something has to happen with Iran there has to be some diplomatic bilateral
communication there no what has to happen is the containment
of iran history moves in one direction right
because of time communism nazism all of that was a regression
from what was happening at for example the beginning of the 19th century in the
20th century what in what way do you think that today
don't from knows that he lost the election absolutely
so i i don't this is one of the areas where we get into this i don't
understand um if there's like brain breaking
happening or what's going on i don't know what world we can ever live in
where we say that trump is less divisive for the country than
biden joe biden literally used the occupational safety and hazard
administration to try to cram down vax mandates on 80 million americans that's
insane what about supercalifragilist and then
you're right about new ultra microscopic or the science terms yeah exactly what
about the seven thousand letter thing that's from part of uh
biochem i got my education the soviet union so we just did math
that's why you're a useful person does body count matter
the following is a debate between ben shapiro and destiny
each arguably representing the right and the left of american politics
respectively they are two of the most influential and skilled political
debaters in the world this debate has been a long time coming
for many years it's about 2.5 hours and we could have
easily gone for many more and i'm sure we will it is only round one
this is the lex freeman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now to your friends here's ben
shapiro and destiny ben you're conservative destiny you're
a liberal can you each describe what key values
underpin your philosophy on politics and maybe life in the context of this
left right political spectrum you want to go first yeah
so i think that we have a huge country full of a lot of people a lot of
individual talents capabilities um and i think that the goal of
government broadly speaking should be to try to ensure that everybody's able to
achieve as much as possible so on a liberal level that usually means
some people might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to things like
education um they might need a little bit of a
boost when it comes to providing certain necessities
like housing or food or clothing but broadly speaking i mean i'm still a
liberal not a communist or socialist i don't believe in the you know total
command economy total communist takeover of all of the
you know economy but i think that broadly speaking the
government should kind of like kick in and help people when they
need it and that government can and should be big
not necessarily i noticed that when liberals talk about government
especially taxes it seems like they talk about it for taxes sake or big
bigness sake so people talk about taxes sometimes it's like a like a punishment
like tax the rich uh i think taxing the rich is fine
insofar as it funds the programs that we want to
fund but democrats have a really big problem demonizing success or wealth and
i don't think that's a bad thing i don't think it's a bad thing to be
wealthy to be a billionaire whatever as long as we're funding what we need to
fund ben what do you think it means to be a
conservative what's what's the philosophy that underlies your political
view so first of all i'm glad that destiny you're already coming out as a
republican that's exciting um i mean i i we hold a lot in common in
terms of uh you know 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 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 you know local governments
because you have higher levels of homogeneity and consent
are capable of doing more things and as you abstract up the chain
it becomes more and more impractical and more more divisive to to do
more things in in my view government is basically there to
preserve certain key liberties uh the those key liberties pre-exist the
government uh insofar as they are more important
than what priorities the government has the the job of government is to
maintain for example national defense protection of property rights protection
of religious freedom these are these are the key focuses of
government as generally expressed in the bill of rights in the constitution
and i agree with the general philosophy of the bill of rights and the
constitution 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 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 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 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
um and it is better for society if we act
as though they do uh second the basic idea of human nature there is an idea
in my view that all human beings have equal value before the law
yeah 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 um 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 soul
suggests is something that government is generally incapable of doing and
more often than not botches and makes things worse
so those are a few key tenants and that that tends to materialize
in in a variety of ways the the easiest way to sum that up with
the traditional kind of three legs of the 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
uh in which free 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 uh and uh 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
and those people will pursue adversarial interests if we if we
do not protect our own interests can i ask a question on that i'm so sure it's
okay um i'm excited for this conversation
because i consider you to be really intelligent
but i feel like sometimes there are ways that conservatives talk about certain
issues that seem to defy logic and reason i
guess so here and i'm sure you feel the same
way about progress i feel the same way about progressives
but even some uh liberals for sure uh before i ask this question it's going
to relate to education we can agree broadly speaking that
statistics are real and that not everybody could do
everything so for a grounded example uh my life was pretty bad
i got into streaming and i turned my life around and that was really cool
but i can't expect everybody to do what i did right
like everybody being able to join the nba or to be like a streamer of course
everybody has different quality sure okay
so i used to be a lot more libertarian um when i was 2021 and one of the things
that dramatically changed kind of my view on
government uh manipulation of things in the
i guess in society came uh when it came time to deal with my son
and the school that he went to and one of the things that i noticed was
when it came time to send my son to school i could either do private
education or i could do public uh personally i did 12 years of catholic
private education um however the public schools in
nebraska depending on where you lived were very very very good and i opted for
a certain district i bought a house there i moved there and my son was able
to go to those schools um and he's been going through those
schools and the difference of availability of like
technology like these kids are taking home ipads and like first grade
uh they've got like huge computer labs and everything
do you think that there is some type of i don't want to say injustice or
unfairness because i'm not even looking at it that way
just pragmatically that there might be children that are in
certain schools that if they just had better funding or more
uh access to technologies or things available to them that those kids would
become more productive members of society that
would like a little bit of a help that they could actually achieve more and do
better for all of society 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
sure the two things i've heard are food availability and i think air conditioning
i think are the two biggest ones that i hear but 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 communities that 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 that money alone that investment of resources
is the top priority in schooling is belied by the fact that la usd which is
where i went to school when i was younger
they pour an enormous amount of money into la usd 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 every resource is finite every resource is limited you have to
prioritize what are the 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
is i quibble with it with the premise of the question which is that
again the the chief injustice when it comes to education on the list of of
injustices is lack of availability to technology or
that it's a funding problem i just don't think that's the case sure
and i can half agree with you there but i don't think any amount of changes in
the schools will create two-parent households right
we can't bring it i 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 pre-exists that sure but then i feel like we're now i
feel like this is kind of the conservative merry-go-round where it's
like what can we do to help with schools so two of the things that i've seen i
think that are usually brought up in research is one is air conditioning that
children in hotter environments just don't learn as well
um and then the second one is access to food so like kids that are given like a
breakfast or a lunch that's provided at school like increases educational
outcomes now i agree that neither of these things
might be determinative in like well 20 of kids were graduating and now 80 of
kids are graduating or these kids are all going you know from
with their geds into the workforce and now these kids are all suddenly becoming
engineers but in terms of where we can help do
you think there should be like some minimum threshold or minimum baseline of
like at the very least every school should have a non-leaky gym or every
school should have uh if children can't afford lunch or
breakfast like some sort of food provided or every
school should have these like baseline things so again i'm going to quibble
with the premise of the question because i think 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 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 starting at a second order question 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 right 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 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 i do not and in fact i think that many of them ends 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 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 net with a hammer and my question is what if the net isn't
even the problem 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 yeah and i agree with you 100 but again
the i feel like we're on the conservative merry-go-round then of
never wanting to address that's not a conservative merry-go-round i can i can
give you 10 ways well sure but so like here would be the merry-go-round i would
say that like there's a minimum funding for schools that i think would help
children and then we go well the thing that would help them the most is
two-parent households and i go okay well two-parent households actually aren't
the problem um the issue is access to things like
birth controls that people don't have children early on
and it's like but the issue isn't actually birth control the issue is
actually you need a certain amount of money to move out early and to get
married and then to have a two-parent household so it's actually like economic
opportunity no well it's not you know just two-parent households that's it
like what is the what are the precursors people before you're ready to have babies
done that's great we can say that and try to fight against you know however
many hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution but people will have sex
and people will make babies 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 sure now
are not married increasingly obviously a societal change something changed it
wasn't human evolution but a lot of those things in terms of resting on
whether or not people get married have to do with financial decisions
do you have the money people are worse off now than they were 50 60 years ago
when the marriage rates were higher people are delaying the start of their
careers because education is going to be increasingly important so
in 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 i'm saying that the one of the biggest indicators for
whether or not somebody's willing to get married is how much money both people
are making if they can move out of their household
people don't tend to want to get married at 22 when they've just finished college
when they don't have the money to move out and they can't afford a house because
we have changed the moral status of marriage in the culture
meaning that everyone poor rich and in between used to get married
that is 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
yes 100 do we think that serves a mother and father sure that is the basis for
all of this including education do we think that shotgun marriages are
well let's say this do we think that that's a reasonable direction that
society would ever take or is this like it was the reasonable direction for
nearly all of modern history was but history moves in one direction
right because of time made up people people don't think that's
in in what in what way is that is and i don't think we've ever like regressed
social standards back to like oh well let's go 100 years back and do things
that you know used to exist before i think there's the entire left right now
is arguing that we regress social standards by rejecting rovers way so
that's obviously not true the rovers weight is not a social
standard it's a supreme court ruling number one number two
what if you read the actual majority opinion on roe v wade we can see that
socially we ever actually never made huge progress on how society viewed
abortion this has always been an incredibly divisive thing right even
that was i think part of alito's uh writing on it was that things like gay
marriage for instance we've kind of moved past and it's not really as
debated anymore but abortion was never a subtle topic
despite the notion the arc of history constantly moves in one direction is be
lied by nearly all of the 20th century what do we mean by that i mean i mean
in terms of like women's rights civil rights barbarism
communism nazism all of that was a regression from what was happening at
for example the beginning of the 19th century in the 20th century what in what
way nazism and communism weren't a
regression from what was going on in 1905 these are well in terms of like
communism being a regression for instance i'm not a communist but like
the industrialization of the soviet union happened under communist society
the industrialization murder of tens of millions of people yeah there's i
consider that a regression there moral regression which is what we are talking
about now moral regression and you're you're suggesting that moral
regression i wouldn't term a return to traditional values in moral regression
you would but your suggestion is that history only moves in one direction and
i'm suggesting the history does not only move in in one direction it tends
to move actually back and forth sure i don't think that
all of history moves in one uh one direction they're going to be wars
they're going to be times of peace i think in general we're more peaceful now
than we have been in the past but i think when we look at the way that
people live their lives i think that we tend to move in a certain direction
socially so when it comes to things like racism or when it comes to things like
slavery or women's rights i think that there are two huge things
that probably aren't changing in the u.s and one is access to contraception
and one is women working jobs i think that these two things are probably huge
things that are moving us off of shotgun marriages or getting married
very early on and i don't see though do you think that those two things are
going to change fundamentally 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 those women are not educated but
those women aren't getting shotgun marriages
those women aren't having children now now you're shifting the topic my topic
was how to get more people married and what
and then you suggested that higher levels of education are delaying
marriage and making it less probable and what i'm telling you
because this is what the data suggests is that actually as you raise up the 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 i agree with you
but that's because one of the biggest precursors to getting married is having
like a level of economic stability so as people get more educated they obtain
this economic stability and then they're in a more comfortable position to
explore more serious 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 i don't understand where this is coming
from why is that such a why is that such a challenge i don't think it's
unbreakable or unshatterable i was just the initial point was for
