The Joe Rogan Experience - #1276 - Ben Shapiro

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

Ben Shapiro is editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire, syndicated columnist, and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show." His new book "The Right Side Of History" is available now everywhere.

Go ahead. Yes, we're live, Ben Shapiro. Hey, how's it going, dude? Very good. How's it going with you, man? It's going well. I love the new digs. Thank you.

I haven't been here since you finished it over. I walked in, I thought to myself, I've been doing my business wrong. I mean, you got what, three employees? Yeah, there's not that many folks working on this. Yeah. I walked in, I thought to myself, I've been doing my business wrong. I mean, you got what, three employees? Yeah, there's not that many folks working on this. Yeah, I mean, so in my offices, we have like 80, and our offices are not nearly this cool. So I'm going to go back to my office and fire everyone and have your folks come in and design because, I mean, it's either a lot of people or I could have cars in my office. Yeah, but you wouldn't go down this route.

You're more of a conservative gentleman than myself. Look at you. You're wearing a suit jacket. You're your own boss. Nobody tells you how to dress, and yet you dress like a grown-up. Yeah, well, you know, I won't pretend that nobody tells me how to dress. We have people who tell me how to dress. We have people who do my hair.

Do you have all that stuff? You have, like, fashion folks? Yeah, yeah, because I used to. I I mean if you look at the old photos of me I have like the Hitler hair I've got like the hair That's the only thing about me that's hilarious It was my old hair And I've got the hair that kind of comes down over the forehead

And I still walk into the office wearing basically an undershirt every day Because I'm incredibly lazy when it comes to that stuff But we have You should be able to Yeah, I mean that's the prerogative of being the boss Maybe you'd be more relatable Maybe if you showed up wearing like flip-flops and t-shirt that kind of kills my brand though No, does it like it is your brand exactly? I thought it was being an asshole

You're an asshole though, thank you. I appreciate you're a very nice guy. You're just conservative. That's the dirty little secret though Yeah, we're not supposed to we're not supposed to talk about that But this is one of the things that bothers me so much about you being so misrepresented. When I read things about you, there was the article that we were just talking about, the alt-right sage without the rage, they called you. And you're not even remotely alt-right. In fact, you were the leading target of anti-Semitic abuse for all of 2016, weren't you? Yeah, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which is no ally of mine. So, yeah, I mean, not only am I not alt-right i've spent the last four years like legitimately battling the alt-right talking about how evil i think their ideology is how evil i think white supremacy is i mean first of all like people with yarmulke

is typically not the favorites of the alt-right and then beyond that i mean i think their ideology is legitimately a devastatingly awful twist on what western civilization is supposed to be. What was amazing is a review of my new book, and my new book has several sections in there dedicated to how terrible the alt-right is. And then the interview they did with me doesn't talk about alt-right stuff at all, but they just assume I'm on the conservative right. That must mean that I am alt-right. And it's like, no, you stupid. There's a problem with these labels.

They're disingenuous. People are labeling people in a very simple manner to try to categorize them as the enemy. And instead of just addressing these points, like I love watching your debates where you do Q&As with college students and with people in the audience. Because you can see you agree with you or disagree with you. You have well-formulated ideas. This isn't just some bullshit that you're spouting out. You've thought these things through. I mean, I've been doing this for legitimately more than half my life. I'm 35, and I started when I was 17. And I started writing a

syndicated column at that point. And when you're 17, you think a lot of dumb stuff. And then you get older, and you educate yourself, and you spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time studying. Hopefully, you have some cogent arguments after 20 years of doing anything. I mean, but the demonization is pretty astonishing. I mean, we had on Andrew Yang. He's the only Democratic candidate who has agreed to go on the Sunday special that I do. We did a full hour on UBI. It was perfectly nice. It was perfectly coherent and conciliatory.

And yet people will suggest that everything I do is about destroying people on the other side because of all the Ben Shapiro destroys videos and all that kind of stuff. There are certain groups of people where that's their shtick. They're like, they're goons, right? They just go after people online for attention. This is a shtick. This is not you. And this is what bothers me so much. And I know that you've said some things in the past, like particularly about Arabs and like when you were a younger man that you said, I shouldn't have said that.

Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Some of those things were taken out of context, like that one particular tweet, which is a bad tweet, was a tweet that was part of a tweet thread in which I was specifically contrasting Israel and the Hamas leadership and saying that the Israeli government likes to build and the Hamas leadership would prefer that their citizens live in sewage and bomb things. But that was a bad tweet, obviously. that their citizens live in sewage and bomb things. But that was a bad tweet, obviously. My entire history on Muslim relations is one, like I supported the ability of Ilhan Omar to wear a hijab on the floor.

I opposed President Trump's originally proposed Muslim ban. In the last three weeks, I've had on Majid Nawaz, I've had on Kanta Ahmed, I had on yesterday, a reformed Muslim. These are conversations that have to be had, but to take... This is one of the things that bugs me so much. I've tweeted I think 140,000 times.

I've written millions of words. I'm sure you can find something I don't even remember having written that is bad. I have a running list, by the way. I try to be honest about this. I'm one of the only people I know who has... I have a running list. It's called, so here's a giant list of all the dumb stuff I've ever done. Right. And I actually go through all this.

You can look it up. This is not me saying this now. I mean, you can go and look up all the things that I think I've done wrong, and I'll apologize for some, and I'll say some were dumb, and I'll say some I'm fine with, and you're just taking out of context. But, I mean, I hope that's what honest people try to do. But this is the problem. You're not dealing with honest people. When people are trying to categorize you as alt-right or they're trying to put you into this category of internet goon, they're taking some little tiny phrase that you said seven years ago and trying to say this is you.

This is you now. That's such a disingenuous thing to do. I hate it, and I hate it across the aisle, by the way. I was a defender of James Gunn. I thought James Gunn shouldn't have been fired from Guardians of the Galaxy. Yeah, I thought so too. They were just dumb jokes. That's exactly right. And even if somebody tweeted something bad like 10 years ago, bringing it up now is not an attempt to actually make the public space better. And you're not actually offended by that thing the person tweeted 10 years ago that you didn't notice. What it is that you want to get rid of this person or

hurt this person. So you're going to bring up something from 10 years ago, and then you're going to try and club them into submission with it. Because if you actually ask them their opinion about it, they might have a more nuanced view on what they said. Maybe they apologize. Maybe they think, I don't even remember saying that. I mean, I felt the same way, by the way. I try to be consistent. I really do about this stuff. I said the same thing about, for example, Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, who is excoriated for having this terrible racist photo on his yearbook page back in medical school in 1987. And people were saying, well, this is evidence he's racist now. I was like, well, no, that's evidence that he was doing a racist thing then. That's not evidence that he is racist now.

You sort of have to look over the broad course of his career. And he ended up doing what everyone now does, which is you just don't apologize for anything. You just try to pass it off as a nothing. The public space is actually getting worse because let's say that you did something bad in the past. There are a few human responses to I did something I don't like in the past. Human response number one is, you know what? I apologize. That was wrong.

These days that gets your face step done, right? You say, I apologize. That was wrong. These days, that gets your face stepped on. You say, I apologize. I was wrong. It means, well, why did you do it in the first place? Because you're a bad person. Apologies are not accepted. And then number two is you brazen it out. You do the Trump.

You know what? I never did anything wrong ever. I've never. I'm perfect. Right. And that and then you get your defenders to come and surround you. And then nothing ever gets cleansed. Or opportunity number three is you do what Barack Obama did,

which is you come out preemptively and you try to remember all the bad stuff you do and then you confess it in public. So in Dreams for My Father, he says, right, well, you know, when I was back in high school, did a little blow.

And everybody's like, oh, okay, so he did cocaine when he was in high school. That's cool. Whereas if it comes out during the campaign, then he's boned, right? Then he's got a real problem.

The problem is that right now, even if you preemptively come out and say I did something wrong like for example liam neeson talking about years ago when he had a racist thought that he didn't act on when he had a racist thought this is now we're going to try and ruin your career for something that you admit was bad that you did 30 years ago we're going to try and ruin you over that if you apologize for something that you did 30 years ago which you're going to try and ruin you over that. If you apologize for something that you did 30 years ago, which you would have preferred, just got forgotten because it was embarrassing and stupid, then we say you're bad. All you're left with is the most shameless

people in the world who are in the public space. The incentive structure is to be deeply shameless. To just say, yeah, man, I own that, and it was great when I said it. Or I didn't say it at all, and you're just full of it. I never said that stuff. Who who you're gonna believe your eyes or me and it makes it makes for a really bad politics well it's just this uh the culture of of going after people

for things and and finding anything to categorize them as someone who's a viable target and this is what i've seen thrust your way it's like there's nothing wrong with being conservative there's something wrong with wanting everyone to think the way you think though this is the difference like you what you what i like that you do is you debate your points you state your positions you have a philosophy and what i don't like is when people try to pretend that that philosophy is some somewhat somehow hateful or somehow regressive or something like that you condemn people for their thoughts. You just, you don't. This is not what I see with you. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the accuracy because I think that's true. I mean, I've come out

against virtually every Twitter ban, including people who have personally targeted me. I've come out against that. I've come out against virtually every YouTube ban. Let's talk about that because what are your thoughts about this idea of de-platforming and you know this is something that we were just discussing before the podcast um where the ceo of youtube and kara swisher yeah from recode i think kara swisher they were talking about removing you from youtube and i thought it was the ceo of youtube it was actually kara who said i would if i could yeah she's pissed because her son apparently listens to that's kind of funny if she's being funny saying i can't but it was it would i thought it was the ceo of youtube

she was trying to imply that she was trying to do the same thing that they they do with you or with dave rubin or jordan peterson which is that anybody who is sort of heterodox because in that group i think i'm the only registered Republican. Anybody who's heterodox is now being portrayed as a – Explain heterodox. Meaning just thinks differently from kind of the down the line Democratic Party platform. You're not like down the line with Hillary. Like Sam Harris is a Democrat. Sam Harris is heterodox because he disagrees that Islam is by necessity a religion of peace,

for example. Right. Or he thinks that we have to look at actual statistics in order to make evidentiary-based points about discrimination and disparity. And this makes him an enemy of people like Ezra Klein at Vox.com, right? This sort of stuff.

They then say that you are a feeder for white supremacy, right? They can't actually get you on what you say. Yeah. So it turns into, well, you know, some members of your audience do things that are really bad. It's like well dude i have like millions of people who are members of my audience i have five million facebook followers i have two million on twitter and you're way bigger than i am i assume that some of those people are going to be crazy yeah i would assume yeah the idea that you're responsible this is what youtube tried to do you know about the comment thing

where youtube was going to try to make people responsible for the comments in their videos which what is a normal jamie like a normal video that we get how many comments does it get i don't know like 10 000 that's like an average one how the fuck am i supposed to have some dude with his itchy trigger finger standing by in front of a keyboard just waiting for something offensive to pop up and this was in response to something that happened with them where there was pedophiles who were watching videos of children doing things and they were commenting stuff in the you know like children's gymnastics and stuff like that they're commenting and like communicating with each other through the comments and it was sort of um discovered that there was this this connection,

that they were doing this in many, many videos. And YouTube rightly panicked. They're like, holy shit, we have to stop this. So the response, I guess, was we just have to make people responsible for their comments. Someone said, oh, yeah, good idea. You didn't think through it at all. Right. There's certain people that can't do that.

It's totally insane, and it's insane in virtually every respect. And it's funny how it's only applied kind of by the media on one side of the aisle so to take an example the congressional baseball shooting happens a couple of years ago guy happens to be a bernie fan is that bernie sanders's fault right no that is not bernie sanders's that went away literally people stopped talking about it and that was shooting of legislators like elected people one nearly died and that kind of went away we don don't talk about Bernie's responsibility, but there's a shooting in Christchurch, and it's Jordan Peterson's fault. And Jordan Peterson has no relationship

with the shooter whatsoever. It's my fault. I have no relationship with the shooter and denounce everything that that piece of crap stands for. And suddenly, it's really ugly, and it will come home to roost. I mean, here's what's going to happen is Facebook and YouTube are going to fall prey

to their own standards. Because if their standard is that you're responsible for your followers or I'm responsible for my followers or Jordan or anybody else is responsible for all the people who view their stuff, okay, then why isn't Facebook responsible for all the people posting on its platform? If they are, if Facebook becomes responsible for all the people posting on its platform, they'll be bankrupt in a week. They've got a problem.

They really do because they have to decide whether they are a platform or whether they are a do-gooder publication. I run a publication, Daily Wire. It's openly conservative. We make no bones about that. And we are responsible for the content that appears on our platform. And if we say something defamatory, we will be sued. If we say something that is false, then we will be sued, presumably. If you post something false on Facebook, Facebook doesn't get sued.

But now Facebook has deemed itself the morality police, and they'll ban people they don't like, and they'll decide what editorially ought to be elevated and what ought not to be elevated. Does that sound more like the phone company to you? Or does that sound more like my website where I decide what gets published and what doesn't? Because Facebook's case for exemption from these laws is, well, we're like the phone company, right? When you're on the phone with somebody, if that person says something criminal, AT&T isn't responsible for the person saying something criminal or terrible. It's just the phone company. But Facebook isn't doing that. Facebook is jumping into the middle of conversations and then saying, well, we don't

really like this conversation, so we're just going to kind of shut it down. Not because of legal threat, but because we just don't like it. So are they actually doing that? Say if you put a post up on Facebook, and they don't like the way you worded things or describe things, will they actually shut down your post? What will they do? So they've done it in the past to some conservative public. It's pretty controversial because they're not transparent at all. I can tell you that at the beginning of 2018, we lost about 35 percent of our traffic because Facebook started cracking down on mostly conservative sites. They said that it was kind of news sites generally, but that's not what the statistics showed.

They're doing it more often with things that we all sort of agree are bad. We all agree white supremacy is bad. White nationalism is bad. Now they say they're going to censor that stuff. But here's where I'm uncomfortable. I think that that stuff is awful and evil. And those people are the ones, they're the reason I have personal security. But once you get into the business of Facebook gets to decide which speech is good and which speech is bad, they're an editor.

They're an editor. Even if I agree with their assessment of what stuff is good and what is bad, I am not comfortable with them in the driver's seat there. And if they are going to be in the driver's seat, then they should be held liable for all the stuff that's on their platform. I mean, why is it that Twitter, same thing, right? Why is it that Louis Farrakhan is still on that platform, but Alex Jones is not? I don't like Alex Jones' material. I've been very, very critical of Alex Jones.

I didn't think he should get banned from Twitter unless he actually violated the law, unless he was responsible for a violent threat, unless he was defamatory or something. They're definitely going down this road of being the moral arbitrators. They're the ones who get to decide what the conversations are. And that's an insane responsibility the responsibility of getting to dictate what should and should not be discussed and to have it to be a handful of people and have these people almost almost exclusively live in the pacific you know north of san francisco exactly that whole tech community i mean it's all tech liberals who really if you're around those people, they live in this really strange, uber-wealthy bubble of super genius spectrum people who are coders and super capitalists and people that are raising money all over the place and designing technology. And they have an ideology. And it's not necessarily a bad one, just being honest and upfront about what it is.

It's incredibly progressive, which is very unusual for big business, right? For big business to be just openly, transparently progressive and pushing social justice, it's very unusual. Well, I think that there is a sort of misunderstanding of when we say what big business is, what big business is. So I think that there's a wide variety of owners of businesses and how they think about politics. Obviously, Bill Gates is a progressive guy. Warren Buffett's a progressive guy. They are now.

I think Bill Gates has been for a while. Was Bill Gates progressive his whole life? He's ruthless with Microsoft. Well, so I think that there are a lot of people. Listen, I think that the vast majority, I think Mark Zuckerberg is ruthless with Facebook and he's progressive. I think Jack Dorsey is as ruthless as the next guy when it comes to profit.

I mean, he's still got to be answerable to his shareholders. So I think a lot of the progressivism is sort of a way to excuse your own involvement in the capitalist market. When Facebook took off, don't be evil. That was their thing. Don't be evil. They decided to remove that. Yeah, it was Google, right? Oh, yeah.

Did I say Facebook? I'm sorry. Google. Yeah, when Google. They decided to remove that. Yeah, it was Google, right? Oh, yeah. Did I say Facebook? I'm sorry. Google. Yeah, when Google did that. I meant Google. It's funny when you think something, but you're saying another thing. When they did that, it's like, why would you ever take off don't be evil? Like, keep that.

But here's my thing. Here's my thing. I think that if our tech companies were honest, they should take that stuff off. Like, stop pretending you're do-gooding. You're not do-gooding. You're providing a platform. And maybe the platform is the good, right? In a capitalist economy,

the product that you provide is the good. I don't need additional good to come from your product, right? If you want to provide me a solid morning drink, right? I don't need your politics along with that. I just need the drink. Well, if I want a social media company, I don't give two craps about what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about politics.

