Robert and Cody Read Ben Shapiro's New Book

Robert and Cody Johnston sit down to read Ben Shapiro's latest non-fiction book, which seems to be based entirely on him not understanding how lions work. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:34Robert Evans?

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• 1:11Robert Evans?

  Oh my goodness, it's Behind the Behind Bastards podcasters, Robert Evans' show that you're listening to. This was not a good introduction.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  Sophie Lichterman, producer, show. Is that what we're doing? Guest.

• 1:25Robert Evans?

  You making fun of me, Sophie? You making fun of me? You laughing at me? Well, here to laugh at me more, Cody Johnston. Would never laugh at you. Thank you so much. Guest. Cody, you are the host of News, some more, a podcast about news, and also a YouTube show about news. How are you doing? I'm great.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  Are you?

• 1:50Robert Evans?

  Ah, no. No, everyone. No one's doing great. Come on. But you gotta be pleasant, right? I was at a friend's wedding the other week. He was like, "How you doing?" I mean, right now, fine. In general, bad. Open bar, so, good, yeah. Outside, maybe? I don't know. Yeah, I'm fine.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  We're all doing our best. Things are weird and happening and they're happening quickly and suddenly in many ways.

• 2:24Robert Evans?

  They are. They're happening here, you could say, the things that are happening.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  I know, could do that.

• 2:30Robert Evans?

  And one of the people who's happening here is a friend of ours, you and me, Cody, a friend of the pods, a friend of our mutual friend who we all miss right now, Katie Stoll.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Hi, Katie.

• 2:40Robert Evans?

  Ben Shapiro, our buddy, our good comrade and colleague.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  My bandmate, he's in my band.

• 2:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, you and Bennifer rocking out. Katie and you and I, and also Sophie, did a long series of podcast episodes. We went through the entirety of Ben Shapiro's unbelievably shoddy fiction novel. I mean, just some of the absolute worst prose I think either of us has ever encountered.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  Real bad.

• 3:04Robert Evans?

  It was bad enough that Ben has not written another fiction novel since, to the best of my knowledge.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  Here's the thing, I'm really upset. He announced he's had this new book out, but I remember like a year or two ago, a few years ago, he said he was working on a science fiction book.

• 3:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I want to read that fucker.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  I want that. Like, don't do that. I don't need your like weird like-

• 3:26Robert Evans?

  That's like a year of free content for me. Ben, get it out.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Give me the juice, man.

• 3:31Robert Evans?

  I know I'm late on my novel, Ben, but come on. You don't have a real job.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, just do it. Take your time off. Take time off.

• 3:38Robert Evans?

  Oh, my god. But we are doing a Ben Shapiro book episode because on September 2nd of this year, he published his latest nonfiction novel, Lions and Scavengers, The True Story of America and Her Critics. That's in-

• 3:53Speaker 04

  And Her Critics, yes, of course.

• 3:55Robert Evans?

  Parentheses at the very bottom in tiny text.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  This is a fascinating choice for him. It seems like, so you know, like, the abundance book? We don't need to talk about abundance or whatever, but that book, Firestorm on the Internet, seemed to be sort of written in a way that was intending for like, well, and then Kamala Harris will be the president, and then this book will come out. That didn't happen, and so it's a, the reaction was different. It's a whole other conversation sort of happening.

• 4:22Robert Evans?

  It's like sitting down with a- Friend to like, tell them that you're worried about like dental health while they're actively bleeding out from

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 4:30Robert Evans?

  arterial wound. And you're like, yes, I just really think you need to floss more. And oh, sorry, you spurred a little bit of that arterial blood right on my neck here, but yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Maybe rip the pages out of that book and use them to like, stop the bleeding or something. And this book seems very like 2019, 2018 coded. It's like, what are you doing? Like, doing this history stuff again? Like, what did the Trump administration do the first time with their like, projects about like, what real history is like, how slavery didn't happen or whatever?

• 4:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  This is a weird book, I guess, to come out now, in my opinion. But I haven't read it, so maybe it's actually perfect for this exact moment.

• 5:06Robert Evans?

  You know what it is? I'll tell you right now, we'll talk about this more. Ben Shapiro desperately wishes he were C.S. Lewis. And, you know, C.S. Lewis talked about politics, but in like, a broader kind of philosophical sense. And he was like, a good writer, you know? And Ben is not. And Ben is also obsessed with like, petty culture war grievances and shit.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Ben Shapiro?

• 5:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 5:31Robert Evans?

  This is him trying to like, really establish himself as a C.S. Lewis type thinker. And it's not good. That's my short. But, but we'll go through it, because I have actually quite a lot to say about most of the introduction to this book is part one. So, Cody, you and I may be back repeatedly talking more about this.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Fair enough.

• 5:51Robert Evans?

  So.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  So five hours on the intro.

• 5:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we haven't, we're not even getting through all of that. But I think you will also get the gist of his argument from this, because Ben being Ben, most of this book is him just kind of repeating himself. Right?

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 6:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It opens with an inscription. This is like, the dedication to the book. "To the lions," the L is capitalized, "the hunters, warriors, and weavers," each of those words is capitalized, "who build, defend, and maintain the greatest civilization in the history of mankind against the scavengers," the S is capitalized, "who would destroy that civilization from within," right? And that's essentially the thesis of the book, right? Is that you've got lions and scavengers. That's all of society.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's his whole thing. I can't wait to find out what he thinks is a lion, what he thinks is a scavenger.

• 6:39Robert Evans?

  And what's funny here is first off, I know this is petty, but I can't get over it, is that we're just, this whole book, the basic premise of this, and he's trying to be kind of artistic by framing it as lions and scavengers, you know? Like, he's trying to be kind of philosophical, but his entire underpinning of that attempt is based on a wild factual inaccuracy about lions.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 7:01Robert Evans?

  Like, out the gate, none of this is right, because lions and scavengers aren't separate things. And I'm gonna quote very quickly from an article on Kruger Park, which is a wildlife national park in South Africa. "Another lion fact not commonly appreciated is that lions are not just hunters, but scavengers as well, often chasing smaller predators like cheetah off their kills. In some instances, up to 50% of a lion's diet can come from scavenging rather than hunting live prey." Lions are scavengers, as much as they are hunters, sometimes more.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Sometimes more. I mean, you imagine he gets most of his information from The Lion King, right?

• 7:39Robert Evans?

  Right, yes. This is all of his knowledge about lions, is from what he remembers of The Lion King, and the fact that lions look impressive.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 7:47Robert Evans?

  But there is something deeply meaningful about, the whole root of his ideological argument here is that you've got lions, which are conservatives, right? Which are the people who build culture and the people who like, make everything good, right? And they're creators, you know, they do the hard work of forging civilization. And then there's scavengers who just wanna tear everything down, and they're just mooching and stealing and criti- and attacking from within this thing that they didn't make. And of course, the reality is that like, well, lions, not only do they scavenge, but most of their scavenging is them stealing kills from animals that did the actual hunting, like hyenas and cheetahs, right?

• 8:23Speaker 04

  So many takers, not makers.

• 8:25Robert Evans?

  And then taking credit for it, yeah. Interesting, interesting.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  He's just a bad writer.

• 8:31Robert Evans?

  He's a bad writer, he's a bad thinker.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  Also, like- He couldn't stretch his analogy past the ant.

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  No.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Because if you're gonna say lions, that's a specific animal. And then you're zooming out to say scavengers, say vultures. Like, pick a scavenger to like lions and vultures, whatever. But like, it's just you're being specific with the first one and then vague. Like, you're using a category for the second, and it's sloppy.

• 8:59Robert Evans?

  It's also evidence of this thing that you see a lot with Bin and with other conservatives, where it's like, well, you've never done anything in the world, right? Like, you don't know anything about survival in the wilderness. If you did, you'd know that hunting is a bad way to survive. Very few animals live just by hunting, because it's hard and it burns a lot of calories. Like, the person who taught me how to hunt is a great outdoors person, right? Extremely skilled. And they will admit, like, if they had to survive on their own, 90% of their calories would be foraging and trapping, because hunting is wildly inefficient. And if you can take a kill that someone else made, or find something dead, that just works a lot better.

