Ben Shapiro: Free Will, AGI, and the Scavengers Ruining America's Future

Most of what is in your hands is in your hands. I think that the biggest question in life right now is whether you decide to take responsibility for your own actions and improve your own life. And if the answer is yes, then you're likely to be successful and if the answer is no, you're likely to be unsuccessful. It doesn't mean that there aren't going to be problems that are outside your control. But I think that the biggest question we all have to ask ourselves in a free society is how much responsibility we wish to take.

Today it is a great pleasure to welcome none other than the little known, very, very, very little known and little followed Ben Shapiro, author of the brand new book, how to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps. As you may know, the podcast, the Enter the Impossible podcast that I host is very non political. We don't get into anything political because I think we have too much politics in the world. We have too much division and polarization and not the good kind of astronomical polarization. So I just want to prepare the listeners for 30 minutes of abject silence. So we'll just sit there, we'll stare at each other.

I was going to say, dude, you picked the wrong guest.

So I want to start with you. You're known for so many things. We're going to talk about the book hopeful. We're also going to talk about the many enthusiasms that you have outside of politics because I think, you know, I always say there's no red constellations, there's no blue comets, no one ever wakes up saying, I hate astronomy. You know, in fact, today there's a big, there's big breaking news about possible discovery of evidence for life on the planet Venus, which is a place that's a little hotter than the valley where I think you are right now. But I want to begin with, how does Ben Shapiro view himself? So if an alien. One of our listeners were to wake you up three in the morning and ask you, are you a podcaster? Are you an author, Are you a pundit? What is Ben Shapiro to Ben Shapiro?

Well, I mean, first of all, a magnificently handsome gentleman. I mean, you have to begin with the good looks people call me. Maybe that's actually the entire thing. Maybe just an incredible Apollo esque specimen of humanity, the finest that the world has to offer. Aside from that, I mean, primarily I am a husband and a dad. And that is, that is how I identify myself. That's what I spend most of my time worrying about and doing. And then somebody who I hope is engaged in the world of ideas.

I spend an awful lot of time trying to read on all sides of various issues, and I have a broad range of interests. I hope that I'm trying to give impetus to people to make better decisions in their own lives and to do things that are meaningful to them. I think if I have one giant message, whether it's political or life, it's that most of what is in your hands is in your hands. I think that the biggest question in life right now, and this is true politically, but it's also true personally, is whether you decide to take responsibility for your own actions and improve your own life. And if the answer is yes, then you're likely to be successful, and if the answer is no, you're likely to be unsuccessful. It doesn't mean that there aren't going to be problems that are outside your control. But I think that the biggest question we all have to ask ourselves in a free society is how much responsibility we wish to take. So if I'm an advocate for that position chiefly, then I'll be happy with that.

So it's interesting you mentioned that. And not being a podcaster, you're followed by millions of people. You're known for your opinions, et cetera, but you essentially key into your responsibility as a husband and a father. And this takes us somewhere where I wasn't planning to go for a while, for the Next, until about 90 minutes from now, but I'll start it now. Just kidding. The question I want to ask is in the Bible, the famous story of Adam and Eve, when they come up, it said that. That God created Eve because it was not good for man to be alone. And of course, that means humanity and basically men and women.

I want to ask you, what matured you more? What caused you to be more mature, getting married or having children? Because if it's not good to be alone, it would seem to me call the homer. As they might say, you should have as many kids as possible. So which is more important to you or which was more maturing to maturation, part of your maturation process, getting married or having children?

I don't want to borrow from sort of an area where you are significantly more versed than I am, but it sort of feels like rocket. It feels like rocket stages. It'd be, you know, one builds on another. I would say that escaping immaturity requires you to realize that you are not the only person in the universe and that you have to put somebody else's interest first. That would be getting married, but then realizing there's an entire another generation that you have to pass things along to, that you have to structure your life in such a way as to provide a home. Values that you really do have to build, as we in the Jewish community say, by Netman, by Yisrael, you have to build a believing household. When people talk about building a household, I don't think they think about it, you know, seriously enough what the language actually means. It's not just that you create a household in which to live.

You have to decide how to build. You have to decide which materials to use. You have to decide how to structure that household. And that means that you have to decide where the doors go, where the windows go, how exactly people are going to live within that household. And that means structuring your own values. You have to build yourself in order to build the household. And I think that having kids, for me, having kids was the culmination of a thought process that begins when you choose to get married. So I'm of the view, and I've made this clear before, that I think that if people want to have successful marriages, you have to decide to get married before you meet the person you're going to marry.

Mainly because if you meet the person you're going to marry and then you kind of fall into marriage, you may have had a very different job description when you met than you do when you get married. When you're looking to get married, then you're looking for something very different. You're looking for somebody to build that house with, somebody who has the same values you do. Whereas if you fall in love with somebody, it may be that now you have to kind of jerry rig the structure that you want to live inside because you've already, you know, met somebody and you've already built a life with this person that was kind of accidental. So for me, it was deciding to get married followed by getting married, which means that you start to build that house and then filling that house with children and then adjusting the house on the fly is sort of how I would think of the maturation process.

It's possible to get to be single and be selfish and just think about yourself. It's possible, probably possible to be married and be selfish, although not for super long, because it probably won't last that long. But then you have to start thinking about the, you know, your moods and taking care of another person potentially. But it's impossible to have children for selfish reasons. I mean, nobody says at three in the morning I'm really getting too much sleep. I really like to change Some diapers. I mean, besides me, I like to get the experience with dark matter, you know, it's very inaccessible otherwise. That brings up a question I had for you, is sort of how you structured your life.

