 There are really only three things you have to do to not be permanently poor in the United States. Don't have kids before you get married, graduate high school, get a job. What's the worst thing he's done? The polarization of the country. Do you think he's a racist? I don't know that he is a racist on a personal level because I'm always hesitant. It's the worst thing you can call someone in American life, so I'm always hesitant to throw around that label. Is it great for the country to have 10 million people with fifth grade education coming in? Or is it better for the country to have 10 million people with college education coming in? I always think of what Albert Einstein said. The thing about smart people is they seem crazy to stupid people. I got this book of the day I want to recommend to you and it's a political book and I never thought to ask you all the time I've known you. Are you Republican or Democrat? I can't believe I've never even wondered. You know what? I don't like to talk politics too much. I try to stay out of that controversy, you know? It's a little controversial. I wonder who's here. Let's go check it out. Maybe a neighbor coming to get some sugar. Speaking of controversy, Ben Shapiro from the Ben Shapiro Show. One of the most listened to political commentators, editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, and we're talking about what's wrong with America and hopefully we'll find some things that are right. There's a lot right in America. I don't know what you can talk about that's wrong with America when you're sitting in this house. When you're sitting in this house, okay. One of the most controversial people in history without a doubt is Donald Trump. We'll get into, you've told me things you like about Donald Trump and you don't, but let's start out. What's wrong with the current presidency? Well, I mean, first of all, there's the institution of the presidency. The president should not have this much power. This is Strunder W. This is Strunder Obama. It's Strunder Trump. What I would love is a situation where we wouldn't actually care who's the president all that much. I would say this to people who I know who voted for Hillary and they're just really upset that Trump is president. And I say, well now you know how I felt when Obama was president and I hated that. You know what would be awesome is if we didn't care who was the president because the president didn't control our lives, didn't have anything to do with us. Basically the president sat there and made sure we weren't attacked and that was most of his job. So I think the, you know, the first thing. Made sure we weren't attacked. So he was like the defensive commander-in-chief. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean that's really, I think, the main function of the federal government. I think most of what the federal government does other than that ought to be devolved down to the state or local level. I think that the president says a lot of things that he ought not say. I think that the president. What's the most egregious thing you've seen him say? A tweet. Well, I mean, let's see. There's the, during the campaign or as president in the last three years. So during the campaign, what made me, I didn't vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton. What got me off the Trump train, so to speak, was when he was in that interview with Jake Tapper and Tapper asked him to denounce the KKK and he pretended he didn't know what the KKK was. That one to me was really egregious. The KKK is a racist? I don't know that he is a racist on a personal level because I'm always hesitant. It's the worst thing you can call someone in American life. I'm always hesitant to throw around that label. I will say that he has said things that I think are racist in the past, but I think that what the media have then done is they say he's a racist, that they can take a bunch of stuff he says that may not be racist and then claim that that stuff is also racist. So for example, they'll say, you know, he said something terrible about Charlottesville, which is true, right? When he said that there were good people marching with the white supremacist in Charlottesville, I mean, that's bad stuff. But when he says, for example, that he wants to restrict immigration, well, that may not be racist. That may just be his immigration policy. And I think what the media do is they say he's racist. Therefore, everything that he says must be racist. And I think that that's an exaggeration and unproductive, not useful. So now that Trump is in office, has been in office, is it worse or better than you expected? So in some ways, I think it's worse. In some ways, I think it's better. So in terms of being conservative, he's better in terms of policy than I would have thought. So I thought that he campaigned on an almost apolitical basis. He was all over the place on policy. He didn't know where he was. He's governed very conservative. He's governed a lot like a typical Republican, which is fine with me. But in some ways, all of the doubts that I had about his character, his divisiveness, those have been justified, I think. You look at some of the things that he says, and it's hard to say that this has been great for the country, what he's saying, even if I like a lot of the stuff that he's doing. What do you think is the best thing he's done? Well, I mean, from a conservative perspective, appointing Justice Gorsuch, I think was really good. The tax cuts, I think, are really good. I think the cutting regulations is really good. Again, a lot of his policy I agree with. What's the worst thing he's done? The polarization of the country, the comments about Charlottesville, some of the comments that he just made about immigration. The problem for President Trump is that even if you think his intentions are good, he's so bad about how he expresses himself, that you very often end up in a situation where it's a Rorschach test. Do you think that he's evidencing bad intentions? Is he saying something that's nasty? Or is he just saying something that's dumb and it's being misconstrued? And you don't really know. I'm not sure that sometimes he really knows, and that's a problem. One of my mentors, Joe Salatin, used to say they're dumb like a fox, meaning they appear to be dumb, they do something outrageous, but then a month later, a year later, you realize, wait a second, that worked out for them. Do you think when Trump's accused of being dumb, oh, look, he tweets this, this isn't how you handle this, do you think he's dumb like a fox, or he's just literally lacking in mental acuity? Well, I mean, I wouldn't put him on the upper end of the IQ bracket. I've been pretty clear about that. So you don't think, even