Ben Shapiro | Ep. 141

Summary

FULL SEND PODCAST – Episode 141: Ben Shapiro

Host/Author: Shots Podcast Network
Description: Full Send Podcast brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer.
Release Date: November 4, 2024

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Introduction and Current Activities

[02:50] Kyle Forgeard introduces Ben Shapiro, highlighting his return to the Full Send Podcast for the second time. Ben shares that his recent weeks have been exceptionally busy, engaging in campaigning activities across various states alongside Republican candidates such as Eric Hovdi in Wisconsin, Sam Brown in Nevada, Bernie Moreno in Ohio, Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, and notably, Donald Trump in New York.

Trump and the 2024 Election Cycle

[03:19] Ben discusses his experience campaigning with Trump in New York, noting the President's unique ability to generate a vast array of memes:

“President Trump is the master of memes. More memes have emerged from this election cycle than will ever emerge for the rest of time.”
[03:44] He emphasizes Trump's enduring appeal despite contentious events, describing him as a "stand-up comedian" whose personality continues to captivate.

[07:16] The conversation shifts to the impact of Trump supporters being labeled "garbage." Ben argues that such rhetoric may dissuade passionate, low-propensity voters from supporting Trump:

“I think that that drives out votes for Trump.”

Comedy and Political Events

[04:17] Steinie brings up Tony Hinchcliffe's controversial appearance at the Republican National Convention (RNC). Ben critiques the decision to allow edgy, potentially offensive jokes:

“He told the roast joke. So, you know, don't hit the roast comedian for telling a roast joke. Hit the guy who booked him.”
[06:43] Ben asserts that such moments do not significantly alter voter behavior, as they primarily affect Republican turnout rather than changing votes outright.

Transgender Issues and Public Discourse

[09:36] The discussion delves into a viral incident involving a transgender individual ranting on live TV. Ben shares his approach to handling such situations, emphasizing empathy over confrontation:

“There have been situations like this in the past that never make the camera.”
[16:36] Ben elaborates on his stance against gender dysphoria, arguing that the surge in transgender identification is a "social contagion." He references Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage to support his viewpoint: “There is a condition known as gender dysphoria, and that condition has been present throughout time, which it has. Now that number was really, really, really low. And now you have, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20% of given populations who are saying that they're gender dysphoric. That's called the social contagion.”

Biden and Harris Relationship

[08:05] Ben discusses the strained relationship between President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, citing sources that indicate mutual disdain:

“He picked her because she was foisted upon him during BLM in 2020. And then Jill despises her. Like, Jill hates her.”
He critiques Biden's leadership, suggesting that Harris undermines his presidency.

Foreign Policy: Iraq, Obama vs. Trump

[37:07] Ben offers a critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy under both Obama and Trump. He argues that past administrations, including Obama, have engaged in misguided interventions, such as the Iraq War and actions in Libya:

“The problem was that afterward the plan for rebuilding Americans, we always have this idea that the process of transforming a country is much easier than it is.”
He challenges the notion of the "military industrial complex," asserting that wars are not orchestrated by shadowy elites but are influenced by broader geopolitical strategies.

Israel, Iran, and Middle East Policy

[54:49] The conversation shifts to Israel’s security concerns and Iran’s threats. Ben praises Israel’s military effectiveness while criticizing the Biden administration's handling of foreign aid:

“The Israelis are quite used to it by this point. I called up a very close friend of mine during the missile attack... They are really capable of handling it if you give them the weaponry with which to do it.”
He advocates for supporting Israel’s military capabilities to counter Iranian threats effectively.

Election Predictions and Analysis

[37:12] Ben shares his predictions for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, expressing confidence in Trump’s chances despite uncertainties:

“My gut is that Trump wins.”
He outlines potential swing states and discusses the complexities of early voting and its impact on election outcomes.

[41:30] Regarding election night coverage, Ben explains that the Full Send team will be broadcasting live, analyzing results in real-time, and preparing for possible prolonged voting scenarios:

“We're going to be covering that until all hours of the morning, maybe grab a couple hours of sleep, do the podcast again Wednesday morning, get back in the chair, sit there for hours on end.”

Daily Wire Growth and Business

[84:03] The discussion transitions to the business side of the Daily Wire. Ben highlights the platform’s growth, mentioning over a million paid subscribers and various revenue streams including advertising and merchandise:

“Last year, we did $220 million in business.”
He discusses new ventures like Jeremy’s Razors and the challenges of expanding into different markets such as children’s products: “Marketing to a different market requires independent marketing efforts.”

[86:45] Ben outlines future plans for the Daily Wire, aiming to double or quadruple their reach by expanding beyond politics into broader entertainment and consumer products:

“We think that could actually expand outside of the political realm.”

Notable Quotes

• Ben Shapiro on America's Strength:

  “[...] this country still is just amazing. It’s an amazing country.” ([04:22])

• On Gender Dysphoria as Social Contagion:

  “That doesn't wash. That doesn't wash. You've never seen anything like that.” ([16:20])

• Critique of Kamala Harris:

  “She was so unpopular over the first two years. They just hit her.” ([35:48])

• On Military Industrial Complex Misconceptions:

  “I think that one of the great disservices Dwight Eisenhower ever did was use of the phrase military industrial complex, which was actually hijacked from some left-wing thinkers at the time.” ([54:49])

• Election Integrity and Forecasting:

  “If you can show me the thing was done, I’m perfectly willing to say the election was stolen.” ([76:43])

• Israel’s Military Necessity:

  “If Israel put down all of its guns tomorrow, then everyone in the region in Israel will be slaughtered.” ([65:18])

Conclusion

Throughout Episode 141, Ben Shapiro offers a robust analysis of current political climates, focusing heavily on the impending 2024 U.S. presidential election, foreign policy challenges, particularly in the Middle East, and societal issues such as transgender identification. He intertwines these discussions with insights into the growth and strategic direction of the Daily Wire, providing listeners with a comprehensive view of both political opinion and media business strategies.

References

• Prizepix App Promotions: Initial advertisements about Happy Dad Seltzer and Prize Picks app ([00:00]-[02:50]) were skipped as per instructions.

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This summary aims to encapsulate the key discussions and insights from Episode 141 of the Full Send Podcast featuring Ben Shapiro, structured into coherent sections with notable quotes and appropriate timestamp references.

Transcript

[Kyle Forgeard]

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[Ben Shapiro]

It and try it out.

[Kyle Forgeard]

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[Steinie]

All right, we got amazing guest, second time he's been on the full send podcast. Me and Steinie are both huge fans of you been fans for a while, so it's great to have you back.

[Ben Shapiro]

Thanks so much.

[Steinie]

How's the last few weeks been for you? Busy.

[Ben Shapiro]

I'm so tired. Yeah, I've been out on the trail with a bunch of candidates. So I went to Wisconsin with Eric Hovdi, went to Nevada with Sam Brown, Ohio with Bernie Moreno, went to Pennsylvania with Dave McCormick, went to New York with Trump. So it's been a lot.

[Steinie]

How was it in New York with Trump?

[Ben Shapiro]

That was fun. I mean, it wasn't a fun day, obviously. It was October 7th, and we were paying tribute to the people who had fallen. And I brought a hostage family to meet him. But he's always a kick. I mean, President Trump is a character, as everybody has seen. I mean, if nothing else, the guy is the master of memes. More memes have emerged from this election cycle than will ever emerge for the rest of time. The cornucopia has been uncorked, and now we just have a wealth of memes for the rest of human history.

[Steinie]

What do you think about the garbage truck troll last night?

[Ben Shapiro]

It's great. I mean, it's hilarious. I mean. And what was great about it is that he went on stage and then explained it, Right? And the explanation was hysterical. I mean, he gets up there and he's talking about how, like, oh, my God, look how high the step is. Am I gonna be able to get up? Oh, shit. He's a funny dude. I mean, that's the secret sauce for Trump is that he's always been a stand up comedian, and that hasn't stopped anywhere along the line. But wouldn't you just think about the images from this campaign? It's crazy. The mug shot to the assassination photo, McDonald's to McDonald's to him in a garbage truck. Like, what the.

[Steinie]

Imagine people looking back in like 50 years, what they're gonna think of this election.

[Ben Shapiro]

You know, all that it underscores for me is something I said to a foreign leader. Actually at one point is right after the Biden Trump debate, before Biden dropped out, and the person was like, in despair about, oh, my God, look at that debate. It was so terrible. I said, listen, let me explain how awesome America is, how much we kick ass. Here's how awesome we are. We can run two 80 year olds against each other. Whichever one golfs better, we'll make the president. Then he'll do a speech at the RNC, introduced by Hulk Hogan. He'll jabber for 93 minutes. No one will understand what the fuck is going on. And you'll love it. You'll love it because we're America, bitch. Like, that's America's great. Like, it's a great country. We're powerful, we're strong. Our institutions are fine. Like, you know, for. For all of the kind of panic that's out there, the reality is that this country still is just amazing. It's an amazing country.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah. I want to go back real quick to Madison Square Garden. The Tony Hinchcliffe stuff's everywhere.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

So I just want to get your opinion on that.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, he's a roast comedian and he told the roast joke. So, you know, don't. Don't hit the roast comedian for telling a rose joke. Hit the guy who booked him. Whoever's at the RNC is like, you know who we need to open? The guy who is telling, like, super, super edgy jokes at the Tom Brady Rose. Like, that's the one. I mean, come on.

[Steinie]

Like, just someone's getting fired on the inside.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, somebody should be. I mean, that's like politics 101 is, don't insult ethnic groups in your closing event like that. That. That's not Trump's fault. I mean, if you think that Trump is. Is micromanaging his. Trump has.

[Steinie]

Yeah, he is. No.

[Unknown Guest]

Well, do you think, do you think Tony was vetted at all?

[Ben Shapiro]

No. No. I mean, no one in the back room was like, this joke is too much. Tell Tony to cut it. Like, he was. I assumed that Tony wasn't going to submit his material to be cut like that. First of all, he's a comedian. He's a talent. A lot of those folks are not really fond of people cutting their jokes. So my guess, he probably said, listen, here's my routine. You know, load it in the teleprompter. We're good.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Ben Shapiro]

And that was kind of it. So, yeah, again, I think he's hysterical. I think Tony Hinchcliffe generally is really funny. The stuff that he's been. The stuff that he's been doing with the, with the Biden Trump fake. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's. It's the, the Shane Gillis stuff. It's. It's so funny. But, you know, like, that was. That. That's a weird move. It's a weird move. It's like strippers at a funeral. Like, I'm not. I'm not sure exactly what's happening.

[Steinie]

Bombed. It just was not the right setting.

[Ben Shapiro]

No. And, and you could tell the audience was. Was awkward about it. It wasn't like the audience was roaring at these jokes. The audience like, oh, my God, he made a Puerto Rico joke. Just what I've been waiting. Like, the audience, like, I don't think I should be laughing at this at this time. Like this.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you think something like that has a big enough impact?

[Ben Shapiro]

No, I don't think anybody's changing their vote based on that. And I also don't think actually that the Biden, Trump supporters are garbage thing has a big impact except on Republican turnout. So Trump. Trump is like, no swing voter is going, man, I just don't know who to vote for. But now that Biden called Trump supporters garbage, I'm going to pull the lever for Trump like that. That's not how that works. What it really is is a bunch of low propensity dudes who are like, should I go to the polls today? Should I not go? I kind of like Trump, but also, like, it's kind of a schlap. Do I really want to get up and, like, go to the polls today? Like that son of a bitch. He just, you know, he just called me. He called me garbage. Fine. You know what? F it. I'm. I'm going. I'm going. Like, I think that that drives out votes for Trump.

[Unknown Guest]

Does that not surprise you, though, how, like, the, the Tony thing was a big deal and he cut a lot of heat, and then everyone thinks, like, this is this monster deal, and then Biden's dumb enough to come back and say something like that. So I bail him out.

