hey i'm mr beats i regularly listen to both joe rogan's and ben shapiro's podcast so i was excited last summer to see that shapiro had once again appeared as a guest on the joe rogan experience episode number 1512 on july 22nd 2020. however something really stood out to me as i listened there were a lot of logical fallacies in this episode like more than normal this was disappointing to me especially since shapiro was known as a logical dude but you're a logical intelligent guy so what are logical fallacies oh you want me to tell you logical fallacies are common errors in reasoning based on bad logic mr beat what's logic well i'm glad you asked puppets uh when i searched online there were many different definitions of logic the one i'm going to use for this video though is reaching a reasonable conclusion by adequately analyzing facts for example if someone spends too much money to a point where they can't afford basic necessities then it is logical to conclude they should save their money to have more of it at first glance a logical fallacy seems to be true but once we apply the rules of logic it is problematic often we use logical fallacies and we don't even realize it logical fallacies hurt our ability to argue but more importantly they cause us to fall for crappy arguments so back to the latest joe rogan experience to feature ben shapiro i'll play clips from that episode and pause it to point out the logical fallacy and then define it maybe give some examples i also have puppets to help out a little bit so that's different okay here the two talk about kosher food the the original logic was that you were supposed to kill the animal in the most humane way was the idea now do i know if it's the most humane way now i have no idea it's most certainly not damn okay well because you have to slice it up with the rabbis man i don't know when shapiro says take it up with the rabbis man i don't know that is an example of the faulty appeal to authority fallacy that's using the opinion or position of an authority figure or institution of authority in place of an actual argument one can be guilty of committing a faulty appeal to authority by trying to impress us or make us reluctant to challenge that authority's viewpoint it just seems like he is making it up how can you say that every week he keeps on changing things he's doing it to make sure the faithful do not become complacent but what is it with all the chickens whoa that is teal level stuff way out of my league here's another example of the faulty appeal to authority fallacy about the 1619 project which we will get into more later it's not good history there are four pulitzer prize-winning historians who said this is not good history okay be listening for the phrase this isn't my argument coming up here soon the story of america is trying to fulfill the promises of the declaration of independence over time make those promises available to everybody and this isn't my argument this is martin luther king jr's argument when he talks on in the march in washington about fulfilling the promise or a note of the declaration of independence he says we're here to catch the check right you issued us the check and then you didn't let black americans be americans we're here to catch the check is the argument frederick douglass the freed slave makes in 1852 makes a famous speech before slavery has ended and he says july 4th doesn't mean anything to black americans because we're not included in the bargain martin luther king said in the name of the flag civil rights are necessary okay okay enough of those let's move ahead a bit and the the move from la being a pretty safe fairly nice city suburban and orientation to just overrun with with horror shows is really it it was a lot faster than i thought it would be but it's sort of a great you're right it's a gradual decline and then it's just off a cliff obviously this is an exaggeration here but i'd also argue that this is an example of the either or fallacy also known as the black or white fallacy or false dichotomy fallacy the either or fallacy is when someone asserts that we must choose between two things when in fact we have more than two alternatives so here ben is basically saying hey uh it used to be a very nice suburban-like city and now it is the worst city ever you basically have two extremes when i think we all know that la is somewhere in between okay here's another example how much of that is historic redlining and how much of that is an 18 year old kid today deciding to pipe a gun and shoot somebody and yet another example it's a shift that's happened throughout american society that went from the notion that men were acting like pigs and they should stop acting like pigs to what if everybody acted like pigs here's a part of the episode where rogan starts talking about regularly seeing the homeless intents all over the city well you started to see tents and you didn't see them at all for decades and then all of a sudden i started seeing tents now don't get me wrong there is no doubt that homelessness is a big problem in los angeles right now but rogan just is sharing what he's personally witnessed in parts of town making it sound like the entire city is like that when there's no evidence of that this is called the part to whole fallacy also known as the composition slash division fallacy it assumes that what's true about one part of something has to be applied to all or