The Divided State Of A Broken America - Ben Shapiro (4K)

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 I'm personally invested in this election like I 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 for them and and get them publicity it's a really really important election and so I've I've been you know taking that pretty seriously plus this is a wild ride I mean nobody's ever seen an election in which one of the nomin completely drops because he dies on stage and is replaced within 24 hours by a completely different human being and everybody acts like that's normal and then within the space of eight weeks you have one of the candidates uh the subject of two separate assassination attempts I will say it is kind of weird that that Donald Trump has been subjected to more assassination attempts in the past eight weeks than KLA Harris has to one-on-one interviews um I didn't see that one coming but you know it's it's a wild election season for sure what do you think's driving that why is it so wild uh I mean I I think that part of it is is just the unique circumstances of the candidates and 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 and you get a lot of internet memes and 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 that's a completely different thing that seems to get ignored in all of the hubub about who performed better in a debate or who is jabbering about eating cats and dogs or or any of that sort of thing what's the arc that you went through from being 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 president 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 trait or anti-free trade was he more hawkish on foreign policy or isolationist on foreign policy where was he on social policy was he sort of 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 uh 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 had 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 uh I assumed that he was going to govern a lot more liberal than he did he governed in ways that I thought were 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 his middle eastern policy was excellent uh 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 like 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 you know 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 um but I would say that I'd been much more likely to vote for Ronda santis in in the primaries than 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 you verbally that I actually wanted to get involved in the campaign because I think that the consequences of of trump losing to either Joe Biden or KLA 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 on him as a character uh 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 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 that's fairly 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 vongh 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 i' 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 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 um you know I would ask him probably about why he chooses to use his social media influence the way that he does why he isn't more uh why in he more dedicated to a solidly focused campaign stately uh not 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 and and that's a problem for me is somebody wants to see him win I'd be asking him about that uh I'd probably drill down on his Ukraine policy uh he and I a bit at odds over his Ukraine policy at least stated Ukraine it's sort of unclear where he is on Ukraine uh I 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 zin'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 zilinsky doesn't want to give up the donbass he doesn't want to give up Crimea you get 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 you know 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 uh don't do him credit and th those sorts of things are things that that presumably i' would ask him about and one of the risks of interviewing president Trump always is that it's you know how he is going to perceive you as an interviewer and some Megan Kelly has talked about that if you are harsh on him as an interviewer he seems to perceive that adversarially uh 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 that's always been sort of a concern what what and what sort of answers would would he be willing to give would there be any new information 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 I 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 ENT doing a protest vote now 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 right so Barack Obama 2008 was a candidate that you voted for 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 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 were all just American and then by 2012 he had pursued a very leftwing agenda and he decided that he was going to campaign by essentially breaking down Americans into what would now be white dudes for Kam it be like white dudes for for Obama black dudes for Obama and 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 who's 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 and they were going to portray M Romney legitimately the most boring milk toast candidate in the history of American politics as 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 be and then Obama won and I think Obama winning drove everyone insane 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 going to have to appeal to Independence we don't have to appeal to rustbelt voters we white non- colge 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 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 has the ability to overcome all the systemic obstacles 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 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 as opposed to 2016 you added about 22 million new voters to the election roles 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 that 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 being reflected exactly and 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 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 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 normaly 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 it was 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 right 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 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 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 scile person and so that's why you saw Biden's numbers start to tank and then KLA 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 you 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 it's 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 uh candidate for 2028 uh if if he runs again which presumably he will because he's uh you think that he would go how old would he be then let's he's 78 now so he'd be coming up on 82 um have a hard time believing that that Trump will go into the the darkness quietly so I think that if he if he loses in this election then he will probably Proclaim that he did not lose which he's done before uh and uh 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 that the the three times is enough uh 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 disan campaign I think that Dan santis 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 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 TI off a lot of the Republican base which believe that Trump had won in 2020 yeah you've got tribalism within the tribe yeah it was it was kind of a catch 22 for santis 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 the stage yeah one of my friends tweeted today on the back of that uh 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 revoltion for the present each side grows to loath 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 for everyone when their opponents are in power it's this sort of weird sort of zero Su 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 in 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 and I think that it speaks to a much greater crisis in the American Body politic which is to say uh a a much greater crisis in the American Heart which is what 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 it's easy to see that polarize the fracturing is now built into the system yeah and and the more you elevate power to the top level it has to be built into the system because if 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 uh what I thought was the best line about government in a presidential race he said I want to make Washington DC 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 leftwing 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 w't live there but I think because the federal government has sucked so much control up to the top level government 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 and and a lot of homogeneity in terms of viewpoint right again my local community I live an Orthodox Jewish Community I'd say the people in my community tend to agree 85% of the time you you know take my community and you contrast that with like an upper class liberal Enclave uh in in San Jose or something and the disagreement is going to look more like you know we agree 25% of the time 30% of the time how much do you think that the Countrywide agreement that was maybe uh 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 which is real and which is uh 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 that 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 the people in New York were correct and the people in Alabama were wrong I mean so that so that that obviously happens to be I mean we fought a Civil War in this country however one of the things that that used to be sort of an insurance and a Bull workk against that was the subsidiarity model that I'm talking about you can see why the subsidiarity 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 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 doesn't apply to say social values like how I want to live with my religious community what the tax policy should be why why why do we have to agree on that why 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 you know very local circumstances exacerbates division in a really divisive way again the the solution to the social fabric problem between you know people who live in disperate parts of the country and 