Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism | Lex Fridman Podcast #410

Something has to happen with Iran. There has to be some diplomatic bilateral communication there.

No, what has to happen is the containment of Iran.

History moves in one direction, right, because of time.

Communism, Nazism, all of that was a regression from what was happening at, for example, the beginning of the 19th century, in the 20th century.

In what way do you think that.

Today Donald Trump knows that he lost the election?

Absolutely.

So I, I don't.

This is one of the areas where we get into this. I don't understand if there's like brain breaking happening or what's going on. I don't know what world we can ever live in where we say that Trump is less divisive for the country than Biden.

Joe Biden literally used the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down vaccine mandates on 80 million Americans. That's insane.

What about supercalifragilication?

And then you're right about new ultra.

Microscopic or the science terms. Or what about the 7,000 letter thing? That's from part of a bio camera.

I got my education the Soviet Union, so we just did math.

That's why you're a useful person.

Does body count matter? The following is a debate between Ben Shapiro and Destiny. Each arguably representing the right and the left of American politics, respectively. They are two of the most influential and skilled political debaters in the world. This debate has been a long time coming for many years. It's about 2.5 hours and we could have easily gone for many more, and I'm sure we will. It is only round one. This is the Lex Freeman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro and Destiny. Ben, you're a conservative. Destiny, you're a liberal. Can you each describe what key values underpin your philosophy on politics and maybe life in the context of this left to right political spectrum? You want to go first?

Yeah.

So I think that we have a huge country full of a lot of people, a lot of individual talents, capabilities, and I think that the goal of government, broadly speaking, should be to try to ensure that everybody's able to achieve as much as possible. So on a liberal level, that usually means some people might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to things like education. They might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to providing certain necessities like housing or food or clothing. But, but broadly speaking, I mean, I'm still a liberal, not a communist or socialist. I don't believe in the total command economy, total communist takeover of all of the economy. But I think that broadly speaking, the government should kind of kick in and help people when they need it.

And that government can and should be big, not necessarily.

I noticed that when liberals talk about government, especially taxes, it seems like they talk about it for taxes sake or bigness sake. So people talk about taxes sometimes as a punishment, like tax the rich. I think taxing the rich is fine insofar as it funds the programs that we want to fund. But Democrats have a really big problem demonizing success or wealth. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't think it's a bad thing to be wealthy, to be a billionaire or whatever, as long as we're funding what we need to fund.

Ben, what do you think it means to be a conservative? What's the philosophy that underlies your political view?

So first of all, I'm glad that Destiny, you're already coming out as a Republican. That's exciting. I mean, we hold a lot in common in terms of the basic idea that people ought to have as much opportunity as possible. And also insofar as the government should do the minimum amount necessary to interfere in people's lives in order to pursue certain functions, particularly at the local level. So a lot of governmental discussions on a pragmatic level end up being discussions about where government ought to be involved, but also at what level government ought to be involved. And I haven't incredibly subsidiary view of government. I think that local governments, because you have higher levels of homogeneity and consent, are capable of doing more things. And as you abstract up the chain, it becomes more and more impractical and more and more divisive to do more things. In my view, government is basically there to preserve certain key liberties. Those key liberties preexist the government insofar as they are more important than what, what priorities the government has. The job of government is to maintain, for example, national defense, protection of property rights, protection of religious freedom. These are the key focuses of government as generally expressed in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. And I agree with the general philosophy of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Now, that doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't do more on a governmental level. Again, as you get closer to the ground, which by the way, is also embedded in the Constitution. People forget the Constitution was originally applied to the federal government, not to local and state governments. But if I were going to define conservatism, it would actually be a little broader than that because I think to understand how people Interact with government, you have to go to kind of core values. And so for me there are a couple of premises. One, human beings have a nature. That nature is neither good nor bad. We have aspects of goodness and we have aspects of badness. Human beings are sinful, we have temptations. And what that means is that we have to be careful not to incentivize the bad and, and that we should incentivize the good. Human beings do have agency and are capable of making decisions in the vast majority of circumstances. And it is better for society if we act as though they do. Second, the basic idea of human nature. There is an idea, in my view, that all human beings have equal value before the law. I'm a religious person, so I'd say equal value before God. But I think that's also sort of a key tenet of Western civilization being non religious or religious, that every individual has equivalent value in sort of cosmic terms. But that does not necessarily mean that every person is equally equipped to do everything equally well. And so it is not the job of government to rectify every imbalance of life. The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell suggests, is something that government is generally incapable of doing and more often than not botches and makes things worse. So those are a few key tenets. And that tends to materialize in a variety of ways. The easiest way to sum that up would the traditional kind of three legs of the conservative stool, although now obviously there's a very fragmented conservative movement in the United States, would be a socially conservative view in which family is the chief institution of society, like the little platoons of society, as Edmund Burke suggested, in which free market and property rights are extraordinarily valuable and necessary because every individual has the ability to be creative with their property and to freely alienate that property. And finally, I tend toward a hawkish foreign policy that suggests that the world is not filled with wonderful people who all agree with us and think like us. And those people will pursue adversarial interests if we do not protect our own interests.

Can I ask a question on that? I'm so sure it's okay. I'm excited for this conversation because I consider you to be really intelligent. But I feel like sometimes there are ways that conservatives talk about certain issues that seem to defy logic and reason. I guess so here. And I'm sure you feel the same way about progress. Well, I feel the same way about progressives, but even some liberals, for sure. Before I ask this question, it's going to relate to education. We can Agree, broadly speaking, that statistics are real and that not everybody could do everything. So for a grounded example, my life was pretty bad. I got into streaming and I turned my life around. And that was really cool. But I can't expect everybody to do what I did, right? Like, everybody being able to join the NBA or to be like a streamer.

Of course, everybody has different qualities. Sure.

