Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Ben Shapiro: The Science™ of Authoritarianism (#183)

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

I spoke with Ben Shapiro about his thoroughly discursive new book: The Authoritarian Moment. Ben is prolific to say the least: his second book in just about a year. Some of you aren't Big Ben fans, but I hope you'll provide to me, and to him, some forbearance in this, the Yom Kippur season. Speaking of Yom Kippur we discussed forgiveness and tolerance and even Ben's biggest regret. Topics: ⚛️ Science vs. The Science™ 🚀 Private Space Flight 📚 Another Free Speech Book?? 💉Vaccine Mandates 🍷 Ben Shapiro Drinking Game ✡️ Yom Kippur Repentance 👽 Ben on Aliens Ben on Bitcoin How far are Americans willing to go to force each other to fall in line? According to the establishment media, the intelligentsia, and our political chattering class, the greatest threat to American freedom lies in right-wing authoritarianism. We’ve heard that some 75 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump represent the rise of American fascism; that conservatives have allowed authoritarianism to bloom in their midst, creating a grave danger for the republic. But what if the true authoritarian threat to America doesn’t come from the political right, but from the supposedly anti-fascist left? There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition. The authoritarian Left is aggressively insistent that everyone must conform to its values, demanding submission and conformity. The dogmatic Left is obsessed with putting people in categories and changing human nature. Everyone who opposes it must be destroyed. Ben Shapiro looks at everything from pop culture to the Frankfurt school, social media to the Founding Fathers, to explain the origins of our turn to tyranny, and why so many seem blind to it. More than a catalog of bad actors and intemperate acts, The Authoritarian Moment lays bare the intolerance and rigidity creeping into all American ideology – and prescribes the solution to ending the authoritarianism that threatens our future." If you're fasting for Yom Kippur, I wish you an easy and meaningful fast! 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️Listen on audio only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Order my book, Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner https://amzn.to/2UPTxOI t A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everybody to another special episode of the Into the Impossible podcast featuring today's guest, Ben Shapiro. Now, before you hit unsubscribe, unfollow, and send me a poisonous pen message, please note that this conversation, like all my conversations with Numpchomsky and Larry Tribe and Eric Topal, as well as with Ben and his cohorts at the Daily Wire and elsewhere, is non-political. I don't get into politics. I don't think politics is particularly interesting. I've never had to. a desire to be a politician or to target them. I think they do a great job. I've hosted the mayor of San Diego and I've hosted other people, but as always to look at their non-political aspects of their life, because I think that's more interesting as a scientist. So today we got into many, many things. You won't believe it. When we got into Ben's beliefs or lack thereof about space travel and even on extraterrestrial intelligence. So you won't want to miss that or any other portion of this

conversation. Trust me, I think you'll be glad you came along for the ride. And now sit back and enjoy this wide-ranging interview with none other than Ben Shapiro. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome everybody to what will surely be one of my many great plunges and subscriber counts as I bring on very rarely political figures. But as I always say astronomy. I got into it because there are no Republican constellations. There are no democratic asteroids. And I like a politics free zone. So actually today we're going to talk with my guests. Some say we look alike. We were separate at birth. I'm sorry to tell you that, Ben. We're talking with Ben Shapiro, proprietor, editor emeritus, the Daily Wire, proprietor of the Ben Shapiro

show. And Ben, how are you doing this fine season? You know, I'm hanging in there, but I'm not in California like you, so better than you. Well, you're welcome back anytime. Your money and your presence is welcome back anytime. So we're going to talk about a lot of things today, but I want to let you know this is our special Erev pre-Yom Kippur special. We did one last year at this time, and this one will be out on the eve of the holiest day of the year, which you told me last year is your favorite day on the calendar. Is that still true, Ben, that Yonkipur is your favorite day on the calendar? You know, it's one of those things where philosophically, yes, and then in practice, no. I'm not a big fan of fasting. I do like food, but in theory, yeah, I mean, the idea that you get to have your sins relieved by God and that you get to face up to those and spend all day dealing with existential questions is really kind of an amazing thing.

So philosophically, yes, but about 11 o'clock in the morning when I haven't had anything to eat or drink and it's only been, you know, 12 hours or 14 hours. And now I've got another 10 hours to go. About that time, I start to have doubt. That's right. If you like fasting that much, you can do it for me or, you know, I can recommend a colonoscopy prep. That might be more. Oh, man, Tom Gadalia, and then this one, it's like two in three weeks. It's just, it's good times. Well, we're going to talk about Judaism because your latest book, which is your sixth in one year, is called The Authoritarian Moment. And I can judge, I'm holding it up to the camera now. I got an advanced copy. Thank you very much to Emma and all your producers over there.

But I also got the real copy, and the reason was, I wanted to ask you and play a favorite game, the game that we're never supposed to do in life as authors, judge a book by its cover. So, Ben, rumor has it that the book is partially inspired by George Orwell,

who we talked about last year. You remember we talked about Animal Farm and whether you'd trade your beautiful tail as Benjamin the donkey did for a shorter tail and not have to have the flies. tell me, what is the inspiration for this title, this cover, design? Where'd you come up with it? What's the backstory behind it? So the authoritarian moment, the title just came up because I was thinking about the, the title

of the authoritarian mind by Theodore Ardorno. It was probably the sort of basis for it. So there was an idea by Theodore Ardano as a philosopher in mid-20th century, who argued that basically there was a certain mindset that tended toward the authoritarian. It turns out that his description of that mindset was not particularly accurate. But there are other sociologists who came around later who had sort of a slightly more accurate description of that. But it seemed to me that everybody these days is calling themselves authoritarian. And so I thought that it would be worthwhile examining sort of where the threats to freedom why. And obviously, look, I'm a conservative. So I think there are certainly people on the right for are authoritarian. But the threats, as the subtitle suggests, are predominantly institutionally from the left at this point. So I'm not going to pretend that the book is a bipartisan examination into authoritarianism. It certainly is not. And the jack boot on the front is obviously supposed to be reminiscent of that sort of 1984 imagery, that there is the boot treading on the human face forever.

And I think that a lot of people, actually, this is bipartisan. I think a lot of people in all facets of life at this point do feel as though there are other people who are coming for them because of their opinion. That's a really dangerous thing. Yeah, it certainly is. And I always have this paradox when I read your books because, you know, they're, they're intricate. researched. They're decisively argued, and each one, the footnotes alone, could be a PhD thesis here at the University of California or elsewhere. And so it is extremely thoroughly researched. And yet, I always have this dichotomy because I always want to ask the questions my audience would

want to know besides why are you having your younger, more attractive brother on. And that is, and that is, you know, really to do with the fact that you and I share a religion. You are Orthodox, and Orthodoxy, as I take it, we are supposed to have a king. We are supposed to have a king in heaven. We're supposed to have an authority above us that we look up to. And maybe it's that there's only one. But how do you resolve this paradox that you submit willingly to the authority of God and do so happily?

