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Adam Carolla Show
Ben Shapiro & Adam Carolla: The War on Common Sense
01:19:38
Welcome to an electrifying conversation between Ben Shapiro and Adam Carolla, where they break down the state of politics, media control, cancel culture, and the shifting Overton Window in America. Highlights from the Discussion: The...
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- [00:00]
Adam Carolla
All right, this show brought to you in part by SimpliSafe.
- [00:03]
Ben Shapiro
If you have 30 minutes, you never have to worry about break ins ever again.
- [00:07]
Adam Carolla
Just go to simplisafe.com Adam get all the sensors you need, all the help you need as well to set it up. Custom system is going to show up post haste@simplisafe.com Adam.
- [00:24]
Dawson
From Ben Shapiro's studio in Florida, this is the Adam Carolla Show. Today, Adam sits down one on one with Ben Shapiro. And now a man who's more likely to create Middle east peace than correctly spell yarmulke, Adam Corolla.
- [00:54]
Adam Carolla
Ben Shapiro, it's great to see you, my friend, Ben Shapiro. Good to see you, brother.
- [01:00]
Ben Shapiro
Good to see you, too.
- [01:02]
Adam Carolla
We're living in interesting times. I want to I'll give you my thought, then you tell me what your thought is. But I remember being interviewed by Tucker Carlson of my warehouse about seven or eight years ago, and he said, when does this all end? And I said, when we stop apologizing. Stop apologizing. When someone accuses you of racism, don't go, I have black friends. Just go, shut up. You're racist. No one's listening to you. And now we're here, right?
- [01:31]
Ben Shapiro
I think that's totally right. I think that what we've seen is the normie revolution. There were weirdos running this place for a really long time with weird ideas like boys can be girls and you can call anybody racist and get what you want out of them. And then it turns out that all the normies kind of got tired of that and we were like, you know what? It's fine for me to just want to have my family and my church and my community and my job. And I don't understand what's bad about that and why I get yelled at about any of those things. And I want to raise my kids to want the same things that I want and why does that make me a bigot in some way? And that's, I think, the real oddity of the situation. And I said this in the run up to the election. I did this debate with Sam Harris on Barry Weiss's podcast for Free Press where Sam just kept saying, well, you know, Trump isn't normal. Trump isn't normal. I said, I think you've got your definition of normal wrong because to you, Joe Biden is normal or Kamala Harris is normal in that they don't tweet weird things. But to the rest of us, what's not normal is the America under Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. It's not normal to have inflation running at 40 year highs. It's not normal to have kids being indoctrinated. They might be a member of the opposite sex. It's not normal to have to think every time you make a remark about job performance, about race, like, none of these things are normal. What actually would be normal are the things that Trump is saying, which are all just kind of baseline common sense things. And yeah, it's in this kind of bizarre package of this garrulous TV host who is uber famous and has been for 50 years. But even that is pretty normal in the sense that like, Donald Trump has been a normalized part of American life since before I was alive. There's nothing sort of abnormal about Donald Trump being at the center of the universe. He has been for 50 years. And so it sort of feels like a restoration of normality. J.D. vance, I think, is almost the avatar of normality. And you're seeing that play out.
- [03:12]
Adam Carolla
I think it was weird that they tried to do the JD Vance weirdo angle early, when I would say he seems like the most normal.
- [03:24]
Ben Shapiro
He might be the most normal political figure that we've seen in a position of high power in two generations. And a guy who grew up in a not well off background who ended up making something of himself, going to the military, going to good school, getting married, having kids, like, that's a pretty non weird background. Religious guy, goes to church, like, what is so weird about that? But I think that to the left, that is weird. The dirty secret is that they actually weren't doing that for sort of public effect. They were doing that because to them it is weird. People who live in the middle of the country are weird. And Barack Obama was saying this sort of stuff in 2008. Everybody ignored it because Obama was such a seminal magical figure. But Obama in 2008, when he was saying, you know, there's a bunch of the country that are just bigger clingers, they're clinging to their guns and their God and their. And their xenophobia, and all this because of fear of change. To him, we all were weirdos. We were strange. And so we look at Tim Walls, we're like, who's this floppy armed goofball who's promoting socialism while his wife sniffs the burning tires from Minneapolis. What the hell is that? And they were like, no, no, no, that's normal. Normal is that you're weird if you think that you shouldn't kneel for George Floyd. That's what makes you weird. And I think it's that culture gap that actually led to Trump, because Trump is. People have. Everyone tries to sort of intuit a philosophy around Trump. What does Trump philosophically mean? What Trump means and has always meant is fuck you. That's all Trump is, right? Trump is a giant orange middle finger to all these people who basically said that if you are a normie, then there's something wrong with you, and that you're a threat to America, you're a threat to the future, and you're probably secretly a bigot who's covering up that bigotry and evil and homophobia with your Bible, and you're wanting to have, like, a normal job.
- [05:03]
Adam Carolla
You know, it's interesting that Hollywood has always been obsessed with the aesthetic. And Trump looks like a Hollywood villain, you know, 80s guy who ran the corporation that polluted the rivers that the Indians had to fight against. You know, he is like an archetype. And Hollywood is so sort of visual and aesthetic and just sort of superficial that they look like they would look at Joe Biden and go, look at that guy. Now, that guy would be cast as the good guy, the uncle who cared about the environment. Joe Biden is a corrupt politician whose family members are grifters who do every single thing that they accuse Trump's family members of, yet comes in a sort of nice package, like a palatable, digestible package. And they all just sort of drift over there, and it's bizarre that they can't see who he is. And then, conversely, who Trump is. Trump is just a dude. He's a commercial developer. He's in a hurry. He wants to get stuff done, and he doesn't like being ripped off well.
- [06:17]
Ben Shapiro
So here's the thing. The Trump aesthetic, which is really fascinating because just from a sort of artistic aesthetic point of view, it's really ugly. Take his hat, okay? So the hat, which is now iconic. When those hats first came out, I remember the first thing that I thought is my family did, like, a family reunion in 1997 in Minneapolis. You go to the Mall of America with your entire extended family, and you yell at each other, and then you go back to the hotel and all the kids are bothering everybody while the parents fall asleep on the couch. And it was those kinds of hats, right? The ones like the foam front and the mesh back, and you've got the little band across the front, and they don't fit your head properly. They kind of pop off your head, so they don't actually fit the shape of your skull. I was like, what are These ugly hats. And then you realize, you know what? Maybe that's what he's going for. Maybe what he's going for is like the family reunion 1997. And you know what? You still kind of have warm feelings that, yeah, it was crazy and okay, but that was total normality. It was your family reunion 1997, Minneapolis. And there's something about that with Trump where, yeah, he's the 1980s villain businessman, but he doesn't read that way. Cause it is an old aesthetic, right? He reads 1980s. That's what he. Or 1970s even. I mean, that's how he reads. And the entire aesthetic of the Republican Party has now been sort of molded to fit that. Right? Everybody sort of dresses that way. Pete Hegseth has the hair slicked back like he's a 1980s corporate guy, right? JD is bringing back beers. These are throwbacks, aesthetically. And meanwhile, the sort of look that the Democrats keep going for is pantsuited Hillary 2016. Right? They just keep going over and over for the guy who is welcome in the faculty lounges and is probably not the person who founded a company, but maybe the person who took over the management of a company after the founder decided to retire because he was too brash and was offending all of the peons. And it turns out America doesn't want. We're kind of unmanageable and we don't really want to be managed. And so what we would prefer is the guy who innovated and started. And that's why I think that you see all these sort of oddball innovator founder types who are now surrounding Trump. I mean, Elon being a perfect example of this.
