The Best Protection Against Evil Is Recognizing It in Yourself

Princeton philosopher Robert George likes to run a thought experiment in class. He asks students to raise their hands if, living in Alabama in 1861, they would have been abolitionists. Almost everyone does. Then he tells them, of course, that is not true. Ben Shapiro cites the exercise to Lex Fridman as a rebuke of what he calls the great lie we tell ourselves: that people who do evil are a class apart, that everyone in history who sinned was a different kind of person from me.

Shapiro's own formulation is starker still. The best protection against evil, he says, is recognizing that it lies in every human heart, and that it might take you over. Fridman puts the question to him directly: in the quiet of his mind, does he ever wonder whether he is participating in evil? The next two and a half hours keep returning to that test.

Fridman asks listeners, whatever their politics, to set those leanings aside and give the most charitable reading of what is said. He notes that the same podcast has room for Shapiro and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for Donald Trump and Barack Obama, for presidents and prisoners, artists and scientists. The reason, he says, is simple. We are all human, all capable of good and of evil, and he is trying to understand.

Fridman starts with Ye, formerly Kanye West, and the comments about Jewish people. Shapiro calls them awful and antisemitic, and says they have gotten worse over time, from the bizarre 'death con 3' tweet to stereotypes about sexual manipulation, media control, and finance. On his own show he called it sheer Nazism, the sort of thing that comes straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

He is not content only to condemn. Having seen bipolar disorder in his own family, he thinks Ye looks like someone in a manic episode, saying things he should not say and believing they are brilliant. The Washington Post even ran a piece speculating about that. Even if Ye is an antisemite, Shapiro says, a shred of common sense would have made him stop; mania drives a person past that point. The deeper logical error is older still: somebody hurt me, that person is a Jew, therefore all Jews are bad. Fridman, who interviewed Ye, kept asking him to name the agents who had screwed him. Ye would not. He kept falling back on 'the Jews' as a group.

Is there a way to talk about high Jewish representation in Hollywood, law, or accounting without it becoming hate? Shapiro says of course: statistical truths are statistical truths, the way a higher share of engineers are Asian, or East African highlanders are overrepresented among distance runners. Culture, history, even genetic adaptation can explain a skew. None of that is racism. Racism starts, he says, when you attribute a bad characteristic to an entire population because some members of it did bad things. Record-label owners might well treat artists badly, and Jews might be overrepresented among those owners. The leap from that group to all Jews is the small, fatal one.

Antisemitism, he adds, is unusual because it splits into types. Ethnic antisemitism is Nazi-style blood libel. Religious antisemitism treated Jews as killers of Christ, and historically a conversion was supposed to lift it. Political antisemitism is stranger: members of a group I dislike are disproportionately Jewish, therefore all Jews belong to that group. Nazis said the communists were Jews; communists said the capitalists were Jews. The structure is a conspiracy theory about a shadowy cadre behind every door. Fridman offers the absurdest illustration: Stalin and Hitler glaring at each other across Poland, each convinced the enemy behind the enemy was the Jews.

What does Hitler's rise teach about human nature? Shapiro's first point is one people skip. Before Hitler took power, power had already been centralized in the government. The Weimar Republic had effectively collapsed; authority sat in the Chancellery under Hindenburg. It was only a matter of time until someone bad grabbed it. The struggle between the reds and the browns radicalized the center and let Hitler in through the front door. He was elected. Communists could have taken power instead, Shapiro says, and it would not have been the same atrocity, but Soviet Russia was already committing the Holodomor. There were very few good parties. Moderates were being dragged into alliance with radicals to stop the other side's worst case.

The figure who fascinates him is Franz von Papen, the Catholic Democrat who was the second-to-last chancellor before Hitler. Papen disliked Hitler, thought him a radical and a nut, and also thought the buffoon could be used by the right to block the communists, restore legitimacy, and keep Papen in the game. After Hitler took power he killed Papen's friends. Papen stayed on out of so-called loyalty and later helped the Anschluss. The lie this history punctures, Shapiro says, is that people who support evil are not like us. Polarized politics makes it easy to become a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robot and back someone hideous in order to stop someone you think is more hideous. He hears that language almost everywhere in the West now: my political enemy is an enemy of democracy, will end the republic, must be stopped by any means necessary. That, he says, is dangerous stuff.

