00:03:31.180And I thought I was going to double major in music and genetic science because I was a violinist, a pretty good violinist at the time.
00:03:37.060And I stepped on campus, and I opened the student newspaper, and there was an editorial comparing Ariel Sharon and the Prime Minister of Israel to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi.
00:03:46.000And so I walked into the newspaper, and I said, I'd like to write a counter to this because this is nonsense.
00:03:52.540That sort of became a point-counterpoint column that I'd do every couple of weeks, and then it turned into just a regular column.
00:03:57.560After a couple of years of that or a year and a half of that, I actually went to my dad, and I was like, do you think my stuff is good enough to be in a real paper?
00:04:03.180And he said, yeah, let me do some research.
00:04:04.620And he came up with a place called Creator Syndicate, which is a syndicator of columns to hundreds of newspapers.
00:04:11.040At the time, it was people like Molly Ivins on the left and David Limbaugh on the right.
00:04:14.800And so I just submitted my stuff cold, and they called me three weeks later, and they said, we want you to have a syndicated column.
00:04:19.540So at 17, I was the youngest syndicated columnist in the country.
00:04:22.640My parents had to sign the contract because I was a minor.
00:04:26.940And I'd say like solidly 75% to 80% of the dumb crap I've ever said or written was like in that period between when you're 17 and when you're 22 because you're trying to get attention and because you think that you're a lot smarter than you are when you're 17 or 18 years old, which you now only recognize in retrospect.
00:04:43.240So again, in a place where you're trying to gain attention, the thing you do is say the thing no one else will say, which sometimes is good and a lot of times is really stupid.
00:05:04.820I was working in law, and I decided that I had always continued to do the column.
00:05:10.280I was always doing political stuff, but I was not enjoying the practice of real estate law, particularly because I came out of law school in 2007, which was like the worst time in human history to go into the real estate market.
00:05:20.980So I would sit in this really nice, glossy office overlooking Century City and do nothing like all day.
00:05:26.580And after 10 months of this and being berated by my superiors for not billing hours because, number one, there's no work, and number two, my whole thing is I work fast, and the legal industry is about do not work fast.
00:05:36.000Work slower so we can bill more hours to the client.
00:05:43.020We had just taken a mortgage on a house, and I took a job for one-third the pay to work at Talk Radio Network, and the deal was that I would do some in-house legal work half the time, and half the time I would learn the radio business.
00:05:54.700So I would actually get up at 4.30 in the morning.
00:06:08.000And then ended up as editor-at-large of Breitbart, which was because I had known Andrew Breitbart for a long time, going back to when I was actually at UCLA.
00:06:15.460Andrew lived in Brentwood, or Westwood, and so we used to get together.
00:06:43.760And for me, that was that famous Piers Morgan interview that I did in 2013 on CNN.
00:06:47.300Now Piers and I are actually pretty good friends, but back then he had me in.
00:06:51.400It was like the day after he'd interviewed Alex Jones on gun control, and he expected that I was going to be like Alex Jones, and I'm fundamentally not like Alex Jones.
00:06:58.980And so that interview didn't go great for him, and there are all sorts of articles, a lot of attention all of a sudden on that.
00:07:03.620And at this point, I'd already met my business partner, Jeremy Boring, a couple of years beforehand.
00:07:07.800We'd talked about trying to get sort of an entertainment company up and running.
00:07:11.660But the idea that we had at that point was that Jeremy was going to be kind of the talent guy, and I was going to be the legal and business guy.
00:07:16.960Because I had a degree from Harvard Law.
00:07:18.260I'd actually been executive vice president of this radio company.
00:07:21.060I went from being like in-house counsel to that.
00:07:23.200And so after that Piers hit, he called me up on the phone, and he's like, we've got this completely backwards.
00:07:27.400You're the talent, and I need to do the business.
00:07:29.560And that's when that fundamental shift sort of took place.
00:07:31.820And we started working with David Horowitz Freedom Center.
00:07:35.340We launched a website called Truth Revolt, which was sort of the predecessor to Daily Wire, and that was a reverse Media Matters.
00:07:42.140The idea was we didn't like what Media Matters was doing, and we explicitly said this in our sort of opening statement.
00:07:47.140And we said that the only way to get Media Matters to stop forcing boycotts is to just do it to the other side until they realize this is a bad idea, weapons down.
00:07:54.640And mutually assured destruction was the basic idea of it.
00:07:58.580And then we had a pretty funny sort of board meeting that ended our careers over there, which was Jeremy had discovered that social media was actually a place that you needed to be.
00:08:11.300And he said, you know, there's some kind of holes in the market here.
00:08:14.060Like you can actually start to build a brand on social media, but we need a million dollars.
00:08:17.920If you give us a million dollars, then we will build you a money machine for all time.
00:08:20.580And we were at a board meeting, and it was a bunch of people between the ages of about 75 and death, and none of them understood what a computer was, let alone what the internet was, let alone what Facebook was.
00:08:30.120And so they said, what's your business plan?
00:14:19.060I was, at the beginning of Daily Wire, I was working several jobs at one time.
00:14:24.700I was doing, like, six hours of radio at one time, plus the Daily Wire, plus I was still doing some stuff for Breitbart at the very beginning.
00:14:29.660But, yeah, I mean, the kind of mission of Daily Wire was be very clear about your principles and then aim toward, eventually, being able to effectuate cultural change across a series of different milieus.
