"- The great lie we tell ourselves, is that people who are evil are not like us. They're a class apart. Everybody in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me. Robert George, the ..."

"Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think about the comments made by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, about Jewish people? - They're awful and antisemitic, and they seem to get worse over..."

"- So jumping from the individual to the group. That's the way he's been expressing it, right. He keeps talking about his Jewish agents, and I watched your interview with him and you kept saying, "So j..."

"is when you are attributing a bad characteristic to an entire population based on the notion that some members of that population are doing bad things. - Yeah, there's a jump between. It's also possib..."

"- Yeah, the most absurd illustration of antisemitism, just like you said, is Stalin versus Hitler over Poland. That every bad guy was a Jew, right. It was like, every enemy, there's a lot of different..."

"Everybody, in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me. Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton, he's fond of doing a sort of thought experiment in his classes where he..."

"- Do you think you're mentally strong enough, if you realize, that you are on the wrong side of history to switch sides? Very few people in history seem to be strong enough to do that. - I think that ..."

"- Yeah, so the grouping is based on the philosophy versus something like a race, like the color of your skin, or race, in the case of the Jewish people. So it's a different thing. You, can be a little..."

"because the thing you jump to immediately is like all- - Vote for Trump. - All Republicans, right. - Right. - Versus, I think, in the charitable interpretation, that means a set of ideas. - Yeah, my a..."

"for example, makes somebody a threat to institutions. That's a conversation that we can have. And then, we'll have to discuss how much power they have, what the actual perspective is, delve into it. B..."

"And so, the difficulty for me is I take politics seriously, but also I have the ability to sort of flip the switch and suddenly it all becomes incredibly funny because it really is. If you just watch ..."

"becomes a joke. - I totally agree with this. I will say this, I try to make less jokes about the ideas and more jokes about the people in the same way that I make jokes about myself. I'm pretty self-e..."

"- "You're getting it wrong. "If anything that I or anyone else in mainstream politics "Says drives you to violence, you're getting it wrong. "You're getting it wrong." Now again, when it comes to stuf..."

"I would imagine that some of them are people who do evil things or want to do evil things. And, I wish that there were a wand that we could wave that would prevent those people from deliberately or mi..."

"- So definitely, that man, that 27 year old man, is the only one responsible for the evil he did. But, what if he and others like him are not nut cases? What if they're people with pain, with anger in..."

"I've never at any point in my entire career suggested violence as a resort to political issues. The whole point of having a political conversation is that it's a conversation. If I didn't think that i..."

"- Of course, of course. I criticize the policies of Israel on a fairly regular basis. I would assume from a different angle than Ilhan Omar does. But yeah, I mean, I criticize the policies of a wide v..."

"it's all about the Benjamins, that American support for Israel is all about the Benjamins. And, she's had to be chided by members of her own party about this sort of stuff before. - Can you empathize ..."

"but it happens to be factually correct. If the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow, there would be a state. If the Israelis put down their guns, there'd be no Israel. - You get attacked a lot on..."

"or when I'm prepping for my show, later in the afternoon, for example. - That doesn't affect you negatively mentally? Like puts you in a bad mental space? - Not particularly if it's restricted, to sor..."

"And, I don't wanna leave bad impressions out. - The sad thing about the internet, just looking at the critiques you get, I see very few critiques from people that actually want you to succeed, want yo..."

"I think that Elon is significantly more transparent, than what has taken place up till now. He seems committed to the idea that he's gonna broaden the Overton Window to allow for conversations that si..."

"Which I think is wonderful. I think that's also why people are freaking out. I think the kind of wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and wearing of sack cloth and ash by so many members of the legacy medi..."

"that basically did all the foreign policy and all the national policy. McClatchy, Reuters, AP, AFP, et cetera. That monopoly oligopoly existed until the rise of the internet. There were sort of pokes ..."

"because it was all centralized in one place, right. You didn't have to do it through Google optimization, you could now just put it on Facebook, and so many eyeballs were on Facebook, you'd get more t..."

"He's not responsible for the stuff on Facebook. It's a platform. Is AT&T responsible for the stuff you say on your phone? The answer is typically no. So when that happened, all of these, because all t..."

"himself sometimes, right. He got himself in trouble the other day for tweeting out that that story about Paul Pelosi, that that was speculative and and untrue. And, I don't think what he did is horrif..."

"we could post stuff, we could post conspiracy theories, and then through discourse, figure out what is and isn't true. - Yeah, again, like I say, I mean I think that is a better mechanism in action th..."

"There are plenty, I'm not criticizing MSNBC for not putting on right wing opinions. I mean, that's fine. I run a conservative site. We're not gonna put up left wing opinions on a wide variety of issue..."

"- You think Alex should be back on Twitter? - I do actually, because I think that there are plenty of people who are willing to say that what he's saying is wrong. And, I'm not a big fan of this idea ..."

"or with Ye. But, Twitter ain't Adidas. - So the way your stance on free speech to the degree it's possible to achieve on a platform, like Twitter is you fight bad speech with more speech, with better ..."