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 in other news this episode is brought to you by function I partnered with function health because I wanted a better way to track what's happening inside of my body they run lab tests covering Heart hormones nutrients thyroid and even detect 50 types of cancer at stage one that's five times more testing than a regular physical and all of the results are charted over your lifetime and explained in one simple dashboard lab testing like this would usually cost thousands but with function it's only $500 you get a streamlined evidence-based system that tracks your health Trends over time giving you real data to optimize your lifestyle I rely on function because it's evidence-based and run by a team of expert Physicians so you can trust the data and that the insights you receive are scientifically sound and unbiased function has a 300,000 person wait list but every Monday they open a few spots for modern wisdom listeners right now you can go to the link in the description below or head to function health.com slod wisdom to bypass the way list today that's function health.com slod wisdom 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 I'm I'm always sort of skeptical of you know what kind what that means what the order means uh I I like more specificity in in those sorts of allegations like who are these people so we can fight them I don't like sort of vague shadowy forces that that are systemic racism right like who are you BL what do you mean the the 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 uh very much a signature of some areas of the right as well for sure for sure and it's something again I I think that that leads to a breakdown in politics because if you believe that there are these vague 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 vague 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 they the the Legacy Media agree in very wide scale on politics do they get together in a back back room and decid and er 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 acts before Elon uh 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 dorsy who's actually pulling a lever and saying you shouldn't do this and I can fight that I know that Jack dorsy 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 an un unverifiable hypothesis that you would that not be the uh 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 operation I me sure I mean that that that's the that's the counterargument but again my problem is it's unfalsifiable so once you posit 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 you know move into it's a mountain Bailey argument you just move right back into the next level of the conspiracy so instead of me saying so for example 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 like they obviously factors change the voting rules in those are all very specific things I'm naming right now right that the media social media downplayed a story okay we know what that is and we can have Congressional hearings about it that there 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 to prevent that sort of stuff right these are specific things what 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 say coordination right exactly like people put bring in boxes and then you'll say okay well I I I need the evidence that people are bringing boxes well but that's the whole point the evidence doesn't exist okay well now now we're arguing with with shadows maybe you're right I mean you could be right I I have no evidence that you're right but I also have no evidence that 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 I usually what I do is I wait for the evidence to emerge so sometimes it feels like I'm laid on the ball because of that right we live in a 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 and wrong 98% of the time but write those two because now you're a prophet yeah right now now you get to say exactly now you get to say you know that Alex Jones's a prophet because of all the weird and crazy things that he says like two times he he was like right on it like wow that's amaz okay well that that that also used to just be called a scam okay like what does that seduction come from the necessity for immediate answers social media has made it so that you want like answers right 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 something an immediate wrong answer than a delayed correct one especially if it backs your priors right if if if the if the immediate answer that comes back at you is what you wanted to hear which is that your 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 jobed out of it there are people who are coming in the middle of the night and they were bringing boxes of ballots and they were shoving through the machines and he actually won and it's all being rigged and and the red and the Red Wave was real but then it was jobed 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 to have you make that argument but I I don't have the evidence at this point to actually to actually say that right one is one's a sexier answer and even if it turns out being wrong there's no punishment for it because you either you don't acknowledge that you were wrong you just keep playing the game before years later and and depending on the and it's a wide variety of conspiracy theories I feel the same way about Co okay I tried to wait for data to emerge that meant that I got some things wrong then there are people who jumped one way or another okay there are some people who jumped to we need a lockdown permanently and we'll just do that for three years and then there were some people who jumped to vaccines will immediately be bad they will be terrible and we don't need to do anything about Co we should basically just let it free free flow through the population Well turns out the second was probably closer to the truth in many circumstances but I didn't have the evidence of of any of that sort of stuff so I had to wait for those things and what that means 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 with me with regard to the vaccine so in in late 20120 fiser and the federal government under Donald Trump announced that the vaccines were 99% effective in preventing transmission not death 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 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 fiser was basically lying that they had 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 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 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 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 change 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 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 we're consistent on this then we lose and that's that's not in no other area of your life do you act like this but when it comes to politics 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 fty 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 uh seduction of coordination as an explanation for Stuff two attempts on Trump's life within the space of eight weeks uh some people will lay that at the feet of the deep State doesn't want him to become president because because they can't allow him cuz 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's forgotten the first assassination so much that we needed a second one to remind them right so I think that that a few things are very clear one is you're asking about sort of the content of the assassination and one 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 hole 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 that 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 a thing that they they can't really acknowledge I think uh and and so the media have immediately reverted to well you know Trump is saying it's about violent rhetoric but look at the violent rhetoric he uses okay well that that is like true whataboutism fine let's assume that you that I don't like some of the rhetoric that Trump uses about about politics fine but let's be real the retoric 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 is it if you believe that he is a singular hilari figure and you happen to have a screw lose I mean what might there 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 president of the United States 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 or 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 conser human beings inherently flawed they have the capacity for good they also have the capacity for bad and people are kind of dumb right like these are like kind of Baseline biblical Notions of what human beings are right 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 right like 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 if human beings were devils then no government would be capable like that kind of shaded View of humanity leads to my politics in a lot of these situations and 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 and in Western life generally and 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 that that 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 is he had a scope on the rifle like there is no way you missed that shot he is extremely close with 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 I or everyone's stupid I mean like aam's Razer suggests that everyone is bad at their job and stupid and the same thing holds true with the second assassination attempt right when when it comes to the second assassination attempt what we know is that this guy was a nut job he happen 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 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 stuff pretty publicly I mean you had a full hear 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 who actually tried to do that um 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 what 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 uh about the thing but the plausibility of the claim is directly related to the plausibility of each individual element in the claim right like for example people on the left were considering a conspiracy theory that the the Wuhan virus was developed by the in the Wuhan Institute of furology right and that was like that's not a conspiracy theory every single element of that is incredibly plausible you have as John 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 that's pretty plausible that'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 