The fallout from yesterday's gun control walkout continues, and I'm getting tons of emails from kids who feel like they were essentially discriminated against at these walkouts. Plus, a new segment called the Mailbag, where I answer your questions and talk about a wide range of topics, including the American Split, the Gun Control Walkout, the Right Splits on Free Trade, and we'll check the mailbag, and do many other fun and amusing things. This is the Ben Shapiro Show, and if you haven't noticed, I'm just in one of those moods because I watched the Avengers Infinity trailer, and all I can say is, does every character from every movie have to appear in one movie? Should we just make, like, a movie mashup where we re all in the same movie together? But I guess that's the way we're gonna do movies now, so I'm doing movie mashups, and then they both die of a horrible disease... Okay, we'll get to actual news in a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare. That's where you get unlimited access to over 18,000 classes for 99 cents right now! You get two months of Skillshare for just 99 cents, and you'll be looking for a new job in the next three months for $99 cents! That's right, you get those two months for 99 cent, right now. That s gonna be a good deal! -Ben Shapiro CHECK THE MONDAY SHOW! CHECK OUT THE MAILBAGE HERE! CHEERS, BONUS CONTENT: American Split: The Gun Control walkout AND FREE TRAINING HERE! CHEER, BECAUSE I'M TALKING ABOUT THAT'S AVAILABLE FOR $99 COULD I GET A MONTH OF $25 AT $99 UPPRISE AND A FRIEND GET A PRICE OF $50 AT $20 AND A CITY BOUGOT A CITY COURSE? CHECK THEM OUT IN A CITY PRODUCING A CITY CALLING ME IN A PLACE TO GET A FRIENDS LIKE THAT? AND OTHER THAN THAT? CHOTOTING A PRICING A VOTING IN A PRIVATE PRISE? AND A THIRD THING AND A FEDCAST AND A PRIEVE THAT SOMETHING LIKE THAT AND A VIOLENT THING?
00:00:30.000I think Sleepless in Seattle and Contagion should be in the same universe.
00:00:33.000Chief and Meg Ryan finally find stomachs.
00:00:36.000And then they both die of a horrible disease.
00:00:39.000Okay, we'll get to actual news in just a second.
00:00:41.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
00:00:45.000So, if you don't want to end up like me, trying to figure out exactly how bad movies mash up with one another, then you need to make your resume better, right?
00:00:52.000You need to actually put more skills on your resume.
00:02:02.000The fallout from yesterday's gun control walkout continues, and I'm getting tons of emails from kids who feel like they were essentially discriminated against at these walkouts.
00:02:11.000I just got one from a kid who wrote to me and said that he wanted to—that he wasn't intending on being political at this walkout.
00:02:19.000He waited until people brought out the gun control signs, then he brought out a Gadsden flag, and he was immediately shut down by his school.
00:02:24.000He was immediately told he had to put it away.
00:03:10.000One teacher has actually been suspended for questioning the gun control walkout.
00:03:14.000Her name is Julianne Benzel, and she says that she opened up the discussion in her classroom about the politics of the protest, and she was subsequently told to stay home on Wednesday because the administration didn't like it.
00:03:24.000Here's what she had to say on CBS 13 Local.
00:03:28.000Julianne Benzel says she never discouraged her students from participating in National School Walkout, but she did question whether it's appropriate for a school to support a protest against gun violence if it's not willing to support all protests.
00:03:42.000It's the best example I thought of at the time.
00:03:44.000If a group of students nationwide or even locally decided, I want to walk out of school for 17 minutes and go in the quad area and protest abortion.
00:03:55.000OK, and she's, of course, exactly right.
00:03:56.000If the students decided to walk out and protest abortion, they would have no capacity to—none of the teachers would sponsor it, right?
00:04:01.000But because this is a national gun, anti-gun walkout, all the students were expected to walk out.
00:04:06.000I've gotten notes from students who say that they wanted to stay in class because they didn't feel like creating a hubbub.
00:04:11.000They were just going to stay inside the school.
00:04:13.000And they've actually been getting notes from teachers, you know, threats of suspension for staying in the school during the walkout.
00:04:41.000And this is why so many parents are pulling their kids out of public school and putting their kids in private school.
00:04:44.000They're saying, you're not even doing a good job of ensuring that my kids are getting an education, but you can certainly ensure that my kids get to walk out of class and miss class in order to make a political statement that has nothing to do with their education.
00:04:55.000Because of course, these kids can't vote.
00:05:13.000If you look at just how teachers unions work, the way they bargain with the state is they are basically democratic tools.
00:05:17.000And that was predicted long ago by Ludwig von Mises in his book, Bureaucracy, talking about how any employee of the state ends up being a propaganda outlet.
00:07:41.000But to pretend that all of these students are the wisest and fairest of all beings, they're the elves in our little morality play of Middle Earth,
00:07:49.000It's just it's foolish and it's not true at all, especially when you look at what actually happened in Broward County.
