Ben Shapiro
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So again, I'm gonna quibble with the premise of the question because I think that when it comes to, for example, food insecurity, school food programs, again, you can always pour money into any program and at the margins create change. I mean, there's no doubt that pouring money onto anything will create change in a marginal way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The question is how large is the margin and how big is the movement, right? So the Delta is what I'm looking at. And so I think that the, you're, you're starting at a second order question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
which is what if we ignore what I would think are the big primary questions of education, namely family structure, value of education at home, how much you have parents who are capable or willing to help with homework. What are the incentive structures we can set up for a society that actually facilitate that? How local communities take ownership of their schools is a big one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
All of these issues we're ignoring in favor of, say, air conditioning or lunch programs. And so in a vacuum, if you say air conditioning and lunch programs, sounds great in a vacuum. In terms of prioritization of values and cost structure, are those the things that I think are going to move the needle in a major way in terms of public policy? I do not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And in fact, I think that many of them end up being disproportionate wastes of money. I mean, I've talked before pretty controversially about the fact that an enormous amount of school lunch programs are thrown out, like an enormous amount of that food ends up in the garbage can. Is there a better way to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If there is a better way to do it, then I'm perfectly willing to hear about that better way to do it. But it seems to me that one of the big flaws in the way that many people of the left approach government is what if we hit every gnat with a hammer? And my question is, what if the gnat isn't even the problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
What if there is a much bigger substructure problem that needs to be solved in order to, if you're shifting deck chairs on the Titanic, sure, you can make the Titanic slightly more balanced because the deck chairs are slightly better oriented. But the real question is the water that's gaping into the Titanic, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then they used to get married. The vast majority of people in this country with kids used to be married. The vast majority of people with kids in this country now are not married increasingly. That is obviously a societal change. Something changed. It wasn't human evolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Do you have the money- People are worse off now than they were 50, 60 years ago when the marriage rates were higher?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So in other words, people are richer now and they have more education now, and yet they're having more babies out of wedlock now because they're richer and have more education?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because we have changed the moral status of marriage in the culture, meaning that everyone, poor, rich, and in between, used to get married.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
By the way, a huge percentage of marriages in the United States used to be what they would call shotgun marriages, meaning that somebody knocked somebody up, and because they did not want the baby to be born outside of a two-parent household, they would then get married. Do we think that shotgun marriages, though, are a way to bring back equilibrium to education? Yes. Yes. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Sure. Because that is the basis for all of this, including education.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yes, it was the reasonable direction for nearly all of modern history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
People don't think that. In what way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That's weird. The entire left right now is arguing that we regress social standards by rejecting Roe versus Wade. So that's obviously not true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The notion of the arc of history constantly moves in one direction is belied by nearly all of the 20th century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the first half of the 20th century is filled with barbarism, communism, Nazism. All of that was a regression from what was happening at, for example, the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century. In what way? Nazism and communism weren't a regression from what was going on in 1905?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I consider that a regression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
A moral regression, which is what we are talking about now, moral regression. And you're suggesting that moral regression – I wouldn't term a return to traditional values a moral regression. You would. But your suggestion is that history only moves in one direction, and I'm suggesting that history does not only move in one direction. It tends to move actually – back and forth. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
First of all, what the data tend to show is that actually more highly educated people, as you were saying, tend to get married more. So the idea is that women getting an education somehow throws them off marriage. It's the opposite. Usually it's women who are not educated who are not getting married.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Those women aren't having children. Now you're shifting the topic. My topic was how to get more people married. And then you suggested that higher levels of education are delaying marriage and making it less probable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And what I'm telling you, because this is what the data suggests, is that actually as you raise up the educational ladder, people tend to be married more than they are lower down on the educational ladder. If you're a high school graduate, you're less likely to be married than if you're a postdoc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's another confound there. I mean, the confound is that people in stable marriages tend to be the children of stable marriages. And there's only one way to break that cycle, which is to create a stable marriage. And that is something that is in everyone's hands. Again, this notion that it is somehow an unbreakable, unshatterable barrier to get married and have kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I don't understand where this is coming from. Why is that such a challenge? It's not a challenge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I am fine within my local community. We all vote. Again, I've suggested that there's a difference between local community and federal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I'm fine with my local community voting for school lunches or air conditioning or whatever it is that we all agree to do, because the more local you get, the more homogeneity you get in terms of interest and the more interest you have in your neighbors. All of that's fine. I'm part of a very, very solid community in our community. We give to each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We have minimum standards of helping one another. All that's wonderful. When it comes to the actual problem of education, what I object to in the political sphere, and this happens all the time, is everybody is arguing on top of the iceberg about how we can move the needle forward. 0.5 percentage points, as opposed to the entire iceberg melting beneath them. And we just ignore that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We pretend that that's just, you know, sort of the natural consequence of thing. The arc of history suggests that people are never going to get married again. Well, I mean, actually, what the arc of history suggests, realistically speaking, is that the people who are not getting married are not going to be having kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And what it also suggests, the people who are married are going to be having kids. And so the demographic profile actually over time is rather going to shift toward people who are having lots and lots of kids. I'm married. I have four kids. Everyone in my community is married. That's like minimum buy-in in my community is four kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so what's happening actually in terms of demographics is that the people who are more religious and getting married are having more kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so if you're talking about the arc of history shifting toward marriage, I would suggest that actually demographically over time, long periods of time, not over one generation, over long periods of time, the only cure for low birth rate is going to be the people who get married and have lots of kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I literally just told you that on the local level, I'm fine for people voting for air conditioning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the idea there would be that presumably if the society, meaning the state, and I generally don't mean the federal state. I mean, like the state of California, for example, decides that everybody ought to have air conditioning, people will vote for air conditioning, and that's perfectly legal. And I don't think there's anything morally objectionable about that per se.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I also don't think that that's going to heal anything remotely like the central problem. And I think that what tends to happen in terms of government is people love arguing about the problems that can be solved by opening a wallet, and nobody likes to solve a problem by...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
you know, closing their sex life to one person, for example, or having kids within a stable religious community, like the things that actually build society. I'm fine with arguing about each of these policies and whether we apply them or not is a matter generally of pragmatism. Not morality. It's a matter of incentive structures, not per se morality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because incentive structures do have moral underpinnings. There's such a thing as, for example, if you're going to use a welfare program, you have to decide how effective it is, to what crowd it applies, where the cutoffs are. Does it disincentivize work? Does it not? All of these are pragmatic concerns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But on a moral level, the generalized objection that I have to people on the left side of the aisle is that they like to focus... In these conversations, very often it feels as though it's a conversation with people who are drunk searching under the lamp for their keys. The problems they want to look at are the problems that are solvable by government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then all the problems they don't want to look at, which are the actual giant monsters lurking in the dark and not particularly solvable by government, are the ones they want to ignore and assume are just the natural state of things. And I don't think that's correct at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And it's actually not the solution to education depending on the kind of solutions that you're talking about. Some solutions, yeah. Some solutions, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think these are all pragmatic discussions. Sure, of course. Actually, this is what we used to hash out in legislatures before they turned into platforms for people grandstanding, but yes. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Sure. So in terms of actual job performance, you have to separate it into a few categories. In terms of actual performance in foreign policy, I think Trump's foreign policy record is significantly better than Biden's, the world being on fire right now, being a fairly good example of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And we can get into each aspect of the world being on fire and where the incentive structures came from and how all of that happened in a moment. When it comes to the economy, I think that Trump's economic record was better than Biden's. Doesn't mean he didn't overspend. He did. He wildly overspent. But he also had a very solid record of job creation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
A huge percentage of the gains in the economy went to people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Actually, the gross income to the average American was about $6,000 during his term. The unemployment rates were very, very low before COVID.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that you almost have to separate the Trump administration into sort of before COVID and during COVID, because COVID obviously is sort of a black swan event, the most signal event change in politics in our lifetime. Governance during COVID is almost its own category, which we can discuss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
In terms of foreign policy, in terms of domestic policy, I think that Trump was significantly better than Biden has been. That's on the upside for Trump. On the downside for Biden, obviously, you're talking 40-year highs in inflation. You're talking about savings being eaten away. You're talking about everything being 20% to 30% more expensive. You're talking about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
