The Ben Shapiro Show - Is It The End Of The Internet? | Ep. 438

00:00:00.000 In this episode, I will spoil Star Wars just for Mathis, my producer.

00:00:03.000 I'm not actually going to do that.

00:00:05.000 But net neutrality has come to an end, which means that Armageddon is upon us.

00:00:08.000 All the children will die.

00:00:09.000 The seals will wither in the sun.

00:00:11.000 All of the terrible things will happen.

00:00:13.000 Or maybe not.

00:00:14.000 I will explain.

00:00:15.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:16.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:23.000 It's a Friday, so we're all in a good mood here around the office, and hence the Last Jedi reference.

00:00:28.000 I've not seen it, so I can't spoil anything about Last Jedi, except I do know that Luke's mechanical hand from Return of the Jedi has now been replaced with a flipper, like a dolphin flipper.

00:00:38.000 That's what I know about the movie.

00:00:40.000 So, spoiler alert, he has a flipper for a hand.

00:00:43.000 Okay, but in other news, net neutrality has come to an ignominious end, and everyone is losing their mind.

00:00:48.000 We're all going to die.

00:00:49.000 Cats and dogs will live together.

00:00:51.000 The world will burst into flame.

00:00:53.000 You'll have to choose between your two firstborn children as to which one will be sacrificed to AOL and which one will be sacrificed to Verizon.

00:01:00.000 You will have to make these decisions.

00:01:02.000 At least this is what we have learned in the last 24 hours after a set of regulations that really didn't end up doing much was just abolished by the FCC.

00:01:10.000 We'll get to all of that, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.

00:01:14.000 So right now, does it seem like there's a lot of uncertainty in the world?

00:01:16.000 Well, it should.

00:01:17.000 And one of the reasons it should feel like there's a lot of uncertainty in the world is because no one knows what the heck is going on any of the time, right?

00:01:23.000 Whether we're talking foreign policy, whether we're talking natural disasters, or whether we're just talking the markets, where it seems like Bitcoin is riding the roller coaster.

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00:02:18.000 Okay, so, everyone lost their mind yesterday because net neutrality was repealed.

00:02:24.000 Now, here's the truth.

00:02:25.000 I've talked about net neutrality here on the program a little bit.

00:02:27.000 I was not in favor of net neutrality.

00:02:28.000 I did an interview with Ajit Pai, the head of the FCC, the guy who was most responsible for getting rid of net neutrality, and I think that his answers were relatively good.

00:02:35.000 There are decent arguments on both sides for net neutrality.

00:02:38.000 There really are.

00:02:38.000 I'm going to try and be as objective as possible about this, and lay out the argument for one side, and then lay out the argument for the other side, and then tell you why I come down on the side that I come down.

00:02:46.000 Basically, here's how it works.

00:02:48.000 You order your internet from Verizon.

00:02:49.000 Verizon is an internet service provider.

00:02:52.000 Netflix buys data from Verizon so that Netflix can actually be on the internet.

00:02:57.000 And then you pay so that you have access to Netflix.

00:02:59.000 This is all common sense.

00:03:00.000 This is how the internet works.

00:03:02.000 Well, Verizon is an ISP, or Sprint is an ISP, Comcast is an ISP.

00:03:09.000 Some of these ISPs

00:03:11.000 They compete with one another, and one of the things that they want to do is they want the ability to privilege certain content above other content when it comes to charging them.

00:03:19.000 The reason for this is that, basically right now, Netflix, for example, takes up an enormous amount of bandwidth for whatever ISP it is working with, and that drives up the price for bandwidth for smaller providers.

00:03:30.000 So it is quite possible that an ISP may launch that wants to charge Netflix more per byte of data, and therefore,

00:03:38.000 Drive the price down for the other people who are using the internet, right?

00:03:42.000 Or it's possible that the ISP may say to Netflix, listen, you want to load faster than other sites, you can pass a premium.

00:03:48.000 All of this is fine, right?

00:03:49.000 I don't see a huge problem with any of this.

00:03:51.000 The only problem with any of this is if there is a monopoly or an oligopoly.

00:03:54.000 And here's the argument in favor of net neutrality.

00:03:56.000 So let's say that you only have one internet service provider in your area.

00:03:59.000 The reason that you probably only have one internet service provider in your area is because a lot of local government regulations make it difficult to build an ISP.

00:04:06.000 In order to lay down broadband, you actually have to have government rights of way, and a lot of local governments will put conditions on the various companies that want to come in.

00:04:14.000 So that creates a sort of oligopoly situation.

00:04:16.000 The idea here is, let's say that there's Comcast, and Comcast owns Netflix.

00:04:20.000 So let's just say they bought Netflix.

00:04:22.000 And they want to help Netflix, but they want to hurt Hulu.

00:04:24.000 So they slow down artificially the speed on Hulu, encouraging people to subscribe to Netflix instead of subscribing to Hulu.

00:04:30.000 Right?

00:04:30.000 This is the great fear.

00:04:31.000 That Comcast is basically going to strangle in the crib competition to its vertically integrated companies.

00:04:36.000 And this is not an idle worry.

00:04:38.000 In a monopoly situation, you theoretically could do this.

00:04:40.000 So the anti-net neutrality people will say, listen, we already have anti-competition regulations in place, right?

00:04:46.000 You can actually prosecute monopolies that are acting as monopolies.

00:04:49.000 The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, can crack down.

00:04:51.000 The FCC can crack down on this.

00:04:52.000 You don't need to basically mandate that all traffic be treated the same or be charged the same because, again, maybe you want to charge Netflix more because it's taking up more bandwidth.

00:05:01.000 Maybe you want to charge the pornography company that's taking up an enormous amount of bandwidth on your computer more.

00:05:05.000 Maybe you want to do all of those things.

00:05:07.000 So, everybody who is in favor of net neutrality says, well, the ISPs shouldn't be allowed to do that.

00:05:12.000 When you buy an internet uplink, then you should basically get all the pages at the same rate and for a given price.

00:05:18.000 But the truth is that you're actually redistributing costs, right?

00:05:20.000 Let's say that my grandmother doesn't use Netflix. 0.95

00:05:23.000 Well, her internet price, the price that Comcast is charging for her, is actually going to be higher than it normally would be if, for example, they could divide out Netflix and have you pay a subscription fee for a faster internet service that gets Netflix faster.

00:05:36.000 She's actually subsidizing me. 0.99

00:05:39.000 Because I'm using Netflix and she isn't.

00:05:40.000 She doesn't have to use very much data.

00:05:42.000 I have to use more data.

00:05:43.000 And there's a sort of redistributive mechanism that happens.

00:05:46.000 So these are the two arguments.

00:05:47.000 One is that oligopoly means that the government has to come in and regulate the ISPs so that they don't strangle Netflix or YouTube or any other outlet that they want to strangle.

00:05:56.000 And people against net neutrality say, well, if you actually want to foster competition in the ISP space, if you want a proper distribution of cost, then you actually need to let competition take over.

00:06:05.000 Now, in order for competition to take over, it's not enough for the federal government just to get rid of net neutrality.

00:06:09.000 The federal government also needs to encourage all of these companies to start investing in local areas, and local governments need to start encouraging all of these ISPs to invest in building new broadband networks.

00:06:21.000 Okay, so those are the arguments.

00:06:22.000 The reason I come down against net neutrality is because I don't think that the answer to oligopoly is more oligopoly.

00:06:29.000 Once you enshrine the idea and create barriers to entry, that every piece of data has to be treated the same, then what is the comparative advantage of a small startup company as opposed to Comcast?

00:06:38.000 The answer is none.

00:06:38.000 It's going to be very difficult for them to compete in that market.

00:06:41.000 That is why you see all of these small ISPs actually in favor.

00:06:46.000 Okay, now here's the truth.

00:06:55.000 No matter what happened with net neutrality, the internet was not going to be radically different.

00:06:59.000 It was not going to radically change.

00:07:00.000 Because if Comcast were to start strangling Hulu in its crib, there would be competitive ramifications for that in the marketplace.

00:07:06.000 People would start opting for Verizon instead of Comcast.

00:07:09.000 There would be an effort by smaller ISPs to get into the market.

00:07:12.000 Competition would become a thing.

00:07:14.000 And it's very interesting to me that a lot of the same people who are deeply concerned with big corporations like Comcast strangling various companies they don't like are seemingly unconcerned about Facebook or YouTube or Twitter strangling political positions they don't like.

00:07:29.000 Twitter routinely knocks people offline for things that Twitter doesn't like.

00:07:33.000 Well, demonetize videos they don't like.

00:07:34.000 Our friends at places like Louder With Crowder and Dave Rubin, they've been demonetized.

00:07:38.000 Prager University has been demonetized by YouTube.

