The economy grew 4.1% in the second quarter, the fastest rate of growth since the third quarter of 2014. President Trump says that we re on track to hit the highest annual growth rate in over 13 years. Meanwhile, the left goes berserk after Jonathan Chait says something heretical, and Facebook s stock takes a massive dive, and the Mueller investigation might be expanding into President Trump s Twitter feed. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, where Ben tells you what's going on in the world, and how to deal with it. Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro: How to Deal with the Left's Berserk Reaction to the Trump-Mueller-Chait Tweet What's the best thing going on with the economy? How should we react to the GDP numbers from the 2nd quarter and GDP numbers for the first quarter? What does it mean for the rest of the year and what impact will it have on the economy in 2020 and beyond, and why it's a good idea to have a 3% GDP in 2020 And much, much more! Thanks to our sponsor Dollar Shave Club for sponsoring the show! Don t forget to like, subscribe, share, and subscribe to our new podcast, and tell a friend about it! Ben's new book, "Ben Shapiro's New York Times Besties: The Best Reads of the Week" coming out on Amazon Prime Day! coming soon! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, "The Best Thing I'm Working on the Internet, The Best Podcast on the World's Best Podcasts of All Things I've Been Working on a Good Podcasts by Ben Shapiro, the best podcast on the Best Podcast I've Got It's Not Working Yet, I'm Gonna Have It All, and I'll Tell a Friend, Too Good at It's All That's Good, I'll Be There Too Good, And I'll See You'll Hear That Too Good & I'll Hear It on The Best of That, Too Bad at That, I Can't Say That & I'm Not Good at That's, and More! . Subscribe on iTunes, and Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, too Good News, Good Things, Good Gotta Have It, Good Food, Good News and Good Thoughts, Good Reviews, and Good Things Are Good At That's Not Good, Good Thoughts by Good Things by Bad News, and Much More!
00:00:00.000The left goes berserk after Jonathan Chait says something heretical, Facebook stock takes a massive dive, and the Mueller investigation might be expanding into President Trump's Twitter feed.
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00:01:49.000There was a quarter in 2014 under President Obama in which the GDP jumped 5.2%, I believe.
00:01:55.000But this has boosted hopes that the economy is ready to break out of its decade-long slumber.
00:01:59.000If the next quarter is as good as this quarter, then we are looking at the possibility of 3% GDP annualized growth.
00:02:05.000So when they say that it grew 4.1% in quarter two, what they really mean is that if you took that growth and you extended it over the course of the entire year, then the economy grew 4%.
00:02:13.000It doesn't mean that the entire economy grew 4% in that particular quarter.
00:02:17.000But with that said, if the economy continues to boom, it'll obviously be a boon to all of these Republican candidates in their congressional districts.
00:02:25.000It'll be a boon to the president of the United States in his reelection efforts.
00:02:29.000This is the fastest rate of growth since the 4.9% in the third quarter of 2014, which was revised downward, I believe, from 5.2.
00:02:34.000It was the third best growth rate since the Great Recession.
00:02:38.000In addition to the strong second quarter, the Commerce Department revised its first quarter reading up from 2% to 2.2%.
00:02:43.000President Trump says that we are on track to hit the highest annual growth rate in over 13 years.
00:02:48.000He says, I will say this right now, and I will say it strongly, as the deals come in one by one, we're going to go a lot higher than these numbers, and these are great numbers.
00:03:02.000It is bad salesmanship to come out and say that we're going to do a lot better than these numbers, because why would you oversell the economy?
00:03:08.000Going out there and overselling it and then coming in short is a recipe for bad headlines.
00:03:12.000Whereas if you just said, we just had a fantastic quarter and we look forward to continued strong growth in the economy, then you're not providing the sort of downside that your political opponents will jump on if we come in at 3.7% next quarter or 3%
00:03:26.000Now, there are some people today who are suggesting that perhaps these GDP statistics are somewhat inflated by President Trump's tariffs.
00:03:34.000Not because the economy jumped on the back of the tariffs, but simply because a bunch of foreign companies bought a lot of American product in expectation that tariffs were about to increase in their own country.
00:03:46.000So, for example, if you're China, now is a good time to buy American soybeans before your own tariffs go into place on all of the
00:03:54.000So, the export numbers were slightly inflated, according to some folks like Ben Smith over at CNBC.
00:04:05.000We'll have to see if that is indeed the case as time goes on.
00:04:10.000Residential real estate starts were a little bit slow, but all other areas of the economy continue to boom.
00:04:16.000All of this is very good for the President of the United States.
00:04:19.000One company that is not booming, however, is Facebook.
00:04:23.000During a conference call on Wednesday, Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Wehner predicted bad news for the second half of the year.
00:04:29.000The company's shares immediately began a drastic retreat in the extended session.
00:04:32.000Facebook would see a $100 billion blow to its market cap after shares plunged 20% because the bloodbath was continuing into Thursday's trading session.
