Listen To When Tai Lopez Interviewed Ben Shapiro
Tai Lopez Jan 22, 2018
Ben Shapiro, one of the most controversial people in the world, came by the house the other day. He’s the editor-in-chief of Daily Wire and has one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

He talks about politics so I interviewed him on his thoughts about everything: Donald Trump, Racism, the Education System, North Korea and much more…

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Tai: Well, I'm glad you're here. For people who don't know, would you say you're one of the more controversial people in the world? You're the editor-in-chief of Daily Wire, you've got one of the biggest podcasts in the world, you talk politics, and you -- I was watching some of your YouTube videos. You do not pull punches on controversial subjects.

Ben: Yeah, I mean, that's sort of what we do and, you know, then it costs people hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring me to Berkeley and it's always a party.

Tai: So, what do you consider yourself? You're not a Republican. You're not a Democrat.

Ben: So I'm a conservative.

Tai: Okay.

Ben: I'm not really a Republican in the sense that I'm just gonna vote for the Republican no matter what. In the last election cycle, for example, I didn't support Trump. I didn't support Hillary either, actually. I didn't vote in the last presidential election.

Tai: So you just abstained?

Ben: Yeah, I thought they both sucked.

Tai: So let me ask you, if you don't mind, just off the top of my head, how do you respond to somebody who says, "Hey, you should vote." ?

Ben: Well, I mean, I think that you should vote, but sometimes the choices just suck. I mean, it's one thing to not vote because you're lazy or because you're apathetic. It's another thing to say all the choices in front of me are just terrible. I mean, if you're at a restaurant, and everything looks like garbage... do you eat at that restaurant?

Tai: Okay, so do you believe in the concept of the lesser of two evils? 

Ben: So I don't really. I mean, I think at a certain point, if you keep agreeing to the lesser of two evils, you never get a good choice.

If you just keep saying over and over that this person is just slightly less bad than that person -- Then the temptation is gonna be worse and worse candidates all the time.

Tai: But did you write somebody in? Did you go Libertarian?

Ben: No, I didn't, Gary Johnson was not for me. I didn't vote at the top of the ticket. I voted down the ticket.

Tai: Okay.

Ben: So, we'll see how it goes next time. We'll see if the options are any better.

Tai: So now that Trump has been in office, is it worse or better than you expected?

Ben: In some ways I think it's worse. In some ways I think it's better. So in terms of being conservative, he's better in terms of policy than what I thought. So I thought that he campaigned on an almost apolitical basis. He was all over the place on policy. He didn't know where he was. He's governed very conservative. He's governed a lot like a typical Republican, which is fine with me, but in some ways, all of the doubts that I had about his character, his divisiveness, those have been justified, I think. You know, you look at some of the things that he says and it's hard to say that this has been great for the country, what he's saying. Even if I like a lot of the stuff that he's doing.

Tai: What do you think is the best thing he's done?

Ben: Well, I mean, from a conservative perspective, appointing Justice Gorsich, I think, was really good. The tax cuts, I think, are really good. I think the cutting regulations is really good. Again, a lot of his policy I agree with.

Tai: What's the worst thing he's done?

Ben: The polarization of the country, the comments about Charlottesville, some of the comments that he just made about immigration, and the problem for President Trump is that even if you think his intentions are good, he's so bad about how he expresses himself that you very often end up in a situation where it's a Rorschach test. You think that he's evidencing bad intentions. He's saying something that's nasty. Or is he just something that's dumb and it's being misconstrued? And you don't really know. And I'm not sure that sometimes he really knows. And that's a problem.

Tai: So here's a question. So, the question I have about Trump and I'd love to hear your opinion 'cause you know a lot more on the subject than me, is -- One of my mentors, Joel Salatin, used to say "they're dumb like a fox" meaning they appear to be dumb, they do something outrageous, but then a month later, a year later, you realize, wait a second, that worked out for them. Do you think when Trump's accused of being dumb... do you think he's dumb like a fox? Or he's just literally lacking in mental acuity?

Ben: Well, I mean, I wouldn't put him on the upper end of the IQ bracket, pretty clear about that, but I think --

Tai: So you don't think, even though he says he's a genius, you don't buy it?

Ben: I don't think he's a stable genius. I do think that he is somebody who has a sort of root-level understanding and reaction to things that mirrors what a lot of people believe. And that's where he's, I think, on his most solid footing.

Tai: So you think maybe he has maybe a little higher EQ in the sense of this deep, intuitive, I mean, let's be honest, he's been a businessman. People question some of his business skill. But he's been in business. He's not a kid who inherited money from his dad and become a meth addict, or something like that.

Ben: That's fair.

Tai: I mean, I'm a businessman. Over time, you do enough deals, even if you do 'em wrong, you gain some street smarts.

Ben: Oh yeah.

Tai: Would you say, 'cause like I said, I'm not super political, but he's somewhat street smart, I mean, that's hard to argue.

Ben: A hundred percent. Is he genius for branding? He's great at branding and he knows how his brand is going to play and that's where he's at his best. When it comes to, you know, actually understanding policy, that's a whole different game. So I think that he's good at pushing the idea of Donald Trump, but I think that once you get into politics, and people actually expect you to deliver for them as opposed to delivering on an investment or delivering on putting your name on a hotel, then people are more deeply invested on an emotional level with what you do.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: And I think that's something that he still hasn't conquered.

Tai: I wanna throw out a controversial thought I have. I've done many experiments in life. So I lived with the Amish for two and a half years when I was in my early 20s. Why? I never became Amish. I just wanted to see what the world was like 100 years ago and they're still living, they have intact families, zero divorce, basically zero crime, they're happy people and one of the things they do in their church, they're basically like Christians, where they have people become preachers or ministers.

So the way they do it is, basically is they draw lots. They draw straws and so a person who could be the most humble, introverted person can become almost the leader of the community.