- [08:10]
Adam Carolla
Do you think that it's going to be impossible for them to pull off what they pulled off just in recent history, like Covid, for instance, where they got hold of the tech Bros and they told them what they could and couldn't print. And people had to be deplatformed and voices had to be silenced. And there wasn't quite enough alternative media people like you and podcasters and folks just with opinions. They had control of the narrative enough that they could tamp down. These people, they did a little whack. A mole. Someone's head would pop up and say social distancing was bullshit and they could smack them. But there's too many heads popping up and they're too fast and CNN doesn't have the viewership and nobody cares about the New York Times anymore. And when Joe Biden says true story or not, a Lie. We dismiss it immediately as a lie. Like have we turned the corner to the point where there is. Where they're not gonna be able to claw it back.
- [09:20]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, I mean, I think the legacy media is toast. I think that you can see that in the levels of distrust for the legacy media, which actually began under the Obama administration before Trump, and it's down in the 20, 30% range now. I mean, these are really bad numbers for legacy media in terms of trust. The media is obviously fragmented. We're part of that fragmentation of the media. We're a big player on the right side of the aisle, but there are tons of players out there right now. That's a really good thing. And the fact that they don't have this sort of monopolized control is huge. This is why Trump winning is really big. Because they were attempting to reassert monopolize control via the social media bros. You had companies like ours on the right and we were the number one publisher on Facebook for 18 straight months. And then the Biden administration got involved and then we weren't and they started to quash our traffic and suddenly it was, they're pushing all the traffic toward all of the old legacy. They're trying to reestablish the monopoly that legacy media or the oligopoly that legacy media had artificially via the social media platforms. Trump winning meant that all those social media platforms now blew up that infra. Now could that be recreated if Democrats win? Sure. I mean, everybody responds to incentive structures and that's sort of the danger. It's why Democrats should not win. And it's also why I think the cautionary note for people on the right is always the same as the cautionary note that I've told people on the left, which is like there's sort of this Overton window of American politics. And if you're in that overton window of American politics, even if people don't love it, it's not so much that the backlash comes after blm, after Covid, after Joe Biden, the backlash really came. Biden and Team Democrat were so far outside the Overton window, the backlash came in the form of the destroyer they had chosen Donald Trump. And Trump is right now acting, I think, firmly within the Overton window of what the American people expect. I think the actions that he's taking. Democrats are freaked out because they're like, why isn't anybody rebelling? And the answer is cuz he's doing a bunch of stuff he said he was going to do and he didn't lie about that. He's now doing all of those things. There could come a point where the right kind of feeling, its own odes is like, okay, well, let's go for, like, let's go for broke. Let's go for the things that we really, really, in the deep recesses of our. Of our heart, really, really want. And then they go too far, and you can see the left claw its way back in. And that tends to be the history of American politics is this sort of wild vacillation from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, and then it comes back to center with kind of like a Bill Clinton, and then it swings slightly to the right with George W. Bush, and then it swings way out to the left with Barack Obama. Anybody who thinks that there's sort of like a final end to American politics where the bad guys never win again just hasn't been watching for more than about four years.
- [11:43]
Adam Carolla
Obama was, like, quietly more destructive than anyone ever really saw, felt, or saw. He's adored on the left. I think people on the right sort of tolerated him, looked at him as a little benign even at the beginning, like, oh, yeah, good for you. We got a black president. Good. You know, okay, good. We've evolved. And by the way, we got a black president. So you guys will shut up now and we can stop calling ourselves systemically racist. They, of course, had to double down their efforts because they're race hustlers. But as you look back on Obama and you hear him now and you hear what he has to say, and you hear what Michelle has to say and stuff, you're like, oh, you guys were always pretty radical. You hated this country.
- [12:24]
Ben Shapiro
I will say I was super early on this train. So when Barack Obama was running for the nomination against Hillary Clinton, there were a bunch of people on the right who were encouraging people to vote for cross party lines. If you could vote in an open primary and vote for Obama, just to throw a wrench into Hillary. And I wrote a column I believe in 2007, saying, do not do this. Barack Obama is a deep radical. Because I'd read his books, and his books are really radical. The introduction to Dreams for My Father, the intro, he makes a statement that I still think is one of the most radical things any American president's ever written, where he says, whether it's the. When I look at the faces of the miserable from Jakarta, Indonesia, to the deepest recesses of Africa and the Middle east to the poor kids in Chicago, I see the same motivating factor. Too many weapons, too much poverty. Okay, this is just Marxism, right? This is just straight up Marxism where he's basically saying that crime and evil and terrorism are all equivalent across all human beings and are caused by systemic racism and poverty, and that it's really the evils of the system that have caused all of this to happen. And if we hadn't just applied our evil, unthinking American pressure to all of these different places, then bad things wouldn't be happening anywhere. And I thought to myself, well, this guy is super duper radical. And he proved himself to be that. I mean, I thought that he was a race hustler from the beginning. Barack Obama. I thought that he was. When he did his whole great unifier routine, I thought he was lying. I thought that the true Barack Obama was the guy who sat in Jeremiah wright's church for 25 years listening to an actual disgusting race hustler jabber about the evils of white people and Jews for 25 years. If a rabbi in my synagogue did that, I'd walk out day one. Barack Obama sat there for 25 years with it. He was wildly damaged. I think that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, is the worst president of my lifetime, but Barack Obama is the most damaging president of my lifetime. I say that Biden's the worst because there's not a single thing he can chalk up successfully. When you are going to be known to history as the interregnum between two Donald Trump terms, there's no way to put you other than the worst president of my lifetime. But Barack Obama, in terms of systemic damage to the United States, I don't think he's even close specifically because of the race question, because you can see it in the polling data. Gallup takes polls on Americans perception of race relations in the United States. And up until about 2014, some 65% of black people thought American race relations were good. 70% of white Americans thought race relations were good. Everybody was on, like, a pretty good footing. And then 2012, 2013 happens, and Barack Obama's running for reelection and he's not doing well because his approval ratings suck, because he governed as a far leftist in his first term, and he decided that he was gonna double down on race strategy in 2012. This is when Trayvon Martin became his son and all this kind of stuff. And Officer Crowley acted stupidly and all this kind of stuff.
- [15:03]
Adam Carolla
That was the beer summit.
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Ben Shapiro
The beer summit, yeah. He started doing a lot of this sort of racial pandering, and suddenly the numbers just dropped precipitously. Ferguson happens in 2014. And suddenly it's 30% of black Americans think that race relations in the country are good with a black president in office. And I think that we still have not recovered from that. My going theory of American politics is that the most important election of my lifetime was not 2016, 2020, or even 2024, which I think will be the most seminal election, but the most important election was when everyone forgets 2012. Because in 2012, Barack Obama shifted the way American politics was done, and everybody has been responding to that ever since. In 2012, he should have lost. He was a bad president with low approval ratings. He decided to polarize Americans based on race, and then he won. And Democrats then fell for the myth, which is they could be as left wing as they wanted to be. So long as they cobbled together an intersectional coalition, they would never lose again. And Republicans bought into the same myth. And so what ended up happening is that Democrats were like, okay, we can run whoever we want as a far left nut and win. And so they ran Hillary Clinton in 2016. And it turns out that wasn't true. But because Donald Trump won, Democrats couldn't believe that he won. And so they kept doubling down and doubling down. It was, well, he couldn't have won because we were stupid. He must have won because the Russians did it or Facebook did it, or somebody. And so they decide to wreck all the systems. The intelligence apparatus has to be wrecked. Everything has to be wrecked in order to stop Trump, because Trump somehow has cheated. That's the only way that he could have won. And the right, meanwhile, believed that Trump was not just uniquely good at some things and uniquely not great at others. It was that Donald Trump had, like, a magic power. And so in 2020, when he then lost, the right went, well, he can't have lost. He was magic. And the left went, well, of course he lost because we have our intersectional magical coalition. And then you rerun the magical coalition in 2024, and again they lose. And now they seem bewildered. So we'll see where things go from here. But it's been an interesting period.