I understand you serve God with joy, right? So how do you reconcile these two dichotomy? Why don't you serve Gavin News? Well, you're not here to serve Gavin News. But why do you serve Donald Trump or Joe Biden with authority? Because look, this is the will. And we believe also that God we pray for Joe Biden every week of the year, right? And synagogue.

So anyway, how do you reconcile these two sides? The authority that you submit to and then the politicians that you refuse to submit. So obviously, I think the divine authority predates any author. to man. And there is this belief even in the Bible, obviously, when it talks about Davidic kingship, obviously in the book of Deuteronomy, when it talks about you're going to have a king, it says you're going to regret having a king. And not only that, the king is supposed to write his own Torah scroll because he's supposed to be reminded of his moral obligations throughout the books of the prophets. The king is constantly being remanded by his reprimanded, rather, by various prophets.

David himself is reprimanded by Nathan. Saul is reprimanded by Samuel. There is this sort of check and balance system, even with regard to kingship, which is the most rudimentary form of top-down rule. There's this belief that the king is supposed to be subjected to certain higher moral standards. The belief that you ought to be subject to a God in heaven also relies on your willingness to submit to a system of thought. And what I mean by that is that there are a lot of, I'd say, differing strains even within Judaism as to who you listen to and why you listen to them. I tend to be much more my monodyan in my approach. So Maimonides was very Aristotelian in his approach to religion. It was his belief that the commandments did have a rationale behind them that could be understood by human reason,

even if we hadn't actually figured all of them out yet. And so there was a real natural law component. So Maimonides was talking about that really mirrors sort of the timistic view of Thomas Aquinas at the same time in the Christian world. And so it makes it a lot easier to say, listen, I agree with the authority of the Bible, but I also agree with the authority of the Bible because it tends to reflect the demands of the real world and reason interacting with those demands. And so, you know, you don't have to, I think there's a vision of religion that religion is basically you throw out your individual human reason in favor of people telling you what to do. And the Maimonidita approach says that's not really the case, which is why religion and practice of religion, particularly in Judaism, was a common law sort of practice that has evolved pretty radically over time. I mean, there are famous sections of the Talmud where there's maybe the most famous section in all the Talmud.

There's one section where there's a rabbi who goes up against a majority of his fellows in the study house on a particular issue. And he's obviously right. And he says he calls on heaven. He calls on the walls of the bait midrash of the place that they're lording to lean if he is right. He calls on the river to reverse itself if he's right. He calls on a voice to come down from heaven if he's right. And all of these things happen. And then one of the other. Rabbi says, right, but none of those are authorities, right? We don't rely on the walls of the Beat Midrash to determine whether a right or a river or even a voice from heaven. You know, it's left in our hands, right, which is some of the verbiage in Deuteronomy as well, is that it's not in heaven, it's here for you. And so that means the interaction of the human, the interaction of reason and revelation lies at the core of my faith. So if you get completely rid of reason, then I think you end up with theocracy. And if you

get completely rid of revelation, I think that you end up at sort of a Nietzschean nihilism. What do you say to those who, you know, witnessing that tragedy and the man-made tragedy in Afghanistan say, well, you know, it's great to speak about these as eighth century, you know, barbarians and thugs? But wouldn't you like that? I mean, wouldn't you like not an authoritarian theocracy, but the rules of Judaism are pretty proscribed, as you say, as you talk about? You know, would you submit to if we could somehow revivify, you know, all the conditions needed to restore, Messianic times, et cetera, would you then submit to an authoritarian, to a government, not just to God, obviously, but to a basically semi-theocratic form of worship, of course, you would believe it's benevolent and as many would. Would you submit to that? Is that something you would look forward to? Let me put it that way. I mean, I think that to get into sort of the halakhic details of, you know, what messianic kingship would look like is probably beyond the scope of what we're talking about. Suffice it to say that messianic kingship, even Davidic kingship, the amount of centralized

authority that was actually brought to bear to actually enforce a lot of the laws of the Rama books is pretty limited, which is why a lot of the punishments, even in the Bible itself, punishment is, for example, excommunication. Right. You're cut off, basically social refusal. Or you have a situation where it will say that your line is cut off, which is really between you and God. It really isn't between you and the compulsive government and what the government can compel you to do. There's sort of a lot of commentaries about what the government could allow you. But listen, I'm not a fan of kingship. I mean, I make this pretty clear. And by the way, I don't think Samuel was a fan of kingship. The notion that the only way this can be done is through a monarchy. There are a lot

of forms of monarchy. I mean, there's a British form of monarchy where the king doesn't have ultimate authority. And then there is the, you know, theocratic monarchy where the king has all authority. So I think that these are, again, I'll rely on Rambam here. I'll rely on my monadies and I'll say that when the Messiah comes, I guess we'll discuss it. But, you know, the, my ideal form of government does not involve one person at the top of a government telling everybody else what to do without any check or balance. And I don't think the Torres does either, actually. Right. Well, just let you know, I get dibs on the Messiah after he's guest on your show. Ben. I had on recently Dr. Eric Topal, America's doctor, I think, if it's not the first lady,

I wanted to ask you, you know, he was kind of very, very of two minds, that the government has a very strong place. And in fact, you know, he advocated famously for, you know, the withholding of the release of the Pfizer and another trial, vaccine trials. But he's obviously, you know, he said to me, and he's not in favor of lying to the public to, even to advance a good goal. In other words, have more mammograms. You shouldn't overstate the amount of cancer risk, for example. And yet, I see you as a very early vaccine advocate. you know, that was very clear. That was actually a very, very important, I think, moral lesson to many people that follow you. So how do you know? What's the rubric speaking as a professor? What's the rub—how do you know when to trust a governmental edict, a decree, and to submit to it? Because I think we have to submit to it at some level. I think Victor Frankel said there should be a West Coast statue of responsibility, not just the statue of liberty. So how do you know? What's the rubric to know when a government edict is good or not? I mean, they have to actually show you the evidence.

And this is, I think, my problem with the public health bureaucracy throughout this pandemic is that you had, I mean, Dr. Patches admitted that not only did he not show people the evidence that he was effectively lying to the American public repeatedly to achieve his goals. He did that on herd immunity where he said, well, I thought that the American public was willing to withstand this level of herd immunity. So I said that percentage. Then I shifted the percentage. He did it on masks early on instead of saying that masking is effective and then saying, but we need to make sure that our health providers have it first. instead of doing that and asking for some shared sacrifice, he instead said that nobody needs a mask. He did it with regard to masking with regard to the vaccine.

So post-vaccine, but before Delta, he was like, well, you definitely have to mask after we've had the vaccine. And then two weeks later, he shifted it. We heard from public health officials who are not Fauci in the middle of the pandemic repeatedly that if you were out protesting against lockdown, this was very bad and spread the virus. But if you were out protesting George Floyd, this was very good and was necessary because racism was a public health crisis.

