On this episode of the podcast, we sit down with a man who's been in the business for a long time. He's been with us since the early 90s, and we talk about how he got to where he is now, and why he thinks it's important to be observant in the modern world. We also talk about what it means to be a chassidus, and what it's like to live in a world where you're not allowed to eat meat that's not kosher, and how to deal with that. And, of course, there's a lot more. We hope you enjoy this episode, and don't forget to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform so you don't miss the next episode! This episode was produced by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg, and edited by David Janove. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Build Buildings Records. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your stuff. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - How do you feel about this episode? 3:30 - What is your favorite part of the show? 4:40 - What do you think of it? 5:00 6:10 - What does it mean to you? 7:00 | What is a good day? 8:30 9:30 | What sabbalah? 10:40 | What are you would you like to see more of it in the future? 11:10 | Is it better? 13:00 // 14:30 // 15:40 15:00 Is it worth it better than this stuff better than that? 16:10 17: Is there a better way to eat it? 16:20 | What would you want to eat more? 17:00 Can you eat it more? 19:00 Do you think it s better than it szn 21:00 What s your favorite thing? 22:00 Should I eat it again? ? 23:00 / 16:40 / 15:50 25:00 +16: What s a good thing to eat something more than you veg 27:20 26:00 & 27:00
00:00:32.000No, I literally just run around on the streets, hoping that one day I will be hunted down by the rioters so I don't have to go deal with my children screaming at me.
00:00:49.000It really wasn't about COVID. It was just I was eating out too much.
00:00:51.000And when I was relegated to home, it was like I had to learn how to use the barbecue, which I'd never learned how to use a barbecue, actually.
00:00:58.000And then it turned out it was actually not that hard.
00:00:59.000So I don't know what I was doing for years.
00:01:21.000So, I mean, not to get too fast into the biblical stuff, but the original logic was that you were supposed to kill the animal in the most humane way was the idea.
00:01:29.000Now, do I know if it's the most humane way now?
00:01:38.000I get it how back in the day, a very sharp knife going through the throat would have been the most humane way because it's almost painless.
00:01:47.000And then the blood just sort of pours out and that's a wrap.
00:02:17.000And then when I... I don't know there's a religious person alive, I mean, who doesn't eventually go like, okay, it's a little weird, but all right.
00:02:39.000They've still got good kosher restaurants.
00:02:40.000One thing that we're seeing with society and culture in general, and one thing that sort of does support the idea of maintaining these sort of rigid disciplines, is that when things start to slide just a little, you lose these little incremental steps.
00:02:56.000They slide, and people go, oh God, what's the big deal?
00:03:10.000And you saw it in LA. I mean, I've lived in LA my whole life.
00:03:13.000And the move from LA being a pretty safe, fairly nice city, suburban in orientation to just overrun with horror shows is really, it was a lot faster than I thought it would be.
00:03:26.000But it's sort of a, you're right, it's a gradual decline and then it's just off a cliff.
00:03:30.000Well, you started to see tents, and you didn't see them at all for decades.
00:03:35.000And then all of a sudden, I started seeing tents.
00:03:37.000I remember I was doing Fear Factor in Skid Row in the early 2000s.
00:03:42.000We would film down there, and I'd be like, this is crazy.
00:04:43.000Like, I don't want them to be freaked out, but I'm like, this is nuts.
00:04:45.000Well, the thing is that that sort of disaster area stuff in LA was sort of localized, right?
00:04:51.000I worked in the LADA's office for a summer when I was in law school.
00:04:54.000It's been like 2007, so it was a while ago.
00:04:56.000And I remember they had a giant tent city and you had to walk from the car.
00:05:00.000They made you park a mile away and walk it.
00:05:02.000And so you're walking through Skid Row.
00:05:03.000And it's like, okay, well, this is really terrible.
00:05:06.000And honestly, I feel bad for these people because I don't think the best solution for people who are drug addicted or mentally ill is to live on the street.
00:05:11.000And a heavy percentage of people who are homeless are drug addicted or mentally ill.
00:05:15.000But, you know, for people who are living in the suburbs, like, this is at least localized.
00:05:18.000It's not, like, reaching into your life.
00:05:20.000And then over the past 13 years, like, I live in a pretty decent suburban area.
00:05:24.000And I'm seeing, like, open needles on the street.
00:05:26.000Walked out of my house one day, there's just a guy lying face down in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe.
00:05:31.000And I thought, well, this is falling apart rather quickly.
00:05:34.000What do you think caused the slide or the expansion of the slide?
00:05:39.000Because I agree with you that it was very, it was very isolated.
00:05:44.000Downtown LA was very, I remember one time we were filming in downtown LA and we were on a gurney, or I guess that's what you call it, one of those things called where it lifts up.
00:06:24.000You get to see some weird shit while you're here.
00:06:26.000But I didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on Winnetka off the 101, and there's 80 fucking tents, and they put a port-a-potty there.
00:06:56.000Well, on this particular problem, this actually started with a bunch of lawsuits.
00:06:59.000So the LAPD used to have the authority to move people's shit if it was on the sidewalk.
00:07:03.000People had a bunch of stuff that was on the sidewalk and they were just camping out there.
00:07:06.000The LAPD could come and they could take their stuff away and they could rouse them or they could arrest them for trespass or for loitering.
00:07:12.000And then the ACLU actually sued and they said that this is a violation of people's personal property.
00:07:16.000Oh, ACLU. You do such good work sometimes.
00:07:19.000And the courts ruled that you actually are not allowed to move people's stuff, that that's actually personal property, even though it's in a public area.
00:07:25.000And then they got a ruling from a court that you're allowed to live in your car, because for a while you weren't allowed to live in your car, and then it was you're allowed to live in your car.
00:07:30.000So now you're basically allowed to leave your stuff on the sidewalk, and the police are not allowed to move it, and you're allowed to live in your car.
00:08:02.000And they shut down the entire county so that douchebags could run around shattering windows, pretending that they were standing up for social justice.
00:08:08.000They shut down Beverly Hills at 1 p.m.
00:09:27.000I thought we had the opportunity to come together was George Floyd.
00:09:30.000So George Floyd died and all of a sudden you have these Black Lives Matter protests and I'm like, maybe we can finally make a dent on racism.
00:09:41.000Maybe we can finally make a dent in police brutality.
00:09:44.000Maybe this is a moment Where we can come together and realize what's important.
00:09:56.000And maybe we should take into account PTSD. Maybe we should take into account the fact that these fucking guys are pulling up on people every day that might shoot them in the face.
00:10:04.000They might never be able to see their family and their kids.
00:11:29.000But beyond that, Like just staying away from each other and socially distancing.
00:11:34.000Like this is all kind of commonsensical stuff that people have known since the flu pandemic event in 1918. Like nothing has really changed.
00:11:40.000And yet it immediately turned into who can we blame?
00:11:43.000Who's to blame for all these dead people?
00:11:44.000Maybe it's Ron DeSantis or maybe it's Cuomo.
00:12:09.000And so when people are like, okay, we're going to look at police brutality.