Do you think maybe there's an inherently flawed, the methodology that we use to select presidents and senators? Like when I look who's running, I'm like, "Are these the two best choices in a 330 million-person country?" Do you think there's a problem in how we select? Should there be a different selection? I know this is going deeper. What do you think?

Ben: I mean, I'm not sure that there's a way to, necessarily, avoid ambition, unless you're gonna do something like the system you're talking about, just randomly select your leadership, but I think that if we are going to be a representative system, a system where we actually vote for people, the most ambitious people are gonna be the ones who run. And the Founding Fathers were pretty clear about this. When you read the Federalist Papers, they were very open about the idea that ambition was going to be there. This is why they suggested checks and balances and a small government. Ambition, counteracting ambition. Then one of the big problems now is that that government has become so big and so unwieldy, and the executive branch particularly has so much power that we almost have an elected king who comes along every four years.

Tai: Right.

Ben: So that's regulatory policy and nobody cares what Congress is doing. When's the last time there was a headline about Congress? It's all about what Trump is doing, or what Obama was doing before that, or what W was doing before that, and so we tend to think of who would we want to be king, and if we want somebody to be king, very often, it's gonna be a celebrity. It's somebody whose name you already know.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: I mean, the fact is that George W. Bush was already a well-known name by the time that he ran in 2000. Barack Obama had already become well-known after the 2004 convention. Obviously Trump was incredibly well-known by the time he ran.

Tai: Ronald Reagan.

Ben: It's been a very long time, actually, since we've had a president elected who was essentially a nobody until they sort of rose on the public scene. Celebrity means something.

Tai: Do you think that's because of the rise of mass media? It's what psychologists call this the availability bias. You're more likely to choose something that you've seen a lot.

Ben: Yep.

Tai: So maybe it's a new problem. The Founding Fathers didn't necessarily have to deal with that, although I was reading a book about the 1840s, when you had all these wars and it was war heroes then.

Ben: Right, exactly.

Tai: They were kind of the celebrities of the day.

Ben: Yep.

Tai: Do you think it'd be better if we had war heroes?

Ben: I don't know, it depends on --

Tai: Versus The Apprentice hero or something like that?

Ben: Well, I mean, hopefully, the reason there was so many heroes, 'cause we were in a lot of wars, but I think that the level of celebrity, you're right, was really connected to your performance in a war. And you're right, from basically, from after Martin Van Buren all the way to Lincoln you get a bunch of generals and then after the Civil War you also get a bunch of people who served in the military. Ulysses S. Grant, for example.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: So yeah, celebrity's always been connected with it. The question is, when did it start to matter?

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: Because it was one thing to say, "Okay, we're gonna elect the most well-known person for president" when the federal government was tiny and didn't bother you. It's another thing when somebody who has no experience but is a celebrity and now they're running the most powerful government in the history of mankind that has the capacity to take all of your wealth and regulate you out of existence, now should we elect the most qualified person, or should we elect the celebrity? And the founders, George Washington was a celebrity in his time. The idea that celebrity was absent from politics is not true, but it didn't have as much of an impact on us because the government just wasn't big enough for it to have that much of an impact on us.

Tai: Yeah, let's jump here on this live. We're gonna go live now. See a little, see what the controversy we stir up. If you wanna sit right here. Okay, we are live from Los Angeles. I'm here with Ben Shapiro. A lot of you know him, one of the most listened-to political commentators, editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire, and we're talking about what's wrong with America and hopefully we'll find some things that are right. There's a lot right in America.

Ben: I don't know what you can talk about that's wrong with America when you're sitting in this house, man.

Tai: When you're sitting in this house Okay, I like that. There's truth to that. But, as we all know, the human mind gravitates toward the negative first. Let's, I'm gonna throw something at you. I wanna ask you a speed round. If you had to name the top three things wrong with America. If you had a magic wand, you could wave it over this country and maybe even this world in general, what are the first three things you're changing? And then we'll talk about what's the best three things.

Ben: Well, the first one that comes to mind immediately is that we've sort of fallen into this tribalism where we're not listening to each other at all anymore. We're not listening to different perspectives. We just assume the worst intentions on the part of the people we're talking to. It's comfortable to do that. When we're talking at each other as opposed to with each other, and that's why everybody seems to hate each other and everybody's doing pretty well economically right now. You know, over the broad spectrum. Obviously, it's not true for everyone, but for a lot of people, things seem to be going pretty well, we're at a time of peace, for the most part. And yet people seem kind of pissed at each other. Really pissed at each other, and that's because they're sort of moving back into their own boxes. So the tribalism needs to stop.

Tai: So number one, the tribalism. Okay, I like, I'm, like I said when we were recording a little earlier, I've never been super political but I probably should be more, so you're the catalyst for me. Okay, and I 100% agree with that. You know, Charlie Munger, somebody I look up to, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffet, says, "You should never be able to take a position "in politics or any argument unless you can argue "the other side better." So if you're a Republican, you should be able to argue the Democrat side better than the average Democrat, and by doing that, you expand your mind, you know. Okay, what's number two?