00:07:40.000 I don't see the same people who are complaining about net neutrality complaining that YouTube is not treating all content the same.

00:07:46.000 They're all in favor of all content being treated the same when it comes to their favorite outlets.

00:07:52.000 But when it comes to their favorite political views, they have nothing to say.

00:07:55.000 I'm pretty consistent on this.

00:07:56.000 I think YouTube has the right to crack down on videos it doesn't like.

00:07:59.000 They have the right to do it.

00:08:00.000 They're wrong to do it, but they have the right to do it.

00:08:02.000 And I think ISPs have the right to do it.

00:08:04.000 Similarly, I think competition in the marketplace keeps a lot of these companies honest.

00:08:07.000 Okay, so with all of that said, there's this weird idea that was going around that the end of the internet was going to happen yesterday.

00:08:12.000 CNN actually headlined, end of the internet.

00:08:16.000 And yet, strangely, their article appeared on the internet after all of this had happened.

00:08:23.000 But the level of outrage and insanity was so high.

00:08:25.000 So, I want to show you some of these tweets, and some of them are totally crazy.

00:08:28.000 This one is from GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

00:08:32.000 They literally tweeted,

00:08:37.000 So, number one, anytime GLAAD headlines anything, you could just get rid of the first four words and put any other four words in there.

00:08:45.000 Republican tax cuts are an attack on the LGBT community.

00:08:50.000 Dog catchers are an attack on the LGBTQ community. 0.99

00:08:53.000 If you think that net neutrality is a specific attack on gay people, I don't know what to tell you.

00:08:57.000 There are lots of straight people who use the internet gang.

00:09:00.000 That seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

00:09:02.000 Banksy, who's most well-known for basically graffitiing other people's property,

00:09:08.000 He tweeted this nonsense out.

00:09:09.000 If you don't want to pay extra for your favorite sites, you need to be supporting net neutrality.

00:09:21.000 This is incoherent.

00:09:23.000 Okay, it's incoherent.

00:09:24.000 You know why Netflix can't charge $14.99 a month?

00:09:26.000 Because no one will pay $15 for Twitter.

00:09:29.000 Okay, you know why Twitter can't charge that?

00:09:30.000 Because no one will pay that money for Twitter.

00:09:31.000 No one on earth.

00:09:32.000 You know why Netflix can't charge $9.99 a movie?

00:09:35.000 Because no one's gonna pay $9.99 a movie for the stuff that's on Netflix.

00:09:40.000 It's not going to happen, because there's a thing called Amazon.

00:09:44.000 This whole idea that Google is going to charge $1.99 per search?

00:09:48.000 Well, if they want to make Bing the biggest thing on planet Earth, they could do that, I suppose.

00:09:52.000 But it makes no sense at all. 0.99

00:09:54.000 It's absolute, utter horse crap. 0.98

00:09:56.000 But this is the sort of alarmism that you saw on the internet yesterday. 0.99

00:09:59.000 We're all going to die.

00:09:59.000 You're going to have to sacrifice your dog to the gods of Twitter if you want to maintain your Twitter account.

00:10:04.000 New York has a lot of toll roads.

00:10:17.000 They work really well.

00:10:18.000 Toll roads are actually kind of great.

00:10:20.000 One of the reasons toll roads exist is because, number one, they actually clear out a lane.

00:10:24.000 Okay?

00:10:25.000 Toll roads actually relieve traffic on the rest of the lane.

00:10:28.000 Usually, a toll road is added to.

00:10:30.000 It is not subtracted from.

00:10:31.000 Usually, you don't just take one of the lanes of the highway and call it a toll road.

00:10:34.000 Usually, you build an extra lane, and then that's a toll road.

00:10:37.000 And so, all of that money goes toward upkeep on the highway.

00:10:40.000 And if you want to pay for the toll road, then you get a fast lane.

00:10:42.000 If that were really true, then toll roads on the internet would work fine.

00:10:44.000 Netflix would pay a little bit more.

00:10:46.000 for their internet speed.

00:10:48.000 You might pay a little bit more if you use Netflix a lot, and you pay a little bit less if you don't use Netflix a lot, which seems fair to me, frankly.

00:10:55.000 If you don't understand how this works, think about bundled cable.

00:10:57.000 Basically, net neutrality is bundled cable.

00:10:59.000 You have to pay one price for everything.

00:11:01.000 And if you get rid of net neutrality, even according to the worst-case scenario people,

00:11:06.000 The idea here would be they get to pick and choose which ISP to use based on the services that it provides.

00:11:12.000 And number one, I don't think that's actually going to happen, but even if it did happen, I'm not sure that it's the end of the world.

00:11:17.000 Well, the alarmism didn't stop there.

00:11:20.000 Bernie Sanders did the same thing.

00:11:22.000 He said net neutrality is going to be the end of the world.

00:11:24.000 First of all, the last time Bernie Sanders used the interwebs was 1997.

00:11:27.000 He used a dial-up AOL modem.

00:11:30.000 Bernie Sanders, I'm not sure, knows what a computer is.

00:11:32.000 But here is Bernie Sanders, the socialist, talking about why net neutrality matters, despite the fact that the internet is the greatest and freest and most open market in the history of mankind.

00:11:43.000 And he opposes open markets.

00:11:44.000 Here's Bernie Sanders.

00:11:46.000 A disastrous decision.

00:11:48.000 It will impact every American.

00:11:51.000 It will give huge advantages to big corporations over small businesses, big media companies over smaller media outlets.

00:11:59.000 We've got to do everything we can to defeat this thing in the courts and defeat it legislatively.

00:12:05.000 Okay, so now they're talking about going to the courts.

00:12:06.000 First of all, Democrats can't go to the courts, okay?

00:12:08.000 Administrative decisions like this are not appealable.

00:12:10.000 If Bernie Sanders wants net neutrality, he can damn well push for it in Congress, which, by the way, is where it should have been pushed for in the first place.

00:12:16.000 This was not a regulatory decision.

00:12:18.000 Regulating the internet, like the DWP under Title II, regulating it like a telephone company under Title II makes no sense legally.

00:12:27.000 If you want to do this, do it through Congress.

00:12:29.000 In a second, I'm going to explain, I'm going to let, really, Ajit Pai, the head of the FCC, explain why it is that net neutrality is a bad idea.

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00:14:09.000 Okay, so yesterday, or the day before, I had the chance to speak with Ajit Pai.

00:14:13.000 Ajit Pai is the head of the FCC.

00:14:15.000 And he explained to me, I asked him specifically about the big question.

00:14:17.000 If there's an oligopoly, right?

00:14:19.000 If there's only one internet service provider in your area, then shouldn't net neutrality be a thing, right?

00:14:24.000 Shouldn't we force that oligopoly to treat all internet traffic the same so it can't strangle off Hulu, or Netflix, or YouTube, or whichever app it wants to in favor of its own content?

00:14:33.000 Here was Ajit Pai explaining.

00:14:35.000 Two different points.

00:14:36.000 Number one, I agree that we need more competition and that's why over the last 11 months that I've been in office as the chairman of the FCC, we've undertaken a number of initiatives to promote a lot more competition.

00:14:46.000 Getting more wireless spectrum out there for wireless carriers to use.

00:14:49.000 Making it easier for smaller fiber providers to enter the marketplace.

00:14:52.000 Getting the next generation of satellite companies into the marketplace to provide an alternative to the terrestrial folks.

00:14:57.000 So we're promoting more competition that way.

00:14:59.000 Number two, ironically, these heavy-handed internet regulations imposed by the FCC in 2015

00:15:05.000 Take us in the opposite direction.

00:15:07.000 They make it harder.

00:15:09.000 It's already hard as it is for a lot of these smaller Internet service providers to build a business case for deploying Internet infrastructure, especially in rural and low-income urban areas.

00:15:17.000 These regulations make it even harder.

00:15:19.000 In the last week alone, I've spoken to small Internet service providers that nobody has ever heard of from Minnesota, Montana, who have said that these regulations make it harder to raise capital.

00:15:30.000 And the statistic that Ajay Pai really cites here, and the one that makes the most sense, we can stop him there.

00:15:38.000 Well, what makes the most sense, he's talked about this.

00:15:40.000 He says that among our nation's 12 largest internet service providers, domestic broadband capital expenditures decreased by 5.6% or $3.6 billion between 2014 and 2016, the first two years of the Title II era.

00:15:52.000 The point being that as soon as net neutrality hit,

00:15:54.000 All of the ISPs basically assumed that all the competition was wiped out.

00:15:58.000 The major ISPs assumed that there was no reason for them to spend anymore because new regulations would be coming down the pike, forcing them to spend.

00:16:04.000 And so they stopped spending on broadband.

00:16:05.000 They stopped doing upkeep on their broadband and making it faster and making it better.

