Joe Rogan Experience #1276 - Ben Shapiro

Key Takeaway

Create one deliberate “rule reset” this week: choose a boundary that protects your attention or health, make it specific, and keep it long enough to notice the effect. Ben Shapiro describes turning his phone off from Friday night to Saturday night as a way to break an addictive cycle; Joe Rogan similarly frames exercise, fasting, and voluntary difficulty as practice in self-command. Start smaller if needed: a phone-free evening, a daily workout, or a defined eating window—and review what changed.

Episode Overview

Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro discuss public polarization, deplatforming, personal responsibility, religion, drug policy, welfare, automation, and the foundations of meaning. Despite substantial disagreements—especially around sexuality and religion—the conversation repeatedly returns to disciplined self-governance, charitable communities, open debate, and separating moral disagreement from coercion.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Joe Rogan Experience #1276 - Ben Shapiro from Joe Rogan Experience. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

yes we're live ben shapiro hey how's it going dude very good how's it going with you man it's going well i love i love the new digs i haven't been here since you finished it over and i walked in i thought to myself i've been doing my business wrong i mean you got what three employees yeah there's not that many folks working on this yeah i mean so in my offices we have like 80 and um our offices are not nearly this cool so i'm gonna go back to my office and fire everyone and then have your folks come in and design because i mean it's either a lot of people or i could have cars in my office yeah but you wouldn't go down this route you're you're more of a conservative gentleman than myself you're wearing a suit jacket you're your own boss nobody tells you how to dress and yet you dress like a grown-up yeah well you know i won't pretend that nobody tells me how to dress we have people who tell me how to dress we have people who do my hair do you have all that stuff you have like fashion folks yeah yeah because i used to i mean if you look at the old photos of me i have like the hitler hair i've got like the hair that's the only thing about me that's hilarious my old hair and i've got the hair that kind of comes down over the forehead and i still walk into the office wearing basically an undershirt every day because i'm incredibly lazy when it comes to that stuff but we should be able to yeah i mean that's that's the prerogative of being the boss maybe you'd be more relatable what if you showed up wearing like flip-flops and t-shirt that kind of kills my brand though no does it like it what is your brand exactly i thought it was being an [ __ ] i don't think you're an [ __ ] though thank you i appreciate it you're a very nice guy you're just conservative that's the dirty little secret though yeah we're not supposed to talk about that but this is one of the things that bothers me so much about you being so misrepresented when i read things about you there was a the the article that we were just talking about the alt-right sage without the rage they called you and you're not even remotely alright in fact you were the leading target of anti-semitic abuse for all of 2016 weren't you yeah according to the anti-defamation league which is no ally of mine so yeah i mean i'm not only am i not alt-right i've spent the last four years like legitimately battling the alt-right talking about how evil i think their ideology is how evil i think white supremacy is i mean first of all like people with yamaka is typically not the favorites of the alt-right and then beyond that i mean i think their ideology is legitimately a devastatingly awful twist on what western civilization is supposed to be what's amazing is a review of my new book and my new book has several sections in there dedicated to how terrible the alt-right is and then the interview they did with me doesn't talk about alt-right stuff at all but they just assume i'm on the conservative right that must mean that i am alt-right and it's like no you stupid it's the problem with these labels they're disingenuous people are labeling people in a very simple manner to try to categorize them as the enemy and instead of just addressing these points like i love watching your debates where you do q and a's with college students and with people in the audience because you can see you agree with you or disagree with you you have well-formulated ideas this isn't just some [ __ ] that you're spouting out you've thought these things through i've been doing this for legitimately more than half my life i'm 35 and i started when i was 17.

and i started writing a syndicated column at that point and when you're 17 you think a lot of dumb stuff and then sure you get older and you educate yourself and you spend a lot of time reading and a lot of times studying hopefully you have some cogent arguments after 20 years of doing anything i mean but it's the the demonization is pretty astonishing i mean we had on andrew yang he's the only democratic candidate who has agreed to go on the sunday special that i do we did a full hour on ubi it was perfectly nice it was perfectly coherent and and conciliatory and yet people will suggest that everything i do is about destroying people on the other side because of all the ben shapiro destroys videos and all that kind of stuff there's there are certain groups of people where that's their shtick they're like they're goons right they just go after people online for attention yes this is a schtick this is not you and this is what bothers me so much and i know that you've said some things in the past like particularly about arabs and like when you were a younger man that you said i shouldn't have said that yeah that's exactly right some of those things were taken out of context like that one particular tweet which is a bad tweet was a tweet that was part of a tweet threat in which i was specifically contrasting israel and the hamas leadership and saying that the israeli government likes to build and the hamas leadership would prefer that their citizens live in sewage and bomb things but that was a bad tweet obviously my entire history on on muslim relations is one like i supported the ability of ilhanomar to wear a hijab on the on the floor i opposed president trump's originally proposed muslim ban uh in the last three weeks i've had on majim nawaz i've had on kanta ahmed i had on yesterday a reformed muslim like these are conversations that have to be had but to take this is one of the things that bugs me so much i've i've tweeted i think 140 000 times i've written millions of words i'm sure you can find something i don't even remember having written that is bad i have a running list by the way i try to be honest about this i'm one of the only people i know who has i have a running list it's called so here's a giant list of all the dumb stuff i've ever done right and i actually go through all this like you can look it up this is not me saying this now i mean you can go and look up all the things that i think i've done wrong and i'll apologize for some and i'll say somewhere dumb and i'll say some i'm fine with and you're just taking out of context but i mean that i hope that's what honest people try to do but this is the problem you're not dealing with honest people when people try to categorize you as alt-right or they're trying to put you into this category of internet goon they're they and they did quote tweet just taking some little tiny phrase that you said seven years ago and trying to say this is you now it's so that's such a disingenuous thing to do i hate it and i hate it across the aisle by the way like i was a defender of james gunn i thought james gunn shouldn't have been fired from guardians of the galaxy they were just dumb jokes that's exactly right and even if somebody tweeted something bad like 10 years ago bringing it up now is not an attempt to actually make the public space better and you're not actually offended by that thing the person tweeted 10 years ago that you didn't notice what it is that you want to get rid of this person or hurt this person so you're going to bring up something from 10 years ago and then you're going to try and club them into submission with it because if you actually ask them their opinion about it they might have a more nuanced view on what they said maybe they apologize maybe they think i don't even remember saying that right i mean i felt the same way by the way i try to be consistent i really do about about this stuff i said the same thing about for example ralph northam the governor of virginia who is excoriated for having this terrible racist photo on his yearbook page back in medical school in 1987.

and people are saying well this is evidence he's racist now he's like well no that's evidence that he was doing a racist thing then that's not evidence that he is racist now you sort of have to look over the broad course of his career and he ended up doing what everyone now does which is you just don't apologize for anything you just try to pass it off as in nothing the public space is actually getting worse because let's say that you did something bad in the past there are a few human responses too i did something i don't like in the past human response number one is you know what i apologize that was wrong these days that gets your face stuck done right you say i apologize i was wrong it means well why did you do it in the first place because you're a bad person apologies are not accepted and then number two is you brazen it out you do the trump you know what i never did anything wrong ever i've never i'm perfect right and that and then you get your defenders to come and surround you and then nothing ever gets cleansed or opportunity number three is you do what barack obama did which is you come out preemptively and you try to remember all the bad stuff you do and then you confess it in public so in dreams for my father he says right well you know when i was back in high school did a little blow and everybody's like oh okay so you did cocaine when he was in high school that's that's cool whereas if it comes out during the campaign right then right then he's got a real problem the problem is that right now even if you preemptively come out and say i did something wrong like for example liam neeson talking about years ago when he had a racist thought that he didn't act on when he had a racist thought this is now we're going to try and ruin your career for something that you admit was bad that you did 30 years ago we're going to try and ruin you over that if you apologize for something that you did 30 years ago which you would have preferred just got forgotten because it was embarrassing and stupid then we say you're bad and so all you're left with is like the most shameless people in the world who are in the public space right the incentive structure is to be deeply shameless to to just say yeah man i own that and it was great when i said it or i didn't say it at all and you're just you're just full of it i never said that stuff who are you going to believe your eyes are me and it makes it makes for a really bad politics well it's just this uh the culture of of going after people for things and and finding anything to categorize them as someone who's a viable target and this is what i've seen thrust your way it's like there's nothing wrong with being conservative there's something wrong with wanting everyone to think the way you think though this is the difference like you what i like that you do is you debate your points you state your positions you have a philosophy and what i don't like is when people try to pretend that that philosophy is some somewhat somehow hateful or somehow regressive or something like you're that you condemn people for their thoughts you you just you don't this is what not what i see with you i appreciate it and i appreciate the accuracy because i think that's true i mean i've come out against virtually every twitter band including people who have personally targeted me i've come out against that i've come out against virtually everything yeah let's talk about that because what are your thoughts about this idea of de-platforming and you know this is something that we were just discussing before the podcast um where the ceo of youtube and kara swishers are yeah from recode i think kara swisher they were talking about removing you from youtube and i thought it was the ceo of youtube it was actually cara who said i would if i could yeah she's pissed because her son apparently listens to that's kind of funny if she's being funny saying i can't but it was it would be i thought it was the ceo of youtube now she's trying to much more disturbing she was trying to do the same thing that they they do with you or with dave rubin or jordan peterson which is that anybody who is sort of heterodox because in that group i think i'm the only registered republican ever anybody who's heterodox is now being exported meaning just thinks differently from kind of the down line democratic party platform you're not like down the line with hillary like sam harris is a democrat sam harris is heterodox because he disagrees that islam is by necessity a religion of peace for example right or he thinks that we have to look at actual statistics in order to make evidentiary based points about discrimination and disparity and this makes him an enemy of people like ezra klein vox.com right this sort of stuff they then say that you're a feeder for white supremacy right they they can't actually get you on what you say yeah so it turns into well you know some members of your audience do things that that are really bad it's like well dude i have like millions of people who are members of my audience i have five million facebook followers i have two million on twitter and you're way bigger than i am i assume that some of those people are going to be crazy i mean yeah i would assume yeah the idea that you're respo well this is what youtube tried to do you know about the comment thing where youtube was going to try to make people responsible for their comments and their videos which what is a normal jamie like a normal video that we get how many comments does it get like 10 000.

that's like an average one how the [ __ ] am i supposed to have some dude with this itchy trigger finger standing by in front of a keyboard just waiting for something offensive to pop up and this was in response to something that happened with them where there was pedophiles who were watching videos of children doing things and they were commenting stuff in the you know like children's gymnastics and stuff like that they're commenting and like communicating with each other through the comments and it was sort of um discovered that there was this this connection that they were doing this in many many videos and youtube rightly panicked they're like oh [ __ ] we have to stop this so the response i guess was we just have to make people responsible for their comments someone said oh yeah good idea i didn't think through it at all right that's certain people that can't do that it's totally insane and it's insane in virtually every respect and it's funny how it's only applied kind of by the media on one side of the aisle so to take an example the congressional baseball shooting happens a couple of years ago guy happens to be a bernie fan is that bernie sanders fault right no that is not bernie sanders that went away literally people stopped talking about it and and that was shooting of legislators like elected people one nearly died and that kind of went away we didn't talk about you know bernie's responsibility but there's a shooting in christchurch and it's jordan peterson's fault yeah and jordan peterson has no relationship with the shooter whatsoever it's my fault i have no relationship with the shooter and denounce everything that that piece of crap stands for and suddenly it's it's really ugly and it's gonna it will come home to roost i mean here's what's gonna happen is facebook and youtube are gonna fall prey to their own standards because if their standard is that you're responsible for your followers or i'm responsible for my followers or jordan or anybody else is responsible for all the people who view their stuff okay then why isn't facebook responsible for all the people posting on its platform if they are right if facebook becomes responsible for all the people posting on its platform they'll be bankrupt in a week they've got a problem they really do because they have to decide whether they are a platform or whether they are a do-gooder publication yeah right i run a publication daily wire it's openly conservative we make no bones about that and we are responsible for the content that appears on our platform and if we say something defamatory we will be sued if we say something that is false then we will be sued presumably if you post something false on facebook facebook doesn't get sued but now facebook has deemed itself the morality police and they'll ban people they don't like and they'll decide what editorially ought to be elevated and what not to be elevated does that sound more like the phone company to you or does that sound more like my website where i decide what gets published and what doesn't right because facebook's case for exemption from these laws is well we're like the phone company right when you're on the phone with somebody if that person says something criminal at t isn't responsible for the person saying something criminal or terrible it's just the phone company right but facebook isn't doing that facebook is is jumping into the middle of conversations and then saying well we don't really like this conversation so we're just going to kind of shut it down not because of legal threat but because we just don't like it so are they actually doing that like say if you put a post up on facebook and they don't like the way you worded things or describe things would they actually shut down your post what will they do so they've done it in the past to some conservative public it's pretty controversial because they're not transparent at all right i can tell you that the beginning of 2018 we lost about 35 of our traffic because facebook started cracking down on mostly conservative sites they said that it was kind of news sites generally but that's not what the statistics showed they're doing it more often with things that we all sort of agree are bad right we all agree white supremacy is bad why nationalism is bad now they say they're going to censor that stuff but here's where i'm uncomfortable i think that that stuff is awful and evil and i those people are the ones they're the reason i have personal security but once you get into the business of facebook gets to decide which speech is good and which speech is bad they're an editor yeah they're an editor even if i agree with their assessment of what stuff is good and what is bad i am not comfortable with them in the driver's seat there and if they are going to be in the driver's seat then they should be held liable for all the stuff that's on their platform i mean why is it that twitter same thing right why is it that louis farrakhan is still on that platform but alex jones is not like i don't like alex jones material i've been very very critical of alex jones i didn't think he should get banned from from twitter unless he actually violated the law unless he was responsible for a violent threat unless he was defamatory or something they're definitely going down this road of being the moral arbitrators they're they're the ones who get to decide what the conversations are and that's an insane responsibility the responsibility of getting to dictate what shouldn't should not be discussed and to have it be a handful full of people and have these people almost almost exclusively live in the pacific no you know north exactly that whole tech community i mean it's all tech liberals who really if you're around those people they live in this really strange uber wealthy bubble of super genius spectrum people who are coders and super capitalists and people that are raising money all over the place and designing technology and they have an ideology and it's not necessarily a bad one just just being honest and upfront about what it is it's it's incredibly progressive which is very unusual for big business right for big business to be just openly transparently progressive and pushing social justice it's very unusual well i think that there is a sort of misunderstanding of when we say what big business is so i think that there's a wide variety of owners of businesses and how they think about politics obviously bill gates is a progressive guy warren buffett's a progressive guy they are now he's ruthless with microsoft well so i think that there are a lot of people listen i think that the vast majority i think mark zuckerberg is ruthless with facebook and he's progressive i think jack dorsey is as ruthless as the next guy when it comes to profit i mean he's still got to be answerable to his shareholders so i think i think a lot of the progressivism is sort of a a way to excuse your own in your own involvement in the capitalist market when facebook took off don't be evil like that was their thing don't be evil they decide to remove that yeah it was google right oh yeah did i say facebook i'm sorry google yeah when google did that i met google but it's funny when you think something but you're saying when they did that it's like why would you ever take off don't be evil like keep that but here's my thing i think that if our tech companies were honest they should take that stuff off like stop pretending you're do-gooding you're not do good and you're providing a platform and maybe the platform is the good right in a capitalist economy the product that you provide is the good i don't need additional good to come from your product right if you want to provide me uh a solid morning drink right i don't need your politics along with that i just need the drink well if i want a social media company i don't give two craps about what mark zuckerberg thinks about politics dude hasn't studied it i don't care at all but jack dorsey who vacations in malaysia and gets bitten by a million mosquitoes while meditating has to say about the nature of life like why do i care about jack dorsey's political view he has provided me a good the good is this basic chat room where i'm consuming news how about that would just be enough but it's not enough for a lot of these folks it's it's the the kind of huli from silicon valley we're going to pretend that we're here to do good and it's not enough just to acknowledge that maybe the thing that you provided is the good like bill gates yes has done more good with microsoft than he has done with any of his charities he's given a lot of money to charity but microsoft has provided legitimately hundreds of thousands of jobs and created enormously productive lines of business and made enormous profit for a lot of people have stock in microsoft as a gener as a basic factual thing he has done more good doing that than giving tens of millions of dollars to to various outside causes so it