CNN's Anthony Bourdain tragically kills himself, President Trump goes to war with other members of the G7, and the North Korean Talks approach. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and it's obviously a depressing day in a lot of the public news, and we'll get to all of that in just a second.
00:00:00.000CNN's Anthony Bourdain tragically kills himself, President Trump goes to war with other members of the G7, and the North Korean talks approach.
00:00:25.000Eastern, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring is hosting a roundtable discussion with me and Andrew Klavan and Michael Knowles, and we'll all discuss what fatherhood means, and Knowles will speculate about it, and why fathers matter, and Knowles will speculate about that too.
00:00:56.000Apparently, get the show when you use Amazon Alexa and all the rest.
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00:01:05.000OK, before I jump into the news, and there is a lot of news to get to today.
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00:01:56.000I mean, they really do have this wide variety of clothing that is really good-looking.
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00:03:07.000Apparently, both Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade were apparently, at least I know this is true of Kate Spade, she was very obsessed with the Robin Williams suicide.
00:03:17.000With a lot of folks who commit suicide as they become fixated on other people's suicide.
00:03:21.000There is a copycat effect that happens with regard to suicide.
00:03:24.000I want to give you some of the statistics on American suicide because they're extraordinarily scary.
00:03:28.000As of 2014, American suicide rates had skyrocketed to their highest rate in three decades, all the way to 13 people per 100,000, even as death rates from other causes have declined markedly.
00:03:38.000Suicide is particularly common among middle-aged white people.
00:03:41.000Obviously, that would include Robin Williams and Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.
00:03:44.000The overall suicide rate climbed 24% from 1999 to 2014.
00:03:49.000In 2014, over 14,000 middle-aged white Americans committed suicide.
00:03:52.000Between 2006 and 2016, the suicide rate for white kids jumped 70%.
00:03:57.000The suicide rate among black kids, which is a lot lower generally than the suicide rate among white children, jumped 77%.
00:04:03.000According to USA Today, a study of pediatric hospitals released last May,
00:04:29.000So let's take some of the traditional theories and we'll talk about whether they are right or whether they are wrong.
00:04:33.000So one of the traditional theories is that suicide is a factor of poverty.
00:04:37.000That when the economy has a downturn, then you see increased suicide.
00:04:41.000There's very little evidence to support this.
00:04:43.000There's very little evidence to support the idea that there's mass suicide on the way when poverty breaks in.
00:04:49.000Obviously, the economy was well underway by 2014.
00:04:51.000That did not stop the increase in suicide from 2008 to 2014.
00:04:56.000And the suicidality rate has continued to increase, as far as I'm aware, up to 2017 and 2018, when the economy has been extraordinarily good.
00:05:03.000I mean, we hit now a 3.9% unemployment rate.
00:05:06.000So, it's hard to blame the economy for all of this.
00:05:08.000Also, it is simply not true that poverty is linked to suicide.
00:05:18.000There's almost a reverse correlation between wealth groups in the United States and suicide rate, at least in some areas.
00:05:24.000So, white people on average are richer than black people on average.
00:05:27.000Black people on average in the United States commit suicide at a far lower rate than white people on average do in the United States as well.
00:05:32.000So, I don't buy into the poverty as an explainer for suicide attempt that's been put out there by the media.
00:05:40.000And then there's the most popular theory that's going around right now, which is that bullying is what is causing this uptick in suicide.
00:05:45.000There's an increase in the amount of bullying that's happening in schools.
00:05:47.000Number one, I don't see the evidence for that.
00:05:48.000I don't see that there's any evidence that suggests that bullying is worse now than it was, say, 30 years ago.
00:05:53.000So, if it really were about bullying, then I don't see that.
00:05:55.000I also don't see why that would have any impact on middle-aged white people killing themselves.
00:05:59.000Also, the statistics on bullying are really conflicting.
00:06:03.000So, there have been studies that suggest that, really, it's depression and delinquency, and when people say they are bullied and then they commit suicide, that doesn't necessarily mean they were bullied.
00:06:11.000People who don't commit suicide are more likely to say that they were picked on, as opposed to bullied.
00:06:15.000So, in other words, if you acted the same way toward two people, and one of them said, I was bullied, and one of them said, I was picked on, the person who said, I was bullied, is more likely a person who's going to commit suicide just from the get-go, than the person who says, I was picked on.