Ben: I'd say number two's probably a feeling of jealous. So I think that right now a lot of people feel like whatever I complain about must be justified. And this is true right, left, and center that whatever problems you have in your life, it's attributable to some outside force and that outside force is usually, usually involves you being jealous of somebody. So if you're a Bernie Sanders fan, what Bernie tells you is he says the reason that you're not doing well is because there's some one percenter somewhere who's screwing you, who's sitting at the top of the money chain and just trying to jack your money and if you just got rid of that guy or if you hurt that guy or if you use the government to take that guy down a peg, than that would fix everything. And then on the other end, you'll have President Trump and Trump will go to downtrodden areas of Ohio and he'll say the factory left town not because there was a machine that was built that made the factory obsolete, not because the money has just moved out of your area into another area, so move. He'll say no, it was Mexico, or it was China. Somebody else screwing you. And when you believe, if you spend your life believing that the forces of the universe are arrayed against you and that no matter what you do, there's somebody who's trying to keep you down, it's gonna make you miserable and it's also gonna make it impossible for you to actually succeed. You actually have to believe that you can succeed. You have to feel like you have an individual capacity to do better than you're doing. If you feel like somebody else is to blame, it makes for bad politics and it also is a lie. Usually, if you fail in a free country like the United States, there are really only three things you have to do to not be permanently poor in the United States. Don't have kids before you get married, graduate high school, get a job. You do those three things, according to the Brookings Institute, which is a left-leaning institute, you will not be permanently poor in the United States. In a free country, you know, rely on yourself and if things in your life aren't great, you might wanna look first here before you look everywhere else.

Tai: But it's more fun to judge other people. We like to blame. Let me, I'm gonna lead the third one, 'cause I wanna lead it down the subject of one of the most controversial people in history, without a doubt, is Donald Trump. We'll get into, you've told me things you like about Donald Trump and you don't, but let's start out, what's wrong with the current presidency?

Ben: Well, I mean, first of all, there's the institution of the presidency. The president should not have this much power. This is true under W, this is true under Obama, it's true under Trump. What I would love is a situation where we wouldn't actually care who's the president all that much. I always say this to people who I know who voted for Hillary, and they're just really upset that Trump is president, and I say "Well, now you know how I felt when Obama "was president and I hated that." You know what'd be awesome is if we didn't care who was the president because the president didn't control our lives, didn't have anything to do with us, basically the president sat there and made sure we weren't attacked and that was most of his job.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: So I think the first thing --

Tai: Made sure we weren't attacked. So he was like the defensive commander in chief, is that it?

Ben: Exactly, yeah, that's really, I think, the main function of the federal government. I think most of what the federal government does other than that ought to be devolved down to the state or local level.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: Or not to government at all. But, you know, that has little to do with Trump and a lot more to do with the institution. And then there's the problems with President Trump is just a human.

Tai: So what are those?

Ben: Well, I mean --

Tai: What do you think?

Ben: I think that the president says a lot of things that he ought not say. I think that the president --

Tai: What's the most egregious thing you've seen him say, Tweet?

Ben: Well, I mean, let's see, there's the, during the campaign or as president?

Tai: In the last three years.

Ben: So during the campaign what made me, I didn't vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton. What got me off the Trump Train, so to speak, was when he was in that interview with Jake Tapper and Tapper asked him to denounce the KKK and he pretended he didn't know what the KKK was. That one, to me, was really egregious.

Tai: Do you think he's a racist?

Ben: I don't know that he is a racist on a personal level, because I'm always hesitant, it's the worst thing you can call someone in American life, so I'm always hesitant to throw around that label. I will say that he has said things that I think are racist in the past, but I think what the media have then done is they say he's a racist so that they can take a bunch of stuff he says that may not be racist and then claim that that stuff is also racist. So for example, they'll say, you know, he said something terrible at Charlottesville, which is true, right? When he said that there were good people marching with the white supremacists in Charlottesville. I mean, that's bad stuff. But when he says, for example, that he wants to restrict immigration, well, that may not be racist, that may just be his immigration policy, and I think what the media do is they say he's racist, therefore everything that he says must be racist, and I think that that's an exaggeration and unproductive, not useful.

Tai: Let's take some questions, 'cause they're coming in. "Do you think Trump deserves to be president?" Shapiro in the house. Here's an interesting question. Somebody, Fred, says he thinks what's wrong with America, too many people with a 1950s mindset. Now, you could take that a lot of ways. I don't know Fred's background, but you could take that as talking about racism.

Ben: Mm-hmm.

Tai: You could take that, 1950s, a little bit of a war-mongering time. We were coming, Vietnam -- uh, Korea, transitioning to Vietnam. Do you think it's wise, because I feel like we look back at the past and we become sentimental and nostalgic about "those were the good old days."

Ben: Mm-hmm.

Tai: Is there a time in history in the U.S., 1776 to today, that those were the good old days?

Ben: No. I mean look, if you had to choose a time to be dropped into history, there's no question you'd choose to be dropped right now.

Tai: Politically, let's say politically, let's say you could have penicillin, you could have, what political time do you think was the healthiest in the U.-- was it George Washington? Where do you think it was?

Ben: I think you'd have to take it along different lines, because obviously, you can't say George Washington or you're saying okay to slavery, right? And you can't say 1950s or you're saying okay to Jim Crow and women not in the workplace. So what you have to do, I think, and this is what we try to do in politics, is try and take the best of the past and then merge it with the best of what's going on now.

Tai: Yes.

Ben: And so what you would say about the 1950s is, yes, the 1950s, no one wants the racism, no one wants the Jim Crow, nobody wants the sexism, but what we do want from the 1950s is the sense of national unity, the sense of national purpose, the economic growth curve, the idea that we all shared a common social fabric or at least we should have. It wasn't extended far enough. It should have extended to minorities and women, but the idea that America had a moral goal in the world, and I think that's fallen away a little bit. I think that we've lost our purpose as a nation and that's, I think, a dangerous thing. I think any nation that feels that it loses it purpose, you're in trouble.

Tai: What was best politically? What would you take from the 17 or 1800s and apply to today?

Ben: Well, small government, I would take from the 17 or 1800s. I mean, when the federal government was originally launched, remember, the Constitution was controversial, right? This is why you have the Federalist Papers. The Articles of Confederacy were less controversial and it almost created an anarchic system. I like the idea of having a federal government that does nearly nothing. I don't like the idea of people in Washington, D.C. Having all this power. If I wanna do something on a local level with, you know, my community, that's my job, but the idea that people 3,000 miles away who don't know anything about me, have never heard of me, don't know the names of my kids, those people are making those decisions. That I despise. I really hate that a lot.

