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Dec. 15, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:02:48
Is It The End Of The Internet? | Ep. 438
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In this episode, I will spoil Star Wars just for Mathis, my producer.
I'm not actually going to do that.
But net neutrality has come to an end, which means that Armageddon is upon us.
All the children will die.
The seals will wither in the sun.
All of the terrible things will happen.
Or maybe not.
I will explain.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
It's a Friday, so we're all in a good mood here around the office, and hence the Last Jedi reference.
I've not seen it, so I can't spoil anything about Last Jedi, except I do know that Luke's mechanical hand from Return of the Jedi has now been replaced with a flipper, like a dolphin flipper.
That's what I know about the movie.
So, spoiler alert, he has a flipper for a hand.
Okay, but in other news, net neutrality has come to an ignominious end, and everyone is losing their mind.
We're all going to die.
Cats and dogs will live together.
The world will burst into flame.
You'll have to choose between your two firstborn children as to which one will be sacrificed to AOL and which one will be sacrificed to Verizon.
You will have to make these decisions.
At least this is what we have learned in the last 24 hours after a set of regulations that really didn't end up doing much was just abolished by the FCC.
We'll get to all of that, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
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Okay, so, everyone lost their mind yesterday because net neutrality was repealed.
Now, here's the truth.
I've talked about net neutrality here on the program a little bit.
I was not in favor of net neutrality.
I did an interview with Ajit Pai, the head of the FCC, the guy who was most responsible for getting rid of net neutrality, and I think that his answers were relatively good.
There are decent arguments on both sides for net neutrality.
There really are.
I'm going to try and be as objective as possible about this, and lay out the argument for one side, and then lay out the argument for the other side, and then tell you why I come down on the side that I come down.
Basically, here's how it works.
You order your internet from Verizon.
Verizon is an internet service provider.
Netflix buys data from Verizon so that Netflix can actually be on the internet.
And then you pay so that you have access to Netflix.
This is all common sense.
This is how the internet works.
Well, Verizon is an ISP, or Sprint is an ISP, Comcast is an ISP.
Some of these ISPs They compete with one another, and one of the things that they want to do is they want the ability to privilege certain content above other content when it comes to charging them.
The reason for this is that, basically right now, Netflix, for example, takes up an enormous amount of bandwidth for whatever ISP it is working with, and that drives up the price for bandwidth for smaller providers.
So it is quite possible that an ISP may launch that wants to charge Netflix more per byte of data, and therefore, Drive the price down for the other people who are using the internet, right?
Or it's possible that the ISP may say to Netflix, listen, you want to load faster than other sites, you can pass a premium.
All of this is fine, right?
I don't see a huge problem with any of this.
The only problem with any of this is if there is a monopoly or an oligopoly.
And here's the argument in favor of net neutrality.
So let's say that you only have one internet service provider in your area.
The reason that you probably only have one internet service provider in your area is because a lot of local government regulations make it difficult to build an ISP.
In order to lay down broadband, you actually have to have government rights of way, and a lot of local governments will put conditions on the various companies that want to come in.
So that creates a sort of oligopoly situation.
The idea here is, let's say that there's Comcast, and Comcast owns Netflix.
So let's just say they bought Netflix.
And they want to help Netflix, but they want to hurt Hulu.
So they slow down artificially the speed on Hulu, encouraging people to subscribe to Netflix instead of subscribing to Hulu.
Right?
This is the great fear.
That Comcast is basically going to strangle in the crib competition to its vertically integrated companies.
And this is not an idle worry.
In a monopoly situation, you theoretically could do this.
So the anti-net neutrality people will say, listen, we already have anti-competition regulations in place, right?
You can actually prosecute monopolies that are acting as monopolies.
The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, can crack down.
The FCC can crack down on this.
You don't need to basically mandate that all traffic be treated the same or be charged the same because, again, maybe you want to charge Netflix more because it's taking up more bandwidth.
Maybe you want to charge the pornography company that's taking up an enormous amount of bandwidth on your computer more.
Maybe you want to do all of those things.
So, everybody who is in favor of net neutrality says, well, the ISPs shouldn't be allowed to do that.
When you buy an internet uplink, then you should basically get all the pages at the same rate and for a given price.
But the truth is that you're actually redistributing costs, right?
Let's say that my grandmother doesn't use Netflix.
Well, her internet price, the price that Comcast is charging for her, is actually going to be higher than it normally would be if, for example, they could divide out Netflix and have you pay a subscription fee for a faster internet service that gets Netflix faster.
She's actually subsidizing me.
Because I'm using Netflix and she isn't.
She doesn't have to use very much data.
I have to use more data.
And there's a sort of redistributive mechanism that happens.
So these are the two arguments.
One is that oligopoly means that the government has to come in and regulate the ISPs so that they don't strangle Netflix or YouTube or any other outlet that they want to strangle.
And people against net neutrality say, well, if you actually want to foster competition in the ISP space, if you want a proper distribution of cost, then you actually need to let competition take over.
Now, in order for competition to take over, it's not enough for the federal government just to get rid of net neutrality.
The federal government also needs to encourage all of these companies to start investing in local areas, and local governments need to start encouraging all of these ISPs to invest in building new broadband networks.
Okay, so those are the arguments.
The reason I come down against net neutrality is because I don't think that the answer to oligopoly is more oligopoly.
Once you enshrine the idea and create barriers to entry, that every piece of data has to be treated the same, then what is the comparative advantage of a small startup company as opposed to Comcast?
The answer is none.
It's going to be very difficult for them to compete in that market.
That is why you see all of these small ISPs actually in favor.
Okay, now here's the truth.
No matter what happened with net neutrality, the internet was not going to be radically different.
It was not going to radically change.
Because if Comcast were to start strangling Hulu in its crib, there would be competitive ramifications for that in the marketplace.
People would start opting for Verizon instead of Comcast.
There would be an effort by smaller ISPs to get into the market.
Competition would become a thing.
And it's very interesting to me that a lot of the same people who are deeply concerned with big corporations like Comcast strangling various companies they don't like are seemingly unconcerned about Facebook or YouTube or Twitter strangling political positions they don't like.
Twitter routinely knocks people offline for things that Twitter doesn't like.
Well, demonetize videos they don't like.
Our friends at places like Louder With Crowder and Dave Rubin, they've been demonetized.
Prager University has been demonetized by YouTube.
I don't see the same people who are complaining about net neutrality complaining that YouTube is not treating all content the same.
They're all in favor of all content being treated the same when it comes to their favorite outlets.
But when it comes to their favorite political views, they have nothing to say.
I'm pretty consistent on this.
I think YouTube has the right to crack down on videos it doesn't like.
They have the right to do it.
They're wrong to do it, but they have the right to do it.
And I think ISPs have the right to do it.
Similarly, I think competition in the marketplace keeps a lot of these companies honest.
Okay, so with all of that said, there's this weird idea that was going around that the end of the internet was going to happen yesterday.