Dude hasn't studied it. I don't care at all what Jack Dorsey, who vacations in Malaysia and gets bitten by a million mosquitoes while meditating, has to say about the nature of life. Like, why do I care about Jack Dorsey's political view? He has provided me a good. The good is this basic chat room where I'm consuming news. How about that would just be enough? But it's not enough for a lot of these folks. It's the kind of hooli from Silicon Valley. We're going to pretend that we're here to do good. And it's not enough just to acknowledge that maybe the thing that you provided is the good. Like Bill Gates has done more good with Microsoft than he has done with any of his charities. He's

given a lot of money to charity, but Microsoft has provided legitimately hundreds of thousands of jobs and created enormously productive lines of business and made enormous profit for a lot of people. A lot of people have stock in Microsoft. As a general, as a basic factual thing, he has done more good doing that than giving tens of millions of dollars to various outside causes. So it feels like a lot of the progressivism in corporate halls and in Silicon Valley is bifurcated mentally. It feels like a lot of the progressivism in corporate halls in Silicon Valley is bifurcated mentally. It's like people have – they're like dolphins. It's one side of the brain on at a time. Here's my capitalist side where I go out and make money and profit.

And then here's my other side where I show people what a great person I am by proclaiming that I'm for Bernie Sanders while parking my money offshore to make sure it's shielded from the tax man. Yeah. Well, that's a good assessment. What I'm saying is that the don't be evil thing, like one of the things that I thought was, what if that was like a legal decision? Me being cynical that they were pulled into some sort of an office and said, if we say don't be evil and you take someone off the platform you're accusing them of evil so that's it i mean that we should slow that down maybe i mean again this this this self

assessment of you are the moral police i find really troubling and it's so funny i'm the i'm the supposed moralist right right i'm the religious guy i'm the orthodox jew right i talk about social standards and how people should behave in their personal life but when it comes to government and when it comes to me imposing my views on you i am am way less of a top down tyrant than any of the people in Silicon Valley. I am not here to tell you that you are not allowed to be on a platform because we disagree. It's one thing if you're threatening violence, which is an actual violation of law. But this crap, where people like me, because I believe in a social fabric built on certain Judeo Christian values, but I'm not forcing you to be part of that. And I'm not, I don't think the government should compel you to be a part of that, or

I'm the tyrant. But the person who sits at the top of Twitter or Facebook, who is saying that they get to police what you see, and they're going to nudge you in the right direction, nudge you in the right direction without your consent, without them even telling them what you're doing, right? They're just, they're going to push you a little bit because they know better than you, and they can sort of massage you into better views if we control your channels of information. This is something the Obama administration was very fond of. There's a

scholar named Cass Sunstein as a legal scholar, and he wrote a book called Nudge. It was very famous. It was used as sort of a handbook during the Obama administration. And the idea was, well, if we can just use non-forcible means to sort of nudge people in a particular direction without them even knowing they're being nudged then shouldn't we do that and i think no you shouldn't you shouldn't because transparency is the only way i can tell what kind of bullshit you're trying to sell me well not just that like you you're you're closing down even conversation if as soon as you're trying to silence this other voice if you're if you believe one thing and

another person believes a different thing you should probably talk about it and the way the way that i know for sure there's something wrong with your argument is if what you're trying to do is you're sneakily trying to silence these voices and again as long as we're not talking about threats of violence and as long as we're not talking about harassment or doxing right we're just talking about conversation you're just talking about threats of violence as long as we're not talking about harassment or doxing. Right. We're just talking about conversation. You're just talking about people with differing points of view. If you want to silence differing points of view, I have to wonder about your intent. I have to wonder about whether you're going into this conversation with good faith.

I have to wonder whether you've really objectively assessed whether or not your argument does hold up against scrutiny. Because this is also part of the problem. When you're in an echo chamber, you often don't formulate these arguments very well. Like when you confront people about certain biased beliefs that they have, and you have an opposing belief, if they're part of a bubble, like sometimes they might not have even ever considered some of the things you have to say. And I've seen that with some of your videos. Yeah, I mean, it does happen all the time. And with sophisticated people. I've spent my entire life, literally my entire life, in areas where everyone disagrees with me.

I grew up in L.A. I went to Harvard Law School for three years. I was in Cambridge where everyone disagreed with me. And then I came back to L.A. So I have never spent more than a week at a time in a red state. Have your conservative values moved in one way or another? Have they shifted at all? My personal values probably haven't shifted say that at all my personal values

probably haven't shifted very much but my political values have shifted libertarian i mean so i used to be a proponent of criminalization of marijuana i'm no longer i've been in favor of what changed that for you a couple of things one was just a general sense the government sucks at everything and the more i see the government try to crack down on things the more prevalent it becomes i mean people were dealing pot on my sixth grade, seventh grade playground in public school. So obviously, like, yeah, exactly. And and then it's terrible. Just a general a general perception.

Not only the government sucks at everything, but that you got to own your own actions and also examining more of the evidence about the impact of pot on people's lives. And, you know, again, there's you ruining your own life through use of drugs. And also examining more of the evidence about the impact of pot on people's lives. And, you know, again, there's you ruining your own life through use of drugs, and there's drugs that legitimately ruin other people's lives. There are drugs that remove your ability to even reason or think. I think there are only two reasons to criminalize drugs in any fashion. One is if there are drugs like, for example, PCP that legitimately make you violent, and then you are going out and committing acts of violence against people.

Then there's a case. Or if you're talking about a drug where it legitimately robs you of your capacity to reason, if you were able – heroin – if you were able to actually crack down on it successfully. But even there, I'm not sure that the proper government solution is criminalization because we've criminalized it, and it's still incredibly prevalent. I agree with you. I agree with you i agree with on that and i agree with you in terms of drugs being extremely detrimental and the other part is that there's comparable drugs that are legal like and comparable drugs meaning not even really comparable drugs that are far more devastating like alcohol like you you could just go to any grocery store and buy a jug of whiskey and kill yourself with it yeah it's not difficult you just drink the whole thing already that prevent externalities if you drive high it's the same as driving drunk so i'm not

sure that you need additional laws to do that and also you know i'm not opposed to zoning laws like i don't think a pot shop should open up right next to my house right there residential zoning that's fine same with liquor stores though right i don't want a liquor store right next to my house this is correct yeah right so so i've become libertarian in some ways on that sort of stuff the same thing is true by the way when it comes to the issue of same-sex marriage so on a personal moral level i'm opposed to same-sex marriage i'm an orthodox jew and i believe that a man and a woman were made for each other when it comes to government involvement I don't think that's anybody's business. I think a lot of things.

I think adultery is bad, too. I don't think the government ought to be involved in adultery. I'm so strict, I don't think premarital sex is a good thing, right? I've been very vocal about this. I was a virgin until I was married. My wife was a virgin until she was married. I think that's a good thing. So I think the government has anything to do with any of those things?

No, I don't. I don't think it's any of the government's business. It's consensual activity. There are no externalities. So what exactly is the government getting involved in? And when the government gets involved in stuff, then there are externalities, right? Once the government starts to cram down its vision on people,

then you start to get unintended externalities. So for example, with the legalization, my view on marriage is that the government should get completely out of the business. I don't think the government should be involved in straight marriage. I don't think it should be involved in gay marriage. I think the government should be out. I agree 100%. And the reason that I say that is because as a religious person, right, who believes in traditional marriage, I have two marriage certificates. I have the one from the state

that I don't give two craps about. It's buried somewhere in my garage. And then I have my religious marriage certificate, which meant among other things that i got to shut up my wife right i mean like this was the one that mattered to me and i think that's true for most religious people the religious ceremony matters a lot more than the state saying a thing and the state isn't incentivizing marriage people aren't getting married because they're like yeah i need the tax break right so that's a bunch of nonsense and once the government decides what version of marriage it wants to push that then comes into conflict with other values so for example once the once the state of California decides that same-sex marriage is on legal par with heterosexual marriage, now I'm worried about the externality of I have a religious day school

or I have my synagogue. My synagogue is a religious institution. It doesn't approve of same-sex marriage. Now is the government going to come in and tell my synagogue how it ought to act with regard to same-sex marriage? I don't think that's the government's business so how about this how about everybody gets to do basically what they want associate with whom they want and it's none of the government's business this seems like a pretty good happy medium i i'm so glad you talked about the two things that i want to talk to you about that i'm sure we disagree about one of them being marijuana and the other one being gay people marrying each other um so let's start with the marijuana one. Do you think marijuana ruins people's lives? Is that one of your contentions?

I think that it can, and I think in the same way alcohol can. Have you ever had any experience with marijuana? No, I'm just talking about the statistical overuse of marijuana among teenagers does have detrimental brain effects that have some long-term after effects. It's pretty proven, and that's one of the things that I really, I'm glad you said that because I wanted to cover that, but you were in the middle of a rant when we were joking around about sixth and seventh graders selling pot.

Don't smoke pot when you're young. You really should. It's not good for the development of your brain. Same thing with drinking. You know, I didn't smoke a lot of pot when I was a kid. I did it a handful of times until I was 30 years old, but I did drink a bunch of times when I was young and in high school. And it's terrible for brain development.

Especially before you're 25 and your frontal cortex hasn't even fully formed. Your frontal lobe is like this. It's a developing thing. There was an article recently that I posted from BBC that was saying that you probably shouldn't be considered an adult until you're 30. Right. They're saying brain development doesn't even stop until you're 26 or 28 this is why when when people are saying let's let's lower the the voting age to 16 i'm like what the what the fuck are you talking about yeah when i was 16 i was a chimp you know i mean i was a chimp in a high school now when the the problem that i have

with many people's perceptions on marijuana is that it's based on ignorance, meaning no personal experience with it. Listen, I'll admit, I have no personal experience with marijuana. I know you don't. I'm not speaking from experience. You probably should get high. That's what I'm trying to say. Man, I've seen the effects on stock prices when people get high in the studios. Oh, they jump up, man.

They jump down for a little when a bunch of chickens jump off the boat. Then they come right back up. The marijuana thing is, in my opinion, it's another one of those things where people have this categorized box that they like to put marijuana users in. Like this is the category, lazy, stoner, stupid, delusional. It's too widespread for that. I mean, there are people i know who are doctors who use marijuana so well there's the jujitsu community is a big one there's a giant percentage of the jujitsu community that does jujitsu high they have competitions like more of a party it's not

man i'm telling you because it's not what people think it is if you've never smoked marijuana this is going to be a very difficult thing to grasp but marijuana enhances jiu-jitsu because it eliminates the rest of the world when you're rolling which rolling is like say if uh you and jamie were going to have a sparring match that would be rolling like you'd slap hands and then you'd go and you're trying to choke him and he's trying to get you in an arm bar and you're going after it when you do that on marijuana it's like you don't think of anything else other than those movements and it becomes like this very intense meditation in violence like it's not violent in terms of most of the time you don't really even get hurt it's like you get

to the point like one of the beautiful things about jiu-jitsu is you can grab a hold of someone and choke them to the point where they're going to go to sleep and you would kill them if you kept going and they tap around your friends again and everybody's cool and you them to the point where they're going to go to sleep. And you would kill them if you kept going. And they tap and then you're friends again. And everybody's cool. And you try to do it to me and I try to do it to you. And you really can do it reasonably hard without people getting hurt. And it happens every day all throughout the world. A lot of these people are high.

And they're doing this jujitsu practice in this almost like trends. It's a transcendent state if you can function when you're using marijuana i don't care but you can this is what i'm saying the perceptions are off so i mean i would assume there's a small subset of the population for whom that's not true right who are overusing marijuana yes and that's probably the majority in fact okay so so then you know but i don't think that's the same way with food. I agree. So I don't think there's anything we disagree about here, because I'm not talking about criminalizing marijuana use.

I think that we should honestly discuss the evidence that for a subset of the population, there is some evidence that marijuana is addicting, but it's a subset. It's not everybody who's on marijuana. The vast majority of people on marijuana are not addicted to marijuana. I think... In the same way, alcohol, I mean, it's true of alcohol as well. There's people that are going to be addicted to almost anything. And I think there's absolutely people that are addicted to sugar. There's for sure people that are addicted to nicotine and alcohol and all these things that we let people have. The material addictiveness of marijuana is not comparable to opioids, though, for example.

It's not even comparable to alcohol or nicotine. It seems to be very rare when people become physically addicted to it, extremely rare. And what's common, though, is abuse. And it's common in everything that human beings consume. Abuse is common, as we said, with food. It's certainly common with alcohol. It's certainly common with pills. But this is why I really believe that the way to solve some of these problems is a social fabric problem like it's a parenting

problem it's a social fabric problem it's a personal choice problem yes that's why virtually every solution i suggest is so funny you know i'm constantly conservatives like me who are libertarian leaning are constantly accused of being non-compassionate no it's just our compassionate solutions don't involve the use of government yeah it's like we're going to encourage people to make better decisions with their lives. And if you choose not to do that, it's a free country. Well, you know, coming from a religious background, you have this community that reinforces this kind of behavior and thought. And I think that's one of the major, really one of the best benefits of religion is that moral fabric and that community, the sense of community.

Even silly ones like Mormormons you know they're the nicest folks right they believe something that is fucking patently insane if you go and read the joseph smith text from 1820 when he's 14 years old the shit that he wrote like i try not to get into doctrinal insanity i wear a funny hat all day i hear you well i'm just gonna get to that yeah but but you know with that said i mean alexis de tocqueville talks about this you know early on in the american republic the idea is that what makes america very different is the idea you don't need a big government when you do have a supportive social fabric where people feel like they're at least oriented toward a common goal it's one of the problems that i think we

have in the country right now i'm not sure people are oriented toward even a common sense of of conversation i mean it's you don't have to agree on on everything in order to have a common sense of conversation. I mean, you don't have to agree on everything in order to have a common sense of the important values that unify the country or should. I always use Sam Harris as sort of my bet noire here because he's obviously a militant atheist. I'm an equally strong believer. And yet when it comes to the things

that we would like to see happen in the country, not on a government policy level, but on a let's have a conversation level and discuss on evidence level, we're on the same page. There are certain core assumptions you have to make in order for that to happen. My argument about America and the West is that those core assumptions are built on Judeo-Christian foundations. Sam's core argument seems to be that they're built on evolutionary biology. We differ a little bit there. I don't want to let this marijuana thing go just yet. One of the things that I wanted to bring up

to you was this idea that if you're a religious person, don't you think that there's certain things that maybe God put here for us to consume, to change your perspective, to allow you to reach new levels of consciousness? don't you think it's entirely possible that some of these things that are here and i know you haven't experienced them but they might literally have been put there by god and there's some evidence to say that a lot of the texts from the bible um that in particular there was uh i think it was the University of Tel Aviv, somewhere in Jerusalem, where these scholars were, they were trying to decipher what it meant when Moses encountered the burning bush. Right. And they believe that it may have been the acacia tree, which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is a psychedelic substance that actually that the brain produces, and it's very common in plants.

that actually that the brain produces, and it's very common in plants. And they think that this might have been, when he met God, and God was a burning bush, that this might have been some crude translation of them being involved in some sort of a psychedelic experience. Now, it sounds outlandish, unless you've had that psychedelic experience. And when you have, you very well could think that you were in a conversation with God. have, you very well could think that you were in a conversation with God. This is on earth, and this is something that may very well have been lost information, or this may very well have been rituals that people participated in to bring them closer together and to reinforce that sense of community that you do get from a church and you do get from a group of people that share moral beliefs and values.

And there's real good discussion that a lot of these experiences that became these religious doctrines came from psychedelic experiences. Now, as someone who's never experienced that before, I know this is probably a very strange thing to try to even wrap your head around. It is entirely alien until you experience it, but it might very well be religious. I mean, i've heard that from other people who have been who have used those kinds of i mean sam actually made

this argument to me too about the use of psychedelics um and i mean maybe i mean god made apples well okay so this argument i'm i will say i'm not super fond of the argument that god made something and therefore it's ours to use or i I mean, like I keep kosher, right? Like God made pigs. I don't eat them. So I am not a huge fan of the argument that because something is here or because an urge is natural, therefore we ought to imbibe or therefore we ought to participate in a particular activity.

You know, one of the things that I'm very big on, I'm a rationalist when it comes to religion, as much as you can be a rationalist with regard to religion, to the things that i that i'm very big on i'm a rationalist when it comes to religion as much as you can be a rationalist with regard to religion to the extent that i think that it's up to us to use our reasonable faculties to determine the proper use of things so which is why you shouldn't overuse drugs even if you're going to use drugs for example this is part of the problem making things illegal you make things illegal then you really don't know what it is or how it affects the body or what's the right dose or the wrong dose and then people get involved in these terrible situations where

they're taking things they're just guessing i mean there's truth to that but it's also true that on a social level i'm not talking about legal because we totally agree on the legal level on the social level there's a couple of things that are true of for example the orthodox jewish community low rates of addiction because people have that social fabric, they don't feel the necessity. Also, as you say, substance use in moderation can actually be quite a good thing. So low rates of alcoholism in the Jewish community, and part of that is the fact that you are given kiddish wine from the time you're a kid, right? I mean, you actually are- It's destigmatized. Yeah, it's destigmatized. And the idea is that in its proper context, this could be a good thing.