though he says he's a genius, you don't buy it? I don't think he's a stable genius. I do think that he is somebody who has a sort of root level understanding and reaction to things that mirrors what a lot of people believe. And that's where he's, I think, on his most solid footing. People sort of have a gut reaction to events, and he does a good job of mirroring what those gut reactions are. And the president started commenting on immigration from Africa, and that's when he used those sickening, heartbreaking remarks saying those shitholes send us the people that they don't want. He repeated that. He didn't just say it one time. Now, if Donald Trump, we don't know what he said, but if he said these are shithole countries, whether, I think I read an article that it was Haiti or somewhere else, do you see any truth to that? There are countries that are shitholes. I mean, I'm not going to pretend that Afghanistan is like a great place to live. But that's just silly. I think we should all be able to grant two things. One, certain countries are shitholes. Two, it is bigoted to suggest that people from those countries cannot become good American citizens. Those are two separate questions. In fact, the vast majority of American citizens, at one point or another, have come from shitholes. The people who were coming over during the Irish potato famine weren't exactly coming over from a place that was wonderful. They were coming from a place that was pretty garbage-y, and they were coming here and making the country better. The people who were coming, my ancestors, coming over from Lithuania and Russia, they were coming from places that were kind of garbage-y, and they were coming here and making the country better. That's the problem that I have. When people go crazy over, he said, shithole countries, it's like, okay, come on. You call your friends apart from the shithole. That's not really the problem here. The problem is that you're saying or seem to be saying that maybe if you're coming from Haiti that you're incapable of becoming a good American citizen, which is absurd. Of course, that's crazy and stupid. I think there is a read where what Trump was actually talking about is the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, and what he was actually saying is, if all we're looking at is the country you're coming from, not you as an individual, not a merit-based system, but we're just going to say, you can take 10 immigrants from Haiti or you can take 10 immigrants from Britain, which 10 immigrants are more likely to assimilate to American moors. On that level, it's probably true that if you take 10 immigrants from Britain, they speak English already. I mean, they speak English and Haiti as well, but let's take Britain and Russia, for example, so you only get the race component, right? So if you're going to take 10 citizens from Britain and 10 citizens from Russia, you take the ones from Britain because it's easier for them to assimilate than the people from Russia. That's probably true, but if what he meant was, I don't want to take anybody from Russia because people from Russia are crappy and that's why Russia is crappy. I don't want to take people from Haiti because Haiti is crappy because the people there are crappy. That seems to be absurd. Yeah. So, okay. Let's take this a little step further. The wall. You got, what's this, half of America is like, yeah, I think we should have a wall and Mexicans and other people shouldn't be able to get in very easily. Let's pretend the wall worked. Let's not argue the merits of whether a wall actually, I have a wall actually around my house and it works sometimes, although a couple of weeks ago, a guy jumped over the wall and broke into my house and he went to jail for Grand Theft Auto for trying to break, he got into my kitchen, I was out of town and he packed himself a sandwich and nuts. He got in water bottles and coconut water and he packed it in the Maserati and he opened the garage and he backed out and he couldn't forget how to open the gate and eight policemen came with guns. So, walls don't always work, but they work sometimes because I close the wall and people don't come in. So, if the wall worked perfectly, is there anything wrong in your opinion with a wall between Mexico and the United States? No. I mean, I think that a country has to decide who its citizens are going to be and people who don't get to come in. Now, on immigration, I'm actually libertarian, meaning if there weren't a welfare system, if there weren't a question of who we're voting, if there was just a question of people coming here to work, I don't care if you come in to work, I'll power to you. I'm perfectly libertarian in terms of free flow of labor. So, you're saying if we got rid of welfare, we didn't have to support people. You'd be like, come in and the best people stay, merit-based, and if you can't make enough money, you go back to where you're from. I mean, that's how immigration worked at the beginning of the 20th century. The year that my great-grandfather got here in 1907, there were, I think, 1.2 million people who immigrated to the United States, mostly from Europe, and everybody integrated, it was fine, it took a generation, and that's because the quality of immigration is largely dependent on the quality of the system you're immigrating to. So, if you're immigrating to a system where you are expected to work, there's not gonna be a handout, there's not gonna be a handout, you're on your own. The people who decide to leave a place where they have stuff, to come to a place where they have nothing, and they're offered nothing, that's gonna be a very interesting group of people. And that's why the United States, really, throughout history, has thrived because of immigrants, because the people who are leaving their countries are not necessarily representative of those countries. They're people who are very often the best and the brightest and most entrepreneurial exactly, and they're coming here for that. So, if in my best of all possible worlds, I have a completely open border and no welfare system, and at least not a federal welfare system, and as far as voting goes, you earn citizenship, right? You earn your way in, basically. And that would be fine with me, but we have welfare, we have cultural differences, people come in, they may expect welfare, or they may expect that they're gonna be taken care of by the government, or they may be bringing biases from the countries they come from, the culture that they live with, and that's going to change the nature of the country that you live in. And so that means that you as a society have to determine who's good for the country and who's bad for the country, right? Is it great for the country