CNN actually headlined, end of the internet.
And yet, strangely, their article appeared on the internet after all of this had happened.
But the level of outrage and insanity was so high.
So, I want to show you some of these tweets, and some of them are totally crazy.
This one is from GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
They literally tweeted, So, number one, anytime GLAAD headlines anything, you could just get rid of the first four words and put any other four words in there.
Republican tax cuts are an attack on the LGBT community.
Dog catchers are an attack on the LGBTQ community.
If you think that net neutrality is a specific attack on gay people, I don't know what to tell you.
There are lots of straight people who use the internet gang.
That seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
Banksy, who's most well-known for basically graffitiing other people's property, He tweeted this nonsense out.
Twitter, $14.99 a month.
Snapchat, $9.99 a month.
YouTube, $19.99 a month. Netflix, $9.99 per movie. Google, $1.99 per search.
If you don't want to pay extra for your favorite sites, you need to be supporting net neutrality.
This is incoherent.
Okay, it's incoherent.
You know why Netflix can't charge $14.99 a month?
Because no one will pay $15 for Twitter.
Okay, you know why Twitter can't charge that?
Because no one will pay that money for Twitter.
No one on earth.
You know why Netflix can't charge $9.99 a movie?
Because no one's gonna pay $9.99 a movie for the stuff that's on Netflix.
It's not going to happen, because there's a thing called Amazon.
This whole idea that Google is going to charge $1.99 per search?
Well, if they want to make Bing the biggest thing on planet Earth, they could do that, I suppose.
But it makes no sense at all.
It's absolute, utter horse crap.
But this is the sort of alarmism that you saw on the internet yesterday.
We're all going to die.
You're going to have to sacrifice your dog to the gods of Twitter if you want to maintain your Twitter account.
Chuck Schumer tweeted out, "If net neutrality is eliminated, the internet may start to resemble a toll road, with the highest bidders cruising along private fast lanes while the rest of us inch along a single traffic choked public lane." Number one, Chuck Schumer is the senator from New York.
New York has a lot of toll roads.
They work really well.
Toll roads are actually kind of great.
One of the reasons toll roads exist is because, number one, they actually clear out a lane.
Okay?
Toll roads actually relieve traffic on the rest of the lane.
Usually, a toll road is added to.
It is not subtracted from.
Usually, you don't just take one of the lanes of the highway and call it a toll road.
Usually, you build an extra lane, and then that's a toll road.
And so, all of that money goes toward upkeep on the highway.
And if you want to pay for the toll road, then you get a fast lane.
If that were really true, then toll roads on the internet would work fine.
Netflix would pay a little bit more.
for their internet speed.
You might pay a little bit more if you use Netflix a lot, and you pay a little bit less if you don't use Netflix a lot, which seems fair to me, frankly.
If you don't understand how this works, think about bundled cable.
Basically, net neutrality is bundled cable.
You have to pay one price for everything.
And if you get rid of net neutrality, even according to the worst-case scenario people, The idea here would be they get to pick and choose which ISP to use based on the services that it provides.
And number one, I don't think that's actually going to happen, but even if it did happen, I'm not sure that it's the end of the world.
Well, the alarmism didn't stop there.
Bernie Sanders did the same thing.
He said net neutrality is going to be the end of the world.
First of all, the last time Bernie Sanders used the interwebs was 1997.
He used a dial-up AOL modem.
Bernie Sanders, I'm not sure, knows what a computer is.
But here is Bernie Sanders, the socialist, talking about why net neutrality matters, despite the fact that the internet is the greatest and freest and most open market in the history of mankind.
And he opposes open markets.
Here's Bernie Sanders.
A disastrous decision.
It will impact every American.
It will give huge advantages to big corporations over small businesses, big media companies over smaller media outlets.
We've got to do everything we can to defeat this thing in the courts and defeat it legislatively.
Okay, so now they're talking about going to the courts.
First of all, Democrats can't go to the courts, okay?
Administrative decisions like this are not appealable.
If Bernie Sanders wants net neutrality, he can damn well push for it in Congress, which, by the way, is where it should have been pushed for in the first place.
This was not a regulatory decision.
Regulating the internet, like the DWP under Title II, regulating it like a telephone company under Title II makes no sense legally.
If you want to do this, do it through Congress.
In a second, I'm going to explain, I'm going to let, really, Ajit Pai, the head of the FCC, explain why it is that net neutrality is a bad idea.
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Okay, so yesterday, or the day before, I had the chance to speak with Ajit Pai.
Ajit Pai is the head of the FCC.
And he explained to me, I asked him specifically about the big question.
If there's an oligopoly, right?
If there's only one internet service provider in your area, then shouldn't net neutrality be a thing, right?
Shouldn't we force that oligopoly to treat all internet traffic the same so it can't strangle off Hulu, or Netflix, or YouTube, or whichever app it wants to in favor of its own content?
Here was Ajit Pai explaining.
Two different points.
Number one, I agree that we need more competition and that's why over the last 11 months that I've been in office as the chairman of the FCC, we've undertaken a number of initiatives to promote a lot more competition.
Getting more wireless spectrum out there for wireless carriers to use.
Making it easier for smaller fiber providers to enter the marketplace.
Getting the next generation of satellite companies into the marketplace to provide an alternative to the terrestrial folks.
So we're promoting more competition that way.
Number two, ironically, these heavy-handed internet regulations imposed by the FCC in 2015 Take us in the opposite direction.
They make it harder.
It's already hard as it is for a lot of these smaller Internet service providers to build a business case for deploying Internet infrastructure, especially in rural and low-income urban areas.
These regulations make it even harder.
In the last week alone, I've spoken to small Internet service providers that nobody has ever heard of from Minnesota, Montana, who have said that these regulations make it harder to raise capital.
And the statistic that Ajay Pai really cites here, and the one that makes the most sense, we can stop him there.
Well, what makes the most sense, he's talked about this.
He says that among our nation's 12 largest internet service providers, domestic broadband capital expenditures decreased by 5.6% or $3.6 billion between 2014 and 2016, the first two years of the Title II era.
The point being that as soon as net neutrality hit, All of the ISPs basically assumed that all the competition was wiped out.
The major ISPs assumed that there was no reason for them to spend anymore because new regulations would be coming down the pike, forcing them to spend.
And so they stopped spending on broadband.
They stopped doing upkeep on their broadband and making it faster and making it better.
A free market makes competition better.
He explained yesterday, as this thing was repealed, 3-2, he explained his net neutrality decision.
And again, everyone went nuts.
I mean, he's been hit with an enormous number of death threats over this whole thing.
Returning to the legal framework that governed the Internet from President Clinton's pronouncement in 1996 until 2015 is not going to destroy the Internet.
It is not going to end the Internet as we know it.
It is not going to kill democracy.
It is not going to stifle free expression online.
If stating these propositions alone doesn't demonstrate their absurdity, our Internet experience before 2015 and our Internet experience tomorrow, once this order passes, will prove them so.
