TRIGGERnometry - An Honest Conversation with Ben Shapiro

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

SPONSORED BY: The Tired Moderate - get his brilliant new satire 'Danielle's Passion' here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYGKX8NM/ SPONSORED BY: EasyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/  Ben Shapiro is an American columnist, author, conservative political commentator, media personality, attorney and businessman. He is editor emeritus for The Daily Wire, a media company he co-founded, and the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and live radio show. He is also the author of 11 books. Get The Tired Moderate's other work here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092W9YPJM  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was working in law, and I decided that I was not enjoying the practice of real estate law. I went and I quit, and I had no job. I was about to get married. We had just taken a mortgage on a house, and I took a job for one-third the pay to work at Talk Radio Network. And the deal was that I would do some in-house legal work half the time, and half the time I would learn the radio business. They had basically won on the same-sex marriage issue, and everybody thought, okay, battle over, like everybody weapons down, go back to your normal business.

I'm like, no, no, we have another step here. And the next step is that we're going to teach our version of sexual orientation and gender identity to your kids. And that is going to include the idea that gender is fully malleable and on a spectrum and completely socially constructed. He's 76 years old. He has no ability to control his mouth or his typing fingers. He has no sort of actual plan to win. I mean, he literally complained in 2020 that he was robbed of the election who voter fraud. But no one will ask him a simple question.

How do you plan to unrob the election in 2024? Do you want to vote for the guy you love, but who's likely to lose? or joy to vote for somebody who you like, but is significantly more likely to win. Hey, Constantin, do you like romantic novels? No. In my country, men who read romantic novels are executed, which is correct. This is why we don't have men with pink hair or women with unshaved armpits.

All right, mate, chill out. How about if the character was woke? Even worse, Lenin would have been spinning in his glass case. But what if it's satirical? In my country, we do not have satire. Laughing is not allowed. If you want humor, read Dostoevsky. Well, if you are blessed with a sense of humor

and enjoy a bitingly funny takedown of romance novels and world culture, then you have to read Danielle's Passion, a new satire that follows a young Ivy League grad as she battles white supremacy, the patriarchy and late stage capitalism in the hellscape that is Irvine, California. This is not natural. Live, laugh and love through the eyes, of one of your moral superiors.

Suffer every microaggression. Judge every co-worker. Betray every family member as if you were doing it yourself and come out feeling just as smug. This sounds like communist Russia. Now I'm interested in this book. It's comedy done the right way.

No lectures. No messages. No characters banging on about the same tired talking points. Satire as it's meant to be. So, if you want great book, go to Amazon and click on link below. We also recommend you by Tide Moderates, other books, Woke Fragility, and a little book of woke jokes. Click on Link and laugh like you're reading War and Peace. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on the road from the USA. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is the co-founder of the Daily Wire. Ben Shapiro. Welcome to Trigonometry. Hey, thanks for asking. I appreciate it. Oh, it's an absolute play. We've been looking forward to this for a while now. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for lending us your studio here. Listen, the question we always ask of all of our guests, and you're very well known, most of the people watching this will know you.

But what is your journey through life? How did you get here? Because a lot of people won't know, actually, many of the things you did when you were starting out. So give us an overview. So, I mean, the kind of short version is that I went to college in out of 16. I'd skipped a couple of grades. I went to UCLA and now 16,

and I thought I was going to major in double major in music and genetic science, because I was a violinist, good violins at the time. And I stepped on campus and I opened the student newspaper and there was an editorial comparing Ariel Sharon than the Prime Minister of Israel to Adaf Eichmann, the Nazi. And so I walked into the newspaper and I said, I'd like to write a counter to this because this is nonsense. And they said, okay, sure. So I wrote a counterpoint to that. That sort of became a point, counterpoint column that I'd do every couple of weeks. And then it turned into just a regular column. After a couple of years of that or a year and a half of that, I actually went to my dad and

I was like, do you think my stuff's good enough to be in a real paper? And he said, yeah, let me do some research. And he came up with a place called Creator Syndicate, which is a syndicator of columns to hundreds of newspapers. At the time, it was people like Molly Ivins on the left and David Limbaugh on the right. And so I just submitted my stuff cold. And they called me three weeks later, and they said, we want you to have a syndicated column.

So at 17, I was the youngest syndicated columnist in the country. My parents had to sign the contract because I was a minor. And so I started writing columns. And I'd say, like, solidly 75 to 80% of the dumb crap I've ever said or written, was like in that period between when you're 17 and when you're 22, right? Because you're trying to get attention and because you think that you're a lot smarter than you are when you're 17 or 18 years old, which you now only recognize in retrospect. And your brain isn't fully developed.

Exactly. So, and again, in a place where you're trying to gain attention, the thing you do is say the thing no one else will say, which sometimes is good and a lot of the times is really stupid. In any case, I finish UCLA, I go to Harvard Law School. I wrote a couple books while I was there. So by the time I finished Harvard Law, I had three published books and a syndicated column. I was working in law. I came back to L.A., got married.

I was working in law, and I decided that I'd always continued to do the column. I was always doing political stuff, but I was not enjoying the practice of real estate law, particularly because I came out of law school in 2007, which was like the worst time in human history to go into the real estate market. So I would sit in this really nice, glossy office

overlooking Century City and do nothing, like all day. And after 10 months of this, and being berated by my superiors for not billing hours, because number one, there's no work. And number two, my whole thing is I work fast, and the legal industry is about do not work fast, work slower so we can build more hours to the client. I went and I quit, and I had no job.

I was about to get married. We had just taken a mortgage on a house, and I took a job for one-third the pay to work at Talk Radio Network. And the deal was that I would do some in-house legal work half the time, and half the time I would learn the radio business. I would actually get up at 4.30 in the morning. I'd help write monologues for hosts.

I would cut all the audio for people, like actually do the audio cutting on the show, cut all the clips, all that kind of stuff. I worked there for a few years, and it was three years, and then ended up as editor-at-large of Breitbart, which was because I had known Andrew Breitbart for a long time, going back to when I was actually at UCLA, Andrew lived in Brentwood, or Westwood, and so we used to get together, we'd become friends. I became editor at Larger Bright-Bart during this time. I'm still writing books and everything. The first sort of big hit, the thing where I became relatively famous, because you're laboring, in like B-level obscurity in politics. Like us. Didn't even challenge it, just laughed at it.

You're absolutely right. Assessment is correct. And then there'll be these kind of moments. And that's the moment where everyone goes, oh my gosh, he's like, an overnight success. Now we know who is. And for me, that was that famous Pierce Morgan interview that I did in 2013 on CNN.

Now Pierce and I are actually pretty good friends. But back then he had me in, it was like the day after he'd interviewed Alex Jones on gun control. And he expected that I was going to be like Alex Jones. And I'm fundamentally not. like Alex Jones. And so that interview didn't go great for him. And there are all sorts of articles, a lot of attention all of a sudden on that. And at this point, I'd already met my business partner, Jeremy Boring, a couple of years beforehand. We'd talked about, you know,

trying to get sort of an entertainment company up and running. But the idea that we had at that point was that Jeremy was going to be kind of the talent guy. And I was going to be the legal and business guy. Because I had a degree from Harvard Law. I'd actually been executive vice president of this radio company. I went from being like in-house counsel to that. And so after that peers hit, he called me up on the phone. And he's like, we've got this completely backwards. You're the talent and I need to do the business. And that's when that fundamental shift sort of took place. And we started working with David Horst Freedom Center. We launched a website called Truth Revolt, which was sort of the predecessor to Daily Wire. And that was a reverse media matters. The idea was,

we didn't like what Media Matters was doing. And we explicitly said this in our sort of opening statement. And we said that the only way to get media matters to stop forcing boycotts is to just do it to the other side until they realize this is a bad idea of weapons down. And mutually assured destruction was the basic idea of it. We did that first. We did that first. for a couple of years. And then we had a pretty funny sort of board meeting that ended our careers over there, which was Jeremy had discovered that social media was actually a place that you needed to be. This is 2015. And he said, you know, there's some kind of holes in the market here. Like you can actually start to build a brand on social media, but we need a million

dollars. If you give us a million dollars, then we will build you a money machine for all time. We were at a board meeting, and it was a bunch of people between the ages about 75 and death. and none of them understood what a computer was, let alone what the internet was, let alone what Facebook was. And so they said, what's your business plan? And Jeremy explained it. I'm like a fast-talking Jew. Jeremy is a slow-talking southerner from Texas.