00:07:55.000So this video came out yesterday and it really is shocking.
00:07:58.000It's video from Broward County of the sheriff's deputy.
00:08:04.000He obviously, first of all, does not look like he should be on school site security.
00:08:09.000One of the big problems that you see when you talk about in-school security is very often these are rented cops.
00:08:14.000Very often these are people who could not pass a physical.
00:08:17.000These are people who could not run a block without losing their breath.
00:08:20.000It's not everybody who's a school deputy, obviously, but it is true for a certain number of them.
00:08:24.000And it is important that you have some people who actually are in good shape, know what they're doing.
00:08:28.000This guy I don't feel bad ripping on because you'll see in the video that they hear the gunshots, he takes off on his little golf cart to go over to the area where the shooting is happening, and then you'll see in the video he stands around and does nothing for 20 minutes.
00:08:40.000Here's what it looked like when the Broward County Sheriff's Office released the tape.
00:08:46.000It's a silent video, so I'll narrate it.
00:08:48.000You can see him, Scott Peterson, the BSO, school resource officer, who looks like he's maybe in his 50s, and he drives over to the area where the shooting is happening, and then he proceeds to legitimately just stand outside the building.
00:09:00.000He's just standing around outside the building doing nothing.
00:09:06.000And there's part of this video that we cut out where you can actually see students fleeing the building through another one of these doors.
00:09:12.000And according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office, the orders that are given to their officers are that if there is an active school shooting, you are supposed to engage.
00:09:19.000You are not supposed to stand outside.
00:09:21.000So the talk about how these guys were told that they were supposed to stand outside, how that was the policy of the department, that was not true.
00:09:27.000So there's one problem with the department with regard to policy, and that is this policy that says we're not going to arrest anyone because we don't want to increase the arrest statistics on students.
00:09:36.000We want to show that our students are doing really well, and so we'll just pretend that no crime is going on.
00:09:40.000But this one looks like it was on Scott Peterson and not on the Broward County Sheriff's Office, per se.
00:09:44.000Nonetheless, this is not stopping the agenda from rolling forward.
00:09:47.000Mika Brzezinski over on MSNBC, she says the NRA should be sued.
00:09:51.000Some things have changed, at least in the state of Florida.
00:09:53.000The NRA, with their inflammatory ads and threatening ads, should be sued.
00:09:58.000Okay, on what grounds should the NRA be sued?
00:10:00.000In order for you to sue somebody, you actually have to have legal grounds.
00:10:03.000There actually has to be a legal purpose for the suit.
00:10:24.000There were three kids who were killed who were members of JROTC, and one of those kids actually threw himself in front of bullets to save other kids.
00:10:30.000While this idiot cop was standing around outside doing nothing,
00:10:33.000One of these students, a 15-year-old, he ran out there and he tried to stop the shooter.
00:12:32.000Well, no, you don't have to do that anymore.
00:12:33.000Now, it all comes directly to your door.
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00:13:12.000It has the support of a wide variety of senators, and it doesn't do anything about gun control per se, but it does do some things about school security.
00:13:19.000So there is no parallel measure pending in the Senate.
00:13:22.000Right now, they're trying to push gun control in the Senate, of course, but that's not going to happen.
00:13:26.000This bill is instead a bill that doesn't allow, that is seeking to increase security at schools.
00:14:55.000And OK, these should be the first steps.
00:14:57.000Obviously, I think that the states should actually take precedence here.
00:15:00.000I'm not sure that the federal government should be leading the way on any of this stuff in the first place.
00:15:04.000But I think that it is it is pretty clear that these that the school, the school safety bill should pass with flying colors through the Senate.
00:16:00.000We didn't achieve that goal, but we're moving firmly in the right direction.
00:16:03.000Making the improvements we made took work, no doubt about it.
00:16:06.000We all tapped our networks and made moves to expand our collective Rolodex.
00:16:09.000I check our numbers at the end of the week because it's easy to lose track or imagine you're doing better than you really are, and the numbers don't lie.
00:16:14.000The numbers also don't tell the whole story about disability, geography, socioeconomics, and more.
00:16:18.000But the work is not onerous, and it's definitely not impossible.
00:16:21.000If we can do it, every other opinion page can do it, too.
00:16:23.000And if you have an op-ed to pitch, here's how you can do that.
00:16:25.000So what I love about this is that the deputy opinion page editor over at the Huffington Post doesn't make any case with regard to the quality of the submissions over at Huffington Post.
00:16:34.000There's nothing to be said here about how great Huffington Post's quality is.
00:16:37.000Instead, all they care about is the racial breakdown of the people writing, which used to be called racial quotas and were obviously Latinx.
00:17:25.000Meanwhile, President Trump continues to forge forth on his anti-free trade program.
00:17:31.000And this is obviously not good policy.
00:17:34.000Tucker Carlson made the best case on this last night.