Okay. So I used to be a lot more libertarian when I was 20, 21. And one of the things that dramatically changed kind of my view on government manipulation of things in the, I guess in society came when it came time to deal with my son and the school that he went to. And one of the things that I noticed was when it came time to send my son to school, I could either do private education or I could do public. Personally, I did 12 years of Catholic private education. However, the public school in Nebraska, depending on where you lived, were very, very, very good. And I opted for a certain district. I bought a house there, I moved there, and then my son was able to go to those schools, and he's been going through those schools. And the difference of availability of, like, technology, like, these kids are taking home iPads and like first grade, they've got like huge computer labs and everything. Do you think that there is some type of, I don't want to say injustice or unfairness, because I'm not even looking at it that way. Just pragmatically that there might be children that are in certain schools that if they just had better funding or more access to technologies or things available to them, that those kids would become more productive members of society that would like a little bit of a help. They could actually achieve more and do better for all of society.

So I think that on the list of priorities when it comes to education, the availability of technology is actually fairly low. On the list of priorities, sure.

Two things I've heard are food availability and I think air conditioning, I think are the two biggest ones that I hear about.

I mean, the biggest thing in terms of education itself, not just the physical thing. Facilities that we're talking about would actually be two parent family, households, communities that have fathers in them. It's actually the number one decisor, according to Roland Fryer and many studies done on this particular topic. And the idea that money alone, that investment of resources is the top priority in schooling is belied by the fact that lausd, which is where I went to school when I was younger, they pour an enormous amount of money into lausd. We're talking about tens of thousands of Dollars very often per student and it does not result in better schooling outcomes. And when you say if we could give every kid an iPad, would you give every kid an iPad? The question is not if I had a replicator machine from Star Trek, would I give everybody an enormous amount of stuff? Sure I would. Every, every resource is finite, every resource is limited. And you have to prioritize what are the, what are the outcomes that you seek in terms of the means with which you are seeking them. And so again, I think that the question is, is I quibble with it with the premise of the question, which is that again, the chief injustice when it comes to education on the list of injustices is lack of availability to technology or that it's a funding problem. I just don't think that's the case.

Sure, and I can half agree with you there. But I don't think any amount of changes in the schools will create two parent households.

Right.

We can't bring a. I totally agree with you.

So that's why I think that the fundamental educational problem is not in fact a schooling problem. I think that it pre exists that.

Sure. But then I feel like we're now I feel like this is kind of the conservative merry go round where it's like what can we do to help with schools? Of the things that I've seen, I think that are usually brought up in research is one is air conditioning that children in hotter environments just don't learn as well. And then the second one is access to food. So like kids that are given like a breakfast or a lunch that's provided at school, like increases educational outcomes. Now I agree that neither of these things might be determinative in like, well, 20% of kids were graduating and now 80% of kids are graduating or these kids are all going, you know, from, with their GEDs into the workforce and now these kids are all suddenly becoming engineers. But in terms of where we can help, do you think there should be like some minimum threshold or minimum baseline of like at the very least, every school should have a non leaky gym or every school should have if children can't afford lunch or breakfast, like some sort of food provided or every school should have these like baseline things.

So again, I'm going to quibble with the premise of the question because I think when it comes to for example, food insecurity, school food programs, again, you can always pour money into any program and at the margins create change. I mean there's no doubt that pouring money onto anything will create changes in a marginal way. The question is how large is the margin and how big is the movement? Right. So the delta is what I'm looking at. And so I think that the. You're starting at a second order question, which is, what if we ignore what I would think are the big primary questions of education, namely family structure, value of education at home, how much you have parents who are capable or willing to help with homework, what are the incentive structures we can set up for a society that actually facilitate that? How local communities take ownership of their schools is a big one. Right. All of these issues we're ignoring in favor of, say, air conditioning or lunch programs. And so in a vacuum, if you say air conditioning and lunch programs sounds great in a vacuum. In terms of prioritization of values and cost structure, are those the things that I think are going to move the needle in a major way in terms of public policy? I do not. And in fact, I think that many of them end up being disproportionate wastes of money. I've talked before, pretty controversially about the fact that an enormous amount of school lunch programs are thrown out. An enormous amount of that food ends up in the garbage can. Is there a better way to do that? If there is a better way to do it, then I'm perfectly willing to hear about that better way to do it. But it seems to me that one of the big flaws in the way that many people of the left approach government is what if we hit every NAT with a hammer? And my question is, what if the gnat isn't even the problem? What if there is a much bigger substructure problem that needs to be solved in order to. If you're shifting deck chairs on the Titanic, sure, you can make the Titanic slightly more balanced because the deck chairs are slightly better oriented. But the real question is the water that's gaping into the Titanic, right?

Yeah.

And I agree with you 100%. But again, I feel like we're on the conservative merry go round then of never wanting to address as a conservative.

Merry go round, I can, I can give you 10 ways.

Well, sure, but so like, here would be the merry go round. I would say that, like, there is a minimum funding for schools that I think would help children. And then we go, well, the thing that would help them the most is two parent households. And I go, okay, well, two parent households actually aren't the problem. The issue is access to things like birth controls, that people don't have children early on. And it's like. But the issue isn't actually Birth control. The issue is actually you need a certain amount of money to move out early and to get married and then to have a two parent household. So it's actually like economic opportunity.

No, well, it's not, you know, just two parent households.

Yeah, but like what is the, what are the pre.

Donors People before you're married and have babies?

Sure.

Done.

That's great. We can say that and try to fight against, you know, however many hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. But people will have sex and people.

Will make babies and then they used to get married. The vast majority of people in this country with kids used to be married. The vast majority of people with kids in this country, sure. Now are not married increasingly, but a lot. Obviously a societal change. Something changed. It wasn't human evolution.

But a lot of those things in terms of resting on whether or not people get married have to do with financial decisions. Do you have the money?

People are worse off now than they were 50, 60 years ago when the marriage rates were high.