And so when you have people saying that kind of stuff, I think it's very difficult to create the sort of institutional trust that's necessary to call upon. It just isn't there. There's a reservoir of trust that you need to call upon sometimes. And when the reservoir is empty, nobody's going to trust you. And I think that's so much of what has happened with the vaccines is that people who are not taking the vaccine, they have a real root base level of distrust in the public health bureaucracy in the media to tell them the truth because the media have not told them the truth.

And I think this is true even so far as, for example, risk factors and how exactly people differentiate based on age and health status. And they've done polls with the American public asking them, how likely do you think you are to die from COVID-19 broadly? And people are off by a factor somewhere between 10 and 100. And if you ask people based on their age, they're off by way more than that. And so, you know, that is really a problem because what that also leads to is this reactionary feeling like, okay, well, if they say to do X, I'm going to do Y. And so, well, X might be right, right? So two things can be true at once. The public health bureaucracy sucks. And also the vaccines are extraordinarily effective and you should totally go get them, right?

These two things are, you can hold them in your mind at the same exact time. And then when you're asked why you would get the vaccine, I think it's fair to say, listen, I know what the IFR is for people in my age bracket. The IFR for people in my age bracket, the infection fatality rate, is higher, significantly higher than any fatality rate that's been established for the vaccines. The prospect of me getting, for example, myocarditis from the vaccine is significantly actually lower from the vaccine than it would be if I got the, if I got COVID itself for my age bracket, the same may not hold true for kids under 12 because we really don't have any data about

that. And one thing that we do know about kids under 18 is the kids under 18 are not dying from this. So, you know, but there are a few, this comes up in the masking context too. I mean, there was an entire article in New York Magazine the other day about how there is literally no serious evidence that mask mandates with regard to children in school are effective. And then you hear constantly on the news that if you're anti-mask mandate, if you don't want to take your five-year-old and put them in mask and send them to school because, first of all, kids can't wear masks properly. They suck at it. I mean, I have three kids, seven and five, and then one. And the seven-and-five-year-old, like, they're constantly picking at the mask,

taking it off, putting it in their pockets, spitting on it, eating, putting it back on. Right? Like, the cloth masks themselves are not nearly as effective as, for example, in N95. You're not going to make a kid worn an N-95. And yet there's this perspective that's cropped up that if you don't want a mask your kid is because you want children to die. And it's just completely evidence-free. And so people are reacting to that by being like, well, screw all of this. I just screw all of it. I'm not going to listen to anything you guys have to say.

And again, I think that that's the worst of all available worlds. But it's only the worst of all available worlds by a little bit because I think the second worst of all available worlds is listen to everything they have to say. They may even be equivalently dumb. Right. That's the hard part again. And not to, you know, we're not doing a Haverusa Talmud study. but the point is to not go too far to the left or to the right, and they didn't mean politically, as they say, back then.

I don't think Moshe, Rovaina, was a Democrat or Republican. And by the way, thank you for using one of your stock phrases. Two things can be true at once. In my household, whenever Ben says that, we drink two cups of wine. So thank you for inebripping us so early in the morning. Miriam Webster, the source of all scientific wisdom and knowledge, defines authoritarian as of or relating to favoring blind submission to authority, which means in some cases that there is an impulse. There's an impulse to be a follower, to be blindly led. And I wonder about that.

Again, you know, this notion that, you know, it's the hardest thing to really split the difference between, you know, knowing when to obey and knowing when to not obey. But I think their secondary definition of or favoring concentration of power in a leader or an elite, not constitutionally responsible to the people. I think that's almost more appropriate for this book. I agree, yeah, is about all the different ways, the modalities in which our lives are, you know, are governed. And yet, again, I always have to push back with respect to you, my friend Ben. I've, in the last year, have had on Michael Shermer, I've had on Dave Rubin, I've had on, let me see, on my list of past guests.

Your friend, your boss, I think, Michael Knowles. I've had on, uh, Dennis, all these people have books out. And they're all about the suppression of free speech. And I wonder, you know, how can we as, or, you know, how can we take, uh, you authors seriously, those that decry the awful suppression, the, the, the jackboots coming down.

And when you guys are so successful in, and almost making the New York Times bestseller list in the case of Michael Knowles, how can we really take that seriously that he is suppressed? Freedom of speech. He's left speechless. What do you have to say to critics that say, come on, you guys are overdoing. So my freedom of speech has absolutely not been suppressed. Let me make that clear from the very outset. My freedom of speech has not been suppressed. There have been sort of attempts informally to do that, right, required 600 police officers at Berkeley for me to speak at Berkeley. But, you know, my free speech, listen, I'm, thank God, I'm a very successful company.

A lot of people listen to the show. The problem is actually for, I think, the person who's not in politics. I think, and I talk about this in the book, I think that there are a lot of people out there who are working for a corporation that is not political, ostensibly. And then they get a note from their boss on a particular political matter, and now they're expected to mirror the priorities of their boss, and if they don't, they're going to be fired, or they're going to be held in low esteem. Or you've got, you know, the normal American who's not in the business of politics, who post something on Facebook, and all of a sudden it blows up, and their business is being boycotted. Or you have the normal person who's friends won't talk to them.

family won't talk to them anymore because they voted for the wrong person. I mean, this sort of stuff is extremely common. As far as top-down refusal to allow my voice to get out there, let's put it this way. There are institutions that have attempted to censor, or there's been pressure inside institutions to censor, even me. We saw earlier this year when I wrote the political playbook and 200 staffers had a phone call with the heads of Politico complaining that I was allowed to even dismerch the sacred playbook. This actually resulted ironically in the formation of a nascent union of Politico.

So I'm very eager to be seen as a union leader over a Politico, frankly. That's exciting. I'm a labor leader now. And I'm fully happy to take credit for the unionization of Politico's workforce. But it sort of differs institution by institution. This book is not primarily about governmental authoritarianism, though I think that's obviously a threat. It's much more about sort of informal social authoritarianism. And that I think we all do feel.

And the argument that I've heard so often is that if it's not the government, it doesn't matter. And that's obviously untrue for the vast majority of Americans, for whom the institutions they deal with most on a daily basis are not the government. It's their company. It's the church they go to. It's the scientific experts they hear on TV. It's the sporting events that they consume. All of those institutions are cramming down a particular viewpoint.