00:17:37.000There are a bunch of folks who are on the Trump side of the aisle who are trying to make the case for tariffs, who are trying to make the case for protectionism.
00:17:44.000My problem with tariffs and protectionism, obviously, is that they believe in the power of centralized government.
00:17:49.000Here's Tucker trying to make his strongest case.
00:17:51.000For technology and trade being the downfall of American civilization.
00:17:57.000It's not a horrible case, but I don't think it's a convincing one either.
00:18:00.000Lawmakers in both parties, for example, have heartily embraced self-driving vehicles and drone delivery of packages.
00:18:07.000It's all impressive technology, but what would be the effect on employment?
00:18:43.000But keep in mind, our leaders said the very same thing about manufacturing jobs 30 years ago.
00:18:48.000Okay, so this is, what Tucker points out here is, I think, a generalized argument that can always be made in favor of centralized government.
00:18:58.000What he's saying is there's a group of people in the United States, they are lower educated white men, basically.
00:19:04.000These are people who are living in the middle of the country and people who are working in non-technology jobs.
00:19:10.000These are people who are working on lines.
00:19:12.000These are people who are truck drivers.
00:19:13.000And these people are going to be hurt by technology and trade and we have to do something for these people.
00:19:50.000There are lots of people who make a lot of money in their jobs, and there are lots of people who make very little money, and all of them go to the same church.
00:19:56.000So, when Tucker suggests that people who are earning a lower wage are suddenly going to not stick around for their kids, I'm not sure I see the correlation there, or at least I'm going to resist the correlation.
00:20:07.000The other thing is that this is not really a case for tariffs.
00:20:10.000It's not really a case for shutting down trade or shutting down technology, so I'm not sure what Tucker is actually arguing for here.
00:20:15.000I agree that a lot of this stuff is a problem.
00:20:17.000I agree that we have a problem with people who are not lawyers or doctors, people who don't have higher education degrees.
00:20:43.000There are a bunch of people who lost their jobs over at AT&T when people stopped using landlines.
00:20:47.000There are a bunch of folks who lost their jobs when dial-up internet went away.
00:20:52.000There are a bunch of people who lose their jobs when any new technology is developed.
00:20:56.000There are a bunch of people who lose their jobs.
00:20:57.000The question is, are a consummate number of jobs created on the other end?
00:21:01.000Are there more jobs that are created on the other end, or just as many jobs created?
00:21:04.000And, by the way, that isn't even really the question.
00:21:06.000The question is, does quality of life go up for the vast majority of Americans every time there's a technological change?
00:21:11.000Because the goal of an economy is not to create jobs.
00:21:13.000The goal of jobs is to create an economy.
00:21:15.000Meaning, the purpose of a job is to create a product or service someone else wants to buy.
00:21:19.000It is not the job of the economy, per se, or the government, per se, to ensure that anyone has a job.
00:21:23.000If you get that polarity backwards, you end up with communism, where everybody has a job, but they're not producing anything anybody wants.
00:21:29.000Centralized government is not the answer here.
00:21:30.000Now, there is a piece that I referenced a little bit yesterday I want to go through in a little more detail here.
00:21:35.000Regarding tariffs, there's a piece over at the Journal of American Greatness.
00:21:38.000The Journal of American Greatness was an outlet devoted to President Trump's purported philosophy.
00:21:43.000And it's kind of lost some of its luster because President Trump doesn't have really a coherent philosophy.
00:21:47.000But there's a piece there that was taking on something I said on the show about free trade.
00:21:52.000And this piece is by a guy named Spencer Morrison, who's a law student and editor-in-chief of the National Economics Editorial, which I've never heard of.
00:22:06.000My perspective on free trade is backed by essentially 100% of economists.
00:22:10.000There are very few economists who believe in tariffs.
00:22:12.000When I say very few, I mean that if you polled actual economists, the number of economists who would dismiss free trade in favor of tariffs, that number is very close to zero.
00:22:24.000I think it's worth discussing in detail.
00:22:25.000So, Morrison argues in favor of tariffs.
00:22:27.000And he begins with an analysis of a three-minute segment of video from this podcast in which I talked about the flaws in tariff-based economics.
00:22:33.000I specifically talked in that segment about the fact that trade deficits don't matter.
00:22:56.000Now, obviously, I've done a lot of work on tariffs on the show, but there's a new argument that Morrison presents that I think that you should know about just so that you know what you're talking about when you talk about free trade.
00:23:04.000So, first, Morrison sort of misrepresents my argument.
00:23:07.000He suggests that I think trade deficits are an act of good.
00:23:09.000I've never said trade deficits are an act of good.
00:23:13.000You sometimes have a trade deficit with your grocery store, sometimes you're a contractor to your grocery store and you have a trade surplus.
00:23:19.000None of that means that anything inherently bad or good is going on.