school if we can provide a minimum level of
educational stuff for children that'd probably be good but when we retreat
back to well it has to be the families that are
fixed first fixing families is a multivariate problem that has so many i
am fine within my local community we all vote again i've suggested that there's
a difference between local community and federal
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 that's fine i'm part of a very very solid community in
our community we give to each other 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 0.5 percentage point
as opposed to the entire iceberg melting beneath them and we just ignore that 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
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 every one of my community is married
that's like minimum buy into my community is four kids
okay 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 and so if you're talking about the arc
of history shifting toward me 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 yeah i don't necessarily disagree with
any of that but i'm just saying that again on the i know you're upset when i
bring up the term merry-go-round um i think that there are good
conversations to be had about people getting married because
stable families produce stable children that are less likely to commit crime
that are more likely to go to school they're more likely to productive
members of society etc i'm not going to disagree with you on any of that all of
that is true um it's just frustrating that sometimes
when you bring up any problem all of it will circle back to other things that
makes it seem like we can't make any progress
in any area without like fixing away i mean i literally just told you that on
the local level i'm fine for people voting for yeah so for instance on the
local level so for school funding school funding is done i think generally
per district so what do you do when you have poor
districts that can't afford air conditioner for their schools
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 cool i also don't think that that's going
to heal anything remotely like the central problem
and i think that what what 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 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
because incentive structures do have you know moral underpinnings there's such
a thing as you know for example if you're using 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 not
all of these are pragmatic concerns 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 with people who are drunk searching
under the the lamp for their keys the problems they want to look at are the
problems that are solved by government 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 and i one billion percent agree and then obviously my criticism for the
conservative side is the exact opposite where where there are parts where
government could remedy some issues for instance you know children having
sex with each other producing other children out of wedlock like sometimes
having after-school programs is nice to prevent that like i didn't have time for
these things when i was in school i was doing football practice i was doing
cross-country practice i went in early for a band you know
i agree with you that sometimes people only focus on one end of the problem as
a i hate to be that guy but as somebody
that have you ever watched the wire sure i'm not going to cite the wire as
real life example but like obviously there's only so much you can do in a
school when the children coming in are so beyond destroyed because of the
family life and everything prior to them even getting
to school that day so i agree government is not like the solution to
broken families that would never be the case 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
yeah so the only thing i'm looking at is as i said earlier just like these
minimum threshold things where it's like where can government make because you
mentioned marginal which i think is a really good way to look at things there
are marginal costs and marginal utility to things
where the first thousand dollars per student you spend might give you a huge
return but the extra twenty thousand after i
think these are all pragmatic discussions
actually this is what we used to hash out in legislatures before they turned
into platforms for people grandstanding but
yes sure okay yeah as we descend from the heavens of
philosophical discussion of conservatism and liberalism
let's go to the pragmatic muck of politics
trump versus biden between the two of them
who was in their first term uh the better president
and thus who should win if the two of them are in fact our choices
should win a second term in 2024 ben sure so in terms of actual
job performance you have to separate it into a few categories
uh 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 fairly good
example of that uh 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 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 six thousand dollars
during his term the unemployment rates were very very
low before covet yeah i think that you almost have to separate the trump
administration into sort of before covet and during covet because covet
obviously is a sort of a black swan event the the most
signal change in in politics in our lifetime
uh and so you know governance during covet is almost its own category which
we can discuss um but you know in terms of foreign
policy in terms of domestic policy i think that trump was significantly better
uh than biden has been and 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 30 more expensive you're talking about
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 um but uh then joe biden continued to fire
hose money at things in 21 22 and 23 uh you know that obviously
is in my opinion bad economic policy uh 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
uh i think that donald trump does say a lot of things 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
it just becomes you know 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 just positive 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 even the things i think he's done right
are i think band-aids for things that he created by doing wrong
uh and when it comes to his 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 in the same way that obama did on the sort of soaring
rhetoric of american unity i'm the president for all
trump came in he's like listen i'm the president for 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
you're like okay you know so that's what it is with biden he came in with i'm the
president for all americans 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 um and um
you know the the sort of lumping in of everybody into magna republicans who
wasn't personally signed on to a 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 he is no longer capable of certainly
rhetorically unifying the country when every speech from him feels like
watching nick milendo walk across a volcano on a tightrope
and it really is like you're just sort of waiting for him to follow i mean
it's 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
uh and i mean jill rushed up there like off that off
as soon as he was done jill rushed up there uh 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 rumba and you know that that's not
really you know i let's put it this way it does not quiet the soul
to watch joe biden rhetorically again it's a different problem than trump's
problem but that's my analysis uh this is one of the areas where we
get into this i don't understand um if there's like brain breaking happening
or what's going on i don't know what world we can ever live in
where we say that trump is less divisive for the country than
biden i think it is so patently obvious trump is so divisive
like not only does trump make an enemy out of every
person in the opposition party he makes an enemy out of his own party and every
single person around him like we all watched him bully uh you
know jeff sessions we all watched him bully his own party on twitter we all
watched like all of these people walk away from him
um even recently i think um his uh the secretary of defense esper and
john kelly the chief of staff where you know saying i think trump is a threat to
democracy um you know you've got all of his prior
people that were around him some of his closest allies you've got bill bahr that
won't co-sign a single thing that he says
um you've got all these people that he used to work with that all say
trump is a horrible evil person he is ineffective as a leader he doesn't
accomplish anything and he didn't you know to say that biden has failed at
bipartisanship when you know we've gotten the chips act we've gotten the
ira we've gotten the uh arp we've gotten the bipartisan infrastructure bill when
we've got like all this major legislation that is working in this
historically divided congress as opposed to trump that got us tax cuts
and deficit spending um i i don't understand where we ever are
in this world where biden is somehow more divisive than trump even the
speeches that ben is bringing up they always bring up i remember that
one um i think we might have even done it on our episode though the one speech
that biden gave were at one point that like the background is red
and the speech i referenced yeah they're like oh my god it's over this is the end
and then meanwhile you've got donald trump you know coming into office
saying things like if you burn the flag you should have your citizenship revoked
or talking about ms uh dnc that i'm going to investigate
every single one of these uh media organizations for corruptness i'm going
to open the libel and defamation laws i'm going to take all of these guys to
court um you've got this weird project 2025
stuff where um is it john pachell i think uh is
talking about uh you know we're gonna we're gonna
investigate all of these people and we're gonna try to throw crimes at all
these people uh trump is like the most divisive president i think we've ever
had in in at least in my lifetime of being
um an american citizen and the rhetoric from him is just it's on a whole other
level in terms of the demonization of political opponents i mean this is a guy
that's known for giving his political opponents
bad nicknames right like that's what trump does
um you know like it's funny but even as a resident of florida
if florida had another natural disaster do you think trump would withhold aid
because you had uh i think that was one of the few nice things that desantis
actually said about biden was like hey listen
you know when the buildings collapsed and i think that was miami beach yeah
that um you know for the hurricane stuff that biden was there he was saying if
you guys need aid however many billions you can have it
meanwhile trump i think was threatening to withhold federal funding from blue
states that wouldn't um i think it had to do with the national
guard stuff the deployment of the national guard that they weren't like
doing enough for the riots and and uh trump was threatening to withhold aid
from some of these blue states um yeah trump is literally the most
divisive person in the world i don't see how on
any metric he is ever succeeding in the divisive category
in terms of the economy i do think it's funny that republicans are very keen to
say that like well we can't really grade trump you know
post-covid because obviously covid mess everything up which is fair
but pre-covid what did trump do yeah he didn't he did deficit spending tax cuts
he presided over historic low interest rates and an economy that was already
like like blazing past the final years of
obama we were posting all-time highs and all the stock markets of 2013 onwards
um you know unemployment rates were falling now under biden unemployment
rates are even lower than they were under trump
but uh it sucks that for trump we can say well we can't really hold them
accountable for 2020 that was covid well all we have for biden is post covid
we don't have any pre-covid biden uh you know economy and it was the same
thing for obama too coming in right after the housing collapse as well
and it sucks that republicans are able to walk out of office
you know having burned the entire american society to the ground
economically and now we've got to try to evaluate
okay well what did obama do during his first two to three to four years just
trying to recover from where the housing crash left it and
then we look at biden now who's trying to recover from
covid and now we're grading him on on a totally different scale than what trump
is being graded on yeah that that sucks i think we can
comment on the foreign policy on the foreign policy i'm gonna be
honest i am a um i am very liberal i'm very not
progressive uh i'll probably come off as more
hawkish than others uh because i'm not a big fan of this
which also if i mean if ben agrees like i think
uh people like people like trump are going to be the most dovish isolationist
people ever they don't want to do anything
internationally they just want to you know protect america be at home protect
our economy don't do anything uh internationally which is why he was
constantly undermining nato uh and constantly you know attacking all
the european union and you know cheering on the uk for
brexiting away from the eu i think that being said
um i think that binus done a phenomenal job uh when it comes to foreign policy i
think that the coalition building was so important
for ukraine russia and i'm so happy that he decided to go to our european
allies and our nato allies and try to build a coalition of people to help
ukraine so that that wasn't only the united
states um personally especially after doing a
whole bunch of research i do tend to side with israel
over um palestine and a lot of the israelite palestinian conflicts
i'm glad that biden while remaining a staunch defender of israel is trying to
rein in some of the more aggressive posturing
towards uh the palestinians in the gaza strip i'm i'm proud that biden said hey
listen we're going to delay some of these attacks hey listen we are going to
allow humanitarian aid here hey listen we are
going to try to uh you know not kill as many palestinian people down
there while still you know signaling that he would be a staunch supporter of
um of israel and in the conflict assuming the
civilian casualties don't go too high um for foreign policy
i mean blemishes i mean like the biggest one you can give to biden
is afghanistan in the poll out there but man
are we going to talk about you know the inspector general report that says that
one of the biggest reasons why the afghanistan poll it was so disastrous
was because of the doha accords where donald trump headed talks that
didn't even include the afghanistan army i mean like these were disasters but
like when when biden took office we had 2 500 troops
left in afghanistan like what was the options even
afforded to biden at that point um obviously you've got the abandonment of
the kurds in northern syria you know for the turkish
armies to lay waste to um you know but iran and north korea although i'm not
sure where uh then would land on those but yeah
that's a broadly that's that's a lot from both
you want to pick pick up something where you disagree with here well i mean
there's a lot so i mean so i want to ask a few questions on each one of these
yeah sure so let's let's talk about divisiveness
for a second so there's no one who can make the case
that donald trump is not divisive yeah 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 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 um
i'm gonna try to be concise when i say this
broadly speaking especially in studying israel palestine and ukraine russia i
try not to take politicians at their word because sometimes they just say
stuff to say stuff i understand that but broadly speaking i'm going to look
at the rhetoric and the actions and i am going to grade them the same so yes i
would hold biden and trump to the same right so
my feeling is in this 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 and he says whatever he
wants to at any given time and it doesn't even match up with his policy
very often can i ask you like for our head of state our chief executive
shouldn't rhetoric be arguably one of the most important things that he does
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 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 accessible and one thing that i would ask you about that though is i
agree especially when you get the favorability but sometimes when i look
at these polls when you start to disaggregate them by party i wonder if
it's actually is biden historically divisive or um i'm trying to think of a
really polite way to say this the people that like trump worship trump i don't
know i like one of the most prescient things that trump could have probably
ever said was that i could kill someone on fifth street and nobody would hold