other parts of it and here's another example and yet it immediately turned into who can we blame who's who's to blame for all these dead people maybe it's ron desantis or maybe it's cuomo like who who can we blame sure some in the media looked for people to blame but definitely most did not and now rogan's going to tell an anecdote i took my family there before kovid like a few four months before covert or so we went to we we're gonna go to there's a famous donut place there so we said just uh one of the most goofy sunday things like what do you guys want to do today let's go get donuts so we went to downtown l.a like holy literally human on the streets everything smelled like piss bums everywhere and i'm like okay stay close to me stay over here yeah this is a pretty common one the anecdotal fallacy using personal experience or an isolated example instead of a valid argument and let's face it most of us are very biased based on our personal experiences here are some more examples of the anecdotal fallacy in the episode and then over the past 13 years like i live in a pretty decent suburban area and i'm seeing like open needles on the street and walk out of my house one day there's just a guy lying face down in the gutter like edgar allan poe i remember one time we were filming in downtown l.a anyway we're filming some fear factor stunt and as we got up we could see people smoke and crack and i go look there's people smoking crack right there and the the guests on the show like a lot of them they fly from all over the country and they're like is that real they're really smoking crack going that's crack that's a homeless person smoking crack welcome to l.a it's right there i know people who died in the hospital of covet and their family could not visit them i didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on like winnetka off the 101 and there's 80 tents and they put a porta potty there by the way the following are clips from the same episode anecdotal evidence is evidence of an anecdote it is not evidence of a broad national trend and i know what you're saying that these are anecdotes and this doesn't encompass the full statistics of cops versus black men and how it what what is exactly is happening i don't like the idea that you are going to attribute to all of america a sin that is number one anecdotal in nature he's reacting to something that's anecdotal but there's many of those anecdotes and you see them over and over again and i was a bit surprised to hear this one actually here is a loaded question what do you think caused the slide or the expansion of the slide with further context listening to the whole episode rogan is referring to the steep decline of los angeles now it's a loaded question because uh it's not a fact that la is in steep decline right now don't get me wrong things have gotten pretty bad in la over the past year or two as they have in many american cities but if you look at la historically this is not as dramatic as rogan and shapiro are trying to make it out to be a loaded question is a question that's asked that has an assumption built into it often it is two questions and one one is hidden behind the other it's like asking why did you take that cookie when you should have asked did you take that cookie first and so the better question for rogan is to ask is los angeles sliding right now or perhaps even how bad is the slide in los angeles right now folks here is one of the most common logical fallacies i see in media that is the texas sharpshooter also known as cherry picking shapiro here is going to focus on specific evidence to back up his argument about why homelessness is such a big problem in l.a and then they got a ruling from a court that you're allowed to live in your car because for a while you weren't allowed to live in your car and then it was you're allowed to live in your car so now you're basically allowed to leave your stuff on the sidewalk and the police are not allowed to move it and you're allowed to live in your car and then there was this sort of equity movement that said okay well things do it in business districts but why can't they do it in like more suburban areas why can't they just move into nicer areas after all if there's misery it should be equally spread across the city the texas sharpshooter fallacy is when you cherry-pick data clusters to suit an argument or you find a pattern to fit a presumption you basically just ignore evidence that doesn't neatly fit into your argument and you focus on evidence that does help your argument it's pretty convenient actually homelessness is a very complex problem with lots of different causes shapiro confidently explains why homelessness in l.a is such a problem focusing only on certain evidence while ignoring lots of other evidence and now here's a clip where they talk about marriage i'll go data driven which is the longer you live together with somebody before you get married the higher divorce right after so that's higher the divorce rate after if you live for a long time with somebody and then you get married there is a higher percentage chance you will end up divorcing that's interesting i wonder why that is i mean after just a quick google search i discovered that the jury's still out on this one it's not an open and shut case we just don't know but shapiro acts like he knows the most common logical fallacy in this episode was the straw man fallacy which is