00:12:12.000Maybe we'll take a look at qualified immunity.
00:12:14.000Maybe we'll take a look at police unions and the kind of restrictive covenants that they have with the cities and how we make sure that everybody knows who the bad cops are so they can't get hired at different places.
00:13:28.000That may have been the moment when I realized that we were all effed.
00:13:31.000It was the moment when we're in the middle of a global pandemic with hundreds of thousands of people dead, and an entire swath of our media and health elites just decided, randomly, That if you were protesting against lockdown, you were very bad, right?
00:13:44.000Then you were a racist and you were going to get people killed and you should wear a mask.
00:13:47.000And I was like, well, I sort of agree with the mask thing.
00:15:37.000I think that the evidence shows that they do something.
00:15:39.000We don't know that they're not like full protective.
00:15:41.000The cloth masks are not as effective as surgical masks, which are not as effective as N95s, but wear a mask, good.
00:15:47.000The point that I was making is people are acting in fairly rational fashion, meaning if you think COVID is like around you, you're wearing a mask and you're socially distancing.
00:15:54.000So this idea that Gavin Newsom knows best how you ought to live your life I got some trouble with that, especially because California saw the same uptick as Texas and Florida, and California never opened.
00:16:03.000I mean, we've been here the whole time.
00:16:06.000Well, we were doing pretty good up until the protests.
00:16:08.000Everything seemed like it was on an uptick.
00:16:10.000The Comedy Store was talking to them about becoming an essential business and opening up, because they had opened up bars, and they had opened up restaurants, and they didn't really have a designation for comedy clubs.
00:16:21.000They sort of We've talked about it as a live performance venue, but then that puts comedy clubs at the same place as the Staples Center, which sounds crazy, right?
00:17:01.000Churches and synagogues were a main vector for this.
00:17:04.000But again, these are all things that are fairly commonsensical and we can agree on and yet we're beating the hell out of each other over this stuff and there's this suggestion we know what to do.
00:17:12.000If only we just did it, this would stop.
00:18:38.000Well, not only that, it goes against science because there's been papers that have been studied that show that this virus dies almost instantaneously when it's exposed to sunlight or even artificial sunlight.
00:18:50.000But it does feel like, bottom line, there were a bunch of gaps in American society, and then a bad thing happened, and everything just sort of fell apart.
00:18:56.000It was sort of like a house of cards, and then there's a little bit of weight put right on top of the house of cards, and everything just collapsed in on itself.
00:19:27.000I gotta say, the media coverage of this stuff is just awful.
00:19:29.000The media were cheering this stuff on.
00:19:31.000They were simultaneously making two arguments that conflict with each other.
00:19:35.000One was, these are mostly peaceful protests.
00:19:37.000First of all, mostly peaceful is the most...
00:19:39.000It's the most loosely defined, arbitrarily applied term in history.
00:19:44.000O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night.
00:19:46.000O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night.
00:19:48.000For like an hour 15, he was really not peaceful.
00:19:51.000But for the other hours between sunset and sunrise, he was unbelievably peaceful.
00:19:55.000Like, I've never heard this term before where a protest turns into a vast riot wrecking all of Melrose and everybody's like, well, it was mostly peaceful.
00:20:42.000Speaking as one of the tribe, let me say, this is not like the Gestapo.
00:20:46.000Okay, like, the Gestapo was not famous for rolling up on people, and then charging them, and then if they didn't have a charge, releasing them.
00:20:53.000I'm sorry, but you decided that you wanted to throw a firebomb at the federal courthouse, and your local mayor said he wasn't going to let the police do anything, and so DHS came in and arrested you.
00:22:37.000The answer is kind of yes, except that the NBA is not racist because obviously it benefits black people, right?
00:22:42.000I mean, now, the NBA is not racist, except it's because the meritocracy is the reason the NBA is not racist.
00:22:48.000But Robin DiAngelo and Kendi both suggest that meritocracy is an aspect of whiteness.
00:22:54.000They say that meritocracy and individual are aspects of whiteness because these institutions, things like meritocracy and individualism and not seeing people's colors, these just reinforce hierarchies that end with disparate outcomes.
00:23:06.000And so what they say is in order to be anti-racist, you have to want to tear down the entire system.
00:23:13.000I know that I'm not misidentifying the argument because, again, I've read their books.
00:23:17.000The basic notion that to be anti-racist, you have to tear down free markets or you have to tear down free speech.
00:23:25.000And what that means is, of course, that anytime there's rioting and looting, that's really just an expression of outrage at the broader American system.
00:23:31.000And so it justifies that sort of stuff.
00:23:33.000This is why you saw Nicole Hannah-Jones, the de facto editor of the...
00:23:36.000New York Times 1619 Project lady tweeting out that she appreciated that people were calling these the 1619 riots.
00:23:41.000Because once you say America is rooted in slavery and rooted in evil and a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place, then robbing a shop is just the latest iteration of you fighting the system.
00:23:51.000Explain the 1619 correlation to people, if you would.
00:23:58.000There are four Pulitzer Prize-winning historians who have said this is not good history.
00:24:01.000The basic argument is the United States was not founded in 1776 with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
00:24:07.000The country was actually founded in 1619 with the importation of African slaves to American shores because that's when the first African slave arrived in the United States was 1619. So the idea is that the entire history of America is a history of a system that is endemically white supremacist.
00:24:23.000And that all of the Declaration of Independence is basically a lie.
00:24:26.000That the principles of all men are created equal, that was a lie when it was written and it's a lie now.
00:24:30.000That the idea that we have rights that pre-exist government, that's a lie.
00:24:39.000So they essentially make the argument that from 1619 to 2020 is a continuum.
00:24:44.000Racism has gone underground a little bit, but it's still there and it's still implicit in all of our systems.
00:24:50.000So the 1619 Project has essays blaming literally everything on racism.
00:24:53.000So disparities in maternal mortality between black women and white women, which by the way exist in Europe and in Canada, that's due to American racism.
00:25:00.000Traffic patterns in the United States is due to systematic American racism.
00:25:04.000Every racial disparity is attributable to a system that was rooted in slavery.
00:25:10.000Now, the traditional notion of America is that America was founded in 1776 and that the story of America is that America did tolerate the great original sin of slavery up until the Civil War and then tolerated Jim Crow up until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
00:25:24.000And that is a great stain and a blot on America.
00:25:26.000But the story of America is trying to fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence over time, make those promises available to everybody.
00:25:34.000This is Martin Luther King Jr.'s argument when he talks in the March in Washington about fulfilling the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence.
00:25:40.000He says, we're here to cash the check, right?
00:25:41.000You issued us the check, and then you didn't let black Americans be Americans.
00:25:56.000The story of America is the Declaration of Independence, those principles that we should all basically still agree on because they're pretty good principles.
00:26:03.000Free speech, free assembly, all the things you see in the Constitution.
00:26:07.000That those things brought about greater freedom and prosperity than anything else and helped us overcome sins that are present in all human societies and were present in the United States in extreme ways as well.
