The White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci has been named as the new communications director, and he is not only a New York financier, but also a supporter of President Trump. What does this mean for the future of the White House communications team? Is this a good or bad move by President Trump and why he should be allowed to work with Jeff Sessions, the attorney general who has been a long-time supporter of the President and has been on the Trump inner circle for a long period of time? What does it mean for his chances of replacing Sean Spicer, the outgoing White House Press Secretary, and why should he be allowed on the inner circle of the Trump administration? What is the best way to protect your savings in the event of a major economic downturn, and what can you do about it? Today's After Show Was Hosted By: John Rocha, Sriram Chatterbox, Ben Kuklinski, and Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Our ad music is by Suneaters. Subscribe to our new album "Goodbye Outer Space" by Fountains of Wayne and our new single "Outer Space Traveler" by Fugue Records, out now available on iTunes! Subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Music and other podcasting platforms! Subscribe on Podchaser. Download MP3" Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your thoughts on our new music streaming service Websites and social media platforms. Send us your reviews and recommendations for future episodes of our new show recommendations! We'll be looking out there! Thank you for supporting us on Anchor.fm.fm and Weebreon.fm/The Best Fiends Subscribe & Share our new ad-free version of the show! If you like what you're listening to us on Apple Podcasts? Subscribe? Subscribe & review us on Podcoin? and we'll be giving you a chance to win a FREE FASTEST SUBSCRIBE to our newest ad-less version of our newest episode on the Podcoin podcast "The Best Podcast Epilog? And we'll send you a review! and more! Thanks for listening to our latest episode of The Best of The Hillcast on iTunes and other places we post it to our podcast, too much love and support us on social media?
00:00:00.000People tend to hang out with people they like.
00:00:02.000That usually means people with whom they share values and community and life experiences.
00:00:05.000But now, it appears that our political polarization has grown so wide that Americans who voted differently in 2016 don't want to hang out with each other.
00:00:12.000That, at least, is the story from the Pew Research Center with regard to leftists.
00:00:16.000That study found that 47% of liberal Democrats stated that if a friend voted for Donald Trump, it would strain the friendship.
00:00:29.000Maybe that number would have changed if Hillary had won.
00:00:31.000But there's more than a whiff of elemental scorn Democrats hold for Trump voters.
00:00:35.000They don't see what was so bad about Hillary that would necessitate a vote for Trump.
00:00:39.000They think a vote for Trump could never be made in a good-faith effort to help the country, but it was rather just an endorsement of Trump's worst behavior.
00:00:45.000This feeling, combined with the fact that leftists live in bubbles, as Aaron Blake of the Washington Post points out, 47% of people who voted for Clinton had zero Trump-supporting friends.
00:00:54.000That means that the left will continue to polarize and pillory.
00:00:57.000Only 28% of Democrats today say they aren't stressed by talking with those who differ on Trump, which means that the vast majority of Democrats won't even deign to discuss the issues.
00:01:05.000That leads to less knowledge of the typical Republican and the lazy intellectual construct that turns Trump voters into an other
00:01:38.000I'm gonna get to a lot of Hollywood because I saw Dunkirk last night and it is just a stunning film.
00:01:42.000I want to talk about why it's so good.
00:01:43.000I also want to show you a trailer that I think is legitimately one of the worst trailers with major stars ever made.
00:01:49.000It's really spectacularly bad and I love it so much because it's so bad.
00:01:53.000But before we get to any of that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
00:01:57.000So, if you are looking at the economy and you are seeing the political situation, you feel that perhaps it is volatile, perhaps we have a situation on our hands, or maybe a situation will arise, then it is important that you spend some of your money and put it in precious metals.
00:02:40.000The people I would trust for investing in precious metals, birchgold.com slash Ben, they will send you a comprehensive 16-page kit showing how gold and silver can protect your savings.
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00:02:52.000Okay, so a lot of breaking news happening actually right now.
00:02:55.000So the biggest breaking news, and this literally broke about five minutes ago as we're filming this, is that Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary, has now resigned, telling President Trump he vehemently disagreed with the appointment of New York financiers Anthony Scaramucci
00:03:08.000As communications director, according to the New York Times, Mr. Trump offered Mr. Scaramucci the job at 10 a.m.
00:03:13.000The president requested Mr. Spicer stay on.
00:03:15.000Mr. Spicer told Mr. Trump he believed the appointment was a major mistake, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange.