uh 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 for the disparities between various groups in the United States I 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 well let's get specific because it turns out that again when it comes to your own personal life no one handles politics like they 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 now the problem's really big it's really really big and it's really systemic you be okay can can we like delve into what no no because that would be to Grant credibility to the people who are forming the problem like 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 yes then it's then you really don't want to solve the problem yeah one one is providing Solutions and the other is identifying problems there is a problem over here 100% And so this is what will happen with you know other people in 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 the generalized solution is because the other guy is mean and wants the worst for you that's not a solution that's that's an epithet and does that get you to where you're trying to go I've said the same thing about Andre Tate right Andrew Tate will make a bunch of claims about how men are victimized by the society and and how feminism has 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 is pretty good and then I'll look at his Solutions I Bean these aren't Solutions these are mainly just complaints and every time somebody mentions a solution he's very dismissive of the solutions and 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 when not those guys like that's the real those are the real issues I mean I think that's true and 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 M Buckley's famous line that conservatism is about standing a thwart the rails of History shouting stop I think it's about more than that but his his basic premise is that if K 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 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 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 agree on is those [ __ ] commies man we are not going to be like that like I think that I think that that is not terrible for societ the problem is when you start applying it to people inside your own country prominantly or inside your own civilization then you got a problem and again I I'll I've been cried ing something on the right here but that I'll lay predominantly at the feet of 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 uh and has attempted to portray the right as the enemy of this is a lot of the rhetor about Trump that he's the enemy of the soul of America that he's 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 the the idea that kamare 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 k Harris or Isis right or or even Vladimir Putin or xiin ping like I don't share a lot with k Harris but I feel like I have more in common with with uh with my Democrat with Democrats on their side of the AL than I do with some of those folks yeah this 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 a country or an entire hemisphere of planet to fracture itself you would hide away what you're doing as a a foreign State actor and you would infiltrate within there but again as to your sort of uh rubrics of being able to be accurate that's quite unfalsifiable that's very woly that's very difficult to work and again I think there are there are actual symptoms of that right I mean Tik Tok is a Chinese algorithm so I think elevation of particular messages on Tik Tok is pretty traceable to particular moves that the Chinese government is making and elevating particular messages for example right again specific problem with a specific solution that was actually attempted by the the republicans in Congress recently which was to dissociate Tik Tok from its Chinese ownership for so CCP didn't have a window into it or control over the algorithm um yeah you can see that with regard to you know allegations that that the Iranians have been paying members of protest communities in and universities right I think actual problem with an actual solution but yes I mean I I think that again the 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 think of it is is sort of you know what 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 got attacked by Hamas and all of a sudden super high levels social solidarity because like activate right we we all live in the same country we 911 right right after 911 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 momentus they make the highest quality supplements on the planet they're literally 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what do you think looking back back skipping grades uh Social Challenges how did you reflect on that time what are the main lessons that you took away from your period in school so there there are a few different lessons so when I was so my family became Orthodox when I was 11 uh which means that I wasn't really part of any click in school I was kind of in and out of different schools I went to public school then it went to private school then it went to public school again then I went to private school um 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 uh to uh either situations with girls or to uh or to close friendships with other dudes in your class when you're two years younger a lot shorter a lot shrimpy and uh and you know smarter than some of the other kids in the class that's not like recipe for social success ability yeah exactly you get stuffed in a Few Lockers is H is is a thing that happens um and uh so there are a few there are kind of two key lessons that I learned sort of from my schooling experience one was uh pretty early I was going into let's see it would have been seventh grade at at a magnet school it's 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 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 was there kids in my class with iq's 180 190 and and I remember sitting in class and saying to my dad like some of these kids are really really smart I mean there's a girl in our class at seventh grade she was doing like senior level calculus in from college and my dad said well well success is a combination of inherent ability and effort and so you're going to have to outwork them right he said you're 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 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 I've taking that very seriously it's why I take you know it's why I take other people's opinions seriously if they have knowledge on a topic I think you there's a sort of now 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 um so that was one uh the other one was that you know when you take a lot of crap you either tend to basically learn to tell people to [ __ ] off or you end up tending to Cave underneath it and so I have a very weird perspective on bullying as somebody who's viciously bullied when I was in school like really badly bullied um 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 okay well that's what life is going to be life is going to be a lot of people who 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 uh and uh and so that was something that I I sort of cultivated in my 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 a an overnight with with other members of the class where I was hit with belts uh there was a there there was you know a lot of situations where I was you know kind physically hit like that that kind of stuff wasn't super rare um and uh and and I'm not talking about like a big public school this is actually like a a Jewish Day School but again no matter what you kids are kids and honestly like I know a lot of the 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 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 a period you 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 you it's a very messy lineage have you have you managed to undo this gordian not I mean I I think that you know all I can control is the things I can control would I would I if I could reccon it and go back in time would I have preferred to have not been bullied sure because and what I have kids who are now you know 1084 And1 do I want them bullied in school of course I 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 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 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 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 you know people who have done much more than I have served in the military for example this they say the same thing they say 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 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 it's true in relationship I think it's true in exercise I think it's true in everything like if you're not if you're not pushing yourself and working to better yourself you 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 required that in order to grow as a human being do you or did you have a chip on your shoulder about those experiences course yeah absolutely yeah 100% and how long did it take for that there's a part of me that thinks about the of taking something bad which happened to you and turning 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 there's 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 of honestly I think this is where the Natural Life transition from being a single man 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 provider people rely on you and you're loved right you have a you have a 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 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 mile away like we're surrounded by family and that's something that we've built up and have deliberately done and that's that's wonderful but I do think that it's one of the reasons why sort of prolonged singlehood for for both men and women is 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 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 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 okay 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 there there's no point you reach in sort of single life where it's like now I am the dominant one because you're you there's always another person who's going be 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 we you're not picking up a second wife or a second family I hope so you know that 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 uh integrated or transcended