Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Ben Shapiro: Free Will, AGI, and the Scavengers Ruining America's Future

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 We talk with Ben Shapiro about his new book “Lions and Scavengers” and how we each have a lion and a scavenger inside of us. Today’s society is shaped by lions who build great things, while the scavengers try to tear them down. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Additional resources: Ben Shapiro’s NEW Book Lions and Scavengers: https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885 Ben Shapiro’s Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BenShapiro ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating #benshapiro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Ben Shapiro just told me that society's greatest threat isn't global warning or AGI. It's ending. Viral influencers are weaponizing or enragment for their engagement. Shapiro calls this the scavenger mentality. People can't create so they destroy. And social media has given scavenging. is the biggest megaphone in human history. We've got moon landing deniers with millions of followers,

rage merchants making fortunes by convincing kids that America's greatest achievements are lies and influencers building empires by teaching people that anyone who succeeds must have cheated the system. I think that there is a mentality that is now set in on pretty much all sides of the political aisle that says that the world is out of my control, burn it all down.

One of the most successful and media-savvy pundits in the world today shows us how to defeat our inner scavenger and unleash our inner lion. Along the way, we explore how we can use our own free will to defeat AI algorithms meant to keep us apart, and his prescription might just save human civilization. Ben, Shapiro, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Ben, I love this new book.

And I want to ask you, the phrase that most resonated with me was that you said that every human being carries within himself a lion and a scavenger. And I want to ask you, now that artificial general intelligence is here, are you worried at all about the prospects for AGI or AI in general to be a lion or a scavenger. I mean, the reality is that with AI, just as with every other tool, it's a tool wielded by human beings. And given that it's supposed to sort of imitate what human beings are, then presumably the same will be true of AI. There are dark parts of AI. There are parts of AI that are oriented toward good. But the question is to whether AI is going to be able to

fight itself, which is a uniquely human capacity. That one's yet to be decided. I think the best way for me to think about AI right now is that bad people can use AI for terrible things and direct AI in terrible ways. And people who are oriented toward the line mentality can use AI in wonderful ways. Seeing it more as a tool than anything else at the moment, makes sense. But obviously, if you're trying to figure out what sort of presets you have to create for AGIs, that it's an agent on its own without acting at your direction, you're going to have to be pretty careful about those presets because, you know, you can certainly see this thing going sideways. I've talked to our mutual friend or he's probably my former friend now, but he may

still be your friend, Sam Harris, who claims that we don't have free will as human beings, but AI certainly has it. What does your take on the prospects of artificial intelligence having free will or not? Again, I think that it's difficult to say that AI has free will in the sense that it doesn't have desires that are interacting with its, with other desires. I think that free will, part of free will is the idea that you have the capacity to overcome desires. And so that means that there is a thing that is inside you that you have the unique capacity to overcome. I'm not sure what AI is overcoming. It's all part of the cohesive system. And so it can imitate desires, but it's not as though AI wants to do things. I think the anthem

of morphization of AI is kind of a dangerous miscategorization. Staying with free will, you mentioned at the end of the book, actually you quote from my bar mitzv portion, you say, you know, life is, God has put before you, life and death, blessing and curse so that you may choose life, et cetera. I always thought before October 7th that no one would choose death. I mean, that's ridiculous. But what do you make of using as a heuristic people that choose things that say lions and scavengers are distinguished by their disparate ways in which they handle free will? I mean, I think that there's truth to that. I think that the basic idea of the scavenger is that you are living in a universe that you don't control. And that because of that, you are basically being

bad at about by that universe. And so anything bad that happens in your life is somebody else's fault. It's deeply enervating. Now, it can coexist with sort of a gut level belief or at least actionable desire to act in the world. It's not as those scavengers believe that they don't have the power to do evil things that they actually do. They have sort of a self-contradictory belief in free will.

It's not my fault, but I can do something about it. It seems to be the general construction. But the lion says that if something, goes wrong, it's almost impossible for it not to be at least partially her fault. And therefore, you really should take responsibility, do your duty, try to build the world in better ways. And when you say the choice between life and death is being obviously shown right now in the Middle East, that that clearly is true. I mean, there are people who have decided that they would rather be a culture of death. They would rather tear things down, tear things to the

ground and have people be miserable than allow for the possibility that actually their failures are their own. And that I think, is the hallmark of the scavenger. I think that that's true across the West. I think it's true across every part of humanity. And I think it's true for an enormous number of human beings. I think that's the Kane and Abel story, in essence, is God saying to Kane, listen, you can kill your brother. Look, I know you have the capacity to do that. I mean, that's why God gives him a warning. You can do all sorts of evil things, but what would be better for you to do is to overcome the sin. The sin crouches at your door, but you can overcome it is the message of the lion. The scavenger

says the sin crouches at my door, but it's not actually a sin. It's just the natural outgrowth of a system I don't control. And so you never have to take responsibility for the fact that you're actually choosing death. So if all human beings carry within them, that sin, that propensity towards sin or proclivity, what's your inner scavenger? It's obvious your lion-like qualities,

but have you confronted what might be your inner scavenger? I mean, just like anybody else, yeah, I mean, just like anybody else, I think that the scavenger tends to think that the forces that are arrayed against you are too great, that whatever your failures are, are somebody else's fault. And you can do this in business,

you can do it in life. I think that it, yeah, on the smallest daily basis, I think that it happens, where it's, you know, you get in a fight with your wife or something. And it's like, okay, well, whose fault is that? It's probably, it's probably her fault or it's probably, you know, the stresses of life that are causing that. Or maybe it's you. And you actually need to, you know, go back to the drawing board and think about what you

could have done differently to fix that, what you can do differently right now and in a more active way to fix that. So it's not as though every struggle has to be gigantically titanic with ramifications for all of humanity in order for your scavenger to, you know, act out. But, you know, even politically speaking, I think that there is mentality that is now set in on pretty much all sides of the political aisle that says, the world is out of my control, burn it all down. And that sort of burn it all down mentality, which seems to be widely popular, particularly on the internet, where you can really get away with doing, enervating and terrible

things and finding a crowd for it and getting big numbers for it, that's always the temptation. Yeah, well, definitely going to get to that later on if you're willing to go there. But I think the question that I first encountered when I read the book is kind of this mapping of the archetype of lion and scavenger. So lions are also predators. And I immediately thought, well, there's this notion in society of people like sheep dogs, the jaco willings and so forth in the world. Why not use the sheepdog that protects against wolves rather than a lion, which is also a predator in addition to being sort of the defender of sort of the virtues and the – Yatesur Hattov, so to speak. So why did you choose that motif, the lion, versus a sheep dog, in the book? Because I don't think that the model needs to be purely defensive. So the sheep dog