massive increases to the deficit, even at a rate that was unknown under Trump. The deficit under Trump raised by about a little under a trillion dollars every year up until 2020. Again, 2020 was COVID year, so everybody decided that we're going to fire hose money at things. But then Joe Biden continued to fire hose money at things in 21, 22, and 23.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That obviously is, in my opinion, bad economic policy. And then you get to the rhetoric and you get to the stuff that Donald Trump says. And as I've said before, My view is that on Donald Trump's epitaph, on his gravestone, it will say Donald Trump, he's had a lot of shit. I think that Donald Trump does say a lot of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that that is basically baked into the cake, which is why everyone who's bewildered by the polls is ignoring human nature, which is at the beginning, when you see something very shocking, it's very shocking. And then if you see it over and over and over and over for years on end, it is no longer shocking. It is just part of the background noise like tinnitus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It just becomes something that your brain adjusts for. And so do I like a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric? No, and I never have. Do I think that that is dispositive as to his presidency? No, I do not. When it comes to Biden, again, I think he's underperforming economically. I think that his foreign policy has been really a problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Even the things I think he's done right are, I think, band-aids for things that he created by doing wrong. And when it comes to his own rhetoric... You can argue that it's grading on a curve because Trump was coming in with such wild rhetoric that just a maintenance of that wild rhetoric doesn't really change, again, the baseline. For Biden, he came in
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
In the same way that Obama did on the sort of soaring rhetoric of American unity. I'm the president for all. Like Trump came in. He's like, listen, I'm the president for what I am. And, you know, I'm going to say the things I want to say. I'm beyond the toilet. I'm tweeting. We're like, OK, you know, that's what it is with Biden. He came in with I'm the president for all Americans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I'm trying to unify everybody. And that pretty quickly broke down into a lot of oppositional language about his political opponents in particular, an attempt to lump in, for example. huge swaths of the conservative movement with the people who participated, for example, in January 6th or who are fans of January 6th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And, you know, the sort of lumping in of everybody into MAGA Republicans who wasn't personally signed on to an infrastructure bill with him. That sort of stuff, I think, has been truly terrible. I thought his Philadelphia speech was truly terrible. And again, I think that you do have the problem of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He is no longer capable of certainly rhetorically unifying the country when every speech from him feels like watching Nick Wallenda walk across a volcano on a tightrope. It really is like you're just sort of waiting for him to follow. I mean, it's sad to say. I mean, the other day he was speaking for what was in effect his campaign kickoff. And this is in Valley Forge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I mean, Jill rushed up there like off that off. As soon as he was done, Jill rushed up there, you know, like she'd been shot out of a cannon to come and try and guide him away. So he didn't become the Shane Gillis Roomba. And, you know, that's not really, you know, let's put it this way. It does not quiet the soul to watch Joe Biden rhetorically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Again, it's a different problem than Trump's problem. But that's my analysis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, I mean, there's a lot. So, I mean, I want to ask a few questions on each one of these. Yeah, sure. So, let's talk about divisiveness for a second. So... There's no one who can make the case that Donald Trump is not divisive. Of course, he's incredibly divisive. It's a given. Do you treat Biden's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness that you treat Trump's rhetoric?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Or I should probably put that the other way around. Should we treat Trump's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness as Joe Biden or, say, Barack Obama's rhetoric?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. So my feeling is – and this is one area where, for clarification, we're going to have a division – is that I, of course, don't treat Trump's rhetoric in the same way that I treat Biden's or Obama's. He's utterly uncalibrated. He says whatever he wants to at any given time, and it doesn't even match up with his policy very often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the answer would be yes. And now I've been given a choice between a person who I think in calibrated ways says things that are divisive and a person who in uncalibrated ways says things that are divisive. And so the evidence that Joe Biden is divisive is every poll taken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
since essentially august of 2021 he he is by all available metrics incredibly divisive a huge percentage of americans are deeply unhappy not only with his performance but don't believe his uniter they're that's just the reality and that may just be a reflection i mean honestly we may be putting too much on trump or biden personally it may just be that the american people themselves are rhetorically divided because of social media and social media can in fact be assessable
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, the reason I would say that Biden is, in fact, historically divisive is because Republicans felt much more strongly about Barack Obama than Joe Biden, actually. But they didn't feel as strongly about Trump as they did about like Romney or McCain. Right. In what way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Oh, no, there's certainly more allegiance to Trump than there is to Romney or McCain, largely because Trump won in 2016. But beyond that, the point that I'm making is that if you're looking at the stats in terms of divisiveness, Republicans always find the Democratic president divisive. The question is where the rest of the country is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And right now, there are a lot of Democrats who either don't agree with Biden or find him divisive. There are a lot of independents who find him divisive. So when we're comparing these things, I don't think they're leagues apart in terms of the divisive effects of what they say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I'm separating that off from like the inherent content of what they say, because obviously what Trump says is is more divisive just on like the raw level. I mean, if he's insulting people as opposed to Joe Biden doing MAGA Republicans, like if I were to just if I're an alien come down from space and look at these two statements, I'd say this one's more divisive than this one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But then there's the reality of being a human being in the world. And that is everyone has baked Donald Trump into the cake. And Joe Biden, again, started off with a patina of being non-divisive and now has emerged as divisive. If you don't mind, I actually want to get to the foreign policy questions because this one is actually slightly less interesting to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, I mean, yes, his Republican base was not in favor of mass spending on infrastructure and neither am I. So there's that. I think that's mostly a state and local.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That's not a spending. I mean... I mean, effectively it is, right? Effectively, it's not. Well, if you're cutting tax receipts, but you're not changing the level of spending, like Biden did with the IRA... Again, we have a fundamental philosophical difference here. I think that when the government takes my money, that is not the government... somehow being more fiscally responsible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And when the government allows me to keep my money, I don't see that as the government spending. I see that as my money and the government is taking less of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. We have a spending problem. It's not a receipts problem is the case that I'm making. The problem with Donald Trump is not that he lowered taxes. The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems on the planet. And in fact, if you wish to have a European style social welfare state, what you actually need is to tax the middle class to death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the reality is the top 20% of the American population pays literally all net taxes in the United States after state benefits and all of this. So if you actually wanted to have the kind of social welfare state that many liberals seem to want to have, like Northern Europe, for example, you'd actually have to tax people who make $40,000, $50,000, $60,000. And I don't want that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I agree with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, if he's like such a uniter. Because I think the Republican Party itself is quite divided. And I think that Trump's- But isn't that his job?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, again, I don't think that Joe Biden has passed wildly historic legislation. The infrastructure bill was the largest. So here's the problem. If you're a Republican, the only bills that you can get consensus on tend to be bills that either – let's be real about this – that are tax cuts because –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
As you would, I think, agree with, when it comes to polling data, Americans constantly say they want to cut the government. And then the minute you ask them which program, they have no idea what they're... Right, exactly. And so it's much harder to come up with a bill to cut things than it is to come up with a bill to add things, which is why spending was out of control under Trump as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But there are some Republicans who still don't want to spend on those things, right? So inherently, the task that... This goes back to the first question. The task that Republicans think government is there to do is different than the task that Democrats think that government is there to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So the way that the very metric of success for a Democratic president versus a Republican president, namely, for example, pieces of legislation passed. As a Republican, one of my goals is to pass nearly no legislation because I don't actually want the government involved in more areas of our life. I want to ask a couple questions on the foreign policy issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. Like, why are there not bills where Donald Trump could take? Well, I mean, first of all, I think that whenever the government says something is spending neutral, it rarely materializes that way. That is not going to be a spending neutral bill. Sure. But there's a difference between like at least they say it's spending neutral versus this is a 500 billion dollar bill over like 10 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, well, but again, I don't see a tax cut as a matter of spending neutrality. The big problem is they keep spending, not that they are allowing me to keep the money that I earned and they did not earn, but.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, the opposite. I would consider it a wild overspending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the deficit spending, by the way, under Biden is way worse than it was under Trump. Of course, but we're in post-COVID, right? Yeah. COVID ended effectively. I mean, you live in Florida. COVID effectively ended in the state of Florida by the middle of 2021.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, even if you're a vaccine fan, by April, May of 2021, there was wide availability of vaccines, whether or not you like the vaccines. And at that point, we were done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. So pouring more money on top of that makes for more inflation. That's what it does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So here's the thing. I don't think that the economy was actually headed for a recession. In fact, if you look at the economic statistics – Every economist said it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