It seems very methodical. I mean, you've been writing since you were 16 or maybe even younger. You started UCLA or bitter rivals to the north. And did you have a plan for how you would go about life? Because we. I'm a pilot. People know that, you know, and it's often said, even in, you know, disparate fields like chess or whatever, a bad plan beats no plan. Did you have a plan? And looking back, was it, did your life kind of unfold to that, to that plan, according to plan or totally randomly?

So I would say that I had a long term plan. Like, if you'd asked me when I was 16 what I wanted to do, it would actually kind of look a lot like, like what I have right now, thank God. But I left a lot of avenues open as to how to achieve that plan. So I think that short term planning can be very, very difficult because there are just too many contingencies. But long term planning allows you to realize that there's play in the joints as you move toward, you know, what you're attempting to do. And so my entire career, I've always thought keeping windows open, having the lifeboats ready is a good strategy. Being able to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, as opposed to you lock yourself into one path and now your path dependent. If this doesn't work, you're kind of stuck.

I've always tried to keep a long term goal in mind and then be open to the opportunities in front of me and try to see how those opportunities can kind of move back and forth, but in general, toward that long term goal.

And to that end, you have a daily routine. How do you structure it on a tactical level, daily level versus the long term strategic level that you just laid out? What's the balance?

Life has radically shifted since COVID But before COVID I had a pretty solid daily routine. I'd wake up in the morning. I would generally wake up with the dawn because my kids wake me up. I would take care of the kids until my wife woke up and make breakfast for them, kind of review the news on my phone while I was doing that. And then I would, as soon as my wife could take over, I would go and do my morning prayers. Then I would go into work, do my work, the podcast, maybe some writing, come home, eat lunch, take a couple of hours out to work out and do some other work, you know, writing or prepping for the next day. And then it was take care of the kids for several hours. And then at night, after the kids go to bed, usually that's when I start to prep for the show the next day.

And then it's relaxed with the wife for a couple of hours. So it's pretty balanced life, I would say. But. And with. With kind of defined areas, I do think that it's important to define how you focus your time. The biggest mistake that I've made, and I think people generally make, is the belief that you're good at multitasking. Nobody is good at multitasking. It's just not something people are good at.

You need dedicated amounts of time in order to focus. And that means that there is a very funny but. But I think true statement that I'm trying to. Which famous writer said this where somebody asked them, can I have five minutes of your time? He said, no. He said, well, it's just five minutes. He said, Right, but it's not five minutes. It's. It's at least 20.

Because you asking me the question has now taken me out of my routine for a certain amount of time. Then I have to actually give you my attention. Then after you leave, I have to spend a certain amount of time getting back into my routine. So there's no such thing as taking five minutes out to do something. You really do have to break your time down into significant chunks.

Yeah. That brings up another point. Your friend Sam Harris has said, at least on his podcast, that it's actually not time that's the most precious quantity. It's attention. Right? We all have time to watch enough cat videos. You know, at least speaking personally, I'm not afraid to admit that, but it's really the attention that you just spoke about, it's taking away attention. And I wonder when you look into your, you know, your children's face, your newborn, and you say, basically, I'm weighing this decision, you know, to grow my following, to grow the Daily Wire, to grow your podcast, your audience, your radio, you're effectively taking time away, and I struggle with that, too. How do you struggle with the guilt? You know, because you are kind of a victim of your own success, and it has to come at some level, at the cost, at the expense of attention, at least to your family.

So how do you balance that mentally? Are you. How do you. How do you weigh those kind of opposite, disparate forces?

So, I mean, the good news for me is that I'VE been really able to build a terrific team here with my business partner, Jeremy Boring, at Daily Wire. So I've been able to really delegate a lot of responsibility to people who are better at these things than I am. So I don't run my own social media, the sort of presence. I mean, I obviously tweet and I put things on Facebook, but that's not a major part of my day. And I'm sort of involved at a strategic level. But because our company is now so large and we have over 100 employees, I'm able to really delegate a lot. And that means that when I focus, I focus in very specifically on what it is that I need to do, and then I'm able to, you know, pitch in at home a lot and. But this has been true for a while.

I've always made it a top priority to ensure that I'm there a lot for my kids. I've been very involved with my kids, even though I work a lot for, you know, since. Since they were born and my daughter is now six. I was actually, you know, sort of the chief parental influence until probably the last year and a half when my wife finished residency. So for. For a long time, my wife was actually doing a lot more work on an hourly basis than I was because she was in medical residency. I would bring the kids to visit her at the hospital. She would duck out for 15 minutes, come down, kiss the kids.

I would take them home. I'd get them ready for bed. So I've always made this, like, a real priority, and that comes from my own parents who made it a real priority, particularly my father, who was actually home a lot more than my mom when I was growing up. But I'm lucky. I'm able to structure my days in such a way that, again, I wake up with my kids. I'm able to spend time with them before school. By the time they get home from school, I've typically worked out a lot of my day already. I'm able to take a break with them until they go to bed, and then after they go to bed, I'll do a little bit more work.

So I'd say if anybody has suffered from lack of time and attention is probably marriage. But that's what happens when you have kids. Once you have kids, then it's like, okay, the adults have to take the hit.

That's right. So, you know, speaking of. Well, before we get to that, I want to talk about your mom specifically, but not your. On your. On the playground level. Your mom. I got Some your mama jokes for you, Ben. No, seriously, before we get there, I have a question for you.

So do you do anything to keep grounded, like meditation? Do you do any meditation as part of your ritual besides prayer, which is.