[Ben Shapiro]

I have a theory of. Of this election cycle, which is that God totally wants Trump to win. And Trump is like, hold on a minute, God. Like, I think that there's a lot of that happening where it's like, you know, God is like, I will turn your head at the last minute right here, so you just don't get shot in the head. And Trump's like, well, what if I go to the Iron Sea and talk for, like, 93 minutes? And then. And then there's, like, another assassination attempt. And God's like, I'm gonna make sure that you don't get shot. Trump's like, what if I have Tony Hinchcliffe hoving for me? And, of course, you know, the Tony Hinchcliffe thing isn't Trump's fault, but. Yeah, to pretend that the, you know, either of these campaigns is being run like clockwork is ridiculous. That's obviously not true.

[Steinie]

Is there. You think there's any beef, actually between Biden and Harris?

[Ben Shapiro]

Oh, yeah. He hates her. He absolutely hates her. Now, I don't think that he's, like, attempting to undermine purposely. I'm not sure that he has the level of intention necessary to do anything right now, but he clearly despises her. I mean, he picked her because she was foisted upon him during BLM in 2020. And then Jill despises her. Like, Jill hates her. Really? This has been well reported. Yeah. I mean, she cannot stand her, because.

[Steinie]

How do you know that?

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. Yeah, I think that was.

[Steinie]

That's interesting.

[Ben Shapiro]

Which book was this? This was. There's a book by Charlie Spear, and where he talks specifically about how Jill does not get along with Kamala, specifically because Jill was angry that. You remember that first Democratic primary debate, Kamala labeled Joe racist. Right. She said, if it were for people like you, I never would have been able to go to an integrated school. Right. And that was, like, the opener. Right. And so Jill, since then, I think rightly so, has thought, this woman's terrible. Like, I don't want her any. And then she became the vice president, and she still doesn't like her. And so for Joe. Joe's entire case was, Kamala's super weak. What's your proof that she's gonna run well ahead of me in this election cycle? And so, you know, the incentive structure is weirdly set up for Joe to be kind of happy if she loses. Like, if she loses, then Joe Biden goes down as the guy who is unfairly deposed in favor of a candidate who then lost to Donald Trump. If she wins, then he's just a transitional president who is there for a few years as a placeholder for Kamala Harris. So if you're Joe Biden and you want to be remembered as a transformational, tragic figure, you kind of want her to lose a little bit.

[Steinie]

Damn, that's interesting.

[Unknown Guest]

This is a total. This. We're going to switch real quick, but I have to. I have to talk to you about it, bro. The Jubilee video, you didn't want to talk about the genitalia, right?

[Ben Shapiro]

Well, I mean, the trans. And I was. I mean, why would I. I mean. No, no, that was crazy. No circumstances. Whoa, whoa. That was. That was the thing I did not want to even have. That's not an image I wanted. That's not. No, none of that. None of that.

[Unknown Guest]

Actually, that was probably the most viral clip I've seen in a long time. Like, all over. Tick tock.

[Ben Shapiro]

And it was. It was, you know, a psychotic break. I mean, the. The. The. You know, this person got up and was not making an argument. There was no argument there. And so she started, you know, talking, and I started trying to interject to try and, you know, have a conversation. And she was growling and moving the chair around and just yelling. At a certain point, I was like, you know what I got. There's. I can't interject. There's nothing I can do to interrupt this stream of consciousness nonsense. What was kind of shocking to me is that obviously the format there is that people can raise the red flag and cut this thing short.

[Steinie]

It's a pretty good setup.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right. But because of the intersectional nature of the thing, this was the. The thing that kind of shocked me about the Jubilee video is people who are making truly awful arguments. If they had intersectional qualities, people would let them go for a long time. And people who are making, you know, half decent arguments, very often, like, the flags would come out right away. And so I was kind of shocked by that. Like the. The kind of informal intersectional structure of the entire event. Like this person. Well, because she's a trans man, that means we're just gonna let her go for like six minutes, just ranting and raving nonsensically. Yeah. I mean, so much so that that segment finished. I. I'll be honest, I haven't actually watched the whole thing through. Cause I experienced it in real time. After that finished, that had run down the clock entirely on the abortion debate. Right. We'd done 20 minutes on abortion. Other people were like, I still want to comment on. Like, I still Wanted to do the abortion debate. And so the producer said to me, like, can we put some more minutes on the clock? I was like, I feel like that would be fair to put some more minutes on the clock for all these other people if they want to comment on it, because that had nothing to do with the topic. That was an emotional rant, and I really don't have anything to respond to it. I mean, what am I supposed to respond to somebody who's clearly having an emotional meltdown in front of me?

[Unknown Guest]

So it's you versus 25 people, right?

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. So you're sitting in the middle of the circle. It was like, 20. It was actually closer to 30. I think they may have called it 25, but I think there were actually 29 sitting in this circle. And the way the format works is that they sort of race. They race to the chair, sort of, which is always amusing. And whoever gets there first gets to sit there and debate until a majority of the people in the circle raise a red flag and say, it's time to switch that person out after a certain point. There were people who obviously were slower to get to the chair who wanted to. I sort of started choreographing the thing where I'd be like, okay, you know what? This person hasn't talked yet. You've talked already. I want to be fair to everybody in the. In the circle. You know, just guys like, I promise I'll get to you. Like, let this person run up and do it.

[Unknown Guest]

So do you think anyone kind of gave you a run for your money?

[Ben Shapiro]

I wouldn't say run for my money, but some people made some interesting arguments that I thought were sort of out of left field. There was the dude who tried to compare the electoral college to dei. I thought that was a weird, strained argument, but I could kind of see.

[Steinie]

That's your boy. No kid, Dean.

[Unknown Guest]

I know him, maybe.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. I mean, he's, like, best friends with that kid.

[Unknown Guest]

I mean, I don't know about best friends.

[Ben Shapiro]

Smart guy. I mean, obviously it has some IQ points. I thought that that was a real stretch of an argument, but it was an interesting one I hadn't heard before. And I always get kind of interested when I hear an argument that I haven't heard before. That's always kind of interesting to me. So I thought that that was the argument that I heard that I was most kind of taken by, because, again, I do this professionally, which means that I just spend all day reading arguments on both sides of every issue. And, you know, I could kind of Through a glass darkly See kind of what he was getting at. But it was. At least. It made me think. At least made me, like, sit there and go, okay, is that true? Is that not like that. That I thought was.

[Steinie]

That's impressive if someone could do that to you.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. I mean, you hit me with something completely out of left field, and, you know, that's okay. At least. At least makes me pause and consider the argument. So.

[Unknown Guest]

But you. Would you agree? You were 25 0.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, I didn't see anybody defeat any of the arguments that I was making. So, you know, the way that I view these things is not about defeating me personally. When you go into these situations, the hardest thing to do is just stay emotionally, you know, kind of on even keel throughout this sort of stuff. I mean, you're being berated by some giant person who's yelling at you in your face, and you have to just be like, okay. You know, that's. That's life. Or when I was in Oxford and there are people who are literally arguing that genocide of Jews is okay, and you're like, okay, well, I guess I just have to kind of sit here and take it like that. That's the hard part. And when I talk to people about what I do for a living, everybody assumes the hard part of the job is the reading and the organ organization. And can you get on camera and talk for 45 minutes straight? How do you do that every day? I mean, that's what I do for a living. That's not the hard part. I'd say 80% of the effort I expend in life is not saying things, is not responding to things, is not just kind of like, I really want to clock this person. But, like, don't do it. Just, like, just withhold. Just don't do it. When that trans person is yelling at me, I mean, they're like, it was six minutes long. So for me, six minutes, a long time. Like, a long time. I. I probably had 10 snarky responses that I could have given in that moment. And I made the active decision that that's not. That's not what I want to, you know, purvey on the air. That's not. That's what I want. I don't want to be the person who's, like, snarking about somebody who's clearly having a meltdown. It's not sympathetic, it's unempathic. Like, it's just not a good thing to do.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Steinie]

So even though that would make the clips go crazier and Yeah, I mean, like, a lot of other people do that now, right?

[Ben Shapiro]

100%.

[Steinie]

You could tell they're just kind of looking for.

[Ben Shapiro]

There have been situations like this in the past that never make the camera. So I'd say it must have been five, six years ago. I did a speech at University of British Columbia up in Vancouver, and there was a trans person who got up and started making the argument, and the person started talking about it was a male to female, about his personal experiences. And I said, listen, I really don't want to talk about that because I'm inevitably going to have to critique your personal experiences. And I don't think that that's good. And he insisted on doing this. He just insisted on going back to it, saying, you know, my, you know, my parents say that I'm female. And eventually after a few minutes, they said, look, I really didn't want to do this. You brought up. You wouldn't stop talking about it. The reason your parents are saying that is because they're sympathetic to you as a person. They don't actually believe you're female. They believe that you're a male, but they're trying to be nice to you. And this person broke down in tears and like, literally broke down in tears and went away crying. And, you know, obviously that's a clip that goes super violent. You've never seen that clip. Why did you never see that clip? Because I went to the camera people at the event and the organizers of the event, I told them to cut it from the tape because it's bad for the mental health of the person. And then I called up the person, somebody who knew that person, one of the organizers knew who it was. And I said, I want you to check in on that person tonight and then invite them to breakfast with me tomorrow morning so I can make sure they're okay.

[Steinie]

Did they come?

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Steinie]

How'd the breakfast go?

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah, what'd you do? I said, I said. I said, listen, I cut that from the tape. I want to make sure you're okay. Like, you know, I don't have to agree with your assessment of yourself. I don't have to agree with what you believe about yourself, but you're a human being. I want to make sure you're okay.

[Steinie]

And how was their reaction?

[Ben Shapiro]

I think they appreciated it.

[Steinie]

How long ago is that?

[Ben Shapiro]

Five, six years ago, maybe.

[Steinie]

What is, like, in your opinion, what's the whole answer to this? Like, I think you think it's like. I mean, we all kind of think it's some sort of Mental.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, but what's the. There's no. There's no answer to. So there's two questions. One is for people who legitimately have gender dysphoria, which is a minute percentage of the population, unfortunately, there's no amazing answer to it.

[Steinie]

That's a real minute percentage of transgender people.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yes, I think that. I think a huge percentage of transgender people are now part of a social contagion that. I mean, that's why you've seen this rapid. They don't.

[Steinie]

Even a large percentage of transgenders don't have gender dysphoria.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yes. I mean, I mean, I think most. I think a lot of people who are transgender will say they don't have gender dysphoria.

[Steinie]

Right.

[Ben Shapiro]

Especially as the current modern definition of gender dysphoria goes, which says including depression, which, again, is a very weird way to define a mental disorder. If I think I'm Napoleon, I walk around all day thinking I'm Napoleon. I'm actually pretty happy about being Napoleon. Apparently, According to the DSM 5, I don't have a mental disorder. That's a very weird way of describing a mental illness to me. I think that if you walk around saying you're Napoleon all day and believing that whether you're enjoying being Napoleon or not, something's wrong. Right. But, you know, you cannot say that. The. If there is a condition known as gender dysphoria, and that condition has been present throughout time, which it has. I mean, there's been a vanishing, vanishingly small percentage of human beings across all of human history who've had problems believing that they are. They feel more like a member of the opposite sex. But that number was really, really, really low. And now you have, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20% of given populations who are saying that they're gender dysphoric. That's called the social contagion. And especially when you see a complete flip in the sex to which it applies. So it used to apply mostly to young men who believe they were women, like teenagers, and then there was a complete flip, and now it's a bunch of young girls who think they're boys. And so that. That's happened over the course of the last 5, 10 years. You're seeing, like 100x increase in. In trans identification in areas of the west. That. That doesn't wash. That doesn't wash. You've never seen anything like that. What condition, other than sort of like an actual viral contagion, what mental health condition have you seen that has increased so starkly without Any sort of social contagion being a part of it doesn't work that way.

[Unknown Guest]

Is there any, is there any data on why that's why it continues to grow at that speed?