• 9:44Robert Evans?

  It's what almost every animal prefers to do, right?

• 9:47Speaker 04

  How to survive.

• 9:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it just keeps you alive better. Anyway, the introduction chapter opens, and it's just titled "London, England." And this is how it starts.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Oh, cool.

• 9:58Robert Evans?

  Attention lies at the core of our being. It roils us, it churns our guts, it boils our brains. The tension lies between two opposing forces. Those forces beat within every man's breast. They fight for supremacy within every civilization. One must triumph and one must fall. The spirit of the lion, the spirit of the scavenger. Again, lions are scavengers.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  Lions are scavengers. The scavengers, they're specific animals you can choose.

• 10:22Robert Evans?

  It's fine.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  A lion being one of them.

• 10:23Robert Evans?

  It's actually very efficient, it's smart. Like...

• 10:27Speaker 04

  Also, my brain's boiling.

• 10:30Robert Evans?

  I say that as a hunter and a scavenger. I pick up roadkill and I hunt. I also raise and slaughter animals. All of these things are ways to get calories. Beyond that, beyond him getting lion facts wrong.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  Beyond like the premise of the analogy he wants to use.

• 10:46Robert Evans?

  Right, the fundamental premise of this is just based on a complete misunderstanding of wildlife. Beyond that, his attempt to apply a moral line to something fundamentally immoral, which is how different creatures take in their calories, shows a very conservative ignorance towards basic biological reality, which is what they're supposed to stand up for, you know? Scavenging for food is not in any way worse than hunting for it. And every great predator, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, paleontologists generally agree, were scavengers at least in equal measure to hunters, right? Because it's just not a great way to survive just hunting.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, you get what you can.

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. You get what you can.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Unless you're like a society.

• 11:23Robert Evans?

  Yes, right. And then you could just go to a grocery store.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like Ben does, pay someone to do your shopping for you, you know? Because your soft little hands, you're not gonna go skin an animal. You're not gonna do that, Ben Shapiro.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Hey, we don't know, you know, well.

• 11:37Robert Evans?

  The cowboy hat chafes your head when you try to wear it outside.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, he got a bunch of splinters when he held up that two by four outside.

• 11:43Robert Evans?

  That two by four, you know, he's still tired from that. He's still getting the splinters out of his hands from that one day he went to Home Depot to buy a single piece of wood.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Gotta go scavenge for more calories to get back to zero.

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, after this, we get a dramatic opening about how Ben is writing this introduction in London, which, quote, "has been conquered by the scavengers." "Who is he defining as scavengers?" you ask Cody theoretically.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  I don't ask that because I know the answer to that, but you can go ahead.

• 12:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It was pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protesters who were marching through the city. Ben writes, quote, "hundreds of thousands strong, marching, their banners unfurled, the banners of terrorist groups and communists and of transgender activists, gathered together to revolt against the civilization that has given them their rights and their prosperity and their power." And, you know, he's writing about protests against the Israeli government's actions in Gaza, which he defines as protests supporting Hamas and the October 7th attacks. And obviously, you can find people who had Hamas flags. There were people cheering on the October 7th attacks. That's a thing that happened. But that's not the primary reason there are protests. The primary reason there are protests and what most people is the genocide is all the deaths.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  It's what the UN just admitted it was.

• 12:53Robert Evans?

  It's what the UN just admitted.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  Like, it's just, that is so kind. Of course, he's doing that. But also, like, actually, Ben, they're not trying to rail against or like destroy the society that like built everything. They're trying to participate in that society.

• 13:07Robert Evans?

  They're participating in it by speaking and by trying to speak to power and make their voices heard. Also, the civilization didn't give them their rights. They had to take their rights, or their predecessors did, via protest and violence sometimes. Because societies don't just give people rights because they're nice. Those rights are fought for.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, like a lion, unlike these people who are fighting for it like scavengers.

• 13:36Robert Evans?

  Right. Now, obviously, in standard Shapiro fashion, he ignores the critiques these marchers have of the mass slaughter of civilians by a modern first world military in favor of raging at people who march around with flags and posts on social media. He cites one commentator from Twitter who wrote after October 7th, "What did y'all think decolonization meant?" in response to those attacks by Hamas. Quote, "Her comment received nearly 100,000 likes." Wow. "And it spoke to the very core of the scavengers. All inhumanity against the lions is justified." And this is just classic conservatism, not just Ben Shapiro, of like, "This person made a dumb post. That's obviously the same as tens of thousands of people getting murdered from airstrikes and starved to death. These are equivalent.

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  100,000 likes to a bad post? Equal to the murder of thousands of equal to fucking babies being incinerated. All equivalent." Yes.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Think of the likes. I'm actually, I need to hold a moment of silence for the likes.

• 14:33Robert Evans?

  For the likes, yeah, really. That's, thank you, Cody. We sometimes forget the real victims here.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  I think we do. I think we do. I also, I am dreading how many fucking times he's going to use the words lions and scavengers.

• 14:47Robert Evans?

  It's so much. It's such bad writing.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Already, I'm just like, God, stop saying it.

• 14:51Robert Evans?

  C.S. Lewis would fucking, like, pile drive him in frustration at how badly this is written.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  At least name the lion.

• 14:59Robert Evans?

  Like, and I'm not particularly a C.S. Lewis stan, but the man knew how to put together a sentence, right? Like, and he understood how to, like, not make my head hurt while reading a book repeatedly.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Or, in Ben's words, "Your boiling brain."

• 15:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. Thank you.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Boiling your brain in London.

• 15:13Robert Evans?

  But we do see here kind of the ultimate reason for the framing of this book. Israelis are lions. Palestinians and people angry at their murder are scavengers. There's a particular irony in his horror at this scavenger gathering and, quote, "The beating heart of what was once the center of Western civilization." Because London was only the center of Western civilization due to a vast, centuries-long program of what can only be described as scavenging, theft on a grand scale against an impossibly vast chunk of the globe. They stole from the rest of the world. That's what imperialism is. They stole from India. They stole from everywhere. They could.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  They built it to themselves from somebody else.

• 15:57Robert Evans?

  They starved 30 million people in Bengal. They wiped out entire ethnic groups, you know, to get spices. Like, it's, it...

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Okay, you're making it really hard for me to say this is building.

• 16:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  But I'm gonna try. Okay.

• 16:11Robert Evans?

  Yes, the Abra Tzar massacre. Clear example of building.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  They're built, they build, okay, impossible. No, you made a good point. I mean, it's all, like, this whole framing just goes back to that fucking tweet from, like,

• 16:24Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  25 or 15 years ago. Israelis like to build, Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.

• 16:30Robert Evans?

  Precisely.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  It's just that. Which he apologized for, by the way, and said it was stupid. He said it was a stupid tweet.

• 16:37Robert Evans?

  We'll talk about another thing that he apologized for in a little bit here, Cody. But yes, thank you for bringing that one up.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  And then you write a whole book about it?

• 16:43Robert Evans?

  So Ben expresses disbelief at the existence of groups like Queers for Palestine, which he says was formed, quote, "in solidarity with people who would throw queers off buildings at the first available opportunity if given half a chance." Meanwhile, his colleague Matt Walsh, in the immediate wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, posted this. "This was left-wing LGBT terrorism. There was never much doubt, nether is none at all. All left-wing terror networks must be crushed. All of the terrorists and their helpers and funders must be arrested, prosecuted, and put to death." Hmm. Yeah, these Palestinians want to kill queer people, unlike Ben Shapiro and his allies at the Daily Wire, who want-

• 17:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, Matt Hamas Walsh.

• 17:21Robert Evans?

  Who LGBT terrorists to death, which I'm sure doesn't include everyone who's LGBT. Just, you know, whoever Matt Walsh thinks is a terrorist.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  They make it very clear. I mean, now it's associating with anybody.

