The Ben Shapiro Show - April 30, 2026


America's Greatest Threat (It's Not What You Think)

Topics
epistemic humility social media Israeli politics free markets
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Tucker Carlson Benjamin Netanyahu Trump John Stuart Mill Rick Perry William F. Buckley Frederick Douglass Alistair McIntyre Navigdor Lieberman Naftali Bennett John Fetterman Neil Ferguson Barry Weiss Benny Gantz Erica Kirk John Locke Ray Dalio Antichrist Marginal Trumpism and 8 more
Dear King Charles, STFU HUGE WIN For Trump SCOTUS

Episode Stats


Length

56 minutes

Words per minute

204.1

Word count

11,477

Sentence count

726

Harmful content

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

16

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Trust in our institutions is at an all time low across the board, and because of this lack of trust, Americans also mistrust one another. This is why we spend so much time obsessed with conspiracies and steeped in anger, and apparently ready to spend large segments of our day fulminating on the internet about people we don t know on topics we know nothing about.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The original amendments have nothing to do whatsoever with the state.
00:00:03.000 That you're not being influenced by your own biases. 0.98
00:00:06.000 The unbelievable and ignorant ingratitude that is spread across the country. 0.96
00:00:09.000 I've been really intrigued by what's gone on with Tucker Carlson over the last year. 0.91
00:00:14.000 This is the greatest place on earth.
00:00:16.000 It remains the greatest place on earth.
00:00:18.000 Hey, I'm out of the office today, but I wanted you to hear a speech I just gave at the University of Austin about the death of our institutions, why that matters, why it's breaking apart our politics.
00:00:27.000 I think it's pretty interesting and I think important stuff.
00:00:30.000 Give it a listen.
00:00:32.000 First of all, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here at one of the most important institutions in America, University of Austin.
00:00:43.000 It takes tremendous innovation, creativity, and courage to put together a brand new institution dedicated to the restoration of what a university was originally supposed to be.
00:00:53.000 And the people at University of Austin are, I think, maybe the only people in the country who had the balls to do it, so good for them.
00:01:04.000 Well, today, I want to talk a little bit.
00:01:05.000 About why we seem to hate each other so much here in the United States.
00:01:10.000 I want to talk about why we are obsessed with conspiracies and steeped in anger and apparently ready to spend large segments of our day fulminating on the internet about people we don't know on topics that we know nothing about.
00:01:26.000 And the simple answer is the failure of our institutions.
00:01:29.000 Trust in our institutions in the United States is at an all time low that is across the board.
00:01:33.000 Trust in the media is at an all time low.
00:01:36.000 Trust in church is at an all time low.
00:01:38.000 Trust in the scientific establishment.
00:01:40.000 Is it an all time low?
00:01:41.000 Trust in government is at an all time low, and of course, trust in academia is at an all time low.
00:01:46.000 And because of our lack of trust in institutions, Americans also mistrust one another.
00:01:51.000 Now, you might think that it would be the opposite that we mistrust one another, therefore, we mistrust our institutions.
00:01:56.000 That's not really the case.
00:01:57.000 Our institutions shape us.
00:01:59.000 The way that we interact with the world is through the mechanism of institution.
00:02:05.000 If you grew up in a religious community, going to church helps shape you, the rules of the church shape you.
00:02:10.000 The people you hang out with shape you.
00:02:12.000 The institution of your family shapes you.
00:02:13.000 Your school shapes you.
00:02:15.000 Your university shapes you.
00:02:17.000 And as we lose faith in all of those institutions to shape us, we are incapable of coming together anymore.
00:02:24.000 See, you don't mistrust the people with whom you are oriented.
00:02:28.000 Institutions tend to foster a common orientation.
00:02:31.000 This is, of course, why Alexis de Tocqueville was such a big fan of them.
00:02:34.000 It's why in Democracy in America, he made the suggestion that one of the things that made America so different from all other countries was the plethora of social institutions in which Americans were enmeshed.
00:02:45.000 That in most other countries, people had formal institutions that they were forced to interact with, but in America, everybody was a member of a social institution or many social institutions, and that created this extraordinary social fabric that was durable, that allowed for innovation, that allowed for freedom.
00:03:00.000 Because without trust, there really can't be freedom at all.
00:03:05.000 If the institutions, which provide the shaping function that set the rules for our lives, the way we interact with the world, if those die, so too does the social fabric.
00:03:14.000 And then when the social fabric dies, we stop.
00:03:17.000 Attributing to each other decent motivation.
00:03:20.000 Instead, we start engaging in what the philosopher Alastair McIntyre called emotivism this belief that everybody except for you is motivated by something nefarious.
00:03:29.000 And so instead of having a political conversation, what you do is you just attribute a motive to the person's policy.
00:03:36.000 So, just to give a quick example, last week, a couple weeks ago, I was speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, and there was a student who got up, and that student started asking about Obamacare.
00:03:46.000 And started off the question, Talking about the differences in policy between Republicans and Democrats on healthcare.
00:03:52.000 Now, it's a very complicated topic because obviously the United States has a very heavily regulated and subsidized system.
00:03:57.000 Even if you wanted to unwind it, it's very difficult to do so.
00:04:00.000 There are a lot of moving parts.
00:04:01.000 It's not an easy question.
00:04:03.000 But what made the question, I think, sort of telling is that he finished the question by saying, Why do people who want to change the healthcare system want tens of thousands of people to die?
00:04:15.000 That's emotivism.
00:04:17.000 That is the idea that the person who disagrees with you on policy does so not because they have an honest, differential assessment of the evidence or different premises from which they are working.
00:04:27.000 Instead, that person disagrees with you because they actually want people to die.
00:04:32.000 And that's what happens when you lack trust in the people around you.
00:04:35.000 You've never actually said this, unless you're a very young child in my family, to other members of your family.
00:04:41.000 My kids say it to each other, but that's because my kids are, you know, 12, 10, 6, 2, and in the womb.
00:04:48.000 So it takes a second when you have that many.
00:04:52.000 But unless you're a child, you shouldn't be attributing motivations to other people unless you have good evidence that their motivation is malign.
00:04:59.000 But that's what we jump to when there is no trust.
00:05:01.000 I trust my wife.
00:05:02.000 I'm not worried that when she criticizes me, it's coming from a terrible place.
00:05:05.000 I trust the people that I go to synagogue with.
00:05:07.000 If they have a critique or we have a disagreement, not even a critique, I don't immediately jump to, they do it because they hate me.
00:05:14.000 And you're doing it because you hate me is the death of politics.
00:05:17.000 Because if that's the case, then how exactly are we supposed to live together and work together and create policy together?
00:05:23.000 Our institutions have been rotted out.
00:05:26.000 They've maintained a lot of their power, but they've retained none of their original philosophy.
00:05:33.000 These sort of foundations upon which they were built have been rotted away.
00:05:37.000 I've said before on my show that a lot of our institutions are being worn around kind of like a Hannibal Lecter skin suit.
00:05:42.000 They're still only animate because they're being worn around by something foreign.
00:05:46.000 Our truth making institutions used to be rooted in truth, and now they're rooted in power.
00:05:54.000 And in the world of truth, power is narrative.
00:05:57.000 And so, for example, if you look at how the media covers stories, the media is no longer interested predominantly in facts and evidence.
00:06:03.000 Instead, the media are interested in What are the narratives?
00:06:06.000 How do we exercise power?
00:06:07.000 And then how do we mobilize some small number of facts and evidence, or maybe not even facts and evidence, in order to support that narrative?
00:06:15.000 It's all reverse engineering of the factual reporting of the evidence that is presented.