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, I think that there is. Abigail Shrier wrote a great book called Irreversible Damage about this, which was then banned from Amazon. Abigail has gone into a lot of research on this sort of stuff and her basic premise is that when you propagandize to a bunch of 12, 13 year old girls who are going through puberty and who are feeling uncomfortable in their own bodies and who are feeling like they. And so girls are. I mean, I have three younger sisters, I have a wife, I have two daughters. Girls get uncomfortable. Puberty is not a comfortable time for girls. And so when they start going through that and they feel awkward and chubby and they feel their hormones are starting to go a little bit crazy and they feel uncomfortable and then they're told the reason you feel all that is not because this is sort of the natural way that you grow into physical maturity. The reason that you're feeling that is probably because you might be a boy. And then what happens? You go to a gender clinic and without pretty much any sort of screening procedure, they shoot you up with testosterone. What testosterone does, it makes you more aggressive and it makes you more confident. And so girls will do that and they'll feel more aggressive and more confident. Temporarily they'll think, oh, it's true, I am a boy, right? Because I feel better now. I feel better having the shots of testosterone. That's a hormonal thing, you know, that's not because you actually were a boy. At no point were you a boy. And also I think that because parenting has become so crappy and parents are totally unwilling to simply civilize their children, then I think that you end up with parents who treat their kids as though it's up to the kid to make these decisions. It is not up to the kid to make decisions. Very important life decisions. I have four children. They don't make any important life decisions, nor should they. They're kids, they're stupid, right? Kids are innocent and they are wonderful and they are not good and they're not smart, right? And then it's your job to make them good and smart, right? That's, that's your job as a parent. And so I've told this story before. I have four. It goes girl, boy, girl, boy. So when my oldest girl was maybe three and the second one, the boy, when he was maybe one. So when you're one. So his sister had some shiny like princess shoes. And he was going around, he like found the shiny princess shoes and he put them on. Cause they're shiny and he was walking around in them. And I said, no, those are not for you, those are girl shoes. And he like did it again. And I said, those are not for you, those are girl shoes. And he was kind of whining about it. I said, just hold up. So I drove him over to like the country western store and I bought him a pair of like cowboy boots and he put on the cowboy boots. He wore them for three years. Okay, now is that sexist that I did that or is that me teaching him that? Actually, yes, there are differences between boys and girls. And you weren't really interested in the femininity of the shoes because you're a girl, you just like cool shoes, you like cool shiny things. And now these are other cool shoes that you can wear. Like there are ways to be a boy and there are ways to be a girl and they are distinct. And that's not a bad thing, that's a very good thing. In a society that pretends that you're supposed to be raising boys as though gender is not supposed to be reinforced by stereotypical assumptions, that's a society doomed for failure because you got to teach boys to be men. And that does come along with some accoutrements, like, you know, wearing pants and not dresses. Like I think it is good to teach boys that they ought to wear boy clothes. I don't think that that is a bad. Like the fact that this sort of stuff has become arguable, nay bigoted in modern society that oh my God, I have a five year old boy and you won't let him wear a dress? Yeah, no shit I won't let him wear a dress because he's a boy. And it's good for him to learn that boys and girls dress differently. That is a good thing for him to know.

[Steinie]

I know it's. So what do you think it is? Is it like, are they just crazy or is there some hidden agenda like you said with the gender clinics and all that? Like that's some weird shit.

[Ben Shapiro]

There's an.

[Steinie]

Are they just like super woke or is it some secret agenda that they're trying to fuck up our youth?

[Ben Shapiro]

Well, I mean, I do think for some people there's that agenda to fuck up the youth. But I also think that there's something else going on. And there's a great book by a philosopher called Carl Truman out of I think it's University of Utah at this point. And his basic premise is called the creation of the modern Self. I believe it's a great book. He basically argues that the traditional way that human beings define themselves was an interaction with the rest of the world, right? The way that you defined yourself as a human being is how you interact with the institutions around you, right? So you're a member of your family, you define yourself as a dad, you define yourself as a son, you define yourself as a member of your church community, you define yourself as a member of your bro pot. Like whatever it is, you define yourself in relation to all these other people's and to duties, right? There are things you are supposed to do in the world. These are roles you're supposed to fulfill.

[Steinie]

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[Ben Shapiro]

This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. With the Gemini app you can talk live and have a real time conversation with an AI assistant. It's great for all kinds of things like if you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm creative ideas. And by the way, this script was actually read by Gemini. Download the Gemini app for iOS and Android today. Must be 18 + to use Gemini live. And then during the romantic era, there became this. This idea that basically what you are is not the things that you do, it's not the conscious decisions that you make, it's the feelings that you have on the inside that's what defines you. And anything that's an imposition on the feelings that you have on the inside is a denial of your authenticity. And so that sort of idea has permeated Western society. That second idea now sounds more natural, I think, to most people than the first idea. The idea that, like, if I ask people who they are, like, well, I'm a person who feels, and here's how I feel about things, and here's what I feel about myself. Whereas if you ask a person who's religious, they'll say, usually if you ask a Christian, they'll say, well, I'm a Christian. It's the first thing they say, I'm a Christian, go to church, I'm a dad, got kids, and religious Jews, same sort of thing. Is that how I feel on the inside? But if you ask young people today what they are, it's how they feel. And so if you believe that all you are is a floating set of feelings, this sort of gnostic idea that you're not a physical body that is integrated with a soul, but you are actually just like a freely wandering soul that has like a meat suit on and like Cartesian duality, and that you are, and that any imposition on you is a denial of yourself. That's how you get to this, right? That's why when the question, like, you'll hear it from every trans person that I talk to, they'll always say, why are you denying my existence? And every time I say, I'm not denying your existence as a person, I'm denying that what you maintain about yourself is true. But you see, for that person, what they're saying to their mind is true because what they are is how they define themselves, right? How they feel about themselves. If I deny that, I'm denying what they are as a human. What I'm saying is what you feel is not who you are. Who you are has many characteristics. How you feel is one of those things, but it's certainly not the majority of the things that make you you. I feel tons of things, all the Time. That's not what makes me me. What makes me me is the things that I do in the world, the person that I am to my family. Right. And that's been a radical shift in the nature of how we perceive ourselves in Western society. I think this is sort of the final outgrowth of that.

[Steinie]

Has anyone ever topped the og. You getting pressed the trans. Was it Zoe?

[Ben Shapiro]

Her name was Zoe Turner.

[Steinie]

Has anyone ever topped that yet or. No, still the biggest.

[Unknown Guest]

What did she do?

[Steinie]

The biggest trans press of all time.

[Ben Shapiro]

So he was a guy who had been a helicopter pilot and transitioned into a. A trans woman. His name is Zoe Tur. And this is a pretty famous clip from CNN Headline News, I believe 2014. Dr. Drew was hosting. And so this is very. This is a funny story, actually. So we were in the. In the green room, and they said, you want to come debate, like, a bunch of issues, including the trans issue. Okay. And so in the green room, I'm there. It's like me versus the entire room. It's like me and four other people, I think, are on the panel.

[Steinie]

How long ago was that? Sorry to interrupt.

[Ben Shapiro]

Is now eight years. Well, 10 years ago, maybe. 10 years ago.

[Steinie]

I remember that clip.

[Ben Shapiro]

I think it's 2014. And. And so the producer comes over, and I should have known things. We're gonna go haywire because the guy's like, listen, I used to produce for Jerry Springer. At this point, I should be like, oh, God. And. But he's like, I want you to. I'm gonna sit you right next to Zoe, and you're gonna. And you're gonna talk. Say whatever you want. He's like, whatever you want to say, just say it. Don't hold back. Like, well, he's a good producer. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, well, you know, that's. That. That's my job. That's what I'm here for. Okay. And so. And so this is when I believe the. The subject was Caitlyn Jenner. And so everybody in the world is like, caitlyn Jenner is the bravest, most wonderful, most important, courageous person on earth. And so the end. Now she's kind of brave, though.

[Steinie]

She's sticking up in the trans community for Trump and stuff.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

What award did she win?

[Ben Shapiro]

So I think ESPN gave Caitlyn Jenner the courage award.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Ben Shapiro]

Like, not because Caitlyn Jenner had, you know, like, won a medal serving the country or something, but because Caitlyn Jenner decided that Bruce was a chick. And so. And so the. The entire conversation was like, on a scale of one to Normandy, how brave is Caitlyn Jenner? People, like, way better than Normandy. Like, oh, my God. Like, no one has ever been braver. Like, when you think of personal sacrifice, it's like, Jesus. And then Caitlyn Jenner, like, right up here. And that. That was like, the entire conversation. They finally came to me. I said, I don't see what's courageous about that. There's a person saying what they feel internally, and then we're all supposed to sort of bow to that. But that. That, you know, somebody declaring that their gender dysphoric doesn't seem particularly courageous to me. Right. It's not. Storming the beaches in Normandy.

[Unknown Guest]

Did you watch Bruce when he was competing?

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, like, back in the day?

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, when he was a great athlete. Yeah, yeah, of course.

[Unknown Guest]

Were you upset when he decided to make.

[Ben Shapiro]

No. I mean, it was a little before my time, so I was only born 84. He was really competing late 70s, early 80s. Yeah. So I've seen tape of him. I wasn't.

[Steinie]

I like Caitlyn Jenner, though. We played golf with her.

[Ben Shapiro]

Oh, that's really funny.

[Steinie]

She's actually.

[Kyle Forgeard]

She.

[Steinie]

She's a beauty.

[Ben Shapiro]

Well, because. Because Bruce Jenner is a great athlete, so changing the name to Caitlin doesn't make him not a great athlete.

[Steinie]

She did try to play from the reds, though, that really. Yeah, we called her out. We said, get back to the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah, correct. Exactly.

[Steinie]

Yes. And she's a nasty Olympic golfer.

[Ben Shapiro]

That is not shocking at all. You know, it turns out that Caitlin and Bruce, exactly the same person, just a different name. I know. Crazy. Crazy to say that. I know. Bruce disappeared and we never know where Bruce went, but it turns out that Bruce and Kaitlin. I know. Same human. Whoa, whoa. Same physical capacity with just a little estrogen. Whoa. I mean, again, she still has her.

[Steinie]

Balls, though, if she's coming out to, like, support Trump, even though, like, the whole Kardashian clan is probably super left.

[Ben Shapiro]

I was going to comment on, like, what? What? No, I'm just, like.

[Steinie]

I'm just saying, like, she. I respect her for, like, coming out and still being.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, listen, I think a lot of what. What Caitlin is saying is fine. And you'll notice that I characterize Caitlyn as a he because people get to change their names. They don't get to. They don't get to choose their. Their genders. But in any case, the. You know, so anyway, this is the whole conversation, and the. And then at some point, I'm talking about gender dysphoria. I make this comment and I'm saying, gender dysphoria is a condition that doesn't make you heroic any more than having depression makes you heroic. Like these, these are, you know, mental conditions. And okay, so this is a thing, but that's not heroism. And Zoe Tur turns to me and says, little boy. You don't know what you're talking about, little boy, you know, and, and so, and I said, well, I mean, I do know that every single cell in Caitlyn Jenner's body, with the ironic exception of some of his sperm cells, has a Y chromosome in it. Like, I know that for a fact. That's a reality. And Zoe Turner's like, well, you don't know anything about genetics, little boy. And I was like, well, what are your chromosomes, sir? And at this point, Zoe sort of like reaches across and grabs me by the back of the neck on live TV and goes, you stop talking like that or I'm gonna, or I'm gonna send you. It was, I'm going to send you home. I'm going to send you home in an ambulance. I remember the specific wording just because I remember the first thing that popped in my mind is that makes no sense. You don't go home in an ambulance. Right. But in any case.

[Unknown Guest]

And Zoe, just, just, just to clarify, Zoe was a guy, right?

[Ben Shapiro]

Yes. So do you think, do you think you could have taken her like in a fight? Yeah, she's big. Oh, Zoe's like, I think he's had some ex military background or ex police. I can't remember. It was a helicopter pilot. And Zoe's like hulking and it's like, I'll meet you in the park. I'm like, no, I'm not going to. I would have to fight you. Like, no, I mean, also, I go to jail. Like if I. That's what I'm saying.

[Unknown Guest]

What's the ruling there?