So between us, I've called them before the stupid whisperer, because I'll say a thing. It'll go right over people's head. Jeremy will say it's slower, but with a Texas accent. Everyone goes, oh, he earned that nickname in a conversation with a congressperson, actually, the stupid whisperer. Anyway, he tried to explain the plan. and it went right over their heads,

and they turned to me, and they said, what's the plan? And I took, I was very agitated by this point, because I'd been going for like an hour, and I took out a napkin. I said, here's the plan. Dollar sign, arrow, Facebook, arrow, website, arrow back to dollar sign.

We're going to spend money on Facebook. It's going to direct traffic to the website. That's going to leave the advertising and subscriptions, arrow back to dollar sign. And then we're just going to reinvest, and that's going to be how we do our business. They fired Jeremy the next day, and I quit in solidarity.

And then we took that business plan out to the market. We got a little bit under $5 million in, in seed investing. And we were profitable at month 18. This is for Daily Wire. We were profitable at month 18. We've been profitable ever since. We've operated purely off of cash flow with no outside investment until this point. And we are generating about $200 million a year in annual revenue. Amazing. It's an amazing story. I want to ask you more about the Daily Wire. But you mentioned Andrew Breitbart. And I was wondering, because you know, you get that thing with like the Bill Hicks of the world, the people who die young, they always get a lot of credit. And that's what happened

with Breitbart. What do you make of his impact on politics, on your own, was he a big influence for you? And what would you make of his impact on the culture? We were good friends. I mean, the thing with Andrew was, and I said this to a lot of people, I spent a fair bit of time with Andrew and, you know, helped him with a bunch of big projects. But if you met Andrew for five minutes, you knew him about 95% as well as I did. He kind of reserved himself for like one close friend who's business partner Larry Solov and his family. But, you know, everybody else was kind of the same too. If he met you for five minutes, you got his entire life story. He knew everything about him.

He was very enthusiastic. The impact that Andrew had on a lot of people was he really helped connect a lot of people. There were a lot of people in different places where he helped make the connections, which is why he actually was one of the founding forces, not just behind Breitbart, but obviously he was involved in Drudge Report, and also he found Huffington Post. So like half the Internet was founded, at least in some large part, by Andrew. It wasn't as though he was sort of guru you go to, you know, for life advice. It wasn't really like that.

He was somebody who you went to, if you want to be connected with another person. and then he had sort of an interestingly eclectic view of the world. He was really a lot of fun. He was really a sweet guy. By the end, his image had changed so much because of the dynamics of politics, that you see him doing the war kind of war, hashtag war, the angry pictures of Andrew and all that sort of stuff near the end. That fundamentally is not who Andrew was,

and if you talk to anybody who knew Andrew for a long time, the image that comes to mind of Andrew, for most of us, is there's a YouTube video where he was literally just rollerblading around Santa Monica just talking to people. And he'd be like, like, let's go to Apple. be. Just sit down with people and talk with them. That was Andrew's unique gift as being able to connect with people that way. And he never thought that he was better than anybody else, which is why I think he was able to connect really well with people. But as far as sort of

the kind of general contributions connecting people, and then the argument that he made, which wasn't unique to him, but he sort of popularized, the culture was upstream of politics, and that you need to get involved in the culture fight, which obviously has had some pretty significant ramifications. Indeed. So, Ben, you set up the Daily Wire. Ward some modus operandi of the Daily Wire. Why did you set it up and what are you trying to do to the culture? So we set it up with the idea that we were going to provide not only a media alternative,

but that we were going to actually wage the culture war. We were going to get into the culture. Like the long-term goal was to do what we've actually been able to achieve. We have created a distribution network for product that goes beyond just politics. So we always thought of ourselves not as a political company with a marketing. when we thought of ourselves as a marketing company that does politics. And that was sort of a different way of doing it. And that's because when Jeremy and I first met,

he was running a charitable organization called Declaration Entertainment. His theory was basically crowd fund movies. And the problem was he did. He made a movie for like, I don't know, $80,000 or something. And then he had no distribution network. So I just kind of languished there and it died. And he and I both realized, well, actually you have to build the distribution network before you can provide the content for that.

And so the basis of Daily Wire was you go in with this really strong marketing strategy. you provide the market with what it wants, which is an alternative to kind of legacy media narrative, and you'll find success there. There were some successes that we obviously didn't see coming. If you look at our original business plan, we've been trying to dig this up for years, the original business plan had slotted for my podcast, for example. I think we had slotted that like three years in we'd have 100,000 listeners. Like it was really, like we were way off. Our estimates for the growth of my content in particular were off by orders of magnitude. But that happens with talents, right? I mean, you think that,

somebody's going to be a B level, they end up in A level. Sometimes you pick somebody you think they're an A level, they're a D. Like, that just happens. So we got lucky with some of the sort of breakout material. But again, the main philosophy was be hard hitting, be openly conservative. We don't try to pretend that we're objective. We're not objective. We have a specific and clear point of view. I, for the first three years of the website, wrote literally every headline that was on the website. I would get up in the morning. I would assign 30 pieces. I would write every single headline because this is one of the things that I was good at. And then we'd put up those pieces on the website, I would do the podcast.

At the beginning of Daily Wire, I was working several jobs at one time. I was doing like six hours of radio at one time, plus the Daily Wire, plus I was still doing some stuff for Breitbart at the very beginning. But, yeah, I mean, the kind of mission of Daily Wire was be very clear about your principles and then aimed toward eventually being able to effectuate cultural change across a series of different milieu. And what is a cultural change that you want to influence? I mean, I think that we have, I would say we work along kind of two lines. One is the anti-left line of broaden the discourse. I've tried to make a point of talking to people across the political aisle, which is why if you watch my Sunday special, I'll have on people like Anna Kasparian, we'll just chat for an hour and a half, or Larry Wilmore or Jason Blomach, I'll have on pretty much anybody to have those conversations. We wanted to make sure that everybody's been sort of siloed off. We wanted to say that those conversations are totally dual.

and haveable and they can be totally fine. And that's why in 2015, 2016, I was kind of considered part of the short-lived intellectual dark web, right? It was this idea that there were a bunch of us who disagreed with each other. I think I was the only registered Republican in the group, contrary to sort of New York Times and public opinion.

And we were all talking with one other, and it's like me and Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin and a couple of Eric Weinstein and a couple others. And so it was broadened the political debate was one. Open the Overton window because the Overton window had closed really tight. 2016, 27, 2018, there's a real move toward you can't say things. And not only cannot say things, you can't have conversations.