00:06:20.000 And the most egregious form of this, of course, in the social media sphere, is when you move from narrative to outright conspiracy theory, where you just jettison the evidence entirely and you just go with whatever is the purest form of narrative that gets you where you need to go.
00:06:33.000 That's how you get to the idea, for example, that Erica Kirk must have been involved in the murder of her husband, right?
00:06:37.000 There's no evidence of this.
00:06:38.000 It is factually unbased, it is insane, but there are an enormous number of people who believe it because for some other narrative reason they wish for it to be true.
00:06:47.000 There's some manipulation of the American system by malign foreign powers, or the entire institution of TPUSA has been perverted from the inside.
00:06:55.000 If you have a narrative in your head and evidence and fact no longer matter to you, then you can push any narrative using any conspiracy theory that you want.
00:07:04.000 Churches used to be truth making institutions, spiritual truths, like baseline morality.
00:07:11.000 The whole purpose of a church, the whole purpose of any religion. is to present eternal truths that stand the test of time.
00:07:17.000 Now, of course, all churches, all synagogues, are going to stick and move with the application of those morals.
00:07:24.000 There can be lots of arguments, and there always are, on the application of eternal morals to temporal principles.
00:07:30.000 But the question of whether the church ought to pursue truth has sort of been supplanted by the idea that churches ought to do politics.
00:07:37.000 And again, I don't believe that my rabbi shouldn't sign into politics when it's relevant, but the idea that churches have basically become, in many instances, sort of progressive bastions Where people go to eat pizza and play guitar rather than unite with some internal value, that is why people don't go to church anymore.
00:07:53.000 Why go to church?
00:07:54.000 You can go to a ball game.
00:07:55.000 There's no reason.
00:07:56.000 The scientific establishment moved from evidence to narrative, from truth to narrative.
00:08:01.000 We saw that most obviously during COVID.
00:08:03.000 And the result of that was not a sort of moderate critique of science.
00:08:08.000 The result for an enormous number of people was to completely discard science in favor of woo woo nonsense that has zero evidence to back it.
00:08:17.000 Again, the slide from truth to narrative is almost invariably followed by a slide from narrative to conspiracism or nonsense.
00:08:25.000 You can see that in the world of science very, very clearly.
00:08:28.000 We were told a lot of lies about, for example, the efficacy of masks or the ability of vaccines to prevent transmission of the COVID virus.
00:08:37.000 And the backlash to that was all in pursuit of a narrative.
00:08:40.000 And the backlash to that was what if we don't do vaccines ever again?
00:08:44.000 People just won't take vaccines.
00:08:46.000 Vaccines must be bad.
00:08:47.000 And instead, we're going to rely on whatever we heard on some third rate podcast from a person who doesn't know a kidney from a spleen.
00:08:55.000 And then, obviously, when it comes to academia, this is clearly true.
00:09:00.000 The destruction of truth in favor of social engineering has been ongoing for decades in the United States.
00:09:05.000 This is nothing new.
00:09:07.000 We watched the apotheosis during the sort of woke revolution that happened over the course of the last 10, 15 years, but it's been going on for a very long time.
00:09:15.000 The first book that I ever wrote, I'm now middle aged.
00:09:16.000 So when I started this, I was your age.
00:09:18.000 When I started working in this field, I was 17.
00:09:20.000 So I've been doing this now for 25 years because I'm now 42.
00:09:23.000 The first book that I wrote was a book called Brainwashed How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth.
00:09:28.000 That book was written in 2004.
00:09:29.000 Okay, and that book was all about liberal indoctrination on college campuses.
00:09:34.000 I was at UCLA at the time, I was a junior when I wrote it.
00:09:37.000 And not much has changed, except that it's gotten in many ways worse.
00:09:41.000 And that happened because professors decided, back in the 1960s essentially, professors and administrators decided to cave to activist students because they did not have the courage of their own principles.
00:09:51.000 And in doing so, they turned over the purpose of a university, which is emblazoned on pretty much all of the insignia of every major university, which they then all ignore.
00:10:02.000 Where I went for law school, Harvard, the insignia says Veritas on it.
00:10:06.000 The last time that Harvard met Veritas, it's been a century.
00:10:10.000 It's been a long, long time.
00:10:13.000 The move from truth to we are going to engineer a population of discontented people who believe that the system must be turned on its ear, that is what college became.
00:10:22.000 It was still good in some STEM areas, obviously, when it came to science and tech, but when it came to the liberal arts or to the idea that you were actually trying to generate good, productive citizens.
00:10:33.000 Citizens, in the fullest sense of the word, people who are engaged in their community and who believed in the fundamental principles of their civilization, these universities decided to discard all of that.
00:10:42.000 And so, naturally, people don't trust the universities anymore.
00:10:46.000 And this was mirrored in a radical distrust of our government.
00:10:50.000 See, the thing about the way the American government is built is that it was built to really pursue one fundamental principle above all.
00:10:56.000 And it wasn't even freedom as much as epistemic humility.
00:10:59.000 Because freedom is rooted in a certain level of epistemic humility.
00:11:02.000 What I mean by that is the idea you might not be right.
00:11:05.000 If you think you're always right, Then you might want to be a tyrant because you're always right.
00:11:10.000 I'm a tyrant with my children.
00:11:11.000 I'm always right, they're always wrong.
00:11:13.000 With my wife, I have to have a little bit of epistemic humility because mostly she's right and I'm wrong.
00:11:18.000 And I'll save that one for tape, so I can show her later.
00:11:22.000 But humility with regard to other people in your society, the idea that maybe they're right on occasion, maybe you're wrong on occasion, that again has to be rooted in trust of our fellow citizens.
00:11:32.000 So if all of those truth making institutions that allowed us to orient towards something useful and good and powerful together, if those all go away, And all you're left with is government.
00:11:42.000 And the fundamental basis of your government is respect for your fellow human beings, such that sometimes you might lose.
00:11:48.000 And not only might you lose sometimes, you might have legitimately lost sometimes.
00:11:51.000 And sometimes, even if you win, you don't get what you want because we have checks and balances in the United States government to prevent the system from swinging side to side radically.
00:12:00.000 The whole point of the American government is to stop things from happening.
00:12:04.000 That is legitimately the point of the American government.
00:12:06.000 Read the Federalist Papers.
00:12:07.000 This is the entire thing.
00:12:08.000 The entire thing is unless we have very broad agreement on something, it should not happen.
00:12:13.000 That is why we have a bicameral legislature, it is why we have three branches of government.
00:12:18.000 There are lots of other countries that don't have these systems.
00:12:20.000 This is why we have a Federalist system in which the powers of the federal government are enumerated.
00:12:24.000 And the powers of the state government are significantly broader.
00:12:26.000 The whole idea is lots of people live lots of different kinds of lives.
00:12:30.000 And you may not like that, but you might also be wrong.
00:12:33.000 And so, in order for us to determine what right looks like, there better be a broad agreement on us, between all of us, to do that thing.
00:12:41.000 And when that wears away, when that wears away, what we end up with when we hate each other is a battle to the death in the blood sport of politics.
00:12:50.000 We get angry at the checks and balances because it's not possible that people who oppose me are right.
00:12:55.000 Those people are malign.
00:12:56.000 Those people want bad things to happen to me and to my family.
00:13:00.000 And so I'm going to grab the government. 0.99
00:13:01.000 I'm going to kill the filibuster. 0.68
00:13:02.000 I'm going to stack the Supreme Court.
00:13:03.000 I'm going to add states willy nilly to the United States Senate.
00:13:06.000 And then I'm just going to run right over everybody.
