The Ben Shapiro Show - June 24, 2026


Can Celebrities Stop Lecturing Us?


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

213.36

Word count

1,938

Sentence count

158

Harmful content

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Actor John C. Riley says that the right needs to be more empathetic, and that the left doesn t have the same problem. What does this have to do with politics? And why does it matter if you have or don't have empathy?

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 .
00:00:00.000 So, celebrities.
00:00:01.000 Most of the time, they don't know anything about politics, and John C. Riley is not much of an exception.
00:00:06.000 So, you remember John C. Riley?
00:00:07.000 He's the dude from Step Brothers, super talented, very funny, great actor.
00:00:10.000 Well, he just took it upon himself to say that the right needs to be more empathetic, which, again, is sort of a get out of jail free car for bad policy.
00:00:18.000 You make a bad policy, and then you say, but it was just my empathy.
00:00:20.000 It was just my empathy.
00:00:21.000 Empathy, apparently, is supposed to solve all of our problems.
00:00:24.000 Well, believe it or not, this terrible take on empathy has a lot to do with geopolitics and the rules of war.
00:00:29.000 I promise I will explain.
00:00:30.000 Plus, we get to another celebrity who is smart enough.
00:00:33.000 Not to tell Americans how to vote.
00:00:35.000 All right, let's dive in.
00:00:36.000 All righty.
00:00:37.000 So John C. Riley, who's looking a little peaked, to be fair, he appeared on another ubiquitous podcast and he explained that the right wing has no empathy.
00:00:50.000 The right has no empathy at all.
00:00:53.000 I'm so tired of hearing about how if you favor public policy that John C. Riley doesn't like, it must be because you lack empathy.
00:01:00.000 Maybe it's not about the empathy.
00:01:01.000 Maybe it's that bad public policy remains bad public policy regardless of your feelings.
00:01:06.000 You know, if you stand up for human rights, why is that a right or a left thing?
00:01:10.000 Why aren't people on the right wing concerned about human rights?
00:01:13.000 They're human too.
00:01:14.000 This whole thing that, like, kind of has come into vogue of like empathy trap.
00:01:19.000 You know, empathy trap.
00:01:21.000 You know, like, that's what Elon Musk says, like, empathy is like, don't be empathy trap.
00:01:25.000 Yes, yes, yes.
00:01:26.000 You know, stick to your agenda and what's best for you.
00:01:29.000 Holy.
00:01:30.000 Don't start feeling bad for so and so.
00:01:32.000 They're on their own thing.
00:01:34.000 Look out for number one.
00:01:35.000 Like, it's like, wait a minute.
00:01:36.000 Empathy is not a trap.
00:01:37.000 Empathy is a superpower.
00:01:39.000 It's what makes human beings exceptional our ability to look outside of ourselves.
00:01:39.000 That's right.
00:01:44.000 We're not an alligator trying to just get the next fish.
00:01:48.000 We're human beings.
00:01:49.000 We can relate to something that's not us.
00:01:52.000 That's a superpower.
00:01:54.000 He's missing the point.
00:01:55.000 When we talk about an empathy trap, that is not what we're talking about.
00:01:58.000 We're not saying you shouldn't empathize with other people.
00:02:00.000 You absolutely should try to.
00:02:01.000 The empathy trap is the idea that you and the other person are the same, that you have the same priorities as that person by necessity.
00:02:07.000 That is false.
00:02:08.000 It is a lie.
00:02:09.000 When you say that.
00:02:10.000 You know, people should be in favor of human rights.
00:02:12.000 We all should be in favor of human rights, meaning treating people well, not abusing their basic human rights to life and liberty, for example, obviously.
00:02:21.000 But the empathy trap is where you project your own values onto another person and then pretend that person thinks the same things as you.
00:02:28.000 So an empathy trap would be you allow a murderer to come into your house because you have empathy for that person.
00:02:32.000 You know, that person might want to kill you and your family, but you say, no, no, no, they're just like me.
00:02:37.000 That person is just like me because after all, I have to empathize.
00:02:40.000 I have to project myself into that person.
