Feb. 11, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
47:07
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I mean, I think that what could theoretically get worse, on a foreign policy front, there are two things that could get worse. | ||
| Or, really, three. | ||
| One, obviously, is that the un-drop shoe here is China and Taiwan. | ||
| I think there's every possibility that if Donald Trump is leading significantly in the polls come June, July, that China just goes for it. | ||
| That China says, OK, we're going to blockade Taiwan, because good shot that Trump is president anyway. | ||
| We've got to get our licks in while Joe Biden is president. | ||
| And if it sinks his reelect campaign, well, he's probably going to lose anyways. | ||
| There's no reason for us to wait on this thing until Trump is president. | ||
| So that is a shoe that could easily drop sometime this summer. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let's look at the stats. | |
| I've got the facts. | ||
| My money like Lizzo. | ||
| My pockets are fat. | ||
| Homie, I'm epic. | ||
| Don't be a wap. | ||
| Dawg, it's a yarmulke. | ||
| Homie, no cap. | ||
| Look at the graphs. | ||
| Look at my charts. | ||
| You're blowing money on strippers and cars. | ||
| You're going to prison. | ||
| I'm on television. | ||
| Dawgs, no one knows who you are. | ||
| Keep hating on me on the internet. | ||
| Alright, B. Diddy. | ||
| Can I call you B. Diddy? | ||
| Does that even make sense in the rap world? | ||
| B for Benjamin. | ||
| I don't know what Diddy means, but B. Shapiri? | ||
| Do you have a rap name? | ||
|
unidentified
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♪ I'm the Billboard number one ♪ All right, B Diddy. | |
| Can I call you B Diddy? | ||
| Does that even make sense in the rap world? | ||
| B for Benjamin. | ||
| I don't know what Diddy means, but B Shapire? | ||
| What are we, what, you know, do you have a rap name? | ||
| It's Dr. Dreidel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ha ha ha. | ||
| We just played a little bit of your number one rap song. | ||
| And I think if I had gone back 10 years to my garage and been sitting there with you going, | ||
| who is this fast talking, crazy right wing maniac? | ||
| If you would have told me 10 years later, he'd be the number one rapper in America. | ||
| Well, I guess relative to everything else going on in the world, it makes a lot of sense. | ||
| Fishizzle. | ||
| Fishizzle. | ||
| I mean, so, you know, when we were sitting there, us homies, talking over our lives, things have gone in weird directions over the past decade. | ||
| That portal that opened the alternative reality, it has not yet closed, and we are there. | ||
| So, if you've become a rapper now, where does this put you ten years from now? | ||
| Ska? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I mean, maybe I'll take up your dream of playing in the NBA because, as Kevin Garnett once said, anything is possible! | ||
| I'm glad to see your skill set developing, Ben, but let's mostly talk about life and the state of the world and politics and all of that stuff. | ||
| Well, I guess, is there anything else you want to say about the rap situation? | ||
| You did it. | ||
| You're number one. | ||
| It's very exciting, but you're moving on. | ||
| You're not going to- It's the greatest cultural troll of all time. | ||
| I mean, I'm just going to pat ourselves on the back over here. | ||
| There has never been a cultural troll as good as this. | ||
| I mean, I'm sorry, but me becoming a number one hip hop artist is legitimately Like, all credit to Tom, all credit to Nova, his girlfriend who directed and produced it, all credit to my parents who paid for 15 years of classical violin lessons so I could become a number one hip-hop star, eventually. | ||
| It's been a journey, it's been a journey. | ||
| But, you know, will this be my career going forward? | ||
| I have doubts. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I feel myself already drawn to the lifestyle. | ||
| I spent the weekend clubbing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As we Orthodox Jews do. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I was out at the clubs, sipping the honey. | ||
| I was going to say, is kvassier kosher? | ||
| I'm not so sure. | ||
| Yeah, it's been... We're going to quit the kosher and kvassier. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But, you know, I can feel myself being dragged down into a morass of this rap, hip-hop lifestyle. | ||
| And the other night, my family had to sit me down for an intervention, and they had to tell me that it might be time to move on. | ||
| And so it might be like a supernova shining bright in the sky for just a moment. | ||
| And we all remember fondly that moment in time. | ||
| We think what might've been, but yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if there's a path forward here. | ||
| Joking aside for just a moment, because Andrew Breitbart always said that politics is downstream from culture, and definitely you have now hit into this, well, you've been in the cultural thing for a long time, but this particular rap thing has hit in a different way. | ||
| What does that say about the state of the culture? | ||
| Like, actually joking aside, that this is kind of where we're at, where this sort of thing happens. | ||
| I mean, joking aside, it's the saddest thing in the entire world. | ||
| I mean, joking aside, the fact that you and I, we spend our life on politics, and that the subset of Americans who follow politics might be 10 million people total? | ||
| Like, follow it at a granular, relatively close level? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That might be 10 million people. | ||
| And in four days, we have 10 million views on this YouTube video. | ||
| And probably it's been seen at this point on various outlets by 100 million people. | ||
| I mean, it's the number one charting song in the world on iTunes. | ||
| The fact that pop culture is so just dominant in terms of what people actually watch and imbibe, And that's an uphill battle for those of us who actually care about values and principles, because the culture that we used to be steeped in, which used to be things like synagogue and church, has been completely taken over by the pop culture, which is why now you're seeing all these dumb fights over Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce and whether it's a CIA op and all this kind of dumb nonsense. | ||
| How are you feeling about the state of the world? | ||
| I think last we spoke was probably two or three weeks right after October 7th, obviously. | ||
| The war is still going on, hostages still there, everything else. | ||
| I mean, not only related to that, but just the sort of general state of where everything's at before we get into some of the granular stuff. | ||
| I mean, you and I, before we got on there, we said, how are you doing? | ||
| And you said, doing fine. | ||
| Everything is terrible. | ||
| And that seems to be a pretty good synopsis of where things are. | ||
| We have an unprecedented crisis on our southern border. | ||
| We have continued militants by Iran in the Middle East, weakness by the Biden administration. | ||
| We have a breakdown of the social fabric in the United States on everything from drugs to crime. | ||
| We have a stagnant economy. | ||
| Just things seem pretty bad out there. | ||
| And the great hope that is, Remains sort of rebuilding at the local level, but again, the cultural forces in favor of sort of top-down dictation are very, very strong. | ||
| So it's definitely a rough time, which is amazing, because if you had asked me 40 years ago where we were, like 2019, before COVID, before BLM riots, before the election, before any of that stuff, I would say that we are in about as good a position as I can remember America and the West ever having been in during my lifetime. | ||
