#845 - Ben Shapiro - Has America Completely Lost Its Mind?
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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ben Shapiro. He's a political commentator, co-founder of The Daily Wire, an author, and a

a podcaster. Election years are always chaotic, but this one feels particularly spicy. Why is the world at fever pitch and how much is actually going to stop after November? Expect to learn if the 2024 election is going to be a typical one, why Ben hasn't had Donald Trump on his show, Ben's experience with childhood bullying and how it changed him, what Ben wished more men realized about masculinity, his thoughts on Elon Musk, how to deal with public criticism,

and much more. Doesn't matter whether you believe or agree with Ben's politics or not, he is a very non-fungible human. There are not many people out there like him, and I find him very interesting. I find his background, his personal drive, his work rate absolutely absurd, and I think there's an awful lot to take away from today. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ben Shapiro.

busy time for you at the moment is this more intense than typical election years how normal is this uh this one is is pretty intense i mean i'm personally invested in this election like i want trump to win obviously i've made that very clear i'm personally campaigning with six different senate candidates like going out and trying to raise money

Yeah.

I will say it is kind of weird that Donald Trump has been subjected to more assassination attempts in the past eight weeks than Kamala Harris has to one-on-one interviews. I didn't see that one coming, but, you know, it's a wild election season for sure. What do you think is driving that? Why is it so wild? I mean, I think that part of it is just the unique circumstances of the candidates. The Democrats in a normal election cycle probably wouldn't have nominated Joe Biden in 2020, which meant that they wouldn't have had to deal with a person who was 8,000 years old in 2024. And also, Donald Trump is...

a wild character. I mean, the fact is that he's the first person who has run for non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. And he's widely perceived as sort of incumbent figure, despite the fact that he was out of power for four years. And he's Donald Trump, which means that he's eccentric and he says wild things and you get a lot of internet memes and all that's very entertaining. One of the things that's kind of frustrating for those of us who watch politics professionally or who are very into public

policy is that there's kind of the bread and circuses aspect of all these elections. And then there are the very real policy consequences of who gets elected. And that's a completely different thing that seems to get ignored in all of the hubbub about who performed better in a debate or who is jabbering about eating cats and dogs or any of that sort of thing. What's the arc that you went through from being elected?

Not keen on Trump 2016, kind of keen on Trump 2020 to now... Fundraising for him. Yeah. Yeah. Can you explain that to me? Sure. So 2016, I looked at both candidates and I said, both of these people are not fit to be presidents of the United States. I'm not going to vote for Hillary Clinton, obviously. I think she's wrong on everything politically. I think that she's corrupt.

I'm not voting for her. And Donald Trump, you know, I had no idea what his policies were going to be. He seemed to take every single side of every single issue in 2016. Was he pro-free trade or anti-free trade? Was he more hawkish on foreign policy or isolationist on foreign policy? Where was he on social policy? Was he socially liberal or was he pro-life? Like, where was he on anything? And nobody kind of knew. And so, and you combine that with, you know, his various sort of eccentricities and some of the things that he said, which I really radically disapproved of. And I was just like,

I'm sitting this election out. I don't like either of these people. Now, I also had the luxury of living in California where my vote literally counts for nothing. If I'd been living in Ohio or a swing state, I assume I would have voted for Trump. 2020, I got to see what I was right about with regard to Trump and what I was wrong about with regard to Trump. I had assumed that he was going to govern a lot more liberal than he did. He governed in ways that I thought were much better for my point of view than I thought

They were going to be. Obviously, he appointed Supreme Court justices that I liked. I thought that his Middle Eastern policy was excellent. I thought that his peace through strength general policy was really good. I liked his tax cuts. There are a lot of things he did that I liked. There were some things I didn't like, his spending policies, for example. But by 2020, I hadn't changed my mind about Donald Trump in terms of his character, but in terms of his policy, I changed my mind because...

I saw that he had done a lot of things that there was no guarantee he would. Now I'd seen his record. And so vote for him in 2020. In 2024, I didn't support Trump in the primaries. If I had been voting in the primaries, it didn't actually reach Florida because Trump cleaned up. But I would say that I'd been...

much more likely to vote for Ron DeSantis in the primaries than Donald Trump. It became very quickly apparent that Trump was going to be the nominee. And then it was a question of Trump versus Joe Biden. And I think Joe Biden has been a horrifically bad president. And so it became clear to me that it wasn't just enough for me to actually

vote for Trump or support Trump verbally that I actually wanted to get involved in the campaign because I think that the consequences of Trump losing to either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris now would have been quite disastrous. So what I would say is that my feelings about Trump on sort of a personal level haven't changed radically on him as a character. They've changed somewhat on him in terms of the policies that he implemented.

My opinions about sort of the sanity of the left have changed fairly radically since 2016. I think that the left has – that sort of meme that Elon likes to tweet out where it shows how he was sort of in the center and then the entire center just moved to the left and so he ended up on the right. I think that that's fairly realistic about how far the left has moved. Why haven't you had Trump on your show? He's talking to Aiden Ross. He's talking to Theo Vaughn.

If you're one of the poster boys for the right and you're also doing the campaigning thing, how come that conversation hasn't happened? I'd be happy to have him on. I mean, honestly, I think that it would be a bit of a biased conversation considering that I'm supporting him and contributing to his campaign. And one of my jobs as a commentator is also to ask tough questions of a particular candidate. Am I the best candidate to do that? I don't know if I'm the best candidate to do that. What's the tough questions that you would ask him if you could? You know, I would ask him probably about

why he chooses to use his social media influence the way that he does why isn't more uh why isn't he more dedicated to a solidly focused campaign stately uh and not even stately but just focused i mean it's just unfocused it feels like he's he's running after every squirrel in in a 300 mile radius during this campaign uh and and that's a problem for me as somebody who wants to see him win i'd be asking him about that i'd probably drill down on his ukraine policy

He and I are a bit at odds over his Ukraine policy, at least stated Ukraine. It's sort of unclear where he is on Ukraine. I'm very much of the opinion, the sort of Henry Kissinger, August 2022 opinion that the United States should be supporting Ukraine sufficient to prevent further Russian incursions and sufficient to get Russia to the table. And then the United States should essentially be brokering some sort of deal in the back room.

directly with Russia, and then probably having to cram that down on Ukraine, specifically because Vladimir Zelensky's interests are not aligned with the interests of the United States in terms of what he's seeking. And you get that. I mean, Zelensky doesn't want to give up the Donbass. He doesn't want to give up Crimea.

You got that. And domestically, he'd have a hard time doing that, given that hundreds of thousands of his own citizens have been killed at the same time. Is that a war that can last interminably without some sort of stasis in terms of the battle lines? Probably not. And so but I'm not sure what Trump thinks about any of those sorts of things. I'd probably be asking about some of his staffing. I think some of the people that he surrounds himself with don't do him credit.

And those sorts of things are things that presumably I'd ask him about. And one of the risks of interviewing President Trump always is that it's how he is going to perceive you as an interviewer. And some Megyn Kelly has talked about that if you are harsh on him as an interviewer, he seems to perceive that adversarially. And if you are not harsh, then and if you're not harsh enough to ask tough questions, then you're really not kind of doing your job.

And so that's always been sort of a concern. And what sort of answers would he be willing to give? Would there be any new information that's added to the debate other than, you know, a sort of weird feel in the room? Without you pushing so hard that, yeah, you do create that weird feel. I mean, we saw this with the most recent debate, right? That if you do...

Throw a few squirrels around that he's probably quite likely to chase them. One thing that's kind of interesting, and I think it tracks with your arc nicely, is whether or not we're in a new era of politics where people are more voting against the person that they hate rather than for the person that they love. It seems like so many people are just essentially doing a protest vote.

I mean, I think that's been true for quite a while, actually. I think that one of my general theories of politics that people tend to vote against, they very rarely tend to vote for. There have been a few candidates in my lifetime that people have voted for. Barack Obama 2008 was a candidate that you voted for. 2012, I think, was when it crossed. I think that's right. So my general grand unifying theory of American politics is that 2012 broke the country.

I think the only important election of our lifetime, perhaps, was 2012, the one that everybody ignores. Because that's when Barack Obama, who had campaigned as great unifier in his own person, he was going to end racial conflict in the United States in 2008. No red states, no blue states, just the United States. No black, no white. We're all just American. And then by 2012, he had pursued a very left wing agenda and he decided that he was going to campaign by essentially breaking down Americans.

what would now be white dudes for Kamala, white dudes for Obama, black dudes for Obama, and a bunch of different kind of constituency groups. He's going to pass out goodies to each one of those, drive up the turnout in the minority community and among white college-educated women, and then he was going to win based on that. And it was a different theory of politics. It was the first kind of base election where nobody tried to reach for the independence. In fact, Romney won with the independence and lost the election. And they were going to portray Mitt Romney, legitimately the most boring, milquetoast candidate in the history of American politics, as a...

a person who murders people by way of cancer and straps dogs to the top of his car and forcibly cuts the hair of gay kids in 1952 or something. And, and, and then Obama won. And I think Obama winning drove everyone insane because,

because the model that Obama applied, which was we are going to drive out the base and that base is so big that we're not even gonna have to appeal to independents. We don't have to appeal to Rust Belt voters. White non-college educated males are complete afterthought. We're not even going to try to reach out to them or determine what makes them tick or anything like that.

And he won on that basis. And Democrats fell into the trap of thinking that this was replicable with literally any candidate. And Republicans fell into the trap of thinking that it was also inevitable. So this led to two conclusions in 2016. Hillary Clinton runs on the same coalition as Obama, but she's not Obama, so she loses. And Trump wins unexpectedly. And the conclusion the Democrats draw from that is that's

that's not possible for her to have lost legitimately because we have an unbreakable, unshakable coalition like 2012. How could we possibly lose? It must have been the Russians or Facebook or something corrupt happened. And on the right, it led to the conclusion that Donald Trump is a wizard and that Donald Trump has the ability to overcome all of the systemic obstacles and

that are inherent in American politics. He's not a normal candidate. He's out of the box. He's totally different. You can't chart him. And that also leads to 2020, right? Where Biden successfully cobbles together again, the Obama coalition, not because he's any great shakes, but because all the rules change and you get this massive uptick in the number of voters in a normal election cycle. You had maybe 4 million voters per election cycle in 2020.

20 as opposed to 2016, you added about 22 million new voters to the election rolls, huge expansion of the voting base because of all the early voting and because of covid and all that sort of stuff. And so the conclusion the Democrats draw is once again, the 2012 Barack Obama coalition rides again. And the conclusion Republicans draw is, well, Donald Trump is a wizard. So if he's a wizard, wizards don't lose, which means that if he says he didn't lose, then he's probably right. He probably didn't lose. He was cheated.

This mythical thinking on both sides is reflected. Exactly. And the actual reality is that the American body politic is split pretty much 50 50, that there is no guarantee that you're going to be able to drive out your base in the way you think you are, that somebody ought to reach out to the people who are in the middle, that 10% of people who are sort of in the middle. And that really what the American public want more than anything else is some level of sanity. And they keep reaching for it and being denied it by the political class.

I think the promise of Joe Biden in 2020, I didn't vote for him, obviously. I didn't support him. I think he's a schmuck. But I think that in 2020, the promise that Joe Biden was inherently making was, I'm dead.

and I am not going to radically shake things up. It's basically going to be stasis. Things will go back to normal, return to normalcy. And then it turns out that he was dead, but also he wasn't going to return us to normal. It was just going to be crazy. And he pursued a bunch of very left-wing policies, spending policies, terrible foreign policy, strange social policy. And so it was chaos. He was dead and there was chaos. And that's why he started to lose. And then suddenly Donald Trump starts to look like the candidate of semi-stability, right? Donald Trump is...

Because he's been disappeared from Twitter and relegated to the outskirts of social media on Truth Social. So you don't even see him. He basically is in the Joe Biden 2020 basement strategy. And the less you see of Donald Trump, the more you're like, I don't see him and I like his policies. And so I would like his policies back. And maybe we won't even get like the super crazy.

And he was able to basically do that. That was the debate with Biden, right? The debate with Biden was Donald Trump stood there. It wasn't like President Trump actually did like an amazing job in the debate with Joe Biden. He was just not crazy. He was just like a normal person in a debate with a senile person. And so that's why you saw Biden's numbers start to tank. And then Kamala joins the race. And Trump really has not yet been able to, I think, adjust to the change in the opposing candidate and regain that sort of momentum and that sort of focus. And that's why, again, I think that

people's opinions of Trump are pretty much baked in. But if what you're saying is right, which is that people vote against things, then his performance in the debate obviously is not good for him because he appeared again, less stable. He appeared less normal. And what the American public is craving is just, will you like leave us alone? Like, I don't want to think about this 24 hours a day. What do you think happens if Trump loses to the Republican candidate for 2028?

If he runs again, which presumably he will because he's- You think that he would go, how old would he be then? Let's see, 78 now. So he'd be coming up on 82. I have a hard time believing that Trump will go into the darkness quietly. So I think that if he loses in this election, then he will probably proclaim that he did not lose.

which he's done before. And yeah, I think it's unlikely that the Republican voters, that conservative voters are going to turn to him a fourth time. I think that the three times is enough. And, you know, again, I hope he wins. I want him to win. If he loses, I think that Republicans are going to say who is best poised to beat a Democrat. This, by the way, was the mistake in the DeSantis campaign. I think that DeSantis was always going to lose in the primaries because Trump is magnetic figure because he's kind of a generational figure. But

If DeSantis had a hope of winning, it had to lie in very early on, like right after November 2022, saying Donald Trump cannot win. I can win. He lost in 2020. He lost us seats in 2022. If you nominate me, I'll win. And the one thing he didn't want to do, I think, was tick off a lot of the Republican base, which believed that Trump had won in 2020. You've got tribalism within the tribe. Yeah, it was kind of a catch 22 for DeSantis. If he had said Trump lost in 2020, half the base, which believes that Trump won in 2020, is angry at him.

And if he doesn't say that Trump lost, then what's your rationale for being on stage? Yeah. One of my friends tweeted today on the back of that voting against the thing you hate. Leftism begins as compassion for the poor, but ends as contempt for the prosperous. Rightism begins as respect for the past, but ends as revulsion for the present. Each side grows to load the other's values more than it prizes its own. Politics devours love and defecates hate. And it is funny that it seems to be such a warping force, politics, that people want things to go badly forever.

everyone when their opponents are in power. It's this sort of weird sort of zero sum type scenario that is self-defeating in a lot of ways. Well, and I think that's only true because the social fabric of the United States has failed. Meaning you don't feel that way about your own local community and you don't feel that way about your family.