00:06:27.000I'm speaking from a position of experience when it comes to bullying.
00:06:29.000I was viciously bullied in high school.
00:06:30.000I was physically abused in high school.
00:06:32.000And none of that made me suicidal because I was not a clinically depressed person.
00:06:36.000And clinical depression and suicide obviously are highly linked together.
00:06:40.000So saying that it's just bullying and if America stopped its bullying, that everything would be better.
00:06:44.000Again, that doesn't explain why the black suicide rate is so low.
00:06:47.000If bullying and racism are so prevalent in American society, why aren't black suicide rates higher?
00:06:53.000It's obviously not true that, to go back to the poverty point for a moment, it's obviously not true that poverty is linked to suicide because, actually, poorer societies have lower suicide rates than richer societies.
00:07:02.000It's almost a Western phenomenon, the phenomenon of mass suicide and suicide in these numbers.
00:07:08.000So that takes a few of the key explanations that have been put on the table off the table.
00:07:14.000There are several arguments to be made about what exactly it is that causes suicide.
00:07:18.000First of all, clinical depression obviously is linked to suicide, and clinical depression can be conditional or it can be just natural, right?
00:07:26.000I mean, it can be genetic, that depression runs in your family, or it can be conditionally related.
00:07:31.000And one of the things that gets people out of depression
00:08:22.000By taking some of the drugs that are available on the market, then you should absolutely do so if you need to.
00:08:29.000But the question is not what to do when you have depression, the question really is why the depression exists in the first place.
00:08:35.000I would suggest that there is a societal lack of meaning that has said in a pretty serious way that young people have basically been told that their emotional state is key, that your emotional happiness is key.
00:08:45.000In prior generations, people were basically taught that your emotional state was not key.
00:08:49.000That what you felt about the world was less important than what you did in the world.
00:08:57.000And that there were going to be people there to help you out through that higher purpose and higher duty.
00:09:00.000I think we've become more fragmented as a society.
00:09:02.000I think we've become more atomistic as a society.
00:09:04.000I think we've treated each other as objects rather than as human beings.
00:09:08.000More as a society, some of that has to do with radical uptake and use of social media.
00:09:13.000And some of that has to do with decline of religion.
00:09:16.000There are good studies that suggest that as religion declined, as religious communities declined, that rates of depression go up, rates of suicidality go up as well.
00:09:25.000Decline of religiosity in wealthier societies, there are studies to support this, has led to an uptick in suicide.
00:09:30.000Finding a common meaning again, I think is going to be something that we actually have to spend some time doing.
00:09:35.000Just sort of brushing this under the rug or suggesting that if we're a little bit nicer to each other, it's going to fix everything.
00:09:40.000I think that there are a lot of people out there who are feeling that they lead a meaningless life.
00:09:43.000And if you feel that you lead a meaningless life and your only method of meaning, your only way of gaining meaning is to look at the superficial or to look at friendship on social media or to gauge
00:09:53.000Your life's worth by your amount of happiness.
00:09:56.000You see this with regard to opioid addiction as well.
00:09:58.000If you read Dreamland by Sam Canona, it's all about the opioid addiction massive wave that's been happening.
00:10:04.000One of the things he talks about is the fact that pain is now considered an ultimate evil in American society, that you actually use pain as what they call the fifth vital sign when you go in for a doctor's appointment, right?
00:10:13.000They check your vital signs, they check your pulse, they check your blood pressure, they check your temperature and all the rest, and then they ask you your pain level.
00:10:19.000And this is considered a vital sign that has to be alleviated.
00:10:21.000Well, people have been living with pain for thousands of years, but if your definition of happiness is avoidance of pain, then anytime you experience pain, you're going to take it a lot more seriously than you would if pain were not at the top of your list for something that matters deeply.
00:10:34.000Finding purpose in life beyond personal alleviation of pain or personal material wealth and happiness is going to be something that's necessary for us as a society.
00:10:42.000And again, none of this is a cure for clinical depression.
00:10:44.000None of this is a cure for people who have genetic predisposition to depression.
00:10:48.000None of this is a cure for people who are going to be depressed no matter what.