People are delaying the start of their careers because education is going to be increasingly important.

So in other words, people are richer now and they have more education now, and yet they're having more babies out of wedlock now because they're richer and have more education.

I'm saying that the. One of the biggest indicators for whether or not somebody's willing to get married is how much money both people are making if they can move out of their household. People don't tend to want to get married at 22, when they've just finished college, when they don't have the money to move out and they can't afford a house.

Because we have changed the moral status of marriage in the culture, meaning that everyone poor, rich and in between used to get married. That, by the way, a huge percentage of marriages in the United States used to be what they would call shotgun marriages, meaning that somebody knocked somebody up and because they did not want the baby to be born outside of a two parent household, they would then get married.

Do we think that shotgun marriages though are a way to bring back equilibrium to education?

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, 100%. Do we think serves a mother and a father?

Sure.

That is the basis for all of this, including education.

Do we think that shotgun marriages are. Well, let's say this. Do we think that that's a reasonable direction that society would ever take?

Or is this like it was the reasonable direction for nearly all of modern history?

It was. But history moves in one direction, Right. Because of time.

People don't think that such. In what way is that?

I don't think we've ever, like, regressed social standards back to, like, oh, well, let's go 100 years back and do things that, you know, used to exist before.

I think the entire left right now is arguing that we regress social standards by rejecting Roe versus Wade. So that's obviously not true.

The Roe versus Wade is not a social standard. It's a Supreme Court ruling, number one. Number two, if you read the actual majority opinion on Roe v. Wade, we can see that socially, we actually never made huge progress on how society viewed abortion. This has always been an incredibly divisive thing.

Right.

Even that was, I think, part of Alito's writing on it was that things like gay marriage, for instance, we've kind of moved past and it's not really as debated anymore. But abortion was never a settled topic.

Despite Roe v. Wade's arc of history constantly moves in one direction is belied by nearly all of the 20th century.

What do we mean by that?

I mean. I mean women's rights, civil rights, barbarism, communism, Nazism. All of that was a regression from what was happening at, for example, the beginning of the 19th century, in the 20th century.

In what way?

Nazism and communism weren't a regression from what was going on in 1905?

Well, in terms of, like, communism being a regression, for instance, I'm not a communist, but like the industrialization of the Soviet Union happened under communist society.

The industrialization, murder of tens of millions of people.

Yeah, there is.

I consider that a regression, moral regression, which is what we are talking about now, moral regression. And you are suggesting that moral regression. I wouldn't term a return to traditional values a moral regression. You would, but your suggestion is that history only moves in one direction. And I'm suggesting that history does not only move in one direction, it tends to move actually back and forth. Sure.

I don't think that all of history moves in one direction. There are going to be wars, there are going to be times of peace. I think in general, we're more peaceful now than we have been in the past. But I think when we look at the way that people live their lives, I think that we tend to move in a certain direction socially. So when it comes to things like racism or when it comes to things like slavery or women's rights, I think that there are two huge things that probably aren't changing in the US and one is access to contraception, and one is women working jobs. I think that these two things are probably huge Things that are moving us off of shotgun marriages or getting married very early on, and I don't see those. Do you think that those two things are going to change fundamentally?

First of all, what the data tend to show is that actually more highly educated people, as you were saying, tend to get married more. So the idea is that women getting an education somehow throws them off marriage. It's the opposite. Usually not educated.

But those women aren't getting shotgun marriages. Those women aren't having children.

Now you're shifting the topic. My topic was how to get more people married. And what I'm suggesting. And then you suggested that higher levels of education are delaying marriage and making it less probable. And what I'm telling you, because this is what the data suggests, is that actually, as you raise up the educational ladder, people tend to be married more than they are lower down on the educational ladder. If you're a high school graduate, you're less likely to be married than if you're a postdoc.

I agree with you. But that's because one of the biggest precursors to getting married is having, like, a level of economic stability. So as people get more educated, they obtain this economic stability, and then they're in a more comfortable position to explore more serious relationships.

There's another confound there. I mean, the confound is that people in stable marriages tend to be the children of stable marriages. And there's only one way to break that cycle, which is to create a stable marriage. And that is something that is in everyone's hands. Again, this notion that it is somehow an unbreakable, unshatterable barrier to get married and have kids, I don't understand where this is coming from. Why is that such a. Why is that such a challenge?

I don't think it's unbreakable or unshatterable. I was just. The initial point was for school. If we can provide a minimum level of educational stuff for children, that'd probably be good. But when we retreat back to, well, it has to be the families that are fixed first. Fixing families is a multivariate problem with.

So many different things. I am fine within my local community. We all vote. Again, I've suggested that there's a difference between local community and federal. I'm fine with my local community voting for school lunches or air conditioning or whatever it is that we all agreed to do, because the more local you get, the more homogeneity you get in terms of interest and the more interest you have in your neighbors. All of that's fine. I'm part of a very, very solid community. In our community, we give to each other. We have minimum standards of helping one another. All of that's wonderful. When it comes to the actual problem of education, what I object to in the political sphere, and this happens all the time, is everybody is arguing on top of the iceberg about how we can move the needle 0.5 percentage points as opposed to the entire iceberg melting beneath them. And we just ignore that and we pretend that that's just, you know, sort of the natural consequence of thing. The arc of history suggests that people are never going to get married again. Well, I mean, actually, what the arc of history suggests, realistically speaking, is that the people who are not getting married are not going to be having kids. And what it also suggests, the people who are married are going to be having kids. And so the demographic profile actually over time is rather going to shift toward people who are having lots and lots of kids. I'm married, I have four kids. Everyone in my community is married. It's like minimum buy into my community is four kids. Okay. And so what's happening actually in terms of demographics, is that the people who are more religious and getting married are having more kids. And so if you're talking about the arc of history shifting toward marriage, I would suggest that actually demographically, over time, long periods of time, not over one generation, over long periods of time, the only cure for low birth rate is going to be the people who get married and have lots of kids.

Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but I'm just saying that again, on the Europe side, when I bring up the term merry go round, I think that there are good conversations to be had about people getting married because stable families produce stable children that are less likely to commit crime, that are more likely to go to school, that are more likely to be productive members of society, etc. Etc. I'm not going to disagree with you on any of that. All of that is true. It's just frustrating that sometimes when you bring up any problem, all of it will circle back to other things that makes it seem like we can't make any progress in any area without, like.

Fixing in a way. I mean, I literally just told you that on the local level, I'm fine for people voting for.

Yeah, but so for instance, on the local level. So for school funding. School funding is done, I think, generally per district. So what do you do when you have poor districts that can't afford air conditioner for their schools?

I mean, the idea there would be that presumably if the society, meaning the state, and I generally don't mean the federal state, I mean like the state of California, for example, decides that everybody ought to have air conditioning, people will vote for air conditioning. And that's perfectly legal. And I don't think there's anything morally objectionable about that, per se. I also don't think that that's going to heal anything remotely like the central problem. And I think that what, what tends to happen in terms of government is people love arguing about the problems that can be solved by opening a wallet. And nobody likes to solve a problem by closing their sex life to one person, for example, or having kids within a stable religious community, the things that actually build society. I'm fine with arguing about each of these policies. And whether we apply them or not is a matter generally of pragmatism, not morality. It's a matter of incentive structures, not per se morality. Because incentive structures do have moral underpinnings. There's such a thing as, for example, if you're going to use a welfare program, you have to decide how effective it is to what crowd it applies, where the cutoffs are, does it disincentivize work? Does it. Not all of these are pragmatic concerns, but on a moral level, the generalized objection that I have to people on the left side of the aisle is that they like to focus in these conversations. Very often it feels as though it's a conversation with people who are drunk, searching under the lamp for their keys. The problems they want to look at are the problems that are solvable by government. And then all the problems they don't want to look at, which are the actual giant monsters lurking in the dark and not particularly solvable by government, are the ones they want to ignore and assume are just the natural state of things. And I don't think that's correct at all.

And I 1 billion percent agree. And then obviously my criticism for the conservative side is the exact opposite. Where there are parts where government could remedy some issues. For instance, you know, children having sex with each other and producing other children out of wedlock. Like sometimes having after school programs is nice to prevent that. Have time for these things. When I was in school, I was doing football practice, I was doing cross country practice. I went in early for a band. You know, I agree with you that sometimes people only focus on one end of the problem. As a. I hate to be that guy, but as somebody that. Have you ever watched the Wire?

Sure.

I'm not going to cite the Wire. As real life example. But, like, obviously there's only so much you can do in a school when the children coming in are so beyond destroyed because of the family life and everything prior to them even getting to school that day. So I agree. Government is not like the solution to broken families. That would never be the case.

And it's actually not the solution to education, depending on the kind of solutions that you're talking about. Some solutions, yeah. Some solutions, no.

Yeah. So the only thing I'm looking at is, as I said earlier, just like these minimum threshold things where it's like, where can government make. Because you mentioned marginal, which I think is a really good way to look at things, marginal costs and marginal utility to things where the first thousand dollars per student you spend might give you a huge return, but the extra 20,000 after.

I think these are all pragmatic discussions.

Sure.

Of course, Actually, this is what we used to hash out in legislatures before they turned into platforms for people grandstanding. But yes, sure.

Okay.

Yeah.

As we descend from the heavens of philosophical discussion of conservatism and liberalism, let's go to the pragmatic muck of politics. Trump versus Biden. Between the two of them, who was in their first term the better president and thus who should win if the two of them are, in fact our choices should win a second term in 2024. Ben.

Sure. So in terms of actual job performance, you have to separate it into a few categories. In terms of actual performance in foreign policy, I think Trump's foreign policy record is significantly better than Biden's. The world being on fire right now being fairly good example of that. And we can get into each aspect of the world being on fire and where the incentive structures came from and how all of that happened in a moment. When it comes to the economy, I think that Trump's economic record was better than Biden's. Doesn't mean he didn't overspend. He did. He wildly overspent. But he also had a very solid record of job creation. A huge percentage of the gains in the economy went to people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Actually, the gross income to the average American was about $6,000 during his term. The unemployment rates were very, very low before COVID I think that you almost have to separate the Trump administration into sort of before COVID and during COVID because Covid obviously is sort of a black swan event, the most signal change in politics in our lifetime. And so governance during COVID is almost its own category, which we can discuss. But in Terms of foreign policy, in terms of domestic policy, I think that Trump was significantly better than Biden has been. And that's on the upside for Trump. On the downside for Biden, Obviously, you're talking 40 year highs in inflation. You're talking about savings being eaten away. You're talking about everything being 20 to 30% more expensive. You're talking about massive increases to the deficit, even at a rate that was unknown under Trump. The deficit under Trump raised by about a little under a trillion dollars every year up until 2020. Again, 2020 was Covid year. So everybody decided that we're going to fire hose money at things. But then Joe Biden continued to fire hose money at things in 21, 22 and 23. You know, that obviously is, in my opinion, bad economic policy. And then you get to the rhetoric and you get to the stuff that Donald Trump says. And as I've said before, my view is that on Donald Trump's epitaph, on his gravestone, it will say, donald Trump, he said a lot of shit. I think that Donald Trump does say a lot of things. I think that that is basically baked into the cake, which is why everyone who's bewildered by the polls is ignoring human nature, which is at the beginning. When you see something very shocking, it's very shocking. And then if you see it over and over and over and over for years on end, it is no longer shocking. It is just part of the background noise, like tinnitus. It just becomes something that your brain adjusts for. And so do I like a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric? No, and I never have. Do I think that that is just positive as to his presidency? No, I do not. When it comes to Biden, again, I think he's underperforming economically. I think that his foreign policy has been really a problem. Even the things I think he's done right are I think band aids for things that he created by doing wrong. And when it comes to his, his own rhetoric, you can argue that it's grading on a curve because Trump was coming in with such wild rhetoric that just a maintenance of that wild rhetoric doesn't really change. Again, the baseline for Biden, he came in in the same way that Obama did on the sort of soaring rhetoric of American unity. I'm the president for all. Like Trump came in, he's like, listen, I'm the president for, for what I am. And you know, I'm going to say the things I want to say. I'm beyond the toilet. I'm tweeting we're like, okay, you know, that's what it is with Biden. He came in with, I'm a president for all Americans. I'm trying to unify everybody. And that pretty quickly broke down into a lot of oppositional language about his political opponents. In particular, an attempt to lump in, for example, huge swaths of the conservative movement with the people who participated, for example, in January 6th or who are fans of January 6th. And, you know, the sort of lumping in of everybody into maga, Republicans who wasn't personally signed on to an infrastructure bill with him, that sort of stuff, I think has been truly terrible. I thought his Philadelphia speech was truly terrible. And again, I think that you do have the problem of he is no longer capable of certainly rhetorically unifying the country. When every speech from him feels like watching Nick Wallendo walk across a volcano on a tightrope, it really is like you're just sort of waiting for him to follow. I mean, it's. It's sad to say. I mean, the other day, he was speaking for what was, in effect, his campaign kickoff, and this is in Valley Forge. And, I mean, Jill rushed up there, like, off that. Off the. As soon as he was done, Jill rushed up there, you know, like she'd been shot out of a cannon to come and try and guide him away. So he didn't become the Shane Gillis Roomba. And, you know, that's not really, you know, let's put it this way, it does not quiet the soul to watch Joe Biden rhetorically. Again, that's a different problem than Trump's problem, but that's my analysis.