Obviously meditative prayer, is that I will say I'm not very good at it. I need to get better at prayer. Probably the closest I get to daily relaxation is just working out, which I try to do daily for an hour, probably. And that's a good time for me to sort of chill out and relax. And I'll listen to podcasts or I'll listen to music while I work out, and I find that pretty calming. But aside from praying, which, as I say, I'm not particularly good at, because I think to be really good at prayer, you have to be able to, as you say, focus. And I mean, as you know, Orthodox Jews, we started off with pretty short prayers, and then they got longer and longer and longer. So it turns out that now, in order to get through chakras, that the morning prayer, you have to bull your way through, you know, 75 pages of Hebrew text.

So I can get through it pretty quickly. But that also does not help in terms of, like, okay, you know, if you're meditating, you're meditating on one thing, and you're being on that one thing for a particularly long period of time, and just getting through that much text is not super conducive to that.

Yeah, I was going to ask you. I had a live stream with Rabbi David Wolpe from Sinai Temple last week, and I asked him, you know, I said, there's famous sayings, you know, a Jew can be angry at God, a Jew can be happy with God, but a Jew can't be without God. I mean, the very word Israel means wrestles with God, which implies that at least you take God seriously. But my question to him, and I guess I'll make it to you, too, although I suspect from what you just said it might not be answerable by you, is, can you be a Jew without prayer? I mean, I relate so much more to Judaism through intellectual, through Talmud study, whatever, than I do to it through prayer. It's just very difficult for me. With the high holidays coming up this week. What do you think? Do you think you can be a Jew without prayer, or do you have to work at it, especially because it's hard for you?

So, I mean, I should be working at it more. And I will admit to a certain amount of laziness that has set in, and that's something that I definitely need to work on. But I think that we have to separate off a couple things. Can you be a Jew without commandments, or can you be a Jew without being good at praying? So the reason that I pray is not because I like praying or because I'm good at it. The reason that I pray is because I'm commanded to. Right. Because that is one of the mitzvot. So I do not think that you can be a Jew without adhering to commandments that you personally don't enjoy.

That one definitely is requisite. But can you be a Jew without being good at praying? Sure. I think that you can. Doesn't mean that you're fulfilling your capacity, as you know. I'm sure I'm not. But I agree with you. I mean, the stuff where I tend to get a lot of meaning in Judaism is the study, is the reading, is the insights, maybe some of the social stuff. Although I'm not super social as a human being.

I'm the kind of guy who, when I go to Shoal, I will, you know, I tend to daven ahead. And then I will usually have a safer. I'll usually have a book with me, and I'll start reading the book and I'll spend 20 minutes reading the book. And I generally feel like on an emotional level and on an intellectual level, I tend to get more out of that than the prayer. But that's probably just because I need to put more work into my prayer, which I'll, as I say, freely acknowledge.

So the next question I have for you actually revolves around commandments. So if you could convince Germany. Boring. Who you call the God King or whatever, or if you were God, let's say, which of the commandments would you get rid of? And you can't say adultery. Okay. You can't say adult.

I wasn't going to. Honestly, that one I don't find particularly troubling. Yeah, no, no, no, no. That one's actually like. There's some that. There's some that obviously don't make tons of sense. That one seems to make a fair bit of sense to me. All the strictures around kashrut can be pretty difficult, particularly if you travel a lot, as you know.

So some of those are particularly difficult. Honestly, I think that a lot of the commandments as originally articulated in the Bible are a lot less onerous than some of the rabbinic practice that's been stacked on top. Right. There's this old Jewish joke that now, several thousand years since the revelation at Sinai and the Jews decide they've had enough. This deal has been bad for them. They decide that they're going to get out of the deal. So they bring all the books, they bring all the Sefarim, they bring all the Talmud, they bring everything over to Mount Sinai and they say to God and Moses, we don't want this anymore. We want to give all of this back.

And Moses said, what is all this? I gave you five books. And I think that there is. While I adhere to the commandments, there's certainly some truth to that. I mean it's become very in some ways abstruse and codified. And that's not unusual. That happens in virtually every religion or legal system. But there are certain aspects that are difficult and onerous. Honestly, I don't find living an Orthodox lifestyle particularly onerous generally.

I mean, listen, I live in a nice big Jewish urban area. There are lots of them in the United States. I can get good restaurants, I need good food. My wife's a good cook. I like Shabbat. I think Shabbat is a godsend, literally. So that's, you know, that doesn't bother me too much in terms of the commandments that I think are overdone. A lot of that would be arguments that I would say that many modern Orthodox Jews and some of the JTs conservatives have had for a long time, like his chicken meat kind of stuff.

And then conversely, are there any commandments that you would add if you were exercising your deistic propensities?

I feel like we have plenty.

You've got enough.

To be honest with you, I feel like the 613, which is the minimum and then the several thousand that in practicality actually are added on top. I feel like we don't have a dearth of commandments. I feel like we're on top of that one.

Yeah, we have enough. Yeah. I always say, you know, people say I have trouble keeping the commandments. I say, did you sleep with your mother in law recently? And they said no. And I'm like, all right, you're part way there. You know, you're 015% of the way there. My thumbs are rather occupied right now holding up good old Carl Sagan. But yours is free to push that like button.

And don't forget to subscribe. It really helps us with the algorithm. Now back to the episode. So you always say one of your key characteristic lines is turnabout is fair play. And I want to start talking about the book for little bit. This is of course your what, sixth, seventh book now? How to destroy America in Three Easy Steps. And I want to talk to you about that because I had kind of a question for you. So I'm thinking about writing a book based on this, and it's about destroying a country that was founded on divine principles, with divine leadership, with leaders that are Founding Fathers, that are basically worshiped and adored.