[Ben Shapiro]

I lose. I lose lose. Like if, let's say Zoe Turk kicks my ass, that's terrible. Just in and of itself. And let's say that I kick Zoe hers ass. I go to jail because I just beat up a trans person. So, like, that's not. That's going to work out well. Yeah, also I'm not the one. Like, I don't feel like the, the adjudication of masculinity is whether you can win a physical fight. Like, I think that's a stupid way of adjudicating masculinity. I think the best way to Adjudicate masculinity is how many good children do you raise in a solid stable and make the world a better place while defending your family and creating things like, I. I think that the adjudication of masculinity by how many people you can punch is a really dumb way to do masculinity. It turns out we have guns now, so if people really want to get in that kind of fight, I can hire security. And I win. You lose. Like, I don't have to. I don't have to physically pummel somebody in order to prove that I'm. That I'm a dude. I have a wife. I have four beautiful kids. I make a wonderful living. I. I do things that I think are productive in the world. I try to help people in my community. I give a lot of charity. That's a better adjudication of masculinity than taking off your shirt, strutting around with a cigar, and pretending that you're doing something for the world because you can rent a lot of Bugattis.

[Steinie]

Is that an Andrew Tate shot that was.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Steinie]

You don't like him?

[Ben Shapiro]

Oh, it wasn't subtle, I think. You schmuck. I think. I think Tate, you don't like him at all. I think that Tate is. What I've always said about Tate is that because feminism is a target rich environment, he hits that target a lot. And I agree with a lot of the critiques. And I think he's like a terrible doctor. He's really good at diagnosis and he's horrible at prescription. Everything that he recommends for guys is pretty much the opposite of what they should be doing. At least I wouldn't say everything half.

[Steinie]

He plays, he says some good shit and then he says some crazy shit.

[Ben Shapiro]

But this is his game. His game is he'll say one thing that is perfectly obvious, and then he'll say one thing that is batshit lunacy. And then when you attack the batshit lunacy, he'll say, are you saying that that's not the perfectly obvious thing? Like, no, I'm saying that, like, what you just said is batshit loony. So he'll say things like, you know, that means that men should, like, work out and strive hard. Agree. Totally agree. And then he'll say things like, and you should be judged by how many women you impregnate. It's like, no, no, that's stupid. That's. That's bad. That's bad for society. That's stupid and unnecessary. And I'm getting kind of tired of the game where everyone is a political candidate. By this, I mean when you're voting for a political candidate, it's a package deal, right? You only have. You vote for the person, you vote against the person, it's a package deal. But when it comes to the people that you choose to consume, it's not a package deal. It turns out that to get the good stuff from Andrew Tate, I don't have to ingest all the trash that Andrew Tate puts out, including at his scam university. I don't have to. I don't have to do any of that. I don't have to have to listen to a guy who made his money in cam girls and then proclaims his virtue at the same exact time.

[Steinie]

Have you ever debated him or talked to him?

[Ben Shapiro]

No. I mean, I did a 20 minute video on, you know, breaking down his Tate University and all of that kind of stuff. So, I mean, listen, that'd be a good.

[Steinie]

That'd be an entertaining.

[Ben Shapiro]

It'd be some great Internet. It'd be some great Internet.

[Steinie]

Would you ever do that?

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, listen, I'd be happy to do that.

[Steinie]

What if we help set it up?

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, that's fine. I mean, but I know what it'll turn into. It wouldn't be a debate. It would be me critiquing his specific ideas and then him just saying that I'm not man enough to take off my shirt and how many women have I impregnated? And can I fight people? And he can kick my ass. I'm sure Andrew Tate can kick my ass. I mean, like, so. So, so the fuck what? Like, okay, a lot of people can kick my ass, as it turns out, not that big. All right. But your ideas are still shit.

[Steinie]

That'd be some good Internet, like you said.

[Ben Shapiro]

Could be amazing Internet.

[Steinie]

That's great.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Steinie]

On that transgender subject, I've seen the clip, but I don't know if you've seen it. Did she actually really say that we should give transgender surgeries to prison inmates?

[Ben Shapiro]

Yes.

[Steinie]

There was no context before that.

[Ben Shapiro]

No, no, that was part. So she. What she did. It was on. It was on a. I believe it was a questionnaire. So the questionnaire was, should inmates of prisons in California be given transgender health care? Which means taxpayer funded surgeries. And she checked. Yes. On. It was like an ACLU questionnaire.

[Steinie]

That's just so crazy that a president, presidential candidate is, like, running on.

[Ben Shapiro]

Honestly, this is part of the thing that the Democrats are benefiting. That is there have been studies done on this, like, that people like, you'll mention what the Democrats actually say and people be like, no. Like, no, but really? Yeah. I'm like, no, that's no way. No, like that's a real thing. So if you say like, they're for abortion all the way till point of birth, people like, that's not true. It's like, no, but. But it is like, no, that's too crazy. That's not true. Unfortunately, it is.

[Unknown Guest]

What is your overall opinion, just as of Kamala?

[Ben Shapiro]

She's a completely empty suit. She's a completely empty suit. There is nothing there. And you can see it anytime anybody asks her a follow up question. There is nothing there. She's got one layer of slogan and then you scratch beneath the surface and it's just vacuum. She's absolutely vacuous. I don't think she's smart. I don't think she's talented. I think that she is good at reading off a teleprompter in short spurts. I think the more you see her, the less you like her, which is what the American public have been experiencing every time they're reintroduced to her. So you get like, Kamala Harris 1.0, and it's like, fresh face, senator out of California, hard charging, progressive within five minutes. Everybody's like, oh, my God, she's insufferable. I can't. And then it's like, here she is running for president in 2019, and she's fresh and she's awesome and she's joyful and she's intersectional and she's doing great in the polls. And then she blows up and she doesn't even make it to California and she's out. And then they pick her up off the scrap even they make her VP and like, third, look at Kamala. She's probably amazing this time. She's going to be so exciting and intersectional and she knows things and she's whip smart. And then she's the least popular vice president.

[Steinie]

She's a fucking ghost.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yes.

[Steinie]

For the last four years.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. Because.

[Steinie]

Because you don't hear anything about it.

[Ben Shapiro]

She was so unpopular over the first two years. They just hit her. They just. They're like, we can't let her out in public anymore. Right. She's like the. She's like, you know the crazy first wife in Jane Eyre? They like put her in the attic there and just left her there. And then. And then finally he died. And they're like, we need somebody who's here. Let's grab Kamala. Let's do that. And so they grabbed Kamala, like fourth. Look at Kamala Harris. I was like, oh my God, the brat and the joy and the dancing and Tim Walls and his crazy weird ass hands and all that kind of stuff.

[Steinie]

I mean, they somewhat. Not that we like her, but they somewhat succeeded in it a little bit.

[Ben Shapiro]

For the first place, which was crazy.

[Steinie]

I don't know how they did it.

[Ben Shapiro]

Well, I mean, the answer was they never let her answer a question. I literally on my show held a counter every single day that she didn't answer an adversarial question. I think our count got up to 48 days.

[Steinie]

Wow.

[Ben Shapiro]

That she didn't answer a single adversarial question. That's a long time to carry your campaign without answering a single adversarial question. And then she started having to do interviews and it turns out that she didn't have much. And then she started like. You can also tell that she's uncomfortable on the trail. She went from like they told her whatever. You don't laugh. Like clearly very early on in the campaign because they knew that that was her kind of tick. Her nervous tic is the crazy laughter. And so they're like, don't laugh.

[Unknown Guest]

She does that every fucking rally.

[Ben Shapiro]

And now. Yeah, right as, as, as she's letting it out, you're getting the crazy laugh.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Ben Shapiro]

And everyone's like, I cannot have that haunting my dreams for four years. Like that. I can't. I can't.

[Steinie]

Fuck, I hope not. What's your prediction? You're probably looking a lot into the early voting.

[Ben Shapiro]

I'm actually not. So the early voting is a bad indicator. Really. Well, the problem is that there's no good comp. So just data wise, I'm a big data guy, obviously. So listen, my gut is that Trump wins and my gut's not worthwhile. So like, I've been wrong on my gut before, so I don't trust it. So my gut is that Trump's winning. I've been in pretty much all the swing states with the exception of Michigan. My feeling is that Trump has the inherent advantage in that his base is very passionate and hers is passionate about him, but not about her. No one can make a case for her. I did a debate with Sam Harris about this recently on Bari Weiss's podcast and he was making the anti Trump case and I was making the pro Trump case, but no one was making the pro Kamala case. Cuz it's not makeable. You can't make a pro Kamala case. You can make a case for Not Trump. And you can also make a case for Trump, but you can't make a case about Kamala. So that means that the real question is, are there enough people who are passionate about it being not Trump to overcome the number of people who are passionate about being Trump? And I don't think so. But who knows?

[Steinie]

Their crazy early voting statistics, though. Like, I saw more Republicans have voted than Democrats in New Jersey.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. So that's why you can't take it seriously. He's not going to New Jersey. Right. So, like, the same thing is. So the only one where early voting really matters because there are tons of maillons, is Nevada. So John Ralston, who's a ballot analyst over there, he does a really good job, and he says that the Republicans are running very strong in Nevada, which makes sense. I mean, Nevada, he's been running strong the whole race in Nevada. But, you know, as far as these other states, the problem is there's no comp. So there are a few things you don't know about the mail in voting. Number one, you don't know if that's cannibalizing day of. Right. So if I was going to vote day of, like, normally I vote day of. I have to be out of town to cover the election in Nashville this year. And so that means I'm voting early. I can't vote twice. So if I vote, you know, early, that doesn't mean that Trump got an additional vote. It just means I voted early. So you don't know how much of the day of voting is being cannibalized by the early voting.

[Steinie]

Right.

[Ben Shapiro]

You also don't know how many of the people who are voting early are the low propensity voters. Those are the people Trump needs. So what's weird about Trump's electoral base is that basically between 2012 and 2016, Trump traded away all of the kind of suburban Republican votes in favor of rural Republican votes. Suburban Republican votes tend to be very high propensity voters, meaning they vote in every single election. Trump traded that away. Like, he lost a lot of that because of his personality. He's uniquely polarizing. And. And instead what he got was, like, a lot of loyalty from people who really don't vote for anyone, probably, except for Trump. And so that makes it really difficult to model the electorate, like, super hard to model the electorate, which is why the polls were really off in 2022 in favor of Republicans. Right. The polls were saying, okay, well, in 2020, a lot of these people showed up, and then they didn't show up in 2022 because Trump wasn't on the ballot. So it's very difficult to model the electorate on that basis. When it comes to mail ins, are the early ballots that are coming in mail in votes from low propensity voters, or is that coming in from, like the high propensity voters like me and the. And you now have to wait to see if the. The, you know, the low propensity guys are going to show up day of. So it's very difficult to kind of model out what exactly is happening. You know, each campaign is trying to hit its numbers. The other thing is that when you count the mail in ballots, all you can count is how many ballots have been mailed in by party registration. If you have people who are crossing over that it doesn't measure that. Right. If I'm a Republican, I voted for Kamala, or I'm a Democrat and I voted for Trump.

[Steinie]

Just shows Democrat.

[Ben Shapiro]

It shows. It shows your Democrat voter or a Republican voter turning in your ballot. Yeah.

[Kyle Forgeard]

All right, guys, I'm going to interrupt.

[Steinie]

The pot really, really quick.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I want to let you guys know about my favorite healthy snack, bored jerky. All right, you guys know, you've seen me. I'm trying to be a little more healthy these days. I was getting too many comments, you guys telling me I looked pregnant and shit. I was staying up all night crying. So now I'm into healthy snacks. And bored jerky is one of my favorites. This jerky, if you guys try it, I don't even have to say it. Try it for yourself. The quality of the jerky is absolutely unbelievable. And I'm a big jerky guy, and this jerky is by far the best. I'm traveling a lot all the time, so I always have bored jerky on me when I get hungry. There's four different flavors. My favorite's the original. The original. The macros are unbelievable. There's lots and lots of protein. So it's just a great healthy snack. Keep the barrel in check.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. Trust me.

[Kyle Forgeard]

If you guys like jerky, try this out, and when you try it, you'll thank me. It's available on Amazon.com the reviews are going through the roof. Everybody loves it. So go to Amazon.com right now. Give bored jerky out a try. Keep it in your gym bags. Keep it in your backpacks. This is my favorite healthy snack. It's on me all the time. Amazon.com, bored jerky. Get back on the pod.