00:16:09.000 A free market makes competition better.

00:16:11.000 He explained yesterday, as this thing was repealed, 3-2, he explained his net neutrality decision.

00:16:18.000 And again, everyone went nuts.

00:16:19.000 I mean, he's been hit with an enormous number of death threats over this whole thing.

00:16:22.000 Returning to the legal framework that governed the Internet from President Clinton's pronouncement in 1996 until 2015 is not going to destroy the Internet.

00:16:32.000 It is not going to end the Internet as we know it.

00:16:35.000 It is not going to kill democracy.

00:16:37.000 It is not going to stifle free expression online.

00:16:41.000 If stating these propositions alone doesn't demonstrate their absurdity, our Internet experience before 2015 and our Internet experience tomorrow, once this order passes, will prove them so.

00:16:53.000 Simply put, by returning to the light-touch Title I framework, we are helping consumers and promoting competition.

00:17:00.000 Broadband providers will have stronger incentives to build networks, especially in unserved areas, and to upgrade networks to gigabit speeds and 5G.

00:17:09.000 This means there will be more competition among broadband providers.

00:17:13.000 It also means more ways that startups and tech giants alike can deliver applications and content to more users.

00:17:20.000 In short, it is a freer and more open Internet.

00:17:24.000 OK, so, you know, this is the case that he's making, people make the opposite case, but one thing that is clear is that it's not going to destroy the Internet.

00:17:29.000 And so CNN's crazed headlines about this and the Democrats' crazed talk about this, it's a wild exaggeration.

00:17:35.000 How a regulatory issue that had very little impact on how the Internet actually worked between 2015 and 2017, how that became a life-or-death scenario, just demonstrates the level of hysteria

00:17:44.000 For people who really don't understand what the issue is, even on the most basic level.

00:17:47.000 I'm not an expert on net neutrality.

00:17:48.000 I don't pretend to be an expert on net neutrality.

00:17:50.000 But the basic issue is not about the destruction of the Internet as we know it.

00:17:53.000 That's just patently insane.

00:17:55.000 But Jimmy Kimmel went off on it, and here he is.

00:17:59.000 I mean, Jimmy Kimmel...

00:18:01.000 First of all, I feel like every time Jimmy Kimmel speaks politics now, he should be morally obligated to bring out his baby, to trot out his child, since he obviously makes emotional appeals on every... What he really should do, if he's not going to bring out his own kid to talk healthcare, what he really should do is he should bring out a poor homeless urchin, street urchin, who will no longer be able to access internet at the public library for purposes of pornography, and he should just drape his arm around him, and then he should say, this poor child will no longer have internet because of net neutrality.

00:18:29.000 He basically did that last night just without the poor street urchin. 1.00

00:18:31.000 Again, I don't know what qualifies Jimmy Kimmel to talk about these things.

00:18:34.000 And I'm happy for Jimmy Kimmel to, you know, have a debate with somebody who knows about it.

00:18:39.000 But Jimmy Kimmel doesn't want to do any of those things.

00:18:40.000 He just wants to read Chuck Schumer agitprop.

00:18:43.000 So here he is.

00:18:44.000 The FCC did something absolutely despicable today.

00:18:47.000 They voted to put an end to net neutrality.

00:18:49.000 This is the rule that says everyone gets equal access to the internet.

00:18:54.000 A big company or somebody selling crocheted owls from their

00:18:58.000 He said jackal, so it's funny. 1.00

00:19:23.000 It's like comedy.

00:19:24.000 He's a jackal, so it's comedy now. 0.99

00:19:26.000 It's not just political.

00:19:27.000 It's because he said jackal.

00:19:28.000 Get it?

00:19:30.000 I love Jimmy Kimmel speaking on behalf of ABC, Disney, the biggest corporation on planet Earth, right?

00:19:35.000 I mean, he's on ABC.

00:19:36.000 Disney just bought Fox.

00:19:38.000 Fox 21st Century, right?

00:19:40.000 They just bought it, okay?

00:19:41.000 Outright.

00:19:42.000 Disney is an enormous corporation.

00:19:44.000 And here is Jimmy Kimmel talking on ABC's Airwaves, on what is basically an oligopoly, right?

00:19:49.000 ABC was allowed to dominate the Airwaves because it was one of three networks for most of its history.

00:19:55.000 And here he is talking about, oh, those corporations, they're going to be controlling everything, those big corporations, because you know who doesn't know anything about big corporations?

00:20:01.000 It's Jimmy Kimmel.

00:20:02.000 And I love when he says that, like, Grandma and her crochet website, that's the one that's gonna pay the price for net neutrality being done away with.

00:20:10.000 The whole point is that Netflix, Google, YouTube oppose it, not Grandma with her crochet website.

00:20:14.000 No one cares about Grandma's crochet website.

00:20:16.000 You'd think that Verizon's sitting around going, aha, now we got Grandma in the crosshairs, we're gonna make her pay up. 0.98

00:20:21.000 I mean, she wants her crochet website up there? 0.77

00:20:23.000 Ha ha ha ha, gotta double her price. 1.00

00:20:26.000 What absolute sheer nonsense. 0.71

00:20:27.000 What he's saying doesn't even make any sense.

00:20:29.000 And it neglects the fact that there are big corporations on both sides of this.

00:20:32.000 Like, we're going to have a giant fight.

00:20:33.000 Dave Burge, Iowa hawk, had a great tweet on this.

00:20:35.000 He basically said, I never thought that the end of the world was going to come over the people who actually provide the content to social media arguing over who should benefit from their content provision.

00:20:44.000 The ISPs or the companies like Facebook.

00:20:47.000 That's really what it is.

00:20:48.000 Like, the cows arguing over who should benefit more over their provision of the milk.

00:20:52.000 The grocery store or the farmer.

00:20:54.000 That's really all that's happening here.

00:20:56.000 But it's insipid, and the level of ire is totally crazy.

00:20:59.000 And again, people don't know about it.

00:21:00.000 Jimmy Kimmel doesn't know what he's talking about here.

00:21:02.000 Again, I'm not an expert, but I know more than Jimmy Kimmel.

00:21:04.000 An MSNBC anchor tried to do the same thing to a former FCC chairman, and the former FCC chairman basically just stomped on him. 0.77

00:21:12.000 One of the arguments for people in favor of removing net neutrality is that consumers will get more choice in the plans that they can buy.

00:21:18.000 Why would they get more choice in plans if someone's not either subsidizing or able to be excluded from a particular plan?

00:21:24.000 Why would I be able to drop what I pay on a monthly basis for internet?

00:21:29.000 If I'm not going to lose something for it.

00:21:59.000 The incumbent is favored over the startup.

00:22:03.000 That's the only point I wanted to make.

00:22:05.000 That's the only point I'm making.

00:22:05.000 And that would be illegal.

00:22:06.000 That's the point I'm making.

00:22:07.000 What you just said is already illegal.

00:22:08.000 It has been for a long time and will be going forward.

00:22:11.000 So it's good news.

00:22:12.000 I'm not sure you and I are interpreting the same information.

00:22:15.000 I know it's good clickbait to say the internet's being destroyed, but it's not.

00:22:17.000 But Robert, I didn't say that.

00:22:19.000 I don't know why you're coming on TV to have an argument that I'm not having.

00:22:23.000 I didn't say the internet's being destroyed.

00:22:25.000 You just said preferred.

00:22:26.000 I said free.

00:22:27.000 If it's preferred, if you're favoring one over another, that's a violation of the law.

00:22:31.000 This would have been a much better conversation if we were just actually having a conversation.

00:22:33.000 We are having a conversation.

00:22:34.000 I'm trying to teach you about the state of the law, which is what's going on today.

00:22:37.000 I appreciate that.

00:22:37.000 Thanks very much.

00:22:38.000 Robert McDowell was former FCC commissioner from 2007.

00:22:40.000 I love that the anchor here has no idea what he's talking about.

00:22:43.000 And the former FCC chairman keeps saying, um, it's illegal what you're talking about already.

00:22:47.000 But none of that matters to anybody.

00:22:49.000 The facts don't matter.

00:22:50.000 All that matters is that Jimmy Kimmel is going to appear on television every night with a different victim who he can trot out.

00:22:55.000 I think it would be a great segment, by the way.

00:22:56.000 I think you should do Victim of the Night.

00:22:58.000 Right?

00:23:00.000 For every policy, he should just bring somebody out.

00:23:02.000 So every time he talks tax cuts, Jimmy Kimmel should show up with some poor, crippled grandmother. 0.99

00:23:07.000 And every time he talks about gun policy, he should bring out some kid who's been shot in the leg.

00:23:11.000 It would just be great.

00:23:12.000 And then he can cry over it.