• 17:34Robert Evans?

  Right, right. And people who associate with them, of course, and who fund them, you know, maybe-

• 17:38Speaker 04

  In ways that we still don't know, we still, but surely they do.

• 17:42Robert Evans?

  It's not important to have that all ironed out right now.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  There are other tweets from Matt Walsh. Obviously, that's horrific. What a horrible, fucking terrible person.

• 17:50Robert Evans?

  He's a bad guy.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  He specifically has also been basically calling for unity amongst all the factions on the right in order to carry out what he's talking about, crushing the left and like, rounding up people and all the stuff he's talking about, and public executions, I believe he's talking about as well.

• 18:06Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. And Charlie Kirk had talked about public executions, too, like his belief that that's something we need to bring back.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Age 12, I think, is the appropriate age for watching that, according to them. So he's calling for uniting all the right-wing factions in order to do this, so, which, I guess a good phrase instead would be to unite the right. So-

• 18:25Robert Evans?

  Sure, yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Maybe he's actually calling to unite with people who actually would want to do the same thing to Ben. Like, if you're calling to unite the right in order to do this, then you're calling to unite very, very far-right, sorry to say, like neo-Nazis, who would want to kill-

• 18:45Speaker 04

  The Jewish people who are in the coalition, much like Ben is saying that Hamas wants to do to gay people. Just seems like I don't think they understand what they're saying, or they recognize these inconsistencies or consistencies to them, who knows?

• 18:59Robert Evans?

  And they don't care.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  Oh, of course not.

• 19:01Robert Evans?

  None of that, it doesn't matter, like, to them, what matters is crushing their enemies, right? Like, the fact that they aren't logically consistent is about power.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 19:09Robert Evans?

  It always has been, you know? And there's, there is a lot that's disingenuous about this framing, though, and it's worth getting into that. One thing is that, as of May 2025, per UNICEF Regional Director Edward Bikebetter, more than 50,000 children have been killed or injured by Israel in the Gaza Strip. These kids had no power, or frankly, desire, to throw anyone off of buildings, right? Like-

• 19:30Speaker 04

  But they might one day.

• 19:32Robert Evans?

  You know, you can find people who are delusional in any group, but I know a lot of queers who are angry about what's being done in Palestine. They're not laboring under a misapprehension that Hamas is woke. They're angry that kids and women and children have nothing to do with Hamas or any other armed group are being murdered. That's what they're angry about, because it's bad.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's very obvious that that's the situation, but again, they don't care.

• 19:57Robert Evans?

  If there's a mass shooting at a church that believes things I don't like, I'm not, not gonna be angry about the mass shooting because the pastor of the church said something shitty? And like, like, that doesn't make it okay that kids got shot. Do you, do you understand that? Like-

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, those kids were massacred, like, it's horrific.

• 20:16Robert Evans?

  The queers for Palestinian people aren't marching in the street because they, they aspire to make their civilization identical to how the Gaza Strip is run. They're marching because they're angry that civilians are being killed, right? And they understand, rightfully, that the average person in the Gaza Strip has absolutely no control over what fucking Hamas does.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  You can call those things horrific crimes against humanity and not have to be like, "But also, I don't wanna do Hamas stuff here because they would, they have, like-"

• 20:47Robert Evans?

  It's like, are you bummed out when you read about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Yes, I can be bummed out about that. I fucking talked to a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. She was like, seven when it happened. She's not responsible for the empire. Like, me being bummed about us nuking Japan doesn't mean I'm pretending the empire of Japan was a good society. It wasn't, like- It's just bad to kill kids.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  Their crime was being born in a certain place at a certain time. And that's actually not a crime.

• 21:16Robert Evans?

  Exactly. It certainly shouldn't be treated like one, right? Again, are there assholes in any mass movement who try to hijack the momentum of a larger number of people to push their own fucked up bullshit, including like uncritical worship of violence used by a group? Sure. And Ben Shapiro knows full well what it's like to uncritically endorse violence against civilians. In 2002, he wrote an article stating that he wasn't the least bit concerned about civilian casualties in Afghanistan or the West Bank. And the insinuation was that this extended generally to the war on terror. He expressed a belief that the life of a single American soldier mattered more than the life of any number of Afghan civilians. And while he apologized for this article being badly written later, the next year, he wrote an article for Town Hall in which he argued in favor of allowing Israel to,

• 22:01Robert Evans?

  quote, "transfer Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Israel proper." That's just an ethnic cleansing.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Like, "Transfer is not a dirty word," I think is the title of that piece. That's ethnic cleansing.

• 22:15Robert Evans?

  Fucking Israeli Arab, they're like citizens, you realize that, right? Like, it doesn't matter because they're not Jewish, I guess.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  I feel like he only really apologized for, like, like you're saying, it being poorly written, which Ben apologized for everything you've ever written.

• 22:26Robert Evans?

  Everything he does.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  But not the actual argument, I don't think. I don't think he's actually, he ever actually said like, "And I don't think we should be doing this." Or he did and then changed his mind back.

• 22:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, I think both of those things have happened. Now, during this rant, Ben first starts referring to, and again, going, sorry, because we've, we've gone off on a tangent. This rant is about the protests last year in London against the, the genocide in Gaza. During this rant, Ben first starts referring to the Lions collectively as "The Pride" with a capital P, in order to differentiate from the so-called "Scavengers" as a group. He accuses scavengers of being willing to do, quote, "anything to tear down The Pride." This is not mere antisemitism. Antisemitism is an age-old hatred rooted in a conspiracy theory. It takes many forms and has countless victims. This is something different. It is a united, coalitional hatred of the West.

• 23:20Robert Evans?

  Now, this is actually where I come closest to agreeing with Shapiro in a certain sense, because the primary motivating factor of these protests is not antisemitism. There, Ben and I agree. One factor at play within many people protesting against Israel's actions here is a coalitional hatred of what Ben defines as the West. But while he tries to describe this as an unreasoning hatred of Western civilization, it's very clearly a hatred of what Western governments do to specific groups of people.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 23:50Robert Evans?

  Right? Like, the decades of support for Israel's continuing actions that have been genocidal and quasi-genocidal for quite some time.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  He definitely does this, I mean, with many different topics and issues, but he's conflating, I mean, basic criticism of actions. Like, it's not, it's not saying like, these values that you pretend to have are evil. It's not about like, Western values or anything like that. It's about specific actions being taken that should be able to be criticized without you saying like, "So, you hate everything we've ever done and everything we believe in? Well, if it's this, then yeah, I guess." That's not what is actually being said or claimed.

• 24:33Robert Evans?

  Right. And we will continue and get to Ben talking about J.R.R. Tolkien, which I am excited to chat with you about, Cody. But first, let's have some ads.

• 24:44Speaker 00

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• 25:13Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 25:37Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetolide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 26:12Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 26:21Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, after introducing this protest and starting his scavengers and the pride, you know, discourse, Ben pivots to discussing the Lord of the Rings. And it becomes clear here that that opening sort of vignette about hundreds of thousands strong, marching, their banners unfurled. This was him pulling from Tolkien, describing- It's hordes, barbarians at the gates. The armies of war marching on ministeria. Right? Yes. Yeah. He's not like sly. It's obvious what he's doing. And he gets very direct here. He literally calls the, quote, "hordes of Mordor, stand-ins for the Nazis and their allies." Now, Tolkien himself would have rejected Ben claiming this wholeheartedly.

• 27:03Robert Evans?

  He always rejected. He hated it when people, like, accused the Lord of the Rings of being rooted in real history and his World War I experiences. And I do tend to be in the camp of like, well, obviously, they were kind of, both World War I and World War II, influenced what you were writing about. Like, I'm sorry, J.R.R. Your experiences have influenced your art in many ways. Yeah. Now, that said, Lord of the Rings, in case you didn't know, was written mostly between 1937 and 1949 trilogy. That was like the bulk of the writing. It wasn't published until the 50s, but that's when he was like doing most of his writing and editing. And I would agree with Ben that like, there's clearly some World War II in The Lord of the Rings.