and included in wilb Barian language uh what happened sort of in school are there any ways that you see where you uh compensate or present now which are kind of the progeny of those exper experiences I I see a uh 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 with my wife I'm not like this like the the thing that people are are generally surprised by in personal interactions is that I'm a nice person uh because the thing that you cultivate uh is the very like you know don't [ __ ] with me uh and and so I'm sure that some of that comes from bad High School experiences or bad College experiences or whatever it is uh I think the the other thing that that you cultivate is a very self-effacing sense of humor right because one of the things you learn when you're bullied is is to make jokes about yourself take yourself too seriously exactly so what you end up doing is like I'll make I I mean people know listen to 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 moment exactly and I'll be like you know like this chiseled physique you know like like like a 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 I my per 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 wasn't going to do that but you know like uh those kind of self-facing 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 it end up being 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 I think it did change I think that when I was like 22 and I was making those kind of jokes it was probably coming from insecurity 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 at 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 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 when you feel part of it's good to feel part of a thing but it's also good to to sometimes stand aside from the thing uh and and you know 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 know 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 uh may be a little bit different but when it comes to the sort of more of the social World side uh 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 I've had this longtime categorization which is that I think people tend to be either friends people or family people uh the most of the people I know you know whenever there's a hard division where you say it's like these people it's it's never true for 100% of people um 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 this is their thing and there are people who like I want if I were on a desert island with my family I'd be totally fine right 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 CEO of Da of daily wire and and my co-founder over there and I have a couple of other friends uh one in Israel one one who lives over a couple who live over here in Florida but you know it's a very it's a very small circle and even my best friends are not even remotely on the same level as my family like it 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 uh solution for people who maybe didn't fit in as kids to uh find a 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 uh which means that family life is uh pretty low down on the totem pole of priorities but when I start a family I'm I I'm going to be fascinated to see what H 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 uh 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 I think it's going to be it's a a different perspective that I hadn't thought of it's also the hardest thing and it's the 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 like my kids fight each other all the time and they're wonderful and they're lovely and also they're 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 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 your sort of variance between happiness and unhappiness on a scale of like 0 to 10 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 20 and positive 20 because when you're happy together it's better than it was 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 like if you're at odds with your spouse over something it's sign 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 it's magic it's stuff that just shapes every aspect of of your being uh and then when bad is happening with their kids it wrecks you I mean absolutely wrecks you in other news this episode is brought to you by Maui newie venison if you like me you're always looking for an easy way to 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checkout how do you how do you learn to cope with that emotionally in pivoting from maybe having a harder exterior to not not investing to um 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 um and so I think that the uh the I'm able to bifurcate pretty easily kind of parts of my life it's just something that I'm I'm good at I do with my time I can do it with humans uh and I can do it with sort of my business life and my 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 you know once every couple of weeks then it would ruin my day and my wife a few years ago she said like it's ruining our day we're out we're having a nice Sunday with the kids and you're miserable you're upset and just 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 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 [ __ ] like if if if I'm having want dad with here with us yeah exactly and and 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 a first priority like the the the iPhone has ruined a lot of lives and made things it's interesting that uh you and Sam Harris I mean you went for the just off the phone Sam went for completely off platform I think uh Jordan has a perennial battle between him and and and Twitter I think it's been a warping a warping Dynamic for him many a time uh but yeah it's it's interesting that the thing that a lot of people do for fun when you get to whatever close to the most followed on within that platform uh people are desperately trying to rip this sort of ejector seat button to get it away from them well the 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 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 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 Bret 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 and keep it in check my wife I mean just just having kids it's kind of a natural part of of life when you find yourself cleaning a vomit at 3:00 a.m. you're like well I do have 9 million Facebook followers here I am and it's 3:00 a.m. and I'm cleaning up vomit well you know that's a lie it's something my wife and I choke about all the time it's like okay you know like there's the social world the social media world the the I'm famous and people want to take pictures with the 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 you got to take out the also I happen to be very fortunate my my wife does not give a [ __ ] about any of this like my my wife is wonderful person we met well before I was very famous I was 23 she was 20 um so we've been married now uh 16 years uh and she and we have four kids and she doesn't care about any of this like she'll I'll have a week where like there was one week earlier this year where I I went to aitz with Elon and the same week we launched a rap song with Tom McDonald that hit number one on the rap treasure I was like 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 like well like everyone else I went to awit with Elon I'm currently the number one rap artist in America right and she's like that's that's really cool that's nice the wash the dishes do need doing if you could hurry up and and nothing is going to nothing is going to make it real more than that right like that's how much do you think a lot of the uh compensatory mechanisms the searching for meaning and stuff that a lot of people have at the moment mindfulness uh how am I going to fulfill my Logos and carry my you know personal actualization forward is just surrogate family life that hasn't yet happened I think it's that I think I mean I 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 cuz at a lot of time I was by myself in Cambridge Massachusetts and it was Winter outside you could do anything and so you're sitting there for hours reading law books and then reading other books and philosophy and that sort of then you have kids and it's like I don't have time for this are you kidding like you know you know my purposes 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 in our in our sort of rationalistic society the 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 you and you know 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 like 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 right these are these are virtuous things and they make you feel good right the the the the first prescription for somebody who suffering from some sort of depression should be like get off your ass and go do something trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction it's just that's a 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 uh actions and self assessment is detached in the wrong direction um I mean if if you are achieving and if you are doing the things you're supposed to be doing then go easy on yourself is is what I would say um 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 have the self-esteem then 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 is 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 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 with 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 preludin algro by by Fritz Chrysler or something that I'd work 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 like oh my God I love wonder wall and I'd be like you chose the wrong instrument I mean that was a strategic era 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 I I learned my lesson very good yeah that's so funny I I think uh you touched on something I've been pretty fascinated by recently which is the direction of sympathy that always goes toward uh 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 insec 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 um and I think that that's another thing that we can say here is that for me for example I had to learn to that that's a learn skill like being easy on yourself is a learn skill uh and that take for example vacationing I used to suck at vacationing like be truly awful at it we go on a vacation with the family 3 hours in I was like I need to be doing work I have just an I'm one of these people 