00:23:23.000As I've quoted before, Thomas Sowell says this, In general, international deficits and surpluses have had virtually no correlation with the performance of most nations' economies.
00:23:31.000Germany and France have had international trade surpluses while their unemployment rates were in double digits.
00:23:35.000Japan's post-war rise to economic prominence on the world stage included years when it ran deficits as well as years when it ran surpluses.
00:23:42.000was the biggest debtor nation in the world during its rise to industrial supremacy, became a creditor as a result of lending money to its European allies during the First World War, and has been both a debtor and a creditor at various times since.
00:23:52.000Through it all, the American standard of living has remained the highest in the world, unaffected by whether it was a creditor or a debtor nation.
00:23:58.000Now, Morrison, this author, claims that I have called Trump a flip-flopper on free trade, which I never have.
00:24:03.000He's been very clear that he's anti-free trade.
00:24:05.000But here's the central argument that's made, and this is the one that I think we should spend some time talking about, just so that you know the arguments that are being made against free trade and why they are wrong.
00:24:25.000Not like the best, but pretty good, right?
00:24:27.000And let's see that I can even make, I can even grow oranges better than my local grocery store.
00:24:32.000But I am the very best at making this podcast.
00:24:34.000So every minute that I spend not growing oranges is a minute that I spend on the podcast.
00:24:38.000And every minute that I spend on the podcast is a minute I spend not growing oranges.
00:24:41.000Should I spend my time doing the podcast or should I spend my time growing oranges?
00:24:44.000The answer, of course, is that I should take all the money I'm earning from the podcast and go buy some oranges at a cheaper price.
00:24:50.000The time value, the monetary value of my time is higher doing the thing that I am best at, even if it means that I'm buying from somebody else who's specializing in an area where I'm still the best, but it's just not the best thing I do.
00:25:02.000I'm better at the podcast than I am at growing oranges, therefore I should spend more of my time doing the podcast than growing oranges, even if the second best guy at growing oranges
00:25:46.000For example, comparative advantage suggests the key to getting rich is to specialize production regardless of what you produce.
00:25:51.000That is, a country with comparative advantage in growing soybeans should focus on growing more soybeans, while a country with comparative advantage in manufacturing semiconductors should focus on manufacturing more semiconductors.
00:26:01.000In either case, this supposes their relative wealth will correlate with the degree of specialization as opposed to the complexity of their production.
00:26:25.000Countries are broad amalgams of individuals, all of whom are in different industries.
00:26:30.000So this guy says, well, this guy makes the obvious point that if you grow bananas, you're going to make less money than if you make computers.
00:27:10.000First of all, you cannot tell which sectors of an economy are likely to be the most profitable.
00:27:16.000This is something called, what he's talking about here is a term called path dependency.
00:27:20.000Path dependency is, you made a mistake, you decided to grow bananas, and now you're stuck growing bananas forever, even if it would be more profitable for you to move into making semiconductors.
00:27:28.000But this assumes that you can't just stop making bananas and start making semiconductors.
00:27:32.000It assumes there's no bank that will lend you money if you get a computer education degree to go make semiconductors.
00:27:38.000This assumes there's no mobility in the economy, which of course is not true.
00:27:42.000And if the government were to say, listen, we're going to tariff semiconductors, we're going to tax all the banana growers and take all their money, and we're going to use it to subsidize semiconductors, who's to say the government knows which industry is going to grow fastest?
00:27:53.000When government introduces subsidies into an industry, it usually makes that industry more profitable, but it doesn't end up picking the industry that always works.
00:28:05.000Trump thinks the steel industry is very, very important.
00:28:08.000So he's going to tax all of us, that's what a tariff is, and then he's going to take that money and he's going to give it to the steel industry.
00:28:13.000It's the same thing as a tax and a subsidy.
00:28:35.000I mean, for security reasons, you could.
00:28:37.000But there's no indication that security is the problem here.
00:28:40.000What's happening here is that Trump likes steel in a way he doesn't like other industries, so he thinks steel ought to be protected.
00:28:44.000But what does Trump know that the economy doesn't?
00:28:46.000This is the whole reason centralized government fails.
00:28:48.000One guy at the top does not know as much about how products and services should move as the entire economy, as this diffused hands of the market, you and I choosing on our own what we want to buy and what we want to sell.
00:29:00.000You can't tell which sectors are going to be the most profitable, and the government is actually far more likely to lock in particular path dependency.
00:29:06.000Right now you're path dependent on steel in the United States, or path dependent on semiconductors, than to spur future economic growth.
00:29:13.000And also, most market lock-in is self-correcting.
00:29:16.000We develop new products on a routine basis that are different in kind from the products that preceded them.
00:29:21.000So the argument for path dependency, that you pick a winner and now you're stuck,
00:29:25.000Or you pick an industry and now you're stuck?
00:29:28.000The sort of example that people use when they talk about path dependency and trade is the example of your QWERTY keyboard, right?