Fridman asks whether Shapiro ever wonders, quietly, if he is participating in evil. Shapiro laughs at a British sketch of two SS men noticing that the other side has a nice eagle while they have a skull and crossbones, and asking, are we the baddies? Evil rarely presents its face so clearly. He says he spends an inordinate amount of time reflecting on whether he is doing the right thing, and he may not always. Asked if he is mentally strong enough to switch sides if he found himself on the wrong side of history, he says he hopes so, and that you never know until the moment comes. He is, he claims, the only person in public life with a list on his website of the dumb things he has said, each annotated with whether he still believes it or whether it was terrible and stupid. The list, he adds, will get longer.

On Ye's comparison of the Holocaust to roughly 900,000 abortions a year in the United States, Shapiro takes two angles. As a pro-life person he did not find it offensive: if unborn lives deserve protection, the killing of just under a million of them a year for nearly fifty years is a historic tragedy on that scale. From the outside he understands why people say you cannot analogize Nazis shoving children into gas chambers to a woman who may not even share the premise that a fetus is a person. Fridman then turns the individual-to-group problem on Shapiro himself: he is one of the most effective attackers of 'the left.' Is that the same oversimplification Ye applies to Jews? Shapiro says he is attacking a philosophy, not a race, and that he distinguishes the left from liberals who merely disagree on taxes or foreign policy. The left, as he uses the word, are people who think dissenting views should be silenced because they are harmful. Joe Biden's 'MAGA Republicans' line bothers him because the speech defined moderates as people who agreed with him on the Inflation Reduction Act. You cannot make 'agrees with me' the line between a threat to the republic and a normal opponent. He will not plead clean hands. Politics, he says, is Veep, not House of Cards: everyone is a moron unless proven otherwise, and virtually everything is done out of stupidity rather than malice.

In 2017 a gunman attacked a mosque in Quebec City. Six people died and five were seriously injured. The 27-year-old had consumed a great deal of online content and checked many Twitter accounts; Shapiro's was among them, 93 times in the month before the shooting. Fridman asks what Shapiro would tell that young man, and other young men with hate in their hearts. The answer is immediate: you are getting it wrong. If anything Shapiro or anyone else in mainstream politics says drives you to violence, you are getting it wrong.

He has a hard rule he says he applies evenly. He never blames a person's politics for someone else's violence unless that person is actively advocating violence. A fan of Bernie Sanders shot up a congressional baseball game; that is not Sanders's fault. A man in San Francisco attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer; that is not Kevin McCarthy's fault. Threats against Brett Kavanaugh are not Joe Biden's fault. Shapiro has 4.7 million Twitter followers, 8 million on Facebook, 5 million on YouTube, and he assumes some of them are violent. He wishes there were a wand that would stop people from misreading him as a call to harm. There is not. It is a negative byproduct of reaching a lot of people.

The deeper worry is what happens if we remove agency from individuals and blame broad political rhetoric for every act of violence. The people who pay, he says, are the general public, because free speech goes away. The sequence is familiar: speech is hate, hate is violence, speech is violence, speech must be curbed. That, to him, is deeply disturbing. Fridman presses: what if these people are not nut cases, just people in pain? Shapiro's message to them is the one he gives young men generally. Find meaning in connections that matter. Grow up, get a job, get married, have a family, take care of the people around you, become useful in your community. He has never, he says, suggested violence as a resort. If he did not think political conversation was worth having, he would not do this for a living.

How does Shapiro keep internet attacks from breaking him, or from curdling into resentment of whole groups? Four years earlier Twitter had been all-consuming, especially the notifications tab, an ego machine of people talking about you. His wife told him Twitter was making his life miserable and that he had to take it off his phone. Now, if he wants to log on, he has to walk to a computer and make a conscious decision. More important, he says, is surrounding yourself with people you trust to critique you and who actually want you to succeed. The internet is full of people who hate your guts, and also of flatterers. He married at 24, his wife at 20, long before fame or money, and she is a sounding board. Family and friends get an open line on the condition that they tell him when he is wrong.