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 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 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 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 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 um amount of work uh and setad of resources that you can leverage that with for sure I mean I think that there is a lot of diminishing returns in terms of the kind of you know stuff that you put in right you do hit a certain level and you know the 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 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 it you you do need a break and I mean in 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 um 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 that's what you know God tells me I have to do that once a week so Shabbat is Shabbat indispensable you've got that programmed in how were you on Shabbat if if you I'm just ch I'm chilled I mean like if you were struggling to let go of the work thing and you've got I I I don't know Shabbat inside out yes 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 like put removable sticky notes kind of right okay I mean that sounds like quite a Jewish solution to a very Jewish problem you've like litigated your way we like work rounds that accomplish kind of the same thing without violating the rules yes yeah and and and I think the the non-jewish answer that is like what the like what what 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 the something bigger than the rule right that that 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 you know will to take old age as so you have somebody who's older and 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 right 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 who's Will why 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 doct of double effect a Catholic idea that you're you're attempting to alleviate pain but what you're achieving is the death of the person then the town's 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 it's 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 how you litigated your way around being able to use a highlighter on a Friday exactly there's always an obstru explanation but yeah Friday night everything goes off going back to the wife discussion you got engaged 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 um I think that the picking the right partner is is actually it's funny to say this not all that difficult the reason I say that is because everyone is looking in the wrong place the the there are two things that obviously you need to be physically attracted to your partner we as a society who said that that's like the number one by far but it's I'm not going to pretend it's 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 all the that thing was the values on our very first date we got into discussion of how many kids you wouldd 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 wool versus determinism this like on our first date at a coffee bean in Santa Monica it's like a three and a half hour first date and then I said sounds like an inquisition yeah I mean she may have felt that way uh 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 you're going to be on tentor hooks and I'll be on tentor 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 after 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 uh and then but it was smart because when she finally did say I love you the next words out out of my mouth were so let's get married like we're done mission accomplished we're we're finished here and she was 20 she just turned 20 in August and this was like October November uh it's 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 I'm maybe 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 religious you don't sleep with each other before you're married so I was like none of this is enjoyable I'm not enjoying the possibility 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 uh 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 [ __ ] and we engaged and so that was uh so we got married in July uh 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 depths that you never knew if it's values based you don't have to worry about that being a fundamental break in the relationship like every surprise is a surprise on the on on you know a wide variety of different levels most of the surprises are great some of them are not you know that's what what are the uh best questions that you think for perhaps someone who's non-jewish uh to work out those values what are what are the really important values um so you know I I think that I'm a big proponent of Jewish oracho is 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 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 person 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 uh so what religious precepts do you want to teach them uh What uh what values you think are most important some people think tolerance is the most important value some people think that rules-based living is the most most important value some people uh 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 do you want 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 obstru in Judaism to the point where it's like okay do in in religious circles women tend to wear skirts instead of pants for example um because they because the Bible says that women should not wear men's clothing men should not wear women's clothing so the more religious you get the more that's interpreted as women should should wear traditionally female clothing and men should wear pants right um and so you know when we when we have kids and our daughter is 16 what do we what kind of school do we want her to be going to and what do we want her to be wearing you can you can get down to to even that level nitty-gritty yeah uh just on the uh saying I love you thing uh 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 69 days into the relationship so I think you were pretty much bang in the middle of the normal distribution yeah I I think 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 their 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 Passion 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 the trying to you know working to maintain passionate love in a companionate love situation is is is without kids to bond it together dude i' 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 uh 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 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 got shredded on the internet for this by most of the people that saw the real meanwhile I'm like the evidence is just there that 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 so is testosterone drops when you get married testosterone drops again when you have kids exactly and so what when is up happening I would assume is over time the testosterone if you don't have kids probably tends to start you know trending up again so that so you know that is so that's why whenever we have discussions in marriage and people are like what about gay marriage listen structure your life however you want you know 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 that's fine I I get it but all of society does actually depend on man woman children I mean like the the pregeneration of society just clinically speaking depends on that thing and the stability of that social unit and that's why traditionally we called that thing marriage and 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 don't know your wife's going to be like in 10 years you don't know you're going to be like in 10 years right lots of 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 quotequote relationship with your boss are you signing up for like the job your boss might change right like that's that that's a different thing what about navigating relationships long term and keeping that effective so I think that uh 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 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 May it's annoying that your spouse didn't do that but you know pick up after the thing anyway right it's not about having equal roles in the relationship or or everything is equal it's about like are you both doing the 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 and you're and you know when you miss it that's that's the number one I mean the number two is that you actually do have to take some time for yourselves so I mean my my wife and I try to actually this is the hardest thing because again we have four children uh is to 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 each other not at screens like 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 talk and hang out and it's and that's great and where you're not watching whatever's on Apple TV and I I listen I get it we watch a lot of TV I mean like you're you're you're zoned after a day where you know my typical days I wake up at like 6:00 a.m. with the kids 6:15 with the kids I'm with them until they go to school at 800 a.m. I work I come 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 I'm 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 9:00 p.m. and we've both been working all day um but uh but you do have to take time out with your spouse uh and you also have to you know and this is one that uh Clarity with your spouse is a big one right communication is a very hard one because I'm I tend to be the kind of person who will 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 and you'll have to blow out oh my God I can't deal with this I'm so mad I need to like and Sh 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 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 there's a lot of blowup risk when you do that there's this idea called 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 like who's going to carry the workload I'll just keep doing it until the rest of time right and um 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 it's unsustainable like it's a pathology uh I guess talking about men a lot of people associate the right with being pren and masculinity now what do you wish more young men realized what masculinity is I think that more 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 um I think in their Pro context all those things are quite good um but it's 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 right they are things that are designed for another thing you