This is one of the areas where we get into this. I don't understand if there's, like, brain breaking happening or what's going on. I don't know what world we can ever live in where we say that Trump is less divisive for the country than Biden. I think it is so patently obvious Trump is so divisive. Like, not only does Trump make an enemy out of every person in the opposition party, he makes an enemy out of his own party and every single person around him. Like, we all watched him bully, you know, Jeff Sessions, we all watched him bully his own party on Twitter. We all watched, like, all of these people walk away from him. Even recently, I think his. The Secretary of Defense, Esper and John Kelly, the chief of staff, were, you know, saying, I think Trump is a threat to democracy. You know, you've got all of his prior people that were around him. Some of his closest allies. You've got Bill Barr that won't co sign a single thing that he says. Um, you've got all these people that he used to work with that all say, Trump is a horrible, evil person, he is ineffective as a leader, he doesn't accomplish anything. And he didn't, you know, to say that Biden has failed at bipartisanship when, you know, we've gotten the CHIPS act, we've gotten the ira, we've gotten the arp, we've gotten the bipartisan infrastructure bill when we've got, like, all this major legislation that is working in this historically divided Congress, as opposed to Trump, that got us tax cuts and deficit spending. I don't understand where we ever are in this world where Biden is somehow more divisive than Trump. Even the speeches that Ben is bringing up, they always bring up. I remember that one. I think we might have even done it on our episode. The one speech that Biden gave where at one point that, like, the background.

Is red and the only speech I referenced.

Yeah. And they're like, oh, my God, it's over. This is the end. And then meanwhile, you've got Donald Trump, you know, coming into office saying things like, if you burn the flag, you should have your citizenship revoked, or talking about. Ms. DNC that. I'm going to investigate every single one of these media organizations for corruptness. I'm going to open the libel and defamation laws. I'm going to take all of these guys to court. You've got this weird project 2025 stuff. Where is it? John Paschel, I think, is talking about, you know, we're going to. We're going to investigate all of these people, and we're going to try to throw crimes at all these people. Trump is like the most divisive president I think we've ever had in at least in my lifetime of being an American citizen. And the rhetoric from him is just. It's on a whole other level in terms of the demonization of political opponents. I mean, this is a guy that's known for giving his political opponents bad nicknames. Right. Like, that's what Trump, you know, like, it's funny, but even as a resident of Florida, if Florida had another natural disaster, do you think Trump would withhold aid? Because you had. I think that was one of the few nice things that Desantis actually said about Biden was that, like, hey, listen, you know, when the buildings collapsed and I think that was Miami Beach. Yeah. That, you know, for the hurricane stuff, that Biden was there he was saying, if you guys need aid, however many billions, you can have it. Meanwhile, Trump, I think, was threatening to withhold federal funding from blue states that wouldn't, I think it had to do with the National Guard stuff, the deployment of the National Guard, that they weren't like doing enough for the riots. And Trump was threatening to withhold aid from some of these blue states. Yeah, Trump is literally the most divisive person in the world. I don't see how on any metric he is ever succeeding in the divisive category in terms of the economy. I do think it's funny that Republicans are very keen to say that, like, well, we can't really grade Trump, you know, post Covid because obviously Covid messed everything up, which is fair. But pre Covid, what did Trump do? Yeah, he did. He did deficit spending, tax cuts, he presided over historic low interest rates and an economy that was already like, like blazing past the final years of Obama. We were posting all time highs and all the stock markets in 2013 onwards, you know, unemployment rates were falling. Now under Biden, unemployment rates are even lower than they were under Trump. But it sucks that for Trump we can say, well, we can't really hold him accountable for 2020. That was Covid. Well, all we have for Biden is post Covet. We don't have any pre Covid Biden, you know, economy. And it was the same thing for Obama too, coming in right after the housing collapse as well. And it sucks that Republicans are able to walk out of office, you know, having burned the entire American society to the ground economically. And now we've got to try to evaluate, okay, well, what did Obama do during his first two to three to four years? Just trying to recover from where the housing crash left it. And then we look at Biden now, who's trying to recover from COVID And now we're grading him on a totally different scale than what Trump is being graded on. Yeah, that, that sucks.

