Ben Shapiro joins me to talk about the alt-right, why he's not a racist, and why he thinks Andrew Yang is the only Democratic presidential candidate who has agreed to go on a full hour on a Sunday morning talk show with Andrew Yang. We also talk about his new book, "The Alt-Right Sage Without the Rage," and how he thinks the term "alt-right" is a crock of crap. And, of course, we talk about why he doesn't like wearing a tie and a tie-dyed shirt in public, even though he's wearing a suit and tie every day of the week, and how to dress like a grown-up in a way that s actually makes him look like a conservative, and not just a guy who likes to wear suits and tie-dye and a shirt that s a little too much like a guy with a lot of hair and a lot too little hair. And, as always, thank you for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please also hit us up on Apple Podcasts and tell us what you thought of the show! and we'll send you a link to the show in the comments section below! Thank you for listening and share it with your friends and family! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite thing about Ben Shapiro? 2: What do you think of him? 3:30 - Is he a racist? 4:10 - What does he think about the Alt-right? 5:00 6:00 | What's his favorite food? 7:40 - Is Andrew Yang a good guy? 8:30 9:15 - What would you like to see him wear a tie? 11:30 | What s your favorite kind of shirt? 13:00 -- Is he Jewish? 16:30 -- How do you feel about his hair? 17:40 -- What are you a good person? 18: Does he have a problem? 19:15 -- What's the worst thing he wears? 21: Is he racist or not? 22:40 23:10 -- How does he like a woman s uniform? 26:10 27:10 | What are your favorite piece of clothing?
00:01:00.000Yeah, yeah, because I used to, I mean, if you look at the old photos of me, I have, like, the Hitler hair.
00:01:05.000I've got, like, the hair, that's the only thing about me that's hilarious, was my old hair, and I've got the hair that kind of comes down over the forehead, and I still walk into the office wearing basically an undershirt every day, because I'm incredibly lazy when it comes to that stuff, but we have...
00:01:36.000We're not supposed to talk about that.
00:01:38.000But this is one of the things that bothers me so much about you being so misrepresented.
00:01:42.000When I read things about you, there was the article that we were just talking about, the alt-right sage without the rage, they called you, and you're not even remotely alt-right.
00:01:51.000In fact, you were the leading target of anti-Semitic abuse for all of 2016, weren't you?
00:01:57.000Yeah, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which is no ally of mine, so...
00:02:00.000Yeah, I mean I'm – not only am I not alt-right, I've spent the last four years like legitimately battling the alt-right, talking about how evil I think their ideology is, how evil I think white supremacy is.
00:02:10.000I mean first of all, like people with yarmulkes, typically not the favorites of the alt-right.
00:02:14.000And then beyond that, I mean I think their ideology is legitimately a devastatingly awful – Twist on what Western civilization is supposed to be.
00:02:22.000What's amazing is a review of my new book, and my new book has several sections in there dedicated to how terrible the alt-right is.
00:02:28.000And then the interview they did with me doesn't talk about alt-right stuff at all, but they just assume I'm on the conservative right.
00:02:41.000People are labeling people in a very simple manner to try to categorize them as the enemy.
00:02:47.000And instead of just addressing these points, like, I love watching your debates where you do Q&As with college students and with people in the audience.
00:02:55.000Because you can see you agree with you or disagree with you.
00:03:36.000And conciliatory, and yet people will suggest that everything I do is about destroying people on the other side because of all the Ben Shapiro destroys videos and all that kind of stuff.
00:03:44.000There are certain groups of people where that's their shtick.
00:03:54.000This is not you, and this is what bothers me so much.
00:03:57.000I know that you've said some things in the past, particularly about Arabs and when you were a younger man, that you said, I shouldn't have said that.
00:04:05.000Some of those things were taken out of context, like that one particular tweet, which is a bad tweet.
00:04:09.000It was a tweet that was part of a tweet thread in which I was specifically contrasting Israel and the Hamas leadership and saying that the Israeli government likes to build and the Hamas leadership would prefer that their citizens live in sewage and bomb things.
00:05:08.000I mean you can go and look up all the things that I think I've done wrong, and I'll apologize for some, and I'll say some were dumb, and I'll say some I'm fine with, and you're just taking it out of context.
00:05:16.000But I mean I hope that's what honest people try to do.
00:05:21.000You're not dealing with honest people.
00:05:23.000When people are trying to categorize you as alt-right or they're trying to put you into this category of internet goon, they're taking some little tiny phrase that you said seven years ago and trying to say, this is you.
00:05:52.000And even if somebody tweeted something bad like 10 years ago, bringing it up now is not an attempt to actually make the public space better.
00:06:23.000I said the same thing about, for example, Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, who is excoriated for having this terrible racist photo on his yearbook page back in medical school in 1987. And people are saying, well, this is evidence he's racist now.
00:06:35.000It's like, well, no, that's evidence that he was doing a racist thing then.
00:06:38.000That's not evidence that he is racist now.
00:06:39.000You sort of have to look over the broad course of his career.
00:06:42.000And he ended up doing what everyone now does, which is you just don't apologize for anything.
00:06:48.000You just try to pass it off as a nothing.
00:06:50.000The public space is actually getting worse.
00:06:53.000Let's say that you did something bad in the past.
00:07:16.000And then you get your defenders to come and surround you, and then nothing ever gets cleansed.
00:07:20.000Or opportunity number three is you do what Barack Obama did, which is you come out preemptively, and you try to remember all the bad stuff you do, and then you confess it in public.
00:07:28.000So in Dreams from My Father, he says, When I was back in high school, did a little blow.
00:07:33.000And everybody's like, oh, okay, so he did cocaine when he was in high school.
00:07:41.000The problem is that right now, even if you preemptively come out and say I did something wrong, like, for example, Liam Neeson talking about years ago when he had a racist thought that he didn't act on, when he had a racist thought.
00:07:53.000This is now—we're going to try and ruin your career for something that you admit was bad, that you did 30 years ago.
00:07:59.000We're going to try and ruin you over that.
00:08:00.000If you apologize for something that you did 30 years ago, which you would have preferred, just got forgotten because it was embarrassing and stupid, then we say you're bad.
00:08:07.000And so all you're left with is, like, the most shameless people in the world who are in the public space, right?
00:08:13.000The incentive structure is to be deeply shameless, to just say, yeah, man, I own that, and it was great when I said it.
00:08:49.000What I like that you do is you debate your points, you state your positions, you have a philosophy.
00:08:55.000And what I don't like is when people try to pretend that that philosophy is somehow hateful or somehow regressive, that you condemn people for their thoughts.
00:09:35.000Kara Swisher, they were talking about removing you from YouTube, and I thought it was the CEO of YouTube, but it was actually Kara who said, I would if I could.
00:09:43.000Yeah, she was pissed because her son apparently listens to my podcast.
00:09:45.000That's kind of funny, if she's being funny saying, but I thought it was the CEO of YouTube, which would make it much more disturbing.
00:09:52.000She was trying to do the same thing that they do with you or with Dave Rubin or Jordan Peterson, which is that anybody who is sort of heterodox, because in that group I think I'm the only registered Republican, Anybody who's heterodox is now being portrayed as a – Meaning just thinks differently from kind of the down the line Democratic Party platform.
00:10:11.000You're not like down the line with Hillary.
00:11:16.000Am I supposed to have some dude with his itchy trigger finger standing by in front of a keyboard just waiting for something offensive to pop up?
00:11:23.000And this was in response to something that happened with them where there was pedophiles who were watching videos of children doing things and they were commenting stuff in the, you know, like children's gymnastics and stuff like that.
00:11:34.000They were commenting and like communicating with each other through the comments and it was...
00:12:39.000I mean, here's what's going to happen is Facebook and YouTube are going to fall prey to their own standards.
00:12:44.000Because if their standard is that you're responsible for your followers, or I'm responsible for my followers, or Jordan, or anybody else is responsible for all the people who view their stuff, okay, then why isn't Facebook responsible for all the people posting on its platform?
00:12:56.000If they are, right, if Facebook becomes responsible for all the people posting on its platform, they'll be bankrupt in a week.
00:13:24.000If you post something false on Facebook, Facebook doesn't get sued.
00:13:27.000But now Facebook has deemed itself the morality police, and they'll ban people they don't like, and they'll decide what editorially ought to be elevated and what ought not to be elevated.
00:13:35.000Does that sound more like the phone company to you?
00:13:37.000Or does that sound more like my website, where I decide what gets published and what doesn't, right?
00:13:41.000Because Facebook's case for exemption from these laws is, well, we're like the phone company, right?
00:13:45.000When you're on the phone with somebody, if that person says something criminal, AT&T isn't responsible for the person saying something criminal.
00:13:54.000Facebook is jumping into the middle of conversations and then saying, well, we don't really like this conversation, so we're just going to kind of shut it down.
00:14:03.000Not because of legal threat, but because we just don't like it.
00:14:08.000Say if you put a post up on Facebook and they don't like the way you worded things or described things, will they actually shut down your post?
00:14:18.000So they've done it in the past to some conservative – it's pretty controversial because they're not transparent at all.
00:14:22.000I can tell you that at the beginning of 2018, we lost about 35 percent of our traffic because Facebook started cracking down on mostly conservative sites.
00:14:31.000They said that it was kind of news sites generally, but that's not what the statistics – They're doing it more often with things that we all sort of agree are bad.
00:15:18.000I've been very, very critical of Alex Jones.
00:15:20.000I didn't think he should get banned from Twitter unless he actually violated the law, unless he was responsible for a violent threat, unless he was defamatory or something.
