The Ben Shapiro Show - July 15, 2026


The Most Important Clip in The History of The Internet


Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

181.34

Word count

3,802

Sentence count

263

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

16

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ben Shapiro's wife just gave birth to her fifth child, and it's an amazing thing to watch her holding her new baby boy. He's a good kid, and she's a great mom, and that's why the world is a beautiful place.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Folks, today I'm going to show you what I believe to be maybe the most meaningful clip in the history of the internet.
00:00:05.000 I'm not kidding.
00:00:07.000 It's why America and the West are good, why the West is great in one clip.
00:00:11.000 And no, it's not a clip of F 35s or a booming American business.
00:00:15.000 As much as I love those things, they're outgrowths of something deeper and more meaningful.
00:00:19.000 We are a culture, we are a civilization that values the individual soul.
00:00:23.000 I'm going to show you this clip in just a minute.
00:00:25.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:34.000 So, maybe I'm just a sucker for this stuff right now.
00:00:37.000 My wife obviously had a baby on Sunday morning, watched my fifth child be born.
00:00:42.000 He's at home.
00:00:43.000 My kids are just loving him and spending the day with him, wanting to hold him, wanting to hug him.
00:00:50.000 And let's be real when it comes to small babies, they are extremely cute, but also deeply dependent, of course.
00:00:58.000 They're very demanding.
00:00:59.000 They're up at all hours of the night.
00:01:00.000 My wife, obviously, more than I am.
00:01:04.000 There is something incredible and eternal and magical about having a child.
00:01:11.000 And I have many of them and watching them grow and watching them change over time, watching them become independent, interact with the world, interact with each other.
00:01:18.000 It's just an unbelievable thing.
00:01:20.000 So maybe that put me in a sort of emotionally vulnerable place.
00:01:24.000 Not a place I'm used to, but an emotionally vulnerable place.
00:01:26.000 Maybe I'm just a sucker for this clip right now.
00:01:28.000 So I promised you this clip, which I saw yesterday.
00:01:31.000 I was browsing the interwebs and I came across this clip from a Daily Wire show, Pines with Aquinas, with our own Matt Fradd.
00:01:38.000 He was interviewing a man named Dr. Peter Kreft, who is a professor of philosophy at Boston College.
00:01:44.000 But here, Dr. Kreft is not talking about philosophy as much as he is talking about what it means to be a good human being and what love for another human being means.
00:01:55.000 Just watch this.
00:01:56.000 This clip is about a minute 40, so it's a little bit long.
00:01:58.000 There are some pauses in it, and when you listen to it, you will see why you should go watch the clip.
00:02:03.000 If you're only listening, you should actually watch it happen because it's pretty astonishing.
00:02:09.000 What advice do you have someone watching this who's newly married or who is about to be?
00:02:19.000 Do you think that when you are very old and your wife is very old and ugly and wrinkled and fat and not very bright or even nasty, that you will still find her beautiful? 0.96
00:02:36.000 If so, marry her.
00:02:41.000 The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home, about an hour after she died, I fell in love with her again. 1.00
00:02:55.000 Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body.
00:03:04.000 It's as beautiful as a crucifix.
00:03:21.000 Because that body ain't going to last, but the soul is.
00:03:29.000 So if you don't love her soul, but just love her body, don't get married.
00:03:38.000 I mean, so an astonishing, an astonishing clip.
00:03:42.000 Again, I just got to watch my wife have our fifth child.
00:03:47.000 And I have to say, just on a normal level, obviously, when you watch your wife have a child, It is a physically demanding process, shall we say.
00:03:58.000 And it's not when, if I ask my wife, is that when you've looked your best?
00:04:01.000 The answer, of course, is no.
00:04:02.000 That is certainly not when she has looked her best.
00:04:04.000 But it's when she is at her most beautiful, for sure.
00:04:07.000 In our marriage, whenever she has the baby, the day of the birth, the moment of the birth, that is when she looks the most beautiful to me as a human being, when the baby is put on her chest and she's holding the baby.