00:10:51.000But it is an argument that there are people who are on the borderline of depression, who are tossed into depression by a lack of meaning in our society.
00:10:58.000I don't think that was the case by Anthony Bourdain.
00:11:01.000Anthony Bourdain seems to me like somebody who is suffering from some deep, some serious demons for a long time.
00:11:05.000Here, for example, is Anthony Bourdain talking about some of the demons that he and his fellow cooks sometimes experience.
00:11:29.000Okay, so, you know, obviously this is somebody who's been suffering for a long time.
00:11:32.000He talked very openly about the fact that he had a drug addiction issue and that he'd suffered with depression for a serious amount of time.
00:11:39.000For folks like Anthony Bourdain, I'm not sure that there is necessarily a cure in the realm of meaning.
00:11:45.000I mean, this is a guy who had, by all accounts, a pretty rich, happy life.
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00:13:35.000Okay, talking about the glorification of suicide, one of the serious issues that we in the media have to deal with, and I want to start this conversation today because I'm still trying to figure out for the media outlet that I run exactly how we ought to cover issues like Anthony Bourdain's suicide.
00:13:48.000There is something called the Werther Effect.
00:13:50.000The Werther Effect is a very well-studied phenomenon.
00:13:55.000When a person who is very prominent commits suicide, there are a lot of people who begin thinking a lot more about suicide, fixating a lot more on suicide, thinking of it as a glorious out... I remember after Robin Williams' death, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences put out a tweet of the genie, right, because Robin Williams played the genie, saying, you're free now, genie, okay?
00:14:12.000That sort of glorification of suicide is awful and actually promotes suicide, obviously.
00:14:17.000The Werther Effect is named after a book called The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe.
00:14:21.000That book supposedly, I mean the studies are conflicting, caused suicides all over the continent.
00:14:27.000There were young men who saw it as such a romantic ideal to commit suicide, they actually started walking around wearing the clothes that Werther is described as wearing in the book.
00:14:34.000Whether it was true of the Goethebook or not, it has been confirmed over and over and over.
00:14:38.000In the aftermath, for example, of Marilyn Monroe's suicide, in the months after her death there were 303 excess suicides, meaning higher than average, in the United States.
00:14:46.000There have been multiple studies on this sort of stuff.
00:14:50.000By Netflix, 13 Reasons Why, which essentially glorified suicide and said there were excuses for it, that a normal person who didn't suffer from depression or problems could be bullied into suicide.
00:14:58.000Once that show came out, Google queries about suicide, as according to The Atlantic, rose by almost 20% in 19 days after the show came out, representing between 900,000 and 1.5 million more searches than usual regarding the subject.
00:15:10.00017 out of the top 20 searches were significantly elevated.
00:15:13.000The biggest increases came with terms related to suicidal thoughts and ideation, like how to kill yourself.
00:15:18.000Many European countries actually have laws on the books that prevent the media from reporting about suicide specifically to avoid this.
00:15:23.000In Venice, they had a spate of people throwing themselves on the train tracks and I believe that they actually changed the law so that people could not report on that and the rates of suicide by throwing yourself on a train track went down.
00:15:32.000Now, I'm not calling for abridgement of the First Amendment or laws on this basis, but in the same way that I have suggested that my media outlet will no longer report the names or faces of mass shooters,
00:15:42.000I'm seriously considering changing the rules here at the Daily Wire when it comes to coverage of celebrity suicide or suicide in general.
00:15:49.000There is something that I want to talk about in just one second called the Papageno effect.
00:15:55.000The media should actually cover all of this stuff.
00:15:57.000So the Papageno effect basically suggests that if the media covers this stuff in a positive way, if the media covers suicide in an attempt to dissuade you from committing it, that this lowers the rate of suicide.
00:16:09.000That really only applies when you are telling a story about somebody who is considering suicide and then didn't do it.
00:16:13.000So if you're covering somebody's actual suicide, it's very difficult to avoid people having dark thoughts about doing the same thing.
00:16:21.000The Papageno effect is named after Mozart's Magic Flute character because Papageno is a character in the opera who's considering suicide and then he's talked out of it by essentially three young boys who are sprites or spirits and that
00:16:32.000Effect has not been all that well documented.
00:16:36.000I believe in Australia, they've done some studies on the Papageno effect.