00:29:34.000There's this myth that there are two types of keyboard.
00:29:37.000There's the QWERTY keyboard that everybody has on their laptop, and then there is the Dvorak keyboard that was invented at the same time and supposedly is faster.
00:29:44.000Number one, there's no evidence that it's faster.
00:29:46.000Number two, the cost of moving away from the QWERTY keyboard and towards something else have to be taken into account when we say, why don't we switch to a more efficient keyboard?
00:30:16.000So if we could see the future, the bottom line is that people who are in favor of tariffs think that certain industries are more important than others and that government can see the future and has to protect those industries.
00:30:26.000In 1947, the smart money in the United States would have been on subsidizing
00:30:30.000Would have been on subsidizing manufacturing, taxing all other industries in the United States to subsidize manufacturing.
00:30:35.000And that would have been totally wrong.
00:30:36.000In 1947, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, manufacturing represented a quarter of all GDP production in the United States, finance represented 10.3%, agriculture represented 8%.
00:30:46.000Those would have been the three industries to dump money into.
00:30:50.000But if we had taxed agriculture and finance to finance manufacturing, that would have been stupid.
00:30:56.000By 2016, manufacturing had fallen to 11.7% of GDP, and finance represented 21%, agriculture represented 1%.
00:31:04.000So if we had had the government picking and choosing winners and losers, we would have put our money in the wrong place.
00:31:09.000This is why central planning usually fails.
00:31:12.000Paul David of Stanford University writes,
00:31:28.000Namely, the government should try to pick winners rather than let markets make mistakes.
00:31:32.000Public policy could try to delay the market from committing to the future inextricably before enough information has been obtained about the likely technical or organizational legal implications of an early precedent-setting decision.
00:31:42.000In other words, government picking and choosing winners actually ensures path dependency.
00:31:48.000Impoverishing profit sectors through tariffs in order to dump money into non-competitive industries actually impoverishes your country as a whole.
00:31:55.000Economic flexibility requires that the government should not impede the free flow of capital within industries.
00:32:02.000What about the idea that if you're a banana and producing economy, you'll never become a software-producing economy?
00:32:43.000Over at dailywire.com for $9.99 a month.
00:32:45.000You also get Michael Moll's show live, Andrew Klavan's show live, and with the annual subscription, you get this, the very greatest in beverage vessels, the leftist here's hot or cold tumbler.
00:33:01.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:33:09.000So moving on from trade policy, the Trump administration is still having high turnover.
00:33:12.000There was a tweet earlier today from a reporter talking about somebody inside the Trump administration who said they were expecting large moves inside the administration.
00:33:21.000Something is coming and we don't know what it is.
00:33:24.000Not a helpful report from the reporters, but the turnover is very high.
00:33:28.000Well, one of the people who has been elevated by the turnover is the new CIA nominee, the new CIA director nominee, whose name is Gina Haspel.
00:33:35.000And we talked about this yesterday about how Senator Rand Paul tore into Haspel, suggesting that she had overseen torture in foreign lands.
00:34:14.000So this is obviously a pretty egregious error, but it shows that people on the left are really invested in trying to suggest that Trump's nominees are awful, awful people.
00:34:23.000Also, they're very invested in the narrative that there's a lot of chaos at the White House.
00:34:25.000Now, there is some chaos at the White House.
00:35:46.000And they keep on recycling rumors and stories constantly that have no basis in fact.
00:35:53.000I think they figure, hey, if a stop clock is at least right twice a day, eventually I'll get this right.
00:35:57.000So if I predict a whole year in advance,
00:36:00.000So-and-so's on Thin Ice, so-and-so's gonna go, and they do a year later.
00:36:03.000I could just recycle those clips where people said, the president has full confidence in X, and six months, a year later, it changes.
00:36:10.000This president has every right to put the team around him that he thinks aligns with his vision, his values, but he is the one who controls the timing, the tone, and content of all substantive and personnel decisions.
00:36:24.000So, obviously, the president has the right to do whatever he wants on personnel.
00:36:31.000Like, Rex Tillerson leaving the secretary of state is good.
00:36:34.000There's so much turmoil at the administration, though, that that was like the sixth biggest story of the week, that the secretary of state was booted out of office by the president.
00:36:41.000Normally, that'd be a pretty big story.
00:36:43.000Instead, that is downgraded to the lower end of the spectrum.
00:36:46.000Listen, if Trump wants to make some moves, he should rip off the mandate, he should make his moves, he should be done.
00:36:51.000The prolonged feeling of chaos is not good for the administration.
00:36:53.000They have some things to do, and it's not worthwhile to have them dragging this process out over long periods of time.
00:36:59.000I recommend to the administration that they just get done what they need to get done, because otherwise it's putting too much pressure on the American public to go along with the daily reality show that's happening at the White House.
00:37:11.000I know a lot of President Trump supporters don't seem to care.
00:37:13.000That's fine, but the American people do care.
