Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #336
- The great lie we tell ourselves, is that people who are evil are not like us. They're a class apart. Everybody in history who
has sinned is a person who's very different from me. Robert George, the
philosopher over at Princeton, he's fond of doing sort
of thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hand
if they had lived in Alabama in 1861, "How many of you
would be abolitionists?" And everybody raises
their hand and he says, "Of course that's not true. "Of course, that's not true." The best protection against
evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over. - Do you ever sit back, in the quiet of your mind and think, Am I participating in evil? The following is a
conversation with Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, host of the Ben Shapiro Show, co-founder of The Daily Wire, and author of several books, including The Authoritarian Moment, The Right Side of History, and Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings. Whatever your political leanings, I humbly ask that you try to
put those aside and listen with an open mind, trying to give the most
charitable interpretation of the words we say. This is true in general for this podcast. Whether the guest is Ben Shapiro or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump or Barack Obama. I will talk to everyone from every side, from the far left to the far right, from presidents to prisoners,
from artists to scientists, from the powerful to the powerless. Because we are all human,
all capable of good and evil, all with fascinating stories
and ideas to explore. I seek only to understand,
and in so doing, hopefully add a bit of love to the world. This is Lex Fridman
Podcast, to support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro. Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think about
the comments made by Ye, formerly known as Kanye
West, about Jewish people? - They're awful and antisemitic, and they seem to get worse over time. They started off with the
bizarre death con 3 tweet, and then they went into even
more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being
sexual manipulators. I think that was the Pete
Davidson, Kim Kardashian stuff. And then, Jews running all of the media, Jews being in charge of the
financial sector, Jewish people. I mean, there's no, I mean, I called it on my show,
there's Sherman Nazism, and it is, it's like right from Protocols of the
Elders of Zion type stuff. - Do you think those words come from pain, where do they come from? - It's always hard to try
and read somebody's mind, what he looks like, to me, just having
experience in my own family with people who are bipolar is, he seems like a bipolar personality. He seems like somebody
who is in the middle of a manic episode. And when you're manic you
tend to say a lot of things that you shouldn't say, and you tend to believe that
they're the most brilliant things ever said. The Washington Post, did an entire piece speculating about how bipolarism played into the kind of stuff that Ye was saying. And it's hard for me to think
that it's not playing into it, especially because even
if he is an anti-Semite, and I have no reason to suspect he's not, given all of his comments. If he had an ounce of common sense, he would stop at a certain point. And bipolarism tends
to drive you well past the point where common sense applies. So, I would imagine it's coming from that. From his comments, I would also imagine that he's
doing the logical mistake, that a lot of anti-Semites
or racist or bigots do; which is somebody hurt
me, that person is a Jew, therefore all Jews are bad. And,cthat jump from a
person did something to me, I don't like, who's a member of a
particular race or class, and therefore everybody of
that race or class is bad. That's textbook bigotry and that's pretty obviously
what Ye's engaging in here. - So jumping from the
individual to the group. That's the way he's been
expressing it, right. He keeps talking about his Jewish agents, and I watched your interview
with him and you kept saying, "So just name the agents." Just name the people who
are, who are screwing you. And he wouldn't do it. Instead, he just kept
going back to the general, the group, the Jews in general. I mean, that's textbook bigotry. And, if we're putting any other context, he would probably recognize it as such. - To the degree is worth
fuel hate in the world. What's the way to reverse that process? What's the way to alleviate the hate? - I mean, when it comes to
alleviating the kind of stuff that he's saying, obviously debunking it. Making clear that what
he's saying is garbage. But, the reality is that I
think that for most people who are in any way
engaged with these issues, I don't think they're being convinced to be antisemitic by Ye. I think that there's a group
of people who may be swayed that antisemitism is acceptable because Ye is saying what he's saying, and he's saying so very loudly, and he's saying it over and over. But yeah, I think that for example, there were these signs that
were popping up in Los Angeles saying, Ye is right. Well, that group's been out
there posting antisemitic signs on the freeways for years. And, there are groups like that posting antisemitic signs
where I live in Florida. They've been doing that for years. Well before YA was saying
this sort of stuff, it's just like latest opportunity to kind of jump on on
that particular bandwagon. But listen, I think that
people do have a moral duty to call that stuff out. - So there is a degree
to which it normalizes that kind of idea that
Jews control the media, Jews control X institution. Is there a way to talk about a high representation of
a group like Jewish people in a certain institution like the media or Hollywood and so on, without it being a hateful conversation? - Sure, of course. A high percentage of, higher
than statistically represented, in the population, percentage of Hollywood
agents are probably Jewish. A higher percentage of lawyers generally are probably Jewish. A high percentage of
accountants are probably Jewish. Also, a higher percentage of of engineers are probably Asian. Statistical truths are statistical truths. It doesn't necessarily mean
anything about the nature of the people who are being talked about. They're a myriad of reasons why people might be disproportionately in one arena or another; ranging from the cultural
to sometimes the genetic. There are certain areas of the world where people are better
long distance runners because of their genetic adaptations in those particular areas of the world. That's not racist. That's just fact. What starts to get racist is when you are attributing
a bad characteristic to an entire population
based on the notion that some members of that population are doing bad things. - Yeah, there's a jump between. It's also possible that
record label owners as a group have a kind of
culture that F's over artists. - Sure. - Doesn't treat artists fairly. And, it's also possible that
there's a high representation of Jews in the group of
people that own record labels, But, it's that small, but a very big leap that
people take from the group that own record labels to all Jews. - For sure. I think that one of the
other issues also is that antisemitism is fascinating because it breaks down into
so many different parts. Meaning that, if you look
at sort of different types of antisemitism, if you're a
racist against black people, it's typically because you're
racist based on the color of their skin. If you're racist, against
the Jews, you're antisemitic. Then, there are actually
a few different ways that breaks down, right. You have antisemitism
in terms of ethnicity; which is like Nazi-esk antisemitism. You have Jewish parentage,
you have a Jewish grandparent, therefore you are, your blood is corrupt and you are inherently going
to have bad properties. Then, there's sort of old
school religious antisemitism; which is that the Jews
are the killers of Christ, or the Jews are the sons
of pigs and monkeys, and therefore Judaism is bad
and therefore Jews are bad. And, the way that you get
out of that antisemitism historically speaking is mass conversion; which most antisemitism for a
couple thousand years actually was not ethnic, it was much more rooted in
this sort of stuff, right. If a Jew converted out of the faith, then the antisemitism was
quote unquote alleviated. And then, there's a sort
of bizarre antisemitism that's political antisemitism, and that is members of a
group that I don't like are disproportionately Jewish. Therefore all Jews are
members of this group or are predominantly
represented in this group. So, you'll see Nazis saying
the communists are Jews. You'll see communist
saying the Nazis are Jews, or you'll see communist
saying that the capitalists rather are Jews. And, so that's the weird
thing about antisemitism. It's kind of like the
Jews behind every corner. It's basically a big conspiracy theory. Unlike a lot of other forms of racism; which are not really conspiracy theory, antisemitism tends to
be a conspiracy theory about the levers of power being controlled by a
shadowy cadre of people who are getting together
behind closed doors to control things. - Yeah, the most absurd
illustration of antisemitism, just like you said, is Stalin
versus Hitler over Poland. That every bad guy was a Jew, right. It was like, every enemy, there's a lot of different
enemy groups, intellectuals, political and so on. Military, and behind any
movement that is considered the enemy for the Nazis, and any movement that's
considered the enemy for the Soviet army are the Jews. What is the fact that Hitler took power teach you about human nature? When you look back at the
history of the 20th century, what do you learn from that time? - I mean, there are a bunch of lessons to Hitler taking power. The first thing, I think
people ought to recognize about Hitler taking power is that the power had been centralized in the government before Hitler took it. If you actually look at the
history of Nazi Germany, the Weimar Republic had
effectively collapsed. The power had been centralized
in the Chancellery, and really under Hindenburg for a couple of years before that. And so, it was only a
matter of time until someone who was bad grabbed the power. And so, the struggle between
the reds and the browns in Nazism, in pre-Nazi Germany, led to this kind of up
spiraling of radical sentiment that allowed Hitler in
through the front door, not through the back door. He was elected. - So you think communists
could have also taken power. - I mean, there's no question communists could have taken power. They were a serious force
in in pre-Nazi Germany. - Do you think there was
an underlying current that would've led to an atrocity, if the communist had taken power? - Wouldn't have been
quite the same atrocity, but obviously the
communists in Soviet Russia, at exactly this time were,
were committing the Holodomor. - Yeah. - So it was, there were very few good guys in terms of good parties. The moderate parties were
being dragged by the radicals into alliance with them to prevent the worst case
scenario from the other guy. So if you look at, I'm sort of fascinated by
the history of this period, because it really does speak to, how does a democracy break down? I mean, the 20's, Weimar Republic was a
very liberal democracy. How does a liberal democracy break down into complete fascism,
and then into genocide? And, there's a character
who was very prominent in the history at that
time named Franz von Papen, who was actually the
second to last chancellor of the Republic before Hitler. So he was the chancellor, and then he handed over to Schleicher. And then, he ended up,
Schleicher ended up collapsing, and that ended up handing
power over to Hitler. It was Papen who had stumped for Hitler to become chancellor. Papen was a Catholic Democrat. He didn't like Hitler. He thought that Hitler was
a radical and a nut job, but he also thought that
Hitler being a buffoon, as he saw it, was going to essentially be
usable by the right forces in order to prevent the
communists from taking power. Maybe in order to restore
some sort of legitimacy to the regime because he was popular. In order for Papen to retain power himself. And then, immediately
after Hitler taking power, Hitler basically kills
all of Papen's friends. Papen out of quote
unquote loyalty, stays on. He ends up helping the
Anschluss in Austria. All this stuff is really interesting, mainly because what it
speaks to is the great lie we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us. They're a class apart. People who do evil things, people who support evil
people; they're not like us. That's an easy call. Everybody, in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me. Robert George, the
philosopher over at Princeton, he's fond of doing a sort
of thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hand if
they had lived in Alabama in 1861, "How many of you
would be abolitionists?" And everybody raises their hand. And he says, "Of course that's not true." Of course, that's not true. The best protection
against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart, and the possibility
that it takes you over. And so, you have to be very
cautious in how you approach these issues, and the back
and forth of politics, the sort of bipolarity of politics, or the polarization in politics might be a better way to put it, makes it very easy to kind of fall into the rock 'em sock 'em robots that eventually could
theoretically allow you to support somebody who's truly
frightening and hideous in order to stop somebody who you think is more frightening and hideous. And, you see this kinda
language, by the way, now pre-dominating almost all
over the western world, right. My political enemy is
an enemy of democracy. My political enemy is
gonna end the republic. My political enemy is going to be the person
who destroys the country we live in. And so, that person has to be stopped by any means necessary. And, that's dangerous stuff. - So the communists had to
be stopped in Nazi Germany, and so they're the devil. And so any useful buffoon, as long as they're effective against the communists would do. Do you ever wonder, because the people that
are participating in evil may not understand that
they're doing evil. Do you ever sit back, you know, in the quiet of your mind and think, Am I participating in evil? - I mean, my business partner and I, one of our favorite memes is from there's a British comedy show, the name escapes me. Of these two guys who
are members of the SS, and they're dressed in the SS uniforms and the black uniforms
with the skulls on them. And they're saying to each
other, one says to the other guy, "You notice like the British,
their symbol is something, "It's something nice. "And it's like, it's like an eagle, "But ours, it's a skull and crossbones. "You see that the Americans, "You see the, the blue
uniforms very nice and pretty. "Ours are jet black, are we the baddies?" And you know, that's it. (hearty laughing) And the truth is, we look
back at the Nazis and we say, "Well, of course they were the baddies. "They wore black uniforms
and they had jack boots "And they had this..." And, of course they were the bad guys. But, evil rarely presents
its face so clearly. So yeah, I mean, I think you have to constantly
be thinking along those lines and hopefully you try to avoid it. You can only do the best
that a human being can do. But yeah, the answer is yes, I would say that I spend an
inordinate amount of time reflecting on whether I'm
doing the right thing, and I may not always do the right thing. I'm sure a lot of people
think that I'm doing the wrong thing on a daily basis. But, it's definitely a question that has to enter your mind, as a historically aware and
hopefully morally decent person. - Do you think you're mentally strong
enough, if you realize, that you are on the wrong side
of history to switch sides? Very few people in history
seem to be strong enough to do that. - I think that the answer,
I hope would be yes. You never know until the time
comes and you have to do it. I will say that having heterodox
opinions in a wide variety of areas is something
that I have done before. I'm the only person I've
ever heard of in public life, who actually has a list on their website of all the dumb stupid
things I've ever said. Where I go through and I either say, this is why I still believe this, or this is why what I said
was terrible and stupid. - Yeah.
- And I'm sure that list will get a lot longer. - Yeah, look forward to
new additions to that. - [Ben] Yeah, exactly. - It actually is a super, super long list. People should check it out. And, it's quite honest and raw. What do you think about, it's interesting to ask you, given how pro-life you are, about Ye's comments, about comparing the Holocaust
to the 900,000 abortions in the United States a year. - I'll take this from two angles. As a pro-life person, I actually didn't find it offensive because if you believe as I do, that unborn and pre-born
lives deserve protection, then the slaughter of just
under a million of them every year for the last almost 50 years, is a historic tragedy
on par with a holocaust. From the outside perspective, I get why people would
say there's a difference in how people view the
pre-born as to how people view, say a seven year old, who's
being killed in the Holocaust. The visceral power and evil of the Nazis shoving full grown human beings and small children into gas chambers, can't be compared to a person who, even from pro-life perspective, may not fully understand the consequences of their own decisions or
from a pro-choice perspective, fully understands the consequences, but just doesn't think that
that person is a person. That that's actually different. I understand both sides of it. I wasn't offended by Ye's
comments in that way though, because if you're a pro-life human being, then you do think that what's happening is a great tragedy on scale
that involves the dehumanization of an entire class of
people, the pre-born. - So the philosophical, you
understand the comparison? - I do, sure. - So in his comments, in the jumping from the
individual to the group, I'd like to ask you, you're one of the most
effective people in the world that attacking the left, and sometimes it can slip
into attacking the group. Do you worry that that's the same kind of oversimplification that Ye's. doing about Jewish people? That you can sometimes do
with the left as a group? - So when I speak about the left, I'm speaking about a philosophy. I'm not really speaking
about individual human beings as the leftist group, and then try to name
who the members of this individual group are. I also make a distinction
between the left and liberals. There are a lot of people
who are liberal who disagree with me on taxes, disagree
with me on foreign policy, disagree with me on a lot of things. The people who I'm
talking about generally, and I talk about the left
in the United States; are people who believe that
alternative points of view ought to be silenced because they are damaging and harmful simply based on the disagreement. So that's one distinction. The second distinction, again, is when I talk about
the right versus the left. Typically, I'm talking about a battle of competing philosophies. And so, I'm not speaking about, typically, it would be hard to, if you put a person in
front of me and said, "Is this person of the
left or of the right?" Having just met them, I
wouldn't be able to label them in the same way that if you met somebody with the name of Greenstein,
you immediately got Jew. Or you met a black person, black person. And, the adherence to a philosophy makes you a member of a group. If I think the philosophy is bad, that doesn't necessarily mean
that you as a person are bad, but it does mean that I
think your philosophy is bad. - Yeah, so the grouping is based on the philosophy
versus something like a race, like the color of your skin, or race, in the case of the Jewish people. So it's a different thing. You, can be a little bit
more nonchalant and careless in attacking a group because it's ultimately
attacking a set of ideas. - Well, I mean, it is really nonchalant in attacking the set of ideas. And, I don't know that
nonchalant would be the way I'd put it. I try to be exact. When you don't always hit, but you know, if I say that,
I oppose the communists, And then, presumably I'm
speaking of people who believe in the communists philosophy. Now, the question is
whether I'm mislabeling. Whether I'm taking somebody
who's not actually a communist and then shoving them in
that group of communists. That would be inaccurate. - The dangerous thing is it
expands the group as opposed to you talking about the philosophy. You're throwing everybody who's ever said, "I'm curious about communism,
I'm curious about socialism." 'Cause there's like a gradient, it's like to throw something at you. I think Joe Biden said,
"MAGA Republicans." - Right.
- Right. I think that's a very careless statement because the thing you jump
to immediately is like all- - Vote for Trump.
- All Republicans, right. - Right.
