Brought to you by the Ramsey Network app. Download for content that keeps you motivated today. I think the very first time I saw you was some YouTube clips of you taking questions on woke subjects from college kids. And that's probably, she and I have been friends for almost 10 years, so that's probably 10 or 15 years ago.
Some of those clips the first time I saw them. And I think it was Rachel, was it at the lake house? She said, you guys see this bench girl? I think one of the things that struck me with that, and I think one of the things that's appealing about those clips, and even about your show, and sometimes we get it on our stuff, but we're a little different take on it, is this sense that it's like your pulse rate doesn't change on these things.
You know, there's this thing of, I want to say not afraid, but that's not it. You don't get amped up at all. It's almost as if when you're debating someone, you're toying with them. You're a chess master, and you've seen four moves ahead, and they're done, so we're going to go ahead and enjoy the ride.
You know, that kind of thing is the way it feels. Have you always been that way, or did you develop that confidence as you did it more? I think some of both. I think you get better at it the more you do it.
And there are times where you still remind yourself to stay calm, depending on how inflammatory the topic you're taking on is. I remember just this year, when I went to Oxford University in the aftermath of October 7th, and obviously I know people whose family members are kidnapped in the Gaza Strip. I know multiple families who lost family who were soldiers in Gaza. I know many people right now who are serving Lebanon.
So I have a pretty close stake in that particular conflict in October 7th and all the rest. And I was facing young students who actively were calling for the destruction of the state of Israel, and all this, and going in, I kind of had to say to myself, listen, just stay calm. Just stay calm. Just don't get angry.
Just stay calm. That's fairly rare. I tend to be more analytic. There's sort of a mode that I go into, and this is the part that's kind of natural.
I'm not sure why it occurred. Maybe it's from being bullied as a kid. I can see myself almost in third person doing the thing. Where it's like, okay, well, now we're in analysis mode, and this person's making an argument.
Is it a good argument? Is it a bad argument? Let's try and figure out what the puzzle pieces are here. Forth and fine terms.
Maybe I agree with them. What exactly is it they're doing here? My wife hates it when this happens during a home argument, by the way. She'll be like, we're not in a YouTube video.
You need to stop this right now. Yeah, how do you argue with Ben Shapiro at home? That feels like, is it even worth it? No, I mean, so...
Do you ever let her win just for fun? Well, I mean, for sure, I let her win all the time, right? That's the smart move. But, yeah, the truth is, my wife is really good about this sort of stuff.
Meaning that I'm, by nature, a very analytic person. And so, I've said this before, when I'm talking to my wife, and I will now generalize this to many women. Many women, when they present a problem, they don't want an answer. They want sympathy.
And this is a mistake I made for many years in the beginning of my marriage. When my wife comes to the problem, they'll be like, right, you should do this and this, and it'll be solved. And she'll get angry. Like, why are you telling me that?
And so, I actually said to her, you know, I need to know. Outside of the conversation, is this solving this thing a problem? Or is this, you just want me to hear you? Conversation.
Like, which one of these is it? And she's nice enough to actually, like, be honest about that. Let me know. Good marriage take.
And I've heard she's one of the nicest people in the world. So, opposite to attractive. Yeah, exactly. So, in that same vein, a lot of your brand has been built around controversy.
You're stepping into extremely controversial things, or sometimes you create it. Is this intentional, or is it just a value? This is something of value, and I need to go there, and if controversy happens, so be it. It's more of a letter.
I really try not to say uncalibrated things for the sake of just running fire. Everything that I say, I feel like I can say in more inflammatory fashion, just to get clicks. I really try to calibrate my language to make sure that if there's a hill that I'm going to die on, I want to die on a hill of my own choosing. And what that means is that if there is a position that finds itself in controversy, then I want to state it as clearly and distinctly as I can.
Avoid it not in a role, right? I mean, these are things that didn't used to be controversial, but now are very, very controversial. Or disparities are not evidence of discrimination. You have to show me evidence of discrimination, otherwise there might be a confound in what you're talking about.
That doesn't become a controversial statement. But I really try not to just initiate firefights for the sake of initiating firefights. I try to be pretty careful about the language that I use, and frankly, I find it irritating when people aren't deliberately vague, when they use semantic overload in order to do that. You'll see people do this, again, criticizing our industry, but you'll see people do this.
They'll say something that is perceived by, say, our side of the aisle as perfectly obvious, and it's perceived by the other side of the aisle as the most controversial thing ever. And if they just said it in a way that they actually meant it, it wouldn't be controversial at all. So instead of talking about, say, to take just a random example, a pretty famous commentator on the right at one point was suggesting that immigration was making our country dirty. And this was perceived by the right as, okay, there are people who are coming across our border who come from cultures where they don't clean the streets as often, and that means there's more trash on the streets sometimes, and that's a bad thing.
And then people must be like, he's talking about racially dirty. If you're on the right, you read that semantic overload. It's a term that can be interpreted a variety of ways. If the commentator just said, what I mean is the person.
What I mean is, when people come here and they come from a culture where there's a regular trash pickup, they sometimes leave their garbage on the lawn, and that makes the neighborhood dirtier, and that has severe social consequences for everybody else who lives in the neighborhood, now it's not even controversial, right? You know exactly what the person's saying. And I think there's a certain amount of deliberate vagueness that very often contributes to controversy that I don't particularly like because it's not, it doesn't aim at solving the problem. You know, sometimes I think it's deliberate, and sometimes I think it's almost mental laziness.
Instead of taking the time to get to the point in a concise way, in a clear way, with courage, and say, this is what I mean. And if you're like that, that's okay. But this is what I mean. And that requires some extra mental gymnastics, and it requires an extra level of backbone to step in.
They'll be very, very clear. If you're going to be mad at me, let's be mad at me that the right... This is one of the things that drives me absolutely up a wall, is when people will use words like they, without an antecedent. They're out to get you.
Say, well, I need to know who they is. Yeah, we get that in the financial world. They said, not heard. Right.
It's a horrible financial planning firm. And you see this all the time in politics. They're doing this. They're doing this.
Can we even know who they are? If you don't know who they are, I can verify it. I can say whether it's false or whether I think that it's true. This is about, say, election 2020.
People will say the election was right. I need specifics. What are you talking about specifically when you say the election was right? Do you mean that members of the legacy media hit the Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the election in order to help Joe Biden?
Totally agree. If that's what you mean by rigs, 100% agree. If by rigs you mean, in the middle of the night in Fulton County, there are people who bring in U-Haul's full ballast and then shoving them through the machines, I need some evidence of that. But people will use rigs and they'll just mean all those things to all those people.
And then if you say, well, I don't agree with you the way you're talking about them, that's because you're on the other side. It's a way of creating artificial division rather than clarity. And that I find pretty much reprehensible. It's where we devolve from arguing about ideas and still we argue about hyperbole.
That's what it comes down to.