00:15:28.000They're definitely going down this road of being the moral arbitrators.
00:15:33.000They're the ones who get to decide what the conversations are.
00:15:39.000The responsibility of getting to dictate what should and should not be discussed and to have it be a handful of people and have these people almost exclusively live in the Pacific...
00:15:55.000I mean, it's all tech liberals who really, if you're around those people, they live in this really strange, uber-wealthy bubble of super-genius people.
00:16:08.000Spectrum people who are coders and super capitalists and people that are raising money all over the place and designing technology, and they have an ideology.
00:16:18.000And it's not necessarily a bad one, just being honest and upfront about what it is.
00:16:23.000It's incredibly progressive, which is very unusual for big business, right?
00:16:27.000For big business to be just openly, transparently progressive and pushing social justice, it's very unusual.
00:16:35.000Well, I think that there is a sort of misunderstanding of when we say what big business is, what big business is.
00:16:40.000So I think that there's a wide variety of owners of businesses and how they think about politics.
00:16:45.000Obviously, Bill Gates is a progressive guy.
00:16:55.000Well, so I think that there are a lot of people – listen, I think that the vast majority – I think Mark Zuckerberg is ruthless with Facebook and he's progressive.
00:17:01.000I think Jack Dorsey is as ruthless as the next guy when it comes to profit.
00:17:04.000I mean he's still got to be answerable to his shareholders.
00:17:06.000So I think a lot of the progressivism is sort of a way to excuse your own – Your own involvement in the capitalist market.
00:17:14.000When Facebook took off, don't be evil.
00:18:02.000I don't care at all what Jack Dorsey, who vacations in Malaysia and gets bitten by a million mosquitoes while meditating, has to say about the nature of life.
00:18:11.000Like, why do I care about Jack Dorsey's political view?
00:18:20.000But it's not enough for a lot of these folks.
00:18:22.000It's the The kind of Hooli from Silicon Valley, we're gonna pretend that we're here to do good.
00:18:27.000And it's not enough just to acknowledge that maybe the thing that you provided is the good.
00:18:32.000Like Bill Gates has done more good with Microsoft than he has done with any of his charities.
00:18:37.000He's given a lot of money to charity, but Microsoft has provided legitimately hundreds of thousands of jobs and created enormously productive lines of business and made enormous profit for a lot of people.
00:18:47.000A lot of people have stock in Microsoft.
00:18:49.000As a basic factual thing, he has done more good doing that than giving tens of millions of dollars to various outside causes.
00:18:57.000So it feels like a lot of the progressivism in corporate halls in Silicon Valley is bifurcated mentally.
00:19:05.000It's like people have – they're like dolphins.
00:19:06.000It's one side of the brain on at a time.
00:19:07.000Here's my capitalist side where I go out and make money and profit, and then here's my other side where I show people what a great person I am by proclaiming that I'm for Bernie Sanders while parking my money offshore to make sure that it's shielded from the tax man.
00:19:25.000What I'm saying is that the don't be evil thing, like, one of the things that I thought was, what if that was like a legal decision?
00:19:33.000Me being cynical that they were pulled into some sort of an office and said, if we say, don't be evil, and you take someone off the platform, you're accusing them of evil.
00:20:08.000to tell you that you are not allowed to be on a platform because we disagree.
00:20:12.000It's one thing if you're threatening violence, which is an actual violation of law, but this crap where people like me, because I believe in a social fabric built on certain Judeo-Christian values, but I'm not forcing you to be part of that, and I don't think the government should compel you to be a part of that, or I'm the tyrant, but the person who sits at the top of Twitter or Facebook who is saying that they get to police what you see And they're going to nudge you in the right direction,
00:20:34.000nudge you in the right direction without your consent, without them even telling them what you're doing, right?
00:20:39.000They're going to push you a little bit because they know better than you, and they can sort of massage you into better views if we control your channels of information.
00:20:46.000This is something the Obama administration was very fond of.
00:20:49.000There's a scholar named Cass Sunstein.
00:20:50.000He's a legal scholar, and he wrote a book called Nudge.
00:21:15.000You're closing down even conversation.
00:21:18.000As soon as you're trying to silence this other voice, if you believe one thing and another person believes a different thing, you should probably talk about it.
00:21:27.000And the way that I know for sure there's something wrong with your argument is if what you're trying to do is you're sneakily trying to silence these voices.
00:21:36.000And again, as long as we're not talking about threats of violence and as long as we're not talking about harassment or doxing, we're just talking about conversation.
00:21:43.000You're just talking about people with differing points of view.
00:21:46.000If you want to silence differing points of view, I have to wonder about your intent.
00:21:50.000I have to wonder about whether you're going into this conversation with good faith.
00:21:53.000I have to wonder whether you've really objectively assessed whether or not your argument does hold up against scrutiny.
00:22:00.000Because this is also part of the problem.
00:22:01.000When you're in an echo chamber, you often don't formulate these arguments very well.
00:22:05.000When you confront people about certain biased beliefs that they have, and you have an opposing belief, if they're part of a bubble, sometimes they might not have even ever considered some of the things you have to say.
00:22:16.000And I've seen that with some of your videos.
00:22:17.000Yeah, I mean it does happen all the time and with sophisticated people.
00:22:21.000I've spent my entire life, literally my entire life, in areas where everyone disagrees with me.
00:22:25.000I grew up in L.A. I went to Harvard Law School for three years.
00:22:28.000I was in Cambridge where everyone disagreed with me and then I came back to L.A. So I have never spent more than a week at a time in a red state.
00:22:34.000Have you ever – have your conservative values moved in one way or another?
00:22:54.000One was just a general sense the government sucks at everything, and the more I see the government try to crack down on things, the more prevalent it becomes.
00:23:25.000there's you ruining your own life through use of drugs, and there's drugs that legitimately ruin other people's lives.
00:23:29.000There are drugs that remove your ability to even reason or think.
00:23:34.000I think there are only two reasons to criminalize drugs in any fashion.
00:23:36.000One is if there are drugs like, for example, PCP that legitimately make you violent, and then you are going out and committing acts of violence against people.
00:23:45.000Or if you're talking about a drug where it legitimately robs you of your capacity to reason, heroin, if you're able to actually crack down on it successfully.
00:23:55.000But even there, I'm not sure that the proper government solution is criminalization because we've criminalized it and it's still incredibly prevalent.
00:26:17.000And once the government decides what version of marriage it wants to push, that then comes into conflict with other values.
00:26:22.000So for example, once the state of California decides that same-sex marriage is on legal par with heterosexual marriage, now I'm worried about the externality of I have a religious day school or I have my synagogue.
00:26:33.000My synagogue It's a religious institution.
00:26:35.000It doesn't approve of same-sex marriage.
00:26:37.000Now is the government going to come in and tell my synagogue how it ought to act with regard to same-sex marriage?
00:26:41.000I don't think that's the government's business.
00:27:12.000I'm just talking about the statistical overuse of marijuana among teenagers does have detrimental brain effects that have some long-term after effects.
00:27:20.000It's pretty proven, and that's one of the things that I really – I'm glad you said that because I wanted to cover that when you were in the middle of a rant when we were joking around about 6th and 7th graders selling pot.
00:27:54.000There was an article recently that I posted from BBC that was saying that you probably shouldn't be considered an adult until you're 30. Right, they're saying brain development doesn't even stop until you're 26 or 28. This is why when people are saying, let's lower the voting age to 16, I'm like, what the?
00:28:12.000I mean, really, I was a chimp in a high school.
00:28:15.000Now, the problem that I have with many people's perceptions on marijuana is that it's based on ignorance, meaning no personal experience with it.
00:28:26.000Listen, I'll admit, I have no personal experience with marijuana.
00:28:38.000They jump down for a little when a bunch of chickens jump off the boat, but then they come right back up.
00:28:45.000The marijuana thing is, in my opinion, it's another one of those things where people have this categorized box that they like to put marijuana users in.
00:28:55.000Like, this is the category, lazy, stoner, stupid, delusional.
00:29:16.000I'm telling you, because it's not what people think it is.
00:29:19.000If you've never smoked marijuana, this is going to be a very difficult thing to grasp, but marijuana enhances jiu-jitsu because it eliminates the rest of the world.
00:29:27.000When you're rolling, which rolling is like, say, if you and Jamie were going to have a sparring match, that would be rolling.
00:29:34.000Like, you'd slap hands, and then you'd go.
00:29:36.000And you're trying to choke him, and he's trying to get you in an armbar, and you're going after it.
00:29:39.000When you do that on marijuana, it's like you don't...
00:29:42.000Think of anything else other than those movements and it becomes like this very intense meditation and violence.
00:29:49.000Like it's not violent in terms of most of the time you don't really even get hurt.
00:29:53.000It's like you get to the point like one of the beautiful things about jujitsu is you can grab ahold of someone and choke them to the point where they're going to go to sleep and you would kill them if you kept going and they tap and then you're friends again.
00:30:37.000And that's probably the majority, in fact.
00:30:39.000Okay, so then, you know, but again, that's not a case for- I agree.
00:30:44.000So I don't think there's anything we disagree about here because I'm not talking about criminalizing marijuana use.
00:30:49.000I think that we should honestly discuss the evidence that for a subset of the population, there is some evidence that marijuana is addicting, but it's a subset.
00:30:57.000It's not everybody who's on marijuana.
00:30:59.000The vast majority of people on marijuana are not addicted to marijuana.
00:31:02.000I think- In the same way, alcohol, I mean, it's true of alcohol as well.
00:31:04.000There's people that are going to be addicted to almost anything.
00:31:07.000And I think there's absolutely people that are addicted to sugar.