And if you refuse to acquiesce to the viewpoint, there are some pretty severe social consequences. Now, listen, there's a fine line between having an open and robust debate and the attempt to, for example, mobilize people against your political opponent's business and thus to destroy it. And I think that that line is crossed pretty frequently these days. What do you think about this reaction to the non-governmental forces that are at work? I'm thinking in particular of the private spaceflight endeavors of Bezos and Branson and Musk and how they're almost villainized. And I'm looking at these people and I'm saying NASA has a budget, I don't know if you know what it's been, but NASA's budget is less than what people spend on lipstick every year. Now, you're remarkably handsome man being in my, you know, compared to me, of course. But that lipstick budget is, you know, $20 billion. And yet if you ask the normal person, they spend billions and half the GDP goes to NASA. No, they don't. They're just remarkably successful. And I wonder, you know, what is this, you know,

reaction to the non-authoritarians? I don't even know if there's a name. I'm going to get into your neologism, ultra-cripidarianism. I can finally use that in Scrabble without embarrassment. What do you make of the hostility from Robert Reich, my fellow colleague at that fine institution up north, UC Berkeley? What do you make of this vilification almost of ways to save the government money? I mean, they've reduced the cost of private spaceflight and of commercial spaceflight by order to magnitude. Why are people so resistant to efforts to save the government money? I mean, frankly, I don't think it has anything to do with saving the government money. I think they could spend their money on literally anything and they would still be decried for their wealth unless they sign a payout to a particular approved organization.

What they're really angry at is that Jeff Bezos is rich. I mean, if Jeff Bezos were not rich, they wouldn't be angry at him. It has nothing to do with what he does with his own money. And frankly, I think that it's very cool, both that he is very wealthy and that he used that money to do something really awesome in developing new technologies that human beings haven't been able to develop before. That's a pretty amazing thing. same thing with Elon Musk. I'm utterly confused why people are upset about this, except that I think there's a root jealousy that has been inculcated by a political elite that says that if somebody is worth, quote, unquote, too much money. This means anything

they do from here on out is bad. They were good people until they made a lot of money. Then they made a lot of money, and they became bad. And I think this is infected, frankly, the whole society. I think that there's, I mean, if you go back to the 1930s, there was a feeling about people who were wealthy, which is that I would also like to be one of them. which is why people, I mean, if you look at the lines, like the breadlines during the Great Depression, right, a horrifying time in American history economically, people, people on the breadlines are wearing suits and suits and hats and ties in the breadline. And now you have billionaires who are attempting to dress like homeless people. Because what you aspire to be today is a person who does not take stock of their wealth, right? If you're really cool with the people, then you can never show that you're wealthy. Listen, honestly, one of the things, there are many things I found not charming about Trump. One of the things that I found absolutely charming about Trump is that he was like, yeah, I'm rich, sir. I am yes good I mean like really we need more of that because I would like more people to be rich I'd like more people to openly aspire to that it's funny honestly they're parts of American culture where this actually is not rejected right for example rap culture really glorifies making a lot of money I don't think that's a bad thing I think that's a bad thing I think a lot of money if you're engaging in a bunch of consensual transactions with others and then you are saying I made a lot of money and I hope you to do I don't see anything wrong with that I think that's perfectly good thing but there's this sort of embarrassment that American society now inculcates about success that is really really antithetical to encouraging people to pursue that success. There's this notion that Jeff Bezos is, quote-unquote, the privilege. If you look at Jeff Bezos's life story, that dude did not grow up

a privilege. Right. If you look at Steve Jobs' life story, these are people who did not grow up, you know, in the heart of luxury. They made something of themselves. And yes, of course, they had people who helped them because we all have people who help us along our way, no question. And we should all seek to help others along their way. But this kind of stark divide between how we call people who are wealthy, the privilege versus the quote-unquote underprivilege. It seems to me that we actually have to define what the privilege is before we determine whether somebody is privileged or underprivileged. Right.

And the notion, you know, it smacks against the notion of gratitude or hakar Satov, as we say. And I think that's dangerous, you know, this notion that if everybody's, we level, by the way, they never like to talk about how much LeBron James makes in a day. Right. It's always Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and Elon, it's, I don't know why, but for anyway, they're always, you know, they're always famous, you know, saying, you know, who cares if it works in practice? work in theory. You know, that's the question we should have. Would you go to space, Ben,

if they had glatt tang? Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube ice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May, May, 14th through June 3rd, U.S. only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. C-Store online for details. I would go to space regardless of whether they had glott tang.

I mean, like, space is awesome. I've been trying to convince my wife that once it gets safe enough, where, you know, there's not a one in 10 chance of the thing blowing up. Once that happens, I'm totally up for it. I mean, there are a couple of developments I'm really up for. I'm up for that. I'm really up for a lot of the talk about how this is going to lower travel time. I just think it would be unbelievable to be able to fly from like Florida to Australia and

take an hour and a half. That would be unbelievable. Yeah. And you'd finally get a good night's sleep when you're on the road. You'd lose a sponsor that. I don't think, you know, your mattress company will support a zero gravity mattress. I want to ask a question about another, I'm going to read another definition from Miriam Webster, Merriam-Webster dictionary. It's ultra-crepidarianism. And the definition is, this word does not exist. Did you make this word? up in, because I had never heard it before you, and I'm a master of the Mojus, what is ultra-crepidarianism, and am I guilty of it? I started to think I might be guilty of this malady. I mean, I think that

all of us are guilty of it a little bit, but ultra-crepanarianism is the idea that you are speaking outside of your area of expertise. And I just thought there really ought to be a German term for it, but there really isn't, so we'll just have to use the English. Ultra-crepidarian is a word. I call it almost a philosophy, ultra-crepidarianism, but it's a phenomenon for sure. And this I discussed in sort of the purview of science is that you have this vast attempt in the field of science for people to speak out of areas that they actually know anything about. And you saw this largely in the public health debate over the last year, where suddenly we moved from what are disease vectors and how do they work and what are the epidemiological

study saying to if you protest for George Floyd, you definitely won't get the virus. And it was like, and racism is a public health problem. I said, well, if you're defining racism as a public health problem, then we're not talking about public health anymore. We're just, we're not. You can talk about racism as a problem, but talking about it as a public health problem, broadly speaking, is now saying that everything is a public health problem, which I think is sort of the point. Once you start, it has a couple of effects. One is, that you have a bunch of people talking about stuff they don't know about. And the second is that when you broaden your field out to include everything, people start to seeing their own

perspective as part of your field. You'll start to see people saying unscientific things and then say those things in the name of science, even though they're not scientists. The science says X, and X is just a political view that I happen to hold. Okay, well, maybe not. Maybe science doesn't say that. And also, when you cite a scientist, the scientist has to be talking about, like, you are in the sciences. I don't think that means that you are an excellent cook. Now, you could theoretically broaden out the possibilities of science to include how the chemistry of cooking works. And you could probably talk about that all day long. But I'm not going to assume that you know how to cook an egg because you're a scientist. And yet because science is the most valuable