| And how fast things can change is pretty amazing. | ||
| Yeah, is that a, would you give that credit right there to Trump? | ||
| And is that, even though I know a few days before DeSantis dropped out, you actually said that if you were voting at this moment, you would have voted for DeSantis, but I think you've been pretty fair to both of them. | ||
| And you did vote for Trump last time, I'm 99% sure, right? | ||
| Yes, I did, yes. | ||
| Does that sort of explain the resurgence of Trump right there, that it was pretty decent, people do remember that, and then if you just remove the COVID thing, it's like, look what happened here? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and that's the smart race if he runs that race. | ||
| If he runs the race and he just says, remember 2019, and then he just points at Joe Biden, then that's a very winnable race for him. | ||
| I mean, right now he's in the strongest polling position for any Republican contender since George W. Bush in 2004. | ||
| So, you know, he certainly has, you know, a serious shot at re-election possibility here. | ||
| And that's because Joe Biden has governed in truly awful ways. | ||
| And it does demonstrate that, again, voting has consequences. | ||
| When you elect a president who has principles that do not serve the American people, then what you end up with is a world on fire. | ||
| And that's what I think a lot of people are feeling like right now. | ||
| They feel like Joe Biden is a person who is not on fire, but the world is on fire. | ||
| Donald Trump is a person who's on fire, but the world is not on fire. | ||
| And so if you have that choice, I'd prefer to have the guy who tweets crazy stuff, but also the world is in a pretty good place. | ||
| What do you think could be worse right now? | ||
| Like, what could Biden be screwing up more? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I get it. | ||
| Like, we could be in World War III right now, but we might be in a couple of weeks. | ||
| I mean, it just seems to me that we have a man with dementia who's clearly not the pilot of this plane. | ||
| We don't really know who the pilot of the plane is. | ||
| Nobody thinks he's competent. | ||
| And yet here we are. | ||
| And all of the issues that you just laid out from the border to international stuff to Bidenomics and everything else. | ||
| I mean, I think that what could theoretically get worse, on the foreign policy front, there are two things that could get worse. | ||
| Or, really, three. | ||
| One, obviously, is that the un-drop shoe here is China and Taiwan. | ||
| I think there is every possibility that if Donald Trump is leading significantly in the polls come June, July, that China just goes for it. | ||
| That China says, OK, we're going to blockade Taiwan because good shot that Trump is president anyway. | ||
| We've got to get our licks in while Joe Biden is president. | ||
| And if it sinks his reelect campaign, well, he's probably going to lose anyways. | ||
| There's no reason for us to wait on this thing until Trump is president. | ||
| So that is an issue that could easily drop sometime this summer. | ||
| That's sort of my out-of-the-box pick for terrible things that can happen. | ||
| In terms of the Middle East, again, I think that you're going to continue to see low-level war. | ||
| I think that Israel is going to have to turn up north and hit Hezbollah. | ||
| That's just something Israel's going to have to do to maintain its own security. | ||
| And then the question is how far Iran wants to get drawn into that war. | ||
| The biggest danger there is that if the United States shows a lot of daylight between itself and Israel, then you could see Iran start to really up the ante with regard to backing Hezbollah in some sort of war there, and then you could see things really start to metastasize and spin out of control. | ||
| America's deterrent power in the Middle East has been the thing that has kept the situation At least somewhat contained to this point, even that, because Biden doesn't have any real deterrent power or any sort of principled strength. | ||
| Even that deterrence has been failing in kind of soft ways, but it could fail much worse. | ||
| The deterrence could fail significantly, significantly more. | ||
| And then obviously when it comes to the situation in Ukraine, you could see serious battlefield reversals against Ukraine if trends hold, if the Russians pour in another round of manpower. | ||
| If the Europeans and the Americans decide that there's no deal to be had there. | ||
| Again, I think that nobody has an interest in the continuation of the war with the lines frozen as they are. | ||
| The only question is whether there's actually a deal on the table. | ||
| And Biden has not been transparent about what exactly his aims are with regard to Ukraine. | ||
| So those are all the things that can happen in terms of foreign policy. | ||
| A short list there. | ||
| And then in terms of domestic policy, obviously you could see a wide variety of things happen in domestic policy. | ||
| You could theoretically see a terror attack from somebody across the southern border, which would completely shift the lines when it comes to American politics. | ||
| You could see a full-scale economic downturn, which we've avoided thus far, but theoretically could happen. | ||
| I mean, we've had unexpected downturns before. | ||
| In fact, nearly every downturn in my lifetime has been quote-unquote unexpected. | ||
| We could certainly see some sort of Catalyzing event that is driven by the media into 2020 like riots. | ||
| That sort of stuff feels always like it's five seconds away from breaking out. | ||
| That if the media decides to whip everybody into a frenzy before the election. | ||
| That could be a serious problem. | ||
| And you could obviously see the federal government crack down on freedom of speech the way that they did in 2020, but much more significantly. | ||
| So, again, as bad as they say that, you know, it always gets darkest just before it goes pitch black. | ||
| And so that may be where we are. | ||
| On the other hand, maybe this is the up, maybe we've hit the bottom, and maybe we're going to have a bounce here. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think anyone believes that yet. | ||
| Like, we're just obviously not at the bottom for all the reasons you just laid out. | ||
| But I want to back up to the foreign policy stuff, because you mentioned three fires there, three different parts of the world, three fires. | ||
| Do you think this administration has any coherent policy as it relates to any of those situations or foreign policy in general? | ||
| No. | ||
| What is our policy in general? | ||
| I don't think anyone knows. | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| I mean, I think that Biden wants to make sounds about America being a powerful force in the world, but he doesn't want to put his money where his mouth is. | ||
| So he simultaneously wants to pull out of Afghanistan, but then he wants to suggest that he is in favor of projecting American power and that we are still the global leader in preserving the so-called global order and all the rest of this sort of stuff. | ||
| And that has led him down all of these bizarre blind alleys. | ||
| Today, most recently, the State Department putting out sort of trial balloons about preemptively declaring a Palestinian state in the aftermath of this war, which is totally crazy. | ||
| I mean, that's literally rewarding the exact people who perpetrated October 7th and people who side with them, and giving them a reward for that, which obviously is going to incentivize tremendous further violence. | ||
| Those sorts of trial balloons are just... | ||
| His policy in the Middle East is predicated on a couple of great lies. | ||