00:04:18.000 And that's not because that is when she is at her most physically beautiful.
00:04:20.000 Of course not.
00:04:21.000 Of course not.
00:04:22.000 It's because it's when her soul is at its height because.
00:04:26.000 Here is a new soul that she's just brought into the world, and she's holding the baby and she's looking down at the baby.
00:04:31.000 She has the same expression every time this kind of expression of astonishment and joy and kind of bewildered happiness all at the same time.
00:04:41.000 And I'm watching this happen, and I'm just looking at her, and I'm not seeing her face or her eyes or her body at that point.
00:04:49.000 I'm seeing something different.
00:04:52.000 And that is what makes the world a beautiful and astonishing place the soul.
00:04:57.000 That's the concept.
00:04:59.000 It's not just something that we need in order to explain why we're here or why we matter.
00:05:03.000 It is, in fact, why we as individual human beings matter.
00:05:07.000 It's not our bodies.
00:05:08.000 It's not the physical condition we're in.
00:05:09.000 It's why, whenever people talk about the purpose of life is human flourishing, they have to mean something more than flourishing in the physical sense because the soul is the thing that matters in the world.
00:05:23.000 And all of that's inspiring because it says that you can have a lifetime of meaning, it's available to you regardless of material circumstance.
00:05:31.000 If you can see the soul of another person, and that's doable, it doesn't require magic.
00:05:36.000 It's a plan of action.
00:05:38.000 It's not just pretty words, as Dr. Kreft is saying, it's a way of actually navigating the world.
00:05:42.000 You can make decisions based on that.
00:05:45.000 You can decide who to marry based on that.
00:05:47.000 You can decide whether to have kids, how many kids to have based on that philosophy. 0.99
00:05:53.000 Now, I know there are a lot of young people right now who are blackpilling.
00:05:56.000 They've decided that they've basically given up on Western civilization or on agency in their own lives.
00:06:01.000 They say things like they can't find a woman, it's impossible to get married now, you can't have kids now.
00:06:07.000 No, it really, really isn't.
00:06:09.000 It is eminently doable.
00:06:10.000 It is available to you.
00:06:12.000 Be that guy.
00:06:13.000 Find your faith, find your wife, and fall in love.
00:06:16.000 Fall in love with her soul, and have kids, and build a life, and honor the God who created you.
00:06:22.000 The world is an incredible, beautiful place created for us by a loving God, but it's also a place of heartbreak and tragedy.
00:06:29.000 What Dr. Kreft is saying there is that it's the same place.
00:06:32.000 He's talking about the beauty in his wife.
00:06:35.000 Looking at her body after she passed away.
00:06:39.000 It's not possible to navigate the tragedy of life without also trying to understand the beauty and connect with that beauty.
00:06:45.000 That's what Dr. Kreft is talking about right there.
00:06:48.000 If he can see the beauty in the broken body of his elderly wife after her death, can't we find the beauty in the world around us?
00:06:56.000 A world that's not just filled with physical beauty, but actual spiritual hope and with faith and with family?
00:07:03.000 That's the stuff that life is made of.
00:07:04.000 It's the stuff that makes the adventure so wonderful.
00:07:08.000 It's finding the soul in another human being and recognizing that you have inherent value as a human being, inherent value as a creation of God.
00:07:19.000 And obviously, this has biblical background, right?
00:07:21.000 Dr. Kraft is a biblical thinker.
00:07:23.000 He's Catholic.
00:07:24.000 Obviously, I'm Jewish, but this always goes back to the Bible.
00:07:27.000 Let's talk about your business because let's see.
00:07:30.000 One aspect of you being made in the image of God is that you are made as a creative human being.
00:07:34.000 That means you have creative output and you ought to control that creative output.
00:07:37.000 And that's part of what modern free market economics is all about.
00:07:40.000 This is why you should be working with Shopify.
00:07:43.000 The truth is, most businesses don't start with venture capital and a boardroom, they start with one person deciding to give it a shot.
00:07:48.000 And that's what Shopify is built for.
00:07:50.000 At The Daily Wire, we use Shopify for our storefront, whether it's facts, hats, Books, daily wire merchandise, Shopify helps make the buying process simple for our customers.