00:26:18.000But that's the counter-narrative, right?
00:26:20.000The 1619 Project says that all that was basically nonsense and that America is just a history of whites keeping blacks down and that no progress has essentially been made.
00:26:28.000If there is progress, it's mostly a lie.
00:26:31.000And so every disparity now can be attributed to historic disparities between white and black.
00:26:37.000So, if we look at 1776 and we look at the Declaration of Independence and we look at America today in 2020, there clearly is some impact in the echoes of slavery and then after that Jim Crow.
00:26:54.000There's clearly some impact in these deeply impoverished communities that don't seem to advance.
00:27:00.000So to make the argument about institutional racism, there's a couple ways you can read this.
00:27:04.000When people say systemic racism or institutional racism, I usually ask them to be a little more specific in what they mean because there are a few ways you can read that.
00:27:16.000If you have a grandfather who went to prison on a particular charge, that leads to poverty for your parents, which led to more poverty for you, right?
00:27:55.000In the world of history, it's a very small amount of time.
00:28:01.000So clearly, there's some impact of both racism and Jim Crow laws.
00:28:07.000So that's where I'm saying there's a middle ground.
00:28:09.000Yeah, and it is important for people on my side of the aisle, conservatives, to acknowledge and recognize the importance of history in people's living situations now.
00:28:19.000And it's important for people on the other side of the aisle to, at the same time, not attribute every single thing to history.
00:28:24.000Right, but isn't there always something like that?
00:28:27.000There's always extremes on each position, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
00:28:32.000Yeah, but I don't think that it lies as far in the dead center of that as people, I think, want it to.
00:28:37.000What I mean by that is the problems that have plagued communities in the United States, not just the black community in the United States, but problems of racism or problems of sexism, the way those get alleviated is people making better choices over time.
00:28:48.000That's the way that those issues get alleviated.
00:28:51.000When Jews arrived in the United States in the early 20th century to talk of my people, when they came, they were impoverished.
00:29:01.000Harvard Law School had quotas on Jews.
00:29:05.000The way to fight against that is to make good decisions.
00:29:09.000And so you fight against the system to make sure that the system has rules that apply equally to everyone.
00:29:15.000Right, but you clearly see that there's a big difference between people coming over here willingly and doing so in order to better their lives versus someone whose ancestors were dragged over here To be sold as property and then dealing with the repercussions of that being your family history and redline laws and all the other things that were put in place to sort of keep them in very specific areas which to this day remain crime-ridden,
00:29:46.000Well, that's true, but the question is how much of that is historic redlining and how much of that is an 18-year-old kid today deciding to pep a gun and shoot somebody?
00:29:52.000But how much of that 18-year-old kid today deciding to pick up a gun and shoot somebody is based on him growing up in this fucked up environment where that's what he models, where everything around him is crime and gangs and you imitate your atmosphere, which is what all humans do.
00:30:08.000Right, but the answer is there's only one way to break that chain.
00:30:11.000That way is to not pick up a gun and shoot somebody.
00:30:13.000I think that's a simplistic way of looking at it if you're on the outside of that community and you're not one of those 18-year-old kids that grows up with the incredible influence of all the people around him and that's all you see and that's all you know.
00:30:26.000Well, but the problem is the only way that's going to be the thing that your kid doesn't know is for you not to do it.
00:30:31.000At some point, personal agency has to come in.
00:30:33.000It does, but education and teaching them about personal agency and letting them understand that there's a way out of this and that the path that they see… Being replicated over and over again by these people that wind up dying young,
00:30:49.000that wind up going to jail, that there are other options.
00:30:51.000There's a lot of kids that never get that other information, or if they get it, they get little blips of it, but the vast majority of the information, the vast majority of the influence they get is terrible.
00:31:02.000Well, I totally agree with this, and this is why I think the worst thing that you can say to a kid is you're born behind the eight ball, and no matter what you do, you're not going to succeed.
00:31:09.000That's literally the worst thing you can say to a kid.
00:31:10.000What you should be saying is, look at how your grandfather was born behind the aid fall, and look how hard he had to work in order to get ahead.
00:31:17.000If that's true though, but if your grandfather wasn't ahead, didn't get ahead, if your grandfather was in and out of jail, if your father was in and out of jail, everyone around you is like that, if there's literally no influence that's positive in your life,
00:31:34.000The idea of saying to a kid like that, hey, don't pick up a gun and shoot somebody, that's way too simplistic a version of their future, in my opinion.
00:31:44.000The problem is I don't see an alternative solution.
00:31:47.000I think an alternative solution is there has to be some sort of large-scale intervention in these communities to do something about what has already been set in motion and the momentum that keeps continuing decade after decade.
00:32:17.000He talked about, he gave a speech very famously in which he said, we're trying to guarantee equality of outcome, not just equality of opportunity, equality of outcome.
00:32:24.000And you can't hold the race where somebody is starting 20 yards behind and then fire the gun and say, okay, then it's an equal race.
00:32:31.000So you have to get the person who's 20 yards behind to actually get up to the starting line so that they're equal.
00:32:35.000And so the idea was we're going to fight this war on poverty and alleviate poverty largely through transfer payments and through the government taking a forcible step in favor of alleviating people's lives.
00:32:45.000We've now spent $22 trillion in the war on poverty and we have about the same number of black Americans living under the poverty line as we're living under the poverty line by the late 70s.
00:32:54.000The real issues that are creating intergenerational poverty, everyone knows this but remains true.
00:33:01.000The number one predictor of intergenerational poverty in the United States remains single motherhood.
00:33:05.000The single motherhood rate in the black community was 20% in 1960. It is upward of 70% today.
00:33:09.000That's not unique to the black community, by the way.
00:33:11.000It's true in the white community as well.
00:33:12.0005% of white kids were born out of wedlock in 1960. Today it's upward of 40%.
00:33:19.000Something has happened and it is not a matter of increased racism.
00:33:23.000That's not happening because of increased racism.
00:33:24.000That is happening because there's been a cultural change that does not place tremendous emphasis for black or white or for anybody.
00:33:33.000On personal responsibility and personal agency.
00:33:45.000In the area of sports, if a kid does not have a good jump shot, nobody says to him, you know what, you don't have a good jump shot because your father didn't have a good jump shot, his grandfather didn't have a good jump shot, and the game is biased against you.
00:33:54.000We say, okay, if you want to be on the team, you're going to have to learn to shoot a jump shot.
00:34:14.000So whatever culture you're from, you walk into this new thing with this very rigid set of rules.
00:34:22.000I don't think white people or Jews or Asians have a monopoly on valuing education or a monopoly on hard work or punctuality or anything.
00:34:28.000I think that black people have exactly the same capacity as any people of any other race to do all of these things, and those are the preconditions for success.
00:34:40.000But don't you think that a lot of that is predicated on the environment that you develop in and the people that you're around and the lives that you imitate and the influences that you have around you?
00:34:51.000Someone has to do something to influence those kids in a different way.
00:34:55.000I was very fortunate when I was young that I discovered martial arts, and it kept me from being what I could have potentially been a bad kid.
