Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Mondays are the worst days for airing podcasts. I only
Speaker 1: found this out after I chose Mondays and Thursdays as
Speaker 1: the days my podcast would be on. But I've kept
Speaker 1: it on Mondays because this is a show about life
Speaker 1: and about making your life better. And I see every
Speaker 1: Monday as a mini New Year's Day where you can
Speaker 1: start over, try harder, be better. I started this year
Speaker 1: pledging to read more fiction because it keeps me from
Speaker 1: doom scrolling as much, and it helps me sleep better
Speaker 1: and all of it, really and I did it for
Speaker 1: like six weeks, really into like the middle of February.
Speaker 1: I read a lot of fiction, and then work got busy.
Speaker 1: Life got busy, and I kept carrying my fiction book
Speaker 1: around on flights to the beach to bed at night,
Speaker 1: but not actually read. So here I am on Monday,
Speaker 1: in the middle of April, starting my New Year's resolution again.
Speaker 1: I'm going to pledge to read a fiction book a
Speaker 1: month through the end of the year. That's not some
Speaker 1: wild goal. I should be able to meet it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I keep pledging to go to the gym, but that
Speaker 1: hasn't happened yet, So baby steps. People. If you have
Speaker 1: fiction book suggestions, send them my way. And if you're
Speaker 1: interested in restarting the new year's resolution that you maybe
Speaker 1: fell off from doing, I'd love to hear about it
Speaker 1: at Carol Maarkowitz Show at gmail dot com or hit
Speaker 1: me up on Twitter x, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1: The best tip on how to improve your life is
Speaker 1: to take the steps you already know will improve your
Speaker 1: life and actually do them. So let's do this coming
Speaker 1: up next and interview with Ilia Shapiro. Join us after
Speaker 1: the break.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My
Speaker 2: guest today is Ilia Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Director of
Speaker 2: Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. He was previously executive
Speaker 2: director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.
Speaker 2: His upcoming book, out September tenth, is called Lawless, The
Speaker 2: Miseducation of America's Elites, and is available for pre order now.
Speaker 3: Hi, Alia, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 4: It'd be with you. But I thought you said in
Speaker 4: the show notes that you sent me that that we
Speaker 4: were going to be doing this in Russian.
Speaker 3: Y Paruski yam.
Speaker 4: And actually and actually, now that you're in Florida, babolon
Speaker 4: and espanols.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, let's not get crazy.
Speaker 2: I took four years of high school Spanish, and it
Speaker 2: turns out I don't know anything like I thought i'd.
Speaker 3: Be ready for a Florida experience.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's not like we're, you know, in a
Speaker 2: full on Spanish speaking country and no I don't know anything.
Speaker 3: It turns out.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, you know, we can get into this.
Speaker 4: You and I of course recently went to Israel, where
Speaker 4: the rule is you need to know two of three
Speaker 4: of Hebrew, English and Russian, and so we've got that
Speaker 4: covered well. Similarly, I think I think in Florida are
Speaker 4: certain parts I think you need two of three of English,
Speaker 4: Spanish and Russian.
Speaker 3: So that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I did actually amazing in Israel, like my I took.
Speaker 2: So I went to Hebrew school from first grade through
Speaker 2: eighth grade, and it turns out that I retained which
Speaker 2: really says a lot about you know, the earlier you
Speaker 2: learn a language, the better. Because I could totally hang
Speaker 2: in Israel, and I kept giving credit to my Israeli husband.
Speaker 3: I'd be like, oh, you know, yeah, I'm married to Israeli.
Speaker 2: He didn't teach me anything, like it's not from him,
Speaker 2: it's from my early schooling.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, yeah, I grew up speaking Russia at
Speaker 4: home but didn't have any Hebrews. Why I still don't
Speaker 4: speak I only speak easy languages, like I'm not about
Speaker 4: to pick up Arabic or Chinese. But I do all
Speaker 4: the romance once because they're all variations on a theme.
Speaker 4: Because I went to a high school that had first
Speaker 4: couple years a lot and then you know, building up
Speaker 4: the French and Spanish and spending time there. Right, But
Speaker 4: I'm going to Hungary in a couple of weeks. But
Speaker 4: you know that's not related to anything like a regular
Speaker 4: all American as if I was, you know, only spoke
Speaker 4: one language. It's a little when I.
Speaker 2: Was in So on the way to Israel, I stopped
Speaker 2: in Warsaw for the day, So Poland, and my mom
Speaker 2: was like, do not speak Russian there? They do not
Speaker 2: like Russians. I'm like, yes, I heard, I heard.
Speaker 3: But although I heard a.
Speaker 2: Lot of people speaking Russian and Ukrainian that was like
Speaker 2: really common in the short.
Speaker 4: What was amusing about that little stop off for you
Speaker 4: was of course, you know, your last name is Polish
Speaker 4: and your first name is a Polish man's name. So
Speaker 4: do you have any any just just giggles from the
Speaker 4: hotel check in or what else happened?