00:07:58.000 Because Shopify handles the checkout experience, customers can buy quickly and easily.
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00:08:28.000 When God creates man in Genesis 2 7, the Bible says, and the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
00:08:38.000 These are two different things.
00:08:39.000 It's the dust of the ground.
00:08:41.000 That's how it makes the man.
00:08:42.000 It's the combination.
00:08:43.000 It's the dust of the ground and the breath that God breathes into the human being.
00:08:48.000 What is that breath of life exactly?
00:08:50.000 Well, the Hebrew word for the breath of life is ruach, which also means spirit.
00:08:55.000 And actually, the first reference to that word describes God's spirit, right?
00:08:59.000 It describes earlier in the Bible.
00:09:01.000 First couple of verses of the Bible, it says that God's spirit was hovering over the unformed waters.
00:09:06.000 And the idea here is that there is something spiritual, something to the universe beyond just the physical things that we see, beyond the material.
00:09:15.000 And we can see it manifest most clearly when we look into God's creation.
00:09:18.000 It's a clue.
00:09:19.000 We have the spirit of God, and then God infuses spirit into man.
00:09:23.000 Human beings are special.
00:09:25.000 And it's God's infusion of us with value that makes us special.
00:09:31.000 It's also what makes the West particularly special.
00:09:33.000 And it makes America particularly, particularly special.
00:09:36.000 Because you want to know where the American concept of rights that attach to you as an individual human being came from?
00:09:41.000 From that line of biblical thinking, that you are made in the image of God, that God infused you, a person, with spirit.
00:09:48.000 This is why it means something when the Declaration of Independence says, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted among men because they require the consent of the governed.
00:10:05.000 This is what Abraham Lincoln meant.
00:10:07.000 When he said that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.
00:10:15.000 When the founders or Abraham Lincoln talk about the equality of human beings, they mean in the sight of God.
00:10:19.000 We all have a soul.
00:10:21.000 Now, of course, this doesn't mean that we don't have collective interests or collective identities.
00:10:25.000 A human existence is a bunch of different layers there is you as an individual, there's you as a member of your family, there's you as a member of your community, there's you as an American.
00:10:34.000 And we as Americans have collective interests.
00:10:37.000 The most important interest we have is in preserving this worldview where the individual soul stands at the center.
00:10:44.000 And that worldview has to win because it actually has some very powerful rivals.
00:10:49.000 And those rivals are powerful and they are terrible.
00:10:52.000 Now, historically speaking, there have been two large scale threats to this idea of the individual soul as a thing that is filled with worth.
00:10:58.000 So, again, go back to the Bible.
00:11:00.000 Genesis has all this stuff.
00:11:01.000 In the book of Genesis, God posits a few different forms of human civilization.
00:11:06.000 One is the family.
00:11:09.000 That's the one that God settles on.
00:11:10.000 God says that human civilizations that are rooted in family are the ones that survive.
00:11:15.000 Noah takes his family on the ark, he survives. 0.68
00:11:17.000 God chooses Abraham and his family to generate the children of Israel. 0.94
00:11:22.000 That it is a familial based system. 0.96
00:11:24.000 Okay.
00:11:25.000 But there are two rivals.
00:11:26.000 One is the anarchic civilization of the pre Noah flood era, right?
00:11:31.000 The Bible before the flood describes that civilization as corrupt and filled with lawlessness.
00:11:36.000 Well, what does the Bible mean by that?
00:11:38.000 It means that in that civilization, people treat other people as means to their own ends, that human beings are just tools.
00:11:43.000 You use them because they're useful to you.
00:11:46.000 You just do what you want with them.
00:11:48.000 They don't have any inherent value.
00:11:49.000 They're instrumental.
00:11:51.000 The second form of civilization.
00:11:52.000 Is sort of the bizarro world reverse of that.
00:11:54.000 That's the tyrannical civilization. 0.86
00:11:57.000 That's the Tower of Babel story. 0.85
00:11:59.000 An entire civilization that's built for a single goal, build a giant thing, but designed without reference to either God, right? 0.78