00:16:39.000But the idea there is that the way to help make suicide less palatable to people is to show them stories of people who would have committed suicide, but then did not go ahead and actually do it.
00:16:50.000In covering celebrity suicide, we may in fact be doing a serious disservice.
00:16:53.000And I'm admitting that that's what we're doing right now.
00:16:56.000And that's why I'm reconsidering, you know, I'm considering right now actively what we should do as media outlets.
00:17:03.000So, there are a lot of issues to unpack here, but I think that we all tend to go surface level when it comes to the problem of suicide in America.
00:17:09.000We tend to think, on the right, that you can just bully your way through depression, which I don't think is generally true.
00:17:14.000We tend to think, on the left, that if we just cut out bullying, and if we're just nicer to each other, then suicide goes away.
00:17:49.000It has to be linked with something that matters.
00:17:51.000People who believe that they are living for something that matters are far less likely to commit suicide, which is why you see that there's less of a suicide rate among people who are involved in communal activities.
00:18:01.000Not just because there's a community there, but because they feel like they are pushing towards something greater.
00:18:05.000If we don't recapture that, if we become this atomized society where we're all individuals and we sadly tweet R.I.P.
00:18:10.000Anthony Bourdain when we see a suicide, I don't think that this crisis is going to get any better any quicker.
00:18:15.000I think that we have become a solipsistic society that is very inwardly focused and that has some pretty negative ramifications, some pretty negative side effects.
00:18:25.000And that doesn't just mean for those of us who are not clinically depressed, reaching out to people who are clinically depressed, it means that people who are on the verge of depression... Depression is... I've lived with people with depression.
00:18:35.000Depression is extraordinarily difficult to deal with.
00:18:39.000Not just by the person who's dealing with it, but by everybody living with that person.
00:18:42.000If you've ever been in a house with somebody with depression, then you can feel it.
00:18:46.000It legitimately feels like there is a dark presence in the house with you.
00:18:52.000I think one of the great lies that's told about depression is that depression is about lack of self-esteem.
00:18:56.000Depression is about complete focus on self.
00:19:00.000I've dealt with many depressed people, severely depressed people, people I'm close to who have been suicidal.
00:19:06.000From the outside, what it looks like is somebody who is so self-obsessed because they're tearing themselves down that they can't get out of it.
00:19:12.000And the cure to that is to get out of your own head.
00:19:15.000The cure to that, whether that requires a boost from some sort of drug, that's quite possible.
00:19:20.000The cure for that is to live beyond oneself.
00:19:22.000And as a society, if we start living beyond ourselves, we're going to be a lot better off in terms of suicide than we will if we continue to go down this path of Instagram selfies and materialism and the idea that happiness can be bought with the price of a dollar or that happiness consists in
00:19:41.000In essentially libertinism, that happiness consists in doing whatever you want, whenever you want to do it, as opposed to living for a higher purpose.
00:19:47.000Happiness consists in living for a higher purpose.
00:19:49.000Without purpose, we are all here for no reason.
00:19:52.000And that's, I think, what the West is falling into.
00:19:55.000I think the West has fallen into a crisis of meaning that it's having a very difficult time pulling out of.
00:20:00.000That does have some political ramifications.
00:20:02.000And more importantly, it has some very serious spiritual ramifications as well.
00:20:06.000So, you know, I feel terrible, mostly for Anthony Bourdain's family.
00:20:11.000It's just a horrifying, horrifying story.
00:21:37.000So if you're still searching for that Father's Day gift and you want to make a last minute Father's Day gift buy, go to mvmt.com slash Shapiro.
00:21:52.000That lets them know also that we sent you.
00:21:54.000OK, so meanwhile, President Trump is going to the G7 and he is in a spat with everyone at the G7 because President Trump has this bizarre view that we will all be better off if he tariffs everyone.
00:22:06.000Okay, I've said, if you want to use tariffs as a way to ratchet down Chinese intellectual property theft, for example, then maybe use it as a punishment.
00:22:23.000But you have to acknowledge that it's a punishment that also hurts the American taxpayer, because we are now paying more for products.
00:22:27.000And for all the talk about the tariffs that are being placed on American products by Canada, the fact is the average U.S.
00:22:34.000When you average across all products that are imported, the tariff rate, it's 2.79%.