to have 10 million people with fifth grade education coming in, or is it better for the country to have 10 million people with college education coming in? And so you have to make those decisions. And that's not a moral decision. Sometimes, sometimes it is, right? You don't want criminals coming in. But a lot of the time, that's an economic decision. Are these people who are going to take out of the system or people who are gonna contribute to the system? Yeah, it seems, you know, so much as I just go through life, my advice to myself at 19 would be like, most things are common sense. It's like, do you wanna have Pablo Escobar's coming into the United States? Well, we tried this. Fidel Castro let a whole bunch of people out of Cuba in the 1980s out of prison, and Miami's crime rate went through the roof instantly. This one woman came with a machine gun and started shooting people in nightclub lines. You ever seen that? She shot a whole bunch of, she was from a Cuban prison. So common sense, you let those kind of people, crime goes up. Common sense is, and I've always thought, we have technology, we can screen people. There's massive amount of data on how to do psychological tests that wouldn't be 100% accurate, but would be able to find good people from everywhere in the world and let them in. Because common sense to me, how do you build a company? And this is, I'll go out on a limb. This is my out on a limb political theory. Okay, we start buying people's passports and sending them to France. The France doesn't like America. So basically we take all the non-productive people and we say, I'll give you a hundred grand and a plane ticket to France. And then we find anybody anywhere in the world who's just good people. And we all kind of common sense know what good people are. And we pay them and buy them a house in the United States. Maybe not pay them and buy them a house, but we buy them a ticket here because that's how you build a good company. You know how Steve Jobs built a good company? He found a good programmer over at Google or at Microsoft and he'd pay a headhunter to go poach him. He'd be like, pay that guy. Right now they're poaching people. Google and Facebook million bucks signing bonus. I'm like, why don't we take a book from business which is kind of common sense. If you're dragging down America and you're going to cost America a million bucks, be like, here's a hundred G's cash, a sack and an American airline. And we send them to all of our enemies. Whoever's your enemy, you flood them. Not the Fidel Castro did. So I read an interesting book and I want to switch a little bit over to race because we're talking about tribalism and nothing's more tribal. And so I'm somebody that's every, I'm basically, I did my 23 and me DNA test. I'm almost every ethnicity. I've decided I can make fun of everybody except Asians and Middle Eastern people. I'm 0% Asian, 0% Middle Eastern. I'm German, I'm Jewish. I'm 6% African. So I got all of Native American. So I can, I don't have to tread too lightly on this. Let's just be blunt about it. R, I think everybody who's saying agrees it has nothing to do with melanin in your skin. Black people, Latin people have more melanin because they came from parts of the world where if you basically get vitamin D poisoning if you didn't protect yourself, a lot of sun. But is it, so I don't think there's anything on a DNA level, a level really different between ethnicities besides some minor aesthetic things. But are the cultures different in terms of, is, so my last name's Lopez. Are Latins holding themselves back by how they, by how their general cultural and world view is? Or I'm a 6% black. I'm not really that black, but are black people. Because if we look in the inner cities, my dad's from Harlem, okay, it's basically black people and Latin Americans for the most part. Are we, or is my group of people, are we the sowing the own seeds of our own disaster? I mean, if there's a disproportionate number of people in a particular group who are not succeeding for any reason, one of the things that you obviously have to look at is the culture in which people are growing up. And that doesn't have to do as you say with race. It can have to do with location, right? There are places in Appalachia where there are a bunch of white people and they're really not succeeding. They're really doing poorly because there are cultural differences between Appalachia and other aspects of white America, right? You can do this in Los Angeles. Just drive to different areas with the same ethnicity and you'll see that people living in one area may differ from people in another area. The question really has to do with what is the, what are the cultural obstacles preventing your individual success? And I think there are cultural obstacles that differ based on less race than the community. You mentioned having kids before your marriage. That's an obvious one. And that's been growing in every ethnic group, right? So the fact is that in 1960, 20% of black kids in the United States were born out of wedlock. Today, it's over 70% of black kids are born out of wedlock. The single greatest intergenerational predictor of poverty is being born into single motherhood. That's not suggesting that you can't succeed if you have a single mom. I was born a single mom. You're an obvious example. But it is an obstacle that you have to overcome that you don't have to overcome if mom and dad got married. And that means that you can't do anything about how you were born, but you can do something about how your kid is born. And that means that you should get married, presumably, before you have children. Again, that's not unique to the black community. You see in the white community, the single motherhood rate used to be 5%. Now it's 40%. So it's rapidly increased. That is not, I think, good for children, I think, overall. And that's an obstacle that you have to overcome. But how do you fix it? How do we fix it? This is hard. You know, but this is one area where I actually don't think it is, meaning that this is the idea that you just have to get married before you put that thing there without that thing on it, right? Like, just don't do that. Like, this is where it comes down to individual agency. Don't have unprotected sex if you're not going to get married to the person that you're having unprotected sex to. Like, I don't think this is too much to ask. Now, I understand. I hold myself to a certain moral standard. I'm an Orthodox Jew. I was a virgin until I was married, right? It's a standard that I think worked, obviously. I've been married for almost 10 years now. I have two kids under the age of four and we're doing great. But the idea that there's something preventing you, society is