Matt Walsh vs The Daily Wire Hosts
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
198.79468
Summary
Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan debate whether or not ghosts are real, and if so, what role do they play in the afterlife. The Daily Wire's own Ben Shapiro joins the debate, and the conversation quickly turns to ghosts.
Transcript
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You know, I think I have a good relationship with the other hosts here at The Daily Wire.
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I consider them all friends, but their one flaw is that they're wrong sometimes, whereas
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And they aren't wrong as often as the hosts on every other channel or site, but it does
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Whereas, as you know, in my case, it never happens at all.
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And so today, I'm going to take on my Daily Wire colleagues, engage them in open debate
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And when I say open debate, I mean that I'm going to play cherry-picked clips of them
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and debate those clips instead of them personally, even though, like, they're in the building.
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I mean, I'm not going to actually debate Ben Shapiro.
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So let's begin with Andrew Klavan, a very wise man, except when it comes to his take on ghosts.
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Whether or not they're ghosts is an open question.
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I would bet that more people have seen a ghost than have visited South Dakota.
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And whether we've been there or not, people tell us it exists.
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And yet so many people have experienced ghosts that it's kind of like God.
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I wrote somewhere about God, I think in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, I wrote that
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if we believe in God, there is more evidence than we need.
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But if we don't believe, no evidence can be enough.
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It is oftentimes a very, very sane, very down-to-earth person who says, yes, I had this experience
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and I don't know what to make of it, but this is what happened.
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Now, I have gone searching for ghosts my whole life and I have never come anywhere near.
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My daughter Faith and I, when we lived in England, we would look up the most haunted hotel
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I mean, not one even strange weirdness ever, ever, ever.
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We stayed at a Motel 6 in West Virginia and we saw a ghostly figure walking across the
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But, you know, so there are strange things that happen.
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First of all, I don't actually believe in South Dakota.
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I've been to South Dakota and I still don't believe that it exists.
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As for ghosts, I don't believe in ghosts either.
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There are two different ways I think you could look at this.
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I only look at it one way, but either way, I don't see how you arrive at ghosts.
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So to begin with, obviously, if you're an atheist, right, if you're a materialist, which
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But if you are, then there's no room for ghosts in that view of the world.
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Once we die, our flesh goes in the ground and decays and we're lost forever into nothingness.
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A very cheery view of life, but there could be no ghosts.
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But then what happens if you do believe in God?
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I think in that case, actually, ghosts are even more implausible.
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Because if by ghosts, we're talking about the souls of dead people still wandering the
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earth, and maybe we have to define what we mean by ghosts.
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I have to assume we're not talking about, say, demons or other supernatural entities.
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Ghosts, we must understand to be dead human beings whose spirits are still lingering on earth.
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But why would God keep disembodied dead people around to haunt old hotels and to scare
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Why would God send souls back to earth or keep them there to shut doors, you know, in a creepy
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If we're damned, if we're condemned, then our destination is we go to hell.
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We go to the destination reserved for such souls.
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If we're not, then we go in the other direction.
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So I'm not sure I see the room, theologically, for ghosts.
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Are these condemned souls who are being spared hell?
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Are these saved, redeemed souls who still have to stick around on earth, scaring old
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Or is it that God can't figure out what to do with them?
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So they're kind of like in a waiting room situation.
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And then there's the empirical problem that in the information age with cameras everywhere,
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nobody's produced any truly compelling documented evidence of ghosts.
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But in this day and age, when everyone's got cameras, somehow he never ends up on camera.
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Well, because as human beings, we tend to detect agency in things, even when it isn't there.
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There's actually a word for this in psychology.
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It's called the hyperactive agency detection device.
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And that's when we have this tendency as human beings, you know, you're walking outside at night
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And really, it's the wind that made the bush rustle.
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But in your mind, you immediately assume that there's a serial killer hiding in the bushes, right?
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Your mind tricks you into thinking that everything that's happening, there's some sort of agency behind it.
