Ben Shapiro | Club Random with Bill Maher

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Speaker 1 Hey, my old pal, Shane Smith from Vice, who just did this show, has a new podcast. Shane talks to everybody about the biggest trending topics that hit your feed every week.

Speaker 1 It's called Shane Smith Has Questions, and it's on the Vice News YouTube channel and on audio, too. Anywhere you listen to your podcast, I recommend it highly.

Speaker 1 You know, as somebody who has a bit of a dog in the Hitler fight, right? I was going to say. You know, like the funny hat, you know, says something about it.

Speaker 1 like on a practical level again that's adorable that you think that anyone wants to stick around after that

Speaker 1 ben are you back there i am i'm hidden back here in the richard

Speaker 1 came to this place yeah exactly i gotta give it up because i bet you you've never done anything like this uh the last time i did something like this was probably when i was in studio with uh was it molly hatchet randomly molly hatchet

Speaker 1 again it's like a punk rock band. When was this? This is like years and years ago, 15 years ago, I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I appreciate you

Speaker 1 coming to a place that seems antithetical to everything you stand for and believe in. But I bet,

Speaker 1 I bet you you had your day when you were like a wild.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Not high school.

Speaker 1 Not even a moment. No.
Really? Not even a moment? Not even a moment. I've always been.
I'm as straight-laced as it it is possible to be. So, you know, that's my blessing, my curse.
Right.

Speaker 1 That's the thing about being religious. Like, if we're right, then it works out great.
And if we're wrong, boy, we F up, right? I mean,

Speaker 1 that's sort of the Pascal's wager of it.

Speaker 1 Well, but come on, that's not even why you really should want to be religious. No, of course not.
It's not. But I mean, certainly people do that.

Speaker 1 I mean, I always say, because I think I'm fair about religion. Yes, I'm anti-religious, of course, but I do admit it does some good.
I mean, it's not a 100 to zero proposition.

Speaker 1 Cat charities, Catholic charities. And one of the things it does is it does keep some people in line.
That's what Voltaire said.

Speaker 1 It makes other people fly planes into buildings. So we'll call that one a push.

Speaker 1 Right? Am I right? I mean, I won't say that all religions are exactly equal in their effect.

Speaker 1 No, but it does keep the idea that and this is not so much in judaism because judaism is the least about the afterlife and

Speaker 1 how much the devil is going to poke you in the ass with a pitchfork if you fuck up on earth right yes what is the uh review for our students what is the judaic version of the post-life what's their post-life big debate about it just like everything else in judaism but there's not one kind of clear picture i mean the the picture that i always got is it heaven?

Speaker 1 More like, yes, but heaven can be construed as sort of reunification with God more than sort of like you're hanging out just like you're a human being, but you're hanging out with all your friends up there.

Speaker 1 And hell is less of like you're burning an everlasting fire and more like there's a cleansing process that your soul goes through because of all the sins that you've done.

Speaker 1 And that process has to continue in order for your soul to be cleansed so it can rejoin God, essentially. But Judaism has a concept of hell, of Hades, of no.
Not really. Right.

Speaker 1 And that's, that's hugely different. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Than the other two big ones. For sure.
No, hell is Los Angeles. I almost got robbed last night, by the way.

Speaker 1 What? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 We were here for family and to be on this and went out with some friends last night on 3rd Street for dinner. And it's, you know, not a bad area.
No. Like 10.30 at night, we get out of the restaurant.

Speaker 1 I have security, obviously. So we start heading one way.
My friends head the other as a husband and wife. They go like, you know, three cars down.
They get in their car.

Speaker 1 As soon as they get in their car, a white Hyundai pulls up and three black gentlemen, I mentioned the race because they are still at large, jump out of the car.

Speaker 1 They immediately grab my friend, pull him out of his car, steal his wallet, steal his watch,

Speaker 1 pull his keys out of his pocket, his phone. They run around to his wife.
They grab her, start trying to rip the jewelry off of her. She screams.
And at this point, their time has elapsed.

Speaker 1 They jump back in the car and they take off. And I remembered why I moved to Florida.

Speaker 1 Well, it's not like that couldn't happen in Florida. Well, I mean, we'd shoot you.

Speaker 1 Well, are you strapped? In Florida, sure. You are.
So is my wife. Everybody's strapped in Florida.
Come on, man. I've been there.
Okay. Well, what I take from this is

Speaker 1 don't eat on 3rd Street anymore.

Speaker 1 There's some fine restaurants on 3rd Street. I mean, Berry's.
I love Berry's. It's late night.

Speaker 1 It's a very strange restaurant because it's nice. Nobody's ever in it.
If you want to be sure to get a table at nine o'clock, I'm just walking off the street. I recommend it highly.

Speaker 1 I think they must be laundering money or something.

Speaker 1 Jones is an old,

Speaker 1 isn't the little door on Third? These are all like places I will never go again. Yeah, no, listen.
I grew up here, man. I mean, I spent my entire childhood here.

Speaker 1 I was here for, of the 36 years before I moved to Florida, I was here for 33 of them here. And then there came a point where we were out.
Well, I mean, you're not

Speaker 1 unique, certainly. There's lots of people who have moved.
The places people move are Florida, Nashville, and Austin. Yep.
Right.

Speaker 1 Those are the three sort of like havens for people who have had wokeness up to here.

Speaker 1 And when I say wokeness, you know, I mean, it's a triggering word because some people think of it in the original meaning, which is, as I always say, noble, alert to injustice.

Speaker 1 Certainly with our despicable racial history, that was necessary to be super alert and vigilant. Then it migrated because words do.
That's just the nature of language. You can't control it.

Speaker 1 Words just become something else. And it became a sort of catch-all

Speaker 1 for what I have called the aggressively anti-common sense agenda. I mean, that's where we share a belief.
Then there's lots of stuff where we don't.

Speaker 1 You know, we don't even have to talk about Trump.

Speaker 1 But, you know, it is like 10 days before an election and we're about to elect like That's a moral obligation. The worst person ever.
Who's a dictator? Whatever.

Speaker 1 It will change America for the worst forever. But, you know what?

Speaker 1 Between friends, little things like that can go.

Speaker 1 But we agree on the aggressively anti-common sense agenda. And, you know, common sense certainly is, you know, job one, make the citizens feel safe.
Well, that's the thing, right?

Speaker 1 I turned to my friend after he got robbed and we were calling the cops and waiting 15 minutes for the cops to arrive.

Speaker 1 And I said to him, well, you know, at least you've done your part to alleviate systemic racism in the United States. And that's, you know, that's sort of the mentality.

Speaker 1 And he's been thinking about moving out of here for a while. And again, he and his family live here.
It's bad governance is a thing that ought not be countenanced regardless of your politics.

Speaker 1 I mean, people would like to live in a place where you can walk down the street at 10.30 at night and not be robbed by roving gangs. And that doesn't seem particularly controversial.

Speaker 1 But the fact that it is, I think, you know, again, we don't have to get into the Trump of it, but I think one of the reasons why people are less concerned about things that people like Trump say is because like, okay, the issues that matter to me are things like, is my grocery bill twice what it was three years ago?

Speaker 1 Am I getting robbed on the street?

Speaker 1 And so the disconnect between the legacy media, which is very concerned about things like systemic racism, and the normal person who's like, I would just like to not get robbed today, that drives an enormous amount of distrust in legacy media.

Speaker 1 So when they start warning about, you know, Donald Trump saying X, Y, or Z, it's like, okay, well, he's saying that. You know what?

Speaker 1 You know, like, what I really care about is who's going to fix my life and make it better. And I think that really is a big divide right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the piece I'm doing at the end of the show Friday, and I guess this will air after that, so I don't have to worry that I'm cheating myself. But it's,

Speaker 1 you know, it ends with saying that the Democrats, when they ran against Trump, certainly in 2020 and this year,

Speaker 1 Really, their big argument is, let's get back to normal. Certainly that was Biden's.

Speaker 1 And what I'm saying to them, and of course I'm voting for her and I want them to win, is, and I don't have to love everything and I don't, but certainly it's not a hard choice for me.

Speaker 1 But if you're with what you're selling is let's get back to normal, be normal. We know Trump isn't normal, but if you lose this election, it's because a sizable number, perhaps a majority, think

Speaker 1 you're not normal in fundamental ways either. And, you know, I know the left, the far left hates me for always noticing this, but I'm going to continue to notice it because it's true.
And

Speaker 1 it's not traditional old school liberalism. It's something very different.
And you can't have that word.

Speaker 1 You are woke or whatever the word is, but it's different. And you can't like merge them when they're very often opposite.

Speaker 1 I think the Democratic Party has also done something where they've been intoxicated by

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 wonderful high of being able to just say Trump over and over and over and Trump is Hitler over and over.

Speaker 1 And that's excused them to basically believe they can do whatever it is that they want, say what it is they want.

Speaker 1 The weird thing about this election cycle is that positionally, Trump is the most moderate candidate in Republican history.

Speaker 1 He took abortion basically out of the platform. I mean, like at the RNC, he basically sidelined abortion, which is a huge issue, obviously, for the pro-life community.

Speaker 1 That's a big part of the Republican Party. He appointed the judges who got rid of it.

Speaker 1 That's true. I mean,

Speaker 1 they got got rid of Roe, but he, but the point is that his position has been that he will veto, for example, a national abortion ban. No other Republican could have gotten away with that.
Correct.

Speaker 1 When it comes to same-sex marriage, that's completely out of the platform because it's a very important part of being a cult leader.

Speaker 1 No, seriously, is that when it's about personality, and this is true, and you know, it's funny you bring up Hitler. It's like he's the one talking about Hitler now.

Speaker 1 I think it's hysterical that for years now, you guys don't seem to care at all that he, the only per the only only human who he has ever not shit on is putin like everybody else gets it uh friends enemies uh people back in the fold everybody gets shit on except and a couple of other dictators he likes but now he's sort of like thrown that mask away and just like you know

Speaker 1 i like all these people who are hitlerian well let's just say i like hitler too well i mean it's kind of funny

Speaker 1 here's the thing about the whole hitler thing so you know as somebody who has a bit of a dog in the hitler fight right? I was going to say.