Simply put, by returning to the light-touch Title I framework, we are helping consumers and promoting competition.
Broadband providers will have stronger incentives to build networks, especially in unserved areas, and to upgrade networks to gigabit speeds and 5G.
This means there will be more competition among broadband providers.
It also means more ways that startups and tech giants alike can deliver applications and content to more users.
In short, it is a freer and more open Internet.
OK, so, you know, this is the case that he's making, people make the opposite case, but one thing that is clear is that it's not going to destroy the Internet.
And so CNN's crazed headlines about this and the Democrats' crazed talk about this, it's a wild exaggeration.
How a regulatory issue that had very little impact on how the Internet actually worked between 2015 and 2017, how that became a life-or-death scenario, just demonstrates the level of hysteria For people who really don't understand what the issue is, even on the most basic level.
I'm not an expert on net neutrality.
I don't pretend to be an expert on net neutrality.
But the basic issue is not about the destruction of the Internet as we know it.
That's just patently insane.
But Jimmy Kimmel went off on it, and here he is.
I mean, Jimmy Kimmel...
First of all, I feel like every time Jimmy Kimmel speaks politics now, he should be morally obligated to bring out his baby, to trot out his child, since he obviously makes emotional appeals on every... What he really should do, if he's not going to bring out his own kid to talk healthcare, what he really should do is he should bring out a poor homeless urchin, street urchin, who will no longer be able to access internet at the public library for purposes of pornography, and he should just drape his arm around him, and then he should say, this poor child will no longer have internet because of net neutrality.
He basically did that last night just without the poor street urchin.
Again, I don't know what qualifies Jimmy Kimmel to talk about these things.
And I'm happy for Jimmy Kimmel to, you know, have a debate with somebody who knows about it.
But Jimmy Kimmel doesn't want to do any of those things.
He just wants to read Chuck Schumer agitprop.
So here he is.
The FCC did something absolutely despicable today.
They voted to put an end to net neutrality.
This is the rule that says everyone gets equal access to the internet.
A big company or somebody selling crocheted owls from their house in the midwest now as long as they tell us they're doing it now internet service providers will be allowed to slow down or block web traffic to any website or streaming service they like which benefits the big telecom companies and does the opposite for all of us but i just want to say thank you president trump thanks to you and this jackal you appointed to run the fcc he's a jackal so it's funny about to take full control of the internet it's it's like comedy it's
He's a jackal, so it's comedy now.
It's not just political.
It's because he said jackal.
Get it?
I love Jimmy Kimmel speaking on behalf of ABC, Disney, the biggest corporation on planet Earth, right?
I mean, he's on ABC.
Disney just bought Fox.
Fox 21st Century, right?
They just bought it, okay?
Outright.
Disney is an enormous corporation.
And here is Jimmy Kimmel talking on ABC's Airwaves, on what is basically an oligopoly, right?
ABC was allowed to dominate the Airwaves because it was one of three networks for most of its history.
And here he is talking about, oh, those corporations, they're going to be controlling everything, those big corporations, because you know who doesn't know anything about big corporations?
It's Jimmy Kimmel.
And I love when he says that, like, Grandma and her crochet website, that's the one that's gonna pay the price for net neutrality being done away with.
The whole point is that Netflix, Google, YouTube oppose it, not Grandma with her crochet website.
No one cares about Grandma's crochet website.
You'd think that Verizon's sitting around going, aha, now we got Grandma in the crosshairs, we're gonna make her pay up.
I mean, she wants her crochet website up there?
Ha ha ha ha, gotta double her price.
What absolute sheer nonsense.
What he's saying doesn't even make any sense.
And it neglects the fact that there are big corporations on both sides of this.
Like, we're going to have a giant fight.
Dave Burge, Iowa hawk, had a great tweet on this.
He basically said, I never thought that the end of the world was going to come over the people who actually provide the content to social media arguing over who should benefit from their content provision.
The ISPs or the companies like Facebook.
That's really what it is.
Like, the cows arguing over who should benefit more over their provision of the milk.
The grocery store or the farmer.
That's really all that's happening here.
But it's insipid, and the level of ire is totally crazy.
And again, people don't know about it.
Jimmy Kimmel doesn't know what he's talking about here.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I know more than Jimmy Kimmel.
An MSNBC anchor tried to do the same thing to a former FCC chairman, and the former FCC chairman basically just stomped on him.
One of the arguments for people in favor of removing net neutrality is that consumers will get more choice in the plans that they can buy.
Why would they get more choice in plans if someone's not either subsidizing or able to be excluded from a particular plan?
Why would I be able to drop what I pay on a monthly basis for internet?
If I'm not going to lose something for it.
Well, let's rewind the tape a little bit, which is, okay, so you're talking about consumers and entrepreneurs and discrimination in favor of your own product, like a Comcast product.
No, that's not what I'm talking about.
I think we need to rewind and have this conversation again at some point because you're making an argument that I'm not making.
I'm saying that if someone has an advantage in streaming their content over the Internet, an established player has an advantage because they've got the money to be able to buy better, faster, quicker access or prevent somebody else from getting it.
That the incumbent is favored over the startup.
That's the only point I wanted to make.
That's the only point I'm making.
And that would be illegal.
That's the point I'm making.
What you just said is already illegal.
It has been for a long time and will be going forward.
So it's good news.
I'm not sure you and I are interpreting the same information.
I know it's good clickbait to say the internet's being destroyed, but it's not.
But Robert, I didn't say that.
I don't know why you're coming on TV to have an argument that I'm not having.
I didn't say the internet's being destroyed.
You just said preferred.
I said free.
If it's preferred, if you're favoring one over another, that's a violation of the law.
This would have been a much better conversation if we were just actually having a conversation.
We are having a conversation.
I'm trying to teach you about the state of the law, which is what's going on today.
I appreciate that.
Thanks very much.
Robert McDowell was former FCC commissioner from 2007.
I love that the anchor here has no idea what he's talking about.
And the former FCC chairman keeps saying, um, it's illegal what you're talking about already.
But none of that matters to anybody.
The facts don't matter.
All that matters is that Jimmy Kimmel is going to appear on television every night with a different victim who he can trot out.
I think it would be a great segment, by the way.
I think you should do Victim of the Night.
Right?
For every policy, he should just bring somebody out.
So every time he talks tax cuts, Jimmy Kimmel should show up with some poor, crippled grandmother.
And every time he talks about gun policy, he should bring out some kid who's been shot in the leg.
It would just be great.
And then he can cry over it.
It'll be the weeping of the evening, every single time.
Okay, so, before I go any further, I'm going to talk about Russian investigation followed by President Trump making a comment this morning that was Rather ill-advised.
Definitely goes in the bad Trump and the good Trump, bad Trump category.
We'll talk about all that, plus a little bit of good Trump.
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Okay, so there is more fallout from the Russian investigation today.