I mean, your own family, even if you're having fights with somebody or disagree with somebody in your family, you don't wish the worst for them. You don't wish that people in your family will suffer so that they learn the lesson. Like you want things to be good, generally speaking, for the family or for your local community. It's when you don't have social solidarity with somebody that you're like, these people need to fail so I can succeed. And I think that it speaks to a much greater crisis in the American body politic, which is to say a much greater crisis in the American heart, which is what do we even share anymore, right? There's been a lot of talk about this. What do people from California and Florida share or New York and Texas?

And I think the answer is that at a very high level, they used to share a lot of things. And I think they still do share a lot of things. But politics has become so nationalized. And I think social media is a part of this.

And the federal government has gained so much power that, you know, it's easy to see that polarized. The fracturing is now built into the system. Yeah. And the more you elevate power to the top level, it has to be built into the system. Because if you didn't feel like the federal government was all that powerful, Rick Perry, who obviously ran a very unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2012, Rick Perry had what I thought was the best line about government in a presidential race. He said, I want to make Washington, D.C. insignificant in your life.

I mean, wouldn't that be delightful? It would be super nice. I've said this to people who are my kind of left-wing friends. Like, you know, wouldn't it be nice if, you know, Donald Trump's president, but you don't have to wake up every day caring what Donald Trump thinks about things because the federal government just doesn't have that much control over your life. And you want to live in San Francisco and you want to be governed like you live in San Francisco, you know, have at it. That's your problem. And if I don't want to live there, I just want to live there. But I think because the federal government has sucked so much control up to the top level,

is essentially a meat hammer and it just hammers everything to the same level. And so you can do that more successfully if it's a very small community with a lot of social fabric and a lot of homogeneity in terms of viewpoint. Again, my local community, I live in an Orthodox Jewish community. I'd say the people in my community tend to agree 85% of the time. You

You take my community and you contrast that with like an upper class liberal enclave in San Jose or something, and the disagreement is going to look more like we agree 25% of the time, 30% of the time. How much do you think that the countrywide agreement –

that was maybe part of the American dream throughout the 1900s, how much of that was actual baseline and how much of that was a perversion from what it truly is, which is now what we're seeing again, something that was broken off into parts, then came together briefly. We have this sense of unity, which is real and which is fabricated. So I think the system has changed. So I think that the

The social fabric of people, you know, from New York versus people from Alabama, obviously, was incredibly broken. I mean, like the idea that people in New York and Alabama agreed about things in 1950 is obviously untrue, most obviously on issues of race, right? Because people in New York were correct and the people in Alabama were wrong. I mean, so that obviously happens to be, I mean, we fought a civil war in this country.

However, one of the things that used to be sort of an insurance and a bulwark against that was the subsidiarity model that I'm talking about. You can see why the subsidiary model broke down because people in New York said you're not allowed to treat black people like that in Alabama. We need a big federal power to come in and stop that. And that's a good moral argument. The problem is that it's an argument that can prove too much if applied to everything.

So it applies to race for sure, right? Black citizens of Alabama should not be treated horribly and put in Jim Crow conditions. But it doesn't apply to, say, social values, like how I want to live with my religious community, what the tax policy should be. Why do we have to agree on that? Why do we have to agree on what social services look like in my local community versus yours? And I think the sort of broad national model being applied to very local circumstances exacerbates division in a really –

divisive way. Again, the solution to the social fabric problem between people who live in disparate parts of the country and have different values is not to get everybody in a room and pretend that they all agree. The answer is actually probably to leave people alone so they don't have to deal with each other as much. Yeah, that's funny.

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Eric Weinstein said he doesn't know if the rules based international order will allow Trump to become president. What do you think of that? I mean, I'm always sort of skeptical of, you know, what kind of what that means, what the order means. I like more specificity in those sorts of allegations. Who are these people so we can fight them? I don't like sort of vague shadowy forces that are systemic racism.

Who are you blaming? What do you mean? The rules-based international order. Who specifically are we talking about that is going to – and how? And what's the mechanism of control? I really appreciate the fact that you seem to very rarely lean into conspiracism. It seems that a lot of the explanations that you give for why things are happening are –

out there in front in some form or another. They're sort of tangible. I can touch them. It's not this sort of up there in the ether. And yet that has become very much a signature of some areas of the right as well. For sure. For sure. And it's something, again, I think that that leads to a breakdown in politics, because if you believe that there are these big conspiratorial forces that are at the center of all things and then you lose, well, then you can't really accept the loss.

And if you win, you have to use your power in order to crush those big conspiratorial forces that you can't actually describe her name. And so politics becomes a little bit of blood sport at that point. Again, I'm not saying there aren't conspiracies, but I'd like to see some evidence of them so that we can all identify them together and then fight them. So, for example, I think that it's not a conspiracy so much as it is a large scale agreement among legacy members of the media on politics. That happens to be a truth. They the legacy media agree in very wide scale on politics.

Do they get together in a back room and decide? No, they just start mirroring each other like you would in a social club because that's actually how it works. Is that something that needs to be fought in terms of the informational dissemination? Sure. Is it a conspiracy when the algorithms are set at Facebook or YouTube or old socials?

X before Elon. Is that a conspiracy when they set these things certain ways? It's not a conspiracy. It's someone who actually it's like Jack Dorsey, who's actually pulling a lever and saying you shouldn't do this. And I can fight that because I know that Jack Dorsey is pulling the lever. What I don't like is stuff like the rules based international order is going to stop Donald Trump from being president because I don't know what I'm supposed to fight at that point. How do I stop that from happening? And isn't that an unverifiable possibility?

Would that not be the purposeful byproduct of such an order like that, that it's very difficult to define and we're going to stay in the shadows? It's sort of endemic to their very mode of operating. I mean, sure. I mean, that's the counter argument. But again, my problem is it's unfalsifiable. So once you put positive a hypothesis that's unfalsifiable, it makes it very, very difficult for me to either fight it or to or to disagree with you because you can always.

It's a Martin Bailey argument. You just move right back into the next level of the conspiracy. So instead of me saying, so for example, the 2020 election, I've said, I think that there were people who informally rigged the election in the sense that the media totally agreed that Donald Trump should not be president. They decided to promote...

certain narratives, to deny certain other narratives, to, for example, push with members of the government to hide the Hunter Biden laptop story. There are obviously factors, change the voting rules. Those are all very specific things I'm naming right now, right? That the media, social media downplayed a story. Can we know what that is? And we can have congressional hearings about it, that there were changes to the rules in places like Pennsylvania. We know exactly what that is, and we can try to win back the legislature to actually change the voting rules in Pennsylvania to prevent that sort of stuff.

These are specific things. What I don't like is when people will say the election was rigged and what they mean is that there was mass voter fraud coordination. Right. Exactly. Like people couldn't bring in boxes. And then you'll say, OK, well, I need the evidence that people are bringing boxes. But that's the whole point. The evidence doesn't exist. OK, well, now now we're arguing with shadows. Maybe you're right.

I mean, you could be right. I have no evidence that you're right, but I also have no evidence that you're wrong. So, I mean, how am I supposed to even adjudicate what to do next? So do you sort of purposefully avoid the deep state coordination conspiracy thing and just that's an area that I'm not going to bother debating? Maybe some other people can try and work that stuff out. I mean, usually what I do is I wait for the evidence to emerge. So sometimes it feels like I'm late on the ball because of that, right? We live in such a fast-paced media environment that there's a weird math that applies in political media.

And the math is that if I jump first 100 times and I'm wrong 98 of those times, but two of those times I'm right, I'm now a credible source. If I'm the second person on the ball because I'm waiting to see the evidence emerge for this thing and I'm right like 98 times, but I'm wrong two times, then I'm no longer trustworthy.

Better to be first and wrong 98% of the time, but right those two because now you're a prophet. Yeah. Right now, you get to say, exactly. Now you get to say, you know, that Alex Jones is a prophet because of all the weird and crazy things that he says, like two times he was like right on it. Like, wow, that's amazing. Okay, well, that also used to just be called a scam. Okay, like- Where does that seduction come from? The necessity for immediate answers.

Social media has made it so that you want answers right now. People always wanted answers, but now you feel like you have the mechanism of getting an answer right away and you get frustrated if people don't give you an answer right away. Yeah, you'd prefer an immediate wrong answer than a delayed correct one. Especially if it backs your priors, right? If the immediate answer that comes back at you is what you wanted to hear, which is that you're a candidate of choice, whether right or left, this applies on both sides.

that your candidate of choice definitely didn't lose. They actually won and they were jobbed out of it. And you're outraged. You didn't want your candidate to lose. You're really pissed that your candidate lost. And then, you know, you have a choice between somebody who says...

absolutely he was jobbed out of it. There are people who are coming in the middle of the night and they were bringing in boxes of ballots and they were shoving them through the machines and he actually won and it's all being rigged and the red and the red wave was real, but then it was jobbed out. Like that's a much more interesting and seductive answer than me saying, you know what? I'm perfectly willing to hear the case. I need to see the actual evidence flow in. And then as it comes in, and if you can prove that to me, then I'm perfectly willing to have you make that argument. But I,

I don't have the evidence at this point to actually say that. One is a sexier answer. And even if it turns out being wrong, there's no punishment for it. Because either you don't acknowledge that you were wrong, you just keep playing the game. Four years later, and depending on the... And it's a wide variety of conspiracy theories. I feel the same way about COVID. I tried to wait for data to emerge. That meant that I got some things wrong. Then there were people who jumped one way or another. There were some people who jumped to, we need a lockdown permanently. And then we'll just do that for three years. And then there were some people who jumped to,

And vaccines will immediately be bad. They will be terrible. And we don't need to do anything about COVID. We should basically just let it free flow through the population. Well, it turns out the second was probably closer to the truth in many circumstances. But I didn't have the evidence of any of that sort of stuff. So I had to wait for those things. And what that means is that sometimes I will have to apologize on the air for having gotten it wrong.

Because I waited for the data and I made a judgment in the absence of data that I then have to walk back because the data have arrived. Right. Most famously, this happened with me with regards to the vaccine. So in late 2020, Pfizer and the federal government under Donald Trump announced that the vaccines were 99 percent effective in preventing transmission, not that transmission.

Right. And the case that I made at that point was, listen, I'm healthy. I'm young. I don't really need it. But I have parents. My parents were in their 60s and they were basically bubbled with us. We weren't bubbled at that time. But, you know, we're out and about. And if I can prevent my parents from getting it by getting the vaccine, fine, I'll get the vaccine.

And so I said that, right? And I said, like, a lot of the talk about how the vaccines are ineffective. I don't know what data you're basing that on. And then it turns out that Pfizer was basically lying, that they had no actual data on transmission, and they were making claims in the absence of the data. Well, when that happens, then I have to come out and I have to say I was too credulous. But the counter to that, you know, the other sort of possibility is people who are so skeptical of everything or selectively skeptical that...

you know, it's unclear when they're right and when they're wrong. What I would hope is to live in an immediate environment where when I'm wrong, I admit that I got it wrong. And when other people are wrong, they admit that they got it wrong, but that's not the environment we live in. Yeah, it's one of my least favorite dynamics that somebody publicly changing their mind is seen as a mark of fickleness, not a mark of intelligence. And like, I don't know, it...

It seems to me that a stupid person's idea of being smart is being unwavering, but that, in my experience, doesn't seem to be the case. It's one thing to be unwavering on your principles. It's another thing to be unwavering on the data.

Right. Sometimes the data just change, right? Like there's new data or it turns out the old data were never based on anything. And at that point, if the data changed, then my opinion on the policy changes. If it turns out that the policy that I've been promoting turns out to be a giant failure. I mean, by the way, no good business would operate on this, right? If my business were pouring money down a rat hole and just kept pouring money down the rat hole, no matter what, because, you know, got to make sure that we're consistent on this, then we'd lose. And that's not in no other area of your life. Do you act like this? But when it comes to politics, it's

then you're supposed to be unwaveringly in favor of the original position that you took regardless of the data that emerges about that position. You wouldn't do it with family, you wouldn't do it with friends, you wouldn't do it with your business. It's like a show of fealty or whatever sort of loyalty to your own side and you're seen as an unreliable ally if you're somebody that does change their mind in retrospect, which I really don't like. But talking about the seduction of coordination as an explanation for stuff, two attempts on Trump's life within the space of eight weeks.

Some people will lay that at the feet of the deep state doesn't want him to become president because they can't allow him because he's going to drain the swamp and blah, blah, blah. There are a myriad of others. How should we even come to sort of think about this election and Trump's place in it? Like, what does it mean that the media has forgotten the first assassination so much that we needed a second one to remind them? Right. So I think that a few things are very clear. One is you're asking about sort of the content of the assassination. And what is the media response to the assassination?

When it comes to the media response, they're perfectly consistent. They tried to memory hole the first assassination as fast as they possibly could, and they will try to memory this whole this assassination as fast as they possibly can, because to acknowledge the reality, which is that the radical increase in political temperature is not a one sided thing on the part of Donald Trump, that the left has radically increased the temperature in terms of political rhetoric, and that when you keep turning up the heat on a pot of water, it boils over sometimes.

and then maybe you want to turn that down a little bit, that would be to acknowledge that there are two sides to the political debate. And that's the thing that they can't really acknowledge, I think. And so the media have immediately reverted to, well, you know, Trump is saying that it's about violent rhetoric, but look at the violent rhetoric he uses. Okay, well, that is like true whataboutism. Fine, let's assume that I don't like some of the rhetoric that Trump uses about politics. Fine, but...

Let's be real. The rhetoric that you guys are using in which he is orange Hitler without the mustache, in which he is a deep and abiding threat to the soul of the country, that the people who are voting for him are a threat to the very fabric and soul of the country. Like, if you believe that he is a singular Hitlerian figure and you happen to have a screw loose, I mean...

What might there not be some people in a country of 340 million people who would want to take a shot at the president of the United States from presidents of the United States? And it seems like the answer is yes. As far as, you know, who's responsible for the assassinations. Again, this is one where it's like, I'm going to wait to see. I think that.

In almost all human areas. So it's kind of funny. There are a lot of conservatives who seem to operate for Republicans who operate from premises that I think are not particularly conservative when it comes to human nature. So a couple of things about human nature that are typically associated with conservatism. Human beings are inherently flawed.

They have the capacity for good. They also have the capacity for bad. And people are kind of dumb. These are like kind of baseline biblical notions of what human beings are. Go back to Adam. Not super bright. Makes mistakes. Has some bad inclinations. Follows up on the bad inclinations. Also can do some good things. And this is carried through to the founders. If you read Federalist 51, James Madison is talking about if angels were, if human beings were angels, no government would be necessary. If human beings were devils, then no government would be capable. Like that kind of shuffles

And so what that means is I look at the Secret Service and I'm like, is it a conspiracy or are they like, which assumes, by the way, deep competence or are people just really, really incompetent? And they set in place a bunch of really bad rules that lead to the elevation of incompetence, which seems to be the truth about like a huge wide variety of institutions in American life and in Western life generally.