00:13:10.000 And by the way, the sentiment is not a pure left wing sentiment, although it's very, very often expressed at the top levels of the Democratic Party.
00:13:15.000 It's also expressed at the top levels by some on the Republican side.
00:13:18.000 Sometimes you'll hear it phrased in preemptive tones.
00:13:21.000 The left will do it.
00:13:22.000 Therefore, we must do it first, which is always a get out of jail free card.
00:13:26.000 But the reality is that in the absence of rebuilding trust in the institutions, what you will end up with is a war of all against all on the governmental level.
00:13:35.000 And things will not go well.
00:13:38.000 And you can see this with regard to how the government is now approaching a wide variety of issues, how Americans want things from the government they never used to want.
00:13:45.000 Checks and balances, when you get rid of the fundamental epistemic humility of the government, give way to a centralized tyranny.
00:13:53.000 Free markets, which are rooted in the idea of epistemic humility, the entire Marginal theory of value, the idea that was promoted by the Austrian school thinkers in economics.
00:14:05.000 The basic idea that actually value is subjective at the margins.
00:14:09.000 I value a glass of water differently than you value a glass of water, and I value a glass of water differently if I'm in the Sahara Desert than if I'm here in Austin, Texas.
00:14:17.000 That basic idea suggests that there is no possibility of centralizing economics.
00:14:21.000 The entire basis of free market economics, as Hayek would argue, is diffuse knowledge.
00:14:27.000 That everyone in this room has a different idea of what things are worth.
00:14:31.000 And what the price is, is the aggregate of what we all think that thing is worth.
00:14:34.000 That's what a price looks like.
00:14:36.000 Well, what happens when we don't trust each other?
00:14:39.000 And when we think some of us are screwing other of us?
00:14:41.000 Then we say, well, what if there was a person right at the top who is deciding what's fair?
00:14:46.000 And again, I wish this were only a left wing phenomenon.
00:14:48.000 It is increasingly a right wing phenomenon.
00:14:50.000 This idea that somehow free market capitalism is eroding the soul of the American people.
00:14:55.000 Whenever people say that capitalism is what's responsible for the soul sickness in Americans, and you hear this from, I've seen this in.
00:15:03.000 Places like Compact Magazine, for example.
00:15:06.000 When you see this sort of argument, understand that trying to solve a sole problem with economics is like trying to change a baby diaper with a hammer.
00:15:16.000 It is the wrong tool.
00:15:17.000 That is not what economics are for.
00:15:19.000 Economics and free market economics are about the generation of new and better products at a better and lower price.
00:15:26.000 That is what economics are designed to do.
00:15:29.000 This is what they do better than anything else because of the preservation of private property and because of the diffusion of knowledge.
00:15:35.000 But if you don't trust your neighbor and you think your neighbor's screwing you, you might be very likely to say that maybe the government should just do what you want it to do.
00:15:42.000 Grab that brass ring and do exactly what you want with that power.
00:15:47.000 And in the realm of equal rights before law, which is of course what all freedom is predicated on and rooted in, the idea that all of us, we have different skills and abilities. 0.99
00:15:56.000 Some of us are tall and some of us are short, some are smart, some are stupid, right? 0.77
00:16:00.000 But we all have equal rights before the law. 0.98
00:16:02.000 Once we lose the trust in our institutions, you fall back on tribal solidarity, which is why you will see people saying that certain types of crimes from certain types of people should be excused.
00:16:12.000 If they look like you or if they're part of your tribe, it's fine.
00:16:15.000 As opposed to if they're part of the other tribe, in which case, the law. 0.56
00:16:20.000 Now, none of this is simply solved by jawing at one another.
00:16:24.000 This is another one of these great internet myths that if we have debates with one another on these particular issues, that it actually solves the problem.
00:16:31.000 There's this bizarre notion online, this sort of debate bro culture, that if you yell at each other a lot in short spurts, that somehow this solves the problem.
00:16:39.000 And this is based on a fundamental misreading of John Stuart Mill.
00:16:41.000 John Stuart Mill, of course, suggesting that liberty was the best pathway toward truth.
00:16:45.000 Well, it's the best pathway except for all the others, meaning it's the worst pathway except for all the others, meaning there is no guarantee that at the end of a debate, The best side wins.
00:16:55.000 That has never been the guarantee.
00:16:57.000 In order for a solid debate, a solid discussion to take place, there must be a fundamental sharing of values, rules of the road, you might call them.
00:17:05.000 Western civilization, there ought not be debate about fundamental propositions.
00:17:10.000 Truly.
00:17:11.000 Because if you are having to debate individual value, like the idea that individual human beings have individual worth, you are arguing with something outside the system.
00:17:21.000 If you have to argue with somebody about the worthiness of truth, That is not an argument that can ever be won because truth itself is an assumed value.
00:17:31.000 This is why, in the Declaration of Independence, when the founders say that there are certain rights that are self evident, they don't mean that they prove themselves.
00:17:39.000 They mean that these are the fundamental building blocks of a society, and if you question them, the society crumbles.
00:17:44.000 Because no values are self evident.
00:17:47.000 No baby comes into the world with values that are self evident.
00:17:49.000 That's not the way that it works.
00:17:51.000 But one of the things that we've decided as a sort of internet culture is that if we debate the fundamental propositions of things like Private property, or free speech, or freedom of religion, that somehow things get wildly better.
00:18:05.000 And I mean, I'd just like to point out that all of those things were actually come to, in a sort of Burkean sense, by human experience, not by logic.
00:18:12.000 We did not argue ourselves into freedom of religion.
00:18:14.000 We had a bunch of bloody wars, and then we decided, hey, you know what would be great?
00:18:17.000 Freedom of religion.
00:18:19.000 We did not argue ourselves into free speech.
00:18:21.000 We had a bunch of people who were burned at the stake, and then we decided, hey, you know what?
00:18:24.000 This is too much of that.
00:18:25.000 Let's not do that anymore.
00:18:27.000 Private property was not the outgrowth of people arguing themselves into private property.
00:18:32.000 It was the outgrowth of the experience of centuries of poverty and death and despair.
00:18:38.000 And if you have to argue your way back into private property, this doesn't mean you can't and shouldn't defend, you should.
00:18:43.000 But if the idea is that you can only win this debate on the fundamental basis of speaking it out, that's not right.
00:18:51.000 Human experience has something to say about this as well, which is why it is so dangerous what is happening right now, because it takes centuries to build the institutions that we are taking minutes to destroy.
00:19:02.000 Only.
00:19:03.000 A carefully cultivated moral culture that values truth and evidence and logic and moral decency, that actually protects free speech and property rights and equal rights under the law, is capable of restoring our institutions.
00:19:15.000 We shouldn't be debating about the fundamental moral matters.
00:19:19.000 Things like lying is wrong.
00:19:20.000 If I have to debate you about that, there's no debate.
00:19:22.000 Or that truth is superior to falsehood.
00:19:24.000 There can be no debate about this.
00:19:26.000 Or that individual human beings have moral worth and that their autonomy has moral value.
00:19:30.000 Those are the values that we begin with.
00:19:33.000 That needs to be embodied in institutions.
00:19:35.000 And that's why, bringing it all the way back to the beginning, that's why the University of Austin is really valuable.
00:19:40.000 Because the University of Austin takes as its fundamental presuppositions the building blocks upon which you can actually erect a civilization, the most important fundamentals of that civilization.
00:19:51.000 Now, they can give you all the justification for all those principles.
00:19:53.000 I can too.
00:19:53.000 If you read the literature, you can do it.
00:19:55.000 But the point is that that is already there.
00:19:58.000 It doesn't have to be erected de novo, it doesn't have to be remade from nothing.
00:20:03.000 And so, the case for the University of Austin is that it is a brand new institution built on very old things, it is a brand new institution that is taking.