00:35:47.000And that's nothing in comparison to changing your whole life.
00:35:50.000But you would say about somebody losing weight, you know what's not useful here is lamenting how bad your family has had it with regard to losing weight.
00:35:56.000Like, at a certain point, if you want to lose the weight, you've got to figure out a way to lose the weight.
00:35:59.000That's true, but this is based on the information that I have.
00:36:02.000I have this vast scope of information that I've been able to absorb.
00:36:06.000If you're in these isolated environments and everyone around you is involved in gangs and crime and drugs, it's very difficult to model yourself after something that you don't see in real life.
00:36:20.000And that's why, again, more information needs to get into areas.
00:36:23.000I agree with a lot of the opportunities that need to be provided by education.
00:36:27.000Getting people to be educated outside their local public school would be a good change.
00:36:30.000Being able to move outside your crap local public school and go somewhere else would be good.
00:36:34.000The best influences for kids that grow up in these environments seem to be people that have gotten out and then come back and talk to them.
00:36:45.000But to go back to the original conversation, none of this has to do with telling kids that you live in an evil country that's seeking to keep you down.
00:36:51.000Well, maybe not, but there has been a very small amount of emphasis placed on taking these impoverished communities and figuring out how to engineer them out of the situation.
00:37:33.000I think they'll spend $80,000 and they'll be right back where they started from.
00:37:36.000But I do think that there is an argument that there can be some way of engineering, whether it's community centers or education or doing something differently in these places to chip away at this problem.
00:38:25.000Okay, so here's the unpopular view, but it happens to be empirically correct.
00:38:30.000The first thing you have to do is you have to load the place with police.
00:38:33.000You got to load the place with police because you have to stop crime.
00:38:36.000Once you stop crime, then businesses are happy to invest in those areas.
00:38:39.000You're not going to get businesses to invest in those areas and provide jobs unless the crime is gone.
00:38:43.000In fact, one of the reasons that you have such a vast differential in racial crime in the United States is because of white racism.
00:38:48.000And this is a point that Jane Levy, writer for the LA Times, has made, and she writes a book called Ghetto Side, and she points out that the reason that black crime was so high in the early 20th century and late 19th century is because basically white communities said to black communities, you're on your own, right?
00:39:02.000And so the crime rates ended up spiking because there were no police there.
00:39:05.000You have to make sure that law-abiding people are protected, that law-abiding businesses are protected, that people want to live there, that people want to invest there.
00:39:12.000You have to have a reestablishment of faith in churches, right?
00:39:16.000You need social institutions outside of government that are promoting things like family.
00:39:20.000One of the reasons you need more companies in these areas is they can offer educational opportunities to kids, internships, deals to go to college and then come back and work for us for a couple of years.
00:39:30.000You need an opportunity, the same way that opportunity is built anywhere else on earth.
00:39:33.000You need to provide a safe space for business to work and for free speech to flourish and for education to be valued.
00:39:40.000You need to go and you need to make clear to every kid, if you graduate high school, then you will have a shot at college, which by the way is 100% true today.
00:39:48.000If you're a black kid and you graduate high school with any level of achievement, you will have a very solid shot of at least going to a community college.
00:39:55.000And if you score even decently on the SATs of going to a very high level college, right?
00:39:58.000Affirmative action programs are extraordinarily common across the United States.
00:40:04.000We are going to ensure that law and order prevail here, a safe space for life, liberty, and property, and ownership of private property, and we are going to make sure that you as a law-abiding citizen have the opportunity to succeed, because the biggest obstacle to young black kids growing up in the inner city, again, is not history.
00:40:20.000The drugs, The crime, the fact that there are no fathers in a lot of these areas.
00:40:24.000Roland Fryer, black professor at Harvard, he's done excellent work showing that actually the number one factor in allowing kids to rise is not even having a father in the home.
00:40:33.000It's how many fathers there are generally in a community.
00:40:35.000So you can have a single mom, but if there are a lot of other male father figures around, that helps fill in the gap, right?
00:40:42.000Giving kids the ability to pick the school they go to so they don't have to go to the local crappy public school if it's a local crappy public school.
00:40:49.000But this all starts with the notion that it is not racist in the slightest to suggest that law and order have to prevail and that law-abiding people should be protected in their exercise of their rights.
00:41:07.000Now, what do you do in this environment when you look at the way people distrust the police now?
00:41:14.000In particular, I mean, I've been reading stories about Cops go into Five Guys Burgers and they can't get served because people won't serve cops.
00:41:24.000And this is a really disturbing perspective to me because you're seeing what's happening right now in Chicago.
00:41:31.000You're seeing what's happening right now in New York where you have this massive uptick in violent crime because it's perceived that the police presence has been diminished greatly.
00:41:42.000So how do you reaffirm the trust in law enforcement and what do you do to reform law enforcement?
00:41:51.000Because clearly, there are some people that are cops that should not be cops.
00:41:55.000Yes, there are a few things that you can do right off the bat and that people right, left and center have sort of talked about.
00:41:59.000And one of them is that you can abridge qualified immunity in certain areas.
00:42:03.000So qualified immunity is the idea that you're not liable to civil suit.
00:42:05.000If you don't do something bad that has specifically had a precedent in law.
00:42:10.000So you could do something bad, but as long as nobody else has done the same exact bad thing before, you're not subjected to civil liability.
00:42:19.000So qualified immunity generally means that if I do something bad, then as a police officer, if I act within the scope of my general reasonable authority, you can't sue me for it.
00:42:33.000So the reason that qualified immunity as currently understood under Supreme Court doctrine is too broad is because the standard used to be you would have to act as a reasonable police officer.
00:42:42.000If you acted as a reasonable police officer and you took a reasonable action, somebody went for their waistband.
00:43:01.000So the way that Supreme Court has done this is they broaden qualified immunity to such an extent that you can still, bottom line, you can still get away with some bad stuff and not be sued for it.
00:43:13.000Second, police union contracts need to be utterly redone across the country.
00:43:17.000Police union contracts right now protect a lot of bad cops, right?
00:43:19.000Because the police unions are designed to protect the members of the union, just like any other union.
00:43:24.000And so what that means is that police unions, I'm not a fan of public sector unions generally, but police unions need to be abridged in their ability to protect cops who do something wrong.
00:43:35.000Third, you need to have a national registry of cops who are disciplined for violation of procedure so that they can't just leave LAPD and then go work for a Ferguson PD. Those are some easy things that you could do right off the bat.
00:43:48.000But the biggest thing right now, the biggest factor in terms of lack of faith between police and citizens really is the media because there's been a lot of talk about the racial constituency of police forces.
00:46:23.000It is, on a data level, an extraordinarily small threat.
00:46:27.000Law enforcement as a threat to black life on a generalized level is extraordinarily small.
00:46:32.000The Washington Post database last year showed a grand total of 15 black Americans shot unarmed across the United States in a country of 42 million black people.
00:46:40.000The problem is when it happens, it doesn't matter what the statistics are.