is defensive and only gets aggressive when attacked. I think that the lion actually does have to be aggressive in the world. And so that's why I think innovators are more like lions than sheep dogs, right? The sheep dog is is more the warrior type that I talk about in the book, the person who is at the front lines defending civilization from encroachment by barbarians. But the lion is, the person who has to surge out into the unknown and face down, you know, things that he hasn't seen before and undertake risk at the risk of his life and the risk of his pride. And so, you know, I do think that trying to relegate particularly masculinity to the sheepdog is doomed to fail. The aggressive, the aggressive instinct in man is greater than that. And I think if channeled

properly, it can be good. I think just relegating human beings to the role of the defensive, that assumes a level of prosperity and success that I don't think is necessarily inherent to the system. You actually have to have people who go out and do aggressive things in order to build. And in retrospect, we get to condemn them for doing all those things. And that's the fun part of living in a very prosperous society. But it's also one of the things that makes for really bad historiography

is that we condemn all the people who came before and did all these aggressive things. And we say, I would have done it differently. It's like, well, you wouldn't be here to talk about it if they had done it differently. That's right. And a similar sort of parallel question is, you know, scavenger has a passive quality to it. But isn't there more of a case that a passive scavenger is less dangerous than an active murderer? I mean, shouldn't we reserve our outrage for predators, not the parasites? Well, I mean, I do think that one of the things that I try to say about the

scavengers is that obviously we're not mapping directly onto biological scavengers versus, you know, predators. And so there's a bit of a metaphor that's being used here, especially when you're, when you're comparing it to humanity. Animals and humans are not the same. But when you're talking about sort of the scavenger mentality, the idea that I put forward is that scavengers exist in every society and they basically are seeking to grab the gains that they've not won. But there can come a point where the scavengers grow feral

and actually start attacking the things that are generating the prosperity for them. You can have situations, I assume, in nature, in which scavengers are attacking the actual lines. It's not just that they're going after the carcasses. They're actually going after the things that created the carcasses in the first place. And so I do think that we do have some of that happening in a dangerous way. So we'll get to specific avatars for lions and scavengers in a bit, but now I'd like to do. I got this expensive new jingle, Ben.

You might have that wonderful studio and everything that makes you look so luscious there. But I have a jingle that's not at all AI generated for this next segment, which we call judging books by their covers. All right, Ben, I want you to do what you're never supposed to do. But what are you supposed to do? I mean, most of my audience is not familiar with you. I mean, many have from your previous book, but that was four years ago, I think. Ben, take it through the book, the title, the subtitle, and that majestic cover art, which appears throughout the book.

All righty. So this is the cover. So Lions and Scavengers, the True Story of America and Her Critics. So honestly, like all credit to the Daily Wire Archipers. who really came up with the art for this book. I think that the symbols that are used were the real key to this. And we went through a bunch of different iterations. But the idea here is using almost medieval imagery to give you a feeling that what we're

talking about here is something ancient. We're not talking about something here that we're coming up with like in the moment. It's not a modern symbol. These are ancient symbols that go all the way back into, for example, British history. I mean, this looks very much like sort of Richard the Lionheart type stuff. And so the art department came up with this symbol here for the lion, which appears throughout the book as sort of a break for instead of saying conclusion, it will have the lion. It's going to appear on gear, frankly, that we're going to have available at our daily wire store because I think that it's an important symbol. Yeah, I got to get the merch tie in there.

And then as far as the font, you know, the lions and scavengers, it's read obviously to be set apart. But the true story of America, which is basically saying that the story, and really is the story of the West, that there is this gap between the lions and the scavengers. And if you wish to build a civilization, then that has to be featured. And then the and her critics is extremely tiny. And the reason that it's extremely tiny, the anthra critics is because, you know, I think that in the story of the West, the critics are significantly less important than the actual victorious.

And I wish to give more credits of the lines than the scavengers. I don't want to pretend like it's the interplay between lines and scavengers that creates the civilization, which is always, I think, the easy way out for people in policy. Well, you know, it's all part of a Hegelian dialectic. And if it weren't for the Hegelian dialectic, then we wouldn't be where we are. And it's like, well, no, actually, I think that a lot of the scavengers have made the world a significantly worse place. And we would have been better off if they had been lions instead. Okay, so we'll talk about some of the avatars as we come up and some of the possibilities that I see is, you know, the dangers of lionizing lions too much, perhaps. But first,

I want to take you to our campus here at UC San Diego, where we have a taxpayer fund. of course. You're not paying it directly anymore, but we're funded by the state taxpayers of California. And we have here, not far from my office lab here, the Chee Cafe. And Chee plays a role in this book. Che is portrayed as sort of an avatar for scavengers. Why is that? And why do you think we have a Chee Cafe here at UC San Diego? Well, I mean, I think that one of the beauties of being a part of Western civilization is that you get to stand on the shoulders of giants and claim that you basically were there all the time, right? You were born on third base and you hit a triple, and therefore the critics of the system are the ones that we ought to emulate the most. And so

these sort of worship of Che Guevara, one of the worst human beings to live in the latter half of the 20th century, a person who was responsible for a wide variety of murder, for exporting murder to other countries, a person who was racist and sexist and awful in a whole wide variety of ways. The fact that he is lionized as a sort of figure worthy of emulation speaks to the fact that particularly for young people, there is always a desire to tear down that which already exists and never to think about what replaces it. Nobody ever talks about the fact that what resulted from Che Guevara was Castroism, which is impoverished an entire country for three quarters of a century. I mean, there are people who are literally trying to float 1950s Chevys off of an island just to get away from that hellhole.

And so I think that the worship of Che is what Rob Henderson would call a luxury belief. and that is maybe the thing that's most endemic to the West right now is this entire set of luxury beliefs that have been imported and then homegrown from parents who have done a terrible job, frankly, inculcating in their kids values that matter and an understanding of gratitude for the country that's raised them. So, you know, on the other side of the coin, you portray your relationship with various individuals

ranging from President Donald Trump to Elon Musk, who you spent quite a good deal of time with, especially at a time when he was accused of being an anti- disemite and promoting all sorts of awful stuff, you actually went with him to Auschwitz. I want to ask you a question, the courage and so forth that is sort of the exemplary characteristic of a lion, what do you make of Musk? How do you reconcile? There are really two sides of him. I mean, let's not lionize him too much. I mean, on one hand, he has this incredible ability to captivate the world, technological advancements. On the other hand, I've been disappointed by his,

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Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. for example to at least 13 kids how do you balance those two things ben do we do i have this you know failure to to try to you know try to hero worship lionized really too much how do you reconcile those two different sides of him if you care i mean again i think that everybody has those two different sides they're very very strong in elon so i think that when it comes to innovating the thing that he's going to be remembered for i hope is things like spacex things like tesla right is it's the creation of new and amazing things for the human species he's going to be remembered

for grand aspirations to get to Mars and building the machinery to get us there. That's the lion part of him, the innovative part of him. And I think that the best part of him is that. And then I think that the scavenger runs very strong in Elon too. I mean, he's a very, very outsized personality. And so the scavenger mentality, which seems to be like I can have kids but not raise them. And I can basically blame the system for me not doing that or say that I've done enough by signing a track.