00:23:14.000 It'll be the weeping of the evening, every single time.

00:23:18.000 Okay, so, before I go any further, I'm going to talk about Russian investigation followed by President Trump making a comment this morning that was

00:23:25.000 Rather ill-advised.

00:23:26.000 Definitely goes in the bad Trump and the good Trump, bad Trump category.

00:23:29.000 We'll talk about all that, plus a little bit of good Trump.

00:23:31.000 But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Upside.com.

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00:24:43.000 Okay, so...

00:24:58.000 There is more fallout from the Russian investigation today.

00:25:02.000 That fallout comes in the form of President Trump and other Republicans now looking to basically curb the Mueller investigation on the back of revelations that people involved in the Mueller investigation have a political bias all their own, which, honestly, we sort of knew.

00:25:18.000 And what you're seeing is that Trump's allies are now coming out of the woodwork and saying that Mueller needs to pause the probe, that Mueller needs to stop the probe.

00:25:24.000 I've said all along,

00:25:25.000 That's actually counterproductive.

00:25:27.000 Mueller needs to go forward with the probe, and then when he comes up with nothing, or even if he comes up with something minor, we can all kick back and say, listen, guys, you came up with something minor after a year of investigation, and your team is corrupt.

00:25:39.000 Clinton was able to do this very aptly, politically speaking, with Ken Starr, who did not run a corrupt investigation, and who did come up with actual perjury.

00:25:47.000 Right, so I don't see the point in cutting off the investigation short, and yet you're seeing advocates for Trump basically say this, and it comes off as fear.

00:25:54.000 To people who are in the middle, it comes off as fear that Mueller's going to find something, even if it really isn't, even if it's just that this investigation is fatally flawed.

00:26:01.000 If something is fatally flawed, right, if you've already gutshot the investigation, there's no need to give the headshot.

00:26:07.000 Now, I'm not calling for Mueller to be fired.

00:26:09.000 It's tempting, but I'm not.

00:26:09.000 But at the very least, he needs to put the brakes on this investigation, at least pause it for a bit.

00:26:12.000 I agree with what Alan Dershowitz said on my radio show this morning.

00:26:34.000 It's time for a respected, independent expert to come in and thoroughly examine the individuals conducting this probe and fire anyone inside who evinces even a hint of an appearance of a confidant.

00:26:48.000 Okay, so this last call that she's making is the correct one.

00:26:50.000 The last thing that Ingram is saying here is absolutely correct.

00:26:53.000 Jim Jordan, friendly with Representative Jordan from the great state of Ohio, he went after Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General.

00:26:59.000 He said, listen, is it time for a second special counsel to look into how Mueller is doing this investigation?

00:27:03.000 I mean, what we're learning now is that half of his team was compromised.

00:27:07.000 You're the guy in charge.

00:27:08.000 You can disband the Mueller special prosecutor and you can do what we've all called for.

00:27:13.000 Appoint a second special counsel to look into this.

00:27:16.000 To look into Peter Strzok, Broussard, everything else we've learned in the last several weeks.

00:27:21.000 This is what a lot of Americans are believing right now, and I certainly do.

00:27:24.000 That the Comey FBI and the Obama Justice Department worked with one campaign to go after the other campaign.

00:27:30.000 That's what everything points to.

00:27:32.000 Think about what we've learned in the last several weeks.

00:27:35.000 We first learned they paid for the dossier, then we learned about Peter Strzok, and last week we learned about Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie.

00:27:41.000 This is unbelievable.

00:27:44.000 What's it going to take to get a second special counsel to answer these questions and find out, was Peter Strzok really up to what I think he was?

00:27:52.000 But that doesn't dismiss the fact that the country thinks we need a second special counsel.

00:27:56.000 20 members of this committee, the Judiciary Committee with primary jurisdiction over the Justice Department thinks we need a second special counsel.

00:28:02.000 All kinds of senators think we need a special counsel. 0.84

00:28:06.000 What fact pattern do you have to have?

00:28:07.000 What kind of text message do you have to see before you say, it's time for a second special counsel?

00:28:12.000 OK, so this is, I think, a valuable call that's happening.

00:28:15.000 I think it is worthwhile, and I think that the Republicans are doing the right thing.

00:28:19.000 What I don't think is worthwhile is President Trump intervening himself.

00:28:22.000 So he was asked today about whether he was going to pardon Michael Flynn.

00:28:24.000 Michael Flynn, of course, the former national security adviser who has now pled guilty to lying to the FBI.

00:28:30.000 As I've said before, I don't think that Michael Flynn apparently lied to the FBI about anything substantive, from what we know.

00:28:34.000 It sounds like he lied about having called the Russian government while he was already in the transition team about an upcoming UN vote on Israel and settlements.

00:28:43.000 I don't see anything there that is particularly noteworthy, and I'm not sure why Flynn lied to the FBI in the first place.

00:28:49.000 Trump may very well want to pardon Flynn, but it's not smart for him to say so because it looks right now like Flynn is working with the FBI, and so Trump's statement here that he might pardon Flynn makes it look like he's trying to bribe Flynn not to talk to the FBI with a pardon offer.

00:29:01.000 Would you consider a pardon for Michael Flynn?

00:29:03.000 I don't want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet.

00:29:06.000 We'll see what happens.

00:29:07.000 Let's see.

00:29:08.000 I can say this.

00:29:09.000 When you look at what's gone on with the FBI and with the Justice Department, people are very, very angry.

00:29:16.000 Thank you very much, everybody.

00:29:18.000 Okay, so that is not particularly smart by the president because now he's opened that can of worms.

00:29:21.000 The White House tried to close that can of worms again today when Ty Cobb, not the great baseball player with the .367 lifetime average, Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer with the crazy mustache, that guy came out and he said that Trump really has no intention of pardoning Flynn.

00:29:34.000 For the moment, that's the line that Trump needs to stick to so it doesn't look like he's obstructing, particularly when Vladimir Putin is doing his best to undermine Trump's credibility.

00:29:43.000 This is one area where I think Trump really needs to be more careful.

00:29:46.000 If Vladimir Putin is playing this game with Trump, he knows Trump's mentality is that Trump loves praise.

00:29:51.000 Trump responds to praise.

00:29:52.000 Like if you toss Trump a Scooby snack.

00:29:55.000 Well, that's been brought in by the nose, you know?

00:29:57.000 That's been invented by those who are in the opposition.

00:30:23.000 People who oppose President Trump to delegitimize his time in office.

00:30:28.000 It really seems strange to me because they don't understand.

00:30:32.000 It seems that they don't understand.

00:30:52.000 So Putin's whole game here is not that he loves Trump or that he's trying to help the United States get through a difficult period in politics.

00:31:03.000 His game is that he's trying to basically bribe Trump with praise, and Trump is susceptible to that.

00:31:07.000 He then said to the press today,

00:31:09.000 That Vladimir Putin, and he had a very nice call, and Putin told him that he was very happy that Trump's economy was doing so well.

00:31:14.000 Like, Putin knows how to play this game.

00:31:16.000 It's foolish of Trump to fall into that, and Trump should resist the urge, both on Flynn and on Putin.

00:31:21.000 Like, just back off it, Mr. President, especially when you're doing some good things, because the President is doing some good things, okay?

00:31:27.000 So, yesterday at the White House, the President did a ceremonial cutting of red tape, and it got made fun of on Twitter a lot, but

00:31:33.000 Who cares about what gets, everything gets made fun of on Twitter.

00:31:35.000 You know, President Trump had all of these papers stacked of apparently regulations.

00:31:41.000 There were some questions about whether all of those pages actually had printed material on them.

00:31:45.000 You remember that President Trump very early on in his presidency, I think it was maybe even before he took presidency, during his transition, he brought out a bunch of folders that he said were all of his Trump

00:31:56.000 Contracts, and that he was going to basically hand those over to his son, and that he was going to disassociate.

00:32:02.000 And then it turned out that half those folders were filled with empty paper.

00:32:04.000 Well, I don't know if this paper was empty or not, but it is true that the president has cut a massive amount of regulation.

00:32:09.000 So yesterday at the White House, he cut a literal red tape with a giant scissors, because this is the kind of schtick we do now in politics.

00:32:16.000 The truth is, Trump knows this.

00:32:17.000 This is what Trump is good at, this sort of branding stuff.

00:32:19.000 Everyone can make fun of this, but if the image is the president of the United States cutting the red tape,

00:32:24.000 So this is what we have now.

00:32:26.000 This is where we were in 1960.

00:32:26.000 And when we're finished, which won't be in too long a period of time, we will be less than where we were in 1960, and we will have a great regulatory climate.

00:32:32.000 Okay?

00:32:53.000 Come on up here, Chris.

00:32:54.000 Come on.

00:32:55.000 You work so hard.