Right. So I'll admit, I don't know enough about the proper context of marijuana to know when it would be a quote-unquote good thing. It can be a good thing. This is what I'm telling you. And also, the truth is I don't enjoy drinking. I'm not a drinker. I don't enjoy – I like reality. I like living in reality, and I like experiencing it totally sober.

So I've never really felt the urge to do any of that stuff. I hear the pitch. I hear the pitch. But I've never really felt the interior desire or need to jump into that. I completely understand that. I think that what we're dealing with, though, is perceptions that have been molded by laws that were shaped by tyrants. That's what I think. I mean, again, that's totally possible and plausible.

Yeah. But it's historically accurate. I mean, when it comes to prohibition, prohibition with alcohol didn't work. Prohibition with drugs is just making the cartels bigger. It's causing more problems with organized crime. I agree with that. It's on a practical level.

Whether you like drugs or don't like drugs, government interventionism is generally a giant fail. I think our perceptions of what is good for you and is bad for you is also based on laws that the government created ignorantly the sweeping psychedelic act of 1970 which made virtually everything psychedelic that they could they missed a few things a few things slipped through the crack but all of the tryptamines and or most of them, psilocybin, LSD, all that stuff was made completely illegal by people who really didn't even know what it was. And a lot of that is why we base our ideas of what's good or bad for you. It's based on what is legal and what other people have done with it.

On this area, I'll admit not only complete experiential ignorance, but complete evidentiary ignorance. I haven't examined the evidence. I really don't have strong opinions on any of this stuff. And there's been other studies done And there's been therapy done On people that are dying of terminal diseases And they give them psilocybin And when they give them these mushroom trips They have these beautiful experiences Where they completely accept death And it's almost a universal reaction to it Like the amount of people Who still experience a positive benefit

Months and months after the experience While they're dying That they say this was an incredibly moving and powerful moment in my life that allowed me to accept the fact that my time here is done. I mean, listen, if that's something that works for people and that's what it's designed to do, then – I don't know if it's designed. Well, even if it's designed, it might be designed by God. Like, it literally might. That's fine. I mean, I think there's also the generalized religious counterargument that there are no shortcuts to happiness.

So, let's pose a sort of thought experiment. That's not really a shortcut. I don't think it's a shortcut. Well, this is the question, right? I mean, like, let's say that I could guarantee you that tomorrow you're going to be a happier person. All you have to do is take this regimen of drugs that you're going to take every day, and it's going to make you a happier person, a more well-rounded person, but it's going to permanently change your brain chemistry. Is that something that you think is good, or is it something you think is bad?

Because from a religious perspective, there's an argument to be made that this is work you need to do on yourself without outside aid, if possible. If there's cases where you can't, then you can't. But it's an interesting thought experiment. Terrence McKenna had a line about that. He said that there was a joke about there was a monk, and he met Buddha because Buddha came to town. And he said, Buddha, he wanted to impress him. He said, I practiced the city of levitation, and I have done this for 10 years, and now I can walk on water.

And the Buddha says, but the ferry's only a nickel. can walk on water and the buddha says but the ferry's only a nickel what are you fucking wasting your time like you can aid the progression rapidly with psychedelic drugs and this is something that you know do you know about maps and their work with mdma and soldiers that have had ptsd not too much no no. It's phenomenal. Mm-hmm. By giving these soldiers MDMA therapy, meaning they give them MDMA, which is essentially what people think of as ecstasy, the street name. They give them pure MDMA,

and then they assist them with, they actually have a psychologist sit with them, a therapist, and they go over all these details of these traumatic events, and they come to peace with everything. And they've had profound benefits for soldiers and for some combat journalists,

different people that have been over there and have experienced the horrors of war and just general PTSD, maybe for people who have experienced violence attacks. It is shown to be one of the very best things we've ever discovered for helping people get past so here's to me and i'm thinking about this on the fly because this is stuff i don't think about very much um but it's it's there's a complex moral equation to the extent that if you're talking about somebody who has ptsd somebody has a condition and the only way to help that

condition is to use these drugs i've never had a problem with any of that stuff, right? I mean, my grandfather was schizophrenic, and maybe bipolar, maybe schizophrenic. The diagnosis is not exactly clear. They prescribed him lithium. It made him a lot better. Would he have been better off struggling with the schizophrenia? Of course not. It's much better that he should have the lithium and then be able to live in his rational mind. So when there's a problem, using drugs to get past it and work with it is a good thing. You do run the risk of the sort of brave new world situation where you have a group of people who have a certain level of airsats happiness that is not driven by a point of view but more by just the chemicals in their body. The chemicals affect your point of view.

Well, that is 100% true. But are you – Yuval Harari talks about maybe this is the future right he talks about the idea that maybe the future is we just drug ourselves until we're happy basically or that happiness is the drugs because if you're a scientific materialist that's what it is happiness is just a bunch of chemicals flowing throughout your body so if you can bring them in without self-change but I do wonder whether that robs people of a certain level of purpose that the struggle is part of being human i think we're changing what it is to be human just by carrying around phones and just i mean that's that's true but i think that that's again one of the things that i think makes being a human worthwhile is the idea that you are

struggling like i think i think the struggle is actually meaningful. And I think that's why religions tend to set prophylactic rules, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. So, for example, I'm addicted to my phone. I mean, there's just no question, right? It's in my hand all the time. But from Friday night to Saturday night, it's off. I can't look at it.

I'm forbidden from looking at it. And this breaks the cycle, at least for one day a week. And that's a good thing that makes me better as a human being because it limit i set for myself and then a limit that i abide by and if you believe in in self-mastery where's the happy medium between self-mastery and i need a little bit of aid and i think that there there is a happy medium there um but i'm not sure that that you know drugs are the answer to i don't think you're suggesting drugs No I'm not suggesting that And I think There's also a problem With the word drugs That

Everything is under that blanket And that blanket can be Entirely negative Or extremely positive And the word drug I mean in the generic But I know But that's

There's a problem I use it too I mean it's not Not accusing you But that That term It's a problem It's a problem term

Because what these are Are substances That are psychoactive. And some of them can be extremely beneficial. And some of them have short-term experiences that last with long-term results. And I don't think that there's enough knowledge that – I don't think the people that are negative against it have experienced enough of it or have looked at it in an objective rational way because i think it's something that could be here to aid perspective to give people a chance to think outside of their normal conditioned way of thinking that might have been established by their

community or by their church or by their neighborhood, whatever it is, sometimes a little bit of a break, a little bit of a mental break from what you're experiencing and the vibration that you exist on almost every day, to separate from that and to get a look at it from the outside, sometimes it allows you to have a renewed perspective that can enhance your life greatly. As long as when people re-engage, they're re-engaging on a level of commonality, right? Yes, but that's a disciplined thing and this is what we share. You and I are both disciplined people

and it's one of the things I really respect about you. You're a very hard worker. You're always on the ball. You're very disciplined. And I know that a lot of conservative people admire that

and they admire that in folks and they think that people who are liberal are not disciplined. They think that they're lazy. It falls into this like weak beta male sort of category of people that are progressive and liberal. And I think that's a misunderstanding. I think you guys, you and I both agree that the struggle is very important.

But I'd struggle physically so that I don't have to struggle mentally. I struggle physically so that I can have a to struggle mentally i struggle physically so that i can have a better way of looking at things with less stress so we have this shared belief that things should be a struggle my i force my struggle on myself so that i can have a better perspective and this is something that you and i differ on like i think you exercise right yes how often you do it i try to every day. Yeah. Makes a big deal.

Yeah. It's a huge deal. Yeah. I mean, I think we both understand that struggle is an important part of understanding yourself. Yes. If you do not push yourself, if you do not struggle, you're not going to really get who you are, what your boundaries are. And if you're self-indulgent, if every day you're stuffing things in your face that you want to like it's good to have a rule like hey for this

next month you can't eat this or you can't do that or i want you to start fasting 16 hours a day is it that hard just eat for eight hours a day and fast for 16 but no but that just doing something like that and setting these guidelines for yourself and putting yourself into a disciplined state can be extremely beneficial. Like Jocko Willink always says, discipline equals freedom. It is a great formula and it's real. Well, and again, it is the basis of a lot of religion. I mean, a lot of religion is very practice-based.

It's one of the reasons I like Judaism as opposed to other religions. It's a very practice-based religion. You know, sometimes you can take that too far in one direction, which is, I say, you need to balance reason with dictates that are meant to make you better. But that goes all the way back to Aristotle. I mean, Aristotle talks about how you have to practice to be good, right? You have to practice to be virtuous. What makes you a virtuous person is acting repeatedly in accordance with right reason, and that is setting rules for yourself, right? That is not violating every rule.

with right reason. And that is setting rules for yourself, right? That is not violating every rule. I think when, when we talk about on the conservative side, you know, folks on the left being lazy, I don't mean that in terms of work. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg is a hard worker. I assume I think Jack Dorsey, when he's not getting bitten by, by mosquitoes seems like a hard worker, but you know, most, most of the people, most people love jobs are hard workers. I don't think it's about that. I think it's a,. I think it's a certain perspective on the necessity of rules and the mindset that if I don't know what a rule is for, I'm going to remove it. So G.K. Chesterton has this very famous kind of contrast that he draws between people who tend to be right-wing politically and people who tend to be left-wing politically. He says people who tend to be left-wing politically, you're walking through the woods and you come across a fence.

You don't know why the fence is there. You say, I don't know why this fence is here. I'm removing it. And the person who's right wing walks through the forest and sees the fence and says, I have no idea why the fence is here. I'm going to go find out why the fence is here. And then maybe I'll remove it. And that's the, the kind of Berkey and conservative attitude toward rules. The, the attitude that this rule was put here for a reason. Now, maybe the rule sucks. Maybe the rule has to go, but let's try and figure out what was at the root of the rule before we just wipe out all the fences and then try to rebuild from the ground up all these new fences. And that's especially true in a civilization that's the most prosperous and free civilization ever created. I mean, if the system really sucked, that would be one thing.

But I think people are kind of ungrateful about the fact that we live in the best possible time in the best possible place. Yeah, agreed. That's just – that's the reality and everybody who's so negative about living in america it's like okay in 1900 one in 10 american children died in the first year of life in 1850 the average life expectancy in europe was under 40 so what are you talking about what are you talking about like our biggest problems today really for for the vast majority of people is that we are too fat or that we don't have a job, but we still have somebody who's basically making sure we have food.

Like starvation is not a serious problem in the United States. There's a problem of poverty, but there's not a problem of widespread starvation. In fact, poverty tends to align with obesity. This is a pretty unbelievably great society. So maybe you ought to look back at the roots of that society before we start willy-nilly tearing up all of the all of the moral boundaries i think you and i agree that this is the greatest time ever to be alive i think what these other folks are saying is that we can do better and i think we all agree with that but

sure but to classify this time as being a terrible time is i think wholly inaccurate by the way i hate it right and left right and this is one of left. This is one of the reasons why I think there's a certain point where the Trumpian populist right meets the Bernie Sanders populist left, and that is them walking around saying how much things suck. And it's like, no, no, that's just wrong. It's an amazing time. It's an amazing time for communication, too. It's an amazing time for people to kind of understand

other people's perspectives and points of view, which is one of the reasons why deplatforming and silencing of conservatives, even though I'm not conservative, bothers the shit out of me. I just think it's a non-harmonious action in a time that I think could lead to people having much more open and much more balanced communication. I mean, this should be the time when we are having more conversations and more fun with each other and where we are feeling more entrepreneurial. We have a better social safety net than ever.

So one of the statistics that really bothers me is that the level of American mobility has declined rapidly in the United States. So the number of people who are leaving their home state to go somewhere else to work a job, for example, is at decades low. Why? It's easier to get anywhere. Now, there's 7 million unfilled jobs. I keep hearing from, you know, folks who I, you know, personally like, people like Tucker Carlson, that, you know, you grew up in this small town,

and the town is dying, the industry left. Well, you have, the government somehow owes it to you, that you get to grow up in this town and stay in that town, even if all the industry left. And I just think to myself, by whom? Who gave you this guarantee that you get to stay there? And I know, listen, I'm a lucky guy. I grew up in a two-parent household. We didn't grow up wealthy, but we were middle, middle class. Like I grew up in a small house in Burbank with two bedrooms and I had three sisters. It was me and my three sisters in one bedroom and one bathroom for six people. That's not poor. That's middle class. That's a great life. And I understand some people don't have that life.

But one thing that is guaranteed to you is the opportunity for adventure in this country. So go and move. Like, why are we inculcating a feeling of victimhood in a society where if you make the right decisions, you will do well? I mean, not you might do well. If you make basic, basic right choices, you will finish better than you started in American society. I mean, we're talking like well. If you make basic, basic right choices, you will finish

better than you started in American society. I mean, we're talking like the most basic choices, like finish high school and don't have a baby out of wedlock and get a job. Like you do those three things. And the Brookings Institute says that you will not be in permanent poverty in the United States. Like that's amazing. That was not true for the vast majority of human history. For the vast majority of human history, you did all of those things. There all of those things there wasn't high school but you did all the other things and then you lived like a serf on a farm until you died at age 37 of diphtheria or something so it's it's just the the lack of optimism in a society where it should be running rampant is is kind of astonishing to me well it's perspective right i mean rich kids grow up with uh this perspective

of constantly being rich and people grow up uh this perspective of constantly being rich and people grow up with this perspective of you know how they view the united states as this negative thing or that they don't know how to change their life they don't know how to take action because they haven't had anyone around them that's done it and that's part of the problem with small town mentalities is that you kind of inherit the vibe of the people that are around you. And if they're ignorant or if they're shallow-minded or if they're stuck in this one town and they're never going to leave and you get caught in that vibe, you can one day wake up and you're 32 and you've never done anything.

I mean, this is what J.D. Vance talks about in Hillbilly Elegy, right? People who are in these small towns and they've basically been told that they have two choices. They can go on welfare or they can leave yeah and it's like okay fine i'll go on welfare you know everybody around me is why why not is there's nothing morally deficient about going on on welfare it's actually one of the the bigger problems i have with the welfare state generally is that it disconnects the person receiving the aid from the person giving the aid one of the like in in our religious community to take an example there there's a time a few years

back where a guy came to me i bought some art from him he's a an artist and uh really does good work he came to me and he said my family doesn't have enough money to make the rent this month can you offer me in advance on art that you'll buy somewhere down the road and of course make sure so i signed him a check and he understood that five years later he came back to me and he said you know you still haven't bought that piece of art i owe you a piece of art because he knew who gave him the money right right and so he was willing to understand that that was an act of charity and he wanted to make sure that that that was paid back you see this in cinderella man right with russell crowe the the moment where he makes his money he walks back into the welfare office and he rolls out a wad yeah right like that that feeling that the

government isn't just a giant cash machine that is exists you you money, but that that money actually comes from somewhere. Either it's coming from the future because we're going to have to pay back the debt or it's coming from somebody's tax money and that we all owe something to each other. Right. And by the same token, what I owe to my neighbors is that if they're in trouble, then it is my obligation as a good person to try and help them out on a personal level. Yes. Right. And the charity in religious communities is extremely high. That's, that's the social fabric that I'm talking about without, without that sort of dutiful sense to one another, you can't have rights because if you just have rights,

then, and no duties, then there will be no one to take care of each other. It's why, while I'm libertarian, when it comes to government, I'm very conservative when it comes to the need to build a social fabric and communities and,

and, and have people with working families and communities of working families. Yeah, I really think that that's one of the best things that comes out of religion is when you have a tight-knit community like yours and you do have that sense of charity where you really are a community of people that care for each other and look out for each other. The problem is, of course, doing that large scale.

And then the problem is doing it in some sort of a non-denominational way where people, they don't have to have the exact same beliefs, but they still share these core values of community and taking care of each other. I mean, that's what people really benefit from. When they've done studies with people, when they show happiness and what is happiness correlated with, it's almost always correlated with friends and loved ones and family. It's the most important thing you can have. And when it comes to diversity, you know, there's the slogan that diversity is our strength. Well, there's a Robert Putnam,

who's a sociologist over at Harvard. He wrote an entire book about the social fabric called Bowling Alone. He was kind of the pioneer in the idea of social capital. And what he said is that he went in to writing this book with the idea that diversity is our strength. And then he did some research. And what he found is that ethnic diversity only correlates with two things. These are his words. Increased TV watching and increased protest marches. That's all it unless unless it is within the boundaries of a common goal. So if you walk into a church, very diverse ethnically, everybody's got the same general goal, which is we're worshiping God in one particular way.