00:31:11.000There's, for sure, people that are addicted to nicotine and alcohol and all these things that we let people have.
00:31:16.000The material addictiveness of marijuana is not comparable to opioids, though, for example.
00:31:20.000It's not even comparable to alcohol or nicotine.
00:31:22.000It seems to be very rare when people become physically addicted to it.
00:31:50.000That's why virtually every solution I suggest is so funny.
00:31:52.000I'm constantly – conservatives like me who are libertarian-leaning are constantly accused of being non-compassionate.
00:31:57.000No, it's just our compassionate solutions don't involve the use of government.
00:32:00.000It's like we're going to encourage people to make better decisions with their lives.
00:32:04.000And if you choose not to do that, it's a free country.
00:32:06.000Well, you know, coming from a religious background, you have this community that reinforces this kind of behavior and thought.
00:32:12.000And I think that's one of the major—really one of the best benefits of religion is that moral fabric and that community, the sense of community.
00:32:20.000Even silly ones like Mormons, you know, they're the nicest folks, right?
00:32:24.000They believe something that is fucking patently insane.
00:32:27.000If you go and read the Joseph Smith text from 1820 when he was 14 years old, the shit that he wrote, like— I try not to get into doctrinal insanity.
00:32:38.000Yeah, but with that said, I mean Alexis de Tocqueville talks about this early on in the American Republic.
00:32:45.000The idea is that what makes America very different is the idea you don't need a big government when you do have a supportive social fabric where people feel like they're at least oriented toward a common goal.
00:32:53.000It's one of the problems that I think we have in the country right now.
00:32:56.000I'm not sure people are oriented toward even a common sense of conversation.
00:33:01.000I mean it's – you don't have to agree on everything in order to have a common sense of the important values that unify the country or should.
00:33:09.000I always use Sam Harris as sort of my bet noire here because he's obviously a militant atheist.
00:33:17.000And yet when it comes to the things that we would like to see happen in the country, not on a government policy level, but on a let's have a conversation level and discuss on evidence level, we're on the same page.
00:33:27.000There are certain core assumptions you have to make in order for that to happen.
00:33:30.000My argument about America and the West is that those core assumptions are built on Judeo-Christian foundations.
00:33:36.000Sam's core argument seems to be that they're built on evolutionary biology.
00:33:42.000I don't want to let this marijuana thing go just yet.
00:33:45.000One of the things that I wanted to bring up to you was this idea that if you're a religious person...
00:33:51.000Don't you think that there's certain things that maybe God put here for us to consume, to change your perspective, to allow you to reach new levels of consciousness?
00:34:03.000Don't you think it's entirely possible that some of these things that are here, and I know you haven't experienced them, but they might literally have been put there by God.
00:34:11.000And there's some evidence to say that a lot of the texts from the Bible, that in particular there was, I think it was the University of Tel Aviv, Somewhere in Jerusalem where these scholars were, they were trying to decipher what it meant when Moses encountered the burning bush.
00:34:31.000And they believe that it may have been the acacia tree, which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is a psychedelic substance that actually that the brain produces and it's very common in plants.
00:34:41.000And they think that this might have been, when he met God and God was a burning bush, that this might have been some Crude translation of them being involved in some sort of a psychedelic experience.
00:34:54.000Now, it sounds outlandish unless you've had that psychedelic experience.
00:34:57.000And when you have, you very well could think that you were in a conversation with God.
00:35:05.000And this is something that may very well have been lost information, or this may very well have been rituals that people participated in to bring them closer together and to reinforce that sense of community that you do get from a church and you do get from a group of people that share moral beliefs and values.
00:35:54.000So this argument, I will say I'm not super fond of the argument that God made something and therefore it's ours to use or – I mean like I keep kosher.
00:36:05.000So I am not a huge fan of the argument that because something is here or because an urge is natural, therefore we ought to imbibe or therefore we ought to participate in a particular activity.
00:36:17.000One of the things that I'm very big on – A rationalist when it comes to religion as much as you can be a rationalist with regard to religion to the extent that I think that it's up to us to use our reasonable faculties to determine the proper use of things, which is why you shouldn't overuse drugs even if you're going to use drugs,
00:36:35.000But this is part of the problem of making things illegal.
00:36:37.000You make things illegal, then you really don't know what it is or how it affects the body or what's the right dose or the wrong dose, and then people get involved in these terrible situations where they're taking things and they're just guessing with you.
00:36:50.000I mean, there's truth to that, but it's also true that on a social level—I'm not talking about legal because we totally agree on the legal level.
00:36:55.000On the social level, there's a couple of things that are true of, for example, the Orthodox Jewish community.
00:37:00.000Low rates of addiction because people have that social fabric.
00:37:05.000Also— As you say, substance use in moderation can actually be quite a good thing.
00:37:10.000So low rates of alcoholism in the Jewish community, and part of that is the fact that you are given kiddish wine from the time you're a kid, right?
00:37:15.000I mean you actually are— It's destigmatized.
00:37:17.000Yeah, it's destigmatized, and the idea is that in its proper context, this could be a good thing.
00:37:23.000So I'll admit I don't know enough about the proper context of marijuana to know when it would be a quote-unquote good thing.
00:38:07.000I mean, when it comes to prohibition, prohibition with alcohol didn't work, prohibition with drugs is just making the cartels bigger, and it's causing more problems with organized crime.
00:38:17.000I agree with that on a practical level.
00:38:18.000Whether you like drugs or don't like drugs, government interventionism is generally a giant fail.
00:38:22.000I think our perceptions of what is good for you and is bad for you is also based on laws that the government created ignorantly.
00:38:30.000The sweeping psychedelic act of 1970, which made virtually everything psychedelic.
00:38:37.000A few things slipped through the cracks.
00:38:38.000But all of the tryptamines, or most of them, Psilocybin, LSD, all that stuff was made completely illegal by people who really didn't even know what it was.
00:38:48.000And a lot of that is why we base our ideas of what's good or bad for you.
00:38:53.000It's based on what is legal and what other people have done with it.
00:38:58.000On this area, I'll admit not only complete experiential ignorance, but complete evidentiary ignorance.
00:39:08.000That we all could use between conservative thought and liberal thought, particularly for people that are dying.
00:39:15.000It's one of the things that Johns Hopkins found and there's been other studies done and there's been therapy done on people that are dying.
00:40:13.000I mean, like, let's say that— I could guarantee you that tomorrow you're going to be a happier person.
00:40:17.000All you have to do is take this regimen of drugs that you're going to take every day, and it's going to make you a happier person, a more well-rounded person, but it's going to permanently change your brain chemistry.
00:40:28.000Is that something that you think is good, or is it something you think is bad?
00:40:30.000Because from a religious perspective, there's an argument to be made that this is work you need to do on yourself without outside aid, if possible.
00:40:37.000If there's cases where you can't, then you can't.
00:40:41.000It's an interesting thought experiment.
00:40:42.000Terrence McKenna had a line about that.
00:40:44.000He said that there was a joke about there was a monk and he met Buddha because Buddha came to town and he said Buddha he wanted to impress him he said I practiced the city of levitation and I have done this for 10 years and now I can walk on water and the Buddha says but the ferry is only a nickel.
00:41:05.000What are you fucking wasting your time?
00:41:07.000You can aid the progression rapidly with psychedelic drugs.
00:41:13.000Do you know about MAPS and their work with MDMA and soldiers that have had PTSD? Not too much, no.
00:41:22.000By giving these soldiers MDMA therapy, meaning they give them MDMA, which is essentially what people think of as ecstasy, the street name, We're good to go.
00:41:59.000It is shown to be one of the very best things we've ever discovered for helping people get past something.
00:42:05.000To me, and I'm thinking about this on the fly because this is stuff I don't think about very much, but there's a complex moral equation to the extent that If you're talking about somebody who has PTSD, somebody who has a condition, and the only way to help that condition is to use these drugs,
00:42:21.000I've never had a problem with any of that stuff.
00:42:34.000It's much better that he should have the lithium and then be able to live in his rational mind.
00:42:38.000So when there's a problem, using drugs to get past it and work with it is a good thing.
00:42:43.000You do run the risk of the sort of brave new world situation where you have a group of people who have a certain level of ersatz happiness that is not driven by...
00:43:58.000And this breaks the cycle, at least for one day a week.
00:44:01.000And that's a good thing that makes me better as a human being, because a limit I set for myself, and then a limit that I abide by, And if you believe in self-mastery, where's the happy medium between self-mastery and I need a little bit of aid?
00:44:14.000And I think that there is a happy medium there, but I'm not sure that drugs are the answer to – I don't think you're suggesting drugs are the – No, I'm not suggesting that.
00:44:22.000And I think there's also a problem with the word drugs.
00:44:26.000Everything is under that blanket, and that blanket can be entirely negative or extremely positive.
00:44:40.000Because what these are are substances that are psychoactive, and some of them can be extremely beneficial, and some of them have short-term experiences that last with long-term results.
00:44:51.000And I don't think that there's enough knowledge that I don't think the people that are negative against it have experienced enough of it or have looked at it in an objective, rational way, because I think it's something that could be here to aid perspective,
00:45:09.000to give people a chance to think outside of their normal Conditioned way of thinking that might have been established by their community or by their church or by their neighborhood, whatever it is, sometimes a little bit of a break, a little bit of a mental break from what you're experiencing and the vibration that you exist on almost every day to separate from that and to get a look at it from the outside,
00:45:34.000sometimes it allows you to have a renewed perspective that can enhance your life greatly.
00:45:39.000As long as when people re-engage, they're re-engaging at a level of commonality, right?