Tai: Yeah, my mentor, my first mentor Joel Salatin, he called himself a Libertarian. I don't think he necessarily wanted to vote for the last Libertarian candidate. But he basically said he thought it was simple. He said look -- And I had an economics professor who said the same thing. Any time you have a complicated problem, shrink it down to a real-life situation. So, if you're trying to decide what restaurant you want to go eat at, does it make sense to call your friend who lives in Cambodia? And knows nothing about Los Angeles, or do you want to call somebody who lives in Los Angeles and be like, "What's the best sushi restaurant?" So he says when it comes to curriculums of schools, can we really nationalize them? I mean, you could play devil's advocate and say, well, what you need to learn in Missouri you need to learn here. So I wanna play both sides of this. What are the things, because I'm kind of on your train that state, local makes sense. What are the things, though, that should be run by a federal, a national government? There has to be something. Military, you said.

Ben: Yeah, the military is the most obvious.

Tai: What else?

Ben: Nothing.

Tai: Nothing?

Ben: Pretty much nothing. I mean, I think that the, because I think that most of the problems that we're talking about are not solved by the federal government. They're solved by individuals. If you're talking about local education, for example, let's say that you have a state or a local, thank you. Let's say that you have a state or local that is teaching stuff that you think is wrong. Well, you as a parent, it's your job, then, to presumably pick up your kids and move somewhere where it's better. It shouldn't be a top-down structure, it should be, "I don't like it here. "I'm moving" or "My friends and I are forming "our own school."

Tai: Mm-hmm.

Ben: The idea is that, the real truth is that educational failures, you know, statistically speaking, tend less to be about the educational system than they tend to be about the presence of parents in the home, how much focus the family is putting on education, which is why you see certain immigrant groups really outperforming based on how these immigrant treat education. So Korean populations coming to the United States spend an awful lot of time focusing on education. The Jewish population that first came to the United States, it's really fascinating when you look at the IQ studies. When European Jews first came to the United States, they scored significantly lower on IQ tests than the rest of the general population. Within a generation, they were scoring a standard deviation higher, which shows, number one, malleability of IQ. It's because European Jews actually cared a lot about learning and education and growth that way. The point is that the decisions that you make on a daily basis are the ones that are going to change your life, and looking to the federal government to fix your problems is not only rarely a solution, it's usually more of a problem. They're taking power from you, supposedly to help you. You're better off, in my view, keeping that power to yourself if you can get it. Localism, I think, is more of a solution than the national government stepping in. Look, there are federal rights that have to be protected. So, for example, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution suggests that due process of law and equal protection of the laws is something that has to be protected by the federal government. So if a state decides "We're just not gonna "let black people vote", then the federal government has to come in and stop that, obviously, under the Constitution. But those roles are incredibly limited, and I think that the stuff the federal government does now, I mean, they're regulating how much water goes through your toilet.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: I mean, it's crazy.

Tai: So, I read an interesting book and I want to switch a little bit over to race, because we're talking about tribalism and nothing's more tribal. I'm somebody that's every, I'm basically, I did my 23 and Me DNA test. I'm almost every ethnicity. I've decided I can make fun of everybody except Asians and Middle Eastern people. I'm zero percent Asian, zero percent Middle Eastern. I'm German, I'm Jewish, I'm six percent African, so I'm Native American, so I can, I don't have to tread too lightly on this. Let's just blunt about it. I think everybody who's sane agrees it has nothing to do with melanin in your skin. Black people, Latin people have more melanin because they came from parts of the world where if, you basically get vitamin D poisoning if you didn't protect yourself. A lot of sun. But is it, so, I don't think there's anything at a DNA level really different between ethnicities besides some minor aesthetic things. But are the cultures different in terms of, so my last name is Lopez. Are Latins holding themselves back by how their general cultural and world view is? I'm six percent black. I'm not really that black, but are black people, 'cause if we look in the inner cities, my dad's from Harlem, okay? It's basically black people and Latin Americans for the most part. Are we hold -- Is my group of people, are we sowing the seeds of our own disaster?

Ben: I mean, if there's a disproportionate number of people in a particular group who are not succeeding, for any reason, one of the things that you obviously have to look at is the culture in which people are growing up, and that doesn't have to do, as you say, with race. It can have to do with location, right? There are places in Appalachia where there are a bunch of white people and they're really not succeeding. They're really doing poorly because there are cultural differences between Appalachia and other aspects of white America, all right. You can do this in Los Angeles, just drive to different areas with the same ethnicity and you'll see that people living in one area may be different from people in another area. The question really has to do with what is the, what are the cultural obstacles preventing your individual success? And I think there are cultural obstacles that differ based on less race than community.

Tai: Well, what would be one? You mention having kids before you're married.

Ben: Yeah, so that's an obvious one. So, and that's been growing in every ethnic group, right? So the fact is that in 1960, 20% of black kids in the United States were born out of wedlock. Today it's over 70% of black kids are born out of wedlock. The single greatest intergenerational predictor of poverty is being born into single motherhood. That's not suggesting that you can't succeed if you have a single mom.

Tai: I was born to a single mom.

Ben: Right, so I mean, you're an obvious example, but it is an obstacle that you have to overcome that you don't have to overcome if mom and dad got married. And that means that you can't do anything about how you were born, but you can do something about how your kid is born.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: And that means that you should get married, presumably, before you have children. Again, that's not unique to the black community. You see in the white community, the single motherhood rate used to be five percent, now it's 40%, so it's rapidly increased. That is not, I think, good for children, I think, overall. And that's an obstacle that you have to overcome.

Tai: But how do you fix it? This is hard.