And we believe in a certain core set of values. And now diversity is great. Your experiences come to bear. You're all aiming in the same direction. He gives the example of the army. You see a bunch of people who go in, diverse group of people, diverse races, different backgrounds. And when you talk to those guys while they're serving or after they leave, they don't give a crap about the diverse backgrounds of the people they were serving with. They're all aiming their guns in the same direction. Well, in the United States, we have to be aiming our guns in the same direction, or we can't really have a functioning social fabric at all. Like, I'm perfectly willing to give charity to people who I don't know, who still believe, like I do, that America is a fantastic country rooted in immutably good

principles. But that starts to break down when I'm being asked to give charity just on a personal level to somebody who believes that America is fundamentally evil and needs to be torn out at its roots and replaced with something better. Because now we're not aiming in the same direction. So on a human level, I care about you. But on a social level, if I have a choice between somebody

who basically agrees with me about fundamental values and somebody who is diametrically opposed, I'm going to give my money to the person who basically agrees with me on those fundamental values. And again, I don't think those fundamental values have to be religious. I don't think you have to be a God believer to receive charity from me, or I don't think I should have to be an atheist to receive charity from you. But I do think that you do have to take into consideration a few things.

And now we're on the same page. Personal responsibility. The idea that you do live in a free country, just historically and relatively speaking, this is a free country, which means decision making is on you. So man up a little bit. The decisions that you make, we should all have sympathy for people who have had worse lives and worse experiences. But in the end, if you are capable, if you're not fundamentally disabled in some way, that you need to make a plan for your own life. And then you need to do that.

Like, are you more willing to give charity to somebody who has a plan for how to get themselves out of the hole? Of course. Of course. But that relies on that person feeling an obligation to do that. But I also think that what you're talking about with charity within the community is so much more, there's so much more connection than charity from the government. When you're talking about welfare, the problem is that there's this dissolving of responsibility because it's just a check that comes in that you feel like,

well, this is a rich country. I'm owed this anyway. And when I was a kid, we were on welfare, and we used food stamps, and I remember being very ashamed of it and feeling really weird that we were that poor, that we needed help from the government. But my parents worked their way out of it.

They were young. They had a kid. My guess is that the social stigma probably has something to do with that, meaning that they didn't want to be on welfare. They didn't want to be on food stamps. Contrast your story with Adam Carolla's, right? Adam talks all the time about how his parents were also on food stamps and welfare, and they just didn't give a shit. And he always resented that. He thought that was bad.

He said like, you could work. Why aren't you? And that gave him the impetus to get up and do what, what Adam has done. So, you know, that, that kind of, it's not pick yourself up by the bootstrap because helping hands are good, but it is, if I, if I were capable of picking myself up by my bootstraps, would I do so? And if the answer is yes, then we're all on the same team. Well, there's a real problem, too, in that some people just get a horrible hand dealt to them at birth. They're with parents that really are doing a terrible job raising them. They're fucking them up every step of the way. You're around a bunch of people that are criminals.

Everybody's fucking up. There's no examples of anybody that's doing well. I mean, it's one of the unique things about the Internet today is that a kid that's in that environment can get a hold of maybe something that you've said or something that someone else has said and start reading books and start taking in information that gives them a different perspective and fuel that perspective with more motivational stuff and more information in education.

And sometimes kids, just like you were saying with Adam Carolla, they grow up with these parents that are just not ambitious at all, so they become very ambitious, and they work very hard to not be like them. I mean, sometimes it's good to see that example, but most of the time it's just fucking hard for them to reprogram their head. Well, for sure. It's hard to do that. And it's also hard. I really think that there's a lot of focus in the country right now on raising awareness, which is fine.

You know, raising awareness of our history and all the bad things that we've done. Yeah. Good. I mean, people should know about all the good things and all the bad things, right? History is history. But this incessant focus on the idea that people's lives are getting better by suggesting that they're perennial victims in the United States. I just don't, I don't understand how that's a good thing. Like, as a historically, a member of a historically persecuted group, if I had grown up

and my parents had said to me, no matter what you do, you will be put under the thumb of the dominant society. That's a pretty horrible message to tell to a kid. And I think that's true for politicians, again, on both sides of the aisle. I think you get it from from President Trump when it comes to some rural areas where it's like, well, it's the Mexicans and the Chinese coming in to steal your jobs. And you're under the thumb of people who are trying to destroy you. And on the other side of the aisle, people who say, well, you're in the inner city, and therefore the cops are racist against you and want to destroy you. And everybody's out to get you. And it's like, well, how about this? How about like, again, the single best thing you can do for yourself

is make basic decisions that are entirely within your control. Unless you are raped, God forbid. Single motherhood is a choice that you get to make about your life. This is a choice you get to make about your life. Finishing high school, unless you are legitimately disabled in some way,

I mean, especially in LAUSD, where you basically have to be able to read at third grade level to finish high school. You know, just like these are decisions, personal decision making. If you want, I've never seen somebody's life get better by complaining about reality. I've seen a lot of people's lives get better by acknowledging that reality is what it is and then making personal decisions to make their lives better. And that's considered non-compassionate. But it seems to me that the essence of compassion sometimes is saying, at least make the baseline

decision. If you make the baseline decisions and then you fail, we can talk about what happened. I don't think it's non-compassionate. I think it's pragmatic. And I think you're right. But I also think that there's some people that are in situations that require something external to assist them they're they're the way their life has been set up and this is what i think when people think about compassion and

people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps if you have a real if you really have an honest and accurate assessment of extreme poverty and terrible neighborhoods it's not as simple as do something good to better your life part of it is you got to fucking stay alive part of it is you're surrounded by people who either have committed crimes or will commit crimes you mean one out of every four people you run into might be a criminal in the worst neighborhood in the country this is for sure and but i think we have to this is where we recognize what government is good at government is good at two things cutting the other people cutting checks from other people's money they're great at it and they'll seize they're right on top of those parking tickets by the way to make

sure that they're best at it and they're they're amazing at it so seizing your money and and paying money they are very good at and and pointing a gun at people right these are the two things that government was built to do was was collect taxes and pay out money and then point guns at people right this is what government does so which of those two things would you apply in a situation where there's just a complete lack of social capital because cutting a check isn't going to do it alone where's that check go to the parents who are not doing not able to protect their kids it's one thing if you're enabling the parents to move out of that community or something. But that's why I say you have to attach – if you're going to do the government welfare thing, you've got to attach it to a plan.

It can't just be here's a check. Enjoy your life. But what is the plan? If you're in one of those terrible communities, you live in an apartment complex. So, I mean, here's the reality. I think that the plan very often when it comes to a crime-ridden area is the other side of what the government does, which is you need more cops in that area. I think that the great lie that these communities that are crime-ridden, I'm talking about white Appalachia and I'm talking about black inner cities. These communities do not need fewer cops. They need more cops. Because the precondition to investment in those communities and increased tax dollars in those communities and increased social capital in those communities is people not getting shot every five seconds. I mean, that's why the worst thing that can happen to law-abiding minorities is for the cops to abandon areas where crime is high.

It just doesn't make any sense. And that's not just me saying that. Jane Levy is a reporter at the LA Times, very much on the left, has said the same thing. Law-abiding people want crime rates to go down. Like, conditions have to change in a community for conditions to change in the community did you ever see the wild uh the whites the wild and wonderful whites of west virginia no it was a was it johnny knoxville did he produce that documentary i think he did right dude it's about this family that lives in west virginia that is just a bunch of psychotic criminals.

These crazy white people. The kids drinking Mountain Dew and doing backflips on the bed. And they're all on pills. It's bananas. And it gives you this insight. Like if you are in this community, if you are in this family, and this is obviously a very extreme family. But there's many more of them out there that have not been documented. If you are in that community, good fucking luck getting out right good luck the the money that you get other than welfare is from

selling pills you know everybody's on these pills so you're all whacked out you don't know what the fuck is going on half the day you're on opiates i mean it is a bananas environment and there's a lot of people like that in this country. For sure. In poor Latino communities, in poor white communities, in poor black communities. The idea that these people are just going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is crazy. I just think they don't have a plan. And I think if we really want to help them,

there's got to be some way where you can give these people the opportunity to step out of that pattern. Whatever that community centers, outreach programs, whatever it is. I don't know what it is. I mean, the truth is that historically speaking, it was people actually going to church. Yes. I mean, and there may be. There's a good, a lot of good. I'm not a church going person.

Right. But I absolutely recognize that there's a lot of good involved in having that framework. Right. And that, I'm not sure that that's, I don't think you can create sort of a fake social fabric with just a government welfare system. Like it just – it hasn't worked. I mean disability exists. It's been increasing every year. It's not – it's a question I asked Andrew Yang actually.

So our episode comes out on Sunday, and obviously Andrew is a big fan of UBI, universal basic income. Andrew is a big fan of UBI, universal basic income. And I'm not averse to the idea of UBI in a future where legitimately 50% of the population can't work because they've all been automated out of existence and all of this. But there's one section in his book where Andrew talks about how if we cut people a check for UBI, then they will spend their extra time creating art and engaging in hobbies that they like. And I just thought to myself, I mean, I said it to him, like, people are on disability, that ain't what they're thought to myself, I mean, I said it to him, like, people are on disability. That ain't what they're doing. I mean, if you're on disability,

the people you're talking about who are suffering, they're not out there writing poetry. I mean, the rise of the opioid epidemic and people who are ODing on drugs and all this stuff, that's in precisely the same demographic you're talking about. You're just talking about a check from one place as opposed to another place. I don't really see how that solves the problem. I think we have

a crisis of purpose right now. And I don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable on the one hand by changing our trade rules. And I also don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable by cutting a government check. I just don't think that that's how people are wired. I absolutely agree with you that there is a crisis of purpose. My concern is about automation. And my concern, and obviously, I haven't really studied this other than talking to Andrew Yang and talking to Elon Musk and a few other people that are proponents of universal basic income, they think that there's going to be such a massive loss of jobs in such a short period of time from people that are non-skilled laborers, it's going to go away there's millions and millions of

jobs and these people are not going to have anything and that it could be chaos right so there's there's two problems that come up there and this is where andrew's book is interesting because problem number one is that the people will be poor they won't have a source of income ubi solves that the other sort of but does it even it gives them a thousand dollars a month even if you opted right i mean even even if you just had a Swedish redistribution system and the average tax rate went up to 60% or something. Let's say we could solve the money problem for a second, which, you know, without tanking the economy, which is questionable. But let's say we could do that. We could add trillions of dollars to the budget every year and we could solve that.

I'm still not sure that that solves the deeper problem, which is that when people lose jobs, they lose purpose. Yes. Right? So I'm not sure that UBI solves that problem. It does. As I say, we have a rich social welfare network in the United States, and we're seeing this stuff happen anyway. I'm a little bit less catastrophic.

By a little bit, I mean a fair bit less catastrophic in my thinking about automation than either Andrew Yang or Elon Musk. Do you think that people will be able to adapt quick enough to avoid the problems? They'll realize the jobs aren't there anymore, and they'll just naturally gravitate towards other professions? I think over time that people will do that, but they're not always the same people. I mean, there's always shift in the economy, and the ideal economic model has a trucker becoming a coder, right? But that's not readout. Well, that was that whole learn to code fiasco that got people kicked off of Twitter.

Right. Still does, apparently. Yeah, apparently. If you say it to then that's that's very bad if you say learn to code to a truck yeah that's what it was that's what i learned to code to a trucker if you say learn to code to a trucker then that's just you being helpful right if you say learn to code to a journalist then that is targeted harassment on twitter that's what if someone says it to me well how does that work twitter doesn't care about you

i can say whatever i want to you but it's uh but yeah i mean i think that but if you just say it to a friend hey fuck face learn to code they i don't know it's your friend gonna report you to the censorship board over it's such a dumb thing to take people out for it's one of the best examples of like how censorship oversteps its boundaries and becomes almost like satire yeah it's it's real it's really really absurd like this is the biggest aggression ever? Learn to code? Learn to code. Like, that's something, like,

this is a stupid thing that someone said about coal miners. They literally said that about coal miners, that maybe they can learn to code. And so everybody's like, what the fuck? And so learn to code became a joke and became something that you would mock people. Right. Their explanation for it was so crazy.

It was like, no, then learn to code got connected with all this white supremacy and all this other stuff. Well, that's the Hitler owned a dog argument, right? Yes, exactly. Dogs are bad. Hitler owned one. Okay, white supremacists are bad. They used the phrase learn to code.

That means if you say learn to code, you're a white supremacist. Like, what the? They lost the frog, that fucking frog, the feels good man frog. That's what happened to Pepe. They lost him. They killed the frog. They turned the freaking frog gay. I mean, whatman frog. That's what happened to Pepe. They lost him. They killed the frog.

They turned the freaking frog gay. I mean, what? Yeah. Oh, that's, yeah. But yeah, I mean, as far as automation, you know, there's constantly people saying, this is the Nicholas Nassim Tlaib view of reality, which is that the black swan incident can happen any second, so watch out for it, versus the sort of Steven Pinker view of reality, which is the black swan incident is called the black swan Swan incident because it's a Black Swan incident, meaning that it

happens incredibly rarely. The idea that we are on the verge of a catastrophic drop in job numbers because of the automation of trucking, for example, I'm not sure that I buy it. The reason I don't buy it is because you still are going to need someone sitting behind the wheel of that truck. There are human drivers on the road. There will be a gradual transition away from some of these jobs. Andrew Yang talks about radiologists and how radiologists are going to be priced out of the market by computers. They can do a better job of diagnosing tumors. First of all, awesome. I mean, that's good.

First of all, that brings down cost, and you won't get cancer as advanced. That would be a good thing. But second of all, what a lot of technology studies have tended to show is that technology just gets integrated in a different way in particular careers. So there will be jobs that are eliminated for sure. There'll be jobs we haven't heard of that will be created also. And mostly technology will become

more of a productivity aid to people. So this is true in factories. Jobs have been lost in factories. It's the best example of where jobs are lost, but it's mostly true in offices, right? How in factories jobs have been lost in factories it's the best example of where jobs are lost but it's mostly true in offices right how many office jobs have been created because you have computers when more office jobs exist because i write by hand do you think that this is akin to like a government bailout like the idea of the government bailout was like the banks are too big to fail and some people thought you know what you got to let them fail so you

figure out why they failed and we'll never have it happen again. If there is this thing and the government steps in and says, wait a minute, I know you lost all your jobs. We're going to give you $1,000. You don't have to figure it out. $1,000 a month. And some people go, okay, I'm not going to figure it out now. Whereas those people might have gone on a fear-filled journey to try to figure out their purpose in life because now they're stuck where their job doesn't exist anymore so they're put in a corner and they have to act there is there

is enervation that comes from from a welfare check i mean there are people who become dependent on government and they're used to being dependent on government i mean that stuff is true it does happen i mean and listen milton friedman made an argument for universal basic income as a replacement for the welfare system there there is another problem with universal basic income that I asked Andrew about also, and that was one of the big issues is that poor people very often, people who are permanently impoverished, not people who are temporarily poor, but they tend not to spend money where we think they ought to spend money. They're not taking that money and they're not putting it into education or into-

They might just be buying ho-hos and cigarettes right i mean the the average the average person who is making less than i think it was sixteen thousand dollars a year spending four hundred dollars a year on lottery tickets right that's legitimately just flushing your money down the toilet so it's so how do you aren't you just going to end up back in the same place you know in six months where people took that money and used it in ways that actually didn't benefit them and at a certain point, the question is, do you own your decisions or do you not own your decisions? And at what level of incompetence or inability do we say, you no longer own your decisions and so we're just going to take care of you on a permanent basis? That's really the question here. I think we're looking at, when you're talking about welfare, we're looking at

worst case scenario, right? Where someone does get dependent upon the welfare state and does use that money frivolously and does make poor decisions but then there's got to be other people that are single moms that you know maybe had a kid with some fucking asshole that doesn't want to pay and it is a piece of shit and they have to hide from them and they're just trying to feed their kids yeah for sure those people exist too they don't have a community to to to help them out maybe they're exist too. A hundred percent. And they don't have a community to help them out. Maybe they're not a part of a church. Maybe they don't have a good group of neighbors. Maybe they had to move somewhere for work and they got stuck in some place where they don't know anybody.

But I think part of this is to recognize that incentives matter on both ends. So the idea is that you give some people more money and they'll do well. It's also true that if you create a welfare system that benefits single motherhood you will get more single motherhood i mean the single motherhood rate in the black community before welfare was 20 now it's 70 in the white community it was like five percent now it's 40 you've said that like out of wedlock children and having a kid when you're young is like it's a terrible idea for your life but what do you recommend to have kids avoid that are you one of those people that thinks don't put it there without that thing on it no condoms that's what you're saying right like don't

don't have don't don't have unprotected sex i mean like this this is not it's not pardon my my fake cursing it's not effing rocket science i mean like you're apologizing for not cursing i'm apologizing for not cursing uh yeah it it's not rocket science. This one always bothers me. It's not, but kids make mistakes. I mean, that's what happens. People get pregnant. And then if the government pays for those mistakes, it becomes less... So what should happen?

Should the kids suffer? No, I mean... How should it be worked out? I mean, it depends on the situation. If there are parents available to the kid, presumably the parents, the grandparents, would take a pretty active role in the raising of that kid. Let's assume they're there. Well, how about this?