And if you do have those conversations, you will be expelled from the movement. It was significantly more from the left than from the right. I think you've seen some similar movements from the right, actually, recently, but I think that you've seen it a lot more from the left overall. So that was mission number one. And mission number two is I am conservative. We are a conservative company. And so we have principles on actual political issues ranging from things like abortion

to traditional marriage, to the value of religion in life, to free market economics. and we're not going to be shy about our agenda, and we're not going to try to hide our agenda. Now, when it comes to our entertainment content, we've been trying to produce movies that are chiefly non-political in orientation because our main contention is that all we have to do to have market space

is make stuff that's not political because Hollywood has gotten so political that if we just make something that's like down-the-line cop show in 2003, that's now considered political, right, because the cops are not evil. And so, you know, that's open some space for us to operate. This is kind of what's happened with us

in terms of like Jeremy's chocolates or Jeremy's Razors, right? Those companies, which were launched, you know, like basically, Jeremy's Razors had some thought to it, but Jeremy's chocolates was not only on the spur of the moment. It was like we put together the ad campaign for that day. We did not have a chocolate supplier. We sold, we've sold that $600,000, 700,000 chocolate bars, just because all we said is we're a chocolate bar

that doesn't want to preach to you, right? So, like, we don't want to preach to you is actually part of the cultural space. So, you know, I think that that lives halfway between message one, which is open the Overton window and message two, which is we are conservative, is that sort of third halfway message, which is there does need to be a place for not politics, right? Which is like you go into your store.

You don't want to be preached to. You just want to get a product. You want to be on Amazon Web Services. You shouldn't have to pass some sort of political litmus test to have a neutral service provider provide you a service. So that's something we've been pushing as well. Yeah, well, that's something we agree on and try to do ourselves. And with that success that you've had and with the attention that you've generated

and with the clear positioning of the brand. that you have. You know, we interviewed Dan Crenshaw. This interview will go out before Dan's, but there is way more security at the Daily Wire than there is in Congress. Yeah. Right. And this ties into what's happened very recently with Matt Walsh's emails and Twitter and everything being hacked, where you guys paint or someone has painted a target on your back and they're really coming after you now. Why is that been? Because all the things you've articulated as an outside of I'd agree with, I'm not a conservative down the line, but I respect those views. They're allowed to be aired without people being threatened, docks, et cetera. So why is that happening?

I think that, you know, the situation has gotten so polarized in the United States that as we, as I say more and more radical issues come up and as you are strong against radicalism, there's always going to be kind of a small group of people. I don't want to make it out to be like it's everybody, but there are small groups of people who actually will get violent. And that's, you know, for me, went back to like 2015. I was the number one target of anti-Semitism online. across 2016, I had to have full-time security. I still have basically full-time security at this point, as you've noticed. Matt has full-time security now. He's been, you know, threatened many, many threats, very specific death threats. Obviously, he had not just his phone hack, but like everything hacked,

including his email. The sort of targeting effort is, I think it's rooted in a belief that because identity politics has decided, everyone puts their focus in the phrase identity politics on the idea that your politics is, that your identity is your politics, but in many ways it's the reverse. Your politics has become your identity. And so if you have a political point of view and someone offends you, they have attacked you. They're seeking to destroy you, right?

This is the sort of language Matt's obviously touching upon this with the trans issue. When Matt says something like, well, you say that you're a woman, but you're clearly a biological man, you're not a woman. Somebody will say, well, you're erasing me. This is an attack on me. And he'll say, well, it's not an attack on you. you're a person, you're standing there, I'm not attacking. You'll say, no, no, no, no, you're attacking who I am at my core, and that's a threat to me.

And so when people decide that they're going to perceive argument as threat in that way, then they tend to get more violent. And that's, you know, that's not just me. Jonathan Haidt says this, right? When he talks about microaggression culture, the idea that I have been attacked by your words, your words are a form of violence, I now get to respond with actual violence. That sort of, you know, temptation, I think, has grown dramatically in the society. And then I think the Internet's made pretty much everything worse.

As somebody who makes out of living on, I mean, I make my living on the internet, my kids will not have access to the internet, I hope until they're about 18. I'm the same, but just had a son, he's 11 months old, and I'm already, like, we're doing interviews with people just to, like, find out exactly when would be the right time and all of that. I totally get it. And how are you going to handle the Matt Wall situation? Because we've met Matt. I don't know him personally, but I don't know a single person that I can think of who can survive 20 years worth of emails being leaked. because, you know, the stuff that we all thought and said and joked about 20 years ago is just in this current environment.

Yeah, I mean, he can survive because we've got his back, because we understand that, and we're not firing him. I mean, end of story. Like, the reality is that you can only be canceled by the people who have the ability to cancel you. The left yelling at Matt isn't going to cancel him. The only people who can actually cancel Matt are the people who pay him, right? And his fans. And none of those people are going anywhere because they all understand what this is,

which is an attempt to discredit and destroy somebody. for the great sin of saying true things about biological sex and the differences between men, wait a minute. And, you know, so I don't, I told me that's nothing in those emails that would ever give you concern. Short of him being like a pedophile or something, or committing some sort of egregious crime, no. I mean, no, that's it, because guess what?

I'm not of the opinion that stuff that you say in confidentiality to your spouse or your friend or the email to somebody in confidentiality, that this is the sole representation of you. And I'm really sick of a culture that says that sort of stuff. because it's not true. It really isn't. The version of yourself that you present to the public is actually the most considered version of yourself because you actually have to consider those things. What you say to a buddy, you make a stupid racial joke or something, and that comes out, the reason that you didn't say it out loud is because you know it's socially unacceptable.

Okay, so what rule did you actually violate? Does this make you like a terrible person, or does it make you somebody who like says rude jokes to your buddies? Is it like the end of the world? Does belies some deeper truth about you? And I just don't buy into the idea that what you say in private is significantly more important than what you say in public. I think usually it's the reverse. That's such a good point, because we don't live in that culture. Why do you think the whole trans conversation is so toxic? I mean, it shouldn't be. I think because it is, there really is no gray area is the answer. I mean, you either believe this thing that is fundamentally untrue, in my opinion, or you, and just actually, or you don't believe the thing. And this is a, people want fealty on this

issue. They don't want to have a discussion about the issue, right? Because there are actual conversations to be had about, like, for example, how do you treat trans people who identify as trans in public? That's a real issue. Like, okay, should they be able to be fired if they're in this position versus if they're in that position? Should there be laws on the books about what kind of bathroom do yous? Right. Those are all sort of pragmatic discussions that you can have about the risks and rewards, various policies, and their edge cases in which a trans man was transitioning when he was a teenager and looks a lot more like a woman versus like a big hulking dude who just says he's a woman who's going into a bad. There are edge cases there that can theoretically be discussed, but that's not what the conversation is about.

The claim that the trans community is now making is that any man at any time for any reason can say that he is a woman, and we must respect that and treat him as though he is a woman. Because he is in fact a woman. A woman, as they have now defined it, is a person who identifies as a woman. That's as mad as pointed out quite properly, completely circular. I mean, there is no content to that statement. A woman is a person who believes they are a woman, is, you know, a be. is anybody who believes they're a bleh. Well, that doesn't mean anything. It's a blank, it's a self-referential statement. And so, you know, if you refuse to kowtow to that ideology, then the idea, again,

is that you're doing violence to a group of people who say they are this thing because you've not accepted their version of the world. And either you will change or they will change, but there is really no in between. And so, you know, that's why all these conversations don't end up being about public policy questions. They end up really being about that fundamental idea. Are you of the belief that a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man? And even deeper than that is the belief are men and women different from one another? And that's really the bigger question that people can have really interesting conversation about because the answers are, in some ways, very, very, very different. In some ways, not so different, right? But as soon as you say,

in some ways, very, very, very different, a lot of people get very offended very quickly because they want to believe in the complete malleability of every individual human being. And they want to believe in some sort of bizarre world in this sort of Cartesian dualism in which we are all disembodied souls that are walking around in meat suits. And those souls can male or female. And it's like trading places with, it's like in 1980s movie where you're just going to be walking around and suddenly you're in mom's body or something. That's not how any of that works. And if you don't believe that, that is a religious point of view. It's a Gnostic point of view, actually. And so if you refuse to believe that, and I assume that you've attacked somebody's religion.