Ben: But this is one area where I actually don't think it is, meaning that the idea that you just have to get married before you put that thing there without that thing on it, right? Like just don't do that. This is where it comes down to individual agency. Don't have unprotected sex if you're not going to get married to the person that you're having unprotected sex to. I don't think this is too much to ask. Now, I understand. I hold myself to a certain moral standard. I'm an Orthodox Jew. I was a virgin until I was married. It's a standard that I think worked, obviously. I've been married for almost ten years now. I have two kids under the age of four and we're doing great. But the idea that there's something preventing you, society is preventing you somehow from making this very personal decision, unless you were raped and had a kid, which is a horrific situation, obviously, but if you were just consensual sex and someone got pregnant and had a baby, then I'm not sure how that's anybody else's fault, except for the two people who are involved with that situation, and the only way to solve that is to have people make more responsible decisions. I mean, just as, whose fault is it if you don't save for your retirement? It's your fault if you don't save for your retirement, right? It's your money. What did you do with the money, right? I think that the more we devolve agency to the individual, the more we say "Listen, make good choices, you, personally" you know, forget about culture, forget about what society says for you, make decisions that are going to make your life better, the more people will do it and the better they'll do. I think saying that these decisions are difficult to actually does a disservice to people. I don't think it's a difficult decision.

Ben: So this person, she says, "I'm a single mother. "I don't think one could choose it. "Even if one gets married, the divorce rate "is as high." So she's saying, Candice Hoskins is saying, "You're right, you should be married, "but half the people that get married "end up divorced, or more, so you're back "to being a single." My mom was, so, my mom was a single mom, but she was married when I was born.

Ben: Mm-hmm.

Tai: And then they were divorced, so I ended up a single -- do you think divorce is just as big a problem as kids out of wedlock?

Ben: I mean, statistically speaking, it is not, but I think that we've also changed our definition of what marriage is for and I think that has a serious ramification for the society. I think that, you know, when you get married, and I'll put it in sort of my traditional religious context. When you get married in a traditionally religious circle, the whole point of getting married is the production and raising of children. Which is why arranged marriages are still a big thing in many parts of the world, which is not a good thing, but it is a thing. And I think the reason for that is because the focus of marriage was having kids and raising the kids, and now the focus of marriage is basically been the same as the focus of living together, are you in love with the person, do you love the person, do you find companionship with the person? And you can do all those things without getting married, right? The whole point of getting married, the reason society has an interest in marriage at all is to make sure that there's a mom and a dad in the home. And this is particularly true for teenage boys, right? Teenage boys without a dad who's present all the time, I mean, I was a teenage boy. Boys tend to, you know, they tend to either create or destroy, and without some sort of militating influence, what I think the left would call toxic masculinity, all right, men tend to lose their boundaries, so, yeah, divorce is a major problem. I think it's a separate problem from single motherhood. But I think that has to do with how we perceive marriage. If you think of marriage, now dating advice, but I think that my dating advice to everybody is, find out the -- if you're dating for marriage, find out the values of the person that you are dating more than common interests. Whether you like the same movies matters almost not at all. But what does matter is, do you have the same aspirations for your kids? Do you want to bring your kids up the same way? What kind of community to you want to live in? How do you want your life together to be? And people don't even talk about these things. They just sort of fall into a relationship, live with someone for years and then after two years, well, I guess we probably have to get married now, and they get married and then it falls apart. Literally on my first date with my wife, now this is not typical, but on my first date with my wife, we talked about free will and determinism.

Tai: Really?

Ben: Yeah, because the idea was --

Tai: That's quite a wife you have. I once went on a date with a girl in L.A. And I said, "I have to go to Miami" and she goes, "What's that?" I said, "Miami, the city." She goes, "I've heard of that before. "Isn't that in Northern California?"

Ben: And now you've been married for five years.

Tai: No no no. So that's a good litmus, if your prospective future wife asks you about free will and determinism, this is much better than if your first date goes, "Where is a large city? "I'm never heard of it." She was a product of the L.A. school systems. Let's talk about school because, like, I talk a lot about what's wrong with the education system and one of the things that I think's wrong with the education system, I do, I'm interested in cryptocurrency, but also the blockchain, which is really a tool to decentralize things and Joel Salatin, my first mentor, said, "We have the same education system, "if you got in a time machine "and went back to pre-Germany, Otto von Bismarck, "late 1800s, they were teaching a system "that created robots and created soldiers "and that's what they wanted, people who obeyed." Everything else has gotten better. You don't travel by steam engine anymore. You don't put leeches on your body if you're sick. We have penicillin, we have all -- but we haven't, if you go in the classroom, it's basically hasn't changed and part of the problem, Joel Salatin told me, is a few bureaucrats in Washington D.C. Decide what you need to learn. Well, do we need to only learn what the hypotenuse of triangle is in the year 2018? What about learning how to use Excel? Learning how to buy a house? What do you, what's your take on education and what's wrong in America?

Ben: So I think that the biggest thing that's wrong with education, I agree, is a certain level of centralized control. I skipped a couple of grades when I was growing up because the system couldn't handle me being in a particular grade, so I had to end around the system, and it was only because I had a principal who didn't care about ending around the system I was able to do that. I was in public school when I was in third grade and she said, "You're beyond this; skip third grade" but we had to game the system, basically, in order to do that. Yeah, I think that, as -- there's no reason why education has to be done the way that it's done. I mean, everything is so decentralized now, we should be able to personalize educational programs to nearly every kid. Now you don't necessarily have to do it when the kid's five.

Tai: Right.

Ben: When the kid's five, you still have to learn how to read, you still have to do basic arithmetic, but by the time the kid's 11 or 12 years old, the idea that everybody has to be learning exactly the same thing is really stupid. And then the idea that everybody has to go to college, regardless of what your major is, is also incredibly stupid, right? Like, my wife had to go to college because she's a doctor, so she was actually studying actual things in college. I had a poli-sci major at UCLA. You telling me I couldn't have gone straight to Harvard Law School and studied law? Like I needed those four years of learning nonsense in poli-sci and just going into debt in order to do that? Like that, the idea that --

Tai: So, would, in hindsight, would you have skipped right and gone straight to law school?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, frankly, I think that the, I think that law school could be skipped and you should go straight into an apprenticeship. That actually is the way people used to get jobs. I mean, you know, once you have a job, the way people do their jobs is they actually go and they work at a job for a year and that's how you get good at the job. No one is qualified coming out of college. For anything. Right, I mean, you're pretty much useless coming out of college.