Speaker 2: They were like, your Carol Mark Woods. I guess I
Speaker 2: am Carol Mark Woods. Yeah it was, you know, my
Speaker 2: parents accidentally gave me a Polish man's name, which was
Speaker 2: the name, of course, of John Paul, Pope John Paul
Speaker 2: his real name. He messed up all my Google results.
Speaker 2: Used to be you could google just my first name
Speaker 2: and get me. But then after he passed, you know,
Speaker 2: he became number one Carol.
Speaker 4: Wait, so you're saying that you were more famous. You
Speaker 4: were more famous Carol for the Pope died.
Speaker 2: I just think a lot of people didn't call him
Speaker 2: Carol on the internet, you know, and then when he died,
Speaker 2: everybody was like they used his you know, given name
Speaker 2: in the obituaries whatever.
Speaker 3: It like fully messed me up. And there's also now no.
Speaker 4: No, what I'm getting from this is Carol thinks she's
Speaker 4: more famous than the Pope. Okay, got it. I'm running
Speaker 4: with it.
Speaker 2: Briefly, Briefly I was more famous than the Pope. And
Speaker 2: now there's a a Latin American singer also named Carol
Speaker 2: with a K, and she totally messes up my results.
Speaker 3: But you know, what are you going to do?
Speaker 2: Ilia?
Speaker 4: Right? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Isn't there another Ilia? There is? Ilia?
Speaker 4: I mean there are many alias as you know, Ilia
Speaker 4: for boys in our world.
Speaker 3: Isn't there another Ilia in our world?
Speaker 2: Ilia?
Speaker 4: There's another law professor Ilia Sliman. Yes, right, yeah, he's
Speaker 4: the smart one. I'm the funny one. That's the division
Speaker 4: of labor. Also, we're nothing like the handsome one.
Speaker 2: The hand.
Speaker 4: Well, we can also do, you know, short and tall
Speaker 4: and all this, but the the the you totally broke
Speaker 4: my train of thought. It left the station and got derailed.
Speaker 3: H lats civilias you know.
Speaker 4: Players, but the anyway, all right, let's go back.
Speaker 2: We'll come back to your hilarious jokes since.
Speaker 4: You're funnier hilarious. Yes, yes, well, Actually, how I make
Speaker 4: my living is that I occupy that thin sliver and
Speaker 4: the then diagress. There's a lot of people who know
Speaker 4: more about constitutional law than I do, a hell of
Speaker 4: a lot of people who are funnier than I am.
Speaker 4: But I occupy that thin sliver where those overlap. It's
Speaker 4: a living Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean that's the way to go about it.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, you represent that that tiny little
Speaker 2: gaza strip.
Speaker 4: Okay, you can say that. I couldn't possibly comment.
Speaker 3: Anything goes on on the Carol Markowitz Show.
Speaker 2: So you and I were in Israel. It was a
Speaker 2: great time, a.
Speaker 3: Sad time, a difficult time. It was a lot of
Speaker 3: things intense, right, But I think that that's what Israel is, right.
Speaker 2: It's it's like they have a lot going on, good
Speaker 2: and bad all the time.
Speaker 4: Like I hadn't been since two thousand and seven, so
Speaker 4: it's you know, different country, even even without October seventh.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't say that it's always intense. I mean these
Speaker 4: are you know, real people, living real lives, having you know,
Speaker 4: normal ups and downs, and apparently happier than almost anybody
Speaker 4: in the world. Well that makes sense, yeah, and with
Speaker 4: a higher birth rate than anybody else in the industrialized world.
Speaker 4: So they're doing something right. And even though they're you know,
Speaker 4: smaller than New Jersey and with enemies armed to the
Speaker 4: teeth around everywhere. It's it's an internal divisions that sometimes
Speaker 4: make the divisions with its external enemies seem like you know,
Speaker 4: powderpuff football. So there's just a society of contrast such
Speaker 4: richness in such a small place. I you know, I
Speaker 4: enjoyed it tremendously and I'm still processing it still, haven't.
Speaker 4: You know. I posted on my sub stack Shapiro's gavel
Speaker 4: while I was there, kind of various kinds of impressions.
Speaker 4: I still haven't written my piece, you know, what I
Speaker 4: learned about, what I learned from in my trip to
Speaker 4: Israel that I'm going to write for the City Journal.
Speaker 4: Just just remarkable stuff, but whether geopolitically or sociologically or
Speaker 4: or anything. And just the way that we were able
Speaker 4: to be based in a nice hotel in Tel Aviv
Speaker 4: and go to the farthest north, you know, ten feet
Speaker 4: from the Lebanese border, and down south you know, less
Speaker 4: than half a mile or so from Gaza and the
Speaker 4: massacre sites and all that, and then still, you know,
Speaker 4: return home for happy hour for the hotel. Just right,
Speaker 4: just amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's kind of always been my feeling
Speaker 2: on Israel.