Well, and then you have the opposite view, which is in the back room, there are a bunch of people who are uber competent and they are scheming to try an assassination attempt where they somehow rope a not particularly good shot 20 year old who can't hit a target from a very close distance. I mean, the original assassination attempt, the fact that he missed Trump is is a miracle of God, truly like God's hand came down, like redirected that bullet because there is no way you missed that shot. That isn't he had a scope on the rifle like there is no way you missed that shot. He is insane.

extremely close with it with a long gun and so but the i guess sort of conspiratorial viewpoint would be that the secret service coordinated with the local police in order to allow a 20 year old incompetent to get up on a roof and then take a shot at the president of the united states but he was such a bad shot and such a nut that he missed with multiple shots or everyone's stupid i mean like occam's razor suggests that everyone is bad at their job and stupid

And the same thing holds true with the second assassination attempt. Right. When it comes to the second assassination attempt, what we know is that this guy was a nut job. He happened to be a left wing nut job, but he's a nut job. And then he was hiding out in a tree outside of Trump's property for something like 12 hours. And the Secret Service didn't have the proper staffing to walk around the exterior of the of the golf club.

and they saw him, they took a shot at him, he ran away. So is that a conspiracy to kill Trump? First of all, you have to assume uber competence in planning the conspiracy and uber incompetence in carrying it out, right, in order for this to be a deep state conspiracy.

Now, if you want to make the case that there are people inside the deep state who would prefer that Trump not have the proper levels of protection, I think that's a much easier case to make because people have said that sort of stuff pretty publicly. I mean, you had a full here and like Democrats tried to bring up a bill to strip Donald Trump of his Secret Service protection. And Benny represented Benny Johnson, I think was the name of the guy who actually tried to do that. So that's that that wouldn't be like super shocking to me. But again, those are cases that are easier to support than

The broad claims and, you know, I'm trained to drill down on broad claims. When people say a sentence like the deep state wants Trump dead. Okay. There's so many, there's so many elements of that, that I need broken down definitionally. What is the deep state? Who in the deep state?

Which agencies? What's the mechanism? How did they make the selection for this particular plan? And again, I'm not asking for each one of those things to be checked in order for me to grow increasingly suspicious about the thing. But the plausibility of the claim is directly related to the plausibility of each individual element in the claim. For example, people on the left were considering a conspiracy theory that the Wuhan virus was developed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And that was like, that's not a conspiracy theory. Every single element of that is incredibly plausible.

You have, as Jon Stewart suggested, you have an institute that does virology, the only one in all of this area, and literally takes viruses and then mutates them so that they are applicable to humans. And then magically, that's exactly where the virus starts. Like, okay, that's pretty plausible. And it's a pretty specific claim about a very specific thing happening at a specific time and place. But anytime people kind of lay out these broad charges, I just want to know what they mean so I can either say whether I think it's true or whether it's not. And I try to be super consistent about the application of the principle.

So I'll say the same thing that I'm saying right now about the conspiracy theories with regard to Trump's, you know, the assassination attempts on Trump that I'll say about systemic racism. People will say systemic racism is to blame for the disparities between various groups in the United States. I'll say, I need you to define systemic racism

What specifically are you talking about that led to and which disparities are we talking about right now? Are those best explained? What percentage is explained by a history of discrimination in the United States? Let's get specific because it turns out that, again, when it comes to your own personal life, no one handles politics like they handle their personal life. And they would be much better off if they did. If your wife came to you and she said, we have a problem.

The first thing you would say is, what's the problem? And then if she said, no, the problem is really big. It's really, really big. And it's really systemic. Okay, can we like delve into what? No, no, because that would be to grant credibility to the people who are forming the problem. I need to know what the problem is so I can solve it. If you're in the business of politics solving, I think maybe this is the key. If you're in the business of politics being about solving problems, you want details and you want to be able to address those details in a way that lends itself to solving the problem.

If politics is just about beating up the other guy, then you really don't want to solve the problem. Yeah. One is providing solutions and the other is identifying problems. There is a problem over here. A hundred percent. And so this is what will happen with other people in sort of the conservative side of the aisle. I'll say I've said this about even Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson. Like there are a bunch of people who I think identify problems sometimes pretty well.

And then the solutions that they provide are completely wrong, in my view, because I don't think there are any solutions that are provided. I think that the generalized solution is because the other guy is mean and wants the worst for you. That's not a solution. That's an epithet. And does that get you to where you're trying to go? And I've said the same thing about Andrew Tate, right? Andrew Tate will make a bunch of claims about how men are victimized by the society and how feminism has been terrible for men. And I'll look at the critique and I'll say, like, I think maybe 70% of that critique is pretty good. And then...

I'll look at his solution. I'll be, these aren't solutions. These are mainly just complaints. And every time somebody mentions a solution, he's very dismissive of the solutions. And so maybe you're not in the business of solving the problem, in which case you're misleading people. Because I thought that the goal of this entire enterprise was to make life better for people. I wonder whether that plays back into the

desire to vote against the organization or the other side that you dislike as opposed to love for your own side. Because as long as you can continue to identify problems as opposed to posit solutions, what you get to do is, well, I mean,

We don't really know how we should move forward, but at least we're not those guys. Yes. Like that's the real, those are the real issues. I mean, I think that's true. And listen, I think a lot of politics is about just saying no to the person saying the wrong thing, right? I mean, like this is William F. Buckley's famous line that conservatism is about standing athwart the rails of history shouting stop. I think it's about more than that. But his basic premise is that if Kamala Harris wants to stack the Supreme Court and you're opposing stacking the Supreme Court, you don't have to have like an active agenda, I

against that you do have to stop her from getting elected in order to in order to do that and oppositionality is i think in some sense good for civilizations i think that the united states was more ideologically solid when posited against the soviet union than it has been in the post-soviet era because it had a contrast to show itself right it could people in new york and people in alabama like we don't disagree we don't agree about a lot of things one thing we disagree one thing we totally around is those fucking commies man we are not going to be like that

I think that that is not terrible for society. The problem is when you start applying it to people inside your own country predominantly or inside your own civilization, right?

Then you got a problem. And again, I've been criticizing some on the right here, but that I'll lay predominantly at the feet of the left, because I do think that the left in the United States particularly has undermined a lot of values that were pretty widely shared and has attempted to portray the right as the enemy of. This is a lot of the rhetoric about Trump, that he's the enemy of the soul of America, that he's destroying America from within. It seems to me that if I were to put together a list of the top 10 threats to the United States,

you know, I think that the idea that Kamala Harris is like the top threat to the United States, like in the top 10, I think her policies are bad for the United States. That's not quite the same thing as an existential threat to the United States in the near term. I think her ideology, if applied over the long term, would be horrible for the United States, truly horrible for the United States. But if I'm thinking of like, do I have more in common with, say, Kamala Harris or ISIS, right, or even Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, like,

I don't share a lot with Kamala Harris, but I feel like I have more in common with my Democrat friends.

with Democrats on the other side of the aisle than I do with some of those folks. Yeah, this is where I think people lay at the feet of foreign actors, the Western anti-Westernism, that, well, if you wanted to really get a country or an entire hemisphere of the planet to fracture itself, you would hide away what you're doing as a foreign state actor and you would infiltrate within there. But again, as to your sort of rubrics of being able to be accurate,

That's quite unfalsifiable. That's very woolly. That's very difficult to work. And again, I think there are actual symptoms of that, right? I mean, TikTok is a Chinese algorithm. So I think elevation of particular messages on TikTok is pretty traceable to particular moves that the Chinese government is making in elevating particular messages. For example, right? Again, specific problem with a specific solution that was actually attempted by the Republicans in Congress recently, which was to dissociate TikTok from its Chinese ownership.

So CCP didn't have a window into it or control over the algorithm. You can see that with regard to allegations that the Iranians have been paying members of protest communities and universities. That's an actual problem with an actual solution. But yes, I mean, I think that, again, the social institutions that used to hold us together have broken down. And in the absence of both the social institutions that held us together and an opposition that holds you together from the outside,

And think of it, think of it as sort of what global opposition does. It holds you as a civilization together. It does. I mean, it's just what it does. And to take an example of Israel, Israel was like fighting each other until via judicial reform. And then they get attacked by Hamas and all of a sudden super high levels of social solidarity because like activate, right? Or we all live in the same country about 9-11, right? Right after 9-11 for like half a second, the United States like, okay, guys, we can see there's an external threat. It's very real. Mobilize.

And then when the threat seems to go away, then people tend to turn on each other if they don't have their own kind of spaces in which to operate. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they're top quality, but few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with

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Right now, you can head to the link in the description below or go to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom and use the code modernwisdom at checkout to get 20% off everything site-wide. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Can we talk about your time in school? Sure. Yeah, I'm pretty fascinated by this. What do you think, looking back, skipping grades, social challenges...

How do you reflect on that time? What are the main lessons that you took away from your period in school? So there are a few different lessons. So when I was, so my family became Orthodox when I was 11, which means that I wasn't really part of any clique in school. I was kind of in and out of different schools. I went to public school, then I went to private school, then I went to public school again, then I went to private school. And so I didn't really have kind of a social sphere that was very stable in terms of

friend groups. I was also two years younger by the time I finished high school than everybody else, which is not conducive to either situations with girls or to close friendships with other dudes in your class when you're two years younger, a lot shorter, a lot shrimpier and smarter than some of the other kids in the class. That's not like recipe for social success. Likeability. Yeah, exactly. You get stuffed in a few lockers is a thing that happens.

And so there are a few, there are kind of two key lessons that I learned sort of from my schooling experience. One was pretty early. I was going into, let's see, it would have been seventh grade at a magnet school. It was a local public magnet school. And they had to give you some sort of, it was basically a rudimentary IQ test to get in. And so people who, you know, scored above a certain threshold, which was very high threshold, would get in. I made it in. I didn't make it in by like,

20 points. There were kids in my class who did. There were kids in my class with IQs 180, 190. And I remember sitting in class and saying to my dad, like, some of these kids are really, really smart. I mean, there was a girl in our class in seventh grade. She was doing like senior level calculus from college. And my dad said, well, success is a combination of inherent ability and effort. And so you're going to have to outwork them.

He said, you're probably rarely going to be the single smartest person in the room. You're going to be in a lot of rooms with smart people. And for sure, on any given topic, there's going to be somebody who knows more than you do in a room of 100 people. And so the best thing that you can do is just work really, really hard and assume you're not the smartest person in the room. And that was really good advice. And I've taken that very seriously. It's why I take other people's opinions seriously if they have knowledge on a topic. I think there's a sort of...

earned hatred of the experts because the experts have failed on so many occasions. But I don't think that the answer to that is, I think the answer to that is better experts. I don't think the answer to that is knowing nothing and then just like, okay, well now I'm an expert, like Twitter expertise, right? I became an expert on the situation in Singapore today because I read like three sentences on Wiki. So that was one. The other one was that, you know, when you take a lot of crap, you either tend to

basically learn to tell people to fuck off or you end up tending to cave underneath it.

And so I have a very weird perspective on bullying as somebody who was viciously bullied when I was in school, like really badly bullied, which is I'm not sure that it's like the worst thing for all kids. And not that I'm pro bullying. No kid deserves to be bullied. It was a terrible experience. I hated it. Did it damage me? I think in some ways it made me a lot tougher because like, OK, well, that's what life is going to be. Life is going to be a lot of people who very often don't like you and they're going to do mean things to you. And you can either just kind of deal with it and try to find a solve for it.

and weather it, or you can cave underneath that. And success is the best form of revenge, basically. And so that was something that I sort of cultivated in my high school years. When you talk about experiences with bullying being pretty rough, what do you mean? What are you referring to? Oh, I mean, so there was an overnight with other members of the class where I was hit with belts. There was a lot of situations where I was physically hit. That kind of stuff wasn't super rare. Yeah.

And I'm not talking about like a big public school. This is actually like a Jewish day school. But again, no matter what you, kids are kids. And honestly, like I know a lot of people who did this now and they're adults and I've never mentioned their names publicly nor would I. Because it turns out that 16, 17 year olds are real dumb and they do dumb stuff.

And, uh, and so, you know, I give them credit for, for becoming better human beings now. And, you know, that's the, that, that is what it, that is what it is. Kids are going to be kids no matter where you go. And particularly young males are going to do aggressive and bad things to each other. That's one of the, uh, oddest horseshoes that I've come back around to. So I was quite badly bullied in school as well. And, uh, to realize that not only was this thing that at the time you really didn't enjoy. And then for a period, you know,

kind of at the mercy of and you've compensated in many ways and it's changed the person that you are but then you end up on the other side of it being somebody that you're very proud of and then you start to think well hang on a second maybe without those things I wouldn't have become this thing but then you also does that mean that I should be thankful for it well maybe not thankful but grateful but then does that disempower the work that I did to alchemize the thing something bad happened to me and I made it into something good so I should be thankful no maybe I should be

proud and it's a very messy lineage have you managed to undo this Gordian Knot I mean I think that

You know, all I can control is the things I can control. If I could retcon it and go back in time, would I have preferred to have not been bullied? Sure. And would I have kids who are now, you know, 10, 8, 4, and 1? Do I want them bullied in school? Of course I don't want them bullied in school. However, do I want them to experience enough adversity that it toughens them? Yes. And whether that comes from other human beings or whether that comes from just life itself, I mean, there's a lot of adversity in life. If you're not prepped for that, you are going to collapse under the weight of it.

And so if you don't have adversity in your life, thank God, you should find adversity. And by that, I don't mean, you know, people who are going to treat you horribly. Start a fight in the street. Yeah, exactly. But I do mean like if you're 15 years old, 16 years old and you have like a really great life, go work for a living, like go for a summer and get a job at McDonald's and get bossed around. Like do things that you don't like to do and find the qualities in yourself that you feel like need to be cultivated and put yourself in a situation where you're forced to cultivate those values.

I mean, whenever I talk to people who have done much more than I have served in the military, for example, they say the same thing. They said they'll go in and very many of them are confused about what they're doing with their life and they come out and they just feel more empowered and like they're ready to take on life and attack life because they've actually been faced with forced adversity, things that they didn't actually want to do and hated in the moment. And I feel like that's true of so many things. I mean, it's true in relationships. I think it's true in exercise. I think it's true in everything. Like if you're not pushing yourself and working to better yourself, you know,

Again, like you wish that you could grow without the pain, but I don't necessarily think that that's the case. I think that you require that in order to grow as a human being. Do you or did you have a chip on your shoulder about those experiences? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, 100%. And how long did it take for that? There's a part of me that thinks about

The alchemy of taking something bad which happened to you and turning it into something which you then benefit from solely as beautiful. But then there's also a bit where I don't want to be driven by that toxic fuel for the rest of my life. It is nothing kind of sadder than the person who's 55 years old who still hasn't been able to let go of what those bullies did to them in school. So can you talk about that sort of process? Honestly, I think this is where the natural life transition from being a single man to being a married man actually makes a huge difference.