preventing you somehow from making this very personal decision. Unless you were raped and had a kid, right, which is a horrific situation, obviously. But if you were just having consensual sex if someone got pregnant and had a baby, then I'm not sure how that's anybody else's fault except for the two people who are involved with that situation. And the only way to solve that is to have people make more responsible decisions. I mean, just who's fault is it if you don't save for your retirement? It's your fault if you don't save for your retirement, right? It's your money. What did you do with the money, right? I think that the more we devolve agency to the individual, the more we say, listen, make good choices. You, personally, right? Forget about culture. Forget about what society says for you. Make decisions that are going to make your life better. The more people will do it, and the better they'll do. I think saying that these decisions are difficult actually does a disservice to people. I don't think it's a difficult decision to do that. Oh, I got to interrupt you. Oh, wow. It's somebody's birthday. Wow. Here to interrupt this conversation about racism. Oh my, I said. I'm a lighter now. Well, thank you. Oh, hey, let's stop that. Wait, Maya, do that. Wow, I'm especially too old for that. Here, Ben, can you look? Hey, and I got this made, so. Oops. It's going to burn out. Oh, yeah, no worries. This is it. Ben Shapiro here on the show. And look, we're talking about politics and racism, and Maya is breaking it up with it's a birthday. Wow. Okay. Boom. It's on fire. Woo. Happy 21st birthday. Wow. There you go. We do want a piece. Everybody wants to stop. So do you. To the end. Happy birthday dear Vera. Oh, I'm not going to sing on camera. Happy birthday dear Vera. I have to admit, this is not how it's how my birthday goes. There you go. Well, that was, that was, that was good. People said, haha. Somebody said happy birthday to you. Um, okay. So this person, she says, I'm a single mother. I don't think one could choose it even if one gets married. The divorce rate is as high. So what she's saying, Candace Hoskins is saying, you're right. You should be married, but half the people get married, end up divorced or more. So it's, you're back to being a single. My mom was, so my mom was a single mom, but she was married when I was born. And then they were divorced. So I ended up a single. Do you think divorce is just as big a problem as kids out of wedlock? Well, I mean, statistically speaking, it is not, but the, but I think that we have also changed our definition of what marriage is for. And I think that this has a serious ramification for the society. I think that, you know, when you get married, and I'll put it in sort of my traditional religious context, when you get married in traditionally religious circle, the whole point of getting married is the production and rearing of children. It's, it's, which is why arranged marriages are still a big thing in many parts of the world, which is not a good thing, but it is a thing. And I think the reason for that is because the focus of marriage was having kids and raising the kids. And now the focus of marriage has basically been the same as the focus of living together. Are you in love with the person? Do you love the person? Do you find companionship with the person? And you can do all those things without getting married, right? The whole point of getting married, the reason society has an interest in marriage at all is to make sure that there's a mom and a dad in the home. And this is particularly true for teenage boys, right? Teenage boys without a dad who's present all the time. I mean, I was a teenage boy. Boys tend to, you know, they, they tend to either create or destroy. And without some sort of militating influence against what I think the left would call toxic masculinity, right? Men tend to be, tend to lose their boundaries. So yeah, divorce is a major problem. I think it's a separate problem from single motherhood, but I think that has to do with how we perceive marriage. If you think of marriage, this is now dating advice. But I think that, you know, my dating advice to everybody is find out the val-, if you're dating for marriage, find out the values of the person that you are dating more than common interests. Whether you like the same movies matters almost not at all. But what does matter is do you have the same aspirations for your kids? Do you want to bring your kids up in the same way? Do you, what kind of community do you want to live in? How do you want your life together to be? And people don't even talk about these things. They just sort of fall into a relationship, live with someone for two years, and then after two years, you know, I guess we probably have to get married now and then they get married, and then it falls apart. Literally on my first date with my wife, you know, this is not typical, but on my first date with my wife, we talked about free will and determinism. Really? Yeah, because the idea was- Quite a wife you have. Oh, she's- I once went on a date with a girl in LA and I said, I have to go to Miami and she goes, what's that? I said, Miami, the city. She goes, I've heard of that before. Isn't that in Northern California? And now you've been married for five years. So that's a good- If your prospective future wife asks you about free will and determinism, this is much better than if your first date goes, where's a large city? I've never heard of it. I'm a businessman. Over time, you do enough deals, even if you do them wrong, you gain some street smarts. Oh yeah. Would you say, because like I said, I'm not super political, but he's somewhat street smart. I mean, that's hard to argue. A hundred percent. I mean, he is a genius for branding. He's great at branding, and he knows how his brand is going to play, and that's where he's at his best. When it comes to actually understanding policy, that's a whole different game. So I think that he's good at pushing the idea of Donald Trump, but I think that once you get into politics, and people actually expect you to deliver for them, as opposed to delivering on an investment or delivering on putting your name on a hotel, then people are more deeply invested on an emotional level with what you do. And I think that that's something he still hasn't conquered. Yeah. It's funny. It's almost like, and I notice, so I want to throw out a controversial thought I have. It's not super controversial, but so I live with the Amish. I've done many experiments in life. So I live with the Amish for two and a half years when I was in my early 20s. Why? I never became Amish. I just wanted to see what the world was like a hundred years ago, and they're still living. They