Do you know, I sometimes just step back and I think, imagine you like, I don't know, had a car crash in 2010 and you were in a coma. And then you woke up and, and then you woke up and 23 and the number one question that everyone's talking about is that they're arguing about what a woman is. Right. Do you know someone sometimes pinch yourself and go like, what? It's insane. I mean, there's a clip of Dennis Prager on Bill Maher. I saw that. From, I don't know, it's like, this is like, this is like seven years ago, eight years ago. And Dennis is like, yeah, there's a bunch of people and they won't even be able to define the word woman. And Marr is laughing in him. Everybody on the pound's like, what are you crazy? What are you talking about? And now that

is being preached by the White House, I mean, the White House has taken that position. That's wild. I mean, the fact that this has been elevated to a position of national prominence is not because of the right. It's because the left decided that this was going to be the core next civil rights front, is that they had basically won on the same-sex marriage issue, and everybody thought, okay, battle over. Like everybody weapons down, go back to your normal business. And like, no, no, we have another step here. And the next step is that we're going to teach our version of sexual orientation and gender identity to your kids. And that is going to include the idea that gender is fully malleable and on a spectrum and completely socially constructed.

and everybody, I think, moderate, even central left and right was like, hold up a second. And then it was, well, we're going to use the exact same model we use for the civil rights movement or for the gay rights movement, and we're going to say that you're a bigot if you don't believe this. And people finally sort of drew the line. Like, I'm not a bigot if I think that women exist. That doesn't make me a bigot. That was a line that nobody was, it so fundamentally runs up against the proof of your eyes, ears,

mind that to simply surrender before it is to become part of the Borg. basically. You mentioned something about partisan politics in their sort of right versus left, and that's something that I don't know whether we are in disagreement or not, but certainly in the UK, I feel we're making more progress than you guys are over here on the trans issue. And I think part of the reason is that in the UK, we have lots of people who are not explicitly on the right, and who are frankly on the left, people like J.K. Rowling, Rosie Duffield, the Labor MP, who's been very outspoken about this, not that it's outspoken to say it, right? Whereas here, I sort of, you know, I do cringe when I hear people,

sort of say the libs are transiting the kids type of thing because I don't think it's the libs that are transiting the kids it's a small minority of people who've captured institutions who've shoved this gender ideology down people's throats have used scare tactics to bully them and to not challenging it but a lot of the people who are challenging certainly in our country it's not a part as an issue and i feel that's why we're making progress whereas here as you say on the one hand there are a lot of people on the right who sort of say the libs are transiting the kids in the other hand the white house is pushing this crap right i mean and that that's sort of where you know it's, you can see why people will say,

I'll say that people are transing the kids. Typically, I try to make it clear who those people are. I think that when the White House is actually promoting it, I'll say the White House is attempting to trans the kids, which they are. But the kind of general point that you're making, which is that there are people in public positions in foreign countries who will say true things,

even if it doesn't necessarily fall into the right-left dichotomy. Yeah, that doesn't apply in the United States. That is definitely true. I mean, really since the era of, I would say Trump, but I don't think it actually is Trump. I think it's really since the era of Obama. There's a real shift that happened, particularly in the media space,

when Barack Obama was elected president. The media went from, yeah, we're left wing, but we understand that there is a right wing in this country, too. Barack Obama is the lightbringer, and we are his actual PR agents, and it is our job to basically back what the president says. And if you don't back the president, it must be because you're a bigot, right? It must be because there's something wrong with you. And that only got exacerbated by Trump,

where suddenly the Washington Post is emblazoning democracy, He dies in darkness on their Chiron or whatever it is. And, you know, the media are a real problem in all of this. I mean, you see how members of the media just get absolutely shellact if they step across the line. The New York Times ran one piece that was fairly balanced about the trans issue. And the reporter got destroyed online, just destroyed. You said a science reporter got fired for the great crime of using the N-word while they were in South America on a trip with some people, not because he was using the N-word, but because he was explaining when it is right and when it is wrong to use the N-word.

You know, the level of outrage that American society is capable of achieving seems to be a lot higher than it is in a lot of European countries. Maybe that's because there are such wide differentials in sort of living in the United States. And the reality is that if the United States was a creedal country and if there is sort of a central creed to the United States, then the further that disintegrates, the more people sort of go back to their corners. The United States is not really an organic outgrowth. I mean, it really is the blessing and curse of the United States is because it's not an organic. genetically grown country, right? I mean, you literally had a European population that is imported into the United States or imports itself into the United States, and then you have various other populations that come in in waves rooted in this one idea. If the idea dies, what do all

those people exactly have in common? That's not really sort of the case with Great Britain or France. When you think of Great Britain, you think, well, yeah, because they're British. When you think of an American, what do you think of? I mean, really, like, if you think of a British person, You think of a person who has a British accent and probably likes tea and maybe doesn't have amazing teeth and like that. There are a bunch of things about the Brits. And you think of Winston Churchill. You think of Margaret Thatcher. You're on the right.

And if you're not, then you think of Tony Blair. You think of, you know, Gordon Brown. Like, there are people that you think of. And then if you go back to British history, you're thinking of the Royals. I mean, like, there's an actual sort of British culture that exists that just doesn't exist in sort of the history of the United States, which is a which is so deeply rooted in the idea of the Constitution, the idea of the Declaration and certain key personalities of Washington and Lincoln that when, when, you destroy your history. What you end up with is everybody being like, well, you know who I'm actually a member? I'm a member of my tribal group that kind of came here together, and I have in common

with those people, but I'm not sure I have that much in common with those people over there. There is, the fundamental assimilative mechanism of the United States has broken down. And what that's done is it's led to this sort of political fragmentation that I think you don't really see in a lot of other countries. The United States is, people in the United States don't get this, but we are way more radical on a wide variety of social policies than pretty much anywhere. I mean, we're not just radical with regards to the transing issue. I mean, we're very radical with regards to the abortion issue. I mean, it comes as an absolute shock to people from Europe when they realize that, like, the state of New York allows abortion all the way up to birth, that in most of Europe,

the average is like 12, 15 weeks with pretty significant restrictions. It's kind of a settled issue. We don't really argue about abortion in the UK or much of Europe. Yeah, I mean, occasionally you'll have something like in Ireland where, you know, the Catholic Church sort of gets overruled by the population or whatever. But in the United States, because, again, it's a very polarized population, the vast majority of Americans, so I'm fully pro-life, right? I want abortion banned, but I also understand where public opinion is in the United States, it does differ by area. And these sort of, if you look at the polls, the mainstream opinion in the United States, just by polling data, is very similar to the European position.

It's like 10, 12, 15 weeks. Like that's, beyond that, people are like very uncomfortable with abortion. Before that, people are like, depends on the circumstance. The reality is in the United States because everything is incredibly, you know, partisan, and because it's a huge country, I mean, it's an enormous country. people are, they want to live how they want to live in their area, but the federal government is where all the big debates are happening. It used to be that you could actually have very wide differences in ideas and standards of living in Alabama and California, but now everything's been nationalized and the federal government's incredibly powerful. And so what you have is a giant overarching government and everybody is fighting for control of that thing so they can turn California into Alabama or Alabama into California when the real solution was actually the one that the founders presented,

which is the states have most of the authorities and the federal government really has very little. Francis, before you jump in, on that very point, Ben, that's such an interesting point. Isn't the right, the small government right, fundamentally at a disadvantage in this situation then? Because if the state, the federal state is becoming more and more powerful, and you guys believe in a smaller one, your opponents, when they're in government, are inevitably, A, going to use it and B, make it bigger. Yeah, I mean, this is the argument that national conservatives are making, and they're making some headway with this argument. They're saying, look, listen, you can have all the principles you want about shrinking the national government. but the minute the other guy's getting power, they don't care about those principles,

they're happy to just blow up the size of government and use those tools against you. And the answer to that is that when it comes to the state level, you should have states that state government of Florida has become very active in protecting kind of the values and rights of the citizens of Florida, how they wish to vote.