So you carry a chip on your shoulder because you're just a dude in a rough world. And then you get married and you start a family and it's like you need to be more than just a dude in a rough world. You're now a protector. You're a provider. People rely on you and you're loved, right? You have a structure around you that provides you love for what you are. The thing that you never had in school, which was somebody else who was standing up for you, that was supporting you through thick and thin no matter what, is now –

what your nuclear family is. Exactly. And I think that, you know, listen, I'm lucky. I have a great set. My parents are awesome and they're always incredibly supportive and we live a mile from them. And, you know, we've always lived a mile from them, you know, our entire marriage. And that's great. And my wife's parents live a mile away. Like we're surrounded by family and that's something that we've built up and kind of deliberately done. And that's wonderful. But I do think that it's one of the reasons why sort of prolonged singlehood for both men and women is a problem because you get stuck in a life stage.

You don't have to, but a lot of people do where you're a single man. You didn't have a great high school or college experience. And now you have a chip on your shoulder and that chip just gets bigger. And it doesn't really change because the mission is about you. Right. At that point, your mission is you. Right. You're looking at you and you're saying, OK, I was bullied. What can I do to avoid being bullied again? What can I do to become the dominant person in the room? And some of that's good, but that's designed so that then you can be dominant on behalf of something else.

And that's when the mission changes. Because when you're trying to dominate on behalf of yourself, then there's no end to that. There's always another hill to climb. But when it's, I need to dominate on behalf of my family, make sure my family is safe. Every day you do that, you're a success. There's no point you reach in sort of single life where it's like, now I am the dominant one. Because there's always another person who's more dominant than you. But your own hierarchy is the hierarchy of you, your wife, your kids. When you're at the top of that hierarchy, there ain't no place to go from there.

Right. You're not picking up a second wife or a second family, I hope. So, you know, that's kind of you've now reached the apex of your dominance hierarchy to use kind of Jordan Peterson language. Yeah. Even if you have integrated or transcended and included in Wilberian language what happened sort of in school, are there any ways that you see that?

where you compensate or present now, which are kind of the progeny of those experiences. I see in some ways a sort of a sternness and a sharp outer edge. It's very difficult. I'm sure that has something to do with it, for sure. I mean, like with my kids, I'm not like this...

at all. Right. And with my wife, I'm not like this, like the thing that people are generally surprised by in personal interactions is that I'm a nice person because the thing that you cultivate is the very like, you know, don't fuck with me. And so I'm sure that some of that comes from bad high school experiences or bad college experiences or whatever it is. I think the other thing that you cultivate is a very self-effacing sense of humor.

Right. Because one of the things you learn when you're bullied is to make jokes about yourself. Take yourself too seriously. Exactly. So what you end up doing is like I'll make I mean, people know those into the show. I make jokes about my physique all the time. Right. Like I'll be reading an ad for for vitamins or for protein drinks. Momentous. Exactly. And I'll be like, you know, this chiseled physique, you know, like this, like a like an ad.

like a Greek God beneath this shirt lies in a 12 pack, you know, that, that kind of stuff. And everybody, you know, it's self-facing. And the truth is I'm in pretty good shape, right? I mean, like I've been working out with a personal trainer since 2013. Uh, you know, my, my, my athletic performance is pretty good. It's not you. I was going to wear a t-shirt and like have a competition here or anything because no man, that was, can we turn the heating up a little, please? We'll make Ben take off that jacket. That'll be good.

Yeah, I wasn't going to do that. But, you know, like those kind of self-effacing jokes about that or about my height or about that sort of stuff that you cultivate as a protective mechanism when you're in high school, for sure. I'll make the joke before somebody else makes the joke about me. It ends up being sort of a degree of humbleness. But again, if it comes from a place of desperation, especially as you get a little bit older, it actually ends up being insincere in another way. Right. So I think it did change. I think that when I was like

22 when I was making those kind of jokes is probably coming from insecurity. Yeah, now I'm pretty secure. So now I just find it funny. What's your advice for people who don't feel like they fit in as a person who perennially maybe didn't for a while? Um, I think it's very often good not to fit in. Again, I think that it cultivates your sense of individuality and your sense that you got to push through. I mean, and this is true in weirdly, like nearly every aspect of my life. So when I am a sports fan,

I'm particularly a big baseball fan. I grew up a Chicago White Sox fan in Los Angeles because my dad was from Chicago. So I picked up all of his allegiances. And so I never went to a baseball game pretty much my entire childhood, maybe a couple of exceptions where I was rooting for the home team. I was always visiting for the rooting for the visiting team. I'm an Orthodox Jew in a society that is largely not Jewish. You know, if you're always the visiting team, then it does force you to sort of define yourself. And I think that that's that's not a bad thing. I think that's that's sort of a good thing.

I think when you feel part of, it's good to feel part of a thing, but it's also good to sometimes stand aside from the thing and see the compare and contrast. Did you ever struggle or have you ever struggled to feel like you're a part of a thing? You have this organization below you now with some ungodly number of staff that work for you. You have peers and colleagues that are sort of at your level as well. But at least in my experience, there is a...

In my less gracious moments, there is a tendency to always see myself on the outside observing things happen over there, that social stuff is this thing. And I'm aware that family life may be a little bit different. But when it comes to the sort of more of the social world side, does that ever do you ever sort of see that creep up inside of you a little watching? Yes, I think particularly in the business sphere. I think that when it comes to my social sphere, the truth is.

So I've had this longtime categorization, which is that I think people tend to be either friends, people or family people. Most of the people I know, you know, whenever there's a hard division where you say it's like these people, it's never true for 100% of people. But there are people who like they love their friends. They want to hang out with their friends. They're very social. They like being out. This is their thing. And then people are like, I want if I were on a desert island with my family, I'd be totally fine.

I don't need to see lots of other people. That's fine with me. I'm definitely a family person. So I spent my entire life not really having tons of close friends. Now I have some close friends, but they're kind of very small in number. Obviously, I'm

best friends with Jeremy Boring. He's the co-CEO of Daily Wire and my co-founder over there. And I have a couple of other friends, one in Israel, one who lives over, a couple who live over here in Florida. But, you know, it's a very small circle. And even my best friends are not even remotely on the same level as my family. Like, there's some people who treat friends like family. And for me, it's like, there's my family and then there's kind of everybody else. That's an interesting solution for people who maybe didn't fit in as kids to...

find a different pathway to take their sense of social belonging from, which is to basically not accept defeat, but go, okay, like, you know, that's a thing. And maybe there's going to be some challenges in this one arena, but this second arena is something that's completely separate. And maybe that was or wasn't the way when I was growing up. So for me, I'm an only child, which means that family life is pretty low down on the totem pole of priorities. But when I'd start a family, I'm going to be fascinated to see

What how much that's going to change? You know, it's going to be something presumably very, very important plan is to have more than one child. So that means that's a good plan. I kids need siblings. Well, I present example shown, but.

Yeah, to just think, to watch the dynamics of siblings in front of you, to see, you know, family life be the single most important thing that's in your entire life. I think it's going to be a different perspective that I hadn't thought of. It's also the hardest thing. And it's the most important thing. And it's by far the hardest thing I do. My business is nothing compared to, you know, dealing with four kids. My kids fight each other all the time. And they're wonderful and they're lovely. And also they're kids.

Anybody who tells you the kids are inherently good has never met a child. Kids are inherently innocent. They're not inherently good. And so, you know, they'll treat each other badly and you have to figure out exactly how to navigate that. But then they'll treat each other well and it's the best thing that's happening in your life. And the way that I've described it to people is that when you're single, you're sort of

variance between happiness and unhappiness on a scale of like zero to ten like when you're very unhappy it's like you're kind of depressed and it's kind of it's kind of bad and when you're very happy it's like okay this is really good everything's really nice then you then you you know get married and with you and your spouse it's like it goes all the way now to probably negative 20 and positive 20 because when you're happy together it's better than it was when when you were happy when you were single but also when things are really bad it's like way worse than it was when you were single if you're at odds with your spouse over something it's significant or if something god forbid terrible is happening with your spouse

way, way worse than anything you were experiencing as a single person. And then you have kids and all limits are removed. Like the happiest things by far in your life are the things that happen with your kids. It's not close. It's like, it's magic. It's stuff that just shapes every aspect of your being. And then when bad stuff is happening with your kids, it wrecks you. I mean, absolutely wrecks you. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Maui Nui Venison. If you're like me, you're always looking for an easy way to get more protein in without compromising on taste, which is why I'm such a massive fan

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choosing to who you have to spend your time with. And then you have this scenario, there's no escape. There's no, I'm not going to be friends with you anymore for a daughter having open heart surgery. Right, exactly. And so I think that the, I'm able to bifurcate pretty easily, kind of parts of my life. It's just something that I'm good at. I do with my time, I can do with humans, and I can do it with sort of my business life and my family life. And anything that was bleeding over, I tried to get rid of. So for example, I don't have Twitter on my phone.

That was bleeding over into my family life because I'd be checking my Twitter. And if I'm trending, which happens once every couple of weeks, then it would ruin my day. And my wife, a few years ago, she said, it's ruining our day. We're out, we're having a nice Sunday with the kids and you're miserable and you're upset and it's ruining your day. So why don't you just take it off your phone? And if something urgent happens, you have a lot of people who work for you, they'll let you know. And if you have to deal with it, you have to deal with it. And that's fine. And I did, I don't have Twitter on my phone and I use it as sort of a marketing mechanism. I'll put out a few tweets a day, but it's made my life

radically better. And so the number one rule is like put down the phone, put out the outside world. The outside world does not exist while you're with your family because your kids don't care. Your kids don't give a shit. Like if I'm having a dad down there. We just want dad here with us. Yeah, exactly. And you know, they are first priority and they know they're first priority. But if you're browsing your phone while you're dealing with your kids, they don't feel like your first priority. Like the...

The iPhone has ruined a lot of lives and made things a lot worse. Well, it's interesting that you and Sam Harris, I mean, you went for the just off the phone. Sam went for completely off platform. I think Jordan has a perennial battle between him and Twitter. I think it's been a warping dynamic for him many a time. But yeah, it's interesting that...

the thing that a lot of people do for fun when you get to whatever close to the most followed within that platform, people are desperately trying to rip this sort of ejector seat button to get it away from them. Well, the worst thing on Twitter is by far the replies button, right? I mean, because...

If you want to talk about an ego machine, Twitter's an ego machine, right? Everybody's talking about me. Everybody's interested in me. Yes, all the time. Like, look at that. It's a new second and there are 10 more people who have mentioned my name. And that's like, that feeds like the worst part of you as a human being. And so just taking yourself out of that and touching grass, touch grass has been a big thing for me. Yeah, yeah. The Brett Cooper approach. The, uh,

What about from a mindfulness standpoint, do you have, I'm sure that you'll have prayer and stuff like that. Have you got anything else that helps you to dissolve that ego and keep it in check? My wife, I mean, just having kids, it's kind of a natural part of life when you find yourself cleaning up vomit at 3 a.m. You're like, well, I do have 9 million Facebook followers. Here I am and it's 3 a.m. and I'm cleaning up vomit. Well, you know, that's life. It's something my wife and I joke about all the time. It's like, okay, you know, like there's,

the social world, the social media world, the I'm famous and people want to take pictures with me world. And then, and people hate my guts world. And then there's the like, okay, somebody's got to take out the garbage right now. And you know, the more you fill up your life with the, you've got to take out the, also I happen to be very fortunate. My wife does not give a shit about any of this. Like my, my wife is a wonderful person. We met well before I was very famous. I was 23 shoes, 20.

So we've been married now 16 years and she and we have four kids and she doesn't care about any of this. Like I'll have a week where like there was one week earlier this year where I went to Auschwitz with Elon. And the same week we launched a rap song with Tom McDonald, the hit number one on the rap chart. I was like in one week and I got home. It was like a Friday night and my wife was telling me about the kids. And and then I was like, yeah, it was kind of a busy week. She's like, oh, yeah, tell me about it.

I went to Auschwitz with Elon. I'm currently the number one rap artist in America. Right, and she's like, that's really cool. The dishes do need doing if you could hurry up and crack them. And nothing is going to make it real more than that. How much do you think a lot of the compensatory mechanisms, the searching for meaning and stuff that a lot of people have at the moment, mindfulness, how am I going to fulfill my logos and carry my personal actualization forward?

is just surrogate family life that hasn't yet happened. I think it's that. I think, I mean, not all of it, but I think a lot of it because it turns out a lot of it is also like you have a lot of time on your hands to be thinking about those sorts of things requires time, but also the amount of time that you have on your hands means you're sitting there and thinking about

these things. I mean, when I was in law school, I thought about a lot of these things because I had a lot of time. I was by myself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was winter outside. You couldn't do anything. And so you're sitting there for hours reading law books and then reading other books and philosophy and that sort of thing. Then you have kids and it's like, I don't have time for this. Are you kidding? Like, you know what my purpose is in life? My purpose right now is changing my son's diaper.

That's my purpose in life right now. And it turns out that's actually not a bad purpose in life. It's the human equivalent of chop wood, carry water. Yeah, exactly. Change diapers. So this is the thing that I think in our sort of rationalistic society, the thing that we, since the Enlightenment, we've thought about is we have to think through everything we do. Everything we do has to be thought through. There has to be a reason for it. What's the reason for it? And I think the thing that traditional religion has always said, and frankly, that doesn't require religion, Aristotle said it too, is like, go do the thing and you will become the thing.

Right. You want to be virtuous, go do virtuous things. And you know what? You don't, you don't become virtuous by contemplating virtue. The way that you become virtuous is by going and doing things that are virtuous things. I go and help other people go take care of your kids, go do something for your community, go out and earn, go out and build a business. These are, these are virtuous things and they make you feel good. Right. The, the, the first prescription for somebody who is suffering from some sort of depression should be like, get off your ass and go do something. Yeah. You need to. Trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction. It,

It's just... That's a really interesting point to consider,

If you think about egotism as somebody who doesn't do a thing believing that they're worthy of it, but the opposite problem that I think a lot of people that listen to podcasts like this may have, which is someone who is an insecure overachiever. Outwardly, they're doing the things, they're working hard, outworking many other people, and yet still do not feel worthy of perhaps the praise or the accolades or the self-esteem that they should based on what they're doing. What would you say to people for whom the actions and self-

is detached in the wrong direction. I mean, if you are achieving and if you are doing the things you're supposed to be doing, then go easy on yourself is what I would say. I think that the general societal problem obviously tends to be the other way, which is people who have unearned self-esteem based on not doing the thing. If you're doing the thing and you don't have the self-esteem, then...