| One is the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian issue to broader peace in the Middle East. | ||
| Same lie that the Obama administration was predicated upon. | ||
| And the second lie is that if you make nice with Iran, if you're conciliatory toward Iran, if you don't slap them down when they get arrogant, then probably they'll be nice to you. | ||
| And of course, that didn't work out well for Barack Obama in any way shape or form is not going to work out well for Joe Biden when it comes to China. | ||
| Biden's policy has been completely at odds with itself. | ||
| On the one hand, you've seen them take some economic measures against China, trying to box China in. | ||
| On the other hand, they've been extremely conciliatory toward Xi. | ||
| Not wanting to offend him to the extent that he makes a hard move against Taiwan, when really what we should be doing is fortifying Taiwan against the possibility of that hard move, and building up our military strength, particularly in the South China Sea. | ||
| We have to project over there. | ||
| I mean, we have to have naval power that is capable of projecting to break a blockade, because in all likelihood, China doesn't actually attack Taiwan. | ||
| If they actually were to attack Taiwan, Taiwan just fries the microchips, and then China's invading for nothing. | ||
| What they really are probably going to do is enact a blockade around Taiwan, shut down the Taiwan Straits, and then shut down global shipping, and basically say, if you give us the microchips so that we have military parity in terms of technology with the United States, then we will release the blockade. | ||
| And then the question is going to be whether the West is willing to brave that blockade if it comes to, like, a shooting war over the blockade. | ||
| Is the United States willing to do that sort of stuff? | ||
| But, again, now would be the time to signal to China that they better not do it. | ||
| Now would be the time to put a couple of aircraft carriers in the South China Sea, for example, and say, like, if you try this sort of thing, we are willing to fight you over it. | ||
| Not in terms of full-scale World War III war, but in terms of deterrent power. | ||
| Again, one of the things that is amazing to me when I hear about some people on the right talk about foreign policy is that the basic idea of deterrence is going completely by the wayside. | ||
| It's as though the only two policy options, and this was sort of the binary that used to have Barack Obama suggesting all the time. | ||
| It was this binary of appeasement or full-scale war. | ||
| Those were the only two possible outcomes, right? | ||
| That's what he used to say about Iran. | ||
| Well, what do you want? | ||
| You want us to just go to war with Iran? | ||
| Is that what you want? | ||
| World War III? | ||
| And he was like, no, I don't want you to sign an appeasement-oriented, chip-billions-of-dollars deal to Iran, and I also don't want you to go to war with Iran, but the best way to prevent the war with Iran is to make clear to them that if they step over this line, you're going to clock them into next week. | ||
| You know, that is what deterrence is. | ||
| I mean, if we had taken the same policy during the Cold War, we would have lost. | ||
| If the policy during the Cold War had been, we either appease, or we go to World War III until we appease, the Soviet Union would still be in existence. | ||
| So, this is, deterrence is the fundamental national security framework upon which all post-World War II policy is built. | ||
| Because World War II essentially was a failure of deterrence in the first place. | ||
| What do you make of the split on the right related to this? | ||
| Because I would say Tucker tends to be in more of the camp that you're talking about right there, where to me it's you speak softly and you carry a big stick. | ||
| I'm more in agreement with you on deterrence. | ||
| That's what stops the really bad things from happening. | ||
| But there clearly is a lot of energy in that Tucker world, let's say. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, listen, the United States is blessed by God with the greatest geography of any country on the planet. | ||
| I mean, we are largely self-sufficient economically. | ||
| We have seas on two sides, Canadians in the north and Mexicans in the south. | ||
| I mean, we are uniquely blessed in terms of geography, and thank God for that. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that foreign policy doesn't impact us. | ||
| I mean, if the freedom of the seas goes away, you are going to feel that. | ||
| I mean, shipping containers, for example, are twice as expensive as they were A few months ago, before the Red Sea was being shut down, everyone was shipping around the Cape of Good Hope. | ||
| Now, that may not sound like a big deal to people, but it is a big deal to people who are actually living on the margins in American society, who are going to have to pay more at the store. | ||
| I understand the impulse to suggest, like, why are we involved over here? | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I think that's a great question to ask in all circumstances. | ||
| Why are we involved? | ||
| And somebody should then give an explanation of why we're involved that involves not just some sort of Highfalutin moral language, but it also involves, like, hard, real American interests. | ||
| Like, why are we involved in this place? | ||
| But to pretend that America does not have interests abroad at all, or that every potential deterrence is an act of escalation toward war, is, I think, a giant misread of American foreign policy. | ||
| Do you blame some of that Tucker-America-first energy On the fact that so many Republicans helped get us to some of these stupid wars over the last three decades, that that was going to be the result. | ||
| That wasn't going to be much of a thought out policy. | ||
| It would just be an impulse policy, sort of as you're describing. | ||
| I mean, that's usually how politics works, right? | ||
| It's actually mostly a series of impulses by the voter, which is why you'll see the American voters swivel wildly from, I don't want to be involved in this area of the world, to we need to go in there and wreck everyone. | ||
| And we swing wildly from one side to the other. | ||
| Let's get out of Iraq. | ||
| Right now we have no business in Iraq. | ||
| ISIS beheads somebody and we're like, okay, let's go wreck those bastards. | ||
| The swivel from one to the other is very typical of American foreign policy, actually. | ||
| And so there's nothing new about that. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that that actually makes for a smart deterrent policy. | ||
| And one of the big problems with deterrence as a policy is that it's literally impossible to see The what would have been if not, right? | ||
| If you successfully deter a country from going to war, then you don't, by necessity, you don't see the war that would have materialized in the absence of the deterrence. | ||
| And so, listen, I totally understand the impulse. | ||
| I certainly understand the reaction to the war in Iraq and its failure. | ||
| I understand the reaction to the lack of a functional plan in Afghanistan. | ||
| All of that is totally understandable. | ||
| It's also possible to swivel too far in the other direction in terms of isolationism, right? | ||
| To full-scale interventionist Wilsonian neoconservatism, I don't think it's isolationism. | ||
| I think that it's foreign policy realism. | ||
| So, for example, we have to look at every conflict and say, is this a conflict where we have an interest? | ||
| For example, did we have an interest in getting ourselves involved in Libya? | ||
| I would argue we had no interest in involving ourselves in Libya. | ||