And that book's called how to Destroy North Korea in Three Easy Steps. So what would be the argument that you could make against the disintegration living in North Korea, as you call it? There are forces between the unionists and the disintegrationists. It's very interesting, very provocative. We can get into it. But I think centrally is this notion that there's sort of an attribute of the United States that's divine. And I wonder if you can comment on that. And why couldn't another country make the same kind of divine claims to its origin and therefore it shouldn't be disintegrated? When I believe, I mean, maybe controversial, you might want to get rid of North Korea, at least in its current standing.

Yeah. Then the North Korean government can go. That's all right with me. You know, if we are. If we're talking about the divine origins of the United States, what I would say is that I don't think that the origins of the United States in terms of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were written by, you know, people who are, quote, unquote, divinely inspired. I think they were built on thousands of years of intellectual developments in the Judeo Christian West. And there are certain principles that are embedded in the Declaration of Independence that take their antecedents, obviously, from those Judeo Christian values. Right.

When it says that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator, certain inalienable rights. These are all ideas that have a long history in the West. I actually talk about this more at length in my previous book, Right side of History, where I talk about sort of the history of where a lot of these Enlightenment ideas came from, because I think there's a tendency, particularly in modern intellectual circles, to draw a complete gap between the Enlightenment and what came before, as though, honestly, like there was some sort of divine enlightenment that happened and it was complete break with the past. And that's not accurate. I mean, it's just not accurate in any real historical or intellectual sense. So the divine inspiration for the United States would have started a lot earlier and lay in the combination of Greek reason and Judeo Christian ethos that springs from Sinai. The principles of the United States are good because they acknowledge human nature and because they are deliberately constructed in order to effectuate the best parts of human nature and tamp down the worst parts of human nature. That's why the American system is good.

The American system is self justifying not because of any appeal to divine authority. It's self justifying because the principles are indeed morally true and descriptive of how human beings are and should behave.

When you look at that, and you mentioned, you know, kind of the intellectual influence of modernity in terms of our scholars at large. And one person that you reserve particular ire for in this book is Howard Zinn, who is deeply influenced, of course, by Noam Chomsky, who was a previous guest on the show. And I thank you. And I point out, you know, I've had people cancel coming on my show because I've had on, you know, Dave Rubin or somebody like that, Michael Shermer, but I've never had you or somebody cancel coming on my show because I've had on Noam Chomsky. And again, I keep my show politically free because I think other people do a great job. Pod Save America, if you want to listen to politics or can listen to the Daily Wire or listen to Ben Shapiro show or what have you. But you mentioned it and you mentioned in the book Howard Zan and Noam Chomsky, and I wonder, thinking about it, what the net effect of that has been on the culture. I mean, you point out that many of our departments, not just history departments on modern campuses, have this book, Howard Zinn's A Popular History of the United States, which he was kind of, I don't know, influential on Noam Chomsky.

And so I want to get your take. Is that sort of irreversible? I mean, once something reaches a level of popularity, it becomes very deeply entrenched, and now it's being read in high schools, et cetera. So what level of impact on these modern intellectual circles, do you think that the relatively recent upsurge of disintegrationist history of the United States, if you will, what effect do you think that's having on university culture?

I mean, tremendous effect. Obviously, the sort of disintegrationist viewpoint of Howard Zinn, which is the United States was never rooted in fundamentally good principles, that the United States, just like many other societies, but particularly evilly in the United States, was rooted in hetero, patriarchal, racist, cisgender, anti woman nonsense, that all of these various interest groups were competing for supremacy and white supremacy lay at the root of the United States. I mean, you've seen this bleed into the 1619 Project. You've seen Howardson's perspective on American history, which of course begins with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so called New World. He begins his book talking about the evils of Christopher Columbus. You've seen, obviously, the focus on tearing down Columbus statues around the United States in the middle of this sort of historical re envisioning and rewriting. It's had a pretty deep impact. Again, it comes from a sort of Marxist materialist point of view, which is that the United States is not in any way rooted in principle.

That all of the United States history is really just covered for exploitation, and that the only solution for exploitation is to tear down those systems and put in place, quote, unquote, fairer, more Marxist systems. I think it's a complete misread of American history. I think that it relies on an awful lot of eliding of evidence. It's not posited as a corrective to whitewashed history, which I would kind of accept. Right. I mean, if you're talking about American history has historically been seen in too positive a fashion. Right. It ignored too much the mistreatment of Native Americans and black Americans and women.

That's totally fair. If you want to talk about how we can correct that history, that's fine. But if you want to say that the root of American history lies in evil, that is absolutely ignorant and counter to prevailing evidence. Because the fact is that all of the things that we've talked about that you're talking about here, racism and sexism and bigotry and homophobia, all these things are present in nearly every society in all of human history. What's different about the United States is what's different about the United States. And so focusing on the. The evils of humanity as manifest in the United States, as unique to the United States, but all of the good things about the United States as sort of universal to humanity runs completely counter to all available evidence.

So given that and your book Brainwashed, which is about your experiences and thoughts as a young person, much younger person, might have been one of your first books.

It was my first. Yeah. I was 19 when I wrote it.

Yeah, yeah. And you talk about what the university experience was like at ucla. Of course, it wasn't anywhere comparable to what you'd get at UC San Diego. But nevertheless, if you were to create actually Shapiro University, what would that look like? What would be the required curriculum at Shapiro University?

So I think obviously you'd have to actually read some classics of Western literature. And I think that that would be judged based on the importance of the literature over the course of history. So it wouldn't be based on any sort of quota system for the race or sex of the author. I think that's silliness of the highest order. I think that Aristotle happens to be a more important thinker than James Baldwin. That is not a degradation to James Baldwin. I think Aristotle is more of an important thing than nearly everybody. Right.

