
| We were really surprised by it because, I mean, Young Turks is a sponsor of the event, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so we did the Q&A, and the Q&A was originally supposed to, right before the debate, the Q&A was originally supposed to be in a room for, I think, 200. | ||
| They had to move it into a room of 1,000. | ||
| And then we were supposed to do the debate in the room of 1,000. | ||
| They had to move it into the auditorium with three. | ||
| And so when we moved over there, you know, I don't want to get inside Cenk's head, but I imagine that his math might have changed on the stage when he walked out and was actively booed by two of the 3,000 people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he went, oh, this is not the same crowd that I debated I have a lot of hope for young people. | ||
| One of the things that I love is now I get spotted a lot in public places. | ||
| That has to be the most hopeful. | ||
| Oh, I mean, I have a lot of hope for young people. | ||
| I mean, one of the things that I love is now I get spotted a lot in public places. | ||
| It's probably been a year since I've been in a public place. | ||
| And so- For the record, I'm never having lunch with you | ||
| at a kosher place again. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| You can't eat, right? | ||
| I'm not your photographer. | ||
| I had to take 27 pictures of you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm going to a strictly non-kosher meat place somewhere, take you to lunch. | ||
| You can bring your own lunch if you want. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Although, I have to say that it was very weird. | ||
| My sister was in town, and so she wanted to go to this club in downtown LA, which I never go to any of these sorts of things. | ||
| You're not a big club guy, Ben? | ||
| Shocker, right? | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| But they do have this place called the Chiquita Club downtown. | ||
| Have you ever been there? | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| It's like an old 40s style club. | ||
| They kept it, they maintained it. | ||
| And so they actually have big bands come in and they do swing music and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| And it's really neat. | ||
| You have to dress like you're, you have to actually come in dressed like you're from the 40s or 50s. | ||
| So I've got like the full black outfit and the white jacket and the whole deal. | ||
| And like 10 people there wanted pictures. | ||
| And so it's, what I got to kick out of is the fact that everybody who wants a picture is somebody who's engaged with the ideas that I'm espousing. | ||
| There are a lot of entertaining people, a lot more entertaining people than I am. | ||
| But I think that the fact that they are interested in the ideas is, I hope, what's driving the interest level. | ||
| Because you're engaging with ideas too. | ||
| And when you're in the business of ideas, I hope that I'm a good proxy for the ideas that I'm espousing. | ||
| And if I am, then them wanting to take a picture of me, I hope, is them being enthusiastic about the system of values that I think is important. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| Alright, you got 10 more minutes? | ||
| I feel a 5.30 hour is fair for you. | ||
| You do have a family and I assume you have other things to do. | ||
| You gotta get back on Twitter or something. | ||
| From Super Chat, Jordan Peterson has argued that about 10% of the population isn't intelligent enough to perform any job. | ||
| Do you agree with this and if so, how do we help them? | ||
| I don't know that I've ever heard him say that specifically. | ||
| So if, for the purposes of this, we'll go with that. | ||
| There may be a contingent of people who are not intelligent enough to perform a job. | ||
| I doubt it's 10%. | ||
| I mean, the unemployment statistics right now are at four, so I think that'd be weird. | ||
| But there are people who legitimately can't take care of themselves, like people who are mentally ill or people who are mentally deficient in some way that they legitimately can't take care of themselves. | ||
| This is why I think community Groups are so necessary. | ||
| I mean, we have groups in my Orthodox community. | ||
| There's a great charity called Ede Israel, and it's a home for people who suffer from mental retardation, and those people are well taken care of. | ||
| The people in the community donate a lot of money to it, and they have Down syndrome, most of these people, and it's really quite great. | ||
| I mean, I think that more of those kinds of groups would take a lot of burden off of government and also prevent the left from using government as sort of their do-gooder routine. | ||
| Oh, this is good. | ||
| Hey, Ben, what are your thoughts on Hayek's why I'm not a conservative and the argument that conservatives' default position is to not do anything, but any movement or capitulation means moving towards progressivism, which is always pulling towards total government control? | ||
| I think this is a totally fair argument. | ||
| When people say a conservative is about conserving, I always think That's not then the terminology is wrong, right? | ||
| I mean, because if you what I use classical liberal is the term terminology that you like to use. | ||
| I think that's probably a better term. | ||
| I mean, it's more indicative of where you are. | ||
| Like, I don't want to conserve a lot of the things in government right now. | ||
| I want to tear a lot of the things in government out by the roots. | ||
| So that's not really conservative, unless you're saying I'm trying to conserve founding era ideas about human liberty. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ironically, I'm trying to conserve my liberalism now. | ||
| So everything gets flipped. | ||
| It's sort of how people have misused the term judicial activism. | ||
| They'll say, well, it's judicial activism if you change an old decision. | ||
| Well, that's not what we mean by judicial activism. | ||
| We mean you reading something into the Constitution that's not there. | ||