| Did we have an interest in helping foment the Arab Spring? | ||
| I would argue that we had virtually no interest and many countervailing interests in fomenting the Arab Spring, for example. | ||
| There are many foreign policy issues where you can say, like, this really is not our business, and frankly, we do it all the time. | ||
| I mean, there's plenty of major foreign policy conflicts that are happening right now in Africa, for example, where the United States is not taking a forward-facing position. | ||
| Asking the question as to why we should be involved in a place is fine, good, and useful. | ||
| But when there's an answer, there actually is an answer. | ||
| And to pretend that there's never an answer, or that everything that happens in the world is purely because it's blowback, because of American policy in a region, and that if we just kind of got our fingers out of the pie, everything would be hunky-dory, I think is looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So with that in mind, what do you think the U.S. | ||
| policy should be right now as it relates to Israel? | ||
| And then I want to talk a little bit more about Iran and what just happened and what we should be doing to, like, concretely sort of lay out what you just said there. | ||
| I mean, the policy with regard to Israel should be unshackle Israel and provide them the armaments they need to completely defeat Hamas and then to establish some sort of stable regime in the Gaza Strip. | ||
| That can educate children in ways that are not wildly anti-semitic, that provide safety and security for the citizens of Gaza so that they're not threatened by Hamas every five seconds, and then actually cultivate a movement toward moderation in the Gaza Strip. | ||
| Because it turns out that leaving them alone and allowing Hamas to run the place was the biggest disaster in Israel's history. | ||
| The same thing is probably true in large swaths of the West Bank. | ||
| I mean, the reality is that, for example, 20% of Israel's population is Arab. | ||
| The Israeli Arab population is moderate. | ||
| Many of them fight in the army. | ||
| This notion that this is simply a pure religious conflict and that there can be no such thing as good governance making a difference is obviously untrue. | ||
| As far as Hezbollah, Israel is obviously going to have to take action against Hezbollah. | ||
| Hezbollah does not move off the border. | ||
| They have 200,000 rockets pointed at the north of Israel. | ||
| Israel cannot afford to have those rockets there. | ||
| And so Israel is going to have to take action up there. | ||
| It seems to me that if America does not want to get involved in further conflict in the Middle East, the best thing is to have our allies be able to take care of business. | ||
| An American ally is Israel. | ||
|
unidentified
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Another one? | |
| An American ally is Saudi Arabia. | ||
| We should allow Saudi Arabia to go after the Houthis. | ||
| Handcuffing the Saudis in the face of the Houthis, which is something else that the Biden administration pursued very early on in the administration, was a disaster area. | ||
| It was a failure. | ||
| It was stupid. | ||
| Containing Iran by re-enacting the sanctions would be a useful policy. | ||
| And we need to make decisions about where we should deploy forces. | ||
| If the argument is that we shouldn't have forces in small bases in Iraq because the intelligence gathered is outweighed by the risks to the soldiers, fine, withdraw those forces. | ||
| I totally get that and that makes perfect sense to me. | ||
| But if the calculation is we need the intel, if the calculation is we need a footprint in these places so as to prevent the rise of ISIS, for example, That means that if an American soldier gets killed there, you gotta go hog wild. | ||
| I mean, this notion that you can then fire a missile at a camel's ass and this is somehow going to dissuade Iran from its aggressive action is peculiar and bizarre. | ||
| And again, the countervailing notion, which is that if you take harsh action against Iran, Iran is somehow going to declare war on the United States. | ||
| That's the dumbest move they ever made. | ||
| I mean, like, the one thing the Mullahs do not want is direct war with the United States, which is why they are currently using every proxy they can find to attack in very sort of low-intensity ways American targets. | ||
| And there's a history, by the way, for the United States in terms of taking harsh action against Iranian terrorism. | ||
| In 1988, after the mining of an American ship, the United States sank the entire Iranian Navy in Operation Prang Mantis in 1988. | ||
| It basically ended the Iran-Iraq War. | ||
| So, again, this... | ||
| This peculiar notion that America's role in the world is to kind of sit behind its walls and not take part in the world system, it sounds pretty until it manifests itself. | ||
| And when it manifests, what that actually means is a giant sphere of influence for China, which is oriented against the United States and will hurt our economy, and will hurt our security as well. | ||
| A giant sphere of interest for Russia, a giant sphere of interest for Iran, and yeah, that does affect American citizens. | ||
| I want to ask you one other thing related to this, since I brought up Tucker a couple of times. | ||
| He's been somewhat critical of you, I actually think kind of unfairly, and I defended you on my show a couple of weeks ago, basically saying that you were too overly emotive about Israel and what was going on there, and I think there's some subtle overtones that come with that. | ||
| What do you make of his criticism of you related to this? | ||
| Also, and I know it's not the most fun thing to talk about, because we all live in the same world, in a sense. | ||
| Also the fact that, you know, he's trying to build a network. | ||
| You have a network. | ||
| He might view you as competition now. | ||
| There could be some other motives going on here. | ||
| Listen, best to Tucker in all of his endeavors with regard to his network. | ||
| I think that some of the... he put out a little documentary on the border recently that I thought was quite good. | ||
| Again, like many things that Tucker says, what Tucker said about me is that I don't love the country, which I found absolutely peculiar. | ||
| It's something that... | ||
| I would never say about him. | ||
| He and I disagree about a wide variety of issues ranging from economics to foreign policy. | ||
| That's a bizarre notion. | ||
| And again, I've actually invited Tucker to come on my show. | ||
| Like, we've been texting. | ||
| I think it's good for the right to have these discussions. | ||
| I'd be perfectly willing to discuss with him. | ||
| Hopefully we can work out a time to make that happen. | ||
| Because yeah, I mean, I too would be interested in some clarification of whether, you know, in fact, he does think that I don't love the country in the way that he suggested. | ||
| Because again, I think that I doubt he feels that way. | ||
| I really doubt he feels that way. | ||
| Perhaps it was poorly articulated. | ||
| But I'd like to certainly ask him the question. | ||
| Taking the high road, that Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Okay, okay, we'll move on. | ||
| I know it's not fun to talk about, but I felt like I just had to ask you. | ||
| It's sort of annoying. | ||
| All right, so we got Trump back. | ||
| He's here. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| Biden, I guess, is running for president, too. | ||
| Was it just destined to be this way? | ||
| Even in the DeSantis thing, was it just, all right, we don't want a competent, decent, young, functional human being. | ||
| We want the show. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that there was a brief moment in time. | ||