Speaker 1 You know, like the funny hat, you know, says something about it.

Speaker 1 As somebody who actually cares about this sort of thing, I was with Trump like two weeks ago at the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe with the hostage family, where one of the kids is being held right now in captivity by Hamas, American kid.

Speaker 1 And I'll tell you something Hitler didn't do that.

Speaker 1 So for all the gibber-jabber about the stuff he says, the thing I've always said about Trump is that on his gravestone, it's going to be written, 45th, maybe 47th president of the United States.

Speaker 1 He said a lot of shit. And that's true.
He does say an enormous amount of shit. And the way that I look at Trump is, and then what does he actually do?

Speaker 1 And I've noticed many of the people who are calling him Hitlerian seem to be perfectly okay with the pro-Hamas protesters on campus or with slow-walking aid to Israel in the middle of a war with actual people who agree with actual Hitler.

Speaker 1 I mean, in Gaza, they used to have like an actual store called Hitler II. That was like an actual shop.
It was a clothing shop in the Gaza Strip. It was a report on by the Jerusalem Post in 2015.

Speaker 1 And like, I'm more concerned about that, right? Nazi uniforms were sharp. There's just no way around it.
Listen, it's just no. Hugo Boss.
Hitler did do one amazing thing. He did kill Hitler.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the uniforms were just on point. Hugo Boss, man.

Speaker 1 I mean, among other, yes, but I mean, just the way the cut on those, like, especially the general's uniform with the red stripe on the leg, and also those leather full-length. Just

Speaker 1 just with the lapels, everything was just

Speaker 1 now. There are things I don't like about the turbo,

Speaker 1 but I can answer your question there about like the well, he just says stuff. I mean, this is, you're so sanguine about this, it just amuses me.

Speaker 1 And it won't in the future because, yeah, he didn't do a lot of the stuff he said the first time, but he tried.

Speaker 1 You know, Hillary, lock her up. Yeah, he tried.

Speaker 1 He tried tried to get sessions to do that not really yeah he did no he didn't and he certainly tried to not honor the election and as I said from the beginning didn't concede

Speaker 1 he tried and he did tried everything he did not have in place enough lackeys and stooges to pull it off the first time. That may not be the case the second time.
That's my worry about Trump.

Speaker 1 The whistling past the graveyard of he says a lot of things about the enemies within and all these words and phrases that we heard from places where they did conduct pogroms about people.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what they said in Rwanda. Okay.
I mean, I think that if you're believing that Donald Trump is a figure who's about to massacre the Houthis, I don't.

Speaker 1 If they were here, he would.

Speaker 1 I highly. The Houthis, they're eating the pet.

Speaker 1 The Houthis,

Speaker 1 the Haitians ate all the dogs and the cats. The Houthis go for the hamsters.

Speaker 1 But like, here's the thing. I keep asking people, like, what's the practical path for Trump to do this?

Speaker 1 I've actually said to people, if you actually want Trump not to deny the next election, then probably he should win because he ain't sticking around for a third term. All he wants is to win.

Speaker 1 Once he wins, he frankly, I mean,

Speaker 1 like, really? Again, like on a practical level. Again, that's adorable that you think that.
You think he wants to stick around after that?

Speaker 1 The only reason he stuck around this time is because he lost last time. That's the only reason he's there.
I mean, he's not even unique in this.

Speaker 1 Once you get to be president, once you have the plane and wherever you want to go in the world, you can get there faster than any other human being because they will clear the countryside, the streets, they will clear everything.

Speaker 1 Once you have all those kind of perks, you never want to give back.

Speaker 1 Look at Biden.

Speaker 1 He must have known that he was a shell of his former self, but you cannot, it's like flying private. Yeah, but he's eligible.
I mean, one should do. Trump's not eligible after that.

Speaker 1 One should fly private once. They can't even list him on a ballot.
I mean,

Speaker 1 once his second term is over, it's over. And as far as the people he's going to appoint to his cabinet, they have to go through Senate confirmation.
I mean, like, here's the thing about Trump.

Speaker 1 And again, we don't have to talk about Trump the whole time, but

Speaker 1 the systems of government, the checks and balances, were built to stop stupid, blundering attempts to overrun those boundaries. They really were.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's why you can say that Donald Trump tried all this stuff and it failed because the system was basically built for that.

Speaker 1 What the system was not really built for was the takeover of institutions from the inside and then the gradual weakening of those institutions.

Speaker 1 So, you know, for example, the use of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to try and cram down vaccines on 80 million Americans, right?

Speaker 1 Or the or the attempt to ram down alleviation of student loans single-handedly. And then after the Supreme Court says, don't do that, the attempt to continue to do that.

Speaker 1 Or the activation of the Department of Justice to continue investigating Trump apparently for everything under the sun. These sorts of things, they can be abused that way.

Speaker 1 And those abuses are pretty serious.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to follow all those trails because we're here at Club Random. But I mean, I could.
I mean, some of what you say I agree with, some I don't.

Speaker 1 I'll just, let's end this section of our conversation with just this one question. If he does do these things that I fear,

Speaker 1 will you admit it? Sure. Yes.
Of course. I think he will.
I think you're an honorable guy. I mean, I do.
I posed him when he was doing this between November and January last time time around.

Speaker 1 Okay, but he did it, so how could you possibly forgive it? I mean, I don't forgive what he did between November and January, and now I'm faced with a binary choice between two candidates.

Speaker 1 And who do I think is going to be

Speaker 1 closer to the market?

Speaker 1 You really think the hellscape that would be America would be worse under Kamala? I mean, again,

Speaker 1 all the woke stuff. I mean, this is last week's editorial that I did and this week, they both kind of have the same theme, which is that Kamala, you need to

Speaker 1 convince the undecided voter

Speaker 1 that you're not a stealth woke nut. Yes.
That's it. Are you convinced? No, but I would take that even over as much baggage comes with that.

Speaker 1 It's still better than the guy who doesn't concede elections, loves Putin, loves autocracy, fundamentally doesn't understand

Speaker 1 that that's the linchpin to America, the peaceful transference of power. No, I don't think he would ever give it up.
I don't think he would ever say, I lost. Can I ask you the countervailing question?

Speaker 1 And he will probably try to pass it on to Uday and Hussei.

Speaker 1 So you've said, you've asked me, you know, if Trump does all these things, will you admit it? And say this.

Speaker 1 And I said, okay, so if Kamala turns out, if she wins, and she turns out to be just as stealthily woke as I fear she will be, and if she pursues the bad kind of foreign policy that I think she will, I assume that you'll also come forward and say that.

Speaker 1 What I will admit is that she was a stealth woke nut.

Speaker 1 i will not admit because i haven't said it now and never have and never would that that is yet worse than not conceding an election understood that to me is the absolute bottom so i think that if you're going to make a bet to be fair just to you know if you're going to put it in people's lap yeah and the bet is basically do you think there's a better chance that donald trump ends up being a hitlerian tyrannical dictator who overruns all the boundaries of power right or do you think that there's a better chance that kamala harris is going to be a stealth woke nut who runs america into a ditch and i think there's a way better chance of the latter than the former.

Speaker 1 Yes, maybe so.

Speaker 1 Don't know, but a good question, at least. What is not a question in my mind is if the worst outcome of each happened, which is the worst of the

Speaker 1 fair. That's part of the calculation.
Can you agree with that? Well, I mean,

Speaker 1 it would be worse. Because if Donald Trump turns into Hitler, I think that that is worse than Conala Harris being that out of the way.
Not Hitler. He's not going to kill all the Jews.

Speaker 1 He likes the Jews. He does.
And so do I.

Speaker 1 I have to tell you, I have a sub stack now because it's a rule. Every media person must have a substack.

Speaker 1 We have exclusive content from Club Random, some great extras, and me talking directly to you about whatever the fuck I feel like. But it's mostly about the goings-on here at Club Random.

Speaker 1 Find it at billmar.substack.com. I'll see you there.

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Speaker 1 And I appreciate your reaching out about my Chapel Roan editorial. Yeah, it was great.
It was great. But it means

Speaker 1 a lot to me because

Speaker 1 the other guests you've had on the show or not? Of course. Okay, so Bill Burr was a fucking asshole on this show.
My show? Yeah. That was so long ago.
I know, but it pissed me off.

Speaker 1 Really, it was quite terrible. That's the last time you saw my show?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 1 I watched the show consistently, but that one's been in my craw for a while. Okay, I don't even remember it, and I don't think he was an asshole.
I think I remember that.

Speaker 1 He had a great, maybe he was.

Speaker 1 Like, he was here. Oh, this show.
Yes. Oh, I thought you meant real-time.
No, no, no, this show. Oh, this show, yes.
Well, you know what? Bill and I have a great relationship. It's not what I call

Speaker 1 a loving relationship, but we have a grudging respect for the other one. And when he is funniest is when I purposely goad him because he's like Mr.
Regular Guy.

Speaker 1 And I'm not really a pompous professor, but I can play one because I know a lot of words he does and things he does, which he finds to be elitist, you know, Ben.

Speaker 1 Listen, I think he's super funny, and I think he was an asshole on the show. That's very possible.
But I happen to love that episode because I would say things like, you know, just to provoke him.

Speaker 1 Bill, do you find it entirely Elimassinary that this

Speaker 1 and I was just, I love playing the straight man. And it just gave him the chance to be the Boston guy who's like, whatever the fuck that means.
And it's funny. Comedians love just to do that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now

Speaker 1 the thing that ticked me off was where he started, you know, essentially getting high-handed about.

Speaker 1 Well, you don't know anything about the Middle East and you can't speak about this, but I love the protesters and the protesters are great. Were you funny in school?

Speaker 1 Like, like I was like, I was not the class clown.

Speaker 1 That was too beneath me. I was a snob even as a kid, but I was kind of the class wit.
You know, I would try to make the teacher laugh.

Speaker 1 Were you anything like that in school? I mean, a little bit, but I was pretty biting. I mean, like, I was, so I was two years younger than everybody.

Speaker 1 Once you were advanced? Yeah, I skipped third grade and ninth grade.