00:45:43.000Yes, but that's a discipline thing, and this is what we share.
00:45:44.000You and I are both disciplined people, and it's one of the things I really respect about you.
00:45:52.000And I know that a lot of conservative people admire that, and they admire that in folks, and they think that people who are liberal are not disciplined.
00:47:13.000Just eat for eight hours a day and fast for 16?
00:47:16.000No, but just doing something like that and setting these guidelines for yourself and putting yourself into a disciplined state can be extremely beneficial.
00:47:41.000Sometimes you can take that too far in one direction, which, as I say, you need to balance reason with dictates that are meant to make you better.
00:47:48.000But that goes all the way back to Aristotle.
00:47:50.000I mean, Aristotle talks about how you have to practice to be good, right?
00:48:02.000I think when we talk about, on the conservative side, folks on the left being lazy, I don't mean that in terms of work.
00:48:08.000I mean, Mark Zuckerberg is a hard worker, I assume.
00:48:11.000I think Jack Dorsey, when he's not getting bitten by...
00:48:18.000I think it's a certain perspective on the necessity of rules and the mindset that if I don't know what a rule is for, I'm going to remove it.
00:48:28.000So G.K. Chesterton has this very famous...
00:48:31.000Kind of contrast that he draws between people who tend to be right-wing politically and people who tend to be left-wing politically.
00:48:36.000He says people who tend to be left-wing politically, you're walking through the woods and you come across a fence.
00:48:42.000You don't know why the fence is there.
00:48:43.000You say, I don't know why this fence is here.
00:49:02.000But let's try and figure out what was at the root of the rule before we just wipe out all the fences and then try to rebuild from the ground up all these new fences.
00:49:09.000And that's especially true in a civilization that's the most prosperous and free civilization ever created.
00:49:13.000I mean, if the system really sucked, that would be one thing.
00:49:15.000But I think people are kind of ungrateful about the fact that we live in the best possible time in the best possible place.
00:49:23.000And everybody who's so negative about living in America, it's like, okay, in 1900, one in ten American children died in the first year of life.
00:49:31.000In 1850, the average life expectancy in Europe was under 40. So what are you talking about?
00:50:22.000It's one of the reasons why I think there's a certain point where the Trumpian populist right meets the Bernie Sanders populist left, and that is them walking around saying how much things suck.
00:50:35.000It's an amazing time for communication, too.
00:50:37.000It's an amazing time for people to kind of understand other people's perspectives and points of view, which is one of the reasons why deplatforming and silencing of conservatives, even though I'm not conservative, bothers the shit out of me.
00:50:55.000That I think could lead to people having much more open and much more balanced communication.
00:51:01.000I mean this should be the time when we are having more conversations and more fun with each other and where we are feeling more entrepreneurial.
00:51:06.000We have a better social safety net than ever.
00:51:09.000So one of the statistics that really bothers me is that the level of American mobility has declined rapidly in the United States.
00:51:15.000So the number of people who are leaving their home state to go somewhere else to work a job, for example, is at decades low.
00:51:24.000Now, there's seven million unfilled jobs.
00:51:25.000I keep hearing from folks who I personally like, people like Tucker Carlson, that you grew up in this small town and the town is dying, the industry left.
00:51:34.000Well, the government somehow owes it to you that you get to grow up in this town and stay in that town even if all the industry left.
00:52:58.000I mean, rich kids grow up with this perspective of constantly being rich, and people grow up with this perspective of how they view the United States as this negative thing or that they don't know how to change their life, they don't know how to take action because they haven't had anyone around them that's done it.
00:53:16.000That's part of the problem with small-town mentalities is that you kind of inherit the vibe of the people that are around you.
00:53:22.000And if they're ignorant or if they're shallow-minded or if they're stuck in this one town and they're never going to leave and you get caught in that vibe, you can one day wake up and you're 32 and you've never done anything.
00:53:36.000I mean, this is what J.D. Vance talks about in Hillbilly Elegy, right?
00:53:39.000People who are in these small towns and they've basically been told that they have two choices.
00:53:42.000They can go on welfare or they can leave.
00:53:47.000There's nothing morally deficient about going on welfare.
00:53:50.000It's actually one of the bigger problems I have with the welfare state generally is that it disconnects the person receiving the aid from the person giving the aid.
00:53:56.000In our religious community, to take an example, there's a time a few years back where a guy came to me.
00:54:23.000And so he was willing to understand that that was an act of charity and he wanted to make sure that that was paid back.
00:54:29.000You see this in Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe, that moment where he makes his money, he walks back into the welfare office, and he rolls out a wad.
00:54:37.000That feeling that the government isn't just a giant cash machine that exists to pay you money, but that that money actually comes from somewhere.
00:54:44.000Either it's coming from the future because we're going to have to pay back the debt, or it's coming from somebody's tax money, and that we all owe something to each other.
00:54:51.000By the same token, what I owe to my neighbors is that if they're in trouble, Then it is my obligation as a good person to try and help them out on a personal level.
00:55:00.000Charity in religious communities is extremely high.
00:55:02.000That's the social fabric that I'm talking about.
00:55:04.000Without that sort of dutiful sense to one another, you can't have rights.
00:55:08.000Because if you just have rights and no duties, then there will be no one to take care of each other.
00:55:14.000It's why, while I'm libertarian when it comes to government, I'm very conservative when it comes to the need to build a social fabric and communities and have people...
00:55:23.000With working families and communities of working families.
00:55:26.000Yeah, I really think that that's one of the best things that comes out of religion is when you have a tight-knit community like yours and you do have that sense of charity where you really are a community of people that care for each other and look out for each other.
00:55:39.000The problem is, of course, doing that large scale.
00:55:41.000And then the problem is doing it in some sort of a non-denominational way where people, they don't have to have the exact same beliefs, but they still share these core values of community and taking care of each other.
00:55:53.000I mean, that's what people really benefit from.
00:55:55.000When they've done studies with people, when they show happiness and what is happiness correlated with, it's almost always correlated with friends and loved ones and family.
00:56:03.000It's the most important thing you can have.
00:56:05.000And when it comes to diversity, you know, there's this slogan that diversity is our strength.
00:56:08.000Well, there's Robert Putnam, who's a sociologist over at Harvard, We're good to go.
00:56:55.000They don't give a crap about the diverse backgrounds of the people they were serving with.
00:56:58.000They're all aiming their guns in the same direction.
00:57:00.000Well, in the United States, we have to be aiming our guns in the same direction, or we can't really have a functioning social fabric at all.
00:57:06.000I'm perfectly willing to give charity to people who I don't know, who still believe, like I do, that America is a fantastic country rooted in immutably good principles.
00:57:39.000I'm going to give my money to the person who basically agrees with me on those fundamental values.
00:57:42.000And again, I don't think those fundamental values have to be religious.
00:57:44.000I don't think you have to be a God believer to receive charity from me, or I don't think I should have to be an atheist to receive charity from you.
00:57:50.000But I do think that you do have to take into consideration a few things, and now we're on the same page.
00:57:57.000The idea that you do live in a free country, just historically and relatively speaking, this is a free country, which means decision-making is on you.
00:58:27.000But that relies on that person feeling an obligation to do that.
00:58:30.000But I also think that what you're talking about with charity within the community is so much more—there's so much more connection than charity from the government.
00:58:40.000When you're talking about welfare, the problem is that there's this dissolving of responsibility because it's just a check that comes in that you feel like, well, this is a rich country.
00:59:29.000And that gave him the impetus to get up and do what Adam has done.
00:59:35.000It's not pick yourself up by the bootstrap because helping hands are good, but it is if I were capable of picking myself up by my bootstraps, would I do so?
00:59:44.000And if the answer is yes, then we're all on the same team.
01:00:03.000There's no examples of anybody that's doing well.
01:00:06.000I mean, it's one of the unique things about the Internet today is that a kid that's in that environment can get a hold of maybe something that you've said or something that, you know, someone else has said and start reading books and start taking in information that gives them a different perspective and fuel that perspective with more motivational stuff and more information and education.
01:00:26.000And sometimes kids, just like you were saying with Adam Carolla, they grow up with these parents that are just not ambitious at all, so they become very ambitious and they work very hard to not be like them.
01:00:35.000I mean, sometimes it's good to see that example, but most of the time, it's just fucking hard for them to reprogram their head.
01:00:42.000It's hard to do that, and it's also hard—I really think that there's a lot of focus in the country right now on raising awareness, which is fine, raising awareness of our history and all the bad things that we've done.
01:00:57.000But this incessant focus on— The idea that people's lives are getting better by suggesting that they're perennial victims in the United States, I just don't understand how that's a good thing.
01:01:08.000As a member of a historically persecuted group, if I had grown up and my parents had said to me, no matter what you do, you will be put under the thumb of the dominant society, that's a pretty horrible message to tell to a kid.
01:01:19.000And I think that's true for politicians, again, on both sides of the aisle.
01:01:22.000I think you get it from President Trump when it comes to some rural areas where it's like, well, It's the Mexicans and the Chinese coming in to steal your jobs, and you're under the thumb of people who are trying to destroy you.
01:01:31.000And on the other side of the aisle, people who say, well, you're in the inner city, and therefore the cops are racist against you and want to destroy you, and everybody's out to get you.
01:01:51.000Single motherhood is a choice that you get to make about your life.
01:01:55.000This is a choice you get to make about your life.
01:01:57.000Finishing high school, unless you are legitimately disabled in some way, especially in LAUSD where you basically have to be able to read at third grade level to finish high school.
01:02:07.000These are decisions, personal decision making.
01:02:11.000I've never seen somebody's life get better by complaining about reality.