[Steinie]

What would your prediction be, though? Like, what do you think is gonna Be the numbers. If you had to predict.

[Ben Shapiro]

If I had to predict, I think that Trump takes North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona. I think that he is going to win Pennsylvania. I think he is going to win Wisconsin. I think he's gonna lose Michigan. If I had. And again, that's based on nothing. All these states are within margin of error. I could be wrong on all of those. I could be right on all of those. And this is one of the things, by the way, that drives me crazy about election prediction. So there's a game that goes on in the commentariat, which is who can make the most outlandish prediction that comes true? Because then you get to be hailed as a prophet. Right? So if you're the guy who's like, trump's gonna blow it out of the water in 2016, despite all the data, and then you hit jackpot, right? Then you spend the next four years being like the election guru. Cuz he called it right once. And so what I tend to do when I'm analyzing these elections is I will say openly and honestly, the only thing the data said, which is this is a very close election. I don't know. Again, my gut says Trump. I'm seeing a lot of enthusiasm on the ground for Trump, but of course I'm an enthusiasm. Right.

[Steinie]

I don't see how Kamala went.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah, that's what I want to ask you is what factors you think are stopping Trump from winning this? Like, the most important things.

[Steinie]

I'm just his past.

[Ben Shapiro]

And I mean, the fact that he's Trump. The fact that he's Trump. I mean, like, people. People, really. So I was at a. I was at an event for a Republican candidate, like, two days ago in Pennsylvania, and the. And there was a lady there who was clearly Trump oriented. Like, she's a Trump voter for sure. But she said, listen, I know I can't vote for common law. I can't. She's awful. I hate her. I want her to lose. But I can't bring myself on a personal level to vote for Donald Trump because of all the things that he said. Because January 6th and because of all. Because of his tweets and because of the mean thing and because of his mannerism and his personality and his character and all this kind of stuff. There are a lot of people who are like that.

[Steinie]

A lot.

[Ben Shapiro]

Like, dudes don't have as much of a problem with this because we all understand, like, I think males inherently understand that males are like schmucks. Like, we're. We're all like, we Understand the lockdowns eat. Males are all, like, male, right?

[Steinie]

Yeah.

[Ben Shapiro]

And so, like, oh, that. You mean that dude just has no control of his id. Okay. That just makes him kind of a dude. Right. But. But I think that for a lot of suburban women, particularly, they look at him and they're like, I'm having a tough time, even if I. Even if I don't like Kamala. And so the question for him is, will those people show up and vote for him? Because he does need some of those people to show up and vote for him. That's a systemic obstacle. I think there's still open questions about how good the on the ground game is. I've heard opinions on, like, all sides of this. Elon is obviously putting a lot of resources in. I've heard that Elon's people are really good. I know Charlie Kirk's TPUSA is putting in a bunch of resources. I don't know how that's doing. I assume that it's doing well. It's very difficult to tell the on the ground game from each of these campaigns, like, who's door knocking, who's actually getting out the. We know Democrats are pros of this. They're really, really good at this. And so their systemic, mechanized organization is better than the Republicans in almost every circumstance. And so that's an obstacle that Trump is gonna have to overcome as well. But there are no undecided voters. I mean, the percentage of undecided voters in this election is incredibly, incredibly low. One of the weird things about this election cycle is that, again, I think that one of the misperceptions about Trump is that he's, like, a uniquely strong candidate, when the truth is he's just a uniquely unique candidate. I mean, like, there's no way to gauge him. He's one of one. In the same way that kind of Obama, in his way, was one of one. Trump is one of one. So is he uniquely strong? Like, people will say, okay, well, if you'd swapped out, say, Trump for, let's say, Nikki Haley had won the primaries, how would Nikki be running? It's all speculative. I can speculate that Nikki would have done a lot better with suburban women. I can also speculate that she wouldn't have done nearly as well with rural men. Right. So, like, they. So, you know, who do you win? Who do you lose? How many do you pick up? How many? Like, he's got unique draw. He also tends to really, really push the buttons on the other side. One thing that I think Nikki would have done is probably suppress Democrat votes, meaning that people weren't gonna show up just to vote against Nikki Haley. If you're a Democrat, people are gonna walk over broken glass in California just to vote against Trump. So these are all factors that go in. But there's a weird thing that's happened over the course of the last three election cycles that never used to happen. So before that, I'm old enough to remember in 2000 when Bush won, the reason Bush was deemed to have won is because Al Gore had failed. Al Gore is not a good candidate. In 2004 when Kerry lost, it was like, well, cuz he wasn't good enough. He couldn't win because he wasn't good enough. When it was McCain versus Obama, it was like McCain just wasn't good enough to beat Obama. Obama was a better candidate in 2012. Romney wasn't good enough. That's why he lost. In 2016 for the first time, the side that lost decided that it wasn't that their candidate wasn't good enough. It had to be some sort of extraneous factor that had led to her losing. It wasn't that Hillary Clinton lost to Trump because she was just a bad candidate. Which is the actual real reason. The reason that she lost is because Russian interference and because of the Internet and because of. And because of Trump being corrupt and like all these different excuses that they used which ended up plaguing his presidency for the next three and a half years with the Mueller report and all that garbage that was originally concocted by Hillary. Now when that happened, we now went into a different kind of matrix that's actually quite bad for the country, I think, generally. Which was when, in 2020, when Trump lost, the Republican response was he didn't lose because he wasn't a good enough candidate. He lost because of all of these external. By the way, I agree with the analysis that there were many external factors that led him to lose. Also, he did not run a good race in 2020. He ran a very, very poor race in 2020. I mean, he was all over the place on Covid. He was all over the place on BLM. It was like 2020 was a very rough year for President Trump. In 2024, if Kamala loses, Democrats are not going to attribute that to her being a poor candidate, even though everyone knows it. They're going to attribute that instead to, well, she had a short campaign window. Maybe it's Biden they're going to attribute it to. Well, the Internet. Well, Elon. Well, you know, Trump was probably Colluding with Russia again, that's what they're going to go back to. And if Trump loses, it won't be on the right that Trump, you know, wasn't a good enough candidate. He alienated a lot of people. The excuse will be, well, you know, probably they rigged the voting procedures or the media's really bad, which of course they are. Again, the extraneous factors are real, but those are real in every election. The problem is that when you have a matrix that's set up where the easy answer for all Americans isn't the same right. For Democrats and Republicans in 2005 said Kerry was a bad candidate in 1996, Democrats and Republicans after Dole got clocked, they're like, wasn't good candidate. The good news about that particular take on elections is that it means, okay, well if I run a better candidate next time, then maybe I'll win. When you don't do that, then you start to think there's no way I can win. And that's when you see desperation setting in, people getting more and more radical. It's like, no matter what I do, no matter what kind of great candidate I run, I'm just going to lose. The system stacked against me. Maybe I disassociate from politics entirely, or maybe the country can't last because if I can never win an election again, I mean, one of the sort of preconditions to a successful democracy is the possibility that your side may win. If you believe that you are going to lose from now until the end of time, why would you buy into that system? You start to opt out of the system. So it's kind of a dangerous metrics that we've been in for the last 10 years.

[Steinie]

Yeah. My biggest thing, why I want him to win is just the wars.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, I desperately want to.

[Steinie]

Even the campaigning and the old, the old Republicans too, they were always like George Bush, they were like warmongers too.

[Ben Shapiro]

So. And now it's not a take I particularly like. So the warmonger take, I think that this is a strawman. As somebody who was, you know, politically active during this period, every single president would have gone into Afghanistan. Everyone, Al Gore would have done it. Everyone would have done it. Okay. The only one who was talking about like letters of mark and reprisal was Ron Paul. Okay. And first of all, the idea that a letter of mark and reprisal would have single handedly gotten rid of Bin Laden, I think is a fantasy. It took, you know, a decade to find him anyway. The ever after 9 11, we were going to destroy Al Qaeda and we should have destroyed Al Qaeda. And by the way, we should not have pulled out the way we. So Iraq was a bit of a different story. There was more controversy over that. But Afghanistan, of course, but Afghanistan, of course, that doesn't make him a warmonger. Iraq was a response to a broader geopolitical theory which is really kind of about look at the map. So if you look at the map in the Middle east, so there are a few levels of Iraq. And again, in retrospect, if you know that Sanam doesn't have weapons of mass destruction, like the beautiful thing about history is you can look back in retrospect and say we shouldn't have done this, right? But in the time, here are the factors that led to the war in Iraq. The things that led to the war in Iraq were the fact that pretty much every international institution was saying that Saddam was in fact developing weapons of mass destruction. And he had attempted to do so in the past. And he was lying about it, right? It turns out that he was lying. And the reason he was lying is because if he, if it had come out that he wasn't developing weapons of mass destruction, it would have put his regime on really shaky footing. In the same way the Iranian regime right now, because they're perceived as non powerful, is on kind of shaky footing. So he was afraid of his own people. And so he was. And so he was putting out information suggesting that he was in fact developing weapons of mass destruction. So the Bush administration looked at that and they had a theory which was, okay, when you get clocked like 9 11, your next move is who might clock me next and how do I clock them first? That's what preemptive war is, right? People are down on preemptive war. But you know what, actually, sometimes preemptive war, the thing about preemptive war, very easy to catch, to sort of hindsight, 20 20, those things, because the counterfactual never happened, right? So let's say that we had gone to preemptive war with al Qaeda in 2000 and there's no 9 11, right? Then. And then things go wrong in 2004, you never see 9 11, so you never know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, right? It's all these sort of what ifs in history. So we go into, into Iraq on the perception that he's developing weapons of mass destruction. There's also a sort of geopolitical theory that if we could transform the government of Afghanistan again This is where I think that the theory was mistaken. I think the way that they approached Afghanistan and Iraq was wrong because they approached it with the, with the mindset of we're going to implant a constitutional democracy in Afghanistan or Iraq. I think that's way too starry eyed for like you can't just what people. Again, this is where knowledge of history is useful. After the Korean War, when we had liberated South Korea from North Korea, right, The North Koreans were wanting to take over the entire Korean peninsula. We liberated South Korea. It took full on 20 years for there to be an election in South Korea that was a dictatorship for solidly 20 years. In Taiwan, the first, the first real elections were held in Taiwan, like the early 90s. So it takes a long time to transition from sort of authoritarian control of an area to democracy. We tried to do it overnight in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and of course that failed. That is not, that is not fertile soil for that sort of institution building. So that was a mistake. But geopolitically, I think the theory was look at a map. Afghanistan is here. Iran is here. Iraq is here. If you can build two American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, you've now contained Iran. Right? So the idea was that you were going to solidify and stabilize the Middle east by actually building friendly governments in these places. Now it turns out that the strategy to actually pursue that was deeply flawed. The war making strategy in Iraq was actually not particularly flawed at the beginning. I mean, we defeated the fourth largest army on earth in three weeks. It was what came after that was a disaster area. And the same thing was true in Afghanistan. We defeated the Taliban within the first month of the war. I mean, the American military is unparalleled. It's the most powerful military force in the history of the world. I mean, we'd kick the shit out of them. The problem was that afterward the plan for rebuilding Americans, we always have this idea that the process of transforming a country is much easier than it is. And we forget again our history. We still have military bases in Japan. We still have military bases in Germany, okay? John McCain was ripped up and down in 2008 when he said, listen, if you want Iraq to be a stable place, you're going to need to leave American troops there. For this episode is brought to you by Dutch Bros. Get stoked for all.

[Steinie]

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[Ben Shapiro]

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[Steinie]

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[Ben Shapiro]

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[Steinie]

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[Ben Shapiro]

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[Steinie]

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[Ben Shapiro]

Your nearest shop, order ahead and start earning rewards. As a descriptive matter, that is correct. If you are going to transform a place, you do in fact have to leave American military presence there for a very, very. So you should take that into consideration before you go in and determine whether that's a thing that you want to do or not, as opposed to trying to do it on the cheap and sort of wishing and hoping that it'll transform itself. Okay. The sort of description though of like everyone who voted for the Iraq war is like they're warmongers. So the question I always ask is, so what was the ulterior motive? Everyone has these sort of bizarre ulterior. We went into Iraq for oil. We clearly did not. We got no oil out of Iraq. We did it because of the military industrial complex. The military industrial complex does not control the United States military or military policy. The political wings of the government people.