That fallout comes in the form of President Trump and other Republicans now looking to basically curb the Mueller investigation on the back of revelations that people involved in the Mueller investigation have a political bias all their own, which, honestly, we sort of knew.
And what you're seeing is that Trump's allies are now coming out of the woodwork and saying that Mueller needs to pause the probe, that Mueller needs to stop the probe.
I've said all along, That's actually counterproductive.
Mueller needs to go forward with the probe, and then when he comes up with nothing, or even if he comes up with something minor, we can all kick back and say, listen, guys, you came up with something minor after a year of investigation, and your team is corrupt.
Clinton was able to do this very aptly, politically speaking, with Ken Starr, who did not run a corrupt investigation, and who did come up with actual perjury.
Right, so I don't see the point in cutting off the investigation short, and yet you're seeing advocates for Trump basically say this, and it comes off as fear.
To people who are in the middle, it comes off as fear that Mueller's going to find something, even if it really isn't, even if it's just that this investigation is fatally flawed.
If something is fatally flawed, right, if you've already gutshot the investigation, there's no need to give the headshot.
Now, I'm not calling for Mueller to be fired.
It's tempting, but I'm not.
But at the very least, he needs to put the brakes on this investigation, at least pause it for a bit.
You don't need to put it out of its misery.
It's going to die on its own.
In any case, here's Laura Ingraham saying that Mueller needs to pause the probe.
Now, I'm not calling for Mueller to be fired.
It's tempting, but I'm not.
But at the very least, he needs to put the brakes on this investigation, at least pause it for a bit.
I agree with what Alan Dershowitz said on my radio show this morning.
It's time for a respected, independent expert to come in and thoroughly examine the individuals conducting this probe and fire anyone inside who evinces even a hint of an appearance of Okay, so this last call that she's making is the correct one.
The last thing that Ingram is saying here is absolutely correct.
Jim Jordan, friendly with Representative Jordan from the great state of Ohio, he went after Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General.
He said, listen, is it time for a second special counsel to look into how Mueller is doing this investigation?
I mean, what we're learning now is that half of his team was compromised.
You're the guy in charge.
You can disband the Mueller special prosecutor and you can do what we've all called for.
Appoint a second special counsel to look into this.
To look into Peter Strzok, Broussard, everything else we've learned in the last several weeks.
This is what a lot of Americans are believing right now, and I certainly do.
That the Comey FBI and the Obama Justice Department worked with one campaign to go after the other campaign.
That's what everything points to.
Think about what we've learned in the last several weeks.
We first learned they paid for the dossier, then we learned about Peter Strzok, and last week we learned about Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie.
This is unbelievable.
What's it going to take to get a second special counsel to answer these questions and find out, was Peter Strzok really up to what I think he was?
But that doesn't dismiss the fact that the country thinks we need a second special counsel.
20 members of this committee, the Judiciary Committee with primary jurisdiction over the Justice Department thinks we need a second special counsel.
All kinds of senators think we need a special counsel.
What fact pattern do you have to have?
What kind of text message do you have to see before you say, it's time for a second special counsel?
OK, so this is, I think, a valuable call that's happening.
I think it is worthwhile, and I think that the Republicans are doing the right thing.
What I don't think is worthwhile is President Trump intervening himself.
So he was asked today about whether he was going to pardon Michael Flynn.
Michael Flynn, of course, the former national security adviser who has now pled guilty to lying to the FBI.
As I've said before, I don't think that Michael Flynn apparently lied to the FBI about anything substantive, from what we know.
It sounds like he lied about having called the Russian government while he was already in the transition team about an upcoming UN vote on Israel and settlements.
I don't see anything there that is particularly noteworthy, and I'm not sure why Flynn lied to the FBI in the first place.
Trump may very well want to pardon Flynn, but it's not smart for him to say so because it looks right now like Flynn is working with the FBI, and so Trump's statement here that he might pardon Flynn makes it look like he's trying to bribe Flynn not to talk to the FBI with a pardon offer.
Would you consider a pardon for Michael Flynn?
I don't want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet.
We'll see what happens.
Let's see.
I can say this.
When you look at what's gone on with the FBI and with the Justice Department, people are very, very angry.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Okay, so that is not particularly smart by the president because now he's opened that can of worms.
The White House tried to close that can of worms again today when Ty Cobb, not the great baseball player with the .367 lifetime average, Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer with the crazy mustache, that guy came out and he said that Trump really has no intention of pardoning Flynn.
For the moment, that's the line that Trump needs to stick to so it doesn't look like he's obstructing, particularly when Vladimir Putin is doing his best to undermine Trump's credibility.
This is one area where I think Trump really needs to be more careful.
If Vladimir Putin is playing this game with Trump, he knows Trump's mentality is that Trump loves praise.
Trump responds to praise.
Like if you toss Trump a Scooby snack.
Well, that's been brought in by the nose, you know?
And, you know, Vladimir Putin knows that, and so he's acting in that way.
So yesterday he came out and he said that people in the United States should support President Trump because delegitimizing Trump undermines the nation.
Like, this is the stuff that—Putin's not saying this because he cares about America.
He's doing this because he wants Trump to do what he wants Trump to do.
Well, that's been brought in by the nose, you know.
That's been invented by those who are in the opposition.
People who oppose President Trump It really seems strange to me because they don't understand.
time in office.
You know, it really seems strange to me because they don't understand.
It seems that they don't understand.
They undermine their own nation.
They limit the powers of the president who's been elected.
It means that...
So Putin's whole game here is not that he loves Trump or that he's trying to help the United States get through a difficult period in politics.
His game is that he's trying to basically bribe Trump with praise, and Trump is susceptible to that.
He then said to the press today, That Vladimir Putin, and he had a very nice call, and Putin told him that he was very happy that Trump's economy was doing so well.
Like, Putin knows how to play this game.
It's foolish of Trump to fall into that, and Trump should resist the urge, both on Flynn and on Putin.
Like, just back off it, Mr. President, especially when you're doing some good things, because the President is doing some good things, okay?
So, yesterday at the White House, the President did a ceremonial cutting of red tape, and it got made fun of on Twitter a lot, but Who cares about what gets, everything gets made fun of on Twitter.
You know, President Trump had all of these papers stacked of apparently regulations.
There were some questions about whether all of those pages actually had printed material on them.
You remember that President Trump very early on in his presidency, I think it was maybe even before he took presidency, during his transition, he brought out a bunch of folders that he said were all of his Trump Contracts, and that he was going to basically hand those over to his son, and that he was going to disassociate.
And then it turned out that half those folders were filled with empty paper.
Well, I don't know if this paper was empty or not, but it is true that the president has cut a massive amount of regulation.
So yesterday at the White House, he cut a literal red tape with a giant scissors, because this is the kind of schtick we do now in politics.
The truth is, Trump knows this.
This is what Trump is good at, this sort of branding stuff.
Everyone can make fun of this, but if the image is the president of the United States cutting the red tape, So this is what we have now.
This is where we were in 1960.
