Lex Fridman Podcast
#336 – Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War
07 Nov 2022
Ben Shapiro is a conservative political commentator, host of The Ben Shapiro Show, co-founder of The Daily Wire, and author of The Authoritarian Moment and other books. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free - Policygenius: https://www.policygenius.com/ - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off EPISODE LINKS: Ben's Twitter: https://twitter.com/benshapiro Ben's Instagram: https://instagram.com/officialbenshapiro Daily Wire: https://dailywire.com Ben's Books: The Authoritarian Moment: https://amzn.to/3T3RRJv Facts (Still) Don't Care About Your Feelings: https://amzn.to/3T3Hwgs How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps: https://amzn.to/3fxmeKx The Right Side of History: https://amzn.to/3E3jGgS How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: https://amzn.to/3FLHR4z Facts Don't Care about Your Feelings: https://amzn.to/3UrcBvL Books mentioned: The Strongman: https://amzn.to/3U8f2U7 Economics in One Lesson: https://amzn.to/3DWAbLA The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: https://amzn.to/3DTGlej PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:07) - Kanye 'Ye' West (14:47) - Hitler and the nature of evil (22:53) - Political attacks on the left and the right (28:37) - Quebec mosque shooting (38:33) - Elon Musk buying Twitter (51:36) - Trump and Biden (56:09) - Hunter Biden's laptop (1:07:42) - Candace Owens (1:11:22) - War in Ukraine (1:21:31) - Rhetoric vs truth (1:26:26) - Infamous BBC interview (1:29:42) - Day in the life (1:44:37) - Abortion (1:57:32) - Climate change (2:04:55) - God and faith (2:16:05) - Tribalism (2:20:41) - Advice for young people (2:24:26) - Andrew Breitbart (2:26:56) - Self-doubt (2:28:58) - Love
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, host of The Ben Shapiro Show, co-founder of The Daily Wire, and author of several books, including The Authoritarian Moment, The Right Side of History, and Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings.
Whatever your political leanings, I humbly ask that you try to put those aside and listen with an open mind, trying to give the most charitable interpretation of the words we say. This is true in general for this podcast, whether the guest is Ben Shapiro or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump or Barack Obama.
I will talk to everyone, from every side, from the far left to the far right, from presidents to prisoners, from artists to scientists, from the powerful to the powerless, because we are all human. all capable of good and evil, all with fascinating stories and ideas to explore. I seek only to understand, and in so doing, hopefully add a bit of love to the world.
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got ExpressVPN for privacy, PolicyGenius for life insurance, BetterHelp for therapy, and InsightTracker for biological monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
I tried to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a longtime beloved sponsor of mine, ExpressVPN. I've been using them for many, many, many years. It has brought joy to my heart for many reasons, some of which you can infer.
because it has opened my mind and my spirit to the internet while keeping me protected, which is what a great VPN does. And that's the one I've always used. It's the one I've always recommended. It always had the big sexy button that you just press and everything works. It's super, super easy. It works really fast.
Wherever the geographical region you connect to, at least all the places I've tried, it's super fast, works on any device. Linux included. It's kind of amazing that I haven't talked to Linus Torvald yet. Not sure why, exactly. I haven't really tried, and he doesn't actually make himself super easy to reach.
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Chapter 2: How does Ben Shapiro view Kanye West's comments on Jewish people?
There's a man who focuses on his work, which of course I deeply respect. Go to expressvpn.com for an extra three months free. This show is also brought to you by Policy Genius, which is a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. I do wonder, since on this podcast we talk about immortality sometimes, what happens to life insurance when you're genetically guaranteed to be immortal?
I mean, because there's not going to be 100% guarantee, obviously. There's going to be ways to destroy the genetic material. where you're not gonna be able to reprint your body and mind. At least you won't be able to reprint memories. Maybe it'll be insurance on your memories.
Like you're not going to insure the life of your body and everything within it, but you're going to insure the sort of the data, the information inside your brain. And if he gets corrupted and destroyed, the people you love will get some money. That's a really interesting future idea. But unfortunately or fortunately, depends where you land on the debate.
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That's PolicyGenius.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help every time I say that I think about Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away, which I think is not a critically acclaimed movie, but I really enjoy it. There's something about a man alone against the elements, faced with a sort of explicit manifestation of his loneliness.