Speaker 1 That makes so much sense because really, I mean, your capacity, I mean, I feel like I have skills that you don't have, but but you have definite, like, and you're not the only one, but people who can write, write and read like long thousand word tones.

Speaker 1 You know, very, I mean, your mastery of the detail of the law and every issue and how fast you speak. You know, it's like, I can't aspire to these things.
And frankly, I don't want them.

Speaker 1 But they are impressive and they're rare.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, I'll say that when I was in school, so that results when you skip a couple grades and you don't hit your growth spurt until, you know, senior year.

Speaker 1 When that happens, that's likely to result in you basically being the class punching bag. Were you stuffed in a locker? That kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, much worse than stuffed in a locker, but yes. Really? Like what? Like physically abused, like hit, like that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 Physically, but not sexually. Not sexually.
Not sexually. Like hit with belts, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 And to get fucked in a locker. No, that would be bad.
That would be bad. I don't think my life would have gone quite a bit.
That's the ultimate

Speaker 1 humiliation. Yeah, that'd be terrible.
But no, it was bad. So you carry a chip on your shoulder around.
I mean, I also was a huge loser in high school and super shy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And again, growth spurt, not that I've ever really a big one, but at least I got to normal.
But I think at like 14, I was still very short.

Speaker 1 And, you know, kids are feral. Kids are awful.

Speaker 1 Kids are. Kids are the real Nazis.
You have to civilize them. And before you do, their instinct is to be awful, and they are.
I agree with you. And I have four of them.
I went to, I mean, people.

Speaker 1 They're wonderful and terrible. Yes.
Yeah. They're innocent, but not good.
Kids are innocent, but not good. That's a great way to put it.
Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 it's funny. Whenever I go to my doctor for a checkup, she always says, like, you know, and stress.
I'm like, life is stress. I said, you know, when I was stressed? When I was a kid,

Speaker 1 adulthood is not stressful at all, even though I've had many stressful episodes about various things. But compared to the knot in my stomach, that was every day, because

Speaker 1 it wasn't like I was ostracized every day, but some days. So like, which days it can be, which of these Nazi children who

Speaker 1 somehow they got to be the

Speaker 1 Gestapo,

Speaker 1 what are they? It's also, especially in high school, they have an innate ability to spot the chink in your armor and just go right forward. The weak.
The weakness. The weakness.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that's like a Darwinian thing. Probably.
Right? Like, let's kill the weak. And so, you know, I have a sort of counterintuitive view of bullying, which is it's really, really bad.

Speaker 1 And also, I'm not sure that it's necessarily bad for everyone who is bullied because, you know, as somebody who was pretty viciously bullied in high school, I think it was kind of good.

Speaker 1 Not that I was bullied, but like, you grow some thick skin. You think so, you get some skill sets.
You think you wouldn't be the success you are if you hadn't been?

Speaker 1 I was always pretty determined, but when you learn young to take shit,

Speaker 1 then, and to kind of walk back at it, that's not bad. Then when the Washington Post writes an editorial about you,

Speaker 1 exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 It's not as bad. Whatever.
Okay. Yeah.
I mean, especially because you know,

Speaker 1 I haven't, I will say my life is a very boring and predictable life because I've made a bunch of good decisions.

Speaker 1 And one of my, one of my, you know, kind of pet peeves about people's life stories is that the ones that are really interesting are very often ones where it's people making their own obstacles and then overcoming the obstacles they make for themselves.

Speaker 1 And I'm pretty proud of the fact that I haven't had tons of obstacles that are at least self-created. I mean, like I grew up in Burbank, California over here.
I had great parents.

Speaker 1 We had a small house, like 1,100 square feet, and it was six of us in a small house with one bathroom. And that's not an obstacle.
That's just called life. Right.

Speaker 1 And, and then, you know, we got a little older. My parents got a little wealthier.
They moved into a 2,400 square foot home and still wasn't that big.

Speaker 1 And, you know, then I went to college and then I paid my way through law school and then I got married and now I have four kids. And it's a series of good decisions.

Speaker 1 And it sounds super boring because it turns out that life being good, it sounds kind of boring. It sounds like boring and predictable, which is what you just said, is you're good with that.

Speaker 1 See, that it's great. It's solid.
Oh, see, that's what would make me want to put a bullet past my tongue.

Speaker 1 No, really. I mean,

Speaker 1 yeah, boring and predictable is what I've tried and sacrificed many things to maintain not.

Speaker 1 I think that it depends on sort of the definition, obviously. I mean, when you're saying you don't want boring and predictable, you don't mean that you'd like to be revived from an overdose, right?

Speaker 1 Like, that's not

Speaker 1 today. I'm a little, I'm a little down, you know, but I'm going to shoot this in my arm and like see how this goes.
Where are my manners? Ben, can I get you a joint? Absolutely not.

Speaker 1 You know, people say I'm

Speaker 1 people say I'm too mellow already, Bill. If I have more, I'm just going to be.

Speaker 1 But it's cool that you'll sit with me and do it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 1 That's good libertarianism, right? That's good kind. Listen, I don't want to potchop on my street.
I'm for zoning laws, but you know, you're an adult.

Speaker 1 And it's really not that harmful. Did you see that

Speaker 1 the Democrats are finally, what did they, they did something. They had a big thing with Willie Nelson.

Speaker 1 Or is that tomorrow? Maybe that's tomorrow. Maybe.
I mean, they're dragging all of them out. They dragged out Eminem, Willie Nelson.
Are they going for it? No, but this is like a last-minute

Speaker 1 pot initiative. I think it's just full legalization.
And

Speaker 1 I mean, here's an interesting question. When evolution, Kamala Harris from like locking up everybody for pot

Speaker 1 I mentioned that in our meeting. Spoken up to

Speaker 1 that's when she kind of lost me. I mean, I remember I donated to her.

Speaker 1 This is back when I used to give money to some politicians. I've learned my lesson.
But

Speaker 1 I think she was very against

Speaker 1 Pot. And I thought, oh, wow.
I mean, like unnecessarily, especially for the Democrat. It looked to me like, oh,

Speaker 1 you're picking on poor little Pot because they can't fight back.

Speaker 1 And it makes you look tough. And that pissed me off because, you know, Pot is one of my, you know, one of the, one of the independent voters call it, issues that matter to me.

Speaker 1 You know, it's all about issues that matter to me. I got to say,

Speaker 1 I do think that for young people, the strains of pot have gotten a lot more intense than when I was a kid. Thank you, Jesus.

Speaker 1 But for young people,

Speaker 1 I don't think it's a wonderful thing. Like 20-year-olds who are regularly toking, I don't think that's a great thing for them.
Well, 20, you're okay. 20, you're grown up.

Speaker 1 And that's when you really want to be smoking listen to uncle bill kids um

Speaker 1 uh but uh one of those areas of disagreement but i'm very i'm very glad that i did not start until i was 19. i was uh it was after the first uh year of college the summer after

Speaker 1 that's good i feel like good for my body and good for my mind you have to learn what reality is before you start with it you know but you know as far as libertarian principles go um

Speaker 1 to me, the most private place that you should not try to interfere with is inside my mind. Don't tell me what I can do inside my mind.
That's worse than coming into my house even. That's my mind.

Speaker 1 And if I want to open the doors of perception, you know the group, the doors? Yeah, of course. You know that that's where that name comes from? I did not know that.

Speaker 1 Aldous Huxley. I believe it was what, wrote a book called The Doors of Perception about drugs.
And that's where they took took that name from. Okay.
Look, I... You taught me something.
I did not know.

Speaker 1 David, I can't believe there's one thing in this world you didn't know.

Speaker 1 This is an area of expertise. I know.

Speaker 1 But I feel like I feel very good that I knew one thing you didn't know. You know, when it comes to this sort of stuff, I also am a big fan of localism on this.

Speaker 1 So again, I don't want to pot shop in my neighborhood where my kids are. And if you want to live in libertarian land in L.A.

Speaker 1 with all the adults with no kids around, like that's, that's your, that's your progressive. I must tell you, as someone who probably has not been to a pot shop, or as we call them, dispensaries.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Again, not my area of expertise.
No, I'm just, that's why I'm filling in. You know, I appreciate it.
But I promise you,

Speaker 1 it's not like, I know you don't want it in your neighborhood, but I think you're picturing a crack den

Speaker 1 and a pot shop. It's just people like me who can afford it.

Speaker 1 going in and having a very elegant experience with bud tenders and people selling a product, giving you advice, you know,

Speaker 1 sleep, or my friend has joint pain, or my friend has Parkinson's, and what would help? And, and

Speaker 1 I do have a question for you on this, actually. And I want to get your opinion on it.

Speaker 1 So, you look at Denver, right? Denver has a huge problem with people in the streets who are, who are clearly high.

Speaker 1 It's actually made a quality of life difference in terms of homelessness, in terms of, and that has been linked to legalization of pot in places like Denver. Pot in the streets?

Speaker 1 Is that what what you're saying i'm saying high levels of drug use in the streets drug use is way too broad my friend okay so pot legalization do you think that's been a boon for seattle san francisco denver i think i think anything

Speaker 1 should be anything that involves great numbers of people there's going to be some downside i i remember talking to um

Speaker 1 Desos about this, I don't know,

Speaker 1 just come up at dinner with a bunch of people and he's, and they were mentioning something that Amazon, they were going after them for. And he said, well, I have 1.9 million,

Speaker 1 I think that was the number. Is that about right for Amazon employees? He said, which is like the size of the city of whatever it was, San Antonio.

Speaker 1 Would you expect the city of San Antonio to like have no

Speaker 1 sexual harassment? You know, you're talking about 1.9 million people.

Speaker 1 I think it's kind of like that with

Speaker 1 it's the right thing to legalize pot. We should certainly have what we want, the pursuit of happiness, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 But yes,

Speaker 1 some number of people are going to fuck up. And we should also have immigration.
And some number of people who come as migrants will commit crimes.

Speaker 1 To try to pretend that that's... the whole issue of immigration.
Yes, it's one that you factor in when you go, what's the right answer on this? And certainly that answer isn't no immigrants.