He is hopeful about Elon Musk buying Twitter. Musk seems more transparent, and committed to widening the Overton window so that conversations once banned, from mask efficacy to whether men can become women, can happen with explained standards. That, Shapiro thinks, is why legacy media is wailing. For most of the twentieth century American media was three television networks, a few newspapers, and the wire services. The internet and then social media smashed that oligopoly, and for a while everyone was happy, including outlets like his, because eyeballs were centralized. The mood flipped the moment Donald Trump became president. The assumption that Democrats would keep winning broke, and the new story was that misinformation had elected him, so platforms had to crack down. You can watch Jack Dorsey's talk about free speech shift from 2015 to 2018, and Mark Zuckerberg go from a 2018 Georgetown speech on the value of speech to telling Congress in 2019 he was responsible for what sat on Facebook. Shapiro's analogy: is AT&T responsible for what you say on the phone?

Once eyeballs sat on a few platforms, those platforms could decide what you saw. The starkest case, he says, was the pre-election blackout of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Musk taking over one of those services and saying he will not play by that rulebook, that a thousand flowers will bloom, with limits on a case-by-case basis, strikes Shapiro as a good thing. It comes with responsibility. Musk tweeted a speculative, untrue story about Paul Pelosi, then deleted it when he learned it was false. That, Shapiro says, is free speech working: you get it wrong, people rip into you, you delete. It is better than preemptive bans, which raise more questions than they stop. He does think Musk, as the face of 'responsible free speech,' should be a little more careful. Fridman compares the urge to moderate with the Ring of Power: everyone wants it because it can stop the bad guys, and it confers a power that can be used in the wrong ways too.

Should Trump's account be restored? Yes, Shapiro says, and this from someone who dislikes an enormous number of Trump's tweets. Trump is an important political figure, and even if he were not, Shapiro does not think he should have been banned from Twitter and Facebook in coordinated fashion. He holds the same view about people he thinks are worse. He is no Alex Jones fan, and Jones has said things about him personally he is not fond of, and he still thinks Jones should be back. The town square is online; banning people from it is unpersoning them. Unless you have violated a criminal statute, you should not be unpersoned in American society. Adidas is right to drop Ye. 'Twitter ain't Adidas.' One of the costs of freedom, he says, is people doing things he does not like, and he would rather have the freedom with all of that than not have the freedom. Asked if he has considered being nicer on Twitter, he says yes. Twitter's thirty-second undo is a friend. Every so often he tweets something, waits, and asks whether he needed to say it.

Fridman asks for one strongly positive and one strongly negative thing about Donald Trump, then the same for Joe Biden. On Trump, the plus is that he has no establishmentarian preconceptions, so he sometimes goes out of the box and it works. The foreign-policy establishment told him he could not get a Middle East deal done unless he centered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; he went around it, cut a series of peace deals, and moved the embassy to Jerusalem. The minus is that there is no filter between brain and mouth. Whatever happens in his head comes out. A lot of people find that charming, and it is often funny, but Shapiro does not think it is an excellent quality in someone with that much responsibility. Trump says damaging things on Twitter and seems consumed by grievance, which is why he remains so fixed on 2020.

On Biden, the thing Shapiro likes most is that he seems, by available evidence, a very good father. Tapes of him talking to Hunter through drug trouble make Shapiro think: he seems like a really good dad, and God forbid, if that were my kid, I would be saying the same things. The deaths in Biden's family, including Beau, are deeply sympathetic. The thing he does not like is that the slap-on-the-back, old-school politician is not genuine when the prevailing winds of the party carry him to radical places and he doubles down. Biden was elected, Shapiro says, to do two things: not be Trump, and be a unifier. Instead he spent seven trillion dollars, pulled out of Afghanistan without a plan, labeled political enemies as enemies of the republic, and brought Dylan Mulvaney to the White House while calling restrictions on the medical transition of minors a moral sin. His approval sank from about 60 percent coming in to the low 40s or high 30s. Trump never had a high approval rating; he arrived around 45 and left around 43. If you are Biden, Shapiro says, you should look in the mirror and wonder why.