feels like a lot of the progressivism in in corporate halls in in silicon valley is bifurcated mentally it's like people have they're like dolphins it's one side of the brain on at a time here's my here's my capitalist side where i go out and make money and profit and then here's my other side where i show people what a great person i am by proclaiming that i'm for bernie sanders while parking my money offshore to make sure that it's shielded from the from the tax man yeah well that's a good assessment um what i'm saying is that the the don't be evil thing like one of the things that i thought was a what if that was like a legal decision me being cynical that they were pulled into some sort of an office and said um if we say don't be evil and you take someone off the platform you're accusing them of evil that's i mean that maybe we should slow that down maybe i mean again this this this self assessment of you are the moral police i find really troubling and it's so funny i'm i'm the supposed moralist right right i'm the religious guy i'm the orthodox jew right i talk about social standards and how people should behave in their personal life but when it comes to government and when it comes to me imposing my views on you i am way less of a top-down tyrant than any of the people in silicon valley i am not here to tell you that you are not allowed to be on a platform because we disagree it's one thing if you're threatening violence which is an actual violation of law but this crap where people like me because i believe in a social fabric built on certain judeo-christian values but i'm not forcing you to be part of that and i'm not i don't think the government should compel you to be a part of that or i'm the tyrant but the person who sits at the top of twitter or facebook who is saying that they get to police what you see and they're going to nudge you in the right direction without your consent without them even telling them what you're doing right they're just they're going to push you a little bit because they know better than you and they can sort of massage you into better views if we control your channels of information this is something the obama administration was very fond of there's a scholar named cass sunstein as a legal scholar and he wrote a book called nudge he was very famous it was it was used as sort of a handbook during the obama administration and the idea was well if we can just use non-forcible means to sort of nudge people in a particular direction without them even knowing they're being nudged then shouldn't we do that and i think no you shouldn't you shouldn't because transparency is the only way i can tell what kind of [ __ ] you're trying to sell me well not just that like you you're you're closing down even conversation if as soon as you're trying to silence this other voice if you're if you believe one thing and another person believes a different thing you should probably talk about it and the way the way that i know for sure there's something wrong with your argument is if what you're trying to do is you're sneakily trying to silence these voices and again as long as we're not talking about threats of violence as long as we're not talking about harassment or doxxing right we're just talking about conversation you're just talking about people with differing points of view if you want to silence differing points of view i have to wonder about your intent i have to wonder about whether you're going into this conversation with good faith i have to wonder whether you've really objectively assessed whether or not you your argument does hold up against scrutiny because this is also part of the problem and when you're in an echo chamber you often don't formulate these arguments very well like when you confront people about certain bias beliefs that they have and you you have an opposing belief if they're part of a bubble like sometimes they might not have even ever considered some of the things you have to say and i've seen that with some of your videos yeah i mean it does happen all the time and with sophisticated people i've spent my entire life literally my entire life in areas where everyone disagrees with me yeah i grew up in la i went to harvard law school for three years i was in cambridge where everyone disagreed with me and then i came back to la so i have never spent more than a week at a time in a red state have you ever have your conservative values moved in one way or another have they i mean i shifted it all my personal values probably haven't shifted very much but my political values have shifted libertarian i mean so i used to be a proponent of criminalization of marijuana i'm no longer i've been in favor of criminalization for you a couple of things one was just a general sense the government sucks at everything and the more i see the government try to crack down on things the more prevalent it becomes i mean people were dealing pot on my sixth grade seventh grade playground in public school so obviously like in l.a yeah exactly uh and and then it's terrible just a general a general perception not only the government sucks at everything but that you got to own your own actions and also examining more of the evidence about the impact of of pot on people's lives and and you know again there's you ruining your own life through use of drugs and there's drugs that legitimately ruin other people's lives right they're drugs that remove your ability to even reason or think i think they're only two reasons to criminalize drugs in any fashion one is if there are drugs like for example pcp that legitimately make you violent uh and then you are going out and committing acts of violence against people then there's a case or if you're talking about a drug where it legitimately robs you of your capacity to reason if it were heroin if you're able to actually crack down on it successfully but even there i'm not sure that the proper government solution is criminalization because we've criminalized it and it's still incredibly prevalent so i agree with you on that and i agree with you in terms of drugs being extremely detrimental and the other part is that there's comparable drugs that are legal like and comparable drugs meaning not even really comparable drugs that are far more devastating like alcohol like you you could just go to any grocery store and buy a jug of whiskey and kill yourself with it yeah it's not difficult and just drink them already that prevent externalities if you drive high it's the same as driving drone so i'm not sure that you need additional laws to do that and also you know i'm not opposed to zoning laws like i don't think a pot shop should open up right next to my house right they're residential zoning that's fine same with liquor stores though right i don't want a liquor store right next to my house this is correct yeah right so so i become libertarian in some ways on that sort of stuff the same thing is true by the way when it comes to the issue of same-sex marriage so on a personal moral level i'm opposed to same-sex marriage i'm an orthodox jew and i believe that a man and a woman were made for each other when it comes to government involvement i don't think that's anybody's business i think a lot of things i think adultery is bad too i don't think the government ought to be involved in adultery i i'm so strict i don't think premarital sex is a good thing right i've been very vocal about this i was a virgin until i was married my wife was a virgin until she was married i think that's a good thing do i think the government has anything to do with any of those things no i don't i don't think it's any of the government's business it's consensual activity there are no externalities so what exactly is the government getting involved in and when the government gets involved in stuff then there are externalities right once the government starts to cram down its vision on people then you start to get unintended externalities so for example with the with the legalization my view on marriage is that the government should get completely out of the business i don't think the government should be involved in straight marriage i don't think you should be involved in gay marriage i think the government should be out i agree 100 and the reason that i say that is because as a religious person right who believes in traditional marriage i have two marriage certificates i have the one from the state that i don't give two craps about it's buried somewhere in my garage and then i have my religion my religious marriage certificate which meant among other things that i got to shut up my wife right i mean like this was the one that mattered to me and i think that's true for most religious people the religious ceremony matters a lot more than the state saying a thing and the state isn't incentivizing marriage people aren't getting married because they're like yeah i need the tax break right so that's a bunch of nonsense and once the government decides what version of marriage it wants to push that then comes into conflict with other values so for example once the state of california decides that same-sex marriage is on legal par with heterosexual marriage now i'm worried about the externality of i have a religious day school or i have a my synagogue my synagogue is a religious institution it doesn't approve of same-sex marriage now is the government going to come in and tell my synagogue how it ought to act with regard to same-sex marriage i don't think that's the government's business so how about this how about everybody gets to do basically what they want associate with whom they want and it's none of the government's business this seems like a pretty good happy medium i i'm so glad you talked about the two things that i wanted to talk to you about that i'm sure we disagree one of them being marijuana and the other one being gay people marrying each other um so let's start with the marijuana one do you think marijuana ruins people's lives is that one of your contentions um i think that it can and i think in the same way you ever had any experience with marijuana no i'm just talking about the statistical overuse of marijuana among teenagers does have detrimental brain effects that have some long-term after effects it's pretty proven and that's one of the things that i really i'm glad you said that because i wanted to cover that when you were in the middle of a rant when we were joking around about sixth and seventh graders selling pot don't smoke pot when you're young you really should it's not good for the development of your brain same thing with drinking you know i didn't smoke a lot of pot when i was a kid i did it a handful of times until i was 30 years old but i did drink a bunch of times when i was young in high school and it's terrible for brain development right especially before you're 25 and your your frontal cortex hasn't even fully formed your frontal lobe is like this it's it's it's a developing thing and there was an article recently that i posted from bbc that was saying that you probably shouldn't be considered an adult until you're 30.

right they're saying brain development doesn't even stop until you're 26 or 20. that's why when when people are saying like let's lower the the voting age 16. i'm like what the what the [ __ ] are you talking about in the world when i was 16 i was a chimp you know i mean i was a chimp in a high school now what the the the problem that i have with many people's perceptions on marijuana is that it's based on ignorance meaning not no personal experience with it you know and listen i'll admit i have no personal experience with marijuana so i know you don't i'm not speaking probably should get high that's what i'm trying to tell you man i've seen the effects on on stock prices when people get high in the studios they jump up man they jump down for a little when a bunch of chickens jump off the boat but then they come right back up um the marijuana thing is in my opinion uh it's another one of those things where people have this this categorized box that they like to put marijuana users in like this is the category lazy stoner stupid delusional it's too widespread for that i mean there there are people i know who are doctors who use so well there's the jujitsu community is a big one there's a giant percentage of the jiu jitsu community that does jujitsu high they have competition sounds like more of a party it's not man i'm telling you it's because it's not what people think it is if you've never smoked marijuana this is going to be a very difficult thing to grasp but marijuana enhances jiu jitsu because it eliminates the rest of the world when you're rolling which rolling is like say if uh you and jaime were gonna have a sparring match that would be rolling like you'd slap hands and then you'd go and you're trying to choke him and he's trying to get you in an arm bar and you're going after it when you do that on marijuana it's like you don't think of anything else other than those movements and it becomes like this very intense meditation in violence like it's not violent in terms of most the time you don't really even get hurt it's like you get to the point like one of the beautiful things about jiu jitsu is you can grab a hold of someone and choke them to the point where they're going to go to sleep and you would kill them if you kept going and they tap around your friends again and everybody's cool and you try to do it to me and i try to do it to you and you really can do it reasonably hard without people getting hurt and it happens every day all throughout the world a lot of these people are high and they're doing this jujitsu practice in this almost like trends it's like it's a transcendent state if you can function when you're using marijuana i don't care but you can this is what i'm saying and perceptions are off so i mean i would assume there's a small subset of the population for whom that's not true right who are overusing marijuana yes and and that's probably the majority in fact okay so so then you know but again the same way with food i agree so i don't think there's anything we disagree about here because i'm not talking about criminalizing marijuana use i think that we should honestly discuss the the evidence that for a subset of the population there is some evidence that marijuana is addicting but it's a subset it's not everybody who's on marijuana the vast majority of people on marijuana are not addicted to marijuana i think in the same way the alcohol is true of alcohol as well there's there's people that are going to be addicted to almost anything and i think there's there's absolutely people that are addicted to sugar this for sure people that are addicted to nicotine and alcohol and all these things that we let people have the material addictiveness of marijuana is not comparable to opioids though for example it's not even comparable to alcohol or nicotine it's it seems to be very rare when people become physically addicted to it extremely rare and what's what's common though is abuse and it's common in everything that human beings consume it's abuse is common as we said with food certainly common with alcohol it's certainly common with pills and this is why you know i really believe that the way to solve some of these problems is a social fabric problem like it's a parenting problem it's a social fabric problem it's a personal choice problem yes that's why virtually every solution i suggest is so funny you know i'm constantly conservatives like me who are libertarian-leaning are constantly accused of being non-compassionate no it's just our compassionate solutions don't involve the use of government yeah it's like we're going to encourage people to make better decisions with their lives and if you choose not to do that it's a free country well you know coming from a religious background you have this community that reinforces this kind of behavior and thought and i think that's one of the major really one of the best benefits of religion is that moral fabric and that community the sense of community even silly ones like mormons you know they're the nicest folks right they believe something that is [ __ ] patently insane if you go and read the joseph smith text from 1820 when he was 14 years old the [ __ ] that he wrote like i tried not to get into doctrinal insanity i would have a funny hat all day i hear it well i was going to get to that yeah but but you know with that said i mean alexis de tocqueville talks about this you know early on in the american republic the idea is that what makes america very different is the idea you don't need a big government when you do have a supportive social fabric where people feel like they're at least oriented toward a common goal it's one of the problems that i think we have in the country right now i'm not sure people are oriented toward even a common sense of of conversation right i mean it's you don't have to agree on on everything in order to have a common sense of the important values that that unify the country or should yes and i always use sam harris is sort of my bet noir here because he's obviously a militant atheist i'm i'm inequally an equally strong believer and yet when it comes to the things that we would like to see happen in the country not a government policy level but on a let's have a conversation level and discuss on evidence level we're on the same page there's certain core assumptions you have to make in order for that to to happen my argument about america and the west is that those core assumptions are built on judeo-christian foundations sam's core argument seems to be that they're built on evolutionary biology we differ a little bit there um um i don't want to let this marijuana thing go just yet one of the things that i wanted to bring up to you was this idea that if you're a religious person don't you think that there's certain things that maybe god put here for us to consume to change your perspective to allow you to reach new levels of consciousness do you think it's entirely possible that some of these things that are here and i know you haven't experienced them but they might literally have been put there by god and there's some evidence to say that a lot of the texts from the bible that in particular there was uh i think it was the university of tel aviv somewhere in in jerusalem where these scholars were they were trying to decipher what it meant when moses encountered the burning bush and they believed that it may have been the acacia tree which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine which is a psychedelic substance that actually that the brain produces and it's very common in plants and they think that this might have been when he met god and god was a burning bush that this might have been some crude translation of them being involved in some sort of a psychedelic experience now it sounds outlandish unless you've had that psychedelic experience and when you have you very well could think that you were in a conversation with god this is on earth and this is something that may very well have been lost information or this may very well have been rituals that people participated in to bring them closer together and to reinforce that sense of community that you do get from a church and you do get from a group of people that share more beliefs and values and there's a there's real good discussion that a lot of these experiences that became these religious doctrines came from psychedelic experiences now as someone who's never experienced that before i know this is probably a very strange thing to try to even wrap your head around it's it is entirely alien until you experience it but it might very well be religious i mean i've heard that from other people who have been who have used those kinds of i mean sam actually made this argument to me too about use of psychedelics um and i mean maybe not again well okay so this argument i i will say i'm not super fond of the argument that god made something and therefore it's ours to use or i mean like i keep kosher right like god made pigs i don't need them so so i i am not a huge fan of the argument that because something is here or because an urge is natural therefore we ought to imbibe or therefore we ought to participate in a particular activity you know one of the things that i that i'm very big on i'm i'm a rationalist when it comes to religion as much as you can be a rationalist with regard to religion to the extent that i think that it's up to us to use our reasonable faculties to determine the proper use of things so which is why you shouldn't overuse drugs even if you're going to use drugs this is part of the problem of making things illegal you make things illegal then you really don't know what it is or how it affects the body or what's the right dose or the wrong dose and then people get involved in these terrible situations where they're taking things they're just guessing there's truth there but it's also true that on a social level i'm not talking about legal because we totally agree on the legal level on the social level there's a couple of things that are true of for example the orthodox jewish community low rates of addiction because people have that social fabric they don't feel the necessity also as you say substance use in moderation can actually be quite a good thing so low rates of alcoholism in the jewish community and part of that is the fact that you are given kiddush wine from the time you're a kid right i mean you actually are destigmatized yeah it's destigmatized and the idea is that in its proper context this could be a good thing right so i'll admit i don't know enough about the proper context of marijuana to know when it would be a quote-unquote good thing and so it can and it's going to be a good thing this is what i'm talking about also and also i'm you know i don't the truth is i don't enjoy drinking right i'm not i'm not a drinker i don't enjoy i i like reality i like living in reality and i like experiencing it totally sober so i've never really felt the the urge to to do any of that stuff i i hear the pitch um but i've never really felt the interior desire needed i completely understand that i think that what we're dealing with though is perceptions that have been molded by laws that were shaped by tyrants that's what i think i mean again that's totally possible and plausible yeah and it's it's historically accurate i mean when it comes to prohibition prohibition with alcohol didn't work prohibition with drugs is just making the cartels bigger and it's causing money no problems with organizing whether you like drugs or don't like drugs government interventionism is generally a giant fail i think our perceptions of what is good for you and is bad for you is also based on laws that the government created ignorantly the sweeping psychedelic act of 1970 which made virtually everything psychedelic that they could they missed a few things slipped through the cracks but all of the tryptamines and or most of them um the psilocybin lsd all that stuff was made completely illegal but people really didn't even know what it was and a lot of that is why we base our ideas of what's good or bad for you it's it's based on what is legal and what and what other people have done with it on this area i'll admit not only complete