- [16:56]
Adam Carolla
Well, all right, thoughts. It's interesting that people don't really hear politicians when they're talking. Like, Obama gave that speech where he said, you didn't build it yourself. You own a small business that's not yours. You didn't build it. Someone else built that. He goes, you had teachers. Somebody built a road. You had to drive on that road in order to get to the factory, in order to build your business. You didn't do that yourself. And it was weird at the end. He was kind of freeballing it a little bit. He was ad libbing. And he goes, you didn't do that yourself. Somebody else did that. And I was like, is anyone listening to this communist over here? Hello. And the audience is like, full of dumb poor people, evidently, who didn't build anything and were cheering. And he was saying it as if. It's like, when I talk to Gavin Newsom, it's interesting, the weird soundbite stuff. I interviewed him famously on my show 10 years ago. He should be back any day now. I'm gonna check my count. Let me call my producer. So at some point, we talked for an hour. People remember the race part we got into, but there are many other subjects. But he said to me, I said, listen, I just want government work big to small. Start with the roads, the schools, the infrastructure, the dams, the aqueducts, and then get down to the small stuff. And he goes, adam, I like to work small to big. And then he sort of pat himself on the back and like, I just start the small stuff and go to the big stuff. And I realized, like, oh, that sounds good, but it doesn't mean anything. It's like, small is delta smelt. Big is California burning to the ground. So you're gonna focus on the small and ignore the big. Big is my house is on fire.
- [18:47]
Ben Shapiro
Small.
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Adam Carolla
There's a guppy that's in a stream of water. And I realized Obama kind of liked that talk too. You know, you didn't build that yourself. He sounded real good and self assured and people would like, nod and clap, but I would say, would you listen to what he's saying?
- [19:04]
Ben Shapiro
He.
- [19:04]
Adam Carolla
He's telling everybody who started a business you didn't do it yourself. Why is he saying that? Well, that means he can take it from you or take more money from you, or you owe more money to the government because it isn't yours. After all. If he said, you worked really hard, you put yourself through vocational training or college, you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, you didn't have anything and you built this business well, that means I would be a criminal if I tried to take money from you because you did it yourself. But if I built you the road that you took to go to your business, then I'm going to ask for my vig, and that's going to go up every single year. I don't think people really heard what he was saying.
- [19:49]
Ben Shapiro
It is interesting when you follow this stuff really closely. There are so many weirdly indicative comments that politicians will make when they're being honest for just a brief second that do kind of like, fly right over everybody's head. My favorite Obama example is during the primaries in 2008, and he was asked a question about raising the capital gains tax. And the question was, you know, there's this theory, which is true, that if you raise the capital gains tax to a certain extent, you'll actually end up with lower government receipts because people will stop investing. Because why would you invest if you're not going to make as much money? So the question to him was, would you increase the capital gains tax even if it meant that revenue to the government would be lower? Even meant less tax revenue coming into the government, less money. And he said. And he said, yes, for purposes of fairness. Right, right. Like, that is such an insane answer that everybody just went, so you're literally saying that you'd make the country worse just to punish people for purposes of fairness. That's what you're saying. You're saying you'd rather that the government take in less revenue by having higher tax rates for purposes of fairness. What's fair about that other than everybody is equally poor? But because now there's less revenue going into the government and people are making less money, you'd rather shrink the economy to make everything more fair is what he just said. And everybody just kind of went, oh, well, yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Fair. He said, fairness. We all like fairness. And so much of this stuff gets buried in the buzzwords. Joe Biden did the same thing. He would say, we want equity. And Kamala Harris would explain what equity meant. She would say, what equity means is that everybody ends up at the same place. He'd be like, okay, so you're just a communist. That's just communism. And then. No, no, that's not what I mean. You literally just said that. I don't understand. You literally just said it.
- [21:21]
Adam Carolla
She did an entire novel graphic illustrated commercial of equity. And some people start off lower. And that's why it's not okay to give them the same amount, because some people start hiring. And I was like, you. I'm apoplectic. I'm like, listen. Would you listen to what she's saying? I just found the Aliens cookbook.
- [21:44]
Ben Shapiro
It's not to serve man.
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Adam Carolla
They're serving our flesh. And everyone's like, shh, get on the spaceship. You know, we're going to their planet. And I'm like, no, doesn't anyone know What? How come you can't hear what she's saying.
- [21:58]
Ben Shapiro
I mean, I think that because politicians speak bullshit all the time, people are trained not to pay attention to specific comments. And also because there's so much that they say that it's hard to pick out kind of the moment that's the sort of hernia, the hiatal hernia of what they're saying, right? Where it kind of pops out and, and then pops back in and like, oh, it was never there. It was never there. But, you know, I think that it's why it's important to watch these people really closely. These are people who govern our lives. And most of what they say is kind of the usual pablum. But every so often there will be some sort of indicator, what they call a Kinsley gaffe, right? Where the gaffe is that they said the thing they actually think. And every so often you hear those and it's pretty, it's pretty evocative.
- [22:43]
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- [23:43]
Dawson
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- [23:58]
Ben Shapiro
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- [23:59]
Adam Carolla
Yeah, baby.
- [24:00]
Ben Shapiro
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- [24:54]
Dawson
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- [25:06]
Ben Shapiro
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- [26:03]
And so, you know, we got to take the walk back with a grain of salt sometimes.
- [26:07]
Adam Carolla
But you also have to wonder, like, I wonder all the time, what is the end game? Like, do they think this is going to lead to prosperity or do they not want prosperity? Like, I would use this metaphor a lot. I would say, what if you hired Gavin Newsom to operate the forklift in your warehouse and you're sitting up in your office and all of a sudden you hear clang and boxes falling down and you walk into the warehouse and there's Gavin Newsom with the forklift and he knocked over a shelf. And you go, all right, you got to take it slow or you're going to make mistakes. You know, he goes, sorry, boss. And then you go back in the office and you hear another shelf has fallen over and you walk out and you go, hey, man, take it slow. I know you didn't do it on purpose, but take it slow. You're going to wreck this place. And then all of a sudden, the forklift forks come through your office door and you're like, wait a minute, is he bad at operating a forklift or is he trying to ruin this warehouse? I don't know. And then everyone goes, oh, no, he's just bad with the forklift. Why would he want to destroy the warehouse? And you go, I don't know. But it Kind of seems like he's trying to destroy the warehouse because he keeps knocking stuff over. And you're like, no, he's just really bad. It's also a weird conceit. Like, I've talked to Dr. Drew about it and I'd go, he's, you know, he'd go, he's not bad. He's just incompetent. He's just incompetent. Give him a break. And I was like, can you imagine if someone said that about Ben Shapiro? Like, Ben Shapiro, he's not an evil host. He's just horrible at what he does. Oh, thank you for that support. Like, well, pardon me, but maybe I don't want the incompetent guy running the state, even if he's not evil. But what is the end game? Because nothing ever comes out the other end, like, defund the police, whatever. Open the border. No one's illegal. Sanctuary cities. It's a. Okay, Nothing works.