Speaker 1 You want to have no immigrant crime? Have no immigrants. That's not the right answer.
Anything in the middle, would you concede, is some mixture of both.

Speaker 1 Of course, there are always trade-offs when it comes to public policy, of course. Okay.
So, yeah, I mean, the real question I'm asking, I suppose, is about externalities, level of addictiveness.

Speaker 1 Because, again, as pot has gotten significantly more powerful, I mean, it's not the same pot as when I was growing up and kids in school were smoking and passing it around. Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, if someone has been smoking steadily for 50 years, I can test it is not addictive.

Speaker 1 But I know that was a joke, but let me tell you why it's actually the truth. Okay.
I know what addiction is. I did cigarettes for 20 years.
That was stupid. I also did cocaine for a few years.

Speaker 1 That was really stupid because I didn't ever really like it. And this shows if you take a drug long enough, casually, eventually it will grab you by the nuts.
and make you want it every day.

Speaker 1 That happened with Coke and it happened with cigarettes. That has never happened with POT.
That is the difference. These drugs said to me, do me now.

Speaker 1 I'm demanding you do me now.

Speaker 1 Pot never does that to me. Pot never says, ooh, do me.

Speaker 1 I tell Pot, oh, okay, this would be a good time to smoke.

Speaker 1 That's the difference. I could, and I do.
If there was data that showed the opposite, would you shift your opinion on it? Like maybe you're an exception. I'm sure data does for some other person.

Speaker 1 I'm a different person we're all we all react to drugs very differently most people reacted to cocaine they got chatty i the last thing i could ever do on coke was talk

Speaker 1 most people couldn't i love to on coke

Speaker 1 okay people are different and our chemistry is different and how drugs affect us pot about a third of the people get paranoid about a third get sleepy and about a third and these are the people who should be doing it get high It makes us like better in a certain way.

Speaker 1 Things move faster in our brain and we just enjoy life.

Speaker 3 Everything would be better.

Speaker 1 But again, because I'm not addicted, I don't do pot for stupid things. And it would never like watch a movie high.
Like, I don't need to be in a different realm for a movie. It's too passive.

Speaker 1 I'll do this when I'm rewriting something.

Speaker 1 Stand up, sex,

Speaker 1 good conversation, the things I really like in life that I want to heighten the experience. But that's not addictive.
Other people, it does get addictive.

Speaker 1 I'm sure there are drooling idiots with Cheeto dust on their shirt who sit home all day and smoke pot all day.

Speaker 1 And by the way, their heroes are people like, and I love them, but Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg, people who are Woody, people of this reputation for smoking pot all day long because they do.

Speaker 1 That's so far from me. So I'm just saying that's the spectrum when we're talking about pot.

Speaker 1 Don't judge me by the worst people who do it. No, I'm not trying to take away your vows.
I've made very good. But you agree with that principle.
I mean, I think that obviously that's true.

Speaker 1 I mean, that doesn't necessarily dispense with the public policy considerations, right? I mean, you have to look at,

Speaker 1 then you have to look at the data. What are the percentages of people? What are the ages where it's most likely to be addictive? Okay, rubber meets the road.
Should it be legal or not? Pot. I mean,

Speaker 1 where I live, no. Where you live, sure.

Speaker 1 I'm a big fan of localism. I'm a big fan of localism.
What a Dodge, localism.

Speaker 1 Why is localism a Dodge? Well, they same thing with abortion, you know, as if that very fundamental issue of life and death was somehow different between, you know, Kansas and Vermont.

Speaker 1 Oh, it isn't, but I think that this is actually a really important political point, which is that, you know, on a principled level, were I the dictator, then all the rules would, you know, be dictated by me, but I'm not.

Speaker 1 The question is pragmatic politics. Do we wish to share a republic together? Do we wish to share the same country?

Speaker 1 If that's true, that's why the system was constructed in favor of localism, specifically for that, so that you and I can disagree on stuff and still get along. So I think that actually

Speaker 1 it's a pretty good position. But certainly you would concede that federalism does trump localism many times, and rightly so.
We do need a federal government.

Speaker 1 I mean, you're not anti-from a very few things, for a very few things.

Speaker 1 It's a government of specified power. So you believe Alexander Hamilton went too far?

Speaker 1 I don't think we need a national bank. Yes.
Yes. Really? Yes.
Yes. I love it that my jokes are your truth.

Speaker 1 We don't need a national bank.

Speaker 1 Seems like banks have done pretty well with that national bank. Where? Here.
A central bank is not.

Speaker 1 That wasn't a central bank.

Speaker 1 Alexander Hamilton's national bank was not like the Federal Reserve or something. But what we have now is a central bank.

Speaker 1 The Federal Reserve.

Speaker 1 and like every big boy country does it didn't until the the mid 20th century until 1920s effectively okay but isn't it something i like the gold standard holy fuck that is conservative

Speaker 1 the gold standard yeah um gold standard is good stuff because it means that there isn't a cadre of of wise men deciding how much my money's worth do you think it would it would create if we did that like a new generation of uh 49ers you know, gold prospectors, but now they have like super high technology.

Speaker 1 So it wasn't like in the river with the pan and you're looking at it like that. They could try it, but let's put it this way.

Speaker 1 The amount of gold they're going to generate by doing that's a hell of a lot less inflationary than the amount of money that's being generated by the federal government every single day.

Speaker 1 You know what broke hearts in the old West?

Speaker 1 One, horse, because you know, you'd go into the saloon and I feel like I can see that one coming. Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, I just thought of it, but I was going to say, apropos of the gold thing, pyrite.

Speaker 1 Must have been real bad. Pyrite looks like gold because I know when I was a kid, I had a little pyrite.
Exactly. Not as malleable.
That's how you can tell, right? Is it a hammer?

Speaker 1 Oh, is that how you tell? That's how you tell it, yeah.

Speaker 1 And what about diamonds?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, there was a time when they were

Speaker 1 considered

Speaker 1 inappropriate to

Speaker 1 support as a business because they were mined by, you know, gangs basically, in Western Africa who, you know, chopped off the arms of the children to assert their sovereignty over the village, stuff like that.

Speaker 1 They were called.

Speaker 1 I feel like there's a joke on the other side. No, no, no.
They were called conflict. Well, I did actually.

Speaker 1 It's funny you say that. It's an all.
I feel like if you're going all the way down into the rash, there's going to be a joke going on the other side. Because it's a true story.

Speaker 1 Well, they're called conflict diamonds, right? Yes. This is a true story, though.
I put it in my 2003 special that I did on Broadway. But it's an an absolutely true story.

Speaker 1 This girl I was dating at the time, and I was telling her about this, where in Africa, the diamonds,

Speaker 1 to assert control over the area where they need to mine, they would sometimes cut off the arms of the little children in the village. And she looked at me with sad eyes and said, both arms?

Speaker 1 Because it was just one.

Speaker 1 Diamonds are just so sparkly.

Speaker 1 But both gave her pause. I just could not have been a sweeter person.
But I think it just illustrated the hole that the diamonds have. Do you ever see that?

Speaker 1 Do you ever see Marathon Man? Of course. Where Lawrence Olivier in the Diamond District as Zell.

Speaker 1 He's the, what was he? Was he?

Speaker 1 He's a Nazi doctor. Yeah.
It's supposed to be Mengelo, right? That's all I was going to ask you. He's supposed to be Mengelo, right?

Speaker 1 Oh, what a great movie that was. Yeah, the great Roy Scheider.
He was the best thing in the film. Roy Scheider.
Roy Scheider. Roy Schider is fantastic.
That's right. Dustin Hoffman, Roy Schider.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, and Roy Schider blows them both off the screen.

Speaker 1 And supposedly, the scuttlebutt from the set was, you know, you had these two generations of actors, Olivier, old school, hit your bark, hit your mark and bark, as they used to say.

Speaker 1 Dustin Hoffman, new school.

Speaker 1 method acting and apparently this famous scene where he's he's a dentist so he's got him in the chair and he's torturing him with the thing, with the instruments to get, which is just like normal dentist.

Speaker 1 He wasn't even doing anything the dentist hasn't done for me, and I don't know where the diamonds are.

Speaker 1 But Dustin Hoffman, supposedly to have the correct amount of angst in the scene, stayed up for two days without sleep. And apparently, Olivier said to him, Dear boy, why don't you just try acting?

Speaker 1 What do you think of our affair business? You say you grew up out here. Were you touched by show business?

Speaker 1 So my dad came out here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, my parents came out here in 79. My dad wanted to write for film and TV.
He's a musician. Oh.
So you know Michelle's? You know what?

Speaker 1 You know the restaurant Michelle's over here on

Speaker 1 Ventura. Of course.
My dad played piano there for 20 years, Monday and Tuesday nights. What years? I bet you I heard him.
I'm sure you did. It would have been like early 90s through mid-2000s.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was still inappropriately going out to bars, bars and clubs. And that's where they had all the waiters singing and stuff.
So I grew up in that restaurant. Like I grew up.
Holy fuck.

Speaker 1 I grew up sitting there and

Speaker 1 bringing out the food. This is what we need to do.
Get under the yarmulke. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Beneath the yarmulke. Yeah, exactly.
The worst name for a podcast ever, Benit the Yamaka.

Speaker 1 Actually, it's not.

Speaker 1 The answer is it's a bald spot. But in any case.
Isn't today? No, you have to leave because it's a Jewish something to do. Yet another Jewish holiday.
Yeah, this is the tail end. What is this one?

Speaker 1 So this one is the end of Sukkot, right? So that's the

Speaker 1 festival of booths, right? That's where we sit the hot. Suppose it? Sukkot.

Speaker 1 Spell it because I've seen it. S-U-K-K-O-T.
Yeah, the K-K. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 I never knew what that one was. Yeah, this one is supposed to commemorate the Jews in the desert.

Speaker 1 I mean, spiritually, it's supposed to commemorate basically the idea that you are living

Speaker 1 in a non-permanent world, in a non-permanent body, and to get comfortable with the idea that you are supposed to perform a mission in life despite the fact that life has a bunch of variables.

Speaker 1 And so you go and live outdoor in a hut for like a week, basically.