Tai: Yes, so far out of all the people I've hired over ten, decade plus, never hired someone competent on day one.

Ben: Exactly.

Tai: Ever.

Ben: Exactly.

Tai: And I wasn't competent on day one. Humans learn, I just read an interesting piece of research, it says, you know, one of the problems in schools is you're primarily being taught by what they call the tutorial method, like somebody preaching at you. And they said what people learn better through is some mixture of kinesthetic learning and kind of case studies. So, like, bringing it, like you said, personalized down to that student's learning methodology, not just preaching at 'em, and the way we do it, fascinatingly enough, is only 15% of people learn the way that all school classrooms are set up right now. So we're basically doing something that we know fails for 85% of people. It's mind-blowing.

Ben: And I think from what you were saying originally is exactly right. If you look at how the educational system was structured, it was structured to make workers for factories. It was structured to make workers for particular businesses, and that's not what we're into anymore. I mean, I've, since I graduated from law school, from 2007 to 2018, I've been in six, seven different jobs. The days when you were at one job forever are just gone. My grandparents working at a place for 50 years, no one's ever gonna work at a place for 50 years. First of all, the company that you're at ain't gonna be around for 50 years in all likelihood. The turnover on the Fortune 500 is incredibly high. So you better be constantly increasing your skill set and learning new skills, and, I mean, you're right about this, but learning is a lifelong process and if you're not deepening that, then you become useless in the marketplace pretty quickly.

Tai: So let's talk about, we've talked about politics, let's just talk about Ben Shapiro the human.

Ben: Debatable, but yeah.

Tai: Some people would debate that. What do they call you, robot?

Ben: Yeah, I get a lot of that, yeah.

Tai: Well, I always think of what Albert Einstein said, "The thing about smart people is they seem crazy "to stupid people." So you can sometimes say that. What, like, let's take this back. So you grew up, were your parents Orthodox?

Ben: So my whole family became Orthodox when I was 11.

Ben: I do remember eating at, like, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's.

Tai: Really?

Ben: Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

Tai: So they were Jewish, but just kind of not practicing.

Ben: More secular and then they moved towards Orthodoxy.

Tai: So what changed?

Ben: So my parents went to a congregation down in, actually in Venice Beach.

Tai: Okay.

Ben: And my dad was always sort of connected to the Jewish heritage and I think because he was connected to the Jewish heritage, he became more interested in Jewish lifestyles. He was brought into the synagogue and started practicing the Sabbath with my mom and it sort of grew from there, so it's, religious conversion, not conversion, moving toward religion very often is experiential more than intellectual for people and I think that's probably true for my parents.

Tai: Yeah, so now you've grown up, went to school, did kind of the college thing, now you're an entrepreneur. You've got, you know, your shows. Let's talk about business. What have you learned in business? What's the number one thing, if you could go back, when did you really start in terms of the business of talking about politics? How long ago?

Ben: I mean, I've been writing about politics as a pundit since I was 17, so literally, now half my life I've been doing this. But as far as kind of running businesses and all of that, last five years, basically.

Tai: So if you could go back right now, time machine, we're back in 2013. What are you gonna tell younger Ben about running a business profitably? What's the biggest mistakes you're like, "Do not do this!"

Ben: I think forcing it.

Tai: Okay.

Ben: I mean really, really. I think that business opportunities tend to present themselves and when they do, it's a short window, so you have to jump on them, but very often what I would do, I know from personal experience, I would have an idea and I'd be like "You know what? "This is a great idea." I wouldn't do, necessarily, proper market research, I wouldn't actually, you know, think through all of the various angles. I'd just be, "Okay, let's do it, let's do it, "because now's the time to make my money. "We're gonna go and do it and force this through" and very rarely does it work that way. Usually it's an opportunity that opens and you just take advantage of the opportunity that's in front of you, and I think that's most of life, actually, is that opportunity comes along, you have to be able to spot it when it comes. But most of us are so, me, for a long time, most of us are so focused on what we want from the universe that we fail to recognize when the universe is presenting something to us. And I think that if you just leave yourself sort of open to the opportunities that come along, then you jump on the opportunities that do, you're likely to do a lot better. Like the business that we started, Daily Wire, that only came about because my business partner, Jeremy Boreing and I were both fired from a 501C3.

Tai: So being fired was one of the good days of your life, then.

Ben: Oh, yeah, I mean, I have a rule in my family. I buy a house, I get a mortgage, and then I quit a job. So when we were fired, I'd just bought a house.

Tai: Did your wife have a heart attack?

Ben: No, she'd been through it two or three times by that point, so she was used to it.

Tai: "Ah, just Ben going through the cycle."

Ben: Exactly, but because of that, we proposed a business idea to this 501C3, they rejected it, and we said, "Okay, fine, we're out" and then we took that business idea around in the marketplace, found some investors, and in two years built a website that has 100 million page views a month.

Tai: Yeah, is that what you're at, 100 million?

Ben: Yeah.

Tai: Wow, congratulations. And that, I would say, we spoke on the bad of America, but that's the best of America, 'cause I've traveled around the world and no place that I've been is as entrepreneurial, in terms of people I meet that just go, "Okay, I've failed here, pick myself up "and start again." Like, other countries, like, in Europe, for example, bankruptcy is like a, it's like a scarlet letter.