- [28:10]
Ben Shapiro
So I think that there are sort of two types. They're inside the Democratic Party or inside left wing movements. Generally, they're the people who are just there for the destruction. And there are a lot of these people who, they don't really care what comes next. What they do care about is that the system that exists is bad. Capitalism is bad, it's exploitative. We don't have a substitute utopia for it. But the thing that really matters is that it must be torn down. And so that then leads to a coalitional strategy where you can disagree on everything with the person next to you, but as long as you both agree on tearing the system down, it's totally fine. Right? This is how you get gays for Gaza, right? This is who exactly we're fighting for, what matters, what we're fighting against. Right? So, sure, the guy who sits next to me would totally cut off my head in a second, but so long as we both hate Donald Trump, then, you know, we're on the same team. And so that sort of coalitional strategy has become very big on college campuses. And then there are the people who actually believe that they can build some sort of Marxist utopia. And I think that's a relatively limited crew. One of the big conflicts I think, that you're seeing inside the Democratic Party right now, and it remains to be seen, you know, which side wins. It used to be, and people have said this many times, so it's nothing new that in this country there were Democrats and there were Republicans, and they both wanted the same thing, but they wanted to get there different ways or they had different ideas about how to get there. What they both wanted was prosperity. They wanted you to be able to have a job and live with your family and live the life that you wanted to live. And it was just a question of what public policy was best suited in order to achieve these things. And I think that there are probably some Democrats, I mean, I know some of them who are still like that. I think they have the wrong ideas about how to get from point A to point B. But the point B that they want is not radically different from the point B that I want. And then there's a group of people who really don't have the same priorities. And I think increasingly this group is running the Democratic Party and the left. And that group just cares about the tearing down of the thing. They have no idea what comes next. They just don't. They know capitalism is exploitative and mean. And there is a. There is a driving rage at lack of success. I think that that drives. I think envy drives an enormous amount of this. I think that so much of this, I mean, if you watch an AOC or if you watch Biden himself, who I think is a totally envy driven creature, I mean, there's a story that I think is the most indicative story about Joe Biden I ever heard is in a biography by Ben Schreckinger where he talks about Joe Biden as a young man and he has a couple of young boys. And apparently one of the things that they used to do is when Joe Biden was like 28, 28, 29, 30, they used to drive into the rich areas of Wilmington and he used to find houses that were being built that you weren't supposed to trespass on. He would send his kids into the house to go check out the houses that were being built to just go see, like, what the rich people were doing. And they got caught. At one point, the police came and brought the kids back. The fact that Joe Biden, like, that's who Joe Biden is. Joe Biden has always envied the people who are rich, which is why he's perfectly willing to do anything that it takes to get his family rich. And I think that that's a huge number of people in the Democratic Party where it's like, okay, your choices are corruption, like Biden, or your choice is to grab control of the system, use it for your own benefit, which is a different form of corruption. Or your choice is to say the system itself is innately corrupt and evil and must be destroyed from within. The reason that you failed or that people who you think are, quote, unquote, like you failed is not because you've made bad decisions or people collectively are making bad decisions that they ought to change. The problem is out there. And if we just destroy that system, then that alleviates my. I never need to succeed. It doesn't matter what comes next. What matters that the system that made me a failure has been destroyed. And that's justice and that's fairness. And that's just a destructive impulse. It's what I call the scavenger impulse. Right. You have, I think, in society, people who are the lions who actually go out and they go and they kill the. They get the meat, make sure the pride is fed. And that's not, you know, just the Elons and people who build business. That's everybody who has a job. That's everybody who's just bringing home the bacon and building a family and being part of a church and a commute. And then there are the people who are like, you know what? I get to live off the carcass that that lion killed. And what would be really great is if the lion felt guilty enough to allow me to kill the lion. That would be really good. Because in the end, sure, we'll all starve because the lion won't be there to hunt, but at least I don't have to feel envious that the lion is the one that's actually succeeding in life and following the rules and is part of the system.
- [32:12]
Adam Carolla
I totally agree. It's interesting, the envy, because I think ultimately all this stuff is driven by psychological sort of dynamics that motivate human beings. It ends up in policy and ends up in a sort of tangible world, but it's driven by the psychology of it. And anyone who's dealt with a very angry woman behind the counter at the airport or in TSA or whatever realizes, why is she being so rude to me? I don't even know her. Why is she so angry and aggressive? I'm just trying to get to Portland. And you realize, oh, that woman has issues with her dad. And maybe her dad left the family or maybe her dad abused her in some way. And now I show up and I become symbolically the dad in this situation. And so our dynamic is, she's going to settle my hash. Now my dynamic is I'm confused because I don't have an issue with her. And so I don't know why she's being so hostile and aggressive. Where you kind of go, where'd this come from? We just met. I'm Just trying to get through security to get to the lounge. So there's a dynamic that drives a lot of this stuff. I believe it's more prevalent in females. They have more of this sort of. This is the relationship I had with. My dad was an alcoholic, so I married an alcoholic, and now I'm going to try to cure him of alcoholism, but it never works kind of thing. There's a dynamic there. And so when you take more women and you put them in these positions of power, there's going to be more energy there. And you can see it in these hearings that go on. Elizabeth Warren starts coming unhinged and screaming at people and the women get like flustered and whatever, because it's not just them disagreeing with a man. There's some sort of dynamic and some sort of power struggle that's going on.
- [34:27]
Ben Shapiro
Well, I mean, I do think that the systems of the United States as have been created by the left, have been uniquely terrible for women on pretty much every level. And so if the idea is that bad feelings about the society are created or proprietary, you know, kind of promoted by people who are experiencing higher levels of sadness, anxiety, depression, that's obviously gonna skew female. And the statistics show that it does. I mean, women have higher rates of depression in the United States. Anxiety in the United States, you're talking about young women skyrocketing rates of these things. And so it's not surprising that that would manifest politically as support for this whole system is corrupt and rigged and let's rip it down. And why are other people succeeding and I'm not? And why does this person look happier on Instagram than I am? And I don't think that's to blame. Female psychology specifically. I think that that really is more about a system that has withdrawn from women many of the things that make women the most happy, and then told them that a substitute was going to suffice for that.
- [35:22]
Adam Carolla
Yeah, get abortion, go to work.
- [35:23]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, exactly. If you do that, it turns out that the thing that makes people most happy in life over the long term is marriage and family. These are the things that make people the most happy over the long. Doesn't mean that it gives you the most joy in the moment when you're up at 3am cleaning barf off the floor cause your kid has the flu this week. You know, that's not the thing that's gonna make you the most happy. But over the long term, what makes you the most satisfied with your life and gives you a purpose are these sorts of things. When you remove that sort of purpose and then you feel upset. That upset has to go somewhere. And so again, I don't think it's unique to women. I think that it's biased against women because the sexual revolution was biased against women in a lot of really, I think negative and stereotypical ways. But the ironically, because it was supposed to be a revolution on behalf of women, but it actually ended up being a revolution that really mostly benefited perverse men. But I think that applies to any group of people or any individual who actually has a rationale for the sadness. So if that's disproportionately located in one segment of the population, then the movement.
- [36:25]
Adam Carolla
Helped women about as much as BLM helped black people, turned out to agitate them and anger them. And it just. Few people got rid of it.