00:04:27.000Considered kind of a Non-entity or somebody who shouldn't have the job by a lot of Trump supporters is because he wasn't on the Trump bandwagon from the beginning and therefore They think that he should not be allowed on the inner circle And this is one of the issues that Trump has had is trying to figure out who should be allowed to work with him Who should he trust and there the people have been with him for a long time are?
00:04:47.000Upset that he seems not to trust them so much anymore so case in point be Jeff Sessions so yesterday Tucker Carlson came out
00:04:53.000When he was ripping up President Trump for ripping on Jeff Sessions.
00:04:56.000As you recall, we played you some of the New York Times interview yesterday in which Trump said that he would never have hired Sessions if he knew that Sessions was going to recuse himself.
00:05:04.000Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, both longtime Trump supporters, came forward and said, listen, stop messing with Sessions.
00:05:09.000Sessions is one of your earliest supporters.
00:05:10.000He's one of the good guys on this team, particularly with regard to immigration.
00:05:16.000And there is a feeling that there's some confusion inside the Trump White House about staffing.
00:05:20.000That is only being exacerbated by a new report yesterday from the Washington Post revealing that academic discussions have been ongoing at the White House regarding President Trump's pardon power.
00:05:30.000Apparently they're having lots of talks about what he can do with pardons.
00:05:33.000Can he preemptively pardon family members?
00:05:37.000Like, this is really in the Washington Post.
00:05:38.000Trump has asked advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members, and even himself in connection with the Russia probe, according to one of those people.
00:05:45.000A second person said Trump's lawyers have been discussing the president's pardoning powers among themselves.
00:05:50.000You know, I would imagine that at every point you have lawyers who are discussing the pardon power.
00:05:55.000I'm not sure what they'd be discussing exactly except for what is he capable of pardoning.
00:05:59.000Like if he pardons a crime now and the new evidence comes out later, does the pardon cover that maybe?
00:06:04.000There's a lot of talk this morning about if he would pardon himself, would that actually be legal?
00:06:27.000If you're into the appearances of politics, you can still believe that Trump has never done anything wrong.
00:06:32.000That Trump is clean as the driven snow and that he has nothing to hide.
00:06:35.000But he needs to stop acting like he has something to hide if he actually wants you to believe that, right?
00:06:39.000The first paragraph of this Washington Post story says some of President Trump's lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president's authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort.
00:06:55.000Yesterday, the spokesperson for his legal effort regarding the Russia investigation quit.
00:07:05.000I mean, if your whole shtick here is, let all the doors be open, let everything come out, I'm draining the swamp, see what I have in here in my apartment, policemen, just come in and investigate, and then the next thing you do is immediately barricade three of the doors, people are going to start getting a little bit suspicious.
00:07:20.000And so, you know, do I think that this means that Trump is guilty of anything?
00:07:26.000No, I mean, there's alternative explanations that are just as plausible.
00:07:29.000Like, for example, maybe the reason he doesn't want Mueller digging into his IRS records is because he is deathly afraid that Mueller is going to find that he's not worth anything like the wealth he said he was worth, right?
00:07:37.000He's only worth two billion bucks instead of ten billion bucks.
00:08:21.000But why is he giving a long interview with the New York Times in which he's talking about why he might fire Robert Mueller and why Jeff Sessions should never have recused himself?
00:08:33.000Unless, there's only two possibilities here, right?
00:08:35.000Trump, his worst enemy is his big mouth and he's doing things that look guilty because he just can't help himself because he has to talk all the time.
00:08:58.000Understand, no hard evidence of Trump-Russia actual collusion has taken place.
00:09:02.000There's intent to collude from Trump Jr., right?
00:09:04.000There's intent to collude from Manafort, presumably.
00:09:07.000There's intent to collude from Jared Kushner, but there is no actual on-the-ground collusion, no payoffs, no quid pro quo.
00:09:15.000You know, so from the perspective of the left, you need to understand we need more evidence in order for us to acknowledge that Trump actually did something illegal or even deeply wrong other than that meeting at this point, and Trump wasn't in that meeting as far as we know.
00:09:27.000From the perspective of the left, I think the right needs to understand the perspective of the left here.
00:09:31.000They're looking at this and what they see is a meeting between Trump Jr.
00:09:34.000and a bunch of Russian lawyers that was basically paved with a promise that they were going to give Trump negative information about Hillary as part of Russia's governmental effort to support Trump.
00:09:46.000And then you have Trump firing Mike Flynn for unspecified reasons after it comes out that Flynn has connections with Russia.