They're still saying that there's like a recession coming, right? Right, but that was largely because of the aftereffects of inflation, meaning if you inflate the economy, what you're going to end up doing is bursting a bubble – And then when that bubble bursts, you'll get a recession. I mean, that was the basic idea, right? The question was whether you're going to get a soft landing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But if you actually look at, for example, the employment statistics or the economic growth statistics in the United States, what they look like under the last year's Obama and then Trump, I mean, this is what the chart looks like. It looks like this. And then it hits March of 2020. It goes like that. And then by like September, it bounces back up, right? It's a V-shaped recovery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then it starts to peter out. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yeah, no, I don't, I'm not going to attribute it to that because the rates of growth in, in job growth from September, October, November were actually very similar to the rates of job growth after Joe Biden took office. Well, you see, it's actually kind of a straight line. I mean, what the chart looks like in any case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So on the foreign policy stuff, this is getting abstruse, but on the, on the, on the foreign policy stuff. Um, so the, the questions that I have with regard to, to Biden on foreign policy, uh, Very, very simple question. Do you think that the situation in the Middle East is better now than it was under Donald Trump?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yes. Why did it end up being essentially a client state of Russia? I know that Putin enjoys access to the ports down there. I don't know. I mean, the reason is because Barack Obama suggested that there was a red line that would be drawn in the face of chemical weapons use. Bashar al-Assad then used chemical weapons in Syria.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And Barack Obama was unwilling to then essentially create consequences for Syria in the form of any sort of Western strike. And so instead, he outsourced it to Russia. This is 2013, 2014. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Who was president during Libya?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The point that I'm making is that actually the Middle East, just historically speaking, was historically good under Donald Trump. It's very difficult to make the case that either before or after Trump were better than during Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He didn't wreck ISIS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's a spike in violence. And then the Trump, I mean, you get credit for when you're president, presumably. I mean, things got better with ISIS under Trump. I mean, yeah, they did. I mean, things got worse with ISIS under Obama. Yeah. For sure. He called them the JV squad. Sure. And then they became not the JV squad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, exactly. the opposite, especially given the fact that after the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords continued to sign and actually expand. And that if Donald Trump had been elected, I have no doubt in my mind that Saudi Arabia would now be a part of the Abraham Accords. In fact, that was basically pre-negotiated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then when Joe Biden took office, Joe Biden took a very anti-Saudi stance on a wide variety of issues. The biggest single effect in the Middle East of Joe Biden's presidency, and again, I agree with you that not every foreign policy issue can be laid at the hands of a president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Joe Biden's main approach to the Middle East was very similar to the Obama approach, which is why the Middle East was chaotic under Obama and chaotic under Biden. And that was to alienate allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, and instead to try to make common cause or cut deals with Iran. What that did is incentivize terrorism from Iran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
What we're watching in the Middle East is Iran attempting to use every one of its terror proxies in the Middle East, and it was specifically launched in an attempt to avoid what Biden actually was trying to do, which was good, which was After two years of failure with Saudi Arabia, try to bring them into the Abraham Accords, right? That was what was burgeoning at the end of last year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And Iran saw that, and Iran decided that they were going to throw a grenade into the middle of those negotiations by essentially activating Hamas. Hamas activates, Hamas commits October 7th. Israel, as a sovereign nation state, has to respond to the murder of 1,200 of its citizens and the taken kidnapping of 240.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Israel has to do that not only to go after its own hostages and try to restore them, but also to reestablish military deterrence in the most violent region of the world. He's below gets active on Israel's northern border. He's below is an Iranian proxy. They get active on the northern border. The Houthis in Yemen get active.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
These are all the only reason all this is happening at the same time is because Iran is doing this right. But not just that. They are threatening global shipping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You're talking about the effects of global supply lines, which I totally agree had a major inflationary effect on the economy thanks to covid. Mm hmm. Right now, the cost of shipping is nearly double what it was just a few weeks ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that is because a ragtag group of Houthi barbarians are attacking international shipping and forcing everybody to stop using the Bab el-Mandib's freight instead of going around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. All of that is the result of the fact that Joe Biden reoriented the United States in the very early days in favor of a more pro-Iranian stance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He appointed Robert Malley to negotiate the Iran deal, who, as it turns out, was using proxies. Many of his aides were actually taking money from Iran. The Biden administration, literally one of their first acts was to delist the Houthis as a terror organization and end sanctions against the Houthis. These are all moves that Biden made very early on. They were disastrous moves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But when it comes to domestic policy, I think he hasn't been nearly as damaging on domestic policy as he has been on foreign policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That means that we're on a road to normalcy with Iran in the 1990s. We do in the, wait, what? That we're on a road to normalcy with Iran in the 1990s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I find that very difficult to believe, and I don't see a lot of evidence. I mean, we can just disagree on that. Sure. Okay. Yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But I know that the after effects, just quick note, the after effect of the Iraq war that was the most devastating was the increase in power of Iran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Originally, it was a Sunni government. Disbanding the Sunni army was one of the worst things that the Bush administration did. Probably, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Pretty sectarian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
UAE and Morocco.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, to pretend that anybody even 15 years ago would have been talking about normalization in Saudi Arabia and Israel is insane. I mean, that's insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
They had already been collaborating and doing things. That's a wild claim that Israel and Saudi Arabia were going to normalize 15 years ago. 15 years ago might have been a wild claim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Those were the first steps toward obviously the formation of a new Middle East in which economics would predominate over sectarian conflict. The chief obstacle to that is Iran. The notion that negotiations with the Ayatollah were going to be a solution to any of this is absolutely benign.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, what has to happen is the containment of Iran, which was what was taking place with the increased normalization with the Sunni Arab world and Israel combined with significant economic sanctions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The notion that there's this far-fetched notion in foreign policy circles that diplomacy can sort of be wish cast out of thin air, that if you sit around a table that you can always come to an agreement with somebody. The Ayatollahs do not have common interests with the United States. They do not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And this idea that they are willing to take money in exchange for, for example, some sort of peaceful acquiescence to Israel's existence is obviously untrue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The economy – the economic gains – Well, I mean – And the same thing with Jordan, same thing with – Not to get into Turkish politics, but the situation with Turkey was actually quite warm between Israel and Turkey in the 90s when you had the sort of –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
secular muslim regime in the 90s but they signed in place and and now erdogan is has joined in the fray and erdogan is significantly more radical sure than what i'm so sorry um if i said turkey i'm in egypt my bad In terms of Egypt and Jordan, we're the first two big ones. Here's the thing. Is it possible that you could theoretically come to a deal with Iran only with a new leadership crew?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
This is true for every peace agreement in the region. Israel could not have made peace with... Well, they made peace with Egypt, and Sadat was the leader for Yom Kippur. They did not make peace with Nasser. The point is that this is a different regime. You need a different regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, that's true. It is also true that that is a relationship that could be cultivated specifically because It was Sadat who made clear he was going to come to the table. Have the Iranians ever made clear that they would come to the table over, for example, the existence of the state of Israel? No. That is not a thing that's going to happen. But I think people probably felt the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Every single one of their proxy groups, every one of them, not only calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, they also call for the destruction of America. I mean, this is literally the Houthi slogan. They're busy hitting ships, and their slogan is literally, Allahu Akbar, death to America, death to the Jews, death to Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, and it's not all that catchy, but that is, in fact, their slogan. The notion that the regime that propagates that is going to be approached with diplomacy is not only wrong. The problem is that it's easy to say that the stakes of diplomacy are, okay, so we try to talk, right? Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Sure, the only problem is that in the Middle East, weakness is taken as a sign that aggression might be an appropriate response. That is how things work in the Middle East. And the fact that Barack, that Joe Biden rather,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
came into office with an orientation toward continuing the Obama policies in Iran has led to conflagrations, these sort of brush fires breaking out everywhere that Iran has borders with either the West or Israel or both, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Any place that's happening, it's leading to brush fires because again, the logic of violence in the Middle East is not quite the logic of violence in other places in the world. By the way, I think the logic of violence in the Middle East is actually closer to what most international politics looks like than we wish that it were. I mean, I think that's part of what's happening in Ukraine as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Which brings me, by the way, here's my question about Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, frankly, I think that what Israel's doing wrong is if I were Israel, okay, like again, America's interests are not coincident with Israel's interests. If I were an Israeli leader- I would have sloved up and I would have knocked the bleep out of Hezbollah early. What does that mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yoav Galant, who was the defense minister of Israel, was encouraging Netanyahu, who was the prime minister, and the war cabinet, including Benny Gantz. So whenever people talk about the Netanyahu government, that's not what's in place right now. There's a unity war government in place that includes the political opposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The reason I point that out is because there are a lot of people politically who will suggest that the actions Israel is currently taking are somehow the... manifestation of a right-wing government. Israel currently does not have a quote-unquote right-wing government. They have a unity government that includes the opposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
In any case, Yoav Galant was urging in the very early days of the war that Israel should turn north and instead of hitting Hamas, they should actually take the opportunity to knock Hezbollah out because Hezbollah is significantly more dangerous to the existence of the state of Israel than Hamas. I actually agree with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