me accountable so is it really that biden is historically divisive or is it
that every single trump supporter will always say that trump is great and no
the reason i would say that biden is in fact historically divisive is because
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 in what way i mean and the allegiance to oh no there's certainly
more allegiance to trump than it is to romney or mccain largely because trump
won in 2016 but beyond that the 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 and right now there are a lot of democrats who either don't agree with
biden or you know find device there are a lot of independents who find them
divisive so when you're when we're comparing these things i don't think
they're leagues apart in terms of the divisive effects of what they say
right 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 mega
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
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 i 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 yeah just one quick
thing i guess like because we can say the reality of it and we can look at
opinion polls what if we look at like legislative accomplishments like biden
is working on a 50 50 divided senate donald trump had both house of congress
and the supreme court and got like no major legislation passed well i mean he
did lose congress in 2018 but sure but prior to that because we got the we got
the infrastructure bill i think in one year which trump promised for his entire
presidency didn't get anywhere 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 in local but they were in favor of mass spending for tax
cuts that's not a spending i mean i mean effectively it is right like
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 uh ira again well we
have we have a fundamental philosophical difference here i think
that when when the government takes my money that is not that is not the
government somehow being more fiscally responsible 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 that's great but at
the end of the day the government is still going to be in a deficit spending
and they're going to have to borrow money from the treasure right we have a
spending problem in other words not a receipts problem is the case that i'm
making the problem with 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
well you actually need us to tax the middle class to death
i mean the reality is the top 20 percent of the american population pays
literally all net taxes in the united states after after state benefits and
all of this sure 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 50 60 thousand dollars and i don't want that i agree with that so how do
you explain the lack of legislation 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 he's the head of the republican party is the president
republican president of the united states i mean again i don't think that
joe biden has passed wildly historic legislation other structure
was the largest like 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 that that let's be real about this that
are tax cuts because 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
right exactly and so trying to 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 coming which is why
spending was out of control under under trump as well but there are some
republicans who still don't want to spend on those things right so
inherently the 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 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 of our life i want to ask a couple questions on the foreign
policy sure yeah okay wait real quick just so for
instance like donald trump wanted to punish china
and he wanted to bring a microprocessor manufacturer the united states
uh biden did that with legislation with the chips act uh you talk about like
spending being out of control and i i mean i can agree with that i think
anybody looks at the numbers has to agree with that but why not pass
legislation like the inflation reduction act
which is at least like spending neutral right like why are there not bills where
donald trump could take well i mean at first 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
well but again i don't see a tax cut as a matter of quote on 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 okay
so then just to understand so if somebody just did massive
like reductions in tax receipts so tax cut after tax cut after tax cut but they
didn't change spending at all you wouldn't consider that like an
increase in deficit spending or out of control spending you would just say
they're just tax cuts no the opposite i would consider it a wild i would
consider it a wild overspending okay meaning meaning was it under trump
then when he did the time i mean the deficit spending by the way under under
biden is way worse than it wasn't of course but we're in post-covid right
covid ended effectively spending you live in florida covid effectively ended
in the state of florida by the middle of 2021
yeah i mean even if you're a vaccine fan by like april may of 2021 there was wide
availability of vaccines whether or not you like the vaccines yeah and at that
point we were done i agree but like we're in a
post like how many trillions of dollars have been dumped in
worldwide that are like leading to inflation
right the inflation is like a worldwide uh issue right now because of the
economy shutting down for a year or two it's not like those effects are gone in
one year right covid might be gone but the after effects of all the stimulus
spending and the unemployment everything 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 sure i agree um but like there's also the
definition of when do you deficit spend is when economies are headed for
recessions right rather than when economies are doing really well like
they were under trump and he was deficit spending whereas biden can at least make
the argument that i should i ought to be deficit spending because the economy is
headed for potential recession so here's the thing i don't think that
the economy was actually headed for a session
in in fact if you look at the economic statistics
it was no they're still saying that there's like a recession coming right
right but that was largely because the after effects 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 idea the question was whether you're
gonna get a soft landing 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 that's what the chart looks like is it looks like this and then it hits
march of 2020 it goes like that yeah right and then by like september it
bounces back up right it's a v-shaped recovery
and then it starts to peter out sure a lot because of the american recovery
plan right that biden did as well i mean four million jobs 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 what you see is actually kind of a straight line i
mean what the chart looks like in any case okay so on the foreign
policy stuff this is getting abstruse but
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
probably um that's a hard one the factors that i'm making right now are
like obviously you've got the israel palestinian war that's going on right
now which is kind of bad but like broadly speaking i'm not sure how much
that affects the middle east as much as like the collapse of syria
2013 syrian civil war sent millions of immigrants throughout all of europe which
was under um which was under obama and continued
under trump trump didn't do anything to alleviate
any of the syrian civil war um in terms did syria end up as a preserve of russia
again how did syria end up as a preserve of
russia yes why did it end up being essentially a client state of russia
um i know that putin enjoys access to the ports down there
um 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 used
pashar asad then used chemical weapons in
syria 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 do you think there might have been some hesitancy
after like seeing how libya ended up that maybe
us like intervening who was president during libya oh yeah
i mean like what does that have to do with anything i'm just saying like there
might have been like a mistake learned that i'm making is that actually the
middle east i mean just historically speaking was historically good
under donald trump i mean it's very difficult to make the case that either
before or after trump were better than during donald trump
i mean the syrian i don't think that trump contributed to the syrian
situation and improving much um i think a lot of
iraq isis which was in the i mean isis had been getting wrecked by the kurds in
iraq by every single person by asad's army by putin by turkey literally
everybody was fighting against isis at that point
there's a spike in violence and then the the trumpet 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
for sure he called them the jv squad sure and then they became not the jv
squad yeah but i don't know if isis is originating in syria
um and uh baghdadi and all of the growth of that is necessarily obama's fault i
know that we like to say that obama created isis i don't know if you say
that but i've heard that saying a lot i think that's a little bit simplistic
um i don't think that when i'm looking at like actions that presidents have
taken the the biggest the biggest criticism i have
for like middle eastern policy is i think the doha accords were a disaster
and i think that's like one of the biggest blemishes that we have right now
i would also argue that moving the um embassy to jerusalem was also kind of
silly um and arguably contributed to some of the conflict we see right now
no it's actually i'll argue precisely 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
and then when joe biden took office joe biden took a very anti saudi stance on a
wide variety of issues the 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 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 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 which was good which was after two years of failure with
saudi arabia tried to bring them into the abraham accords right that was what
was burgeoning at the end of la at the end of last year
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 1200 of its citizens and the taken kidnapping of
240 israel has to do that not only to go after
its own hostages and try to restore them but also to re-establish military
deterrence in the most violent region of the world
hizballah gets active on israel's northern border hizballah is an iranian
proxy they get active on the northern border
the the who these in yemen get active these
are all the only reason all this is happening at the same time is because
iran is doing this right and i not just that they're they are
threatening global shipping sure if 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 right now the cost of shipping is nearly
double what it was just a few weeks ago and that is
because a ragtag group of who the barbarians are attacking
international shipping and forcing everybody to stop
using the babel mound of straight instead going around the cape of good
hope in 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 he appointed robert
mallet to negotiate the iran deal who as it turns out
was using proxies he many of his aides were actually taking money from iran
rah the the the biden administration literally one of their first act was to
delist the who these as a terror organization and sanctions
against the who these these are all moves that the biden made very early on
they were disastrous moves but when it comes to domestic policy i think
he hasn't been nearly as damn domestic hold it let's do it on foreign power
sure so just a couple of middle eastern things
so one of the big things that threw the middle east into disaster was
we are all traumatized by it now was the iraq evasion
which i'm a republican president sure i agree with that right sure the
the deposition of saddam hussein and everything that followed after
probably contributed more to the growth of isis and the destabilization of that
entire region probably more than anything else i think that
under prior to bush um for clinton even at the beginning of bush's presidency we
were on some kind of road to normalcy with
iran which i think has to happen whether we like them or not
um until bush for whatever reason decides to throw iran into the axis of
evil it 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 my understanding is that yeah from the
late 90s and prior to the axis of evil uh labeling of iran that there was going
to be some path forward to where we could start to normalize relationships
with them i i find that very difficult to believe
and i don't see a lot of evidence i mean we can just disagree on that okay yeah
sure we can disagree on that 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
i agree yeah because of the destabilization of iraq and iraq not
having a a government there that was functional
for at least a decade and was in fact a sunni government right originally it was
a sunni government disbanding the sunni army was one of the
worst things that the bush administration did all the former
baht parties sectarian yeah all horrible under republican president
um but disagree that the uh yeah that that probably contributed more to
isis uh to the growth of power in iran maybe even related to the
destabilization of syria probably more than anything that obama did
also the uh when we look at iran funding people in the region
i don't disagree with that as well i think iran is the number one instigator
of bad guy things right now in the middle east iran
on the irgc i supported when donald trump killed sili amani i think that
was a great thing um i i think that iran is a major
problem however i don't know if the path forward
is constantly being a belligerent to iran or trying to figure out some
road to normalcy i don't know if the collapse of iran um or the destruction
of that country considering how unpopular
yeah it all even is there like the citizens of iran i don't think our big
supporters of the government there um i i feel like moving on a path where
you know let's do our nuclear inspections we had that
iranian nuclear deal that trump pulled out of let's do the nuclear inspections
make sure you're not on the way to nuclear weapons let's unfreeze some
funds let's move in some direction where we get on a good term with you
i feel like that's the most important thing that needs to happen in the middle
east as much as people like to look at the
abraham accords who cares if what was it uh bahrain i think oman
um i think ua morocco the uae and morocco yeah are something like
all of these people even saudi arabia already have like de facto
normalization with israel anyway they're all trading no this is i mean to pretend
that that anybody even 15 years ago would have been talking
about normalization saudi arabia and israel is
insane i mean that's they already they were already on that path they
they had already been trained they were already de facto trading partners with
each other that that that they had already been
collaborating that's a wild claim that that israel and saudi arabia were going
to normalize 15 years ago 15 years ago might have
been a wild but after turkey um after jordan and then in the past like
20 years of like economic relations and ties with each other
all the leadership in the middle east and you'll agree with this look at
israel and they go okay well we've got palestinians who you know god bless them
do nothing and then you've got israel which is on a
on a region with no natural resources to somehow become like an economic giant
they're going to trade with their population is educated they you know
have military power um all of the leadership in these
middle eastern countries are wanting to be friendly with israel and are engaging
in trade de facto with israel and the idea that like the uae and
bahrain were brought in to say like oh well now we're going to
officially say this i i just those were 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 i agree the notion that you that that
negotiations with the ayatollah were going to be a solution to any of this
is but do we think absolutely are the is it the abraham accords that's
convincing saudi arabia to take a stance against iran
no i mean they're already fighting with each other right like i don't think the
abraham accords moved us any closer towards
any type of real peace in the region it has to happen if something has to happen
with iran there has to be some diplomatic bilateral
communication there no what has to happen is the containment of iran which
was what was in prey which was what was taking place with
the increased normalization with the suny arab world and israel
combined with significant economic sanctions
they the notion that that there's this far-fetched notion in 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 and this idea that they are willing to take money in exchange for
for example some sort of people peaceful acquiescence