00:14:42.000And what is a cultural change that you want to influence?
00:14:44.840I mean, I think that we have, I would say we work along kind of two lines.
00:14:48.420One is the anti-left line of broaden the discourse.
00:14:53.860I've tried to make a point of talking to people across the political aisle, which is why, if you watch my Sunday special, I'll have on people like Anna Kasparian.
00:15:00.360We'll just chat for an hour and a half or Larry Wilmore or Jason Blomack.
00:15:04.540I'll have on pretty much anybody to have those conversations.
00:15:07.760We wanted to make sure that everybody's been sort of siloed off.
00:15:12.340We wanted to say that those conversations are totally doable and haveable and they can be totally fine.
00:15:16.480And that's why in 2015, 2016, I was kind of considered part of the short-lived intellectual dark web, right?
00:15:22.020It was this idea that there were a bunch of us who disagreed with each other.
00:15:24.560I think I was the only registered Republican in the group, contrary to sort of New York Times and public opinion.
00:15:28.200And we, you know, we were all talking with one another and it was like me and Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin and a couple of Eric Weinstein and a couple of others.
00:15:38.220And so it's broadened the political debate was one, open the Overton window because the Overton window had closed really tight.
00:15:43.800In 2016, 2017, 2018, there was a real move toward you can't say things and not only can you not say things, you can't have conversations.
00:15:50.280And if you do have those conversations, you will be expelled from the movement.
00:15:54.280It was more from – significantly more from the left than from the right.
00:15:57.120I think you've seen some similar movements from the right actually recently but I think that you've seen it a lot more from the left overall.
00:16:02.560And mission number two is I am conservative.
00:16:04.260We are a conservative company and so we have principles on actual political issues ranging from things like abortion to traditional marriage to the value of religion in life to free market economics.
00:16:14.160And we're not going to be shy about our agenda and we're not going to try to hide our agenda.
00:16:18.040Now when it comes to our entertainment content, we've been trying to produce movies that are chiefly non-political in orientation because our main contention is that all we have to do to have market space is make stuff that's not political.
00:16:29.120Because Hollywood has gotten so political that if we just make something that's like down-the-line cop show in 2023, that's now considered political because the cops are not evil.
00:16:38.600And so that's opened some space for us to operate.
00:16:41.620This is kind of what's happened with us in terms of like Jeremy's Chocolates or Jeremy's Razors, right?
00:16:45.860Those companies which were launched like basically – Jeremy's Razors had some thought to it but Jeremy's Chocolates was not only on the spur of the moment.
00:16:52.080It was like we put together the ad campaign for that that day.
00:16:56.660We sold – we've sold 600,000, 700,000 chocolate bars just because all we said is we're a chocolate bar that doesn't want to preach to you, right?
00:17:04.600So like we don't want to preach to you is actually part of the cultural space.
00:17:08.240So I think that that lives halfway between message one, which is open the Overton window, and message two, which is we are conservative, is that sort of third halfway message, which is there does need to be a place for not politics, right?
00:17:24.020You want to be on Amazon Web Services.
00:17:26.920You shouldn't have to pass some sort of political litmus test to have a neutral service provider provide you a service.
00:17:31.540So that's something we've been pushing as well.
00:17:32.740Yeah, well, that's something we agree on and try to do ourselves.
00:17:35.300And with that success that you've had and with the attention that you've generated and with the clear positioning of the brand that you have, you know, we interviewed Dan Crenshaw.
00:17:45.920This interview will go out before Dan's, but there is way more security at the Daily Wire than there is in Congress, right?
00:17:54.240And this ties into what's happened very recently with Matt Walsh's emails and Twitter and everything being hacked, where you guys painted or someone has painted a target on your back, and they're really coming after you now.
00:18:10.240Because all the things you've articulated as an outside observer I'd agree with, I'm not a conservative down the line, but I respect those views.
00:18:18.580They're allowed to be aired without people being threatened, doxxed, et cetera.
00:18:23.040I think that, you know, the situation has gotten so polarized in the United States that as more and more radical issues come up and as you are strong against radicalism, there's always going to be kind of a small group of people.
00:18:34.820I don't want to make it out to be like it's everybody, but there are small groups of people who actually will get violent.
00:18:38.860And that's, you know, for me, it went back to like 2015.
00:18:40.840I was the number one target of anti-Semitism online across 2016.
00:18:50.280He's been, you know, threatened many, many death threats, very specific death threats.
00:18:55.080Obviously, he had not just his phone hacked, but like everything hacked, including his email.
00:18:58.920You know, the sort of targeting effort is – I think it's rooted in a belief that because identity politics has decided – everyone puts their focus in the phrase identity politics on the sort of – the idea that your politics is – that your identity is your politics.
00:20:15.960He's 11 months old, and I'm already, like, we're doing interviews with people just to, like, find out exactly when would be the right time and all of that.
00:20:29.860But I don't know a single person that I can think of who can survive 20 years' worth of emails being leaked because, you know, the stuff that we all thought and said and joked about 20 years ago is just in this current environment.
00:20:50.660Like, the reality is that you can only be canceled by the people who have the ability to cancel you.
00:20:54.840The left yelling at Matt isn't going to cancel him.
00:20:56.720The only people who can actually cancel Matt are the people who pay him, right, and his fans.
00:21:01.380And none of those people are going anywhere because they all understand what this is, which is an attempt to discredit and destroy somebody for the great sin of saying true things about biological sex and the differences between men and women.