- [36:35]
Ben Shapiro
All the statistics show that women were happier in 1970 than they are today. All of them. And that's not. And that again is not a suggestion that women can't be in the workforce. This is where you get all the left. Oh, well, you're saying women shouldn't work. I'm not saying that. My wife's a doctor, my mom worked and my dad was home. That's obviously not true. But the sort of left wing feminist notion that the height of fulfillment lies in never having children, never getting married, that you are sufficient unto yourself. No one is sufficient unto themselves. Men, women, no one. You're not. I'm sorry, you're not. That's not, not to be too biblical, but that's the message at the very beginning of the Bible, right? Man is alone in the garden and God's like, this doesn't work. We need a woman here and we're going create one just so that man and woman can be one flesh and then create a family. Like that's the whole idea. These sort of basic notions. Again, this, this would be considered weird, what I'm saying, right? We'll go back to the weird conversation. What I'm saying now is weird, except it wasn't weird for literally all of human history and is not weird today. What's weird is actually saying the opposite, which is that true happiness lies in if you're a young woman never getting married and living a sex in the city lifestyle where you're 35 years old and you know, having the romantic sort of ambitions of a 17 year old. Well, what we all ought to be is Taylor Swift 37 year old women who sing songs like they're 17 year old girls breaking up with their third boyfriend in high School, Right.
- [37:52]
Adam Carolla
Yeah. Well, you know, once again, all this.
- [37:55]
Ben Shapiro
And by the way, Taylor Swift should get married and she'll create a marital revolution. This is my take. I think I want her to get married. I wanted to have babies. And I think that it'll create a baby boom in America when she does. Because finally, many of the women who have been lied to about feminism will say, hey, wait a second, a very prominent woman that I like, got married and had babies and is happy. I think that'd be a very good thing for the country, actually.
- [38:12]
Adam Carolla
Agreed. So circling back to the group that wants to destroy the country, if you believe in institutional and social racism, where they go, it's just built into the fabric. You know, if you're sitting around going, racism is woven into the fabric and in the DNA of America, well, why wouldn't you want to tear it down?
- [38:43]
Ben Shapiro
And I think that's the purpose of saying it.
- [38:44]
Adam Carolla
Yes, that's the purpose of saying it.
- [38:46]
Ben Shapiro
The exact purpose of saying it is you're putting a bomb at the root of the tree so you can blow up the tree.
- [38:51]
Adam Carolla
It's systemic, right? It's systemic. It's everywhere. We need to take it out.
- [38:55]
Ben Shapiro
And I've said for literally years, whenever I've debated this issue, and I've debated this issue for probably two decades at this point, because I've been saying this stuff for a very, very long time. I'm 41 years old. I started writing a syndicated column when I was 17. So I've been doing this for almost a quarter of a century, weirdly enough. And I've been saying forever. If you can show me a racist policy, like a policy that says black people ought to be treated differently than white people, I will stand next to you and we'll go fight that thing together. But if you just say that we need to go ghost hunting, I'm not going to do that with you. Because clearly, the agenda is not to fix a problem. Clearly, the agenda is to impute a bigger problem to a bigger system so that the only way to tear out the problem is to tear out the system is to do chemo on the entire system or to just destroy it utterly. Same thing for you. You don't really care because all you care about is destroying the thing. That's exactly right. When you use vague terminology, Vagary is the enemy of success in anything in life. Being vague is bad. Being vague is bad. This is true in marriage. This is true in. This is true in politics. One of the big mistakes people make in marriage is they'll say you always do X. Have you ever say that to a spouse? Oh my God. Just absolute poison. You cannot say you always do X. What you have to do is say, you know, last week you did this thing. I didn't like that thing that you did last week. Can we talk about that thing you did last week? Because it's not vague. Then it's like, okay, it's a thing that either happened or didn't happen. We can discuss it. The same thing is true in politics. If I can point to this specific policy and say this specific policy is bad and this is what we need to fight, we can have a conversation about that. But if your take is the whole system is rigged. And by the way, this actually is a problem, I think for politicians all over the map. Not just left. I think on the right you get this too, where people use kind of big sentences and they'll say the system is corrupt. Okay, I need to know which system, how is it corrupt? Which people are corrupt, which actual laws are corrupt and regulations. And then we can go fix those things. Because otherwise what I think you're really arguing for is the destruction of the system itself. Now we can argue about whether the system should be destroyed, but once we do that, then we have to start talking about whether the system as a whole is a net positive or a net negative. Yeah, right, but vagaries are a big problem.
- [40:52]
Adam Carolla
I agree. The thing about the race issue is. So you would say, okay, name specific legislation, be specific, what is racist, and then I will stand by you. And then they would say, I can't name any of that, it's just white people and the way they view black people. And again, unprovable vagaries that don't exist but now have sort of been a self fulfilling prophecy on the side of the left. Because now when I find out Kamala Harris is only there because Biden said, I'm only going to look at women of color, now I do go, oh, then maybe she's not the best and the brightest. Which is what you're accusing me of, which I am now doing because of the DEI and the affirmative action. So now you see the 19 year old black fella on the canvas of Harvard and you go, is his SAT scores as high as that Asian girl over there or did he just get let in because of. Now he may have had the highest SAT score in his school and he may deserve to be here way more than the Asian guy who's over there. But you created this now. And now we are looking at it a way you accused us of looking at it, but we never wanted to look at it. Because now every time Biden would parade somebody who is trans or gay or Pete Buttigieg or Admiral Levine, I'm going to miss that lucky lady. I'm going to miss Admiral. If nobody just said to me, if someone came to me from a different solar system and said, this is one picture to explain the Biden administration, all you got is one picture. I just show a picture about it. And they'd go, what the hell? And I'd go, yeah, okay. Anyway, that's it. That's all you need to know about the Biden administration. But now I look at all these people and I go, well, are they the best and the brightest, which is unfair to them, or is it a DEI hire, which I assume it is because they seem incompetent.
- [43:07]
Ben Shapiro
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Adam Carolla
Hey, everybody. Public wreck.
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Ben Shapiro
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Adam Carolla
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- [47:45]
Adam Carolla
But it's. They've created a self fulfilling process and.
- [47:48]
Ben Shapiro
They want it that way because that way they then get to claim that you have the bad feeling that they were accusing you of all along, right? It's useful to them because then they're like, oh, this is the stupid game. You get where Joe Biden will say, like, I will only pick a woman of color for the Supreme Court. And then he picks Ketanji Brown Jackson and she just performs horribly during her hearings. And you go, well, this lady's not smart enough to be on the Supreme Court. There's no reason she should be on the Supreme Court other than she's a black woman. Like, ah, you're a racist for saying that. She's only on the Supreme Court because she's a black woman. You're saying, no, you said that, so you said the thing. I said the exact same thing back to you when you said it. It was progressive. When I say it, I'm a racist. I feel like you're playing a game with me. And of course it is a game and it's a perversely stupid game. But I think that the American people are tired of it. They're just tired of all of that bullshit. And it doesn't mean that the right can't blow it. I think the right finds unique and interesting ways to blow it all the time. But the left has a long way to go. Just the other night there was a DNC chair hearing where they were doing some sort of event on MSNBC with all the prospective chairs of the dnc, Good luck to them. And Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post, he asks them, he's the questioner. And he goes, how many of you think that Kamala Harris lost, at least in significant part because of racism and misogyny? And every single hand goes up, not just on the stage, in the crowd also, right? And he goes, you ball passed the test. It's like, if that's your test, I mean The American people will reject that day in and day out forever. Because most Americans don't either believe that or they don't want to believe that. And they shouldn't believe that, cuz it ain't true. I mean, Joe Biden was gonna get his ass kicked by Donald Trump and Joe Biden was a white dude, so that isn't true.
