Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism | Lex Fridman Podcast #410
something has to happen with Iran there has to be some diplomatic bilateral communication there no what has to happen is the containment of Iran history Moves In One Direction right why because of time communism Nazism all of that was a regression from what was happening at for example the beginning of the 19th century in the 20th century what in what way do you think that today Donald Trump knows that he lost the election absolutely so I I don't this is one of the areas where we get into this I don't understand um if there's like brain breaking happening or what's going on I don't know what world we can ever live in where we say that Trump is less divisive for the country than Biden Joe Biden literally used the occupational safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down vax mandates on 80 million Americans that's insane what about super cal fragile and then you what about new multra microscopics or the science terms exactly or what about the 7,000 letter thing that's from part of uh biochem I got my education the Soviet Union so we just did math this that's why you're useful person does body count matter the following is a debate between Ben Shapiro and Destiny each arguably representing the right and the left of American politics respectively they are two of the most influential and skilled political Debaters in the world this debate has been a long time coming for many years it's about 2.5 hours and we could have easily gone for many more and I'm sure we will it is only round one this is the Lex Freon podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Ben Shapiro and Destiny Ben you're conservative Destiny you're a liberal can you each describe what key values underpin your philosophy on politics and maybe life in the context of this left right political Spectrum you want to go first yeah so I think that we have a huge country full of a lot of people a lot of individual talents capabilities um and I think that the goal goal of government broadly speaking should be to try to ensure that everybody's able to achieve as much as possible so on a liberal level that usually means some people might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to things like education um they might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to providing certain Necessities like housing or food or clothing but broadly speaking I mean I'm still a liberal not a communist or socialist I don't believe in the you know total command economy total communist takeover of all of the uh you know economy but I think that broadly speaking the government should kind of like kick and help people when they need it and that government can and should be big not necessarily I notice that when liberals talk about government or especially taxes it seems like they talk about it for taxes sake or big bigness sake so people talk about taxes sometimes as like a like a punishment like tax the rich uh I think taxing the rich is fine in so far as it funds the programs that we want to fund but Democrats have a really big problem demonizing success or wealth and I don't think that's a bad thing uh I I don't think it's a bad thing to be wealthy to be a billionaire or whatever as long as we're funding what we need to fund Ben what do you think it means to be a conservative what's what's the philosophy that underlies your political view so first of all I'm glad that Destiny you're already coming out as a republican that's exciting um I mean I I we hold a lot in common in terms of uh you know the the basic idea that people ought to have as much opportunity as possible and also in so far as the government should do the minimum amount necessary to interfere in people's lives in order to pursue certain functions particularly at the local level so a lot of governmental discussions on a pragmatic level end up being discussions about where government ought to be involved but also at what level government ought to be involved and I have an incredibly subsidiary view of government I I think that you know local governments because you have higher levels of homogenity and and consent uh are capable of doing more things and as you abstract up the chain it becomes more and more impractical and more and more divisive to to do more things in in my view government is basically there to preserve certain key Liberties uh the those key Liberties pre-exist the government uh in in so far as they are more important than what priorities the government has the the job of government is to maintain for example National Defense protection of property rights protection of religious freedom the these are these are the key focus of government as generally expressed in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution and I agree with the general philosophy of the bill rights and the Constitution now that doesn't mean by the way that you can't do more on a governmental level again as you get closer to the ground which by the way is also embedded in the Constitution people forget the Constitution was originally applied to the federal government not to local and state government um but you know if I going to Define conservatism it would actually be a little broader than that because I think to understand how people interact with government you have to go to kind of core values and and so for me there there are a couple of premises one human beings have a nature that nature is neither good nor bad we have aspects of goodness and we have aspects of Badness human beings are sinful we have temptations and what that means is that we have to be careful not to incentivize the bad and that we should incentivize the good human beings do have agency and are capable of making decisions in the vast majority of circumstances um and it is better for a society if we act as though they do uh second the basic idea of human nature there is an idea in my view that all human beings have equal value before the law I'm I'm a religious person so I'd say equal value before God but I think that's also sort of a key tend of Western Civilization being non-religious or religious that every individual has equivalent value in sort of cosmic terms um but that does not necessarily mean that every person is equally equipped to do everything equally well and so it is not the job of government to rectify every imbalance of Life The Quest for Cosmic justice as Thomas Soul suggests is something that government is generally incapable of doing and more often than not botches and makes things worse so th those are a few key tenants and that that tends to materialize in in a variety of ways the the the easiest way to sum that up would the traditional kind of three legs of the the conservative stool although now obviously there's a very fragmented conservative movement in the United States would be a a socially conservative view in which family is the chief institution of society like the little platoon of society as Edmund Burke suggested uh in which free free markets and property rights are extraordinarily valuable and necessary uh because every individual has the ability to be creative with their property and to freely alienate that property uh and uh and finally I tend toward a hawkish foreign policy that suggests that the world is not filled with wonderful people who all agree with us and think like us and those people will pursue adversarial interests if we if we do not protect our own interests can I ask a question on that I'm so okay um I'm excited for this conversation because I consider you to be really intelligent um but I feel like sometimes there are ways that conservatives talk about certain issues that seem to defy logic reason I guess so here and I'm sure you feel the same way about prog I feel the same way about progressives um but even some uh liberals for sure uh before I ask this question is going to relate to education we can agree broadly speaking that statistics are real and that not everybody could do everything so for a grounded example uh my life was pretty bad I got into streaming and I turned my life around and that was really cool but I can't expect everybody to do what I did right like everybody being able to join the NBA or to be like a streamer of course everybody has different qualities sure okay so I used to be a lot more libertarian um when I was 2021 and one of the things that dramatically changed kind of my view on government uh manipulation of things in the I guess in society came uh when it came time to deal with my son and the school that he went to and one of the things that I noticed was when it came time to send my son to school I could either do private education or I could do public uh personally I did 12 Years of Catholic private education um however the public schools in Nebraska depending on where you lived were very very very good and I opted for a certain District I bought a house there I moved there and then my son was able to go to those schools um and he's been going through those schools and the difference of availability of like technology like these kids are taking home iPads and like first grade uh they've got like huge computer labs and everything do you think that there is some type of I don't want to say Injustice or unfairness because I'm not even looking at it that way just pragmatically that there might be children that are in certain schools that if they just had better funding or more uh access to Technologies or things available to them that those kids would become more productive members of society that with like a little bit of a help they they could actually achieve more and do better for all of society so I think that on the list of priorities when it comes to education the availability of technology is actually fairly low on the list of priorities sure the two things I've heard are food availability and I think air conditioning I think are the two biggest ones that I hear but sure well I mean the biggest thing in terms of Education itself not just the physical facilities that we're talking about would actually be two parent family house households sure communities that that have fathers in them is actually the number one deiser according to Roland frier and many studies done on this particular topic and the idea that that money alone that investment of resources is the top priority in schooling is boted by the fact that LUSD which is where I went to school when I was younger they pour an enormous amount of money into La USD we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars very often per student and it does not result in better schooling outcomes and so when you say if we could give every kid an iPad would you give every kid an iPad the question is not if I had a replicator machine from Star Trek would I give everybody an enormous amount of stuff sure I I would every every resource is f it every resource is limited you have to prioritize what are the what are the outcomes that you seek in terms of the means with which you are seeking them and so again I think that the question is is I I quibble with the with the premise of the question which is that again the the chief Injustice when it comes to education on the list of of injustices is lack of availability to technology or that it's a funding problem I just don't think that's the case sure and I can half agree with you there but I don't think any amount of changes in the schools will create two parent households right we can't bring a I totally agree with you that's why I think that the the fundamental educational problem is not in fact a schooling problem I think that it pre-exists that sure but then I feel like we're now I feel like this is kind of the conservative marry go around where it's like what can we do to help with schools so two of the things that I've seen I think that are usually brought up in research is one is air conditioning that children in hotter environments just don't learn as well um and then the second one is access to food so like kids that are given like a breakfast or a lunch that's provided at school like increases educational outcomes now I agree that neither of these things might be determinative in like well 20% of kids were graduating and now 80% of kids are graduating or these kids are all going you know from with their geds into the workforce and now these kids are all suddenly becoming Engineers but in terms of where we can help do you think there should be like some minimum threshold or minimum Baseline of like at the very least every school should have a non- leaky gym or every school should have uh if children can't afford lunch or breakfast like some sort of food provided or every school should have these like Baseline things so again I'm going to quibble with the premise of the question because I think when it comes to for example food insecurity School food programs again you can always pour money into any program and at the margins create change I mean there's no doubt that pouring money onto anything will create change in a Marginal Way the question is how large is the margin and how big is the movement right so the Delta is what I'm looking at and so I think that the you're you're starting at a second order question which is what if we ignore what I would think are the big primary questions of Education namely family structure value of education at home how much you have parents who are capable or willing to help with homework what are the incentive structures we can set up for a society that actually facilitate that how local communities take ownership of their schools is a big one right all all of these issues we're ignoring in favor of say air conditioning or lunch programs and so in a vacuum if you say air conditioning and lunch programs sounds great in a vacuum in in terms of prioritization of values and cost structure are those the things that I think are going to move the needle in a major way in terms of public policy I I I do not and and in fact I think that many of them end up being disproportionate wastes of money I mean I've talked before pretty controversially about the fact that an enormous amount of school lunch programs are thrown out like an enormous amount of that food ends up in the garbage can is there a better way to do that if there is a better way to do it then I'm perfectly willing to hear about that better way to do it but it seems to me that one of the big flaws in the way that many people of the approach government is what if we hit every knat with a hammer and my question is what if the Gat isn't even the problem what if there is a much bigger substructure problem that needs to be solved in order to if you're shifting deck chairs on the Titanic sure you can make the Titanic slightly more balanced because the deck chairs are slightly better oriented but the real question is the the water that's gaping into the Titanic right yeah and I agree with you 100% but again the I feel like we're on the Conservative merrygoround then of never wanting to address that's not a conservative Mound I can you 10 ways well sure but so like here would be the marry around I would say that like there's a minimum funding for schools that I think would help children and they would go well the thing that would help them the most is two parent households and I go okay well two parent households actually aren't the problem um the issue is access to things like birth controls that people don't have children early on and it's like but the issue isn't actually birth control the issue is actually you need a certain amount of money to move out early and to get married and then to have a two parent household so it's actually like Economic Opportunity well it's you no just two parent households yeah but like what is the what are the pre fuck people before you're and have babies sure done that's great can say that and try to fight against you know however many hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution but people will have sex and people will make babies and then they used to get married the vast majority of people in this country with kids used to be married the vast majority of people with kids in this country now are not married increasingly that is obviously a societal changed something changed it wasn't human evolution but a lot of those things in terms of resting on whether or not people get married have to do with financial decisions do you have the money people are worse off now than they were 50 60 years ago when the marriage rates were higher people are delaying the start of their careers because education's going increasingly important so in in other words people are richer now and they have more education now and yet they're having more babies out of wedlock now because they're richer and have more education I'm saying that the one of the biggest indicators for whether or not somebody's willing to get married is how much money both people are making if they can move out of their household people don't tend to want to get married at 22 when they've just finished College when they don't have the money to move out and they can't afford a house because we have changed the moral status of marriage in the culture meaning that everyone poor Rich and in between used to get married that by the way a huge percentage of marriages in the United States used to be what they would call shotgun marriages meaning that somebody knocked somebody up and because they did not want baby to be born outside of a two parent household they would then get married do we think that shotgun marriages though are a way to bring back equilibrium to education if we yes absolutely yes 100% a child deserves a mother and a father because that is the basis for all of this including education do we think that shotgun marriages are well let's say this do we think that that's a reasonable direction that society would ever take or is this like it was the reasonable direction for nearly all of modern history was but history Moves In One Direction right why because of time mean people people don't think that's a in in what in what way is that is and I don't think we've ever like regressed social standards back to like oh well let's go 100 years back and do things that you know used to exist before I the entire left right now is arguing that we regret social standards by rejecting Row versus Wade so that's obviously not true the row vers Wade is not a social standard it's a Supreme Court ruling number one number two what if you read the actual majority of opinion on roie Wade we can see that socially we ever actually never made huge progress on how Society viewed abortion this has always been an incredibly divisive thing right even that was I think part of alito's uh writing on it was that things like gay marriage for instance we kind of moved past and it's not really as debated anymore but abortion was never a settled topic despite the Arc of History constantly Moves In One Direction is be lied by nearly all of the 20th century what do we mean by that I mean I mean barbarism communism Nazism all of that was a regression from what was happening at for example the beginning of the 19th century in the 20th century what in what way Nazism and communism weren a regression from what was going on in 1905 these are well in terms of like communism being a regression for instance I'm not a communist but but like the industrialization of the Soviet Union happened under communist Society the industrialization murder of T of millions of people that regression moral regression which is what we are talking about now moral regression and you're you're suggesting that moral regression I wouldn't term a return to Traditional Values in moral regression you would but your suggestion is that history only Moves In One Direction and I'm suggesting that history does not only move in in One Direction it tends to move actually back and forth sure I don't think that all of history moves in one uh One Direction there going to be Wars there are going to be times of peace I think in general more peaceful now than we have been in the past but I think when we look at the way that people live their lives I think that we tend to move in a certain direction socially so when it comes to things like racism or when it comes to things like slavery or women's rights I think that there are two huge things that probably aren't changing in the US and one is access to contraception and one is women working jobs I think that these two things are probably huge things that are moving us off of shotgun marriages or getting married very early on and I don't see though do you think that those two things are going to change fundamentally first of all what the data tend to show is that actually more Highly Educated people as you were saying tend to get married more so the idea is that women getting an education somehow throws them off marriage it's the opposite usually wom are not educated those women aren't getting shotgun marriages those women aren't having children now now you're Shifting the topic my my topic was how to get more people married and what I'm s and and then you suggested that higher levels of Education are delaying marriage and making it less probable and what I'm telling you because this is what the data suggests is that actually as you raise up the the educational ladder people tend to be married more than they are lower down on the educational ladder if you're a high school graduate you're less likely to be married than if you're a postdoc I agree with you but that's because one of the biggest precursors to getting married is having like a level of economic stability so as people get more educated they obtain this economic stability and then they're in a more comfortable position to explore more serious relation there's another confound there I mean the confound is that people in stable marriages tend to be the children of