Most of us walk about our lives with our loneliness on the inside. Here, that loneliness is made explicit. It's real. It's made unavoidable. We can't lose ourselves in the daily busyness of life with the people around us. We have to face that loneliness when you're alone on an island. And even then, we find camaraderie with a volleyball. There you go.
And write help on the sand, hoping somebody will save us. So here we are, not alone on an island, but nevertheless are deeply lonely, deeply troubled, and are looking for ways to become better versions of ourselves. For that, talk therapy is great. I recommend BetterHelp for that kind of thing. Check them out at betterhelp.com and save on your first month.
This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data that comes from my body and gives me wisdom about which way I should walk through life. Lifestyle changes. diet recommendations, all to improve my life. The trajectory of your life should not be defined by a blog post you read somewhere, an advice column in a magazine with a sexy guy or girl on the cover.
It should come from the data that comes from your own body. That's the 21st century. There needs to be machine learning algorithms that integrate as much data as possible that comes from the body, obviously in a privacy-preserving way, and then give you recommendations based on that. It doesn't matter what works for the population. What matters is what works for you and you alone.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from Hitler's rise to power?
They're awful and anti-Semitic, and they seem to get worse over time. They started off with the bizarre DEFCON 3 tweet, and then they went into... even more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators. I think that was the Pete Davidson, Kim Kardashian stuff. And then Jews running all of the media, Jews being in charge of the financial sector, Jewish people.
I mean, there's no, I mean, I called it on my show, there's Sherman Nazism and it is, I mean, it's like right from protocols of the elders of Zion type stuff.
Do you think those words come from pain where they come from?
And, you know, it's always hard to try and read somebody's mind. What he looks like to me, just having experienced in my own family, people who are bipolar, is he seems like a bipolar personality. He seems like somebody who is in the middle of a manic episode. And when you're manic, you tend to say a lot of things that you shouldn't say.
And you tend to believe that they're the most brilliant things ever said. The Washington Post, an entire piece speculating about how bipolarism played into the kind of stuff that Ye was saying.
And it's hard for me to think that it's not playing into it, especially because even if he is an anti-Semite, and I have no reason to suspect he's not, given all of his comments, if he had an ounce of common sense, he would stop at a certain point. And bipolarism tends to drive you well past the point where common sense is applies. So, I mean, I would imagine it's coming from that.
I mean, from his comments, I would also imagine that he's doing the logical mistake that a lot of anti-Semites or racists or bigots do, which is Somebody hurt me. That person is a Jew. Therefore, all Jews are bad. And that jump from a person did something to me I don't like, who's a member of a particular race or class, and therefore everybody of that race or class is bad.
I mean, that's textbook bigotry, and that's pretty obviously what Ye is engaging in here.
So jumping from the individual to the group.
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Chapter 4: What is Ben Shapiro's perspective on the current political landscape?
And he wouldn't do it. Instead, he just kept going back to the general, the group, the Jews in general. I mean, that's textbook bigotry. And if it were put in any other context, he would probably recognize it as such.
To the degree as words fuel hate in the world, what's the way to reverse that process? What's the way to alleviate the hate?
I mean, when it comes to alleviating the kind of stuff that he's saying, obviously debunking it, making clear that what he's saying is garbage. But the reality is that I think that for most people who are in any way engaged with these issues, I don't think they're being convinced to be anti-Semitic by Ye.
I mean, I think there's a group of people who may be swayed that anti-Semitism is acceptable because Ye is saying what he's saying, and he's saying so very loudly, and he's saying it over and over. But... Yeah, I think that, for example, there are these signs that are popping up in Los Angeles saying Ye is right.
Well, that group's been out there posting anti-Semitic signs on the freeways for years. And there are groups like that posting anti-Semitic signs where I live in Florida. They've been doing that for years, well before Ye was saying this sort of stuff. It's just like latest opportunity to kind of jump on that particular bandwagon.
But listen, I think that people do have a moral duty to call that stuff out.
So there is a degree to which it normalizes that kind of idea that Jews control the media, Jews control X institution. Is there a way to talk about a high representation of a group like Jewish people in a certain way? institution like the media or Hollywood and so on without it being a hateful conversation.