Ben: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Tai: In America, it's almost a badge of honor to be able to say "I'm bankrupt and I --" and that's some of the good things about America. Don't you wish there -- this is what I wish. If I had this machine, if you, if anybody here can design this machine, please let me know. I will invest all my money in it. A machine, it's called the Combinder and it combines the greatest, so let's say you marry somebody. You remember being on a date with Suzy, Jennifer, and Holly. You take the best out of all three of them, this one has the best personality, this one you like how they looked, this one was the nicest, and you put 'em, merge 'em into one human. We also need that for countries. Because I was traveling around the world. I love America, I was born here and I feel patriotic, but once in a while I go to certain countries, and I was like "I wish we had that in America."

Ben: Mm-hmm.

Tai: So it's like, I'm hoping that even though I think mass media in some ways is the death of the world, it also has this light in that we now learn what they're doing in Scotland and in Manchuria or whatever. I mean, there is that kind of thing. What would you combine from outside of the United States. What's another country that you go "Yes! "We need some of that here."

Ben: Well, I mean, just because I'm not as familiar with a lot of countries as you are, I would say the Israeli educational system is quite good, and one of the things they do is they track people once you hit 18, so once you hit 16 or 17, they say "So what do you "want to do?" And if you're in engineering track, they put you in the engineering track. You're not going and studying general theory at a college. You're already moving along those lines, and I think that that is a really good thing.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: I think that there's a certain sense of citizenry that exists in certain countries, I feel like, again I'll use Israel as an example. There's a sense of citizenry in the country that people feel like they owe something to the country that I think is not a bad thing. And that's because Israel's constantly under danger, and the United States is not under fire ever so we sort of feel like, "Okay, we live here, "this is where we are, but do we owe to the country?" That's not really in evidence here, I think, quite as much, but, you know, listen, I think that America is, by most measures, the best thing going. I think there's certain aspects of how government is done in other places that, for example, I'm not a big fan of the jury system. I think that the European criminal justice system, where you actually have a judge who's a professional judge who sits there and it's not necessarily a system where you have a prosecutor and a defense lawyer, it's actually just the court trying to get to the truth. I'm not sure that's a worse system than our jury system, for example. But I mean, overall, we're the most powerful country in the history of the planet for a lot of very good reasons, I think.

Tai: Yeah, now if Donald Trump, we don't know what he said, but if he said these are shithole countries, whether I think, I just read an article that it was Haiti or somewhere, do you see any truth to that?

Ben: There are countries that are shitholes. I mean, I'm not gonna pretend that Afghanistan is like a great place to live. That's just silly. I think we should all be able to agree on two things. One, certain countries are shitholes. Two, it is bigoted to suggest that people from those countries cannot become good American citizens.

Tai: Right.

Ben: Those are two separate questions. In fact, the vast majority of American citizens, at one point or another, have come from shitholes.

Tai: Yes.

Ben: And the people who were coming over during the Irish Potato Famine weren't exactly coming over from a place that was wonderful. They were coming from a place that was pretty garbagey and they were coming here and making the country better. My ancestors coming over from Lithuania and Russia, right, they were coming from places that were kinda garbagey and they were coming here and making the country better. That's the problem that I have. When people go crazy over "he said shithole countries" it's like, "Okay, come on, you call your friend's "apartment a shithole." Like, that's not, that's not really the problem here. The problem is that you're saying or seem to be saying that maybe if you're coming from Haiti that you're incapable of becoming a good American citizen, which is absurd. Of course that's crazy and stupid. I think there is a read where what Trump was actually talking about is the diversity visa lottery program and what he was actually saying is if all we're looking at is the country you're coming from, not you as an individual, not a merit-based system, but we're just gonna say "You can take ten immigrants "from Haiti or you can take ten immigrants from Britain" which ten immigrants are more likely to assimilate to American mores, then on that level, it's probably true that if you take ten immigrants from Britain, they speak English already, I mean they speak English in Haiti as well, but let's take Britain and Russia, for example. So you don't get the race component, right? So if you're gonna take ten citizens from Britain and ten citizens from Russia, you take the ones from Britain because it's easier for them to assimilate than the people from Russia. That's probably true, but if what he meant was "I don't want to take anybody "from Russia because people from Russia "are crappy and that's why Russia is crappy" or "I don't want to take people from Haiti "because Haiti's crappy because the people "there are crappy" that seems to me absurd.

Tai: Yeah, so, okay, let's take this a little step further. The wall. You got this half of America is like, "Yeah, I think "we should have a wall and Mexicans "and other people shouldn't be able to get in very easily." Let's pretend the wall worked.

Ben: Okay.

Tai: Let's not argue the merits of whether a wall actually -- I have a wall, actually, around my house and it works sometimes although, a couple weeks ago, a guy jumped over the wall and broke into my house and he went to jail for grand theft auto for trying to break, he got in my kitchen and I was out of town and he packed himself a sandwich and he, and nuts, he got and water bottles and coconut water and he packed it in the Maserati and he was not, and he opened the garage and he backed out and he couldn't figure out how to open the gate and eight policemen came in, you know, with guns. So walls don't always work. But they work sometimes, because I closed the wall and people don't come in. So if the wall worked perfectly, is there anything wrong in your opinion with a wall between Mexico and the United States?

Ben: No, I mean, I think that a country has to decide who its citizens are going to be and people who don't get to come in. Now, on immigration, I'm actually Libertarian, meaning if there were no welfare system, if there weren't a question of who were voting, if there were just a question of people coming here to work, I don't care. If you come in to work, all power to you. I'm perfectly Libertarian in terms of free flow of labor.

Tai: So you're saying if we got rid of welfare, we didn't have to support people, you'd be like, "Come in and the best people stay, merit-based" --

Ben: Exactly.

Tai: You don't make the money you go back where you're from.