How about we assume that if you are old enough to get pregnant, then you are old enough to, let's talk about a 17-year-old or 18-year-old. Used to be shotgun marriages were a thing. And really, like. You think that's a good idea? I think the idea of parents staying together for the sake of a kid That they accidentally bore is absolutely a good idea Yes, I think that is a better idea than the man walking away

And the kid being without a man in the house For the rest of their childhood So you think the parents should figure a way to work it out Yes And if they were both reasonable they could do that Yeah, and I think that, by the way A huge percentage of American births in the 40s and 50s Were exactly this There were a lot of 7 births in the 40s and 50s were exactly this.

There were a lot of seven-month babies in the 40s and 50s. Yeah. Something like 30% to 40% of all kids born in the 30s and 40s and 50s were seven-month babies. Somebody got knocked up, and then the expectation was, you did the crime, now you do the time, right? Yeah, but that puts people in relationship prison good then don't then don't have sex then don't have don't don't find somebody find find somebody to have sex dare you find somebody to have sex with who you actually think is worthy of a relationship right now or online pornography is available to you like figure it out you're okay with that

um on a moral level yes no but if i'm going to if i'm going to compare that to having a baby out of wedlock, then yeah. This is what I think about pornography. They could stop now and we're good forever. But yet, they keep making it. I think you guys enjoy it. There's no supply and demand problem in pornography. I think you like it.

I think you like making it. You guys are a bunch of freaks. I mean, it's like a business. It's almost like You have excess houses That stack up to the moon Like there's no way Everyone's gonna live

In all those houses Why do you keep making houses There's no way One person has ever Jerked off to every video That ever existed It doesn't It's not possible

It's like And it's also like Other forms of media Where they just stack up Like I never really Thought of that Until But you have the

Backlog of internet Pornography And you're like God I'm You know I'm a month Behind now But just think about Music right

There's all the music That existed before In the 50s And the 60s And the 70s And the 80s And there's new shit Every goddamn day

It never ends It's this overwhelming Library of stuff That we have to experience Well it would be good If that music Changed from time to time The same song recorded seven different ways you know it what kind of shit do you listen to what do you think i listen to do i listen to classic jazz and classical of

course of course yeah you're so interesting i i was i was a concert level violinist until i was until i was like 17 do you still practice yeah mean, the only expensive object that I own other than my house is a violin. Oh, really? Yeah. Is it a Stradivarius? It is not. It is a,

it's not. That's all I know, a Stradivarius. Yeah, the two that people may know are Strad and like a Guarneri, but those ones are like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This isn't the tens of thousands of dollars. A Stradivarius is hundreds of thousands of dollars? I had a guy who we knew, my family knew, he had a million dollar Stradivarius. What was so big about it? What was thousands of dollars? Yeah, I had a guy who my family knew who had a million-dollar Stradivarius. What was so big about it?

What was the big deal? Well, I mean, aside from the historic value of the thing, they're not making any more of them, it does play very differently. I mean, very differently. Like, I had a crappy violin for most of my, like, really until the last two years. I had a violin that was handed down from my grandfather

that was worth maybe $1,300, and it was a piece of crap. I mean, it was not a good violin. If if you're good enough then you can tell the difference between a really great violin to play and one that is a piece of garbage and i was good enough to do that so that's yeah i mean i i was a i was a classical guy i played i played violin for years and my dad was a growing up my dad was a pianist look at what jam Jamie just pulled up. The most expensive violin in the world sold for an estimated $16 million for a Stradivarius. They never lose value. I mean, really, they don't.

This is, it's a good investment. The person, I know a guy who's offered a Strad, I think it was $250,000 maybe 10 years ago. And he's like, no, it's worth like $3 million today. God, no. What is the deal? Like what, if you had to explain what's the difference between the sound that this makes? So, I mean, it has to do with the acoustics of the instrument, meaning the wood quality. There's slight variations in the construction of the instrument.

Certain parts of it are thicker or thinner. And it's easier to play a better violin. So it almost covers for your mistakes. When you play a bad violin, it tends to scratch and screech more. That's why when you get in the upper register with a violin, you hit very high notes. It can either be very screechy or it can be very beautiful. Some of that, most of that's the player. Some of that's the violin.

Yasha Heifetz, who's widely considered the greatest violinist to ever live, he had a Strad. Look at this. violin yasha heifetz who's widely considered the greatest violinist to ever live he had a strad lady blunt stradivarius cost 15.9 million dollars people buy these and then they lend them out on on loan to you know world's great violinist so but there's a but in the end it really is the uh the quality of the player there's a famous yasha heifetz story where he was playing at carnegie hall and some lady came up to him afterward and she said, you know, your violin, it sounds so beautiful and he picks up the violin

and puts it to his ear and he says, funny, I don't hear it right now. So do you listen to any other kind of music? Yeah, I mean,

I like some classic rock. Do you? I can see you rocking out. Yeah, I went to a Doobie Brothers concert with my parents. No, you didn't. Really?

Yeah, yeah. That's a band that was named after a joint. That is true. That's outrageous. That is accurate. I know. Did you feel like a sinner? I was a rebel that day.

Going to the Doobie Brothers concert with the other boomers. So the other thing is same-sex marriage. There's the other thing that I think that we disagree with. Well, we agree with the marriage thing. Right, on a governmental level. I don't think the government should be involved they don't i think where people should be protected is through assets and you know the contract yes yeah i think that that all makes sense to me that all that's in terms of like alimony and child support and all those things make sense to me and that then the idea that the community reinforces it which would then become the government reinforced and all that stuff that

all makes sense to me i understand it but um why do you care if uh two gay guys want to get married um so from a religious point of view sure let's go from religious so so i mean why would a secular point of view first so the the idea is not that I care deeply whether two gay guys want to get married to each other. The idea is that do I prefer traditional marriage to same-sex marriage? Okay, well, let me phrase it this way. What do you think a gay guy is? Do you think someone's – they're making a choice, or do you think that this is how they were born? So the religious point of view on this, and I think this is actually just the general conservative point of view on human action generally is I don't know, meaning that for the vast majority of people, I would assume that they have a biological drive to engage in that behavior.

But the traditional sort of will point of view is that biological drive does not necessarily match up to the activity you ought to engage in. Men, for example, have a biological drive to impregnate many women. That's not something religion is cool with either. So the idea is that – Right, but religion is cool with a man being with one woman and impregnating her. But you're not cool with a man being with a man. So I can give you the religious explanation and I can give you the secular explanation. So the religious explanation is that there is something different about a woman than there is about a man

and a man is made better through his union with a woman and that if you pervert the sex drive to pursue mere pleasure instead of a lasting relationship upon which the basis of society is built then you are foregoing the proper use of your sex drive right but if you wanted to step in and argue against that you would say that just because someone can't get pregnant doesn't mean that they don't have a loving relationship that contributes to society. Well, that's true, but it is also foregoing the more productive relationship of being able to bear and rear children.

And also recognizing that the sexes are not different, right? And recognizing also the sexes are not the same. So, you know, being with a man is, in a relationship, different than being with a woman, I would assume. I mean, I assume that's why gay guys are gay. If it weren't, then I assume that they would be fine with being with a woman. So that relationship, from a religious perspective, is more valuable because women have different qualities than men. You round off each other's harsh edges, it changes you. I mean, you're married. Being married changes a man in a different way that being married

to a member of the same sex would right but i don't want people to have to do it but if you're i'm not forcing anybody right but i want them to have the option if you're a gay person and we just say you don't know no i mean of course because legally we agree right yeah legally and i keep making this distinction because yes whenever I talk about my moral perspective on things, then people immediately assume that I'm a theocratic fascist. And I just want to keep underscoring, like, my personal views on Dave Rubin's it should be a part of public policy. I think people should absolutely be allowed to marry and divorce and do whatever the fuck they want to do, no matter who it is. But why do you care? Like, as a person who's a rational thinker, it's pretty clear that people are gay. And I don't really think that this is a decision they make in terms of, like, I'm going to make a clear choice to defy God and be gay. I think they're just gay.

Well, again, I think that's a conflation of – I don't think it's everyone. It's a conflation of identity and drive with activity, which is something that religion fundamentally rejects. Okay. So religion fundamentally rejects the idea that you are driven to do something, therefore it is your identity, therefore you get to participate in a behavior. That's a chain of thinking that religion does not accept.

So in religion, if a man is gay, in your religion, yes a man is gay and they're in love with another man they should just squash those thoughts and find a woman well ideally they would be honest with the woman they marry so they're not like messing up but they would want to ideally ideally you would still get married and have children in a heterosexual relationship if you're not up to that then you wouldn't get married at all to when you describe this to a gay man they will tell you imagine ben shapiro someone said to you you should stop being with your beautiful wife and you need to now marry a man because this is what god wants you to do so you're gonna have to stoop this man and he's gonna stoop you and because this is how the rules are set up. So far, this sounds pretty terrible.

Sure. Right. Well, this is how it sounds to gay folks when you're telling them they have to find a woman. They're like, I like dudes. I'm not saying you have to find a woman. I'm saying you can't. Well, I'm saying you can't do X, right? I'm not saying you must find a woman.

But say you can't, but by whose determination? If you decide to participate in this religion, then there is a buy-in to the precepts of the religion. And the buy-in is the precepts of the religion and the buy-in is well no the buy-in is that you can have whatever sexual orientation you please but there's certain activity you can't participate in so you can be gay but you can't have gay sex correct that's that by the way that's what the bible i mean if we want to go direct to the text of the bible that's what the bible actually says right i mean even the parts of the bible that people really hate those parts say that a man shall not lie with a man it doesn't say a man can't be attracted to another man that's old

testament right yeah that's right that's our stuff right new testament that it gets a little harsher in the new testament in some places romans corinthians but in any case you know again when it comes to this is what i'm puzzled by is the idea that this is a unique area of human behavior that religion is supposed to treat differently. Meaning religion treats virtually every human activity like this. Sin is a failure to abide by a covenant, right? That's the definition of sin. When you commit a sin in Judaism, in Avera, in Judaism, what you are doing is failing to do a mitzvah, which is a commandment.

You're violating a commandment. Well, there are lots of commandments that go directly against what people are driven to do. Just because the drive is stronger does not make it more morally non-culpable to violate that commandment. So when people pick this one out and they say, well, this one is particularly intolerant, for example, I don't see why it's more particularly intolerant than saying to a man that you have to marry one woman or saying to a Jew that you are not allowed to eat this stuff. It may be harder. I don't think there's any question it's harder to abide by those commandments. But it is well within religious tradition, like literally every religious tradition, that there's a bunch of stuff you are driven to do that you can't.

Now, again, you don't have to agree with my program. I'm not trying to convert you. This is one of the nice things about my religion. I don't give a crap whether people are Jewish or not. Like, we actively discourage converts. But if you're going to proclaim that you are, you know, abiding by traditional Judaism, this is the buy-in, right? There's lots of buy-in. You have to wear a funny hat sometimes. You have to go to shul on Saturdays.

You have to keep Shabbat. Like, there's a lot of buy-in. Sometimes you have to go to shul on Saturdays. You have to keep Shabbat. There's a lot of buy-in. And as long as I'm not bothering anybody else, I frankly don't see what business it is of legitimately anybody's, what I think about personal relationships. I'm not imposing my view on anybody else. Well, I do acknowledge that out of all the religions, Judaism probably makes it the most obvious they don't give a fuck what you do.

Go ahead. Do your thing. Like they're not trying to proselytize. You're doing your business. My uncle converted and when he converted, it was a grind, man. He had to learn a lot of shit.

It's like three years of a grind. It's a long time, man. Yeah, for sure. It's a long time. So that was the religious perspective. On the secular perspective,

when it comes to valuing traditional marriage over same-sex marriage, that's a very simple calculation, which is one type of marriage produces traditional children, produces children in the traditional biological way, and then you have both parents in the house to take care of the kid. That's the value of marriage.

And I fully acknowledge that when the value of marriage shifted from it's about production and rearing of children to it's two people who love each other, the case for same-sex marriage against same-sex marriage went completely out the window. Right. So you are just sticking to your rigid ideology in terms of like what you believe to be a sin and not believe to be a sin based on your religion based on this very strict moral fiber that this religion is operating in a religious context meaning it applies to me it applies to my family it doesn't apply to you right but is there any room for growth in that when people have a better

understanding about biology like it so if it was proven if there's proven like oh this is why a person develops blue eyes this is why a person is gay this is why there's nothing wrong with it it's just a variation it's red hair it's freckles it it's gay, it's straight. You can tell me that homosexual orientation is 100% biologically driven, and I will almost completely agree with that. I think that there are some cases where it's not, but those are rare. By the way, the research tends to show that there's more sexual fluidity among females than males. Males, it tends to be either heterosexual or homosexual. That research is all done by dudes who want their wives to hook up with chicks, but keep going. Don't let me stop you.

Honey, let me just show you the paperwork. There's something wrong. But again, it's a question that I've always found actually not particularly interesting, simply because it doesn't take into account the worldview generally, which is that a biological drive does not equal excuse for behaving in a certain way. But that's where it brings me back to this. Like, is it possible that these laws in this religion were written when they're – I mean, who do you think wrote the stuff? Do you think people wrote the stuff or do you think God wrote the stuff?

I think either way. Even if it were – I mean, because I am an Orthodox Jew, I believe that at the very least it's god inspired and god written right but even if i believed on a secular level that human beings wrote that stuff so i think that people three thousand years ago had never seen a gay person before a person who had homosexual tendencies like the very reason to have a commandment is because certain people in your community are behaving in a particular way presumably right there's no commandment not to take your head and shove it in a meat grinder well this is also the argument against pork it's because they didn't understand trichinosis they understand you have to cook the meat to 145 degrees and pork parasites which are very dangerous for people so i'm not a huge fan of naturalistic explanations

for religion don't you think that's a good one though for pork i mean i don't know like i think you could make an argument maybe that kid just died in india and there's horrific x-rays of his head he had parasites from pork that had gotten into his body and they had nested in his brain started developing all these cysts inside of his head and they couldn't do anything about it because it was so deep in his head that if they gave him the anti um you know anti-parasitic uh medication it would cause swelling of the brain. And it was so far gone. So how are you feeling about bacon right now?

Because you tell the story. It's actually pig shit, apparently. Oh, that's him. People accidentally coming in contact with pig shit produces this particular type of parasite. Yeah, that's not kosher either. It's more rare. But trichinosis was pretty common for a long time.

Well, again, their attempts to sort of paint back into the Bible certain rationalistic explanations like this was— Doesn't that make sense, though? I think— Why else would it be bad to eat pigs? Like, Jesus loves pigs? Is that what's going on? Well, I think that the reversal of the kosher laws in the New Testament, you know, from a Jewish point of view where we don't believe in the the divinity of christ i think that there you can make an argument that the the gospels which were written he was just a prophet and significant no no we don't even believe he's a prophet what do

you think he was what do you guys i mean i what i what do i think he was historically i think he was a jew who tried to lead a revolt against the romans and got killed for his trouble just like a lot of other jews at that time who were crucified for trying to lead revolts against the roman and got killed for their trouble so he became legend in story and it became a bigger and bigger deal as time went on. Yeah, he had a group of followers and then that gradually grew and then... Do you think he was resurrected? No, that's not a Jewish

belief. Okay, I just want to check. Yeah, no. We're not into... You're not into zombies? We're not into miracle stories. No? Do you not have any miracles? No, not by Jesus. There are ones in the Old Testament. Yeah, you've got Moses splitting the sea and all that. what do you think happened there what do i think happened there yeah well i'll go with my monody and explanation that there was i mean it says in the bible there was a strong east wind so there's a naturalistic explanation for a physical phenomenon that

makes sense i mean that's so that's what my monodies is constantly trying to do is read nature back into the bible yeah that that is the problem with these texts, right, is that you're trying to decipher translations from original texts which were written in ancient Hebrew thousands of years ago and were told in an oral tradition for longer than that. Right. I mean, this is where, you know, my book, which I always hesitate to pitch my own stuff because it sounds gauche. Pitch away.

But the new book, The Right Side of History, number one New York Times bestselling nonfiction book. Wait a minute, you got number one in the New York Times bestselling, really? Yeah, we sold enough that we knocked Michelle Obama out of the number one slot for a week, so that was nice. Is there a protest? Well, no protest yet, but suffice it to say the New York Times book reviewer didn't like it, but I'm not super shocked

by that. But the basic contention that I make is that Judeo-Christian values values on the one hand, and then human reason on the other, Greek reason, really, that that tradition is a tension and that that tension is where Western civilization lives. That basically civilization is a suspension bridge. It takes certain fundamental precepts of Judeo-Christian values on the one hand, and then takes Greek reason, and they're pulling against each other. And sometimes reason feels like it's going to dominate religion. And sometimes reason feels like it's going to dominate religion, and sometimes it feels

like religion is going to dominate reason. But in the best of all available worlds, you have a bridge that is capable of building upon, where you can actually have a functional civilization. And if you lose reason in the name of theocracy, then you end up with tyrannical theocracy. And if you lose religion in the name of reason, you end up in some pretty dark places because human beings don't have a very good track record of creating their own purpose, creating their own meaning, creating their own systems.