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  But it's also not accurate to say the hordes of Mordor are just stand ins for the Nazis and their allies. That's not really true. And I think it's worth discussing J R R Tolkien's personal politics here. Because like most peoples, they are complex and not entirely consistent and sometimes incoherent. For an example, Tolkien, on a number of occasions, described himself as an anarchist. And described himself as an anarchist in ways that are like relatively like recognizable to modern day anarchists. He talked about his hatred of power. He expressed a disgust for industrialism that is very much in line with how some anarcho-primitivists talk today. Right? Not entirely so, but his fundamental dissection of like why he was an anarchist is very much like relevant to modern day anarchists.

• 28:29Robert Evans?

  He thought people were not fit to hold power over people. Right? This is an important belief. The ring of power. Right? Never heard of it. That is effectively an object in which all of like political power, all power of the state is Yeah, craving it. Ensorcelled into, right? Like, that's not, it's not super subtle. Right? Yeah. There's certainly a reading of The Lord of the Rings that's very much anarchist. And at the same time, Tolkien was, for example, not an uncritical, but a supporter of the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War. Largely because he was horrified at the killings and what he saw as the unjustified murders of nuns and priests and whatnot. By, in some cases, anarchists. Right?

• 29:10Robert Evans?

  And so, again, this is not, like most people, J R R Tolkien's political beliefs were not entirely coherent or consistent. Ebb and flow is a little bit Yes. Contextual. However, what I can say is that J R R Tolkien was not at all in alignment with Ben Shapiro's politics and would have been disgusted by them. Tolkien was a firm anti-Nazi. He was also very anti-Stalin. But he was regularly critical of conservative icon Winston Churchill, who he described as looking like the biggest ruffian in photographs from the Tehran conference. Right? So he said basically, standing next to fucking Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill looks like a scumbag.

• 29:48Robert Evans?

  Like, which is not something Ben Shapiro would ever say. I found a summary of a letter that Tolkien sent his son Christopher in December of 1943 that gives you an idea of how little Tolkien's personal politics graph on the Ben's ideological schema. Tolkien lamented that the globe was getting smaller, duller, and flatter, foreseeing American sanitation, moral pep, feminism, and mass production introduced everywhere, which would at least cut down travel. Colonel Knox said that one-eighth of the world spoke English, which Tolkien called a damn shame. He called for the Curse of Babel to strike all tongues and considered refusing to speak anything but Old Mercean. Seriously, Tolkien found Amaro cosmopolitanism terrifying. He was unsure if victory would be much better for the world as a whole.

• 30:30Robert Evans?

  This was the sentiment of a lot of folk, but it indicated no lack of patriotism. Tolkien loved England, but not Great Britain, and certainly not the British Commonwealth. But were he younger, Tolkien figured he would be grousing in the military, willing to go to the bitter end and hoping that things might turn out better for England. Again, you know, you can find Tolkien had some issues with like feminism, like or what he saw as feminism, but he also, he hated like American capitalism. He was disgusted by like advertisements. He was disgusted by the culture of consumption and he was disgusted by the flattening of culture, by the idea that everyone would need to speak, you know, English, by the idea that American culture would flatten the world, right?

• 31:13Robert Evans?

  He found this personally horrifying and disgusting, which is like the opposite of Ben's politics. And he was not pro the British Empire. He was in fact deeply critical of the British Empire for the reasons established in the letter above. He hated the flattening of cultures around the globe under burgeoning capitalism and was disgusted by the domination of peoples around the world by foreign powers. The beliefs he most consistently expressed throughout his adult life were a sort of anti-capitalist, anti-industrial sentiment based around a hatred of pollution and the destruction of the natural world. But he was clear in his letters to his son and others that he saw America and Americanism as the central culprits in this.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  I mean, that's what Mordor was basically modeled after, right? Like, and like the-

• 31:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, there's Germany in there, too. Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, but like the orcs like sprouting up from the ground and like destroying the planet and all that stuff that we apparently love now.

• 32:05Robert Evans?

  Yes, like, like, there's some Germany in Mordor, but there's more than a little of the United States there, too. Yeah. And quite frankly, more than a little Great Britain, you know? He was not, because he was looking at the industrialization that had happened in his own country, too. This is something that horrified him, right? If Tolkien were somehow to have survived to the present day and gotten involved in like a film version of The Lord of the Rings and had any choice in casting a voice actor for Sauron, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd wind up sounding like a Californian, right? That's a little bit, I'd be a little bit... No, a little bit. But like, he expresses feelings in line with that, right? Like, yeah, I can tell you one thing that conservatives are on about in this country that he would have hated is the idea that like, everyone needs to speak English.

• 32:50Robert Evans?

  So what the fuck are you talking about? Like, yes. Anyway, after quoting a passage from Return of the King describing the armies of Mordor marching on Minas Tirith, Ben Shapiro writes, "So it goes today in London. The lions are gone, and without the spirit of the lion, our civilization collapses. What is the spirit of the lion? The spirit of success, of responsibility, of duty." Now, I should note here, Cody, lions sleep up to 18 hours a day. They have intensely matrilineal family group. The women run and like, are in charge, as a general rule, in lion society. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, they steal and scavenge food regularly from kills made by better but physically weaker predators, like hyenas.

• 33:35Robert Evans?

  I know it's probably silly for me to keep returning to the bill doesn't know a goddamn thing about lions well, but paragraphs like this drive me fucking crazy, Cody. The lion is a hunter, creative, audacious, innovative. He bends the world to his will. He forges new paths and crafts new solutions. When faced with a problem, the lion does not complain about the unfairness of life. He seeks an answer. The lion is bold and persistent. Failure does not unnerve him, it teaches him. The lion knows that boldness of purpose and willingness to undergo risk are the driving forces of any successful civilization. He believes in the words of Proverbs, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."

• 34:10Speaker 04

  He's really stretching this really, really, really far.

• 34:13Robert Evans?

  Let's avoid the biological critiques here.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  If we're just talking about conservatives, the opposite of what you do is find new solutions

• 34:22Speaker 04

  I know.

• 34:22Robert Evans?

  to problems or forge new paths. You're violently offended by the idea of forging new paths and new solutions. Novelty disgusts you, Ben Shapiro. You're a arch-conservative.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Conservative. What's the, there's one bit also about like, they don't whine. I know that's not what the phrase is.

• 34:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, my God, yes. Yeah, no, he's saying that they don't complain. The lion does not complain about the unfairness of life. That's literally your job, Ben.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Buddy, that's every conservative's job.

• 34:47Robert Evans?

  That is the only way you've ever made money.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  Job. He's constantly talking about how everything is unfair to him specifically.

• 34:54Robert Evans?

  Well, it's just, you're got rich complaining, Ben. That's what you do for a living.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Business model.

• 35:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  Complain and then sell leftist tears mugs.

• 35:04Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  What are you talking about, lion? It's absurd.

• 35:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  I think there's also Ezra Klein did an interview with Ben.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  Oh, eat crazy, yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  Not, you know, whatever. But like Ben's like talking about like lions and he's like, yeah. And then, you know, they build the social fabric and all this kind of stuff. Trump's entire project is to tear down the social fabric. That's not the lion that you're talking about. Literally in 2019, Ben was on like Bill Maher or something. And he's like, yeah, I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 because I didn't want to break the social fabric, but he did. So now I'm going to vote for him because he's already broken the social fabric. Like a scavenger, maybe?

• 35:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right?

• 35:50Speaker 04

  It's just the whole thing is just like not, it's just a mess.

• 35:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a mess and it's like, ultimately, Ben, I know you believe in things. To be entirely fair, I can think of one time in his life where Ben took a principled moral stand when he got really angry at.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  When he left Breitbart.

• 36:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  For what, Lou, was it Lewandowski who?