stable marriages and there's only one way to break that cycle which is to create a stable marriage and that is something that is in everyone's hands again this notion that it is somehow an unbreakable unshadow barrier to get married and have kids I don't understand where this is coming from why is that such a why is that such a challenge chall I it's unbreakable or unshatter I was just the initial point was for school if we can provide a minimum level of educational stuff for children that' probably be good but when we Retreat back to well it has to be the families that are fixed first fixing families is a multivariant problem that so many I am fine within my local community we all vote again I I've suggested there's a difference between local community and federal I'm fine with my local community voting for school lunches or air conditioning or whatever it is that we all agree to do because the more local you get the more homogeneity you get in terms of interest and the more interest you have in your neighbors all of that's fine I'm part of a very very solid community in our community we give to each other we have minimum standards of helping one another all that's wonderful when it comes to the actual problem of Education what I object to in the political sphere and this happens all the time is everybody is arguing on top of the iceberg about how we can move the needle .5 percentage points as opposed to the entire Iceberg melting beneath them and we just ignore that we pretend that that's just you know sort of the natural consequence of thing the Arc of History suggests that people are never going to get married again well I mean actually what the Arc of History suggests realistically speaking is that the people who are not getting married are not going to be having kids and what it also suggests the people who are married are going to be having kids and so the demographic profile actually over time is rather going to shift toward people who are having lots and lots of kids I'm married I have four kids everyone in my community is married that's like minimum buying in my community is four kids okay and so what's happening actually in terms of demographics is that the people who are more religious and getting married are having more kids and so if you're talking about the Arc of History shifting toward Mar I I would suggest that actually demographically over time long periods of time not over one generation over long periods of time the only cure for low birth rate is going to be the people who get married and have lots of kids yeah I don't necessarily disagree with any of that but I'm just saying that again on the on yoursite when I bring up the term marry around um I think that there are good conversations to be had about people getting married um because stable families produce stable children that are less likely to commit crime that are more likely to go to school that are more likely to produced members of society ET I'm not going to disagree with you on any of that all of that is true um it's just frustrating that sometimes when you bring up any problem all of it will Circle back to other things that makes it seem like we can't make any progress in any area without like fixing I literally just told you that on the local level I'm fine for people voting for so for instance on the local level so for school funding school funding is done I think generally per District so what do you do when you have poor districts that can't afford air conditioner for their schools I mean the idea there would be that presumably if the society me the state and I generally don't mean the federal state I mean like the state of California for example decides that everybody ought to have air conditioning people will vote for air conditioning and that's perfectly legal and I don't think there's anything morally objectionable about that per se I also don't think that that's going to heal anything remotely like the central problem and I think that what what what tends to happen in terms of government is people love arguing about the problems that can be solved by opening a wallet and nobody likes to solve a problem by you know closing their sex life to one person for example or having kids within a stable religious community like the things that build Society I'm fine with arguing about each of these policies and and whether we apply them or not is a matter generally of pragmatism not morality it's a matter of incentive structures not per se morality because incentive structures do have you know moral underpinings there there's such a thing as you know for example if you're going use a welfare program you have to decide how effective it is to what crowd it applies where the cut offs are does it disincentivize work does it not all of these are pragmatic concerns but on a level the generalized objection that I have to people on the left side of the aisle is that they like to FOC in these conversations very often it feels as though it's a conversation with with people who are drunk searching under the the lamp for their keys the problems they want to look at are the problems that are solvable by government and then all the problems they don't want to look at which are the actual giant monsters luring in the dark and not particularly solvable by government are the ones they want to ignore and assume are just the natural state of things and I don't think that's correct at all and I 1 billion per agree but then obviously my criticism for the conservative side is the the exact opposite where where there are Parts where government could remedy some issues um for instance you know uh children having sex with each other and producing other children out of wedlock like sometimes having after school programs is nice to prevent that like I didn't have time for these things when I was in school I was doing football practice I was doing Cross Country Practice I went in early for a band you know um I agree with you that sometimes people only focus on one end of the problem as a I hate to be that guy um but as somebody that have you ever watched The Wire sure I'm not going to site the wire's real life example but like obviously there's only so much you can do in a school When the Children coming in are so Beyond destroyed because of the family life and everything prior to them even getting to school that day so I agree government is not like the solution to Broken families that would never be the case and it's actually not the solution to education depending on the kind of solutions that you're talking about some solutions yes some solutions no yeah the only thing I'm looking at is as I said earlier just like these minimum threshold things where it's like where can government make because you mentioned marginal which I think is a really good way to look at things there marginal cost and margin utility to things where the first $1,000 per student you spend might give you a huge return but the extra 20,000 after I think these are all pragmatic discussions actually this is what we used to hash out in legislatures before they turned into platforms for people Grand standing but yes sure okay yeah as we descend from the heavens of philosophical discussion of conservatism and liberalism let's go to the pragmatic muck of politics Trump versus Biden between the two of them who was in their first term uh the better president and thus who should win if the two of them are in fact our choices should win a second term in 2024 Ben sure so in terms of actual job performance you have to separate it into a few categories uh in terms of actual performance in foreign policy I think Trump's foreign policy record is significantly better than Biden's the world being on fire right now being fairly good example of that uh and we can get into each aspect of the world being on fire and where the incentive structures came from and how all of that happen in a moment when it comes to the economy I think that Trump's economic record was better than Biden's doesn't mean he didn't overspend he did he wildly overspent uh but he also had a very solid record of job creation a huge percentage of the gains in the economy went to people on the lower end of the economic spectrum actually uh the gross income to the average American was about $6,000 during his term the unemployment rates were very very low before covid you I think that you almost have to separate the Trump Administration into sort of before covid and during covid because Co obviously is sort of a Black Swan event the the most signal change in in politics In Our Lifetime uh and so you know governance during Co is almost its own category which we can discuss um but you know in terms of foreign policy in terms of domestic policy I think that Trump was significantly better uh than than Biden has been and that's on the upside for Trump on the downside for Biden obviously you're talking 40e highs in inflation you're talking about savings being eaten away you're talking about everything being 20 to 30 30% more expensive you're talking about massive increases to the deficit even at a rate that was unknown under Trump uh the deficit under Trump raised by about a little under a trillion dollarss every year up until 2020 against 2020 was Co year so everybody decided that we were going to fire hose money at things um but uh then Joe Biden continued to fire hose money at things in 21 22 and 23 uh you know that obviously is in my opinion bad Economic Policy uh and then you get to the rhetoric and you get to the stuff that Donald Trump says and as I've said before my view is that on Donald Trump's half on his gravestone it will say Donald Trump he said a lot of shit uh I I think that Donald Trump does say a lot of things I think that that is basically baked into the cake which is why everyone who's bewildered by the polls is ignoring human nature which is at the beginning when you see something very shocking it's very shocking and then if you see it over and over and over and over for years on end it is no longer shocking it is just part of the background noise like tontis it just becomes you know something that your brain adjusts for uh and so do I like a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric no and I never have do I think that that is just positive as to his presidency no I do not when it comes to Biden again I think he's underperforming economically I think that his foreign policy has been really a a problem even the things I think he's done right are I think bandaids for things that he created by doing wrong uh and when it comes to his his own rhetoric you can argue that it's grading on a curve because Trump was coming in with such wild rhetoric that just the maintenance of that wild rhetoric doesn't really change again the Baseline for Biden he came in in the same way that Obama did on the sort of soaring rhetoric of American Unity I'm the president for all like Trump came in he's like listen I'm the president for for what I am and you know I'm going to say the things I want to say I'm going be on the toilet and I'm tweeting we're like okay you know what it is with Biden he came in with I'm a president for all Americans I'm trying to unify everybody and that pretty quickly broke down into a lot of oppositional language about his political opponents in particular and attempt to lump in for example huge swaths of the conservative movement with the people who participated for example in January 6th or who are fans of January 6th um and um you know the the the sort of lumping in of everybody into Maga Republicans who wasn't personally signed on to an infrastructure bill with him that sort of stuff I think has been been truly terrible I thought his Philadelphia speech was truly terrible and again I think that you do have the problem of he is no longer capable of certainly rhetorically unifying the country when every speech from him feels like watching Nick Wenda walk across a volcano on a tight RPP and it it really is like you're just sort of waiting for him to follow I mean it's it's sad to say I mean the other day he was speaking for what was in effect his campaign kick off and this is in Valley Forge uh and I mean Jill rushed up there like off the off the as soon as he was done Jill rushed up there uh you know like she'd been shot out of a cannon to to come and try to guide him away so he didn't become the Shane Gillis Roomba and you know that that's not really you know I let's put it this way it does not quiet the soul to watch Joe Biden rhetorically again it's a different problem than Trump's problem but that that's my analysis uh this is one of the areas where we get into this I don't understand um if there's like brain breaking happening or what's going on I don't know what world we can ever live in where we say that Trump is less div divisive for the country than Biden I think it is so patently obvious Trump is so divisive like not only does Trump make an enemy out of every person in the opposition party he makes an enemy out of his own party and every single person around him like we all watched him bully uh you know Jeff sessions we all watched him bully his own party on Twitter we all watched like all of these people walk away from him um even recently I think um his uh the Secretary of Defense esper and um John Kelly the chief of staff where you know saying I think Trump is a threat to democracy um you know you've got all of his prior people that were around him some of his closest allies you've got Bill bar that won't co-sign a single thing that he says um you've got all these people that he used to work with that all say Trump is a horrible evil person he is ineffective as a leader he doesn't accomplish anything and he didn't you know to say that Biden has failed at bipartisanship when you know we've gotten the chips act we've gotten the IRA we've gotten the ARP we've gotten the bipartisan infrastructure bill when we've got like all this major legislation that is working in this historically divided Congress as opposed to Trump that got tax cuts and deficit spending um I I I don't understand where we ever are in this world where Biden is somehow more divisive than Trump even the speeches that Ben is bringing up I they always bring up I remember that one um I think we might have even done it on our episode though the one speech that Biden gave where at one point that like the background is red and spee reference yeah they're like oh my God it's over this is the end and then meanwhile you got Donald Trump you know coming into office saying things like if you burn the flag you should have your citizenship revoked or talking about Ms DNC that I'm going to investigate every single one of these uh media organizations for corruptness I'm gonna open the liel and defamation laws I'm G to take all of these guys to court um you've got this weird project 2025 stuff where um is it John pasel I think uh is talking about uh you know we're going to we're going to investigate all of these people and we're going to try to throw crimes at all these people uh Trump is like the most divisive president I think we've ever had in in at least in my lifetime of being um an American citizen and the rhetoric from him is just it's on a whole other level in terms of the demonization of political opponents I mean this is a guy that's known for giving his political opponents bad nicknames right like that's what Trump does um you know like it's funny but even as a resident of Florida if Florida had another natural disaster do you think Trump would withhold Aid because you had uh I think that was one of the few nice things that Des Sanz actually said about Biden was like Hey listen you know when the buildings collapsed in I think that Miami Beach yeah that um you know for the hurricane stuff that Biden was there he was saying if you guys need Aid however many billions you can have it meanwhile Trump I think was threatening to withhold Federal funding from Blue states that wouldn't um I think it had to do with the National Guard stuff the deployment of the National Guard that they weren't like doing enough for the riots and and uh Trump was threatening to withhold aid from some of these blue States um yeah Trump is literally the most divisive person in the world I don't see how on any metric he is ever succeeding in the divisive category in terms of the economy I do think it's funny that Republicans are very keen to say that like well we can't really grade Trump you know postco because obviously messed everything up which is fair but preo what did Trump do he did he did deficit spending tax cuts he presided over historic low interest rates and an economy that was already like like blazing past the final years of Obama we were posting all-time highs in all the stock markets from 2013 onwards um you know unemployment rates were falling now under Biden unemployment rates are even lower than they were under Trump but uh it it sucks that for Trump we can say well we can't really hold him accountable for 2020 that was Co well all we have for Biden is postco we don't have any pre-co Biden uh you know economy and it was the same thing for Obama too coming in right after the housing collapse as well and it sucks that Republicans are able to walk out of office you know having burned the entire American society to the ground economically and now we've got to try to evaluate okay well what did Obama do during his first two to three to four years just trying to recover from where the housing crash left it and then we look at Biden now who's trying to recover from Co and now we're grading him on on a totally different scale than what Trump is being graded on yeah that that sucks I think comment on the foreign policy on the foreign policy I'm going to be honest I am a um I am very liberal I'm very not Progressive uh I'll probably come off as more hawkish than others uh because I'm not a big fan of this which also if I mean if Ben agrees like I think uh people like people like Trump are going to be the most dovish isolationist people ever they don't want to do anything uh internationally they just want to you know Protect America be at home protect our economy don't do anything uh internationally which is why he was constantly undermining NATO uh and constantly you know attacking all the the European Union and you know cheering on the UK for brexiting away from the EU I think that being said um I think that Biden has done a phenomenal job uh when it comes to foreign policy I think that the Coalition building was so important for Ukraine Russia and I'm so happy that he decided to go to our European allies and our NATO allies and try to build a coalition of people to help Ukraine so that that wasn't only the United States um personally especially after doing a whole bunch of research I do tend to side with Israel over um Palestine in a lot of the Israeli Palestinian conflicts I'm glad that Biden while remaining a staunch defender of Israel is trying to reign in some of the more aggressive posturing towards uh the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip I'm I'm proud that Biden said Hey listen we're going to delay some of these attacks Hey listen we are going to allow humanitarian Aid here Hey listen we are going to try to uh you know not kill as many Palestinian people down there while still you know signaling that he would be a St supporter of um of Israel in in the conflict assuming the civilian cas don't go too high um for foreign policy I mean blemishes I mean like the biggest one you can give to Biden is Afghanistan and the poll out there but man are we going to talk about you know the uh Inspector General report that says one of the biggest reasons why the Afghanistan PLL out was so disastrous was because of the Doha Accords where Donald Trump headed talks that didn't even include the Afghanistan army uh I mean like these were disasters like when when Biden took office we had 2500 troops left in Afghanistan like what was the options even uh afforded to Biden at that point um obviously you've got the abandonment of the Kurds in Northern Syria you know for the Turkish armies to lay waste to um you talk about Iran and North Korea although I'm not sure where uh Ben would land on those but yeah that's a broadly that's that's a lot from both you want to pick pick us something we disagree with here well I mean there's a lot so I mean so I want to ask a few questions on each one of these so let's let's talk about divisiveness for a second so there's no one who can make the case that Donald Trump is not divisive of course he's incredibly divisive it's a given M do you treat Biden's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness that you treat Trump's rhetoric or I should probably put that the other way around should we treat Trump's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness as Joe Biden or say Barack Obama's rhetoric um I'm going to try to be concise St broadly speaking especially in studing Israel Palestine and Ukraine Russia I try not to take politicians at their word because sometimes they just say stuff to say stuff I understand that but broadly speaking I'm going to look at the rhetoric and the actions and I am going to them the same so yes I would hold Biden and Trump to the same right so my feeling is and this is one area where for clarification we're going to have a division is that I of course don't treat Trump's rhetoric in the same way that I treat Biden's or Obama's he's utterly uncalibrated he says whatever he wants to at any given time and it doesn't even match up with his policy very often can I ask you like for our head of state our chief executive shouldn't rhetoric be arguably one of the most important things that he does I mean the answer would be yes and now I've been given a choice between a person who I think in calibrated ways says things that are divisive and a person who in uncalibrated ways says things that are divisive