Speaker 1 That's what they used to do? Yeah. I mean, that's

Speaker 1 so the story goes. I mean,

Speaker 1 we still go and eat the meals there, and some people actually sleep in it. It's like,

Speaker 1 yeah, you'll see them around town a little bit. How many people do this? Like, what percentage of Jews do this? Like, 15 million Jews on earth.
I'd say probably

Speaker 1 million, maybe. Yeah, a couple million.
If you're including like Orthodox and Israel, Orthodox, yeah, two, two and a half million. They're real super Jews.
Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 1 That's what we call ourselves. We control the weather on Friday nights and we and we build huts and

Speaker 1 control the monetary supply. And I may say, have a lot of the Nobel Prizes.
We do. We do.
That is a true thing. I'm not, maybe it's who you know,

Speaker 1 but I'm just saying Team Hebrew

Speaker 1 has done very well

Speaker 1 at the metal account. Listen, we're perfectly happy that.
And that's part of, I think,

Speaker 1 the reason why there's anti-Semitism in the world. I mean,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 a small group of people who are outsizedly successful at certain things, especially things that are very sort of public, you know, show business, the arts,

Speaker 1 money, you know, banking, you know, medicine.

Speaker 1 Medicine.

Speaker 1 I mean, they're going to have some haters.

Speaker 1 That's why I think that the most dangerous thing that's happening across the West is, in fact, in this, you know, the story of Canaan Able, you don't have to believe in God to understand the message of the story in Canaan Abel, which is a really simple message.

Speaker 1 Well, it's not that simple because one represented agriculture and one represented herding, you know, like

Speaker 1 animal husbandry. Animal husbandry.
Right. And that was in that era.

Speaker 1 uh obviously the story tells us that what that meant in that era which was very important because there was a time in history when those two things were in conflict for sure you know the way we argue about things that are you know to us you know should we do this or should we tax more should we tax less they were like should we go with raising the food

Speaker 1 I'm a conservative. I say we should just hunt it down.
What is this raising food?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 in the biblical text anyway, the basic idea is that Cain and Abel, actually, Cain is the first one who says, let's bring sacrifices. So they bring sacrifices.

Speaker 1 It doesn't really explain why God accepts Abel's sacrifice, but then God

Speaker 1 gives Cain a big speech.

Speaker 1 He says,

Speaker 1 he says, sin crouches at your door, but you can avoid it basically if you do the right thing.

Speaker 1 If you read East of Eden, John Steinbeck talks about this in East of Eden, great book.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, Cain, instead of trying to learn from Abel what he did right or trying to to correct his own ways so as to bring a better sacrifice, decides he's going to kill Abel because he's jealous of him and angry that his sacrifice was accepted.

Speaker 1 And he's a farmer. Well, that too.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 if he's a farmer and his sacrifice is not accepted, then presumably it doesn't kill him.

Speaker 1 Does the shepherd kill the farmer or did the farmer kill the shepherd?

Speaker 1 Which what was Cain? This is so important, and I'm too stoned to remember which

Speaker 1 Cain is

Speaker 1 agriculture and Abel is animal husbandry. Right.
So they It's the triumph of the new thing. And I'll get fact-checked if that's not true, but I think that's right.
It's new farming.

Speaker 1 But the basic idea, which I think is still relevant today beyond the debate between agriculture and animal husbandry, is the basic idea that if you are successful in society, it must be because you've exploited somebody.

Speaker 1 And if you're a failure in society, it must be because you were exploited.

Speaker 1 And that is the ugliest thing that I think is happening. Boy, is that relevant today? Yes.

Speaker 1 That's the thing.

Speaker 1 That's the whole fallacy of the anti-Israel coalition of useful idiots is that, you know, I mean, that was what you were writing me about when I did a couple of weeks ago, trying to explain to the kids through the Chapel Roan thing that,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 they're not colonizers because they were there originally. I mean, this is indisputable.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 so much of the buzzword information,

Speaker 1 I hesitate to even call it information. And it's just buzzwords from TikTok, from social justice warriors who want to somehow have their version of decolonization and getting rid of apartheid.

Speaker 1 I mean, those were things that other generations did get rid of. And, you know, colonization, it's kind of gone.

Speaker 1 But it's not just that.

Speaker 1 It's the reason they're angry at Israel is what you said, which is that because Israel is successful, that is why, you know, everyone keeps wondering, what is the, and you mentioned it, this sort of queers for Palestine stuff, which is chickens for KFC, right?

Speaker 1 Like, this is it, like, what, what is that?

Speaker 1 And the answer is people who believe that they have been marginalized by society and therefore society has to pay the price for that.

Speaker 1 And so what you get is a bunch of really spoiled, rich Western kids who believe that they are somehow victims of the society around them because they have not made success of themselves or wish not to.

Speaker 1 And so they are in alliance with people who also have actually run an entire area of the world, not only into the ground, but into the worst situation in modern history.

Speaker 1 And it must be that none of those people made bad decisions. It must be that they were victimized, that society victimized them.

Speaker 1 And so tear down the system, eat the rich, destroy the, destroy private property,

Speaker 1 wreck any developing country that actually wishes to develop.

Speaker 1 That's the part that's dangerous.

Speaker 1 And I don't think that has to be a right-left divide, because I think that frankly, if you're on the left, you should, if you're a liberal, I always make the distinction left and liberal because I don't think it's quite the same thing.

Speaker 1 But if you're a liberal, you should believe that human beings have the capacity for success. If you make good decisions, then you benefit from those good decisions.

Speaker 1 And maybe we have disagreements over

Speaker 1 redistributive mechanisms, which is why I can have a normal conversation.

Speaker 1 But if you believe that every evidence of success, group or individual, is actual evidence of exploitation by that group, that's how you end up with

Speaker 1 anti-Semitic conspiracy. There is, and by the way, also anti-Asian conspiracy.
I mean, that's how you end up with like, don't let the Asian kids into Harvard because they're too semi-disciplined.

Speaker 1 And, you know, for the folks who are listening to this and say, oh, you know, you're always picking on the fringe, that's not the fringe. I mean,

Speaker 1 I wouldn't say it's the majority of the left, but it's the places that have been ideologically captured. It's the New York Times, it's Harvard, it's the ACLU.

Speaker 1 And that is where left-leaning thought comes through. So these kind of ideas, which I agree with you, are crazy.
And this is, again, what I mean by aggressively anti-common sense.

Speaker 1 it's really uncommonsensical, and they're aggressive about it, almost like you have to like it.

Speaker 1 You have to like penises in the women's shelters.

Speaker 1 It's not just that.

Speaker 1 Well, but you do because

Speaker 1 I think that the threat level perception is actually correct from their perspective. Because their entire definition of what you are is what you feel on the inside.

Speaker 1 And so if there's any imposition on what I feel, even if it's at war with objective reality.

Speaker 1 So if I'm a failure and I don't feel like I'm a failure because I've made bad decisions, it's because society was mean to me.

Speaker 1 If I say to you, well, maybe the reason you're failing is because you made a bunch of dumb decisions, then I've actually threatened your identity. I'm a threat to you at that point.

Speaker 1 And that's a danger. So I do have to agree with them because otherwise I'm basically saying it's your own fault.
And that's something people can't abide.

Speaker 1 People cannot abide the idea that failure is their own fault. And guess what? In a mostly free society, in a mostly free country, that's the most prosperous place in human history,

Speaker 1 a lot of failure, not all failure, an enormous amount of failure is luck, an enormous amount of failure is bad health.

Speaker 1 But an enormous amount of failure is, in fact, people making bad decisions. That gets back to my boring life again.
Like, it's

Speaker 1 like make better decisions.

Speaker 1 And if you make all the right decisions and then you fail, then maybe you can blame external factors. This sounds to me what you probably tell your kids.
100% is what I tell my kids.

Speaker 1 Like, this is your big theme with your kids. This is my theme.
This is my theme. By the way, this is also the theme of every successful company.
And how are the kids taking to this theme?

Speaker 1 They like it because it turns out, you know what kids actually like? You mentioned before that they're actually bad people, kids.

Speaker 1 They like duty and responsibility, and they're like, no. Kids actually like those things.
They really. If you do not provide structure for kids, it is the worst mistake you can make.

Speaker 1 Discipline is love.

Speaker 1 It's not on the surface. It's below the surface.
But it translates to love. It really does.
Especially it's the hardest thing for a parent. Because kids know.

Speaker 1 This is pulling your kids a pain in the ass. Kids know on a certain level when they're being an asshole.
And so when the parent straightens them out, they're like, okay,

Speaker 1 it may not be conscious, but the unconscious matters too. And it gets in there.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, I think the root of all the problems from the left stem from bad parenting and just giving up on the idea that,

Speaker 1 you know, kids are kids. You know,

Speaker 1 they

Speaker 1 don't deserve to be treated like just shorter adults who have just as valid a thought. They're idiots.

Speaker 1 They're like dogs. They don't know anything.
They're stupid. I mean, even when I was 20, you said 20.
I mean,

Speaker 1 oh my God, I've said this many times on this show. Like, would it be great physically to be 20 again? But I wouldn't trade it, and I'm almost 70 for 70 if I had to go back with that brain.

Speaker 1 because when I think about what that brain was doing

Speaker 1 and getting me to do it's just it's so painful it is true for everybody I mean I was writing syndicated column when I was 17 which means that all the dumb stuff or most of the dumb stuff I ever wrote was between the ages of like 17 and 24 right because you get older you get better at this stuff and you think better thoughts nobody nobody should ever be held accountable for almost anything they did in that age unless it's murder or something I mean I agree which is why you know when people have asked me before who are the kids in school who bullied me I'm like I would never name them they were like 16.

Speaker 1 Well, I wouldn't name them. That's ridiculous.
They're different people now. They dug up something, I think, Bernie Sanders wrote, like when he was 19, he tried his hand.

Speaker 1 It was some kind of semi-pornographic story. That's mostly just funny.
What? What he wrote. You remember it? You remember the story? Yeah, it was like, it was like a weird,

Speaker 1 it was a weird semi-pornographic piece with a rape fantasy in it or something. So you didn't make any hay out of it.
I mean, I laughed at it because it was funny. But on your show.
No, not really.