And I think that that's very good. I do not think that the use of the federal government at a very heavy level in order to implement a conservative set of values is likely to be successful. I don't have a general problem with it in sort of theory, but in practice, I don't think that it's likely to work. I think that very often what you end up with is the American public,

I think for the most part, like any Western public, just wants to, they want normalcy and predictability and to be left alone. That's mostly what most people want. And I think that the battle over government is swinging wildly from this direction to that direction. The American people keep saying we want right here. Just predictability, leave us. I mean, we elected a dead person specifically for this,

for this purpose, right? We're like, we went from Barack Obama Lightbringer. We're like, we don't need a lightbringer. You know, bring in the guy who's like the business guy who's an outsider. We don't want Hillary because she's just corrupt and terrible. We'll bring in this outsider. We'll give that a try. And maybe that'll be normal.

And like, oh, boy, this wasn't normal at all. Let's go. Let's get the dead guy. Maybe the dead guy will be normal. And they bring in the animated corpse of Joe Biden. And it's not normal at all. And people are like, well, maybe we'll get back to normal. And the rights like, well, screw those people. We're going to bring back in the guy who was ousted by that guy.

And so it's kind of wildly vacillating. politically engaged, and the vast majority of people in the middle who show up maybe only for presidential elections are then presents with the binary choice between the people of either party who may not be the most normal people. I think this keeps being, I actually think that this is not just a theme in the United States. I think this seems to be like a theme across Western civilization right now, is people are just looking for a politician who's like, can we just be normal for a second? Or just something relatively like, I know what's happening tomorrow and I don't have to pay attention to you. But, you know, so long as we have a national media that thrives on this sort of

conflict, it's going to be very difficult to achieve that, I think. Absolutely. And if you look at the Matt Walsh situation, we demand that our politicians never say anything controversial, never do anything controversial. And then we're surprised when we get these weird people for election. It's because everybody else does normal things and says things that are controversial, makes mistakes, and whatever else. But the question that I really want to ask to you, Ben, is, do you think the right concentrate too much? on the trans issue, and I'm not saying the trans issue is not highly important, it is highly important and I understand the aspects of it.

But you look at, you know, we've got a fentanyl crisis in this country. Shouldn't the right also be talking about that and everything like, and everything else? I think a lot of these problems are overlaid onto far deeper systemic problems. So I think that very often in politics we argue about the things that are at the top of the iceberg, but we very rarely get to the bottom of the iceberg. So the thing that I would say, the fentanyl crisis and maybe the France issue have in common, is that the thing that has been dissolving, dissolving in American life for a very long time is the fundamental family structure.

When the fundamental family structure dissolves, what you end up with is adamistic individuals. Atomistic individuals make bad decisions. They tend to be depressed. They tend to be upset. They tend to be volatile. And so a huge variety of issues in America are just aspects of this, ranging from school shootings to the fentanyl crisis to broken families and higher crime rates to the transition, right? All of these things are, as social fabric falls away, then sort of the nakedness of the, of the, you know, raw humanity is left unleashed. And you're seeing a lot of aspects of that. So I don't think that they're utterly unrelated.

I think that people like to talk about the trans issue on both sides because it's an issue with like very, very clear, demarcated lines. And so that's a fun issue to talk about because if you're on the right, you look at this, you're like, this is just crazy. I could talk about this all day how crazy this is so crazy. And if you're on the left, you're like, oh, those intolerant bigots. I love calling them bigots. This is my favorite thing is to call them bigots.

And so it's a fun issue for people to talk about. Fentanyl is a less fun issue to talk about for people, not just because it involves mass death, but also because it actually implicates some deeper issues that make people very uncomfortable. You're actually going to have to talk about things like, is this happening because of, you know, as the right will maintain sometimes trade and the outsourcing manufacturing jobs, or is this actually happening because of the thing that very few people want to touch maybe across the aisle, which is no one goes to church anymore, fewer and fewer kids are growing up with two parents in the household. There's no social fabric. There's no social structure. There's no one to keep an eye on these kids.

You know, when that happens, that perhaps men losing their role in society as protectors and providers for their family actually unmoors them and makes them depressed and more likely to get into drug use. These are really deep kind of fundamental philosophic issues. And I think most people tend to shy away from those because it's not as fun, right? It's not as it's not as memeable. It's not as kind of ticot-able. And again, it gets to some really uncomfortable things about individualism in the age of the post-enlightenment, right? I mean, like, what I'm talking about is actual things that create obligations and duties for people. I'm talking about now, like, what you should do with your life.

I'm not just talking about what you shouldn't do or what's stupid. I'm talking about, like, the things that you should do in life to make a thriving society. And that comes with actual rules. It comes to things you have to do. And then you say to somebody, this comes with obligation. People go, I, right? Because if you say, you know, the way to prevent the fentanyl crisis, it's not just an easy thing about, like, bombing cartels. The way you have to prevent the fentanyl crisis is that you actually have to provide thriving family structures in religious.

communities in which people feel comfortable looking for help, but also can find a wife, can have children, are expected to do these things. And that means leaving behind the things of childhood and actually taking on an obligation to live more fulfilled and better life, not just for yourself, but for your community. Because without that social fabric and you taking part and building that social fabric, it doesn't just fall apart for you. It falls apart for everybody. People immediately go, wait, you want me to do a thing? I didn't sign up for this. I signed up to listen to a political show, right? I signed up to watch CNN. I signed up to watch Fox News. I signed up to watch, like, you know, somebody yell at how if I just change this politician, then that'll fix the thing.

This is why I think there's so much faith in politicians, which is also why everything is polarized. No one should have faith in politicians. Politicians are representatives of the people, which means inherently that if you worship a politician, you're an idol worshipper. You're actually worshipping yourself. You elect the politician, then you mold the golden calf to your specifications, and then you worship it, and you say, why isn't it doing the thing I want it to do? And if only I just replace this golden calf with that golden calf, then that would be better. But perhaps the real work that we all have to do is not just solved by going into the voting booth and pulling the lever on a particular politician. Maybe the actual work that we have to do is the hard work of getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning with your kids and doing your homework with your kids and battling through whatever hardships you have in your marriage to maintain your marriage.

And then taking care of your parents as they get older and making sure that the people in your community, if they're calming on hard times actually have something to fall back on, but also making sure that they're incentivized to go out and working at. Like, these are actually the hard everyday things. And, you know, my belief is, obviously, I'm an Orthodox Jew. I think in the absence of religious structure, it's very difficult to promote these things. But, you know, those are, again, conversation. But you also believe in facts, Ben, and the fact of it is that most people are increasingly less religious in Western society, right?

So I was going to ask you this because, of course, I understand, and by the way, we spent time with religious conservatives, you know, and it's wonderful to see the positive sides of that, you know, all of the things you've just talked about. And I agree with you 100%. Those things are incredibly important for society to thrive. But the fact is, you know, we've had different guests on the show, Louise Perry and Mary Harrington talking about the sexual revolution and how that unleashes all of this process, 60s onwards.

But all I'm saying is, I put it to you that your solution, which is right for you and right for many religious people in this country, is increasingly less taken up, whether you and I like it or not. I agree with you. So what do we do about that? How do we encourage people who are not religious? When Peterson had me on his podcast, we talked about a lot of this. How do you instill some of the values in a society that doesn't believe in God as much?

Right. I mean, I think Jordan is really great about this, which is the idea that you take on obligations to do something higher, and then you'll find yourself doing something. So do the thing right in front of you. I think Jordan is really great at this. You know, as an Orthodox Jew and a proponent of my own religion, obviously, I think my religion is very Aristotelian in its approach to life, which is you get up in the morning and there's a bunch of things you have to do.