Ben: I mean, that's how immigration worked in the beginning of the 20th century. The year that my great-grandfather got here, 1907, there were, I think, one point two million people who immigrated to the United States, mostly from Europe, and everybody integrated. It was fine. It's the Greatest Generation, and that's because the quality of immigration is largely dependent upon the quality of the system you're immigrating to, so if you're immigrating to a system where you are expected to work, right, there's not gonna be a handout, there's not gonna be a hand up, you're on your own, the people who decide to leave a place where they have stuff to come to a place where they have nothing and they're offered nothing, that's gonna be a very interesting group of people. And that's why the United States, theoretically, really, our history has thrived because of immigrants, because the people who are leaving their countries are not necessarily representative of those countries, they're people who are very often the best and the brightest.

Tai: They're outliers.

Ben: Exactly, and they're coming here for that, so, you know, if in my best of all possible worlds I have a completely open border and no welfare system and, at least not a federal welfare system, and, you know, as far as voting goes, you earn citizenship, right? You earn your way in, basically. And that would be fine with me. But we have welfare, we have cultural differences, people come in, they may expect welfare or they may expect that they're gonna be taken care of by the government or they may be bringing biases from the countries they come from, the culture that they live with, and that's going to change the nature of the country that we live in, so that means that you as a society have to determine who's good for the country and who's bad for the country, right? Is it great for the country to have ten million people with fifth grade educations coming in or is it better for the country to have ten million people with college educations coming in? And so you have to make those decisions. And that's not a moral decision sometimes. Sometimes it is, right? You don't want criminals coming in. But a lot of the time that's an economic decision. Are these people who are going to take out of the system or people who are going to contribute to the system?

Tai: Yeah, it seems, you know, so much as I just go through life, my advice to myself at 19 would be like, "Most things are common sense." It's like, do you wanna have Pablo Escobars coming into the United States? Well, we tried this. Fidel Castro let a whole bunch of people out of Cuba in the 1980s out of prison and Miami's crime rate went through the roof instantly. This one woman came with a machine gun and started shooting people in nightclub lines. You ever seen that? She shot a whole bunch of -- she was from a Cuban prison. So, common sense, you let in those kind of people, crime goes up. Common sense is, and I've always thought, we have technology, we can screen people, there's a massive amount of data on how to do psychological tests that wouldn't be 100% accurate but would be able to find good people from everywhere in the world and let 'em in. Because common sense to me, how do you build a company, and this is, I'll go out on a limb, this is my out-on-a-limb political theory. Okay, we start buying people's passports and sending them to France. If France doesn't like America, so basically we take all the non-productive people and we say "I'll give you 100 grand and a plane ticket "to France" and then we find anybody anywhere in the world who's just good people and we all, kind of common sense know what good people are, right? And we pay them and buy them a house in the United States. Maybe not pay them and buy them a house, but we buy them a ticket here, because that's how you build a good company. You know how Steve Jobs built a good company? He found a good programmer over at Google or at Microsoft and he's pay a headhunter to go poach 'em. He'd be like, "Pay that guy right now." They're poaching people, Google and Facebook, million bucks signing bonus. I'm like why don't we take a book from business, which is kinda common sense, if you're dragging down America and you're gonna cost America like a million bucks, be like "Here's a 100 Gs cash, a sack, "and an American Airline" and we send 'em to all of our enemies, whoever's your enemy, you flood them. That worked for Fidel Castro. All right, that's a little crazy. Last question 'cause I know you gotta go to your birthday party. And I might have your mortal enemy on after you're gone.

Ben: Knowles is here?

Tai: We'll see. I have a surprise besides the birthday party, besides the birthday cake. North Korea, we're gonna end on a light note. I like to end on a very light note. Let's talk about North Korea.

Ben: And nuclear annihilation.

Tai: The devastation of planet Earth. Do you think there's a chance, first of all, is Trump handling it correctly, and is this something we need to be worried about or is it just like the Hawaiian text alert yesterday that's a false alarm?

Ben: So I think, you know, I tend to be sanguine about this than a lot of other people. I know a lot of people are panicking about North Korea. First of all, I don't think that the leadership in North Korea is thinking, "Ooh, Trump Tweeted something, "I'm gonna nuke L.A." If I thought that, I'd have sold my house a while ago and moved in country, right? Moved into Iowa, away from the coast, but the idea that, look, the Kim family wants to maintain power. That's pretty much what they want out of life, this we know, and they also know that the minute they fire a nuke at anybody we are going to wipe out their entire country. I mean, they will not only lose their power base, the entire country will basically be a sea of glass, it will be over for them, so the real danger, I think, is not that. The real danger is their capacity to maintain power over the long haul and keep, you know, their gulag going. That's the danger to their own people. As far as them posing a serious danger to outside countries, only if the regime thinks it's gonna fall, maybe they fire into Seoul, but as far as direct threat to the United States mainland, I'm less worried about that, because again, they know that is the death certificate for them. I mean, the minute that they fire anything at us..

Tai: So you think he's logically, obviously he's somewhat crazy, Kim Jong Un, but you think he's logical enough to be able to go at an animal level, "Me press this button me die?"

Ben: Yeah, that's right. He's crazy, but I don't think that he's, I think that part of his strategy is to appear crazy, frankly. Every time he appears crazy, we give him something.

Tai: Yes.

Ben: So this is what his dad did and his grandfather did.

Tai: So is he dumb like a fox?

Ben: Um, I think he's crazy like a fox.

Tai: What's the best place for those who don't know you.

Ben: So check us out over at DailyWire.com and you can buy a subscription over there and if you wanna check out the podcast, then all the usual places you get podcasts, iTunes, SoundCloud, and we're also on YouTube, of course, so go over there and subscribe. Those are the best places, I would think. Also, Twitter, follow me @BenShapiro. I'm pretty active over there.

Tai: Happy birthday, my friend.

Ben: Thank you, I appreciate it.

======

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Stay Strong,
Tai

 
Tai Lopez

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