Speaker 3: It's so it's got just so much going on, and
Speaker 3: it is a real place.
Speaker 2: It's super a real place, which I think gets lost
Speaker 2: in all the news of it because you see it
Speaker 2: as this, you know, historic country, and when you walk
Speaker 2: around Jerusalem, you do feel like you're like in a
Speaker 2: story book or you're, you know, maybe possibly the most
Speaker 2: famous story book of all time, the Bible. I think
Speaker 2: that you feel that, you know, sense of history there.
Speaker 2: But then you're in Tel Aviv and you're at like
Speaker 2: the hottest restaurant and you're eating this unbelievable innovative food.
Speaker 2: It was just it's a country of contradictions. I think
Speaker 2: that that gets used a lot. And I really felt
Speaker 2: that this time more than on previous visits because we
Speaker 2: got to see so many different facets of it. But
Speaker 2: you know, like I definitely I've been thinking about it
Speaker 2: so much.
Speaker 3: When I landed.
Speaker 2: I don't know if the guy said this to you,
Speaker 2: but like when I landed last time I was there
Speaker 2: was twenty eleven, and the guy, the border you know,
Speaker 2: agent in Israel is like, why has it been so long?
Speaker 3: Like why haven't you been back?
Speaker 2: And I, you know, I started telling him like, no,
Speaker 2: I had a wedding. We were supposed to come in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, we were supposed to come last year.
Speaker 3: It didn't work at whatever.
Speaker 2: He doesn't really care but the sense of like, why
Speaker 2: have you been away so long?
Speaker 4: Was I had an interesting exchange with the with the
Speaker 4: customs agent as well. She said, you know what you
Speaker 4: what are you here for? And I said, well, it's
Speaker 4: like a media influencer's tour. And she kind of smiled
Speaker 4: and nodded because a lot of people are going through
Speaker 4: and that sort of thing. And she said, oh, so
Speaker 4: where are you going And I said, well, everywhere, you know,
Speaker 4: to the north, to the south Jerusalem, and she's like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: we're up north and I'm like, I'm not sure. Do
Speaker 4: you want to see my tenerary And she's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 4: I just want you to be safe because there's fingers
Speaker 4: out there. And remember that was the day that we
Speaker 4: had to put on helmets and flat jackets and there
Speaker 4: was eight missiles that morning and there was touch and
Speaker 4: go whether we could make it there. So she was,
Speaker 4: you know, just just caring about the media influencers safety. Nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there's so much of that.
Speaker 2: I just feel like it's very homey and it's a
Speaker 2: really great country. I think, you know, whether you're Jewish
Speaker 2: or not, I think visiting Israel is really an amazing trip.
Speaker 2: And I highly recommend people listening make that trip. You know,
Speaker 2: it seems like it's so dangerous, but it's really not.
Speaker 2: When you're there, you feel complete safety, complete security.
Speaker 4: And it's anywhere you go, whatever kind of whatever kind
Speaker 4: of tour group you you go with. Uh, you know,
Speaker 4: the the army briefs them and they're not going to
Speaker 4: take you to places, you know, like we had to
Speaker 4: change our plans in Jerusalem because of the biggest red
Speaker 4: alert in decades over the first Friday at Ramadan since
Speaker 4: since uh, since October. So so I mean it's it's uh,
Speaker 4: you're probably in more danger, you know, getting in a
Speaker 4: car and driving around d C. Than the Israel.
Speaker 3: So, you know, you've had an exciting couple of years.
Speaker 4: You were very Chinese curse may you live in interesting times.
Speaker 2: You have lived in interesting times. You were very famously canceled.
Speaker 4: They tried to cancel me. You cancel me, I cancel you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they can't cancel ilia. Okay, they tried to cancel you.
Speaker 2: But you know, one of the themes on this show
Speaker 2: is like that some of your hardest times can obviously
Speaker 2: lead to some of your best times.
Speaker 3: And you do seem like you won.
Speaker 2: You're thriving and you're doing amazing. But what was it
Speaker 2: like in the moment, like did you feel did you
Speaker 2: feel like you would recover?
Speaker 3: Did you feel like you'd come back stronger than ever?
Speaker 3: Or were there dark times?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 2: Do you want to tell us about it a little bit,
Speaker 2: like just you know, just in passing.
Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be the.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, no. I sketched this out on my on
Speaker 4: my substack Shapiro's gabble, come subscribe free or paid or whatever.
Speaker 5: Uh, and the man pay the man do it right,
Speaker 5: that's right, And in more detail in my book that
Speaker 5: that you graciously plugged at the at the outset Lawless.
Speaker 4: It's coming out in September. So I had this when
Speaker 4: when Justice Bryer retired. I was doing media all day
Speaker 4: because that's what I do, that's my area of expertise.