So that's when I think that you can say, kind of screw the people around me who are not providing me what's like, this is, you know, how I felt in high school and college probably. It's like, I'm doing all these cool things. I'm doing all these things and I'm not getting the notoriety. And the way that you can, the way that you can react to that is with bitterness, uh,

Or you can basically just say, listen, I know I'm good enough and I know what I'm doing is good. Now, that's that's not that's easier said than done. Easy for me to say now I have a very happy family life. It's a lot harder when you're in high school. And I was a virtuosic violinist when I was in high school. I was a really, really good violinist and studying for one of the top 10 teachers in the world. And, you know, every talent show was the same. There'd be a talent show at the high school and I'd get up there and I'd play something virtuosic. I'd be playing.

you know, Prelude of an Allegro by Fritz Kreisler or something that I'd worked really hard on. And then some schmuck would get up there and play three chords on a guitar and sing badly. And all the girls would be like, oh my God, I love Wonderwall. And I'd be like, oh God. You chose the wrong instrument. I mean, that was a strategic error. By my parents. Yeah, exactly. When you're five, you don't get to choose. Yeah. I'm not making that mistake with my son. He's learning to play guitar. That's, I learned my lesson. Very good. Yeah. That's so funny. I think you touched on something I've been pretty fascinated by recently, which is,

The direction of sympathy that always goes toward type B people who have a type A problem, not type A people who have a type B problem. Hey, you need to chill out more. You're overworking. You're going to be burned out. You don't give yourself the credit that you need because.

Everybody knows that the worldly outcomes that that person is going to get are always going to be better. The insecure overachiever, despite the fact that they may be totally miserable and never able to give themselves credit, is at least from a structural real world standpoint going to be in a better position than the type B person who's never able to get off the couch. It's super true. And I think that that's another thing that we can say here is that for me, for example, I had to learn. That's a learned skill. Like being easy on yourself is...

is a learned skill. And that, take for example, vacationing. I used to suck at vacationing, like be truly awful at it. We'd go on a vacation with the family, three hours in, I was like, I need to be doing work. I have just an inner, I'm one of these people that has like an inner compulsion where if I have two hours free and I haven't actually accomplished anything in those two hours, I get angry at myself. I'm like, what are you doing? Why aren't you like writing a book? Why aren't you doing a thing? And people will be like, why are you so efficient? It's like, because I have a drive to do, like I'll write books. I

Like right now, I haven't had a book that I've published since 2021. I have like four in the can just for fun. I'll sit and I'll write a book. Like those are those are things that I'll do. And it's in. So I had to learn and my wife helped me with this. Like when it's on vacation, you have a duty to yourself to actually like let yourself just breathe that that's called recharging the batteries. You need to actually take the time.

And so it used to take me like full on two to three days in a vacation to actually get into vacation mode and get out of work mode. And now it's fairly instantaneous. Now it's like, okay, I turn off the phone, I turn off the computer and now I'm fairly ready to go. Yeah. I think about most people need to be taught to develop a good work ethic and no sympathy is given to the people who need to develop a good rest ethic. And, um, I just love that. I love that frame. And it's something I'm really going to work on both for myself now as yet unfamilied, but can't wait to do it. Uh,

with all of the trappings of the stuff that you know kind of on this trajectory journey type thing and it's very easy to become increasingly obsessed with an increasingly seductive amount of work and set of resources that you can leverage that with. For sure. I mean, I think that there is a law of diminishing returns in terms of the kind of, you know, stuff that you put in, right? You do it at a certain level and, you know, each additional unit, at the very beginning, each additional unit of work you put in is going to have tremendous results. I mean, it's going to look like an arithmetic increase and then,

It turns out that each individual unit of work that you put in is starting to have sort of like mildly diminishing results. And then you get to the point where it's negative. It's negative where you actually are working so hard that you're actually undermining, like you're unhappy about the thing that you're doing. And if you're unhappy about the thing that you're doing and you're frustrated with the thing you're doing, you do need a break. And I mean, in my industry, that's particularly true. I mean, it's very easy to fall into despair following politics daily. It's not a healthy profession, just mentally. And so there are times where it's like, I just...

I need to zone out. Now I will say that I'm lucky. That's what, you know, God tells me I have to do that once a week. So Shabbat is, Shabbat's indispensable. You've got that programmed in. How were you on Shabbat? Um,

If you were struggling to let go of the work thing and you've got, I don't know Shabbat inside out, but I was listening to you talk about the fact that you couldn't use a highlighter, but you can use post-it notes. Yes, you're not allowed to write, but you're allowed to put removable sticky notes kind of. Right, okay. I mean, that sounds like quite a Jewish solution to a very Jewish problem. It is. That's exactly right. We were like workarounds that accomplish kind of the same thing without violating the rules. Yes. Yeah, and I think the non-Jewish answer to that is like, what the fuck?

Like, why are you doing all that? And the answer that I usually give to that question is because when you obliterate the rule, you end up

actively undermining something bigger than the rule. I think one of the things that modern society has said is, why do we have these sort of formalistic workarounds? To take a more broad example, to take old age. So you have somebody who's older and they're suffering from some sort of debilitating disease and they're dying. And so what we'll say to them, we'll put them in hospice and then we'll say, okay, well, we will alleviate your pain. And by alleviate your pain, very often that means we're going to give you enough morphine that you're going to die. So why not just allow euthanasia?

And the answer is because there are actual consequences to allowing as a society euthanasia in which you now get into a different moral matrix, right? Where the different moral matrix is all about like, well, who deserves to live? Who deserves to die? Why should suicide be wrong if euthanasia is okay, right? You get into a whole different moral matrix. Whereas if you say, well, it's the doctrine of double effect, a Catholic idea that you're attempting to alleviate pain, but what you're achieving is the death of the person, then it's

That sounds formalistic. So there's a lot of that in Judaism. It's like, okay, well, why not just obliterate the rule and let you write on Sabbath? Because like, well, okay, well, if I can write on Sabbath, well, then that now allows me to materially change the world in particular ways. And that principle is now broader and allows other things. That's the brief explanation of a rules-based Judaism. How you litigated your way around being able to use a highlighter on a Friday. Exactly. There's always an abstruse explanation, but yeah, Friday night, everything goes off. Going back to the wife discussion, you got engaged to your wife after knowing her for

Three months. Three months? Three months, yeah. What have you come to believe about how to pick the right partner and make that work long-term? So I think that picking the right partner is actually, it's funny you say this, not all that difficult. The reason I say that is because everyone is looking in the wrong place. There are two things that obviously need to be physically attracted to your partner. We as a society have said that that's like the number one by far, but I'm not going to pretend it's not important. Of course it's important. I think my wife is beautiful.

Um, yeah, I think she was a hot number. I always thought she was a hot number. The, but when it comes to the, the thing that made me marry her, as opposed to just being interested in dating her or something, I, the, that thing was the values on our very first date. We got into discussion of how many kids you'd want to have. What, what do you want your family life to look like? What level of Jewish observance are you interested in? We had like an hour discussion on free will versus determinism. It's like on our first date at a coffee bean in Santa Monica, it's like a three and a half hour first date. Um,

And then I said, sounds like an inquisition. Yeah. I mean, she may have felt that way. But before we got out of the, before she got out of the car, I said to her, like, I don't hold by this, you know, stupid rule where I'm not going to call you for three days and you're gonna be on sensor hooks and I'll be on sensor hooks. So how about this? If you're interested, let's just, when do you want to go out next?

And so we made a date in the car and then we saw each other, you know, virtually every day after that. And after three and a half, two and a half months, I said, I love you. And she said, thank you. And that was and I was very insulted at the time because for about a month, every conversation ended with I love you and thanks. Catch you later. And then but it was smart because when she finally did say I love you, the next words out of my mouth were, so let's get married.

Like, we're done. Mission accomplished. We're finished here. And she was 20. She'd just turned 20 in August, and this was like...

October, November, uh, it was November. And, and she, and she's like, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know. Maybe we should take our time. Maybe you should just enjoy this time. I was like, let me explain. I'm not enjoying this time at all. I think this time is terrible. So part of that is of course, we're both religious, right? So, you know, one of the things that's fallen by the wayside in modern society is if you're religious, you don't sleep with each other before you're married. So I was like, none of this is enjoyable or I'm not enjoying the possibility that we're going to break up. I'm not enjoying the, there's nothing happening physically. Like none of this is happening. So, you know,

How about this? How about we get married and then we'll both be happy and that'll be great. And she thought about that for about a week and pushed me off for about a week. And then she's like the most romantic thing she ever said to me. We were talking about this and she realized that the reason she wasn't saying yes is because she was afraid of what people would think getting engaged that quickly. And so she turned to me and she goes, people are full of shit and we're engaged. And so that was so we got married in July of that of the next year.

And in terms of staying married, I mean, you find out things about your spouse that you never knew, like depth that you never knew. If it's values based, you don't have to worry about that being a fundamental break in the relationship.

Every surprise is a surprise on a wide variety of different levels. Most of the surprises are great. Some of them are not. What are the best questions that you think for perhaps someone who's non-Jewish to work out those values? What are the really important values? So I think that

I'm a big proponent of Jewish or not Jewish. You should marry somebody who is like-minded values wise. I do not think diversity of values in marriage is a good idea. Agreed. So, so if, if you are Christian, I think you should probably marry somebody Christian. If you're Muslim, I think you should marry somebody Muslim. I, I, again, I think that that makes the biggest value is, do you agree on how you want to raise your children? That's what marriage was built for. Marriage is built for raising kids. That's what it's for. I don't, I frankly don't care how people structure their personal lives in terms of their personal relations.

I don't, I mean, I can think things are sinful or not. It makes no difference to me on a practical sociopolitical level. The thing that actually matters to me in terms of building a society is what does the family structure look like that is geared toward the proper creation and raising of children? When you say the way you want to raise your kids, what do you mean specifically? So what religious precepts do you want to teach them? What, uh,

What values do you think are most important? Some people think tolerance is the most important value. Some people think that rules-based living is the most important value. Some people believe that it should sort of be free-range parenting. And some people are like, no, this is the way that it's going to go. And these are the values I want to instill in my kids. So a lot of that boils down to kind of specific circumstances. So for me and my wife, it was like, do you want to send your kids to Jewish school versus do you want to send them to public school? How religious do we want to be? Do we want to keep like

you know, a fairly religious version of Sabbath or not. It gets abstruse in Judaism to the point where it's like, okay, in religious circles, women tend to wear skirts instead of pants, for example, because they, because,

The Bible says that women should not wear men's clothing. They should not wear women's clothing. So the more religious you get, the more that's interpreted as women should wear traditionally female clothing and men should wear pants, right? And so, you know, when we have kids and our daughter is 16, what kind of school do we want her to be going to and what do we want her to be wearing? You can get down to even that level. Nitty gritty. Yeah. Just on the...

saying I love you thing, a study that came out that I learned in the New York Post a couple of years ago. In heterosexual relationships, who usually says I love you first? Research finds that men are more likely than women to say it first. On average, men say it's 69 days into the relationship. So I think you were pretty much bang in the middle of the normal distribution. Yeah, I mean, that's right. I think that's right. The difference is that now, it used to be that people would do that and then they're...

We were the normal trajectory. The normal trajectory was like three months in, you figured out whether this is a thing or not. And then you're, you know, have an engagement and then you're married within a year. And now the normal thing is you might say that to each other and then you might date for six years and then maybe you fall out of love. And by which we mean you fall into companionate love as opposed to passionate love. And then you mistake the thing and then you're like, oh my God, look at that hot chick over there. We can have passionate love again. And it's like trying to, you know, working to maintain passionate love in a companionate love situation.

Without kids to bond it together. I've talked about this so much, and especially when you fold hormonal birth control into this as well, it becomes really, really messy. But there does seem to be this sort of trajectory that straight up non-child births

nuclear family, so basically just partners. Maybe you're married, maybe you're not. But after about between four and seven years, sometimes people just, I don't know, don't seem to like their partner so much and they're not really too sure what's going on. And there's an argument from an evolutionary psychology perspective that if two people

two people are in a relationship together and no kids have come about, something is wrong. Maybe it's wrong with you. Maybe it's wrong with them. But if you guys break up, maybe the fertility... Because there was no time in our evolutionary past when two people would have been together. There was no reliable birth control. So what was going to happen? There was some incompatibility. So it's good for you guys to break up. And I got shredded on the internet for this by most of the people that saw the reel. Meanwhile, I'm like...

The evidence is just there. Well, I mean, also, what is the, so the question that I've always asked about marriage, and I get in trouble every time I ask this, but it is the only question that matters. What is the social utility of a relationship? The social utility of a relationship, not utility to you, not your personal utility, not your personal enjoyment. What is the social utility of a relationship? The social utility of a relationship is man, woman, children.

That is the social utility of the relationship. Otherwise, just to interject that there is maybe an argument that it domesticates men, that it reduces risk taking behavior from young guys. I mean, I think that that is true to an extent. And I think it really only kicks in when you have kids.

Testosterone drops when you get married. Testosterone drops again when you have kids. Exactly. And so what ends up happening, I would assume, is over time, the testosterone, if you don't have kids, probably tends to start trending up again. Good point. So that's why whenever we have discussions of marriage and people are like, what about gay marriage? Listen, structure life however you want. I don't want the government criminalizing whatever social arrangement you've made. What I do want is an acknowledgement that if

society has an interest in a particular relationship, that there is a difference in kind between a relationship that is built on man, woman, children than on any other type of relationship, any other type of relationship. It's a different thing. And so you can make the case, I think it's not a very good case, that the government has nothing to do with any of this sort of stuff. That's fine. I get it. But all of society does actually depend on man, woman, children. I mean, like the progeneration of society, just clinically speaking, depends on that thing.

And the stability of that social unit. And that's why traditionally we call that thing marriage. And your commitment was not just to your spouse. Your commitment was to the marriage, right? Your commitment was to the higher instant. Because what else could you commit to? I mean, when you say that I'm committing to my wife, right? You first get married. I'm committing to my wife. You don't know your wife.

You know what your wife's going to be like in 10 years. You know what you're going to be like in 10 years, right? Lots of shit's going to happen. Things are going to change. You're going to go through crisis. You're going to go through successes and failures and sufferings and all that sort of stuff. The thing you can commit to right now is the thing that won't change, which is the nature of the institution. In the same way that like when you sign up for a job, you're signing up for, are you signing up for a quote unquote relationship with your boss? Are you signing up for like the job? Your boss might change. Yeah. Right? Like that's a different thing. What about navigating change?

relationships long-term and keeping that effective? So I think that the key there is, so I've said a few of these things before, but one of them is try to have more expectations of yourself than you have of your spouse.

So the very easiest thing to do is something doesn't get done. You're like, oh my God, I can't believe my spouse didn't do that. And you might be right. Maybe it's annoying that your spouse didn't do that. But pick up after the thing anyway. It's not about having equal roles in the relationship or everything is equal. It's about like, are you both doing the best? Are you both efforting it? Are you both doing the best that you can? If there's a sock on the floor and she walks right by it and you pick it up, yeah, it's annoying that you walk right by it. But hopefully next time she's going to be the one who picks it up when you miss it.