The case that the Hunter Biden laptop is a big deal is twofold. First, it is relevant if a vice president's son is picking up bags of cash abroad because his last name is Biden, which raises influence-peddling questions. Second, and for Shapiro more important, the coordinated media and social-media blackout of a story implicating a presidential candidate in the last month of an election is itself a major story. The case that it might not be a big deal is that Hunter may have been off on his own, a derelict, with Joe uninvolved. The problem is those questions were never allowed to be asked and answered. Cut off a story at birth and people speculate in every direction, from 'Russian disinformation' to 'Joe personally sent him to Beijing for a sack of cash.' Fridman steel-mans the other side: consulting is often selling a name, the way a Harvard degree is, and Hunter himself admitted he probably would not have gotten the job without the last name. Shapiro agrees, and still says the smashed life cycle of the story is the scandal. He also objects to the slide from 'disinformation' (deliberate foreign fakes) to 'misinformation' (mistaken or 'out of context' speech, often domestic). Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan the FBI had put the platform on lookout for Russian interference, people called the laptop Russian disinformation, and Facebook shut it down. The laptop was real.

The human brain is built to find patterns, Shapiro says, and in politics that appetite produces conspiracy theories. The classified documents at Mar-a-Lago are his exhibit. The left imagined nuclear codes sold to Russia or China; the obvious explanation is that Trump looked at the papers, liked them, was told he could not keep them, and put them in a box in another room. About 94 percent of the time, he estimates, the conspiracy turns out to be people being dumb and other people reacting dumbly. On his Daily Wire colleague Candace Owens, his favorite thing is that she will say things nobody else will say, and his least favorite thing is the same. He thinks the way she first responded to Ye, with confusion and a defense of her friend, was dead wrong. He wishes she had said, immediately: he is my friend, and he said something antisemitic.

Shapiro says his foreign-policy views have morphed. He was a big backer of the Iraq War; in retrospect, knowing what open-ended occupations the American public will not bear, he might not be. He describes himself as more of a Kissinger realist now. On Ukraine, the West's pre-war mistake was almost the worst available stance: encourage Kyiv to keep trying to join NATO and the EU, but do not let it in. That infuriated Russia without giving Ukraine any of the protections. Zelensky, back when he was a comic, even filmed the joke, Merkel welcoming him to NATO and then realizing Ukraine was on the line. If you are going to offer an alliance, Shapiro says, offer it. If you are going to guarantee security, guarantee it. The West failed to do either.

Once the war began, the West's job became giving Ukraine the material needed to repel the invasion, and on that he thinks the West did well, with Europe often ahead of a late United States. American interests, as he lists them, were preserving borders, degrading an aggressive Russian military, and knocking Europe off a balance with Russia and China. Most of those goals, he says, have already been achieved. So the question becomes the off-ramp. The best case is Ukraine forcing Russia entirely out, including Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea. Virtually no one, including the White House, thinks that is accomplishable, especially Crimea, and it would be a long slog in a collapsing Ukrainian economy.

The best case might also be a worst case. Putin, unable to tell his people that tens of thousands of lives were wasted for nothing, might use a tactical nuclear weapon; nobody knows what happens after that, because nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. The other unknown is Putin falling. His replacement is unlikely to be a liberalizer; more likely a man from the current brass, or a Syria-style collapse with no central power, which would also be a disaster. Risk mitigation, Shapiro argues, means offering an off-ramp: Putin keeps Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk; Ukraine commits not to join NATO formally; the West gives a real treaty obligation to defend Ukraine against another invasion, not the empty assurance of the 1990s when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons.