00:20:11.000 The foundations that have been cast aside by all of these institutions.
00:20:16.000 And it is taking those and it is building a new institution atop the foundations that have been discarded.
00:20:22.000 There is no more important work.
00:20:24.000 And if you're considering coming here, if you're already here, congratulations because you're making the right choice.
00:20:28.000 Thanks so much.
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00:21:37.000 In our American experiment class, we learned about how Lincoln connected the Declaration of Independence to why slavery should be ended, or by the end of his arguments.
00:21:48.000 Do you think it was a mistake to connect the ideals of the Declaration of Independence to law in the American imagination?
00:21:57.000 The ideals to law?
00:21:59.000 I mean, what Lincoln said about the Declaration of Independence is he suggested that the Constitution was the frame of silver surrounding the apple of gold, the apple of gold being the Declaration.
00:22:10.000 The basic idea that the Declaration is law, it's law in the sense that it is a guiding principle, but it's very hard to derive black letter law from the Declaration of Independence.
00:22:19.000 And so you have to read that in.
00:22:21.000 Consilience with the Constitution was the case that Lincoln was making.
00:22:24.000 And it is a really complicated legal case, frankly.
00:22:26.000 I mean, it's very interesting to read the arguments and counter arguments leading up to the Civil War about the application of the Constitution to the issue of slavery.
00:22:34.000 But the idea that what Lincoln was doing was reading the Constitution in light of the Declaration, that I think is correct.
00:22:39.000 I think that the sort of hard divide that was made by the secessionists between the Declaration saying this is not law and the Constitution saying this is law, that's ideologically wrong and un American. 0.80
00:22:50.000 And so I think Lincoln was right to link the two.
00:22:52.000 And again, I think that.
00:22:54.000 The mistake would be to de link in the other direction the declaration from the Constitution.
00:22:58.000 Say the Constitution is not important, the principles of the declaration are what's important.
00:23:02.000 That's how you end up with the idea that on the basis of vague pursuit of happiness standards, the government can do whatever it wants, as opposed to the actual limitations of that frame of silver.
00:23:12.000 Thank you.
00:23:18.000 Hi, Ben.
00:23:19.000 I'm a Noah Hyde from Houston, and I've always been fascinated by government.
00:23:24.000 One of our seven laws in our religion is to establish courts of justice.
00:23:29.000 In other words, to make good government.
00:23:31.000 Where would you say that is most needed in our government, whether state or federal?
00:23:39.000 Where is it most needed?
00:23:41.000 The biggest thing that's needed in government is for the federal government to go back to its constitutional boundaries, which of course is never going to happen, but it's a nice idea.
00:23:51.000 The truth is that the state governments were given extraordinary powers under the federal constitution.
00:23:56.000 The original amendments have nothing to do whatsoever with the states.
00:23:59.000 So, for example, the First Amendment, which declares freedom of speech, says literally Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
00:24:05.000 It does not say that states shall make no law abridging it.
00:24:08.000 Now, there are mirror provisions in virtually every state constitution in the original colonies.
00:24:12.000 But the idea that there's a strange sort of balance.
00:24:16.000 I actually have a political philosophy book that I wrote that has not been published yet and may one day.
00:24:22.000 But the basic thing that I talk about in that book is the idea that the place where you can do and it's appropriate to do the most legislation is the place where you need the least and vice versa.
00:24:32.000 So in your local community, in your HOA, there are a lot of informal things that don't need to be codified because you know all of your neighbors and you know your family members, but that would also be the place where theoretically a lot of rules could theoretically apply because there's a lot of agreement.
00:24:44.000 As you abstract up the chain, there should be fewer rules because there's less agreement.
00:24:49.000 And instead, we seem to do the reverse.
00:24:50.000 The idea being we don't need any rules at the local level, but we need lots of rules at the federal level.
00:24:54.000 That's a huge, huge, huge mistake.
00:24:55.000 It's one of the reasons why we have such knockdown, dragout battles over the federal government.
00:25:01.000 Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who, again, I was actually originally supportive when he ran for president in 2012, and then his campaign flamed out over his inability to name agencies.
00:25:10.000 Governor Perry had, I thought, the best line of the campaign, which was he wanted to make Washington, D.C. irrelevant to your life.
00:25:17.000 That sounds fantastic.
00:25:19.000 I would love to not care who the president is, truly.
00:25:21.000 I would love to not care.
00:25:22.000 And instead, we spend every minute of every day caring who the president is, whether it's Democrat or Republican, whether he is, you know, comatose or whether he's tweeting, which seems to be the only two possible options for each party, variously.
00:25:37.000 Thank you.
00:25:37.000 Thank you, Ben.
00:25:42.000 Hey, Ben.
00:25:43.000 I am an evangelical Christian and a huge.
00:25:47.000 Fan of yours, listened to you about every single day for eight years.
00:25:49.000 So I wanted you to know that before I asked this question.
00:25:51.000 And this is maybe a softball of sorts, but I've been really intrigued by what's gone on with Tucker Carlson over the last year.
00:25:59.000 I can't figure it out.
00:26:00.000 I told a friend of mine in California, Matt, I said something switched.
00:26:03.000 I can't, I don't know what's going on with him.
00:26:06.000 And now I just hear him like say one thing one time and something else three weeks later.
00:26:10.000 I mean, he recently said Israel was a beautiful country, gorgeous, wonderful place.
00:26:15.000 Hideously ugly, five seconds later, yeah.
00:26:16.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:26:17.000 So I just didn't, I thought I would like to hear your theory.
00:26:20.000 Because it's such a radical thing to have a reasoned critique of Gaza and how, whatever, but this seems so crazy and such a 180.
00:26:27.000 I would love to hear your thoughts.
00:26:28.000 So I try not to get into Tucker's head, although I seem to take up an enormous amount of space in his head, Renfree.
00:26:37.000 But when it comes to what Tucker has been doing, when I spoke about truth, making way for a narrative, making way for conspiracy, I think that's clearly what's happened with Tucker.
00:26:46.000 I think that the first indicator that I thought that Tucker Carlson was going off the reservation.
00:26:51.000 Was actually significantly earlier than anyone else.
00:26:54.000 I've been saying that I think that Tucker's ideas are quite dangerous and that he's demagogic since I believe 2018, 2017, 2018.
00:27:00.000 He was still on Fox at the time.
00:27:02.000 And there are a couple of early indicators.
00:27:04.000 One of them, he did a monologue where he was just launching into an investor who had made the signal moral error, in his opinion, of buying a firm that was going out of business.
00:27:15.000 He had bought the firm, it was in Wisconsin, some industrial firm, and he basically sold off the pieces that made it indebted, and then he had tried to relaunch the business or sell it.
00:27:23.000 And this was a great sin, according to Tucker, and he used all sorts of terms like vulture capitalism to describe all of this because the idea is that if free markets don't work the way that Tucker Carlson wants them to work, then free markets are immoral and wrong and evil.
00:27:35.000 About a year later, Tucker was on my show and he was talking about self driving cars.
00:27:40.000 And I asked him whether he would outlaw self driving cars.
00:27:42.000 He'd made the case to do so.
00:27:43.000 And I said, on what grounds, on what governmental grounds would you outlaw self driving cars?
00:27:49.000 And Tucker said, I would do so on the basis of safety.
00:27:52.000 And I said, Tucker, that makes no sense.
00:27:53.000 You can watch this, it's on tape.
00:27:54.000 I said, Tucker, that makes no sense.
00:27:56.000 Self driving cars will be significantly safer than human driven cars.
00:28:00.000 And he said, You asked me on what grounds I would ban them, not what's true.
00:28:05.000 And I, you know, that's kind of the whole story.
00:28:08.000 So I think that Tucker Carlson is steeped in grievance.