That's the number one. I mean, the number two is that you actually do have to take some time for yourself. So, I mean, my wife and I try to actually, this is the hardest thing because, again, we have four children, is to actually like take time and be like, okay, we're going to go out to dinner. It's actually important. We're going to try and spend time looking at each other, not at screens. You actually have to take time to focus on one another.

Again, highly recommend Sabbath. Excellent time. Like Friday nights, our kids go to bed and then we have like three hours just talking, hanging out and it's great. And we're not watching whatever's on Apple TV. And I, listen, I get it. We watch a lot of TV. I mean, like you're zonked after a day where, you know, our

My typical days, I wake up at like 6 a.m. with the kids, 6.15 with the kids. I'm with them until they go to school at 8 a.m. I work. I come and do the show. I work. I do meetings. I do writing. I pick them up from school at like 3.30 or somebody else does. They're home by 3.34. I do homework with them. I hang out with them until they go to bed. They go to bed. I work for another hour and a half. And then we like hang out. And so it's either like by that time, we might both be brain dead. You know, it's 9 p.m. We've both been working all day. But you do have to take time out.

with your spouse. And you also have to, you know, and this is one that clarity with your spouse is a big one. Communication is a very hard one because I tend to be the kind of person who'll suck it up. I'll just suck it up.

And so my wife will say like, okay, you're sucking it up and you're sucking it up and you're sucking it up for like six months. Then you'll have to blow out. Oh my God, I can't deal with this. I'm so mad. I need to like, and she said, it would be better if you like didn't just suck it up. Just like, tell me what's going on early on. Yeah, exactly. And that's been a problem for me on a, on a personal level, because again, I'm the kind of person, whether work or anything else, I'll just work my way through it, man. I will just grit my way through this thing. And you can't really do that with, with a relationship. You do have to be

fully honest about the things. There's a lot of blow up risk when you do that. There's this idea called the region beta paradox where things aren't that bad, but they're not that good. And

people get stuck in this period of being comfortably numb. But I realized that a lot of people who are type A have a reverse region beta paradox, which is that anyone weaker or with less resilience would have been kicked out the bottom of this workload, but not you. You're the David Goggins of doing work. You'd like, who's going to carry the workload? I'll just keep doing it until the rest of time. Right. And yeah, in some ways that's very virtuous and we should uphold it, but sometimes you're patting yourself on the back for it. And then, and then it's, and it's unsustainable. Like eventually it's a pathology. I guess,

Talking about men, a lot of people associate the right with being pro-men and masculinity. Now, what do you wish more young men realized? What masculinity is. I think that there's been a concerted movement on the right to treat masculinity as lifting weights and having sex and driving awesome cars. And

You can do all of those things, and I'm not saying any of those things are bad. I think in their proper context, all of those things are quite good. But that is not the core of what masculinity is. You do all those things in service of another thing. Those are what we would call instrumental goods. They're not inherent goods. They're things that are designed for another thing. You lift weights in order so that you can be strong. So you can pick up your kids. You can pick up the groceries. You can stay healthy for your family. So you can be attractive to your spouse. Right?

These are all, it's an instrumental good. It's not an inherent good. You're not inherently more virtuous because you picked up weights. It's a useful thing. In the same way that earnings, right? Your income is an instrumental good. You're not inherently a better person because you have a higher income. I've had much lower income than I have, like much lower income than I've had right now. And right now I have a really, really healthy income.

That didn't make me a better person. What makes me a better person is how I use that income. Why am I earning the income? It's an instrumental good. The same thing is true with regard to sex, sex within the context of a committed marriage, which is designed to foster love between you and your spouse and to, and yes, to make babies on multiple occasions that,

That is an instrumental good. It is a very, very, it is inherently enjoyable and pleasurable and all that stuff. And that's why God made it that way. It's also an instrumental good that is designed toward a higher good, which is the maintenance of the marriage. It's why extramarital sex, for example, is bad, right? So this is, so I think that the way that we treat masculinity now, and I think it's,

The more I just live in the political sphere and the philosophical sphere, which I've been doing now this for a while. I'm 40, but I've been doing this since I was 17. So I've been doing this for 23 years. The more you follow this sort of stuff, the more you realize that everything is reactionary. Everything is reactionary. And so I think that the modern conception of what masculinity is, is a direct response to what feminism said masculinity cannot be. So feminism said masculinity is not about you taking care of your kids because men are unnecessary to the raising of children.

of children. It's not about being a husband because women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle. It's not about providing because a woman can be in the workplace and she can earn on her own. And some men were like, okay, what are the things that are left? What are the things that are left? The things that are left are what that I can do. I can weightlift. I can, I can earn, I can have lots of sex with random ladies without really trying to cultivate any of them for marriage. Uh, you know, I can, I can do all those things on my own because feminists don't want me to do any of these things. And instead of sort of

muscling their way back into what traditional roles are, which would require a difference in the way feminism perceives female roles. It's all complementary. In other words, you can't have a traditional masculinity without a traditional femininity. And traditional femininity is good. And traditional femininity does not require that a woman not be in the workplace. My wife is a doctor. It doesn't require that a woman be quote-unquote

totally submissive or anything like that. It requires that she be a partner to you, just as you are a partner to her. That's what masculinity constitutes. And so, again, I think that that's been now seen as sort of a washed out, compromising version of masculinity, which annoys the hell out of me. I remember I had this interchange with Andrew Tate on X at one point where he was, I can't remember, he was ripping on me and saying something about masculinity. And I was like, well, I have four kids and I know all of them. Like I have four kids. I know all of them. I raise all of them. I provide for all of them. I defend my house.

You have like a complex in Romania with some fancy cars and some cam girls. Like, I don't know, like maybe that's your definition of masculinity. If it is, that's a dying version of masculinity. It is not maintainable and it doesn't build anything. Masculinity is about taking the very male drive. Males have a drive. It's an aggressive drive. That's going to be used in one of two ways. See, they're going to beat up.

knock shit down or build shit up. Those are the only two things that men are capable of doing. We either knock things down. I see it in my sons, right? My eight-year-old, my one-year-old. The only things they want, my girls are nurturers, right? They want to play with the dolls. They want to play house. My boys are like,

I'm either going to build a structure or I'm going to knock down the structure. These are like the only two choices to build a thing or knock it down. And that doesn't change. Men are always like that. So are you going to be a person who builds a thing or are you going to be a person who knocks down a thing? And there's a time for knocking down things, right? When there are bad things out there, there are bad guys out there, you got to knock them down. But if your version of masculinity does not include a thing that you wish to build, then you're a destructive force in the universe. What have you learned since becoming closer to Jordan Peterson? So, Ellen.

I love Jordan. Jordan's great. Jordan's constant willingness to delve is fascinating. Well, we got along the first time we met. I mean, when I met him, he was way less famous. When we met, I don't know, it was like 2015, 2016 maybe. This is right when Bill C-16 was happening. We were both speaking at some event in Canada. And the first thing that we did is we started exchanging book lists.

And so, yeah, there are a bunch of concepts I've learned from Jordan. I mean, I think that his read on the original structure of meaning in the world and maps and meaning is fantastic. I've used it in sort of biblical analysis of my own. Again, Jordan is somebody who really, really likes to search. That's the thing. And it's always an inspiration to watch him kind of go search for those answers.

Even if I don't always agree with his answers, I think they're really interesting. What about the pivot that he's made? Obviously, since coming to DW, it seems like he's been talking more about politics and also more about religion at the same time. There's a bit of me and I think a lot of my audience, John's been on the show three times now, that really misses the spit and sawdust sort of down to earth, less symbolic stuff. Mm hmm.

I wonder, I would love to see him arc back around. I agree with a lot of that. I mean, I think that's where Jordan's at his, and I think he's the best in the world at that. I think he's literally the best in the world at that. Me too. I think that a lot of the sort of recent vacuum that has sucked in other voices for whether it be masculinity, men's movement, personal development, has been laid at the feet of Jordan's music.

moving on abandonment of that for other stuff, whether it be politics, whether it be religion. I think there's some truth to that. I think also because Jordan has been, I mean, it's been a wild trajectory for Jordan. I think because of that, as you, you know, experience more kind of power in the universe, as you, as you have a bigger and bigger following, I think Jordan feels a responsibility to delve into these areas. And, but I, I agree. I think that a lot of his best stuff is the kind of 12 rules for life. Here's the thing that you can do this morning. That's going to make your life, uh,

a lot better. And I think that Jordan is, is going to swing back around to that. I think he's, he's taking in a lot of big ideas and I think you're going to see him infuse that back into kind of the smaller, I'd love that. I think hard. Yeah. I think that would be very much like a, I don't know, return to, I would love that. I still think that's his, I agree with you. And I think that, you know, he has a new book coming out. That's sort of about analysis of the Bible and it's great. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff in there. That's fantastic. And, and,

And him being able to sort of reduce that back down to like, if you see a cat pet it, you know, like that, that kind of stuff. That's the best stuff of Jordan. And if you watch Jordan speak, that's what's great about Jordan. Watching Jordan speak is almost like watching a really great magician do a trick. He'll kind of do a bunch of stuff out here and like, I don't even see how all these puzzle pieces fit together. And then he'll go, and that's bloody well God, isn't it? And you're like, oh, wow, that was cool. That was a really cool trick. He brings it back into land. Have you changed much since being friends with him? Has there been anything that you've adjusted in yourself? Yeah.

I think that the temptation toward advice giving has definitely increased because when you talk to Jordan, he's constantly talking about how do you affect people on a personal level. I think that there's been a weird sort of shift in the sense that I used to do kind of pure politics and no life advice, and now I do a little bit more life advice and maybe slightly less politics, and he does more politics and more life advice. So maybe we're having a nefarious influence on one another. But I think that...

Again, I don't think there's a better voice on planet Earth for kind of the values that young men should hold than Jordan. I agree about the... I always want to ask people about their personal philosophies, about how they approach life. I understand that after a while, you kind of need to transcend yourself and stop being so solipsistic or narcissistic or whatever, and you need to actually go out there and affect things. Also, Jordan's very intellectually curious, and I think that

anybody who has a high IQ and is intellectually curious, it's very easy to sort of get bored in this fear that you're in and be like, I don't want to explore like a new field now. Fully understood. Jordan is constantly doing that sort of stuff. But I do think he's going to, you know, and I think increasingly you're seeing it. He's going to bring it back into a lot of these messages that are easier to digest. Yeah. Let's put it that way. There was a Kurt Vonnegut quote that I came across recently that I want to talk to you about. We are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Do you ever worry about becoming a caricature of yourself that you're

there are incentives that align in order for you to play into a niche that you've already carved out. Basically,

How do you allow yourself to change privately when the world has expectations of you publicly? And is there a tension or a friction between those two things? I mean, the truth is that I think that I'm pretty well on air who I'm off air. I think that the perception of me for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from the titling of YouTube videos to sort of how I'm perceived on Twitter is a bit different. Listen, Twitter as a medium tends to suck out your vitriol and your acid, and you're not going to have a lot of... Not at your best. Well, I...

Yeah, I mean, in the... At my best as a human, sure. I mean, I struggle to think of anybody who's at their best as a human...

on Twitter because either you're, it's very one-dimensional Twitter. You're either the person who's like the self-help guru on Twitter, you're like Adam Grant or something, you know, Adam's great, or you're, you know, kind of in the combat mode in Twitter. And, you know, it's a mechanism of distribution and you see that. In terms of my show, I think people actually have a pretty good read on me if they watch the show because I do talk about from time to time family stuff or I will talk about, you

Again, even the show tends to be more political because the daily political show, if you watch, if you watch, it's easy to say this, but if you watch the vast compendium of the things that I do and I do like a bunch of different shows, then that's me. Like you put all those different, but every show has to focus on sort of a different thing. So if you watch me in discussion with Anna Kasparian or something, you'll see a different side of me than you would if I was like hard pressing on Kamala Harris on today's show.

And so those are all different facets of me. And if you put them all together, then that's very close to what I am in private life. When I talk on a show like this, I'm not sure that there's something radically different. I think that the questions that are being elicited are radically different. And so that changes. It's really funny. I've mentioned this in the context of different political debates. So I will say a thing that if I said it on my show, my audience would be mad at me. If I say it to Bill Maher, my audience is super happy with me.

Right. So if I what's an example? Okay. So if I say I think that Donald Trump has a lot of personal foibles, I think that he says a lot of dumb stuff on truth social, and I think it doesn't help him in his race, then my audience might get mad at me for saying that on my show. I'll say, look, listen, I want him to win. I think Kamala Harris is terrible. I think she'll be an awful president.

if Trump wants to win, he needs to stop doing dumb crap on Truth Social. My audience might be a little mad at me. If I go on Bill Maher and I say, listen, I think Donald Trump does a lot of stupid crap on Truth Social. He really needs to win. Kamala Harris can be a terrible president. Then my entire audience is like, he's telling Bill Maher. Right? They understand that the medium is the message in many ways. Exactly. So I think that that's something to keep in mind. I've likened it to the optical illusion where you have two different, where you have a color and it's a color red and it's the same exact color red. But if you put

it next to, you know, one color, it looks purple. And if you put it next to another color, then it looks more red. Yeah. So I think over time as well, the thing that I'm particularly interested in is there are expectations by your audience that if you continue to nudge those over time, well, this isn't the Ben that we had previously, even within this context of the show. And yeah, I just...

I wonder about what happens as you grow up as your philosophical viewpoint. It's definitely a struggle. I mean, not even in terms of philosophical viewpoint, but in terms of where you put your focus. One of the things that, you know, as a business, one of the things that you have to consider is what does my audience want of me? Not even in terms of viewpoint, but in terms of content, for example. So just to give an example, I love talking about the Bible. I know the Bible super well, right? I mean, in the original Hebrew, uh,

We read it every single week. I've done it for 30 years. I know, I know, you know, the, I venture to say that I know, you know, the five books of Moses, at least, as well as anybody who's not a rabbi. And so, but does my audience want to hear my deep read on Genesis? Right. So like, I'll talk with Jordan about Genesis and Jordan's wonderful. And Jordan has a wide variety of interests that he can bring to bear and all these different things where he's talking about religion.

but he doesn't read Hebrew, right? I mean, like I read Hebrew. I know all that stuff. I can translate it. I know all of the commentaries on it for a thousand years. Like, does my audience really want me to analyze Genesis? Yeah, probably not. I mean, like we tried this. We had a book club and the book club was, you know,

we'd read like great works of literature so we'd read Moby Dick. So the one where yeah you were on a deck of a ship. Right exactly so we did one with Moby Dick and it's like I love that stuff right I love literary literary analysis I read tons does my audience desperately want my analysis of Moby Dick it turned out not so it's like okay well that's something that they don't want. Do you ever wish that you didn't do a daily show you're kind of at the mercy of whatever bullshit happens in the press P. Diddy gets arrested today guess what we're doing five minutes on P. Diddy because it's important for us to I don't know whether

Yeah, and I didn't cover that in the slightest. I'm so uninterested in that I couldn't possibly care. And there's a certain level of stuff where I'm sure the audience cares and I can't bring myself to care, so I just won't cover it. Unless it's in a funny way. I won't make a dumb video about the VMAs or something. As someone who...

thinks about ideas across a long period of time, who likes to read classics, who's reading stuff in Hebrew, there must be a desire in you to make a Lindy body of work. Yes. And yet, I don't know. I listened to a lot of your show during 2020 because that was the only way I could get daily updates on what the hell was happening with a global pandemic. Right.