We tend to get very utopian very quickly. And things get really ugly, which is sort of the story of particularly the first half of the 20th century. So this is the benefit of sticking to the rigid ideology that's prescribed by religion, is that you don't allow the human beings to keep updating it and changing it because if you do they will eventually slide into chaos yes but there's there which is not to say there's not play in the joints right there's certainly

religion has morphed over time i mean judaism as it was practiced originally probably in many ways does not resemble judaism as practiced now right i mean in fact the talmud even says this i mean there's there's this kind of fascinating and counterintuitive section of the Talmud where Moses is, it's what is called the Gadotah, which is some of these stories that are just kind of put into the middle of the Talmud, where Moses comes back and he's watching from on high as a bunch of rabbis in, you know, second century Palestine are talking about Judaism. And he's like, I don't recognize any of this stuff.

I brought down these books from the mountain, and I do not recognize any of this stuff. And God says to him, right. I mean, this is how this is morphed, and Moses is pleased. In other words, he's not. Judaism has always had a common law tradition where you're using reason to try and develop the ideas behind the commandments and then try and extend them or broaden them. And I think that's a good thing, but you have to be careful not to completely undermine fundamental roots or get rid of basic precepts.

In other words, you have to acknowledge there are certain fundamental truths that exist there, and then there's play as far as how those are implemented. Does Judaism have one of those pray the gay away traditions? No, that's not a thing. I mean, it's – What do they want guys to do? Like, what would you do if you were – Not to sin, but again, sin is a thing that everybody does, meaning that masturbation is not okay according to Judaism.

I assume that a vast majority of young Jewish men, even the Orthodox, are masturbating. So people sin. I mean, that's a recognition. It's always, again, I think I can speak on behalf of, I will audaciously speak on behalf of both Jews and Christians here. I think that religious people are told

that when they say that something is a sin, this means that they are looking askance at the people who are committing the sin. And that is not correct. I mean, what Judaism and Christianity say is that we are all committing sins on a fairly regular basis. Where we get uptight is when people start saying,

because I have a desire for the sin, the sin is no longer a sin. Hmm. Yeah. The real problem is, like, why is it a sin? Like, who says it's a sin? So, again— Again, these rules you were assuming are influenced by God. Right.

But clearly written by people. Well, this one, you would say, if you're a fundamentalist or at least somebody who believes in the idea that the Torah was given by God, it was given literally by God. Somebody who believes in the idea that the Torah was given by God was given literally by God. But again, that doesn't – the logic behind the rules, which people like Maimonides have tried to explicate, the idea is, as I said, this you can do without God. This part you can do without God. The human sex drive was made to procreate within a stable relationship in order to progenerate and have future generations of people. Misuse of that sex drive in any way, whether you're talking about from masturbation to homosexual activity, is therefore a diminishment of the use of that drive.

That's the natural law case against homosexual activity. And again, I will reiterate for Media Matters for the one millionth time, I'm not in favor of any of this being encoded into American law because freedom is freedom. People should be able to sin how they choose so long as they're not harming anybody else. Right. But what about people that have had vasectomies? And what about women that also— Judaism is not cool with vasectomies. Not cool with it.

And neither is Catholicism from what I understand. Right. Right. Yeah, well, I'm not a big fan of that one either. That one I have more experience with. But so what if a man is sterile and the woman's sterile are they allowed to have sex if they both know so yes because there are ancillary benefits to married couples having sex like relationship building but that's not a generalized case

against the favored view of sex right that's that's sort of like arguing that intersex people mean that there's no such thing as two separate sexes. There are two separate sexes and also there are intersex people who have a condition. Yes. And that's the same thing here. The case in favor of heterosexual sexual activity does not change based on the fact that some people can't actually participate in that. for advice if someone said hey ben i'm an admirer of yours i i love the way you think and follow your philosophies but i've got a problem i'm a young jewish man and i'm gay and i don't know what to do what would you tell them to do i mean i can't tell them to do anything right what would you advise would you tell would you tell them to not act out on those feelings i would say you do the best you can as a human being.

And from my moral perspective, you try to avoid sin as best you can. But everybody sins. The problem is that sin, though, it seems to me that it was defined by people that didn't understand biology because they were dealing with humans that existed thousands of years ago. No books, no real understanding of why people were gay. I mean, again, I really don't think that biblical commandments are linked, and religious commandments generally are linked to a view of biology. Meaning that... You don't think so?

No, I think that all sin is a recognition that we have drives that we are supposed to forego. Okay. I mean, that's fundamental to certainly Judaism and to Christianity as well I would say. Islam even has this basic precept. Right. And I think we can agree that there's some real benefits to discipline. There's real benefits to having structure and it doesn't mean that you can't be creative. It doesn't mean that you can't be free and do whatever you want some of the time too.

But I think we can both agree that this is one of the one of the best benefits of an ideology and hopefully a positive ideology right and one of the things that i the reason i keep coming back to the governmental regulation point is because my view is that if your view of discipline is not my view of discipline good on you right like go do what you want to do like i've never had a conversation with dave rubin about about him being a gay guy, but you did say that you like wouldn't go to his marriage, right? Well, I said, right. As a religious person, I can't say – I can't actively participate in something that I consider to be a sin. But I would go out to dinner with Dave and his husband anytime. Like my wife and I would do that, of course.

We'd have him over to our house with his husband. You don't find any contradiction between your religious perspective and your personal perspective in that regard, that you wouldn't be there for religious reasons, but that you would be there for personal reasons? Like, if it wasn't, would you go to the after party? Like, if you wouldn't go to the wedding, would you go to the after party? Anything that was a celebration of same-sex marriage, no. Wow. So anything but, like—

You wouldn't even go to the party? No. I mean, that's it. What if there was a barbecue the next day? Would you consider it a tag on? You know, it's, and again, like, I'm not sure why. I'm not a good party person. So I'm not sure why anybody would want me at their party, frankly.

You'd be a great party. I haven't been to a party with you, but I went to a dinner party with you. That's true. We had a great time. That was a good time. That's a funny picture, man. That is a wild picture. People don't know what the fuck To think about that picture

That is certainly true Eric and Jordan And Sam And Dave And you and I It's like what in the fuck All the white supremacists In one place right

Yeah That is a disturbing one When they'll just Just lump you in With a bunch of fucking psychopaths Just because it's convenient for them And it's an easy way To diminish you That is a bunch of fucking psychopaths just because it's convenient for them and it's an easy way to to diminish you that that that is a that is a thing that i see more from the left

than from the right and it's really disturbing i always thought until this clickbait generation came along i always thought that especially well you know the new york times is obviously the higher standard but that you would never see that kind of shit from progressive people. You would never see willful distortion of reality to define their narrative in a really disingenuous way. And it happens so often now that people get called – my favorite is alt-right adjacent. I don't even know what that means. They don't know what it means it doesn't they don't know what it means it's a new thing it's a new thing people are trying out they're trying it out it

might go away it's it's again trying to lump everybody into one group for purposes of castigating their motives is really about this you don't have to have an argument with somebody if you assume they're nazi so i guess if you call everybody a nazi you don't have to have an argument it is goofy but you know i think when it comes to the the gay marriage thing what people really worry about is other people trying to stop people from doing what they want to do you don't have that in you that's not you what you are doing is opposing it from your your religious beliefs right like if you want to join into my shul that shul has religious beliefs and that's their business by the way they're like i can't join a church i assume i don't believe the

things that people in the church believe you probably could if you donate you got to give the right amount of money well i don't believe in the jesus so there's that there's the jesus that's not my thing right i mean so that's i i wouldn't expect to walk into a mosque and expect them to change their their standards on religion. I find it really audacious when people actually expect other people to view the world the same way that they do and then expect that they're going to be catered to in that way. Like I wouldn't walk into a gay-owned bakery and expect them to bake a cake that has verses from Leviticus on it. Why would I do that? That story is a weird story.

You know, that bake a cake story because it gets bandied about. Those folks went to several bakers until someone said no. This is correct. Yeah. They were looking for a court case. Yeah. And honestly, like, that's not you being a civil rights hero. That's you being a jackass.

Seriously, like, go to the other bakery. What do these people do to you? They didn't have anything to do with you. They don't owe you their cake. And if you want to boycott them, boycott them, right? You want to get all your friends to say, we're not going to go buy a cake from these discriminatory humans. Fine. It's a free market. Have at it. But this, this notion that somebody owes you their services, that's, that to me, it's not even a freedom of religion case to me. That one's a freedom of association case. Well, I think what the the goal is is to shame a business into submission and also

to to put it out there in the public eye so that people understand that this is a discrimination that does happen with gay folks will they will go somewhere and someone won't make a cake for them right you know and so i think they wanted to highlight it so if i was being very charitable and i didn't think there would be an attention wh, I would say maybe that's what they're doing. Maybe they're just trying to highlight this very real problem. That's fine. But they actually took it to the government. Once you start pointing a government gun at people, I get real uptight.

That's a weird one. If you were just to walk into – Yelp review. Right, exactly. Yelp review it. Talk about how much you don't like them. Fine. I may disagree with you or I may agree with you.

Whatever. That's fine. Fine. I may disagree with you or I may agree with you. Whatever. That's fine. But once you start going to the government and having the government levy $100,000 fines on family bakeries because you couldn't find a gay baker in Colorado, supposedly. No.

I'm sorry. That's not cool. And I feel the same way. If I walked into a bakery and they're like, you're Jewish. We're not serving you. I'd be like, okay, you're an a-hole. But all right, I mean, it's free country, and there's a bakery across the street. Or maybe I'll just open a bakery next door to you and take all your business. Yeah, well, it's unfortunate that anyone would ever think like that.

But should it be a law to force someone to think differently? You can't. It doesn't work. This is my point. It's a slippery slope, too. People will point to my religious beliefs beliefs and they'll be like, oh, you're a theocrat. And I keep coming back to, I'm not though. Like, I don't want to force my beliefs on anybody. You just have those beliefs.

Those are my beliefs. So leave me alone. And those are your beliefs. So leave you alone. And if we can't have a system where we acknowledge that those beliefs can coexist and we can still have conversations with each other or be friends, it's going to be real hard to have a society. When you told Dave Rubin that you wouldn't go to his wedding,

did he get butthurt? No pun intended? No, he wasn't upset about it. No? No, because Dave and I were friends. He knows that I have no anger or upset about him doing whatever he wants. What the fuck, Ben? Come on, man.

I don't know. I'm not a friends person. You don't have any friends? I mean, I have friends, but it's like very close friends and then acquaintances. I tend to keep a pretty close social circle. That's smart. You have so much time in this life. That's pretty much how I feel.

Yeah. Like, if you're the kind of person where it feels like a true obligation for me to drive you to the airport, not a thing, man. I'm not driving you to the airport, bro. They're legitimate. Correct. There are people who make money off of you driving to the airport you know how to do that this is this is exactly correct that those people but that that kind of went away for the most part so if you find someone who's still asking for a ride to the airport that's a greedy motherfucker at this point

greedy bitch you know unless it's like 30 bucks on the uber yeah it's like your wife or your girlfriend and she wants to talk to you when you drop her off at the airport that's totally cool right well that's understandable this is well but that's what i mean by my circle of friendship like somebody where i'm in the car with them for half an hour and it doesn't feel like an obligation yeah yeah you have a nice conversation that's fine but um i value community and i i value i value people talking and trying to understand each other and i i've seen so much conflict that's unnecessary because I see so much conflict that's rooted in people not communicating instead of communicating. And I think this is one of the things that I'm most nervous about with all this deplatforming and censoring people and the silencing of people on the right. And it's not that I agree with these people. It's that I see how this is just going to shore up these two sides,

and it's going to make it a much more difficult atmosphere for communication, for real understanding and coming to agreements on things and recognizing the things that we all, all good people seem to agree. You should try to help each other. You should be kind to each other. You should work hard. you should have good morals and ethics you shouldn't steal you shouldn't take from people you shouldn't lie you shouldn't try to cheat the government you shouldn't try to cheat people right just be a good fucking person and that this this transcends religious ideologies it transcends political leanings it really does it should and we can have a truly diverse community truly diverse not forced diversity diverse meaning some people are progressive some people are

conservative some people are libertarian you can joke with each other we can all get along together and disagree with things just not be fucking hateful towards each other this is possible but it it becomes less possible when people feel like they're being silenced or censored this is totally right and it's also true that when you when you castigate somebody as morally unequal what you're really doing is you're giving an excuse to get into their shit i mean like this is what's really happening here like if i had a slogan beyond the facts don't care about your feeling stuff it would just leave me alone yeah right don't get into my shit like i'm not bothering you, so why are you bothering me?

And if I have a belief system that's different than yours, then so the hell what? As long as I'm not bothering you, what difference does it make to you how I feel about things? The only thing about the gay thing is that it's not you. You have a belief about things that's not you. But I have lots of beliefs about things that are not me. Right, but they're people that aren't hurting each other. But it's, so what? I mean, I can believe that people who aren't hurting each other, like, I'm i mean i can believe that people who aren't hurting each other like i'm not a fan of prostitution so like so i'm not a fan of people

here's some somebody not her prostitution is clearly more of a choice than i think gay people are okay but i'm right but again you're coming you're coming back to the same moral distinction which i've repeated a few times which is that I'm not a believer that a natural desire to do something therefore makes an activity okay. But that's a view that has no externalities. My view has no externalities. So in the same way, listen, I have beliefs about people who eat too much and get obese because they eat too much. I think it's a bad thing to do. I don't think it's my business. You want to do it? Your problem. Like you want to F up your life? That's what freedom is called, right? Isn't it one of the seven deadly sins? Gluttony?

Yeah, again, a Christian thing. But yeah, I think that... But yes, I mean, and I have lots of beliefs about lots of things that people do. And by the way, so do you. Things that don't affect you, right? I mean, this is... We all do. But as long as I'm not forcing that on you, because there are no externalities to your behavior,

I don't see why it bothers you. Like, there are legitimately, I would assume, tens of millions of people in this country who believe that when i die i will go to hell right i don't i don't believe in jesus and so there are a lot of people who believe i don't believe in jesus therefore i am bound for hell that does not bother me one iota because no one's bothering me so what do i care right i don't understand why everyone doesn't take this view if i'm not legitimately bothering you why should why should you care what i think like this is this is what would be puzzling me if somebody came to me and they wanted my opinion on something because they valued my opinion that much i'd give my opinion but it's a you don't have to care about my opinion i think

when it comes to the gay thing what people are looking for is to people for other folks to be accepting of who they are and i think for a lot of these gay folks that have been in the closet their whole life, that's the big thing is they're always worried about someone treating them differently or someone diminishing them because they're gay. Then when they hear someone like you say that you think it's a sin and that you shouldn't act on your biology even though you have these urges that you should instead find a woman they feel the same pangs of rejection and i get that i i for sure get that but the the confluence between activity

and identity is actually kind of a dangerous one meaning that the you know the the idea that if i disapprove of an activity in which you engage that i disapprove of you right i disapprove of lots of activities that in which lots of people engage I disapprove of you. Right. I disapprove of lots of activities in which lots of people engage, including most members of my family, including my children a lot of the time. That does not mean I disapprove of them as a human being or that I'm saying they are lesser as a human being. Right. We all interact with people this way.

You disapprove of my view on this. I don't get the feeling you disapprove of me as a human being. No, I don't. I practice a religion. You obviously think my religion is bullshit, but that's okay. I don't care. I don't think the feeling you disapprove of me as a human being. No, I don't. I practice a religion. You obviously think my religion is bullshit, but that's okay. I don't care. I don't think it's bullshit. I wouldn't say I think it's bullshit.

You think it's like God spoke to somebody on a mountain is bullshit, right? Well, I don't even know if that's bullshit. of stories that were as much as they could or as little as they wanted to be accurately defined and written down and then passed on from generation to generation. Okay, so let me take it for an example. You think the fact that I won't eat pork is kind of stupid bullshit? No, I don't think it's stupid bullshit. First of all, I think pigs are intelligent. I wish they weren't wild.

I have a deep affinity to pigs. I really do. That's the wrong example here. I love them, but I also kill them when I eat them. I mean, I kill wild pigs. Let me be broader about this. You're not an Orthodox Jew,

so I assume there are things about the things that I do. But I don't think it's stupid. But there are certain things of which I believe or practice that you probably disapprove or you don't think

they're the smartest or you think that they're... I might not think it's the smartest, but as I've gotten older and hopefully wiser, I give a fuck less about why you do what you do, but whether or not the benefits seem to be worth,

if the juice is worth the squeeze. Right. And in your case, I think the juice is worth the squeeze. I think you're a very successful person. You're very reasonable. You're very intelligent. You're an outstanding debater, and I enjoy talking to you and listening to you on youtube um i think part of that

is because of the fact that your religion right of your religious i think it's cross training i think in a lot of ways it's like if you lift weights for jujitsu it makes you stronger it'll make your jujitsu better as long as you keep training I think Your discipline From your religion Has There's Psychological benefits to it There's ethical benefits to it It's a real thing I totally get all that

I guess the point is That we're different people So there's a certain activity In which I engage That you probably think Well that's I wouldn't do that That's kind of dumb

And that's okay But I wouldn't though I would but I wouldn't I wouldn't I don't want to do it I don't want to wear a yarmulke But I get it I understand why you do it It would be hard to keep it on your head I mean't. I don't want to do it. I don't want to wear a yarmulke. But I get it. I understand why you do it.

