Ben vs. The Left: Best Book Tour Moments

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Alrighty, folks, so I've been on a book tour for my brand new bestseller, Lions and Scavengers, and we had some interesting moments with people who disagree.

We're going to go through them right now.

This video is sponsored by our friends at PDS Deck.

So one of the places that we went to was the Breakfast Club, and it was wonderful.

I mean, everybody in the room was very nice.

Charlemagne is a super nice person.

The rest of his crew, very kind.

You know, it's always interesting to walk into a place where you know people are going to disagree because you never know just how sort of fraught it's going to be.

And this wasn't that.

I thought that it was a great conversation, really really thorough conversation that ranged across a variety of issues.

Here's a little bit of it.

You believe in banning abortions, right?

I'm pro-life, yes.

Even in cases of incest and rape?

Yes.

Why?

Because this is sort of a fundamental definitional question.

If you believe life begins at conception, then regardless of the source of the life, it now has an independent interest in life.

So that is not to minimize the tremendous evil of rape or incest.

I believe rape

should be executed, frankly, or chemically castrated at best.

But

that's sort of a different question from the independent source of life and whether this, again, it gets back to definitions.

And

this conversation tends to be either you're on one side of that or the other.

If you don't believe life begins at conception, then obviously you believe abortion is acceptable in a wide variety of circumstances.

If you believe it's an independent life deserving of protection, then you believe it's an independent life deserving of protection.

Laura, what do you think about that?

I'm just as a woman.

I think that a woman should be able to choose to do what she wants to do wherever she decides to do it.

I personally, I believe that women should be able to abort babies if they want to, if they feel like that's what they need to do.

Do you have a time limit on that out of curiosity?

I mean, I think it should happen earlier on if it were me making a decision for myself, but I think it's up to the woman and what she's personally experiencing and what she personally went through.

I really think it's a per-person thing.

That's why I think it's crazy when you have like these structures and these like people who are not in that

situation making the decision for the woman of what you can and can't do because it's very like per person.

Okay, so one of the things that's fascinating here, and I asked her further clarifying questions, because again, I think that in order to have a solid, useful discussion, you have to be clear on the other person's position, is I asked her if she had any point at which abortion would be beyond her morality.

And she said that abortion should be done earlier, which of course suggests that abortion has to do with the development of the fetus.

If it were just about the interest of the mom, then the answer should be whenever you want.

But obviously, nobody truly believes that abortion should be available whenever you want.

Very, very few people really believe that.

Like Peter Singer from Princeton, maybe.

But other than that, everybody sort of has a limit.

And the question is, why?

And that's the really interesting question because people are tacitly admitting the argument that I'm making, which is there is, in fact, a moral cutoff point where you believe that the child, that the human being developing in the womb, has an independent interest in life.

I believe the only logical starting point is conception.

Other people have tried to make other arguments, but that argument itself lives in the realm of definitions.

It does not live in the realm of a woman's emotional state as to what she feels in the moment.

By the end of that conversation, it should be said that Charlemagne said that his standard would be at the heartbeat, which again is very, very early on in the pregnancy and is, in fact, the law in a wide variety of red states.

One of the places that we visited was CNN.

I like doing CNN, honestly.

I like doing these shows where their oppositional voices and where I'm sort of the person who's the Gadfly in the room.

Sometimes it's more fun than going on shows where I agree.

The panel on this show was interesting because it had people who I've known previously, who've been on the show before.

Van Jones was on.

I really like Van.

Annika Sparring was on.

Obviously, she and I have had our ups and our downs, and we have some pretty significant disagreements, to say the very least.

And one of the topics that they wanted to talk about was Social Security and comments that I made now, about a year and a half ago, probably.

about retirement age in the United States, which was then taken out of context to suggest that I said that people who are working backbreaking jobs should basically work until they die, which of course I never said.

But that's sort of the usual arrangement.

And it's your job to sort of fight your way out of the straitjacket that they put you in, which is kind of fun, honestly.

Here is one of the exchanges that we had about the American dream and economic.

I mean, the life expectancy, if you make it to 65 and you're a dude, is now 83.

So the real question that I was asking is, when should the government pay you to retire?

Which is a sort of a different question than when should you retire.

When you should retire is sort of a personal question, and also depends on your definition of retirement.

I don't think that, you know, if your goal is to be 65 and sitting on a beach for the rest of your life doing nothing, the social science tends to say that's not very good for you.

You actually should be involved in your community and get involved and still have a side job and all the rest of that.

But if we really believe that we can't raise the retirement age and we're never going to change that, we will go bankrupt.

And all the talk about cutting at the margins, you know, whatever Doge is doing, that's not going to touch the real driver of the systemic debt in the United States.

Women are living to 85 if you make it to 65.

Men are living to 83 if you make it to 65.

That's 20 years on the public dime.

When you're talking about, hold on, when you're talking about the government paying, you're talking about Social Security, which is people's money?

Well, it is, it is, well, it is not the money you paid in.

It's a payment.

Yeah, it's the system that they pay into.

Well, no, you're not going to be able to do it.

They're calling check stuff.

Yes.

But believe me, I pay a lot.

I've payloaded Social Security.

I don't know about you.

I promise you, the amount that people are taking out is not the amount that is going in, which is why we are going bankrupt.

Okay, but it's not the government just handing out a blank check.

No, it's the government borrowing money to pay.