00:09:52.000And then you have him firing his FBI director and saying openly that it's because of the Russia investigation.
00:09:58.000And then you have him saying that he should have fired Sessions or never hired Sessions because Sessions was recusing himself from the Russia investigation.
00:10:04.000And then you have a series of policy decisions that benefit Russia, including the decision this week by President Trump not to arm and fund Syrian rebels against Bashar Assad, right, which helps the Russian government.
00:10:14.000So if you're on the left, you're looking at all these indicators and you're saying, OK, well, you know, I see a lot of dots here.
00:10:21.000And if you're on the right, you have to understand that perspective, because we did the same thing with President Obama, right?
00:10:25.000We were very suspicious of President Obama.
00:10:27.000I think it's more justified with Obama than it is for Trump, because I think that, frankly, Trump is more likely to make stupid mistakes and say dumb things than Obama was.
00:10:35.000I think Obama was much more of a president by design.
00:10:38.000I think that it's important we understand where we are so that we don't fall apart as a country because what I can foresee happening is some quasi-smoking gun comes out and the right says it doesn't mean anything unless it means everything and we just grow further and further apart as a people and I think that's a mistake.
00:10:52.000I think we we can disagree on the implications of these facts but we should at least acknowledge what the facts are and why maybe the other guy thinks what he thinks.
00:11:26.000His name is Kevin Allred, and he's an adjunct part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, which is a hell of a title.
00:11:32.000He taught a class there called Politicizing Beyonce, starting in 2010, because our institutions of higher education are the stupidest places on earth.
00:11:39.000And Kevin Allred tweeted the other day, John McCain is pretty okay with taking away everyone's healthcare, so excuse me if I don't have a well of sympathy for his brain cancer.
00:11:48.000There are Democrats who believe this sort of stuff.
00:11:52.000Bernie Sanders, he says that he's not using violent rhetoric with regard to Trumpcare, but that's a lie.
00:11:57.000Here's Bernie Sanders doing it over and over and over again.
00:11:59.000Okay, I want to talk about the rhetoric then, Senator, because if you're going to sit down with people on both sides of the aisle... Some Democrats have branded Republicans the party of death, for example, calling the tax cuts in the Senate health care bill blood money.
00:12:11.000You yourself have said Republicans are potentially killing Americans.
00:12:15.000Is that rhetoric irresponsible, and does it provide an impasse to compromise if you're going to sit down with those very people that you've now said want to kill people?
00:12:23.000No, I never said... That's not... You're using rhetoric that I didn't use.
00:12:54.000Okay, so that was put together by Reagan Battalion.
00:12:57.000Obviously, the democratic rhetoric on this is over the top to the point where you're seeing people take it seriously.
00:13:03.000And as you know, I don't blame rhetoric for violence, because I think that there's always a contingent of crazy people who are going to be triggered.
00:13:12.000As I've explained this before, if rhetoric is a circle and then crazy people are generally outside the circle, as you broaden the circle of rhetoric to get more and more violence or closer and closer to violence, you're going to end up triggering more and more people.
00:13:23.000So those people who are outside the circle who wouldn't have been triggered by the rhetoric, they are going to be now encompassed in the circle as the rhetoric gets more and more violence.
00:13:30.000I'm not going to directly blame Bernie Sanders for what happened yesterday in Nevada, but
00:13:35.000This sort of rhetoric does make things more polarized.
00:13:47.000Las Vegas police released a video from surveillance cameras.
00:13:50.000This is from Senator Dean Heller's office.
00:13:53.000You can see this fellow standing outside the elevator over at Dean Heller's office.
00:13:57.000He left a note threatening to kill Heller if he voted to repeal Obamacare.
00:14:02.000The note actually said that if you repeal Obamacare, I'm going to die and I'm going to take you with me.
00:14:10.000This sort of stuff is going to become more and more common.
00:14:14.000As the Democrats continue to maintain that Republican policy murders people.
00:14:19.000And so you have to understand on the left, one of the reasons people are so defensive of Trump is because the left is so crazy.
00:14:23.000If the left would stop with their craziness, then people might stop defending Trump so ardently.
00:14:27.000The reason that the right is defending Trump is because they feel like he's legitimately under threat, sometimes violent threat, from people on the left because of the rhetoric that's being used.
00:14:35.000Okay, so before I go any further, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the U.S.
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00:15:56.000You want to know that you're protected.
00:15:58.000Okay, so in other news, in other news, the OJ Simpson parole hearing happened yesterday.