- Versus, I think, in the charitable interpretation, that means a set of ideas. - Yeah, my actually problem with the MAGA Republicans line from Biden is that he went
on in the speech that he made in front of Independence Hall to actually trying and find what it meant to be a MAGA Republican, who was a threat to the republic, was the kinda language that he was using. And later on in the speech
he actually suggested, well, there are moderate Republicans. And, the moderate Republicans
are people who agree with me on like the Inflation Reduction Act. It's like, well that
can't be the dividing line between a MAGA Republican and a moderate. Like a moderate Republican is somebody who agrees with you, that you gotta name me, like a republican who disagrees
with you fairly strenuously, but is not in this group
of threats to the republic. You make that distinction, we can have a fair discussion about whether the idea of election denial, for example, makes somebody
a threat to institutions. That's a conversation that we can have. And then, we'll have to discuss
how much power they have, what the actual perspective
is, delve into it. But you know, I think that he was being over
broad and sort of labeling all of his political
enemies under one rubric. Now again, in politics, this stuff sort of happens all the time. I'm not gonna plead clean hands here, 'cause I'm sure that I've been inexact. But, what would be good in that particular
situation is for somebody to sort of read me back the quote, and I'll let you know
where I've been inaccurate. I'll try to do that. - And also, you don't shy away from humor and occasional trolling and mockery, and all that kind of stuff for the fun, for the chaos,
all that kind of stuff. - I mean, I try not to to do
trollery for trollery sake, but, if the show's not
entertaining and not fun, people aren't gonna listen. And so, if you can't
have fun with politics, the truth about politics is
we all take it very seriously. 'Cause it has some serious ramifications. Politics is Veep, it is not House of Cards. The general rule of politics
is that everyone is a moron unless proven otherwise. That virtually everything
is done out of stupidity rather than malice. And that, if you actually
watch politics as a comedy, you'll have a lot more fun. And so, the difficulty for me
is I take politics seriously, but also I have the ability
to sort of flip the switch and suddenly it all
becomes incredibly funny because it really is. If you just watch it from a
pure entertainment perspective and you put aside the fact that it affects hundreds of millions of people, then watching President Trump, I mean, he's one of the funniest humans who's ever lived watching. Watching Kamala Harris be Kamala Harris and talking about how much
she loves Venn diagrams or electric buses. I mean, that's funny stuff. So if I can't make fun of that, then my job becomes pretty
morose pretty quickly. - Yeah, it's funny to figure out what is the perfect balance
between seeing the humor and the absurdity of the game of it, versus taking it seriously enough because it does affect
hundreds of millions of people. It's a weird balance to strike. It's like, I am afraid with
the internet that everything becomes a joke. - I totally agree with this. I will say this, I try to make less jokes about the ideas and more jokes about the
people in the same way that I make jokes about myself. I'm pretty self-effacing
in terms of my humor. I would say at least half the
jokes on my show are about me. When I'm reading ads Tommy John and they're talking about
their no wedgie guarantee, I'll say things like, "That would help me in high
school, because it would've." I mean, just factually speaking, if I can speak that way about myself, I feel like everybody
else can take it as well. - Difficult question. In 2017, there was a mosque
shooting in Quebec City. Six people died, five
others seriously injured. The 27 year old gunman consumed
a lot of content online and checked Twitter
accounts of a lot of people. But, one of the people he
checked quite a lot of is you, 93 times in the month
leading up to the shooting. If you could talk to that young man, what would you tell him and
maybe other young men listening to this that have hate in
their heart in that same way, What would you tell? - "You're getting it wrong. "If anything that I or anyone
else in mainstream politics "Says drives you to violence,
you're getting it wrong. "You're getting it wrong." Now again, when it comes
to stuff like this, I have a hard and fast rule
that I've applied evenly across the spectrum. And that is, I never blame people's
politics for other people committing acts of violence; unless they're actively
advocating violence. So when a fan of Bernie Sanders
shoots up a congressional baseball game, that is not
Bernie Sanders's fault. I may not like his rhetoric. I may disagree with him on everything. Bernie Sanders did not tell
somebody to go shoot up a congressional baseball game. When a nut case in San Francisco goes and hits Paul Pelosi with a hammer. I'm not gonna blame Kevin McCarthy, the house speaker, for that. When somebody threatens Brett Kavanaugh, I'm not gonna suggest that
that was Joe Biden's fault because it's not Joe Biden's fault. We can play this game all day long. And, I find that the people
who are most intensely focused on playing this game are
people who tend to oppose the politics of the person, as opposed to actually believing sincerely that this has driven
somebody into the arms of the god of violence. But, I have 4.7 million Twitter followers, I have 8 million Facebook followers, I have 5 million YouTube followers. I would imagine that some of them are people who are violent. I would imagine that some of
them are people who do evil things or want to do evil things. And, I wish that there were
a wand that we could wave that would prevent those
people from deliberately or mistakenly misinterpreting
things as a call of violence. It's just a negative byproduct of the fact that you can reach a lot of people. And so, if somebody could
point me to the comment that I suppose quote unquote
drove somebody to going literally murder human beings,
then I would appreciate it. So I could talk about the comment. But, I don't, mainly because I just think that if we remove agency from individuals, and if we blame broad
scale political rhetoric for every act of violence,
we're not gonna... The people who are gonna
pay the price are actually the general population because
free speech will go away. If the idea is that things that
we say could drive somebody, who is unbalanced, to
go do something evil, the necessary byproduct is hate. Is that, speech is a form of hate. Hate is a form of violence,
speech is a form of violence. Speech needs to be curbed. And that. to me is deeply disturbing. - So definitely, that man, that 27 year old man, is the only one responsible
for the evil he did. But, what if he and others
like him are not nut cases? What if they're people with
pain, with anger in their heart? What would you say to them? You're exceptionally influential
and other people like you, that speak passionately about ideas. What do you think is your
opportunity to alleviate the hate in their heart? - If we're speaking about
people who aren't mentally ill and people who are just misguided, I'd say to him, the thing I
said to every other young man in the country, you need to find meaning and
purpose in forming connections that actually matter, in a belief system that actually
promotes general prosperity and promotes helping other people. And this is why, the message that I most
commonly say to young men is, it's time for you to grow
up, mature, get a job, get married, have a family, take care of the people around you, become a useful part of your community. I've never at any point in
my entire career suggested violence as a resort to political issues. The whole point of having
a political conversation is that it's a conversation. If I didn't think that it
were worth trying to convince people of my point of view, I wouldn't do what I do for a living. - So violence doesn't solve anything? - No, it doesn't. - As if this wasn't already
a difficult conversation. Let me ask about Ilhan Omar. You've called out her criticism of Israel policies as antisemitic. Is there a difference between
criticizing a race of people, like the Jews, and criticizing the policies of a nation like Israel? - Of course, of course. I criticize the policies of Israel on a fairly regular basis. I would assume from a different
angle than Ilhan Omar does. But yeah, I mean, I criticize the policies of a wide variety of states. And to take an example, I've criticized Israel's
policy in giving control of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf; which effectively prevents
anybody except for Muslims from praying up there. I've also criticized
the Israeli government for their COVID crackdown. They can criticize the
policies of any government, but that's not what Ilhan Omar does. Ilhan Omar doesn't actually believe that there should be a state of Israel. She believes that Zionism is racism and that the existence of
a Jewish state in Israel, is in and of itself the great sin. That is a statement she would
make about no other people in no other land. She would not say that the
French don't deserve a state for the French. She wouldn't say that
Somalis wouldn't deserve a state in Somalia. She wouldn't say that that Germans don't deserve a state in Germany. She wouldn't say for the
50 plus Islamic states that exist across the world, that they don't deserve
states of their own. It is only the Jewish state that has fallen under
her significant scrutiny. And she also promulgates
laws about one specific state in the form of suggesting, for example, that Israel is an apartheid state; which it is most eminently
not considering that the last unity government in
Israel included an Arab party. That there are Arabs who sit on the Israeli Supreme
Court and all the rest. And then, beyond that, obviously she's engaged
in some of the same sort of antisemitic ropes that
you heard from Ye, right. The stuff about, it's all about the Benjamins, that American support for Israel
is all about the Benjamins. And, she's had to be chided
by members of her own party about this sort of stuff before. - Can you empathize with the
plight of Palestinian people? - Absolutely. Some of the uglier things that
I've ever said in my career are things that I said very
early on, when I was 17, 18, 19. I started writing a
syndicated comment, I was 17. I'm now 38. So virtually all the dumb things, I'd not say virtually all,
many of the dumb things, the plurality of the dumb
things that I've said came from the ages of, I would say 17 to maybe 23. - Yeah. - And they are rooted,
again, in sloppy thinking. I feel terrible for people
who have lived under the thumb and currently live under
the thumb of Hamas; which is a national terrorist group, or the Palestinian authority; which is a corrupt
oligarchy that steals money from its people and leaves them in misery. Or Islamic Jihad, which is an actual terrorist group. The basic rule for the region
in my view, is if these groups were willing to make peace with Israel, they would have a state
literally tomorrow. And if they are not, then
there will be no peace. And, it really is that simple. If Israel, the formulas typically used, it's become a bit of a bumper sticker, but it happens to be factually correct. If the Palestinians put
down their guns tomorrow, there would be a state. If the Israelis put down their guns, there'd be no Israel. - You get attacked a lot on the internet. - Oh yeah, you noticed. - I gotta ask you about
your own psychology. How do you not let that
break you mentally? And, how do you avoid letting
that lead to a resentment of the groups that attack you? - There are a few sort of practical things that I've done. For example, I would
say that four years ago, Twitter was all consuming. Twitter is an ego machine, especially the
notifications button, right. The notifications button is
just people talking about you all the time. And the normal human tendency as, "Wow, people talking about me, "I gotta see what
they're saying about me." Which is a recipe for insanity. So my wife actually said, "Twitter is making your life miserable. "You need to take it off your phone." So Twitter is not on my phone. If I wanna log onto Twitter, I have to go onto my computer and I have to make the conscious decision to go onto Twitter and then take a look at what's going on. - I could just imagine you like, there's a computer in the basement, you dissent into the check Twitter. - That's pretty much- - In the darkness. - If you look at, when I actually tweet, it's generally in the run
up to recording my show or when I'm prepping for my show, later in the afternoon, for example. - That doesn't affect
you negatively mentally? Like puts you in a bad mental space? - Not particularly if it's restricted, to sort of what's being watched now. I will say that I think
the most important thing is you have to surround
yourself with a group of people who you trust enough to make
serious critiques of you, when you're doing something wrong. But also, you know that they have your best interests at heart. 'Cause the internet is filled with people who don't have your
best interests at heart, and who hate your guts. And so, you can't really take
those critiques seriously or it does wreck you. And the world is also filled
with (indistinct), right. The, the, the more successful you become, there are a lot of
people who will tell you, "You're always doing the right thing." I'm very lucky. I got married when I
was 24, my wife was 20, so she's known me long before I was famous or wealthy or anything. And so, she's a good sounding board. I have a family that's
willing to call me out on my bullshit, as you talk Ye about. I have friends who are able to do that. I try to have open lines of communications with people who I believe have
my best interest at heart. But, one of the sort of
conditions of being friends, is that when you see
me do something wrong, I'd like for you to let me
know that, so I can correct it. And, I don't wanna leave
bad impressions out. - The sad thing about the internet, just looking at the critiques you get, I see very few critiques from
people that actually want you to succeed, want you to grow. I mean, they're very,
they're not sophisticated. They're just, I don't know, they're cruel. The critiques are just,
it's not actual critiques, it's just cruelty. - And, that's most of Twitter. I mean, as I said, Twitter is a place to smack and be smacked. I mean, anybody who uses Twitter for an intellectual conversation, I think, is engaging in category error. - I use it to spread love. I think it's still possible. - Yeah, you're the only one. It's you, it's you and
no one else, my friend. (hearty laughing) - Right, well, on that topic, what do you think about
Elon buying Twitter? What do you like? What do you hope for on that front? What would you like to
see Twitter improve? - So, I'm very hopeful
about Elon buying Twitter. I think that Elon is
significantly more transparent, than what has taken place up till now. He seems committed to the
idea that he's gonna broaden the Overton Window to
allow for conversations that simply were banned before. Everything ranging from efficacy of masks, with regard to COVID, to whether men can become
women, and all the rest. A lot of things that would
get you banned on Twitter before without any sort
of real explanation. It seems like he's dedicated
to at least explaining what the standards are going
to be and being broader in allowing a variety of
perspectives on the outlet. Which I think is wonderful. I think that's also why
people are freaking out. I think the kind of wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and
wearing of sack cloth and ash by so many members of the legacy media, I think a lot of that is because Twitter essentially was an oligarchy in which certain perspectives were allowed and certain perspectives just were not. And, that was part of a
broader social media reimposed oligarchy in the aftermath of 2017. So in order for just to
really understand, I think, what it means for Elon
to take over Twitter, I think that we have to take
a look at sort of the history of media in the United States
in two minutes or less. The United States, the media, for most of its existence,
up until about 1990, at least from about 1930s until the 1990s, virtually all media was three
major television networks, a couple major newspapers
and the wire services. Everybody had a local
newspaper with wire services, that basically did all the foreign policy and all the national policy. McClatchy, Reuters, AP, AFP, et cetera. That monopoly oligopoly existed until the rise of the internet. There were sort of pokes at
it; in talk radio and Fox News, but there certainly was not
this plethora of sources. Then, the internet explodes
and all of a sudden you can get news everywhere. And, the way that people
are accessing that news, I believe, significantly
younger than I am. But we used to do this
thing called bookmarking, where you would bookmark
a series of websites, and then you would visit
them every morning. And then, social media came up. - Was this on AOL or? - Yeah, exactly. You had the dial up, it was actually a can
connected to a string and you would actually, it would go. (high pitched squeaking) And, then there came a point
where social media arose. And, social media was sort
of a boon for everybody because you no longer
had to bookmark anything. You just followed your favorite accounts, and all of them would pop up, and you followed everything on Facebook and it would all pop up
and it was all centralized. And, for a while everybody was super happy because this was the brand
new wave of the future, made everything super easy. Suddenly, outlets like mine
were able to see new eyeballs because it was all centralized
in one place, right. You didn't have to do it
through Google optimization, you could now just put it on Facebook, and so many eyeballs were on Facebook, you'd get more traffic. And everybody seemed pretty
happy with this arrangement, until precisely the moment
Donald Trump became president. At that point then the sort
of preexisting supposition of a lot of the powers that be; which was Democrats are
gonna continue winning from here on out. So, we can sort of use
these social media platforms as ways to push our information and still allow for there to be other information out there. The immediate response
was, we need to reestablish this siphoning of information. It was misinformation and disinformation that won Donald Trump the election. We need to pressure the social
media companies to start cracking down on misinformation
and disinformation. And, actually see this
in the historical record. You can see how Jack Dorsey's
talk about free speech shifted from about 2015 to about 2018. You can see Mark Zuckerberg
gave a speech at Georgetown in 2018; which he talked about
free speech in its value. And by 2019, he was going
in front of Congress talking about how he was
responsible for the stuff that was on Facebook; which is not true. He's not responsible for
the stuff on Facebook. It's a platform. Is AT&T responsible for the
stuff you say on your phone? The answer is typically no. So when that happened, all of these, because all the eyeballs
had now be centralized in these social media sites, they were able to suddenly control what you could see and
what you could not see. And the most obvious example was obviously leading up to 2020, the election, the killing
of the Hunter Biden story, is a great example of this. And so, Elon coming in and taking over one of the social media services and saying, "I'm not playing by your rules." There's not gonna be this
sort of group of people in the halls of power who are gonna decide what we can see and hear. Instead, I'm gonna let
1,000 flowers bloom. There'll be limits, but it's gonna be on a
more case by case basis. We're going to allow
perspectives that are mainstream, but maybe not mainstream
in the halls of academia or in the halls of media, let those be said. I think that's a really good thing. Now, that comes with,
some responsibilities on Elon's personal part; which would be, for example, I think more responsible and
dissemination of information himself sometimes, right. He got himself in trouble the
other day for tweeting out that that story about Paul Pelosi, that that was speculative and and untrue. And, I don't think what
he did is horrific, he deleted it when he found
out that it was false. And, that's actually a
free speech working, right. He said something wrong,
people ripped into him. He realized he was
wrong and he deleted it; which seems to me a better solution than preemptively banning content, which only raises more questions than than it actually stops. With that said, as the face
of responsible free speech, and that's sort of what
he's pitching at Twitter. He, I think, should enact that himself and be a little more careful in the stuff that he tweets out. - Well, that's a tricky balance. The reason a lot of people are
freaking out is because one, he's putting his thumb on the scale by saying he is more
likely to vote Republican. He's showing himself to be center, right. And sort of just having
a political opinion versus being this amorphous thing that doesn't have a political opinion. I think, if I were to guess, I haven't talked to him about it, but if I were to guess, he's
sending a kind of signal that's important for
Twitter, the company itself. Because if we're being honest, most of the employees are left-leaning. So you have to kind of send a signal that, like a resisting mechanism to say, since most of the employees are left, it's good for Elon to be more right to balance out the way the
actual engineering is done. To say, we're not going
to do any kind of activism inside the engineering. If I were to guess, that's
kind of the effective aspect of that mechanism. And, the other one, by
posting the Pelosi thing is probably to expand the Overton Window. Saying we can play, we could post stuff, we could post conspiracy theories, and then through discourse, figure out what is and isn't true. - Yeah, again, like I say, I mean I think that is a better mechanism in action than what it was before. I just think it gave people
who hate his guts the opening to kind of slap him for no reason. But, I can see the
strategy of it for sure. And, I think that the general idea that he's kind of pushing, right where the company
had pushed left before. I think that there is actually
unilateral polarization right now in politics, at least with the regard of social media. In which one side basically says, "The solution to disinformation
is to shut down free speech "From the other side." And the other side is basically like, people like me are saying, the solution to disinformation
is to let a thousand, I'd rather have people on
the left also being able to put out stuff that I disagree
with than for there to be anybody who's sort of in
charge of these social media platforms and using
them as editorial sites. There are plenty, I'm not criticizing MSNBC for not putting on right wing opinions. I mean, that's fine. I run a conservative site. We're not gonna put up left
wing opinions on a wide variety of issues 'cause we are
a conservative site. But, if you pitch yourself as a platform, that's a different thing. If you pitch yourself as the town square, as Elon likes to call it, then I think Elon has
a better idea of that than many of the former employees did. Especially, now that we have
that report from The Intercept suggesting that there
are people from Twitter working with DHS to monitor disinformation, and being rather vague about
what disinformation meant. - Yeah, I don't think activism has a place in what is fundamentally
an engineering company that's building a platform. The people inside the company should not be putting a thumb on the scale of what is and isn't allowed. You should create a
mechanism for the people to decide what is and isn't allowed. Do you think Trump should have
been removed from Twitter? Should his account be restored? - His account should be restored. And, this is coming from somebody who really dislikes an enormous number of Donald Trump's tweets. Again, he's a very important
political personage. Even if he weren't, I don't think that he should
be banned from Twitter or Facebook in coordinated fashion. By the way, I hold that
opinion about people who I think are far
worse than Donald Trump. Everyone knows I'm not an Alex Jones guy. I don't like Alex Jones. I think Alex Jones- - You think Alex should
be back on Twitter? - I do actually, because I think that
there are plenty of people who are willing to say that
what he's saying is wrong. And, I'm not a big fan of this idea that because people I disagree with, and people who have
personally targeted me. By the way, I mean Alex Jones has said
some things about me personally that I'm not real fond of it. - You guys are not? - Well, we're not besties. No, it turns out, yeah. All I've said is I don't
really enjoy his show. He's said some other stuff
about the antichrist and such; but that's a bit of a
different thing I suppose. Even so...