01:02:15.000I've seen a lot of people's lives get better by acknowledging that reality is what it is and then making personal decisions to make their lives better.
01:02:21.000And that's considered non-compassionate.
01:02:22.000But it seems to me that the essence of compassion sometimes is saying, at least make the baseline decision.
01:02:27.000If you make the baseline decisions and then you fail, we can talk about what happened.
01:02:34.000But I also think that there's some people that are...
01:02:39.000They're in situations that require something external to assist them.
01:02:45.000The way their life has been set up, and this is what I think when people think about compassion and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, if you really have an honest and accurate assessment of extreme poverty and terrible neighborhoods,
01:03:02.000It's not as simple as do something good to better your life.
01:03:06.000Part of it is you gotta fucking stay alive.
01:03:09.000Part of it is you're surrounded by people who either have committed crimes or will commit crimes.
01:03:16.000I mean, one out of every four people you run into might be a criminal.
01:04:23.000Is the other side of what the government does, which is you need more cops in that area.
01:04:26.000I think that the great lie that these communities that are crime-ridden—I'm talking about white Appalachia and I'm talking about black inner cities—these communities do not need fewer cops.
01:04:37.000Because the precondition to investment in those communities and increased tax dollars in those communities and increased social capital in those communities is people not getting shot every five seconds.
01:04:46.000The worst thing that can happen to law-abiding minorities It's for the cops to abandon areas where crime is high.
01:05:17.000Dude, it's about this family that lives in West Virginia that is just a bunch of psychotic criminals, these crazy white people, the kids drinking Mountain Dew and doing backflips on the bed, and they're all on pills.
01:05:30.000And it gives you this insight, like if you are in this community, if you are in this family, and this is obviously a very extreme family, but there's many more of them out there that have not been documented.
01:05:40.000If you are in that community, Good fucking luck getting out.
01:07:25.000If you're on disability, the people you're talking about who are suffering, they're not out there writing poetry.
01:07:29.000I mean the rise of the opioid epidemic and people who are ODing on drugs and all this stuff, that's in precisely the same demographic you're talking about.
01:07:39.000You're just talking about a check from one place as opposed to another place.
01:07:41.000I don't really see how that solves the problem.
01:07:43.000I think we have a crisis of purpose right now, and I don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable.
01:07:50.000On the one hand, by changing our trade rules, and I also don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable by cutting a government check.
01:07:56.000I just don't think that that's how people are wired.
01:07:59.000I absolutely agree with you that there is a crisis of purpose.
01:08:02.000My concern is about automation, and my concern, and obviously I haven't really studied this other than talking to Andrew Yang and talking to Elon Musk and a few other people that are proponents of universal basic income, they think that there's going to be such a massive loss of jobs in such a short period of time From people that are non-skilled laborers,
01:11:42.000There will be a gradual transition away from some of these jobs.
01:11:46.000Andrew Yang talks about radiologists and how radiologists are going to be priced out of the market by computers that can do a better job of diagnosing tumors.
01:12:22.000It's the best example of where jobs are lost.
01:12:24.000But it's mostly true in offices, right?
01:12:25.000How many office jobs have been created because you have computers?
01:12:28.000Would more office jobs exist because I write by hand?
01:12:30.000Do you think that this is akin to, like, a government bailout?
01:12:33.000Like, the idea of the government bailout was, like, the banks are too big to fail.
01:12:37.000And some people thought, you know what, you gotta let them fail so you figure out why they failed and we'll never have it happen again.
01:12:44.000If there is this thing and the government steps in and says, wait a minute, I know you lost all your jobs, we're gonna give you $1,000, you don't have to figure it out.
01:12:51.000$1,000 a month, and some people go, okay, I'm not gonna figure it out now.
01:12:54.000Whereas those people might have gone on A fear-filled journey to try to figure out their purpose in life because now they're stuck where their job doesn't exist anymore, so they're put in a corner and they have to act.
01:13:08.000There is enervation that comes from a welfare check.
01:13:11.000I mean, there are people who become dependent on government and they're used to being dependent on government.
01:13:17.000Listen, Milton Friedman made an argument for universal basic income as a replacement for the welfare system.
01:13:22.000There is another problem with universal basic income that I asked Andrew about also, and that was One of the big issues is that poor people, very often, people who are permanently impoverished, not people who are temporarily poor, but they tend not to spend money where we think they ought to spend money.
01:13:37.000They're not taking that money and they're not putting it into education or into...
01:13:40.000They might just be buying ho-hos and cigarettes.
01:13:55.000Aren't you just going to end up back in the same place in six months where people took that money and used it in ways that actually didn't benefit them?
01:14:02.000And at a certain point, the question is, do you own your decisions or do you not own your decisions?
01:14:06.000And at what level of incompetence or inability do we say, you no longer own your decisions and so we're just going to take care of you on a permanent basis?
01:14:15.000I think we're looking at, when you're talking about welfare, we're looking at worst case scenario, right, where someone does get dependent upon the welfare state and does use that money frivolously and does make poor decisions.
01:14:28.000But then there's got to be other people that are single moms that, you know, maybe...
01:15:59.000If there are parents available to the kid, presumably the parents, the grandparents, would take a pretty active role in the raising of that kid.
01:16:09.000How about we assume that if you are old enough to get pregnant, then you are old enough to – let's talk about a 17-year-old or 18-year-old.
01:16:16.000It used to be shotgun marriages were a thing.
01:20:54.000In the end, it really is the quality of the player.
01:20:57.000There's a famous Yasha Heifetz story where he was playing at Carnegie Hall and some lady came up to him afterward and she said, you know, your violin, it sounds so beautiful.
01:21:05.000And he picks up the violin, puts it to his ear and he says, funny, I don't hear it right now.
01:21:11.000So do you listen to any other kind of music?
01:21:14.000Yeah, I mean, I like some classic rock.
01:21:56.000In terms of alimony and child support and all those things make sense to me.
01:22:00.000And the idea that the community reinforces it, which would then become the government reinforced and all that stuff, that all makes sense to me.
01:22:32.000Do you think they're making a choice, or do you think that this is how they were born?
01:22:36.000So the religious point of view on this, and I think this is actually just the general conservative point of view on human action generally, is I don't know, meaning that for the vast majority of people, I would assume that they have a biological drive to engage in that behavior, but the traditional sort of will point of view is that Biological drive does not necessarily match up to the activity you ought to engage in.
01:22:57.000Men, for example, have a biological drive to impregnate many women.
01:23:00.000That's not something religion is cool with either.
01:23:05.000Religion is cool with a man being with one woman and impregnating her, but you're not cool with a man being with a man.
01:23:13.000So I can give you the religious explanation and I can give you the secular explanation.
01:23:17.000So the religious explanation is that there is something different about a woman than there is about a man, and a man is made better through his union with a woman, and that if you pervert the sex drive to pursue...
01:23:31.000Mere pleasure instead of a lasting relationship upon which the basis of society is built, then you are foregoing the proper use of your sex drive.
01:23:40.000Right, but if you wanted to step in and argue against that, you would say that just because someone can't get pregnant doesn't mean that they don't have a loving relationship that contributes to society.
01:23:51.000Well, that's true, but it is also foregoing the more productive relationship of being able to bear and rear children and also recognizing that the sexes are not different and recognizing also the sexes are not the same.
01:24:03.000So being with a man is in a relationship different than being with a woman, I would assume.
01:24:08.000I mean, I assume that's why gay guys are gay.
01:24:09.000If it weren't, then I assume that they would be fine with being with a woman.
01:24:12.000So that relationship from a religious perspective is more valuable because women have different qualities than men.
01:24:20.000You round off each other's harsh edges.
01:24:41.000And I keep making this distinction because whenever I talk about my moral perspective on things, then people immediately assume that I'm a theocratic fascist.
01:24:48.000And I just want to keep underscoring my personal views.
01:24:51.000On Dave Rubin's marriage are of no consequence to public policy in any way whatsoever.
01:24:58.000But I agree with you on that and I don't think it should be a part of public policy and I think people should absolutely be allowed to marry and divorce and do whatever the fuck they want to do no matter who it is.
01:25:37.000Therefore, you get to participate in a behavior.
01:25:38.000That's a chain of thinking that religion does not accept.
01:25:41.000So in religion, if a man is gay, in your religion, if a man is gay and they're in love with another man, they should just squash those thoughts and find a woman.
01:25:49.000Well, ideally, they would be honest with the woman they marry, so they're not messing up the woman.
01:25:54.000But they would want to go and get a woman.
01:25:56.000Ideally, you would still get married and have children in a heterosexual relationship.
01:25:59.000If you're not up to that, then you wouldn't get married at all.
01:26:02.000When you describe this to a gay man, they will tell you, imagine Ben Shapiro.
01:26:07.000Someone said to you, you should stop being with your beautiful wife and you need to now marry a man because this is what God wants you to do.
01:27:08.000New Testament— It gets a little harsher in the New Testament in some places, Romans, Corinthians.
01:27:13.000But in any case, again, what I'm puzzled by is the idea that this is a unique area of human behavior that religion is supposed to treat differently.
01:27:25.000Meaning religion treats virtually every human activity like this.
01:27:29.000Sin is a failure to abide by a covenant, right?
01:27:41.000Well, there are lots of commandments that go directly against what people are driven to do.
01:27:45.000Just because the drive is stronger does not make it more morally...
01:27:51.000Non-culpable to violate that commandment.
01:27:53.000So when people pick this one out and they say, well, this one is particularly intolerant, for example, I don't see why it's more particularly intolerant than saying to a man that you have to marry one woman or saying to a Jew that you are not allowed to eat this stuff.