00:22:38.000Canada's average tariff rate is 2.44%.
00:22:40.000So Canada, in the same way as the United States, there are a bunch of lobbying groups that have lobbied to protect
00:22:45.000You know, sausage and dairy and various other products, but America has exactly the same sorts of tariffs because of lobbying groups here, right?
00:22:59.00035% on tuna, 20% on dairy, 25% on trucks, 16% on wool sweaters.
00:23:03.000We have a prohibitive sugar quota, so that's why we use corn syrup here in the United States, is because we basically tariff sugar out of existence.
00:23:09.000The United States does have a lot of tariffs on products.
00:23:13.000We should work to remove all those tariffs.
00:23:15.000But ratcheting up tariffs, unless your goal is to ratchet down tariffs on the other side, doesn't seem to make all hell of a lot of sense.
00:23:21.000And it does damage the American taxpayer.
00:23:23.000There's a story today about President Trump's Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
00:23:29.000So according to AMM.com, which studies these markets,
00:23:32.000American metal markets aluminum foundry alloy premium, a price closely watched by automakers, climbed 15 to 17 cents per pound on May 11th, up 60% from the start of the year.
00:23:42.000The assessment for hot dipped galvanized steel coil rose to $54.75 per 100 weight on May 31st, up 17% since the beginning of the year.
00:23:50.000This means the price of your car is about to go up in a pretty significant way.
00:23:54.000And there's a White House economic analysis.
00:23:55.000The White House itself is acknowledging the tariffs are bad for the economy in a way that President Trump refuses to acknowledge the tariffs are bad
00:24:01.000The analysis concludes that Mr. Trump's tariffs will hurt economic growth in the United States.
00:24:24.000That, of course, is no shock because tariffs always hurt the growth of the country that imposes the actual tariff.
00:24:29.000There's been a lot of talk about whether Congress is going to overrule President Trump.
00:24:32.000They probably will not, and that is an element of gutlessness on the part of the American Congress.
00:24:38.000Republicans, I don't care if you're Republicans or Democrats, you should be standing up when the policy is bad, and this is in your purview.
00:24:43.000And I understand that there are Republicans who are very afraid that President Trump is too thin-skinned on these issues, and that if they react by stripping him of authority on trade, that he's going to react by suddenly going and working with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer or something.
00:24:55.000I don't think that you can govern by being afraid of the President of the United States, just as I don't think the President of the United States should govern by being afraid of Congress.
00:25:02.000The system was built for checks and balances, and trade authority was not given to the President of the United States.
00:25:10.000Nonetheless, President Trump is now in a flame war with Emmanuel Macron, who is the leader of France.
00:25:16.000So, Macron was tweeting out against the President,
00:25:33.000So first of all, I will just say this about Emmanuel Macron and the Europeans.
00:25:41.000They're perfectly happy to sign an agreement with Iran that was garbage, but they're not going to work that hard to sign an agreement with the United States.
00:25:47.000It seems like they might want to work a little harder on all of that.
00:25:49.000But if he's talking about tariffs and trade policy, you know, President Trump is very difficult on these issues.
00:25:54.000And here's what President Trump was tweeting.
00:26:11.000When we ratchet up our own tariffs and barriers, they ratchet up their tariffs and barriers, and it was Trump who started this thing by ratcheting up tariffs and barriers.
00:26:17.000The EU has announced that it's going to start imposing a sweeping round of tariffs on about $3 billion worth of U.S.
00:26:21.000products in retaliation after the White House's decision to hit European steel and aluminum products with duties.
00:28:18.000This is the problem with President Trump's view on trade.
00:28:20.000Again, if he were using this to actually ratchet down trade barriers, I'd be okay with that.
00:28:24.000But it seems like he's more than happy to walk away from the table without ratcheting down trade barriers, and that's not only a waste, it's just bad policy overall.
00:28:33.000President Trump, by the way, suggested something very foolish today.
00:28:36.000He suggested today that Russia should be added back into the G8.
00:28:39.000The reason that Russia was originally kicked out of the G8, the G7 plus one, is because Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:28:45.000And now without them getting out of Crimea, he's suggesting openly that he should instead allow them back into the G8.
00:30:30.000The chances that you're gonna look like your dad in 20 years are basically 100%.