00:04:42.000The decline was stunning not only because of the scale, according to MarketWatch, but because Facebook had managed to avoid this type of punishment through a multitude of sins, too numerous to fully list.
00:04:50.000While the Cambridge Analytica controversy weighed on the stock and it easily rebounded from those declines, even during Zuckerberg's, Mark Zuckerberg's head of Facebook, congressional hearings earlier this year, the company's shares rebounded during his testimony.
00:05:01.000Facebook seems to have become the Teflon company, but when it comes to finance, you actually have to show profit.
00:05:06.000And one of the things that Facebook has done is they've cut off a lot of avenues to profit by cutting off a lot of their advertisers, particularly on the news side.
00:05:13.000And then if they can't monetize the data they've been gathering from people because of things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it makes it questionable as to how they're actually going to earn for their investors.
00:05:22.000So Facebook shares took a serious, serious hit.
00:05:25.000And Mark Zuckerberg, his stock was worth $20 billion less than it was on Tuesday, basically, by the end of Thursday.
00:05:32.000So that is some pretty stunning stuff.
00:05:35.000Colin Sebastian, who's an analyst with Robert W. Baird, wrote,
00:06:08.000Right now, as in today, it has been down significantly today.
00:06:12.000It was down almost 20% at one point during the day.
00:06:15.000And over the course of the last five days, it has taken a massive hit.
00:06:19.000Starting at the end of the trading day on Thursday, Twitter just plummeted.
00:06:23.000It went from $43 a share all the way down to about $35 a share.
00:06:27.000So it's a massive, massive hit over the end of the week.
00:06:30.000And a lot of that has to do, again, with all sorts of trust issues that have been
00:06:38.000Harming Twitter and then that ranges from the shadow banning scandal that is that has harmed Twitter To the fact they've had to purge all of these fake accounts on Twitter One of the serious questions about Twitter has already has always been what its profit model is going to be because you don't pay for Twitter It's free.
00:06:50.000And so advertising was supposed to be the the profit model for Twitter But advertisers aren't seeing the kind of revenue that they want to see in return from Twitter.
00:06:59.000And so the stock has dropped tremendously
00:07:02.000The company did post another profit, which for the third consecutive quarter, it was able to do so in the company's history.
00:07:08.000And the $134 million in net income it reported amounts to $0.13 a share.
00:07:12.000Twitter's top line did climb, and it beat the fact set consensus estimate according to MarketWatch.
00:07:16.000But investors were reacting to Twitter's slowing user growth because its monthly user count went south.
00:07:21.000It fell by 1 million to 355 million from the year's first quarter.
00:07:24.000So people are simply not joining Twitter at the same rate.
00:07:27.000They may be experiencing the limit of the number of people who actually want to be on Twitter, which makes some sense because right now,
00:07:32.000What you're seeing on Twitter is social media mobbing becoming the most popular form of entertainment on Twitter.
00:07:37.000Somebody says something and you destroy them.
00:07:38.000Somebody says something you don't like and you decide to end their career.
00:07:42.000That means that a lot of prominent people are no longer going to take part in Twitter.
00:07:46.000They're not going to take part on Facebook.
00:07:48.000A lot of these social media companies have reaped the whirlwind and they would have been a lot better off if they just said, listen, we're a platform.
00:07:56.000Not our job to police it other than criminal activity.
00:07:58.000But instead, the folks over at Twitter have said, we want to make a better user experience with healthier conversation.
00:08:04.000And then people on the right say, well, yeah, but your definition of healthier conversation is not allowing us to talk.
00:08:08.000Your definition of a healthy conversation on Twitter is shadow banning us.
00:08:12.000Preventing our tweets from being seen.
00:08:14.000And the same thing on Facebook, where people say, well, you've discriminated against particular points of view on Facebook, why would we want to give you our business?
00:08:22.000These social media companies decided they didn't want the backlash from the left, and instead they drew the backlash from the right.
00:08:27.000I don't think that that fully explains the decline in stock price, but it has something to do with the overall lack of trust people now feel in social media.
00:08:35.000And the politicization of business is having some major impact across the board, and not just on people on the right, on people on the left as well.
00:08:42.000The latest example comes courtesy of the Huffington Post.
00:08:45.000So on Thursday, the Huffington Post revealed an absolute bombshell.
00:08:49.000Liberal columnist Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine was in an all-hands staff meeting, and he said at this meeting that part of him was glad that President Trump had won the Oval Office.
00:08:58.000This required the Huffington Post to run a front-page story about how terrible Jonathan Chait is.
00:09:08.000But according to the Huffington Post's Ashley Feinberg, Chait, among others on the magazine's editorial staff, was asked whether any part of him was happy that President Trump had won thanks to the possibility of more exciting content.
00:09:21.000So according to the Post, listen to the way the Huffington Post reports this.
00:09:24.000There's a woman named Traister, Rebecca Traister, who's a writer at large there.