00:28:11.000 He believes that America is fundamentally bad in some of its founding principles.
00:28:14.000 He thinks it has gone completely wrong.
00:28:16.000 It is not a misnomer to say that he thinks pretty much everything America has done since World War II has been wrong, nefarious, and indeed evil.
00:28:23.000 Satanic, he might call it, right?
00:28:25.000 I mean, that's the kind of language that he uses.
00:28:27.000 I think he feels himself to be part of an aggrieved group of people who have been ground underfoot by a nefarious coterie who may have certain types of last names.
00:28:37.000 And while proclaiming, obviously, obviously, that he is not in any way discriminatory, of course.
00:28:46.000 It's all just a tap and stance.
00:28:47.000 And so, again, without getting into why he is saying what he's saying, I will say any person who is now making the overt case that the world would be better off if the United States ceded power to Russia and China, which they think he is saying, overtly, right now, and that the president, he's making the case that the president of the United States is the Antichrist.
00:29:04.000 He's literally doing that.
00:29:06.000 I don't know what's going on with him, but.
00:29:08.000 It's a very, very strong case against ingesting numbers of Alp pouches.
00:29:14.000 Thank you.
00:29:21.000 Hi, Ben.
00:29:22.000 Before I ask my question, I want to say thank you.
00:29:25.000 I found out about the University of Austin five years ago from your channel.
00:29:28.000 I would not be here if it wasn't for you.
00:29:28.000 Oh, good.
00:29:33.000 I did not apply anywhere else.
00:29:35.000 I wanted to be here because of you and you presenting this to me.
00:29:40.000 The preamble established the foundational terms of our country 250 years ago, laying out the self evident truths.
00:29:46.000 The challenge for us today in 2026 is whether we'll respond to the concluding appeal in the Declaration and commit our, just as the Founding Fathers did, lives, fortune, sacred honor to the proposition that these truths remain self evident.
00:29:58.000 And throughout time, as countries grow and got more diverse, Frederick Douglass did not share in that promise of 1776, but he believed in it more fervently than many who did.
00:30:09.000 What can we do 250 years now?
00:30:11.000 To recultivate a generation of American citizens to help want to pledge their lives, sacred and honor to the commitment of these self evident truths, that they remain self evident?
00:30:22.000 So it's a great question.
00:30:23.000 I think that the most important thing that we express in our daily lives and in our action is gratitude for the country we live in.
00:30:31.000 The massive ingratitude that is.
00:30:33.000 The unbelievable and ignorant ingratitude that is spread across the country, it's beyond, honestly, it's beyond reason to me. 0.91
00:30:43.000 It makes no sense at all. 0.93
00:30:44.000 It requires an extraordinary amount of ignorance about the way the rest of the world works, or indeed how all of human history has worked, in order to come up with the idea that America is somehow in outlier fashion terrible.
00:30:55.000 America is in outlier fashion unbelievably wonderful.
00:30:59.000 And there is a reason why literally billions of people would kill to get into the country.
00:31:04.000 Because this is the greatest place on earth.
00:31:06.000 It remains the greatest place on earth.
00:31:07.000 We are all lucky to be here.
00:31:09.000 And anybody who refuses to say that is lying.
00:31:15.000 Now, there's a corollary to that, which I do think that we should do some tough.
00:31:19.000 Talk to people who are not grateful for what they have.
00:31:24.000 I think there are an enormous number of people who sit around, for lack of a better word, bitching about their lives and pretending they don't have the ability to rise or that bad decision making is somehow excused by the evils of the system.
00:31:36.000 And that seems to me an aspect of weakness that needs to be called out at every turn.
00:31:40.000 That doesn't mean there aren't terrible things that happen in life.
00:31:43.000 It doesn't mean some people aren't unlucky.
00:31:44.000 It doesn't mean that every decision is going to be met with success, even if it's a good decision.
00:31:47.000 What it does mean is that if you make more right decisions than wrong in the United States, You have a better chance than anywhere on earth at any time in human history of succeeding than anyone.
00:31:58.000 And so if you're failing, the first place you should be looking is in the mirror, not out the window.
00:32:10.000 Thank you.
00:32:11.000 Good afternoon, Mr. Shapiro.
00:32:12.000 Thank you so much for being here.
00:32:13.000 It's a pleasure to have you here and speak to you today.
00:32:17.000 I wanted to ask that in a world that politics is so polarized right now, And at the end of the day, we're all humans, but we seem to be assigning these labels to our identities I am a Democrat, I am a Republican, and this is furthering us more and more and polarizing our society.
00:32:35.000 I wanted to ask you, from everything that you've learned, what do you see as the common ground and the common vision that can reunite both extremes to furthering America, to furthering our institutions, and ultimately lead to less polarization, more collaboration between two sides when it's so polarized now?
00:32:52.000 So the truth is that I think the vast majority of Americans actually want, still, when you're not online.
00:32:58.000 And online is a massive problem.
00:33:00.000 I think the vast majority of Americans still want basically the same thing.
00:33:03.000 They want to get married, they want to have kids, they want to have a job, they want to have a family, they want upward mobility for themselves and for their children, they want to go to a church where people care about them, they want to be part of a community where people care about them, and they want a country where their freedoms are still capable of being exercised.
00:33:17.000 I think Democrats and Republicans want that in the main.
00:33:20.000 And I think that this is why one of the things that I've said very often is I think that we should try to avoid words like they without mentioning the antecedent.
00:33:29.000 This happens a lot.
00:33:30.000 Something bad happens in America, and we say, they did it.
00:33:33.000 And you don't say who they is, which allows somebody else to fill in the blank of what they is. 0.95
00:33:36.000 They could be the left, it could be the right, it could be the Jews, it could be whatever.
00:33:39.000 And the reality is that we should be very specific about our critiques because specificity is a friend to unity. 0.87
00:33:46.000 Vagueness is a friend to chaos.
00:33:50.000 When you're vague, it allows people to take it any way that you want, and it allows them to put themselves on your side or on the other side, and it creates artificial divisions.
00:33:58.000 When you're very specific about the things that you're talking about, and this is why I try to be as meticulous as I can about my language on my show, for example, because of that, I think that you end up with a strange amount of bipartisanship.
00:34:10.000 Because if you say to somebody, listen, here's what I want to do with the healthcare system, then you list 10 things.
00:34:14.000 It may be that they agree with you on four of them.
00:34:16.000 Okay, well, great.
00:34:18.000 That's more than they thought they did before.
00:34:19.000 Whereas if you just say they want to kill 20,000 people with their healthcare program, who is they?
00:34:24.000 Why do they want to kill you?
00:34:26.000 And that creates also, by the way, permission structures for violence.
00:34:28.000 I think one of the reasons we've seen this massive uptick in violence in the United States on a political level is because we're creating these gigantic permission structures where we basically say there are a group of people out there.
00:34:39.000 They want to hurt you.
00:34:40.000 They're an existential threat to you.
00:34:42.000 Therefore, the only thing that is justified is violence against them, or at least violence is justified against them.
00:34:48.000 And certain structures of thought lend themselves to this more than others.
00:34:51.000 But yeah, I think you're right.
00:34:54.000 When you meet a human being, the first thing you tend not to ask them is listen, we all use shorthand, right?
00:34:58.000 I mean, when somebody says they're a Democrat, okay, we understand they're probably pro choice, they're probably for higher taxes, they're probably left on social issues.
00:35:04.000 Yeah, but we really should, if you have the time, you should dig below the label.
00:35:10.000 Because sometimes what you'll find is that many of the reasons they think they're a Democrat are reasons they probably should not be voting that way.
00:35:16.000 And that's a strange thing that happens in a lot of conversations, you'll notice.
00:35:20.000 Somebody will say, What I really want is flourishing families.