and so the evidence that Joe Biden is divisive is every poll taken since essentially August of of 2021 he he is by all available metrics incredibly divisive a huge percentage of Americans are deeply unhappy not only with his performance but don't believe he's a uniter they're that that's just the reality and that may just be a reflection I mean honestly we may be putting too much on Trump or Biden personally it may just be that the American people themselves are rhetorically divided because of social media and social media can in fact be assessible one thing that I would ask you about that though is I agree especially when you look at the favorability but sometimes when I look at these polls when you start to disaggregate them by party I wonder if it's actually is Biden historically divisive or um I'm trying to think of a really polite way to say this the people that like Trump worship Trump I don't know I like one of the most precient things that Trump could have probably ever said was that I could kill someone on Fifth Street and nobody would is itally divisive or is it that every single Trump supporter will always say that Trump is great and the reason I would say that that Biden is in fact historically divisive is because Republicans felt much more strongly about Barack Obama than Joe Biden actually but they didn't feel as strongly about Trump as they did about like Romney or McCain right in in what way I mean and that the allegiance to Trump oh no there's certainly more allegiance to Trump than it is to Romney or McCain largely because Trump won in 2016 but beyond that the the point that I'm making is that if you're looking at the stats in terms of divisiveness Republicans always find the Democratic president divisive the question is where the rest of the country is and right now there are a lot of Democrats who either don't agree with Biden or you know find him divisive there are a lot of Independents who find him divisive so when you're when we're comparing these things I don't think they're leagues apart in terms of the divisive effects of what they say right and I'm separating that off from like the inherent content of what they say because obviously what Trump says is is more divisive just on like the raw level I mean if he's insulting people as opposed to Joe Biden doing Maga Republicans like if I were to just if I an alien come down from space look at these two statements I'd say this one's more divisive than this one but then there's the reality of being a human being in the world and that is everyone has baked Donald Trump into the cake and Joe Biden again started off with a patina of being non- divisive and now has emerged as divisive I if you don't mind I actually want to get to the the foreign policy questions because this one is actually slightly less interesting to me just one quick thing I guess like because we can say the reality of it and we can look at opinion polls what if we look at like legislative accomplishments like Biden is working on a 5050 divided Senate Donald Trump had both house of Congress and the Supreme Court and got like no major legislation passed well I mean he he he did lose Congress in 2018 but sure but prior to that because we got the we got the infrastructure bill I think in one year which Trump promised for his entire presidency didn't get anywhere on it I mean yes his his Republican base was not in favor of mass spending on infrastructure and neither am I so that there's that I think that's mostly a state and local they were in favor of mass spending for tax guns that's not a spending I mean we I mean effectively it is right like effectively it's not well if you're cutting receipts but you're not changing the level of spending like Biden did with the uh Ira again we we have a fundamental philosophical difference here I think that when when the government takes my money that is not that is not the government somehow being more fiscally responsible and when the government allows me to keep my money I don't see that as the government spending I see that as my money and the government is taking less of it that's great but at the end of the day the government is still going to be in a deficit spending and they're going to have to borrow money from the treasur right we have a spending problem it's not a reeds problem is the case that I'm making the problem with with Donald Trump is not that he lowered taxes the United States has one of the most progressive tax systems on the planet and in fact if you wish to have a European style social welfare state what you actually need is to tax the middle class to death I mean the reality is the top 20% of the American population pays literally all net taxes in the United States after after state benefits and all of this so if if you actually wanted to have the kind of social welfare state that many liberals seem to want to have like northern Europe for example you'd actually have to tax people who make 4050 $60,000 I I agree with that how do you explain the lack of legislation I mean if he's like such a uniter because I think the Republican Party itself is is quite divided and think that Trump but isn't that his job he's the head of the Republican Party he's the president Republican president of the United States I mean again I don't think that Joe Biden has passed wildly historic legislation was the largest like so here here's the problem if you're a republican the only bills that you can get consensus on tend to be bills that either that that let's be real about this that are tax cuts because as you would I think agree with when it comes to polling data Americans constantly say they want to cut the government and then the minute you ask them which program they have no idea what right exactly and so trying to it's much harder to come up with a bill to cut things than it is to come up with a bill to add things coming which is why spending was out of control under under Trump as well but there are some Republicans who still don't want to spend on those things right so inherently the the task that this goes back to the first question the task that Republicans think government is there to do is different than the task that Democrats think that government is there to do so the way that the very metric of success for a Democratic president versus a Republican president namely for example pieces of legislation passed as a Republican one of my goals is to pass nearly no legislation because I don't actually want the government involved in more areas of of our life I want to ask a couple questions on the foreign policy yeah okay wait real quick just so for instance like Donald Trump wanted to punish China and he wanted to bring uh microprocessor manufacturer the United States uh Biden did that with legislation with a chips act uh you talk about like spending being out of control and I I mean I can agree with that I think anybody looks at the numbers has to agree with that but why not pass legislation like the inflation reduction act um which is at least like spending neutral right like why are there not bills where Donald Trump could take I mean first of all I think that whenever the government says something is spending neutral it rarely materializes that way that is not going to be a spending neutral bill but there's a difference between like at least they say it's spending neutral versus this is a $500 billion do Bill over like 10 years I well but again I don't see a tax cut as a matter of cor on spending neutrality the big problem is they keep spending not that they are allowing me to keep the money that I earned and they did not earn but okay so then just to understand so if somebody just did massive like reductions in tax receipts so tax cut after tax cut after tax cut but they didn't change spending at all you wouldn't consider that like an increase in deficit spending or out of control spending you would just say they're just tax cuts no the opposite I I would consider it a wild I I would consider it a wild overspending okay meaning so then was it under Trump then when he did the tax I mean theend by the way under under Biden is way worse than it was under of course but we're in postco right Co ended effectively I mean you live in Florida Co effectively ended in the State of Florida by the middle of 2021 I if you're a vacc fan by like April May of 2021 there was wide availability of vaccines whether or not you like the vaccines and at that point we were done I agree but like we're in a post like how many trillions of dollars have been dumped in worldwide that are like leading to inflation right the inflation is like a worldwide issue right now because of the economy shutting down for a year or two it's not like those effects are gone in one year right Co might be gone but the after effects of all the stimulus spending and the unemployment everything definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods so pouring more money on top of that makes for more inflation that's what it does sure I agree um but like there's also the definition of when do you deficit spend is when economies are headed for recessions right rather than when economies are doing really well like they were under Trump and he was deficit spend whereas Biden can at least make the argument that I should I ought to be deficit spending because the economy is heading for potential recession so here's the thing I don't think that the economy was actually headed for recession in in fact if you look at the economics Economist said they it was Economist they're still saying that there's like a recession coming right right but that that was largely because the after effects of inflation meaning if you inflate the economy what you are going to end up doing is bursting a bubble and then when that bubble bursts you'll get a recession I mean that was the basic idea right the idea the question was whether you're going to get the soft Landing but if you actually look at for example the employment statistics or the economic growth statistics in the unit States what they look like under the last year's Obama and then Trump I mean this is what the chart looks like is it looks like this and then it hits March of 2020 it goes like that right and then by like September it bounces back up right it's a v-shaped recovery and then it starts to Peter out sure a lot because of the American Recovery plan right that Biden did as well I mean four million jobs yeah no I don't I'm not going to attribute it to that because this the rates of growth in in job growth from September October November were actually very similar to the rates of job growth after Joe Biden took office what you see is actually kind of a straight line I me looks like in any case Okay so on the foreign policy stuff this is getting obrus but on the foreign policy stuff um so the the questions that I have with regard to to Biden on foreign policy uh very very simple question do you think that the situation in the Middle East is better now than it was under Donald Trump probably um that's a hard one the factor that right now are like obviously you've got the Israel Palestinian War that's going on right now which is kind of bad but like broadly speaking I'm not sure how much that affects the Middle East as much as like the collapse of Syria 2013 Syrian Civil War sent millions of immigrants throughout all of Europe which was under um which was under Obama and continued under Trump trump didn't do anything to alleviate any of the Syrian Civil War um in ter why did Syria end up as a Preserve of Russia again how did Syria end up as a Preserve of Russia yes why did it end up being essentially cin state of Russia um I know that Putin enjoys access to the ports down there um I don't know you I mean the reason is because Barack Obama suggested that there was a red line that would be drawn in the face of chemical weapons used Bashar Assad then used chemical weapons in Syria and Barack Obama was UN unwilling to then essentially create consequences for Syria in the form of any sort of Western strike and so instead he outsourced it to Russia this is 2013 2014 sure think there might have been some hesitancy after like seeing how Libya ended up that maybe us like intervening pres during Libya yeah I mean sure but what does that have to do anything though I'm just saying there might have been like a mistake learn Point making is that actually the Middle East I mean just historically speaking was historically good under Donald Trump I mean it's very difficult to make the case that either before or after Trump were better than during Donald Trump the Syrian I don't think that that Trump contributed to the Syrian situation improving much um I think he Isis which was in the I mean Isis had been getting wrecked by the Kurds in Iraq by every single person by Assad's Army by Putin by tur literally everybody was fighting against Isis at that point there was a spike in violence and then the the Trump I mean you get credit for when you're president presumably I mean things got better with Isis under Trump I mean yeah they did I mean things got worse with Isis under Obama for sure he called them the JB Squad sure and then they became not the JV Squad yeah but I don't know if Isis is originating in Syria um and uh baghdaddy and all of the growth of that is necessarily Obama's fault I know that we like to say that Obama created Isis I don't know if you say that but I've heard that saying a lot I think that's a little a little bit simplistic um I I don't think that when I'm looking at like actions that presidents have taken the the big the biggest criticism I have for like Middle Eastern policy is I think the Doha Accords were a disaster and I think that's like one of the biggest blemishes that we have right now I would also argue that moving the um Embassy to Jerusalem was also kind of silly um and arguably contributed to some of the conflict we see right now is I'll argue precisely the opposite especially given the fact that after the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem the Abraham Accords continued to sign and actually expand and that if Donald Trump had been elected I have no doubt in my mind that Saudi Arabia would now be a part of the Abraham Accords in fact that was basically pre-negotiated and then when Joe Biden took office Joe Biden took a very anti-saudi stand on a wide variety of issues the the biggest single effect in the Middle East of Joe Biden's presidency and again I agree with you that not every foreign policy issue can be laid at the hands of a President Joe Biden's main approach to the Middle East was very similar to the Obama approach which is why the Middle East was chaotic under Obama and chaotic under Biden and that was to alienate allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel and and instead to try to make common cause or cut deals with Iran what that did is incentivize terrorism from Iran what we're watching in the Middle East is Iran attempting to use every one of its Terror proxies in the Middle East and it was specifically launched in an attempt to avoid what Biden actually was trying to do which was good which was after two years of failure with Saudi Arabia triy to bring them into the Abraham Accords right that was what was burgeoning at the end of La at the end of last year and Iran saw that and Iran decided that they were going to throw a grenade into the middle of those negotiations by essentially activating Hamas Hamas activates Hamas commits October 7th Israel as a sovereign nation state has to respond to the murder of 1200 of its citizens and the taken kidnapping of of 240 Israel has to do that not only to go after its own hostages and try to restore them but also to reestablish military deterrence in the most violent region of the world kah gets active on Israel's northern border kah's and Iranian proxy they get active on the northern border the the hudis in Yemen get active these are all the only reason all this is happening at the same time is because Iran is doing this right not just that they're they are threatening global shpp if you're talking about the effects of global supply lines which I totally agree had a major inflationary effect on the economy thanks to right now the cost of shipping is nearly double what it was just a few weeks ago and that is because a rag tag group of hthi Barbarians are attacking international shipping and forcing everybody to stop using the Babel M Freight instead going around the Cape of Good Hope in in Africa all of that is the result of the fact that Joe Biden reoriented the United States in the very early days in favor of a more pro-iranian stance he appointed Robert Maly to negotiate the Iran deal who as it turns out was using proxies many of his AIDS were actually taking money from Iran the the the Biden Administration literally one of their first acts was to delist the hoodies as a terror organization and end sanctions against the hoodies these are all moves that that Biden made very early on they were disastrous moves but when it comes to domestic policy I think he hasn't been nearly as dam domestic policy on foreign sure sure so just on a couple of Middle Eastern things so one of the big things that threw the Middle East into disaster was we are all traumatized by it now was the Iraq evasion CH or Republican president sure agree that right the the deposition of Saddam Hussein and everything that followed after probably contributed more to the growth of Isis and the desil of that entire region probably more than anything else I think that under prior to Bush um for Clinton and even at the beginning of Bush's presidency we were on some kind of road to normaly um with Iran which I think has to happen whether we like them or not um until Bush for whatever reason decides to throw Iran into the aess of evil and need that we on a road to normaly with Iran in the 1990s do in the wait what that we on a road to normaly with Iran in the 1990s my understanding is that yeah from the late 90s and prior to the aess of evil uh labeling of Iran that there was going to be some path forward to where we could start to normalize relationships with them I I I find that very difficult to believe and I don't see a lot of evidence I mean we can just disagree on that sure we can disagree on that but I know that the after effect just quick note the after effect of the Iraq war that was the most devastating was the increase in power of Iran I agree yeah because of the destabilization of Iraq and Iraq not having a uh a government there that was functional for at least a decade and was inni government right originally it was Sunni government disbanding the the Sunni Army was one of the worst things that the bush administ all the former yeah all horrible under Republican president um Bute that the uh yeah that that probably contributed more to Isis uh to the growth of power in Iran maybe even to the decivilization of Syria probably more than anything that Obama did um also the uh when we look at Iran funding people in the region I don't disagree with that as well I think Iran is the number one instigator of bad guy things right now in the Middle East Iran um the irgc I reported When Donald Trump killed simman I think that was a great thing um I I think that Iran is a major problem however I don't know if the path forward is constantly being a belligerent to Iran or trying to figure out some road to normaly I don't know if the collapse of Iran um or the destruction of that country considering how unpopular the a even is there like the citizens of Iran I don't think are big supporters of the government there um I I feel like moving on a path where you know let's do our nuclear inspections we had that um Iranian nuclear deal that Trump pulled out of let's do the nuclear inspections make sure you're not on a way to nuclear weapons let's unfree some funds let's move in some Direction Where We Get on a good term with you I feel like that's the most important thing that needs to happen in the Middle East as much as people like to look at the Abraham Accords who cares if what what was it uh Bahrain I think Oman um I think the UAE and Morocco yeah AR like all of these people even Saudi Arabia already have like de facto normalization with Israel anyway they're all trading this I mean to to pretend that that anybody even 15 years ago would have been talking about normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel is insane they already they were already on that path they had already been tra they were already de facto trading partners with each other that that they had already been collaborating and do that's a wild claim that that Israel and Saudi Arabia were going to normalize 15 years ago 15 years ago might have been a wild claim but after Turkey um after Jordan and then in the past like 20 years of like economic relations and ties with each other all of the leadership in the Middle East and you'll agree with this look at Israel and they go okay well we got Palestinians who you know God bless them do nothing and then you've got Israel which is on a on a region with no natural resources to somehow become like an economic giant they're good to trade with their population is educated they you know have military power um all of the leadership in these Middle Eastern countries are wanting to be friendly with Israel and are engaging in trade de facto with Israel and the idea that like the UAE and Bain were brought in to say like oh well now we're going to officially say this I I I just those are the first steps toward obviously the formation of a new Middle East in which economics would predominate over sectarian conflict the chief obstacle to that is Iran that that negotiations with the Ayatollah were going to be a solution to any of this is absolutely are the is it the Abraham Accords that's convincing Saudi Arabia to take a stance against Iran no I mean sa they're already figh yeah they're already