00:32:57.000 Elaine, are you okay?

00:32:58.000 Come on.

00:32:58.000 Yep.

00:32:59.000 You okay?

00:32:59.000 Yep, fine.

00:33:01.000 She has a lot to do with it. 1.00

00:33:02.000 She has things called roads. 1.00

00:33:05.000 And bridges, right?

00:33:06.000 Yes.

00:33:06.000 Okay.

00:33:08.000 One, two, three.

00:33:13.000 With all the wild enthusiasm of youth, President Trump cuts that ribbon.

00:33:17.000 One, two, three.

00:33:20.000 Pretty spectacular stuff.

00:33:21.000 It is mock-worthy, but it is also true.

00:33:23.000 The President of the United States has cut a lot of regulations.

00:33:26.000 One of the reasons the stock market is doing well.

00:33:28.000 One of the reasons the economy is very hot.

00:33:29.000 Last quarter was a 3.3% GDP growth.

00:33:33.000 And not only that, the Fed is raising the rates again.

00:33:36.000 So the Fed has been tightening up the monetary flow.

00:33:39.000 Inflation is going to be brought under control, and the economy continues to be strong.

00:33:44.000 Some of that is on President Obama and the Republican Congress before Trump, but obviously there's a lot of confidence in how the economy is working right now, and that is at least in large part due to President Trump.

00:33:54.000 So that is good stuff.

00:33:55.000 And this is the area where Trump really could succeed.

00:33:57.000 This is why it's actually deeply important that the president work on his popularity rating.

00:34:01.000 I know a lot of people don't care about this.

00:34:03.000 I know a lot of people aren't worried about his popularity.

00:34:05.000 They think, oh well, he can have bad poll numbers, and as long as he's doing well, we're happy.

00:34:09.000 He needs to get his poll numbers up, because a lot of the things he's doing are things I like.

00:34:12.000 They are things that I agree with.

00:34:14.000 A lot of his agenda mirrors my own.

00:34:16.000 I think that's wonderful.

00:34:17.000 But, if you take my agenda, and then you smear poop all over it, right?

00:34:20.000 If you take my agenda, and you take your unpopularity, and you smear my agenda with unpopularity, it makes my agenda toxic.

00:34:26.000 That's not worthwhile.

00:34:28.000 Okay, you should not make your own agenda toxic this way.

00:34:31.000 And that's why it's very important that the president should be focusing in on his own accomplishments like a laser.

00:34:36.000 He should be focusing in on the things he's doing like a laser. 0.75

00:34:38.000 He should not be making himself more unpopular with foolish statements like the one that he made today about Mike Flynn.

00:34:43.000 He should not be engaging on Twitter as much. 0.75

00:34:46.000 Honest to God, if somebody unplugged the man's phone and it just, the battery ran down,

00:34:50.000 Or if Comcast decided to cut off Twitter, but just for the White House, then his popularity ratings would jump rather dramatically.

00:34:59.000 Because the fact is, the Democrats have nothing here, right?

00:35:00.000 Nancy Pelosi was saying that the GOP — like, she's trying to make the case the GOP tax bill is a Pyrrhic victory, that it's going to end the Republicans.

00:35:07.000 There has never been a tax reduction in history that has redounded to the negative effect of Republicans, ever.

00:35:13.000 It does not work that way.

00:35:15.000 Well, we stayed united, and we still continue that fight.

00:35:19.000 I think this is a Pyrrhic victory if, in fact, it does happen.

00:35:23.000 We don't have the votes to take it down unless some of the Republicans see the light.

00:35:28.000 And people are speaking out, especially since they added the repeal of the mandate, the Affordable Care Act individual mandate.

00:35:36.000 That has energized the base further.

00:35:39.000 But this is who they are.

00:35:41.000 This is what they came here to do, tax cuts.

00:35:44.000 This is all empty.

00:35:48.000 It doesn't work.

00:35:49.000 Democrats have been trying this for years.

00:35:50.000 All the anti-tax cut rhetoric is a bunch of nonsense.

00:35:53.000 And so that's why, if Trump's agenda were the main focus here, as opposed to whatever Trump says today, he'd be doing a lot better, and so would the conservative agenda.

00:36:00.000 Because he's been a lot more conservative than I thought he would be as president.

00:36:04.000 This is not how he campaigned.

00:36:05.000 I'm very pleased with that.

00:36:06.000 But I want to see all of that at the top of the page, not all of the other nonsense that seems to cloud our judgment.

00:36:11.000 Okay, so I have a lot to get to today.

00:36:13.000 We have the mailbag today, things I like, things I hate, still a lot on the docket here.

00:36:18.000 But for all of that, you're going to have to go over and subscribe at dailywire.com.

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00:37:03.000 One we filmed yesterday is patently absurd, but you will definitely want to see it.

00:37:07.000 I'm not going to give any clues because it would give away the joke, but suffice it to say, there will be images of me that I would rather not be on the internet.

00:37:14.000 That will be available probably next week.

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00:37:22.000 We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:37:30.000 All righty, time for a quick thing I like, and then a thing I hate, and then we'll get to the mailbag.

00:37:33.000 So thing that I like today, I've been doing Beethoven all week.

00:37:36.000 So this is one of my dad's favorite pieces.

00:37:38.000 This is Beethoven's Sonata Opus 111.

00:37:40.000 The reason that I picked this is not only because it's fun, but this particular segment of Beethoven, if you don't hear snidely whiplash in here, like Beethoven is so modern that when you listen to his music, especially his late music, what you will hear is all of these film references that you never had thought about before, and you'll hear where they came from.

00:37:56.000 So this is basically

00:38:00.000 It sounds like Snidely Whiplash.

00:38:01.000 There's no way around it.

00:38:01.000 It sounds like Nell is tied to the tracks and Dudley Durett's gonna show up.

00:38:04.000 So here it is from Sonata, Opus 111 from Beethoven.

00:38:38.000 That's the thing about Beethoven.

00:38:39.000 If you actually listen to a lot of Beethoven, his range is just astonishing.

00:38:42.000 And some of the concerts that he gave.

00:38:44.000 So Beethoven started off as a concert pianist.

00:38:46.000 Everybody thinks that he's famous for being a composer.

00:38:48.000 He started off like Mozart as a performer.

00:38:50.000 He was world famous.

00:38:51.000 I mean, he was famous across Europe.

00:38:53.000 He was mostly famous for improvisation.

00:38:54.000 So everybody thinks of classical music as being very staid, and it's all written on the page, as opposed to jazz, which is improvisational.

00:39:01.000 But Beethoven

00:39:02.000 He was very, very famous for being the greatest improviser of his age.

00:39:05.000 And you can tell that in his development sections in his pieces, which I talked about yesterday.

00:39:08.000 But they're famous stories of him.

00:39:10.000 They would basically have improvisation offs.

00:39:12.000 Like, they would actually have a couple of pianists in a room.

00:39:14.000 One person would improvise, and the other person would have to do something cooler with improvisation.

00:39:18.000 There's a famous story about Beethoven where he was in a bad mood one day, and somebody invited him to one of these parties and wanted him to play.

00:39:24.000 And he was not into it, and he lost to some guy.

00:39:26.000 It was the only time he'd ever lost.

00:39:27.000 He was sort of undefeated.

00:39:29.000 And then the guy called for a rematch.

00:39:31.000 And in the rematch, the guy who he was improvising against, that guy made a mistake.

00:39:36.000 He took one of Beethoven's themes and started improvising off one of Beethoven's themes as a way to mock Beethoven.

00:39:40.000 The guy had also premiered a new piece of his.

00:39:42.000 Beethoven went over to the cellist in the new piece, took the cellist's music, turned it upside down, and then improvised off the guy's music upside down.

00:39:51.000 So that's how talented a musician Beethoven was.

00:39:55.000 You can't say enough about the greatness of Beethoven's genius.

00:39:59.000 Okay, time for a couple of things I hate and then we'll go mailbag.

00:40:06.000 OK, so first thing that I hate, there's this video going around yesterday that's just insane.

00:40:11.000 A lot of the northern European countries have gotten very into euthanasia.

00:40:15.000 When I say that, I don't mean that they've legalized euthanasia.

00:40:18.000 I mean that they have actually started advocating for euthanasia for people who are mentally handicapped. 0.74

00:40:22.000 They've advocated for euthanasia for people who are depressed.

00:40:25.000 They've relieved restrictions on euthanasia.

00:40:26.000 This is doctor-assisted suicide, of course.

00:40:29.000 And this video, if this doesn't scream Nazi to you, it's because you don't know enough about the Nazis.

00:40:33.000 Here's a Dutch government official telling a Down Syndrome man that he's too expensive, how much he costs the state to be living, to be alive.

00:40:40.000 Here is this video, it's pretty astonishing.