I mean, he's not that way with X, but he is that way with apparently a lot of his other kids. And some of the things that he says with, regard to sort of conspiratorial view of how the world works, which he does a lot of that on X. Again, I think that these forces lie in everybody. And I think that one of the other lessons of the Bible is that you shouldn't treat men as gods and you shouldn't suggest that people are purely one or purely the other. Again, I think that it's going to be easy to draw away from the book that people kind of in a mannequian fashion fall into either lions or scavengers. And I think that, you know, there are people who pretty clearly categorizes one

or the other in terms of sort of their overwhelming majority of human activity. But everybody is a mix of both of these things. And even some of the worst people that you've ever heard of probably have certain aspects of the lion that they try to enact in their daily lives. I mean, the saying goes that Hitler was nice to his dog, right? So I think you can always find, you know, you can always find even among the worst people, some aspect of them because those instincts live with them in all of us. And you would expect that sometimes even on rare occasions, the lion might

win. But yeah, I mean, when you look at Elon, he's a very conflicted figure for sure. Now, last time we talked in 2021, I think it was, I asked you if you would take a trip to Mars with Elon. You spent in the fullness of time, much more time with him. Would you revise that? Would you want to be on a spaceship? And I can cut the time down to about six months if you're, if you're good. Would you want to take a trip to, you know, recolonize the Earth, so to speak, obviously with your family and everybody else? But would you do it? Would you still want to spend that much time with him? Or at a, I don't. and project directed by him.

I mean, Elon is fascinating. A project directed by him may be a different story. I mean, I hear some pretty wide, you know, a wide variety of experiences working with Elon. And so, you know, would I want to be an employee of Elon? I kind of doubt it. I tend to be a little more independent-minded and probably have some pretty strong feelings about things. But, you know, if you get time to, you know, spend in the presence of people who are impactful

and genius, then you'd be remiss not to take them. But, yeah, you'd have to put a time limit on anybody. I have a difficult time spending too much time with pretty much anybody outside of my immediate family. And, you know, kind of speaking in that same, you know, motif of explorers, lions as, you know, the kind of great courageous men of history and, you know, and women can be obviously lions as well. Talking about someone like Charles Lindberg, you know, who is obviously courageous, obviously did a tremendous amount of good exploration. And yet, and yet here in San Diego, we've taken his name off the airport here. What do you make of people like Lindberg and others who have this incredibly strong positive aspect,

even if it's not directed towards nationalistic desires that are good for maybe America or Jews or so forth? But how do you reconcile that with this, you know, should we take his name off the airport? I don't think that Lindberg's name should be taken off the airport. I think that he was, you know, obviously deeply wrong about World War II. He ended up obviously flipping to support the United States military during World War II, despite his isolationism after the United States entered the war in 41. But this is, to me, one of the biggest problems, again, when we talk about history and when we talk about people like Elon,

looking at people as a combination of lion and scavenger and trying to identify the parts that we're trying to emulate is the biggest thing. The reason that his name was on the airport is because he is the most historic flyer in the history of the United States. It's the same thing that people were saying about John Wayne. We should remove John Wayne's name from the airport in Orange County. And it's like, well, no, I mean, he's not famous for a playboy interview he did in 1971. I mean, he's famous because he's the most famous, you know, iconic

Western star in the history of American cinema. And you can do this with literally anyone. I mean, MLK had an extraordinarily checkered personal life to say the very least. But the reason that MLK has a name after him is because essentially they have a dream speech and because there's a more moderate approach to ending racial tension in the United States. If we treat human beings as purely one or purely the other, it's a mistake. But as a civilization, we ought to reward the portions of people that are the ones. while punishing the parts of people that are the scavenger. I thought we had MLK Day because that was the day that you were born.

But you were born in 1984 and January 15th, which is MLK's birthday. Talk about those two men. George Orwell, we associate with 1984. And you just mentioned MLK. But talk about that, you know, kind of those two different personalities separated by so much time in history and how they both had sort of clarion calls for not just West, but all of civilization. Yeah, well, I mean, again, I think that the part that we remember about Orwell is not his sort of soft socialism, but the fact that he was clear thinking when it came to hard communism.

And because Orwell was clear thinking about that, he was also very clear about fascism. His essay on the appeal of Hitlerism is one of the great pieces of journalistic writing ever probably. It's fantastic. I think I quote it in this book. But he's, but Orwell, the reason that we remember Orwell is because of that clarity. The same thing is true of MLK. MLK, we like MLK as Americans, not because of his socialistic perspective on economics or misunderstanding of American foreign policy. We like him because at root, what he understood is that Americans are individuals who ought to be treated by the contents of their character. And so I think that both of those men, I hope, would agree with the generalized message of the book, which is that virtue ought to be rewarded at the individual level. Ben, in my life as an astrophysicist, as a pilot, the thing that I most looked up to about our country and maybe even humanity as a whole was the fact that humans landed on the moon in July of 1969. Lately, there's been a tremendous pushback on the factual occurrence of that event by none other than your former colleague at the Daily Wire, Candace Owens, and colleagues that you used to be

friendly with like Tucker Carlson. These individuals deny the greatest triumph in human history, according to me, at least as a scientist. And it's sort of puzzling to me, because not only is it the greatest accomplishment of humanity, it's the greatest accomplishment of America, at least in the technological sense. These are purportedly America first people. What do you make of this,

that there are people that will deny and really protest a factual occurrence that's been verified, not only by American scientists, but by Soviet scientists at the time, by Indian scientists, by China, what do you make of this desire to take down the greatest accomplishment

of the lines, that the scavengers can they ever have their way and take down the pride of the lion? I mean, I do think that this is part of a greater gestalt that we're seeing across the aisle. I mean, there's a real horseshoe thing going on on left and right here in favor of conspiracy theorizing. And that conspiracy theorizing, which I do talk about at length in lines and scavengers, that conspiracy theorizing, again, is built on the idea that there is this giant shadowy conspiracy that is somehow inspired to put you and people who are like you beneath the boot heel of the system. And so one of the things that has to be done, in terms of historical revisionism, which you're seeing an awful lot of on both the horses

you left and the horseshoe right is the idea that the civilization that went to the moon or that defeated the Nazis must be a bad civilization. And the reason you think it's a good civilization is because you're suffering from a sort of false consciousness that you've been trained by people to think the wrong. You've been lied to about the system. You've been lied to about the goodness of that system because a normal person's reaction to the idea that America is inherently bad as well, well, America or America is weak or that America has brought terrible things to the world or that the American system is so deeply flawed that it needs to be torn down to the ground. The normal person's response to that being steeped in American history at any level is,

well, I mean, we did free Europe of the Nazis. We then freed the world of communism. You know, we did put a man on the mood. I mean, we did generate virtually all of global innovation. I mean, we did do a few things. And so in order to achieve the effect, what you have to do is say, actually, we didn't do any of those things. Actually, you're wrong about all those things, right?