Speaker 4: I had written a book about Supreme Court politics and traditional nominations. Uh,
Speaker 4: and I was getting more and more upset about President
Speaker 4: Biden keeping to his campaign pledge to appoint a black woman,
Speaker 4: that is, to restrict his candidates by race and sex.
Speaker 4: And so after you know, doing all this stuff all day,
Speaker 4: and I was in Austin, Texas at a friend's Celebritory dinner.
Speaker 4: Came back to my hotel and you know, not a
Speaker 4: best practice. Doom scrolling late at night in your hotel room,
Speaker 4: getting more and more upset on Twitter, and I fired
Speaker 4: off a hot take saying that you know, if I
Speaker 4: were a Democratic president, I would pick U. And I
Speaker 4: chose the chief Judge of the d C Circuit, very
Speaker 4: prestigious court, very smart man, Sreese Ri Navas and great,
Speaker 4: great judge was a contender for previous vacancies. But this time,
Speaker 4: because of the hierarchy of intersectionality, he's excluded, even though
Speaker 4: he's an Indian American and an immigrant checks off lots
Speaker 4: of boxes, but not these ones.
Speaker 3: So I said, had promised that it would be a
Speaker 3: black woman.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right, Yeah, that's right. And I said, so,
Speaker 4: you know, he's just qualified, so we will we will
Speaker 4: end up with a lesser black woman. It's really those
Speaker 4: three works. You know, I met less qualified. You know,
Speaker 4: by by basic operation of logic, I'm saying this person
Speaker 4: is the best. Everyone else in the entire universe is
Speaker 4: worse or less or less qualified.
Speaker 2: Whatever.
Speaker 4: Anyway, So I fired that off, went to sleep, woke
Speaker 4: up the next morning, checked my Twitter feed and all
Speaker 4: I had broken loose and people were trying to get
Speaker 4: me fired. Mind you, because I was moving to Georgetown.
Speaker 4: I had been at CATO for nearly fifteen years. The
Speaker 4: CATO is leading libertarian thing tank. If I had still
Speaker 4: just been at CATO, you know, you know, people to
Speaker 4: know more right wing nonsense whatever, blah blah. But because
Speaker 4: I was trying to intrude on a progressive bastion Georgetown
Speaker 4: Law School, people trying to get me canceled and fired
Speaker 4: and all the rest of it. And so began my
Speaker 4: four days of hell. It was really the most unpleasant
Speaker 4: period of my life, other than when my mom died
Speaker 4: when I was in college. I said, it's the second
Speaker 4: most unpleasant period of my life. You know. I couldn't sleep,
Speaker 4: the gastro intestinal issues, My wife was upset. My kids
Speaker 4: could tell that mommy and Daddy weren't weren't happy. You know.
Speaker 4: It felt like everything I had worked towards in my
Speaker 4: entire life, the sacrifices that my parents had made, and
Speaker 4: coming over from the Soviet Union, everything was crumbling because
Speaker 4: of a badly worded tweet. And luckily I have a
Speaker 4: big enough network of pr professionals and crisis management and
Speaker 4: media personalities that could platform me and my story that
Speaker 4: I survived those first four days, at which point the Dean,
Speaker 4: who is you know, no profile encouraged throughout this whole thing,
Speaker 4: decided that I would indeed be on board it because
Speaker 4: it was four days later that I was supposed to
Speaker 4: start with the new jobs as a director of the
Speaker 4: Center for the Constitution, which is an important center at
Speaker 4: George Town, as we've learned, because the rest of the
Speaker 4: law school is the Center against the Constitution. So I
Speaker 4: was onboarded, but immediately suspended, placed on administrative leave with pay.
Speaker 4: The reason why they kept paying me was so I
Speaker 4: would have less of a lawsuit later on. And so
Speaker 4: began after the four days of hell, what I referred
Speaker 4: to us four months of purgatory. Initially I was taking
Speaker 4: it seriously. I was prepping with my lawyer, you know,
Speaker 4: the interview with the DEI on and HR and all
Speaker 4: this stuff. But then it became clear that it was
Speaker 4: just such a farce, and as time went on, I
Speaker 4: went back to commenting on the court and commenting on
Speaker 4: judicial politics and all the rest of it. And it
Speaker 4: took them more than four months to figure out whether
Speaker 4: my tweet violated policies on harassment and discrimination, and ultimately,
Speaker 4: a junior associate at the high paid law firm Wilmer
Speaker 4: Hale that they hired to advise them on this, how
Speaker 4: many millions of dollars they expended on this is really funny,
Speaker 4: discovered that I was not yet an employee when I tweeted,
Speaker 4: and so it wasn't covered by these policies, And so
Speaker 4: I celebrated that technical victory. But then I read the
Speaker 4: longer report from the DEI office, which Georgetown is called
Speaker 4: the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action Idea,
Speaker 4: and it became clear that it would be untenable for
Speaker 4: me to stay, not just me, but anybody who they wrote,
Speaker 4: anybody who says or write something that offends someone what
Speaker 4: would effectively be creating a hostile educational environment. So I
Speaker 4: could do the job that I was hired to do,
Speaker 4: and as one does, I probably did my best lawyering
Speaker 4: of my life and putting together this resignation letter and
Speaker 4: then published it in the Wall Street Journal opinion page,
Speaker 4: and then the next day announced as one does, and
Speaker 4: asked my move to the Manhattan Institute on Nelson Show
Speaker 4: on Fox. So that was, yes, an interesting period in
Speaker 4: my life.