- Yeah. - I'm just not a big fan of this idea. I've defended people who
have really gone after me on a personal level, have targeted me. The town square is online, banning people from the town
square is unpersoning them. Unless you violated a criminal statute, you should not be unpersoned
in American society, as a general rule. That doesn't mean that
companies that are not platforms don't have the ability to respond to you. I think Adidas is right to terminate its contract
with Kanye, for example, or with Ye. But, Twitter ain't Adidas. - So the way your stance on free speech to the degree it's possible
to achieve on a platform, like Twitter is you fight
bad speech with more speech, with better speech. So, if Alex Jones and
Trump was allowed back on, in the coming months and years leading up to the 2024 election, you think that's gonna
make for a better world in the long term? - I think that on the principle that people should be allowed to do this, and the alternative being
a group of thought bosses telling us what we can
and cannot see, yes. Do I think in the short term
it's gonna mean a lot of things that I don't like very much? Sure, them's the class of doing business. I think that one of the class of freedom is people doing things that
I don't particularly like. And, I would prefer the freedom with all the stuff I don't
like, than not the freedom. - Let me linger on the love a little bit. You and a lot of people are
pretty snarky on Twitter; sometimes to the point
of mockery, derision, even a bit of, if I were to say bad faith in the kind of mockery, and you see it as a war, like I disagree with both
you and Elon on this. Elon sees Twitter as a war zone, or at least has saw it
that way in the past. Have you ever considered
being nicer on Twitter? (hearty laughing) As a voice that a lot
of people look up to, that if Ben Shapiro becomes
a little bit more about love that's gonna inspire a lot of people or no, is it just too fun for you? - The answer is yes. Sure, it's occurred to me. Let's put it this way, there are a lot of tweets
that actually don't go out that I delete. I'll say that Twitter. Twitter's new function, that 32nd function is a friend of mine. Every so often, I'll tweet something and
I'll think about it a second. I'll be like, "Do I need to say this?" Probably not. - Can you make a book published after you pass away of all the
tweets that you didn't send? - Oh no, my kids are
still gonna be around it. I hope, so that's the legacy. But yeah, I mean, sure, the answer is yes. And there's a good piece
of what we would call in Orthodox Judaism, Mussar. This is like, he is giving a Mussar schmooze, right now. This is like the kind of,
be a better person stuff. I agree with you. I agree with you, and yeah. I will say that Twitter
is sometimes too much fun. I try to be at least, if not even-handed, then equal opportunity in my derision. I remember that during the 2016 primaries, I used to post rather snarky tweets about virtually all of the candidates, Republican and Democrat. And, every so often I'll
still do some of that. I do think actually the amount
of snark on my Twitter feed has gone down fairly significantly. I think if you go back a couple of years, it was probably a little more snarky. Today, I'm trying to
use it a little bit more in terms of strategy
to get out information. Now, that doesn't mean I'm
not gonna make jokes about, for example, Joe Biden. I will make jokes about Joe Biden. He's the president of the United States. Nobody else will mock him. So, the entire comedic
establishment has decided they actually work for him. - So the president of the United States, no matter who they are, get the snark. - Yes, yes. And, President Trump,
I think is fairly aware that he got the snark from me as well. When it comes to snarking the president, I'm not gonna stop that. I think the president
deserves to be snarked. - So you're not afraid of attacking Trump? - No, I mean, I've done it before. - Can you say what your favorite and least favorite things
are about President Trump and President Biden, one at a time? So maybe one thing that you
can say is super positive about Trump, and one thing
super negative about Trump. - Okay, so the super
positive thing about Trump is that because he has
no preconceived views that are establishmentarian, he's sometimes willing to go
outta the box and do things that haven't been tried before. And, sometimes that works. The best example being
the entire foreign policy establishment telling
him that he couldn't get a Middle Eastern deal done unless he centered the
Palestinian Israeli conflict. And instead he just
went right around that, and ended up cutting
a bunch of peace deals in the Middle East or moving the embassy in Jerusalem. Sometimes he does stuff and
it's really outta the box, and it actually works. And, that's kind of awesome
in politics, and neat to see. The downside of Trump is
that he has no capacity to use any sort of... There's no filter between brain and mouth. Well, whatever happens in his brain, is the thing that comes out of his mouth. I know a lot of people find
that charming and wonderful, and from time, and it is very funny. But, I don't think that
it is a particularly excellent personal quality in a person who has as much responsibility,
as President Trump has. I think he says a lot of damaging, and bad things on Twitter. I think that he seems, consumed, in some ways,
by his own grievances; which is why you've seen him focusing in on election 2020 so much. And, I think that that is very negative about President Trump. I'm very grateful to president
Trump, as a conservative, for many of the things that he did. I think that a lot of
his personality issues are pretty severe. - What about Joe Biden? - I think that the thing that
I like most about Joe Biden. - Yes.
- I will say, that Biden, two things. One, Biden seems to be a very good father by all available evidence, right. There are a lot of people who are put out, kind of tape of him talking to Hunter; and Hunter's having trouble
with drugs or whatever. And, I keep listening to
that tape and thinking, he seems like a really good dad. The stuff that he's saying to his son is stuff that God forbid, if that were happening with my kid, I'd be saying to my kid. And so, you can't help
but feel for the guy. He's had an incredibly difficult go of it with his first wife and the death of members of his family, and then Beau dying. I mean, that kind of stuff, obviously is deeply sympathetic in his... He seems like a deeply sympathetic father. As far as his politics, he seems like a slap on
the back, kind of guy. And I don't mind that. I think that's nice, so far as it goes. It's sort of an old school politics, where things are done with handshake and personal relationships. The thing I don't like about him is I think sometimes
that's really not genuine. I think that that sometimes, I think that's his personal tendency, but I think sometimes he
allows the prevailing wins of his party to carry him to
incredibly radical places. And then, he just doubles
down on the radicalism in some pretty disingenuous ways. And, there I would cite the Independence Hall speech; which I thought was truly
one of the worst speeches I've seen a president give. - So, you don't think he's trying to be a unifier in general? - Not at all. I mean, that's what he was elected to do. He was elected to do two things, not be alive, and be a unifier. Those were the two things. And like, and when I say not be alive, I don't mean like physically dead, this is where the snark comes in. But, what I do mean is that he was elected to not be
particularly activist. Basically, the mandate was don't be Trump. Be sane, don't be Trump,
calm everything down. And instead he got in, he is like, "What if we spend 7 trillion dollars? "What if we pull out of Afghanistan "Without any sort of plan? "What if I start labeling
all of my political enemies, "Enemies of the republic? "What if I start bringing Dylan
Mulvaney to the White House "And talking about how it is a moral sin "To prevent the general
mutilation of minors?" This kinda stuff is very radical stuff. And, this is not a
president who has pursued a unifying agenda; which is why his approval
rating sank from 60% when he entered office, to
low 40s or high 30s today. Unlike President Trump, who never had a high approval rating. Trump came into office, and he had like a 45% approval rating, and when he left office, he had about a 43% approval rating. It bounced around between 45 and 37 pretty much his entire presidency. Biden went from being a
very popular guy coming in, to a very unpopular guy right now. And, if you're Joe Biden, you should be looking in the mirror and wondering exactly why. - Do you think that pulling
out from Afghanistan could be flipped as a pro for Biden, in terms of he actually did it. - I think it's gonna be almost impossible. I think the American people
are incredibly inconsistent about their own views on foreign policy. In other words, we like to be isolationist
until it comes time for us to be defeated and humiliated. When that happens, we tend
not to like it very much. - You mentioned Biden being a good father. Can you make the case for and against the Hunter Biden laptop story? For it being a big deal and against it being a big deal? - Sure, the case for being a
big deal is basically twofold. One, is that it is clearly relevant if the president's son is running around to foreign countries
picking up bags of cash because his last name is Biden, while his father is vice
president of the United States. And, it raises questions
as to influence peddling for either the vice president or the former vice president
using political connections. Did he make any money? Who was the big guy? All these open questions, that obviously implicates
the questions to be asked. And then, the secondary
reason that the story is big is actually 'cause the
reaction of the story, the banning of the story is in
and of itself a major story. If there's any story that implicates a presidential candidate in the last month of an election, and there is a media blackout, including a social media blackout, that obviously raises some
very serious questions about informational flow and dissemination in the United States. - No matter how big of
a deal the story is, it is a big deal that there's a censorship of any relevant story. - When there's a coordinated
collusive blackout, yeah. That's a serious and major problem. So those are the two reasons
why it would be a big story. The two reasons, a reason why it would not
be a big story perhaps, is if it turns out, and we
don't really know this yet. But let's say that Hunter Biden
was basically off on his own doing what he was doing, being a derelict or drug
addict or acting badly, and his dad had nothing to do with it, and Joe was telling the
truth and he really knew. But, the problem is we never actually got
those questions answered. If it had turned out to
be nothing of a story, the nice thing about stories
that turn out to be nothing is that after they turned out to be nothing, they're nothing. The biggest problem with this story is that it wasn't allowed to take the normal life cycle of a story; which is original story breaks, follow on questions are asked, follow on questions are answered. Story is either now a big
story or it's nothing. One, when the life cycle
of a story is cut off right at the very beginning,
right when it's born, then that allows you to speculate
in any direction you want. You can speculate, "It means nothing. "It's it's nonsense. "It's Russian, it's a Russian laptop, "It's disinformation." Or on the other hand, this means that Joe Biden
was personally calling Hunter and telling him to pick up a sack of cash over in Beijing and
then he became president and he's influenced pedaling. This is why it's important
to allow these stories to go forward. So this is why actually the bigger story for the moment is not the laptop, it's the reaction to the laptop 'cause it cut off that
life cycle of the story. And then, at some point I would assume that there will
be some follow on questions that are actually answered. The house is pledging,
if it goes Republican, to investigate all of this. Again, I wouldn't be supremely surprised if it turns out that there was no direct
involvement of Joe in this sort of stuff. Because it turns out, as I said before, that all of politics is Veep. And, this is always the
story with half the scandals that you see is that everybody assumes that there's some sort of
deep and abiding clever plan that some politician is implementing. And then, you look at it and it turns out, now it's just something dumb, right. This is sort of, perfect example of this, President Trump with the
classified documents in Mar Lago. So people on the left lane,
it's probably nuclear codes, probably he's taking secret documents and selling them to the
Russians or the Chinese. And, the real most obvious explanation is Trump looked at the papers and he said, "I like these papers." And then, he just decided to keep them. And then, people came to him and said, "Mr. President, you're not
allowed to keep those papers." He said, "Who are those people? "I don't care about what they have to say, "I'm putting them in the
other room in a box." It is highly likely that
that is what happened. And it's very disappointing
to people, I think, when they realize it. The human brain, I mean, you know this better than I do, but the human brain is
built to find patterns. It's what we like to do. We like to find plans and patterns because this is how we
survived in the wild, is you found a plan, you found a pattern, you crack
the code of the universe. When it comes to politics, the conspiracy theories
that we see so often, it's largely because we're
seeing inexplicable events. Unless, you just assume
everyone's a moron. If you assume that there's
a lot of stupidity going on, everything becomes quickly explicable. If you assume that there must
be some rationale behind it. You have to come up with
increasingly convoluted conspiracy theories to explain just why
people are acting the way that they're acting. And, I find that, I don't say a 100% of the time, but 90, 94% of the time, the conspiracy theory turns out
just to be people being dumb and then other people
reacting in dumb ways to the original people being dumb. - But it's also, to me, in
that same way, very possible, very likely that Hunter Biden
getting money in Ukraine, I guess for consulting
and all that kind of stuff is a nothing burger. He's qualified, he's
getting money as he should. There's a lot of influence
pedaling in general that's not corrupt. - The most obvious
explanation there probably is that he was fake influence pedaling; meaning he went to Ukraine. And he is like, "Guess what? "My dad's Joe." And they're like, "Well, you don't have
any qualifications in oil "And natural gas and you don't
really have a great resume "But your dad is Joe. And then, that was kinda the end of it. They gave him a bag of cash,
hoping you would do something. He never did anything. - I think you're making
it sound worse than it is. I think this in general, consulting is done in that way. Your name, it's not like you're- - I agree with you. - You're not, it's not like he is some rare case and this is an illustration of corruption. If you can criticize consulting, which I would. - [Ben] That's fair. - Which they're basically not providing... You look at a resume and who's who. If you went to Harvard, I can criticize the same thing. If you have Harvard on your resume, you're more likely to be
hired as a consultant. Maybe there's a network
there of people that you know and you hire them in that same way. If your last name is Biden, there's a lot of last names
that sound pretty good at it. - That's for sure. For sure, for sure. - It's not like- - And, Hunter Biden admitted
that much, by the way. In an open interview. He was like, "If your last name weren't Biden, "Would you have got that job?" And he is like, "Probably not." And you're right. - That's an honest, that's- - I agree with you. - It's not like he's getting
a ridiculous amount of money. He was getting like a
pretty standard consulting kind of money; which I also would criticize 'cause they get a
ridiculous amount of money. But, even to push back on the life cycle or to steel man the
side that was concerned about the Hunter Biden laptop story. I don't know if there is a
natural life cycle of a story because there's something about
the virality of the internet that we can't predict that
a story can just take hold and the conspiracy around it builds. Especially around politics,
where the interpretation, some popular sexy
interpretation of a story that might not be connected
to reality at all, will become viral. And that, from Facebook's perspective, is probably what they're worried about, is organized misinformation campaign that makes up a sexy story
or sexy interpretation of the vague story that we have. And that, has an
influence on the populace. - I mean, I think that's true, but I think the question becomes who's the great adjudicator there. Who adjudicates when the
story ought to be allowed to go through even a bad life cycle or allowed to go viral as opposed to not? Now, that's one thing if you wanna say, "Okay, we can spot the Russian accounts "That are actually promoting this stuff, "They belong to the Russian government. "Gotta shut that down." I think everybody agrees. This is actually one of the slides that's happened linguistically that I really object to, is the slide between
disinformation and misinformation. You notice there was this evolution. In 2017, there was a lot of
talk about disinformation. It was Russian disinformation. The Russians were putting out
deliberately false information in order to skew election
results, was the accusation. And then, people started using disinformation or misinformation. And misinformation is
either mistaken information or information that is quote
unquote out of context. That becomes very subjective very quickly as to what out of context means. And it doesn't necessarily have
to be from a foreign source, it can be from a domestic source, right. It could be somebody
misinterpreting something here. It could be somebody
interpreting something correctly, but PolitiFact thinks
that it's out of context. That sort of stuff gets
very murky very quickly. And so, I'm deeply
uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook, I mean Zuckerberg was on with Rogan and talking about how the FBI had basically set lookout for Russian interference in the election, and then all of these
people were out there saying that the laptop was
Russian disinformation. So, he basically shut it down. That sort of stuff is frightening, especially 'cause it wasn't
Russian disinformation. I mean the laptop was real. And so, the fact that you
have people who seemed to, let's put it this way, it seems as though, maybe this is wrong. It seems as though when
a story gets killed, preemptively like this, it is almost universally
a story that negatively affects one side of the political aisle. I can't remember the last
time there was a story on the right that was
disinformation or misinformation, where social media
stepped in and they went, "We cannot have this, "This cannot be be distributed. "We're going to all collude so that this, "Information is not distributed." Maybe in response to the
story being proved false, it gets taken down. But, what made the Hunter
Biden thing so amazing is that it wasn't even
a response to anything. It was, the story got posted, there were no actual doubts
expressed as to the verified falsity the story. It was just supposition
that it had to be false and everybody jumped in. So I think that confirmed a
lot of the conspiracy theories people had about social
media and how it works. - Yeah, if the reason you want
to slow down the viral spread of a thing is at all
grounded in partisanship, that's a problem. You should be very honest with yourself and ask yourself that question. Is it because I'm on the
left or on the right, that I want to slow this down? Versus is it hate, bipartisan hate speech? It's really tricky. But, like you, I'm very
uncomfortable in general, with any kind of slowing down, with any kind of censorship. But, if there's something
like a conspiracy theory that spreads hate, that becomes viral, I still lean to let that
conspiracy theory spread 'cause the alternative is
dangerous, more dangerous. - It's sort like the ring of power. Everybody wants the ring. 'Cause with the ring you
can stop the bad guys from going forward. But, it turns out that the
ring gives you enormous power and that power can be used
in the wrong ways too. - You had The Daily Wire; which I'm a member of. (hearty laughing) - I appreciate that, thank you. - I recommend everybody sign up to it, it should be part of your regular diet; whether you're on the left and the right, the far left or the far right, everybody, should be part
of your regular diet. Okay, that said, do you worry about the