00:40:44.000 It says 48,000 euro per year approximately.

00:40:50.000 Per Downer, per Down Syndrome person.

00:40:53.000 So Stuart costs us as a society 48,000 euros per year.

00:41:03.000 That is a considerable amount, but is it a high one compared to normal persons?

00:41:10.000 Well, you can calculate that by taking the big number, that 90 billion, and divide this amount by the number of citizens in the Netherlands.

00:41:18.000 And there you're approximately 17 million, and that will give you approximately an amount of 5,000 euros per year per person.

00:41:25.000 So you could say that short is almost 10 times as expensive than we are.

00:41:32.000 Those expenses are indeed 10 times as high.

00:41:35.000 You are a valuable man, Sjoerd.

00:41:37.000 Okay, the reason that this is creepy, folks, is if you look back at the Nazi eugenics programs, this is how they all started. 0.76

00:41:42.000 Look back at the campaign of 1932.

00:41:44.000 One of the things the Nazis were saying is, there are a bunch of people in our society who are the undesirables and they cost the government too much money.

00:41:50.000 They cost the government too much money for upkeep.

00:41:52.000 And if there were only something we could do with them, if there were only something we could do with all these very expensive people, it costs a lot of money to keep them alive.

00:42:00.000 And there's always a creepy prelude.

00:42:02.000 Either these are people who deserve our help, or they're people who don't deserve our help.

00:42:06.000 They're human beings.

00:42:07.000 They can't take care of themselves.

00:42:08.000 They deserve our help.

00:42:10.000 Falling into this trap is the essence of evil.

00:42:12.000 But this is also what socialism ends toward, right?

00:42:15.000 When the government is quote-unquote paying people to live, and private charity withers, then it's only a matter of time before the government starts thinking of ways out of this particular conundrum.

00:42:26.000 OK, so final thing that I hate today.

00:42:28.000 So Mark Stein, I thought, made a point that is worth noting with regard to sexual harassment.

00:42:32.000 He's getting all sorts of flack for it.

00:42:34.000 But this is a point that I've made, too.

00:42:36.000 When we talk about sexual harassment and sexual assault, we need to be very specific about what it is that we are talking about, because vague standards actually hurt women. 0.99

00:42:42.000 They not only hurt women by conflating sexual harassment with non-sexual harassment, or conflating mild sexual harassment, meaning a guy says something crude in the workplace, to rape.

00:42:51.000 But they also end up making it

00:42:54.000 They give a reverse incentive for employers to actually hire women, in much the same way that the Americans with Disabilities Act, which forced business owners to build in ramps in their places of business if they hired a disabled person, caused a lot of business owners not to hire disabled people.

00:43:09.000 There are actual statistics that bear that out.

00:43:11.000 In the same way, this idea that sexual harassment is going to be vaguely defined and we're going to destroy the career of anybody who's ever accused of anything is going to encourage men to hire only other men, so that they're not accused of this sort of stuff.

00:43:21.000 Mark Stein makes this point yesterday.

00:43:23.000 Do I really want to be alone with a female employee now? 1.00

00:43:29.000 Who knows how she's going to feel about it in 30 years time?

00:43:32.000 I mean, I don't think that's necessarily in the interests of women in the workplace. 1.00

00:43:37.000 I don't think it's in the interests of social relations.

00:43:40.000 It's an insane moral panic that started with genuine rape, genuine violence, genuine power issues, and now just seems to have degenerated into one anonymous accusation

00:43:54.000 Well, this is why we have to be very careful, and that's why we have to be very specific about what accusations we're going to hold to.

00:43:58.000 You know, I've said this over and over and over.

00:44:01.000 Sexual harassment is evil. 0.81

00:44:03.000 Sexual abuse is evil.

00:44:05.000 But we need to be very clear about what we're talking about and what kind of accusations we're going to take with the proper amount of severity.

00:44:11.000 Otherwise, the actual effect will be people making the kinds of decisions you don't want them to make, saying, I'm not going to hire that woman because if I hire her, 1.00

00:44:18.000 Then I'm afraid she's going to accuse me of sexual harassment at some point down the line.

00:44:21.000 That may be unjustified.

00:44:22.000 That is the way people act.

00:44:24.000 Okay, time for the mailbag.

00:44:25.000 So, Caitlin says, Hi Ben, I read on your Fox News Power Player of the Week article that you initially wanted to double major in genetic science and music.

00:44:32.000 What brought you to deciding on political science and then law school?

00:44:35.000 Thanks, Caitlin.

00:44:35.000 So, what actually brought me to political science is two things.

00:44:39.000 One, I tried an engineering class, a math engineering class.

00:44:43.000 And I did okay in it.

00:44:44.000 I was getting an A. I think I was getting an A up until the final.

00:44:47.000 And then I ended up with a B in the class, I believe.

00:44:50.000 But in any case, I was like, that's enough of that.

00:44:52.000 That was one thing.

00:44:53.000 The other thing that happened is that I was walking through the UCLA campus and I picked up the UCLA Daily Bruin, which is a far left rag.

00:44:59.000 And there was a piece in it comparing then the Israeli Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon.

00:45:03.000 To Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi.

00:45:05.000 And I walked into the offices and said, do you mind if I write a counter to this?

00:45:08.000 And they said, sure.

00:45:09.000 And then that became a counterpoint column.

00:45:11.000 And I realized that this is something I'm much more interested in than doing all the things necessary to become an expert in genetics.

00:45:18.000 It's not that I wasn't interested in the topic.

00:45:19.000 I just wasn't willing to slog through that mud.

00:45:22.000 And I have nothing but admiration for people who do.

00:45:25.000 For the 1,000th time, my wife is a doctor, which means that she is still basically doing, she's residency now, right?

00:45:30.000 I mean, she's been doing this since we met.

00:45:31.000 Okay, we've been married for 10 years.

00:45:33.000 And she's, 10 years in July.

00:45:35.000 And she, and yet she is still, you know, doing this.

00:45:38.000 So that's a long haul.

00:45:40.000 Well, it's very difficult to prove to a small child there's long-term benefits playing the instrument.

00:45:43.000 You have to make it fun.

00:45:44.000 One of the things that

00:45:51.000 Was of advantage to me is that my father was a professional musician, so he would sit there with the piano and play with me.

00:45:57.000 You actually need to sit there and practice with your kid.

00:45:59.000 You need to be involved.

00:46:00.000 It's boring, it may not be fun for you, but if your kid knows that you're willing to put in the time, then your kid assumes that you are willing also to do that only for things that are important.

00:46:08.000 Plus, kids want to spend time with their parents, and if you're willing to spend time with your kid practicing, even if you are not, you know, even if you're not musically versed,

00:46:17.000 Then your kid will take it a lot more seriously.

00:46:19.000 You can't just tell a kid, go practice for half an hour.

00:46:21.000 You actually need to sit there with the kid.

00:46:23.000 And I think if you're willing to do that, then your kid will be more likely to practice.

00:46:26.000 Also, when you get to a certain level, it does become enjoyable.

00:46:28.000 At the very beginning, it's kind of fun because it's something new.

00:46:31.000 And then there's a plateau that gets hit where it becomes very difficult.

00:46:35.000 And then when you get good enough, then it's a lot of fun again because you're skilled.

00:46:39.000 Okay, Al says,

00:46:41.000 Hey, Ben.

00:46:41.000 Coming from the U.K., which has health care for all, but to my mind is struggling to pay for it, your arguments on health care supply interest me greatly.

00:46:46.000 I like the American idea that the market is used to drive down costs, but at the same time, according to the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S.

00:46:51.000 government spends way more on health care than most major countries.

00:46:54.000 It has the lowest quality of care in terms of outcomes, equity, and access, whereas the U.K.

00:46:57.000 has the highest, even though we're close to rationing the system is so expensive.

00:47:00.000 What in your mind is the best system for countries with huge populations like the U.K.

00:47:03.000 and U.S.

00:47:04.000 to solve the health care crisis, given they both spend too much, but socialized health care seems to produce better results?

00:47:09.000 Well, it depends on the results that you are seeking.

00:47:10.000 So, number one, socialized medicine has pretty good emergency care, but they have not great surgical care in the sense that you have to wait around in line for the rationing to actually take place.

00:47:20.000 The five-year survival rate for cancer in the United States is significantly higher than it is in places like the UK, specifically because I can go and get the care that I need now instead of having to sit around and wait.

00:47:30.000 Healthcare on demand is, you know, a market-driven healthcare system.

00:47:34.000 Thank you.

00:47:50.000 If you were actually forced to sit there and say, OK, is it worth an x-ray today?

00:47:53.000 Is it worth $1,000 for an x-ray?

00:47:56.000 Or I can go home and wait for a week.