00:21:11.360And, you know, so I don't – I told Matt this directly.
00:21:14.320There's nothing in those emails that would ever give you concern.
00:21:17.000It's short of him being like a pedophile or something or committing some sort of egregious crime.
00:21:24.340I'm not of the opinion that stuff that you say in confidentiality to your spouse or to your friend or that you emailed to somebody in confidentiality, that this is the sole representation of you.
00:21:33.780And I'm really sick of a culture that says that sort of stuff because it's not true.
00:21:38.300The version of yourself that you present to the public is actually the most considered version of yourself because you actually have to consider those things.
00:21:44.080What you say, you know, to a buddy, you make a stupid racial joke or something, and that comes out.
00:21:49.580The reason that you didn't say it out loud is because you know it's socially unacceptable.
00:21:52.580Okay, so what rule did you actually violate?
00:21:55.060Does this make you like a terrible person or does it make you somebody who like says rude jokes to your buddies?
00:21:59.340Is it like the – is the end of the world?
00:22:01.060Does it belie some deeper truth about you?
00:22:03.160I just don't buy into the idea that what you say in private is significantly more important than what you say in public.
00:22:19.180I think because it is – there really is no gray area is the answer.
00:22:23.040I mean you either believe this thing that is fundamentally untrue in my opinion or you – and just factually – or you don't believe the thing.
00:22:29.780And this is a – people want fealty on this issue.
00:22:33.680They don't want to have a discussion about the issue, right?
00:22:36.160Because there are actual conversations to be had about like for example, how do you treat trans – people who identify as trans in public?
00:22:43.160Like, okay, should they be able to be fired if they're in this position versus if they're in that position?
00:22:48.640Should there be laws on the books about what kind of bathroom to use, right?
00:22:51.700Those are all sort of pragmatic discussions that you can have about the risks and rewards of various policies and there are edge cases in which a trans man was transitioning when he was a teenager and looks a lot more like a woman versus like a big hulking dude who just says he's a woman who's going into a – right?
00:23:04.620Like there are edge cases there that can theoretically be discussed.
00:23:07.500But that's not what the conversation is about.
00:23:09.680The claim that the trans community is now making is that any man at any time for any reason can say that he is a woman and we must respect that and treat him as though he is a woman because he is in fact a woman.
00:23:20.900A woman, as they have now defined it, is a person who identifies as a woman.
00:23:24.720That's, as Matt has pointed out quite properly, completely circular.
00:23:28.040I mean there is no content to that statement.
00:23:29.880A woman is a person who believes they are a woman is a bleh is anybody who believes they are a bleh.
00:23:36.060It's a blank – it's a self-referential statement.
00:23:38.980And so if you refuse to kowtow to that ideology, then the idea, again, is that you're doing violence to a group of people who say they are this thing because you have not accepted their version of the world.
00:23:49.360And either you will change or they will change, but there is really no in between.
00:23:52.680And so that's why all these conversations don't end up being about public policy questions.
00:23:56.720They end up really being about that fundamental idea.
00:23:59.020Are you of the belief that a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man?
00:24:02.480And even deeper than that is the belief are men and women different from one another?
00:24:07.800And that's really the bigger question that people can have really interesting conversations about because the answers are in some ways very, very, very different.
00:24:16.260But as soon as you say in some ways very, very, very different, a lot of people get very offended very quickly because they want to believe in the complete malleability of every individual human being.
00:24:25.500And they want to believe in some sort of bizarre world in this sort of Cartesian dualism in which we are all disembodied souls that are walking around in meat suits.
00:24:35.440And those souls can be male or female.
00:26:15.520That was a line that nobody was – it so fundamentally runs up against the proof of your eyes, ears, mind that to simply surrender before it is to become part of the Borg basically.
00:26:27.260You mentioned something about partisan politics in there, sort of right versus left.
00:26:30.940And that's something that – I don't know whether we are in disagreement or not.
00:26:33.540But certainly in the UK, I feel we're making more progress than you guys are over here on the trans issue.
00:26:38.260And I think part of the reason is that in the UK, we have lots of people who are not explicitly on the right and who are frankly on the left.
00:26:45.760People like J.K. Rowling, Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP, who's been very outspoken about this.
00:26:51.120Not that it's outspoken to say it, right?
00:26:53.160Whereas here, I sort of – I do cringe when I hear people sort of say the libs are trans in the kids type of thing because I don't think it's the libs that are trans in the kids.
00:27:02.420It's a small minority of people who've captured institutions, who've shoved this gender ideology down people's throats, have used scare tactics to bully them into not challenging it.
00:27:10.860But a lot of the people who are challenging, certainly in our country, it's not a partisan issue.
00:27:15.720And I feel that's why we're making progress.
00:27:17.180Whereas here, as you say, on the one hand, there are a lot of people on the right who sort of say the libs are trans in the kids.
00:27:22.140On the other hand, the White House is pushing this crap.
00:27:24.640I mean that's sort of where it's – you can see why people will say – I'll say that people are trans in the kids.
00:27:31.480Typically, I try to make it clear who those people are.
00:27:33.440I think that when the White House is actually promoting it, I'll say the White House is attempting to trans the kids, which they are.
00:27:38.060But the kind of general point that you're making, which is that there are people in public positions in foreign countries who will say true things even if it doesn't necessarily fall into the right-left dichotomy.
00:27:49.600Yeah, that doesn't apply in the United States.