to israel's existence is obviously untrue
they're literally hasn't that been the case though that you've had a region
with tons of sectarian violence for a long time and then finally turkey was
like you know what this isn't worth it the
united states paid them a lot of money they had conversations
with israel you know what the economy the economic game
i mean same thing with jordan same thing with the turkish politics
but but the the situation with turkey was actually quite warm between israel
and turkey in the 90s when you had the the you know sort of secular
muslim regime in the 90s but they signed an autoturk in place
and and now erdogan is has joined in the frame
erdogan is significantly more radical sure i'm so sorry um if i said
my bad yeah okay so egypt yeah right so so yeah so
in terms of like egypt and jordan right we're the first two you need back to so
here's the thing you need is it possible that you could theoretically come to a
deal with iran only with a new leadership group
okay this is true for every peace agreement in the region you could not
israel could not have made peace with well they made peace with egypt and
sadat was the leader for yom kippur right did not make peace with nasser
right the point is that this is a different regime you need a different
regime there's one thing the same regime that did
the part of the yom kippur war was the same regime that negotiated peace with
israel 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 uh no you know that is not a thing that's
going to happen but i think people probably felt the
same every single one of the proxy 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 alahu akbar death to
america death to the jews death to israel
it doesn't fit on a bumper sticker but that 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 we it's easy to say the stakes of diplomacy are
okay so we try to talk right jaw jaw is better than war war
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
came into office with an orientation toward continuing the biden
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 any place that's happening is
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 then we wish that it were i mean i think that's
part of what's happening in ukraine as well so you think which brings me by the
way here's my question about ukraine well just real quick and then you guys
listen now so you think that for iran right a country that has been sanctioned
for god knows how many years now you think that for iran just
continuing to sanction them and contain them is an effective way
is more effective than trying to engage them in bilateral and multilateral peace
talks yes 100 and the proof is in the pudding
before we go to ukraine can i ask about israel so you're both
mostly in agreement but what is it i'm about to say that
okay but as i'm learning uh what is israel doing right what is israel
doing wrong in this very specific current war
in gaza um i mean frankly i think that what israel is doing wrong is if i were
israel okay like again america's interests are not
coincident with israel's interests if if i were an israeli leader
i would have stilled up and i would have knocked the leap out of hizballah
early what does that mean what does that mean so i i would have i would
yoav galant who is the defense minister of israel was encouraging nathaniel who
is the prime minister and the war cabinet including ben egan so
whenever people talk about the nathaniel government that's not what's in place
right now there's a unity war government in place that includes the political
opposition 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 unity government that includes the opposition 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 hizballah out because hizballah is significantly more dangerous
to the existence of the state of israel than hamas i actually agree with that
uh 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 is doing pretty well from an israeli perspective fire
israeli i would actually want israel to be
less loose about sending its soldiers in on the ground level so israel is
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
they're attempting to minimize civilian casualties and they're
losing a lot of guys in in this particular in this particular
war um you know the the problem that israel has had historically speaking is
that israel got very complacent about its own
security situation they believe the technology was going to somehow
correct for the hatred on the other side of the wall that it very
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 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 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
um maybe uh so uh in terms of broadly speaking uh i
generally oppose settlement expansion is a thing that israel does incorrectly
that i think is kind of like provocative to
at least all the palestinians uh in the west bank and it probably energizes
hatred in the gaza strip for them as well in terms of
conducting uh in terms of conducting warfare uh the one thing that i always
say to everybody uh especially americans is you can't
evaluate things from an american perspective it's very stupid
it happened a lot with ukraine where people like oh well didn't they work
with the nazis and like weren't the soviets the good guys
and it's like well in in other parts of the world it's not quite as simple
um and i think the same is true for israel palestine that a lot of americans
will analyze the conflict as just being one
between only israel and palestine which is not it's a conflict between israel
and then palestine has beloved huthis and iran right now it is
um i think that the however one area where i'll break with ben is i think
that minimizing civilian casualties and
everything is very very very important i think on the israeli side
i don't think it's important so that the u.s will stay with them because i think
the u.s is probably going to stick with israel
as long as i don't do anything crazy and i don't even think it matters for the
international community it doesn't definitely matter for the un because
jesus christ um however i think it's really really
really important that i think that in the middle east broadly
speaking i think that leadership especially in the gulf has gotten over
the palestinian uh issue i think that leadership is kind of like
they don't care as much anymore but the populations still care quite a bit
and i think that the main issue that israel could run into is
if the civilian death toll does climb too high and if they start to hit this
you know 40 50 60 000 number of civilian casualties
they run the risk of the civilian populations in the surrounding middle
eastern states becoming so antagonistic towards israel that they start to take
steps back towards normalization in the region so for
instance i know that barin i think already pulled out their
ambassador to israel my guess is going to be it's
temporary um i know that on the um on the public speaking side you've got a
lot of people condemning israel for the attacks and on the private side
you've got people telling israel please kill all of hamas because this is
untenable and nobody wants to work in the situation
um i don't know if this ended up being true or not i'm guessing it didn't but i
saw on a couple of twitter accounts it was leaked that potentially saudi arabia
was considering installing a government in the west bank that they would run
um no i mean i i think israel would love nothing better than that but that is for
sure okay one of the big problems in the middle
east is literally no one wants to preside over the palestinians yes no one
so i think arab states israel no one so i think the issue and i think and
i'm largely actually i'm very sympathetic towards the palestinians
because i think that for um since 48 and onwards i think that
all of the arab states super gassed them up on that they wanted the palestinians
to fight because they wanted to fight with israel
um however as time has gone on and they've realized that the it's kind of a
lost cause states have started to drop out so
you're getting these bilateral uh peace treaties with um egypt and with
jordan you're getting multilateral agreements like the abraham accords
and now the palestinians are looking around i'm like okay well you guys told
us to fight all this time and now the only people that we have supporting us
are iranian proxies so the palestinians are in a very weird
spot where they've like lost all their support
um yeah i think that i think that israel what i would say to be quote-unquote
critical of israel is israel needs to take strong steps towards peace that
probably involves them enduring some undue hardship so not the
october 7th attacks because jesus that's way too much
but you know other types of you know attacks that they might have to deal with
that might cause some civilians to die that they don't come out over the top
with and and retaliate with if there's ever
going to be peace in that region however another thing that i've always
said is a huge problem between israel and palestine is
i think that both sides think that if they continue to fight
it will be good for them but the problem is one side is delusional
uh israel i think israel wants to continue to fight because
they get justifications for uh the annexation of the golan heights
they get justifications for expansions especially in area c that i think
they're probably going to try to annex soon
uh they get justifications for the increased military posturing
towards the gaza strip and the embargoes and israel is right that if the conflict
continues really the situation only improves for israel over time
but the palestinians also all believe that if they keep fighting they
thought this since 2000 or arafat that if they just keep fighting they'll get
better gains too but that's not the case is
there a difference between palestinian citizens and the leadership when you say
that i love all people i love all people around
the world and i think that when we analyze issues i think that we have to
be very honest with what the people on the ground think
and the idea that hamas is just this one-off thing in the gaza strip
is not only incorrect with the situation on the ground it's also incredibly
ahistorical and the idea that like the palestinians
in the west bank of which i believe the most recent polling shows i want to say
75 to 80 support the october 7th attacks
palestinians in general want to fight in violent conflict with israel that's not
just the position of the government that's not just people
there's a reason why abbas doesn't want to do elections in the west bank
and it's because the palestinian people really do want to fight with israel but
to combat that problem is like you have to get the un on board we've got to do
an actual addressing of the palestinian refugee problem which is handled like a
joke right now iran has to be brought to the table in
terms of negotiations there has to be huge efforts made to
economically revitalize these like palestinian areas even though they're
one of the highest recipients of aid in the world
um you have to do something about the embargo and the blockade
and the gaza strip which isn't just maintained by israel it's also maintained
by egypt you should ask why um yeah there's a lot of things that
have to happen to fix that problem but the reality is is i don't think israel
really wants to because they get to continue their expansion into the west
bank and i don't think anybody around the
world really cares that much so we won't be talking 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 are 8 000 jews who are living inside
the gaza strip in gush katif uh up until 2005
they they withdrew all of those people i mean took them literally out of their
homes uh and the result was not the burgeoning
of a of a better attitude toward the state
of israel with regard to for example you know the the palestinian population
in gaza in fact it was more radical in gaza than it was
in the west bank uh the the the result was obviously the election of hamas the
the october 7th attacks in which unfortunately many civilians took place
it took part in the october 7th attacks there's video of people rushing
who are civilians and dressed in civilian clothing into
israeli villages always the same thing well no no that is that is 100 true
obviously uh and when it comes to you know area c
and israel's you know supposed to deepen abiding desire
for territorial expansion in area c area c so for for those who are not
familiar with the oslo accords and again this is getting very abstruse but
the oslo accords are broken down into three areas of the west bank area a is
under full palestinian control that'd be like janine and nablus the the major
cities for example there's area b which is mixed israeli
palestinian control where israel provides
some level of military security and control uh 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
there is building taking place in area c by both actually no one talks about
this but by palestinians as well as israelis
uh and the the you know question is whether
if israel stopped building there have been many settlement freezes in the
past including some undertaken by netanyahu
uh and and it actually has not done one iota of good
in moving the ball forward in terms of actual negotiations
again the the biggest problem is that the leadership for palestinians has
spent every day since really 67 it's not even
48 because after 40 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 you ought to hand this over to an independent palestinian state which
was originally the division that was that was promoted
by the u.n partition plan in 47 because of that uh the 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 in 64 the basic idea
as you know kind of indicated by that was israel will not exist
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 when it 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 in hanunas you're out of your mind
you're out of your mind israelis do not want that 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 true but i think israel does want to
continue to expand settlements into the west bank right they want to continue to
build they want to have all of jerusalem east jerusalem as well 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
what why would they not until there's a peace partner sure that's what i mean
but i'm saying as long as the conflict continues like because even when you
talk about you know what your suggestion is that they're incentivizing the
conflict to continue so they can grab more land well let me be very clear i
don't think there's like a point like so some people say for instance
uh they'll take that one quote from netanyahu and i'll try to say that like
he was funding the people in the gaza strip by allowing katari money to come
in even though he was actually speaking in
opposition to abbas allowing the gaza strip to fall for netanyahu to clear it
out for him they give it back etc etc i'm not saying i'm not claiming those
theories i'm just saying that i think that israel will take a relatively
neutral stance towards conflict enduring because as long as the conflict
endures and as long as the uh settlements can expand i think that
benefits i think that ultimately benefits israel
the i think there would be very let's put 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 in return for not expanding bathrooms in a fraud i
kind of agree i would have agreed with you on october 6 i think we're probably
a year or two away from that right now no no but no 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
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 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 are the mark fund yeah right and and which is from the the moderate west
bank right exactly that's the the so you know again like the taste in israel for
this is a even the people who are the kilo name right those are the most
secular people in israel which was by the way the place that was attacked on
october 7th 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 job i mean it's just it's it's mind-boggling that's why you've
had this ground shift in israel 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 and i will say i agree
essentially with everything you're saying um not to loop back another topic
but this is one of the reasons then why i was so critical
i don't wanna say critical but like kind of nonchalant about the abraham
accord because they didn't address anything with the palestinians
whatsoever they brought countries that weren't super relevant to the conflict
they didn't bring in qatar which is where a lot of the money and support
for the gaza they didn't involve iran at all they involved bilateral nobody
totally changed the mentality and this is why
what i'm seeing right now this is why listen i'm 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 and biden by every metric with that said