00:47:57.000 You'd probably go home and wait for a week.

00:47:59.000 There actually isn't perfect market transparency in the United States, and that causes a serious problem in terms of the meat between supply and demand in terms of medical care in the United States.

00:48:11.000 Well, I mean, when you talk about access, basically, socialized medicine will always have the highest access because people can walk into a hospital and demand service, or to a doctor's office and demand service.

00:48:25.000 They don't have the highest outcomes in terms of the rate at which those services are provided.

00:48:30.000 And in terms of outcomes, again, it sort of depends on which outcomes you're looking at.

00:48:33.000 You can't say outcomes overall.

00:48:35.000 Also, the U.K.

00:48:36.000 population is not really comparable to the United States either in terms of size or diversity.

00:48:40.000 Well, I'd have to think about that one a little bit more.

00:48:50.000 I'm trying to think back to a time when the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were sort of reverses of what they are now.

00:48:57.000 I think that in 1948, I would have to seriously consider Truman versus Dewey.

00:49:01.000 I think that that would probably be the only one

00:49:04.000 That's a good question.

00:49:26.000 Those two races, but I don't know.

00:49:28.000 I'd really have to study those more to determine how I would have come out, whether I really would have voted for the Democrat over the Republican in those races.

00:49:37.000 I work with a bunch of liberals that hate God.

00:49:38.000 One person in particular has zero respect for God, my belief in God, or just me as a human being in general.

00:49:42.000 She'll ask zero questions about God and then mock my answer. 1.00

00:49:45.000 This individual is a supervisor.

00:49:46.000 I fear going to HR or upper management in case of retaliation and losing my job.

00:49:49.000 How should I handle this?

00:49:50.000 Well, you should stop interacting.

00:49:51.000 I mean, frankly, it's not worth every interaction.

00:49:54.000 They may make things chilly.

00:49:55.000 Keep things professional.

00:49:56.000 Keep things light.

00:49:56.000 Don't talk about God.

00:49:57.000 If they mock God, just say, listen, I find that offensive and I don't deserve to have my belief system mocked.

00:50:02.000 I don't mock your belief system.

00:50:04.000 I don't know if they have a problem with that, Toph.

00:50:06.000 But I don't think that professionalism in the workplace seems to me a bare minimum, no matter what your political viewpoint.

00:50:13.000 So what I've said is in an ideal world, everyone who has credible allegations of sexual assault and abuse should resign.

00:50:18.000 Everyone.

00:50:18.000 And in an ideal world, that would include the president.

00:50:34.000 There is a difference in kind between the Roy Moore situation and the Al Franken situation and Trump.

00:50:39.000 The difference in kind is this, and not with regard to the allegations.

00:50:42.000 With regard to the practicality of saying they should resign, there's one giant obstacle.

00:50:47.000 That is, Roy Moore was running in an election.

00:50:49.000 The people did not elect him.

00:50:51.000 Okay, so, that's that.

00:50:53.000 Al Franken, people didn't know this information when they elected him, so now it's new information breaking, and that changes the calculation as to whether he should resign.

00:51:00.000 All the allegations against Trump are old, people knew about it when they elected him, nothing new has been added to the pie, therefore it's difficult to say that, on the basis of nothing changing, he should now resign.

00:51:08.000 That's like saying he should have quit during the election cycle, which, by the way, I believe I said, during the election cycle, in the middle of the P-word tape. 0.54

00:51:15.000 So, that's my general take.

00:51:17.000 In the ideal world, sure.

00:51:18.000 In the real world, not really.

00:51:36.000 I do think that remaining abstinent until marriage affects the success of relationships generally.

00:51:41.000 Meaning that people who live together before marriage have a significantly higher divorce rate than people who don't live together before marriage.

00:51:46.000 And usually once you're living with a certain level of intimacy, sexually, you end up living together before you're married.

00:51:52.000 And that does not actually end up reflecting married life.

00:51:55.000 Married life is not you living together with your boyfriend.

00:51:57.000 Married life is you have kids, you have a joint bank account, you have responsibilities. 0.62

00:52:00.000 Those are not always reflected in just you living with your boyfriend, even with the advent of single motherhood.

00:52:07.000 I think that

00:52:08.000 The idea of born-again marriage, the virgins, the idea that you've had sex, but now with your new partner, you're gonna say no sex until marriage.

00:52:14.000 I think that's a worthwhile thing because it's asking, just practically speaking, it's asking for a commitment before you decide to commit your body to somebody.

00:52:21.000 And I think that that is a smart play.

00:52:22.000 I think it's a smart play.

00:52:24.000 I think it's a demand for commitment that should easily be met by a good person.

00:52:29.000 The fact that we, there's so many TV shows now where they've reversed everything.

00:52:33.000 It's funny how this worked.

00:52:34.000 It used to be, 0.69

00:52:36.000 That when I grew up, my parents said to me, when you get married, then you'll have sex. 0.76

00:52:39.000 And then it turned into, when people talk to their kids, they say, well, when you love somebody, you have sex. 0.69

00:52:44.000 And now it's turned into, you'll have sex, and then you figure out whether you love somebody. 0.58

00:52:47.000 And when you watch TV, this is what you see.

00:52:48.000 You see two people hop into bed, and then they'll be real awkward about whether to say I love you or not.

00:52:53.000 So this idea that somehow love has been more closely tied to sex, with the disconnection between sex and marriage, is absolutely false.

00:52:59.000 In fact, love has become less connected to sex.

00:53:02.000 Sex was much more connected with love when love was connected to commitment.

00:53:06.000 So I think we've completely reversed the polarity on sex, love and marriage.

00:53:24.000 When I got married, my wife seriously considered keeping her last name as her middle name. 1.00

00:53:30.000 So her maiden name is Toledano.

00:53:32.000 She seriously thought about keeping that as her middle name.

00:53:34.000 And I was fine with that, because my mom did the same thing.

00:53:37.000 She kept her maiden name as her middle name.

00:53:39.000 It never bothered me.

00:53:40.000 I never thought that was a big deal, as long as she took my last name.

00:53:43.000 The reason I think that's important is because I think that it is important that a family

00:53:47.000 That a family start on the footing of, we are a new family now.

00:53:51.000 We are our own family.

00:53:51.000 We are our own family unit.

00:53:53.000 And the reason that I think that it's important for, I think it is sort of emasculating for men, maybe it's a cultural totem, but I think it's emasculating for men to give up their family name.

00:54:00.000 The idea that a man is supposed to give up, you know, what he has grown up with in favor of the woman's family can be emasculating.

00:54:07.000 If you don't find it emasculating, I don't see a problem with it.

00:54:10.000 If you do find it emasculating, then I do see a problem with it.

00:54:12.000 So this is really

00:54:13.000 between you and the person that you're married to?

00:54:16.000 For me, my wife said to me, listen, she was thinking about keeping that middle name.

00:54:19.000 She decided not to.

00:54:20.000 She decided to just go with her first name.

00:54:21.000 She didn't even have a middle name. 0.98

00:54:22.000 She decided to go with her first name and my last name because she said, listen, we're now our own family.

00:54:27.000 We are our own family unit.

00:54:29.000 I want to be part of that family unit with you.

00:54:31.000 It was very moving to me, frankly, and it's something that I really appreciated.

00:54:35.000 It's a gift from her to me.

00:54:36.000 It's not something I had to expect, but it's something that I certainly appreciated.

00:54:40.000 Okay, Joe says, what is the most infuriating debate tactic used against you and how do you combat it?

00:54:44.000 Well, always the most infuriating debate tactic is when someone will dig something up ten years old, take it out of context, and then use it against you, and then refuse to hear the answer.

00:54:51.000 That's always infuriating.

00:54:53.000 Because context matters.

00:54:54.000 And things that you said in 2007 may not be things that you agree with today.

00:54:58.000 And things that you tweeted in 2012 may not be things that are even taken in context.

00:55:03.000 So for me, for example, there's been a tweet that people have been using against me on Twitter for a long time with regard to Arabs and Israelis in which I said something to the effect of Israelis like to build and Arabs like to live in open sewage. 0.99

00:55:14.000 The idea of that tweet was not that every Arab likes to live in open sewage, you morons. 1.00

00:55:18.000 The idea of that tweet is that in the Israeli-Arab conflict, there is one side that likes to build things and one side that would prefer to spend its money on building terror tunnels in the Gaza Strip. 0.99

00:55:27.000 Instead of actually caring for its people.

00:55:29.000 And in fact, not only am I saying that now, I said that in 2012.

00:55:31.000 There were four follow-up tweets, I believe, and all of them said exactly that.

00:55:35.000 Doesn't matter, people take that tweet out of context and then they use that to say that I'm racist against Arabs, which is absurd.