experiential ignorance but complete evidence your ignorance so i haven't examined the evidence i really don't have strong opinions on any of this i think it's one of the bridges that we all could use between conservative thought and liberal thought particularly for people that are dying it's one of the things that johns hopkins found and uh so there's been other studies done and there's been therapy done on people that are dying of terminal diseases and they give them psilocybin and when they give them these mushroom trips they have these beautiful experiences where they completely accept death and it's almost a universal reaction to it that like the the amount of people who still experience a positive benefit months and months after the experience while they're dying that they they say this was an incredibly moving and powerful moment in my life that allowed me to accept the fact that my time here is done i mean listen if if that's something that that works for people and that's what it's designed to do then i don't know if it's designed well even if it's not designed by god like it literally might that's fine i mean i think there's also the generalized religious counter argument that there are no shortcuts to to happiness so let's let's pose a sort of assurance i don't think well this is the question right i mean like let's say that i could guarantee you that tomorrow you're going to be a happier person all you have to do is take this regimen of of drugs that you're going to take every day and it's going to make you a happier person a more well-rounded person but it's going to permanently change your brain chemistry is that something that you think is good or is it something you think is bad because from a religious perspective there's an argument to be made that these are this is work you need to do on yourself without outside aid if possible if there's cases where you can't then you can't but yeah you know it's an interesting thought experiment terence mckenna had a line about that uh he said that uh there was a joke about there was a monk and he met buddha because buddha came to town and he said buddha he wanted to impress him he said i practiced the city of levitation and i have done this for 10 years and now i can walk on water and the buddha says but the fairies only a nickel the idea what are you [ __ ] wasting your time like you can aid the progression rapidly with psychedelic drugs and this is something that ma you know do you know about maps and their work with mdma and soldiers that have had ptsd not too much no it's it's phenomenal by giving these soldiers mdma therapy meaning they they give them mdma which is essentially what people think of as ecstasy the street name they give them pure mdma and then they assist them with they actually have a psychologist sit with them a therapist and they go over all these details of these traumatic events and they come to peace with everything and they've had profound benefits for soldiers and for we uh some combat journalists different people that have been over there and have experienced you know the horrors of war and and just general ptsd maybe for people who have experienced violence attacks it is shown to be one of the very best things we've ever discovered for helping people get past these so here's to me and i'm thinking about this on the fly because this is stuff i don't think about very much um but it's it's there's a complex moral equation to the extent that if you're talking about somebody who has ptsd somebody has a condition and the only way to help that condition is to use these drugs i've never had a problem with any of that stuff right i mean i've my grandfather was was schizophrenic and by maybe bipolar maybe schizophrenic diagnosis is not exactly clear they prescribed him lithium made him a lot better would he have been better off struggling with the schizophrenia of course not it's much better that he should have the lithium and then be able to live in his rational mind so when there's a problem using drugs to get past it and and work with it is a good thing you do run the risk of the sort of brave new world situation where you have a group of people who have a certain level of air sats happiness that is not driven by a point of view but more by just the these chemicals in their their body do chemicals affect your point of view well that is a hundred percent true yeah but are you dr yuval harari talks about maybe this is the future right he talks about the idea that maybe the future is we just drug ourselves until we're happy basically uh or that happiness is the drugs because if you're a scientific materialist that's what it is happiness is just a bunch of chemicals flowing throughout your body so if you can bring them in without self-change but i i do wonder whether that robs people of a certain level of purpose that the struggle is part of being human i think we're changing what it is to be human just by carrying around phones and just i mean that's that's true but i think that that's again one of the things that i think makes being a human worthwhile is the idea that you are struggling like i think i think the struggle is actually meaningful and i think that's why religions tend to set prophylactic rules sometimes for good and sometimes for ill so for example i i'm addicted to my phone i mean there's just no question right it's it's in my hand all the time and but from friday night to saturday night it's off i can't look at it i'm forbidden from looking at it and this breaks the cycle at least for one day a week and that's a good thing that makes me better as a human being because the limit i set for myself and then a limit that i abide by and if you believe in in self mastery where's the happy medium between self mastery and i need a little bit of aid and i think that there there is a happy medium there um but i'm not sure that that you know drugs are the answer to i don't think you're suggesting drugs no i'm not suggesting that and i think there's also a problem with the word drugs that the everything is under that blanket and that blanket can be entirely negative or extremely positive i know but that's there's a pro i use it too i mean it's not not accusing me but that that term it's a problem term because what these are are substances that are psychoactive and some of them can be extremely beneficial and some of them have short-term experiences that last with long-term results and i don't think that there's enough knowledge that i don't think the people that are negative against it have experienced enough of it or have looked at it in an objective rational way because i think it's something that could be here to aid perspective to give people a chance to think outside of their normal conditioned way of thinking that might have been established by their community or by their church or by their neighborhood whatever it is sometimes a little bit of a break a little bit of a mental break from what you're experiencing and the vibration that you exist on almost every day to separate from that and to get a look at it from the outside sometimes it allows you to have a renewed perspective that can enhance your life greatly as long as when people re-engage they're re-engaging in a level of combination and this is what we share you and i are both disciplined people and it's one of the things i really respect about you you're a very hard worker you're always on the ball you're very disciplined and i know that a lot of conservative people admire that and they admire that in folks and they think that people who are liberal are not disciplined they think that they're lazy it falls into this like weak beta male sort of category of people that are progressive and liberal and i think that's a misunderstanding i think you guys you and i both agree that the struggle is very important but i'd struggle physically so that i don't have to struggle mentally i struggle physically so that i can have a better way of looking at things with less stress so we have this shared belief that things should be a struggle my str i force my struggle on myself so that i can have a better perspective and this is something that you and i differ on like i think you exercise right yes how often do you do it i try to every day yeah makes a big deal yeah it's a huge is it huge it's a huge deal yeah i mean i think we we both understand that struggle is a it's an important part of understanding yourself if you do not push yourself if you do not struggle you're not going to really get who you are or what your boundaries are and if you're self-indulgent if every day you're stuffing things in your face that you want to like it's good to have a rule like hey for this next month you can't eat this or you can't do that or i want you to start fasting 16 hours a day is it that hard just eat for eight hours a day and fast for 16.

but no but that just doing something like that and setting these guidelines for yourself and putting yourself into a a disciplined state can be extremely beneficial like jocko willenko says discipline equals freedom it is a great formula and it's real well it's it and again it is the basis of a lot of religion i mean a lot of religion is very practice based it's one of the reasons i like judaism as opposed to other religions a very practice based religion you know sometimes you can take that too far in one direction which as i say you need to balance reason with with dictates that are that are meant to make you better but that goes all the way back to aristotle i mean aristotle talks about how you have to practice to be good right you have to practice to be virtuous what makes you a virtuous person is acting repeatedly in accordance with with right reason and that is setting rules for yourself right that is not violating every rule i i think when when we talk about on the conservative side you know folks on the left being lazy i don't mean that in terms of work i mean mark zuckerberg is a hard worker i assume i think jack dorsey when he's not getting bitten by by mosquitoes seems like a hard worker but you know most most of the people most people love jobs are hard workers i don't think it's about that i think it's a it's it's a certain perspective on the necessity of rules and and the mindset that if i don't know what a rule is for i'm going to remove it so gk chesterton has this this very famous uh kind of contrast that he draws between people who tend to be right-wing politically and people who tend to be left-wing politically he says people who tend to be left-wing politically you're walking through a you're walking through the woods and you come across a fence you don't know why the fence is there you say i don't know why this fence is here i'm removing it and the person who's right-wing walks through the forest and sees the fence and says i have no idea why the fence is here i'm gonna go find out why the fence is here and then maybe i'll remove it and that's the the kind of berkey and conservative attitude toward rules the the attitude that this rule was put here for a reason now maybe the rule sucks maybe the rule has to go but let's try and figure out what was at the root of the rule before we just wipe out all the fences and then try to rebuild from the ground up all these new fences and that's especially true in a civilization that's the most prosperous and free civilization ever created i mean if the system really sucked that would be one thing but i think people are kind of ungrateful about the fact that we live in the best possible time in the best possible place yeah that's just that's the reality and everybody who's so negative about living in america it's like okay in 1900 one in 10 american children died in the first year of life in 1850 the average life expectancy in europe was under 40.

so what are you talking about like our biggest problems today really for for the vast majority of people is that we are too fat or that we are we don't have a job but we still have somebody who's basically making sure we have food like starvation is not a serious problem in the united states there's a problem of poverty but there's not a problem of widespread starvation in fact poverty tends to align with obesity this is a pretty unbelievably great society so maybe you want to look back at the roots of that society before we start willy-nilly tearing up all of the moral boundaries i think you and i agree that this is the greatest time ever to be alive i think what these other folks are saying is that we can do better and i think we all agree with that but yeah sure but to classify this time as being a terrible time is i think wholly inaccurate by the way i hate it right and left right and this is one of the reasons it's one of the reasons why i think there's a certain point where the trumpian populist right meets the bernie sanders populist left and that is them walking around saying how much things suck and it's like no no that's just that's just wrong it's an amazing time it's amazing time for communication too it's amazing time for people to kind of understand other people's perspectives and points of view which is one of the reasons why de-platforming and and silencing of conservatives even though i'm not conservative bothers the [ __ ] out of me yeah i just think it's it's a it's a non-harmonious action in a time that i think could lead to people having much more open and much more balanced communication i mean this should be the time when we are having more conversations and more fun with each other and where we are feeling more entrepreneurial we have a better social safety net than ever so one of the statistics that really bothers me is that the level of american mobility has declined rapidly in the united states so the number of people who are leaving their home state to go somewhere else to work a job for example is at decades low why it's easier to get anywhere now there's seven million unfilled jobs i keep hearing from you know folks who i you know personally like people like tucker carlson uh that you know you you grew up in this small town and the town is dying the industry left well you have the government somehow owes it to you that you get to grow up in this town and stay in that town even if all the industry left and i just think to myself by whom who who gave you this guarantee that you get to stay there and i know listen i'm i'm a lucky guy i grew up in a two-parent household we grew up wealthy but we were middle middle class like i grew up in a small house in burbank with two bedrooms and i had three sisters it was me and my three sisters in in one bedroom and one bathroom for six people that's not poor that's middle class that's a great life and i understand some people don't have that life but one thing that is guaranteed to you is the opportunity for adventure in this country so go and move like why are we inculcating a feeling of victimhood in a society where if you make the right decisions you will do well i mean not you might do well if you make basic basic right choices you will finish better than you started in american society i mean we're talking like the most basic choices like finish high school and don't have a baby out of wedlock and get a job like you do those three things and the brookings institute says that you will not be in permanent poverty in the united states like that's amazing that was not true for the vast majority of human history you did all of those things there was in high school but you did all the other things and then you lived like a surf on a farm until you died at age 37 of diphtheria or something so it's it's just the the lack of optimism in a society where it should be running rampant is kind of astonishing to me well it's perspective right i mean rich kids grow up with uh this perspective of constantly being rich and people grow up with this perspective of you know how they view the united states as this negative thing or that they don't know how to change their life they don't know how to take action because they haven't had anyone around them that's done it and that's part of the problem with small town mentalities is that you kind of inherit the vibe of the people around you and if they're ignorant or if they're they're shallow-minded or if they're they're stuck in this one town and they're never going to leave and you get caught in that vibe you can one day wake up and you're 32 and you've never done anything i mean this is what jd vance talks about in hillbilly elegy right the people who are in these small towns and they've basically been told that they have two choices they can go on welfare or they can leave yeah and it's like okay final going welfare you know everybody around me is why not is there's nothing morally deficient about going on on welfare it's actually one of the the bigger problems i have with the welfare state generally is that it disconnects the person receiving the aid from the person giving the aid one of the like in our religious community to take an example there there's a time a few years back where a guy came to me i bought some art from him he's a an artist and uh really does good work he came to me and he said my family doesn't have enough money to make the rent this month can you offer me in advance on art that you'll buy somewhere down the road and of course make sure so i sent him a check and he understood that five years later he came back to me and he said you know you still haven't bought that piece of art i owe you a piece of art because he knew who gave him the money right right and so he was willing to understand that that was an act of charity and he wanted to make sure that that that was paid back you see this in cinderella man right with russell crowe the the moment where he makes his money walks back into the welfare office and he rolls out a wad yeah like that that feeling that the government isn't just a giant cash machine that is exists you pay you money but that money actually comes from somewhere either it's coming from the future because we're gonna have to pay back the debt or it's coming from somebody's tax money and that we all owe something to each other right and by the same token the what what i owe to my neighbors is that if they're in trouble then it is my obligation as a good person to try and help them out on a personal level yes right and the charity in religious communities is extremely high that's that's the social fabric that i'm talking about without without that sort of dutiful sense to one another you can't have rights because if you just have rights then and and no duties then there will be no one to take care of each other it's why while i'm libertarian when it comes to government i'm very conservative when it comes to the need to build a social fabric in communities and and and have people with working families and communities of working families yeah i really think that that's one of the best things that comes out of religion is when you have a tight-knit community like yours and you do have that sense of charity where you really are a community of people that care for each other and look out for each other the problem is of course doing that large scale and then the problem is doing it in some sort of a non-denominational way where people they don't have to have the exact same beliefs but they still share these core values of community and taking care of each other i mean that's what people really benefit from when they've done studies with people when they show happiness and what is happiness correlated with it's almost always correlated with friends and loved ones and family right it's the most important thing you can have when it comes to diversity you know there's this slogan that diversity is our strength well there's a robert putnam who's a sociologist over at harvard he wrote an entire book about the social fabric called bowling alone he was kind of the the pioneer in the idea of social capital and what he said is that he went in with to writing this book with the idea that diversity is our strength and then he did some research and what he found is that ethnic diversity only correlates with two things these are his words increased tv watching and increased protest marches that's all it unless unless it is within the boundaries of a common goal so if you walk into a church very diverse ethnically everybody's got the same general goal which is we're worshiping god in one particular way and we believe in a certain core set of values and now diversity is great your experiences come to bear you're all aiming in the same direction he gives the example of the army you see a bunch of people who go in diverse group of people diverse races different backgrounds and when you talk to those guys while they're serving or after they leave they don't give a crap about the diverse backgrounds of the people they were serving with they're all aiming their guns in the same direction well in the united states we have to be aiming our guns in the same direction or we can't really have a functioning social fabric at all like i'm perfectly willing to give charity to people who i don't know who still believe like i do that america is a fantastic country rooted in immutably good principles but that starts to break down when i'm being asked to give charity just on a personal level to somebody who believes that america is fundamentally evil and needs to be torn out at its roots and replaced with something better right because now we're not aiming in the same direction so on a human level i care about you but on a social level if i have a choice between somebody who basically agrees with me about fundamental values and somebody who is diametrically opposed i'm going to give my money to the person who basically agrees with me on those fundamental values and again i don't think those fundamental values have to be religious i don't think you have to be a god believer to receive charity from me or i don't think i should have to be a an atheist receive charity from you but i do think that you do have to take into consideration a few things and now we're on the same page personal responsibility the idea that you do live in a free country just historically and relatively speaking this is a free country which means decision making is on you so man up a little bit that that the decisions that you make we should all have sympathy for people who have had worse lives and worse experiences but in the end if you are capable if you are not fundamentally disabled in some way that you need to make a plan for your own life and then you need to do that like are you more willing to give charity to somebody who has a plan for how to get themselves out of the hole of course or some of course yeah that but that relies on that person feeling an obligation to do that but i also think that what you're talking about with with charity within the community is so much more there's so much more connection than charity from the government when you're talking about welfare the problem is that there's this dissolving of responsibility because it's just a check that comes in that you feel like well this is a rich country i'm owed this anyway right and you know and when i was a kid we were on welfare and we we used food stamps and i remember being very ashamed of it and feeling really weird that we were that poor that we needed help from the