00:09:28.000Traister went first and gave the right answer, which is no, said one employee, and realized that there was a right answer to how do you feel about things.
00:09:35.000She said there isn't a single molecule of her that is happy Trump won and that will all face repercussions for generations.
00:09:40.000Chait, however, answered the question with an affirmative 100%.
00:09:43.000According to the staffer, Chait said with a laugh, maybe that makes me a sociopath.
00:09:47.000Some of the employees in attendance said the group was stunned by Chait's response.
00:09:50.000Others were less surprised to hear the sentiment come from a self-described disenfranchised white man.
00:09:56.000This is how the left responds to its own when they say something mildly positive about President Trump.
00:10:01.000Not even that they love President Trump, want President Trump to remain president, but just he's entertaining.
00:10:07.000The level of horror in the Huffington Post article is telling.
00:10:10.000And of course, Jonathan Chait then got dragged on social media
00:10:13.000Requiring him to respond to the Huffington Post in which he said that his comments were quote intended for an audience which I assume was familiar with my work and the obvious seriousness with which I take politics in general and Trump in particular.
00:10:24.000I was commenting in an ironic and self-deprecating fashion about the way in which I can professionally disassociate myself from the events I am commenting on.
00:10:32.000But that didn't stop folks on the left from losing it.
00:10:34.000Jeet here over at The Atlantic said the disappointing thing here is that Chait, as I thought when I saw the headline, isn't an accelerationist, meaning there are some people on the left who are happy that Trump was elected because they think that it's going to precipitate a vast move to the left, but that's not what Chait was saying.
00:11:01.000And then you wonder why so many people don't want to take part in social media.
00:11:05.000You wonder why it is that so many people are running screaming from companies like Facebook and Twitter, and why Facebook and Twitter, in an attempt to stem that tide, have decided to crack down on conversations.
00:11:15.000It turns out that OpenFORA, I mean, honestly, I sort of feel for the heads of Facebook and Twitter to the extent that OpenFORA are going to lead to a large amount of meanness.
00:11:24.000But if you crack down on the meanness, there's no way to do that without cracking down on the content as well.
00:11:28.000So it's no wonder that the stock is dropping for a lot of those companies, even as the economy booms.
00:11:54.000Like, seriously, everyone at the office, a lot of dog people here at the office.
00:11:57.000We have an official dog that is the mascot of The Daily Wire here at the office.
00:12:01.000People even send me pictures of their dogs drinking from our leftist year's hot orc called Tumblr.
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00:13:54.000Michael Cohen is basically begging, at this point, Robert Mueller to cut him some sort of deal so he can avoid prison time, and in return, he will flip on President Trump.
00:14:01.000That's what he is doing very publicly.
00:14:03.000This really isn't conjecture at this point.
00:14:05.000And the latest evidence of this is that Michael Cohen has now come out and he has said that President Trump knew in advance of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr.
00:14:14.000and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was involved with the government.
00:14:19.000And who, it had been promised, would have the goods on Hillary Clinton.
00:14:22.000According to CNN, Michael Cohen, President Trump's former personal attorney, claims that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, in which Russians were expected to offer his campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton.
00:14:36.000Those sources with knowledge, their names might rhyme with Schmeichel-Mohan.
00:14:40.000Cohen is willing to make that assertion to special counsel Robert Mueller, the sources said.
00:14:44.000The sources, their names might rhyme with Schmeichel Glowen.
00:14:49.000Cohen's claim would contradict repeated denials by Trump, Donald Trump Jr., their lawyers, and other administration officials who have said the president knew nothing about the Trump Tower meeting until he was approached about it by the New York Times in July 2017.
00:15:00.000Now here is the timeline if you've forgotten all about the timeline.
00:15:03.000The timeline was that in June 2016 there was a meeting between Donald Trump Jr.
00:15:07.000and some members of the Trump campaign and Natalia Veselnitskaya all about supposedly bringing dirt to the attention of the Trump campaign from the Russian government that wanted to help Trump get elected, right?
00:15:17.000This was the biggest smoking gun that the left had and there's no evidence that Donald Trump knew about it at all.
00:15:43.000Cohen alleges that he was present, along with several others, when President Trump was informed of the Russians' offer by Trump Jr.
00:15:49.000By Cohen's account, Trump approved going ahead with the meeting with the Russians, according to sources who may or may not be Michael Cohen.
00:15:54.000To be clear, these sources, who may or may not be Michael Cohen, said Cohen does not have evidence, such as audio recordings, to corroborate his claim, but he is willing to attest to his account.
00:16:03.000Okay, now, if Michael Cohen is willing to testify in court about this, this means that someone is committing perjury.
00:16:08.000Either Michael Cohen is committing perjury or Donald Trump Jr., who testified under oath in front of Congress, I believe, is committing perjury.
00:16:14.000Cohen privately testified last year to two congressional committees, but he said nothing about this at the time.
00:16:19.000A source familiar with Cohen's House testimony said he did not testify that Trump had advanced knowledge.