00:27:51.840I mean really since the era of – I wouldn't say Trump, but I don't think it actually is Trump.
00:27:57.280I think it's really since the era of Obama.
00:27:59.180There's a real shift that happened, particularly in the media space, when Barack Obama was elected president.
00:28:03.860The media went from, yeah, we're left-wing, but we understand that there is a right-wing in this country too.
00:28:07.840Barack Obama is the light-bringer, and we are his actual PR agents.
00:28:11.680And it is our job to basically back what the president says.
00:28:14.860And if you don't back the president, it must be because you're a bigot.
00:28:17.380It must be because there's something wrong with you.
00:28:18.820And that only got exacerbated by Trump where suddenly the Washington Post is emblazoning democracy dies in darkness on their chyron or whatever it is.
00:28:27.460And the media are a real problem in all of this.
00:28:30.400I mean you see how members of the media just get absolutely shellacked if they step across the line.
00:28:34.580The New York Times ran one piece that was fairly balanced about the trans issue, and the reporter got destroyed online, just destroyed.
00:28:40.760He said a science reporter got fired for the great crime of using the N-word while they were in South America on a trip with some people,
00:28:46.540not because he was using the N-word but because he was explaining when it is right and when it is wrong to use the N-word.
00:28:50.920You know, the level of outrage that American society is capable of achieving seems to be a lot higher than it is in a lot of European countries.
00:28:59.220Maybe that's because there are such wide differentials in sort of living in the United States.
00:29:03.660And the reality is that if the United States was a creedal country and if there is sort of a central creed to the United States,
00:29:09.560then the further that disintegrates, the more people sort of go back to their corners.
00:29:14.340The United States is not really an organic outgrowth.
00:29:16.280I mean it really is – the blessing and curse of the United States is because it's not an organically grown country, right?
00:29:21.900I mean you literally had a European population that is imported into the United States or imports itself into the United States,
00:29:27.700and then you have various other populations that come in in waves rooted in this one idea.
00:29:33.540If the idea dies, what do all those people exactly have in common?
00:29:37.280That's not really sort of the case with Great Britain or France.
00:29:40.220When you think of Great Britain, you think, well, yeah, because they're British.
00:29:43.300When you think of an American, what do you think of?
00:29:46.000I mean really – like if you think of a British person, you think of a person who has a British accent and probably likes tea and maybe doesn't have amazing teeth.
00:29:52.100There are a bunch of things about the Brits.
00:30:23.660And I have in common with those people, but I'm not sure I have that much in common with those people over there.
00:30:29.040The fundamental assimilative mechanism of the United States has broken down.
00:30:33.600And what that's done is it's led to this sort of political fragmentation that I think you don't really see in a lot of other countries.
00:30:39.580The United States is – people in the United States don't get this, but we are way more radical on a wide variety of social policies than pretty much anywhere.
00:30:46.120I mean we're not just radical with regards to the transing issue.
00:30:49.260I mean we're very radical with regards to the abortion issue.
00:30:51.040I mean it comes as an absolute shock to people from Europe when they realize that like the state of New York allows abortion all the way up to birth,
00:30:57.640that in most of Europe, the average is like 12, 15 weeks with pretty significant restrictions.
00:31:03.820We don't really argue about abortion in the UK or much of Europe.
00:31:07.300Yeah, I mean occasionally you'll have something like in Ireland where the Catholic Church sort of gets overruled by the population or whatever.
00:31:13.760But in the United States because, again, it's a very polarized population, the vast majority of Americans –
00:31:27.300And these sort of – if you look at the polls, the mainstream opinion in the United States just by polling data is very similar to the European position.
00:31:46.960People are – they want to live how they want to live in their area, but the federal government is where all the big debates are happening.
00:31:52.260It used to be that you could actually have very wide differences in ideas and standards of living in Alabama and California.
00:31:58.380But now everything has been nationalized and the federal government is incredibly powerful.
00:32:01.560And so what you have is a giant overarching government and everybody is fighting for control of that thing so they can turn California into Alabama or Alabama into California when the real solution was actually the one the founders presented, which is the states have most of the authorities and the federal government really has very little.
00:32:14.860Francis, before you jump in, on that very point, Ben, that's such an interesting point.
00:32:18.840Isn't the right – the small government right fundamentally at a disadvantage in this situation then?
00:32:24.300Because if the state, the federal state is becoming more and more powerful and you guys believe in a smaller one, your opponents, when they're in government, are inevitably A, going to use it and B, make it bigger.
00:32:34.640Yeah, I mean this is the argument that national conservatives are making and they're making some headway with this argument.
00:32:39.100They're saying, look, listen, you can have all the principles you want about shrinking the national government.
00:32:42.720But the minute the other guy is getting power, they don't care about those principles.
00:32:45.080They're happy to just blow up the size of government and use those tools against you.
00:32:48.520And the answer to that is that when it comes to the state level, you should have states that – the state government of Florida has become very active in protecting kind of the values and rights of the citizens of Florida, how they wish to vote.
00:33:02.360I do not think that the use of the federal government at a very heavy level in order to implement a conservative set of values is likely to be successful.
00:33:12.820I don't have a general problem with it in sort of theory.
00:33:16.220But in practice, I don't think that it's likely to work.
00:33:18.340I think that very often what you end up with is the American public, I think for the most part, like any Western public, just wants to – they want normalcy and predictability and to be left alone.