00:12:06.000 It's designed to attack God, or without reference to individual human beings. 0.52
00:12:11.000 The Midrash, which is sort of a Jewish commentary that adumbrates the Bible, suggests that the building of the Tower of Babel took so long and was so arduous that it would take weeks for bricks to move from the base all the way up to the heights. 0.77
00:12:23.000 And so workers would actually cry when a brick would break. 0.67
00:12:26.000 When a brick would fall, they would cry.
00:12:27.000 But if an individual human being died, that was not a big deal because the labor could easily be replaced.
00:12:33.000 And these two rivals to the soul filled civilization of the American way, they still exist.
00:12:38.000 The secular utilitarianism that says that all human beings don't have a soul, basically a nihilistic universe in which everyone is either an obstacle or a tool.
00:12:49.000 And tyrannies, tyrannies that see the collective as the chief mechanism by which the world moves.
00:12:55.000 So, French Revolution idea.
00:12:57.000 That the revolution eats everything in its path.
00:13:01.000 That would be Chinese communism or Russian tyranny or the Iranian malacracy.
00:13:08.000 All of these things are very live.
00:13:10.000 These are not old examples because all old pathologies are simply poured into new bottles.
00:13:16.000 Well, it is an increasingly modern world.
00:13:18.000 But the reality is that if you look in your garage, there's a bunch of stuff that ain't modern there, like a bunch of old photographs that are falling apart, film reels that are falling apart.
00:13:26.000 That's your family history.
00:13:27.000 And when it's lost, it's just gone.
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00:13:45.000 My parents can do the same with their parents because we did it for them as well.
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00:14:25.000 Take, for example, that first secular utilitarian view that human beings only have value if they have value to you.
00:14:32.000 They don't have any inherent value.
00:14:35.000 A truly horrifying story that is sort of indicative of this worldview emerged from Canada.
00:14:44.000 This story is about a Canadian same sex couple, as reported by the New York Post, suing a woman who carried their now two year old son because she refused their demand to abort the fetus because of a minor birth defect and a cleft lip.
00:14:59.000 According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Ontario Superior Court in May and obtained by the National Post, the parents claimed the surrogate did not adequately keep them informed about the baby's health.
00:15:07.000 Put the child at risk, violated confidentiality, and caused them emotional distress.
00:15:13.000 According to the New York Post, the relationship started off strong but soured in June 2024 when she told the couple about an ultrasound revealing that the baby had a cleft lip, possibly a cleft palate, and a minor heart defect.
00:15:24.000 The surrogate said she would have agreed to an abortion if the child was unlikely to survive after birth, but would not abort a 22 week old fetus.
00:15:31.000 And 22 weeks is essentially a survivable outside the womb fetus.
00:15:36.000 I believe the earliest surviving fetuses are at 21 weeks.
00:15:40.000 Certainly by 23, 24 weeks, you actually have a survival rate among fetuses.
00:15:44.000 The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors in Mount Sinai said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip.
00:15:53.000 After the child got treatment, the parents took the child home and ceased contact with the surrogate, who asked them to cover around 10 grand in outstanding expenses, lost wages, transportation costs, and skipped contributions to her pension plan.
00:16:07.000 So, again, it sounds as though originally she was willing to agree to an abortion demanded by them if it hadn't been so late and the.
00:16:17.000 Defects had been more severe.
00:16:19.000 The fact that this is the way that we're discussing a human life demonstrates the sickness here.
00:16:24.000 Again, my wife and I just had a child.
00:16:26.000 One of the decisions that you make in the religions that believe in the individual soul when you have a child is that God infuses soul into children well before birth, that human beings with potential are human beings with potential, and that you cannot deprive that individual human soul of its interests in the world out of convenience for yourself.
00:16:50.000 And yet, this is obviously a child being treated as a convenience.