[Steinie]

They don't have any influence at all.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean they're not lobbying, they're not lobbying for war per se, they're lobbying for war buildup which doesn't necessitate war very often. Again, I think the sort of idea that there are these shadowy powers outside that Lockheed Martin is calling up George W. Bush and being like, dude, we need war. Pick a country, let's do this shit. That's not how politics works. That's not how politics works. I mean, the reality is that Lockheed Martin is a supplier to the American military. Republicans tend to fund the military better than Democrats do because they have a theory about peace through strength. Now of course war companies are gonna make more money off war, but the notion that because a war company makes more money off of war, it was the war company that drove the war is generally untrue. I think that one of the great disservices Dwight Eisenhower ever did was use of the phrase military industrial complex, which was actually hijacked from some left wing thinkers at the time. This sort of idea that, I mean, think there is such a thing as regulatory capture. You see it in the, in the agencies, right? You see it. RFK talks about this all the time. You'll see.

[Steinie]

Yeah, I was going to say.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah, and he's right about that. I mean in the regulatory agencies that's where you see institutional capture. It's like the fda and you'll see a company that works outside the FDA lobbying people inside the FDA to do X, Y, and Z. You'll see military contractors who are lobbying the DoD to contracts with them for particular types of weapon systems. But that's not quite the same thing. As I'm gonna call up my local congressperson, I'm gonna tell them I want them to vote for a war in Iraq so I can make $100 million off a weapon system. Like that is way too rudimentary for.

[Steinie]

I mean, it's evil.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah, it's evil, but that's not actually what's happening, is what I'm saying. That's not how war gets done. Because, again, these people are answerable to their constituents. It's not that easy to talk Americans in a war. We tend to be a pretty isolationist people. We don't like war. We don't like being in wars, which is why every single president of my lifetime has run as an isolationist and then ended up being kind of interventionist. It turns out that the world is filled with terrible, horrible people who want to fill that vacuum. And President Trump knew this, too. The thing is that President Trump took the position that the best way to avoid a war was to basically threaten to kick everybody's ass, right? Everybody's acting as though Donald Trump is an isolationist. Donald Trump is an isolationist. I did a fundraiser for President Trump, and he was talking to me about the war in Ukraine, and he's like, you know, ben, Ben, the reason that Vladimir Putin never invaded Ukraine is because I called him up, said, vlad, Vlad, Vlad, Vlad, don't go into Ukraine, because if you do, I'm gonna bomb the shit out of you. And Vlad said to me, Mr. President, no, you won't. And I said, well, I might. And then he said to me, because, Ben, that's how you do it. If you think there's a 5% chance the most powerful military on earth is going to blow the shit out of you, you don't do it, okay? That's how you actually do foreign policy. Now, is that an isolationist foreign policy, or is that actually a building up of military strength in order and use of credible threat of force, which is what Trump could do, because everyone thinks he's crazy. Which is a great way to be, right? Because everyone thinks, like, I don't know, he's going to shake my hand or just shoot me in the head. I really have no clue, right? One day he's threatening to press his little button on Kim Jong Un, the next day he's written love letters to him. I don't know that's actually not a terrible place to be. The sort of wild man theory of politics. It's not bad. That is not isolationist. Like, the way to dissuade people from doing things is the credible threat of the use of force. Joe Biden makes threats of force all the time. He's just not credible. Okay, so, yeah, again, the question with the Iraq war, again, in a period that was right after 9 11, there was a lot of focus on how do we stop the next 911 from happening. You guys are really young, so I don't know how old you were during 9 11.

[Steinie]

Very young. Probably seven.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right. So if you're too young to really remember and remember what 911 was. 911 was the worst thing to have ever happened in this country since Pearl harbor. And worse than Pearl harbor because it was an attack on a civilian site. It was terrifying. It scared the shit out of everyone. It should have. It killed 3,000 people. It should have killed probably 80,000 people. If that. If they. If they decided to fly those planes in those buildings at 11am that morning instead of at 8:56am that morning, then probably 80,000 people die. That's how many people were working the buildings. Tens of thousands of people working in those buildings. It took out, you know, lower Manhattan. I mean, it was. It was horrifying. It was absolutely. And so the first thing that every American was thinking is, I don't care who we have to clock. I don't give a shit. I don't care if we have to clock Iraq. I don't care if we have to clock Iran. I don't care who we have to clock. Clock whoever you have to do. So we don't see giant towers in the United States collapsing in on American citizens and pulverizing them into dust, and American citizens jumping off the 88th floor and landing on their head. Right. That was like the number one priority. And so, you know, does that mean that every decision that was made was good? No. If I could have retrospect, of course you undo the Iraq war. Of course you do. Because there's no purpose. And it ends up badly. But the sort of retrospective of, well, because it went badly, that means that the original intent of the war was warmongering and military industrial complex. That's such Noam Chomsky bullshit. I don't like it when it comes from Republicans. I don't like it when it comes from Democrats before Trump.

[Steinie]

I feel like. Weren't we in, like, Libya? We were in.

[Ben Shapiro]

So Libya was a bad intervention. And Libya, we shouldn't just seems like.

[Steinie]

Trump's really good at preventing the wars, is what I mean.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yes, I totally agree. So this is what Trump has. The best foreign policy in my lifetime. The only point that I'm making is it's not because the people who were his predecessors were quote, unquote, warmongers. It's because some of. I mean, I think, frankly, the, the. Maybe the biggest warmonger in terms of just getting us involved in random wars we had no place in being was Obama. Right. Obama was getting involved in Libya, and then he was sort of halfway getting involved in Syria. Not really getting involved in Syria like that. That, like, that's a disaster area, because when you put your finger in all the pies, but none of them, well, that's the worst for Trump, it was like, don't put your finger in the pie unless you're really willing to go. And I think that's a great way to approach foreign policy. But it's not that Trump will never put his finger in the pie. He absolutely will. I mean, Trump authorized the kill on Qasem Soleimani, right? Who's the Iranian general who's in charge of their terror program. It was President Trump who was brokering deals in the Middle east that were explicitly based on containing Iran. Donald Trump threatened to use force more than any president in my lifetime and used it less than any president in my lifetime, which is. Which is actually a really good strategy, 100%.

[Steinie]

How, how big of a threat is Iran right now?

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, to whom? So to Israel. A very serious threat in the sense that if they develop a nuclear weapon, Israel's a tiny state. If, if, if they were to use a nuclear weapon on Israel, Israel would nuke them back then you have a major conflagration, obviously, in the Middle East. So it's a threat to sort of global security. Iran is a threat to shipping lanes. Obviously, you've seen that in the Red Sea. They shut down all shipping through the Red Sea, which means that all your products are more expensive because now they're getting shipped around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. So that's a real problem. Iran is a threat to American allies abroad and in the United States. I mean, they have a pretty extensive terror apparatus in South America. Hezbollah agents are over there. You saw that Iran was actually attempting to foster assassination attempts against Trump himself. So they're dangerous in that sense. Are they dangerous in the sense that they're an existential threat to the United States? They're clearly not an existential threat to the United States, which is why my preferred policy would be to let the Israelis do whatever they have to do to take out the Iranian nuclear program and then tell the Iranians. And by the way, if you hit too hard back then we'll give the Israeli more material and they'll do it. Never put an American troop on the ground, never get an American troop involved in harm's way. The Israelis are perfectly capable of handling it if you give them the weaponry with which to do it. What's weird about the Biden administration approach is they're doing precisely the opposite. They're giving tons and tons of weaponry to the Ukrainians with no actual end goal. And then they're slow walking the aid to the Israelis who clearly are capable of militarily achieving the thing if they have the weaponry. Like Israel is the greatest military attack power in the world.

[Steinie]

What do they need to achieve? Like, what do you think needs that?

[Ben Shapiro]

Like in Israel? I mean, the thing that they need to achieve is they need to. There's going to be a long term military presence in the Gaza Strip to solidify security in the Gaza Strip. That's not going to end. There's going to be a buffer zone that goes around the edge of the Gaza Strip. There's going to be control of the Philadelphia corridor, which is the barrier between. Barrier. It's the. Is the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt because that was being used as a go between by Hamas to use those tunnels to get people and material in and out through Egypt. So Israel is now in control of that. They're going to maintain control of that and they're not going to give it up, nor should they. They're going to build that buffer zone. So that means that people can't walk up to the border again and cross it and then murder 1200 people. They're going to have a significant security presence inside. Israel would love to hand it off to somebody, but nobody will take it. They've literally offered it to everybody. They offered it to the Egyptians, the Egyptians, like, no way. They offered it to the Qataris. The Qataris are like, no way. Like they offered it to the Saudis. No, no one wants a piece of this. No one. And so everybody's like, well, why can't Israel just like get out? Well, because then Hamas takes over again, that's why. So they're not going to do that. That would be idiotic. So they're not going to do that. They're going to maintain a military presence over there, a policing presence, an intelligence presence. The biggest problem they had before October 7th is that because of the pullout from Gaza in 2005, they had no intelligence apparatus inside the Gaza Strip. They do have intelligence apparatus in parts of the west bank, like Jenin, Nablus, like the big Palestinian cities. Over there. They have a unit called Duvduvan, you've seen that on Fouda, right? And they do have intelligence presence over there. So that's what'll be in the Gaza Strip, in southern Lebanon. There'll probably be either a military occupation of southern Lebanon or you would hope maybe the French get involved. I mean, the French do have sort of a historic stake in Lebanon that was a French territory until it gained its independence. And they still have a very strong relationship with France. You would hope that the Lebanese government would tell Hezbollah they need to stay the hell out of the area in the south of Lebanon, south of the Latani River. That would be, by the way, in accordance with UN Resolution 1701, which says there's not supposed to be a Hezbollah presence in that area. It's supposed to be clear of military apparatus. So then Israel can move its citizens back into the north of Israel. And then with regard to Iran, Israel's chief goal with Iran is to cripple its nuclear program. Because if Iran were to gain nuclear program, it's not just that they might fire a missile tipped with a nuclear weapon at Israel. It's also that they could then activate all of their terror proxies and say to Israel, if you go too hard, then we will fire a nuclear weapon at Israel. In my opinion, what Israel just recently did, which was largely knocking out their ballistic missile capacity, was the first step. I would be surprised if Israel does not try to take out their nuclear facilities sometime in the next few months.

[Steinie]

Did they destroy all their defense?

[Ben Shapiro]

Yes, they destroyed the S300 system from Russia, which was sort of the anti aircraft stuff. They destroyed all of those. And the Israeli military has performed amazing performance, like truly, just on a military level, amazing performance by the Israeli military. Like the only other military on earth who does it this well is the US military. And Israel is, you know, they have to be even more meticulous because of all the world pressure, the United States, the beautiful thing is we don't give a shit. So it doesn't matter. But you know, for Israel, when they knocked out, so they knocked out the anti aircraft and anti missile defense stuff over there and they also knocked out a lot of their long range ballistic missile technology. So there's a factory that makes a lot of the parts of that. They knocked that out as well. So they're knocking out preliminarily all of the retaliatory stuff that Iran could fire at them if Israel were to take out, say, the Natanz nuclear facility.

[Steinie]

That shit's scary. Is that recent strike by Iran, is that, like, the biggest escalation there's been in, like, a long time?

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, there's 181, you know, that.

[Steinie]

Has never, like, really happened.