have intact family, zero divorce, basically zero crime. They're happy people. And one of the things they do in their church, they basically believe like Christians, you know, they have, you can't aspire to be the preacher or the minister. So the way they do it is basically they draw lots. They draw straws. And so a person who could be the most humble, introverted person can become almost the leader of the community. Do you think there's maybe an inherently flawed, the methodology that we use to select presidents and senators, doesn't it draw a certain sort of narcissism, a certain Machiavellianism, a certain hunger for power that basically half the time like you, when I look who's running, I'm like, are these the two best choices in 330 million person country? Do you think there is a problem in how we select? There be a different selection. I know this is going deeper. What do you think? I mean, I'm not sure that there's a way to necessarily avoid ambition unless you're going to do something like the system you're talking about. You're going to randomly select your leadership. But I think that if we're going to be in a representative system, a system where we actually vote for people, the most ambitious people are going to be the ones who run. And the founding fathers were pretty clear about this. When you read the Federalist Papers, they were very open about the idea that ambition was going to be there. This is why they suggested checks and balances and a small government ambition counteracting ambition. I think one of the big problems now is that the government has become so big and so unwieldy and the executive branch particularly has so much power that we almost have an elected king who comes along every four years since regulatory policy and nobody cares what Congress is doing. When's the last time there was a headline about Congress? It's all about what Trump is doing or what Obama was doing before that or what W is doing before that. And so we tend to think of who do we want to be king? And if we want somebody to be king, very often it's going to be a celebrity. It's somebody whose name you already know. The fact is that George W. Bush was already a well-known name by the time that he ran in 2000. Barack Obama had already become well-known after the 2004 convention. Obviously, Trump was incredibly well-known by the time that he ran. It's been a very long time actually since we've had a president elected who was essentially a nobody until they sort of rose on the public scene. Do you think that's because of the rise of just mass media? It's just, psychologists call this the availability bias. You're more likely to choose something that you've seen a lot. So maybe it's a new problem. The founding fathers didn't necessarily have to deal with that. Although I was reading a book about 1840s when you had, you know, America was in the Mexican-American war. And it was war heroes then. They were kind of the celebrities of the day. Do you think it would be better if we had war heroes? I don't know. I mean, it depends on who the war is. Versus the apprentice hero or something like that. I mean, hopefully, the reason there were so many war heroes is because we were in a lot of wars. But I think that the level of celebrity you're right was really connected to your performance in a war and you're right, basically from after Martin Van Buren all the way to Lincoln. You get a bunch of generals. And then after the Civil War, you also get a bunch of people who served in the USES grant, for example. So yeah, celebrity's always been connected with it. The question is, when did it start to matter? Because it was one thing to say, okay, we're going to elect the most well-known person for president when the federal government was tiny and didn't bother you. It's another thing when it's somebody who has no experience but is a celebrity and now they're running the most powerful government in the history of mankind that has the capacity to take all of your wealth and regulate you out of existence. Now, should we elect the most qualified person or should we elect the celebrity? And the founders, George Washington was a celebrity in his time. I mean, the idea that celebrity was absent from politics is not true, but it didn't have as much of an impact on us because the government just wasn't big enough for it to have that much of an impact on us. Here's an interesting question. Somebody, Fred, says, he thinks what's wrong with America, too many people with the 1950s mindset. Now, you could take that a lot of ways. I don't know, Fred, the background, but you could take that, talking about racism. You can take that 1950s, a little bit of a warmongering time. We're coming with Korea transitioning to Vietnam. Do you think it's wise, because I feel like we look back at the past and we become sentimental and nostalgic about those were the good old days. Is there a time in history, in the year 1776 to today, that those were the good old days? No, I mean, I think that if, look, if you had to choose a time to be dropped into history, there's no question you choose to be dropped right now. Politically, let's say politically. Let's say you could have penicillin and you could have, what political time do you think was the healthiest in the, was it George Washington? Where do you think it was? I think you'd have to take it along different lines, because obviously you can't say George Washington or you're saying okay to slavery, right? And you can't say in 1950s you're saying okay to Jim Crow and women not in the workplace. So what you have to do, I think, and this is what we try to do in politics, is to try and take the best of the past and then merge it with the best of what's going on now. And so what you would say about the 1950s is, yes, the 1950s, no one wants the racism, no one wants the Jim Crow, nobody wants the sexism. But what we do want from the 1950s is the sense of national unity, the sense of national purpose, the economic growth curve, the idea that we all shared a common social fabric or at least we should have, right? It wasn't extended far enough, it should have been extended to minorities and women, but the idea that America had a moral goal in the world and I think that's fallen away a little bit. I think that we've lost our purpose as a nation and that's, I think, a dangerous thing. I think any nation that feels that it loses its purpose, you're in trouble. What was best politically, what would you take from the 17 or 1800s and apply to today? Well, a small government I would take from the 17 or 1800s. I mean, when the federal government was originally launched, remember the Constitution was controversial, right? This is why you have the federalist papers. The articles of confederacy