So pointing out that you only have a certain amount of time, a curriculum that included both of those people would probably be a good thing. But I think that if you have to prioritize, then you prioritize the most important thoughts in human history rather than prioritizing the sillinesses of Jacques Derrida or the ridiculousness of Herbert Marcuse. The attempt to quota your way to a good education is really, really stupid because what's inside your head matters much more than the color of the skin on the outside of your head.

Sticking with the book theme, your next book, I think, was a book that you wrote with your father, involving, of all subjects, the White Sox. So I wanna ask if you wrote a book with your mother. You talk a lot about your relationship with your father, but a little less so about your mother. If you were to write a book with your mother, what would that be about?

Probably practical living. My mom happens to be the most practical person I know. She's very tacless like, she's very down to earth. Something needs to get done. How do you go about doing it? My dad tends to be much more of a dreamer, Much more kind of visionary in his. Like, he's the one who would talk politics with me, and my mom would be the one like, okay, now you gotta sit down and you gotta do X, Y and Z. How do we actually get that done? And so, yeah, sort of making practical tips for living would be sort of more. My mom's.

My mom's game.

Also sort of along that theme in terms of culture, et cetera, within the, you know, Shapiro University universe, what would the role of, you know, cultural things? Hollywood. I always point out, you know, the budget for Hollywood blockbuster movies about space or aliens or whatever is like 10 times the budget of NASA. And why does Hollywood. It's actually, if you take how much Hollywood contributes to the GDP, it's a lot. I mean, it's maybe $100 billion or something like that. It's pretty good. But that's like what Apple has in cash on a Wednesday. So why do you think Hollywood has such a big influence on culture? And then I'll Ask a follow up just about the influence that science fiction has had on you in particular.

Obviously, as you mentioned earlier, attention is the key commodity. So people spend an awful lot of their time being attentive to Hollywood products. Human beings are storytelling animals and Hollywood tells stories in a way that not only is easy to comprehend, unless it's the latest Nolan film apparently, but also in a way that is somewhat addictive. I mean, images tend to be addictive to the human brain in a way that words are not. Which is why we are stupider culture now than we were 100 years ago or 150 years ago when people tended to read a lot more often. It's also why people, you know, when they watch the news tend to jump to conclusions a lot more frequently than actually if they read the story. But that, that's. Yeah, that's why Hollywood is so impactful and it's why it matters the kind of material that Hollywood puts out there as far as science fiction.

Yeah, I'm a huge sci fi fan. I've always been a huge sci fi fan. So I've read. I can't imagine the. There's not much classic sci fi that I haven't read. And there's some good new sci fi that's coming out ranging from sort of the action genre to sort of the more. More thinky sort of stuff. No, I really enjoy sci fi because again, you can explore both moral issues and technological issues outside the confines of a lot of the dictates that exist in normal literature where, you know, you can be.

You're not going to be accused of violating certain taboos if you're writing in a theoretical universe as opposed to, you know, writing in practical one.

Yeah, I think I had this conversation with Dave Rubin in connection to the Great book Fahrenheit 451. Obviously relevant to his book. Don't burn this book directly relevant. And we kind of, you know, came to the conclusion that, you know, science fiction allows you to kind of pre game or have thought, conduct thought experiments as we physicists say, gedankin experiments about the future in a way that's really unique, important and unusual. So I wanna ask you if you were a science fiction hero or if you were a superhero, DC Comics fan that you are, what would be your superpower? What is your. Besides amazing, you know, reducing your height a little bit because, you know, you don't wanna get too tall. That's right. So what would be your superpower?

If I could choose one, obviously physical invulnerability would be a Pretty good one. I feel like Superman style physical invulnerability would be a pretty good one. But yeah, trying to think about super speed would probably be pretty fun. But I feel like that's just. I feel like I can wait on a plane and do some reading. It's not that bad.

I've asked this to many people and I kind of see a difference between how a scientist answers this question and non scientists answers this question. If I could give you a pill. One of my sons is working on a pill called the never dying pill, which will undoubtedly win him a Nobel Prize. Ironically, not his father. But if you could take a never dying pill and only you, you can't give it to everyone you know, would you take it? You know, you'd be in the same health. You are now, 35 or so years old, peak physical condition, Adonis like physique. Would you take such a pill?

I mean, the only militating factors against it would be the wife and kids. That's literally the only militating factor against it. But yes, I mean, sure, I'm fascinated by people who get bored with the world. This is a pretty interesting place and there's always new stuff happening and new things to find out. So, yeah, I mean, a longer time span means more things I can spend my attention on.

So if I, you know, you are in harmony with many scientists who wanna see what physical laws will be like in the year 2200. But going ahead just a few more days, a few fewer days than that, I wanna ask you, first of all, a lot of my friends can't really vote for Trump. I mean, that's no surprise on a campus like this. I don't wanna get too political. I don't get really political at all. But what do you say to someone who can't vote for Trump and can't vote for Biden and just kind of in the middle, what do they do? Is it like flipping a coin? What should such a person do who's not like a rabid political animal? It feels like we're in this, we're in the zone right now. And neither one is particularly palatable to them.

I mean, I hear you. I didn't vote at the top of the ticket last time around, so I get it. I mean, seriously, like, I don't think that it's a moral failing not to vote or to vote only below the top of the ticket. There's two ways of viewing your vote, right? This is what I said last time around. There is a way of viewing your vote where it is just, you know, a coupon that expires tomorrow. So you may as well use it because who cares, right? It's a Burger King coupon. It goes away. That after the election is irrelevant.