[Ben Shapiro]

No. And between Iran and Israel, and then. And then the Biden administration was like, well, Israel has to be proportionate. I was like, by proportionate, you mean that Israel now gets to fire 181 ballistic missiles at Iran? Like, what do you mean by proportionate? Like that. Proportionate is such a stupid word that when people use proportionate in foreign policy, traditionally, what they mean is your. The means you use to achieve a goal must be proportionate to the goal you are seeking to achieve. So, for example, you want to kill Osama bin Laden, you can go into his compound, you can kill everybody who's in the compound to get bin Laden, but you can't just drop a nuke on his compound and kill 50,000 people, because that's disproportionate to the goal of you're seeking to achieve. So use the minimum possible necessary force in order to achieve the goal. But the way that use it is they fired 181 missiles. That means you get to fire 181 missiles. Or maybe it means gets like, what. What proportion are we talking here? It's very stupid. It was. It was a massive escalation. I will say that the Israelis are quite used to it by this point. I called up a very close friend of mine during the missile attack, which I was covering live, and I called him up while I was on the air, like, how are you doing, Nadav? And I was like, this is so irritating. It's so irritating. I was like, irritating. I was in the shower and I had to think to myself, do I get out of the shower? Do I not get out of the shower? Like, they're so used to that at this point. It's crazy. It is crazy. And it's a different thing. I mean, the people over there, because they're constantly in a state of war, because every person who's 18 or older, with the exception of some of the ultra orthodox who should be drafted, is drafted because of all of that. An 18 year old in Israel is not the same as an 18 year old in the United States. They're just not. I Mean, like, and that's true in a lot of places in the world where, you know, reality exists. And then the nice thing about America is really doesn't exist here. I mean, we are the richest, freest people in the history of the world. And that means that we have, many of us are the most irresponsible people. Because it turns out that when you're rich and you're free and you have no duty, very often people don't tend to do their duty.

[Steinie]

I feel like there's never going to be, like a happy solution where both sides are happy in that area.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right.

[Steinie]

Because we went to. We went to Israel. They brought us out there, we had a great time. And then I never even, because I'm not too educated on that specific, like, you know, area. And then, yeah, obviously when we went there, we were getting a ton of hate. I was, like, shocked. I was looking at my DMs, just like, fuck you, fuck you, blah, blah, blah. So then after I got home, I actually watched your video on just the history of thousands of years on that region. How many times it's traded.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yes.

[Steinie]

How many times it's been under dispute. And I just feel like it's been going on for thousands of years.

[Ben Shapiro]

So there will be. So that there will be peace in the region when people acknowledge Israel's existence. I mean, this is actually, the math here is actually fairly simple. If Israel put down all of its guns tomorrow, then everyone in the region in Israel will be slaughtered. I mean, that's just the reality. If the IDF were to disband tomorrow, every Jew is dead. If the Palestinians would have put down all of their guns 20 years ago, there would have been a Palestinian state in the west bank and the Gaza Strip already. But that's not the goal. I mean, the key thing to remember is that the Palestine Liberation Organization, the plo, which became the Palestinian Authority, which was the peace partner supposedly with Israel and the Oslo Accords, the PLO was founded in 1964. Why does that matter? Because the liberation of the west bank and the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defense force was in 1967. So what exactly was the Palestine Liberation Organization trying to liberate if they were already in control? Jordan was already in control of the west bank and Egypt was in control of the Gaza Strip. So if you're already in control of those things and you say, I'm liberating Palestine, what are you talking about, liberating? You're not talking about liberating the West Bank. You're not talking about liberating Jerusalem, which was under control of the Jordanians, the Old City. What are you talking about? Liberating? You're talking about liberating Tel Aviv, you're talking about liberating Haifa, you're talking about wiping out the state of Israel. And unfortunately that has been indoctrinated into generations of Palestinians. That basically the thing that you are looking for is not living side by side in a state of peace and security. We all want the same thing. On economic prosperity. If it were that simple, it had already been done. It really is about an identity that says that Israel should not be in that area, it should be extirpated and it should be destroyed. And unfortunately, no matter how many times Israel tries to keep, you know, giving things away to make it happen, it ain't happening. I mean, this is why October 7th, I think was such a shock to the Israeli psyche. The Israelis wish that were true. You think the Israelis want to send all their 18 year old kids to the army? They don't want to send all their 18 year old kids to the army. They hate it. It's the worst thing in the world. You're literally sending your kid into the line of bullets. I mean the number of soldiers who have been wounded or killed in this war is in the. It's like 5 to 6,000 in Israel right now. There have been, I think 750, 800, you know, young soldiers who've been killed and there are thousands who've been wounded. And I've seen them. I mean like last time I was in Israel, which was in June, I was at afternoon prayers on a Jewish holiday. And I look over next to me and there's a 20 year old kid and the 20 year old kid's in a wheelchair. He's missing both legs above the knee, he's missing one arm at the elbow and the other hand. He's had two of his fingers blown off. His parents are American, he had moved there and he joined the idf. And you know, like you think his parents want that? No one wants that, at least not on the Israeli side. So if that were, that's why they pulled out of Gaza in the first place. So the great shock of October 7th is that it happened from an area that Israel completely abandoned in 2005. What territory were they attempting to liberate? When they crossed that border? They already were in control of the Gaza Strip. What were they attempting to liberate? Not the Gaza Strip. They're trying to liberate everything else. So when you have one side that is eliminationist and one side that is not. That's not. There's no deal to be made there, which is. And what the Abraham Accords acknowledged is that's insoluble, right? The, the, the Bahrainis and the UAE and the, and the Moroccans and all the other countries that, that were members of the Abraham Accords. What they recognize is this issue isn't going anywhere. So let's have all the other issues, right? Let's economically cooperate. Let's have some defense cooperation against Iran, right? Let's foster technological cooperation. And we'll ignore the fact that, like, there's one group here that wants to kill the other side and the other side refuses to be killed. And, and that's how you get the Abraham Accords and the Saudis are in it too. I mean, like the grave mistake the Biden administration made was elevating the insoluble issue back to the top of the pile as opposed to saying, that's insoluble, let's solve all the other issues.

[Steinie]

So crazy.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Steinie]

I was gonna ask about. What do you think about North Korea bringing troops to Russia too?

[Ben Shapiro]

Again? I think that Russia is a staggeringly weak country, technologically speaking.

[Steinie]

That's kind of never. That hasn't happened in a while too, where North Korea is actually putting ground troops.

[Ben Shapiro]

Well, I mean, it was the opposite, right? I mean, the worry during the Korean War is that Soviet troops are going to go into North Korea and be used against Americans. The idea that they have to like draw on North Korea for troops demonstrates how weak Russia is militarily. And I think that what the last few years of war have shown is that it's really good to be a first world country or at least associated with first world countries. It's not that a first world country can't, you know, can't get surprised or hit or anything. It's that first world countries or allies of first world countries can kick the shit out of everybody else. I mean, like Israel gets hit with October 7, and then Israel proceeds to launch some of the most sophisticated military operations in human history. And Ukraine gets hit with a full scale Russian invasion. And with drone technology and some parts provided by the west, they've been able to push off one of the world's largest armies. The thing that people forget is that capitalism, free enterprise, private property, these things generate awesome military power. Awesome military power. Like, that's why if you want America to remain strong, like in terms of foreign policy, you have to have a thriving economy. It's really important. You need to be Able to pay for this sort of stuff. You need innovation. You need geniuses who are working on this sort of stuff all the time. People like Palmer Luckey, who's a founder of a defense company that's sort of in competition with Lockheed Martin. Like he's constantly innovating. You need that. That doesn't happen in Russia. In Russia, they're using like World War II era armament. I mean, look, Iran, same kind of thing. Iran is like flying its. They're flying the President around like a 1980American helicopter with no replacement parts, which is why it goes down in the forest. It turns out that technology is indeed a weapon, but it takes two things, technological superiority and willingness to use it, which is how the Houthis, who don't have either of those things, are really harassing shipping. If the United States wanted to end that tomorrow, we totally could end that tomorrow. But that would require an actual commitment to being brutal and harsh. Cuz war is brutal and harsh. And the thing that westerners and we in the first world have to get through our head is that war doesn't become unbrutal and unharsh. When you delay it, it becomes worse and it takes longer. You're better off just punching somebody so hard in the fucking head that they go down and then that's the end of the fight. If you're talking militarily, do you think.

[Steinie]

There'S going to be unrest with this election no matter what happens?

[Ben Shapiro]

Hard to see how it's not. I mean, unless it blow out from one side or the other.

[Steinie]

What do you think would be worse? I feel like. I feel like it would be worse if Trump loses this time. I know typically, I know typically the left is known for rioting more, but I think this time it's going to be like, this is kind of the last chance.

[Unknown Guest]

Let's give you a scenario.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

Kamala wins.

[Ben Shapiro]

Okay.

[Unknown Guest]

How do you react to that?

[Steinie]

I'm pissed.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, it depends under what circumstances. So let's say that Kamala wins. It's really, really, really tight. And you know, she is. She's declared the victor. As long as I don't see the proof of widespread electoral fraud, then she's the winner. And there are gonna be a lot of good reasons why she was the winner, including the weakness of the ground game. We'll analyze it and we'll figure out exactly why what happened, happened. Let me get, you know, worst case scenario. Here's a really great worst case scenario. And since we live in a timeline in which God clearly hates Us, we may as well assume this will be the reality. So here's the worst case scenario. In 2020, there was a census. That census was done wrong. Okay? That census radically overcounted states like New York, Delaware, I believe Michigan, and it radically undercounted states like Florida and Texas. Like, this has been openly acknowledged by the census.

[Steinie]

What do you mean by that?

[Ben Shapiro]

So whenever they do the census, they can't survey everybody. Right. They take a sample, okay? And so like, they try to get everybody and they get about 67% of people, but the estimate is very often wrong. Okay, okay. So in 2020, they acknowledged, like, afterward, they're widespread. I mean, the government acknowledged that they'd gotten the census wrong. The problem is, how do you apportion congressional seats and electoral votes? You do it based on the census, right? So theoretically, Florida should have two more electoral votes, New York should have one fewer, and Delaware should have one fewer. So here's your worst case scenario. Your worst case scenario is Donald Trump wins North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada. Okay? If he wins those and he loses Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the final electoral college tally is Kamala Harris, 270. Donald Trump, 268. Now, now you have the state of Florida say, guys, you fucked up the census. The census is that we should have two more electoral college votes. And you failed to. And you acknowledge this. You know this. So you need to rejigger. We've now been damaged. We now have standing. This, this election really should be Donald Trump, 270. Kamala Harris, 268. Based on the population shifts in the country, that goes to the Supreme Court. Now you have a Supreme Court in which six of the justices were appointed by Republicans, including three by Donald Trump, deciding whether the electoral college count should be reversed based on the census failure. Okay, you wanna, like, that's a very.

[Steinie]

You wanna, like, that's possible thing that could happen for sure.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right? I mean, by the way, the polling right now shows Trump ahead in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

[Steinie]

And those other three are dead even.

[Ben Shapiro]

Those other three are like dead even. So, like, so not only is that, and because God hates us, I think that, that, that's, you know, it's not, it's not a crazy possibility. So, you know, there's my, my tendency in these circumstances is to try and figure out first people get on my case because I try to suss out the reason why things happen before I go crazy, as opposed to going crazy first and then sussing out the reason things happen. So during the last Election cycle. Trump declared himself the winner on election night. And I said, that's not true. Like on election night, I said, that's not true yet. They haven't counted all the mail ins. So maybe he won, maybe, I don't know. But it's not true that he won right now. And people are really, really mad at me because he had said he won. And so then I waited. And then when he started launching lawsuits, I was like, okay, well, I mean, that's his legal right. Maybe he'll show evidence. And then I didn't see him show any, you know, real credible evidence that, you know, 12,000 votes were switched in Georgia and 20,000 were switched in Wisconsin. And I was like, okay, well, I mean, if you can't show the evidence, then it ain't there. And people got really, really mad at that. And so I think the tendency for a lot on the right because the incentive structure is such is that if Trump were to lose, I think there'd be a lot on the right who would immediately jump to the election stolen. And it may be, but I'm gonna wait to make that adjudication until I see actual evidence of how and why it was. It was like, who did the thing. Right. If you show me the thing was done, I'm perfectly willing to say the election was stolen. But you actually have to show me the thing happened and how it happened. And it can't just be assumptions and it can't just be speculation. I can give you a whole range of sort of informal reasons why the election was stolen. Okay. One of them would be how the hell do you switch out your nominee in the middle of a race? One would be the media actively attempting to suppress bad stories about Kamala Harris, about Doug Emhoff, about Tim Walls, like just covering none of it while magnifying everything that Donald Trump like. All of that's true, but those are all informal reasons that don't impact the actual counts of the electoral College. Right. So, you know, that, that'll be my reaction if Trump loses is to try and analyze all the reasons why and then come to sort of some sort of conclusion. If Trump wins, I think the left is going to lose their ever loving mind. I think that they're, they're, you know, it'll be a section of the left, I actually think, I think that, you know, you're right in the sense that if Trump wins, I think there will be some brief rage that comes out of them and then they'll just be like, well, at least in, you know, at least for the next four years, like, we can rebuild and then Trump will be gone, and then we'll move on with our lives. So, like, I.