00:02:42.000 That's actually a form of narcissism.
00:02:46.000 Not everyone is like you.
00:02:47.000 Not everyone believes the same things as you. 1.00
00:02:49.000 It is a peculiar idiocy that is, I think, native to Western civilization. 1.00
00:02:56.000 I'm not aware of any other civilization that thinks that other civilizations are just like it. 0.99
00:03:00.000 That everybody from another civilization, like if you're a member of radical Islamic civilization, you do not think of members of the West thinking like you think and having the same priorities.
00:03:08.000 But the West is so arrogant in its belief that everyone must inherently think the same way that we end up. 0.81
00:03:15.000 Collapsing to people who are perfectly willing to take advantage of us at every available opportunity.
00:03:20.000 So we set up rules that the other side doesn't abide by.
00:03:24.000 And the other side then takes advantage of those rules.
00:03:25.000 And then we yell at ourselves for having to violate our own rules.
00:03:30.000 So we will say, for example, no, no, no, we should definitely never hit civilians when we're aiming at terrorists, right?
00:03:36.000 We need to target the terrorists.
00:03:38.000 They go, oh, so your priority is not to hit civilians.
00:03:38.000 And terrorists say that.
00:03:41.000 What I'm going to do is I'm going to hide among school children.
00:03:44.000 And then we say, you know what?
00:03:45.000 Wait, but that terrorist probably believes like we do that school children are valuable.
00:03:49.000 No, they don't.
00:03:49.000 That's literally why they're hiding among the school children.
00:03:52.000 There is nothing you could say to me that would make me hide behind my own children.
00:03:56.000 Nothing.
00:03:57.000 Zero things.
00:03:58.000 Okay, but that is not the value of a huge chunk of the world.
00:04:02.000 And so, what do they do?
00:04:03.000 They fire rockets literally from behind school children.
00:04:06.000 And then, if you are forced to hit, you say, Oh my God, we're so terrible.
00:04:09.000 How could we be violated human rights? 1.00
00:04:11.000 Taking advantage of our own stupidity and projecting our values on people who do not share them, that's the empathy trap. 0.99
00:04:18.000 Empathy itself is not a trap. 0.99
00:04:20.000 It's good to empathize with members of your family.
00:04:23.000 There's also a difference between sympathy and empathy.
00:04:25.000 Empathy is where you start to identify so much with one person or one group.
00:04:30.000 That you fail to recognize that public policy applies to everyone.
00:04:33.000 So you empathize with that poor guy there, and so you become a communist.
00:04:37.000 Well, you violate the rights of 100 million people because you empathize deeply with that one poor guy there.
00:04:41.000 It's not my point.
00:04:42.000 There's a point by the psychiatrist Paul Bloom.
00:04:45.000 So John C. Riley doesn't know what he's talking about, obviously.
00:04:49.000 That's what we should be worried about in terms of empathy.
00:04:51.000 But, and this is what happens when I understand actors have to be in a very feelings place all the time.
00:04:57.000 This is what actors do, it's what you do for a living.
00:05:00.000 They have to empathize with their characters.
00:05:01.000 They play some of the most egregious characters on screen, but they have to find the humanity in them.
00:05:05.000 So I get why they would think this way. 1.00
00:05:08.000 It is a very, very bad and stupid way to do public policy. 0.98
00:05:11.000 And the implication that somehow you don't care about humans, if you wish to, by the way, minimize civilian casualties, because it turns out the only way out is through when it comes to some of these questions. 0.99
00:05:22.000 So play it out all the way.
00:05:25.000 You say, we don't want to kill civilians, we want to target only terrorists.
00:05:28.000 The terrorists say, ah, I see your priority.
00:05:30.000 The only way I can be safe is for me to hide behind civilians. 1.00
00:05:33.000 And I will use those civilians as human shields and shoot at you. 1.00
00:05:36.000 So now you have two choices. 1.00
00:05:37.000 You can either take incoming fire, just incessantly, and do nothing about it, or you can say, you violated the rules and now you will pay.