00:16:04.000I think that this is important because not only is it one of the first things that I remember as a kid, I remember when they wheeled in the TV for the O.J.
00:16:10.000verdict, and I remember the racial polarization in our class.
00:16:13.000All the white kids kind of put their heads in their hands, and all the black kids in the class started cheering when O.J.
00:16:17.000was let off for obviously murdering his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman.
00:16:41.000But this merger of politics and entertainment, it really was, I think, the beginning of the rise of the sort of reality TV star as political figure.
00:16:49.000Because Ronald Reagan was an actor, but then he was the governor of California before he ran for president.
00:16:54.000OJ Simpson had been an NFL star, and then he was an actor in some of the Naked Gun films,
00:17:00.000And then he commits this double homicide, these two slayings, and everybody in the world is watching this trial and treating it as entertainment, when it really is not entertainment, it's about whether a man murdered two human beings.
00:17:13.000And the polarization that it brought off, the reality TV polarization was shocking, because remember this is in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, there's a widespread perception in the black community in LA at that time, and I think still,
00:17:28.000I think that there was some truth to it then.
00:17:30.000And the fact is that a lot of black folks wanted to let OJ Simpson off the hook, not because they actually thought that he was innocent, but because he killed white people and they didn't really see why this shouldn't be a referendum on the LAPD as opposed to on OJ Simpson.
00:17:44.000The polls at the time showed a plurality of black people said that he was innocent.
00:17:46.000It was obvious that he was guilty from the get-go.
00:17:51.000That's a conflict that has never really cooled down.
00:17:53.000We have the after-effects of it in Ferguson.
00:17:55.000We have the after-effects of it over in Baltimore.
00:17:58.000We have the after-effects of it every time a white cop shoots a black suspect, or when a white non-cop shoots a black person, as in George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.
00:18:08.000In any case, this was treated as sort of a joke yesterday.
00:18:52.000So, like, I was eleven when this happened, and this was a major, earth-shaking incident.
00:18:57.000If you didn't grow up with this, though, you don't understand what it meant when they cut into the NBA finals to show a white Bronco with OJ Simpson in it, running down the free width, AJ Cowlings at the head, and OJ threatening to kill himself.
00:19:07.000I mean, it was legitimately insane time.
00:19:09.000So, OJ, yesterday, he goes to the parole board, and everybody knows that the sentence that he got in 2008 was basically
00:19:15.000It was basically karma for him murdering two people.
00:19:22.000It's demonstrative of the fact, when you watch some of this testimony, it's demonstrative of the fact that OJ was a very stupid man who obviously committed two murders and was used as a central rallying point for race baiters on all sides.
00:19:34.000Here is OJ yesterday explaining why he should be let out of prison.
00:19:39.000Well, as I said, the alternative to violence, of course, is I've always thought I've been pretty good with people, and I've basically spent a conflict-free life.
00:19:51.000You know, I'm not a guy that ever got into fights on the street with the public and everybody, but as I said,
00:19:58.000They give you a bunch of little tools about how to talk to people instead of fighting, instead of throwing punches.
00:20:04.000Tools that I've used here that, you know, it's how you talk to people.
00:20:48.000This is all part of the same general phenomenon, that celebrity is celebrity is celebrity, and political celebrity is the same kind as everything else.
00:20:55.000OJ was granted parole, even though this parole hearing really went poorly.
00:20:58.000I mean, here's a clip of OJ trying to, he's supposed to be admitting to his crimes, right?
00:21:02.000I mean, this is what you do in a parole hearing.
00:21:03.000You admit to your crimes, and then you say, well, I'm very sorry I did that, and I'm never going to do it again.
00:21:08.000Here's OJ talking about how he never did anything wrong.
00:23:30.000He could have known that the Holy Grail was next to it, and he would have gotten this leftist-tier Tumblr.
00:23:34.000Sure, his face might have melted away, but it would have been worth it, because for just a moment, his hands would have beheld the glory that is the leftist-tier's Hot or Cold Daily Wire Tumblr.
00:23:43.000You get that with your $99 annual subscription.
00:23:45.000So head over there and check it out, or if you just want to listen later, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play.
00:23:50.000We are on all of those things, and you can subscribe and leave us a review.
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00:24:02.000Alrighty, so President Trump is trying to get beyond all the Trump-Russia stuff.
00:24:08.000It would help if he got out of his own way, but he is doing some good things, and I want to discuss a couple of the good things that he is doing.
00:24:13.000So, there's a report out that over the first six months, Trump promised that for every new regulation that he made, he would cut two.