• 36:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  His colleague, yeah.

• 36:12Robert Evans?

  Was physically aggressive towards like a female employee.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, he left. It was, uh, I, I've mentioned that exact thing before.

• 36:19Robert Evans?

  So he does, unlike a lot of these guys, Ben does believe in some things, but his beliefs are very fluid, right? And his morality is very fluid, you know?

• 36:29Speaker 04

  I mean, so it's so inconsistent. He became a political pundit when he was 17. Like, he's gotta, he's gotta do that. He wasn't ready for that and he decided to do it and he's just constantly inconsistent. Everything he purports to like, believe in socially in the conservative sphere is not something like he lives. He's like a theater guy with a doctor wife. He stays home and like, does podcasting and takes care of the kids. Like, that's not what he purports that people should be doing.

• 36:56Robert Evans?

  No. Now, Ben goes on to describe the lion as, quote, "A warrior who understands the spirit of the scavenger is always abroad and that only strength can defend against it." Then he, and again, the lions are the scavengers that like hyenas need to defend.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Also like warriors, are you like, doing like, now they're like, people doing like, whatever.

• 37:18Robert Evans?

  And lions aren't warriors. They don't have wars. They fight because they're animals.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  Exactly. Like, why are you saying lions are warriors? What are you talking about?

• 37:25Robert Evans?

  It's just not, anyway, whatever. Then he brings up another much better writer, C.S. Lewis, claiming the lion lives by these words, and he's quoting C.S. Lewis, right? That he's, Ben says, describes how the lion lives. "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions." Now, that's a very good point from C.S. Lewis. I don't think Ben understands what this sentence means.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  It's a good sentence.

• 37:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because, I mean, his whole being disgusted and horrified at Trump and then voting for him and supporting him because he won and pivoting like that's, that's him yielding to danger, a danger to his career, a danger to maybe his personal health.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  I mean, that's what the entire GOP did. We all saw it live in 2015, 2016. It happened. We saw Ted Cruz go out there and say, "Vote your conscience." And then like four weeks later, he's sweaty on the phone being like, "Vote for Trump, please."

• 38:25Robert Evans?

  Right, exactly. And that's, I agree with this C.S. Lewis quote. It's a very well-written and accurate point to make, and Ben does not understand it at all because he is incapable of living that way. Ben's entire career has been built on taking money from the mega-rich to push a very specific kind of propaganda. He wouldn't know courage if it bit him in the ass, and he has never had to stand up for what's right in a way that meant taking on any meaningful personal risk. Lewis's quotation here is excoriating men like Ben Shapiro, who lack any meaningful virtue because they've never had to stand up to any kind of danger. I would like to introduce Ben to another quote, one that might be more relevant to his own stated political aims and the aims of the party he supports. This is from

• 39:05Robert Evans?

  a 1946 letter C.S. Lewis sent to a professor friend of his, collected in "Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories." Quote, "Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong, he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor, who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of heaven, will torment us indefinitely, because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations."

• 39:41Speaker 04

  There it is. I mean, that's like, it's just like, now they're supporting a robber baron who is leading-

• 39:49Robert Evans?

  Who is backed by theocrats.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Theocrat, is backed theocratic movement. Like, he's just talking about, he's just doing both. It's so-

• 39:56Robert Evans?

  C.S. Lewis failed to consider, you know, porcino lost dos, right?

• 40:00Speaker 04

  What if you get a robber baron to lead your theocratic movement? That's wild, man.

• 40:05Robert Evans?

  There we go. Speaking of robber barons, Cody.

• 40:10Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of this podcast.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, get them. Wow.

• 40:14Robert Evans?

  There we go.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Got them. So good.

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah.

• 40:18Speaker 01

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• 40:48Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients, or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 41:47Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 41:56Robert Evans?

  And we're back.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  Snaps for Robert for the ad transition.

• 42:00Robert Evans?

  Thank you, Sophie. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you. So.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Cody clapped.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  I guess I just cared more.

• 42:08Robert Evans?

  I crave praise. I simply crave it, you know? It's my heroine. Also heroine. No, I don't do heroin.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Robert.

• 42:15Robert Evans?

  Anymore. No. I've never done heroin.

• 42:17Speaker 04

  I mean, according to RFK Junior, it helps you focus in school.

• 42:20Robert Evans?

  It does. It makes it easy to focus.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Or at least the worm in his brain.

• 42:23Robert Evans?

  Focus on being on heroin.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Didn't know I was on heroin until I did it. Now it's all I can think about.

• 42:30Robert Evans?

  To be fair, the only heroin I've ever taken, I licked off a guy's finger at a cafe in rural India.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  That's... ...fair.

• 42:38Robert Evans?

  It was a nice afternoon. So, we're talking about C.S. Lewis, who Ben Shapiro just brought up.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Not licking heroin off of fingers, yeah.

• 42:46Robert Evans?

  No, we're not. Although, I'd do it again.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Oh, buddy.

• 42:49Robert Evans?

  Well, maybe not in this fentanyl era. Anyway. It's worth noting that in 1951, when Winston Churchill and his Conservative Party retook the UK government, the Prime Minister's Office wrote Lewis a letter offering to gift him an honorary title, Commander of the British Empire, and C.S. Lewis declined. Not because he wasn't conservative, he was, that's the most accurate box to put him into, but because he was worried that if he accepted, it would turn him into a political figure, which would diminish him as a writer and a thinker. Because, well, again, he would talk philosophically about things that kind of were adjacent to politics. He was kind of disgusted at the idea of being like what Ben Shapiro is, you know? Like of being a political pundit.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Propaganda.

• 43:32Robert Evans?

  He thought that was gross, because it is.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  You know, to put those sort of thoughts in your work and stuff.

• 43:38Robert Evans?

  As Orwell would say, "All art is propaganda," right? But I don't think Lewis believed that, you know?

• 43:43Speaker 04

  But there's a huge difference between doing your art and expressing yourself in that way, and being like, "Well, I'm gonna start an organization that does propaganda for the regime."

• 43:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that gets literally paid by oil billionaires to write propaganda supporting oil billionaires, yes.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 43:56Robert Evans?

  And again, Lewis would have obviously, well, not, maybe not obviously if you don't know him, but Lewis would have fallen on the more conservative axis of politics, certainly more conservative than progressive. But one of his most consistent stances was a sort of disgust at political hacks and politicians. Now, where Lewis would align with Ben Shapiro is he had a strong belief in natural law and in a sort of objective moral reality, which he saw as necessary to accept in order to be able to criticize groups like the Nazis. In other words, Lewis wrote that if there was no right, in like a greater cosmic sense, by what standards could we judge the Nazis as being wrong? And I don't agree with Lewis in this, I'm just describing his beliefs here. At the same time, though, like his friend Tolkien, he expressed horror- At the two occupations that he worried were doom mankind, the magician who quote,

• 44:41Robert Evans?

  "sought power over nature," and the astrologer who quote, "proclaimed nature's power over man." And I want to quote from a write-up on cslewis.com here. "The former thought led many to think man can do everything. The latter strongly suggested he can do nothing. Lewis saw modern scientists as the sons of the magician who believe every ill in the world can find a cure in science. From the astrologer came the philosophical materialist who believed man is nothing but a slave to nature, his animal instincts." And one thing we see here is that despite having a belief and absolute morality, Lewis tended to reject simple dichotomies like the one Ben presents us with in his very bad book. He presented readers with two archetypes in opposition, either of which would doom

• 45:23Robert Evans?

  mankind if worshipped or followed beyond reason. Lewis isn't saying "science is bad," and he's not saying that like, "belief in the natural world is bad," or like, kind of yielding to nature's power is bad, but making either of those, like, the kind of center of your being is bad, right?

• 45:41Speaker 04

  Right, because he's also not saying there are two types of people.

• 45:44Robert Evans?

  No, no, he's not.

• 45:46Speaker 04

  One or the other.

• 45:47Robert Evans?