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00:32:08.000It will make your life richer in virtually every conceivable way.
00:32:12.000So go check that out right now for $99 a year.
00:32:14.000Also, as I announced earlier, The Ben Shapiro Show is now available on Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
00:32:19.000So if you have a virtual assistant, you can listen to my podcast with a simple voice command after you enable the skill on Alexa or ask Google to talk to the show.
00:32:26.000For more information, just go check out our pinned tweets on Facebook and Twitter.
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00:32:51.000Alrighty, so, I also want to talk about this big leak investigation.
00:32:55.000So, according to NBC News, a long-time staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee has been arrested on charges of lying to investigators, probing the potential leaking of classified information the Justice Department announced on Thursday night.
00:33:06.000A federal grand jury indicted the staffer, James Wolf,
00:33:08.000Who is 58 on three counts of making false statements in December about contacts with reporters, including providing sensitive information related to the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which he served as director for security director for 29 years.
00:33:21.000He's expected to appear in US District Court for the District of Maryland.
00:33:24.000So, what the leak was, according to BuzzFeed, is the leak was that this guy had leaked information to a New York Times reporter, and a BuzzFeed reporter, that there had been Russian spies targeting Carter Page, basically, to meet with him.
00:33:31.000And this was leaked out in the middle of the investigation, and this is indeed an illegal leak.
00:33:53.000And the Trump administration decided to pursue it.
00:34:31.000She was tweeting out recently that, you know, that she sort of liked the character from House of Cards who apparently was sleeping with an older staffer to get leaked information, which makes perfect sense since apparently that's what she was doing.
00:34:40.000She was in her early 20s and this guy was in his late 50s.
00:34:43.000So clearly this is a love match that was happening right here.
00:34:49.000And it was a serious problem when Obama did it.
00:34:50.000It's a serious problem when Trump does it.
00:34:51.000When Obama was in office, you remember, he targeted the Associated Press and he targeted James Rosen of Fox News by essentially tapping their phones and checking their emails without permission.
00:35:00.000And they were tapping his mom's phone, James Rosen's mom's phone, to try and determine his whereabouts in an attempt to determine a leaker from the State Department.
00:35:30.000And you can't protest one and say that the other is okay.
00:35:32.000No matter how much you dislike Allie Watkins, and I think that she seems, again, like a piece of work, no matter how much you dislike the leak,
00:35:37.000Tapping journalists is not a good thing.
00:35:39.000Just as if you don't like President Trump, you still can't tap him, right, if that's what happened at Trump Tower.
00:35:44.000But if you're objecting to tapping President Trump at Trump Tower...
00:35:47.000You know, and the left says, well, we think it's justified.
00:35:50.000They're going to have to really show how it was justified.
00:35:51.000I don't see necessarily how this particular phone tap was justified simply because they wanted to track down the leaker inside the government.
00:35:57.000You want to track down the leaker inside the government, then go track down the leaker inside the government.
00:36:01.000You don't get to go after private people's records simply because you want the information that they have at their
00:36:08.000Well, I don't think that it's all that tough.
00:36:09.000It depends what grade you're trying to teach.
00:36:11.000But if you can decide the curriculum, I think one of the things that you can do is just assign alternative readings.
00:36:31.000So whatever the assigned textbook is, you use that, and then you say, and here's some alternative viewpoints on the same set of facts, and that's what a well-rounded teacher does.
00:36:40.000I think that that would behoove all of us.
00:36:42.000I mean, I think that the best education that I got, largely, was not only through teachers who did that, but also because I spent an awful lot of time outside of class reading about the material that I was reading inside of class.
00:36:51.000You can do more by exposing people to new types of ideas than you can by simply going along to get along, I think, as long as you're not going to get fired.
00:36:57.000Joe says, Hey Ben, I'm a graduate student in counseling psychology.
00:37:00.000In my multicultural class, it was suggested by classmates that when students feel they accidentally had a microaggression slip when speaking, they're supposed to say, oops.
00:37:07.000And when you feel a microaggression has been placed upon you, you are supposed to say, ouch, in class discussions.
00:37:11.000Ben, in this situation, I'm deciding whether to be over the top sarcastic with this being practiced in class, or if I should openly talk about how stupid and infantile this idea is.