Speaker 1 Because that's what I hate about today's fucking media is that so little of it really stands the test of,

Speaker 1 you know, not bad faith. Bad faith being we know better, but we know the audience doesn't know better, so we can put this over on them.
And so much of it is just some sort of cultivating.

Speaker 1 these stories and they are rampant of somebody on the left and it's a big country there's going to be a lot of people who do goofy things, and then make it, you know, like making it all about that.

Speaker 1 I feel like that's what Tucker Carlson does, ignoring the bigger story. And I feel like you, you less than they.

Speaker 1 I try not to. Yeah.
And I won't say I'm immune to it, but

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 we call it nut picking, right? Like find a nut and then

Speaker 1 perfect.

Speaker 1 Yes. Right.
Like it's very easy to try and mistake an anecdote for a trend. You know what? I said in my writer's meeting today, they were starting in on Arnold Palmer's cock.

Speaker 1 Who gives a shit? And I said,

Speaker 1 guys,

Speaker 1 this is Trump derangement syndrome. I said, yes.
Is it going to be in the monologue? Yes, of course. I'm a comedian and this is ridiculous and he's a preposterous figure and he shouldn't be president.

Speaker 1 But like,

Speaker 1 you're actually agitated about it. And I watched the video of it and the people...

Speaker 1 The people who get him and the people who hate him,

Speaker 1 they're just in different universes.

Speaker 1 I feel like I'm a person who hates him but I also get him because I saw the video and the people behind him are laughing as a comedian I see something working on a comedic level and he's a guy who says I'm not really a politician and he sure is

Speaker 1 an interesting one

Speaker 1 who's going to be part comedian and part this he's half stand-up for sure he's half stand-up what it when it bleeds over into the enemies of the the people and Hitler, you know, again, we don't have to go back there.

Speaker 1 I think you're wrong and you're going to be proved wrong that you whistled past that graveyard.

Speaker 1 But the part about Arnold Palmer's cock, if you're agitated about that on the left, you're just looking to be agitated.

Speaker 1 He's been doing this for a long time, and it has nothing to do with anything that's going to affect your life.

Speaker 1 How big Arnold Palmer's cock is is, first of all, of all the things that I never in the world thought I'd be talking about. Many English sentences have been constructed in the Trump era that never

Speaker 1 would have been thought. It's an amazing thing.
And, you know, if Kamala Harris said it, the race would be over tomorrow. That's what's so unfair about this.
But, you know, it's an unfair sport.

Speaker 1 But what I want to know is: okay,

Speaker 1 he said

Speaker 1 the other guys after the golf matches and the shower

Speaker 1 thought it was unbelievable.

Speaker 1 Golfers shower together? Yeah, I didn't know that either, actually. That was a new one to me.
That was a new one.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 I'll tell you this, this whole race, everybody's getting very despondent about this race on both sides.

Speaker 1 And the one thing that I'll say, and I said this earlier to some actually relatively famous world figures, is when Biden was still in the race before they threw him off the back of the train, because he's dead.

Speaker 1 But before that,

Speaker 1 it was after the debate, and all my Democrat friends were despondent and upset.

Speaker 1 Well, then what's he doing? I'm going to defend Joe Biden. He's not dead.
You're right. He's a better candidate than Kamala Harris.

Speaker 1 But what's amazing, so it was right after the debate, and everybody was despondent on one side and ecstatic on the other side. And I said, listen, here's the good news about America.

Speaker 1 I was talking to a foreign leader at the time. Hey, let me tell you something about America.
America, here's how much ass we kick, okay? Here's how great this country is.

Speaker 1 This country is so powerful and so awesome. We can run two 80-year-olds against each other.
Whichever one golfs better, we'll make president. We'll have Hulk Hogan introduce that guy at the RNC.

Speaker 1 He'll babble for 93 minutes and you'll fucking love it because this is America. I love America.
America's great. America's fucking great.

Speaker 1 I was in this and my friends know I feel how I feel about America. I'm not a rah-rah idiot about it.

Speaker 1 I understand its flaws, but I also am someone who's read the New York Times every day since I was like 14 years old, including the part about the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 So I have it in perspective, which is what the kids today lack completely. They don't know.
They think they live in the worst time ever in the worst country ever. So they know I feel like this.

Speaker 1 I was at the dinner the other night and like,

Speaker 1 I don't know, I don't know what somebody said, or maybe it was the waiter

Speaker 1 said that, how's everything? And we're looking, we're at this beautiful restaurant in LA, all the beautiful people. And I said, terrible.

Speaker 1 That's how things are. It's America.
It's terrible. There's no food.
There's no meat left. We're all dying.

Speaker 1 Because some of this is what Trump says, but also some of this is what the TikTok people say. You know,

Speaker 1 the women are ugly.

Speaker 1 Everyone's miserable. Look at this restaurant.
Racism is everywhere. There was a black couple having a wonderful time.

Speaker 1 I can't take it. America is just a shithole.
It's a flaming pile of dog poop.

Speaker 1 And it's just hysterical on both sides. I mean, Trump gets away with characterizing America as ridiculously worse than it is.
You know that. So let's not even have the argument.

Speaker 1 But also, the other side, the kids, they really think America, I mean, I've seen tons of TikToks. I've shown some of them in editorials where, like,

Speaker 1 anywhere else.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. No, that's, that's right.
That's right. I mean, I, and that's the same people who's like, Hamas is coming.
Woo! Right, exactly. Hey, the Houthis, they're cool.

Speaker 1 What I've said before to people is like, you know, you think everything is so terrible now.

Speaker 1 If you had a time machine and you went back like a hundred years, the first thing that you'd notice when you got out of the time machine was how everything smelled.

Speaker 1 It would smell like shit. It would smell awful.
And you'd notice it when I was a little bit more. I think I saw that on your show.

Speaker 1 People didn't shower 100 years ago. They didn't have indoor plumbing in most places.
And by the way,

Speaker 1 a shower was not like as we see a shower. Yeah, a couple hundred years ago, definitely was not.
And it was like some dude with a bucket pouring it

Speaker 1 into a canteen or whatever it was with holes in it.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's if you had a bucket guy. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 But the thing is that I've said on the show. Had a bucket intern.

Speaker 1 The thing that I've said on the show is we have a time machine. It's called an airplane.
Right.

Speaker 1 And it goes all over to different times. You can go to places in the world and they are living a living standard that is 1520.
Right.

Speaker 1 You can go there right now and you can visit and you can see if that time is better than the time that you live in.

Speaker 1 I remember I taught school, believe it or not, in Geneva, Switzerland in the summer of 1978. It was right after I graduated from Cornell and my girlfriend, Mike.

Speaker 1 finally got a college girlfriend and she was a linguistics genius. And her summer job was teaching at Collège de Le Mans, which was in Geneva.
And Ingmar Bergman film here. Yeah, kind of.

Speaker 1 Not really.

Speaker 1 Oh, I wish.

Speaker 1 But so I followed her there and she got me a job when we were in love right after college ended. So I spent the summer in Geneva.
Fucking hated it, but that's me, partly my fault.

Speaker 1 But it was a very rich school. in Geneva where kids from all over the world, there were kids from Japan and Italy, but a lot of them at the time were either from Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the kids from Iran, this is 1978, and by the way, the revolution happened while I think

Speaker 1 this session was the summer session. So I remember them all running to the phones because I think Ayatollah Khamenei, I forget what he did, but he was on the march.

Speaker 1 But the Iranian kids

Speaker 1 really were like at that point in the 1950s,

Speaker 1 you know, leather jackets and kind of, but not unsophisticated. The Saudi kids,

Speaker 1 yeah, it was like a different time.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was. And by the way, countries can go backwards because those Iranian kids from the 1950s, now the Iranian kids live in the 1750s because of what the Ayatollahs have done to the country.

Speaker 1 Not the people. Not the people.
Not the people. No, no, I don't mean that the people want to live there.
The people of Iran, by the way, kick ass. They're great.
The government sucks.

Speaker 1 The government's awful. We're both big supporters of Israel.
We may differ on the Iranian nuclear deal thing, and let's not get into it because it's just so wonky.

Speaker 1 And, you know, we're here having a good time, smoking a joint.

Speaker 1 So we don't have to get into that. But

Speaker 1 my reason for always thinking it was a pretty good idea to try to open up Iran is because, as opposed to a lot of these places like North Korea, which you could never open, they're gone.

Speaker 1 They're like a child that was abused and kept in a cellar. That's not Iran.
They have a very sophisticated populace, at least in the capital.

Speaker 1 I feel like that makes a difference. The Iranian people could be, it could be a European country.
So I agree with you. I think that the distinction on the Iranian nuclear deal is a pragmatic one.

Speaker 1 Meaning, do you think that's more likely to empower the people to then change the regime, or do you think it's significantly less likely by re-enshrining the power of the regime by funding them, giving them billions of dollars they can use for funding terrorism around the region?

Speaker 1 and all the rest.

Speaker 1 But I think that the goal is the same, which is the Iranian people should be able to live in a semblance of freedom that they actually used to have before the Ayatollahs took over in the first place.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the proof is in the pudding.

Speaker 1 The Iranian government has been spreading terror all over the region and killing thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, because you have to include the Palestinians among that, since none of this would have happened if the Iranians weren't sponsoring it.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 aside from that, and among the things that people probably hate, again, the Jews for being good at is

Speaker 1 being badass.

Speaker 1 I mean, Munich,

Speaker 1 Munich, that beeper operation. The beeper operation.
I was just going to say, like, and then Munich-type stuff, like, on a scale. Like, okay, first we take you out with the beepers.

Speaker 1 You know, I mean, in the last couple of years, they rolled up first Suleimani

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 the Gaza dude once his, yeah, you know. They killed Sinoar.
They killed Ladea. They killed Nasrala.
Right, Nasrala. I mean, like.
No, the beeper thing. The beeper thing is the greatest thing.

Speaker 1 I love the beeper thing. I love it.
It's like, so we have, you know, Jewish Halloween is Purim. So my family this year is going as Avi's Bieber Emporium, explosive sales.
Like, that's the

Speaker 1 all my kids. Well, don't care.
Like, that's it.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm sorry. The most targeted anti-terror operation in literally human history.
I'm sorry young men anywhere have to have their nuts blown off. But, you know.