were less controversial and it almost created an anarchic system. I like the idea of having a federal government that does nearly nothing. I don't like the idea of people in Washington D.C. having all this power. If I want to do something on a local level with my community, that's my job. But the idea that people 3,000 miles away who don't know anything about me, have never heard of me, don't know the names of my kids, those people are making those decisions, that I despise. I really hate that a lot. Yeah. My mentor, my first mentor, Joel Salatin, is, he called himself a libertarian. I don't think he necessarily wanted to vote for the last libertarian candidate. But he basically said, he thought it was simple. He said, look, and I had an economics professor who said the same thing. Anytime you have a complicated problem, shrink it down to a real-life situation. So if you're trying to decide what restaurant you want to go eat at, does it make sense to call your friend who lives in Cambodia and knows nothing about Los Angeles or do you want to call somebody who lives in Los Angeles and be like, what's the best sushi restaurant? So he says, when it comes to curriculums of schools, can we really nationalize them? I mean, you could play devil's advocate and say, what you need to learn in Missouri, you need to learn here. So I want to play both sides of this. What are the things, because I'm kind of on your train that state, local make sense. What are the things, though, that should be run by a federal, a national government? There has to be something. Military, you said. Yeah, the military is the most obvious. What else? Nothing. Nothing. I mean, pretty much nothing. I mean, I think that the, because I think that most of the problems that we're talking about are not solved by the federal government. They're solved by individuals. I mean, if you're talking about local education, for example, let's say that you have a state or a local, thank you, let's say that you have a state or a local that is teaching stuff that you think is wrong. Well, you as a parent, it's your job then to presumably pick up your kids and move somewhere where it's better. It shouldn't be a top-down structure. It should be, I don't like it here. I'm moving. Or my friends and I are forming our own school. The idea is that, the real truth is that educational failures, statistically speaking, tend less to be about the educational system than they tend to be about the presence of parents in the home, how much focus the family is putting on education, which is why you see certain immigrant groups really outperforming based on how these immigrant groups treat education. So, Korean populations coming to the United States spend an awful lot of time focusing on education. The Jewish population, when it first came to the United States, it's really fascinating when you look at the IQ studies. When European Jews first came to the United States, they scored significantly lower on IQ tests than the rest of the general population. And within a generation, they were scoring a standard deviation higher, which shows number one malleability of IQ. But second of all, it's because European Jews actually cared a lot about learning and education and growth that way. The point is that the decisions that you make on a daily basis are the ones that are going to change your life. And looking at the federal government to fix your problems is not only rarely a solution, it's usually more of a problem. They're taking power from you supposedly to help you. You're better off, in my view, keeping that power to yourself if you can get it. Localism, I think, is more of a solution than the national government stepping in. Look, there are federal rights that have to be protected. So for example, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution suggests that due process of law and equal protection of the laws is something that has to be protected by the federal government. So if a state decides, we're just not going to let black people vote, then the federal government has to come in and stop that, obviously, under the Constitution. But those roles are incredibly limited. And I think that the stuff the federal government does now, they're regulating how much water goes through your toilet. I mean, it's crazy. I talk a lot about what's wrong with the education system. And one of the things that I think is wrong with the education system, I'm interested in cryptocurrencies, but also the blockchain, which is really a tool to decentralize things. And Joel Salatin, my first mentor, said, we have the same education system. If you got a time machine, went back to pre-Germany, Otto von Bismarck, late 1800s. They were teaching a system that created robots and created soldiers. And that's what they wanted people who obey. Everything else has gotten better. You don't travel by steam engine anymore. You don't put leeches on your body if you're sick. We have penicillin. But if you go in the classroom, it basically hasn't changed. And part of the problem, Joel Salatin told me, is a few bureaucrats in Washington DC decide what you need to learn. Well, do we need to only learn what the hypotenuse of a triangle is in the year 2018? What about learning how to use Excel? Learning how to buy a house? What's your take on education and what's wrong in America? So I think that the biggest thing that's wrong with education, I agree, is a certain level of centralized control. I skipped a couple of grades when I was growing up because the system couldn't handle me being in a particular grade. So I had to end around the system. And it was only because I had a principal who didn't care about ending around the system. I was able to do that. I was in public school when I was in third grade and she said, you're beyond this, skip third grade. But we had to game the system basically in order to do that. I think that there's no reason why education has to be done the way that it's done. I mean, everything is so decentralized now. We should be able to personalize educational programs to nearly every kid. Now, you don't necessarily have to do it in kids five. In kids five, you still have to learn how to read. You still have to do basic arithmetic. But by the time the kid's 11 or 12 years old, the idea that everybody has to be learning exactly the same thing is really stupid. And then the idea that everybody has to go to college, regardless of what your major is, is also incredibly stupid. My wife had to go to college because she's a doctor. So she was actually studying actual things in college. I had a poly-sci major at UCLA. You're telling me I couldn't have gone straight to Harvard Law School and studied law. I needed those four years of learning nonsense and poly-sci