institution that we have in terms of just pure human prosperity, there is this willingness to grant a halo effect to science where we're like, okay, well, if a scientist said it and the dude's wearing a white coat, I guess I'll just do what he says now, even though it makes no sense at all. Well, yeah, on those frame, I did a video called Follow the Science, which I argue just that, that you should not, for Prager University, that you shouldn't, you know, this notion that, you know, because someone has a PhD in chemistry, and I pointed out, you know, Fritz Haber, who is the father of a fertilizer that powered our breakfast food this morning, he also invented chemical weapons. And he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry after World War I when these weapons were used. And he personally witnessed the, the devastation that they wrought. So listening to him on social policy or even warfare is a tragic mistake. And as I quote, you know, in that video, Richard Feynman said, science is actually the belief in the ignorance of experts, not the wisdom of experts. You know, the word science, as I pointed out to your friend Michael Knowles, it doesn't mean wisdom. It means knowledge. And wisdom is knowing

not to, you know, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit and wisdom's knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. But I wonder, you know, as Galileo said, in the sciences, the authority, of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one spark of reason from an individual man. And I wonder, you know, the book about authoritarianism, when we look to science, is there a danger in kind of venerating science too much in the sense that scientists have all the traits, I always say, scientists are like children. You know, they're curious, they're, they're whimsical, their, intellectual, you know, they just want to know everything, they're passionate, they don't play well with others. They don't share their toys. They're jealous, they're petty. We have a lot of

negative traits in science. Doesn't mean don't listen to science. I'm not antagonistic. Obviously, I have devoted my life to it. But is there not a danger? We do have authority bias. We have prestige bias. We have confirmation by. We have all these biases in not the science, TM, Ben Shapiro in 2021, but in science itself. We have all these biases, prejudices, lacunae in our character. Why should we venerate science so much? Yeah, I mean, I think that this is why, you know, venerating science as a process that is capable of producing useful results to people is totally worthwhile. But even that, you know, has its limits, meaning that I feel that people do the same thing with economics. They'll say, well, economics doesn't

fill the needs of the human soul. And I keep thinking myself right, did it ever say it was going to? Like, well, why would it? And it's the same thing with science, except that a lot of scientists think that science is supposed to fill the need in the human soul, right? This is my kind of long-running debate with Sam Harris. I don't think that you can get from is to aught. I don't think that you can look at the scientific facts of existence and then immediately go from there to a cohesive moral framework that wasn't actually kind of rooted in just Judeo-Christian morals that you're now guising as humanism. So I think that there's a real mistake that is made by folks in science to declare that everything is science and also by people who are not scientific to simply grant credibility to that because once you slap the label science on something, we're all supposed to believe it. And there's also this bizarre and stupid reductionism where people will give very complex results, but then they think that the public can't handle the results. And so they reduce it down to some

sort of headline that actually isn't true. You see this all the time in science. You see it, you saw it with COVID a lot. But you certainly see it with global warming as well, right? Where people will say global warming is a threat to how we live over the course of the next century. That's a very broad statement. It's a very broad statement. Then you get into the specifics and you look at it and you say, okay, well, it's probably going to lead to, for example, more intense hurricanes, but it doesn't necessarily have an impact on frequency of hurricanes, and it's unclear if the damage done by hurricanes is actually due to the increased winds of the hurricane or the fact that the target has now increased because people are building more on these coasts, right?

And when you look at even the impact of global warming over the course of time, the IPCC itself has a very, like a rather broad range of how much the temperature could change over the course of the next century. It's like anywhere from 1.5 degrees Celsius to 4.5 degrees Celsius, which is a huge range. And when you point out all of this, or when you point out that certain solutions that are undertaken in the name of science are very unlikely to have any sort of serious effect on the climate, say the Kyoto Protocols or the Paris Pisa Cords, when you point that out, then people say you're anti-science. And it's like, well, no, I'm using the exact same source as you are. I'm just making a different political argument. But this

is now considered anti-science on the basis of what exactly? And that's a dangerous thing, because then again, we are getting to the point very quickly, where when institutions is our misused, people lose trust in the institution. If you lose trust in science as a value, then that's going to have some really dire downstream effect. Frankly, I think that you're seeing it for a lot of folks who refuse to take the vaccine, not for any scientific reason, but just because they just don't trust the institutions promulgating the sort of science talk that isn't really scientifically rooted. All right. You see that a lot. I joke in my book. Every four years, we find out from 70 Nobel Prize winners, which Democrat we should vote for.

And, you know, it becomes, you know, what is someone who studies low temperature, superconductivity, or string theory? You know, what do they have to teach us about, you know, who should be the, you know, the leader of the free world, the most powerful country in human history? I want to talk about big tech now. Obviously, you're, you know, you're a huge fan of technology. You know, you can eat like a king nowadays. You can live better than a kid. You can get a chauffeur to come to your house with a push of a button. You can get a home-cooked meal, you know, from, from, you know, from.

your favorite place down the street, delivered to you from your mother, or you can get a restaurant cooked meal if you're so inclined. You can get medical diagnoses. I believe you met your wife on Tinder. These are all social media and other tools to community. You have more reach than, you know, almost anybody on Earth. I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show a couple months back, and I said, Neil, you're the most famous scientist in human history because, you know, 40 million people know who you are right now, and you can, you know, it's not like you're, you know, you've passed away. And he's like, no, no, no, but the influence that technology confers, is this double-edged sword, as the Bible says, is this worth it? Is the, is this tool? Because it seems

to me, you know, Twitter is the most efficient tool ever devised for spreading Lashon Hara, you know, evil speech. How do we, how do we balance the technology authority that is inherent in all these apps? Because we love it. We need this technology and we live better because of it. How do you balance those to competing demands? For sure. And I think that that's particularly true with a lot of these services that are really designed to be kind of addictive. I mean, the fact is that when they design Twitter, for example, that little kind of flip that you hear every time you refresh is designed to be almost a Pavlovian response for you, that you get like a little dopamine hit every time. And that's why you find yourself doing it all the time.

And so for me, I just took Twitter directly off my phone, right? If I want to be on Twitter, I'm going to have to be on my computer and sit and think about what I'm typing, as opposed to just being on my phone and just randomly throwing things out there, which has been, I think, beneficial for my life. And the answer to this is like the answer to, you know, all other problems of technological systems that both make our lives better, but also provide for the possibility of greater sin. And that is you really have to create prophylactic rules for yourself and their use. And this has been true about literally every technology ever developed, right, or pretty much all of them, that if you are like the car made possible the ability to have an affair in another city, right? If you're horsebound, basically the group of people that you've

could go out with and sleep with was limited to the distance that you could take your horse within a couple of hours. Yeah, it wasn't all that far. Angus Khan, it really was a bad for him. The horn. Right. Yeah, he made a, yeah, he had unique success in this respect. But, but the, car and the plane, right, all of these things enable sin in ways that the horse does not. You know, does that mean that the car and the plane are bad? No, of course, the car and the plan are wonderful, wonderful creations. What it does mean is that as a species, we have tended to confuse. This goes back to your last question a little bit. We have tended to confuse technological and scientific development with moral development, and they are not the same thing whatsoever. And in fact,