00:24:21.000So far, he is running circles around that, according to James Barrett over at Daily Wire, to the tune of 16 regulations eliminated for every new one proposed.
00:24:29.000The idea that Trump hasn't done anything is not right.
00:24:31.000I've said before that what Trump did was gorsuch and cutting regulations.
00:24:35.000The 16 to 1 ratio comes via numbers presented in a report this week from the Office of Management and Budget that shows the administration is holding true to its vow to be business friendly.
00:24:43.000That's why you wonder why the stock market continues to go up even with all of the unease around President Trump's behavior.
00:24:49.000The reason is because there's a general perception he's not going to do too much to hurt business and he's going to do a lot to help it by removing regulations.
00:24:56.000In Obama's final year in office, the Federal Register set the record for the highest page count ever at almost 82,000 pages.
00:25:03.000This is a very good move by the Trump administration.
00:25:04.000That is something that is worthy of pointing out and he deserves credit when he does things that are right.
00:25:27.000Also, Mick Mulvaney was out there yesterday, he's the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and he is saying that it's time to push what he calls MAGAnomics, right, so Make America Great Again-nomics.
00:25:36.000Okay, MAGAnomics is basically just conservative economics.
00:25:41.000I mean, like, he's going to give you a list of talking points, they're all things we've been saying for years, but now everything has to be put, has to have the Trump brand on it.
00:26:19.000We introduced the term this week called MAGAnomics, which is sort of this unifying theme of everything we're trying to do to get the healthy, traditional American economy back on track.
00:26:30.000And to have that, you have to have a lot of capital investment.
00:26:33.000You have to make people more productive.
00:26:34.000And that means businesses need to invest more.
00:26:37.000And that's what we're shooting for on tax reform.
00:26:39.000Okay, well, that's all good stuff, and I hope to see President Trump pursue that.
00:26:42.000In order to do that, he's gonna have to get out of his own way.
00:26:45.000As we say, you know, Spicer is out, Scaramucci is in, he's got a whole new set of lawyers on the Russia stuff.
00:26:50.000He should put all of that to the side, and he should stop talking to the press, and he should just pursue what it is that he wants to pursue.
00:26:55.000I think one of the big problems here is that he's not sure what he wants to pursue, but hopefully
00:27:42.000Things like design, Adobe Illustrator, logo design, typography, animation, and photography, and marketing, entrepreneurship, branding, web design, public speaking, right?
00:30:25.000I want to play more of it because it's so wonderful.
00:30:27.000Okay, so, first of all, it's like they took every line from every serial killer film that was the most cliched and it's like serial killer Mad Libs.
00:30:54.000In order for you to make a creepy film, you can take something that's like a childhood thing, but it has to be inherently a little bit creepy.
00:30:59.000So clowns are a little bit creepy just inherently.
00:31:25.000I love it so much, and I just love that Hollywood is making films that, like, they got top-name cast because this is a best-selling novel, because people have no taste whatsoever.
00:31:34.000You know, Dunkirk will probably open to $35 or $40 million this weekend.
00:31:51.000They took lines from, like, Insomnia, and then they took a line from Silence of the Lambs, and they took a line from, and then they took a, like, every serial killer movie.
00:32:01.000They just took a random line from it and stuck it in.
00:32:02.000I have to play a little bit more because I just can't stop watching this.
00:34:41.000So it's really, it's a gripping film, but it's not gripping in the way that Saving Private Ryan's opening scene is gripping, where you just get non-stop violence and people's guts being blown out and the randomness of it.
00:34:51.000What you get from this is something very different.
00:34:54.000Saving Private Ryan is done in classical style.
00:34:56.000It's sort of done like, I always forget the name of the film that was nominated last year, Ridge, what is it?
00:35:40.000And the tide, when it comes in, it doesn't come in high enough for big boats to get in, so a destroyer couldn't get in and just pick up people.
00:35:47.000Instead, they had to have small ships trying to ferry things out, and they didn't have any ships, because the British were afraid that the Germans were going to strafe the entire army and destroy all their ships, as well as the army on the beach.
00:36:15.000of the 400,000 men standing in orderly queues on the beach as though they're waiting for ice cream, but they're really waiting to know whether they're gonna live or die as they're being strafed from overhead.
00:36:24.000When people die, it's not done in like, okay, there's in Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan fashion where there's like a leg over here.
00:36:29.000It's actually done in almost classical fashion.
00:37:03.000And there aren't all, you know, serving on various bases, but there are lots of people who are in the National Guard and such.