00:35:22.000 And you'll say, Okay, well, which policies best match that?
00:35:25.000 Again, specificity allows you to get somewhere in a conversation.
00:35:29.000 Thank you.
00:35:34.000 Hello.
00:35:36.000 At UATX, it's an example of rebuilding the institution of education.
00:35:41.000 Instead of repairing Harvard, instead people sought out to make their own institution of education.
00:35:47.000 But there's a lot of other institutions that have failed us, like medicine or government, which are going to be a lot harder to rebuild, and instead we need to repair them.
00:35:54.000 What are the avenues that we need to use to repair our institutions which have failed us?
00:35:59.000 So, first of all, I think that some of them will actually be easier to replace than repair.
00:36:03.000 So, I think in the institutions of medicine, for example, there's no reason why the AMA needs to be the charter organization for medicine, for example, or the AMA.
00:36:14.000 Those institutions are eminently replaceable.
00:36:16.000 It just takes some courage and some solidarity in order to make that happen.
00:36:19.000 And there are, in fact, competing organizations in that space.
00:36:21.000 Again, the private sphere, it's a lot easier to do this.
00:36:24.000 When it comes to the government, much, much more difficult.
00:36:27.000 And the reason that it's much more difficult than the government is because politicians make bank from lying to you.
00:36:31.000 And again, I think most of the politicians that I know are not willfully trying to lie, but I think that the way that most people get elected is not by telling you, I can't solve your problems, you can solve your problems.
00:36:41.000 That's a pretty bad electoral pitch.
00:36:42.000 It also, by the way, happens to be the only true electoral pitch.
00:36:46.000 The vast majority of problems in your life are solvable by you.
00:36:49.000 And if you're looking to government to solve those problems, you're looking to the wrong place.
00:36:52.000 The best pitch would be something like, I can get government out of the way so you can solve your own problems.
00:36:58.000 That would be the best electoral pitch.
00:36:59.000 But politicians, that's very likely to be defeated in many cases by somebody who's going to say, no, no, no, you sit back, I'll take care of it for you.
00:37:07.000 Now, I think that at a certain point, the American people are going to get tired of people telling them they're going to fix it.
00:37:11.000 What we seem to be doing right now, politically, is swiveling between parties telling you that only they can fix.
00:37:19.000 I love President Trump for a lot of reasons.
00:37:20.000 There are a lot of things he does that are really, really good.
00:37:22.000 But I will say that President Trump's approach to government, which is, I'm going to fix it for you, at least rhetorically, I think is wrong.
00:37:28.000 I don't think it's his job to fix the economy for me.
00:37:31.000 So whenever I hear presidents say, I'm creating jobs, you're not creating jobs.
00:37:35.000 Presidents don't create jobs.
00:37:36.000 They suck money out of the private sector and then they redistribute it to places they think it ought to go.
00:37:39.000 But they're not creating the jobs.
00:37:42.000 It's private entrepreneurs and markets that are creating those jobs.
00:37:45.000 So it's going to take an awakening on the behalf of the American people.
00:37:48.000 I think the most likely scenario, honestly, Is the federal government keeps growing and growing and growing.
00:37:52.000 People keep moving down to places like Texas, to places like Florida.
00:37:55.000 You end up with a massive divide in the country politically between blue states, which get bluer, and red states, which get redder.
00:38:00.000 And then probably the impossibility of governing a country as divided as that means that there has to be a kind of renewed baseline federal redistribution of power back down to the state level just as a solve.
00:38:14.000 Which, by the way, wouldn't be the craziest thing.
00:38:15.000 I mean, it's kind of funny that now we think of, oh, when the United States was founded, everybody was unified.
00:38:19.000 Nobody thought of themselves as an American at the beginning.
00:38:22.000 If you go back and you read the way that all the founders talked about themselves, they talked about themselves as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, as a Bostonian.
00:38:28.000 They talked about themselves as the state that they were from, which is why the South referred to the Civil War as the war between the states.
00:38:35.000 It wasn't that we are Confederates and they are Unionists, it was a war between states.
00:38:38.000 And so the sort of grand federalization scheme or nationalization scheme in politics will have to, I think it will be naturally reversed because it's unlivable.
00:38:53.000 Howdy, my name is Noah, and I'm very excited to.
00:38:55.000 Finally, see you on the screen.
00:39:00.000 You're definitely a big part of my childhood, so I thank you for that.
00:39:03.000 You're welcome, and now I'm old.
00:39:04.000 So, one of the most important things that you have is that you always say you go approach things with facts and logic.
00:39:13.000 What I'm curious is there are oftentimes really huge contexts to debates.
00:39:18.000 So, how do you know when you've gotten to what's important, like you've gotten enough context to what's important, and that you're not being influenced by your own biases?
00:39:26.000 So, I think we're all influenced by our own biases, obviously.
00:39:30.000 I think that you have to have a good feedback loop in terms of people who are going to check you on those and tell you when you're wrong.
00:39:35.000 And that's something you should have just in your personal life, let alone your political life.
00:39:39.000 People who will tell you the truth about things, even when they're hard, and you have to cultivate people who care about you so it's coming from a good place.
00:39:46.000 It's the way to stay sane, it's the way to have a good life, let alone a sort of good political outlook.
00:39:51.000 Obviously, when it comes to cultivating the proper context for things, the best thing that you can do is read and Truly.
00:40:00.000 Just reading history, reading books.
00:40:02.000 I know books have gone out of fashion.
00:40:04.000 I know they're not out of fashion here, which is great.
00:40:06.000 Exactly, not here.
00:40:08.000 But in a lot of other places, they've gone totally out of fashion.
00:40:10.000 You can only have context when you know a broader context.
00:40:13.000 You can only have broader context when you actually know a broad panoply of things, and usually you should read an entire book to even get one look at that.
00:40:20.000 It is kind of insane.
00:40:21.000 Like, what I do for a living is I talk about an enormous number of topics, okay?
00:40:23.000 There are experts on those topics who are more expert than I in pretty much all of those fields.
00:40:28.000 What makes you an expert in the public commentariat space in politics is you read two books on a thing.
00:40:35.000 Because most Americans have read zero books on a thing, right?
00:40:38.000 And the ones who are fairly informed have read one book on a thing.
00:40:41.000 So, if you've read two books on a thing, this makes you so much more knowledgeable than the vast majority of the population.
00:40:46.000 I mean, honestly, if I'm going to talk about a thing and really not bring on an expert to talk about it, I'd like to have read five or six books on a thing minimum.
00:40:51.000 But I think that that's going to provide you the proper context.
00:40:54.000 And again, I think it's totally fair to say that the three most important words in the English language I don't know.
00:41:02.000 You're just allowed to say, I don't know.
00:41:05.000 One of the things that happens on X, which is always hilarious, is that somebody who Was a Ukraine expert since 30 seconds ago will suddenly become an Iran expert when they didn't know what the Strait of Hormuz was or where it was on the planet until 10 seconds ago.
00:41:21.000 They shift expertise to expertise, of course, not having achieved any expertise in those particular areas.
00:41:26.000 I think it's definitely possible to say, I don't know enough about that.
00:41:29.000 Maybe I should do some reading before I come back on that one.
00:41:31.000 Thank you.
00:41:38.000 What do you think of how the last two elections became fairly populous?
00:41:44.000 And then the UK's Reform Party is also a very populist movement.
00:41:50.000 How do you think we can come back from populism as the West, or do we need to fundamentally move to different parties and create new parties instead of move back from populism?
00:42:05.000 So I think Britain is obviously constituted governmentally very differently than the United States, right?
00:42:10.000 You can have a third or a fourth or a fifth party in Britain that can be successful.