  Going too far in either of these directions is bad, yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:51Robert Evans?

  And this is something that Ben would never do. Ben glories in presenting a false and limited choice to the reader, and then describing one of those choices as inherently good and the other as inherently bad. Lewis was a believer in natural hierarchies and a critique of democracy, which he felt was the best system overall, but also was not a good system. And he believed that, among other things, one of the problems democracy had is that it must ultimately destroy education, right? That like, because of the way democracy functions, it's going to like, fuck up the educational system effectively.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  And then sort of, like, overtaking facts and reality and sort of...

• 46:29Robert Evans?

  Like we see, you know?

• 46:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:31Robert Evans?

  He's not entirely wrong about, obviously, other democracies do better, so I don't agree with him that this is inherent, but it can happen, right?

• 46:37Speaker 04

  A lot of bad things can happen in a democracy.

• 46:39Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. And Lewis was also, he was deeply critical about technological process and the worship of machines in a way that makes me pretty certain he'd have rejected AI violently.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:50Robert Evans?

  Both he and Tolkien would have been on the bomb data center side if they would be radicals about that. Like, if you could bring both of those guys forward and explain to them what Sam Altman is trying to do, they would try to buy a gun. Like, they would be extremists.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Uh, using, I mean, even like using the AI for like fake things like dead people have said and like the ghost AI stuff they're doing, all, all of it.

• 47:14Robert Evans?

  If you explained to him like how much water and pollution are created by data centers, he would like fucking Tolkien especially would lose his mind. Like, he never imagined anything that awful. Like, it's just...

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Not even like taking into, like...

• 47:29Robert Evans?

  What the thing is doing itself, right?

• 47:30Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah. What it can create, or create in quotes, I guess, but...

• 47:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, Lewis did believe that you could reform bad political systems through Christian education. Like, that was his solution to the problems democracy causes for education, but he was also against mandating Christian principles in public education, right? So what we see in Lewis is a mix of some values and stances that could very easily be mapped to things that Ben himself believes, there are some, but mixed in with this is a fundamental distrust of giving humans power, one that makes me equally certain he'd have disliked the argument that Ben is making here about lions and scavengers. In his book Present Concerns, Lewis wrote, "I don't deserve a share in governing a hen roost, much less a nation, nor do most people who believe advertisements and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse.

• 48:20Robert Evans?

  Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows."

• 48:25Speaker 04

  He would hate so much about everything.

• 48:27Robert Evans?

  He would be so unhappy.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Like, like the internet memes, meme culture, like, like, oh, God, he would hate it so much.

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  And again, not at all woke, just absolutely not a fascist.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  No, yeah, just disgusted with, like...

• 48:39Robert Evans?

  And not a theocrat, as Christian as he was, not a theocrat.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah. Every single AI post that the Department of Homeland Security puts up, like, every single thing they're doing.

• 48:48Robert Evans?

  He'd be losing his fucking mind.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  He despises this.

• 48:51Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Grotesque. Gosh.

• 48:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, after quoting Lewis, Ben introduces another wrinkle to his lion scavenger dichotomy. The pride of lions is split up between three sub-archetypes. The weaver, who, quote, weaves together the disparate strands of family and society, and often goes unnoticed, but, quote, are the true heroes of our civilization. And the hunters, the warriors, and the weavers form a pride together. It is kind of unclear to me what separates the hunters from the warriors.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  I was gonna ask, like, does he describe the hunters and the warriors?

• 49:23Robert Evans?

  I think the weavers are like women. That's the place women have in the pride. Is there the weavers? You know?

• 49:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, the men get two groups to choose from.

• 49:30Robert Evans?

  That's right. They get to hunt or war.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Or be a warrior.

• 49:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  All right.

• 49:35Robert Evans?

  I, anyway, and again, also Ben uses warrior and hunter more or less as synonyms in this book. It's just, he's bad writer. After establishing this, the subsets of the pride, the categories inside the pride, Ben acknowledges that lions have to create a system of rules, which they absolutely don't, because they each have the spirit of the scavenger in them. And so they have to always be on guard against being overtaken by that. And again, half of their calories they get from scavenging.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Wait a second.

• 50:04Robert Evans?

  They're not on guard against it. It's how they survive.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  The pride has a spirit of scavengers?

• 50:09Robert Evans?

  Every lion has the spirit of a scavenger in them.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  Ben, what are you talking about?

• 50:14Robert Evans?

  What he's trying to say is that, like, he's describing the scavengers liberals and leftists as like people who are lazy and just want to steal from other people and also tear down what other people have built. And Ben is trying to say that, like, there's that voice in all of us that we have to be on guard against, right? Like, that's, that's what he's trying to say, right?

• 50:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. Because also, in that same interview about this book, they bring up Vance and Ben basically admits that, like, yeah, the current version of Vance is a bit of a scavenger. He's doing all these things. He, like, he's straight up says it.

• 50:46Robert Evans?

  Describe Vance.

• 50:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, 100%. Like, he's like, yeah, the, uh, the hillbilly elegy era, he was like a lion, which, like, maybe he was a scavenger the whole time, Ben, who, you know?

• 50:55Robert Evans?

  How is that being a lion? He's literally just, okay.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  I know. We don't need to talk hillbilly elegy. But like, it's just, it's absurd. But it was interesting that he is willing to recognize that there are scavengers amidst, I don't even know if he thinks Trump's a lion or not, but that whole group of people.

• 51:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Next, after this, we get one of the least coherent sections of the book thus far. A pride of lions can accomplish nearly anything unless the pride falls to the pack, and pack is capitalized too.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:26Robert Evans?

  To the spirit of the scavenger. The spirit of the scavenger is the spirit of envy.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  He's not, he's just putting word, there's just, there's, it's just ridiculous. This means nothing.

• 51:39Robert Evans?

  It means nothing. It's so fundamentally irrational because the foundation of this, the whole life, you're just wrong entirely about, like, none of this makes sense. It's like if I were to write a book about, like, fucking, I don't even know how to, like, make a bad enough analogy.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  No.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  It's too bad and messy. You can't, because also, when you say the word pack and you capitalize, I'm thinking of wolves, which wouldn't you be able to use for your other, like, they're so interchangeable.

• 52:09Robert Evans?

  It's like if I were to write a book called The Horse and the Ant and start it with, like, obviously, the horse soars high above all of us on its mighty wings.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 52:17Robert Evans?

  Like.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, the ant looming over the horse.

• 52:21Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 52:23Robert Evans?

  So I debated whether or not to discuss the fact that Ben himself is clearly motivated by a deep spirit of envy, right? His initial career goal, as you and I have talked about on several podcasts, Cody, was to write for Hollywood. He wanted to be a screenwriter. He wanted to write TV and movies. And he failed in this goal because he's not good at it, right? And The Daily Wire's movie, like, is also a massive waste of money. Horrible idea, because none of them are good writers.

• 52:50Speaker 04

  Hey, you wait until they do the anti-woke Snow White, okay? That's gonna be really, really good.

• 52:55Robert Evans?

  That's gonna really blow up. Audiences are craving. The children cry out, demanding anti-woke Snow fucking White.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  You can hear them now. They're just, "Anti-woke Snow."

• 53:06Robert Evans?

  Was Snow White mean like the 60s? It's not woke. I don't know. Anyway.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  It's because they made a new one and the

• 53:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 04

  wasn't white enough.

• 53:15Robert Evans?

  I haven't been keeping up with the fucking Disney reboots. Yes. But I think it's important to hear the spirit of envy is the primary. That's the center of Ben Shapiro's soul. Right? It is quite obvious, reading his angry rants against Hollywood. That's a huge amount of his writing and it's why he's tried to make The Daily Wire. They've wasted millions trying to create their own Hollywood because his hatred of the left, its origin in a lot of ways, I'm not going to say this is the only origin point, but a major source for his hatred of the left is because he sees Hollywood as a fundamentally leftist institution that refused to give him the respect he deserves, that didn't recognize his brilliance. Right? That is Ben Shapiro's origin story as a villain is that he couldn't hack it

• 53:59Robert Evans?

  as a fucking professional screenwriter.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Yes, about 85%.