misrepresenting someone's argument to make it easier to attack in this clip you're going to hear shapiro talk about authors like robin d'angelo and ibram kennedy so what they say is in order to be anti-racist you have to want to tear down the entire system they literally say this i'm not i'm not really i know that i'm not misidentifying the argument because again i've read their books yeah he's misidentifying the argument they never said that at least when i was looking at the books i couldn't find it oh he keeps going with the straw man fallacy the the basic notion that to be anti-racist you have to tear down free markets or you have to tear down free speech or you have to and what that means is of course that anytime there's rioting and looting that's really just an expression of outrage at the broader american system and so it justifies that sort of stuff saying that to be anti-racist you have to tear down free markets or tear down free speech that is definitely misrepresenting the other side now here shapiro has a rant against the 1619 project which personally i'm not a fan of but he just completely misconstrues and oversimplifies what their mission is so the idea is that the entire history of america is a history of a system that is endemically white supremacist and that all of the declaration of independence is basically a lie that the principles of all men are created equal that was a lie when it was written and it's a lie now that the idea that we have rights that pre-exist government that's a lie all of these things are lies the constitution was built in order to enshrine white supremacy and no evolution has taken place so they don't they they essentially make the argument that from 1619 to 2020 is a continuum racism has gone underground a little bit but it's still there and it's still it's still implicit in all of our systems so the 1619 project has essays blaming literally everything on racism i mean sure all that is partially true but i don't even know if shapiro realizes he's doing this but it is exaggeration here's another one shapiro does not think that systemic racism or institutional racism really is a big issue history has consequences is not the same thing as saying the rules today are racist because the rules today are not racist actually the rules today are quite not racist but most who talk about institutional racism today are talking about enforcement of the laws not the actual laws themselves and so instead of just saying that standards exist and people don't live up to them but the standards are actually not a bad thing we just decide you know what we don't want to be hypocrites we're getting rid of all standards whatsoever everybody shouldn't have standards and if you believe that anybody should have standards then you're a hypocrite i mean he keeps saying we but let's first establish even a small group that is saying we should get rid of all standards they shut down the entire county so that douchebags could run around shattering windows pretending that they were standing up for social justice no that's not why they shut them down yeah they should then rodeo drive at 1pm so that people could run up and down rodeo drive talking about how capitalism sucks while tweeting from their iphone while stealing stealing nikes oh that's a two for one not only was that a straw man fallacy but that was also a tuquo quay fallacy the tuquo kuey fallacy is dismissing someone's viewpoint on an issue because he himself is inconsistent in that very thing basically hey this person's a hypocrite so why should i listen to what they're saying shapiro and rogan here basically downplaying criticisms of capitalism because the critics themselves benefit from capitalism are you tired of having to come up with well-thought-out arguments to defend yourself you betcha then you should try the tuquoqui app it removes all of the effort by refocusing the criticism back at the person that's giving you guff how does it work the app auto generates insults and other shortcomings to take the heat off of you that seems kind of asinine of course you would say that because you're a jerk you can only protest if it's a black lives matter what about a protest for increasing your immunity what about a protest for educating people to the the the techniques and the strategies for increasing your immune system it is there are they're out there and there's no discussion about this amongst health professionals excuse me amongst uh politicians yep what about ism falls under this fallacy basically answering criticism with criticism what we saw yesterday where they're breaking into amazon go in seattle like that guy owns the washington post he owns the most left-wing newspaper in america and you're like not good enough okay this is a bit of a stretch but that is kind of an example of the genetic fallacy because rogan is judging amazon based on the ceo jeff bezos who is left-leaning and owns a left-leaning newspaper so yeah the genetic fallacy is judging something good or bad on the basis of where it comes from or from whom it comes a better example might be not believing something from a certain news network because they've lied in the past i mean i'm not a big fan of cnn but that doesn't mean that they never tell the truth if i dismissed everything from cnn that could easily lead to the genetic fallacy the next clip is about the killing of george floyd i don't know a single human being who watched