Speaker 2: We're going to take a quick break and be right
Speaker 2: back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 3: Did you feel fully victorious like doing that? I must
Speaker 3: have felt so good.
Speaker 2: You know, they went through four months, they tried to
Speaker 2: kill you, they didn't and and it must have felt
Speaker 2: amazing to say, now I don't want to be with
Speaker 2: you now.
Speaker 4: I'm not exactly this is what I'm saying. I mean,
Speaker 4: I feel a little sheepish in front of the rest
Speaker 4: of Georgetown's faculty and staff because they started implementing extra
Speaker 4: diversity trainings because of me, so they have to do it.
Speaker 4: I'll deal with all this crap. But no, I felt
Speaker 4: I felt free for the first time. Again. Nothing was
Speaker 4: as bad as those first four days, but I just
Speaker 4: felt free and liberated, and especially since I had the
Speaker 4: job offer in hand. The Riihan Salaam, the president of
Speaker 4: m I, and Alana Golan, who was the executive VP,
Speaker 4: over the course of a weekend put together an offer
Speaker 4: for me, which was very comforting because because even though
Speaker 4: theoretically I knew I would have job opportunities and whatnot,
Speaker 4: it was nice when I was resigning to actually have
Speaker 4: the next thing in place, absolutely family safety and all
Speaker 4: the rest of it. But yeah, for the first time
Speaker 4: in over four months, I was in control of the
Speaker 4: media cycle, and Georgetown could not respond because they're a
Speaker 4: big institution. They can't move that nimbly, and they didn't
Speaker 4: have a they didn't have a coordinated mess and so
Speaker 4: I was doing all of these you know, radio and
Speaker 4: TV and whatever for two weeks right at the end
Speaker 4: of the Supreme Court term, when I was also commenting
Speaker 4: on the big explosive cases in twenty twenty two, and
Speaker 4: then I went on a vacation with my family. So
Speaker 4: it was felt liberating. In fact, that first day, the
Speaker 4: day I resigned, that evening, I went to a reception
Speaker 4: at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Museum in DC,
Speaker 4: which everyone should check out when you come to these
Speaker 4: great museum, and they had these name tags made up,
Speaker 4: and of course, mindset Georgetown is when I'd registered, so
Speaker 4: I crossed that out and I wrote in Freeman.
Speaker 3: Amazing, it was great.
Speaker 2: Do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 4: It depends how you define those terms. I mean, people
Speaker 4: ask whether having gone through all of that and two
Speaker 4: years later, you know, having a book deal, being elevated
Speaker 4: in type speeches, I'm invited to give or this media influencers,
Speaker 4: trip to Israel and opportunities that I wouldn't necessarily I
Speaker 4: had before, even if I was respected in my field.
Speaker 4: Was it all worth it? And I'll say this, I'm
Speaker 4: definitely better off in terms of you know, career profession brand.
Speaker 4: You know, does that end justify the means that those
Speaker 4: those four days of hell? I'm not sure how to
Speaker 4: answer that. That's kind of a question for a I'm
Speaker 4: not a psychologist, you know, I can tell a man
Speaker 4: from a woman without being a biologist. But to answer
Speaker 4: that question, I think I need I don't know, but
Speaker 4: I definitely am career wise, you know, better off. And
Speaker 4: I'm sort of bulletproof with respect to cancel culture. It's like,
Speaker 4: what you're gonna try to cancel me again? Like, I
Speaker 4: don't care. I'm at age forty six. I've achieved the
Speaker 4: d GAF part of my of my life. So that's amazing.
Speaker 4: That's great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So does the whole cancelation thing, or the attempted
Speaker 2: cancelation does it make you I don't know, does it
Speaker 2: make you worry about societal you know, pressures.
Speaker 3: Not everybody can be Ilia Shapiro.
Speaker 2: Not everyone could stand something like that. Would you say
Speaker 2: that that's one of our largest challenges, you know, as
Speaker 2: a culture.
Speaker 4: You know, I've gotten awards for for that experience. And
Speaker 4: it's funny. All I did was like nothing like not
Speaker 4: for four months and then I quit, and that's it.
Speaker 4: It's kind of a low bar. It's a low bar
Speaker 4: for showing courage these days. I guess, uh, you know,
Speaker 4: not like the stuff going on in Israel, as I'm
Speaker 4: lifting up the dog tag for the for the hostages
Speaker 4: that we got.