and just going into debt in order to do that. The idea that... So in hindsight, would you have skipped, right, and gone straight to law school? Yeah, I mean, frankly, I think that law school should be skipped and you should go straight to an apprenticeship. I think that actually is the way people used to get jobs. I mean, you know, once you have a job, the way people do their jobs, they actually go into work at a job for a year. And that's how you get good at the job. No one is qualified coming out of college for anything. I agree with that. You're pretty much useless coming out of college. Yes. So far, I have all the people I've hired in over 10 decade plus never hired someone competent on day one ever. And I wasn't competent on day one. Humans learn... I just read an interesting piece of research that says, you know, one of the problems in schools is you're primarily being taught by what they call the tutorial method, like somebody preaching at you. Matt. And they said what people learn better through is some mixture of kinesthetic learning and kind of case studies. So like bringing it, like you said, personalized down to that student's learning methodology, not just preaching at them. And the way we do it, fascinatingly enough, is only 15% of people learn the way that all school classrooms are set up right now. So we're basically doing something that we know fails for 85% of people. It's mind blowing. I mean, I think what you were saying originally is exactly right. If you look at how the educational system was structured, it was structured to make workers for factories. It was structured to make workers for particular businesses. And that's not what we're into anymore. I mean, since I graduated from law school, from 2007 to 2018, I've been in six, seven different jobs. The days when you were at one job forever are just gone. My grandparents working at a place for 50 years. No one's ever going to work at a place for 50 years. First of all, the company that you're adding can be around for 50 years in all likelihood. The turnover on the Fortune 500 is incredibly high. So you better be constantly increasing your skill set and learning new skills. I mean, you're great about this, but I mean, learning is a lifelong process. And if you're not deepening that, then you become useless in the marketplace pretty quickly. So let's talk about politics. Let's just talk about Ben Shapiro the human. Forget politics. Some people debate that. What do they call you, robot? Yeah, I get a lot of that, yeah. Well, I always think of what Albert Einstein said. The thing about smart people is they seem crazy to stupid people. So you can sometimes say that. What, like, let's take us back. So you grew up with your parents' orthodox? So my whole family became orthodox when I was 11. So I do remember eating at like Kentucky Fried Chicken in McDonald's. Really? Yeah. So they were Jewish, but just kind of... More secular, and then they sort of moved to the orthodox. What made them change? So my parents went to a congregation down in, actually in Venice Beach. Okay. And my dad was always sort of connected to the Jewish heritage. And I think because he was connected to Jewish heritage, he became more interested in Jewish lifestyles. He was brought into the synagogue and started practicing Sabbath with my mom. And it sort of grew from there. So it's religious, not conversion, moving toward religion, very often is experiential more than intellectual for people. And I think that's probably true for my parents. Yeah. So now you've grown up, went to school, did kind of the college thing. Now you're an entrepreneur. You've got, you know, your shows. Let's talk about business. What have you learned in business? What's the number one thing if you could go back? When did you really start in terms of the business of talking about politics? How long ago? I mean, I've been writing about politics as a pundit since I was 17. Yeah. So I've been, so literally now half my life, I've been doing this. But as far as kind of running businesses and all of that, last five years basically. So if you could go back right now, Time Machine, we're back in 2013. What are you going to tell younger men about running a business profitably? What's the biggest mistake you're like, do not do this? I think forcing it. I mean really, I think that the business opportunities tend to present themselves. And when they do, it's a short window, so you have to jump on them. But very often, what I would do, I know from personal experience, I would have an idea and you know what, this is a great idea and I wouldn't do necessarily proper market research. I wouldn't actually, you know, think through all of the various angles and I would be like, okay, let's do it. Let's do it. Because now's the time to make my money. We're going to go and we're going to do it and force this through. And very rarely does it work that way. Usually it's an opportunity that opens and you just take advantage of the opportunity that's in front of you. And I think that's most of life, actually, is that the opportunity comes along, you have to be able to spot it when it comes. But most of us are so, me for a long time, most of us are so focused on what we want to fail to recognize when the universe is presenting something to us. And I think that if you just leave yourself sort of open to the opportunities that come along, then you jump on the opportunities that do, you're likely to do a lot better. Like the business that we started at Daily Wire, that only came about because my business partner, Jeremy Boring, and I were both fired from 501c3. So being fired was one of the good days of your life then? Oh yeah. I mean, I have a rule in my family. I buy a house, I get a mortgage and then I quit a job. So we weren't fired. So we bought a house. Did your wife check? No, she'd been through it two or three times by that point. So she was used to it. She's like, oh, it's just Ben going through the cycle. Exactly. But because of that, we had proposed a business idea to this 501c3. They rejected it and we said, okay, fine, we're out. And then we took that business idea around in the marketplace, found some investors and in two years have built a website that has 100 million pages a month. Is that what you're at? 100 million. Wow. Congratulations. And that, I would say, we spoke in the bad and no place that I've been is as entrepreneurial in terms of people I meet that just go, okay, I failed here. Pick myself up and start again. Like other countries, like in Europe, for example, bankruptcy is like a, it's like a scarlet letter. If you have one, in America, it's almost a badge of honor to be able to say, ah, bankrupt. And that's some of the good things about America. Don't you wish