Or there is the idea that your vote is a. Is some sort of moral judgment upon you, in which case you have to decide whether that vote is actually a moral judgment that's made about you because you are giving the green light to the character of the person to whom you're voting or because you are voting in favor of the program the person stands for. So if you believe that it's a referendum on character, you can vote that way. If you believe that it is a referendum on the political program, you can vote that way as well. I tend to be pretty tolerant in how people cast their votes because I think that there are a lot of fair arguments about what a vote should represent. But being dissatisfied with the current state of our politics, I think is certainly not uncalled for, given how things are going.

I feel like you are critical of President Obama. I mean, you've been on the record of critiquing him and your feelings about him, but I don't wanna ask you about him specifically, but more the meta question, which he was the first black president. It was a huge precedent for America. And I remember feeling like we had turned a corner. I wonder, do you think it's a good idea for a Jew to be president? Does it not carry with it this unrealistic weight that the person, he or she would be a representative of all the members of that particular, in this case, faith group?

So honestly, the reason that I thought it would be good for America to have a black president would be if the president had then brought down the temperature in terms of racial polarization, which was sort of the inherent promise and implicit promise of the Obama campaign. It didn't end up materializing. So as to whether a Jew should be president, I don't care. I really don't. I mean, I don't care whether a black person's president or a Jew is president. I don't care about any of the features of the person who's president, other than, you know, their character and what sort of policies they effectuate. So do I think that it would be a particularly bad thing for a Jew to be president? Not especially. I think how they represent themselves as a Jew matters to me as a Jew.

Right. If you get somebody like a Bernie Sanders and he says, I'm the first Jewish president, and it's like, okay, yeah, but what do you do that is Jewish. And his answer is, I once had a matzo ball. Like, I don't find that particularly compelling in terms of him being the, quote, unquote, first Jewish president. So he's born ethnically Jewish. Whatever, man. It says more about America's willingness to elect people of all different backgrounds, which says something good about Americans generally. But I've never expected Barack Obama to be a stand in for all black Americans or anything.

I always expected Barack Obama actually to be a rational individual. And I was disappointed when I thought that he reverted to a certain level of tribal politics.

What do you think if President Shapiro came about, Ben Shapiro came about, what would you want to enact in your first hundred days in office?

Well, I would be the first president in modern American history to completely destroy the executive branch. I mean, I would eviscerate the executive branch. I'd fire nearly everybody, and then I would force the. And then I'd force Congress to pass very specific laws dealing with what it was they wanted to do, as opposed to kicking all legislative and policy making priorities over to the executive branch. I'd get rid of the Department of Education and two other departments that Rick Perry can't name. There'd be a lot of cuts, a lot of cuts over at the federal government level. And I think that is perfectly appropriate. The president basically has two jobs.

One is to, you know, keep the nation safe, ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, and the other is the educational job. And I would spend an awful lot of time trying to educate the American public. I think about founding principles, doing a lot of the same things that I tried to do on a daily basis, just, you know, from the seat of the White House. Again, this is one of the divides I've had about President Trump, is that I like a lot of his policy. I think he's done a terrible job on the educational front, trying to teach people what government is, what it should do, and what he expects of the country and what he should do. So I would spend a lot more time on the second facet. I think Barack Obama spent a lot of time on that facet. He just said things I disagree with, and he grew the executive branch massively.

But it's one of the reasons why I don't really want to be president, because, frankly, I think I get to do a lot of the fun stuff without having to do a lot of the boring stuff.

Yeah, you might have a nicer ride to show for you around and called Air Force One. So I want to ask you a couple Questions. You're used to asking people questions on the Sunday special. I was honored to be on it a couple about a year ago. Exactly. But I want to ask you, what's the one question you wish you would be asked by somebody in an interview show such as this?

I suppose that I wish that somebody would ask me whether I actually care about. About other individual human beings like that because the perception is so wildly different from what is the reality. Of course, you know, when you're in politics, politics, you spend a lot of time talking, as you should, about broad public policy that infuses, you know, all of that encompasses a lot of individual human beings. And so you have to make policy that is the best for as many human beings as humanly possible without violating the rights of anybody. But do I, do I care about, you know, people who are negatively affected by policies that I talk about? Of course. I mean, and the basic notion in politics is that if I am not directing a government policy at helping X person is because I don't care about X person. Well, maybe I do. Maybe I think that the policy that I'm effectuating is better for that person.

Or maybe I think that there are nongovernmental things that can be done to help that person that are more important than using the government as sort of a broad club in order to achieve a particular policy end. The government is a blunderbuss. And I think that most human interactions are scalpel and ought to be done at that level.

And follow up to that is what's the most misunderstood thing about you other than you're the president of the Simi Valley cardi b fan club?

I think there's this weird perception online from people who've never watched the show that I'm incredibly serious all the time, which means they've never actually watched the show. And that's somewhat irritating to me. I mean, the cardi b thing plays into it. That's a 10 minute long comedic segment on my show. And so there's been this attempt by some folks on the left to paint me as some sort of scolding personality who's just there to be angry at you all the time. And that's always weird. I've never really understood that, frankly, because I think you watch one episode of the show and you're not gonna get that.

Okay, so let's move into the rapid fire questions. And for extra credit, I urge the audience to set the podcast on 2x speed. So first of all, are you a techno optimist? Would you sign up for a Trip to Mars or a neuralink chip to be embedded into your brain so you can commune with the Hazer and like Elon Musk is having us do, would you accept such a chip implanted into your brain or take a trip to Mars?

How well proven are the technologies?

So far, not so good. But if you got a letter from God and says you're not going to die on this trip to Mars, you might die on Mars, but would you take the trip? Are you an adventurous person in that sense? And would you take the chip implanted in your brain?

What can it allow me to do?

Instantaneous recall. You can rap like Cardi B anytime you want. You can.