So when it came to the moon landing, that was a false way. We probably didn't do that. It was probably a law perpetuated by the same people who run the system that I'm saying is conspiratorial today. If you say the Leah Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy, which, by the way, clearly Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy by every piece of all evidence, all of it. If you say that, people get angry on this sort of conspiratorial side because the idea is, no, no, the system is lying to you. The system itself did it, right? It was the CIA or allies of the CIA that did. It's all to see distrust. in the broader systems and institutions that most people bear some sort of baseline

fealty too, knowing that America is the greatest place in human history with the greatest system in human history. It's why you're now seeing a revisionist history that's being retailed about everything from World War II and how it was fought to the dropping of the atomic bomb is the idea that basically all of human history since 1940 has been wrong and you've been lied to about it. And the reason that's being specifically targeted is because, again, number one, most people, their knowledge of human history doesn't go back that far.

And so when you think of what makes America great, people will cite examples like World War II, fighting the Soviets, the moon landing, right? The technological revolution, all that kind of stuff. But number two, there is a widespread perception in the sort of conspiracy-ridden community that America took a wrong turn in the post-1930s era. That post-1930s era was bad

because it ushered in the quote-unquote globalist system that is victimizing me. And so you have to kind of start from the conclusion and then reason back to the conspiracies. The conclusion is, system bad. I have been victimized by system. If system bad, that means that all the good things that purportedly are results of the system must be lies. You must have been lied to about them.

And there's some sort of shadowy group that has been implanting in you the idea that America was right to fight the Nazis in World War II or that America didn't have a choice but to drop to atomic weapons on Japan, thus ending World War II, with actually what would have been a minimum cost of human life. had invaded Japan, it would have cost a million lives minimum. So, you know, I think that's what you're seeing that the lives behind all of these. I don't think it's just the moon landing. I think the moon landing is symptomatic of an obsession with a lot of these conspiracy theories. A lot of them, of course, end up with Jews because if you are a person who believes that there's a shadowy cabal of people

who are running the system for their own benefit, then you tend to go to who has been very successful in the system. And so you look at people who are highly educated, who are disproportionately represented in successful industries, and Jews are overrepresented in higher education. Jews are overrepresented in earning power. And so there's this sort of logic that because Jews have been very successful, then it must be that they are the ones who are running history from behind the scenes. And you see that from right and left, by the way. That's not unique to the right.

They weren't overrepresented as astronauts, unfortunately, for Candace. But that doesn't stop her from saying that it was NASA was founded by, you know, cabal in order to spread fake and gay. science throughout the universe. But you know, because I've given you one of these beauties, is a meteorite. So I have moon rocks, which I think I also gave you, not collected by astronauts, but collected by gravity in the U.S. Postal Service, which I do give away to folks when they visit my website. But I have a video where I'm taking down specifically point by point, just calmly addressing every single claim that she makes. And it's just so laughable because she'll use the

science, you know, she's using Wi-Fi. She's using, you know, the internet, which is created by stern, you know, physicist, you know, 30, 40 years ago. She's using the tools of science to attack science. And I find it, you know, quite, quite reprehensible. We're not going to get into more of that. But I want to turn more back to science. And you quote in this book, this famous quote said to Napoleon by Pierre Simon de Laplace, who said, when asked, where does God fit into his theories of the mechanistic deterministic universe that he said, Fingo, no such hypothesis. I have no need of such hypothesis. You strenuously argue against that. You. You say that the starting point of science has to begin with God? What do you mean by that?

So, I mean, first of all, historically speaking, it did. I mean, it was not an atheistic universe that generated the idea of science. It was a God-centered universe that generated the idea of the pre-monotheistic universe. The idea was the bunch of gods were fighting up in heaven, and everything was the chaotic result of that sort of thing. And the idea of a monotheistic universe in which God has a logic that undergirds everything. And not only does the universe have a logic, but that God implanted in us the capacity to actually discover some of that logic, those are two premises that cannot be proved scientifically. The idea that the universe has a logic and a set of rules cannot be proved scientifically.

You can think that you've discovered a rule, but again, that's a theory. That is not an actual kind of basis for future discovery. And the idea that human beings can understand has no basis in evolutionary biology. Understand is a word that has teleology attached to it. And science is famously non-teleological, the idea that, And you see Richard Dawkins and people who are atheists try to smuggle in teleology under kind of different auspices that the gene is trying to perpetuate itself. And the gene's not trying to do anything, right?

The evolution is not striving for an end. It is the result, presumably, of a wide variety of sort of random occurrences. But when people will say that an evolutionary adaptation is designed to do acts, I mean, it's designed by whom and for what? It's always teleology that's being smuggled in. And one of the aspects of this is the teleological idea of human understanding, that you have the capacity to grasp the secrets of the universe. There is no scientific basis for any of that. The idea that you are quote unquote grasping.

What does grasping mean from a scientific perspective? It means that your neurons are firing in a particular way and you have the experience of grasping. But that's not actually what's going to drive you to actually do the thing, unless you believe in a fully deterministic universe. I asked this to Sam Harris when we actually debated this on stage in San Francisco is that he uses an awful lot of cause. language and will-driven language and a lot of active verbs in the way that he discusses the universe. And I guess you would argue that that's automatic. But I find that unconvincing. And it's hard for me to believe that just historically speaking, absent a concept of a God-ordered universe, at least at the very beginning, that you would have gotten the discoveries of science.

