Ben Shapiro's Ultimate GOAT Rankings

All right, today we're going to do something different. We're going to crown the top five GOATs of all time. Greatest of all time. So it's actually, you can't say GOATs of all time. In any case, in a variety of categories, we're going to GOAT of sports, GOAT of movies, GOAT of politics, TV, and music. Let's begin with sports. Now, obviously, there's a GOAT in each sport, right? Jack Nicklaus in golf or Michael Jordan in basketball. But if you're going to go with a GOAT of all sports, you have to say Babe Ruth. And the reason you have to say Babe Ruth is because he totally revolutionized sports in America long before basketball was sort of a national pastime or even football was a national pastime. Babe Ruth was revolutionizing how people thought about sports in America. And it's not just that he was the greatest baseball player ever. It is that he turned America into a sports crazy country, truly a sports crazy country. Now, he was, in fact, the greatest baseball player ever. He has the highest career on base plus slugging percentage in MLB history. The average on base plus slugging in Major League Baseball is around 100. Ruth is like 206, so twice as productive as the average player of his era. The next closest are Ted Williams, widely considered the greatest hitter who ever lived, and Barry Bonds, who, again, without the steroids, was still a great player with the steroids, was an all-time great player. He had the highest career wins above replacement in baseball history. Wins above replacement is sort of an all-around metric that people use in order to measure how much better you would be than sort of the normy replacement player. His number is 182.6. He is well ahead of the second-place finisher Barry Bonds at 162.8 or Willie Mays at 156.2. And if you look at top war seasons of all time, he's like all of them. And that is also because he was not just his era's best hitter, he was also his era's best pitcher, getting a 94-46 record and a .228 ERA earned run average. The only player who is even remotely close to Babe Ruth in terms of efficiency on both sides of the ball is Shohei Otani. That's what makes Otani remarkable, is the fact that he is pitching and hitting in today's major leagues. But Ruth did it, and Ruth revolutionized baseball by doing it. So not only did he hit 714 home runs in a little less than 8,400 at-bats and led the AL in home runs 12 times, he also, again, revolutionized how the sport was played. So before Ruth in the so-called deadball era, a huge season was you hit 15 to 20 home runs. In 1920, he hit 54. And then in 1927, of course, he hit 60. Totally changed how the game was played. So Babe Ruth changed the sport, changed America. OK, greatest musician of all time. The answer, obviously, is going to have to be Beethoven. There are competitors in the classical category. Bach would be in this conversation. Mozart would be in this conversation. Brahms would be in this conversation. But if you're just going to go for one, it's got to be Beethoven. If you're looking at the eras of classical music, you're looking at the Baroque, which was Bach. And then you have the Romantic era, which is Brahms. Beethoven bridges the classical and the Romantic eras. He totally, again, changes how music works. So the Eroica Symphony, which was composed in 1804 and originally dedicated to Napoleon as a symbol of heroic ideals and freedom. And then Beethoven actually scratched out the dedication when Napoleon crowned himself emperor dramatically longer, significantly more complex than any previous symphony, far greater, like expands the boundaries of what the symphony is all about. Everybody knows, of course, Symphony No. Everybody knows it. Literally every human. And it is an extraordinary piece. The fourth movement wildly underplayed. The whole piece is great. And of course, the ninth, which, again, expands the entire genre of how symphonies work. The reason that you end up with the choral ode to joy in the final movement of the ninth. And by the way, the other movements of the ninth are ridiculous. Some theorists suggest he had gone beyond what instruments could do without the human voice. His nine symphonies are all masterpieces, although starting with three, they really become masterpieces. His piano sonatas, which are astounding. You have his string quartets. The late string quartets are unbelievably sophisticated, like so sophisticated musically that they are actually thematically more difficult to listen to. They're not easily accessed. They sound like they were composed in the 20th century. And of course, he was doing all of this while he was going deaf. His late work was all written while he was deaf. You got the Beethoven piano concerti, which are, again, astounding. They're wonderful. Check out the Gillel's recordings. I love them. You've got the violin concerto, which is an amazing piece. His work is endless. It is endlessly