government but my parents worked their way out of it they were young they had a kid my guess is that the the social stigma probably has something to do with that meaning that i'm sure you didn't they didn't want to be on welfare they didn't want to be on food stamps like contrast your story with adam corolla's right adam talks all the time about how his parents were also on food stamps and welfare and they just didn't give a [ __ ] they were just and he always resented that he thought that was bad yeah he said like you could work why aren't you and that gave him the impetus to get up and do what what adam has done so you know that that kind of it's not pick yourself up by the bootstrap because helping hands are good but it is if i if i were capable of picking myself up by my bootstraps would i do so yeah and if the answer is yes then we're all on the same team well there's there's a real problem too and that some people just get a horrible hand dealt to them for sure at birth they're with parents that really are doing a terrible job raising them they're [ __ ] them up every step of the way you're around a bunch of people that are criminals everybody's [ __ ] up there's no examples of anybody that's doing well i mean it's one of the unique things about the internet today is that a kid that's in that environment can get a hold of maybe something that you've said or something that you know someone else has said and start reading books and start taking in information that gives them a different perspective and fueled that perspective with more motivational stuff and more information in education and sometimes kids just like you were saying with adam corolla they grow up with these parents that are just not ambitious at all so they become very ambitious and they work very hard to not be like them i mean sometimes it's good to see that example but most of the time it's it's just [ __ ] hard for them to reprogram their heads well for sure it's hard to do that and it's also hard i really think that there's there's a lot of focus in the country right now on raising awareness which is fine you know raising awareness of our history and all the bad things that we've done yeah good i mean people people should know about all the good things and all the bad things right it's it's history is history but this this incessant focus on the idea that people's lives are getting better by suggesting that they're perennial victims in the united states i just don't i don't understand how that's a good thing yeah like as as a historically a member of a historically persecuted group if i had grown up and my parents had said to me no matter what you do you will be put under the thumb of the dominant society that's a pretty horrible message to tell to a kid and i think that's true for politicians again on both sides of the aisle i think you get it from from president trump when it comes to some rural areas where it's like well it's the mexicans and the chinese coming in to steal your jobs and you're under the thumb of people who are trying to destroy you and on the other side of the aisle people who say well you're in the inner city and therefore the cops are racist against you and want to destroy you and everybody is out to get you and it's like well how about this how about like again the single best thing you can do for yourself is make basic decisions that are entirely within your control okay unless you are raped god forbid single motherhood is a choice that you get to make about your life this is a choice you get to make about your life finishing high school unless you are legitimately disabled in some way i mean especially in lausd where you basically have to be able to read a third grade level to finish high school you know just just like these are these are decisions personal decision making if you want i've never seen somebody's life get better by complaining about reality i've seen a lot of people's lives get better by acknowledging that reality is what it is and then making personal decisions to make their lives better and that's considered non-compassionate but it seems to me that the essence of compassion sometimes is saying at least make the baseline decision if you make the baseline decisions and then you fail we can talk about what happened i don't think it's non-compassionate i think it's pragmatic and i think you're right but i also think that there's some people that are they're in situations that require something external to to assist them they're they're the way their life has been set up and this is what i think when people think about compassion and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps if you have a real if you really have an honest and accurate assessment of extreme poverty and terrible neighborhoods it's not as simple as do something good to better your life part of it is you got to [ __ ] stay alive part of it you're surrounded by people who either have committed crimes or will commit crimes you mean one out of every four people you run into might be a criminal in the worst neighborhood in the country for sure and but i think we have to this is where we recognize what government is good at two things cutting other people cutting checks from other people's money they're great at it and they'll see that they're right on top of those parking tickets by the way to make sure that they just i mean they're amazing at it so seizing your money and and paying money they're very good at and and pointing a gun at people right these are the two things that government was built to do was was collect taxes and pay out money and then point guns at people right this is what government does so which of those two things would you apply in a situation where there's just a complete lack of social capital because cutting a check isn't going to do it alone where's that check go to the parents who are not doing not able to protect their kids it's one thing if you're enabling the parents to move out of that community or something right but that's why i say you have to attach if you're going to do the government welfare thing you got to attach it to a plan it can't just be here's a check enjoy your life because what is the plan i don't think one of those terrible communities you live in an apartment complex so i mean here's the reality i think that the plan very often when it comes to a crime-ridden area is the other side of what the government does which is you need more cops in that area like i think that the the great lie that these communities that are crime ridden i'm talking about white appalachia and i'm talking about yes black inner cities these these communities do not need fewer cops they need more cops because the precondition to investment in those communities and increase tax dollars in those communities and increase social capital in those communities is people not getting shot every five seconds yeah i mean that's that's why the worst thing that can happen to law abiding minorities is for the cops to abandon areas where crime is high it just doesn't make any sense and that's not just me saying that jane levy is a reporter at the la times very much on the left has said the same thing law-abiding people want crime rates to go down like conditions have to change in a community for conditions to change in the community did you ever see the wild uh the whites the wild and wonderful whites of west virginia no it was a was it johnny knoxville did he produce that documentary i think he did right dude it's about this family that lives in west virginia that is just a bunch of psychotic criminals there's these crazy white people the kids drinking mountain dew and doing back flips on the bed and they're all on pills it's bananas and it gives you this insight like if you are in this community if you are in this family and this is obviously very extreme family but there's many more of them out there that have not been documented if you are in that community good [ __ ] luck getting out right good luck the the the money that you get other than welfare is from selling pills you know everybody's on these pills so you're all whacked out you don't know what the [ __ ] is going on half the day you're on opiates i mean it is a bananas environment and there's a lot of people like that in this country for sure in poor latino communities and poor white communities and poor black communities the idea that these people just going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is crazy i just think they don't have a plan and i think if we really want to help them there's got to be some way where you can give these people the opportunity to step out of that pattern whatever community centers outreach programs whatever it is i don't know what it is i mean the truth is that historically speaking it was people actually going to church yeah i mean and and they're made there's a good a lot of good church going person right but i absolutely recognize that there's a lot of good involved in having that framework right and that that i'm not sure that that's yeah i don't think you can create sort of a fake social fabric with just a government welfare system like it just it hasn't worked i mean disability exists it's been increasing every year it's it's not this is it's a question i asked andrew yang actually so our episode comes out on sunday and obviously andrew is a big fan of ubi universal basic income and i'm not averse to the idea of ubi in a future where legitimately 50 of the population can't work because they've all been automated out of existence and all of this but there's one section in his book where andrew talks about how if we cut people a check for ubi then they will spend their extra time creating art and engaging in hobbies that they like and i just thought to myself i mean i said it to him like people are on disability i don't know what they're doing right i mean if you're on disability the people you're talking about who are suffering they're not out there writing poetry i mean the the rise of the opioid epidemic and people who are oding on drugs and all this stuff that's in precisely the same demographic you're talking about you're just talking about a check from one place as opposed to another place i don't really see how that solves the problem i think we have a crisis of purpose yes right now and i don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable on the one hand by changing our trade rules and i also don't think that that crisis of purpose is solvable by by a a government check i just don't think that that's how people are wired i absolutely agree with you that there is a crisis of purpose my concern is about automation and my concern and obviously i haven't really studied this other than talking to andrew yang and talking to elon musk and a few other people that are proponents of universal basic income they think that there's going to be such a massive loss of jobs in such a short period of time from people that are non-skilled laborers and it's going to go away there's millions and millions of jobs and these people are not going to have anything and then it could be chaos right so there's there's two problems that come up there and this is where andrew's book is interesting because problem number one is that the people will be poor they won't have a source of income yeah ubi solves that the other florida but does it even it gives them a thousand dollars a month even if you upped it right i mean even even if you just had a swedish redistribution system and and the average tax rate went up to 60 or something it might let's say we could solve the money problem for a second which you know without tanking the economy which is questionable but let's say we could do that we could add trillions of dollars to the budget every year and we could solve that i'm still not sure that that solves the deeper problem which is that when people lose jobs they lose purpose yes right so i'm not sure that ubi solves that problem as i say we have we have a rich social welfare network in the united states and we're seeing this stuff happen anyway you know i'm i'm a little bit less catastrophic by a little bit i mean i fair bit less catastrophic in my thinking about automation than either andrew yang or elon musk i think that people will be able to adapt quick enough to to avoid the problems they'll realize that jobs aren't there anymore and they'll just naturally gravitate towards other professions i think over time that people will do that but they're not always the same people right there's always shift in the economy and the the ideal economic model has a trucker becoming a coder right but that's that's not real that was that whole learn to code fiasco that got people kicked off of twitter right and it still does apparently yeah apparently if you say to journalists then that's that's very bad if you say loads of code to a truck yeah that's what it was that's what's happening to code to a trucker if you say learn to code to a trucker then that's just you being helpful right if you say learn to code to a journalist then that is targeted harassment on twitter that's what if someone says it to me well it works twitter doesn't care about you i can say whatever i want but it's uh but yeah i mean uh i think that but if you just say it to a friend hey [ __ ] face learn to code that i don't know is your friend report you to the censorship board over twitter it's such a dumb thing to take people out for it's one of the best examples of like how censorship st oversteps its boundaries and becomes almost like satire yeah it's it's real it's really really absurd like this is the biggest aggression ever learn to code that's something like this is a stupid thing that someone said about coal miners they literally said that about coal miners that maybe they could learn to code and so everybody's like what the [ __ ] so learn to code became a joke and became something that you would mock people right there is their explanation for it was so crazy it was like no then learn to code got connected with white supremacy and all this other stuff well that's that's this that's the hitler on the dog argument right it's like dogs are bad hitler owned one okay white supremacists are bad they use the phrase learn to code that means if you say learn to code you're a white supremacist like what the [ __ ] they lost the frog that [ __ ] frog that feels good man frog that's what happened to pepe they lost them they they killed the frog they turned the fricking frog gay i mean what yeah oh that's yeah but yeah i mean as far as automation um you know there's constantly people saying this is the the nicholas naseem teleview of reality which that the black swan incident can happen any any second so watch out for it versus the sort of stephen pinker view of reality which is the black swan incident is called a black swan incident because it's a black swan incident meaning that it happens incredibly rarely you know the the idea that we are on the verge of a catastrophic drop in job numbers because of the automation of trucking for example i i'm not sure that i buy it the reason i don't buy it is because you still are going to need someone sitting behind the wheel of that truck there are human drivers on the road uh it's going to there will be a gradual transition away from some of these jobs andrew yang talks about radiologists and how radiologists are going to be priced out of the market by computers that can do a better job of diagnosing tumors first of all awesome right i mean that's that's good first of all that brings down cost and you won't get cancer as advanced so that would be that'd be a good thing but second of all what what a lot of technology studies have tended to show is that technology just gets integrated in a different way in particular careers so there will be jobs that are eliminated for sure there will be jobs we haven't heard of that will be created also and mostly technology will will become more of a productivity aid to to people so this is true in factories jobs have been lost in factories it's the best example of where jobs are lost but it's mostly true in offices right how many office jobs have been created because you have computers more office jobs exist because i write by hand do you think that this is akin to like a government bailout like the idea of the government bailout was like the banks are too big to fail and some people thought you know what you got to let them fail so you figure out why they failed and we'll never have it happen again if there is this thing and the government steps in and says wait a minute i know you lost all your jobs we're going to give you a thousand dollars you don't have to figure it out a thousand dollars a month and some people go okay i'm not going to figure it out now whereas those people might have gone on a fear-filled journey to try to figure out their purpose in life because now they're they're stuck where their job doesn't exist anymore so they're put in the corner i mean they have to act there is there is innervation that comes from from a welfare check i mean there are people who become dependent on government and they're used to being dependent on government i mean that stuff is true it does happen i mean and listen milton friedman made an argument for universal basic income as a replacement for the welfare system there is another problem with universal basic income that i asked andrew about also and that was you know one of the big issues is that poor people very often people who are permanently impoverished not people who are temporarily poor but they tend not to spend money where we think they have to spend money right they're not taking that money and they're not putting it into education or into they might just be buying ho hoes and cigarettes right i mean the average the average person who is making less than i think is 16 000 a year spending 400 a year on lottery tickets right that's legitimately just flushing your money down the toilet so it's so how do you aren't you just going to end up back in the same place you know in six months where people took that money and used it in ways that actually didn't benefit them and at a certain point the question is are you do you own your decisions or do not own your decisions and at what level of incompetence or inability do we say you no longer own your decisions and so we're just going to take care of you on a permanent basis that's that's really the the the question here i think we're looking at uh when you're talking about welfare we're looking at worst case scenario right where someone does get dependent upon the welfare state and does use that money frivolously and does make poor decisions but then there's got to be other people that are single moms that you know maybe had a kid with some [ __ ] that doesn't want to pay and it is a piece of [ __ ] and they have to hide from them and they're just trying to feed their kids for sure those people exist too they don't have a community to to to help them out maybe they're not a part of a church and maybe they don't have a good group of neighbors maybe they had to move somewhere for work and they got stuck in some place where they don't know anybody but i i think part of this is to recognize that incentives matter on both ends so the idea is that you give some people more money and they'll they'll do well it's also true that if you create a welfare system that benefits single motherhood you'll get more single motherhood i mean the single motherhood rate in the black community before welfare was 20 now it's 70 percent in the white community it was like five percent now it's forty percent you've said that like out of wedlock children and having a kid when you're young is like it's a terrible idea for your life but what do you recommend to have kids avoid that are you one of those people that thinks don't act without that thing on it no condoms that's what you're saying right like don't don't have unprotected sex i mean like this this is not it's not part of my my fake cursing it's not effing rocket science i mean like i'm apologizing for not cursing uh yeah it's it's not rocket science this one's always bothering kids make mistakes and i mean that's what happens people okay well but and then if the government pays for those mistakes it becomes less so what should what should happen should the the kids suffer so who no i mean should it be i mean how should it be worked out i mean it depends on the situation you know if there are parents available to the kid presumably the parents the grandparents would take a pretty active role in the in the raising that kid i'll assume they they're there well how about this how about we assume that if you are old enough to get pregnant then you are old enough to let's let's talk about a 17 year old or 18 year old used to be shotgun marriages worth it uh and uh and really i think that's a good idea i think the idea of parents staying together for the sake of a kid that they accidentally bore is absolutely a good idea yes i think that it's a better idea than the man walking away and the kid being without a uh uh man in the house so for the rest of their childhood a lot of people figure a way to work it out yes and if they're both reasonable they could do that yeah and i think that that by the way a huge percentage of american births in the 40s and 50s were exactly this there were a lot of seven month babies in the 40s and 50s yeah like something like 30 to 40 percent of all kids born in the 30s and 40s and 50s were seven month babies where somebody got knocked up and then the expectation was now you're gonna like you did that you did the crime now you do the time right i mean that puts people in relationship prison good they don't think they don't don't have sex then don't ask don't don't find somebody find find somebody to have sex where are you find somebody to have sex with who you actually think is worthy of a relationship right now or online pornography is available to you like figure it out you're okay with that um on a moral level yes no but if i'm going to compare that to having a baby out of wedlock then yeah this is what i think about pornography they could stop now and we're good forever but yet you guys are a bunch of freaks i mean there's no it's like a business it's almost like you have excess houses that stack up to the moon like there's no way everyone's going to live in all those houses why do you keep making houses there's no way one person has ever jerked off to every video that ever existed it doesn't it's not possible it's like and it's also like other forms of media where they just stack up like i never really thought of that until you have the backlog of internet pornography you're like god i'm you know i'm a month behind now but just think about music right there's all the music that existed before in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and there's new [ __ ] every goddamn day it never ends it's this overwhelming library of stuff that we have to experience it would be good if that music changed from time to time the same song recorded seven different ways you know what kind of [ __ ] do you listen to what do you think i listened to did i listen to classic jazz and classical of course of course yeah so you're so interesting i was i was a concert level violinist until i was like 17.