"- Let me linger on the love a little bit. You and a lot of people are pretty snarky on Twitter; sometimes to the point of mockery, derision, even a bit of, if I were to say bad faith in the kind of mo..."

"- So the president of the United States, no matter who they are, get the snark. - Yes, yes. And, President Trump, I think is fairly aware that he got the snark from me as well. When it comes to snarki..."

"He's had an incredibly difficult go of it with his first wife and the death of members of his family, and then Beau dying. I mean, that kind of stuff, obviously is deeply sympathetic in his... He seem..."

"Unlike President Trump, who never had a high approval rating. Trump came into office, and he had like a 45% approval rating, and when he left office, he had about a 43% approval rating. It bounced aro..."

"- No matter how big of a deal the story is, it is a big deal that there's a censorship of any relevant story. - When there's a coordinated collusive blackout, yeah. That's a serious and major problem...."

"theories to explain just why people are acting the way that they're acting. And, I find that, I don't say a 100% of the time, but 90, 94% of the time, the conspiracy theory turns out just to be people..."

"- It's sort like the ring of power. Everybody wants the ring. 'Cause with the ring you can stop the bad guys from going forward. But, it turns out that the ring gives you enormous power and that power..."

"- Yeah, somebody like Sam Harris is pretty good at this, at fighting, at saying the most outrageous thing that he knows. He almost leans into it, he knows will piss off a lot of his audience. Sometime..."

"Has there been any argument from the opposite political isle that has made you change your mind about something? If you look back. - So I will say that, I'm thinking it through because I think that my..."

"in some ways. When it comes to social policy, I would say that, I'm fairly strong where I was. I may have become slightly convinced actually by more of the conservative side of the isle and things lik..."

"or the EU to Ukraine. Zelensky is on film when he was a comedy actor making that exact joke. He has Merkel on the other line and she's like, "Oh welcome to NATO." And he's like, "Great." And she's lik..."

"for the United States. And so then, the question becomes, what's the off ramp here, and what is the thing you're trying to prevent? So what's the best opportunity? What's the best case scenario? What'..."

"on the battlefield. Nobody knows what happens after that. So we put NATO planes in the air to take out Russian assets. Do Russians start shooting down planes? Does Russia then threaten to escalate eve..."

"The problem is that requires political courage, not from Zelensky. It requires courage from probably Biden because the only, Zelensky is not in a political position, where he can go back to his own pe..."

"- This is the importance of great leadership by the way. That's why the people we elect is very important. Do you think there's power to just one on one conversation? Where Biden sits down with Zelens..."

"and they're all in. And if you look at, 'cause I traveled to Ukraine, I spent time there, I'll be going back there hopefully. Also, going back to Russia, just speaking to Ukrainians. They're all in, t..."

"You wrote How to Debate the Leftist and Destroy Them. You're kind of known for this kind of stuff, just exceptionally skilled at conversation, at debate, at getting to the facts of the matter and usin..."

"Because some of the time people think they're disagreeing and they're actually not disagreeing. When I'm talking with Ana Kasparian, and she's talking about how corporate and government have too much ..."

"are like 20 years old, and they're usually not sophisticated in any kind of degree, in terms of being able to use logic and reason, and facts and so on. - And, that's totally fine by the way. If peopl..."

"But, I think that the easy way out for a clip that people don't like, is to either immediately clip the clip. They'll take a two minute clip and clip it down to 15 seconds. Where somebody insults me a..."

"was that I just don't watch enough British TV. So the way that interviews are done there, are much more adversarial than American TV. In American TV, if somebody is adversarial with you, you assume th..."

"What goes through the preparation mentally, diet-wise, anything like that? When do you wake up? - Okay, so I wake up when my kids wake me up, usually that's my baby daughter who's two and a half. She ..."

"So I sit down, I do the show and then once I'm done with the show, I usually have between, now it's like 11:15 in the morning maybe, 'cause sometimes I'll prerecord the show. It's 11:15 in the morning..."

"And then, in a good week five. And then, I write, I read. And then, I go pick up my kids from school at 3:30. According to my kids, I have no job. I'm there in the mornings until they leave for school..."

"sometimes it's hard to translate that over to a massive audience; which is really my job. - Well, I think it can actually, it's funny with the two books, you can actually get a pretty deep understandi..."

"- Well, Putin as an example. That's a difficult one to find the right books on. I think The New Czar is the one I read, where it was the most objective. - One I read, I think, about Putin was, it was ..."

"- That's the hero villain archetype, right? - [Lex] Yeah. - It's like, either somebody's completely a hero or completely a villain. And, the truth is pretty much no one is completely a hero or complet..."

"- The Federalist Paper is a big one in terms of sort of how American politics works. The first econ book that I thought was really great 'cause it was written for teenagers, essentially, is one called..."

"And, this has had some somewhat kind of shocking effect in terms of social politics. - So there's negative consequences in your view of that. But, is there also a positive consequence of more power, m..."