As far as what Israel has been doing wrong in the actual war, I mean, I think that Again, from an American perspective, I think that Israel is doing pretty well. From an Israeli perspective, if I were Israeli, I would actually want Israel to be less loose about sending its soldiers in on the ground level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So Israel's attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and the cost of that has been the highest military death toll that Israel has had since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I mean, I personally know through one degree of separation, three separate people have been killed in Gaza. And that's because they're going in door to door. It's because they're attempting to minimize civilian casualties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And they're losing a lot of guys in this particular war. You know, the problem that Israel has had, historically speaking, is that Israel got very complacent about its own security situation. They believed the technology was going to somehow correct for the hatred on the other side of the wall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Okay, so our people have to live underground for two weeks at a time while some rockets fall, but at least it's not a war. And that complacence, you know, bred hatred.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
what happened on october 7th so to me what israel did wrong was years and years and years of complacence and belief in an oslo system that is at root a failure because you cannot make a peace agreement with people who do not want to make peace with you so that that's what i think israel is doing wrong i have a feeling there's gonna be wide divergence on this point
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, I mean, I think Israel would love nothing better than that. But that is for sure. One of the big problems in the Middle East is literally no one wants to preside over the Palestinians. Yes. No one. So Arab states, Israel, no one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I will argue with that. The idea that Israel does not want to end the conflict is belied by the history of what just happened with the Gaza Strip. So when we talk about settlements, for example, Israel did have settlements inside the Gaza Strip. There were 8,000 Jews who were living inside the Gaza Strip in Gush Katif up until 2005. They withdrew all of those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, took them literally out of their homes. And the result was not the burgeoning of a better attitude toward the state of Israel with regard to, for example, you know, the Palestinian population in Gaza. In fact, it was more radical in Gaza than it was in the West Bank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The result was obviously the election of Hamas, the October 7th attacks, in which unfortunately many civilians took place, took part in the October 7th attacks. There's video of people rushing who are civilians and dressed in civilian clothing into the Israeli villages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's Area B, which is mixed Israeli-Palestinian control, where Israel provides some level of military security and control. And then there's Area C. And Area C was like to be decided later. It was left up for possible concessions to the Palestinian Authority if the Oslo Accords had moved forward. Those are disputed territories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There is building taking place in Area C by both actually, no one talks about this, but by Palestinians as well as Israelis. And the the question as to whether if Israel stopped building. There have been many settlement freezes in the past, including some undertaken by Netanyahu. And it actually has not done one iota of good in moving the ball forward in terms of actual negotiations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Again, the biggest problem is that the leadership for Palestinians has spent every day since really 67.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's not even 48, because between 48 and 67, Jordan was in charge of the West Bank, and Egypt was in charge of the Gaza Strip, and at no point did either of those powers say, hey, maybe we ought to hand this over to an independent Palestinian state, which was originally the division that was promoted by the UN Partition Plan in 47.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because of that, the leadership post 67 and really starting in 64, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 64 and it called for the liberation of the land in 64. They had the West Bank and they had the Gaza Strip. So they're talking about Tel Aviv when it was founded in 64. The basic idea, as kind of indicated by that, was Israel will not exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that was a promise that's been made by pretty much every Palestinian leader in Arabic to the people that they are talking to. Yasser Arafat famously would do this sort of thing. He'd speak in English and talk about how he wanted a two-state solution, and then he'd go back to his own people and say, this is a Trojan horse, and we're going to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If Israel could, if you think that Israeli parents want to send their kids at the age of 18 to go and monitor Janine and Nablus and be in Hanuneth, you're out of your mind. You're out of your mind. Israelis do not want that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
In fact, Israelis didn't want that so much that they allowed rockets to fall in their cities for full on 18 years in order to avoid sending soldiers en masse back into the Gaza Strip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, I mean, East Jerusalem has already been annexed. So East Jerusalem is, according to Israel, a part of Israel. That's not a settlement. Okay, so there's that. With regard to, you know, does Israel have an interest in expanding settlements in the West Bank? Why would they not until there's a peace partner? Sure, that's what I mean.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But I'm saying as long as the conflict continues, like, because even when you talk about the— No, but your suggestion is that they're incentivizing the conflict to continue so they can grab more land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think there'd be very, let's put it this way. If suddenly there arose among the Palestinians a deep and abiding desire for peace approved by a vast majority of the population with serious security guarantees, I think you'd be very hard pressed to find Israelis who would not be willing to at least consider that I feel like we're not expanding bathrooms in a fraud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, but the point I'm making is that Israelis now realize that the entire peace process was a sham, meaning the people who are on the other side of the table were using it as a Trojan horse in the first place. The death of Oslo is not the death of Israeli hopefulness. It's the death of the illusion that on the other side of the table was anyone worth bargaining with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That's what's happening, and that's why you have this sort of insane disconnect right now between the United States and the Israeli government. Again, it's a unity government. No one in Israel is talking about making concessions to the Palestinian Authority for a wide variety of reasons, including the fact that Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah continues to pay actual families of terrorists who kill Jews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Sure, the Mark Fund, yeah. Right? Which is from the moderate West Bank. Right, exactly. So, again, the taste in Israel for this is – Even the people who are the Chilonim, right? Those are the most secular people in Israel, which was, by the way, the place that was attacked on October 7th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, what people should understand is that October 7th was not an attack against settlements in the West Bank. It was an attack on peace villages that were essentially disarmed. And many of these people who were killed were peace activists, were literally trying to work with people in Gaza to get them jobs. I mean, it's just, it's mind-boggling. That's why you've had this ground shift in Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The next 20 years in Israel is going to be about security and economic development, period, end of story. Everything else goes second, third place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
They involved bilateral peace. mentality. And this is why what I'm seeing right now, this is why, listen, I think that Biden has done better than I certainly expected him to do in terms of support for Israel. Like Obama was way less supportive of Israel than Biden by every metric.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
With that said, the rhetoric that he's been using recently and that Blinken had been using recently about Israel needs to make painful concessions for peace. Re-centering this issue at the center of relations in the Middle East is doomed to failure. The magic, magic is a strong word, the benefit of the Abraham Accords was proof that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Of what you're saying, which is true, which is that all of the surrounding countries in reality have abandoned the idea that there is a centrality to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. That is not the central conflict in the Middle East. And by the way, one of the reasons it's not the central conflict in the Middle East is because actually, ironically, because of the rise of Iran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's Sunni states that are largely signing up with Israel because they're realizing they need some sort of counterweight to a burgeoning nuclear power in Iran. Can we talk about Ukraine? Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
My main problem with Biden's policy with regard to Ukraine is that he outsourced the end goal of the war to Zelensky early on. Now, that might make sense if that goal were something that he was willing to fund to the point of achievement or if Zelensky could have achieved it on his own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But right now – and this has been true since pretty early on in the war, this point Henry Kissinger made – that pretty early on in the war, it was very clear that, for example – Crimea was going nowhere. The Russians had control of Crimea, barring the United States giving permission to fly F-16s over Crimea. Nothing was going to change over there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The same thing was true in most of the Donbass, right, in Luhansk and Donetsk. That was not going to change. Zelensky stated goal, and you understand it, he's the leader of Ukraine, right, is that there was a predation on his territory in 2014, and that the Russians sent their little green men across the border, and then they took all of these areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so he is the leader of Ukraine is saying, okay, I want all of that back. Now, the reality is that the U.S. 's interests had largely been achieved in the first few months of the war, meaning the revocation of the ability of Russia to take Ukraine and just ingest it, and two, the devastation of Russia's military capability. I mean, Russia has just been wrecked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, their military is in serious... straits because of the war in Ukraine. From an American perspective, I'm very much pro all of that. I think that we have an interest in Ukraine maintaining the buffer status against a territorially aggressive Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that the United States does have an interest in degrading the Russian military to the extent that it can't threaten the Baltic states or threaten Kazakhstan or other countries in the region. The problem I have with Biden's strategy is the As always, I think that it's a muddle. And I think muddles tend to end with misperceptions. War tends to break out and maintain because of misperception.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Misperception of the other side's strength, the other side's intentions, and all of the rest. People misperceive what's going to happen. They say, I'll cross that line and nothing will happen, right? This is what Putin thought. He thought, I'll cross that line. They'll greet me as a liberator. And because the United States just surrendered in Afghanistan, essentially, they won't do anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the West is fragmenting because NATO's fragmenting and all the rest of this. And obviously, he was wrong on all of those scores. As with virtually every war, no end line was set.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so it became out recently that it was widely reported that actually there was a peace deal that was on the table in the first few months that Putin was on board with that basically would have ceded Luhansk and Donetsk and Crimea to Russia in return for solidification of those lines, American and Western security guarantees to Ukraine, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ukraine wouldn't formally join NATO, but there would be security guarantees to Ukraine. We're ending up there anyway. It's just taking a lot more money and a lot more time to get there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Yes, and I think that Biden actually did Zelensky a bit of a disservice because Zelensky knows where this war is going to end, and it's not going to end with Luhansk and Donetsk and Crimea in Ukrainian hands. It's just not going to, and he knows that. What actually, in my opinion, Zelensky...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