00:16:24.000That source may or may not be Schmeichel Moen.
00:16:26.000Cohen's claims were not mentioned in separate reports issued by Republicans or Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.
00:16:33.000One of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment on the report.
00:16:35.000Now, all of this prompted President Trump to fire back at his now open warfare between the president and his former consigliere, Michael Cohen.
00:16:43.000This is basically turning into the scene from Godfather 2 with Pantheon.
00:17:09.000There's a character in Godfather 2, guys.
00:17:11.000And that character in Godfather 2 is going to flip and testify against the Corleone family after spending years working with the Corleone family.
00:18:37.000I think Donald Trump hired him, which doesn't speak highly of his hiring abilities, and then worked with him for years.
00:18:41.000But is there any reason for me to believe that after two years of saying that nothing happened, Michael Cohen, as soon as he is threatened with legal repercussions, suddenly flips and says, oh yeah, Trump knew all about that Trump Tower meeting.
00:18:54.000Is there any reason for me to believe Michael Cohen?
00:19:16.000It's wild watching the media think they have Trump at every turn.
00:19:20.000We finally have Trump, and then it's like watching a fat kid with a greased pig.
00:19:26.000I mean, they're chasing him, and then there's the greased pig, and they finally have him, and they fall forward, and boom, right in the mud.
00:19:31.000And then they get up, and they chase the greased pig around a little bit more, and then boom, right in the mud.
00:19:35.000And by the end, the only person covered with mud is the fat kid, in this case the media, and the greased pig just keeps escaping.
00:19:42.000If you think that Michael Cohen is going to be the club with which you beat Donald Trump, this is the funny thing, right?
00:19:46.000All of the clubs the media have used to beat Donald Trump are, at the very least, as bad people as Donald Trump.
00:19:54.000Stormy Daniels is not exactly a paragon of moral virtue.
00:19:57.000And that was the club that they decided they were going to use to beat Donald Trump with.
00:20:00.000It was the porn star who had a one-night stand with a guy who was married.
00:20:04.000And has sex on film for a living and then took $130,000 from that guy and now is supposed to be the great Democratic hero.
00:20:11.000And now they're going to go to Michael Cohen, who until five minutes ago was the worst person in the world, according to Democrats.
00:21:20.000How your DNA influences your facial features, taste, ability to smell certain odors, other traits.
00:21:25.000So it basically tells you how much of this is genetic, how much of this is real, and you can actually find out your ancestry.
00:21:31.000So if we could somehow get Elizabeth Warren to take one of these tests, we could actually find out whether indeed Elizabeth Warren is Native American or has any Native American ancestry whatsoever, because of those high cheekbones.
00:21:41.000I'm sure Donald Trump would pay Elizabeth Warren a million dollars to take a 23andMe Ancestry Service test.
00:22:19.000So, obviously, the Trump team is unhappy with Michael Cohen.
00:22:23.000Rudy Giuliani, who is President Trump's new lawyer, and who has not demonstrated tremendous credibility on a lot of issues himself, he says that Michael Cohen is a pathological liar.
00:22:33.000So here's what he has to say about it.
00:22:38.000I mean, or for two, he's been lying for years.
00:22:40.000I mean, there's nobody that I know that knows him that hasn't warned me that if he's, back is up against the wall, he'll lie like crazy because he's lied all his life.
00:22:48.000Okay, so there's a famous logical conundrum in which you go up to, in which you go up to a knight.
00:22:54.000Okay, this is called the knights and knaves problem in logic.
00:22:56.000And the knights and knaves problem goes something like this.
00:22:59.000You walk up to a guy on the road and you say to him, are you a knight or are you a knave?
00:23:35.000For example, rewriting Donald Trump Jr.'
00:23:37.000's statement on the Trump Tower meeting, or with regard to Stormy Daniels, or with regard to a myriad of other topics on this particular subject.
00:23:44.000You can't necessarily believe what President Trump has to say just because he said it.
00:23:48.000And then you've got Michael Cohen, who lies an awful lot and also doesn't know what polls are.
00:23:52.000So you've got a lot of things to worry about with Michael Cohen.
00:23:54.000Then you've got Rudy Giuliani, who in the last several weeks has backtracked several times on a variety of different topics.
00:24:03.000So the only thing I will say is that if Michael Cohen, in fact, were aware that Donald Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting, the serious question to be asked is why there are no tapes of it.
00:24:14.000Because obviously the guy was taping everything.
00:24:36.000According to Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman over at the New York Times, quote, for years, President Donald Trump has used Twitter as his go-to public relations weapon, mounting a barrage of attacks on celebrities and then political rivals, even after advisors warned he could be creating legal problems for himself.
00:24:49.000If you have to go through President Trump's Twitter feed for evidence of obstruction of justice, I'm going to say you don't have much, okay?
00:24:55.000We all saw all of those tweets, and the explanations are just what they always were.