01:28:12.000It's harder to abide by those commandments.
01:28:14.000But it is well within religious tradition, like literally every religious tradition, that there's a bunch of stuff you are driven to do that you can't.
01:28:19.000Now, again, you don't have to agree with my program.
01:28:42.000And as long as I'm not bothering anybody else, I frankly don't see what business it is of legitimately anybody's, what I think about personal relationships.
01:28:49.000I'm not imposing my view on anybody else.
01:28:51.000Well, I do acknowledge that out of all the religions, Judaism probably makes it the most obvious they don't give a fuck what you do.
01:29:41.000So you are just sticking to your rigid ideology in terms of what you believe to be a sin and not believe to be a sin based on your religion, based on this very strict moral fiber that this religion is operating in.
01:29:55.000In a religious context, meaning it applies to me, it applies to my family, it doesn't apply to you.
01:29:59.000Right, but is there any room for growth in that when people have a better understanding about biology?
01:30:05.000If it was proven, if there's proven like, oh, this is why a person develops blue eyes, this is why a person is gay, this is why, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just a variation.
01:30:17.000It's red hair, it's freckles, it's gay, it's straight.
01:30:21.000You can tell me that homosexual orientation is 100% biologically driven, and I will...
01:30:48.000But again, it's a question that I've always found actually not particularly interesting simply because it doesn't take into account the worldview generally, which is that a biological drive does not equal – Excuse for behaving in a certain way.
01:31:03.000But that's where it brings me back to this.
01:31:05.000Like, is it possible that these laws in this religion were written when they're—I mean, who do you think wrote the stuff?
01:31:12.000Do you think people wrote the stuff, or do you think God wrote the stuff?
01:31:15.000Even if it were—I mean, because I am an Orthodox Jew, I believe that at the very least it's God-inspired and God-written, right?
01:31:23.000But even if I believed on a secular level that human beings wrote that stuff, do I think that people— 3,000 years ago had never seen a gay person before?
01:31:30.000Or a person who had homosexual tendencies?
01:31:31.000Like the very reason to have a commandment is because certain people in your community are behaving in a particular way, presumably.
01:31:36.000There's no commandment not to take your head and shove it in a meat grinder.
01:31:39.000Well, this is also the argument against pork.
01:31:41.000It's because they didn't understand trichinosis.
01:31:43.000They understand you have to cook the meat to 145 degrees and pork parasites, which are very dangerous for people.
01:31:48.000So, I'm not a huge fan of naturalistic explanations for religion.
01:31:52.000Don't you think that's a good one, though, for pork?
01:31:57.000Like, I think you could make an argument, maybe?
01:31:59.000There's a kid who just died in India, and there was horrific x-rays of his head.
01:32:03.000He had parasites from pork that had gotten into his body, and they had nested in his brain, started developing all these cysts inside of his head, and they couldn't do anything about it, because it was so deep in his head...
01:32:16.000That if they gave him the anti-parasitic medication, it would cause swelling of the brain.
01:32:55.000Well, I think that the reversal of the kosher laws in the New Testament, you know, from a Jewish point of view, where we don't believe in the divinity of Christ, I think that there you can make an argument that the Gospels, which were written...
01:33:11.000I mean, what I think he was historically, I think he was a Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans and got killed for his trouble, just like a lot of other Jews at that time who were crucified for trying to lead revolts against the Romans and got killed for their trouble.
01:33:20.000So he became legend in story, and it became a bigger and bigger deal as time went on.
01:33:24.000Yeah, he had a group of followers, and then that gradually grew.
01:34:01.000That is the problem with these texts, right, is that you're trying to decipher translations from original texts which were written in ancient Hebrew thousands of years ago and were told in an oral tradition for longer than that.
01:34:47.000That that tradition is a tension and that that tension is where Western civilization lives.
01:34:52.000That basically civilization is a suspension bridge.
01:34:54.000It takes certain fundamental precepts of Judeo-Christian values on the one hand and then takes Greek reason and they're pulling against each other.
01:35:00.000And sometimes reason feels like it's going to dominate religion and sometimes it feels like religion is going to dominate reason.
01:35:04.000But in the best of all available worlds, you have a bridge that is capable of...
01:35:10.000Building upon, where you can actually have a functional civilization.
01:35:14.000And if you lose reason in the name of theocracy, then you end up with tyrannical theocracy.
01:35:19.000And if you lose religion in the name of reason, you end up in some pretty dark places because human beings don't have a very good track record of creating their own purpose, creating their own meaning, creating their own systems.
01:35:30.000We tend to get very utopian very quickly, and things get really ugly, which is sort of the story of particularly the first half of the 20th century.
01:35:37.000So this is the benefit of sticking to the rigid ideology that's prescribed by religion, is that you don't allow the human beings to keep updating it and changing it, because if you do, they will eventually slide into chaos.
01:35:48.000Yes, which is not to say there's not play in the joints.
01:36:03.000Kind of fascinating and counterintuitive section of the Talmud where Moses is—it's what is called the Gadotah, which are some of these stories that are just kind of put into the middle of the Talmud, where Moses comes back and he's watching from on high as a bunch of rabbis in, you know, second-century Palestine are talking about— Judaism,
01:36:24.000and he's like, I don't recognize any of this stuff.
01:36:25.000Like, I brought down these books from the mountain, and I do not recognize any of this stuff.
01:36:29.000And God says to him, you know, God says to him, right, I mean, this is how this is morphed, and Moses is pleased.
01:36:37.000In other words, he's not—Judaism has always had a common law tradition where you're using reason to try and develop the ideas behind the commandments and then try and extend them or broaden them.
01:36:46.000And I think that's a good thing, but you have to be careful not to completely undermine fundamental roots or— Or get rid of basic precepts.
01:37:18.000Masturbation is not okay according to Judaism.
01:37:21.000I assume that a vast majority of young Jewish men, even the Orthodox, are masturbating.
01:37:30.000Again, I think I can speak on behalf of...
01:37:32.000I will audaciously speak on behalf of both Jews and Christians here.
01:37:34.000I think that religious people are told that when they say that something is a sin, this means that they are looking askance at the people who are committing the sin.
01:38:13.000Well, this one, you would say, if you're a fundamentalist or at least somebody who believes in the idea that the Torah was given by God, it was given literally by God.
01:38:34.000The human sex drive was made to procreate within a stable relationship in order to progenerate and have future generations of people.
01:38:43.000Misuse of that sex drive in any way, whether you're talking about from masturbation to homosexual activity, is therefore a diminishment of the use of that drive.
01:38:51.000That's the natural law case against homosexual activity.
01:38:54.000And again, I will reiterate for Media Matters for the one millionth time, I'm not in favor of any of this being encoded into American law because freedom is freedom.
01:39:01.000People should be able to sin how they choose so long as they're not harming anybody else.
01:39:28.000So yes, because there are ancillary benefits to married couples having sex, like relationship building, but that's not a generalized case against the favored view of sex.
01:40:17.000Would you tell them to not act out on those feelings?
01:40:20.000I would say you do the best you can as a human being.
01:40:23.000And from my moral perspective, you try to avoid sin as best you can, but everybody sins.
01:40:30.000The problem with that sin, though, it seems to me that it was defined by people that didn't understand biology because they were dealing with humans that existed thousands of years ago, no books, no real understanding of why people were gay.
01:40:43.000I mean, again, I really don't think that biblical commandments are linked, and religious commandments generally are linked to a view of biology, meaning that— You don't think so?
01:40:52.000No, I think that all sin is a recognition that we have drives that we are supposed to forego.
01:41:26.000And one of the things that I – the reason I keep coming back to the governmental regulation point is because my view is that if your view of discipline is not my view of discipline, good on you.
01:41:45.000As a religious person, I can't actively participate in something that I consider to be a sin, but I would go out to dinner with Dave and his husband any time.
01:41:52.000My wife and I would do that, of course.
01:41:54.000We'd have him over to our house with his husband.
01:41:56.000You don't find any contradiction between your religious perspective and your personal perspective in that regard?
01:42:01.000That you wouldn't be there for religious reasons?
01:42:06.000But that you would be there for personal reasons?
01:42:47.000Jordan and Sam and Dave and you and I. It's like, what in the fuck?
01:42:51.000All the white supremacists in one place, right?
01:42:53.000Yeah, that is a disturbing one when they'll just lump you in with a bunch of fucking psychopaths just because it's convenient for them and it's an easy way to diminish you.
01:43:04.000That is a thing that I see more from the left than from the right, and it's really disturbing.
01:43:11.000I always thought, until this clickbait generation came along, I always thought that especially, well, you know, the New York Times is obviously the higher standard, but that you would never see that kind of shit from progressive people.
01:43:25.000You would never see willful distortion of reality to define their narrative in a really disingenuous way.
01:43:34.000And it happens so often now that people get called, my favorite is alt-right adjacent.
01:43:48.000It's – again, trying to lump everybody into one group for purposes of castigating their motives is really what this – you don't have to have an argument with somebody if you assume they're a Nazi.
01:43:56.000So I guess if you call everybody a Nazi, you don't have to have an argument.
01:44:00.000But I think – When it comes to the gay marriage thing, what people really worry about is other people trying to stop people from doing what they want to do.
01:44:39.000I wouldn't expect to walk into a mosque and expect them to change their standards on religion.
01:44:44.000I find it really audacious when people actually expect other people to view the world the same way that they do and then expect that they're going to be catered to in that way.
01:44:54.000I wouldn't walk into a gay-owned bakery and expect them to Bake a cake that has verses from Leviticus on it.
