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.

Hi, listeners. I want to tell you about the Free Press's latest new podcast, old school with

Shiloh Brooks. When we met Shiloh, he was one of the most popular professors at

Princeton, and he was making reading great books cool again. Now, he's hosting this show to help all

of us and young men in particular get back into reading for pleasure. The show features intimate

conversations with fascinating men, from fitness gurus to philosophers, about books that shape their lives.

They cover books like The Old Man in the Sea, Middle March, and down and out in Paris and London to bring you a truly old school education.

New episodes out every Thursday. And in fact, I am one of his first guests. So go to old school with Shiloh Brooks on

Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 that'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 attacks, 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.

...