| Well, if Ron, who of course I supported him, you supported him, that if Ron had jumped in early enough, I think there might have been a brief window in time where he could have started to build some momentum. | ||
| But it would have had to been in like December of 2023, of 2022. | ||
| He would have had to jump in December, January. | ||
| The polling showed that after the November 2022 election, there was a widespread Republican perception that Donald Trump's hand-picked candidates had failed and that Donald Trump was actually a negative impact on the Republican Party and that he was probably going to lose to Joe Biden. | ||
| That's what all the polls were showing at the time. | ||
| And then we had the evidence of 2020, 2021, and 2022. | ||
| And For a moment in time, if Ron had, for example, jumped in at that point, picked up the banner and said, listen, Donald Trump is going to lose. | ||
| He loses to Joe Biden. | ||
| He's lost to a bunch of Senate races. | ||
| He lost last time to Joe Biden. | ||
| We can't lose anymore. | ||
| That would have had some resonance in January. | ||
| By March, when it became clear that the DOJ was targeting Trump, you can see it in the polls, at that point, the race was basically over. | ||
| Because as soon as the DOJ targeted Trump, the Republican Party rallied around Trump. | ||
| And the argument on the right side of the aisle was now the head versus the heart. | ||
| The heart was, I want Trump to defeat the enemies who are keen on hurting him, and so loyalty to Trump started to play in. | ||
| And then, on top of that, was layered in Joe Biden being a terrible president, his poll numbers just absolutely cratering. | ||
| So, once he dropped below Trump in the polls, even the electability argument went away. | ||
| And so, you can make the case that by the time that Ron jumped into the race in May, the race was already over. | ||
| Because, you can see, by the time he jumped in, he was already down by ten points to to Trump, the polls Trump versus Biden had already closed. | ||
| And so if you were saying to somebody who supported Trump before, | ||
| he's going to lose to Biden, you need to vote for somebody else, you would get a lot of nods. | ||
| You get a lot of people who are big fans of Trump who are like, yeah, but I would really like Joe | ||
| Biden not to be president anymore. But as soon as it became clear that Trump might actually be able | ||
| to beat Biden, so you could have your cake and eat it too, right? You could, on the heart level, | ||
| the guy you love, Donald Trump, you want him to run, you want him to win, you want him to do the | ||
| And then on the head level, you're not looking at the data and you say, well, he actually could beat Joe Biden. | ||
| Now there's no debate inside the Republican Party at all, right? | ||
| Both of those cases, that number one, he's a loser, and number two, that he is uncompetitive with Biden himself. | ||
| Both of those cases just kind of disappear into the ether. | ||
| And so I think that by the time Ron jumped in, in retrospect, The race was basically over. | ||
| Could Ron have run a better race? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Could anyone have run a better race? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I think that it was kind of a foregone conclusion, and by the polling data, it was. | ||
| The polls basically didn't move since June. | ||
| Yeah, I would say whether he got in in December of 22 or when he got in, which was, I guess, around May or June of 23, it was like, they didn't know how to deal with Trump. | ||
| It's as simple as that, for some of the reasons you just described there, that Trump is just Trump, and how the hell do you beat that thing? | ||
| But relative to all that, since, you know, you founded The Daily Wire, and there's an interesting thing It's sort of related to the Tucker thing, but there's an interesting, I would say, fight happening in conservative media relative to the Trump and DeSantis thing that I think there was a lot of people that would have supported DeSantis publicly in our world that were afraid of losing clicks and losing views and everything else. | ||
| And I wonder if, did you guys have any internal discussions about that? | ||
| And I'm not making this about the Daily Wire, but the Blaze, all of these companies that you don't wanna completely go against your base, you also wanna, You know, have integrity, like there's a real pull and push there as a business person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I mean, when it came to, you know, the actual primaries, I have a hard and fast policy, which is that I don't publicly endorse candidates. | ||
| I say who I would vote for in a primary, but I won't, quote unquote, endorse a candidate because at that point I can't critique their performance, right? | ||
| If I've endorsed a candidate, then I can't anymore really say that I'm now surrogate for the campaign effectively. | ||
| And that's something that I'm unwilling to do. | ||
| So I think that there are people in right-wing media who certainly would have preferred DeSantis over Trump, just on a policy level. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Do I think there's an enormous amount of blowback for saying that? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, that is certainly true. | ||
| And, you know, I don't really like doubting people's motives, per se, but it's hard not to feel that way when you look at a lot of the media ecosystem and some of the moves that people are making, which, you know, sometimes seem pretty cynical. | ||
| So, you know, do I think that that is a problem? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I think that it's, you know, it had a major impact on the nature of the race. | ||
| If more people had come out vocally in favor of DeSantis or any of the other candidates against Trump, would that have made a difference? | ||
| No, because the polling data showed that the base really likes Trump. | ||
| I mean, that's the weirdness of this election campaign is that Inside the Republican Party, the base really wants Trump and the elites really didn't. | ||
| And then in the Democratic Party, the elites really want Biden and the base really doesn't. | ||
| And so you have a weird dynamic where Trump might actually overperform some of his polls because the base loves him so much. | ||
| But for the Democrats, Biden might actually underperform his polls because the bait really isn't different about him. | ||
| So that's what's keeping Trump competitive at this point. | ||
| But yes, I mean, as far as the media ecosystem point, you know, listen, it's an interesting job. | ||
| I've always tried to make it my policy to give you what I think is the truth about particular candidates, even if I think that my audience doesn't like it all the time. | ||
| But I can't speak for, I'm not gonna speak for anybody else. | ||
| Bottom line is that when it comes to this particular race, the race was over after Iowa. | ||
| I got some blowback from both the Haley and the DeSantis camps for saying that, but it was. | ||
| I mean, the data were just that the race was over. | ||
| And the data are the data, and you can't argue with the data. | ||
| Let's talk about the other side of the aisle for a second, because it seems to me like Biden is the last vestige of anything sane we're gonna see on the Democrat side for a long, long time. | ||
| They brought him in to kinda hold the door and make sure the crazies didn't get in. | ||
| He still let the crazies in, but he's old, so people don't fully realize it. | ||
| Like, do you think this is the end of anything close to a Democrat party that we've had in America for the last 50 years? | ||
| Like, after this, it is the party of the wackadoodle progressives, officially? | ||