the rhetoric that he's been using recently in the blanket have been using
recently about israel needs to make painful concessions for peace israel
re-centering this issue at the center of relations in the middle east
is doomed to failure the magic magic a strong word
the the benefit of the abraham accord was proof of what you're saying which is
true which is that all the surrounding countries in reality
have abandoned the idea that there's 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 not the central conflict in the middle east
is because actually ironically because of the rise of iran
right it's it's suny 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 you have a disagreement with you uh with what uh
destiny said my my main problem with biden's policy
with regard to ukraine is that he outsourced the end goal
of the war to zalensky early on now that might make sense if that goal
were something that he was willing to fund to the point of achievement
uh or if zalensky could have achieved it on his own but right now and this has
been true since pretty early on the worst point henry kissinger made
uh this is that that pretty early on in the war 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 the same thing was true in most of the
donbass right in luhanskin dinesk that that was not going to change
zalensky stated goal and you understand it he's a leader of ukraine
right is 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 and so he is 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 to the devastation of russia's
military capability i mean russia has just been wrecked i mean the 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
territorially aggressive russia i think that the united states does have an
interest in degrading the russian military to the
extent that it can threaten the baltic states or threaten
kazakhstan or other countries in the region the problem i have with
biden's strategy is 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 misperception
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 and the west is fragmenting because nato's fragmenting
and all the rest of this and obviously he was wrong on on all those scores
the problem for for biden is that as with
virtually every war no end line was set and so it came out recently 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 uh that basically would
have ceded luhansk and dnatsk and crimea to russia
in return for solidification of those lines american and western
security guarantees to ukraine right 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 and do you
think trump would have helped push that peace
yes and i think and i think that biden actually did zolenski a bit of a
disservice because zolenski knows where this war is going to end and it's not
going to end with luhansk and dnatsk and crimea in ukrainian hands it's just
not going to and he knows that what actually in my opinion zolenski
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 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 this was reported in the washington post last year the bite
administration said we're gonna fight for as long as it takes with as much as
it takes and when they were asked until when they said whatever zolenski
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
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 i don't like it when american leaders um
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 you know
30 000 foot goal advance democracy and and
rights where we can but the reason that we were fighting
in favor of ukraine and when i say fighting i mean giving them money and
giving 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 it was a pure
real politic play 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 and
that 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 he's
the united states as we speak is striking the hooties i think that that's
a really really good thing 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 you're screwing up the straights i mean you
can't you can't do that you can't screw up
free trade 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 the barberry pirates from 1800
are bothering everyone right so ben said a lot there do you disagree with any
aspect on the ukraine side um a little bit yeah um i think on the
macro i agree maybe we get into the weeds a little bit on some things i
on the final thing that he said though i wish that americans could have honest
conversations about foreign policy i think that it would just be better for
everybody um i don't know if it's uh you know red
scare after the cold war where it was like literally you know
the behemoths you know we're fighting against communism and we felt like after
91 every single foreign policy decision needs
to be able to be explained in like seven words like he's the bad guy and
that's it i wish we had more honest
conversations about uh what our foreign policy interest is in
a particular region because i don't think most americans honestly could even
articulate why israel would be an important ally or why
it's important to defend ukraine against russia or why
should we care about taiwan at all i don't know if most americans could
articulate anything there even though they might have very strong
opinions about why we ought to be involved in certain conflicts
so i do agree with that i wish we had more honest conversations about
foreign policy um in terms of how biden has handled ukraine my the things that i
liked the most were one that he was very clear in the
beginning about what we wouldn't do so biden's saying that we're not going to
do um uh not a red line no fly zones over
ukraine we're not going to be deploying troops on the ground in ukraine
we're not going to be doing anything that would have you know u.s soldiers
and russian soldiers crossing swords with each other that's not going to
happen i like that he made that very clear at the beginning
um and i like that he coalition built between nato and the eu to get people to
send uh funds training soldiers airplanes and
everything to ukraine i thought those two things were really good
in terms of basically writing zelensky a blank check
i would like to hope that biden and the entire united states learned a lesson
from iraq and afghanistan that open-ended
missions with unlimited budgets and no clear goal
are like the worst foreign policy decisions you can ever do they've like
defined u.s foreign policy for the past two or three decades which is
unfortunate but seems to be the case um my my feeling would be and this is just
a feeling i don't know if internal cables have leaked that say otherwise
is the uh the biden administration has probably always had a quiet position of
at some point there's going to be an off-ramp here
and i think even a month or two ago i think those talks were being leaked
that discussion had begun with zelensky looking for an off-ramp but publicly
of course the united states is never going to come out and say we're going to
support you guys to fight as much as you want for three months
and then after that it's no more obviously that can't be the statement
it's always going to be that we're going to support you in your
fight against russia we tried that under obama with afghanistan
it was terrible sure yeah you can't you can't escalate the troop levels to x but
only for six months yeah you can't you just can't do that it's always going to
come off as we're going to support you forever and as long as it takes and as
long as you need whatever we have to do to defend freedom and democracy in your
country and any any other statement would be
absurd so i can understand why it feels like on a public level a blank check
and an indefinite time period was granted to zelensky but i don't think
that's going to be the case i think i again i hope
we've learned our lessons in the middle east about the forever wars that this
isn't going to be a forever funding to ukraine to fight for as long as they
want um i do disagree i feel like we're
playing a little bit retrospectively saying that like well it's obvious that
they're not going to capture the dawn boss it's obvious that they're not going
to capture crimea i agree for crimea that was incredibly
obvious but it was also really obvious that in two weeks
russia would own kiev and ukraine was going to be belarus 2.0 i think that
even for a lot of uh military people um and analysts around the world
uh that that that was an expectation or at least a significant probability
nobody knew uh the phrase that's thrown around now
is paper tiger that russia's military was as ill-equipped as they were so i
can understand why especially if you're ukraine and if
you've repelled an invasion from one of the world's largest armies
why you might feel like well fuck it you know let's fight for a few months let's
fight for a year let's see what happens and i can understand the united states
supporting them but i agree that there has to be some reasonable offering but
we're not going to fight forever i think the u.s
um state department has already begun those conversations with zelensky
to look at what that off-ramp looks like um
but yeah i'm not too sure other than like explicitly stating publicly like
you can only fight until this date i don't really know what else i would
change i don't think i don't think the by the ministration should have done
that i don't know what else do you think
biden should cut this deal on uh on the funding
meaning there's like 60 there's this 105 billion dollar deal that's been held up
by debate between republicans and democrats over
border right so basically it contains 60 billion
dollars for ukraine 14 billion dollars for israel
another several billion dollars for taiwanese defense against china
and then include some border funding and some border provisions republicans want
the border funding the border provisions because
we can get into the illegal immigration issue but that's a pretty serious issue
and biden democrats have been unwilling to hold that up and that seems to me
like just from put aside republican democrats seems
like political malpractice meaning there's a widespread perception in the
united states that the border's a disaster area
joe biden wants these things many republicans don't want these things 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
and if he caves on the border stuff even on the ukraine stuff yes because then he
gets the whole package meaning he can he can go back to his own base and he can
say listen guys i wanted to i wanted to be
easy on the border the republicans forced me to it but we needed the
ukraine aid we needed the taiwan right yeah that's
you're honestly you're going to be more educated than me on this i don't like
uh or maybe maybe i just don't know enough i don't like the principle that
when we negotiate things in the united states there's like
50 million hostages at all points in time for every single thing
like oh boy here comes the debt ceiling what do the republicans want what do the
democrats want oh boy like here you know we can't fund our government
um but i mean obviously the the argument is going to be that if the ukraine
funding doesn't come in this bill and if biden and his administration feel like
it's really important that unilaterally or not unilaterally but as a single
issue it's not going to pass so um i i would say that at this point and
i don't know what the conversations look like between the biden administration and
zelensky i would say at this point that it's probably fair
to start making contingencies on the money that we give to ukraine
that listen like this conflict has you know waged on now like now we need to
start looking for potential peace we can't just write you an unlimited check
so i mean if those strings are attached i'd be okay with it but the broader
question of like is it okay to make this particular piece of legislation with all
this funding contingent on uh the ukrainian funding i mean that
just seems to be the way the government works now
unfortunately quick pause bathroom break one of the big issues in this
presidential election is going to be january 6th
it's in the news now and i think it's going to get become bigger and bigger
and bigger so question for destiny first did donald
trump incite an insurrection on january 6 2021
absolutely uh this is probably ignoring every other issue we've talked about of
which i think there are plenty that i would say
disqualify trump from holding office um i think that the conduct and the
behavior leading up to and including january 6th
i think is wildly indefensible i am excited
to see them trying to uh yeah the uh the three to four stages are the um
the taking what i think any reasonable person saying knowingly false
information about elections being rigged or ballot
boxes being stuffed or ruby freeman you know running ballots three times in
georgia taking that knowingly false information
and trying to call uh state secretaries and stuff to have
them flip their electoral vote that was horrible um the
plot that eastman hatched in order to have these like
false slates of electors where all seven states had citizens go in and falsely
say that they were the duly elected uh electors that could submit
votes to congress that was insane uh that happened um
asking or begging pence to accept these false states of electors initially and
then just say you should just throw it out completely and throw it to the house
delegation which was majority republican that was
absolutely unbelievable and then on the day of january 6th
trying to capitalize on the violence by him juliani and eastman making phone
calls to senators and congressmen saying well
don't you think maybe you guys should delay the vote a little bit you know
don't you think they're just really mad about the election i think he said to
mccarthy they're more upset than you um and and his utter dereliction of duty
and not doing anything to uh stop the rioting that happened on
january 6 because he was too busy taking advantage of it i think all of these
things are horrible i look forward to seeing the uh
jack smith indictments play out in court uh maybe even the georgia rico case but
um yeah i think all of these things are
unfathomable and i think when you look at the plot from start to finish
clearly the goal the entire time was to circumvent the peaceful transfer of
power that was the goal from start to finish
whether it was through false claims whether it was through illegal schemes
or whether it was through violence at the capital to delay the certification
of the vote so i'm glad you're excited it's always
fun so um there are two elements to
incitement of insurrection one is incitement the other is insurrection
uh 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 i said i will continue to say no he did
not i think he was saying things that are false
uh 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's brought publicly and all the rest of that
if we're talking about incitement of insurrection as a legal standard doesn't
meet any of those standards when it comes to incitement it has to be
immediate law incitement to immediate lawless action that's the standard for
incitement 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 the media tend
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 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 uh 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 more
the typical description in case law is the replacement of one legitimate
government of the united states with another by violent means
the the notion that donald trump coordinated any such insurrection
is belied by the fbi itself the fbi put out a report in
i believe it's august of 2021 suggesting that there was no well-coordinated
insurrectionist attempt coordinated by the white house
uh in fact what you had was donald from thrashing around like
that weird alien in the movie life i don't know if you ever saw the jake
jill and hall where he's like kind of thrashing up against this glass box just
an alien just thrashing up against the glass box
uh that that i think is more what you were seeing from november
4th to january 6th um 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 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
um you know there were some people who you could say informally had
insurrectionist ideas those would be the people who want to hang nancy pelosi or
kill mike pence and those people are in jail right now
uh and the election went forward 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 the donald trump by the way was still president at
that point 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 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 the 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
he used a phrase that trump was disseminating knowingly false
information the word that's carrying a lot of weight there is the word
knowingly um so knowingly implies a nowhere
do i think the information who's 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 donald trump was doing there and the evidence of that is donald trump