fighting with each other right like I don't think the ab Accords moved us any closer towards any type of real peace in the has to happen is something has to happen with Iran there has to be some diplomatic bilateral communication there no what has to happen is the containment of Iran which was what was in which was what was taking place with the increased normalization with the Sunni Arab world and Israel combined with significant economic sanctions the notion that that there's this far-fetched notion in in foreign policy circles that diplomacy can sort of be wish cast out of thin air that if you sit around a table that you can always come to an agreement with somebody the IAS do not have common interests with the United States they do not and this idea that they are willing to take money in exchange for for example some sort of PE peaceful acquiescence to Israel's existence is obviously untrue hasn't that been the case though that you've had a region with tons of sectarian violence for a long time and then finally turkey was like you know what this isn't worth it the United States paid him a lot of money they had conversations with Israel you know what the the economy the economic gains same with Jordan same thing with Turkish politics but the but but the the situation with turkey was actually quite warm between Israel and Turkey in the 90s when you had the the you know sort of secular Muslim regime Turk in place and and now erdogan is has joined in the frey and erdogan is significantly more radical than I'm so sorry um if I said turkey I'm in Egypt my bad yeahp right yeah so like in terms of like Egypt and Jordan right were the first two you need so you here's the thing you need is it possible that you could theoretically come to a deal with Iran only with a new leadership crew okay this is true for every peace agreement in the region you you could not Israel could not have made peace with well they made peace with Egypt and and Sadat was the leader for Yom kapor right he did not make peace with Naser right the point is that this is a different regime you need a different regime this I'm the same regime that did the part of the Yum kapor war was the same regime that negotiated peace with Israel I mean that's true it is also true that that is a relationship that could be cultivated specifically because it was sadad who made clear he was going to come to the table have the Iranians ever made clear that they would come to the table over for example the existence of the state of Israel uh no that is not a thing that's going to happen but I think people every every single one of their proxy every one of them not only calls for the destruction of the state of Israel they also call for the destruction of America I mean this is literally the houie slogan they're busy hitting ships and their slogan is literally ALU Akbar death to America death to the Jews death to Israel it doesn't fit on a bumper sticker but that and it's not all that catchy but that is in fact their slogan the notion that the regime that propagates that is going to be approached with diplomacy is not only wrong the problem is that we it's easy to say the stakes of diplomacy are are okay so we try to talk right jaw jaw is better than war war sure the only problem is that in the Middle East weakness is taken as a sign that aggression might be an appropriate response that is how things work in the Middle East and the fact that Barack that that Joe Biden rather came into office with an orientation toward continuing the Biden the Obama policies in Iran has led to conflagrations these sort of brush fires breaking out everywhere that Iran has borders with either the west or Israel or both right any place that's happening it's leading to brushfires because again the logic of violence in the Middle East is not quite the logic of violence in other places in the world by the way I think the logic of violence in the midle East is actually closer to what most International politics looks like than we than we wish that it were I mean I think that's part of what's happening in Ukraine as well which brings me by the way here's my question about Ukraine just real quick you so you think that for Iran right a country that has been sanctioned for God knows how many years now you think that for Iran just continuing to sanction them and contain them is an effective way is more effective than trying to engage them in bilateral multilateral peace talks yes 100% And the proof is in the pudding before we go to Ukraine can I ask about Israel so you're both mostly in agreement but what is I don't know i' say that okay but as I'm learning uh what is Israel doing right what is Israel doing wrong in this very specific current war in Gaza um I mean frankly I think that what Israel is doing wrong is if I were Israel okay like again America's interests are not coincident with Israel's interests if if if I were an Israeli leader I would have swiveled up and I would have knocked the leap out of hisbah early what does that what does that mean so I I would have I would yov Galant who's the defense minister of Israel was encouraging netanyahu's the Prime Minister and the war cabinet including Benny Gan so whenever people talk about the Netanyahu government that's not what's in place right now there's a Unity War government in place that includes the political opposition the reason I point that out is because there are a lot of people politically who will suggest that the actions Israel is currently taking are somehow the manifestation of a right-wing government Israel currently does not have a quotequote rightwing government they have Unity government that includes the opposition in any case y Galant was urging in the very early days of the war that Israel should turn north and instead of hitting Hamas they should actually take the opportunity to knock hisbah out because hisbah is significantly more dangerous to the existence of the state of Israel than Kamas I actually agree with that uh as far as what Israel has been doing wrong in the actual War I mean I think that again from an American perspective I think that Israel is is doing pretty well from an Israeli perspective V Israeli I would actually want Israel to be less loose about sending its soldiers in on the ground level so Israel's attempting to minimize civilian casualties and the cost of that has been the highest military death toll that Israel has had since the 1973 yum kipur War I mean I personally know through one degree of separation three separate people have been killed in Gaza and that's because they're going in door Todo it's because they're they're attempting to minimize civilian casualties and they're losing a lot of guys in in this particular in this particular War um you know the the the problem that Israel has had historically speaking is that Israel got very complacent about its own security situation they believed the technology was going to somehow correct for the hatred on the other side of the wall that very okay so our people have to live underground for two weeks at a time while some Rockets fall but at least it's not a war and that complacence you know bred what happened on October 7th so to to me what Israel did wrong was years and years and years of complacence and belief in an Osa system that is at root a failure because you cannot make a peace agreement with people who do not want make peace with you so that that that's what I think Israel is doing wrong I I have a feeling there's going to be wide Divergence on this point um maybe uh so uh in terms of broadly speaking um I generally oppose settlement expansion is a thing that Israel does incorrectly that I think is kind of like provocative to at least all the Palestinians uh in the West Bank and I probably energizes hatred in the Gaza STP for them as well in terms of conducting uh in terms of conducting Warfare uh the one thing that I always say to everybody uh especially Americans is you can't evaluate things from an American perspective it's very stupid happened a lot with Ukraine where people like oh well didn't they work with the Nazis and like weren the Soviets the good guys and it's like well in in other parts of the world it's not quite as simple um and I think the same is true for Israel Palestine that a lot of Americans will analyze the conflict is just being one between only Israel and Palestine which is not it's a conf between Israel and then Palestine Hezbollah the houthis and Iran right now it is um I think that the however one area where I'll break with Ben is is I think that minimizing civilian casualties and everything is very very very important I think on the Israeli side I don't think it's important so that the US will stay with them because I think the US is probably going to stick with Israel as long as they don't do anything crazy and I don't even think it matters for the International Community it doesn't definitely doesn't matter for the UN because Jesus Christ um however I think it's really really really important that I think that in the Middle East broadly speaking I think that leadership especially in the Gulf has gotten over the Palestinian uh issue I think that leadership is kind of like they don't care as much anymore but the populations still care quite a bit and I think that the main issue that Israel could run into is if the civilian death to does climb too high and if they start to hit this you know 40 50 60,000 number of Civilian casualties they run the risk of the civilian populations and the surrounding middle eastern states becoming so antagonistic towards Israel that they start to take steps back towards normalization in the region so for instance I know that um Bahrain I think already pulled out their Ambassador um to Israel my guess is going to be it's temporary um I know that on the um on the public speaking side you've got a lot of people condemning Israel for the attacks and on the private side you've got people telling Israel please kill all of Hamas because this is untenable and nobody wants to work in the situation um I don't know if this ended up being true or not I'm guessing it didn't but I saw on a couple of Twitter accounts it was leaked that potentially Saudi Arabia was considering installing a government in the West Bank that they would run um no I mean I I think Israel would love nothing better than that but that is not one of the big problems in the Middle East is literally no wants to preside over the Palestinians no one Arab states Israel no one so I think the issue is and I think and I'm largely actually I'm very sympathetic towards the Palestinians because I think that for um since 48 and onwards I think that all of the Arab states super gassed them up on that they wanted the Palestinians to fight because they wanted to fight with Israel um however as time has gone on and they realized that the it's kind of a lost cause states have started to drop out so you're getting these bilateral uh peace treaties with um Egypt and with Jordan you're getting multilateral agreements like the Abraham Accords and now the Palestinians are looking around and like okay well you guys told us to fight all this time and now the only people that we have supporting us are Iranian proxies um so the Palestinians are in a very weird spot where they've like lost all their support um yeah I think that I think that Israel what I would say to be quote unquote critical of Israel is Israel needs to take strong steps towards peace that probably involves them enduring some undue hardship so not the October 7th attacks because Jesus that's way too much but you know other types of you know attacks that they might have to deal with that might cause some civilians to die that they don't come out over the top with and and retaliate with if there's ever going to be peace in that region however another thing that I've always said is a huge problem between Israel and Palestine is I think that both sides think that if they continue to fight it will be good for them but the problem is one side is delusional uh Israel I think Israel wants to continue to fight because they get justifications for uh the annexation of the Goan Heights they get justifications for expansions especially in area sea that I that think they're probably going to try to Annex soon uh they get justifications for the increased military posturing uh towards the Gaza Strip and the embargos and Israel is right that if the conflict continues really the situation only improves for Israel Over time but the Palestinians also all believe that if they keep fighting they thought this since 2000 under Arafat that if they just keep fighting they'll get better gains too but that's not the case is there a difference between Palestinian citizens and the leadership when you say that I love all people I love all people around the world and I think that when we analyze issues I think that we have to be very honest with what the people on the ground think and the idea that Hamas is just this one-off thing in the Gaza Strip is not only incorrect with the situation on the ground it's also incredibly ahistorical um and the idea that like the Palestinians and the West Bank of which I believe the most recent polling shows I want to say 75 to 80% support the October 7th attacks um Palestinians in general want to fight in violent conflict with Israel that's not just the position of the government that's not just people there's a reason why a boss doesn't want to do uh elections in the West Bank uh and it's because the Palestinian people really do want to fight with Israel but to combat that problem is like you have to get the UN on board we've got to do an actual addressing of the Palestinian refugee problem which is handled like a joke right now um Iran has to be brought to the table in terms of negotiations uh there has to be huge efforts made to economically Revitalize these like Palestinian areas even though they're one of the highest recipients of Aid in the world um you you have to do something about the Embargo and the blockade and the Gaza Strip which isn't just maintained by Israel it's also maintained by Egypt you should ask why um yeah there's a lot of things that have to happen to fix that problem but the reality is is I don't think Israel really wants to because they get to continue their expansion into the West Bank and I don't think anybody around the world really cares that much a month we won't be talking I will argue with that the idea that Israel does not want to end the conflict is be lied by the history of what just happened with the Gaza Strip so when we talk about settlements for example Israel did have settlements inside the Gaza Strip there were 8,000 Jews who were living inside the Gaza Strip in gush kaiv uh up until 2005 they they they withdrew all of those people I mean took them literally out of their homes uh and the result was not the burgeoning of a of a better attitude toward the state of Israel with regard to for example you know the the Palestinian population in Gaza in fact it was more radical in Gaza than it was in the West Bank uh the the the result was obviously the election of Kamas the the October 7th attacks in which unfortunately many civilians took place took part in the October 7th attacks there's video of people rushing who are civilians and dressed in civilian clothing into Israeli Villages always the same thing well no no that that is 100% true obviously uh and when it comes to you know area C and Israel's you know supposed deep and abiding desire for territorial expansion in area C area C so for for those who are not familiar with the oso cords and again this is getting very abstruse but the oso cords are broken down into three areas of the West Bank area a is under full Palestinian control that' be like Janine and Nablus the the major cities for example there's area B which is mixed Israeli Palestinian control where Israel provides some level of military security and control uh and then there's area C and area was like to be decided later it was left up for possible concessions to the Palestinian Authority if the oo cords had moved forward those are disputed territories there is building taking place in areas by both actually no one talks about this but by by Palestinians as well as Israelis uh and the the you know question as to whether if Israel stopped building there have been many settlement freees in the past including some undertaken by Netanyahu and and it actually has not done one iota of good in moving the ball forward in terms of actual negot NE iations again the the biggest problem is that the leadership for Palestinians has spent every day since really 67 it's not even 48 because after 40 between 48 and 67 Jordan was in charge of the West Bank and Egypt was in charge of the Gaza Strip and at no point did either of those Powers say hey maybe we ought to hand this over to an independent Palestinian state which was originally the division that was that was promoted by the UN partition plan in 47 because of that uh the the leadership post 67 and really starting in ' 64 the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 64 and it called for the liberation of the land in ' 64 they had the West Bank and they had the Gaza Strip so they're talking about t uh when it was founded in in ' 64 the basic idea as you know kind of indicated by that was Israel will not exist and that was a promise that's been made by pretty much every Palestinian leader in Arabic to the people that they are talking to yasat famously would do this sort of thing he'd speak in English and talk about how he wanted a two-state solution and then he'd go back to his own people and say this is a trojan horse and we're if Israel could if you think that Israeli parents want to send their kids at the age of 18 to go and monitor Janine and Nablus and be in inun you're out of your mind you're out of your mind Israelis do not want that in fact Israelis didn't want that so much that they allowed Rockets to fall in their cities for full on 18 years in order to avoid sending soldiers on mass back into the Gaza Strip true but I think Israel does want to continue to expand settlements into the West Bank right they want to continue to build they want to have all Jerusalem East Jerusalem as well well I mean East Jerusalem has already been annexed so East Jerusalem is according to Israel a part of Israel that's not a settlement okay so there there's that with regard to you know does Israel have an interest in expanding settlements in the w why would they not until there's a peace partner sure that's what I mean but I'm saying as long as the conflict continues like because even when you talk about no but your suggestion is that they're incentivizing the conflict to continue so they can grab more land well no let me be very clear I don't think there's like a PL like so some people say for instance uh they'll take that one quote from Netanyahu and they'll try to say that like he was funding the people in the Gaza STP by allowing Qatari money to come in even though he was actually speaking in opposition to aboss allowing the Gus strip to fall for Netanyahu to clear it out for him and they give it back etc etc I'm not saying I'm not claiming those theories I'm just saying that I think that Israel will take a relatively neutral stance towards conflict in enduring because as long as the conflict endures and as long as the uh settlements can expand I think that benefits I think that ultimately benefits Israel they I think there would be very let's put this way if suddenly there arose among the Palestinians a deep and abiding desire for peace approved by a vast majority of the population with serious security guarantees I think you'd be very hardpressed to find Israelis who would not be willing to at least consider that in for not expanding bathrooms in a I kind of I would have agreed with you on October 6 I think we're probably a year or two away from that right now no no but no the point I'm making is that Israelis now realized that the entire peace process was a sham meaning the people who are on the other side of the table were using it as a trojan horse in the first place the the death of Oslo is not the death of Israeli hopefulness it's the death of the illusion that on the other side of the table was anyone worth bargaining with that's what's happening and that's why you have this sort of insane disconnect right now between the United States and the Israeli government again it's a Unity government no one in Israel is talking about making concessions to the Palestinian Authority for a wide variety of reasons including the fact that Mahmud abas fatak continues to pay actual families of terrorists who kill Jews the fund yeah right and and which is from the the moderate West Bank right exactly that's that so you again like the taste in Israel for this is a even the people who the kilon right those are the most secular people in Israel which was by the way the place that was attacked on October 7th I mean what people should understand is that October 7th was not an attack against settlements in the West it was an attack on peace Villages that were essentially disarmed and many of these people who were killed were peace activists who were literally trying to work with people in Gaza to get them J I mean it's just it's it's mindboggling that's why you've had this ground shift in Israel the next 20 years in Israel is going to be about security and economic development period end of story everything else goes second third place and I will say I agree essentially with everything you're saying um not to loop back on another topic but this is one of the reasons then why I was so critical I don't want to say critical but like kind of nonchalant about the Abraham Accords because they didn't address anything with the Palestinians whatsoever they brought in countries that weren't super relevant to the conflict they didn't bring