00:05:46.000 And if there's collateral damage, the collateral damage is tragic.
00:05:48.000 It's on you since you're the one who's putting the kids in front of you. 1.00
00:05:53.000 And you have to show that it is stupid for them to hide behind kids. 1.00
00:05:56.000 Otherwise they'll keep hiding behind kids. 1.00
00:05:58.000 Put aside the civilian casualty example.
00:06:01.000 Think about being in uniform.
00:06:02.000 So, one of the rules of the Geneva Conventions is that they apply to people who are in uniform.
00:06:06.000 Why?
00:06:07.000 Well, we want to be able to distinguish soldiers from people who are civilians.
00:06:10.000 If you wear a uniform, we know you're a soldier.
00:06:12.000 If you're not wearing a uniform, we assume you're a civilian.
00:06:14.000 So, what do evil people do?
00:06:16.000 They immediately take off the uniform and they hide as civilians because then they feel like they are immune to us doing anything.
00:06:23.000 And so, if the rule is that when we capture a terrorist wearing civilian garb and we treat them the same as a soldier, we have created an incentive for them to continue cheating because they are safer hiding as a civilian than dressing as a soldier.
00:06:36.000 What you actually should do with terrorists.
00:06:38.000 Who dress up as civilians and don't get into uniform, they say the Geneva Conventions do not apply to them.
00:06:43.000 If they want the privileges of the Geneva Convention, they must abide by the rules.
00:06:48.000 This is the problem.
00:06:49.000 This is the empathy trap.
00:06:51.000 People don't think like you, and yes, people take advantage of you.
00:06:53.000 It doesn't mean that you ought to be uselessly cruel.
00:06:56.000 No one's talking about that.
00:06:57.000 It does mean that when you are attempting to set up a system of rules for the road, you must, in fact, look at the behavior and intentions of the other party.
00:07:05.000 You can't just project your own ideas of how the world should be on that other party.
00:07:09.000 Okay, well, the opposite of John C. Riley, Kenny Chesney was on with Bill Maher over the weekend, and he said that actually he never saw his platform as a reason to preach politics, which is refreshing.
00:07:20.000 I just never felt like it was my place.
00:07:22.000 It's not always everybody's place.
00:07:25.000 You're right.
00:07:26.000 There's a certain ego, I think, that lives in there, and a certain box inside your head and your soul that you have to check for some reason to think that you can make a difference.
00:07:40.000 Well, you can make a difference by speaking out.
00:07:43.000 And it doesn't.
00:07:44.000 It just, you're just, I mean, I think they've actually studied this.
00:07:47.000 When celebrities talk, I think it has the opposite effect.
00:07:50.000 I agree.
00:07:51.000 They were all waiting, by the way, for Taylor Swift in 2024 to go.
00:07:56.000 If Kamala just had Taylor's, it didn't help, and they think it hurt.
00:08:02.000 Yeah, well, I mean, that makes sense because people don't like being lectured to about politics by people whose chief claim to fame has nothing to do with that matter.
00:08:11.000 Again, it'd be like me lecturing people on how best to cook pork.
00:08:16.000 Like, I just don't know anything about that.
00:08:18.000 I know nothing about that.
00:08:19.000 I'm not qualified in that.
00:08:20.000 Me lecturing you on that would be really, really, really weird.
00:08:23.000 I understand politics is a thing where everyone has an opinion.
00:08:26.000 One of the sort of bizarre parts of my job is that if I go to a dinner party, everyone wants to talk about my job, right?
00:08:31.000 Everyone wants to talk about the thing that I study all day long.
00:08:36.000 And most people don't know that much about these things.
00:08:39.000 But at least Kenny Chesney has the brains to say, listen, you know, this is not my bag.
00:08:45.000 I don't know that much about it.
00:08:46.000 You want to go read somebody who knows something about it?
00:08:48.000 There are plenty of places you can go.
00:08:50.000 That sort of sort of humility about what you know and what you don't.
00:08:54.000 It's refreshing, I think.
00:08:55.000 What an amazing video you just watched!
00:08:57.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:08:58.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.