00:33:56.620And they bring in the animated corpse of Joe Biden and it's not normal at all.
00:33:59.600And people are like, well, maybe we'll get back to normal.
00:34:01.180And the right is like, well, screw those people.
00:34:02.460We're going to bring back in the guy who was ousted by that guy.
00:34:05.080And so it's kind of wildly vacillating.
00:34:07.000And it's wildly vacillating mainly because the people who are most politically engaged are the people who are most politically engaged.
00:34:11.960And the vast majority of people in the middle who show up maybe only for presidential elections are then presented with the binary choice between the people of either party who may not be the most normal people.
00:34:23.240And I think that this keeps being – I actually think that this is not just a theme in the United States.
00:34:28.280I think this seems to be like a theme across Western civilization right now is people are just looking for a politician who's like, can we just be normal for a second?
00:34:34.600Or just something relatively like I know what's happening tomorrow and I don't have to pay attention to you.
00:34:39.460But, you know, so long as we have a national media that thrives on this sort of conflict, it's going to be very difficult to achieve that, I think.
00:34:46.380And if you look at the sort of Matt Walsh situation, we demand that our politicians never say anything controversial, never do anything controversial.
00:34:54.200And then we're surprised when we get these weird people for election.
00:34:58.060It's because everybody else does normal things and says things that are controversial and makes mistakes and whatever else.
00:35:03.860But the question that I really want to ask to you, Ben, is do you think the right concentrate too much on the trans issue?
00:35:10.180And I'm not saying the trans issue is not highly important.
00:35:12.240It is highly important and I understand the aspects of it.
00:35:14.840But you look at, you know, we've got a fentanyl crisis in this country.
00:35:17.540Shouldn't the right also be talking about that and everything else?
00:35:21.840I think a lot of these problems are overlaid onto far deeper systemic problems.
00:35:26.060So I think that very often in politics we argue about the things that are at the top of the iceberg, but we very rarely get to the bottom of the iceberg.
00:35:31.400So the thing that I would say that the fentanyl crisis and maybe the trans issue have in common is that the thing that has been dissolving in American life for a very long time is the fundamental family structure.
00:35:42.100When the fundamental family structure dissolves, what you end up with is atomistic individuals.
00:35:45.280Atomistic individuals make bad decisions.
00:35:50.700And so a huge variety of issues in America are just aspects of this, ranging from school shootings to the fentanyl crisis to broken families and higher crime rates to the trans issue.
00:36:01.800All of these things are – as social fabric falls away, then sort of the nakedness of the raw humanity is left unleashed.
00:36:10.980And you're seeing a lot of aspects of that.
00:36:12.600So I don't think that they're utterly unrelated.
00:36:13.840I think that people like to talk about the trans issue on both sides because it's an issue with like very, very clear demarcated lines.
00:36:20.560And so that's a fun issue to talk about because if you're on the right, you look at this, you're like, this is just crazy.
00:36:24.460I could talk about this all day, how crazy this is because it's so crazy.
00:36:26.540And if you're on the left, you're like, oh, those intolerant bigots.
00:36:28.960This is my favorite thing is to call them bigots.
00:36:30.480And so it's a fun issue for people to talk about.
00:36:32.560Fentanyl is a less fun issue to talk about for people not just because it involves mass death but also because it actually implicates some deeper issues that make people very uncomfortable.
00:36:40.900You're actually going to have to talk about things like is this happening because of, you know, as the right will maintain sometimes trade and the outsourcing manufacturing jobs or is this actually happening because of the thing that very few people want to touch maybe across the aisle, which is no one goes to church anymore.
00:36:56.560Fewer and fewer kids are growing up with two parents in the household.
00:37:01.240There's no one to keep an eye on these kids.
00:37:02.660You know, when that happens, that perhaps men losing their role in society as protectors and providers for their family actually unmoors them and makes them depressed and more likely to get into drug use.
00:37:14.620These are really deep kind of fundamental philosophic issues.
00:37:18.620And I think most people tend to shy away from those because it's not as fun.
00:38:49.900And you say, why isn't it doing the thing I want it to do?
00:38:51.820And if only I just replaced this golden calf with that golden calf, then that would be better.
00:38:54.840But perhaps the real work that we all have to do is not just solved by going into the voting booth and pulling the lever on a particular politician.
00:39:02.600Maybe the actual work that we have to do is the hard work of getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning with your kids and doing your homework with your kids and battling through whatever hardships you have in your marriage to maintain your marriage.
00:39:13.040And then taking care of your parents as they get older and making sure that the people in your community, if they're coming on hard times, actually have something to fall back on.
00:39:19.540But also making sure that they're incentivized to go out and working it.
00:39:21.980Like, these are actually the hard everyday things.
00:39:23.640And, you know, my belief is obviously I'm an Orthodox Jew.
00:39:26.720I think in the absence of religious structure, it's very difficult to promote these things.
00:39:29.800But, you know, those are, again, conversations.
00:39:53.000Those things are incredibly important for society to thrive.
00:39:56.040But the fact is, you know, we've had different guests on the show, Louise Perry and Mary Harrington, talking about the sexual revolution and how that unleashes all of this process, 60s onwards.
00:40:04.260But all I'm saying is I put it to you that your solution, which is right for you and right for many religious people in this country, is increasingly less taken up, whether you and I like it or not.
00:40:15.440I agree with you that it's increasingly less taken up.