lift weights in order so that you can be strong and that in so you can pick up your kids you can pick up the groceries so 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 it's a it's a useful thing and the same way the 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 I 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 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 that is an instrumental good it is a very very it is inherently enjoyable and pleasurable and all that stuff 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 which is why extramarital sex for example is bad right so this is so the 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 you know I've been doing now this for for a while I'm I'm 40 but I've been doing this since I was 17 I've doing this for like 23 years uh the more you you know 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 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 so 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 if 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 from marriage uh you I I can do all those things on my own because feminists don't want me to do any of of these things and instead of sort of musling their way back into what traditional roles are which would require a difference in the way feminism perceives female roles it's all complimentary in other words you can't have a traditional masculinity with also 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 it requires that she be a partner to you just as you are a partner to her that's what masculinity constitutes and so yeah again I think that that's been now seen as sort of a washed out compromising version of of masculinity which annoys the hell out of me I remember I had this interchange with Andrew Tate on 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 I have four kids I know all of them I rais 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 M males have a drive it's an aggressive drive that's going to be used in one of two ways it's either going to beat up knock [ __ ] down or to build [ __ ] up those are the only two things that men are capable of doing we either knock things down I see in my sons right my my my eight-year-old my my one-year-old the only things they want my girls are nurturers right they want they want to play with the dolls they want to 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 that doesn't change men are always like that so are you going to be a person who builds a thing or are it 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 close to Jordan Peterson um so I love Jordan Jordan's great um Jordan's constant willingness to delve is uh is fascinating well we got along the first time we met I mean he when I met him he was way less famous when we met I don't know was like 2015 2016 maybe this is right when Bill c16 was happening we were both speaking at uh some event in Canada and the first thing that we did is we started exchanging book lists and so um yeah there a bunch of Concepts I've learned from Jordan I mean I think that that his read on uh the original stru of meaning in the world in maps of meaning is fantastic I've used it in sort of biblical analysis of my own uh again Jordan is somebody who really really likes to search that that's the thing and it's always an inspiration to watch him kind of go search for 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 uh that really misses the um spit and sword just sort of down to earth less symbolic stuff um I wonder I would love to see him Arc back around I agree with a lot of that I mean I think that that's what Jordan that is is I think he's the best in the world with that I think he's literally the best in the world me too I think that a lot of the sort of recent uh vacuum that has sucked in other voices for whether it be masculinity men's's movement personal development uh has been laid at the feet of Jordan moving on abandonment of that for other stuff whether it be politics whether it be religion I I think there's some truth to that I think also because Jordan has been I mean it's been a wild projectory for Jordan I think because of that as you you know experience more kind of power in the universe as 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 a lot of big ideas and I think you're going to see him Infuse that back into kind of the smaller more 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 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 him being able to sort of reduce that back down to like if you see a cap P it you know like that that kind of stuff that that that's 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 track He 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 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 is there been anything that you've adjusted in in yourself um I think that the Temptation toward you know advice giving has definitely uh increased cuz when you talk to Jordan he's constantly talking about like how do you affect people on a 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 an nefarious influence on one another but um it's but I you know I I 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 in Jordan I agree about the I I 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 the sphere that you're in and be like I don't want to explore like a new field now 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 he's going to bring it back into to a lot of these messages that are easier to digest let's put it that way there was a Kurt vonet quote that I came across recently that I went to talk 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 there 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 uh for a wide variety of reasons ranging from the titling of YouTube videos to sort of how I'm perceived on Twitter uh is 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 I yeah I mean in the and my best is a human sure I mean I I I struggle to think of anybody who's at their best as a human on Twitter because either you're it's very onedimensional Twitter you're either the person who's like the self-help Guru on Twitter you're like Adam Grant or something I'm you know Adam's great um or your or your you know kind of in the combat mode in Twitter uh and you know it's a mechanism of distribution and and you see that uh in terms of my show I think people actually have a pretty good read on me if they watch the show uh because I do talk about from time to time family stuff or I will talk about you know deeper values again even the show tends to be more political because it's a 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 on kamla Harris on today's show right so those those are all different facets of me um and if you put them all together then that's very close to what I am in in private life uh you when I when I talk on a show like this I I 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 that changes it's it's 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 of that okay so if I say I think that 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 like listen I want him to win I think KL 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 K is going to be a terrible president then my entire audience is like he's telling Bill Maher right so 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 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 uh 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 uh yeah I just I I wonder about what happens as you grow up as your philosophical view 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 I 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 uh as well as anybody who's not a rabbi um 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 I read Hebrew I I know all that stuff I can translate it I know all the commentaries on it for a thousand years like does my audience really want me to analyze Genesis y probably not I mean like we tried this we had a book club uh and the book club was you know we'd read like great works of literature so we read M the one way yeah you were on a deck of a ship right exactly so we did one with Moby deck and it's like I love that stuff right I love literary literary analysis I read tons does my audience desperately want my analysis my dick it turned out not so it's like okay well that's something that they don't want do you have a wish that you didn't do a Daily Show you're kind of at the mercy of whatever [ __ ] happens in the pre P Diddy gets arrested today guess what we're doing five minutes on P didy because it's important for us to I don't know whether you cover it I cover that in the slightest um the uh the I'm so uninterested in that I couldn't possibly care and there there's a certain level of stuff where I'm sure the audience cares and I I can't bring myself to care so I just won't cover it like I'm unless it's in a funny way I gu 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 there must be a desire in you to make a Lindy body of work yes and yet I don't know I listen to a lot of your show during 2020 cuz that was the only way I could get daily updates on what the hell was happening with a global pandemic right um I don't know how many people are going back and and listening to May 2020 Ben episode so is there a part of you that go like I I've got the books and I've got the other bits and pieces is that of uh pull becoming more it's a it's a 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 and I i' I've done a pilot episode of what a Biblical commentary would look like is that something my audience wants from me I know I I've I've done you know one of the things that I'd love to do is this I do think our audience would love uh is H is something called the the historians which is I want to sit with a group of historians on particular topics and basically do a round table 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 um Victor Davis Hansen 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 people I think would dig that um but you I I have those big Ideas all the time indulge all of your personal oh my God I mean the stuff that I'm really interested in I 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 uh is is typically like a deep read on the military conflict over Taiwan traits 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 well I know as much as somebody who studies it for a living no but will I know 70% of that sure and that's good enough you know to for it 