00:25:13.000Either President Trump is obstructing justice and trying to stymie the Mueller investigation because he's trying to hide something, or the President is just mouthing off about things.
00:25:22.000The President is just frustrated with Mueller, and he's frustrated with Comey.
00:25:25.000Which one of those do you think is more likely?
00:25:27.000That the President is really obstructing justice, that he has something deep and dark to hide, or that the President of the United States says a lot of stuff on Twitter.
00:25:36.000Now, as I've said, my belief on this is very clear.
00:25:39.000The president says a lot of stuff on Twitter, and if your best evidence is going to be stuff that he says to 50 million people on Twitter, then he's really bad at collusion, right?
00:25:46.000He's really bad at collusion and obstruction.
00:25:48.000Like, I just, I don't buy any of this, and I find it difficult to believe that this is what's going to take down President Trump is going to be Twitter.
00:25:58.000Now, they are also saying that federal investigators in Manhattan have asked to interview Allen Weisselberg, who's the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, as part of their investigation into Michael Cohen.
00:26:06.000Now, what's really fascinating about the kind of Michael Cohen and Robert Mueller of all of this is that while everybody is focused on the Mueller investigation, it really is going to be the Cohen stuff that is going to be more damaging to President Trump, if there is anything that damages President Trump.
00:26:30.000When Mueller comes out with indictments and I say, OK, well, there's some good stuff and I'm waiting to see more evidence on President Trump.
00:26:39.000Then people say, why don't you just go along with Mueller?
00:26:42.000Why don't you just believe, just believe that collusion happened and that obstruction happened?
00:26:45.000And I'm like, well, I'm waiting for the evidence.
00:26:47.000But when Trump says that there is no, that this is all a witch hunt, that there's nothing there, I say, well, listen, I'll just wait for the evidence.
00:26:52.000And then people on the right say, how dare you wait for the evidence?
00:26:57.000Because I'm a lawyer and also a rational human, and you should be too.
00:27:00.000If you don't have evidence of an allegation, you should wait for the evidence of the allegation to amount to something before you jump to the conclusion.
00:27:08.000And the fact that everybody is willing to jump to conclusions without waiting for the evidence is more than slightly troubling to me.
00:27:14.000Okay, meanwhile, the Republicans are signaling to their own base a lot.
00:27:19.000Now, Jim Jordan, a guy who I really like, Representative Jim Jordan from Ohio, a strong Freedom Caucus member, a very, very conservative member of Congress,
00:27:27.000He is running for Speaker of the House.
00:27:30.000And I think that he would make a very good Speaker of the House or a House Minority Leader if, God forbid, the Democrats win back Congress in 2018, because he is quite strong.
00:27:47.000He's not somebody who's going to pull his punches.
00:27:49.000So I'm very much in support of the idea that Jim Jordan is going to run for Speaker of the House.
00:27:55.000He said that he's sending a letter to his colleagues as we speak.
00:27:58.000That said, I think that the sort of signaling that is going on from the right wing of the Republican caucus with regard to, for example, Rod Rosenstein, as I said yesterday, I think is a mistake.
00:28:07.000The attempt to impeach Rod Rosenstein is counterproductive, and it signals to the country that you're trying to cover up something from President Trump.
00:28:15.000There's what you think it signals to your base, which is, Rosenstein and the deep state are out to get Trump, let's fire Rosenstein.
00:28:20.000And then there's what it signals to the rest of the country, which is Congress is a lackey of the president, and they're doing his dirty work for him.
00:28:45.000I think it's politically stupid to move for the impeachment of Rod Rosenstein.
00:28:49.000I understand why some of the leaders in the House are doing it.
00:28:51.000I think they're doing it because they want to show that they are very much in support of President Trump and that they're standing up to the deep state and that there are going to be a lot of rah-rah cheerleaders on the conservative side of the aisle who are happy because fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, MAGA, MAGA.
00:29:09.000It is appropriate that we conduct oversight of the executive branch and that we get full compliance with the executive branch on what are very legitimate document requests.
00:29:18.000Do I support impeachment of Rod Rosenstein?
00:29:21.000Okay, and here's something for Republicans to remember.
00:29:24.000If you set the precedent that somebody ought to be impeached over not being completely transparent with oversight committees in Congress, wait till the Democrats have control of Congress.
00:29:32.000Wait till they're subpoenaing documents from members of the Trump administration.
00:29:35.000Wait until they call Trump before them for testimony.
00:29:39.000Wait until all that happens and then launch impeachment on the back of this kind of stuff.
00:29:42.000It's just, it's not particularly smart.
00:30:20.000Plus, if you subscribe, then not just to the website, but if you subscribe over at YouTube or iTunes, then you will always have access to our Sunday specials.
00:30:26.000This Sunday, it's Mike Rowe, which is awesome.
00:30:28.000Everybody's very excited about the Mike Rowe episode of the Sunday special.
00:31:01.000He said at some point he hopes that I'll come and speak at the University of Kentucky because they have great bourbon, which is a strong, strong pitch.