01:45:31.000But this notion that somebody owes you their services, that to me, it's not even a freedom of religion case to me.
01:45:37.000That one's a freedom of association case.
01:45:39.000Well, I think the goal is to shame a business into submission and also to put it out there in the public eye so that people understand that this is a discrimination that does happen with gay folks where they will go somewhere and someone won't make a cake for them.
01:46:21.000But once you start going to the government and having the government levy $100,000 fines on family bakeries because you couldn't find a gay baker in Colorado, supposedly.
01:47:12.000Those are my beliefs, so leave me alone.
01:47:13.000And those are your beliefs, so leave you alone.
01:47:15.000And if we can't have a system where we acknowledge that those beliefs can coexist and we can still have conversations with each other or be friends, it's going to be real hard to have a society.
01:47:22.000When you told Dave Rubin that you wouldn't go to his wedding, did he get butthurt?
01:48:36.000And I value people talking and trying to understand each other.
01:48:41.000And I've seen so much conflict that's unnecessary because I see so much conflict that's rooted in people not communicating instead of communicating.
01:48:51.000And I think this is one of the things that I'm most nervous about with all this De-platforming and censoring people and the silencing of people on the right.
01:49:00.000And it's not that I agree with these people.
01:49:02.000It's that I see how this is just going to shore up these two sides and it's going to make it a much more difficult...
01:49:10.000Much more difficult atmosphere for communication, for real understanding, and coming to agreements on things, and recognizing the things that we all, all good people seem to agree.
01:50:06.000And it's also true that when you castigate somebody as morally unequal, what you're really doing is you're giving an excuse to get into their shit.
01:50:12.000I mean, this is what's really happening here.
01:50:15.000If I had a slogan beyond the facts don't care about your feelings stuff, it would just...
01:50:49.000Here's some- Prostitution's clearly more of a choice than I think gay people are.
01:50:54.000Okay, but you're coming back to the same moral distinction, which I've repeated a few times, which is that I'm not a believer that a natural desire to do something therefore makes an activity okay.
01:51:06.000But that's- A view that has no externalities.
01:52:07.000If somebody came to me and they wanted my opinion on something because they valued my opinion that much, I'd give my opinion.
01:52:12.000But you don't have to care about my opinion.
01:52:14.000I think when it comes to the gay thing, what people are looking for is for other folks to be accepting of who they are.
01:52:22.000And I think for a lot of these gay folks that have been in the closet their whole life, that's the big thing is they're always worried about someone treating them differently or someone diminishing them because they're gay.
01:52:33.000Then when they hear someone like you say that you think it's a sin and that you shouldn't act on your biology even though you have these urges that you should instead find a woman, they feel the same pangs of rejection.
01:52:47.000I for sure get that, but the confluence between activity and identity is actually kind of a dangerous one, meaning that the idea that if I disapprove of an activity in which you engage, that I disapprove of you, I disapprove of lots of activities in which lots of people engage,
01:53:04.000including most members of my family, including my children a lot of the time.
01:53:08.000That does not mean I disapprove of them as a human being or that I'm saying they are lesser as a human being.
01:53:29.000You think that God spoke to somebody in the mountains is bullshit, right?
01:53:32.000Well, I don't even know if that's bullshit.
01:53:34.000What I do know is that it's a historical interpretation of stories that were as much as they could or as little as they wanted to be accurately defined and written down and then passed on from generation to generation to generation.
01:54:10.000But there are certain things of which I believe or practice that you probably disapprove or you don't think they're the smartest or you think that they're – I might not think it's the smartest, but as I've gotten older and hopefully wiser, I give a fuck less about why you do what you do,
01:54:29.000but whether or not the benefits seem to be worth—the juice is worth the squeeze.
01:54:52.000I think in a lot of ways it's like if you lift weights for jiu-jitsu, it makes you stronger, it'll make you jiu-jitsu better as long as you keep training.
01:55:00.000I think your discipline from your religion has – there's psychological benefits to it.
01:56:41.000Now can we talk about the stuff we think are the – what are the fundamental building blocks upon which you can base a society or base a politics?
01:56:49.000And if we agree on those, then the God stuff, I think God is a better base for those fundamental – I don't think that you can actually get to human beings are of inestimable value from scientific materialism.
01:57:13.000If you believe that human beings are effectively just animals, then I don't know why they would be of infinite value, nor why I should respect somebody's belief system simply because they're human.
01:57:21.000I don't respect animals, and if we're just another animal, there's nothing that necessitates that logical line.
01:57:27.000In fact, for most of human history, it was not the logical line of thinking.
01:57:30.000It was, if you're a member of my tribe, then we like you, and if you're not a member of my tribe, then we get to kill you.
01:57:38.000Isn't there a difference between single-celled organisms and the way a primate interacts with its environment?
01:57:43.000I mean, yes, but I'm not sure why that would indicate any sort of greater existential value.
01:57:48.000It's not necessarily a greater existential value, but as we were talking about the value of community and the value of having a group of people that you care about, that this is a core component of being human.
01:58:00.000It's a core component of this understanding mind, this rational, intelligent interfacing with the universe in a way that no other animal is capable of.
01:58:25.000Let's go kill them and take their shit.
01:58:27.000That was pretty much how humanity works for a very, very long time.
01:58:31.000And the simple and effective idea that the reason that human beings are of value is because we are more than just our material bodies, that there's something that is us that is of inestimable value.
01:58:42.000That's a religious concept, and it has a lot of weight.
01:58:45.000Now, if Sam wants to get to the same place and we can build a political conversation from there, that's fine.
01:58:49.000My real argument with Sam is Sam and I go down to the bottom of the iceberg about 90% of the way.
01:58:55.000We have the same fundamental values about free speech, diversity of opinion, about I think to mostly an extent free markets.
01:59:02.000I think that we agree on a lot of these fundamental principles.
01:59:05.000He then says that he gets those from pure reason.
01:59:08.000I have serious questions about whether pure reason necessitates those conclusions.
01:59:13.000He tends to think that Those are the only conclusions a reasonable person could come to if you properly apply your reason.
01:59:47.000It seems to me a better historical explanation is that we grew up 10 miles from each other in Los Angeles after 3,000 years of common history of Judeo-Christian development.
02:00:12.000I don't want to get too deep in the weeds here.
02:00:14.000There's a weird kind of nexus on what truth is, where you've heard Sam and Jordan Peterson debate this.
02:00:56.000Well, it depends on what the concept is, right?
02:00:57.000Like what are you talking about in terms of objective truth?
02:01:00.000I'm talking about anything that Sam says is true.
02:01:03.000What makes it true as opposed to just evolutionarily beneficial for us to think so?
02:01:07.000Meaning what evolution does is it creates a series of thoughts in our mind presumably if you're a materialist that are beneficial to your preservation and promulgation of the species.
02:01:19.000So if it's beneficial, this is Sam's explanation for the prevalence of religion, for example.
02:01:23.000He'll say religion isn't true, but evolutionary biology sort of drives people toward religion so you can have group bonds that are beyond 150 people or whatever.
02:01:33.000Why is it that two and two—how do you know that two and two actually equals four?
02:01:36.000As opposed to it is evolutionarily beneficial for you to believe that two plus two equals four.
02:01:42.000So Sam believes there's an objective truth somewhere out there that two plus two equals four.
02:01:45.000I don't know what evolution has to do with that sort of stuff.
02:01:48.000So what do you think is happening that he disagrees with?
02:01:52.000So I think that what is happening is that human beings were placed in an orderly universe through the processes of biology and have a unique capacity to understand that universe because we are made in the image of God.
02:02:04.000This is where I think that the religious viewpoint diverges pretty strongly from Sam's evolutionary viewpoint.
02:02:37.000Making the evolutionary being, you know, we're going to accelerate the process.
02:02:43.000And there's all sorts of fine-tuning arguments about how implausible it would be for just atoms roaming around the universe randomly to end with human creation.
02:02:51.000The alternative explanations seem no less implausible to me.
02:02:57.000The multiple universes theory, plausible, but we have no way to prove it because we can't get to those multiple universes, so how is that testable?
02:03:04.000Or the now popular theory that we're living in an AI simulation, not sure how that's more testable than God.
02:03:10.000Not sure how it's more testable that aliens put us here.
02:03:13.000Why is that more testable or more plausible than the idea that there is a force behind that which we see that has mind?
02:03:23.000Well, let's just break this down slowly.
02:03:46.000Is it happening because of random events that sort of coincide with biology and technology and all these things come to fruition to you and I standing across from each other talking on this podcast in front of millions of people?
02:04:06.000Is things compete constantly, try to get better, and then in this gigantic ecosystem of all these things competing and trying to get better, one super successful organism, us, rises above and continues.
02:04:27.000I mean if you really believe in evolution, you can't think we're done.
02:04:30.000It's got to be moving towards some better product.
02:04:33.000It keeps going until it creates something like that.
02:04:35.000So this is why I say that Sam is more religious than I am.
02:04:38.000I think that there's a plausible argument for atheism.
02:04:40.000I just don't think that there is a plausible argument for Sam's moral vision of atheism, meaning that what Sam tends to do is – For example, you and I have talked a lot on this particular podcast about the value of self-betterment and making decisions and being responsible for those decisions.
02:04:58.000How does that work in an area where we don't have free will?
02:05:00.000So Sam actively says we do not have free will.
02:05:04.000It is a weird conversation and sort of a self-defeating one.
02:05:06.000Sam suggests when it comes to the scientific method that we are using science to find out truths about the universe, and we're using reason.
02:05:14.000I also am big on reason, but I don't know how Sam is defining reason as opposed to just an evolutionarily beneficial firing of neurons, meaning that That's what we are.