innovative. It is powerful. It is inspiring. It's dramatic. If you got to pick one, it's clearly Beethoven. All right. Greatest TV show of all time. The answer here is Breaking Bad. Yes. Hell yeah. Hey, come on, baby. Come on. Yes. Come on. I know that there are people who are going to say The Wire. I love The Wire. The Wire is great, but it is not as consistently good as Breaking Bad. Because Breaking Bad is a five season arc. It is better plotted. It is better written. The characters are drawn beautifully and satisfyingly. It is stylistically innovative. The acting is terrific. The reason I love Breaking Bad, as somebody who writes, is because Breaking Bad is focused on people don't just do dumb things. The thing that drives me absolutely up a wall when I watch a TV show is when the writer writes himself into a corner and then can't get out. And so you have to have a character do a dumb thing in order to get out of the situation. Breaking Bad is so beautifully plotted that that never happens. And again, it makes Walt's journey from extraordinarily sympathetic victim to horrific monster absolutely understandable and wonderful. By the way, the moral message behind Breaking Bad is actually quite good. I know there are a lot of people who watch Breaking Bad. It's glorifying crime. No, it isn't. Breaking Bad is about how if you perceive yourself to be a victim and if you can't get yourself out of that mindset and you refuse to accept help from the people who love you and want to help you, you end up being a true monster. That is the theme of Breaking Bad. Say my name. We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, have you ever had to buy a product online that comes with like one of those giant waiver forms? You know, the one that you just scroll all the way to the bottom, just hit click, right? Because are you kidding? 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Winston Churchill, who was warning for years in advance what the cost of appeasement and weakness would be, who was a key player in pretty much every important issue involving the British Empire from the beginning of the 20th century all the way through until the 1950s. Winston Churchill, not only the most talented speaker of his generation and the most talented writer of his generation, but also the most talented leader of his generation. The clarity with which Churchill saw the world, his pugnacity, his unwillingness to bend or curry favor in order to achieve what he needed to achieve is truly astonishing. There's so many great biographies of Churchill that are worth reading, like tons of them. There's a brand new Andrew Roberts biography of Churchill, one volume that's really great. There's the Martin Gilbert, huge volumes about Churchill, wonderful. There's the William Manchester, several volume series, The Last Lion, which is great. All of them are wonderful reads. The best way to get to know Churchill is just read Churchill, whether it's the history of English-speaking peoples or his history of World War I, in which, again, he was the head of the admiralty, or his history of World War II, which is astonishing in its scope and its breadth, particularly the first volume. And Churchill, one of the beauties of Churchill is that he produced so much over the course of his lifetime that you can just read all of his thoughts, and it's pretty amazing. Okay, finally, best movie of all time. I know, lots of competition in this category. Some people say Citizen Kane. Listen, Citizen Kane is brilliant. I love it. Some people say Casablanca. Casablanca is close to my heart. I've watched Casablanca probably 15 times. The best movie of all time is the trilogy of Lord of the Rings. It is the greatest movie achievement of all time. It builds an entire world. It takes what is a kind of loose book, because the truth is, when you read the books, and I've been reading them with my son, there's a lot of wasted movement, a lot of motion that doesn't need to be there. The attempt to hone that down to the sort of core essence of Lord of the Rings, the immersiveness of the world, the acting quality, the writing quality, the visual creativity is just the detail-orientedness of Lord of the Rings. Like, the movie holds up. It was made, those movies were made in the early to mid-2000s, and they still hold up visually better than most of the stuff that is made today. And I'm not sure there's ever been a more inspiring trilogy ever made. One of the things about Lord of the Rings that works as a trilogy is, of course, it was filmed continuously. It was filmed essentially as one piece, and Peter Jackson had overall control. He never matched that level of accomplishment again, but it is an astonishing piece of film accomplishment. Alrighty, so again, in sports, Ruth. In music, Beethoven. In TV, Breaking Bad. In politics, Churchill. And in movies, Lord of the Rings. Those are my picks. What are yours? Leave them in the comments below.