I think we can comment on the foreign policy.

On the foreign policy. I'm going to be honest, I am very liberal. I'm very not progressive. I'll probably come off as more hawkish than others because I'm not a big fan of this, which also if, I mean, if Ben agrees, like, I think people like, people like Trump are going to be the most dovish isolationist people ever. They don't want to do anything internationally. They just want to, you know, protect America, be at home, protect our economy, don't do anything internationally. Which is why he was constantly undermining NATO and constantly, you know, attacking all of the European Union and, you know, cheering on the UK for Brexiting away from the eu. I think, that being said, I think that Biden has done a phenomenal job when it comes to foreign policy. I think that the coalition building was so important for Ukraine, Russia, and I'm so happy that he decided to go to our European allies and our NATO allies and try to build a coalition of people to help Ukraine so that that wasn't only the United States. Personally, especially after doing a whole bunch of research, I do tend to side with Israel over Palestine in a lot of the Israeli Palestinian conflicts. I'm glad that Biden, while we' remaining a staunch defender of Israel, is trying to rein in some of the more aggressive posturing towards the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I'm proud that Biden said, hey, listen, we're going to delay some of these attacks. Hey, listen, we are going to allow humanitarian aid here. Hey, listen, we are going to try to not kill as many Palestinian people down there while still signaling that he would be a staunch supporter of Israel in the conflict, assuming the civilian casualties don't go too high for foreign policy. I mean, blemishes. I mean, the biggest one you can give to Biden is Afghanistan and the poll out there. But, man, are we going to talk about, you know, the inspector general report that says that one of the biggest reasons why the Afghanistan pull out was so disastrous was because of the Doha Accords, where Donald Trump headed talks that didn't even include the Afghanistan army. I mean, like, these were disasters. Like, when Biden took office, we had 2,500 troops left in Afghanistan. Like, what was the options even afforded to Biden at that point? Obviously, you've got the abandonment of the Kurds in northern Syria to, you know, for the Turkish armies to lay waste to. You talk about Iran and North Korea, although I'm not sure where Ben would land on those. But, yeah, that's a broadly, that's, that's.

A lot from both. You want to pick at something where you disagree with here.

Well, I mean, there's a lot. So, I mean, so I want to ask a few questions on each one of these.

Yeah, sure.

So let's, let's talk about divisiveness for a second. So there's no one who can make the case that Donald Trump is not divisive. Of course, he's incredibly divisive. It's a given. Do you treat Biden's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness that you treat Trump's rhetoric, or I should probably put that to the other way around. Should we treat Trump's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness as Joe Biden or, say, Barack Obama's rhetoric?

I'm gonna try to be concise. My answer is broadly speaking, especially instead of Israel, Palestine, and Ukraine, Russia, I try not to take politicians at their word because sometimes they just say stuff to say stuff. I understand that. But. But broadly speaking, I'm going to look at the rhetoric and the actions, and I am going to grade them the same. So, yes, I would hold Biden and Trump to the same standard.

Right. So my feeling is, and this is one area where, for clarification, we're going to have a division, is that I, of course, don't treat Trump's rhetoric in the same way that I treat Biden's or Obama's. He's utterly uncalibrated, and he says whatever he wants to at any given time, and it doesn't even match up with his policy very often.

Can I ask you, like, for our head of state, our chief executive, shouldn't rhetoric be arguably one of the most important things that he does?

I mean, the answer would be yes. And now I've been given a choice between a person who I think in calibrated ways, says things that are divisive and a person who, in uncalibrated ways, says things that are divisive. And so the evidence that Joe Biden is divisive is every poll taken since essentially August of 2021. He. He is, by all available metrics, incredibly divisive. A huge percentage of Americans are deeply unhappy, not only with his performance, but don't believe he's a uniter. That's just the reality. And that may just be a reflection. I mean, honestly, we may be putting too much on Trump or Biden personally. It may just be that the American people themselves are rhetorically divided because of social media, and social media can, in fact, be accessible.

One thing that I would ask you about that, though, is I agree, especially when you look at the favorability, but sometimes when I look at these polls, when you start to disaggregate them by party, I wonder if it's actually, is Biden historically divisive or. I'm trying to think of a really polite way to say this. The people that like Trump worship Trump, I don't know, like, one of the most prescient things that Trump could have probably ever said was that I could kill someone on Fifth street and nobody would hold me accountable. So is it really? That Biden is strictly divisive, or is it that every single Trump supporter will always say that Trump is great and.

No, the reason I would say that Biden is, in fact, historically divisive is because Republicans felt much more strongly about Barack Obama than Joe Biden, actually.

But they didn't feel as strongly about Trump as they did about, like, Romney or McCain. Right.

In what way?

I mean, the allegiance to Trump.

Oh, no, there's certainly more allegiance to Trump than it is to Romney or McCain, largely because Trump won in 2016. But beyond that, the, the point that I'm making is that if you're looking at the stats in terms of divisiveness, Republicans always find the Democratic president divisive. The question is where the rest of the country is. And right now, there are a lot of Democrats who either don't agree with Biden or, you know, find divisive. There are a lot of independents who find them divisive. So when you're, when we're comparing these things, I don't think they're leagues apart in terms of the divisive effects of what they say. Right. And I'm separating that off from, like, the inherent content of what they say, because obviously what Trump says is more divisive just on, like, the raw level. I mean, if he's insulting people as opposed to Joe Biden doing MAGA Republicans, like, if I were to just, if I'm an alien, come down from space and look at these two statements, I'd say this one's more divisive than this one. But then there's the reality of being a human being in the world, and that is everyone has baked Donald Trump into the cake. And Joe Biden again started off with a patina of being non divisive and now has emerged as divisive. If you don't mind, I actually want to get to the foreign policy questions, because this one is actually slightly less interesting to me. Yeah.