00:37:15.000Not because they're sitting around waiting for the next tweet to fire somebody, but because they do want a feeling of steady leadership at the White House.
00:37:22.000Now, Obama was not a steady leader, but the media ensured that he felt like a steady leader, even though he was not.
00:37:27.000They would continue to put out this vision of Obama as a cool-as-a-cucumber guy, which I don't think the evidence is quite there for, but they're not there for Trump, right?
00:37:35.000They're going to up the amount of cash.
00:37:36.000So Trump has to be twice as cool as anybody else who's been in the office, and I don't know that that's actually going to happen.
00:37:56.000So Hendrik says, if you detest rock music, why does your show start with an electric guitar?
00:38:01.000So I don't detest all rock music, Hendrik, number one.
00:38:03.000Number two, my show starts with an electric guitar because that electric guitar is being played by the brother of the founder of the company, one of the founders of the company.
00:38:13.000And we didn't want to pay right to actually buy musical cuts to use here.
00:38:19.000So instead, we just had a guy play two notes.
00:38:22.000Okay, so James says, Hi Ben, I don't know if you've ever been asked about these particular questions, but I'm sure it's highly likely.
00:38:27.000Your background in debate and evidence-based arguments is well established.
00:38:30.000When it comes to the evidence concerning the existence of God, is the citation of an accepted religious tome of authority enough, or is it considered conjecture, and or not substantial enough?
00:38:37.000Could a rational argument based on biblical evidence hold up in a rational legal court of law if the idea of God were put on trial?
00:38:43.000Could, or rather would, ardent atheists like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins find any substantive reason to find your arguments compelling enough
00:38:49.000Okay, so, Jim, I will say that I think that logical proofs of God tend to lack.
00:39:15.000Yeah, I think that you can make a logical argument for God, but that's not the same as a logical proof of God.
00:39:20.000Because God hides himself in the universe, right?
00:39:24.000He doesn't manifest himself, at least in Judaism, right?
00:39:27.000There's no idea of God actually taking corporeal form in the form of Jesus, for example.
00:39:31.000So in Judaism, and this is true in Islam as well, and even in Christianity, where God has not taken human form for the last 2,000 years,
00:39:40.000There's a feeling that God hides himself in the universe, that God is something you have to discover.
00:39:45.000Making an argument for the existence of God is possible.
00:39:47.000In fact, I've recommended a book by Edward Fazer, a philosophy professor over at Grove City College in Pasadena, who has written a very good... I think it's at Grove.
00:39:57.000In any case, he's written a very good book called Five Proofs of the Existence of God, and he has an Aquinas proof, and he has a
00:40:05.000He has a proof from Pascal, and he has a bunch of different proofs.
00:40:08.000And some of them I find pretty compelling.
00:40:10.000But at best, you can make a probabilistic case for God.
00:40:12.000It's very difficult to make an evidentiary case for God, because any piece of evidence in favor of God can also be interpreted against God.
00:40:19.000So if you say, look at the beauty of the universe, the atheist will say, right, that beauty of the universe was created through sheer accident.
00:40:27.000If you say, God made this universe in a particular way, and the chances of the universe being made in this particular way to sustain human life are really, really, really unlikely,
00:40:35.000Then folks on the other side, atheists, will say, well, what if there are multiple universes?
00:40:40.000Or what if time is endless and the dice have been rolled a bajillion times?
00:40:46.000In other words, these arguments come to a standstill.
00:40:49.000The best argument for God that I believe exists, there are two arguments for God that I think are compelling.
00:40:54.000Again, I don't think they are provable, but I think they are compelling.
00:40:57.000One is that there is a system of logic that undergirds the universe that is the basis for all human thought and science.
00:41:02.000Science is the idea that you are discovering consistent rules in the universe that pre-exist your being, and there is an objective truth that would exist regardless of your presence on Earth.
00:41:11.000And so, the religious person says that's proof of a designer.
00:41:25.000You're just a speck of dust moving through the universe on a meaningless rock.
00:41:28.000You're a ball of meat moving without sentience through life, right?
00:41:31.000You have a basic idea that you're here, but you don't really have control.
00:41:34.000Which brings us to the second argument in favor.
00:41:37.000And that is the argument of free will, the argument that you have something that allows you to supersede your own biological necessity and make choices every single day, and that all of civilization is based on this premise.
00:41:48.000And in fact, all of atheistic thought, too, is based on this premise, because until very recently, most atheists believed in the concept of free will.
00:41:54.000If you go back to the French Revolution and Enlightenment thinkers, even people like Laplace, there are a bunch of folks who are Enlightenment thinkers, who are atheists, who believed in at least a very contained notion
00:42:06.000Now, folks like Sam Harris, I think, are really consistent on this, right?
00:42:09.000Sam says there is no such thing as free will, and he doesn't try to make the compatibilist argument that is made by some advocates of non-free will, where they say, well, you know, everything is biologically determined, but at the same time, there is a sense of free will because there is chaos built into the system.