audience capture aspect of it because it is a platform for conservatives and you have a powerful voice on there. It might be difficult
for you to go against the talking points or
against the stream of ideas that is usually connected
to conservative thought. Do you worry about that? - Well, I mean, the audience would
obviously be upset with me and would have a right to be upset with me if I suddenly flipped all
of my positions on a dime. I have enough faith in my
audience that I can say things that I think are true
and that may disagree with the audience on a fairly
regular basis, I would say. But they understand that
on the deeper principle or on the same side, or at least I hope that
much from the audience. It's also why we provide a
number of different views on the platforms, many
of which I disagree with, but are sort of within
the generalized range of conservative thought. It's something I do have to
think about every day though. Yeah, I mean you have to,
you have to think about , "Am I saying this because I'm afraid "Of ticking off my audience "Or am I saying this because
I actually believe this?" And you know, that's a
delicate dance a little bit. You have to be sort of
honest with yourself. - Yeah, somebody like Sam
Harris is pretty good at this, at fighting, at saying the most outrageous thing that he knows. He almost leans into it, he knows will piss off
a lot of his audience. Sometimes you almost
have to test the system. It's like if you feel, you almost exaggerate your
feelings just to make sure to send a signal to the audience that you're not captured by them. So speaking of people you disagree with, what is your favorite
thing about Candace Owens, and what is one thing
you disagree with her on? - Well, my favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things
that nobody else will say. My least favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things
that nobody else will say. (hearty laughing) I mean, listen, she says things that are audacious and I think need to be said sometimes. Sometimes, I think that
she is morally wrong, I think the way she responded to Kanye, I've said this clearly, was
dead wrong and morally wrong. - What was her response? - Her original response was
that she proffered confusion of what Ye was actually talking about. And then, she was defending her friend. I wish that the way that she
had responded was by saying, "He's my friend. "And also he said something
bad and antisemitic." I wish that she had said that. - [Lex] Right away. - Right away. - Yeah, I think you can also, this is the interesting human thing. You can be friends with
people that you disagree with and you can be friends with people that actually say hateful stuff. And, one of the ways
to help alleviate hate is being friends with people that say hateful things. - Yeah, and then calling
them out on a personal level, when they do say wrong or hateful things. - Yeah, from a place of love
and respect and privately. - Privately is also a big thing, right? I mean, the public
demand for denunciation, from friends to friends, is difficult. And, I certainly have
compassion for Candace, given the fact that
she's so close with Ye. - Yeah, it breaks my heart sometimes, the public fights between
friends and broken friendships. I've seen quite a few friendships
publicly break over COVID. COVID made people behave
their worst, in many cases. Which yeah, breaks my heart a little bit. 'Cause like the human connection is a prerequisite for effective debate and discussion and battles over ideas. Has there been any argument
from the opposite political isle that has made you change
your mind about something? If you look back. - So I will say that, I'm thinking it through because I think that my views
probably on foreign policy, morphed somewhat. I would say that I was
much more interventionist when I was younger. I'm significantly less
interventionist now. I'd probably- - Can you give an example? - Sure I was a big backer of the Iraq War. I think now, in retrospect, I might not be a backer of the Iraq War, if the same situation arose again, based on the amount of evidence
that had been presented or based on the sort of
willingness of the American public to go it, right. If you're gonna get involved in a war, you have to know what
the end point looks like, and you have to know what the
American people really are willing to bear. The American people are not willing to bear open-ended occupations. And so knowing that, you have
to consider that going in. So, on foreign policy, I've become a lot more of, I'd say almost Henry Kissinger realist in some ways. When it comes to social policy, I would say that, I'm fairly strong where I was. I may have become slightly convinced actually by more of the conservative side of the isle and things
like drug legalization. I think when I was younger, I was much more pro-drug
legalization then I am now, at least on the local level. On a federal level, I think the federal government
can't really do much, other than close the borders with regard to fentanyl
trafficking, for example. But, when it comes to how drugs
were in local communities, you can see how drugs were in local
communities pretty easily. - Which is weird because
I saw you smoke a joint right before this conversation. - It's my biggest thing. I mean, I try to keep that secret. - Well that's interesting
about intervention. Can you comment about the war in Ukraine? So for me, it's a deeply personal thing, but I think you're able to look at it from a geopolitics perspective. What is the role of the
United States in this conflict before the conflict, during the conflict, and right now, in helping achieve peace? - I think before the conflict, the big problem is that the West took almost the worst possible view; which was encourage Ukraine
to keep trying to join NATO and the EU, but don't let them in. And so, what that does is
it achieves the purpose of getting Russia really,
really, really ticked off and feeling threatened. But also, does not give any
of the protections of NATO or the EU to Ukraine. Zelensky is on film when
he was a comedy actor making that exact joke. He has Merkel on the
other line and she's like, "Oh welcome to NATO." And he's like, "Great." And she's like, "Wait, is this Ukraine on the line? "And, oops." But so, that sort of policy is sort of nonsensical. If you're gonna offer
alliance to somebody, offer alliance to them. And if you're going to
guarantee their security, guarantee their security. And, the West failed signally to do that. So, that was mistakes in
the run up to the war. Once the war began, then the responsibility of the
West became to give Ukraine as much material as is
necessary to repel the invasion. And, the West did really well with that. I think we were late on the
ball in the United States. It seemed like Europe led
the way a little bit more than the United States did there. But, in terms of effectuating
American interests in the region; which being an American, is what I'm chiefly concerned about. The American interests were several fold. One is preserve borders. Two is degrade the Russian
aggressive military because Russia's military
has been aggressive, and they are geopolitical
rival of the United States. Three, recalibrate the
European balance with China. Europe was sort of balancing
with Russia and China. And then, because of the war
they sort of rebalanced away from China and Russia; which is a real geostrategic opportunity for the United States. It seemed like most of those goals have already been achieved at this point for the United States. And so then, the question
becomes, what's the off ramp here, and what is the thing
you're trying to prevent? So what's the best opportunity? What's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario? And then, what's realistic? So best case scenario is Ukraine
forces Russia entirely out of Ukraine; including Luhansk,
Donetsk, and Crimea, right. That's the best case scenario. Virtually no one thinks
that's accomplishable; including the United States. The White House has
basically said as much. It's difficult to imagine,
particularly Crimea, the Russians being forced out of Crimea. The Ukrainians have been
successful in pushing the Russians out of certain parts
of Luhansk and Donetsk. But, the idea they're
gonna be able to push the entire Russian army completely back to the Russian borders. That would be at best a very, very long and difficult slog, in the middle of a
collapsing Ukrainian economy. Which is a point that Zelensky has made. It's not enough for you guys
to give us military aid. We're in the middle of a war, we're gonna need economic aid as well. So it's a pretty open-ended
and strong commitment. - Can I take a small tangent on that? - [Ben] Sure. - And best case scenario? If that does militarily
happen, including Crimea, do you think there's a world
in which Vladimir Putin, would be able to convince
the Russian people that this was a good
conclusion to the war? - Right, the problem is
that the best case scenario, might also be the worst case scenario. Meaning that there are
a couple of scenarios that are sort of the worst case scenario. And this, is sort of the
puzzlement of the situation. One, is that Putin feels so boxed in, so unable to go back to
his own people and say, "We just wasted tens of
thousands of lives here "For no reason." That he unleashes a
tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield. Nobody knows what happens after that. So we put NATO planes in the
air to take out Russian assets. Do Russians start shooting down planes? Does Russia then threaten
to escalate even further by attacking an actual
NATO civilian center, or even a Ukrainian civilian
center with nuclear weapons? Like where it goes from
there, nobody knows. 'Cause nuclear weapons
haven't been used since 1945. So, that is a worst case scenario. It's an unpredictable
scenario that could devolve into really, really significant problems. The other worst case scenario, could be a best case scenario, it could be a worse, we just don't know is Putin falls. What happens after that? Who takes over for Putin? Is that person more moderate than Putin? Is that person a liberalizer? It probably won't (indistinct), if he's gonna be ousted. It'll probably somebody who's
a top member of Putin's brass right now, and has capacity
to control the military. Or it's possible the
entire regime breaks down, and what you end up
with is Syria in Russia. Where you just have an
entirely out of control region with no centralizing power; which is also a disaster area. And so, in the nature of risk mitigation, in sort of an attempt at risk mitigation, what actually should be happening
right now is some off ramp has to be offered to Putin. The off ramp likely is going
to be him maintaining Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk. It's probably gonna be
a commitment by Ukraine, not to join NATO formally, but a guarantee by the
West to defend Ukraine in case of an invasion of its
borders, again, by Russia. Like an actual treaty
obligation, not like, the BS treaty obligation
and win-win Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the 90s. And, that is likely how
this is gonna have to go. The problem is that
requires political courage, not from Zelensky. It requires courage from probably Biden because the only, Zelensky is
not in a political position, where he can go back to his own people, who have made unbelievable
sacrifices on behalf of their nation and
freedom and say to them, "Guys, now I'm calling it quits. "We're gonna have to give
them Luhansk and Donetsk "And give Putin an off ramp." I don't think that's an acceptable
answer to most Ukrainians at this point in time, from the polling data and from
the available data we have on the ground. It's gonna actually take
Biden biting the bullet, and being the bad guy
and saying to Zelensky, "Listen, we've made a
commitment of material aid. "We're offering you all these things, "Including essentially a defense pact. "We're offering you all this stuff, "But, if you don't come to the table, "Then we're gonna have to
start weaning you all." There will have to be a stick there, it can't just be a carrot. And so, that will allow Zelensky,
if Biden were to do that, it allows Zelensky to blame
Biden for the solution everybody knows has to happen. Zelensky can go back to his
own people and he can say, "Listen, this is the way it has to go. "I don't want it to go
this way, but it's not my, "I'm signing other people's checks. "I mean, it's not my money." And Biden would take the hit because he wouldn't then
be able to blame Ukraine for whatever happens next. Which has been the easy road off, I think for a lot of
politicians in the West. Is for them to just say, Well, this is up to the
Ukrainians to decide. It's up to the Ukrainians to decide. Well, is it totally up to
the Ukrainians to decide? Because it seems like the
West is signing an awful lot of checks and all of Europe
is gonna freeze this winter. - This is the importance of
great leadership by the way. That's why the people we
elect is very important. Do you think there's power to
just one on one conversation? Where Biden sits down with Zelensky, and Biden sits down with
Putin, almost in person. 'Cause I, or maybe I'm
romanticizing the notion, but having done these podcasts in person, I think there's something
fundamentally different than through a remote call, and also a distant kind
of recorded political type speak versus like man to man. - So I'm deeply afraid
that Putin outplays people in the one-on-one scenarios because he's done it to
multiple presidents already. He gets in one-on-one scenarios
with Bush, with Obama, with Trump, with Biden; and he seems to be a very canny operator and a very sort of hard-nosed
operator in those situations. I think that if you were
gonna do something like that, an actual political face-to-face summit, what you would need is for Biden to first have a
conversation with Zelensky. Where Zelensky knows what's going on. So he's aware, and then Biden walks in and
he says to Putin on camera, "Here's the offer, let's get it together, "Let's make peace. "You get to keep this stuff." And then, let Putin respond, how Putin is going to respond. But, the big problem for Putin I think, and the problem with public facing forum, maybe it's a private meeting. If it's a private meeting, maybe that's the best thing. If it's a public facing forum, I think it's a problem
'cause Putin's afraid of being humiliated at this point. If it's a private meeting,
then sure, except that again, I just wonder whether, when it comes to a
person as canny as Putin, and to a politician that
I really don't think is a particularly sophisticated
player in Joe Biden. And again, this is not unique to Biden. I think that most of our
presidents for the last 30, 40 years have not been
particularly sophisticated players. I think that's a risky scenario. - Yeah, I still believe
in the power of that. 'Cause otherwise, I don't think stuff on paper and political speak will
solve these kinds of problems. Because from the Zelensky perspective, nothing but complete victory will do. - [Ben] Right. - As a nation has people
sacrificed way too much and they're all in. And if you look at, 'cause I traveled to
Ukraine, I spent time there, I'll be going back there hopefully. Also, going back to Russia,
just speaking to Ukrainians. They're all in, they're all in. - Yeah. - Nothing, but don't complete victory. - Yep, don't blame them, that's right. - And so for that, the only way to achieve peace is through honest human
to human conversation. Giving both people a way to off ramp, to walk away victorious. And some of that requires
speaking honestly as a human being, but also for America to actually, not even America, honestly, just the president, be able
to eat their own ego a bit, and be the punching bag a little, just enough for both presidents
to be able to walk away and say, "Listen, we got
the American president "To come to us. "And, I think that makes the President "Look strong, not weak." - I mean, I agree with you. I think it would also require
some people on the right, people like me, if it's Joe Biden to say, "If Biden does that,
I see what he's doing. "It's the right move." I think one of the things
that he's afraid of, to steel man him. I think one of the
things he's afraid of is, he goes and he makes that sort of deal, and the right says "You just
coward in front of Russia, "You just gave away Ukraine." Whatever it is. But, it's gonna require
some people on the right to say that that move is the right move, and then hold by it. If Biden actually performs that move. - You're exceptionally good at debate. You wrote How to Debate the
Leftist and Destroy Them. You're kind of known
for this kind of stuff, just exceptionally
skilled at conversation, at debate, at getting to
the facts of the matter and using logic to get to
the conclusion in the debate. Do you ever worry that this power, you talked about the ring, this power you were
given has corrupted you and your ability to see what's... To pursue the truth versus
just winning debates? - I hope not. So I think one of the things that's kind of funny about the
branding versus the reality, is that most of the things
that get characterized as destroying in debates
with facts and logic, most of those things are
basically me having a conversation with somebody on a college campus. It actually isn't like a formal
debate where we sit there and we critique each other's positions, or it's not me insulting anybody. A lot of the clips that
have gone very viral is me making an argument, and then there not being an
amazing counter argument. - [Lex] Yep. - Many of the debates that I've held have been extremely cordial. To take the latest example
like about a year ago I debated Ana Kasparian from Young Turks. It was very cordial, it was very nice. Yeah, that's sort of the
way that I like to debate. My rule when it comes to
debate and or discussion, is that my opponent actually
gets to pick the mode in which we work. So if it's going to be a debate of ideas and we're just going to discuss
and critique and clarify, then we can do that. If somebody comes loaded for bear, then I will respond in kind. Because one of the big problems, I think in sort of the debate
slash discussion sphere is very often misdiagnosis of what exactly is going on. People who think that
a discussion is debate and vice versa. And that can be a real problem. And there are people who will treat what
ought to be a discussion, as for example, an exercise in performance art. And so what that is, is mugging or trolling, or saying trolley things in order to just get, that's something I actually
don't do during debate. If you actually watch me talk to people, I don't actually do the trolling thing. The trolling thing is almost
solely relegated to Twitter and me making jokes on my show. When it comes to actually debating people, that sounds actually a lot
like what we're doing right now is just the person maybe taking just an
adverse position to mine. And so, that's fine. Usually half the debate or discussion is me just asking for
clarification of terms. What exactly do you mean by this? So I can drill down on where the actual disagreement may lie. Because some of the time people
think they're disagreeing and they're actually not disagreeing. When I'm talking with Ana Kasparian, and she's talking about how
corporate and government have too much power together, I'm like, "Well, you sound like a tea party." Like you and I are on
the same page about that. That sort of stuff does tend to happen a lot in discussion. I think that when discussion
gets termed debate, it's a problem. When debate gets term discussion, it's even more problematic because debate is a different thing. - And I find that your
debate and your conversation is often in good faith, you're able to steel
man on the other side. You're actually listening, you're considering the other side. The times when I see that you, venture pure destroys leftist, it's usually just like you said, the other side is doing the trolling because they didn't... I mean the people that do
criticize you for that interaction is the people that usually get destroyed are like 20 years old, and they're usually not sophisticated in any kind of degree, in terms of being able
to use logic and reason, and facts and so on. - And, that's totally fine by the way. If people wanna criticize me for speaking on college campuses, where a lot of political
conversation happens, both right and left, that's fine. I've had lots of conversations
with people on the other side of the aisle too. I've done podcasts with Sam Harris, and we've talked about atheism. Or I've done debates with Anna Kasparian, or I've done debate with Cenk Uygur, or I've had conversations
with lots of people on the other side of the aisle. In fact, I believe I'm the
only person on the right who recommends that
people listen to his shows on the other side of the aisle. I say on my show on a
fairly regular basis, that people should listen