02:05:25.000We're balls of meat wandering purposeless through the universe.
02:05:27.000And then he'll talk about making our own meaning or seeking human prosperity or flourishing is the word he likes to use.
02:05:37.000This is an active vision of man in the universe.
02:05:40.000And I'm not sure how that flows from we're a ball of meat that evolved from another ball of meat that evolved eventually, if you go back far enough, from non-balls of meat without any free will, without any capacity to choose.
02:05:54.000I don't know how you build a civilization on that.
02:05:57.000Well, there's two different conversations here.
02:05:58.000One is determination or determinism, rather.
02:06:01.000Whether or not you have free will or whether or not your life and your actions are being dictated by the past, by your biology, by your learned experiences, by external pressures.
02:06:44.000I'm in the latter group, I think, as well.
02:06:45.000I think we also experience great benefit from making positive choices and then experiencing like whenever you meet someone who's lost a lot of weight, one of the things they have is this fucking tremendous feeling of accomplishment.
02:07:02.000They get this positive feedback from it.
02:07:05.000There's real good in making good choices.
02:07:08.000And when people decide to get their shit together and make a good choice, they're rewarded.
02:07:13.000The question is, are you doing that because of determinism or are you doing that because of free will?
02:07:18.000Or are you doing that because of a combination of both of those things?
02:07:21.000And can you fuel that free will purposely through outwardly seeking things that are motivational or things that are educational, things that allow you to kind of remap the way you process reality?
02:07:45.000But I think that's a pretty fundamental question, and I think that that's why in the end I'm religious and I'm not sure why Sam isn't because he agrees with the same premises.
02:07:55.000He'll talk about self-betterment and decisions that you can make, and then he'll write a full book about why free will doesn't exist, and I just don't understand how those two things can coexist.
02:09:44.000It's a difference between understanding people as whole people and then saying that I don't like some of the things that they do and simply saying – making the assumption that because I don't like some of the things that you do, we can't be friends or I disapprove of you as an entire human being, which I think is not true.
02:09:58.000It's a good belief system to have if you're straight and then you go, look, got it locked down.
02:12:30.000Yeah, I think, in a way, I don't have a defined religion.
02:12:40.000But in a way, I have some pretty rigid ideas that I have in my head about behavior and ethics and morals and how you treat people you care about.
02:14:12.000The thing that, when it comes with religion in defining whether or not other people's behavior is sinful, where it doesn't involve you, that's where a lot of folks start thinking that maybe these ideas are bigoted.
02:16:29.000There's the truth and then there's your opinion and we do have to – for purposes of conversation at the very least, it's deeply irritating when people say living my truth because then it's like I disagree with you and then they're like, well, you're disavowing me as a human being.
02:16:59.000Well, you know as well as I do that the further you go left, you reach the same sort of zealotry that you do when you go all the way right.
02:17:10.000You meet these crazy people that are just completely connected to their idea of being correct, and they take the most rigid stance on all these issues on the left side or on the right side, and it's so goddamn common.
02:17:49.000But if you are locked into that far-left ideology, as far-left as you can go, and it's one of the problems with ideologies that have these extremists, is that you believe in a percentage of the things these people say,
02:18:09.000You're connected with them because you're a part of that, even though you don't have a similar notion.
02:18:18.000Failure to ask questions and give plausible answers gives credence to the alt-right.
02:18:24.000So he did a whole speech where he said, listen, there are lots of conversations about IQ and race, and the alt-right loves these conversations because then they suggest wrongly that black people are inherently unfit and white people are more fit and all that kind of stuff.
02:18:38.000And he says there are great ways to explain how much of IQ is cultural, how much can be changed, how much is genetic, how much that actually matters in terms of real-life outcomes.
02:18:50.000We can do all those things, but when you say, don't ask the question, stop asking the question, then you make people Google, and the only thing that they will Google and find are answers that are given by people who are actually alt-right.
02:19:00.000And he got ripped as alt-right for this.
02:19:02.000His entire argument was don't allow people to push into alt-right answers by failing to give them proper responses or by throwing them out the window.
02:19:09.000And then people are like, well, you're alt-right now because you're saying that people should be able to ask questions.
02:19:14.000It's the exact same version as people in the religious community where it's like, you know, I used to go to Sunday school and then I asked too many questions and they kicked me out.
02:19:29.000And there's also – when you're investigating anything, any measurable thing, when you find a number, whatever it is, like these people, like Asian folks are better at mathematics – European folks are better at this.
02:21:31.000The media will label me outright tomorrow because that's the way this goes.
02:21:33.000Well, the disingenuous media that's being less and less taken seriously, taken less and less seriously.
02:21:40.000It seems to me that that trend, which is a common trend that's existed for the last few years of these clickbaity bullshit articles and mislabeling people, it's going to go away.
02:21:50.000Because your perspective is not going to be appreciated.
02:21:53.000It's not going to be respected if you're obviously making disingenuous statements like that.
02:21:59.000And I think we're in this weird position where it's very difficult to find real journalism and real objective takes on things that aren't flavored by their ideology.
02:22:09.000And everybody's trying to shape everybody and they feel like it's their obligation.
02:22:12.000They feel There's many people that write things that feel like it's their obligation to change your perspective on national subjects and things that are important to us.
02:22:22.000It's not their obligation to just report what's going on, but also their obligation to flavor things in a way that'll make one side look favorable to the other.
02:22:30.000Yeah, well, I'm very much in favor of journalists revealing their biases.
02:22:33.000I think that the greatest lie in media is that objective journalism is a thing.
02:23:16.000Maybe the narrative has trumped the actual job you were supposed to do, guys.
02:23:21.000Well, it's just so many people were so convinced, and there were so many people that were making statements that, in retrospect, are probably – you could probably – I mean, I don't want to say I'm not a litigious person,
02:23:38.000but if I was a guy like Donald Trump, there's so many people to sue.
02:23:45.000I mean, I remember I was on Bill Maher's show, and we were supposed to talk about free speech stuff, and like five minutes before, and he's like, let's talk about Russia.
02:24:05.000And we get on stage and he's talking about Trump-Russia collusion.
02:24:08.000And I said what I've always said, which is I'll wait for the evidence to come out and then I will make a decision as to whether Trump-Russia collusion was a thing.
02:24:49.000Well, it's because people have this need to let everyone know that they're on the right side.
02:24:56.000And they want you to know that they do believe in the collusion.
02:24:59.000If you disagree with that for whatever reason, you must either be a right-wing person, a Trump supporter, someone who's in denial, someone who doesn't look at the evidence, and you're a part of the problem.
02:25:11.000But the real problem was jumping to conclusions.
02:25:14.000There obviously seemed to be some attempts.
02:25:16.000There's obviously some fuckery with that IRA company, the internet research agency that is responsible for millions of interactions with people online where they pretended to be different supporters.
02:26:12.000If you could attribute this to—here's a good rule of thumb for politics.
02:26:17.000Attribute everything to stupidity unless you can prove malice.
02:26:21.000The real problem, and this is something that is very similar to what we were talking about earlier, when you say something, and you say it over and over and over again, and you say it with such conviction, and it becomes a giant part of your news narrative,
02:26:37.000and then that something turns out to be horseshit, you just massively empowered Trump.
02:26:44.000I've said for a long time that I'm not a big fan of Trump's fake news shtick because I think he applies it too broadly.
02:26:49.000I think that whenever there's a bad piece of news, he's like, fake news.
02:26:51.000And it's like, well, sometimes yes and sometimes no.
02:26:54.000But now that you just blew a two-year narrative where he was clearly in Putin's pocket, how many people do you think are going to listen to the nuanced view of fake news now?
02:27:01.000And how many people do you think are going to actually believe Trump when he says that a bad piece of news is legitimately a fake piece of news?
02:27:06.000Yeah, it empowers him in a spectacular manner.
02:27:44.000These are all former heads of the intelligence agencies.
02:27:46.000It just makes me think the intelligence agencies need to be wildly curved back if these were the heads of them.
02:27:50.000I mean, if, like, the heads of the intelligence agencies are using their platform to proclaim that they have inside information about Trump that turns out to be utter nonsense, I'm not sure these people should have that much power to, like— Is that what he's saying, or is he saying he doesn't know?
02:31:00.000Do you think that they became a Russian front group to try to stay operative and stay safe because they were obviously being attacked by the United States government and in danger of being shut down?
02:31:11.000I'll be honest, I really don't know enough about WikiLeaks to really get into a sort of historical...
02:31:16.000But I know that he's been trapped in that embassy since 2012. Yeah, I mean, I hope that he's got some video games or something in there.
02:31:35.000I mean, it's a terrible place to be, and I don't know if it's better than prison, because it's like the stress of him never knowing when they're going to come knock down the door and pull him out of there.
02:31:44.000I was like, how well does that guy sleep?
02:32:05.000Because the original dump from Chelsea Manning was that he dumped all the information to WikiLeaks, including the stuff that was unredacted.
02:32:35.000One of the things that I was thinking when Trump got into office with all this drain that swamp shit, I was like, I wonder if Trump would be a WikiLeaks supporter.
02:33:20.000Yeah, so you can check out my book, The Right Side of History.
02:33:22.000It talks about a lot of the sort of deeper issues we were talking about, Judeo-Christian values and reason.
02:33:27.000It's a kind of short-form philosophical history of the West from Sinai through Greece and talking about all the major Enlightenment philosophers.
02:33:34.000Some of the things we talked about on the show are in the book.
02:33:37.000It's the number one bestseller on the New York Times nonfiction list, at least at the moment.