And when we're finished, which won't be in too long a period of time, we will be less than where we were in 1960, and we will have a great regulatory climate.
for every new regulation added. - So this is what we have now.
This is where we were in 1960.
And when we're finished, which won't be in too long a period of time, we will be less than where we were in 1960 and we will have a great regulatory climate.
Okay, come on up here, Chris.
Come on.
You work so hard.
Elaine, are you okay?
Come on.
Yep.
You okay?
Yep, fine.
She has a lot to do with it.
She has things called roads.
And bridges, right?
Yes.
Okay.
One, two, three.
With all the wild enthusiasm of youth, President Trump cuts that ribbon.
One, two, three.
Pretty spectacular stuff.
It is mock-worthy, but it is also true.
The President of the United States has cut a lot of regulations.
One of the reasons the stock market is doing well.
One of the reasons the economy is very hot.
Last quarter was a 3.3% GDP growth.
And not only that, the Fed is raising the rates again.
So the Fed has been tightening up the monetary flow.
Inflation is going to be brought under control, and the economy continues to be strong.
Some of that is on President Obama and the Republican Congress before Trump, but obviously there's a lot of confidence in how the economy is working right now, and that is at least in large part due to President Trump.
So that is good stuff.
And this is the area where Trump really could succeed.
This is why it's actually deeply important that the president work on his popularity rating.
I know a lot of people don't care about this.
I know a lot of people aren't worried about his popularity.
They think, oh well, he can have bad poll numbers, and as long as he's doing well, we're happy.
He needs to get his poll numbers up, because a lot of the things he's doing are things I like.
They are things that I agree with.
A lot of his agenda mirrors my own.
I think that's wonderful.
But, if you take my agenda, and then you smear poop all over it, right?
If you take my agenda, and you take your unpopularity, and you smear my agenda with unpopularity, it makes my agenda toxic.
That's not worthwhile.
Okay, you should not make your own agenda toxic this way.
And that's why it's very important that the president should be focusing in on his own accomplishments like a laser.
He should be focusing in on the things he's doing like a laser.
He should not be making himself more unpopular with foolish statements like the one that he made today about Mike Flynn.
He should not be engaging on Twitter as much.
Honest to God, if somebody unplugged the man's phone and it just, the battery ran down, Or if Comcast decided to cut off Twitter, but just for the White House, then his popularity ratings would jump rather dramatically.
Because the fact is, the Democrats have nothing here, right?
Nancy Pelosi was saying that the GOP — like, she's trying to make the case the GOP tax bill is a Pyrrhic victory, that it's going to end the Republicans.
There has never been a tax reduction in history that has redounded to the negative effect of Republicans, ever.
It does not work that way.
Well, we stayed united, and we still continue that fight.
I think this is a Pyrrhic victory if, in fact, it does happen.
We don't have the votes to take it down unless some of the Republicans see the light.
And people are speaking out, especially since they added the repeal of the mandate, the Affordable Care Act individual mandate.
That has energized the base further.
But this is who they are.
This is what they came here to do, tax cuts.
This is all empty.
It doesn't work.
Democrats have been trying this for years.
All the anti-tax cut rhetoric is a bunch of nonsense.
And so that's why, if Trump's agenda were the main focus here, as opposed to whatever Trump says today, he'd be doing a lot better, and so would the conservative agenda.
Because he's been a lot more conservative than I thought he would be as president.
This is not how he campaigned.
I'm very pleased with that.
But I want to see all of that at the top of the page, not all of the other nonsense that seems to cloud our judgment.
Okay, so I have a lot to get to today.
We have the mailbag today, things I like, things I hate, still a lot on the docket here.
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Alrighty, time for a quick thing I like and then a thing I hate and then we'll get to the mailbags.
So thing that I like today, I've been doing Beethoven all week.
So this is one of my dad's favorite pieces.
This is Beethoven's Sonata Opus 111.
The reason that I picked this is not only because it's fun, but this particular segment of Beethoven, if you don't hear snidely whiplash in here, like Beethoven is so modern that when you listen to his music, especially his late music, what you will hear is all of these film references that you never had thought about before, and you'll hear where they came from.
So this is basically It sounds like Snidely Whiplash.
There's no way around it.
It sounds like Nell is tied to the tracks and Dudley Durett's gonna show up.
up.
So here it is from Sonata, opus 111 from Beethoven.
piano plays softly
That's the thing that Beethoven If you actually listen to a lot of Beethoven, his range is just astonishing.
And some of the concerts that he gave.
So Beethoven started off as a concert pianist.
Everybody thinks that he's famous for being a composer.
He started off like Mozart as a performer.
He was world famous.
I mean, he was famous across Europe.
He was mostly famous for improvisation.
So everybody thinks of classical music as being very staid, and it's all written on the page, as opposed to jazz, which is improvisational.
But Beethoven He was very, very famous for being the greatest improviser of his age.
And you can tell that in his development sections in his pieces, which I talked about yesterday.
But they're famous stories of him.
They would basically have improvisation offs.
Like, they would actually have a couple of pianists in a room.
One person would improvise, and the other person would have to do something cooler with improvisation.
There's a famous story about Beethoven where he was in a bad mood one day, and somebody invited him to one of these parties and wanted him to play.
And he was not into it, and he lost to some guy.
It was the only time he'd ever lost.
He was sort of undefeated.
And then the guy called for a rematch.
And in the rematch, the guy who he was improvising against, that guy made a mistake.
He took one of Beethoven's themes and started improvising off one of Beethoven's themes as a way to mock Beethoven.
The guy had also premiered a new piece of his.
Beethoven went over to the cellist in the new piece, took the cellist's music, turned it upside down, and then improvised off the guy's music upside down.
So that's how talented a musician Beethoven was.
You can't say enough about the greatness of Beethoven's genius.
Okay, time for a couple of things I hate and then we'll go mailbag.
OK, so first thing that I hate, there's this video going around yesterday that's just insane.
A lot of the northern European countries have gotten very into euthanasia.
When I say that, I don't mean that they've legalized euthanasia.
I mean that they have actually started advocating for euthanasia for people who are mentally handicapped.
They've advocated for euthanasia for people who are depressed.
They've relieved restrictions on euthanasia.
This is doctor-assisted suicide, of course.
And this video, if this doesn't scream Nazi to you, it's because you don't know enough about the Nazis.
Here's a Dutch government official telling a Down Syndrome man that he's too expensive, how much he costs the state to be living, to be alive.
Here is this video, it's pretty astonishing.
It says 48,000 euro per year approximately.
Per Downer, per Down Syndrome person.
So, short costs us as a society 48,000 euros per year.
Whoa.
That is a considerable amount, but is it a high one compared to normal persons?
Is that now also in comparison with normal persons?
Well, that can you also hear me out of here.
Well, you can calculate that by taking the big number, that 90 billion, and divide this amount by the number of citizens in the Netherlands.
And there you're approximately 17 million, and that will give you approximately an amount of 5,000 euros per year per person.