Speaker 2: What would you say is our largest cultural issue our society?
Speaker 4: It's related, It's related to that. It's kind of the
Speaker 4: divisions that we have in our country despite the wealth
Speaker 4: and technological advancement and the fact that we are living
Speaker 4: more comfortably than you know, any society in history. I mean,
Speaker 4: regardless of what percentile of socioeconomic advancement in this country
Speaker 4: you are, it's better than any time in any society
Speaker 4: in history. Nevertheless, we're tremendously divided. And I don't just
Speaker 4: mean kind of what shows up at the polls, because
Speaker 4: I don't think Americans are as polarized in that way.
Speaker 4: As Congress is because of Jaran mandering, because the dynamics
Speaker 4: of the parties and campaign finance and other things. But
Speaker 4: we are physically separated. You know, there are many fewer
Speaker 4: competitive jurisdictions in the country anymore. You know, Ronald Reagan
Speaker 4: had a landslide in nineteen eighty nineteen, well, certainly eighty four,
Speaker 4: convincing when in nineteen eighty and there were more landslide
Speaker 4: counties in twenty twenty. In just that, it's it's people
Speaker 4: are less likely to have neighbors that are that are
Speaker 4: different from them in.
Speaker 3: Various Is that I don't know.
Speaker 2: I almost like I'll look as somebody, as somebody who's
Speaker 2: living for the very first time in a place where
Speaker 2: I'm the majority.
Speaker 3: It's very I like it.
Speaker 4: That's liberating as well, it's not. But that's that's only part.
Speaker 4: It's not just you know how you vote. It's it's
Speaker 4: different than you and in all sorts. You know, you're
Speaker 4: reading what you read, what coffee you buy, whether you
Speaker 4: buy coffee, you know beer, Why all these different kinds
Speaker 4: of cultural economic signifiers are more sordid than they've been.
Speaker 4: But then you get the kind of the online part,
Speaker 4: because we all live our lives so much online these days.
Speaker 4: I remember when I was in grad school at the
Speaker 4: London School of Economics. It took a year between college
Speaker 4: and law school to kind of broaden my horizons and
Speaker 4: deepen my knowledge about various things. And we read a
Speaker 4: book when we're studying nationalism, read a book by Benedict
Speaker 4: Anderson called Imagined Communities, his definition of nationalism before this
Speaker 4: kind of current populist nationalist moment, you know, twenty five
Speaker 4: years ago. You find a nation by who you imagine
Speaker 4: that you're sort of a part of. Well, in the
Speaker 4: digital world, you could be part of, you know, with
Speaker 4: lots of people and never encounter people outside of your
Speaker 4: bubble of whatever kind that might be. It doesn't have
Speaker 4: to be politics. And so there's this long tail of
Speaker 4: people getting sorted in various ways, and it's good in
Speaker 4: terms of individualism, but it's not good in terms of
Speaker 4: a sense of community or nation or or cohesion. And
Speaker 4: so we we face all of that again. I'm, you know,
Speaker 4: in most of the time on most things, like Brett
Speaker 4: Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings, I live on the sunrise
Speaker 4: side of the mountain beer. You know, I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 4: gonna go a little personal on you, Carol. I am
Speaker 4: a gout patient and we can talk about this medieval
Speaker 4: disease because of Because of that, I can't drink beer anymore,
Speaker 4: the contraindicated things. So I've got even you know, as
Speaker 4: as you get up in age, anyway, you switch more
Speaker 4: to wine or cocktails or whatever. But you know, I
Speaker 4: hardly ever drink drink beer anymore. So I do. I
Speaker 4: do like beer, but I don't drink it anymore. I
Speaker 4: do have a koozy with with Justice Kavanaugh's face on
Speaker 4: it and says I like beer. But yeah, I don't
Speaker 4: recommend getting out. It's it's probably the most painful, non
Speaker 4: life threatening thing that you can have, short of childbirth
Speaker 4: or something like that. But anyway, uh so Sunrise side
Speaker 4: of the Mountain. But for certain things, whether the state
Speaker 4: of our political institutions, whether state of higher education, certainly
Speaker 4: it's hard to be optimistic. Maybe I may be less
Speaker 4: pessimistic than I was two years ago when when I
Speaker 4: quit Georgetown, because things kind of after COVID that addled
Speaker 4: so many brains were sort of normalizing in a certain way.
Speaker 4: But there are some things that give me pause.
Speaker 2: That's very interesting, but because because I have gone sort
Speaker 2: of the other way, and I you know, I love
Speaker 2: arguing with you. We argued on a stage recently. I
Speaker 2: love being like I disagree, Ilia, But you know, have
Speaker 2: you ever lived anywhere it's America.
Speaker 4: You're free to be wrong in this that's right.
Speaker 3: That's right. You are free to be wrong. Ilia.