to Positive America. Now, no one on Positive
America will ever say that somebody should listen to my show. That is verboten. That is not something that can be had. It's one of the strangeness
of our politics. It's what I've called the
happy birthday problem; which is, I have a lot of
friends who are of the left, and are publicly of the left. And, on my birthday they'll
send you a text message, "Happy birthday." But, they will never tweet happy birthday, less they be acknowledging that you were born of woman
and that this can't be allowed. So, on the Sunday Special, I've had a bevy of people who are on the other side of the aisle, a lot of them ranging
from people in Hollywood, like Jason Blum to Larry Wilmore, to Sam, to just a lot of people on the left. I think, we're in the near future probably gonna do a Sunday Special with Ro Khanna in California. The California Congress person. Very nice guy, I had him on the show. That kinda stuff is fun and interesting. But, I think that the easy way out for a clip that people don't like, is to either immediately clip the clip. They'll take a two minute clip and clip it down to 15 seconds. Where somebody insults
me and then that viral; which is, welcome to the internet. Or to say, "Well you're
only debating in colleges, "You're only talking to 20." I talked to a lot more people than that. That's just not the stuff you're watching. - You lost your cool in an interview with BBC's Andrew Neil, and you are really honest about it after; which was kind of
refreshing and enjoyable. As the internet said, "They've never seen
anyone lose an interview." So to me, honestly, it was like seeing like
Floyd Mayweather Jr. Or somebody, knock down. Can you take me through that experience? - Here's that day. That day is, I have a book released, didn't get a lot of
sleep the night before. And this is the last interview of the day, and it's an interview with BBC. I don't know anything about BBC, I don't watch BBC, I don't
know any of the hosts. So we get on the interview and it's supposed to be about the book, and the host Andrew Neil, doesn't ask virtually a single
question about the book. He just starts reading me battled tweets, which I hate. I mean, it's annoying and it's stupid, and it's the worst form of an interview. - [Lex] Yeah. - When somebody just
reads you battled tweets, especially when I've acknowledged
battled tweets before. And so, I'm going
through the list with him and this interview was solidly 20 minutes. It was a long interview. And we get to, and I make a couple of
particularly annoyed mistakes in the interview. So annoyed mistake number
one, is the ego play, There's a point in the
middle of the interview where I say, "I don't even know who you are." Which was true, I didn't know who he was. It turns out he was a very
famous person in Britain. And so you can't make that ego play. - But even if he's not famous, that's not- - It doesn't, it's a dumb thing to do and it's an ass thing to do. So saying that was more just
kind of peak in silliness. And so, that was mistake number one. - I enjoyed watching that. It was like, oh Ben is human. (hearty laughing) - Glad somebody enjoyed it. So there was that. And then, the other mistake was that I just don't
watch enough British TV. So the way that interviews are done there, are much more adversarial
than American TV. In American TV, if somebody
is adversarial with you, you assume that they're a
member of the other side. That's typically how it is. And so, I'm critiquing
some of his questions at the beginning and I thought that the critique
of some of his questions is actually fair. He was asking me about abortion, and I thought he was asking it from a way of framing the question
that wasn't accurate. And so, I assumed that he was on the left. 'Cause again, I'd never heard of him. And so, I mischaracterized him, and I apologize later for
mischaracterizing him. We finally go through the interview. It's 20 minutes, he just keeps
going with the battle tweets. And finally, I got up and
I took off the microphone. I walked out. And immediately, I knew it was a mistake. Like within 30 seconds of
the end of the interview, I knew it was a mistake. And, that's why even before
the interview came out, I believe I corrected the
record that Andrew Neil is not on the left. That's a mistake by me. And then, took the hit
for a bad interview. And so as far as, what I
wish I had done differently, I wish I'd known who he was. I wish I'd done my research. I wish that I had treated it as though there was a possibility that it was gonna be more
adversarial than it was. I think I was incautious
about the interview because it was pitched as, it's just another book interview, and it wasn't just another book interview. It was treated much more
adversarially than that. So I wish that, that's on me. I gotta research the people
who are talking to me, and watch their shows,
and learn about that. And then obviously, the kind
of gut level appeal to ego or arrogance, that a bad look, and shouldn't have done that. And losing your cool is always a bad look. - The fact that that sort
of became somewhat viral and stood out, just shows that it
happens so rarely to you. So just to look at the day
in the life of Ben Shapiro, you speak a lot, very eloquently,
about difficult topics. What goes into the research, the mental, and you always look pretty like energetic, and like you're not
exhausted by the burden, the heaviness of the topics
you're covering day after day after day after day. What goes through the
preparation mentally, diet-wise, anything like that? When do you wake up? - Okay, so I wake up
when my kids wake me up, usually that's my baby
daughter who's two and a half. She usually, we hear her on the monitor, usually about 6:15, 6:20AM. So I get up, my wife sleeps in a little bit. I go get the baby, and then my son gets up, and then my oldest daughter gets up. I have eight, six, and two. The boy's the middle child. - Is that both a source
of stress and happiness? - Oh yeah, it's the height of both, right. I mean, it's the source
of the greatest happiness. So the way that I characterize it is this, when it comes to sort of kids and life. When you're single, your boundaries of
happiness and unhappiness, you can be a zero in terms of happiness, you can be like a 10
in terms of happiness. Then, you get married and
it goes up to like a 20 and a negative 20; because your happiest
stuff is with your wife. And then, the most unhappy stuff is when something happens to your spouse, it's the worst thing in the entire world. Then, you have kids and
all limits are removed. So the best things that
have ever happened to me are things where I'm watching my kids and they're playing together and they're being wonderful
and sweet and cute, and I love them so much. And, the worst things are
when my son is screaming at me for no reason because he's being insane, and I have to deal with that. Or something bad happens
to my daughter at school or something like that. That stuff is really it. So yes, the source of
my greatest happiness, the source of my greatest stress. They get me up at about
6:15 in the morning. I feed them breakfast. I'm kind of scrolling the news; while I'm making the eggs. Just updating myself on anything that may have happened overnight. I go into the office, put on the makeup and
the wardrobe or whatever, and then I sit down and do the show. A lot of the prep is actually
done the night before because the news cycle
doesn't change all that much between kind of late at night, and in the morning. So, I can supplement in the morning. So, I do the show. - So a lot of the preparation, like thinking through what are
the big issues in the world is done the night before? - Yeah, and that's reading
pretty much all the legacy media. I rip on legacy media a lot, but that's because a lot of
what they do is really good and a lot of what they do is really bad. I cover a lot of legacy media. So that's probably covering,
Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington
Post, Boston Globe, Daily Mail. And then, I'll look over at
some of the alternative media. I'll look at my own website, Daily Wire, I'll look at Breitbart. I'll look at The Blaze. I'll look at maybe The Intercept, I'll look at a bunch of different sources and then I will look at
different clips online. So media comes in handy here, (indistinct) comes in handy
here, that sort of stuff. 'Cause my show relies very heavily on being able to play people, so you can hear them in their own words. And, that's sort of the media diet. So I sit down, I do the show and then once
I'm done with the show, I usually have between, now it's like 11:15 in the morning maybe, 'cause sometimes I'll prerecord the show. It's 11:15 in the morning, I'll go home and if my wife's available, I'll grab lunch with her. If not, then I will go and work out. I try to work out five
times a week with a trainer, something like that. And then, I will- - Just regular gym stuff? Just going to the gym? - Yeah, weights and plyometrics, and some CrossFit kind of stuff. Beneath this mild astute
lies a hulking monster, yeah. And, so I'll do that. Then, I will do reading and writing. I'm usually working on a
book at any given time. - Do you shut off the rest of the world? - Yes, I put some music in my ears. Usually Brahms or Bach, sometimes Beethoven or Mozart. Those four it's usually,
those are on rotation. - No rap? - No rap, no rap. Despite my extraordinary rendition of WAP. I'm not in fact a rap fan. - Do you still hate WAP, the song? - I will say, I do not think that it is the
peak of western civilized art. - [Lex] Okay. - I don't think that a
hundred years from now, people will be gluing their faces to a WAP and protest at the environment. - But, Brahms and the
rest will be still around? - Yes, I would assume. If people still have a
functioning prefrontal cortex in any sort of taste. - Strong words from Ben Shapiro. All right, so you got some
classical music in your ears and you're focusing. Are you at the computer
when you're writing? - Yeah, I'm at the computer, usually. We have a kind of a room
that has some sun coming in, so it's nice in there. Or I'll go up to a library
that we just completed for me. I'll go up there and I'll write and read. - Like with physical books? - Yeah, I love physical books and because I keep Sabbath. I don't use Kindle. Because when I'm reading a book, and I hit Sabbath, I have to turn off the Kindle. So that means that I have
tons and tons and tons of physical books. When we moved from Los Angeles to Florida, I had about 7,000 volumes. I had to discard probably 4,000 of them. And then, I've built that back up now. I'm probably gonna have to
go through another round, where I put them somewhere else. I tend to tab books rather
than highlighting them because I can't highlight on Sabbath. So I have the little stickers
and I put them in the book. A typical book from me, you
can see it on the book club, will be filled with tabs on the side. Things that I wanna
take notes, I actually, I've gotten a person
who I pay to go through and write down in files the quotes that I like from the book. So I have those handy. Which is a good way for me to remember what it is that I've read. 'Cause I read probably somewhere between three and five books a week. And then, in a good week five. And then, I write, I read. And then, I go pick up my
kids from school at 3:30. According to my kids, I have no job. I'm there in the mornings
until they leave for school. I pick them up from school, I hang out with them until they go to bed; which is usually 7:30 or so. I'm helping them with their homework, and I'm playing with them. And, I'm taking them on
rides in the brand new Tesla; which my son is obsessed with. And then, I put them to bed
and then I sit back down, I prep for the next day. Go through all those media sources I was talking about, compile kind of a schedule for what I want the show to look like, and run a show. It's very detail oriented. Nobody writes anything for me. I write all my own stuff. So every word that comes
outta my mouth, is my fault. And then, hopefully I have a couple hours or an hour to hang out with
my wife before we go to bed. - The words you write, do you edit a lot or does it
just come out, you're thinking? What are the key ideas I want to express? - No, I don't tend to edit a lot, I thank God I'm able to write
extraordinarily quickly. I write very, very fast. In fact, in a previous life I was. - You also speak fast, so similarly. - Yeah, exactly. And I speak in paragraphs, it's exactly the same thing. In a previous life, I was a ghost writer. So, I used to be sort of known
as a turnaround specialist in the publishing industry. There'd be somebody who came
to the publisher and says, "I have three weeks to get this book done. "I don't have a word done." And they would call me up and be like, "This person needs a book written." And so, in three weeks, I'd
knock out 60,000 words or so. - Is there something you
can say to the process that you follow to think? How you think about ideas, stuff is going on in the
world and trying to understand what is happening. What are the explanations? What are the forces behind this? Do you have a process or
just you wait for the news to give you the interpretation? - Well, I don't think
it's a formal process, but because I read... There's two ways to do it. One is sometimes, the
daily grind of the news is going to refer back to core principles that are broader and deeper. I thank God because I've read so much on so many different things of a lot of different point of views. Then, if something breaks,
and a piece of news breaks, I can immediately sort
of channel that into, in the mental Rolodex. These three big ideas that I
think are really important. And then, I can talk at length about what those ideas are and I can explicate those. And so, for example, when we were talking about
Musk taking over Twitter before and I immediately
go to the history of media. That's me tying it into a broader theme. - [Lex] Yeah. - And, I do that, I would
say fairly frequently. We're talking about, say
subsidization of industry, and I can immediately tie that into, okay, what's the history of subsidization in the United States, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson and forward through
FDR's industrial policy. And, how does that tie into sort of broader economic
policy internationally? It allows me to tie into bigger themes because what I tend to
read is mostly not news. What I tend to read is mostly books. I would say most of my media diet is actually not the stuff. Like, that's the icing on the cake. But, the actual cake is the
hundreds of pages in history, econ, geography, social science, that I'm reading every week. And so, that sort of stuff allows me to think more deeply about these things. So that's one way of doing it. The other way of doing it is,
Russia breaks in the news. I don't know anything about Russia. I immediately go and I purchase
five books about Russia, and I read all of them. The fortunate thing for me, and the unfortunate thing about the world is you read two books on a subject. You are now considered by the media, an expert on the subject. That's sad and shallow. But, that is the way that it is. The good news for me is that my job isn't to be a full expert
on any of these subjects. I don't claim to be. I'm not a Russia expert. I know enough on Russia
to be able to understand when people talk about Russia, what the system looks like,
how it works, and all of that. And then, to explicate
that for the common man; which a lot of people who are infused with the expertise can't really do. If you're so deep in the weeds, that you're like a full on
academic expert on a thing; sometimes it's hard to translate that over to a massive audience;
which is really my job. - Well, I think it can actually, it's funny with the two books, you can actually get a
pretty deep understanding if you read and also
think deeply about it. It allows you to approach a
thing from first principles. A lot of times if you're
a quote unquote expert, you get carried away by the
momentum of what the field has been thinking about
versus like stepping back, "All right, what is really going on?" The challenge is to pick
the right two books. - Right, usually what I'll try to find is somebody who knows
the topic pretty well and have them recommend, or a couple people, and
have them recommend books. So a couple years ago I
knew nothing about Bitcoin. I was at a conference
and a couple of people who you've had on your show, actually, were there and I asked them, "Gimme your top three books on Bitcoin." And so then, I went and I read
like nine books on Bitcoin. And so, if you're nine books on Bitcoin, you at least know enough to get by. - [Lex] Yeah. - And so, I can actually
explain what Bitcoin is and why it works, or why it doesn't work in some cases, and what's happening in
the markets that way. So that's very, very helpful. - Well, Putin as an example. That's a difficult one to
find the right books on. I think The New Czar is the one I read, where it was the most objective. - One I read, I think, about Putin was, it was one called Strong Man. And, it was very highly critical of Putin, but it gave a good background
on him at the very least. - Yeah, so I'm very
skeptical sort of things that are very critical of Putin because it feels like
there's activism injected into the history. Like, the way The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich is written about Hitler, I like because there's almost
not a criticism of Hitler. It's a description of
Hitler, which is very, it's easier to do about
a historical figure; which with William Shirer with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it's impressive because
he lived through it. But, it's very tough to
find objective descriptions about the history of the
man and a country of Putin, of Zelensky, of any difficult, Trump was the same. And, I feel like- - That's the hero
villain archetype, right? - [Lex] Yeah. - It's like, either
somebody's completely a hero or completely a villain. And, the truth is pretty much
no one is completely a hero or completely a villain. People, in fact, I'm not sure that I love
descriptions of people as heroes or villains, generally. I think that people
tend to do heroic things or do villainous things. In the same way that I'm not sure I love descriptions of people as a genius. My dad used to say this
when I was growing up, he used to say he didn't believe
that there were geniuses. He said he believed that there
were people with a genius for something because people, yes, there are people who have very high IQ and we call them geniuses, but does that mean that
they're good at EQ stuff? Not necessarily, but there are people who
are geniuses at EQ stuff. In other words, it would be more specific to
say that somebody's a genius at engineering than to
say just broad spectrum, they're a genius. And that, does avoid
the problem of thinking that they're good at something
that they're not good at. It's a little more specific. - So because you read a lot of books, can you look back, and it's
always a tough question, 'cause so many, it's
like your favorite song, but are there books that have
been influential in your life that are impacting your thinking? Or maybe ones you go back to that still carry insight for you? - The Federalist Paper is a big one in terms of sort of how
American politics works. The first econ book that
I thought was really great 'cause it was written for teenagers, essentially, is one called Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. It's like 150 pages. I recommend it to everybody
sort of 15 and up. It's easier than say
Thomas Sowell's Basic Econ; which is four or 500 pages. - And it's looking what,
at like macroeconomics, microeconomics, that kind of stuff? - Macro, macro. And, then, there's a great book by Carl Trueman called Rise and
Triumph for the Modern Self, which I think is the best
book in the last 10 years. That's been sort of impactful
on some of the thoughts I've been having lately. - What's the key idea in there? - The key idea is that
we've shifted the nature of how identity is done in the West, from how it was historically done. That basically, for nearly
all of human history, the way that we identify
as human beings is as a mix of our biological drives, and then how that interacts with the social institutions around us. And so, when you're a child, you're a bunch of unfettered
biological drives, and it's your parents'
job to civilize you. And, civilize you literally means bring you
into civilization, right. You learn the rules of the road, you learn how to integrate
into institutions that already exist and
are designed to shape you. And it's how you interact
with those institutions that makes you, you. It's not just a set of biological drives. And then, in the modern world, we've really driven toward
the idea that what we are is how we feel on the inside without reference to the outside world. And it's the job of the outside world to celebrate and reflect what we think about