Well, you pay in X dollars, and then you get multiple times X dollars when you retire.

That is how the system works.

It is not a lockbox.

Okay, again,

the fact that I had to sort of explain this basic concept to people is pretty incredible.

There's a social security tax, obviously, that exists and has been raised dramatically over the course of time, taking more money out of the pockets of the American people.

But it is not your exact money that you get out when it went in.

My grandmother was on Social Security for years and years and years.

She lived to be 91.

And my grandmother.

did retire at the social security retirement age of 65.

So she was on social security for 26 years.

And I guarantee you that the amount my grandmother got out from Social Security was significantly higher than the amount that she paid in, which is one of the big problems with these defined benefits programs as opposed to defined contribution programs.

When it comes to government spending, two-thirds of American spending every single year, and this is mandatory spending, is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

That is the gigantic systemic driver of the American national debt.

And when it comes to talk about war and the amount that we spend on war, that is maybe one quarter of what we spend on these gigantic social security welfare safety nets.

Get some more on this in a moment.

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I had the opportunity to sit down with Ezra Klein of the New York Times.

Again, I think that Ezra is a really interesting person.

I think that we had a very deep and wide-ranging conversation conversation about American politics, the recent history of American politics, about the state of the globe and Western civilization.

It was great.

I mean, it's like a two-hour conversation.

And I think these sort of in-depth conversations, this is what the internet is made for.

So this was some good stuff here.

In 2013, 2014, 2015.

But is that because Barack Obama should have been more positive on what happened to Trayvon Martin or what happened in a very different way to Henry Louis Gates?

Or because it was hard for people to hear?

Like, yeah, if you're a black man and you see these, your interpretation is, yeah, like we get hassled by the cops often for no reason in a way that white people don't really understand.

Or my son could have been Trayvon.

It just, it's hard for me when I look back on that and the Beer Summit in particular to hear like, that's what radicalized you all.

Yes.

And the reason is because the implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America, which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying.

That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King's dream.

And when instead things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was, well, you know, it turns out that black people in America, they're inherently victimized by a system, by

a white supremacist system that puts black people underfoot.

And my son could have been Frayvon.

And people on the right saw that as like, well, but that's not true.

You are an upper-class black man who is living in the White House.

And unless your son was mistaken for a prowler going around at night in a neighborhood, then no, that actually wouldn't happen to your son.

In fact, you have two black daughters and that stuff has never happened to them.

So this sort of pre

Michael Brown and Ferguson, the idea that when the president went out and he said that people wouldn't just make this up, right?

And it turns out actually that a lot of it was made up.

There are so many people on the left who have never actually addressed these arguments, who never got out of their box enough to see the opposing point of view, that if you looked at Barack Obama and you saw a person who racially radicalized the country, and that's what the polls show.

The polls absolutely 100% show that race relations were on a solid footing in 2012.

And by 2013, they had plummeted.

And there's only one person who's really responsible for that.

And that person's name is Barack Obama.

Without understanding that you cannot understand the Trump movement, you can't understand the way that the country has moved since 2012.

In that interview, which I think, again, you should read or go listen to because it really is fascinating.

I think Ezra says some intelligent things.

I think we have a good conversation.

And it's a conversation that needs to be had between right and left to really understand one another.

I talk about the importance of the 2012 election and the shift under Barack Obama in the country from an optimistic country to a quite pessimistic country.

One of the other places that we hit on the book tour was Bill Maher's show.

I love doing Bill's show, it's always a lot of fun.

Here's a clip.

As a believing Jew, that is one of the central points of the book of Deuteronomy, right?

You're supposed to choose life so you and your children shall live.

Doesn't mean that you have to agree with everything in Deuteronomy or Leviticus.

But that's not going to happen.

Bill does.

I know, but like,

that's always such a silly argument because if God wrote the book, how could there be things we don't agree with?

It either got to be perfect because it's written by you-know-who, or it's just not perfect and written by people, which it was, obviously, and it's full of nonsense and wickedness and things that are everything but virtue.

So, Bill, you and I agree on morality.

I'd say like 87%.

But not from the Bible.

I have a question.

Why?

Because it's for slavery.

Because it's okay with slavery.

Why do you and I agree on morality like 87.5%?

I'm a religious Jew.

You're an atheist.

Why do we agree on those things?

I mean, I can give you my answer.

Yeah, please.

Because we probably grew up a few miles from each other in a Western society that has several thousand years of biblical history behind it.

And so you can think that you hit that triple and you formed your own morality, but the reality is you were born morally on third base.

No, we.

We.

Okay.

This was a particularly fun moment.

Obviously, listen, Bill and I disagree on matters religious.

We disagree on matters political.

Those sorts of conversations are really fun to have.

And having the opportunity to do that, thanks to Bill for doing that.

But yes, I mean, this point that I'm making right here is a point I frequently make in arguments with atheists.

Because the argument I'm making is not that an atheist has to believe in the Bible in order to be moral.

The point I'm making is that Western atheists did not craft their own morality out of whole cloth.

And pretending that they did is essentially ignoring the reality.

That's the reason Bill and I agree on morality is because we grew up in a Judeo-Christian biblically based culture.

Alrighty, folks, that is just a taste of some of the stuff that we did on this book tour.

We will do more of these sorts of interesting and fraught and controversial interviews in the future, and you'll see them very soon.

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