00:46:44.000If people see that video and that video gets shared 200 million times, it looks like there's 200 million white cops killing a black guy.
00:46:53.000And this is why I say that the media's treatment of this stuff is just horrific.
00:47:20.000Anecdotal evidence is evidence of an anecdote.
00:47:23.000It is not evidence of a broad national trend, nor is it evidence that taking a broad national policy like cutting back funding to the police in a time of rising crime is a good idea because you saw a video on YouTube.
00:47:33.000Well, I think we both agree that's a terrible idea.
00:47:35.000But when you look at these videos, the positive side, if there is any positive side, is that it's They're accountable now.
00:47:46.000If you talk to people that are black that grew up in poverty-stricken areas, they will tell you horrific stories about being abused by cops.
00:47:56.000And I think the number is like 25% more likely.
00:47:59.000A black person or brown person getting any sort of interaction with a cop is 25% more likely to become physical for them to be abused.
00:48:18.000Even on a percentage basis, you have to use the control group of crime.
00:48:21.000You can't use the control group of raw population.
00:48:23.000So you have to look at people who are in situations where a deadly interaction is likely.
00:48:28.000There have been multiple studies that show that black people are not in more danger of being shot by cops than white people.
00:48:32.000But it is true that low-level uses of force between cops and black people are worse than low-level uses of force between cops and white people, right?
00:48:39.000There are a few confounds that have yet to be sort of worked out.
00:48:42.000I think probably white people are less likely to believe that the cop's going to kill them, whereas black people are probably convinced the cop's going to kill them.
00:48:49.000That might play a factor in why there's more white people being killed by cops.
00:48:54.000It may also be that low-level uses of force may be disparate.
00:48:58.000If you think that the cop's likely to be a racist, then you might be more likely to resist the cop, and then you might be more likely to rough you up.
00:49:04.000So it's very difficult to rub out the confounds there.
00:49:08.000The one thing that we know for sure is that the greatest threat to black life, just like the greatest threat to white life, is members of your own race killing you.
00:49:16.000Like, if you're talking about actual murders, White people are killed by white people.
00:49:20.000Black people are killed by black people.
00:49:21.000It's conflict by people you know, mostly.
00:49:57.000We're only talking about police brutality right now.
00:49:59.000And Terry Crews was like, well, why aren't we talking about all Black Lives Matter?
00:50:02.000Because if Black Lives Matter means you withdraw cops, and withdrawing cops means more dead Black people, then why wouldn't those lives matter too?
00:50:10.000And this is where the sloganeering gets in the way of actual progress.
00:50:14.000Right, it's where ideology hits facts.
00:50:42.000Young white people in Appalachia need to get their shit together.
00:50:44.000Everybody needs to get their shit together.
00:50:46.000But again, young white people in Appalachia are dealing with the same thing.
00:50:49.000What's around them all the time is crime, people taking pills, everyone having babies out of wedlock, people impoverished, no hope, no potential for escape.
00:51:02.000I agree, but the first thing that has to change – so my dad had a – when I was looking to get married, my dad said the way that you get married is it's not that you find a girl and then you decide to get married.
00:51:11.000You decide to get married and then you find a girl, meaning that you have to sort of make up your mind that you're in the mode of – That's a good way to get hooked up with the wrong lady, bro.
00:51:24.000Well, you make the life decision that you're at that point in your life when you want to make a decision along those lines.
00:51:28.000Get married when you love a girl so much you're willing to do something so fucking stupid that you're willing to get married to her.
00:51:35.000Because getting married to her is less painful to you than the idea of losing that person.
00:52:22.000I think that is where the legal definition of marriage and protection of children and protection of the woman who has to take care of these children financially.
00:52:47.000Well, I totally agree with that, obviously.
00:52:48.000But the point that I'm making is that when you want to make a change in your life, you first have to commit that you want to make the change before you make the change.
00:53:07.000And the reason that I say you have to make up your mind that you want to get married before you get married is because you look for a different set of factors then.
00:53:15.000If you make up your mind you want to get married, what you're going to look for is commonality of values.
00:53:19.000Who is the person you want to build your life with?
00:53:25.000Whereas if you sort of fall into it, then you can fall in love with somebody you don't share any of these things with and it makes it a lot more difficult later on to actually build a life on that.
00:53:51.000I don't have any friends with eyeballs tattooed.
00:53:53.000But people make mistakes when they get attracted to someone physically.
00:53:59.000And, you know, particularly men are, and I guess women too, I'm just not one of them, are attracted oftentimes by people they think are sexy, but are a bad choice in terms of a life partner.
00:54:10.000But I don't think you fall in love with those people.
00:54:12.000They just become someone who's mad at you.
00:54:13.000How many twos have married a girl just because they thought they were hot?
00:55:06.000He talks about the fact that people make a very large-scale mistake about marriage, Yes.
00:55:30.000And then over time, after about like two years, the passionate love starts to decline.
00:55:33.000And by the time you're 60, then you better have shared values because after 60 years, it ain't going to be like it was when you were 20, right?
00:55:39.000So you have to have in mind what things are going to be like a few years down the road, which is why I say you should be thinking about what your life together is going to be like before you fall into bed together.
00:55:50.000But, well, see, that's why I disagree.
00:55:53.000Because I don't think there's anything wrong with falling into bed with someone that you're not going to live the rest of your life with.
00:55:58.000That's where you and I probably disagree.
00:56:00.000Yeah, I mean, I think that it is a bad idea generally.
00:56:03.000And again, I think that it is a bad idea because...
00:56:05.000There's a lot of people out there that have had some really good times with those bad ideas, Ben Shapiro.
00:56:09.000And it may be that when I die, I look back and that is one of my great regrets, my friend.
00:56:12.000But let me just say that I think that the...
00:56:17.000The thing that has been foregone is, in my life at least, more than made up for by the relationship that I have with my wife.
00:56:25.000So I'll go anecdotal there, but I'll go data-driven, which is the longer you live together with somebody before you get married, the higher the divorce rate after.
00:57:20.000I've tried to be open-minded with basically every kind of way that people live their lives, including, like, couples that live with other couples and they wife swap, which is...
00:57:38.000And I almost universally believe that they are distracting themselves from their life.
00:57:44.000They distract themselves from either their career, they're fulfilling the potential, whether it's as an artist, or as a creative person, or as a person who's pursuing a discipline.
00:57:55.000I really believe that a lot of times when people complicate their lives with multiple sex partners, and a lot of times what they're doing is they're distracting themselves.
00:58:05.000And they don't realize it at the time.
00:58:07.000It just keeps getting pulled into this direction, pulled into that direction.
00:58:10.000It's because you don't have a primary focus on something that's very important to you.
00:58:14.000And it doesn't mean that you have to be with this person for the rest of your life.
00:58:17.000It doesn't mean you have to only be with one person.
00:58:20.000But when I see a guy that is involved in swinging or something like that, and they're balancing a bunch of different gals, trust me, you're going to waste time, man.
00:58:32.000I mean, it's weird to tie this whole conversation together, but it is true that if you want to be good at a thing or be successful at a thing, you have to commit to the thing.