ourselves on the inside. And so, what that means
is that we are driven now toward fighting institutions 'cause institutions are in positions. So everything around us,
societal institutions, these are things that
are crimping our style. They're making us not feel
the way that we wanna feel. And, if we just destroy those things, then we'll be freer and more liberated. It's, I think, much deeper model of how to think about
why our social politics particular are moving in
a particular direction. Is that a ground shift has happened in how people think about themselves. And, this has had some somewhat
kind of shocking effect in terms of social politics. - So there's negative
consequences in your view of that. But, is there also a positive
consequence of more power, more agency to the individual? - I think that you can make the argument that institutions were
weighing too heavily in how people form their identity. But, I think that what we've done is gone significantly too
far on the other side. We basically decided to
blow up the institutions in favor of unfettered
feeling slash identity. And I think that that is
not only a large mistake, I think it's gonna have dire
ramifications for everything from suicidal ideation to
institutional longevity in politics and in society more broadly. - So speaking about the nature of self, you've been an outspoken
proponent of pro-life. Can we start by you trying to steel man, the case for pro-choice? That abortion is not murder, and a woman's right to choose is a fundamental human right, freedom. - So I think that the
only way to steel man, the pro-choice case is to, and
be ideologically consistent, is to suggest that there
is no interest in the life of the unborn, that counter weighs at
all, freedom of choice. So, what that means is we
can take the full example, we can sort of the partial example. If we take the full example. What that would mean is that
up until point of birth; which is sort of the democratic
party platform position, that a woman's right to
choose ought to extend for any reason whatsoever
up to point of birth. The only way to argue that
is that bodily autonomy is the only factor. There is no countervailing factor that would ever outweigh bodily autonomy. That would be the strongest
version of the argument. Another version of that argument
would be that the reason that bodily autonomy
ought to weigh so heavily is because women can't be the equals of men, if the vicissitudes of biology are allowed to decide their futures. If pregnancy changes women in a way that it doesn't change men, it's a form of sex
discrimination for women to ever have to go through with pregnancy; which is an argument that was made by Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, kind of. Those are the arguments. The kind of softer version is the more, I would say emotionally resonant
version of the argument; which is that bodily
autonomy ought to outweigh the interests of the
fetus up till point x. And then, people have different feelings about what point X looks like. Is it up to the point of viability? Is it up to the point of the heartbeat? Is it up to 12 weeks or 15 weeks? And, that really is where
the American public is. Where the American public
is broadly speaking, not state by state, where there are various,
really varied opinions. But, like broadly speaking, it seems like the American
public by polling data wants somewhere between a 12 and 15 week abortion restriction. And, they believe that
up until 12 or 15 weeks, there's not enough there
for, to not be specific, but to be kind of how
people feel about it, to outweigh a woman's bodily autonomy. And then, beyond that point, then there's enough of
an interest in the life of the pre-born child,
it's developed enough. Then now, we care about it enough that it outweighs a
woman's bodily autonomy. - What's the strongest case
for pro-life in your mind? - I mean, the strongest case for pro-life is that from conception, a human life has been created. It is a human life with potential. That human life potential with potential, now has an independent
interest in its own existence. - If I may just ask a quick question. So conception is when a
sperm fertilizes an egg? - Yes. - Okay, just to to clarify
the biological beginning of what conception means. - I mean, because that is
the beginning of human life. Now, there are other standards that people have drawn. Some people say
implantation in the uterus, some people will suggest viability, some brain development
or heart development. But, the clear dividing line between a human life exists and a human life does not exist, is the biological creation
of an independent human life with own DNA strands and et cetera; which happens at conception. Once you acknowledge that there is that independent
human life with potential, and I keep calling it that because people sometimes
say potential human life, it's not a potential human life. It's a human life that
is not developed yet to the full extent that it will develop. Once you say that, and once you say that
it has its own interest. Now, the burden of proof is to explain why bodily autonomy ought to allow for the snuffing out of that human life. If we believe that human
life ought not to be killed for quote unquote, no good reason, you have to come up with a good reason. The burden of proof is now shifted. Now, we'll find people who will say, "Well, the good reason is that "It's not sufficiently
developed to outweigh "The mental trauma or emotional trauma "That a woman goes through. "If, for example, she was
raped or the victim of incest." Okay, and that is a fairly
emotionally resonant argument, but it's not necessarily dispositive. You can make the argument that just because something horrific and horrible happened to a woman, does not rob the human life
of its interest in life. One of the big problems
in trying to draw any line for the self-interest of life, in the human life is that
it's very difficult to draw any other line that doesn't
seem somewhat arbitrary. You say that independent heartbeat, people have pacemakers. If you say brain function, people have various levels
of brain function as adults. If you say viability, babies are not viable after they're born. If I left a newborn baby on a table, and did not take care of it, it would be dead in two days. So, once you start getting
into sort of these lines, it starts to get very fuzzy very quickly. And so, if you're looking
for sort of a bright line moral rule, that would be
the bright line moral rule. And, that's sort of the pro-life case. - Well, there's still mysterious difficult scientific questions
of things like consciousness. - So what does the
question of consciousness, how does it come into
play into this debate? - So I don't believe that consciousness is the sole criterion by which we judge the
self-interest in human life. So we are unconscious a good
deal of our lives, right? That does not, we will be conscious again. When you're unconscious,
when you're asleep, for example, presumably your
life is still worth living. If somebody came in and killed you, that'd be a serious moral
quandary at the very least. - But the birth of consciousness, the lighting up of the flame, the initial lighting up of the flame, there does seem to be
something special about that. And, it's a mystery of when that happens. - Well, I mean, Peter
Singer makes the case that basically
self-consciousness doesn't exist until you're two and a half. He says that even
infanticide should be okay. He's the bioethicist over at Princeton. You get into some real dicey territory once you get into consciousness. Also, the truth is that
consciousness is more of a spectrum than it is a dividing line. Meaning, that there are
people with various degrees of brain function. We don't actually know
how conscious they are. And you can get into eugenic
territory pretty quickly, when we start dividing between
lives that are worth living based on levels of consciousness, and lives that are not worth living based on levels of consciousness. - Do you find it, the aspect of women's freedom, do you feel the tension
between that ability to choose the trajectory of your own life versus the rights of the unborn child? - In one situation, yes. In one situation, no. If you've had sex with
a person voluntarily, and as a product of that,
you are now pregnant, no. You've taken an action with a
perfectly predictable result. Even if you took birth control. This is the way that human
beings have procreated for literally all of human existence. And by the way, also how all mammals appropriate. So the idea that this was an
entirely unforeseen consequence of your activity, I find, I have less sympathy for you in that particular situation because you could have made decisions that would not lead you to
this particular impasse. In fact, this used to be
the basis of marriage. Was when we were a, apparently
more terrible society, we used to say that people should wait until they get married to have sex, a position that I still hold. And, the reason for that was because then if you have
sex and you produce a child, then the child will grow up in a two parent family with stability. So, not a ton of sympathy there. When it comes to rape and incest, obviously heavy, heavy sympathy. And so, that's why I think you
see, statistically speaking, a huge percentage of Americans, including many pro-life Americans, people who consider themselves pro-life, would consider exceptions
for rape and incest. One of the sort of dishonest
things that I think happens in abortion debates is
arguing from the fringes. This tends to happen a lot, is pro-choice activists will
argue from rape and incest to the other 99.8% of abortions. Or you'll see people on
the pro-life side argue from partial birth abortion to all of abortion that
you actually have to take on sort of the mainstream case, and then decide whether or
not that's acceptable or not. - But to you, the exception, just ethically without generalizing it, that is a valid ethically exception. - I don't hold that there
should be an exception for rape or incest because again, I hold by the bright line
rule that once a human life with potential exists, then it has its own interest
in life that cannot be curbed by your self-interest. The only exception that I hold by is, the same exception that
literally all pro-lifers hold by; which is the life of the
mother is put in danger. - Such a tough, tough topic. 'Cause if you believe
that that's the line, then we're committing mass murder. - Well, or at least mass killing. So I would say that murder
typically requires a level of mens rea that may be absent and in many cases of abortion. Because the usual follow on question is, "Well if to murder, why
don't prosecute the woman?" And the answer is because
the vast majority of people who are having abortions,
don't actually believe that they're killing a person. They have a very different view of what is exactly happening. I would say that there are
all sorts of interesting hypotheticals that come in to play when it comes to abortion. And you can play them any which way. But, let's put it this way, there are gradations of wrongs. I don't think that all abortions
are equally blameworthy. Even if I would ban virtually all of them. I think that there are
mitigating circumstances that make, while being wrong, some abortions less morally
blameworthy than others. I think that, I can admit a difference between killing a two week old embryo in the womb, and stabbing a seven year old in the face. I can recognize all
that while still saying, I think that it would be wrong
to terminate a pregnancy. - Do you think the
question when life begins, which I think is a fascinating question, is a question of science
or a question of religion? - I mean when life begins,
is a question of science. When that life becomes
valuable enough for people to wanna protect it is
is gonna be a question that is beyond science. Science doesn't have moral judgements to make about the value of human life. This is one of the problems that, Sam Harrison and I have had
this argument many times, and it's always kind of interesting, 'cause Sam is of the opinion that you can get to ought from is. That science says "Is,
therefore we can learn ought." So human flourishing is the goal of life. And I always say to him, I don't see where you get that
from evolutionary biology. You can assume it, just say you're assuming it, but don't pretend that
that is a conclusion that you can draw straight from biological reality itself because
obviously that doesn't exist in the animal world, for example. Nobody assumes the innate
value of every ant. - I think I know your answer to this, but, let's test it 'cause I think you're going to be wrong. (hearty laughing) So there's a robot behind you. Do you think there will
be a time in the future when it will be unethical and illegal to kill a robot, because they will have sentience? My guess is you would say, "No, Lex, 'cause there's
a fundamental difference "Between humans and robots." And I just want to get you on record 'cause I think you'll be wrong. - It depends on the level of development I would assume of the robots. You're assuming a complexity in the robots that eventually imitates
what we in the religious life would call the human soul. - [Lex] Yes. - The ability to choose
freely, for example. - [Lex] Yes. - Which I believe is sort of the capacity for human beings. - The ability to suffer. - Yeah, if all of that could be proved and not programmed, meaning the freely willed
capacity of a machine to do X, Y, or Z. - You, could not pinpoint exactly where it happens in the program. - Right. - [Lex] Yeah. - It's not deterministic. - [Lex] Yeah. - Then it would raise serious
moral issues, for sure. I'm not sure I know to
answer to that question. - Are you afraid of that time? - I'm not sure I'm afraid of that time. I mean, any more than
I'd be afraid if aliens arrived in the world, and had these characteristics. - Well, there's just a
lot of moral complexities and they don't necessarily have
to be in the physical space. They can be in the digital space. There's an increased
sophistication and number of bots on the internet, including on Twitter. As they become more and more intelligent, there's going to be serious questions about what is our moral duty to protect ones that have or claim to have an identity. - And that'll be really interesting. Actually what I'm afraid of
is the opposite happening, meaning that people, the worst that should happen
is that we develop robots so sophisticated that they
appear to have free will and then we treat them with human dignity. - [Lex] Yeah. - That should be the worst that happens. What I'm afraid of is
the opposite, is that, if we're talking about this
particular hypothetical, that we develop robots that have all of these apparent abilities and then we dehumanize them, which leads us to also
dehumanize the other humans around us; which you could
easily see happening. And the devaluation of
life to the point where it doesn't really matter. I mean people have always treated, unfortunately, newly discovered
other humans this way. I don't think there's
actually a new problem. I think it's a pretty old problem. It'll just be interesting
when it's made of human hands. - Yeah, it's an opportunity to either celebrate humanity or to bring out the worst in humanity. The derision that naturally happens, like you said with pointing out the other, Let me ask you about climate change. Let's go from the meme to the profound philosophy. The meme is, there's a clip of you
talking about climate change and saying that- - Ah, the Aquaman meme. - You said that, "For
the sake of argument, "And if the water level
arises five to 10 feet "In the next hundred years, "People will just sell
their homes and move." And then, the meme is sell to who? Can you argue both sides of that? - The argument that they're
making as a straw man, the argument that I'm making is over time. I don't mean that if a tsunami
is about to hit your house, you can list it on eBay. That's not what I mean, obviously. What I mean is that human beings have an extraordinary ability to adapt. It's actually our best quality. And that as water levels rise, real estate prices in
those areas tends to fall. That over time people tend
to abandon those areas. They tend to leave, they tend to, right now, sell their houses. And then, they tend to move. And eventually, those
houses will be worthless and you won't have anybody to sell to. But presumably not that many people will be living there by that point, which is one of the reasons
why the price would be low because there's no demand. - So it's over a hundred years. So all of these price dynamics
are very gradual relative to the other price dynamics. - Correct, that's why the joke of it, of course is that like
I'm saying that tomorrow there's a tsunami on your
so step and you're like, "Oh, Bob will buy my house." Bob ain't gonna buy your house. Like we all get that. But it's a funny meme, I'll admit, I laughed at. - How's your view on climate change, the human contribution to climate change? What should we do in
terms of policy to respond to climate change? How has that changed over the years? - I would say the truth is for years and years, I've believed that climate
change was a reality and that anthropogenic
climate change is a reality. I don't argue with the IPCC estimates. I know climatologists at
places like MIT or Caltech, and they know this stuff better than I do. The notion that climate
change is just not happening or that human beings have not
contributed to climate change, I find doubtful. The question is to what extent
human beings are contributing to climate change, that 50%, is it 70%? Is it 90%? I think there's a little bit
more play in the joints there, so it's not totally clear. The one thing I do know, and this I know with factual accuracy, is that all of the measures that are currently being proposed are
unworkable and will not happen. So when people say, Paris Climate Accords, even if those were imposed, you're talking about lowering
the potential trajectory of climate change by a
fraction of a degree. If you're talking about the Green New Deal, net zero by 2050, the carbon is up there in the
air and the climate change is going to happen. Also, you're assuming that geopolitical dynamics don't exist. Everybody's gonna magically
get on the same page and we're all gonna be
imposing massive carbon taxes to get to net zero by 2050. I mean like hundreds of times higher than they currently are. And that's not me saying that,
that's Klaus Schwab saying this at the World Economic Forum; who's a big advocate of
exactly this sort of policy. And the reality is that
we're gonna have to accept that at least 1.5 degrees
Celsius of climate change is baked into the cake by
the end of the century. Again, not me talking William Nordhaus, the economist who just won the Nobel Prize in this stuff, talking. And so, what that suggests to
me is what we've always known human beings are crap at mitigation and excellent in adaptation. We are very bad at
mitigating our own fault. We are very good at adapting
to the problems as they exist. Which means that all of
the estimates that billions will die, that there
will be mass starvation, that we'll see the migration
in just a few years of hundreds of millions of
people, those are wrong. What you'll see is a
gradual change of living. People will move away from
areas that are inundated on the coast. You'll see people building sea walls, you'll see people adapting new
technologies to suck carbon out of the air. You'll see geoengineering, this is the sort of stuff
that we should be focused on and the sort of bizarre focus on what if we just keep tossing hundreds of billions of
dollars at the same three technologies over and over in the hopes that if we subsidize it, this will magically
make it more efficient. I've seen no evidence whatsoever that that is going to be the
way that we get ourselves out of this, necessity
being the mother invention. I think human beings will
adapt because we have adapted and we'll continue to adapt. - So to the degree we invest
in the threat of this, it should be into policies
that help with the adaptation versus the mitigation? - Right, sea walls, geoengineering, developing technology to
suck carbon out of the air. Again, if I thought that
there was more sort of hope for the green technologies
currently in play, than subsidization of those technologies, I might be a little bit more for, but I haven't seen tremendous progress over the course of the last 30 years in the reliability of,
for example, wind energy. Or the ability to store solar
energy to the extent necessary to actually power a grid. - What's your thoughts on nuclear energy? - Nuclear energy is great. Nuclear energy is a
proven source of energy and we should be radically
extending the use of nuclear energy. To me, honestly, this is
like a litmus test question as to whether you take climate change seriously. If you're on right or left