that tape and didn't think okay that guy deserves to go to jail chalvin right the officer in that case and the george floyd i didn't think that yeah everyone and everybody every single person was like yeah that's that's real bad like that's and cops like i know tons of cops i'm friendly with tons of cops and not one of them was like yeah that's good police procedure i'm glad he did that like no one thought that this is not quite a fallacy but it's almost a no true scotsman fallacy which is making what could be called an appeal to purity as a way to dismiss relevant criticisms or flaws of an argument if shapiro found out that yes actually there were people out there who thought that chauvin should not go to jail i'm predicting he would say well no decent human being would want to see chauvin not in jail later in the show when they're talking about colin kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem here is a more clear-cut case of the no true scotsman fallacy no because i think that he made a serious error which is that the most positive movements in american social history have been ones that don't kneel for the flag but say in the name of the flag you should do x in other words no true patriotic american would protest that way since the colin kaepernick controversy and the george floyd killing there has been increased discussion about defunding the police ben shapiro's gonna take that a step further though let's have a conversation instead about like just completely defunding the police we don't have like a responsible conversation about things that make sense we'll talk about like what if we just got rid of the police how crazy is that discussion that discussion uh when when people were really saying defund the police i'm like cooler heads would prevail this is an example of the slippery slope fallacy which assumes that if we allow a to happen then z will consequently happen too therefore a should not happen when they say that defunding the police will lead to no police that is a slippery slope okay here's another two for one you're seeing what's happening right now in chicago you're seeing what's happening right now in new york where you have this massive uptick in violent crime because it's perceived that the police presence has been diminished greatly i mean new york city has had record crime record homicides who would have thought who would have thought first of all that's an example of a false cause fallacy assuming that a real or perceived relationship between things means that one is the cause of the other they are assuming that the record crime side note i'm not sure exactly what they mean by record crime but anyway they are assuming that that was caused by defunding the police which was not done anyway most places okay let's rewind it and watch it again here i mean new york city has had record crime record homicides who would have thought who would have thought that's also an appeal to fear fallacy when a person attempts to create support for an idea by attempting to increase fear towards an alternative as i said before there's no evidence to back up what they're claiming and so they're really just trying to scare people saying hey if we're going to defund the police then there will be chaos man that if you were protesting against lockdown you were very bad right then you were a racist and you're going to get people killed and you should wear a mask and i was like well if you're i sort of agree with the mask thing like yeah okay and then you get millions of people in the streets yelling at each other and breathing on each other and spitting on each other and you got health professionals on tv being like well racism is a public health threat i guess that you can do that now it's like what the you know apples and oranges are both fruits but other than that they don't have a whole lot in common so yeah this is the apples and oranges uh fallacy the false equivalence fallacy making it seem the two different things appear to be logically equivalent when in fact they are not even if they share a common trait he's talking about the george floyd protests and he's talking about the anti-mass protests they both are protests but the anti-mass protests hardly anybody was wearing a mask so that's a pretty big difference here's another one a cultural change that does not place tremendous emphasis for black or white or for anybody on personal responsibility and personal agency there needs to be a mindset change we do this by the way in all other areas of american life except for the most important decisions in the area of sports nobody does this routine and there's a point shelby steel makes in the area of sports if a kid is not does not have a good jump shot nobody says tim you know what you don't have a good jump shot because your father didn't have a good jump shot his grandfather didn't have a good jump shot and the game is biased against you we say okay if you want to be on the team you're going to have to learn to shoot a jump shot again two things that you probably shouldn't be comparing i know people who died in the hospital of covet and their family could not visit them like they literally died alone in the hospital of covet and family could not visit them and you're telling me that it's deeply important that we have like dance lines this was stuff happening at rallies like dance lines in the streets in new york to fight racism that's deeply important