00:58:53.000And it is true that you have to make the pre-investment and you have to make the commitment that you're going to continue to invest in the relationship as time goes on.
00:59:03.000And that's where people fall off the wagon.
00:59:05.000That's why you see a lot of divorces around year three.
00:59:07.000As that passionate love It kind of goes down and the companionate love is the name of the term.
00:59:12.000When the companionate love starts to rise, people are like, well, yeah, but the companionate love ain't as much fun as the passionate love.
00:59:22.000The ultimate biological trick is like, look, when we were monkeys hiding from eagles, okay, you had to fuck as much as you could and spread that seed around because you likely only had five or six years on this earth, right?
00:59:43.000And that program is when you see a man, and he's with a beautiful woman, but another beautiful woman walks by, he's like looking at her and thinking, maybe I can do better.
00:59:52.000That's a thing that is programmed into your DNA. But you have to understand what that is.
00:59:56.000If you're a man and you understand what that is, you go, oh, this is nature and it's a dirty little trick.
01:00:03.000Dirty little trick trying to get me to spread my seed.
01:00:06.000Brett Weinstein, he illuminated this in a really interesting way.
01:00:11.000He was saying to me, what's the difference between beautiful and hot?
01:00:15.000And I said, I don't know, what is the difference?
01:00:18.000And he's like, beautiful is someone who you look at and you're like, wow, that person looks beautiful.
01:02:03.000Well, he's on probably all kinds of drugs that keep his dick hard, but I would imagine, like, he couldn't run on a treadmill for 20 minutes, right?
01:02:12.000So how is he going to have sex for 20 minutes?
01:02:14.000So even if he's having sex, like, it's probably exhausting, and the rest of the day, he's just listening to them talk about TikTok and all kinds of other stupid shit, and he's like, He's like, remember when Frank Sinatra was here and we were banging everything in sight?
01:02:27.000And he's like, those were the good old days.
01:03:17.000Yeah, I can't believe this perfect body and I get to, with this wrinkly sack of rocks that he has as a body, he gets to have sex with this beautiful, perfect specimen of a female human being.
01:04:47.000Well, that's another Jonathan Haidt book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is amazing.
01:04:51.000And it really illuminates, and I'm waiting for my kids to read it.
01:04:56.000I think maybe this year is a good time for my 12-year-old just to understand that this is a real issue with children that are comparing their lives to these...
01:05:57.000So if you're a girl and you are overweight or you don't like the structure of your face or whatever is bothering you, you have acne, and you see a girl like that, and she's like, can't believe I'm graduating high school,
01:07:16.000And then it has broader societal ramifications because then it turns into stories about, well, okay, well, society doesn't accept me for the way that I am.
01:07:23.000Society values that look and that means society is flawed.
01:07:48.000I mean, they've built these apps that are specifically designed to be addictive, right?
01:07:50.000I mean, they're specifically designed to prey on certain parts of your brain that you're not really in control of, that are mostly subconscious.
01:08:44.000I mean, this is not an argument to ban porn or anything, but like, the way that it has integrated into so many really young people's lives, I'm talking like young teens.
01:08:57.000It's got to be an extraordinarily high percentage, and none of that is good for relations between men and women.
01:09:01.000And then you've got this weird dynamic where it used to be that the feminist movement sort of recognized what social conservatives did, that this is pretty objectifying and not necessarily great for women.
01:09:10.000Now it's like raising sex workers, which is weird.
01:09:13.000They went completely the other direction.
01:09:15.000And I just thought, in what Hugh Hefner fantasy did women decide that all the women at Hugh Hefner's mansion were actually super-duper empowered?
01:09:23.000That does not seem like the most super empowering lifestyle.
01:09:46.000I think there was a shift, and it's a shift that's happened throughout American society that went from the notion that men were acting like pigs and they should stop acting like pigs to what if everybody acted like pigs?
01:09:59.000And so instead of just saying that standards exist and people don't live up to them, but the standards are actually not a bad thing, we just decided, you know what?
01:10:08.000And if you believe that anybody should have standards, then you're a hypocrite.
01:10:11.000And when all the standards go, then everything goes.
01:10:13.000So I actually kind of agree with the original feminist idea that men were kind of acting like sexist jackasses and they should stop that.
01:10:20.000But the solution to that was not, okay, now women should imitate men at their worst and that's a free or better society.
01:10:26.000I just don't think that that's Again, it's a free country, do what you want on a legislative level, but as a cultural matter, I don't think that leads to a lot of human happiness.
01:10:32.000I look at it like sexual televangelists.
01:10:36.000That's what I look at pornography like.
01:10:38.000I think that you should be allowed to rip people off With a really obvious ruse.
01:10:48.000Like, if you're one of those late night people that can put hands on people and raise them from the dead, if you're one of those people, I feel like, God, that's so obvious.
01:10:56.000It's almost like a good little pitfall to have out there in society to teach people that some folks can be deceptive.
01:11:02.000And I feel like really manipulative women that trick old guys into marrying them and then take all their money, I feel like that's sexual televangelism.
01:12:07.000No, because I think that he made a serious error, which is that the most positive movements in American social history have been ones that don't kneel for the flag but say, in the name of the flag, you should do X. Martin Luther King said, in the name of the flag, civil rights are necessary.
01:12:22.000Booker T. Washington said, in the name of the flag, civil rights are necessary.
01:12:25.000They didn't say the American flag stands for racism and Jim Crow.
01:12:28.000They said the American flag stands for something beyond that.
01:12:44.000Why is it trashing the American flag to take a knee?
01:12:47.000Isn't that in some ways just another gesture of respect?
01:12:52.000Like you're not doing what everybody wants you to do, which is put your hand over your heart, but you're doing something that's also respectful and silent.
01:13:02.000You're not standing up and going, fuck the American flag, fuck these people.
01:13:07.000You're actually taking it to another level of respect.
01:13:12.000Whether you're doing it For something that you want to talk about later, saying, I'm not going to stand up because this is my way of acknowledging the fact that there have been a lot of people that have been mistreated by police and murdered by police, and this is how I do it.
01:13:28.000This is how I treat racist police killing black people.
01:14:50.000He did mean it as an FU. I mean, there's no question that's what he meant it as.
01:14:54.000And it wasn't even over something that actually made sense.
01:14:56.000Like, you understand during the civil rights movement, when people are raising the black power fist at the Olympics to say, like, we're fighting for civil rights, Jim Crow is still in operation around the country.
01:15:05.000Colin Kaepernick taking the need to symbolize that America's police are systemically brutal and racist is just – it's factually untrue, and to attribute that to the American flag is really kind of nasty.
01:15:29.000You see something like that, and that motivates him to do that.
01:15:33.000And I know what you're saying, that these are anecdotes, and this doesn't encompass the full statistics of cops versus black men and what exactly is happening.
01:15:44.000But that's not his area of expertise anyway.
01:15:47.000He has an issue— Well, I mean, I agree with that.