• 54:03Robert Evans?

  Right? Yeah, exactly.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  Growing up fundamentalist, religious, conservative, all that kind of stuff. Did not help, but that resentment fueled by envy is 100%. Yeah.

• 54:14Robert Evans?

  And he can only see this as an example of Hollywood hating conservatives like him. Right? It has to be bigotry. That's because that's the only way he could not succeed. Right? And, you know, he has to ignore a lot in order to believe this. If you were to look at reality, he would see that plenty of conservatives have been very successful in Hollywood. Screenwriters like David Mamet and John Milius, right? Or Milius, I always forget, the guy who did Red Dawn, right? Actors like Kelsey Grammer and John Voight, not to mention Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who feels more like a Democrat today, but was the literal Republican governor of California. Right? There's plenty of successful conservatives in Hollywood as actors and writers. Clint fucking Eastwood. Massively successful.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Talented, very conservative person.

• 55:00Robert Evans?

  Plenty of conservative, like movies that are conservative. And I'm just think about how many during the war on terror, how many TV shows and movies had a scene where the guy has to torture someone to save lives? Right? That is conservative propaganda.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  Even though it's like made by a lot of like self-described libs or whatever, like it's still conservative. Ideologically.

• 55:22Robert Evans?

  Like, yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  But we're in America, so we don't recognize that all of that is in service of a more right wing viewpoint. And he resents it. And I mean, we're seeing it now with all this like move to like, I'm not even gonna say cancel culture, because that's not what it is. It's not what's going on. But like, the firing of all these people is an expression of that resentment, because they want to do it. They want to be doing it.

• 55:49Robert Evans?

  Right. And they're, yeah, a part of it is, if I get them out, finally, I'll get a shot and people will realize I was better.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Finally, late night with Gutfeld.

• 55:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Right. And obviously, you know, Ben did not fail to make it in Hollywood, because people were bigoted against his conservatism. He failed because he's not a good writer. His only talent is an agitating people with cheap political shots. This is very funny, because the next paragraph of the book, after that line about the spirit of the scavengers, the spirit of envy, the very next paragraph is basically Ben describing himself. Quote, "The scavenger does not believe in an understandable universe in which success is the result of performance of duty. Instead, the scavenger believes that any such argument has a guise for power and power alone. The scavenger, in his perverse projection, believes that there is a great conspiracy against him, and that the only path to success lies in tearing away at that great conspiracy with tooth and claw." Oh, Ben.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  Ben, you gotta read that again, Ben.

• 56:42Robert Evans?

  That's like your whole life. Buddy. That's your entire, like, career, buddy.

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Your first book was about the conspiracy against you and you specifically and conservatives generally.

• 56:55Robert Evans?

  Yes. With tooth and with claw. Now, Ben goes on to write that while lions form a pride, scavengers form a pack. Is it a problem from a writing standpoint that pack and pride are basically synonyms? No. Yeah, I mean, it should be, but could you describe lions as having a pack? Sure.

• 57:14Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 57:15Robert Evans?

  Right? I guess you couldn't describe other, like, pride, it doesn't go both ways.

• 57:18Speaker 04

  Pride is very specific.

• 57:19Robert Evans?

  It's like a bourbon whiskey thing, right? Anyway, "The pack consists of looters, lechers, and barbarians. The fall of London," he writes, "is symptomatic of the growing..." Power of the pack and reading this, reading him write about the fall of London, felt particularly ridiculous in 2025, given that about a month before Ben's book was published, London police arrested 474 people at a Palestine Action ban protest. Per the BBC, police have arrested 474 people at a demonstration in London in support of the band group Palestine Action. The Metropolitan Police said 466 protesters were arrested for supporting the group, five for assaults on police officers, two for public order offenses,

• 58:01Robert Evans?

  and one for a racially aggravated offense. Scores of people simultaneously unveiled handwritten signs with the message, "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action," at the protest, organized by Defend Our Juries at Westminster's Parliament Square. It was the biggest protest since the government prescribed the group in July under the Terrorism Act of 2000, making membership of or support for it a criminal offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison. No officers were seriously injured, and the Met Police said that the number of arrests was the largest made by the force on a single day in the last 10 years. London really has fallen to the pack.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  Pack of police.

• 58:33Robert Evans?

  You can't even say, "I oppose genocide. I support this group." They'll arrest you.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, I feel like he loves it. Again, it's just, this is what they're talking about doing now, labeling anybody as a terrorist and doing exactly what you described, but here.

• 58:48Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 58:49Speaker 04

  That is their political project. That is what he is supporting right now. He's guesting on all the podcasts with the vice president, who's only a podcaster now, talking about this exact things.

• 58:59Robert Evans?

  Yes, exactly.

• 59:00Speaker 04

  So maybe he's a, I don't know, a wolf, a vulture. I don't, I don't, a liar.

• 59:05Robert Evans?

  Asshole. Yes. Bad writer. Yes.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  Line, piece of shit, bad writer. Yeah.

• 59:10Robert Evans?

  Now, given the way book publication timetables work, there's no way that, you know, these mass arrests happen. They certainly didn't happen in time for Ben to revise his book to account for it, right? But the fact that this happened puts the lie to everything he says here about the supposedly massive and rising social power of the pack and the fact that they've taken London, you know, the fact that the pride has to constantly be back on their heels, scrambling desperately to hold on to civilization, because if like... You just acknowledge that like, no, actually, they have all the power and they're like massively abusing it and like hurting people and like are in no danger whatsoever, but are endangering huge numbers of people. That doesn't sound as good.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it needs to be barbarians at the gates were perpetual.

• 59:49Robert Evans?

  Desperately self-defense.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  Victims perpetually persecuted.

• 59:52Robert Evans?

  We have every lever of power.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 59:54Robert Evans?

  And he critiques leftists in this passage for embracing Mao Zedong's statement that political power grows from the barrel of a gun. But that's the only power Ben has ever recognized. What do you call these ma- what do you go mass arrests, man?

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  Premise of police. Like, what are you talking about? Like, ICE is like, do it like, that is political power.

• 1:00:14Robert Evans?

  What do you call like Israel's actions, right? Like, I mean, it's bombs, I guess, more than the barrel of a gun, but you know, the basic idea is the same, right?

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  You can use language in ways to mean many things. Yeah, he believes that.

• 1:00:27Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  He believes that.

• 1:00:29Robert Evans?

  Yes. Ben continues with a warning that the children of lions will themselves become scavengers if the lions don't pass on their ways to their kids. And then he pivots to talking about an 1897 poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. This poem, written at the height of the power of the British Empire, he sees as a warning that went unheeded. "The tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart. Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, and humble in a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget." Now, I don't really see that as a warning about not indoctrinating your kid with propaganda, but I guess I can see where he's coming from there.

• 1:01:11Robert Evans?

  That's that. It's clear that where he goes next in this chapter, basically, he says that the reason England fell, so to speak, is that they embraced the welfare state. And that's why the British Empire ended, right? That's why they're no longer the center of the West, is because they got taken over by these socialist ideas. And like the establishing of a welfare state, all of those lions, their kids became scavengers, you know? That's the argument he's making, right?

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a mandatory scavengerism, right?

• 1:01:38Robert Evans?

  And this is classic Ben, leaving out a massive and important inconvenient fact that does not fit in his neat ideological lines. The British Empire didn't get sick and fail because of welfare. It began its slow death slide during the First World War, in which it lit its treasury on fire and annihilated a generation of young men. Kipling himself was profoundly changed by the horrors of World War I. He was a strong imperialist his whole life. He was a very strong imperialist prior to the outbreak of hostilities in World War I. Kipling despised Germany and German civilization, and he was a huge supporter at the outset of the war, in England getting involved and committing to it.

• 1:02:19Robert Evans?