00:37:09.000Especially in places like California and New York, it's a good shot you'll go your entire life without meeting somebody who is an active-duty military member.
00:37:16.000And so, when you hear about a war, what you think about a war is not somebody who you know, it's just some disembodied person who's out there doing heroic things to try and save you.
00:37:49.000He makes so many great directorial choices in this film.
00:37:52.000One of them is that you never see the Nazis at any point in the film.
00:37:54.000There's no point at which you see the Nazis.
00:37:55.000The opening scene, you see that right at the beginning of the trailer where they're all walking through the town of Dunkirk and they're on the streets and these flyers are floating down saying, you're surrounded.
00:38:24.000It legitimately will jump in your seat, because it's so loud.
00:38:26.000And it's meant to do that, because the idea is that every shot is equally... it's equally possible that it's deadly and gonna kill you.
00:38:32.000And so they're walking down the street, these five guys, as you see there, and in the first 30 seconds of the film, you see them getting picked off one by one.
00:38:39.000But you never see the Nazis at any point during this film.
00:38:45.000And so the idea here is that these guys are fighting an unseen force, an enemy that they can't control, an enemy they don't know, and yet they are having to make these really, really difficult decisions.
00:38:55.000So the three main stories are the one on the beach, as I mentioned,
00:38:57.000There was one by sea, so the story of Dunkirk is that a bunch of civilian vessels were commandeered by the British military, and civilians were told to go sail across this 26-mile stretch to Dunkirk and pick guys up from the beach.
00:39:09.000So civilians were non-military members.
00:39:11.000It was men, women, just sailing across the English Channel to pick up all of these members of the British military.
00:39:59.000And I think it's a deliberate attempt by Nolan.
00:40:01.000So some people have found that off-putting.
00:40:02.000People have said that they don't feel emotionally invested in the characters because they're not being given the backstory, they're not being given this whole thing.
00:40:08.000Okay, you don't have to be emotionally invested in who the soldiers are who defend civilization in order for you to be emotionally invested in their fight for survival and their fight for victory.
00:40:52.000So according to the Daily Mail, Monica Lewinsky has now praised Jay-Z for speaking openly about cheating on his wife, Beyonce, on his latest album.
00:40:59.000Lewinsky, who understands better than anyone the public cost paid for a high-profile affair, spoke about the iconic rapper's transgressions in an essay published by Vanity Fair.
00:41:06.000In the piece titled Jay-Z, Prince Harry, Brad Pitt, and the New Frontiers of Male Vulnerability, the former White House intern praised Hubb for not ignoring the allegations hurled at him by Beyonce on her 2016 album Lemonade.
00:41:17.000Jay-Z had a choice, Lewinsky wrote, having been called out publicly by his wife in her fierce 2016 album and video, he knew his fans wouldn't have blinked if his next album skimmed past the allegations.
00:41:26.000That's not uncommon for men to do, and it's not as if we hadn't seen Beyonce and Jay-Z out in the world together since then, not to mention welcoming their twins to planet Earth.
00:41:32.000Jay-Z could have ignored it all, but instead he chose a path of candor that will move the conversation forward and help others.
00:41:40.000If Beyonce wanted to stay together with her husband, then she shouldn't have been talking about his infidelities publicly.
00:41:45.000And if he wanted to stay together with her, not only should he not be committing infidelities, he shouldn't be out there talking about his infidelities publicly.
00:41:52.000This is not a marriage, in my opinion, that is going to end well, because marriages where the partners talk about cheating on each other openly, that's not bound to go particularly well.
00:42:04.000And some behavior can stay private, okay?
00:42:06.000What happens between you and your wife... Actually, one of the weirder aspects of human nature is you'll see a husband who cheats on his wife and then he feels the necessity to tell her.
00:42:13.000There's nothing more selfish than doing that, okay?
00:42:16.000It's super selfish to commit infidelity in the first place.
00:42:19.000But then to tell your spouse about it is even more selfish, because that's about you alleviating your guilt, not about you making your spouse's life better in any way.
00:42:26.000It's about you now creating a choice for your spouse that your spouse never would have had to make except for you being an idiot and feeling the need to dump off your own guilt on your spouse.
00:42:37.000So when they say that honesty is the best policy in these sorts of things, no.
00:42:41.000Being good is the best policy, and then if you do something guilty, live with your guilt.
00:43:34.000The problem that we've had with Internet Service Providers is that they're local monopolies that ensure that there are only two or three, at the most, companies, Internet Service Providers, that are actually in a particular area.