I mean, the latter sounds terrible. That would cause a significant reduction in my lingual abilities. So I'm not super into that. But. But as far as instant recall and all of that. Yeah, no, I think that I'd probably do it. I mean, I'm a techno optimist. I don't think the technology is particularly threatening, and I think it's enhanced nearly every facet of human life.

I see you as sort of the most optimistic pessimist that I know. But what are you really optimistic about? What kind of thing gives you optimism for the future?

Human ability to solve problems. So the thing that we've apparently forgotten completely about and thus must take drastic action in order to prevent the progressive abilities of human beings to solve problems. It makes me absolutely nuts when folks take climate change as an example. I think climate change is happening. I think the evidence shows climate change is happening. I think the majority of it is caused by human activity. But I am not of the belief that you shut down all industry across the world or tax it out of existence in order to stop climate change. I think human beings have an unbelievably great ability to adapt and to create new products and services.

It seems like so much of public life is rooted in the assumption that human beings are never going to be able to create our way out of this one. Which is a weird thing to say since human beings have literally been creating their way out of problems for all of human history. And that's really accelerated in the last two to 300 years.

When you look at that, you look at the progress, though, it comes with a downside, too. And some say things like artificial intelligence will lead to kind of this dystopian future where we're effectively going to subvert all of our needs to machines and machine learning and there'll be less opportunities for employment, et cetera. You talked to Andrew Yang about that. But the question I have for you now is what do you think about these kind of ultimate extensions of that possibly seeming like science fiction now, so called simulation hypothesis, that we're actually the result of a simulation being run on a Pentium processor of the year 2700. That progress that you talk about comes with a downside, crispr, gene modification, all sorts of things. In that way, techno optimism specifically can cause potentially these dystopian scenarios. But I want to ask you specifically, have you heard of the simulation hypothesis that we are effectively the simulation of this ultimate artificial intelligence sometime in the future?

I've heard the hypothesis. There's no evidence to back it so far as I'm aware. So it's as much of a faith statement as a belief in God with actually I would say maybe significantly less evidence than the idea of. I mean it is just a form of a God hypothesis, just from. In a different guise it seems. I mean, given how crappy this year has been, maybe that's right.

The simulation has a few bugs, we gotta reboot it. And I would ask, you know, the simulators, you know, why are there so many Kardashians? You know, that's kind of a question I would ask. So you've already had me on your show. So who's your dream guest in the future? Who would you most like to have that's alive? And then I'll ask you dead, but first, alive, who's like your dream get or one of the two or three, you don't have to narrow it down. But who would you most like to have a conversation with, present company excluded, that you haven't yet?

Well, we've been trying to book Thomas Sowell for a long time. He's been a big hero of mine, frankly. I think it would be interesting to have a conversation with Barack Obama because I'd quiz him on some stuff. I think he's an interesting thinker. I just think that he. I think that he dumbs down what he actually thinks for public consumption a lot of the time. And I would understand him not being too fond of the idea of getting on camera with me, given some of the things that I've said about his presidency in the past. The Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel.

We've tried to book that. I think we probably will sometime this year. So honestly there are a lot of people who I like talking to I don't think would make a great special, but are just interesting human beings whose books I've read. And usually that happens on a one off basis, I read somebody's book, I think it's interesting, and then I want to talk to them. And very often I'll reach out to them on a one to one level and we'll actually have conversations that way. And I tend to use them as sort of expert resources on particular topics. So it may not sustain like a full hour conversation. The reason that you'd want prominent figures is because they have interesting life histories and interesting stories to tell.

But in terms of exploration of ideas, you know, it's. I would say that I've had an opportunity to talk with a lot of those people, just not all of it's public.

So. Next question revolves around your social media presence, and that is the following. You've got 3.1 million followers on Twitter. You've got millions of followers on Facebook, online, elsewhere. But you know, as I said to you in person when we met about a year ago, I said, there's this famous vignette from Animal Farm where the pig says to the donkey, Benjamin, your name says Benjamin the donkey. The pig says to the donkey, you've got such a nice tail and I only have this short little curly thing. And the donkey says, yeah, God gave me the tail to keep away the flies, but I'd rather not have the flies and not need the tail. So I guess my question could be summarized, you know, if you could go time traveling backwards, kill baby Twitter, you know, would you do it? Is there a downside to this stature that you've achieved?

Well, I mean, there's certainly downsides to being, you know, well meaning. And those downsides range from safety concerns to taking enormous amounts of abuse every three weeks. When I turn on Twitter and it's literally on the. Every three weeks, I know it's going on with their algorithm, or maybe I just say something dumb every three weeks, whichever. But in any case, you know, there are obviously downsides to it. I think of all the apps, Twitter is the most damaging because Twitter is built for one liners. And then it went from a place where everybody sort of joked and understood it was built for one liners to a place where you were supposed to perform serious discourse in one liners, which is not possible. So I think what it started off as and what it morphed, what it started off as was fine and basically innocuous.

And what it morphed into is something that's really, really damaging. Especially now that it's like, okay, we're going to go back to 2011 and we're going to dig up a Joke tweet that you sent, and we're going to destroy you. And that's for everybody, right? We're going to completely pretend that what was essentially a repository for making dumb jokes was actually the same as it is now, which is vetted political statements being put out in 240 character increments. And that's very silly.

I've had people cancel, unfollow me, unfriend me, whatever, because I was on your show. And I think that kind of belies a certain type of simple mindedness. I'm not inviting everybody to unfollow, et cetera, but I do think it has had a pernicious effect on the culture. It's almost become a part of almost Hollywood Silicon Valley kind of nexus of influence that's so outsized. I want to go to a positive thing right now. Why do you play the violin? What does that mean to you? Is it something that you feel God's presence the most? You know, oftentimes I ask people, where do you feel God's? Oh, when my child was born, I'm like, okay, well, that was once. Or, you know, if you're lucky more than once, or even if you're lucky once, a lot of people can't experience. Do you feel God's presence through music.