Right. But to push back with, you know, requisite love and respect, I mean, we have to separate epistemology from theology. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. I mean, there were great scientists,

there are great scientists, obviously 93% of the National Academy of Sciences are not actively professing a belief in God, Chinese scientists, Egyptian scientists, polytheistic, obviously Greeks, Aristotle, the great accomplishments of Greek scientists. So tell me, I mean, how do you distinguish between the kind of zeitgeist of the time in which everybody was religious at that time? And really the search for truth, which should undergird everything that we a scientist do, whether or not it comes from God or not, it still may have use. You know, as Feynman said, we do science, you know, like having sex. It doesn't always lead to a baby, but, you know, that's not the only reason we do it.

So tell me, Ben, what, how do you distinguish between those two of the ultimate goal, perhaps of being a God, just for a skeptic, and, you know, giving us the ability to do these things and the actual project of science, which is to find out, you know, and apply universal laws to improve nature. I'm certainly not saying that atheists can't be good scientists. Obviously, they can. What I'm saying is that the way that they behave in the world is not as atheist. The way that they believe in the way that everyone effectively behaves in the world is using God smuggled premises.

They're using, you know, you suggested before that Candace is using modern science in order to, quote unquote, debunk the moon landing. I feel like a lot of scientists are using the language of religion in order to forward science. So we'll say things like, oh, we're trying to discover the truth. What is the truth? What does evolutionary biology have to do with the truth? Evolutionary biology has to do with what's adaptive and what's advantageous. So theoretically, if you are discovering a rule that is effective but untrue, would that be good from a scientific perspective? If it's evolutionarily adaptive and it is untrue, then please explain to me why that's a problem.

But most scientists will say that is a problem. What you want is the truth because presumably the truth matters to you in a way that you can't even necessarily define. And when you start adapt, when the scientific enterprise, and I think most scientists will agree, the scientific enterprise has a moral basis. Once you start talking about the moral basis of science, not just the practice of science, which of course doesn't require religion, but once you start talking about the moral basis of science or the rationale for science, then inevitably you end up with unprovable premises. You start speaking in the language of what's good and what's right and what's wrong and what's useful, which useful is a way of saying right and wrong from a utilitarian perspective

and requires a sort of judgment call as to what is good and what is bad. That is language that you cannot assume from science. So I feel like a lot of scientists are in the position of the economist and the old joke, right? There's the old joke where you have the physicist and you have the engineer and you have the economist and they're stuck on a desert island and they have no way of escaping the desert islands. The physicist starts thinking about the patterns of the wind and tries to figure out how to build a sail that is likely to take him off the island and the engineer starts looking at the things that are on the island and figures out how to build something floatable and the economist says to assume a boat. And I feel like, and I feel like there are a lot of

scientists who when it comes to the way they act in the world, it's assume a boat, assume that there is a good, assume that there is a bad, assume that there is a reason why we care about human flourishing. Well, what if we don't have to assume it? What if that assumption is in and of itself a recognition that there is something beyond science that drives human activity and that we are relying on to not only lend meaning to our lives, but also to structure the universe in a particular way. And you can call that God or you can call it something else. But I think one of my favorite things about the way that Aquinas approaches proofs of God, is that instead of saying God does X, and I'm going to prove that God does X.

He says, let's assume all of these things are true. Then we can call that thing God. And it seems to me that's a better way of approaching God than the opposite. Before we get to your thoughts and your quoting of Thomas Sol on science as being a modern version of myth making, you know, that's obviously the trope that, you know, Galileo, my friend here, I got a finger puppet of Galileo, if you're listening here. He's my hero. I translated the guy made the first ever audio.

book by Galileo, which is slightly shorter than your audio book spent. So he was obviously, you know, castigated by the Catholic Church for his, you know, evidentiary attempts to prove that heliocentrism was correct. I've always wondered, why did the Catholic Church, you know, in Christianity in general, why did they, you know, hold up a pagan scientist as their exemplar of the kind of cosmology of the church, which we obviously know is wrong at that time in the 1600s? Why would they work? Why would they basically beatified?

And they did beatify, believe Aristotle became a saint effectively. So why was that? What do you think that was? Well, I mean, I think that the rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle, which had disappeared for several hundred years, and then the sort of shock that people find when they realize that much of the wisdom of their own tradition is backed by another tradition and seems to be verified by that other tradition from a different place, from a different time, from what's widely considered a very advanced civilization.

I think that the attempt to, you know, recapitulate Aristotelianism is nearer Aristotelian. The same was known with Plato, obviously neoplatanism is sort of a recapitulation of Plato, but also a twisting of Plato in particular ways. There's something flattering about the idea that great philosophers agreed with me. And obviously there is certainly crossover between the Judeo-Christian tradition, biblical tradition and Plato. But it's not like the easiest marriage, for sure. And when we talk about the development of Western civilization, which I talk about, you know,

in one of my earlier books, the right side of history, what I talk about is like the actual balance and tension between the two. Jerusalem and Athens are not identical. If they're identical, then one of them would be superfluous. And so you do have those two that are fighting with each other. Also, I mean, again, I think the idea was the Greeks were advanced. If the Greeks were advanced, they must have known science really, really well. And obviously, it wasn't just Aristotle.

I mean, people were using the biology of Galen for centuries. And the biology of Galen is completely false and just wrong in a thousand ways. But what was seen by people as quote unquote advanced because they were looking back instead of trying to, discern from the available science. It really took until, obviously, Francis Bacon and characters like that, so to really start advancing science in a new direction. My favorite anecdote about Aristotle and his scientific prowess was that he thought that men have more teeth than women.

And I always wondered, why don't you ask Mrs. Aristotle to open her mouth and say, okay, so in the book you quote, I read from the book here, you say, Thomasole says the following. He said that science isn't always more certain than myth. and then you immediately bring in Hayek's idea of tradition as cumulative growth without design. First of all, what do you think that soul meant, Thomas saw all this is? What did he mean by myths are more reliable or no more certain than science or actually the reverse? He's speaking about the moral world there.

So what he means there is that using science as a moral guide is obviously really problematic. And we saw that over the course of the 20th century when people used science as a moral guide and came up with Holocaust, eugenics, forced sterilization, and racism. And it turns out that was really, really quite bad. So, you know, what he was saying there is that, you know, the idea that an inherited myth, which carries the moral truths, is somehow false because, you know, factually speaking, that, you know, people weren't turning water into wine or that's what you think anyway, or that there wasn't a voice that emanated to a particular person at a particular time from another region or whatever the case may be.

The reason there's a survival of those stories is because those stories have deep human importance to the psyche and that the relevance of those myths maintains today. And I think that's why the Bible is such an important document, even if you're not a religious person, is because what it's really describing is human nature. That's why an atheist can read the beginning of Genesis and recognize the story of Adam and Eve or recognize the story of Ken and Abel. These are universal human stories about what human beings are.