| But if you were to say it's judicial activism to say overturn Roe v. Wade because Roe v. Wade is a bad legal decision no matter what you think of abortion, then Then I'm not a judicial activist, I guess. | ||
| Then I would be, in that case, pro-judicial activism, because I'm in favor of getting rid of Roe. | ||
| But I'm not a pro-judicial activism guy, so this kind of futsy, wonky terminology is not my favorite. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much of thought have either of you put into the accelerating technological progress of the world that will, without a doubt, eclipse current issues? | ||
| I think this is sort of interesting, just related to AI and automation and all that. | ||
| How much, we think things have changed a lot in these last let's say three years in a lot of respects, | ||
| but that we're about to cross a threshold where everything is going to be completely different. | ||
| Yeah, so I think that obviously there are benefits and drawbacks. | ||
| Technology can take care of, I hope, of a lot of our problems, materially speaking. | ||
| You know, people have asked, one of the questions I get a lot now | ||
| is the universal basic income, the idea of automation is gonna become so great | ||
| that even intelligent jobs are gonna be done by machines. | ||
| And at that point, do you need a universal basic income? | ||
| What I've always said is that at the point where scarcity ceases to exist and you have the replicator from Star Trek and basically can make whatever you want with a machine, then sure, then you can have a universal basic income, no problem. | ||
| But typically speaking, every time there's a new technological shift, | ||
| it creates a new set of jobs that go along with that. | ||
| Plus, the technology that I've seen so far has suggested that the best, | ||
| the sort of best decision-making and most skilled operations | ||
| are combinations of human ingenuity and technology. | ||
| So the best chess players are not pure computers or pure humans. | ||
| It's a human using a computer. | ||
| And so maybe that's the direction that things go. | ||
| But if I could predict technology, it would already be created, right? | ||
| So I can't fully predict where I think technology's gonna go. | ||
| Yeah, I've used this example a couple times, but there's a McDonald's in the airport in Seattle that's now using iPads. | ||
| And just yesterday, I was at an airport and Burger King, iPads instead of people. | ||
| And it's like, well, if you keep telling them that they have to pay everyone 15 bucks an hour, guess what? | ||
| You're gonna see a lot more of these and a lot less actual human beings. | ||
| What is your position on DACA and your legislative solution? | ||
| Okay, so DACA, for those who don't know, is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. | ||
| This is Obama's executive amnesty, in which he basically said that if you're a dreamer, meaning that you were under the age of 16, or between the ages of 16 and 30, I believe, and you arrived as a child, then you get to stay, barring any sort of criminal record. | ||
| So my position on DACA is that I am not in favor. | ||
| The reason I'm not in favor is I think that a country gets to decide who its citizens are. | ||
| and just because you arrived here and you've been here for a long time does not change the country's capacity | ||
| for deciding whether you are of net benefit or net detriment to the society. | ||
| Now with that said, I'm pretty libertarian on immigration generally. | ||
| If you're here to work and not here on welfare and you're not destroying the culture in any way | ||
| and you're willing to acclimate to what I would consider to be traditional American values, | ||
| you know, hard work, the government doesn't take care of you and all the rest, then join. | ||
| Come on in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| I mean, I'm totally fine with that. | ||
| My preferred legislative solution to all of this is instead of evaluating everybody on the basis of a class, saying, oh, well, you're between this age and this age and from this country, and therefore good. | ||
| You're good. | ||
| I think that's a bunch of crap. | ||
| I don't understand why the government has the capacity to look at hundreds of millions of tax returns every year, but it can't take individuals and say, does this person provide economic benefit and or cultural benefit to the United States or not? | ||
| And if you are, if you're here illegally and you're providing benefit to us, then we should | ||
| basically put you in the back of the line and give you an application for citizenship | ||
| or, if not citizenship, at least for a green card and give you a work visa in the meantime. | ||
| This whole treating everybody by class is ridiculous, man. | ||
| I've never understood this. | ||
| Maybe this is because I'm in California and in California everyone has worked with illegal | ||
| immigrants or known illegal immigrants or hired an illegal immigrant. | ||
| It's always that awkward conversation. | ||
| Have you had that awkward conversation? | ||
| I have. | ||
| I mean, if you're here, you always have to have the awkward conversation where somebody | ||
| comes in and they apply for a job and they want to work and you're like, well, can I | ||
| see your car, your, your social security card? | ||
| And they're like, well, I don't have one because I'm not a citizen. | ||
| And I've always thought it was incredibly weird that the federal government wants me | ||
| to enforce immigration law when it won't even enforce its own damn immigration law. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I've hired even just a couple guys that work around my house and do some stuff and fix things and done some stuff even in the studio that, to be 100% frank with you, I hope nobody's watching, that I don't know actually if they're legal or illegal. | ||
| I pay them on the books and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| These people work incredibly hard. | ||
| I'm not hiring them out of charity. | ||
| I have never seen people that work harder than some of the people that I've hired. | ||