00:40:17.580How do we encourage people who are not religious?
00:40:19.720You know, when Peterson had me on his podcast, we talked about a lot of this.
00:40:23.140How do you instill some of the values in a society that doesn't believe in God as much?
00:40:28.420Right. So, I mean, I think Jordan is really great about this, which is the idea that you take on obligations to do something higher and then you'll find yourself doing something.
00:40:35.540So do the thing right in front of you.
00:40:36.660I think Jordan is really great at this.
00:40:38.160You know, as an Orthodox Jew and a proponent of my own religion, obviously, I think that my religion is very Aristotelian in its approach to life, which is you get up in the morning and there's a bunch of things you have to do.
00:40:46.780And if you do those things, then you'll grow increasingly virtuous and you'll grow increasingly close to God.
00:40:51.520Now, you can be Aristotelian, not really bring God into it very much.
00:40:54.940You can say you can grow increasingly close to virtue.
00:40:56.580I think that's stepping one short logically because then the question is how do you define virtue?
00:41:05.360But if you don't wish to go there, if you just wish to stop at that step without going to God or without going to church or any of that stuff, first of all, you're going to have to find a community of people who agree with you, people who actually want to build that community with you.
00:41:16.360Maybe they're not so religious, but they have the same set of values as you do.
00:41:19.280And then you're going to have to actually undertake those obligations in a really methodical and thought-out way.
00:41:27.020Now, the reason I say that religion provides a structure is because traditionally that has been the structure.
00:41:30.420Now, what's fascinating is that you can be a non-religious person living in a society that values religion and a lot of that stuff sort of bleeds over to you through the water, through osmosis.
00:41:38.860So here I'll take the example of Israel.
00:41:40.420What's fascinating about Israel is that Israel has a reproduction rate of currently something like three.
00:41:46.000It is the only Western country that is reproducing at above replacement rates, literally the only one.
00:41:50.660And it's not just reproducing at the rate of three.
00:41:53.720There's a huge disparity between the people who are religious and the people who are secular.
00:41:57.700But – so the people who are the most religious, like the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, they're having – I think they're averaging seven kids.
00:42:03.600The people who are Dati Lumi, which is, you know, religious Zionist, which is probably where I would fall if I were living in Israel, they're having like four to five kids, right?
00:42:34.800And so you see that sort of bleed down.
00:42:36.460So even if you're not – I think that you can have a society in which you have Voltaire, so long as Voltaire's recognize what Voltaire did, which is, I don't believe in God, but I sure hope my maid does, right?
00:42:46.560Otherwise, she'll steal the silverware is his famous line, right?
00:42:48.620I mean so – but I think that as Western civilization becomes increasingly individualistic and anti-religious, it's not just like sort of apathetic about religion.
00:42:57.300It's become antagonistic toward religion.
00:42:59.380I think that that bleeds over into a secular world that was living off sort of the fumes of a religious society.
00:43:04.400But as those fumes dissipate, what you end up with is, what do I do this morning?
00:43:28.820I think for the vast majority of people throughout human history, again, the thing that orients you is the idea that when you get up and you have a duty, it's not a duty just because you think it's good to have the duty.
00:43:37.840It's a duty because you are enjoined to do the thing, right?
00:43:40.880What makes you – so I'll ask you guys.
00:43:42.180I mean like what makes you do the thing you don't want to do, right?
00:43:46.460So having a lot of kids, it's a pain in the ass, right?
00:43:51.920I mean like having it – they're wonderful.
00:43:53.660As I always say to people in life, when you're a single dude, basically your sort of spectrum of happiness to sadness is like a 10 to a zero.
00:44:02.040And then you get married and it goes from like a 20 to a negative 20 because if something bad happens with your spouse, it's really terrible.
00:44:06.580And then you have kids and all limits are removed.
00:44:08.200The best things in your life will be your kids and the worst things by far in your life will be your kids.
00:44:33.380Because that's the question because people increasingly are not making the decision to get married and then even if they do get married to have kids.
00:44:38.440We're at an all-time low in terms of people getting married and having kids.
00:44:40.600Look, my view is there's a biological explanation for why we all want to have kids, right?
00:44:45.240So – and actually my wife and I put it off quite late, probably later than we ought to have done.
00:44:50.320I'd love to bang out five as well at this point.
00:44:52.780But anyway, for me, I think it's the biological drive to procreate.
00:44:56.760So the only problem with that is that that was true and it was maintainable before the birth control pill, right?
00:45:02.440Because the biological drive to procreate – so two things happen, the birth control pill and the feminist movement.
00:45:08.380Men had babies because they couldn't stop having babies.
00:45:10.780And women had babies because not only could they not stop having babies, they actually wanted to have babies and they were in touch with the idea that it is good for a woman to have a baby.
00:45:18.120Now I have entire movements that teach women that the highest form of life is don't get married until you're close to 30 if you do get married.
00:45:24.480If it's going to inhibit your career, then you should probably freeze your eggs and wait until you're maybe 40.
00:45:28.360Then you have a risky pregnancy at 40 in which we fertilize the egg and may be implanted in you.
00:45:32.940And that's like the apotheosis of civilization.
00:45:35.140And women, by all available polling data, are significantly less happy than they were in the age of 70.
00:45:45.640But the bottom line is that how do you reverse that?
00:45:48.820So there are only two ways, especially because you can see, I mean, as countries get richer and as birth control becomes more plentiful, the original pitch for having kids was twofold.