Through listening more than playing? Because I hear my own flaws when I play. Just as in every part of my job, whenever I do something, I tend to be my own toughest critic. And so I tend to hear the parts where I'm playing that don't sound as good as they should. I mean, I play because I've been playing since I was 5, and I enjoy making music with my father and. And he plays piano. He's a professional pianist. And so we can play Brahms together. And that's wonderful and enjoyable.

My kids really love it. And when you're really into it, you feel a certain flow, a psychological flow that's quite good for you mentally. Where I see God the most in my life is obviously in my kids. And it's not just in their birth. It's how they act, it's how they see the world, it's how they interact with each other. And spending a Shabbat and watching them play on the floor with each other is pretty much as close to heaven as I think you're gonna get in this lifetime.

I always say kids are the only proven form of time travel. It's just you don't get to go with them into the deep future. But they're meat out or shaped by you and that actually will live on to the future. All right, that brings us to the very end questions. There's just three left to go, Ben. First question I ask all my guests, I'm going to ask you. Can you provide for us in 30 seconds or less a geometric quantization of space and time that also involves relativistic properties of the hadron particles?

42. Right. You got it.

I've asked Nobel prize winners. They can't get that. Okay. So as you know, in Judaism, there's a concept of what's called an ethical will, a zava.

Ah.

And that's sort of a bequeathing of one's ethical and wisdom values rather than their monetary acquisitions or material acquisitions. I know those will all go to, you know, good causes, I'm sure. But in this case, I want to know what would be in your zava. Ah. In your ethical will, what kinds of wisdom or morals do you want to leave to your children and those of us or those out there who are your ideological children in a sense?

Well, I mean, the sukim, the verses from Deuteronomy where it describes choosing life and that the choice is in your hands. That's the best parsha.

Very good. That's my.

To me, the key aspect of human living is recognizing that most choice about your own life is in your hands. Doesn't mean everything. Obviously, health is not in your hands in many cases, and sometimes wealth. But most of the choices that you make toward happiness or non happiness in your life are in your own hands. And that comes with an awful lot, you know, a lot of responsibility, but also an awful lot of freedom. And those two are balanced. The freedom and the responsibility are balanced. I think as a society, we've tried to maximize the freedom and reduce the responsibility, but I don't think you can do that.

I think they're two sides of the same coin. The more you want to be free, the more you have to take responsibility for your decisions. And conversely, the more responsibility you take on your shoulders, the more free you are to actually act within your own life.

I want to ask you about going also into the future in sort of a time capsule question. But first, a word from our sponsors, which is Cardi B. Rap microphones courtesy. No, no, I actually don't have any sponsors and I likely won't after this.

Inter, which is this bucket and this mop sponsored by Cardi B. Okay.

Hey, we're not gonna get into that aspect of the culture. Very good, Ben. Okay, next question involves science fiction. And so the into the Impossible podcast is named after one of Sir Arthur C. Clarke's famous three laws. The first one being any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The second one being for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. But the third one is the only way to find out what is possible is to venture a little bit into the impossible.

So now, going backwards in time, I want to ask you what thing or achievement or whatever seemed impossible to a young Ben Shapiro? A 20 year old Ben Shapiro, but now, since you had the courage, which I think is one of your dominant traits, you have an incredible amount of courage. You went into the impossible and you did it. So what thing in the past would you tell yourself, have this courage, go forward. What seems impossible will become possible.

Honestly, I think that the one thing that I would tell myself as a young person is I've never had, I've never been shocked. So that was never something I had to advise myself to shirk with the shyness. To me, it would be, have the courage to question your own assumptions and your own opinions and don't be quite so sure of what it is that you're saying and take a look at all sides. I hope that's something I've gotten better at over the course of my career. And I hope that people can, you know, if you listen to the show or if you read my writings, you can hear me kind of turning over points before I immediately come to a conclusion.

Okay, couple more rapid fire. Would you rather win a Nobel Peace Prize or a Pulitzer Prize? Just quick answers.

Oh, God, they're so degraded. Honestly, I'd rather have a $5 cup of coffee than either.

So would you rather write a Torah comed commentary or a Talmud commentary?

Torah commentary.

And what would you say to, like Hillel said, you know, the secret to Torah is. Secret to the Torah is don't do something unpleasant to your neighbor that you find unpleasant yourself. What's kind of your teaching or conversion on one leg, so to speak?

I think I've already said it, that your life is in your hands. And so make choices that are most likely to maximize success for yourself and for those you care about.

Okay, Ben Shapir, well, last question, if you'll indulge me. 10 more seconds. Let's say Daily Wire goes off the air. The Internet get zapped, you have to start all over. What would you do? You have no Twitter, no Facebook. I mean, it would be like a paradise, apparently. What would you do differently besides, you know, maybe learning to code or whatever you guys would do.

I don't know. I mean, I enjoy my life so much. I get to speak about topics I care about and write about topics I care about. So if all that went away, I'd go back to what I was doing before, which was doing all that anonymously. Right Before I was famous doing this stuff. I was not famous doing this stuff. So I would continue to do a lot of that stuff. Or maybe I'd go to medical school.

My wife seems to. Honestly, it seems kind of cool.

Okay, Ben, thank you for all the. The wonderful influence you've had on the world to the good, which I think is very, very important. So thank you, Ben. Shanat. Tova.

Shanatova, thanks so much.