in Qatar which is where a lot of the money and support for the god con they didn't involve Iran at all they involved bilateral no but totally changed the mentality and this is why what I'm seeing right now this is why listen I think that that Biden has done better than I certainly expected him to do in terms of support for Israel like Obama was way less supportive of Israel than Biden by every metric with that said the rhetoric that he's been using recently and the blankin have been using recently about Israel needs to make painful concessions for peace Israel reentering this issue at the center of relations in the Middle East East is doomed to failure the magic magic is a strong word the the benefit of the Abraham Accords was proof of what you're saying which is true which is that all the surrounding countries in reality have abandoned the idea that there's a centrality to the Palestinian Israeli conflict that is not the central conflict in the Middle East and by the way one of the reasons it's not the central conflict in the Middle East is because actually ironically because of the rise of Iran right it's it's Sunni states that are largely signing up with Israel because they're realizing they need some sort of counterweight to a a burgeoning nuclear power run can we talk about Ukraine sure you have a disagreement with you uh with with what uh Destiny said my my main problem with Biden's policy with regard to Ukraine is that he outsourced the end goal of the war to zinski early on now that might make sense if that goal were something that he was willing to fund to the point of achievement uh or if zinsky could have achieved it on his own but right now and this has been true since pretty early on the war Point Henry kiss gerid uh this that that pretty early on in the war it was very clear that for example Crimea was going nowhere the Russians had control of crimeia barring the United States giving permission to fly f-16s over Crimea nothing was going to change over there the same thing was true in most of the donbass right in luhansk and DK that that was not going to change zinsky stated goal and you understand it he's the leader of Ukraine right is is that there was a predation on his territory in 2014 and that the Russians sent their little green men across the border and then they took all of these areas and so he is leader of Ukraine is saying okay I want all of that back now the reality is that the US's interest had largely been achieved in the first few months of the war meaning the revocation of the ability of Russia to take Ukraine and just ingest it and two the devastation of of Russia's military capability I mean Russia has just been wrecked I mean the military is in serious Straits because of the war in Ukraine from an American perspective I'm very much Pro all of that I think that we have an interest in Ukraine maintaining a buffer status against territorially aggressive Russia I think that the United States does have an interest in degrading the Russian military to the extent that it can't threaten the Baltic states or threaten Kazakhstan or other countries in the region the problem I have with Biden's strategy is as always I think that it's a muddle and I think muddles tend to end with misperceptions war tends to break out and maintain because of misperception misperception of the other side's strength the other side's intentions and and all of the rest people misperceive what's going to happen they say I'll cross that line and nothing will happen right this is what Putin thought he thought I'll cross that line they'll greet me as a Liberator and because the United States just surrendered in Afghanistan essentially they won't do anything and the West is fragmenting because NATO's fragmenting and all the rest of this and obviously he was wrong on on all of those scores the problem for for Biden is that as with virtually every war no end line was set and so it became out recently it was widely reported that actually there was a peace deal that was on the table in the first few months that Putin was on board with uh that basically would have seeded luhansk and denet and Crimea to Russia in return for solidification of those lines American and Western Security guarantees to Ukraine right Ukraine wouldn't formally join NATO but there would be security guarantees to Ukraine we're ending up there anyway it's just taking a lot more money and a lot more time to get there and do you think Trump would have helped push that piece yes and I think and I think that Biden actually did zeny a bit of a disservice because zinsky knows where this war is going to end and it's not going to end with lanskin denes and Crimea in Ukrainian hands it's just not going to and he knows that what actually in my opinion zilinski needed was for Joe Biden to be the person who foed that deal upon him so that he could then go back to his own people and say listen guys I wanted all those things but the Americans weren't willing to allow me to have all those things and so we did an amazing job we did a heroic job in defending our own land we devastated the Russian military even though no one expected us to but we can't get back those things because it's unrealistic to get back those things because America basically they're big funer and they're the ones who want the deal instead what Biden said and this was reported in the Washington Post last year the Biden Administration said we're going to fight for as long as it takes with as much as it takes takes and when they were asked until when they said whatever zinski says and that's not a policy that's just a recipe for a frozen conflict with endless funding now it may be that Putin's walked away from the table and that deal is no longer available if that deal is is available right now I certainly hope that's being pursued behind closed doors my main critique again of Biden is that when you Outsource the end goal to another country without stating what America's interest is that's a problem I also think that Biden did really quite poor job of sort of explaining what America's realistic interests are I I I don't like it when American leaders um it's weird for me to say this but I'm not a huge fan of the we're in it to protect democracy kind of rhetoric because frankly we are allied with many many countries that are not democracies and that's not actually how foreign policy Works uh we should as an overall you know 30,000 foot goal Advance democracy and and rights where we can but the reason that we were fighting in favor of Ukraine and when when I say fighting I mean giving them money and giving them Weaponry the reason that we were doing that in favor of Ukraine is not because of Ukraine's long history of clean voting and non-c Corruption the reason that we were doing that is to counter Russian interests in the region I mean that was it was a pure real politic play and that real politic play is hard to deny no matter what side of the aisle you're on I think that what many Americans are going to are reverting to is we have no interest there why are we spending money there and not spending money here and that that kind of stuff and that that argument can always be applied unless you actually articulate the reason why it is good for Americans Beyond simply the ideological for the United States to be involved in a thing so for example I think right now when when Biden is talk I think that what Biden just did he's the United States as we speak is striking the houth I think that that's a really really good thing I think that's a necessary thing and I think American people should understand why that is happening it's not because of quote unquote ideology it is I mean on a on a very root level but really it's because you're you're screwing up the Straits I mean you can't you can't do that you can't screw up free trade and Americans have an interest in not seeing all of our prices the groceries St double and triple because a bunch of rag tag Pirates you know akin to the the barber pirates from 1800 are are bothering everyone right so Ben said a lot there do you disagree with any aspect on the Ukraine side the um a little bit yeah um I think on the macro I agree maybe we get into we a little bit on some things I on the final thing that he said though I wish that Americans could have honest conversations about foreign policy I think that it would just be better for everybody um I don't know if it's uh you know Red Scare after the Cold War where it was like literally you know the behemoths you know we're fighting against communism and we felt like after 91 every single foreign policy decision needs to be able to be explained in like seven words like he's the bad guy and that's it um I wish we had more honest conversations about uh what our foreign policy interest is in a particular region because I don't think most Americans honestly could even articulate why Israel would be an important Ally or why it's important to defend Ukraine against Russia or why should we care about Taiwan at all I don't know if most Americans could articulate anything there um even though they might have very strong opinions about why we ought to be involved in certain conflicts so I do agree with that I wish we had more honest conversations about uh foreign policy um in terms of how Biden has handled Ukraine my the things that I liked the most were one that he was very clear in the beginning about what we wouldn't do so Biden saying that we're not going to do um uh not a red line no fly zones over Ukraine we're not going to be deploying troops on the ground in Ukraine we're not going to be doing anything that would have you know US soldiers and Russian soldiers crossing swords with each other that's not going to happen I like that he made that very clear at the beginning um and I like that the Coalition built between NATO and the EU to get people to send uh funds training soldiers airplanes and everything to Ukraine I thought those two things were really good in terms of basically writing zalinsky a blank check I would like to hope that Biden and the entire United States learned a lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan that open-ended missions with unlimited budgets and no clear goal are like the worst foreign policy decisions you can ever do they've like defined US foreign policy for the past two or three decades which which is unfortunate but seems to be the case um my my feeling would be and this is just a feeling I don't know if internal cables have leaked that say otherwise is the uh the Biden Administration has probably always had a quiet position of at some point there's going to be an off-ramp here and I think even a month or two ago I think those talks were being leaked that discussion had begun with zilinsky looking for an off-ramp but publicly of course the United States is never going to come out and say we're going to support you guys to fight as much as you want for three months and then after that it's no more obviously that can't be the statement it's always going to be that we're going to support you in your fight against Russia we tried that under Obama with Afghanistan it was terrible sure you can't we'll escalate The Troop levels to X but only for six months and then we're yeah you can't you just can't do that it's always going to come off as we're going to support you forever and as long as it takes and as long as you need whatever we have to do to defend freedom and democracy in your country and any any other statement would be absurd so I can understand why it feels like on a public level a blank check and an indefinite time period was granted to zalinsky but I don't think that's going to be the case I think I again I hope we've learned our lessons in the Middle East about the forever Wars that this isn't going to be a forever funding to Ukraine to fight for as long as they want um I do disagree I feel like we're playing a little bit retrospectively saying that like well it's obvious that they're not going to capture the Don boss it's obvious that they're not going to capture Crimea I agree for Crimea that was incredibly obvious but it was also really obvious that in two weeks Russia would own Kiev and Ukraine was going to be Belarus 2.0 I think that even for a lot of uh military people um and analysts around the world uh that that that was an expectation or at least a significant prob nobody knew uh the phrase that's thr right now is paper tiger that Russia's military was as IL equipped as they were so I can understand why especially if you're Ukraine and if you've repelled an invasion from one of the world's largest armies why you might feel like well fuck it you know let's fight for a few months let's fight for a year let's see what happens and I can understand the United States supporting them but I agree that there has to be some reasonable offramp where we're not going to fight forever I think the US um state department has already begun those conversations with zinski to look at what that offramp looks like um but yeah I'm not too sure other than like explicitly stating publicly like you can only fight until this date I don't really know what else I would change I don't think I don't think the bid Administration should have done that I I don't know what else do you think Biden should cut this deal on uh on the funding meaning there's like six there's this $ 105 billion deal that's been held up by debate between Republicans and Democrats over border right so basically it contains $60 billion for ukraine4 billion for Israel another several billion for taiwan's defense against China and then include some border funding and some border Provisions Republicans want the funding in the Border Provisions because we can get into the illegal immigration issue but that's a pretty serious issue and Biden Democrats have been unwilling to hold that up and that that seems to me like just from put aside Republican Democrat seems like political malpractice meaning there's a widespread perception in the United States that the border is a disaster area Joe Biden wants these things many Republicans don't want these things if he caves On the Border stuff he gets all the things that he wants and he's going to be able to go back to the moderates in the country and say I did something about the Border it seems like such an obvious win if he caves On the Border stuff you mean on the Ukraine stuff yes because then he gets the whole package he can he can go back to his own base and he can say listen guys I wanted to I wanted to be easy on the border the Republicans forced me to it but we needed the Ukraine Aid we needed the Taiwan a right that's you're honestly you're going to be more educated than me on this I don't like uh or maybe maybe I just don't know enough I don't like the principle that when we negotiate things in the United States there's like 50 million hostages at all points in time for every single thing like oh boy here comes the debt ceiling what do the Republicans want what do the Democrats want oh boy like here you know we can't fund our government um but I mean obviously the the argument is going be that if the Ukraine funding doesn't come in this bill and if Biden and his administration feel like it's really important that unil or not unilaterally but as a single issue it's not going to pass so um I would say that at this point and I don't know what the conversations look like between the bid Administration and zinski I would say at this point that it's probably fair to start making contingencies on the money that we give to Ukraine that listen like this uh conflict has you know waged on now like now we need to start looking for potential peace we can't just write you an unlimited check so I mean if those strings are attached I'd be okay with it but the broader question of like is it okay to make this particular piece of legislation with all this funding contingent on uh the Ukrainian funding I mean that just seems to be the way the government works now unfortunately quick pause bathroom break one of the big issues in this presidential election is going to be January 6th it's in the news now and I think it's going to get become bigger and bigger and bigger so question for Destiny first did Donald Trump inight an Insurrection on January 6th 2021 absolutely uh this is probably ignoring every other issue we've talked about of which I think there are plenty that I would say disqualify Trump from holding office um I think that the conduct and the behavior leading up to and including January 6th I think is wildly indefensible I am excited to see Ben try to uh yeah the uh the the three to four stages are the um the taking what I think any reasonable person say knowingly false information about elections being rigged or ballot boxes being stuffed or Ruby Freeman you know running ballots three times in Georgia taking that knowingly false information and trying to call uh State secretaries and stuff to to have them flip their electoral vote that was horrible um the plot that eastmen hatched in order to have these like false slates of electors where all seven states had citizens go in and falsely say that they were the duly elected uh electors that could submit votes to Congress that was insane uh happened um asking or begging Pence to accept these false states of electors initially and then just say you should just throw it out completely and throw it to the house delegation which was majority Republican that was absolutely unbelievable and then on the day of January 6th trying to capitalize on the Violence by him Giuliani and Eastman making phone calls to senators and congressmen saying well don't you think maybe you guys should delay the vote a little bit you know don't you think they're just really mad about the election I think you said to McCarthy they're more upset than you you um and and his utter dereliction of Duty and not doing anything to uh stop the the rioting that happened on January six because he was too busy taking advantage of it I think all of these things are horrible uh I look forward to seeing the uh Jack Smith indictments play out in court uh maybe even the Georgia RICO case but um yeah I think all of these things are un unfathomable and I think when you look at the plot from start to finish clearly the goal the entire time was to circumvent the peaceful transfer of power that was the goal from start to finish whether it was through false claim whether it was through illegal schemes or whether it was through violence at the capital to delay the certification of the vote so I'm glad you're excited it's always fun so um there are two elements to incitement of insurrection one is incitement the other is Insurrection uh so incitement has a legal standard so does Insurrection neither of those standards are met so if you're asking me morally speaking did Donald Trump do the right thing between November 4th and January 6th I said I will continue to say no he did not I think he was saying things that are false uh with just factually false about his theories with regard to the election about the election being stolen about fraud this was all adjudicated in court he did not even bring many of the claims that he was brought publicly and all the rest of that if we're talking about incitement of insurrection is a legal standard doesn't mean any of those standards when it comes to incitement it has to be immediate law incitement to immediate Lawless action that's the standard for incitement and I'm very meticulous in how I use this because I happen to speak publicly a lot and that means there are lots of people who listen to me which means some of those people are probably crazy and some of them may go and do a crazy thing did I incite them the media tends to use the word incitement very Loosely with regard to this sort of stuff in the same way that Bernie Sanders quotequote incited the Congressional baseball shooting he did not B Bernie Sanders has a lot of things I disagree with I think Bernie's a schmuck doesn't matter he did not incite that so saying bad things is not the same thing as inciting violence inciting violence the legal standard in the United States is I want you to go punch that guy in the face that's that's inciting uh with regard to Insurrection typically in Insurrection and there are some descriptions in case law though none in statutory law as far as I'm more the typical description in case law is the replacement of one legitimate government of the United States with another by violent means the the notion that Donald Trump coordinated any such Insurrection is Bel lied by the FBI itself the FBI put out a report in uh I believe it's August of 2021 suggesting that there was no well-coordinated insurrectionist attempt coordinated by the white house uh in fact what you had was Donald Trump thrashing around like that weird alien in the movie Life I if ever saw with Jake jenal or is like kind of thrashing up against this glass box just an alien just thrashing up against the glass box that that that I think is is more what you were seeing from November 4th to January 6th um and then again the claim that January 6th itself was an Insurrection so virtually I'm not aware that anyone was charged with actual Insurrection there were some people who were charged with seditious conspiracy there are Insurrection statutes that do exist no one was charged under those particular statutes um you know the there were some people who you could say informally had insurrectionist ideas those would be the people who wanted to hang Nancy Pelosi or kill Mike Pence and those people are in jail right now uh and the election went forward the election was certified Mike Pence presided over the certification Mitch McConnell presided over the certification Joe Biden has been the president for the last three years so the Donald Trump by the way was still president at that point if he had actively wanted to do what other people