I don't know how many people are going back and listening to May 2020 Ben episodes. So is there a part of you that go, like, I know I've got the books and I've got the other bits and pieces. Is that pull becoming more? It's a deep struggle. It's like the thing that I want to do

Is that the thing my audience wants to do? Is that something I can justify spending, you know, money to actually produce? I mean, I've done a pilot episode of what a biblical commentary would look like. Is that something my audience wants from me? I've done, you know, one of the things that I'd love to do is, this I do think our audience would love it.

is something called the historians, which is I want to sit with a group of historians on particular topics and basically do a roundtable where we talk about like the history of World War II. I think the audience would dig that and I think that'd be very cool and get Neil Ferguson and get John Keegan and get, you know, Victor Davis Hanson in a room and like just sit around a table and do like, let's start in 1933 and do history of World War II. Like people would, I think would dig that. But I have those big ideas already

You can't indulge all of your personal. Oh, my God. I mean, the stuff that I'm really interested in, if you look at my nightstand, there's nothing on Daily News. I don't put Daily News on my nightstand. I mean, the stuff that's on my nightstand is typically like a deep read on military conflict over Taiwan's rights.

Right. Like, is my audience deeply invested? Now, that may come in useful. Like if China attacks Taiwan, I'm going to know a lot more than sort of the normal commentator would on that. Well, I know as much as somebody who studies it for a living. No. But will I know 70 percent of that? Sure. And that's good enough, you know, to work. But in terms of like establishing a long term body, listen, the thing that I'm proudest of in terms of like one product that I've created is the right side of history, which is basically a review of Western philosophy over the course of about 250 pages.

It was the hardest thing I've had to write. I think it was a really interesting and cogent book. And I think it has shelf life. I think it'll last the test of time. That's part of the problem with doing a daily show. You're exactly right. And I wonder how much video is going to be permanent anyway. I mean, meaning that what's the last kind of political or philosophical video that you've watched that wasn't made in the last year or two? I think that the nature of video is kind of transitory unless you're talking about like

from 25 years ago that's self-encapsulated, but a piece of nonfiction content. Like,

Everybody knows who's politically aware that Milton Friedman did an entire series called Free to Choose. Has anybody ever watched Free to Choose? Probably not. So in the nonfiction space, very difficult to create kind of quote-unquote permanent content. Archival, as Eric calls it. Exactly. So that's where books come in, and that's why I'm still interested in writing books. We'll probably come out with a couple in the next few years. But it's definitely a struggle. I like talking big ideas. It's the thing that I'm most interested in.

And sometimes the politics of the day does not lend itself to that. And when the news cycle is boring and when there's nothing to talk about, sometimes that's actually when I get to do the thing I want to do. Some of my best shows, I think, are the ones that have the lowest listenership. There was one that I did. I remember this one I thought was kind of cool. I did like

a year and a half ago and is real slow. And I was talking about relative, I was talking about the connection between economics and military power. And so I, there's a really cool YouTube video, which is essentially a moving chart that just shows the nature of military spending over the last like four centuries versus GDP in

in various countries. And I was pointing out how uniquely powerful the United States is and has been and what that means for Western capitalist, you know, Western capitalist military buildup and how you actually compete with China and why China actually is on a pretty bad path here because their economy will collapse and then they won't have the ability. And so I like sat there and I did like a full history of Western spending on military. I think that stuff's fascinating. I'm sure some of my listeners were probably dying. And so every so often I'll get to it. It's like,

A hundred for you and one for me. There'll be some of that. Talk to me about how you deal with public criticism and scrutiny, especially given the background upbringing that you had. There is a tendency to be hypersensitive to that. So how do you deal with public criticism? You know, it sort of depends on from whom. So I've created what I think is a pretty healthy feedback loop. I think that everybody needs a feedback loop. People who are going to tell you the truth when you're really effing it up.

Um, that usually is a couple of people in my business. Jeremy particularly is very good at this. Jeremy and I have a very good relationship where if I've screwed something up, he's not shy about telling me that, that he thinks that I've screwed something up or that I need to correct something. Uh, and we'll, we'll talk it out. Um, I have a couple other friends who are very good about that. Some family members on personal level, obviously I have family members, uh, but, uh,

I think that everybody needs that because unfortunately, the online discourse is not comprised of people who want the best for you. They generally want the worst for you. And so they are looking for an opportunity to jump on your neck with both feet. And it is disappointing.

for sure when people who you think of as allies kind of run for the woods if there's if there's something controversial that comes up and this happens to i think all of us from from time to time i try not to be that person where if one of my allies is getting hit i try to actually like defend uh and i take that pretty seriously i know jeremy does too we do this as a company a fair bit um but it's uh

It's never easy. I mean, I can pretend that it's wonderful. It's again, one of the reasons I got off Twitter is because of the trending element of it. So simply reducing your exposure to it is one strategy. But yes, for sure. But you need a permeable, a permeable bubble where if something really is placed around exactly like you need somebody who you trust, who's going to speak truth to you. This is true in any walk of life who says like you're doing this or

on. How do you avoid, there's a great idea, you'll be familiar with audience capture. Of course. There is an article I'll send you once we're finished called Criticism Capture by Ethan Strauss. He basically says that the most warping dynamic is not the compliments that you receive, but the criticisms which you get. And a lot of the time, for instance, Seth Godin stopped putting comments on his blog

15 years ago, people said, you can't do that. It's a blog. A blog has comments on it. He said, well, if I leave comments up there, I'll know that each article I write will be longer and there'll be more caveats and I'll be writing to defend the criticisms of the position as opposed to just explain the position. That dynamic. That's really smart. That's really smart. I mean, I, I,

I agree with that. I totally agree with that. Again, the nature of human beings, not just politics, reactionary. If you get attacked a thousand times on a thing, you tend to believe that one of two things happens. You're the cave and you think you're wrong. Or you think this is the truest thing you've ever said because you're not taking flack unless you're over the target. Either way, it's warping. Right. And that latter one, by the way, has become like holy writ on parts of the right where it's like if you say something truly awful and people are ripping into you, it's because what you said is truly necessary.

I think this is one of the big mistakes of the right. I think that, again, prompted by the left's shrinking over the Overton window to near invisibility and everybody finding themselves out in the cornfield. I think that the right kind of cultivated the counter argument, which is the more criticism I take, the more right I must be. And it's like, well...

sometimes yes and sometimes really, really no. There's a difference between saying something that is true and saying something that just makes you an asshole. Yeah. And they're not the same thing. It's just provocative for no reason. I've heard you say, I don't doubt my ability to say what I want to say. I doubt my ability to handle the emotional blowback that comes with saying it. So how do you deal with the emotional blowback? Again, I think I've gotten better at this over the years. As you get older, you tend to grow a thicker skin. Every year, I feel like I need to grow a slightly thicker skin. Yeah.

And, you know, it's elephantine at this point, but I think that it'll continue to increase. It comes from directions that you don't necessarily game out. What you find is that you build a suit of armor for yourself, and then somebody always finds wherever the chink is in the armor and sticks a knife right in there. Okay, well, I better, you know, get some iron and patch that up. What does that look like from a real perspective? So...

To give an example, the amount of anti-Semitism that I'd experienced up until 2015, 2016 in the United States was nil, like zero, like non-existent. This is the best country in the history of the world for Jews, unbelievably kind of Jews. 2015, 2016, because of all of the sort of alt-right associations and the fact I wasn't voting for either party, I got an enormous amount of blowback in 2015, 2016 for taking the positions that I was taking.

that sort of receded again post-2015, 2016. It broke out again very much into the open post-October 7th and was getting collaterally attacked by people who I wouldn't have expected on the basis that if I care what happened on October 7th too much, then I must be a bad American or I must not care about what's going on anyplace else on Earth, which I think is totally disingenuous. And I rarely say this, but truly badly motivated. I try not to say that people are badly motivated, but I think that's a pretty obvious thing

bad, a move that can only be motivated by animus. And so I had to sort of build new systems for that. Just realize that people who I thought were going to speak up, we're not going to. That I think has been a new, I mentioned it before. I think that's, you find new ways to get hurt in life. I think one of the new ways is that reliance on other people outside of your close circle can be

can be very difficult. People you expect to speak up in a particular moment very often will sit down. I wonder how much of that as well is maybe reassuring the prior that some teenage version of Ben would have been quite worried about as well. This sort of, I'm on the outside looking in, people truly don't have my back overall. This sort of confirms the fear that I had of the world all along. I mean, there may be some of that, although I think I've gotten...

over, I'd say 90% of that. You never get over 100% of it probably. I think that more it has to do with, for me, the reason I got into this business in the first place is because obviously I'm very political. I believe that politics matters. I think policy matters. And I always thought of myself and still do as part of sort of a broader ideological movement. And when you think of yourself as sort of a broader ideological movement, which you see as sort of a community, then when you kind of get

separated off from the community and people let that happen, it can be painful and it can be difficult. And when you realize that maybe it wasn't quite as much of a nice, happy community as you thought it was, and that kind of stuff is- Do the Bayesian thing and move forward. A Scientific American article said, "'Vote for Kamala Harris to support science, health, and the environment. Kamala Harris has plans to improve health, boost the economy, and mitigate climate change. Donald Trump has threats and a dangerous record.'"

What do you think about the editors of Scientific American endorsing a candidate for the second time in only 179 years? I mean, I would say that they're not actually adding to their own credibility. I mean, the data that I've seen suggests that not a lot of voters are going to shift their viewpoint based on the grand input of Scientific American, but a lot of people are going to shift what they think of Scientific American because of that input.

And science overall. Yes. The politicization of science has been one of the worst developments of my adult lifetime. The attempt to turn science into a tool on behalf of certain political interests has been truly bad. And here's where I'll give a couple examples, right? Because I don't want to just throw a big allegation out there. The attempt to say transmedicine is medicine.

that there are vast studies suggesting that transgender surgery is going to alleviate mental health conditions among wide spectrums of the population, a proposition supported by virtually no data, and that it should be applied to minors. That is a political move. The attempt to suggest during COVID-19

that Black Lives Matter, if you went out and rioted for Black Lives Matter, that you could be out there. Like there were full on public health statements that you being in a giant crowd in the middle of the street for George Floyd, apparently it was a woke virus didn't affect you. But if you went to the grocery store, obviously you had to gear up like you were walking into, you know,

post-nuclear Fukushima. That sort of stuff. The politicization of science in those sorts of directions has been horrifying. And what it's done is it's undermined everything scientific. So again, everything being reactionary, the reaction isn't, wow, that's crazy that they would say that. But you know what? What they're saying about

you know what they say about you know this particular food and its effect on health that might still be true it was like well fuck those guys like if they said that this is wrong then everything they say is wrong blanket covering exactly and you see that again in a wide variety of sort of arena in in public life that institutions it's very hard to earn credibility for an institution and it's incredibly easy to blow it up it really is like all it takes a couple of

a couple of giant cracks in the dam that holds back the public skepticism and bam, it's gone. The study that you were referring to in 2020, Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the US presidential election. A survey found that viewing the endorsement did not change people's views of the candidates.

but caused some to lose confidence in nature and in U.S. scientists generally. And that was published in Nature. Right. Right. And then they did it again. And Scientific American did it again. It's like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And it's that temptation.

The word for it that I like to use, it's not my word, it's just a great word that I wish would drop into common usage, is ultra-crepidarianism, which is speaking well outside your purview of expertise. So I'm not a nuclear physicist, and so everything I say about nuclear physics should be taken with a giant iceberg chunk of salt. And whenever the editors of Scientific American decide to speak about

about politics, that is like case in point of ultra-crepidarianism, them speaking well outside their purview. Well, you've got on one end Taylor Swift and on the other end Scientific American. Is this the period now of the election where all of the armaments are going to be sort of rallied in an attempt to try and push for whichever candidate the side wants? It's going to be insane. The next 50 days are going to be totally out...

out there. I mean, I can't even like 70 days ago, we had a different nominee.

I mean, what the hell, man? I mean, like, this thing is shifting so fast that if you think that we've seen the last event in this election cycle, what I've said is that God's writing this year is just awful. I mean, it's like season eight of Game of Thrones. Like, they spend all this time building up and, like, developing characters, and it takes you, like, a year to get from King's Landing to the Wall, and then season eight, they're like, you know what? Fuck it. The timeline's all after... Wolf's Feet. Yeah, exactly. You're getting on that dragon, and you're up there in five minutes, and you're just zooming back and forth, and none of the plotting makes sense, and it's like, if...

If it's on the board, then I mean, God's going back to his old storylines now. I mean, look, we've had two assassination attempts in the last eight weeks. Like we're now getting like repeats in the storyline. Yeah. So I don't know. He's he's the wrong people are in charge of the writer's room. This is a badly written season of Trump. Trump season eight is not good. What would you say to people who want to try and survive with their sanity intact the next month and a half? Um.

don't take every bump in the road as though it's the grade of the grade of the road. A bump is not a grade, you know, like just like weather is not climate, a bump is not a grade. If there, if something happens, the tendency is going to be for things to settle back into status quo ante unless it's a major event. So don't follow every single thing that happens as though this is going to be the make or break point of the election. This is the turning point. This is where everything falls apart. So there's a tendency to do that after the debate where Trump really didn't perform well.

And Kamala was able to spring to string sentences together in somewhat coherent fashion. And the and everyone's Oh, my God, the election's over. Oh, it's over. And it's like, well, no, it'll settle back into what it was, which is pretty much a dead heat. Yeah. So take a breath. And then also, yeah, spend some time not watching politics. And I say this is somebody who benefits from you watching politics like that.

Watch half of my show or the whole show and then go outside and do something else. Don't get drawn into the idea that if you miss a day, then it's the end of the world. And also...

I said this to both sides. Believe it or not, this is not the last election. Please stop with this shit. It's not true. And anybody who says that to you is lying. It's cataclysmic language. It's just not true. And it's worse. It makes the country a worse place. It makes the country a very, very bad place. When you keep saying over and over and over that if your political opponent is elected, the world will end. Then, first of all, you're ramping up the rhetoric such that assassination attempts do become more common. But more importantly, you're basically saying that half the country is so evil that they want the country to end.

and that there will be no more elections. So if you don't actually do something in this election, then you may as well give up hope. You may as well despair. And it's not true. The political class who are telling you this are lying to you. They are lying. And there are people in my industry who do this routinely, and it's gross. This is not the last election. 2020 was not the last election. 2016 was not the last election. There will be another election in 2028. It may not go the way we want in 2024. I really, really hope that it does. And then you know what? You're going to get back on the horse, and you're going to go try, because if you don't, then you will lose. It's so obnoxious. And it's this sort of kind of charged...