needed was for Joe Biden to be the person who foisted that deal upon him so that he could then go back to his own people and say, listen, guys, I wanted all those things, but the Americans weren't willing to allow me to have all those things. And so we did an amazing job. We did a heroic job in defending our own land. We devastated the Russian military, even though no one expected us to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But we can't get back those things because it's unrealistic to get back those things because America, basically, they're a big funder and they're the ones who want the deal. Instead, what Biden said, and this was reported in the Washington Post last year, the Biden administration said, We're going to fight for as long as it takes with as much as it takes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And when they were asked until when, they said, whatever Zelensky says. And that's not a policy. That's just a recipe for a frozen conflict with endless funding. Now, it may be that Putin has walked away from the table and that deal is no longer available. If that deal is available right now, I certainly hope that's being pursued behind closed doors. My main critique, again, of Biden is that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
When you outsource the end goal to another country without stating what America's interest is, that's a problem. I also think that Biden did really quite a poor job of sort of explaining what America's realistic interests are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I don't like it when American leaders – it's weird for me to say this, but I'm not a huge fan of the we're in it to protect democracy kind of rhetoric because, frankly, we are allied with many, many countries that are not democracies, and that's not actually how foreign policy works. We should, as an overall – 30,000-foot goal, advance democracy and rights where we can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But the reason that we were fighting in favor of Ukraine, and when I say fighting, I mean giving them money and giving them weaponry. The reason that we were doing that in favor of Ukraine is not because of Ukraine's long history of clean voting and non-corruption. The reason that we were doing that is to counter Russian interests in the region. I mean, it was a pure, real politic play.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that real politic play is hard to deny no matter what side of the aisle you're on. I think that what many Americans are going to, are reverting to is, we have no interest there. Why are we spending money there and not spending money here? And that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that argument can always be applied unless you actually articulate the reason why it is good for Americans beyond simply the ideological for the United States to be involved in a thing. So for example, I think right now, When when Biden is taught, I think that what Biden just did is the United States, as we speak, is striking the Houthis. I think that that's a really, really good thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that's a necessary thing. I think American people should understand why that is happening. It's not because of, quote unquote, ideology. It is, I mean, on a very root level. But really, it's because. you're screwing up the straights. I mean, you can't do that. You can't screw up free trade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And Americans have an interest in not seeing all of our prices at the grocery store double and triple because a bunch of ragtag pirates, you know, akin to the Barbary pirates from 1800, are bothering everyone, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We tried that under Obama with Afghanistan. It was terrible. We'll escalate the troop levels to X, but only for six months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Do you think Biden should cut this deal on the funding? Meaning there's this $105 billion deal that's been held up by debate between Republicans and Democrats. over border, right? So basically it contains $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, another several billion dollars for Taiwanese defense against China, and then include some border funding and some border provisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Republicans want the border funding and the border provisions because we can get into the illegal immigration issue, but that's a pretty serious issue. And Biden and Democrats have been unwilling to hold that up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And that seems to me like just from, put aside Republican, Democrat, it seems like political malpractice, meaning there's a widespread perception in the United States that the border is a disaster area. Joe Biden wants these things. Many Republicans don't want these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If he caves on the border stuff, he gets all the things that he wants, and he's going to be able to go back to the moderates in the country and say, I did something about the border. It seems like such an obvious win. If he caves on the border stuff, you mean on the Ukraine stuff? Yes, because then he gets the whole package.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He can go back to his own base and he can say, listen, guys, I wanted to be easy on the border. The Republicans forced me to it, but we needed the Ukraine aid. We needed the Taiwan aid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So first of all, I'm glad that Destiny, you're already coming out as a Republican. That's exciting. I mean, we hold a lot in common in terms of the basic idea that people ought to have as much opportunity as possible, and also insofar as the government should do the minimum amount necessary to interfere in people's lives in order to pursue certain functions, particularly at the local level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I'm glad you're excited. It's always fun. So there are two elements to incitement of insurrection. One is incitement. The other is insurrection. So incitement has a legal standard. So does insurrection. Neither of those standards are met. So if you're asking me, morally speaking, did Donald Trump do the right thing between November 4th and January 6th?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I said I will continue to say no, he did not. I think he was saying things that are false with just factually false about his theories with regard to the election, about the election being stolen, about fraud. This is all adjudicated in court. He did not even bring many of the claims that he has brought publicly and all the rest of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If we're talking about incitement of insurrection as a legal standard, it doesn't meet any of those standards. When it comes to incitement, it has to be incitement to immediate lawless action. That's the standard for incitement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I'm very meticulous in how I use this because I happen to speak publicly a lot, and that means there are lots of people who listen to me, which means some of those people are probably crazy. And some of them may go and do a crazy thing. Did I incite them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The media tends to use the word incitement very loosely with regard to this sort of stuff in the same way that Bernie Sanders, quote unquote, incited the congressional baseball shooting. He did not. Bernie Sanders has a lot of things I disagree with. I think Bernie's a schmuck. Doesn't matter. He did not incite that. So saying bad things is not the same thing as inciting violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Inciting violence, the legal standard in the United States is I want you to go punch that guy in the face. That's that's inciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
With regard to insurrection, typically in insurrection, and there are some descriptions in case law, though none in statutory law as far as I'm aware, the typical description in case law is the replacement of one legitimate government of the United States with another by violent means. The notion that Donald Trump coordinated any such insurrection is belied by the FBI itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The FBI put out a report in, I believe it was August of 2021, suggesting that there was no well-coordinated insurrectionist attempt coordinated by the White House. In fact, what you had was Donald Trump thrashing around like that weird alien in the movie Life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So a lot of governmental discussions on a pragmatic level end up being discussions about where government ought to be involved, but also at what level government ought to be involved. And I have an incredibly subsidiary view of government. I think that local governments, because you have higher levels of homogeneity and consent, are capable of doing more things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I don't know if you ever saw it with Jake Gyllenhaal where he's like kind of thrashing up against this glass box, just an alien just thrashing up against the glass box. That I think is more what you were seeing from November 4th to January 6th. And then, again, the claim that January 6th itself was an insurrection. So virtually, I'm not aware that anyone was charged with actual insurrection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There were some people who were charged with seditious conspiracy. There are insurrection statutes that do exist. No one was charged under those particular statutes. There were some people who you could say informally had insurrectionist ideas. Those would be the people who wanted to hang Nancy Pelosi or kill Mike Pence. And those people are in jail right now. And the election went forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The election was certified. Mike Pence presided over the certification. Mitch McConnell presided over the certification. Joe Biden has been the president for the last three years. So Donald Trump, by the way, was still president at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If he had actively wanted to do what other people who have actually launched coups have done, he would have theoretically called the National Guard not to put down the riot, but to actually depose the sitting government of the United States in the name of a specious legal theory. He did not do that. He did not attempt that. Nobody working for him did that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The most you can say, I think, about what everybody was doing is that, you know, and I want to say everybody. We can talk about Trump because this is really about Trump. used a phrase that Trump was disseminating knowingly false information. The word that's carrying a lot of weight there is the word knowingly. So knowingly implies a knower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Do I think the information he was disseminating was false? Yes. Do I think that Donald Trump has a unique capacity to convince himself of nearly anything that is to his own benefit? Absolutely. And I think that that's actually what Absolutely. Absolutely. So I don't, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Would a reasonable person have known that they were? No, it depends on the mens rea standard. So it's not the same in every case. If you have to establish individual intent, then it's not enough to say a reasonable person should have known. That would be enough for a negligence statute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Usually when you're talking about reasonable people, person statutes, just legally speaking, a reasonable person statute is should a reasonable person have known that's when you get to like manslaughter. You can't do a reasonable person standard on like first degree murder. So you have to establish actual motive in first degree murder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And as you abstract up the chain, it becomes more and more impractical and more and more divisive to do more things. In my view, government is basically there to preserve democracy. certain key liberties. Those key liberties pre-exist the government insofar as they are more important than what priorities the government has. The job of government is to maintain, for example, national defense,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You're reverting to, should a reasonable person have known? Yeah. Yes, a reasonable person should have known. Did Donald Trump know? That's a different question. And so conflating those two questions is going to get you into some message here. By the way, this is why Jack Smith charged the way Jack Smith charged. Yeah, which wasn't – Jack Smith did not charge conspiracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Jack Smith did not charge insurrection. He did not charge seditious conspiracy, right? If he – the reason is because Jack Smith is a good lawyer. What he's doing is he's actually – broadly, I would say, pretty obviously expanding statutory coverage in weird areas in order to cover a thing that doesn't quite fit into any of these legal categories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But the point that I'm making is that Jack Smith is on my side of this. He doesn't think that he can actually establish the intent necessary to convict under a seditious conspiracy or an insurrection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I'm sorry that I don't have the memorization. I believe one's a fraud charge that generally does not apply to cases like this. Generally, the fraud charge is like you're trying to steal money from the government. Sure, fraud has been used pretty broadly in the past, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. So the default of civil rights is usually somebody standing in the actual like voting house door and preventing you from voting. Not you have a specious legal theory that you espouse in court about whether those votes should be thrown out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, If you're talking about the legal cases, I mean, that's not true, but Gore sued in 2000, right? I mean, so if you're talking about the legal cases, right? Well, if this is comparable to Gore, if this is comparable to Gore, then... I'm not saying it's comparable to Gore. I'm saying that if the idea is that espousing a legal theory in court amounts to de facto some form of election...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