00:16:54.000 This is not why you have children.
00:16:57.000 This is not how human beings ought to be treated.
00:16:59.000 And a civilization that treats human beings with this sort of disposable mentality is a civilization that loses its moorings utterly.
00:17:07.000 It is a culture of convenience.
00:17:08.000 And a culture of convenience, when it comes to other human beings, is a culture of death.
00:17:12.000 Because it turns out human beings are not convenient.
00:17:16.000 Human beings are highly inconvenient.
00:17:17.000 The people you love the most are, by necessity, the most inconvenient people you know.
00:17:22.000 My children are highly inconvenient to me.
00:17:25.000 I love them more than anything.
00:17:27.000 My wife, highly inconvenient to me.
00:17:29.000 I love her more than anything.
00:17:29.000 It doesn't mean that they deprive me of something.
00:17:32.000 No, the inconvenience is the point because the inconvenience generates obligations that matter in the world.
00:17:39.000 And those obligations matter even more than it would to a normal, non familial human being because I care deeply about these human beings.
00:17:48.000 And that's because they have inherent value, value beyond what I ascribe to them.
00:17:55.000 You want a civilization that's worth its salt, you have to reject this viewpoint that human beings, particularly unborn children, are somehow just tools for you to use.
00:18:03.000 That is one threat.
00:18:06.000 And that threat exists all over the political spectrum.
00:18:10.000 This idea that human beings are simple conveniences for you to sort of do away with when they get in the way, that individual souls are to be discarded at will.
00:18:21.000 And then you have the collectivists people who believe that individual souls don't matter because the only thing that matters is the collective.
00:18:29.000 The only thing that matters is the sort of great common good collective.
00:18:35.000 Now, again, this isn't to imagine that communities don't have communal interests.
00:18:38.000 Obviously, they do.
00:18:40.000 And sometimes individuals have to lose to a communal interest.
00:18:45.000 But the key rule there has to be that that communal interest is in line with what God wants from a civilization that values the individual soul.
00:18:55.000 This is why rights matter, is why immunities to government power matter.
00:19:00.000 Because your life has value, inherent value, not just as an instrument of the collective.
00:19:06.000 Well, if you find yourself on the same side as regimes that disparage the very idea of the soul, that treat individuals as simply cogs to be worked into the machine, that resemble the Tower of Babel civilization, you're on the wrong side of doing civilization. 0.64
00:19:21.000 Which brings us to China and Russia.
00:19:24.000 So, China and Russia, these are not places that respect the individual at all, at all, at all, at all.
00:19:30.000 They do not care.
00:19:31.000 For China, it's all about the Chinese collective, the power of the Chinese Communist Party. 0.94
00:19:37.000 They're willing to discard literally millions of human beings to kill off tens of millions of unborn children, and in many cases, born children in the greatest infanticide in human history. 0.94
00:19:50.000 They're willing to do that all in the name of the collective.
00:19:53.000 Russia is all about the power of one man, Vladimir Putin, and his oligarchic buddies, and they are willing to sacrifice the well being of tens of millions of their own citizens.
00:20:03.000 For the simple power of Vladimir Putin or for an idea of a collectivist Russian power in the world.
00:20:08.000 That's the thing that really, really matters.
00:20:10.000 Not on behalf of a vision of the world in which individuals matter, in which rights are spread.
00:20:16.000 One of the weird things about American foreign policy is that American foreign policy is not purely about preserving America's interests in the same way that Greek foreign policy is about preserving Greek interests or Russian foreign policy is about preserving Russian interests.
00:20:28.000 There's always been a moral component to American foreign policy because we take seriously our role As a lighthouse on behalf of certain values.
00:20:38.000 That's not true for China and Russia. 0.88
00:20:40.000 So I would humbly suggest that if you find yourself on the same side as China and Russia in any debate, you've sold out your civilization. 0.73
00:20:48.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
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