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And that's where the stories come from, not from actual ghosts.
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This was a debate that we had a little while ago about aliens, and Knowles is a true alien skeptic and anti-alien bigot.
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The one argument that drives me the craziest is this one.
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The universe is a gazillion light years across.
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So it's just probable that there is life somewhere else.
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And I say, you know, to ascertain a probability, you need to know literally anything about the subject that you're talking about.
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And when it comes to the origins of life, there's the Miller-Urey hypothesis of the primordial soup, but the experiment didn't work out that well because they didn't have the right chemicals.
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Then there was the clay hypothesis, but there's really no way to describe how it goes from that to nucleotides, right?
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Then there's this idea that it came here from Martians, you know, from outer space, which only pushes the question off and says, well, how the hell did life form there?
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And my only point is maybe that's true, but we have no evidence.
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We have no reason to believe that we're not special.
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My favorite part of that clip is Ben looking completely bored and annoyed with the whole conversation.
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I think it was our best segment that we've ever done on Backstage.
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We're talking about aliens, even though what you just heard there was a bunch of propaganda.
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The argument he dismisses, the argument that comes from just the vastness of the universe is what tells us that there's probably life on it.
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That's not only a good argument, it's actually decisive.
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And the propagandists on the anti-alien side have never come up with a good answer to it.
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There are something like 100 billion galaxies in the known universe.
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That's what we can see from the Hubble telescope.
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The actual number, astronomers say, is probably 200 billion or more than that.
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In each galaxy, there are probably 100 billion stars on average.
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Each star has on average at least one planet, sometimes many more than that.
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Very, very, very big, to put it in very technical scientific terms.
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And so I would argue that if you're going to look upon this vast, incomprehensible expanse with literally countless numbers of galaxies and planets and assume that there's no other life anywhere, the burden of proof actually falls on you.
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It's possible to prove a negative in this case.
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Because the most logical assumption by far is that the universe not only has other life, but is teeming with it.
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So Michael says, well, there's no reason to think that there is life.
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The only planet we've ever been to has life on it.
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We know that there are trillions of other planets.
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On what basis could we possibly assume that none of the other ones are anything like this one?
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If you say that, then you're the one that has to bring the evidence.
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I don't need to produce evidence to support the most logical assumption.
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It's like if we drove into a city with hundreds of buildings and we drove down one back street and didn't see anyone.
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And then you said, well, that probably means nobody lives in the whole city.
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If I say no, obviously there are other people living here.
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I am not the one making a ludicrous or implausible claim requiring evidential support.
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If you could produce evidence, demonstrate scientifically that it's just like impossible that other life could have developed anywhere else.
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Absent that, when you look upon this expanse of trillions of planets, by far the most logical thing is to say, well, yeah, clearly there's going to be life on those other planets.
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I think this is the most important subject we probably ever debated.
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No, as a DC guy, no, Aquaman does not have super strength.
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He happens to be a strong person, but his power is to talk to fish.
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But that's just because he's a monster of a human.
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As you heard there, he claims that Aquaman does not have super strength.
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Not to appeal to authority, but I did consult superman.fandom.com, one of my favorite websites.
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Quote, Aquaman possesses superhuman strength on the order of 150 times human maximum.
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Although he's shown feats of at least 80 tons worth of striking lifting power,
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but his strength is always underrated by people like Ben Shapiro,
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considering the company that he keeps, Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter.
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Only steel-reinforced barriers have a serious chance of slowing him for any length of time.
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He lives in the ocean, gets into fistfights with octopuses or whatever.
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Aquaman, you know, lives in a pineapple at the bottom of the sea.
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So just the water pressure alone, that deep down, we're talking like 5,000 pounds per square inch.
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That requires you to either be a gelatinous life form like a jellyfish.
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Or you have to be very strong, which Aquaman is.
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And I have now vanquished all of the Daily Wire hosts,
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which means I can now steal their life force and their salaries.