00:42:28.000There's an ability to choose otherwise.
00:42:31.000And then there is the deterministic position, which is that you, in this situation right now, have no choice but to behave as you are behaving, if you believe in free will, which is an experiential thing.
00:42:40.000If you believe like Samuel Johnson, right, that it's tautological, that let's not argue about free will, it's here.
00:42:45.000If you believe that, it's very difficult not to believe that there is at least some force in the universe that you just do not understand and that cannot be explained away by physical laws.
00:42:55.000That at least gets you to a place where there's a supernatural element to life that we just don't connect with or understand.
00:43:01.000And then you can move beyond there to, is there a logic to that supernatural presence that unites creation?
00:43:06.000So those are the arguments in favor of God.
00:43:09.000I don't think that they are completely provable, and I'm not going to pretend that I can prove to Sam Harris or Matt Delahunty or anybody else on the atheist left
00:43:18.000I just don't think that it's possible to prove God exists, and I think that that's one of God's points, right?
00:43:22.000As a believer in God, I think God does not want you to be able to prove God exists.
00:43:25.000If I could provide you proof right now, here and now, that God existed, then obeying God's law would be the easiest thing in the world, because you wouldn't have a choice.
00:43:33.000The argument would be, God exists, and then if I could prove to you, just through sheer evidence, that the Bible was given by God, it's the unadulterated Word of God, then you would not have a choice.
00:43:42.000The Creator of the universe has ordered you to do things, you must do these things, or the punishments that God provides in the Bible will come true.
00:43:50.000But I don't think God wants us to behave that way.
00:43:51.000I think God's whole purpose in creating the world was to create beings in his image, meaning they have free will and the capacity to create and choose.
00:43:57.000People who believe, by the way, they have free will and the capacity to create and choose.
00:44:01.000As my friend Jordan Peterson likes to say, people who are trying to generate order from chaos, these are people who find fulfillment and purpose in life.
00:44:06.000It's very difficult to build either an individual or collective system of meaning on the basis of your meatball floating through space.
00:44:12.000Kyle says, what do you think the world would be like if there was a second species on Earth as intelligent as humans?
00:44:18.000Well, you know, I think that we'd have conversations with them, and I think we'd have to take into account common interests.
00:44:24.000Frankly, I do think that there are such differences between people that we are not separate species, but there's enough for us to talk about to get past our differences.
00:44:31.000Men and women are different enough that having conversations that way is hard enough as it is.
00:44:35.000Adding a second species would make things even more difficult.
00:44:39.000Joel says, how can we innovate in music if only one genre is correct?
00:46:16.000Well, James, I can't believe that they put you in the mailbag, but I will say that just because the original saying was, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, does not mean that the proof is in the pudding is not the modern saying, or at least the bastardization of that saying.
00:46:25.000So it's less a correction than I think an addendum by Michael Knowles.
00:46:42.000Yeah, Michael has corrected me on occasion about things like writing words in books.
00:46:45.000That apparently was a complete waste of time.
00:46:46.000But it does not feel good to be corrected by Michael Knowles.
00:46:49.000Listen, I've had to pay him more money than I thought humanly possible, right?
00:46:59.000I had an idea for a YouTube series where I talk about struggling with depression and anxiety.
00:47:02.000I hope to use my experiences to help others realize they can reach out to their families and communities with their struggles and get the help they need.
00:47:08.000My only worry is that if I admit to some of the darker problems I faced, I could lose my Second Amendment rights.
00:47:12.000I haven't ever attempted suicide and it has been years since the worst of my depression, but I live in New Jersey and gun laws are tough to begin with.
00:47:20.000Am I worrying over nothing or am I right to be hesitating?
00:47:22.000Well, I don't know what the current status in law is in New Jersey, but typically you have to prove that someone is a current danger to themselves or others, not that they once had issues with depression ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago.
00:47:33.000You actually have to have hard proof that somebody is a threat to themselves or others.
00:47:35.000You don't sound like that's the threat.
00:47:37.000I think that your series sounds like a wonderful thing.
00:47:39.000I think there are a lot of people out there who are suffering with depression and anxiety who don't even know what it is they are suffering with, and a little solidarity along those lines would be a perfectly wonderful thing.
00:48:09.000It's really frustrating because as a conservative slash libertarian, I would love to see a vital and working libertarian party, but this is the party that trots out John McAfee at their events, and then also trots out a naked guy wearing an iron cross tattoo.
00:49:11.000But I don't think the wall is going to solve the problem.
00:49:15.000I've been following your show for the last few years, but just recently subscribed.
00:49:18.000I use part of my tax refund because what's more American than that?
00:49:20.000My question is regarding taxes and the latest tax reform.
00:49:23.000My sister and brother-in-law are big liberals, and at that last family get-together we're saying that without the inheritance tax, the rich could and would put all their money in a trust fund and then claim a lower tax bracket.