And if you do those things, then you'll grow increasingly virtually. and you'll grow increasingly close to God. Now, you can be Aristotelian, not really bring God into it very much. You can say you can grow increasingly close to virtue. I think that's stepping one short logically because then the question is, how do you define virtue, where does virtue come from,

is there an objective standard of virtue or is it all just moral relativism? That's why I'm religious. But if you don't wish to go there, if you just wish to stop at that step without going to God or without going to church or any of that stuff, first of all, you're going to have to find a community of people

who agree with you, people who actually want to build that community with you. Maybe they're not so religious, but they have the same set of values as you do. and then you're going to have to actually undertake those obligations in a really methodical and thought-out way. Now, the reason I say that religion provides a structure is because traditionally that has been the structure. Now, what's fascinating is that you can be a non-religious person living in a society that values religion, and a lot of that stuff sort of bleeds over to you through the water, through osmosis. So here I'll take the example of Israel.

What's fascinating about Israel is that Israel has a reproduction rate of currently something like three. Okay, it is the only Western country that is reproducing it above replacement rates. literally the only one. And it's not just reproducing at the rate of three. There's a huge disparity between the people who are religious and the people who are secular. But so the people who are the most religious, like the Haredium, the ultra-Orthodox, they're having some or the, I think they're averaging seven kids. The people who are Dati-Lummi, which is, you know, religious Zionist, which is probably where I would fall if I were living in Israel, they're having like four to five kids, right? I have three, I'm having a fourth, that's fairly typical. And then the secular's,

the seculars. The seculars are having three kids. Why are the secular people, they're the only secular people anywhere in the Western world who are having three kids. Why? And the answer is because the entire culture values having children. When you see people having kids around you, you're like, that's cool. I would also like to have kids. It seems like that would be amazing. Maybe two kids isn't enough. The guy across the street has eight.

They seem amazing. They're really happy. And so you see that sort of bleed down. So even if you're not, I think that you can have a society in which you have Voltaire, so long as Voltaire recognize what Voltaire did, which is, I don't believe in God, but I sure hope my maid does. Right. Otherwise, she'll steal the silverware, is his famous line, right?

So the, but I think that as Western civilization becomes increasingly individualistic and anti-religious, it's not just like sort of apathetic about religion, it's become antagonistic toward religion. I think that that bleeds over into a secular world that was living off sort of the fumes of a religious society, but as those fumes dissipate, well, you end up with his, what do I do this morning? How do I get up? What is the moral obligation? What's in it for me? Okay, so the religious ideal was always, and this is why, again, you can do the stoic thing, right?

There's stoke philosophers who say, you get up in the morning, you do virtue. that's great. That may work for some people. I hope it works for a lot of people, right? I think it's a valuable belief system. That's the rule. I think I take in France, too. Yeah, I mean, I think that there are people who want to do that. I think that's great. That's wonderful. I think for the vast majority of people throughout human history, again, the thing that

orientes you is the idea that when you get up and you have a duty, it's not a duty just because you think it's good to have the duty. It's a duty because you are enjoined to do the thing. Right? What makes you, so I'll ask you guys. I mean, like, what makes you do the thing you don't want to do? You have an 11-month-old baby. So having a lot of kids, it's a pain in the ass, right?

I mean, like, having it, they're wonderful. As I always say to people, in life, when you're a single dude, basically your sort of spectrum of happiness to sadness is like a 10 to a zero. And then you get married, and it goes from like a 20 to a negative 20, because if something that happens with your spouse, it's really terrible. And then you have kids, and all limits are removed. The best things in your life will be your kids, and the worst things by far in your life will be your kids.

It's really tough. I mean, parenting is not an easy thing. So what motivates you that, you know, it's 3 o'clock in the morning, your kid took a dump, and now you have to change the diaper? What makes you get up as opposed to just turning over and saying, you know, you deal with it, I'm going back to sleep? Well, for me, the duty is that is an obligation I took up on myself when we decided to have a child. That's what I signed up to do. So why did you do that? What drove you to make that decision?

Because that's the question, because people increasingly are not making the decision to get married, and then even if they do get married to have kids. We're an all-time low in terms of people getting married and having kids. Look, in my view is there's a biological explanation for why we all want to have. kids, right? So, and actually, my wife and I put it off quite late, probably later than we ought to have done. I'd love to bang out five as well at this point. But anyway, for me, I think it's the biological drive to procreate. So the only problem with that is that that was true and it was maintainable before the birth control pill. Right? Because the biological drive to procreate, so two things happen, the birth control pill and the feminist movement. So there are two

real drives. Men had babies because they couldn't stop having babies. And women had babies because not only could they not stop having babies. They actually wanted to have babies, and they were in touch with the idea that it is good for a woman to have a baby. Now I have entire movements that teach women that the highest form of life is don't get married until you're close to 30, if you do get married. If it's going to inhibit your career, then you should probably freeze your eggs and wait until you're maybe 40. Then you have a risky pregnancy at 40 in which we, you know, fertilize the egg and maybe implanted in you. And that's like the apotheosis of civilization. And women, by all available polling data, are significantly less happy than they were.

Oh, you're preaching to the choir. I said something completely innocuous about this on Twitter. I've been dealing with feminists giving me shit for a week now. So I'm familiar with the argument. But the bottom line is that how do you reverse that? So there are only two ways, especially because you can see, I mean, as countries get richer and as birth control becomes more plentiful, the original pitch for having kids was twofold. One, you had a religious obligation to have kids.

And two was they were labor on your farm, right? Those were the original. Now kids are a net cost. It costs you a lot of money to have a child. It is not an economic, not only that. You had kids because when you got old, they were going to take care of you. Now you have social welfare nuts that take care of you. So what's the economic case for how?

There's no economic case. No, there is no. It disappeared. It's now a reverse economic case. If you want to live high on the hog, you don't have kids. You go to vacation in Rome, but you don't have kids. And so that's a real problem. But how do you overcome that?

And so then it has to be something like a woman desperately wants to have kids. And the only way that she is going to have kids is if she makes the rules that a man has to marry her in order to have the kids. So you have to overcome two things societally. One, you have to teach women. It's good to have kids. And two, you have to teach women. that actually men's standards for sex are the wrong standards for sex.

That if you wish to have long-lasting, fulfilling relationships, then hopping in and out of the sack with people isn't actually a form of liberation. It's a form of bondage to a certain extent. You're training yourself to how males tend to think about sex rather than what is fulfilling for females, a biological function that has existed for literally all of humankind's existence.

These are heavy lifts. It seems to me that the shortcut on these lifts, which is proved out by literally every demographic study done in the West, is that if you say God told you to have kids, You have a duty to have kids. It is good to have kids. And you're trained in that from the time you're little. Like my kids again right now, they're nine by the time I say there's seven and three

and in the womb. And I ask my three-year-old daughter how many kids she wants to have. Like it's ingrained in her. It's ingrained. Like my son, I'll ask him how many kids he wants to say, I want to have four kids, right? Because we're going to have four kids. Like, that's the way it works. I ask you, you know, like, you actually have to bring your kids up in this way,

which is why across Western society, there are exceptions who will do the thing. You'll do the thing. People will do the thing. But that's a lot rarer. If you look at the demographic profiles, the only people, the only populations in the West reproducing it above replacement rates are in the United States, for example, Mormons, religious Catholics, religious Jews, religious Muslims, religious Protestants. That's it.

No one else is reproducing it above replacement rates. So unless those are like the bulk of your population, and then those values sort of bleed over into the rest of the population, which is not the case in the United States, then you're going to have a declining birth rate, and then you're going to have to do it through immigration. And that's going to come with whatever attendant problems is mass immigration. comes with, right? Demographic problems are a real thing.