So you could say that short is almost 10 times as expensive than we are.
Those expenses are indeed 10 times as high.
You are a valuable man, Sjoerd.
Okay, the reason that this is creepy, folks, is if you look back at the Nazi eugenics programs, this is how they all started.
Look back at the campaign of 1932.
One of the things the Nazis were saying is, there are a bunch of people in our society who are the undesirables and they cost the government too much money.
They cost the government too much money for upkeep.
And if there were only something we could do with them, if there were only something we could do with all these very expensive people, it costs a lot of money to keep them alive.
And there's always a creepy prelude.
Either these are people who deserve our help, or they're people who don't deserve our help.
They're human beings.
They can't take care of themselves.
They deserve our help.
Falling into this trap is the essence of evil.
But this is also what socialism ends toward, right?
When the government is quote-unquote paying people to live, and private charity withers, then it's only a matter of time before the government starts thinking of ways out of this particular conundrum.
OK, so final thing that I hate today.
So Mark Stein, I thought, made a point that is worth noting with regard to sexual harassment.
He's getting all sorts of flack for it.
But this is a point that I've made, too.
When we talk about sexual harassment and sexual assault, we need to be very specific about what it is that we are talking about, because vague standards actually hurt women.
They not only hurt women by conflating sexual harassment with non-sexual harassment, or conflating mild sexual harassment, meaning a guy says something crude in the workplace, to rape.
But they also end up making it They give a reverse incentive for employers to actually hire women, in much the same way that the Americans with Disabilities Act, which forced business owners to build in ramps in their places of business if they hired a disabled person, caused a lot of business owners not to hire disabled people.
There are actual statistics that bear that out.
In the same way, this idea that sexual harassment is going to be vaguely defined and we're going to destroy the career of anybody who's ever accused of anything is going to encourage men to hire only other men, so that they're not accused of this sort of stuff.
Mark Stein makes this point yesterday.
Do I really want to be alone with a female employee now?
Who knows how she's going to feel about it in 30 years time?
I mean, I don't think that's necessarily in the interests of women in the workplace.
I don't think it's in the interests of social relations.
It's an insane moral panic that started with genuine rape, genuine violence, genuine power issues, and now just seems to have degenerated into one anonymous accusation Well, this is why we have to be very careful, and that's why we have to be very specific about what accusations we're going to hold to.
You know, I've said this over and over and over.
Sexual harassment is evil.
Sexual abuse is evil.
But we need to be very clear about what we're talking about and what kind of accusations we're going to take with the proper amount of severity.
Otherwise, the actual effect will be people making the kinds of decisions you don't want them to make, saying, I'm not going to hire that woman because if I hire her, Then I'm afraid she's going to accuse me of sexual harassment at some point down the line.
That may be unjustified.
That is the way people act.
Okay, time for the mailbag.
So, Caitlin says, Hi Ben, I read on your Fox News Power Player of the Week article that you initially wanted to double major in genetic science and music.
What brought you to deciding on political science and then law school?
Thanks, Caitlin.
So, what actually brought me to political science is two things.
One, I tried an engineering class, a math engineering class.
And I did okay in it.
I was getting an A. I think I was getting an A up until the final.
And then I ended up with a B in the class, I believe.
But in any case, I was like, that's enough of that.
That was one thing.
The other thing that happened is that I was walking through the UCLA campus and I picked up the UCLA Daily Bruin, which is a far left rag.
And there was a piece in it comparing then the Israeli Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon.
To Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi.
And I walked into the offices and said, do you mind if I write a counter to this?
And they said, sure.
And then that became a counterpoint column.
And I realized that this is something I'm much more interested in than doing all the things necessary to become an expert in genetics.
It's not that I wasn't interested in the topic.
I just wasn't willing to slog through that mud.
And I have nothing but admiration for people who do.
For the 1,000th time, my wife is a doctor, which means that she is still basically doing, she's residency now, right?
I mean, she's been doing this since we met.
Okay, we've been married for 10 years.
And she's, 10 years in July.
And she, and yet she is still, you know, doing this.
So that's a long haul.
Well, it's very difficult to prove to a small child there's long-term benefits playing the instrument.
You have to make it fun.
child there's a long-term benefit to playing an instrument.
Well, it's very difficult to prove to a small child there's a long-term benefit to playing the instrument.
You have to make it fun.
One of the things that was of advantage to me is that my father was a professional musician, so he would sit there with the piano and play You actually need to sit there and practice with your kid.
You need to be involved.
It's boring, it may not be fun for you, but if your kid knows that you're willing to put in the time, then your kid assumes that you are willing also to do that only for things that are important.
Plus, kids want to spend time with their parents, and if you're willing to spend time with your kid practicing, even if you are not, you know, even if you're not musically versed, Then your kid will take it a lot more seriously.
You can't just tell a kid, go practice for half an hour.
You actually need to sit there with the kid.
And I think if you're willing to do that, then your kid will be more likely to practice.
Also, when you get to a certain level, it does become enjoyable.
At the very beginning, it's kind of fun because it's something new.
And then there's a plateau that gets hit where it becomes very difficult.
And then when you get good enough, then it's a lot of fun again because you're skilled.
Okay, Al says, Hey, Ben.
Coming from the U.K., which has health care for all, but to my mind is struggling to pay for it, your arguments on health care supply interest me greatly.
I like the American idea that the market is used to drive down costs, but at the same time, according to the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S.
government spends way more on health care than most major countries.
It has the lowest quality of care in terms of outcomes, equity, and access, whereas the U.K.
has the highest, even though we're close to rationing the system is so expensive.
What in your mind is the best system for countries with huge populations like the U.K.
and U.S.
to solve the health care crisis, given they both spend too much, but socialized health care seems to produce better results?
Well, it depends on the results that you are seeking.
So, number one, socialized medicine has pretty good emergency care, but they have not great surgical care in the sense that you have to wait around in line for the rationing to actually take place.
The five-year survival rate for cancer in the United States is significantly higher than it is in places like the UK, specifically because I can go and get the care that I need now instead of having to sit around and wait.
Healthcare on demand is, you know, a market-driven healthcare system.
is great, but it requires the patient to actually do the research.
And because of the insurance companies that provide a barrier between you and the doctor, and you don't actually know what you're paying to the doctor 'cause your insurance company covers it, you end up ordering more services than are necessary, and in many cases, so does your doctor.
If you were actually forced to sit there and say, "Okay, is it worth an X-ray today?" Is it worth $1,000 for an x-ray?
Or I can go home and wait for a week.
You'd probably go home and wait for a week.
There actually isn't perfect market transparency in the United States, and that causes a serious problem in terms of the meat between supply and demand in terms of medical care in the United States.
Well, I mean, when you talk about access, basically, socialized medicine will always have the highest access because people can walk into a hospital and demand service, or to a doctor's office and demand service.
They don't have the highest outcomes in terms of the rate at which those services are provided.