Sure, of course. A high percentage of higher than statistically represented in the population percentage of Hollywood agents are probably Jewish. A higher percentage of lawyers generally are probably Jewish. A high percentage of accountants are probably Jewish. Also, a higher percentage of engineers are probably Asian. Statistical truths are statistical truths.
It doesn't necessarily mean anything about the... nature of the people who are being talked about. There are a myriad of reasons why people might be disproportionately in one arena or another, ranging from the cultural to sometimes the genetic.
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Chapter 5: How does Ben Shapiro define a good faith debate?
It's just the person maybe taking just an obverse position to mine. And so that's fine. Usually half of the debate or discussion is me just asking for clarification of terms. Like, what exactly do you mean by this so I can drill down on where the actual disagreement may lie? Because some of the time people think they're disagreeing and they're actually not disagreeing.
When I'm talking with Anna Kasparian and she's talking about how corporate and government have too much power together, I'm like, well, you sound like a tea party. You and I are on the same page about that. That sort of stuff does tend to happen a lot in discussion. I think that when discussion gets termed debate, it's a problem.
When debate gets termed discussion, it's even more problematic because debate is a different thing.
And I find that your debate and your conversation is often good faith. You're able to steal men on the other side. You're actually listening. You're considering the other side. The times when I see that Ben Shapiro destroys leftists, it's usually just like you said, the other side is doing the trolling.
I mean, the people that do criticize you for that interaction is the people that usually get destroyed are like 20 years old. And they're usually not sophisticated in any kind of degree in terms of being able to use logic and reason and facts and so on.
And that's totally fine, by the way. I mean, if people want to criticize me for speaking on college campuses where a lot of political conversation happens, both right and left, that's fine. I mean, I've had lots of conversations with people on the other side of the aisle, too.
I mean, right, I've done podcasts with Sam Harris, and we've talked about atheism, or I've done debates with Anna Kasparian, or I've done a debate with Cenk Uygur, or I've I've had conversations with lots of people on the other side of the aisle. In fact, I believe I'm the only person on the right who recommends that people listen to shows on the other side of the aisle, right?
I mean, I say on my show on a fairly regular basis that people should listen to Positive America. Now, no one on Positive America will ever say that somebody should listen to my show. That is verboten. That is not something that can be had. It's one of the strangenesses of our politics.
It's what I've called the happy birthday problem, which is I have a lot of friends who are of the left and are publicly of the left. And on my birthday, they'll send you a text message, happy birthday, but they will never tweet happy birthday, lest they be acknowledging that you were born of woman and that this can't be allowed.
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Chapter 6: What lessons does Ben Shapiro share from his experiences?
And this is the last interview of the day. And it's an interview with BBC. I don't know anything about BBC. I don't watch BBC. I don't know any of the hosts. So we get on the interview, and it's supposed to be about the book. And the host, Andrew Neal, doesn't ask virtually a single question about the book. He just starts reading me bad old tweets. Which I hate.
I mean, it's annoying and it's stupid and it's the worst form of interview when somebody just reads you battled tweets, especially when I've acknowledged battled tweets before. And so I'm going through the list with him. And this interview was solidly 20 minutes. I mean, it was a long interview. And we get to – and I make a couple of particularly annoyed mistakes in the interview.
So annoyed mistake number one is – The ego play, right? So there's a point in the middle of the interview where I say, like, I don't even know who you are, which was true. I didn't know who he was. It turns out he's a very famous person in Britain. And so you can't make that ego play.
But even if he's not famous, that's not what it's about.
It's a dumb thing to do, and it's an ass thing to do. So saying that was more just kind of peak and silliness. And so that was mistake number one.
I enjoyed watching that. It was like, oh, Ben is human.
Glad somebody enjoyed it. So there's that. And then the other mistake was that I just don't watch enough British TV. So the way that interviews are done there are much more adversarial than American TV. In American TV, if somebody is adversarial with you, you assume that they're a member of the other side. That's typically how it is. And so I'm critiquing some of his questions at the beginning.
And I thought that the critique of some of his questions is actually fair. He was asking me about abortion. And I thought he was asking it from a way of framing the question that wasn't accurate. And so I assumed that he was on the left because, again, I'd never heard of him. And so, you know, I mischaracterized him and I apologize later for mischaracterizing him.