being a human and all of us watching him for the last several years
uh so you know the the idea that that he knew it to be false
i'm not even sure those standards apply in any like just assessing him as a
human which is really what we're being asked to do because there's an intent
element to this crime does donald trump do you think that
today donald trump knows that he lost the election absolutely
so i i don't actually i think when we so i'm glad that you have the attorney
background when we are assessing manzareya when we're looking at certain
criminal statutes where intent is required
it's a reasonable person standard right but would a reasonable person have known
that they were no it depends on the right 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 negligent statute 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 but for first degree murder you don't
need the statement of i plan to kill this person
or i intend to kill this person we know prove that state of mind you know you
need a substantial evidence correct yes sure you could so i feel like my my
feeling for donald trump was there were all these people around him that he
trusted to investigate election fraud he trusted bar in the doj he asked pence
uh his vice president to look into it he asked his chief of staff he asked his
legal counseling so many people that ostensibly he trusts them if he's asking
them to look into it and when all of them looked into it and
reported back to him no we found nothing what and unless we're going to
literally make the concession that trump might actually be a delusional psycho
man at that point should he not have realized
like well okay maybe that's not a thing he should have realized the day of the
election that he lost the election but that's not but that sure but i'm just
asking i'm saying that like at that point should he not have known that for
him to go and propagate those claims that he'd asked all of the people he
trusted to research and then for him to take those claims to uh michigan and to
georgia and then publicly and to try to convince people to throw out the
election you don't think that you're doing the same thing you're reverting to
should a reasonable person have known yes a reasonable person should have
known did donald trump know that's that's that's a different 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 was jack smith did not charge conspiracy
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
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 or an
insurrection i agree with that but i think a lot of the underlying facts
though because he does bring up those calls to
uh raffensperger and georgia he does bring up in the indictments that that
they were knowingly false information so it seems like that's going to be part
of the case maybe not to convict on any of the four
particular charges that he mentioned but it seems like that's probably going
to be part of um what he's going to have to establish
in court to convict trump so i want to look at the actual text of the charges
so i i'm sorry that i don't have them memorized but 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 pretty broadly in the past though it doesn't have to just be because
smith has done oral arguments in response to a lot of the claims by
trump's lawyers this was one of them the infinite civil and criminal immunity was
another one of them where he cites past cases where
these types of things because i think it was to defraud of civil rights i think
was the fourth charge right so the defraud 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 sure um although i don't like the when we say
specious legal theory and novel application which i do agree some of
these in some ways is novel i don't think
we've ever also had a president try to do this before it is a novel situation
where somebody has resisted the peaceful transfer of power
this clearly in so many different ways well if you're talking about the legal
cases that i mean that's not true but gore sued in 2000
right i mean so that so like if you're talking about the legal comparable to
gore if this is comparable to gore 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 denial
or interference in some way that that can't
that that's not as a general principle it's over inclusive sure gore wasn't
trying to decertify the vote though for states
right they challenged their thing to the supreme court they lost their case
in the supreme court and then power transfer happened right and 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
yeah but but the eastman theory of what pence could do in congress is a far cry
away truly shitty theory i mean make no mistake it's but not just shitty i think
that if any democrat had done this i i think that i feel like we'd be
looking at it in a far different lens as in we would be using terms like
attempted coup subversion a peaceful transfer of power
if um if a democrat vice president had tried to
essentially say that in uh congress they could throw away the vote
so i think what i want to get to here actually
so we can be more specific sure is why are these terms important we agree on
largely speaking what happened i think the the the characterization of the term
are we are we we're kind of bouncing around
between two different different categories and i want to make sure we
check are we the legal stuff okay okay so we're not looking at insight because
as you said jack jack smith nobody's charging with incitement and i don't
believe insurrection is um a part of it so we don't mean legal
i just in terms of like a president that is trying to prevent
the peaceful transfer of power so we do call that a bloodless coup or a coup
or uh whatever contemporaneous term you want to use right so
prevent the peaceful transfer of power with all means
or using means that are inappropriate not quite the same thing using meaning
that are inappropriate or illegal okay inappropriate okay so illegal i don't
think so i don't think that these charges actually meet
the criteria for the for the various charges and we can discuss each case if
you want to sure um as far as inappropriate sure i
think tons of inappropriate stuff i mean i i inappropriate seems like the
word inappropriate though is because then conservatives are very quick to say
well sure he was inappropriate but everybody's inappropriate
i mean i'll concede that he's more inappropriate than others i just don't
see most inappropriate sure okay i mean that's important to me though does it
not bother you that like donald trump sought
through legal and extra legal and and trump magical ways of
trying to entrench his power as president past when he should have been
able to is that not something that was incredibly
troublesome i mean the question to me is the bigger question that i think the
democrats are trying to promote 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 is that such but my answer to that last
time could he not try it for next time and i mean he could try to do whatever
he wants presumably and he would fail the same way that he did last time why
do we think that because he failed because because there's a riot in three
hours yes like let's say hypothetically lord
save me uh let's say hypothetically juliani was the next
um head of the department of justice juliani was the next attorney general
how would he be confirmed um well i i'm not entirely sure if uh
because so much of the republican party despite feeling like they don't support
trump when it comes time to actually back him in congress also i would have
to check whether he would be barred by criminal
conviction from holding i don't know the answer to that
sure yeah well yeah that's especially the 14th amendment we're figuring out a
little bit right now yeah um but i mean like say if not juliani
say if there are any other number of insane people that trump could
theoretically put on his side of the government
that wouldn't tell him no last uh next time because there were a lot of people
that rebuked him there were republicans and in a lot of the states right
rapinsberger is one of them um they were republicans in his own
administration uh you've got rosen uh you've got bar um there was his own
vice president but like theoretically next time
and i feel like last time going in i'm going to do a little bit of mind reading
a macro maybe maybe i think that trump kind of
thought one i don't think trump knows much at all about how the government
works i think we probably go that um i think trump probably thought that if he
had people that were like at least in his party and kind of camp that they'll
basically do whatever needs to be done to give him what he wants um and with no
respect for process but now that he sees it well that's it's
not enough to just have allies i need people that are fiercely
allegiance to me would we not be worried that a guy that tried to
essentially steal the election for real wouldn't try to pick people that would
be more amenable to his plans in the next administration
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 so you so if somebody was running and they blatantly said
like i um i don't want to use the fascist word but if they said like i
want to be an authoritarian i'm going to abolish all elections
you would say sure he's saying that but like i don't think he can actually do it
so it's okay if he runs for president you
don't care at all as long as you feel like the guardrails i mean i might
prefer other candidates but i think that also one of the things that you do is
that politicians again this would be an exceptional
circumstance but politicians constantly make promises about
the things that they are going to do and then don't fulfill and we tend to take
those out in the wash meaning that you know the if i promise that day one as
donald trump has pledged to do that he's going to deport literally every illegal
immigrant to the country do i think he's actually going to do that
i mean i i really highly doubt it didn't do it last time he was in office
that's just there are many examples of this i agree do i do i think
here's my question do you think the guardrails are going to fail to hold i'm
not sure really yeah because i think the issue is
is one um when it's election time republicans are
spineless in office um and i don't know how many congressmen would support what
he wants just because they want to win re-election or because they think it's
inevitable anyway 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 offices this sure but i mean like look at what happened with like uh
kinzinger kinzinger and cheney right who were very like staunchly anti-trump
uh after j6 uh for that select committee right
kinzinger didn't even run again and cheney lost her
election but i think the widest margin that anybody has ever lost an election
ever like all of us politics people who were
not born voted against yeah i guess it's just it's a surprising position to me
for if we're looking at like principled stances of government
the idea that a man who has and i think we both agree on this that
donald trump's donald trump's only allegiance is to donald trump
right we agree on that the only thing he cares about is donald trump that's the
only thing you care about i think it's certainly the largest thing it's the
largest thing he cares about right so you've got a man who only cares about
himself welcome to politics i mean it may be more
but that's not even it may be more with trump but it's certainly not unique to
i think that the issue with trump too though is um i think he's even a threat
to the republican party in which i think i think he would mostly agree with me
maybe not overall but on every individual point trump picks bad
candidates he has no concern for the future of the republican party like for
instance i think there is a chance i don't think it'll happen because of the
polling looks now but if trump didn't get the nomination
i think trump would say screw it and run as an independent because he thinks he
can win or whatever right um i i doubt that he would do that but
theoretically possible you know again trump has he was really content to throw
georgia um the two runoff elections under the bus
because rapinsburg doesn't support him from the election
so what what is all this in service of what's the 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 is that is that like what what percentage
on it what percentage do you think that that's a reality if donald trump wins i
think there is a 100 chance that he will try to prevent the peaceful transfer of
power in terms of would he succeed i can guarantee you he will not do that
why is that because he's in the second term and he's no longer eligible and he
will believe he won and he will leave yeah but hasn't donald trump himself
joked about running for a third term that's
i think that i think that having a third term what what has donald trump not
joked about i mean forgot i don't okay hold on if you want to
prevent 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
here's another broad argument that i don't like in favor of trump and this
was brought up earlier in terms of like we talk about like not grading
presidents on a curve but then earlier we said we take biden to rhetoric oh no
i totally grade from i know i 100 great presidents on a curve are you kidding oh
okay i grade pretty much everybody on a curve then i feel like i don't treat my
seven-year-old the same way that i treat my nine-year-old
sure but i don't think i don't like that it feels like we're treating donald
trump like a seven-year-old or a nine-year-old i think we should treat
him like the president of the united states i don't think having a president
that has taken like concrete steps to prevent the
transfer of power which he did with the electorate's sham
which he did with pence and what he did with trying to capitalize on the j6
violence a president has taken concrete steps
towards uh cooing the government essentially i don't know why that guy
we'd say well you know it's trumpy does trump things the guardrails held i'll
probably hold next so let me let me say we shouldn't do you
mean that he should be actually barred from office i'm just
talking about support for him i don't think republicans should
should support trump you lose your incumbent advantage the guy's obviously
self-destructive he's distracted the political party itself
like um do you think he should be on the ballot
um you think there's a case to be made to remove him from the ballot
i think there's a case to be made but man the phrasing
for as much as our uh governmental founding fathers everybody else
you know wrote nice amendments and wrote nice the constitution some of the
phrasing is very very very blah and the uh section three um the the
not requiring any type of actual conviction
um i don't have a strong feeling on it i will say i'm very interested in reading
the majority opinion from the supreme court i
seriously doubt the supreme court is going to uphold that states should be
able to decide if they leave them off the ballot or not
um i think for the political future of the united states it's probably not
healthy that the leading opposition candidate is now going to be
barred from the ballot it's probably not healthy for us
um because because then what you want to talk about threats of democracy that
would be a pretty serious one applied across the board by the way it
would be however like that threat to democracy was earned by donald trump and
the conservatives that supported him i think conservatives made a dangerous
gamble when they threw trump into office and now
like all of the fallout from that is is something that we all as americans have
to deal with i mean i 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 that you can say it's pretty well but
there is an amendment in the constitution the 14th amendment that
says that if they have engaged in this they
shall not be or you shall i don't remember the phrasing because it doesn't
require conviction but it's a self-executing arguably thing if we're
getting into constitutional law i mean there there are a number
of provisions that that suggest that this is number one not self-executing
minority opinions in the in the colorado supreme court case are pretty thorough
the the number one contention which is that this is not self-executing
uh because other elements are not self-executing uh that ignores
subsequent actual law that that happened 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 it is
unlike say the the the analogs that are used by the majority opinion
like age 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's an insurrectionist without any reference to
a legal stature or definition of the term
i would also be careful with that because remember one of trump's first
like big political actions was challenging obama's birth certificate
well and i thought that was dumb at the time sure
i like that you both said 100 chance that trump will try to go for third term
and zero percent chance which he's done man are you kidding