| I do have some hope that there are some people inside the Democratic Party who have not completely lost their minds. | ||
| John Fetterman would be a great example of this. | ||
| The guy who had brain damage six months ago is now the sanest Democrat. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's totally wild. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| I mean, what do you think? | ||
| You're gonna make a movie about that, by the way. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's like awakenings. | ||
| It's like, it's like, it's like. | ||
| I said that on my show earlier. | ||
| It's totally amazing. | ||
| I mean, Fetterman has been incredible. | ||
| He's been great on the border. | ||
| He's been great on the Middle East. | ||
| He's been great on a wide variety of issues. | ||
| I hope it ends better than Awakenings. | ||
| You know, in Awakenings he ends up back in the coma. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Hopefully there's no parallel. | ||
| The kind of status of the Democratic Party, I think that the Democratic Party If they lose an election, if they lose to Trump, the left is going to take over the party for the foreseeable future because the reaction is going to be that they lost because Biden was too moderate. | ||
| And the media are going to, of course, foment exactly that. | ||
| Now, would it matter? | ||
| Would it matter? | ||
| Because it seems to me that he's just pretending not to be a bananas when the policies are what what policy could possibly be worse? | ||
| Yes, I mean, the only thing that matters is that the open embrace of the policy does in fact lead you down the slippery slope to the next crazy thing. | ||
| So, you know, there is something to the idea that if Biden ran as a moderate | ||
| and then governed as a leftist, that that is better than him running as a leftist | ||
| and then governing as a further leftist. | ||
| That if you're always, if you always end up to the left of where you campaign, | ||
| which is pretty frequent, right? | ||
| I mean, that seems to be the case for Republicans and Democrats, by the way, | ||
| is that you tend to govern more to the left than you actually campaigned as very often. | ||
| But certainly for Democrats, if you govern to the left of where you campaigned, | ||
| then where you campaign, if you can use that as sort of a baseline, | ||
| then it kind of matters i suppose if you if you campaign is moderate if you feel | ||
| At least you're trying to read the American people, as opposed to being sort of the fomenting factor in generating hard left pushes. | ||
| There are some members of the Democratic Party, again, who I don't think are quite as crazed as, like, the Bernie squad wing of the Democratic Party, but the younger generation is definitely moving in the wrong direction on all of that. | ||
| And on the right side of the aisle, you do have a younger generation that is kind of Trumpy in orientation, but I've always had trouble determining exactly what that means in terms of policy. | ||
| It seems more like an affect than a policy. | ||
| The love for Trump is largely Based on the way that he approaches the world, not necessarily based on his policy, which is why I think that for everybody running against him, they're attacking Trump on policy. | ||
| Like, Ron was running against him from the right. | ||
| He was saying, okay, he's wrong on this, he's wrong on this, I'm right on this. | ||
| And the entire base was like, meh, meh. | ||
| And everybody was like, okay, doesn't the policy matter? | ||
| And the answer is no, the policy doesn't matter. | ||
| The affect actually matters. | ||
| So, if that's the case, I do think that as the parties get more and more brash in their rhetoric, there will be the rise of an independent party. | ||
| If RFK's What do you think about him taking over the Libertarian Party? | ||
| Because that's being talked about now. | ||
| Then he gets ballot access, and then it's like, you actually could affect the election. | ||
| I'm not saying he'd be president, but if he got 20% of the vote, depending on where it was coming from, it's like he absolutely could swing the election. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that if he did that, the first move he would have to make is to defenestrate everyone in the Libertarian Party. | ||
| Number one, he's not a Libertarian. | ||
| But number two, I think that the stigma, the brand stigma of the Libertarian Party, which is naked people dancing around on stage at their convention, is pretty strong. | ||
| And if the rip on RFK is that he's a little kooky, then associating with the kooky party is probably not helpful. | ||
| He'd be better off going no labels if they actually have ballot access because then he can claim to be sort of the moderate middle-of-the-road guy who's still rational and reasonable. | ||
| And again, I think there are a lot of people both right and left who would take a look at RFK. | ||
| Right, but the fact of the matter is the Libertarians are on all the ballots, and that shiny thing might just be enough to make them do it. | ||
| I want to ask you about the border stuff, because there's something interesting going on here, and I've watched some of your videos, and I saw what you were saying on Twitter, and I'm completely in agreement in that, you know, these 25 Republican governors are doing the right thing. | ||
| It's doing the right thing and all that. | ||
| But does this put more conservative-leaning people in a bizarre position that suddenly, at least the optics of it, appear that we are now the ones who will not listen to the Supreme Court, and that's not how it's supposed to be? | ||
| Um, so, I don't think that that optic is going to work. | ||
| I mean, number one, it's not legally true, obviously. | ||
| There's been no actual, there's been no actual thing demanded of the state of Texas. | ||
| The case that went before the Supreme Court was about whether the federal government has the capacity to dismantle razor wire. | ||
| It did not, in fact, tell the state of Texas not to erect the razor wire in the first place. | ||
| And so, you know, the state of Texas actually hasn't violated Supreme Court order at all at this point. | ||
| And what they're doing right now is going to end up being challenged in the courts, presumably, if they would deny access or if they would attempt to enforce some sort of deportation orders on their own. | ||
| I'm not aware that Governor Abbott, by the way, has actually done that. | ||
| I'm not aware that there's been actually any policy whereby people are being arrested and then quote-unquote deported by the state of Texas. | ||
| I don't think that that's actually happened yet. | ||
| They're being pretty careful about how they're approaching this from a legal point of view. | ||
| Again, I don't think that this is going to come down to civil war type, actual civil war, people fighting each other on the border sort of thing. | ||
| I think that the worst case scenario here, and this is why I've been encouraging civilians to stay out of that area, is when you see protesters who are deciding they're going to go and they're going to stand on the border, we need to draw attention to all this. | ||
| Believe me, the attention is already there. | ||
| The last thing we need is somebody coming to blows of the Border Patrol agents and then Joe Biden and the administration using that as an excuse to crack down on everybody on the right and open the border at the same time. | ||
| We don't need any of that. | ||
| Well, what Abbott is doing is pretty well calibrated at this point. | ||
| Would you do anything else if you were Abbott? | ||
| So if you were the governor of a border state at this point, what would you be doing? | ||
| I mean, unless Abbott is, again, willing to look at legal options as far as what deportation actually looks like, I think that it's going to be a problem. | ||