do you still practice yeah i mean the only expensive object that i own other than my house is is violin oh really yeah is it a stradivarius it is not it is it is a it's not that's all i know yes yeah the two that people may know are strad and like a guarneri but those those ones are like hundreds of thousands of dollars this is in the tens of thousands of dollars a stradivarius is hundreds of thousands of years yeah i had the guy who we knew my family knew hit a million dollars stradivarius was so big about it was the big deal uh well i mean aside from the historic value of the thing they're not making any more of them um it does play very differently i mean very differently like i had a crappy violin for most of my like really until the last two years i had a violin that was handed down for my grandfather that was worth maybe 1300 bucks and it was a piece of crap i mean it was a not a good violin if you're good enough then you can tell the difference between a really great violin to play and one that is a piece of garbage and i was good enough to do that so that's yeah i mean i was i was a classical guy i played i played violin for years and my dad was a growing up my dad was a pianist look at what jamie just pulled up the most expensive violin in the world sold for an estimated 16 million dollars for a stroud of areas they never lose value i mean really they don't this is this is it's a good investment the the person i know a guy who was offered uh he's offered a strat at i think it was 250 000 maybe 10 years ago and he's like no that it's worth like three million dollars no what is the deal like what if you had to explain what's the difference between the sound that this makes so i mean it has to do with the acoustics of the instrument meaning the wood quality there's there's slight variations in the construction of the instrument certain parts that are thicker or thinner and it is also it's easier to play a better violin so it almost covers for your mistakes when you play a bad violin it tends to scratch and screech more that's why when you get in the upper register with a violin you hit very high notes it can either be very screechy or can be very beautiful some of that a lot of most of that's the player some of that's the violin like joshua heifetz who's widely considered the greatest violinist to ever live he had a strad and lady blunt stradivarius cost 15.9 million people buy these and then they lend them out on on loan to you know world's great violinists so but there's a but in the end it really is the uh the quality of the player there's a famous yasha heifetz story where he was playing at carnegie hall and some lady came up to him afterwards and she said you know your violin it just it sounds so beautiful and he picks up the violin puts it to his ear and he says funny i don't hear it right now so do you listen to any other kind of music yeah i mean i like i like some classic rock do you like yeah i could see rocking out yeah i i went to a duby brothers concert with my parents no you did yeah yeah really yeah yeah that's a band that was named after a joint that is true that's how it really is accurate i know did you feel like uh like a sinner i was i was a rebel that day i was really going to the doobie brothers concert with the other boomers so the other thing is uh same-sex marriage that's the other thing that i think that we disagree with well i we agree with the marriage thing right government government should be involved i think where people should be protected is through assets and you know the contract yes i think that that all makes sense to me that all that stuff in terms of like uh alimony and child support and all those things make sense to me and that then the idea that the community reinforces it which would then become the government reinforcing all that stuff that all makes sense to me i understand it but um why do you care if uh two gay guys want to get married um so from a religious point of view sure let's go from a legislation so so i mean why wouldn't a secular point of view first so the the idea is not that i care deeply whether two gay guys want to get married to each other the idea is that do i prefer traditional marriage to to same-sex marriage okay well let me let me phrase this way what do you think a gay guy is do you think someone's they're making a choice or do you think that this is how they were born so the religious point of view on this and i think this is actually just the general conservative point of view on human action generally is i don't know meaning that for the vast majority of people i would assume that they have a biological drive to engage in in that behavior but the traditional sort of will point of view is that biological drive does not necessarily match up to the activity you ought to engage in right men for example have a biological drive to impregnate many women that's not something religion is cool with either right so the the idea is that right but religion is cool with a man being with one woman and impregnating her but you're not cool with a man being with a man so i can give you the religious explanation and i can give you the secular explanation so the religious explanation is that there is something different about a woman than there is about a man and a man is made better through his union with a woman and that if you pervert the sex drive to pursue mere pleasure instead of a lasting relationship upon which the basis of society is built then you are foregoing the proper use of your sex drive right because you wanted to step in and argue against that you would say that just because someone can't get pregnant doesn't mean that they don't have a loving relationship that contributes to society well that's true but it is also foregoing the more productive relationship of being able to bear and rear children and also and also recognizing that the sexes are not different right and recognizing also the sexes are not the same so you know being with a man is in a relationship different than being with a woman i would assume i mean i assume that's why gay guys are gay if it weren't then i assume that they would be fine with being with a woman right so that's so that relationship from a from a religious perspective is more valuable because women have different qualities than men you round off each other's harsh edges it changes you i mean you're married being married changes a man in a different way that being married to a member of the same sex would right but i don't want people to have to do it but if you're not forcing anybody right but i want them to have the option and if you're a gay person and we just say no i mean of course because legally we agree right yeah legally and i keep making this distinction because whenever i talk about my moral perspective on things then people immediately assume that i'm a theocratic fascist and i just want to keep underscoring like my personal views on dave rubin's marriage are of no consequence to public policy in any way whatsoever right but i i agree with you on that and i don't think it should be a part of public policy and i think people should absolutely be allowed to marry and divorce and do whatever the [ __ ] they want to do no matter who it is but why do you care like as a person who's a rational thinker it's pretty clear that people are gay and i don't really think that this is a decision they make in term in terms of like i'm going to make a clear choice to defy god and be gay i think they're just gay well again i think that's a conflict because it's everyone it's a conflation of identity and drive with activity which is something that religion fundamentally reject okay right so religion fundamentally rejects the idea that you are driven to do something therefore it is your identity therefore you get to participate in a behavior that's it that's a chain of thinking that religion so in religion if a man is gay in your religion if a man is gay and they're in love with another man they should just squash those thoughts and find a woman well ideally they would be honest with the woman they marry so they're not like messing up one they would want to ideally ideally you would still get married and have children in a heterosexual relationship if you're not up to that then you wouldn't get married at all too when you describe this to a gay man they will tell you imagine ben shapiro if someone said to you you should stop being with your beautiful wife and you need to now marry a man because this is what god wants you to do so you're going to have to stoop this man and he's going to stoop you and because this is how the rules are set up yeah so far this sounds pretty terrible right well this is how it sounds to gay folks when you're telling them they have to find a woman and like i like one i'm not saying you have to find a woman i'm saying that's kind of well i'm saying you can't do x right i'm not saying you must say you can't but by whose determination if you decide to participate in this religion right then there is a buy-in to the precepts of the religion and the buy-in is the body can't be gay well no the buy-in is that you can have whatever sexual orientation you please but there's certain activity you can't participate in so you can be gay but you can have gay sex correct that's that by the way that's what the bible i mean if we want to go direct to the text of the bible it's what the bible actually says right i mean even the parts of the bible that people really hate those parts say that a man shall not lie with a man it doesn't say a man can't be attracted to another man that's old testament right yeah that's right that's our stuff right new testament that it gets a little harsher in the new testament in some places romans correct yeah but in any case you know again when it comes to this is what i'm puzzled by is the idea that this is a unique area of human behavior that religion is supposed to treat differently meaning religion treats virtually every human activity like this sin is a failure to abide by a covenant right that's that's the definition of sin right when when you commit a sin in judaism and aveira in judaism what you are doing is failing to do a mitzvah which is a commandment you're violating a commandment well there are lots of commandments that go directly against what people are driven to do just because the drive is stronger does not make it morally more morally non-culpable to violate that commandment so when people pick this one out and they say well this one is particularly intolerant for example i don't see why it's more particularly intolerant than saying to a man that you have to marry one woman or saying to a jew that you are not allowed to eat this stuff or like it's it may be harder i think there's any question it's harder to abide by those commandments but it is well within religious tradition like literally every religious tradition that there's a bunch of stuff you are driven to do that you can now again you don't have to agree with my program i'm not trying to convert you this is one of nice things about my religion i don't give a crap whether people are jewish or not like we we actively discourage converts but if you're going to proclaim that you are you know abiding by traditional judaism this is the buy-in right there's lots of buy-in you have to wear a funny hat sometimes you have to go to shula on saturdays you have to keep shabbat like there's there's a lot of buy-in and as long as i'm not bothering anybody else i frankly don't see what business it is of legitimately anybody's what i think about personal relationships i'm not imposing my view on anybody else well um i i do acknowledge that out of all the religions judaism probably makes it the the most obvious they don't give a [ __ ] what you do go ahead do your thing like they're not trying to proselytize you're doing your business my uncle converted and uh when he convert it was a grind man he had to learn a lot of [ __ ] like three years of a grind a long time yeah for sure it's a long time so that was the religious perspective on the secular perspective when it comes to valuing traditional marriage over over same-sex marriage that's a very simple calculation which is one type of marriage produces traditional children it produces children in the traditional biological way and then you have both parents in the house to take care of the kid right that's the value of marriage and i fully acknowledge that when the value of marriage shifted from it's about production and rearing of children to it's two people who love each other the case for same-sex marriage against same-sex marriage went completely out the window right so you are just sticking to your rigid ideology in terms of like what you believe to be a sin and not believed to be a sin based on your religion based on this very strict moral fiber that this religion is operating in a religious context meaning it applies to me it applies to my family it doesn't apply to you right but is there any room for growth in that when people have a better understanding about biology like it's so once if it was proven if there's proven like oh this is why a person develops blue eyes this is why a person is gay this is why there's nothing wrong with it it's just a very no it's red hair it's freckles it's gay it's strange you can tell me that homosexual orientation is 100 biologically driven and i will almost completely agree with that i think that there are some cases where it's not but those are rare but this is particularly true by the way the research tends to show that there's more sexual fluidity among females than males males it tends to be either heterosexual or homosexual that research is all done by dudes who want their wives to hook up with chicks but keep going don't let me stop you but hey let me just show you the but paperwork wrong but again that it it's it's a question that i've always found actually not particularly interesting simply because it doesn't take into account the world view generally which is that a biological drive does not equal excuse for behaving in a certain way but but this that's where it brings me back to this like is it possible that these laws in this religion were written when they're what i mean who do you think wrote the stuff do you think people wrote the stuff or do you think god wrote this i think either way even if it were i mean because i am a an orthodox jew i believe that at the very least it's god inspired and god written right but even if i believed on a secular level that human beings wrote that stuff so i think that people 3000 years ago had never seen a gay person before like the very reason to have a commandment is because certain people in your community are behaving in a particular way presumably right there's no commandment not to take your head and shove it into meat grinder well this is also the argument against pork it's because they didn't understand trichinosis they understand you have to cook the meat to 145 degrees and pork parasites which are very dangerous for people so i'm not a huge fan of naturalistic explanations for religion do you think that's a good one though for pork i mean i don't know like i think you could make an argument maybe that kid just died in india and there was horrific x-rays of his head he had uh parasites from pork that had gotten into his body and they had nested in his brain started developing all these cysts inside of his head and they couldn't do anything about it because it was so deep in his head that if they gave him the anti um you know anti-parasitic uh medication it would cause swelling of the brain and they were like it was it was so how are you feeling so far gone did you tell the story it's actually pig [ __ ] apparently the people accidentally coming in contact with pig [ __ ] produces this particular type of parasite yeah that's not true it's more rare but but trichinosis was pretty common again their attempts to sort of paint back into the bible certain rationalistic explanations like doesn't that make sense though um i i think why else would you would it be bad to eat pigs like jesus loves pigs is that what's going on uh well i i think that the the reversal of the kosher laws in the new testament you know from from a jewish point of view or we don't believe in the divinity of christ i think that there he can make an argument that the the gospels which were written he was just a prophet significant no no no we don't even believe he's a prophet what do you think he was what do you guys i mean what i what do i think he was historically i think he was a jew who tried to lead a revolt against the romans and got killed for his trouble just like a lot of other jews at that time who were crucified for trying to lead revolts against the roman and got killed for their trouble so he became legend in story and it became a bigger and bigger deal as time was yeah he had a group of followers and then that gradually grew and then do you think that was resurrected no that's not that's not a jewish belief okay i just want to check yeah no we're not into yeah you've got moses splitting the sea and all that what do you think happened there what do i think happened there yeah well i'll go with maimonides explanation that there was i mean it says in the bible there was a strong east wind so there's a naturalistic explanation for a physical phenomenon that makes sense i mean that's so that's what my monitors is constantly trying to do is read nature back into the bible um yeah that that is the problem with these texts right is that you're trying to decipher translations from original texts which are written in ancient hebrew thousands of years ago and were told in an oral tradition for longer than that right i mean this is this is where you know my my book which i always hesitate to pitch my own stuff because it sounds gauche pitch away but the new book the right side of history number one new york times best-selling non-fiction book wait a minute you got number one in the new york times best-selling really yeah we sold enough that we knocked michelle obama out of the number one slot for a week so that's nice is there a protest uh well no protests yet but suffices to say the new york times book reviewer didn't like it but i'm not super shocked by that but the the basic contention that i make is that judeo-christian values on the one hand and then human reason on the other greek reason really that that tradition is attention and that that tension is where western civilization lives that basically civilization is a suspension bridge it takes certain fundamental precepts of judeo-christian values on the one hand and then takes greek reason and they're pulling against each other and sometimes reason feels like it's going to dominate religion and sometimes it feels like religion is going to dominate reason but in the best of all available worlds you have a bridge that is that is capable of building upon that where you can actually have a functional civilization and if you lose reason in the name of theocracy then you end up with tyrannical theocracy and if you lose religion in the name of reason you end up in some pretty dark places because human beings don't have a very good track record of creating their own purpose creating their own meaning creating their own systems we tend to get very utopian very quickly and things get really ugly which is sort of the story of the particularly the first half of the 20th century so this is the benefit of sticking to the rigid ideology that's prescribed by religion is that you don't allow the human beings to keep updating it and changing it because if you do they will eventually slide into chaos well yes but there's there which is not to say there's not play in the joints right they're certainly religion has morphed over time judaism as it was practiced originally probably in many ways does not resemble judaism as practice now right in fact the talmud even says this i mean there's there's this kind of fascinating and counterintuitive section of the talmud where um moses is it's it's uh what is called the gadata which some of these stories that are just kind of put into the into the middle of the talmud where moses comes back and he's watching from on high as a bunch of rabbis in you know second century palestine uh are are talking about judaism and he's like i don't recognize any of this stuff like i brought down these books from the mountain and i do not recognize any of this stuff and and god says to him you know god says to him right i mean this is how this is morphed and moses is pleased in other words he's not judaism has always had a common law tradition where you're using reason to try and develop the ideas behind the commandments and then try and extend them or broaden them and i think that's a good thing but you have to be careful not to completely undermine fundamental roots or or get rid of basic precepts in other words you have to acknowledge there are certain fundamental truths that exist there and then there's play as far as how those are implemented does judaism have one of those pray the gay away traditions that's not that's not a thing i mean it's what do they want guys to do like what say what would you do if not not to sin but again sin is a thing that everybody