as technology gets more sophisticated, there is a significant call on the human capacity to be more moral. And we have largely shirked the call. We have insane levels, while we talk about the level of privacy that's not available online, and you should all get expressed VPN for this, the reality is that you can now partake in all sorts of sin from the privacy of your own home that you would have to go out in a public to do before. And so this is enabled to, sin on record levels. So this means that you actually have to be prophylactic in your own acknowledgement of your own sinful capacity. And yet we also live in a society that says that to even mention the capacity for sin is to be shaming people. They don't want to sin shame somebody. You

don't want to make somebody feel bad about themselves. And so, you know, with greater technology comes a greater need for us to be reflective about how we act. And that's difficult. I mean, nobody likes being reflective. It's no fun, except for me on Yom Kippur. That's the only time. That's right. You're fasting. Your Yom Kippur app has saved many. It actually allowed me to drop five pounds from my double chin to my backside. I want to ask now about another thing near and dear to my heart, and I know your heart too, in all seriousness, academia. You're a scholar. You clearly, you know, thoroughly love the life of the mind. And on one hand, you know, academia hasn't really changed much in a thousand years since the first university

in Bologna, Italy, and 1080. You have, you know, some guy scratching on a piece of rock with another a piece of rock. And we call that learning. And almost nothing has changed in that millennium since. I wonder, you know, are, are, is there something in store? You know, you've got this media corporation now. You've got, you're now doing entertainment. You've obviously been doing news. I wonder if the, by the way, is Daily Wire planning like a national the science foundation? With academia, do you see it ripe for disruption? Do you see this, you know, as you talk about in the book, You talk about the varsity blues scandal. You know, we had these actresses and actors getting their daughters into college that didn't

want to go to college and didn't even need to take the SAT for the college. They wanted to go to Juilliard, one of them. You know, she didn't even need to go take the SATs, let alone be coached illicitly in doing so. So anyway, what do you see as the opportunities for disruption in academia, which you spend not an inconsiderable amount of time in the book devoting to? So this is one place where I think the Internet's really going to help. So first of all, you see a tremendous appetite for people who do want to learn online, right? I mean, you have things like the Great Courses Plus or Hillsdale Online programs and people,

or Prager You, for that matter, people who are looking for information on a regular basis and want it. And I think that as more and more colleges move online, I think the pandemic helped accelerate this. I think that you're going to see alternatives start to form that are a hell of a lot cheaper than hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In order to effectuate that, you're going to need businesses to stop looking at the Ivy League credential as though it is the BL Endall. and this is coming from somebody who went to an Ivy League law school. I don't actually think that it's necessary for somebody to even go to college in order to be an excellent employee. And I think there will come a point where smart first movers in the space

are going to start seeking good employees in places outside sort of the traditional well-trod paths, right? There's going to be somebody who instead decided to get their degree in something in a year and a half being an online program by a Harvard Extension or something. And then people look at it and go, well, that's good enough for, me, they also got a 1,500 on their SAT, so I know they're smart. And I think that colleges, unless you're in the actual hard sciences, I think that colleges have largely become a sorting mechanism. And the sorting mechanism is a very expensive sorting mechanism that puts people

severely into debt. But I don't think that just because you got a polyside degree from UCLA, the way that I did, I don't think that means that you're necessarily going to be a better employee than a person who got the same score I did on the SAT, graduated the same age, and didn't get a polyside degree from UCLA. I wonder, though, I mean, I'm actually working on a project to take the written word of Galileo for the first time and make it into an artificial intelligent learning engine because there's never been something like that and why I learn, you know, celestial mechanics for me when you can learn it from Isaac Newton or Galileo as good as I think I am at teaching it. But then it opens up to me this concern that, you know, with machine learning

and artificial intelligence, do you see, you know, kind of a, you know, a very brief calm before that storm when now it's going to be, if you thought it was at scale before the spying, the the authoritarianism, once we get, you know, super computers, quantum computers, in charge of the algorithms, are we just toast? I mean, we may very well be, but again, I think that as with, as I was saying with all technology comes, you know, we have to have a lot of humility when we approach these technologies and recognize that we're going to have to set limits on ourselves because, you know, when it comes to the vagaries of machine learning, you know better than I do.

So I'm not, you know, I tend to be sort of a technological optimist as opposed to, you know, somebody who believes that SkyNet is coming and it's going to kill all of us and that the machines are going to wake up and decide that we're their overlords and it's time to kill everyone. If that happens, then I guess I'll, you know, just be among the ruins and won't have much to say about it. But as long as that doesn't happen, then the increased capacity seems to me to open a lot of vistas for people. But, you know, there are consummate downsides, obviously, and how this stuff is used. We're going to need a lot better controls. governmental or otherwise, although I don't trust the government to control itself in these areas. Right. And building on that and technology as a whole, I think I was able to connect you with Michael Saylor, who was one of the biggest Bitcoin proponents on the face of the planet. And I was glad to make that connection. But I want to talk about disruption there because we saw recently, you know, and my condolence has been that they took down your favorite site, Only Fans, where you have one of the most popular accounts in Yiddish Kite. It's just me wearing tuxedos.

That's all it is. It's you. And stylized Keep Us Sugars. That's the only way you can get it is join Ben's only fans account. But anyway, they took it down, right? And those are credit cards. And we had Amazon Web Services take down, you know, parlor and so forth. Do you see opportunities?

I don't know if you got into this with Michael Saylor, but I know many of my audience is very curious about what can things like the decentralization of technology, the de-authoritarianism of both blockchain and Bitcoin as a means of transaction that's immune from government, you know, snooping in some level. I'm not going to get into the details. But also for things like academia and even communication peer-to-peer, not relying on, you know, Twitter could turn off your account tomorrow, as we know, right? So what do you see? Are you optimistic about that? Are there any potentials that you're most interested in in that space is in tech? Yeah, I mean, I'm super pumped up about that. So the decentralization of money, you know, via Bitcoin, the effectuation of that technology

in other spheres, and decentralization of informational dissemination, right, which has sort of been done but on the old mechanisms, just like money used to be done on the old mechanisms, right? There's what PayPal was. Instead, the sort of next generation stuff where it will be completely peer-to-peer and you won't need an intermediary to do any of that. Everything will just sort of live in the ether and be verified not by a centralized company saying that you are you, but by a blockchain technology, for example. That stuff's going to be really cool, and it's also going to allow for a lot to thrive. Now, that also is going to mean that bad guys thrive.

But, you know, that is just the risk of liberty is that bad people do bad things. And that's a risk that I'm willing to take. I think that the attempt over and over and over again, for example, to cast the bad people out from Facebook has not resulted in the bad people not being online. It's resulted in them being at 4chan and then 8chan and then presumably 16chan, and they'll just keep channing it up. And at a certain point, they go underground and they go to places where, and the government follows them.