"- So speaking about the nature of self, you've been an outspoken proponent of pro-life. Can we start by you trying to steel man, the case for pro-choice? That abortion is not murder, and a woman's rig..."

"- What's the strongest case for pro-life in your mind? - I mean, the strongest case for pro-life is that from conception, a human life has been created. It is a human life with potential. That human l..."

"If we believe that human life ought not to be killed for quote unquote, no good reason, you have to come up with a good reason. The burden of proof is now shifted. Now, we'll find people who will say,..."

"And so, if you're looking for sort of a bright line moral rule, that would be the bright line moral rule. And, that's sort of the pro-life case. - Well, there's still mysterious difficult scientific q..."

"When it comes to rape and incest, obviously heavy, heavy sympathy. And so, that's why I think you see, statistically speaking, a huge percentage of Americans, including many pro-life Americans, people..."

"- Do you think the question when life begins, which I think is a fascinating question, is a question of science or a question of religion? - I mean when life begins, is a question of science. When tha..."

"- Yeah, if all of that could be proved and not programmed, meaning the freely willed capacity of a machine to do X, Y, or Z. - You, could not pinpoint exactly where it happens in the program. - Right...."

"- Yeah, it's an opportunity to either celebrate humanity or to bring out the worst in humanity. The derision that naturally happens, like you said with pointing out the other, Let me ask you about cli..."

"But presumably not that many people will be living there by that point, which is one of the reasons why the price would be low because there's no demand. - So it's over a hundred years. So all of thes..."

"Also, you're assuming that geopolitical dynamics don't exist. Everybody's gonna magically get on the same page and we're all gonna be imposing massive carbon taxes to get to net zero by 2050. I mean l..."

"I think human beings will adapt because we have adapted and we'll continue to adapt. - So to the degree we invest in the threat of this, it should be into policies that help with the adaptation versus..."

"to deal with threats of the world, is almost a timeframe question. So I think, we're very bad at looking down the road and saying, because people can't handle, for example, even things like compound i..."

"by sort of Catholic theology. - Why do you think God created the universe or as is popularly asked, what do you think is the meaning behind it? What's the meaning of life? - What's the meaning of life..."

"We all parent in different ways, but being a parent is a meaningful role. We all have spouses, but you know, how you interact with that relationship is what makes your life meaningful and interesting...."

"are going to collapse. And, I think if people are feeling as though we're on the verge tyranny, I think that's why. - This is fascinating by the way. It's an instrumental perspective on liberty that's..."

"One of the tough questions. - So we're going deep here. There's two types of cruelty and suffering. So if we're talking about human cruelty and suffering, because God does not intervene to prevent peo..."

"I mean, this is a fairly well known capitalistic concept called tzimtzum in Judaism; which is the idea that when God created the universe, He sort of withdrew in order to make space for all of these t..."

"I don't think you can build a society on that because I think that that relies on the sort of goodness of mankind. Natural goodness of mankind. I don't believe in the natural goodness of mankind. - [L..."

"in our modern world, what are the pros and cons of tribes? Is that something where we should try to outgrow as a civilization? - I don't think it's ever gonna be possible to fully outgrow tribalism. I..."

"I think that everybody should have the ability to join with their own culture. I think how we define tribes is a different thing. So I think that tribes should not be defined by innate physical charac..."

""So I'll go over to the Soviets and we'll talk about it." - There's some deep truth to that. What does it mean to be a good man? The various role that a human being takes on in this role theory that y..."

"And that's a very hard job. And I've said before that, because I engage a lot with the public and all of this, the word great comes up a lot. What is it to be a great leader? What is it to be a great ..."

"- Live out the values that you think are really important and seek those values in others, would be the first piece of advice. Second piece of advice, don't go on Twitter until you're 26. - Why 26? - ..."

"with the exception of three years of law school. Right now, they live a mile and a half from us. - What'd you learn from about life from your parents and your father? - Oh man, so many things from my ..."

"engage with everybody. Take joy in sort of the mission that you're given. And, you can't always fulfill that. Sometimes, it's really rough and difficult. I'm not gonna pretend that it's all fun and ra..."

"I mean, again, to take just one example. In 2016, the ADL measured that I was the number one target of antisemitism on planet Earth. That's not fun, that's unpleasant. And when you take critiques, not..."

"I mean, if I go a few days with that exercise, I tend to get pretty grumpy pretty quickly. I gotta keep this six pack going somehow, man. (hearty laughing) - There you and Rogan agree. Well, we haven'..."

"I think one of the mistakes that we make in politics is trying to substitute love for respect or respect for love. And, I think that's a big mistake. So I do not bear tremendous love in the same sense..."

"And so, that's why I'm suggesting that respect might be a more solid and realistic foundation for the way that we treat people far away from us or people who are strangers. Respect for their dignity, ..."

"- Yeah, there's a danger that that word becomes empty and instead is used for dogmatic kind of utopianism. - I mean, this is the way that, for example, religious theocracies very often work. We love y..."