there, that's what I wish. If I had this machine, if anybody here can design this machine, please let me know. I will invest all my money in it. A machine, it's called the combiner. And it combines the greatest, so let's say you want to marry somebody. You remember being on a date with Susie, Jennifer, and Holly. You take the best out of all three of them. This one had the best personality. This one, you liked how they looked. This one was the nicest and you put them, merge them into one human. We also need that for countries. Because as traveling around the world, I love America. I feel patriotic. But once in a while, I go to certain countries and I was like, I wish we had that in America. So it's like, I'm hoping that even though I think mass media in some ways is the death of the world, it also has this light in that we now learn what they're doing in Scotland and in Manchuria or whatever. You know, there is that kind of thing. What would you combine from outside of the United States? What's another country that you go, yes, we need some of that here? Well, I mean, just because I'm not as familiar with a lot of the countries as you are, I would say the Israeli educational system is quite good. One of the things they do is they track people once you hit 18. So once you hit 16 or 17, they say, what do you want to do? And if you're an engineering track, they put you in an engineering track. You're not going and studying general theory at college. You're already moving along those lines. And I think that is a really good thing. I think that there's a certain sense of citizenry that exists in certain countries. I feel like, again, I'll use Israel as an example. There's a sense of citizenry in the country that people feel like they owe something to the country that I think is not a bad thing. And that's because Israel is constantly under danger and the United States is not under fire ever. So we sort of feel like, okay, we live here, this is where we are, but what do we owe to the country? That's not really in evidence here. I think quite as much. But listen, I think that America is, by most measures, the best thing going. I think there are certain aspects of how government is done in other places. For example, I'm not a big fan of the jury system. I think the European criminal justice system where you actually have a judge, he's a professional judge, who sits there and it's not necessarily a system where you have a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. It's actually just the court trying to get to the truth. I'm not sure that's a worse system than our jury system, for example. But I mean, overall, one of the most powerful country in the history of the planet for a lot of very good reasons, I think. Yeah. Last question, because I know you got to go to your birthday party. And I might have your mortal enemy on after you're gone. The nose is here? We'll see. I might have a surprise besides the birthday party. Oh my goodness. Besides the birthday cake. North Korea. We're going to end on a light note. I'd like to end on a very light note. Let's talk about North Korea and the devastation of the planet Earth. What do you think there's a chance? First of all, is Trump handling it correctly? And is this something we need to be worried about or is it just like the Hawaiian text alert yesterday? That's a false alarm. So I think, I tend to be more sanguine about this than a lot of other people. I know a lot of people are panicking about North Korea. First of all, I don't think that the leadership in North Korea is thinking, oh, Trump tweeted something. I'm in a new gala. If I thought that I'd sold my house a while ago and moved in and the Kim family wants to maintain power. That's pretty much what they want out of life this we know. And they also know that the minute they fire a nuke at anybody, we are going to wipe out their entire country. I mean, they will not only lose their power base, the entire country will basically be a sea of glass. It'll be over for them. So the real danger, I think, is not that. The real danger is their capacity to maintain power over the long haul and keep their gulag going. That's the danger to their own people. If the regime thinks it's going to fall, maybe they fire into soul. But as far as a direct threat to the United States mainland, I'm less worried about that because, again, that's the death certificate for them. I mean, the minute that they fire at anybody. So you think he's logically, obviously he's somewhat crazy, Kim Jong-un, but you think he's logical enough to be able to go at an animal level, me press this button, me die. Yeah, that's right. I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, he's crazy, but I don't think part of his strategy is to appear crazy, frankly. Every time he appears crazy, we give him something. Yes. So this is what his dad did and his grandfather did. So is he dumb like a fox? I think he's crazy like a fox. Crazy like a fox. I've met a few people like that. Okay. So here's the deal. I brought on your, I brought not only a birthday present, Kate for you, but a birthday present. You want to come around this way. I brought your favorite friend here to close up the show. No. Kim, what's up guys? No. Happy birthday. No. For your birthday, I brought on your least favorite person on the planet, Michael. Hey, what's up guys? So I heard there was cake. I heard there was cake for Ben's birthday. And basically my whole strategy in life is for Ben to have a birthday and for me to come eat some cake. For you, that is basically, there's a koi pond right behind you, dude. It's like a James Bond layer. So I'm going to be eaten by koi fish. All right. We might have to separate. Are they going to take him? Um, they might have to separate YouTubers. People are going to end up killing my fish. Those fish have been in there for years. All right. Where can people find you? This bullies, this is one of your best selling books. Yeah, it is. Yeah. What's the best place for those who don't know you? So check us out over at dailywire.com and you can buy a subscription over there. And if you want to check out the podcast, then all the usual places you get podcasts, iTunes, SoundCloud. We're also on YouTube and we have Ben Shapiro. I'm pretty active over there. Happy birthday, my friend. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. We're going to cut the show. Lots for those of you who we didn't get any questions. Um, somebody said his name is Michael Knowles. Somebody said guys, they're actually friends. Thank you for seeing this attire through it. I'm going to walk them out and then I'll be back. Thanks everybody. Ben, sorry, go on, go on his YouTube and comment. Say, Ben, loved your show with Ty. Talk to you soon.