and you take climate change seriously, you should be
in favor of nuclear energy. If you're not, I know that you're just, you have other priorities. - Yeah, the fascinating thing about the climate change
debate is the dynamics of the fear mongering
over the past few decades, 'cause some of the nuclear energy was tied up into that somehow. There's a lot of fear
about nuclear energy. It seems like there's a
lot of social phenomena, social dynamics involved versus
dealing with just science. It's interesting to watch
and if, on my darker days, it makes me cynical about
our ability to use reason and science to deal with
the threats of the world. - I think that our ability
to use reason and science to deal with threats of the world, is almost a timeframe question. So I think, we're very bad
at looking down the road and saying, because people
can't handle, for example, even things like compound interest. - [Lex] Yeah. - Right, the idea that if I
put a dollar in the bank today, that 15 years from now, that's gonna be worth a
lot more than a dollar. People can't actually see that. And so the idea of let's foresee
a problem then we'll deal with it right now, as opposed to 30 years down the road. Typically, we let the problem happen and then we solve it, and it's bloodier and worse
than it would've been, if we had solved it 30 years ago. But, it is in fact effective
and sometimes it turns out the solution that we're proposing 30 years in advance is not effective. And that, can be a major problem as well. - Well that's then to steel man, the case for fear mongering,
for irrational fear mongering, we need to be scared shitless in order for us to do anything. I'm generally against that. But, maybe on a population scale, maybe some of that is
necessary for us to respond appropriate to long-term threats. We should be scared shitless. - But, I don't think think that we can actually do that though. First of all, platonic lives are generally bad. And then second of all, I don't think that we actually
have the capacity to do this. I think that the people who are, the sort of elites of our
society who get together in rooms and talk about this sort of stuff, and I've been in some of those meetings. At my synagogues Friday nights, actually no, but... - I was gonna make the
joke, but I'm glad you did. - Yeah, I've been in
rooms, Davos like rooms. And, when people discuss
these sorts of topics, and they're like, "What if we just tell people
that it's gonna be a disaster "With tsunamis and the
day after tomorrow?" It's like, you guys don't have that power. You don't, and by the way, you dramatically undercut your
own power because of COVID to do this sort of stuff. Because a lot of the, what if we scare the
living hell out of you to the point where you
stay in your own house for two years, and we tell you you can't
send your kids to school, and then we tell you that the vaccine is gonna prevent transmission, and then we also tell you that
we need to spend $7 trillion in one year, and it won't have any inflationary effect. And it turns out, you're wrong on literally
all of those things. The last two years have
done more to undermine institutional trust than any time in probably American history. It's pretty, pretty amazing. - Yeah, I tend to agree with
the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Let me ask you, back
to the question of God in a big ridiculous question. Who's God? - Who is God? I'm gonna use sort of
the Aquinas formulation of what God is. That, if there is a cause of
all things not physical things, if there is a cause underlying
the reason of the universe, then that is the thing we call God. So not a big guy in the
sky with the beard,. He is the force underlying
the logic of the universe, if there is a logic to the universe. And He is the creator in the
Judea view of that universe. And He, does have an interest in us living in accordance with
the laws of the universe that, if you're a religious
Jew, are encoded in the Torah. But, if you're not religious Jew, it would be encoded in the natural law by sort of Catholic theology. - Why do you think God
created the universe or as is popularly asked, what do you think is
the meaning behind it? What's the meaning of life? - What's the meaning of life? So I think that the meaning of life is to fulfill what God made you to do. And that is a series of roles. I think that human beings, and here you have to look
to sort of human nature rather than looking kind
of to big questions. I've evolved something that I've really been working on. I'm writing a book about this actually, that I call colloquially role theory. And basically the idea is
that the way that we interact with the world is through
a series of roles. And those are also the
things we find most important and most implementable. There's sort of virtue ethics, which suggests that if we act
in accordance with virtue, like Aristotle, then we will be living the most fulfilled and meaningful life. And then, you have sort
of deontological ethics, continent ethics, that
it's a rule-based ethic. You follow the rules, then you'll then you'll
find the meaning of life. And then, what I'm proposing
is that there's something that I would call role ethics, which is there are a series of roles that we play across our lives; which are also the things that we tend to put on our tombstones, and find the most meaningful. So when you go to a cemetery, you can see what people
found the most meaningful because it's the stuff
they put on the stone that has like four words on it. Like beloved father, beloved
mother, sister, brother, you might have a job once in a while; a creator, a religious person. These are all roles that
have existed across societies and across humanity. And those are the things where
we actually find meaning. The way that we navigate
those roles brings us meaning. And I think that God created
us in order to fulfill those roles for purposes that I
can't begin to understand 'cause I ain't him. And, the more we recognize those roles, and the more we live those roles, and then we can express
freedom within those roles. I think that liberty exists
inside each of those roles, and that's what makes all of our lives different and fun. We all parent in different ways, but being a parent is a meaningful role. We all have spouses, but you know, how you interact with that relationship is what makes your life
meaningful and interesting. That is what we are put on earth to do. And, if we perform those roles properly, and those roles do include
things like being a creator, like we have a creative
instinct as human beings, being a creator, being an innovator, being a defender of your family, being somebody who builds up, being a social member of your community; which is something that we're built to do. If we fulfill those roles properly, then we will have made
the world a better place then we inherited it. And, we'll also have had
the joy of experiencing the sort of flow they
talk about in psychology. Where, when you engage in these roles, you actually do feel a flow. - So these roles are a fundamental part of the human condition. - [Ben] Yes. - So, the book you're working on is constructing a system
to help us understand. - It's looking at, let's
assume that all that's true. The real question in the
book is how do you construct a flourishing and useful
society in politics? - Ah, so a society level. If this is our understanding
of a human being, how do we construct a good society? - Right, exactly, because
I think that a lot of political theory is right now based in either J.S. Mill kind of thought, which is all that a good politics does, allows you wave your hand around until you hit somebody in the face. Or a Rawlsian thought, which is what if we constructed society in order to achieve the most
for the least, essentially. What if we constructed society
around what actually makes humans the most fulfilled? And that is the fulfillment
of these particular roles. And where does liberty come into that? How do you avoid the idea
of a tyranny in that? "You have to be a mother,
you must be a father, "You must be a..." Where does freedom come into that? Can you reject those roles
totally as a society and be okay? The answer probably is not. So you need a society
that actually promotes and protects those roles, but also protects the
freedom inside those roles. And that raises a more
fundamental question of what exactly liberty is for. And I think that both
the right and the left actually tend to make a mistake
when they discuss liberty. The left tends to think that
liberty is an ultimate good, that simple choice makes a bad thing good, which is not true. And I think the right talks about liberty in almost the same terms sometimes. And, I think that's not true either. The question is whether
liberty is of inherent value or instrumental value. Is liberty good in and of
itself or is liberty good because it allows you
to achieve X, Y or Z? And, I've thought about this one a lot, and I tend to come down on
the latter side of the aisle. I mean this is, you asked me areas where I moved, this may be an area where I've moved. Is that I think when you think
more shallowly about politics or maybe more quickly because
this is how we talk in America is about liberties and rights. We tend to think that the right is what make, not like
the political right, rights make things good, liberties make things good. The question really is what are those rights and liberties for? - [Lex] Yeah. - Now, you have to be careful, so that that doesn't shade into tyranny. You can only have liberty to do the thing that I say that you can do. But, there have to be spheres
of liberty that are roiling and interesting and filled with debate, but without threatening
the chief institutions that surround those liberties. Because if you destroy the institutions, liberties will go too. If you knock down the
pillars of the society, the liberties that are
on top of those pillars are going to collapse. And, I think if people
are feeling as though we're on the verge tyranny,
I think that's why. - This is fascinating by the way. It's an instrumental
perspective on liberty that's gonna give me a lot to think about. Let me ask a personal question. Was there ever a time that
you had a crisis of faith, where you questioned your belief in God? - Sure, and I would, less call it a crisis of faith, and an ongoing question of faith; which I think is, I hope most religious people. The word Israel, right, in Hebrew, Israel means to struggle with God. That's literally what the word means. And so, the idea of struggling with God. Where if you're Jewish or Bene Israel, the idea of struggling
with God I think is endemic to the human condition. If you understand what God's doing, then I think you're wrong. And, if you think that that
question doesn't matter, then I think you're also wrong. I think that God is a
very necessary hypothesis. - So struggle, the
struggle with God is life. That is the process of life? - That's right, because
you're never gonna get to that answer otherwise your God, and you aren't. - Why does God allow cruelty
and suffering in the world? One of the tough questions. - So we're going deep here. There's two types of
cruelty and suffering. So if we're talking about
human cruelty and suffering, because God does not
intervene to prevent people from exercising their free will because to do so would be
to deprive human beings of the choice that makes them human. This is the sin of the
garden of Eden, basically. Is that God could make you an angel, in which case you wouldn't have the choice to do the wrong thing. But, so long as we are going
to allow for cause and effect in a universe shaped by your choice, cruelty and evil are going to exist. And then, there's the question
of just the natural cruelty and vicissitudes of life. And, the answer there is I
think that God obscures himself. I think that if God were to
appear in all of his glory to people on a regular basis, I think that would make faith, you wouldn't need it. There'd be no such thing as faith. It would just be reality. Nobody has to prove to you
that the sun rises every day. But, if God is to allow us
the choice to believe in Him, which is the ultimate choice
from a religious point of view, then He's gonna have to
obscure himself behind tragedy and horror and all those other things. I mean, this is a fairly well
known capitalistic concept called tzimtzum in Judaism; which is the idea that when
God created the universe, He sort of withdrew in order to make space for all of these things to happen. - So God doesn't have a
instrumental perspective on liberty? - Right, in a chief sense, He does because the best use of liberty is going to be belief in Him. And you can misuse your liberty, right? There will be consequences if you believe in an afterlife or if you believe in sort of
a generalized better version of life led by faith, then
liberty does have a purpose. But, He also believes that
you have to give people, from a cosmic perspective, the liberty to do wrong
without threatening all the institutions of society. I mean, that's why it
does say in the Bible that if man sheds blood by man, shall his blood be shed, right. That there are punishments, that are in biblical
thought for doing things that are wrong. - So for a human being who
lacks the faith in God. So if you're an atheist, can
you still be a good person? - Of course, 100%. And there are a lot of religious people who are crappy people. - How do I understand that tension? - Well, from a religious perspective, what you would say is that it
is perfectly plausible to live in accordance with a set
of rules that don't damage other people without believing in God. You just might be understanding the reason for doing that wrong, is what
a religious person would say. This is the conversation,
again, that I had with Sam. Basically, is you and I
agree, I said this to Sam, "You and I agree nearly everything "When it comes to morality. "Like we probably disagree
on 15 to 20% of things. "The other 80% is because you grew up "In a Judeo Christian society and so do I. "And we grew up 10 miles from each other, "Around the turn of the millennium." So there's that. So you can perfectly well be an atheist living a good moral decent life because you can live a
good moral decent life with regard to other people without believing in God. I don't think you can
build a society on that because I think that that relies on the sort of goodness of mankind. Natural goodness of mankind. I don't believe in the
natural goodness of mankind. - [Lex] You don't? - No, I believe that man was created both sinful and with the capacity for sin, and the capacity for good. - But, if you let them
be on their own, doesn't- - Without social
institutions to shape them, I think that that's very
likely to go poorly. - Oh, interesting. Well, we came to something we
disagree on, but that may be, that might reflect itself in our approach to Twitter as well. (hearty laughing) I think if humans are left on their own, they tend towards good. They definitely have the
capacity for good and evil. But, when left on their own, I tend to believe they're good. - I think they might be good with limits. What I mean by that is
that what the evidence I think tends to show is that human beings are quite tribal. So what you'll end up with
is people who are good with their immediate family, and maybe their immediate neighbors. And, then when they're
threatened by an outside tribe, then they kill everyone. Which is sort of the
history of civilization in the pre-civilizational era; which was a very violent time. Pre-civilizational era was quite violent. - Do you think on the topic of tribalism in our modern world, what are the pros and cons of tribes? Is that something where we should try to
outgrow as a civilization? - I don't think it's
ever gonna be possible to fully outgrow tribalism. I think it's a natural human condition to want to be with
people who think like you or have a common set of beliefs. And, I think trying to obliterate that in the name of a universalism, likely leads to utopian results that have devastating consequences. Utopian sort of universalism
has been failing every time it's tried, whether
you're talking about now it seems to be sort of
a liberal universalism; which is being rejected
by a huge number of people around the world in
various different cultures. Or you're talking about
religious universalism, which typically comes
with religious tyranny or they're talking about communistic or Nazistic sort of universalism, which comes with mass slaughter. So this is, universalism,
I'm not a believer in. I think that you have some values that are fairly limited,
that all human beings should hold in common,
and that's pretty much it. I think that everybody
should have the ability to join with their own culture. I think how we define
tribes is a different thing. So I think that tribes
should not be defined by innate physical
characteristics, for example. Because I think that, thank God, as a civilization we've outgrown that. And I think that that is a
childish way to view the world. And, all the tall people aren't a tribe. All the black people aren't, all the white people aren't a tribe. - So the tribes should
be formed over ideas versus physical characteristic? - That's right, which is why, actually to go back to
sort of the beginning of the conversation when it comes to Jews, I'm not a big believer in ethnic Judaism. As a person who takes Judaism seriously. Judaism is more to me than
you were born with a last name like Berg or Stein. And so I- - Hitler would disagree with you. - He would disagree with me. But that's 'cause he was a tribalist. Who thought in racial terms. - So maybe robots will help
us see humans as one tribe, maybe that, as long as- - This is Reagan's idea, right? Reagan said, "Well, if
there's an alien invasion, "Then we'll all be on the same side. "So I'll go over to the Soviets
and we'll talk about it." - There's some deep truth to that. What does it mean to be a good man? The various role that
a human being takes on in this role theory that
you've spoken about. What does it mean to be good? - It means to perform, now I will do Aristotle. It means to perform the function well. What Aristotle says is the
good, is not like moral good, moral evil, in the way that
we tend to think about it. He meant that a good cup holds liquid, a good spoon holds soup. It means that, a thing that is broken can't hold those things, right? So the idea of being a good
person means that you are fulfilling the function
for which you were made. It's a teleological view of humanity. So if you're a good father, this means that you are bringing
up your child in durable values that is going to
bring them up healthy, capable of protecting
themselves and passing on the traditional wisdom of the ages to future generations; while allowing for the
capacity for innovation. That'd be being a good father. Being a good spouse would
mean protecting and unifying with your spouse and
building a safe family, and a place to raise children. Being a good citizen of your community means protecting the fellow
citizens of your community; while incentivizing them
to build for themselves. And, it becomes actually much
easier to think of how to, this is why I like the role
theory because it's very hard, since in sort of in virtue theory, to say be generous. How does that manifest? I don't know. I don't know what that looks like. Sometimes being generous
might being not generous to other people. When Aristotle says that
you should be benevolent, what does that mean? This is very vague. When I say be a good dad, most people sort of have
a gut level understanding of what it means to be a good dad. And mostly, they have a
gut level understanding of what it means to be a really bad dad. And so, what it means to be a
good man is to fulfill those roles as many of them as you can, properly and at full function. And that's a very hard job. And I've said before that, because I engage a lot with
the public and all of this, the word great comes up a lot. What is it to be a great leader? What is it to be a great person? And I've always said to people, it's actually fairly easy to be great. It's very difficult to be good. There are a lot of very great
people, who are not very good, and they're not a lot of good people. And most of them, frankly, most good people die mourned by their family and friends. And two generations
later, they're forgotten. But, those are the people who
incrementally move the ball forward in the world sometimes
much more than the people who are considered great. - Understand the role in your
life that involves being a cup and be damn good at it. - Exactly, that's right. - [Lex] Hold the soup, it's very- - Jordan Peterson. - Yeah, it's like lobster
with Jordan Peterson. - [Ben] Exactly, exactly. I think people quote
you for years and years to come on that. What advice would you give, a lot of young people look up to you, what advice, despite
their better judgment. No, I'm just kidding.