but a daughter being able to visit her dad before he dies that's not important similar to the appeal to fear fallacy this is actually an appeal to pity which is trying to make someone believe or do something only because we pity them or something associated with them by shapiro bringing up his friends who couldn't see their family this is really unfortunate but it doesn't mean his argument is true okay here's the part of the show where rogan and shapiro just make a bunch of hasty generalizations so the economy collapsing at the same time as the george floyd protests led people to start looting and then people that didn't give a about george floyd or black lives matter were just stealing and then this police was letting them steal they were standing down in beverly hills and santa monica literally cops standing there while people were saying i gotta say the media coverage of this stuff is just awful the me the media were cheering this stuff on and they were simultaneously making two arguments that conflict with each other one was these are mostly peaceful protests first of all mostly peaceful is the most it's it's the loosest most loosely defined arbitrarily applied term in history the irony here is that shapiro and rogan just got done giving seven hasty generalizations and now shapiro is criticizing a hasty generalization a lack of awareness there people o.j simpson was mostly peaceful that night oj simpson was mostly peaceful that night for like an hour 15 he was really not peaceful but for the other hours between sunset and sunrise he was unbelievably peaceful the hasty generalization fallacy is when you generalize about something based upon a small or poor sample this is actually apparently the most common logical fallacy i mean i do it all the time you watching right now you do it all the time most human beings generalize at a practicality it's a good way to survive but a hasty generalization is made when people just pick too small of a sample or not a representative sample and yeah in general people generalize too much i know our brains like to generalize crap i just generalized but no i have evidence to back it up i promise the media refused to make that distinction and then they act like the cops are the bad guys when they come in to to arrest people who are violating the license in portland right now they're trying to burn down the damn courthouse yeah and the and the feds come in and start arresting people and people like this is the gestapo it's like okay everybody's worried about everything being racist every single thing that anyone does syrup is racist pancakes are racist all right the next logical fallacy is personal incredulity although these aren't perfect examples of it i've never heard this term before where a protest turns into a vast riot wrecking all of melrose and everybody's like well it was mostly peaceful because i don't exactly understand why they're attacking the courthouse i don't exactly understand why they're smashing the windows at amazon go it's it's steve martin right they think they must hate these paint cans really from the jerk right but it's it's it went from this to literally tear down the structure of society the personal incredulity fallacy is saying that because one finds something difficult to understand that it's therefore not true now shapiro might just be disingenuous here but with rogan i think he really doesn't understand and he probably should just learn more maybe but people are boring something like that there's always like extremes on each position and the truth lies somewhere in the middle that's the middle ground fallacy saying that a compromise or middle point between two extremes is the truth at this point in the podcast they are now talking about the seemingly endless cycle of gang violence the answer is there's only one way to break that chain what what way is that that way is to not pick up a gun and shoot somebody i think meaning a simplistic way of looking at it if you're on the outside of that community it's also an example of the begging the question fallacy with the incredible influence of all the people around him and that's all you see good job joe you're trying to correct them but the problem is the only way that's going to be the thing that your kid doesn't know is for you not to do it at some point personal agency has to come in some it does because the expectation education and and teaching them about personal agency also known as the assuming the answer fallacy the begging the question fallacy is a circular argument in which the conclusion is included in the premise when shapiro argues that all you gotta do to stop the cycle of violence is not be violent he's kind of just brushing over all the reasons why this violence might be really happening if your father was in and out of jail everyone around you is like that if there's literally no influence that's positive in your life the idea of saying to a kid like that hey don't pick up a gun and shoot somebody it's way that's way too simplistic a version of of their future in my mind well i mean the problem is i don't see an alternative solution there's another one that's the argument from ignorance fallacy which assumes something is true because it has not yet been proven false or something is false because it has not yet been proven true which is what shapiro just did people makes this stuff up pretty regularly well people are silly people are