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 um and the I I wonder how much video is going to be permanent anyway I mean that 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 uh I think that the nature of video is kind of transitory unless you're talking about like a movie from 25 years ago that self-encapsulated but a piece of non-fiction content that like everybody knows who's you know politically aware that that Milton Freeman an entire series called free to choose has anybody ever watched free to choose probably not so in the non-fiction space very difficult to create of quotequote permanent content yeah archival as Eric calls it you exactly so you know that that's where books come in and that's why I'm still interested in writing books and you know we'll probably come out with a couple in the next few years um but it's but it's definitely a strong I 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 right some some of my some of my best shows I think are the ones that have the lowest listenership and 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 this was 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 uh YouTube video which is essentially a moving chart that just shows the nature of military spending over the last like four centuries V versus GDP 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 uh you know Western capitalist military bu build up and how you actually compete with China and why China actually is is on a pretty bad path here because their economy will collapse and then they won't have the ability and and so I I like sat there and I did like a full history of Western spending on Military like I think that stuff's fascinating I'm sure my some of my listeners were probably dying you know and so every so often I'll get to it's like 100 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 of bringing that you had there is a tendency to be hyp sensitive to that so how do you deal with public criticism um you know it sort of depends on from whom uh so I 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 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 a personal level obviously I have family members uh but I think that everybody needs that because unfortunately the online discourse is not comprised of people who want the best for you they 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 we do this as a company a fair bit um but it's uh it's never easy I mean I'm not going to 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 uh simply reducing your exposure to it is one strategy but yeah yes for sure but you need a permeable a permeable bubble uh where if something really placed around the St exactly like you you need somebody who you trust who's going to speak truth to you there true in any Walk of Life who says like you're doing this wrong how do you avoid there's a great idea you'll be familiar with audience capture of course there is uh an article I'll sent 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 um for instance Seth Goden 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 will 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 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 FL unless you're over the target either way it's whooping right and and that latter one by the way has become like holy RIT on 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 one of the big mistakes of the right I think that again prompted by the left shrinking over the Overton window to near invisibility and everybody finding themselves out in the in the cornfield I think that the the right kind of cultivated the counter 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 [ __ ] and they're not 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 um again I think I've gotten better at this over the years as as you get older you tend to grow a thicker skin every every year I feel like I need to grow a slightly thicker skin uh and you know it's elephantine at this point but I think that'll it'll continue to to increase it comes from directions that you don't necessarily game out what what you find is that you you build a suit of armor for yourself and then somebody always finds wherever the chank is and the armor and sticks a knife right in there like okay well I better you know get some iron and patch that up what does that look like from a a um real perspective so to give an example uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 any place else on Earth which I think is totally disingenuous uh and and I 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 uh bad a a move that that can only be motivated by animus and so you know I had to sort of build new systems for that just realize that you know people who I thought were going to speak up were not going to that that that I think has been a new a new I've mentioned it before I think that's you find new ways to get hurt in life I think one of the new ways is is that um you Reliance on on Reliance on on other people outside of your close Circle can be can be very difficult people you expect to speak up in in a particular moment very often we'll we'll sit down I wonder how much of that as well as maybe reassuring the prior that some teenage version of Ben would have been quite worried about as well there 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' I've gotten over say 90% of that you never get over 100% of it probably um I think that 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 I'm very political I I believe that politics matters I think policy matters and I always thought of myself and still do as part of sort of broader ideological movement and when you think of yourself as sort of a broader ideological movement which you see as sort of a community than when you kind of you know get separated off from the community and people let that happen uh it can be painful and it can be difficult and when you realize that it maybe it wasn't quite as much of a nice happy Community as you thought it was and you know that that kind of stuff is do the basan thing and and move forward uh a Scientific American article said vote for CA Harris to support science health and the environment camela Harris has plans to improve health boosts the economy and mitigate climate change Donald Trump has threats and a dangerous record what do you think about the editors of scientif iic American endorsing a candidate for the second time only 179 years well I mean I would say that they're not actually adding to their own credibility I mean the data that I've seen suggest 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 overrall 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 where I'll give a couple examples right because I don't want to just throw a big allegations out there the the attempt to say trans medicine is medicine uh that that that the 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 like that that that is a political move the the attempt to suggest during covid that black lives matter what if you went out and ried for black lives matter that you could be out there like there there were full-on Public Health statements that you being in a giant crowd in the middle of the street for for George Floyd apparently 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 postnuclear Fukushima that sort of that 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 what they say about you know this particular food and its effect on health that might still be true it was like well [ __ ] those guys like they if they said that this is is wrong then everything they say is wrong blanket covery exactly and and you see that again in a wide variety of of sort of arena in in public life that institutions it's 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 your in the in the dam that holds back the public skepticism and Bam it's gone the uh study that you were referring to in 2020 nature endorsed Joe Biden in the US presidential election a survey found that view the endorsement did not change people's views of the candidates but caused some to lose confidence in nature and in US scientists generally and that was published in nature right right and then they did it again and and scientific Americans did it again it's like what what what are you doing what are you doing and it's and that that Temptation uh the word for it that I like to it's it's not my word it's just a great word that I wish would drop into common usage is ultracrepidarianism which is speaking well outside your purview of of expertise right 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 uh and whenever the editors of Scientific American decide to speak about about politics that is like case in point of ultracrepidarianism them speaking well outside their their view their their perview 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 uh candidate decide once it's gonna be insane the the next the next 50 days are going to be totally out out there I mean I I can't even like 70 days ago we had a different nominee 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 it's like season eight of Game of Thrones like like they they spend all this time building up and like developing characters and it takes you like a year to get from Kings in to the wall and then season 8 they're like you know what [ __ ] it the timelin after yeah exactly you're getting on that dragon and you're up there in 5 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 story lines now I mean like 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 room this is this is a badly written season of Trump trump season 8 is not good what would you uh 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 the grade of the road uh you know a bump is not a grade you know like just like weather is not climate a bump is not a grade if if there if something happens the tendency is going to be for things to settle back into status quo anti unless a major Ament so don't follow every single thing that happens 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 commo was able to Spring to string sentences together in somewhat coherent fashion um and the and everyone was 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 um yeah so take a breath uh and and then also yeah spend some time not watching politics and I say this is somebody who benefits from you watching politics like watch half of my show or the whole show and then and then go outside and do something else don't get drawn into the idea that that