00:55:40.000 In that same tweet thread, I specifically say that there are Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs who are wonderful people, just not the ones who side with terror groups like Hamas.

00:55:48.000 But, again, that's just an example of how people take things out of context and then use them against you, and that I find highly irritating.

00:55:54.000 David says, do you feel everyone speaks too slowly?

00:55:56.000 Yes.

00:55:57.000 Yes, everyone speaks too slowly.

00:55:59.000 They're wasting my time.

00:56:00.000 The podcast that I listen to, I actually had to download an app that allows me to listen to podcasts at 2.5.

00:56:06.000 So I listen to all the podcasts that I listen to at 2.5.

00:56:10.000 I guess the maximum is 3.

00:56:11.000 It depends on who's podcasting.

00:56:13.000 If somebody's a very slow speaker, then 3 is the proper speed.

00:56:17.000 I hear that it's difficult to listen to my podcast on 2, or even 1.5.

00:56:20.000 But for those who are willing to take the speed challenge, go for it.

00:56:25.000 Michael says, Ben, I've been deeply inspired by your devotion to your religion and dedication to the nation.

00:56:28.000 I'm a person raised Christian, but I rejected the church and have been living as an atheist for the last 15 years.

00:56:33.000 As a veteran fighting PTSD, I found that your Bible talk was leading me to read the Torah, and I've been more optimistic than I have been in years.

00:56:38.000 I want to know more about converting to Judaism, and what your advice would be for a person living in a deeply Christian community, Bible Belt coal country, with absolutely no Jewish community to turn to.

00:56:46.000 Is there a place I can find mentorship, and what is the view of the Jewish community on conversion?

00:56:49.000 So Jewish law generally actually discourages conversion because it's not the world's easiest life, right?

00:56:54.000 Now, to convert, you have to convert orthodox from the orthodox point of view, and that means that you have to take upon yourself all the obligations.

00:57:00.000 Not working on Sabbath, making sure that you eat kosher, right? 1.00

00:57:03.000 You're supposed to commit to everything, because if you're gonna commit, commit, right?

00:57:06.000 That's the basic idea here.

00:57:07.000 So we actually tell people, if somebody wants to convert, we actually turn them down three times. 0.98

00:57:11.000 We're actually halachically, according to Jewish law, obligated to turn them down three times before we're allowed to say yes. 0.97

00:57:17.000 As far as mentorship, I think there are a lot of rabbis who can be talked to who are really good on this.

00:57:23.000 If you want to email me directly, I can probably refer you to some if this is something that you want to take seriously or find out more about.

00:57:28.000 It's going to be very difficult for you to live as an observant Jew in an area where there are no other Jews because so many Jewish commitments are communal. 0.85

00:57:35.000 It's about the nation of Israel and Judaism, not just the individual who has a relationship with God in the Torah.

00:57:40.000 But I'd be happy to pass on some names for you.

00:57:42.000 So the answer is yes.

00:58:04.000 But I think the entire thing becomes a giant self-contradiction.

00:58:08.000 So one of the big problems here is that if you are living in a determinist universe, even the question as to what policies the government should pursue assumes a certain level of free will on the part of government actors to actually change the policies.

00:58:21.000 This is my big problem with Sam's take on free will.

00:58:24.000 Once you say this, once you're living in a fully deterministic universe, then I'm going to do what I was going to do.

00:58:30.000 The idea of me even getting up in the morning and going to do things, I was going to do that.

00:58:33.000 So it's not like I make the choice to do that, or I make the choice to support certain policies.

00:58:37.000 I was going to support those policies all along, and I had no choice in that process.

00:58:41.000 The computer fries itself, in other words.

00:58:45.000 All of human progress relies on the idea that we have a capacity to discover what's true about the universe, and that we have a capacity to make better policy that frees people.

00:58:52.000 All of that is based on free will and the capacity for choice.

00:58:55.000 You get rid of all that.

00:58:56.000 This is the basic question that I kept asking Sam, and I'm not sure that I got an answer that satisfied me at the very least.

00:59:01.000 I kept saying to him,

00:59:03.000 You know, Sam, you talk a lot about changing the world and you talk a lot about using active verbs, making choices, but you don't believe in those choices.

00:59:11.000 You talk a lot about moral values and what that value system should be.

00:59:14.000 Making a value decision is a choice about hierarchy of values.

00:59:18.000 How do you make that decision?

00:59:19.000 You can't get from is to ought.

00:59:20.000 You can't get from we are balls of meat wandering aimlessly through the universe with some capacity for self-perception with

00:59:26.000 The idea that there is a moral system that makes certain things more worthwhile than others.

00:59:30.000 You can't get from here is a cup to what should I do with this cup unless there was a creator of the cup who had in mind what the cup is for.

00:59:38.000 That's the point that I was making.

00:59:40.000 Philosophy bridges the is-ought gap.

00:59:42.000 This is what Aristotle does.

00:59:43.000 Aristotle says, what makes a man good is that man was created for a certain purpose.

00:59:47.000 Once you get rid of purpose, once you get rid of design, once you get rid of the idea of meaning, I don't know how you reconstruct anything that looks like a functional society.

00:59:55.000 Ben says, hi Ben, I was reading an article you retweeted from National Review about how America's youth are lonelier, less independent, and less attached to community.

01:00:02.000 I understand that much of this could be applied to me.

01:00:04.000 How does someone who desperately wants to break this rather nihilist youth mentality go about doing it?

01:00:07.000 Engage.

01:00:09.000 The answer is engage.

01:00:10.000 Get active.

01:00:11.000 You can sit there and you can contemplate it, or you can go involve yourself with other people.

01:00:14.000 It's hard, I know.

01:00:15.000 It's especially hard when you're a single guy.

01:00:16.000 I remember being a single guy before I was married.

01:00:18.000 Marriage is a wonderful thing.

01:00:19.000 I love being married.

01:00:20.000 When I was a single guy, I did not enjoy being single because it takes actual effort to go out and engage with other human beings.

01:00:26.000 You actually have to go out and make an effort to join a group.

01:00:28.000 Go out and do it.

01:00:29.000 It'll make your life better.

01:00:31.000 Those social engagements will make you more apt to open up to others, and that will enrich your experience in life.

01:00:36.000 Holden says, Well, I mean, the number one thing that I always say about income inequality is that there are two things.

01:00:40.000 Number one, what level of income equality would be sufficient for you?

01:00:42.000 And why?

01:00:54.000 So, for Bernie Sanders, why shouldn't everyone make $40,000 a year?

01:00:58.000 That seems the fairest thing.

01:01:00.000 Why not be full communist?

01:01:01.000 Seize all the property, redistribute it, everybody gets the same thing.

01:01:04.000 Why not?

01:01:05.000 Is it really fair that someone should make more than somebody else?

01:01:07.000 And why?

01:01:08.000 How do you make that decision?

01:01:09.000 Put the onus on the person to explain what level of income inequality is bad versus what level of income inequality is good.

01:01:15.000 Second, it does not hurt you that Bill Gates is rich.

01:01:18.000 Bill Gates being rich is actually good for you because it's Bill Gates' wealth that brought about all of these consensual transactions in which you take place.

01:01:25.000 Every time you buy a loaf of bread from the grocer, you are making the grocer richer.

01:01:29.000 Would you prefer not to be able to buy the loaf of bread?

01:01:31.000 You've created more income inequality because you just spent money with the grocer.

01:01:34.000 You're poorer.

01:01:35.000 He's richer.

01:01:36.000 Are you both worse off?

01:01:37.000 Or are you both better off?

01:01:38.000 The answer is, you're both better off.

01:01:40.000 No.

01:01:40.000 The short answer is no.

01:01:42.000 I feel like there's probably some hip-hop that

01:01:56.000 I might enjoy it on a visceral level, but I have not yet found it.

01:02:01.000 Maybe that's because I let my Apollonian side dominate my Dionysian side too much in the sort of Nietzschean juxtaposition.

01:02:09.000 So maybe that's a little sophisticated for a hip-hop breakdown.

01:02:12.000 But there you are.

01:02:14.000 Okay, so we will be back here next week.

01:02:17.000 We'll be back here on Monday.

01:02:18.000 I hope you have a wonderful and meaningful weekend.

01:02:21.000 If you're celebrating Hanukkah, I hope that you're having a wonderful Hanukkah.

01:02:23.000 If you're celebrating Christmas, I hope you're having a wonderful time getting prepared for Christmas.

01:02:26.000 In any case, have a great weekend.

01:02:27.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

01:02:28.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

01:02:33.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.

01:02:35.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:02:37.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

01:02:38.000 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

01:02:40.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

01:02:42.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.

01:02:43.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:02:45.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

01:02:48.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2017.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 15, 2017

Is It The End Of The Internet? | Ep. 438

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