Speaker 2: Have you ever lived anywhere where you were the majority
Speaker 2: ideologically or that you were at least like leaning towards
Speaker 2: somewhere that most people agreed with you. It really is dazzling.
Speaker 2: I can't say enough about it. And it's not crazy
Speaker 2: to want to live around people that do agree with you.
Speaker 2: I get the online part, the segregation. I used to
Speaker 2: love commenting on like feminist blogs like back in the day,
Speaker 2: of course, until I got banned, until I got banned
Speaker 2: from their comments section.
Speaker 4: So someone was wrong on the internet and you had
Speaker 4: to fix that.
Speaker 3: I used to love arguing.
Speaker 2: I used to love arguing with with with strangers on
Speaker 2: the internet. And I never argue anymore. It is a
Speaker 2: little depressing because I think, you know, debating, I love
Speaker 2: all that, but you don't get that anymore. You get,
Speaker 2: you know, drive by insults, and then I block and
Speaker 2: then I never hear.
Speaker 3: From them again.
Speaker 4: That's yeah. Yeah. Part of these interesting times that that
Speaker 4: I've lived is before my Georgetown experience, I ran for
Speaker 4: school board in Falls Church City, Virginia in the fall
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty one. False Church is a small town.
Speaker 4: It's even called it a little city, fifteen thousand residents,
Speaker 4: ten thousand voters, And during COVID people were really upset,
Speaker 4: like they were with school boards across the country, about
Speaker 4: COVID policy, about when the schools were closed. Here despite
Speaker 4: a popular survey to the contrary, the school board voting
Speaker 4: unanimously to rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of discontent and I thought, well,
Speaker 4: you know who's going to step up and fix the
Speaker 4: and not many people were, So I said, well, I
Speaker 4: guess I have to run and broke fundraising records again,
Speaker 4: launched my local school board campaign with a Wall Street
Speaker 4: journal op ed as one does, and started being attacked
Speaker 4: by the local weekly paper, who was run by a
Speaker 4: Lindon Laruche acolyte. That's kind of an amusing local politics here.
Speaker 4: Falls Church is the epitome of limousine liberal. It went
Speaker 4: for Biden by more than Alexandria, Virginia by more than Charlottesville.
Speaker 4: I mean just I think it was like eighty one
Speaker 4: or eighty two percent. And yet this is the richest
Speaker 4: town in America, not because we have billionaires, but we
Speaker 4: don't have poor people here. It's all lawyers and lobbyists
Speaker 4: and other professionals. So anyway, an interesting political dynamic. So
Speaker 4: I had that experience, which that sucks.
Speaker 3: That doesn't suck, it.
Speaker 4: Does it does. Although, because it's so local and small,
Speaker 4: the school board turned over, so there were four seats open.
Speaker 4: None of the incumbents ran for reelection, which tells you something,
Speaker 4: and seven of us ran for these four seats. The
Speaker 4: reformers we did not win, but but the four that
Speaker 4: went on were definitely better than the four that left.
Speaker 4: And the school board is now in control. Even when
Speaker 4: I disagree with their decisions. They're not just laying down
Speaker 4: for the superintendent, which was the case before. He hates me,
Speaker 4: by the way, and he knows that, you know, I
Speaker 4: can summon you know, flying monkeys to attack him and
Speaker 4: whenever he does something silly. But but Christain and I,
Speaker 4: my wife and I we now exercise soft power behind
Speaker 4: the scenes. I played tennis with the chairman of the
Speaker 4: school board and checks with some of the other people.
Speaker 4: Just they care about what the you know, they know
Speaker 4: that there's a lot of people that just don't have
Speaker 4: time to pay attention to it. But they know that,
Speaker 4: you know, they want to be you know, rational and
Speaker 4: not have been made into national news stories like our
Speaker 4: neighbors in Arlington and Fairfax, right really do for all sorts.
Speaker 4: We don't have that kind of craziness here. It's much
Speaker 4: more small and nimble, like we can meet with our
Speaker 4: kids principle whenever we want kind of thing. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's it's very you know, we still it's still high quality.
Speaker 4: It's still now you know, our kids are small so
Speaker 4: far second grade in kindergarten. We'll see how it goes
Speaker 4: as things go on. But and then and then we
Speaker 4: have baby twins as well. So that's the other thing
Speaker 4: that happened during this whole crazy period, we had our
Speaker 4: cancelation babies. So anyway, it has been interesting times. Uh
Speaker 4: and uh, and that's that's brought me here to this,
Speaker 4: which reminds me of one of my favorite songs. I
Speaker 4: don't know, if you're into country music, Carol.