And in terms of outcomes, again, it sort of depends on which outcomes you're looking at.
You can't say outcomes overall.
Also, the U.K.
population is not really comparable to the United States either in terms of size or diversity.
Well, I'd have to think about that one a little bit more.
I'm trying to think back to a time when the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were sort of reverses of what they are now.
I think that in 1948, I would have to seriously consider Truman versus Dewey.
I think that that would probably be the only one that I'd be interested in looking at seriously.
Perhaps '56, Adley-Stevenson versus Eisenhower.
I might've looked at that one more seriously, mainly because I think Eisenhower's foreign policy with regard to the Suez Canal crisis, which really happened at the tail end of his first term, that that would have been a problem for me.
So I think that that's a, you know, those two races, but I don't know, I'd really have to study those more to determine how I would have come out, whether I really would have voted for the Democrat over the Republican in those races.
I work with a bunch of liberals that hate God.
One person in particular has zero respect for God, my belief in God, or just me as a human being in general.
She'll ask zero questions about God and then mock my answer.
This individual is a supervisor.
I fear going to HR or upper management in case of retaliation and losing my job.
How should I handle this?
Well, you should stop interacting.
I mean, frankly, it's not worth every interaction.
They may make things chilly.
Keep things professional.
Keep things light.
Don't talk about God.
If they mock God, just say, listen, I find that offensive and I don't deserve to have my belief system mocked.
I don't mock your belief system.
I don't know if they have a problem with that, Toph.
But I don't think that professionalism in the workplace seems to me a bare minimum, no matter what your political viewpoint.
So what I've said is in an ideal world, everyone who has credible allegations of sexual assault and abuse should resign.
Everyone.
for Roy Moore to drop out and Al Franken to resign.
Where do you stand on Trump's allegations and how do they differ from the above-mentioned senators?
Should Trump resign too?
So what I've said is in an ideal world, everyone who has credible allegations of sexual assault and abuse should resign.
Everyone.
And in an ideal world, that would include the president.
But there is a difference in kind between the Roy Moore situation and the Al Franken situation and Trump.
The difference in kind is this, and not with regard to the allegations.
With regard to the practicality of saying they should resign, there's one giant obstacle.
That is, Roy Moore was running in an election.
The people did not elect him.
Okay, so, that's that.
Al Franken, people didn't know this information when they elected him, so now it's new information breaking, and that changes the calculation as to whether he should resign.
All the allegations against Trump are old, people knew about it when they elected him, nothing new has been added to the pie, therefore it's difficult to say that, on the basis of nothing changing, he should now resign.
That's like saying he should have quit during the election cycle, which, by the way, I believe I said, during the election cycle, in the middle of the P-word tape.
So, that's my general take.
In the ideal world, sure.
In the real world, not really.
Danielle says, I do think that remaining abstinence until marriage affects I do think that remaining abstinence until marriage affects the success of relationships generally, Meaning that people who live together before marriage have a significantly higher divorce rate than people who don't live together before marriage.
And usually once you're living with a certain level of intimacy, sexually, you end up living together before you're married.
And that does not actually end up reflecting married life.
Married life is not you living together with your boyfriend.
Married life is you have kids, you have a joint bank account, you have responsibilities.
Those are not always reflected in just you living with your boyfriend, even with the advent of single motherhood.
I think that The idea of born-again marriage, the virgins, the idea that you've had sex, but now with your new partner, you're gonna say no sex until marriage.
I think that's a worthwhile thing because it's asking, just practically speaking, it's asking for a commitment before you decide to commit your body to somebody.
And I think that that is a smart play.
I think it's a smart play.
I think it's a demand for commitment that should easily be met by a good person.
The fact that we, there's so many TV shows now where they've reversed everything.
It's funny how this worked.
It used to be, That when I grew up, my parents said to me, when you get married, then you'll have sex.
And then it turned into, when people talk to their kids, they say, well, when you love somebody, you have sex.
And now it's turned into, you'll have sex, and then you figure out whether you love somebody.
And when you watch TV, this is what you see.
You see two people hop into bed, and then they'll be real awkward about whether to say I love you or not.
So this idea that somehow love has been more closely tied to sex, with the disconnection between sex and marriage, is absolutely false.
In fact, love has become less connected to sex.
Sex was much more connected with love when love was connected to commitment.
So I think we've completely reversed the polarity on sex, love, and marriage.
Robert says, hey Ben, my girlfriend has a very small family.
I have a very large family.
She has asked me previously about taking on her family's last name because if I don't, her dad will likely be the last to hold it.
I want to hold on to my last name.
I also don't know why I should seemingly be selfish and have her give it up.
What is your advice and what are your thoughts on last names?
So when I got married, my wife seriously considered keeping her last name as her middle name.
So her maiden name is Toledano.
She seriously thought about keeping that as her middle name.
And I was fine with that, because my mom did the same thing.
She kept her maiden name as her middle name.
It never bothered me.
I never thought that was a big deal, as long as she took my last name.
The reason I think that's important is because I think that it is important that a family That a family start on the footing of, we are a new family now.
We are our own family.
We are our own family unit.
And the reason that I think that it's important for, I think it is sort of emasculating for men, maybe it's a cultural totem, but I think it's emasculating for men to give up their family name.
The idea that a man is supposed to give up, you know, what he has grown up with in favor of the woman's family can be emasculating.
If you don't find it emasculating, I don't see a problem with it.
If you do find it emasculating, then I do see a problem with it.
So this is really between you and the person that you're married to?
For me, my wife said to me, listen, she was thinking about keeping that middle name.
She decided not to.
She decided to just go with her first name.
She didn't even have a middle name.
She decided to go with her first name and my last name because she said, listen, we're now our own family.
We are our own family unit.
I want to be part of that family unit with you.
It was very moving to me, frankly, and it's something that I really appreciated.
It's a gift from her to me.
It's not something I had to expect, but it's something that I certainly appreciated.
Okay, Joe says, what is the most infuriating debate tactic used against you and how do you combat it?
Well, always the most infuriating debate tactic is when someone will dig something up ten years old, take it out of context, and then use it against you, and then refuse to hear the answer.
That's always infuriating.
Because context matters.
And things that you said in 2007 may not be things that you agree with today.
And things that you tweeted in 2012 may not be things that are even taken in context.
So for me, for example, there's been a tweet that people have been using against me on Twitter for a long time with regard to Arabs and Israelis in which I said something to the effect of Israelis like to build and Arabs like to live in open sewage.
The idea of that tweet was not that every Arab likes to live in open sewage, you morons.
The idea of that tweet is that in the Israeli-Arab conflict, there is one side that likes to build things and one side that would prefer to spend its money on building terror tunnels in the Gaza Strip.
Instead of actually caring for its people.
And in fact, not only am I saying that now, I said that in 2012.
There were four follow-up tweets, I believe, and all of them said exactly that.
Doesn't matter, people take that tweet out of context and then they use that to say that I'm racist against Arabs, which is absurd.