00:37:54.000Here's all the information that you need on why I'm not doing this and why I think it's foolish for us to pursue this policy.
00:37:59.000So the classic by John Stuart Mill, of course, is On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, and that's sort of his doctrine of utilitarianism in a nutshell.
00:38:13.000You know, his most famous work, obviously.
00:38:16.000He also wrote a book literally called Utilitarianism.
00:38:19.000But you can get a really good compendium of his stuff.
00:38:23.000They make these compendiums from Cambridge.
00:38:59.000Breach the cognitive dissonance between the fact that suffering happens in the world and you have difficult times and the fact that there's a plan for you and that there's a purpose to life.
00:39:15.000It's from the situation where Jacob wrestles with the angel and he's renamed at that point from Jacob to Israel because he struggled with God and overcame.
00:39:22.000Okay, but that doesn't mean you overcome God.
00:39:24.000It means that you do struggle with the concept of God.
00:39:38.000As you look to nature, you look how beautiful it is.
00:39:40.000You look at the fact that you have a baby, you have a baby kid, you know, like when my kids were born, you look at that and you say, how can there not be a God?
00:39:45.000I understand the emotional aspect of that.
00:40:06.000Relying on a very reductionist view of materialism to define your life, which I find utterly unfulfilling and very difficult to build a system of thought upon.
00:40:17.000I can only tell you from working in manufacturing, if I have two sources of steel, if both meet my design requirements and one is cheaper, I'm going to be using it.
00:40:23.000I'm not really looking at Buy American, I'm looking at the bottom line.
00:40:25.000If that steel comes in with the tariff, my other supplier becomes the primary due to cost.
00:40:29.000Yes, some of that higher cost may be moved to the consumer.
00:40:31.000My question to you is if the lower cost is due to folks like China dumping steel below cost to manufacture, is that fair to other producers?
00:41:05.000So either you pass that on to the consumer, or you're spending that money in other places.
00:41:08.000Is it fair to you that you now have to buy more expensive steel?
00:41:12.000Because we have to protect some industry here as opposed to not protecting that industry.
00:41:17.000And the idea that, by the way, China can subsidize all of its industries is obviously untrue.
00:41:21.000China cannot subsidize all of its industries.
00:41:22.000It can pick a couple of key industries it wants to subsidize.
00:41:25.000There are national security reasons, for example, that if we don't want America's steel production dropping below a certain point, we tariff.
00:41:31.000But we're not anywhere near that point right now.
00:41:33.000And if China wants to waste its own money subsidizing industries in order to undercut the price of steel in the United States, that's their problem and it's our gain.
00:41:41.000Honestly, their subsidy is our gain to a certain extent in that industry, and it's our loss if we tariff our own people, because a tariff is a tax on our own consumers and our own producers.
00:42:31.000We're not talking long ways down the road.
00:42:33.000We are talking about within the foreseeable future, like in the next 10 to 15 years.
00:42:38.000That means that we have to figure something out.
00:42:40.000The way to figure something out is by totally restructuring this stuff, bring it down to local level, getting the federal government out of the business of Social Security and Medicare altogether, putting it back on charitable institutions and community institutions at the outside if we can.
00:42:52.000We have to make the payments to the people who have already been guaranteed payments, but if you are younger, you should instead be given the opportunity to take your money out of Social Security, and you should be told instead to
00:43:05.000Put that money to invest that money in stocks, in bonds, in whatever it is that you choose to do.
00:43:12.000Also, we should raise the retirement age.
00:43:14.000That's something we should do right now.
00:43:40.000Well, counterintelligence investigations, you don't need, for example, a warrant to spy on foreign sources.
00:43:53.000You do need a warrant to spy on American sources.
00:43:55.000If you're spying on foreign sources and Americans get caught in the loop, then that is a more dicey issue.
00:44:00.000Usually you have to get a FISA warrant for something like that, or you may have to get a FISA warrant for something like that.
00:44:04.000If you're spying on an American citizen like Carter Page, then you do need to actually go get a FISA warrant with court approval.
00:44:09.000Counterintelligence investigations generally require less of a burden
00:44:14.000In order for you to go gather information than criminal investigations because American citizens are the only ones who can be prosecuted in criminal investigations in the United States and they have rights that foreigners simply don't in our system.