you know if you miss a day then it's it's the end of the world and and also I I've said this to both sides believe it or not this is not the the last election please stop with this [ __ ] it's not true and anybody who says that to you is lying it's cataclysmic language it's it's 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 like it's it's just it's so it's so obnoxious and it's 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 um it's sort of pandering in a strange way and it's uh it reminds me of the rhetoric that climate activists the most extreme sort of totally um 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 it 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 overg 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 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 believe that he wouldn't put on that hat anymore than he put on a hat exactly so he doesn't believe that he's totally full of [ __ ] and and same thing is true when people are like oh my God it's the the last election so that's one tendency that I hate is the last election crisis point the other thing that I hate is again emotivism which is a term that's used by Alistar McIntyre uh not coined by him but used by him which is basically the the attribution of motive to people in lie 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 right the real reason they're doing this is because they despise you they despise you and they 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 they and everything about you is is terrible to them and so you you should hate them right like 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 in say how they vote is the truth I think they get into the B they get into the voting booth and they're like okay I got this schmuck and I got this person I got this other schmuck and like okay fine so both one the's like okay 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 uh 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 uh stuff that I don't think Elon would want on there uh on the platform or elevated on the platform including probably some foreign interference from the Russians for examp you see some accounts that that obviously have have risen to prominence because of being jogged by outside forces pretty clearly and obviously and I think Elon wants to to not have that happen I think he wants to crack down on that again I think that Elon he's somebody who who always shoots from the hip he's very honest about what he thinks which means that he will actually 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 he's done this many many times which I actually find kind of charming one of the things that I 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 ban on YouTube you have no idea why it was shadowban 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 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 like tweet to Elon directly and Elon will be like yeah I don't see why they did that and they they'll just unban you like there there's something Charming about that like You' 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 he is he has a generalized worldview that does not line up with the kind of woke redistributionist left that he thinks Kam Harris represents does that mean that every tweet is being you know run through a rigorous fact check machine or is he just meing he's just meing I mean that the truth is Elon is using Twitter the way we all used to use Twitter in like 2010 okay I remember when Twitter was fun before it became a [ __ ] show and is there a risk of doing that at the scale that he's at um I I think there an obligation that comes with platform size I mean I I I do think that 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 yeah 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 dorsy in the back room with a bunch of levers telling people they couldn't say you know he or she then I would I'd much prefer Elon system it seems like Jack dorsy increasingly is coming out as sort of a pro Free Speech position whether that's red conning or whatever I'm not too sure uh Mark Zuckerberg has gone from sort of like nerd to Chad this Arc of him also uh I what do you is there some underlying some is this just growing up what's going 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 [ __ ] campaign it had to be that she was jobbed by the Russians in Facebook and so all the pressure was brought to bear on social media had Diane 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 about at Georgetown about free speech like really good I remember playing parts of it on my show and then by 20120 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 salutory for the American public discourse I think that I think actually the loss of Facebook in terms of news distribution has been really bad uh 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 I think that it's been bad for the national discourse because Facebook was kind of Normy Central right Facebook is like your 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 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 foran 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 for the social netw 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 when they when they your reach has declined 90% well 90% since 20 are you aware if that's the same on all sides of the political line so I think it is I mean I as far as I'm aware targeting that's I I'm not aware that it's that it's Target it maybe targeted us I mean we've had some intimations that perhaps but again I don't want to you know get into conspirac 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 and sort of the nature of business in 2019 what is the uh thrust of platform now YouTube uh 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 on we have a million paid subscribers so we tend to have you know a lot of those people watching on app um and those numbers don't even get attributed to our advertisers we have hundreds of thousands of people who watch my show on app and the that's without mid roll ads though uh that meaning that the embedded ads yeah right yeah right they no they're no they're no like YouTube ads or anything but like the the they're embedded ads still in on the app uh uh actually I don't believe so I think but for our subscribers watching ad free they watch ad free interesting so so at some point you know we could see you know maybe there'll be a lower TI like Netflix it'll be like a lower tier and if you want exactly you get exposed to a few ads from yeah do you think that we've passed Peak woke um yes uh I do think that we pass 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 [ __ ] and so I think that a lot of people were 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 equity and inclusion officer and so I think that there there's some of that in the corporate world uh the right obviously has gotten much more mobilized people like Chris rufo and um Robbie starbu been doing good job sort of mobilizing people against this sort of stuff at their corporations and and from you know 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 between BLM and and and Co it was a terrible year for a huge number of people real onew 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's racist and horrible like I just don't want to hear it and by the way you're seeing KLA 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 in 2012 I imagine that even for people who were 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 normaly 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 if we've passed Peak woke that creates both a vac 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 people everyone's cognizant of that Matt Walsh can't just do a like his another Tik Tok 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 you know Peak I'm searching for a term for it uh I would say Peak phonism um like I think that France fenon the author of wretchard of the Earth this kind of post this idea that that there will be colonially oppressed and then they're the oppressors the oppressed oppressed matri that that's not going away I think the oppressor oppressed Matrix is is here to stay I think that it was 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 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 um but I do think that there are class divides there are um divides in terms of what carar call res represent all the the kind of jealousy and resentment that are going to come to the FL again you're seeing in terms of foreign policy it's leading to uh I think the Great Divide that's to come is between groups that I've called the Lions and groups I've called the the uh the Scavengers uh and that's 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 rights to left I think there are some people on the right who are sort of in jealousy and resentment mode um and I think that you know the it's it's largely relegated there it's it's a very big movement on the left uh 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 who uh and the reason I say that is because virtually a huge percentage of the American population will spend some time in the middle class right 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 it's 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 went for the merchant class and you become you know nvo Reacher or something it's not like that in the United States this always been the magic of the US is that you can start off dirt poor and you can finish off super rich and you know that so 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 Kan and Abel and Kan and abble 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 for reject being like 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 uh 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 in a fit of peak that that I think is and I I don't think those conflicts are going away anytime soon so for example you're not going to see I I think that we may have hit Peak woke on like men are women I think that that may be past it's it's cell by date but have we hit Peak woke on I'm protesting America on a college campus Because I think America is a systemically uh brutal exploiter of third world peoples I don't think remotely hit the end of that I think that's probably likely to 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 thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my full length 3 hour hourong conversation with the one and only Eric Weinstein just here