But why is it so taboo to talk about these things, about things like immigration? Why is it that it's so charged? Instead of just having a reasonable debate and saying, look, like every decision you make in life, there are trade-offs. Right. Well, that's the thing. No one in politics actually wants to talk about trade-offs. Every solution is going to be the solution that fixes all the things. And it's an immature way of thinking about politics. The truth is that, like, everything that we do is going to have costs and benefits. but politicians aren't in the business of lying to you.

And again, this goes back to if you get your values from politicians, you're likely to have a very skewed set of values. Politicians have no incentive to tell you about tradeoffs. They have incentives to tell you that if you vote for them, they will solve. I mean, Trump literally said this. He said, only I can fix. And Joe Biden says the same thing from his angle. If you elect me, all your problems will go away.

It'll be sunny days from here on in. They're all lying. I mean, that's not true. But apparently we want to be lied to because the actual thing that fixes your life is you. This is true for 95% of our problems. There are problems that are unsolvable, health problems, terrible things that have tragedies that occur in life. All that's true. But 95% of the problems that people have are problems that are generally within their purview.

And by the way, you should treat even the problems that you have that are not within a purview as though you could possibly solve them because it's a better way of approaching life. But politics allows you to outsource all of that. It allows you to just say, listen, the problem is not me. The problem is the system. And if I just elect this guy to fix the system, and what does that create the incentive for him to do, to say that he's going to fix the system, right? And then he fails. And then we get disappointed. and then we radically shift over to the system. Maybe that guy will fix the system.

Oh, no, he's not working. We'll shift. Maybe that guy will fix the system. None of them are going to fix the system. Because fundamentally, in terms of human freedoms and prosperity right now, the system ain't broken. They're real problems with the system, but we are the most prosperous free people in the history of the world. Like, bar none. It is not close. I mean, when you talked about dropping someone from 2010 and 2023, and they're looking at the debate's going, well, what is this? But think of it a different way. You drop somebody from 1810 into 2023. They're living in magic land, man.

I mean, this is a place where you pick up a piece of phone, you pick up a thing that it's a magic thing in your hand that connects you to every piece of information ever devised. You hit a button and a thing arrives at your door, usually within 24 hours, that has been outsourced to 27 different countries and arrives for a fraction of the money that you make in a month. I mean, that's magic. That's magic. You're expecting.

Like, if somebody dies at 80, you're like, oh, man, it probably had another 10. I mean, that's crazy. That's crazy. For the vast majority of human civilization, people died, you know, at the age, if you were lucky, you made it to 60. But people were dying at 50, or make it out of childhood, right? Huge, huge, the amount of childhood death has declined so radically that, you know, it used to be that, that, you know, childhood death was a tragedy, but wasn't treated nearly the way that it's treated

today because, again, we expect children to live now, right? Like, all of these standards are magical. So the question is, how can the magical material living standards be so high? And we're able to do kind of what we want, like on a daily basis. You walk out your front door, nobody's telling you what to do. And yet we're wildly unhappy, right? We have depression, suicidality, huge fentanyl crises. We're worried about the, I mean, the problems we're talking about are real problems.

We've apparently lost our societal minds because we're believing complete untruths. We're so angry at each other that we're willing to take sure the death threats over whether men or women or women or men. Where is that coming from? And the answer is the social fabric that undergirded all of that progress has fallen away. And we thought we could have all of the nice things that lie on top of the foundation while taking a jackhammer to the foundations. And so people don't want to talk about the foundations because it might mean that you have to – I get a question a lot. So obviously I talk about religion a lot.

and people will say, I don't believe in God, but I have kids. Should I go to church? And my answer is, yes, you should go to church. If you grew up Christian and that's your religion, you should go to church. Because, you know what? That may be the way that your kid understands the values, the best. It's very difficult to make a sophisticated argument to three-year-old. It really is.

When they're 20, and they have questions about God and they say, listen, I can't get there. You can say, like, listen, I'll make an argument for God, but maybe you don't want to. Maybe that's not your thing fine. But you know who can't handle that argument of three-year-old? Yeah. And niceness is not a moral value system. It really isn't. Ben, there's a question that I want to ask. The thing or the slogan or the words that people who associate with you are facts don't care about your feelings. But isn't there an issue with that statement in that feelings are the most important things we have, which is why the left is winning, because they make you feel good. And it's actually really not about facts anymore. It's about the way I make you feel. And if you look at our entire conversation, it really is about that. You know, if you've

think about kids. Kids don't always make you feel great and, you know, they're going to challenge you. You want someone to come in and solve your problems. Why is that? Because confronting your problems doesn't make you feel good. In fact, it makes you feel sometimes inadequate. Isn't that really the problem here? Yes. I mean, it's why, so the other phrase that I've been fond of using a lot over the past couple of years is reality always wins. So here is the thing. Facts don't care about your feelings and the facts are going to win. It's just a question of if you're stupid enough to run up against them enough times in a row. And so when I say facts don't care about your feelings, I don't mean that, you know, you're not, that your feelings don't matter. What I do mean is

that if you, if you are running directly up against the wall of facts over and over and over and reality over and over and over and over, then you're going to break. Those things, reality doesn't change just because you wish for it to change. And so my friend Andrew Claven, he's very fond of saying people are, you know, a woman will come to him and say, I can't find Mr. Wright and say, well, did you make yourself Mrs. Wright yet? Right. Like if you want to find Mr. Right, you have to be Mrs. Right. You have to make yourself the thing. People don't want the They want the standard to change, the world to change for them. And the world is not going to change for you.

The world is just the world. You can effectuate small changes over time in the course of the world. You know, this is, the truth is that the vast majority of change, because we're in politics, we tend to think of great figures who effectuated large-scale change. The truth is there are millions of people who stand behind those people. And most change that occurs is really a bunch of people whose names you don't know at the graveyard and who are completely forgotten now, right?

Those are people who are, like, changing their society from the inside by doing the things that we're talking about. It's a lot less glorious. You're right. I mean, this is the problem, but I don't see a way of combating that with more feelings. So I think that it's a mistake, for example, for conservatives to talk about, if you do these things, then you will be happier. Because I don't know whether you'll be happier.

I know that you'll be more fulfilled, but I don't like the word happier because I think that happy is a, it's a messy word. You feel happy when you have an ice cream, right? The words that are used by the ancients, you know, eudaonia or in Greek or Simcha in Hebrew, Like, these sorts of words have broader meanings, right? It didn't just mean like you feel good one day, but we're a society that sort of boiled down happiness, so you feel good that day. And that's a really bad standard because what makes you feel good today is not going to make you feel good in the long run. I mean, very often, I was just reading a study actually by a social scientist named Roy Baummeister, and he was looking at things that make people feel fulfilled versus things that make people feel happy.

And very often there's overlap, but there are certain areas where there's no overlap. So, for example, things that make you feel happy but not fulfilled would be things. things like parties. You go to parties and it might make you happy in the moment, but doesn't make you feel very fulfilled. It's just a night, whatever. Things that make you not happy but extremely fulfilled having kids. Having kids is number one on the list of things that make you not happy, but extremely fulfilled. Which is true. Having kids is not a happy, but it has happy moments, joyous moment, but overall it's a slog. And people need to know that getting in, but it's also the most important thing that you're ever going to do. Important is a word that's totally left our

sort of conversation. No one talks about doing important events. Yeah, because it implies the existence of a moral structure. Correct. It implies there are certain things you're doing that are unimportant. And you can't say that to me. What I do every day is important. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. The vast majority of things you do

in a given day are not important. Ben, we're running out of time, unfortunately. So a couple more questions before we go to locals. Having established that politicians don't matter as much as personal behavior, nonetheless, I have to ask you, we're sitting here in Florida.

You guys are going to have an election the next couple of years. The governor of this state, Ron DeSantis, is very likely to challenge Donald Trump for the nomination. Who do you back? Desantis. Why?