| But, again, in the end, this is going to be a federal issue. | ||
| Like, what he's doing right now by basically saying, OK, fine, you want to let people loose in Texas? | ||
| They're going to Chicago. | ||
| That's a pretty good policy. | ||
| I mean, if you're the governor of Texas, that's the right policy. | ||
| That is, okay, we're not going to absorb the cost of this. | ||
| You guys voted for this. | ||
| We're going to absorb the cost of this. | ||
| I'm not sure there's ever been a more effective political stunt-slash-maneuver than the shipping of illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities. | ||
| It's truly, like, an amazingly effective political maneuver. | ||
| So since we started this show by talking about it, we've been doing this together for about 10 years and things have precipitously seemingly gotten worse or at least crazier. | ||
| I mean, it seems to me that the border thing is going to be the thing that leads everything to really getting crazy. | ||
| And I'm not into this civil war conversation either. | ||
| But I really do see almost no way around the states going their separate ways at this point. | ||
| It just does not, just for the reason that you just laid out, that you're saying the competent thing for a Republican governor to do is send them to blue states. | ||
| Well, that can only hold for so long. | ||
| I mean, what do you make of that general concept? | ||
| You know, you've probably seen that map going around Twitter, where they've got Texas and border in some of those Southeast states, almost all the way into Arizona. | ||
| Not civil war attacking each other on the streets, but just kind of separating, almost sort of how the founders were kind of into it a little bit. | ||
| Well, I mean, this basic idea that you need to actually go back to a form of subsidiarity, I think, would be the great hope. | ||
| I mean, it's the reason why people like you and people like me left California and went to a state that we like better. | ||
| I'm very much in favor of the big sort. | ||
| I think that if you don't like living a California lifestyle, then you should leave California and you should go to Florida. | ||
| If you don't like Florida, you should go to California. | ||
| I think all of that is quite good, but there will have to be, at some point, a recognition that the federal government cannot simply cram down on the half of the country that doesn't like what the federal government is doing Federal policy if we are actually going to share a country | ||
| that shares for example a foreign policy a tax system You know and any sort of federal | ||
| You know any sort of federal programs if we're going to do that then that the hand of the government is going to have | ||
| to Get lighter not heavier and my great fear is that as? | ||
| People that it's that it's general Tarkin, right? | ||
| That as the galaxies are slipping out of his grasp, then he's going to grip tighter. | ||
| And I think that's what you're starting to see from the federal government, when the real answer to that would be, you know, let everybody breathe a little bit. | ||
| Like, let Texas be Texas, like California be California. | ||
| And yes, enforce your basic duties. | ||
| If, by the way, any president who actually runs on that platform is going to win. | ||
| Any president who actually runs on the platform of You know, we're not here to make California be Texas, and we're not here to make New York be Florida, but vice versa also applies. | ||
| And also I'm enforcing the border, and also America is going to retain its position as the most powerful country on the planet. | ||
| That simple statement probably makes you the president. | ||
| So since we talked about things devolving over 10 years, let's do it the other way for just a second, which would be that now with The Daily Wire and with some of these other networks and Rumble and all of these things, guys like us are out there. | ||
| And really at this point, if I was ever drawing the numbers of MSNBC, I'd almost shoot myself because we're doing way better than that. | ||
| And you're probably doing even better than that. | ||
| That shift, do you think it's here to stay? | ||
| And how worried are you that whatever tricks the government has come up with related to big tech and the pipes that you guys are on and everything else, and not necessarily owning all of the tech at least yet, are you worried that that could all just disappear one day? | ||
| I mean, of course. | ||
| And that's why you have to have sort of alternative lifeboat plans. | ||
| And we do. | ||
| I mean, we have sort of backup systems that are in place in case we would be denied server access, for example. | ||
| And these are things that I think every major company on the right has to think about. | ||
| And there aren't that many of us, so we really have to think through sort of the policy of what happens if the spigot just gets turned off. | ||
| And that spigot is frequently being turned off. | ||
| I mean, you do see that sort of stuff happen. | ||
| Facebook turned off its bigot, right? | ||
| I mean, Facebook used to be a great source of traffic to the right, and then they just decided | ||
| they weren't gonna do news anymore, and now Facebook has really cut off the access. | ||
| You've seen it from other outlets as well. | ||
| I mean, you could meet a platform at any time, depending on the platform. | ||
| So, yes, the right is building its own ecosystems, and those ecosystems are good, | ||
| but those ecosystems are also gonna have to broaden their reach a little bit. | ||
| I think that the big next motion is that you have the machines in place. | ||
| How do you orient those toward crowds of people who are not actually part of your ecosystem? | ||
| How do you grow that pie beyond sort of us all fighting over the same 10 million people who watch politics? | ||
| How do we actually grow into the 330 million Americans who are out there in that ecosystem? | ||
| And we're trying to do that in a wide variety of ways, whether it's children's entertainment or entertainment, but there are a bunch of companies that are trying to do exactly that same sort of stuff, and everybody is looking for sort of the magic formula To get there. | ||
| And it's going to take a while. | ||
| We're going to have to iterate. | ||
| We're going to have to do the process over and over and over again until we realize exactly what is the best way to gain access to more and more Americans. | ||
| Many of whom, again, we started off, you know, talking about how the fact that most Americans are pop culture oriented, not politics oriented. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| But we all start off in the political space. | ||
| So bridging that gap is going to be the really difficult one. | ||
| So why is it that Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, and maybe Dave Rubin will consult, haven't written the new Star Wars yet? | ||
| Instead of letting Disney just destroy all the old things and every other company reboot everything? | ||
| I mean, you guys have started doing the kids stuff and you've had two feature-full lengths already? | ||
| Uh, so we've released, I believe, well we had Lady Ballers, right? | ||
| That came out a month ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then we did Gina's movie, Terror on the Prairie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then we've released three other full-length feature films. | ||
| Shut In was independently produced by us. | ||
| And then the other two were licensed. | ||
| So we've released five movies at this point, and that's not including What is a Woman, which of course is the best documentary of the last ten years. | ||
| So we've done, you know, And those have been serious projects. | ||
| Pendragon, our project this year, is by far the most expensive thing we've ever done. | ||