00:31:07.000Okay, so here's the answer with regard to interest.
00:31:09.000So in Judaism, first of all, there's a huge portion of Talmudic law that is basically designed to work out
00:31:19.000Because interest is quite good for the economy.
00:31:22.000Because one of the big problems is that if I am not allowed to loan money at interest to Senya, I might loan money at no interest to Senya because I'm friendly with Senya.
00:31:31.000But if I have to loan money at interest to Austin, I'm not going to do it.
00:31:41.000So why exactly would I loan him money at no interest?
00:31:43.000One of the great incentives to loan people money is that you are able to charge them interest and that creates a sort of security for you to lend them the money in the first place.
00:31:51.000Well, it is important to understand the context in which the rules on interest are written in the Bible.
00:31:57.000Religious communities are supposed to be seen as charitable social safety nets.
00:32:01.000That's what they're supposed to be seen as.
00:32:04.000And so, in Judaism, if you have a business that is loaning money to another business, it's not clear that that is actually banned.
00:32:09.000So this has actually become an issue with, for example, Bank Leumi, which is the Israeli national bank, is that if you loan at interest in your institution, it may not be quite the same thing biblically as me loaning money to Senya.
00:32:21.000Or me loaning money to, take a more specific religious example, me loaning money to a fellow member of my synagogue.
00:32:26.000The idea in Christianity and Judaism is that members of a community should act as support structures for one another and loan each other money at no interest so that everybody can prosper.
00:32:37.000This is also true, by the way, under Qur'anic law.
00:32:40.000The Qur'an is very much against interest.
00:32:41.000Now, there are people who suggest that that's because these are all human-written
00:32:47.000Documents supposedly then people just didn't understand how interest works.
00:32:50.000I find that a little bit I find that a little bit cynical I think instead the basic idea here is the same as it is in the New Testament when it says that that Jesus's disciples lived in common and then people use that as a as a as evidence and
00:33:29.000It's your wife's job to tell her parents to stop.
00:33:51.000It is not your job to tell her parents to stop.
00:33:53.000It's just going to be a terrible disaster if you do that.
00:33:55.000If you tell her parents, listen, mom, I need you to back off, then she's just going to go complain to your wife.
00:34:00.000Your wife's going to say, why were you so mean to my mom?
00:34:02.000And then you got trouble because she's not sleeping anyway and she's nursing the six month old.
00:34:05.000So what you actually want, and this is a rule that we have in my family, is that if there's a problem with my parents, if my wife has a problem with my parents, it is my job to convey that to my parents, particularly because you have to be open minded about your own parents that maybe, listen,
00:34:18.000Your parents, this is one of the toughest lessons in life, seriously, is when you grow up, part of growing up is realizing that your parents are human beings, too, and they make mistakes, and sometimes they're annoying, and sometimes they do silly things.
00:34:30.000I mean, they basically provide secondary childcare to my kids all the time.
00:34:35.000But there are times when I will have to say to my parents, listen, Dad, that's not the way that I really want to do that, or listen, Mom, that's really not the way that we want to do that.
00:34:42.000And my parents are really, because they're good people, they're willing to hear that out.
00:34:44.000They understand my kids are my kids, and I'm raising my kids as I want to raise my kids.
00:34:48.000The same thing is true of my wife's parents.
00:34:50.000If there is a problem with my wife's parents, it is her job to speak to her parents.
00:35:30.000Every day after the show, if I don't do my ad reads, the extra ad reads that I have to do properly after the show, Senya will play Taylor Swift in my ear as a sort of Chinese water torture in order to get me to do what she wants me to do.
00:36:22.000Tariffs are not a good thing unless you're using them as a ratchet to get another country to lower its tariffs and you have to use it as a sort of leverage point.
00:36:31.000Also, you can punish cheating in terms of like, if somebody's stealing IP and then shipping the product back into the country, if they're actually violating fraud laws, then tariffs are appropriate as a punishment.
00:36:43.000If the idea is that somebody else is just making cheap products that people want to buy, I don't see why it's any of your business if I want to buy a Japanese Walkman.
00:36:49.000Like, that really is none of your business at all.
00:36:57.000Well, honestly, I'm not sure I'd have a lot to say to Bernie Sanders, because I'm not sure that Bernie Sanders is the kind of guy who listens to things.
00:37:03.000I'm not sure that we would actually have a good conversation.
00:37:05.000I'd probably try to avoid politics if I wanted to have a pleasant evening with Bernie Sanders, because what could I say to him that would actually convince him?
00:37:42.000As far as what kind of pudding cups would I bring, well, I mean, I know the man loves pudding cups.
00:37:48.000But I think I would deprive him of pudding cups.
00:37:50.000I think what I would do is I would only bring one type of pudding cup.
00:37:52.000And then I would suggest that a free market system provides too many different options for pudding cups.
00:37:57.000And clearly what we need is a government centralization of all pudding cups and redistribution of pudding cups.