Just one quick thing, I guess, like, because we can say the reality of it and we can look at opinion polls. What if we look at, like, legislative accomplishments? Like, Biden is working on a 5050 divided Senate. Donald Trump had both House of Congress and the Supreme Court and got, like, no major legislation passed.

Well, I mean, he did lose Congress in 2018, but sure.

But prior to that, because we got the. We got the infrastructure bill, I think, in one year, which Trump promised for his entire. So he didn't get anywhere.

I mean, yes, his Republican base was not in favor of mass spending on infrastructure and Neither am I. So there's that. I think that's mostly a state and local.

They were in favor of mass spending for tax cuts.

That's not spending. I mean, I mean, it is, right? Effectively, it's not.

Well, if you're cutting tax receipts, but you're not changing the level of spending like Biden did with the ira.

Again, we have a fundamental philosophical difference here. I think that when, when the government takes my money, that is not. That is not the government somehow being more fiscally responsible. And when the government allows me to keep my money, I don't see that as the government spending. I see that as my money and the government is taking less of it.

That's great. But at the end of the day, the government is still going to be in a deficit spending and they're going to have to borrow money from the Treasury.

We have a spending problem, in other words, not a receipts problem. Is the case that I'm making. The problem with Donald Trump is not that he lowered taxes. The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems on the planet. And in fact, if you wish to have a European style social welfare state, what you actually need is to tax the middle class to death. The reality is the top 20% of the American population pays literally all net taxes in the United States, after state benefits and all of this.

Sure.

So if you actually wanted to have the kind of social welfare state that many liberals seem to want to have, like Northern Europe, for example, you'd actually have to tax people who make 40, 50, $60,000.

And I don't want that. I agree with that. So how do you explain the lack of legislation? I mean, if he's like such a uniter.

Because I think the Republican Party itself is quite divided. And I think that Trump's.

But isn't that his job? He's the head of the Republican Party. He's the president, Republican President of the United States.

I mean, again, I don't think that Joe Biden has passed wildly historically. Legislation was the largest. Like. So here's the problem. If you're a Republican, the only bills that you can get consensus on tend to be bills that either that, that, let's be real about this, that are tax cuts. Because as you would, I think, agree with when it comes to polling data, Americans constantly say they want to cut the government, and then the minute you ask them which program, they have no idea what they're. Right. Exactly. And so trying to. It's much harder to come up with a bill to cut things than it is to come up with a bill to add things coming, which is why spending was out of control under, under Trump as well. But there are some Republicans who still don't want to spend on those things. Right. So inherently, the, the task that this goes back to, the first question, the task that Republicans think government is there to do is different than the task that Democrats think that government is there to do. So the way that the very metric of success for a Democratic president versus a Republican president, namely, for example, pieces of legislation passed. As a Republican, one of my goals is to pass nearly no legislation because I don't actually want the government involved in more areas of our life. I want to ask a couple questions on the foreign policy. Sure.

Yeah. Okay, wait real quick.

Just.

So, for instance, like Donald Trump wanted to punish China and he wanted to bring microprocessor manufacturer to the United States. Biden did that with legislation. With the CHIPS act, you talk about like spending being out of control. And I mean, I can agree with that. I think anybody looks at the numbers has to agree with that. But why not pass legislation like the Inflation Reduction act, which is at least like spending neutral. Right? Like, why are there not bills where Donald Trump could take.

Well, I mean, first of all, I think that whenever the government says something is spending neutral, it rarely materializes that way. That is not going to be a spending neutral bill.

Sure. But there's a difference between, like, at least they say it's spending neutral versus this is a $500 billion bill over like 10 years.

Well, but again, I don't see a tax cut as a matter of, quote, unspending neutrality. The big problem is they keep spending. Not that they are allowing me to keep the money that I earned and they did not earn. But.

Okay, so then just to understand, so if somebody just did massive of like reductions in tax receipts, so tax cut after tax cut after tax cut, but they didn't change spending at all. You wouldn't consider that like an increase in deficit spending or out of control spending. You would just say they're just tax cuts.

No, the opposite. I would consider it a wild. I would consider it a wild overspending. Okay, meaning, so then was it under.

Trump then when he did the tax.

I mean, the deficit spending, by the way, under, under Biden is way worse than it was.

Of course. But we're in post Covid, right?

Covid ended effectively. I mean, you live in Florida. Covid effectively ended in the state of Florida by the middle of 2021. Yeah. I mean, even if you're a vaccine Fan by like April, May of 2021, there was wide availability of vaccines, whether or not you like the vaccines. And at that point we were done.

I agree, but like we're in a post like how many trillions of dollars have been dumped in worldwide that are like leading to inflation. Right. The inflation is like a worldwide issue right now because of the economy shutting down for a year or two. It's not like those effects are gone in one year. Right. Covid might be gone, but the after effects of all the stimulus spending and the unemployment, everything.

The definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. So pouring more money on top of that makes for more inflation. That's what it does.

Sure, I agree. But like there's also the definition of when do you. Deficit spend is when economies are headed for recessions. Right. Rather than when economies are doing really well like they were under Trump and he was deficit spending, whereas Biden can at least make the argument that I should, I ought to be deficit spending because the economy is heading for potential.

So here's the thing. I don't think that the economy was actually headed for recession. In in fact, if you look at the economic statistics, economists said that it was.

No, they're still saying that there's like a recession coming.

Right, Right. But that was largely because of the after effects of inflation. Meaning if you inflate the economy, what you are going to end up doing is bursting a bubble. And then when that bubble bursts, you'll get a recession. I mean, that was the basic idea. Right? The idea, the question was whether you're going to get the soft landing. But if you actually look at, for example, the employment statistics or the economic growth statistics in the United States, what they look like under the last year is Obama and then Trump. I mean, this is what the chart looks like is it looks like this and then it hits March of 2020, it goes like that.