It would be hard to keep it on your head, frankly. Yeah, just glue it. What do bald dudes do? They put a piece of double-stick tape there? Not much you can do. You're not allowed to? No, you can. You totally can.

But that seems painful and uncomfortable. Yeah. The point is that living in a society, we all are constantly disapproving of each other, right? Politics is just us disapproving of each other all the time. And so long as we're not forcing that on anybody else, I really don't see the problem. And I think everybody should sort of get over it. Like, if I don't approve of your personal behavior, welcome to the club. I disapprove of 99% of people's personal behavior, including my own half the time.

How often do you debate people on the merits of religion or the merits of your belief system? You know, not super frequently, but not infrequently. I mean, like I mentioned that I've had this conversation with sam a couple of different times yeah like well he's he's so rabid as an atheist but yet you guys he's more religious sam is more religious than i am sam is more of a religious atheist than i am like i'll admit questions about my own religion sam is very very convinced of his of his correctness and in his viewpoint sam sam's a religious dude he's a fascinating guy. He is.

I like Sam a lot. I do too. And Michael Shermer, I've had on my show to talk about religion and skepticism and all that. I'm not shy about talking about it. I just, sometimes I find that it's kind of a dead end because sometimes it just turns into, I believe in God. And then the other person's like, I don't believe in God. And it's like, well, okay, fine.

Now can we talk about the stuff we think are the, what are the fundamental building blocks upon which you can base a society or base of politics? And if we agree on those, then, you know, the God stuff, I think God is a better base for those fundamental policies and,

and, and belief systems. I think free speech, individualism, democracy, these are based on a simple verse in Genesis that human beings are made in God's image. I think that that's a logical leap. This is the case I've made to Sam. I don't think that you can actually get to human beings are of inestimable value from scientific materialism.

If you believe that human beings are effectively just animals, then I don't know why they would be of infinite value, nor why I should respect somebody's belief system simply because they're human. I don't respect animals and if we're just another animal i i there's no there's nothing that necessitates that logical line of in fact for most of human history it was not the logical line of thinking it was if you're a member of my tribe then we like you and if you're not a member of my tribe then we get to kill you but is that a logical comparison like is isn't there a difference between single-celled organisms and the way a primate interacts with its environment?

I mean, yes, but I'm not sure why that would indicate any sort of greater existential value. It's not necessarily a greater existential value, but as we were talking about the value of community and the value of having a group of people that you care about, this is a core component of being human. It's a core component of this understanding. This is a, it's a core component of this understanding mind. But that's, that's rational, intelligent interfacing with the universe in a way that no other animal is capable of. I'm not saying you can't get to the point where Sam agrees with me.

I'm saying that I think it's less convincing than Sam thinks it is. Meaning there's an, there's an alternative line of thought that says, okay, you're right. Social fabric is great. You know where that social fabric is particularly awesome among me and my friends. You know where it ain't that great? Those guys over there. Let's go kill them and take their shit. That was pretty much how humanity

worked for a very, very long time. And the simple and effective idea that the reason that human beings are of value is because we are more than just our material bodies, that there's something that is us, that is of inestimable value. That's a religious concept, and it has a lot of weight. Now, if Sam wants to get to the same place, and we can build a political conversation from there, that's fine. My real argument with Sam is, Sam and I go down to the bottom of the iceberg about 90% of the way. We have the same fundamental values about free speech, diversity of opinion, about, I think, to mostly an extent, free markets. I think that we agree on a lot of these fundamental principles. He then says that he gets those from pure reason.

I have serious questions about whether pure reason necessitates those conclusions. He tends to think that those are the only conclusions a reasonable person could come to if you properly apply a reason. I don't think that's right. What do you think is happening there? What's the mechanism? I think that the mechanism is that we are common. What I said to Sam

when we were debating this in San Francisco is, it's real weird. He's a materialist, a scientific materialist atheist who is sitting across the stage from me, a religious Jew. We agree on 95% of our values. So how? And his answer was, well, you know, here's where I've studied. I've studied Buddhism.

I've studied these philosophies and I've studied science and all this. He said, right, I know, here's where I've studied. I've studied Buddhism. I've studied these philosophies, and I've studied science. He said, right, I haven't studied a lot of those things, but we have the same values. So why? It seems to me a better historical explanation is that we grew up 10 miles from each other in Los Angeles after 3,000 years of common history of Judeo-Christian development, balanced with reason in the West. Like, location has something to do with this. And that location was rooted in commonality of interest and philosophy. So I'm less – it's – there's a weird nexus. I don't want to get too kind of deep in the weeds here.

There's a weird kind of nexus on what truth is where you've heard Sam and Jordan Peterson debate this. That was insane. It's wild, right? And the truth is I'm closer to Sam than Jordan on this. I'm closer to Jordan than Sam when it comes to the value of religion, and I'm closer to Sam than Jordan when it comes to objective truth. Sam believes that there is such a thing as objective truth.

Jordan tends to be more of a pragmatist. He tends to believe that truth is sort of what is useful to a certain extent. And I agree with Sam, but I'm not sure how he gets to objective truth from a scientific materialist worldview. Why is there objective truth as opposed to what you think being evolutionarily beneficial? How do you get from that to it's a universal principle that is objectively true? It's a bit of a jump. Well, it depends on what the concept is, right?

Like what are you talking about in terms of objective truth? I'm talking about anything that Sam says is true. What makes it true as opposed to just evolutionarily beneficial for us to think so meaning what evolution does is it creates a series of thoughts in our mind presumably if you're a materialist that are beneficial to your preservation and promulgation of the species right they're not active actually true so if it's beneficial this is sam's explanation for the prevalence of religion, for example. He'll say religion isn't true, but evolutionary biology sort of drives people toward religion

so you can have group bonds that are beyond 150 people or whatever. So why doesn't that apply to math? Why is it that 2 and 2, how do you know that 2 and 2 actually equals 4? As opposed to it is evolutionarily beneficial for you to believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4. So Sam believes there's an objective truth somewhere out there that two plus two equals four so sam believes there's an objective truth somewhere out there that two plus two equals four i don't know what evolution has to do with that sort of stuff so what do you think is happening that he disagrees with so i think that what is happening is that human beings were placed in an orderly universe through the

processes of biology and have a unique capacity to understand that universe because we are made in the image of God. This is where I think that the religious viewpoint diverges pretty strongly from Sam's evolutionary viewpoint. But you believe in evolution. Yes. You believe that evolution was a process that was created by God to formulate human beings. Yes. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's the nice thing about being religious.

You can attribute most everything to God, as some would say, right? It's nice. Well, here's the thing. It's not that implausible. If there was some sort of a grand plan, there would be no regard for, like, oh, we've got to get a rush on this, making the evolutionary being, you know, we're going to really accelerate the process. And there's all sorts of fine-tuning arguments about how implausible it would be for just atoms roaming around the universe randomly to end with human creation. You know, the alternative explanations seem no more, no less implausible to me. Like the multiple universes theory, plausible, but we have no way to prove it because we can't get to those multiple universes.

So how is that testable? Right. Or the now popular theory that we're living in an AI simulation, not sure how that's more testable than God. Not sure how it's more testable that aliens put us here. Like how is any of this – why is that more testable or more plausible than the idea that there is a force behind that which we see that has mind? Well, let's just break this down slowly. There's obviously something that's happening. There's obviously something that went from the Big Bang to planet Earth in 2019 with cellular communication and satellite dishes.

And obviously something happened happened something pretty radical why is it happening is it happening because of random events that sort of coincide with biology and technology and all these things come to fruition to you and i standing across from each other talking on this podcast in front of millions of people or is this is this just how things go is things compete constantly try to get better and then in this gigantic ecosystem of all these things competing and trying to get better one super successful organism us rises above and continues right and continues and by far passes all these other creatures below it and moves we, in our estimation, I mean, if you really believe in evolution, you can't think we're done.

It's got to be moving towards some better product. It keeps going until it creates. So this is why I say that Sam is more religious than I am. I think that there's a plausible argument for atheism. I just don't think that there is a plausible argument for Sam's moral vision of atheism, meaning that what Sam tends to do is, like, for example, you and I have talked a lot on this particular podcast about the value of self-betterment and making decisions and being responsible for those decisions. How does that work in an area where you don't have free will? So Sam actively says we do not have free will.

Yeah, that's a weird conversation. It is a weird conversation and sort of a self-defeating one. Sam suggests when it comes to the scientific method that we are using science to find out truths about the universe, and we're using reason. Sam's very big on reason. I also am big on reason, but I don't know how Sam is defining reason

as opposed to just an evolutionarily beneficial firing of neurons, meaning that that's what we are right we're balls of meat wandering purposeless through the universe and then he'll talk about making our own meaning or seeking human human um prosperity or uh flourishing is the word he likes to use these are all very active verbs right this is this is an active vision of man in the universe right and i And I'm not sure how that flows from, we're a ball of meat that evolved from another ball of meat that evolved eventually, if you go back far enough, from non-balls of meat,

without any free will, without any capacity to choose. I don't know how you build a civilization on that. Well, there's two different conversations here. One is determination, or determinism, rather. Whether or not you have free will, or whether or not your have free will or whether or not your life and your actions are being dictated by the past by your biology by your learned experiences by external pressures what is causing this very clear decision that you make is this free will are you deciding i'm going to get my shit together. Or all the factors around you pushing you and funneling you into this direction that it's unavoidable to you.

Right. And that you are not a product of free will. You're just a product of a lot of different factors. Right. Or is it both? Is it that you are the product of your environment and your life experiences and you also have free will? Right. And I'm in the latter i'm i'm in the latter

group i'm in the latter group i think as well i think we also experience great benefit from making positive choices and then experiencing like whenever you meet someone who's lost a lot of weight one of the things they have is this fucking tremendous feeling of accomplishment yep you know like yeah i lost a hundred pounds like holy, holy shit, man, 100 pounds. Like, they get this positive feedback from it. There's real good in making good choices. And when people decide to get their shit together and make a good choice, they're rewarded. The question is, are you doing that because of determinism or are you doing that because of free will? Or are you doing that because of a combination of both of those things?

will or are you doing that because of a combination of both of those things and can you fuel that free will purposely through like outwardly seeking things that are motivational or things that are educational things that allow you to kind of remap the way you process reality right which can be extremely beneficial and can aid in you taking steps towards exercising your free will right well and this is why i think that in the end – Right. But I think that's a pretty fundamental question. And I think that that's why in the end I'm religious and I'm not sure why Sam isn't because he agrees with the same premises. Right.

He'll talk about self-betterment and decisions that you can make. And then he'll write a full book about why free will doesn't exist. And I just don't understand how those two things can coexist. Yes. It's – well, i think it's a thought experiment first of all i think the whole determinism thing is a thought experiment because there's really no way to determine right it's like you can but you have to act as though for sure right i mean like there's just no way to act otherwise um but i guess i know i've absolutely act as if i have free will right and we all do and i get angry at myself when i fuck things up i don't say well it's just determinism man right no that doesn't get you in and but maybe it's determinism that has put me in this position

where i'm the kind of guy that gets upset if i fuck things up right i don't know i don't know man i don't know but i don't know if you know either. That's my take on all these things. When people get really rigid with their ideologies, I'm like, okay, I want to hear it out. I want to hear the whole thing. I want to hear it all. I'm not sure if you know. No, I think there's a lot that I don't know. But I think that there's more plausible and less plausible.

I agree. This is where I think people misunderstand you. You have your beliefs, but you're not a God that imposes them on people. And I think we need to be way more reasonable in terms of the way we address people's beliefs. And I've been guilty of this in the past. I'm sure many people listening have. So have I. Everyone has. But I think it's a core component to a healthy community is to allow people to have their own beliefs. And, you know, who

knows, man, maybe your beliefs on gay people will adjust and move over time as you get older and move into a gay neighborhood. Again, it's not, look, dude, it's not about

tolerance for gay folks. I know. It's a religious thing. I mean, I don't, yeah. It's a difference between understanding people as whole people and then saying that I don't like some of the things that they do and simply saying, making the assumption that because I don't like some of the things that you do,

we can't be friends or I disapprove of you as an entire human being, which I think is not true. It's a good belief system to have if you're straight. And then you go, look, got it locked down. Don't need to worry about that. I got a problem. But if you were gay, God damn, that'd be a pain in the ass. Yeah, absolutely.

Fuck, it would be annoying. If you just always wanted to bang dudes and everyone's saying no. And you're like, but that's what I want to do. Nobody said religion's easy, man. What's the value in it though? If you're a giant homo, all right, and all you want to do is go to gay discos and party your ass off that's what you enjoy some people like golf okay some people some people like parasailing some dudes just want to fucking get it on man you want to dress up like

the village people and go have a fucking party that's why santa monica boulevard is such a hot spot i mean they find each other you know do whatever you want to do honestly do whatever you want to do just don't don't ask me to think that you know don't ask me to like put my stamp of of moral approval on i understand but do what you want to do like it's free country this this should be a free country not just it is a free country it should be a free country it should not be my job to police your personal behavior right right right like you doesn't mean i have to approve it on a personal level right but i'm i'm a jerk if i want to impose my belief system on on your personal behavior that affects no one else i mean that's the definition and i'm a hypocrite if i continue to berate you about your your opinion on gay folks why do i give a fuck what your opinion is correct because

you are a reasonable person and you do you're very polite and you're you're even friends with dave rubin so there you go there's gotta be something there it's um it's a strange thing though this uh this need that people have for everyone to think the way they think and i understand the need to reinforce your own thoughts and and and and argue them and try to figure out a way to debate that the other person's perspective is incorrect and your perspective is correct i understand all these inclinations that people have but uh i i think that they conflate that with bigotry right you know and i don't exactly i don't think you're a bigot i don't agree with you about gay folks but that's one of the few the marijuana thing is just i just don't think you have any experience in it right and as far as the as far as disagreeing i think that we probably don't disagree on on gay folks i think we disagree on identity and gay activity and all the rest of

it i mean as human beings yeah these are human beings i know many gay people who i think are Yeah. have a defined religion but in a way i have some pretty rigid ideas that i have in my head about behavior and ethics and morals and how you treat people you care about those are those are like they're pretty rigid and i think one of the things that religion does is it allows you to have this sort of ethical framework sort of like um you know what is it called scaffolding like when you're building like it allows you to develop a more disciplined life and it just shows you this is good and this is bad and it's clear and there's there's most different in the for the most part it's good for the most part these are these are good patterns to follow and i think that i've most certainly sort of adopted my own somewhere along the line.

I think we all do. Yeah. I mean, honestly, a value system effectively is usually a form of religion. Right. So when you're saying that Sam is religious, he's a religious atheist, you're not being inaccurate. There's a lot of folks do that. We do develop these sort of principles that we follow.

We're not just free willy-nilly, just do whatever we want all day long. No one does that. And the reason I say it is sort of facetiously, but I think that we all make fundamental assumptions about the nature of human life. And we have to recognize that those are assumptions. It's not reason all the way down. Yeah. Because that tends to actually become even more inflexible. Then it's, I'm the only reasonable person in the room.

My reasons are the only ones that matter. And so it's my reasons all the way down. Acknowledge that we're all making some assumptions, and then we can discuss whether those assumptions are worthwhile or not. Yeah. The thing that, when it comes with religion in defining whether or not other people's behavior is sinful, where it doesn't involve you, that's where a lot of folks start thinking that maybe these ideas are bigoted. Right. But it does involve me. It does.

Well, I'm enjoined. Every sin that I say is a sin is a sin that enjoins me. It's just that I may not have a desire for that particular sin. Meaning I'm not holding people to a different standard than I hold myself, nor am I saying that I never sin. Right. But you know that you have different biological desires than they do. You kind of acknowledge that, right?

Of course that's true. Yeah. Of course that's true. By the same token, I assume that a gay guy doesn't have the desire to strip a thousand women, which most straight guys do. Yeah. Why do you think, if God has a plan, why do you think he would create gay people? I mean, I think that God creates, first of all, I don't think that I'm in a position to evaluate God's plan. I wish I were.

If you like God's liaison. If I had to guess, God creates people with all sorts of different challenges, and those challenges span the spectrum. I mean, I'm not. So God sneaks it up on you. Hey, man, I know this is going to be fucked up, but you're going to just like dudes. Like, forget about women. You're going to like dudes. I am not. But I want you to ignore that. I want you to listen to just like dudes. Like, forget about women. You're going to like dudes. I am not.