does meaning that masturbation is not is not okay according to judaism i assume that a vast majority of young jewish men even the orthodox are masturbating so people sin i mean that's that's a recognition it's it's always again i think i can speak on behalf of i will audaciously speak um i have both jews and christians here i think that religious people are are told that when they say that something is a sin this means that they are looking a scant at the people who are committing the sin and that is not correct i mean what judaism and christianity say is that we are all committing sins on a fairly regular basis where we get uptight is when people start saying because i have a desire for the sin the sin is no longer a sin hmm yeah the the real problem is like what why is it a sin like who says it's a sin so again who again this these rules you were assuming are influenced by god right but clearly written by people well the this one you would say if you're a fundamentalist or at least somebody who believes in the the idea that the torah was given by god was given literally by god but again that doesn't the logic behind the rules which you know people like maimonides have tried to explicate the idea is as i said a secular this you can do without god right this part you can do without god the human sex drive was made to procreate within a stable relationship in order to progenerate and have future generations of people misuse of that sex drive in any way whether you're talking about from masturbation to homosexual activity is therefore a diminishment of the use of that drive that's the natural law case against against homosexual activity and again i will reiterate for media matters for the one millionth time i'm not in favor of any of this being encoded into american law because freedom is freedom people should be able to send how they choose so long as they're not harming anybody else right no but what about people that have had vasectomies and what about women that also judaism is not cool with vasectomies not cool with it but neither catholicism from what i understand right right yeah well i'm not a big fan of that one either that one i have more experience with but uh so if what if a man is sterile and the woman sterile are they allowed to have sex does they both know so yes because there are ancillary benefits to married couples having sex like relationship building right but that's not a generalized case against the favored view of sex right that's that's sort of like arguing that intersex people mean that there's no such thing as two separate sexes there are two separate sexes and also they're intersex people who have a condition yes right and that's the same thing here the case in favor of heterosexual sexual activity does not change based on the fact that some people can't actually participate in that what would you do if a young gay guy came to you for advice if someone said hey ben i'm an admirer of yours i love the way you think and follow your philosophies but i've got a problem i'm a young jewish man and i'm gay and i don't know what to do what would you tell them to do i mean i can't tell them to do anything would you advise would you tell them to not act out on those feelings i would say you do the best you can as a human being and from my moral perspective you try to avoid sin as best you can but everybody sins the problem is that sin though it seems to me that it was defined by people that didn't understand biology because they were dealing with humans that existed thousands of years ago again i really i have no real understanding of why people are gay i mean again i really don't think that biblical commandments are linked and religious commandments generally are linked to a view of biology meaning that you don't think so no i think that all sin is a recognition that we have drives that we are supposed to forego okay that's pretty much i mean that's that's fundamental to certainly judaism it's to christianity as well i would say islam even has has this basic precept right when i think we can agree that there's some real benefits to discipline there's real benefits to having structure and and it doesn't mean that you can't be creative it doesn't mean you can't be free and do whatever you want some of the time too but i think we can both agree that this is one of the best benefits of an ideology and one hopefully a positive ideology right and one of the things that i the reason i keep coming back to the governmental regulation point is because my view is that if your view of discipline is not my view of discipline good on you right like go do what you want to do like i've never had a conversation with dave rubin about about him being a gay guy right but you did say that you like wouldn't go to his marriage right well i said right as a religious person i can't say i i can't actively participate in something that i consider to be a sin but i would go out to dinner with dave and his husband anytime like my wife and i would do that of course we'd have him over to our house with his husband does no you don't find any contradiction between your religious perspective and your personal perspective in that regard that you would you wouldn't be there for religious reasons but that you would be there for personal reasons like if it wasn't would you go to the after party like if you wouldn't go to the wedding would you go to the after party anything that was a celebration of same-sex marriage no wow so anything but like even go to the party no i mean that's it and that's it if there's a barbecue the next day would you consider it you know it's it and again like i'm not sure why i'm not a good party person so i'm not sure why anybody would want me at their party frankly i haven't been to a party with you but i went to a dinner party with you that's true we had a great time that was a good time that's a funny picture man that is why people don't know what the [ __ ] to think about that picture that is certainly true eric and jordan you and i it's like what all the white supremacists in one place right yeah all the yeah that that is a disturbing one when they'll just just lump you in with a bunch of [ __ ] psychopaths just because it's convenient for them and it's an easy way to to diminish you that that that is a thing that i see more from the left than from the right and it's really disturbing i always thought until this click bait generation came along i always thought that especially well you know the new york times is obviously the higher standard but that you would never see that kind of [ __ ] from progressive people you would never see willful distortion of reality to define their narrative in a really disingenuous way and it happens so often now that people get called my favorite is alt-right adjacent i don't know what that means it doesn't they don't know what it means it's a new thing people are trying out they're trying it out it might go away it's it's again trying to lump everybody into one group for purposes of castigating their motives you don't have to have an argument with somebody if you assume they're a nazi so i guess if you call everybody a nazi you don't have to have an argument it is goofy but you know i think when it comes to the the gay marriage thing what people really worry about is other people trying to stop people from doing what they want to do you don't have that in you that's not you what you are doing is opposing it from your your religious beliefs right like if you want to join into my show that show has religious beliefs right and that's their business by the way they're like i can't join a church i assume i don't believe the things that people in the church believe you probably could if you donate you got to give the right amount of money well i don't believe in the jesus so there's there's the jesus yeah that's not my thing right i mean so that's i i wouldn't expect to walk into a mosque and expect them to change their their standards on religion i find it really audacious when people actually expect other people to view the world the same way that they do and then expect that they're going to be catered to in that way like i wouldn't walk into uh i wouldn't walk into a gay owned bakery and expect them to bake a cake that has versus from leviticus on it story is a weird story you know um that bacon cake story because it gets bandied about they those folks went to several bakers until someone said no this is correct yeah they were looking for a court case yeah and honestly like that's not you being a civil rights hero that's you being a jackass seriously like go to the other bakery what do these people do to you they didn't have anything to do with you they don't owe you their cake and if you want to boycott them boycott them right you want to get all your friends to say we're not going to go buy a cake from these discriminatory humans fine it's a free market have at it but this this notion that somebody owes you their services that's that's to me it's not even a freedom of religion case to me that one's a freedom of association case well i think what the the goal is is to shame a business into submission and also to to put it out there in the public eye so that people understand that this is a discrimination that does happen with gay folks well they will go somewhere and someone won't make a cake for them right you know and so i think they wanted to highlight it so if i was being very charitable and i didn't think there would be an attention [ __ ] i would say maybe that's what they're doing maybe they're just trying to highlight this very real problem that's fine but they actually like took it to the government once you start pointing a government gun at people i get real uptight so again if that's a weird one if you were just to review yeah right exactly right talk about how much you don't like them fine you know like i i may disagree with you or i may agree with you whatever that's that's fine but once you start going to the government and having the government levy like hundred thousand dollar fines on family bakeries because they because you couldn't find a gay baker in colorado supposedly like um no i'm sorry that's that's not cool and i feel the same way if i walked into a bakery they're like you're jewish we're not serving you i'd be like okay you're you're an a-hole but all right i mean it's free country and there's a bakery across the street or maybe i'll just open a bakery next door and take all your business yeah well it's unfortunate that anyone would ever think like that but should it be a law to force someone to think differently you can't it doesn't work this is this is my point is it you know pointing to my my religious beliefs oh you're a theocrat and i keep coming back to i'm not though like i don't want to force my beliefs on anybody right we'll just have those those are my beliefs so leave me alone and those are your beliefs so leave you alone and if we can't have a system where we acknowledge that those beliefs can coexist and we can still have conversations with each other or be friends it's gonna be real hard to have a society when you told dave rubin that you wouldn't go to his wedding did he get butt hurt no pun intended no he wasn't upset about it no no because because dave and i uh we're friends he knows that i have no anger or upset about him doing i would whatever what the [ __ ] ben come on man i don't know i'm not a friends person so i don't have any friends i mean i have friends but they're it's like very close friends and then acquaintances i tend to keep a pretty close social circle that's smart you have so much time in this life that that's pretty much how i feel yeah like if you're the kind of person where it feels like a true obligation for me to drive you to the airport oh not a thing man i'm not driving you in the airport correct they're legitimate correct they're people who make money off of you driving to the airport if you're trying to do that this is this is exactly correct that those people but that that kind of went away for the most part so if you find someone who's still asking for a ride at the airport that's a greedy [ __ ] at this point greedy [ __ ] you know 30 bucks on the uber yeah it's like your wife or your girlfriend and she wants to talk to you when you drop her off at the airport that's totally cool right well that's understandable this is well but that's what i mean by my circle of friendship like somebody where i'm in the car with them for half an hour and it doesn't feel like an obligation yeah yeah you have a nice conversation that's fine but um i value community and i i value i value people talking and trying to understand each other and i i've seen so much conflict that's unnecessary because i see so much conflict that's rooted in people not communicating and instead of communicating and i think this is one of the things that i'm most nervous about with all this de-platforming and censoring people and the silencing of people on the right and it's not that i agree with these people it's that i see how this is just going to shore up these two sides and it's going to make it a much more difficult atmosphere for communication for real understanding and kind of coming to agreements on things and and recognizing the things that we all all good people seem to agree you could try you should try to help each other you should be kind to each other you should work hard you should have good morals and ethics you shouldn't steal you shouldn't take from people who shouldn't lie you shouldn't try to cheat the government you shouldn't try to cheat people right just be a good [ __ ] person and that this this transcends religious ideologies it transcends political leanings it really does it should and we can have a truly diverse community truly diverse not forced diversity diverse meanings some people are progressive some people are conservative some people are libertarian you can joke with each other we can all get along together and disagree with things just not be [ __ ] hateful towards each other this is possible but it it becomes less possible when people feel like they're being silenced or censored this is totally right and it's also true that when you when you castigate somebody is morally unequal what you're really doing is you're giving an excuse to get into their [ __ ] yeah i mean like this is what's really happening here like if i had a slogan beyond the facts don't care about your feelings stuff it would just leave me alone yeah right don't get into my [ __ ] like i'm not bothering you so why are you bothering me and if i have a belief system that's different than yours then so the hell what as long as i'm not bothering you what difference does it make to you how i feel about things the only thing about the gay thing is that it's not you you have a belief about things that's not you but i have lots of beliefs about things that are not me right but they're people that aren't hurting each other but it's so what i mean i can believe that people who aren't hurting each other like i'm not a fan of prostitution so like so i'm not a fan of people here's some somebody not prostitution is clearly more of a choice than i think gay people are okay but i'm right but you're coming back to the same moral distinction which i've repeated a few times which is that i'm not a believer that a natural desire to do something therefore makes an activity okay but that's but that's a view that has no externalities my view has no externality so in the same way listen i have beliefs about people who eat too much and get obese because they eat too much i think it's a bad thing to do i don't think it's my business you want to do it your problem like you wanna you wanna eff up your life that's what freedom is called right isn't it one of the seven deadly sins gluttony yeah again a christian thing but yeah i think that but it's but yes i mean and i have lots of beliefs about lots of things that people do and by the way so to you things that don't affect you right i mean this is we all do but as long as i'm not forcing that on you because there are no externalities to your behavior i don't see why it bothers you like they're legitimately i would assume tens of millions of people in this country who believe that when i die i will go to hell right i don't i don't believe in jesus and so there are a lot of people who believe i don't believe in jesus therefore i am bound for hell that does not bother me one iota because no one's bothering me so what do i care right i don't understand why everyone doesn't take this view if i'm not legitimately bothering you why should why should you care what i think like this is this is what would be puzzling me if somebody came to me and they wanted my opinion on something because they valued my opinion that much i'd give my opinion but it's a you don't have to care about my opinion i think when it comes to the gay thing what people are looking for is to people for other folks to be accepting of who they are and i think for a lot of these gay folks that have been in the closet their whole life that's the big things they're always worried about someone treating them differently or someone diminishing them because they're gay then when they hear someone like you say that you think it's a sin and that you shouldn't act on your biology even though you have these urges that you should instead find a woman they feel the same pangs of rejection and i get that i i for sure get that but the the confluence between activity and identity is actually kind of a dangerous one meaning that the you know the the idea that if i disapprove of an activity in which you engage that i disapprove of you right i disapprove of lots of activities that in which lots of people engage including most members of my family including my children a lot of the time that does not mean i disapprove of them as a human being or that i'm i'm saying they're lesser as a human being right that like we all interact with people this way like you disapprove of my view on this i i don't get the feeling you disapprove of me as a human being no i don't right i practice a religion you obviously think my religion is [ __ ] but that's okay i don't care like why i don't think it's [ __ ] i wouldn't say i think it's [ __ ] what do you think you think like god spoke to somebody in the mountains [ __ ] right well i don't even know if that's [ __ ] what i do know is that it's a historical interpretation of stories that were as much as they could or as little as they wanted to be accurately defined and written down and then passed on from generation to church okay so let me give you an example you think the fact that i won't eat pork is kind of stupid no i don't think it's stupid [ __ ] first of all i think pigs are intelligent i wish they weren't wild i have a deep affinity to pigs example here i love them but i also kill them when i eat them i mean i kill wild pigs let me be broader about this you're not an orthodox jew so i assume there are things about the things that i do well but i there are certain things of which i believe or practice that you that you probably disapprove or you you don't think they're the smartest or you think that they're or i might not think it's the smartest but as i've gotten older and hopefully wiser i give a [ __ ] less about why you do what you do but whether or not the benefits seem to be worth if the juice is worth the squeeze right and in your case i think the juice is worth the squeeze i think you're a very successful person you're very reasonable you're very intelligent you're an outstanding debater and i enjoy talking to you and listening to you on youtube um i think part of that is because of the fact that you're religion right of your religious i think it's cross-training i think in a lot of ways it's like if you lift weights for jiu-jitsu it makes you stronger it'll make your jiu-jitsu better as long as you keep training i think your discipline from your religion has there's psychological benefits to it right there's total benefits to it there's it's a reason no i totally get all that i guess the point is that we're different people so yeah there's a certain activity in which i'm engaged that you probably think well that's i wouldn't do that it's kind of dumb and that's okay but i wouldn't though i i would but i wouldn't i wouldn't i don't want to do it i don't want to wear a yarmulke but i get it i understand why you could do it hard to keep it on your head what what did bald dudes do they put up a piece double stick tape there not much not allowed to no you can you totally can but that seems painful and uncomfortable yeah um the point is that in living in a society we all are constantly disapproving of each other right politics is just us disapproving of each other all the time and so long as we're not forcing that on anybody else i really don't see the problem and i think everybody should sort of get over it like if i don't approve of your personal behavior welcome to the club i disapprove of 99 of people's personal behavior including my own half that do you how how often do you debate people on the merits of religion or the merits of your belief system um you know not not super frequently but not infrequently i mean like i mentioned that i've had this