who have actually launched coups have done he would have theoretically called the National Guard not to put down the riot but to actually depose the the sitting government of the United States in the name of a specious legal theory he did not do that he did not attempt that nobody working for him did that the the most you can say I think about what everybody was doing is that you know and I want to say everybody we can talk about Trump because this is really about Trump he used a phrase that that Trump was disseminating knowingly false information the word that's carrying a lot of weight there is the word knowingly um so knowingly implies a no were do I think the information he was disseminating was false yes do I think that Donald Trump has a unique capacity to convince himself of nearly anything that is to his own benefit absolutely and I think that that's actually what Donald Trump was doing there and the evidence of that is Donald Trump being a human in all of us watching him for the last several years uh so you know the idea that that he knew it to be false I'm not even sure those standards apply in any like and just assessing him as a human which is really what we're being asked to do because there's an intent element to to this crime does Donald do you think that today Donald Trump knows that he lost the election absolutely so I I don't actually I think but when we so I'm glad that you have the attorney background when we are assessing men's area when we're looking at certain criminal statutes where intent is required it's a reasonable person standard right like would a reasonable person have known that they were no it depends on the ment right standard so it's not the same in every case if you have to establish individual intent then it's not enough to say a reasonable person should have known that would be enough for a negligent statute usually when you're talking about reasonable people person statutes just legally speaking a reasonable person statute is should a reasonable person have known that's when you get to like manslaughter you can't do a reasonable person standard on like first-degree murder so have to establish actual motive in first deegree murder but for first-degree murder you don't need the statement of I plan to kill this person or I intend to kill this person we can prove that State of Mind circumstantial evidence correct yes sure you can prove it so I feel like my my feeling for Donald Trump was there were all these people around him that he trusted to investigate election fraud he trusted bar and the doj he asked Pence his vice president to look into it he ask his chief of staff he ask his legal counsel so many people that ostensibly he trusts them if he's asking them to look into it and when all of them looked into it and reported back to him no we found nothing what unless we're going to literally make the concession that Trump might actually be a tion psychoan at that point should he not have realized like well okay maybe that's think he should have realized the day of the election that he lost the election but that's not but that but I'm just ask I'm saying that like at that point should he not have known that for him to go and propagate those claims that he'd asked all of the people he trusted to research and then for him to take those claims to uh Michigan and to Georgia and then publicly and to try to convince people to throw out the election you don't think that but you're doing the same thing you're reverting to should a reasonable person have known yes a reasonable person should have known did Donald Trump know that's that's that's a different that's a different question and so conflating those two questions is going to get you into Syed ter by the way this is why Jack Smith charged the way Jack Smith charged yeah which was Jack Smith did not charge conspiracy Jack Smith did not charge Insurrection he did not charge Sous conspiracy right if he the reason is because Jack Smith is a good lawyer what he's doing is he's actually broadly I would say pretty obviously expanding statutory coverage in weird areas in order to cover a thing that doesn't quite fit into any of these legal categories but the point that I'm making is that Jack Smith is on my side of he doesn't think that he can actually establish the intent necessary to convict under a seditious conspiracy or or an Insurrection I agree with that but I think a lot of the underlying facts though because he does bring up those calls to uh raffensberger in Georgia he does bring up in the indictments that that they were knowingly false information so it seems like that's going to be part of the case maybe not to convict on any of the four particular charges that he mentioned but it seems like that's probably going to be part of um what he's going to have to establish in court to convict Trump so I I want to look at the actual text of the charges so I I'm sorry that I don't have the memorized I believe one's a fraud charge that generally does not apply to cases like this generally the fraud charge is like you're trying to steal money from the government pretty broadly in the past though it doesn't have to just be because um Smith has done oral arguments in response to a lot of the claims by Trump's lawyers this was one of them the infinite civil and criminal immunity was another one of them where he cites past cases where these types of things because I think it was to defraud of civil rights I think was the fourth charger right so the defraud of civil rights is usually somebody standing in the actual like voting house door and preventing you from voting not you have a specious legal theory that you espouse in court about whether those votes should be thrown out sure um although I don't like the when we say specious legal Theory and novel application which I do agree some of these in some ways is novel I don't think we've ever also had a president try to do this before it is a novel situation where somebody has resisted the peaceful transfer of power this clearly ways well if you're talking about the legal cases that I mean that's not true but G gors suit in 2000 I mean so that so like if comparable to gore if this is comparable to gore I'm not saying it's comparable to gore I'm saying that if the idea is that espousing a leg theory in court amounts to de facto some form of election denial or interference in some way that that can't that that's not as a general principle it's over inclusive sure Gore wasn't trying to desertify the vote though for States right they challenged their thing to the Supreme Court they lost their case in the Supreme Court and then power transfer happened and and Donald Trump had a bunch of legal challenges and then he had a rally and then there was a riot and then he left power yeah but the but the Eastman theory of what Pence could do in Congress is a cry a truly shitty Theory I mean make no mistake it's not just shitty I think that if any Democrat had done this I I think that I feel like we'd be looking at it in a far different lens as in we would be using terms like attempted coup subversion to Peaceful transfer of power if um if if a Democrat vice president had tried to essentially say that in uh Congress they could throw away the vote so I think what I want to get to here actually so we can be more specific is why are these terms important we agree on largely speaking what happened I think the the the characterization of the term are we are we we kind of bouncing around between two different different categories I want make the legal stuff we're looking at in because like you said Jack Jack Smith nobody's charging with incitement and I don't believe Insurrection is a part of so we D legal just in terms of like a president that is trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power so whether you call that a bloodless coup or a coup or whatever contemporaneous term you want to use right so prevent the peaceful transfer of power with all means or or using means that are inappropriate not quite the same thing using means that are inappropriate or illegal okay inappropriate okay so illegal I don't think so I I don't think that these charges actually meet the the criteria for the for the various charges and we can discuss each case if you want sure um as far as inappropriate sure I think in tons of inappropriate stuff I mean I I inappropriate seems the reason I don't like the word inappropriate though is because then conservatives are very quick to say well sure he was inappropriate but everybody who's inappropriate I mean I'll can see that he's more inappropriate than others I just don't see the most inappropriate sure okay that's important to me though does it not bother you that like Donald Trump sought through legal and extra legal and and Trump magical ways of trying to entrench his power as president past when he should have been able to is that not something that is incredibly Troublesome I mean the question to me is the bigger question that I think the Democrats are trying to promoe in this election cycle which is this means he is a threat to democracy sufficient that if he were to win the election there would not be another is that but he tried to do that last time could he not try to next time and I mean he could try to do whatever he wants presumably and he would fail the same way that he did last time why do we think that because he failed because so R three hours yes like let's say hypothetically Lord save me uh let's say hypothetically Giuliani was the next um head of the Department of Justice Giuliani was the next Attorney General how would he be confirmed um I well I I'm not entirely sure if uh because so much of the Republican Party despite feeling like they don't support Trump when it comes time to actually back him in Congress also I would have to check whether he would be barred by criminal conviction from holding I I don't know the answer to that sure yeah well yeah we that's especially the 14th Amendment we're figuring out a l this right now yeah um but I mean like say if not Giuliani say if there are any other number of insane people that Trump could theoretically put on his side of the government that wouldn't tell him no last uh next time because there were a lot of people that rebuked him there were Republicans in in a lot of the states right rensberger is one of them um they were Republicans in his own Administration uh you've got Rosen uh you've got bar um there was his own vice president but like theoretically next time and I feel like last time going in I'm going to do a little bit of mind reading at macro maybe agree maybe disagree I think that Trump kind of thought one I don't think Trump knows much at all about how the government works I think we probably agree with that um I think Trump probably thought that if he had people that were like at least in his party and kind of camp that they'll basically do whatever needs to be done to give him what he wants um and with no respect for process but now that he sees that well that's it's not enough to just have allies I need people that are fiercely Allegiant to me would we not be worried that a guy that tried to essentially steal the election for real wouldn't try to pick people that would be more amable to his plans in the next Administration I believe in the checks and balances of American government I believe they worked on January 6th so if you're asking me do I think that Trump has bad intent or could have bad intent with that sort of stuff sure do I believe that the guard rail is held and will continue to hold also sure so you so if somebody was right and they blatantly said like I um I don't want to use the fascist word but if they said like I want to be an authoritarian I'm going to abolish all elections you would say sure he's saying that but like I don't think he can actually do it so it's okay if he runs for president you don't care at all as long as you feel like the guard rail Ian I might prefer other candidates but I think that also one of the things that you do is that politicians again this would be an exceptional circumstance but politicians constantly make promises about the things that they are going to do and then don't fulfill and we tend to take those out in the wash meaning that you know the if I promise that day one as Donald Trump has pledged to do that he's going to deport literally every illegal immigrant in the country do I think he's actually going to do that I mean I I really highly doubted he didn't do it last time he was in office that's just there are many examples of this do I do I think here's my question do you think the guardrails are going to fail to hold I'm not sure um really yeah because I think the issue is is one um when it's election time Republicans are spineless in office um and I don't know how many Congressmen would support what he wants just because they want to win re-election or because they think it's inevitable anyway well I mean one of the one of the things that happened in 2022 is Democrats ran directly on this platform and a bunch of Republicans lost who running on this platform literally every secretary of state ran on the Donald Trump we should deny elections platform lost in every state sure but other Republicans office is this sure but I mean like look at what happened with like a kininger kininger and Cheney right who had were very like stly anti-trump after j6 uh for that select committee right kininger didn't even run again and Cheney lost her election but I think the widest margin that anybody has ever lost an election ever like all of politics people who were not born voted I guess it's just it's a surprising position to me for if we're looking at like principled stances of government the idea that a man who has and I think we both agree on this that Donald Trump's Donald Trump's only Allegiance is to Donald Trump right we agree on that the only thing he cares about is Donald Trump I don't it's the only thing you care about I think it's certainly the largest thing he care it's the largest thing he cares about right so if you've got a man who only cares about himself welcome politics I mean it's it may be more but it may be more with Trump but it's certainly not unique to Trump I think that the issue with Trump too though is um I think he's even a threat to the Republican party in which I think I think you would mostly agree with me maybe not overall but on every individual Point Trump picks bad candidates he has no concern for the future of the Republican party like for instance I think there is a chance I don't think it'll happen because of how the polling looks now but if Trump didn't get the nomination I think Trump would say screw it and run as an independent because he thinks he can win or whatever right um I I doubt that he would do that but theoretically again Trump has he was really content to throw Georgia um the two runoff elections under the bus because ravensburg didn't support him for the election so what what is all this in service of what's the what's the generalized argument that you're making do you believe I'll go back to my question you think if Trump wins there will be no more elections is that is that like what what put percentage on it what what percentage do you think that that's a reality that if Donal Trum Trump wins I think there is a 100% chance that he will try to prevent the peaceful transfer power in terms of would he succeed I can guarantee you he will not do that why is that because he's in the second term and he's no longer eligible and he will believe he won and he will leave yeah but hasn't Donald Trump himself joked about running for a third term that's I think that think that having a third turn what what has Donald Trump not joked about I mean for God I don't okay hold on if you want to prevent if you want to prevent him from creating a revolution you probably should actually just appoint him president and again here's another broad argument that I don't like in favor of trump and this was brought up earlier in terms of like we talk about like not grading presidents on a curve but then earlier we said we take Biden I totally gr I know I 100% grade presidents on a curve are you kidding oh okay I grade pretty much everybody on a curve I I don't treat my seven-year-old the same way that I treat my 9-year-old sure it feels like we're treating Donald Trump like a seven-year-old or a 9-year-old I think we should treat him like the president of the United States I don't think having a president that has taken like concrete steps to prevent the transfer of power which he did with the electorate Shem which he did with Pence and what you did with trying to capitalize on the j6 violence a president that's taken concrete steps towards uh cing the government essentially I don't know why that guy we'd say well you know it's Trump he does Trump things the guard rails held I'll probably hold next time when we say we shouldn't do you mean that he should be actually barred from office I'm just talking about support for I don't think Republicans should should support Trump you lose your incumbent Advantage the guys obviously destructive he's destructive the political party itself like um you think he should be on the ballot um you think there's a case to be made to remove him from the ballot I think there's a case to be made but man the phrasing for as much as our uh governmental founding fathers everybody else you know wrote nice amendments and wrote nice in the Constitution some of the phrasing is very very very and the uh section three um the the the not requiring any type of actual conviction um I don't have a strong feeling on it I will say I'm very interested in reading the majority opinion from the Supreme Court I seriously doubt the Supreme Court is going to uphold that states should be able to decide if they leave him off The Ballot or not um I think for the political future of the United States it's probably not healthy that the leading opposition candidate is now going to be barred from the ballot it's probably not healthy for us um because because then what you want talk about threats to democracy that would be a pretty serious one applied across the board by it would be however like that threat to democracy was earned by Donald Trump and the conservatives that supported him I think conservatives made a dangerous gamble when they threw Trump into office and now like all of the Fallout from that is is something that we all As Americans have to deal with I mean I I I think that the the unprecedented legal theory that a state can simply Bor somebody from the ballot on the basis of in an informal way believing that he is quote unquote an insurrectionist uh is is pretty wild I mean that's that that say pretty well but there is an amendment in the Constitution the 14th amendment that says that if they have engaged in this they shall not be or you shall I don't remember the phrasing because it doesn't require conviction but it's a self-executing arguably thing we're getting into constitutional law I mean there there there are a number of Provisions that that suggest that this is number one not self-executing the minority opinions in the in the Colorado Supreme Court case are are pretty thorough uh the the number one contention which is that this is not self-executing uh because other elements are not self-executing uh that ignores subsequent actual law that that happened I mean the Congress passed a law for example in 1872 defining who was an insurrectionist who is not an insurrectionist for perses of elections in 1994 Congress passed a law that specifically defined insurrectionist criminal activity so that somebody could theoretically be convicted of insurrection and therefore ineligible to run for office it is unlike say the the the analogues that are used by the majority opinion like age obviously this is not the same thing we can all tell what somebody's age is by looking at the birth certificate I can't tell whether somebody's an insurrectionist without any reference to a legal statute or definition of the term I would also say be careful with that because remember one of Trump's first like big political actions was challenging Obama's birth certificate well and and I thought that was dumb at the time but in any Cas I like that you both said 100% chance that Trump will try to go for third term and 0% chance which statis third term he's done man are you kidding he would want to Trump's going to walk around hands up high and be like I'm a two-term president I'm the only President since Grover Cleveland he would know but but since Grover Cleveland who served two non-consecutive terms I kicked Joe Biden out of office and I kicked Hillary Clinton out of off dude would be like he'd be living large are you kidding he doesn't want the presidency anymore after that I just think that the I think it's scary that like Donald Trump it feels like for all of the accusations that are made sometimes against Democrats like Biden is ordering uh Garland to investigate Donald Trump and blah blah blah uh it seems like Donald Trump would actually do that with his doj would give them order he didn't he didn't he kind of did though right um so for instance with um Jeffrey Clark Jeffrey Clark went to Rosen and Donahue and said Hey listen uh I need you guys to sign off on a letter that we're going to use essentially to bully States into overturning their elections by saying we found significant election fraud and part of that threat was Jeffrey Clark saying listen if you're not going to do it Rosen uh you know Trump's going to fire you and just make me the acting attorney general that was a threat that he carried and I think Trump repeated that threat in a meeting later on that was I only rebuked when I think like half the White House staff said if you do this were resid okay so that's a slightly different topic because now you're getting into all the election Shenanigans