And I think that's why they carry such inordinate truth. And I think this carries through to the statements that you make later on, which is that scavengers inherently failed to see a theology, a purpose to the, to the world. And so they can sort of be entrusted with the ability to create their own, you know, gods, religions, and so forth. And then typically they do and they fill that vacuum that otherwise a moral structure would provide. Do you see that there is, is it correlative, is it causative, that most of the scavengers, you know,

are come from a godless tradition, as you, as you describe it in the book? I mean, I certainly think that over the course of human history, there are certainly a lot of people who have been from a god-based tradition who have gone in wildly terrible directions and been scavengers who seek to tear down societies, freedom, individuals in the name of their own self-aggrandizement. So I wouldn't want to pretend that religion is sort of for everyone at all times the cure-all, or that all religious traditions are equivalent, because I do not think that they are. I think radical fundamentalist Muslims today are engaging in an awful lot of scavenger activity from Africa to the Middle East, to Europe, actually. But I do think that the idea that you are a victim of a cruel universe that is conspiring against you, that tends not to be the outgrowth of biblical tradition. If there is one lesson from the Bible that I think is supposed to ring out pretty clearly, particularly from the book of Deuteronomy, it's that if you fail, it is almost certainly your fault. I mean, the book of Deuteronomy is just filled with statements like this where Moses is saying

to the people, you're going to screw up, I know you're going to screw up, you're going to sin. When you do, you're going to get punished. and to kind of modern ears that sounds so simplistic. It's like, oh my God, I'm going to sin and I'm going to get punished. Like, what world are we living in? I've seen bad people rewarded and good people who suffer. And all of that's true. And it's not like people didn't know that thousands of years ago.

The book of Job is also part of the Bible. But the basic idea there is that as a whole, and for the vast majority of people over the span of time, doing the right things, doing the virtuous thing, doing the duty-bound thing tends to make your life better and the lives of the people around you better. And if you reject that framework, that cause and effect framework, that duty bound framework, you end up tearing down everything around you. And there also is a real gap, I think, in the ideology of the scat. There really isn't, as I say, in the book, you can try to boil this down to ideology.

I think that there is a sort of philosophy of the lion that is more solid than the philosophy of the scavenger. I'm not sure that there is a philosophy of the scavenger as much of an envious instinct, right? I say this. It's much more of an instinct than it is like a set of principles. And if there are principles, they're oppositional just to the things that the lion believes, as opposed to being their own kind of self-encompassing, cohesive system.

So one of the things that you see a lot from scavengers is the idea, the universe is deterministic. Nothing is my fault. But I myself have the unique capacity to overturn the system and then build one of my own, right, which is self-contradictory. And the sort of Marxist theory, which is that history is entirely determined, except for the great revolutionary who steps up and overthrows the society and then builds his entire utopian system, you know, that self-contradiction never seems to be, you know, there's no revelation where people go, oh, I see how those two things conflict.

But again, I think that human beings need a purpose. And if that purpose is not turned toward good, it can very easily be turned toward evil. Let's talk now to the hyenas out there, you know, kind of hybrids between scavengers and lions. Let's say someone wants to be a lion. What do you advise them to do? Get up and do the dutiful thing every morning. Get up and, you know, as my friend Jordan Peterson would say, make your bed. Like figure out the things in life that are likely to make your life more responsible.

Try to find duties that you can do to other people. get involved in institutions that help build social fabric. And I lay out basically three models of being a lion. I think people can do many of these at once. I talk about the hunter being the innovator. There are a lot of people who are very risk-seeking. I tend to be a risk-seeking person in terms of not risk activities, but like business or being willing to go out there and take the heat for something.

There are people who are very much of that mold. I would encourage them to innovate, take those risks, bear the failure, because failure is a great teacher, and then take more risks. There are people who are the warriors whose job it is to defend. Those are the sheep dogs that you were mentioning earlier. And so you should find sheepdog activities if you're that kind of person. And then there are the people who I call the weavers who are very involved in weaving the social fabric

and building family and building community, involvement in charitable activity, going to church, going to synagogue, and all the like. Find more activities to get yourself involved. By the by the way, it happens to be the single best curative for depression. We have an incredibly depressed younger set in the United States. And that's because if you are sitting in your room doing nothing, you are likely to become depressed. You need to go out and do things. If you go out and do things, particularly things for other people, you will be happier. Your life will get better.

Your community will get better as a result. So let's turn, you know, as we begin to land the spaceship. The, you know, kind of prototypical feline in my world is, of course, Schrodinger's cat. It's an ambiguous creature that can be both living and dead. And I want to kind of, you know, use that as a stepping stone to talk about where you've touched upon it already, but sort of these innovators, these, these, you know, techno-optimists, which I see you as, I see you as the world's most optimistic pessimist or the mis-pessimistic optimist. I don't know, Ben, you'll have to tell me. But in the Schrodinger, like, ambiguity,

where we don't know, like, say, a Sam Altman, we don't, I don't actually know, I don't, I don't have a good read on him. It's sort of inscrutable to me. But he's capable of having great power. He may, he's very young. He's very wealthy. He may be the richest man in the world someday. And, and yet he has all this power. We don't know. know much about his personality. So my question is, you know, at what point should we, you know, sort of start to check in on these vast innovators before they accumulate, you know, enormous amounts of power and perhaps influence our world to a great extent? What at what stage should we look to maybe put a, what do they call it, bridle or something on the lion or put blinders on him or her?

When would we start to get worried personally? Well, I mean, I think there should always be checks and balances. I mean, I think that one of the geniuses of the American constitutional system is the acknowledgement that in a system of lions, ambitious lions tend to attack each other and tear down the whole system at the same time. And so you actually don't want a monarchy. I know there's some people on the right who have been calling for feudalism, neo feudalism in a monarchy, which I find bizarre. But the sort of idea that there should be like the great leader because he's the great lion. That's not what I'm talking about in the book. And I think that that applies also to innovation. If you are innovating in a product that is likely to change the world in unique ways,

then us, by us, I do not mean the government collectively. I mean, like us as individuals or as businesses or as the public, making demands for transparency and trying to create competitors. What are your pre-send? What are you going for here? What is the thing you're attempting to do? And then making that transparency to people, I think that that has to be an ongoing process. And we should treat business people just like we treat people in our lives, which is,

you know, trust but verify. Like, well, let's see the product of what you're attempting to do. What is your goal? What are the moral presets? Because I think that if you don't do that, then you can see this thing spinning off in a wide variety of ways. We've seen that with tech already. I mean, the idea was that Facebook and social media were supposed to connect us. We'd make new friends.