| I agree with this, and that's why I've always been bewildered by this position that, and this is a position that I think Trump took, and Jeff Sessions as well, this position that people who come here to work, we have to restrict those people too. | ||
| I've never understood that. | ||
| If you're here to work and you're not gonna mooch off the public dime, then why wouldn't I want you here? | ||
| There are plenty of people who were born here who are mooching off the public dime and not working. | ||
| All right, I'm gonna ask you one more. | ||
| It's not on the iPad, it's mine, but there were literally a gajillion here, and I know we'll do this again, so it's all right. | ||
| What would you say, in our remaining minutes, is the best way for the average person that's watching this? | ||
| to break the spell. | ||
| So when I did my direct message from this morning, I said that 2016 was the year of fake outrage, 2017 was the year of misguided anger, and that 2018 is going to be the year of unusual alliances. | ||
| That's what I really think is happening, and I think we're sort of showing it. | ||
| I like that you have these trilogies. | ||
| Yeah, wait until you see the prequels. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a disaster. | |
| But that's what I see sort of happening here, is that this is gonna, yes, the identity politics, it's not going away, and all the forces, the postmodernism and all that nonsense, it's not going anywhere. | ||
| But I think some interesting alliances are gonna be forming this year. | ||
| And look, you just sat down in front of 2,000 or 3,000 people with Sam Harris. | ||
| That's an unusual alliance for all your differences. | ||
| What would you say is the best way for the average person that just wants to live in society? | ||
| Get a decent job, live decently, eat some food, have some sex, whatever it is that they play, some video games, whatever you wanna do in your life. | ||
| I hope you just describe my tomorrow. | ||
| That sounds terrific. | ||
| But to break the spell of being afraid to say what you think and stand up for what you believe, that all this endless, the outrage machine and the cries of, we just did this for two hours, I don't think you said anything that sounded remotely racist, but you got accused of being all white and racist. | ||
| Yeah, as soon as we leave, I'm gonna start, you know. | ||
| Then I unleash. | ||
| But what would you say to the person that wants to break out of the spell but is just afraid? | ||
| Well, I mean, I think the first emboldening step is basically saying F you to people who are implying that you are something that you're not. | ||
| Which is funny, because, you know, we started off by saying identity politics is garbage, and it is garbage. | ||
| But something else that's garbage is when people are trying to identify you, right? | ||
| They're giving you your identity. | ||
| So you must be—you're a conservative, or you are a person who disagrees with something that the left has said, or you're just somebody who disagrees with the prevailing notion. | ||
| That means that you are a bad person. | ||
| Once you say F you to that person, you say you don't have any evidence for that proposition, It's actually a pretty liberating feeling. | ||
| And once you feel that liberation, it's pretty addictive because you never want to go back to this place where you feel like you can be pushed into a corner just because of your political viewpoint. | ||
| Andrew Breitbart, who I was very close to, was very fond of saying that you sort of have to walk toward the fire. | ||
| And when you walk toward it, what you realize very often is that it's just a mirage. | ||
| There's really not a lot of fire there in the end anyway. | ||
| It's a lot of people who are shouting and yelling. | ||
| And particularly on social media, it's a lot of people shouting and yelling. | ||
| Like, people yell and shout on Twitter all the time. | ||
| I found it amazing. | ||
| I've been at the center of some of the biggest controversies in American politics over the last two years. | ||
| And what I found is that on Sabbath, when I turn off my phone from Friday night to Saturday night, none of it is there. | ||
| It's just not there. | ||
| And I'm interacting with human beings on a one-to-one level, whether it's my family or members of my community. | ||
| And that's true for most people in life. | ||
| So don't get caught up in the virtual stupidity of people calling you names. | ||
| And feel free to say you're being a jerk. | ||
| But most people are not willing to be as rude to you in person as they are online. | ||
| And so if we can all start interacting, I think not just as individuals, but also face-to-face | ||
| more, spending more time with each other, going to events. | ||
| Maybe we should try to do a joint event and go out and meet a lot of people. | ||
| I think that that kind of stuff, once people do that, they realize that in the end, if | ||
| we treat each other as individuals and if that's the goal, is a government that will | ||
| treat us as individuals, we'll probably end up in at least the same direction. | ||
| We may not end up in exactly the same place, but our X-wings will be pointed toward the right target. | ||
| And you finish with a Star Wars reference. | ||
| How much more can I ask for? | ||
| It's always a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| Well, thanks for having me. | ||
| We've been on an interesting journey that sort of parallel each other in just the way the media operates and the people that hate us and love us and the whole thing, and this was the right way to kick off 2018. | ||
| Well, thanks for having me. | ||
| It's been a good year. | ||
| I now release you to your family and to your children. | ||
| Right, now I'll just disappear. | ||
| Oh, and the two sons in the distance. | ||
| All that good stuff. | ||
| All right, guys. | ||
| You know where to find Ben Shapiro. | ||
| It's on Twitter, at Ben Shapiro, dailywire.com. | ||
| Do you want to send them anywhere else? | ||
| I mean, my podcast is on iTunes or SoundCloud or any of the... He's got a podcast on iTunes. | ||
| There you go. |
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