denial or interference in some way that that can't that that's not as a general principle. It's over inclusive. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. And Donald Trump had a bunch of legal challenges and then he had a rally and then there was a riot and then he left power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I think what I want to get to here actually, so we can be more specific, is why are these terms important? We agree on, largely speaking, what happened. I think the characterization of the term, are we kind of bouncing around between two different categories here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We're not looking at incitement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Right. So prevent the peaceful transfer of power with all means or using means that are inappropriate, not quite the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Okay. Okay, so illegal, I don't think so. I don't think that these charges actually meet the criteria for the various charges, and we can discuss each case if you want. Sure. As far as inappropriate, sure, I think tons of inappropriate stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I'll concede that he's more inappropriate than others. I just don't see that. The most inappropriate. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
protection of property rights, protection of religious freedom. These are the key focuses of government as generally expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And I agree with the general philosophy of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean— The question to me is the bigger question that I think the Democrats are trying to promote in this election cycle, which is this means he is a threat to democracy sufficient that if he were to win the election, there would not be another. But he tried to do that last time. Could he not try it next time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, he could try to do whatever he wants, presumably, and he would fail the same way that he did last time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because he failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Now, that doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't do more on a governmental level, again, as you get closer to the ground, which, by the way, is also embedded in the Constitution. People forget the Constitution was originally applied to the federal government, not to local and state government. But, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I believe in the checks and balances of American government. I believe they worked on January 6th. So if you're asking me, do I think that Trump has bad intent or could have bad intent with that sort of stuff? Sure. Do I believe that the guardrails held and will continue to hold? Also, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You know, if I promise that day one, as Donald Trump has pledged to do, that he's going to deport literally every illegal immigrant into the country, do I think he's actually going to do that? I mean, I really highly doubt it. He didn't do it last time he was in office. There are many examples of this. I agree. Here's my question. Do you think the guardrails are going to fail to hold?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I'm not sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I think that one of the one of the things that happened in 2022 is Democrats ran directly on this platform and a bunch of Republicans lost were running on this platform. Literally every secretary of state ran on the Donald Trump. We should deny elections platform lost in every state. Sure, but other Republicans that have been – A great way to lose local office is this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
like all of US politics. People who were not born voted against.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If I were going to define conservatism, it would actually be a little broader than that, because I think to understand how people interact with government, you have to go to kind of core values. And so for me, there are a couple of premises. One, human beings have a nature. That nature is neither good nor bad. We have aspects of goodness and we have aspects of badness. Human beings are sinful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I doubt that he would do that, but theoretically he could.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
What is all this in service of? What's the generalized argument that you're making? Do you believe... I'll go back to my question. Do you think that if Trump wins, there will be no more elections? Put a percentage on it. What percentage do you think that that's a reality?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I can guarantee you he will not do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because he's in his second term and he's no longer eligible and he will believe he won and he will leave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
What has Donald Trump not joked about? I mean, for God's sake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Hold on. If you want to prevent him from creating a revolution, you probably should actually just appoint him president and then he can't run again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Oh no, I totally grade Trump. No, I 100% grade presidents on a curve. Are you kidding? Oh, okay. I grade pretty much everybody on the card. I don't treat my seven-year-old the same way that I treat my nine-year-old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Let's throw him in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We have temptations. And what that means is that we have to be careful not to incentivize the bad and that we should incentivize the good. Human beings do have agency and are capable of making decisions in the vast majority of circumstances. And it is better for society if we act as though they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You're talking about threats to democracy. That would be a pretty serious one applied across the board, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I think that the the unprecedented legal theory that a state can simply bar somebody from the ballot on the basis of in an informal way, believing that he is, quote unquote, an insurrectionist is is pretty wild. I mean, that's that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If we're getting into constitutional law, I mean, there are a number of provisions that suggest that this is, number one, not self-executing. Minority opinions in the Colorado Supreme Court case are pretty thorough. The number one contention, which is that this is not self-executing because other elements are not self-executing, that ignores subsequent actual... law that happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, the Congress passed a law, for example, in 1872, defining who was an insurrectionist, who was not an insurrectionist for purposes of elections. In 1994, Congress passed a law that specifically defined insurrection as a criminal activity so that somebody could theoretically be convicted of insurrection and therefore ineligible to run for office.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It is unlike, say, the analogs that are used by the obviously this is not the same thing. We can all tell what somebody's age is by looking at their birth certificate. I can't tell whether somebody is an insurrectionist without any reference to a legal statute or a definition of the term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I thought that was dumb at the time. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Are you kidding? He would want to. Trump's going to walk around hands up high. He's going to be like, I'm a two-term president. I'm the only president since Grover Cleveland. He wouldn't know. But since Grover Cleveland, who served two non-consecutive terms, I kicked Joe Biden out of office and I kicked Hillary Clinton out of office. Dude would be like, he'd be living large. Are you kidding?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He doesn't want the presidency anymore after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He didn't. He didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Second, the basic idea of human nature, there is an idea, in my view, that all human beings have equal value before the law. I'm a religious person, so I'd say equal value before God, but I think that's also sort of a key tenet of Western civilization being non-religious or religious, that every individual has equivalent value in sort of cosmic terms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
OK, so that's a slightly different topic because now you're getting into all the election shenanigans and all this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's not beyond the pale for him, right? It's not beyond the pale for him to order them to do it, and then it's not beyond the pale for them to reject him doing that, which is the story of his entire administration. Whereas Joe Biden orders his DOJ to do things, and then they just do them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
This is one of the big problems that I have with, I mean, for example, all the talk about Trump tyrant, Trump executive power. I mean, Joe Biden has used executive power in ways that far outstrip anything that Donald Trump has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Joe Biden is going like... Joe Biden has gone well beyond anything Trump even remotely attempted to maintain via just pure executive power. And actually, Trump's use of executive power is nowhere near even what Obama's was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean... I mean, Joe Biden literally used the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down VAX mandates on 80 million Americans. That's insane. He literally said, I cannot relieve student loan debt and then tried to relieve... hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt. Yeah, but what happened to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It got struck down by the Supreme Court, and then they still did it. They still did it. Biden brags about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, I mean, so here's the way I would think of this. think of the guardrails holding as the filter. Okay. Meaning like the, the coffee is in the filter. Some of it's, you know, what, what you want is going to get through and all the stuff that are the guardrails prevent the other stuff from getting through. Now the question becomes what liquid are you pouring into the filter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Meaning, so if I'm if the filter exists, if the guardrails hold and if Donald Trump can't steal elections, what's the policy that comes through the other end of the filter? The policy I get from Donald Trump on the other end of the filter is a bunch of stuff that I like. The policy that I get from Joe Biden on the other end of the filter is a bunch of bullshit I don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So that's the basic calculation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I told you he's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Because he won't be eligible to be on the ballot in, I mean, by the way, you want to talk about 14th Amendment? That's where the 14th Amendment applies. Okay, that's where it actually applies. Meaning you cannot, he is not qualified to be on the ballot in 2028 if he is the president of the United States. States can literally, in self-executing fashion, take him off the ballot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Just like he's past the age of 35. Once you have been president two times, you're no longer eligible to be president of the United States. Then you actually have a strong location.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
when he's not on the ballot? So now your theory is that he's going to get reelected. And then in 2028, he's not even going to be on the ballot. And he's going to direct his new vice president, Kerry Lake, to simply declare him president of the United States when he has not been on a ballot? I don't know what the scheme would be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But that does not necessarily mean that every person is equally equipped to do everything equally well. And so it is not the job of government to rectify every imbalance of life. The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell suggests, is something that government is generally incapable of doing and more often than not botches and makes things worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But I think that- Macho, like with the machine gun, he's going to walk into the-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I'll make you the case that if you want him not to make election trouble, you should elect him president in the next election cycle. And then he will be ineligible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So obviously I'm going to say it's a huge threat. The reason that I think there's a huge threat, I want to give a definition of wokeism because people are very often accused of not using wokeism properly or believing that it's sort of a catch-all phrase. I don't think it's a catch-all term. I think that wokeism has its roots in...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