i even want to give trump's gonna walk around hands up high and be like i'm a
two-term president i'm the only president since grover cleveland who
would know but but since grover cleveland who served two
non-consecutive terms i kicked joe biden out of office and i kicked hillary clinton
dude would be like he'd be living large you're kidding he doesn't want the
presidency anymore after that i just think that the i think it's scary
that like donald trump it feels like for all of the accusations that are made
sometimes against democrats like biden is ordering
uh garland to investigate donald trump and blah blah blah uh it seems like
donald trump would actually do that with his doj would give them orders he didn't
he didn't well he kind of he kind of did though right
um so for instance with um jeffrey clark uh jeffrey clark went to rosen and
donahue and said hey listen uh i need you guys to sign off on a
letter that we're going to use essentially to bully states into
overturning their elections by saying we found significant election fraud
and part of that threat was jeffrey clark saying listen if you're not going
to do it rosen uh you know trump's going to fire you
and just make me the uh acting attorney general that was the threat that he
carried and i think trump repeated that threat in a meeting later on
that was i only rebuked when i think like half the white house staff said if
you do this we're resigned okay so it's a slightly different topic because now
you're getting into all the election shenanigans and all of this but
threatened to fire his acting attorney general if he wouldn't carry the same
plot for him essentially like if trump could order his doj to do
something would he um it's not beyond the pale for him right
it's not beyond 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 well i'm not we can get into specifics
there um i i just it 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 every president has
been stretching and stretching and stretching executive power that's 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 i mean trump
inability to get border policy passed literally had him using executive power
to march the military down to the border to do border
policy 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 yeah but
what happened to that it got struck down by the supreme court
and then they still did it they still did it
biden brags about it for for for having relief for what he for what he was able
to for what he was able to relieve which i think
were related to particular types student loan debt but i'm just saying that like
well the guardrails are holding with biden as much as they're holding with
trump the only difference is is that once biden
you know exhaust his executive power he's not running around like
lying to people or trying to extort people or trying to
and concoct insane schemes 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 the guardrails prevent the other stuff
from getting through now the question becomes what liquid are you pouring into
the filter okay meaning so if i 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
so that's the basic calculation okay so so then the idea is essentially that
donald trump's rhetoric is insane but we don't care um
donald trump would probably try to steal an election if he could but he probably
won't be able to um he's not gonna do it again i told you
he's not you don't you don't think he has any why not
because he won't be eligible to be on the ballot in front i mean by the way
you want to talk about 14th amendment that's where the 14th men 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 just like he's passed the age of 35
once you have been president two times you're no longer eligible to be
president of the united states why do you have a strong yeah but like
keep him off the ballot why the why would the 14th amendment stop if he
thought vice president pence could unilaterally decide the outcome of the
election that when he's not on the ballot so now
now your theory is that he's gonna get he's gonna get re-elected and then in
2028 he's not even gonna be on the ballot and he's gonna 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 i don't know what the scheme would be i think we can kind
of like laugh and say there's no scheme we could even concoct
but i think that the machine gun he's gonna walk i think i think the issue
though is that like the idea of electing another president that has
tried to circumvent the peaceful transfer of power using extra legal
means and then pretending like we can't concoct a single
scheme that he could try to circumvent um other legal processes to have a third
term or to have a longer term or to install who he
wants as an ex-president i just when a person has already shown
you who they are and with every single person around him agrees with that
when every single person that's worked with him save for the what sydney powell
uh eastman and juliani which i don't think even i don't think anybody would
want to throw their lot in with those three
um it just seems wild to me that we would say like yeah we're just going to
go ahead and trust this guy with another uh term of president but like he can't
run for a third term so it's fine when there's like 50 million other things 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 that okay i find that to be a wholly
unconvincing argument okay well recently in the news the
presidents of harvard penn and mit failed to fully denounce
calls for genocide and that rose questions about
the influence of dei programs at universities
and so maybe either looking at this or zooming out
more broadly at identity politics at universities or identity politics
wokeism at in our culture how big of a threat is it
to our culture to western civilization so obviously i'm going to say it's a
huge threat um 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
post-modernism 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 sort of marxist ways the suggestion being
that economic inequality was the result of misallocation of
power in the structure preserved by an upper crust of people
who wanted to cram down exploitation on people that was sort of the marxist
version of post-modernism and that got transmuted into sort of a
racial version of post-modernism in which the systems of the united states
are white supremacist 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 generalized theory of
critical race theory as proposed by for example gene
stefanchek 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 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 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 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
and the only corrective for that would be as ibram x kennedy likes to suggest
uh effectively anti-racist policies racism in the service of destroying
racism that you're going to have to that
you're going to have to you know discriminate
on the basis of race in order to correct for discrimination that's baked into the
system that's incredibly dangerous 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
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
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 and the externalities of that mean that
other people benefit from the meritorious and excellent
performance of those people maybe you'd be good to get your comments
you're all stomping ground harvard do you think the president of harvard
should have been fired i mean i think she's been fired not over the plagiarism
allegations i think she should have been fired
based on her performance just at that congressional
hearing uh if if the word black had been substituted for jew and in in that
statement by elise stefanic that she was asking about or trans or literally any
other any other minority in america maybe with the exception of asian
uh then the answer would have been very different coming from claudine gay
you know with that said i don't think the firing of clouding gay really
accomplishes very much meaning i'm i'm did she get what she
deserved sure 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
universities as truthful as mcgillip pen also to basically
throw somebody overboard as the as the sacrifice to maintain the underlying
system that that continues to predominate american universities where
they spend literally billions of dollars every year on dei initiatives and
diversity hires and diversity administrators and
all of this i mean one of the cost of education
escalating is in the massive administrative
function that that is now undertaken by universities
as opposed to teaching and and you know cost of dorms and such
you guys probably agree on a lot of this right kind of maybe yeah
um i i don't know i don't know what makes things do this but it feels like
we can never like have a good thing and then
have it end as a good thing uh things always get taken to their
uh extreme and then we have to fight on those extremes
like i would argue that back in my day we called it sjw social justice warriors
before it became woke um like 2013 onwards whatever like there
are aspects to wokeism that i think are good like i
like the additional representation that we have in media now i like how as much
as people complain about the internet how it's regulated
that there are way more groups that are represented on the internet whether
we're talking uh x the platform former formerly known
as twitter or facebook or whatever um i think in some ways or whether we're
pushing uh you know like women's achievements in school and in in
in the wider workforce i think that these are all good things
the issue that you run into is people don't ever have a stopping point
and i think people kind of get lost in this woke for woke sake thing
where we start to see these very weird warpings of
these like academic i guess arguments that are used for
really horrible things uh so for instance i think that you can
talk about in the united states things like white supremacy
or uh things like um oppression or certain demographics especially with
like jim crow laws and pre-jim crow and you can even talk about effects from
that but then when you run into this weird world where we've kind of warped
these things so that like not only is white supremacy still
as present today as it ever has been well actually uh black people in other
minorities can't even be racist they don't have the power to because we're
going to use a different definition of racism
and we can only talk about punching up as opposed to punching down uh and we're
actually going to say it's totally okay for these people to say or do whatever
they want and it's never bad but like white people who have always
been the oppressors even if you're like a trailer park guy whose family is
addicted to meth you know you have all this privilege
etc etc i think that you run into these issues where wokeism it starts off as
like a really good idea and i would argue has achieved really good things
especially in regards to like women's education everything and then it just
gets so academia-y so there's a word there
academic whatever will you take something and you put it into school
too much and then it comes out of some frankenstein
you know cancer baby of like horrible things such that today when i'm reading
stuff and i know ben is the same way like if i even hear somebody say the
word like anti-racism i'm probably ignoring every other thing you have to
say if you utter the word like colonial
anything i'm probably going to say you probably don't have anything
uh good to say um yeah a lot of it has just taken way too far
but you know what i will blame on some of this is i will blame
conservatives for some of this because i think one issue that happens and i
think ben might even agree with me here too
is i think there there's two huge problems that have happened in the
united states i think broadly speaking is that one we become more different
than we ever have been and two we become more similar than we
ever have been and when i say this what i mean is that like we're splitting off
into these groups and then these groups are enforcing this insane homogeneity
between these two separate groups and i think one of these schisms has
been conservative's reluctance to participate in things related to higher
uh education uh so for a long time conservatives are saying like oh you
know the educational institutions are against us
you know rush limbaugh talks about how evil the colleges are and blah blah blah
and then what happens is conservatives are less and less willing to engage in
them so then you get this scenario or this
environment where everybody that's engaged in
academia on the administrative side are are fucking insane they're very like
even more so too and i also want to draw a distinction between like the
the administrators and the faculty because oftentimes when you're reading
story after story after story of like all of these insane admins that are
pushing further and further left usually the faculty is fighting against it
a lot of the tenured professors a lot of people in their departments are like
hold on well we actually don't agree with this
but i feel like because conservatives for so long have demonized these
institutions rather than like critically evaluated
them uh and tried to like have like honest
critique and engagement that they've just like completely broken off
and when you only have a bunch of lefties or righties together all they'll
do is they're veer off like even more into their insane directions i feel like
that's a big problem that we run into in the country to where
conservatives have totally broken off some conversations broken away from
where they won't participate in them anymore
and then the people that you have left just run as far to the left as possible
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 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 steel's work
on this where he talks about how you know he used to be
he's now a conservative black person he was a liberal black person at the time
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 very 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 he's he said shelby steel
says i thought he was going to say something
about this 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 or sort of the spiritual strength just
say listen i agree with you on some of these things but you're acting like a
jackass 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 have to separate the universities off into two separate
categories 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
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 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 lonnie guinier lonnie guinier what they tried to
appoint her i believe secretary of labor under clinton
and she was too liberal and she got rejected 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 terrific professor there are some professors who
are like this unfortunately 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 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 and two was the distribution of stem
iq right which is something that you certainly were not allowed to talk about
the idea that 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 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 more men
are qualified that's that's quite he was ousted for that by a left-wing
faculty and and you know general alum network
at at harvard university 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
yeah so i think that um a couple things so uh one of the big issues that i have
with kind of like this uh i don't know if we call it era of
trumpism or populism is this total disregard for institutions and this
disconnect from participation in the system
so it's one of the big things that i felt with progressives about who who
cares because they're all 20 years old they don't vote anyway
um but it's another thing that i noticed with a lot of people that are
uh trump voters trump fans or whatever is this idea where we say
this institution is uh irrevocably destroyed it's irredeemable it can't be
saved it can't nothing that we do can can fix it um and i think that what
that leads people to doing is one they disconnect further and then two
there's a general hopelessness when it comes to how society is like ran or
structured such that you fall into that populist
brain rot of the only person that can save me is donald trump i can't trust
literally anything and i think that when you start driving
people into that direction all it does is it further amplifies all
the problems that you're complaining about
so that's one of the reasons why when we talk about like conservative
participation i want there to be more conservatives that are trying to
participate in academia but i feel like the leading
thought or the leading speaking out against it is basically saying it's a
waste of time it's completely lost so i think that the alternative to that is