We finally go through the interview. It's 20 minutes. He just keeps going with the battle tweets. And finally I got up and I took off the microphone.
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Chapter 7: What is the role of love in the human condition according to Ben Shapiro?
I walked out and immediately I knew it was a mistake. Like within 30 seconds of the end of the interview, I knew it was a mistake. And, and that's why even before the interview came out, I believe I corrected the record that Andrew Neal is not on the left. That's a mistake by me. And, and then, you know, took the hit for a bad interview.
And so as far as, you know, what I wish I'd done differently, I wish I'd known who he was. I wish I'd done my research. I wish that I had treated it as though there was a possibility that it was going to be more adversarial than it was. I think I was incautious about the interview because it was pitched as it's just another book interview. And it wasn't just another book interview.
It was treated much more adversarially than that. So I wish that that's on me. I got to research the people who are talking to me and watch their shows and learn about that. And then obviously, you know, the kind of gut level appeal to ego or arrogance like that. That's a bad look and and shouldn't have done that. And losing your cool is always a bad look.
So the fact that that sort of became somewhat viral and stood out just shows that it happens so rarely to you. So just to look at like the day in the life of Ben Shapiro, you speak a lot, very eloquently about difficult topics. What goes into the research, the mental, and you always look pretty like energetic and
You're not exhausted by the burden, the heaviness of the topics you're covering day after day after day after day. So what goes through the preparation mentally, diet-wise, anything like that? When do you wake up?
Okay, so I wake up when my kids wake me up. Usually that's my baby daughter who's two and a half. We are on the monitor usually about 6.15, 6.20 a.m. So I get up. My wife sleeps in a little bit. I go get the baby. Then my son gets up. And then my oldest daughter gets up. I have eight, six, and two. The boy's the middle child.
Is that both a source of stress and happiness?
Oh, my God. It's the height of both, right? I mean, it's the source of the greatest happiness.
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Chapter 8: What advice does Ben Shapiro give to young people?
So the way that I characterize it is this when it comes to sort of kids in life. So when you're single... Your boundaries of happiness and unhappiness, you can be a zero in terms of happiness, you can be like a 10 in terms of happiness.
Then you get married and it goes up to like a 20 and a negative 20 because your happiest stuff is with your wife and then the most unhappy stuff is when something happens to your spouse. It's the worst thing in the entire world. Then you have kids and all limits are removed.
So the best things that have ever happened to me are things where I'm watching my kids and they're playing together and they're being wonderful and sweet and cute and I love them so much. And the worst things are when my son is screaming at me for no reason because he's being insane. And I have to deal with that, right?
I mean, like, or something bad happens to my daughter at school or something like that. That stuff is really bad. So yes, the source of my greatest happiness, the source of my greatest stress. So they get me up at about 6.15 in the morning. I feed them breakfast. I'm kind of scrolling the news while I'm making them eggs. And, you know,
Just updating myself on anything that may have happened overnight. I go into the office, put on the makeup and the wardrobe or whatever, and then I sit down and do the show. A lot of the prep is actually done the night before because the news cycle doesn't change all that much between... kind of late at night and in the morning so I can supplement in the morning. So I do the show.
So a lot of the preparation, like thinking through what are the big issues in the world is done the night before.
Yeah, and that's reading pretty much all the legacy media. So I rip on legacy media a lot, but that's because a lot of what they do is really good and a lot of what they do is really bad. I cover a lot of legacy media. So that's probably covering, you know, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Daily Mail. And then I'll look over at some of the alternative media.
I'll look at my own website, Daily Wire. I'll look at Breitbart. I'll look at The Blaze. I'll look at maybe the Intercept. I'll look at, you know, a bunch of different sources. And then I will look at different clips online. So MediaEye comes in handy here. Grabian comes in handy here. that sort of stuff.
Cause my show relies very heavily on being able to play people so you can hear them in their own words. Uh, and, uh, and so that, that's sort of the media diet. So I sit down, I, I do the show. And then once I'm done with the show, I usually have between now it's like 11, 15 in the morning, maybe cause sometimes I'll pre-record the show. So it's 11, 15 in the morning. I'll go home.
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