- [49:23]
Adam Carolla
Yeah, you know, to me, when it comes to race, I believe that we have feelings about groups which we cannot prevent ourselves from, from creating. So and it's not unhealthy, it's sort of normal. Like, you know, we do, we will profile naturally as a human being. You walk down the street and you see a Labrador coming your way, wagging its tail. You know, your profile is. And let's say you're with your young child, you know, you'll go, oh, I don't need to cross that. That guy's, it's a lab. He's wagging his tail. Then you see a pit bull and you're like, I don't know that pit bull. But I do know in general, pit bulls bite more toddlers than Labradors do. So we have a kind of a. But then conversely, there may be a friend of yours who has a pit bull that's the greatest and you love him and he's sweet and you let your kid run around. So we do a kind of general profiling of groups and people and you know, to say we don't, I think it's disingenuous.
- [50:34]
Ben Shapiro
So Thomas Sowell does this thing that I think is he has a great book called Disparities and Discrimination. And he talks about.
- [50:39]
Adam Carolla
That's how you say Thomas Sowell?
- [50:40]
Ben Shapiro
Yes.
- [50:40]
Adam Carolla
Yeah.
- [50:41]
Ben Shapiro
Okay, go ahead. So Sowell has a book called Black.
- [50:43]
Adam Carolla
Guys Aren't Good at Writing Books. Well, anyway, anyway.
- [50:48]
Ben Shapiro
So he basically creates a taxonomy of discrimination. What he says is basically there are three types of discrimination. There's like discrimination that you do that everybody considers good and normal. Like you go to a restaurant and you decide what you want to eat, you're discriminating. If you say somebody has discriminating taste. Right, right. Somebody has a good taste in music, they have discriminating taste. That's like normal discrimination where you're morally apathetic about what you pick. Doesn't matter whether you pick a burger or a steak, you're discriminating between the two things. Then you get into discrimination, what he calls type 1 and type 1A. So what he says is type 1 is a discrimination where you have group data available for a group and you have no individual data available. And so now you have a perception about the group data that you apply to an individual knowing nothing about the individual. So that's the situation that you're talking about, right? Where you, you know that the pit bull coming down the street, pit bulls have a higher rate of biting children. You have a Labrador and a Labrador has a lower rate of biting children. And you don't know anything about these dogs individually. And so you cross the street for the pit bull, but you don't for the Labrador, for example. Okay. What he says is the actual discrimination is where you know the pit bull and you know the pit bull and you know that that's a nice pit bull and you cross the street anyway because you don't. Because pit bulls in general are bad. He says that's the kind of discrimination that is really pernicious and bad. Using group data in the absence of individual data is just called risk assessment. Right. And we do it literally all the time, every day, all the time. And we've been taught this kind of weird idea that to do such a thing is in and of itself discriminatory. So, for example, if the TSA is going to profile Muslim men, because Muslim men have a higher rate of hijacking planes than non Muslim men, then this is considered racism. Well, that's not actually racism or Islamophobia. That's a data analysis. The question is, if you know that Muslim guy and you know that he's not a hijacker and you still profile that guy, then that makes you an Islamophobe. Right? And so that's the distinction that the soul makes. And it's been completely obliterated. And so you end up with this bizarre feeling like, well, I mean, am I racist if I'm walking down the street? And the Jesse Jackson, Jesse Jackson literally used this example. Jesse Jackson said, well, if I'm walking down the street and I see like a young 17 year old gang member walking down the other end of the street, black guy, I'll cross the street and say, Jesse Jackson, vicious racist. Right? Like it's. Does that make you a racist if you cross the street? As opposed. So the example that you'd hear is somebody saying, well, I mean, you wouldn't do that if you were wearing a medical coat. It's like, right, because a medical coat says he's a doctor. Yes. I mean, that's a new piece of information that you've now added to the math. When we go through life, all we do is assess situations based on the Data that is available to us. If you want everybody judged as an individual without reference to group data, then either you have to ban group data entirely, which is something that Europe is unsuccessfully attempting to do, or you have to just say every individual is responsible for their own actions and ought to be judged on an individual basis. That's not going to solve all your problems. It's going to solve as many problems as possible for human beings to solve.
- [53:40]
Adam Carolla
Yeah. And back to Kamala Harrison, racism or woman or anything. We do think in terms of groups and we think in terms of data and risk assessment and exactly what Thomas Sowell you just conveyed to me. But at some point we get granular and then they become an individual. Magic Johnson is not a black man. You know, he's Magic Johnson and Snoop Dogg the same. And whomever that is, at a certain point, they become a person. And then people worship them some of the most. Beyonce or Oprah or something. Oprah's not some black chick. She's Oprah, and that's how we look at her. And Kamala Harris is Kamala Harris. She's not a black woman. We're looking at her as Kamala Harris. And we don't like what we're seeing, but it's not what they'd like to say, which is she's a group of black women in general.
- [54:39]
Ben Shapiro
Right. You're judging her in the absence of data about her based on her race. No, I'm not judging her in the absence. I'm judging her literally based on all the data about her without regard to her race. And by the way, I think that's true at the highest level of politics, virtually always. Meaning once somebody reaches the highest level of politics, the stereotypes that you might associate with a group, the person you now have a bunch of information about that wouldn't be available to generic person. If a person is a senator, here's what I know about them. What I know about them is they have at least a relatively high level of intelligence. I know that they've stuck around in school long enough to become a senator. I know that they are successful at speaking. Like there's a bunch of things that you can take away from just the position alone. That means that you're no longer operating purely in the realm of stereotype. Right. Or at least if you are operating on stereotype, you're operating on the basis of stereotypes about the Senate. Right. You're saying that now you're a member of a group of 100.
- [55:26]
Adam Carolla
Right.
- [55:26]
Ben Shapiro
It's a smaller group. And so now I can use that group data to substitute. If you just say senator, what you're going to think is, okay, probably not a complete dumb. Dumb. It might be kind of dumb, but not a complete dumb dumb. Somebody who's probably in their 50s, minimum 50s, somebody who's made their way up in politics, which means has worked in a bunch of different systems, decent shot, they're corrupt. There's a bunch of data that you will now attribute to that smaller group. And so again, if you think of human beings as sort of a data gathering machine, which we may well be, then whenever you see an individual, the first thing you do is you run down as many data points as you possibly can get on the person. The idea that Kamala Harris was being judged on the biggest stereotypical groups, woman and black, for example, that's obviously not true. She was the vice President of the United States. She was a senator. Before that she was AG of California. But like, she had a long record where people knew her. She was pretty famous by the time she ran for president. And so this idea that we judged her based on black woman is so stupid as to be absolutely, just inconceivably dumb.
- [56:28]
Adam Carolla
Well, it's also insulting and it's also dangerous. Like, I don't think we lay enough at the feet of the Joe Bidens for race hustling and destruction and burning and looting and death. You know, I mean, they deserve a lot more ire than they get for race hustling.
- [56:51]
Ben Shapiro
I agree. By the way, your examples before are great. So nobody ever looks at a basketball player in the NBA and says, ah, he's there because he's black.
- [56:58]
Adam Carolla
Right?
- [56:58]
Ben Shapiro
Nobody. That has never occurred to any human being. Why? Because we know that the NBA is only taking the people who are best at the thing. Right. In fact, you have accusations of reverse racism where you'll hear people say, well, they're only giving credit to Luka Doncic because he's a white guy.
- [57:12]
Right?