That requires political courage from Biden, not from Zelensky. Zelensky cannot tell a people who have made unbelievable sacrifices that he is calling it quits. Biden would have to be the bad guy: we will keep sending aid and a defense pact, but if you do not come to the table we start weaning you off. That lets Zelensky blame Washington, and it requires people on the right, Shapiro included, to say the move was correct if Biden actually makes it. Fridman believes in the chemistry of sitting down in person. Shapiro is afraid Putin outplays people one-on-one; he has done it to Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. If there is a summit, a private meeting is better, because Putin is afraid of being humiliated in public. Even then, a canny operator across from a president Shapiro does not consider a particularly sophisticated player is a risky scene. He adds that this is not unique to Biden. Most American presidents of the last thirty or forty years have not been particularly sophisticated players either.

Shapiro wrote How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them, and Fridman asks whether that power, like the Ring, has corrupted his pursuit of truth. Shapiro hopes not. Most of the clips branded as destroying people with facts and logic are him talking on a college campus, not a formal debate and not an insult. His actual rule is that the other person picks the mode. If it is a discussion of ideas, they discuss. If someone comes loaded for bear, he responds in kind. A lot of the rot in the 'debate' sphere, he thinks, is misdiagnosis: treating a discussion as a debate, or a debate as a discussion, or turning what ought to be a conversation into performance art and trolling. He says he does not troll in actual debates; that stays on Twitter and on his show.

Half of a real discussion, he says, is asking what you mean, because people often think they disagree when they do not. Debating Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks, he heard her complain that corporations and government have too much power together and told her she sounded like the Tea Party. He has talked atheism with Sam Harris, debated Cenk Uygur, and hosted people from the other side on his Sunday Special, from Jason Blum to Larry Wilmore, with Ro Khanna then in the works. He claims he is the only person on the right who regularly tells his audience to listen to the other side, specifically Pod Save America, and that no one there will ever return the favor. He calls it the happy-birthday problem: left-leaning friends will text him privately and never tweet it, lest they admit he was born of woman.

Then there is the BBC interview with Andrew Neil, which the internet treated as a rare knockdown. Shapiro walks through the day. He had a book out, had not slept much, and this was the last interview. He did not watch the BBC and did not know the host. Neil asked almost nothing about the book and spent a solid twenty minutes reading old tweets, which Shapiro considers the worst form of interview, especially when he has already acknowledged the tweets. Mistake one was ego: he said he did not even know who Neil was, which was true and also, he later learned, a famous person in Britain, and an ass thing to say either way. Mistake two was assuming an adversarial interviewer in the British style must be on the left, the way it usually works on American TV. He mischaracterized Neil and later apologized.

He got up, took off the microphone, and walked out. Within thirty seconds he knew it was a mistake. Before the interview even aired he corrected the record: Andrew Neil is not on the left, and the interview was a bad one, on him. He wishes he had known who Neil was, done the research, and treated it as potentially more adversarial than a standard book hit. Losing your cool, he says, is always a bad look. Fridman notes that the clip went viral precisely because it happens so rarely to him.

A typical day starts when the children start it. Shapiro has three, then eight, six, and two and a half; the two-year-old is usually on the monitor around 6:15 a.m. Marriage, he says, expands the range of happiness and unhappiness; children remove the limits entirely. He feeds them breakfast, scrolling overnight news while the eggs cook, then goes to the office, puts on makeup and wardrobe, and records the show. Most of the prep is done the night before, because the news cycle does not move much between late night and morning. He reads the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Daily Mail, plus Daily Wire, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Intercept, and clips, because the show leans on letting people hear themselves in their own words. The show is usually done around 11:15. Then lunch with his wife if she is free, or a workout: five days a week with a trainer, weights, plyometrics, CrossFit-ish. 'Beneath this mild astute lies a hulking monster,' he jokes.