We'd be closer. You know, it would build social cohesion. And it did precisely the reverse. We might have been better to check ourselves before we wrecked ourselves in about 2013. Yeah, actually, I was got to turn there. You basically, you know, sort of suggest that the Bible. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill,

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and maybe it's this notion of envy. Can you say more about that, the ancient warnings for a modern age? Yeah, sure. I mean, the Ninth Commandment, which says that the 10th Commandment, which says that you are not supposed to envy, your neighbor's wife, your neighbor's property. It's the only commandment that's emotionally laden. So all the other commandments are, don't do this or treat this person in this way.

The idea that you are not supposed to envy is like, in the Ten Commandments. And that is because there's nothing that destroys human beings quite like envy. Social media has radically increased the amount of envy. Because, number one, you have people who are faking the beauty of their lives with filters and with, you know, beautiful pictures and with AI and all this kind of stuff. And so you envy the person who has the amazing boat that they maybe don't own. But more than that, you can find other envious people to kind of jump on the bandwagon

with you and tell you that your envy is actually a form of virtue. That you shouting about how the universe is unfair to you, it's not that you're being a brat or that you're tearing down a system that is actually quite good for the vast majority of people. It's that there are many people who are exactly like you and they are envious not because they're envious, but because they are truth tellers about an evil system. And, you know, the thing I say on my show all the time is please get out and touch grass. Like truly, get out and touch grass. Like go talk to like a normal human being, interact with that person in person, not via the phone,

not via the computer. God's greatest invention is the Sabbath. The reason for that has become eminently clear not only over time. but particularly in the modern age. As you know, right, like the electricity goes off. There's no phone. There's no computer. You go to synagogue.

You hang out with your family. There's no podcast. There's no engagement with kind of the outside world. It's like you with family and friends and community, ensconcing yourself in a system of values. And that's when people tend to feel the most whole. It's why even, you know, it's why there's a movement to bring back kind of a truer Sabbath for Christians too right now.

Like a media Sabbath, which in Judaism we just call Sabbath. but in the rest of the world, they're like this idea of like a media break or a media Sabbath. I'm, you know, that that's a, that's a very good thing. But yeah, social media has made all of this worse because it has now allowed people to masquerade their envy as virtue. If you went to church and you're like, God, you know, that guy over there, I can't believe there's a system that allows the guy sitting next to me in the pew

to have a Lambo. Like, that's just terrible. The system allows him to have a Lambo. You wouldn't think of doing that at church because you know that guy. And that guy might be a really good guy. That guy might give a lot of charity. That might be like one of the best people that you know. Now, he could be a jerk also, but he's,

He's not a jerk because the system allowed him to get a Lambo, right? But if you're at home, then everybody who has a lambo is a member of evil, right? This is the Bernie Sanders. If you're a billionaire, you're bad routine. And this is one of the things that's declined with the presence of church in our lives. And I've encouraged, you know, millions and millions of people to go back to church as a Jew. Go to church. It's important because of this.

Because in church, there really is neither rich nor poor, right? In a synagogue, there really is neither rich nor poor. Like, when I go to, when I go to Shoal, there are people around me who are earning, you a lot of money, there are people around me who are earning nothing. But if I'm praying in the same direction that they are to the same God that they are, then we are unified in that. And they're a human being, regardless of what they earn. And there's no injustice in the fact that the person next to me earns more or less than I do inherently.

There may be something unjust going on, but you have to show me the evidence of the injustice. Yeah, that seems to be the, you know, kind of the rubric, if I could take away anything from the book of how you can tell if you're a lion or a scavenger or some, you know, hyena in between. And that does have to do with envy. I think you're absolutely right. What do you say to somebody, though, that's, you know, I've hosted Richard Dawkins in person, you know, here and the West Coast. There's no chance I'm going to convince him. I've talked to Sam Harris. We had a three and a half hour conversation.

And then it abruptly ended when he brought up, you know, how evil slavery is and that he and I could come up with a better notion of a biblical text than the Torah in about 15 minutes. And, you know, just incredible arrogance and so forth. And even when presented with the evidence, you know, about what slavery actually meant, you know, he still acquitted it with chattel slavery. read, so I do believe there are certain people that are lost causes. I'm not going to get them to Shul, you know, on Shabbas or Dawkins to church. But what do you say to somebody in the middle, you know, that is just, look, I was born Christian or born Jewish. I don't really believe in God, quote unquote. How do you flex an exercise, the potential to receive and the permission to believe perhaps? Okay, so this is where I think a Judeoic perspective on this is useful because

Judaism is an action-first religion. It's very Aristotelian. So the idea is, like, go do the thing and then you will come to believe, as opposed to Christianity, which tends to be believed first, believe the thing and then you will come to do. I would say that might be the main contrast between the two religions, even though they share obviously a common biblical heritage. So I think that, you know, when you talk to Dawkins, I wouldn't expect Dawkins to come out and rebut his entire career and start saying he believes in God. But what Dawkins does do is he recognizes the value of what he calls cultural Christianity. And the point that I've made about Dawkins is you cannot have cultural Christianity without actual Christianity.

You can say that you really like the Bach in the pews of Saint-Annie, but there will be no buts in the seats at St. Antony if people don't actually believe in the God that the church was built to honor. And so, you know, I think that one of the biggest things, and this goes back to the action point, even if you don't believe in God, even if you don't believe in the religion, go do the thing. And what you find is that honestly, I'm amazed, honestly, at the way that people talk about, God, it's bizarre to me. No one talks about anything else in life the way that they talk about God.

They'll say, I don't believe in God. Name a thing that you, quote, unquote, believe in. Right, I have a video on my channels is I don't believe in gravity. I mean, I have evidence for gravity. I don't need to believe in it. Right, exactly. And when it comes to things in the world, if somebody asks you, like, what do you believe about your love of family, you wouldn't really, like, that's a stupid question.

It's a dumb question. How you act with regard to your family is evidence of what it is that you actually believe. And I think the way, I think that, you know, revealed preference is the ultimate test. And I think the vast majority of people who live in the world have revealed preference for a meaning-based universe. And I don't think that you can have a meaning-based universe in an atheistic universe. Call it God, call it whatever you want to. But I think that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are living in what they believe to be a purpose-filled meaning-based universe.