01:15:49.000So making him a spokesperson for a movement where he has no expertise is a weird thing to do.
01:15:52.000There are plenty of people who talk about this with actual statistical— Right.
01:15:55.000But if you're a famous person and you decide to take this big stand publicly like that, you become a spokesperson.
01:16:00.000After you get benched for Blaine Gabbert, yeah.
01:16:02.000After you get benched for Blaine Gabbert and take millions of bucks from a major corporation currently- Who's Blaine?
01:16:28.000If he'd explained it the way that you're explaining it, meaning we're not living up to the American flag, which is why I'm kneeling, I wouldn't be arguing with it.
01:17:21.000So, I mean, he had one fantastic season.
01:17:23.000He led the 49ers to the Super Bowl, and then like a lot of kind of one-hit wonders in sports, people kind of figured him out season two, and his QB rating started to decline.
01:17:31.000But, I mean, look, bottom line is that making him the spokesperson of a movement where he really...
01:17:38.000I don't like the idea that you are going to attribute to all of America a sin that is, number one, anecdotal in nature, and number two, cannot be attributed to America's highest ideals.
01:18:01.000The gay rights movement said, listen, everybody in America has been guaranteed a certain level of freedom, and we're not being guaranteed that level of freedom.
01:18:06.000The freedom to pursue happiness is not being guaranteed to us.
01:18:10.000We're just asking that we be left alone.
01:18:17.000The same thing holds true on police brutality.
01:18:19.000If you make an invocation and you say to Americans, as Americans, I know that over time my fellow Americans are going to come to realize that they need to live in accordance with the fundamental principles that founded the country.
01:18:30.000To say that the American flag is inherently non-unifying is really bad.
01:18:35.000Like to the point where you now have college campuses where if you fly an American flag, there have been cases where people are asked to take it down because it's too divisive.
01:18:43.000When you say it's anecdotal, that he's reacting to something that's anecdotal, but there's many of those anecdotes, and you see them over and over again.
01:18:59.000He's a kickboxer, and his entire Instagram has been dedicated to bad cops over the last few months, just showing all these videos of bad cops.
01:19:07.000I mean, yes, it's anecdotal, but goddamn, there's a lot of anecdotes.
01:19:11.000Well, there's 330 million police interactions every year, so yeah, I mean, that's What was the initial interaction?
01:20:05.000I think everyone wants the police officer punished.
01:20:07.000The defense is going to make a case that the police officer is not responsible for George Floyd's death in exactly the same way that the New York police officers made the case that they were not responsible for Eric Garner's death.
01:20:18.000And the autopsy, the initial autopsy tends to support that.
01:20:22.000So what that suggests is not that Derek Chauvin is good or clean or decent, but if you're going to charge him with murder, that's a hard charge to make, just on a legal level.
01:20:30.000So I'm warning people now of that because the next move will be, obviously the system is racist if Derek Chauvin doesn't get convicted of first degree murder.
01:20:38.000It's going to be very hard to convict him.
01:20:56.000I had the part of when this actually started in 2016. He started by sitting, and people started getting video of him sitting as the preseason was starting.
01:21:39.000It's not right that they're not put in the position to succeed or given those opportunities to succeed.
01:21:47.000And as far as taking a knee tonight, Eric, as well as myself, had a long conversation with Nate Boyer, who is a military vet, and we were talking to him about how can we get the message back on track.
01:23:17.000Although he recently released a video that sort of goes back to the original explanation, suggesting that America is endemically and systemically racist, which is a problem.
01:23:35.000I always hope that things go really far in one direction and really far in the other direction and sort of Listen, I end up in the same place I always end up, which is we gotta learn to leave each other the F alone.
01:23:48.000I mean, seriously, that's the only way this is gonna work.
01:23:50.000Because we either have to decide we want to share a country and live together with each other, or we have to decide we don't.
01:23:55.000If we want to live together and share a country, then we have to stop...
01:23:59.000Basically making crazy demands of one another.
01:24:01.000And this is what the cancel culture is all about.
01:24:09.000As much as I dislike what Colin Kaepernick's doing, I don't think that he should be blackballed from the NFL. If I were an NFL owner, by the way, I'd hire him in a second.
01:24:15.000You know the kind of press I'd get for hiring Colin Kaepernick?
01:24:17.000I'd make a boatload off of Colin Kaepernick.
01:24:23.000I mean, I assume because he's not that great a quarterback.
01:24:27.000I mean, like, if he were Tom Brady, I think that he would, you know, be getting a contract.
01:24:31.000He also, I mean, there was that whole situation last year with Kaepernick where he wanted to do tryouts for the NFL and then he sort of broke the NFL's rules in doing the tryouts and he wanted it filmed in a certain way and all this sort of stuff.
01:24:42.000I'd hire him as a backup quarterback because here's the thing.
01:24:44.000You're either going to please one half of the population or please the other.
01:24:47.000Either he's amazing, in which case you've got a winning team and a great story, or he gets sacked every other down, in which case half the country cheers.
01:25:22.000But apparently they have Mexican products that they were calling Trader Jose's.
01:25:27.000And some board person in their basement decided to create a petition that got signed by some 2,400 other board people about why it shouldn't be called Trader Jose's because that's racist.
01:25:38.000So apparently it's cultural appropriation if you're Trader Joe's and you make a burrito.
01:25:41.000But if you call Trader Jose's, then that's...
01:27:16.000But he kind of looked like that, but he was really dressed like an old-timey guy, and he had this old-timey shop, and he would make this stuff, and I loved watching him, and I don't give a fuck about his shitty furniture.
01:27:28.000I don't, but what I cared about was the fact that this guy was really passionate about his thing, and it was very attractive to me.
01:27:34.000And I feel the same way when I watch this guy, Rick Bayless, talk about Mexican cuisine.
01:27:39.000He takes regular trips to Mexico and learns how to cook these dishes in the traditional way and then talks about it with his great passion.
01:28:44.000I read a column this morning by somebody, I think it was in the Washington Post, saying that we should just keep changing the name of everything.
01:30:12.000Do you remember back when they were tearing down the Civil War statues and Trump, in all of his wisdom, was like, what are they going to do next?
01:30:42.000Do you think there's an argument to be said that maybe we shouldn't celebrate those bad people anymore, now that we know what they really were?
01:31:30.000And we should talk about all those things.
01:31:31.000But this notion that the only cruelty that has ever existed in human history came at the behest of Western civilization, that everything was a Russellian paradise before Christopher Columbus came, that Christopher Columbus doesn't deserve a statue in specific.
01:31:43.000That we should, like, either make the argument that everybody was a product of their time and therefore no one deserves a statue, or recognize that when there's a statue of Christopher Columbus, we are not honoring how he treated the Arawaks.
01:31:54.000No one ever thought that we'd put up a statue to Christopher Columbus because he was really sweet to the natives on the other end of that statue.
01:32:42.000But there is this idea that has settled in, and it's really of high irritation to me, that we are now the only good people who have ever lived.
01:32:49.000Everyone who came before us was just a horrible person, and we are the only good humans who have ever...