This sort of charged language, which is done for cheap political gain. Yeah, it's very, it's very, it's sort of pandering in a strange way. And it's, it reminds me of the rhetoric that climate activists, the most extreme sort of totally annoying climate activists use.

where they say we have this tiny amount of time or else the world's going to end and everything. And you go, well, I know that that's not the case. And I know that the reason that you're using this inflammatory language is because you think it's so important and people are listening so little that if you overcompensate by driving the car unbelievably quickly, people go, oh, I maybe need to listen to this. And it's kind of the same. If we overreg what's actually happening, it will motivate people in order to go out and vote against or for whoever it is that we're talking about.

but it's just patronizing. It comes across as being very patronizing. The two worst elements of our politics right now are that, the idea that like, oh my God, it's the last election. If we don't vote right now, it's, by the way, they're all lying. They're all lying. Right and left when they say this, they're lying. Hey, Joe Biden the other day, he goes to an event in Pennsylvania and at this event, he puts on a MAGA hat, right? It's kind of a joke, right? There's like a bunch of firefighters there. They're big Trump fans and he has kind of a charming joke, puts on the MAGA hat. And I thought that's charming. That's nice. And then I thought, you know, what's kind of crazy about that is that like,

He's going to go on TV tomorrow and he's going to say that Donald Trump is a deep and abiding threat to the soul of the country. He obviously doesn't believe that because if he actually believed that, he wouldn't put on that hat anymore than he put on a swastika hat. Exactly. So he doesn't believe that. He's totally full of shit. And the same thing is true when people are like, oh my God, it's the last election. So that's one tendency that I hate is that the last election crisis

The other thing that I hate is, again, emotivism, which is a term that's used by Alistair McIntyre, not coined by him, but used by him, which is basically the attribution of motive to people in lieu of attempting to explain their logic. So what you will do is you will say the real reason

that they're doing X. The real reason they say this is because they hate you and they want you to die. The real reason they're doing this is because they despise you. They despise you and they despise. And so I have a right to despise them because they despise you. It's not just a legit disagreement about foreign policy or about tax policy. It's they hate you and they want you to die. And everything about you is terrible to them. And so you should hate them. That is not good. It's not good for the country. Now, are there cases where that's true? Sure. There are cases where that's true.

Sure, there are cases where that's true. But do I think that that's like the underlying motive of the vast majority of the American population voting the way that's different than you? No, I actually don't think that that's I don't think people put that much thought into how they vote is the truth. I think they get into the ballot. They get into the voting booth and they're like, OK, I got this schmuck and I got this person. I got this other schmuck and like, OK, fine. So I'll vote for one of the schmucks. Like, OK, I have to. Twitter is not the real world with regards to that. Speaking of which.

What do you make of Elon and his recent injection into public life? So I think that Elon taking over X has been excellent. I think that him opening up the gates has been really good. I think that obviously there are safety mechanisms that need to be put in place. I think that one of the things he did is he sort of nuked the entire staff when he came in, which was necessary and good. That also allowed, obviously, a lot of stuff that I don't think Elon would want on there on

on the platform or elevated on the platform, including probably some foreign interference from the Russians, for example. You see some accounts that obviously have risen to prominence because of being jogged by outside forces pretty clearly and obviously. And I think Elon wants to not have that happen. I think he wants to crack down on that. Again, I think that Elon, he's somebody who always shoots from the hip. He's very honest about what he thinks.

which means that he will actually take things down, right? He'll put something up. He'll realize he doesn't like what he put up and then he'll take it down. He's done this many, many times, which I actually find kind of charming. One of the things that I like about what he is doing is also he's very transparent about what he's doing, like ultra transparent. So if you get a video shadow banned on YouTube, you have no idea why it was shadow banned. It takes him three months to get back to you. You got a yellow flag for some unspecified reason. It was a low-level staffer in San Jose who decided that you ought to be downgraded and suddenly your traffic gets nailed for a month.

Elon, if you get banned, you'll have one of your friends tweet to Elon directly, and Elon will be like, yeah, I don't see why they did that, and then he'll just unban you. There's something charming about that. You'd hope that there are systems that are put in place, but what he's trying to do, I think, is good. Do I think that every position that Elon is articulating is well thought out? No, I don't think that Elon is giving it that much thought sometimes. I think that he has a generalized worldview that does not line up with the kind of woke redistributionist left that he thinks Kamala Harris represents.

Does that mean that every tweet is being, you know, run through a rigorous fact check machine or is he just memeing? He's just memeing. I mean, the truth is Elon is using Twitter the way we all used to use Twitter in like 2010. Yeah.

I remember when Twitter was fun before it became a shit show. And is there a risk of doing that at the scale that he's at? I think an obligation that comes with platform size. I mean, I do think that, you know, listen, do I wish that he would not tweet some of the things he tweets? Sure. Does he also get community noted on his own site? He does. And he removes stuff. So people come as a package. I think overwhelmingly Elon is good.

And if I have a choice between that and sort of the prior regime, which was Jack Dorsey in the back room with a bunch of levers telling people they couldn't say, you know, he or she, then I would much prefer Elon system. It seems like Jack Dorsey increasingly is coming out as sort of a pro free speech position, whether that's retconning or whatever. I'm not too sure. Mark Zuckerberg has gone from sort of like nerd to Chad's this arc of him also. Yeah.

Is there some underlying, is this just growing up? What's going on here? I think a lot of the tech bros feel correctly that they were targeted by the government in the aftermath of 2016. So after Trump won, but remember before 2016, social media was going to save all of us. Before 2016, Twitter was a good, Facebook was a good, all these places were great. And then Hillary lost and the left, because of that mythical, you know,

story that we told earlier, they could not believe that Hillary lost. So there had to be another reason that she lost. It couldn't be that she was a terrible candidate who ran a shit campaign. It had to be that she was jobbed by the Russians in Facebook. And so all the pressure is brought to bear on social media. Dianne Feinstein calling Zuckerberg in front of Congress and saying, if you don't regulate yourself, we're going to regulate you.

And I think that Zuckerberg and a lot of these other social media heads, after expressing support for free speech, I mean, Zuck did a speech in 2019 that was really good at Georgetown about free speech, like really good. I remember playing parts of it on my show. And then by 2020, because of all of the government pressure around BLM and COVID and all of that, he basically shut off news on Facebook almost entirely. And I think that's not been salutary for the American public discourse.

I think that, I think actually the loss of Facebook in terms of news distribution has been really bad for, forget about for businesses like mine, which, you know, obviously this is self-serving. I'd love to be able to distribute more news on Facebook, but I think that it's been bad for the national discourse because Facebook was kind of normie central, right? Facebook is like your grandma was on Facebook and everybody on Facebook has a name and has a

picture and they're actual humans. And so you had, and also you had a broader panoply of humanity. And when you shut it down on Facebook, those, the people who are politically active, don't go away. They just go to Reddit or 4chan. Well, interestingly with Facebook, it's the only social media that still exists where you are only

connected to people who you actually know. Right. You know, on Instagram, you follow people that you like their music or you like their dog or whatever. On Twitter, you follow people that you don't know that maybe just think have interesting takes or takes that you hate. But on Facebook, apart from the fan pages side, most of the other people that you're connected with are people who you actually know from your own life. And there's still yet

to be a replacement for that. I totally agree. And I think that, you know, because of that, there's a natural kind of social fabric that exists more at Facebook than some of these other social media sites. I also think that, you know, listen, again, self-serving, I have a lot of followers on Facebook and it's not a good thing that all the people who follow me have just seen my content disappear over the course of the last four years. Like if you click follow on a thing, you should be able to see the updates when they- Your reach has declined? 90%. Wow.

Wow. 90% since 2020. Are you aware if that's the same on all sides of the political aisle? So I think it is. I mean, as far as I'm aware, I think- It's not a targeting that's- I'm not aware that it may be targeted at us. I mean, we've had some intimations that perhaps, but again, I don't want to get into conspiracy land. Originally, that was a big part of the growth loop of DW, right? 100%. Yep. Yep. Facebook was a huge part of that. And we've had to come up with creative workarounds. That's sort of the nature of business. In 2019- What is the thrust of platform now? YouTube? YouTube.

Well, I mean, actually, we're more and more directing people to our home platform, right? We have more people who are watching on app. We have a lot of people. Our subscribers generally tend to watch. We have a million paid subscribers. So we tend to have, you know, a lot of those people watching on app. And those numbers don't even get attributed to our advertisers. We have hundreds of thousands of people who watch my show on app. Surely that's without mid-roll ads, though. Yeah.

Meaning that the embedded ads. Yes. Right. They're not like YouTube ads or anything, but they're embedded ads. But it's still in on the app? Actually, I don't believe so. I think for our subscribers, we're watching ad-free. They watch ad-free. Interesting. So at some point, we could see maybe there'll be a lower tier, like Netflix. It'll be like a lower tier. You get exposed to. Exactly. You get exposed to a few ads from virtual. Yeah. Do you think that we've passed peak woke?

Um, yes, I do think that we've passed peak woke. I think that corporations have decided that it's not profitable. I think that booming economies that are inflated have a lot of money to expend and you can experiment on a bunch of stupid bullshit. And so I think that a lot of people are like, we can do woke, we can do DEI, we can do all of it. And look, our bottom line keeps growing. And that's probably because of DEI. And then it turns out that, you know, when you got to tighten the belt a little bit, the first person to go is your diversity and equity and inclusion officer.

And so I think that there's some of that in corporate world. The right obviously has gotten much more mobilized. People like Chris Ruffo and Robbie Starbuck have been doing good jobs or mobilizing people against this sort of stuff at their corporations and from various businesses.

All that I think is good. And frankly, I think that 2020 was so exhausting for everybody, like so exhausting. I think people don't even recognize that we're still exhausted from 2020. Like it's 2024 and we're all, like we've all blocked out of our memories how bad 2020 was. 2020 was horrible. I mean, between BLM and 2020,

In COVID, it was a terrible year for a huge number of people. Real one-two punch. Oh my God. It was, it was, it was, I mean, it drove us from California. And so like the, I think for a lot of people, we're still living in the aftermath of that. And we're like, we don't want to remember anything that has to do with it. So if you're going to tell me about like how America is racist and horrible, like, I just don't want to hear it.

And by the way, you're seeing Kamala smartly avoid this, right? Like this is the one smart part of her campaign is that she'll get asked about race and she'll try and brush it away in a way that Obama certainly would not have in 2012. I imagine that even for people who were and still are in support of everything that happened during 2020, there's still this lingering fatigue.

of that. Again, I think that the American people long for stability and normalcy. And that's why I think you see a lot of people like my family that moved from a blue state that did not feel like stable or normal to Florida, where it does feel pretty stable and pretty normal. Are you worried, you know, DW and your platform have been built on lots of things, but one of them has been in response to crazy stories from the left. Yeah.

if we've passed peak woke, that creates both a vacuum of stuff to react to and also less of a revolutionary guard feel if more people agree that it is crazy what you're doing. Is that something that everyone's cognizant of, that Matt Walsh can't just do a like, here's another TikTok react montage if there's less of that to react to? So I think it'll be a different thing that we're reacting to, and I think it'll be a more serious thing that we're reacting to. I think we're past peak woke, but I don't think that we're past peak...

I'm searching for a term for it. I would say peak Fanonism. I think that Frantz Fanon is the author of Wretched of the Earth, this idea that there are the colonially oppressed and then there are the oppressors. The oppressed-oppressed matrix, that's not going away. I think the oppressor-oppressed matrix is here to stay. I think that it was being sort of forced through the prism of race and sex.

I think that that prism is starting to collapse a little bit because I think that it's so tiring. It turns out that men and women actually, I think, don't generally want to be at war with one another. And eventually it turns out that they kind of like one another. And it turns out that, you know, as racially divisive as the past period has been, I think most Americans kind of want to just be left alone and treat each other decently. But I do think that there are class divides. There are, you know,

in terms of what Kierkegaard called resentment, the kind of jealousy and resentment that are going to come to the fore again, you're seeing in terms of foreign policy. It's leading to, I think the great divide that's to come is between groups that I've called the lions and groups that I've called the scavengers.

And that's true economically. It's true societally. Lions are people who want to produce, who want to defend, who want to be part of a cohesive society while having individual freedom to pursue success. And then there are people who just want to tear those people down. And they've been living off kind of the spoils of the innovators and the people who are entrepreneurial and the people who want to build. And then there are people who just

are happy to just tear away at that. And I don't think that that necessarily lines up completely right to left. I think there are some people on the right who are sort of in jealousy and resentment mode. And I think that, you know, the it's largely relegated there. It's a very big movement on the left. It's always been sort of a class movement on the left, which always fits weirdly awkwardly in the United States, which is not a class based society. It's always whenever people say I'm fighting for the middle class in America, I always think like

And the reason I say that is because virtually a huge percentage of the American population will spend some time in the middle class. Everybody who's rich was once middle class in the United States. And a huge number of people who were once poor are now in the middle class. It's not like Britain in 1890, where like where you were born is kind of where you stay. And if you're very lucky, you enter the merchant class and you become, you know, nouveau riche or something. It's not like that in the United States. It has always been the magic of the U.S. that you can start off dirt poor and you can finish off super rich.

And, you know, that's I think that it maps awkwardly, but the innate kind of jealousy of man, the oldest story that the two oldest stories are Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. And Cain and Abel is the story of humanity always. It is God saying to the person whose sacrifice was rejected, you can learn from the person whose sacrifice was accepted. You can do better. You don't have to do this. And the person who sacrificed was rejecting or I could kill that guy.

And I think that that's, that's what you're seeing that in terms of foreign policy, I think that you're seeing a coalition of the supposed oppressed, who have decided that if you're a productive society, you need to be torn to the ground, because my failure is your fault. And I think you're seeing that economically, I think that you're seeing that in terms of in social policy, I think you're seeing in terms of some of the attacks on the family, because the family is a safe and secure place. And you're seeing people who feel alienated from family attacking that in a fit of peak that I think is and I don't think those conflicts are going away anytime soon. So

For example, you're not going to see, I think that we may have hit peak woke on like men are women. I think that that may be past its sell by date. But have we hit peak woke on, I'm protesting America on a college campus because I think America is a systemically brutal exploiter of third world peoples. I don't think we've remotely hit the end of that. I think that's probably likely to grow. Ben Shapiro, ladies and gentlemen. Ben, I really appreciate you. It's been a long time coming. Thank you so much. Hey, thank you. I appreciate it.

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