And all of that, you know, maybe that's effective. Maybe that's not. But it seems to me that the greater risk to me is a centralized authority telling you what you can and cannot say online, for example, or what financial transactions you can and cannot pursue. Right, if credit card companies, I think, in the near future, might be in the position where they just start banning particular credit card users because they don't like who they are. There was a report over the weekend that maybe one of the credit card companies

was doing that to Michael Flynn. That scares the living hell out of me. These are neutral service providers. And so the potential to just have a Bitcoin wallet, for example, where it's not up to Bitcoin. It's not up to Coinbase to decide if you can and cannot have a wallet. I mean, frankly, they can't. They don't even have the capacity to determine whose wallet it is, really. Because theoretically, if you've got Bitcoin in the name of a code, then the code owns the wallet.

If that's the case, then it removes a lot of these obstacles. I'm very much in favor of, I haven't been thinking a lot about this since I got kind of into Bitcoin over the last couple of months, three months. And I'm very into the idea of radical decentralization at this point because we've seen radical centralization in corporate life. We've seen radical centralization in informational dissemination. We've seen radical dissemination in terms of money supply. And so if we can reverse a lot of those trends, I think that'd be an excellent thing. And in terms of the media outreach, et cetera, I do think that there's incredible opportunities for this technology. And even in science, I think you could do things

where you could, you know, somebody has some discovery or some, you know, vaccine, but they don't, they're not ready for it to be released. They could stake it on the blockchain, show proof of work, and, you know, and this could be something that could transform science as well. I think we're, yeah, we're definitely in the early days there, and I'm excited to see what happens there. Speaking of, you know, going into the, you know, the realm of media that you are so expert in, there's a famous Yiddish saying, I'm sure you've heard it, he who stands in the middle of the road gets hit by both sides of the traffic. In other words, the fact that you are so courageous, you know, some say brazen,

do you take more risks now? Would you say, Ben, as your celebrity increases the network effect, you know, you have this wide-ranging influence now that you probably couldn't have dreamed of just 10 years ago when I first started following you? You know, do you think that there's a limit or that there's a limit or that there's, you know, some, some restraint on who you are that will, you know, allows you to take risk that maybe some of the readers couldn't, you know, if one of my students, you know, writes me and says, you know, I can't say this to my professor in class, but, you know, maybe I can say it to you,

I get messages like that all the time, you know, he or she could get, could get repercussions. And yet, you, you know, make your living on having an opinion and being paid to do so, quite handsomely, as we know, from ExpressVPN. But I want to know, like, have you become more bold, or have you decided to just take more chances now? Or are you still the same old Ben that I listened to on, what was it, truth revolt, a decade ago? Yeah. I mean, I think there's some of both. So on the one hand, I'm more prominent. That means I can withstand more risk. So that's great. It means I can say things that, you know, I can get away with things that maybe other people can't. Like, if I have strong feelings about vaccines. I'm going to say what the strong feelings about vaccines are. And if it ticks people

off, then, you know, so be it. I try to, I try to couch everything I say in terms of data, so if people want to get mad at the data I'm using, that's okay. But, you know, I've always tried to approach things from a data-driven point of view, except when maybe I was 17 or 18 and you're just, you know, attention-seeking, which is what people do when their teenagers. Unfortunately, when you're 17 or 18 in writing a public column, the intention-seeking is on your permanent record. So in any case, it's not quite, you know, now, obviously, I'm able to say things that I think many other people aren't able to say on politics and networks in both directions, although for a lot of people, I'd say it's mostly from the right. The counterintuitive

fact is that if you are very prominent and if you speak to a lot of people, this means that if you make a mistake, everybody notices. And so this means that you have to be very, very careful in how you approach this stuff. And that's the stuff of nightmares, right? I literally will have nightmares where I get on the air and I say something that's just totally untrue. and I'll wake up in a cold sweat, like, oh, God, I hope I didn't say that. And it's, you know, and I try to be extremely careful about what I say on air, at least factually speaking. You know, when it comes to opinion, you get impassioned, you say things, you fly off the cup. That sort of stuff happens. But, you know, you really do have to be careful in the sort of

information you disseminate. And even in your approach, right, there's certain sort of, there is an Overton window. I think the Overton window right now in American life is far too narrow, but it does exist. And, you know, seeking to say the right thing, well, not. triggering, for example, the overlords at YouTube to take you down, is always sort of an interesting balance that you have to draw because, you know, people might say that that's self-interested. Well, you know, if nobody can actually hear my show, it's not just self-interested, it's listener interested. My listener is still want to hear the show. And along those lines that because it's the Eve of Yom Kippur, I want to ask you about,

you know, we talk about sin and sinning at scale with the rise of technology. What about Teshuvah? What about repentance? What about atonement? Are there opportunity. Can we be a tone for anything? I mean, uh, is, is there, is there room, not just in the Overton window, which I think of as, you know, is kind of remote from most of my listeners, but, you know, they're not on CNN or in the New York Times, which who published one of your, uh, your obituary, uh, eulogizing Rush Limba. I mean, I thought that was a very positive sign. 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. But anyway, is there room for Teshuba or, you know, repentance? Or is it cast in the amber of the blockchain of cancellation and recrimination? So I think it depends from whom. So there's a certain group of people whose sole goal in life is just to extirpate you from public life. And for those people, there's no repentance. But I think for most other people, there really is. And I think Americans generally want to give people second chances and allow them back through the door.

I think that there's been an attempt right now to basically say that whatever sins you've committed are on your permanent record. You can never come back from that. And I'm actively trying to fight back against that. I mean, like, I think that if you said something that was bad and now you want to and now you've repented and now you want to come back to public life. I think that we should try to make some pretty significant efforts to allow that to happen, because we ought to incentivize to Shuvah. I've done some of that stuff publicly myself. I mean, I'm the only columnist I know of, I think, ever, who has put up like an entire list of the things I think I've said over the course of the last 20 years that I think are wrong or bad

and then try to explain what I was trying to say or what I failed to say or whether I was just being an idiot, right? No, if media matters a kill list, that was actually. Yeah, I mean, that's what it was. I mean, I effectively went back through and I was like, okay, here's all the stuff that I've said over the last 20 years. Here's a really bad tweet. Here's what I meant by it. It didn't come out that way and it's bad. And I think that that's a useful thing. I think we should all, you know, do that from time to time. There have been times when I've done this interpersonally. I remember that, you know, way back when, like when I was a kid, maybe 17, 18 years old, I tweeted something that wasn't particularly nice about Rabbi David Wolpey in Los Angeles. And I got, and Barry Weiss, who I was friends with, she said, you know, you don't know Rabbi Wolpe and you really should like meet with him. And I called them up and we got together. And he expressed to me how upset

he'd been about that tweet. And I was like, yeah, that was, you know, at that point 15 years ago. And I didn't realize that, you know, that I was young and stupid and I'm sorry about that. And he said, right, but it's one thing for you to apologize to me in person. And, you know, that tweet is still out there. And so I went on Twitter and I put out a tweet saying, you know, sometimes you just get people wrong and you get things wrong. And I apologize for this. That was wrong. It was like 10, 15 years later. So I think that, you know, apologizing at scale is very often effective. And, you know, As Donald Trump says, you try to be in a position where you don't have to apologize.