00:43:43.000So, you're using a regulatory fix to fix a regulatory problem.
00:43:47.000What you really should do is relieve all the regulations on Internet Service Providers in general, allowing people to build new infrastructure and then compete in the open market with one another.
00:43:56.000Because there'll be some ISPs that charge Netflix more and some that charge them less.
00:43:59.000There'll be some ISPs that charge small providers less, and let them compete.
00:44:03.000And that competition will ensure a better internet.
00:44:05.000Plus, I mean, the internet seems to be working pretty fine as it is.
00:44:08.000I don't understand the huge issues that people are having with the internet that they think that needs to be fixed by some sort of overarching government system.
00:44:16.000Nick says, Dear Ben, which state is your least favorite?
00:44:18.000And since we're on the topic of California, why do you live there?
00:45:18.000Machines are good at doing some manual labor, but they're not good at doing all manual labor.
00:45:21.000So machines are good at doing very specialized manual labor, like at factories, right?
00:45:26.000If it's doing one thing over and over and over, machines are really good at that.
00:45:28.000What machines are not really good at is doing many different tasks.
00:45:31.000So, for example, you can have a Roomba that cleans your floor, but it's not going to be able to clean your table.
00:45:36.000Right, so a person can do both of those things.
00:45:38.000So manual labor is not going to go totally out of style for people who are not, you know, Phi Beta Kappa and actually need to work in manual labor.
00:45:45.000But yes, we are going to have to develop skill sets.
00:45:48.000As mechanization creates less need for manual labor, there is going to be a need for more creativity in the market.
00:45:57.000The good news is that IQ doesn't always match up with creativity.
00:46:00.000So there's a lot of people who are very creative
00:46:20.000There's no need for markets, because markets are created by scarcity.
00:46:26.000If you have the replicator from Star Trek, and it just creates everything that you could ever need, then you don't have to worry about things being created anymore, and then you talk about a universal basic income.
00:46:34.000The answer is because there is always a bias against the religion with which you grew up in Western civilization.
00:46:50.000If you grew up in an area where everybody's conservative and you become lefty, then you are considered an enlightened member of the upper class by people in the big cities.
00:46:59.000And the same thing is true with regard to religion.
00:47:01.000You are moving beyond your boundaries.
00:47:04.000Never mind that if a person from the East converts to Judaism or Christianity, they are considered a heretic very often or they're considered a rube.
00:47:11.000That's just because we as a society have learned to hate ourselves in a lot of ways.
00:47:15.000Evan says, in what circumstance do socks go with sandals?
00:47:19.000So, as someone who used to wear socks with sandals and found it extraordinarily comfortable when I was a teenager, I will say, in situations in which you are not publicly seen, that would be the proper answer.
00:47:29.000Because, I gotta tell you, I'm not a big sandals fan in general, particularly for dudes, right?
00:47:34.000Dudes should not wear sandals because feet are ugly.
00:47:35.000So, dude feet, not something people want to see.
00:47:43.000Okay, Chris says, So, I am not aware of Ted Cruz's votes on veterans benefits, so I'd have to look that up to confirm whether that is in fact true.
00:47:49.000But, the general question, to say that veterans deserve entitlements due to the nature of their service, no, I don't think that's out of bounds at all.
00:47:54.000I think that's part of the contract when they sign up.
00:48:09.000You're telling them to go do the most violent, difficult job on planet Earth, in many cases, and you're going to have to pay people a lot of money for that, including lifetime benefits in some cases.
00:48:51.000You should make sure that your relationship with your spouse is ultra rock-solid, because having kids changes the nature of your relationship with your spouse.
00:48:57.000Before you could focus solely on the other person in your marriage, and now you both have to focus on these new people who take over your lives.
00:49:03.000So you better be solid before that happens.
00:49:05.000So if you're financially, you know, on the upswing, and if you are solid with your spouse, then you can safely say you're ready for kids, but
00:49:13.000If you're not ready for kids, that doesn't mean that you can't be a good parent, or that you can't become ready for kids, or that it can't help you grow as a human being, and that you take responsibility for decisions that you make.
00:49:22.000Nat says, Hey Ben, my little sister is 13.
00:49:24.000She, like most kids, is very caught up in today's culture and politics because her idols tend to be liberal.
00:49:28.000She's been developing a more liberal view of the world.
00:49:30.000She already tends to look at conservatives in a bad light.
00:49:32.000I was wondering if you had any advice on how I could go about helping her understand conservatism better without alienating her.