(hearty laughing) Only kidding, only kidding. They seriously look up to
you and draw inspiration from your ideas, from your bold thinking. What advice would you give to them? How to live a life worth living? How to have a career they can be proud of and
everything like that? - Live out the values that you think are really important and seek those values in others, would be the first piece of advice. Second piece of advice, don't go on Twitter until you're 26. - Why 26? - Because your brain is fully
developed at that point. As I said early on, I was on social media and writing columns from the time I was 17. It was a great opportunity. And as it turns out, a great temptation to say
enormous numbers of stupid things. When you're young, you're kind of trying out ideas and you're putting them on, you're taking them off. And, social media
permenatizes those things and engraves them in stone, and then that's used against
you for the rest of your life. So I tell young people this all the time, if you wanna be on social
media, be on social media, but don't post, watch. If you wanna take in
information, more importantly, you should read books. As far as other advice, I'd say engage in your community. There's no substitute for
engaging in your community, and engage in interpersonal action because that that will soften you and make you a better person. I've become a better
person since I got married. I've become an even better
person since I've had kids. So you can imagine how terrible I was before all these things. Engaging your community does allow you to build the things that matter on the most local possible level. The outcome, by the way,
of the sort of the politics of fulfillment that I
was talking about earlier is a lot of localism. Because the roles that I'm talking about are largely local roles. So that stuff has to be protected locally. I think we focus way too much
in this country and others, on world beating solutions,
national solutions, solutions that apply to
hundreds of millions of people. How about we get to the solutions
that apply for like five? And then we get to the
solutions that apply to like 20, and then we get to the solutions
that involve 200 people or a thousand people. Let's solve that stuff. And I think the solutions
at the higher level flow bottom up, not top down. - What about mentors
and maybe role models? Have you had a mentor or
maybe people you look up to, either you interacted on a local scale, you actually knew them or
somebody you really looked up to? - For me, I'm very lucky. I grew up in a very solid
two-parent household. I'm extremely close with my parents. I've lived near my parents
literally my entire life, with the exception of
three years of law school. Right now, they live a
mile and a half from us. - What'd you learn from about life from your parents and your father? - Oh man, so many things from my parents. - [Lex] Good and bad. - That's a hard one. I mean, I think the good stuff from my dad is that you should hold
true to your values. He's very big on, you have values. The values are important
and hold true to them. - Did you understand what your values are? What your principles are early on? - Fairly quickly, yeah. And so, he was very big on that, which is why, for example, I get asked a lot in the Jewish community, why I wear a kippah. And the answer is, it never occurred to me
to take off the kippah. I always wore it. Why would I take it off at any point? That's the life that I wanna live. And, that's the way it is. So that was a big one from my dad. From my mom, practicality. My dad is more of a dreamer. My mom is much more practical. And so, the sort of lessons that I learned from my dad are that you can have, the counter lesson is that
you can have a good idea, but if you don't have a
plan for implementation, then it doesn't end up as reality. And I think actually he's learned that better over the course of his life too. But, my dad from the
time I was very young, he wanted me to engage with other adults and he wanted me to
learn from other people. And, one of his rules was
if he didn't know something, he would find somebody who
he thought did know the thing for me to talk to. That was a big thing. So, I'm very lucky. I have wonderful parents. As far as sort of other mentors, in terms of the media, Andrew
Breitbart was, was a mentor. Andrew, obviously, he was kind
of known in his latter days, I think more for the militancy than when I was very close with him. - So for somebody like me who doesn't, who knows more about the militancy. Can you tell me what
makes him a great man? - What made Andrew great is
that he engaged with everyone. I mean, everyone. So there are videos of him
rollerblading down the boulevard, and people would be protesting, and he would literally
roller blade up to them and he would say, "Let's go to lunch together." And, he would just do this. That's actually who Andrew was. - What was the thinking behind that? - That's who he was. He was just garrulous. He was much more outgoing
than I am actually. He was very warm with people. Like for me, I would say that with Andrew, I knew Andrew for, let's
say I met him when I was 16. He passed away when I would've been 28. So I knew Andrew for 10, 12 years. And people who met Andrew
for about 10 minutes knew Andrew 99% as well as I knew Andrew because he was just all out front. Everything was out here. And, he loved talking to people. He loved engaging with people. And so, this made him a lot
of fun and unpredictable, and fun to watch and all of that. And then, I think Twitter got to him. Twitter is one of the
lessons I learned from Andrew is the counter lesson. Which is Twitter can poison you. Twitter can really wreck you. If you spend all day on Twitter, reading the comments and
getting angry at people who are talking about you, it becomes a very difficult life. And I think that, in the
last year of his life, Andrew got very caught up in that because of a series of
sort of circumstances. - It can actually affect your mind. It can actually make you resentful. All that kind of stuff. - I tend to agree with that. But, the lesson that I
learned from Andrew is engage with everybody. Take joy in sort of the
mission that you're given. And, you can't always fulfill that. Sometimes, it's really
rough and difficult. I'm not gonna pretend that it's all fun and rainbows all the time, 'cause it isn't. And some of the stuff that I
have to cover I don't like, and some of the things I have to say, I don't particularly like. That happens. But, that's what I learned from Andrew. As far as sort of other mentors, I had some teachers when I was a kid, who said things that stuck with me. I had fourth grade teacher
named Ms. Genetty who said, "Don't let potential be
written on your tombstone." Which is a pretty... - That's a good line. - It's a great line,
particularly to a fourth grader. There was guy, an 11th
grade English teacher named Anthony Miller, who was
terrific, really good writer. He had studied with James Joyce at Trinity College in Dublin. And so, he and I really got along. And, he helped my writing a lot. - Did you ever have doubt in yourself? Especially, as you gotten
into the public eye with all the attacks. Did you ever doubt your
ability to stay strong, to be able to be a voice of the ideas that you represent? - Definitely, I don't
doubt my ability to say what I wanna say. I doubt my ability to handle
the emotional blow back of saying it. Meaning that, that's difficult. I mean, again, to take just one example. In 2016, the ADL measured that
I was the number one target of antisemitism on planet Earth. That's not fun, that's unpleasant. And when you take critiques,
not from Antisemites, but when you take critiques
from people generally, we talked about near the beginning, how you surround yourself with people who are gonna give you good feedback. Sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes people are giving you feedback and you don't know whether
it's well motivated or poorly motivated. And if you are trying
to be a decent person, you can't cut off the
mechanism of feedback. And so, what that means is sometimes you take to
heart the wrong thing or you take it to heart too much, you're not light enough about it. You take it very, very seriously. You lose sleep over it. Man, I can't tell you the number of nights where I've just not slept because of some critique
somebody's made of me. And I've thought to
myself, maybe that's right. And sometimes it is right. - Some of that is good to
stew in that criticism, but some of that can destroy you. Do you have a shortcut? So Rogan has talked about
taking a lot of mushrooms. Since you're not into the mushroom thing. What's your escape from that? Like when you get low, when you can't sleep? - Usually writing is a big one for me. The writing for me is cathartic. I love writing that. That is a huge one. Spending time with my family. Again, I usually have a
close circle of friends, who I will talk with in order to sort of
bounce ideas off of them. And then, once I've kind
of talked it through, I tend to feel a little bit better. Exercise is also a big one. I mean, if I go a few
days with that exercise, I tend to get pretty
grumpy pretty quickly. I gotta keep this six
pack going somehow, man. (hearty laughing) - There you and Rogan agree. Well, we haven't, aside
from Twitter mentioned love. What's the role of love
in the human condition? Ben Shapiro. - Man, don't get asked for love too much. In fact, I was- - [Lex] You don't get that
question on college campuses? - No, I typically don't, actually. In fact, we were at an event recently, it was a Daily Wire event, and in the middle of this event, was a meet and greet with
some of the audience. And, in the middle of this event, this guy walks by with this girl. They're talking and they're talking to me and their time kind of runs,
the security's moving them. And he says, "No, no, no, wait. "Hold on a minute." And he gets down on one knee
and he proposes to the girl in front of me. And I said to him, "This is the weirdest
proposal in human history. "What, what, what is happening right now? "I was your choice of cupid here?" He said, "Well, you know, "We actually like got together "'Cause we listened to your show." And I said, "I can perform it like a
Jewish marriage right now. "We're gonna need like a glass,
we're gonna need some wine. "It's gonna get weird real fast." But yeah, so love doctor. I'm typically not asked too much about. The role of love is important in binding
together human beings, who ought to be bound together. And the role of respect is
even more important in binding together broader groups of people. I think one of the mistakes
that we make in politics is trying to substitute love for respect or respect for love. And, I think that's a big mistake. So I do not bear tremendous love in the same sense that I do for my family, for random strangers. I don't, I love my family. I love my kids. Anybody who tells you they love your kid as much as you love your kid is lying to you. It's not true. I love my community more than
I love other communities. I love my state more
than I love other states. I love my country more than
I love other countries. That's all normal and that's all good. The problem of empathy can be when that becomes so tight knit that you're not outward looking, that you don't actually have
respect for other people. So in the local level, you need love in order to
protect you and shield you, and give you the strength to go forward. And then beyond that, you need a lot of respect for people who are not in the circle of love. And I think trying to
extend love to people who either are not gonna love you back or are gonna slap you in the face for it, or who you're just not that close to. It runs the risk of
being arsehats and fake. Or it can actually be
counterproductive in some senses. - Well, there's some sense in which you could have
love for other human beings just based on the humanity
that connects everybody. So you love this whole project that we're a part of and actually, sort of another
thing, we disagree on. So loving a stranger, like having that basic empathy and compassion towards a stranger, even if it can hurt you, I think it's ultimately... That to me is what it
means to be a good man. To live a good life is
to have that compassion towards strangers. 'Cause to me, it's almost, it's easy and natural and obvious to love people close to you. But, to step outside
yourself and to love others. I think that's the
fabric of a good society. You don't think there's value to that? - I think there can be, but I think we're also discussing love almost in two different senses. Meaning that when I talk about love, what I think of immediately
is the love I bear for my wife and kids or my parents or my siblings. - [Lex] What about friendship? - Or the love of my close friends. But, I think that using that same term
to describe how I feel about strangers, I think
would just be inaccurate. And so, that's why I'm
suggesting that respect might be a more solid and realistic foundation for
the way that we treat people far away from us or
people who are strangers. Respect for their dignity,
respect for their priorities, respect for their role in life. It might be too much of
an ask, in other words. There might be the rare human being who's capable of literally
loving a homeless man on the street the way they
he loves his own family. But, if you respect the
homeless man on the street, the way that you respect your own family, because everyone is deserved, everyone deserves that respect. I think that you get to the same end without forcing people into a position of unrealistically expecting themselves to feel a thing they don't feel. One of the big questions in religion that comes up is God
makes certain requests that you feel certain ways. You're supposed to be (indistinct). You're supposed to be
happy about certain things or you're supposed to love
thy neighbor as thyself. You'll notice that in that statement, it's thy neighbor. It's not just like generally anyone. It's love thy neighbors, in any case. - I think that extends to
anyone that follows you on Twitter, thy neighbor, because God anticipated
the social network aspect that is not constrained by geography. - Yeah, I'm gonna differ with
you on the interpretation on that, but in any case. The kind of extension of love outwards might be too big an ask. So maybe we can start with respect and then hopefully out
of that respect can grow something more, if people earn their way in. 'Cause I think that
one of the big problems when we were talking about universalism is when people say, "I'm a world citizen. "I love people of the other country. "As much as I love myself or
as much as I love my country." It tends to actually lead to, and almost cram down utopianism. That, I think can be kind of difficult because with love comes a certain expectation of solidarity. And I think, when you love your family,
you love your wife, there's a certain level of
solidarity that is required inside the home in order to preserve the most loving kind of home. And so, if you love everybody, then that sort of implies a
certain level of solidarity that may not exist. So maybe the idea is for me, start with respect, and then maybe as people
respect each other more, then love is an outgrowth of
that as opposed to starting with love and then hoping
that respect develops. - Yeah, there's a danger
that that word becomes empty and instead is used for
dogmatic kind of utopianism. - I mean, this is the
way that, for example, religious theocracies very often work. We love you so much, we have to convert you. - So let's start with respect. What I would love to see
after our conversation today, is to see a Ben Shapiro that continues the growth on Twitter of being even more respectful
than you've already been. And maybe one day, converting
that into love on Twitter. If I could see that in this world, that would make me die a happy man. - [Ben] Wow. - A little bit more. - If I can make that happen for you. - Love in the world, for
me, as a gift, for me. - I'll try to make that happen. I do have one question, I'm
gonna need you to tell me. Which jokes are okay? Are jokes still okay? - So yeah, can I just run
your Twitter from now on? You just send it to me. - 100%, I will pre-screen you the jokes, and you can tell me if
this is a loving joke or if this is a hate filled. - People will be very surprised by the all the heart emojis
that start popping up on your Twitter. Ben, I thank you so much
for being bold and fearless, and exploring ideas,
and your Twitter aside. Thank you for being just good
faith and all the arguments and all the conversations
you're having with people. It's a huge honor. Thank you for talking to me. - Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Ben Shapiro. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ben Shapiro himself. "Freedom of speech and thought matters, "Especially when it is speech and thought "With which we disagree. "The moment the majority
decides to destroy people "For engaging a thought it dislikes, "Thought crime becomes a reality." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.