00:45:57.200One, you had a religious obligation to have kids.
00:45:58.960And two was they were labor on your farm, right?
00:46:23.820And so then it has to be something like a woman desperately wants to have kids.
00:46:28.140And the only way that she is going to have kids is if she makes the rules that a man has to marry her in order to have the kids.
00:46:35.240So you have to overcome two things societally.
00:46:37.240One, you have to teach women it's good to have kids.
00:46:39.720And two, you have to teach women that actually men's standards for sex are the wrong standards for sex.
00:46:45.040That if you wish to have long-lasting, fulfilling relationships, then hopping in and out of the sack with people isn't actually a form of liberation.
00:46:50.720It's a form of bondage to a certain extent.
00:46:52.880You're chaining yourself to how males tend to think about sex rather than what is fulfilling for females, a biological function that has existed for literally all of humankind's existence.
00:47:03.900It seems to me that the shortcut on these lifts, which is proved out by literally every demographic study done in the West, is that if you say God told you to have kids, you have a duty to have kids, it is good to have kids.
00:47:12.400And you're trained in that from the time you're little.
00:47:14.540Like my kids again right now, they're nine by the time this airs, seven and three and in the womb.
00:47:19.780And I asked my three-year-old daughter how many kids she wants to have.
00:47:28.960I asked him, you know, like you actually have to bring your kids up in this way, which is why across Western society, there are exceptions who will do the thing.
00:47:41.200If you look at the demographic profiles, the only people, the only populations in the West reproducing at above replacement rates are in the United States, for example, Mormons, religious Catholics, religious Jews, religious Muslims, religious Protestants.
00:47:52.600No one else is reproducing at above replacement rates.
00:47:54.340So unless those are like the bulk of your population and then it's sort of – those values sort of bleed over into the rest of the population, which is not the case in the United States, then, you know, you're going to have a declining birth rate.
00:48:05.760And then you're going to have to do it through immigration.
00:48:07.060Then that's going to come with whatever attendant problems mass immigration comes with, right?
00:48:09.820Demographic problems are a real thing.
00:48:12.980But why is it so taboo to talk about these things, about things like immigration?
00:48:17.500Why is it that it's so charged instead of just having a reasonable debate and saying, look, like every decision you make in life, there are tradeoffs?
00:49:13.240But 95 percent of the problems that people have are problems that are generally within their purview.
00:49:17.440And by the way, you should treat even the problems that you have that are not within your purview as though you could possibly solve them because it's a better way of approaching life.
00:49:23.200But politics allows you to outsource all of that.
00:49:25.260It allows you to just say, listen, the problem is not me.
00:49:40.020Well, maybe that guy will fix the system.
00:49:42.020None of them are going to fix the system because fundamentally in terms of like human freedoms and prosperity right now, the system ain't broken.
00:49:49.120There are real problems with the system, but we are the most prosperous free people in the history of the world.
00:50:00.840You drop somebody from 1810 into 2023, they're living in magic land, man.
00:50:05.640I mean this is a place where you pick up a piece of phone that – you pick up a thing that – it's a magic thing in your hand that connects you to every piece of information ever devised.
00:50:13.760You hit a button and a thing arrives at your door usually within 24 hours that has been outsourced to 27 different countries and arrives for a fraction of the money that you make in a month.
00:50:30.840For the vast majority of human civilization, people died at the age – if you were lucky, you made it to 60.
00:50:35.640But people were dying at 50 or make it out of childhood, right?
00:50:38.380The amount of childhood death has declined so radically that it used to be that childhood death was a tragedy but it wasn't treated nearly the way that it's treated today because, again, we expect children to live now, right?
00:50:49.500Like all of these standards are magical.
00:50:50.940So the question is how can the magical material living standards be so high?
00:50:54.720And we're able to do kind of what we want like on a daily basis.
00:51:00.960We have depression, suicidality, huge fentanyl crises.
00:51:04.060We're worried about the – I mean the problems we're talking about are real problems.
00:51:06.800We've apparently lost our societal minds because we're believing complete untruths.
00:51:10.140We're so angry at each other that we're willing to send each other death threats over whether men are women or women are men.
00:51:13.640Like what – where is that coming from?
00:51:16.560And the answer is the social fabric that undergirded all of that progress has fallen away and we thought we could have all of the nice things that lie on top of the foundation while taking a jackhammer to the foundations.
00:51:25.600And so people don't want to talk about the foundations because it might mean that you have to – I get a question a lot.
00:51:29.960So obviously I talk about religion a lot.
00:51:31.260And people will say, I don't believe in God, but I have kids.
00:52:54.460Facts don't care about your feelings, and the facts are going to win.
00:52:56.560It's just a question of if you're stupid enough to run up against them enough times in a row.
00:53:00.100And so when I say facts don't care about your feelings, I don't mean that, you know, you're not – that your feelings don't matter.
00:53:04.200What I do mean is that if you are running directly up against the wall of facts over and over and over in reality over and over and over and over, then you're going to break.
00:53:12.360Like those things – reality doesn't change just because you wish for it to change.
00:53:16.120And so my friend Andrew Klavan, he's very fond of saying people are – you know, a woman will come to him and she'll say, I can't find Mr. Right.
00:53:21.980And I say, well, but did you make yourself Mrs. Right yet, right?
00:53:24.320Like if you want to find Mr. Right, you have to be Mrs. Right.