Afternoons are for reading and writing, usually a book in progress, with Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart in his ears. No rap. He reads physical books because he keeps the Sabbath and cannot use a Kindle once it starts. When the family moved from Los Angeles to Florida he had about 7,000 volumes, discarded some 4,000, and has been building the pile back up. He tabs rather than highlights, again because of Sabbath, and pays someone to file the quotes he likes. He reads three to five books a week, five in a good week. At 3:30 he picks the children up from school; as far as they are concerned he has no job. Homework, play, rides in the new Tesla his son is obsessed with, bed around 7:30. Then he sits down again, compiles the next day's rundown, and writes every word of the show himself. He hopes for an hour or two with his wife before sleep. He writes extraordinarily fast; in a previous life he was a ghostwriter, a turnaround specialist who could knock out 60,000 words in three weeks.

How he thinks about the news is not a formal process so much as a Rolodex. Because he reads history, economics, geography, and social science every week, a breaking story can be channeled into three larger ideas. Musk taking Twitter sent him straight to the history of American media; industrial subsidies send him back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. News is icing; the cake is hundreds of pages of books. The other method is cramming. Russia breaks, he buys five books and reads them. The sad fact about the world, he says, is that two books on a subject make the media treat you as an expert. His job is not to be that expert. It is to know enough to translate for a mass audience, which full academic specialists often cannot do. A few years ago he knew nothing about Bitcoin; at a conference he asked people for their top three books and then read nine.

Asked for books that still shape him, he names the Federalist Papers, Henry Hazlitt's short Economics in One Lesson, and Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which he calls the best book of the last ten years. Trueman's claim is that Western identity used to be a mix of biological drives and the social institutions that civilize them, and that we have shifted toward treating the inner feeling as the self, with the outer world obliged to celebrate it. Institutions become enemies to be blown up in the name of liberation. Shapiro thinks that shift is already showing up in suicidal ideation and in the fragility of political institutions. He is not sure he loves calling people heroes, villains, or geniuses. People do heroic or villainous things; they have a genius for something. His father used to say he did not believe in geniuses, only in people with a genius for a particular work.

Fridman asks Shapiro, a vocal pro-life advocate, to steel-man the pro-choice case. The only fully consistent version, Shapiro says, is that nothing in the unborn life outweighs bodily autonomy at all, which is why the Democratic Party platform's logic runs to the point of birth, for any reason. A related argument, one Ruth Bader Ginsburg gestured at, is that women cannot be men's equals if biology is allowed to decide their futures, so forcing a pregnancy to continue is a form of sex discrimination. The softer, more emotionally resonant version, and where polling suggests most Americans actually are, is that autonomy outweighs the fetus until some point X, often twelve to fifteen weeks, after which the child's development is enough to matter.

The strongest pro-life case, as he sees it, is that conception creates a human life with potential, an independent organism with its own DNA, and that this life now has an interest in its own existence. It is not a potential human life; it is a human life not yet developed. Once you grant that, the burden shifts: why does bodily autonomy permit snuffing it out? Other proposed lines, he argues, go arbitrary fast. Heartbeat? People have pacemakers. Brain function? Adults have wildly different levels of it. Viability? A newborn left on a table is not viable either. If you want a bright-line moral rule, conception is the one that does not dissolve under the next hypothetical.

He does not treat consciousness as the sole criterion, because we are unconscious a good deal of our lives and killing a sleeper would still be a moral crime. Consciousness is a spectrum, and once you start ranking lives by how lit-up they are you are in eugenic territory; Peter Singer at Princeton has argued that self-consciousness may not exist until two and a half and that infanticide can be permissible. On women's freedom, Shapiro feels little tension when the pregnancy follows voluntary sex, even with contraception, because the result is the predictable one mammals have always produced. He feels heavy sympathy in rape and incest, which is why many Americans who call themselves pro-life want those exceptions, but he himself does not hold them. The only exception he shares with essentially all pro-lifers is danger to the life of the mother. He would not call all abortions murder in the legal sense, because murder needs mens rea, and most women having them do not believe they are killing a person. He can admit a difference between ending a two-week embryo and stabbing a seven-year-old, and still say terminating the pregnancy is wrong. When life begins, he says, is a science question. When that life is valuable enough to protect is beyond science. That is a standing argument with Sam Harris, who thinks you can get ought from is. Shapiro does not see innate human value falling out of evolutionary biology. Nobody assumes the innate value of every ant.