| And it really is an attempt at creating sort of a tentpole feature system to, you know, carve into that from Hollywood. | ||
| That's going to be a big project. | ||
| I mean, we'll see whether the... And conservatives, if you want to see us do more of that sort of stuff, same thing for all the projects you're doing. | ||
| As we've said, we want conservatives to support all of these various outlets. | ||
| We don't just want conservatives to support us, we want conservatives to support you. | ||
| I want conservatives to support Tucker. | ||
| I want conservatives to support everybody who's in the right-wing ecosystem, because that ecosystem doesn't exist without people actually willing to support that ecosystem, obviously. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| It's so funny when I've seen, you know, guys in our space that are so worried about clicks and views and who's getting more than anybody. | ||
| And I'm just like, if I do something good, it'll keep growing. | ||
| And that's not going to take from Ben or take from this one. | ||
| It's like we can all do this thing together and become successful. | ||
| And fortunately, in the last decade, it kind of worked for the two of us. | ||
| Let's talk about another successful guy, because you just went to Auschwitz with Elon Musk, and I've gotten to know him a little bit. | ||
| I guess talk about how that even came to pass, and then we can talk about some of the specifics that you guys chatted about. | ||
| You remember that, actually before October 7th, there was some controversy regarding anti-Semitism and X, and I had defended Elon, suggesting that he's not anti-Semite, because he's not, and that the ADL was actually well over its skis in attacking Elon that way. | ||
| And we ended up doing an X Spaces together, in which we discussed a lot of these issues. | ||
| In the middle of that X Spaces, there was another organization called the European Jewish Association, that there's a rabbi who represented that, who asked Elon whether he would go to Auschwitz. | ||
| And Elon said that He kind of considered it. | ||
| One of the things I actually like about Elon as a person is that he actually sits there and considers the questions that you ask him in real time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He doesn't actually have a canned answer. | ||
| He'll actually sit there, take in the question, and then process it, and then he may shift his opinion in the middle of the question. | ||
| It's really fascinating to interview him because of that. | ||
| And so he said, at first, he wasn't really interested. | ||
| Then he said, you know, maybe as a model to others, I'll go. | ||
| So I get a call in December, maybe November, from some of Elon's folks and some people at the EJA saying, Elon wants to go to Auschwitz, but he would really like for you to interview him at Auschwitz. | ||
| And so I turned to my wife and I said, I guess I'm going to Auschwitz for winter vacation, because my kid's winter vacation was literally that week. | ||
| So it worked out very poorly that way. | ||
| But got on the plane. | ||
| It was my first time going there, which is in and of itself a Uh, an extremely disturbing and heavy experience. | ||
| Being there with Elon with a lot of cameras on us and the world watching makes it, I think, even more heavy and difficult for sure. | ||
| And then I had the opportunity to sit with him for a couple of interviews. | ||
| We sat down and did sort of a much more kind of wide-ranging interview that we released on X where we talked about everything from the birth of SpaceX and Tesla to You know, free speech and DEI, and that was great. | ||
| That was a blast. | ||
| I kind of broke the rules and got Elon to sign something for my kit. | ||
| My seven-year-old's a huge Elon fan and loves SpaceX and all the rest of it, and Elon was sweet about that. | ||
| And then we did the interview that we saw, obviously, on the stage about anti-Semitism and what's going on in Israel and X and all the rest of it. | ||
| It was definitely a fascinating experience, and again, the site means that it's an excellent reminder of where terrible, terrible ideology takes you. | ||
| Whenever people talk about the Holocaust and they suggest that really the message of the Holocaust is man's inhumanity to man, that is such a pap nonsense answer as to what caused the Holocaust. | ||
| It was a very specific ideology and conspiracy theory that was then effectuated in terms of murder. | ||
| And that specific ideology and conspiracy theory was that there is a clique of people who are connected to one another and disproportionately influence all world events and wield too much power and thus must be ground down and or destroyed. | ||
| And you can see exactly how that crosses over with a wide variety of conspiracy theories, ranging all the way from the left, where that is a very dominant conspiracy theory in the form of DEI, to the right, where you see it as a form of conspiracy theory, as well in sort of the far-right, anti-Semitic troll right. | ||
| So, you know, that ideology is still alive and well with us. | ||
| It continues to be really ugly. | ||
| You can watch that interview in full, I believe it's still up at X, or you can go check out Daily Wire, obviously become a subscriber, watch that, watch a boring documentary we just went, Down to the Border. | ||
| How does this all feel to you, that you're sort of like, in the midst of everything we've talked about here, you've also kind of become like the world's number one Jew. | ||
| You're like the top Jew. | ||
| I mean, you are. | ||
| Like, I think people probably thought it was Jon Stewart for about a decade, and I think he did a hell of a lot of damage culturally to this country and everything else, and went the wrong way, as many progressive Jews have. | ||
| But you represent something that's beyond just Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire. | ||
| For example, when I saw you in London a couple months ago at Jordan Peterson's show, it was a little bit after October 7th, and when Jordan brought you on stage, you got a huge standing ovation, but it clearly wasn't just, oh, there's Ben Shapiro from YouTube. | ||
| It was, here is this Jew who is outspoken in a time of craziness. | ||
| That can't be the easiest thing for you. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, listen, it's something that I take very seriously. | ||
| I take my religion seriously. | ||
| I take the principles of my religion very seriously. | ||
| I think that those principles happen to be core principles of the West as well. | ||
| Sinai and Greece are the basic building blocks of Western society. | ||
| I read the book, man. | ||
| I read the book. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so I take that really, really seriously, obviously, in my everyday practice, in my everyday life, and also in discussing everything from religion to politics. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, it's been heavy. | ||
| I mean, it means a lot more security since October 7th, that's for sure. | ||
| We went from kind of sporadic 24-7 security to complete around-the-clock 24-7 security all the time. | ||
| And that's going to be how it is probably for the rest of my life. | ||
| But that's, you know, The honor is that I get to speak on behalf of views that I think are truly valuable. | ||
| And, of course, that comes with the burden of being high profile, and I'm willing to do that. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Shapiro, we will continue doing this, and we'll just see where our hairlines are in ten years, I suppose. | ||
| I feel like you'll do better than I will on that score, Dave. | ||
| It's good seeing you, my friend. | ||
| You too. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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