Because if they didn't do that, I don't know how they could live. I think they'd be lying to themselves. I mean, one of the things that I thought was fascinating is that at that event that I did with Sam, this is now five years ago, six years ago or something. At that event, there was a woman who got up and she'd listen, Sam, I listen to your show all the time and I love your show, but I have a 15 or 16 year old son and he's coming to me and he's telling me that the universe is deterministic

and I'm trying to get him and basically do his homework and like live a good life in the world. What should I do? And Sam basically said you should Fibb, right? That he might not be able to understand all the things that we're saying yet and you should basically, like you don't have to reveal all this at once. And it's like, well, I mean, or maybe maybe the best way for people to act is as if there is a God because maybe there is, or maybe people should act as if there is meaning because maybe there is. And you know what? In the end, I think that that's what matters is how you

act in the world, less what you quote unquote believe on an intellectual level. There's a, there's a famous debate in Judaism of what are called Tom Mahm Mitzvot, right? The idea of like the reason behind them is, are you supposed to, the reasons behind the commandments? Are you supposed to discover them? Are you not supposed to discover them? There's a rabbi down here in Florida named Ephraim Goldberg and Rabbi Golberg. And Rabbi Golberg. Berk likes to say that ta'amé, the word ta'am in Hebrew means two things. It means reason, but it also means taste. What's the relationship between those two things?

The idea is that the value of the commandments, it lies in their nutritional component. The taste is an additive. It's good. It makes it better. Having a reason to do what you do intellectually is a good thing. But actually, the things that you do are the more important things. What they do for you is the most important thing. So, Ben, my Haverusa, Rabbi Kuhnan here at UC San Diego, they would be, you know,

quite mad at me if I didn't ask this Parsha, the Suggia that were going over in Bavacama. So now the retention graph, you know, the retention graph is about to take you know, a cat, Carl, you know. Listen, if you're going to start quoting Amara, I mean, I'm out, but yeah, go ahead. Anyway. All right, great. So in Bavacama, we're studying

above a comma. So obviously it talks about these different types of damages. And one of them is sort of unknown. We don't know what it is. There's the ox, the pit, man, and fire. But there's a all this thing called Mave. But I really want to turn that into a question about about lions and scavengers.

It, Babacama also gives agencies, so to speak, to man, but it also says that you're responsible for other, you know, things. In this case, an ox or not covering up your pool or whatever. Now, I know you keep your oxes on a short leash down there in Miami, but up here we let our oxes roam free. What do you think this is trying to tell us that, I mean, we have responsibility for ourselves. That's a core requirement.

But to what level does our, does our, you know, requirements on us? safeguarding our children, obviously. When does that end? I mean, if I see a homeless person on the street, am I responsible for the damages that they do and I could prevent? I mean, where does it end, if at all? I mean, I think it's a messy question. I think it's situational. I mean, I don't think there's like a hard and fast. It ends, you know, that you have a duty to take the homeless person home, put them in your extra bedroom, or you have a, or you have a duty to stop the homeless person from killing the child he's chasing, right? I don't think those are quite the same question. It's not like, I have a duty to the homeless person or to run the homeless person's life writ large.

I think that those two questions are very different questions. But I think the biblical idea, at least for practical purposes, is take responsibility for as much as you possibly can. And there are going to be situations where you can't, and you can't do it for everybody. I mean, the biblical injunction to give charity in Judaism is limited. You're not supposed to give away all of your wealth, actually, because the idea is then you won't be able to take care of yourself.

You're supposed to not put your life in danger to save another human. if there's like a high certainty that you are going to die in doing so. For example, you're supposed to if there's a risk, but not if you're certainly going to die and doing stuff. There's obviously, you know, kind of shades to all of this. I think a good rubric is if you can do it, you should. And so when it comes to, you know, your oxen, I think that the general, the general biblical rule is if you know that your oxen is habitually goring people, you're responsible

for what the ox does, if the ox like goes off one day and go to somebody and you've made, you know, you fenced your field or whatever. then you're not responsible for it. The ox does, because now it's accidental. But I think that that's actually a pretty good rule for life. If you know that an action has been damaging over and over and over and over, don't do that action and try to stop other people from doing it as well. So are the scavengers the mave then? This is the one question I've been dying to ask you all in the interview.

Wow, I have no idea. I have no idea. I need to work on my Aramaic. Oh, which category of damage are they? How do they do damage? Are they active like an ox that gores or a passive like a pit that swallows? I mean, I think, I mean, they're more active than passive. I think that what's passive, the damages that are passive are the lions,

meaning the lions being enervated. Lions basically saying, okay, well, you know, we're the sinners, we're the guilty ones, making room for the possibility of the dangerous ox, right? That's more like, okay, I'm just going to leave my gate open, even though I know the ox is going to go do serious damage. So we're coming to the end here, Ben. I just want to conclude with a passage that you quote from nicely from my bar mitzvah. portion in Nizovim, where you were invited to my bar mitzvah, of course, at the co-tel.

That was September 7, 2023. And as I said, at that time, I was very optimistic. I, you know, seemed like there could be peace, et cetera. And obviously exactly a month later, that was completely destroyed. But the quote that you, that you put out in the book says that I've set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life not only for you, but so that you and your children may live. I'm going to ask you in the final call to you as your inner lion.

What does that look like to you? What does choosing life look like to you as a young man, as a young father, and as someone with this incredible future ahead of him and this great responsibility ahead of him? What is choosing life of its high and what does that mean to you? I mean, I think that that, you know, grabbing onto the things that matter, those values, and then inculcating them in the kids. I think that when you choose life, it's not just choosing life for yourself, it's choosing life for your kids. And this is, I think, where the lions really have to step it up.

I think that even many lions who I know do a very bad job of transmitting those values to the next generation. People who actually believe strongly in things. And they're like, oh, but let a thousand flowers bloom. My kids have questions. But that's good that they have. It's fine for kids to have questions. But your job as an adult is to help civilize them and give them good answers or at least the tools to answer the questions that they're being asked. Proper tools.

So they don't get sucked into the maw of envy, the maw of resenti maul that I talk about in the book. That really drives them toward, again, an enervated view of life in which they've no control and the only form of control they can exercise is going out into the streets shouting against the civilization that has given them everything. That is, I think, the greatest call in the end is that even if you believe yourself to be a lion, the biggest test is whether you can raise lions. Because if you raise scavengers, you haven't done your job. And speaking of the mall, I learned from our mutual friend, Dennis Prager, in the schmah says, Shinn and Tom Levineko, it means to put these words in your mouth, but it actually means plant them like teeth,

like put them as solidly your values and your morals and the way that you live, don't leave it to chance. And I think you do that so wonderfully. Ben Shapiro, congratulations on this wonderful new book. I hope we see each other before too long, either here or there, if you're willing to come back to the land of the scavengers.

Maybe Gavin News and my boss will be kind and let you back in. Thank you so much. And congrats in Mazel to them in the book. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. The biblical framework that Ben subscribes to isn't shared by all my guests. Click here for my interview with. Sam Harris, who offers a completely different take on the dangers of AI, the influence of religion,

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