Fridman then tries a question he thinks Shapiro will get wrong: will there be a time when it is unethical, even illegal, to kill a robot because it has sentience? Shapiro says it depends on the robot's development. If the machine can imitate what religious language calls a soul, including a freely willed, non-programmed capacity to choose and to suffer, it would raise serious moral issues, and he is not sure he knows the answer. He is not more afraid of that day than of aliens arriving with the same traits. What he actually fears is the opposite: that we build robots that appear to have free will and then dehumanize them, which teaches us to dehumanize the humans next to us. People have always treated newly discovered others this way. It is an old problem, he says, made of human hands.

The climate meme is a clip of Shapiro saying that if water levels rise five to ten feet over a hundred years, people will sell their homes and move, followed by the punchline: sell to whom? He laughs at it. He never meant that if a tsunami is about to hit you list the house on eBay. He meant that adaptation is humanity's best quality. As waters rise, prices in those areas fall, people leave over time, and eventually the houses are worthless because demand is gone. The joke works because it collapses a century of price dynamics into tomorrow morning.

For years, he says, he has believed climate change is real and that anthropogenic climate change is real. He does not argue with IPCC estimates; he knows climatologists at MIT and Caltech who know this better than he does. How much of the change is human, 50 percent or 70 or 90, has more play in the joints. What he claims to know factually is that the measures currently proposed are unworkable and will not happen. Even imposed, the Paris accords would lower the trajectory by a fraction of a degree. The Green New Deal and net zero by 2050 assume carbon already in the air can be wished away and that every government will impose carbon taxes hundreds of times higher than today's, a figure he attributes to Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum. At least 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, he says, is baked into the cake by the end of the century, citing Nobel economist William Nordhaus. Human beings are crap at mitigation and excellent at adaptation. Estimates of billions dead, mass starvation, and hundreds of millions migrating in a few years are, in his view, wrong. People will move inland, build sea walls, pull carbon from the air, try geoengineering. That is where the money should go, not into subsidizing the same three green technologies in the hope that subsidies magically create efficiency.

Nuclear power, he says, is a proven source and should be radically extended. It is a litmus test. If you are on the right or the left and you take climate change seriously, you should be for nuclear. If you are not, he knows you have other priorities. Our ability to use reason on long-term threats is, he thinks, a timeframe problem. People cannot even feel compound interest, so they let the disaster arrive and then solve it, bloodier than it had to be, and sometimes the solution proposed thirty years early would not have worked anyway.

Fridman steel-mans fear itself: maybe a population has to be scared witless to act on slow threats. Shapiro doubts we have that capacity, and he thinks Platonic philosopher-kings are generally bad. He has been in Davos-like rooms where people ask what if we just tell everyone it will be tsunamis and The Day After Tomorrow. You do not have that power, he says, and COVID dramatically undercut it. Elites told people to stay in their houses for two years, not to send children to school, that the vaccine would prevent transmission, and that spending seven trillion dollars in a year would not be inflationary. They were wrong on all of it. The last two years, he argues, did more to undermine institutional trust than any stretch in recent American history. Fridman sides with Franklin Roosevelt: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Who is God? Shapiro reaches for Aquinas. Not a man in the sky with a beard, but the cause underlying the logic of the universe, if the universe has a logic, and in the Jewish view the creator of that universe, with an interest in people living by its laws. The meaning of life, as he is working it out in a book, is to fulfill what God made you to do, which he calls role theory. Virtue ethics is too abstract: be generous, but generous to whom? Deontological ethics is a rulebook. Role ethics says we live through a series of parts that also end up on tombstones in four words: beloved father, mother, sister, brother, sometimes a job or a faith. Those roles exist across societies. Liberty, on this picture, exists inside the roles. There are a thousand ways to be a father; that is what makes lives different and interesting. Both left and right, he thinks, talk as if liberty were an ultimate good, as if choice itself made a thing good. He has moved. Liberty is instrumentally valuable: it is good because it lets you achieve something. You have to be careful, or that slides into tyranny, you may only do what I permit. But if you knock down the institutions that are the pillars, the liberties on top collapse with them.