00:42:14.000 I mean, the Reform Party didn't exist until five seconds ago.
00:42:17.000 So, you can do that in Britain.
00:42:18.000 In the United States, it's a two party system, much easier to take over one of the established parties than it is to remake a third party, which is why Trumpism is different than Bushism.
00:42:26.000 It's why what comes next for the Democrats is likely to be even more left than Obamaism, which was significantly more left than Clintonism.
00:42:33.000 So, I think that when it comes to populism itself, I do not like populism.
00:42:39.000 I think that populism is not a philosophy, it is an approach.
00:42:43.000 And that approach tends to be, again, lowest common denominator.
00:42:49.000 There are certain areas where I think populism There's a case to be made for it.
00:42:53.000 The case that I would largely make for populism is in moral populism, but that is because most people get their morals from their parents, and most parents get their morals from the sort of Western, I would say the gas left in the tank from Western civilization.
00:43:07.000 And so, if you want to do a moral populism, it's sort of like the William F. Buckley, I'd rather listen to the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than the professors at Harvard.
00:43:14.000 I agree with that kind of populism because the first hundred names in the Boston phone book probably went to church more often than the professors at Harvard.
00:43:21.000 When it comes to things like economics, No.
00:43:24.000 I mean, no.
00:43:25.000 Because the true populism in economics would be we all have the same, we get to all each have our independent opinions.
00:43:30.000 It's like the most populous thing in economics is called private property and free markets, where we all have our individual opinions.
00:43:35.000 But that's not what economic populism is.
00:43:37.000 Economic populism is 51 of us think the other 49 of you should pay our bills.
00:43:42.000 Or 80 of us think that you 20 over there are screwing us, and so we're going to confiscate your property.
00:43:42.000 Right?
00:43:48.000 Or 90 of us don't like this one guy over there, and so what we're really going to do is we're going to regulate the hell out of him or subsidize his rival in order to destroy him.
00:43:55.000 So, yeah, I'm not a fan of populism, but I think, again, it takes a long time to build the wonders of Western civilization, a very short time to break them.
00:44:04.000 And populism has been a tactic used for literally millennia at this point, so, nothing new.
00:44:16.000 All right.
00:44:16.000 Hey, thank you very much for coming here.
00:44:18.000 God bless you.
00:44:19.000 Keep doing the good work.
00:44:21.000 So I've noticed the problem, right?
00:44:21.000 All right.
00:44:24.000 The big problem that's being described is mass indoctrination, which naturally leads to mass change of opinion if it succeeds.
00:44:31.000 So I'm wondering, what do we do if the mass opinion is changed?
00:44:35.000 Because if you've noticed in other countries like Canada, for example, guns were outlawed.
00:44:39.000 Why?
00:44:40.000 I believe at least there was a change in opinion.
00:44:42.000 So the government, when it's able to use that and outlaw guns.
00:44:46.000 So, an equivalent thing in America, what would we do?
00:44:49.000 I mean, obviously, what I'm in the business of is trying to change opinions back the other way, right?
00:44:53.000 So, we started a company specifically in order to prevent this, and we need to grow.
00:44:57.000 And there are other people in this space, Barry Weiss being one, who is trying to move away from sort of the traditional left wing narrative towards something that's more centrist and more interesting.
00:45:07.000 There are a lot of people in this space.
00:45:08.000 I would say in the media space, I'm a lot more hopeful than I was even when we started the business because so many avenues have been opened.
00:45:15.000 I'm a lot more pessimistic when it comes to social media.
00:45:17.000 I think social media has been a bane and a curse.
00:45:19.000 And if I could somehow, I mean, again, here's the only area in life in which I'm a Luddite is when it comes to social media.
00:45:25.000 If I could hit a red button today and destroy it, I would do it.
00:45:29.000 I think social media has been a blight on human existence. 0.99
00:45:32.000 I think it's hacked our lizard brains and turned us into morons and taught us that smarts are to be found in unity. 0.97
00:45:41.000 It's used all of the flaws in human thinking and then exacerbated those flaws in order to hit our dopamine receptors. 0.99
00:45:47.000 And it's really, really bad.
00:45:50.000 I think there can be changes that are made there.
00:45:52.000 I would hope that some of the social media tech bros would do something about that.
00:45:56.000 I don't have a lot of hope for that.
00:45:58.000 But in the meantime, this is one area where I do think state legislation would be good.
00:46:01.000 I'm very much with Jonathan Haidt. 0.91
00:46:03.000 I think that social media should be banned for people under the age of 16.
00:46:06.000 I think that I have, again, I have four kids going on five.
00:46:09.000 I think that those four kids going on five, I'm not going to give them access to anything remotely like social media until they hit 18.
00:46:16.000 I see zero good to it, like zero.
00:46:21.000 Not like there's some good and there's some bad.
00:46:22.000 Zero good.
00:46:24.000 They should go and they should hang out with actual human beings and be with those actual human beings.
00:46:33.000 I agree with you, Ben.
00:46:34.000 Over here.
00:46:35.000 Two people to do three more.
00:46:36.000 What's funny, Joe, is that all the tech bros agree with me.
00:46:39.000 Many of the tech bros who designed a lot of this infrastructure banned their kids from using it.
00:46:43.000 The incentives are very bad for how to make money on these things because it does a dopamine.
00:46:47.000 It's a drug, right?
00:46:48.000 It's not good.
00:46:48.000 Yeah.
00:46:50.000 Good evening.
00:46:51.000 Earlier today, Sir Neil Ferguson described domestic Israeli politics as the hardest thing in the world for him to understand other than astrophysics.
00:46:59.000 I was wondering if you had some insight as to why it's so hard for even a sympathetic outsider to understand the political climate, and if you have any views on the upcoming general.
00:47:09.000 Okay, so I mean, okay, I can try to explain the.
00:47:11.000 I actually know a lot about this, okay?
00:47:16.000 So, without going into a massive disquisition, basically, we can say this.
00:47:20.000 When it comes to the Israeli population, the Israeli population is center right, okay, very center right.
00:47:26.000 What I mean by this is that there was a poll recently done of Israelis between the age of 18 and 29.
00:47:30.000 78% identified as right wing.
00:47:32.000 Okay, so there are three main issues in Israel right now that have 70 to 80% agreement on.
00:47:38.000 One, military independence.
00:47:39.000 They never want to get caught up short again by somebody denying them military capacity in a time when they need to win a war.
00:47:44.000 Two, everyone needs to serve in the military.
00:47:47.000 This is the most divisive issue in Israel.
00:47:49.000 Basically, you have 10% of the population, which is Arab, and 10% of the population, which is ultra orthodox in English, called Haredi in Hebrew, who don't serve in the military.
00:47:57.000 The other 80% say this is crazy and everyone needs to serve in the military. 0.75
00:48:01.000 And third, economic deregulation.
00:48:03.000 Okay, so those are the three issues, and 80% of the population agrees on them.
00:48:07.000 The reason that you've had a significant breakdown in Israeli politics is because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in his heart agrees with all three of those things, cannot form a coalition based on all three of those things.
00:48:19.000 So he's got a coalition right now that agrees that Israel should be militarily independent and agrees to a large extent on economic deregulation, although there's part of his coalition, the ultra orthodox, that are heavily welfare dependent and oppose a lot of the economic deregulation.
00:48:31.000 Okay, that third issue, the one about everybody serving in the army. 0.91
00:48:36.000 He would love for the Haredim, particularly the ultra. 0.98
00:48:39.000 No one is expecting the Arabs to serve in the army, right, left, or center. 0.94
00:48:42.000 When it comes to the ultra Orthodox, people in Israel want the ultra Orthodox to serve, except for the ultra Orthodox, who, again, are taking a disproportionate share of welfare and also are not serving in the military. 0.57
00:48:51.000 But they're part of the coalition because nobody in the center or center left will join Netanyahu's coalition because they despise Netanyahu. 0.53
00:48:58.000 And that is a result of Netanyahu being the most effective single politician in Israeli politics for the last 25 years.