Speaker 3: But country music right now? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Good? Well? Uh you know uh the artist who used
Speaker 4: to be Hoody of Hoody and the Blowfish, Darius Rucker
Speaker 4: is a big country star and he wrote this song
Speaker 4: called this about you know. It's it's kind of it
Speaker 4: sets the scene. It's raining outside. He's sitting on the
Speaker 4: couch with his wife watching a movie or something, his
Speaker 4: baby girl sleeping in the next room, and he he
Speaker 4: thinks he gets kind of nostalgic or sentimental about all
Speaker 4: the doors that closed in his life, the colleges that
Speaker 4: rejected him, the girls that dumped him, all these wrong
Speaker 4: decisions that he made, but that ultimately brought him here
Speaker 4: to this, which was contentment. And so you know, I've
Speaker 4: had this tumultuous period. But all of a sudden, you know,
Speaker 4: this only child Soviet emigray uh is here. It's a
Speaker 4: large family with this. You know, we joke that we're
Speaker 4: landed gentry. We have this. It's not a McMansion. Our
Speaker 4: neighbors have bigger house than we do. But it's like
Speaker 4: this old house on a hill with the circular driveway
Speaker 4: and we have a pool. And my in laws built
Speaker 4: their house on our properties. Who have this multi generational compound.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 4: It is fit. The only thing wrong with it is
Speaker 4: that it's not in Florida. That you know, it's great
Speaker 4: if we.
Speaker 3: Could figure out a way to move it to Florida.
Speaker 4: I think the transaction, really, the transactions costs are are
Speaker 4: just too high. We have such a great setup. We
Speaker 4: have an O pair now, we built a little we
Speaker 4: knocked out in our garage and and and put up
Speaker 4: a space for for someone to uh to live and
Speaker 4: kind of a guest bedroom situation with a gym that
Speaker 4: I got. So yeah, you should, you should.
Speaker 2: We so end here with your best tip for my
Speaker 2: listeners on how they can improve their lives and.
Speaker 3: Be you know, more like Ilia Shapiro.
Speaker 4: It's all what I've learned. First of all, it depends
Speaker 4: who's asking. If it's someone you know just graduating college
Speaker 4: or a you know, a student, it's different. And the advice,
Speaker 4: the wrong advice is to say, oh, just follow your
Speaker 4: passion or something. Kids these days, kids any days, don't
Speaker 4: really know what their passion is. Right. It's sort of
Speaker 4: you know, or whether you're someone talking to someone mid career.
Speaker 4: And I wouldn't fathom to give someone advice who's older
Speaker 4: than me. But look, it's it's what I've learned in reading,
Speaker 4: especially psychologists like Jonathan Height is very popular these days.
Speaker 4: Everyone should go read what he's writing. But what agency
Speaker 4: is so important? That is feeling like you're in control
Speaker 4: of your life, all different aspects of your life. People
Speaker 4: are what makes people unhappy. You know, once you kind
Speaker 4: of uh satisfy the basic needs, you know, you're not
Speaker 4: in danger of being homeless or starving or things like this.
Speaker 4: You have you know, if your kid gets sick, you
Speaker 4: can take them to the doctor, these basic things. After that,
Speaker 4: it's just it's not you know, you work too much
Speaker 4: and therefore you're unhappy or the people are unhappy when
Speaker 4: they feel like they aren't in control of what they're doing.
Speaker 4: And so my only advice is figure out a way
Speaker 4: to both personally and professionally feel like you're the master
Speaker 4: of your fate. You run the show that you're right.
Speaker 4: And that doesn't necessarily mean go start your own business.
Speaker 4: I'm not entrepreneurial in that sense. I am entrepreneurially, I
Speaker 4: feel in terms of like ideas and figuring out identifying opportunities,
Speaker 4: and you know, I thought I would, you know, going
Speaker 4: to Georgetown I would be teaching this and I would
Speaker 4: be writing about originalism and doing this right and God
Speaker 4: plans and man plans and God laughs. So you just
Speaker 4: identify opportunities and try to try to do that. But
Speaker 4: I you know, I'm not going to sit here and
Speaker 4: pretend that you ask me, you know, whether I've made it.
Speaker 4: And I don't feel like I've figured it out necessarily,
Speaker 4: but I'm I'm doing my best. My hardest job is
Speaker 4: as a dad. I just took my older boys on
Speaker 4: spring break to Arizona and California. We had a fun
Speaker 4: and interesting time. Of course, now I feel like I
Speaker 4: need a real vacation. But you know, just just again,
Speaker 4: get to a place where you know, whether you're working
Speaker 4: in a giant corporation, a small business for yourself or
Speaker 4: or whatever it is, you know, starting a business with
Speaker 4: your husband or wife or whatever it is, that's what
Speaker 4: will make you, give you a sense of accomplishment and
Speaker 4: mission and and all that sort of Thank.
Speaker 2: You so much for coming on. He is, Ilia Shapiro.
Speaker 2: His book is Lawless, The Miseducation of America's Elites by
Speaker 2: It now pre order it wherever books are sold. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much, Ilia, Carrol watching Watchune Priatna.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcoit Show.
Speaker 1: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.