  As the war started, he wrote something that feels very familiar to what Ben writes in his book. "For all we have and are, for all our children's fate, stand up and take the war, the Hun is at the gate." That's essentially what Ben's writing. That is what he's writing. Right? Yeah. So let's talk about Kipling. Let's talk about what World War I did to Kipling. Because Rudyard had one son, 16-year-old John Kipling. John was 16 when the war started. Now, John had intended to join the Royal Navy, but his eyesight was bad, and so he was unable to take on a navy career. So Rudyard used his connections, being a very famous and influential person in media, to get John a commission as an officer in the Irish Guards, which is a British military

• 1:03:02Robert Evans?

  unit made up of Irish soldiers, right, with British officers. In 1915, John became a platoon commander in the Irish Guards and was sent to fight in the Battle of Lus. He died while assaulting the German lines. This was a profoundly traumatizing and changing event for Kipling. For one thing, prior to his son becoming a platoon commander, Kipling was super anti-Irish, right? He was a strong Unionist, so he was anti-Irish independence, but he was also just kind of bigoted against Irish people. He had written with disgust about Irish culture previously. And this changed, I think in part just because he had more contact through his son and whatnot with Irish people as a result of this. That's how things like this can happen.

• 1:03:45Robert Evans?

  And I'm not going to say he ever totally turned around on the issue, but he wrote poetry about Irish history and started expressing, after this point, a considerable degree of admiration about Irish culture, particularly in comparison to what he'd written before. Now, he also wrote this about what happened to his son in the wake of World War I. If any questioned why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.

• 1:04:07Speaker 04

  That seems maybe different from

• 1:04:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  What the topic started as.

• 1:04:14Robert Evans?

  Right. It seems maybe, again, to go from where Ben is like, like, no, the war is at the gate. Anything we have to do is justified. And like, oh, no, my son's dead. Oh, my kids.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Shouldn't have done that. We shouldn't have said that. We shouldn't have told him to do that.

• 1:04:25Robert Evans?

  Maybe this was a fuck up, right? Now, there's some context to this line, and I'm going to quote from an article for the Irish Times by Ronan McReavy, explaining the context behind this line. This has often been wrongly interpreted as Kipling believing that his son's death was in vain. He never believed the First World War was unnecessary. He believed it was badly prosecuted. On a more general level, this couplet is about the lies the older generations tell that compels the younger to fight. It could also allude to his own lies in getting a son a commission when he was physically unfit to fight. So there is a lot going on here, but Kipling was racked for the rest of his life with a tremendous guilt because of what happened to his son. And because, even if he could never admit that World War I was itself fully a bad idea, he knew that it was, right? He had to be like, well, it was badly, but he, I think there's

• 1:05:08Robert Evans?

  a degree of ego there. But he knew that he'd fucked up, right? That they all had.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  Lied to them to get them to fight. That's.

• 1:05:15Robert Evans?

  And, you know, Ben, Ben will never admit to being wrong about anything. I don't think, no matter what happens, he's capable of that. But Kipling was to an extent, you know? He never fully repudiated imperialism, but he went to his grave racked by the knowledge that the war he'd endorsed and supported had taken not only his son, but had shattered the British Empire, right? It had shattered his hopes of continuing British imperial dominance. As an imperialist, he couldn't ignore the fact that like, oh, this kind of ruined it all, right?

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, like, sometimes expressing that sort of guilt is how you're actually saying that you were wrong without saying it.

• 1:05:52Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  Because that's, human beings are complex and it can be very hard to just say those words. So you just express the guilt of it.

• 1:06:01Robert Evans?

  Right, and it's so telling about Bin and about what goes on in his head, that he cites approvingly this passage of Kipling while ignoring the rest of his life. Because in reality, a figure like Rudyard Kipling ought to be a warning to Bin Shapiro and those like him, right? And even, again, I don't want to frame it as like Kipling got woke after World War I, but Kipling got increasingly critical of imperialism and of his previous stances after World War I. And he actually wrote some stuff, one of his poems, "A Pict Song," is one of my favorite anti-imperialist pieces of writing. And I was considering just reading like a segment from it, but do you mind if I just read the poem?

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  Go for it.

• 1:06:43Robert Evans?

  Because I think we all need this, right? I think this might be handy as we all watch this fucking empire come down to crush us and the ones we love. So I'm gonna read this poem and then we'll talk about it afterwards.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  If it's something really depressing and then yeah, do the nice poem.

• 1:06:58Robert Evans?

  So this is "A Pict Song" by Rudyard Kipling. "Rome never looks where she treads, always her heavy hooves fall, on our stomachs, our hearts, or our heads. And Rome never heeds when we bawl. Her centuries pass on, that is all. And we gather behind them in hordes, and plot to reconquer the Wall with only our tongues for our swords. We are the little folk, we, too little to love or to hate. Leave us alone and you'll see how we can drag down the state. We are the worm in the wood, we are the rod at the root, we are the taint in the blood, we are the thorn in the foot. Mistletoe killing an oak, rats gnawing cables in two, moths making holes in a coat. How they must love what they do.

• 1:07:42Robert Evans?

  Yes, and we little folk too. We are as busy as they, working our works out of you. Watch and you'll see it someday. No, indeed, we are not strong, but we know peoples that are. Yes, and we'll guide them along, to smash and destroy you in war. We shall be slaves just the same? Yes, we have always been slaves. But you, you will die of the shame, and then we shall dance on your graves."

• 1:08:09Robert Evans?

  I like that poem. Anyway, that's all I got for part one, or for the first, we'll, we'll probably come back to this book, but I think you get the idea of what Ben's going for here and why it's full of shit.

• 1:08:21Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm convinced that maybe we're all lions and scavengers.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Are we part of a pack?

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  We're also a part of a pack and we are also a colony of, we can say ants, we're a hive also, and the hives are made of crows and the crows are made of lions.

• 1:08:42Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Every crow contains a lion, you know?

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  It is known.

• 1:08:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's known, you know?

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  We all went to school. We all learned about lions and crows.

• 1:08:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like the parable of the butterfly and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, you know? Both of which swim deep in the ocean in the Marianas Trench.

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  On the moon.

• 1:09:04Robert Evans?

  It's as accurate as what Ben's written.

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. Yeah. It's good.

• 1:09:08Robert Evans?

  Anyway, how you feeling, Brody? Have I ever done that before?

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:12Speaker 04

  I think I feel like you have to have, yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  And Chody.

• 1:09:16Robert Evans?

  Chody, sure.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  I appreciate that he at least knows he needs to get some good sentences into his books, so he quotes other writers, even if he doesn't like necessarily interpret them well, he's at least kind of.

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  Got to pad this out with some Tolkien and Lewis and Kipling.

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  I gotta keep people reading the book.

• 1:09:34Robert Evans?

  That I can't write. Yeah.

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:09:37Robert Evans?

  Oh, good stuff.

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  Job to him.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  Cody, you want to plug anything?

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  Sure, why not? Check out some more news. It's our weekly show. I sit at a desk, I read the news and talk about various topics. We also have a show called Even More News twice a week. It talks about more current events in a more casual way. And check out my band. It's called The Hot Shapes.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:09:59Robert Evans?

  Check out Cody's band. Check out Cody, you know, at like a bar or something. Be like, hey, how's it going?

• 1:10:07Speaker 04

  I'll be like, good. Yeah.

• 1:10:08Robert Evans?

  You want a drink?

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  I'll say, yeah.

• 1:10:10Robert Evans?

  Don't do that.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, don't.

• 1:10:13Robert Evans?

  I shouldn't joke about the weird parasocial stuff because that'll happen.

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  Oh, we don't want any of that.

• 1:10:18Robert Evans?

  But check out Cody's podcasts and YouTube show and check out when we come back to Ben Shapiro's book, which I'm sure we'll do at least one more time before the year ends.

• 1:10:29Robert Evans?

  Well, gang, this has been Behind the Podcast, a Bastards about Shapiro Ben. Good night and good luck.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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