00:38:01.000And if he has to pay with less pudding cups, then that's just the way it goes.
00:38:04.000Justin says, on tariffs, other than having strong leverage, how does a nation get other countries to lower their tariffs without threatening them with our tariffs?
00:38:10.000There are actually a lot of ways to get other countries to lower their tariffs, without actually increasing our tariffs.
00:38:16.000First of all, if they want to increase their own tariffs on our products, that doesn't actually hurt our economy in any significant way, since we are just getting cheaper products and inputs, and then we can generate our own products, and then we can sell that to other markets.
00:38:27.000Thank God there are not only two players in the global system.
00:38:30.000But let's simplify economics for just a second.
00:38:34.000There are only two people in the world, you and the guy who owns the grocery store.
00:38:37.000And the guy who owns the grocery store does not want to, and you're a carpenter, he doesn't want to use you to make the shelves, right?
00:38:42.000He says, I'm not going to use you to make the shelves.
00:38:45.000The groceries are still cheap at the grocery store.
00:38:47.000Would you rather go in your backyard and farm all of your stuff yourself and then you have to do your carpentry and you also have to grow your own wheat in the backyard?
00:38:55.000Or would you be better off just going and buying the groceries and then spending the extra time trying to find another client?
00:39:02.000You know, the idea that you actually make yourself better off by taxing yourself at a higher rate, I think, is completely silly.
00:39:07.000The highest leverage for free trade is the fact that people would actually, in their own countries, want access to your products and services, which is why the
00:39:18.000Again, if you're temporarily increasing tariffs in order to lower other people's tariffs, I don't really have a problem with that.
00:39:23.000But if you're using tariffs as a way of strengthening your own economy, I think that's idiotic.
00:39:28.000Well, first of all, I think the president really needs to stop saying things that make him unpopular, because as I've said with my balloon theory of politics a little bit earlier this week, I think the president has squeezed all the air out of the presidential side of the balloon.
00:39:41.000Anything he does from here on in doesn't affect the presidential polling, but it does affect the congressional polling.
00:39:46.000Other than that, I'm not sure what the Republicans can do, frankly.
00:39:49.000I mean, I think the Republicans should just go out and campaign on the economy, they should go out and campaign on the tax cuts, they should go out and campaign on getting rid of the individual mandate.
00:39:55.000There are a lot of good things for them to campaign on.
00:39:57.000They're going to need to stop making big boo-boos because congressional elections turn on big boo-boos.
00:40:39.000Being honest with your employer when they ask you trick questions, like, what is your greatest flaw, is probably a better way to tackle things than trying to outsmart the question.
00:40:48.000Usually what people do is they say, well, what is your greatest flaw?
00:41:09.000Pick a number higher than the one you want.
00:41:10.000I used to make this mistake in negotiations.
00:41:12.000And the negotiation used to go, me saying what I actually wanted, and then somebody coming back with a lower number.
00:41:17.000I would negotiate based on what I need, not what I can get.
00:41:19.000If you're actually negotiating on salary, you should try to assess what the other side thinks you're worth, and then try to go a little higher than that number and let them negotiate you down.
00:42:03.000I think that there are folks on the left who basically suggest that if you disagree with them, you are not a legitimate person of minority status.
00:42:10.000And listen, the same thing has happened to me as a Jew, right?
00:42:13.000When I was critical of the alt-right, then it was Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro.
00:42:18.000And when I am critical of Barack Obama, then it is white nationalist critic Ben Shapiro.
00:42:28.000But this is how the left acts because the left has now identified all core goods with minority, ethnic, racial, cultural status and all core bads with majoritarian white status.
00:42:39.000So it's really that simple and it's really gross.
00:42:43.000I'm a stay-at-home mom of a six and two-year-old.
00:42:46.000My husband and I have pretty much decided we are not going to have any more children, but lately I've been having some second thoughts.
00:42:51.000Not because I want more kids, it is a challenge handling the ones I have now, and I feel like we'll be able to offer more attention and opportunities to our kids since there's just two, but I almost feel like we have some sort of responsibility to have more since we're a stable Christian home, we have a great relationship, and my husband has put in the hard work so that I can be home full-time.
00:43:05.000Just curious about your thoughts on this.
00:43:08.000You know, I do believe that people should have more than two children.
00:43:12.000I believe people should have lots of kids.
00:43:14.000You know, I'm not saying, listen, you gotta make the judgment for yourself.
00:43:17.000I've suggested that I think that healthy, able-bodied people who are responsible with their lives should definitely have kids.
00:43:23.000I think that it is selfish not to have kids if you can provide a kid with a good home because the next generation is significantly more important than your pleasure over the next 20-odd years.
00:43:33.000Or over the rest of your life, for that matter.
00:44:20.000Well, I mean, if you're talking about nuclear power plants, then absolutely.
00:44:23.000Yeah, of course, we should be having more nuclear power plants.