conversation with sam a couple of different times in public well he's he's so rabid as an atheist but yet you guys he's more religious sam is more religious than i am sam is more of a religious atheist than i am like i'll admit questions about my own religion sam is very very convinced of his of his correctness and his viewpoint sam sam's a religious dude he's a fascinating guy he is i i like him a lot and michael shermer i've had on my show to talk about religion and and skepticism and all that i'm not shy about talking about it i just sometimes i find that it's it's kind of a dead end because sometimes it just turns into i believe in god and then the person's like i don't believe in god and it's like well okay fine now can we talk about the stuff we think are the what are the fundamental building blocks upon which you can base a society or base of politics and if we agree on those then you know the god stuff i think god is a better base for those fundamental policies and and and belief systems i think free speech individualism democracy these are based on a simple verse in genesis that human beings are made in god's image i think that that's a logical leap this is the case i've made it to sam i i don't think that you can actually get to human beings are a benestable inestimable value from scientific materialism if you believe that human beings are effectively just animals then i don't know why they would be of infinite value nor why i should respect somebody's belief system simply because they're human i don't respect animals and if we're just another animal i there's no there's nothing that necessitates that logical line in fact for most of human history it was not the logical line of thinking it was if you're a member of my tribe then we like you and if you're not a member of my tribe then we get to kill you but is that a logical comparison like is isn't there a difference between single-celled organisms and the way a primate interacts with its environment i mean yes but i'm not sure why that would indicate any sort of greater existential value it's not necessarily a greater existential value but as we were talking about the value of community and the value of uh having a group of people that you care about that this is this is a core component of being human this is a it's a core component of this understanding mind but that's that's rational intelligent interfacing with the universe in a way that no other animal is capable of i'm not saying you can't get to the point where sam agrees with me i'm saying that i think it's less convincing than sam thinks it is meaning there's an alternative line of thought that says okay you're right social fabric is great you know where that social fabric is particularly awesome among me and my friends yeah i know it ain't that great those guys over there let's go kill them and take their [ __ ] right like that that was pretty much how humanity works for a very very long time and the simple and effective idea that the reason that human beings are of value is because we are more than just our material bodies that there's something that is us that is of inestimable value that's a religious concept and it has a lot of weight now if sam wants to get to the same place and we can build a political conversation from there that's fine my real argument with sam is sam and i go down to the bottom of the iceberg about 90 percent of the way we have the same fundamental values about free speech diversity of opinion about i think to mostly an extent free markets uh you know i think that we agree on a lot of these fundamental principles he then says that he gets those from pure reason i have serious questions about whether pure reason necessitates those conclusions he tends to think that those are the only conclusions a reasonable person could come to if you properly apply your reason i don't think that's right what do you think is happening there what's the mechanism i think that the mechanism is that we are common what i said to sam uh when we were debating this in san francisco is it's real weird he's a materialist a scientific materialist atheist who is sitting across the stage from me a religious jew we agree on 95 of our values so how and his answer was well you know here's where i've studied i've studied buddhism i've studied these philosophies and i've studied science and it's all right i haven't studied a lot of those things but we have the same value so why it seems to me a better historical explanation is that we have grown we grew up 10 miles from each other in los angeles after 3 000 years of common history of judeo-christian development balanced with reason in the west like location has something to do with this and that location was rooted in commonality of interest and philosophy so i i'm less it's it's there's a weird nexus and i don't want to get too kind of deep in the weeds here there's a weird kind of nexus on what truth is uh but where you've heard sam and jordan peterson debate this that was insane it was it's wild right um and the truth is i'm closer to sam than jordan on this i'm closer to jordan than sam when it comes to the value of religion and i'm closer to sam than jordan when it comes to objective truth sam believes that there is such a thing as objective truth jordan tends to be more of a pragmatist he tends to believe that truth is sort of what is useful to a certain extent um and my i agree with sam but i'm not sure how he gets to objective truth from a scientific materialist world view why is there objective truth as opposed to what you think is what you think being evolutionarily beneficial how do you get from that too it's a universal principle that is objectively true it's it's a bit of a jump well it depends on what the concept is right like what are you talking about in terms of i'm talking about truth i'm talking about anything that sam says is true what makes it true as opposed to just evolutionarily beneficial for us to think so meaning what evolution does is it creates a series of thoughts in our mind presumably if you're a materialist that are beneficial to your preservation and promulgation of the species they're not actually true so if it's beneficial this is sam's explanation for the prevalence of religion for example he'll say religion isn't true but evolutionary biology sort of drives people toward religion so you can have group bonds that are beyond 150 people or whatever so why doesn't that apply to math why is it the two and two how do you know that two and two actually equals four as opposed to it is evolutionary been evolutionarily beneficial for you to believe that two plus two equals four so sam believes there's an objective truth somewhere out there the two plus two equals four i don't know what evolution has to do with that sort of stuff so what do you think is happening that he disagrees with so i think that what is happening is that human beings were placed in an orderly universe through the processes of biology and have a unique capacity to understand that universe because we are made in the image of god this is where i think that the religious viewpoint diverges pretty strongly from from sam's but you believe in evolution yes you believe that evolution was a process that was created by god to formulate human beings yes interesting yeah i mean that's that's the nice thing about being religious you can attribute most most everything to god is it's not well here's the thing it's not that implausible if if there was some sort of a grand plan there would be no regard for like oh we got to get a rush on this right making the evolutionary being you know we're going to you know accelerate the process there's all sorts of fine-tuning arguments about how implausible it would be for just atoms roaming around the universe randomly to end with with human creation you know the the alternative explanation seemed no no more no less implausible to me like the multiple universes theory plausible but we have no way to prove it because we can't get to those multiple universes so how is that testable right or the or the now popular theory that we're living in an ai simulation not sure how that's more testable than god not sure how it's more testable that aliens put us here like how's any of this why is that more testable or more plausible than the idea that there is a force behind that which we see that has mined well let's let's just break this down slowly there's obviously something that's happening there's obviously something that went from the big bang to planet earth in 2019 with cellular communication and satellite dishes and obviously something happened something pretty radical why is it happening because of random events that sort of coincide with biology and technology and all these things come to fruition to you and i standing across from each other talking on this podcast in front of millions of people or is this is this just how things go is things compete constantly try to get better and then in this gigantic ecosystem of all these things competing and trying to get better one super successful organism us rises above and continues right and continues and by far passes all these other creatures below it and moves we in our estimation i mean if you if you really believe in evolution you can't think we're done right it's got to be moving towards some better product that keeps going until it creates so this is why i say that sam is more religious than i am i think that there's a plausible argument for atheism i just don't think that there is a plausible argument for sam's moral vision of atheism meaning that what what sam tends to do is like for example you and i have talked a lot on on this particular podcast about the value of self-betterment and making decisions and being responsible for those decisions how does that work in an area where you don't have free will so sam actively says we do not have free will yeah that's a weird conversation it is it is a weird conversation and sort of a self-defeating one sam suggests when it comes to the scientific method that we are using science to find out truths about the universe and we're using reasons sam's very big unreason i also am vague on reason but i don't know how sam is defining reason as opposed to just an evolutionarily beneficial firing of neurons meaning that that's what we are right we're balls of meat wandering purposeless through the universe and then he'll talk about making our own meaning or seeking human human um prosperity or uh i'm flourishing is the word he likes to use these are all very active verbs right this is this is an active vision of man in the universe right and i'm not sure how that flows from where a ball of meat that evolved from another ball of meat that evolved eventually if you go back far enough from non-balls of meat without any without any free will without any capacity to choose i don't i don't know how you build a civilization on that well there's two different conversations here one is determination or determinism rather whether or not you have free will or whether or not your life and your actions are being dictated by the past by your biology by your learned experiences by external pressures what is causing this very clear decision that you make is this free will are you deciding i'm going to get my [ __ ] together or are all the factors around you pushing you and funneling you into this this direction that you it's unavoidable to you right and that you are not a product of free will you're just a product of a lot of different factors right or is it both is it that you are the product of your environment and your life experiences and you also have free will right and i'm i'm in the latter group i think as well i think we also experience great benefit from making positive choices and then experiencing like whenever you meet someone has lost a lot of weight one of the things they have is this [ __ ] tremendous feeling of accomplishment you know like yeah i lost 100 pounds like holy [ __ ] man a hundred pounds right like they get this positive feedback from it there's real good in making good choices and when people decide to get their [ __ ] together and make a good choice they're rewarded the question is are you doing that because of determinism or are you doing that because of free will or are you doing that because of a combination of both of those things and can you fuel that free will purposely through like outwardly seeking things that are motivational or things that are educational things that allow you to kind of remap the way you process reality right which can be extremely beneficial and can aid in you taking steps towards exercising your free will right well and this is why i think that in the end and right but but i think that's a pretty fundamental question and i think that that's why in the end i'm religious and i'm not sure why sam isn't because he agrees with the same premises right he'll he'll talk about self-betterment and decisions that you can make and then he'll write a full book about why freewill doesn't exist and i just don't understand how those two things can co-exist yes it's uh well i think it's a thought experiment first of all i think the whole determinism thing is a thought experiment because there's really no way to determine right it's like you can you have to argue though for sure right i mean like there's just no way to act otherwise um but i i guess i've absolutely act as if i have free will right and we all do and i get angry at myself when i [ __ ] things up i don't say well it's just determinism man right no that doesn't get you in and but maybe it's determinism that has put me in this position where i'm the kind of guy that gets upset if i [ __ ] things up right i don't know man i don't know but i don't know if you know either that's my my take on all these things when people get really rigid with their ideologies yeah like okay i want to hear it out i want to hear the whole thing you know i want to hear it all i'm not sure if you know i think there's a i think there's no i think there's a lot that i don't know but i think that there's more plausible and less plausible i agree um this is where i think people misunderstand you you have your beliefs but you're not a god that imposes them on people and i think we need to be way more reasonable in terms of the way we address people's beliefs uh i've been guilty of this in the past i'm sure many people have everyone has but i think it's a core component to a healthy community is to allow people to have their own beliefs and you know who knows man maybe your beliefs on gay people will adjust and move over time as you get older and move into a gay neighborhood and i don't know again it's not it look dude it's not it's not about tolerance i understand folks i know it's a lot of interesting things i mean i don't yeah it's it it's it's a difference between understanding people uh as as whole people and then saying that i don't like some of the things that they do and simply saying the making the assumption that because i don't like some of the things that you do we can't be friends or i disapprove of you as an entire human being which i think is not true it's a good belief system to have if you're straight and then you go look got it locked down don't need to worry about that i got a prop but if you were gay god damn there'll be a pain in there yeah absolutely i think it would be annoying if you just always wanted to bang dudes and everyone's saying no you're like nobody said nobody said religion's easy man it's uh what's the value in it though if you're if you're a giant homo all right and all you want to do is go to gay discos and party your ass off that's what you enjoy some people like golf okay some people some people like parasailing some dudes just wanna [ __ ] get it on man they wanna dress up like the village people and go have a [ __ ] party that's why santa monica blvd are such a hot spot they find each other you know do whatever you want to do honestly do whatever you want to do don't don't ask me to think that you know don't ask me to like put my stamp of of moral approval on i understand that's what you want to do like it's a free country this is this should be a free country not just it is a free country it should be a free country it should not be my job to police your personal behavior right right right like you doesn't mean i have to approve it on a personal level right but i'm i'm a jerk if i want to impose my belief system on on your personal behavior that affects no one else i mean that's the definition of being and i'm a hypocrite if i continue to berate you about your your opinion on gay folks why do i give a [ __ ] what your opinion is correct because you are a reasonable person and you do you're very polite and you're even friends with dave rubin so there you go this guy there's gotta be something there it's um it's a strange thing though this uh this need that people have for everyone to think the way they think and i understand the need to reinforce your own thoughts and and and argue them and try to figure out a way to debate that the other person's perspective is incorrect and your perspective is correct i understand all these inclinations that people have but uh i i think that they conflate that with bigotry right you know and i don't exactly i don't think you're a bigot i don't agree with you about gay folks but that's one of the few the marijuana things just i just don't think you have any experience in it right and as far as the as far as disagreeing i i think that we probably don't disagree on on gay folks i think we disagree on identity and gay activity and all the rest of it i mean as human beings yeah these are human beings i know many gay people who i think are significantly better human beings than religious people that i know yeah yeah i'm glad you said that yeah i think um there's in a way i don't have a defined religion but in a way i have some pretty rigid ideas that i have in my head about behavior and ethics and morals and how you treat people care about those those are like they're pretty rigid and i think one of the things that religion does is it allows you to have this sort of ethical framework sort of like um you know what is it called scaffolding like when you're building like it allows you to develop a a more disciplined life and it just shows you this is good and this is bad and it's clear and there's there's most different for the most part it's good for the most part these are these are good patterns to follow and i think that i've most certainly sort of adopted my own somewhere along the line i think we all do yeah i mean honestly a value system effectively is usually a form of religion right so when you're saying that sam is religious he's a religious asian atheist yeah you're not being inaccurate there's a lot of folks do that we we do develop these sort of principles that we fought we're not just free willy-nilly just doing whatever we want all day long no one does that and the reason i say it is sort of facetiously but i think that we all make fundamental assumptions about the nature of human life and we have to recognize that those are assumptions you can't it's it's not reason all the way down yeah that because that tends to actually become even more inflexible than it's i'm the only reasonable person in the room my reasons are the only ones that matter and so it's my reasons all the way down acknowledge that we're all making some assumptions and then we can discuss whether those assumptions are worthwhile or not yeah the thing that when it comes with religion in defining whether or not other people's behavior is sinful where it doesn't involve you that's where a lot of folks start thinking that maybe these ideas are bigoted right but it does involve me meaning that well i'm enjoying every sin that i say is a sin that enjoins me it's just that i may not have a desire for that particular sin meaning i'm not i'm not holding people to a different standard than i hold myself nor am i saying that i never sin right but you know that you have different biological desires than they do you kind of acknowledge that right of course that's true yeah of course that's true by the same token i assume that a gay guy doesn't have the desire to strip a thousand women which most straight guys do yeah why do you think if if god has a plan why do you think he would create gay people i mean i think that god creates first of all i don't think that i'm in a position to evaluate god's plan but i wish i was but if you like god's if if i had to guess god creates people with all sorts of different challenges and those challenges span the spectrum i mean i i'm not so god sneaks it up on you hey man i know this is gonna be [ __ ] up but you're gonna just like dudes like forget about women you're going to like dudes but i want you to ignore that i don't want you to listen to my old book i don't know why god gives people drives i don't know why god gives kids cancer i don't know a lot of things about god wish i did it would make my life a lot easier so you think that that is a challenge akin to any other challenge that a human being might face in this life that the challenge of but a lot harder yeah a lot more difficult and a lot more straining and a lot yeah of