00:44:38.000Shelby, so the one that people tend to miss on the tours is Sfat.
00:44:43.000So, Sfat is the home of Kabbalistic thinking.
00:44:47.000It's sort of the spiritual center of Hasidic, the kind of spiritual side of Judaism, the more spiritual side of Judaism.
00:44:54.000Obviously, everything in Jerusalem you should go visit.
00:44:56.000All the main points you're going to hit.
00:45:00.000But I think that Sfat is one of my favorite places in Israel just because you can
00:45:05.000You can feel the holiness of the city emanating, and at least the dedication to spirituality of the people living there.
00:45:09.000It's also an artist colony, which is really neat.
00:45:10.000Like, they have these little hole-in-the-wall shops on this block-long area.
00:45:14.000When I say hole-in-the-wall, I mean no bigger than the size, not much bigger than a phone booth.
00:45:19.000I mean, maybe three phone booths put together, and they have all these different artists who put their stuff together there, and they will cook you, and they have just this great Middle Eastern food.
00:46:01.000Okay, and people who do not vaccinate their kids because they're a yoga teacher told them not to vaccinate their kids, or because they were listening to Jenny McCarthy, or somebody who doesn't know a damn thing about science, it's idiotic.
00:46:10.000Okay, we have essentially wiped smallpox out.
00:46:13.000On planet Earth, because of vaccination.
00:46:15.000Vaccination is one of the great inventions in human history, one of the great discoveries in human history.
00:46:19.000And to not vaccinate your child is not only irresponsible for your child, it is irresponsible for other children, because there are kids who cannot actually get vaccinations and require herd immunization in order to prevent them from getting sick.
00:46:30.000I talked about this a couple years ago.
00:46:32.000I did nearly an entire episode on this with regard to my daughter who came down with whooping cough.
00:46:36.000She'd been vaccinated, but the problem is that the vaccination is only about 85% effective, which means you require everybody to be vaccinated so that there is herd immunity, right?
00:46:45.000The level of vaccination effectiveness
00:46:47.000Skyrockets when everybody has a vaccination.
00:46:49.000There are externalities to not getting vaccinated.
00:46:51.000So normally I would say do whatever you want.
00:46:55.000But I don't believe that number one, if you endanger the health of your kid, that's OK.
00:46:58.000And number two, I don't think that if you endanger the health of somebody else's kid, a kid who has leukemia and can't get a vaccination because of a weak immune system, for example, that this is palatable under any circumstances.
00:47:13.000I'm a Pennsylvania high school senior graduating just a few hours after you finish your podcast today.
00:47:17.000Once I do, I'd eventually like to introduce myself to the public sphere as a fresh conservative voice and potentially campaign for office at some point.
00:47:27.000So I think there are too many figures in the conservative movement and in politics generally who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
00:47:32.000Or who don't know what they don't know, and who don't spend a lot of time actually cultivating the expertise necessary to talk about particular issues.
00:47:38.000I spend an awful lot of time researching this show, reading.
00:48:15.000There was a reporter who decided that it would be worthwhile to report on what they call the inflatable run, which is, I guess, where people dress up in giant, like, inflatable plastic thingies, and then they run around like idiots.
00:49:53.000All righty, so yesterday we had Ben Rhodes, the former Obama administration liar, going around and talking about how we need the government to watchdog Facebook.
00:50:00.000We need the government to watchdog social media to ensure that we are not told bad information.
00:50:07.000Now we have James Clapper, who also is a liar, right, who essentially likely perjured himself before Congress.
00:50:12.000James Clapper, we have, saying that what we actually need is an FCC for social media.
00:50:16.000So he wants the government to regulate social media too.
00:50:18.000You're getting the message that a lot of these people on the left are very interested in regulating social media, maybe because they're losing the conversation when they can't regulate it?
00:50:25.000Here's James Clapper making a fool of himself.
00:50:27.000I believe, and I've said this publicly, that what we need for the social media platforms is something akin to the Federal Communications Commission, which was set up in the 1920s to regulate radio and later television.
00:50:41.000We have nothing comparable for the social media platforms.
00:50:44.000And as we've seen, they'd like to just regulate themselves.
00:50:49.000I believe they need oversight and regulation from the government.