But if you do, then it does give you the opportunity to do so in pretty large measure. And every Donald Trump or John Kerry impersonation by Ben earns somebody a glass of whiskey in my house. Thank you, Ben, for that. Yeah, there is a famous martial story of a man who disparages his rabbi and then goes and ask for repentance and forgiveness. And the rabbi says, yeah, bring a pillow. And the guy says, all right, I'll bring a feather pillow. what's it for? A guy cut his rabbi says, cut it open, let the wind scatter the feathers to the four winds. And the guy says, oh, thank you, Rabbi for forgiving me. He said, no, you're not forgiving yet.

Now go out and collect all the feathers. And I think that's really true. It is harder to, you know, put the toothpaste back in the tube, as they say, then to squeeze it out in the first place. Lightning Round has come upon us, Ben. I know you only have five minutes left. So I'm going to play the lightning round of Into the Impossible as we are wont to do on this podcast. a reminder we're speaking to Ben Shapiro, a proprietor of the Ben Shapiro show, the Sunday special, which I've been honored to be a part of. And I know I apologize in advance to all the many only fans that I'm going to lose, but you know what? I love talking to Ben.

I learn something every time I talk. Every time you write a book, glad I can see your hands, so I know you're not actually writing your 18th book in three years, but I look forward to all your future work. Is there anyone that you wouldn't talk to on the show? I mean, not just like a fairer, can or somebody like repugnant, invidious, you know, human being. But is there anyone you

wouldn't talk to? That's, you know, kind of in the public sphere. Or conversely, is there someone you're dying to talk to, you know, and you just can't get for one reason or another? So, I mean, there's some people who I've tried to get on the program, who I think it'd be really interesting to talk to. Like, I think it would be interesting to talk to George W. Bush. We haven't had that opportunity yet. There's some, you know, kind of more obscure professors who wouldn't be obscure in their fields, but are obscure to kind of the general public, who I think it would be fun to talk to, and you have to sort of monetize it and figure out how that works, right?

Because a fun conversation doesn't always mean that it pays for itself in terms of crew time or anything. So that's as far as people who I wouldn't talk to, outside of the Farrakhan crowd and people who I, like, because you're talking publicly, one of the things that you do have to determine is whether you believe that the view is so vile, that airing the view itself is doing a disservice,

because no matter how well you're about the position, you've now granted the position added credibility. And I don't believe that there's no such thing as the Overton window. I make a pretty strong distinction between the presence of an Overton window, which I agree with, and the limits of the Overton window, which I think right now are far too narrow. But yeah, I mean, there are people who I think it's worthless to talk to

where I'd be radically raising somebody's profile to no purpose other than to radically raise the profile of a terrible person or a person who I think has terrible beliefs. And obviously, like, I wouldn't have on the spokesperson for the Taliban to give their point of view on women's rights. You can just go to their Twitter account. That's true. That's true. You can go to their Twitter account. So there's some of that.

And then there are some people who, you know, I just don't think are up for a real conversation and who are just there to score points. And, you know, well, there might be an organized debate setting where that might be useful, right, where you say, okay, well, this is going to be, you know, rock and sock and stock them robots. We know the rules going in. But what you don't like,

And what I don't like is you organize a conversation and then the person comes in treating it like a boxing match. And it's like, well, that's not right. And so you sort of have to set the preconditions on the ground for what the conversation is going to look like. And then if somebody breaks the rules, then you have to smack them. Yeah, I believe debate is basically pointless. You never commits. Oh, that was a great Biden-Trump debate. That really changed my mind. How do you know when you're doing a good interview? How do you know when an interview is going well? You know, what's running, what's the algorithm in the back of your mind in real-time feedback to know that you're doing a good job or not? I mean, usually it kind of comes out in level of engagement. So a bad interview is one where I'm getting tired or bored, and so my speed of speaking or thinking starts to slow down, I start to get distracted.

I have to re-ask the interviewer what the question was, that sort of stuff. As far as sort of an adversarial interview, if I take on, I've realized that the more passionate I am about topics, sometimes the worse I am at them, you know, a certain level of reserve is necessary. in the same way that, you know, a doctor wouldn't want to operate on a relative. I don't ask my wife to operate on our kids, God forbid.

You know, if you're too invested in something, you tend to lose the necessary objectivity to having a productive conversation. And so when you get to a certain level of a move, that's actually sometimes quite good for a conversation, especially if the discussion is adversarial. If you're too invested, you can get over the top. And I've had conversations like that publicly that I regret and things sucked. Yeah. Last question in the zeitgeist, literally, are these,

notions of UFOs, unidentified flying objects. You haven't had any real discussion of that on your show. I'm wondering, why do you think it's so much in the zeitgeist in the spirit of the times? And what do we make of, you know, its importance and threat perhaps to this country? Do you think that aliens exist? Do you think they're among us? Do you think that there's reason to be suspicious? Where do you come down on that space? So I think aliens may exist. I do not think they among us, unless we're talking about like animal species, because those are weird. And do I think that they are like, you know, foreign objects from China or something? I don't think they have that sort of tech capacity at this point. If they do, I think that we'll

be the first to know. So I'm really, really skeptical of all UFO talk, especially, have you ever seen one of one of my favorite things is the map of UFO settings? So if you look at the map of UFO settings, basically the entire United States is lit up. And then the rest of the world, there's nothing. It's like, why is that? It's either because the aliens are specifically and only interested in the American way of life and like the Simpsons, or because Americans are uniquely susceptible to looking up in the sky, seeing things with lights on and being like, I don't recognize that thing with light on. I'm going to take a picture of it, and I'm going to tell people that it was a UFO. So I don't know. I'm really, really skeptical of the, it's alien

intelligences and they're hanging out, but they're also not doing anything. And they have to monitor us using physical objects as opposed to, you know, surveillance, crap from space or anything like that. I'm, I count myself among the wild skeptics of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully, you know, if they do decide to serve you, they'll, you know, at least fatten you up with some good kosher meal beforehand. Ben Shapiro, a longtime listener, second time host of you on the End of the Impossible Podcast. I want to thank you. I want to wish you an easy fast. I want to wish you New Year's blessings to you and your family of health and success. And I just want to keep, you, giving you the hope that you will continue in this courageous stance that you take in society.

I think you are an extremely important figure in the culture and in our world. So thank you, Ben, for being on my guest. Thanks so much, Yamakrya Simatova. Goodbye, Ben. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating.

That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at briankeeting.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

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