postmodernism, which essentially suggests that every principle is a reflection of underlying structures of power, and that therefore any inequality that emerges under such a system is a reflection, again, of that structure of power. That used to be applied in Marxist ways, the suggestion being that economic inequality was the result of misallocation of power in the structure of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
preserved by an upper crust of people who wanted to cram down exploitation on people. That was sort of the Marxist version of postmodernism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And then it got transmuted into sort of a racial version of postmodernism, in which the systems of the United States are white supremacists in orientation and are perpetuated by a group of people who are, in fact, in favor of the preservation of white power and white supremacy. That is the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
generalized theory of critical race theory, as proposed by, for example, Gene Stefanczyk and Richard Delgado in their book on critical race theory, that has taken a softer form that we refer to as DEI. The key in DEI is the E, meaning equity. So equity is a term that does not mean equality. People mix it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Equality is the idea that we all ought to have equal rights, that we all ought to be treated equally by the law. Equity is the idea that if there is an inequality that emerges from any system, it is therefore due to discrimination. And the best way to tell whether somebody has been victimized is by dint of their race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So those are a few key tenets, and that tends to materialize in a variety of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And we can tell whether you're a member of an oppressed group or an oppressor group by the intersectional identity that you carry and by the nature of your group's success or failure predominantly along economic and power lines in American life. This means that if one group is predominantly successful economically, they must be a member of the victimizing class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the only corrective for that would be, as Ibram X. Kennedy likes to suggest, effectively, anti-racist policy is racism in the service of destroying racism, that you're going to have to discriminate on the basis of race in order to correct for discrimination that's baked into the system. that's incredibly dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The easiest way to sum that up would – the traditional kind of three legs of the conservative stool, although now obviously there's a very fragmented conservative movement in the United States, would be a socially conservative view in which family is the chief institution of society, like the little platoons of society, as Edmund Burke suggested, in which –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It leads to a victim-victimizer narrative that is unhealthy for individuals and terrible for societies. It relieves people of individual responsibility, and it destroys the very notion of an objective metric by which we can decide meritocracy. And meritocracy is the only system human beings have ever devised that has positive externalities in literally any area of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Every other distribution of wealth, power, done along other lines that is not having to do with merit has negative externalities. Every system having to do with merit has positive externalities because presumably the most effective and useful people are going to succeed under those systems. That's the very basis of a meritocracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the externalities of that mean that other people benefit from the meritorious and excellent performance of those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I think she should have been fired not over the plagiarism allegations. I think she should have been fired based on her performance just at that congressional hearing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If the word black had been substituted for Jew in that statement by Elise Stefanik that she was asking about, or trans, or literally any other minority in America, maybe with the exception of Asian, then the answer would have been very different coming from Cloudy and Gay. With that said, I don't think the firing of Cloudy and Gay really accomplishes very much. Did she get what she deserved? Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Does that mean that the underlying DEI equity-based system has been in any way severely damaged? No, I think that this is a way for
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
universities, as truthful as McGillipent also, to basically throw somebody overboard as the sacrifice to maintain the underlying system that continues to predominate at American universities, where they spend literally billions of dollars every year on DEI initiatives and diversity hires and diversity administrators and all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, one of the costs of education escalating is in the massive administrative function that is now undertaken by universities, as opposed to teaching and, you know, cost of dorms and such.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Free market and property rights are extraordinarily valuable and necessary because every individual has the ability to be creative with their property and to freely alienate that property. And finally, I tend toward a hawkish foreign policy that suggests that the world is not filled with wonderful people who all agree with us and think like us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Certainly when you look at certain institutions, I think that one of the things that people on both sides of the aisle are constantly looking at is, has the institution suffered such capture that there is just no capacity to fix it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And when you talk about the universities, I'm not going to blame conservatives for the failure of the universities because they haven't been present in major positions at universities since effectively the late 1960s. And you can go read Shelby Steele's work on this where he talks about how he used to be – he's now a conservative – black person. He was a liberal black person at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
He was actually quite a radical black activist at the time in the 60s. And he talks about walking into the office of liberal administrators who are largely on his side with regard to civil rights and being a radical, him claiming that the systems of the university were inherently broken, were inherently wrong, unfixable. And he talks about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's a very evocative episode where he's talking about how he's smoking. And as he's smoking, the ash is growing more and more and the ash falls down on this very expensive carpet. And the president of the university who's listening to him rant and rave, Shelby Steele says, I thought he was going to say something about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And those people will pursue adversarial interests if we do not protect our own interests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I was wrecking like a thousand dollar carpet in his office being a jackass. And instead, I could see him wilt inside. I could see him collapse. He didn't have the institutional credibility or the intellect or sort of the spiritual strength to just say, listen, I agree with you on some of these things, but you're acting like a jackass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And what you see in the late 1960s and early 1970s is, in fact, the collapse of these institutions to the point where, by the time I was going to college, there was this radical disproportion between conservatives and liberals. And the problem is that when it comes to a system like the universities, basically, you have to separate the universities off into two separate categories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
One is STEM, where the universities are still pretty damn good. American universities, when it comes to STEM, are still leading universities in the world. Harvard's main creations these days are coming from actual hard science fields. Then you have the liberal arts field in which you basically have a self-perpetuating elite because that's actually how dissertations work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If you have somebody who's very far to the left and you decide that you're going to write a dissertation on the history of American gun rights, the chances that that is going to be approved by your dissertation advisor are much lower than if you happen to write something that tends to agree with the political positions of your dissertation advisor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Now, listen, I think there are open and tolerant professors even in the liberal arts at these universities. I went to these universities. I went to UCLA. I went to Harvard Law School. When I was at Harvard Law School, one of my favorite professors was Lani Guinier. Lani Guinier, they tried to appoint her, I believe, Secretary of Labor under Clinton, and she was too liberal, and she got rejected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So she was like a full-on communist. By the time I went there, she was great. We had debates every day. It was wonderful. She used to write me recommendations for my legal jobs after we left. Randall Kennedy, I don't agree with him very much. Randall Kennedy was a terrific professor. There are some professors who are like this. Unfortunately –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
there tends to be in these echo chambers more and more ideological conformity that is rigorously enforced, and it is by left on left. So for example, when I was at Harvard Law School, the president of the university was another president who ended up being ousted, Larry Summers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Larry Summers had been the secretary of treasury under Bill Clinton, and he made the critical error of suggesting that perhaps the dearth of women in hard sciences in prestigious positions was due to possibly two factors that people were refusing to talk about. One was the possibility that women actually didn't want to be in hard sciences at nearly the rates that men do, which happens to be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And two was the distribution of STEM IQ, right? Which is something that you certainly were not allowed to talk about. The idea that the men's bell curve when it comes to IQ, particularly on STEM subjects, tends to be shallower than women's bell curves. When you get to the very end of the bell curve, what you tend to see is a lot of really dumb guys and a lot of really smart guys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so when you're talking about the top universities, maybe that has something to do with the disproportion. And he's trying to explain that to say that our systems are not discriminating. If we end up with more men than women, maybe more men are applying and more men are qualified. He was ousted for that by a left-wing faculty and general alum network at Harvard University.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's a lot to blame conservatives for, for surrendering the playing field. I totally agree that conservatives should not have surrendered the playing field in some institutions. Colleges were surrendered a lot earlier than 20 years ago. They were surrendered in the late 1960s, early 1970s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I think that the alternative to that is that you are seeing on the right a growth of, for example, alternative universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
No, I don't think so at all. I think competition is a great way of incentivizing some change on behalf of universities that may have forgotten that there's an entire other side of the aisle in the United States. No, no shot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So first of all, let me make clear. I think the entire educational system at the upper levels, if you're not in STEM, is a complete scam. I think it's a complete waste of money. I think it's a complete waste of time. And I think that it's all, all it is, is a formalized, very expensive sorting mechanism for people of IQ. That's all it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