Speaker 1 We have to be realistic about the larger parameters here. What does a nation do when it is being attacked? You know, I keep saying this is all very simple.
Stop attacking Israel.

Speaker 1 Stop attacking Israel. And then we won't be having these fights about when should we have a ceasefire, which is always the day after Israel attacks.
Right.

Speaker 1 That's right. There's never a better time for a ceasefire in an Israeli war than the day after.

Speaker 1 Listen, props to the IDF for this time saying, you know what? No. We're not stopping until Hamas is extirpated, until people can go back to the north, until the Iranian threat is done with.

Speaker 1 You know, listen, my family was there. We were there October 6th.
We left October 6th.

Speaker 1 My in-laws were staying with us. They stayed

Speaker 1 into October 7th. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Super Jews, get the super Jews out.

Speaker 1 And I mean, I think one of the things that people also don't understand about

Speaker 1 the involved Jewish community is that it's very small. So, like, I know multiple hostage families.

Speaker 1 I know families of people who have been killed on October 7th, families of people of IDF soldiers, IDF soldiers who are currently serving. Like, I know tons of those people.

Speaker 1 And the amount of care that Israel is taking by going house to house and street to street in the Gaza Strip to avoid civilian casualties, only to be told they're committing a genocide, is just, it is sickening.

Speaker 1 It's always been that.

Speaker 1 It's always been that, played by completely different rules. Who was it who said

Speaker 1 Israel is the only country in the world that is supposed to act like Christians?

Speaker 1 Brilliant.

Speaker 1 But I did read, I mean, the New York Times, which is astounding to me because it's a traditionally Jewish-owned newspaper that's very, very pro-Palestinian.

Speaker 1 They've been wildly anti-Israel my entire life.

Speaker 1 Your entire life? My entire life. My entire life, truly.
Oh. This is like

Speaker 1 the LA Times too. These are publications that a lot of pro-Israel people started.
I I remember

Speaker 1 unsubscribing from in the 90s.

Speaker 1 They printed an article, which you could tell on the front page they thought was like a big scandal, that said Israelis are using captured Hamas fighters basically to go into an area first and possibly get blown up by their,

Speaker 1 what do you call it?

Speaker 1 Compatriot IEDs. IEDs.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, that's war. I would do the same thing if I was in war.
Why should I get blown up? If, you know, maybe as they're approaching it and they planted it,

Speaker 1 you know what, guys,

Speaker 1 you're right. There is a bomb planted in this.
And I mean, it's just amazing. Like, once war starts, it's kind of all bets are off.
I know we have the Geneva Convention,

Speaker 1 and that's kind of a crazy concept in itself. It's worthy.
The Geneva Convention was also designed specifically keep people from meshing with civilian populations.

Speaker 1 The protocols of the Geneva Convention apply to people in uniform. If you're out of uniform, the Geneva Conventions don't apply the same way to you because

Speaker 1 it's an attempt to force people not to merge with civilian populations so as to protect the civilian population.

Speaker 1 This is like one of the purposes of the Geneva Convention in the first place, which is why if you turn a civilian site into a military site, it now becomes a military site.

Speaker 1 So if you take a UNRWA school and you put rockets in it, it's no longer a school. It is now a military site.

Speaker 1 I mean, for most of history, wars have just dé-rigueur

Speaker 1 involved the civilian population. I mean, Sherman burned Atlanta and Julius Caesar,

Speaker 1 they made no distinction. The one exceptional time is sort of like revolutionary war times when armies, especially in Europe, marched in red uniforms, like in a line.

Speaker 1 You know, they didn't even attempt to run or hide. That era of fighting when it was very gentlemanly.
You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 During the medieval period, you'd have a king with some of his lords, and they would go out and they'd fight like the other king and his lords, and it would be on a field somewhere because it was very difficult to actually have mass population integration.

Speaker 1 That really begins to change around the turn of the Napoleonic era, the French Revolutionary era, actually is the time when you have this big merger happen.

Speaker 1 But in medieval times, they totally involved the civilian population.

Speaker 1 That's where the fighters were. But they would burn villages and stuff.
They'd go out of the way.

Speaker 1 I was saying there was this brief period where people turned into gentlemen and they were like war is a gentlemanly operation and we will march i mean to to march like in these lines in red uniforms is so counterintuitive to survival is it not well and that the guy would get shot next to you and you would just keep going like to be fair to the military strategists at the time the reason that they were walking in straight lines is because the accuracy of the rifles they were using because they were using musket balls is very very bad so if you if you line everybody up in a a straight line then the basic idea is you've created a massive field of fire whereas if you don't line them up in a straight line it's very difficult to snipe no matter how bad the guns were you don't think it would be probably better for your own survival to like crawl or scatter not be all like lined up together hide behind trees maybe if just in the name of military history to be fair to the british empire they did kick the shit out of everybody for about 200 years using these sorts of tactics and and then the tactics changed but the integration of the civilian population the general point you're making, which is that war is brutal and it is hell.

Speaker 1 And it has never not been brutal and never not been hell. And it turns out the way you stop war is by winning it.

Speaker 1 It's only in the last half century that the West has decided that the way you stop war is by jabbering about it. Like this is

Speaker 1 that's not the way you actually stop war. I mean, there's a great book called The Causes of War

Speaker 1 by Jeffrey Blaine, where he actually analyzes every war between 1700 and 1988. And what he finds is peace is an outgrowth of one side giving up.

Speaker 1 It turns out that peace is an outgrowth of one side kicking the shit out of the other side so hard that they decide not to do war anymore.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, everybody in the West for a century has been trying to figure out, well, what was it about the Versailles Treaty? Was it too onerous? Was it not onerous enough?

Speaker 1 And the answer that Jeffrey Bland gives, he says, well, you know what I noticed?

Speaker 1 Germany was still standing after World War I. And then they weren't after World War II.
After World War II, Germany gets completely divvied up. They get demilitarized.

Speaker 1 They get owned by the Americans and by the Russians.

Speaker 1 They split the entire country. And guess what? Ain't no more wars from Germany.

Speaker 1 Because it turns out that when you kick the shit out of somebody really, really, really hard, they don't want to do war anymore.

Speaker 1 And so every time you have these sort of premature, what if we did a ceasefire? What if we, what if we, you know, just like, well, what if we just calmed down?

Speaker 1 You actually, war is a process of exhausting one side or the other. And if people remain unexhausted, five minutes from now, they're back at it, as it turns out.

Speaker 1 And so it turns out the best thing the West can do is fight,

Speaker 1 if they're hit, anybody in the West, the United States, anybody, fight a brutal, vicious war in as short a fashion as possible, trying to to preserve as many civilian lives as you can, and win.

Speaker 1 And then you get peace. And if you don't win, you don't get peace.
Yeah, that's true. It's the way of the world.
But I will

Speaker 1 contest you on this one thing. You said the British kicked ass for a couple of hundred years using those tactics.

Speaker 1 Well, you know whose ass they didn't kick? Mr. George Washington.
That's true. All right.

Speaker 1 Comrade. America.

Speaker 1 Comrade.

Speaker 1 And you know that Washington only fought nine battles and only won three. Did you know that? I did know that, actually.

Speaker 1 But it's, I mean, again, I don't wish to be like the British apologist here.

Speaker 1 There's a case we made the British kind of gave up. And the British basically said, this is not worth the cost.

Speaker 1 Well, because they tried every which way to defeat us. First, they came down from Canada.
Then they went in the middle states. That's like Delaware in all those battles.

Speaker 1 And then they went through the South. They tried every which way, and then they lost.

Speaker 1 Now, of course, it also pinned, hinged rather on the fact that we got the French fleet, which was on vacay because they were, I think they were just in Haiti or something.

Speaker 1 They were probably doing something heinous and colonizing. I'm sure they were because all people were bad back then, including people of color in other parts of the world.

Speaker 1 All humans are the same, basically, to not think that is actually what is racist. Okay, but they were doing something horrible, I'm sure, in our hemisphere.
But like, then they had like, it was like,

Speaker 1 you know, a timeshare. They had an opening.
And

Speaker 1 they were somehow, and we texted them and said,

Speaker 1 could you bottle up the British with your fleet as long as they're not working? I mean, we'll make it worth your while.

Speaker 1 And listen, the other point you can make is that the Brits in the Revolutionary War were basically fighting other Brits, meaning that the Americans were a British offshoot. I mean, they were.

Speaker 1 Everybody's grandfather had been from Britain. So, you know, it was British people kind of fighting other British people.

Speaker 1 What's amazing that probably maybe people don't realize is that 10 years before we declared independence, nobody was thinking about it in America. They were proudly British colonists.
100%.

Speaker 1 But 1765, you get the Stamp Act.

Speaker 1 And that's the beginning of, oh, taxation without representation and we're paying for, because Britain was fighting a war with the French overseas. Right.

Speaker 1 Which became, which was the French and Indian War here in America. But it was a global war and it cost a lot of money.
And they were asking us to chip in. And

Speaker 1 this is what is the breaking point for a lot of people. People like money.

Speaker 1 It's true.

Speaker 1 And people also, the Brits recognized that because the population of the United States was growing so fast and the United States territory was so vast and lucrative, that eventually, if they allowed proper representation in parliament, eventually America would run Britain.

Speaker 1 That was one of their major concerns, is that in parliament, as the population of the United States grew, that Britain would eventually, it would be a reverse colony of America as opposed to the other way around.

Speaker 1 And America was like, well, yeah, I mean, that's, that's true. So what's the problem?

Speaker 1 And so you see, obviously, decolonization from Britain among former British citizens in Australia, you see it in the United States, you see it in Canada, you see in a wide variety of places around the globe.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I mean, listen, the British Empire was the greatest empire of its day for two centuries through freedom of the seas. Now we're the greatest empire of our day through freedom of the seas.

Speaker 1 And this is one of the quarrels I have with some of my compatriots on the right who are more escalationists about foreign policy.