- [57:13]
Right. The only reason they think Jokic is good is because he's a white guy. Because there are so few white players in the NBA. The Democrats use of these groups as a way to sort of shove in people who they overtly say would not get in. In a plain meritocracy creates the perception. It exacerbates the perception. It's what you were saying earlier. And it's totally true. It's totally true. You never, nobody has ever said on the right side of the aisle, nobody goes, you know, Condya Rice, she's probably there because she's black.
- [57:40]
Adam Carolla
Right?
- [57:42]
Ben Shapiro
Because the right's like, well, I mean, no, we tried to do meritocracy over here. She's probably there because she's smart.
- [57:47]
Adam Carolla
Well, you spoke about envy, which I think is a big issue. And I think I'll try to circle back and sort of attach it to the lack of religion in this country and how we're heading the wrong direction in terms of religiosity. And I think I wrote in 50 years wall be Chicks or one of my books. And I know your dad, I love that book. I enjoyed one of them.
- [58:13]
Ben Shapiro
In 50 year old Wallaby. Chicks is one of the great comedy books of all time. It's phenomenal.
- [58:17]
Adam Carolla
From Ben Shapiro, I wrote.
- [58:20]
Ben Shapiro
We used to read all the. All of it at the Sabbath table in all of its obscene glory.
- [58:24]
Adam Carolla
Really?
- [58:24]
Ben Shapiro
Oh yeah, man. I bring that thing out and just read it to my sisters. It's hysterical. It's so funny.
- [58:29]
Adam Carolla
Oh, I'm so honored. It could have been that book could have been. Not Taco Bell material, which is the next book. But either way, I wrote this example of. Back in the day, a father and son would be walking through a neighborhood. This reminded me of the Joe Biden and his son situation. And a guy go by in a big Cadillac and the father would say to the sons, you work really hard. That's Mr. Johnson. You stay in school and you work hard and you do your job. And one day you'll have that Cadillac that's on its way to the big house on top of the hill. You hear me, son? And that's how that was society. And now society says, screw that guy. I bet that was his dad's Cadillac. Or he probably stole that Cadillac from the indigenous people. Son, get a rock. Let's throw it at his Cadillac. Now the first example is biblical, you know what I mean? And I wonder how much of this is directly connection. Directly connected to religion going the way of the dodo. Because I'm basically agnostic, but I'm all in on the Ten Commandments. And so I'm saying, look, follow the Ten Commandments whether you're an atheist, agnostic or deeply religious, because it's a no brainer for me. And by the way, I want to live in the society of the Golden Rule and of the Ten Commandments, of many other things that are cited in the Bible. So is it connected directly to that?
- [60:00]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So first of all, the Ten Commandments is a great reference point for this. So the Ten Commandments is all about action, right? You're supposed to, for Example, keep the Sabbath, or you're supposed to not commit adultery, or you're not supposed to kill people. These are all actions. There's only one emotionally laden of the ten Commandments. Only one is about emotions, how you're supposed to feel. And that is don't covet. Right, because don't steal is a separate commandment. Don't covet is the commandment. You're not allowed by the Bible. You're banned from coveting that which is your neighbors, which presupposes one, your neighbor has a right to his own property, and two, you don't have a right to your neighbor's property. And so you're not supposed to covet the thing. Now you can say, I want to be like that guy, that's totally fine. What you can't do is say that guy's thing. I wish I had that thing and I deserve that thing. Because that guy has that thing, his wife, his donkey, all the rest of it, like that, that belongs to him, it doesn't belong to you. And your covetousness is in and of itself a sin. And now we've made envy into a social good. We've said the more you envy the person next to you, the better you are. Because now you want to use the power of government to redistribute goods. And this is what makes you altruistic and this is what makes you non. This is why when Bernie Sanders will say stupid shit like, well, you know, capitalism is all about greed. Now give me all your money. Well, I mean, who's greedy? I didn't take any money from Bernie Sanders. He's trying to take a lot of money from me. I noticed that sort of that envious attitude in the end is I think, a distrust of the rules. So I have a going theory now about sort of conspiracy theories, which is that obviously some conspiracy theories are not theories, they're true, they're conspiracies that exist in the real life. But there is what Karl Popper called the big conspiracy theory. The philosopher Karl Popper, and what he suggested was the big conspiracy theory is this idea that there is a big system, it is rigged and it is out to get you. And that's a self justifying mechanism for failure. You fail, the system is out to get you. And so you're right to envy the guy next to you stuff because he didn't earn that stuff. The system made that stuff for him, but it didn't make it for you because the system is corrupt. Now the entire biblical corpus is built Around a very, very basic logic which is if something goes wrong in your life, it's probably because you fucking something, right? It's probably your fault. This is where Catholic guilt comes from. It's where Jewish guilt comes from. It's where all Judeo Christian sort of guilt, shame, that all comes from the place of if you failed in life, don't blame God, blame yourself, right? It's you, you did it. Probably right now it could have been something else that happened to you in the world, sure. But the first place you should look, if you go theologically back to the roots of both the church and in Judaism, you'll find people saying things like, well, even if something bad in the universe happened to you, it's probably because you're being punished for something that you did. I mean, that's like the really hardcore version of this, but the basic version just in the plain biblical text is if you act well, then you will be rewarded and if you don't act well, then you will be punished. Right? This is all over the biblical text. And so it turns out that when you do follow the Ten Commandments, you do better in life. And maybe that part of the Bible, whether you believe it was written by God or not, maybe that's just generally true. Maybe if you don't kill people, covet their property, steal things from them, maybe if you respect your parents and, and you keep one day of the week that's off from work so you can spend time with, maybe if you do all of those things, you will lead a better and happier life and success will then follow you. Well, if you decide to reject all of that and then you fail, you now have two choices. One is you can say, oh man, you can be a religious person. Oh my God, I can't believe I rejected all that stuff. That's probably why I'm failing. If I'd only followed the rules, then maybe I would be doing better. But if you're a non religious person and an anti religious person, then you might go the other direction, which is, well, that's because the whole system is rigged by people who built the system so that those rules would work. And so those rules have to be torn down. And so envy is actually a social good. It's actually good to violate these rules. And I think that that's the move over the last couple of centuries in the West. The move over the last couple centuries in the west has been toward what Carl Truman, another philosopher from University of Utah, has suggested is a sort of identification of yourself with your feelings that in the real world, the way that most of us identify who we are is by our interaction with the world. What makes you Adam Carolla? Adam Carolla is. Adam Carolla does the Adam Carolla show, and he's a dad and he takes care of his family and he speaks out about issues that matter. Those are the things that make Adam Carolla Adam Carolla. That's the way traditionally human beings thought about themselves. How we interact with our community, the world, what we do in the real world. And then in the early 19th century, there was this move toward the actual you is what you feel on the inside. The authentic you is what you feel on the inside. And so if the world does not confirm what you feel on the inside, the world is corrupt and the world is imposing something on you. And that's true whether we're talking economically or whether we're talking about sexual identity. It's the world that is making you feel that way. And so you have to rebel against the world. You have to fight the world. And I think that you have a lot of people who are fighting the world. And there's only one problem with that, which is reality always wins. This is one of my kind of big statements. Reality never loses. It is undefeated. You can fight reality as long as you want to fight reality. Reality, man, reality is unrelenting. It is ceaseless, and it is all time record of infinity to zero. You lose every time.