Yeah, right.

And then by like September, it bounces back up. Right. It's a V shaped recovery and then it starts to peter out.

Sure. And a lot because of the American recovery plan.

Right.

That Biden did as Well.

I mean, 4 million jobs.

Yeah.

No, I don't. I'm not going to attribute it to that because the rates of growth in job growth from September, October, November were actually very similar to the rates of job growth after Joe Biden took office. What you see is actually kind of a straight line. I mean, what the chart looks like in any case. Okay, so on the foreign policy stuff, this is getting abstruse. But on the foreign policy stuff. So the. The questions that I have with regard to Biden on foreign policy, Very, very simple question. Do you think that the situation in the Middle east is better now than it was under Donald Trump? Probably.

That's a hard one. The factories that I'm making right now are like, obviously, you've got the Israel Palestinian war that's going on right now, which is kind of bad. But, like, broadly speaking, I'm not sure how much that affects the Middle east as much as, like, the Collapse of Syria. 2013 Syrian civil war sent millions immigrants.

Throughout all of Europe, which is under.

Which was under Obama and continued under Trump. Trump didn't do anything to alleviate any of the Syrian civil war.

Why did Syria end up as a preserve of Russia?

Again, how did Syria end up as a preserve of Russia?

Yes, why did it end up being essentially a client state of Russia?

I know that Putin enjoys access to the ports down there. I don't know you.

I mean, the reason is because Barack Obama suggested that there was a red line that would be drawn in the face of chemical weapons use. Bashar Assad then used chemical weapons in Syria, and Barack Obama was unwilling to then essentially create consequences for Syria in the form of any sort of Western strike. And so instead he outsourced it to Russia. This is 2013, 2014.

Sure. Do you think there might have been some hesitancy after, like, seeing how Libya ended up, that maybe us, like, intervening.

Was president during Libya?

Obama?

Yeah. I mean, like, so.

But what does that have to do with anything, though? I'm just, like, there might have been, like, a mistake learned.

The point that I'm making is that actually the Middle East, I mean, just historically speaking, was historically good under Donald Trump. I mean, it's very difficult to make the case that either before or after Trump were better than during Donald Trump.

I don't think that Trump contributed to the Syrian situation improving much.

He did wreck isis, which was in the.

I mean, ISIS had been getting wrecked by the Kurds in Iraq, by every single person, by Assad's army, by Putin, by Turkey. Literally everybody was fighting against ISIS at that point.

There's a spike in violence and then the trumpet. I mean. I mean, you get credit for when you're president, presumably. I mean, things got better with ISIS under Trump.

I mean. Yeah, they did.

I mean, things got worse with ISIS under Obama, for sure. He called them the JV Squad.

Sure.

And then they became not the JV Squad.

Yeah. But I don't know if ISIS is originating in Syria and Baghdadi and all of the growth of that is necessarily Obama's fault. I know that we like to say that Obama created isis. I don't know if you say that, but I've heard that saying a lot. I think that's a little bit simplistic. I don't think that when I'm looking at like actions that presidents have taken. The, the big, the biggest criticism I have for like Middle Eastern policy is I think the Doha Accords were a disaster. And I think that's like one of the biggest blemishes that we have right now. I would also argue that moving the embassy to Jerusalem was also kind of silly and arguably contributed to some of the conflict we see right now.

I'll argue precisely the opposite, especially given the fact that after the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords continued to sign and actually expand, expand. And that if Donald Trump had been elected, I have no doubt in my mind that Saudi Arabia would now be a part of the Abraham Accords. In fact, that was basically pre negotiated. And then when Joe Biden took office, Joe Biden took a very anti Saudi stance on a wide variety of issues. The, the biggest single effect in the Middle east of Joe Biden's presidency. And again, I agree with you that not every foreign policy issue can be laid at the hands of a president. Joe Biden's main approach to the Middle east was very similar to the Obama approach, which is why the Middle east was chaotic under Obama and chaotic under Biden Biden and that was to alienate allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel and instead to try to make common cause or cut deals with Iran. What that did is incentivize terrorism from Iran. What we're watching in the Middle east is Iran attempting to use every one of its terror proxies in the Middle East. And it was specifically launched in an attempt to avoid what Biden actually was trying to do, which was good. Which was after two years of failure with Saudi Arabia, tried to bring them into the Abraham Accords. Right. That was what was burgeoning at the end of, at the end of last year. And Iran saw that and Iran decided that they were going to throw a grenade into the middle of those negotiations by essentially activating Hamas. Hamas activates. Hamas commits October 7th. Israel as a sovereign nation state has to respond to the murder of 1200 of its citizens and the taken kidnapping of 240. Israel has to do that not only to go after its own hostages and try to restore them, but also to re establish military deterrence in the most violent region of the world. Hezbollah gets active on Israel's northern border. Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy. They get active on the northern border. The Houthis in Yemen get active. These are all. The only reason all this is happening at the same time is because Iran is doing this Right. But not just that they are threatening global shipping. Sure, if you're talking about the effects of global supply lines, which I totally agree had a major inflationary effect on the economy, thanks to Covid, right now the cost of shipping is nearly double what it was just a few weeks ago. And that is because a ragtag group of Houthi barbarians are attacking international shipping and forcing everybody to stop using the Babel Mountains freight instead going around the cap shape of Good Hope in. In Africa. All of that is the result of the fact that Joe Biden reoriented the United States in the very early days in favor of a more pro Iranian stance. He appointed Robert Malley to negotiate the Iran deal, who, as it turns out, was using proxies. Many of his aides were actually taking money from Iran. The. The. The Biden administration, literally one of their first acts was to delist the Houthis as a terror organization and end sanctions against the Houthis. These are all mutual.