00:44:25.000The fact that we have, like, two in the state of California, and we have rolling brownouts every single year during the summer, and the government says every year, turn off your air conditioner when it's summer.
00:44:33.000It's like, did you not get the memo that over the past several billion years, it gets hot in the summer?
00:44:39.000That's when I need my air conditioning, is during the summer.
00:44:42.000And you idiots have cut off all the abilities to build nuclear power plants, and instead you're like, oh, well, what if we just have windmills?
00:44:48.000Yeah, the windmills are gonna do it in the middle of the summer when there's no wind and it's 190 degrees outside, you idiots.
00:44:54.000Yes, of course nuclear would be a good solution.
00:44:55.000Listen, most of, I believe most of France's energy is based on nuclear power, which is significantly cleaner than any other form of power that can provide mass amounts of electricity.
00:45:06.000How can conservatives respond when liberals quote that this land is stolen from Native Americans as a response to illegals coming into the United States?
00:45:12.000They use this to justify open borders.
00:45:14.000Well, there are a couple of responses to this.
00:45:15.000First of all, the history of the world is movement of populations.
00:45:21.000The truth is that Native American tribes
00:45:23.000Move routinely and took over each other's lens and made war with one another.
00:45:28.000It is also true that there was no sovereign state in the United States when settlers arrived.
00:45:32.000It wasn't like there was a sovereign nation that had claimed actual territorial ownership over particular areas as far as I'm aware.
00:45:39.000And so was the treatment of Native Americans decent?
00:45:43.000But can you say that the United States quote unquote stole the land?
00:45:46.000In rare cases, I think you probably can.
00:45:48.000But in most cases, I think the answer is no.
00:45:50.000There's a lot of unoccupied land out there.
00:45:52.000And I also do hold by the Lockean theory of property that property ownership is largely based on your ability to cultivate the land, which is why I believe in a legal thing called adverse possession, which is basically if you own 200 acres and you're not doing anything with it ever, you don't ever visit it, you don't do anything with it.
00:46:06.000And I go out there and I set up a farm on your land.
00:46:08.000And 20 years later, you come by and you say, why do you have a farm on my land?
00:46:29.000You've been living with your girlfriend.
00:46:31.000It turns out, when you have sex with people, of the opposite sex particularly, and specifically, then there is a serious possibility that pregnancy may be the result, because this has been true throughout all of human and animal history.
00:46:43.000So, I'm glad that you're having fun, but now I think that it's quite important that you provide a home to that child.
00:46:53.000Your job on planet Earth is now to marry your girlfriend and take care of your child.
00:46:56.000And if you feel that you couldn't be responsible for that, that's a decision you should have made before.
00:47:00.000But now, responsibility has been thrust upon you.
00:47:03.000And you can either be a man, or it can be a child.
00:47:05.000If you decide to be a child and either abandon the kid, or you decide to do something much, much morally worse, and...
00:47:12.000Do something or convince your girlfriend or discuss with your girlfriend doing something to the baby itself, which is an act of not only ultimate irresponsibility, but deep evil.
00:47:19.000If you do that, you've betrayed your purpose on the planet.
00:47:24.000You've betrayed my purpose on this planet.
00:49:29.000I've learned to laugh at jokes thrown from both sides of the ideological spectrum.
00:49:32.000That being said, I do feel like comedy has become a way for certain people to become motivational or inspirational icons without the repercussions that political commentators face.
00:49:39.000What is the future for comedy in this country?
00:49:41.000Do you have any particular favorite comedians?
00:49:43.000Well, the future of comedy is dark and dismal because everybody is now made a virtue out of being offended.
00:49:52.000If you're going to be offended when taboos get violated, you're not going to be able to laugh at things and it means that we're going to destroy anybody who tells a joke, even a bad joke.
00:49:58.000Comedians are not going to hit 100% of the time.
00:50:01.000They're going to violate all your taboos and sometimes it'll be funny and sometimes it won't.
00:50:39.000's bits on kids are just, they're spectacularly good.
00:50:43.000He has a couple of bits on kids that are really, really funny.
00:50:46.000One of them is my favorite bit on kids ever about his daughter asking him particular questions and the tendency of children to ask why until you basically die.
00:50:57.000I mean, honestly, I think that he was rather honest about the fact that he was sleaze, right?
00:51:03.000I mean, it wasn't like he was trying to hide the ball on that one in any sense.
00:51:07.000But the fact is that, yeah, I think that Mulaney, Louis C.K., those are two good ones.
00:51:13.000It's until until Bill Cosby turned out to be a horrible multiple serial rapist.
00:51:17.000Allegedly, I think that a lot of his old comedy was was actually quite good.
00:51:21.000I grew up listening to some of Bill Cosby's old CDs.
00:55:53.000And then he says, Trump should know we are a nation of martyrdom and that we await him.
00:55:56.000If you guys launch a war against us, I mean, legitimately, you launch a war against the United States, then you will be a nation of martyrdom.