Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.

My guest today is Ben Shapiro.

Most of you will be familiar with Ben.

Ben's a writer, political commentator, co-founder of the Daily Wire, and host of the Ben Shapiro show.

Ben has a new book out called Lions and Scavengers, which is the topic of today's conversation.

So without further ado, Ben Shapiro.

All right, Ben Shapiro. Thanks so much for coming on my show. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

So you've got a new book out. Can you tell us the title of the book and tell us why you wrote it at this time? Sure. It's called Lions and Scavengers. The basic premise of the book

is that we are breaking down as a civilization into people who wish to build, who wish to create

social fabric, who wish to innovate and risk take, and defend the civilization. And people who are

predominantly driven by envy who want to rip away all those systems, tear them down to the ground, they don't really care what comes next, a coalition of people who disagree internally with each other about nearly everything except that fundamental desire to destroy all of those systems. And what drove this book, unlike most of the books that I've written, I think it's my 12th,

most of the books that I've written kind of starts with an idea, and then I develop that idea over time, and then I sit and I read and I research, and, you know, the writing takes anywhere from a couple months to even, you know, on the short end, like three or four weeks. This one was almost written contemporaneously with events happening. And so the seedbed of this one was a trip that I took to London, or rather Oxford, in November of 2023. So it was about a month and a half

after the October 7th attack, and I was supposed to debate at Oxford University about this.

And my security told me, you can't stay in London. It's too unsafe. There'd been a march the

weekend before with some 300,000 people marching across London Bridge in favor of Hamas.

And so I stayed about an hour outside of London. And then I went to Oxford University. And it was

probably the most fraught kind of personal safety situation that I've been in,

certainly in a long time. It was very close quarters. There were people there who were clearly

very, very angry, kind of borderline violence in their mien. And it occurred to me that many

of those people who really despised Israel and also despised America, despised the very institution that they were,

that they were attending. Many of them were at Oxford, but they believe that Oxford is sort of the

tip of the spear of a civilization that is historically exploitative and oppressive and terrible.

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