- [65:02]
Adam Carolla
Yeah. As Dr. Drew would always say, reality on reality's terms. And I was like, yep, you're right. And the analogy I always kind of use is diet and exercise. Like, you want to be fit, you want to look good in your swim trunks or your bikini. Diet and exercise. And everyone goes, I don't really like eating tofurkey and doing push ups. And you go, I don't either, but that's all we got. And they go, yeah, well, Weight Watchers has a new fudge. And I go, that's not going to work. And they go, there's a new workout where you don't have to work out. It's called the Watch TV and Eat Donuts workout. And you go, it's just never going to work. But I realized it's simple and it's unavoidable, and it's the easiest thing in the world, and it's the most difficult thing in the world. And it's the same with society. It's, look, here are the rules. Don't get anyone pregnant. Finish high school, get married, get a job. It's boring. It's Rote. We all know what it is. You can be fit as a fiddle and be in prison by just doing chin ups on a water pipe like a Stallone movie. And we always, you know, they do this thing all the time and they go, that rich guy with his personal trainer. If I had a personal trainer, I'm always like, listen, I'm a rich guy and I'm still lazy. Like, no, I still don't want to go do kettlebells with some guy named Marco. You know, I don't want to do it. Don't do the rich guy thing. You can do push ups and in your one bedroom apartment and be jacked. You can choose to just eat protein, no carbs, do your push ups. You can do lunches just holding two telephone books that they dropped off for free, right? Or two water jugs with five gallons of water in it. So it's bs. We all know what it is. They know what it is too. But the scary part is politicians have figured out, oh, nobody wants to do push ups and eat tofu. What do they want? Oh, they want dietetic fudge and no workout. And so we're going to start literally and figuratively feeding them this crap that we know is never going to work. It's like, hey, black community. Here's the answer. It's not systemic racism. It's parents, it's fathers staying involved with the kids life. It's family units, it's marriage, it's children after wedlock. Come on, black community. That's diet and exercise. They know what it is. They'll never say it because that's the hard stuff that nobody wants to do. And it's easier to hear, well, the reason this other guy is doing better than you is because there's, you know, because the coach likes him more, right?
- [67:53]
Ben Shapiro
And that's true for, like everybody. It really is. It's a universal, It's a universal rule. What's amazing about all of this is that the solution that is always proposed, which is more government control to fix all of the systems. To take a different example, one of the things that people are very worried about right now is what about the IQ gaps in the United States? There are people who are really smart and they're gonna make all the money, and people who are not as smart are not gonna make as much money. And it's like, well, we have this thing, it's really cool. It's called capitalism. And in capitalism we have this thing that's also called comparative advantage. And comparative advantage is awesome because, you know, how many people I think are not particularly smart, have a lot of money? I know a lot of people who I know on a raw IQ level aren't going to Harvard Law.
- [68:35]
Adam Carolla
DJ Khaled, he's the dumbest person in the world. Nothing but money.
- [68:41]
Ben Shapiro
But I mean, this is the thing, like, all comparative advantage means is that, you know, a supposedly smart, high IQ person like me who went to Harvard Law, right? Well, guess what? I still pay a lot of money for somebody to do my plumbing. And that's great because it turns out that a variety of skill sets tend to balance off against each other. And then we pay each other to do these things that none of us want to do for ourselves, which is really, really cool. The government solution for that individualized decision making is how dare God have created a system where not everybody is equally smart. At the very beginning, what we need to do is just crush everybody in this vice. We'll do Harrison Bergeron, and all the smart people can be made stupid, and all of the strong people can be made weak. And then we'll all be equally miserable together. And then we'll all really feel good about ourselves. All the language that politicians use is along these lines. Whenever I hear about income inequality, I just want to retch. I just want to retch, because who gives a shit about income inequality? Seriously, why aren't we worried about poverty?
- [69:37]
Adam Carolla
Right?
- [69:37]
Ben Shapiro
Right. We should worry about poverty. I don't care. You know who has tremendous income inequality? I have a lot of really, really rich friends. You know, that's tremendous income inequality. I have unbelievable income inequality with Elon. Elon and I have unreal income inequality. Now. I'm pretty rich. Elon is the richest person on Earth. But I don't look at Elon. I go, oh, my God. You know, our income inequality is just. It's devastating me. I can't believe that. That dude is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And here I am only worth, you know, some millions of dollars. Like, that's. That's just awful. That's the stupidest shit I ever heard in my life. What am I complaining about? Rich Elon is this. That's stupid. I should be worried about, like, how do I help the poor guy, right? Like, the poor guy. Why does it matter how much money I make? It matters how much money the poor guy isn't making. What do we do so that he can make more money?
- [70:19]
Adam Carolla
It's infuriating for sure, but it's also destructive because Karen Bass, you know, a couple of years ago, was talking to the DNC maybe it's the California Democrats or something. And she just basically blamed homelessness on income inequality. So if you're blaming homelessness on income inequality and you can't solve income inequality because it doesn't exist, because it either doesn't exist or shall always exist, there's always going to be somebody making more than that guy, that guy's going to be making less, and then he'll in turn have people making less than him. Okay? You will never solve homelessness if you did this. If you tried to attribute smallpox to goblins, well, you can never cure smallpox. You know what I mean? And so there's a big problem where it's pablum, you know, income inequality. But if you're using it to try to solve a problem and it won't work to solve the problem because that's not what created the problem, then we got an issue. Like when I interviewed Gavin Newsom all those years ago, I said to him, homeless people, this is 10 years ago. He said homelessness was his biggest issue. I guess fire prevention is number two, just behind homeless. But he said to me, that's his number one issue. And I said, homelessness are people that are on drugs. It's addiction and it's mental disorders. It's like schizophrenia and addiction, and that's the homeless problem. And he said, but what about the real face of homelessness? What about the true face of homelessness? And I said, what is it? And he said, it's a mother of two who's recently divorced, who has a full time job, being paid minimum wage but not enough, who's now out on the streets with the kids. And I said, that doesn't exist. That's not. I said, that may be a postage stamp of homelessness. I'm talking about the AIDS quilt. He didn't think it was funny. I thought it was a good reference point. And anyway, but I realized right then I was like, oh, he can't solve this problem. He hasn't identified the problem.
- [72:37]
Ben Shapiro
Well, I think he has. He just didn't want to.
- [72:38]
Adam Carolla
He didn't want to.
- [72:39]
Ben Shapiro
It's the same thing as when he's Karen Bass. Wildfires are climate change. Right, Right. Well, that's a great way of avoiding, like doing anything. Congrats to you. So you haven't solved China pumping coal into the atmosphere, like genius level stuff there, Gavin. I'm so glad. If you have a plan for lowering the global temperature by 3% Celsius by next year.
- [73:00]
Adam Carolla
Right.
- [73:00]
Ben Shapiro
Spill it, dude. Without destroying the entire world economy and Even if you destroy the entire world economy, it's still gonna happen. So, like, you know, that wouldn't involve an asteroid, for example, like anytime, dude, just drop it right now. We're all love to hear it.
- [73:13]
Adam Carolla
Oh, I'd love to say to Gavin, it's too bad the climate change didn't kick in faster, so the sea levels could have put out some of those fires. All right, let me give you a plug, Ben. I listen to the podcast on a daily basis. It's one of the best shows out there and I get so much information from it. And there's a podcast also, Daily Wire, right. With all the info and all the new shows and all kids shows, Bent Key and always something new coming out. DailyWire.com is where people DailyWire.com and the podcast, that's everywhere.
- [73:48]
Ben Shapiro
That's Spotify, that's Apple. Wherever you listen to podcasts, the Ben Shapiro show is available.
- [73:52]
Adam Carolla
Thanks for being generous with your time, Ben.
- [73:54]
Ben Shapiro
Thanks, Adam. Great to see you.
- [73:56]
Dawson
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