01:32:53.000Like, isn't the world lucky to have us?
01:32:55.000We're the only people who have ever lived who are completely sinless, and we can look from our perch at the top of morality at everyone who came before us and say that those people were all garbage compared to us.
01:33:04.000Now, there were people who were garbage compared to us, but I really don't think that Washington was among the people who you can say was garbage compared to you.
01:33:10.000Like, I don't think that you living in 1770 are a better person than George Washington.
01:33:14.000I think you stand atop the legacy that George Washington helped build.
01:33:17.000Well, I have news for those people that were trying to break into Amazon Go.
01:33:20.000History is going to look back at you like you're a piece of shit.
01:33:23.000The people in the future that would never shatter property and never spray paint things and never attack people for filming things with their cell phones, they're going to look back at these violent actions.
01:33:35.000And they're going to look back and they're not going to be kind.
01:33:39.000Every single generation, hopefully, if society doesn't implode, we don't have nuclear war, Every single generation is going to learn from the mistakes of the past and hopefully improve.
01:33:54.000And we should be happy that we can look back on a lot of these people and say, we understand now how deeply flawed they were and what was wrong with George Washington or what was wrong with Thomas Jefferson.
01:34:08.000Although he did draft the Declaration of Independence, he was a slave owner.
01:34:13.000And this is one of the contradictions of our society and our culture.
01:34:18.000I mean, you don't have to shortchange the evils of human beings in order to recognize either the direction of American history or recognize the good things about people.
01:34:25.000People are a little more complex than I think we want to think of them as.
01:34:28.000And this is one of the arenas that sort of gets back to the point about the system.
01:34:33.000If you recognize that human beings are capable of great sin and also capable of doing great things, what you really want is a system that Of checks and balances that prevents people from gaining too much power to hurt other people.
01:34:46.000And what you also want to recognize is that the flaws of human beings are not necessarily the flaws of the system.
01:34:52.000And that just changing the system is not going to change the underlying flaws of human beings.
01:34:56.000Which means you actually have to think through the policies that you're promulgating before you implement them.
01:35:00.000Clearly, if you say this, you're not paying attention to what happened at CHAZ or CHOP. Because they had it nailed.
01:35:06.000It was paradise for a short period of time.
01:35:09.000That's one of my favorite stories of this year because these people basically took over this gigantic chunk of Seattle and said, we're going to show you how it's done.
01:35:58.000There's a childlike idea of what you can do that's better.
01:36:04.000You don't really understand that the Founding Fathers really did put into place all these checks and balances to keep someone from abusing power.
01:36:14.000And as much as Trump would like to overcome all that, you see time and time again, he's a great example.
01:36:21.000In many ways, of how this system really is beautifully engineered from 300 fucking years ago.
01:36:27.000Because the founders didn't understand the problem of human nature, which is people want power, and they want to hurt other people very often.
01:36:33.000And you still need government in order to do things, but there better be broad-scale agreement on the things you want to do, or a small majority of people can really hurt a huge minority of people, right?
01:36:43.000This is what they call tyranny of the mob.
01:37:08.000One of the biggest problems we have in American politics is the myopia with which we look at the United States.
01:37:12.000So when you're dating somebody, it's very easy to see all the problems with the person you're dating.
01:37:17.000When you're married to someone, it's certainly easy for my wife to see all the problems with me, and there are plenty.
01:37:20.000But when she looks at all the other people, then she's like, okay, well, he's less flawed than the others, right?
01:37:24.000When you look at the United States, it's very easy to see all the different flaws in the United States because, of course, they exist.
01:37:29.000This is a society filled with humans, 330 million of them.
01:37:32.000But when you look abroad and you look at other examples of civilizations over time, and then you look back at the United States, you think maybe the system isn't quite that bad.
01:37:39.000Because the fact is that for all the problems we got, the biggest problems that humanity faces and has faced are not happening in the United States.
01:37:47.000China right now is shipping Uyghur Muslims on trains after shaving their heads to concentration camps where they are being forcibly sterilized.
01:37:54.000There are actual problems on planet Earth.
01:37:56.000That is not to say there aren't problems in the United States, but they are not the same in terms of degree, and they are not the same in terms of scope.
01:38:02.000And to pretend that the system of the United States needs to be ripped down from the inside, and that if you build a beautiful new system, you will shape humanity such that we are all saints and no sinners, you're out of your mind.
01:39:12.000And the rest of the world is just like, well, you know, this is where, you know, in the sporting world, the story that's undercover in the sporting world is the blowback that the NBA gave to Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets GM, for saying free Hong Kong.
01:39:27.000You can't even get anybody in the NBA to condemn China while China's subjecting a million Uyghurs to abject slavery.
01:39:32.000Mark Cuban just had an exchange with Ted Cruz the other day where he was going after Cruz for something and he questioned Cruz's balls or something and Cruz came back and said, well, do you have the balls to condemn China?
01:39:45.000And Cuban said something like, well, you know, I don't want to get involved in the internal affairs of another country.
01:39:52.000That is not an internal affairs question.
01:39:54.000It's one thing to say I don't want to get involved in the tax rates of other countries.
01:39:57.000It's another thing to say shaving people's heads, shipping them on trains to concentration camps where you force them into labor and or sterilize them.
01:40:03.000That seems like not an internal issue that you're not allowed to criticize, really.
01:40:27.000That's one of the things that we really found out from this pandemic is how many things are built there, how much of our medicine, how much we rely on China.
01:40:34.000It also demonstrates the lie of the idea that if you trade with somebody, then they're going to liberalize.
01:40:38.000That was something that was pushed over the last 30, 40 years real hard, which is we'll help them out economically.
01:40:45.000And they'll liberalize because once they realize it's good to be part of the world economy, then they won't be tyrants anymore.
01:40:50.000And instead, they just took all the chips off the table and said, no, actually, I'm going to double down on this and we're going to get more tyrannical, not less.
01:40:55.000I mean, Xi is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao.
01:41:18.000So I think that if we're going to hold together, we have to make a decision.
01:41:21.000Either fundamentally the American system is good but flawed, we need to work on the flaws within the system, or fundamentally the American system sucks and was rooted in slavery and bigotry and we need to rip down the entire system.
01:41:31.000The latter is not really a great recipe.
01:41:33.000So we can have normal political arguments within the former or the country is toast.
01:41:37.000As far as what goes down in November, Look, right now the polling data says Trump gets skunked.
01:41:43.000I mean, right now the polling data's got Biden up 10, 12 points in the polls.
01:41:46.000But didn't the polling data in 2016 say that Hillary was going to steamroll him?
01:41:49.000On the national data, they were kind of right.
01:41:52.000So on the national data, the final RealClearPolitics poll average was like three points.
01:41:56.000Hillary won by three points in the popular vote.
01:41:58.000The state polls were really wrong, particularly in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania.
01:42:03.000On this one, because Trump is universally losing in like all the swing states and is in spitting distance in Texas, he's got a lot of ground to make up right now.
01:42:11.000Listen, Biden is running almost the ideal campaign.