00:53:33.160You can effectuate small changes over time in the course of the world.
00:53:35.660And, you know, this is – the truth is that the vast majority of change – because we're in politics, we tend to think of like great figures who effectuated large-scale change.
00:53:43.000The truth is there are millions of people who stand behind those people.
00:53:45.940And most change that occurs is really a bunch of people whose names you don't know at the graveyard and who are completely forgotten now, right?
00:53:51.620Those are people who are like changing their society from the inside by doing the things that we're talking about.
00:54:11.860But I don't like the word happier because I think that happy is a – it's a messy word.
00:54:16.940You feel happy when you have an ice cream, right?
00:54:19.140The words that are used by the ancients, you know, eudaimonia or in Greek or simcha in Hebrew, like these sorts of – those sorts of words have broader meanings, right?
00:54:29.540It didn't just mean like you feel good one day.
00:54:31.220But we're a society that sort of boiled down happiness to you feel good that day.
00:54:34.180And that's a really bad standard because what makes you feel good today is not going to make you feel good in the long run.
00:54:39.220I mean very often – I was just reading a study actually by a social scientist named Roy Baumeister.
00:54:43.420And he was looking at things that make people feel fulfilled versus things that make people feel happy.
00:56:41.480He has an approval rating, last I checked, in the 20s.
00:56:44.480And he is 76 years old and he already served a term.
00:56:48.460I mean that is – that's a pretty formidable list of reasons why you don't nominate – and he lost to the guy who's going to run on the Democratic Party side already by 7 million votes.
00:56:57.360And by the available data, he will probably underperform how he performed in 2020, at least with – again, one of the hardest things in politics is to switch somebody's mind.
00:57:06.620Saying to millions of people, yeah, you voted for me in 2016.
00:57:19.420You know, and that's putting aside all of the oddities and all the rest of the scandals and all that kind of stuff.
00:57:24.180The case for DeSantis is that DeSantis is extremely meticulous about how he approaches politics.
00:57:30.500You see, for example, there are no leaks from his campaign because he actually staffs up correctly as opposed to Trump who's going on Truth Social and bashing somebody he hired as an idiot every other day.
00:57:46.880So the dirty little secret about Florida is to really well govern a state, right?
00:57:50.160We have all the culture war stuff that makes the national media.
00:57:52.020But the stuff that doesn't make the national media is that when there's a hurricane, we're rebuilding bridges within like a day, right?
00:57:56.340That the problems actually get solved here, that DeSantis has brought down crime rates dramatically, that he offered a police officer a $10,000 stipend to move into the state.
00:58:03.060Then in the state of Florida, if you have a kid who's going to school, you have available to you now as of July like an $8,000 school tax credit.
00:58:11.760So you can actually take your kid out of a public school if you want to and move them to the local private school if you think that that's a better school.
00:58:16.440I mean these are very good things for people who are living in the state of Florida, which is why it's the number one incoming state for population.
00:58:21.280So he's very good at just like the pure governance of it.
00:58:23.660And then on sort of the culture war front, he's taking on a lot of the culture wars in a way that really animates the base.
00:58:28.200The base doesn't want a Mitt Romney type who's going to be sort of dull as ditch water, really glossy.
00:58:34.680They want somebody who's willing to get in the trenches and fight, which is why he's very popular in the primaries right now because the media chose him as sort of its opponent.
00:58:40.780And that was over COVID where he happened to be right and the left happened to be completely wrong on that using Andrew Cuomo whose two missions in life were killing old people and grabbing ass and he ran out of old people.
00:58:51.140You know, DeSantis has – his governance during COVID, keeping the state open, keeping the economy running was against all of what the media was saying and he succeeded with that.
00:59:01.620So that's a really good case for DeSantis.
00:59:03.400Now, listen, there are flaws with DeSantis as a candidate.
00:59:05.060He's not nearly as sort of magnetic as Trump because no one is.
00:59:07.860I mean Trump is just like – he's been on TV for years and years and years and years and the cameras are just drawn to him.
00:59:14.060You know, I think that the battle for Trump is going to be between the fact that he's magnetic and the fact that he's extraordinarily tiring.
00:59:19.800Like if you see him too much, everybody's just like, oh, oh, like I can't.
00:59:23.820And for DeSantis, the battle is going to be how do you keep people interested because he's very pugilistic but he's not like an amazing speaker or something.
01:00:58.280I think that people have to get over this sort of weird dream-esque quality that they have about Trump, which is that he's sort of a miracle worker.
01:01:06.320And again, I think that actually goes back to 2012 because in 2012 when Romney ran and Obama was unpopular and Romney lost, the Democrats decided they were never going to lose another election.
01:01:15.340And Republicans also thought Democrats are never going to lose another election.
01:01:18.160They've built a new minority majority coalition with some college-educated white people.
01:02:13.100Like those are three elections he did not do well in.
01:02:15.500Ben, we're about to ask you a few questions from our supporters on Locals.
01:02:18.680But we always end the show with the final question, the same one for all our guests, which is what do you think is the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
01:02:25.340I mean I think that was probably the first 40 minutes of this conversation, right?
01:02:45.240But the stuff that's significantly more important is how you get up and interact with the people in your life, what sort of duties you perform, what obligations you undertake to make the social structure more secure and also to provide for a future.
01:03:07.900Ben, while your stance on guns is understandable in a US context, would you recommend more guns in other countries, for example, UK, Australia, New Zealand, for example?