00:49:37.000So, I think the first thing to say is that, you know, it's not good to label people you don't know as bigots without any sort of evidence that they are bigots.
00:49:46.000You are tolerant of all sorts of views.
00:49:48.000If you consider yourself a liberal, you probably are conservative.
00:49:50.000Because if you consider yourself liberal, it's because you want everybody to be able to do what they want, basically.
00:49:54.000That's a libertarian position, not a leftist position.
00:49:57.000Okay, leftists like to say that about sexual matters.
00:49:59.000The right doesn't really even care about that stuff anymore, okay?
00:50:01.000Libertarians don't even care about that stuff.
00:50:03.000If I care about it on a religious level, I certainly don't care about it on a governmental level or on a public policy level.
00:50:08.000So, you know, I think that she probably has a skewed view of what the right is because she's listening to people from the left.
00:50:12.000The answer should be go listen to some people from the right and that way maybe you can determine whether what is being said about those people is true or not.
00:50:20.000What is your position on mandatory tipping?
00:50:22.000I think the original tradition of getting a tip in advance for better service made sense, but now everybody demands a tip for everything, regardless of the level of service.
00:50:43.000I'm with Dwight Schrute from The Office on this one.
00:50:45.000I don't tip my proctologist and he's doing something more important than carrying my food seven feet from the counter to my table.
00:50:51.000So this idea that you get a special tip because you carried food seven feet, like, how about this?
00:50:55.000I would rather that you make a better wage and charge me more for the food than that I have to decide whether I'm a good person or not based on the tip I give.
00:51:19.000It's just that you don't want to be perceived by that waiter as a bad guy, so you give a tip.
00:51:23.000So there's a moral judgment that's made about you based on the level of your tip, and you're making moral judgment about your waiter based on, you know, did they do a good job or not?
00:52:11.000Yes, the over-the-top sex and violence is over-the-top sex and violence.
00:52:14.000Over-the-top violence doesn't tend to bother me very much, because I think that there are situations in which violence is necessary.
00:52:21.000So, the over-the-top violence in Band of Brothers doesn't bother me, really, because I think there are situations in which violence is necessary, and violence against evil is necessary, and we should all see the wages of sin or death, and we should all see that, you know, bad things even happen to good people.
00:52:34.000But, when it comes to the graphic sex in the first season, for example, and it is, it's very graphic, the first season is basically near-pornographic,
00:52:42.000I fast-forwarded through a lot of that because I thought that it was just HBO doing what HBO does.
00:52:46.000Every HBO show, just to prove that they're HBO and they're pay access, they have some boobies just to show, oh, look, we're HBO and we can put boobies on TV.
00:52:54.000And now they've decided to up the ante and say, oh, we're HBO so we can put a dinghy on TV.
00:53:00.000Well, I don't think there's a way to justify it.
00:53:02.000I think that you can say overall the show's great.
00:53:04.000I think you can fast forward those scenes.
00:53:07.000But I'm not going to justify what I think are bad artistic choices.
00:53:09.000There are situations in which nudity on screen is actually useful to the story.
00:53:15.000So I think of two cases in particular, Clockwork Orange, where there is some nudity on screen but it's directly designed to demonstrate the evil and vulgarity of the villains.
00:53:24.000And what the brainwashing program has done to this one guy afterward.
00:53:30.000And there's another movie called The Pawnbroker that I think I've recommended on the show before with Rod Steiger about a Holocaust survivor and there's one scene where he runs a pawn shop and a woman comes in and she bears her breast in front of him and it's used as a gateway for a flashback to his wife was in a concentration camp with him and she's being raped by a Nazi officer.
00:53:53.000So I think in rape scenes very often you have to show that stuff in order to show how vile and evil rape is and why rapists should be castrated or killed because they're the most evil people on earth.
00:54:03.000But in terms of like erotica, you know, showing erotic stuff on screen, I don't think that's hardly ever necessary.
00:54:08.000In fact, the most romantic scenes of all time are rarely sex scenes.
00:54:11.000Those are usually the most forgettable, right?
00:54:12.000The romantic scenes are the ones that are from the 1940s.
00:54:15.000Where, you know, people barely touch and the tension is just tremendous.
00:54:19.000Most romance is sexual tension, not sexual release.
00:54:22.000And it seems that most of today's movies focus in on sexual release and not sexual tension.
00:54:26.000Okay, so, we will be back here next week.
00:54:28.000Next week I will be traveling to Washington, D.C.