But I want you to ignore that. I want you to listen to my old book. I don't know why God gives people drives. I don't know why God gives kids cancer. I don't know a lot of things about God. Wish I did. It would make my life a lot easier. So you think that that is a challenge

akin to any other challenge that a human being might face in this life, that the challenge of being... But a lot harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But a lot more difficult and a lot more straining and a lot yeah of course you think there's value in following that challenge and not acting on gay urges i think that i think there can be and having sex with a woman plug your nose go and make a face because you're disgusting did you

create it did you create a baby out of that did that is that baby like a part of your life now that is that is deep and meaningful maybe but what about in the past there are a lot of gay guys having kids what about people saying living their truth i'm living my truth ben shapiro well i mean as a general rule living my truth is a bunch of crap like there's there's living your opinion which is fine like live your opinion how you want again that gets back to do what you want as long as it's not bothering me living my truth is a different thing that's one of those social media creations like living my truth there's such that's just bullshit i'm sorry living my truth is bullshit like it's it's

there's no such thing as your truth there's the truth and then there's your opinion and we do have to if we're going for purposes of conversation at the very least it's deeply irritating when people say living my truth because then it's like i disagree with you and then like well you're you're disavowing me as a human being no i, I just disagree. Like, you can be you. You can do what you want. Like, you do whatever, man. Calm down. How did I become the most loosey-goosey libertarian lean-back guy in the world in this society?

How is this possible? I'm the most uptight person I know. How is this a thing? Well, you know as well as I do that the further you go left, you reach the same sort of zealotry that you do when you go all the way right. This is correct. You meet these crazy people that are just completely connected to their idea of

being correct, and they take the most rigid stance on all these issues on the left side or on the right side, and it's so goddamn common it's a pattern of human behavior it's also it's it's also incredibly boring yes i mean there's just nothing to discuss with with yeah i agree and that's one of the reasons why it's so disgusting when people mislabel people like so there was an article that connected me with richard spencer like what in the fuck like that is such a disingenuous thing to do. And they know what they're doing.

They're either trying to get me to react to it and talk about it and get more clicks. Get people to boycott you, yeah. But it's horseshit. Yep. Like, anybody who, but if you are locked into that far left ideology, as far left as you can go, and it's one of the problems with ideologies that have these extremists, is that you believe in a percentage of the things these people say, but then they go way too far with it. But you're connected with them.

You're connected with them because you're a part of that, even though you don't have a similar notion. Steven Pinker got browbeaten over suggesting that failure to ask questions and give plausible answers gives, excuse me, credence to the all right. failure to ask questions and give plausible answers gives, excuse me, credence to the alt-right. That if you do a, so he did a whole speech where he said, listen, there are lots of conversations about IQ and race. And the alt-right loves these conversations because then they suggest wrongly that black people are inherently unfit and white people are more fit and all that kind of stuff and he says there are great ways to explain how much of iq is is cultural how much can be changed how much is genetic how much that actually matters in terms of real life outcomes we can do all those things but when you say don't ask the question stop asking the question then you make people google and the only thing that they will google and find are answers that are given by people who are actually alt-right right and he got ripped as alt-right for this

yeah his entire argument was don't allow people to push into alt-right answers by failing to give them proper responses or by throwing them out the window. And then people are like, well, you're alt-right now because you're saying that people should be able to ask questions. Well, it's almost like when you discuss... It's the exact same version as people in the religious community where it's like, you know, I used to go to Sunday school and then I asked too many questions and they kicked me out.

Right? That's not how religion is supposed to work. That's not how reason is supposed to work. That's not how any of this is supposed to work. Right. And there's also, when you're investigating anything, any measurable thing, when you find a number, whatever it is, like these people, like Asian folks are better at mathematics uh european folks are better at this and like what is what's the reason for that like what what's let's find out is it cultural is it biological is it something can we learn about how human beings evolved and adapted why are nigerians so smart like there's so many nigerians that come to this country they thrive

they thrive in business they're extremely motivated they're extremely disciplined it's like it's like almost like korean folks why do koreans like why are they so hard working why do they strive and obviously these are big generalizations but what is it about italians what what makes them wear gold chains and love mafia movies like what is it those are my people like what the what the fuck why do they all talk like that? Like, what is that? What causes any sort of ethnic group to turn out the way they turned out? Why are so many European Jews Nobel Prize winners? What the fuck is going on over there?

And also, like, what is the impact of the measurable on how we live our lives? Like, how much should this stuff matter? Is this a result of discrimination or is this a result of something else? Is it true that when you group any group of people together racially or non-racially, there will be disparities between those two groups of people? This is just true statistically. But not asking those questions and then saying, shut down the questions. What that actually does is it leads people to only get the answers to the questions from the people who don't know what they're talking about in many cases and who are giving convenient, easy, and selfattering answers about the nature of themselves the fear is it being used by racists to reinforce their positions right but what you find out is that they'll do that anyway superior race right and

they'll do that anyway like one of the one of the funniest things about white supremacists is they're so fucking stupid i mean pardon the language like the the white supremacists are invariably not the nobel prize winners it's it's you go to a white supremacist are invariably not the Nobel Prize winners. Go to a white supremacist compound, you're not looking at a bunch of people who are curing cancer. These people piss me off. And I'll say all that. It won't matter. The media will label me alt-right tomorrow because that's the way this goes.

Well, the disingenuous media that's being less and less taken seriously. Taken less and less seriously it's it seems to me that that trend which is a common trend that's existed for the last few years of these clickbaity bullshit articles and mislabeling people it's going to go away because your your your perspective is not going to be appreciated it's not going to be respected if you if you're obviously making disingenuous statements like that and i think um we're in this weird position where it's very difficult to find real journalism and real objective takes on things that aren't flavored by their ideology and everybody's trying to shape everybody and they feel like it's their obligation they feel there's many people that write things that feel like it's their obligation to change your

perspective on national subjects and things that are important to us. It's not their obligation to just report what's going on, but also their obligation to flavor things in a way that'll make one side look favorable to the other. Yeah, well, I'm very much in favor of journalists revealing their biases. I think that the greatest lie in media is that objective journalism is a thing. So I'm a conservative. You want to go to my site, you'll get a conservative spin on the news. That's the way it's going to work. And guess what?

CNN's liberal, and they are going to give you the liberal spin on the spin on the news that's the way it's going to work right and guess what cnn's liberal and they are going to give you the liberal spin on the news and that's just the way this is going to work did you see the video when the mueller report came out they look like somebody got killed oh my god it's crazy it was the day that kennedy got shot yeah exit yeah shouldn't you be happy if if you guys believed in mueller everybody was like mueller is the fucking man he's gonna go get go get Trump. This guy is methodical. He's precise. People were buying votive candles. He's going to find out everything. Votive candles

with his face on them that they could like burn. They were pumped. Yeah. And then he came out and it was like, well, no collusion. Everybody's like,

well, I guess that now it's a cover up. Yeah. Like what? Wait a minute. Yeah. Maybe the narrative has trumped the actual job

you were supposed to do, guys. Well, it's just so many people were so well it's just so many people were so convinced and there were so many people that were making statements that in retrospect are probably like you could probably i mean i don't want to say i'm not a litigious person but if i was a guy like donald trump oh man yeah there's so many people to sue is it it was it was amazing i mean i remember i was on bill maher's show and we were supposed to talk about free speech stuff and like five minutes before and he's like let's talk about russia his producer

came in let's talk about russia and i was like okay fine so we get on the producer said that yeah this is like right before they switch the topic for your tv shows will they just tell you what you have to talk i don't know it's some guy comes in with a clipboard. Yeah. It was a little bit strange. And we got on stage, and he's talking about Trump-Russia collusion. And I said what I've always said, which is I'll wait for the evidence to come out, and then I will make a decision as to whether Trump-Russia collusion was a thing. You're radical. I know. And Bill Maher goes, you don't believe it was a thing?

And I was like, well, I don't see any evidence yet that it was a thing. Like I see some evidence of attempts to collude, like don jr i see some attempts of people trying to get information but i don't see evidence of like actual legal collusion and why don't we just wait like you guys keep wanting muller to give us like let's just wait on it and mark could not believe that this was my perspective right it was like it was like shocking to him why should why should the perspective i'm waiting for more evidence be shocking to anyone when it is obvious the evidence is not out like why why is that in any way controversial it's bewildering to me well it's because people have this need to let everyone know that they're on the right side and they want you to know that they do believe in the collusion

if you disagree with that for whatever reason you must either be a right-wing person a trump supporter someone who's in denial someone who doesn't look at the evidence and you're a part of the problem yep but the the real problem was jumping to conclusions there obviously seemed to be some attempts there's there's obviously some fuckery with that ira company that the internet research agency that is responsible for millions of interactions with people online where they pretended to be right different supporters they caused conflict like constant conflict in regards to political opinion and that's all real that was coordinated effort to try to change people's opinions but how much that had to do

with donald trump how much did he ask for? You've got no evidence. Also, I was always bewildered by this theory. Like, did you watch that campaign? That was not the most well-coordinated campaign. It was chaos. It was chaos. I mean, I knew everybody who was in the campaign. Like, it was a shit show. And the idea that they're sitting there, but when the mask comes off at night, they call up Vladimir Putin.

And they put together a point-by-point plan on how they're going to swing this particular precinct in rural in rural michigan it's like what what are you are you guys high like what are you talking about like what like if you could attribute this to anything here's a good rule of thumb for politics attribute everything to stupidity unless you can prove malice the real problem and this is something that is very similar to what we were talking about earlier when you say something and you say it over and over and over again and you say it with such conviction and it becomes a giant part of your news narrative and then that something turns out to be horseshit yep you just massively empowered trump that's that's

exactly right i mean i said for a long time that you know i'm not a big fan of trump's fake news shtick because i think he applies it too broadly i think that whenever there's a bad piece of news he's like fake news and it's like well sometimes yes and sometimes no but now that you just blew a two-year narrative where he was clearly in putin's pocket how many people you think are going to listen to the nuanced view of fake news now and how many people do you think are going to actually believe trump when view of fake news now? And how many people do you think are going to actually believe Trump when he says that a bad piece of news is legitimately a fake piece of news? Yeah, it empowers him in a spectacular manner. They made a giant mistake.

Oh, yeah. They blew this one in spectacular fashion. And people are still hanging in there with it. All they had to do. This is true for so many people right now. All you have to do is not be crazy. Just stop it. That's all you have to do, this is true for so many people right now, all you have to do is not be crazy. Just stop it. Who was the guy that was talking about the possibility that Trump has been a Russian asset since like 1987 or some shit?

Who the fuck was that? I mean, Andrew McCabe, the former FBI director, was asked whether Trump was legitimately a Russian asset. And he's like, I don't know. It's like you're using the power of the institution you used to run to spread this nonsense. And you got that from John Brennan. You got it from James Clapper. These are all former heads of the intelligence agencies just makes me think the intelligence agencies need to be wildly curved back if these were the heads of them i mean if like the heads of the intelligence agencies are using their platform to proclaim

that they have inside information about trump that turns out to be utter nonsense i'm not sure these people should have that much power to like is that that what he's saying? Or is he saying he doesn't know? He didn't say, I don't know. He was saying like, I have basically, I expect that Mueller is going to indict as a former intelligence professional. I expect that. Yeah.

There's a lot of that. It was ugly. Adam Schiff on the committee doing the same thing. It's crazy now. Cause like, what do they do now? Like, how do they rebound from this?

If this is something that you didn't just say once, this is something you said for two years? Right. You've seen the compilation videos? Oh, yeah. They're hilarious. They're amazing. They've done them to rap music.

They put a beat behind it. Have you seen it? No, I haven't. No, there's some great ones. Some great compilations. There's compilations of people saying, possible collusion, possible collusion, possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then there's music that goes with it, and they just cut to possible collusion with the Russians. Possible Russian collusion. Yeah. Possible Russian collusion possible collusion possible and then there's music that goes with it and they just cut to possible collusion with the Russians possible Russian collusion possible Russian collusion it's yeah

they blew it in a major way yeah I mean there's plenty of shit to complain about you didn't have to go with that like the idea was that he was a traitor he's a target rich environment

and you decided to go to he's a Russian traitor like it's no way out or something and he's Kevin Costner in the last scene. The only way he could have ever beaten Hillary. Sorry, I don't mean to check my watch.

Do you want to get out of here, man? I do a little bit, yeah. When do you have to leave? Right now? I wanted to ask you one more question. Yeah, let's do one more question. What do you think about this Chelsea Manning situation? Because I don't know exactly what happened other than she's in contempt of court.

And so they've got her in solitary confinement now this is about testifying yeah i haven't been i'll be honest i haven't been following it that closely i mean my understanding is that chelsea manning who okay so here's where you call her bradley no he changed his name to chelsea he is a biological male i can't believe you're misgendering are you dead naming as well don't know no i don't i don't dead but unless we were talking about when he committed his crime to which point he was actually bradley as opposed to chelsea right so if we're talking about so the person who was convicted that was a male named bradley manning did you say the artist

formerly known as bradley if we're talking about the human being who's currently in jail that is a male who is currently known as chelsea so okay so my understanding is that brad is that chelsea manning is a refused to hand over information that he was legally bound to hand over about wiki leaks and now there were complaints that he's being held in solitary but that's not true apparently uh and that he's being mistreated i do find it weird that the same people who are complaining about Donald Trump coordinating with WikiLeaks are very upset about Chelsea Manning going to jail for coordinating with WikiLeaks. You're going to need to pick one or the other. Is WikiLeaks bad or is WikiLeaks not bad? Yeah, what is WikiLeaks? It's only dependent upon whether or not they're supporting the narrative that you want. That's exactly right.

And it used to be that WikiLeaks was very good, remember? Exactly. It was right and left, by the way. Like there are people on the right where it's like Julian and left wikileaks was very good remember exactly it was right and left by the way like there are people on the right where it's like julia julian assange is the worst and then 2016 happened like julian assange now there's a person i can really talk to it's like well no i'm pretty sure julian assange is uh a wikileaks good information suggests they are a russian front group and take make of that what you will end of story do you think that they became a russian front group to try to stay operative and stay safe? Because they were obviously being attacked by the United States government and in danger of being shut down. And then they've – I mean, he's been –

I really don't know enough about WikiLeaks to really get into a sort of historical – But I know that he's been trapped in that embassy for – since 2012. Yeah, I mean, I hope that he's got some video games or something in there fuck man he's been in there for like seven years now

right that's a long time to be in an embassy that is a long time can't go outside no sunlight Pamela Anderson visits every now and then

he's fucked man I mean it's it's a terrible place to be and I don't know if it's better than prison cause it's like the stress of him never knowing

when they're gonna come knock down the door and pull him out of there. I was like, how well does that guy sleep? Yeah. Seven years in that embassy. It can't be great. It can't be great. It's got to be awful.

They took his internet away, right? I think they did. That's fucked. Although, to be fair, WikiLeaks was releasing information on specific American soldiers in lines of combat. Were they? Yes. They didn't redact any of the names? That was the problem. That's why people were pissed Were they? Yes. They didn't redact any of the names? That was the problem.

That's why people were pissed. Really? Yes. Because the original dump from Chelsea Manning was that he dumped all the information to WikiLeaks, including the stuff that was unredacted. And WikiLeaks just released it? Yeah, that was the claim.

That was the claim anyway. I don't know if that's accurate. If you find differently, then let me know because I'll be happy to correct always. Yeah. No, I'm sure you would. I just don't know if that is... I don't know know i don't have the information in front of me do you want to check no that'll take too much time that'll do folks you're gonna have to google this one um

but so when one of the things that i was thinking when trump got into office with all this drain that swamp shit i was like i wonder if trump would be a WikiLeaks supporter. I wonder if Trump would be happy. Depends. If it helped him, sure. Right. And Snowden as well. I was wondering about that. Yeah.

I mean, it's the same sort of thing. I mean, unfortunately, politics very often has little to do with principle and everything to do with convenience. Yeah. So if it's helpful, sure. But wouldn't a guy like him, who's always anti-deep state and talking about these – I mean, he's extremely critical. Yes, but I have a feeling that once you actually sit in the big seat, I think that tends to change. Remember, Obama was too. Yeah.

And then five minutes later, he was droning people. So, like – Well, listen, I know you've got to get out of here. So, let's just wrap this up. Tell people about your book. Yeah, so you can check out my book, The Right Side of History. It talks about a lot of the sort of deeper issues we were talking about, Judeo-Christian values and reason.

It's a kind of short-form philosophical history of the West from Sinai through Greece and talking about all the major Enlightenment philosophers. Some of the things we talked about on the show are in the book. It's the number one bestseller on the New York Times nonfiction list, at least at the moment. Congratulations, man. Thank you. That's awesome. I appreciate it.

That's really pretty spectacular. That's pretty exciting, sir. Your show, also, Ben Shapiro Show. You can get the Ben Shapiro Show on iTunes. You can get it on YouTube. Your Sunday review, which I did once. Yeah, the Sunday special. It was a blast.

Sunday special. We'll have to have you on again. That'd be fun. I would love to. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Cool. And your book's available on Amazon, everywhere.

All the places, yep. Okay. Ben Shapiro, ladies and gentlemen. That was great. Thank you so much.