00:49:31.000I wasn't sure of the logistics, so I had to debate them using all of their premises.
00:50:04.000But the solution to this is not to claw back half the money that you already paid taxes on.
00:50:09.000I mean, every year I'm paying an enormous sum of taxes and then I'm taking the leftover and I'm putting it into savings for my kids.
00:50:14.000And by the way, when I put that money into a trust fund for my kids, the bank is taking that money and borrowing against that money.
00:50:20.000The bank doesn't just leave the money sitting in a lockbox somewhere.
00:50:22.000The bank actually takes that money and lends it out at interest to other people who are starting businesses.
00:50:26.000So all of this is economic ignorance on the part of these folks.
00:50:31.000The whole point of working hard, one of the reasons that you work to make a profit, is that you can take that money and pass it on to your children.
00:50:37.000I would be supremely pissed if I did not have the ability to dispose of my money as I saw fit at the end of my life.
00:50:42.000So, I think that the National Archive is fantastic.
00:50:48.000You can actually go see the actual original Constitution of the United States and Declaration of Independence, which is super cool.
00:50:58.000I think that the Supreme Court is really fun to visit.
00:51:01.000The Smithsonian Museums are, of course, really neat.
00:51:04.000You should walk through the Capitol and check that out because
00:51:38.000is that I think that you can tell whether a country is run well or not by whether the buildings that are government buildings are nicer than the private buildings.
00:51:54.000I think we should decentralize Washington D.C.
00:51:56.000and make people live in their home districts and then vote from their home districts.
00:51:58.000This is what the internet was created for.
00:52:02.000Trump has nominated Gina Haspel to replace Mike Pompeo.
00:52:05.000The biggest criticism of her is her work in a secret prison in Thailand where at least one terrorist was waterboarded, and then she subsequently ordered evidence of the waterboarding destroyed.
00:52:11.000So again, this was retracted today by ProPublica.
00:52:14.000So, the justification for using torture on terrorist suspects is twofold.
00:52:21.000Terror suspects are not accorded protection under the Geneva Convention.
00:52:24.000As I explained yesterday, the Geneva Convention was designed to ensure that soldiers stayed in uniform.
00:52:35.000If they got out of uniform, they're no longer protected by the Geneva Conventions.
00:52:38.000Go back and watch The Great Escape, and you'll see this is a major issue.
00:52:41.000As soon as people try to escape the prison and dress up as civilians to escape, they're no longer protected by the Geneva Conventions, and this is a major risk for them.
00:53:06.000Well, it was for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
00:53:08.000We waterboarded him a bajillion times and we got some good information from him about Al-Qaeda and its leadership structure and all the rest.
00:53:15.000So there's a really strong open debate going on about whether torture works or whether it does not.
00:53:22.000I'm not going to pretend that I think that waterboarding isn't a form of torture.
00:53:25.000It's not the form of torture that does permanent damage, but it's certainly torturing the person psychologically.
00:53:30.000Do I think that it's called for in certain circumstances?
00:53:53.000I feel like I'm making progress in a book.
00:53:55.000One of the things that drives me nuts about Kindle is that it tells you percentage of the book that you've completed, not page numbers, which is annoying to me.
00:54:01.000And then beyond that, I have another problem, which is I can't use a Kindle on Sabbath, and I get a lot of reading done on Shabbat.
00:54:06.000So if I'm in the middle of reading a book on Kindle, I can't read it on Sabbath, so I have to buy the physical copy anyway.
00:54:11.000Well, number one, just research the facts all the way up and down and make sure that, you know, Trevor Noah
00:54:25.000May try to suggest that you care less than your liberal friend, and if he does, then what you should say to him is, listen, Trevor, I'm one of the people who was at the school.
00:54:31.000You don't get to call into question my sincerity on these issues.
00:54:37.000We need to have an open debate about these things, and that has to start with people stopping questioning other people's sincerity.
00:54:43.000I think you should say to Trevor, no, you've been here ripping on the NRA, ripping on Dana Lash, suggesting that she doesn't care about dead kids and all the rest of it.
00:54:49.000I am one of the kids who's victimized.
00:54:50.000I believe a lot of the same things that Dana Lash believes, and I don't think that makes her uncaring.
00:54:54.000And I think that you need to stop that if you want to have a valuable conversation.
00:54:57.000Like, this is a good, valuable conversation we're having.
00:55:10.000Second of all, it would go totally viral, so you should totally do that if you're on Trevor Noah's show.
00:55:13.000Carl says, Hey Ben, if you had, Carl, if you had an opportunity to overhaul the public education system, what would you do?
00:55:19.000What curriculum changes would you make?
00:55:20.000And would you remove or include any courses of study?
00:55:23.000Do you believe there should be an early separation of students into different tracks, like for students that plan to go to college versus to trade schools straight to the workforce?