course you think there's value in following that challenge and not acting on gay urges i think that i think there can be and if you're having sex with a woman plug your nose go and make a face because you're disgusting did you create it did you create a baby out of that did that is that baby like a part of your life now that is it that is deep and meaningful maybe what about a lot in the past there are a lot of gay guys having kids what about people saying living their truth i'm living my truth ben shapiro well i mean as a general rule living my truth is a bunch of crap like there's there's living your opinion which is fine like live your opinion how you want again that gets back to do what you want as long as it's not bothering me living my truth is a different thing that's one of those social media creations like living my truth such that that's just [ __ ] i'm sorry living my truth is [ __ ] like it's it's there's no such thing as your truth there's the truth and then there's your opinion and we do have for purposes of conversation at the very least it's deeply irritating when people say living my truth because then it's like i disagree with you and then like well you're you're disavowing me as a human being no i just disagree like you can be you you can do what you want like you do whatever man calm down like i'm how did i become the most lucy goosey libertarian lean back guy in the world in the society how is this possible the most uptight person i know how is this a thing well you know as well as i do that the further you go left you you you you reach the same sort of zealotry that you do when you go all the way right this is correct you meet these crazy people that are just completely connected to their idea of being correct and they take the most rigid stance on all these issues on the left side or on the right side and it's so goddamn common it's a pattern of human behavior it's also it's it's also incredibly boring yes i mean there's just nothing to discuss with yeah i agree and that's one of the reasons why it's so disgusting when people mislabel people like so was an article that connected me with richard spencer like what in the [ __ ] like that is such a disingenuous thing to do and they know what they're doing they're either trying to get me to react to it and talk about it and get more clicks but it's horseshit like anybody who but if you are locked into that far left ideology as far left as you can go and it's one of the problems with ideologies that have these extremists is that you believe in a percentage of the things these people say but then they go way too far with it but you're connected with them because you're a part of that even though you don't have a a similar notion stephen pinker got brow beaten over suggesting that failure to ask questions and give plausible answers gives excuse me credence to the alt-right that if you do a so he did a whole speech where he said listen there are lots of conversations about iq and race and the alt-right loves these conversations because then they then they suggest wrongly that black people are inherently unfit and white people are more fit and all that kind of stuff and he says there are great ways to explain how much of iq is is cultural how much can be changed how much is genetic how much that actually matters in terms of real life outcomes we can do all those things but when you say don't ask the question stop asking the question then you make people google and the only thing that they will google and find are answers that are given by people who are actually alt-right right and he got ripped as alt-right for this yeah his entire argument was don't allow people to push into alt-right answers by failing to give them proper responses or by throwing them out the window and then people like well you're all right now because you're saying that that people should be able to ask questions well it's almost like it's just like it's the exact same version as people in the religious community where it's like you know i used to go to sunday school and then i asked you many questions and they kicked me out right that's that's not how religion's supposed to work that's not how reason is supposed to work that's not how any of this is supposed to work right and there's also when when you're investigating anything any measurable thing when you find a number whatever it is like these people like asian folks are better at mathematics european folks are better at this and like what is what's the reason for that like what what's let's find out is it cultural is it biological is it something can we learn about how human beings evolved and adapted why are nigerians so smart like there's so many nigerians that come to this country they thrive they thrive in business they're extremely motivated they're extremely disciplined it's like it's like almost like korean folks why do koreans like why are they so hard-working why do they strive and obviously these are big generalizations but what is it about italians what what makes them wear gold chains and love mafia movies like what is it those are my people like what the what the [ __ ] why are they all talk like that like what is that what causes a a any sort of ethnic group to turn out the way they turned out what are so many european jews nobel prize winners right what the [ __ ] is going on over there and also like what is the impact of the measurable on how we live our lives like how much should this stuff matter is this is this a result of discrimination or is this a result of something else is it true that when you group any group of people together racially or non-racially there will be disparities between those two groups of people this is just true statistically like but not asking those questions and then saying shut down the questions what that actually does is it leads people to only get the answers to the questions from the people who don't know what they're talking about in many cases and who are giving convenient easy and self-flattering answers about the nature of of themselves the fear is it being used by racists to reinforce their positions right but what you find out is that they'll do this superior race right they'll just and they'll do that anyway like one of the funniest things about white supremacists is they're so [ __ ] stupid i mean pardon the language like the the white supremacists are invariably not the nobel prize winners it's it's you go to a white supremacist compound you're not looking at a bunch of people who are curing cancer like these people piss me off and this is and now and i'll say oh that won't matter the media will label me out right tomorrow because that's where this goes well the disingenuous media that's being less and less taken seriously taking less laws seriously it's it seems to me that that trend which is a common trend that's existed for the last few years of these click-baity [ __ ] articles and mislabeling people it's going to go away because your your perspective is not going to be appreciated it's not going to be respected if you if you're obviously making disingenuous statements like that and i think we're in this weird position where it's very difficult to find real journalism and real objective takes on things that aren't flavored by their ideology and everybody's trying to shape everybody and they feel like it's their obligation they feel there's many people that write things that feel like it's their obligation to change your perspective on national subjects and things that are important to us it's not their obligation to just report what's going on but also their obligation to flavor things in a way that will make one side look favorable to the other yeah well i'm i'm very much in favor of journalists revealing their biases i think that the greatest lie in media is that objective journalism is a thing so i'm a conservative you want to go to my site you'll get a conservative spin on the news that's the way it's going to work and guess what cnn's liberal and they are going to give you the liberal spin on the news and that's just the way this is going to work did you see the video when the mueller report came out they look like somebody got killed oh my god that is crazy it was the day yeah exit yeah shouldn't you be happy if if you guys believed in mueller everybody was like mueller is the [ __ ] man he's gonna go get trump this guy is methodical he's precisely vote of candles with his face on them that they could like burn they were pumped yeah and then he came out and he was like well no collusion everybody's like well i guess that now it's a cover-up like what wait a minute yeah maybe maybe the narrative has has trumped the actual job you were supposed to do guys well it's just so many people were so convinced and there were so many people that were making statements that in retrospect are probably like you could probably i mean i don't want to say i'm not a litigious person but if i was a guy like donald trump oh man yeah there's so many people to sue it was it was amazing i mean i remember i was on bill maher's show and we were supposed to talk about free speech stuff and like five minutes before and he's like let's talk about russia his producer came in let's talk about russia and i was like okay fine so we get on the producer said that yeah this is like right before they switch to talk goofy or tv shows so they just tell you what you have to talk about i don't know some guy comes in with a clipboard yeah it was it was a little bit strange and we got on stage and he's talking about trump russia collusion and i said what i've always said which is i'll wait for the evidence to come out and then i will make a decision as to whether trump russia collusion was a thing and bill maher was radical i know and bill maher goes you don't you don't believe it was a thing and i was like well i don't see any evidence yet that it was a thing like i see some evidence of attempts to collude like don jr i see some attempts of people trying to get information but i don't see evidence of like actual legal collusion and why don't we just wait like you guys keep wanting mueller to give us like let's just wait on it and mark could not believe that this was my perspective right it was like shocking to him why should why should the perspective i'm waiting for more evidence be shocking to anyone when it is obvious the evidence is not out like why is that in any way controversial it's bewildering to me well it's because people have this need to let everyone know that they're on the right side and they want you to know that they do believe in the collusion and if you disagree with that for whatever reason you must either be a right-wing person a trump supporter someone who's in denial someone who doesn't look at the evidence and you're part of the problem but the the real problem was jumping to conclusions there obviously seemed to be some attempts there's there's obviously some [ __ ] with that ira company that the internet research agency that is responsible for millions of interactions with people online where they pretended to be right different supporters yeah they caused conflict like constant conflict in regards to political opinion and that's all real that was coordinated effort to try to change people's opinions but how much that had to do with donald trump how much did he ask for first of all you got no evidence also i was always bewildered by this theory like did you watch that campaign um that was not the most well-coordinated campaign it was chaos i mean i knew everybody who's in the campaign like it was a [ __ ] show and the idea that they're sitting there but they're but when the mass comes off at night they call it vladimir putin and they put together a point-by-point plan on how they're going to swing this particular precinct in rural in rural michigan it's like what what are you are you guys high like what are you talking about like what like if you could attribute this to anything here's a good rule of thumb for politics attribute everything to stupidity unless you can prove malice the real problem and this is something that is very similar to what we were talking about earlier when you say something and you say it over and over and over again and you say it with such conviction and it becomes a giant part of your news narrative and then that something turns out to be horseshit yep you just massively empowered trump that's that's exactly right i've said for a long time that you know i'm not a big fan of trump's fake news stick because i think he applies it too broadly i think that whenever there's a bad piece of news he's like fake news and it's like well sometimes yes and sometimes no but now that you just blew a two-year narrative where he was clearly in putin's pocket how many people you think gonna listen to the nuanced view of fake news now and how many people do you think are going to actually believe trump when he says that a bad piece of news is legitimately a fake piece of news yeah it empowers him in a in a spectacular manner they made a giant mistake oh yeah and they blew they blew this one in spectacular fashion and people are still hanging in there all they had to do this is true for so many people right now all you have to do is not be crazy just stop it who was the guy that was talking about the possibility that trump has been a russian asset since like 1987 or something who the [ __ ] was that i mean andrew mccabe the former fbi director was asked whether trump was legitimately a russian asset and he's like i don't know it's like you're using the power of the institution you used to run to spread this nonsense and you got that from john brennan he got it from james clapper these are all former heads of the intelligence agencies just makes me think the intelligence agencies need to be wildly quebec if these were the heads of them i mean if like the heads of the intelligence agencies are using their platform to proclaim that they have inside information about trump that turns out to be utter nonsense i'm not sure these people should have that much power to like is that what he's saying or is he saying he doesn't know he didn't say i don't know he was saying like i have basically i expect that mueller is going to indict as a former intelligence professional i expect yeah there was a lot of that it was ugly adam schiff on the intel committee doing the same thing it's crazy now because like what do they do now like how do they rebound from this if this is something there's nothing to say once this is something you said for two years right you've seen the compilation videos oh yeah they're amazing they've done them to rap music and they're like they've they put a beat behind it have you seen it no i don't know there's some great ones some great competit these compilations of people saying possible collusion possible collusion possible yeah and this music that goes with it and then just cut to possible collusion with the russians possible russian collusion it's yeah they they blew it in a major way yeah i mean there's plenty of [ __ ] to complain about you didn't have to go with that like the idea was that he was a traitor he's a target rich environment and you decided to go to he's a russian trader well like like it's no way out or something and he's kevin costner is the last scene like what what any way he could have ever beaten hillary sorry i'm going to check my way gotta get out of here man i do a little bit yeah when do you have to leave right now like uh i wanted to ask you one more question let's see one more question what do you think about this um chelsea manning situation because i i don't know uh exactly what happened other than she's in contempt of court and so they've got her in solitary confinement now this is about testifying again i'll be honest i haven't been following it that closely i mean my understanding is that chelsea manning who okay so here's where we get comments do you call her bradley no he changed he changed his name to chelsea he is a biological male oh i can't believe i believe you're not misgendering are you dead naming as well don't no no i don't i don't detonate but unless we were talking about when he committed his crimes at which point he was actually bradley as opposed to chelsea right so if we're talking about a person who's convicted that was a male named bradley manick did you say they're talking about the formerly known as bradley if we're talking about the human being who's currently in jail that is a male who is currently known as chelsea so okay so my understanding is that brad is that chelsea manning is a refused to hand over information that he was legally bound to hand over about wikileaks and now there were complaints he was being held in solitary but that's not true apparently and that he's being mistreated i do find it weird that the same people who are complaining about donald trump coordinating with wikileaks are very upset about chelsea manning going to jail for coordinating with wikileaks you're going to need to pick one of the others wikileaks bad or is wikileaks not bad yeah what is wikileaks it's only dependent upon whether or not they're supporting the narrative that you want that's exactly right and it's right wikileaks was very good remember right exactly it was right and left by the way like there are people on the right words like julia julian assange is the worst and then 2016 happened like julian assange now there's a person i can really talk to it's like well no i'm pretty sure julian assange is uh a wikileaks good information suggests they are a russian front group and take make of that what you will end of story do you think that they became a russian front group to try to stay operative and stay safe because they were obviously being attacked by the united states government and in danger being shut down and then they've i mean he's going to be honest i really don't know enough about wikileaks to to really get into uh i don't see historical but i know that he's been trapped in that embassy for since 2012.

yeah i mean i hope that he's got some video games or something in there [ __ ] man he's been in there for like seven years now right that's a long long time that is a long time it can't go outside no sunlight pamela anderson visits every now and then he's [ __ ] man i mean it's it's a terrible place to be and i don't know if it's better than prison because it's like the stress of him never knowing when they're going to come knock down the door and pull him out of there i was like how how well does that guy sleep yeah seven years in that embassy it can't be great it's got to be awful they took his internet away right uh i think they did that's fine although to be fair wikileaks was releasing information on specific american soldiers in lines of of combat so were they yes they didn't redact any of the names that was the problem that's why people were pissed really yes because the original from chelsea manning was that he dumped all the information to wikileaks including the stuff that was unredacted and wikileaks just released it yeah that was that was the claim anyway um i don't know if that's accurate because if you find differently then let me know because i'll be happy to correct always yeah you know i'm sure you would i just don't know if it that is i don't know i don't have the information in front of me do you want to check no that'll take too much time that'll do folks you're gonna have to google this one um but so when one of the things that i was thinking when trump got into office with all this drain that swamp [ __ ] i was like i wonder if trump would be a wikileaks supporter i wonder if trump would be happy it depends if it helped him yeah sure right right and or even and snowden as well just wondering about that yeah i mean same sort of thing i mean unfortunately politics very often has little to do with principle and everything to do with convenience yeah so if it's helpful sure if not a guy like him who's always anti-deep state and talking about the the these i mean he's extremely critical yes but i do i have a feeling that once you actually sit in the big seat i think that tends to change remember obama was too yeah and then five minutes later he was droning people so like so well listen um i know you gotta get out of here so let's just wrap this up tell people about your book yeah so you can check out my book the right side of history it talks about a lot of the sort of deeper issues we're talking about judeo-christian values and reason and sort of it's it's a kind of short-form philosophical history of the west from sinai through greece and talking about all the major enlightenment philosophers some of the things we talked about on the show are in the book it's number one bestseller on the new york times nonfiction list at least at the moment congratulations man that's awesome i appreciate it that's really pretty spectacular pretty exciting um your show also ben's pure show you can get the ben shapiro show on itunes you can get it on youtube your sunday review which i did once yeah the sunday special sunday special we'll have to have you out again i would love to thank you uh thanks for being here and and your books available on amazon everywhere bench peer ladies and gentlemen that was great you