that you're you're seeing on the right a growth of for example alternative
universities yeah but that's the worst thing
no i i don't think so at all i think competition is a great way of
incentivizing some change on on behalf of universities that may have forgotten
that there's an entire another side of the aisle
in the united states meaning no shot i don't believe even i don't think even
you think that so first of all first of all let me be 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 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 and this again is a bipartisan problem but
it's just a generalized problem we we have 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 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 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 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 gotta go to juco and then you gotta go to
college or nobody's gonna look at your resume
it's really really terrible for people who can't afford all of that 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 but one of the things i did when i went
to law school is i took loans because a bank said
i was gonna get my money back if i got a law degree from harvard but you know
when you're not gonna get your money back
if you're a bank you're not gonna lend to some dude who wants to major in you
know art theory because is that a good bet there's no collateral
right 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 you know
one of my so yeah 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 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
now it would cut out so much of the middleman but as far as the general
point you're making about institutions i i may disagree on the
education and how far it's gone in general i agree with you so it's in
in general i agree and i get to use my my favorite longest
word in the english language here i i would consider myself in many cases an
anti-disestablishmentarianist nice you see i like to drop that that's
it because if you're an establishmentarian that means you like
this establishmentarianism right so i'm an anti so can you say that word
that's the one we all learned growing up anti-disestablishmentarianism
but and then some kind of group would say what about supercalifragilist and
then you know what about new ultra microscopic stuff
or the science terms yeah exactly what about the seven thousand letter thing
that's from part of a biochem i got my education the soviet union so we just
did math that's why you're a useful person so the
union math was that one plus one how to make that equal three
we know long words and he streams on the internet and
and and i talk for a living so anyway but the 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 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 which ones
are not so i'm not a full anti-disestablishmentarianism
i'd be partially in that camp 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
and yeah but i think you have to establish you have to look at it
industry by industry you know just institution by institution on that
position on institutions do you think biden or trump would side with you more
uh 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 yeah but i'm just curious on your general view of institutions do you
think biden or trump would side with you more
on how you view them um i mean i think that in rhetoric biden would and then i
think that he would tear out the face of the institution
wearing around like a mask like hannibal lector i mean that's even though he
resisted some people's calls to like pack the court
uh yes because i think that his use of executive power
was greater than that of donald trump the power that he had he used
greater effect than donald trump donald trump again thrashed up against the
sides of the box but could not get out of it
okay um for just on a real quick because on the that that answer went a lot
farther than it is yeah yeah just on the real quick thing the reason why i again
my main problem that i feel like we have today in society is people are getting
into their own bubbles the idea of having like
conservative schools and liberal schools seems like the saddest thing in the
world to me like i would want conservatives
and liberals going to school together because i think these people need to
interact with each other more if for no other reason than to say that the other
person is not like an actual monstrous horrible entity
that wants to destroy the country listen i think a classically liberal idea for
many schools would not be a bad thing i think it would be a good thing you just
wonder if that's salvageable and if it's not salvageable then the
answer to that is i feel like i feel like i feel like the biggest issue that
we have is people are they sort into these
different like phantom worlds to where even if you live in the same city
there are totally different worlds that exist between liberals and conservatives
and i feel like one of the big barriers to people understanding the other side
sometimes it's just a little bit of information or a little bit of like
first-hand experience um when i so in terms of information i'm
sure you saw um i don't i don't know this is a full-on study but they were
talking about how some huge percentage of students would
change their mind on from the river to the sea when you told them what from the
river was what the river was and what the sea was yeah
yeah uh or when you said like yeah what does a one-state solution mean a lot of
them like such that the numbers went from like 70 percent like 30 percent in
terms of like support um would fall and it wasn't because you
were doing a radical redefining their whole ideology you're just giving them a
little bit more information um and then something that i've seen on
a first-hand level is when i go and speak or do debates at university
sometimes i'm in very very very conservative areas
some of my fans are trans having like a trans person show up and talk to
conservatives for a little bit uh not like in a speech just like in a in
like a bar or setting like a lot of them walk away they're like oh not every
trans person is like this insane lunatic from twitter that is
fucking an actual crazy person and then for some of my fans when they hang out
with conservatives like oh these guys are actually pretty friendly i thought
they would have all been homophobic racist transphobic and evil
but they're not they're just like normal people i feel like we need more of that
i totally agree yeah certainly yeah and i feel like on our social media
platforms on our algorithms and our schools
i feel like we're sorting harder and harder and harder and any type of
rhetoric that encourages the sorting is really bad and damaging we need to like
continue to mix up and there's other things i want to talk
about my life is opening his mouth destiny the uniter wow
all right like biden as we not like trump as we approach the end let us
descend into the meme further and further uh ben you're in a
monogamous marriage uh destiny you've been mostly in an
open marriage until recently how foundational is
marriage monogamous marriage to to the united states of america can open
marriages work are they harmful to society um then
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 but the reality is the thing that you
can do the best change of 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 healthy growing of a child is a father and mother who are committed to
each other all idea all ideas about there being no
emotional component to sexual activity are completely
specious uh that it's true for men than it is for
women but it's not true for either uh the the idea of a full a full
commitment to a human being 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 is it gives the great lie to both the communitarian lie and the
and the atomistic individualist lie the communitarian lie is that you
belong to the giant community of man which is not
true because you have a family 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 and it also is a lie to the notion that we are
atomistic individuals with no responsibilities 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'll be no healthy children 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 destiny what do you think um i think that when we talk about like
relationships or marriage i think something that's really important is we
have to talk about whether or not children are being discussed or not
because i think once you introduce the child aspect i think the
style or the type of relationship that you do is going to become way more
important than whatever exists prior to that
um like i would agree for instance for in terms of what ben is saying that
there's probably going to be some structure that is ideal for the
uh care and the raising of a child i think that having a child gives you a
much bigger buy-in to society because now all of a sudden
you'll care about a lot of things that you might not have before because not
only do you exist in society you can't just run
uh now you've got a child that exists there and you've got to ensure that
everything functions smoothly not just for you but for that child as well
um and arguably although we're getting into weird places i guess in the world
now like children are the primary conduit
for like where you transmit like cultural values and everything
um the one kind of weird thing that we're coming up against that we have
been coming up against um now for for some number of decades
and will continue to is as societies progress seems like
people are having less children and i actually don't know
100 what the answer is to that question um yeah i mean an implementable answer
that works that we know we can get everybody on board with
it seems like for a large part of human history
um having children and it still is having children is awesome and children
are cool and children are magical and miraculous and
all of this but you didn't really have much competing for your attention to
have a child right when you hit a certain age and
you started working especially if you're a woman i mean
childbirth is kind of the next step and then having a family raising your
children and then doing that is kind of the next step
nowadays especially with women being able to work especially women having
access to birth control there's a lot available in the world
that's competing for the interest of people that could otherwise be having
children such that we've almost flipped it such
that has been brought up earlier like wealthy people tend to have less
children than not wealthy people um or unless you're part of particular
religious communities that push childbirth a lot
i don't know if i would say there exists a a moral imperative on an individual to
have children i think that there's a lot of interesting arguments down that path
i don't know if we're quite at the point yet
where we need to say like oh my god we're running out of people we need to
have more kids i don't think we're quite there yet but
we are seeing you know weird demographic trends that are having big
impacts on how countries are playing out for instance the fact that we have a
disproportionately huge aging population that needs to be taken care of with
medical expenses and everything that vote in different ways than our
younger population and that when they die off like the
way that society is going to look is going to be a lot different um
yeah i don't actually have a i'm not entirely sure what the future is going
to look like in terms of pushing people to have kids when every
single industrialized country as they become more industrialized
have fewer and fewer and fewer children rapid fire questions
and the answer my my answer was go to church religion yeah i'm figuring yeah
well we could talk about religion that's not rapid fire at all
let me ask uh this is from the internet does body count matter
jesus christ you're really bringing up the red pill stuff
are you avoiding answering i mean it's totally it depends on who you are if
you're somebody that doesn't care about it it doesn't if you're somebody that
does care about it yeah it does of course depends on the
okay should porn be banned no
if you could do it yes there is no there is no benefit to
pornography is a waste of time and destructive to the human soul
i can't believe i'm asking this question is only fans empowering or destructive
for women i jesus these are rapid fire yeah just
you can't i mean it's probably empowering for the ones that are making
a lot of money off it it probably feels disempowering for others that feel
affected by the cultural norms set by women that do only fans there's my
rapid-fire answer it's it's 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
is uh rap music absolutely have you evolved on this or uh have i
evolved on this um so again i'm gonna 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 uh there there may be
maybe a melody maybe sometimes um so it depends on the
kind of rap uh with that said i i could be convinced on this issue but
listen i'm i'm a classical violinist i mean that's how i was raised
i listen to beethoven and Brahms and Mozart like in the car with my kids
so is it comparable is in the same category as beethoven Brahms and Mozart
i have a very hard time sticking it in the same category as that
all right you're uh both world-class debaters
um even public intellectuals if i can say that
jesus yeah i know real hard here i know uh
you both care about the truth what is your process
of arriving at the truth
uh i think it's really important to everybody will say that they're
objective and that they are non-partisan i think
it's really important to have mental safeguards for bad opinions
so for instance like a couple things that i'll ask myself is for a particular
debate that i'm having like can i argue convincingly both sides of the debate if
i can't i won't bother having the debate because i realize that i'm probably too
partisanly dug in if i can't even represent like an opposite argument here
um another question that you might ask yourself is like well what would it take
to convince you out of a certain position
um if you know if you feel very strongly that uh
you know medicare for all is a good you know system by which to run the united
states health care and somebody says well what would it take you to convince
you otherwise if you can't even fathom like what would it take to convince me
otherwise you're probably too dug into a position so
i think if you go through life saying like well i try my best to be
unbiased rather than saying i try to best my best be aware of my biases
because the latter is more realistic in the former is literally impossible
unless you're a computer uh yeah so i think having like actual
mental practices that you engage in to try to
counter some of the biases that you have is more important than trying to pretend
that you're free of all biases and then consuming all your media from
one source yeah ben uh 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 fact and then everything else is extrapolated opinion
from different premises that's the that's sort of the short
story so read the new york times and bright bart and they're going to
disagree on a lot but if the core of the and the daily wire
certainly read the daily wire if you read the daily wire and you read the
washington post and there is a and there's a nexus of
the same thing then you can pretty well guarantee that at least
you know if it's 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 right you may not
know what the elephant is and if you're feeling frisky then watch
destiny as well um thanks you've talked about you know
having a conversation debating ben for a long time what is your favorite
thing about ben shapiro my favorite thing about ben
shapiro is at least when we're in election season
he's very critical of his own party i appreciate that
um that doesn't i feel like ben generally tries to adhere more
to the fact-based arguments than other conservatives that i listen to which is
something that i appreciate because it's more fun to fight
on kind of like the factual grounds of discussing things like foreign policy or
whatever rather than people that only inhabit the idealistic or philosophical
grounds because they don't want to learn about any of the facts so i
appreciate that ben you've gotten a chance to talk to
destiny now what do you like about the guy
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 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
but getting to watch you do it in real time is is a really cool window into how
people think and how people learn so that's a really neat thing
well gentlemen this was incredible it's an honor thank you for doing this today
hey thanks a lot thanks for having me thanks for listening to this debate
between ben shapiro and destiny to support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words
from aristotle the basis of a democratic state is
liberty thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time