and all this but I'm saying he threatened to fire his acting attorney general if he wouldn't carry the same platform essentially like if Trump could order his doj to do something would he um it's not Beyond The Pale for him right it's not Beyond The Pale for him to order them to do it and then it's not Beyond The Pale for them to reject him doing that which is the story of his entire Administration whereas Joe Biden orders his doj to do things and then they just do them well I'm not we can get into specific there um I I just I it one of the big problems that I have with I mean for example all the talk about Trump Tyrant Trump executive power I mean Joe Biden has used executive power in ways that far outrip president has been stretching and stretching and stretching executive power Jo Joe Biden is going like Joe Biden has gone well beyond anything Trump even remotely attempted to maintain via just pure executive power and actually Trump's use of executive power is nowhere near even what Obama's was in ability to get border policy passed literally had him using executive power to to March the military down to the border to do border policy I I mean I mean Joe Biden literally used the occupational safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down vax mandates on 80 million Americans that's insane he literally said I cannot relieve student loan debt and then tried to relieve hundreds of billions of dollars in stud what happened to that it got struck down by the Supreme Court and then they still did it they still did it Biden brags about it for what he for what he was able to for what he was able to relieve which I think were related to particular type student loan debt but I'm just saying that like well the guard rails are holding with Biden as much as they're holding with Trump the only difference is is that once Biden you know exhausts his executive power he's not running around like lying to people or trying to extort people or trying to and concoct insane schemes well I mean so here here's the way I would think of this think of the guard rails holding as the filter sure okay meaning like the the coffee is in the filter some of it's you know what what you want is going to get through and all the stuff the guard rails prevent the other stuff from getting through now the question becomes what liquid are you pouring into the filter okay meaning so if I if I'm if if the filter exists if the guard rails hold and if Donald Trump can't steal elections what's the policy that comes through the other end of the filter the policy I get from Donald Trump on the other end of the filter is a bunch of stuff that I like the policy that I get from Joe Biden on the other end of the filter is a bunch of bullshit I don't so that's the basic calculation okay so so then the idea is essentially that Donald Trump's rhetoric is insane but we don't care um Donald Trump would probably try to steal an election if he could but he probably won't be able to um he's not goingon to do it again I told you he's not you don't you don't think has any why not because he won't be eligible to be on the ballot in I mean by the way you want to talk about 14th Amendment M that's where the 14th amendment applies okay that that's where it actually applies meaning you cannot he is not qualified to be on the ballot in 2028 if he is the president of the United States states can literally in self-executing fashion take him off the ballot just like he's past the age of 35 once you have been president two times you're no longer eligible to be president of the United States why then you to have a strong keep off the B why the why would the 14th Amendment stop if he thought vice president Pence could unilaterally decide the outcome of the election that when he's not on the ballot so so now now your theory is that he's going to get he's going to get reelected and then in 2028 he's not even going to be on the ballot and he's going to direct his new vice president K Lake to Simply declare him president of the United States when he has not been on a ballot I don't know what the I don't know what the scheme would be I think we can kind of like laugh and say there's no scheme we could even concoct but I think like with the machine gun he's going to walk I think I think the issue though is that like the idea of electing another president that has tried to circumvent the peaceful transfer of power using extra legal means and then pretending like we can't concoct a single scheme he could try to circumvent um other legal processes to have a third term or to have a longer term or to uh install who he wants as the next president I just when a when a person has already shown you who they are and with every single person around him agrees with that when every single person that's worked with him save for the what Sydney pal uh Eastman and Giuliani which I don't think even I don't think anybody would want to throw their lot in with those three um it just seems wild to me that we would say like yeah we're just going to go ahead and trust this guy with another ter of president but like he can't run for a third term so it's fine when there's like 50 million other things make you the case that if you want him not to make election trouble you should elect him president in the next election cycle and then he will be ineligible that okay well I that be a wholly unconvincing argument but okay well recently in the news the presidents of Harvard pen and MIT fail to fully denounce calls for genocide and that Rose questions about the influence of Dei programs at universities and so maybe either looking at this or zooming out more broadly at identity politics at universities or identity politics wokeism at in our culture how big of a threat is it to our culture to Western civilization so obviously st's a huge threat um the reason that I think this a huge threat I want to give a definition of wokeism because people are very often accused of not using wokeism properly or believing that it's sort of a catch-all phrase I don't think it's a catch-all term uh I think that wokeism has its root in postmodernism which essentially suggests that every principle is a reflection of underlying structures of power and that therefore any inequality that emerges under such a system is a reflection again of that structure of power that used to be applied in sort of marxist ways the suggestion being that economic inequality was the result of misallocation of power in the structure preserved by a an upper crust of people who wanted to cram down exploitation on people that was sort of the Marxist version of postmodernism and then got transmuted into sort of a racial version of postmodernism in which the systems of the United States are white supremacist in orientation uh and are perpetuated by a group of people who are in fact in favor of the preservation of white power and white supremacy that is the generalized theory of critical race Theory uh as proposed by for example jeene stanic and Richard Delgado in their book on critical race theory that has taken a softer form that we referred to as Dei the key in Dei is the e meaning Equity so Equity is a term that does not mean equality people mix it up equality is the idea that we all ought to have equal rights that we all ought to be treated equally by the law Equity is the idea that if there is an inequality that emerges from any system it is therefore due to discrimination and the best way to tell whether somebody has been victimized is by Dent of their race and we can tell whether you're a member of an oppressed group or an oppressor Group by the intersectional identity that you carry and by the nature of your group success or failure predominantly along economic and power lines in American life this means that if one group is predominantly successful economically they must be a member of the victimizing class and the only corrective for that would be as I X Kennedy likes to suggest uh effectively anti-racist policy is racism in the service of destroying racism uh that you're going to have to that you're going to have to you know discriminate on the basis of race in order to correct for discrimination that's baked into the system that's incredibly dangerous it leads to a victim victimizer narrative that is unhealthy for individuals and terrible for societies it relieves people of individual responsibility and it destroys the very notion of an objective metric by which we can decide meritocracy and meritocracy is the only system human beings have ever devised that has positive externalities in literally any area of life every other distribution of wealth power done along other lines that is not having to do with Merit has negative externalities every system having to do with Merit has positive externalities because presumably the most effective and useful people are going to succeed under those systems that's the very basis of a meritocracy and the externalities of that mean that other people benefit from the meritorious and excellent performance of those people maybe it would be good to get your comments your old stomping gr Harvard do you think the president of Harvard should have been fired I mean I think she should have been fired not over the plagiarism allegations I think she should have been fired based on her performance just at that Congressional hearing uh if if the word black had been substituted for Jew in in in that statement by Elise stanic that she was asking about or trans or or literally any other any other minority in America maybe with the exception of Asian uh then the answer would have been very different coming from Cloudy and gay you know with that said I don't think the firing of cloud and gay really accomplishes very much meaning I'm I'm did she get what she deserved sure does that mean that the underlying Dei Equity based system has been in any way severely damaged no I think that this is a way for universities this Truth for mcil pen also to basically throw somebody overboard as the as the sacrifice to to maintain the underlying system that that continues to predominate at American universities where they spend literally billions of dollars every year on Dei initiatives and diversity hires and diversity administrators and and all of this I mean one of the cost of Education escalating is in the massive administrative function that that is now undertaken by universities as opposed to tjing and and you know cost of dorms and such you guys probably agree on a lot of this right kind of maybe yeah um I I don't know I don't know what makes things do this but it feels like we can never like have a good thing and then have it end as a good thing uh things always get taken to their uh extreme and then we have to fight on those extremes like I would argue that back in my day we called it sjw social justice Warriors before it became woke um like 2013 onwards whatever like there are aspects to wokeism that I think are good like I like the additional representation that we have in media now I like how as much as people complain about the internet and how it's regulated that there are way more groups that are represented on the internet whether we're talking uh X the platform for formerly known as Twitter or Facebook or whatever um I think in some ways or whether we're pushing uh you know like women's achievements in school and in in um in the wider Workforce I think that these are all good things the issue that you run into is people don't ever have a stopping point and I think people kind of get lost in this woke for woke sake thing where we start to see these very weird warpings of these like academic I guess arguments that are used for really horrible things uh so for instance I think that you can talk talk about in the United States things like white supremacy or uh things like um oppression of certain demographics especially with like Jim Crow laws and pre- Jim Crow and you can even talk about effects from that but then when you run into this weird world where we've kind of warped these things so that like not only is white supremacy still as present today as it ever has been well actually uh black people in other minorities can't even be racist they don't have the power to because we're going to use a different definition of racism and we can only talk about punching up as opposed to punching down uh and and we're actually going to say it's totally okay for these people to say or do whatever they want and it's never bad but like white people who have always been oppressors even if you're like a trailer park guy whose family is addicted to meth you know you have all this privilege etc etc I think that you run into these issues where wokeism it starts off as like a really good idea and I would argue has achieved really good things especially in regards to like women's education everything and then it just gets so academ so there's a word there academic whatever where you take something and you put it into school too much and then it comes out as some Frankenstein you know cancer baby of like horrible things such that today when I'm reading stuff and I know Ben is the same way like if I even hear somebody say the word like anti-racism I'm probably ignoring every other thing you have to say uh if you utter the word like Colonial anything I'm probably going to say you probably don't have anything uh good to say um yeah a lot of it has just taken way too far but you know what I will blame on some of this is I will blame conservatives for some of this because I think one issue that happens and I think Ben might even agree with me here too is I think there there's two huge problems that have happened in the United States I think broadly speaking is that one we've become more different than we ever have been and two we become more similar than we ever have been and when I say this what I is it like we're splitting off into these groups and then these groups are enforcing this insane homogeneity between these two separate groups and I think one of these schisms has been conservatives reluctancy to participate in things related to higher uh education uh so for a long time conservatives are saying like oh you know the educational institutions are against us you know Russ lb talks about how evil the colleges are and blah blah blah and then what happens is is conservatives are less and less willing to engage in them so then you get this scenario or this environment where everybody that's engaged in uh Academia on the administrative side are are fucking insane they're like even more so to and I also want to draw a distinction between like the the administrators and the faculty because often times when you're reading story after story after Story of like all of these insane admins that are pushing further and further left usually The Faculty is fighting against it a lot of the 10e professors a lot of people in their departments are saying like hold on well we actually don't agree with this but I feel like because conservatives for so long have demonized these institutions rather than like critically evaluated them uh and and tried to like have like honest critique and engag that they've just like completely broken off and when you only have a bunch of lefties or righties together all they'll do is they ve off like even more into their insane directions uh I feel like that's a big problem that we run into in the country to where conservatives have totally broken off some conversations broken away from where they won't participate in them anymore and then the people that you have left just run as as far to the left as possible certainly when you look at certain institutions I think that one of the things that people on both sides of the aisle are constantly looking at is has the institution suffered such capture that there is just no capacity to fix it and when you talk about the universities I'm not going to blame conservatives for the failure of the universities because they haven't been present in major positions at universities since effectively the late 1960s you can go read Shelby Steel's work on this where he talks about how you know he used to be he's now a conservative black person he was a liberal black person at the time he was actually quite a radical black activist at the time in the 60s and he he talks about walking into the office of liberal administrators who are largely on his side with regard to civil rights and being radical him claiming that the systems of the University were inherently broken were inherently wrong unfixable and he talks about this very it's a very evocative episode where he's talking about how he's smoking and as he's smoking the ash is growing more and more and the ash falls down on this very expensive carpet and the president of the University who's listening to him rant and Rave he he said Shelby steel says I thought he was going to say something about this I mean I was wrecking like a thousand carpet in his office being a jackass and instead I could see him Wilt inside I could see him collapse he didn't have the institutional credibility or the intelle or or sort of the spiritual strength to just say listen I agree with you on some of these things but you're acting like a jackass and what you see in the late 1960s and early 1970s is in fact the collapse of these institutions to the point where by the time I was going to college there was this radical disproportion between conservatives and liberals and the problem is that when it comes to a system like the universities basically you have to separate the universities off into two separate categories one is stem where the universities are still pretty damn good American universities when it comes to stem are still leading universities in the world Harvard's main Creations these days are coming from actual hard science Fields then you have the liberal arts field in which you basically have a self-perpetuating elite because that's actually how dissertations work if you have somebody who's very far to the left and you decide that you're going to write a dissertation on the history of American gun rights the chances that that is going to be approved by your dissertation adviser are much lower than if you happen to write something that tends to agree with the political positions of your dissertation adviser now listen I think there are open and tolerant professors even in the liberal arts at these universities I went to these universities I went to UCLA went to Harvard Law School when I was at Harvard Law School one of my favorite professors was lonni guier Lonnie guier they tried to appoint her I believe Secretary of Labor under Clinton and she was too liberal and she got rejected so she was like a full-on communist by the time I went there she was great we had debates every day it was wonderful she used to write me recommendations for my my legal jobs after we left Randle Kennedy I don't agree with him very much Randle Kennedy was terrific Professor there are some professors who are like this unfortunately there tends to be in these Echo Chambers more and more ideological Conformity that is rigorously enforced and it is by left on left so for example when I was at Harvard Law School the president of the University was another president who ended up being AED Larry Summers Larry Summers had been the Secretary of Treasury under Bill Clinton and he made the critical error of suggesting that perhaps the dir of women in hard Sciences in prestigious positions was due to possibly two factors that people were refusing to talk about one was the possibility that women actually didn't want to be in hard Sciences it nearly the rates that men do which happens to be true and two was the distribution of stem IQ right which is something that you certainly were not allowed to talk about the idea that that the men's bell curve when it comes to IQ particularly on stem subjects tends to be shallower than the women's bell curves when you get to the very end of the bell curve what you tend to see is a lot of really dumb guys and a lot of really smart guys and so when you're talking about the top universities maybe that has something to do with the disproportion and he's trying to explain that to say that our systems are not discriminating if we end up with more men than women maybe more men are applying and more men are qualified that's that's quite he was ousted for that by a left-wing faculty and and you know General Alum Network at at Harvard University so there's a lot to blame conservatives for for surrendering the playing field I totally agree that conservatives should not have surrendered the playing field in some institutions colleges were surrendered a lot earlier than 20 years ago they were surrendered in the late 1960s early 1970s yeah so I think that um a couple things so uh one of the big issues that I have with kind of like this uh I don't know if we call it error of trumpism or populism is this total disregard for institutions and this disconnect from participation in the system so it's one of the big things that I F with progressives about who who cares cuz they're all 20 years old they don't vote anyway um but it's another thing that I Noti with a lot of people that are uh Trump voters Trump fans or whatever is this idea where we say this institution is uh irrevocably destroyed it it's irredeemable it can't be saved it can't nothing that we do can can fix it um and I think that what that leads people to doing is one they disconnect further and then two there's a general hopelessness when it comes to how Society is like ran or structured such that you fall into that populous brain rot of the only person that can save me is Donald Trump I can't trust literally anything and I think that when you start driving people into that direction all it does is it further amplifies all the problems that you're complaining about so that's one of the reasons why when we talk about like conservative participation