Speaker 1 And that is, if all people everywhere are kind of the same, as you mentioned, it turns out that if we just abandon the world scene, then somebody else is going to fill it.

Speaker 1 And we're not really an empire. We had an empire.
We had the Philippines and we had lots of places. We have a few.

Speaker 1 If we're an empire, we're a pretty lame one. No, well, we're an empire only in the sense that we are the ones who are guaranteeing the security of our allies.
Like, in the end, we are.

Speaker 1 And that doesn't mean that we have to own our allies, right? They're not colonies. It's a very loose empire.
Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 the historian Neil Ferguson, right?

Speaker 1 We're not lording it over Belgium, but we would come to the ⁇ I mean, they're in NATO.

Speaker 1 Everybody sort of understands that in the end, for example, all the shipping lanes are alliance on the power of the U.S. Navy.

Speaker 1 That's just the reality of the world. And you know what? All right.
I mean, like, that's the burden of greatness.

Speaker 1 And America, you know,

Speaker 1 it's funny to think of it this way. America was an empire domestically, like on the continent.
And we start off on one end of this giant continent. We take over the entire continent.

Speaker 1 I mean, that is a process of building an empire. So, you know, whether you call us an empire or whether you don't, bottom line is world security, economic freedom all over the world.

Speaker 1 That relies on us. Ain't nobody else filling that gap.
Somebody's having this video. I

Speaker 1 thought it was very moving of some veteran, and you you could tell it was heartfelt and true and he's talking about he fought in the iraq war and he said you know there's one night where i broke into this family's home which is something i did a lot over there and uh the guy reached for a gun so i shot him and then i thought well why did i shoot him because he reached for a gun but he was i was if he was coming into my bedroom what would i do I'd reach for a gun.

Speaker 1 He said, what if I met this guy like at a cafe somewhere and he was funny and we had coffee and, you know, maybe he wasn't, but I just did this because

Speaker 1 a politician told me to do it.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 that's true. And it's also true that sometimes politicians have to do, now, not the Iraq war, I don't agree with that thing, but they just have to do things that,

Speaker 1 yeah, there's going to be horrible things that make no sense within the macro.

Speaker 1 I mean, the truth about even the Iraq war is that the only one who ever told the truth about the Iraq war was the much maligned John McCain, who said, if you want to win the Iraq war, you're going to have to put boots on the ground there for 100 years.

Speaker 1 People read that as, you know, he wants to do that.

Speaker 1 That's how trade-offs are. So true.
That's how trade-offs are. Or Afghanistan.
Or Afghanistan. You know, you don't change a culture that much.
I mean, you can.

Speaker 1 Ataturk did it in Turkey, but he killed a lot of people.

Speaker 1 I mean, he made

Speaker 1 mandatory laws, cut off your beard,

Speaker 1 which I'm sure didn't go well

Speaker 1 in a lot of barbershops. You know, it just wasn't, but I guess, you know, and if you didn't, we'd execute you.
Yeah, you can change, but no one wants to do it that way.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, you do need 100 years.

Speaker 1 I mean, the truth is that, again, because people don't know their history, they assume that, for example, after the Korean War, South Korea immediately became a beacon of democracy.

Speaker 1 And that's not true. It was a dictatorship for several decades after the Korean War.
Taiwan only started having good elections in the last couple of decades.

Speaker 1 It takes a very long time for institutions to actually take root in these places.

Speaker 1 And that's why this sort of quicky foreign policy where it's like, okay, well, we'll get in there and then we'll just fix it.

Speaker 1 Or alternatively, we'll never get involved anywhere and then the world will be a beautiful place.

Speaker 1 None of that is real.

Speaker 1 No, if there's one thing I feel like the left lacks that makes them look bad when I'm talking about the far left, when they comment on foreign policy, I'm talking about hippies and so forth, is they don't factor in this one little thing,

Speaker 1 which is that there are bad people in the world. It just seems like everything bad that America does in their mind is just sort of self-generated just for shits and giggles.

Speaker 1 And it's

Speaker 1 totally right. We have done bad things.
I mean, the CIA has engineered coups in places, and I'm sure it wasn't cool in a lot of ways. But what was the least bad?

Speaker 1 This is the thing. There's never an amazing option in foreign policy.
It's not like there's an incredible option. Never.
So good. And it's like, here are a couple shitty options.
Now pick one. Right.

Speaker 1 Right. And, and that, that is the nature of decision making.
And you're, you're exactly right that when, when, you know, people sort of suggest that

Speaker 1 this sort of hippy-dippy nonsense, we're the only people with agency on planet Earth are Americans. Right.
This, this shit pisses me off. It really does.
Right.

Speaker 1 There was, there was a comedian on SNL who did this the other day. He was, he was coming back at the whole like,

Speaker 1 why are there no gays in Gaza thing? And he said, well, you know, if you stop bombing, they'll stop bombing them. There will will be gays in Gaza.
And the answer is, no, actually, there will not.

Speaker 1 He didn't. He did.
Really? Yes.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. It's just, it was an awful, it's like

Speaker 1 it's so idiotic because it turns out that people all over the world have belief systems and ideologies and ideas that are different than yours.

Speaker 1 And it turns out that they may have a value system that is completely different from yours. Now, all human beings have very similar biology, but their cultures are not remotely the same.

Speaker 1 It's so narcissistic in its way. Like, really? We're the progenitor of everything.
Everything happens because what we do,

Speaker 1 you know, get over yourself.

Speaker 1 I mean, yes, is

Speaker 1 colonization part of countries' history that still matters in their life today? Of course. You know, it's just like your past is the past that influences and makes you the person you are now.

Speaker 1 But it doesn't have to be determinative forever.

Speaker 1 Exactly. At a certain point, this is the case that I make all the time, and people get upset.
I'll be like, okay, well, the choice, forget history for a second. The choice in front of you.

Speaker 1 You can make a good one or you can make a bad one. Which ones do you want to make? And people get angry because what they actually want to do is avoid making the choice.

Speaker 1 And so they prefer talking about the history.

Speaker 1 So you get this on everything from crime policy to the Middle East, where the question I always ask about Israel and the Palestinians is, okay, so one of those states is a flourishing democracy with a flourishing economy where Arabs and Jews live in freedom.

Speaker 1 And one of these places is a terrible place to live, where if you're a Jew and you're driving there by accident, they kill you.

Speaker 1 So which one of them has a quote, which one is the world better for existing? Which one is the world better? And that's a question nobody ever answers.

Speaker 1 Instead, they just start talking about the Balfour Declaration and various fights between the Peel Commission and the American.

Speaker 1 To be fair, which I always try to be, Arabs don't live in complete freedom. They have way more rights than, and if they're Israeli citizens, they have full rights.

Speaker 1 But certainly some of the people in the West Bank and so forth who work in Israel and have to go through the

Speaker 1 Palestinian Authority, sure. Right.
I mean, but and I'm talking about Israeli Arabs.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about Israel Arabs, I'm not talking about the Palestinian Authority, which was delegated authority under the Oslo Accords, right?

Speaker 1 Where you have giant rays, I mean, you've seen them, I'm sure. They have the giant red signs outside of Palestinian Authority governed areas that say in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.

Speaker 1 If you are not a citizen of Palestinian authority, if you drive in this area, we cannot guarantee your safety and you'll be killed.

Speaker 1 So, when you were there, you go just because you want to take your kids and have them see it? Yeah, yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 we go for religious holidays. So, you know, my wife has family.
Yeah, we go a lot. And you're flying to Tel Aviv? Yeah.
Yeah. No,

Speaker 1 I mean, I made the movie Religilist. We spent a week there.
It was one of the greatest weeks of my life. I didn't love every minute, but I'm a bad traveler.
We've established that.

Speaker 1 But, I mean, Tel Aviv is New York. Yes.

Speaker 1 On the Mediterranean. I mean, and this is, you know, one of the arguments I always make with the, you know, Hamas is coming people.
It's like, you're such hypocrites because you wouldn't last a day.

Speaker 1 You would go running and screaming to live in Tel Aviv, which is a lifestyle you are familiar with that you just take for granted.

Speaker 1 And it didn't just happen that kind of lifestyle where you have freedom and can prosperity and go where you want and do what you want and dress what you want. It just doesn't happen.

Speaker 1 I think everybody in society now wants to skim the cream off the top of history without recognizing that history is a dirty, messy place with a lot of decisions that have to get made between various bad options.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is the same thing that drives me up a wall. I was doing an event recently where I had to debate.

Speaker 1 It was some internet thing where I'm debating a bunch of people who are voting for Kamala or whatever.

Speaker 1 And somebody comes up and the first thing they say is, before we start, I want to do a land acknowledgement and do a land acknowledgement. And I said,

Speaker 1 we are sitting on Native American tribal land. And I said, so give it back.

Speaker 1 So give it back. Like new?

Speaker 1 Who's stopping you? Give it back. I know.
Get to it, my friend.

Speaker 1 You say, give it back or shut the fuck up. And it's always like, you know,

Speaker 1 we're opening this strip mall. It's like, but you're going to.
It's so performative. Guess what?

Speaker 1 I'm fucking ecstatic that America exists. And you know what? A lot of bad shit had to happen in order to make that happen.
As if all the people.

Speaker 1 Yes. The proud Chumash people.
This really is theirs. If you'd really rather have a TP there than your Starbucks,

Speaker 1 I mean, just

Speaker 1 don't be stupid. Like, people ask me all the time, we'll come on the show, like they're nervous, like,

Speaker 1 what should I do?

Speaker 1 Just don't lie to him. Just don't lie to him, and he'll love you.
It's fine. Just don't lie.

Speaker 1 But once you start with the proud Jumash

Speaker 1 people,

Speaker 1 like you say, you then give it back.

Speaker 1 Well, look, I know you turn into a vampire at 5.30. That's right.
I could go on. I've got my protocols of the elders meeting, man.
But

Speaker 1 what would happen if you were out there when darkness fell? Would it...

Speaker 1 I mean, I melt.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 nothing happens. I do a bad Jewish thing.
That's what happens.

Speaker 1 The cognitive dissonance of talking to someone as brilliant as you and then having to let you go because it's getting dark.

Speaker 1 But I love it.