People take an SAT, you go to a good school, you take four years of bullshit. I know I did at UCLA. And then we analyze based on your degree, where you should go to law school. I could have gone directly from high school to law school with maybe one year of training and then done one year of law school and been done. Okay. The reality is that this is a giant scam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And this, again, is a bipartisan problem, but it's just a generalized problem. You want to talk about things that hurt the lower classes in the United States? The bleeding of degrees up is so wild and crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There's so many jobs in the United States that should not require a college degree that we now require a college degree to do because there was this weird idea that came over Americans where they mistook correlation for causation. They would say, oh, look, people who go to college are making more money than people who don't go to college. Therefore, everyone should go to college.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, maybe the reason is because people who are going to college were better qualified for particular jobs because on average, not all the time, but on average, a lot of those people were smarter and making more money because of that. And so all you've done is you've now created these additional layers of stratification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So a person who used to be able to get a job with a college degree now has to have a postdoc degree in order to go get that degree. A person who used to be able to just graduate high school, now it's de facto, you got to go to JUCO and then you got to go to college. or nobody's going to look at your resume. It's really, really terrible for people who can't afford all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's led to this massive increase in educational cost that is inexplicable other than this particular sort of bleed up, and by the way, federal subsidies for higher education. Again, one of my problems with federal subsidies for higher education, I'd love for everyone to be able to go to college if qualified to do so and if it is productive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But one of the things I did when I went to law school is I took loans because a bank said I was going to get my money back if I got a law degree from Harvard. But you know when you're not going to get your money back? If you're a bank, you're not going to lend to some dude who wants to major in art theory because is that a good bet? There's no collateral, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If I give a loan for a house, I can go repossess the house. How do I repossess your garbage college degree from UCLA? There's no way to do that. So this is the broader conversation about education in general. I think the educational system is cruising for a bruising, and I think all that's necessary for it to completely collapse on the non-STEM side where you actually learn things is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
for people who employ to simply say, give me your SAT score and I will hire you for an apprenticeship directly out of high school. It would cut out so much of the middleman. But as far as the general point that you're making about institutions, I may disagree on the education and how far it's gone, In general, I agree with you. So in general, I agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And I get to use my favorite longest word in the English language here. I would consider myself in many cases an anti-disestablishmentarianist. Nice. See, I like to drop that. Because if you're an establishmentarian, it means you like the establishment. Disestablishmentarianism, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There you go. Longest word in the dictionary. And so he is also. Oh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We know long words, and he streams on the internet, and I talk for a living. So anyway, but the point is that I don't disagree that there is a general populist tendency on all sides of the aisle to look at the institutions and then throw them overboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think that some of that is earned by people who are in positions of power at institutions who have completely undermined the faith and credibility of those institutions. I think you have to examine institution by institutions, which ones are salvageable and which ones are not. So I'm not a full anti-disestablishmentarianism. I'd be partially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
There are certain institutions like higher education in the liberal arts that I think we may be better off without. And then there are certain institutions like, say, participation in American government, where when people talk about we need a revolution, like, no, we don't. That's not a thing. We need an evolution. We need change. We can use the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And, you know, but I think you have to establish you have to look at it industry by industry differently. you know, institution by institution. On that position on institutions, do you think Biden or Trump would side with you more? As far as the institutions? Yeah. I think the institutions in the United States at the governmental level are robust. I think the social institutions are fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, I think that in rhetoric, Biden would. And then I think that he would tear out the face of the institution, wear it around like a mask, like Hannibal Lecter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And yes, because I think that his use of executive power was greater than that of Donald Trump. The power that he had, he used to greater effect than Donald Trump. Donald Trump, again, thrashed up against the sides of the box, but could not get out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Listen, I think a classically liberal idea for many schools would not be a bad thing. I think it would be a good thing. I just wonder if that's salvageable. And if it's not salvageable, then the answer to that—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I totally agree with that. Certainly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ben? Yeah. Marriages are the single most important thing that people can do in the United States because the things within your control are easier to control than things outside your control. People tend to think about big political change, obviously, about things they can do to change the entire system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But the reality is the thing that you can do that best changes society is to get married and have kids and raise your kids responsibly. That is the single best thing that you can do. Can an open marriage work? I mean, I think that it depends on your definition of work. So in my version of work, the answer is no, because what you actually need in order to facilitate the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
healthy growing of a child. It's a father and mother who are committed to each other. All ideas about there being no emotional component to sexual activity are completely specious. It's truer for men than it is for women, but it's not true for either. The idea of a full commitment to a human being
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
with whom you genetically create children, which is typically how we've done it throughout human existence, is in fact the fundamental basis for any functional civilization. It allows for the transmission of culture and values. It allows for the transmission of beliefs and responsibility. And it gives the great lie to both the communitarian lie and the atomistic individualist lie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The communitarian lie is that you belong to the giant community of man, which is not true because you have a family, uh, and your allegiance should be and is naturally to the members of your family first. That's how we learn. And then we expound that out, uh, And it also is a lie to the notion that we are all atomistic individuals with no responsibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We are born into a world of responsibilities. Everyone is born into a world of responsibilities and rules and roles, and those are good. And if we do not actually socialize our children that way, there will be, number one, no children. Number one, there will be no healthy children. Number two, there will be no healthy children.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Number three, there will be not the foundation for either social fabric, which is the real glue that holds together society, or for a functional government. So yes, yes, monogamous marriage. I'm a fan. 15 years married. Four kids. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
If you could do it, yes. there is no benefit to pornography. It's a waste of time and destructive to the human soul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It's destructive to even the ones who are making a lot of money because when you degrade yourself to being just a set of human body characteristics that other people jack off to, it's bad for you and it's bad for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Have I evolved on this? So... again, I'm going to go to what's the definition of music. My original argument about rap was that music involves the following three elements, rhythm, melody, harmony. Rap typically involves maybe one of those. There may be a melody, maybe, sometimes. So it depends on the kind of rap. With that said, I could be convinced on this issue, but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Listen, I'm a classical violinist. I mean, that's how I was raised. I listened to Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart, like in the car with my kids. So is it comparable? Is it in the same category as Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart? I have a very hard time sticking it in the same category as that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ben? So, I mean, I agree with a lot of that. I think that the easiest practical guide is read a bunch of different things from a bunch of different sources, and where they cross is probably the set of facts, and then everything else is extrapolated opinion from different premises. That's sort of the short story. So read the New York Times and Breitbart, and they're going to disagree on a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But if the core of the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Certainly read the Daily Wire. If you read the Daily Wire and you read the Washington Post and there's a nexus of the same thing, then you can pretty well guarantee that at least, you know, if we're all blind men feeling the elephant, at least if we're all feeling the trunk, we know that there's a trunk there. You may not know what the elephant is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So I think that on the list of priorities, when it comes to education, the availability of technology is actually fairly low on the list of priorities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
A lot of the same sorts of things, but it's really fun to see how you do your process. That is a cool thing. That is a cool thing. And it's a gift to the audience because honestly, doing what we do, so much of what we do is sitting and reading and being behind closed doors and educating yourself and talking with people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The two things I've heard are food availability and I think air conditioning, I think are the two biggest ones that I hear about. Sure. I mean, the biggest thing in terms of education itself, not just the physical facilities that we're talking about, would actually be two parent family households. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But getting to watch you do it in real time is a really cool window into how people think and how people learn. So that's a really neat thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Communities that have fathers in them is actually the number one decisor, according to Roland Fryer and many studies done on this particular topic. And the idea that money alone, that investment of resources is the top priority in schooling is belied by the fact that LAUSD, which is where I went to school when I was younger- They pour an enormous amount of money into LAUSD.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars very often per student, and it does not result in better schooling outcomes. And so when you say, if we could give every kid an iPad, would you give every kid an iPad? The question is not... if I had a replicator machine from Star Trek, would I give everybody an enormous amount of stuff? Sure, I would. Every resource is finite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Every resource is limited. And you have to prioritize what are the outcomes that you seek in terms of the means with which you are seeking them. And so, again, I think that the question is, I quibble with the premise of the question, which is that Again, the chief injustice when it comes to education on the list of injustices is lack of availability to technology or that it's a funding problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I just don't think that's the case. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I totally agree with you. So that's why I think that the fundamental educational problem is not, in fact, a schooling problem. I think that it preexists that.
We Might Be Drunk
Ep 202: Kyle Dunnigan & Blair Socci
But it can't be defined in words. It's the darkest heart of soulless man. It's a note on the piano that mustn't be bled. It's a naughty little piggy handing you a hot dog. It's a paparazzo. Not getting out of your face when you call him a cocksucking asshole. I'm way more confused now. It's a... You take a swing at a stewardess, but it doesn't taste as good.