[Steinie]

It all depends on how. You're right. Like, if it's. If it's a landslide for Kamala, right.

[Ben Shapiro]

It becomes 2,7 by 5 million popular votes, and he wins by, like, two votes in each state. They're going to lose it. Yeah, absolutely lose it. So, again, like, the best case scenario for America is the Trump wins big. That's like, the best case scenario for America is Trump sweeps all the swing states and wins the popular. Right. That's like. That's what I'm praying for. I'm not trying for him to win. I want him to win big.

[Steinie]

Yeah, right.

[Ben Shapiro]

Like that. That'd be best for my party. It's best for. It's best for the country. Like, that's the thing I'm hoping for. The second best case scenario is that Trump wins small. The third best case scenario is that Kamala wins big, because if she wins big, then you don't at least get the insane breakdown of the country. And the worst case scenario, Worst, worst. Worst case scenario, she wins really narrow, like that one. Right? Like, that's. That's. If I'm just gaming out, like, where I think that there could be a lot of conflagration inside the United States. That. That's kind of how I gave it out.

[Steinie]

What do you do on election night?

[Ben Shapiro]

So we're broadcasting all election night, right? I mean, so we're going to get in at like, 4pm so basically my schedule for the next week is I'm flying to Texas to join the trail with Senator Cruz because he's running a pretty competitive race with Con. All right. Over there. Then I'm flying to Nashville to our headquarters, and I'm going to be doing. We'll prep for election night on Monday. We'll be on the air. I'll do the show Monday morning, Tuesday morning, then we will that afternoon get in the chair, and we will just stay there for the rest of our lives. We're gonna. We're gonna be covering that until all hours of the morning, maybe grab a couple hours of sleep, do the podcast again Wednesday morning, get back in the chair, sit there for hours on end, hope to God that these jackasses can count the votes in anything, like a timely fashion.

[Steinie]

You think it'll be that night again?

[Ben Shapiro]

It really depends on how close this stuff is. You're gonna be able to tell pretty early there. There. There are a few, at least Whether it's gonna be a long night or not. If there is bad turnout in urban areas, she stows, if the vote count starts to come back from Philadelphia, for example, and it turns out low, she's dozed, it's over. If you know, there are a few. There are like two counties in Pennsylvania, I think one's Erie County, I think, that are. They've been kind of bellwether counties. They've gone for the presidential winner since 2008. It was like, Obama, Obama, Trump, Biden, whomever. So I'm sure we'll be watching those. But Michigan is saying they're not even going to have preliminary results until early morning Wednesday. Wisconsin saying the same thing. So it could be. It could be long. I mean, I was reading an interview with the guy who calls the elections for Fox, because obviously Fox got ripped up and down for calling Arizona early last time for Biden. And he said, like, I'm not sure we call this election before Saturday. This shit is terrible for the country. It really is. And it's really stupid. Like, it's totally unnecessary. I mean, we're here in the great state of Florida, the best run state in the country. And in this state, we're gonna know within five minutes of the polls closing who won legitimately within like half an hour, you know, who won. Because all the battling is electronic in person, and all the early voting is counted up before election day. So they already counted all that shit. And then they just add in the day of and they're done. And it's done day of. Like, it's bewildering to me that states across the country don't just imitate what Florida does. And we could have, like, a clean election result literally within like, two hours of the polls closing on the East Coast.

[Steinie]

Where can people watch your election coverage? Is it on YouTube?

[Ben Shapiro]

It'll be on YouTube. It'll be on. We'll put up on X.

[Steinie]

Live on YouTube?

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah, live on YouTube. Live on X. I'm everywhere. Daily wire, you know, plus, everywhere. Everywhere that we normally put our stuff will be live streaming.

[Steinie]

What's new with the business of the Daily Wire? It's obviously just become a fucking absolute machine.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. Thank God. It's, it's, you know, so we have well over a million subscribers at this point, paid subscribers.

[Steinie]

That is crazy.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. Thank God. It's become a really, really great business. We have a lot of support. Last year, we did $220 million in business. We, you know, what, what's. We're always launching new stuff. So And I think there are certainly under capitalized areas of, of our company that we're going to really focus on, on, you know, moving those up the chain. So if you were to look at our business, a huge, a huge swath. Our business, probably 60% of our revenue is from those subscriptions and then probably 25% of our revenue to 30% of our revenue is from the advertising dollars. That's like on my show and you know, Matt's show, Matt Walsh's show, Jordan Peterson show, tiny bit from Michael Moles and, and, and then we, we make some money off merch. We have Jeremy's Razors, right. Which we, we hilariously launched and now has like125,000 people who subscribe to our razor company.

[Steinie]

Wow.

[Ben Shapiro]

And so that's like a $25 million business a year. And we, we have under capitalized that we need to, we need to raise more money for that. We need to break that off as its own separate sort of entity and really pour money into it because that's a real brand and we. And it. The RA product. So we think that could be a really solid line of business. You know, we are still making documentaries like Matt's, right? Am I right?

[Steinie]

We had him on last week talking about the movie and stuff.

[Ben Shapiro]

The movie's great. Yeah, Matt is. Matt's a true talent. He's a really, really talented guy. And that movie, like you think it's hard for me to be in a room like, you know, with 25 people surrounding me. The stuff that Matt does, I, I could, I couldn't do that. That's his skill set. It's incredible. It's incredible. So Amiracist obviously did great at the box office. I think did 12, $13 million at the box office on an original $3 million budget. That doesn't mean that we made $9 million of profits. That's not how the business works. Right. You have marketing fees and distribution fees and all this kind of stuff. But it is also responsible for our single best movie launch day in the history of the Daily Wire. So in terms of when we brought on streaming on Monday, tons of subscribers signed up just for the extras or because they missed it when it was in theaters. So you know, that's going to continue to be a line of business. We have our whole children's network Met Key, which we've been giving away to our subscribers for free. I would assume at some point it becomes not free because we can't just give away tens of millions of dollars of material for Free. So that would become not free, probably. And then we're expanding. We're looking for other shows that we want, other hosts that we want. So that's kind of the future for us, obviously.

[Steinie]

How much are you involved in bringing on Matt Walsh or Jordan Peterson?

[Ben Shapiro]

So I certainly have a voice in like who I like and who I don't. I'm not a member of man, I'm, I'm a manager of the company, but I'm not an executive of the company. So I'm So the co CEOs, Jeremy and Caleb are the ones who actually make the hard and fast decisions. They might seek my input like a 30,000 foot level or if I'm making like a big company decision since I'm an owner of the company, then I have a voice in that sort of stuff for sure. But you know, when it, when it comes. So, you know, I mean, on a personal level, I sort of recruited Matt. Right. Matt was working for the Blaze at the time. I'd read his stuff and I said to Jeremy, this is like very early on in the company. I said, you know, he's a real talent, I think we should grab him. And Jeremy looked at him too and was like, yeah, I totally concur. We should totally try and make an offer to him. And so we grabbed Matt. If you watch his original podcast, he was doing it from his car. It's really, it's really funny. And you know, all of our stuff was really bootstrapped or the story of the company is kind of amazing. I mean, we originally had a $4.8 million investment from an angel investor and we did not take any outside money for the first eight years of the existence of the company. We spun it up from, from $4.8 million of initial investment to a $200 million a year company just on cash flow. We were profitable 18 months in and we just kept reinvesting in the company and reinvesting in the company.

[Steinie]

Impressive. That's crazy.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah, it's a credit to Jeremy and Caleb. They're the ones doing the day to day. You know, I get to do the talent stuff. Every so often I have like a good business idea, but you know, they're the ones who are really running the ship.

[Steinie]

Where do you see it? Like, what's the ultimate goal with it in like five years?

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, I want to double, triple, quadruple. They want to do the same thing. I mean, so that, so that means extending, you know, our reach in politics, but it also means extending our reach outside of politics. It's one of the reasons why we're enthusiastic about brand opportunities like a Jeremy's Razor, because we think that that can actually expand outside of the political realm. Or just like normal dudes who don't care about politics really like the razor. So, you know, put it in, put it. It's already in Amazon, but, you know, put it in grocery stores, for example. We would love to expand. We've tried a couple of times expanding, sort of the entertainment offering, but that's more delicate. You have to. Our audience is trained to want politics. So if we just make a straight movie, is that something our audience is going to dig?

[Steinie]

Probably not.

[Ben Shapiro]

Probably not. So you have to gradually expand what the audience wants. We have the capacity to launch new brands at a particular level, but it's not going to be at Netflix level. So we're constantly kind of probing to see where the opportunities are in each of these areas. And then wherever you see the opportunity, you push. But they require independent marketing efforts. So like when you launch the children's network, I think we made the faulty assumption, for example, that you could kind of politically market to parents and say, listen, you don't want woke crap on Disney. You should check us out. And it turns out the parents are kind of lazy about this sort of stuff and they just want to, you know, buy what their kid wants them to buy without having stops crying and. Yeah, exactly. And so that, that requires an independent market. Also, it's marketing to a different market than we typically do. Right. We tend to skew male in terms of our consumers. But if you're doing kids product, that tends to skew grandparents and moms. So that's a different marketing contingent. You have to, you have to market in a different way and in different places. So all these things require like actual business plans and constantly breaking and remaking the machine. It's business is like breaking bones and resetting them and breaking bones and resetting them. That's all it is. Over and over and over.

[Steinie]

That's super impressive though.

[Ben Shapiro]

That's crazy.

[Steinie]

Anything else new coming up.

[Unknown Guest]

What about the Aquanaut? Is that new?

[Ben Shapiro]

Oh, yeah, super new. This is like a year old. Yeah, I like it. The watch game going on. Yeah, exactly. There you go.

[Steinie]

How many watches you have?

[Ben Shapiro]

10. Damn. Not all at this level.

[Unknown Guest]

What do you drive to work?

[Ben Shapiro]

Because I have 24, seven security, unfortunately an Escalade, but I'm not driving it. You know, the cars that I have at home, I have like a Honda Odyssey. So my joke is that, you know, like Andrew Tate walks into his compound. He's got, like, a Bugatti, and he's got, like, a Lamborghini. And this is like my. My version of masculinity is I walk into my compound, it was, like, 8 Honda Odyssey, but of different colors, but we've got that. And then we have a Tesla Model X, which my. Which my son is just in love with.

[Steinie]

We should set up this roundtable with Andrew Tate, too.

[Unknown Guest]

Let's do it.

[Ben Shapiro]

Go for it.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Steinie]

Would you do it one day if we zoom them in or something?

[Ben Shapiro]

I doubt.

[Steinie]

You want to fly to Romania.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. Flying to Romania seems like a long schlep, but that'd be some good Internet. No, it would be. It would be great.

[Steinie]

And it'd be an interesting debate, like, just to, like, watch again.

[Ben Shapiro]

I think as a fan, my only. My only proviso is that, like, you know, I would like to have a good intellectual conversation with Andrew Tate without maybe some of the, you know, bluster, if that's achievable. That sounds great. If it's just going to be me talking about the vision of masculinity and him talking about how he can kick me in the head, I fully accept as a proviso, just right up front, Andrew Tate can for sure kick my ass. Yeah. I don't think. That doesn't mean. Also, his ideas are bad. So that's all sweet.

[Unknown Guest]

All right, well, Benjamin, thank you so much, bro.

[Steinie]

Thank you.

[Ben Shapiro]

Thanks so much, guys.

[Steinie]

Awesome.