00:49:04.000 Right?
00:49:04.000 He just is.
00:49:05.000 I mean, that's not even descriptive of whether you like him or hate him.
00:49:07.000 Just as a political Machiavellian player, Benjamin Netanyahu is unbelievable at this, which is why all the parties in the opposition, I'm not even kidding, two thirds of the parties in the opposition are started by people who used to be deputies to Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:49:22.000 Naftali Bennett used to be a deputy to Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:49:24.000 Avidor Lieberman was a deputy to Bibi Netanyahu.
00:49:27.000 Benny Gantz was a deputy to Bibi Netanyahu.
00:49:30.000 So basically, you have a bunch of personality conflicts that are preventing a unity government from doing the things that ought to be done.
00:49:37.000 Now, I think that will end.
00:49:38.000 I do. 0.98
00:49:39.000 I think that there will come a point here where a government will arise that actually just moves Bibi 76 years old.
00:49:45.000 Right? 0.85
00:49:46.000 His dad lived to 101, Benzian lived to 101. 0.90
00:49:48.000 So he could theoretically be around for a while to the consternation of Americans, many Americans on the left.
00:49:54.000 But the reality is that there will come an administration that is beyond Netanyahu in which the center left, all the way out to the right, is basically unified because the left does not exist in Israel.
00:50:04.000 It was destroyed by October 7th.
00:50:06.000 And so then you will have all three of those policies pursued.
00:50:10.000 The truth is, Israel is not in existential trouble.
00:50:12.000 Israel is actually domestically in quite good shape.
00:50:15.000 Israel's shekel is trading right now at three to one to the American dollar.
00:50:18.000 To understand how insane that is, you have to understand that for the last 30, 40 years, the shekel was trading well north of four, sometimes up to five.
00:50:26.000 That as of two years ago, it was trading at four.
00:50:29.000 The Israeli economy, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, has gained more in the last three years since October 7th than any stock exchange by percentage on planet Earth.
00:50:39.000 So Israel is doing fine.
00:50:41.000 The fact that you can't get a domestic coalition together is, again, a factor of a pretty poorly put together governmental system.
00:50:47.000 There are real problems with it.
00:50:48.000 They kind of took half from the Brits and they took half from the communists.
00:50:51.000 I'm not even kidding.
00:50:52.000 Their judicial system was taken from the communists and their parliamentary system was taken from the Brits. 0.71
00:50:56.000 And their cutoff point is like if they have four seats and you get into Knesset out of 120, it's a mess. 0.53
00:51:02.000 It's a mess.
00:51:02.000 That was a little detail, but there you are.
00:51:03.000 Thank you.
00:51:04.000 Let's do two more.
00:51:11.000 Hi, I have two questions.
00:51:13.000 I'm Jonathan, I'm from California.
00:51:15.000 The second question is meant for both of you, but the first question is where would you point to.
00:51:23.000 The starting point of the American culture, like disagreements.
00:51:27.000 And the second question is in such a time of uproar, like during, okay, so if you want to preserve American exceptionalism during our era, I've read that a couple of texts by Ray Dalio that suggest that great powers fall every 250 years.
00:51:49.000 We're nearing that period of time.
00:51:53.000 We are at that period of time.
00:51:56.000 What are two main metrics that America needs to succeed on in order to preserve our exceptionalism?
00:52:05.000 Okay, so I'll answer the second question first, mainly because I don't remember the first question.
00:52:11.000 The second question so, first of all, anybody who sells you a nostrum based on years, like at 250 years, everything will collapse.
00:52:22.000 I'm sorry, it's nonsense.
00:52:23.000 It's nonsense.
00:52:24.000 I mean, the Roman Empire lasted a hell of a lot longer than 250 years.
00:52:29.000 And the United States is going to last a hell of a lot longer than 250 years, I think.
00:52:33.000 So, the sort of like, oh my gosh, he's giving us the date.
00:52:36.000 The beautiful thing about making predictions like that is if you're right, you make bank off it for the rest of time.
00:52:40.000 And if you're wrong, nobody remembers.
00:52:42.000 It's one of the beauties of the political sphere.
00:52:44.000 If you make a terrible prediction, nobody remembers it.
00:52:47.000 If you get it wrong 99 times, but that one time you said Trump was going to win in 2016, you can make bank off that forever.
00:52:53.000 It's fantastic.
00:52:54.000 Anyway, so as far as what America needs to do, a couple of things that America needs to do it needs to re embrace the principles of free market capitalism.
00:53:03.000 Re embrace them.
00:53:04.000 No one, right or left, no one, and this is the part that drives me crazy, no one is making a moral defense of free markets.
00:53:11.000 Even free marketeers make a utilitarian defense of free markets.
00:53:13.000 They work really well.
00:53:14.000 That's true.
00:53:15.000 But guess what?
00:53:16.000 Most people who have grown up under a free market don't even understand the alternative to a free market, so they think that the natural state of mankind is prosperity, which is not true.
00:53:25.000 The natural state of mankind is penury, starvation, and death.
00:53:29.000 All you have to do to check that out is take an airplane most places on earth.
00:53:33.000 But the thing that we need to defend is the idea.
00:53:36.000 That free markets are inherently good.
00:53:38.000 They are, because they're a reflection of human innovation and human creativity, the fact you own your own labor.
00:53:42.000 They're an outgrowth of your honor and dignity as an individual.
00:53:45.000 That's what free markets come from.
00:53:46.000 And we need to defend it on those grounds.
00:53:55.000 And then, secondly, we need to obviously defend the principles of equal justice before law, equal rights before law.
00:54:02.000 If you had to pick two, these would be the two private property and equal rights before law.
00:54:08.000 Life, liberty, and property, you might say, if you're John Locke.
00:54:11.000 If you defend life, liberty, and property, you're in pretty good shape.
00:54:14.000 A country that gets away from any of those three is going to be in serious trouble.
00:54:17.000 I think America can defend and should defend all three of those things.
00:54:21.000 Awesome.
00:54:26.000 I'll answer offline, but I think fighting for our principles.
00:54:29.000 And fixing our institutions, which is what we're trying to do with UATX.
00:54:31.000 You better build some new ones, and we gotta fix some other ones.
00:54:34.000 But let's do the last question here.
00:54:36.000 So, this was touched on earlier with having a support system of people that you can trust to fact check you for bias.
00:54:43.000 I wanted to ask if you have any practical advice for students that want to inform ourselves.
00:54:49.000 There's a lot of information, some of it is true, some of it is medium, some of it is really not true, and it can be really overwhelming wanting to inform yourself, but wanting to find the truth in facts.
00:55:03.000 And what advice do you have?
00:55:06.000 I mean, listen, we all have heuristic shortcuts, as I say.
00:55:08.000 You have to find people that you can trust because you can't be an expert on everything.
00:55:11.000 And so, what I would say is if people keep making bad predictions, those people should not be listened to.
00:55:16.000 If people keep making, based on their ideas, predictions that keep coming false, then probably they're not worth listening to.
00:55:24.000 If their response to a request for evidence is to be offended or upset or to claim that you are doing something wrong, then you shouldn't listen to them either.
00:55:33.000 Well, what I usually say to people is that you should read legacy media publications, then you should read Conservative publications, and usually where there's crossover, that's the basis of fact, and then everything else is the opinion.
00:55:43.000 So, I have some friends on the left, like I'm friendly with Van Jones, I'm friendly with Bill Maher.
00:55:48.000 If you listen to my show and then you listen to what Van says, Van and I come at it from very different angles, but our basis in fact is going to be pretty similar because Van is a reasonable human, even if we disagree.
00:55:56.000 And the same thing is true for a Bill Maher or, say, for a John Fetterman.
00:56:00.000 They're going to be operating off the same basis of fact.
00:56:02.000 So, where we agree, that would usually be the basis of fact, and where we disagree, that's usually the opinions that we're drawing from the facts based on a different lens on the world.
00:56:10.000 That's a good way to get informed, I think.
00:56:13.000 Thank you, Scott.