In that same tweet thread, I specifically say that there are Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs who are wonderful people, just not the ones who side with terror groups like Hamas.
But, again, that's just an example of how people take things out of context and then use them against you, and that I find highly irritating.
David says, do you feel everyone speaks too slowly?
Yes.
Yes, everyone speaks too slowly.
They're wasting my time.
The podcast that I listen to, I actually had to download an app that allows me to listen to podcasts at 2.5.
So I listen to all the podcasts that I listen to at 2.5.
I guess the maximum is 3.
It depends on who's podcasting.
If somebody's a very slow speaker, then 3 is the proper speed.
I hear that it's difficult to listen to my podcast on 2, or even 1.5.
But for those who are willing to take the speed challenge, go for it.
Michael says, Ben, I've been deeply inspired by your devotion to your religion and dedication to the nation.
I'm a person raised Christian, but I rejected the church and have been living as an atheist for the last 15 years.
As a veteran fighting PTSD, I found that your Bible talk was leading me to read the Torah, and I've been more optimistic than I have been in years.
I want to know more about converting to Judaism, and what your advice would be for a person living in a deeply Christian community, Bible Belt coal country, with absolutely no Jewish community to turn to.
Is there a place I can find mentorship, and what is the view of the Jewish community on conversion?
So Jewish law generally actually discourages conversion because it's not the world's easiest life, right?
Now, to convert, you have to convert orthodox from the orthodox point of view, and that means that you have to take upon yourself all the obligations.
Not working on Sabbath, making sure that you eat kosher, right?
You're supposed to commit to everything, because if you're gonna commit, commit, right?
That's the basic idea here.
So we actually tell people, if somebody wants to convert, we actually turn them down three times.
We're actually halachically, according to Jewish law, obligated to turn them down three times before we're allowed to say yes.
As far as mentorship, I think there are a lot of rabbis who can be talked to who are really good on this.
If you want to email me directly, I can probably refer you to some if this is something that you want to take seriously or find out more about.
It's going to be very difficult for you to live as an observant Jew in an area where there are no other Jews because so many Jewish commitments are communal.
It's about the nation of Israel and Judaism, not just the individual who has a relationship with God in the Torah.
But I'd be happy to pass on some names for you.
Daniel says, "Hey Ben, caught your talk in San Francisco this weekend and thought you did a good job.
Here's my question.
If you were to concede Sam's point about free will, that low producing people or even criminals are entirely products of their biological predisposition and environment, would you still think that the best mindset or policies for maximizing human well-beings are ones that promote and empower self-reliance over support from the government?" So the answer is yes, but I think the entire thing becomes a giant self-contradiction.
So one of the big problems here is that if you are living in a determinist universe, even the question as to what policies the government should pursue assumes a certain level of free will on the part of government actors to actually change the policies.
This is my big problem with Sam's take on free will.
Once you say this, once you're living in a fully deterministic universe, then I'm going to do what I was going to do.
The idea of me even getting up in the morning and going to do things, I was going to do that.
So it's not like I make the choice to do that, or I make the choice to support certain policies.
I was going to support those policies all along, and I had no choice in that process.
The computer fries itself, in other words.
All of human progress relies on the idea that we have a capacity to discover what's true about the universe, and that we have a capacity to make better policy that frees people.
All of that is based on free will and the capacity for choice.
You get rid of all that.
This is the basic question that I kept asking Sam, and I'm not sure that I got an answer that satisfied me at the very least.
I kept saying to him, You know, Sam, you talk a lot about changing the world and you talk a lot about using active verbs, making choices, but you don't believe in those choices.
You talk a lot about moral values and what that value system should be.
Making a value decision is a choice about hierarchy of values.
How do you make that decision?
You can't get from is to ought.
You can't get from we are balls of meat wandering aimlessly through the universe with some capacity for self-perception with The idea that there is a moral system that makes certain things more worthwhile than others.
You can't get from here is a cup to what should I do with this cup unless there was a creator of the cup who had in mind what the cup is for.
That's the point that I was making.
Philosophy bridges the is-ought gap.
This is what Aristotle does.
Aristotle says, what makes a man good is that man was created for a certain purpose.
Once you get rid of purpose, once you get rid of design, once you get rid of the idea of meaning, I don't know how you reconstruct anything that looks like a functional society.
Ben says, hi Ben, I was reading an article you retweeted from National Review about how America's youth are lonelier, less independent, and less attached to community.
I understand that much of this could be applied to me.
How does someone who desperately wants to break this rather nihilist youth mentality go about doing it?
Engage.
The answer is engage.
Get active.
You can sit there and you can contemplate it, or you can go involve yourself with other people.
It's hard, I know.
It's especially hard when you're a single guy.
I remember being a single guy before I was married.
Marriage is a wonderful thing.
I love being married.
When I was a single guy, I did not enjoy being single because it takes actual effort to go out and engage with other human beings.
You actually have to go out and make an effort to join a group.
Go out and do it.
It'll make your life better.
Those social engagements will make you more apt to open up to others, and that will enrich your experience in life.
Holden says, Well, I mean, the number one thing that I always say about income inequality is that there are two things.
Number one, what level of income equality would be sufficient for you?
Can you give me some pointers on how to debate income inequality?
Well, I mean, the number one thing that I always say about income inequality is that what level, two things.
Number one, what level of income equality would be sufficient for you and why?
So for Bernie Sanders, why shouldn't everyone make $40,000 a year?
That seems the fairest thing.
Why not be full communist?
Seize all the property, redistribute it, everybody gets the same thing.
Why not?
Is it really fair that someone should make more than somebody else?
And why?
How do you make that decision?
Put the onus on the person to explain what level of income inequality is bad versus what level of income inequality is good.
Second, it does not hurt you that Bill Gates is rich.
Bill Gates being rich is actually good for you because it's Bill Gates' wealth that brought about all of these consensual transactions in which you take place.
Every time you buy a loaf of bread from the grocer, you are making the grocer richer.
Would you prefer not to be able to buy the loaf of bread?
You've created more income inequality because you just spent money with the grocer.
You're poorer.
He's richer.
Are you both worse off?
Or are you both better off?
The answer is, you're both better off.
No.
The short answer is no.
Rodney says, I know you said hip-hop isn't music.
Are there any hip-hop songs or artists that you have at least somewhat enjoyed?
No.
The short answer is no.
I feel like there's probably some hip-hop that I might enjoy on a visceral level.
But I have not yet found it.
Maybe that's because I let my Apollonian side dominate my Dionysian side too much in the sort of Nietzschean juxtaposition.
So maybe that's a little sophisticated for a hip-hop breakdown.
But there you are.
Okay, so we will be back here next week.
We'll be back here on Monday.
I hope you have a wonderful and meaningful weekend.
If you're celebrating Hanukkah, I hope that you're having a wonderful Hanukkah.
If you're celebrating Christmas, I hope you're having a wonderful time getting prepared for Christmas.
In any case, have a great weekend.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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