Because. Do you want this from the why not Donald Trump or the why Roddened Dostantis? It's a sorry. There are two sort of angles. First of all, I'll preface this with whoever is the Republican nominee. I'm a conservative. I'm very likely to vote for them. Now, as between DeSantis and Trump, we'll start with the shortcomings of Trump.

He's 76 years old. He has no ability to control his mouth or his typing fingers. He has no sort of actual plan to win. I mean, he literally complained in 2020 that he was robbed of the election through voter fraud, but no one will ask him a simple question. How do you plan to unrob the election in 2024? Right? Like, what's your plan for victory?

I did ask that of his former deputy assistant, Seb Gorka, when we interviewed him. Well, people will have to wait and see. Okay. I'm curious. I'll tell me off here. He's trailing in every swing state poll. He is wildly unpopular with independence. He's wildly unpopular with women. He has an approval rating last I checked in the 20s. And he is 76 years old, and he already served a term. I mean, that's a pretty formidable list of reasons why you don't nominate. And he lost to the guy who's going to run on the Democratic Party. side already by 7 million votes and by the available data, he will probably underperform how he performed in 2020. At least with, again, one of the hardest things in politics is to switch somebody's

mind saying to millions of people, yeah, you voted for me in 2016, then you voted against me in 2020, and now I want you to switch back and vote for me. That's not even switching minds once. That's switching minds twice. That's super difficult. So, you know, that's a hard thing. You know, and that's putting aside all the oddities and all the rest of the scandals and all that kind of stuff. The case for DeSantis is that DeSantis is extremely meticulous about how he approaches politics. You see, for example, there are no leaks from his campaign because he actually staffs up correctly, as opposed to Trump who's going on truth social and bashing somebody he hired as an idiot every other day. He hired them. DeSantis actually doesn't have any leagues. He

hires a team. He's very meticulous about it. When he focuses on an issue, he really focuses on an issue. He's good at actually governing. So the dirty little secret about Florida is to really well govern his day. We have all the cultural war stuff that makes the national media, But the stuff that doesn't make the national media is that when there's a hurricane, we're rebuilding bridges within like a day, right? That the problems actually get solved here, that DeSantis brought down crime rates dramatically, that he offered police officer a $10,000 stipend to move into the state. Then in the state of Florida, if you have a kid who's going to school,

you have available to you now, as of July, like an $8,000 school tax credit. So you can actually take your kid out of a public school if you want to and move them to the local private school if you think that that's a better school. I mean, these are very good things for people who are living in the state of Florida, which is why it's the number one incoming state for population. He's very good at just like the pure governance of it. And then on sort of the culture war front, he's taking on a lot of the culture wars in a way that really animates the base. The base doesn't want him at Romney type who's going to be sort of dull as ditch water, really glossy.

They want somebody who's willing to get in the trenches and fight, which is why he's very popular in the primaries right now, because the media chose him as sort of its opponent. And that was over COVID, where he happened to be right and the left happened to be completely wrong on that using Andrew Cuomo, whose two missions in life were killing old people and grabbing ass and he ran out of old people. You know, the, the, the, DeSantis has, has, you know, his governance during COVID, keeping the state open, keeping the economy running, was against all of what the media was saying, and he succeeded with that. So that's a really good case for DeSantis. Now, listen, there are flaws that DeSantis as a candidate. He's not nearly as sort of magnetic as Trump, because no one is.

I mean, Trump is just like, it's a, he's been on TV for years and years and years and years, and the cameras are just drawn to him. You know, I think that the battle for Trump is going to be between the fact that he's magnetic and the fact that he's extraordinarily tiring. Like, if you see him too much, Everybody's just like, oh, oh, like, I can't. I can't with this. And for DeSantis, the battle is going to be, how do you keep people interested?

Because he's very pugilistic, but he's not like an amazing speaker or something. He's not super personable. Trump's a big people person. He likes ripping people, you know, and giving them a hug. And he likes, or at least shaking their hand, he likes going out in public. He likes the adulation. He likes interactions. That's not DeSantis.

DeSantis is a lot more kind of reserved as a person. And so that's an uphill battle for him. But he also knows how to run a government. And if he gets into the presidency, then he presumably will not allow the, quote, called Deep State to thwart him, he'll just go in a whole fire a bunch of people. He was in Congress. He's been a governor. He knows how to run things.

So that's the case for DeSantis and I think also against Trump. And what would you say to those people who say Descentus simply doesn't have the cut through with ordinary people like Trump does? I mean, I don't know who the ordinary people are. So I think that it's true that Trump for, let's say, blue-collar, conservative white voters, there's nobody going to be like Trump. No one. I mean, like, Trump has a magic with this group.

And it's not an insignificant group of people by any measure. The question for those people is going to be, do you want to vote for the guy you love, but who's likely to lose, or do you like to vote for somebody who you like, but is significantly more likely to win? And that really is going to have to be the question for people. I mean, I had this conversation with the guy the other day, and he's like, yeah, I think DeSantis has a better shot. There's a Wall Street Journal poll that came out this week that says the same thing. 41% of Republican voters say DeSantis is more likely to be Biden. 31% say Trump. That same poll showed 51% voting for Trump in the primaries versus 38% for

DeSantis. It's like, who are these 20% of people who don't think that Trump is likely to win, but we'll vote for him in a primary. Who are those people? Like, that's such a weird thing. You're going to vote from him in the primary knowing that he's likely to lose? Like, that seems, that seems very strange to me. I think that people have to get over this sort of weird, dream-esque quality that they have about Trump, which is that he's sort of a miracle worker. And again, I think that that actually goes back to 2012. Because in 2012, when Romney ran, and Obama was unpopular, and Romney lost, the Democrats decided they were never going to lose another election. And Republicans also thought Democrats are never going to lose another election. They've built a new

minority majority coalition with some college educated white people, they're never going to lose. They've got this thing from here on in. That was the theme for Hillary. And then Trump wins. And everybody's brain just breaks. The left goes, it must have been the Russians. The Russians must have stolen this thing. And the right goes, he must be a wizard. I mean, there's no way for us. There's no way for us to win. I mean, look at this. He lost by, you know, three million votes, but he pulled exactly, like, right in this place. Like, you know, the bolts hit from Zeus and suddenly he's president. Like, that's the man works miracles. And then 2020 happens. And now the presuppositions are challenged again. So the left goes,

well, maybe, you know, our coalition is more durable than we thought it was in 2016. And the right goes, well, maybe he's not a miracle worker. And then Trump says, I didn't lose. Well, maybe he's a miracle worker who got stiffed, right? He's still a miracle worker. And so the question for a lot of Republicans is going to be, do you still think he's a miracle worker? Do you think that he's being jobbed? Or do you think that, like, political gravity applies.

And he won one election. And then he lost, like, three elections. He lost 2018. He lost 2020. He lost 2022. Like, those are three elections. He did not do well in. Ben, we're about to ask you a few questions from our supporters on locals.

but we always end the show with the final question, the same one for all, I guess, which is what do you think is the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? I mean, I think that was probably the first 40 minutes of this conversation, right? Yeah, it was. Yeah, I mean, the thing that we don't want to.

The breakdown of the family. And mainly the duties that you have as an individual in your daily life, how do you get up in the morning and do those things? Because that's how you actually change the society. It's not with all the stuff I talk about on a daily basis. That stuff is important, but the stuff that's significantly more important

is how you get up and interact with the people in your life what sort of duties you perform, what obligations you undertake to make the social structure more secure and also to provide for a future. That's the thing that matters. Ben, thank you so much for joining us for the show. Thank you guys for watching and listening. Head over to locals for the bonus questions and we'll see you there. Take care and see you soon, guys. Ben, while your stunts on guns is understandable in a US context, would you recommend more guns in other countries, for example, UK, Australia, New Zealand, for example.