I want there to be more conservatives that are trying to participate in Academia but I feel like the leading thought or the leading speaking out against it is basically saying it's a waste of time it's completely lost so I I think that the alternative to that is that the you are seeing on the right a growth of for example alternative universities saying the worst thing no I I I don't think so at all I think competition is a great way of incentivizing some change on behalf of universities that may have forgotten that there's an entire another side of the aisle in the United States no no shot I don't believe even I don't think even you think that so first of all first of all let me make clear I think the entire educational system at the upper levels if you're not in stem is a complete scam I think it's a complete waste of money I think it's a complete waste of time and I think that it's all all it is is a formalized very expensive sorting mechanism for people of IQ that's all it is people take an SAT you go to a good school you take four years of bullshit I know I did it UCLA and then we analyze based on your degree where you should go to law school I could have gone directly from high school to law school with maybe one year of training and then done one year of law school and been done okay the reality is that this is a giant scam and this again is a bipartisan problem but it's just a generalized problem the we we have and you want to talk about things that hurt the lower classes in the United States the bleeding of degrees up is so wild and crazy there's so many jobs in the United States that should not require a college degree that we now require a college degree to do because there was this weird idea that came over Americans where they mistook correlation for causation they would say oh look people who go to college are making more money than people who don't go to college therefore everyone should go to college well maybe the reason is because people who are going to college were better qualified for particular jobs because on average not all the time but on average a lot of those people were smarter and making more money because of that and so all you've done is you've now created these additional layers of stratification so a person who used to be able to get a job with a college degree now has to have a postdoc degree in order to go get that degree a person who used to be able to just graduate high school now it's the facto you got to go to Juco and then you got to go to college or nobody's going to look at your resume it's really really terrible for people who can't afford all of that it's led to this massive increase in educational cost that is inexplicable other than this particular sort of bleed up and by the way Federal subsidies for higher education again one of my problems with Federal subsidies for higher education I'd love for everyone to be able to go to college if qualified to do so and if it is productive but one of the things I did when I went to law school is I took loans because a bank said I was going to get my money back if I got a law degree from Harvard but you know when you're not going to get your money back if you're a bank you're not going to lend to some dude who wants to major in you know art Theory because is that good bet there's no collateral right if I give a loan for a house I can go repossess the house how do I repossess your garbage college degree from UCLA there's no way to do that so you know one one of my so yeah this is the broader conversation about education in general I think the educational system is cruising for a bruising and I think all that's necessary for it to completely collapse on the non- stem side where you actually learn things is for people who employ to Simply say give me your SAT score and I will hire you for an apprenticeship directly out of high school that it would cut out so much of the middleman but as far as the general point that you're making about institutions I I may disagree on the education and how far it's gone in general I agree with you so it's in in general I agree and I get to use my my favorite longest word in the English language here I I would consider myself in many cases an anti-is establishmentarian right see I like to drop that that's because if you're an establishmentarian that means you like establishmentarian I'm anti can you say that word that's the one we all learned growing up anti- dis establishment teris long group say what about super Calif fragile let and then you what about new ultra microscopic or the science terms or what about the 7,000 letter thing that's from part of uh biocham I got my education the Soviet Union so we just did math didn't Lear any of this that's why you're a useful person sovet Union math was that 1 plus one how to make that equal three we know long words and he scams on the internet and and I talk for a so anyway the but the the point is that I don't disagree that there is a general populace tendency on all sides of the aisle to look at the institutions and then throw them overboard I think that some of that is earned by people who are in positions of power at institutions who have completely undermined the faith and credibility of those institutions I think you have to examine institution by institutions which ones are salvageable and which ones are not so I'm not a a full anti- disestablishmentarianism I'd be partially in that camp there are certain institutions like higher education in the liberal arts that I think we may be better off without and then there are certain institutions like say participation American government where when people talk about we need a revolution like no we don't that's not a thing we need an evolution we need change we we can use the system and you know but I think you have to estab you have to look at it industry by industry you know just institution by institution on that position on institutions do you think Biden or Trump would side would you more uh as far as the institutions yeah I think the institutions in the United States of the governmental level are robust I think the social institutions are fair yeah but I'm just curious on your general view of Institutions do you think Biden or Trump would saage you more on how you view them um I mean I think that in rhetoric Biden would and then I think that he would tear out the face of the institution and wear it around like a Mas like cannibal Lector I mean he resisted some people's calls to like pack the court and uh yes because I think that his use of executive power was greater than that of Donald Trump the power that he had he used to Greater effect than Donald Trump Donald Trump again thrashed up against the sides of the box but could not get out of it okay um for just on real quick because on the that that answer went a lot further than the initial question but yeah just on the real quick thing the reason why I again my main problem that I feel like we have today in society is people are getting into their own bubbles the idea of having like conservative schools and liberal schools seems like the saddest thing in the world to me like I would want conservatives and liberals going to school together because I think these people need to interact with each other more if for no other reason than to say that the other person is not like an actual monstrous horrible entity that wants to destroy the country listen I think a classically liberal idea for many schools would not be a bad thing I think it would be a good thing I just wonder if that's salvageable and if it's not salvageable then the answer to that is to actually create alter in I feel like I feel like the biggest issue that we have is people are they sort into these different like Phantom worlds to where even if you live in the same city there are totally different worlds that exist between liberals and conservatives and I feel like one of the barriers to people understanding the other side sometimes it's just a little bit of information or a little bit of like firsthand experience um when I so in terms of information I'm sure you saw um I don't I don't know if this is a full-on study but they were talking about how some huge percentage of students would change their mind on from The River To The Sea when you told them what from the riv what the river was and what the sea was yeah or when you said like yeah what does a one state solution mean a lot of them like such that the numbers went from like 70% to like 30% in terms of like support um would fall and it wasn't because you were doing a radical redefining of their whole ideology you just giving them a little bit more information um and then something that I've seen on a firstand level is when I go and speak or do debates at University sometimes I'm in very very very conservative areas some of my fans are are trans having like a trans person show up and talk to conservatives for a little bit uh not like in a speech but just like in a in like a bar or a setting like a lot of them walk away they like oh not every trans person is like this insane lunatic from Twitter that is fucking an actual crazy person and then for some of my fans when they hang out with conservatives like oh these guys are actually pretty friendly I thought they would have all been homophobic racist transphobic and evil but they're not they're just like normal people I feel like we need more of that I totally agree with that certainly yeah and I feel like on our social media platforms on our algorithms and our schools I feel like we're sorting harder and harder and harder and any type of rhetoric that encourages the Sorting is really bad and damaging we need to like continue to mix up and there's other things I want to talk about is opening his mouth Destiny the uniter wow all right bid as weo not like Trump as we approach the end let us descend into the meme further and further uh Ben you're in a monogamous marriage uh and Destiny you've been mostly in an open marriage until recently how foundational is marriage monogamous marriage to to the United States of America can open marriages work are they harmful to society um Ben marriages are the single most important thing that people can do in the United States because the things within your control are easier to control than the things outside your control people tend to think about big political change obviously about things they can do to change the entire system but the reality is the thing that you can do that best to change your Society is to get married and have kids and raise your kids responsibly that is the single best thing that you can do can an open marriage work I mean I think that it depends on your definition of work so in my version of work the answer is no because what you actually need in order to facilitate the healthy growing of a child it's a father and mother who are committed to each other all idea all ideas about there being no emotional component to sexual activity are completely specious uh that it is trer for men than it is for women but it's not true for either uh the the idea of a full a full commitment to a human being with whom you genetically create children which is typically how we've done it throughout human existence uh is in fact the fundamental basis for any functional civilization it allows for the transmission of culture and values it allows for the transmission of beliefs and responsibility and it is it gives the great lie to both the communitarian lie and the and the atomistic individualist LIE the communitarian LIE is that you belong to the giant community of man which is not true because you have a family uh and your Allegiance should be and is naturally to the members of your family first that how we learn and then we expound that out uh and it also is a lie to the notion that we all atomistic individuals with no responsibilities we are born into a world of responsibilities everyone is born into a world of responsibilities and rules and roles and those are good and if we do not actually socialize our children that way there will be number one no children number one there will be no healthy CH number two there will be no healthy children number three there will be not the foundation for either social fabric which is the real glue that holds together Society or for a functional government so you yes yes monogamous marriage I'm a fan 15 years married four kids yes Destiny what do you think um I think that when we talk about like relationships or marriage I think something that's really important is we have to talk about whether or not children are being discussed or not um because I think once you introduce the child aspect I think the style or the type of relationship that you do is going to become way more important than whatever exists prior to that um like I would agree for instance for in terms of what Ben is saying that um there's probably going to be some structure that is ideal for the care and the raising of a child um I think that having a child gives you a much bigger Buy in to society because now all of a sudden you care about a lot of things that you might not have before because not only do you exist in society you can't just run uh now you've got a child that exists there and you've got to ensure that everything functions smoothly not just for you but for that child as well um and arguably although we're getting into weird places I guess in the world now like children are the primary conduit through for like where you transmit like cultural values and everything um the one kind of weird thing that we're coming up against that we have been coming up up against um now for for some number of decades and we'll continue to is as societies progress seems like people are having less children and I actually don't know 100% what the answer is to that question um I'm sure you do yeah I mean an implementable answer that works that we know we can get everybody on board with um it seems like for a large part of human history um having children and it still is having children is awesome and children are cool and children are magical and miraculous and all of this but you didn't really have much competing for your attention to have a child right when you hit a certain age and you started working um especially if you a woman I mean child birth is kind of the next step and then having a family raising your children and then doing that is kind of The Next Step nowadays especially with women being able to work especially with women having access to birth control there's a lot available in the world that's competing for the interest of people that could otherwise be having children such that we've almost flipped it such that has been brought up earlier like wealthy people tend to have less children than not wealthy people um or unless you're part of particular religious communities that push child birth a lot I don't know if I would say there exist a a moral imperative on an individual to have children I think that there's a lot of interesting arguments down that path I don't know if we're quite at the point yet where we need to say like oh my God we're running out of people we need to have more kids um I don't think we're quite there yet but we are seeing you know weird demographic trends that are having big impacts on how countries are playing out for instance the fact that we have a disproportionately huge aging population that needs to be taken care of with medical expenses and everything that vote in different ways than our younger population and that when they die off like the way that Society is going to look is going to be a lot different um yeah I I don't I don't actually have a I'm not entirely sure what the future's going to look like in terms of pushing people to have kids when every single industrialized country as they become more industrialized have fewer and fewer and fewer children rapid fire questions by the answer my my answer was go to church religion yeah yeah well we could talk about religion but that's not rapid fire at all let me ask uh this is from the internet does body comp matter Jesus Christ you're really bringing up the red pill stuff are you avoiding answering I mean it's totally it depends on who you are if you're somebody that doesn't care about it it doesn't if you're somebody that does care about it yeah it does of course depends on the the answer is yes okay should porn be banned no if you could do it yes there is no there is no benefit to pornography a waste of time and destructive to the human soul I can't believe I'm asking this question is only fans empowering or destructive for women I Jesus these are rapid fire yeah just you I mean it's probably empowering for the ones that are making a lot of money off it it probably feels disempowering for others that feel affected by the cultural norms set by women that do only fans there's my rapid fire answer it's it's it's destructive to even the ones who are making a lot of money because when you degrade yourself to being just a set of human body characteristics that other people jack off to it's bad for you and it's bad for them yeah is uh rap music absolutely you evolved on this or uh have I evolved on this um so again I'm going to go to what's the definition of music my original argument about rap was that music involves the following three elements Rhythm Melody Harmony rap typically involves maybe one of those uh there there may maybe a Melody maybe sometimes um so it depends on the kind of rap uh with that said I I could be convinced on this issue but listen I'm I'm a classical violinist I mean that's how I was raised I I listen to Beethoven and brahs and& Mozart like in the car with my kids so is it comparable is in the same category as beov brahs and moart I have a very hard time sticking in the same category as that all right you're uh both worldclass Debaters um even public in intellectuals if I can say that Jesus real hard here I know uh you both care about the truth what is your process of arriving at the truth uh I think it's really important to everybody will say that they're objective and that they are nonpartisan I think it's really important to have mental safeguards for bad opinions um so for instance like a couple things that I'll ask myself is for a particular debate that I'm having like can I argue convincingly both sides of the debate if I can't I won't bother having the debate because I realize that I'm probably too partisan dug in if I can't even represent like an opposite argument here um another question that you might ask yourself is like well what would it take to convince you out of a certain position um if you know if you feel very strongly that uh you know Medicare for all is a good you know system by which to run the United States Healthcare and somebody says well what would it take you to convince you otherwise if you can't even fathom like what would it take you to convince me otherwise you're probably too dug into a position so I think if you go through life saying like well I try my best to be unbiased rather than saying I try to best my best to be aware of my biases because the latter is more realistic in the former is literally impossible unless you're a computer uh yeah so I think having like actual mental practices that you engage in to try to counter some of the biases that you have is more important than trying to pretend that you're free of all biases and then consuming all your media from One Source yeah Ben uh so I mean I agree with a lot of that I I think that the easiest practical guide is read a bunch of different things from a bunch of different sources and where they cross is probably the set of fact and then everything else is extrapolated opinion from different premises that that's the that that's sort of the short story so read read the New York Times and Breitbart and they're going to disagree on a lot but if the core of the story and the daily wire certainly read the daily wire if you read the daily wire and you read The Washington Post and there's a and there's a Nexus of the same thing then you can pretty well guarantee that at least you know if if it's if we're all Blind Men feeling the Elephant at least if we're all feeling the trunk we know that there's a trunk there right you may not know what the elephant is and if you're feeling frisky then watch Destiny as well um thanks you've talked about you know having a conversation debating Ben for a long time what is your favorite thing about Ben Shapiro my favorite thing about Ben chapiro is at least when we're in election season he's very critical of his own party I appreciate that um um that doesn't I feel like Ben generally tries to adhere more to the fact-based arguments than other conservatives that I listen to which is something that I appreciate because it's more fun to fight on kind of like the factual grounds of discussing things like foreign policy or whatever rather than people that only inhabit the idealistic or philosophical grounds because they don't want to learn about any of the facts so I appreciate that Ben you've gotten a chance to talk to Destiny now what what do you like about the guy a lot of the same sorts of things but it's really fun to see how you do your process that is a cool thing that is a cool thing it's a gift to the AUD a because honestly doing what we do so much of what we do is sitting and reading and being behind closed doors and educating yourself and talking with people but getting to watch you do it in real time is is a really cool window into how people think and how people learn so that's a really neat thing well gentlemen this was incredible it's an honor thank you for doing this today he thanks a lot thanks for having me thanks for listening to this debate between Ben Shapiro and Destiny to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Aristotle the basis of a democratic state is Liberty thank you for listening and hope to see you next time