Has he had a crisis of faith? He would rather call it an ongoing question. Israel, in Hebrew, means to struggle with God. If you understand what God is doing, you are wrong; if you think the question does not matter, you are also wrong. God is a necessary hypothesis. Why cruelty? Human cruelty exists because God does not override free will; to do so would be to make us angels. Natural suffering exists because God obscures himself. If he appeared in glory on a schedule there would be no faith, only seeing. The kabbalistic idea is tzimtzum: God withdrew to make space. Can an atheist be a good person? Of course, he says, a hundred percent, and plenty of religious people are crappy. He once told Sam Harris they agree on nearly everything morally, maybe fifteen or twenty percent apart, the rest because they both grew up in a Judeo-Christian society ten miles from each other around the turn of the millennium. What he does not think you can do is build a whole society on atheism, because that relies on the natural goodness of mankind, which he does not believe in. Here he and Fridman finally diverge. Fridman thinks people left alone tend toward good. Shapiro thinks they may be good with limits: decent to family and neighbors, and then, threatened by an outside tribe, they kill everyone. That, he says, is the pre-civilizational record, and it was violent. Tribalism cannot be fully outgrown. Trying to obliterate it in the name of universalism, liberal, religious, communist, or Nazi, has repeatedly ended in utopia's body count. Tribes should form around ideas, not skin. He is not a big believer in ethnic Judaism; Hitler would disagree, he notes, because Hitler thought in racial terms.

What does it mean to be a good man? He reaches for Aristotle: a good cup holds liquid. To be good is to perform the function you were made for. Be a good dad, and most people have a gut sense of the job and of its opposite. It is fairly easy to be great, he has long said, and very difficult to be good. A lot of great people are not good. Most good people die mourned by family and friends and are forgotten two generations later, and those are the people who incrementally move the ball. Advice for the young: live the values you think matter, and seek them in others. Do not go on Twitter until you are 26, when the brain is developed; he started writing columns at 17 and it was a temptation to say enormous numbers of stupid things that then get engraved. If you must be on social media, watch, do not post, and read books. Engage your community. Solutions should run from five people to twenty to two hundred, not start at hundreds of millions. Mentors: a father who insisted on values and found adults for him to talk to when he did not know something; a practical mother; Andrew Breitbart, who would rollerblade up to protesters and ask them to lunch, and who also taught the counter-lesson that Twitter can poison you. A fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Genetty, told him not to let potential be written on his tombstone. Doubt, for him, is not about whether he can say what he thinks. It is about handling the blowback. In 2016 the ADL measured him as the number-one target of antisemitism on earth. He loses sleep over critiques, and writing, family, a close circle, and exercise are how he climbs out.

Near the end Fridman asks about love. Shapiro is rarely asked. Love, he says, binds together the people who ought to be bound together; respect binds broader groups. A common political mistake is substituting one for the other. He does not love strangers the way he loves his family. Anybody who tells you they love your kid as much as you do is lying. He loves his community, state, and country more than others, and that is normal and good, until it becomes so tight you stop looking outward. Beyond the circle you need respect, not a counterfeit of family love that will not be returned and can turn fake. Fridman argues that compassion for the stranger, even when it can hurt you, is the fabric of a good society, because loving your own is easy. Shapiro thinks they are using the word in two senses. Respect for a homeless man's dignity gets you to the same end without forcing people to fake a feeling they do not have. 'Love thy neighbor,' he notes, is not 'love everyone,' and starting with universal love often becomes a cram-down utopianism, the logic of theocracies: we love you so much we have to convert you. Start with respect, and let love grow where it is earned. Fridman says he would die a happy man if, after this conversation, he saw a Shapiro who kept growing more respectful on Twitter, and maybe one day converted that into love. Shapiro says he will try to make that happen. At the beginning of the talk he said evil lives in every heart. At the end he promised to be a little more careful with other people. Both, in their way, are a kind of honesty.