indeed silly people do people tattoo their eyeballs ben that is an example of a bandwagon fallacy which is appealing to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation here's another one people out there that have had some really good times with those bad ideas and it may be that when i die i look back and that is one of my great regrets yeah it's pretty clear here that rogan's joking so i'll let these slide okay jumping back to when they were talking about colin kaepernick if you just look at the gesture itself isn't taking a knee even more respectful than standing with your hand over your heart i mean then i imagine millions of us would routinely take a knee for the american flag you might also say this is the bandwagon fallacy because why does there have to be millions of people kneeling during the national anthem for it to be respectful colin kaepernick is a terrible spokesperson for this moment i'll give props to shapiro and rogan because they didn't do this one very much but that is an example of the ad hominem fallacy which is attacking your opponent's character or personal traits in order to undermine their argument sure colin kaepernick may be a bad spokesperson that doesn't mean his argument is wrong i have to get bench for blaine gabbert and take millions of bucks from a major corporation terrible qb rating is all you really need to know not not a good quarterback is the answer really it's just it's sort of a traditional thing we're arguing over well it i mean it isn't the way that it was originally expressed yep that was an appeal to tradition fallacy which is when someone encourages us to believe something is good because it is associated with things of the past related to the appeal to tradition fallacy is the appeal to nature fallacy which is saying that because something is quote natural it is therefore good hey look this plant looks delicious i don't know grunk that plant looks really strange what are you talking about it comes from nature of course it's safe you kidding nature is already trying to kill you three times this morning so the odds are pretty low it would happen again you're doing it wrong if you want to fight police brutality say america is not living up to her promises i know that over time my fellow americans are going to come to realize that they need to live in accordance with the fundamental principles that founded the country that's unifying to say that the american flag is inherently non-unifying is is really bad that's possibly a fallacy fallacy also known as the argument from fallacy it's assuming that because a claim has been poorly argued or a fallacy has been made that it is necessarily wrong just because kaepernick maybe went about it the wrong way doesn't mean that what he was trying to argue is wrong after it was revealed to shapiro that perhaps he got it a bit wrong about the reasoning why kaepernick was kneeling now we're gonna see the special pleading fallacy the second take after talking about the military yeah that's better military rather yeah although he recently released a video that sort of goes back to the original explanation suggesting that america is endemically and systemically racist the special pleading fallacy is moving the goal post to create exceptions when a claim is shown to be false and after seeing the evidence shapiro's earlier claims were wrong about the intentions of kaepernick and so he had to kind of sneak that in well he you know he's he's still bad by this other thing okay holy crap this video turned out to be way too long uh i guess i'm just gonna wrap this up now i know i was a bit nitpicky and perhaps i even got some of these wrong but i just wanted to show you how two smart entertaining people can be guilty of a lot of logical fallacies in just an hour and a half of conversation i counted 58 of them for the record i still enjoy the episode and i am definitely guilty of using logical fallacies myself one of my goals lately has been to stop using logical fallacies when making arguments so maybe you can join me in in this quest to be logical very boring it's a very boring movement the logic movement but a special shout out to my friend paul from the felt show for once again providing his wonderful puppets to make my video better be sure to subscribe to his channel the felt show i'll put the link in the description or it's right there in the corner i want to invite you to an upcoming virtual event i'm going to be hosting a seminar yeah baby seminar how exciting about logical fallacies basically what this video is about and i'm going to give you some tips on how to spot them more easily we're going to spend part of the time interactively we're going to see if you can spot logical fallacies in real life situations so join me all the details are in the link and in the description of this video limited spots are available so sign up quickly if you want to join us oh at the end of it there will be an opportunity for a q a so that's always fun so join me that seminar and this video were inspired originally by this book here i've been reading this book since i first started teaching many years ago it has lots of great scenarios and lots of good tips and it's a great workbook for teachers i also put a link to buy it in the description of this video so what do you think how did i do spotting logical fallacies was i too hard on joe and ben let me know in those comments below thanks for watching